Acknowledgements

This article was written within the framework of the American Institutions Project (AIP) of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) at Columbia University. For advice, intellectual stimulation, and help with roll call coding, we warmly thank Project colleagues Melanie Springer and Christina Greer at Columbia, and Matt Glassman, John Lapinski, and Rose Razaghian at Yale.

In this article, we will probe two distinct historical questions. First, we explore why congressional representatives from the South, who had generally supported the Democratic Party on labor issues during the 1930s, joined with Republicans to oppose the party's pro-labor orientation in the 1940s. We also examine why the class-based union movement that mobilized so assertively after the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 became so cramped and pragmatic by the early 1950s. These puzzles, we believe, are closely related. Our explanation for why labor's horizons, topography, and prospects constricted to workplace issues, to some segments of the working population, and to limited geographic areas by the end of the Truman years points to how southern Democrats shaped the main institutions produced by New Deal and Fair Deal labor legislation.

The preferences of the congressional delegations from the seventeen states that mandated racial segregation proved decisive.¹

This line of reasoning entails a series of claims both about the efficacy of labor law, stressing the powers of institutions, and about the pivotal place of the southern minority faction within the (mostly) majority party of the period, highlighting shifts in the ordering of their preferences under conditions of growing uncertainty. We focus on the policy history of labor law in Congress in the 1930s and 1940s because, contrary to critics of the arrangements fashioned by the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA; the Wagner Act), and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) who see the New Deal labor regime as using public authority to canalize and limit the economic power of an organized working class, these institutions provided the most hospitable climate ever fashioned in American history for trade unions and for decent enforceable conditions of employment. Within this framework, social class was placed at the center of American politics and at least some of the traditional organizational advantages of business were overcome, if temporarily.³

To be sure, southern representatives composed a heterogeneous group. Some were urbane and broadly liberal; others either were virulently racist or conservative on almost every issue. But with the exception of Texas' Maury Maverick and Florida's Claude Pepper, who enjoyed active union support, virtually all the southern politicians in Congress shared a broadly common position on labor despite their various differences. Further, to a person, including the liberals, they all supported racial segregation. Without support from these representatives, the 1930s labor order could not have been fashioned; without a big shift in southern behavior in Congress in the 1940s, it could not have been changed decisively.

Although the South, in short, must be situated at the center of any meaningful story about labor and class in these decades, its role is either absent or treated as a side story in the massive literature on these subjects. By contrast, we underscore two related developments. We observe, first, how, regarding labor, the dominant left-right dimensional structure of American politics dividing Democrats, regardless of region, from Republicans was joined by a second dimension based on region and race. In the 1930s, union and labor market issues were arrayed primarily on the ideology-party dimension, while, in the 1940s, southern Democrats came to understand labor questions mainly as issues that concerned the durability of Jim Crow, while Republicans and nonsouthern Democrats continued to think and act about labor as matters of ideology and party, treating as secondary the questions that had come to obsess their colleagues from the South. Second, we can discern how, at the microlevel, these southern members, who possessed orderings of preferences in both dimensions, switched their rankings of preferences regarding questions of social class and labor, thus altering the axis of preferences that dictated their roll-call behavior.⁴

By decisively shaping the legal framework within which organized labor could make choices and deploy resources, the South affected the contours and limits of social class in postwar America. Having gingerly supported efforts that enhanced and coordinated working class action, it soon collaborated with Republicans to disorganize the working class. In successfully doing so, it also transformed the long-term character of movements for black rights, effectively detaching them from class- and labor-based movements for economic justice. While it is hard not to be elegiac about these lost opportunities, we do resist the temptation. Rather, we seek to understand how, within the charged and anxious context of the Roosevelt-Truman years, issues of class, and their overlap with questions of race, were presented and adjudicated within Congress primarily by the “strange bedfellows” coalition that characterized the Democratic party of the period, a hybrid of an immigrant, labor-oriented, big-city machine, nonsouthern wing that looked very much like a social democratic party and a native, mostly rural, white supremacist southern wing that represented almost no African Americans and only a minority of the region's white population.

There were, we show, three distinct periods. In the first, characterized by the New Deal's efforts to grapple with the Great Depression, southern members joined their Democratic Party brethren, most often against the opposition of Republicans, to support pro-labor legislation on conditions they understood would protect Jim Crow. In the second, marked by wartime mobilization, southern Democrats, pressed by harbingers of wartime social change, including very tight labor markets and union forcefulness that, together, seemed to threaten the labor market underpinnings of the racial order, shifted positions, moving to limit the effect of the labor regime they had helped install. Finally, in the postwar years, as the country reverted to a peacetime economy, southern Democrats allied with Republicans to remake this framework in a far-reaching manner. Some of the most important consequences for class and race that we identify, in closing, have proved durable.

I.

It had been, J. David Greenstone observed of the Roosevelt-Truman years, a “working-class interlude in American labor history.”⁵

Union power came to be widely acknowledged by supporters and opponents alike. Contributing to a distinguished collection of essays assessing “civilization in the United States” in 1938 (including chapters by Jacques Barzun on race, John Cowles on journalism, and Karl Menninger on psychiatry), Louis Stark concluded on a remarkably upbeat note, finding that:¹⁰

By the late 1940s, not just leaders of business mounting an assertive counterattack on class-based union capacity,¹¹

Yet at just the moment when a mix of exultation and anxiety characterized responses to the heightened capabilities of the labor movement, some observers rightly understood that the working-class interlude, though not labor union facility, was swiftly passing. Fortune's book-length study of the country's “permanent revolution” noted that labor militancy, which continued at the workplace and which was achieving secure contracts, escalating real wages, and generous fringe benefit agreements most notably in the core manufacturing industries like steel and automobiles, should not be confused, despite recent experiences, with class-based politics.

The “strong whiff of class warfare” that had characterized the moment when trade-unionism had moved from the periphery to the center of American capitalism, Daniel Bell likewise observed in a chapter excised from all but the first edition of The End of Ideology, had been replaced by circumstances in which organized labor, with “a middle-class stake in the country” acted as “a specific interest group concerned with its own needs first, rather than a broad social-reform movement seeking wholesale change in the nature of society.”¹⁵

Broadly speaking, two strands of work have been constitutive of this trope of disenchantment, the dominant orientation among disappointed historians and social scientists interested in the fate of labor and class in the United States.¹⁶

In the approach of exceptionalism, the behavior of American workers and their leaders is deemed deficient when measured against either a theoretical counterfactual (Marxist theory leads us to expect that the more developed capitalism becomes, as in the American case, the more class conscious and prone to collective action the working class should be) or an empirical one (Why has there been no labor party in the United States or a strong socialist politics, sites of working class agency found in other capitalist democracies?). Within the exceptionalist rubric, there tend to be two strands of argumentation. The first transcends specific historical moments to focus on enduring features of politics, economics, or society in the United States. It is the country's absence of feudalism and liberal hegemony, constitutionalism marked by federalism and separation of powers, individualist values, business culture, uncommon prosperity, ethnic and racial diversity, recurrent immigration, agrarian domination, or quite a lengthy list of other candidates that are thought to impede the “natural” state of affairs marked by self-aware working class agency.¹⁷

