Mike Quill

Wednesday December 11, 2002 13:53

by SW Kerry Socialist

Kerry Founder of the Transport Workers Union of America

Mike Quill - Kerry Founder of the Transport Workers Union of America - an address by Manus O?Riordan SIPTU Head of Research at the Biennial Delegate Conference of SIPTU?s South West Region Killarney, Co. Kerry, October 11, 2002

Mike Quill - Kerry Founder of the Transport Workers Union of America

- an address by Manus O?Riordan SIPTU Head of Research at the Biennial
Delegate
Conference of SIPTU?s South West Region
Killarney, Co. Kerry, October 11, 2002

Comrades and Friends,

It is indeed a great honour on the occasion of this Conference that we have
among us this evening a delegation from the Transport Workers Union of
America
who are visiting the birthplace of their Union ? South Kerry!

One of the most abiding TV memories of my school days was in 1966 when the
newly-elected Mayor of New York, John Lindsay, responded to media goading
and decided he would try to face down the Transport Workers Union. But he
met more than his match when he was confronted by New York?s first ever
city-wide transit strike. It was then that I saw and heard on screen the
leader of that strike, Michael J. Quill, denounce, with all his
Kerry-accented
verbal eloquence, both the Mayor and the Judge who was sending him to prison
for violating an anti-strike injunction. Quill persevered and led the Union,
which he had founded in 1934, to win its greatest contract ever. Tragedy
followed victory. On January 28, 1966, three days after speaking at the
mass rally called to celebrate that new contract, Mike Quill was dead.
Against
all medical advice he had insisted on leading his members in that momentous
struggle. He had literally given his life on the picket-line.

Mike Quill?s fighting spirit had been nurtured in the very Kerry mountains
that surround us here. He was born in Kilgarvan on September 18, 1905.
During
Ireland?s War of Independence from 1919 to 1921 the teenage Mike Quill was
a dispatch rider when his family home served as headquarters of the Kerry
no.2 Brigade of the Irish Republican Army. His uncle?s house, also in
Kilgarvan,
was yet another home so renowned for its revolutionary sympathies that the
British occupying garrison of Black-and-Tans derisively nick-named it
"Liberty
Hall"!

In the tragic Civil War that followed the Anglo-Irish Treaty Mike Quill
participated in the Republican capture of the town of Kenmare. It was,
however,
a short-lived victory before the defeat of the side on which he fought.
During those years Mike Quill also had his first experience of industrial
struggle when he and his brother John were fired for staging a sit-in strike
in a Kenmare saw-mill. Thereafter an employment black-list prevailed against
Quill, as both a defeated Republican fighter and a sacked industrial
activist,
leaving him no other option but emigration. So it was that on the eve of
St. Patrick?s Day 1926 Mike Quill first set foot in the New York City he
would make his own.

Following a variety of jobs Quill finally took up employment in 1929 as
a ticket agent with the Interboro Rapid Transit Company, or IRT, the largest
subway operation in the USA. Working conditions were horrendous, with Mike
often required to be in attendance for four hours without pay until work
might finally become available, and then condemned to a slave-driving
schedule
? 12 hours a night, seven nights a week. In 1961 he recalled:
"During those twelve hour nights we?d chat about the motormen, conductors,
guards etc. whose conditions were even worse. They had to work a ?spread?
of 16 hours each day in order to get 10 hours pay. Negro workers could get
jobs only as porters. They were subjected to treatment that makes Little
Rock and Birmingham seem liberal and respectable by comparison ? I also
saw Catholic ticket agents fired by Catholic bosses for going to Mass early
in the morning while the porter ?covered? the booth for half an hour.
Protestant
bosses fired Protestant workers for similar crimes ? going to Church. The
Jewish workers had no trouble with the subway bosses ? Jews were denied
employment in the transit lines".

At that time 50 percent of New York?s transit workers were Irish. Mike Quill
and other politicised immigrants began to associate in the Irish Workers?
Clubs that had been established in New York by James Gralton, the only
Irishman
ever to be deported from his native land because of his political
activities.
These Irish immigrant workers formed the nucleus of a leadership that would
give birth to a new Union in New York. It was my privilege to have known
two of Quill?s fellow pioneers in that historic project, Austin Hogan from
Cork and Gerald O?Reilly from County Meath. Through the Irish Workers? Clubs
they learned that James Connolly had not only been an executed leader of
the 1916 National Rising. They also learned that he had been an Irish trade
union leader and, more significantly, an American union organiser as well.
In his 1910 pamphlet "The Axe to the Root" Connolly had written in great
detail of how craft divisions had ensured the defeat of a recent strike
of New York transit workers and how much a new model of industrial unionism
was required. Quill and his comrades devoured Connolly?s teachings and a
quarter of a century later put them into practice with the foundation of
just such a Union on April 12, 1934.

You will note that I have referred to these New York workers as transit
and not transport workers. The Irish writer and wit Oscar Wilde once
observed
that both sides of the Atlantic were divided by a common language. "Transit"
is the word used in the "American language". But why, then, did these
transit
workers call their new union the Transport Workers Union of America? It
was in honour of SIPTU?s predecessor, the Irish Transport and General
Workers
Union of Larkin and Connolly, whose history had inspired them to go and
do likewise.

Time does not allow for a detailed history of that American Union. Beginning
with just 400 members, it fought successfully to organise and represent
all 14,000 employed by the IRT. In the next largest subway company - the
Brooklyn Manhattan Transit or BMT line ? the successful 1937 sit-down strike
led to further victories which soon brought total union membership to
45,000.
In the late 1940s membership was further extended to embrace utility and
airline workers.

