I

In 1955, the Perfect Circle Corporation, a leading automotive parts manufacturer, stood briefly in the national spotlight when a gunfight erupted at its piston ring foundry in New Castle, Indiana, during an eighteen-week strike by members of local unions affiliated with the United Automobile Workers (UAW). On the morning of October 5, over two thousand strikers and their supporters gathered at the foundry to protest the firing of thirty-five strikers for what management termed “picket line disorders,” a constant feature of the strike since its inception. The scene turned bloody when a company guard inside the foundry fired a shot into the crowd, which was either milling peacefully outside the foundry's gates, as all witnesses at the time maintained, or threatening to drag out nonstrikers, “beat them,” and then dynamite the foundry, as company managers later testified before Senate investigators. Once the shooting began, several strikers rushed home to retrieve their own firearms and a gun battle ensued in which eight people—five protestors and three nonstrikers inside the foundry—were wounded.Footnote ¹

The 1955 strike marked the culmination of an ongoing contest between management and labor at Perfect Circle that began during the Second World War when local UAW unions first won bargaining rights at the foundry and at Perfect Circle's main plant in the nearby village of Hagerstown. The UAW upheld a collective bargaining relationship with management through a pair of strikes in the late 1940s, and labor relations temporarily stabilized at Perfect Circle in 1953 when union leaders, although denied the company-wide agreement they sought, secured separate contracts at all of the company's east-central Indiana plants, which by this time, included two additional facilities in the city of Richmond, near the Indiana-Ohio border. Perfect Circle management terminated these contracts in May 1955, and the two sides spent eight weeks in negotiations, with management putting a single “take-it-or-leave it” offer on the table. When the UAW's bargaining committee countered with a series of demands that included a union shop, Perfect Circle seized on this issue to force the strike, which management portrayed as a heroic crusade to protect the individual worker's “right to work” from “compulsory unionism.”

From the outset, the strike was marred by confrontations on the picket line, which escalated into vandalism, mass arrests, and eventually, the October 5 gunfight. Some commentators feared that the violence that accompanied the Perfect Circle strike, along with similar incidents in the Kohler and Square D strikes a year earlier, signaled a return to the “dark days” of industrial relations when capital and labor settled their disputes with brute force instead of civilized negotiations.Footnote ² But these concerns evaporated less than two months after the gunfight when nonstrikers ousted the UAW in separate National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decertification elections at Perfect Circle's Hagerstown and Richmond plants. The remaining strikers at the New Castle foundry held out until the end of November, when UAW International officials, determined to cut their losses, intervened and demanded that local strikers agree to a settlement that was identical to management's original offer.Footnote ³

By any measure, Perfect Circle delivered a serious blow to the UAW during the 1955 strike. Not only did management eliminate three local unions and cripple a fourth, but also fired and blacklisted several union officers and rank-and-file activists, including the entire leadership of the Hagerstown local union. For several years afterward, the Perfect Circle strike surfaced in the larger arena of state and national politics. It was conservatives' cause célèbre during their national “right-to-work” campaign in 1957 and reappeared a year later during the McClellan “Labor Rackets” Committee hearings in 1958.

Although the 1955 Perfect Circle strike has since faded into obscurity, an examination of the strike through a broader historical perspective supports the growing trend in labor history that rejects the “postwar accord,” or the notion that after the Second World War, labor and management carved out what Nelson Lichtenstein once termed a “remarkably stable settlement” and ushered in a “crisis-free quarter-century of union-management relations” in the industrial sector that lasted through the early 1970s.Footnote ⁴ The first significant study to reject the postwar accord was Howell Harris's The Right to Manage (1982), which traced management's response to the New Deal and the industrial union movement of the 1930s.Footnote ⁵ Harris showed that, as a group, employers never accepted unions, but instead adopted a practical, “realist” approach to collective bargaining that successfully stymied organized labor's growth by the late 1940s. Harris also noted that management mounted a vigorous public relations campaign in defense of capitalism that successfully rehabilitated business's image, which had been severely tarnished by the Great Depression. Harris's argument was picked up and elaborated in the 1990s by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Sanford Jacoby, Jefferson Cowie, Daniel Clark, and, most recently, by Kim Phillips-Fein.Footnote ⁶

Labor historians who reject the postwar accord are divided on precisely when business prevailed in what Fones-Wolf calls the “assault on labor and liberalism,” but otherwise, they share seven common themes: 1) The business assault began as early as the late 1930s with employers' revival of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the US Chamber of Commerce, which their respective members turned into effective antilabor lobbying organizations by the mid-1940s.Footnote ⁷ 2) Business was more or less united in its assault against labor and liberalism, despite the presence of a handful of “progressive” firms that accepted unions. 3) In their assault on labor, employers and their political allies made no distinction between unacceptable communist “left-led” unions and “responsible” noncommunist unions. Communist unions were only initially singled out for elimination because they provided the most radical challenge to management's prerogatives, threatened prevailing gender and racial norms, and constituted the most vulnerable target in the context of the Cold War.Footnote ⁸ 4) The business assault was, in large part, a political and legal contest. Business gained a decisive advantage with the passage of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, especially with its so-called employer “free speech” guarantees, which proved as destructive to postwar unionism as the Act's noncommunist affidavit or “right-to-work” provisions.Footnote ⁹ As Sanford Jacoby points out, Taft-Hartley gave employers the legal right to campaign openly against unions and to petition the NLRB for “representation” elections, a form of harassment that could force a local union to defend its majority status on an almost annual basis or else lose its collective bargaining rights.Footnote ¹⁰ 5) The business assault was not limited to regions of the United States where organized labor was weakest. As the case of Perfect Circle shows, employers who resisted an accord were just as likely to be found in the small-town Midwest as in the South or other areas of low union density. If management was somehow unable to tame an intractable union, it would not hesitate to move its operations to areas where workers were more compliant. Although organized labor sought to surmount this problem in the postwar era with strong national organizations, as Jefferson Cowie shows, management successfully “learned to locate power in the spaces they controlled, to disempower locations with strong oppositional cultures, and to divide the bargaining power of organized labor.”Footnote ¹¹ 6) The business assault was accompanied by a massive propaganda campaign that attempted to turn public opinion against liberalism and turn workers against their unions. As an essential aspect of this campaign, business leaders generously funded an interlocking network of right-wing “think tanks” and pressure groups, which, in turn, supplied business with propaganda material and lobbied on behalf of promanagement legislation.Footnote ¹² 7) The business assault on labor and liberalism in the 1950s shows that, as much as conservatives today deny it, the roots of the New Right lay as much with antilabor employers as they do with elite intellectuals, college conservatives, or Sun Belt suburbanites, groups conventionally credited with giving birth to the New Right.Footnote ¹³

