In the Wake of Pearl Harbor

In January 1942, President Roosevelt set up the National War Labor Board to reduce strikes, control wage inflation, develop national policies for union-management relations, and resolve disputes between labor and companies for the duration for the war. This chapter explains the dire situation facing the United States and its allies in the winter of 1941-42, how the NWLB came into being, the board’s members, and the backgrounds and outlook of the young economists and attorneys who did the bulk of the board’s work. Philip Murray, the president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Steelworkers union, called the staffers “the Labor Board boys.”

The Emergence of White-Collar Unionism in New York’s Culture Industries

Chapter 2 explores the development of white-collar unionism in New York’s culture industries during the Great Depression. Culture workers responded to the crisis with new organizing initiatives, many of which eventually gravitated toward the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Larger groups of workers received charters from the CIO as affiliated international unions, such as the American Newspaper Guild, with the New York locals containing a substantial share of total national membership. Organizing efforts in cultural fields that were more concentrated in the metropolitan area, like the Book and Magazine Guild and the American Advertising Guild, became local unions within the United Office and Professional Workers of America, which was the CIO affiliate with a general jurisdiction covering white-collar workers. This chapter also examines the important role of women activists in white-collar organizing as well as unionists’ participation in the broader Popular Front social movement of the 1930s.

A Labor-Liberal Constellation

This chapter traces the initial diffusion of the PAC concept from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to other labor organizations, including the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and liberal ideological groups. Though the AFL had previously opposed the CIO’s partisan electoral strategy and the formation of P.A.C., it came to emulate both following passage of the Taft-Hartley Act by a Republican Congress in 1947, forming Labor’s League for Political Education (LLPE) to engage in elections. That same year, two avowedly “liberal” groups were created to bolster the anti-Communist Left and champion liberal Democrats: the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the National Committee for an Effective Congress (NCEC). The chapter traces the intertwined electoral efforts and tactical innovations of these liberal and labor organizations through the AFL-CIO merger in 1955, the subsequent creation of their joint PAC, the Committee on Political Education (COPE), and the latter’s activities in the 1956 elections.

The Rise of Political Action Committees

This book explores the origins of political action committees (PACs) in the mid-twentieth century and their impact on the American party system. It argues that PACs were envisaged, from the outset, as tools for effecting ideological change in the two main parties, thus helping to foster the partisan polarization we see today. It shows how the very first PAC, created by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1943, explicitly set out to liberalize the Democratic Party by channeling campaign resources to liberal Democrats while trying to defeat conservative Southern Democrats. This organizational model and strategy of “dynamic partisanship” subsequently diffused through the interest group world—imitated first by other labor and liberal allies in the 1940s and 1950s, then adopted and inverted by business and conservative groups in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Previously committed to the “conservative coalition” of Southern Democrats and northern Republicans, the latter groups came to embrace a more partisan approach and created new PACs to help refashion the Republican Party into a conservative counterweight. The book locates this PAC mobilization in the larger story of interest group electioneering, which went from a rare and highly controversial practice at the beginning of the twentieth century to a ubiquitous phenomenon today. It also offers a fuller picture of PACs as not only financial vehicles but electoral innovators that pioneered strategies and tactics that have come to pervade modern US campaigns and helped transform the American party system.

Introducing P.A.C.

This chapter examines the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO’s) political action committee or P.A.C. in 1943, following the collapse of Labor’s Non-Partisan League and passage of a new law restricting union money in elections. This was a critical point in the CIO’s embrace of a “dynamic partisan” electoral strategy. Through interventions in primary elections and the targeted provision of general election support to sympathetic Democratic candidates, P.A.C. sought to reshape the Democratic Party along more pro-labor and liberal lines. As this chapter reveals, P.A.C. leaders hoped to elect supportive lawmakers in the 1944 and 1946 elections, seeking out candidates who were strongly committed to labor’s goals. Despite public pronouncements of nonpartisanship, however, they chose not to look for allies on both sides of the aisle, instead favoring liberal Democrats over liberal Republicans—hoping to impress Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal vision onto the Democratic Party as a whole.

Epilogue

This epilogue shows that Hague v. CIO had a legacy more complex than its reputation as a speech rights victory for workers and others over dictatorial city boss Frank Hague under the Bill of Rights. The American Civil Liberties Union and renamed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) immediately split over the decision’s ramifications. Moreover, while the ruling enlarged constitutional protection for the right of public assembly to the benefit of Jehovah’s Witnesses, civil rights demonstrators, and others, it did little to enhance picketing and other “labor speech,” or to shield union organizers from police harassment. And while the decision freed the CIO to organize in Jersey City, it did not destroy Mayor Hague, who accommodated CIO unions and was ousted later due to city politics.

