Note by Hunterbear: This is our Lair of Hunterbear page on Maurice Travis -- a major leader of International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in the 1940s and 1950s. He was an early, major and consistent backer of the making and distribution of Salt of the Earth. He has never been given due credit for his many significant contributions to the Union, Salt, and the metal miners/millmen/smeltermen and their families and communities. He was also someone to whom I am much personally indebted -- as I came into things in the mid-50s. [My involvements in those wild and wooly days focused pretty much in Arizona's copper country -- and certain Rocky Mountain/Intermountain areas.] At this time, I'm involved in a major writing project centered primarily [not exclusively, of course] on "Trav" and his life and times. Here is our website page on him, which also gives some indication of the many tensions within and around Mine-Mill -- engendered by a relentless array of the most venomous enemies any union [other than than its very close kin, the IWW] has ever had to face in this country. This is the link to the page, which carries a photo of Maurice Travis, with the black patch over his eye [kicked out by racists in Alabama.] http://www.hunterbear.org/travis.htm It also carries the cover of his historic civil rights pamphlet -- only one of his many social justice writings: Now Is The Time. The Encyclopedia of the American Left [page 211] carries a bio I did [as John R Salter, Jr] of Trav's very activist father-in-law, A.S. "Sam" Embree. Hunter [Hunterbear]
MINE-MILL: MILITANT ADVOCATE FOR RACIAL EQUALITY AND JUSTICE (Continued) Maurice E. Travis NOTE BY HUNTERBEAR: I posted this page on many discussion lists on August 21 and August 22, 2002. Here are my introductory comments: Although, as I've often indicated, the social justice focus of our quite large Lair of Hunterbear website [ www.hunterbear.org ] is contemporary in thrust, we do have within it a substantial amount of radical history material: e.g., labor, Native American, civil rights. And we shall have much more. I was fortunate, as a very young person, to spend substantial periods of time with older veterans-of-struggle -- who were most generous in the time and effort that they spent with me. Some of these, reaching back into the very earliest parts of the Twentieth Century [e.g., C.E. Payne, a founder of IWW and one of its principal activists over many decades], were of advanced years -- but their bright sun still hovered in full above the Western horizon. Others had cut important trails in the '30s and '40s -- and were still doing so in significantly on-going struggles in the cruel era of the mid '50s when I arrived to Save the World. In appropriate Native fashion, I incorporated and assimilated all of these courageously committed Left examples and perspectives into my own being and on my own terms, And, when I began, soon enough, to cut my own visionary trails in earnest, learning and building my own experiences and insights and lessons with my own intensity, all of these people and their shining eyes and minds and vital recollections were -- and sturdily remain -- of enormous value to me. And, I should add, since they were humans of several different -- but always eminently committed and courageous radical traditions -- I came early on to recognize the great importance of Solidarity, rather than backbiting and knifing, if one is to effectively confront the Adversary of Capitalism "and all its wicked works and ways" and blaze the trail to genuine socialist democracy, Hunter [Hunterbear] Further Note by Hunterbear: I'm much into contemporary issues but I never forget my roots. I personally owe a very significant debt, vis-a-vis my own development as a radical activist, to a number of great fighters for social justice. And one of those -- and one to whom my debt is great -- is the late Maurice E. Travis. I'm presently involved in a major writing project on his turbulent life and times -- in the context of the American West, the fighting Mine-Mill union, and the literal bulls-eye of the extraordinarily vicious Cold War Red Scare. We have much Western radical labor history on our very large website, Lair of Hunterbear, and this page -- my short sketch of Maurice Travis -- is taken from one of our many on the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. [ IUMMSW was formerly known as the Western Federation of Miners -- founder of the Industrial Workers of the World.] Maurice Travis was a man who kept fighting and kept going. His fine example is super relevant to our times. I'll keep our List posted on the progress of my writing project. Hunter [Hunterbear] Now Is The Time -- a speech (issued as a widely disseminated pamphlet by IUMMSW), given by Mine-Mill International Secretary-Treasurer, Maurice Eugene Travis, at the founding convention of the National Negro Labor Council at Cincinnati, Ohio, October 28, 1951. Maurice Travis, born [1910] and raised in the Pacific Northwest, exemplified, throughout his life, the uncompromising fighter for worker and minority rights. A person of extraordinary capability, he held many Mine-Mill posts and was subjected to extraordinary red-baiting and witch-hunting by private and governmental forces. He was the son-in-law of A.S. "Sam" Embree, the noted Western I.W.W. organizer and later Mine-Mill organizer. Maurice Travis wore a black patch over one eye -- an eye no longer there: kicked out by a gang of KKK members and other white supremacists at Bessemer, Alabama in April 1949. In his major and historic Now Is The Time speech, Maurice Travis spoke as he always did: forcefully, directly: "I didn't come here to tell the Negro workers of America, or their leaders, what to do. I didn't come to orate about the problems of the Negro people and hand out a fancy custom-built set of answers designed to wash away all those problems -- like Tide, the Washday Wonder. Here on the stage, and out there, is a great abundance of genuine Negro leadership. Here are the real leaders of the Negro workers of America. They know what must be done, and they are ready, willing and very, very able to do it. . . . This is a time for new John Browns to arise, up and down the land. And I am convinced that out of this conference will come