A few weeks before the 1958 California gubernatorial election, the Republican candidate and Senator William Fife Knowland arrived for a scheduled speaking engagement at the Fontana United Steelworkers Union Hall, a mammoth structure seating more than one thousand people. Knowland, the son of the powerful publisher of the Oakland Tribune, had been admired by conservatives throughout his Senate career. He had voted against the censure of Joseph McCarthy, and he had contributed an article to the inaugural issue of National Review. An ardent Cold Warrior, he was dubbed the “Senator from Formosa” because he consistently advocated that the United States should support anti-Communist forces in China, instead of focusing only on the Soviet Union. His name had been circulated in the conservative press as a possible presidential candidate in 1956.Footnote ¹

But in 1958, as he sought the governorship of California, Knowland sought to appeal to a group of people to whom conservatives in the 1950s rarely turned for support: union members. He did so even though the central issue in his campaign was the passage of a right-to-work ballot initiative, bitterly contested by the California labor movement and the national AFL-CIO: Proposition 18, which made it illegal to require union membership as a condition of employment. While the Knowland campaign knew that labor’s leaders would oppose right-to-work legislation, the candidate nonetheless attempted to sway union members and other working-class voters to support the measure by presenting the proposition as a matter of individual rights and union democracy. Knowland sought to demonstrate that right-to-work was actually carrying forward the legacy of the New Deal and of the labor movement, fulfilling the cause of economic justice and embodying the promise of civil rights.

In 1958, these efforts failed miserably in California. Few people showed up at the Steelworkers Hall to hear Knowland (most of the dozen or so who were there had in fact only come to do interviews for jury duty), and he spoke before a largely empty hall. On the door of the union offices outside the auditorium was a handwritten sign: “Offices Closed. Attending Pat Brown Meetings.” (Attorney General Edmund “Pat” Brown was the Democratic candidate for governor.) Union officials condemned Knowland, saying that the campaign had exaggerated the plan for him to address a meeting of rank-and-file workers: “Every one of our locals has endorsed Pat Brown and unalterably expressed opposition to Knowland and his wreck-labor policy through Proposition 18.”Footnote ² It was a sign of his campaign’s fate. Knowland lost the November election by a margin of more than a million votes (the turnout was 5.2 million). California was not the only state where right-to-work was defeated in 1958. The measure had been on the ballot in five other states as well (Idaho, Washington, Colorado, Kansas, and Ohio), and in all but one of them (Kansas) it lost. Learning from the debacle, later in the century Republican candidates such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan would studiously avoid the issue.Footnote ³

Despite these public failures, however, the 1958 right-to-work campaigns—especially in California—foreshadowed the development of an important new tactic for the Republican Party and the conservative movement more generally. They represented the attempts of the conservative mobilization to appeal to voters on the grounds of economic populism, arguing that the overgrown power of organized labor and the welfare state ultimately limited, rather than expanded, the freedom and prosperity of working-class people. Even though the right-to-work issue itself would not remain central to conservative politics, the campaigns helped to revive a rhetorical framework and interpretation of the oppressive power of labor unions that would prove important to the popularization of the economic ideas associated with the conservative movement later in the twentieth century. In their efforts on behalf of the right-to-work, conservative activists sought to take a cause that had previously been seen as reactionary and antiunion—and that was still bitterly opposed by labor unions, which feared it as a real infringement on their ability to organize and represent workers effectively—and transform it into one capable of attracting broad popular support through the language of individual rights. Later in the century, they would make this rhetorical move regarding a range of other issues—such as school busing and IRS tax code protections for religious schools—as well as continuing to speak about economic matters largely in terms of populist individualism.

