Quill, Mike

QUILL, MIKE (1905–1966). One of the most colorful personalities in twentieth-century American labor history, Michael Joseph Quill was chief organizer and longtime president (1936–1966) of the Transport Workers Union of America. Born into an ardently nationalist family in the west of Ireland, Quill emerged from the war of independence with England and the subsequent civil war (Quill fought with Irish Republican Army [IRA] forces against the partition of Ireland) with a fine war record. This made him persona non grata in the Irish Free State but very welcome in nationalist circles in New York, where he immigrated in 1926. Quill joined the Clan na Gael, the American affiliate of the IRA, and after a series of odd jobs went to work in the New York subways in 1926. The New York transit workers, at the time, were more than 70 percent foreign (mostly Irish) born.

When Irish socialist James Gralton was deported from Ireland to the United States in 1933, Quill resumed work begun the year before organizing Irish Workers Clubs in New York. He was among the Clan na Gael subway workers whom Gralton tutored in socialism and the writings of James Connolly, Ireland’s premier socialist theoretician. Connolly’s critique of the 1907 Yonkers, New York, trolleymen’s strike, in particular, became a blueprint for the embryonic Transport Workers Union.

A nucleus of Clan na Gael members began actively organizing subway workers in 1934, at the same time the Communist Party of the United States (CP) was attempting independently to organize New York transit workers. After being refused support for their organizing drive by the major Irish American fraternal organizations—even though Quill was a well-known figure in New York Irish circles, as a popular emcee for Irish ceili dances—Quill and his Clan na Gael colleagues sought help from the CP. The Party provided salaries, organizers, legal support, an editor, and the wherewithal to start a union newspaper.

The twelve- to fourteen-hour split shifts, meanwhile, and the seven-day work week required of transit workers, provided New York subway workers ample incentive to join the union. Imposing IRA discipline on union organizers, Quill outflanked the employers’ elaborate industrial espionage network. (It was estimated at the time that every fifth employee earned an extra dollar a week by reporting back to the company office on coworkers’ activities.)

In 1937 and 1938, union-recognition elections were won decisively by the TWU, which affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Quill, meantime, had become a New York celebrity. He was elected to the city council, representing the Bronx, in 1937 (and reelected in 1943 and 1945). He made regular broadcasts from the city-owned radio station, WNYC. The newspapers baited him as “Red Mike,” while finding him eminently quotable. (An affectionately sarcastic spoof of Quill’s career, “The Shamrock and the Sickle,” was the main event at the annual New York City Press Club Dinner in 1946.)

In 1948 Quill, who may or may not have ever officially been a member of the CP, broke with Party policy irrevocably over two issues. He insisted on supporting (in accord with CIO policy) Truman, rather than Wallace, for president in 1948, and he refused to oppose a proposed nickel increase in the subway fare (which was slotted to fund, among other things, a healthy increase in transit workers’ wages).
Quill’s top officials in the union were privately divided over the wisdom of the CP position on these issues, but publicly condemned Quill, who retaliated by deposing them from office. For several years Quill engaged in red-baiting, and then quietly readmitted to the TWU a number of the Communists he had expelled, who had been instrumental in founding the union.

In 1966, after engaging in decades of ritual, much-publicized battles with respective New York City mayors as contract negotiations came down to the wire—always settling at the last minute without a strike—Quill led New York’s transit workers out on strike. The strike began fifteen minutes into Mayor John Lindsay’s new administration, lasted thirteen days, and won a fifteen-percent pay increase. Quill, characteristically, fed the press corps a barrage of quotable quotes, capped by his memorable: “May the Judge drop dead in his black robes.” Jailed in the course of the strike, Quill, who had been ailing, collapsed in his jail cell and was dramatically rushed to the hospital. He died three weeks later.

Cronin, Sean. “James Connolly and the Transport Workers Union of America: The Ideological Links with Mike Quill and His Associates.” Dublin: Labour History Workshop, 1983.

Freeman, Joshua. In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933–1966. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Quill, Shirley. Mike Quill, Himself. Greenwich, Conn.: Devin Adair, 1985.

Transport Workers Union of America. Moving Ahead: The TWU at Fifty. New York: TWU, 1984.

Whittemore, L. H. The Man Who Ran the Subways. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968.