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"I'll begin to worry the day the papers say something nice about me."
--Michael J. Quill

"It was all in the flippin' of a coin that I came to New York at all. Once you decide to leave Ireland, it doesn't matter much which way you go. It's all strange land and no friends. I narrowed my choice and then I tossed my coin. It landed heads and I landed here--on St. Patrick's Day!"
-- Michael J. Quill, quoted in L. H. Whittemore, *The Man Who Ran the Subways: The Story of Mike Quill*, pp. 7-8

From *Time*'s 1966 obituary ("The Lad from Gourtloughera") of Mike Quill:

"On St. Patrick's Day 40 years ago, Michael Joseph Quill, late of County Kerry and the Irish Republican Army, landed at Ellis Island. He had flipped a coin, it was said, to decide between New York and Melbourne, and New York won--in a manner of speaking.

"A handsome, burly broth of a lad, he worked hard, organized a powerful national union, shouted and weaseled his way through a thousand fights with Communists and anti-Communists, employers and brother unionists, mayors and Presidents, and finally blundered into the strike that everyone said he lacked the courage to bring off. In the first twelve days of 1966, his Transport Workers Union brought America's greatest city to the brink of chaos. Mike Quill, 60, having thus made his name a household word and almost certainly prompted federal legislation to outlaw future strikes by public-service employees, died quietly last week in the bedroom of his Manhattan penthouse."
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,898925,00.html (full article no longer avaialble online except to subscribers)

For more background on Quill, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Quill

Quill, of course, did not organize the Transport Workers Union (TWU) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Workers_Union_of_America single-handedly. The Communist Party took the leading role in building the union in the 1930's through the Hungarian-born John Santo, who was to become the union's secretary-treasurer. According to L. H. Whittemore, in *The Man Who Ran the Subways: The Story of Mike Quill*, "The meeting [in 1934] of Mike Quill from Ireland and John Santo from Hungary brought together two brands of revolution, one nurtured in Dublin and the other in Moscow. The Irish Workers Clubs, filled with veterans of the Easter Rebellion, and the Communist Party, led by idealistic intellectuals dedicated to the overthrow of the capitalist system, supplied the nucleus for that meeting."

Quill reciprocated the Party's embrace of him. Harvey Klehr writes that "...Quill faithfully served the Communist Party until 1948. He never openly admitted Party membership, but several witnesses placed him in Party units, saying that he paid Party dues and recruited union members into the Party. He himself later admitted to attending Party caucuses and fraction meetings at CIO conventions. And he made no secret of who his friends were: 'I would rather be called a Red by the rats than a rat by the Reds,' he explained to one audience." *The Heyday of American Communism*, p. 234. (Selling a Communist-dominated union to religious Irish Catholic transit workers was made easier when the Party in its Popular Front period eased its anti-religious line: "As with many Communist initiatives, the impetus for change came from abroad. The French Communists, with the approval of the Comintern, extended an'outstretched hand' to Catholics in 1936. Within a year of Browder's 1937 visit to France, *The Daily Worker* was hailing 'progressive' Catholic priests and Mike Quill was explaining to the uninformed that 'St. Patrickis a People's saint.'" Klehr, p. 222.)

"Red Mike" Quill's break with the Communists in 1948 is indicative of the way the Communist Party in the postwar years mishandled and lost its greatest asset, the one powerful social institution where it had a real foothold--the left-wing unions of the CIO. (I suspect that had Earl Browder been retained as Party leader in 1945, he would not have been quite as dismal a failure in this field as his successor William Z. Foster was--even granted all the "objective conditions" working against Communist influence in the unions.) The Party insisted that Quill oppose any increase in the nickel subway fare until after 1949, because defense of the nickel fare was going to be a key issue in party-aligned Congressman Vito Marcantonio's mayoral campaign that year. This, even though everyone knew that the subway lines were losing money and that there was no way they could afford a substantial wage increase for the workers without a fare increase. The Party also insisted the TWU support Henry Wallace's quixotic presidential candidacy; when Quill warned that this could split the TWU, Foster told him (according to Quill's later account) that the Party insisted on having the left-wing unions support Wallace even if it meant splitting every union in the CIO. Quill adopted the motto "Wages before Wallace" and with his rank-and-file popularity defeated the Communist majority on the TWU's executive council. He was helped by Mayor O'Dwyer "who, thanks to a fare increase to ten cents, was able to grant the union a wage increase that more than satisfied most of the membership. Moreover, adopting a pattern that would characterize New York transit negotiations until the mid-1960s, O'Dwyer went through the charade of appearing to make painful concessions to Quill and allowed Quill to take all the credit for the wage increase." (Harvey A. Levenstein, *Communism, Anti-Communism and the CIO*, p. 263)

