The fourth episode of New Yorkers at Work focuses on the gradually diminishing influence of communism and the left-wing in the AFL-CIO during the beginnings of the cold war. Narrators Martha Greenhouse and Frederick O'Neal begin the episode with a lengthy disclaimer qualifying the discussion and clarifying the episode's political agnosticism.
The program features interviews with union members, party members, and men and women who had been subject to red-baiting or seen their union expelled from the AFL-CIO. Unions found themselves faced with the impossible task of balancing local needs and practices with national and international influences from their own parent unions and from new laws and government activities.
The program is interspersed with historical context from the narrators and with prerecorded performance of folk music from Paul Robeson and others, as well as a choir performing the union anthem "Solidarity Forever."
Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection
WNYC archives id: 92585