In tracing the history of Local 100, I draw on four main sources of information. There is the “objective” documentary record: New York’s four major daily newspapers, “The Chief,” New York’s weekly civil service newspaper, and a large handful of longer articles in periodicals or journals that mostly address the two strikes. The second set of sources is the copious written record the union leadership and opposition activists generated over several decades: the union newspaper (under both leaderships), New Directions’ Hell on Wheels newspaper, and hundreds of leaflets, including those by leftist organizations. Sometimes the literature was purely informational, but most often it also advocated or reflected action, clearly espousing a point of view. The third set of documentary evidence consists of hundreds of memos, letters, emails, and contract bargaining notes I both generated and collected during my years at the union hall (January 2001 – March 2003). All of this, presumably, would be available to a historian one hundred years hence, in microfilm, digitally archived, or in boxes of material contributed to NYU’s Tamiment Labor Library, where most historical TWU information is housed.
The fourth set of sources was only available to a contemporary historian: almost 100 extensive interviews of transit workers, Local 100 officers and staff, as well as some other closely-placed observers.1 Their words, ideas and actions are at the heart of this story. By and large, they were eager to tell their stories, and gratified that their life experiences were deemed worth telling. Many of them have thought long and deeply about events they consider climactic in their lives; more than a handful have developed a coherent analysis of decades of activist work in transit. My discussions with them generally paralleled Peter Friedlander’s with his own main interlocutor: “I did not simply ask questions … or seek reminiscences. On the contrary, I sought to bring to bear on Kord’s experience a number of theoretical and historical conceptions … a
With the exception of a handful of the original leftists, most transit workers I interacted with had little book learning beyond high school. But many of them are really smart. You need to be smart to successfully compete against 10,000 other “unskilled” civil service test takers for a few hundred conductor jobs. They thought about their jobs and work, and often had analysis of both, and of supervision. As everywhere in the working-class world, since at least the time of Frederick Taylor, management hates this – why can’t they just be dumb brutes and do what they’re told? – and they (in turn) hated management for that attitude. When they “talked shop” or “talked union,” they debated among themselves. They admired smart people, people who could figure things out: how to coax a bad train down the track, how to fix a carburetor, how to organize a work crew, how to read the contract and find a loophole. They are neither disdainful of, nor intimidated by, people with particular skills or higher education. I talked to them as peers – that is what we were – but they understood that just as they have thought long and hard about (for example) how to fight management or fix rail, my years of craft training and research bring something to the table, too; that we still are jointly participating, in many ways, in the endeavor we set off on decades ago.3
Although interviewees’ recollections were subject to the vicissitudes of time and their own perspectives on events, I do not consider the words that come out of their mouths to be inherently more or less true than written materials I have read, which are often full of very purposeful lies or misstatements.
Interviews, however, are different than archival materials. In some ways they are richer. People can be interrogated in a way the written word cannot: Anita, what was it like going out to sell a contract the members had already rejected? Or Really? But when I talked to John McCarthy he said … Information can be gathered that was rarely reflected on in emails or agitational flyers: Tim, why didn’t you run for office with Members’ First?
Of course, those clarifications introduce the potential for a middle layer of subjective interpretation. The document, clear or obscure, exists as it did at its moment of production, and the historian interprets it and utilizes it as best they can. On the other hand, memories can be faulty, and sometimes interviewees have an explicit or implicit present-day agenda. Moreover, Donatella della Porta has noted that activists create their own life narratives, making coherent “sense” of their lives, after the fact.5 As with all historical investigation, my task was to scrutinize their words, to weigh one piece of evidence or analysis – of whatever kind – against others, to try to find second and third and fourth sources of information, to search for “documentary” clarity about controversial events. I had to decide how and when to discard information, if it seemed intuitively wrong, or too unverifiable about an important event, or the respondent was consistently wrong on other matters. I had to decide how to treat material when how did you feel then, in the moment? received an answer that seemed more like how do you feel about then, now?
Now matters more than it might, because of the New Directions split, one faction led by Roger Toussaint, the other by Steve Downs. These factional leaders and, to a lesser extent, those grouped around them, created justifications for this split, then responded to each other. That spilled over into their analyses of the Local’s efforts and the character of New Directions before that. (As recently as 2017, Toussaint and Downs, then working as chief of staff for Toussaint’s political opponent and successor, debated for three hours about the past and present and their respective legacies on an internet radio show aimed at contemporary transit workers and hosted by a worker who ran for Local 100 president the next year and was angling for Toussaint’s endorsement.) As in any political struggle, lies were sometimes told, or the truth got stretched; or one side of a controversy was presented with approval, the other with disdain.
Of course, I often participated in those struggles; this too distinguishes this book from one written by a 22nd century historian. For almost a decade, I was an outside observer to Hell on Wheels and New Directions, joining only in 1995.
In odd ways, then, I stood within and apart from both factions almost from the time of my departure. That meant some people on each “side” refused to talk with me, either because they did not trust me or felt I would not parrot “their” story – chief among them Toussaint. So, my sources are not ideally complete; but what historical record ever is?
More important, though, the information and ideas I gleaned from my varied and diverse interviewees, as well as my own subsequent experiences and archival and book learning, caused my own ideas to shift and deepen, in some case changing dramatically from the views I expressed when I was interviewed twice in 2003–04. Like Appendix C, which presents my views in late 2000, they are part of the historical record. In general, though, I am more respectful of both difficulties and achievements than I was when I left transit. The result is my adoption of “dilemmas” as the framing device for my narrative.
I have tried to stand outside the material and my own history, to take my respondents seriously, to sift their ideas against each other, and my own. Where there is substantive controversy, I have tried my best to present alternative views before weighing in with my own, so that the reader themselves can participate in judgment. After all, my main purpose is to assess the meaning and dilemmas of the New Directions project, so that other labor activists who come after us can utilize this analysis and apply it fruitfully to their own work and efforts. Those activists, workers, and the reader, are participants in that task.
Most were conducted by me, but I have also utilized an incisive set of interviews conducted by Sarah Goldstein in 2003–04 with some of the New Directions principals, when events were fresher and more raw in the activists’ minds. Roger Toussaint was interviewed four times by Tramell Thompson in 2016–17, once joined by Steve Downs.
Peter Friedlander, The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936–39: A Study in Class and Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975): xii, xxix. Friedlander adds, “The necessity for cross-examination, digging for details, and even confronting an interviewee with contradictory evidence, is critical,” XXXII.
In this, I see myself in a different position than Alessandro Portelli, who writes about the oral history interview as only “an experiment [my italics throughout] in equality’ in which two individuals separated by class, age, gender, ethnicity, education or power endeavor to speak to each other as if all these inequalities were suspended, and human beings could talk to one another as if in a utopian world of equality and difference”: see Alessandro Portelli, “Afterword,” in Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice, ed. Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 273.
“The past, as it has existed, has never asked the pertinent questions about its own systematic view of the world – i.e., its own ideology and its own myth. But the oral historian can do this through interrogation,” Ronald Grele, “Movement Without Aim: Methodological and Theoretical Problems in Oral History,” 49 in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson. eds, The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge, 2006).
Donna della Porta, Methodological Practices in Social Movement Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).