Taft-Hartley Loyalty Oath

TAFT-HARTLEY LOYALTY OATH. The major anti-trade union legislation of the postwar years was the Labor Management Act of 1947, which is better known as the Taft-Hartley Act. Its provisions made it difficult for unions to organize aggressively or carry on militant activities. For the Communist-oriented Left, Section 9 (h) contained a poison pill. This section denied any union the right to use the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) unless each of its officers filed an affidavit that he or she (1) was not a member of the Communist Party (CP), (2) was not affiliated with the CP, and (3) did not believe in, was not a member of, or was not a supporter of any organization that believed in or taught the overthrow of the U.S. government “by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.” What this meant was that any union with an elected or appointed Communist officer could not use the NLRB to gain certification as a collective bargaining unit even if the majority of workers voted for it and that any certified union that did not meet the act’s provisions could be decertified.

Many justifications were advanced for Section 9 (h) by its advocates, but what their reasoning boiled down to was that the elimination of domestic Communists from the trade union movement was an essential ingredient of a larger anticommunist crusade. The authors of the act stated that the Communists must be purged to prevent “political strikes,” with the implication that such strikes might be ordered from abroad with the aim of weakening the defenses and economy of the United States. Trade unionists who were hostile to or uncomfortable with their CP colleagues justified their support of Section 9 (h) as necessary to keep their unions from being manipulated by outside organizations with independent political agendas, irrespective of the source of those agendas. The sincerity of such sentiments was suspect as other ideological groups, such as various right-wing organizations, were not singled out for punishment. Nor, for that matter, was the Socialist Party.

As soon as Taft-Hartley was introduced, trade unionists spoke out against it in no uncertain terms. They were joined by allies ranging from religious leaders to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s third-term vice president, Henry Wallace. Ben Gold, the Communist leader of the Fur and Leather Workers Union, urged the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) leadership to take dramatic action by calling for a one-day strike or even a five-hour strike before Congress voted, but his counsel was not taken. After the bill was passed, President Truman vetoed it on the grounds the act violated the principles of the New Deal, but his veto was overridden. John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, then affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), considered the law “fascistic.” At the 1949 AFL national convention, Lewis said the act would be rendered inoperative if all trade unionists refused to comply with its anticommunist affidavit process. His views did not carry, and the United Mine Workers soon left the AFL.

The timidity of the AFL leaders would soon find its counterpart in the more militant CIO. Although conventional trade unionists despised the Taft-Hartley Act, many were willing to live with it while opportunistically using the affidavit clause to oust ideological rivals. Such leaders felt that reformers and other non-Communists in alliance with the CP could be neutralized or intimidated into shifting sides. The room for maneuvering was enormous. Jurisdictional raids could be made on any international or local that did not comply. Even if officers submitted affidavits, government informers could charge the officers were lying. Should a trade unionist resign from the CP in order to fulfill the law’s requirements, it could be charged that the individual remained a secret member or still adhered to the Party line.

Legal challenges to Section 9 (h) were soon forthcoming. In 1948 Victor Rabinowitz, representing the American Communications Association, an international CIO union, and the Wholesale and Warehouse Workers Local 65 in New York, a local whose international officers had complied, filed suit that the act illegally abridged rights guaranteed by the First and Fifth amendments. A similar suit was filed by the Steel Workers Union when Inland Steel refused to bargain on pensions with a union whose officials had not filed affidavits.

Union attorneys thought they had a decent chance to win over the Supreme Court to their view, but fate played a heavy hand against them. Two justices the attorneys had counted on to support them died unexpectedly, Justice Frank Murphy in July 1949 and Justice Wiley B. Rutledge in September. Making matters worse was that Justice William O. Douglas, an outstanding liberal, fell from a horse in a mountain area of his home state of Washington just a few days before the argument was heard and could not participate. Justice Tom Clark, appointed to replace Murphy, disqualified himself because he had been attorney general when the law was before Congress, and Justice Sherman Minton, the successor to Rutledge, was not appointed until after the case was heard. The truncated Court upheld the law by five to one in American Communications Association, CIO v. Douds. Justice Hugo Black filed the lone dissenting opinion.

Even as the legal challenges moved through the courts, labor’s house was falling apart. The relatively small Fur and Leather Workers Union suffered thirty raids on its locals within a single year. The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE); the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers; and other larger unions that did not comply were hit even harder. Union after union was rent with internal debate on whether to comply or not. But the trend was unmistakable. From 1947 to 1951, 232,000 non-Communist affidavits were filed.

