There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Vows were made at a San Francisco AFL gathering in 1934 to take steps toward industrial organizing. But the lack of follow-up led Lewis, at an AFL convention in Atlantic City the next year, to accuse the leadership of reneging on “the promissory note that this Federation held out [at San Francisco] to the millions of workers in the mass-production industry.”59 Lewis counted among his supporters for a new direction Hillman of the ACW, Charles P. Howard of the Typographical Union, David Dubinsky of the ILGWU, and Philip Murray, Lewis’s right-hand man at the UMW.

  Lewis, pivoting on the AFL’s broken promises from San Francisco, waged a strident campaign at the Atlantic City convention, demanding in soaring words that the AFL deacons “heed this cry” that “comes from the hearts of men,” to “organize the unorganized and in doing so make the American Federation of Labor the greatest instrument that has ever been forged in the history of modern civilization to befriend the cause of humanity.” On the AFL’s response, he warned, rested the organization’s fate.60 In a convention-wide vote, however, the old craft ways held firm against industrial unionism by a substantial margin. As the Lewis forces continued to try to raise the issue for debate, William L. Hutcheson of the carpenters’ union (whom the journalist I. F. Stone once described as “a six-foot oaf”) moved to suppress further discussion.61 Lewis challenged the parliamentary maneuver. Hutcheson then called Lewis a “bastard,” prompting Lewis to jump over a row of chairs and punch Hutcheson in the side of the head, knocking him against a table. The carpenters’ chief was led away by friends to wash the blood from his face while Lewis, according to a witness, “casually adjusted his tie and collar, relit his cigar, and sauntered slowly through the crowded aisles to the rostrum.” The rift tearing apart the AFL could not have been better illustrated; the sound of Lewis’s punch, it was said, “resonated through the working class.”62

  A split in the AFL now appeared inevitable. The next day those favoring organizing along industrial lines—Lewis, Hillman, Dubinsky, joined by a half-dozen others—caucused and established a Committee for Industrial Organization; soon after, on November 23, 1935, Lewis resigned his office as AFL vice president. The announcement was covered extensively by the press, Lewis taking advantage of the limelight to expound on his theory that only unionism that addressed current realities would allow America to recover from the Depression without recourse to the extremes of Fascism or other forms of dictatorship.

  In January 1936 the nascent CIO made one last appeal to the AFL to charter industrial unions. Far from responding favorably, the AFL demanded that the CIO, still formally a committee of the AFL, disband at once. Lewis informed the members of the AFL executive council that he would see them “wearing asbestos suits in hell” before he would surrender his breakaway group.63 The matter simmered for several months until late summer 1936, when the AFL suspended the ten unions that had affiliated with the CIO; in March 1937 they were formally expelled.

  It was Lewis and his CIO, however, who had read the trends most astutely, for the appeal of the industrial approach, if anything, had only gained in strength. Previously nonunionized workers flooded into the CIO, while Lewis emerged as perhaps America’s best-known labor leader. His public appearances across the nation’s industrial heartland drew on his theatrical background. “In places like Detroit and Akron,” recounts labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan, “he would speak with his own thunder, at huge open-air rallies of workers, roaring like Lear into the wind and rain, and denouncing Wall Street and the AFL, both of them, with Bible-type blasts, in the cadence of King James, and bringing to it all the grandeur and majesty of the English stage.”64 Such was the enthusiasm for Lewis that those who could not gain admittance to his appearances frequently waited outside as he spoke; one group at a labor convention was so smitten it followed him into a men’s room and stood by while he urinated.65

