Joe Manley’s biography reads like a history of the U.S. radical movement; a Dublin-born iron molder who was a member of the Western Federation of Miners in Butte; then the Socialist Party in Washington state where he was expelled with William Z. Foster; with Foster he would be closely associated the rest of his life. Following Foster’s trajectory through syndicalism into the A.F.L. and, in 1921, into the Communist Party, where he soon became central figure, leading much of the early T.U.E.L. project and writing extensively for the Daily Worker. Manley was also leader of the ‘Foster-Cannon’ faction and would largely withdraw from activity after the 1925 victory of the opposing Lovestone-Ruthenbeg-Pepper faction. It was then that he died; at work, in a fall from a Brooklyn building site, a veteran member of the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers’ Union. Fellow ‘Fosterite’ Alexander Bittelman with Manley’s political biography.

‘Joseph Manley’ by Alexander Bittelman from The Daily Worker Saturday Supplement. Vol. 3 No. 204. September 11, 1926.

JOE was a worker, a proletarian and a militant fighter. When a man like him dies the labor movement sustains a great loss.

He was only 39 years old. Still young and energetic and with a future of struggle in the cause of labor which would have placed him among the best and most valuable leaders in the international working class movement. But fate and the damnable capitalist system willed differently. And Joseph Manley is no more.

On August 26, 1926, the life of Joseph Manley came to an end. His death resulted from internal injuries sustained in a fall from a building in Brooklyn, New York, on August 24, upon which he was employed as an iron worker.

FROM what I know of Joseph Manley, that was not the way he would have liked to die. Joe was a born proletarian revolutionist. He had it in his blood to hate capitalism and capitalist oppression. His whole makeup was that of challenge, resistance and struggle. And nothing would have suited Joe better than to lay down his life when the time came-in the working class struggle for power and for a new order of society.

JOSEPH MANLEY was born on July 26, 1887, in Dublin, Ireland. His father was a physician and an explorer, but most of his mother’s family were workers employed in the making of casks, barrels and tubs. That is probably the reason why ten-year-old Joe was made a cooper’s apprentice when the time came around for him to begin making a living. At about the same time Joe became a member of his trade union.

He emigrated to Canada in 1907 and soon afterwards came to the United States. Here he joined the Western Federation of Miners. During 1907-8-9 he worked in Butte and in Cobalt. In 1910 he became a bridge-man and joined the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers’ Union, of which he was a member (16 years) until his death.

The political and intellectual development of Joseph Manley is interesting and instructive in many respects. The road of Manley was traveled by many American workers. Some of them, along with Manley, have gone the whole length and have come to be Communists and active members of the Workers (Communist) Party. Others have stopped in the middle of the road and are still wavering between the deadening conservatism of Gompers and the invigorating, promising creativeness of Communism. Still others have turned back on their militant past and have become satisfied with merely vegetating and slowly dying away either in the folds of Gomperism or in the morass of impotent futility of anarchism, syndicalism, etc.

Manley started out on the field of class struggle as a trade unionist. Ten years of age he became a cooper’s apprentice in Dublin, Ireland, and joined the union. A European worker of his type might have started out as a socialist, but for a militant working class youngster in Great Britain (or in the United States, for that matter) a quarter of a century ago the natural and possible thing was to enter the class struggle thru the trade union. Why? Because there, unlike many countries on the European continent, it was not socialism but trade unionism that stood at the cradle of the class struggle.

But when Manley came to Canada in 1907 he was already mature for a fuller understanding of and participation in the class struggle. He joined the socialist party of Canada and later, when he came to the United States, the socialist party of America. This was no accident. During the decade (1897-1907) of work, struggle and union membership in Ireland Manley had learned things. His liking for books and reading, together with a more than ordinary faculty for thinking and reasoning had made Joe Manley, around the twentieth year of his life, a conscious opponent of capitalism and a determined fighter for socialism. The great crisis of 1907, the unemployment and suffering of large asses of workers, which met Manley on his arrival in the United States  must have exerted a powerful influence upon his intellectual and political development.

However, Manley did not stay long in the socialist party. He was expelled from its Washington state organization in 1909, together with a whole group of left wingers, among them William Z. Foster, with whom Manley collaborated later in many outstanding events in the American labor movement.

As a member of the socialist party of America Manley was a left wing socialist. Tho he couldn’t very well, as far back as 1909, have crystallized a consistent revolutionary working class philosophy like the one represented by the Communist International, yet he was proletarian revolutionist enough to rebel against the anti-proletarian, opportunistic and compromising policies of the socialist party leadership. For this he was expelled, but it did not hurt him.

On the contrary, since then Manley’s intellectual life became more intense. He became deeply occupied with the basic problems of the proletarian class struggle. At first he joined the Industrial Workers of the World. Like many another militant worker of those days, this was Manley’s way of challenging the reactionary bureaucracy of the American Federation of Labor and their opportunistic counterpart in the socialist movement. Joe was in search of a revolutionary proletarian organization and he thought he had found it in the I.W.W.

