Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (7 page)

The labor contracts of the war years, the late 1940s, and the 1950s also gave slowly increasing numbers of union members better benefits: health insurance, life insurance, paid vacations, and old-age pensions. Employer contributions to these plans were passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. These were important gains for those American workers, mainly men in the larger manufacturing industries such as steel, rubber, and automobiles, who received them. But better benefits could be a mixed blessing: some covered employees felt "locked in" and therefore afraid to look elsewhere for jobs. Moreover, smaller corporations usually lacked the resources to extend such benefits to their workers, and nonunion workers lacked the clout to demand them. Gulfs that historically had divided American workers—union and non-War anticommunism at home—and one union, skilled and unskilled, full-time and part-time, male and female, manufacturing and non-manufacturing, white and black—if anything widened over time.

It also became increasingly clear that these gains, like COLA clauses, were achieved at the cost of larger visions. In 1945 many American liberals hoped that the end of war might bring expansion of New Deal social programs, including extension of Social Security to millions of uncovered workers such as waitresses, domestic workers, and farm laborers. Liberals also supported federal aid to education, higher minimum wages, and even some form of government-provided health insurance. Some were showing interest in civil rights action for minorities.
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Many labor leaders remained officially committed to such liberal programs, and blue-collar workers continued to vote heavily for liberal Democratic candidates; it was not accurate to claim (as some did) that "labor" had dropped its political agenda. But the vision was becoming dimmer. More and more, union leaders concentrated on securing better
private
benefits. The 1940s, a time of significant expansion of governmental social welfare in many western European countries, in fact solidified the privatization of social welfare in the United States. In 1948 almost half of America's workers still had no coverage from federal retirement plans. Those who did worried greatly that inflation might cut the purchasing power of their pensions.
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Unions, moreover, grew only slowly after World War II. Leaders like Reuther and American Federation of Labor (AFL) head George Meany, an uninspiring but shrewd and hard-working labor bureaucrat, maneuvered as effectively as they could both at bargaining tables and as lobbyists for better labor legislation. But the union movement did not keep pace with growth in the labor force. In 1950 union membership was 15 million, only barely higher than in 1945. Unions then included only 31.5 percent of non-agricultural employees, 4 percent less than in 1945. By 1960 the unions had 17 million members but only 31.4 percent of a larger non-agricultural force.

The fundamental sources of this stall, and of rapid union decline thereafter, were structural and political. World War II, promoting huge expansion in manufacturing, boosted employment—and therefore growth in union membership—in heavy industries that had already begun to unionize in the 1930s. In the late 1940s and 1950s, however, these sectors of the economy expanded only slowly. Growth areas after 1945 were increasingly in white-collar work and service employment. Workers in these jobs were scattered, often in relatively small companies. Many were part-time employees. Thousands of difficult-to-organize middle-aged married women moved in and out of the work force. Higher percentages of Americans labored in rapidly growing southern and western areas, many of which were hostile to union organizers. Add to all these structural realities the traditional problems facing union activists—racial and sexual discrimination in unions, interethnic hostilities, the resistance of many white-collar Americans to labor organization, the determination of anti-union business groups and politicians, the divisive influence of Cold War anti-communism at home—and one begins to understand the stall of union organization as well as of liberal politics in the United Spates after 1945.

Four conflicts during the late 1940s highlighted the problems faced by organized labor at the time. The first pitted a few union leaders against a sometimes angry President Truman. The President, a liberal New Dealer, ordinarily supported blue-collar demands for change. But he had been distressed by the strikes in January 1946, which he believed threatened his efforts at reconversion, and he grew alarmed when faced with strikes by coal miners two months later and by railroad workers in May.
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Truman could not prevent the miners from striking, but he was determined to stop the railroad workers. Trains, after all, were vital to the American economy, for both passenger and freight travel, in the days before widespread superhighway transportation.

