For a large portion of the year, I’ve been collecting evidence on unions in post-WWII to very early 60s American science fiction.¹ To be clear, I am not on the hunt for the best by these authors. This project is about stories that reference unions. I will read all the stories I can by American SF authors on the topic during this timeframe for this project in order to understand how authors responded to the historical moment in which they lived. Exciting!

A Bit of Historical Context

During the Great Depression, there was broad consensus among leftist thinkers that the labor movement would lead to radical change. The Second World War and the economic recovery shattered that consensus.² The unions themselves underwent substantial transformation in this period. American corporate powers and their conservative congressional allies unleashed a “propaganda campaign” against the labor movement.³ This culminated in the contentious passage of the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), which weakened the ability of unions to strike. Over the course of the 1950s, automobile manufacturers and their unions pioneered a new relationship—adopted by other industries—in which companies agreed to grant wage increases, health care, and retirement plans in return for union support of long-term contracts. Increasingly, the political and social transformation of capitalism became secondary to preserving their organizations and maintaining a harmonious relationship with industry.⁴

Before World World II, anti-capitalist intellectuals imagined the labor movement as the American Proletariat which would, at any moment, transform the capitalist system. After WWII, they struggled to grapple with an economic system they had expected to collapse and the lack of interest in socialism within American unions.⁵ C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) argued labor had been co-opted by state power.⁶ Those that continued to support elements of the labor movement, such as Sidney Lens (1912-1986), struggled to rationalize labor’s part in the militarization of Cold War America.⁷ The one-time Trotskyist, Seymour Martin Lipset (1922-2006), argued that while the labor-movement fell short of representing the “class-based aims of a unified working class” it continued to play a roll in “prohibiting antidemocratic mass movements” by offering workers a role in a “mediating institution.”⁸ Most involved in the 60s New Left abandoned labor completely as a force for change and grouped unions as part of the liberal establishment, irrelevant in the construction of a new radicalism.⁹ As in, trade unions “focused on material gains, not fundamental social change.”¹⁰

Science fiction written in the post-WWII world likewise reflected outright criticism, deep ambivalence, and confusion over the role of the labor movement. Philip K. Dick’s “Stand-By” (1963) satirizes unions and the media in a post-scarcity world but tentatively suggests conflict between both might lead to the overthrow of a ruling computer and the eventual reemergence of democracy. Milton Lesser’s “Do It Yourself” (1957), one of only a handful unabashedly positive accounts on unions in the 50s, imagines a post-apocalyptic future in which the American individualist ethos reigns supreme. While banned and publicly ridiculed, a union secretly sends out agents to facilitate the rebuilding project. And in H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire’s “Hunter Patrol” (1959), a ragtag group of disaffected, including a union man (an object of jest), attempt to recruit a soldier from earlier in time to overthrow a dictator. More than a few 50s authors, like Robert Silverberg (whom I’ll feature in a later post) and Clifford D. Simak, read and engaged with contemporary writers on the labor movement.¹¹

Let’s get to the stories!

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2.75/5 (Bad)

Philip K. Dick’s “Stand-By” first appeared in Amazing Stories, ed. Cele Goldsmith (October 1963). You can read it online here.

Unicephalon 40-D, a vast computer, rules humanity. As it calls citizens “comrades,” I assume Dick intends the computer to be read as a manifestation of totalitarian Communism. The computer’s stand-by human president in case it goes offline, Old Gus Schatz, dies. The Government Civil Servants’ Union appoints Max Fischer to take over. Obese with a weak heart, dependent on union funds, glued to his TV set, and without much independent thought, Max attempts to resist the appointment. The union assures him that it’ll be a dull task and an opportunity to take on whatever time-wasting hobby he so desires. Anyway, he doesn’t have a choice. The previous stand-in collected old car magazines (a reference to the glory days of industrial unionism) and the man before him made a massive rubber band ball now housed in the Smithsonian.

Unfortunately for Max there’s an alien invasion that knocks out Unicephalon 40-D. And Max, unelected, must take on the presidency. In predictable fashion, he immediately dismisses his cabinet and advisors, appoints his relatives to positions of power, and acts like a dictator. Only the actions of a news clown (he wears a red wig) named Jim-Jam Briskin, attempts to challenge his authority.

As with Simak’s “Worlds Without End” (1956), “Stand-By” presents unions as a victorious interest group in a larger, dystopian, political game after the fall of democracy. Both works extrapolate from the anti-union sentiment that grew over the course of the 50s. Mainstream news promoted the 1955 merger of the AFL (American Federation of Labor) and CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) as a “danger to the public.”¹² Despite labor’s willingness to work within the existing political system in alliance with the Democrats, business leaders and Republican politicians feared the emergence of a monolithic union. During President Eisenhower’s administration, the McClellan Committee, in a series of sensational televised hearings between 1957 and 1960, heightened the public’s concern with corruption and “antidemocratic” practices in organized labor.¹³ Dick presents Max as the corrupt do-nothing union man who rose from poverty and pretends to have class.

