Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (6 page)

Attitudes such as these abetted continuing discrimination. Early in the war the army refused to commission women doctors, until an act of Congress forced its hand in 1943. Women were frozen out of important governmental decision-making during and after the war. Private institutions discriminated openly. Medical schools closed their doors to women or maintained very low quotas. Bank training programs, law schools, and many businesses also established quotas. The perpetuation of sex-segregated employment contributed to low wages for women, who earned only slightly over half as much as the average for men.

Women seeking greater sexual freedom encountered equally resistant reactions in the 1940s. By then middle-class married women in many places could go to their doctors and get fitted for birth control devices. But single women normally could not, nor could the millions of poorer women without access to private doctors. Birth control clinics were few and far between. In some states it was illegal to sell—or even to use—birth control devices. Though these laws were widely ignored, it was not until 1965 that the Supreme Court ruled against such a law in Connecticut, thereby setting that issue to rest.
⁶⁸
Women wishing to terminate unwanted pregnancies in the 1940s (and 1950s and 1960s) had to consider illegal abortion, the only kind there was at the time. This was a secret and frequently a dangerous business. Millions nonetheless undertook the risk. Contemporary data from the studies of Alfred Kinsey suggested that roughly 22 percent of married women had induced abortions, most of them early in the marriage or late in the child bearing years, and that the majority of single women in his survey who became pregnant resorted to abortion.
⁶⁹

Amid such a cultural milieu people who called themselves feminists found little popular support. A sign of the times was the respectful attention given to
Modern Women: The Lost Sex
, written in 1947 by the sociologist Ferdinand Lundberg and the psychoanalyst Marynia Farnham. It denounced career women. "The independent woman is a contradiction in terms," the authors argued. Women should strive instead for "receptivity and passiveness, a willingness to accept dependence without fear or resentment, with a deep inwardness and readiness for the final goal of sexual life—impregnation." Women who rejected this kind of femininity were "sick, unhappy, neurotic, wholly or partly incapable of dealing with life." Lundberg and Farnham went on to say that bachelors in their thirties should get psychotherapy and that spinsters should be legally forbidden to teach, on grounds that they were emotionally incompetent.
⁷⁰

Few women in the mid-1940s could accept such extreme views, but most well-known female political leaders readily asserted that women were in some ways a "weaker" sex that needed protection under the law. These leaders, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, had fought hard in earlier years for "protective legislation," much of it on the state level, that opposed exploitation of women on the job. Laws set maximum working hours, outlawed night work, and disallowed the employment of women at jobs involving strenuous tasks thought to be appropriate for men. Perkins maintained that "legal equality . . . between the sexes is not possible because men and women are not identical in physical structure or social function, and therefore their needs cannot be identical."
⁷¹

Perkins, Roosevelt, and leaders of the government's Women's Bureau therefore opposed approval of the gender-blind Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed in 1923, which affirmed that "equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of sex." Such an amendment, they assumed, would gut the protective laws. Frieda Miller, head of the Women's Bureau, denounced the ERA as "radical, dangerous, and irresponsible." Another Women's Bureau official memo at the time identified backers of the ERA as a "small but militant group of leisure class women [venting] their resentment of not having been born men."
⁷²

Alice Paul, head of the militantly pro-ERA National Women's Party, fought back by arguing that women were equal in every way and needed no "protection." She insisted that protective laws encouraged employers to deny work to women and instead to hire men, who faced fewer restrictions. The debates between the pro- and anti-ERA camps were bitter and sometimes nasty. Paul occasionally resorted to playing on contemporary Cold War fears. Among the opponents of the ERA, she pointed out, were members of the American Communist party. Alerting the rabidly anti-Communist House Un-American Activities Committee, she disparaged the loyalty of her rivals.
⁷³

The rancor that divided these women leaders was but one of many forces that helped assure defeat of the ERA in the 1940s and early 1950s. The amendment came closest to passage in 1946, when Paul and other leading women—Georgia O'Keeffe, Margaret Mead, Margaret Sanger, Pearl Buck, and Katharine Hepburn among them—demanded its adoption. In that year a small majority of the Senate, 38–35, voted for it. But the initiation of constitutional amendments by this means requires approval by two-thirds of both houses of Congress. Some of the senators who voted in favor in 1946 did so knowing it would not receive two-thirds. In the House, meanwhile, the ERA got nowhere. When it failed to win approval in the Senate, the
New York Times
breathed a sigh of relief. "Motherhood," it declared, "cannot be amended, and we are glad the Senate didn't try."
⁷⁴

