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The Wagner Act, Again: Politics and Labor, 1935–37

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

David Plotke
David Plotke
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

Why write about the Wagner Act again? There is no shortage of commentary, yet disagreement persists on basic questions: Why did the measure pass? Did the Wagner Act make any difference. If so, how?

Here I argue that the Wagner Act was passed by Progressive liberals inside and outside the government, in alliance with a mass labor movement. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) played a major positive role in the emergence of new industrial unions.

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Articles
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Studies in American Political Development , Volume 3 , Spring 1989 , pp. 104 - 156
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

For helpful comments on an earlier version of this article, thanks are due to the editors of Studies in American Political Development and a reviewer. This article was written at the Institute for Advanced Study, where my stay in 1987–88 was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Thanks to Lucille Allsen at the Institute for crucial technical assistance.

1. The full argument is developed in a book manuscript, “The Democratic Political Order, 1932–72.”

2. The first view colors recent works on contemporary parties which contain little direct discussion of the 1930s or 1940s, such as Polsby's, NelsonConsequences of Party Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar. For different versions of the second argument, see Burns, James MacGregor, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956)Google Scholar; Davis, Michael, Prisoners of the American Dream (London: Verso, 1986)Google Scholar; and Skocpol, Theda, “Legacies of New Deal Liberalism”, Dissent (Winter 1983): 33–44Google Scholar.

3. Relevant works published in the last decade include: Domhoff, G. William, “The Wagner Act and Theories of the State: A New Analysis Based on Class-Segment Theory”, Political Power and Social Theory 6 (1987): 159–85Google Scholar; Edwards, P. K., Strikes in the United States, 1881–1974 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981)Google Scholar; Milkman, Ruth, ed., Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women's Labor History (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985)Google Scholar; Skocpol, Theda, “Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal”, Politics and Society 10, no. 2 (1980): 155–201Google Scholar; Tomlins, Christopher L., The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Vittoz, Stanley, New Deal Labor Policy and the American Industrial Economy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and a volume of articles on labor in the 1930s, Zeitlin, Maurice, ed., Political Power and Social Theory 4 (1984)Google Scholar.

4. Efforts to explain the contemporary decline of the unions are crucial not only for accounts of the labor movement, but for overall views of recent developments in American politics. Recent works in which these connections are clear include: Ferguson, Thomas and Rogers, Joel, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986)Google Scholar; Freeman, Richard B. and Medoff, James L., What Do Unions Do (New York: Basic Books, 1984)Google Scholar; Goldfield, Michael, The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Piore, Michael J. and Sabel, Charles F., The Second Industrial Divide (New York: Basic Books, 1984)Google Scholar.

5. Brinkley's, AlanVoices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982)Google Scholar offers a sympathetic view of 1930s populism. For treatments of the Communist experience, from critical to antagonistic, see Pells, Richard H., Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1973)Google Scholar; and Klehr, Harvey, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984)Google Scholar.

6. On race relations, see McAdam, Doug, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Sitkoff, Harvard, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and Weiss, Nancy J., Farewell to the Party of Lincoln (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

7. For the recent debate on the Social Security Act, see Cates, Jerry R., Insuring Inequality: Administrative Leadership in Social Security, 1935–54 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Domhoff, G. William, “Corporate-Liberal Theory and the Social Security Act: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge”, Politics and Society 15, no. 3 (1986–1987): 297–330Google Scholar; Ikenberry, G. John and Skocpol, Theda, “Expanding Social Benefits: The Role of Social Security”, Political Science Quarterly 102, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 389–416Google Scholar; Quadagno, Jill, “Welfare Capitalism and the Social Security Act of 1935”, American Sociological Review 49 (1984): 632–47Google Scholar; and Skocpol, Theda and Ikenberry, John, “The Political Formation of the American Welfare State in Historical and Comparative Perspective”, in Comparative Social Research, vol. 5, The Welfare State, 1883–1983, ed. Tomasson, Richard F. (Greenwich, Conn.: JA1 Press, 1983), 87–148Google Scholar.

8. The initial vote in the Senate was 63–12; efforts to modify the pro-union emphasis of the bill in the House were voted down. The House then approved the bill without a record vote (Millis, Harry A. and Brown, Emily Clark, From the Wagner Act to Taft-Hartley: A Study of National Labor Policy and Labor Relations [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950], 28)Google Scholar. Also see the House Conference Report (No. 1371 on S.1958) in Legislative History of the National Labor Relations Act, vol. 2 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1935), 3252–67.

9. In 1934, Roosevelt expressed no great urgency about changing labor law. He suggested a radically simplified version of the bill, locating any new agencies within the Labor Department, and restating Section 7(a) of the NIRA. He was inclined to recommend further study (Memo, “President's Conference with Senators”, April 14, 1934, Folder “U.S. Senate 1933–36”, President's Secretary's File 188, Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers as President, FDR Library). Also see Bernstein, Irving, New Deal Collective Bargaining Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 63–70Google Scholar; Sipe, Daniel Albert, “A Moment of the State: The Enactment of the National Labor Relations Act, 1935” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1981), 147–49Google Scholar.

10. National Industrial Recovery Act, H.R. 5755, June 16, 1933, in Public Laws of the U.S.A. — Passed by the Seventy-Third Congress, 1933–34 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1934), 195–200.

11. Complaints about the inability of the labor relations machinery to secure compliance and thus to protect efforts to achieve unions began in 1933 and persisted. Many reports of these problems were made to Roosevelt (Letter, William Connery to Roosevelt, 11/26/33, Folder 1933–34, Official File 407—Labor, Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers as President, FDR Library).

12. National Labor Relations Act, July 5, 1935, Public Laws of the U.S.A.—Passed by the Seventy-Fourth Congress, 1935–36 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1936), 449–57.

13. Legal conflict was a central process for the contending parties. It concerned the legiti-mate uses of government power, including physical force, in industrial relations. Employers' willingness to accept legal outcomes they opposed was due to a combination of commitment to legal practices and lack of realistic political alternatives. The centrality of legal conflict in the decade is one of the main points of Irons, Peter, New Deal Lawyers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

14. See Bernstein, New Deal Collective Bargaining; Goldberg, Joseph P., “The Law and Practice of Collective Bargaining”, in Goldberg, , ed., Federal Policies and Worker Status since the Thirties (Madison: University of Wisconsin, Industrial Relations Research Association, 1976), 13–19Google Scholar; Huthmacher, J. Joseph, Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (New York: Atheneum, 1948), 103–45Google Scholar.

