Presidential transitions are essential springs of American political development. Unlike exogenous shocks such as wars and economic crises, their endogeneity gives them great potential for theory building, for they are embedded in history at several time scales, from the prevailing ideas about the ameliorative role of the state to the policy legacies of prior administrations and the political context of the election. Stephen Skowronek follows a long tradition of classifying presidents, creating a fourfold typology, depending on whether the new president is allied with the dominant regime or opposed to it, and whether the regime itself is powerful or in decline.Footnote 1 The most interesting of Skowronek's categories is the group that includes Dwight Eisenhower—preemptive presidents, who take office in opposition to a robust regime. These presidents pose salient historical puzzles, because the prospects for a preemptive president to establish the legitimacy of his own governing project is exceptionally constrained—not only by the trajectory of reformist policies and the inertia of institutions, but also by the dominant ideas regarding the role of government—and yet such presidents have powerful personal and partisan incentives and just enough resources to upset the inherited policy legacy.
Eisenhower's inauguration in 1953 followed arguably the most productive period of reformist policymaking in American history, and the new president faced a heightened version of the preemptive dilemma. His comfortable victory and his party's control of Congress put Old Guard Republicans in mind of the 1920s, and senior Congress members pushed the president hard to reverse twenty years of progressive policy. Other conservative activists, backed by a powerful, strategically sophisticated coalition of business groups, were more moderate, but they saw Eisenhower's election as a brief window of opportunity, where change depended on immediate and dramatic action. Eisenhower could see that acting on the most radical of these demands would have overreached his mandate, but it was not clear how he would pick his battles. As Supreme Commander, he had confronted similar choices during the war, and commentators have singled out his strategic sense as one of his most distinctive leadership traits. But, with little political experience, Eisenhower needed to weigh the ideologically attractive call to attack or reverse the New Deal against the resilience or vulnerability of particular programs and the resources or strategies available to the White House. Skowronek documents the risks inherent in action: a president who directly asserts his drive to disrupt the policy stream at such a moment of political time will be sorely challenged, perhaps impeached. Although he suggests that “Eisenhower is, perhaps, the most remarkable of the preemptive leaders,” Skowronek does not carry the analysis to conclusion, placing Eisenhower with Coolidge and Cleveland as “hard cases.”Footnote 2
In abstract, two alternative courses are possible for a preemptive president savvy enough to avoid directly contesting the dominant regime. He could survive by following a path of moderation: He would avoid advancing the majority party's signature reforms, but by borrowing ideas and modifying implementation, his legacy would be to consolidate the changes initiated by his predecessors. A more ambitious and difficult, but risky, strategy would involve separating off particular elements of the inherited reforms and seeking to reverse them. The payoff to the minority party's ideological activists would be much greater, but the president risks mobilizing congressional or popular supporters of the inherited reforms he has placed under assault.
Scholars who have focused on social welfare policy have praised Eisenhower for choosing the former course, exemplifying a “presidency of consolidation” and building a legacy whose developmental significance was to ratify the New Deal. Eisenhower had disowned any intention to use the Republican interregnum to push for a wholesale realignment, and as president, his most prominent actions carried forward or even enlarged the scope of reforms put in place by Roosevelt and Truman, including modifying the Social Security and unemployment insurance programs and lending at least tacit consent to counter-cyclical macroeconomic policies. Here, Eisenhower's influence was to slow the pace but maintain the direction of past policy.Footnote 3
In this article, I argue that Eisenhower in fact pursued the second strategic alternative, sharply distinguishing between the “safety net” programs and the New Deal's much more politically ambitious labor reforms. Where the New Deal's social welfare settlement sought to round off the rough edges of capitalism by ameliorating market outcomes, the intention of the Wagner Act had been to strengthen and protect the political power of interests that are intrinsically disadvantaged in market transactions. When we turn our attention to actions that center on the national government's posture toward unions and labor organizing, it becomes clear that Eisenhower's accomplishment is not consolidation but change. In labor policy, after a brief attempt to enact legislative revisions to Taft-Hartley, the president adopted an administrative strategy, working in less visible ways to orchestrate the conditions for reversing the direction of policy and weakening the future capacity of institutions to fulfill the New Deal's political economic goals. The economic policy of the Eisenhower years, in short, had a dual developmental significance: ratifying the New Deal's social welfare reforms but weakening the political status of organized labor and undermining the union base of the Democratic Party.
The argument unfolds in three parts. The next section describes the political context when Eisenhower entered the White House, including the president's economic beliefs and the policy agenda set by the melded legacy of the Wagner and Taft-Hartley Acts. The following sections survey two crucial initiatives, describing how the interplay between ideas and policies altered the developmental trajectory of labor policy. In the first, Eisenhower sought to shape a concrete set of proposals that would fulfill his campaign commitment to modify Taft-Hartley. Consulting with congressional leaders, including Taft, with nongovernmental actors, ranging from union leaders to policy specialists in the American Bar Association (ABA), and taking advantage of the stalemate between moderates and conservatives in the Cabinet, Eisenhower and his advisors produced a list of changes that would have had the effect of rolling back some of the more stringent new restrictions on labor. This initiative was framed by a group-based, even pluralist, conception of labor relations centered on the competition of organized interests. This was not a novel idea, as it essentially carried forward the common thread of Wagner and Taft-Hartley, where advocates of both Acts had appealed to the idea of “balanced competition” (albeit to radically different images of “balance”) to justify the government's intervention in labor relations. The idea that the goal of labor policy should be to maintain the conditions for fair competition between groups had been voiced by Eisenhower in the campaign and by the staffers most closely involved with drafting his amendments, but Eisenhower was not an ideological thinker and had not worked out the relation between the image of politics as group competition and his early socialized individualism. Eisenhower's initiative, which probably would have succeeded but for Taft's death, was beaten back by a conservative attack whose vehemence brought Eisenhower up short. The failure of what he had intended as a minor adjustment to labor law led him to pull back from the idea of legislating reforms, but it also brought him to reconsider and eventually abandon the “intuitive pluralism” that had motivated his proposed Taft-Hartley amendments.
Chastened by this experience, Eisenhower looked to administrative changes as a less conflictual route to shaping the interpretation and enforcement of labor law; the penultimate section of this article describes the change of ideas and political tactics. The White House and its business allies worked energetically to take advantage of a window of opportunity, encouraging Democratic resignations from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and nominating ardent conservatives to replace them. The strategy that took shape in Eisenhower's assertively partisan appointments to the NLRB is to a notable extent discontinuous with his moderate draft amendments to Taft-Hartley, and it was rooted in a change in Eisenhower's conception of industrial relations, toward a frame that emphasized property rights and workers' individual decision-making rather than group-based competition. This gloss on labor law drew on a conservative formulation going back to the late 1930s, and in the intervening decade and a half, it had been shaped by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and conservative business organizations into an alternative to the Wagner Act's frame for understanding the state's role in labor relations. While the conception of labor relations and the focus on the NLRB were widely shared among conservatives, the conclusion of the article argues that it was Eisenhower's particular involvement that accomplished the change. In less than two years, the NLRB had radically altered the scope and grounds for exercising jurisdiction, and produced a sea change in the balance of interest group power in labor policy.
THE POLITICAL AND POLICY CONTEXT
This section discusses two key elements of the context in which the new president engaged the labor issue, Eisenhower's economic beliefs and the state of labor policy. Eisenhower's economic ideas were fundamentally conservative, but compared with the Republican Party leadership or with his main rival for the nomination, Robert Taft, they were a more complex and less ideological amalgam, in which there was a legitimate place for unions and a role for government to maintain a fair bargaining structure. When World War II ended, the country's industrial relations policy, although contested, still possessed the philosophical and administrative coherence to merit description as “the New Deal labor regime.” But by Eisenhower's inauguration, the policy context had changed dramatically. The legal context was defined by inconsistent but partial enactments, as the passage of Taft-Hartley in 1947 had reversed some but not all the provisions of the 1935 Wagner Act. The highly contested political context was shaped by the rising influence of business opposition to unions but also included well-publicized congressional investigations of organized labor, and changes in the political goals and tactics of major unions. Under attack by well-heeled interest groups and conservative politicians, and with unions the object of increasing disapproval by the public at large, labor policy was vulnerable to a degree that made it the exception among New Deal issues.
Eisenhower's Economic Ideology
In 1952 the leaders of the Republican Party were less than enthusiastic about placing Eisenhower at the head of the ticket. They already had a reliable conservative in Senator Robert Taft, and they worried that if Eisenhower were as liberal as the media painted him, winning the presidency would sell out the party's long-held ideas and its core supporters in the business community. In the months before the convention, Eisenhower participated in a series of private meetings with the party faithful, assuring them that he shared their principles of government, and his campaign speeches regularly railed against Truman's Fair Deal for pandering to left wing interest groups.Footnote 4 Eisenhower's conservatism was genuine, but Republican Party leaders were not mistaken in seeing it as less fixed and more nuanced than Taft's.
