[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

BILL FINGER:

From your accent, you obviously didn't grow up in Charlotte or around here. How did you first become interested in the labor movement? Did that go back into your early years, your childhood?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, my parents were missionaries in Egypt and I came back to the United States to go to school, in the last year of high school. And originally, I was interested in the New Deal. At the end of college, I got an internship program in Washington. And I thought that would be very stimulating, but it turned out to be removed from people and so I stopped that and I got interested in the consumer cooperative movement for a couple of years.

BILL FINGER:

What year did you come back from Egypt?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

It would have been back in 1936 and I got out of college 1941.

BILL FINGER:

Did you go to Antioch College?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I went to a little church college, Monmouth College out in Monmouth, Illinois and they would give, you know, scholarships for missionary, church-related people.

BILL FINGER:

How about the years before that, were you in Egypt?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes.

BILL FINGER:

Then you went to an American school?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

They were little schools run for, basically for the children of the mission group out there. They were very small, three people in my high school class for example. But I guess it would be a good teaching ratio, since many high schools graduate 500 yearly. We three obviously received much individual attention.

BILL FINGER:

That's hard to imagine. I was in India for one year.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Were you?

BILL FINGER:

In the Peace Corps, and that's the closest I can imagine. So, you spent your first seventeen years in Egypt?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, with the exception of sabbatical leaves. They would bring the family back once every seven years. So, '36 was my third trip to the States. And so at any rate, the internship thing… I worked in the Department of Agriculture, it was a Rockefeller financed early program to feed people into public administration and it was called the National Institute of Public Affairs. It was fun, you know, the other people were interesting people, they came from a wide range of schools and backgrounds. And we had tuition scholarships at American U. unknown we worked in whatever agency we wanted to. I picked the Office of Land Use Coordination in the Department of Agriculture, which happened to be headed at that point by Henry Wallace as the Secretary and this office was headed by Milton Eisenhower.

BILL FINGER:

You worked under Milton Eisenhower.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Milton Eisenhower. [Laughter]

BILL FINGER:

As an intern.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Very far down. [Laughter]

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I didn't cause many waves in the office. [Laughter] So, at any rate, I stopped all that and I got into this consumer cooperative thing along with a period of studying at the University of Pennsylvania, in the Wharton School. And I did some graduate work at the Wharton School, completing all course work for the M.A., but not the dissertation. I started to get involved in a study of relationship of Consumer Coops and the organized labor movement, which is a natural if you look at the history of cooperatives in Europe. You know, they are actively sponsored by the labor movement over there. And then I got involved in the Philadelphia area in some shop stewards classes.

BILL FINGER:

This was through Wharton?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, they are not too much interested in shop stewards' education. This was through a man, a very fine man called Dr. Benjamin Barkas. And he at that point, I guess, probably was the only labor education man in the United States on the faculty of a city school system. He worked for the Philadelphia public school system and this would have been in 1941 and '42, along in that period of time. So, I took a course of his at Temple University in labor education and then he brought me into teaching shop stewards' classes, things like that. And finally, I decided that labor education was a good operation and the labor movement began appealing to me. Eventually I went to the director of the Steel Workers Union in Philadelphia, Mickey Harris.

BILL FINGER:

This is '40, '42.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, this is maybe by '44-'45, I guess. And I indicated that I wanted to go to work for a union and I thought that the best way of doing that was to be a rank and file member for awhile. So, he suggested that I try to get a job with the SKF, which is a Swedish owned ball-bearing

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company in Philadelphia and I went to work there, I guess in 1945 for about a year. I found out that people in that local didn't pay any attention to me at all. I could teach shop stewards classes …

BILL FINGER:

You had taught shop stewards' classes before …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Before I went to work there.

BILL FINGER:

For a year, went through this Mr. Barkas? You kind of helped him out?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I was doing this part-time while I was going to school at Wharton. [text deleted]

So, at any rate, after I got through with that is when I went to work in the steel plant and I was looking around after a year for a job, a job in the labor movement. I couldn't get on with the Steel Workers Union, I was away down the hierarchy in that. And I did get an offer for a job with Textiles, from Larry Rogan. He at that time was our education director and it was for a job that he sponsored in our union

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called a combination education-publicity guy with a joint board, which is a collection of local unions in an area and this was with two joint boards up in Maine. And so, I …

BILL FINGER:

You hadn't had any background in Maine, though, that was just where there was a job.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, that was it and this was my first full time thing in the labor movement. Although, I had belonged to the Packing House Workers organizing committee one summer in Chicago when I worked at Swift for a few months. And then I had belonged to the Steel Workers and then I went to work for Textiles. So, in March of '48, I went up to Lewiston, Maine and I was unknown to divide my time between these two joint boards, one in Lewiston and one in Biddeford, Saco, which is the southern area of Maine.

BILL FINGER:

Was that a big decision to go with labor as a part of the staff, you had kind of dabbled with teaching the shop stewards and working in the plant there in Philadelphia? It sounds like you just needed a job and it sounds like you were very aggressive, going with the Steel Workers and …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, I really wanted to … that had become a precise objective, to become a part of the labor movement. And I identified, there were a lot of things going on at that point in the labor movement. It was an exciting period of time… Reuther was just moving up to become the president of the UAW …

BILL FINGER:

Had you met Union people through any of these other contacts, had they turned you on personally or reading …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

In Philadelphia, which has an active and pretty sophisticated labor

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community, you know, we belonged to the Philadelphia CIO, the UAW was part of it, the Steel Workers, Textile had an aggressive joint board in the Philadelphia area, and …

BILL FINGER:

People that were in all kinds of things.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes. Political action, for example used to be called PAC, the Political Action Committee in CIO days. I can remember the headlines in the Philadelphia Inquirer in, I guess the '46 Congressional elections indicating that PAC and CIO were Communist inspired, talking about things like that. Jim Carey, you know, was from the Philadelphia area. And we felt part of the mainstream of the labor movement at that time. So, I was interested in getting into the labor union movement.

BILL FINGER:

The CIO sort of attracted you, not particularly textiles.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes.

BILL FINGER:

It wasn't Emil Rieve …, it wasn't Textile people?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Not as such. The CIO was important. I can remember an article in, believe it or not, in The Saturday Evening Post that came out while I was working in the Steel Workers plant, the SKF, I believe at that time, about the southern drive.

BILL FINGER:

Was that Operation Dixie?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

That's right. And it was exciting.

BILL FINGER:

But they sent you way off to the boondocks instead of to … or is that the case?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Most Textiles are located in the outer areas in the country, smaller towns.

