Labor's Voice Is Stilled

George Meany: 1894-1980

Crusty George Meany. The adjective was so often tied to his name that Meany would growl (he never just spoke, of course, always growled): "Don't they know my first name isn't Crusty?" Yet the description was apt. The downturned lips, the jowls, the half-closed lids--all were dour. As the decades passed and he retained power as American labor's most dominant and durable leader, Meany's ideas as well as his manner sometimes seemed encrusted by the past. When he criticized Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter in his raspy Bronx accent, he did indeed growl. If he did not literally rattle windows at the White House across Lafayette Park from his imposing headquarters, he often shook the occupant.

When William George Meany died last week of cardiac arrest in George Washington University Hospital at the age of 85, he had completed 24 years as the first and, until his retirement last November, the only president of the AFL-CIO. He had outlived such powerful challengers as John L. Lewis, Jimmy Hoffa and Walter Reuther. All too often his foes had underestimated Meany as being merely an ex-plumber with a thick skull. "I don't think that the Federation has a head," scoffed Lewis at an AFL convention in 1947. "I think its neck has just grown up and haired over." After Meany assailed corruption in the Teamsters in 1963, Hoffa declared: "When you're old and decrepit on top of being stupid, you're in trouble. He's blocking us now, but he can't live forever."

Meany was, in fact, a crafty manipulator of the strong-willed men who fought for influence in labor's biggest house. Finding no way to dislodge Meany, first Lewis and his miners, then Hoffa and his Teamsters, finally Reuther and his auto workers, went their separate ways. Thus for almost a quarter of a century, Meany ran the organization he had created. It included as many as 111 unions and 17 million workers at times, and he did not hesitate to consider himself the spokesman for U.S. labor.

If he lacked the missionary fervor of a Eugene Debs ("Ideology is baloney," Meany scoffed) or the organizing zeal of a Samuel Gompers, he clung with consistency to his conviction that no nation could be free if its trade unions are shackled. Meany fought hard for the basics: higher wages, shorter hours, safer working conditions, and limits on corporate profits in any wage-price control plan.

Meany despised politicians and powerbrokers whose positions seemed to bend with every shift of public opinion or the latest headlines. He dismissed them contemptuously as "jitterbugs." Meany did not jitter. A stubborn conservative, he was one of the first cold warriors, urging labor to shun cooperation with the Soviet Union even before World War II had ended. In 1959, when Soviet First Deputy Premier Anastas I. Mikoyan wanted a Sunday tour of the AFL-CIO'S impressive new headquarters (it stands, in effect, as a monument to Meany), he rejected a State Department official's plea that he unlock the doors, declaring "Hell, no. I don't want him on the premises."

Nor did Meany ever budge from his all-out support of U.S. intervention in Viet Nam, and he insisted that Chicago police had not overreacted in clubbing antiwar protesters during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. They had merely subdued, he contended, a "dirty-necked and dirty-mouthed group of kooks."

Meany's tough view of life was nurtured early. He grew up in The Bronx as the second of ten children in a Roman Catholic Irish family. When Meany's father died in 1916, George suddenly found himself the sole financial support of his grandfather, his mother and six younger brothers and sisters. He was a plumber, like his father, and he worked hard at his trade until 1922, when he became a professional trade unionist as business agent of his local.

Impatient and energetic, Meany combined his workingman's blunt rhetoric with a knack for grasping the essence of complex labor-management conflicts. In 1934 he was elected president of the New York State Federation of Labor; in 1939 he became secretary-treasurer of the national AFL; in 1952 he was made its president.

Meany's greatest achievement was to engineer the merger of the AFL and the CIO, two jealous and differently conceived umbrella organizations. The AFL organized crafts, the CIO tackled industries, and they often fought for turf. Meany's biographer, Joseph C. Goulden, tells how the former plumber felt that the rivalry was less a matter of philosophical principle than it was a split caused by personality collisions and power grabs. Meany broke the impasse by making a practical and simple proposal: no individual union would lose any of its existing authority. The merger was completed in 1955, with Reuther, head of the CIO, readily agreeing that Meany should get the top spot.

In recent years Meany's influence faltered as the AFL-CIO membership declined. In 1979 it was down to 14 million, only 14% of the U.S. work force. Devastated by the death last March of his wife Eugenia, Meany began to lose interest in his job--and even in living. The aging Irishman who had liked to sit at a piano and sing such ballads as Cockles and Mussels --somehow managing to keep his cigar (never in recent years from Havana) from going out--stopped singing. Forced first to use a cane and then a wheelchair, he had given up his favorite sport of golf. Despite his bulk (usually more than 200 Ibs.), he had often broken 80. By the time Meany finally retired, his health was already rapidly deteriorating.

The labor boss's fiercely loyal aides had joked about proposing a two-volume biography of their leader. Volume I was to have been titled George Meany: The First 100 Years. They could console themselves last week that 85 years was not bad. President Carter praised Meany for his service to labor and recalled a meeting between the old battler and Pope John Paul II at the White House just three months ago. Carter said that the Pope had clasped Meany's hands and said simply, "You do good work for your people." That summed up a lifetime.

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