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What was the mood of labor, in general, towards the war? Could you characterize it? That's a very broad question, I realize, but what kind of stream were you swimming in?

We were swimming against the stream, although all the polls that were published indicated that working people's attitudes were similar to other people's attitude. But it never reflected itself in the labor movement, in the sense that the labor movement was cowtowed by it.

The other thing that I wanted to mention is that probably the most effective thing that I used in getting labor leaders to support the organization was to utilize the alienation of the young people from their parents, who were labor leaders. This worked every place. That's what got Murray Finley in, although Murray had a more advanced position on it. It got Leonard Woodcock in.

What do you mean, exactly?

I got a sense, as I started calling around, that people would say, “Gee whiz, this is good. I'd like to be involved.” Of course, it turned out that they couldn't speak to their kids when they came in on vacation and the end of semester, because, for the most part, their children were involved in the antiwar movement which was sweeping the campuses. Their parents were part of the enemy. So that when there was a handle, a broadly based kind of thing that wasn't taking a head-on attack on George Meany, although it was obviously an anti AFL-CIO position, it was open.

Jimmy Wechsler once did a column on this. Years later, I was out in Ann Arbor at a conference, and I met Woodcock for the first time, and he came up to me and said, “I want to thank you.”

I said, “Why?”

He said, “You know, that sort of kept my family together.” And it happened with a lot of people. That was a very, very important thing.

So that there was a significant current of anti-war--

There was a significant current.

Recall, of course, that the dominant media portrayal of workers and of labor was--

Hard hats!

Hard hats, Peter Brennan, and so on and so forth.