i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

62 / Neel’s Social Realist Artwould assume Whalen to be a mill or mine worker, but Whalen was a maritimeworker, a seaman stationed in Baltimore, the ƒrst of several importantunion leaders Neel recorded. Why then no newspaper reference to the greatWest Coast maritime strike that had erupted in May 1934? Perhaps Neelchose instead to refer to the inter-union con„ict that would lead in October ofthat year to the creation of the left-leaning industrial union, the CIO, by JohnL. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers. Whalen’s Marine Workers IndustrialUnion had dissolved in 1935, and so the future of the union movement,and the communists’ position within it, was unstable. Whalen’s two clenchedƒsts, planted on the Daily Worker, may indicate the double front on whichcommunist union leaders were then forced to ƒght.Neel’s 1983 remembrance of Whalen, like all good oral (anecdotal) history,encapsulates more scholarly written histories, such as Bruce Nelson’s Workerson the Waterfront (1988):Patty Whalen was the organizer on the waterfront . . . He was just an ordinary Irishmanexcept for one thing: He was absolutely convinced of Communism, and hecould convince other longshoremen . . . I painted another painting of him pullingdown the swastika „ag from the Bremen, but I painted over it . . . A liberty ship wasnamed for him after the war, but during the McCarthy era they changed the nameof the ship . . .George Myers told us a great story about when Patty Whalen was head of theport of Baltimore, a very important job. Patty Whalen would go into a bar. Hewould demand a drink for a black man who was with him. They’d say: “We do notserve Negroes here.” So Patty Whalen would take his heavy glass of beer andsmash the mirror . . . And ƒnally the owners of the bar were so intimidated thatthey would sell to Negroes.” 58Neel’s verbal picture of a communist union activist conƒrms Nelson’s thesisthat the maritime unions in the 1930s, motivated by “a powerful determinationto transform the world of work,” made major gains during the Depression59 and were not paralyzed by the social inertia of the working class. 60Although Whalen is not mentioned in Nelson’s discussion of the MarineWorker’s Industrial Union in Baltimore, he characterizes the leaders there asparticularly hard-working and self-sacriƒcing. 61 During the Popular Front era,their most conspicuous and dramatic acts involved pulling down the swastikasfrom German ships in Olympia, Washington, San Francisco, and New York.Whalen, with his unshakable resolve, has all of the attributes of the leaders inthese years, as well as the record of Communist proselytizing, and of ƒghtingagainst particularism, racial discrimination, and fascism that characterized theunion’s heroes. 62 Neel’s portrait is a record of communist idealism in the