Nor were the campaigns without impact at the time. While the larger political victories of conservatism would not come until the 1970s and 1980s, the right-to-work movement was part of a broader turn against organized labor in the late 1950s, reflected by the hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities of Labor and Management, the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959, and the declining win rate in union elections at about this time. The success that this early antilabor activism had in damaging the reputation and the power of organized labor ultimately weakened unions in American politics, helping to clear the terrain for the development of conservatism later in the century.Footnote ⁴

Recent scholarship on the rise of the conservative movement in postwar America has treated the right as a grass-roots mobilization of housewives, professionals, and working-class people inspired by their own distinctive vision of American politics. This body of work has taken aim at the older 1950s narratives of conservatism and McCarthyism as the province of a marginal “radical right,” while also contesting the image of conservatism as a product of the politics of racial and cultural backlash of the 1960s and 1970s. It has explored the complex ideological roots of conservatism, the role of women in the movement, and the organizing tactics used by conservative activists. This groundbreaking scholarship has made invaluable contributions to our understanding of the history of the rise of conservatism. However, issues of race, culture, and anticommunism have often remained at the forefront of the analysis of the rise of the right, while antilabor politics and economic issues have received much less attention until recently.Footnote ⁵

The “right-to-work” campaigns of the late 1950s provide one example of conservative politics at a formative stage in the movement’s history that suggest the centrality of the language of individual rights and economic populism to its overall rhetorical strategy and goals. The right-to-work campaigns tapped into long-standing American ideas about individualism, suggesting the unsteady political and cultural foundations of New Deal liberalism and the potential for its undoing throughout the postwar years. While not altogether new in the postwar period—indeed, the right-to-work movement went back to the early twentieth century—the reinvigoration of this way of thinking about and talking about labor unions in the 1950s proved critical in building support for conservatism later in the twentieth century. It also foreshadowed the conservative movement’s later reliance on ideas about rights to defend racial inequality, criticize environmental and social regulation, and advance a conservative religious project.Footnote ⁶ Often backed by conservative business activists for whom the rhetoric of rights was part of a deeper and more long-standing antagonism toward organized labor, the campaigns ultimately contributed to the weakening of unions in the second half of the twentieth century, even as they helped to create the intellectual and rhetorical framework for the reinvigoration of conservatism.

The right-to-work issue grew out of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which permitted states to ban unions and employers from entering into contracts that mandated union membership as a condition of employment, known as the “union shop.”Footnote ⁷ The rationale for the union shop lay in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which gave unions the responsibility of representing equally all the workers in a given workplace after winning a representation election. Unions thus had to represent members and nonmembers alike, which set up a “free-rider” problem: workers might feel that they had no reason to join the union, since they would be able to benefit from representation whether or not they paid dues. Union shop provisions addressed this issue by enabling unions to require membership and thus prevent people from using the services of the union and benefiting from its contracts without paying membership dues. But the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 expressly permitted states to pass laws banning such contractual provisions for union security. Even before the passage of Taft-Hartley, some states (mostly in the South) had established right-to-work provisions, and, as Elizabeth Tandy Shermer has shown, the issue remained a contentious one in the Southwest throughout the 1950s, as the Sunbelt states adopted the legislation in attempts to woo manufacturing companies away from the Northeast and Midwest by demonstrating that they could provide an economic and political climate supportive of business.Footnote ⁸

While right-to-work had been an issue throughout the postwar period, however, in the late 1950s it emerged with new force in national politics. This was in part due to the new level of open skepticism and hostility toward organized labor at the time. The McClellan Committee hearings on labor abuses helped create greater public support for a critical stance toward unions, while many businesses were willing to take a harder line toward unions in the recession of 1957–58. The right-to-work campaigns of the late 1950s also represented the culmination of a wave of political organizing among businessmen over the course of the decade, at the time described as the “business-in-politics” movement. The “business-in-politics” movement reflected mounting frustrations with the Eisenhower administration’s acceptance of the basic political framework of the New Deal, as well as business anxiety about labor’s political clout following the merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955. There were many different activities associated with the “business-in-politics” effort. Consulting companies like the Effective Citizens Organization (run by political strategist F. Clifton White) helped craft public affairs seminars for businessmen to teach them how to get involved in politics.Footnote ⁹ The Wall Street Journal described a two-month-long workshop organized by the Chamber in 1958, covering local party structures, running a campaign, and creating political clubs and fund-raising strategies. Johnson & Johnson started to hold political workshops on company time, and Ford created a series of seminars offering the same basic political education.Footnote ¹⁰ Other companies, including Chase Manhattan Bank, began to use company publications as a political forum, and to celebrate the political engagement of employees.Footnote ¹¹ The model for these efforts was the political involvement of the labor federations, especially after the merger of the AFL and the CIO. As Charles Sligh, the president of the National Association of Manufacturers, observed: “The labor unions themselves have blazed the trail for the rest of us. We must do as they have done.”Footnote ¹² By October 1958, such programs were sufficiently widespread that Fortune magazine could write that the American corporation had “rediscovered” politics.Footnote ¹³

