Interview
I [interviewer James Cavanaugh] interviewed Gordon for two hours on November 10, 1977, and for five hours on July 19, 1978. The entire interview was conducted in his office on the tenth floor of the TWUA Building in New York. The first two hours covered, roughly, 1930-1955; the second session covered the remainder of TWUA's history. Gordon, particularly in the second session, was quite candid; and those five hours of interview are closed to researchers until his death. His rapid-fire speech permitted him to cover a lot of ground in the seven hours of taping. To some extent Gordon tends to simplify things, to describe things in black and white. He zeroes in on what he feels is the major cause of an event and then exaggerates the importance of that cause almost to the exclusion of other factors. This approach, however, does not necessarily detract from the interview because he is usually correct in identifying the major factor; and the exaggerated status he gives it merely stresses, for the careful researcher, its importance. The main drawback to this approach is that Gordon often minimizes the significance of a particular incident by saying it was politically motivated, rather than searching for underlying causes or analyzing how the incident became political.
The Gordon interview, for the purposes of the TWUA Project, is most useful for its discussion of the internal dispute in the Union which occurred in the early 1960s and culminated in 1964. He was a member of the inner council, or strategy committee, of the Executive Council Majority which challenged the Administration. He provides a very candid and critical view of who did what and why. The Gordon interview is also very good on the formation and history of the Dyers Federation and Local 1790. Gordon also gives a persuasive analysis of why the TWUA was never able to merge with the United Textile Workers. On the other hand, Gordon was not close enough to the Union power base in the early 1950s to speak very authoritatively on the Rieve-Baldanzi split of that period. Similarly, he is weak for the years 1964-1972 when he was not on the Council, but he is good for 1972-1976 when he returned to the Council. His analysis of the current status of the textile industry and textile unionism, while typically oversimplified, is nevertheless probably fairly representative of current thought within the Union.
Abstract
The tapes for this interview have two tracks: a voice track containing the discussion and a time track containing time announcements at intervals of approximately five seconds. The abstract lists, in order of discussion, the topics covered on each tape, and indicates the time-marking at which point the beginning of the particular discussion appears.
Thus, the researcher by using a tape recorder's fast-forward button may find expeditiously and listen to discrete segments without listening to all of the taped discussion. For instance, the user who wishes to listen to the topic on “Strike in September 1933” should locate the place on the second track of side one, tape one, where the voice announces the 03:50 time-marking (the voice says at this point, “Three minutes, fifty seconds”), and at this point switch to the first track to hear the discussion. The discussion on “Strike in September 1933” continues until approximately 05:50 at which point discussion of the next topic (“Initial Organization Easy”) begins.
Notice that in most cases sentences beneath each headline explain more about the contents of the topic. For example, the sentences underneath “Strike in September 1933” give further details on what appears on the tape between 03:50 and 05:50.
The abstract is designed to provide only a brief outline of the content of the tapes and cannot serve as a substitute for listening to them. However, the abstract when used with the index will help the researcher easily locate distinct topics and discussions among the many minutes of commentary.
Index
There is a master index for most of the TWUA Oral History Project interviews in the collection-level finding aid.
