CHAPTER
12
PILOTS AND PACS, REPUBLICANS AND LABOR
The “Reagan Revolution” Hits ALPA
“I wanted to take him by the scruff of his neck and throw him out of the room,”
said President Theodore Roosevelt.
Who was the President so mad at, some tinhorn Central American dictator? Some
slick lawyer defending a cattle rustler whom Teddy had caught red-handed?
Actually, he was a perfectly respectable member of the President’s own class, a
man named George F. Baer, who had come to the White House about the little
matter of a nationwide coal strike.
“Teddy” Roosevelt, for whom the “teddy bear” was named, has come down through
history with something of a “cuddly” image. Often seen as an eternally
adolescent President, forever out hiking, camping, and exploring, Teddy’s zest
for life and concern for the “less fortunate” (as the poor were quaintly called
in those days) made him a hero to millions.
But Teddy Roosevelt had another side. He was also noted for carrying a “big
stick” (he hardly ever “walked softly”), which he used regularly on
enemies—foreign and domestic. Overseas, Teddy laid into sleazy politicians in
Latin America who dared stand in the way of his canal in Panama. At home, he took dead aim at the
corporate greedheads who were known then as “robber barons.” Teddy’s pugnacity
toward the “trusts” (or business monopolies) earned him enemies in corporate
boardrooms and affection in the hearts of ordinary Americans. In short, working
people loved Teddy Roosevelt for the enemies he made.
One such enemy was the aforementioned George F. Baer, a pompous, overbearing
labor-baiter who acted as principal spokesman for the nation’s coal mine owners.
Despite the fact that he and Teddy spoke the same language (in an upper-class
accent barely distinguishable from that of the British aristocracy), Teddy found
Baer immediately disagreeable. So disagreeable, in fact, that Teddy wanted to
lay hands on Baer and throw him bodily out of the White House.
Teddy’s angry remark about Baer came in 1902, following a meeting he had just
sat through in the White House. Teddy had called the meeting between the coal
mine operators and representatives of the United Mine Workers to help settle the
strike. This unprecedented attempt by a sitting President to mediate a labor
dispute (which the newspapers of the day were calling “The Great Anthracite Coal
Strike”) invites some obvious comparisons with the lack of action by George Bush
during the Eastern Airlines strike of 1989.
Nothing like Roosevelt’s intervention had ever
happened before. Before Teddy Roosevelt, Presidents (whether Democrat or
Republican) had been uniformly hostile to labor unions and had sided with the
courts in regarding them as “syndicalist conspiracies.” Grover Cleveland
(a Democrat, we must remember) had ordered federal troops to shoot down strikers
during the Pullman Strike of 1894, on the totally spurious grounds that they
were “interfering” with the mail.
Teddy Roosevelt was something new in the history of the American presidency and
its relationship to organized labor. Despite his wealth, patrician upbringing,
and privileged place in the American caste system of the 19th century, Teddy Roosevelt was a
fair-minded man. Unlike most men in his social class, he had actually gotten to
know the working people of America, first as a rancher in the Dakotas in the 1880s, where he became something of a cowboy. Later,
during the Spanish-American War, Teddy got to know working men even better by
sharing the unvarnished reality of combat.
So when privileged people like George Baer spouted “social Darwinism” at him,
declaring that working men were lazy and irresponsible and deserved their lowly
status because of “character flaws,” Teddy knew better. He had seen men like
these striking coal miners in action, and he knew that they were the same breed
of men who had charged up San Juan Hill with him in Cuba. They weren’t saints, but their character
under fire was far from “flawed.” So Teddy decided the miners deserved a hearing
of their grievances against the mine owners.
The coal mine operators (several of whom had been Teddy’s Harvard classmates)
had ready access to political power and influence. Teddy had already heard their
horror stories about the UMW’s penchant for violence. But he wanted to find out
for himself, firsthand, rather than have his information filtered through people
who were hostile to unions. To get at the truth, Teddy Roosevelt created what
was, in effect, the first Presidential Emergency Board in American history.
