Authors: Ira Katznelson
As sponsors, House Democrat Howard Smith of Virginia in partnership with Senator Tom Connally of Texas gave the WLDA a southern pedigree. Union power, they insisted, had to be curbed. “We have permitted political organization, under the name of organized labor, to grow to such proportions,” Albert Gore of Tennessee cautioned, “that they now threaten the sovereignty of the Government itself.”
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To bring unions under control, they and their southern colleagues supported increasing federal administrative authority over the labor relationship by giving statutory authority to a War Labor Board, authorizing the president to seize and operate struck plants, requiring a thirty-day notice to the NLRB prior to striking in a labor dispute that might interrupt war production, mandating a secret strike ballot on the thirtieth day, if the dispute had not been resolved, and prohibiting labor organizations from making national election political contributions, a move that would have weakened the national Democratic Party.
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Almost every southern member of the House voted with Republicans to pass the WLDA.
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In the Senate, southern and Republican voting patterns to override the president’s veto were identical.
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Much southern rhetoric was both anxious and inflammatory. Referring to labor organizers from northern industrial centers, Georgia’s John Gibson, cited “the nefarious and dastardly attempts of the Communist to fool the lower classes, and especially the American Negro.”
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When a number of Republicans sought to introduce an amendment banning discrimination in employment and union membership, a quick objection by Senator Tom Connally of Texas saw the amendment defeated by voice vote; most Republicans understood that its passage would doom the bill.
Southern defections from Democratic Party positions in 1943 in effect constituted a declaration of war on their colleagues for whom labor unions had become the single most important source of money, political muscle, and votes. This party schism deepened in 1946 with the debate about the Case bill, sponsored by New Jersey Republican Clifford Case, which sought to curb strikes by mandating a sixty-day cooling-off period before a strike could begin, a prohibition against violence or conspiracy that interferes with the movement of goods in interstate commerce, monetary damages against unions for contract violations, and the proscription of secondary boycotts.
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Once again, it was a nearly perfectly aligned coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans that passed the bill in both chambers.
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The legislation failed only when the House narrowly failed to override the presidential veto by five votes (a vote on which southerners voted with Republicans).
Southerners were vocal supporters of the bill. During protracted floor debates, they expressed concern about the power of organized labor, especially the CIO, to bring the national economy to a grinding halt, and the potential impact of unions on the racial order. They also resurrected long-standing southern tropes about the colonial dominance of the North.
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Responding to critics of the bill who had argued that it represented not just an antilabor but an antiurban bias by rural sectional interests, Paul Stewart, an Oklahoma Democrat, responded by arguing “that from the viewpoint of the big industrial cities, the agricultural states are just colonies.” Using populist language, he went on to say that “the people are going to take over. . . . They are getting tired of this minority stuff, and labor is the predominant minority group that is trying to wreck the government.” Labor, he continued, had become “stronger than the law or any political organization that has ever been in power in this country, a supergovernment within this great Government that we love so well.”
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However exaggerated, such fears were accelerating in 1946. A special issue of
Fortune
fretfully described the country’s rising industrial conflict. With labor “scarce, expensive, and rebellious,” it chronicled the accelerating number of picket lines on the docks, and in the key industries of steel, coal, automobiles, and electrical products. It also wryly noted that even elevator operators, barbers, and bakers were taking strike action. In all, the magazine identified how “all the arguments and all the strikes of 1945–46 really boiled down to a single issue,” which it identified as the vexing question of “the role of a strong labor movement in a democratic, capitalistic state.” With a massive wave of strikes pummeling American industry—at one point, nearly 2,000,000 workers were on strike simultaneously; 3,470,000 workers struck in 1945 and 4,600,000 in 1946, when fully 116,000,000 “man days” were lost to the economy—and with union membership having tripled in the decade since the passage of the Wagner Act, the labor question had become “the most urgent of the country’s domestic problems.”
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The country remained transfixed by the huge strikes of mine workers and railroad workers in the spring of 1946, and the seizure of the railroads by President Truman on May 17, just as the Case bill was being debated.
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What was especially notable,
Fortune
further commented, was how, in building on their quite stunning wartime gains, both the AFL and the CIO had set out to conquer the South, which it designated as “the last U.S. labor frontier.” The CIO’s executive board launched Operation Dixie in February 1946, an operation with headquarters in Atlanta and led by a long-time organizer Van Amberg Bittner, who had scored big successes in coal, steel, and meatpacking drives, and who commanded an initial budget of $1,250,000. This campaign was driven by a mix of necessity and opportunity. With the South far less integrated into national unions than the rest of the country, the CIO feared that low-wage unorganized southern firms would undercut national wages and induce companies to move away from centers of union strength. There also was a political factor, the wish to counteract southern congressional hostility to organized labor. In turn, the AFL responded by opening what its president, William Green, called “a crusade to organize the unorganized workers of the South” at the third Southern Labor Conference the AFL held in Asheville, North Carolina, in May 1946.
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In addition to menacing the region’s traditional low-wage and racially inscribed cotton fields, textile firms, and mines, these union drives posed a more tangible, direct threat to southern patterns. During World War II, even before Operation Dixie, the Washington headquarters of the CIO was issuing widely circulated pamphlet materials opposing racism. “The CIO and the Negro Worker: Together for Victory” stressed, in 1942, “the great contribution” of the organization in acting “to break down the barriers which have existed in the past between Negro and white workers in labor organizations,” a form of unity necessary for “the resistance of our own people to Hitler and his Japanese allies.” It boasted how a “southern drive” was bringing “many thousands of Southern workers, Negro and white alike . . . under the protection of the CIO.” In 1943, it underscored the need for “working and fighting together regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin.” As the war drew to a close, its National CIO Committee to Abolish Discrimination called for equal treatment in employment and housing, and, after the war, this committee continued to press for a permanent FEPC.