While it’s not entirely clear how the future unfolds in Dick’s vision, it appears the Government Civil Servants’ Union attempted to maintain their influence with a strike after the ascent of Unicephalon 40-D. PKD not only levels a critique at the union man who no longer even needs to work yet collects a check but also the entire system in which everyone seems perfectly okay with a mechanical dictator. The jumbled designators of time-past, “presidency,” “elections,” “car magazines,” etc. all suggest the misguided motives of the labor movement who went along with Unicephalon’s takeover. Dick’s message is clear: unions promote the least worthy individuals and are inherently anti-democratic.

As a story, “Stand-By” is far from Philip K. Dick’s best. It doesn’t have any interesting surreal images, fascinating twists, or memorable turns of phrase. That said, I haven’t read the two sequels–“What’ll We Do with Ragland Park?” (1963) and “Cantata 140” (1963). “Cantata 140” forms the first part of Dick’s The Crack in Space (1964), which I’m almost positive I read before I started my website.

Avoid “Stand-By” unless you’re interested in organized labor in science fiction (me!) or a PKD completist.

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3.5/5 (Good)

Milton Lesser’s “Do It Yourself” first appeared in Science Fiction Quarterly, ed. Robert W. Lowndes (November 1957). You can read it online here.

In a post-apocalyptical future, Long Island City (across from Manhattan) is a wasteland. In the “dregs of the old industrial society,” scavengers “who hadn’t yet been absorbed by the new rural America” attempt to live a fragment of the pre-bomb life (96). In the wreckage of the old U.N. building, now “the East Manhattan Home Workshop center” (96), a union prints DIY plans and sends out agents to assist those trying to make it on their own. Farther out on Long Island, rural farmers attempt to create a new life. However, behind the facade of DIY projects, workshops, and farmers, they still rely on scavenging. The catch? They can’t let their neighbors know. It must look like everyone is self-sufficient! McPeek is one of the union agents and the story follows his interaction with the Crawford farm. The patriarch of the family proclaims “I’ve got some farm now […] Maybe in the spring I’ll even find the time to plant some crops” (101). While the patriarch makes his plans, McPeek actually gets to work making a latrine, constructing a barn for livestock, making storm windows, fixing tractors, and getting the farm ready for planting. He must avoid vigilantes who raid the countryside attempting to root out anything that might symbolize the old order.

Lesser’s “Do It Yourself” works on multiple levels: 1) the unintended consequences of the Cold War rhetoric of American individualism vs. collective action. 2) A more specific satire of the explosion of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) craze in the 1950s. and 3) A pointed acknowledgement of the value of unions in a moment in which there was growing anti-union sentiment (see the Dick review for more details).

The DIY craze reached a “fever pitch” in the 1950s with traveling road shows and conventions, handyman magazines, and front-cover stories in Time Magazine.¹⁴ SF often took this craze to humorous extremes, for example Clifford D. Simak’s robot strike in “How-2” (1954) comes to mind. The implications of Lesser’s take are far more disturbing. Lesser extrapolates that a WWIII leads to a economic depression in which the isolated and depressed attempted to do things for themselves. They interpreted “capital and industry” as artificial contrivances to “keep a man in debt” (102). Thus unions, now banned, secretly attempt to appeal to this individualistic ethos to get people creating new things again (instead of scavenging) on farms instead of factories (102). Unfortunately, the average person is more likely to make grandiose plans than implement them. Lesser argues that America’s fixation on individualism means that even in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, meaningful attempts to assist and mobilize workers will be met with outright violence. The union of idealist handymen, even banned, will continue to fight for tangible benefits for the next generation.

An odd and strangely intriguing post-apocalyptic rumination… This is the first Lesser story I’ve read. Somewhat recommended.

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2/5 (Bad)

H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire’s “Hunter Patrol” first appeared in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, ed. Cele Goldsmith (May 1959). You can read it online here.

A SF time-travel centric thriller with a few moments of debate over politics, “Hunter Patrol” plunges the reader into the media res. The story follows the soldier Benson on a raid, his last patrol until rotation home, deep into Pan-Soviet territory (the Cold War rages hot). He’s yanked from his time 50 years into the future by a strange group of disaffected plotting to overthrow a dictator. It appears that Cold War exhausted all sides (“the Soviet Bloc was broken up”) and left large portion of the US a nuclear wasteland, and St. Louis, now the location of the U.N., emerges as the World Capitol (25). The Guide rules the U.N. as a dictatorship. Through brainwashing, The Guide prevents his citizens from practicing violence (diabolical eugenics related executions excluded). Thus Benson, free of brainwashing and always up for a fight, is recruited to assassinate The Guide. There’s a catch, previous soldiers yanked from the past have all failed. And the nature of their failure isn’t entirely clear. As the narrative shifts dramatically from time to time a far more bizarre picture of sinister future technology and soda drinks (yes!) emerges.¹⁵ You know, time travel makes everything a paradox…. And everyone LOVES soda.