From the vantage of exceptionalism, the outcome of a sometimes militant and laborist union movement confined to the workplace and largely lacking in broad class analysis or political impulses by the end of the Truman years hardly is a surprise. It is simply understood to be the most robust possible outcome when considered within the conditions of American life. This is a story of persistence. In post-New Deal, post-Fair Deal America, unions have been confined largely to the workplace, and to bargaining about wages, work rules and conditions, and fringe benefit packages. Although the national labor federations have sought to influence public policy in Washington and have been, in the main, bulwarks of Democratic Party support, their policy goals have been geared mainly to underpin high-wage, good working condition, and generous benefit collective bargains with employers. This “business unionism” has been confined in the second half of the twentieth century geographically as well, as unions have continued to be relatively contained within enclaves in the northeast, midwest, and far west, with rather low union density in areas – the south and the area between the Mississippi River and the states on the west coast – that overwhelmingly were agrarian until recent times. From this perspective, in respect both to the spatial limitation of union activity and the contraction of union attention to the workplace the story at first glance seems to be one of continuity. Long-existent features of working class life in America, whether understood as enduring regime features or in more historicized path-dependent terms, continue to constitute and define the character as well as the limits of working-class orientations and actions.

Manifestly, however, this perspective stressing the homologous situations before and after the 1930s and 1940s is forced to downplay the remarkable shifts in possibility and achievement that occurred in this era, and fails to understand that labor relations pluralism was more a result settled for than the outcome intended by organized labor within the framework of New Deal labor law. A certain similarity of before and after thus composes an illusion of continuity. During these two decades, after all, there was a real rupture to prior patterns. At minimum, this break, and with it a far-reaching new openness, was constituted by the following constellation of elements: the hegemony of a political party for which both industrial and craft workers composed a key electoral basis of support, especially in the most contested large American states; support, if grudging at times, by national administrations both fearful of working class radicalism and desirous of working-class votes and access to the mobilizing capacities of organized labor; the growing appearance and resonance of a language of class outside as well as within the workplace under conditions of economic duress; a deep-seated delegitimation of business as a class and traditional capitalism as a system in consequence of the Depression; permissive public opinion; more accommodating Supreme Court jurisprudence; the closure of the immigration gate in 1924 that, perhaps ironically, advanced a process of ethnic integration and the development of multiracial as well as multiethnic workplaces; and, as a key catalyst, the passage of legislation in the 1930s that provided a framework empowering and legalizing trade unions, encouraging their expansion, as well as legislation that put a floor under wages and defined maximum working hours, long basic concerns of the union movement.

A second strand of the trope of disappointment looks precisely to this labor regime as the source of the decline of a class-based labor movement. Among others, Mike Davis, Colin Gordon, Rhonda Levine, Joel Rogers, Katherine Stone, Christopher Tomlins, and Stanley Vittoz have argued that the very framework of labor law and regulation created by the Roosevelt administration, most notably the NLRA, contained and limited labor possibilities by hedging working class power and providing incentives and legitimacy for a business-oriented system of collective bargaining premised on managerial prerogatives.¹⁹

We find this line of reasoning quite unconvincing when situated inside the actual history of American labor before the New Deal. Only with the NLRA did industrial unionizing take off in the United States; only under this regime did labor density more generally start to robustly expand; and only under this regime did the labor movement move into a position of influence as the leading interest group inside the Democratic party. “Given the American labour movement's pre-New Deal weakness – its ideological subordination, political dependence, marginal legal status, organizational impotence,” Howell Harris, hardly a wide-eyed innocent regarding New Deal labor law, has noted, “. . . it is scarcely possible to conceive of the creation and entrenchment of what was, for all its glaring deficiencies, the nearest thing to a dynamic, inclusive, mass movement that the American industrial working class has ever managed to put together, without the transformation of public policy after 1932.”²⁰

In more than the very short run, these “realistic” possibilities were not realized. A different kind of labor movement developed. It is this outcome we wish to explain. Like the critics of the New Deal labor regime, we are institutionalists who credit the power of legal codes to shape behavior; yet we think their line of attack has things quite backwards. The Wagner Act (and the NIRA before it and the Fair Labor Standards Act and the actions of the National Labor Relations Board after it) pushed the limits of American possibilities very hard, opening space for class contestation that otherwise simply would not have existed.²¹

But this regime had a short life. Within a decade of FLSA's passage in 1938, changes to labor law radically altered the possibilities of the labor movement. It was this end result, we argue, that was decisively shaped by the Jim Crow South. At first a partner, if only under certain conditions, with nonsouthern Democrats in crafting working-class friendly labor codes, southern Democrats in the 1940s exercised a decisive role in revising these institutional conditions within which the labor movement had developed. We will see how the South, which collectively occupied the role of pivotal voter in the quasi-three party system characterizing Congress in this period, and whose members, free from the constraints of a conventional reelection imperative, placed the highest value on their preference for preserving their region's “way of life,” was in position to play a switchboard role. Where southern members approved of policies in tandem with their nonsouthern Democratic colleagues, these policies became law; where they dissented, they could exercise a veto rejecting the modal policy positions of the Democratic Party.²²

During the 1930s and 1940s, in short, it was the southern shift with regard to labor law that drastically changed the rules of the game that had been established, in part, to reproduce their region's organization of race and class. In these circumstances that white southern representatives crucially authored, the situation of union leaders as strategic actors also changed drastically in ways that led them to take decisions that led to a delimited labor movement. In these circumstances, too, a young civil rights movement took flight in ways that focused on legal rights rather than economic possibilities.

The confined post-1950 orientation of the labor movement, in short, must be assessed and explained neither as if all roads in American history led to it nor as the inevitable result of the full panoply of New Deal labor regulations. Our alternative account moves in three steps. First, we offer reminders of the empowering effects of the pre-war New Deal labor legislation while noting the racial adjustments that were made to secure a winning coalition for this legislation that would include southern members of Congress. Second, turning to the close of the period, we show how the two main achievements of the early period, the NLRA and the FLSA, were altered to the detriment of labor by a coalition now led in considerable measure by southern Democrats. Wishing to understand why the South defected from the modal position of their presidents and their party, we then set sights on key intervening legislative moments to argue that wartime labor successes in the South and a growing threat of federal intervention in southern labor markets caused the region's representatives to alter their understanding of labor questions, and thus realign their preferences as they feared for the increasingly close interconnections joining issues of race to the organization of labor unions and markets.

