Post-World War II America saw a number of trends in the business and working class communities. The American workers were indoctrinated by both labor and business interests over the future of the country. The New Deal had left the labor unions in a very strong position by giving them the power to challenge big business’s policies toward its employees. Business was in a weakened state but was determined to restore its lost power.
An under-emphasized response to this phenomenon was the massive business propaganda campaign carried out during the 30s and 40s. This campaign focused on undermining both labor and poor people’s achievements during the New Deal and World War II. It sought to re-establish corporate prestige, much of which had been lost during the years of the Great Depression. Labor unions responded with their own propaganda to effort to shape the public’s mind.
Many workers, especially the working-class poor wanted the government and big business to be held partially responsible for providing for the economic well-being of workers. They believed in the power of labor to regulate business and the welfare state to intervene on behalf of the poor workers to compensate for economic failures. They were able to help achieve these goals by joining labor unions1. These unions had started to grow in popularity and were once again a powerful force. By 1935 union membership was up to 3.7 million. By 1940, 10.6 million had joined labor unions. Their strength was increased due to congressional support and widespread support among the working-poor.
Throughout the World War II period, labor achieved several important legislative victories that served to strengthen and legitimize its influence. Regulation of big business was understood by President Roosevelt to be necessary for a healthy economy. After the failures of Norris-LaGuardia and National Recovery Acts, Congress had to address labor’s problems.
This came in the form of The National Labor Relations Act . This act outlawed company-dominated unions and set up the National Labor Relations Board which had power to supervise elections and collective bargaining, hear complaints of unfair labor practices and enforce its decisions. The La Follete Civil Liberties Committee of 1937 noted industry’s disregard for labor’s legal rights and how it carried out unfair business practices such as strikebreaking and spying on union officials. This was followed by the Fair Labor Standards Act which established minimum wage, a 44 hour work week, and abolished child labor. Furthermore, the Employment Act of 1946 set out ‘“maximum employment, production and purchasing power” as goals of governmental policy”’2.
Already a reality for members of unionized labor, these laws extended the protections that labor had earned and gave them to all workers. It gave benefits to unprotected workers including women, minorities and the unskilled. Almost 2.5 million people were immediately affected by this. Complimenting this was the huge gains workers had seen with the New Deal’s creation of both short term and long term government safety nets, such as Social Security.
By the start of the post war period, labor had achieved much. The power of organized labor was at an unprecedented level and for the first time won legal protection. By the end of the war, unions had received “ the right to organize, and bargain collectively, workmen’s compensation, minimum wages, old age insurance and unemployment insurance, limitation on hours, and the prohibition of injunctions”.3
The gains made by the labor did not go unnoticed by business interests. The disaster of the Great Depression had naturally caused Americans to reevaluate their view of corporations. These business interests were well organized, well funded, and felt that they had a lot to lose. Not only did businesses attempt to undermine labor’s protection, but they also wanted to dismember the newly created welfare state, and its wealth redistribution. They were motivated by the fears that organized labor would further rise in popularity and begin to make more and more radical demands. A large fear was that labor would push demands into the area of the workers controlling the industries they worked in, thereby taking the decision making process out of the hands of management. This was not a new idea. The factory workers of Lowell had been suggesting the same thing a century earlier. Businesses also took note of the very close connection between labor and its new protector- the Federal government.
In 1946, the National Association of Manufacturers released a very comprehensive report titled “The American Individual Enterprise System”. In this they analyzed the labor union’s wage doctrine, quoting from a 1941 CIO policy statement. A passage is quoted that states: “CIO policy must continue to be based on the conviction that working people shall have a greater share in the national income” and “The CIO …deplores the existing wage differential between workers in the North and the South”4. The NAM report attacks this as dangerous to the economy because it decreases the income gap between skilled and unskilled workers, and therefore decreases production and the incentive to become skilled.
The N.A.M. report discusses the role the government should play in the country’s economy. “In a modern industrial nation government has a distinct and inescapable function…to maintain that environment which makes possible and encourage business policies”. Governments, they argue, should create the rules, which, if followed , “will assure the continued orderly functioning of the economic system.” The report paints a stark alternative, the choice between their economic system and what labor wants is the choice between “freedom and dictatorship”. It argues that “one cannot have the freedoms and rights of democracy unless there is a system of individual enterprise”.5
An alternative system, no matter the name, will restrict personal freedom and ruin the economy by decreasing output per employee and production in an effort to eliminate business fluctuations.6
Furthermore, the report argued against wealth redistribution and New Deal programs. It states that governmental savings and life insurance are not necessary because there is now $25 billion dollars in saving deposits and “practically all of it, one should remember belongs to people of relatively low incomes”.7 It argued that wealth distribution would mean that everyone would receive the same money for their labor, no matter their job, and this would destroy one’s incentive to work and to aspire to further one’s place in the world.8
There is no doubt businesses felt threatened by the power of labor and the New Deal’s economic programs. In response big business carried out large and well organized campaigns designed to win back the allegiance of the American worker and roll-back New Deal achievements9. The campaign was two-fold. At a national level, it was carried out through lobbying, campaign financing and litigation. Its most visible success would be passage of the Taft-Hartley Act over the president’s veto. This bill was fiercely opposed by the two largest labor unions: the AFL and CIO. In their campaign against it they referred to it as the ‘slave-labor’ bill. It was so fiercely opposed because it retracted and reinterpreted many of the features of the Wagner Act that had given labor its legitimacy. Furthermore, intense business campaigning had resulted in the passage of a much watered-down Employment Act, from which the bill’s original intent of full employment was removed.
