Collections : [New York State Modern Political Archive]

Arranged chronologically and interfiled, except for the minutes of the Executive Committee meetings, 1915-19. Minutes through 1968 are glued into scrapbooks.

This series contains material that Abramowitz collected while researching the history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Among the highlights in this collection are carbon copies and photocopies of letters (1937-39) concerning the attitudes of CIO leaders John Brophy and Philip Murray toward Communists active in CIO unions, a partial photocopy of Brophy's typescript autobiography (1948), and a carbon copy of a twenty-six page letter Murray wrote to President Harry S. Truman urging him to veto the Taft-Hartley Act (1947). The collection also contains a number of important documents concerning the United Auto Workers (UAW) and Walter Reuther, among them transcripts of a 1945 speech that Reuther delivered, documents concerning racial discrimination and UAW Fair Employment Practices Committee Executive Director George W. Crockett, a typescript of UAW contract demands presented to the General Motors Corporation in 1964, and a typescript (c.1970) of John W. Anderson's scathing biography of Reuther. Other materials of interest document the United Furniture Workers (UFW): copies of representation election reports (1940, 1950), photocopied fliers and internal CIO documents concerning the UFW's 1949 expulsion from the CIO on the grounds that it was "Communist dominated" and its 1950 return to the CIO fold, and newsletters (1973-74) published by UFW Local 140 (Bronx County, New York). Also included are Abramowitz's notes on his oral-history interviews (1973, 1974) of an anti-Communist International Union of Electrical Workers activist identified only as "Raskin."