Columnist Heptasix Urges Restraint on Anti-Union Legislation

The unions had grown strong under the New Deal and now that the war was over they were flexing their muscles. The business community was looking to roll back these gains and limit their negotiating power. The anti-union crowd emphasized the most extreme and unreasonable demands made by unions, and there were many to be called out. They linked unions to Communism and organized crime. They argued that unions hurt consumers, as if consumers and workers with two separate classes that did not overlap. They managed to get a backlash going as waves of strikes appeared to prolong and intensify the shortages of products. Congress and much of the public was in an anti-union mood. It was a Tea Party moment. But in his column in the Sunday Herald Tribune, Rodney Yonkers Gilbert, who wrote under the pen name Heptisax, urged his Republican friends to exercise restraint or risk generating a backlash.

He was no unabashed union fan. He attacked the Wagner Act, which had made it easier for unions to organize, as “grossly unfair.” Grossly unfair to whom? He attacked the "arrogant" union leadership as unrepresentative of the rank-and-file members, many of whom he wrote had joined a union unwillingly thanks to the institution of the closed shop. His assertion that “in the big cities there is an element in organized labor that because of origin or upbringing has too little American tradition in its spiritual tradition” reeked of antisemitism. However, he warned, there were limits in how far Congress should go in fighting back.

He cited a recent encounter with a rabidly anti-Red business agent for the more conservative American Federation of Labor who pointed to a report that ran in the paper on April 8. It was about a statement issued by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, striking at the time against Westinghouse. The document had nothing to do with the strike or collective bargaining demands. Rather it attacked US foreign policy as “being directed toward the suppression of every people which seeks liberty” as well as railing against “monopoly” Capitalism. Gilbert wrote that the AFL agent called it the work of a “bevy of Bolsheviks who respect no authority but Joe Stalin's putting out Red propaganda in the name of 75,000 American citizens. Who can read that and believe that these blankety blanks called a strike to improve the conditions of these workers or for any reason but to undermine the economic order and prepare the way for a Red despotism.” The irate AFL man called for a law “making it impossible for Muscovite agents to lead great hordes of Americans around by the nose and make unreasonable ninnies of them.”

To me this revealed the twin problems of labor relations at this time. The Communists had taken control of a number of CIO unions, including the United Electrical Workers, and were attempting to use them as vehicles to support Soviet foreign policy and Communist economic theory and build class consciousness. These unions, as discussed in the pages here on the Left, saw it as part of their mission to supply crowds to Communist Party rallies. On the other hand, the business elite believed then as now that the government had a duty to uphold the economic order, preserving in law the privileges and entitlements of the wealthy, including the existence of oligopolies and companies that were "too big to fail." This had no more to do with free markets than Stalinism had to do with democracy.

Heptisax disagreed with the AFL man's assertion that any proposed labor legislation should bar Communists or felons from union leadership. He feared that this was overstepping the bounds and might end up strengthening the radicals. He felt that cleaning out the Reds and crooks best could be accomplished by the rank and file if the law gave them greater control over their own unions and eliminated the ability of union leaders to act on their own.

The call for union "democracy" and “open shops” was disingenuous and hypocritical on the part of the business elite. They did not, for instance, believe in consumer "democracy" by which consumers had a right to know the ingredients in the products they bought. They did not believe in shareholder "democracy" by which small shareholders had the right to detailed information about a company's operation. They certainly did not believe in laws that limited the autonomy of corporate executives. What they did believe in was weak or non-existent unions.