Vol. 73/No. 29      August 3, 2009

When he died at age 84 this past June, Leonard was active in the SWP branch in Houston and working on a project to make the rich history of the party’s work in the maritime industry in the 1940s and 1950s accessible to new generations of fighters.

In 1942, at the age of 18, Leonard went to sea in the merchant marine. Over the next years his eyes would be opened to the realities of imperialist war, colonial exploitation, and racism, as he traveled to countries like Korea, China, South Africa, and the Philippines.

It was the middle of World War II. Like others, Leonard went to a military-run training school to get his seaman’s papers.

He received a lesson in class politics after boarding his first ship. Two members of the union quickly took him to task for wearing the military uniform issued at the training school. They said unionists rejected that uniform because it symbolized the threat of militarization of commercial ships, undermining the union. Leonard never wore the uniform again.  
 
Deadly conditions for seamen
Conditions for seamen at the time were deadly. Thousands—including sailors who belonged to the SWP—died either from wartime torpedo or bomb attacks or when their “liberty ships”—so named to encourage skeptical workers to think the U.S. war effort was in their interests—broke into pieces on the high seas.

Leonard wrote a review of a TV documentary on liberty ships, which appeared in the Aug. 14, 1995, Militant. Some 3,000 of these vessels were produced, primarily to carry war materials. They were “shoddily built, due to horrendous round-the-clock speedup imposed on the labor movement to ‘support the war effort,’” Leonard wrote. “Some of the ships were built in about 10 days; rushed welding encouraged by supervisors as well as poor design resulted in many of them breaking up and sinking in rough weather.”

There were SWP members in several maritime unions, including the National Maritime Union (NMU), Seafarer’s International Union, and Sailors Union of the Pacific. As these party members carried out collective, sustained political work with other workers on the ships, joining in fights to strengthen the unions, more sailors were recruited to the communist movement.

SWP members told coworkers the truth about World War II, that it was a war over capitalist markets that working people should oppose. This was the opposite of what the Communist Party USA, which led the NMU at the time, said about the war.

In his Militant review about the liberty ships, Leonard wrote, “The trade union bureaucracy, the Communist Party, and nearly every other current in the labor movement collaborated with the U.S. government to paint World War II as a ‘war for democracy.’ …

“Despite services rendered to U.S. imperialism in World War II, the Communist Party took major blows in the postwar witch-hunt,” he explained. “In 1950 more than 2,000 seamen, many of them members of the Communist Party—but also members of the Socialist Workers Party and other union militants—lost their seamen’s papers and right to sail at the hands of the U.S. Coast Guard.”

At the 1949 NMU convention, the union bureaucracy, no longer CP-dominated, rammed through a motion aimed at establishing a blacklist to be used against socialists and other militants. It called for a roll-call vote, putting every delegate on record, would they defend the United States in a war with the Soviet Union? SWP members who were delegates at that convention knew that by voting against the motion they were guaranteed to lose their jobs. They stood their ground, voting against.

Leonard joined the SWP in 1951. He was active in many different branches of the SWP during his lifetime, spending nearly three decades building the party in Houston. The Houston branch was chartered in 1970, part of an expansion of the SWP in the South to participate more effectively in the class struggle there.

The city was 45 percent Black and Latino at the time. Houston’s rulers were determined to keep political space for working-class politics closed. The police force was riddled with members of the Ku Klux Klan, a racist and antilabor outfit that used violence against anyone trying to protest the U.S. war in Vietnam or race discrimination at home.

In 1971 the SWP launched the mayoral campaign of Debby Leonard, who was married to Tom. The party faced a host of requirements designed to keep working-class candidates off the ballot—a $1,250 filing fee, five years’ residency in the city, ownership of real estate for two years, and signing a “loyalty oath.” A lawsuit filed by the socialists forced city officials to back off from these onerous restrictions.

A month after the campaign began, a pipe bomb was thrown into the SWP campaign offices, blowing out the windows and the door. This was one of 18 violent attacks carried out in the city in the space of a year and a half for which no one had been arrested, despite widespread suspicions that the Klan was behind them. The SWP campaign refused to be intimidated and demanded the city take action to apprehend the bombers.

The cops’ initial response was to tell the media the socialists had probably bombed themselves to get publicity. Undeterred by such slanders the SWP united various groups and individuals who had been targets of violence to demand the city put a halt to the Klan’s reign of terror.

The socialists waged an aggressive campaign for mayor at the same time. Debby Leonard was even invited by a local TV station to debate the grand dragon of the United Klans of America, Frank Converse, not once but twice—the second time for an hour without commercial interruptions.

The SWP’s refusal to cut and run, combined with growing support from other forces to open up political space in the city, finally produced results. Beginning in late May several Klan members were charged with attacks on the SWP campaign offices and other targets. Converse was indicted for illegal possession of weapons. The KKK attacks subsided.  
 
Steelworkers Fight Back
Tom Leonard and other members of the SWP branch in Houston, along with other workers, were active in 1976 in a fight to win the right to vote on contracts in the United Steelworkers (USWA) union. As part of this effort they backed the campaign of Ed Sadlowski for USWA president. He campaigned for union democracy and militant defense of workers’ interests against the bosses.

The entrenched bureaucracy in the steel union was determined to beat back this challenge. On July 26, Sadlowski supporter Ben Corum was passing out flyers to the shift change at Hughes Tool in Houston when he was shot and narrowly escaped death. Leonard, who was a member of the USWA, joined in efforts to denounce this act.

Sadlowski did not win the election, but rank-and-file steelworkers continued to fight for control of their union. In 1977, the USWA officialdom accepted a contract with the industry. Workers still did not have the right to vote on the pact, nor to even read it. When the Militant obtained a copy of the whole text it printed the document with explanatory notes in the margins. The Militant’s sister-language magazine, Perspectiva Mundial, translated the contract into Spanish and published it as well. Thousands of copies were sold at steel mills and in working-class neighborhoods across the country.  
 
Turn to industry
The experience in the USWA helped lay the basis for what the SWP called the “turn to industry,” a campaign begun in the late 1970s to organize for the big majority of party members to get jobs in industry and be active members of industrial unions. Leonard’s experiences were a valuable contribution in helping to build and lead party industrial fractions on both the local and national levels.

Simultaneous with the turn, the SWP also opened a leadership school where cadre were released from all other assignments so they could study the basic political works of Marx and Engels for six months, removed from the pressure of daily political responsibilities. Leonard attended the 1984 session of the school, setting an example for younger party members of disciplined study.

Another product of the turn was the Maritime Project, an effort to pull together the experiences of the party in the maritime industry and its relevance for socialist workers in the unions today. Leonard collaborated with other party leaders who had belonged to the maritime fraction, such as Ray Sparrow, Oscar Coover, Ed Shaw, and Catarino Garza, to put this material together and assumed substantial responsibility for the project.

In the last years of his life he spoke across the United States and in Australia and New Zealand on lessons from the maritime fraction for workers today. He made the class battles he had been part of come alive for his audiences, not as something that happened in the past but as part of the legacy of the working class as it confronts the challenges of transforming the labor movement today.  
 
 
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