Communism and the Labor Movement

Communist activists took a strong interest in American trade unions from the 1920s through the 1950s and played an important role in shaping the nature of the American union movement. Initial communist trade union activism drew upon radical labor traditions that preceded the formation of the American Communist Party (CPUSA). Early communist trade unionists experimented with different types of structures to organize unorganized workers. They also struggled with international communist factionalism. Communist trade unionists were most effective during the Great Depression and World War II. In those years, communist activists helped build the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and bring industrial unionism to previously unorganized workers. Throughout the history of communist involvement in the US labor movement, international communist policy guided general organizing strategies. Shifts in international policy, such as the announcement of a Soviet non-aggression pact with Germany, proved politically difficult to navigate on the local level. Yet, Left-led unions proved to be more democratically run and focused on racial and gender equality than many of those without communist influence. Their leadership supported social justice and militant action. The Cold War years witnessed CIO purges of Left-led unions and federal investigations and arrests of communist trade unionists. Repression from both within and without the labor movement as well as the CPUSA’s own internal policy battles ultimately ended communist trade unionists’ widespread influence on American trade unions.

Back to Work

As the Great Depression crushed the mining industry, Tri-State miners looked for ways to restore their standing as hard-working-white men and their faith in capitalism. The New Deal offered hope but brought labor unions back into the district. Some miners, but not a majority, looked to organized labor as the best way to roll back the power of the companies. This chapter explores their 1935 strike to regain what they had lost and the ways the New Deal labor regime was too weak to protect them. While strikers waited for allies in the nascent Congress of Industrial Organizations, the mining companies organized the majority of the district’s nonunion miners into a back-to-work movement that became a company union. This group rallied around old promises of racial superiority and high pay for loyal, hard-working white men who were willing to destroy the CIO union. The CIO, with the help of New Deal officials, eventually won this dispute in court, but it could not overrule the reactionary commitments in the hearts of the majority of Tri-State miners as a new world war brought the mining economy to life again.

The Failure of Labor Unionism in the US South

The failure of labor unions to succeed in the American South, largely because national unions proved unable or unwilling to confront white supremacy head on, offers an important key to understanding post–World War II American politics, especially the rise of the civil rights movement. Looking at the 1930s and 1940s, it is clear that the failure was not the result of a cultural aversion to collective action on the part of white workers in the South, as several histories have suggested, but rather stemmed from the refusal of the conservative leadership in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to organize an otherwise militant southern workforce composed of both whites and Blacks. These lost opportunities, especially among southern woodworkers and textile workers, contrasts sharply with successful interracial union drives among southern coal miners and steelworkers, especially in Alabama. Counterfactual examples of potentially durable civil rights unionism illustrate how the labor movement could have affected the civil rights movement and transformed politics had the South been unionized.

Labor and US Foreign Relations

American workers have often been characterized by the press, scholars, and policy-makers as apathetic and ill-informed about foreign policy issues. To highlight this point, scholars have frequently used an anecdote about a blue-collar worker who responded to an interviewer’s questions regarding international issues in the 1940s by exclaiming “Foreign Affairs! That’s for people who don’t have to work for a living.” Yet missing from many such appraisals is a consideration of the long history of efforts by both informal groups of workers and labor unions to articulate and defend the perceived international interests of American workers. During the early years of the American Republic, groups of workers used crowd actions, boycotts, and protests to make their views on important foreign policy issues known. In the late 19th century, emerging national labor unions experimented with interest group lobbying as well as forms of collective action championed by the international labor movement to promote working-class foreign policy interests. Many 20th- and 21st-century US labor groups shared in common a belief that government leaders failed to adequately understand the international concerns and perspectives of workers. Yet such groups often pursued different types of foreign policy influence. Some dominant labor organizations, such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), participated in federal bureaucracies, advisory councils, and diplomatic missions and programs designed to encourage collaboration among business, state, and labor leaders in formulating and promoting US foreign policy. Yet other labor groups, as well as dissidents within the AFL and CIO, argued that these power-sharing arrangements compromised labor’s independence and led some trade union leaders to support policies that actually hurt both American and foreign workers. Particularly important in fueling internal opposition to AFL-CIO foreign policies were immigrant workers and those with specific ethno-racial concerns. Some dissenting groups and activists participated in traditional forms of interest group lobbying in order to promote an independent international agenda for labor; others committed themselves to the foreign policy programs of socialist, labor, or communist parties. Still others, such as the Industrial Workers of the World, advocated strike and international economic actions by workers to influence US foreign policy or to oppose US business activities abroad.