by Philip Dray
“My stock in trade is being the ogre. That’s how I make my way,” Lewis once confided to an associate,3 and conservatives were only too glad to bestow upon Lewis the monstrous caricature of big labor over-endowed with influence and privilege. After the declaration of war, the UMW boss had suspended his opposition to U.S. military involvement and toned down his antagonism for the president. In late 1942, however, he returned to form, angrily voicing his miners’ resentment at having to shoulder the war’s crushing demand for coal. Due to his peculiar and very public disavowal of Roosevelt in the election of 1940, Lewis was now viewed skeptically by many Americans, which was unfortunate, in that his perception that miners had been dealt a bad hand was not entirely off base. Expanded production meant that miners worked longer, often punishing schedules; as a result, the rate of workplace deaths and injuries multiplied. Miners stricken in war production, Lewis believed, were no different from soldiers wounded at the front.
Building on rank-and-file resentment evident in a series of coalfield wildcat strikes that began in January 1943, Lewis announced his willingness to fight. When in April 1943 the contract between the UMW and coal operators came up for renewal, Lewis sought a $2-per-day increase for miners plus an added form of compensation, known as portal-to-portal pay, to cover the time miners spent getting to the mine face underground. Calling no formal strike (in observation of the no-strike pledge), Lewis nonetheless shunned the meetings called by the War Labor Board to examine the situation and announced that UMW miners would not enter coal owners’ property in the absence of a contract. On May 2, Roosevelt ordered a government takeover of the mines and went on radio to ask the miners to go back to work for the nation’s good. Representative William M. Colmer of Mississippi, echoing the president’s concern, declared, “Without coal you cannot make steel and without steel you cannot make ships and planes and tanks and guns.”4 While newspapers and even government were probably exaggerating the likelihood that the nation would run out of coal, the administration’s more genuine fear was that Lewis’s antics and his defiance of the no-strike pledge would leach over into other defense industries.5
The situation infuriated the coal operators, who were stuck with the government’s possession of their mines even as no coal was being extracted from the ground. Eventually Lewis agreed to a six-month wait-and-see period and ordered miners back to work, although some rebellious UMW members continued to stage walkouts. In the end, Lewis won for the miners a $1.50-per-day wage increase, higher than the Little Steel formula allowed. Thus the strike ended, but with considerable bad publicity for Lewis, the UMW, and the labor movement generally. The New Republic excoriated “Lewis the Dictator,” while other publications labeled him a racketeer, a Nazi sympathizer, and a defeatist, recalling his earlier dissent regarding the war.6
Lewis’s experience of being shredded in the press for appearing unhelpful to the dire needs of the war was a problem all organized labor shared. The war’s reigning spirit of public cooperation and sacrifice, its Victory Gardens and rubber and metal drives, made many ordinary union activities, especially strikes and “strike talk,” appear selfish, a form of labor “blackmail.” Soldiers in their foxholes did not go on strike; sailors at sea did not mutiny; pilots did not ground their planes. Who were coal miners, then, to hold up their part of the vital war effort, and for money? A legislative solution proposed by Texas representative Hatton Sumners, who “would not hesitate one split second to enact legislation to send [strikers] to the electric chair,” hinted at the depth of the resentment.7 The bill submitted by Sumners and like-minded forces on Capitol Hill, soon known as the Smith-Connally Act, authorized the president to seize operation of a factory where a strike threatened national security. It mandated a thirty-day cooling-off period before any work stoppage, put criminal penalties in place against those who persisted in urging or leading a strike, and forbade union contributions to political campaigns. This last condition was particularly offensive to labor, as it had used its political muscle to support the New Deal (an example being the UMW’s $500,000 contribution to Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936), and enjoyed “calling in” that debt when useful. Labor also resented, quite understandably, the idea of establishing criminal offenses for strike activities.
Smith-Connally was rightly seen by many editorial pages as drastic legislation designed to punish one man, John L. Lewis, the “stormy petrel of labor.”8 But the bill’s congressional advocates had public opinion on their side. Even Senator Claude Pepper, one of Congress’s staunchest labor allies, had castigated Lewis as “an unscrupulous and sinister figure,” and joined the chorus that sought to curtail what was perceived as Washington’s indulgence of Lewis and other influential union men.9 “For the last decade the government and its agencies have in effect become organizers of unions,” the New York Times concurred, “building them up in size, strength and immunities to the point where they can successfully defy the government itself.”10 The expression of such sentiments signaled a harmful trend of thought—the idea that the excessive generosity of the New Deal was to blame for the current wartime problems with organized labor.
