Republicans and Big Labor: Wagner and Taft-Hartley

Republicans and Big Labor, a Failed Courtship (full series)
GOP-Union Outreach Before Franklin Roosevelt | Wagner and Taft-Hartley
The Two Minds of Tricky Dick | Reagan-Bush and Beyond

Wagner and Taft-Hartley

The outreach to organized labor by Republicans essentially became irrelevant after the election of President Franklin Roosevelt and massive congressional majorities with a mandate to enact his “New Deal” of central planning, government spending, and regulation. Among Roosevelt’s and his Big Labor allies’ priorities was the codification of collective bargaining, and a collective bargaining provision was included in the central-planning omnibus National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). The NIRA’s collective bargaining provision was unsatisfying to union groups, since it permitted substantial employer involvement in the operations of NIRA-recognized unions.

The Supreme Court threw NIRA out in 1935. Sen. Robert Wagner (D-NY) pushed a new law, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), that established powerful protections for union activities including mandatory recognition and mandatory bargaining, alongside powers to seek federal intervention against “unfair labor practices” by employers. To protect their new powers, union officials formed “Labor’s Non-Partisan League” to support pro-Roosevelt candidates and FDR’s reelection.

Unions would align closely with Roosevelt for the remainder of his life and political career, except for United Mine Workers and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) president John L. Lewis, who broke with Roosevelt over the president’s exceeding the then-customary two-term limit and Roosevelt’s support for the United Kingdom in the early phase of World War II. When Roosevelt was reelected, Lewis stood down as head of the CIO, which under his successors (and aides who were Communists or fellow-travelers) would become a core element of the Roosevelt-Truman coalition.

After the war, unions flexed their NLRA-supercharged muscles with the largest strike wave in American history, which worsened inflation caused by military demobilization. That economic disruption swept the Republicans into control of Congress in the 1946 elections. In 1947 a bipartisan supermajority passed the Taft-Hartley Act over President Harry Truman’s veto. Politically, this reinforced the labor-Democratic alliance, as Big Labor went all out to re-elect Truman in 1948 (which was successful) and to unseat Act namesake Sen. Robert A. Taft (R-OH) in 1950 (which failed miserably).

The Plumber Among the Millionaires

In 1952, Republicans broke a five-term Democratic hammerlock on the presidency, when retired World War II General and Columbia University president Dwight Eisenhower won election over Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson (D). A month after the election, Eisenhower announced that he would appoint Martin Durkin as secretary of labor. The New York Times described Durkin’s selection as “President-elect Eisenhower’s most unconventional appointment to date,” in part because “Mr. Durkin is a Democrat and voted for Governor Stevenson; he is an A. F. L. man and a critic of the Taft-Hartley law.”

Senator Taft, the Senate Majority Leader-designate, was outraged; why had the Republican president appointed not only a Democrat but a labor union boss—Durkin led the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry—as secretary of labor? Eisenhower had pledged to be “fair” to organized labor, but Durkin’s appointment looked like a thumb on the scale in Big Labor’s favor.

Conservative Republicans feared for the young Taft-Hartley Act, which had survived attempts by Truman and Democratic Congresses to repeal it. Joseph Ball, a former U.S. senator from Minnesota, wrote in The Freeman (the journal published by the free-market Foundation for Economic Education at the time): “The job of emasculating the law will be done by way of amendments, with the  sponsors piously insisting they are preserving the essentials of Taft-Hartley. But the effect on national labor policy will not differ materially from repeal.” Ball continued,

What is really frightening, however, is that the background of the message [a list of mostly union-favoring proposed amendments to Taft-Hartley that was leaked before being presented to Congress] indicates it may well be only a starting point for concessions to union leaders, which ultimately could result in a far worse law than the original Wagner Act.

But the Plumbers Union official in the cabinet of millionaires serving the war-hero general would not last. First, there was a game of back-and-forth negotiations between the Eisenhower Commerce Department and Durkin’s Labor Department, with Commerce advocating more pro-management changes and Durkin recommending changes more favorable to organized labor, especially the AFL. Durkin, at the urging of union officials, bailed on the joint plan and offered his own 19-point list of changes. Eisenhower balked at Durkin’s changes, Durkin threatened to resign, and Eisenhower accepted his resignation in early September.

Durkin was out, and Taft-Hartley had outlived its namesake. (Sen. Taft died of cancer at the end of July 1953.) The plumber’s eight-month tenure as Labor Secretary is, as of February 2025, the shortest completed tenure of any Senate-confirmed Labor Secretary; following his departure, Durkin returned to the Plumbers Union, which he led until his death two years later.