15. The authoritarianism of the 1920s factory regime is clear in accounts both of welfare capitalism and of conditions early in the depression. While the mass production industries provided an eventually favorable setting for new types of collective action, the fullest account of welfare capitalism in the 1920s argues only for the unhappiness of workers with the package of wages, working conditions, and benefits it supplied, not that rebellion was imminent prior to the depression. The unions had been defeated, and employers had the economic and political resources to limit reform efforts, given a continued growth in wages and productivity. See Brandes, Stuart D., American Welfare Capitalism: 1880–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 136–48Google Scholar.

16. For example, see Aglietta, Michel, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (London: New Left Books, 1979)Google Scholar.

17. Bernstein, Irving provides a graphic account of the upsurges of 1934–35 in The Turbulent Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970)Google Scholar. Dramatic press accounts are collected in Dubofsky, Melvyn, ed., American Labor since the New Deal (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971)Google Scholar.

18. In 1934, 1,856 strikes resulted in 19.6 million “man-days” idle; in 1935, 2,014 strikes resulted in 15.5 million lost days (Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States — Colonial Times to 1970 [Washington: Bureau of the Census, 1975], D 970–985, “Work Stop-pages, Workers Involved, Man-Days Idle, Major Issues, and Average Duration: 1881–1970”).

19. Schlesinger, Arthur, The Politics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 242–54Google Scholar; Brinkley, Voices of Protest.

20. In addition to Schlesinger's account in Politics of Upheaval, 270–320, see Burns, Roosevelt, 205–40, and Hawley, Ellis, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 154–55Google Scholar, for statements of business opposition to the administration.

21. Not surprisingly, one of the most extended analyses of the New Deal from a perspective that emphasizes the role of business self-organization and the state's alliance with business projects contains no discussion of the Wagner Act. See Kolko, Gabriel, Main Currents in Modern American History (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 100–56Google Scholar.

22. This view is argued in Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 336–51, and more recently in Stanley Vittoz, New Deal Labor Policy, 149–53. Efforts to demonstrate substantial business support for the Wagner Act have been unsuccessful. Thomas Ferguson tries to show that business groups were important, but there are two major problems. First, his evidence is very weak, amounting to little more than meetings of Gerard Swope with Wagner. He seems not really to want to claim that these meetings determined the course of events. Second, even if broader contact between the Progressive liberals and business could be found than seems to have occurred in the course of the writing and passage of the act, it would be necessary to show that this represented a business initiative rather than a response to a Progressive effort to cope with an emerging political and economic crisis. See Ferguson, Thomas, “From Normalcy to New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party Competition, and American Public Policy in the Great Depression”, International Organization 38 (Winter 1984): 88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. Horowitz, Ruth, Political Ideologies of Organized Labor: The New Deal Era (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1978), 110–27, 131Google Scholar.

24. See Cochran, Bert, Labor and Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 78Google Scholar, and Bernstein, New Deal Collective Bargaining, 108–09. Sympathetic accounts of the role of the Communists in the labor movement often pay little attention to the CP'S early opposition to the NLRA. A good example of this delicacy is Keeran's, RogerThe Communist Party and the Auto Workers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 121–47Google Scholar. In 1935, testimony for the Communist party against the NLRA was given by a writer for the Daily Worker, Dunne, William. See “Statement of William Dunne”, Hearings before the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, in Legislative History of the National Labor Relations Act, vol. 2 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), 1966-73Google Scholar.

25. Brinkley, Voices of Protest, 246–48.

26. “Republican Platform of 1936”, in Johnson, Donald Bruce, comp., National Party Plat-forms (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 367Google Scholar.

27. Johnson, National Party Platforms, 331–32.

28. Obviously Roosevelt was aware of the year's labor conflict, and if somehow it had escaped his attention, he received many reminders from within the administration. For example, see Memo, Isador Lubin (Bureau of Labor Statistics) to Roosevelt, n.d., Official File 407B—Strikes, Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library. He received many letters complaining about disorder and urging action against the strikes, as in 1934 Folder, 1935 Folder, Official File 407B—Strikes, Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library.

29. Thus the secretary of commerce advised the inclusion of language very similar to that in the Republican platform (Letter, Daniel Roper to Roosevelt, June 20, 1935, Official File 300, Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library).

30. See Fleming, R. W., “The Significance of the Wagner Act”, in Derber, Milton and Young, Edwin, eds., Labor and the New Deal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), 128Google Scholar. Also see Perkins, Frances, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 239Google Scholar.

31. In 1934 and 1935, participants in the labor boards criticized the lack of mechanisms for securing compliance in decisions. Compliance with decisions that required employers to make concessions seems to have occurred at most one-third of the time, probably a good deal less (Letter, J. W. R. Maguire to Roosevelt, 5/9/35, and Memo, Hopkins to Roosevelt, 2/12/35, both in Folder Labor 1935, Official File 407—Labor, Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library). Roosevelt's disinterest is clear in the lack of attention given to the NLRA in his main statements and speeches in 1935, and in the modest tone of his statement upon signing the act. See Roosevelt, , The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 4, The Court Disapproves — 1935 (New York: Random House, 1938), 294–95Google Scholar. Also see Leuchtenburg, William E., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 145Google Scholar.

32. The main way of making such a case seriously is to focus on the mass action of 1934. Although they are not enthusiastic about the Wagner Act, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward attribute its passage mainly to the actual and prospective disruption caused by the working-class mobilization. They overstate its (substantial) extent and thus see political mediation as mainly conservative. See Piven, and Cloward, , Poor People's Movements (New York: Vintage, 1979), 120–33Google Scholar.

33. In addition to Bernstein, The New Deal Collective Bargaining Policy, 88, and Vittoz, New Deal Labor Policy, see Gross, James A., The Making of the National Labor Relations Board, vol. 1, 1933–1937 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), 13033Google Scholar.

34. Fred Block argues that such crises offer opportunities for reformist coalitions between state managers and subordinate social groups, expanding the power and freedom of maneuver of the first group while reducing the power of business elites to prevent reform (Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes on the Marxist Theory of the State”, Socialist Review7. no. 3 [ 05–06 1977]: 6–28).