BILL FINGER:

I didn't mean Biddeford, but Maine seems like a long way away.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah. Well, you know, travelling didn't bother me, I was used to that.

BILL FINGER:

Were Textiles thriving in Maine in 1948?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, it was an interesting relationship in Maine. Maine was sort of the equivalent to the South of New England. The wage scales in the big cotton and rayon plants …there was a New England wage scale and then below that was the Maine wage scale and then below that in 1948 was a southern wage scale. Of course, that is no longer true. And Maine was probably the least organized area. There were a lot of unorganized textile plants and there still are a substantial number. I would estimate that at least 40% of the textile plants in New England are still unorganized, although it is a very small total number compared to what it was in 1948.

BILL FINGER:

So, when you went up to Biddeford, were you an organizer? With these two local boards, what were your duties?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I had an interesting job. It was called education and publicity. You did everything, you know, you did anything that came along. Rogan used to say, "The first thing that you learn as an education guy is how to sweep out the hall before the meeting." And that was pretty true. You did whatever needed to be done that was helpful.

BILL FINGER:

But there were organizers working in that area besides yourself?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes. There was a fairly large and a strong structure. Each of these joint boards, at that point had about five thousand members. So, they were important and they bargained with some big companies. Bates Manufacturing was the biggest employer up there. That was mostly in the Lewiston joint board. And then in the Biddeford-Saco joint board, there

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was a very large machine shop, textile machinery company called Saco-Lowell which was organized by TWUA, and then a big Pepperell plant and then another Bates plant.

BILL FINGER:

But you yourself weren't organizing.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, but these joint boards had, their structure was that they had a manager of each joint board and then they had two business agents in each joint board paid by the joint board. The managers were on the international union payroll. The business agents were hired by the manager and locally paid. A couple of office girls in each one, and then I was the floater, 50-50. And the joint boards each paid half of my salary, which was a big item, sixty dollars a week.

BILL FINGER:

Now, you started in 1948?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes.

BILL FINGER:

Do you remember the Wallace campaign?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes. The Progressive Party, I guess. I remember a little bit you know, in terms of activity of the state itself. Obviously the CIO wasn't buying that project, we weren't. And I can remember a sound truck for Harry Truman. I think the statement was that "If sixty million people vote today, you can be sure that Harry Truman will be re-elected, because he is the choice of a broad group of the working people. If we get a small vote, it may be somebody you don't like." Well, both these areas were at that point, Democratic islands in Maine. The people who worked in the plants were 90% Catholic, French Canadian. Many of them first generation, many of them not citizens. And they would buy Harry Truman, they would buy anybody on the Democratic ticket. And of course, a few years after that, Maine tipped over from being a Republican state and

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got into the Democratic column and basically stayed that way.

BILL FINGER:

So, were you active politically out of your personal interest or because the union was very active, the CIO was very active?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, I had worked in politics in Philadelphia before I was in the unions. My wife and I were active on our precinct committee, where we lived in central Philadelphia. And the first big project I had with Textiles in Maine involved a political project. They had two anti-labor bills on a referendum ballot and I think they were voted on in the general election or possibly in the primary, which in Maine, at that point, I think came in September. They were the Tabb and the Barlowe bills. They would have prohibited union shop agreements. And we really beat the bushes on those and we had an awful lot of fun. We set up a Save Maine Labor Committee, which had no representatives of organized labor on it. It consisted of the Catholic bishop and the head of the Maine Education Association, the head of the Maine Council of Churches, a businessman, couple of businessmen, a professor or two…

BILL FINGER:

A coalition.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes.

BILL FINGER:

Did you organize that?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes, we worked with that. It was mostly an advertising, you know, public statement type of committee. We put out a lot of literature in their name, with their authorization obviously. And those bills were beaten very badly. We got a statement from Margaret Chase Smith. It was a good operation.

BILL FINGER:

You could use those big names and that group. You didn't have to hold rallies and large petitions and …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, we had a lot of activity, in the sense that you know, we had registration drives, we had a total apparatus, I would say. Or as much as

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a union can. And I thought that it worked out well. And the United States Senators … I know that we had Margaret Chase Smith issue a statement saying that she didn't see the need for this in the state of Maine.

BILL FINGER:

How long did you work in Maine?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I worked there until 1952, for four years. But the second half of that four years, I changed from a local payroll to the national union payroll and started doing political action work in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. From '51 on.

BILL FINGER:

So, you were working directly under Larry Rogan then, or was George Murphy in education?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, Larry was the national education, our education director and we had, you know, staff conferences and so on. This was the year that the Textile Workers Union had its top membership figure.

BILL FINGER:

195- …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

1948. And it hit a peak of something like 325,000 dues payers that year. Since then, it has curtailed very, very sharply. So has the industry, but our membership went down faster because it was more concentrated in the North. But at any rate, we had quite a team on board the union. Rogan, who later became the AFL-CIO education director, was our education director. He had come over from the hosiery union before it merged with TWUA and then separated again. Sol Barkin was the research director for TWUA and he was a very capable guy. Al Barkan was …

BILL FINGER:

The same Al Barkan?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

The same Al Barkan, was our political action director.

BILL FINGER:

He was out of Textiles?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah. And Ken Fiester, who for many years was active in the AFL-CIO and IUD publications division. He was our editor for Textile Labor. We had quite an extremely capable assortment of staff people, working for Emil Rieve, basically.

BILL FINGER:

Were things still as exciting by '52 as they were when you were first stimulated?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Between '50 and '52, the union became distracted by a very severe internal fight, which arose between the executive vice-president of the union, George Baldanzi, and Emil Rieve.

BILL FINGER:

He ran against him in …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

It had started at the '50 convention in Boston and it culminated in the '52 convention in Cleveland, with Baldanzi running a complete slate against Rieve. And being defeated. And the next thing that happened immediately after the Cleveland convention, which was in May of '52, was that a number of the locals that were pro-George Baldanzi, a small number compared to his support at the convention but still a significant number, tried to leave TWUA and go back into the United Textile Workers AFL with George and a lot of staff people that had supported him. And that's how I got South.

BILL FINGER:

How did that happen?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Somebody called me up and said, "Go to Greensboro, North Carolina." And I went.

BILL FINGER:

Were you caught in that dispute?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I wasn't a Baldanzi supporter. He had very little support in New England. He had a lot of support in the South, at least in the beginning. And they wanted me to come down South because there wasn't any TWUA staff

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left in North Carolina. Everybody on the TWUA, N. C. staff—ten out of eleven, changed sides after the Cleveland convention.

