1934 New York Hotel Strike

The Fieldites were a small leftist sect that split from the Communist League of America in 1934 and known officially as the Organizing Committee for a Revolutionary Workers Party and then the League for a Revolutionary Workers Party. The name comes from the name of its leader B.J.Field.

Born Max Gould in 1903, B.J. Field had been a successful Columbia educated petroleum analyst on Wall Street before the crash of 1929. Afterwords he became a Trotskyist and led informal discussion groups at his home with the other members. When the New York branch of the CLA first expelled him for not putting these under the direction of the party, he traveled to Constantinople to get permission from Trotsky himself.

The immediate causes of the split were rooted in the New York Hotel strike of January 1934, led by Field on behalf of the CLA. Though the strike was successful in gaining some concessions, Field was expelled in February for not accepting CLA discipline and not getting adequate safeguards for former strikers against discrimination. In his book on the history of American Trotskyism, James P. Cannon - at the time a major leader of the CLA - provides a detailed (though manifestly polemic and hostile) account of Field's antecedents and his part in the hotel strike.

As noted by Cannon, in the late 1920s some CLA members happened to be involved in a small hotel workers' union which organized only a small part of the workforce. In 1932, the CLA regarded the sudden upsurge in unionism among the hard-pressed hotel workers as its big chance, throwing much of its resources and membership into this struggle - among them B.J. Field. A statistician, economist and linguist, Field had no previous trade union experience, but his fluent knowledge of French was of crucial importance in establishing contact with the hotels' French chefs, many of whom did not speak English. Because of the chefs' prestige and their being "the most strategically important sector in the hotel situation", their adherence to the strike was a major coup, for which Field got credit. For their part, the chefs insisted that Field be placed at the head of the new union. In this position he got much into the public eye and had his photo in the New York papers. His fame and prestige soared especially after a series of mass meetings, the biggest of which - at the annex of the Madison Square Garden - drew a crowd of no less than 10,000 people.

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