35. Many examples of the federal government's incapacity are reported to Roosevelt in Official File 716—NLRB; a good collection of them appears in Hermann Kebrunk, “Report to the National Labor Relations Board”, 2/26/36, Official File 716—NLRB, Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library.

36. The persistence of AFL voluntarism is a major theme in Tomlins, The State and the Unions, as well as in Horowitz, Political Ideologies of Organized Labor, 73, 121.

37. Leuchtenburg, Roosevelt and the New Deal, 114–17.

38. Huthmacher describes the preparation of the bill, in Robert F. Wagner, 187–97. A recently published interview with Leon Keyserling underlines the role of Progressive liberal policy intellectuals (mainly lawyers and economists) in the discussions that led to the framing of the NLRA. Keyserling and others were in contact with labor leaders, mainly through the lawyers for labor organizations. See Casebeer, Kenneth M., “Holder of the Pen: An Interview with Leon Keyserling on Drafting the Wagner Act” University of Miami Law Review 42, no. 2 (11 1987): 285–363Google Scholar.

39. Letter, William M. Leiserson to Frances Perkins, April 11, 1934, Official File 407B— Strikes, Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library.

40. David Burner stresses Roosevelt's role in the modernizing efforts of the 1920s; his own candidacy was crucial to continuing that direction (Burner, The Politics of Provincialism [New York: W. W. Norton 1975], 142–57). Also see Davis, Kenneth S., FDR: The New York Years, 1928–1933 (New York: Random House, 1985)Google Scholar.

41. This social portrait emerges clearly in general accounts of the decade and in treatments of particular legislative and judicial conflicts. See Huthmacher, Robert F. Wagner, 118–30; Irons, New Deal Lawyers, 3–10; and Clawson, Marion, New Deal Planning — The National Re-sources Planning Board (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

42. A recent study convincingly shows that much of pre-World War I Progressivism had reformist aims. See Kloppenberg, James T., Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. 349–84Google Scholar. By the early 1930s, even Progressive intellectuals who contemplated a major extension of planning did not conceive their egalitarian and centralizing projects as anticapitalist. See Sternsher, Bernard, Rexford Tugwell and the New Deal (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1964)Google Scholar, as well as Tugwell, Rexford, The Brains Trust (New York: Viking, 1968)Google Scholar.

43. Here, Kloppenberg's argument for the convergence of American Progressivism with European social democracy in the first two decades of the century is dubious. In Europe, even conservative tendencies within social democracy were often in dialogue with organized working-class political and social movements that presented themselves as the central agents of overall reform. European social democrats were located in a different field of assumptions than American Progressives, whose intermittent support for labor issues was much more paternalistic. There is a difference between viewing the labor movement as a major force for democratic reform and viewing the extension of citizenship as requiring reforms in working conditions. During the 1930s, some Progressives became willing to view labor as a genuine ally in a process of democratic reform and reorganization. This development originated both in state and local experiences and in disillusionment with the variants of Progressivism represented in the Hoover administration. See Sipe, “Moment of the State”, 73–80.

44. In addition to Huthmacher, RobertF. Wagner, 103–15, andTugwell, The Brains Trust, see Davis, FDR: The New York Years, 269, and Jerold S. Auerbach, “Lawyers and Social Change in the Depression Decade”, in Braeman, John, Bremmer, Robert H., and Brody, David, eds., The New Deal: The National Level (Colombus: Ohio state Univrsity Press, 1975), 132–69Google Scholar. Auer Bach's account is one of note that anti-Semitism in elite private legal circles helped make public service an attractive choice for young Jewish lawyers.

45. See Edelman, Murray, “New Deal Sensitivity to Labor Interests”, in Derber, Milto and Young, Edward, eds., Labor and the New Deal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), 186–88Google Scholar.

46. Progressive liberalism was a vehicle for linking a range of reform tendencies—such as social feminism—to New Deal political-economic projects. See Ware, Susan, Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 167–243Google Scholar.

47. The conservative impulses of large parts of the Democratic Party are clear in the accounts of Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, and Leuchtenberg, Roosevelt and the New Deal. Internal conflict between pro- and anti-New Deal Factions was rampant, coloring letters outlining local political situations sent in response to a 1936 form letter by DNC Chair James Farley soliciting judgments of Roosevelt's reelection prospects. The questionnaire is in Folder Farley's Forms for Campaign Correspondence, Miscellaneous Democratic Papers 1932–38, Papers of the Democratic National Committee, FDR Library. Among the many accounts of conflict are Letter, Charles H. Deuel to Farley, September 3, 1936; Letter, Eds. C. Purpus to Farley, October 2, 1934; Letter, James Meeks to Farley, August 17, 1936—all in Correspondence of James Farley, Papers of the Democratic National Committee, FDR Library.

48. Evidence of the middle-class social character of the leading liberal reformers permeates accounts of particular governmental institutions and reform and reorganization projects, such as Irons, New Deal Lawyers: Gross, The Making of the National Labor Relations Board; and Polenberg, Richard, Reorganizing Roosevelt's Government (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49. The Communist and Socialist parties remained small; their middle-class membership numbered in the tens rather than the hundreds of thousands. But their reality shows the limits of reducing political choices to the alleged social interests of the agents involved. Just as this approach is not adequate for explaining Progressive liberalism, it will not work with the Communists. The increase in membership of the Communist party in the mid-thirties occurred during and after the turn from United Front to Popular Front policies. The latter formulation was explicitly multiclass; the new membership was disproportionately middle class, compared with the prior composition of the party. Yet the CP'S Popular Front turn was not caused by its changing class composition; instead, that major strategic shift was caused by judgments regarding the shape of American politics and pressures from the international Communist movement. See Cochran, , Labor and Communism, as well as Al Richmond, A Long View from the Left: Memoirs of an American Revolutionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972)Google Scholar.

50. The efforts of state managers to secure a stable environment, obtain resources, and expand the state itself are central to the arguments of Block, in “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule” the articles on social and economic policy in the United States by Theda Skocpol and her colleagues cited above; and Margaret Weir and Theda Skocpol, “State Structures and the Possibilities for ‘Keynesian’ Responses to the Great Depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States”, in Evans, Peter, Roeschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 107–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. State building is conceived as the process resulting from such maximizing efforts. Thus given known and roughly constant objectives by state managers (economic resources and order), variation in outcomes hinge on variation in the capacities of state institutions to achieve those objectives. This fruitful approach tends toward a rationalistic conception of political action; what disap-pears is the political framework within which state building is or is not attempted. Bureaucracies expand in some directions and not others, with some aims and not others. The forms of expansion chosen depend partly on the substantive political aims of “state man-agers”, as needs for order and resources almost always require specification.