BILL FINGER:

Let me ask you that. One of the things that I've read says that the series of strikes in North Carolina and Virginia, mostly southern in 1951 …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes.

BILL FINGER:

About 40,000 people I think, were out at one time.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes.

BILL FINGER:

And It seems to be a recoup of Operation Dixie. This source blamed a number of people and says that for one thing, the union got distracted and that Emil Rieve had mixed up and proposed this strike for his political survival.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I think that was true of both groups. It was a very unfortunate thing. The decision was made on striking not only by the staff people from here, but there was a national conference I think, in Washington on … which would amount to a wage conference by managers, local joint board managers and International Union representatives charged with bargaining situations. To determine what to do. This included people from New England and the Mid-Atlantic. And one of the questions was, what to do. Because the employers in the North had given something like 10¢ and the employers in the South would only offer 2¢. And I think both sides sort of got caught up in their own political rhetoric and said, "Well, the thing to do is to be very militant and take the industry on." And we took them on and it was not a good operation in many, many locations.

BILL FINGER:

You say that the decision was taken while the first ones were …it wasn't thought out?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes. It's very hard to have a political fight and run a union responsibly at the same time. And the representation at the decision making level, my impression is, I wasn't involved in any of this, was very evenly divided and probably in the South, Baldanzi, who was very popular and spent a lot of time down here, would have had the emotional and political support of the big groups.

BILL FINGER:

Who are some people that are still around who would know … who would have been, who would be frank about what happened between Baldanzi and Rieve in this area? Would Jimmy Blackwell?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Jimmy Blackwell would know about it, if he wanted to get into that.

BILL FINGER:

Was he a Baldanzi person?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, he would have been an administration person, I think. In this area, there are a small number of people left.

BILL FINGER:

Would Julius Fry?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Fry would know about it. That's a period in which he was the director in Alabama and he was pro-administration. I guess that's why he became the director. And he had a lot of, he had some Alabama people who were strongly opposed to the administration. They were pro-Baldanzi. This was immediately after the '52. He would be one guy.

BILL FINGER:

Was Baldanzi considered or is it easier to consider in retrospect, was he considered more conservative or a political label like that?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, Baldanzi was much more of an activist, a showman. He would take a more militant … he used to have a tremendous capacity as an orator. He was probably the best, other than maybe John L., I would say that he was one of the finest orators the American labor movement ever had. And we've got some recordings of Easter messages and things like that.

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You know, on old records, that are really very moving. But he sometimes got carried away with his own oratory. He used an unfortunate phrase in one speech that the newspapers and the companies picked up about "blood running in the streets." That was in support of the southern drive.

BILL FINGER:

Did he have more in his background besides his oratory? Could he put together an organization and make decisions?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes, I would rank him as a capable person. I would say that if he made a mistake, it was to be impatient in not waiting for time to bring him to the top of the union. I think that he would have gotten to the top of the union if he had been more patient.

BILL FINGER:

Did you have that perception at the time?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No. I was a very junior guy and this was the first real look at the structure of a union and I found it … you know, I was making very poor judgements about many things. A real greenhorn. I was having a hard time understanding relations between members and staff.

BILL FINGER:

Much less the …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Much less the politics at a higher level. That was something else.

BILL FINGER:

Well, if you couldn't understand then because you were young, in retrospect, why was it that Baldanzi pushed for … you know, the UTW at that time was getting more and more conservative.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

For the AFL.

BILL FINGER:

I mean for the AFL.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

That was just a move of opportunism. It wasn't …I guess that he felt that he had no place to go.

BILL FINGER:

He lost at Cleveland and that's all he could do?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes. And he was offered, by the way, a job with the CIO in Washington. And he apparently turned that down and the story is, and I think

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it's probably true, that he had gotten some … he or the UTW had gotten a loan. I believe that it was from the Teamsters. I think that it was the Teamsters. I think that the UTW in this process, got a loan of at least $100,000 to help finance some of this operation. Which, you know, involved heavy new expenses for them.

BILL FINGER:

Do you know any of the North Carolina people that … or South Carolina in this area, Virginia, that went with Baldanzi in the You say that ten out of eleven left and then there was a vacum here.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes. Joe Pedigo. Joe Pedigo retired in January. He lives in Charlotte and he went with Baldanzi into the UTW.

BILL FINGER:

Did he come back?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

He came back to TWUA and he has worked very hard and very dilligently for our union for … I don't know, the last how many years? He's probably been back with us maybe fifteen years. He's now retired.

BILL FINGER:

But he lost, he had to start back at the bottom? I mean, was it that kind of …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I don't know whether he did or not. I don't know how … it looked like he did. That's a personal matter, you know, between him and the international union. But it constituted a break in his service, as I guess you would say. As far as we know.

BILL FINGER:

But at any rate, they called you up to come down and take over?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

They called me up and said, "Go to Greensboro." So, I got to Greensboro and in the meantime …

BILL FINGER:

Who was in the state?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Wayne Dernoncourt. Wayne Dernoncourt was in Greensboro.

BILL FINGER:

Was John Wright still around?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, they were non-TWUA people. At any rate, when I got here, it turned out that the Philadelphia joint board had, after some hemming and hawing, decided that they were going to leave TWUA and they wanted me to go back to Philadelphia. So, I did that for one week. And at that point, there was an accommodation worked out between JoeHuetter, the manager in Philadelphia and Rieve, and so then, I came back down to North Carolina.

BILL FINGER:

And what was your position then?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, after some shuffling around, what we were doing was staffing up places where the folks had kind of jumped the fence. And what this involved, in my own situation, I went to Erwin Mills in West Durham, which had been TWUA, and Erwin Mills in Erwin which was organized by, was TWUA. Both those locals as well as Cooloomee, which was the third Erwin mill, they were all three trying to go UTW. So, we were bringing in staff from the North and staff from other places in the South that were still with the administration and I ended up in charge of the situation at Erwin, North Carolina. I spent about a month and a half, maybe, in Durham at the old hotel that is torn down now.

BILL FINGER:

You were just trying to rebuild the organizational structure?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes. We were doing a very complicated thing, because we were trying to replace… first of all, all these locals took the money out of the bank and put it in someplace that they thought would be safe. When they did that, the international union put them all under an administrator, which in effect, suspended activity, like imposing martial law. It suspended everybody and it left only the administrator in charge of internal affairs and with the ultimate responsibility for a bargaining relationship. That

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was the tricky part, with the companies involved. Now, the companies …

BILL FINGER:

This was all internal kinds of … constitutional things …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes.

