Workers in the Gallo vineyards here have been out on strike since last April, trying to retain their right to be represented by the UFW. Most of Gallo's steady workers live in several labor camps operated by the company. One compound contains individual houses where the conditions range from passable to poor. The others consist of connected row houses. There the conditions are scandalous.
When the strike came, 120 of the 150 regular workers walked out. The Mexican workers responded nearly 100 percent, and more than 75 percent of the Portuguese workers joined the strike as well.
October 25, 1948
The debate between Farrell Dobbs, Presidential candidate
of the Socialist Workers Party and Norman Thomas, Presidential
candidate of the Socialist Party, held in New York, Oct. 17,
was an important event in the 1948 election. It was the only
debate in which two candidates for the highest office in the
country discussed their programs from the same public
platform. The audience was estimated at 1,000.
Dobbs asked Thomas why he had broken his promise to oppose war, solemnly given in the resolution passed by Thomas and his friends at the 1936 Socialist Party convention. He [Thomas] tried to make out a difference between imperialist war and another, trying to justify his support of World War II in contrast to his opposition to World War I. He came to the conclusion that revolution was not likely in "any conceivable time." All we had was a "tremendous choice of evils." And so he decided that the best thing he could do was to give "critical support" to the imperialist war.
Farrell Dobbs ended the debate by expressing his confidence in the revolutionary capacities of the American working class:
"Norman Thomas doesn't believe that the workers have the power to make a revolution and that's why he falters and halts and leans back on the American State Department. He's got no faith in the working class. We HAVE. And that's where we differ fundamentally with the Socialist Party. We have unbounded faith in the mighty American working class and we stake our lives on that future that will be made by the struggle to make a proletarian revolution, overthrow the capitalist system and build a socialist America and go on from there to build a socialist world."