For businessmen becoming politically active in the late 1950s, right-to-work quickly emerged as a central cause.Footnote ¹⁴ The issue had an obvious rhetorical appeal: it focused attention on union corruption; it emphasized labor’s control over dues, and so made unions out to be self-serving financial institutions; and it enabled business to frame itself as standing up for the individual rights of the ordinary worker, joining employers and employees together against labor bureaucrats. In 1956, the National Association of Manufacturers focused on right-to-work as one of the key targets of its educational campaign on “labor’s abuse of its monopoly power,” which sought to recast the public image of unions by emphasizing the excessive “concentration of power” in the hands of unions.Footnote ¹⁵ “The right-to-work issue is by far the best battleground which management has been presented with, on which to fight out whether or not the country is going to fall all the way into the grasp of the unions,” one small manufacturer wrote to Sligh.Footnote ¹⁶

The most important organization in the right-to-work movement was the National Right-to-Work Committee, which was founded in 1955. In 1951, Congress changed the Railway Labor Act to permit unions to negotiate union shop contracts with the railroads. Several railroads signed such contracts. In response, railroad workers—some of whom were opposed to unionization and others who had previously belonged to railway union locals that prior to the law’s amendment could select their membership—created the National Committee for Union Shop Abolition. The organization circulated petitions opposing union shops in the industry and also mounted a legal challenge through the courts, which met with some success in 1955, when the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled on behalf of the railway workers that the amendment to the RLA violated their First and Fifth Amendment rights. In later years, Reed Larson, the president of the NRWC, recalled that businessmen in other industries who were opposed to right-to-work became interested in finding a way to form an alliance with the railway workers who had opposed union shops in their industry; as he put it, the railway workers “didn’t have any funds to speak of,” and as a result, some businessmen began to feel that there was a “real need for a coalition that could merge the interests of this kind of employee with the interests of businessmen that had a similar feeling.”Footnote ¹⁷ The result was the founding of the NRWC in 1955. Reflecting its roots in the fight against the amendment of the Railway Labor Act, early leaders of the group included L. A. Hooser, who had been an employee of the B&O Railroad before getting fired after the company agreed to a union shop, and S. D. Cadwallader, a conductor on the B&O who had been a union officer before the introduction of the union shop. Other people prominent in the early leadership of the NRWC included Virginia manufacturers Robert Englander (president of the Appomattox Garment Company) and Edwin Dillard (president of the Old Dominion Box Company); former Congressman Fred Hartley, the co-sponsor of the Taft-Hartley Act; and Paul Russell, an employee of the Wolverine Tube Company in Decatur, Alabama, who had organized a decertification drive against the UAW. At the same time as founding the national organization, right-to-work activists started state-level committees. For example, Nathan Thorington, a businessman active on the national committee, also helped to organize a Virginia Right-to-Work Committee, enlisting other businessmen to support the state organization, while Edward Colwill, a general contractor, headed up the Maryland Right-to-Work Committee.Footnote ¹⁸

As a single-issue organization, the NRWC tried to distinguish its efforts from ideologically driven antiunionism. The organization insisted that it was not opposed to labor overall, but simply to the union shop, because the latter violated the individual freedoms of workers. The language that the group used was largely one that focused on the defense of civil and political rights. Its motto proclaimed, “Americans Must Have the Right, But Not Be Compelled to Join Labor Unions.”Footnote ¹⁹ One poster quoted Samuel Gompers: “That which we call freedom, that which we call liberty, are not tangible things.”Footnote ²⁰ The group attacked the union shop by arguing that the threat of losing one’s job for not belonging to a union was tantamount to “economic slavery,” the “first stage of dictatorship.”Footnote ²¹ In its newsletter, the NRWC criticized the ACLU for its opposition to right-to-work laws, arguing that the ACLU ignored the need for the “protection of the rights of American citizens against compulsory economic domination by other private citizens.”Footnote ²² Vermont state representative Richard Snelling, who sponsored right-to-work legislation in Vermont, said in November 1959 that right-to-work “is not just an important issue, it is a truly great and basic issue. It is as great an issue as war or peace; it is as great an issue as communism or democracy; it is as great an issue as slavery or abolition.”Footnote ²³