Lewis, it seemed, had handed reactionary forces in Congress a weapon with which they might now deny not only the positive results of wartime production cooperation, which were in fact considerable, but the New Deal’s good works as well. Just as government had acted to empower labor in the 1930s, the momentum could swing the other way, with Smith-Connally hailed as the needed fix, “the first regulatory bill that has breached the bulwark of union resistance in a decade.”11 Union executives, seeing the legislation for what it was, were quick to speak out. The AFL’s William Green cautioned the Roosevelt administration that labor would respond at the polls if the act became law, and along with characterizing the pending bill as “a fascist measure pointed like a revolver at the heart of labor,” reminded reporters that fewer than one-half of one percent of American industrial workers had taken part in a strike since the war’s no-strike pledge had been adopted. Daniel J. Tobin of the Teamsters similarly warned both parties that any “crucifying” of the trade union movement would reverberate loudly in the election of 1944.12
Smith-Connally passed, but Roosevelt had heard labor’s cries and vetoed it. He thought it punitive toward labor unions and not aimed strictly enough at the immediate need to maintain war production. But his counterproposal, that Congress raise the age limit for noncombat military service from forty-five to sixty-five years of age so that workers in vital industries could be drafted, thus voiding the entire worker-union-management system, was widely denounced as unpatriotic: it would turn the honor of wearing the uniform of the nation’s military into a badge of slave labor, even dishonor. In any case, his veto of Smith-Connally was overridden by Congress, and by late June 1943 the War Labor Disputes Act, as the legislation was formally known, had become law.
Within a month labor moved to make real its threats regarding the passage of such deviant legislation. The CIO formed the Political Action Committee (PAC) to energize and focus the labor vote in the elections of 1944. The PAC, led by Sidney Hillman, distributed literature linking the goal of victory in war with the aim of postwar labor policies that would ensure a continuation of New Deal concern for labor’s rights. Hillman’s insight was that labor’s battles were no longer going to be fought strictly at the factory gates or police barricades, but within the nation’s corridors of power. In lieu of an independent labor party, the PAC could serve as a counterbalance to the ever more polished lobbying efforts by nationally powerful corporations and their front groups like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce. “Workers can no longer work out even their most immediate day to day problems through negotiations with their employers,” Hillman explained. “Wages, hours, and working conditions have become increasingly dependent upon policies adopted by Congress and the [government]…. Labor must bring its full influence to bear in shaping these decisions.”13
The PAC’s agenda was no
t simply to see Roosevelt elected to a fourth term, although that was important; it included broader reforms for the postwar era, including investment in public works and public housing, assistance for returning GIs, and publicly subsidized medical insurance. The action group proved surprisingly effective at the grassroots level, managing a strong get-out-the-vote drive directed at women and minorities that was unprecedented for its time. In the Southern primaries it unhorsed several congressional representatives with records of voting against working people’s interests. Perhaps the highest tribute to Hillman’s effort was the reaction it spurred. Time derided the PAC’s campaign material as “the slickest political propaganda produced in the United States in a generation,”14 while others denounced the PAC as part of a plan “to dominate our government with radical and communistic schemes.”15 As ever, it was left to a representative of the state of Mississippi to make the most outrageous charge, Congressman John L. Rankin asserting that Hillman was “a Russian-born racketeer” despised by his fellow Jews, who “wants to be the Hitler of America.”16
The specter of labor or even Jewish “domination” of the president reappeared in the allegation that Roosevelt had granted Hillman say-so over the Democratic Party’s vice presidential pick for the fall 1944 election. When the New York Times’s Arthur Krock wrote that Roosevelt had instructed an aide to “Clear it with Sidney”17 regarding the vice presidential choice, the phrase proved electric, signaling to conservatives the undue authority “alien” labor elements had gained over the nation. “It’s Your Country—Why Let Sidney Hillman Run It?” asked a Republican Party billboard.18 But even if the “Clear it with Sidney” rumor was valid, historian Steven Fraser points out, what Hillman’s purported clout should have suggested was not that labor had become a powerful alien influence at Roosevelt’s shoulder but the exact opposite—that its views were becoming inseparable from those of the political mainstream.19 In the end Roosevelt chose as his running mate the pro-labor but relatively unknown Harry S. Truman, U.S. senator from Missouri, whose career in government had begun in the Depression when Frances Perkins named him to head a public works employment agency.20
LABOR JOINED THE REST OF THE COUNTRY in cheering the war’s end in 1945, sharing fully in the quite palpable relief and rush of national pride that was recalled by one witness as “the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history.”21 The reconversion to a peacetime economy, however, was a challenge the nation would have to face without the man who had guided it through the Depression and the war, for President Roosevelt had died that April while at his summer home in Warm Springs, Georgia.
American workers had suffered badly from the loss of jobs, overtime wages, and bonus pay following the armistice that ended World War I, and the related sharp reduction in full-capacity production. The result had been the widespread labor strife of 1919. Organized labor was determined that no such collapse recur, although it was unclear how the spirit of progress that had governed industrial relations since 1933 would carry over into the postwar era, especially with troubling indicators of reaction such as Smith-Connally already visible. There was much to mourn in Roosevelt’s passing, but from labor’s perspective nothing would be missed more than his fundamental understanding of workers’ value to society, his belief that they deserved an “industrial citizenship” that guaranteed work, security, and democracy, specifically the rights to organize and petition for reforms. He held so great a faith in such a doctrine that he sought to give it permanence in a Second Bill of Rights, which he proposed in his State of the Union address of 1944 and would not live to pursue.
