In this episode, host Kate Carpenter interviews labor historian Dr. Shaun Richman. Shaun is a program director at SUNY Empire State College, and he recently completed his PhD in American Studies. But before that, he spent more than a decade as a union organizer and representative. That experience inspires much of his writing, including two books, magazine articles, and op-eds in numerous outlets. His first book was Tell the Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the Twenty-First Century. His second book, which came out in 2025, is We Always Had a Union: The New York Hotel Workers’ Union, 1912-1953. In addition to being an enthusiastic labor historian, Shaun has a personal connection to this history, as a onetime member of one of the union’s featured in the narrative. We talked about how that perspective shapes his work, how he found his way to writing history after years as a labor organizer, and why he’s determined to write books that other labor organizers will want to read.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Shaun’s website: https://shaunrichman.com/
- Shaun Richman, Tell the Bosses We’re Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the Twenty-First Century
- Shaun Richman, We Always Had a Union: The New York Hotel Workers’ Union, 1912-1953
- Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist
- Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs
- George Orwell, A Collection of Essays
- Michael Harrington
- Ahmed White, The Last Great Strike: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America and Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
This is Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I'm Kate Carpenter, your host. I wish I had something pithy or inspiring or otherwise useful to say in this moment, but the most useful thing I have to offer is continuing to provide a community for people writing histories, especially histories about people coming together to fight for what's right. So in this episode, I am pleased to be joined by labor historian Dr. Shaun Richman.
Shaun Richman 0:28
Thank you for having me.
Kate Carpenter 0:30
Shaun is the program director of the Harry Van Arsdale Jr School of Labor Studies at SUNY Empire State College. He recently completed his PhD in American Studies--like really recently, congratulate him--but before that, he spent more than a decade as a union organizer and representative. That experience inspires much of his writing, including two books, magazine articles and op eds in numerous outlets. His first book was Tell the Bosses We're Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the 21st Century. His second book, which came out in 2025, is We Always Had a Union: The New York Hotel Workers' Union, 1912 to 1953. In addition to being an enthusiastic labor historian, Shaun has a personal connection to this history as a one time member of one of the unions featured in the narrative. We talked about how that perspective shapes his work, how he found his way to writing history after years as a labor organizer, and why he's determined to write books that other labor organizers will want to read. Here's my conversation with Dr. Shaun Richman.
Shaun Richman 1:37
I studied journalism in undergrad, but I wound up becoming a union organizer, and I did that for about a decade and a half. I actually worked for Hotel Employees Local 6, which is one of the unions that is profiled in this book, but I spent most of the time at the American Federation of Teachers, where by the end, I was running the union's charter school organizing division, where I like to joke we were spending four and a half million dollars to organize 1000 workers a year, and so when I got off the road, when I left, I had all of this sort of pent up critique about how, you know, how we were doing things, that the legal system of labor relations had become a trap, that unions were sort of following certain strategies, almost as a as a reflex, weren't, weren't, sort of critically reevaluating what works and what doesn't. And I started writing about this in magazines like In These Times and Jacobin and The American Prospect. I managed to even get a few op eds in places like the Washington Post and The New York Times. And so after a couple of years of that, I felt like I had enough material for a book, and also that, like things weren't going to change for at least a year or two for like, a current events book, you know, current affairs book. And so in 2020 I published Tell the Bosses We're Coming, sort of put all these thoughts together, and the book went over like a lead balloon. But at least I taught myself how to write a book. So coming out of that, I, you know, I knew I wanted to write more. I didn't want to be one of these guys who keeps sort of writing the same book over and over again. And I had been nursing this idea for this hotel workers history for over 10 years. At that point, 15 years, where I knew I had something. I was collecting these FBI files. The project had intimidated me, until I went and wrote a book. And I was like, All right, I can do this. And so I started working on the book the day that I handed the manuscript for tell the bosses into to that publisher.
Kate Carpenter 3:42
Did you always see yourself as a writer?
Shaun Richman 3:44
I think so. I mean, I was a teenage socialist, so, you know, you have your party magazines and such, and I edited some of them. I was, you know, I was a pretty good propagandist, and I wrote essays that I was like, that's actually pretty good, you know, and when I could get other people to agree, like it was an essay that I wrote in freshman year about freshman year labor studies, one on one course where I look at the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and I say, You know what? Willy Wonka is running a Stalinist gulag, and I got a couple of zines to republish it, and all these years later, I'm still like, that was a pretty good essay for an 18 year old kid. I keep that one in my clips still.