51. In 1935, substantial forces within the administration sought to modify the pro-union and pro-labor force of the NLRA. Suggestions for changes were made in a long memo from Attorney General Cummings to Senator Wagner, summarizing a White House conference of May 24 on the bill. A letter from Secretary of Commerce Roper argued for including clauses to protect employees from “union intimidation”, implying a defense of their right to join company unions. Other administration figures who generally supported the bill, including Frances Perkins, wanted to put the NLRB in the Labor Department, a step that would have limited its power (Memo, Homer Cummings to Roosevelt, 5/28/35; Letter, Harold Stephens to Robert Wagner, 5/27/35; Memo, Daniel Roper to Roosevelt, 6/20/35; Letter, Frances Perkins to Mr. McIntyre, 6/18/35—all in Folder Labor 1935, Official File 407—Labor, Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library).

52. The combination of structuralism and rationalism that characterizes the approach of such Marxist analysts as Nicos Poulantzas—for whom structural forces virtually dictate what the state and political forces must do to reproduce capitalism—is not improved if one substitutes “state” for “capital” and assumes “rational” state managers. For a very good critique of the Poulantzian approach to politics, see Skocpol, Theda, “Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal”, Politics and Society 10, no. 2 (1980): 179–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a more recent account, Skocpol recognizes that focusing on the state does not solve the problem of accounting for the actions of state managers. Her response is mainly to stress the immediate interests of state managers as a group in their positions and privileges. This concern clearly motivates some state officials at some points, but as a general formulation it leaves far too little space open for politics. See Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research”, in Evans et al., eds., Bringing the State Back In, 14–15.

53. Vittoz offers a similar account of the act's passage. But when he concludes that though capitalists failed to realize their immediate preferences, the overall experience is best under-stood as “interest brokering” within the confines of American capitalism, he undermines his own account by downplaying the scope of the political and social change that occurred (Vittoz, New Deal Labor Policy, 7, 171).

54. See Huthmacher, Robert F. Wagner, 153–63, and the account of the bill's preparation in Irons, New Deal Lawyers, 227–31.

55. In 1935 there was extensive testimony on the NLRA before the Senate Education and Labor Committee. The following relies on the records of those hearings and the 1935 congressional debates, as well as Bernstein, New Deal Collective Bargaining and Turbulent Years; Horowitz, Political Ideologies of Organized Labor; Irons, New Deal Lawyers; Sipe, “Moment of the State” and Tomlins, The State and the Unions.

56. Employers insisted that the unions envisaged by the Wagner Act would be unable to avoid committing endless crimes against their property rights. The volume of such testimony—and the virtual absence of major employers taking opposed positions in public—is impressive, although its shrillness and unoriginality doubtless helped limit its persuasiveness in a situation where a simple reaffirmation of faith was not politically sufficient. A livelier than usual sample is the testimony of Emery, James, general counsel of the National Association of Manufacturers, before the Senate Education and Labor Committee on March 21, 1935, in Legislative History of the National Labor Relations Act, 1935, vol. 2, (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), 1626–50Google Scholar.

57. Christopher Tomlins's account of labor law in the 1920s and 1930s seems to offer a brief on behalf of the AFL'S voluntarist conception of unions as autonomous private organizations engaged in supplying labor. His account of the adaptation of voluntarism to organizational pressures for individualism and against republican themes early in the century is compelling. But as he moves toward the 1930s he loses sight of the overall political and ideological context and he fails, for example, even to note the great vulnerability of a conception of unions as private entities supplying labor to a conservative/populist critique of them as privileged interests (Tomlins, The State and the Unions, 103–60).

58. Bernstein, New Deal Collective Bargaining, 106–10; Irons, New Deal Lawyers, 247.

59. The AFL support for the NLRA was also encouraged by the argument that a voluntaristic approach, whatever its previous virtues, was not adequate to the challenges it faced. When the NLRB appeared to favor the cio, the AFL was compelled to fight on a new terrain regarding the forms and extent of state intervention in labor relations. In addition to the accounts of Tomlins and Bernstein, see Galenson, Walter, The CIO Challenge to the AFL (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

60. National Labor Relations Act, July 5, 1935, in Public Laws of the U.S.A, 1935–36, 449.

61. The underconsumption argument for the Wagner Act was often intertwined with notions of the desirable economic consequences of industrial order (Letter, H. A. Millis to Roosevelt, 6/21/35, Folder NLRB July-October 1935, Official File 716—National Labor Relations Board, Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library). Also see Bernstein, New Deal Collective Bargaining, 112; Fleming, “Significance of the Wagner Act”, 129.

62. Fairness could be conceived either in organizational terms, as a form of counterplanning with respect to the power of monopoly and oligopoly forms, or as meeting the needs of the downtrodden for respect and dignity. See Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly, 195, 276; and Burns, Roosevelt, 218–19.

63. This fusion of rationalizing and egalitarian arguments marks “Senate Report No. 573 on S. 1958,” in Legislative History of the NLRA,. 2302–03.

64. In 1935, Roosevelt was deluged with fairness arguments from union forces; they appear in Official File 407—Labor, Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library.

65. Horowitz, Political Ideologies of Organized Labor, 127–30; Tomlins, The State and the Unions, 149.

66. Huthmacher, Robert F. Wagner, 192; Horowitz, Political Ideologies of Organized Labor,175–77.

67. Tomlins criticizes this shift toward the public—and the state—but neglects the ways in which, on the actual political field, antistatism was fused with employers' rights. Thus “democracy” was a powerful stake of conflicts that the AFL'S voluntarism could barely even engage (Tomlins, The State and the Unions, 239, 243).

68. That the unions rarely made claims in class terms is clear not only in “traditional” labor histories, such as Bernstein, Turbulent Years. Oral histories also show that explicit class terms were marginal in popular discourse, beyond leftist groups for which such language verged on being a private code. See Staughton, and Lynd, Alice, Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working Class Organizers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973)Google Scholar. Also see Vittoz, New Deal Labor Policy, 164–66.

69. In an important article, Karl Klare stresses the extent to which the Wagner Act meant sharply limiting employers' rights. In context, however, this assault emphasized efficiency, order, and fairness. See Klare, , “Judicial Deradicalization of the Wagner Act and the Origins of Modern Legal Consciousness,” Minnesota Law Review, 62, no. 3 (03 1978): 277–90Google Scholar.

