CHAPTER 1
Power and Politics
Three related issues, each with deep historical roots, structured domestic politics during the years immediately after World War II. First was the proper role of government in ordering society. Second was what rights individuals should have, both in controlling government and more broadly as citizens. Third was how much power, relative to one another, business, labor, and consumers should have over the economy.
World War II brought the Great Depression to an end, but the questions raised by the economic collapse and the New Deal to which it gave birth remained unresolved. Could the country’s system of political economy prevent a return of economic stagnation? How far should the government go in regulating the economy and providing social benefits? Should the redistribution of power and resources that began during the 1930s be continued or rolled back? These questions long remained central to national politics. But within just a few years they began to be answered.
Government
Harry S. Truman discovered upon assuming the presidency, following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, that the head of the most powerful nation on earth operated with a tiny staff. Only a handful of administrative assistants; a few military aides; appointment, press, and correspondence secretaries; a special counsel; some staff borrowed from executive departments; and the heads of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion and the Bureau of the Budget directly aided the president. In spite of its tremendous expansion during the New Deal and World War II, the federal government remained decentralized and ad hoc.
Until the twentieth century, Americans had had very limited contact with the federal government, especially in peacetime. Most rarely, if ever, interacted with federal agencies, except for the post office. Early in the century, that began to change. Rapid industrialization, disruptive labor conflict, urbanization, and the growth of radical political movements led progressive reformers and even some more conservative politicians to broaden their notion of the responsibility of the state in regulating the economy, mediating social conflict, and promoting minimal standards of well-being. Still, until the 1930s, the federal government stayed modest in size, administrative capacity, and penetration into the daily routines of American life.
The New Deal changed that, and did so quickly. In 1930, the federal government had 860,000 employees and a budget of $3.3 billion. Ten years later it had 1.5 million employees and spent $9.6 billion. By then, it had become intricately involved in everything from collective bargaining and old-age pensions to housing construction, the arts, and fighting crime. Almost every county in the country had a new public works project—a school, hospital, courthouse, post office, park, road, or dam—funded by Washington.
The swelling size and scope of government came, in large part, in response to the Great Depression. During Roosevelt’s presidency, the federal government hired millions of unemployed; propped up prices and incomes; lent money to keep businesses afloat and homeowners from defaulting on mortgages; and rescued and reformed the banking system. With conservative political and business elites discredited by the economic debacle, reformers had the opportunity to carry out previously blocked plans, including offering subsidies to farmers, creating the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and more actively regulating Wall Street. Under pressure from popular movements of the left and right, Washington established a limited welfare state. The Social Security Act created a national pension system, unemployment insurance, and welfare programs for the dependent poor. The National Labor Relations Act (commonly known as the Wagner Act) protected the right of workers to join a union and engage in collective bargaining. The Fair Labor Standards Act established a national minimum wage and limited working hours.
An electoral realignment accompanied the expansion of the state. By the mid-1930s, a new coalition had emerged in support of Roosevelt. It included immigrants and their children; African Americans; organized labor; big-city Democratic machines; farmers; small businessmen; some corporate leaders; and, at least tacitly, elements of the socialist and communist left (whose influence exceeded their small size). The Roosevelt administration also benefited from solid Democratic control of the South.
Powerful though it was, the New Deal coalition stopped winning major reforms well before the Depression ended. Southern Democrats grew fearful that the extension of federal power into localities would threaten the racial order, while urban politicians fretted that New Deal networks outside their control would undermine local party organizations. As many voters grew disenchanted with the growing size of the government and Roosevelt’s failure to bring about sustained economic recovery, anti–New Deal business leaders mobilized through trade associations and the Republican Party. From 1938 on, a stalemate developed in Congress between two blocs, one of pro–New Deal liberals, largely in the Democratic Party, and the other of anti–New Deal conservatives, which joined Republicans with southern Democrats.
Just as the New Deal reached its seeming limits, war brought a further expansion of the state. In 1945, the federal government spent ten times what it had in 1939. While fighting raged across the globe, federal presence deepened in everyday life, as Washington regulated prices and wages; rationed consumer goods; controlled transportation; allocated raw materials; built factories, pipelines, and military bases; carried out a military draft; and held, without trial, thousands of citizens in internment camps.
To finance the swollen state sector, Washington undertook massive borrowing and revamped the tax system. Prior to the war, only the wealthy paid income taxes. During it, Congress drastically lowered the cutoff for income tax exemption, so that middle- and working-class families had to pay federal taxes as well. Filing income tax returns became a yearly national ritual, reminding income earners of the extent and cost of federal power.
Federal growth evoked less controversy during World War II than during the New Deal, since the state expanded to wage a war that most Americans supported. Still, the backlash against the New Deal continued. Business leaders, widely blamed for the economic ills of the 1930s, found their social standing and political influence reelevated, as the Roosevelt administration turned to them to lead the defense mobilization. By contrast, reformers found their influence diminished by the priority given to war needs and an increasingly conservative Congress. The union movement provided something of a countervailing force, growing during the war to 14.7 million members, from 10.5 million before its start, but, committed to military victory, it generally cooperated with government efforts to maximize production and avoid disruptive disputes.
Successful though it was, the wartime mobilization led intellectuals, political activists, and government insiders to rethink the role of government. Many felt that the wartime federal bureaucracy had proved to be an inefficient mechanism for controlling the economy, riven as it was by battles over turf and policy, and generating as it did widespread grumbling about regulations and restrictions. But the expansion of the federal spending had had a miraculous effect on the economy. During the war, the GNP soared from $91 billion to $166 billion. Personal savings reached $37 billion in 1944, a national nest egg that financed a postwar spending spree. With vast investment in capital equipment and the creation of fifteen million new jobs, the United States simultaneously supplied its twelve million soldiers and sailors with arms and equipment; sent shipload after shipload of goods to its allies; and still produced enough consumer items to allow a substantial improvement in the standard of living.
