Not for Bread Alone: A Memoir

By Moe Foner

Cornell University Press, 2002

One beauty of a memoir is its synthesis of disconnected, parallel histories into a single narrative of an individual.  Moe Foner’s Not for Bread Alone: A Memoir tells multiple stories.  Foner imparts expertise from his forty-year career as a labor public relations specialist, and explores his founding of Bread and Roses, “labor’s foremost arts program.”  Not technically a history, Not for Bread Alone contributes invaluable perspectives on the New York post-war labor scene, on organizing public sector and service employees, and on one strand of the Popular Front.  Not for Bread Alone could even be read as a communist inflected Horatio Alger story.  Foner and his siblings, raised to “move up the ladder,” all did so by championing America’s least powerful.  His older twin brothers, Philip and Jack, became noted authors on the left, and his younger brother Henry went on to head the Furriers Union. 

 Those looking for inspiration in the life of this “gallant, passionate scrapper”—Studs Terkel’s words—will find it. Those seeking an analytic or introspective exploration might be disappointed.  Foner fully chronicles certain campaigns, for example 1199’s early forays into the hospital industry.  More often he sketches the outlines of activities, sacrificing a deeper examination of his convictions and the unlikely places they took him.  Foner’s 991-page oral history is recommended for greater detail, but in this book former 1199 News editor Dan North has captured Foner’s voice and essential narrative.[1]

Foner shows how ethnic culture, commercial entertainment, and mass culture shaped his early life, and once digested, fed his activism.  He jests that the Brooklyn neighborhood where he was raised in the 1910s and 1920s was so Jewish that outsiders were feared to have “horns.”  Foner’s father attended an Eastern European verein, his grandfather read the Yiddish Forward.  Mom switched on the radio for opera and the “Goldbergs.”  Foner watched the Dodgers, memorized song-sheet lyrics, and hung out at Coney Island.  Foner broke this youthful “cocoon” when his brothers launched him into the worlds of Jewish entertainment and the communist left.  Foner helped amuse “Jewish New York” in the Catskills as tenor sax in his brothers’ swing band. By twenty, Foner had performed with Leadbelly, Zero Mostel, and Louis Prima; and as social director of the Arrowhead Lodge, he picked up the networking skills so central to his cultural activism.  In the political ferment of the 1930s Foner joined the Young Communist League with “the smartest and the best people.”  New York City’s 1940 Rapp-Coudert hearings, a “local warm-up” of McCarthy’s HUAC, resulted in the firing of all three brothers from City College.  With aplomb, they renamed their band “Suspended Swing.”

A Catskills connection got Foner his first union job, he then moved to District 65 United Wholesale and Warehouse Workers Union.  There he “absorbed” from its president, the “organizational genius” Arthur Osman, how to integrate cultural programming such as a penthouse nightclub or children’s sing-alongs into a perpetual organizing machine.  When Osman forced Foner out over signing of the Taft-Hartley non-communist affidavits, Leon Davis, 1199 Retail Drug Employees Union’s president, nabbed him as publicist. 

Foner is the only labor publicist to have won the American Public Relations Association’s Silver Anvil award.  He deserved it, following many of the field’s tenets as articulated by PR pioneer, Edward Bernays.   Foner won the award for his PR tactics in 1199’s first hospital campaign at Bronx’s Montefiore in 1958.   He excelled at developing catch phrases that crystallized the union’s struggle, such as the city’s “forgotten men and women,” which moved New Yorkers to empathize with Montefiore workers.  Foner also persuaded key “opinion molders,” Bernays’s phrase, to come out in the workers’ favor. Foner put the heat on hospital trustees by getting community newspapers El Diario and Amsterdam News to embrace the workers’ struggle as la crusada.   National opinion molders such as Eleanor Roosevelt and the New York Times editorial staff joined them in more modulated tones.  In the union’s 1959 multi-hospital campaign, he drew in union leader A. Philip Randolph, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin.

Foner rarely controlled events but he managed strikes to the union’s advantage, echoing Bernays’s call for “engineers of consent” to “create news.”  1199’s first national campaign, run in conjunction with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was in Charleston, South Carolina.  Foner made effective use of Ralph Abernathy’s jail-house “milk and smuggled gin” hunger strike, and the managers’ intransigent racism which included awarding workers time off—on Robert E. Lee’s birthday. Celebrity support garnered Foner press attention in metropolitan dailies nationwide.  Charleston became a tinderbox, with a boycott of main street businesses, marches, curfews, mass arrests, and the National Guard. The union capitalized on this turmoil to demand local and federal government intervention.

Not all these drives succeeded.  In Charleston workers got managerial concessions but no union.  Foner however, believes that “every hospital administrator and trustee in the country had seen the marchers in Charleston night after night on their television screens.” Managers were more apt to capitulate when workers organized new 1199s.  Foner surely helped 1199 grow from some five thousand, mostly Jewish pharmacy employees to a 200,000 member organization of mostly black and Latina women, hospital and home care workers.  