At each of these moments, we treat the character and impact of significant legislation, probe the histories of key legislative debates while noting the character of southern discourse, and scrutinize roll call behavior to identify key patterns in southern political behavior. In short, we offer a fresh reading of the period's labor policy history in order to make better sense of fateful changes to the period's institutional context for labor relations and the manner in which the least unionized, least industrialized, and least urban part of the country imposed its wishes on the character of these rules.

In 1933 and 1935, we show, southerners joined their nonsouthern congressional colleagues to support a new state-sponsored labor regime friendly to labor organizing but unfriendly to the majority of African-Americans who lived below the Mason-Dixon line. Their support was not unbridled. In light of their racialized, low-wage, mostly agrarian political economy, they insisted on occupational exclusions, leaving agricultural and domestic labor, the most widespread black categories of employment, outside the ken of legislative protection and empowerment. Their regional development strategy dependent on luring investment capital by paying low wages and their desire to guard the bastions of Jim Crow coalesced in their understanding that they must secure the region's labor markets for domestic and farm workers. During 1937 and 1938, we can see the South struggling to stay within this paradigm while deepening its insistence on categorical exclusions and now raising a demand for administration by discretionary regional decentralization to protect sectional differences as they grappled with the threats they perceived in the effort to set national minimum wages and maximum hours.

In 1940, 1943, 1946, and especially 1947, the South moved decisively away from the pattern that had prevailed in the 1930s and that, less heartily, was still subscribed to in 1938. Now, large majorities of southern Democrats began to join Republicans to form a winning coalition that sharply delimited the organizational capacities of unions and curtailed some of the favorable conditions of work secured by the FLSA. As a result of this transformation in behavior, the strategic terrain for the labor movement and for civil rights efforts was altered in fundamental ways.

The tight labor market of World War II, we argue, by facilitating the penetration of unions, some of which were racially integrated, within the South, was the most fundamental cause of this southern readjustment. In wartime, successful organizing by both the AFL and more threateningly by the CIO, which often directly confronted regional racial mores, drove up the proportions of unionized southern workers. Emboldened by these successes, as the war was nearing its end, both labor federations announced large-scale organizing drives. Further, at the start of the postwar period, nonsouthern Democrats moved to consolidate and extend the considerable penetration of national administrative authority into labor markets that had been accomplished in the course of wartime mobilization, authority that the national government had wielded in contravention of race discrimination in employment. Now, increasingly anxious southern members were less and less willing to sign on to pro-labor legislation, even when occupational exclusions and administrative decentralization were built-in. Rather, endeavoring to defend their “way of life,” southern Democrats in Congress shifted to an unambiguous antilabor stance, now joining with Republicans to form a labor-specific conservative coalition.

The result of these moves was a deep-seated change in conditions confronting the labor movement. Under the rules advanced by Taft-Hartley, it no longer seemed possible to extend organizing efforts across the country. Labor no longer could hope to become, as most of its leaders had wished, a genuinely national political class capable of entering into systematic patterns of bargaining with government and business or fighting for such social democratic legislation as national health insurance. Instead, labor opted to go into battle only where it had real strength and to reorient its social policy demands to seek private, rather than public, benefits like generous pensions and decent health insurance, incorporating these gains for their constituents into labor contracts. One result was a new, more limited labor movement, one that could ally with the South to support most Democratic party policy initiatives, including expansive fiscal policies which were good both for the (relatively poor) South and (comparatively rich) labor. In the short-term, this outcome left labor as a still-growing and important political force. But its constrained position soon made unions terribly vulnerable to shifts in investment and technology. By 1954, a yet to be arrested decline set in. Concurrently, issues of race and questions of labor markets came to be sundered, thus helping to produce a soon powerful civil rights movement that transformed jurisprudence and shaped landmark legislation without possessing instruments with which to redress economic harms.

II.

After decades of legislative indifference or hostility to trade unions, Congress, sometimes prompted and sometimes supported by the Roosevelt Administration, enacted sweeping changes to labor-management relations and labor markets during the first half-decade of the New Deal, most notably by mandating that employers recognize unions and by regulating wages and hours in massive segments of the economy. The 1920s had proved an especially grim and demoralizing time for organized labor, which gave back virtually all the gains it had made in organizing mass production industries during World War I. The Supreme Court's 1917 decision in Hitchman Coal & Coke v. Mitchell made the legal climate for unions particularly inhospitable by sanctioning yellow-dog contracts that authorized employers to insist on pledges by their workers not to join a union as a condition of employment, thus making it impossible to organize without the consent of its target firms. Side by side with yellow-dog restraints on union organizing lay efforts by some of the country's largest and vigorously antiunion corporations to undermine labor organizing efforts by creating company unions as a substitute for adversarial collective bargaining.

In the context of working class anger during the Depression, Congress, even before the New Deal, in 1932, took a small but significant step by passing the country's first positively-oriented labor law, the Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act that sought to free labor from the Anti-Trust Act of 1890 by prohibiting federal courts from issuing injunctions to enforce yellow dog contracts. This legislation was a move supported by President Herbert Hoover and by large majorities of both parties to eliminate the period's most conspicuous and much resented antilabor activities, but this measure still left organized labor without effective proactive instruments. With the enactment of the NIRA in June 1933, at the close of the Hundred Days Congress, the institutional context for unions began to change far more substantially. Company union paternalism was rendered nugatory by Section 7(a) of Title I providing that “employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers . . . in the designation of such representatives.”²³

Two months after the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA as unconstitutional in May 1935, Congress enacted the NLRA, a far more robust and detailed regime that empowered efforts to organize unions.²⁵

Legal hostility to organizing thus was turned on its head, as the federal government offered unions a broad legal umbrella under which to shelter. Almost immediately, they began to expand at a rapid rate. Both the AFL and the breakaway CIO quickly thrived, exhibiting notable growth. In 1929, the labor movement possessed fewer than 4 million members. A decade later, despite continuing mass unemployment (more than 9 million Americans still were out of work in 1939), the new CIO alone matched this membership, the AFL had grown to more than four million members, and more than one million other workers had joined independent unions. Even before the wave of union expansion made possible by World War II, the NLRA labor regime conduced dramatic union growth, altering the balance of power between labor and management.²⁹

The New Deal also transformed conditions of work. Prodded by President Franklin Roosevelt, Congress returned to consider the issue of minimum labor standards in 1937, and, enacted the landmark FLSA in 1938 to eradicate “labor conditions detrimental to the maintenance of the minimum standards of living necessary for health, efficiency and well-being of workers.”³²

Not without reservations, to be sure, and not always with the same keenness of support offered by other members of their party, southern Democrats in the main supported this New Deal system of law that was well-disposed to labor unions, secured decent conditions of employment, and enhanced working class power. All the key labor-related legislation in this package of legislative accomplishment, including, ultimately, the Fair Labor Standards Act, long considered the first moment of appearance of a Republican-southern Democrat conservative coalition, was enacted only with, or after securing sufficient support of southern members.³⁶