Let us flash forward from 1902 to 1989. The Eastern Airlines employees, stressed
beyond endurance by their boss, Frank Lorenzo, and in the same position as the
miners during the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, needed a forum to air
their grievances. The sitting president in 1989, George Bush, was a man “born
with a silver spoon in his mouth” into an ancient family of wealth, power, and
political influence—just like Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt had gone west to the
Dakotas in the 1880s to prove himself in the rough-and-tumble
ranching business. George Bush also went west, to
Texas after graduating from Yale, to make his bones in the oil business. Teddy fought
in the Spanish-American War; Bush was the youngest Naval aviator in World War
II. But that’s where the similarity between Roosevelt and Bush stopped.
As an ex-Navy pilot, one might have expected George Bush to feel sympathy for
men like those he had fought alongside during World War II. Although there is no
evidence of any continuing interest in aviation by Bush after his military
service, nor any record of his ever having piloted an airplane again, one might
have logically expected him to give at least a fair hearing (which is
what a Presidential Emergency Board is for) to the pilots of Eastern in their
dispute with Frank Lorenzo. Teddy did as much for the coal miners who soldiered
with him in Cuba.
But for the moment, let’s put this speculation aside and return to the meeting
Teddy chaired in October 1902. He was in a state of high irritation because
winter was looming and the nation’s principal source of home heat, the grade of
coal called “anthracite,” was in short supply because of the strike. The UMW
delegation, led by John Mitchell, had already agreed to binding arbitration of
their dispute with the coal operators. As working men, they had no desire to
inflict hardship on people like themselves or to see women and children suffer
in unheated homes and factories. The purely economic aspects of their strike
were negotiable. But the miners wanted the arbitrator to recognize their
right to bargain collectively.
In a leap of faith, UMW President John Mitchell (whose rapport with
Roosevelt easily leaped across lines of class and social standing)
gambled that he could trust the President to appoint an arbitrator who would
judge this vital issue impartially. But the mine owners dug in their heels,
emphatically rejecting arbitration of the UMW’s right to bargain collectively
for coal miners. They expected Teddy Roosevelt to support them. That labor
unions were fundamentally illegitimate was, we must remember, an article of
faith among people of their background. If need be, the mine owners argued,
Teddy should call out the U.S. Army to dig coal. How dare the
President even listen to this rabble, let alone invite them into the White
House! Baer had argued forcefully that merely sitting down with the UMW
leadership at the same table was a travesty. But when the President of the
United States, against all expectations, agreed to sponsor the meeting, Baer and
his fellow mine owners really had no choice but to attend.
Advance this scenario to 1989, and one might logically expect George Bush to
at least not veto a congressional bill mandating an impartial fact-finding
commission in the Eastern Strike. Owing to Bush’s background in aviation, and
the undeniable fact that a majority of the Eastern pilots had probably voted for
him in the 1988 election, accepting such a bill would have been a painless way
to handle the pilots’ dispute with Frank Lorenzo, one that entailed no political
risks. After all, Frank Lorenzo was unlikely to retaliate by becoming a major
fund-raiser for the Democrats, as he had been for both Reagan and Bush. Not
vetoing the bill would cost Bush nothing, and as a gesture, it might earn him
political points with labor.
Back to 1902 for a moment and Teddy’s relationship with the striking UMW and
their employers. Teddy, like George Bush a blue-blooded aristocrat to his
fingertips, never tried to hide his social status. He would never have stooped
to publicly declaring pork rinds his favorite snack food, as George Bush did in
1988. Teddy’s identification with the ruling class of America
was obvious, and he never bothered with theatrical tricks to build a bogus sense
of connection with working people. To build that sense of commonality, Teddy
relied on fair play and an open mind, not cheap shots. In Teddy’s moral
universe, the price of political power was an honest stewardship of his office,
and he was supremely confident that God had ordained his Presidency and the
values by which his class lived.
And that’s what got George Baer and his fellow mine owners in trouble with Teddy
Roosevelt. Baer’s scornful attitude toward working people was bad enough, but
what really irritated Teddy Roosevelt was Baer’s belief that he spoke with the
voice of God Almighty!
“The rights and interests of the laboring man,” Baer said “will be protected not
by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite
wisdom has given control of the property interests of this country.”
