The International Workers Order was a Communist mutual aid society that provided, among other things, low cost insurance and medical and dental clinics to members. It reached its peak membership of 185,000 in 1947. It was a spin-off from the rival Workmen's Circle, founded by the Socialists in 1900. Like the Workmen's Circle, it was especially strong in Jewish working class neighborhoods where it ran a network of cultural and recreation centers, as well as 100 elementary schools and three secondary schools teaching Yiddish and Jewish culture and the "progressive" tradition. In 1947 it had 7,000 students in its school system. It also operated a summer camp for Red Diaper babies, Camp Kinderland, which is still in operation, as well as an adult camp, Camp Lakeland, where left wing labor activists spoke and the usual mainstays of the pro-Stalin cultural front including Pete Seeger, Leadbelly and Paul Robeson performed.
Under the Communists, the IWO became a Stalinist propaganda tool and activist organization that regularly turned out large numbers for Party rallies and protests.
The IWO expanded beyond its Jewish base by establishing a network of groups based in other ethnic groups, mostly Eastern European but also including Irish, Italian, African American and Puerto Rican lodges. In many cases these lodges competed directly with conservative ethnic organizations affiliated with the Catholic Church. Their success was due largely to their insurance and mutual aid operations. The IWO offered its members primary health care for an annual flat fee and even offered contraceptive services through its insurance program, a radical innovation The IWO was one of the few insurance organizations that did not charge blacks higher rates then whites. Membership was concentrated in the Northeast, where the Party was strongest, and in the industrial areas around the Great Lakes, where there was a large concentration of blue collar workers with strong ethnic ties to Eastern and Central Europe.
Noted illustrator and artist Rockwell Kent was president of the IWO from 1944 until 1953. Although some Party leaders were uneasy with the organization's ethnic emphasis which ran counter to the overall Party theme of internationalism, the nationality groups wanted and gained greater autonomy to better compete with the church-linked groups. The IWO lodges held dances, picnics, basketball and softball tournaments, concerts, folk festivals, pageants and film showings. They sponsored schools, choral groups, dance groups, theater groups and literary study circles. The IWO also published a newspaper. Fraternal Outlook, in several languages. The national organization operated a concert and lecture bureau to provide entertainers and speakers to the lodges.
The IWO was also a means to disseminate Stalinist propaganda and provide bodies for Party rallies and events. This proved to be its undoing. Although the IWO was fiscally sound, the New York State Insurance Department closed down its insurance operations in 1954, ruling that IWO's political activities violated state insurance regulations and put its policy holders at risk. Interesting how radical groups drum up membership by providing much needed social services. Interesting how conservatives react not by the free market practice of offering similar alternatives but by using big government to shut down the operations. The IWO disbanded altogether soon after, but in 1946 it was demonstrating its muscle.
In March. 2,500 members of the IWO-affiliated Ukrainian American Fraternal Union, the American Russian Fraternal Society and the Carpatho-Russian American Mutual Aid Society gathered at Cooper Union to hear congressmen John M. Coffee of Washington state denounce a "weak" American foreign policy that "allows itself to become the catspaw of Russia-baiters, most of whom are imperialists operating by and for the British Empire." He charged that high Army and Navy officers "in their bars and lounges" were openly predicting war with the Soviet Union within the year. He declared his opposition to the upcoming atom bomb test which he asserted was meant to intimidate the Russians. Coffee, first elected to Congress in 1936, was among those "Progressive" Democrats who. although not themselves Communists, cultivated the support of the Far Left and consequently were swept out of office by anti-Communist Republicans in November.
