Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  Reagan professed astonishment. “Do you mean that the first vice-president of the AFL”—Hutcheson—“is deliberately and willfully flouting the principles of arbitration by blocking the award?” he remembered saying.

  The three nodded.

  Reagan and the others shook their heads in dismay. “We were beginning to get wiser, if a little sadder,” he recalled. Yet they refused to give up. They took their case to William Green, the AFL president, to register their protest at Hutcheson’s obstruction. “We said that if something was not done about this one-man block in the AFL, the Screen Actors Guild was prepared to fly stars to every key city in the United States to make personal appearances and show films of the violence outside the studio gates, and to tell people that one man—the first vice-president of the AFL, Bill Hutcheson—was responsible.”

  In Reagan’s recounting, Green broke down in tears of frustration. “What can I do?” he said. “We are a federation of independent unions. I have no power to do anything.”

  The threat of the adverse publicity, however, got Hutcheson’s atten tion. He agreed to see the SAG delegation. The meeting began with Hutcheson in good humor but adamant that construction of sets belonged to the carpenters of the CSU. When Reagan and the others demanded that he abide by the decision of the arbitrators, he grew angry. “Those three blockheads of arbitrators don’t know anything about construction!” he said, in Reagan’s telling.

  “In this country,” Reagan responded, “if you decide to play ball and use an umpire, you obey his decisions.”

  Hutcheson turned to Reagan. “Look,” he said, “thirty years ago the AFL ruled against my men in a dispute with the machinists. I haven’t obeyed that for thirty years. Because of that the IAM”—the machinists—“got out of the AFL and I’ve kept them out.”

  Reagan and his SAG associates tried to change Hutcheson’s mind, but he refused to budge. “It was apparent we were getting nowhere,” Reagan recalled. “This was a roadblock in labor consisting of one arrogant man completely wrapped in the cloak of his own power. No one, he was convinced, could tell him what to do.” Finally the actors gave up. But as they left, Hutcheson delivered a parting message: “Tell Walsh”—Richard Walsh, the head of the IATSE—“that if he’ll give in on the August directive, I’ll run Sorrell”—of the CSU—“out of Hollywood and break up the CSU in five minutes.” He added, “I’ll do the same to the Commies.” Reagan thought the addendum significant, in that Hutcheson until then had denied that there were communists in the CSU.

  On the way out of Hutcheson’s hotel, the actors ran into Herb Sorrell. They told him what Hutcheson had said. Sorrell responded defiantly. “It doesn’t matter a damn what Hutcheson says,” he declared. “This is going on, no matter what he does! When it ends up, there’ll be only one man running labor in Hollywood, and that man will be me!”

  8

  HAD THE LABOR troubles been confined to Hollywood, much of the country would hardly have noticed. The studios kept cranking out movies, and viewers kept filling the theaters. As things happened, though, the two years after the war witnessed a tsunami of strikes. Hundreds of work stoppages in scores of industries affected millions of workers as unions large and small sought pay hikes to match the increased productivity their members had delivered since the start of the war but been unable to collect because of wartime wage controls. Railroad workers walked off the job in the spring of 1946, paralyzing the nation’s transportation network and prompting Harry Truman, who had succeeded to the presidency on Franklin Roosevelt’s sudden death in April 1945 and whom the rail workers supposed to be sympathetic, to threaten to draft the strikers into the army, where they would be subject to his orders as commander in chief. The rail union declined to test Truman’s resolve, instead settling the strike. But the experience left the country edgy and willing to heed assertions that radical unionists were seeking to undermine the American economy.

  Meanwhile, a coal strike sent hundreds of thousands of miners out of the pits and shafts. The coal strike forced steelmakers and other manufacturers to trim production; if it persisted until winter, millions of Americans would be without fuel to heat their homes. John L. Lewis, the mine workers’ chief, had refused during the war to join the leaders of other major unions in a no-strike pledge, and he had been roundly condemned as an unpatriotic radical; now he was denounced by Truman as a danger to America’s health and safety. Time magazine depicted him on its cover as a volcano about to erupt.

  THE RAIL AND coal strikes, and the Hollywood strike, took place amid a fundamental rethinking of reform in American life. Compared with Europe, the United States had long been politically conservative. From the onset of industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century through the first three decades of the twentieth century, socialism never caught on in America the way it did in Europe, and communism, the militant form of socialism espoused by Marx, Lenin, and other European radicals, won almost no following. But things changed during the 1930s. The left wing of the Democratic Party advocated anti-depression measures that verged on socialism, and even communism acquired a certain intellectual respectability. The principal alternative to socialism and communism, capitalism, had gone bust, and there was little compelling reason to think it would revive. During the sixty years or so since capitalism had taken industrial root in the American economy, it had lurched from crisis to panic to depression. The panic of 1873 produced the country’s first nationwide depression, which featured bloody labor battles between striking workers and the hired guns of management. The panic of 1893 triggered a depression that was broader and deeper and included more strikes. The panic of 1907 jolted Congress into taking control of the nation’s money supply out of the hands of J. P. Morgan and the money trust and giving it to the new Federal Reserve. The panic of 1929, the stock market crash, was followed by the worst banking crisis in the nation’s history and the longest and most painful depression. By then it was easy to believe that Marx had been right and that the contradictions of capitalism impelled the system to excess and self-destruction. After each crisis so far, the system had recovered, but the crises kept getting worse, and as the Great Depression dragged on, the radical critique of capitalism grew ever more persuasive.