Many New Deal reformers concluded from this experience that fiscal policy, rather than a further expansion of government institutions or a redistribution of wealth, provided the best means of promoting social well-being. Stimulating economic growth through government spending held the promise of keeping employment high and downturns shallow without a large, intrusive federal bureaucracy, avoiding the managerial and political problems evident during the New Deal and the war. Demand stimulation might produce budget deficits, but the wartime experience led many economists and politicians to shed their fears of unbalanced budgets, recognizing that deficit spending, on a scale far beyond what the New Deal engaged in, had led to unprecedented economic growth.
Liberals, leftists, and labor leaders by no means entirely abandoned ideas for extending the New Deal. As the war drew to an end, they promoted sweeping political programs that in various ways combined fiscal management of the economy, expanded social welfare benefits, and direct state spending. Many borrowed language from President Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union address, in which he argued that since “individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence,” the country needed “a second Bill of Rights” that would guarantee all Americans a right to “a useful and remunerative job,” “a decent home,” “adequate medical care,” and “a good education.” Typical was the “People’s Program” put forth in 1944 by the Political Action Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO-PAC), the political arm of one of the two major union federations. It called for full employment at fair wages, federal aid to education, large-scale public housing construction, federally sponsored health insurance, continued rent and price controls, continued agricultural price supports, and compensatory public works spending when the economy softened.
Some of the liberal proposals took specific legislative form. In 1943, Congressman John Dingell and Senators Robert F. Wagner and James E. Murray introduced a bill to expand the Social Security system to include medical, hospitalization, and disability insurance; improve existing benefits; and create a national network of government-run employment offices. Murray also sponsored a bill to set up a Missouri Valley Authority, the first of what some New Dealers hoped would be a series of new Tennessee Valley Authorities, which would tame rivers, create jobs and electricity, and bring economic and social planning to large sections of the country. To address a severe housing shortage, Wagner joined with Democratic senator Allen J. Ellender and Republican senator Robert Taft to propose a massive expansion of federal funding for public housing and slum clearance.
Some state and local leaders proposed New Deal–type programs of their own. In California, liberal Republican governor Earl Warren unsuccessfully pressed for a state-sponsored compulsory health insurance system. New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, also a Republican, helped set up the nonprofit Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York (HIP). Several states developed plans for public housing.
These liberal proposals received extensive publicity and sparked widespread debate, but, at least in Washington, their backers had little success in getting legislation passed. The necessities of war and the revival of business pushed the political pendulum to the right. The war years hardened an antistatism among conservatives that already had crystallized in their opposition to the New Deal. Looking beyond the borders, conservative intellectuals—and some liberals, too—concluded that fascist and communist dictatorships revealed the threat to individual liberty from any expansion of state power. Some, like Friedrich von Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, argued that only by abandoning state planning and economic regulation for a strictly free-market economy could liberty be preserved, a view that grew increasingly influential in the decades to come.
Conservative critics of the New Deal found allies, at least on some issues, among southern Democrats, who did not necessarily object to expanding government but opposed federal programs that by providing jobs or benefits to African Americans might undermine the southern system of racial rule. During the war, Congress terminated the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, the National Youth Administration, and the National Resources Planning Board. The 1944 Democratic Party decision to jettison from its ticket incumbent vice president Henry A. Wallace, a forceful advocate of extending the New Deal at home and abroad, replacing him with Truman, an undistinguished border-state moderate, reflected the changing political balance.
Pro-business forces generally bested liberal and pro-labor elements in battles over economic reconversion. As was the case after World War I, business wanted Washington to dismantle its wartime economic apparatus as quickly as possible, rejecting liberal hopes for a gradual reconversion aimed at maximizing employment and spending power. Even before the war ended, the government began abruptly terminating contracts for war supplies, leading to sudden factory shutdowns and layoffs, while handing over government-built war facilities to private business.
The shifting political tide could be seen in the fate of the Full Employment Bill, introduced to Congress in January 1945. During the war, liberals increasingly focused on full employment as the centerpiece for a postwar economic and social program. More optimistic than in the prewar years, when many New Dealers feared permanent economic stagnation, full-employment advocates believed that government policies could ensure a job for every person who wanted one, which in turn would stimulate consumption and economic growth. In its original form, the Full Employment Bill would have required the president to make an annual assessment of the number of jobs needed for full employment and the level of economic activity required to generate them. If he determined that the private sector would not provide sufficient openings, the government would be mandated to intervene through direct spending, loans, and investments to fill the employment shortfall.
Truman actively backed the Full Employment Bill, as did the CIO and the National Farmers Union. But it faced fierce opposition from business groups and large-scale farmers, who feared that full employment would drive up labor costs. As the employment bill slowly wended its way through the legislative process, one provision after another was stripped from it. Once the war ended and a feared postwar recession failed to materialize, what little enthusiasm there was for a potentially costly new government program drained away. As finally passed in early 1946, the bill retained a rhetorical commitment to government action to ensure a growth-oriented, full-employment society, but it had few mechanisms to achieve it, other than a new Council of Economic Advisers to assist the president.
