Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (8 page)

Taft-Hartley aroused storms of outrage from labor leaders, who damned it as "fascistic" and as a "slave labor act." CIO counsel Lee Pressman explained, "When you think of it merely as a combination of individual provisions, you are losing entirely the full impact of the program, the sinister conspiracy that has been hatched."
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Murray cried that the law was "conceived in sin." Like other labor leaders, he feared that the act would end a brief era in American history, during which the state had served as a neutral or pro-labor broker in relations with management. The rules of the game would be changed.

The angry reaction of unions prompted strenuous, often frantic lobbying. Truman, too, opposed the bill as an unreasonable assertion of corporate interests. Having damaged his standing with unions in 1946, he was also anxious for political reasons to mend fences. When the bill passed in mid-1947, he vetoed it. But both houses quickly and decisively overrode the veto, and the bill became law. Some union leaders then considered calling strikes in protest, only to back off from such a defiant step. This was probably a prudent decision, for rank-and-file attitudes were uncertain.
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Union leaders decided instead to fight the law in the political arena, by urging subsequent Congresses to amend or repeal it.

In fact, Taft-Hartley was far from a "slave labor act." The ban on closed shops, to be sure, lessened the control that a few strong unions had had over hiring. But most unions managed to live with the law. Swallowing civil libertarian scruples, they signed the non-Communist affidavits and continued to avail themselves of the procedures and protections of the NLRB. The major industrial unions bargained as before with employers. Aggressive, expanding unions such as the Teamsters—ultimately to become by far the nation's largest union—flourished even in right-to-work states. By the 1950s most observers agreed that Taft-Hartley was no more disastrous for workers than the Wagner Act had been for employers. What ordinarily mattered most in labor relations was not government laws such as Taft-Hartley but the relative power of unions and management in the economic marketplace. Where unions were strong, they usually managed all right; when they were weak, new laws did them little additional harm.
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Still, the success of Taft-Hartley revealed that the political power of organized labor was waning. Although the law did not repeal the Wagner Act—the conservatives who wrote it reaffirmed labor's basic right to bargain collectively—its passage exposed broad popular suspicion of Big Labor that remained strong thereafter. Unions, despite sustained lobbying, failed to secure revision of the law in the Democratic Congress of 1949—or even in the heady years of liberal triumph in the mid-1960s.
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A third conflict of the late 1940s, so-called Operation Dixie, further revealed the limits of labor power at the time. This was the quest of the CIO and the AFL, competing with one another, to break the anti-union hold of employers in much of the South. The CIO spent $1 million and took on 200 organizers at the peak of its efforts in 1946 and 1947. From the beginning, however, Operation Dixie ran into determined opposition from state governments and from the textile industry. Agricultural employers also fought forcefully against the effort. Anti-union leaders appealed shamelessly to racist feelings by linking the CIO with efforts for desegregation, thereby driving wedges between white and black workers. In Birmingham, Alabama, a major steel city, white steel workers rejected an insurgent, largely black local of workers who organized under the Communist-dominated Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union. By the end of 1947 the hopes for interracial steel union locals were all but vanishing in the South.
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By 1948 it was clear that Operation Dixie had failed completely. Indeed, unions enrolled slightly smaller percentages of non-agricultural labor in the South in 1955—around 18 percent—than they had in 1945. Equally worrisome to liberals, the failure exposed the enduring divisiveness of race, which had managed—as so often in United States history—to damage the potential for working-class solidarity. The lack of such solidarity, in turn, weakened liberal southern politicians, who after 1947 faced an anti-union coalition of conservatives roused to potitical action by Operation Dixie. Liberal office-holders who dared to present themselves as pro-union racial moderates often went down to defeat—as Florida's Claude Pepper and North Carolina's Frank Graham did in races for the United States Senate in 1950. Other political figures concluded that they had to soft-pedal liberal ideas about unions and about blacks if they hoped to stay in office.
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The struggle in Birmingham revealed the fourth, and sometimes nastiest, conflict that damaged labor solidarity in the immediate postwar years. This was the battle between Communist and anti-Communist union leaders.
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Corresponding with rising Cold War fears, it simmered as early as the war years. By 1945 a number of unions, including the United Electrical Workers, the International Longshoremen's Union, the National Maritime Union, and the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union either had Communist leaders or followed the Soviet party line on political and economic issues. Most of these were in the CIO. In all, twelve of thirty-five CIO affiliates in 1946 had a Communist or strongly pro-Soviet leadership. Nearly a million workers (most of them non-Communist) belonged to these unions.
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By this time most leading labor figures, including Reuther, Meany, and Murray, had fought many battles with Communist unionists. So had others on the non-Communist Left, including Socialists. All these leaders believed that Communists, parroting the Soviet party line, sought to seize control for their own sectarian purposes. In 1947 and 1948 these internal struggles became bitter and occasionally violent, leading Murray to tell the CIO executive board, "If communism is an issue in your unions, throw it to hell out, and throw its advocates out along with it." In 1949 he called Communists "sulking cowards," "apostles of hate," and "dirty, filthy traitors." With the support of anti-Communist allies he expelled eleven unions, with 900,000 members, from the CIO.
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Murray and his allies were right about one thing: Communist or pro-Communist leaders of these unions generally followed the Soviet party line on a range of domestic and international issues. In so doing they did not reflect the political views of most of the workers they were representing, and they exposed the union movement as a whole to loud charges that it was "soft" on Communism. For these reasons Murray and other top unionists decided to fight against Communist influence. In expelling Communist officers, however, Murray and his allies acted without much attention to democratic procedures. Some leaders of the purged unions, after all, had been elected to office by democratic votes of their members. The purges also threw a number of effective union organizers out of the movement and stifled internal discussion. As Paul Jacobs, a union activist who reluctantly supported the expulsions, said later, the purges brought "all serious debate within the CIO to a standstill. In some unions it became a habit to brand as a Communist anyone who opposed the leaders."
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By mid-19 50 the Red Scare in unions had triumphed, leaving anti-Communists in firm control of the labor movement in the United States. For this and other reasons, many unions operated thereafter more as special interest groups than as supporters of broad-based liberal ideas such as those that Reuther had emphasized in 1945. Strong within the Democratic party in industrial areas, unions were also something of a prisoner of the party, unable to do much in politics without it. In non-industrial areas—and among the masses of blacks, working women, and other non-unionized Americans—they had little influence at all. To committed social reformers in the United States, the stagnation of organized labor by 1950 was both cause and consequence of a broader political stalemate that blocked liberal goals at the time.
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I
N
1945
IT WAS
NOT altogether easy to predict the development of such a stalemate. On the contrary, some signs suggested that liberals might advance. The Democrats after all, continued to have a clear majority of the electorate, having grown mightily under the leadership of Roosevelt and the New Deal. They could count on the allegiance, some of it strong in those days of intense partisan loyalties, of large majorities of politically numerous people: blacks, poor farmers, blue-collar workers, unionists, Jews, and Catholics. Of course, there were reasons for Democrats to be concerned. Voter turnouts favoring Democrats, after rising in the 1930s, had fallen again during the war. Truman, although a loyal New Dealer, was an uncertain political quantity as a leader. And Republicans enjoyed the backing of most businessmen; with the aid of conservative Democrats the GOP had blocked New Deal measures in Congress since the late 1930s. Still, conservatives seemed to be in a minority among the electorate; the Democratic-dominated political universe looked stable in 1945.