The 1955 Perfect Circle strike fits into this revised version of labor-management relations of the postwar era. It was not what Life magazine called an “old-style labor war,” nor merely a temporary return to the 1930s “Stone Age” of labor relations, as New York Times labor reporter A. H. Raskin maintained, but an essential episode in the postwar business assault on labor and liberalism.Footnote ¹⁴ A longer history of the strike, which focuses on Perfect Circle management and its reaction to the rise of industrial unionism in the 1930s and 1940s reveals that, from the start, its owners and managers, were determined to thwart collective bargaining and, ultimately, rid their plants of unions. Management's methods were not crude, however, and at times, it appeared that something resembling a postwar accord did govern labor relations at Perfect Circle. But during these periods, Perfect Circle was engaged in a vigorous antilabor propaganda campaign and a variety of other tactics designed to undercut union power. Hardly a relic of a bygone age, Perfect Circle and other aggressively antiunion firms of the 1950s, provide the critical link that connects employers' reaction against the labor upsurge of the 1930s and 1940s with the rise of the New Right in the 1960s and the subsequent broader offensive against organized labor by larger firms at the economy's core.

II

A new era for the Perfect Circle Corporation began in March 1946, when Lothair Teetor resigned from his position as the company's president after twenty-four years at the helm. Although Teetor had never relished running the company and rarely mingled with workers on the shop floor, in many ways, he proved to be an exceptional and progressive manager. In the early 1920s, Teetor had inherited from his father a small machine shop in which male craft workers were engaged in small-scale “batch” production of piston rings using relatively rudimentary production methods and a variety of general-purpose machine tools.Footnote ¹⁵ Determined to modernize the entire operation, Teetor expanded the company's marketing and distribution networks, enlarged its plant capacity, and vertically integrated its supply chain with the establishment of a foundry in nearby New Castle.

More importantly, Teetor oversaw Perfect Circle's conversion to continuous mass production, which included a state-of-the art factory building, dedicated machine tools, and the controversial Bedaux incentive plan, which lowered base hourly rates while tying bonus pay to what management even admitted was an arcane piece-rate formula.Footnote ¹⁶ From Teetor's perspective, only individualized shop-floor incentives—which kept hourly wages low but rewarded rapid and mistake-free performance—could drive workers to improve their productivity and ensure Perfect Circle's competitive edge in the manufacture of piston rings, an intricate precision process that resisted full automation. To encourage greater efficiency, management unilaterally decided all promotions, routinely ignored seniority procedures when determining departmental transfers, and adhered to a strict internal hiring policy, in which the most productive and ambitious workers were promoted to white-collar management positions. These moves, along with the 1920s boom in automobile sales and repair, made Perfect Circle one of the nation's leading automotive parts companies, “the largest firm of its kind in the world,” in the words of one local newspaper.Footnote ¹⁷

Teetor's transition to mass production involved more than changes inside the factory walls. To meet his company's increased need for labor, Teetor offered a factory job to all local residents, and quickly achieved remarkable domination over the local labor market. By the end of the 1920s, Perfect Circle hired sixty-five percent of Hagerstown's employable adults and forty-three percent of those in the surrounding countryside.Footnote ¹⁸ As one member of the Teetor family would later write, “almost everyone in town who wanted a job could find it at the piston ring company.”Footnote ¹⁹ Thus, Perfect Circle had access to a ready labor supply consisting of local workers—white, Protestant, native-born Hoosiers—who, as economic geographers Brian Page and Rich Walker point out in their analysis of small-town Midwestern industrialization, were “attuned to the particular needs of the [town's] dominant plant.”Footnote ²⁰ But while his company guaranteed local residents regular employment, Teetor brooked no collective opposition to his new mass production regime. In February 1929, when male machine operators, who had previously labored in a more informal fraternal craft setting, staged a walk-out in protest of the Bedaux plan, Teetor flatly refused to meet with them, except to admonish each worker for lacking “confidence” in management, and the strike collapsed within two weeks.Footnote ²¹

With the onset of the Great Depression, Teetor sealed Perfect Circle's civic supremacy by not only guiding the company successfully through the economic slump, but by offering employees an array of welfare benefits, which included life and accident insurance, an employee credit union, paid vacations, a profit-sharing bonus, and leisure and recreation programs. Perfect Circle also sponsored numerous entertainment events and funded several civic improvements that benefited the entire community. But Teetor became increasingly frustrated with developments in the mid-1930s when, first, the New Deal state, and then, industrial unions, encroached on what he and other family members believed was their right to run their local business as they saw fit. In 1937, union activists at Perfect Circle's New Castle foundry, inspired by a UAW organizing drive at the town's large Chrysler parts plant, formed their own UAW local and staged a sit-down strike at the foundry for union recognition and better pay and benefits. Teetor responded to the union threat with timely wage increases and an “independent” company union to defeat the UAW in successive NLRB elections in the early 1940s.