Eisenhower responded to the concerns of party activists by evoking the way his beliefs about the proper extent of government activity built on an upbringing that lent itself to political mythologizing. The child of a self-reliant Kansas family in the early years of the century,
I absorbed [values] from my father and mother as one of a large family of boys without any money or one atom of political influence. The teaching in that family was one of reward for hard work and the existence of opportunity, for the worker, on every hand. That entire group of boys is today as devoted to individualism as I am … . Everyone in the family was raised on such slogans as “Sink or swim, survive or perish,” a favorite saying of a very wise, even if very poor, set of parents.Footnote 5
Eisenhower's elevation of the individual and his belief in states' rights and localism was part of an idealized image of the robust citizen in a harmonious local community of culture and interest, where civil society, largely bereft of politics, consisted of informal, purely voluntary associations.Footnote 6 His beliefs about the role of government in the economy were also honed by his postwar experience when, headquartered in Paris, he coordinated participation in the emerging collective security pact that became the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Rebuilding Western Europe's capacity to defend itself depended on restarting these economies, but the self-reliance and initiative that would provide the foundation had been, he feared, dangerously weakened by statist policies and uncontrolled inflation.Footnote 7
Unlike the Republican Party elders, however, voters were eager for evidence of Eisenhower's moderate ideological views. He and his advisors were keenly aware that the electorate's overwhelming majority identified with the Democratic Party and shared an outlook on the role of government that had been shaped by the rhetoric and policies of the previous two decades. Moderates and even liberals could take heart in the president's “modern Republican” sentiments: “There is, in our affairs at home, a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands for the welfare of the whole Nation. This way must avoid government by bureaucracy as carefully as it avoids neglect of the helpless.”Footnote 8 This was not mere campaign rhetoric; Eisenhower embraced the reality that a modern economy entailed the legitimate expansion of government's role. In a letter to his old friend Bradford Chynoweth, Eisenhower linked the government's responsibility to provide a safety net with his conception of the individual as spiritual being:
I find myself in enthusiastic agreement with your rebellion against the reduction of every value, every incentive to the materialistic … . But the very fact that man is a spiritual thing makes it impossible for any durable governmental system to ignore hordes of people who through no fault of their own suddenly find themselves poverty stricken, and far from being able to maintain their families at decent levels, cannot even provide sustenance. Mass production has wrought great things in the world, but it has created social problems that cannot be possibly met under ideas that were probably logical and sufficient in 1800.
… . [W]e have the people—and I know quite a number of them—who want to eliminate everything that the Federal Government has ever done that, in one way or another, represents what is generally classified as social advance … . When I refer to the Middle Way, I merely mean the middle way as it represents a practicable working basis between extremists … . It seems to me that no great intelligence is required … to discern the practical necessity of establishing some kind of security for individuals in a specialized and highly industrialized age.Footnote 9
This moderate stance was not limited to safety net policies. Eisenhower gave his enthusiastic endorsement to the formulation of modern Republicanism written by his Labor undersecretary Arthur Larson, including Larson's emphatic statement that modern Republicans were “in favor of trade unionism,” because unions helped raise wages and generate the shared social purpose needed in the fight against communism.Footnote 10 And voters as well as liberal members of Congress could not but have been struck by the fact that Eisenhower's sympathy with working people was more closely grounded in personal experience than that of his main rival for the Republican nomination, Ohio Senator Robert Taft. Eisenhower accepted that unions were not only a legitimate outcome of freedom of association but also a mechanism for resolving economic disputes without detailed government regulation. The most forceful expression of these sentiments came in his campaign speech to the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Invoking Samuel Gompers, “who stood for voluntarism and against compulsion,” Eisenhower declared that he would resist any move to have the federal government intervene in labor–management relations, even stopping short of asserting a government role if a strike had national import: “Only a handful of unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and working women of the right to join the union of their choice. [Moreover] the right of men to [strike] is a test of freedom … . There are some things worse, much worse, than strikes—one of them is the loss of freedom.”Footnote 11
Eisenhower's orientation toward the national economy was broadly conservative, but he did not enter office with a detailed blueprint of policy initiatives. In fact, the first year or so was marked by what in retrospect amounts to an eclectic mix of actions that, through trial-and-error learning, yielded a clearer view of the political terrain and fostered the revision of his own ideas and policy ambitions.Footnote 12 He disagreed with the Old Guard who wanted to return to the 1920s—he understood both the importance of protections for workers in an advanced economy and the depth of public support for the safety net programs of the New Deal. When it came to managing the economy (by addressing the dangers of recession or inflation) or protecting individual workers from harms caused by economic forces beyond their control, Eisenhower used, rather than seeking to change, the policy tools he inherited. On labor policy, however, he came to appreciate that the government's role posed a different set of ideological and policy issues, but he was skeptical about getting involved in an already intense battle over Taft-Hartley. As he began his presidency, he sided neither with the unions (and Democratic liberals) calling for repeal, nor with business organizations (and many Republicans) who wanted to strengthen the Act by shifting the balance of regulations in favor of employers. His initial sentiment was that the Act had gone too far in restricting unions, but this belief was not nearly as strong as the intention to get the labor issue off the national agenda with as little fanfare as possible.
The Legacy of New Deal Labor Reforms: The Wagner Act, Taft-Hartley, and Public Opinion in the Early 1950s
The most ambitious component of the New Deal's economic policy legacy was both more radical and more directly political than macroeconomic management or safety net programs. The Wagner Act of 1935 was intended to democratize relations between workers and employers; by establishing the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively over a wide range of employment decisions, it aimed to replace employers' unilateral decisions over wages, hours, and working conditions with something approaching industrial democracy. The statute aimed not only to redistribute power, but, by guaranteeing workers the right to organize and employers the responsibility to bargain in good faith, also to set in motion a dynamic but sustainable equilibrium between “countervailing forces” that would—once the structure was up and running and the process accepted—require minimal government intervention in the process of workplace bargaining. Against the background of American economic culture and the history of class relations, this was a truly radical initiative.
Laws are never self-executing, of course, and the more ambitious the reform, the more difficult it is to build the conditions for sustainability. The recent literature on the durability of political reforms underlines the fact that the enactment of legislation intended to change individual behavior or the operation of the economy is only the beginning of the story.Footnote 13 Whether a policy “takes” depends on a variety of contingencies, including its initial support and the continued attentiveness and involvement of that coalition; whether social and economic conditions change in ways that undermine the salience of the problem or the fit of the policy as a solution; whether opponents, especially well-situated clientele interests who have lost economic advantages or government subsidies, mobilize to undermine the reform; and whether the reform creates new structures or patterns of participation that will entrench the policy change against attack.Footnote 14 The powerful, and politically resourceful, conservative and business opposition to the New Deal labor regime, along with growing public disapproval of trade union tactics, inhibited the establishment of a positive feedback dynamic and eventually opened the door for Taft-Hartley's reversal of the Wagner Act's central political thrust.
Business opposition to the New Deal widened and intensified as Roosevelt's policies evolved from the provision of relief and the rudiments of a welfare state to the commitment to narrow the permitted discretion of employers in order to ensure meaningful bargaining rights for organized labor. By 1935, NAM, for example, had shifted its emphasis from a broad public relations campaign to improve the image of business to a “no-holds-barred fight against labor unions by every possible means.”Footnote 15 When Wagner's bill was being debated in Congress, the NAM argued that it was unconstitutional, and after it passed, the organization encouraged employers to resist it, orchestrated legal challenges through the courts, and disseminated information about the tactics of firms that had been successful in resisting unionization or in breaking strikes. Although the Liberty League utterly failed to persuade the electorate to withdraw Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR)'s mandate in 1936, in Congress the emergence of the conservative coalition mapped an alternative route to limiting the president's liberal initiatives. The 1937 fight against FDR's court-packing plan showed the potential of a cross-party coalition, and by 1938, Southern conservatives had succeeded in defeating Roosevelt's attempt to “purge” conservative Democrats and had forced the modification of economic and labor policies that might be used to undermine segregation. Republican gains in the 1938 midterm elections gave conservatives enough leverage to block the completion of the idealistic list of reforms, for health care, full employment, stronger and more politically integrated unions, from the early 1930s. Meanwhile, anticommunist critics, particularly Texas Representative Martin Dies, focused their investigations on the NLRB and employment initiatives such as the Federal Theatre Project, further cementing the distinction—in the public and among elites—between the New Deal's labor policy and institutions versus issues and programs not related to labor.Footnote 16
In the economy, newly aggressive labor tactics such as the sit-down strike turned some centrist supporters against unions' assertive use of their economic weapons; and union victories in recognition fights in the late 1930s gave the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and organized labor unprecedented public visibility. By the 1940s, growing conservative, especially Southern, strength in Congress, and increasingly ambitious organizing drives by the CIO led to a widening attack on unions, labor organizing, and the NLRB. At the same time, as Schickler and his colleagues show, popular opinion was shifting in response to union tactics and the growing impression that organized labor's demands had become too radical. The increasingly widespread opinion that unions had too much influence was at once the foundation for the Southern Democratic-Republican alliance and the outcome of ambitious conservative politicians' adroit use of labor issues to stoke popular anger against unions, as a decade and more of investigations worked “as part of a broad, long-term strategy to attack labor's place in the emergent New Deal regime.”Footnote 17 Schickler and Caughey show, however, that the labor issue was the exception: the shift of public opinion was specific to the activity of unions and to labor law, and it existed along with approval of the New Deal in general and even with support for expanding the coverage of key social welfare programs.