70. That even militant sections of the labor movement were generally not calling for “workers' control,” much less socialism, is such an obvious point that it is almost embarrassing to have to make it. But doing so is still necessary. Sometimes anecdotal evidence is cited to show a burgeoning labor radicalism, without a serious effort to weigh the strength of different currents. In some leftist accounts, there is a striking absence where one might expect some discussion of what workers really wanted; thus the notion of a frustrated radical upsurge is sustained less with reference to frustrated radicals than via an implicit notion of the forms of political consciousness appropriate to the working class in capitalist societies, or via a notion of social movements as constituted by disruptive forces demanding more. See Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, and Piven and Cloward, Poor People's Movements, 96–180.

71. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics, D 970–985, “Work Stoppages, Workers Involved, Man-Days Idle, Major Issues, and Average Duration: 1881 — 1970.”

72. It is hard to establish this quantitative relation with certainty, given the unreliability of the categories and data on strikes in periods of great turmoil, but the prevalence of recognition strikes is beyond dispute. The next question, of course, is what was meant by union recognition. It was both an aim and a symbol of other aims. Working conditions—the pace of work, the abusive power of foremen, the lack of any seniority protection—were at least as powerful as and probably more urgent than immediate wage issues in the labor upsurge of 1935–37. David, Montgomery argues this view in Workers' Control in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 140–49Google Scholar.

73. The NLRB was deluged with cases where employers refused to bargain and discriminated against employees because of their union affiliations. This pattern is apparent in reports sent to Roosevelt from the NLRB, such as Letter and Memo, J. Warren Madden to Roosevelt, January 28, 1936, Folder NLRB 1936, Official Folder 716—NLRB, Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library. Also see Millis, Harry A. and Brown, Emily Clark, From the Wagner Act to Taft-Hartley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950)Google Scholar.

74. Comparison with the Social Security Act is useful here. In that case, one can find some empirical support for the view that business initiated and sustained the reform process, though in the end such an interpretation is problematic. With the NLRA, the difficulty of even getting such an argument off the ground at the empirical level drives those who try toward vague functionalist claims about the ultimately conservative nature of the new unions. On Social Security, see, for example, Berkowitz, Edward and McQuaid, Kim, Creating the Welfare State: The Political Economy of Twentieth Century Reform (New York: Praeger, 1980), 113, 165–67Google Scholar.

75. The decision to uphold the NLRA was a surprise. Its departure from the logic of most Supreme Court decisions in 1935–36 required several years of intense legal and political pressure. Many of the restraint of commerce objections to the NIRA might have been made against the NLRA. See Irons, New Deal Lawyers, 260–90.

76. Often starting with tax and spending issues, many of the attacks on Roosevelt and the New Deal featured the Wagner Act and the subsequent labor upsurge as examples of what had gone wrong. See Leuchtenburg, Roosevelt and the New Deal, 177–79; Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, 515—47; Patterson, James T., Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), 71–75; and James Holt, “The New Deal and the American Anti-Statist Tradition,” in Braeman et al., The New Deal, 27–49Google Scholar.

77. An argument about the causal role of a handful of capitalists could be made by showing that a small group had a privileged position by virtue of its economic location. This is the type of argument Ferguson, Thomas wants to make about business support for the New Deal as a whole in “From Normalcy to New Deal—Industrial Structure, Party Competition, and American Public Policy in the Great Depression,” International Organization no. 38, 1 (Winter 1984):41–94. His key claim is that the more capital-intensive and internationally oriented a sector was, the more likely its support for the New Deal. Ferguson has so far made modest progress toward showing that the predicted support for the New Deal actually existed, but much less in showing that it was causally important. Regarding labor law in particular, his evidence on business involvement is very unpersuasive. A second approach might fare better by reducing its claims dramatically. In this view, the function of a Swope would be mainly to mark left boundaries. Those engaged in reform activity could test its limits by inquiring about Swope's response, and inferring that if he were strongly opposed to a given measure, its prospects would be limited. This might permit one to claim a role for (a fraction of) capital in helping bound the reform process. The fact of meetings with Swope or others does not demonstrate even this modest causal relation, however, without attention to what was said and evidence that reformers needed restrainingCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78. See Domhoff, G. William, “The Wagner Act and Theories of the State—A New Analysis Based on Class-Segment Theory,” Political Power and Social Theory 6 (1987): 178–80Google Scholar. Domhoff arrives at this argument when he finds that of the three main groups of capitalists heidentifies—southern capital, oligopoly/international capital, and competitive/national capital—the last two were opposed to the NLRA, and the first was willing to go along only if much of the South were excluded.

79. Domhoff asserts that Robert Wagner should be treated as an agent of capitalist auto-reform on the basis of a definition of “reformers, politicians, and experts who started by accepting the existence of the emerging framework of corporate capitalism and then at-tempted to incorporate other groups into that framework.” Given the structure of American political discourse, this definition includes just about everyone, and with only slight work on the notion of “accepting,” Popular Front Communist intellectuals could be added (Domhoff, “The Wagner Act,” 172).

80. Skocpol, Theda, “A Brief Response,” Politics and Society 15, no. 3 (1986–87): 331–32Google Scholar; Block, , Revising State Theory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 14–15Google Scholar.

81. The clanger of applying class labels to explain political choices is as great with “middle class“ as with the others. By the 1930s, so many different currents had a “middle-class” social element—from the more flexible strains of Republican thought about association and cooperation through the center of the New Deal to Popular Front Communism—that the term is little more than a marker. For example, when Martin Shefter depicts efforts to enlarge state agencies and build issue-oriented “responsible” parties as an expression of the “class interests” of the middle class, he has made an interesting connection, but given the multivalent nature of middle-class “interests” and ideologies, it is not clear what is being explained (Shefter, “Party, Bureaucracy, and Political Change in the United States,” in Maisel, Louis and Cooper, Joseph, eds., Political Parties: Development and Decay [Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1978], 241–43)Google Scholar.

82. It is unfair to burden all pluralist analysis with an extreme denial of the relevance of concepts of the state or even government institutions. Nonetheless, most pluralist formulations link claims about the political efficacy of socially based interest organizations with anargument that outcomes can be treated as the result of interacting decisions about deploying resources, given a varying intensity of preferences.