As Teetor saw it, labor relations at Perfect Circle took a turn for the worse during the Second World War. Although the company benefited from lucrative military contracts, to meet its increased production demands, it was forced to hire many new workers, including many southern migrants, unfamiliar with Perfect Circle's local corporate culture. Furthermore, the federal government compelled Teetor to sign a union contract with his employees at both the New Castle foundry and the Hagerstown main plant that included a “maintenance-of-membership” clause that amounted to a union shop. Once covered by a collective bargaining contract, union members at Perfect Circle displayed increased militancy for the duration of the war, waging several wildcat strikes, protesting management's seniority procedures, demanding a say over piece rates, and then, launching a strike that shut down production during the reconversion period in protest of the company's lay-off policy. After the reconversion strike was settled, Teetor remained with the company for several more months to guide the company's successful transition from military to civilian production. But, disgusted with what he saw as the Truman administration's embrace of the welfare state and its support of labor unions, Teetor soon stepped down from daily management of Perfect Circle.

Teetor may have relinquished his position as Perfect Circle's president, but he was not so much abandoning the company as he was extending its political influence. Rather than retreating into a leisurely retirement, Teetor pursued his fight against the liberal state and organized labor through formal political channels, an interest that first began in the late 1930s when he assumed leadership of various conservative business organizations, starting with a seat on the Indiana State Chamber of Commerce's tax committee, and taking over as the organization's president in 1940. The next year, Teetor moved onto the national stage when he became a director (and later a vice-president) of the revitalized National Association of Manufacturers. Advocating that business managers “should run for the legislature and take an active part in lawmaking,” Teetor entered the political arena in 1944 when he won a seat in the Indiana state assembly, where he would serve three more terms in the immediate postwar years.Footnote ²²

Teetor's experience in the Indiana state government convinced him that the conservative reforms he sought could only be secured at the federal level. Although he claimed several major legislative achievements as a leader of the antitax wing of Indiana's Republican party, Teetor grew increasingly disappointed that “he had done nothing toward stemming the nationwide tide of Leftist legislation.”Footnote ²³ In the late 1940s, as a first step toward directly influencing federal policy, he became a chief financial backer of right-wing US Congressman Ralph Harvey, who represented Teetor's rural and heavily-Republican east-central Indiana district.Footnote ²⁴ In the early 1950s, Teetor himself moved to Washington, D.C., first, to serve as a lobbyist for NAM's ongoing effort to reduce the federal income tax, and then, in 1953, to take a position with the Eisenhower Administration as assistant secretary in the Department of Commerce.Footnote ²⁵ During his tenure at the Commerce Department, Lothair Teetor continued to work for lower federal tax rates, while in his spare time, he traveled around the country denouncing organized labor in a series of speeches to local business associations.Footnote ²⁶

III

Following Lothair Teetor's departure in 1946, his cousin Ralph Teetor took over as Perfect Circle's president and successfully directed the company's continued growth, fueled largely by the postwar boom in car sales. Ralph Teetor was born in Hagerstown in 1890, and, although he completely lost his eyesight as the result of a childhood accident, he diligently mastered the practical aspects of automotive engineering through painstaking hours spent in his own workshop and at his family's factory. After high school, he left home to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he became the first blind student to graduate from its prestigious engineering department in 1912. Immediately upon receiving his diploma, Teetor returned to Hagerstown to take his place in the family firm, overseeing Perfect Circle's engineering division until his cousin Lothair Teetor retired.Footnote ²⁷ Once Ralph Teetor took over as Perfect Circle's president, he enlarged Perfect Circle's existing plant capacity, beginning in July 1948 with the completion of a new production complex in Richmond, Indiana, that featured a finishing plant and machine shop to replace the government-owned factory the company occupied during the war.Footnote ²⁸ Perfect Circle's constant expansion, which eventually included foreign subsidiaries, made it one of the nation's most successful smaller manufacturing firms and “the nation's largest volume producer of piston rings” by the mid-1950s, according to the Wall Street Journal. Footnote ²⁹

While Ralph Teetor successfully guided Perfect Circle to postwar prosperity, he faced entrenched UAW local unions at the company's Hagerstown main finishing plant and its New Castle foundry.Footnote ³⁰ Determined to regain his employees' loyalties, Teetor promised a new era of labor relations, one centered around the notion of a heartland consensus, a conservative civic identity that he was convinced would render unions unnecessary. Declaring that he “acquired a good many ideas about management” through both his personal experience and copious reading on the subject, Teetor put employee communications high on his agenda, instituting a regular column in the employee newsletter, with the neighborly title, “Conversation with Ralph Teetor.” In his inaugural message, Teetor admitted that Perfect Circle “shared the whole world's need for improvements in the realm of human relationships,” a problem that he blamed on the “friction and petty irritations” of a “complicated … modern society.” As a remedy, he advocated that Perfect Circle managers and workers follow a humane set of “social principles”—“sincere consideration, honesty, patience, generosity, and mutual confidence”—which he believed governed human relations in the same way the laws of physical science governed the natural world. Avoiding the subjects of unions, collective bargaining, or government labor policy, he did caution that neither management nor labor could be “forced by laws” to accept these “simple rules”; instead, both must accept them “willingly” through a “foundation of mutual respect.” To foster such an attitude, Teetor promised to create an atmosphere that “encourages free expression of opinion” and assured workers that, just like any ordinary employee, he expected to be “reminded of [his] own faults.”Footnote ³¹

Teetor was convinced that Perfect Circle's small-town character served as a unique source of management-labor unity. The image of an idyllic heartland small town particularly appealed to Teetor's own sensibilities. Although he traveled widely in professional circles, Teetor firmly believed in the superior virtues of small towns over cities, which he saw as hotbeds of crime and corruption. In a Thanksgiving message during his first year as company president, Teetor reminded employees that they should be grateful for Perfect Circle's “advantageous” geographical location:

Such quaint “Main Street” imagery, as historian Roland Marchand pointed out, was a common feature in corporate public relations strategies of the mid-1940s, and a particular favorite of conservative managers who envisioned the Middle American small town as “the embodiment of homogeneity and unity, of an assumed lack of class differences and conflicts.”Footnote ³³ The “Main Street” approach was tailor-made for Ralph Teetor, who, even as he was expanding Perfect Circle's operations abroad, retained tiny Hagerstown (pop. 1700) as its corporate headquarters and site of its main manufacturing plant.

