The Funsten Strike

In 1924, at age sixteen, Senter was admitted to Washington University to study architecture. “He was surprised by the class biases of most of his classmates,” Rosemary Feurer writes in Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900–1950. Sentner was poor, working his way through school; his peers were the children of lawyers and business owners. In 1927, Sentner’s father died, and the tuition money ran out. His university education was cut short, but not before a friend introduced him to the works of Karl Marx.

Sentner decided to “study by experience” and hit the road, riding the rails out West, landing in California where he joined the merchant marine. Acquaintances later told the FBI that Sentner “became enthusiastic toward the communistic movement while a seaman.” Feurer notes the spirit of syndicalist ideology he encountered among the crew at sea as an early influence on Sentner’s political outlook.

After four years at sea engaging in a self-guided study of Marx, labor history, and architecture, Sentner returned to St Louis. It was in much worse condition than when he left. By 1932, the Great Depression had made three thousand St Louisans homeless, and a mile-long colony of shacks lined the banks of the Mississippi River. The St Louis “Hooverville” had its own self-elected mayor and a church made of orange crates.

With unemployment at 30 percent, Sentner relied on his partial college education to get work as an architectural draftsman. He hung out in the jazzy bohemian bars on the banks of the Mississippi, where he debated with a “diverse and often motley group of the disaffected, including his old grade school friend, the house painter–turned-artist Joe Jones, as well as the novelist Jack Conroy,” writes Feurer.

One of the first organizing campaigns Sentner spearheaded was also one of the most radical. The Funsten Company was a collection of food-processing plants near the Mississippi where black and white women toiled in dingy conditions to rid nuts of their shells. After many clandestine meetings and planning, an upstart leader named Carrie Smith argued with the boss for two hours before taking to the picket line. Smith carried a Bible in one hand and a brick in the other. “Girls,” she announced, “we can’t lose!”

The strike ended with a meeting at the Labor Lyceum, the St Louis Communist Party headquarters, where Sentner, Smith, and Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann reached an agreement. Sentner argued that taxpayers were subsidizing the Funsten Company because so many of Funsten’s workers toiled all day long and still qualified for relief. In the end, nut pickers doubled their wages. Black workers achieved equal pay but still no union.

As Feurer writes, “The model of the strike was electrifying in St. Louis’s black working class, and to activists across the country.” It also broadened the fundamental definitions of who a worker was. Industrial factories demanded labor power. White and black, men and women — all were subject to the flattening logic of the assembly line.

For recognizing the rights of black women in their workplace, the strike at Funsten allowed Communists to “come out with prestige” in the black working class. Toni Buneta — a Yugoslavian packinghouse worker whom Sentner met and married while organizing — noted that there was a particular St Louis taboo around white people entering a black household. White Communists were the first to break it.

In the aftermath of Funsten, Sentner was offered opportunities to organize black ragpickers, laundry workers, longshoremen, metalworkers, and steelworkers. On flimsy charges, he was arrested by federal authorities, who held him for several days. Senter’s success had put him on the state and federal radar.

The “Big Three” Stronghold

Sentner’s organizing often landed him in jail. His only protection was union bail funds, lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, and the community outside the prison walls. After a 1934 strike with the Metal and Machinery Workers Industrial Union, he was thrown in a cell and brutally beaten by police. When freed, Sentner walked out and signed his membership card with the Communist Party. “Every bone in his body was about democracy,” recalled his wife, Toni. “He lived and breathed the idea that the more democracy, the more power for workers. That was what socialism meant to him.”

Sentner’s next fight was with St Louis’s “Big Three” trifecta of electrical manufacturers — Emerson, Century, and Wagner Electric. Nationally, almost all generators, gigantic turbines, and big motors in the US market were dominated by General Electric and Westinghouse — the literal engines of capitalism. St Louis’s Big Three trafficked in small appliances like ceiling-fan motors, kitchen blenders, small water pumps, printing presses, and textile machines — anything that wound or whirled and was smaller than a plane engine.

The Big Three were an open-shop stronghold, meaning workers weren’t required to join the union. This not only depressed wages across St Louis but also diluted national union power for all electrical workers. As Feurer notes, “Independent electrical managers worked together with businessmen in other industries to establish a regional labor market based on low wages.”

It wouldn’t be easy to take them on, not least because the workers’ movement lacked personnel. St Louis’s 1930s organizing scene was known for starving its activists. Toni Sentner recalled her husband’s ulcers from eating spoiled food, and the twenty miles he walked to meetings across the river in East St Louis because he lacked bus fare. The Senters relied on rations from fellow organizers and financial gifts from wealthier progressive friends.