BILL FINGER:

None of this was NLRB or anything like that?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Not at that point. It got there. But this was all following the internal procedures set out in the constitution. You know, dual unionism isn't encouraged in any labor organization or in any international. So, at any rate, I got to be the administrator in Erwin. Mostly because neither of the other two staff guys, both of whom were older and had more service, wanted that responsibility. And what we found down there, happily, was a group of people in the local who thought what the incumbents had done was absolutely wrong and they didn't want any part of the United Textile Workers. And the big argument all over the South was, "Lord, we don't want to get into that Union and have happen to us what they did to our mothers and fathers in 1934."

BILL FINGER:

You heard that a lot?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Oh yeah. About that they had promised in the '34 strike that the food would come and the food never came.

BILL FINGER:

Where did you hear that stuff?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

In Erwin.

BILL FINGER:

You heard it in Erwin?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

In Erwin, yeah, sure.

BILL FINGER:

Do you remember the names of people?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, I don't know whether all of these folks … I was trying to think of the name of an old gentlemen named Hawley. Yeah, his name was Nate Hawley in the cardroom. He may be dead now. He was elderly at that

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point. The business agent at Erwin would be a good guy for you to talk to. He was on the Baldanzi side. He's a fine man, Lloyd Byrd. And he could steer you to some people who were on the CIO side, if you wanted that.

BILL FINGER:

He came back to TWUA?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, well, he was in the carpenter shop and he was an active UTW supporter and they elected him business agent. And after going through several business agents for about ten years after '52, he got elected and he's been elected ever since. There is a guy down there named Lacey Dawkins, who was the business agent immediately after the split, I think. I don't know how sharp his recollection is.

BILL FINGER:

So, over in Durham, they remembered the '34 strike?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Oh, God. They remembered it in the organized plants, but they really remember it in the unorganized plants. If you want to hear about '34, you ought to go up to Roanoke Rapids and talk to the old people up there. That's what they've got against the unions. That and Henderson. O.K., so the split resulted in some Labor Board elections and we lost Danville to the UTW. We lost all the Cone plants to the UTW except one that went no union.

BILL FINGER:

You lost these to United?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

The United Textile Workers, that's right. In a series of elections that began in the summer of '52 and went all the way into '53 in some cases, where there were reruns.

BILL FINGER:

How long had you had Cone Mills?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

We started organizing Cone in '41, '42, '43.

BILL FINGER:

You had it in the forties and you lost it to United?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, we sure did. There was a guy named Bruno Rantane, who was the manager in Cone in the forties. And they had an organizing campaign going on in the big White Oak plant in Greensboro.

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

SCOTT HOYMAN:

… those organizers switched and they switched the campaign and they organized White Oak for the UTW. There was a fascinating guy, a really agitational type, called Luke Carroll, from Cedartown, Georgia originally. He's still got some sisters who work in the Goodyear UTW plant in Cedartown. He lives someplace else in Georgia, but he was a terrific agitator. And there was an important guy in the UTW, who was their lawyer, who was on our staff and then went into business for himself. He lives in Greensboro now, he's not too much for the labor movement at this stage in life. His name is Bob Cahoon. And he advised their locals and was very helpful to them. And he advised their locals how to do the thing legally, how to leave legally.

BILL FINGER:

Did Baldanzi get these people to switch just by personal loyalties?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes, he had a tremendous loyalty from these people.

BILL FINGER:

It wasn't a philosophical split?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

There was some political philosophy behind it. They used it at the convention in Cleveland. Now, this was more … maybe not as geniune, but it was important, they used this as an issue: every staff person should get elected by the people that he services. Democracy, that was their word.

BILL FINGER:

Direct Representation, is that what you mean?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I don't think they would have done it, they would have talked it, you know, but I don't think they would have done it. It's like this guy that our black vice-president told me about, who got elected head of the National Black Baptist Conference and he ran on a platform that the presidency should be rotated at every convention, and as soon as he got elected, he stopped the proposal for rotation. And Todd says that he is still there. I don't know, there was that element, and you know, it is always easy in the South to be anti-international. That's a fact, you know,

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"well, they're up in New York." They had some programs like that. They weren't programs that Baldanzi had worked for within TWUA. No, I think they were more politically designed, possibly. But I think that it would be true to say that a lot of the idealistic people, like the education department people, who tend to be idealists anyway, a lot of those guys, Pat Knight, whose daddy had been a doctor in Greensboro, had been on our education staff for a long time and she is with a government agency now out of the country, she was very much pro-Baldanzi. Joe Glazer. He was in the education department under Larry Rogan. Larry told them, "you've got to keep your noses clean." The theory was, and it is a theory that I believe in, that department people have got to be non-political. If they are not non-political, they can no longer perform their own functions. No regional director is going to have a political type education person come in and teach the shop stewards class. The hell with that, you know. If they will concentrate on what their subject is, you know, they can function. If they don't, only the people on the same side as them, wherever they are …

BILL FINGER:

Will be receptive?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Now, that's a little bit different than a Jerry Wurf philosophy, I suppose. But that, basically, you know, was Rogan's philosophy and …

BILL FINGER:

And you learned it from Rogan?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes.

BILL FINGER:

As well as by experience, or mostly from him?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes and no. The theory was that professionals advise and perform their specialities and the line guys, they get to fight. Well, as a result of this, before '52, I made a decision that I was …

BILL FINGER:

That you were going to be a professional?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, I wasn't going to be a professional, I didn't want to be on the education side, I wanted to be in where I could make some decisions

BILL FINGER:

You didn't want to be neutral?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I didn't want to be the odd guy, I wanted to be in the line-up, communication and control and that's what I started doing.

BILL FINGER:

And so Glazer … you didn't quite finish there …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Glazer, I'm sure, was pro-Baldanzi.

BILL FINGER:

But Rogan said that "because you are in the department you should be neutral."?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes, and there was another guy who was with him who was the same way, Harry Gersh. The intellectuals in the union, I guess that's a good way to class them, I think that they were pretty much pro-George. The group that opposed him on the executive council were the conservative New England, northern guys.

BILL FINGER:

They were behind Rieve, huh?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

They weren't behind Rieve. They didn't trust George. There is a lot of background that you can go into, like which part of the union he came out of. He came out of the dyers, and the dyers are a certain ethnic group and they are concentrated in certain states, you know, and the guy who would have replaced George had he lived—and he was a very good guy—he died of a heart attack right after '52, a guy by the name of Mariano Bishop. He was a Portugese-American out of New Bedford. And other than some politicians and people like that, Mariano Bishop, I imagine, could have been one of the most important Portugese people, other than business types.

