I would like to carry that point a little further at this time.
While you were a member of the Communist Party were you acquainted with an organization known as the Trade Union Unity League?
Mr. Dennett. I was.
Mr. Tavenner. Will you tell the committee, please, briefly, what that organization was?
Mr. Dennett. Well, it was an effort on the part of the Communist leadership in this country to bring about the organization of unorganized workers. It had the idea that they should be organized in industrial unions. This is because its leader was William Z. Foster, and William Z. Foster had been an active leader in A. F. of L. unions. As a matter of fact, he was the leader of the great steel strike of 1919, and in the course of that strike he drew certain conclusions about the way it was conducted, namely, that it was next to impossible for the workers to obtain the kind of solidarity they needed to win when they were divided into so many different craft organizations.
So it was Foster who gave the greatest attention to this question of getting the maximum strength through organization of the workers in unions. And the Trade Union Unity League was an effort to organize these unorganized workers.
Now to the best of my knowledge some of the greatest success of the Trade Union Unity League occurred right here in the Northwest.
When I came into the district in 1932 there was a comparatively young fellow by the name of James Murphy who was the head of the Trade Union Unity League here. He was a lumberworker. He was a bona fide worker. He knew the language, he knew the habits, and he was able to get around the same as any “bindle stiff.”
For fear some might not understand the use of the term, in the old days loggers had to carry their own blankets when they went from place to place. And the way they carried them caused them to be called bindle stiffs.
These fellows were very adaptable. They were very skillful at traveling under adverse conditions, overcoming all kinds of physical difficulties. The stories of Paul Bunyon are not something out of the figment of the imagination entirely; they grew out of the huge efforts that the Northwest lumberworkers had to make in order to live.