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    Publishing Information

    Presenting John P. Frey

    By Paul W. Ward

    The Nation
    February 13, 1937
    Vol. 144, No. 7, P. 176-177

    Washington, February 7

  1. While the rest of the nation mulls over the President's move to dodge the constitutional reform issue by padding the Supreme Court, let's take up the case of John P. Frey, chief backbiter of the American labor movement at the moment. Frey has just issued a public statement attacking the sitdown-strike technique as "made in Moscow." Before that he successfully used his influence to get the Cleveland Federation of Labor to rescind its resolution indorsing the C. I. O. strike at local General Motors plants. And before that he had engineered a demand by metal and building-trades unions that General Motors reopen its plants and refuse to deal with the C. I. O. "outlaws."

  2. All these things have been of invaluable aid to labor's enemies in creating the idea that the American labor movement's rebirth in the General Motors strike was and is illegitimate. They have been of aid solely because they bore the stamp of a supposedly responsible and high-minded labor leader, the president of the A. F. of L.'s metal-trades department. It is important, therefore, to consider precisely what kind of man Frey is, and we may as well begin that consideration by reporting that among labor lobbyists here—both A. F. of L. and C. I. O.—he commonly is referred to as the liaison officer between the A. F. of L. and Army Intelligence. Neither Frey nor the War Department will confirm this report, of course, and the War Department records show simply that he has been since 1928 a lieutenant colonel in the Reserve Corps and only recently was retired to the "inactive" list because of his age.

  3. The report itself may help to explain why Colonel Frey not long ago boasted to some newspapermen that he sees copies of all the confidential correspondence passing between Communist leaders in this country and abroad. It may also explain why the La Follette committee—in exposing the National Metal Trades Association as a far-flung espionage agency engaged, with the aid of some of Frey's subordinates, in sabotaging the very unions Frey is supposed to lead—was unable to obtain any helpful data from Frey but was offered by him, instead, a mass of alleged evidence showing Communist "infiltration" of the trade unions. Once a year he struts off to the War College to teach the soldiers about organized labor; and those in his audience who are attached to Army Intelligence go on helping the labor-espionage agencies with their work, while the War Department tightens up its plans to conscript labor during the next war.

  4. Frey, if he were not actually dangerous, and potentially more so, would be a laugh-provoking spectacle. An inherently stupid man, he is full of pretensions to scholarliness. But even his appearance stirs the risibilities, especially when, as so frequently happens, he dons his officer's uniform and goes on parade. He is almost Negroid in appearance but unbearably Aryan in his race pride. In recent years he has taken to boasting that his forbears were Prussians and that his name is, by rights, von Frey. He was born sixty-six years ago at Mankato, Minnesota, of a German father and a French mother. During the World War he emphasized his French ancestry and efficiently served as Gompers's French interpreter overseas. In the years immediately after the war he used to denounce anything distasteful to himself and the rest of the A. F. of L. hierarchy as "made in Germany," just as today he denounces the sitdown strike as "made in Moscow." Until recently unemployment insurance in Colonel Frey's opinion was "made in Moscow," and he publicly reviled it as a scheme destined to destroy the labor movement. At the 1920 A. F. of L. convention at Montreal he dubbed the stand of the railroad brotherhoods for public ownership as "made in Germany" and helped Gompers and Mart Woll to keep the convention from indorsing the brotherhoods' position.

  5. He belongs to the Molders' Union, which gave us Tom Mooney, and rose to his present eminence via the editorship of the Molders' Journal, which he held from 1903 to 1927. Frey joined his colleagues on the union's executive board in suppressing the progressive inclinations of the rank and file and thus reducing the union to its present size and impotence. This man who now assails the sitdown strike as a threat to democratic process in trade unionism has all his life been engaged in stifling rank-and-file efforts and crushing democracy out of the labor movement. In 1924 rank-and-file delegates to the Molders' Union convention put over resolutions calling for a third party and for amalgamation in the metal trades, that is, industrial unionization. The union's delegates to the A. F. of L. convention that year were instructed to present and fight for the adoption of similar resolutions by the federation. Frey and the rest of the salaried officers of the union were its delegates to the A. F. of L. convention. That delegation, with Frey taking a leading part, decided that the delegates to the Molders' Union convention did not know what the rank-and-file membership wanted and that the resolutions they had adopted were unwise and unsound. They proceeded to oppose instead of support the position which their own convention had taken by democratic process. The "dictatorship by militant minorities," which Frey discovers and assails in the General Motors sitdown strike was not distasteful to him in 1924.

  6. It was this same Frey who "prosecuted" the C. I. O. unions in the proceedings before the A. F. of L. executive council last year that resulted in their suspension from the federation. He played a similar role at the A. F. of L. convention and became so overwrought that he had to leave for a European rest cure. John L. Lewis recently remarked that he never thought of Frey without recalling the Buffalo convention of the A. F. of L. when, as Frey was making a speech, Jim Fitzpatrick, of Actors' Equity, leaned over and said to Lewis, "I've been coming to these conventions for twenty years and all I've ever seen that man [Frey] do is constantly try to correct the mistakes of God." Frey brought to the ouster proceedings a vast venom and a stupefying array of irrelevancies. It took hours for Frey to get to the point, for it was essential to his assumed role as the great scholar of the American labor movement that he go back to the beginnings of history for his opening statement and work up gradually to date.

  7. Frey's scholarly pose is almost pure fake. Nevertheless, it is taken seriously by a great number of American leaders who regard him as a Jesuit among them and respect him unutterably for it. It even causes him to be called "Dr. Frey" by the swart and oily Matt Woll. Frey's reputation as a scholar is rooted almost entirely in the fact that he has read Gibbons's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." He awes the bullnecks who cluster around him at labor conventions with talk of ancient Rome. As proof that he is an authority on the subject he shows them snapshots of ruins that he himself took while on a visit to Rome some years ago. His other badge of scholarship is a book he wrote in 1922 on the history of labor injunctions. Only Frey could conceive so deadly dull a book on the subject; it would still be gathering dust in the publisher's bins if Frey's friends at the top of the A. F. of L. had not passed out word that it was good book for any labor leader to have who aspired to higher things.

  8. At the moment Frey himself is unable to devote his full time to deploring the G. M. sitdown strike because he is having to give part of it to assisting J. P. Morgan, Myron Taylor, Charles Schwab, E. T. Weir, and the rest of the steel barons in carrying forward an employers' sitdown strike. The steel manufacturers have decided not to bid on steel contracts offered by the Navy Department unless they can escape the forty-hour week imposed on all federal contractors by the Walsh-Healey bill. As a result of their strike the Navy Department is about to have to stop work on two submarines building at its Portsmouth yards and probably will have to stop work or other war craft. The navy has joined with the steel masters in bringing pressure on the Labor Department for an "emergency" exemption from the Walsh-Healey bill and, meeting no success there, has now turned to Frey and his metal trades with a plea that unless they help get an exemption out of the Labor Department 30,000 machinists will have to be laid off by the navy. Frey has agreed to conference on the matter here a few days hence and has asked that there be no public hearing and that the negotiations take place in secret. It would never occur to him or to the Navy Department either, that if an "emergency" that endangers the national security exists, the time has come for the government to take over the mills and make its own steel, instead of yielding to the steel barons, who actually are intent only on resisting the workers in their fight for unionization.