Kate Carpenter 4:23
Cool, well, let's talk about the details of how you write. So when and where do you like to do your writing?
Shaun Richman 4:27
I work from home, so I drop my kids off at school, and I'm usually back at my desk at eight o'clock at the university. At all universities, you know, people don't like to schedule meetings until at least 10am right? So, you know, that's a good uninterrupted block of time that I get a lot of work done. And the work could look different from day to day. You know, if it's a real writing day, maybe there was a paragraph that was rattling around in my head in the shower or that I was dreaming about. I have very literal dreams. I just write in my dreams. So, you know, get, get to the get to the computer and try to get it down. Otherwise, maybe I'm taking notes. One of the things that I did that I found to be a best practice is I create a document that I call, you know, my my lit review, and I just sort of make tabs for, these are the books, these are the archives. These are the magazines, whatever, so that as I'm reading, I'm taking notes, and instead of general notes, I try to write it like this is probably how it would sound if I, if I put this in the book, you know. So if I've got a newspaper account of, you know, picketers, where police drove picketers away from the New Yorker Hotel, when they reemerge five blocks to the west at the Waldorf Astoria, they threw rocks through the windows of the first floor, and then make sure to get the footnote right. And so that maybe, on this book there's a, there's a digitalized archive of New York newspapers back when we had, like, 17 daily newspapers. So a lot of it was just, you know, a day's work was going through a day of newspapers and getting the the 17 clips so that on a writing day, it might be a lot of copy and paste and just making sure that the syntax and and the tense match, but a lot of that, the time consuming work of getting the footnote right, is done. Yeah, so on a writing day, I can make, you know, maybe I can add 2000 words to the to the manuscript.
Kate Carpenter 6:20
When you're organizing all of that. What tools are you using? Is that just word? Are you using something else?
Shaun Richman 6:25
Google Docs, baby. I swear by it. I mean Word just, you know, it reformats everything. It's so infuriating. Google Docs was it was a real revelation to make the first book. I started writing it at my in laws kitchen table. We're out in Chicago on a family vacation. I started taking the notes, and it was just like, now this book can go everywhere. It's at my office. I wasn't working from home at the time. It was at my home office and and there it is, and they haven't put too much junk into it yet, although I'm sure that their AI machine is is plagiarizing me constantly at this point, but I don't know what to do about that.
Kate Carpenter 7:01
So it sounds like you like to sort of start writing even as you're researching. Is that right? Is there a point that you say to yourself, like, Okay, I'm writing the book now?
Shaun Richman 7:10
Yeah, I get itchy. But there is a point where I'm like, oh, yeah, I guess I am writing. This is, this is transcended notes, and this is now paragraphs that are, that are connected to each other and, and there's a sketch. I mean, I start with an outline always, you know, try to get a breakdown of this is what the chapters are going to be, and then even, like, what there might be, sort of subheadings within the chapter. And it's very hard to, it's very hard to commit to a project without coming up with a title. I have found because when I was started working on the next book, after We Always Had a Union, actually pursued two projects simultaneously, where I said, I'll write the first two chapters of each, and then I'll settle on one. And I think I settled on the one that I did because it had a title, and the other one, the title had not occurred to me yet.
Kate Carpenter 7:53
Suppose that makes sense. It reflects a certain sort of like the idea congeals, for lack of a better word.
Shaun Richman 7:58
In your brain, like there's a there, there, you know, yeah.
Kate Carpenter 8:00
What does revision look like for you?
Shaun Richman 8:03
My own revision is usually by the midway point I go back to the first chapters and try to tighten them with an eye towards going on the market and pitching the thing. Yeah, a lot of, a lot of tightening. And then frequently, of course, you know, because I I get so itchy and I start writing, potentially prematurely, I've discovered all these new things, so I'm cutting, but then I'm adding in new details so that that word count just, you know, sort of like a like an accordion, where. And then, of course, there's there, there's the editorial process, where I've had good experience working with with editors the peer review certainly have the sort of the traditional review or two problems, but my editors have been very, very good. Michael Yates edited, tell the bosses, and Alison Syring Bassford edited, We Always Had a Union. I think they, they're very good at just like, well, what's your story and cut up like this, is this your story? Or is this just, you know, a thing that you wrote that you know were enamored with the words, or it's a funny story, but is it your story and sort of getting it down as much as possible to the essence?
