George Meany

William George Meany (August 16, 1894 – January 10, 1980) was an American labor union administrator for 57 years. He was a vital figure in the creation of the AFL–CIO and served as its first president, from 1955 to 1979.

Meany, the son of a union plumber, became a plumber himself at a young age. Within a decade, he was a full-time union official. As an officer of the American Federation of Labor, he represented the AFL on the National War Labor Board during World War II. He held the position of AFL president from 1952 to 1955.

In 1952, Meany proposed a merger of the AFL with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). He managed the negotiations until the merger was completed in 1955, creating the largest federation of unions in the United States. He was AFL–CIO president for the next 24 years.

Meany had a reputation for integrity and consistent opposition to corruption in the labor movement, and strong anti-communism. He was one of the best-known union leaders in the U.S. during the mid-20th century.

Early years

Meany was born into a Roman Catholic family in Harlem, New York City on August 16, 1894, the second of 10 children. Michael Meany was also a precinct level activist in the Democratic Party.

In 1923, he was elected secretary of the New York City Building Trades Council, the city federation of unions representing construction workers. He won a court injunction against an industry lockout in 1927, which was then considered an innovative tactic for a union, and was opposed by many of the older union administrators.

National leadership in Washington, DC

Three years later, he relocated to Washington, D.C., to become national secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor, where he served AFL president William Green.

During World War II, Meany was one of the permanent representatives of the AFL to the National War Labor Board.

The labor strikes of 1945-1946, which were organized to a large extent by CIO unions, resulted in passage of the Taft Hartley Act in 1947, which was perceived widely as anti-union. One provision required union officials to sign loyalty oaths affirming that they were not communists; this had a major effect on the CIO unions. Meany, in opposition to John L. Lewis and other leftist union leaders,

Merger of AFL and CIO

When Green's health began failing in 1951, Meany gradually assumed day-to-day operations of the AFL. He became president of the American Federation of Labor in 1952 upon Green's death. It took longer for Walter Reuther to complete his control of the CIO, Jimmy Hoffa, second in command of the Teamster's Union, protested, "What's in it for us? Nothing!" Meany further relied on a small, select group of advisors to craft the necessary agreements. The draft constitution was written primarily by AFL Vice President Matthew Woll and CIO General Counsel Arthur Goldberg, while the joint policy statements were written by Woll, CIO Secretary-Treasurer James Carey, CIO vice presidents David McDonald and Joseph Curran, Brotherhood of Railway Clerks President George McGregor Harrison, and Illinois AFL–CIO President Reuben Soderstrom.

Meany's efforts came to fruition in December 1955 with a joint convention in New York City that merged the two federations, creating the AFL–CIO, with Meany elected as president. Termed Meany's "greatest achievement" by Time magazine,

Meany also organized campaigns against organized crime and corruption in the International Jewelry Workers Union, the Laundry Workers International Union, the AFL Distillery Workers, the AFL United Auto Workers, and the Bakery and Confectionery Workers International Union.

Charles Cogen, president of the American Federation of Teachers, joined the opposition when the 1967 AFL–CIO convention adopted a resolution pledging support for the war. Reuther stated that he was busy with negotiations with General Motors in Detroit and could not attend the convention. In his speech to the convention, Meany said regarding Vietnam that the AFL–CIO was "neither hawk nor dove nor chicken", but was supporting "brother trade unionists" struggling against Communism. In the aftermath of the violence by antiwar demonstrators and police at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Meany sympathized with the police by terming the protesters a "dirtynecked and dirty-mouthed group of kooks".

Meany opposed the antiwar presidential candidacy of U.S. Senator George McGovern in 1972 against incumbent Richard Nixon, despite McGovern's generally pro-labor voting record in Congress. However, Meany also refused to endorse Nixon. On Face the Nation in September 1972, Meany criticized McGovern's foreign policy position—that the U.S. should respect other peoples' right to choose communism—by saying there had never been a country that had voted freely for communism. Meany accused McGovern of being "an apologist for the Communist world".

