Rewarded by Friends and Punished by Enemies: The CIO and the Taft-Hartley Act

The Wagner Act, passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress in 1935, provided unprecedented federal protections for American labor unions. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed by a Republican-controlled Congress just twelve years later, effectively rolled back significant parts of Wagner. Previous research on Taft-Hartley identifies three factors that led to this anti-labor backlash. First, the American public was repulsed by the large strike wave that followed the end of World War II. Second, southern Democrats were concerned that powerful labor unions would organize African Americans and upset the South's racial hierarchy. Third, the Republican Party was increasingly embracing a conservative, probusiness ideology. This article contributes a new angle to this old debate by exploring the role of the CIO, its 1943 decision to create the country's first political action committee (PAC), and the consequences of its informal alliance with the Democratic Party. Using original data on CIO density and congressional voting on the Taft-Hartley Act, we demonstrate that CIO strength polarized the parties: higher levels of CIO density led Democrats to vote in favor of organized labor but led Republicans to vote in an increasingly anti-labor manner.

The Memorial Day Massacre and American Labor

On the afternoon of May 30, 1937, the Chicago Police killed or mortally wounded ten men who were among a large group of unionists attempting to picket a mill operated by the Republic Steel Corporation. Scores of demonstrators were injured, some critically, in this shocking episode. The “Memorial Day Massacre” occurred during the Little Steel Strike, a sprawling and protracted conflict that arose out of the Committee for Industrial Organization’s (CIO) attempt to overcome the strident resistance of a coalition of power companies and to organize the basic steel industry. The strike evolved into a contest to decide how much the Second New Deal and its legislative centerpiece, the Wagner Act, would alter the landscape of American labor relations. This was evident in Chicago, where the unionists’ efforts to engage in mass picketing at Republic’s plant were an attempt to wrest from the Wagner Act’s ambiguous terms an effective right to strike, and where the violence of the police, who were doing Republic’s bidding, was intended to prevent this. Ultimately, the use of violence against the unionists not only defeated this bid to engage in mass picketing but served, along with similar clashes elsewhere during the strike, to justify government intervention that ended the walkout and secured the companies’ victory. Later, the strike and the massacre were invoked to justify political and legal changes that further limited the right to strike and that endorsed much of what the police, the steel companies, and their allies had done during the conflict. While the CIO did eventually organize steel, this success was primarily the result of the war and not the strike or the labor law. And although the National Labor Relations Board prosecuted the steel companies for violating the Wagner Act, this litigation took years and ended with Republic facing only modest penalties.

The Churches Do Their Part

This chapter shows how mainline Protestant religious leaders, often working in conjunction with Jewish and Catholic groups, were instrumental in building popular support for New Deal programs including unemployment insurance, the National Recovery Administration, and the Wagner Act. It shows that Protestant elites offered the Roosevelt administration a variety of tangible forms of assistance—from local educational sessions to letter-writing campaigns to “NRA Sundays”—that went well beyond their public expressions of support. Arguably the churches’ greatest contribution to the construction of the New Deal-era welfare state, however, was to serve as a bulwark against attacks from a growing cadre of proto-libertarian entities on the far right. So long as most Protestants attended mainline churches, and so long as mainline leaders were monolithic in their support of social welfare programs, claims that there was something un-American about redirecting resources to aid the downtrodden remained an exceedingly tough sell.

The Myth of Section 7(a): Worker Militancy, Progressive Labor Legislation, and the Coal Miners

In this article, the authors look at the supposed causal role of progressive labor legislation on union organizing. As an extension of the Wagner Act debates of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the authors argue—contrary to the accepted wisdom of virtually all established scholarship—that “progressive” labor legislation is not generally the impetus for worker organization, a necessary prerequisite without which mass unionization would be impossible. Rather, this legislation is often consciously cooptive, with the explicit goal of diffusing worker militancy, denuding and undermining radical leadership while simultaneously placating popular discontent. The theoretical and methodological shortcomings of the former position are analyzed in the context of the passage of Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). The authors argue that if the unionization of coal miners—the supposed primary beneficiaries of the stimulus attributed to the legislation—occurred prior to the passage of the NIRA, Section 7(a) could not have acted as a catalyst to unionization in the coalfields. The authors show, using archival and secondary accounts, that nearly all the nation’s coal miners were organized before the passage of the NIRA. In light of this empirical data, the authors propose an alternative model of union growth that rejects the methodological individualist assumptions that tacitly undergird the existing literature.