This predominant pattern characterized by labor votes being defined as party issues in support of a labor-friendly legal climate was made possible, it is important to note, by what might be called a southern tilt in the details of these public policies. Southern participation in the New Deal coalition on labor issues had a price, and in extracting it from fellow Democrats southerners shaped and limited the emerging labor law in important ways, especially by excluding agricultural and domestic workers from coverage by federal labor regulation.⁴⁰

While the NIRA had no express statutory exclusion of agricultural or domestic labor, its application in these areas was contested and rather ambiguous. In the floor debate over the NIRA, southern and midwestern legislators voiced apprehension that the labor provisions of the act might govern agricultural labor. In a colloquy between Democratic Senators Huey Long of Louisiana and Joel Clark of Missouri, both complained that the act failed to define “industry” (the category of activity regulated by the act), and expressed concern that the term could be construed to apply to agriculture.⁴¹

Senator Robert Wagner, the New York Democrat who was the bill's principal congressional author, responded to such criticism by simply stating that “in the act itself agriculture is specifically excluded.”⁴⁵

The NIRA, however, had been amended on the floor so as to make clear that it applied to industries “engaged in the handling of any agricultural commodity or product thereof.”⁴⁷

An explicit legislative exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from New Deal labor legislation first appeared in the NLRA. The original draft of the bill (S. 2926) introduced in the 73rd Congress by Senator Wagner contained no such exclusion, and some evidence in the legislative history indicates that legislators and participants in the Senate hearings on the bill understood it to apply to agricultural labor.⁵⁰

The recognition of this possibility triggered discussion of the issue when the bill was referred to the Committee on Education and Labor. Hugo Black of Alabama and Park Trammell of Florida worked closely with three nonsouthern Democrats representing rural states to report a bill containing the exemption of agricultural and domestic labor.⁵²

The introduction of the original Black-Connery FLSA bill of 1937 in Congress was accompanied by a message to Congress from the President unequivocally calling for minimum wages and maximum hours for industrial and agricultural workers.⁵⁶

In the course of congressional consideration of FLSA, southern members in coalition with other farm state legislators aggressively expanded the scope of the agricultural exemption and elaborated its reach in detail.⁶¹

The status of subaltern black labor in agriculture was a consistent concern for southern members during the construction of the New Deal labor regime in the 1930s, peaking that decade when FLSA was being considered. By setting a floor on wages, it necessarily would have leveling effects that would cut across racial lines in the lowest wage sectors of the South, where there existed wide wage disparities between African American and white wage workers.⁶⁶

Representative Martin Dies, a Texas Democrat, articulated the same concern, stating that a “racial question” was implicated by the FLSA because under its minimum wage provisions “what is prescribed for one race must be prescribed for the others, and you cannot prescribe the same wages for the black man as for the white man.”⁶⁸

Yet other southern legislators condemned the FLSA as racial legislation aimed at the South, claiming it was comparable to antilynching legislation.⁷⁰

It should come as no surprise that, in the 1930s, southern members would focus far less on the racial implications of unions in nonagricultural pursuits than on the preservation of agrarian arrangements that constituted the core of the South's political economy. Farm labor dominated the economy of the South as in no other region of the country. Of all people engaged in agricultural labor nationwide, 57 percent worked in the South in 1930, and 55 percent in 1940.⁷²

“The most abject of America's rural people . . . were the African Americans who farmed in the South; they lived in the poorest region of the United States and were the poorest people living there.”⁷⁸

Southern black workers were overwhelmingly concentrated in agricultural and domestic labor. Approximately 58 percent of the South's black workforce labored in the agricultural and domestic sectors in 1930, a figure that had declined to 41 percent by 1940 due to the mechanization of agriculture and the out-migration of poor blacks from the South over the course of the decade.⁸⁰

In short, three features from the first half-decade of New Deal labor legislation stand out. First, within a short compass of time, there was a fundamental shift to federal policy that tilted strongly in the direction of working class capacity.⁸²

III.

This equilibrium – sponsored by the Democratic party, favorable to organized labor, meaningful for improving conditions of work, but of only limited assistance to African Americans (and other farm workers and maids) – was not sustained. By 1947, it had been superceded by new arrangements, equally doleful for black workers and now much less friendly to unions and a good deal less protective of workers. Following an unprecedented strike wave in 1945 and 1946, the 1946 election of a Republican 80th Congress placed labor law reform, intended to weaken unions and their organizing potential, at the top of the domestic policy agenda. “No domestic issue,” the economist Orme Phelps observed in 1947 as major changes to the Wagner Act were being debated, “exceeds in importance and no issue, domestic of foreign, has received more attention since the close of World War II than that of the proper policy to be observed in labor disputes.”⁸⁴

With Harry Truman in the White House, the veto threat on contentious labor issues meant that the Republicans needed a substantial number of Democrats to join with them if they were to secure labor law retrenchment. Concurrently, the now-minority Democratic party had grown more dependent on the fidelity of its southern members, who represented a greater proportion of the party in the 80th Congress than they had in a quarter century.⁸⁵

The most far-reaching antilabor measures in Taft-Hartley concerned limitations upon the right of unions to negotiate collective bargaining agreements providing for closed shops and union shops. The act banned closed shop provisions that outright require union membership as a condition of being hired. Further, it authorized states to pass “right-to-work” laws prohibiting agreements under which unions obtain a “union security clause” obliging all employees to pay union dues as a requirement of employment.⁸⁶

The act also substantially empowered employers to aggressively work to defeat organizing drives with a so-called free speech clause that stipulated that an employer's dissemination of antiunion views in the course of campaigning against a union could not constitute, or even be evidence of, a violation of the act absent a threat of reprisal or force or the promise of a benefit.⁸⁸

In the case both of prohibited strikes and picketing, the NLRB was required under the act to seek an injunction to prevent or end such activity.⁹¹

At the same time that Taft-Hartley increased the NLRB's power to issue injunctions against collective action by unions, it diluted the Board's authority in respects harmful to labor. Most significantly, the NLRB was turned into a purely quasi-judicial institution, as its investigative and prosecutorial functions were segregated and delegated to a newly created General Counsel separate from the Board.⁹⁴

Further, in a limitation on the Board's authority and an attack upon unions as presumptively suspect and corrupt, certain reporting requirements were imposed upon unions as a precondition to the Board recognizing and adjudicating their claims. To qualify for the protections offered by the NLRA, union leaders were compelled to submit affidavits to the Labor Department swearing that they were not members of, or affiliated with, the Communist Party, and they had to file reports disclosing a wide array of information about internal operating procedures, including the election of officials and compensation paid to them, as well as comprehensive financial statements.¹⁰¹

While the NLRA's exclusion of agricultural workers remained unchanged by Taft-Hartley, both the Taft and Hartley bills reported out of committee had included detailed and expanded agricultural exclusions meant to place workers in processing and handling activities ancillary to agriculture outside the scope of the NLRA.¹⁰⁴

