cuts of ten percent by both the IRT and the BMT, along with the layoff of thousands of employees and a speed up of work for those who remained, spurred new organizing efforts in 1932. Seven subway workers who belonged to Clan na Gael, a longstanding Irish nationalist organization that had received an influx of veterans of the Irish Republican Army in the 1920s, and who were inspired by the socialism and trade union work of James Connolly, met to discuss formation of a trade union. Used to the secrecy of Clan na Gael, they proceeded cautiously, first seeking help from Irish organizations, such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. When those groups declined to involve themselves in something this controversial, the organizers approached the Communist Party. The Communist Party had, in fact, been making organizing efforts of its own among transit workers, beginning in 1933. John Santo and Austin Hogan, Trade Union Unity League organizers, met with the Clan na Gael's members in a cafeteria at Columbus Circle on April 12, 1934. The name that they chose for the new union was a tribute to the Irish Transport and General Workers Union led by Jim Larkin and James Connolly twenty years earlier. The new organization, founded during the CPUSA's ultrarevolutionary phase as part of the Third Period, focused both on organizing workers into the union and recruiting members for the Party through mimeographed shop papers with titles such as "Red Shuttle" or "Red Dynamo". The new union appointed Thomas H. O'Shea — who would later become a witness against it before the Dies Committee — as its first president. The TWU declared its aim to represent all public transit workers in the City, regardless of craft, and campaigned to reverse the ten percent wage cut, increase wages to meet increases in the cost of living, limit the workweek to forty hours and hire more workers to eliminate the speedup and to establish safe and sanitary working conditions. The union proceeded clandestinely, forming small groups of trusted friends in order to keep informers at bay, meeting in isolated locations and in subway tunnels. Even so, the IRT managed to infiltrate spies into the organization, as the union discovered when it obtained some of the company's files from sympathetic sources. One of the workers who had been in attendance at early meetings, Michael J.