ERA supporters kept up the fight in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but the struggle commanded little public attention. ERA was not an issue in the 1948 campaign. Truman made no mention of it. In 1950 the Senate again approved it, this time by a substantial margin of 63 to 11. But they were voting on a new version that included an amendment exempting protective legislation. In this form the National Women's Party opposed it, and the House ignored the issue. The same series of events took place again in 1953. After that the ERA was all but dead until the resurgence of feminism in the 1960s.

The fate of the ERA, which never had a realistic chance in the late 1940s, hardly stood as a main event in the lives of American women at the time. Much more important for people was the quest for satisfactory personal lives—a quest that was driving a boom in consumer goods and sending ever-larger numbers of women into the work force. In time, the experience of working outside the home broadened the expectations of many American women. Their children, moreover, grew up in homes where mothers were different role models: wage-earners as well as housekeepers. But though these social changes were powerful, they were gradual and slow to affect the culture in the 1940s. Values about matters like gender roles—or religion and race—normally evolve only gradually, and the postwar era was no exception. In this sense, defeat of the ERA in the 1940s and 1950s was more a symbol of continuing cultural patterns than it was a major political battle. Expectations aside, some things indeed remain much the same.

2
Unions, Liberals, and the State: Stalemate

In 1942 the left-wing Almanac Singers performed a new song, "UAWCIO," about the United Automobile Workers, a militant union of the Congress of Industrial Organizations:

I was there when the Union came to town.
I was there when old Henry Ford went down;
I was standing at Gate 4
When I heard the people roar:
"Ain't nobody keeps us Autoworkers down!"

It's that UAW-CIO
Makes the Army roll and go—
Turning out the jeeps and tanks and airplanes every day
It's that UAW-CIO
Makes that Army roll and go—
Puts wheels on the USA

I was there on that cold December day
When we heard about Pearl Harbor far away
I was down on Cadillac Square
When the Union rallied there
To put them plans for pleasure cars away

Chorus

There'll be a union-label in Berlin
When the union boys in uniform march in;

And rolling in the ranks
There'll be UAW tanks—
Roll Hitler out and roll the union in!

The song captured well the genuine pride and patriotism of many wartime blue-collar workers in the United States. Just as the war helped to acculturate many first- and second-generation immigrants, it brought millions of Americans into a much-expanded work force, gave them meaningful jobs to do, and engaged them in a common effort against the enemy. The war virtually ended unemployment and led to considerable improvements in the average real wages of workers. Many of these workers gladly proclaimed their pride in "being an American."
¹

The song revealed a second key fact about many American blue-collar workers during the war: they took great pride in their unions. These had grown greatly during the 1930s, when the American labor union movement at last surged ahead. Thanks in considerable part to the militancy of the newly formed CIO, which recruited millions of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, total union membership increased between 1930 and 1940 from 3.4 million to 8.7 million, or from 11.6 to 26.9 percent of non-agricultural employment. Growth during the war was even greater, indeed unmatched before or since. By 1945 there were 14.8 million union members. In that year they composed 35.5 percent of total non-agricultural employment and 21.9 percent of employment overall.
²

Unions had not only grown by 1945; they also constituted a vanguard of American liberalism. This is not to say that they were egalitarian in all that they said and did: unions, like other American institutions, had a generally poor record when it came to admitting women, blacks, and other minorities.
³
Nor were American workers ordinarily class-conscious in a Marxian sense. But many union members—as well as other low-income Americans—felt the sting of inequality, and they proudly identified themselves as "working class." Given a sense of their rights as citizens during the New Deal, they backed a range of liberal social policies, voted for liberal office-seekers, and exercised considerable political power within the Democratic party. More than at any other time in American history, the union movement in 1945 defined the left liberal limit of what was possible in politics.
⁴

Indeed, unions were considerably more powerful at the time than left-wing organizations such as the Socialist and Communist parties. Other activist, progressive organizations, such as the Congress of Racial Equality, the NAACP, and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, which battled to help poor and black people in the South, also confronted widespread hostility: none of these had much influence in politics. The postwar years frustrated the American Left, which faced increasingly harsh Red-baiting after 1945.