Popular willingness to call on the State, a source of liberal social policies since the 1930s, also seemed to grow during the war. As passage of the GI Bill of Rights suggested, a sense of rights-consciousness had grown during the previous decade.
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By 1945, the majority of people accepted the once heretical ideas that government had a responsibility to fight unemployment, that economists and other "experts" had the know-how to manage economic life, even that short-term governmental deficits were tolerable in times of distress.
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Total federal spending rose from around $9 billion in 1939 to $95 billion in 1945; expenditures during the war years were twice the total spent during the previous 150 years of United States history. This did not mean that Americans accepted or even understood the often arcane ideas of liberal economists like John Maynard Keynes, who had argued for compensatory public spending to relieve recessions. It did mean, however, that people had developed a matter-of-fact appreciation of the larger role of the federal government.
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Deficits, indeed, had been a fiscal reality since 1930, had mushroomed during the war to a scarcely conceivable peak of $54 billion in 1943, and were widely believed to have been an engine of wartime prosperity. After all, the gross national product (GNP) boomed at the time, from $100 billion in current prices in 1939 to $212 billion in 1945.

The Supreme Court by 1945 had unambiguously accepted these ideas about the economic obligations of the State. One case in point was
Wickard
v.
Filburn
in 1942, in which the Court unanimously laid to rest any lingering doubts about the constitutionality of intrusive federal management of the economy. It ruled that farmers who had agreed to federally determined production quotas could be penalized if they grew wheat in excess of such quotas, even if they used the excess only for home consumption.
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Comparably broad interpretations of the commerce clause had sparked explosive disagreements as recently as the 1930s. After 1942, however, they evoked virtually none at all. Then and later the Court, dominated by Roosevelt appointees, endorsed expansive notions about governmental activism in economic matters.
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Americans seemed to support such governmental activity even when it came to taxation, which grew dramatically during the war. In 1939 only 3.9 million Americans had paid individual federal income taxes. At no time in the 1930s had this tax revenue amounted to more than 1.4 percent of GNP. Federal corporate taxes had never exceeded 1.6 percent. By 1943, 40.2 million Americans paid federal income taxes, which had risen by then to 8.3 percent of GNP. Starting in 1944 Americans went along with the withholding of taxes—also a wartime innovation—as a normal fact of life. After 1945 federal taxes dipped a little but never sank to prewar levels: income taxes reached a postwar low of 5.9 percent of GNP in 1949, by which time 35.6 million people were filing tax returns. Scarcely looking back, the nation went from a system of class taxation to one of mass taxation during the war.
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With the advantages of hindsight, however, it is now clear that war-related growth in government also had malignant consequences. As early as the mid-1930s Roosevelt had begun making wider use of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) headed by J. Edgar Hoover. Shrewd, deeply suspicious, a consummate bureaucratic infighter, Hoover had already developed a number of carefully guarded special files, including an "Obscene File," a "Sex Deviate File," and other "Personal and Confidential" files that contained all manner of rumor, gossip, and information about people. When FDR asked Hoover to investigate the activities of isolationists and political opponents in 1940, the FBI went so far as to tap the phone of Harry Hopkins, FDR's chief adviser. There is no evidence that all this skulduggery contributed to the war effort. What it mainly did was vastly to increase Hoover's power, as well as his command of information that he could use to silence potential opponents. The FBI was to become an extraordinarily dangerous force in American politics after 1945.
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