Quill was also aided by John Santo's voluntarily accepting deportation to Hungary in 1948. (Santo had previously resisted attempts to deport him, but now that Hungary was a People's Republic, he imagined a bright future for himself there, which indeed he seemed to be realizing--until 1956.) "The union constitution which Santo had drawn up gave extraordinary power to the secretary-treasurer, the position that he held. His legal problems forced him to relinquish the position to Gustav Farber, who sided with Quill and helped to compensate for Quill's lack of a majority on the union Executive Board." Levenstein, p. 262. The Communists thought that they could undermine Quill's support among the Catholic transit workers by proving that Quill himself had been a Communist. Unfortunately for them, Quill had anticipated them, and had had his membership records stolen from Party headquarters, even dramatically offering to resign as president if his CP membership could be proven. (Levenstein, p. 263)

Quill's break with the Communists, coming soon after that of Joe Curran of the National Maritime Union, was devastating for the left wing of the CIO, and helped ease the way for the CIO's 1949 purge of the left-wingers. Even as an anti-Communist, though, Quill remained something of a maverick within the CIO; he was one of the few CIO leaders to oppose the 1955 merger with the AFL, believing that the terms of the merger did too little to combat corruption and racial discrimination within the merged federation's unions. And to New Yorkers, Quill, in his Communist and anti-Communist phases alike, was something of a colorful monster, always good for a startling quote in a brogue that seemed to get thicker every year, and always threatening a devastating transit strike which somehow was always avoided just in the nick of time--until 1966. (Quill and newly-elected Mayor John Lindsay--youthful, Episcopalian, Yale-educated, and a nominal Republican: in short, all the things Quill was not--did not get along at all. Jimmy Breslin summed it up by saying "John Lindsay looked at Quill and he saw the past. And Mike Quill looked at Lindsay and he saw the Church of England." Lindsay's reputation never really recovered from the early 1966 transit workers' strike, which practically shut down the city and gave his administration an image of incompetence at its very inception.) Indeed, so unpopular was Quill that John Santo was embittered when in 1957, Quill called for Santo, who had fled Hungary in disillusionment with Communism after the crushing of the 1956 revolution, to be allowed back into the US. Santo thought that this set back his re-admittance for several years... [1]

So suppose the coin lands tails and Quill emigrates to Melbourne instead of New York City? The effects can be divided into two categories: (a) effects on the US, and (b) effects on Australia.

(1) Effects on the US: No doubt John Santo chooses some other Irishman to head the TWU. (Indeed, in OTL the first president of the TWU was Thomas O'Shea, like Quill a former IRA man who had joined the Party. When the Party asked him to step aside in late 1935 for Quill, he did so, but became embittered and later testified before the Red-hunting Dies Committee.) But whoever he would choose would probably be more of a figurehead than Quill was--less dynamic, less popular with the rank-and-file, and more dependent on the Party. He might hesitate to break with the Party in 1948, and even if he tried, might not be able to prevail. We might get a redder but weaker TWU, which may help the fiscal situation of New York City. (As for effects on the wider labor movement: Having the TWU stay left-wing would strengthen the leftists within the CIO but not enough by itself to prevent their expulsion from the CIO in 1949.) The rank-and-file might overthrow the Communist leadership, but one should not be too certain of this--even at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, a few of the left-wing unions that had been expelled from the CIO managed to survive in fairly good shape, and were able to win NLRB-certified elections, because workers cared more about whether their union leaders could "deliver the goods" than about their politics. OTOH, if the City indicates it will give better terms to an anti-Communist union, this could be a sufficient inducement either for the alternative leader to Quill to turn against the Communists, or for the rank-and-file to turn against him if he doesn't. (One reason that Harry Bridges and the ILWU easily survived expulsion from the CIO is that the waterfront employers regarded Bridges as a man they could do business with. "He was willing to discuss such sensitive matters as mechanization on the docks with an understanding of their position. His AFL rival, Harry Lundeberg, on the other hand, revelled in confrontation rather than discussion. Lundeberg displayed his militancy by refusing to accept arbitration. 'The employers,' reported a correspondent in 1953, 'really prefer to do business with Bridges and [his Communist associate] Bryson rather than Lundeberg. Personally they are more reasonable, more intelligent, and more attractive men. Lundeberg is contentious, arrogant, and insulting at every turn. His pet ploy these days is to call waterfront employers 'Commie-lovers' because they won't refuse to talk to Bridges and Bryson.'" Levenstein, p. 320)