A corollary of Perfect Circle's small-town ideal, Ralph Teetor also noted, was its tradition of local ownership. In contrast to those firms run by “absentee management,” Perfect Circle's owners and employees were “neighbors and friends,” and each Perfect Circle plant was “small enough to enable almost everyone to know each other personally.” This combination of small-town, small-plant intimacy, Teetor intoned, made class hierarchies irrelevant because “all of our problems are common problems.” One would assume that this unity of interests led to a set of reciprocal responsibilities, but instead it “add[ed] up to a certain freedom—a freedom in living and working” shared by both management and labor.Footnote ³⁴

Many Hagerstown residents embraced Teetor's heartland consensus, and agreed with him that its managers and workers shared a unity of interests. In a letter to a local newspaper during the 1955 strike, one resident told readers how much she revered the Teetors for their “service to the community,” supported their welfare capitalist programs (“that everyone has enjoyed”), and preferred their shop floor individualism to union representation.Footnote ³⁵ Union members needed no testimonials to convince them about the Teetors' local popularity. Sam Selke, a UAW officer at Perfect Circle's New Castle foundry, learned this lesson from an aunt and uncle who lived in Hagerstown and worked at the Perfect Circle plant. “[They] thought there was nothing like the Teetors or Perfect Circle,” Selke later recalled. “They thought I was crazy [for] being in the union.”Footnote ³⁶

But during the immediate postwar years, Perfect Circle, in contrast to other modern welfare capitalist firms, failed to quell unionization even at its main plant in Hagerstown where its corporate and community interests were so closely tied.Footnote ³⁷ The union's appeal to workers in Hagerstown frustrated the Teetors. They understood why workers at their foundry in New Castle could be attracted to unionism. Those workers lived in what I. F. Stone called a “labor citadel,” a Democratic party stronghold where the UAW claimed over two thousand members, thanks to the local union at the town's large Chrysler parts plant.Footnote ³⁸ But the Teetors could never comprehend why workers at Hagerstown felt the same way. Accounting for the UAW's success in their hometown, the Teetors and the company's non-family managers naturally figured that that workers' attraction to the union must be the work of “outsiders,” either a handful of shop-floor “radicals” who lived in rural communities outside of Hagerstown or power-hungry UAW staff representatives who forced workers into unions through union shop provisions and then grew rich off their dues payments.Footnote ³⁹

What Ralph Teetor and other Perfect Circle managers refused to acknowledge was how the UAW appealed to many workers' sense of fair play. Carl Evans, a Kentucky native who first started working for Perfect Circle in December 1941, and who would later serve as president of Hagerstown UAW Local 156 during the 1955 strike, was one of many workers who were drawn to the union for just this reason.Footnote ⁴⁰ As with many new union members across the country in the 1930s and 1940s, Evans found that his personal grievances against his employer could be remedied only through membership in an independent industrial union. In Evans's case, his conversion to unionism was hastened by unsatisfactory shop-floor conditions, low pay, and as he later recalled, “lots of grievances that wasn't settled.” Class antagonism against Perfect Circle management sealed Evans's commitment to the UAW. “If it hadn't been for unions,” he explained, “‘the people’ wouldn't have nothing.” “They'd just take what [wages] the company give ‘em,” while the company's owners “stuck the rest in their pocket.” For Evans, the UAW addressed this injustice and “tried to get it right.”Footnote ⁴¹

Hagerstown UAW Local 156 not only drew active support from workers such as Evans who lived in nearby rural communities or as far away as New Castle, but through its ability to secure better material benefits also attracted a number of native-born Hagerstown residents. As one worker who grew up in Hagerstown put it years later, he and other workers “owe everything”—insurance, a better job, and more money—“to the union.”Footnote ⁴² Given Perfect Circle's pervasive civic influence, the UAW's success at Hagerstown represented a substantial rank-and-file achievement. Not only did Local 156 survive the immediate postwar years intact, but it enjoyed the most secure period of its institutional existence, competing with Perfect Circle for civic supremacy. Asserting its presence in Hagerstown's social life, Local 156 hosted a series of community dances, organized its own softball and bowling teams, and sponsored radio broadcasts of the Hagerstown High School basketball team.Footnote ⁴³

Local 156, along with UAW Local 370 at Perfect Circle's New Castle foundry, demonstrated they were more than mere social institutions when they secured a pair of annual contracts in the immediate postwar years that included steadily improving wages and fringe benefits. Although it took months of negotiations, strike threats, and the intervention of federal mediators, the UAW unions signed their first peacetime contract with the company in July 1947, followed by a second pact in February 1948.Footnote ⁴⁴ The economic improvements in these contracts paled next to those contained in the contracts that the UAW signed with the Big Three automakers, but they provided the local unions at Perfect Circle with what local union officials viewed as a solid foundation for future bargaining rounds by putting many important issues on the table as negotiable demands. In addition to annual wage increases, the contracts included a maintenance-of-membership clause, a dues check-off, seniority clause, an improved vacation plan, and procedures for departmental transfers and readjustment of piece rates.Footnote ⁴⁵ A reopening clause also allowed the union to renegotiate wage rates once during the life of the contract to keep up with spiraling postwar inflation.Footnote ⁴⁶ While the postwar contracts represented what appeared to be major steps toward a stable bargaining relationship with Perfect Circle, union leaders found certain aspects troubling. For instance, annual wage increases were distributed unevenly, with workers at Hagerstown and New Castle receiving higher rates than those at Perfect Circle's new Richmond complex, which remained unorganized and whose workers therefore lacked a collective bargaining relationship with management.Footnote ⁴⁷ The absence of company-wide solidarity prevented union leaders from achieving the UAW's twin goals of a company-wide contract at Perfect Circle and industry-wide pattern bargaining for the entire automotive parts sector.

