Johnson, Clyde, b. 1908.

Clyde Johnson, union organizer, business agent, and writer.

Clyde Johnson was born in 1908 in Proctor, Minn., a railroad town outside Duluth. In 1929, after Johnson had completed two years of junior college, layoffs preceding the Great Depression sent him east in search of work. He was hired by the Western Electric Company of New Jersey as a junior engineer. He also attended night classes at the City College of New York, where he joined the National Student League and was elected an organizer. He took part in four college strikes in 1932 and 1933, at City College, Columbia, New York University, and City College again, after which he was expelled from City College. He went to Rome, Ga., in 1933 in response to a student request to help organize a strike at the Martha Berry School. While there, he also advised striking stove foundry workers. In Atlanta, he organized advocacy councils for the unemployed; in Birmingham, Ala., in 1934, he worked with steel workers, coal miners, and ore miners. He became an organizer for the Sharecroppers' Union (SCU) in central Alabama in 1935, the year of a cotton pickers' strike. During this period, he also married Leah Anne Agron, whom he had met in Atlanta.

In 1937, the Congress of Industrial Organizations chartered a national union for agricultural and cannery workers. Johnson became an international vice president of this union. As such, he organized and led strikes of beet workers in Colorado and pecan shellers in Texas. He resigned from this post in 1941, when the CIO set up an Oil Workers' Organizing Campaign and hired Johnson as its Southern director. By the end of 1943, the staff had won bargaining rights at seven of the eight refineries targeted in southeast Texas, and Johnson resigned to join the Merchant Marine.

After World War II, Johnson was hired as business agent by Local 610 of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers in Pittsburgh, Pa. In 1948, Local 610 played a key role in the defeat of a Republican congressman, a member of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. Johnson and Local 610 also led a campaign in support of Henry Wallace for president.

In 1950, Johnson moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked for some time as a house carpenter before moving to Oakland, Cal., in 1955. There he joined Local 550 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, becoming business agent in 1960. In 1966, he retired from this position and spent the next two years researching and writing Organize or Die: Smash Boss Unionism--Build Union Power, Organize Two Million Carpenters and Woodworkers, a book intended as a criticism of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and the failures of the Hutcheson Dynasty. He also wrote Millmen 550: A History of the Militant Years (1961-1966) of Local 550 United Brotherhood of Carpenters, which relates to his activities as business agent of the local during those years.