History

Class Struggles: The UFT Story

by Jack Schierenbeck

Feb 16, 1996 1:14 PM

A History Lesson

The UFT turns 36 this year. As unions go, that makes us a fairly new kid on the block. But the reality is that our labor roots stretch back to 1916 and that most of our founding mothers and fathers have either retired or passed on. Even those who came after and survived the bruising battles of the '60s and '70s are themselves nearing the end of their careers.

I, for one, have no doubt our newer people are up to the job of taking this union forward in the years to come. Still, through no fault of their own, they know very little of how far we as a union have come. As we all know, history -- textbooks, newspapers, movies, even music-- gives short shrift to the long and often bitter struggles of common people for justice and dignity. Yesteryear's educators, as this series will show, had no easy time of it. Their stories show that most of the day-to-day rights and dignities we take for granted had to be wrested from a system that would never have changed on its own.

Thirty-six years later, we're still fighting. Today our union is fighting for a contract that acknowledges our true worth to this city and its future, our students, and for a school budget that provides the means for us and our students to teach and learn. Nothing will change unless we make it change.

I urge you to read this series. While history is no blue print for the future, it can be a compass keeping us pointed in the right direction.Sandy Feldman President (Feb. 19, 1996) ***

THE EARLY DAYS
For the rapidly vanishing corps of UFT old timers, Nov.7 is as close as things get to a high holy day. The year was 1960. As the nation watched and wondered whether it would be Nixon or Kennedy, for several thous and New York City school teachers, that Monday before Election Day was a day of reckoning.

In direct defiance of the law forbidding strikes by public employees, they refused to report for work, putting jobs and careers on the line.

The union elders had long admonished their youngeritchin'-for-a-fight comrades not to be so gung-ho. "Wait until you have a majority of teachers on your side before striking," they were told. But there was no holding them back.

For their part, Jeannette and John DiLorenzo, teachers at JHS 142 in Red Hook, Brooklyn, were ready to walk. Though new to teaching,both were veteran organizers and activists. In a little more than a year,they had signed up nearly all of the teachers at their school.

Come Monday morning, it seemed as if all of Red Hook had turned out in support of their striking teachers. Parents were handing out refreshments, while longshoremen from the nearby piers and merchant seamen from the Seafarers Union were out carrying signs of support. As the morning bell rang, some 80 teachers were giving an open-air civics lesson on democracy.

But the DiLorenzos' hearts would soon sink. They had been detailed to check on some 30 other schools in south Brooklyn. As they rode by one school after another, a depressing realization began to sink in. "It was a terrible feeling," recalls Jeannette. "It was pitiful passing by all the elementary schools and not a soul coming out."

By the time they returned to JHS 142, half the striking teachers had deserted the picket line and returned to their classrooms. Word was out. The strike had fizzled and the superintendent of schools had fired the strikers.

By day's end, Dilorenzo found herself hoping "to find a way to get back in that building with some kind of dignity."

Part I

Jeannette DiLorenzo remembers coming home from her first day as a teacher in "total shock." She and her husband John had come into teaching at the tail end of the 1950s as a second career after organizing investigators, accountants and clerks at the city's Department of Finance for AFSCME. "We were adults where we were and we'd come into a system where the teachers were treated as if they were children. It was almost a throw back to feudal times. The principal was the lord. You were the serf."

Lou Carrubba had done a hitch in the service, so he was familiar with authority. But life in uniform was nothing compared to then it picking bullying that teachers suffered. "There was no real grievance machinery, no protections, no due-process procedures. Besides, if you complained they'd make your life even more miserable."

So did teachers have to "eat a lot of crow" back then?” Today’s teachers have no idea. I'm telling you, hardly a day went by when we weren't humiliated in one form or another," responded Carrubba. "Let's just say eating crow is a nice way of putting it." Authoritarian rule had always been a sore spot for teachers. The original Teachers Union was founded in 1916 in small part "to fight oppressive supervision."

THE PRINCIPAL AS TYRANT
"The principal was a real matriarch, a tyrant," recalled Alice Marsh, who started as a teacher in 1929. "They thought we were their children."

Marsh recalled how she and her colleagues had devised a system of shared monitoring that would have saved them all from climbing five double flights of stairs four times a day. Marsh was chosen emissary and walked into a frosty reception with the principal.

"She looked at me with those steely blue eyes and said:’ I am the principal of this school. Good day!'"

Around the same time, a first-year substitute teacher at a Brooklyn elementary school got an early lesson in the doctrine of principal in fallibility. "She (the principal) came in and thought (my class) was too noisy and disorderly," Si Beagle recalled shortly before his death in 1985. "Being a wise guy I said to her, 'But this is creative disorder.' She immediately told me to look elsewhere for work.

"In those days, the principal had the power to bring me up on charges by simply saying, 'Mr. Beagle has shown conduct unbecoming a teacher.' It was as simple as that.

"'Conduct unbecoming a teacher' meant anybody could be fired. Teachers would be asked to do work after school and you couldn't refuse,” Beagle said. "When my principal said stay after school and coach the track team, you did."

Abe Levine did likewise when ordered to skip lunch in favor of "yard duty." Even by the early 1950s a teacher was still very much under the thumb of the principal. "I felt very much taken advantage of,” said Levine. "You were completely beholden to the principal. He was the king. We had absolutely no rights. We were afraid to speak up."

CHEAP LABOR
Along with monastic-like obedience came a vow of poverty, or something close to it. So pitiful was the pay that there was a long-standing joke that whenever teachers were introduced to each other they'd ask what the other did for a living.

A New York Times editorial in January 1955 titled "Teach or Wash Cars," posed the question why anyone would take a job teaching at$66 a week when washing cars paid $72.35.

The fact is, it wasn't just anyone who went into teaching. Beginning in the mid-19th century, schoolwork was woman's work, a natural extension of the home schooling that women had always done. Besides, as Diane Ravitch writes in her book "The Great School Wars," school officials preferred women. With other "respectable occupations" all but closed, they'd be happy to take the job and all that came with it.

Low salaries were easily explained away. Teaching, after all , was only a "temporary" occupation before a woman settled into her real career as wife and homemaker. Besides, as unmarried women they could "afford” their jobs because they lived at home with their parents. Later, officials used marriage as a convenient rationale for miserly wages. When Brooklyn school teacher Mary Murphy successfully mounted a court challenge in 1905that allowed women to keep their jobs after marrying, the official line was that with husbands to support them women didn't need the money.

Things began to change after World War I. Due in large part to stricter enforcement of child labor laws, more and more children were going beyond grade school. As the number of high schools quadrupled in the decade after the war, an acute shortage of teachers developed. At the same time, there was an audible concern among school officials and others that the teaching of older male students would be better left to men. To attract male teachers in the post-war boom economy, salaries were raised-- so much so that by 1928 teachers' wages were competitive with most private sector jobs. As an added inducement, the board maintained separate eligibility lists from which men were often given preference in hiring. Slowly more men began to enter the teaching field, including many Jews who could not find work in WASP-dominated banking, insurance and law.

Still it wasn't until the Depression of the 1930s that many men, desperate for any kind of job, thought about teaching. The promise of a steady job drew out-of-work Ph.D.s, accountants and even lawyers --men like Jules Kolodny, Dave Wittes and Charles Cogen who, over the coming decades, would play pivotal roles in the growth of teacher unionism.

Together with equally brilliant but professionally thwarted women, there evolved what many have argued was the greatest assembly of brainpower ever in the schools. But if it was the Golden Age of talent, it was anything but golden for the teachers themselves.

These mind workers came cheap. The deepening Depression had all but wiped out the salary gains. With more qualified candidates than openings, teachers were in no position to bargain. The city had the upper hand and used it, cutting salaries and imposing one-month unpaid furloughs-- even going so far as to coerce teachers into "voluntarily" contributing5 percent of their pay for needy children.

The School Relief Fund, as it was called, raised close to $6 million at the height of the Depression. While there's no denying that the money went to a good cause -- everything from a hot lunch program to clothing and eyeglasses -- it amounted to yet another shakedown scheme. A little nudge from a supervisor or principal was all it took to leave teachers in a giving mood.

The Depression had given the Board of Education the chance to keep thousands of teachers in a permanent state of job insecurity. Instead of appointing a teacher to a regular position whenever there was a vacancy, the board filled it with a substitute. These "permanent substitutes" had no sick pay, no paid holidays or vacations, no pension, no health insurance-- and they could be let go at any time with or without cause.

With as much as 25 percent of the teaching force employed as substitutes, management's already considerable power got even stronger. Lacking even the slightest leverage, all teachers were forced to work under the most demoralizing conditions.

PREGNANT? LEAVE NOW
Double and even triple sessions were not uncommon, especially during the post-WW II baby boom years. As part of a series called "The Scandal of Our Schools," the New York Post reported in January 1952 that one Queens elementary school built for 1,140 students had an enrollment of just under 3,000.

The 48 children who jammed Alice Marsh's first-grade class were typical. "My first year I had to leave 12 children back because I couldn't get to them when they were slipping. This was par for the course."

Lunch was no break. For elementary school teachers there was no such thing as a duty-free lunch period. Lunch, what there was of it, amounted to a sandwich gobbled down in makeshift, overcrowded rooms. "You lined up with your kids in the schoolyard and stayed with them the whole day, even eating with them -- not even a bathroom break," remembers Janet Miller.

As for sick pay: You needed a doctor's note if you were out sick for even one day. No note, no pay.

Sabbaticals were a luxury few could afford, since the pay was only 40 percent of the regular salary.

It wasn't until 1957 that teachers, along with other city employees, were allowed to participate in the government retirement and disability program.

And pensions? You got one, but not until you were either65 or had logged 35 years of service.

Until 1937, teachers were forced to take a two-year, unpaid maternity leave. Though this was a far sight better than in the private sector, where maternity protection was rare, the practice of forced leave was a huge financial hit. Even later when the rules were relaxed, teachers were still required to report to their principals as soon as they became” aware" they were pregnant. But since admission meant you were required to leave immediately, teachers usually hid their condition until there was no denying the evidence. "You stayed until you showed," said Phyllis Wallach who favored loose jackets during her pregnancy in 1962.

Wallach scoffs at the idea that the board was simply worried about a woman's health. "It was Puritanism, pure and simple," she said. "God forbid students would see that their teacher was having sex. Fort hem, exposing children to a pregnant teacher was akin to corrupting the morals of a minor."

Three decades earlier, Alice Marsh's elementary school principal had made known her disapproval of female married teachers. "I don't see how you can stand in front of a class after you've slept with a man the night before," Marsh remembers the principal saying.