As the reader will note, Baer said nothing about the role of the President of
the United States in this process. Aside from the pure pomposity of Baer’s
remark, talking that way around Teddy was unwise for Baer. Roosevelt sincerely
believed that he, not Baer, had the direct pipeline to God, and that if
anybody spoke with the authority of The Almighty, it would be the President of
the United States—not some pushy coal hustler!
Update the language used by Baer and the coal mine operators to our own time,
and they sound a lot like Frank Lorenzo. Certainly the underlying assumptions
that characterized Baer’s attitudes toward labor unions harmonize nicely with
the assumptions of the new breed that began appearing in airline management
during the 1970s. Actually, modern greedheads might have been worse, in a
philosophical sense, than the robber barons of Teddy’s day. At least Baer and
his ilk talked about their “Christian duty” and expressed a sense of noblesse
oblige—the notion that by virtue of their privileged positions, the wealthy
were responsible (in a general, or perhaps spiritual, sense) for their workers’
welfare. Contrast Baer with Lorenzo, who once declared that his flight
attendants did not deserve a living wage, and George Baer doesn’t sound
all that bad!
The underlying question that every airline pilot flying the line into the 1990s
must ask is, why was there such a difference between a president like Teddy
Roosevelt and a president like George Bush? Two men, both war heroes, both
aristocrats, both Republicans—but so very different. Bush, under circumstances
that were roughly comparable to the Great Anthracite Strike of 1902, vetoed
the congressional bill that would have created a Presidential Emergency Board
for Eastern’s pilots in 1989. Teddy took the risk of leading the effort
to settle the Great Anthracite Strike of 1902. George Bush sat on his hands.
Like his forebears in the coal industry, Lorenzo flatly rejected binding
arbitration. Both George Baer and Frank Lorenzo believed they could win the
fight with their employees, and they wanted no interference from politicians
while doing so. But there was a big difference between the coal miners’ strike
of 1902 and the airline pilots’ strike of 1989—the coal barons had to contend
with a fair-minded President who would not bow to the antilabor shibboleths of
his time, even though they constituted the “conventional wisdom.” The striking
Eastern pilots of 1989 would have no such luck with George Bush. How do we
explain this set of historical circumstances, and what does it mean for
professional airline pilots?
The Republican party was born out of the struggle against slavery. As the
vehicle of middle-class idealism, the “Grand Old Party” (GOP) came into the
political arena as the authentic voice of reform, speaking for the noblest
ideals of which the U.S. system of government is capable. As the party that freed the slaves and saved
the union, Republicanism was absolutely
dominant for two generations. Between the election of James Buchanan in 1856 and
Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, only two Democrats won the White House, and both
on flukes. Grover Cleveland got lucky in 1884 and
again in 1892 (the only split-term President in U.S. history), when the GOP
nominated weak candidates; Woodrow Wilson won in
1912 because of a split within the GOP between
Teddy’s “Progressives” and the “Old Guard” conservatives.
The long dominance of the GOP in national politics came at a price, however.
Gradually, the GOP evolved into the national conservative party, committed to
the status quo on social and economic matters and identified with the idea that
corporations should be seated first at the banquet of American life.
This political transition did not take place without a struggle. A
fierce war for the soul of the Republican party broke out in the first two
decades of the 20th century. This struggle illustrates a point that historian
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has made about U.S. history. Schlesinger argued
persuasively in The Age of Jackson and subsequently in his multi-volume
The Age of Roosevelt that U.S. political history was really about the struggle between
“businessmen” trying to
use government power for their own purposes and “reformers” trying to limit the
business community’s power over government. Generally, businessmen used
government power to line their own pockets; reformers sought to use it to serve
“the general welfare.”
In the early 20th century, this battle pitted Teddy Roosevelt and his
“Progressives” against those Republicans who called themselves the “Old Guard.”
As the dominant party, the GOP had the power to mold the social, economic, and
political landscape, so it was natural that the conflict over these issues
should manifest itself as a factional dispute within the party. The Democrats
were a minority party, strongest in the backward South and tainted with treason
because of the old association with the Confederacy. The Democrats were, in
short, nonplayers, powerless to mold events. Post-Civil-War Republicans
dismissed the opposition by saying: “While not all Democrats were traitors, all
traitors were Democrats!”
