Who could not like the 1976 film, Union Maids? The stories of three smiling, kindly old maids who in a soft-spoken manner, recount the struggles of their youth as labor organizers. As they warmheartedly recall their work for justice, one can’t help but feel that at any moment, they may have to interrupt the interview to pull a couple of hot, golden brown apple pies out of the oven. Yet, all that glitters in not gold. 

Despite the film doing everything possible to make these three ladies appear as sweet, dear grandmotherly figures  who were simply trying to obtain fair working accommodations for themselves and their coworkers, the truth lay elsewhere.

In reality, all three of these old hags were long time Communist Party members who followed the Party line which advocated for the violent overthrow of our democratic republic, the United States of America. All three had a long history of engaging in violent protest in furtherance of their revolutionary ideals. The filmmakers had to have been aware of all of the above.

Further, the film duplicitously portrays all three communist women as suffering the alleged misery of their working conditions while struggling to merely feed themselves. This was not true. First, many of their coworkers owned homes and cars.  Second, these three women were all living in the cushy homes of their Communist Party handlers (Masters) and lived quite comfortably. “Stella Nowicki” was taken in by her wealthy Jewish Marxist handlers to become in Communist speak, what is known as a “colonizer”–an underground union organizer–in a meatpacking plant in Chicago. In her off-work time, she enjoyed the fine cuisine and comfortable living conditions of her handler’s Gold Coast residence West of downtown Chicago. While at work she spent her time covertly recruiting ill educated, naive souls into her conspiratorial organizing. 

Each of these Marxist beldams has a history of violence and industrial espionage.  The worst of this little Marxist witch’s coven was one Vicky Starr. Wait a minute you say, there was no one named Vicky Starr in the film? That’s because Vicky Starr was such a notorious Communist Revolutionary with a rap sheet and thick FBI file, that the filmmakers decided to give her a false name to cover her Communist revolutionary past. Hence, the filmmakers  gave her the nom de plume of “Stella Nowicki.” Yes, throughout each step of making this deceptive little documentary, the filmmakers made every effort to conceal the true identities and backgrounds of the subjects and avoided identifying them as Communists. This subterfuge is where the work crosses the line from documentary cinema verde into propaganda. Of course, had the film’s production disclosed its subjects’s Communist bona fides, it’s likely few would have wasted their time watching such agitprop nor would the Academy of Motion Picture Arts have nominated it for an Academy Award. 

Vicky Starr was a dedicated communist who savored the day when our Republic would become her depraved version of a Stalinist state and were as a Communist Commissar she would delight in shipping off the “enemies of the people” to a Soviet style “camp,” where they would be worked to death. Yet, this Red viper is portrayed in the film as harmless old spinster who might otherwise be knitting stockings or baking cookies for some of her grandchildren, if she had any. Ms. Star a/k/a Ms. Nowicki, spent much of her youth and adult life supporting Communist sponsored Union violence and subversion while working toward the savage overthrow of our system à la The Bolsheviks, October 1917.  She was a morally depraved, seditious Red who had her revolutionary objectives been achieved, would have delighted in the mass murder of her political opponents and cheered the shipment of millions more to suffer until death in in some remote, Hellish Gulag. 

Then there was Ms. Sylvia Woods, a vile, bigoted, loud mouthed black women who when she was ten-years-old, got in trouble at school for refusing to sing the National Anthem. Here parents were surprise, surprise… Communists. A black racist, she openly wore her  contempt for white people on her shirt sleeve. She undoubtedly dreamed of the day when her longed for Communist revolution would sweep her and her ilk into power and where she would be able to personally exact revenge on all  “white people.” Yet in the film she is portrayed as an amiable, if not harmless soul akin to the character Shirley Wilson, from the 1970s TV Comedy series, What’s Happening. No mention was made of her past or serving as President of the Chicago Committee to Free Angela Davis. Davis was a notorious American Communist Revolutionary and at the time a fugitive from justice related to charges concerning a murder.