Another obstacle was the fear of factory workers, who had witnessed many union drives crash and burn, brutally repressed by management. But Sentner had new tools. For one, he was a committed St Louis historian. In 1877, at the end of Reconstruction, black and white St Louis workers had banded together for one of the most successful general strikes in American history. Sentner saw the struggle for American socialism as a direct continuation of previous struggles like these, as well as efforts by the Farmers’ Alliance and the Knights of Labor.

The Progressive Era’s worker movements failed in part because they maintained segregated unions. But the 1930s marked a new age — that of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Sentner drew inspiration from the past and surmised that organizers in the St. Louis Communist Party could help grow the CIO, and therefore the American labor movement, into an incredibly powerful social force so long as the New Deal labor epoch could overcome race and gender bigotry. Sentner wrote:

In our District our Party is the inheritors of the splendid labor traditions and revolutionary backgrounds as laid by John Brown of Kansas, the correspondents of Marx and early abolitionists of St. Louis and Missouri, and the heroic farmers of Arkansas who led the premature Green-Corn rebellion during the world war in their attempt to turn it into a civil war. Yes, comrades, we can say that we are the inheritors of all that is good in the history of the gateway to the southwest.

As Feurer notes, by 1933, many workers saw Communist Party organizers as “the light at the end of the tunnel, showing you the way out.” But Sentner’s philosophy rejected the idea of workers as followers, stressing “movement from below.” The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) was one of the first unions chartered by the CIO, breaking with a previous union that maintained racial discrimination. As the UE grew by hundreds of thousands in the 1930s, Sentner, out in the Midwest, became one of its most effective organizers.

Critical to Senter’s “from below” movement strategy was building a social world for workers where they could bond outside work, away from the bosses. The United Electrical Workers developed sports programs including boxing, wrestling, corkball, and baseball. Each local often held a dance and hosted picnics to make the union “a family affair.” UE even hosted a mock Veiled Prophet Ball — satirizing the Klanish debutante celebration hosted by the St Louis elite. The union elected its own “Queen of the UE” as a rival to the Veiled Prophet’s “Queen of Love and Beauty.”

Sentner’s bet paid off. Ultimately, the Big Three were brought down by the second-longest sit-down in American history. Whereas previous work stoppages were contained to one department, in April 1937, Sentner and the Emerson Electric workers were so organized that they took over the plant simultaneously at every level. Two hundred sit-downers occupied the Washington Avenue offices, escorting foremen out the door. “Just think of that — us workers telling the bosses to get out of the plant!” recalled Gilbert Kamp, an Emerson worker.

Knowing the UE organizing campaign was underway, the Big Three spent a fortune on spies and stool pigeons. They thought they could replace any worker with one of the thousands of unemployed in the Hoovervilles, desperate for a spot on the line, but this leverage didn’t work in a sit-down. The bosses maintained that workers were interchangeable and had no power over the company. But when everyone at their stations halted work at once and refused to leave, the illusion of workers’ powerlessness dissipated. Workers proved they had agency by acting as one.

Plus despite the risks and high stakes, the Emerson sit-down was fun. A “picnic atmosphere” prevailed among the two thousand Emerson workers inside the factory, and the picket lines outside drew hundreds of fellow workers, the unemployed, and supporters to parade with arms linked, singing songs of solidarity. Over the course of fifty-three days, doctors volunteered free medical care to strikers and their families. A welfare committee helped families pay bills and fend off debt collectors. A cafeteria owner across the street turned over his operation as a commissary. When the St Louis relief office refused payments to Emerson strikers, a coalition of white and black workers invaded and sat down until the commission reversed course. Local reporters were remarkably sympathetic, broadcasting the strikers’ demands without pro-management bias.

Meanwhile the company owners threatened tear gas and the police baton. “They may send me and the other leaders to jail before this is over,” Sentner told Emerson workers, “but other leaders will take our places and the fight will go on.”

Sentner stressed nonviolence, but late in the game, the sit-downers were so bitter that some threatened to “blow up the plant” rather than leave it. Century and Wagner hastily upped wages, and Century organized its own rinky-dink company union. The final cry from Emerson’s corporate leadership was an attack on Sentner as a Communist, but no one listened.

The United Electrical Workers felled the Big Three and won their union. Sentner became president of the UE’s District 8 and set his sights on the rest of the heartland.

Smith Act Mind Control

Over a decade later, in 1952, Sentner was staying at a motel while helping workers negotiate a contract at Eagle Signal in Moline, Illinois. Eagle Signal manufactured traffic lights and was a smaller fight compared to Sentner’s recent Herculean battles.

