George Meany, American Labor Leader August 16th 2008 marks the
114th birthday of William George Meany (1894-1980), better known
as George Meany the American labor movement leader, advisor to
seven US Presidents, and long-tenured AFL-CIO union president.
I
have not seen George Meany mentioned as a descendant of County
Carlow emigrants, but he was one, whether he himself realized it
or not. Some months before his death, as he accepted an award
from an Irish-American organization, he began his speech with
the words, “tonight you honor a grandson of the Meanys of
Westmeath.” If I could have been present with the information
currently available at Michael Brennan’s County Carlow web site
and the Carlow Library, I would have liked to ask him, “The
Meanys of Westmeath, OK-- but George, what about the Coogans of
Carlow?”
His grandmother was
Bridget Coogan, born about 1824, the
eldest daughter of Matthew and Catharine Nolan Coogan of
Ballyloughan. In 1845 Bridget married
Lawrence Meany,
whose family had roots in County Westmeath. The record of their
marriage at St. Andrew’s Church in
Bagenalstown
lists Lawrence’s surname as Mooney, an English version of the
Irish Maonaigh. The couple’s Irishborn children are listed
variously with surnames Mooney and Meany in the records of
Leighlinbridge, where Bridget and Lawrence lived until they
emigrated in 1853: Philip (baptized 1846), Mary (1848), John
(1850), and Catherine (1852). George Meany was aware of his
Coogan ancestors’ politics even if he did not know where in
Ireland they came from.
The years that Bridget and Lawrence
spent in Leighlinbridge were marked by poverty and illnesses of
their children, the continued effects of the Famine. Like other
Famine survivors who immigrated to the US, they rarely spoke of
home. But George knew his grandmother’s family name and his
grandfather’s trade. According to two of his descendants, when
George showed visitors around Manhattan, he often took the
opportunity to drive past Coogan’s Bluff and to mention his
family’s relationship to James J. Coogan (1844-1916), who
developed the Bluff sports area, later renamed the Polo Grounds
and then the Giant’s football stadium. Though the legend
survives of a “cousin” relationship between James J. and Bridget
Coogan Meany and her siblings, I have not yet found a connection
between the two families.
But I suspect that Coogan’s Bluff was
a natural early inspiration in George Meany’s life. Its
developer, James J., was an avid supporter of late-19th-century
labor unions. He pioneered the shortening of the work week for
New York shop clerks to five and one-half days, and he twice ran
for New York City Mayor on union nominations. Trained in the
law, he became a wealthy businessman, sports promoter, and real
estate entrepreneur, yet he kept his working-class politics and
his support for Irish republicanism until his death in the same
year that George Meany’s father died.
George Meany was one of the eight children of Bridget and
Lawrence’s youngest child, Michael Joseph Meany. Born in July
1864 in Harlem, New York City, Michael Meany was named for
Bridget’s brother Michael Coogan (1841-1904), who took his first
vows as a Cistercian lay brother at Mt. Melleray Abbey, County
Waterford, the same week that his Meany nephew was baptized in
New York. Young George enjoyed sitting in on the plumbers’ union
meetings that his father held in the family’s home in those
early days of union organizing. When George decided to leave
school in his teen years, Michael insisted that his son continue
his education in trade school and apprenticeships. George
followed his father, two Meany uncles, and grandfather Lawrence
into the plumber’s trade and remained a member of plumbers’
local 463 throughout his career in New York State and
Washington, D.C.
By 1922, George Meany held an office in the United Association
of Plumbers and Steam Fitters. In 1934, he was elected president
of the Federation of Labor in New York State, and five years
later rose to national office in the American Federation of
Labor (AFL). During his years in New York, he successfully
lobbied for prolabor legislation in Albany. He first became
influential in Washington politics during Franklin Delano
Roosevelt’s last years in office, when Meany helped shape FDR’s
labor policies as a committee appointee and served on the
National Labor Relations Board. With the end of WW II, Meany
took an active role in helping to strengthen the labor movement
in postwar Europe, but he resisted affiliation with socialist
organizers and remained a fierce opponent of communism
throughout his lifetime. He brought the same political energies
to his work with South American labor unions.