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Fortune
’s report noted that “both the A.F. of L. and C.I.O. southern leaders are convinced that organizing in the South means organizing white and Negro workers.” To be sure, the AFL largely kept white and black workers apart in segregated union locals, and the CIO, while placing blacks and whites in the same organization, often took care in the South to address larger questions of Jim Crow only very gingerly. But with both federations understanding “that southern whites and Negroes must be organized together if they work together,” all the key actors understood how much was at stake, especially as the CIO often entered into alliances of cooperation to promote litigation on labor-related issues with the NAACP in the early years of the wartime and postwar civil rights movement.
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In these circumstances, both employers and politicians in the South proved “willing to fan the flames of race feeling” to prevent the organization of southern plants.
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They understood just how deeply race and labor intertwined. “Over the years,”
Fortune
projected, “it may well be that the most important effect of southern unionism will be in the field of Negro-white relationships.” Since Reconstruction, it recalled,
segregation has so increased in efficiency that today, novel as the idea may seem to most Southerners, the South’s two great population groups are almost strangers to each other. They live in different sections, go to different schools, worship in different churches, read different newspapers, shop in different stores, seek different places of amusement, live separate lives, and are buried in separate cemeteries.
The only local institution that southern whites and Negroes have in common today is the labor union
.
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It was this recognition, coupled with the widespread sense that both the AFL and CIO were in a strong strategic position in the South, that led the magazine to conclude that “there is little doubt that eventually the South can be organized. . . . The question is not whether, but when.”
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When never arrived.
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The principal reason was the radical shift to labor law that the South, together with Republican congressional allies, succeeded in producing in 1947. This legislation transformed the prospects for U.S. unions—across the country and especially in the South. On June 23, 1947, the Labor-Management Relations Act, the Taft-Hartley law, passed over the veto of President Truman, who denounced it as a “slave labor bill.” The act, which was technically a series of amendments to the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) of 1935, dramatically shifted power in favor of owners and managers. The major provisions of the Wagner Act had included exclusive union representation in any given bargaining unit, and restrictions on unfair labor practices by employers. Taft-Hartley dramatically relocated the vectors of labor and management bargaining capacities.
Taking note of the coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats, the editorial page of the
New York Times
celebrated how the bill “has been approved with a larger majority of both parties in both Houses than Congress has ever mustered . . . on other controversial measures of similar importance which have aroused controversy—Lend-Lease, Selective Service, and the Hull Trade Agreements Act, for example.”
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Taft-Hartley’s proponents and foes understood the legislation in the same terms, even as they evaluated its desirability in dramatically different ways. The law, its Senate sponsor, Republican Robert Taft of Ohio, argued, was passed “to restore justice and equality in labor relations . . . and to eliminate special privileges conferred on labor union officials by law and administrative regulation.” The law, President Truman averred, would “go far toward weakening our trade union movement” by converting the National Labor Relations Act “from an instrument with the major purpose of protecting the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively into a maze of pitfalls and complex procedures.”
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Truman’s own 1947 State of the Union message had called for modest amendments to the Wagner Act to ban certain types of secondary boycotts, jurisdictional strikes, and strikes over contract interpretation; he also called for better machinery for mediation and arbitration. The bill introduced by Republicans Fred Hartley in the House and Taft in the Senate was far more sweeping. It narrowed the definition of who counted as an employer under the law, and it excluded independent contractors and foremen from the meaning of the term
employee.
To the rights of employees to join or assist unions, bargain collectively through representatives, and have the right to strike “for the purpose of collective bargaining,” the new law appended new language. It stipulated that workers “shall also have the right to refrain from any or all such activities” unless an existing agreement compelled union membership. Acts by union members, moreover, were to be constrained by a redefinition of an unfair labor practice to include “interference with an employee’s rights of non-membership.” This stipulation effectively banned closed union shops that required union membership as a condition of being hired.
Crucially, the law authorized states to pass “right to work” laws. These could make it illegal by state action to require workers to pay union dues as a condition of their employment. And even where no right-to-work law existed, Taft-Hartley required union shop provisions to be approved by a majority of the membership in a secret ballot. These measures were aimed to promote open shops that made it voluntary to join a union even after it was recognized through Wagner Act procedures. As a result, union organizing was made dramatically more difficult, especially in right-to-work states. By the early 1950s, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia had passed such laws, effectively bringing labor organization to a halt.
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Two other features are especially noteworthy. Taft-Hartley kept the exact language of the Wagner Act regarding the exemption of agricultural workers and maids, stipulating that the law “shall not include any individual employed as an agricultural laborer, or in the domestic service of any family or person at his home.” But in fact the agricultural exclusion was substantially expanded. When the Wagner Act passed in 1935, this set of exclusions had not been the subject of open debate, since the Democratic Party then convened a compromise in which the South went along with the North on labor, and the North went along with the South on occupational exemptions in order to leave southern race relations untouched. But with the collapse of this arrangement, the legislative record contains open disagreement about what amounted to an even wider agricultural exclusion, of the extended kind nonsouthern Democrats had agreed to in the 1938 version of the Fair Labor Standards Act.