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Dorothy Bellanca and Ulisse De Dominicis were the most important of the socialist
ACW leaders to emerge from this union's Italian-American constituency.
Additionally, there were socialists active in the union struggles of the textile
workers, a group that tended to be "native" white American in ethnicity.2**

Finally there was also some socialist sentiment, or at least openness to
socialism, evident in the craft unions of Baltimore. The Socialist Party's Maryland
Leader regularly served the craft unions as well as the industrial unions, covering
their struggles, their meetings, and the meetings and conventions of their umbrella
groups, the Baltimore Federation of Labor and the Maryland-District of Columbia
Federation of Labor. In October 1930, Baltimore's best known Socialist, Elisabeth
Oilman, addressed the craft-dominated Baltimore Federation of Labor (BFL) with
a proposal on ending prison labor. And in July 1933, craft unionist Henry F.
Broening, president of the BFL and cousin of the previous mayor of Baltimore, co-
sponsored the Socialist Party-initiated Maryland Convention of the Continental
Congress of Farmers and Workers.  '

PUL organizers made productive use of the Socialist Party's links to the
white working class and organized labor movement in many ways. Broening of the
BFL endorsed the PUL during its initial drive, and Joseph McCurdy, Broening's
successor spoke often at PUL meetings and events, giving the PUL legitimacy in
the ranks of white craft workers. A few months after he led the red-baiting attack
on the Baltimore seamen and the Marine Workers Industrial Union, McCurdy
defended the PUL from a similar attack, declaring, "The PUL are often called
communists and radicals... so were our forefathers at Boston Commons, but now
as then, right will prevail." Undoubtedly, the existence of a "Communist threat" to
the left of the PUL made anti-Communist labor leaders like McCurdy friendlier
than they otherwise might have been to the league. But the leadership of BFL-
affiliated organized labor was generally friendly toward the PUL, and early in its