Ms. Woods an enormously corpulent windbag, also had the dishonor of being the “Spokesperson” for the Communist Party of Illinois for many years. She too lived with her Red handlers in pleasant accommodations, while covertly undermining from within, the company that was gracious enough to hire her fat, whiny ass. 

After she died, she was buried in “the radicals section,” also known as the “Communist plot” in the Forest Home Cemetery.

That leaves us with the third and last sorceress in this trinity of evil. That would be Kate Hyndman. The following quote from her youth best sums up her childhood and family:

“My father was an undemonstrative man, but the night in 1929 when I came home and told him I had joined the Communist Party, he took me in his arms and danced around the dining room table, tears of happiness in his eyes.” 

Well, ain’t we got fun.  Except the United States Government was not amused as evinced in the following passage about Ms. Hyndman, a violent Communist revolutionary who dedicated her entire life to the bloody overthrow of the United States government:

“On October 7, 1952, two agents of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service arrested 45-year-old Kathryn Hyndman in her Gary home. The agebnts took her to the Crown Point jail, where she was incarcerated for nearly ten months in a cell blocks with prostitutes, drug addicts, and murderers. (Mere criminals were forced to suffer this woman’s presence among them?) Two years before, over President Harry Truman’s veto, Congress had passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, which called for the deportation of alien subversives.”  Unexplainably snatched  by the Feds as though they had just randomly drew her name from a hat.

Why this criminal was ever released from jail or allowed to stay here in our nation which she obviously hated and worked to undermine, is inexplicable. What’s clear is that she and her two “comrades” from this dubious “documentary” were enemies of America and our government should have like Thor’s hammer, smashed down upon them with the full weight of our justice system. 

She too was an American hating Marxist who had her revolutionary dreams been realized, would have gladly placed five or six drug addicted, street scumbags to dwell in your personal residence had she considered your home too spacious or bourgeois, like the Communist Black Captain,  Comrade Kaprugina from the 1965 film, Dr. Zhivago. 

People have the right to make any propaganda film of their choosing. Unlike the Communist totalitarian states of past and present, all in our fair land are afforded freedom of speech and expression. However, when a filmmaker presents a cinematic work as a “documentary” such as Union Maids 1976, which was speciously presented to the populace and The Academy, they have an ethical obligation to the viewers to present the complete rendering of the subject(s) and issues in play. For example, no legitimate filmmaker would make a documentary about Charles Mansion the musician without alluding to his criminal past and involvement in the Tate-LaBianca murders. Nor would a legitimate documentarian present a film examining the Naval Career of George Lincoln Rockwell without mentioning that he would later go on to become a despicable white supremest. 

In Union Maids, the filmmaker neglected to mention the three subjects’ criminal pasts and Communist Party membership. The so called documentary also conveniently forgot to mention that these women were not merely powerless, vulnerable workers spontaneously reacting to the alleged workplace mistreatment but, highly trained Communist Party “colonizers” with the  mission of engaging in  underground union organization while disrupting workplace productivity. Further, no mention was made of how the women lived in comfortable homes and were paid above and beyond their employment wages by their Communist Party handlers. 

This is where the film which had the potential to be a good documentary, slipped across the line into propaganda. So, who is responsible for this? The blame for a bad and in this case dishonest film, lies with the Captain of the Ship. Who was the Captain of this ill-fated documentary? The director- of course. 

This Marxist newspeak disinformation documentary was directed by the late Julia Reichert, a talented and highly intelligent independent filmmaker, who unfortunately devoted her life to making obscure, deceptive, low budget films with Communists/Leftist themes. She earned her undergraduate degree at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, OH- a Marxist training academy for the true believers since the early 1900s- although Ms. Reichert claimed to be a Democratic Socialist. After graduating from this American equivalent of the Sverdloy Communist University, Ms. Reichert remained a lifelong resident of Yellow Springs. A place where one standing in the town square, is unable to throw a rock in any direction without hitting a Communist. Ms. Reichert’s photo is below. Need more be said?