Eyes turned to Harry Truman, Roosevelt’s successor. “Wage increases are imperative to cushion the shock to our workers, to sustain adequate purchasing power and to raise national income,” the new president said of the reconversion. Industry’s handsome wartime profits, he believed, would contribute to what he hoped would be a gradual transition. But the Rooseveltian concern for the nation’s wage earners had become a harder sell. FDR had done his work in the midst of severe economic crisis; labor’s considerable gains had been linked to the urgency of national recovery. Now the situation had changed: American industry, having responded heroically to the demands of wartime production, was ready to flex its power. Labor had had its moment—it had been rewarded amply by the New Deal; now, with the crises of economic trial and global conflict receding, its loyal contribution to the war effort was often overlooked; better remembered were the prominent episodes of wartime strike mischief.22
In November 1945, in an attempt to appease nervousness on either side of the industrial relations divide, Truman followed the example of President Wilson at the conclusion of the First World War and convened a national labor-management conference in Washington. The meeting was looked to for its potential to “lay the groundwork for peace and justice on the home front,” as one senator phrased the objective, much as the recent United Nations gathering in San Francisco had established a foundation “for external peace and justice.”23 Truman greeted the attendees by thanking both sides for their wartime cooperation, but reminded his listeners that in the absence of wartime governmental controls, the future of peaceful labor-management relations, “the whole system of private enterprise and individual opportunity,” now rested on their shoulders.24
Well-dressed executives departing the conclave arm in arm with their scruffier labor counterparts would have made a pleasing news photo, but the response to Truman’s remarks was, on the whole, somewhat listless, and from the round of meetings emerged only statements of goodwill and vague promises to respect collective bargaining. No actual procedures were agreed upon to make labor-management relations function smoothly once wartime restrictions expired. Hearing criticism that he had not shown sufficient initiative in the matter, Truman reacted by asking Congress to consider new legislation based on the Railway Labor Act of 1926, which had outlawed yellow-dog contracts and safeguarded rail and airline workers’ right to form or join a union. Capitol Hill, however, appeared more intent on correcting, not expanding upon, the government’s existing labor policies.
With the irrefutable economics of reconversion at work, and absent any new labor-management protocols or conferences, unrest in America’s workplace was probably inevitable. Strikes became rampant throughout late 1945 and early 1946—in Stamford, Rochester, Pittsburgh, and Oakland—while a nationwide steel walkout in 1946 took four hundred thousand workers off the job, at the time the largest coordinated work stoppage in American history. Not to be left out, the conservatives’ favorite nuisance, John L. Lewis, was soon at it again, seeking wage increases for the UMW as well as the creation of a miners’ welfare fund to which coal operators would contribute. The operators refused Lewis’s entreaties, and on April 1, 1946, tens of thousands of miners abandoned their jobs. Truman had the government seize the mines on May 21, citing coal as an essential resource and claiming the strike had created a national emergency. When the miners refused to work in government-controlled mines, the administration obtained an injunction against the strike; Lewis, citing the supposedly injunction-limiting protections of the Norris–La Guardia Act, openly defied it, and was charged with contempt. This high-stakes standoff wound up before the Supreme Court, which in United States v. United Mine Workers ruled that the protections of Norris–La Guardia had been superseded by the terms of Smith-Connally, and that the government was entitled to seek an injunction where a strike endangered national security.25
Lewis had no choice but to back down, and the miners returned to work, although when Smith-Connally, as a war measure, expired in 1947, the UMW boss renewed his demand for an operator-funded welfare fund and succeeded in obtaining it. The court’s ruling on Smith-Connally, however, was clear encouragement to Congress to move on more restrictive antiunion legislation, Newsweek describing the determination to bring organized labor into line as “an anger that burned across the nation.”26
Even Truman’s patience had begun to wear thin. When in May 1946 th
ree hundred thousand Railroad Trainmen and Locomotive Engineers struck, rejecting a government-sponsored settlement, the president responded by threatening to have the government run the railroads and to deploy soldiers to defend replacement workers. He also reprised Roosevelt’s idea of drafting recalcitrant workers into the armed forces. Secretary of War Robert Patterson advised Truman that Congress could amend the Selective Service Act, raising the upper age limit of draftees from thirty to forty-five in order to snare more railroad men able to run the trains. As in Roosevelt’s time, however, the threat of drafting strikers was denounced as excessive, as well as potentially demeaning to the military.
Not to be intimidated, Truman went before Congress in a mood far from conciliatory, warning that he would seek injunctions against individual rail union leaders, assign federal arbitrators to set wages, and put any profits earned by government operation of the railways into the U.S. Treasury. (He meant his remarks also for the ears of the National Maritime Union, which had scheduled a strike for June 15.) The rail unions balked, calling off their strike even as Truman was at the podium issuing his strong remarks. Word of the capitulation filtered into the Capitol, gratifying Congress, although the even better news for conservative representatives was that the president appeared to have at last seen the light. The moment had come, Truman said, to “adopt a comprehensive labor policy which will tend to reduce the number of stoppages of work and other acts which injure labor, capital, and the whole population.”27