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153
Because of their commitment to industrial unionism and their belief thai
workers in the most "socialized" industries - those with the largest units of
production, the most developed mechanization, and the most complex division of
labor — had the greatest capacity for class consciousness, party militants in the
Baltimore area were panicularly drawn to the gigantic Bethlehem Steel complex at
Sparrows Point. Al Richmond, who arrived in Baltimore as Young Communist
League section organizer in 1932, reflected, in his autobiography, this fascination:
You must see Sparrows Point. Soon after arriving in Baltimore you
obeyed this injunction.
To see Sparrows Point you traveled five miles southeast from
Baltimore and on to one of several fingers protruding from a peninsula at
the confluence of the Patapsco River and the Chesapeake Bay. You were
there after you crossed a bridge at Bear Creek. ... [A]t the entrance you
used Bear Creek seemed like a moat and the bridge a single link with the
rest of the world. Instead of turrets and spires, however, blast furnaces and
smoking chimneys stood tall on the other side of the moat.
Sparrows Point was one name, but it is three things. It is the tip of
the peninsular finger, it is a town, and most important, for this is what you
came to see, it is the largest production complex of Bethlehem Steel
Corporation.
You approach the massive array of furnaces and mills and you
thought: what a fantastic locale for a feudal castle, water on three sides and
a narrow strip of land on the fourth.-*-*
Unfortunately, Richmond found that there were only seventeen party
members and seven YCL members organizing for the Steel and Metal Workers
Industrial Union, a TUUL affiliate, among the 17,000 workers at Bethlehem. The
conditions of Bethlehem workers were horrible — most were working only one or
two days a week at a reduced hourly wage - and so were the conditions for
organizing. Company surveillance was extremely effective. Any worker showing
union sympathies was immediately fired; Communist and TUUL leader Carl
Bradley had been identified by company spies and ejected shortly before
Richmond's arrival. Agitation of any sort was all but impossible in the company
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