Fear Itself (62 page)

In the House, every Republican who served on the Labor Committee was joined by its four southern Democrats (Graham Barden of North Carolina, Ovie Clark Fisher of Texas, John Wood of Georgia, and Wingate Lucas of Texas) to support widening the exclusion to include workers who handled, dried, packaged, processed, froze, stored, or delivered crops, the vast majority of whom in the South were black. The six Democrats who opposed this extension notably included Harlem’s African-American representative, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and a future president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. In the Senate Committee, only Florida’s Claude Pepper demurred, while Louisiana’s Allen Ellender and Alabama’s Lister Hill joined the Republican majority. There was little debate on the matter once the bill reached the floor, though Robert Wagner did excoriate fellow Democrats who voted with Republicans in favor of “excluding agricultural workers.”
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A key element of the new law was its expansion of activities that it labeled “unfair labor practices,” including secondary boycotts, picketing, or strikes that targeted companies doing business with a firm where the union was engaged in a labor dispute. But as the historian Hugh Davis Graham pointed out, despite this development, “racial discrimination as an unfair labor practice was expressly rejected by Congress when it passed Taft-Hartley.”
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As Senator Taft explained, “Let us take the case of unions which prohibit the admission of Negroes to membership. If they prohibit the admission of Negroes to membership, they may continue to do so; but representatives of the union cannot go to the employer and say, ‘You have got to fire this man because he is not a member of the union.’ ” Further, Florida’s Spessard Holland successfully included an amendment specifying that unfair labor practice provisions “shall not impair the right of a labor organization to prescribe its own rules with respect to the acquisition or retention of membership therein.”
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With such reassurances, Virginia’s Howard Smith reminded the House after the law had been signed that care had been taken to make sure that no FEPC requirements had been smuggled in.
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Republican support for Taft-Hartley was based on a variety of motives. Influenced not only by established big industry that had made a kind of peace with labor but wished to protect its traditional managerial prerogatives, but by upstart, strongly anti-union entrepreneurs who had extreme free-market commitments, congressional Republicans were concerned that union wages might make many firms uncompetitive. They also desired to roll back any remaining prospects for democratic planning and corporatism that would require effective union representation. Additionally, they sought to punish unions that had actively been mobilizing to elect Democratic Party candidates, and they hoped to eliminate Communist influence in some CIO unions by making the signature of a non-Communist affidavit mandatory for union officials.
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Southern Democratic purposes were different. They offered indispensable support for this law in order to restrict union penetration into their region, broaden the exclusion of farmworkers, and make it possible for unions to continue to practice racial discrimination without federal restriction. They understood that the legislation’s key provisions would advance their efforts to insulate the South’s employment relationships and labor markets from the effective reach of countrywide unions. Right-to-work laws would negate federal union protections and help the region build up the hungry new industries that had been spurred by the war, including independent oil, electronics, and aircraft, without having to worry about union demands. The prohibition of secondary boycotts would prevent such developments as the refusal by national unions to transport agricultural goods produced in the South by nonunion labor. Clauses that bolstered independent and regional unions would aid organizations that were likely to understand and adapt to the southern circumstances, and be less interested in industry wide national bargaining.

The new law allowed the South to correct what it now viewed as a mistake. The only outspoken southern supporter of unions during the protracted debate was Florida’s Claude Pepper.
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“I come from the South,” he remarked, “where I regret to say we have not yet gained as large an organized labor force as I hope we shall have, where our attitude toward labor organization is not always as sympathetic and understanding as I wish it were.”
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Rather more typical was Senator W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel of Texas, who “saw the need to take power away from labor,” and “wanted to protect employees from ‘goon squads’ and ‘labor racketeers.’”
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In the House, Graham Barden of North Carolina explicitly referred to Van Bittner (“a little Caesar”) and Operation Dixie to argue that unless action were taken to curb union power “we certainly cannot continue . . . and preserve our American economy and our American way of life.”
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His Mississippi colleague, William Whittington, likewise sought to take on Bittner and the CIO, arguing for “an amendment that would definitely ban the union shop” and stressing the importance, in deliberately ironic language, of “freedom from involuntary servitude.”
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“As we all know,” Congressman Hartley observed in his review of the process by which the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 had become law, the Wagner Act’s enactment “was made possible only through the support of a good many southern Democrats who were later to regret their action.”
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One such House member was Mississippi’s John Rankin, who now spoke of how “some of the greatest injustices that have ever been wrought have been in some of the labor legislation that has been passed in the last 10 years.”
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Of all the lawmaking in the Truman years, Taft-Hartley represented the greatest triumph for the security of Jim Crow by creating a legal climate that was designed to inhibit a genuinely national labor movement. Not surprisingly, it mobilized overwhelming southern support in the House and Senate. If, in the late 1930s, southern Democrats had begun to be an essential partner in a new coalition with Republicans that then sought to reduce the administrative scope of the National Labor Relations Board and to enhance the relative position of employers as they faced organized labor, a decade later the southerners had become the pivot around which far-reaching antilabor initiatives could succeed even against the determined opposition of a Democratic president. In the early years of the Wagner Act, “the NLRB had ‘tackled the Big Boys in every industry’: the Aluminum Company of America, Carnegie-Illinois, Wierton, Inland and Republic Steel, Swift, Standard Oil, Shell Oil, Western Union, Consolidated Aircraft, Goodyear, the Associated Press, Chevrolet, Ford, Remington Rand, the growers and shippers associations in California, United Fruit, and the East, West, and Gulf Coast shipping associations.”
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Taft-Hartley shifted the targets of federal concern to the AFL and CIO, which would now be attacked as “Big Boys” in an even more punitive way.
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The South made this happen. The country’s profound change in law and attitude toward the circumstances of organized labor was the direct result of shifts in southern legislative behavior during the 1940s. Faced with the surprising rise of labor in their region, and with the union movement’s increasing command of resources and issues in the Democratic Party, southern members of Congress came to believe that they no longer could afford to treat labor as an issue that should command party loyalty. Labor organizing, they saw, stimulated civil rights activism. A powerful labor movement that pressed against employment discrimination threatened to level wages across racial lines and directly challenge Jim Crow. It also encouraged blacks to leave the South, and diminished the southern establishment’s control over those who stayed. Even the 1930s arrangements excluding the occupations in which the majority of southern blacks worked from federal social welfare and labor laws had become precarious. Agricultural workers had been included in the FEPC, and some were incorporated within Senator Wagner’s proposed changes to unemployment compensation.

