chapter 11
The Second World War and Its Aftermath
Sometimes World War II is seen by Americans as “the good war,” a crusade against the brutal militaristic expansionism, the murderous racism, the vicious dictatorships of the Axis powers; a worldwide “people’s war” against the Nazi, fascist, and imperial regimes dominating Germany, Italy, and Japan and seeking to subjugate the entire world. Many saw the war against the Axis powers as a struggle for a postwar world in which all could enjoy the “the Four Freedoms”—freedom of expression, freedom of thought and religion, freedom from fear, freedom from want. Some in the U.S. labor movement of 1940 believed (with John L. Lewis) that in some ways it was also a power struggle—including a struggle for markets, raw materials, and economic conquest, similar to what World War I had turned out to be—that would destroy the lives of millions of innocent people. But by the time of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into the war as an official combatant, the bulk of the AFL and CIO were prepared to give thoroughgoing support to the U.S. war effort.
Many workers joined the armed forces, and many more were drafted. On the homefront, millions of workers flooded into the now-booming war industries generated or regenerated by generous government contracts. Millions of women and African Americans were drawn into what, for them, had been “nontraditional jobs,” and the booming industries yielded spectacular profits for big-business corporations (as well as smaller profiteers) while churning out massive quantities of war materiel essential to the victory of the wartime alliance—the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, China, and many other nations—over the Axis powers.
Home Front
The CIO’s new president, soft-spoken Philip Murray (who earlier had moved from the United Mine Workers to head the new Steelworkers union), and his AFL counterpart, William Green, promised organized labor’s adherence to wage and price controls and a no-strike pledge for the duration of the war. A War Labor Board was established to oversee and negotiate industrial relations, with substantial union representation, which—among other things—oversaw (with the National Labor Relations Board) the unionization of hundreds of thousands of new wartime workers, a bitter pill for employers that was thickly sugar-coated with soaring wartime profits and guarantees that the unions would help enforce industrial discipline and the no-strike pledge.
Amalgamated Clothing Workers president Sidney Hillman was made associate director of the Office of Production Management, tirelessly seeking to maintain workers’ discipline on the job while at the same time defending the interests of labor in the wartime economy. He urged Roosevelt to adopt an expansive wartime program of economic, social, and labor reform that would involve taxation falling most heavily on the rich, a stricter policy of price controls, the equitable rationing of basic commodities, union security, and “equality of sacrifice”—but he was snubbed and demoted for his pains. Leading up to the 1944 elections, Hillman was able to mobilize enough labor pressure to force the President to give lip service to an Economic Bill of Rights “guaranteeing” full employment at decent wages, aid to farmers, government regulation of industry, cradle-to-grave social security, and decent housing, health care, and education to all as a matter of right. This far-reaching vision of social justice was never enacted, however, and the pro-labor political rhetoric was more than offset by pro-business economic policies.
John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers—angry over war profiteering at the expense of workers’ needs and dignity—challenged the no-strike pledge in a series of 1943 coal strikes. In the previous year, after Lewis’s unsuccessful effort to engineer AFL-CIO unity in order to more effectively withstand government and employer pressures, the UMW had left the CIO (briefly rejoining the AFL in 1946). Both labor federations denounced Lewis’s militant wartime tactics. But the miners’ action was emulated by thousands of rank-and-file workers in other industries who conducted an unprecedented wave of “wildcat” strikes over a number of shopfloor grievances in 1944 and 1945.
Those who went “too far,” however, risked heavy persecution. Trotskyists leading the powerful Minneapolis Teamsters were critical of the war aims of the U.S. government, which they said were geared to advance the domestic and overseas interests of U.S. corporations, and to which they counterposed a socialist working-class program for defeating fascism. Government prosecutions led to the imprisonment of James P. Cannon, V. R. Dunne, and sixteen other revolutionary socialists under the newly passed Smith Act.* While many unions protested this political persecution and violation of free speech, few protested an even more extreme injustice: hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans were deprived of their jobs and homes and herded into detention camps for the duration of the war simply because of their race and national origin.