Board and school authorities were intent on teachers setting a "proper example" to their students -- so much so that very little about a teacher's appearance, speech or even personal politics escaped their scrutiny. For example, while the board never had an official standard of” school attire" for teachers, many a principal drew the line when it came to sporting facial hair or men's not wearing jackets, even in the hottest weather.

The Board of Examiners, which had the final say in the issuance of licenses, was a law unto itself, functioning as the educational equivalent of the medieval Star Chamber by allowing anonymous complaints against the character of candidates.

FREE SPEECH DENIED
In 1937, Albert Smallheiser, president of the Teachers Guild, challenged the Board of Examiners for capricious practices such as disqualifying candidates with a foreign accent for having "speech defects.” Even as late as 1950, "people who had foreign accents could forget it," said Carrubba. "Even a distinct Brooklyn or Bronx accent was looked down on."

It was an open secret that many racial and ethnic minorities were not welcome. In her book "Having Our Say," Sadie Delaney tells of how she, a young black woman, had outwitted a bigoted principal. An elementary school teacher, Delaney had made it to the top of the seniority list for a high school appointment. All that stood in her way was an interview with the high school principal.

"At the appointment they would have seen I was colored and found some excuse to bounce me down the list," wrote Delaney. Instead, she skipped the appointment and just showed up at the all-white Theodore Roosevelt HS on opening day. "Child, they just about died when they saw me."

For Eastern European Jews and other immigrants, on the other hand, getting a job meant long hours learning how to break the board's sound barrier. In anticipation of the dreaded oral interview, many a would-be teacher took the mandatory speech course at City College and fretted over how to avoid the dead giveaways.

Just how much of the board's standards can be explained by simple prejudice will never be known.

There was no question, however, that certain forms of” speech" could get a teacher into trouble. In her book "My Daughter, the Teacher," Ruth Markowitz tells of how one teacher in the 1930s was censured and warned by her principal not to "plant any seeds of doubt in her pupils' minds." Her crime? She asked her high school civics class "to debate whether President Roosevelt had too much or too little power." Another was chastised for calling a number of congressmen "racists." Still another was transferred after posting a union notice on the school bulletin board.

By the late 1940s, talk of "communist infiltration" of the schools was everywhere. Under the watchful eye of self-styled "patriotic” groups, a teacher's every move -- both inside and outside the classroom --might be scrutinized, weighed and interpreted. Even advocating what was then known as "inter-cultural education," aimed at countering racism and anti-Semitism, carried the danger of being found "disloyal."

At any rate, by the mid-1950s, dozens of teachers had lost their jobs for refusing to answer questions put to them by school authorities about past or present membership in the Communist Party along with what books they read and who they saw at political rallies, etc.

The Teachers Guild of the late '40s and early '50s was bitterly divided over whether professed communists should be allowed to teach in the public schools. Years of watching small-party cadres frustrate democratic majorities had deeply embittered many non-communist teacher unionists. Many in the Guild ranks openly questioned their fitness for the classroom. Blind party loyalty, they argued, made it impossible for them to be "open-minded” and "independent." It was a question that was hotly debated on the democratic left.

Yet, at the time, Communist Party-dominated unions were being expelled from both the AFL and the CIO for their slavish adherence to Stalinist dictums. The Teachers Guild followed suit, narrowly passing a resolution that called for the barring of communists from the classroom. They strongly opposed, however, efforts to force teachers to inform on one another.

Still, the identification of unionism with communism left average, apolitical teachers confused and wary. On top of this, the residual stigma had an undeniably chilling effect on both organizing activities and academic freedom. "People were afraid to be heard talking union," recalled Si Beagle.

Censored. Browbeaten. Overworked. Underpaid. Why, then, weren’t teachers lining up to join a union? Why was it that long after workers in mining, steel, automobiles, textiles, railroads and the building trades had organized, teachers were still turning a deaf ear to calls for unionization?

"The objective conditions for organizing teachers were always there," said George Altomare. "We were every bit as exploited as blue-collar workers. In fact, I remember a former Board of Education president, some time in the 1950s, describing the board's labor relations as 50 years behind the times.

"But we were divided. I guess you could say that before we could add and multiply, we had to figure out how to deal with division."

The Next Phase

Though she retired in 1990 after 37 years of teaching, on most days Rose Moran can be found at UFT headquarters in mid-Manhattan. A regular at the Si Beagle Learning Center, she attends workshops in calligraphy, art history, folk dancing, then gets the blood moving with an exercise class.” It’s wonderful," says the former chapter leader. "The union continues to enrich my life. I'm 100 percent, true-blue UFT."

Unions are in her blood. Moran's Irish immigrant parents were Roosevelt Democrats and staunch union supporters -- she'd even voted for Adlai Stevenson over Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. "The only magazine that ever came to the house was from Local 488 of the Carpenters' Union,” she says. "From an early age, I understood my father had a job because of the union."

Raised in the Bronx, Moran went to Catholic grammar and high schools before going off to Hunter College to become a teacher. One summer in a steno pool had convinced her that she wasn't cut out for the business world. "I was the only girl in the entire neighborhood who went to college," she says. "I really wanted to be a journalist, but I didn't have the means. The only careers really open to women back then were secretarial, nursing or teaching."

In 1953, Moran's first assignment took her to the far north Bronx. "PS 72 wasn't what you would call a radical hotbed," she says.” I don't remember anyone from the Teachers Guild ever coming to talk with us. But I'd heard talk that they were communists.

"Not that it would have mattered. Really, it was a very conservative, lady-like environment. Those women wouldn't have given a thought to joining a union. It was beneath them."

But on Monday, Nov. 7, 1960, her beliefs collided with her fears. "I was a Depression baby, scared to lose my job." So with a "twinge of guilt," Rose Moran went to work, while a tiny minority of teachers went on strike. She didn't have to cross a picket line. Like most of the city's grade schools, it was business as usual at PS 37.

PART 2: THE NEST PHASE
Ever the agent provocateur, Al Shanker reminded the large UFT Teacher Union Day audience last fall that in the 1950s there was no shortage of naysayers who said teachers would never get their act together: "Can teacher sever be organized? Well, no they can't be. Because they're snobs. They think of themselves as professionals. Most of them are women who don't need the money. Right?"

Shanker had hit a raw nerve. An audible murmur went up from the crowd. "Whoa," he said, holding up his hands, smiling. "I'm not saying that. That's a quote from a lot of discussions in teacher rooms as to why this would never happen."

Forty years earlier, Shanker had every reason to doubt. He’d studied symbolic logic in graduate school. But you didn't have to be a logician to figure out that organizing teachers was going nowhere.

The numbers told the story: Between 1930 and 1960, the number of teachers in the union had doubled to a whopping 8.8 percent!

It's not that New York City's 45,000 public school teachers didn't have their gripes. In fact, they should have been fighting mad. America's post-World War II full-throttle economy had all but skipped public education. Teachers' real wages were never lower. Conditions in the schools were deplorable. Yet fewer than one in 10 teachers had joined the union, leaving Shanker and others scratching their heads in disbelief. Why was it so much harder to organize school workers than, say, steelworkers?

106 DIFFERENT ORGANIZATIONS
It was a case of self-inflicted wounds, said Charles Cogen. In 1952 Cogen, then president of the Teachers Guild, had come to the view that teachers' problems were largely of their own making. The biggest stumbling block, he wrote, was the "curse of the 57 varieties, or more, of teachers' organizations, (a situation) as unique as it is tragic.

"Divided along subject lines, divided by boroughs, divided by religious groupings, divided by grade levels, divided according to type of occupation, we in this city bear the curse of our misadventures in disunity,” railed Cogen.

"Is it any wonder that cynics sometimes say of New York City teachers' frustrations, defeats and failures, 'It serves them right for not sticking together.'"

Cogen was referring to the dizzying array of teacher” associations."

"There were Catholic, Jewish, Italian and Irish teaching associations. Everything but the blue-eyed teachers association," Si Beagl equipped years later.

Teachers in the Bronx had their own group, as did all the boroughs. The "Kindergarten-6B Teachers Association" had thousands of members, built largely on their opposition to higher salaries for high school teachers.

High school teachers, in the meantime, were unapologetic and adamantly opposed to a single salary schedule. "There was a feeling of elitism that high school teachers were better qualified and deserving of higher status," recalls Roger Parente, a leader in the High School Teachers Association during the 1950s.

On paper, the high school teachers had a point. The preparation and credentials needed to teach secondary school were more demanding. But as Rebecca Simonson later recalled, high school teachers more often than not held their grade school counterparts in disdain. "The high school teacher considered himself superior to the elementary school teacher because he had higher qualifications to get the job and he was teaching older children. He looked upon the teaching of young children as unimportant work," Simonson said.

While some of the organizations were little more than letter heads, others did make their presence felt. The largest such group, the Brooklyn Teachers Association, actually published journals and a newsletter with teaching tips, stories about teachers, ideas for class trips, museum show listings, organized outings and vacation tours. The BTA even created a coop to get discounts from Brooklyn merchants, and dispensed interest-free loans.

In total, some 106 separate organizations dotted the landscape, pushing and pulling in opposite directions. Serving separate interests and agendas, the rival organizations could be ruthlessly cutthroat, especially when it came time to slice the budget pie.

In the days before collective bargaining, salaries weren't so much negotiated as dictated. Every year, a block-long line of supplicants would plead their cases before the Board of Estimate. The hearings would last long into the night as every imaginable organization made its case for a raise, often at the expense of fellow teachers. The groveling came to be known as "collective begging."

ETHNIC CLEAVAGES
There were other sources of friction. By the turn of the century, the crush of new immigrants was changing the face of the city. Where Irish and Germans once held sway, by 1920 southern and eastern European immigrants predominated. The city's 1.5 million Jews quickly became objects of both scorn and fear. Schools weren't immune.

Much has been written about that unsettling time, most notably Irving Howe's masterwork "World of Our Fathers." Little, though, has been said of the role that ethnic tensions played in driving teachers apart and stalling unionization.

Ruth Markowitz's book, "My Daughter, the Teacher" is an exception. She writes that the steady stream of Jews -- mostly women -- into teaching after 1920 was a sore point for the Irish and old-stock Yankee teachers who'd had a lock on the classroom since the mid 19th century. Most of the time the uneasiness was expressed in cold-shoulder separatism; at other times it was open and hostile, with gentile teachers reading known anti-Semitic literature in the teachers' room or making ethnic slurs.

In one school, stickers were found that said: "Gentile teachers organize or lose your jobs to Jews. Join the Gentile defense front,” writes Markowitz. "Another leaflet with the heading 'Teachers Union Mostly Jews,' and sub-headed 'Communism is Jewish' was distributed."