Dancing with the Devil

Durkin’s departure did not end the Eisenhower administration’s appetite for outreach to Big Labor, then at its modern-era height in power, influence, and membership relative to the size of the workforce. Eisenhower’s team had a receptive audience from elements on the organized labor side, especially in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which functioned as labor’s compromised right wing in the mid-20th century.

Dave Beck was the leader of the Teamsters from 1952 through 1957. James Neff, a journalist and author who has written multiple books on the history of the Teamsters Union, characterized the boss:

A florid, fleshy man with a bald head, Beck used his power to insinuate himself into Seattle’s political and cultural establishment. He bought downtown real estate, gas stations and other small companies. By the 1950s, Beck, a Republican, had become more powerful in Washington state than the governor. President Eisenhower welcomed him at visits to the White House, referring to him as the Republicans’ labor statesman. Behind his back, Beck was known as His Majesty the Wheel.

Eisenhower and Beck were friendly. On policy, Beck promoted the Eisenhower administration’s efforts to close down the Mexican migrant-worker program and expel Mexican-national migrant workers (known by the moniker “Operation Wetback”). President Eisenhower sent a telegram hailing the construction of the Teamsters’ “marble palace” headquarters down the street from the U.S. Capitol, writing “democratic trade unionism is one of the bulwarks of our American way of life.” In 1956, President Eisenhower invited Beck to the White House for a meeting at which the union boss endorsed Ike’s re-election campaign.

But Beck had secrets, and a young ambitious Democrat set out to uncover them. Working on the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field (a.k.a. the McClellan Committee) under Sen. John McClellan (D-AR), Robert F. Kennedy opened an investigation into the finances of the nation’s then-largest labor union (which had, conveniently, endorsed the Republican Eisenhower). Kennedy’s main target was a Detroit-area Teamster boss thought to have ties to organized crime named James Riddle Hoffa, but in the process of inquiring into Hoffa discovered that Beck was also on the take.

By New Year’s Day 1957, Kennedy and his fellow McClellan Committee investigators had secured an admission from Beck’s fixer, a labor-relations consultant named Nathan Shefferman, that he had paid $94,000—over $1 million in today’s money—toward Beck’s personal expenses and the expenses of Beck’s family and friends. Financial records backed up Shefferman’s admission. All told, Kennedy and his colleagues found that Beck had misused $400,000 in Teamsters funds—in today’s money, over $4.6 million.

At a congressional hearing, Beck pleaded the Fifth. His allies tried to make Kennedy’s Democratic probe appear partisan, since the Teamster boss had allied with the Republicans. But later in 1957, facing a state charge in Washington, Beck had to step down as Teamsters boss.

For Republicans, who wanted to direct the McClellan Committee’s investigations toward the liberal-left United Auto Workers under Walter Reuther, Beck’s departure didn’t mean that much. His replacement, the aforementioned James Riddle Hoffa, was also GOP-friendly and hostile to Kennedy and his brother, Sen. John F. Kennedy (D-MA). Jimmy Hoffa—hailed to this day as “A Worker’s Hero” by the Teamsters Union he led—was if anything more corrupt than Beck, as Bobby Kennedy had reportedly suspected.

Even before Beck’s defenestration, Hoffa had attempted to put a double agent on the McClellan Committee’s payroll, only to have Cye Cheasty turn him in to Kennedy and go to work for the committee. Indeed, if Hoffa had not benefitted from a cynical defense strategy focused on Black racial solidarity and bungling from DC federal prosecutors, Kennedy might have put Hoffa in prison before Hoffa managed to top the Teamsters.

The McClellan Committee ultimately produced dozens of volumes of testimony and documentary evidence showing the extent of corruption in organized labor, with the Teamsters being the principal perpetrators. In response to the McClellan Committee investigations, Congress passed and President Eisenhower signed the Landrum-Griffin Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959. It placed regulations on union internal operations, required labor unions to file financial disclosures subject to public inspection, and further restricted “secondary boycotts” by prohibiting “hot cargo” agreements under which employers agreed not to handle goods produced by or intended for a struck shop.

The Eisenhower labor record ended up not being the rollback of Taft-Hartley into a union-favoring Wagner Act environment that former Senator Ball feared. While the administration had opposed attempts to expand state-level right-to-work in 1958 (most attempts, most prominently in California, failed amid the internal GOP opposition and a Democratic wave-election environment), the Landrum-Griffin Act ultimately advanced the Taft-Hartley consensus.

In the next installment, President Richard Nixon tried to reach out to unions, with limited success.