Letters

Communists & the Miners

Editor:

Theodore Draper, whose self-esteem has risen with the passing years as he continues to receive the adulation of those whose criterion for scholarship is anti-Communism with footnotes, ridicules my assertion that the Trade Union Unity League was formed, in part, by expulsions of Communists and other left-wing militants inside the AFL. (See “The Communists and the Miners,” Spring 1972.) Scornfully he notes that the last expulsions occurred in 1923. However, there is the slight fact that on March 2, 1927, 37 Communist and leftwing officials of the New York Joint Board of the International Fur Workers’ Union (AFL) and locals 1, 5, 10, and 15, comprising the ...