Fanning anti-Jewish feelings was the infamous radio priest Charles Coughlin. Markowitz cites a 1939 story in Coughlin's magazine Social Justice headlined, "Are Reds in Control of New York Schools?" The story listed the names of prominent members of the New York City Teachers Union with the words "Jew," "Jewess," "Gentile," or "Undetermined" next to each name.

Charlie Michaelson recalls the New York of the 1930s and '40s as a city of "tribal villages." Michaelson, a longtime reporter for UFT and NYSUT papers, says that ethnic uneasiness wasn't so much a case of antagonism but a wariness, borne of almost total isolation. "You have to remember there was very little contact outside your group. The Irish lived on the West Side of Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, the Italians were in the Village and sections of Brooklyn, the Jews on the lower East Side, the Bronx and in Williamsburg.

"Even the men worked in jobs that left little opportunity to get to know outsiders. The Irish, for example, had the waterfront, subways, most of the building trades and of course the police and fire departments. The Jews, on the other hand, had the garment and textile trade pretty much sewn up for themselves. Until World War II and the rush to the suburbs, everybody more or less stuck to their own kind."

ORGANIZING'S A 'NIGHTMARE'
More than ethnic enmities kept teachers apart. The very logistics of organizing made it a struggle. A union such as the United Auto Workers could reach thousands of workers at one shot at Henry Ford's mammoth River Rouge assembly plant in Detroit, but unionizing New York City's schools essentially meant organizing hundreds of Mom and Pop stores one at a time.

"Sometimes you'd get lucky and turn a hot-shot organizer loose in a big school with dozens if not hundreds of teachers," says George Altomare, one of the UFT's early organizing geniuses. "But other times, the effectiveness of some of our best organizers was limited by the fact that they were assigned to a tiny school where the numbers weren't there."

Besides, as Altomare points out, the organizing efforts of teachers, like those of all public employees, were not protected by the1935 National Labor Relations Act. "We had no legal right to leaflet or hold organizing meetings in the school. If you had an unsympathetic principal-- and there were plenty of stinkers -- he could keep his school off-limits to the union."

High teacher turnover didn't help either. "Many of the men who entered teaching during the 50s and even the 60s did so as a stopgap. They figured they'd teach a while and move on to real job," recalls Altomare. "Well, if you think a job is only temporary, why struggle to make it better? It was no different for women who knew that they'd be gone for long stretches of time on maternity. Turnover was like a safety valve for the system bleeding off discontent."

CLASSROOM DIVIDERS
Getting teachers together was very different from conventional organizing, adds Altomare. The very nature of the work process -- holed up alone behind closed doors in separate classrooms -- isolated teachers from one another and made shop-floor solidarity impossible. "In most workplaces, you can always find time to kibitz with the worker next to you," Altomare says. "My mother was a cutter in the garment trade and even when she was doing the sleeves, she could be talking with the person next to her: 'Hey, the boss is trying to cut the payments, maybe we should slow down.'

"Over the course of the ordinary school day, there were no coffee breaks where people might strike up a conversation. In elementary schools, there wasn't even a lunch break to speak of. Even in the high schools, teachers are always pressed for time, marking papers or preparing lessons," Altomare points out.

Where other workers might go out for a beer after their shifts, most female teachers with school-age children had to hurry home. Many male teachers moonlighted as salesmen and insurance agents or taught night school to support their families. "People were exhausted from the side jobs, the travel and the homework preparation, not to mention the teaching,” says Altomare.

Getting teachers to stick together was also complicated by the rigid separation of their work and personal lives. Before the post-war suburban exodus, workers lived within walking distance or a short commute from work. So organizing a union meeting -- or, for that matter, a bowling or a softball team -- was a lot easier when people lived in the neighborhood.

"Teachers never had that luxury. Where you lived and where you were assigned had nothing to do with one another," he said. "Believe me, having teachers so cut off from one another both on and off the job made forging relationships -- no less unions -- an uphill struggle. From an organizing stand point, it was a nightmare."

Mind you, not that everyone was looking to join a union. More often than not, teachers' very perception of themselves as "professionals” made the idea of joining a union unthinkable.

'IT'S JUST UNPROFESSIONAL'
Rightly or wrongly, many teachers had professional aspirations or pretensions. They thought of themselves more akin to doctors and lawyers.” Teachers in the elementary schools were still the professional ladies who believed that teachers should not strike," recalls Jeannette DiLorenzo. "They still wore hats and gloves. They still acted in a way that said, 'No matter how little I earn, my professional dignity will not permit me to be in a union."

Janet Miller vividly recalls conversations with teacher sat PS 113 in Brooklyn in the late 1950s. "In the teachers' lounge, you’d hear talk of how terrible the very idea of a union was. How dare we associate ourselves with mine workers and garment workers. We're better than that. We’re educated. It's just unprofessional," remembered Miller.

"To be told you were a worker didn't sit well with many teachers," says Andy Weiss, a Cornell University historian, who has studied teacher unionism in the 1920s and '30s "(Teachers) were jarred and offended by a class analysis that said, 'We're the workers and they're the bosses.'"

Yet another school of thought held that teacher unions were so slow to catch on because so many teachers were women. Family and not work, the argument went, was a woman's priority. No matter how bad things got on the job, she'd always have the consolations of home. On top of that, was the idea that a woman's wages were an extra or "pin money." Besides, as nature's nurturers, women would always put their students before themselves. Tradition-bound, pushed around, passive and lacking ambition, women were seen to be their own worst enemies. Only when men entered teaching in sufficient numbers would union organizing have a fighting chance.

A TURN-OFF TO WOMEN
In her forthcoming book, "City Teachers" (Teachers College Press, fall 1996), Kate Rousmaniere lays the blame on the unions themselves.” The union wasn't set up to appeal to women," she says. Rousmaniere, who teaches at Ohio's Miami University, points to the scheduling of after-school meetings and the highly confrontational screaming-match atmosphere.

With men running the show, she says, the union became intellectual and too rigidly ideological. "The union spent too much time wrangling over ideology and politics rather than bread-and-butter issues and immediate workplace needs."

Rousmaniere also says that anyone looking to understand why women didn't jump at the chance to join has to realize that the average female teacher had a higher degree of job satisfaction. "When it comes to salary, pension and maternity, it was by the late 1920s the best white-collar job open to women.

"It was a chance for women to get up in front of a group of people -- even though they were little people -- and express themselves. They earned the self-respect they couldn't get in the rest of society."

There's no denying that, for all its problems, teaching was a definite step up for working-class women. Compared to a life as a domestic, a salesclerk or a sweatshop hand, a career as a schoolteacher offered security, stability and status.

The fictional character Sara Smolinsky, in a 1925 novel” The Bread givers," spoke for many real-life women when she said that becoming a teacher "was like looking up to the top of the highest skyscraper while down in the gutter." And as Ruth Markowitz makes abundantly clear in her book, immigrant working class Jewish children held their teachers in almost God-like awe.

"I remember how I admired them. I wanted to be just like them," recalled one teacher in Markowitz' book.

Rebecca Simonson made a similar point to the UFT's oral history project in 1985. Oppression, she said, was par for the course for women, but the classroom offered an escape, albeit an imperfect one. "Teaching was the first chance for these women to step out of one social group, which had been working and living under very trying conditions, into a prestige group.

"Their position, therefore, was a more precarious one. They took a lot of guff from their administrators. They were afraid of any recourse. They hardly understood the need (for a union). They were growing up out of an oppressed group into another.

"They were afraid of a (union)," Simonson recalled. "They would trust a professional organization more than a union, which never meant much to these people -- not at home; not in the press; not in the society at large."

So between the organizational, legal, cultural and perceptual hurdles, it's no wonder teachers had trouble getting their act together. Still, none of these proved as divisive as politics -- radical politics, that is -- in keeping a mass union from forming prior to the 1960s. But that's a story in itself.

The Struggle for Idenitity

The Big Bang theory may be right about the origin of the universe, but it isn't much help when it comes to explaining the making of a union.

Like other unions, the UFT didn't just explode onto the scene in 1960. In fact, it wasn't even the first teacher union in New York City . In 1916, almost a half-century earlier, a small, but gutsy, group of public school teachers founded the Teachers Union, affiliating with the newly formed American Federation of Teachers.

Among those fired was a Brooklyn high school history teacher, Benjamin Glassberg, who also served as director of the New York Call, the Socialist weekly newspaper and a lecturer at the socialist Rand School for Social Science in Manhattan. To Glassberg the issue was simple:” Because I am a Jew, a Socialist and a member of the Teachers' Union , I have been dismissed."

LINVILLE ERA BEGINS
Led by its first president, Henry Linville, the TU fought to protect teachers' rights of free speech and academic freedom. Though the teachers were never reinstated, Linville stood alone as the only officer of the many teacher organizations to protest. He also fought long and hard against forced loyalty oaths and the interrogation of teachers about the books they read and assigned to their classes, according to Phillip Taftin "United They Teach."

Linville was hardly your typical city teacher. He had come not from the city's Lower East Side, but America's mid west -- St. Joseph, Mo.

Midwest upbringing and Ivy-League education aside, Linville must have felt right at home amid the intellectual and political ferment that was New York at the time. Linville -- like much of the Teacher Union's nucleus -- was an unabashed socialist.

MOLDED IN HIS IMAGE
The decade of 1910 to 1920 marked American socialism's high tide. The Socialist Party, according to historian James Weinstein, had more than 300 daily, weekly and monthly publications -- its weekly newspaper, the Appeal to Reason, alone had a circulation of over 750,000. In 1912,Socialists had been elected mayors of 79 cities from coast to coast. And its presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, had polled close to 900,000votes.

Using his positions as union president and editor of the American Teacher, Linville defended the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and backed the ill-fated New York mayoral campaign of socialist Morris Hill quit in 1917.

He'd supported the losing Seattle General Strike and the Great Steel Strike of 1919, at a time when most of the press labeled the uprisings as communist-inspired. He'd crossed swords with Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor's president, on numerous occasions, including Gompers' support for the war and his opposition to the League of Nations. He even went so far as to support United Mine Workers John L. Lewis' insurgent campaign to oust the aging AFL head in 1921.

Linville had refused to be cowed into submission by the Red Scare hysteria that swept post-war America. He vocally protested the roundup of 10,000 suspected radicals -- hundreds of whom were later deported-- in some 70 cities in January 1920 by the Justice Department under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and a young J. Edgar Hoover.

He was an early and strong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union, formed in 1920 to defend radicals caught in the Red Scare dragnet. He opposed the New York state Legislature's expulsion of legally elected Socialists in 1920.