  In leading the cause of industrial unionism out of the AFL, Lewis had fired the aspirations of working people in ways even he probably didn’t expect, for he had not only offered a superior means to confront capital but had attacked big labor as well, and in championing industrial organization he won the support of the Communists, then perhaps the best organizers in the country; after some hesitation, Communist-led unions departed the AFL to join the CIO. At the same time Lewis’s close working relationship with Roosevelt positioned him as a father of the New Deal, saving capitalism and democracy, as well as adjusting the nation’s economy so as to benefit workers. The importance of his multifaceted role was not lost on his admirers. It is difficult today to imagine Lewis’s popularity during the Depression and war years; radio addresses by the so-called President of the Workingman drew tens of millions of listeners; his observations, and his advice or criticism of the AFL, Congress, or the White House, were avidly read. As aide Lee Pressman later said, when Lewis pronounced the words “United Mine Workers of America,” he somehow made it sound more important that if he had said “United States of America.”66 It seemed in no way incongruous when Lewis had the insignia on his UMW stationery designed to resemble that of the presidential seal.

  Within months the CIO’s 3.7 million members surpassed the AFL’s 3.4 million. Such figures have long suggested to labor historians the significant opportunity for American labor that had been lost in the AFL-CIO split. Had the groups managed to forge an alliance, the resulting organization would have stood as a truly national labor contingent of almost limitless authority. In retrospect, the AFL’s inability to adapt to and embrace the industrial organizing around which the CIO was founded appears pointlessly shortsighted, particularly because, unlike previous union movements accepting of unskilled workers, such as the Knights of Labor or the IWW, the CIO was for the most part faithful to the AFL’s basic creed. It was neither utopian nor an advocate of revolutionary change, but sought only enhanced conditions for the nation’s laborers; its greater idealism showed in its inclusiveness toward blacks, women, Communists, and immigrants, but it was fundamentally a hardheaded labor organization focused, as the AFL had long been, on improving workers’ lives through practical means.

  THE TOLEDO, SAN FRANCISCO, and Minneapolis actions offered convincing proof that labor was keen to organize along the lines suggested by the NIRA’s Section 7(a), and that it was capable of mounting massive, disciplined strike actions. But there was clearly more work for the federal government to do. Unions were stymied in many instances by employers’ skill at thwarting the rights entailed in the law. One of the more outlandish examples appeared in the textile strike of 1934. Inspired by the enactment of the NIRA, membership in the United Textile Workers had exploded between September 1933 and August 1934—increasing from 40,000 to 270,000. This had come as a surprise and delight to Northern labor New Dealers, for the South—through state “right to work laws,” racial exclusion in trade unions, and a rigidly unified regional culture—had long suppressed union organizing. But textile mill owners were not going to concede easily, nor buckle under to the fair labor practices codes of the National Recovery Administration (NRA). They ignored the NRA strictures by “code chiseling”—manipulating the regulations so as to force greater production from workers, or setting production standards so high that they were then freed to terminate older workers and women who couldn’t meet their quotas. In response to such sleight of hand, and also in reaction to the Southern mills’ disregard for minimum wage and collective bargaining reforms, the UTW called a strike for September 3, 1934, demanding union recognition, humane production levels, and a thirty-hour week.

  Beginning with a walkout by employees at Spindale, North Carolina, and facilitated by “flying squadrons” of strikers in pickup trucks and jalopy automobiles who tore through back roads to outlying mill sites to urge on the revolt, 376,000 textile workers abandoned their machines at mills extending up the East Coast as far as Maine; it stood, at the time, as the largest strike in U.S. history. The years of pent-up frustration and suffering were evident as men, women, and children took to the streets of long-sleepy village
s to march, picket, and threaten the bosses, as well as the store owners and property owners who had long deprived them of their meager pay. At Honea Path, South Carolina, heavily armed and trigger-happy “deputies” fought back, killing seven strikers. In neighboring Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge declared martial law, terming the strike the worst trouble to hit the region since Reconstruction.

