The Growth of American Power Through Cold and Hot Wars 339have been the biggest target in the postwar era, and had charges of being
disloyal or Communist thrown at them with frequency. This harmed labor’s
ability to organize and get better wages and benefits. When the CIO tried to
organize workers in the South, the region most hostile to workers’ rights, in
“Operation Dixie” after the war, it failed badly. Southern state officials and
the bosses made it nearly impossible for labor organizers to do their work,
and racism—rumors and threats about Black workers getting power over
Whites—and “red baiting,” calling out people as Communist whether they
were or not, doomed the Dixie campaign. In fact, red-baiting was so success-
ful that the unions themselves kicked out members who “followed the
Communist line” more than labor’s policies; the CIO, the allegedly militant
union, expelled 11 affiliated for that reason in 1949-50. In fact, the CIO
publicly referred to itself as “an American institution with a single national
allegiance [to] the United States of America, its form of government, and basic
democratic institutions... .”
As noted, labor agreed to a no-strike pledge and endured a wage freeze
during the war, but afterwards sought to organize unions and gain more pay
and benefits. Rather than address their sacrifices and needs, many employers
accused them of being “Communist” and thereby made it impossible for them
to even discuss their problems. That was the power of “domestic contain-
ment”–it shut down ideas. Labor was not threatening violence, though it did
call many strikes, nor was its own patriotic affection for the U.S. in question.
Truman, however, did not want to be associated with labor, especially the CIO,
and in his “State of the Union” address in 1947 he proposed laws to curb
strikes and ban “secondary boycotts,” efforts by workers to show solidarity with
unions on strike by trying to force other companies, “neutrals,” to cease doing
business with the business against which labor was striking—a key weapon in
labor’s limited arsenal. Truman, a New Deal Democrat, had thus laid the
groundwork for more intense anti-labor action. More troubling for unions,
then, Congress took serious action, doing its best to overturn the Wagner Act,
especially with the Taft-Harley Act of 1947, the most damaging anti-labor law
in postwar history. As one Texas Democratic representative put it, the Congress
had to protect the “public interest against the actions of power-drunk labor
bosses.” His conception of whom was drunk with power, the labor bosses, was
widely shared by politicians and media, and thus the public, and would remain
so from that point onward, and still is today. But labor’s “power” was tiny