  Communism looked good by comparison. This was partly because, until very recently, it had not been tested. Only after the Russian Revolution of 1917 were the theories of Marx made the basis for policy in any sizable country. The early results were promising, from what those in the West could see. The Soviet Union largely escaped the depression of the 1930s, and to those few Westerners who trekked east to observe the communist regime there, it appeared to be making steady economic progress, if from a poverty-stricken start. The violence and famine that accompanied Stalin’s collectivization campaign remained invisible to most outsiders. To the extent the suffering in the countryside was known, it was often explained as a vestige of historical Russian practice, not a consequence of communism. The czars hadn’t required Marx to teach them to mistreat peasants.

  Communism acquired moral cachet as well. At a time when the capitalist countries of the West conspicuously avoided confronting fascism, the Soviet Union consistently and vehemently denounced Hitler and Mussolini. Moscow sent weapons and men to Spain to fight the Spanish fascists, who were aided by the German and Italian governments, after the civil war broke out in that country. The antifascist side ultimately lost, but the communists got credit for courageous and worthy intentions.

  As a result of all this, communism during the 1930s enjoyed a vogue in the United States unlike anything it had experienced before or would experience after. Membership in the American Communist Party grew significantly, and many who didn’t join the party sympathized with its views. Party members meanwhile soft-pedaled talk of world revolution, in favor of a popular front against fascism. Communists joined liberal organizations and in many cases were welcomed. The communists and their fellow travelers suffered a jolt when Stalin signed a 1939 nonaggression pact with Hitler, clearing
the way for Germany to launch World War II by invading Poland (and allowing the Soviet Union to seize the eastern part of that luckless country). But Stalin’s reversal could be interpreted as the desperate act of a government that could no longer resist Germany alone. Anyway, Hitler’s 1941 betrayal of Stalin set things right once more. After Pearl Harbor drove the American government into an alliance with the Soviet Union, the American communists and their friends boasted that they had got there first.

  The American alliance of communists and liberals lasted until the end of the war. And it fell apart for the same reason the alliance of the Soviet Union and the United States was falling apart at the same time: an essential incompatibility of purposes. A shared aversion to Hitler had been the cement holding the Soviet-American alliance together; on Hitler’s death the cement swiftly dissolved. Washington and Moscow remembered that they weren’t just antifascist; the former was also anticommunist, the latter anticapitalist and antidemocratic. Each embraced an ideology that had universal application: the United States aimed to make the world more capitalist and democratic, the Soviet Union to make it more communist.

  Whether the clash of ideologies would produce a clash of arms was the question that seized the world from the moment the smoke of World War II dissipated. Given the penchant for violence the world had manifested during the previous three decades, the outlook wasn’t good.

  And it was this grim outlook—the possibility, even likelihood, of armed conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union—that shattered the alliance between liberals and communists in America. The former put their faith in democracy and thus in their own country; the latter stuck with communism, which meant opting for the Soviet side. Before 1945 liberalism and communism had been merely different locations on the spectrum of American reform; after 1945 they became antagonists in a struggle for world dominance.

  HARRY TRUMAN GOT caught in the cross fire. Truman wasn’t on the ballot in 1946, but Democrats in Congress were, and after sixteen years as the majority party they faced a backlog of voter grievances. The result was a Republican sweep of both houses, which rendered Truman’s iffy position as an accidental president even more precarious.

  During their long exile the Republicans had nursed numerous grudges against the Democrats. Most Republicans had never become reconciled to the New Deal, with its novel constraints on business and its unprecedented social welfare programs; many hoped to roll back the federal government to something resembling its size and scope during the 1920s. But Social Security, the signature public welfare program, was gaining a constituency that grew stronger by the month as more workers retired and began receiving pension checks, and many businesses preferred the regulations they knew to the uncertainty that would accompany efforts at repeal. Besides, though the Republicans controlled Congress, they didn’t hold the White House, and Truman could veto any anti–New Deal legislation.

  Even so, the labor turmoil of the postwar period provided the Republicans with an opening for attack. Until the 1930s, American law and political practice had typically favored employers over employees, capital over labor. Federal courts issued injunctions against strikes; federal troops were deployed against strikers. Things changed with the New Deal, in particular Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which shifted the ground sharply in favor of organized labor. The Supreme Court had overturned the Recovery Act, thereby voiding Section 7(a), but the Democratic Congress had passed a substitute, the Wagner Act, which guaranteed unions the right to organize and specified various unfair practices by management. Under the auspices of the Wagner Act, labor had won signal victories in strikes against General Motors and other large employers.

