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by Jeff Mackler
Following is an edited and expanded version of the remarks by Jeff Mackler that opened the June 12, 2004 Oakland, Calif., memorial meeting for Bob Mattingly—who wrote for Socialist Action newspaper and other publications generally under the pseudonym Charles Walker. Some 80 friends, family members, trade union militants, and comrades attended the memorial event.
I met Bob Mattingly almost 34 years ago when we were both members of the Socialist Workers Party’s Oakland branch. This was the beginning of a political collaboration that ran through the six-month 1972 Teamster strike against the Pepsi Cola Corporation, in which Bob was deeply involved, and continued, interrupted for a while here and there, until the last weeks of Bob’s life, when we discussed what lessons were to be drawn from the recent strike of 70,000 Southern California grocery workers who valiantly but unsuccessfully struggled to preserve the hard won gains of their union.
Bob’s loving wife Ethel asked me to help facilitate this gathering of Bob’s family, friends, trade-union collaborators, fellow workers, and socialist comrades.
Bob and Ethel were married for 36 years. They met at the home of Asher and Ruth Harer in San Francisco in 1968 and were married in 1974. Their daughters “Big Michelle and “Little Michelle,” as they were called in their childhood, are here with us today, as is Bob’s first wife, Sue Roglin. Ethel correctly observed that Bob’s modesty might well have led him to reject having any form of ceremony to commemorate his life and achievements.
But our love and respect for Bob’s work and person compels us to meet here today nonetheless to pay homage to a journey well spent in the service of all humanity and because Bob meant so much to his family, friends, and comrades.
Bob Mattingly was born on Jan. 4, 1933, in Chicago. He was a working man all his adult life and proud of it. And he was a militant trade unionist all of his adult life and equally proud. Bob was also a revolutionary socialist who devoted his life to the emancipation of the working class from a social system he considered to be contrary to the interests to the vast majority.
In his youth Bob worked as a busboy and as an elevator operator. His formal education consisted of one semester at San Francisco State University. But he had a Ph.D in revolutionary politics, especially as they applied to the organized labor movement.
Bob began his final job as a Teamster-organized bottler at the Bay Area Pepsi plant, where he worked for 35 years, 20 of them as a union shop steward. He served Teamster Local 896 as an elected Business Representative from 1985 to 1988 and retired in 1989.
For the past 15 years Bob focused his energies on advancing labor’s cause as an independent labor activist, agitator, and writer.
Before his job at Pepsi, Bob ran the Spartacus Bookstore for two years in Berkeley and then Mattingly’s Bookstore for a year and half in San Francisco. Spartacus was the legendary slave whose mass rebellion came close to toppling the Roman Empire 2000 years ago. History’s lessons were among Bob’s greatest strengths.
Bob was always passionate about books, about reading and learning what made the world go round. He sought knowledge to understand the world he lived in and to change it.
Writing eventually became central to Bob’s life, his most potent tool to win workers to what he called a class-struggle perspective in the trade-union movement and in society more generally. His skillful analyses of trade-union politics resulted in an outpouring of insightful and sometimes brilliant articles that were printed in a variety of labor and socialist publications, from my own party’s newspaper, Socialist Action, to the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism and its successor, Labor Standard, to Socialist Viewpoint and Labor Notes, to name just a few.
Bob was an activist in the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and a regular at its national conventions as he was at the national gatherings of Labor Notes, a rank-and-file organization of union activists. Not long ago more than 100 of his TDU friends assembled in the Bay Area to celebrate Bob’s contribution to the cause of democratic and militant trade unionism.
Bob played an important role in Ron Carey’s election to the national Teamster presidency in his two successful campaigns against the union’s old guard. I recall that Carey offered Bob a job at the IBT’s national headquarters working on Teamster publications. Bob’s advancing age compelled him to regretfully decline.
Bob was outraged at the government’s role in removing Carey from office following Carey’s breakthrough role in leading the successful 1997 United Parcel Service (UPS) strike that demonstrated to the entire labor movement what a democratic and fighting union could accomplish against the most powerful of adversaries.
But the UPS victory was short-lived as top government officials moved to punish Carey for the blow his Teamsters struck against a powerful employer.
Carey was framed up on false charges and removed from office by the government’s receivership, paving the way for the return to the IBT presidency of company man and corrupt bureaucrat, James Hoffa Jr.
Bob was gravely disappointed when the TDU leadership failed to defend Carey against the government’s intervention in the Teamsters and from their refusal to mobilize Teamster power against this move. Bob’s confidence in Carey was vindicated when each and every charge leveled against him was repudiated during Carey’s trial. Vindicated or not, however, Carey was banned from holding Teamsters office.
Bob joined the Socialist Workers Party during the McCarthy witch-hunt era in 1957. It was a time of retrenchment for the party and a time when only the most dedicated and brave linked their futures to the success of the working-class movement and its vanguard organization.
Bob was recruited to the SWP branch in Los Angeles at age 25 by Carl Feingold, a youthful militant who eventually became a close associate of SWP founder, James P. Cannon. The Los Angeles branch at that time included many from the core group of American Trotskyists who had weathered the witch hunt and recruited the first generation of 1960s youth that rebuilt the SWP and went on to help lead the mighty American antiwar mobilizations that contributed to ending the war in Vietnam.
Bob’s early SWP comrades were veteran trade unionists from the 1930s, including Milt and Tyve Alvin, Dave Cooper, Oscar Coover, and Ted Selander.
Bob wrote under the pen name Charles Walker, the author of the classic history of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster’s general strike, “American City.”
It was that strike that helped to pave the way for the unionization of the American working class and the formation of the CIO three years later. Bob absorbed to the marrow of his being labor’s proud history and militancy.
Bob and his wife Ethel recently began a regular May Day sojourn to Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery to lay a red carnation on the gravestone of IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) leader Vincent St. John. The marker had been placed there just three years ago. Bob and Ethel agreed on a yearly visit since that time, desiring to rededicate themselves to the workers’ cause for social justice, freedom, and equality.
On May Day 2004, Bob again visited the grave with Ethel and his two daughters. The photos taken that day include his daughters celebrating St. John’s fighting spirit with clenched fists.
During the last few years, when times were sometimes tough for me and some old friends had faded away, I came to enjoy calling Bob, just to chat on the progress of this or that strike—from the ILWU’s potential challenge to the bosses and government last year to the recent Southern California grocery strike just a few months ago.
Bob’s failing health prevented him from writing a full account of this strike, a five-month battle that ended in what Bob considered a major defeat for the entire U.S. labor movement. He urged me to tell the story straight and spare nothing in laying the blame on the UFCW’s bureaucratic misleaders for turning what could have been a precedent-setting victory into a tragic defeat.
Bob’s life was spent in the cause of the workers’ movement and in the pursuit of an egalitarian socialist society. It was my great pleasure and honor to have been his friend and comrade.
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