On the eve of the 1946 election, “[U]nions were engaged in a race against time: [T]hey needed to organize a substantial enough share of the workforce to make their political position invulnerable, before their opponents succeeded in translating the antistrike backlash into policy changes that would hamper further organizing. With the ultimate passage of Taft-Hartley, unions lost that race.”Footnote 18 The individual provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act imposed new legal restrictions, virtually all of which had been on the agenda of the NAM since 1938; but more significantly, “the Act represented the definitive end of the brief era in which the state served as an arena in which the trade unions could bargain for the kind of tripartite accommodation with industry that had been so characteristic of the New Deal years … [it] altered the whole texture of the sociopolitical environment.”Footnote 19 For Taft, the Act's central accomplishment was to restore the balance of power between employers and employee organizations, by adding to the existing Section 8A, defining employer actions as unfair, a new Section 8B, which defined certain acts by unions as unfair labor practices. This meant that the NLRB would, for the first time, have to adjudicate charges brought against unions by employers and workers. The Taft-Hartley Act marked the triumph of the business opposition that had been aroused by Roosevelt's initial quest to empower workers' organizations.
Once enacted, however, Taft-Hartley itself proved to be a reform whose efficacy depended on many of the same contingencies of policy feedback, as its passage stimulated mobilization by labor unions and their supporters, and its implementation surfaced administrative inconsistencies that even the Act's defenders admitted needed revision.Footnote 20 Both conservatives and liberals saw Eisenhower's election as a potentially freighted transition. Conservatives pressed the new administration to widen the discretion of employers and rein in the NLRB, where the trend of decisions had largely continued to follow the trajectory set in the years of Democratic dominance before Taft-Hartley. Liberals and union leaders believed that their popular and legislative support was strong enough to enact substantial revision, and they saw a crucial opening in Eisenhower's commitment to revisit the Act. Although the prevailing impression was that the Act had shifted the balance too far in favor of employers, it was by no means certain that the new administration would reopen the question. Taft-Hartley had already accomplished much of the party agenda, by constraining unions' workplace assertiveness and political organizing; postwar prosperity and the rise of middle class consumerism had weakened the link between unions' social democratic aspirations and their natural constituency among working class identifiers; and less ideological Republicans, such as Arthur Summerfield among Eisenhower's advisors, or governors such as Tom Dewey and Earl Warren had shown that moderate Republican programs could win without attacking labor, even in industrialized, urban states, by fragmenting the Democratic coalition.Footnote 21 For Eisenhower the question was not whether to ratify the New Deal labor regime, but what direction to take in revising and consolidating Taft-Hartley.
A MODERATE PROPOSAL TO REVISE TAFT-HARTLEY
The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947 over Truman's veto by a Congress vigorously acting on the postwar Republican resurgence, set out clearly the line dividing the two parties' political economic ideologies.Footnote 22 By the early 1950s, the Act was widely viewed as in need of revision, and the 1952 Republican platform promised to take up the question.Footnote 23 Eisenhower's campaign speeches went further, vowing that if he were persuaded that Taft-Hartley was being used to undermine legitimate unions, then “that must be changed. America wants no law licensing union-busting. And neither do I.” Revision would not only respond to public opinion, Republican moderates argued, it would also be an especially effective signal to conservative craft unions uncomfortable with the CIO's influence in the Democratic Party.
Amending Taft-Hartley
Eisenhower's first State of the Union address included a call for “some corrective action” on Taft-Hartley.Footnote 24 This commitment reflected pulls on the president from two directions, a deeply personal but largely apolitical sympathy with workers treated unfairly and a principled desire to minimize government interference in business decisions. Eisenhower was aware that in a modern economy owners and managers sometimes acted as if the welfare of workers and their families was immaterial, and he appreciated the rightful place unions played as an expression of workers' freedom to join together in order to bargain more effectively with management. Eisenhower brought what might be called an intuitive pluralism to his image of the issues raised by labor law; in a negotiation between groups with competing interests, the legitimacy of the bargaining process hinged on the meaningful representation of both sides. His wish to “get government out of the labor–management business,” he realized, depended on maintaining a bargaining process in which countervailing groups had relatively equal influence.
His approach to this dilemma was typical of his response to similar challenges in the past: he undertook a systematically structured search for information and advice on which he could draw in forming his own view. Although Eisenhower had virtually no contacts in the labor movement to compare with his many close friends among business leaders, he understood the political wisdom of reaching out to AFL unions (especially the more conservative building trades unions), and he encouraged Lucius Clay and Herbert Brownell, who were directing the appointments process, to look for a Secretary of Labor who could speak for that segment of the economy. The nomination of Martin Durkin, a Stevenson supporter and head of the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union, struck moderates as courageous, particularly when Taft and other party leaders mounted a highly publicized brouhaha over Eisenhower's failure to follow their advice.Footnote 25 Eisenhower also sought to consult widely before deciding on amendments to Taft-Hartley, and after less than a month in office, he invited CIO leaders Walter Reuther and David McDonald to the White House. Reuther proposed a tripartite commission including representatives of labor, management, and both the White House and Congress, whose members would meet to discuss emerging issues with an eye to crafting quicker, less conflictual settlements. The idea initially appealed to Eisenhower: he praised Reuther for recognizing the potential of public–private cooperation rather than the “socialist” ideas he had expected, and Durkin moved to set up such a consultative group. But when Republican congressional leaders came out strongly against it, claiming that it would supplant legislative hearings and diminish their authority, Eisenhower dropped the proposal.Footnote 26
Eisenhower's hope was to take the issue of labor–management relations off the table; his intuition was that active government regulation could be minimized by ensuring that the bargaining process among private actors gave no one an unfair advantage.Footnote 27 He regarded Taft-Hartley as sound but in need of minor changes to relieve some unjustified restrictions on labor. Politically, the aim was to complete a quick legislative revision that would symbolize the Republican Party's sensitivity to the claims of “responsible” labor, without energizing the opposition of the emergent conservative movement. Above all, he was strongly averse to putting the imprimatur of the White House on conservatives' aim to strengthen the hand of employers: it would cut off the possibility of winning conservative unions and working class voters to the party, and it might actually increase the government's regulatory role, as it would stimulate pressure for more federal intervention in the future.
