George Morris

George Morris (April 6, 1903 – 1997) was an American writer and labor editor for the CPUSA Daily Worker newspaper who left a body of written work and oral history that documents militant trade unionism as part of American labor history during the first half of the 20th century – including the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike.

Background

George Morris was born "Morris Yusem" on April 6, 1903, to a Jewish family in Raehni (Reni?), Russian Empire (now part of Ukraine). Around 1919, he came to New York City and became a founding member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). On February 24, 1928, Morris Yusem, garment worker, received a US passport to travel in Western Europe; on May 11, 1929, he received another passport to travel to Russia. In 1959, the US Congress questioned Harry Bridges about Morris.

In 1959 and 1966, Morris took "extended trips" to the USSR to study Soviet trade unions.

In October 1964, an explosive device arrived by mail to the offices of The Worker, addressed to Morris; a police bomb squad dismantled it. It was the second such bomb in a week, and members of the police in both Chicago and New York, as well as the US Post Office Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated the attempted bombings.

Sol Bryson speaks at Morris's sendoff reception, November 15, 1971.(L-R): Si Gerson, George Morris, Louis Weinstock, Sol Bryson.

Morris' 1971 article on the police received mention in 2015 Workers World newspaper, republished in 2020 in Struggle for Socialism newspaper: A column by George Morris, the Daily Worlds labor analyst, waxes eloquent about the cops' strike and says "it is in the spirit of rebellion we see everywhere today as in unions against the long entrenched bureaucracy." He further says that the cops are "beginning to see themselves as in much the same position as other city employees and workers." Finally, he admonishes his readers that "fire should not be blunderbussed against all on the police force." You see, the way to look at it is that there are good cops and bad cops, just like there are good capitalists and bad ones. We must assume then, that there are good storm troopers and bad ones if we use the logic of George Morris. In this way, Morris substitutes bourgeois morality for Marxist analysis of class antagonisms and contradictions between class groupings.

Legacy In addition to his written works, Morris gave an Oral history in 1980, whose topics include: 1934 West Coast waterfront strike International Longshoremen's Association and its president Joe Ryan Rank and File issues Impact on jobs due to the growing use of containerization in shipping Laborers' International Union of North America and Angelo Fosco International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and Harry Bridges Marine Workers Industrial Union, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and Joe Kearny Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and John L. Lewis AFL–CIO Communist Party USA Cold War How Wall Street Picks Your Pocket (1946) The Red-Baiting Racket (1947) How to Make Your Vote Count (1948) Where is the CIO Going? (1949) A Tale of Two Waterfronts (1952) Labor and Anti-Semitism (1953) What I Saw... in the Soviet Union Today (1959) CIA And American Labor: The Subversion Of The AFL-CIO's Foreign Policy (1967)