After weeks of bickering with the carriers and twenty rail unions, Truman thought he had an agreement in hand. But leaders of the two largest unions, A. F. Whitney of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen and Alvanley Johnston of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, refused to toe the line. Both were old friends of the President, who brought them to the Oval Office three days before the strike deadline and lectured them, "If you think I'm going to sit here and let you tie up this whole country, you're crazy as hell." Whitney said he was sorry: "We've got to go through with this, Mr. President. Our men are demanding it." Truman responded by giving them forty-eight hours to reach a settlement. "If you don't, I'm going to take over the railroads in the name of the government."
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When the workers nonetheless went out on strike, Truman became perhaps as angry as any American President of recent times. On Friday, May 24, he marched into a Cabinet meeting and announced he would go to Capitol Hill and seek an extraordinarily draconian law. It would have authorized him to draft strikers into the military, without regard to age or number of dependents, whenever a walkout threatened to create a national emergency. Truman even had aides prepare a speech to be given over the radio that evening. It was virtually irrrational, assailing the patriotism of "effete union leaders" like Whitney, Johnston, Murray and others, whom he also associated with Communism. "Every single one of the strikers and their demigog
[sic]
leaders have been living in luxury, working when they pleased and drawing from four to forty times the pay of a fighting soldier." Truman's draft closed, "Let's give the country back to the people. Let's put transportation and production back to work,
hang a few traitors
, and make our country safe for democracy." Charles Ross, Truman's old friend and press secretary, was "horrified" by the diatribe. Clark Clifford, Truman's top policy adviser, recalled that it was "surely one of the most intemperate documents ever written by a President."
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Ross and others managed to calm Truman down, and his radio address that evening was forceful but temperate. Still, he insisted on going to Capitol Hill the next day, by which time everyone knew his intent. As he entered the House, he received a standing ovation, whereupon he outlined his tough proposals. When he was almost finished, his chief labor adviser, John Steelman, informed Clifford, who was in an anteroom off the House floor, that the unions had settled on the terms proposed by the President. Clifford wrote a note about the settlement and had it delivered to Truman, who paused and then read it to thunderous applause. Clifford and others considered it a victory for Truman, who dropped his demands for legislative action. But many liberals and labor leaders were deeply frightened. The
New Republic
, a leading liberal journal, called Truman's congressional message the "most vicious piece of anti-union legislation ever introduced by an American President."
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If railroads were important, coal was vital to the economy in 1946. It still drove 95 percent of locomotives and furnished 62 percent of electric power. Labor-management strife had long affected the coal industry, which by the 1940s correctly perceived the very real threat of oil. John L. Lewis, head of the mine workers, was a tenacious, relentless, and successful advocate of safety, better wages, and benefits for the dwindling number of miners who managed to survive the decline of the industry. Unlike Reuther and many other labor leaders at the time, he did not trust the government, liberals included, to be reliable in support of the workers' interests, and he had had no hesitation even during the war in urging his following to strike.
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This they often did, for the miners loved and trusted him: many miners' homes displayed only two pictures—of John L. Lewis and the Virgin Mary. The historian Joseph Goulden has remarked, "To Americans of the 1930s and 1940s Lewis's coal strikes were as much an annual ritual as the first sighting of the ground hog, or a President throwing out the first baseball of the season."
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Lewis was a fierce-looking, hulking, and majestic man whose ice-blue eyes glared at people under huge and bushy eyebrows. He spoke in rolling, theatrical cadences rich in biblical phrases and did not care who he insulted. In 1937 he had called no less a figure than Vice-President John Garner a "poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, labor-baiting, evil old man." On another occasion, he said that the "AFL has no head; its neck just growed up and haired over." Lewis relished power and had used it readily over the years. "When we control the production of coal," he said, "we hold the vitals of our society right in our hands. . . . I can squeeze, twist, and pull until we get the inevitable victory." By 1946 he was a widely feared figure. Truman loathed Lewis, regarding him as a "racketeer," and aimed his May 25 diatribe to Congress against him as well as the trainmen.
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When the coal miners settled their strike in May, it seemed possible that further conflict would be avoided, at least in 1946. But in November Lewis made it clear that he wanted to change the settlement and would call out the miners, 400,000 strong, if he did not get his way. Truman was almost desperately determined to resist. Winter was fast approaching. Equally important, Truman saw Lewis's action as a deliberate test of wills. He intervened by securing a court order stopping the proposed strike. Lewis, ignoring the order, sent the miners on strike and was cited for contempt of court. A federal judge fined the union an astounding $3.5 million and Lewis personally $10,000. The strike, the judge added, was "an evil, demoniac, monstrous thing that means hunger and cold and unemployment and disorganization of the social fabric. . . . if actions of this kind can be successfully persisted in, the government will be overthrown."
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Lewis then sought to negotiate, but the President refused to talk to him or to any of his representatives. The struggle held front-page attention for more than two weeks.