Kate Carpenter 9:11
You mentioned that between the first and second books, you felt like the first book really taught you how to write a book as you headed into We Always Had a Union. What do you feel like you learned from that first book?
Shaun Richman 9:23
Just my process is, right? Like, what times of day am most productive? How to organize my notes so that the writing days are, are more productive? How to how to structure the chapters. I mean, although that was, I guess the big epiphany there was a book is just a really long magazine article, which is, you know, it's that that's very encouraging. Like, okay, I already knew how to do this.
Kate Carpenter 9:49
That is nice to learn. You mentioned in the acknowledgements, I think that you struggled with imposter syndrome while you were working on this book. How did you overcome that feeling?
Shaun Richman 10:00
Time and distance. You know, it helps that as as other people read early drafts, people who I respect, as historians, as as writers, you know that I was getting feedback of this is, this is good stuff. I you know, I didn't know any of this. This is pretty you know, and it just helps to sort of move on to the next project too, so that by the time you're writing your second history, even if neither of them had been published yet, still like you now you're you're in your own head, you're a multi book author. But you know that I also just went and got myself a PhD to deal with some of it as well, which I, you know? I think that that was the main purpose of doing that was taking away some of that imposter syndrome.
Kate Carpenter 10:40
I was not entirely surprised to learn that you were an undergraduate journalism major, because you did a lot of sort of gumshoe reporting for this book in the archives. But also, you know, using the Freedom of Information Act, FOIA, to get access to FBI articles or FBI files. Could you talk a little bit more about that process of really digging into the research of this book?
Shaun Richman 11:02
I mean, I approached the story like, like a journalist would, right? I mean, I'm not sure. I mean, my PhD is not, it wasn't a traditional program. So I can't really speak to how folks are trained in in a traditional American PhD program. But, you know, I feel like there's, there are certain sort of thesis statements and questions that started. And I just started with, like, Well, what happened? Like, who was in that room, and what did they, you know, what did they agree? And so, yeah, like, I mean, and it's kind of crazy. Like, you know, this guy, Michael J Obermeier, is really, in essence, in a lot of ways, he's sort of the heart of the story. He's a president, one of the first presidents of local six, who, when I was there, the legend was, the federal agents came into the union office and arrested one of our presidents, and he was, he was deported for being a communist. And that was just inconceivable for a union, that at the time we were, you know, we were campaigning for Republican George Pataki re election. Like, how did, how did we get from here to there? You know, I wanted to know, well, who were the rats? Like, you know, you get an FBI file that's redacted. I want to know who those were, and that was a sort of a crazy goal, but it's also crazy how easy it was eventually to figure out, you know, you get this other FBI file and and you start to see points of overlap, you know, with this being a communist led union. You know, one of the values of studying communist led unions, I would say is, you know, it's not a value judgment about what communism brought to the labor movement. I'm not trying to make any points about that at all. It's really that if you're trying to reconstruct what a union organizing campaign looked like in 1923 you don't have a lot of material to draw on. You're lucky if the union published a journal, and it still exists. Maybe, maybe they were disruptive enough that the New York Times covered a strike. Maybe some other historian wrote something up back in the 1940s when it was fresher. But you don't have a lot, but if you have the Communist Party, then you've got, you've got those FBI files, because the FBI was keeping pretty diligent notes on these people and their stuff was impressive. You find transcripts sometimes of what's going on in meetings, transcripts of phone conversations. It's crazy. They've also got the notes that they kept. Organizers sending notes to regional directors, sending sending memos on to the common turn where they're giving membership figures that are at odds with what the union is publishing in, in its newspaper. You know, you've got the, you've got the daily worker, which is going to give extra coverage to unions that that are communist led. You've got other journals, like, there's, there was a an internal magazine called The Organizer, which was just organizer notes, you know, and then communists write about themselves a lot, so you've got more memoirs to tap into, and then you've got the sort of the common turn archives themselves, right? So I think a lot of people know this, that the Communist Party had to, had to get their their records out of the country, anticipating the Cold War. So they were all shipped off to Moscow, and then there they sat for decades, until the end of the Soviet Union, when those archives were opened