The main item of business for the Cooper Union gathering was to demand the immediate deportation of former Czarist General Anton Denikin from the US and an investigation of those in the government who had allowed the 74 year-old into the country. State Department witch hunts apparently were acceptable to Communists as long as they did not target Communists. While the Stalinists repeatedly demanded that Soviet agents be allowed to remain in this country in the name of civil liberty and freedom of expression they adamantly demanded that Stalin's foreign-born critics and opponents be deported. Denikin had led the White Russian Army that had battled the Bolsheviks almost 30 years earlier. Soviet propaganda depicted him as a member of the landed aristocracy. Actually he was more proletarian than Lenin and much of the Bolshevik leadership, His father had been a serf who became a border guard; his mother was a Polish seamstress. He had risen through the ranks. The official Stalinist version of Russian history pictured him as a ruthless dictator responsible for brutalities and massacres, including pogroms, during the Russian Revolution. Atrocities were committed by the White Armies but then again the Bosheviks were hardly well-mannered Boy Scouts during the Revolution or the decades that followed and it is not clear to what extent any war crimes were carried out on Denikin's orders. After the Revolution, Denikin had lived in near poverty among the Russian emigre community in France. He had refused to cooperate with the Germans during the Nazi occupation and rather than participating in Nazi anti-Soviet propaganda efforts he had urged his fellow White Russians not to support the German invasion of the Soviet Union. According to his wife's diary, he was disgusted in particular with Nazi anti-Semitism. None of this mattered to the Stalinists who never forgave or forgot. After the war, Denikin provoked Stalin's ire by urging that the Soviet POWs in Germany not be relocated forcibly to the Soviet Union, predicting, with great prescience, that they would be executed or imprisoned once they reached their homeland. Denikin died in 1947. His reputation has been somewhat rehabilitated in post-Soviet Russia and his remains were brought back for burial in Moscow after the fall of the Soviet state.
There were some hecklers that night in the Cooper Union audience. The Stalinists regularly and loudly declared that their right of free speech included the right to heckle and disrupt speakers with whom they disagreed. They did not, however, tolerate this behavior at their own gatherings. One of the hecklers, Arthur Leovan of the Bronx, who said he belonged to the Committee of Protection for the Oppressed Russian People, foolishly dared to shout out his opposition when the mob roared its approval of a resolution demanding the ouster of Denikin. Some thug in the crowd smashed Leovan in the face. According to The New York Times, a group of irate men and women then gathered around him, punching and kicking him as he attempted to leave the hall. So much for Stalinist commitment to civil liberties and free speech. Workers democracy in action?
IWO members were also among the picketers at the Churchill dinner in March demanding that he too be run out of the city , IWO lodges supplied one of the largest contingents at the May Day parade where Communist Party leader William Z. Foster was the keynote speaker. The Irish lodge marched against the British imperialists demanding the release of IRA prisoners as well as Arab and Jewish prisoners in Palestine.
Signs of future trouble for the IWO was evident at a failed protest in May when only thirty members of The Polonia Society of the IWO could be mustered to picket the Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory at Lexington and 26th where Lt. General Tadeusz Komorowski was speaking before a crowd of 4,200 Polish Americans at a meeting sponsored by the Polish American Congress. The picketers gave up after a short time. The Polish American Congress had been formed by groups that bolted the American Slav Congress in 1944 over its endorsement of a Communist postwar government in Poland. The overwhelming majority of Polish Americans supported the Polish American Congress over its Communist rivals. (See this Time magazine article on the September 1946 meeting of the American Slav Congress in New York.)
Stalin hated Komorowski, who under the code name General Bor, had led the Polish uprising against the Germans in Warsaw in 1944. In his address, Komorowski blamed the failure of the uprising on sabotage by the Soviets. The Red Army had been advancing in Poland and had called for the residents of Warsaw to rise up but when they did under leadership of the nationalists and the Polish government-in-exile, the Soviets halted the advance of their Army (claiming, perhaps with cause, of being halted by a flood of German reinforcements), offered no assistance and blocked the Allies from offering aid. It did not fit Stalin's plans for Warsaw to be liberated by Polish nationalists. As a result 200,000 Poles were slaughtered in the uprising and Warsaw virtually leveled by the Germans. Only then did the Red Army resume its march toward the city.
Komorowski denounced the "Moscow stooges" ruling Poland under the thumb of the Soviet "liberators." The crowd jeered and hooted whenever he mentioned Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko or the Polish UN delegate Oscar Lange, the former American citizen whose diplomatic mission to the Polish Communists in 1944 had been among the factors provoking the Polish American walkout from the American Slav Congress. On the other side, the American Slav Congress demanded Komorowski's immediate deportation. His deportable offense, apparently, was his anti-Communism which the leader of the American Slav Congress said was "a first-class scandal and a severe blow to the cause of mutual trust and friendship between the New Poland we have recognized and our nation." Once again we see the Stalinist commitment to free speech and civil liberty in action.