The one major piece of social legislation that did get passed during the war adopted the language and some of the programmatic ideas of those seeking to expand the New Deal, while moving fundamentally in a different direction. No law from the 1940s had greater impact on the social and physical landscape than the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill. The law grew out of a modest American Legion proposal for mustering-out pay. When a congressional committee tried to reduce the proposed pay level, the Legion vastly expanded its proposal into what it initially called “The Bill of Rights for GI Joe and Jane.”
The GI Bill built on a precedent established early in the war. In 1942, the Roosevelt administration proposed a Federal Rehabilitation Service to help both civilian and military disabled. Veterans’ groups, with the support of some New Deal opponents, rejected the measure, arguing that veterans deserved special treatment because of their service, not wanting them to be used to promote a broad new federal program. In its stead, Congress passed a rehabilitation bill covering only veterans, reiterating the idea that men and women who served in the armed services deserved separate, better benefits than the general population.
The GI Bill gave returning veterans $500 mustering-out pay and a comprehensive package of benefits, including health care, up to four years’ tuition and living expenses for college or training school, employment counseling, unemployment benefits for up to a full year, and loans on favorable terms to purchase a home, farm stock or equipment, or to start a business (like the many diners onetime Army and Navy cooks put up across industrial America). Although the Roosevelt administration had its own veterans’ bill, the president prudently accepted the American Legion proposal, which went through Congress with little opposition in spite of its expansiveness and expense. (In 1948, the GI Bill accounted for 15 percent of the federal budget; the education provisions for World War II veterans alone ended up costing $14.5 billion.)
In its language of expanded rights, and its provision of what in other contexts might have been called social democratic benefits, the GI Bill resembled the proposals of the unreconstructed New Dealers. But its authors rejected some of their key premises. Most obviously, the GI Bill benefited only a particular segment of society. Many New Deal measures had not been universal, including the Social Security Act, National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which excluded large parts of the workforce and privileged wage earners over homemakers. But New Dealers saw the exclusions as necessary and hopefully temporary concessions to powerful lobbies like farm groups, which succeeded at blocking coverage for agricultural labor, and southern Democrats, who got domestic workers (mostly African Americans in their region) shut out. The GI Bill, by contrast, had categorical distinctions at its very heart.
In some respects, the GI Bill did represent a move toward equal rights. In contrast to New Deal programs that either explicitly provided inferior benefits to blacks or treated disproportionately African American groups, like sharecroppers and domestic workers, more poorly than heavily white ones, the GI Bill treated black and white veterans equally. For this reason, Mississippi congressman John Rankin led a last-minute effort to kill it. But in practice the GI Bill also reinforced or created inequities. For one thing, in a segregated world, many African Americans found themselves less able than their white peers to actually use their GI benefits because colleges would not admit them, businesses would not sell to them, and public laws and private practices limited where they could buy homes. For another thing, though female veterans could take advantage of the GI Bill—getting somewhat less generous benefits than men—there were far fewer GI Janes than GI Joes, since women had not been subject to the draft and caps had been placed on the number allowed to enlist. With women making up only 2 percent of the armed services, the effect of the GI Bill was to further the economic and social distance between the sexes. The GI Bill also became the first federal benefit program to explicitly discriminate against gays and lesbians, when the Veterans Administration decided to deny benefits to veterans given “undesirable” discharges for homosexuality.
Beyond its rejection of universalism, the GI bill departed from the New Deal in its stress on individual benefits and individual mobility. The New Deal provided many of its benefits through government institutions that directly hired people, housed them, educated and entertained them. The GI Bill took a different tack, giving funds to individuals to shop for education, housing, employment, and business opportunities in the private market. (Health care came directly from the government through Veterans Administration hospitals and clinics.) In promoting its bill, the American Legion used the language of individual freedom, not social provision. Some of the strongest congressional support for the measure came from conservative critics of the New Deal.
The GI Bill proved one of the most successful pieces of legislation in the nation’s history. By providing veterans with generous unemployment and education benefits, it prevented a postwar flooding of the labor market that might have led to soaring joblessness and discontent. The bill funded a massive expansion of higher education and enabled veterans to equip themselves for upward mobility as wage earners or businessmen. GI Bill mortgages financed one-fifth of all single-family homes built between the end of World War II and 1966. Yet in easing the economic and social transition from war to peace and helping a generation of young men and women reach a level of comfort unknown to most Americans before the war, the bill launched postwar social policy on a trajectory that favored aid to particular groups over universal benefits, promotion of individual mobility over the creation of new social institutions, and pumping money into the private marketplace over the direct provision of government benefits.
Rights
The idea of an economic bill of rights or a “Bill of Rights for GI Joe and Jane” to provide economic and social benefits built on the presumption that political rights already received adequate protection. In practice that was far from the case. By standards that came to be broadly accepted in the late twentieth century, the United States had serious deficiencies as a democratic polity at the end of World War II.
The United States had never been a universal democracy. Over its history, political rights had expanded and contracted, with some groups gaining rights even as others lost them. The New Deal had not made the extension or protection of political rights a high priority. Roosevelt refused to endanger his southern white support by backing measures to protect African Americans from discrimination or violence or to ensure their right to vote. The rhetoric of World War II, however, with its stress on freedom as the defining characteristic of the United States and its allies, along with the need to mobilize millions of African Americans into military and industrial service, made it more difficult for the government to ignore glaring examples of undemocratic ways. During the war, Congress guaranteed the right of all soldiers, regardless of race, to vote without paying a poll tax, while the Supreme Court issued its ruling against whites-only primaries. Congress also eliminated long-existing bars that effectively prevented Asian immigrants from ever achieving citizenship. African Americans and their allies took advantage of wartime conditions to push harder for equal rights, with the percentage of southern blacks registered to vote increasing fourfold between 1940 and 1947, from 3 to 12 percent.