up to Western scholars. Some folks made microfilm reels of it, so all of the Communist Party of the United States of America's files are here on microfilm in America. And you know, it's useful, although it's spotty, it's a product of activist bureaucracy. So there are times when it's incredibly detailed, and there's times where, like, entire years go by and there's nothing. But then there's also archives in Moscow of the common turn itself, many of them duplicative, but the most important ones to me were the personnel files, which is, anybody who traveled internationally on communist business had to provide a questionnaire about themselves. They had to transfer their party membership for a period of time, depending on what country they were in or if they were going to Moscow to study. And these are, you know, there's not much to it. It's, it's maybe two pages per person, but it's gold because it just confirms the thing that nothing else would where, you know, like you've got, you know, everybody is whispering, you know, Obermeier, he was a day one communist. He was there since the beginning. But there's nothing to prove it, until I see his, his personnel file. It's like, Yep, he joined in 1919, he really was there from the beginning, you know, and then, I mean the one, the one really interesting find in there. One person had four pages of files. And the additional file was just a letter from Moscow to the party back in America saying, you know this guy, Jay Rubin, he's, he's here. He's doing technical advising for us. He's actually helping them develop hotels. He was just there to provide expertise on the industry. They were like, he's great. Can we keep him? And the party in America writes back like, no, he's actually, we kind of need him right now. And I, at this time, was had a version of this chapter written about how these two independent unions were negotiating a merger, and then they were sort of dancing around the AFL which they were independent of. And it's an amazing archive in and of itself, because the two independent unions had newspapers, and they're debating each other in their newspapers on the points of merger. And Rubin is presenting himself as if he is in New York this whole time, and he's actually in Moscow the whole time.
Kate Carpenter 16:18
Did you have any trouble accessing the records that are still in Moscow?
Shaun Richman 16:22
Yeah, I did. I mean, I mean, the war changed everything. Sean Guillory hooked me up with a research assistant who was based in Moscow, and we worked out a deal where I'd pay him 20 bucks an hour, and he would just go and instead of officially requesting the files, they aren't microfilm as well, but he'd just take his cell phone up to his the screen. And and give me the snaps back. But when the war broke out, he had to leave the country. That really cut off my access. And I think it's, I think it's probably cut off every Western scholar's access to those files for a while to come.
Kate Carpenter 16:57
This seemed like a good moment to have Shaun read an excerpt from his new book so we could talk about it a little more in depth. Here's Dr Shaun Richman reading from Chapter Seven of We Always Had a Union.
Shaun Richman 17:08
"Martin Cody, an organizer for Local 6, crossed the street from Penn Station and into the lobby of the Governor Clinton on March 20, 1939. Dinner was being served, guests were checking in, and a fashion show was underway upstairs. Cody was distributing stacks of flyers to the hotel staff; that was their signal. Workers at the 1,200-room hotel voted for union representation via a card check election eight months prior, and the Hotel Association signed the Industry Wide Agreement (IWA) in January. That obligated the Governor Clinton to also sign, but management at the hotel, which was in financial receivership, claimed that they were unable to enter into any contractual agreement regarding wages without bond holder’s approval. The workers began distributing Cody’s flyers, which apologized for the inconvenience of the surprise work stoppage, calling it a ‘last resort’ that was ‘necessary to protect our legal right to enjoy collective bargaining’ and blamed management’s ‘continued stubborn refusal’ to sign the contract. The elevator operators parked the eight guest elevators on random floors and then sat down. One small group of uniformed hotel workers began a picket line outside the property while another group distributed the flyers in the bar and grill to patrons who sat before half-served dinners and empty glasses and in the lobby to 300 guests who were stranded with their luggage. The remainder of the night crew of bellhops, doormen, waiters, waitresses, and cooks descended to the locker rooms in the basement and waited for news about whether they were returning to work that night. After a half hour, police removed the elevator operators to the picket lines outside the hotel, and by the end of the night, the bosses managed to get at least three of the elevator cars operating with white collar workers. Management and the union spent the next day arguing about who was responsible to get back to the bargaining table and about the effectiveness of the strike, which would last a year and a half and end with a return to ‘Status Quo.’"
Kate Carpenter 19:09
What went into writing this passage?
