There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Roosevelt, like Perkins, was not committed at first to the legislation; for one thing, the bill seemed “remedial,” addressing the shortcomings in Section 7(a); it fell short of the far more comprehensive ethical code of labor-industrial relations the White House had once imagined as its goal. The president also feared the Wagner legislation would meet a fate identical to 7(a), and arouse fresh hostility from business. In any case, with Wagner himself having donned full armor to force a path for his bill, Perkins and the president had the luxury of watching intently from the sidelines as the Senate took up the matter in spring 1935. Roosevelt became more supportive of the measure once it became clear the Supreme Court would invalidate the NIRA in Schecter.78

  The debate over the bill in Congress was involved, for like seminal disputes about labor’s status dating back to Commonwealth v. Hunt, it asked the fundamental question of who a worker was to be in America’s industrial society—a cog, a partner, an investor—and how much power he should be given. Advocates of the Wagner bill emphasized that only collective bargaining and the right to organize would secure working people a place in a democratic society; allowing them a protected means for the expression of their discontent was the kind of policy that distinguished America from societies that suppressed such freedom, and would pay back the nation in dividends of labor peace. Business, through its traditional defenders in Congress, saw the rights embedded in Wagner as representing an unpalatable intrusion into the nation’s capitalist system, granting far too much say to those who were neither businessmen nor stockholders.

  The Senate Labor Committee reported favorably on the bill on May 2; on May 15 Wagner delivered a powerful address in the Senate, reassuring his colleagues that “the pending bill is designed merely to apply to industry generally the benefits of our rich American experience. While it has been branded radical by some and ultraconservative by others, every one of its principles has been sanctioned by a long train of laws of Congress,” an allusion to the Clayton, Norris–La Guardia, and National Industrial Recovery acts. “[It] is responsive to the ominous industrial disturbances of last summer, when blood ran freely in the streets and martial law was in the offing, [and] appeals to the conscience and intelligence of all those who know the history of our country and are imbued with its high ideals.”79 Wagner continued to coax votes and the next day—with the measure appearing to be riding “on greased skids”—the bill passed by a count of 62–12.80

  There were several reasons for the speed with which the legislation won approval, beginning with the fact that Senator Wagner by then was associated with a number of successful New Deal programs and enjoyed considerable sway in the Senate. With the NIRA having just been dispensed with, and the lack of any agreement to extend its protections, there was also no doubt a sense among many senators that a vote for the Wagner Act was required to soothe voter anxiety or resentment. Another factor was that members of Congress opposed to Roosevelt’s reforms were eager for the current, mostly conservative Supreme Court to have a chance to sit in judgment of the Wagner Act and other disputed New Deal programs before the president liberalized its bench with his own appointments. Thus it was in their interest to “put no particular legislative obstacles” in the way. “Several members of the court are old men,” noted the New York Times, “and the next few months may bring great changes. If those changes come, the majority mind of the court inevitably will turn more sympathetically to the objectives of the administration.”81 It was precisely this eventuality that the congressional conservatives wished to avoid. The bill passed the House, the president signing it into law on July 5, 1935.

  THE NEW DEAL DREW organized labor in from the fringes. Not every program worked, business continued to fuss and grumble, but the era’s sustained attitude of government concern had the effect of enshrining the concepts of labor organization and workers’ rights as integral to the maintenance of democracy. Particularly against the frightening rise of European Fascism and the ever-present fear of totalitarian Communism, the homegrown American labor organization appeared to have won some semblance of a place in society and to have shed the historic stigma of radical “otherness.” Labor, historically wary of entanglements with major party politics, adjusted to its new status by becoming more politically involved, for it now had compelling reasons to do so.

  The romance bloomed fully in the election year of 1936. Labor was determined to safeguard advances already delivered and those yet to be attained. The administration and the Democratic Party wanted to win reelection convincingly in order to validate the New Deal, as many of the president’s policies remained under fire from conservative forces. All allies, all who had benefited from the Roosevelt program, were urged to pitch in, labor’s involvement replacing, to an extent, the former influence of the big-city political machines, whose power had begun to wane.82 As the election neared—Roosevelt’s opponent was Republican Alf Landon, governor of Kansas—the incumbent became more confident of victory, but feared winning by so narrow a margin that his program of reforms would be handicapped by the lack of an overriding mandate.

  Senator Wagner again played a key role, giving a series of nationally broadcast radio talks that hailed the accomplishments of the New Deal; he also supervised the writing of the Democratic platform, which itself was an eloquent restating of the administration’s vision. The preamble echoed the Declaration of Independence, setting forth “self-evident truths” regarding a modern government’s “obligations to its citizens,” including the importance of home and family, the creation of “a democracy of opportunity” for all citizens, and the need to assist those “overtaken by disaster.” It vowed that the Democratic Party would “continue to use the powers of government to end the activities of the malefactors of great wealth who defraud and exploit the people,” while reminding readers that the party had “given the army of America’s industrial workers something more substantial than the Republicans’ dinner pail full of promises.