By the early 20th century, this old argument about who was loyal to the Union
and who was a traitor, an emotional campaign technique called “waving the bloody
shirt” (which was roughly comparable to George Bush’s use of the Pledge of
Allegiance in 1988) was losing its power to obscure the real issues confronting
working Americans. The overriding issue between Teddy Roosevelt’s “Progressives”
and their “Old Guard” opponents was simple and stark: what should the limits of
corporate power be? Should the men who controlled great corporations be free,
unhindered by government, to seek profits at the expense of ordinary Americans?
Or should government have the power to shape and control corporate power in the
interests of the ordinary working people?
Teddy Roosevelt spoke for that segment of the GOP that wanted to control
corporate power, to guide its creative and beneficial aspects into socially
useful channels. He denounced the greedheads of his day as “malefactors of great
wealth” and fiercely resisted the buccaneering aspects of laissez-faire
capitalism. Did employers have the right to lock their employees into unsafe
workplaces, to avoid spending money on fire safety equipment, simply to maximize
profits? Following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York, few ordinary
Americans thought so. Several hundred women workers, trapped hopelessly in the
inferno because of their employers’ greed, perished horribly.
Teddy was outraged! The answer to such malfeasance was obvious—laws mandating
a safe workplace. The Old Guard thought this kind of interference in the
marketplace was terrible. If the women who died in the blazing shirt factory
didn’t like their conditions of employment, they were free to quit! In a
nutshell, the argument between liberals and conservatives in the 20th century
has pretty much boiled down to the question of whether government should force
businessmen to behave. Teddy Roosevelt was the first politician of stature to
take the “liberal” position. He called it the “New Nationalism.”
In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt split his party over this issue. His hand-picked
successor, William Howard Taft, whom Teddy thought a Progressive like himself,
had betrayed the cause and gone over to the Old Guard during his Presidency.
After unsuccessfully seeking to regain the GOP nomination (Teddy had retired
voluntarily from the White House in 1909), he entered the 1912 campaign at the
head of his own party, the Progressives. In the three-way race which
followed, Teddy came in second to the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, but well ahead
of Taft.
Teddy Roosevelt would die in 1919, while this war for the GOP’s soul still raged. His opponents, who controlled the
party’s machinery, eventually outlasted Teddy’s “Bull Moose” Progressives and
became dominant. During the 1920s, the GOP’s Old Guard consolidated power and
elected three presidents—Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover—who were among the
most conservative men ever to occupy the White House. The GOP increasingly
became the party of “Big Business.” Coolidge expressed this perfectly when he
said: “The business of America is business. The man who builds a factory builds a temple.
The man who works there, worships there.” George Baer couldn’t have said it
better.
And this is where airline pilots enter into the political equation. Dave Behncke
would use this remnant of Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Progressivism (so-called
because Teddy said he felt “fit as a bull moose” when he entered the 1912
election) to secure passage of the “Pilots’ Amendment” to the RLA in 1936. This
“Title II” of the RLA is arguably the most significant, far-reaching piece of
legislation in ALPA’s history, in the sense that every pilot flying the line
today still lives with it on an almost daily basis. Dave Behncke won the RLA’s
passage by adopting a cold-eyed view of politics. Can airline pilots in the next
century learn anything from him?
Dave Behncke was a child of the 1920s. He bought the whole Republican world
view. He believed the conventional wisdom of the day, which preached the values
of individualism and hard work. Behncke scratched his way up from obscurity,
became an “officer and a gentleman,” founded his own business, went broke, and
came up swinging again. John Wayne, in his finest
Hollywood fantasy, couldn’t have played Dave
Behncke’s life better than Behncke lived it. Behncke was the living embodiment
of the Republican ethos in the 1920s.
But Behncke was not stupid. After repeated bashings by the corporate power
structure that Teddy Roosevelt had failed to tame, Behncke came to the
conclusion that only labor unions provided the simple justice that working men
needed. So he became a trade unionist, learning his lessons at the elbows of
giants of the old labor movement, men like William Green of the American
Federation of Labor (AFL). The labor leaders of the 1920s, who guided Behncke as
he formed ALPA, had in turn, learned from legendary activists like Samuel
Gompers, the patron saint of 19th century unionism.
