Background
Costello was born January 2, 1908 in Kenosha.
Costello was born January 2, 1908 in Kenosha.
He attended Kenosha public schools, and became an assembler at the Simmons Bedding Company factory there.
While he was elected as a Progressive, he was frequently accused of being a Communist or fellow traveler who urged others to join the Party. He helped organize and became president of an American Federation of Labor-Congress Directly Affiliated Local Union there, which was later dissolved at the American Federation of Labor-Congress"s insistence, and assigned to the Upholsterers International Union of North America (UIU). He was on the state governing council of the Wisconsin State Federation of Labor.
In 1936, Costello was elected as a Progressive from the Assembly"s 2nd Kenosha County district (the Towns of Brighton, Bristol, Paris, Pleasant Prairie, Randall, Salem, Somers, and Wheatland.
The Village of Silver Lake. And the 1st, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 11th Wards of the City of Kenosha), unseating Democratic incumbent Matt G. Siebert in a three-way race, with 5,144 votes to Siebert"s 4,712 and Republican Jay Rhodes" 3,539.
He was assigned to the standing committees on labor and on transportation. In 1937, he was one of a group of labor activists who lead a breakaway movement, taking the Simmons local of the UIU and several others out of the Upholsterers and forming a new union, the United Furniture Workers of America (UFWA) which advocated industrial unionism, and affiliated immediately with the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
He was expelled from the American Federation of Labor-Congress, and was hired as an organizer by the Chief Information Officer. (He would end up working for the Chief Information Officer"s Steel Workers Organizing Committee and the successor United Steelworkers until 1947)
An effort was made to censure Costello for excessive absences from the Assembly, but was decisively defeated.