On September 9, 1947, federal agents stormed the offices of Hotel & Restaurant Employees Local 6 and arrested the president of the union, Michael J. Obermeier, on politically motivated immigration charges. Obermeier had been the president of Local 6 for the last ten years, and a militant union leader for food workers in the city since 1922, having organized hundreds of hotels and restaurants and thousands of poor, immigrant, minority and female workers in the hospitality industry to fight for respect and dignity on the job, higher pay and lower hours.
The Red Scare was the perfect pretense to chase troublemakers like Obermeier out of the industry, and the Taft-Hartley Act (passed two weeks earlier) already laid a legal framework to remove Communists from union office, but Obermeier was an even easier target because he had not entered the country legally in 1913. Despite his German translation and propaganda work in support of the US war effort during World War II, and his repeated applications for U.S. citizenship, he was deemed to be an undesirable alien subversive shortly after the war.
The feds were likely alerted to Obermeier’s position, status and “threat” by the officers of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union who had welcomed Obermeier and his comrades into the unions only a decade earlier in an effort to drive the mafia out of the union and organize the thousands of workers who were crying out for the union but were suddenly shocked – SHOCKED – to find out that the officers of their largest local were COMMUNISTS!
It was a scenario that played itself out in countless CIO unions that were “bored from within” by Communist elementa, but the H&RE were an AFL union that had invited the Communists in before they spat them out. The officers of Local 6, and the Hotel Trades Council to which it was affiliated, were faced with the same choice of repudiating the Communist Party and their earlier politics, or being thrown overboard. Obermeier’s close partner, Jay Rubin, rejected him and their radical politics and claimed allegiance to the U.S. flag and the bureaucratic union regime, and he continued to lead the union for much of the rest of the century.
Obermeier took the fall for the New York local’s radicalism. He was found guilty of perjury for having denied past or present Communist affiliations when he had applied for U.S. citizenship, even though he had been a member of the party from 1930 until 1939. He was deported to Germany on December 11, 1952 and died in Spain on May 28, 1960.
Much remains obscure about Obermeier. Who was he? Where, exactly did he come from? How did he come to the independent syndicalist trade union movement? And how from there was he attracted to the Communist Party and the Trade Union Education League? Did he recruit Jay Rubin to the CP, or did Jay Rubin join first? What political beliefs did he have that were independent of the CP? What happened to him when he was repatriated to Germany? And what the fuck was a German Communist (and, I suspect, a Jew) doing in Fascist Spain?
I have been studying Obermeier, Local 6 and the movements that spawned it, for most of the year and I am not much closer to the answer. My research continues.
Dear Shawn,
I don’t know if you are still concerned with this since this article is already 8 years old. I was doing some research on my family tree and found this by coincidence. Michael Obermeier was the cousin of my great-grandfather, who was also called Michael. It was my great-grandfather who lived in Spain and as far as I know, his “American” cousin died there during a visit.
There are three more things that I can tell you in answer of your questions: Michael came from Eastern Bavaria (Oberpfalz) and he was not Jewish. My family is of catholic origin. I was also told that he always denied to be or have been a communist.
I hope this helps you and if you are interested, I can ask my grandfather for further information.
Sincerely,
Matthias Obermeier