Writing lead editorials about the passage of Taft-Hartley in June 1947, the New York Times chastised President Truman for having vetoed the bill in light of the administration's “record of labor-management strife [that] has been far and away the worst in the nation's history,” and exulted at the “new chapter . . . in labor-management relations” promising a more “balanced society in which everyone at all times enjoys his rights and everyone at all times fulfills his obligation.” The newspaper especially celebrated how the veto had been rejected with bipartisan support, as an overwhelming number of southern Democrats had joined Republicans to defy their party's leader.¹⁰⁷

Likewise with the effort to modify the FLSA. The Portal to Portal Act also stood on southern shoulders, eliciting southern Democratic-Republican likeness scores on passage of 79 in the Senate and 99 in the House. Precipitated by the “portal to portal” pay disputes of the 1940s in which suits were brought under provisions of the FLSA to recover payment for “off the clock” time which, by custom or practice, was not compensated. These cases principally involved demands for compensation for time spent walking from a factory gate or time-clock to a work station such as a steel furnace, which could be substantial in large industrial or mining facilities, as well as some work-related preliminary and postliminary activities, such as on-site after work showers for employees who worked with chemicals.¹⁰⁹

With respect to past claims, the bill provided that any custom or practice of not paying for certain time, even during the middle of the workday, would be sufficient to defeat portal suits. With respect to future claims, while certain activities “preliminary” and “postliminary” to the employee's “principal activity” would not be compensated (unless they were made explicitly compensable by contract), the amendments clarified that time spent doing tasks “integral” to the principal activity was covered by the FLSA, as was time that an employee was required to spend idly between tasks during the workday, regardless of an employer's past custom or practice.¹¹²

As a number opponents of the Portal to Portal Act noted at the time, most of the act went beyond the portal issue and cut into unrelated FLSA rights.¹¹³

Another important change wrought by Portal to Portal was a significant restriction on class actions that had been facilitated by FLSA's section 16(b), which provided that some named employees could sue on behalf of themselves and other “similarly situated” workers who did not have to be named or consent to the suit. The Portal amendments changed section 16(b) to require that each employee individually file written consent to participate in such a suit.¹¹⁹

IV.

This institutional (counter-) revolution, business and labor immediately understood, fundamentally changed the status of unions in national life, having altered the milieu within which they could operate, the tools they could deploy, and the degree to which they could appeal to new members. “Management has grounds,” a spokesperson for the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) put it, shortly after the passage of Taft-Hartley, “sufficient under the LMRA to swamp our courts with requests for injunctions, suits for violation of contract and damages, and prosecution for unfair labor practices, to appear as a tidal wave compared to labor's portal-to-portal suits.” But such action was not necessary, NAM counseled, because a “go-slow” policy should prove more effective by holding these powers in reserve.¹²⁰

The AFL's United Textile Workers of America immediately published a warning to its members that “it DID happen here” in “this anti-union Congress” with a result that “threatens the strength, financial security and freedom of Unions to operate under free collective bargaining.”¹²²

To be sure, Taft-Hartley did not eliminate or totally transform the prior regime. When the National Foremen's Institute explained to its members that “supervisors are a part of management,” it cautioned that “the supervisor who wishes to avoid trouble for his company should observe two rules: 1) Keep his opinions about unions to himself. 2) Deal impartially with rival unions,” and stay within the letter of the law which continues to confer important rights to unions.¹²⁶

Notwithstanding the continuing clout and ability of organized labor, its capabilities had been very much hedged, as the unions came to experience. We can see this learning at work in the more analytical and nonpolemical publications published ten years on by the AFL-CIO's Industrial Union Department chaired by Walter Reuther to assess the impact of the act. A synoptic overview convincingly showed how “If Taft-Hartley has been a problem to unions in organized industries, it has been a disaster to those unions whose major organizing job is yet to be done.” A carefully-written case study of the American Federation of Hosiery Workers demonstrated how the new law had helped frustrate that union's organizing efforts in the South. The union had won the large majority of its certification elections under NLRB jurisdiction prior to Taft-Hartley, almost all producing contracts. By contrast, “in the 10 years following Taft-Hartley, the union was able to sign only 23 new agreements” out of “a total of 117 NLRB representation elections.”¹²⁸

Indeed, even in the early years of Taft-Hartley a clear change had taken place in the climate of labor relations, shifting the weight of expectations, that especially had a deleterious impact on union efforts in low-density areas. As a 1951 study observed,¹²⁹

By such means, with labor “constantly thrown on the defensive,” as Senator Paul Douglas put it in his memoirs, unions in the South “found it hard to get a foothold in these states, and . . . could not establish themselves in such industries as textiles, tobacco, and chemicals.”¹³¹

Likewise, the changes Portal to Portal wrought to the FLSA diminished the ability of organized labor to utilize legal resources to protect worker rights, and is something of a lesson in the considerable difference seemingly modest procedural changes to public policy can make. 1947, the last year before Portal to Portal rules came into effect, stands out for the high number of enforcement actions filed in federal court (3,772), the most in any single year before or since. This peak reflected a steady rise in such judicial interventionism in the labor market under the aegis of FLSA during the prior three years. Once Congress enacted its amendments making such proceedings more difficult, the number of enforcement actions plummeted, in 1948, by 72 percent to 1,062. During the decade following enactment the average annual number of suits filed was 754, a number representing a decline of some 80 percent from the high water mark of 1947.¹³²

V.

Why did southern members of Congress abandon their position of support for the New Deal labor regime, which, after all, had been adjusted to suit their preferences? At the core of their near-universal shift to positions geared to make union organizing more difficult and to restrict federal intervention in labor markets was a transformation in the way in which they understood labor issues. Once domestic and agricultural exclusions had been made integral to labor legislation in the 1930s, they had viewed these votes primarily as choices about party loyalty and ideological conviction; that is, as an integral part of the New Deal they broadly supported as Democrats. By contrast, in the 1940s labor roll calls became referenda on the durability of Jim Crow. A combination of striking labor union gains in the South and growing national administrative responsibilities for labor markets made southern representatives more keenly aware of the racial issues at stake.

As labor unions began to enjoy increasing, and unexpected, success in the South, and as nonsouthern New Deal liberals pressed to create a more expansive federal administrative regime to control labor, without relenting where race intersected with labor, southerners in the House and Senate closed ranks to consider labor questions first and foremost defensively as problems to be addressed in terms of their perception of regional interests. From their standpoint, labor matters no longer were a minor sideshow where they could compromise with other members of the Democratic Party in exchange for regional favors. They now had reason to fear that labor organizing might fuel civil rights activism, that close enforcement of the Fair Labor Standards Act would cause wage leveling along racial lines, that the creation of a fluid national labor market under the auspices of the Department of Labor would induce poor black rural labor to leave the region, that efforts to increase national administrative authority over unemployment compensation would diminish incentives that had been counted upon to keep these workers in the fields, and that zealous bureaucrats would use their administrative discretion, reinforced by wartime anti-discrimination efforts, to confront racially discriminatory practices by state government officials. Having merged indissolubly with race, labor votes now evoked preferences in southern members geared more to guard Jim Crow than distinguish Democrats from Republicans.