If Eisenhower's intention was to move quickly and modestly to reach out to craft unions and to the growing popular skepticism regarding federal labor policy activism, the personalities in his Cabinet offered him few levers for achieving this. When he set up his own joint administration-congressional committee to advise him on labor law changes, its structure was surprisingly maladroit in light of his wartime success at orchestrating the interpersonal aspects of leadership. The committee was cochaired by Durkin, inevitably wary and defensive as the odd man out in a Cabinet of “eight millionaires and a plumber,” and Commerce Secretary Weeks, businessman and former Republican Party Finance Chairman—the two of Eisenhower's close advisors least capable of adopting a broad perspective on labor–management issues and least inclined to compromise—and the committee's membership was heavily weighted toward businessmen and conservative Republicans.Footnote 28 Durkin, who was in regular contact with Meany, believed that the president was committed to major revisions, including modifying the hated “right to work” Section 14(b), and his enthusiastic insistence on substantive amendments at one point provoked Eisenhower to rebuke him publicly for “consider[ing] himself only a direct representative of unions.”Footnote 29 Weeks himself did not participate, but his preference—to weaken national authority by narrowing NLRB discretion and strengthening states' jurisdiction—was aggressively represented by his Department's General Counsel, Stephen Dunn, whose own views were even more intransigent than the Secretary's. Given this configuration of personalities, the committee quickly deadlocked.Footnote 30
Two of Eisenhower's White House aides, special counsels Bernard Shanley and Gerald Morgan, sought to move the work forward. They held a series of meetings with Durkin and Dunn, and when those yielded no movement, they gained the approval of Eisenhower and Taft to convene a larger group including legislative leaders from both parties.Footnote 31 At the same time, an unofficial but influential collaboration was initiated at an ABA conference among four lawyers (two representing labor and two management). The lawyers managed to draft a list of amendments, which Durkin approved and Dunn conceded could be the basis of negotiation. When the Shanley-Morgan Committee met on June 19, with both Eisenhower and Taft attending, the proposals from the ABA group became the starting point for the discussion.Footnote 32
By July 30 Shanley had distilled their consultations into a draft message on labor–management policy that Eisenhower planned to release publicly and then send to Congress before adjournment on August 7.Footnote 33 The nineteen-point proposal was, on balance, favorable to organized labor, including circumscribing although not repealing Section 14(b). After ceding the principle that states would have jurisdiction over small employers, for example, the proposal forbade states from implementing restrictions on union security agreements that were more severe than federal law and went on to emphasize “the paramount authority of the Federal law in the interest of uniformity throughout the United States.” Only a few of the provisions had gained unanimous assent, and some members of the committee remained strongly opposed to specific ones, but Shanley and Morgan were able to present the president with a package of amendments that addressed the most significant criticisms of the current law. Eisenhower, seeing the opportunity to capitalize on the momentum of new administration's “honeymoon,” was ready to announce the proposed amendments to the Congress, when Senator Taft's death on July 31 brought the process to an abrupt halt. Senator Smith, one of the original committee members, made a fervent plea for delay.Footnote 34 Eisenhower agreed that forwarding amendments so soon after Taft's death would be inappropriate, but he did not intend this to signal his disapproval of the proposal.
At this point the momentum shifted. The president, who had been pressing his staff to ready the proposal for presentation while his popular and legislative support was high, put the process on hold. The conservative opponents, conversely, determined to use the interval to mobilize their forces and gain the initiative. Secretary Weeks immediately contacted his network of influentials in the business community, and they communicated their concerns to the White House and key Congress members; Vice President Nixon intervened and was the main influence in extending the delay. Senator Smith requested a memo from Tom Shroyer, Taft's key advisor on labor issues, and Shroyer, noting Taft's opposition to eliminating Section 14(b), insisted that he would have rejected the draft message.Footnote 35 The opposition did not restrict their efforts to lobbying the White House; within a day or two, the nineteen-point proposal had been leaked to the Wall Street Journal.Footnote 36 The Journal immediately published the proposal, backing it up with an editorial that accused the president of abandoning his principles and siding with union bosses. The story riled business leaders and the right wing of the Republican Party, and the resulting outcry caused Shanley to reevaluate the political clout of Weeks and his allies. The White House, overwhelmed by infuriated communications, responded by announcing that the proposals were only tentative, and that “work on the draft had not yet approached even the ‘semi-final stage’.”Footnote 37
Eisenhower's initial reaction engaged his famously short temper; Upset by the leak and incensed by the obvious orchestration of angry opposition from business leaders, the president was “literally wild” when he met with Shanley to review events. He demanded to know the source of the leak and promised “if you have proof as to who did it, I'll fire him.” Railing against both his Cabinet secretaries, Eisenhower fumed, “We are not living in the Dark Ages, and Weeks will have to recognize it, and Durkin will have to be reasonable as well.”Footnote 38 The president was stung, however, by the accusation that he had betrayed his friends and was bent on restricting the freedom of business people to manage their own enterprises and preempting states' preferences for governing labor issues within their borders.Footnote 39 Eisenhower now sought to retrieve an accurate picture of the committee's deliberations and to reassess the prospects for congressional passage. Concerned to identify Taft's positions, he called on Shanley to canvass his notes and other participants' memories.Footnote 40 Although Taft's stance on Section 14(b) had been more complex than what Shroyer related, the fervent opposition of Shroyer, along with Smith and other Republican legislators, deflated the president's hopes. Forming accurate expectations for congressional action was complicated: the general trend of the amendments appealed to Democrats and their labor allies, but some proposals would advantage conservative unions in competition with more liberal ones; the package attempted to deflect conservative opposition by including provisions previously supported by Republicans and Southern Democrats (fourteen of the nineteen points had been supported by Southern Democrats in the 1949 fight over repealing Taft-Hartley, and Smith and Taft had proposed most of the nineteen points in response to attempts to amend the Act since then), but the efficacy of this strategy was uncertain given the heat of business and conservative reaction to the nineteen-point proposal. And Senator Taft's leadership was an essential part of the calculation. In the Senate, Taft would not have supported all of the nineteen points, but as the Republican Party's unquestioned legislative leader and a crucial influence on the conservative coalition, he would have led the administration's effort in Congress, and no other leader would be able to bring his prestige and parliamentary knowledge to advocating revision.Footnote 41 In the end, Eisenhower concluded that he must jettison the Shanley-Morgan draft. In a meeting with Durkin on September 10, he informed the Labor Secretary that he would not send the proposed amendments forward. Durkin immediately resigned, implying that Eisenhower had gone back on his word to support repealing Section 14(b).Footnote 42 Although this episode was much-publicized, the break with Durkin was not the cause but an outcome of the development of Eisenhower's position.
Compared to the position of major business groups or Republican conservatives, the thrust of the Shanley-Morgan proposal was clearly liberalizing. But it was not by any means liberal. The tone of his proposed revision would, Eisenhower hoped, reflect a modern Republican approach to labor relations by moving to restore widely accepted protections for workers but with minimal changes to Taft-Hartley, particularly on two subjects where liberals held high hopes: the repeal of Section 14(b) and tightening the restrictions on employer free speech. Eisenhower and his advisors were sensitive to the importance of advancing the legislation before the opposition could mount a counteroffensive, and several considerations suggest that, if Taft had lived, the bulk of the president's proposal stood a good chance of enactment: Eisenhower's popularity was high; Congress members, including conservatives, were hesitant to oppose him; Taft had worked closely on the package, he and Eisenhower had developed a close working relationship, and Taft had pledged to lead the legislative effort. If the president had succeeded in this first foray into labor law, it would have strengthened the economic resources of unions, elevated the political standing of the AFL, and contributed to fragmenting the Democratic Party's base in organized labor. In the short run, Eisenhower remained in favor of liberalizing revisions to Taft-Hartley, but Secretary Weeks and congressional conservatives had won this round and they thwarted attempts by moderates to revive the proposals.Footnote 43
When the Cabinet met to map out the issues for the 1954 State of the Union address, the consideration of labor law looked nothing like a year earlier. Then, the president had led a wide-ranging canvass of views on Taft-Hartley revision and had taken an active role in discussions; at the meeting on December 15, 1953, Eisenhower presided as competing advocates took the lead. Labor Secretary Mitchell and Sherman Adams pushed to reiterate the administration's endorsement of revising the law, arguing that Congress was sure to take up the issue and that the administration should be in the lead. They mapped out a scenario in which a move on labor law could help separate the more conservative unions from the Democratic coalition. But they were overmatched by Cabinet members with closer ties to the business community, particularly Nixon, Weeks, and Lodge, who argued that proposing liberalizing amendments would alienate business groups and cost Republicans in the short run, and chiding progressives that the anticipated gains from blue collar voters were purely speculative.Footnote 44 The proposals submitted to Congress in January 1954 included fourteen items from the nineteen-point list that had garnered unanimous support in the committee. Several other provisions that had been advocated by Weeks but blocked by Durkin were added to the 1954 list, including one restricting participation in strike ballots, a controversial expansion of the “free speech” rights of employers, and an enlargement of states' discretion to intervene in labor disputes. The new Labor Secretary, James Mitchell, endorsed these in order to gain Weeks's support for the whole package and to address objections voiced by McConnell on behalf of conservatives in the House. Shanley judged that “Senator Taft would have fully approved” of the plan.Footnote 45 With the new additions having reversed his initial intention for modifying Taft-Hartley, Eisenhower signaled his lack of enthusiasm for the package by sending the message to Congress without publicity, keeping his advisors' involvement to the minimum, and rebuffing the committee's invitation to clarify his position on the question of federal and state jurisdiction.Footnote 46 The White House let the legislation die when a bipartisan coalition of Senate moderates voted to recommit on May 7, and McConnell withdrew Taft-Hartley revision from the House committee's agenda.Footnote 47
In the later years of Eisenhower's first term, Vice President Nixon dominated Cabinet discussions of labor issues and the administration's commitment to labor law revisions visibly waned. With Eisenhower convalescing from his heart attack,Footnote 48 Nixon headed the planning process for the presidential election year of 1956, and he quashed Labor Secretary Mitchell's proposal to include Taft-Hartley revision, arguing that pressing labor law reform in the face of business opposition was now electorally unnecessary, since polls showed that increasing numbers of workers preferred the Republican Party to manage the economy. Over the next several years, Eisenhower's ideas about labor and the state developed along a path that increasingly diverged from those that had fostered his early efforts to revise Taft-Hartley: still persuaded that protecting workers' interests merited government actions, he came to believe that the greater threat came from union organizations rather than employers.