One must remember that that was the period before the world war and the Russian revolution, before Lenin as the world proletarian leader and before the Communist International. Now it is easier for a militant worker in America to find his way, but it was not so when Manley was groping toward a revolutionary working class organization. Disgusted with the reactionaries and opportunists of the “official” labor family, Joe later on switched off toward syndicalism and became active in the Syndicalist League of North American, led by Foster.

The world war and the collapse of reactionary syndicalism, along with opportunist socialism; the futility of traditional dual unionism as a means of revolutionizing the American labor movement; the great and obvious need of a political mass party of the workers which became so pronounced since about 1912; all these developments have brought Manley back into the main stream of the American labor movement. Together with Foster, Johnstone and several more revolutionary trade unionists, Manley became actively engaged in large organization campaigns within the American Federation of Labor. Chief among those were the organization of the stockyard workers in Chicago and the organization of the steel workers, which resulted in the great steel strike.

In the steel campaign Manley has been closely associated with Foster. During 1918-1922 Manley was an active member of the national commit-tee for the organization of the steel industry, functioning there as the representative of his union, the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers’ Union. Later he was directing the campaign of his union to organize the non-union bridge shops.

During this period of his life, when he was actively engaged in large organization campaigns within the A.F. of L., Manley already had a clear conception of the wider meaning of these activities. He realized quite definitely that the way to revolutionize the A.F. of L. is to bring into its ranks the large masses of the unskilled unorganized workers, to build an effective left wing movement in the organization and thus seek to defeat the reactionaries in the unions. It was this line of reasoning that made Manley one of the leading spirits of the Trade Union Educational League led by Wm. Z. Foster.

It was at about the same time, and because of these activities, that Manley became a prominent figure in the Chicago Federation of Labor. That was the time when Fitzpatrick and Nockels still had in them the genuine spark of loyalty to the workers and a good measure of militancy in fighting for their ideas against the opposition of Gompers and his machine. Due to the general progressiveness of Fitzpatrick and Nockels, reinforced by the effective work of Foster, Manley, Johnstone and other left wingers, the Chicago Federation of Labor was then holding the place of the most progressive center in the American labor movement.

Manley’s horizon was continually growing wider. His conceptions of the class struggle were beginning to approach those of the most advanced section of the world labor movement–the Communist International. The Russian Revolution undoubtedly had a profound effect upon his whole make-up. His revolutionary working class instincts at last found a concrete political expression. His sympathies were all with the proletarian revolution. During the famine in the Soviet Union Joseph Manley joins actively in relief work and becomes the secretary of the Trade Union Committee for Russian Relief.

At that time Manley was so close to the Communist movement ideologically that his actual membership in the party became a practical question. And when Joe had realized this fact he made the logical conclusion. In 1921 Manley becomes a member of the Communist Party of America

From that time on and until about a year before his untimely death Manley is to be found in the front ranks of every progressive and militant step in the American labor movement. As one of the founders of the Trade Union Educational League, Manley carries on active work for the building of a left wing in the trade unions in the capacity of eastern district organizer of the T.U.E.L. With the sweep of the farmer-labor party movement in 1922-23 Manley becomes one of the most active Communists in the movement. So much so that when the federated farmer-labor party was formed in July, 1923, Manley was elected national secretary-treasurer of the organization. In this work he was greatly aided by the experiences that he gathered in previous years as a leading spirit of the farmer-labor party of the United States led by Fitzpatrick.

As he grew in political maturity and Communist Party experience, he also became an influential man in the party. During 1923-25 he stood very close to the central leadership of the Workers (Communist) Party of America and was later made a candidate of its central executive committee. Unfortunately, the sharp internal struggles in the party had the effect of weakening his ability for active party work and even moved him to complete abstention from participating in political and party life. But that was a frame of mind which could not have lasted very long with Joseph Manley. He was too proletarian, too ardent a revolutionist and follower of the Communist International to be satisfied with the role of mere onlooker in the class struggle for any length of time. Comrades that have been close to Manley are quite positive in saying that shortly before his death he was beginning to chafe under the position of inactivity and was seriously considering the question of actively re-entering party life.

The labor movement and our party have lost in the death of Joseph Manley a valuable comrade in arms. His proletarian past, revolutionary temperament and his rich experiences in the class struggle and in the trade union movement would have made Manley an outstanding leader in the revolutionary struggle of the American working class.

Let this short and by no means adequate recital of Manley’s life serve as a tribute to his memory and as a reminder to the working class militants still on their way to hasten their movements, to come into our party and help build the power that will lead the American workers to their final liberation.

The Saturday Supplement, later changed to a Sunday Supplement, of the Daily Worker was a place for longer articles with debate, international focus, literature, and documents presented. The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1926/1926-ny/v03-n204-supplement-sep-11-1926-DW-LOC.pdf