* The communists were Trotskyists, who opposed Stalinist policies in the Soviet Union and were hounded by Soviet agents all around the world.
* Survivors’ pensions were added in a 1939 amendment.
* The ITU never formally joined the CIO, but the AFL expelled it in 1938 for refusing to pay a Federation “war tax” assessment to fight the CIO.
* Two CIO founding unions—the Ladies’ Garment Workers and the Cap and Millinery Workers—returned to the AFL.
* The AFL opposed the Act, as it had always opposed minimum-wage legislation, on the grounds that the minimum would become the maximum.
* The Committee also looked into immigrant rightists like the Italian Black Shirts and the German American Bund. The Bund endorsed the Committee’s work.
CHAPTER
9
HOT WAR, COLD WAR
War-related production boosted the economy out of depression on a rising tide of employment. As the nation mobilized for war, union leaders took on key roles, and unions made dramatic gains, especially in mass-production industries. By war’s end the Congress of Industrial Organizations claimed six million members; its unions enjoyed new rights to representation and collective bargaining, and its leaders planned to use labor’s political power to expand labor and civil rights and New Deal social programs. The postwar regime did have a place for organized labor, but it was not a leading role, and it came with political requirements that split the labor movement. The plans faltered, and even eventual reconciliation and merger between the American Federation of Labor and much of the CIO could not restore labor’s momentum.
In 1940, labor—like the rest of the country—was divided over the preparations for war. John L. Lewis would not trust Roosevelt after the president failed to stop government contracts going to companies that broke labor laws. He joined with the communists to oppose any move to draw the U.S. into another war. Most union leaders opposed the peacetime draft, which Congress passed in September 1940 by a single vote. A few supported the president—Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers argued, “No man can say he is for labor, if he is not ready to defend democracy to the utmost.” Hillman enjoyed Roosevelt’s confidence, and served on his National Defense Advisory Council.
CIO unions meanwhile enrolled close to a million new members. At Ford, the United Auto Workers lined up endorsements from civil rights activists and swept a May 1941 NLRB election against an AFL-chartered “United Auto Workers” led by the losing faction in the union’s national election of 1939. The first Ford contract stunned observers. It provided for a union shop, dues check-off, seniority protection, grievance procedures, and the highest wages in the industry, all in return for a no-strike clause. The Steelworkers shut down Bethlehem Steel’s Lackawanna, New York, plant in February and its home works in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in March, then went on to win one NLRB election after another. Youngstown Sheet & Tube and Inland Steel signed union contracts without asking for elections.
Some employers resisted. When strikes affected military procurement, company executives and War Department officials urged federal intervention. Open-shop Allis-Chalmers fired union activists from a plant making Navy turbines in January 1941, and UAW Local 248 walked out. Now codirector of the Office of Production Management (OPM), Sidney Hillman tried to mediate and failed. Roosevelt ordered the plant reopened in March; the National Guard suppressed the picket line. The local accepted a compromise in April.
The fight at North American Aviation in Inglewood, California, was more complicated. The UAW defeated the AFL Machinists for representation in January 1941 and demanded big wage increases. The company stalled, and the local set up pickets on June 5. UAW leaders wanted no part of it. Aviation Division director Richard Frankensteen denounced the strike as Communist-inspired, suspended local officials, and ordered members back to work. Most refused—strikers shouted him down at a mass meeting—and Roosevelt sent the National Guard to enforce the back-to-work order. Federal mediators later handed down substantial raises.
Inglewood displayed the increasingly bitter feuding between Communists and anticommunists in the CIO. Roosevelt loyalists had been quick to charge their opponents with communist loyalties during the 1940 election, and that year’s CIO convention passed (with no roll-call vote) the first of what CIO News editor Len De Caux called “anticommunazi” resolutions, opposing policies based on communism, fascism, and other “foreign ideologies.” The Communist Party had abandoned the united front against fascism following the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of August 23,1939;but when Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Party almost overnight returned to support for the antifascist war. However welcome the communists might be as allies, the switch did little to alter the widespread suspicion that the Party followed orders from Moscow.
Lewis maintained his antiwar position. In September he began a series of short strikes for union recognition in the “captive” mines owned and operated by corporations like U.S. Steel. More and more isolated in the CIO, he disaffiliated his 600,000 miners in 1942 and returned them to the AFL the next year.
Still another labor constituency criticized the war mobilization. A. Philip Randolph of the AFL’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids organized a movement to “March on Washington” to protest racial discrimination and segregation in war industries, government employment, and the armed forces—over 100,000 people planned to rally in the capital on July 1, 1941. When Roosevelt agreed to ban racial discrimination by military contractors, Randolph called off the march. His compromise angered his own allies;opposition to the march from union leaders and communists, who put the fight against fascism abroad, before the struggle for justice at home made them even angrier.