  The onset of the war froze the new labor status quo in place without convincing Republicans and conservatives that it was permanent or ought to be. And when the postwar period brought its epidemic of strikes, which alienated voters and contributed to the Republicans’ big victory in 1946, the new congressional majority was eager to launch its counteroffensive.

  The spearhead of the assault was a 1947 bill sponsored in the Senate by Republican Robert Taft of Ohio and in the House by Republican Fred Hartley of New Jersey. The measure aimed to turn back the clock on labor relations to a more management-friendly time, identifying unfair practices by labor, outlawing the closed shop (which required employers to hire only union members), banning jurisdictional strikes and secondary boycotts, and authorizing the government to break strikes by means of injunctions when the strikes were determined to endanger the national welfare.

  Union leaders condemned the Taft-Hartley bill as restoring the shackles the Wagner Act had chiseled off the limbs of American labor. But the Republicans, with the support of conservative southern Democrats who had never liked unions, possessed the votes and passed the bill. Truman vetoed the measure, calling it a “shocking piece of legislation,” yet the anti-union coalition mustered an overriding two-thirds majority and rammed it down the president’s throat.

  WILLIAM HUTCHESON AND the Wise Men remembered their meeting with Reagan and the SAG delegation differently than Reagan did. The AFL leaders denied that any untoward pressure had been applied or experienced in their efforts to resolve the strike. Reagan defended his account in testimony before a congressional committee investigating the strike; he observed that as an actor he had honed his skills at remembering dialogue. Besides, he and the others had been sent to Chicago expressly to listen and remember. “We went into that meeting, knowing in advance of the fact that every word said to us in Chicago—every single thing that happened to us—must be reported factually to our membership; that is why we were sent there. We went in with the definite knowledge we were going to remember everything that was said.”

  Regardless of who said what, it quickly became clear that the strike wasn’t ending. Reagan and other members of the SAG board continued to try to mediate. They persuaded more than forty local unions to come to an October meeting at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Los Angeles. Reagan revisited the origins and evolution of the strike and reiterated his desire for a settlement. But Herb Sorrell and the CSU remained intransigent.

  Reagan then went public with his belief that it was the CSU that was the intransigent party. “I am no longer neutral,” he declared. “The CSU has proved itself unreliable. Its leadership does not want a settlement of the strike. It stands to gain by continued disorder and disruption in Hollywood.”

  Reagan’s open opposition to the CSU provoked opposition to him within SAG. The dissenters demanded a meeting of the full membership to determine if the board’s bias against the CSU reflected the wishes of the guild as a whole. Reagan reluctantly agreed. “We were scared to death,” he said later, referring to the possibility that the dissenters would stampede the meeting. But he couldn’t well deny the dissenters their right to be heard.

  The meeting was rowdy, and Reagan became the object of vituperation. The leftists lashed him for opposing worker democracy and siding with the studios. Reagan presented his and the board’s position again, his voice rising and accelerating amid the excitement. “Reagan spoke very fast,” observed Alexander Knox, a character actor who had worked with Reagan but didn’t like his politics. “He always did, so that he could talk out of both sides of his mouth at once.”

  The dissenters proved to be a small minority. A motion was offered that the assembled body should vote confidence in the board’s leadership. Under the circumstances this equated to opposition to the CSU strike. The motion passed by an overwhelming majority of those present, who evidently agreed with Reagan that working and collecting paychecks outweighed whatever arguments the CSU made for its vision of worker representation.

  The studio chiefs were no less pleased with Reagan’s performance. “Ronnie Reagan has turned out to be a tower of strength, not only for the actors but for the whole industry,” Jack Warner told his son.

  The strike went on for months, but without the support of the actors it weakened. The strikers wandered back to their j
obs and then out of the union, which expired for lack of interest. Reagan was happy for the part he had played in killing it. The SAG board seemed equally happy, for in March 1947 it made him the guild president.

  The dissidents despised him more than ever. “Eddie Arnold and I were crossing an intersection one night on our way to a board meeting,” Reagan wrote later. “Coming toward us were two actors we both knew. My smile was already forming and I had just started to greet them when one of the two thrust his face close to mine, his eyes burning with hatred. ‘Fascist!’ he hissed, literally spitting the word at me.”

  9

  A LESSER CLAUSE OF the Taft-Hartley Act required union officers to affirm that they were not communists. This provision was comparatively uncontroversial, in that the big unions were as eager to rid themselves of communists as conservatives and Republicans were to see the communists rid. But the consequences of the provision, and the mind-set it manifested, contributed to one of the most controversial chapters of modern American history, a chapter in which Reagan played a crucial part.

  Congress had been conducting investigations since the eighteenth century. The first congressional investigation probed the 1791 defeat by Indians in Ohio of an army force under General Arthur St. Clair. Congress investigated Abraham Lincoln’s conduct of the Civil War. It investigated corruption in the construction of the transcontinental railroad. It investigated the financial power of J. P. Morgan in the early twentieth century. It retrospectively investigated the “merchants of death” who were said to have manipulated America into World War I and battened on the profits therefrom.