BILL FINGER:

He would have replaced …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

He ran for executive vice-president. We had three officers and he

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became the executive vice-president in Cleveland and died of a heart attack between then and the next convention.

BILL FINGER:

He would have replaced Baldanzi?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

He did actually replace Baldanzi.

BILL FINGER:

But, you know, no telling how many millions of dollars was spent during '51 to '53 and by the time all the locals were shuffling back and forth a couple of times, the total number of union members was just about the same, I think.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, we lost some membership. We didn't lose much, but there was tremendous damage done and it was done right here, where it hurts the worst, in the South. We lost almost nothing in the North. You can go from the Mason-Dixon line all the way up, I think there are maybe a couple of locals in Wilkesboro that we lost, and that's it. But Dan River had had a crippling strike in 1951 and we lost the checkoff in that '51 strike. They went UTW. UTW never got the checkoff back. They are on strike today, unless they settle this week. The first strike since 1951.

BILL FINGER:

At …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Danville, Virginia. And Cone. Cone left in '52, they came back in '54. The UTW signed contracts without checkoff and we never got the checkoff back out of that company. Erwin Mills, two out of the three Erwin Mills left. The one I was on happened to stay, but Durham left, Cooloomee left. They broke the chain up. Erwin stayed CIO, the others went AEL. Rockingham …

BILL FINGER:

Did you lose the checkoff there?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

We didn't. In Erwin Mills, We were bargaining with DeVyver, by the way. He was

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the vice-president in charge of industrial relations. Rockingham, Aleo Manufacturing left and they destroyed the union. The UTW couldn't keep it. There was a whole joint board, it wasn't a big joint board, a guy by the name of Joel Leighton, I think that was his name, I don't know these people well. He ran that joint board. Now, other than those …

BILL FINGER:

You finally got Dan River back, is that right?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, we never tried really, once the checkoff was gone. Well, we did try, I'm sure we tried, but they were in bad trouble.

BILL FINGER:

But there wasn't enough energy for the unorganized.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

That's the problem. The first three or four years that I worked in the South, I worked entirely on either holding these locals, getting them back where they belonged, or trying to repair the damage. I came down in '52 and I decided to stay down here. In '54, I moved into Greensboro unknown In '54, that's when Cone came back. They wanted to bring it back, Luke Carroll and one of the other guys over there, because they knew that the UTW couldn't look after the Cone workers they weren't doing any good. Our staff that went over was destroyed, you know, the UTW didn't want them. That was the last thing that they wanted, was to have Baldanzi and about twenty hot CIO staff guys in a little tiny union. They had them so compartmentalized, you know, and they wouldn't pay them. The regular UTW guys were getting paid every week, our guys they started off every other week. It was, you know.

BILL FINGER:

So, they came back.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

In Cone, they came back. It was the only place that I can think of off hand that they came back. North Carolina and Danville, Virginia are about the only places we lost. Alabama, we kept everything, South Carolina the same. It's peculiar. And part of

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of the reason N. C. locals left is a tribute—although he might regret it now—part of it is a tribute to the director that we had in North Carolina, he was a very effective guy, a guy named Lou Conn. He was the state director for us, and he went with George. And he's got two brothers, by the way, connected with the labor movement. One, Harry Conn, runs, I think that it is called Labor Press Associates. It's sort of a wire service for the labor press in Washington. And there is another Conn who might be with something related to journalism, maybe the government, the information service or something like that. But Lou Conn ended up back in Louisville, Kentucky …

BILL FINGER:

You said that it was because of him that everyone went with Baldanzi?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes.

BILL FINGER:

He had that kind of …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

He was an effective, appealing personality. He wasn't a strong arm guy, you know, he was a guy who would appeal to somebody, you know, if there was a lady who was an officer of a local, he would call her on the phone, a very sympathetic type.

BILL FINGER:

So, were you a business agent from '54 to '60?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, I guess you would call that, I would call that organizing, you know, in the elections, and then when we won the elections, then I started doing service work. And I didn't know anything about service work and Julius Fry broke me in. After the split, Fry came up from Alabama to North Carolina, he was going to replace part of the vacuum. And he did, he settled in Greensboro and he was servicing these locals and I was helping in Erwin and he was breaking me in on some of these locals. That went from all of '53 and then in mid-'54, we started the Cone project. I moved to

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Greensboro, Larry Rogan was in charge. I was sort of the second guy on the spot. There was an old guy named Kelly, and that took about six or seven months and …

BILL FINGER:

And they came back?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes, they all voted to come back. It was a fairly big operation. We had six plants voting on the same day, involving about four or five thousand people at that time. In three plants in Greensboro and they were scattered around in four other small towns in a radius of fifty miles. O.K., and then I worked there on Cone and it was very bad. I was so young that I didn't know how bad it was. But finally, I started to realize that it was pretty bad and it was very depressing and …

BILL FINGER:

Why was that?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

We couldn't get contracts with checkoffs. The high point in dues payments was something like 650 …

BILL FINGER:

Was that out of three thousand?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Out of five, five thousand people. And we went for over a year, I think it was, before we signed the first contract. It's a hell of a decision to sign a contract without a checkoff. We had the general secretary treasurer of the union down, John Chupka. And he was really the number one guy on the strategy. We couldn't break the company and we couldn't strike them.

BILL FINGER:

Because you didn't have strength?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

That's right. In the '51 strike, the Cone workers were terribly weak. And that wasn't the fault of the politics, it was just an inadequate non-militant response.

BILL FINGER:

Did they remember '34 too, what was the reason for …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I don't know that. They might have even been skipped in '34. You know, some of these places were.

BILL FINGER:

You never got a feeling as to why it was different in Greensboro from Durham or Rockingham or these other places?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

There were a lot of places that were bad in '51. Dan River was very bad and we had more capable staff there. We had quite a crew up there at Danville. The Proximity Plant, which is a weaving plant in the middle of Greensboro (White Oak wasn't organized in '51) but that plant, I understand, had 30 or 40% scabs within a week or two after the strike started. The same thing happened, I think, in Gibsonville, North Carolina. I don't know about Haw River. And it's unfortunate. And we've never been able to build a real militant group in Cone.

BILL FINGER:

It's still very low?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes, about 5 or 10%. Now, Cone is in a joint board now with Julius, but in 1955, we set up a new joint board I was the manager, I had a business agent. And at different times in that six year period, we had as high as seven or eight staff people. We would come right down to the brink of striking and you wouldn't get enough support. You couldn't get people out. We had one strike that did occur and it was over a work load change and involving a particular group of people.