By focusing on the right to work, supporters of the NRWC believed that they could build a cohesive movement that was independent of the two political parties. They hoped to appeal to liberals and conservatives alike, not simply to those who already identified as Republicans. Reed Larson, a former management employee at a Kansas lamp manufacturer who became one of the leaders of the NRWC in the late 1950s, told an audience that “strict adherence to this single purpose enables you to harness the efforts of persons with widely varying political and economic philosophies.” In fact, he said, “The very diversity of philosophical alignments which can be assembled in a single-purpose organization is one of its greatest strengths.”Footnote ²⁴ What was more, the cause of right-to-work did not necessarily need to be identified only with businessmen—always a problem for the critics of the welfare state and of organized labor. The NRWC tried to counter the idea of being associated with the business community and to avoid what Larson referred to as “the built-in handicaps of being a spokesman for employers or other special interest groups” by seeking out alliances with a broad range of different kinds of organizations. Finally, perhaps the greatest appeal of right-to-work was that it seemed to have the potential to bring together employers and employees in a single mobilization. As Larson suggested, unlike open opposition to unions, the issue of right-to-work made possible “the inclusion of wage-earners” in the “leadership group,” which was “an essential in presenting the issue to the public in its proper light.”Footnote ²⁵ Labor union members themselves could be featured in the campaigns against labor union power. The cause of right-to-work seemed like it could join workers and employers in a common struggle against the overweening power of labor unions. In this way, businessmen could present themselves as the leaders in a populist cause.

The centrality of the idea of mobilizing business and workers together in a single political movement is evident in the way that the leaders of the NRWC described their efforts to obtain a constitutional amendment making Kansas a right-to-work state in 1958. The state legislature had actually passed right-to-work legislation in 1955, but Governor Fred Hall, a moderate Republican, had vetoed the law. In 1957, the legislature adopted a resolution placing the constitutional amendment on the ballot for the following year.Footnote ²⁶ The measure was the only one to be successful in the 1958 elections. While Kansans likely voted in favor of right-to-work for a variety of different reasons, the leaders of the NRWC argued that the most important was the open support of business throughout the state. The leadership of business encouraged other supporters—“wage-earners, housewives, farmers and everyone else”—to become active. Larson insisted in a speech advising others on how to achieve the same kind of success that “this kind of support can be obtained in sufficient quantity only when business leaders come out from behind the cloak of anonymity afforded by business organizations to let it be known that they, as individuals, believe in freedom from compulsory unionism.”Footnote ²⁷ He compared Wichita and Kansas City to prove the point. In Wichita, he said, the president of nearly every company “wrote letters to all employees stating frankly that he, the writer, was supporting right-to-work, and explaining why. Among the active business people were executives of Boeing Airplane Company, Cessna Aircraft, the Coleman Company, Vickers Petroleum Company, Kansas Milling Company, Southwest Grease and Oil, Love Box Company, and many others.”Footnote ²⁸ William M. Allen, the company president of Boeing, for example, sent a statement in support of right-to-work to all his supervisors, announcing, “With the exception of labor unions, I am unaware in the history of our nation of a private organization being permitted to, in effect, conscript members. . . . The power of the individual employee to give or to withhold his support of a union is the power to assure responsible unionism. When the employee loses this power, our most basic freedoms . . . become endangered.”Footnote ²⁹ In Kansas City, by contrast, “Right-to-work had almost NO public support from business men. The two courageous small business people who took a stand for the amendment found themselves conspicuously alone.”Footnote ³⁰

Larson argued that the “housewives, wage-earners, professional people, farmers, and small businessmen who must make up the Right-to-work team at the grass roots, are present in every state,” but that they could not “challenge the concentrated power of the labor leaders until the leaders of business—big business—make up their minds to stand on principle, and give the small businessman and the wage-earner assurance that business leaders, as individuals, will defend the right of every person to decide for himself whether or not he joins a union.”Footnote ³¹ By taking part in right-to-work campaigns, business could help to build cross-class alliances in support of economic proposals that were bitterly opposed by labor unions. This theme was echoed as well in campaign literature; one advertisement for right-to-work in Kansas featured photographs of doctors, farmers, lawyers, railroad workers, and union members, all opponents of the union shop, under the banner headline “Kansans Speak Out for Freedom.”Footnote ³²