Defeat and Change: From Collective Interests to Individual Rights
As with his wartime experience, Eisenhower did not expect defeats and he undertook to learn from them. In this respect, his experience with Taft-Hartley revision illustrates the sort of trial-and-error learning that must of necessity inform the strategic thinking of an ambitious preemptive president as he tests the boundaries of his constrained authority. His initial response, to withdraw the Shanley-Morgan proposals and disown them as a statement of administration policy, was not simply a tactical move to placate opponents, for it signaled the seriousness of his reconsideration. He wanted to hear the complaints of business on Taft-Hartley revision, but going forward he wanted to make sure that the concerns of these groups were known earlier in the process. And the departure of Labor Secretary Durkin (although he was by no means a close confidant and his successor James Mitchell was a moderate) altered the climate of opinion in the Cabinet in the same direction, by removing the one member who not only spoke in favor of the interests of workers but saw the advancement of those interests as intrinsically tied to effective union organization. Over time, Eisenhower distanced himself from the issue of labor law reform, and his contacts on labor issues came to be more narrowly concentrated on traditional Republican constituencies and long-standing opponents of the New Deal labor regime.
Over the next year or so, the evidence of racketeering union bosses, propelled by a rising drumbeat of sensational media coverage of union corruption, and echoed and focused by the McClellan hearings, undermined the assumptions that gave legitimacy to Eisenhower's idea that labor policy should be oriented toward assuring balanced representation of organized interests. The intuitive pluralism that had framed his view of the labor issue, with its inevitable connection to union organizations and their formal leadership, now seemed insupportable. Eisenhower continued to believe that the federal government had a role in protecting employees from unfair treatment, but the frame for this concern now had less to do with the balance of collective interests and political power than the image—of workers and employers alike—as individual decision makers subject to the forces of the market. The change of perspective amounted to a return to the ideological individualism that lay at the center of his broader social and political views, and it explained how the interests of workers and the political demands of union leaders could be—and, Eisenhower came to believe, often were—at odds. At its best, the union as an organization was superfluous; but the evidence of corruption suggested that some of the most powerful unions were worse, a harmful overlay that distorted and interfered with individual employee's capacity for free choice. Eisenhower's growing skepticism toward unions voiced the trend of public opinion, for through the 1940s and into the early 1950s, popular sentiment honored workers and approved of collective bargaining but, disgusted with unions' aggressive strike activity and sensational instances of racketeering, disapproved of unions and “union bosses.”Footnote 49
The facts and sensational media coverage of union corruption were the immediate cause of Eisenhower's rethinking his view of unions, but the evolution of his ideas was shaped by the growing influence of a frame that linked the individualistic values at the core of his belief system to a new model of labor relations. At the firm level, the model took its inspiration from the growing influence of professional public relations in shaping corporate labor tactics; but its political logic provided a newly attractive brief for revising national labor policy, not by moderating the anti-union provisions of Taft-Hartley but by strengthening the rights of employers and further regulating unions. Kim Phillips-Fein's insightful history describes how corporate human relations departments and the more active anti-union organizations such as the NAM developed and disseminated what amounted to an alternative approach to labor relations. This narrative, which centers on General Electric's innovative use of human relations techniques in the immediate postwar years, was only the most quotidian aspect of a lively process involving various conservative activists in the campaign to reshape the ideas that framed economic policy and political economy. The more philosophical strain was crucial to articulating the movement's ideas,Footnote 50 but the businesspersons in Eisenhower's Cabinet and his informal circle were oriented toward the more accessible approach that first formulated the political issue as a management problem.
The great 1946 strike had shocked and angered executives at General Electric (GE), for not only its workers but their communities had come out against the corporation. GE's postwar management, more strongly opposed to unions than their predecessors, was deeply impressed by the fact that workers at a few GE factories—plants managed by Lemuel Boulware, a recently hired “marketing assistant” whose background was not in the industry but in sales and public relations—had resisted the strike and stayed on the job. Boulware's almost immediate promotion to vice president in charge of employee and community relations gave him a platform for implementing a conception that drew equally on a grand image of labor relations as a “titanic struggle” over the future of business and the country, and on the detailed optimism of the public relations specialist that education and persuasion could cure social ills. Boulware set about not only to improve the firm's image in the community by contributing “leadership in all heart-warming local activities,” but also to create a company-wide communication network, including managers as “thought leaders” who would educate workers to the reality that jobs and profits identically depended on the company's competitive success in the marketplace—“a ceaseless education campaign in the ideology of the free market … a gigantic school [in which] supervisors, managers and executives needed to hold intellectual sway over their employees.”Footnote 51 The “lesson” was simple: in a free, competitive market, increases in wages and benefits must of necessity be contingent on the overall profitability of the company; union demands for a greater share would inevitably prove to be self-defeating in the face of market forces. Because only management had the wide conspectus to understand the market and envision the way forward, “fighting the unions came to seem moral, a righteous cause, forward-looking, necessary to make a better America.”Footnote 52 GE's anti-union tactics were ahead of other firms, more clearly strategized and intensely implemented, in the late 1940s. But by the Eisenhower years conservative activists had recognized Boulware's innovation, and NAM publications and management training sessions were spreading his labor relations techniques—and the ideas behind them—through the business community.
Translated to the national debate over labor policy, Boulwarism framed the issue of union corruption in a new light. The idea that employees, like voters, were individuals susceptible to the sales campaigns of different groups helped explain how union bosses could manipulate their members; and the merger of the AFL and CIO, and the sensational publicity accompanying the McClellan Committee investigations, lent further justification to a policy of increased scrutiny of unions. For Eisenhower, the goal of fair bargaining between organized interests gave way to a much more punitive orientation toward unions, grounded in an individualistic image in which the interests of workers and the political demands of union leaders were typically at odds.Footnote 53 He was increasingly worried by the evidence of racketeering, and his reactions were as naively interventionist as any of his conservative business colleagues. Early in 1955, he suggested to the Cabinet that the administration consider backing large-scale federal intervention in the internal affairs of unions, including a proposal that the Justice Department should audit union funds: “[I] am troubled by the realization that under the Taft-Hartley Act we set up by law the ‘union shop’ procedure under which an American citizen can be compelled to join a union in order to keep a job. As I understand it, we then allow the officials of that union to require dues and spend money as they please.” Henry Cabot Lodge finally, and with some difficulty, persuaded the president not to endorse the idea publicly, pointing out that the merged AFL-CIO hardly amounted to the elevation of union leaders as “political bosses,” and arguing that if the administration combined this proposal with continued laissez faire treatment of corporations' finances (as Eisenhower apparently intended), the policy “would certainly strike the everyday man as somewhat unjust.”Footnote 54 This proposal, seemingly so radical in 1955, was largely implemented by the Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959: “For the first time in American history a federal agency was charged with refereeing the internal operation of private organizations.”Footnote 55 Eisenhower's role in the passage of Landrum-Griffin was critical: his public advocacy put the bill over the top by way of a campaign that, with its appeal to ideological individualism and uncritical acceptance of market outcomes, centered on just such an image of free-market populism.
For Eisenhower, both the flow of new information about the misdeeds of labor organizations and the new ideas about labor relations undermined the legitimacy of unions' claim to special political status, at the same time that they elevated the image of business as arbiter of the nation's economic interest. The vision that the universal and benevolent power of the market could best be accommodated when employers took the lead in defining the interests of their workers and the public had become part of Eisenhower's conservative populism. Although Reagan is sometimes credited as the clearest exponent of “the idea of a populist base for free-market politics,”Footnote 56 Eisenhower's actions suggest that the origins of the idea lay in the 1950s.
REGULATING LABOR: EISENHOWER TRANSFORMS THE NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD
Eisenhower's advocacy of proposals to relax Taft-Hartley's restrictions on unions provoked anew the worries of conservative Republicans that his moderation as a candidate might guide his actions as president. Within a few weeks of his inauguration, activists were publicly criticizing his appointments, their complaints stoked by Taft's fiery objection to the Durkin nomination and their concerns heightened by the Senator's failing health. The pressure was intended to bear particularly on labor policy, for conservative ire at the New Deal continued to center on the conviction that—even with Taft-Hartley—the national labor policy regime constituted an illegitimate alliance of government power with the interests of employees. Eisenhower responded to the criticism with a directive to the Cabinet, citing “the mandate given to this Administration, to clean out the mess in Washington,” and emphasizing that “the [nominee's] political philosophy should be in line with the Administration's”; and he gave the order practical force by directing his staff to coordinate appointments with the Republican National Committee.Footnote 57 The attentiveness to Eisenhower's appointments was part of a larger campaign, stimulated by the Chamber of Commerce and the NAM with the intention of prioritizing labor policy and its implementation and sharpening the expectations for a Republican administration. This discussion formed the background of ideas and the lines of emerging coalitions over how the president should act to reshape the NLRB.