TIME TO SPLIT : NOW FAST FORWARD TO 1935.
The Teachers Union had become a battleground where socialists,” left" socialists, communists, Trotskyites, Lovestonites, Shachtmanites and Musteites all wanted control.

When they weren't warring, the wily foes were boring each other into a mind-numbing stupor. Meetings gaveled to order at 4 o'clock dragged on till after midnight as various factions used parliamentary tactics to frustrate one another's planks.

Prepared to burn the midnight oil, the highly disciplined communist faction often passed resolutions in close-to-deserted meeting rooms.

To be sure, these splits within the Teachers Union were neither new nor unique. The left -- both in Europe and the U.S. -- had along history of tearing itself apart over the eternal questions of how to bring about a more just social order. Only now the issues, tactics, timetable, organization, the role of unions and the relationship between means and ends were no longer just theoretical. The what-if questions were now replaced by debates about the Soviet Union 's experience and its lessons. Was it a socialist showcase or a totalitarian horror show?

FROM RUSSIA WITH PASSION
As a young man, Simon Beagle was a "red" of one shade or another. "I was swept up by the idea that Russia was the hope of humanity. I believed we needed a new political system, political democracy and the ownership of the major means of production," said Beagle, who played a key role in founding the UFT.

Beagle, like many teachers in the late '20s and early'30s, had journeyed to Russia in 1932 and come back with glowing reports. Like George Bernard Shaw, John Dewey, Sidney Hook and countless others, he'd missed the grim privation, police-state terror and mass murder while carefully chaperoned by his Soviet hosts. "I went with rose-colored glasses. I wanted Russia to be successful, hoping they would lead us into a wonderful world, etc."

Beagle was a Lovestonite, a follower of Jay Love stone. Though a founding member of the American Communist Party, Lovestone argued that "exceptional" conditions made the United States a poor fit for a Marxist-Leninist or any other insurrectionary model for revolution.

Lovestone had the heretical idea that the party should work with the AFL and Socialist party. Called to Moscow in 1929 to rethink such "deviationism," Love stone faced down Stalin and lived to tell about it. As the story goes, the 29-year-old got into an argument with the Soviet strongman and called him a "murderer." To which Stalin icily replied: "There is plenty of room in the cemeteries of the Soviet Union for people like you."

LOVESTONE NEVER BLINKED.
"Such remarks," he shot back, "show that you are unfit to be the leader of the Russian working class, much less of the international working class."

With visions of storming the American "Winter Palace” dancing in their heads, many young radicals found Henry Linville's "parlor pink" socialism -- gradual, peaceful, tolerant and democratic -- wishy-washy at best.

'OVER-THE-HILL' GANG?
In her book "Blackboard Unions," Marjorie Murphy recounts an incident in 1933 that best dramatizes the widening personal, political and generational chasm:

Begin's brickbats aside, the issue was tactics, not geriatrics. And it was Moscow, not the union young bloods, who had decreed Linville "over the hill" -- in one of its many and almost comic about-faces. In its early days, the renegade Soviet regime had sought out liberals and socialists in the West in the hope they could create a favorable climate of opinion. Isolated, Russia desperately needed to attract investment, secure foreign credits and obtain diplomatic recognition.

A well-meaning Linville, along with countless other Western intellectuals, writers and artists, had been a good friend to Russia and its revolution. In fact, Linville -- at least through the end of the 1920s-- appeared to fit the classic description of a "fellow-traveler," someone who basically sympathized with the Soviet "experiment," and was willing to overlook or justify its "excesses."

By 1928, Moscow -- more precisely the Communist International or Comintern -- suddenly turned on its friends. Liberals and democratic socialists were being denounced as enemies of the people, no less than "social fascists." Ironically, by the time Linville and company had seceded from the Teachers Union, the Comintern had reverted to cultivating, rather than burying, would-be sympathizers during its Popular Front period.

Linville and the union's old guard would lobby Albany for pensions improvements, tenure laws and professional standards and crow about "legislative victories and bargaining gains."

SEEING RED
The AFT's current director of legislation, Morris studied the New York local's troubles for his Harvard sociology dissertation. "Linville was outflanked by a highly disciplined group under the control of the Communist Party that wanted to take over the union and turn it into a mouthpiece for Moscow ," he said.

Not everyone, though, shares this view. Georgia State University scholar Wayne Urban, among others, says both Linville and Lefkowitz came to see the Teachers Union as their store. "They had a proprietary sense that this was their union. They felt that they'd started and built it, so who were these people coming in and telling them how to run their business."

"That would have been suicide," says Cogen, recalling how Calvin Coolidge, then governor of Massachusetts , became a national hero for his handling of the Boston Police Strike of 1919. "He fired them all."

FROM 'DREAM' TO NIGHTMARE
The Wallachs were from Brooklyn's rough-and-tumble Red Hook waterfront, the only Jews in an Italian neighborhood. He and his brother-- Eli Wallach, the actor -- helping run the family candy store. Like a lot of young people at the time, Wallach became a radical at City College , from which he graduated in 1929. "How's that for timing," he says with a laugh.

What about the Soviet Union ? "I thought it was a noble experiment and wished them well," Wallach says. "It was wonderful to see people get off their backs and fight back. (But) Stalin and his gang betrayed my dream, a wonderful dream."

SCHISMS AND PURGES
"It was tragic," says Andy Weiss, a Cornell University historian whose doctoral dissertation deals with communism and anti-communism in New York City schools.

The TU limped along until 1964 when it was disbanded-- its leaders recommending that its few remaining diehard members join the UFT.

The Struggle Continues

Within months of the end of World War II the country was convulsed in the greatest wave of strikes in its history, before or since. With the memory of the Great Depression still fresh in their minds, many workers saw the huge post-war layoffs as a sign the country was headed for trouble. Besides, the wartime sacrifices of rationing, a wage freeze and no-strike pledge had left many workers frustrated and angry, especially as prices and profits continued to soar.

All told, some 8 million workers in the auto, steel, coal, electrical, maritime and rail trades walked off their jobs in 1945 and '46. The Truman administration, using its wartime powers, seized struck oil refining plants, coal mines, packinghouses and railroads, thereby forcing workers to stay on the job. In the case of the railroads, Truman threatened to draft striking workers into the Army.

In a radical break with their staid tradition, teachers across the country joined this postwar upsurge of militancy. Only a decade before, in 1936,Chicago teachers had chosen a Saturday for a demonstration "walk," rather than risk the penalties of a "walkout." Now teachers from 12 states -- from Rhode Island and Pennsylvania to Minnesota and even Tennessee -- were taking matters into their own hands.

In September of 1946, several hundred striking teachers closed Norwalk, Conn. schools for nine days. The action won the National Education Association affiliate a sizeable pay raise, even though the NEA's official position was that strikes were "ineffective."

As for the American Federation of Teachers, it still had a no-strike pledge in its constitution that dated back to its formation in 1916. But after the voters in St. Paul, Minn., voted down a tax increase to raise teacher salaries, the AFT local went out on strike for five weeks. The public got the message. Six months and another referendum later, the teachers got their raise.

In New York's westernmost outpost, Buffalo, 2,400 teachers defied threats of dismissal and closed down most of the school system. Picketing in brutal near-zero cold, they stayed out for a week until their demands were met.

The same story in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Dayton, Jersey City and Chicago, where the mere threat of a strike had Windy City authorities crying uncle.

DISUNITY IN NEW YORK
All this bottom-up militancy paid off handsomely, writes Marjorie Murphy in "Blackboard Unions." In one year, from 1947 to 1948, teachers' wages shot up an average of 13 percent across the country.

As for New York City, a "union town" with few peers and arguably the country's foremost left-wing stronghold -- hardly a ripple.

Why?
Beset by organizational rivalries, ethnic and religious animosities and ideological civil wars, the city's tens of thousands of teachers were no more together in 1946 than they had been in 1916. In fact, far less.

As detailed earlier in this series, with "The Split" in 1935 there were two unions: The larger, Communist Party-dominated Teachers Union and the breakaway Teachers Guild, led by Henry Linville, Abraham Lefkowitz, Albert Smallheiser, Rebecca Simonson and George Counts.

What little strength the Guild did have was diluted when hundreds of its members left in a huff over the imposition of a single salary scale. Until1947 regular high school teachers were paid an average of 25 percent more than their elementary school counterparts. This differential, as it was called, had long been justified on the grounds that only high school teachers were required to have a master's degree and to pass special licensing exams.

Secretly, though, the differential had as much to do with the notion that teaching young children was easier work. Not surprisingly, what was a source of pride and distinction for secondary school teachers was a sore point to elementary school teachers.

Since the setup encouraged teachers to seek promotion to the high schools, many of the system's best teachers were being drained away from the elementary schools. Looking to solve an acute elementary school teaching shortage that was only going to get worse as the baby boomers came along, the state Legislature put an end to the differential. Elementary school teachers were brought up to parity with a substantial wage hike while high school salaries remained relatively unchanged. The Guild was left in no-win position. As a long time supporter of the principle of a single salary as a matter of basic equity, the Guild backed the move, knowing full well that its high school people might bolt.

And they did. Hundreds of incensed Guild teachers quit to join the High School Teachers Association (HSTA) -- up till then little more than a letterhead organization.

Emboldened by their new strength and sensing that "quiet diplomacy" was getting them nowhere, the rank and file of the HSTA pushed the leadership to adopt more confrontational tactics. In the spring of 1950 a boycott of high school extra-curricular activities began that was to last more than a year. It was a dramatic success as teachers throughout the city system refused all after-school assignments. Sports, club activities, dances and even open school night were all shut down. As for the Guild, the fact that it played only a peripheral role in the boycott added to the general perception that it was not militant enough.

Nor did the Guild help itself with a "door policy" that made it seem as restrictive as a fancy private club. In those days getting into the Guild meant finding a sponsor and getting past a membership committee every bit as picky as a swanky Fifth Avenue coop board. Prospects were routinely grilled on everything from their position on the separation of church and state to how they felt about the United Nations.

EBB TIDE FOR THE GUILD
Not that teachers were breaking down the doors to get in.

Ben Kaplan joined the Teachers Union in 1936. It didn't take long for him to figure out that the TU had more of a "political than a union orientation.” Still, when Kaplan drifted away he never thought of joining the Guild. "They were too dormant," Kaplan told the UFT Oral History Project in 1986.

Its ranks thinning, the Guild had little clout, either with the Board of Education or with elected officials. "We were treated with a certain degree of derision and contempt by political leaders," Rubin Maloff told the UFT Oral History Project.