BILL FINGER:

Does Cone pay a little higher? Is that why people aren't quite as lonely, they aren't as threatened, they have a little bit more?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, I think that one reason may be the company. The company has a paternalistic … that's maybe an easy word to use … they have certain standards that they maintain, they may come out of a Jewish tradition and like the Jewish tradition, I don't know. They maintain certain standards, some of which they learn from the Union. And they will do that without being forced to do it.

BILL FINGER:

What do you mean?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

They will do it as a matter of company policy. They think that people should be treated in a certain fashion and they are available. If an overseer mistreats a weaver in the White Oak plant, well, she'll say "I'll go see Mr. Clarence." She'll trot right down to the main office or wait outside and she'll talk to Clarence Cone. And she'll say, "That man's not treating me right." And in order to get that kind of respect, you know, you must deliver something. And if they keep on doing it, you know, there's a side there …

BILL FINGER:

So, they listen to individual grievances like that and keep control of the work force?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

To some extent.

BILL FINGER:

And people think well of the Cones, like people think well of the Reynolds?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes, maybe so. I don't know what they think of the Reynolds, but… and it varies. All of these things are changing. That's the old pattern and then the second generation of owners-managers is unwilling to maintain those patterns. In this case, it's the third or fourth generation, in the case of the Cones. In fact, there are very few of them left in the mill management, period. So, you change from the personal relationship, it's typical of the history of the industry, you change from the personal relationship to the system.

BILL FINGER:

It's more typical isn't it, in a more isolated mill village than in an urban situation like Greensboro?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, that's true. But that wasn't an urban situation. It was a group of mill villages on the edge of a small town. It's no longer that way, but that's the way that it started. Each mill had its own village and they sold those out in the fifties, I think, approximately. So, I worked there until '60, and then I had a couple of years as an organizer, doing everything

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that came along.

BILL FINGER:

You were in Greensboro from '54 to '60?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah. I moved over there from Durham and …

BILL FINGER:

Did you have any role at all when Julius was involved at Henderson?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Not very much. Julius lived in Greensboro and he serviced Henderson. And I went over there a few times for arbitration cases, or to make meetings before the strike. I did not play any role, except maybe talking a couple of times to strike meetings, that kind of thing, in the strike. And Boyd Payton was by then the southern director and …

BILL FINGER:

He was in …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

He was here. And he came in as the top guy in the negotiations and then sort of took over the strike.

BILL FINGER:

Were there strong feelings about the Henderson strike among other union people. Other staff people that weren't on assignment there.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Oh, I think that everybody got emotionally involved, pretty emotionally involved in that strike. It was, you know, the first thing about it that everybody in the union understood, they were two terrifically good local unions. They were really topnotch locals. And they had good leadership and they had run a nice, cleancut, basic operation. You know, textile unionism has a lot of hazards, pitfalls, and they ran a high membership thing without being overbearing and I would have said that they weren't being super-militant. They didn't have any strikes. I don't know what happened in '51, I'm not sure that they came out in that strike, I think that they might have. But they didn't have any strikes inbetween '51 or '58 and you know, they seemed to settle their contracts, they didn't have a lot of arbitration

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cases. I'll tell you, this whole period was a period when labor, the whole labor movement, our union certainly, was on the defensive. You had the Right to Work Laws in '48 and '49. You had the Taft-Hartley Act in '47.

BILL FINGER:

You haven't mentioned the merger in '54 and what that did to the CIO.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, that's sort of far away. That was a sort of a shot in the arm. But, you know, labor unions after the second World War, were dirty words. You know, we were supposed to be the guys that made hundreds of dollars a week on merchant ships while the boys were getting their heads shot off, you know. And we were the guys that goofed off in the war factories while the boys over there were slugging it out. So, it was what you could call a reactionary period. And where that showed up was really in two places. The bargaining got very difficult with some companies and the Labor Board.

BILL FINGER:

You think that the bargaining, that kind of reaction, seeped all the way down to the local companies, like the Harriat -Henderson Company in Henderson?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, I think there became a … frankly, I think that if you did an objective study, the reason for that strike, there would be some personality things involved, but basically I think that there was a decision by somebody in the company level, "We're not going to continue this kind of pattern." And I think that there were some good attorneys on the other side. They were capable of presenting that.

BILL FINGER:

From the company's side?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah. Within management groups. There was a period in which in the forties, things had been going our way. The government was on the unions'

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side in the Second World War. They would enforce a contract with a checkoff and maintenance of membership in any textile company in the South that was in a bargaining relationship. A brand new company. And they did it with few exceptions. In the fifties, the companies decided to go the opposite way. The "Right to Work" Laws in these southern states, you know, didn't happen. They didn't fall out of the sky like the gentle dew.

BILL FINGER:

You think that …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

This was a time when they were going to get it back.

BILL FINGER:

Do you have any evidence, or do you… besides the specific strikes. Say, someone in the company level at Henderson was in touch with legislators who passed the so-called "Right to Work" Law … the Association of Manufacturers or …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, I don't know about evidence as such. You have to take certain things for granted. Number one, the southern textile industry is not an isolated group of companies. They mistrust each other in certain areas, but they certainly communicate about what they consider common problems. At the beginning of the 1950's, the threat of being organized was a common problem. And many, many companies had gone through the experience of having their workers vote for the union during the Second World War and being required to bargain. Almost every bargaining relationship that this union has ever had, began then … there are only a handful that go back beyond the year 1938 or '37. Those were mostly token relationships when they go back beyond that. The big group of organizing was '37, '38, '39, that would be during the TWOC days, and then a lot of people organized during the Second World War. The whole Cone chain, with the exception of the Edna Plant in Reidsville, I guess. I think, it had a local number, 121. That's the lowest local number of any Cone plant. Proximity Weaving, for example,

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is #739, or whatever it was, it's defunct now. But they went back before this period. O.K., and then during the war, there was a lot of organization. The Wagner Act was a big thing. A guy from the Labor Board would come down and he would meet a company guy and he'd say, "Listen, Uncle Sam says that your people have got a right to have a union. Now you stop fighting that." And the management people in many cases would say that they would stop it. Well, that came to a screeching halt by 1948. That's when Blakeney, you know, Blakeney in this town, you could write the labor history of most of the South simply by getting a list of the cases … of North and South Carolina, you could almost write a labor history by getting a list of Blakeney's cases and what happened by the years. He went into business I think, in 1936.

BILL FINGER:

NLRB cases, is that …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, that's all he does. Well, he gets into school segregation cases once in awhile. But that's what he does, labor cases.