The wave of right-to-work campaigns in 1958 was inspired by the passage of right-to-work legislation in Indiana in 1957, thanks in large part to the lobbying efforts of the Indiana Right-to-Work Committee. The victory in Indiana was especially notable given the relative strength of unions in the state—about 36 percent of the labor force belonged to unions, and 78 percent of union contracts contained a union security clause. But the INRWC was able to win passage of a right-to-work law through patient and savvy public relations work. The organization ran a speakers’ bureau, took out newspaper and radio ads, published pamphlets, publicized episodes of strike violence in Indiana, and met regularly with legislators. They worked closely with the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, which held twenty-one meetings around the state about right-to-work, attended by about 2,500 local business people. The Indiana right-to-work victory in 1957 seemed to signal a shift in national opinion on the issue, and supporters began to hope for the passage of additional state laws. Some angled for greater victories still: Senator Barry Goldwater met with President Eisenhower to encourage him to endorse a federal statute guaranteeing the right-to-work, while Senator John McClellan of Arkansas (who was the chair of the investigation into union corruption) sought to add a right-to-work provision to a civil rights bill.Footnote ³³

Although there were vigorous campaigns in states such as Ohio, the most dramatic of the 1958 campaigns was that of William F. Knowland for governor of California, which came to center on the candidate’s support for a right-to-work initiative on the ballot. Knowland’s campaign is generally viewed as one of the great political failures of the twentieth century—badly run, inept, and clumsy. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a better standard-bearer for right-to-work from the viewpoint of the labor movement. Knowland’s controversial decision to split the Republican Party in the state, combined with his own wooden demeanor on the campaign trail, made it highly unlikely that the issue would be able to succeed in California. But while it is true that the Knowland campaign was a flop on its own terms, the right-to-work effort had broader significance than has often been realized. It indicated the efforts of Republican candidates in 1958 to find ways to peel working-class supporters away from the Democratic Party. It suggests one of their early attempts to find ways to mobilize around a populist economic language of individual rights—and the broader maneuverings to recast antilabor politics to appeal to a cross-class constituency. Although the approach focused on right-to-work turned out not to be successful, conservatives would continue to work toward this broader goal in the future.Footnote ³⁴

The Knowland campaign had its origins in complex internal maneuvering within the California Republican Party. Early in 1957, Knowland announced that he would not seek re-election to the Senate. In October of that year, he declared his candidacy for governor of California, a move widely seen as a precursor to a presidential bid. But in order to win the nomination, he and his backers in the state’s GOP had to confront the reality that there was already a Republican in Sacramento: the moderate Republican Goodwin Knight. Knowland sought to find the right issue to galvanize conservatives. He settled on right-to-work, deciding to attack the Knight administration for being too cozy with labor unions. He did not choose the issue in a vacuum. Businessmen and conservative Republicans had been interested for some time in organizing a right-to-work initiative campaign in California, and had actually initially sought to do so in 1956, before Eisenhower dissuaded them from taking on the controversial issue in the midst of an election year.Footnote ³⁵ But new survey data from late 1957 indicated that Californians backed a right-to-work initiative by almost a two-to-one margin, suggesting that the initiative might have a chance to win.Footnote ³⁶ Knowland set himself apart from Knight while attracting the attention and support of prominent business leaders by declaring his support for right-to-work, and after complex maneuvering within the party Knight was compelled to drop out of the gubernatorial race (he ran for Knowland’s Senate seat instead, in what became known as the “Big Switch”).Footnote ³⁷