Equal Rights
On the other hand, significant gains were made against prejudice in other sectors of the home front. At the early stages of the war, companies had continued their long-standing racist hiring practices (which was reflected in the U.S. military, whose units remained racially segregated throughout the Second World War). Yet with the United States preparing to be involved in a war against Nazi efforts to establish the supremacy of a “master race” in Europe, the U.S. government was vulnerable to a threatened march on Washington for racial equality by thousands of black workers led by A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. In exchange for the calling off of the march, Roosevelt signed an executive order pledging to protect the rights of black and female workers in companies with wartime contracts. Through the Fair Employment Practices Commission, black and female unionists had a potent weapon to challenge companies, and hundreds of thousands of workers ultimately benefited. Union halls from Detroit to Birmingham were the center of the civil rights movement as radical whites and blacks fought racism on the job and segregation in the community.
Many of the new women workers did not participate in the union. “The women felt the union was a man’s thing because once they got through the day’s work they had another job,” union activist Stella Nowicki recalled. “When they got home they had to take care of their one to fifteen children and the meals and the house and all the rest, and the men went to the tavern and to the [union] meetings and to the racetrack and so forth.” Struggling to overcome this sexism, and sometimes helping to make genuine gains (such as child-care facilities at the workplace and increased women’s involvement in the union), Nowicki continued to be frustrated by insufficient union concern over the needs of its female members: “The unions had so many things they had to work for—the shorter work day, improved conditions—so many things that they couldn’t worry about these things in relation to women.”
Postwar Triumphs
With the end of the war in 1945, the FEPC was dismantled, and government protection of minority workers ended. Most women workers were fired. Some protested, like the women Ford workers who pointed out that “the hand that rocks the cradle can build tractors too.” Although black men were not exactly told to make room for returning white veterans, the best seniority could do was to uphold the policy of last hired, first fired. At worst, seniority could be used to hold black workers into separate job lines or “Negro” departments. Racial segregation, discrimination, and prejudice persisted—in the Southern states maintained most systematically with the force of law, violence, and lynching. (On the other hand, returning black veterans—most of whom were part of the working class—were less inclined than ever to accept racism at home after helping to defeat it abroad: the stage was set for the rise of the modem civil rights movement.)
With the end of World War II, many unionists expected employers to counterattack and attempt to destroy the unions as they did after World War I. There were also fears that—with the end of wartime stimulus—another economic depression would devastate the country. But reality unfolded differently.
As labor journalist Art Preis commented, 1945–1946 saw “American labor’s greatest upsurge,” with a massive eruption of postwar strikes—mobilizing 3,470,000 workers in 1945 and 4,600,000 in 1946, in each case far exceeding the number of strikers of 1937, the most tumultuous year of the Depression decade. The militant strikers enjoyed widespread community support, and far from being crushed (as had been the case in 1919) they were overwhelmingly victorious. Auto, steel, electrical, rubber, and other workers successfully raised wages in line with business’s high prices and profits. In addition, regarding the organization of unions throughout the South as a key to the long-run success of the labor movement, the CIO with great fanfare announced “Operation Dixie”—a plan to mobilize the entire labor movement to aid in unionizing the South. It seemed that the dynamic industrial unions were here to stay, and the consequence was the beginning of a steady rise in the living standards—and buying power—of U.S. workers for the next twenty-five years, which would help fuel general economic prosperity. Many of the New Deal social programs remained in place, and Roosevelt’s Democratic successor, Harry Truman, promised a continuation of such policies with his “Fair Deal.”
There were efforts to alter the economy in even more fundamental ways. In 1946, the United Auto Workers, under pressure from its left wing, challenged General Motors to “open the books” to prove that workers could receive a raise without a rise in prices, and union negotiator Walter Reuther explicitly put forward the highly publicized demand that a raise in auto workers’ pay not be passed on to the consumer. The union won its raise, but union leaders subsequently avoided such radical challenges to “management’s right to manage.” In 1948, however, the UAW did secure the first cost-of-living escalator clause, so that at least some union members’ pay increases would keep pace with rising prices.
In the wake of the 1946 strikes labor-relations scholar Sumner H. Slichter suggested that postwar America might be “gradually shifting from a capitalistic economy to a laboristic one—that is to a community in which employees rather than businessmen are the strongest single influence.” The only way such an outcome could be prevented would be—in the words of historian Elizabeth Fones-Wolf—if “important segments of the business community responded to this economic and ideological challenge with an aggressive campaign . . . to undermine the legitimacy and power of organized labor.”
* This repression was carried out with the full support of conservative and bureaucratic elements in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Breaking the left-wing influence facilitated the expansion of gangster-linked elements in the union.