After Nixon's landslide defeat of McGovern, Meany said the American people had "overwhelmingly repudiated neo-isolationism" in foreign policy. Meany added that American voters had split their votes by endorsing the Democrats in Congress.

Meany's support for the war effort continued up until the final days before Saigon was captured by the North Vietnamese in April 1975. He called for President Gerald Ford to provide a U.S. Navy "flotilla" if it was needed to ensure that hundreds of thousands of "friends of the United States" could escape before a communist regime could be established.

Conflict with Reuther

Despite their co-operation during the AFL–CIO merger, Meany and Reuther had a contentious relationship for many years. In 1963, Meany and Reuther disagreed about the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a major event in the history of the U.S. civil rights movement. Meany opposed AFL–CIO endorsement of the march. In an AFL–CIO executive council meeting on August 12, 1963, Reuther's motion for a strong endorsement of the march was supported by only A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the titular leader of the march. As a compromise, the AFL–CIO backed a civil rights law and allowed individual unions to endorse the march.

After years of disagreement with Meany, Reuther resigned from the AFL–CIO executive council in February 1967. and the UAW did not re-affiliate with the AFL–CIO until 1981, long after Reuther's death in a 1970 airplane crash.

Political goals

Amidst the Great Society reforms advocated by President Johnson, Meany and the AFL–CIO in 1965 endorsed a resolution calling for "mandatory congressional price hearings for corporations, a technological clearinghouse, and a national planning agency". American socialist Michael Harrington commented that the AFL–CIO had "initiated a programmatic redefinition that had much more in common with the defeated socialist proposal of 1894 than with the voluntarism of Gompers", He backed the two-party system, and believed in "supporting your friends and punishing your enemies". During his final years, Meany adopted amateur photography and painting as hobbies.

Meany's wife of 59 years, Eugenia, died in March 1979, and he became depressed after losing her.

Meany died at George Washington University Hospital on January 10, 1980, of cardiac arrest. The AFL–CIO had 14 million members at the time of his death. President Jimmy Carter termed him "an American institution" and "a patriot".

Awards, tributes and legacy

thumb|right|300px|George Meany smoking a cigar, and a cigar also appears in the banner of the [[League for Industrial Democracy's "Tribute to George Meany".]]

President John F. Kennedy established the Presidential Medal of Freedom on February 22, 1963, but died before he could award it. Two weeks after Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson awarded it to Meany and thirty others on December 6, 1963. Johnson said the award was for Meany's service to unionism and for advancing freedom throughout the world.

On November 6, 1974, Meany dedicated the George Meany Center for Labor Studies (founded 1969), which was renamed the National Labor College in 1997. From 1993 to 2013, the college housed the George Meany Memorial Archives. In 2013 the archival and library holdings were transferred to the University of Maryland libraries, making the university the official repository. The holdings date from the establishment of the AFL (1881), and offer almost complete records from the founding of the AFL–CIO (1955). Among the estimated 40 million documents are AFL–CIO Department records, trade department records, international union records, union programs, union organizations with allied or affiliate relationships with the AFL–CIO, and personal papers of union leaders. Extensive photo documentation of labor union activities from the 1940s to the present are in the photographic negative and digital collections. Additionally, collections of graphic images, over 10,000 audio tapes, several hundred movies and videotapes, and more than 2,000 artifacts are available for public research and study.

The George Meany Award was established by the Boy Scouts of America in 1974.

Books published about Meany include Meany: The Unchallenged Strong Man of American Labor (1972) and George Meany and His Times: A Biography (1981). Meany's entry in the biographical encyclopedia American National Biography was published in 2000, authored by historian David Brody.

Meany was known as a cigar smoker, and pictures of him often appeared in newspapers and magazines smoking a cigar.

On the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1994, Meany was pictured on a United States commemorative postage stamp.

He was interviewed by Krusty the Clown on an episode of The Simpsons.

References

External links

George Meany (1894–1980) AFL-CIO biography
George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archives at the University of Maryland's Hornbake Library
Virginia Tehas Oral History interview at the University of Maryland libraries. Tehas was Meany's secretary from 1940 to 1979, and the interviews include her insight on working for Meany.