When southerners had voted for the Wagner Act, unions were a trivial force in the South. During the prewar period, the unionization movement had been concentrated in large urban areas in the northeast and midwest where mass production industries were situated and in isolated “total” work environments like lumber camps and mining communities. With the exception of union momentum on New Orleans's docks and Birmingham's packing houses and steel mills, the South was largely left out of the union surge of the 1930s. And not just for reasons of industrial location. After all, lumber unionized on the West Coast, as did textiles in New England, but neither had succeeded in the South, where they were undermined by employer resistance, the absence of union traditions, and a widespread fear that unions, as part of a national movement controlled by leaders from outside the region, would disrupt the political economy of race and harm the low-wage strategy of economic development. Thus despite some gains, “the union movement of the South in 1939 . . . lagged markedly behind the Northeast, Midwest, and West coast in reacting to the stimulus of the New Deal.”¹³⁴

Labor organizing in the South faced high hurdles. The region was less industrialized than the rest of the country, and its factories, by comparison to other areas, were widely dispersed in small- and middle-sized towns where resistance, often relentless, was more intense. Further, the huge supply of dreadfully poor persons in the South both depressed wages and made union efforts very difficult. Most important, the region's racial order partitioned workers by race, making divide and conquer strategies by employers a ready tool with which to defeat union drives. Many efforts before the New Deal to build southern unions, including a large organizing drive conducted by the AFL in the teeth of the depression, came to naught.¹³⁵

Yet even before World War II, a period of very significant labor organizing gains in the South, the growth of the CIO, shielded by the NLRB, had begun to concern the South. Some of its national unions quickly developed a presence in such major industries as steel, rubber, automobiles, oil, and mining that included a growing southern, often multiracial, membership. During the war, both the AFL and CIO secured unforeseen gains and planned major campaigns to build on these successes in peacetime. The tight labor market induced by wartime industrial expansion fueled by large federal investments, by urbanization, and by the substantial development of military bases, facilitated aggressive union efforts to take advantage of the legal climate that had been created by the Wagner Act but which previously had had little effect in the South. In just two years, from Pearl Harbor to late 1943, industrial employment in the South grew from 1.6 million to 2.3 million workers. Many farmers and sharecroppers who experienced the military or worked at war centers were not prepared to tolerate a return to prewar conditions (during the war, 25 percent of farm workers left the land).¹³⁶

All in all, southern trends were brought more in line with national developments. Between 1938 and 1948, the two data points studied by Frank De Vyver, the region's rate of increase in membership, marked by more than a doubling to more than one million, exceeded the growth of 88 percent for the country as a whole. Likewise, Leo Troy's survey of union membership in the South between 1939 and 1953 found that “For the entire period . . . union membership increased more rapidly in the South than in the rest of the country,” noting that most of the growth had come in wartime.¹³⁷

These achievements were pregnant with deep-seated implications for southern race relations. Because “the Negro constitutes a relatively large and permanent part of the southern industrial labor force in such industries as tobacco, lumber, and iron and steel,” Douty noted, “successful unionization of such industries require[s] the organization of colored workers,” adding that, based on wartime experiences, including experiments with multiracial union locals, there “is evidence to the effect that workers among both races are beginning to realize that economic cooperation is not only possible, but desirable.”¹³⁸

Seeking to secure their dramatic wartime gains in the South, both the AFL and the CIO (with the dramatic title of Operation Dixie) announced major organizing campaigns in spring 1946, based in part on the understanding, as a CIO prospectus had declared in 1939, that a relatively unorganized South is “a menace to our organized movement in the north and likewise to northern industries.”¹⁴⁰

Throughout this period of initial concern over the prewar incursions of the CIO to the hearty labor efforts during and following World War II, southern legislators moved vigorously to alter the institutional rules within which unions could operate. Three such efforts stand out: the 1939 Smith Committee investigation of the NLRB and the bill it produced that passed the House but failed to get to the floor in the Senate; the War Labor Disputes Act (WLDA; the Smith-Connolly Act) of 1943; and the Case Bill of 1946 that passed both houses but was vetoed by President Truman. Although only Smith-Connolly became law, each legislative event demonstrated the new preferences and pattern of behavior of the South regarding unions, and provided important trial heats for Taft-Hartley“

Voting with Republicans with a likeness score of 73, southern members were instrumental in establishing a committee in the House led by Howard Smith, an antiunion Virginia Democrat, whose main aim would be to investigate

The primary target was the CIO and the help it had received from the Board in jurisdictional disputes with the AFL. During the brief debate, themes soon to be more prominent in southern discourse were articulated by Representative Edward Cox, a Georgia Democrat:¹⁴⁶

Aspiring to allay the NLRB's putative pro-CIO bias, the bill proposed by the committee, and supported on the House floor with an average southern Democratic-Republican likeness score of 86, adopted the expansive Social Security Act definition of agricultural workers, denied the Board power to reinstate workers convicted of violence or destruction of property during a strike and included provisions separating the prosecutorial and judicial functions of the NLRB while increasing judicial review of board decisions and requiring that it apply rules of evidence applicable in federal courts.¹⁴⁷

As sponsors, Howard Smith in partnership with Senator Tom Connolly of Texas also gave the War Labor Disputes Act a southern pedigree. To bring unions under control, they and their southern colleagues supported increasing federal administrative authority over the labor relationship by giving statutory authority to a War Labor Board, authorizing the President to seize and operate struck plants, requiring a thirty-day notice to the NLRB prior to striking in a labor dispute which might interrupt war production, mandating a secret strike ballot on the thirtieth day, if the dispute had not been resolved, and prohibiting labor organizations from making national election political contributions.¹⁴⁸

The language utilized by southerners was charged, anxious, and inflammatory. Referring to wartime strikes, especially by the CIO and the Mineworkers (who had recently left the CIO), southern members characterized union leaders as criminally corrupt (“racketeers,” “goon squads”), lacking in patriotism under conditions of war crisis, and as communistic, fascistic, and dictatorial.¹⁴⁹

Like Smith-Connolly, the Case bill, sponsored by New Jersey Republican Clifford Case, was directed primarily at strikes, heralding Taft-Hartley by proposing, among other provisions, a 60-day cooling off period, a prohibition against violence or conspiracy that interferes with the movement of goods in interstate commerce, monetary damages against unions for contract violations, and the proscription of secondary boycotts, amending Norris-LaGuardia to allow for injunctions in such cases.¹⁵²

In all, the legislative record is clear. The coalition that southern members had begun to fashion with Republicans on labor union issues in 1939 grew to near-unanimous solidarity during and especially just after World War II. The articulated motivations for this dramatic shift were deep concern about union power, its growing role in their region, and its potential impact on the racial order. Further, at the start of the postwar period, Democrats outside the South sought to continue and deepen the far-reaching extension of national authority in labor markets that had been a hallmark of wartime public administration, an effort that intensified the apprehensions of southern representatives.