IV

In October 1948, Perfect Circle UAW Locals 370 and 156 hosted the quarterly meeting of the UAW's National Piston Ring Council (NPRC) at New Castle's Plaza Hotel. The NPRC conference drew together union officers from the nation's major independent piston ring companies to devise a “pattern bargaining” strategy designed to equalize and increase wages and benefits across the automobile industry's most competitive and decentralized sector.Footnote ⁴⁸ On the conference's first day, the NPRC members visited Perfect Circle's New Castle foundry and then drove to its main finishing plant in Hagerstown where they dined at the employee cafeteria before taking a guided tour of the plant.Footnote ⁴⁹ At first glance, this scene of union officials walking around unmolested and even welcomed into a factory where years earlier they would have been unceremoniously evicted, reflects the conventional view of the postwar accord.

But despite opening its factory doors to union officials, Perfect Circle, along with other firms in the automotive parts sector, opposed the NPRC's pattern bargaining strategy for fundamental economic reasons. While the Big Three oligopoly faced little price competition and could pass on any increased labor costs to their customers, competitive sector employers tended to be concentrated in wholesale “producer goods” industries where they faced particularly stiff price competition from their rivals. Caught between union demands and price pressures, most competitive sector employers refused to concede to any type of pattern settlement.Footnote ⁵⁰ At Perfect Circle, the two sides’ conflicting positions on pattern bargaining culminated in a strike in late 1948, when local unions demanded a thirteen-cents-per-hour raise aimed at establishing a single industry wage scale in the parts sector.Footnote ⁵¹

Perfect Circle immediately undercut the strike's effectiveness by keeping its plants open for the strike's duration and rewarding non-strikers with a five-cent-per-hour wage increase, a pension plan, and enhanced seniority.Footnote ⁵² Management also thwarted the UAW's organizational drive at Perfect Circle's Richmond plant (illegally, as the NLRB later ruled) by promising workers a similar wage increase if they voted against the UAW in a representation election held just prior to the strike.Footnote ⁵³ Management may have undermined the UAW's attempt at company-wide solidarity, but strike-related conflict exposed the limitations of Ralph Teetor's vision of a heartland consensus.

From the strike's outset, local union leaders competed with Perfect Circle's influence over the broader community by engaging in a public debate over the union's chief demands of an industry-wide wage and union shop. For the first time in its history, Hagerstown UAW Local 156 took its case to the “public in general” through press releases and newspaper advertisements that condemned Perfect Circle's “Propaganda Department” for betraying the public trust by distorting production figures, exaggerating the number of nonstrikers, and planting anti-UAW stories in the local press.Footnote ⁵⁴ Union leaders particularly resented Perfect Circle's rejection of the union shop as a violation of the principle of heartland consensus that management so cherished. As Local 156's bargaining chairman put it, Perfect Circle's position “shakes democratic union-company relationships pretty badly,” because management would refuse to grant a union shop “even if every employee voted for one.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The 1948 strike also revealed that each side held a different conception of how workers could best achieve their share of the postwar prosperity. Believing that a worker's behavior was subject to the strict laws of the market, Ralph Teetor spent the duration of the strike totaling up how many extra days the strikers would have to work to make up for the wages they lost while off the job.Footnote ⁵⁶ Local union leaders, for their part, argued that the company's refusal to match the UAW pattern through collective bargaining denied them a level of affluence commensurate with Perfect Circle's leading position in the piston ring industry. According to one Hagerstown UAW officer, Perfect Circle workers “badly needed” a substantial wage increase “to adequately feed, clothe, and house our families” in a manner consistent with rising postwar standards of living.Footnote ⁵⁷

Militancy on the picket line also demonstrated that local UAW members rejected Teetor's heartland consensus. Although the strike initially started as a subdued affair, frustration over management's hard-line bargaining stance led strikers to resort to more confrontational tactics at the Hagerstown plant.Footnote ⁵⁸ When the strike entered its fourth week in early December, over fifty picketers massed at the plant and prevented nonstrikers from entering the company parking lot. As the local newspaper reported, “tempers flared briefly” and a “minor tussle occurred when one picketer allegedly smashed the windshield of one car.” In response to the growing tensions, Hagerstown's marshals had to escort nonstrikers through the picket line for the remainder of the strike.Footnote ⁵⁹

While Perfect Circle could count on local authorities to help the company maintain production at its hometown plant, management was frustrated by the situation at its New Castle foundry, where, on the strike's first days, the UAW used mass picketing to shut down production.Footnote ⁶⁰ In contrast to Hagerstown, New Castle police officers, whose loyalties lay with the strikers, refused to help non-strikers cross the picket line. Determined to reopen the foundry, Perfect Circle turned to legal powers that reached beyond New Castle's town limits to neighboring Randolph County, where a friendly state court judge issued an injunction against “illegal picketing.”Footnote ⁶¹ The injunction, which required police officers to arrest picketers or face contempt of court charges themselves, effectively curbed mass picketing at the foundry.Footnote ⁶² With the end of mass picketing, strikers and strike sympathizers sought to enforce what they saw as a local proscription against crossing a picket line through a campaign of nightly vandalism, which included throwing rocks at nonstrikers' homes and smearing yellow paint on their automobiles. While such episodes convinced some potential strikebreakers not to cross the picket line, it was a purely defensive maneuver that, more than anything else, testified to the local unions' inability to prevail in the strike.Footnote ⁶³

The eventual outcome of the 1948 strike underscored the fact that organized labor's primary weaknesses lay beyond the local community. Although the strikers were affiliated with the UAW, then the nation's largest union, they lacked the economic resources to win a battle of attrition even against a small manufacturer that was determined to resist the UAW's pattern bargaining strategy. With each passing day, strike solidarity waned as the strikers, “faced with cold weather and Christmas needs for their families,” according to one local newspaper, received only piecemeal support from the UAW International and other UAW unions in the region.Footnote ⁶⁴ Most importantly, the strike demonstrated that, under current labor law, the postwar state possessed little power to bring a recalcitrant employer to the bargaining table. A representative from the US Federal Conciliation Service had initiated several attempts to resolve the strike, but much to his frustration, made little headway as Perfect Circle easily rebuffed his efforts.Footnote ⁶⁵ The eventual settlement came on Perfect Circle's terms, as the result of small-town personal relationships, when the local union presidents promised to reach a settlement “immediately” if the two sides could meet alone and “without legal counsel.”Footnote ⁶⁶ After a marathon bargaining session that stretched past the New Year, the unions agreed to the same five-cent per hour wage increase—a full eight cents below the industry pattern—that Perfect Circle had already granted its nonstrikers.Footnote ⁶⁷

