SL

I have asked myself this question over the years. I believe that the Wagner Act is Exhibit 1 for many radicals and liberals looking back on the successes and failures of the New Deal and of their own lives. I think of my own father, Robert S. Lynd. As a member of the governing board of the 20th Century Fund in the 1930s, he critiqued the Wagner Act for mistakenly presuming that the Act would equalize the bargaining power of management and labor.

Yet at a UAW educational conference after World War II, my dad delivered a speech that was well received by the delegates and, according to Victor Reuther, reprinted as a pamphlet by the UAW because of insistent rank-and-file demand. Therein my father said that organized labor was the only force big enough to counter big business, and that the country would move toward socialism or fascism depending on the outcome of this confrontation.

On the other hand, as Cletus Daniels showed in his book on the ACLU in the 1930s, Roger Baldwin of the ACLU opposed the Wagner Act because he saw how Lewis would use the mechanism of exclusive representation to squeeze the life out of the Progressive Miners in southern Illinois, the union actually preferred by the membership.

It is always easier to blame someone for the failure of a cherished remedy to deliver a solution than it is to critique the remedy itself. It is especially puzzling that folks on the Left have been so insensitive to the dictatorial heavy hand that John L. Lewis laid on dissidents within his own union and on naysayers within nascent CIO unions. When an initial convention of the UAW voted not to support Roosevelt in 1936 and to look toward a new labor party, Lewis prevailed through UAW president Homer Martin and CIO staffer Adolph Germer to have that vote reversed.

In truth, we live through the cycle of over-adulation of leaders, followed by disillusion with his or her performance, over and over. Labor historians and union staffers sequentially idolize Lewis, Reuther and Murray, followed by Arnold Miller, Ed Sadlowski, John Sweeney, and others, only to recognize when the smoke clears that the structure of unionism in the United States has not changed. Yet they still go looking for another leader. As we sang in the 1960s, when will they ever learn?