the left, in response to both the increasingly hostile response by employers and the wave of worker discontent that had replaced the apathetic resignation of the first years of the Great Depression. The CP, having denounced Roosevelt as a fascist only a few years earlier, moved closer and closer to embracing him. At the same time the CIO and other progressive organizations and individuals overcome many of their reservations about working with the CP. Of the two hundred or so organizers that Lewis hired for the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, sixty were CP members, with particular strength among the staff responsible for organizing foreign-born and African-American workers and in the Chicago area. Lewis was not particularly concerned with the political beliefs of his organizers, so long as he controlled the organization. As he once famously remarked, "I do not turn my organizers or CIO members upside down and shake them to see what kind of literature falls out of their pockets." He took the same line in private, when David Dubinsky of the ILGWU asked him about the communists on the SWOC staff; as he told Dubinsky, "Who gets the bird? The hunter or the dog?" Organizing basic industry The CP did not gain influence solely through seeking staff positions, however. In the rubber workers' strike in Akron, Ohio that represented the first test of the CIO's ability to turn mass discontent into union gains, a number of rank-and-file leaders were also CP members. The Party had a degree of presence, both at the local and international level, in the United Rubber Workers union formed after the strike. The CP also exerted a great deal of influence within the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (or UE), founded in 1936 by the merger of a number of federal unions created by the AFL and small shop caucuses, largely made up of CP activists and other socialists and radicals, at General Electric, Westinghouse Electric Company and other unorganized companies. The CP grew even more powerful within the UE in 1937 when James J. Matles, former head of the CP's Metal Workers Industrial Union, brought in a number of locals after a brief affiliation with the International Association of Machinists. Matles and other CP members and allies held the bulk of the important positions within the UE for the next twelve years, until the CIO engineered a split within it