Local union leaders viewed the 1948 strike as a lesson in the importance of company-wide solidarity, one that they would remember before they decided to wage another strike against Perfect Circle. As one local newspaper noted, the strike “never was 100 per cent effective” because a significant number of workers at Hagerstown crossed the picket line while the majority of workers at Richmond voted against joining the union.Footnote ⁶⁸ Intent on correcting this deficiency, UAW staff representatives in the area made the Richmond plant their main target for organization. At the same time, union leaders at Perfect Circle's other plants cautiously pushed for better contracts but limited their demands to incremental improvements in wages and benefits that avoided another showdown with management.

V

While the 1948 strike taught union leaders a sobering lesson, it also coincided with a renewed effort by management to attract union members and local residents to its vision of heartland consensus. Even before the strike began, Perfect Circle had joined other firms across the nation in the vigorous public relations campaign of “selling free enterprise” as an alternative to unionism and liberalism.Footnote ⁶⁹ For support, Perfect Circle reached beyond the confines of its Hoosier hometown to tap into a national right-wing network that included “policy groups” such as the National Economic Program, Committee for Constitutional Government, Industrial Information Institute, and the American Economic Foundation, antiunion employers such as Warner-Swasey and the Joe Lowe Company, and magazines such as Reader's Digest, all of which churned out the endless propaganda material that Perfect Circle published in its employee newsletter, stuffed into factory information racks, or blared over the local airwaves. As with other firms, Perfect Circle's public relations campaign featured both an educational program that touted the virtues of free market economics to its workers, and a community campaign that warned all local residents about the dangers of impending “collectivism” and “creeping socialism,” notions popularized by Friedrich von Hayek, John T. Flynn, and other opponents of the postwar welfare state.Footnote ⁷⁰

The first half of Perfect Circle's postwar public relations campaign, a program to educate its workers on the fundamental principles of free market economics, dovetailed neatly with Ralph Teetor's vision of heartland consensus. Through its educational program, Perfect Circle promoted a notion of management-labor unity in which hard-working and loyal hometown workers rejected unions and the welfare state as institutions that violated the work ethic by promising “something for nothing” while taking money out of workers' paychecks through rising inflation and higher taxes. The central figure in this campaign was “the Customer,” the personification of the immutable laws of the market, who, through his or her purchasing decisions, set all prices and therefore determined all wages. The “Customer” transcended class lines—outside the factory walls, everyone was a customer, and inside the factory, everyone was subjected to the customer's whims. As one item in the company newsletter succinctly explained, the “Customer” was “Ralph Teetor's Boss—He's Your Boss—He's Everybody's Boss.”Footnote ⁷¹ Eager to present this message to his employees, Ralph Teetor devoted several of his columns in the newsletter to explaining the “basic fundamentals” of Fred Clark's “easily understood concept of free enterprise economics.” Clark, the head of the anti-New Deal American Economics Foundation, published a series of short books in the 1940s devoted to stamping out “economic illiteracy” by “simplify[ing] economics for the masses.”Footnote ⁷² As far as Ralph Teetor was concerned, one of Clark's “simple” economic axioms provided irrefutable proof that union militancy harmed all workers' material interests. “When organized labor through force (strikes) raises the costs of production,” Clark maintained, “they gouge other workers as customers.”Footnote ⁷³

The second half of Perfect Circle's postwar educational campaign, aimed at the broader community, also upheld the tenets of heartland consensus by warning residents that local union leaders unwittingly served the interests of a “foreign” power by sending the United States down the path of “collectivism.” This argument had the advantage of avoiding crude and overt red-baiting that could potentially alienate union members. No local union officers were remotely connected to the Communist party, but they, along with liberals and other critics of unregulated capitalism, could be depicted as the party's unsuspecting agents. In January 1947, Perfect Circle published a short, anonymous column, “To Destroy America,” in which the narrator assumed the role of a fictional subversive to show how the actions of liberals and labor leaders would lead to an eventual Communist takeover.Footnote ⁷⁴ “To destroy America,” the narrator speculated that he would first “foment strikes and create just as much industrial confusion and uncertainty as possible”; next, he “would try to prove Private Enterprise a failure”; and finally, he would “boost all wasteful appropriation bills … and teach people to expect something for nothing from government.”Footnote ⁷⁵

For a time, Perfect Circle showed a remarkable commitment to its campaign in defense of free enterprise. Its most elaborate effort came through its participation in the national “Freedom Forum,” founded with a $300,000 grant from GM head Alfred P. Sloan's philanthropic foundation by rabid anticommunist George Benson, the head of tiny Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas (and the actual author of the “To Destroy America” column). The Freedom Forum was an annual seminar held at Harding College in which corporate managers, school teachers, and civic leaders were exposed to “film showings, lecturers, and literature” that boosted the merits of American capitalism while sounding the familiar warning that the nation was following Great Britain's postwar path to socialism through “the Welfare State here in America.” Several of Perfect Circle white-collar managers attended the 1950 Freedom Forum and then spent the next several months spreading their message across east-central Indiana.Footnote ⁷⁶ To make sure that they received a wide hearing, Perfect Circle's Freedom Forum speakers delivered their presentations to all of the company's employees, who were required by management to attend these mandatory “captive audience” meetings (permitted under the Taft-Hartley Act's “free speech” provision). Reaching out to the broader community, the Freedom Forum's speakers also appeared before fifty-five different civic groups and addressed an additional 4,500 listeners through company-sponsored radio broadcasts.Footnote ⁷⁷