VI.

Shortly after the United States entered World War II, the federal government extended its regulation of the employment relationship and labor markets by federalizing the operation of the United States Employment Service (USES), which previously had been run by the states, and, pressured by an incipient civil rights movement, by creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to investigate complaints about racial discrimination in defense industries and government.

The Wagner-Peyser Act of 1933 had established the USES to create a “national employment system” with the purpose of linking employers with individuals looking for work. The legislation provided federal matching funds to state-level employment service offices, which were required to coordinate with one another to create a nationwide system that would facilitate the flow of labor both within states and across state lines. The USES was joined to the administration of unemployment compensation. Applicants for unemployment benefits could be referred to a USES office to determine whether there were “suitable” employment opportunities that could avert an individual's need for compensation, which, in turn, could be denied to individuals who declined a suitable work referral.¹⁵⁶

In early 1942, in response to pressing manpower needs, the federal government took over the administration of these state employment offices under the national administrative authority of the War Manpower Commission, which, by and large, continued to give state offices the leeway to discriminate against African-American clients. During the war, USES offices in many southern cities ran segregated, sometimes entirely separate, offices to serve whites and blacks, made referrals in accordance with employer requests for “whites only” skilled and clerical positions, and “blacks only” positions for laborers, janitors, and maids, and often did not refer skilled African-American workers to available and suitable skilled jobs in war industries. Further, following the war, some southern USES offices began working in conjunction with state unemployment compensation offices to deny skilled African Americans unemployment compensation if they refused to accept referrals to unskilled jobs. These and other discriminatory practices brought southern USES administrators into conflict with the FEPC.¹⁵⁷

In June 1941, President Roosevelt had created the FEPC as a wartime agency by an Executive Order prohibiting the federal government from discriminating in its hiring practices based upon race, color, creed, or national origin, and further requiring federal agencies to negotiate contracts with private employers certifying they would abjure bias on any of those grounds. The FEPC was charged to probe and find remedies for complaints of hiring prejudice.¹⁵⁸

Following the war's end, President Truman advocated a “permanent” FEPC to continue in peacetime. In January 1946, Democratic Senator Dennis Chavez of New Mexico introduced an FEPC bill that, compared with the wartime version, proposed a radical extension of national intervention in labor markets and race relations. Whereas Franklin Roosevelt's FEPC had only covered the federal government and businesses choosing to contract with it, Chavez's bill covered all private firms, and labor unions, with six or more employees, a scope of private sector coverage more extensive even than Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. During the successful filibuster burying the bill, Georgia Democrat Richard Russell, arguably the Senate's most powerful southern member, characterized the difference between the wartime and the proposed FEPC as the disparity between a rat and an elephant.¹⁶⁰

A principal argument southerners advanced in opposition to the FEPC bill was that it represented a menacing expansion of national administrative authority, and, more specifically, the “nationalization” of the employment relationship. The administrative enforcement apparatus in the FEPC bill was broadly similar to that of the NLRB. The five-member committee was granted wide authority to appoint investigators/trial examiners, who in turn were given the right to demand business records without obtaining a warrant, and a highly deferential standard of review was applied to federal court review of committee fact-finding, thus vesting the FEPC with the ultimate authority to determine the validity of an allegation of discrimination in most cases. Although southerners had voted to enact this type of administrative machinery in the NLRA of 1935, they attacked the FEPC's administrative authority under the bill as excessive, foreshadowing some aspects of Taft-Hartley's curtailment of NLRB powers in the 80th Congress.¹⁶¹

In decrying the growth of federal administrative power, southerners expressed antagonism toward the “snoopers,” “inquisitors,” “busybodies,” and “troublemakers” that would proliferate under the aegis of the FEPC, and would “harass,” “annoy,” “invade,” and “intimidate” citizens and businesses.¹⁶²

The FEPC proposal was the first major piece of New Deal labor legislation to emerge from the committee phase since the NIRA without an agricultural exclusion. Although it is not entirely evident what prompted Democrats to disregard what had become a standard part of the labor compromise between nonsouthern and southern Democrats, we hypothesize that the absence of the agricultural exclusion indicates that now that southern members had defected from the prolabor orientation of the party other Democrats were now free to exert pressure to expand the embrace of New Deal labor law to include farm workers. In earlier floor debates on the NLRA and FLSA, each reported to the floor with agricultural exclusions, Democratic members irrespective of region had been virtually silent on this issue, codifying a then-tacit arrangement. By contrast, throughout FEPC debates southern expressions of displeasure were copious. “A farmer,” Senator Russell observed, “could not put more than five individuals in his field to pick cotton at any one time without subjecting himself to the provisions of the bill.”¹⁶⁹

One of the striking features of these colloquies about fair employment was the central role southerners assigned to organized labor, especially the CIO which was vilified most for supporting the bill, as Russell put it, “in and out of season, and with every means and method at their command.”¹⁷⁰

The CIO's braiding of labor and race politics in important ways represented to southerners the impossibility of keeping the two issues separate.¹⁷³

Southern legislators clearly understood that racial equality, not just a strong union movement, had been embraced as a key goal by the CIO, and they protested that the bill's passage would compel the racial integration of unions.¹⁷⁴

Looking ahead to the most significant antilabor provisions of Taft-Hartley, the prohibition of closed shops and authorization of so-called right-to-work laws, Senators Russell, Eastland, and Maryland Democrat Millard Tydings complained that the FEPC bill failed to prohibit discrimination against non-union members caused by closed or union shops.¹⁷⁸

Just as the Senate was debating FEPC, some Democrats in the House were unsuccessfully attempting to permanently increase federal authority over the administration of the United States Employment Service as part of the debate about a bill introduced by Democrat Robert Ramspeck of Georgia to amend Wagner-Peyser during the period of reconversion before USES offices had been returned to state operation. A “recapture clause” they advanced would have empowered the Secretary of Labor to take over operation of state employment offices if no state system of public employment service existed, or if the state was ineligible for federal funds because of noncompliance with provisions of the act, or with the rules and regulations promulgated by the Secretary.¹⁸⁰

The bill also provided that states must maintain “reasonable referral standards” according to which workers are sent to “jobs at wages and under working conditions which are not less favorable to the individual than those prevailing for similar work in the community,”¹⁸²

Jennings Randolph, a Democratic member of the House Labor Committee that reported out the Ramspeck bill, stated that “[t]here was sentiment in our committee for . . . the permanent Federal operation of public employment offices,”¹⁸⁶

