Authors: Ira Katznelson
65
Ibid., January 29, 1946, p. 539.
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid., p. 540.
68
Ibid.
69
Ibid.
70
Ibid., January 28, 1946, pp. 477, 478.
71
Robert C. Lieberman,
Shifting the Color Line
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 189.
72
Congressional Record
, 79th Cong., 2d sess., January 28, 1946, pp. 475, 472; January 29, 1946, p. 530.
73
Ibid., January 29, 1946, p. 540.
74
In adopting this substitute on January 29, the southerners voted with Republicans with a high likeness score of 76 (and with only a likeness of 38 with nonsouthern Democrats). The vote on passage records a southern Democratic–Republican likeness of 82, and intra–Democratic Party likeness of just 35.
75
In 1946, the USES spent $61,747,899, all in Washington or in federally controlled state and local employment offices. By 1949, only $5,735,812 was being expended on the USES by the Department of Labor, as compared with fully $176,169,096 that was spent on grants to states. See Federal Security Agency,
Annual Report
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946–1949); cited in Katznelson and Pietrykowski, “Rebuilding the American State,” p. 333.
76
Congressional Record
, 79th Cong., 1st sess., September 19, 1945, p. 8737.
77
Ibid., p. 8735.
78
Ibid., pp. 8737, 8743.
79
Ibid., p. 8735.
80
This coalition was marked by a high likeness score of 86 (by contrast, southern and nonsouthern Democratic likeness scored an uncommonly low 14).
81
Congressional Record,
80th Cong., 2d sess., March 16, 1948, p. 2904.
82
With a likeness score of 81. Following President Truman’s election in 1948, and a gain of seventy-five southern Democrats in the House and nine in the Senate, the 81st Congress failed to veto a presidential reorganization plan that included transferring responsibility for unemployment insurance to the Department of Labor, where it has remained ever since.
83
For a discussion, see Sean Farhang and Ira Katznelson, “The Southern Imposition: Congress and Labor in the New Deal and Fair Deal,”
Studies in American Political Development
19 (2005): 25.
84
For discussions, see Lois Ruchames,
Race, Jobs, and Politics: The Story of the FEPC
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1953); Merl E. Reed,
Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941–1946
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991); Anthony S. Chen,
The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, Politics, and Civil Rights in the United States, 1941–1972
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Kenneth M. Schultz, “The FEPC and the Legacy of the Labor-Based Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s,”
Labor History
49 (2008): 71–92.
85
In a debate over a reorganization plan, Senator Elbert Duncan Thomas, a Utah Democrat, read into the record a letter from both the Texas Manufacturers Association and the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce that contained this information. See
Congressional Record,
80th Cong., 2d sess., March 16, 1948, p. 2904.
86
Orme W. Phelps, “Public Policy in Labor Disputes: The Crisis of 1946,”
Journal of Political Economy
55 (1947): 189–211.
87
For a study of the late 1930s, see Marian D. Irish, “The Proletarian South,”
Journal of Politics
2 (1940): 231–58; and for data on union growth, see Leo Troy, “The Growth of Union Membership in the South, 1939–1953,”
Southern Economic Journal
24 (1958): 407–20. The key work remains Ray F. Marshall,
Labor in the South
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).
88
New York Times,
July 7, 1943.
89
Congressional Record,
78th Cong., 1st sess., June 2, 1943, p. 5228.
90
Harry A. Mills and Emily Clark Brown,
From the Wagner Act to Taft-Hartley: A Study of National Labor Policy and Labor Relations
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), pp. 354–56. See also James B. Atleson,
Labor and the Wartime State: Labor Relations and Law during World War II
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Patrick Renshaw, “Organized Labor and the United States War Economy, 1939–1945,”
Journal of Contemporary History
21 (1986): 3–22.
91
With a likeness score of 84.
92
With a likeness score of 100. The head of the AFL, William Green, and the head of the CIO, Philip Murray, together with Donald Robertson, who led the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Engineers, sent a long memorandum to President Roosevelt, asking him to veto this “wicked, vicious bill,” which they said was “born of malice” and represented “the very essence of fascism.” See
New York Times,
June 18, 1943. The president’s motives for issuing a veto were less ideological and more instrumental. As Nelson Lichtenstein has written:
FDR had vetoed the bill, not because he or his advisers opposed its punitive sections—many thought them inadequate and maladroit—but because this particular effort to curb the unions promised only instability and disaffection within labor ranks. Ickes told FDR that the bill would make [John] Lewis [the head of the United Mine Workers, which had struck for the third time in six weeks] a martyr, and William Davis feared that if Roosevelt signed the measure, it would drive “responsible and loyal labor leaders into Lewis’ corner.” The section of the bill mandating rank-and-file strike votes forecast even more trouble. After talking to Philip Murray, domestic affairs aide Wayne Coy warned FDR that the Smith-Connally Act would “encourage local leaders to submit strike notices on their own responsibility. . . . Such a tendency can only weaken the authority and influence of responsible international officers over their constituencies, thereby increasing rather than diminishing the danger of widespread stoppages.”
See Nelson Lichtenstein,
Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 167–68.
93
Congressional Record,
78th Cong., 1st sess., June 3, 1943, p. 5312.
94
Mills and Brown,
From the Wagner Act to Taft-Hartley
, pp. 360–62.
95
Southerners voted in favor of passage with Republicans at a remarkable likeness score of 100 in the House and 89 in the Senate.
96
For a discussion, see Farhang and Katznelson, “The Southern Imposition,” p. 24.