Wartime advances still left a huge gap between democratic verbiage and political practice. Across the South, poll taxes, literacy tests, threats of violence, and the simple refusal by local registrars to enroll them kept the vast majority of blacks away from the polls. Indians, too, faced obstacles to voting. An Arizona law banning Indian voting—one of several such state laws—kept Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian who achieved fame as one of the flag raisers at Iwo Jima, from casting a ballot. In many localities, whites also faced high hurdles when they sought to vote. The poll tax, in place in five southern states through the 1950s, kept more whites than blacks away from the polls. South Carolina and Alabama had property requirements for voting. In one postwar election, out of one and a quarter million Mississippians of voting age, only 180,000 actually cast a ballot. Residents of the territories of Alaska, Hawaii (which in 1950 exceeded three states in population), Puerto Rico (which exceeded twenty-three), and the District of Columbia (which exceeded thirteen) had no representation in Congress and could not vote for the president.
Even when a citizen did get to vote, that vote might count for very little. At the end of World War II, seven western states had fourteen senators to represent their 3.6 million people, the same number as represented 51.9 million residents of seven eastern states. Failure to reapportion as population urbanized introduced further inequities into congressional representation. In Illinois, which at the end of World War II still used congressional district lines drawn in 1901, Cook County had over half the state population but only ten of twenty-six House seats.
Many states had similar skews in the makeup of their state legislatures, with generally more conservative rural areas having disproportionate representation. In California, half the population lived in San Francisco or Los Angeles but elected only two out of forty state senators. Georgia picked its governor and congressmen not by popular vote but by a system that gave the winning candidate in each county a certain number of “units” weighted to heavily favor rural and small counties. In 1946, the governor and a congressman were elected by the unit count even though they lost the popular vote.
In addition to their geographic disproportionality, legislative bodies failed to mirror the population in their sexual and racial composition. In 1949, fewer than 3 percent of state legislators were female. Congress had but eight female House members and one female senator. (Three had taken over their husbands’ seats when they died, including Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith, the best-known woman on Capitol Hill.) Only two African Americans sat in the House—William Dawson representing the South Side of Chicago and Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr.—and none in the Senate.
The structure of representation gave a conservative tilt to national and state politics. Working-class men and women tended to be more liberal than their middle- and upper-class peers, but millions of them, particularly nonwhites, could not vote, while millions more, living in cities or big eastern and midwestern states, had their political weight diminished by unequal apportionment. Liberals in effect needed a supermajority to achieve power. Only at moments of massive support for change, like the early and mid-1930s, could liberal reformers translate popular backing into legislative action. Had the makeup of Congress and the state legislatures mirrored popular political views, the chances for an expanded New Deal would have been far greater.
Congress’s own rules further devalued the political influence of some Americans while elevating that of others. The use of seniority to choose committee chairs favored the southern states, where a one-party system meant that incumbents rarely faced serious challenge. In the Senate, the rule requiring a two-thirds vote to cut off debate (“cloture”) gave the South an effective veto over legislation. While these rules were defended in terms of abstract political principles, southern congressmen used the institutional arrangements that favored them primarily to funnel federal appropriations to their region and to block any move toward advancing the civil rights of African Americans. Repeatedly during the 1940s, southern senators used the two-thirds rule to kill anti-lynching and anti–poll tax legislation and bills to make permanent the wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee.
Various state constitutional provisions also limited popular democracy. All but five state legislatures met only every other year, and in many cases for just brief sessions. Many states forbade governors from succeeding themselves, with two-year terms of office common. With most elected state officials rarely present, lacking experience, or both, lobbyists and political insiders wielded inordinate power.
The right to a fair trial, like the right to vote, often proved illusory, in spite of seemingly clear constitutional guarantees. In the South, African Americans facing serious charges routinely suffered beatings in efforts to force confessions, and received only token and often utterly incompetent representation by court-appointed lawyers, in spite of a series of prewar Supreme Court rulings that theoretically gave black defendants greater rights. In places where African Americans or Native Americans were denied the right to vote, they generally could not sit on juries either. Furthermore, in most of the country, women were either barred or discouraged from jury service. In 1946, the Supreme Court forbade the exclusion of women from federal juries in states where they could serve on state juries, but the states themselves could and did continue to discriminate (as did federal courts in states that limited women’s jury rights). While many states loosened jury restrictions after the war, three states continued to forbid women from serving on juries into the 1960s, with the last, Mississippi, dropping its bar in 1968. Even then, in twenty-two states women could be excused from jury service on grounds not available to men. Economic conditions also shaped jury composition; in many parts of the country, both state and federal courts systematically favored wealthier individuals in picking petit and grand juries, while weeding out workers and the unemployed.
The democratic rhetoric of the New Deal and the fight against fascism, along with wartime demographic shifts that pulled hundreds of thousands of African Americans out of the rural South, brought increased scrutiny to the limitations on the basic rights of Americans. For the first time since the mass disenfranchisement of black voters at the end of the nineteenth century, equal rights for African Americans got placed on the national agenda—debated in Congress, supported by various black, liberal, and labor groups, and discussed in books by African Americans and white social scientists, most famously Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 study of racial inequality, An American Dilemma. But actual progress toward guaranteeing basic political rights proved extremely limited.