Foner collapses his last years at 1199 into a discussion of the “busted stradivarius” that 1199 became after Leon Davis stepped down in 1981.  Riven by the “bitter elements of racism, sexism, red baiting, violence and corruption,” 1199 split into two: a newly chartered national and the local under RWDSU’s umbrella.  Foner doesn’t probe too deeply into what went wrong, but does give an inside account of the campaign to wrest control of 1199 from Davis’s hand-picked successor, former dietary clerk Doris Turner.   1199, a beacon of progressive unionism, could not fully embody its ideals, even internally.  It generated unusual levels of member involvement, but little independence.  The union’s vaunted internal democracy depended on a delegate system that impeded discussion by bringing too many members together.  Davis’s centralized control was deeply flawed from the perspective of long-term stability.   This centralization was at odds with the union’s commitments to equity, for it left women, African-Americans, and Latinos with little decision-making power. [2]      

 Foner’s reticence on these complexities points to a frustration with Not for Bread Alone.  He cautions that his is a memoir of “what I did and what I saw,” but one is left wishing Foner shared more of what he thought of what he did and saw.   What was the internal process by which he and his cohorts dedicated their lives to working people, became enchanted by the party, and then disenchanted?   How did the Cold War constrict the paths they took?  What was it like to work so closely with America’s foremost civil rights leaders, Washington’s elite, or Hollywood celebrities?  These questions concern racism, social mobility, oppositional politics, state repression, and an image-driven mass culture, and they lie at the heart of the twentieth century’s contradictory history.  Foner’s life is interesting because he engaged intimately with these questions, but his circumspection flattens the narrative’s potential richness.

Perhaps Foner’s biggest PR accomplishment was wedding culture with unionism by founding Bread and Roses in 1978.  “Being known as the Bread and Roses union is so powerful, so sweet and non-threatening,” that it enhanced 1199’s public image, said Foner.  The organization’s name evokes the 1912 Lawrence strike where immigrant women carried a banner demanding bread, but roses too. “Roses” suggests culture in some undifferentiated sense,  matching Foner’s instrumental and aspirational conceptions of cultural activism.  He embraced the Popular Front notion of culture as “a weapon…to build a better world.”[3]  Simultaneously, Foner was “determined to show…we could give our workers the best culture has to offer” harking back to socialist visions of “high culture.”   “The best culture has to offer” came with a “middle-brow” or celebrity twist.  Seeing Harry Belafonte at Lincoln Center, or having Jane Fonda, or long-time Bread and Roses champions Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee perform for members at union headquarters, grants workers cultural capital otherwise denied them.  It also ties workers more tightly to their union.  Bread and Roses has also involved members as cultural producers, but Foner claimed not to want to “settle for another amateur night.” Perhaps as a consequence, he tells us less about these activities.

It’s worth considering how Foner, arguably one of labor’s most important cultural activists, made culture work.  In the “Images of Labor” series Foner realized two of his pragmatic suggestions to cultural activists—get the best and stay out of their way.  Among the recognized artists he involved: Jacob Lawrence, known for the colorful, geometric figures who people his Great Migration series; Alice Neel, who limns her sitters’ inner lives in bold, graphic portraits; Sue Coe, a “visual journalist” whose dark, violent canvases and etchings grapple with AIDS, war, and the meat industry; and mixed-media artist May Stevens who criticizes authority by evoking memory and loss.  Each artist had strong political commitments.  Lawrence treated the African-American experience; Neel had Communist Party connections, and painted labor figures such as Mike Gold but also celebrities like Andy Warhol.  Stevens’s work is grounded in feminism, while Coe has been most recently dedicated to animal rights.  Each artist visually interpreted a quote from a labor martyr, activist or American cultural figure.  Sojourner Truth’s “and ain’t I a woman” joins a 1937 sit-downer who realized his consciousness drives the machine, while Mark Twain celebrates “they that make the bread that the soft handed and idle eat.”  

 Foner pulled these artists and their audiences into a hundred-year conversation about labor and its concerns.  He then expanded the audience: half a million people saw the exhibition, eighty thousand bought a book, and sixty-five thousand poster sets were sold.  Foner fused high art with mass production; he recuperated workers’ history to imagine a new community of labor solidarity that spoke to workers and the broader public. Ironically, a Container Corporation of America ad campaign that joined its corporate logo to an artwork and the appropriated words of public figures like Thomas Jefferson inspired Foner.  When corporations assemble these free floating signifiers it’s good business. Think Container Corporation, think democracy.  Foner believed labor could do the same.     

Not all projects were so grand, but at its best, Bread and Roses’s programming confounds the rigid analytic frameworks employed by analysts of unions, workers, and culture.  Social critics often imagine a labor’s “top 40” that fits preconceived notions of the ideologically correct: the muscled arm with hammer of the 19^th century, or union theatre such as “Pins and Needles.” This nostalgic elegy calls on the same cast of characters who become ever more dessicated and brittle over time.[4]   Or, we see a monolithic, mass culture that saturates workers lives: McDonalds for lunch, Walmart on the weekends, evenings parked in front of the TV.  This focus blinds us to the persistence of alternative cultures that workers engage in: whether it is chainsaw carving, low-riding, religion, or ethnic and associational life.  A more recent trend is finding resistance and opposition in mass culture and other cultural forms that involve workers.  This conceptualization breaks the narrowness of earlier frameworks, but tends to be overly celebratory.  Foner certainly took advantage of early labor icons, wasn’t too interested in workers’ creativity, and did not doubt the influence of mass culture.  But with Bread and Roses he showed how a bit of tinkering could renew labor’s cultural past, enhance workers loyalty to the union, even alter their relationship to the culture surrounding them.

In the interviews that formed the basis of Not For Bread Alone, Foner resisted being pinned down on any grand conceptualization of culture for or by workers.  This is in keeping with his strengths. Like all great PR specialists and organizers, Foner brought the bodies in.  Foner’s lesson isn’t whether Bread and Roses is possible in another context, (he thought perhaps not) or whether workers will listen to an oppositional message, or how to tug workers from the New York Post or “Survivor.”  Rather Foner proved that an alternative labor culture doesn’t spring up.  It can be invented however, with organization and openness to a variety of methods.  

I only met Moe Foner once, months before he died.  What he was most interested in doing that day was publicizing his almost completed memoir.  This meant getting on the phone for prospective cover blurbs and sales commitments.   Foner said a good publicist had to be a “nudge,” and that he would be until the very end.