Shaun Richman 19:12
When I handed the manuscript into the publisher, there were, I think, two chapters that began with a sort of in media res flash forward to action in in the chapter, and this was not one of them, but my my editor, Alison Syring Bassford, said, you know, some of the, some of the chapters, like this chapter in particular, you know, right after I tell that story, then, then it goes into this painstaking process of the hotel association, this management association of hotel managers and their politics and the negotiating of the status quo agreement and what it covered, and then a little bit into how the union began to organize and to hire their staff, and all questions that I find really fascinating, but does sort of take a bit to get to what you would traditionally consider action. So as. Alison suggested, Why don't you? How about we try start every chapter with some action, at least, so that it whets the reader's appetite for going forward, and so you know the details of of that particular picket line. Again, the union published a newspaper, so I had their account. There was some controversy in in later years, Martin Cody goes on to become president of local six, and when there's finally a split in the ranks of the communist he leads the faction that remains loyal to the communist party line. So later on, in the 50s, there are all kinds of hearings where they're, they're they're litigating their past. And there's even more details about this, this strike, and whose decision it was to start it, and blah, blah, blah, the Governor Clinton was an important enough hotel that, you know, the Herald Tribune and the New York Times also covered the strike. So some of the details, some of the best details come out of that, like, for some reason, the union newspaper didn't think the fashion show was noteworthy, whereas that's one of the most fun details, because it was, you know, they were on, it was on the third floor, which meant all these models in these ridiculous get ups had to, like, walk down the stairs to eventually leave the hotel. I don't know how any writer could leave that detail on the floor. I returned to the story later in in the chapter. So it basically, when it came to writing, it was now about pulling it out of a narrative where it fit chronologically, leaving enough details that that it's still because it's a very important turning point in the union's organizing campaign to get the bosses to sign on to an industry wide contract. So enough to sort of give, give the chapter this really gripping lead, but also leave enough detail so that it's still fun and not redundant when the story catches up to it later in the chapter.
Kate Carpenter 21:50
You've given us some hints about narrative structure here, in the sense of, you know, pulling out some scenes ahead of the chronology in order to kind of get us into chapters. How did you think about the overall narrative structure for the book?
Shaun Richman 22:02
I think chronologically, I find it sort of crazy sometimes when history books will write about the 1930s as if it all happened at once, as if, like, you know, you know, the overturning of the National Industrial Recovery Act wasn't this massive game changer in terms of the meaning and the direction of the New Deal, as if the Communist Party's pivot to the Popular Front wasn't also a huge change the founding of the CIO and these things, they happen minute by minute, day by day. And so, you know, it's really instructive just to, like, read the newspaper archives. Just read them as newspaper like, just flip the page, you know, flip, flip the microfilm page, and go through it. Put yourself in the mindset of just an ordinary worker at that time. So I, you know, I saw this as, as being broken down into a number of eras. First of all, you know, the story here is that hotel workers in New York always had a union, even though, officially, the New York hotel Trades Council doesn't get created till 1938 there was this succession of independent unions going back to a strike in 1912 and the workers themselves viewed it as a Straight continuity. They viewed that 1912 union as their union. Even though that union went defunct, another union replaced it. That union went defunct. There was a merger, there was there was a split, there was a re merger, all that, all that happened. And also, you sort of have to respect those signposts of the story. You can't you can't blow through them. You can't fudge them. And, you know, talk about what are two distinct independent unions that that competed with each other in 1934 and refer to them as as the same thing. You need to sort of get into those, those, those details.
Kate Carpenter 23:55
You mentioned ahead of our conversation, that part of the publishing process was that you had to fight to make this more of a narrative history, maybe, than some peer reviewers or others wanted. What was that fight like? Why was that important to you?