Labor
Elections and legislation helped determine the trajectory of postwar society, but so did popular mobilizations, especially by union members and, to a lesser extent, consumers. The union movement loomed large in the immediate postwar years, not only because of its ability to shut down much of the nation’s economy. Compared to other non-elite organizations, unions had unusually rich financial and ideological resources and greater capacity to mobilize mass action. In the mid- and late 1940s, they played a larger part in shaping the political economy than would be the case in later years.
Even before World War II ended, tens of thousands of workers began walking off their jobs. Tens of thousands soon became hundreds of thousands, and hundreds of thousands became millions, in the largest strike wave in U.S. history. At its height, in January 1946, nearly two million workers were off the job. All told, some five million workers struck in the year following VJ Day.
The postwar strikes stemmed from specific employer-union disputes over contracts and grievances, but they had broad implications, as labor and management battled to establish the parameters of postwar union power and the relationships among wages, prices, and profits. Given the nature of the issues involved and the repeated efforts by the Truman administration to prevent or end strikes through fact-finding boards, administrative rulings, and threats of repression, the industrial conflict took on a highly political cast.
During World War II, government controls had limited increases in wage rates, but steady work, promotional opportunities, and extensive overtime significantly boosted average weekly earnings. As the war drew to a close, workers wanted to push up hourly rates in the face of diminished workweeks and fears of postwar inflation. Union leaders worried that a drop in national income would lead to falling consumer demand and a downward economic spiral. As one CIO memorandum put it, “Nothing short of big and substantial wage and salary raises will bring earnings up to a level where America at least will have a fighting chance of beating depressions and licking unemployment.”
Many rank-and-file workers thought less about the national economy and more about their own hopes for a better life. Wartime prosperity had begun transforming the lives of working-class families. A 50 percent wartime increase in real wages in the southern textile industry allowed workers to begin buying cars and in some cases their mill village houses, which many companies started to sell off. Still, workers generally lived very modestly, at best. In the heavily unionized steel industry, as late as 1942, 15 percent of workers lived in homes without running water and 30 percent lacked an indoor bathroom. The average steelworker family did not move above the federally defined poverty line until 1953. When in 1948 thirteen-year-old Elvis Presley’s family moved from Tupelo, Mississippi, to Memphis, they could afford to rent only a single room in a boardinghouse, cooking meals on a hot plate and sharing a bathroom with other families, even though Elvis’s father found work at a munitions factory and his mother as a sewing machine operator. Heavy borrowing gave working-class families increasing access to consumer goods but left them susceptible to the effects of unsteady work and the frequent layoffs that characterized many industries.
Leaders of the CIO—the bulk of whose members worked in mass production industry—hoped that at the end of the war the federal government would shepherd through industry-wide agreements boosting wages while keeping price controls in place. At a November 1945 conference, the Truman administration tried to bring labor and management together, but no consensus could be reached on either a wage policy or the role government should play in industrial relations. Leaders of the American Federation of Labor (AFL)—many of whose members were skilled workers organized along craft lines—wanted minimal federal interference. So did business leaders, who sought to keep labor from using the power of the state to advance its cause.
With the government, at least initially, on the sidelines and the rank and file in a militant mood, labor leaders turned to mass demonstrations of worker power to preserve the improved living standards their members were beginning to enjoy and to check management efforts to roll back the institutional position unions had achieved. Many postwar strikes were notable not only for their size and duration—General Motors workers struck for 113 days, textile workers for 133 days, glassworkers for 102 days—but also for the solidarity and feistiness workers displayed. Most struck companies did not use scabs or violence, recognizing that the legal, political, and social climate had so changed during the New Deal and war years that crude strikebreaking efforts most likely would rebound against them. Companies that did try to maintain production at struck plants or terminate collective bargaining unilaterally met fierce resistance. In Stamford, Connecticut; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Rochester, New York; and Oakland, California, union-busting efforts led to general strikes, rarities in American history.
The militancy of postwar strikers flowed from their fears that peace would bring joblessness, lower income, and weakened unions, but also from their confidence about their social centrality. The years immediately after the war marked the zenith of blue-collar America. In 1950, craft workers, operatives, laborers (not even counting those on farms and in mines), and their supervisors made up 41 percent of the workforce, a twentieth-century high. Manual workers, once treated by those in power as virtual outcasts, had been celebrated in New Deal iconography and rhetoric. During the war, billboards, newsreels, and other propaganda hailed industrial workers, including the two and half million women who took factory jobs, as fighters on the war’s home front, whose efforts and sacrifices would be key to victory. (Total female employment during the war jumped from twelve to eighteen million.) Such social validation, along with higher income, steady employment, and, for many, union protection, brought a jauntiness to the working class that carried over into the postwar years, evident in the Oakland general strike, when strikers ordered bars to put their jukeboxes on the sidewalk to provide music for couples dancing in the streets.
Unions gave institutional expression to the workers’ power and esprit. During the war, unionists often gained say over production methods, work pace, job assignments, and discipline far beyond what their contracts called for. And with mass memberships, financial resources, and experienced organizers, unions provided much of the clout for liberal coalitions and did nuts-and-bolts political work for Democratic candidates in areas where the Democratic Party itself was institutionally weak.
Organized labor was largely a regional phenomenon; at the war’s end, two-thirds of all union members lived in just ten states. But where unions were strong, in the Northeast-Midwest manufacturing belt and parts of the West Coast, they used their workplace strength to win political influence and used their political influence to win government benefits and protection for workers. Michigan provided a dramatic example. In the years after World War II, the United Automobile Workers (UAW), United Steelworkers, and their allies succeeded in taking over and vitalizing the state Democratic Party, culminating in the 1948 election of liberal Democratic governor G. Mennen Williams, who held office for twelve years. Labor went on to help elect two liberal, pro-union Democrats to the Senate, the first time since the Civil War that at least one Michigan seat was not held by a Republican. Under Williams’s leadership, Michigan became a pioneer in promoting civil rights, health insurance, recreation, education, and manpower training.
