The other principal problem of the economy was labor and what to do about labor and big labor. Labor unions, as far as conservatives were concerned, had gotten out of hand—labor had gotten too big. In the late 1930s, unions had begun to gather strength, much to the distaste of America's industrialists. Various strikes and acts of violence came to be identified with the growth of labor during the late 1930s. During the war years, controls enacted by the federal government prevented massive strikes that might jeopardize the war effort. But after the war, as those controls disappeared, a wave of strikes swept the nation. In 1946 alone, 750,000 steel workers went out on strike. General Motors was struck. General Electric was struck. Over 400,000 mine workers, members of the United Mine Workers Union walked off the job, not once, but twice during the year. The railroad workers walked off the job. All told during the year 1946, more than 4.6 million American workers went on strike at one time or another. Clearly something had to be done.

The conservative answer from Congress was a major piece of legislation still on the books, still enforced from time to time, a piece of legislation in 1947 called the Taft-Hartley Act. That act was the attempt of conservatives to destroy big labor in America, or if not to destroy it, to hedge in and to limit the expression of its power.

Conservatives Enact Taft-Hartley

The Taft-Hartley Act had a number of clauses to it, but there were several that I think are particularly important for you to know about.
Number one, Taft-Hartley prohibited the "closed shop," meaning that to work in a particular industry, one had to be a member of the union that served that industry. The "closed shop" had come into being in the late 1930s. Now conservatives wanted to put it to an end. A second part of Taft-Hartley that conservatives hoped would cripple the power of labor was the prohibition of any "secondary strikes" or "sympathy strikes." What that means simply is that members of one union would refuse cooperation with an industry being "struck" by a fellow union. Those kinds of secondary strikes had a major effect on the economy. Third, Taft-Hartley disallowed any political contributions by the unions. Finally, Taft-Hartley gave the president of the United States the right to call a "cooling-off" period of 80 days during which labor and management sought agreement. No strikes would be allowed during that period. If labor struck during that period when the President had declared a national emergency, labor leaders would be fined, jailed, or both. Truman immediately vetoed the bill, calling it totally arbitrary, totally unfair, totally unworkable. But there were enough votes in Congress easily to override Truman's veto—Taft-Hartley became law.

As matters turned out, Taft-Hartley may have strengthened American labor in the long-run rather than weakened it, because workers and union leaders tended to band together in the face of Taft-Hartley. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) formed back in the 1880s, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which arose in the late 1930s had been in competition with one another for national prominence and membership. They now saw a common threat and began to have talks to join together. In 1955 the two largest unions, the AFL and the CIO, united to become one giant union, AFL-CIO, with some 16 million new members [note that the audio lecture incorrectly states the year as 1945].

The economy faced major obstacles in this crucial decade following the end of World War II. Truman, with no success, had sought to continue a number of the New Deal economic programs, as well as introducing even more liberal economic reforms in his Fair Deal proposals. Conservative congressional opposition had batted down those proposals and limited government controls over economic affairs. Results in the economy pretty much mirrored results in politics in general. There had been a definite political shift to the right; there had been a definite economic shift to the right. If we were to summarize politically and economically the Fair Deal proposals of Harry Truman, we would have to conclude that liberalism certainly was on its way out in America.

If we look at what I label the psychological shift to the right that occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s, our conclusion becomes stronger. That psychological shift we could fairly call the "Second Red Scare." Remember the first Red Scare back in the 1920s. Well, there was also a fear of radicalism, anarchy, communism—particularly the communism of the Soviet Union—that filled American society in the late 1940s and into the early 1950s. That Second Red Scare is known more popularly by one word, "McCarthyism," after the junior Republican Senator from scenic Appleton, Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy [voice of Joe McCarthy].