Yet even unions, poised as they were for further gains in 1945, contended with large obstacles in the late 1940s, a time of strong corporate and conservative resistance to social reform. The travails of unions in those years reveal much about the stalemate that came to characterize American labor relations as well as politics in the late 1940s.
⁵

T
HE DREAMS
of the United Automobile Workers, as expressed by one of the union's most articulate leaders, Walter Reuther, were especially compelling to liberals at that time. Reuther, thirty-eight years old in 1945, differed from stereotypes that portrayed labor union "bosses" as crude, cigar-chomping, and semi-literate. A one time tool-and-die maker who had worked in auto plants in Detroit (and, briefly, in the Soviet Union during his youth), he was fastidious in his personal habits and ill-at-ease in what one historian has described as the "blowzy comradeliness of smoke-filled union halls and blue-collar taverns."
⁶
He commanded the respect, but not always the personal affection, of the rank-and-file. Some close associates worried about his great ambitions. The story circulated that Reuther, Truman, and CIO head Philip Murray met about this time. When Reuther briefly left the room, Truman took it upon himself to give Murray a warning. "Phil," he told Murray, "that young man is after your job." Murray replied quietly, "No, Mr. President, he really is after
your
job."
⁷

But friends as well as foes recognized that Reuther was an articulate, principled, and even visionary man. A former Socialist, he had been beaten by Ford Motor Company thugs during the strikes of the 1930s. By the 1940s he had rejected socialism as impractical in the United States, but he maintained good relations with democratic socialists like Norman Thomas, the longtime head of the Socialist party. Reuther believed that organized labor must take the lead in promoting a more progressive society that would improve the lives of blacks and other poor and powerless people.
⁸
His vision incorporated much that the Left was seeking at the time: a governmentally guaranteed "annual wage," a much-expanded welfare state, civil rights protection for abused minorities, federal legislation to promote better education and health care, and workers' control of key decisions about production and technological development.
⁹

Though relatively few American workers had such large visions as Reuther, many responded enthusiastically to the bread-and-butter demands that he and other labor leaders agitated for in the 1940s. Militant movements for better wages and working conditions blazed like wildfires rising from the grass roots. In 1944 these caused a record number of 4,956 work stoppages involving 2.12 million workers, or 4.8 percent of all those who were employed. Not only conservatives, who retaliated with bills to draft strikers, but also Roosevelt and many other liberals expressed mounting alarm about disruption of wartime production.

The end of the war brought a host of new problems for American labor. Layoffs reaffirmed the specter of depression. Workers still on the job lost overtime pay, which had been vital to their earnings during the war. Take-home pay for many such workers declined in late 1945 by 30 percent. Rumors of corporate greed fanned the flames of egalitarian outrage. Murray, a soft-spoken but determined advocate, estimated that the aftertax profits of steel corporations were 113 percent higher between 1940 and 1944 than they had been in the previous four years. Charles E. Wilson, head of General Motors, was known to have received a salary in 1943 of $459,014. In late 1945 around one-fifth of working families in American cities received less than $1,500 in total cash income for the year—at a time when the average for full-time employees was $2,190.
¹⁰

Anxieties such as these provoked a rash of angry disputes and walkouts in late 1945. Joseph Goulden's sprightly book on the era captures the turbulence well: "At the Stock Exchange, the tickers fell silent when 400 clerical employees walked out. Barbers, butchers, bakers struck. Stoppages interrupted the production of copper wire, Campbell's Soup, castor oil, Christmas toys. The Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team, near the cellar in the National League, took a strike vote in midsummer, but decided to continue playing." A strike of 3,500 electric company workers in Pittsburgh threw an additional 100,000 out of work. The city's trolleys came to a halt, the streetlights went out, and office buildings shut down for fear of elevator failure. "This is a disaster," Mayor David Lawrence said in imploring workers to end the strike. In Manhattan, simultaneous strikes by elevator operators, truck drivers, and maritime workers stopped shipments in and out of the city. In all, there were 4,750 work stoppages in 1945, only 200 or so fewer than in 1944. The disruptions upset Truman. "People are somewhat befuddled and want to take time out to get a nerve rest," he wrote his mother. "Some want a guarantee of rest at government expense and some I'm sorry to say just want to raise hell and hamper the return to peacetime production to obtain some political advantage."
¹¹