On labor policy, two options centered the debate in the business community and among conservatives.Footnote 58 One channeled the radical spirit of Taft-Hartley, advocating that Eisenhower go to Congress with a proposal to abolish the NLRB, devolving its monitoring powers to the states and its adjudicatory tasks to district courts. The other was less politically ambitious: it sought to avoid the pitfalls of congressional procedure by vaguely advocating using administrative changes to make the implementation of labor law more sympathetic toward employers. Perhaps because its access to the White House had been attenuated for so long, the Chamber of Commerce imagined that the new president had the authority immediately to reverse the impact of labor law on employers by summarily replacing all the members of the board.Footnote 59 Most observers, however, agreed that the potential for the president to change the composition of the board was limited: NLRB terms are staggered and it would take years for the terms of three of the five members to expire; and the new members would inevitably have to rely on staff appointed by Democrats for gathering the facts and interpreting cases.
The NAM was divided over whether to focus on decentralizing authority to the states or maintaining the board's jurisdiction at the national level while reining in its discretion to sanction employers. Small businesses and geographically concentrated firms favored abolishing the NLRB and devolving authority over labor regulation to the states. Advocates reasoned that liberals had so penetrated the agency in Washington and in regional offices that even replacing the whole board would not reverse the close relationship between the NLRB and unions.Footnote 60 This sentiment commanded the majority of the House Labor Committee, who hailed largely from rural or less-industrialized areas. Immediately after the new Congress was seated, and before Eisenhower's inauguration, the committee sought to build momentum for legislation by holding several weeks of well-publicized hearings on the NLRB.Footnote 61 In the Cabinet, Commerce Secretary Weeks initially favored this course, which was ardently advocated by the Department's General Counsel, Stephen Dunn.Footnote 62 Opposite this sentiment, large manufacturers with geographically dispersed operations preferred the predictable uniformity of a single regulatory agency, as their national market made them wary of the potential that different state governments and district courts would create a patchwork of interpretations and thus increase the costs of compliance. In addition, proponents doubted that devolution would improve outcomes for employers, since the federal district courts would be staffed for years into the future by judges appointed by Roosevelt and Truman. They favored the general idea of creating a labor–management tribunal to replace the NLRB. The NAM Industrial Relations Committee was dominated by large firms, and it codified this approach in a document authored by Gerard Reilly and Theodore Iserman, lawyers who had worked with the Republican majority of the 80th Congress in crafting Taft-Hartley. The NAM report gained a crucial supporter when Secretary Weeks was persuaded by his contacts in the corporate community to back the Reilly-Iserman proposal. In the Cabinet, the Labor Department took the position that any change in the agency's structure would be politically costly, a stance given additional force by the stated opposition of the AFL, in addition to the expected opposition of the more liberal CIO. The moderate Republicans in the Labor Department could not set the administration's position, but the division stalled preparation of Eisenhower's 1954 message to Congress, limiting it to minor amendments to Taft-Hartley and none regarding the NLRB.
At the same time, the president and his allies were working with conservative Congress members to widen the window of opportunity for replacing members of the NLRB. Board member John Houston's term would end in August, giving the president the opportunity to appoint one new member of the five-member board, but conservative groups and the business press concentrated their criticism on the board chairman Paul Herzog. They argued that the rulings of the Herzog Board, in spite of the passage of Taft-Hartley, showed visible continuity with the decisions of its predecessors, and they accused him of standing in the way of President Eisenhower's legitimate right to act on his popular mandate. Along with the 1953 congressional hearings, during which advocates pointedly accused the board of giving broad interpretation to the sections on employer misconduct but narrowing their reading of union tactics in order to allow unions to escape the legislative intent of Taft-Hartley, the criticism wore down Herzog's energy and his commitment to service, and he resigned (on June 30) with two years remaining in his term. The chair is traditionally the spokesperson for the board's policy orientation and holds some agenda-setting authority, so this appointment gave Eisenhower an exceptional opportunity to set the public tone. He nominated Guy Farmer, an NLRB attorney for seven years starting in 1938 and now a partner in a Washington law firm representing employers. A strong supporter of Eisenhower in 1952, Farmer advocated decentralizing the agency by ceding significant authority to the states, and he criticized the Herzog Board for its pro-union decisions. The Senate Labor Committee and the full Senate quickly approved Farmer's nomination.
Only a few weeks later (on August 27), when the term of John M. Houston ended, Eisenhower nominated Philip R. Rodgers for a full term. Since 1947 Rodgers had been chief clerk and then Republican staff director of the Senate Labor Committee, where he had worked closely with Taft, including negotiating with conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats to bring them into the coalition that passed Taft-Hartley over Truman's veto. Significantly enough, the Democratic majority on the Senate Labor Committee again devoted little attention to the nomination, and undertook virtually no investigation of Eisenhower's candidate. Both nominations went forward from the committee easily, and they were confirmed resoundingly by the full Senate. Gross notes that, only after he had been on the job for several weeks did it become clear that Rodgers was “way to the right” politically and “thought of himself as the employers' representative on the board.”Footnote 63
The third vacancy opened when Paul L. Styles resigned on August 31. By this time, it was clear that Eisenhower's nominee would face closer scrutiny, and the White House took some time planning strategy. Reilly and Iserman reflected the optimism of the business community, in a message to the NAM that looked back on the surprising evolution of the NLRB and predicted that “if the President makes a wise choice, it will be possible within the next few months for the new Board to accomplish a thoroughgoing reform.”Footnote 64
In November 1953, Eisenhower nominated Albert Beeson for the ten months remaining in Styles' term. Beeson's confirmation would produce the first Republican majority on the board, but more politically significant was the aggressive character of Eisenhower's choice: the nomination appeared purposely designed to test the outer limits of his power to secure confirmation of a blatantly ideological nominee. Labor Secretary Mitchell had advocated nominating a moderate to the board, not only to signal the Republican Party's independence from anti-union sentiment in the business community but also to head off what promised to be a concerted battle over confirmation. In the Cabinet's discussion, Mitchell's appeal was overwhelmed by Secretary Weeks, who championed Beeson as the right man for the job, and by Vice President Nixon, who argued that the momentum of Eisenhower's previous two appointments would carry the confirmation battle and that the party's business constituency would reward the ideological clarity of the appointment.
Unlike Farmer and Rodgers, who had not been professionally involved in management, Beeson was at the time the director of industrial relations for a large food-processing and chemical manufacturing company that held substantial defense contracts. As the firm's top representative in dealing with employee organizations, he had been overtly partisan, whether negotiating contracts with the union or defending company policies before the NLRB. By now aware that the deference they had given to Eisenhower's nomination of Rogers had been mistaken, the Democratic members of the Senate Labor Committee were taken aback by the even more outspoken partisanship voiced by Beeson, and they announced their determination to do a thorough investigation. Beeson's evident pride in his reputation as an effective anti-union corporate official gave them plenty of ammunition. He promised to “explain the American enterprise system, from the businessman's viewpoint,” describing it as “enlightened selfishness.” He emphasized the principle that the employer had the right to set the conditions of employment, but insisted that in a competitive market managers would act on the best interests of employees. Recounting to the committee one of his greatest triumphs, he reported, he had “free speeched … the Pennsylvania Dutch people” in one of the firm's plants, with the result that the union was roundly rejected in a representation election. “Now, you could say, if you like in that instance, that I was a union buster.” Beeson was also snared in several equivocations, including about whether he intended to resign from his corporate position in order to take up the NLRB appointment. After a week of hearings, however, the Senate Labor Committee voted 7 to 6 to send Beeson's nomination to the floor with a favorable report. In the full Senate, Democrats argued that the nomination violated the norm that appointees to independent commissions, unlike executive departments, should not be committed ideologues. The nomination was vigorously opposed by the AFL and the CIO. On the other side, the White House mounted a lobbying campaign of unparalleled intensity to keep moderate Republicans in line. After five hours of fervent debate, and with the help of three Southern Democrats, Beeson was confirmed 45 to 42 on March 2.Footnote 65
The Impact of Eisenhower's National Labor Relations Board Appointments
Given the opportunity to appoint three members of the five-person NLRB within his first year in office, the president had acted with uncharacteristic assertiveness to radically realign its ideological composition. The impact of Eisenhower's appointments was dramatic and almost immediate, nowhere more striking than in the change of jurisdictional standards.Footnote 66 The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) had allotted the NLRB complete authority over disputes involving representation and unfair labor practices in any case “affecting commerce.” The intention was to extend a uniform policy across the country and over the whole field of labor relations.Footnote 67 As early as 1943, however, the board explicitly refused to act where it viewed the industry as essentially local in character, and it systematized its jurisdictional standards in a series of unanimous decisions in 1950.Footnote 68 All three of the new board members had criticized even this restricted scope of NLRB jurisdiction, and they promised to revisit the standards. The project of curtailing the board's exercise of discretion took shape incrementally and without any official statement explaining the change as, on a case-by-case basis, the new members refused to assert jurisdiction over issues involving employer conduct that clearly fell under the old standards. But in July 1954, the NLRB issued a press release authored by the Eisenhower majority, formally setting out new standards that raised the threshold cases would have to meet if they were to fall under the board's jurisdiction. The rationale drew on the distinction between local businesses as contrasted with enterprises having a regional or national impact, but the criteria were specified in terms of the dollar volume of business. For most firms, the standard was doubled over the size required by the Herzog Board (it was quadrupled for firms providing services), and new dollar volumes were set out for businesses the board regarded as “fundamentally local,” such as intrastate trucking, radio stations, newspapers, and public transportation. The three Eisenhower appointees emphasized that the goal was to reduce the workload and allow the board to concentrate on more important cases. Liberals doubted this rationale, and Murdock spoke for this reading in a firmly worded dissent that included both a detailed statistical analysis that contradicted the “caseload” argument and a biting review of speeches by Farmer and Rogers in which they had avowed their intention to narrow the range of federal jurisdiction and expand state authority over labor relations.
