Russell Crowell
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Russell R. Crowell (April 23, 1919 – September 11, 2004) was a labor organizer and trade union reformer in the United States.
The 18th of 19 children, Crowell grew up during the Great Depression in rural Nebraska, where his widowed mother supported the family by taking in washing. Hitchhiking to California as a teenager, he found work in a dry-cleaning plant, married, and started a family. As a young man he had leftist political sympathies, but these were moderated by his disillusionment due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and he was known for the rest of his life as a "straight" trade unionist and a mainstream liberal Democrat.
After serving as an infantryman in the Pacific in World War II, he became active in his union. In the early 1950s, the Laundry and Dry-Cleaners union was a part of the corrupt Teamsters organization. Crowell attempted to reform the union from within, running for vice president against the Teamster-approved slate of candidates in 1957, but losing. In 1958, the union was expelled from the AFL-CIO. Crowell was one of the organizers of the new AFL-CIO Laundry and Dry Cleaning International Union formed as an alternative to the Teamsters union, with headquarters in Oakland, California. He was elected third vice president of the new union. During this period, he received death threats, and his hotel room was ransacked.
In 1962, Crowell was elected president of the new union, defeating incumbent Winfield Chasmar, and in the same year he was one of the union leaders who signed a pledge to voluntarily obey John F. Kennedy's executive order banning racial discrimination in labor unions. The president had no power to enforce the order, so voluntary compliance was required; many unions continued to practice racial discrimination despite it. Crowell was known as an energetic labor organizer, and unionized not only large laundry and dry cleaning plants but also many smaller neighborhood laundries.
Crowell remained president of the laundry and dry-cleaning international until his retirement in 1983, when he moved to Diamond Springs, California. He was active in the El Dorado County Democratic Party. He ran a Christmas tree farm, and did his own farm work until he was past the age of 80.