97
Congressional Record,
79th Cong., 2d sess., February 6, 1946, p. 993; February 5, 1946, p. 922.
98
“The Labor Situation,”
Fortune,
November 1946, p. 125. An important overview can be found in United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin No. 898,
Labor in the South
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947).
99
That crisis passed when the engineers and trainmen returned to work.
100
“Labor Drives South,”
Fortune,
November 1946, pp. 134, 135.
101
Congress of Industrial Organizations, “The CIO and the Negro Worker: Together for Unity” (1942); “Working and Fighting Together Regardless of Race, Creed, Color or National Origin” (1943); “Report of the National CIO Committee to Abolish Discrimination” (1945); “A Legal Informational Guide to State Civil Rights Statutes and FEPC Legislation, and Procedures for Processing Court Cases” (1947).
102
Risa Lauren Goluboff, “Let Economic Equality Take Care of Itself: The NAACP, Labor Litigation, and the Making of Civil Rights in the 1940s,”
UCLA Law Review
52 (2005): 1393–1486.
103
“Labor Drives South,” p. 230.
104
Ibid., pp. 230, 232 (italics in original). Discussions of the entwining of race and labor during this period include Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,”
Journal of American History
75 (1988): 786–811; Michael Goldfield,
The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics
(New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 240–49; Philip Foner,
Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1916–1973
(New York: Praeger, 1974), pp. 238–74; Ray Marshall, “The Negro in Southern Unions,” Marc Karson and Ronald Radosh, “The American Federation of Labor and the Negro Worker,” and Sumner N. Rosen, “The CIO Era, 1935–55,” in
The Negro and the American Labor Movement,
ed. Julius Jacobson (New York: Doubleday, 1968), pp. 128–208; Paul Frymer,
Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 54–63; Judith Stein, “Southern Workers in National Unions: Birmingham Steelworkers, 1936–1951,” in
Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century South,
ed. Robert H. Zieger (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), pp. 183–222.
105
“Labor Drives South,” pp. 234, 237.
106
The collapse of Operation Dixie was a key development. For a discussion, see Michael Goldfield, “The Failure of Operation Dixie: A Critical Turning Point in American Political Development?” in
Race, Class, and Community in Southern Labor History
, ed. Gary M. Fink and Merl E. Reed (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), pp. 166–89.
107
“The Labor Bill Becomes Law,”
New York Times,
June 24, 1947.
108
Robert A. Taft, “The Taft-Hartley Act: A Favorable View,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
274 (1951), p. 195; http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=12675#axzz1Q7QXfGtV.
109
By 1954, the only nonsouthern states to pass such laws included Arizona, Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, and South Dakota. For a listing of right-to-work states, see Erwin S. Mayer, “Union Security and the Taft-Hartley Act,”
Duke Law Journal
4 (1961): 515. For fuller discussions of Taft-Hartley, see Katznelson,
When Affirmative Action Was White,
pp. 61–65; Sumner H. Slichter, “The Taft-Hartley Act,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
63 (1949): 1–31; and especially R. Alton Lee,
Truman and Taft-Hartley: A Question of Mandate
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966). A rich nonpartisan contemporaneous source is the 335-page report by the Bureau of National Affairs,
The Taft-Hartley Act after One Year
(Washington, DC: BNA, 1948).
110
Congressional Record,
80th Cong., 1st sess., April 28, 1947, p. 4150.
111
Hugh Davis Graham,
The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 37.
112
Congressional Record,
80th Cong., 1st sess., April 29, 1947, p. 4317–18, 4399.
113
Ibid., June 18, 1947, p. 906.
114
For a discussion, see Nelson Lichtenstein, “Taft-Hartley: A Slave Labor Law?,”
Catholic University Law Review
47 (1998): 770–72, 782–85.
115
In the Senate, Minority Leader Alben Barkley of Kentucky and Harley Kilgore of West Virginia also spoke up for unions, although in far more measured terms than Pepper.
116
Congressional Record,
80th Cong., 1st sess., March 10, 1947, p. 1171.
117
Ibid., p. 1322.
118
Ibid., April 3, 1947, p. 632.
119
Ibid., April 26, 1947, p. 698.
120
Fred A. Hartley,
Our New National Labor Policy
(New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1948), p. 12.
121
Congressional Record,
80th Cong., 1st sess., April 17, 1947, p. 857.
122
James A. Gross,
The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board: National Labor Policy in Transition, 1937–1947
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), p. 16.
123
Had southern Democratic voting been patterned like that of other Democrats, Taft-Hartley would not have been passed into law. On the legislation’s five key votes in the House, southern Democratic and Republican likeness averaged 89; on the fourteen roll calls in the Senate, a nearly as high 81. When the House voted to override President Truman’s veto, the likeness score of this coalition reached 91; in the Senate, it was a high 79. On the labor question, southern defection was nearly total.
124
Andrew Schonfield,
Modern Capitalism: The Changing Balance of Public and Private Power
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 357, 313, 322, 319, 115, 308.
125
The degree to which a strong interregional coalition on social policy could form varied by issue area. Likeness within the party fell below 70, to the mid-60s, on questions of housing and urban renewal; yet agreement was sufficiently strong to pass important legislation. See David R. Mayhew,
Party Loyalty among Congressmen: The Differences between Democrats and Republicans, 1947–1962
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), especially pp. 57–90.
126
An important framework within which to assess these matters can be found in Peter A. Hall and David Soskice, eds.,
Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
127
The classic study of interest-group pluralism written at the time is David B. Truman,
The Governmental Process: Political Interest and Public Opinion
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951).