The postwar strike wave revealed the support labor had amassed inside and outside company gates. During the 1946 steel strike, in town after town where local officials and newspapers had once backed companies in fighting unionism, they now remained neutral or sided with labor. In Chicago, grocery stores and pharmacies extended credit to striking packinghouse workers, and priests joined their picket lines.
With few exceptions, businessmen loathed the position labor had achieved, for what it meant for their own enterprises and for the balance of power in society. Most believed, as an ideological and a practical matter, that their enterprises should be run by themselves and themselves alone. Unions compromised their ability to do so. The increased political activism of unions particularly frightened businessmen, many of whom saw any step toward fulfilling labor and liberal plans for greater economic regulation and enhanced state benefits as a threat to their firms’ profitability and their personal liberty.
Businesses fought back in a variety of ways. Many companies that did not already have unions used all the resources they could, legal or not, to resist them. Others accepted collective bargaining as a practical necessity but fought to minimize its scope. Many firms won contractual limits on the number of union shop stewards, severe penalties for unauthorized strikes, and clauses that explicitly spelled out management prerogatives over production methods, job assignments, and worker discipline. By showing their willingness to take long strikes, employers made workers painfully aware of the price of militancy.
Many business leaders and trade associations also came to believe in the necessity of a long-term effort to win public opinion to their side. Companies began mounting large-scale education and advertising campaigns, aimed at schoolchildren, the general public, and their own workers, which stressed the virtues of capitalism and the social good created by business. Some business-backed propaganda amounted to little more than thinly disguised efforts to elect Republicans or to win public support for company positions in collective bargaining. Other campaigns more broadly sought to change public attitudes by equating freedom with the free market and labeling any attempt to interfere with the market, by unions or government, as a step toward tyranny. To promote such ideas, companies and wealthy individuals funded policy centers and networks of conservative academics and intellectuals that slowly but effectively made anti–New Deal thinking more respectable and widespread.
In broad terms, the postwar clash between labor and management ended in a draw. For unions, their ability to survive long massive strikes intact represented a historic achievement in itself, a marked contrast to the strike wave after World War I, when unions suffered numerous defeats that contributed to a sharp decline in their membership and power. With the tacit support of the Truman administration, workers won significant wage hikes in the first rounds of postwar bargaining, with gains of 15 percent and more by the large industrial unions. Many smaller unionized companies and even nonunion firms matched these advances, so that for a brief while unions like the Auto Workers and Steelworkers effectively bargained for much larger constituencies than their own members. In subsequent rounds of bargaining, in addition to further wage increases, unions won a variety of new benefits, including health insurance and pension plans to supplement Social Security. For their part, companies won stricter limits on the parameters of bargaining, clear statements of their “right to manage,” and greater stability, as one-year contracts were replaced by agreements lasting two, three, or even five years.
Prices
Workers saw some of their wage gains eaten away by inflation. During World War II, the Office of Price Administration (OPA) set prices. To help enforce its regulations, it recruited a mostly female army of volunteer price checkers, giving consumers an unprecedented position in managing the economy. When the war ended, Truman kept price controls in place, hoping to smooth economic reconversion and check postwar inflation.
Businesses hated price controls and public debates over pricing. Setting prices for the goods and services they sold, they believed, was their prerogative alone. Once the war ended, business groups moved into open, vociferous opposition to price regulation. If companies could not set prices at profitable levels, they argued, they would have no incentive for reconverting to peacetime production, creating shortages that would generate inflationary pressure.
Labor saw prices and wages as deeply intertwined. Both determined the working-class standard of living, with any rise in prices diminishing or wiping out gains won through wage increases. Just two days after the Japanese surrender, UAW leader Walter Reuther (soon to be the union’s president) explicitly linked wages and prices when he demanded that General Motors grant its workers a 30 percent wage increase without raising car prices, arguing that large wartime profits made this possible. When the company refused, Reuther announced that he would drop the price demand if GM opened its books to prove that it needed higher prices to pay higher wages. The company ignored Reuther’s challenge, leading 175,000 autoworkers to walk off their jobs on November 21, 1945.
Reuther’s effort to make unions the agents of price stability won little support. Other unions and many federal officials agreed that companies had the capacity to raise wages without raising prices, but they felt it was the government’s job, not labor’s, to check inflation. The Truman administration ended up establishing the wage/price relationship when it intervened in steel industry negotiations.
In November 1945, U.S. Steel said that it could not meet the United Steelworkers’ demand for a wage increase of twenty-five cents an hour without the OPA raising the ceiling on steel prices. Hoping to prevent a strike, Truman appointed a fact-finding board that recommended workers get an increase of eighteen and a half cents an hour (nearly a 20 percent raise). The union accepted the proposed settlement, but U.S. Steel rejected it. On January 21, 1946, three-quarters of a million steelworkers walked off their jobs. Fearful that an interruption of steel production would sabotage the economy, the Truman administration upped the size of the price increase it would permit if the steel companies settled, until U.S. Steel accepted the proposed wage increase, ending the strike. With this settlement, the pattern was set: across the economy, companies and unions signed contracts with wage increases patterned after the steel agreement, while the Truman administration allowed offsetting price hikes. When Reuther finally ended the GM strike, he did so on essentially the same terms.