Throughout all this period Quill also remained politically focused. In 1937
he was first elected to the New York City Council on behalf of the American
Labour Party and on the final occasion on which he stood for the City
Council
in 1945, he was elected on the first ballot. Indeed, he was the first
candidate
to be elected in the entire city. Nor was he afraid to risk the popularity
that came his way when his principles demanded that he should swim against
the tide.

In 1969 and 1970 when I was a student in the United States and was
protesting
against the Vietnam War I knew how much we were still a minority viewpoint.
And yet as early as 1965, at his last Union Convention, Mike Quill had the
courage of his convictions to confront his members with his own forthright
opposition to that War.

Three decades earlier Quill had also risked unpopularity with much of his
membership by supporting the Spanish Republic and its right to defend itself
against Fascist rebellion and aggression. In Christmas 1937, in the wake
of his victory in the New York City Council elections, Mike Quill briefly
returned to Ireland in order to marry Molly O?Neill of Cahersiveen. And
yet he still found time to have a meeting with a 20 year old Cork volunteer
about to set out to fight in defence of the Spanish Republic, my own father
Michael O?Riordan. Quill had already seen a neighbour?s child from Kilgarvan
make that internationalist commitment to Spain ?Michael Lehane, who would
subsequently serve in the Norwegian Merchant Navy on the transAtlantic
convoys
of World War II and who would give up his life in the cause of anti-fascism
when his ship fell victim to a Nazi U-boat attack in 1943. In 1989 my father
unveiled a plaque in honour of his close friend and comrade-in-arms in Spain
at the Morley?s Bridge entrance to Kilgarvan. And in 1997 Mick Lehane was
posthumously awarded his Second World War Service medal by the Norwegian
Government in a ceremony appropriately held in Kilgarvan?s own Michael J.
Quill Memorial Centre.

Mike Quill was a man ahead of his time in so many different ways. Here in
Ireland, as we are still struggling to overcome the situation where this
country has the worst provision of childcare services in the European Union,
it is worth remembering that in 1944 Quill had introduced a bill into the
New York City Council to establish free childcare centres for working
mothers.

And as issues of racism in varying guises now need to be confronted in
Ireland,
we can also learn from Quill?s inspired leadership. An unequivocal and
relentless
foe of all forms of anti-Semitism, Quill declared at the end of World War
II:
"We licked the race haters in Europe, but the millions of Jewish dead cannot
be restored to life".

Mike Quill was a Kerryman who was never afraid to court unpopularity by
fearlessly tackling any anti-Semitism encountered among his fellow-Irishmen.
In the 1930s the anti-Semitism of Father Charles Coughlin?s Christian Front
and the associated stormtroopers of America?s Christian Mobilisers was
finding
a sympathetic hearing among significant sections of New York?s Irish. Quill
took them on head-to-head in June 1939 when he staged a rally against
anti-Semitism
in a 95 percent Irish district of the South Bronx and won over the
overwhelming
majority of the four thousand Irish who came to hear him. He was in the
best traditions of James Connolly himself who in 1902 had issued a
Yiddish-language
address to Jewish immigrant workers in Dublin.

Throughout his life Quill also fought relentlessly against colour prejudice.
In marked contrast to other railroad unions of the 1930s, which either
excluded
black workers entirely or accorded them only second class status, the
Transport
Workers Union from the very outset declared it was open to all workers
without
regard to colour. Indeed, the African-American IRT porter Clarence King
was elected to the very first TWU Executive Board. Here again Quill was
prepared to face down reactionary white racism whenever it raised its ugly
head among his own Union membership. In 1944 he successfully brought to
an end a boss-inspired wildcat strike of white members in Philadelphia who
had been encouraged to rebel against a Union contract which had secured
promotion rights to the grade of conductor for eight black porters.

In 1961, when Quill received a letter allegedly written by twenty-five TWU
airline workers in Tennessee protesting against the Union?s support for
the Civil Rights desegregation campaign, his immediate response was to
invite
the Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King to address that year?s Union
Convention. Quill introduced him with the following prophetic words:
"We may very well be making history here .. in the presence of the man who
is entrusted with the banner of American liberty that was taken from Lincoln
when he was shot 95 years ago ? Dr. King was almost stabbed to death, has
been shot at, has been arrested more often than anybody in the United
States,
South and North ? Dr. King?s life at this moment is in just as great danger
as was Lincoln?s. And he has to walk with care if he is to continue to lead
this crusade".
Quill?s own earlier death in 1966 spared him from seeing his prediction
of the murder of Martin Luther King come true. It would have devastated
him, for one of the proudest displays at the Quill Centre in Kilgarvan is
a photograph of those two great leaders united together at that 1961 Union
Convention.

As for Quill?s philosophy of life, he summed it up as follows:

"I believe in the Corporal Works of Mercy, the Ten Commandments, the
American
Declaration of Independence and James Connolly?s outline of a socialist
society ? Most of my life I?ve been called a lunatic because I believe that
I am my brother?s keeper. I organise poor and exploited workers, I fight
for the civil rights of minorities, and I believe in peace. It appears to
have become old-fashioned to make social commitments ? to want a world free
of war, poverty and disease. This is my religion".

On the occasion of Quill?s death one speaker paid the following tribute:

"Mike Quill was a fighter for decent things all his life ? Irish
Independence,
labour organisation and racial equality. He spent his life ripping the
chains
of bondage off his fellow man. This is a man the ages will remember".

That was praise indeed ? particularly when we recall that the speaker in
question was none other than that outstanding twentieth century beacon of
freedom ? the Reverend Martin Luther King himself.

At this Conference of SIPTU being held in Kerry we can warmly assure our
colleagues from the Transport Workers Union of America that we too are truly
proud of Michael J. Quill of Kilgarvan and New York. So, let us all salute
his memory!