Leeann Graham, my wife, is too important to put last. For almost fifty years, she has been my closest confidant and, often, my best advisor. Leeann lived transit with me; she lived the union with me; she lived the research and writing of this book with me. I tested out my arguments on many of my colleagues and comrades and interviewees, but none more consistently than Leeann. Sometimes it was just useful to have someone listen to me while I tried to make sense of some idea in my head; but countless times over the years, she had an insight or a framing that I had not thought of – wait let me write that down.
My daughter Rachel was thirteen when we got to the union hall in 2001 – old enough to have observed some of the struggles and have her own memories of those years. Also, she knows why we honk the horn – in solidarity. My son Gordon was a transit worker himself for a few years. That experience, along with his general good analytic sense, has allowed him to participate in the interrogation of this work in its many draft forms. He’s also a good wordsmith.
How much luckier could I have been than to be under the wing of Josh Freeman during my tenure at the CUNY Graduate Center? Josh is not just the foremost expert on the TWU, but a brilliant and insightful historian. He patiently took an activist and taught him, as well as I allowed, to be a historian.
Others in and around the GC: Jonathan Sassi, Amanda Brennan, Alexander Gailing, Alex Gambaccini, Andrew Lang, and Todd Fine read my first-year paper that became Chapter 3. Ruth Milkman and her dissertation reading group read many draft chapters: Luke Elliott-Negri, Juan Ferre, Isaac Jabola-Carolus, Joey van der Naald, Alison Richardson, Lynne Turner, and Andrew Wolf. My dissertation committee: Joshua Freeman, Thomas Kessner, Ruth Milkman, and Robyn Spencer. Jim Jasper and his group of grad students who co-authored Gains and Losses: How Protestors Win and Lose (Oxford, 2022): Luke Elliott-Negri, Isaac Jabola-Carolus, Jessica Mahlbacher, Manes Weisskircher, and Anna Zhelnina. Chapter 4 is a more sociological version of Chapter 6 here.
Early on, Alan Anderson, David Katzman, Antoinette Perry, Bob Reilly and Lisa Gell-Mann made me think about working-class struggle. Paul Filson pushed me into tenant organizing in 1978 and changed my life. We have bickered about union strategy and tactics for forty years, sometimes joined by David Kranz and Rena Epstein.
I was very fortunate to be part of the House Maintenance gang at the 207th St. Overhaul Shop, an unusually militant crew, led by the great shop steward Lou Russo. My belief in the importance of participatory democracy came first from House Gang, where I saw how our meetings and collective decision-making
The many transit workers and TWU-related staff who agreed to be interviewed are listed in the Bibliography, but some deserve special notice. For Chapter 3, Arthur Goldberg, George McAnanama, and Mike Scott gave me the inside story. Arthur is also a protagonist in Chapter 5. Arnold Cherry was a political opponent in TWU, but when I came calling years later, he graciously gave me hours of his time. Joseph Gayol’s papers, at NYU Tamiment Labor Library, were crucial in piecing together the story of the 1980 dissident groups. Thanks to Shannon O’Neill and Mike Koncewicz at Tamiment, where Sarah Goldstein’s brilliant interviews with many of the key New Directions (ND) activists in 2003 and 2004, when experiences were still fresh – and raw! – are housed. One of those interviewees, Marian Swerdlow, is a trained sociologist, one of the first women subway conductors (her book, Underground Woman, chronicles those years) and a founding member of Hell on Wheels. Marian’s characterization, “bottom-up change from the top,” is crucial to understanding the perspective of ND’s left activists. She also took a fierce developmental editor’s pen to several chapters.
For the later chapters in this book, great thanks to Arthur Schwartz, Terry Meginniss, David Katzman, Nick Unger, JP Patafio, and Steve Downs. Arthur was the New Directions lawyer and later general counsel of Local 100. His perceptions and characterizations of many players, from a sort of outsider-insider perspective, were very useful. Terry succeeded Arthur as general counsel and was a crucial source of information about the 2005 contract negotiations.
David Katzman was hired as TWU staff in 2002, has been an astute observer of the many ins and outs of Local 100 policy over the years, and gently pricked some of my more speculative balloons. Nick Unger read several of my chapters and held my hand through patient discourses on Local 100 in the first years after I left the union. JP Patafio joined New Directions in 1996, and was probably its last surviving member still at the union hall. JP’s an organizer, and being able to talk with him about that type of work in the field, and where it’s been missing, has been invaluable.
Steve Downs is one of the two main protagonists in this work. Steve was the founding father of Hell on Wheels and New Directions. Without Steve’s efforts New Directions never would have held together for the time necessary to become a viable insurgent organization. Yet only rarely did Steve hear anything but complaints for all his vital work that made it meaningful to criticize
I wish I could say the same of Roger Toussaint. I first met Roger in the early 1980s, and we were part of the same left organization, and its transit “cell” for ten years. Soon after it dissolved, we reunited in New Directions and later worked side-by-side at the Local 100 union hall for two years – until I criticized the contract we negotiated and he fired me. We’ll see the two sides of Roger in this work: a fierce fighter against management, an astute organizer, a charismatic leader, brilliant in so many ways, Roger was also a “my way or the highway” manager, as one of his closest advisors once said, intolerant of public criticism, and with a long memory of perceived slights. Roger has crafted an extensive narrative of the Local under his leadership and the faults of those he clashed with, and I’ve made extensive use of that written and oral legacy. Unfortunately, he has been less than willing to interrogate himself or be seriously questioned by others (the one exception is a remarkable joint interview with Steve Downs), so some of his thinking about his choices and decisions, especially about the 2005 strike, remains unknown.