Patriotic union leaders could sometimes get help from the government. Minneapolis Teamsters Local 544, led by anti-Stalinist communists from the Socialist Workers Party, threatened to join the CIO in mid-1941. At the suggestion of Teamster president Daniel Tobin, the Justice Department invoked the Smith Act, raided the Minneapolis SWP office and indicted twenty-nine Party members, most also Local 544 activists, for conspiring “to teach, advocate, and encourage the overthrow of the government by force and violence.” Attorney General Francis Biddle led the prosecution and got eighteen convictions; Tobin lieutenant Jimmy Hoffa took over the local. As the American Civil Liberties Union noted, the government “injected itself into an interunion controversy in order to promote the interests of the one side which supported the Administration’s foreign and domestic policies.”
On December 7, 1941, the president’s arbitrator announced the UMW would represent the captive mines. That very day Japanese warplanes attacked the Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The next day Congress declared war on Japan (and the judge in the Minneapolis trial handed down sentences). Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S. three days later. Over the next three and a half years, the war touched every part of American life and transformed the labor movement. How these changes looked depended on one’s perspective: the view from union offices was rosier than the view from the shop floor.
AMERICA AT WAR
For the U.S. the Second World War began and ended in the Pacific. After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese overran British and U.S. colonial forces in the West Pacific from Malaya north to Attu and Kiska in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. With Britain and the Soviet Union facing Nazi conquest, the U.S. almost alone opposed Japanese expansion, and came late to the European theater—after the Soviets had defeated the main Nazi force at Stalingrad in February 1943. Nevertheless, the European “war against Fascism” shored up morale and sustained the ideology of a war for democracy.
The Second World War dwarfed the First. The death toll was enormous—more than 50 million overall, more than 18 million in the Soviet Union alone. Compared to the First World War, U.S. losses were considerable, though mostly military—322,000 combat dead, 675,000 wounded, 124,000 captured (more than 12,000 dying in captivity).
The nation mobilized on an
unprecedented scale and at immense cost—$350 billion, about ten times more than the First World War. More than half the money was borrowed; the national debt quintupled. Corporate profits soared on cost-plus government contracts and tax credits for building or improving plants for war production. Unemployment virtually disappeared Labor shortages drew many new workers from rural areas, especially the South and Southwest. War production penetrated some rural areas too. Navajo miners working on reservation lands on the Colorado Plateau extracted a thousand tons of uranium for the government’s atomic bomb project. The president set the work week at forty-eight hours, with hours over forty paid as overtime. More people made more money than ever before.
A host of agencies coordinated the effort. The War Production Board directed conversion of civilian plants to military production—autoworkers made antiaircraft guns at General Motors. The Board of Economic Warfare allocated short supplies of rubber and petroleum. The Office of Price Administration (OPA) set maximum prices for manufactured goods, controlled rents in housing-short cities, and rationed scarce goods like sugar, coffee, and gasoline. Other agencies oversaw scientific research, transportation, housing construction, aid to allies, war information, and propaganda. The War Manpower Commission (WMC) coordinated both military conscription and the war production workforce. By mid-1943, the WMC had frozen 27 million workers in critical war industries.
Almost everyone supported the war. Families planted “victory gardens” and bought “Liberty Bonds.” Volunteers collected scrap metal, served on Civil Defense committees, organized blood drives, wrote “victory mail” to the troops. Some opposition came from religious pacifists like the Catholic Worker organization and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and from a few socialists. More substantial opposition came from fascist groups like the Silver Shirts and the Christian Nationalist Crusade (though even the Ku Klux Klan endorsed the war). Selective Service classified 43,000 draftees (out of ten million) as conscientious objectors, and reported that about 350,000 tried to evade the draft.
Federal agencies working with civilian groups promoted patriotic sentiments in a giant propaganda campaign. Newspapers, magazines, posters, movies, and radio broadcasts celebrated the war as a battle for democracy and portrayed wartime America as a beacon of tolerance, fairness, and equality. But just as the antifascist war was also a fight for empire, its impact on home-front democracy was ambiguous too.
Gender, racial, and ethnic barriers to employment and advancement diminished. Publicists celebrated multiethnic cooperation: the Detroit News compared autoworkers with names like Kowalski, Lugari, and Bauer to an “All-American football team.” Immigration standards relaxed. Congress established the “Bracero” program in 1942 to bring in Mexican farm workers, and revoked Chinese exclusion in 1943. Roosevelt promised citizenship and veterans benefits to Filipinos who volunteered to keep fighting the Japanese until U.S. forces returned. Everyone could be enlisted or drafted, though Japanese American volunteers were accepted only as an experiment, and island Puerto Ricans and African Americans served in segregated units or assignments, mostly construction and stevedoring. (African Americans also served as servants for the almost exclusively white officer corps.) Of the more than 15 million people who went into the military, 700,000 were black, 350,000 Mexican American, 48,000 Puerto Rican, 30,000 Japanese, 19,000 Native American.
About 350,000 women joined the military, and the female labor force grew by more than five million, mostly in industrial and clerical work. Popular stereotypes like “Rosie the Riveter”—working to help her fighting man—boosted morale; many women war workers came from less well-paid jobs segregated by sex and race. The auto industry employed 115 black women at the beginning of the war; a year later the UAW had 5,000 black women members.
