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Preface Labor’S Grave Hour

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Preface Labor’S Grave Hour Preface Labor’s Grave Hour Nearly nine months after the vicious, surprise attack on the military installations near Pearl Harbor, on September 5, 1942, Presi- dent Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his tenth Labor Day statement. Al- though the American victory at Midway Island in June 1942 had given the nation cause to be optimistic, the war was not progressing quickly, and the liberation of Europe and the defeat of Japan were years away. President Roosevelt and his wartime cabinet knew that winning the war would require enormous sacrifices and Herculean efforts. FDR never missed a chance to remind Americans of these essential truths about the Second World War. He also never missed a chance to emphasize the stakes of war. “There has never been a Labor Day as significant as this one,” he began his Labor Day statement. Alluding to the conflagration that was engulfing the planet, he noted that in a great many countries, free labor had ceased to exist. “A blackout of freedom has darkened Europe from the tip of Norway to the shores of the Aegean and sturdy working men who once walked erect in the sun now stumble and cower beneath the lash of the slavemasters.” Perhaps more unsettling than the eradication of “the rights of free labor and free men in the conquered lands” was the undeniable reality that free labor was “threatened and besieged everywhere.” “This is indeed labor’s grave hour,” FDR ob- served. But, he pointed out, “happily our good right arm is strong and growing stronger.” “In our own country . the people who live by the sweat of their brows have risen mightily to the challenge of the strug- gle.” Roosevelt then expressed his “appreciation to the working people of the United States for the energy and devotion with which they have met the demands of the present crisis.” Finally, applauding them as much as challenging them, he concluded that American workers “know too democracy has made labor’s advances possible. They know just vii viii | Preface what stake they have in America, just what they are fighting for.” They “are pledged to the war effort” and were willing to make “sacrifices of wage increases, crop price increases, profit increases, bodily comforts.” “All this,” the president opined hopefully, “is little enough for free men to sacrifice in a world where freedom is imperiled.”1 This book is about the wartime sacrifices, the accomplishments, the triumphs, and the failures of American workers who during the Second World War rose to meet the challenge of “labor’s grave hour.” In partic- ular, it is an investigation into the wartime history of the American Fed- eration of Labor (AFL). I came to this topic while researching my first book, a history of FDR’s Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC). In Race, Jobs, and the War, I drew from the works of such scholars as Nelson Lichtenstein, August Meier, Elliott Rudwick, Ruth Milkman, Joe W. Trotter, Jr., and Robert H. Zieger. These historians’ examinations of the working class and of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and its affiliates not only inspired me but also made my job eas- ier. Since the FEPC worked with labor organizations, particularly CIO unions, I was able to look up much of what I needed to know in mono- graphs rather than assemble the information solely from primary docu- ments. Curiously, when I turned my attention to the FEPC’s relationship with the American Federation of Labor, I found that recent labor histo- rians had been nearly silent on the subject. I soon discovered that in fact almost no one had examined the AFL’s wartime experiences. I also learned that I was not the first to notice this historiographical lacuna. In a review of Irving Bernstein’s Turbulent Years: A History of the Ameri- can Worker, 1933–1941 (1970), the historian Roger Daniels pointed out a “major weakness of a very strong book”: Bernstein failed to deal with the AFL, although he noted in passing, on pages 773 and 774, that “by 1941 the AFL had gained a decisive and permanent victory” over the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Despite the fact that Philip Taft’s two-volume AFL history does cover the war years, until now there has been no AFL counterpart to Nelson Lichtenstein’s La- bor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II, which focuses almost exclusively on the CIO. In part, this book is an attempt to bring my interests in labor history to bear on the AFL during the Second World War and thus to fill the historiographical void.2 The practitioners of the new labor history have not completely ig- nored the AFL, but most treatments carry the Federation’s story only through the First World War.3 There have been important exceptions, Preface |ix such as Christopher L. Tomlin’s important 1979 article about the AFL in the 1930s and Dorothy Sue Cobble’s provocative 1997 essay about reviving the AFL organizing strategy.4 But few others have been tempted to examine the AFL outside its early heyday. In this, they are much like the “old” labor historians of the Wisconsin School. Typically, when his- torians look at labor during the Age of FDR, the CIO quickly takes cen- ter stage and the AFL all but disappears. This is unfortunate for several reasons. First, there are the membership numbers. As one can see from Table 1.1, the American Federation of Labor was always larger than the CIO. By the end of the Second World War, the AFL was roughly twice the size of its main rival. Moreover, while the CIO had added more than 1.5 million workers during the war, the Federation had increased its membership by more than 2.5 million. Clearly, if one wants to discuss wartime union workers, one must examine the federation to which nearly 60 percent of all unionists belonged. Second, an analysis of the AFL in the 1940s can yield new insights into issues that are central to recent historical inquiry, such as the importance of race and gender and the transformations on the shop floor. Finally, a look at the Federation at war points to a dramatic change in the labor organization. The basic argument here is that, although the AFL’s reputation for conservative, “pure and simple” unionism is well deserved, during the war the AFL became much more active in American politics and society. Thus, as the AFL’s power grew, so did its commitment to political activism. The standard treatment of the AFL at war remains Philip Taft’s The A. F. of L. from the Death of Gompers to the Merger. As one of the last disciples of the Wisconsin School of Labor History, Taft brought the notion of “job consciousness” to the Federation’s war years.5 The main issue for the AFL, according to Taft, was wages. The union’s leadership fought constantly with the National War Labor Board (NWLB), which largely set the structure of worker compensation during the war. In par- ticular, AFL president William Green and the Executive Council tried to relax the Little Steel Formula whereby the NWLB had limited wage increases to 15 percent above the hour wage rates that had prevailed in January 1941. Nevertheless, despite the criticism of the Board, Taft con- cluded that the “Federation commented favorably . upon the volume and quality of work the [NWLB] performed during its tenure.” In sum, Taft maintains that the AFL continued its commitment to “pure and simple” union politics, which focused largely on lobbying and on bread- and-butter issues.6 x|Preface In the five decades since Taft published this analysis, scholars have not revisited the subject of the AFL at war in the 1940s. Why? One answer could be that since the 1960s, labor historians have made it a priority to examine the role of radical and liberal politics in the Ameri- can labor movement. Since, with the exception of a few stalwart social- ists like A. Philip Randolph, most left-leaning unionists joined the Con- gress of Industrial Organizations, these more recent labor historians naturally followed their subjects and their political interests into the CIO. Additionally, scholars critical of the Wisconsin School, which largely focused on the AFL and the union’s institutional politics and policies, sought to break with that tradition by looking not only at the CIO but also at nonunion workers and, more important, working-class culture. Indeed, the study of these latter issues has been the hallmark and the most important contributions of the new labor history. More- over, perhaps the AFL gets scant attention because, unlike the those of the CIO or the Industrial Workers of the World, the Federation’s mem- bership drives were rather undramatic. There were few stunning climac- tic organizing struggles like the 1937 Battle of the Overpass, which lend themselves to great writing.7 Finally, one reason why the AFL is ignored relates to the research dif- ficulties inherent in the topic. The American Federation of Labor was an organization whose parts seemed larger than their sum. The Federation was made up of thousands of chartered unions, local affiliates, and Internationals. Although there was a central leadership, its influence was often limited. Furthermore, the story of the AFL is not merely the summary of the pronouncements, lobbying, and activities of the Federa- tion’s hierarchy. By focusing on just the administrative leaders—as Philip Taft did—one risks forgetting about the average AFL union worker. Hence, to understand the AFL at war, one has to turn to the un- ions and the workers themselves.
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