Distressed by these developments and keenly aware of the dangers that threatened the South’s racial order, southern members closed ranks in Congress to reshape the framework within which unions and the labor market could operate. For their Republican partners, labor remained an issue of party and ideology. For southern legislators, labor had become race.

IV.

A
SSESSING THE
historical changes that had transformed the United States after World War II, the British economist Andrew Shonfield, the leading commentator on postwar capitalism in the West in the mid-1960s, underscored how, by the end of the Roosevelt and Truman years, with “public authority having been deliberately weakened,” there was “no serious attempt to co-ordinate the various economic activities of the Government in the public sphere into a coherent policy endowed with purpose and direction.” Such public power would have required an appropriate institutional ensemble within the federal government, and a capable national labor movement in the country. These the United States lacked. To be sure, Schonfield noted, “the central government can from time to time make its influence felt through the Bureau of the Budget,” but apart from the BOB, there were no federal agencies with the authority and expertise to determine spending priorities or direct, plan, and coordinate capitalist development. Furthermore, he noted, American labor did “not extend—as it does on the continent of Europe—to those occupations in which workers’ organizations happen to be weak.” He observed how, in all, the postwar years did not revive the radical experimentation of the 1930s or build a domestic state that stood on the shoulders of the dramatic mobilization of the war economy.
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More than any other factor, we have seen, southern political power in Congress explains this unforeseen outcome. There was no lack of ambition or interest within the Roosevelt and Truman administrations for public policies to guide capitalism or advance union interests. Nor was there an absence of mass constituencies, or a lack of support among experts and politicians, that would have precluded such assertive government action and enhanced powers for working-class organizations.

With southern representatives being able to confine policies about capitalism and labor to the limited options consistent with their racial preferences, the Democratic Party and labor unions remade themselves. Seeking to bring its internecine warfare to a close, the party settled on an activist fiscal approach, supported across regional lines, which distinguished it from the more cautious orientation to spending and taxes backed by Republicans. Working with broad strokes, these impulses made it possible to find policy agreement within the Democratic Party across regional lines. Despite sharp differences about organized labor, the party’s southern and nonsouthern representatives could agree to back significant spending based on revenue generated by progressive income taxes, and find sufficient, if often uneasy, harmony to garner the votes needed to pass federal programs for hospital construction, public housing, and urban renewal, each of which was crafted to conform to existing racial rules.
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This new variation of Democratic Party liberalism came to be reflected in the hands-off racial policies of the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 1952, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois. Equally telling was the Democratic candidate for vice president, Alabama’s segregationist senator John Sparkman, who, four years later, would be one of 101 southern members of the Senate and House to sign the Southern Manifesto, which promised to resist the Supreme Court’s ruling against segregation in
Brown v. Board of Education.

Bringing together restrictions on unions with generous fiscal policies, the combination of limited unions and active fiscal policy that the South successfully promoted created a distinctive kind of American economy. These policies set capitalism’s outer boundaries. They defined the powers, strategies, and identities of key actors, and clarified the stakes over which they could conflict. This policy mix would foreclose the type of coordinated market economy that developed after World War II in much of Western Europe and Japan. It would rule out national patterns of bargaining among representatives of business, labor, and the state. Rather than use the powers of the national state to shape corporate patterns of investment, governance, and employment actively, the economy relied mainly on competitive market mechanisms, including financial instruments and price signals, to solve problems of coordination and induce collaboration among firms. In turn, the concerns of unions were restricted in the main to wage levels and working conditions in particular industries and firms. Especially after Taft-Hartley and the return of USES to the states, labor markets became uncommonly fluid, ever more weakly regulated, and not sustained by national labor policies or institutions for training and placement. Large swaths of the country lacked virtually any union presence or capacity.
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These policies and outcomes did more than remake and help shape the main features of U.S. capitalism or determine the vectors of union power. Together, fiscal and labor policy set the course for the country’s political system. They fashioned, in effect, a new national state that was dramatically different from its crusading face. With debate focused on the scale and distribution of spending, and with organized labor as a critical interest group but not a national political class, U.S. politics increasingly came to be a politics of competitive bargaining among organized interests for the public purse. Under this system of pressure-group pluralism, lobbying grew. Groups pressing particular claims mobilized constituents, influenced public opinion, spent funds to elect favored candidates, penetrated regulatory agencies, swayed the legislative process, and built webs of influence to orient public policies in ways that would help them achieve their private ends.
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