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challenge the refusal of the ISU leadership to support a strike by the American
Radio Telegraphists Association. When a top local ISU leader (who was known as
the "Crown Prince") moved to expel him as a dual-unionist, Rubin and a body of
rank and filers invaded the trial committee meeting and forced them to withdraw
the charges.

Despite such small successes, no big breaks occurred for more than another
year. But a protracted struggle within the ISU in Baltimore continued. Ultimately
the foundations laid by the MWIU and the Baltimore Soviet led to an upsurge in
the ISU rank-and-file movement and, subsequently, the construction of a powerful
and influential branch of National Maritime Union (NMU) in the city. To get a bit
ahead of the story, while the local MWIU, as it itself admitted in late 1934, was
never really able to build real ties to the labor movement in Baltimore beyond the
waterfront, the NMU was to become (along with the ACW) one of the two main
pillars of the CIO in the city through the late 1930s, and an articulate exponent of
interracial, socially conscious industrial unionism. The NMU's role in Baltimore
from 1937 to the early 1940s was symbolized by its top city leader, its port agent
Patrick Whalen, who also headed the Baltimore Industrial Council of CIO unions,
and who was deeply involved in virtually every progressive struggle in the city,
whether labor-based or not. Whalen was a veteran of the MWIU -- and a member
of the Communist Party (though not a public one).*1

A final word or two on the relationship of the MWIU in Baltimore to the
Communist Party is in order. As one would expect, and as was the case with the
national MWIU, the leadership of the Baltimore MWIU was comprised of party
members. In fact, many of the top Communists in the national MWIU were active
in Baltimore for shorter or longer periods of time during the early 1930s, including
Al Lannon (who later became head of the Communist Party in Baltimore), Harry
Alexander, Roy Hudson, Al Kaufman (then known as Oscar The Kid" Everett),