BILL FINGER:

He started doing cases when?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I think that he became a lawyer in '36. And I don't know too much about his early history, except I know that he was never on our side of the fence. A big law firm in Atlanta used to be really powerful, Constangy and Prowel. Constangy started out originally as a Labor Board lawyer and I think that for awhile, he represented us and then he became a management guy. So, at any rate, back to the fifties. It was tough.

BILL FINGER:

From '51 and the strike then, until '58, there were no big strikes, except that there were lots of squabbles between United Textile Workers and you.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, a lot of things were going badly. From 1951 to 1955, my

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recollection is that there wasn't a wage increase in the southern textile industry. Now, just think about that one. That's a fantastic thing to be saying. And my recollection is that in 1956, Burlington Industry broke the pattern by announcing a chain wide 5¢ an hour wage increase. And boy, that was big news. And some of the problems that we had with Cone were three and four day weeks. Now, nobody ever thinks about that anymore. But this used to be a big problem for textile workers. What do you do about three and four day weeks? One of our organizing arguments was "We've got some answers that make the company treat you better if you go on short time." And you know, there are stock answers. Like you have a peak force, UTW used to have contracts up North that had what are called "regular forces" and "peak forces."

BILL FINGER:

So, if you hire people for a short …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah. And the regular people have certain rights. They are like class A stockholders and the peak people, they are like class B stockholders. You know, the IBEW used to have A memberships in construction and B memberships in factories. At any rate, that was a hell of a problem. It was a low paid industry. You know, wages, poverty. And the work loads, you know, lay offs and Eisenhower, the New Deal was gone. We had a nice government that smiled and did nothing. Except the Labor Board was really tough. The Labor Board now is so much better …

BILL FINGER:

Even under Nixon?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Even with Nixon. So much better with Nixon than it ever was under Eisenhower, it isn't even funny. You know, Labor people don't often say that. But it is really true.

BILL FINGER:

Is it individual members at the top, or is it the way the staff operates?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, I think that labor has gotten to be important enough so that Nixon from the very beginning and particularly before the second term, he didn't want to alienate the labor vote. And if you look at his strategy in the second campaign, of trying so hard on all the foreign groups, half of whom are blue collar. If he had really gone out to gut us in the first term with the Labor Board, those guys would have picked it up in the work place. He wouldn't have been able to pull the switch that he pulled. He really wanted labor support and he got it. Hell, he got a lot of labor support.

BILL FINGER:

Well, let me ask you about 1960, then. You were at Greensboro then.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, I went on the road for two years but I had had a very, I don't view the experience in Greensboro as a broadening experience. It was too concentrated. I would get involved in other things, but I hadn't been on the road as an organizer.

BILL FINGER:

You had not?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No. And I went on the road and I traveled around and I put out leaflets. I can remember that one year I guess that I put out leaflets at a hundred plants in North Carolina. You know, part of a wage agitation drive. But I can remember hitting eighty plants in Gaston County with another guy in about eight weeks. We wanted to hit them with a wage leaflet. O.K., that's one transition… And then …

BILL FINGER:

Let me ask you … in 1960, did you have anything to do with Terry Sanford's campaign? The AFL-CIO …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, the AFL-CIO was backing him. I would have been enthusiastic about it, but when you start moving around, you don't get active in politics except incidentally.

BILL FINGER:

You say that you would have been in or you would not?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

You do not.

BILL FINGER:

You would have been enthusiastic about it?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yes. Because, as I recall it, he was getting strong endorsements from organized labor in North Carolina. I can remember meeting him and that kind of thing. But at any rate, that's '60 and '61. And '62 and '63 are in a category. One is called "Cleveland, Tennessee" and the next one that lasted for exactly fifty-two weeks, is called "Dalton, Georgia." In Cleveland, Tennessee was the Peerless Woolen campaign, which was a Burlington plant and in Dalton, Georgia, I was the coordinator for a Tufting Carpet campaign, which was the first time that I really got into a sort of semi-directing type of role. We were organizing the Tufting plants, the carpet plants in north Georgia. That's where Tufting started, in case you're not familiar with that. This whole efficient method of making stuff by needle punctures was invented on these chenille peacocks spreads you know, the bedspreads that they used to sell on U.S. 41 'way back. And in '48, they started fooling around with how to make a carpet and from '51 to '71, they tore the carpet industry apart and put it back in a new image just from that technological advantage of tufting versus weaving. One tufted machine, if you kept it running, could produce one mile of carpet in twenty-four hours. A carpet loom would be doing very good on the same width, fifteen feet, would be doing very good to get out maybe a hundred feet. I don't know whether they could even do that. So, there is a big difference.

BILL FINGER:

So, that took away a lot of the workers?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, but the mills that closed were our Northern mills. Alexander Smith, Mohawk, you know. Bigelow-Sanford, all up North. And the tufting plants grew up with twelve hour shifts, working for the minimum wage,

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but if you worked a hundred hours a week, you would come home with a hundred bucks. So, 1962 to '63, we had a high-class organizing operation where we did a lot of agitation around Dalton, Georgia. And it was quite an experience. We won the first tufted carpet plant election to be organized by TWUA in the South. A plant called Dixie Belle in Calhoun and we still have it.

BILL FINGER:

Did you have to strike? Or you just won a vote?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, this was a campaign and it was against Constangy and Prowell in a plant … they were the boys that always beat us. So, that shook up the companies in that area. We tried a lot more than that and failed on the others. But, we hung on to this group of people for a very long time, between the date we petitioned and the election. It was something like a ten-month period, caused by the fact that we were seeking to change the election unit, the old unit under which these people had voted combined a plant in Dalton and another in Calhoun, which are twenty miles apart. We wanted to sever those two plants and the Labor Board procedures took ten months to reach that decision so that the Calhoun-Dixie Belle plant could vote separately.

BILL FINGER:

Did you organize …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

We hung on to those people. In fact, one of them is now the joint board manager. I put him on as a joint board manager over there, he's a good guy. So, at any rate, '63 to '65 …

BILL FINGER:

What happened at the Burlington plant?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

We lost. After we petitioned in Cleveland, the company announced to the Allied Industrial Workers in Rossville, Georgia where the big Peerless plant was, and they had won an election. and at the first negotiating session, they told the Allied Industrial committee, "we're sorry to have to tell you, but we are closing down this plant." 1500 jobs. Well, it was a well kept

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secret. And we didn't want to pull the petition, but by election day …

BILL FINGER:

You couldn't file charges?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, it was Allied Industrial Workers, and we helped them file charges. They tried to get an injunction and they got shot down on that By election day, in our Peerless plant in Cleveland, Tennessee, they had little white cards out, "Save Our Jobs Committee: Vote No." And we had some people in the Cleveland plant who had lost their jobs at the Rossville plant.