The Guild's assistant legislative rep, Maloff recalled a meeting with Mayor William O'Dwyer in 1950. "He was filing his nails and had his feet up on the desk. He hardly said hello. He said, 'What can I do for you? Tell me in a minute or two.'"

No doubt the Guild's cause wasn't helped by the climate of the late 1940s and early 1950s, one of the most illiberal periods in modern American history. The Cold War was red hot. China had fallen to the communists in 1949. The following June North Korea invaded South Korea. A month later the Rosen bergs were arrested for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets.

At home, no matter where you turned, there was talk of "communist infiltration” and "domestic subversion." From kitchen tables to congressional hearings to church pulpits, Hollywood and the State Department, unions and schools were all "on trial." Even Americans for Democratic Action, explicitly founded to fight communism, was being called "an international conspiracy to socialize America."

It didn't matter that the Guild had left the Teachers Union in the mid '30sover the threat of communist control. Nor did it matter that the Guild's own Delegate Assembly had passed a resolution favoring the barring of communists from the classroom in 1950. All teachers were being smeared with the same red brush.

"The biggest problem facing the union was shaking its image as a red organization members were still pinned with the image of the red schoolteacher," Marjorie Murphy wrote of the AFT in "Blackboard Unions." The same can be said for New York City teachers and the Teachers Guild -- only in spades.

Is it any wonder then that when a young Albert Shanker was approached to join the Teachers Guild he was assured that the Guild Bulletin, the monthly newspaper, would be mailed to his home "in an unmarked envelope."

Not that Shanker needed coaxing. He'd come from a union family, his mother a member of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. Even so, down deep he didn't think the Guild would amount to much. "I never thought it would be a large mass organization," he recalls. "I thought that if I stuck with it, probably in 20 or 30 years it would still have 2,400 members."

Certainly nothing that happened at those early Guild meetings, held in the basement of a local church, foretold otherwise. "You'd go to a Guild meeting and listen to some very brilliant people expound on the state of the world,” says Shanker. "After three hours you'd leave edified with nothing done."

"We were in awe," George Altomare are says, remembering his and Shanker's impressions. "When you heard someone like Abe Lefkowitz debating, you had to respect them for their knowledge, their logic, their ability to speak. They exuded character."

Coming over from the Teachers Union, Rubin Maloff remembers being struck by the "aristocratic" bearing of the veteran Guilders -- a stark contrast from his days in the more "working class" Teachers Union. "I never heard a bit of profanity," he says. "Well dressed and formal, you could sense the patrician in the Guild leadership."

To Roger Parente, of the rival High School Teachers Association, the Guild was all talk and little action. "We pictured them as a debating society rather than a group ready to take action," Parente recalled in 1986.

MAKING HASTE SLOWLY
"Now was never the time, it was always later. At that time we equated their feelings with fear." But he hastened to add: "I think we can say in retrospect it wasn't fear but caution: a willingness to move more slowly than some of us who were more hot-headed."

Rose Schuyler, a Guild member since 1946, believes the Guild did what it could, given the tenor of the times. "The bulk of the teachers back then weren't ready for anything. Remember, it was illegal for public employees to strike. Do you think those Irish Catholic teachers who were married to policemen were going to break the law? Really, it's very easy to criticize the leadership as too timid, but it's unfair."

Fair or foul, as many saw it, the "old guard" leaders of the Guild carried caution to a fault and let opportunities for mass organizing and militant action slip through their hands. Instead of being "action-oriented" the Guild, in the words of Queens College scholar Arthur Salz, "relied heavily on quiet, behind-the-scenes, lobbying, a method based on close relationships with city and state officials." In his 1967 Columbia Teachers College dissertation, Salz writes that decades of insider maneuvering as a legislative rep had made Abraham Lefkowitz a confirmed believer in the art of "quiet diplomacy."

So much so that when thousands of teachers stormed the Albany legislature in the winter of 1947, Lefkowitz told them to go home. "Instead of waving clubs," he said, "the teachers should rely upon the judgment of their experience d leaders." In retrospect, who's to say he was wrong. Hadn't the Teachers Union shown that militant rhetoric and raising hell didn't raise salaries a penny.

Besides, unless you were prepared to back your talk with a strike it was just empty saber rattling. If you were Rebecca Simonson, the president of the Teachers Guild in the 1940s, a strike would be suicidal. "We were a minority organization," Simonson told the UFT Oral History Project. "Nobody in his right senses would call a strike without having a good majority of the membership." Of course, as events would develop, the UFT had nowhere near even a sizeable minority when it won its first strike in 1960.

As old school socialists, Simonson, Lefkowitz and many of the old guard had studied Marx's theory of historical materialism and come away with the understanding that social transformation was not an act of will alone. "Menace their own history, but they do not make it just as they please," wrote Marx after the failed revolution of 1848. "(T)hey do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."

To many of the young activists, all "the-time-isn't-ripe" talk was analysis-paralysis. "Our strategy was not based on any ideology," Altomare says. "It was based on militant action for immediate concerns. Yes, there were many of us who wanted justice for the world. But that wasn't our raison d'etre. We were ready for the revolution of teachers."

"The (old guard) were not action-oriented people," says Altomare. "They excelled at writing a beautiful criticism of the present pension plan or how the supervisory system rated teachers. They believed that someone is going to read your tract and they're going to join. One by one they will join.

"(They) were the elite, the intelligentsia of the teaching profession. They were fighters for justice, for salaries, for academic freedom. They believed in the labor movement. But they did not have a vision of a militant union of professionals that would use the techniques of strike, collective bargaining, mass demonstrations and so on. They never had that vision."

BUT DAVE SELDEN DID.
An AFT organizer, Selden recalls walking into the Guild's cramped and dingy fourth floor office on East 23rd Street one hot July morning in 1953. It was a lean operation: An executive secretary, a bookkeeper and a secretary were the entire paid staff.

Selden was a pro. He spent years on the road as the AFT's "Eastern organizer"-- everything east of Lincoln, Neb. -- often living out of his car. Raised in Michigan, both of his parents had been teachers and he'd been a teacher himself. He'd put himself through school working on the automobile assembly lines.

From his years as the AFT's traveling salesman, Selden was used to a fair amount of independence. For his new assignment, the daring, free-spirited 39-year-old would have to learn how to answer to authority, as well as acquire some "get-along, go-along" skills. One of the people whom Selden had to answer to as well as get along with was the Guild's newly elected president, Charles Cogen. They made "an unlikely pair," as Selden would later write in his book” The Teacher Rebellion."

"Charlie was usually cautious to the point of timidity but courageous and stubborn on occasion," writes Selden. "I often urged him to do things he did not want to do, and he frequently moderated my often abrasive proposals. Whether because of our differences or in spite of them, we made an effective combination."

But not overnight. It took a couple of years of single handedly trying to sign up the city's far-flung 45,000 teachers before Selden realized that organizing could only be done on a school-by-school basis. The plan was that the members in each chapter would function as their own little union: Electing a chair, holding weekly meetings and working to improve conditions at their school. And, in a novel twist, meetings and even voting would be open to nonmembers, too.

Selden credits the idea for the open-door policy to a young junior high schoolteacher named Ely Trachtenberg. Like Selden, Trachtenberg had worked on an automobile assembly plant and had been a member of the United Auto Workers. Only in his early 30s at the time, Trachtenberg was your classic "red-diaper baby." Growing up in a culture of ultra left-wing politics -- his father had been a mainstay of the militantly fierce Furriers Union -- he combined a theoretical sophistication with a savvy understanding of practical union organizing.

That Trachtenberg came out of a junior high was no oddity. Selden had discovered that the junior highs were a breeding ground for militant "young Turks.” As he liked to say: "Show me a junior high school teacher and I'll show you a union member."

It was at a junior high school in Astoria, Queens, that another group of Selden's protégés were putting their own creative spin on their mentor's ideas.

"Every Friday afternoon, practically without fail, we had an informal party at Al Shanker's apartment, which was about 10 blocks away from JHS 126,"recalls Altomare. "I even remember the cocktails Al made: whiskey sours."

"We were creating a chapter life," says Altomare. "We realized that people could only take so much intellectual argument. After you got your nucleus-- the people who joined because this was the ideologically correct or practical thing to do -- you said, 'Hey, join, everyone is there. It's fun.'

"Sure, we wanted people to join for the right reason. But we wouldn't refuse them if they felt left out of the whiskey sour parties. After a while people said, 'Can I come?' And I said, 'Sure, but you have to join. Give me your$9.'"

Astoria's loyal "party" cadre didn't stop with Friday mixers. They took over the school's social committee that organized Christmas and end-of-term parties and just about every other school function.

Meanwhile, the Guild was making a name for itself. Slowly, its philosophy was changing. Actually there was less philosophy and more action devoted to the "immediate concerns of teachers."

By the mid-1950s the Guild was proving itself adept at bread-and-butter services like pension counseling, grievance assistance and prep courses for license exams. The Guild produced handbooks dealing with pensions and grievances. Whenever there was an opportunity to increase its visibility and credibility, the Guild grabbed it. When a faculty meeting was scheduled to discuss pensions, Reuben Mitchell and Dave Wittes were called. They were there as teacher members of the pension board but they seldom missed a chance to put in a subtle, or not so subtle, plug for the Guild.

Rubin Maloff found time to plug the union while on building assignment. "I had the largest chapter in the city at Morris HS," he says. "I loved hall patrol. I walked (around) and spoke union to everybody."

BALANCING OLD TIMERS AND YOUNG TURKS
Selden and his young bloods were breathing new life into the Guild. But as Altomare argues, the old guard deserves some credit too. "You've got to give the old-timers their due," he says. "The young Turks were not in the majority. But they saw -- to their credit -- that we were not just baloney artists. We were there all the time and we were getting members."

A member of the Guild's executive board at 24, Altomare says "old radicals" Si Beagle and Dave Wittes welcomed the new militants with open arms -- "They were bomb throwers at heart" -- but it was Guild President Charles Cogen's support that made the difference.

"Charlie was the bridge that spanned the generation gap," Altomare says.” Charlie had a unique talent for finding common ground among seemingly irreconcilable positions. He had the respect of the old guard but wasn’t set in his ways. He was a democrat, small 'd.' He'd allow for any discussion, and if the majority voted, that was fine with him. He was a true believer in the democratic process."

He was also an important symbol for the growing union. Shanker maintains:” We never could have achieved success unless we had both the old timers and the young Turks on board. The old timers represented the traditions. When you have a guy like Charlie who is a department chairman and an author of textbooks and a scholar, it represents to the older teachers that this is not a bunch of crazies. They are not going to burn the place down."