  “The worker has been returned to the road to freedom and prosperity,” the platform vowed. “We will keep him on that road.”83 The document took care to flatter both labor and capital by suggesting that their respective wisdom and restraint would ultimately limit the need for government interference.

  John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman contributed to the campaign by creating the Non-Partisan League, a labor entity designed to aid Roosevelt’s reelection yet not formally affiliated with the Democratic Party. They were also involved in a New York–based splinter group, the American Labor Party, which worked to bring Socialist and independent voters in line behind the president. “American labor will keep faith with the president next November as the president has kept faith with American labor,” Hillman assured.84 Lewis, always unpredictable and reserving the right to criticize, nonetheless offered Roosevelt his and the UMW’s hearty endorsement. The UMW also gave the reelection effort a $500,000 donation, while the CIO chipped in with loans, contributions, and other in-kind support.

  ROOSEVELT WAS REELECTED with the help of a massive voter turnout from organized labor, and began 1937 with the mandate he’d sought from the American people as well as Democratic control of both houses of Congress. One of his first acts brimmed with the superior confidence gained from so heartening a victory: on February 5, 1937, he set out to conquer the last obstacle to his administration’s economic program: the United States Supreme Court. The high court had thwarted him not only in Schechter, which had voided the NIRA, but also in United States v. Butler, which had declared unconstitutional the Agricultural Readjustment Act of 1933, an effort to manage the nation’s farm economy by reimbursing farmers to limit crop production. Roosevelt seethed that the needs of the American people, and the ability of the president to regulate commerce, were being undermined by “the private, social philosophy” of the majestic, and unfortunately traditionalist, figures who sat with lifetime appointments on the Supreme Court.85 His hubristic proposal to address this annoyance, the Judiciary Reorganization Bill, or as it was know
n by critics, “Roosevelt’s court-packing plan,” was to expand the Court’s membership in order to alter its present unadventurous majority. Using the rationale that the justices were too few and too old to keep up with the obligations of their docket, the president proposed that a new justice be added to the Court for each existing justice who had served ten years and did not resign or retire within six months of reaching seventy years of age.

  Conservatives pounced on so transparent a scheme. Even many Democrats were dubious about the idea, including the stalwart Senator Wagner, himself a former judge who cherished the ideal of the bench’s independence from politics. Press and public alike also seemed uneasy, concerned that the plot was overbearing, even dictatorial. No less a personage than Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes publicly contradicted Roosevelt’s claim that the Court was overwhelmed by its docket.

  Roosevelt’s Court-restructuring bill died in the Senate Judiciary Committee in July, and a House version also failed to advance, the defeat suggesting the limits of an otherwise popular president’s influence; the Court, however, did soon show itself to be more accommodating of the administration’s wishes, a turnabout that came just in time to preserve the constitutional justification for the Wagner Act.

  In Schechter the Court had drawn a narrow interpretation of the scope of the Constitution’s commerce clause, ruling that the NIRA and its Section 7(a) could not be applied broadly as it only affected businesses literally engaged in interstate commerce. Employers had cherished the hope that the Wagner Act would be dismissed on similar grounds. But on April 12, 1937, the Wagner Act was found constitutional in a series of rulings, especially National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. The Court reversed itself on two main points formerly invoked to thwart pro-labor legislation—that labor disputes were a private matter because of the liberty of contract protection of the due process clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments, and the objection that such matters could not be legislated by Congress under the commerce clause. Regarding the question of liberty of contract—whether the Wagner Act’s empowerment of workers’ organizing power constituted an unfair restraint on business—the Court ruled that workers “have as clear a right to organize and select their representatives for law purposes as the [employer] has to organize its business and select its own officers and agents.”86 The Court was also willing to cede that labor union battles were not merely local affairs, as it had previously, but that their ramifications impacted the national economy, and thus Congress had the right to address them with appropriate legislation. The key to the Court’s reversal in the narrow 5–4 vote in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones was the changed opinions of Chief Justice Hughes and Justice Owen Roberts, a shift some observers attributed to the effect of Roosevelt’s threatened restructuring.

  Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson later said that he thought the real reason behind the Court’s change of heart on the Roosevelt administration’s economic program may have been tied to the president’s overwhelming reelection in 1936, which some of the justices, like Roosevelt himself, were willing to see as an affirming national referendum on the New Deal:

  I think that the Court in the early days had felt that the New Deal was a sporadic and passing thing; that the people of the country hadn’t really in 1932 given a mandate for it. I think that when the 1936 election came about, [justices] felt that such measures were a real-felt necessity on the part of the people of the country and that the Court ought not to strive to support objections to it.87

  Whatever the Court’s motivations, the successful validation of the Wagner Act became one of numerous second-term New Deal victories for Roosevelt. An important corollary to the Wagner Act was the administration’s effort to tackle the era’s staggering unemployment by creating jobs through the Civil Works Administration and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. These programs represented a significant political as well as cultural turnabout, overthrowing the long-reigning sentiment that inhibited government from helping provide people in need a means of making a living. Insomuch as the president and his aides grappled with this ethical readjustment, they did so by inverting the long-fixed dynamic of rugged individualism without negating the sacred matter of self-reliance. Such a value was so central to individual Americans, they pointed out, the nation would never fully recover until workers regained their self-respect. This would result from their having meaningful work, fairly paid. They must be given a chance to stand again on their own two feet.