In 1955, he helped to unite the AFL with the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO) and soon began his lengthy tenure
as president of the AFL-CIO, representing the largest, most
visible segment of the country’s crafts and trades. In 1957,
when the Teamsters proved unwilling to sever their ties with
organized crime, Meany expelled their leader, Jimmy Hoffa, along
with the Teamsters’ entire membership, from the AFL-CIO.
Meany
routed corruption which had been part of unions since their
beginnings, while he strengthened labor’s participation in
politics. Under President Eisenhower, Meany twice served as a
delegate to the UN. Though he sometimes clashed with
African-American union officers who wanted the AFL-CIO to speed
the work of racial integration, Meany worked tirelessly to
persuade presidents and legislators to hold corporations
responsible for racial discrimination in employment. The 1964
Civil Rights Act was in part a result of those efforts. This
federal law was modeled on a program developed by Meany for his
union membership.
He always remained a supporter of Israel, and though he voiced
early support for the American war in Vietnam, later he candidly
admitted that he had made a mistake and withdrew his support.
President Lyndon B. Johnson called him from his
Washington-suburb home to many a private, informal “chat” in the
White House about challenges Johnson faced during the era of
Civil Rights activism and anti-Vietnam-War protests that
followed the assassination of President Kennedy. Influential in
the Democratic Party, Meany advocated protective measures for
workers, such as oversight by the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration. He urged the resignation of Republican President
Richard Nixon and was outspoken in his criticism of Democrat
President Jimmy Carter’s handling of economic problems in the
1970s.
Despite having dropped out of high school, Meany
developed a comprehensive sense of economics: he could foresee
how a policy decision made in Washington would affect workers’
paychecks or the unemployment rate or inflation months later.
Like his grandfather Lawrence Meany, George Meany did not retire
until his mid-80s, when failing health and eyesight finally
began to diminish the considerable energy his work had always
demanded of him. At a Labor Day picnic for union leaders on the
White House lawn in 1979, President Carter told his guests that
he had spoken by phone with the absent George Meany, who had
given his own Labor Day radio broadcast that morning though he
was ill with flu. According to the New York Times report of the
picnic, Carter said that Meany “was reading my report card, . .
. ‘He said if I wouldn’t tell anyone what was on it he wouldn’t
either.’ There were three things that a President ‘always has on
his mind,’ Mr. Carter said: national security, Congress and Mr.
Meany” (NY Times 4 Sept. 1979, page A1).
Meany’s long career parallels the rise of one of the great
American social and political movements--that of labor. This is
a story of progress that began in his Carlow / Westmeath
grandparents’ days in Old New York. Meany’s dedication to that
movement flowed, I believe, from the cultural memory of his
grandparents’ generation, Famine survivors, from their heritage
of struggle against oppression. Labor was not the last such
movement; civil rights and women’s rights and others followed by
mid-century.
But the Labor Movement set standards of integrity
and education which benefitted later reform movements. In the
1930s, unions were educating immigrant workers in the English
language and encouraging them to educate their children; union
newspapers strengthened workers’ communities; union officers
spoke out on issues of social justice and called for ethical
constraints on business; union members voted reform politicians
into office and voted elites out. Reaction against the increased
power of labor followed their successes.
The movement that Meany
energized is certainly in decline at present, not only because
of anti-labor legislation but also because of a resurgence of
corporate greed and corruption. Americans will celebrate another
Labor Day in a few weeks, and perhaps we will remember better
times for workers and George Meany’s role in fostering progress.
Michael Meany moved his family to the Bronx before he died.
There his son George married Eugenia McMahon in 1919 and built a
home in the Pelham area, where the couple began raising three
daughters. Eugenia died in March 1979, and George died on the
following January 10.
Today, the National Labor College, near
the Meany home in Silver Springs, Maryland, educates the public
as well as emerging labor leaders. You can find full-length
biographies and many articles on George Meany’s work, for
example J. C. Goulden’s book Meany (Atheneum,1972) and Archie
Robinson’s. George Meany and His Times (Simon and Schuster,
1981). On the Internet you can visit http://www.georgemeany.org/
(The National Labor College, formerly the George Meany Center
for Labor Studies) and http://www.nlc.edu/archives/home.html
(The George Meany Memorial Archives).
Source:
Mary Coogan August 2008
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