What fundamental truths did they learn? In a nutshell, labor leaders of the old
AFL learned that without friends in politics, organized labor’s position was
almost hopeless. Samuel Gompers argued for “pure and simple unionism,” but he
also taught another cardinal lesson—“Reward your friends and punish your
enemies.”
But how can airline pilots at century’s end learn from the past? What have Dave
Behncke or Samuel Gompers got to say to contemporary airline pilots, whose
unionized jobs involve a technology that neither could have imagined? Behncke
surprised many pilots by taking ALPA into the political thicket during the
1930s.
“I am a strong Roosevelt man myself,” Behncke habitually declared. “You can just
take the simple facts and put them on the table. Had it not been for him, the
picture would be pretty black today.”
But Behncke also said, somewhat slyly: “It doesn’t matter where the coal comes
from, so long as it gets on the fire.”
What Behncke meant can be seen clearly in his friendships with politicians of
both parties, Democrat and Republican. A former Bull Moose Republican named
Fiorello H. La Guardia was ALPA’s strongest congressional supporter during
Behncke’s time. Behncke understood that unions need friends in politics; but by
the 1930s, his fellow pilots were becoming skeptical. Behncke lined up with
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal at a time when many airline pilots were
beginning to think of themselves as “professionals” who belonged in the GOP
alongside doctors and lawyers. Owing to the high economic status that ALPA’s
successes had won them, many airline pilots began to lose sight of their roots
in organized labor, and they flirted with a “conservatism” that was more
emotional than practical. They forgot that most fundamental Machiavellian
dictum: “My enemy’s friend is my enemy.”
Political parties, like nations, have no permanent friends, only shifting
interests. When the interests change, so do the friends. Repeatedly, ALPA has
relied upon its friends in politics to secure its goals. In practice, this has
meant that ALPA’s friends were Democrats, because that party has served the
labor movement’s interests better since Teddy Roosevelt’s day. But it doesn’t
have to be that way.
In the scary world of deregulation, a time of turmoil and change that the Old
Guys who formed ALPA could scarcely have imagined, political alliances may well
prove as crucial as they were in Behncke’s day. Because organized labor’s
friends have mostly been Democrats, and because ALPA depends so heavily on its
friends in organized labor, it stands to reason that airline pilots should be
practical Democrats. The awful truth is that if a Democratic President had
been in the White House instead George Bush, he almost certainly would not
have vetoed the Eastern bill that Congress passed in 1989. Under the white heat
of a Presidential Emergency Board, Frank Lorenzo would undoubtedly have suffered
the kind of damage that would have forced a settlement of the Eastern Strike on
terms favorable to working people—that’s what happened in 1902.
The kind of fact-finding commission that Teddy Roosevelt pioneered, which looked
into the meat packing industry’s unsavory history and brought about the passage
of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1905, would undoubtedly have sunk Frank Lorenzo
in 1989. Harry Truman, following his reelection in 1948, paid his debt to
organized labor by forcing George T. “Ted” Baker into a settlement of the
National Airlines strike in 1948. Would Tom Dewey, the defeated Republican, have
done so? John F. Kennedy appointed the Feinsinger Commission, which investigated
the Southern Airways Strike of 1960. The result was a victory for ALPA. Would
Richard Nixon have done so?1
In the modern “global village” of instantaneous communication, public opinion is
a powerful tool. The most effective way to mobilize it,
historically, has been the kind of fact-finding commission Teddy Roosevelt
invented—the kind George Bush vetoed. Democratic Presidents have historically
been willing to use this tool in support of organized labor, while Republicans
have not. Teddy Roosevelt did not intend it to be that way.
In 1902, Teddy appointed a commission to study the miners’ grievances. The
commission met, investigated, and exposed the facts. The white heat of public
scrutiny, once focused on the mine owners’ abuses, was enough. Public opinion
did the rest. It was the first great victory for organized labor.