Where are the unions? H. Beam Piper (1904-1964) frequently featured unions in his stories, often with a very negative eye.¹⁶ I’ll write a post about his visions in the future. In “Hunter Patrol,” they are a tertiary concern in a wider satire of Cold War interventionalism and American commercialism. The rebels deliberately represent a variety of contemporary political and moral views–collectively they all desire to overthrow The Guide. One, Carl, is a member of a large “Union of all unions. Every working man in North America, Europe, Australia and South Africa belongs to it” (27). There’s a problem, “The Guide has us all hog-tied” and won’t let them strike preventing “closed-shop contracts to stick” and pay raises (27).¹⁷ Carl’s view, as with others in the story, is played for laughs as he clearly is not a poor worker. In another instance, Carl appears to adhere to a Marxist interpretation of class-struggle in his depiction of the fragmentation of the Soviet Bloc. His view is dismissed by Anthony, “capitalistic dictatorships he means […], let’s not confuse this with any class-struggle stuff” (25).

Regardless of the ambivalence towards organized labor, Piper and McGuire are overtly critical of big business and the sinister methods (brainwashing, chemicals, et.) it might use to acquire profit. As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, during the early Cold War Americans depicted Communism as denying inherent human freedoms of choice and enslaving the mind. After the Korean War, the terror of Communist brainwashing collided with fears of the detrimental effects of consumer culture and advertising. Perhaps Americans were also susceptible to commercial brainwashing deployed to convince the American family to conform and buy the latest products and models. “Hunter Patrol” is the perfect example of this paranoid lens turning inward.¹⁸

I am firmly aware that this is probably one of the worst H. Beam Piper short stories I could have picked up. That’s okay. I’m gathering evidence. If it’s from the 50s or early 60s and talks about unions I’ll read it!

Not recommended unless you’re an H. Beam Piper completist.

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Notes

1. I’ve gathered the titles of all the SF stories I’ve identified about unions and organized labor in footnote 1 here. ↩︎
2. Jeffrey W. Coker’s Confronting American Labor: The New Left Dilemma (2002), 51. ↩︎
3. See Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf’s Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960 (1994). She describes both a local and a national campaign. ↩︎
4. I adapted this paragraph from my recent article “’We Must Start Over Again and Find Some Other Way of Life’: The Role of Organized Labor in the 1940s and ’50s Science Fiction of Clifford D. Simak.” You can read the entire article here. The summary comes from Ch. 19, “Retrenchment, Cold War, and Consolidation, 1946-1955,” of Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin’s Labor in America: A History, 9^th edition (2017), 303-320 ↩︎
5. Coker, 187; See also local level attempts to instill anti-union “American” values in Fones-Wolf’s Selling Free Enterprise; also, Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin describe in Ch. 19 the alliance between the Democratic party and labor and the resulting purge of labor’s radical left wing. ↩︎
6. Coker discusses C. Wright Mills in Ch. 3 and 4 of Confronting American Labor, 65-100. See also Ch. 3 in Daniel Geary’s Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (2009), 74-105 and Ken Mattson’s Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970 (2002), 52-56 for Mills’ evolving views.  ↩︎
7. Coker traces Sidney Lens’ views in Ch. 5 and 6 of Confronting American Labor, 103-139. ↩︎
8. Coker, 51. ↩︎
9. Coker, 58. ↩︎
10. Coker, 186. ↩︎
11. I am confident that Silverberg read articles in The Nation by Harvey Swados (1920-1972) (stay tuned!). I make the argument that Simak either read C. Wright Mills’ The New Men of Power (1948) or a review of it. ↩︎
12. See Dubofsky and McCartin, 314-320. ↩︎
13. Fones-Wolf’s Selling Free Enterprise, 266-270 explores the impact of the McClellan Committee. ↩︎
14. I snagged my information on the craze from this wonderful survey article. It contains a bibliography that I am keen to read; See the August 2nd, 1954 issue. ↩︎
15. A bit of soda-related trivia, Coke Cans first appeared in 1955! Coincidence? Hah. ↩︎
16. In addition to “Hunter Patrol” (1959), I’ve identified the following (I assume there are more): “The Mercenaries” (1950), “Day of the Moron” (1951), “The Null-ABC” (1953), and “The Edge of the Knife” (1957). ↩︎
17. Closed-shops require the hiring of only union members. They were declared illegal under the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 yet, while not written into contracts, were still used by employers who depended on unions for hiring: Source. ↩︎
18. See Matthew W. Dunne’s A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and Postwar American Society (2013) and Charles R. Acland’s Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence (2012). ↩︎

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