Shaun Richman 24:08
Yeah, I mean, it was. It was a peer review fight. It wasn't that much of a fight. I mean, I but, you know, one peer reviewer didn't like the structure of the book and clearly wanted it to be written thematically, chapters as themes and and, you know, reading between the lines of their notes, I really felt like they were saying, you know, I want to be able to read the first couple of pages of the chapter and the last couple of the pages of the chapters and then consider that chapter done. I'm just like, No, I want people in the book. I want this to be a gripping story. I want this to be a page turner. So, you know, it was one of those things where I, you know, obviously, cool off and walk away and wait a day or two before you respond, you know, like one of the one of the comments was just like, I don't understand why all of these items are you. Belong together in chapter seven. I'm just thinking because they all happened in the year 1938, like, I mean, are you, do you not see a chronology when it's there in front of you? So, I mean, one of the ways that we, that we dealt with it, and this is like, so silly, but it was, like, so silly that it was, that it was effective, is just we added years to the chapter titles. And I was just like a light bulb moment for the peer reviewers, like, Aha, okay, now, now, now we see what they're doing, but it's important to me, because labor people, union organizers, union activists, they read not enough of them, and not enough books, but they do read and so if you're doing a labor history, you want it to have some impact, some real world impact. And so you want union organizers to read your book. And those readers want stories. You know, I always, I'm always surprised when I see on social media some newer activist. Always somebody I want to know more about Eugene Debs. And, you know, can you, can you recommend a book? And like, those of us who are serious historians, you know, will always suggest, you know, it's like Nick Salvatore's book is, it's the most rigorous. It's the best book on him. But everybody loves Ray Ginger's much older bending cross, you know, it's a much older style. It's a story. There's no footnotes, but people love it because of the story and the attention to character. And so, I mean, there, there's, there's a lesson there, right? Like we got more rigorous in terms of the questions that we ask as researchers, the questions that we explore. But at the end of the day, if that's the audience I want, and I want to, I want to tell them a story that'll get them to recommend the book to other people. Oh, it's, it's a fun, it's a fun story. You know,
Kate Carpenter 26:47
How did you see your relationship to this story as both a historian and reporter, but also as a union organizer and a member of one of these unions that features prominently? How did you think of sort of your position in this history?
Shaun Richman 27:02
It's a little bit complicated, I would say so as a union organizer, there are questions like the putting together of the industry wide agreement, where, first of all, there aren't a lot of those. The idea of multiple small employers getting signing on to the same collective bargaining agreement, that's very rare in labor relations in America. In Europe, it's normal. In many other countries, it's normal. In America, our rugged individualist corporate CEO jerks just they totally resist it. You know, the closest that we have is pattern bargaining. You know, famously GM and Ford and Chrysler and UAW would target one of those employers and try to set a pattern, but there have been industry wide contracts in the garment industry, very famously. But most history sort of treat it as the days where workers were just treated as individuals and at the mercy of the bosses some great conflagration, you know, and then management comes to terms and and just Fay accompli. There it is, the industry wide agreement. Now, I was telling the story at some conference somewhere from the audience, and I was courted by some organizer for an SEIU Local in Milwaukee, in the bathroom, where he was like, I want to know more about this, because he actually was given a charter by SEIU to, you know, to explore organizing some subdivision of healthcare where, you know, they were all very clear strategically that it wouldn't work unless they could get some pull together, some kind of employer association among all of these very small employers, and get industry wide terms. But they were like they had no roadmap for how to do it, because nobody's done it for close to a century. So he was like, I want it how? And so, you know, and as an organizer, I also, you know, we struggled this with in charter schools where, you know, if we had to negotiate a fresh A 30 page agreement for every Charter School, where each one was a special snowflake, we would, we'd be out of resources very quickly. So, how was it put together? So questions that could be very boring about you know, well, they targeted these five hotels in the targets, makes sense, but they made no progress on these two. This one went a little bit further. You know, it's all it's fascinating to me as an organizer. So though it's those kinds of questions that I pursued, and then there's a little bit of, I mean, if this was a union that I didn't work for, I'd like to think that I could still sort of read a union newspaper, read a union flyer, and interpret because there's a lot of sort of, you know, they're not going to tell the whole truth in in their materials, but you can sometimes read between, like, I see what's going on here. You know, particularly questions of like, at some point they're going hotel by hotel, about whether this hotel will sign the agreement and so on. Some cases, they were pressing forward with no, no, you, you signed on to this neutrality agreement. We presented a majority of cards showing that a majority of the work. Want a union, that's it. You have to recognize. And in other cases, they would occasionally go, fine, we'll do an election. And they crushed the election. It's like, well, why did they do one or the other? And I know from organizers experience, I can tell that when, like, well, they had a weak hand at that hotel where they were hanging on to this card check from three years ago, that they knew they couldn't prevail in an election this other one where they went forward, they knew they would crush it and embarrass the boss, and it might help them with that other property. So, you know, I'd like to say if this book was