The profoundly disruptive impact of the affidavits issue on radicalism within the trade unions is indicated by a minor incident that did not even involve the CP. In the late 1930s the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had gained representation in some twenty industrial plants in Cleveland and it had maintained that representation through the war years. If the IWW trade unions did not comply with Taft-Hartley, the IWW would be decertified; but if they did comply, they would violate IWW principles. Expediency won out over ideology, and in the resulting organizational furor, the IWW lost its last foothold in basic industry.

By May 1949, CIO compliance with Taft-Hartley was in high gear. The executive board, which had previously included known Communists, now banned Communists not only from the board itself but from holding office in any CIO union. The board further tightened the screws by dismissing officers who did not endorse board decisions. Among these decisions were the required approval of the Marshall Plan and disavowal of the Progressive Party. Unions that resisted these litmus measures were expelled. Between November 1949 and August 1950, the CIO kicked out ten unions: the UE; the Farm Equipment Workers; the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers; the United Office and Professional Workers; the United Public Workers; the American Communications Association; the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (including the Fishermen and Allied Workers, which had affiliated with the union); the National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards; and the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers Union. The International Fur and Leather Workers Union withdrew before it, too, could be expelled. The combined membership of these unions came to nearly a million workers. Two of the unions had been among the eight unions expelled by the AFL in 1935 and a third, the UE, had joined them in the formation of the original CIO. These founding CIO unions, still under the same basic leadership as in the 1930s, were suddenly deemed unacceptable by the very movement they had inaugurated.

The pattern that emerged after expulsion was one of constant organizational and individual harassment. Some cities denied public housing to anyone who would not sign non-Communist oaths and some states suspended unemployment compensation to employees of the CP. Various federal agencies used similar measures against individuals until challenged in court by cases that often dragged on for years. The irony in many of these situations was that the benefits denied had often been originally championed by movements led or influenced by the CP.

Within the labor movement itself, the bloodletting was relentless. Complying unions raided expelled unions at every opportunity as the government moved to decertify or charged perjury or insincerity when some trade unionists withdrew from the CP to adhere to the law. In major unions such as the United Auto Workers where there was a considerable CP presence, there was a purge of Communists and their allies. The labor press took a strong anticommunist posture that became a hallmark of the AFL-CIO merger of 1955. More significant than any single conflict in this cataclysmic era was the fact that such traditional goals of labor as organizing the unorganized and advancing the gains of those already organized were severely blunted.

Labor’s attempts to have Taft-Hartley repealed failed again and again, but the affidavit proviso came under fire. Understanding that Section 9 (h) was poorly phrased, Congress clarified its intent with the Communist Control Act of 1954. The need to file affidavits was done away with. The new act simply made it a crime to be a member of the CP and simultaneously hold office in a labor union or to hold office within five years of resigning from the CP. The five-year clause was obviously aimed at those who had resigned from the CP to avoid decertification of their unions. Attorneys immediately pointed out the act’s legal shortcomings. It created punishments for beliefs rather than for crimes, it punished without due process, and it created penalties for membership in what was still a legal political organization. Despite these unconstitutional aspects, a clear challenge to the act did not develop until the end of the decade.

The person who finally took on the Communist Control Act was Archie Brown, a man who had joined the CP in 1929 and the Longshoremen’s Union in 1936. Running as an avowed Communist, Brown was elected to the executive board of Local 10 of the Longshoremen’s Union in 1959, 1960, and 1961. He was also very active in an anti-House Un-American Activities campaign centered in San Francisco. In 1961 he was arrested for violation of the Communist Control Act. His case moved to the Supreme Court with speed. Fourteen years after Section 9 (h) of the original Taft-Hartley Act had been found constitutional, the successor Communist Control Act was struck down by a five-to-four decision written by Chief Justice Earl Warren. The Court held the act was a violation of the right of trial by jury in that it allowed Congress to convict and punish citizens in advance or absence of trial by jury.

Civil libertarians of all persuasions rejoiced at the decision. Remaining state and federal laws of like nature gradually fell into disuse under the assault of legal and political challenges. In fact, however, the original intent of the Taft-Hartley Act had been achieved. The tremendous trade union momentum that had been generated by the great organizing drives of the 1930s had been checked and then reversed; and radical influence within the labor movement had been largely exorcised. Whether judged by bread-and-butter measures such as the percentage of work force organized and gains in real wages or by a more abstract criterion of political influence, the trade union movement declined steadily after passage of Taft-Hartley. This deterioration was partly masked by the relative prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s, but was clearly evident by the 1970s. With the election of the aggressively anti-trade union Reagan administration of the 1980s, organized labor reached a postwar nadir, but still represented 20.1% of the work force. By the 2020s that percentage had fallen to 10.5%.

Ginger, Ann Fagan, and David Christiano, eds. The Cold War Against Labor. 2 vols. Berkeley, Calif.: Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, 1987.