Truman’s back-and-forth on industrial prices, and the general disarray in his administration over reconversion issues, undercut his effort to get Congress to reauthorize price controls, which were set to expire in June 1946. Just before the deadline, Congress sent the president a bill that kept OPA alive but gutted it of much of its power. In a politically costly miscalculation, Truman vetoed the bill, hoping that Congress would come up with a stronger measure. With no controls in effect, prices shot up, led by food costs, which increased 14 percent in a single month.
Consumers, infuriated by rising prices and the turn of events in Washington, began mobilizing, with a heightened sense of being a distinct social constituency as a result of the wartime OPA experience. Coalitions of unions and their female auxiliaries, middle-class consumer groups, and cooperative organizations demonstrated against price increases and sent delegations to Washington to lobby for reinstating price controls. In Washington and several other cities, they organized boycotts of high-priced meat and milk.
Faced with consumer uproar, Congress passed a new bill extending OPA, but again giving it very limited power. This time Truman signed. Now producers protested, unhappy with any return of controls. Meatpackers sharply reduced the number of animals they slaughtered, creating widespread shortages of meat. Consumers, who generally had supported OPA, began blaming it for the empty meat counters. Shortly before the November 1946 election, Truman lifted controls on meat prices to get packers to up their output. Soon thereafter, he ended most remaining price controls.
Prices soared. In 1947 the consumer price index jumped 14 percent. The following summer, the left-wing Congress of American Women helped organize a new meat boycott that spread from Texas to much of the nation. Three years later, another wave of meat boycotts took place. But by and large, consumers failed to coalesce as a political force.
With consumer pressure ineffective and price controls gone from the arsenal of government economic regulation (though briefly reinstated during the Korean and Vietnam wars), unions turned to a different device to counter inflation: contractual clauses that automatically raised wages when prices went up, so-called cost-of-living adjustments, or COLAs. The idea had been around for some time but began gaining widespread acceptance only in 1948, when at GM’s suggestion a COLA was inserted into its contract with the UAW. By the early 1960s, about half of all union contracts had cost-of-living provisions.
COLAs helped protect union members from inflation, but the linkage between prices and union wages nonetheless hurt labor. Many companies began using contract settlements as an occasion for price increases, justifying them by pointing to rising labor costs. By doing so, they shifted some of the public blame for rising prices away from themselves toward labor. Meanwhile, COLAs created a growing distance between those wage earners at least partially protected from rising prices and those who were not, undermining the ability of the labor movement to present itself as a representative of a broad working class, as opposed to simply its own membership. Over time, the gap contributed to the lessening of labor’s social and political clout.
“Had Enough?”
Truman’s inept handling of reconversion and wage and price determination had a heavy political cost. Not only were prices shooting up, but many civilian goods were unavailable at any cost. A very slow restart of housing construction left millions without decent dwellings. (In Chicago, things were so bad that the city sold off old streetcars, to be converted into houses.) In the November 1946 congressional elections, the Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1930.
By the time of the 1946 election, many liberals had come to compare Truman unfavorably to Roosevelt, in whose shadow he had the misfortune to labor. His frequent blunders and reversals left him open to ridicule. “To err is Truman,” went one popular joke. His replacement of many Roosevelt appointees (including almost the entire cabinet) with figures of less stature and little commitment to reform, in some cases men whose main qualification was political loyalty, dampened the enthusiasm of many of the liberals who had worked hard to keep the Democrats in power.
Truman’s failure to control prices and his episodic attacks on labor diminished support for the Democratic Party among working-class voters and their organizations. The president’s May 1946 threat to draft striking railway workers led some labor and liberal activists to begin exploring the possibility of building a liberal, labor-based third party. Although in the end, most unions did support the Democrats, many working-class voters stayed home on election day, contributing to an extraordinary low turnout, with less than a third of the electorate voting.
The Republicans proved more successful than the Democrats at getting their core supporters to the polls, while winning new backers. Their campaign slogan—“Had Enough?”—meant had enough of strikes, shortages, inflation, and administration blundering. But it also meant had enough of the New Deal, big government, powerful unions, and Democratic rule. Apparently many people had had enough, for the Republicans made major gains among middle-class voters, especially farmers, professionals, and small businessmen, and significant though smaller gains among Catholics of Eastern European heritage (to a large measure a reaction to Soviet control of their homelands, which some voters blamed on the Democrats).
State contests confirmed the swing away from the New Deal and the widespread fear of the power of labor. The Republicans made major advances in several large states, including New York, where Governor Thomas E. Dewey, considered a likely Republican standard-bearer in 1948, won reelection with a plurality of 680,000 votes. Nebraska, South Dakota, and Arizona passed constitutional amendments outlawing closed shop contracts (agreements that required employers to hire only union members). A tectonic political shift seemed to have occurred.
At least that was what many Republicans and business lobbyists believed. Frustrated by long years of Democratic control, they saw in the new Congress a long-awaited opportunity to begin dismantling, or at least diminishing, the legal and institutional structures of the New Deal. The changes they managed to effect turned out to be modest, but they did almost entirely impede Truman’s own legislative program, which included proposals to expand the federal role in housing, health security, education, and the protection of civil rights and to initiate new large-scale public works programs.
The first step the Republicans took when the 80th Congress convened in January 1947 was largely symbolic, kicking the corpse of their dead tormentor, FDR, by passing a constitutional amendment limiting presidents to two terms in office. (After state ratification, it took effect in 1951 as the Twenty-Second Amendment.) Congress then tried to weaken the Interstate Commerce Act, remove some workers from Social Security coverage, and reduce federal income taxes. The following year it tried to force the sale of Indian lands and exempt some common carriers from antitrust laws.