about shoe workers instead, I'd still be able to sort of figure that out. But it helps that I actually knew this place, and it's amazing the extent to which it's the same union. And there's just stuff that is in the culture of the union. And, you know, I try to draw that continuity. You know, this is, this is a union that starts the 1912 strike starts with a spontaneous walkout during dinner, or seemingly spontaneous walk out during dinner, and throughout 1912 and 1913 that was the union's MO was like, serve the soup and then walk out and leave the patrons stranded, and never let the boss know in advance that you were going to strike. And I can see that continuity, where we still do stuff like that, even when there there's a contract in place. You know, you call a lobby meeting and you send your organizers up to the 47th floor, and you, you know, lobby meeting, all the room attendants come down, everybody leaves the kitchen, all the work stops. Nobody's checking in the guest. And you scream and yell for a couple of hours about how management has refused to comply with this arbitrators decision. And so it all made sense in that regard. And then, you know, there was, there were moments sometimes where names would pop up, and they became more familiar to me because some of the people who are in the latter chapters of the narrative were had just retired a few years before I got there, and they were notorious. And so it was always sort of a little like, oh, that's getting a little too that's getting a little too close for comfort. And once or twice, in research, I get out, I found this thing where, I guess, because there's no longer such a thing as actual telephone white pages, but there is still a website called White pages.com nobody ever dies in the white pages. I've discovered, after a couple of brief heart attacks of my own, where, you know, I'm trying to look up, I'm trying to find a proof of death so I can FOIA an FBI file. Because you can't, you can't look for an FBI file of a living person. And every now and then, it's like, well, you know, according to white pages, this 94 year old is still alive, and it's just like, I don't, I don't want to do an oral history, and then finally confirm that now they're not still alive. That got a little, sometimes a little bit scary even, you know, Peter Ward, who I write about in the introduction, who was president when I was there, and I thought would be president when this book published, very surprisingly retired during the covid lockdown. And so then the president became actually a very good friend of mine, very much to my surprise, which sort of changed my relationship as I'm as I'm writing this thing. You know? I mean, I I want to honor the union's legacy. I want it to be something that they'll be proud of as well. And it just feels very strange that, like the president is actually one of my best friends in this world all of a sudden. Never saw that coming.
Kate Carpenter 33:26
It sounds like you felt like there were a lot of advantages to having sort of this insider knowledge of the history, which I can really see. Did you also feel like you ever had blind spots that you kind of needed to push past and write in a history that you knew so well?
Shaun Richman 33:41
That's a good question. I feel like I'm gonna sound like I'm full of it if I say no. I mean, I'm a pretty cynical guy, so, I mean, I think I still sort of, like, I sort of approach it as like, Okay, well, yeah, that's, that's the legend. That's the legend. We told ourselves, like it will What's the truth to it? That I still sort of probed a lot of what what we thought to be true, or what we told ourselves to be true, you know? And I mean, I in general, in terms of broader labor history. I mean, I, I try to do that as well. I mean, because it's more interesting, if you find out something that confounds everybody's expectations, right? Like, one of the things that confounds everybody's expectations, or should if they read it about this book, is that this was a substantial outpost of the Communist Party in the American Federation of Labor. The story that that the existing literature says is that the the CP was influential in about a dozen unions in the CIO and had really nothing in the AFL except for, like, smattering of, you know, some building trades local, a little bit in the service industry in New York, and, of course, the Hollywood writers. But then, when you, when you actually look at the size of this union, when you look at the extent to which the the state of. AFL went to ban them from meetings. The extent to which the central trades and labor council went to not have meetings at all for a decade, for a very important decade, it's like, let's not have meetings. There's really what there to discuss in the year of our Lord, 1937, and interactions that William Green and George Meany had with this union both positive and negative, like not on an anti communist war path, even though they were very much anti anti communist, like that, part of the story doesn't change. But they tolerated this union for a long time. In some respects, they welcomed this independent union of communists in because they had a big organized crime problem, and this was really the only way to deal with it. You step back and it's like, Wait, hold on a second. Actually, the story here is that the Communist Party was very influential in the CIO and in New York, in the AFL, and like, of course, it was in New York, because half the party was in New York. You know, everything happens bigger when it comes to socialism and communism in New York. And why are we surprised by this? Well, because we just told ourselves the story that the AFL is really not that interesting in this era, that all the sexy stuff happens with the CIO, and for the most part, that's true for the most part, the overall story of labor development, the post war labor paradigm, all of that is set in the mass production industries in the CIO, that what you get with the AFL story is this complicated echo of it, right? I mean, it's an industry wide contract. It's, you know, it's, it's multiple, you know, smaller employers. It's not big nationwide companies, not yet, and the unions are pursuing very similar goals. But, yeah, so, you know, I'm the kind of person who goes into this being like, was George meany really that bad of a guy? Let's, you know, I'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt. Let's, let's look at this record. Let's look at what he actually said, and not what people said he said.
