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by Baltimore Socialists and PUL activists J. Fred Rausch and James Blackwell, and
by Albert Blumberg of the Baltimore teachers' union and the Communist Party.
This resolution was defeated by only 82 to 76. McCurdy managed to retain
leadership, but his organization was shaking.

By the time of the AFL city and state federation conventions of 1936, the
CIO had already made itself felt in the class struggle in Baltimore. Garment
workers, undoubtedly encouraged by the emergence of the CIO, were again
moving. And, in March, steel workers at Eastern Rolling Mills struck, resisted
police with stones, and tried to block the entrance of the plant to non-striking night
shift workers. But the CIO really rolled into town — and in this case the metaphor
is apt - when the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) appeared and
launched its local campaign during late summer.-*

From the national point of view, SWOC was to be the vanguard of the CIO.
The desire to organize the steel industry was a primary impetus behind the efforts
of John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers to spearhead industrial unionism in
the U.S. labor movement: for years the non-union steel industry had been buying
up coal mines and squeezing the UMW. As soon as the CIO was established, Lewis
asked the AFL executive committee to fund a campaign in steel. Receiving little
more than derision in return, the UMW put up the funds itself. Philip Murray, vice
president of the UMW, was put in charge of the steel campaign, scores of the best
organizers (including, according to some sources, sixty Communists) were hired,
and an elaborate centralized strategy was mapped. In June 1936, the CIO steel
campaign was launched. And Baltimore, of course, was of great interest to SWOC
because of its important iron and steel industry, and especially because of the
gigantic Bethlehem emplacement at Sparrows Point.

The Baltimore SWOC campaign began in early August 1936, with a
house-to-house canvass in the eastern Baltimore communities of Highlandtown and