Truman vetoed thirty-two bills in 1947 and forty-three the following year in an attempt to stymie Congress. In some cases he succeeded in stopping Republican initiatives, while in others, such as the Social Security measure, he only postponed them. In 1947 he twice blocked tax reduction bills, but the following year Congress overrode his veto and succeeded in lowering taxes and requiring married couples to file joint returns.
The latter provision responded to an inequity among states: married couples, with one partner earning substantially more income than the other, could reapportion their income on their separate tax returns to lower their federal taxes if they lived in a community property state, but not if they lived elsewhere. The joint return provision eliminated this interstate disparity, but did so by forcing two-earner couples to pay more taxes than they would if they were unmarried and filed separate returns. The “marriage penalty” created a disincentive for wives to work, in line with a general trend in the immediate postwar years to encourage women to stay at home, reversing the wartime government message.
The most important piece of domestic legislation to come out of the 80th Congress was the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, a substantial revision of federal labor law, passed over Truman’s veto. For many business leaders and some of their political allies, labor law revision had long been a top priority. The 1946 strike wave reinforced their sense that the Wagner Act had given too much power to workers and their unions. Much of the public agreed, disgusted with the disruptions and price hikes associated with strikes; a public opinion poll taken after the 1946 election found that two-thirds of those questioned favored legal changes to control unions.
The National Association of Manufacturers heavily promoted a set of principles that congressional Republicans and southern Democrats drew on in hammering out the new law. In a host of ways, the Taft-Hartley Act moved the balance of power away from unions toward employers. The act outlawed sympathy strikes, mass picketing, secondary boycotts, and closed shops and gave employers the right to sue unions for broken contracts and damages due to strikes. The president could forestall a strike or lockout that he believed would create a national emergency by obtaining an injunction making it illegal during a sixty-day “cooling off” period. Reflecting the growing power of anticommunism, the law took aim at radical labor leaders by requiring union officers to file affidavits swearing that they were not members of the Communist Party. If they refused, their unions would be denied recognition by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—the federal agency set up by the Wagner Act to supervise labor relations—and banned from NLRB-supervised elections to pick collective bargaining agents.
Besides weakening existing unions, Taft-Hartley made it more difficult for the labor movement to grow beyond its established geographic and industrial strongholds. While the Wagner Act gave only workers a say in deciding if an establishment would have a union, Taft-Hartley allowed employers a voice as well, permitting them to express their opinion for or against a union, a right that over time proved effective in retarding union growth. The law also banned the unionization of supervisors and foremen, blocking a movement that had gained momentum during World War II. During the decades after the war, as the number of white-collar and service workers with some supervisory responsibilities swelled, Taft-Hartley effectively placed them off-limits to unionization. Finally, Taft-Hartley gave states the option of outlawing union shop contracts (which required employees to belong to a union to keep their jobs). Eleven states—seven in the South, four in the Midwest—immediately took up the option.
Increasing union organization in the South was a top labor movement priority when World War II ended. Besides boosting overall membership, labor hoped to halt a growing trend among northern manufacturers to relocate production southward, or at least keep such shifts from undermining wage rates and union power in the North. Equally important, unions saw southern organizing as a political strategy, a step toward liberalizing southern politics and weakening the congressional bloc of Republicans and conservative Democrats. In 1946, the CIO launched “Operation Dixie,” a well-funded campaign that put 250 organizers in the field. The AFL quickly responded with a southern organizing drive of its own.
Operation Dixie had some early success among workers at branch plants of northern companies and among largely black tobacco, cotton-press, and timber workers. (The AFL also made gains among African Americans, whom, unlike the CIO, it placed in segregated locals.) But the CIO failed badly at its main target, textile manufacturing, the most important southern industry, in the face of fierce opposition from employers, police, and ministers; the rejection by white workers of the group’s support of racial equality; and the policy of many textile firms of raising wages to near union rates.
The southern drives already were flagging by the time Taft-Hartley passed. The new law made substantial gains so unlikely that the AFL abandoned its effort. The CIO kept at it at a reduced level until 1953. That year, an estimated 17 percent of nonagricultural workers in the South belonged to a union, roughly half the national percentage and about the same level as when Operation Dixie had begun. With “right-to-work” laws banning union shops in place in a majority of southern states, the uneven regional pattern of union power had become institutionalized.
By the time Congress recessed in June 1948, the large political issues facing the nation when the war ended had been at least partially resolved. The structure of the GI Bill, the end of wartime economic controls, the gutting of the Full Employment Act, the 1946 election returns, and the work of the 80th Congress all seemed to indicate that political and intellectual momentum had shifted away from support for expanded state function toward a more limited notion of the role of government in welfare provision and economic regulation. Wartime rhetoric of rights and freedom and black protest brought new attention to racial inequality, but social and legal practices remained largely unchanged. In the economic arena, the struggle over price controls showed that consumers would not emerge with much power as an organized constituency. Labor proved durable even in clashes with the most powerful corporations, but its structural and moral ascent that began in the mid-1930s came to a halt with the public backlash against strike disruptions, its failure to increase unionization in the South, and the legal restraints of Taft-Hartley. Business, feeling beleaguered by organized labor and liberal government policies, proved effective in containing labor and promoting conservative ideas and politicians. With Truman widely given little chance for winning reelection, a new era of Republican rule, more limited government, and laissez-faire economics seemed likely. But events took a different turn, partly because of the unexpectedly effective reelection campaign undertaken by the president, and partly because of rapidly unfolding international developments that profoundly affected every aspect of American life.