There was little attempt to disguise the fact that this administrative change responded to the political demands of business groups: the new jurisdictional standards clearly limited federal regulation of employers' actions. The vehicle for accomplishing this within the strictures of the NLRA involved the board's simply refusing to take up categories of cases where previous boards would have issued a ruling. By narrowing the standards, this administrative move essentially overturned the blanket preemption of state-level action that had been intended by the Wagner Act, and—in theory at least—it expanded the scope for state discretion.Footnote 69 In the context of a labor law regime whose institutional apparatus existed essentially only at the national level, however, the action of the board majority had created a large and significant enforcement loophole. The approach, that is, presumed that the states had the will and capacity to take on the job, and at the time, only twelve states had set up any administrative machinery for regulating labor–management relations.Footnote 70 In practice, then, the effect was to carve out a fluctuating and ill-defined area in which labor disputes would remain unregulated, a danger that board chair Herzog had noted some six years earlier: “There is considerable danger of creating a no-man's land, especially if the NLRB decides to refrain from exercising its own jurisdiction to the hilt.”Footnote 71 Since the courts had ruled that the Taft-Hartley Act did not require the NLRB to take jurisdiction in all cases, the result was a momentous change in the NLRB's ability to regulate labor–management relations. The policy-setting actions of the Eisenhower appointees disabled the established national-level mechanism for investigating and resolving labor disputes, without creating a state-level alternative that could fulfill the same function.
Other changes in the board's decisions were less overt, but the cumulation of decisions along a consistently conservative trajectory was at least as significant in reversing the trend of labor regulation. In matters involving the two major categories of NLRB actions, unfair labor practices and representation, the influence of Eisenhower's appointees was noticeable almost immediately.Footnote 72 The House Labor Committee's 1953 hearings had provided a forum for employers whose hostile response to postwar unionization campaigns had run afoul of NLRB rules. The complaints these businessmen voiced resonated with the sentiments of Eisenhower's appointees, and, issue by issue, the decisions of the new majority responded to virtually the whole agenda.
An especially sore point was the NLRB's requirement that employers maintain a stance of strict neutrality in response to employees' organizing activities. In the late 1930s, management organizations including the Chamber of Commerce and the NAM had mounted a public opinion campaign claiming that the NLRA violated employers' constitutional right to free speech, and employer organizations and their congressional allies continued through the 1940s to propose amendments to the NLRA to “restore the right of management to express its opinion.” The most virulent anti-union electioneering typically occurred in regions where unions were weak, the South and Southwest, and NLRA regional directors reported that “antiunion electioneering influenced significantly the outcome of representation elections.”Footnote 73 In Section 8(c) of Taft-Hartley, the coalition of business interests and Southern conservatives had succeeded in enacting an expansive definition of employer speech: employer electioneering would count as an unfair labor practice only if it sought to coerce via explicit threats or benefits. Hartley himself believed this provision would, in time, have a significant effect on union organizing by stimulating more aggressive anti-union electioneering. The NLRB under Herzog, however, interpreted the provision by striving for balance between employers' free speech and the conditions for workers' free choice, with the result that conservatives blamed “pro-labor” members for blocking the full impact of the new law. The issue of whether employers' free speech rights extended, for example, to calling their employees together on company time to listen to speakers argue against unionization had been litigated before the NLRB, and a Supreme Court judgment had resulted in relaxing the “strict neutrality” standard. By Eisenhower's election, employer intervention would constitute an unfair labor practice only if the employer's speech was coercive or if the employer denied the union a roughly equal opportunity to address employees.Footnote 74 In one of the first actions of the new board, Eisenhower appointees Farmer and Rogers, joined by Peterson, issued a ruling in December 1953 reversing the “equal opportunity” criterion and further narrowing the category of employer interventions that would be deemed unfair. The decision in NLRB v. Livingston Shirt Corp. was written broadly and assertively, contradicting not only the specific rulings of Democratic-majority boards going back to the Wagner Act's first board, but also articulating a distinctly different conception of the intention of Taft-Hartley and the government's role in labor relations.Footnote 75 Once Beeson joined the board, Eisenhower's appointees constituted a majority, and the flow of decisions reversing the precedents of earlier boards increased. Several rulings expanded the ambit of employer free speech rights to permit employers to interrogate individual employees about their organizing activities, while other rulings raised the evidentiary standards for establishing interference, bad faith bargaining, or discrimination.Footnote 76 Eisenhower's three appointees all had come out against the Herzog Board's rulings on employer electioneering, and by the mid-1950s, they had “transformed Taft-Hartley's free speech provision into a powerful weapon for employers intent on defeating union organizing campaigns.”Footnote 77
These changes concerned the political and regulatory status of unions, but the board was equally concerned to circumscribe the ability of unions to use the economic power of collective action to pressure employers. The Wagner Act had clearly conceived of bargaining power as grounded in economic leverage, and earlier boards had acknowledged this reality and explicitly protected unions' ability to organize and strike, as an intrinsic condition for fair collective bargaining. The Eisenhower majority issued a series of rulings that reversed several key precedents, including restricting the legal ability of a union to engage in secondary activity, for example, responding to a bargaining stalemate with a primary employer by pressuring that employer's suppliers or customers;Footnote 78 narrowing the protections for striking employees and novel union tactics;Footnote 79 and expanding range of circumstances in which employers could lock out their employees in response to a strike against another member of an employer bargaining association.Footnote 80 Like the jurisdictional changes, these did not require the Republican administration to enact new laws, for the Farmer NLRB essentially cleared the way for employers to make aggressive use of tactics that had been legislatively permitted but not (under the Herzog Board) administratively authorized. In an important sense, then, Eisenhower's appointments, by removing a crucial administrative support for the Wagner Act's conception of the conditions for fair collective bargaining, had the effect of consolidating Taft-Hartley.
By the time Beeson's term ended in December 1954, Eisenhower's NLRB majority had accomplished virtually all the changes employers had called for in the 1953 congressional hearings. Cumulating over a series of rulings—on jurisdiction, the right of employers to intervene in union elections, and the right of unions to bring economic pressure on employers—the new policy reflected a coherent image of the role of government in labor relations that was radically different from either the intention of the Wagner Act or the precedents of earlier boards. A major business periodical summarized the board's actions as “tilt[ing] noticeably in the direction of management” by expanding the “free speech” rights of employers to try to influence representation elections, circumscribing the range of lawful union secondary activity, and removing small firms from the enforcement of unfair labor standards regulations. A contemporary commentator reflected that “seldom in the history of this Board has so much law been made so quickly by so few.” Terry Moe surveys quantitative indicators of the degree to which NLRB decisions favored business versus labor from 1948 to 1979, and his research supports this verdict while placing its significance in perspective. Moe's statistical analysis shows that Eisenhower's first three appointees to the board produced more conservative records than his subsequent appointees; and that the “Eisenhower shift” in the labor–management tilt of the board's decisions was larger than any later presidential transition.Footnote 81 The clearest indicator of the impact on the climate for labor organizing is the precipitous decline in the proportion of union victories in certification elections, from around 80 percent at the time of Eisenhower's inauguration to just over 50 percent in 1961 when Kennedy entered the White House.Footnote 82
CONCLUSION
This essay has made the case that changes in the implementation of labor policy under Eisenhower significantly altered the trajectory of the New Deal labor regime and in effect amounted to the consolidation and strengthening of the reforms legislated in the Taft-Hartley Act. In this section, I summarize the case for attributing this change to President Eisenhower's actions, along two routes. The first considers the counterfactual: Given the historical and political context, could any Republican president have accomplished the same thing? The evidence of Eisenhower's prepresidential image, compared with the reputation and policy preferences of the most likely alternative to Eisenhower, Robert Taft, is inconsistent with this hypothesis.Footnote 83 The second reviews the strategic calculations of an exceptionally canny preemptive president, and underlines the significance of Eisenhower's dual developmental legacy.
