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chartered at Westinghouse, the region's dynamic electrical industry was still open
shop. Finally, the region's new glamour industry, aviation, remained decidedly anti-
union, as the huge Glenn Martin plant to the east of Baltimore not only steadfastly
refused to deal with the CIO, but also refused to hire Black workers. All in all, the
CIO's penetration of the most modern sectors of basic production in the Baltimore
region was not overly impressive. -
Another limitation to the CIO's progress by the end of 1939 — this one not
alluded to in the Jones report - was the growth of factionalism in the ranks of its
leadership. Earlier that year the Popular Front alliance of militant industrial
unionists, Socialists, and Communists took some heavy blows in the wake of the
pact between Germany and the Soviet Union. The fact that an international issue
could so directly effect the workers' movement in the Baltimore metropolitan area
was, of course, testimony to the degree which that movement had joined the
national and international mainstream in the previous four years. But the matter
was divisive, and the presence of Communist sympathies among the leadership and
rank-and-file of the regional CIO became an important issue, rather than an
unspoken-though-open secret, for the first time. Demands for anti-fascist, anti-
Communist clauses were heard, and Uylisse De Dominions and other ACW
delegates walked out of a BMDCIUC meeting because a resolution for a ban on
Communists and fascists in the council was amended to bar only fascists. De
Dominicus, a Socialist, also began increasingly to contest the leadership of Pat
Whalen, a non-public Communist, in the BIC, and the Baltimore CIO's cornerstone
alliance between the ACW and the NMU was weakened in the process.
The controversy around Communism within the CIO was fueled by the
growth of anti-Communism in the region as a whole. In a much publicized action in
December 1939, for example, a group of Jewish World War I victims invaded a
Communist Party meeting in Baltimore, and heckled national Communist leader
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