prominent roles in the Flint sit-down strike, Martin first suspended, then expelled, Mortimer and his other opponents on the UAW's Executive Board. The CIO leadership, alarmed by the possibility that sectarian infighting might destroy the UAW, forced Martin to reinstate the Executive Board members. When the reconstituted Executive Board ordered Martin to sever his ties with Lovestone and to submit all his public announcements to it for its approval, he attempted to suspend the majority of the Board, including both his opponents associated with the CP, such as Mortimer, their allies, such as Richard Frankensteen, and the UAW leaders associated with the Socialist Party, such as Walter Reuther. That nearly split the UAW. After skirmishes at the UAW headquarters and some local unions, the expelled Executive Board members, with the support of the CIO, regained control in 1939 and expelled Martin. He left with about 20,000 members to form his own union, which affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Lovestone left with him. The CP was in a particularly strong position at that point: it was the leading player in the Left-Center coalition that had defeated Martin and would have been able to elect George Addes, a close ally of the Party, as President of the UAW if it had pressed the point. But that would have required that the Party defy Sidney Hillman, head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the most powerful force within the CIO after Lewis, and Philip Murray, Lewis' protégé and head of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, who came to the convention to demand the selection of R.J. Thomas, an apolitical Board member who had, until recently, supported Martin, as its candidate to end the factional fighting within the UAW. According to some reports, when Hillman and Murray could not bring Mortimer and his supporters around, Earl Browder, Chairman of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), came to Cleveland to demand that they support Thomas. Eager not to appear as sectarians and thus endanger their role within the CIO at large, the CP leadership had the Communists within the UAW support Thomas and also permit the elimination of the Vice-President positions that they had held. At the same time, the CP began dissolving its factions within the UAW and dropping its shop papers as it aligned itself even more closely with the New Deal. In the name of labor