  Reengineering the government’s relationship with America’s working people remained a priority. The movement for some kind of government-assured old-age pension had been around since the Progressive era, and Frances Perkins, while industrial commissioner of New York State, had advocated the idea in 1930 to then-governor Roosevelt along with the need for unemployment insurance. The state of Wisconsin had in 1932 enacted unemployment and retirement compensation, and the former muckraker Upton Sinclair ran a surprisingly popular campaign for governor of California in 1934 championing a $50-per-month old-age pension. From the California community of Long Beach emerged the unique grassroots phenomenon known as Townsend Clubs, named for physician Francis Townsend, a crusade that convened in religious revival-style gatherings across the nation, urging a federal stipend of $200 per month to senior citizens.

  Perkins had traveled to England to study that nation’s unemployment compensation methods and returned speaking well of them, although she suggested that any such programs in America be automated, avoiding the mountainous paperwork created by the British system. To counter the expected constitutional challenges to unemployment insurance and old-age pensions, she acted on a suggestion made by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis that the unemployment provision be supported not by direct taxation but rather by employee and employer contributions to state reserves designated for this purpose.88 The Social Security Act, an “epochal development in the history of a nation so long wedded to laissez-faire concepts of the role of government in economic and social matters,”89 was signed into law in August 1935, providing a system of insurance for workers once they had attained age sixty-five, and benefits to support surviving children and spouses of workers who died at a younger age.

  While the Wagner Act had addressed the need for unions to be able to organize and bargain collectively, the administration also sought more directly to affect the questions of wages and working conditions. The Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act of 1936 standardized the forty-hour week and minimum wages for employees of government contractors, and prohibited the employment of children. The idea behind the act, which was strongly supported by Perkins, was that reduced hours would motivate employers to hire more workers, while increased wages would give workers more consumer power. But when the administration sought to expand the Walsh-Healey standards to all American workplaces, there were warnings that the Supreme Court would block it on constitutional grounds.90 Congress was slow in moving on the legislation, so the president called the body into special session, stressing the need to enlarge the spending power of the average worker by giving him a fair consistent wage and rational hours of work that did not sap his lifeblood. The Fair Labor Standards Act passed in May–June 1938, creating a 25-cent-per-hour minimum wage (which would be increased to 40 cents per hour within seven years), a forty-four-hour workweek that would decrease to a forty-hour week within three years, and a ban on the employment of children under the age of sixteen. By now the complexion of the Court had changed somewhat, with two justices voluntarily retiring (perhaps in response to newly passed legislation guaranteeing their pensions), and the act was upheld as constitutional in the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in United States v. Darby Lumber Co. in 1941. A number of other forthcoming rulings by the high court also benefited labor, such as Thornhill v. Alabama (1940), in which the right of peaceful picketing was upheld as an expression of free speech.

  IN LATE 1936 THE UNITED AUTO WORKERS, which had departed the AFL for the more militant CIO,
sought recognition from the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford. Of the three, GM, whose main plants were in Flint, Michigan, was the biggest; indeed, it was the most profitable company in America and the dominant force in automobiles, employing 262,000 of the 400,000 workers in the industry. Its fifty-seven plants scattered across North America manufactured over 2 million cars and trucks each year.91

  The UAW found GM’s response to its quest disappointing—an assurance from GM vice president William S. Knudson that, in lieu of an exclusive collective bargaining agreement with the union, individual GM plant managers would be glad to deal with outstanding employee grievances. The UAW president was Homer S. Martin, an ordained Baptist minister known for his passionate speeches on behalf of autoworkers’ rights but little respected as a labor negotiator. Martin’s well-known nickname, “The Leaping Parson,” an allusion to the National Hop, Step, and Jump championship he had won as a young man, doubtless contributed to the difficulty Martin had being taken seriously at the negotiating table, along with his penchant for wandering off to take in a movie when the pressures of his job grew too strenuous.

  CIO chief Lewis, suspecting that Martin would not be able to deal effectively with GM, asked for a national conference between GM and the UAW, but GM president Alfred Sloan adhered to the terms of Knudson’s offer, refusing to recognize the UAW, although he did discuss the matter with Labor Secretary Perkins. Sloan drew some of his confidence that GM could hold out against any UAW labor action because Flint had long been a company town—its workers, elected officials, and even its daily press loyal to the town’s majority employer. As a disturbing sign of the uphill battle the UAW faced, some Flint autoworkers had gone so far as to join the Black Legion, a right-wing paramilitary group that resisted the influence of unions generally and was known to target immigrants and blacks who competed for “American jobs” or seemed otherwise intrusive.92 Against this conservative intransigence the UAW did benefit from the presence among the Flint movement’s leaders of veteran Communist organizers, bringing a degree of militancy to the operation both within and outside the walls of GM’s plants