An “Eisenhower Effect” or a “Republican Effect”?
When he was inaugurated, President Eisenhower's views on labor policy were not widely publicized nor thoroughly worked out, but as they evolved, it is clear that they were not radically different from the mainstream of his party. This raises the question whether another Republican president would have undertaken the same actions and gained the same degree of success. The uncontested confirmations of Farmer and Rogers to the NLRB are the key cases, and—judging from the Democrats' surprise at the outcome of these two appointments and the hard-fought opposition to the Beeson nomination—the deference to Eisenhower was excessive. The ambiguity of Eisenhower's views and the positive relation he had established with congressional leaders go far to explain why his nominees were treated with such deference.
Both his wartime reputation and his well-orchestrated campaign for the presidency contributed to his winning the votes of independents and Democrats, and to smoothing the path of legislation and confirmation in Congress, as erstwhile opponents held back from partisan attacks. Eisenhower's reputation as a leader but a political neutral, along with his emphasis on foreign policy in campaigning against Taft for the Republican nomination, made it easy for observers to assume that his moderate views carried over to domestic issues. In the general election campaign, Eisenhower's most vehement attacks targeted Truman rather than popular New Deal policies, and he “deliberately … tempered his private conservatism” and made effective use of his famous gift for ambiguity.Footnote 84 In the early months of his administration, Eisenhower not only voiced a respectful, studiedly nonpartisan posture toward the legislative branch but met socially with leaders from both sides of the aisle, and the duration of his “honeymoon” with Congress was historically exceptional.
Taft would have had none of these advantages. The ideological inflexibility that endeared him to the Republican Old Guard polarized his relations with liberals and moderates; his reputation for slashing attacks on New Deal policies and their supporters went back decades; and his success as a leader of the Senate had come on issues at the heart of the Democratic coalition. Taft won his seat in the Senate in 1938, as a hard-hitting campaigner who “saved his most passionate remarks for a denunciation of New Deal economic policy.” Six years later his reelection campaign included opposition to Republican progressives Willkie and Dewey, and Taft's allegation that the Ohio CIO political action committee (PAC) was “dominated by communists.”Footnote 85 The immediate postwar period brought Taft national attention as a legislative strategist and a campaigner: he personified his party's 1946 attack on the Fair Deal, and with Republicans in the majority in the 80th Congress, he crafted the Taft-Hartley Act and constructed the coalition that overturned Truman's veto. In the 81st Congress, the best opportunity Democrats and unions had to repeal Taft-Hartley was parried by Taft's parliamentary resourcefulness. Campaigning for the nomination in 1952, Taft epitomized the Old Guard: his organization was staffed by older professionals rather than young Republican progressives; his strategy centered on first winning delegates in the South, at the price of distancing urban Republicans; and his isolationist pronouncements worried the Eastern establishment.Footnote 86 In short, where Eisenhower's thin record of political stands and his genial ambiguity enhanced the likelihood that voters and elites would give him the benefit of the doubt, Taft's career pointed in just the opposite direction: there was little room for maneuver on labor and economic issues, and the interests and organizations that had borne the brunt of his attacks were determined to oppose his initiatives.
Eisenhower and the New Deal Political Economy
In the legacy of economic institutions and policies he inherited, Eisenhower saw more nuance than either the Old Guard or Republican liberals such as Dewey. He appreciated the structural limits, and even more the historical constraints faced by a preemptive president; these ruled out taking on the New Deal's most popular programs, however ideologically disagreeable. But a president, even a minority president, can have different effects on different policy trajectories, and Eisenhower's political discernment revealed the possibility of disrupting the developmental path of his predecessors' most politically important economic policy legacy. In this project, Eisenhower fastened on the crucial distinction between the New Deal's two great themes, the essentially welfarist aim of protecting individuals against the misfortune of economic depression or poverty, and the more political goal of using the authority of the government to limit the economic power of corporations vis-à-vis workers and consumers.Footnote 87
Scholars who have characterized Eisenhower's as a “presidency of consolidation” have good evidence for the portrayal, but the picture is a partial one. Where programs were directed at protecting the economic security of individuals, Eisenhower was accepting and his policies often quite generous. Moreover, the president and his economic advisors understood that they carried forward the core ideas of his Democratic predecessors. “Consolidation” involved three policy commitments that were roundly rejected by the Old Guard: (1) problem-definition, identifying and measuring the contours of a problem, and justifying the claim that the problem was a legitimate subject for the national political agenda; (2) the focus on a particular category of solution, including the attribution of responsibility to the federal government for ameliorating conditions; and (3) the implementation of a specific set of remedies, entailing governmental action that inevitably involved redistributing resources from more or less identifiable categories of people to others. The New Deal policies that Eisenhower ratified shared two important characteristics. They were politically popular, garnering large majorities among Republicans and even in traditionally conservative categories such as affluent WASPs. And they were ideologically acceptable: Although designed to ameliorate market-caused inequalities, they did not infringe on the distribution of economic power in the marketplace.
The developmental significance of the Eisenhower years is not unitary, however, and his leadership in labor relations shows the importance of distinguishing among issue areas or policy regimes. Compared with programs designed to insure economic security, New Deal labor policy differed both politically and ideologically. Politically, the Wagner Act and its implementing agencies were more vulnerable. Public support for unions and governmental protections for labor organizing fell through the 1940s, in response to postwar strikes and the relentless campaigns of business groups and congressional conservatives; and the decline continued with new revelations of union corruption in the 1950s. In addition, splits in the labor movement, and the growing affluence of American workers, weakened the appeal to class solidarity that had resonated in the 1930s. Ideologically, New Deal labor policy directly challenged two values at the very center of conservative beliefs, individualism and the elevation of the market as the arbiter of income distribution and mobility chances.
The literature on policy feedback emphasizes the importance of the early life of a policy to its survivability against the attacks of ideological and interest group opponents. The relatively short life of the New Deal labor policy regime (especially if one excludes wartime as exceptional); the success of Taft-Hartley in weakening its institutional supports; the concerted conservative opposition, and particularly its success at using the postwar strike wave and the sensational evidence of union racketeering to weaken public support; and the complacency and political miscalculation of union leaders and their allies combined to make the trajectory of the labor law regime especially vulnerable. Its political and ideological weaknesses were significant, but neither would have been fatal so long as the policies were not aggressively challenged. Indeed, if a Democratic president had governed through the 1950s, it is likely that the New Deal labor regime would have grown more sturdy roots and accumulated the incremental support of the policy feedback produced by steady implementation. As management, labor, and regulatory agencies adjusted to a maturing policy, the effect would have been to strengthen the New Deal labor regime against later political challenges. But Eisenhower early identified the distinctive vulnerability of labor policy and grasped the opening for reversing the most politically significant trend of the New Deal political economy. This policy course is a challenging one, especially for a president with limited political resources; it requires an exceptional degree of strategic focus, the self-confidence to take on a potentially costly fight, and probably a certain amount of overconfident misjudgment on the part of an opponent lulled into complacency by long incumbency. It is doubtless no accident that Eisenhower, with his experience as a military strategist, offers a telling instance of success in such an endeavor.
The legacy of such a president will be a deeply differentiated set of accomplishments: apparent acceptance (“consolidation”) of inheritances where the conditions for change are not propitious; and unexpected reversal (“realignment”) even of his predecessor's most treasured policies, where the transitional president's strategic perceptiveness has bested the opposition. In the case of labor relations, Eisenhower's actions reversed the New Deal's most politically potent reforms: by consolidating the thrust of the Taft-Hartley Act, he shifted the balance of interest group power across a range of issues and set up a dynamic that would make it increasingly difficult over time to restore the equilibrium the Wagner Act had sought. Finally, it is worth remarking that the historical significance of the Eisenhower transition is all the greater because it came early in the life of the New Deal's labor reform, disrupting its developmental path and undermining its sustainability at a crucial moment. In this respect, President Reagan's “war on labor,” although well-publicized and undoubtedly important, came at a time when labor was already severely weakened by political (and economic) developments, many of which got their start in actions undertaken by President Eisenhower decades earlier.