For some the war had two fronts. African American activists promoted a “Double V” campaign (“Victory over the Axis abroad, Victory over racism at home”). In August 1942 in St. Louis, people who had organized to march on Washington marched instead on Carter Carburetor, where not one employee out of 2,650 was black. The Fair Employment Practice Committee monitored job discrimination. In 1942, the FEPC directed Allis-Chalmers and nine other companies to cease racial and religious discrimination. In 1943 hearings, the War Manpower Commission found twenty-two railroads and fourteen rail unions discriminating against African and Mexican Americans.
Some people reacted violently to the changes. When the government built the Sojourner Truth Housing Project for black workers in a white Detroit neighborhood in early 1942, it had to send the National Guard to protect the new residents from violent harassment. The next year, 25,000 white Detroit Packard workers walked out to protest black workers placed in white jobs. The strike ended four days later after UAW President R. J. Thomas got the government to issue a back-to-work order and declared strikers would be fired without union objection. Two weeks later (June 20) the city exploded—thirty hours of racial violence left thirty-four dead, twenty-five black, most killed by police. The military had trouble too. That summer racial disturbances were recorded at bases around the country and overseas—one reporter was confused when he listened to black soldiers stationed in England talk about “the enemy” until he realized they meant white Americans. Nearly every week black newspapers reported another black soldier beaten or killed off base, usually somewhere in the South. Some vigilantes wore uniforms. Early in June 1943, rumors spread in Los Angeles that “zooters” (young Mexican American men affecting a distinctive style of tailored suits) were beating up sailors. Gangs of servicemen went hunting zooters, stripping and beating any they caught, and killing several.
The federal government committed the war’s most massive violation of civil liberties. In February 1942, Roosevelt ordered Japanese Americans interned—about 112,000 men, women, and children. Internment was impractical in Hawaii (more than a third of the population had Japanese ancestry), but the authorities did declare martial law, detain 3,400 community leaders, and close Japanese newspapers, schools, and temples. Some trade unionists like A. Philip Randolph (though not communists) joined social workers and church leaders denouncing the internment. Louis Goldblatt of the California CIO Council warned against turning the antifascist struggle into a race war, with little apparent effect—in the brutal Pacific campaigns government propaganda on both sides described the enemy as inferior or inhuman, and many soldiers preferred not to take prisoners alive.
Some other acts of political repression had racial tones. The government suppressed the Nation of Islam’s Final Call, and the leader of a Black Hebrew group in New Orleans was given a fifteen year sentence for encouraging draft refusals. But no dissent was tolerated. Six thousand conscientious objectors went to prison—most of them Jehovah’s Witnesses—and many served in solitary confinement on bread and water diets. Another 12,000 objectors were put in “service” camps to work jobs like fire fighting without pay.
The war did transform labor relations. Most union leaders immediately pledged not to strike for the duration. To resolve labor disputes, the president established the National War Labor Board with representatives from labor, business, and government. To protect unions from losing members, the NWLB approved “maintenance of membership”—union-shop agreements in which new hires had fifteen days to join the union or be dismissed. From 1940 to 1945, total union membership more than doubled to 15 million.
When the steelworkers—who became the United Steelworkers of America (USWA)—began bargaining with “Little Steel,” they demanded more pay to cover rises in the cost of living. In July 1942, the Board allowed a 15 percent raise over the level of January 1, 1941, and applied this formula to all wartime wage demands. Unions could get around it by negotiating better nonwage (“fringe”) benefits. The NWLB routinely approved settlements with improvements in paid holidays and vacations, travel and meal allowances, shift differentials, incentive pay, and bonuses. It exempted insurance and medical care from the formula entirely.
Union leaders cracked down on “hat
e strikes” like Detroit Packard or tried to head them off. When Bendix hired a black man into the tool room at Sylvia Woods’s plant, her UAW steward said, “He’s coming here to work. Anybody that doesn’t like it . . . turn in your union cards and get the hell out.” As she recalled, “No one quit.” Some unions campaigned against racism: the UAW endorsed the “Double V” campaign; USWA urged federal prosecution of the Klan. Los Angeles CIO unions were active among Mexican Americans, protesting housing discrimination, defending youths arrested as zooters, and getting voters registered.
The number of women in unions rose from 800,000 in 1940 to 3.5 million in 1944, almost a quarter of total membership. Some unions responded with new initiatives. Women were 40 percent of the members in the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE) in 1944, and a third of the national staff. UE filed NWLB complaints against General Electric and Westinghouse for paying women less than men for the same work, and won. Women were 28 percent of UAW membership in 1944. UAW locals hired women counsellors to help members with problems like child care and sexual harassment. In the United Cannery Workers (UCAPAWA)—renamed the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers (FTA) in 1944—more than half the shop stewards were women, two out of three contracts required equal pay for equal work, and three out of four provided leaves of absence (for pregnancy, for example) with no loss of seniority.
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 29