The wave of strikes crested in early 1946, involving 1.8 million workers in such major industries as meat-packing, oil-refining, electrical appliances, steel, and automobile manufacture. The year 1946 ultimately became the most contentious in the history of labor-management relations in the United States, with 4,985 stoppages by 4.6 million workers, or about one of every fourteen Americans in the labor force. The number of worker-days lost was 116 million, three times the previous high in 1945. More than in 1945, these were strikes called by union leaders after lengthy but futile negotiations with management. Contemporaries were impressed by the order and discipline of the masses of union members who attended meetings, walked the picket lines, and undertook the sacrifices of refusing to work.
¹²

The disputes mainly involved wages. Union leaders cited wartime and postwar inflation as justification for seeking wage hikes of 30 percent. For auto workers—a little better paid than most manufacturing workers at the time—this would have meant average pay increases of approximately thirty-three cents an hour, from $1.12 to $1.45, or from $44.80 to $58 for a forty-hour week. That would have been $3,016 for a full year. General Motors countered with an unsatisfactory offer of ten cents an hour, and the strike began in December 1945, followed in January by a wave of walkouts in other industries. Government fact-finders then estimated that inflation since the start of the war might justify raises of around nineteen cents. Steel industry leaders, authorizing a price hike, settled there, as did bargainers in most other industries. The auto workers hung on but were isolated. After 113 days Reuther agreed to wage increases of eighteen and a half cents an hour.

Labor leaders at the time complained that the settlements, which resulted in average wages in manufacturing in 1946 of around $50 a week ($2,600 for a fifty-two-week working year) were far too stingy. Actually, these workers did well by comparison with many other Americans at the time—well enough, in fact, to think in time of buying a small home. By contrast, regularly employed farm, forestry, and fishery workers at the same time averaged $1,200, domestic workers $1,411, medical workers (mainly nurses) $1,605. Public school teachers and principals averaged only $1,995. Still, it was true that a wage of $50 a week left little margin: temporary unemployment, injury, and illness were among the many setbacks that could quickly cause impoverishment. Aging workers, fearing replacement by more productive younger people, were especially vulnerable. At that time few American corporations had pension plans. Longtime workers (in covered jobs) who retired could expect Social Security pensions of around $65 to $70 per month, or a maximum of $840 per year.
¹³

Reuther and other American liberals especially lamented their inability to prevail in the larger battle over control of practices on the shop floor: managers refused to budge on this important issue. Reuther also insisted that corporations had reaped great profits in the war and could afford to pay better wages without increasing their prices. Management, he asserted, should "open its books" to expose its costs. This claim especially outraged business leaders, who recognized that it threatened their control of basic decisions. Almost to a man they resisted Reuther's "socialistic" approach to labor-management relations.
¹⁴

It is difficult to say whether Reuther was correct in claiming that corporations could afford to pay better wages without increasing prices. Business leaders adamantly refused to open their books. Instead, they tended to yield to demands for modest wage increases, whereupon they raised the prices of their goods and passed on wage costs to consumers. Then and later, labor leaders reluctantly acquiesced in this kind of compromise. Starting in 1948 unions compromised further, agreeing to COLA (cost-of-living agreements) clauses in annual contracts. These used measures of inflation in order automatically to readjust wages. In so doing labor surrendered effective efforts to have a say in pricing. This pattern of annual wage and price settlements—almost always upward—reflected an important reality that dominated the economics and politics of the postwar years: well-established interest groups ultimately agreed to accommodate each other while giving lip service at best to the needs of the unorganized. Subsequent labor negotiations, especially in manufacturing industries, led to similar patterns in the 1950s.