a whole army of -- John Browns, men who are dedicated not to talk and double-talk, but to action. Men of principle and of conscience who are convinced that jim crow can be licked, and that the time has come to lick it, so that the Negro can take his full and rightful place as a first-class citizen of this land -- with full social, economic, political, and civil rights. The time is ripe. Let's go!" As the viciousness of the Red Scare intensified in both the United States and Canada, the attacks against Mine-Mill and its activist radical leadership mounted from the mining bosses, the Federal government, some state governments, then-right wing unions such as the Steelworkers, and thugs and vigilantes. The relentless assault against the Union was the most concerted and venomous campaign of its kind since the multi-faceted attack on the Industrial Workers of the World during the World War I and post-war Red Scare epoch. [And what remained of the old-time I.W.W. was formally listed by the United States Attorney General on the Federal "subversive list" in the late '40s and carried thereon for a generation.] Maurice Travis, a person of great ability and courage and commitment, was an especial Mine-Mill target of the witch-hunters for many years -- as was, for example, Clint Jencks, the equally courageous and committed Mine-Mill International Representative in southwestern New Mexico. Jencks, of course, was also a major figure in the splendid and enduring Mine-Mill film, Salt of the Earth -- to which Travis had given full backing as International Secretary-Treasurer. Mine-Mill fought back year after year -- hard and effectively -- on all fronts: collective bargaining, labor defense, civil rights, civil liberties. But, in 1956, the Union's Executive Board -- in an unsuccessful effort to stop or at least reduce the attacks, pushed the "controversial" Travis and Jencks out of their Mine-Mill positions. The Union, fighting on, continued to handle all of their legal defense needs. See, among other Mine-Mill sections of our Lair of Hunterbear website, these links on the Red Scare attacks against the Union and a discussion of the great film, Salt of the Earth. All of these link-pages are at and around this page on Maurice Travis. http://www.hunterbear.org/international_union_of_mine.htm http://www.hunterbear.org/repression.htm http://www.hunterbear.org/Mine-Millconspiracycase.htm http://www.hunterbear.org/salt.htm Clint Jencks wound up as a graduate student at UC Berkeley and then the London School -- securing a PhD in economics. He then taught successfully for many years in the California university system. Travis went on to the West Coast where he initially worked as a chef in the Bay Area and then as a cabinet maker. Securing a shipping clerk's position with International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, he worked in that capacity for thirteen more years. In 1967, the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers merged -- in both the United States and Canada -- with its bitter adversary, United Steelworkers of America, which had, by this time, a few relatively better faces in its top leadership. [One Mine-Mill local, 598, representing workers at Falconbridge Nickel, Sudbury, Ontario, refused to merge and continued a very effective life on its own -- eventually, many years later, entering Canadian Auto Workers, and then the New Century. It maintains its unique Mine-Mill identity to this very moment.] Maurice Travis never lost a spark of his basic fire. In a late Summer, 1984 letter to a friend, commenting on the 1967 merger of Mine-Mill, he wrote in part: "I regret very much what happened to Mine-Mill in both this country and Canada and, as a matter of fact, if I were younger I would attempt to restore that international union to a place in the sun. I think this could be done without too much difficulty under present circumstances because there is no doubt that the American labor movement, with a few exceptions such as the ILWU and some of the other so-called left-wing unions, are merely the tools of a reactionary government. The sorry workers and even the employers as well are paying the price for their short-sighted policies. The steel industry is practically shut down in this country. The poorer south-west miners and smeltermen, etc., are on strike under hopeless conditions, the mines are shut down in the south-west, the smelters and mines of Montana are completely shut down. . ." [Note by Hunter Gray: Travis, in his reference to the copper workers' situation in the Southwest, is referring to the disastrous Steel-led Phelps-Dodge strike of 1983-84. Characterized by the usual top-down decisional polices of the Steel union -- in contrast to the grassroots democratic approach of the old Mine-Mill -- the PD strike was functionally lost.] Although the latter portion of his life was increasingly isolated and often bitterly lonely, Maurice Travis consistently maintained his powerful commitment to militant and democratic radical unionism and social justice in general. And he kept his good humour, high spirits, and great optimism all the way through. He died in 1985 at Fremont, California -- an area that he and his wife Una had come to love deeply. In one of his final communications before he succumbed to painful and debilitating illness, he wrote in conclusion: "Perhaps [it's] the most beautiful spot in America, under the shadow of Mount St. Helena and rich in the varied colors of the grape leaves and the smell of burning grape cuttings. There is no place like it on the face of the earth. Perhaps one day I will return there. However like the greatest brains that lived in this century, Albert Einstein, who was an Agnostic, I believe only that there is a powerful force somewhere in the scramble of stars." I am very fortunate to be one of a tiny number of people who has a transcript of Maurice Travis' extensive oral history. I also have in my personal possession much other rare Travis material. Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org Protected by NaŽshdoŽiŽbaŽiŽ and Ohkwari' In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings. Then it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious and remembering way. [Hunterbear] _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