For example, in 1938 in Newton, Iowa, Sentner was thrown in jail, and Maytag workers threatened to burn it down to get him out. The National Guard stood on the roof of the massive washing machine plant, defending Maytag from picketing workers. A local attorney said of Sentner, “The coming of that black cloud from St. Louis had torn the town apart.”

Eagle Signal also couldn’t compare to conditions at Evansville, Indiana. Evansville was famous for its Chrysler plant, but Sentner went for the Servel Electric Company instead. Just like the Big Three, Servel dictated the city’s labor policy. Servel made gas-powered refrigerators, water heaters, and air-conditioning units. In wartime, its production shifted to make P-47 Thunderbolt wings, ammunition cartridges, and anti-tank mines. Sentner spearheaded a decade-long union drive there. During one picket, a company guard shot a union man in the leg. Police arrested Sentner and the bleeding worker himself on the grounds that violence had occurred. Two hundred police were dispatched to guard the Servel plant. Management bullied grocery stores into cutting off the accounts of strikers.

In 1939, sit-down strikes were made illegal under the Wagner Act. That marked the beginning of a series of dramatic changes to the organizing landscape. As Feurer writes, the Maytag and Servel campaigns were “emblematic of how the union tide was rolled back in the wake of political and economic retrenchment.” World War II changed everything about industry in America and what it meant to be a Communist. Sentner fought a thousand battles between workers and management all across the Midwest’s District 8, but worker power was stifled at the federal level, especially by the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.

Meanwhile, McCarthyist anticommunism was brewing, and the call was coming from inside the house. Catholic anti-communists formed a faction in the UE that would “sneak up the alley St. Louis University from [the] union offices on West Pine to Father Leo Brown,” Feurer writes. There Brown would coach union men on how to turn fellow members against Communists.

By 1950, local papers like the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and Post-Dispatch ran stories about the CIO “shaking loose” from Sentner. Amid the hostile political climate, some unions backed away from previous commitments, even undoing the integration of black workers. Opal Cline, a Local 1102 member, was labeled a “national security threat” for protesting the lower wage she received as a woman.

It was late in negotiations at Eagle Signal when Sentner was awoken in his hotel room by an FBI agent’s knock at the door. They arrested him for violating the Smith Act and were bemused to find a fishing license in his wallet rather than Communist paraphernalia. “The only thing I have conspired in is to keep the Eagle Signal Corporation from installing an incentive system at the plant,” Sentner said.

The Second Red Scare produced legislation that equated any interest in Marxist ideas with an endorsement of the violent overthrow of the US government. Sentner’s arrest was “part of the ‘red roundup’ of ‘second string’ midwestern Communist leaders,” Feurer writes.

Over the course of 1954, Sentner defended his beliefs in socialism and democracy. He published a newsletter with updates on his trial:

I sit in Court as the prosecution calls upon stool pigeon after stool pigeon to recite their lies. I keep telling myself that certainly this jury will not believe all this stuff. And then I remind myself that this is a jury composed in the main of big shot executives and small businessmen. Most of these kinds of people are dead set against labor.

Supporters of Sentner in the District 8 Defense Committee published a pamphlet titled “The Veiled Prophet, How It Began,” noting the interracial solidarity of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and placing Sentner in that tradition. The pamphlet included a drawing of the Veiled Prophet, emblematic of St Louis’s wealthy white elite and their ties to the Ku Klux Klan, wielding a pistol and a pair of handcuffs, listening through a closed door. The drawing is captioned “SMITH ACT THOUGHT CONTROL.”

The jury found Sentner and four other St Louis defendants guilty. They sentenced him to five years in prison, but he was released pending appeal.

Sentner walked free but was ousted as District 8 president. He returned to a life in St Louis where he couldn’t find work, and his family suffered in poverty. He took odd jobs to make ends meet, eventually finding steady employment on the maintenance crew at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

Months after the Supreme Court overturned the Smith Act, Sentner died of a heart attack. He was fifty-one, a father of three, and a vast crowd attended his funeral. As Feurer notes, workers held great affection for Sentner “even when they were not free to openly express it.”

St Louis suffered in his absence and in the wake of the labor movement’s better days. In the 1970s and ’80s, deindustrialization hit St Louis hard. The combination of anticommunism and resegregation vanquished the world of ideas that once buoyed the local working class.

The governing logic of Sentner’s District 8 was “human rights over property rights,” and he believed in breaking down barriers of social difference to realize this vision. Up to his final days, Sentner advocated for an American working-class party to come — a party dedicated to socialist principles, that would unite us all in one big union.