While Teddy Roosevelt was not exactly a fan of labor unions, he knew a knave in
a three-piece suit when he saw one, and George Baer fit the definition. Much to
his surprise, Teddy rather liked the rough-hewn UMW leader, John Mitchell. His
reasonableness and good humor contrasted favorably, in Teddy’s mind, with the
overbearing smugness of Baer.
Why didn’t George Bush sit down across a table from Frank Lorenzo, with Jack
Bavis or Skip Copeland and Hank Duffy alongside, so he could take the measure of
the men? Why was Bush unwilling to judge for himself which among these men was
the knave? Why wasn’t George Bush like Teddy Roosevelt?
In the 1980s, ALPA finally got serious about using the only weapon guaranteed to
get the attention of politicians—money. ALPA-PAC (for Political Action
Committee), created by the BOD in November 1975, was the final vindication of
Dave Behncke’s hard-headed political realism. For all his lack of formal
education, Behncke grasped the fundamental fact that only political
pressure—intelligently applied—could mold events to ALPA’s advantage. Money,
Behncke knew, was “the mothers’ milk of politics.” He waged a long guerrilla war
against pilots who just couldn’t see the connection between politics, money, and
ALPA’s well-being. Behncke’s vindication began with J.J. O’Donnell’s creation of
ALPA-PAC in 1975 and blossomed with Hank Duffy’s cold-eyed use of it in the
1980s.
The PAC concept emerged as part of the reform package of campaign financing laws
following the “Nixon scandals.” In addition to Watergate, Nixon and his minions
literally extorted campaign contributions from businessmen who depended
upon the favor of the federal government. A shamefaced series of powerful
businessmen would later plead guilty to knowingly violating the law by diverting
corporate funds to the 1972 Nixon campaign. Airline executives were particularly
vulnerable to this kind of financial mugging, all questions of ideological
kinship aside. Nixon’s attempt to convert the regulatory agencies into political
instruments was already well advanced by the time Watergate erupted. When
Congress voted on Nixon’s impeachment, “abuse of power,” particularly his
corruption of regulatory agencies like the CAB, was one of the charges that
stuck.
“I was under pressure,” Braniff’s Harding
Lawrence said when pleading guilty to making an illegal $40,000 contribution.
Indeed he was! Imagine the damage G. Gordon Liddy, John Dean, and assorted
“plumbers” could have done Braniff as members of the Civil Aeronautics Board!
The PAC reform was designed primarily to permit ordinary people to make their
political-financial muscle felt collectively. Simultaneously, the reform
movement strengthened the prohibition on direct corporate political
contributions, a law that had been on the books since the 1920s, thanks to Teddy
Roosevelt’s Progressive supporters in Congress. Henceforth, people who wished to
voluntarily contribute to a PAC, whether organized by corporations or
unions, would be free to do so. ALPA’s leadership, after a fierce internal
debate, created ALPA-PAC, which by the early 1990s was widely acknowledged as
one of the most effective and well-financed in Washington, D.C.
But because of internal conflicts brought on by the emotional Republicanism of
many pilots, ALPA-PAC was relatively quiescent until Hank Duffy energized it in
the mid-1980s, largely as a result of reverses such as the Continental strike.
“Jay was nervous about pressing for PAC contributions from the membership,”
Duffy said in his 1989 interview. “Pilots really do have a jaundiced view of the
morality of the PAC, of making contributions for favors returned. I didn’t have
that shyness. O’Donnell was raising about $180,000 per year. I raised about $1.5
million per two-year election cycle. I believe in it. It’s a great system for
ALPA. We’re not like the Teamsters, where we can affect an election through
voting power. We have to do it through our contribution power. And it works!”
O’Donnell’s reluctance to fully activate ALPA’s financial power in politics
through the PAC was understandable. Although O’Donnell lined up with Democrats
for practical reasons, he was a closet Republican and like most pilots,
emotionally attached to the conservative view. The hard realities of
politics meant that ALPA-PAC’s funds, to be effective, would have to go mostly
to Democrats. Confronted with this conundrum, O’Donnell froze at the
controls, figuratively speaking.