In addition to the campaign carried out the national level, the business community carried out a local level campaign which aimed to “shape ideas, images, and attitudes through which Americans understood their world, specifically their understanding of their relationships to the corporation and state”.10 As an alternative to the new focus on wealth redistribution, the business community responded in its campaign by emphasizing permanent economic growth.
Indoctrination of workers by businesses on company time became one major way that business associations sought to win over the worker’s allegiance. Millions of workers participated in mandatory programs where they were taught the importance of the free market after World War II. Organized labor also carried out campaigns in the work place in an effort to fight their efforts. For example, a 1950 United Automobile Worker’s poster shows a wealthy businessman attempting to poison the mind of a worker who has been tied down to a chair11. Another medium that was used in the work place was the employee magazine. By 1950 their circulation reached an astounding 80 million employees12. Again labor responded with posters urging workers to throw away the literature the company had published.
Corporate groups also sought to glamorize business’s contributions to society. A large portion of the campaign was directed at the communities in which the workers resided. These communities had been very supportive of union efforts at striking and other activities. Businesses organized such events as picnics and recreational activities to gain favor within communities 13. Again, organized labor used their own propaganda efforts to counter the efforts of corporations. They also carried out recreational activities and propaganda campaigns14 to show the value of unions to its members. Businesses organizations went as far as creating billboards to propagandize ordinary citizens. For example, a NAM billboard stressed the success and fairness of the American system15. Another one emphasized how the “American Way” not only consisted of “Freedom of religion and speech”, “Opportunity”, and “Representative Democracy” but also “Private Enterprise”.
A 1942 article in Time Magazine quotes the Federal Council of Churches as having condemned the existing economic system for causing “’mass unemployment, widespread dispossession from homes and farms, destitution, lack of opportunity for youth and old age..” and suggesting that a new economic order be developed “through voluntary cooperation within the framework of democracy”. This would seem a vision shared by many poor workers at the time16.
In response, a poster created by the pro-business American Council of Christian Churches accused the Council of putting forth communist, therefore Anti-American ideas.17 Not only did business interests seek to discredit organized labor, but anyone who was putting forth their demands. Labor responded with their own initiatives. For example, the CIO held conferences with religious leaders in an effort to bring over to their side18.
By the end of the 1940s, the battle was largely, although not completely over. Many factors contributed to this end result, but there is no doubt that by using its much greater resources, business lobbies had helped to end the debate over whether the economy should be drastically restructured. By associating the ‘American Way’ with the free-market and by discrediting alternative options, the lobbying campaign had done much to shape the future of the country.
The end of the decade saw the American worker rededicated towards the free market, individual rights and an expanding economy to solve America’s problems. Equally important, business had successfully fought the tide of wealth redistribution started in the New Deal. The programs they did accept, such as Social Security, but they insisted that such programs required a constantly expanding economy to sustain. The consensus and post war economic success of the 1950s silenced this debate until the 1960s and President Johnson’s Great Society programs.
Although labor remained strong for many years to come, the post-war period witnessed a change in its allegiances. The major unions were soon co-opted by the Democratic Party, which meant abandoning their broader goals of economic equality and class solidarity. Perhaps a testament to its success, this meant that goals of organized labor and that of poor were to take drastically different directions. The poor were pushed out of the public’s consciousness and would have to wait until the Civil Rights Movements to again be able to press for their demands. Finally, because the debate for wealth redistribution had largely been ended and because of the 1950’s economic boom, the assault on the welfare state and the poor’s safety net had begun.
Primary Sources:
1. National Association of Manufacturers, “Industrial Relations Division.
Labor-management developments - challenge to the nation”; excerpts from key addresses at NAM's 65th Congress of American Industry. 1961.
2. Advertising Council, “Condensed record of a round table discussion on the basic elements of a free, dynamic society”, held under the sponsorship of the Advertising Council. 1951.
3. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, “Billboard on U.S. Highway 99 in California. National advertising campaign sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers.” Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection. 1944.
4. John Cameron Aspley and Eugene Whitmore, The Handbook of Industrial Relations, (Chicago: Dartnell, 1952), p. 1104.
5. National Association of Manufacturers, ““The American Individual Enterprise System: Its Evolution and Future”
Secondary Sources:
Norman J. Ware, Labor in Modern Industrial Society (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1935)
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60 (Chicago: University Of Illinois, 1994
1 Norman J. Ware, Labor in Modern Industrial Society (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1935), 379
2 June Axin and Mark J. Stern, Social Welfare, 6th Edition(New York: Allyn and Bacon, 2005),234.
3 Ibid, 235.
4 National Association of Manufacturers, The American Individual Enterprise System(New York: Mcgraw-Hil, 1946), 465.
5 Ibid, 874.
6 Ibid, 863-864.
7 Ibid, 907.
8 Ibid, 906.
9 Robert Griffith, “The Selling of America: The Advertising Council and American Politics, 1942-1960,” Business History Review 57 (1983): 388.
10 Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The business assault on Labor and Liberalism 1945-60(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 5.
11 Ibid, 77.
12 Ibid,80.
13 Photo reprinted from Industrial Sports and Recreation, Feb 1954, reprinted in Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The business assault on Labor and Liberalism 1945-60(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 75.
14 Photo from Olga Madar Papers, reprinted in Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The business assault on Labor and Liberalism 1945-60(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994),
79.
15 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, “Billboard on U.S. Highway 99 in California. National advertising campaign sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers.” Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection. 1944.
16 American Malvern, TIME - The Weekly Newsmagazine, March, 16, 1942, 44-46.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,801396,00.html
17 Poster reprinted with permission from Laymen’s Commission of the American Council of Christian Churches, reprinted in Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The business assault on Labor and Liberalism 1945-60(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 210.
18 Photo from John Ramsay Papers, reprinted in Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The business assault on Labor and Liberalism 1945-60(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 211.
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