Class Struggles: The UFT Story
Feb 3, 2005 12:27 PM
A change was in the ‘heir’
Maybe it’s just too painful to dwell on what might have been, but Roger Parente still has a hard time believing he was ever Charles Cogen’s hand-picked successor. “I never felt he thought of me as the heir apparent,” Parente said recently. “Besides, I felt that the oldtimers would be willing to do almost anything to keep me out.”
Parente isn’t alone. “The old guard — the Rebecca Simonsons and Alice Marshes — still had a lot of power,” remembers Sol Jaffe, a well-respected member of the anti-Cogen faction. “They were wary, even suspicious, of Parente — his ambition. His idea of a union was different from their own.”
That’s putting it mildly. Where Cogen had been the president of the Socialist Teachers League and a true-believer in the trade union movement, Parente made no such noises about “the class struggle.” His father, Michael, had been a lifelong member of the plasterers union. Still, while Parente considered trade unions OK for lunch-pail palookas, he felt teachers deserved a higher professional status. He had what many thought was the fanciful — if not downright loopy — idea, that teachers eventually could form a professional organization akin to a “benevolent AMA.”
“I pictured teachers as having the professional status of doctors and lawyers,” Parente said. “That meant we had to command a salary that would attract the best and the brightest into the profession.”
Like doctors, Parente’s “professional organization” would control the flow of teachers into the profession by taking over the responsibility for licensing, disciplining and, when necessary, expelling incompetent teachers.”
But in the spring of 1962, Roger Parente’s presidential campaign message was far more punchy: Teachers had been kicked around long enough; now was the time for militant action.
It was — or so it seemed — a message that would click with teachers.
After all, promising settlement or not, Cogen was still catching flak for not only his decision to call off the strike but the way it was done. Many felt that the issue should have been put to a vote in the Delegate Assembly, if not the general membership. So emotionally charged was the situation that a week after the strike, at a 3,000-strong Delegate Assembly, union leaders were booed and hissed. After explaining that the decision had tried to spare teachers from heavy fines and possible jailing, Cogen said to loud cheers: “There are those who felt and still feel that we should have gone ahead and taken the risk.”
Cogen, Al Shanker remembers thinking, looked like he was going down to defeat. Shanker — who had resigned his AFT organizing job and was running for union secretary — recalls accompanying Cogen on campaign visits to schools. “What few people showed up were mostly the opposition. I thought we were going to lose.”
So did Parente, who took an unpaid leave from school that spring to speak and press the flesh at faculty meetings across the city. “We were all confident that our side would emerge victorious,” said Parente. “I thought the voters would remember that it was we who spearheaded the push for a better settlement.”
His father, however, thought better. Parente recalls a conversation between the two shortly before the election. “He wasn’t so sure about our chances. He pointed out that when a union gets a good settlement the president invariably gets the credit and gets re-elected. When I protested that Cogen wasn’t responsible for winning the settlement, my father said it doesn’t matter. The voters won’t remember that. It turns out he was right.”
Indeed. As it turned out the vote wasn’t even close. That June, Cogen swept to victory by a 2-to-1 margin — winning even the militant hotbed junior highs.
To this day, Sol Jaffe — who lost a much closer race to Shanker for UFT secretary — faults “Cogenites” for using scare-tactics to paint Parente and the militants as crazies. “They pulled a Willie Horton,” said Jaffe recently. “It was a whisper-scare campaign. They got on the phones to members saying that these guys can’t be trusted; that Parente was a reckless, strike-happy hothead.”
Parente, on the other hand, has mixed feelings. He won’t deny that his radical image cost him dearly. “My reputation as a firebrand who was willing to go out on strike, scared some people, especially female teachers in the elementary schools.” But he thinks he still might have prevailed had he a softer edge. “It was my own personality. I clearly antagonized some people. I could be sarcastic at times and no doubt my propensity for attack made people wary.”
Post-mortems aside, Parente’s defeat would have huge repercussions in years to come for both the UFT and the career of one Albert Shanker. While there’s no way to predict these things, with Parente no longer the presidential heir apparent or serious rival, the way was now clear for the union’s new 33-year-old secretary to make his own mark.