The Guild was awakening, and so was much of American society. In many ways, the Guild's young militants were the other side of the 50s split personality. By mid-decade the country's gray-flannelled conformity was beginning to come apart at the seams.

In his book, "The Dark Ages: Life in the United States 1945-1960," MartyJezer argues that one scene in the 1954 film "The Wild One" encapsulates these stirrings. When a sharp-tongued waitress asks motorcycle jacket-clad Marlon Brando, "What are you rebelling against?" the gum-chewing rebel answers "Whattaya got?"

From Lenny Bruce's and Mort Sahl's comic riffs to Jack Kerouac's hipster wanderlust to Bill Haley's "rock" anthem, change was in the wind.

Is it pure coincidence that while Shanker and company were refusing to go along with the program, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to sit in the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus that December day in 1955, touching off a successful year-long boycott?

Is it far-fetched to think that Guild militants may have felt a charge of electricity when Bayard Rustin was organizing marches and strikes to integrate our capital city's school system in 1958 and '59? Or when young black men and women sat in at an all-white Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., in February 1960?

It wasn't happen stance, says George Altomare, who along with scores of other Guild members, young and old, carried picket signs outside a Harlem Woolworth to dramatize their support for sit-ins all over the South.

"The civil rights movement helped plow our earth," says Altomare. "For many of us it was a training ground. After all, a picket is a picket. The experience of picketing and having cops wade into you with their horses was for many their first taste of action. As far as I'm concerned, our own organizing efforts gained maybe five, even 10 years because of the civil rights movement."

It's not surprising, then, that with resistance and rebellion swirling throughout the country, New York teachers stayed out from work for the first time in the city's history. Fed up with years of rotten conditions and even worse pay -- $12.50 a night for four hours -- close to 1,000 evening high schoolteachers all handed in their resignations in January 1959. In resigning they’d hoped to avoid the stiff penalties for striking in defiance of New York’s Condon-Wadlin Act. Enacted in 1947, the law permitted the automatic firing of striking public employees. Even for workers not let go there would be no salary increases for three years and a four-year probationary period.

Resigned or striking, the net effect was the same -- night schools were shutdown. The job action was a classic wildcat strike, unauthorized by any union. But since most of the teachers also taught in the day high schools, the action won the backing of the High School Teachers Association, especially two of its officers, Samuel Hochberg and Roger Parente -- himself an evening schoolteacher.

Fearing that a successful strike would strengthen the rival HSTA, many in the Guild wanted to do nothing. Ely Trachtenberg showed them where they were wrong. He convinced the Guild's executive board "that it did not matter which organization sponsored a particular militant action," Selden recalled in his book. "What mattered was that the workers, in this case the teachers, advance. It was the struggle that was important, not the organization."

The Guild threw its whole support to the strikers, Guild members walking side by side on the picket line with high school militants. Among the nightly picketers were Selden, Shanker, Trachtenberg and Altomare. In fact, both Shanker and Selden made stops at the various schools in their station wagons, christened "Guild Coffee mobiles," passing out coffee and donuts. When a rally was called at City Hall, it was the Guild's telephone network, mimeo machine and tight-knit organizational structure which turned out the crowd.

After a couple of weeks the Board of Education threw in the towel. Wages were raised to $24 a night.

To say that the rest of the system's 45,000-plus teachers took notice is putting it mildly. "You could feel a charge of electricity in the schools for weeks afterward," says Altomare. "And it wasn't just among the militants. From reports we were getting, the strike and the raise were the talk of teachers’ rooms around the city."

Hoping to capture lightning in a bottle, Selden came up with the idea for a one-day work stoppage a month later in April. It was timed to coincide with the Board of Estimate's deliberations on the education budget, but many of the Guild's old guard leaders were worried about Condon-Wadlin repercussions. Some even fretted that the union might be getting in over its head, especially if the walkout escalated into a longer strike.

Selden's blustery persistence, coupled with the board's last-minute reneging on a promise of a raise, carried the day. But the old guard's caution was not alarmist. Selden hadn't let on but, as he later wrote in his memoirs, he too was concerned that a small turnout would tarnish the Guild's organizing efforts.

To make matters worse, instead of returning the Guild's favor and backing the walkout, the High School Teachers Association urged its members to cross picket lines. The HSTA turnabout angered Hochberg and Parente, who had gotten to know and like Selden, Shanker and Altomare while walking the picket line together. Parente, especially, had been impressed with their militance and expressions of solidarity. He'd come away hoping the two organizations could work out their differences.

On the night before the scheduled "demonstration work stoppage" Cogen appeared on the evening news urging teachers "to stick to their guns."

What Cogen didn't know was that Selden was sitting in the office of the Superintendent of Schools, John J. Theobald, watching him with a very perturbed Harry Van Arsdale, president of New York's Central Labor Council. Van Arsdale, who was wired to the Democratic leadership and Mayor Robert Wagner, had been trying to get hold of Cogen for hours to strike a last-minute deal. He hadn’t been able to get through because both of the phones at Guild headquarters were busy with last-minute preparations. "Two phones for 40,000 workers," Selden recalls Van Arsdale muttering.

Watching Cogen spur on his troops, an exasperated Van Arsdale picked up the phone and called the TV station, asking to speak with the Guild president.” I know he's there because I can see him. This is an emergency. Tell him to come to Superintendent Theobald's office right away."

Cogen, still on camera, was handed a message. The reporter asked if he would be willing to share the message. Cogen did. "Dr. Theobald would like to see you in his office as soon as possible. Take a taxi." Cogen excused himself and walked off camera.

A half hour later Cogen joined the expectant trio. The money was found for the raise. The walkout was called off. And Cogen, writes Selden, was "on his way to becoming a folk hero."

The 50's

Nat Levine will never forget the time his principal made the mistake of tangling with a young union organizer.

It was in the late 1950s. The principal of PS 108 in Queens was giving the Teachers Guild a hard time -- petty stuff like forbidding the use of the school's bulletin board for union matters and calling a faculty conference to deliver a three-paged, single-spaced diatribe accusing the Guild of trying to "destroy the fabric of the school."

But the principal got his come uppance the day he invited himself to a chapter meeting to sit in on a talk given by a Guild staffer. True to form, the principal made a comment about the union to which the guest speaker took strong exception.

"He let (the principal) have it good," recalls Levine, still savoring the moment. "In no time he shot him full of holes and laid him out in clover. He was very sharp and a real firebrand."

He was Albert Shanker.

To Dave Selden, the AFT's veteran organizer assigned to help get the Guild up and running, young militants like Shanker were a Godsend. It came as no surprise, then, that when a full-time staff position opened up in the summer of 1959 he would tap one of them.

But Shanker wasn't Selden's first choice. Instead, he approached Eli Trachtenberg, considered the Guild's brightest rising star. But because the union job meant resigning from the school system, Trachtenberg declined. Only then did Selden turn to Shanker.

Ironically, Trachtenberg died suddenly on Shanker's first day on the job.

Meanwhile, a pro-labor mayor, Robert F. Wagner Jr., sat in City Hall. His father, the long-time senator from New York, had authored the landmark 1935National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Hailed as labor's Magna Carta, the Wagner Act , gave workers the "right to self organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing." Immediately after its passage, workers and the labor movement took the Wagner Act to heart. In union halls, organizing rallies and picket lines , signs appeared saying: "The President (Roosevelt) wants you to join the union."

More than two decades later, Mayor Wagner showed signs of wanting to finish his father's work. The 1935 Wagner Act had not been the Magna Carta for all workers. It excluded public employees.

Coming into office in 1954, Wagner inherited a municipal government in which “city workers were way below the salaries of workers in private industry,” he told the UFT Oral History Project in 1986.

TIMES A CHANGIN'

Creating his own "Little Wagner Act," the mayor issued executive orders in1954 and 1958 which set up grievance machinery, granted city workers the right to bargain collectively and allowed a voluntary dues check off. By July of 1959, DC 37 of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees began bargaining with the city.

The plight of teachers, however, remained unchanged. Neither an executive nor mayoral agency, the Board of Education was not bound by Wagner's authority. Still, Wagner's words and actions indicated the city's political climate was changing and that the mayor might be an ally.

There were other developments, within the ranks of teachers themselves, which gave hope that change was in the air. For some in the Guild and the rival High School Teachers Association, the experience of marching side-by-side, picketing the evening high schools on those cold winter nights in early 1959 had been the ice breaker -- warming to the point where there was talk of making the collaboration permanent.

Still, it wouldn't be easy. Standing in the way of unity was the bitterly divisive dispute over the single salary question. More than a decade after losing their differential, high school teachers were still fuming because they no longer earned more than teachers of lower grades.

They had a point. High school teachers were required to earn master's degrees, take very difficult qualifying exams and wait years for an appointment to what they'd been told were better-paying jobs, only to have the rules changed in 1947.

But more than differences over the single salary separated the HSTA and the Guild .

Perhaps no one person embodied these differences more than Roger Parente, the HSTA's secretary and one of the prime movers behind the evening high school strike An English teacher at Grace Dodge Vocational HS, Parente was straight out of John Osborn's post-war play "Look Back in Anger," the archetypical angry young man, impatient and itching for a fight. To Parente, the Guild's old-timers represented the cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz-- all roar and no fight.

Like many high school teachers, Parente had been reduced to taking odd jobs after school and on weekends to support his family. Believing power concedes nothing without struggle, he wouldn't hesitate to use a strike, he said, "to club the public to get their attention. Then we'll change the dialogue."

Though his father had been a union plasterer, Parente wasn't after the Holy Grail of collective bargaining. Nor was he driven by left-wing ideology, socialist or otherwise. While Teachers Guild people wore their working class credentials with pride, Parente and many of his fellow HSTA colleagues thought of themselves as middle-class professionals, albeit with one big difference.

To many the word "professional" meant an above-it-all disinterest in the pursuit of money, the rejection of any form of public protest, union membership, and certainly strikes. But not for Parente. To him the word was a rallying cry .

Yet despite the differences, Parente favored unity with the Teachers Guild if that meant action. He saw no other way to grow and believed that overtime he and the HSTA could change the Guild. In fact, he made no secret of his ambition of one day becoming president of a united organization.

Sensing that the old guard leadership of both organizations would represent a roadblock, George Altomare of the Guild and John Bailey of the HSTA hatched a plan for secret talks of merger.

As it turned out, the sticking point of a single salary vs. the former high school differential wasn't so sticky after all. The ad-hoc group developed a compromise plan for a "promotional increment." They agreed that high schoolteachers, and other teachers with a master's or its equivalent, should been titled to more money.

Time came to go public and sell it to their respective organizations. But the Secondary School Teachers Association's executive board (the HSTA had in the meantime renamed itself in a vain bid to attract militant junior high people ) spurned their plan.