On Pearl Harbor Day 1946 Lewis capitulated by calling off the strike. Truman was grimly delighted. "The White House," he told aides at an impromptu celebration, "is open to anybody with legitimate business, but not to that son of a bitch." Editorial writers also celebrated. Arthur Krock of the
New York Times
wrote that the President "has greatly regained stature as a national leader." Joseph and Stewart Alsop, widely syndicated columnists, added that Lewis's surrender was the "first break that he [Truman] has had in considerably more than a year."
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Truman and his aides indeed had grounds for self-congratulation. In May he had threatened the trainmen and had faced them down. Six months later he had brought the imperious John L. Lewis to heel. These actions by no means revolutionized labor-management-government relations. On the contrary, Reuther, Lewis, and other leaders of big industrial unions continued to fight against corporate powers. Over these struggles, which set larger patterns for wage-price increases in the United States, the government had relatively little control, whether in the 1940s or in later years. In the longer run, moreover, the ongoing structural changes in the economy proved especially decisive in determining the fate of unionization. Still, Truman's stiffened posture in 1946—especially his humbling of Lewis—struck a political blow against Big Labor, as opponents called it, in the United States.

Hostility to Big Labor proved especially powerful on Capitol Hill, where the second revealing conflict over labor rights erupted in 1947. Influential congressmen since the late 1930s had chafed openly at what they considered the arrogance of organized labor. During the war and again in 1946, Democratic Congresses had passed legislation that restricted union power, only to encounter presidential vetoes. Voters in 1946 then elected Republican majorities to both houses for the first time since 1930. Supporting these Republicans were many conservative Democrats, especially from the South and other areas of the country where labor unions were politically unpopular. The coalition seeking to curb labor benefited from intense lobbying by employer groups and was led in the House by Fred Hartley, a strongly anti-union Republican from New Jersey. In the Senate the key leader was Robert Taft of Ohio, son of the former President. Acting quickly, they drafted the so-called Taft-Hartley bill in early 1947.

Taft-Hartley was a bold effort to weaken the pro-labor Wagner Act of 1935. A highly publicized clause authorized the President to call for eighty-day "cooling-off" periods before strikes could be called that might affect the national interest. Another title banned closed shops, workplaces that required workers to be members of unions at the time of hiring. The bill also prohibited secondary boycotts, which had enabled workers to boycott the goods of allegedly anti-labor companies. An especially controversial provision, Section 14b, authorized states to prohibit union shops, which were workplaces requiring employees to join unions within a short period of time following initial hiring. States instead could pass what became known as "right-to-work" laws that were expected to impose major obstacles to union organizing. Reflecting widespread fears that radicals dominated the labor movement, the bill required union leaders to sign non-Communist affidavits if they wanted their workers to receive access to the activities of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This access had proved important and usually beneficial to unions, many of which since 1935 had come to rely on the NLRB to police labormanagement relations, including fair elections seeking to certify union locals.
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