Despite its enthusiastic participation in the Freedom Forum and other propaganda efforts, by 1953 Perfect Circle had all but discarded its public relations campaign, which, by any measure, had proved ineffective at curbing union growth. In February 1951, management first tested its anti-union propaganda campaign when it called for a Taft-Hartley representation election that forced UAW Local 156 at its Hagerstown plant to demonstrate its majority status. In the weeks before the election, Perfect Circle sent letters to workers that encouraged them to abandon the UAW and revive their old company union as an independent entity. As an enticement, management promised to maintain the same grievance, seniority, and job transfer procedures contained in the current UAW contract.Footnote ⁷⁸ Although Local 156 rank-and-file members were then split over two rival leadership factions, they rallied around the UAW during the representation election, with a full sixty-eight percent voting to remain with the union.Footnote ⁷⁹ The UAW handed Perfect Circle management another setback several months later when it won a narrow victory in an NLRB representation election at the Richmond finishing plant, which it followed up the next year with a more convincing victory at the smaller Richmond machine shop, where workers voted to affiliate with the UAW by a two-to-one majority.Footnote ⁸⁰

Following the UAW's twin victories at Richmond, a union contract finally covered workers in all four of Perfect Circle's east-central Indiana plants. But this arrangement would not be a durable one. In fact, 1953 and 1954 were the only two years that anything resembling a postwar accord ever existed between management and labor at Perfect Circle, and one that reflected rank-and-file solidarity rather than management's accommodation with local labor unions. Despite its extensive propaganda campaigns, Perfect Circle had watched the UAW only grow stronger at its east-central Indiana plants as two sides prepared to square off in the 1955 strike. This time, management would effectively neutralize union power by linking the union's mass picketing tactics to the broader claim that all unions constituted an unlawful “monopoly” ruled by shadowy outsiders who sought domination over the small-town heartland.

VI

Much to management's displeasure, UAW members in east-central Indiana had successfully used mass picketing to gain union recognition during their initial organizational drives in the 1930s.Footnote ⁸¹ Prior to the New Deal, management could have relied on local and state authorities to intervene on its side, but from the late 1930s through the end of the Second World War, the UAW benefited from a unique national and local political climate in which government officials, rather than suppressing mass picketing, helped mediate strike settlements that were, in most cases, favorable to the union. In the postwar era, union members in east-central Indiana continued to view mass picketing as a legitimate means of upholding a collective bargaining relationship with their employers.

Not surprisingly, antiunion employers and right-wing intellectuals decried mass picketing as a criminal tactic that served as clear-cut “proof of the existence of a labor monopoly.” Unions that relied on this tactic, according to Chrysler economist and right-wing pamphleteer John W. Scoville, violated the tenets of American individualism through the use of “private armies” that illegally inhibited non-strikers' “free and lawful movement.”Footnote ⁸² By the mid-1950s, faced with the impending AFL-CIO merger and the violence surrounding the Kohler and Square D strikes, employers launched what Elizabeth Fones-Wolf terms “another campaign to capture public opinion and redraw the laws governing labor relations at both the state and federal level.”Footnote ⁸³ Downplaying the notion that unions served as purveyors of “collectivism,” employers and their intellectual allies now warned that “Big Labor” constituted a criminal power that sought nothing less than control of the entire economy and destruction of individual liberty through “compulsory unionism” which organized labor enforced through mass picketing and other coercive tactics.Footnote ⁸⁴

In the east-central Indiana communities where Perfect Circle's plants were located, public opinion about mass picketing, and particularly about the presence of out-of-towners on the picket line, split local residents along sharp social lines. To UAW members, out-of-town picketers were their “brothers and sisters” whose participation demonstrated that their cause reflected broad and reciprocal class solidarities that extended beyond the boundaries of their own communities.Footnote ⁸⁵ To Perfect Circle management, nonstrikers, and the state's conservative press, mass picketing violated the tenets of heartland consensus by signifying an invasion by “menacing” strangers who created an “explosive situation” that threatened civic order in their otherwise “peaceful” villages.Footnote ⁸⁶

During the 1955 strike, the UAW unveiled its mass picketing strategy on the strike's first two days, July 25 and 26, when it effectively shut down Perfect Circle's entire east-central Indiana operations. Local union leaders pinned their hopes of success on the previous actions of Indiana Governor George Craig. A “moderate” Eisenhower Republican who also counted the Teetors among his political supporters, Craig had nevertheless shown restraint toward mass picketing during a 1953 UAW strike at a small kitchen fixtures manufacturer in nearby Connersville, when he ordered the plant closed and then mediated a settlement to the strike.Footnote ⁸⁷ On the fifth day of the Perfect Circle strike, however, Craig, alarmed by a report of an attack on a nonstriker miles away from the picket line, reversed course and used state police troopers to halt mass picketing at the company's Richmond and Hagerstown plants, which forced the UAW to concentrate its efforts at the New Castle foundry. When Perfect Circle management convinced the town's mayor to enforce a court injunction against mass picketing, violence escalated as strikers and their supporters resorted to a campaign of vandalism aimed at both the foundry and nonstrikers' homes. Tensions increased as Perfect Circle management successfully stonewalled both federal and state labor mediators' efforts to negotiate a strike settlement. Following each aborted negotiating session, the UAW retaliated by resuming its mass picketing at the foundry, leading to a series of mass arrests. This pattern repeated itself for several weeks before culminating with the shootout at the foundry in October 5, after which Craig used the Indiana National Guard to impose martial law throughout the strike area. By this time, strikers began trickling back to the Hagerstown and Richmond plants, where, in a subsequent NLRB decertification election, they overwhelmingly voted to oust the UAW. And while the local union at the New Castle foundry managed to survive the strike, it never again displayed its previous militancy.