(2) Effects on Australia: Here I simply don't know enough about the Australian labor movement to offer more than a few suggestions. I do know that Australian unions, like the US CIO unions, went through a bitter left-versus-right struggle in the 1940's; as in the US, the pro-Communist Left lost some key unions, though it did not suffer the near-total wipeout of its US counterpart. One thing that occurs to me is that Quill if he went to Australia, like Harry Bridges if he had stayed there, might be more openly Communist than they were in the US. If Quill were to be a successful trade unionist in Australia, as he was in the US, would he break with the Communists as he did in OTL in the late 1940's? (Maybe he even becomes a Grouper...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Groups

(When I first posted this in soc.history.what-if, an Australian poster remarked "I like the idea of a Communist with Irish heritage, born in 1906, organising the transport workers of Melbourne. Sadly the gig is already taken, with Clarrie O'Shea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarrie_O'Shea as the Victorian State Secretary of the Australian Tramway & Motor Omnibus Employees' Association. [Unlike Quill O'Shea is not, strictly speaking, Irish being born in the other Emerald Isle.]"

[1] After a rocky start in Humgary (he apparently was considered as a possible defendant in the Rajk trial), Santo did fairly well for himself in People's Hungary, becoming a high official in the state meat turst. However, after the Soviet ceushing of the 1956 revolution, he was totally disillusioned with communism. He wanted to return to the US practically from the minute he arrived in Vienna in late 1956. (His wife returned to the US with their two children on December 15, 1956.) A high ranking and cooperative disillusioned Communist official was normallly greeted with open arms in those days. Why did it take Santo so long (until 1963) to get back into the US? According to Whittemore, *The Man Who Ran the Subways,* p. 236:

"Early in 1957 the Commissioner of Immigration stated that if Santo wanted to return he would have to 'spill' what he knew about communism to the American authorities in Vienna (which he did). The following year, the House Committee on Un-American Activities voted to ask the Justice Department to let Santo back into the country. Mike Quill sent a telegram to the Secretary of State, demanding that his former comrade be let in. In later years, Santo said that he felt that Quill's gesture of friendship was the 'kiss of death' and that Mike was well aware that because of his own unpopularity, such a demand was like twisting the knife. According to Santo, Quill's statment set back the reentry procedures five years.

"Santo still thought of himself as the 'father' of the Transport Workers Union; and therefore, Quill figured that it would be better to keep him away as long as possible. While Santo waited to return, he was assisted by the World Church Service, which took Santo under its wing and secured temporary employment for him in Austria, first as an interpreter and then as an English teacher. Santo later joined an Austrian partner in the importation of goods from the United States. He was a stateless person, and he never forgave Mike Quill for dealng him that 'kiss of death.' He returned to the United States in January, 1963."

For a less sinister explanation, see Francis Walter (chairman of HUAC) in 1963: "Although the ring of sincerity was quite apparent in Santo's story as first told to me, an extensive review of Santo's actvities in the United States and a study of records of interrogations conducted by American officials in Austria, caused me to defer action in Santo's behalf. One important element of this decision was my conviction that Santo's return to the United States, if it were to occur, must be in full compliance with the law — and the law, the Immigration and Nationality Act, states that a former Communist is not eligible to enter the United States until he demonstrates that "since the termination of such membership or affiliation such alien is and has been for at least 5 years prior to the date of the application for admission actively opposed to the doctrine, program, principles and ideology of such party" (Communist Party or a Communist-dominated organization). (Sec. 212 (a) (28) (I) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.) Preface to "A Communist in a "Workers' Paradise,": John Santo's Own Story" (1963) https://archive.org/stream/communistinworke1963unit#page/2/mode/2up
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