BILL FINGER:

So, you went from a major defeat to Dalton?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I came back over here, for a month or two and then Chupka asked me if I wanted to ake it on and I said, "Great, I'll be glad to try." So, I did. And it involved working with a whole new crew. We had about eight or nine staff people, a publicity person and an office, you know, it was a fairly extensive project.

BILL FINGER:

Did you commute from Greensboro. Were you still living there?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I would go home every third week or so. Yes. I did that for a year.

BILL FINGER:

Was that a strain on your family?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

A very big strain. And I've got staff people, and I've got some staff people that basically do that right now. Except that we are much more lenient now than we used to be then. We organized a staff union while I was at Dalton. I became the president of it eventually. Over some issues like that. And so, that's that. Then '63 to '65, I worked on Stevens I came over here and I was Pierce's assistant. The same guy that offered me the job in Georgia, Chupka, offered me—told me—that they wanted a TWUA guy working with Pierce. That was a very interesting experience. God, it was… it taught me a lot of things that you can't do. One thing is that you cannot have a suddenly big organizing program like that. It's impossible. The ability of staff to produce and to be supervised and to know what the

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hell they are doing is very hard in this field. You just can't turn it on. If everybody wanted to join the union, then all you have to do is pass out cards. But when people don't want to join the union because they are afraid and they get fired and you've got all kinds of problems, you've got to have a capable staff and one thing that I learned out of the Stevens campaign was that our theory of bringing a whole collection of people together, which was IUD theory, every union contributed whoever they wanted to contribute, that doesn't work well.

BILL FINGER:

You didn't know that until '65?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

No, I didn't, I'm a slow learner about some things. There were some other aspects of that that I learned a lot about.

BILL FINGER:

Did you think there were misconceptions from the top level? Wasn't that Walter Reuther's baby?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, I don't quarrel with the idea of big scale organizing. It just takes a lot longer than anybody is usually willing to admit, to move from a small scale to a big scale. And you've got to put the pieces together with a lot of care and you've got to have a tough guy at a high level who is able to review the pieces. And if they don't fit right, you are going to have to get another piece. And if you don't do that, you get into a mirage-type fantasy that does not always have much relationship to the real facts of life as it is at the loom or at the ballot box or wherever and it can go on for a long time.

BILL FINGER:

Are you saying that's what happened?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

I'm not going to engage in a lot of second guessing. I don't think that it is appropriate and I don't think that it's my role. I don't get any satisfaction from it. I would simply say that since then …

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

SCOTT HOYMAN:

… I would have a more step by step, less grandiose approach. That's one aspect. So, that's '63 to '65.

BILL FINGER:

The whole campaign got wound up in a lot of legal battles, didn't it?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

It was sort of forced to do that by the fact that that was the only powerful thing that we had going for us after they kept firing people.

BILL FINGER:

Is that where the Darlington, that famous case that …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

That's a non-Stevens case, that goes back to '56 and it happened in a bad year of the Eisenhower board and interestingly enough, we didn't make any progress at the Labor Board until long after '60. Long after Eisenhower was replaced.

BILL FINGER:

Well, just one more thing about the Stevens campaign, do you think that the lessons learned from that, apart from the organizational questions, about the company and how long it takes to go against somebody that is spread out like that and can shift their production, that is very strong and very sophisticated. Are those lessons being used now, in the last year and a half in the Stevens campaigns?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Well, that's hard to say. I think that all of us are more intelligent in our approach, I think that we are now getting some of the fruits of the unfair labor charges that were originated way back in '63 in the contempt proceedings which are now restraining the company in many aspects, believe it or not. It took us ten years to get there. And so, that's obviously a successful tactic. Now, if you gear the whole timing of organizing to legal things, you are not going to have organizing, you're just going to have endurance. Organizing should have a life, you know, it has to have a speed to it, a crescendo. But I do think that some of the things learned have been helpful. But even in the efforts now, the most difficult thing to handle in a major campaign would be the staff problems. And this isn't confined

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to the IUD or TWUA. A good example of that is the joint organizing project between the UAW and the Teamsters in what was a widely publicized and much better financed operation, you know. And it fell flat on its face. Their cooperative organizing program in Atlanta. And they had a lot of money and they were putting in a lot of effort. But there are many significant questions about Stevens and many interesting experiences. The question of targets, the question of tactics, the question of "how would you do it if …" or "is it possible?" Some things may have been impossible in a particular period of time that now are a little bit more possible.

BILL FINGER:

It began to show last week, the strain on the staff, when I was at Roanoke Rapids.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, I know that there are some unhappy people involved in that. That's not an assignment that an immature person is going to thrive on. That's an assignment that separates, you know, the men from the boys and you've got to have a hell of a lot of dedication to work in Roanoke Rapids I spent eight months in Roanoke Rapids. I ran the last election up there, it was in 1965. And we had some unhappy staff people in 1965.

BILL FINGER:

That's where you went after the Stevens thing?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

That was still part of the Stevens thing. When I got out of the office, I was …

BILL FINGER:

That's right.

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Yeah, that's all Stevens. O.K., then …

BILL FINGER:

You were with that IUD operation until …

SCOTT HOYMAN:

From '64, '65 and part of '66. I went through the elections in Roanoke Rapids, I was up there for a long time. I was in charge of that. I went down then with Harold McIver to Greenville afterwards, following that. That was where we had the next ones. And at that point, I got

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involved in a new phase, which I began negotiating. And sometimes striking, as sort of an assistant. I developed into an assistant to Swaity, who was down here from '64, maybe '63 on. And I started in two different sets of first-contract negotiations. One was very good and one was very bad and fortunately, they were simultaneous. The bad one was Collins and Aikman in Albermarle and the good one was Timme Corporation in Wilmington. And apparently that was the first real test, the hardest kind of negotiation is the first contract; that's the highest state of the art in my book. And those were first contracts.

BILL FINGER:

You were working with Swaity then, you weren't negotiating on your own?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

He's not a negotiator, he was the director and he was basically interested in organizing. That's still his field, he's the National Organizing Director. He was not a negotiator.

BILL FINGER:

You were negotiating these two yourself?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

Chupka, the Secretary-Treasurer, started me off on both situations and then turned me loose. And Bob Freeman had won one election and a guy named Tom Barker had won the other election down in Wilmington.

BILL FINGER:

And it's first contracts that are the toughest part of negotiation?

SCOTT HOYMAN:

That's right. So, I did well enough so that they let me keep on doing that kind of thing. And I worked into a job as Swaity's assistant. He liked to work on organizing and that