The Knowland campaign was unfazed by the fact that almost 40 percent of California’s nonagricultural labor force was unionized in the late 1950s.Footnote ³⁸ Despite the support of antiunion forces for a right-to-work initiative in California, the candidate worked assiduously to combat the antiunion image of right-to-work, arguing that right-to-work laws were in fact in the interest of organized labor, because more democratic unions would be stronger unions. Although the campaign also suggested that right-to-work could be good for the economy, the central argument made was on the grounds of freedom and individual rights, as well as union democracy.Footnote ³⁹ Knowland’s “Bill of Rights” for labor promised to democratize union governance by requiring elections of union officials and other similar measures; in a bid to appeal to African-American voters, it also prevented unions from discriminating against members on the basis of race or sex, or preventing any members from full participation in the internal affairs of the union.Footnote ⁴⁰ Throughout the campaign, Knowland made speeches seeking to define himself as unambiguously pro-union: “I am in favor of labor unions, and I have been fighting a long time for the rights of you union members.”Footnote ⁴¹ Republican activist Ed Shattuck (who served as Knowland’s campaign manager through the primary) argued early on that Knowland’s supporters should use unionized printers and make sure that materials associated with the senator carry the union bug, in order to counter the image of Knowland as antiunion (it’s not clear that the campaign listened to this advice).Footnote ⁴² He also urged Knowland to speak directly to union audiences in the hopes of reaching working-class voters directly “rather than via their bosses.”Footnote ⁴³

The Knowland campaign sought to portray right-to-work as a cause commanding the activism and energy of working-class people throughout the state. His advisers eagerly pursued any leads they got about working-class political support for right-to-work. Hearing about an organization called Citizens’ Committee for Voluntary Unionism, Shattuck wrote that its supporters were “all small businessmen and working men. It seems to me that what they are doing might well be something that parallels what we are doing and that we might find that they can be very helpful to us in our objective.”Footnote ⁴⁴ One campaign memo in July 1958 suggested that Knowland set up a “Labor for Knowland League independent of any other existing organization, to be a hard-hitting organization.” The candidate should do “plant tours, employee meetings and union meetings with management of key and other industry—Knowland must get acquainted with people at the plant level.”Footnote ⁴⁵ A report by two Stanford political scientists argued that Knowland should describe his policy as an effort to “enhance rank-and-file control over unions” and to push for “union democracy.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In all these different ways, the Knowland campaign sought to appeal to working-class voters, with the aim of winning their loyalty away from their unions, all of which were strongly opposed to the right-to-work law.

In addition to wooing working-class voters, the Knowland campaign attempted to foster divisions within the California civil rights movement by appealing to African American voters on the grounds that labor unions were racially discriminatory. Despite the continued prevalence of discrimination within unions, the NAACP had since the 1940s opposed right-to-work laws and supported various kinds of union security arrangements.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Knowland campaign sought to disrupt the alliance between labor and the civil rights movement by criticizing racism in the labor movement, arguing that right-to-work laws would make unions more responsive to members and hence more egalitarian. In October 1958, a pamphlet entitled “The Negro and His Right-to-work,” written by Joseph V. Baker, a black advertising and public relations specialist, began to appear in mailboxes in black neighborhoods throughout the state. Baker argued that black workers should support Proposition 18 as a way of winning their own rights in the workplace. He sought to place the fight for right-to-work in the context of the movement for civil rights: “The Negro cannot fight with all his might to keep one segment of the country from telling him where his children may and may not go to school, while he condones and votes to protect another segment in the right to do the very same thing with, and to, his opportunity to make a living. . . . No logical mind can find an acceptable difference between Faubuses in Arkansas and union leaders in California, or Ohio, or New York, or Pennsylvania, who keep in their bylaws and cling to in their practices, the barring of Negroes from membership.”Footnote ⁴⁸ One black Republican activist and Knowland supporter sent the campaign headquarters an appeal he had written and circulated to political friends: “We of the minorities are at a crossroads. In times past we have readily and willingly allied ourselves with every cause that we believed was good for the whole people. In the labor picture this has been particularly true. What has this loyalty gained us? Few Negro workers could be satisfied with present conditions.” Footnote ⁴⁹ In the end, however, it was not so easy to divide African Americans in California from the state labor movement; one poll taken shortly before the election suggested that only one in ten black voters supported right-to-work, and African Americans ultimately voted against the law by a large margin.Footnote ⁵⁰

