Jeff Schuhrke
After the 1932 election, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt won, Democrats had big majorities in Congress and were in charge of the White House for the next decade and a half. This is when the New Deal, Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, National Labor Relations Act, regulations on corporations and Wall Street, and more were passed. Then World War II started. In the 1946 midterm elections, Republicans retook control of Congress for the first time since FDR had been elected. By this point, FDR was dead, and the country shifted in a more right-wing direction.
The Republicans elected to Congress in 1946 included people like Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy. They had seen how organized labor was getting more and more powerful in these preceding years, especially 1945–1946. There was this huge strike wave after World War II with workers fighting back against wartime inflation, wanting to keep some of the gains they had won during the war like security of union membership. These Republicans came in with a mission to stop this growth that the labor movement had been seeing.
At the same time, the fragile wartime alliance between the United States and Soviet Union was breaking down. There had always been strong anti-Soviet, anti-communist sentiment in the United States, and so the Republicans and corporate America were really eager to use this emerging Cold War, anti-Soviet animus against organized labor, and to paint the labor movement in the US as nothing more than a communist conspiracy aiming to destroy the American way of life.
So in 1947, they passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which was a series of amendments to the 1935 National Labor Relations Act that explicitly wanted to rein in the kinds of powerful, militant union tactics like secondary strikes and secondary boycotts; to allow states to pass “right-to-work” laws, which are…
Auteur: Jeff Schuhrke