83. Dahl, Robert A., Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 38Google Scholar.

84. This is only a claim that labor action had objectives and aimed reasonably to achieve them. An alternative view, in which labor action could be discounted as an index of the real structure of political and social opportunities, would treat it as a nonrational response to suffering. To make this latter argument stick, one would have to show both a strong relation between immiseration and labor action in the decade, and the presence of real opportunities to form independent organizations before the mass action of 1936–37, which workers failed to exercise. But through 1935, unionization faced bitter opposition; and labor action was not at its highest when social and economic conditions were at their worst, in the early 1930s.

85. Tomlins is right to stress the NLRA'S role in this regard, though he downplays prior intervention in labor relations, against unions and labor action (Tomlins, The State and the Unions, 146, 150–60, 185, 221).

86. The form of this expansion matched Roosevelt's preference, which was to govern by encouraging alternative views and competing powers before choosing among them. Thus the NLRB was both under presidential control and an alternative source of perspectives on labor relations to the Labor Department. Burns calls this a “broker leadership” in making clear his preference for a more disciplined, centralizing approach (Burns, Roosevelt, 191–200).

87. See the first Annual Report of the National Labor Relations Board, submitted January 4, 1937, for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1936 (Letter, J. Warren Madden to Roosevelt, January 4, 1937, plus “Appendix 1—Names, Salaries, and Duties of All Employees and Officers in the Employ or under the Supervision of the Board,“ Official File 716—NLRB, Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library).

88. During the Hoover administration, federal expenditures increased significantly, especially in 1932, but executive branch employment grew only from 169,000 in 1928 to 196,000 in 1932. Those who stress the continuities between Hoover and Roosevelt can make a modest case regarding emergency expenditures, but badly miss the dramatic growth of the permanent administrative apparatus under Roosevelt (Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics, Y308–317, “Paid Civilian Employment of the Federal Government: 1816 to 1970,” Y466–471, “Outlays of the Federal Government by Major Function: 1900 to 1939”).

89. In heading the new National Labor Relations Board, there was no rush by prominent state managers to seek nomination. When the nominations were made in 1935, one member, John Carmody, was a member of the National Mediation Board when appointed. The new chair, J. Warren Madden, was a law professor. The third member was a holdover from the 1934 NLRB, Edwin S. Smith, a former personnel manager who came quickly to be targeted by business as adamantly prolabor (and pro-cio). See Gross, The Making of the National Labor Relations Board, 149–56.

90. They conducted the board's affairs competently under the new law in ways that limited the number of early NLRB decisions overturned by the courts, although business condemned the NLRB from the start, and the AFL soon came to view it as hopelessly biased in favor of the cio. See Millis and Brown, From the Wagner Act to Taft-Hartley, 235–43.

91. Federal, state, and local expenditures on public welfare more than doubled between 1932 and 1936, from $445 million to $997 million (Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics, Y533–655, “Federal, State, and Local Government Expenditure, by Function: 1902 to 1970”).

92. Efforts at urban policy, which at the national level only began as such after 1932, illustrate the process. See Gelfand, Mark, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933–65 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

93. Similar approaches persisted. Dorothy Healey reports that at the end of the decade, union organizers were still using the claim that Roosevelt wanted workers to unionize as a central argument for unionization. Naturally, many employers, and a number of Democrats, objected (Interview, Dorothy Healey, Washington, D.C., October 24, 1984).

94. The story of its weakness is told in Brody, David, Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Montgomery, David, The Fall of the House of Labor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Melvyn Dubofsky, “Abortive Re-form: The Wilson Administration and Organized Labor, 1913–1920,” in Cronin, James E. and Sirianni, Carmen, eds., Work, Community, and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900–1925 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 197–220Google Scholar.

95. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics, D952–69, “Labor Union Membership, by Industry: 1897 to 1934.”

96. Both Bernstein and Brody emphasize the unions' weakness by 1930 (Bernstein, The Lean Years, 334–57; Brody, , Workers in Industrial America [New York: Oxford University Press], 44–45, 82)Google Scholar.

97. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics, D940–45, “Labor Union Membership, by Affiliation: 1897 to 1934.”

98. For a strong claim about Republican strength among urban workers, see James Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System, 200.

99. On 1932, see Leuchtenburg, Roosevelt and the New Deal, 10–17. On 1936, seeSchlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, 592–95.

100. American labor law's hostility to union organization and the voluntarism of the AFL had long reinforced each other. As Horowitz notes, this voluntarism allowed an interpretation of positive acts of state intervention, such as the Norris-La Guardia Act, as enabling acts within which voluntarist relations might flourish. And voluntarism persisted in the AFL (Horowitz, Political Ideologies of Organized Labor, 55, 73, 80, 219, 241).

101. Bernstein's work exemplifies the first view; the second is put sharply in Piven and Cloward, Poor People's Movements, 155–75.

102. Harry Braverman's account of Taylorism overstates its spread but identifies its main themes. Gordon, Reich, and Edwards treat both the assembly line and Taylorism as part of what they term the “homogenization” of labor. Empirical indexes of these shifts in the 1920s include growth in the size of establishments, the number of production workers, capital per production worker, and value added per worker (Braverman, , Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974]; Gordon et al., Segmented Work, Divided Workers, 1 130–35)Google Scholar.

103. Bernstein's Lean Years and Turbulent Years provide information about these learning processes, as do memoirs and ethnographies, such as Friedlander, Peter, The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936–39: A Study in Class and Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

104. For employers, the aim of avoiding independent unions was conceptually linked with an image of a harmonious, integrated factory system. This view recognized the reality of social relations in the factory and the need to organize them positively, allowing welfare capitalist efforts to take root. Brody argues that the depression was required to destroy relatively successful efforts at welfare capitalism; Piore and Sabel offer an even more positive view of the system, in which it prefigures contemporary efforts to reorganize work in more cooperative ways. The latter account downplays the extent of coercion required to hold welfare capitalism together inside and outside the factory (Brody, Workers in Industrial America, 20–78; Piore, Michael J. and Sabel, Charles F., The Second Industrial Divide [New York: Basic Books, 1984], 125–30)Google Scholar.

105. Some degree of industrial stability was important in providing a framework for union insurgency. With the major exception of the mineworkers, when unions started to grow, they developed most quickly in larger metropolitan areas, owing to the more liberal political culture of some of those areas and the greater institutional resources available to unions there. See Milton Derber, “Growth and Expansion,” in Derber and Young, Labor and the New Deal, 38–42.