When word of the secret talks came to light, Guild President Cogen was furious. Both Altomare and Selden were hauled onto the carpet. There was even talk of firing the wily AFT organizer. In the end, while Selden's lone- ranger stunts were wearing thin on Cogen and some of the old guard, his undeniable organizing genius saved his hide.

But Selden, who reveled in court intrigue, wouldn't give up. He and Altomare created a front group called the Committee for Action Through Unity (CATU), which met at Altomare's house to iron out a merger plan. The plan got a boost when Bailey and Altomare took out an ad on the "School Page" of the old World, Telegram & Sun calling on high school teachers interested in merger to send in their membership applications along with $5.

More than 1,500 applications poured in.

A new constitution was drawn that shared power with the newcomers, and Hochbergeven became "deputy president". When the merger plan was complete, it was readied for a vote by the Guild's Delegate Assembly.

Some in the Guild got cold feet at the last minute. Shanker recalls Rebecca Simonson, the Guild's longtime president, asking, "Who are these people?"

Shanker recalls: "Some of the old timers got up and said, 'We oppose this merger. We know who we are and we know where we stand on civil rights and on the trade union movement. Who are these 1,500 people? Will they change the fundamental nature of this organization.'"

THE UFT IS BORN
In reality, more than principles were at stake. Many in the Guild fear edit was only a matter of time before the CATU would take over the union. A sit turned out they weren't all that wrong. At a Delegate Assembly meeting in the old Astor Hotel, the merger vote carried.

The Guild was no more. The United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 AFT, AFL-CIO, was born on March 16, 1960.

With unity came action. In short order, the new UFT presented six demands to the Board of Education. While collective bargaining topped the list, the remaining points were craftily designed to appeal to a cross section of members. The elementary teachers would be drawn to the call for duty-free lunches, the full-time substitutes to 10 days paid sick leave, the high school people to the $1,000 promotional increment and everyone would like the idea of a substantial raise. Last, but not least, the union treasury would get a much-needed infusion of funds from the guaranteed dues check off.

The board, however, ignored the demands. So the UFT set May 16, 1960, Teacher Recognition day, for a strike.

As he had the year before during the threatened one-day work stoppage, Harry Van Arsdale stepped in. The Central Labor Council president arranged a meeting with School's Superintendent John J. Theobald just one day before the strike.

The UFT negotiating team included Cogen, Jules Kolodny and Selden, as well as newcomers Hochberg and Parente. The board made vaguely positive assurances about an election in which teachers could choose a collective bargaining agent, but it refused to be pinned down to a date. As for the other demands, the board agreed to a modest raise and sick leave for subs. However, it wouldn't budge on duty-free lunch, dues check off and the all-important promotional increment. Worse still, it wouldn't put its offers in writing.

Disheartened, the UFT group retreated to another room with Van Arsdale to discuss the board's offer. "We discussed compromise formulas for advancing the negotiations," Selden recounts in his book "Teacher Rebellion."

The labor council president became increasingly impatient. Finally, Van Arsdale said, "Look! We aren't getting anywhere. When I get to this point in my negotiations with employers I say, 'Gentlemen! (slamming his palm down on the table for emphasis) 'Your shops will not open tomorrow.' (Van Arsdale)stopped and glared at the committee before continuing. 'If you can say that and make it stick, all right. You have my support. But if you don't have the troops, we might as well stop wasting time. You've got all you're going to get.'"

Cogen called for a vote. It was 4 to 1 to accept the board's offer. The one nay was Parente's.

Looking to turn lemons into lemonade, the leaders immediately attempted to put an upbeat spin on the agreement, characterizing the board's vague assurances to "strongly consider" collective bargaining as a promise. In fact, all six of the original demands became "promises" that became "broken promises."

Selden came away from the May agreement predicting, quite rightly, the board would do nothing. The summer passed without headway. The board dragged its feet, referring the issue of collective bargaining to the city attorney for study. Even the sick leave provision looked stillborn as Theobald expressed second thoughts.

And there was still more evidence of bad faith. In June, the World Telegram& Sun reported on its "School Page" that the board was maneuvering behind-the-scenes to undermine the UFT. A high-ranking board official had arranged for members of rival teacher organizations, including the Elementary School Teachers Association, to be excused with pay to confer with the National Education Association in Washington.

That October the banner headline on the UFT's newspaper, The United Teacher, warned: "We Will Not Be Double-Crossed." It announced that the Executive Board and Delegate Assembly had voted to set a strike date of Nov. 7, 1960-- the day before election day.

The date, says Shanker, was no accident. "The mayor was a nationally prominent Democrat, and we felt he'd broken his word to us, and therefore we were going to do something which he would find quite uncomfortable."

Besides, they figured that the Democratic political machine would be reluctant to come down hard on strikers just before a presidential vote many were predicting would go down to the wire.

LABOR LEADERS FROWN
The city's labor chiefs weren't pleased. With few exceptions, the labor establishment, dominated by the politically conservative building trades unions of the old AFL, had settled into a comfortable give and take. Even the fiery Mike Quill boasted that his Transport Workers Union had not struck the city in over 30 years.

At election time these labor leaders wielded a lot of power, enough to make or break any would-be Democratic officeholder. They didn't take kindly to a group of upstart teachers embarrassing a friendly mayor, or worse, costing John Kennedy the election.

By mid-October the AFL-CIO's mahatma himself, George Meany, came to New York to talk some sense into the UFT. At the Commodore Hotel, Cogen, Hochberg, Parente and Selden, representing the UFT, joined Meany who had brought along Carl Megel, president of the AFT, and Harry Van Arsdale for the powwow. Selden captured the scene in his book:

"How many members you got?" Meany inquires.

"Five thousand," I lie.

"How many teachers are there?"

"Forty thousand." There were really forty-five thousand, but I shaded the number downward to improve our odds.

"How many will strike?"

"At least 10 thousand, maybe 20," I say.

Meany grunts contemptuously. "They won't pay dues to you but they'll strike for you. Is that it?"

Hochberg and Parente watch me for any sign of wavering. I stick to my guns. "That's about it."

Selden went on to describe more awkward exchanges that left Meany unimpressed. Finally, after taking a long draw on his cigar, an exasperated Meany blurted out: "For heaven's sake, Harry. Can't somebody blow the whistle on these guys?"

It was the last official word from organized labor until the day before the strike. If the teachers were going to win, it looked as if they would have to do it on their own.

George Altomare was ready. Working day and night since the beginning of the summer recess, the union's strike chairman had set up an elaborate "network." Leaving nothing to chance, Altomare walked around with his own custom-made Delaney cards that in seconds could reveal all about a school and its members. "It was the closest thing to a computer in those days," he recalls.

With a flick of the wrist he knew everything from where the entrances and exits were to where the nearest candy store with a phone was located. Altomare could look up who were the friendliest, the fence-sitters and the likely strike-breakers.

Based on questionnaires and telephone polls, Altomare could tell who would volunteer to picket another school but not their own. Many feared reprisal by the principal or felt uneasy about their students seeing them picket.

Since Altomare knew where a single picketer could do the trick and where even a dozen couldn't, he was able to create an "optimum picket plan," thereby getting the most impact per pavement pounder.

Most teachers had never walked a picket line. A Bronx chapter leader came up with the novel way of breaking them in gradually. Three weeks before the November strike deadline, teachers from JHS 120 and 139, began reporting early for school and walking a line until the bell sounded. The practice soon spread as teachers from close to 300 schools took up what became known as "honor picketing." Not only was it good practice, but it generated great publicity as the evening papers ran photos.

In the weeks leading up to the strike, the tiny UFT headquarters on East 23rd Street was jammed with volunteers manning phones, cranking mimeo machines and painting signs.

"It was all thunder and lightning, do or die," Jeannette DiLorenzo recalls of the exhilarating pre-strike atmosphere. "Even the old were young again."

But the excitement was mixed with foreboding. Many teachers were rightfully nervous that taking part could cost them jobs and pensions -- after all, that’s what state law demanded at the time. So, to bolster morale and ease fears, scores of volunteers made phone calls to members' homes.

They had answers at the ready. "Do you really think Mayor Wagner, whose own father was responsible for the Wagner Act, is going to crush a strike by teachers?" And, "There's a teacher shortage. Do you think the board could replace every striking teacher?"

"Of course, we didn't know for sure," Altomare says. "But that's what we said," hastening to ask with a laugh if the statute of limitations has run out.

Those weren't the only fast ones that Altomare, a graduate of Selden's whatever-it-takes school, pulled. When the Guild old-timers challenged him to produce 3,000 members at the October strike authorization meeting, Altomare went to St. Nicholas Arena and slipped the janitor $50 to remove 500 folding chairs and spread out the remaining 2,500. "That was a week's pay back then, but it was the best $50 I ever spent."

The union was not the lone player in mind games. Just days before the strike, teachers were forced to sit through a radio address by Schools Superintendent Theobald, who again said he would not "negotiate with members of my own family” and vowed he would fire any teacher who violated the Condon-Wadlin Law by going on strike. The board even forbade teachers to discuss the proposed strike at school meetings. Undeterred, they met on street corners, churches and synagogues -- in one case even a funeral parlor.

Though some principals privately assured teachers they'd provide cover by marking them present if the strike went kaput, the great majority left no doubt as to their opposition.

As the days dwindled, not only were the rank-and-file worried, but some in the leadership had their doubts, too. Shanker remembers a meeting at which sentiment was running in favor of calling off the strike. With the city’s labor movement showing no signs of coming around, Theobald vowing to fire strikers and uncertainty over how many teachers would walk, many of the old-timers thought it looked like a suicide mission.

Shanker held his tongue. Being on the AFT payroll, his job was not in jeopardy." I looked around the room and saw Charlie Cogen and Si Beagle with 30 years in the system and others with so much time in. But there was just too much at stake to stay quiet.

"Look, we have no choice but to go out," he recalls saying. "With Condon-Wadlin, a strike is going to be illegal next year and every year. If we're going to allow that to stop us, then forget about the union. We're finished.

"You've been urging people to join the labor movement and now you're going to be telling them the labor movement isn't going to support us and that’s why we're not going out.

"There's no argument that anybody can come up with to call this strike off that allows us to continue to have a union or any chance of building one. I admit this is risky. Maybe there will be a miracle and something will happen. But the other way is a certain death warrant."

With that, old firebrands Beagle and Dave Wittes spoke up in support and not another word was heard about calling off the strike.

There was no turning back. As an editorial in the last edition of The United Teacher before the strike proclaimed, "This is a strike for our dignity, for our self respect. We will smash once and for all the concept that teachers are educated fools."