Business supporters of Knowland and right-to-work sought to act on the campaign’s suggestion to build a mobilization joining workers and employers against unions in support of right-to-work. Some executives sought to communicate directly with their employees, attempting to create an alliance between themselves and their workers. Robert Cannon of the Cannon Electric Company in Los Angeles, for example, sent a special letter to his employees in March 1958, arguing that “your management at Cannon Electric is not against unions. We are for individual freedom.”Footnote ⁵¹ Cannon was a member of Californians for Yes on #18, along with longtime right-to-work supporter Cecil B. DeMille and executives from Union Oil and Times-Mirror Co., which sent out press packets encouraging journalists to track down ex-union members who had grievances with their former unions—”victims of the union shop”—as well as current unionists who supported voluntary unionism.Footnote ⁵²

The letters that the Knowland campaign received from working-class supporters suggested that they were aware of his attempt to craft a populist rhetoric, even as they thought that he was not entirely effective or successful in doing so. Working-class Knowland supporters claimed that while they personally understood the importance of right-to-work, they feared that it would be nearly impossible to convince other union members. They tried to encourage Knowland to do more to develop a more explicitly populist economic campaign, urging the candidate to “honestly criticize some of the faults of big business, wholesalers and retailers,” to counter the impression that “you represent big business and are using the Right-to-work issue to grind your axe.”Footnote ⁵³ Another described “the man-in-the-street, the factory worker . . . who is being brainwashed about your alleged anti-labor stance, like the Lockheed employee who said to me, ‘Knowland is a good man all right, but he’s out to ruin the unions. I got a wife and four kids. I have to vote for a Democrat.’”Footnote ⁵⁴ A “‘rank and file’ member of Organized Labor” who was planning to support Knowland wrote in, “It occurs to me to wonder whether the seven-point Labor Bill of Rights which you have formulated really amounts to an adequate and dynamic association of ideas; in other words, isn’t it a lot like ‘being against sin!’”Footnote ⁵⁵ The owner of a Colfax clothing store wrote that most people believed that “your program will throw a monkey wrench into their whole union setup,” and that “a fellow Republican friend of mine who is employed by the P.G. & E. Company told me that he wouldn’t vote for you if you were the only one running. He likes his union and you can’t blame him. Sure I convinced him about your program and he is now going to vote for you, BUT HOW MANY MORE LIKE HIM ARE THERE THAT HAVE TO BE REACHED?? Boy oh boy! Senator, the way I look at it you’ve got a battle on your hands.”Footnote ⁵⁶

In some ways, the Knowland campaign’s very emphasis on individual rights instead of economic and political power made it hard for it to attract working-class voters, many of whom were well aware of the ways in which they had benefited from union security provisions. The only Republican member of the legislative committee of Local 6 of the International Longshoremen’s Workers Union indicated the underlying economic reasons why working-class supporters might fail to be swayed by Knowland’s rhetoric of union democracy: “Being a good union man, and a hard working republican also, I would like to call your attention to the fact that under our union shop policy, a million other wage earners and I have bought our homes, cars, and many home appliances without fear of losing our jobs. Job seniority, paid vacations, hospitalization and many other benefits have enabled us to look into the future more secure than ever before in the history of American labor.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Another potential supporter wrote, “The greatest part of the people involved with this right-to-work movement are not ‘working people,’ but are people living on limited incomes, or civil service, who begrudge the working man his high wages, or people who think that they can make more money by the immediate dropping of wages, and with absolute control of the working people in their industries. (God help the poor working girl!)”Footnote ⁵⁸ Even some small manufacturers were opposed to right-to-work legislation, writing that if the law passed there would be additional union activities as nonmembers were organized: “After all, no one wants to pay dues, go on strike, attend meetings, submit to arbitration and see the guy on the next machine earning the same wages (which he would) and not making the same sacrifices as the union man.”Footnote ⁵⁹

