Thomas William "Teddy" Gleason (November 8, 1900 – December 24, 1992) was president of the

International Longshoremen's Association The International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) is a North American labor union representing longshore workers along the East Coast of the United States and Canada, the Gulf Coast, the Great Lakes, Puerto Rico, and inland waterways; on the W ...

from 1963 to 1987. Gleason was born in

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

, the oldest of 13 children. Coming from a family of

longshoremen A dockworker (also called a longshoreman, stevedore, docker, wharfman, lumper or wharfie) is a waterfront manual laborer who loads and unloads ships. As a result of the intermodal shipping container revolution, the required number of dockworke ...

, he left school after the seventh grade and started working in the docks. When wages were cut in 1931 in the wake of the

Great Depression The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn from 1929 to 1939. The period was characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty, drastic reductions in industrial production and international trade, and widespread bank and ...

, Gleason and several co-workers were

blacklist Blacklisting is the action of a group or authority compiling a blacklist of people, countries or other entities to be avoided or distrusted as being deemed unacceptable to those making the list; if people are on a blacklist, then they are considere ...

ed for stopping work. This eventually led to the eviction of Gleason, his wife and their two children from their home when they could not pay the rent. When he was

ed, he pushed a hand truck in a sugar factory during the day and he sold hot dogs on Coney Island at night. When the

New Deal The New Deal was a series of wide-reaching economic, social, and political reforms enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1938, in response to the Great Depression in the United States, Great Depressi ...

allowed him to resume work in the docks, he became an ILA member and rose to the rank of ILA organizer in 1947, as a protegee of ILA president Joseph P. Ryan. Gleason supported William Bradley when he replaced Ryan in 1953; Gleason, in turn, replaced Bradley in 1963 as president. In 1963, during the Kennedy administration, he opposed Kennedy's proposal to sell surplus wheat to the Soviet Union, but relented when the government agreed that half of the grain ships would be American ships. When the Johnson Administration went back on this promise, Gleason led an eight-day-long dockworkers' boycott of the Soviet-bound wheat. In 1971, when the Nixon Administration informally made grain sales to the Soviet Union part of striking a deal for a

Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were two rounds of bilateral conferences and corresponding international treaties involving the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War superpowers dealt with arms control in two rounds of ta ...

, the union refused to load Soviet ships. When Henry Kissinger tried to persuade Gleason on the issue, Gleason told Kissinger to "go fuck yourself." The union relented when the administration said it would find funding for construction of more merchants ships and support legislation important to the union. In exchange, Gleason was the first member of the AFL-CIO executive committee to endorse Nixon for re-election. During the Vietnam War, Gleason made four trips to Saigon to relieve congestion in the ports there. He also performed similar duties at Mombasa in Kenya. Gleason handed over the presidency to his vice president John Bowers in 1987. Gleason died in the Cabrini Medical Center in Manhattan on Christmas Eve of 1992 at the age of 92.

References

External links

''A historical dictionary of the U.S. merchant marine and shipping industry''
(two pages on Google books) 1900 births 1992 deaths Activists from New York City International Longshoremen's Association people Vice presidents of the AFL-CIO {{Trade-unionist-bio-stub