Concern about the implications of such federal authority for Jim Crow was a feature of the debate. The fluid national labor markets that had prevailed during wartime when the employment service was in federal hands had encouraged agricultural labor to leave the South. Gathings thus noted that “[w]e have not forgotten that our labor has been taken away from the agricultural sections of the country and transplanted in the metropolitan areas, leaving farm houses empty and an inadequate supply of labor to harvest the crops.” He complained that during the war the USES ran advertisements in southern newspapers attracting labor out of the South to northern industry with promises of housing and a forty-eight–hour work week conferring overtime pay, with the result that “[o]ne-fourth to one-third of the cotton produced in 1945 in Arkansas remains in the field unpicked.”¹⁹⁰

Gathings further suggested that federal control of the employment services had caused unemployment compensation to be paid in a manner that had diminished the incentive for poor workers who remained in the South to participate in agricultural labor: “[w]hat little labor we have in the South available for farm work has stopped working and are drawing allotment checks, unemployment compensation or other Federal benefits, “¹⁹¹

Much like the nonsouthern Democrats in the 79th House who sought in the proposed amendments to Wagner-Peyser to gain indirect federal leverage over the administration of unemployment compensation, their colleagues in the 79th Senate made more direct efforts toward this end. As part of the War Mobilization and Reconversion Act, New York Democrat Robert Wagner led an effort to create certain uniform and, as compared to many state systems, more generous standards to govern unemployment compensation. Key provisions he proposed would have increased the maximum allowable benefits, added supplemental federal payments to meet the elevated benefit levels, administered the program through “Federal machinery,” and extended the duration of benefits to be paid.¹⁹⁶

The bill was referred to the Senate Finance Committee dominated by southern Democrats; half of the twelve Democrats were southern, including five of the six most senior. Working with the nine Republicans, they gutted the bill with respect to the provisions creating new federal standards for unemployment compensation and extending coverage to agricultural processing employees.¹⁹⁹

VII.

Writing in 1954, the year labor union density peaked at some 34 percent of wage and salary employees in non-farm workplaces, Irving Bernstein projected continuous growth to come. The unionized labor force, he argued, would continue to grow. The steady dissolution of discrimination against Catholic and Jewish immigrants and “the gradual improvement in the status of the Negro [that] has permitted his growing participation in all our institutions, including the trade union” had produced a work force less likely to be exploited by employers wishing to use ascriptive differences to thwart union organization. During the Second World War and the Korean War, organized labor had achieved unprecedented access to the federal government. “If the forces we have emphasized continue to work in the future,” he concluded, “unionism will grow steadily in the long run, will suffer little or no loss in bad times, and will expand sharply if we are so unfortunate as to engage in wars or to sustain severe depressions.”²⁰¹

In a rejoinder, Daniel Bell pointed out that union growth had effectively been brought to a stop by Taft-Hartley. Between 1947 and 1952, labor density actually had declined slightly. Now, labor's future looked dim. In mining, rail transport, and manufacturing apart from textile and chemical production, labor already had achieved union organization of between 80 and 100 percent of the workforce. Moreover, most large firms had been unionized with the exception of supervisory employees, now ruled out by Taft-Hartley, and white collar workers, who had little incentive to unionize since their wages were tied to union contracts. Most unorganized workers were in plants of fewer than 250 members, where employer resistance was likely to be most effective under Taft-Hartley rules. A large proportion of “these plants,” he stressed, “are located . . . in the South where the atmosphere is distinctly hostile. Many,” Bell further observed, “live on their ability to cut union wage corners. The political atmosphere in these towns makes organizing more troublesome.” Further, post-Taft-Hartley, “government, on the national and state levels, is no longer favorable to unions.” As a result, he forecast, “the tide of unionism has reached a high-water mark and . . . in the next five years – as in the last five – unionism will not advance significantly.”²⁰²

Bell, rather than Bernstein, proved the better seer. As the impact of more limited possibilities became clear to the leaders of organized labor, they opted to make three fateful moves, all rational in this new context and all successful in the short-term. First, they reined in their once-ambitious efforts, focused on the South, to make the labor movement a genuinely national force. This strategy now had become prohibitively costly. Instead, they opted to deepen their capacities where their strength already was considerable. Second, they thus concentrated on making collective bargaining a settled, orderly, and productive process, trading off management prerogatives for generous, secure wage settlements indexed to inflation, and they experimented with long-term contracts (such as the UAW-General Motors five year agreement in 1950), while limiting their scope of attention almost exclusively to the workplace. Third, rather than continue to fight for a more advanced national welfare state for all Americans, they concentrated their energy, with considerable accomplishment, on flourishing efforts to secure private pension and health insurance provisions for their members that would be financed mainly by employers and began an attempt that first bore fruit in a UAW-Ford agreement in 1955, to have employers provide supplemental unemployment insurance.²⁰³

In these circumstances, the rotten-borough political system of the South and its structure of racial domination largely remained unchallenged by organized labor, the one national force that had seemed best poised to do so in the 1940s. In consequence, both the emerging judicial strategy to secure black enfranchisement and challenge Jim Crow as well as the still nascent mass movement for civil rights that gained force after the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott developed independently of a labor movement that more and more had come to look inward. The result, in this domain, was a civil rights impulse that rarely tackled the economic conundrums of southern blacks directly, focusing instead mainly on civic and political, rather than economic, inclusion.²⁰⁵

These linked outcomes, we have been arguing, were the direct result of a shift in the axis of southern preferences about labor during the 1940s. Faced with the surprising rise of labor in the region and a continuing attempt by members of the New Deal coalition to create a more expansive federal administrative regime to control labor that might not yield where issues of race intersected with those of employment, southern members of Congress no longer could afford to treat labor issues within a ‘first-dimension’ issue space dividing Republicans on the right from Democrats on the left. Labor organizing, they now feared with good reason, would blend inexorably with, and fuel, civil rights activism, while governmental activism both on questions of labor and racial discrimination would level wages across racial lines, create a national labor market, including unemployment policies, that would encourage blacks to leave the South and diminish the southern establishment's control over those who stayed, and directly challenge Jim Crow practices. Further, even the older 1930s deal that had excluded the occupations in which the majority of southern blacks worked from federal protective legislation now seemed precarious at best. Once tacit and widely assumed to be permanent, this arrangement now grew tense, threatening to give way. Agricultural workers were included in the FEPC, and some were incorporated within Senator Wagner's proposed unemployment compensation amendments. The unified nonsouthern Democratic attack upon the proposed expansion of the NLRA's agricultural exemption in the Taft-Hartley debate is further evidence of this pressure. Distressed by these developments, keenly aware of what was at stake, and thus anxious to find means to maintain control of their racial order, the “solid South” in Congress closed ranks to join Republican members to reshape the institutional regime within which unions and the labor market would operate. For their Republican partners, labor remained an issue of party and ideology. In the mind of the southern legislator, by contrast, labor had become race.