By the mid-1980s, as ALPA staggered under the adverse effect of deregulation,
recession, and the Lorenzo wars, taking ALPA into the political thicket via the
PAC was not only easier, but politically imperative for Duffy. No clearer
evidence can be found of this changing mood, and the sense of betrayal that
encouraged PAC contributions, than a letter that Republic Airlines MEC Chairman
Richard A. Brown sent to Ronald Reagan in 1983.
“Most of the Republic pilot group supported you and the Republican Party with
money and time in 1980,” Brown wrote in this official letter sanctioned by ALPA
national. “What Mr. Lorenzo is doing may be legal under the bankruptcy laws, but
to airline employees, it is certainly immoral. Mr. President, in your 1980
campaign, you exhibited pride in having been a union officer for the Screen
Actors Guild. Are we naive in even hoping to gain your support? To permit your
administration to support union-busting risks losing the few unions that have
supported you in the past. Though it would be difficult for us as a group to
switch our allegiance, it may be our only course of action to preserve our
jobs.”
Only money gave meaning to Brown’s threat. Certainly Hank Duffy’s long
association with the GOP as a County Chairman hadn’t paid off.
“The Reagan people just didn’t care about labor,” Duffy declares flatly.
“They were so right-wing. That was not the Republican Party I had known. I
thought we had a chance with Bush, but it was just shifting color, a shading,
still right-wing. We got to him personally, and he did send a message back
saying that his veto of the Eastern bill was not aimed at the pilots. We
wouldn’t have gotten that polite response from Reagan. He would have just said,
‘Screw you, guys.’”
As professional airline pilots began flying the line into the 1990s, a new
political awareness emerged. In the summer of 1990, ALPA-PAC’s Steering
Committee, which consisted of Hank Duffy and First Vice-President Roger Hall as
ex-officio members, plus Pat Broderick of Eastern, Andy Brown of Delta, Harry
Hoglander of TWA, Jamie Lindsay of United, and Pete Pettigrew of USAir, had a
formidable weapon at their disposal—money. Average donations of just over $100
per year by ALPA-PAC supporters, who make up slightly more than 20 percent of
ALPA’s total membership, put a powerful war chest of nearly $1 million per year
at the Steering Committee’s disposal. While ALPA-PAC made contributions purely
on a politician’s stands on issues relevant to ALPA and was, thus, nonpartisan,
Democrats got most of the money because they most often supported ALPA’s
position. That was the reality of politics that professional airline pilots had
been forced to accept by the 1990s.
As this century draws to a close, it is time for professional airline pilots to
recognize some hard political facts. From the point of view of organized labor,
Teddy Roosevelt was just about the last friendly Republican to occupy the Oval
Office. By income, education, and social inclination, pilots are emotional
Republicans. But the circumstances of their workplace require pilots to be
practical Democrats. Airline pilots who call themselves Republicans should
constantly remind their fellow Republicans that their party has betrayed its
historic legacy of fair play for unions. This legacy, which dates from the days
of Teddy Roosevelt and whose proudest moment was the invention of the impartial
fact-finding commission to investigate conflicts between management and labor,
has been all but forgotten by Republican Presidents since Teddy Roosevelt.
Unlike George Bush, who walked away from flying and never again showed the least
interest in it, Teddy was fascinated with airplanes. At St. Louis in 1910, while on a political visit to
supporters urging him to enter the Presidential contest upcoming in 1912, Teddy
visited a commercial airshow at Kinloch Park. While running his hands over the
fabric wing surface of a Wright pusher Model B, Teddy wondered aloud what it
would be like to fly. As President, he had gone down in the Navy’s first
commissioned submarine, while the nation held its breath. Arch Hoxsey, the
legendary “Birdman,” acting as the ex-President’s host, volunteered to take him
aloft. Teddy could never refuse a dare. Impetuously, he accepted. The flight
lasted three minutes. Thousands of spectators gasped as Teddy, strapped bravely
alongside Hoxsey, rode this primordial Air Force One skyward. Teddy later said
it was “bully.”
Professional airline pilots were about to rediscover the importance of having a
friend in the White House. Frank Lorenzo had plans for the pilots of Continental
Airlines that only a President like Teddy Roosevelt could have stopped.
1 See “The
National Airlines Strike of 1948” and “The Southern Airways Strike of 1960,”
Flying the Line, Chs. 13 & 18.