106. Karen Orren, “Liberalism, Money, and the Situation of Organized Labor,” in Greenstone, J. David, ed., Public Values and Private Power in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 183–84Google Scholar.

107. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics, D 946–51, “Labor Union Membership and Membership as Percent of Total Labor Force and of Nonagricultural Employment: 1930 to 1970“; F 31, “Gross National Product, Total and Per Capita, in Current and 1958 Prices: 1869–1970.”

108. Sinclair's analysis indicates that incoming congressional Democrats in 1932 and 1934 were somewhat less supportive of New Deal programs than were veterans. But the differences are not dramatic, as Democratic newcomers were a source of support for the New Deal (Sinclair, Barbara Deckard, Congressional Realignment, 1925—1978 [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982], 31–33)Google Scholar.

109. The La Follette Committee's work played a major role in discrediting company unions. See Gross, The Making of the National Labor Relations Board, 214–23; Derber, “The New Deal and Labor,” 114.

110. In 1936–39, 82 percent of all sit-down strikes, involving 77 percent of all the workers involved in such strikes, occurred in 1937. And after that year, such actions declined precipitously, from 477 in 1937 to 52 the next year and only 6 in 1939 before the wartime clampdown on labor action (Monthly Labor Review [1939], 1130; [1940], 1105, cited in Edwards, P. K., Strikes in the United States, 1881–1974 [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981]). On the sit-down strikes, see Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 499–501; Cochran, Labor and Communism, 114, 122Google Scholar; and Fine, Sidney, Sit Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936—1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969). The. sit-down strikes are better understood as an explosion of working-class anger focused on the aim of securing recognition of unions, for the purposes noted above, than as a tactic congruent with an essential radicalism of the new labor movementGoogle Scholar.

111. Letter, R. D. Small to Roosevelt, 4/8/37, Folder 1937, January-May, Official Folder 407B—Strikes, Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library. Roosevelt was deluged with complaints about administration “weakness” in not forcing workers to abandon their sit-down in the automobile strike. Murphy and Roosevelt were also pressured by the AFL not to encourage a settlement of the auto situation that would benefit the cio and weaken AFL units (Telegram, William Green to Franklin Murphy, 2/6/37, Summary of Franklin Murphy telephone call to White House, 2/8/37, Folder Auto Strike 1937, Official Folder 407B—Strikes, Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library).

112. Roosevelt, , The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1937 volume, The Constitution Prevails (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 7, 20, 23, 274Google Scholar.

113. Hughes, Chief Justice, decision in Nlrb V. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp, 301 U.S. 1, Aprial 12, 1937, in Court Decisions Relating to the National Labor Relations Act, vol. 1 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1944), 323Google Scholar.

114. This shift was a political aim of New Deal forces. In 1936, the question of how to force Court acquiescence in New Deal legislation was discussed widely in administration circles, and the election was perceived partly as a choice between the Court and the administration's view of the Constitution. Attorney General Cummings proposed a platform plank calling for an amendment to affirm social and economic regulation as a governmental responsibility. Felix Frankfurter made similar proposals (Letter, Homer Cummings to Roosevelt, 6/20/36, Folder Justice Department 1933–37, President's Secretary's File, Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library; Letter, Frankfurter to Roosevelt, 5/29/35, Folder Frankfurter 1933–35, President's Secretary's File, Roosevelt Papers, Fdr Library). It was later argued within the administration that despite the debacle of the “Court-packing” bill, its introduction encouraged the Court to rethink its position.

115. The key role of the Supreme Court's decision is emphasized in accounts written by those involved in the Nlrb's work, Madden, such asj. Warren, “Birth of the Board,” in Silverberg, Louis G., ed., The Wagner Act after Ten Years (Washington: Bureau of National Affairs, 1945), 34‐42Google Scholar.

116. Vittoz, New Deal Labor Policy, 171.

117. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics, D946–51, “Labor Union Membership.”

118. It isn't necessary to go far for relevant examples. In sectors where federal support for unionization was nonexistent or weak, employers' violence and that of local authorities could be frequent, brutal, and generally effective. Perhaps the best example is agriculture, where workers were particularly vulnerable both before and after passage of the Nlra, which did not cover them. See Auerbach, Jerold S., Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New Deal (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966); andGoogle ScholarDaniel, Cletus, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 204–05, 225Google Scholar.

119. Although there was an explicit use of considerable force by workers in the sit-downs, and the threat of more, the amount of physical violence to individuals in these strikes was less than in some of the turbulent strikes fought by more conventional means, such as the Little Steel strike.

120. The grudging quality of employers' eventual acceptance of unions is very clear. Howell John Harris divides management into four groups regarding unions in the 1930s: sophisticated and belligerent antiunionists, “realists,” and “progressives.” Yet not only did the first two groups fight unions energetically; almost all of the third group and a good portion of the fourth did so, differing mainly in how soon they came to view unions as unavoidable. Given the small size of his fourth group, that makes the number of major employers who put no serious obstacles in the way of unions (much less encouraging them!) a very modest one. See Harris, , The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 23–37Google Scholar.

121. The story of the employers' counterattack is recounted in James Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal; Tomlins, The State and the Unions; and Millis and Clark, From the Wagner Act to Taft-Hartley.

122. Stressing the political side of the formation of the unions opens the way toward analyzing where unions took shape and where they did not. Clearly the perception that the formation of mass unions in modern industrial sectors was key is well founded. But some such sectors were organized more rapidly than others; and in other areas unions were not uniformly unsuccessful. The prior history of unionization efforts, the character of relations among firms, the geographic location of sectors, and the gender and racial composition of workers all entered into the determination of rates of unionization. Thus, arguing for the crucial role of politics in forming the unions does not stop at the national level, but also concerns political processes at other levels. A systematic examination of these processes is beyond the scope of this article, however. Vittoz, Stanley offers a useful discussion of unionization by sector in New Deal Labor Policy, 34–46, 65, 119, 126; so do several articles in Milkman, Ruth, ed., Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women's Labor History (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985)Google Scholar.