On the morning of Nov. 7, Mel Aaronson was up early to open UFT headquarters. He was no sooner in the door than the phone rang. It was the Chicago Tribune calling to find out about the state of New York City schools. Without missing a beat, Aaronson told the reporter that he was "proud to report that at this moment every one of New York's public schools is shut down."

It was 6 a.m.

At schools across the city, picketers were gathering in the cold, early morning dark. They'd been told to get there before other teachers tried to sneak in. Rival teacher organizations, such as the Secondary School Teachers Association, had come out against the strike and were instructing members to cross the picket lines. One, the Elementary School Teachers Association, went as far as calling for the punishment of striking teachers.

The UFT strikers had hoped to shame teachers belonging to the remnants of the original Teachers Union, but to no avail. Still tightly disciplined, its members crossed grim-faced past the picketers.

At JHS 142 in Red Hook, the scene was anything but grim. It was more like a block party as parents handed out refreshments and longshoremen from the nearby piers and merchant seamen from the Seafarers Union joined the 80 teachers on the picket line -- a tribute to a year's worth of organizing by the husband-and-wife duo of Jeannette and John DiLorenzo.

There was no rousing start for Nat Levine's day, though. He arrived at his school that morning expecting to walk a picket line. But by a vote of 14 to 12 the UFT's chapter at PS 100 in Queens decided to report for work. Levine wasn’t happy, but went along with the majority -- for a while. By lunchtime, however, the thought of working while others were striking was eating at him.

"I just I couldn't live with it," he said. After leaving a note on his blackboard saying "to thine own self be true," Levine told the principal he was leaving. “He asked me if I was sick and I told him I'm staying out because I'm staying out."

'YOU GOTTA DO WHAT YOU GOTTA DO'
When Levine got home he took a tranquilizer for the first and last time in his life. "I knew that my job was on the line. If the union failed I wouldn’t have a job there or anywhere in teaching. But for the first time in my life I realized you gotta do what you gotta do."

To Ray Frankel there was never a question. As the the daughter of life long ILGWU activists, the strike was a constant in her life. "In my milieu you were either planning a strike, on strike or reminiscing about one."

Not everyone was so ardent. At Frankel's school, PS 165 on the upper West Side, some teachers were actually driven to tears as they looked out the window and saw their colleagues picketing on the street below. "I told them to stop crying and come out," remembers Frankel, one of only five teachers on the line that day.

It was even lonelier for Lou Carrubba, the only teacher at Stuyvesant HS to walk a picket line -- even the school's chapter leader crossed. Carrubba can still recall his colleagues' words. "Some shouted encouragement and said they were sorry for going in, but they were just too afraid to lose their jobs. Others called me a "disgrace to the profession and worse." Ironically, Carruba's only visible support came from an unlikely source, the school's football team which talked many students into staying out of school that day.

Not surprisingly, reports coming in from the "network" showed that the strike was taking its greatest toll in the junior highs, the Guild's old stronghold, and in the high schools where the CATU rebels dominated. Also no surprise was the news that the strike was a virtual bust in the elementary schools, a fact Jeannette DiLorenzo learned all too well when dispatched to checkout some 30 schools in south Brooklyn.

"It was a terrible feeling," recalls DiLorenzo. "It was pitiful passing by all the elementary schools and not a soul coming out."

DiLorenzo would get more bad news when she returned to her own junior high in Red Hook. The morning's festive atmosphere had turned funereal as word of the superintendent's firing of all strikers sent half her pickets scurrying back to their classrooms.

More bad news came when it was learned that the powerful Central Labor Council head Van Arsdale came out in the press calling the strike "extremely regrettable."

Van Arsdale, who the night before had tried to broker a last-minute deal to avert the strike, called Selden a few hours into the strike. He'd been driving around and hadn't seen any pickets. "Well, how many do you have out?” he asked Selden. True to form, Selden declared the strike a success. To which Van Arsdale replied, "Looks pretty thin to me," and hung up.

Later that afternoon, Selden got another call, this time from the legendary president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, David Dubinsky.

"Listen," he said, "vill you take mediation? I vant to meet with you."

Later that night at Dubinsky's apartment, the aging labor statesman spelled out the deal. Call off the strike and the mayor will appoint a "fact-finding” committee consisting of Dubinsky, Van Arsdale and Jacob Potofsky, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union.

Of course, it didn't take a genius to figure out that, given the committee’s makeup, the deal was a rigged jury. Collective bargaining was all but assured.

"I thought it was the best deal we could get given the weak hand we were dealt," Shanker recalls thinking. A lot of members of the executive board felt it wasn't enough. The former HSTA people, notably Parente, were miffed that no action had been taken on the high school differential -- their reason for merging in the first place. Still, after a couple of hours of emotional debate, the plan was approved.

Getting it by the Delegate Assembly proved a tougher sell. There's an adage in labor circles that the second toughest thing a labor leader has to do is convince the membership to go out on strike. The hardest is getting strikers to go back.

Cries of "sellout" filled the room as Cogen and the leadership were pummeled for caving in to the mayor, the board and the "traitors" in the labor movement. But in the end, they too went along. The city and the Board of Ed had gotten got themselves a deal. The strike was over.

All told, some 5,600 teachers, secretaries, guidance counselors and social workers struck that day, with another 2,000 calling in sick. The Great Strike of Nov. 7, 1960, was neither a mass uprising nor a total victory. The fact is the city's labor movement saved the UFT's hide. But it was by no means total surrender. The UFT would live to fight another day. And next time it would be stronger.

Looking back on those days the older but wiser veterans shake their heads in disbelief wondering how a tiny group could have pulled off so daring a caper. "It didn't seem as outrageous then as it now seems," says Shanker, laughing.

"We had more chutzpah than brains," offers Altomare. "But we had no choice. The strategy of the old-timers in the Guild of waiting to grow before acting wasn’t working. We knew that we had to act in order to grow."

Stephen Cole's book "The Unionization of Teachers" quotes another veteran of the struggle, "It was a kind of kamikaze thing which worked."

The Struggle for Recognition -- 1961

For Milton Pincus, the decision to call off the November 7th strike in return for Mayor Robert Wagner's promise of a fact-finding committee loaded with the leading lights of the city's labor movement, was a no-brainer. From where he stood -- outside Brooklyn's Tilden HS walking a lonely picket, one of only 14 teachers out of Tilden's 300 or so faculty -- the strike was a loser.

"(It) could have been a total disaster," Pincus recalled years later as part of the UFT Oral History Project. "(The city) could have destroyed those few thousand who went out. But because of Dubinsky, Potofsky and Van Arsdale-- and the influence they wielded with the city officials -- they prevented a massacre."

Pincus wasn't alone in reading the appointments of David Dubinsky and Jacob Potofsky, presidents of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU)and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, respectively, along with the powerful head of the New York City Central Labor Council, Harry Van Arsdale, as a sign that things were looking up for the fledgling UFT.

But if Pincus had breathed a sigh of relief at the news of the settlement, Roger Parente had breathed flames. Long leery that close ties to the city’s labor movement, which was wired to the Democratic political machine, would dampen teacher militancy, Parente had felt the strike was just catching fire when the labor patriarchs snuffed out the blaze.

At a closed-door meeting, Parente, a UFT vice president, had pleaded with Van Arsdale for one more day to show that the strike was starting to gel. The city's Central Labor Council president, worried that the walkout was hurting the mayor, not only said no, but also threatened to disavow the strike altogether if it weren't halted immediately.

"The thought that our actions could be vetoed by others who knew nothing about education did not sit well with me," Parente told the UFT Oral History Project in 1985.

Bailout or sellout, there would be a rude awakening for anyone who thought that even a blue-ribbon panel with a prominent union label could deliver collective bargaining on a silver platter to the UFT.

Winning the right to represent all the city's teachers at the bargaining table would take 13 months, a referendum, a bargaining election, a battle royal with the powerful National Education Association, stonewalling, scandal and a bloodletting at the Board of Education, the strong backing of the American Federation of Teachers, an angel named Walter, a spook named Dave and countless thousands of hours of organizing by hundreds of union volunteers.

With the exception of Philip Taft's "United They Teach," histories of this period all too often give only passing mention, sometimes barely more than a footnote, to this year-long struggle for recognition. "No one will ever know the story of what it took, the sweat and sacrifice that went into winning,” said George Altomare, one of the authors of that struggle. "The (November7th) strike is what everybody remembers, but it would have meant nothing if we'd lost the other fights."

BOARD WAS IN NO HURRY
As it was, it took only two months for the Dubinsky, Potofsky and Van Arsdale committee to deliver its report recommending an "election before the end of the school term."

The board, however, was in no hurry. Both board members and Superintendent of Schools John J. Theobald were still miffed that Mayor Wagner had gone over their heads and brokered an end to the November strike. As they saw it, the mayor had overstepped his authority in promising their employees collective bargaining. They were intent on reasserting their authority and making the mayor, his labor cronies and the upstart UFT sweat.

Besides, in their minds, the final strike tally -- 10 percent of the teachers went out -- was hardly a mandate for action. The vast majority of teachers was yet to be heard from, especially the dozens of teacher organizations that effectively would be out of business if the UFT were granted exclusive bargaining rights. They questioned whether it was even legal to grant exclusive bargaining rights to one organization.

Why shouldn't other organizations, which had not struck the system, be entitled to a piece of the action through "divisional bargaining" -- that is, separate bargaining for elementary, junior high and high school teachers? For that matter, why not borough wide bargaining?

To buy more time and sort out these issues, the board appointed its own Commission of Inquiry on Collective Bargaining. Several months later the Commission proposed taking a poll of teachers to determine how they felt about collective bargaining, the results of which would be binding.

That wasn't what the Board of Ed had in mind. Balking at the idea of being bound by the results, the board rejected the recommendation of its own committee, which promptly resigned in protest. Instead, the board insisted that the city’s Board of Estimate -- the now disbanded panel composed of the mayor, comptroller, city council president and five borough presidents, -- should have the final authority to nullify any collective bargaining agreement.

Still, under pressure from the mayor, who was facing a tough reelection fight that November, the Board of Ed set aside June 19-29 for a poll of teachers. The referendum asked one simple question: "Do you want collective bargaining?"

BATTLING THE NEA
Leading the charge against collective bargaining was the National Education Association. Founded in 1857, the NEA was a powerhouse on the national scene, with a membership of over 700,000 -- almost 12 times the number of AFT members. However, the NEA had only 700 members in New York City schools in 1961.

What it had, though, was a considerable war chest which it didn't hesitate to tap. Dozens of organizers were detached to the city to help mobilize opposition to