During the 1955 strike, Perfect Circle's determination to defend the small-town heartland by undercutting the power of local unions did not result in the company's banishment to the fringes of postwar business culture. Indeed, Perfect Circle received widespread support from both the local and regional press, which portrayed the strike as a case of Big Labor invading the small-town American heartland to impose “compulsory unionism” on innocent Hoosiers. Although outside of a few brief scuffles, the UAW maintained what even local law officers noted were orderly picket lines during its first days of mass picketing at Hagerstown, the right-wing Chicago Tribune alarmed readers by reporting that the town's residents had been “terrorized” by “rioting and goon squad violence.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The hometown Hagerstown Exponent likewise declared that the town was beset by a “wave of lawlessness” spurred by “gang leaders” and “out-of-town picketers,” who “swept citizens off the sidewalk” and threatened to overturn cars “on a public street,” creating a climate of civic disorder that had “shocked” the “[c]itizens of peaceful Hagerstown.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Similar stories appeared in the national media after the shootout at the foundry. The probusiness U.S. News and World Report depicted the nonstrikers as heroic heartland rebels, quoting one resident who described the strike as “a revolt of small-town folks who just don't like the UAW's big-city ideas, and its pie-in-the-sky demands.”Footnote ⁹⁰ For his part, Ralph Teetor echoed the theme that mass picketing stood at odds with Perfect Circle's heartland consensus. “You just don't force people to join unions here like you do in the big city,” he told a reporter from the Detroit News. “Things are different down here,” he explained. “I know everybody in Hagerstown and everyone knows me.” Although he lived in a large mansion surrounded by a ten-acre estate, Teetor proudly pointed out that “[t]hree of my closest neighbors work on a production line in our plant.”Footnote ⁹¹

For several years after its conclusion, the Perfect Circle strike resonated in the larger arena of state and national politics as conservatives added it to their indictment that organized labor constituted a criminal monopoly bent on total control of the American economy. In 1957, a coalition of Indiana business groups, with help from the National Right-to-Work Committee, exploited the violence surrounding the Perfect Circle strike and a similar strike at an electrical parts manufacturer in tiny Princeton, Indiana, to convince the state's legislature to pass a right-to-work law that outlawed the union shop, the first such legislation in a heavily-unionized midwestern state.Footnote ⁹²

The next year, conservative members of the US Senate, led by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, pushed for hearings on the Kohler and Perfect Circle strikes as part of the McClellan “Labor Rackets” Committee's investigations into union corruption.Footnote ⁹³ The McClellan hearings provided the then-unknown Goldwater with his first national forum, which he used to denounce UAW member's militancy in the two strikes as “an organized, directed campaign led by imported professional hoodlums who, through mass picketing, terroristic tactics, personal threats, and intimidation sought to achieve their union objectives.” In his minority report, Goldwater and the McClellan Committee's three other GOP conservatives sounded the familiar theme of unions' threat to heartland consensus, claiming that the “communities involved in these labor disturbances were actually under siege as though invaded by foreign mercenaries. … arm-locked professional goons and thugs employed and imported by the UAW to enforce its dictates.”Footnote ⁹⁴

By the late-1950s, raising the specter of a corrupt union monopoly that stood in violation of small-town sensibilities now served as employers' favorite anti-labor tactic, and helped hasten the passage of the 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act, which limited labor protest tactics while subjecting union internal affairs to strict government oversight.Footnote ⁹⁵ But such legislative action failed to pacify heartland workers or create a stable collective bargaining regime. Violent strikes at small- and medium-sized competitive sector firms, eerily similar to the 1955 Perfect Circle strike, continued to erupt in the heartland throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s.Footnote ⁹⁶ At the same time, such large oligopolistic firms as General Electric and US Steel began displaying increasing belligerency and provoked bitter strikes by the unions in their plants.Footnote ⁹⁷ Even workers at Perfect Circle's Hagerstown plant exhibited renewed militancy. When the Teetors violated their own principle of local ownership and sold the company to the multinational Dana Corporation in 1963, Hagerstown workers voted to reaffiliate with the UAW, launched several wildcat strikes, and joined other Indiana unions in uniting to overturn the state's “right-to-work” law in 1965.Footnote ⁹⁸

In the end, however, the depth of the postwar business assault on labor left a deep and lasting historical legacy. The ultimate weakening of unionism in the small-town Midwest allowed conservatives to craft a historical narrative that now portrays the industrial heartland as a bastion of traditional “red state” values, the “embodiment of the authentic American tradition of self-reliance, family values, and community spirit,” while erasing its long history of class conflict.Footnote ⁹⁹

The postwar business assault on labor also modifies prevailing historical accounts of the rise of the New Right, which typically credit its origins to an elite intellectual movement, a conservative student uprising, or a grassroots struggle by Sun Belt suburbanites.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Such interpretations ignore the formative role played by antilabor heartland employers, such as Perfect Circle, Kohler, and the Allen-Bradley Company, the Milwaukee-based electronics manufacturer that funneled millions of dollars to free-market “think tanks” through the auspices of its Bradley Foundation.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Antilabor intellectuals in the heartland also contributed to conservatives' takeover of the Republican party. As Rick Perlstein has shown, Clarence Manion, the Indiana-based antilabor and antiliberal advocate, was so impressed by Barry Goldwater's performance in the McClellan Committee hearings that he handpicked the Arizona Senator to run for the 1960 Republican party presidential nomination, a prelude to his successful bid four years later. (Needless to say, one of Goldwater's first political benefactors was conservative newspaper mogul Eugene Pulliam, whose chain of Indiana newspapers enthusiastically supported Perfect Circle during in the 1955 strike.)Footnote ¹⁰²

Finally, those same policy groups that Perfect Circle relied on for its antiunion propaganda material also played a crucial role in organizing grassroots conservatism in the Sun Belt suburbs. In the early 1960s, Benson's Freedom Forum allied with anticommunist crusader Fred Schwartz, who won recruits in the Orange County suburbs by shifting the Forum's focus away from the evils of labor unions and toward such cultural issues as purging schools of “godless Communism” or urging the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren.Footnote ¹⁰³ But while the New Right may have first emerged as a mass movement in the sunny suburbs of California, its roots lay in the much grimmer labor history of the industrial heartland.