123. For discussions of the contemporary weakness of the labor movement with substantial reference to the nature of the labor relations framework built in the 1930s and 1940s, see Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream; Goldfield, The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States; and Tomlins, The State and the Unions. Raising this issue would be pedantic if it were not so often the case that analysts of the labor movement treat long-term conservative consequences as cooptation. Even leaving aside the crucial question of whether such consequences are necessary, showing cooptation requires showing that a real force actually was coopted. Thus when David Montgomery claims cooptation on the grounds that “the government's intervention also opened a new avenue through which the rank and file could in time be tamed and the newly powerful unions be subjected to tight legal and political control,” he simply assumes a mass radical movement for direct workers' control which he has not come close to showing existed (Montgomery, Workers' Control in America, 165).

124. The claim is obviously not that one-third of the members of the early cio (as of 1938, 700,000‐800,000) identified with the Communist party. Rather, a section of the overall labor movement roughly equivalent to that figure was composed of diverse political forces who conceived their aims in terms significantly to the left of the center of the labor movement and the New Deal. Within this radical current the number of members of Socialist or Communist political organizations was a small fraction, considerably less than 10 percent—Communist party membership (at a time when the class composition of the party was quite varied) reached no more than 70,000, and other socialist organizations were much smaller. For an account of Communist influence in the early cio, see Starobin, Joseph R., American Communism in Crisis, 1934–57 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 38Google Scholar.

125. In 1932, bankers and brokers alone contributed 24 percent of all sums of $1,000 or more; in 1936 that figure fell to 4 percent (Overacker, Louise, “Labor's Political Contributions,” Political Science Quarterly [1939]: 60)Google Scholar.

126. Leuchtenburg credits the labor movement with carrying Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Indiana for Roosevelt, and for swinging a number of previously Republican cities into the Democratic column (Leuchtenburg, Roosevelt and the New Deal, 189). Lubell's classic account also stresses the effects of the unions' mobilization (Lubell, , The Future of American Politics [New York:Harper, 1951], 46–55)Google Scholar.

127. See Greenstone, Labor in American Politics, 49–50. In contrast, Piven and Cloward's stress on economic disruption in forming the unions leads them to downplay the importance of the 1936 election, in Poor People's Movements, 160–61.

128. In 1936, Roosevelt wrote to a meeting of Labor's Non-Partisan League state chairmen: “I should like to have you know that I am sincerely proud that you are gathering in support of my candidacy. This could not be the case if you did not know, out of the experience of the past three years, that the present Administration has endeavored to promote the ideal of justice for the great masses of America's wage earners and to make that ideal a reality” (Letter, Roosevelt to George L. Berry, August 3, 1936, Official File 407, Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library). Also see Burns, Roosevelt, 276–77.

129. Those who insist on treating unionization as cooptation have so little persuasive evidence of this in terms of mass political consciousness that they are forced to adopt other explanatory strategies: to conceive the dynamic of the labor movement mainly in terms of militance and disruption, and avoid the issue of political or economic consciousness; to posit that a potentially radical mass orientation was blocked by the emergent union leadership; or to focus attention in a highly unrepresentative fashion on socialists and communists within the left of the labor movement.

130. Although many representatives considered that they owed their election partly to labor's efforts, the recruitment of political elites was not changed so dramatically as to include a large number of individuals from subordinate social classes. The fragmentary archival evidence, including the state folders in the Dnc records and Farley's correspondence, is that Democratic elites in 1936 were first of all lawyers, then other professionals and career politicians, and much less prominently, businessmen. See state files (esp. California, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, New York), Papers of the Democratic National Committee, 1928–48, FDR Library.

131. On the convention, see the Official Report of the Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention—1936. In 1936, the Republicans tried to win labor votes by attacking Roosevelt's relationship with Lewis, hoping that this would win over AFL members and unaffiliated workers. The head of the labor committee, Daniel Tobin, often found himself trying to persuade AFL leaders that Roosevelt's closeness to the Lnpl did not signify a choice for the cio (Letter, Tobin to James Farley, August 20, 1936, Folder 8/14–21, 1936, Official Folder 300— Democratic National Committee, Roosevelt Papers, Fdr Library).

132. The head of Labor's Non-Partisan League claimed his group had organized in every state and most congressional districts, but it is hard to know how much this “organizing” meant. Although direct labor intervention sometimes influenced the behavior of officials and shifted electoral outcomes, the image of a coherent, mass, disciplined force turning out masses of voters everywhere would greatly overstate labor's political reach and coherence (Letter, George L. Berry to Steven Early, 9/9/36, and Memo, “Notations for the President,” Official File 2251—Labor's Non-Partisan League, Roosevelt Papers, Fdr Library).

133. It is hard to make a quantitative estimate of the scope of “mass party” forms. Much of the literature on labor in the decade makes no effort to describe the organizational forms of local political involvement; the line between them and active interest group mobilization of a fairly conventional type is hard to draw. The modest scope of such forms is indicated by the small set of places that met their apparent preconditions: that the area be Democratic; that the cio be at least as strong as the AFL; that there not exist a powerful Democratic machine capable of blocking new organizational efforts. Mass party forms were the exception rather than the rule and probably emerged with force in less than a third of major cities. An indirect method of guessing the extent of interest group and mass party organization is to review the early voting studies of the mid-to-late 1940s and monographs on labor's political involvement in that period. This survey suggests either a very narrow scope for mass forms in earlier years or a great fragility, inasmuch as they seem so weak by the 1940s. Michigan is an exception, but apparently an exception built after 1935–37 rather than at that time. See Lazarsfeld, Paul F. et al. , The People's Choice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948)Google Scholar; Calkins, Fay, The CIO and the Democratic Party (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952)Google Scholar.

134. Local and especially state administrations were often unsympathetic to labor after 1936, even in places where labor's political efforts had been very important for the presidential campaign. National-level arrangements were crucial in shielding labor from local administrations. See Patterson, James T., The New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 125Google Scholar.

135. When Lewis and others pressed Roosevelt on patronage issues after the 1936 election, expecting something in return for their support, they were generally disappointed by the result (Report of meeting, Lewis et al. with Roosevelt, n.d., 1937, Official Folder 2251— Labor's Non-Partisan League, Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library).

136. This cooperation is discussed in Auerbach, Labor and Liberty, 75–120. It is also apparent in the first yearly reports of the NLRB which read, at great length, like energetic briefs against employers for obstructing unionization. See especially the sections entitled “Principles Established,” in Second Annual Report of the National Labor Relations Board (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937), 58–156; and Third Annual Report of the National Labor Relations Board (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1938), 51–215.