Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [8]
Sadlowski rose fast in the union. First, he became president of his local, then he ran for the directorship of District 31, a consortium of the locals in the mills along the Chicago–Indiana corridor. The incumbent union machine, which called itself “the Official Family,” had been in power for thirty years and wasn’t about to relinquish its position easily. They refused, for instance, to give Sadlowski the location of all 285 locals, and so he, as well as family members and friends, dispersed throughout the city, looking for factories and then sneaking in to talk with the union members there. He lost the election, but it soon became clear that the Official Family engaged in massive voter fraud, filling out blank ballots—for their own family, of course. In a new election, which was monitored by four hundred federal observers, Sadlowski won by twenty thousand votes.
In 1976, at the age of thirty-seven, Sadlowski took on sixty-year-old Lloyd McBride for the presidency of the international union. The old guard, of which McBride was a part, had recently entered into a more cooperative arrangement with management. They had signed a contract that called for all disputes to be settled by arbitration. The union had promised not to strike, and I. W. Abel, who was stepping down as president of the union, had signed and let his picture be used in an industry newspaper ad pleading for higher productivity. Sadlowski saw things differently. His perspective harked back to labor’s more militant days. He believed that there was a point at which the interests of management and that of the workers diverged. He believed it was a mistake for the union to give up its most powerful weapon. He believed that the members of the union should be allowed to vote on this new experimental contract. His campaign gathered momentum, and soon Time magazine warned that “if Sadlowski does become the Steelworkers’ chief, both the economy and the climate of the nation’s labor–management relations could be significantly affected.” One company executive told a reporter that if Sadlowski was elected “it would be a whole new ballgame.” (The executive also tipped his hat to Sadlowski, saying “He was far and away the ablest union guy who has come down this pike—dedicated, tireless, and honest.” ) Profiles of Sadlowski appeared in Rolling Stone and The New York Times Magazine. He gave an interview to Penthouse and appeared on Meet the Press. He became the darling of the left; Richard Goodwin and the television producer Norman Lear held fund-raisers for him. Geoghegan, in his marvelous book Which Side Are You On?, wrote, “It’s hard to believe now, but in 1976 this was a big story.” Bigger for some, Geoghegan recounts, than the presidential election that year, between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Sadlowski became a modern-day paradox, a working-class hero in a country that doesn’t think it has classes.
When the old guard accused Sadlowski of being a communist dupe, he told a New York Times writer: “You can make it sound like any kind of revolutionary rhetoric you want but the fact is it’s the working class versus the coupon clipper. The boss is there for one damn purpose alone, and that is to make money, not to make steel, and it’s going to come out of the worker’s back. . . . I guess maybe I’m a romantic, but I look on the American labor movement as a holy crusade, which should be the dominant force in this country to fight for the workingman and the underdog and make this a more just society.”
Sadlowski tapped a deep vein of worker discontent, and so faced deep hostility from the opposition. One Sadlowski supporter at a steelworkers’ convention was beaten up by three old-line unionists. Another, while pamphleteering outside a Houston factory, was shot in the neck. (Marlene says the supporter resembled her husband from behind, and she believes that that’s who they