Memoirs / by Ben Gold.

Prologue: My first love, Meyer London, Zuckerman under charges -- I. Victory of the rank-and-file -- II. The historic 1926 strike -- III. The enemies attack == IV. One union! -- V. Fur and leather unite -- VI. Reaction in the saddle -- VII. Dismantling the union.

"In the preface to his widely-hailed 1950 work, The Fur and Leather Workers Union, the noted labor historian, Dr. Philip S. Foner wrote, 'The battle of the fur workers for a free union ...was a revolt against the shackles of terrorism. It was an irruption against the misery imposed by employers - against unscrupulous misleaders of labor - against sordid betrayals by AFL and Socialist Party officials. In heroic battles that resounded throughout the nation, the fur workers gave expression to the struggles and hopes of all workers for a clean, democratic and progressive labor movement....It opened the floodgates for revolts by workers in other trades and pointed the way for the great mass movement out of which was born the CIO.' The central figure of this struggle to cleanse the fur market of the gangsters who plagued it for a clean, honest, militant union was the president, first of the international Fur Workers Union and later of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union - the only avowed Communist to lead an international union in the U.S. - Ben Gold. Born in Bessarabia in 1898, Gold came to this country in 1910 and by 1912, at the age of 14, he was already active in the fur workers strike that year. It was the strike that introduced Gold to the theories and leaders of the Socialist Party. In 1917, he helped lead the 12-week strike of the Montreal fur workers, and he demonstrated the qualities of leadership that caused the New York workers to look to him to head their struggle against a corrupt, bureaucratic leadership. ... Here is Ben Gold's first published account of the years between 1925, when he lead a rank-and-file revolt that toppled the corrupt leadership that has stifled the fur manufacturing workers of New York, until 1954, when he resigned the presidency of the International Fur and Leather Workers Union in the face of the anti-Communist hysteria that gripped the leadership of the labor movement, including the CIO, after World War II.