As these Knowland supporters feared, a great deal of support for right-to-work actually came from business conservatives in and out of the state, suggesting the degree to which the campaign’s insistence on individual rights and its attempt to present itself as a cross-class coalition was more image than reality. “The right-to-work issue and the need to stabilize the state government in the hands of a free enterprise proponent, have a sweet taste in the mouths of thousands of our conservative Napa County farmers and business pioneers,” wrote one agricultural businessman in Northern California.Footnote ⁶⁰ The president of the E. K. Campbell Company, a manufacturer producing space heaters, wrote in, “I surely welcome the news that you have challenged Governor Knight squarely on the issue of the ‘right-to-work’ laws, and are making speeches that have the fervor and the element of a Crusade.”Footnote ⁶¹ The Knowland campaign also attracted support from out-of-state businessmen, who saw its potential significance in national politics. For example, the president of the Cleveland-based National Screw and Manufacturing Company in Cleveland raised $2,315 for the campaign, canvassing his friends and business acquaintances. (He sent the money to the campaign with a letter saying, “I assume there will be no publicity on this”).Footnote ⁶² Sun Oil executive J. Howard Pew and his family gave $10,000.Footnote ⁶³ An executive from the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company told the campaign headquarters, “I shall be glad to request our 750 agents in California to support you in an active way.”Footnote ⁶⁴ A lawyer in Enid, Oklahoma, announced that he would contact every member of the Oklahoma bar, asking each person to speak to any acquaintances in California to ask them to vote for Knowland.Footnote ⁶⁵ Businessmen organized chain letters to bring in financial support, saying that in addition to Knowland’s support for right-to-work legislation, “what is more important . . . is the national implication of whether a candidate, who dares to condemn the monopolistic power of unions, can be elected to high office.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Ultimately, the approach of the Knowland campaign was not able to convince union members to vote in favor of right-to-work. The language of “rights” that would prove so powerful in later conservative campaigns was not able to mobilize working-class voters against their unions in the absence of a connection to other economic and political issues. Yet despite the losses at the polls, the 1958 right-to-work campaigns represented an important moment in the development of the conservative movement. Even though the campaigns lost, the year was not one of clear victory for organized labor either. In Arizona, Barry Goldwater won reelection to the Senate using a similar rhetorical strategy to that employed by Knowland, describing himself as defending the individual rights of union workers against the depredations of their unions. The following year, the McClellan Committee hearings would culminate in the passage of the Landrum-Griffin Act, which intensified regulation of the labor movement. In California, the networks of businessmen who had mobilized in support of Knowland and right-to-work came together to back Barry Goldwater for president in the state in 1964 and to encourage Ronald Reagan to run for governor in 1966. Men such as Edward Mills, A. C. Rubel, Henry Salvatori, and Holmes Tuttle—who would join to create “Friends of Ronald Reagan” in 1965, financing the conservative actor’s challenge to Pat Brown—all participated in fundraising for the Knowland campaign; out of forty-two members of Reagan’s finance committee in Southern California, thirty had been active with Knowland.Footnote ⁶⁷ Beyond this, the campaign helped to develop the conservative movement in California more broadly; it was the first time that conservative principles had been brought into an electoral contest, and even though it split the Republican Party within the state, it also galvanized a new conservative base.

Conservative activists themselves saw 1958 as a critical year. By and large, they were determined to take the long view with regard to the failures and disappointments they encountered. Reflecting on the absence of “glory” for California conservatives in 1958, Cecil B. DeMille compared the year to the birth of the Republican Party 102 years earlier: “There was very little glory for the Republican Party officials in 1856, when the party first went into national politics, and was defeated. But four years later the party gave Lincoln to America.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, the antiunion General Electric executive, wrote that same summer that right-to-work initiatives should not be judged on their immediate success or failure. It was not, he argued, important to win “every one of these right-to-work campaigns,” but only that the right-to-work movement “make very public progress in every one of them.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The right-to-work campaigns demonstrated that small groups of business conservatives acting in concerted ways could introduce substantive criticisms of New Deal liberalism into public debate, and that, under the right conditions (as in Kansas), such measures could become law. They represented an early attempt to translate the anti–New Deal economic program into a principled language of individual rights that would be able to speak to a much larger number of people, ultimately weakening the political and cultural power of organized labor. They were one step in the attempt of conservatives to build a cross-class political movement in support of the Republican Party and opposition to the New Deal and the welfare state, a political project that figures such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan would resume later in the twentieth century. The effort to craft a popular antigovernment, antiunion appeal would prove far more successful in the subsequent decades of cultural conflict and economic decline, when conservatives proved able to use the rhetoric of rights to provide a broad framework for articulating material grievances, economic anxieties, and racial antagonisms. But the roots of that political project can be found much earlier in the postwar period, in the campaigns for the right to work.