Kate Carpenter 36:48
In the last part of our time. I want to talk a little bit more about your own influences as a writer. Are there other people that you like to read?
Shaun Richman 36:56
You know? I mean, growing up, I I probably, a big influence was like the the rude alt weeklies. Remember that whole ecosystem of the Village Voice and, you know, Chicago Reader, you know, I also, I love Jimmy Breslin's columns, wherever he was, he was getting picked up in terms of writing on politics. I was always very impressed by by George Orwell's voice as an essayist. There's a sort of a crisp, this narrow and a preciseness. Michael Harrington, very similarly. More lately, I don't know. I mean, there are writers that, you know, historians that I read. I'm like, That guy's good, right? Like Ahmed White, you know, who wrote a history of the steel workers campaign. More recently, wrote a thing about the government repression of the IWW, they're, they're solid histories. But also, you come over like, that guy can write, like, that's, that's, you know, that's a good narrative. That's, yeah, I started, I started reading fiction again for the first time in an embarrassing, embarrassingly long time. So I've got, I've got a Philip Roth novel sitting on my end table right now, too soon to say that it's any influence on me.
Kate Carpenter 38:09
What's the most influential writing advice you've gotten?
Shaun Richman 38:12
That journalism program at Queens College. And philosophically at Queens College, it was a minor. They were like, we're not going to do a major. There's a craft. But you know, you can learn the craft pretty, pretty quickly, like you should also gain an expertise and take that to your journalism. So you know the inverted pyramid and the importance of your lead and keeping your sentences, you know, short and snappy, those experiences. And, you know, writing for op eds or writing for magazines, like in these times, you know, when you have to fight for 700 words, it makes the 97,000 words that you're writing, it just, it makes you sort of go for high value within there, not, not to sort of like, Oh, I'm going to stretch out like No, no, no. It's, it's every word matters. You're fighting for every word here. Try to be economical and how you write this thing.
Kate Carpenter 39:09
You mentioned at the start of our conversation that you had sort of started working on two different projects to see where you were going, and then had had gone with one. Are you up for talking about what you're working on now?
Shaun Richman 39:20
Yeah, sure, absolutely, I'm doing a history of the dissident communists of the 1930s which, because it has a title, I'm calling Generals Without an Army. And this is not just the Trotskyists, but there was a group called the Lovestonites, who were considered the right wing opposition, where they spent the 1930s essentially loyal to the Soviet Union, and the vision of the Soviet Union critical of the Communist Party and trying to reform things, and to a certain extent, trying to overthrow Joseph Stalin from the Bronx. There's fascinating stuff. There's some times when they're deeply influential, like there was a minor. A strike wave in 1934 that I don't think would have happened if it wasn't for them as outsiders, because the CP was not in a position to spark it, and the traditional trade unions weren't in a position to spark it, but they had this outsider perspective where they played a role in the hotel strike in New York in 1934 they played a role in a garment strike in 33 they played a role in the Teamster strike in Minneapolis. But then there's also just, like, these ridiculous things where they Splinter endlessly over the most ridiculous things, and actually sort of trace the meaning of the meaning of the split and like, where that group wound up, you know, and where these these personalities who most history sort of leave them for, you know, once they split us, like we're not interested in them anymore. It's like, well, I know, but how did he die? And you know, they wind up prey to spies, but also, and it makes sense, if you think about, they wind up being highly attractive as potential spies, because it's like, who would who would suspect this person that broke with the Communist Party of spying for the Soviet Union, so I'm having a lot of fun putting that together.
Kate Carpenter 41:03
Dr Shaun Richman, thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past. Thanks for talking about your writing process with me.
Shaun Richman 41:09
Thanks so much for having me.
Kate Carpenter 41:10
Thanks for listening to this episode of Drafting the Past. Check out drafting the past.com for complete show notes and links to the books we talked about in this episode. You can also sign up for the Drafting the Past newsletter, so you'll always get updates on new episodes and other Drafting the Past news. I'll see you back here again next time where friends don't let friends write boring history.