  The mill hands believed they had a powerful ally in the NRA and the president, one worker terming Roosevelt “the first man in the White House to understand that my boss is a son of a bitch.” It was to their great disappointment then that the Roosevelt administration reacted hesitantly, seemingly fearful of alienating the Southern congressmen whose support was essential for New Deal legislation.67 The president asked the strikers to return to their jobs and vowed the appointment of a mediation board to examine their grievances, but this body did little more than request further study of the issues. By September 22, their worksites hemmed in by soldiers and police, most of the strikers had obeyed Roosevelt’s request. They not only were left to resume their jobs with none of their demands realized, many were forced to sign no-strike pledges. The defeat of the strike and the sense of abandonment by the federal government inhibited labor organizing in the South for decades.

  At the same time, companies everywhere were finding some of the more than seven hundred NRA rules governing all aspects of their businesses unwieldy; the codes had begun to be challenged in courtrooms across the country. Eventually, in May 1935, the question of their constitutionality came before the U.S. Supreme Court in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States. The case involved the A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corporation, a Brooklyn chicken slaughtering and retailing concern run by several brothers. The Schechters had appealed a lower court verdict that found them guilty of violating the wage and hour restrictions of the NRA code governing their employees, as well as rules about how wholesale customers selected the birds they wished to purchase. Among the charges, the brothers were accused of selling a chicken whose condition violated public health restrictions, causing the court action to become known as the “sick chicken case.” The appellants argued that while the chickens they sold came from another state, they had bought them from a middleman in New York and thus were engaged solely in intrastate, not interstate, commerce; hence the operation of their business was not subject to federal regulation.68 This line of attack sought to void the NIRA’s basic premise—that Congress, based on the Constitution’s commerce clause, possessed the authority to adjust and reform features of the nation’s economic, trade, and labor policies. The underlying issue, of course, was whether the Roosevelt administration, even given the extraordinary circumstances of the Depression, had the right to dictate how and in what manner an individual operated his or her business.

  By unanimous vote, the Court in Schechter declared the NIRA, including Section 7(a), unconstitutional. The ruling was clearly a conservative interpretation, an expression of the judiciary’s weariness with the codes and the many complaints they had prompted; it was a severe setback for the New Deal, for it implied that the administration lacked the right to address the ailing economy through acts of Congress. Roosevelt was furious at what he called the Court’s “horse and buggy” interpretation of the Constitution. To the president and his policy makers it was an article of faith that the interconnectedness of American life and commerce was what made sweeping reforms necessary; “a nation-wide problem demands a nation-wide remedy,” he had said.69

  Riding to the rescue was Senator Wagner. An alien-born citizen, the New Yorker could not aspire to advance in politics beyond the U.S. Senate, unlike his former Tammany colleague Al Smith, who had run for president in 1928. Instead, Wagner had taken on a role as the New Deal’s driving force in Congress, helping to parent the Social Security Act, the Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Certainly the New Deal had other paladins on Capitol Hill, such as Senator Robert La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin and Congressman George W. Norris of Nebraska, but Wagner, as I. F. Stone wrote, “knew what it was to live in a slum basement, to eat stale rolls, to sell papers on icy street corners.” While similarly gifted men sought affluence or privilege (or in Smith’s case, questioned the New Deal), Wagner remained “the champion of the underprivileged,” dedicated to “one task … that is to raise the living standards of the lower-income groups in our society.”70 As he told the Senate Finance Committee in early 1933, “We are not in a mere business recession. We are in a life and death struggle with the forces of social and economic dissolution.”71 So great was his fervor that at times it seemed not so much a case of Wagner falling in line with the New Deal, as the New Deal coming to resemble Wagner.

