was out of fear of distancing the Party from the strikers, who were, in the opinion of CP leadership, using revolutionary means to achieve traditional union goals. The Socialists, by contrast, had a much smaller base within the striking workers, but were much more inclined to attach revolutionary significance to the sit-down strikes and to magnify their own role in them. Steelworkers The CP was even more circumspect in the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. The CP was anxious not to scare off its partners and employers in the CIO: its members therefore made no effort to advertise their Party affiliation and even took steps not to pack SWOC conventions. Nor did circumstances give them much opportunity to rise to leadership. Unlike the UAW, which was born out of tumultuous struggles in which CP activists and other radicals played leading parts, the SWOC conducted a much more top-down organizing campaign subject to close control. SWOC organizers who belonged to the CP played an important role in recruiting and organizing members, but rarely stayed in one area long enough to cultivate the sort of relations with local leaders that might have allowed them to recruit them into the Party, if they had tried to do so. They simply did not have the freedom of action that Mortimer, Travis and others within the UAW did. Nor did they have the same power. As staff members, Pressman, de Caux and the SWOC organizers who belonged to the CP had, at most, only indirect influence on CIO or SWOC policy and no independent base to rally support or propagandize for other issues. Philip Murray, a former UMWA associate whom Lewis installed as head of the SWOC, weeded out most of the Communists from the union over the years after the initial organizing drives as the SWOC became the United Steelworkers of America. By 1942 the purge was almost complete. See also Communists in the U.S. Labor Movement (1937-1950) Industrial Workers of the World Footnotes Further reading Barnard, John, American Vanguard: A History of the United Auto Workers, 1935–1970 (2004) . Fink, Gary M. Biographical Dictionary of American Labor Leaders(Greenwood Press, 1974). pp. 4-5. Halpern, Martin. "The 1939 UAW convention: Turning point for communist power in the auto union?" Labor History 33.2 (1992): 190-216. Kampelman, Max M. The Communist Party vs. the CIO: A Study in Power Politics (1957) online Klehr, Harvey, and John E. Haynes.