  He had been irritated by the devices employers came up with to evade the meaning of Section 7(a), and by the Schechter ruling, but as it had long been expected that the NIRA would be assaulted in court, Wagner and his aides had already developed legislation to clarify and buttress the New Deal’s pro-labor provisions. Working with Leon Keyserling, his economic adviser; William Leiserson of Columbia University; and Sidney Hillman’s garment-industry colleague Isador Lubin, Wagner in 1934 introduced a new bill to clarify the government’s powers of enforcement, chiefly by requiring employers to bargain with the labor representatives chosen by workers and to streamline the methods of the federal government in safeguarding those choices. “Section 7(a) was written by Congress to protect the weak who could not protect themselves, and it was intended for universal application, not universal modification,” Wagner told the Senate.72 He took special aim at company unions, saying, “Collective bargaining becomes a mockery when the spokesman of the employee is the marionette of the employer.” While not endorsing the closed shop outright, he allowed as to how it might be warranted in particular situations; above all he insisted that the right to collective bargaining must be free of trickery or restraint:

  Business men are being allowed to pool their information and experience in vast trade associations in order to make a concerted drive against the evil features of modern industrialism. If employees are denied similar privileges, they not only are unable to uphold their end of the labor bargain but, in addition, they cannot cope with any issues that transcend the boundaries of a single business. And under modern industrial conditions problems of wages and hours are regional or even national in scope.73

  What Wagner grasped more fully than some of his colleagues was that the New Deal attainment of “collective bargaining” was code for much more than the right to negotiate with an employer; it was the fulfillment of the Progressive ideal of industrial democracy, allowing the Constitution at last to enter the workplace. “The responsibilities and expectations of American citizens—due process, free speech, the right of assembly and petition,” suggests historian Nelson Lichtenstein, “would now find their place in factory, mill, and office. A civil society would be constructed within the very womb of the privately held enterprise.”74

  The legislation Wagner brought before Congress, soon to be known as the National Labor Relations Act or simply the Wagner Act, sought to put teeth in the New Deal’s guarantees to labor. It forbade employer interference with union organizing, banned employer-supported company unions, prohibited any firing of men for union membership, and insisted that employers enter into collective bargaining with the representatives of the union backed by a majority of a company’s workers as demonstrated by their votes. The bill also endowed an administrative government board—soon to be known as the National Labor Relations Board—that would determine union legitimacy through on-site elections, thus enabling employers to know they were dealing with a union supported by a majority of workers; at the same time the provision meant employers would not be able to delay bargaining by claiming instead of denying that a particular labor organization did not truly represent employees.

  The bill had some influential friends, such as Lincoln Filene, the Boston retailer and industrial relations reformer whose Twentieth Century Fund had issued a report
proposing some of the same solutions. Filene used his status as a prominent employer to speak directly to those of his business peers who had dragged their heels on 7(a). Infuriated by “the average cupidity and narrow-mindedness of his fellow businessmen,” writes historian Steven Fraser, Filene “began delivering scathingly sarcastic tirades against their anachronistic fondness for the ethos of frugality, their inability to formulate anything but the most immediately selfish policies, and a provincialism he warned would lead to revolution, a grim prospect to be avoided only by encouraging industrial unionism on a nationwide scale.”75

  Despite Filene’s strong words to his business cohorts and Wagner’s strenuous advocacy, both President Roosevelt and Labor Secretary Perkins had reservations about the legislation. Perkins worried, as the fate of the NRA codes in the run-up to Schechter suggested, that legislation designed to force employers to behave a certain way would not be effective; she had begun to think of changing capital’s attitude toward labor’s rights as an “educational process” that might take years. Wagner, on the other hand, felt duty-bound to go to bat for workers but also for those employers who had willingly accepted 7(a), who had been “good citizens” and had tried to work with unions; to abandon the effort now would be to reward those very firms that had stalled and been the least helpful.76 Perkins did come to see that unions and labor leaders such as the AFL’s William Green were willing to give Wagner’s legislation their support, which surprised her. She had “felt sure labor would object [to it], for

  the recognition of a union under the [Act] would depend upon the counting of noses. A labor union would have to prove it had the backing of a majority of workers in a plant. This was certainly new doctrine in 1934. It had not been AFL policy in the past to count noses before a committee went in to see the boss to demand better wages, hours, working conditions. No labor union had ever asked a government board to tell it whether they could represent [employees]. That was the union leader’s judgment. Closed shops had been gained by bold methods at times. This bill would make that impossible.”77