Creating the National War Labor Board: Franklin Roosevelt and the Politics of State Building in the Early 1940s

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 12, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 233-264

  Workman, Andrew A ^a  

^a MILLS COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 79953919808     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jph.2000.0016     Document Type: Article

References (179)

1. On the NWLB and its impact, see James B. Atleson, Labor and the Wartime State: Labor Relations and Law During World War II (Urbana, 1998)
2. Joel Seidman, American Labor from Defense to Reconversion (Chicago, 1953), 61-67
3. Howell J. Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison, 1982), 47-58
4. Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II (New York, 1982), 26-43, 182-95
5. Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modem America (Chapel Hill, 1994), 169-82
6. Joshua Freeman, “Delivering the Goods: Industrial Unionism during World War II,” Labor History 19 (Fall 1978): 570-93
7. Timothy A. Willard, “Labor and the National War Labor Board, 1942-1945: An Experiment in Corporatist Wage Stabilization” (Ph.D. diss. University of Toledo, 1984)
8. Paul V. Grambsch, “The Impact of the National War Labor Board Upon Management Policy and Practice” (Ph.D. diss. Indiana University, 1955)
9. Andrew A. Workman, “Creating the Center: Liberal Intellectuals, the National War Labor Board, and the Stabilization of American Industrial Relations, 1941-1945” (Ph.D. diss. University of North Carolina, 1993).
10. On the first NWLB, see Valerie Jean Conner, The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justicef and the Voluntary State in World War I (Chapel Hill, 1983)
11. and the important recent book by Joseph A. McCartin, Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921 (Chapel Hill, 1997), 88-91.
12. The World War I board was bipartite with five representatives each of business and labor and each group chose one of its two co-chairs. On the history and structure of the NLRB, see James A. Gross, The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board: National Labor Policy in Transition, 1937-1947 (Albany, N.Y. 1981)
13. Christopher L. Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960 (New York, 1985), 148-96
14. Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modem America, 71–77, 123-67.
15. Historians in the organizational school have been working on similar issues for some time, but much of their work is atheoretical and tends to assume an inevitable trend toward bigness and complexity in government across the century. On the organizational perspective, see Louis Galambos, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review (Autumn 1970): 279-90
16. Louis Galambos, “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” Business History Review (1983): 471-93
17. Robert Cuff, “An Organizational Perspective on the Military-Industrial Complex,” Business History Review (Summer 1978): 250-67.
18. For a supportive but critical perspective on the organizational school, see Alan Brinkley, “Writing the History of Contemporary America: Dilemmas and Challenges, Daedalus (Summer 1984): 134
19. Ellis Hawley, “Social Policy and the Liberal State in Twentieth-Century America,” in Donald T. Critchlow and Ellis W. Hawley, eds. Federal Social Policy: the Historical Dimension (University Park, Pa. 1988), 127
20. Brian Balogh, “Reorganizing the Organizational Synthesis: Federal-Professional Relations in Modern America” Studies in American Political Development (Spring 1991): 119.
21. On institutionalism, see James G. Marsh and Johan P. Olson, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life,” American Political Science Review 78 (1984): 734–49
22. Theda Skocpol's “Bringing the State Back In,” and
23. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer, and Theda Skocpol, “Towards a More Adequate Understanding of the State,” in Evans, Rueschmeyer, and Skocpol, eds. Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research (New York, 1985), 3-37.
24. For two very different critical accounts of the “return to the state” to American social science, see Gabriel A. Almond, “The Return of the State” Ameri#x0027;can Political Science Review 82 (1988): 853-74, and
25. Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 77-96.
26. J. Peter Nettle, “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics (July 1968)
27. Stephen Krasner, “Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics,” Com’ parative Politics 16 (1984): 223-46
28. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York, 1982), 3-18, quotation from 285.
29. Institutionalism, or the “new institutionalism” as it is often labeled, has been widely proclaimed as an important shift in the study of politics. Nonetheless, the kinds of studies performed under this banner, their methodology, and even their definitions of institutions have been quite diffuse. See Ellen M. Immergut, “The Theoretical Core of the New Institutionalism,” Politics and Society (March 1998): 5-35, for an excellent discussion of the current state of the field.
30. Here the term institutionalist is used to describe recent works on the history of the state that emphasize the importance of institutions, such as bureaucracies, political parties, and legal systems, in shaping the outcomes of policies. What redeems this work from repeating the mistakes of “one-size-fits-all” theoretical approaches is a methodological individualism that appreciates the contingency and complexity of particular historical situations. At its best, this historical insitutionalism merges the analytical rigor of sociology and political science with the attention to causality and contingency of the field of history. See also Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol, State and Party in Americas New Deal (Madison, 1995), 31-65.
31. For a thoughtful account of virtues and limits of historical institutionalism, see Ira Katznelson's “The State to the Rescue? Political Science and History Reconnect,” Social Research (Winter 1992): 719-37, and
32. “The Doleful Dance of Politics and Policy: Can Historical Institutionalism Make a Difference?” American Political Science Review 92 (March 1998): 191-98.
33. Bartholomew H. Sparrow, From the Outside In: World War II and the American State (Princeton, 1996)
34. Ira Katznelson and Bruce Pietrykowski, “Rebuilding the American State: Evidence from the 1940s” Studies in American Political Developments (Fall 1991): 301-39
35. Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933-1950,” Political Science Quarterly 108 (Summer 1993): 283-307.
36. James B. Atleson's Labor and the Wartime State provides a useful account of labor policy during the war and is particularly strong in its analysis of the legal changes that emerged from the war. Atleson's text does not, however, offer a systematic account of the wartime state or its development and does not put forward a theoretical position on the matter.
37. Sparrow, From the Outside In, 3–32.
38. From the Outside In, 67-96, 261-65. On other scholars' interpretations of the negative impact of state on the labor movement during World War II, see Nelson Lichtenstein, Labors War At Home, passim
39. James Atleson, “The Law of Collective Bargaining and Wartime Labor Relations,” in Sally Miller and Daniel Cornford, eds. American Labor in the Era of World War II (Westport, Conn. 1995), 38-63.
40. For a more positive view of labor's experience at the hands of the state, see Joshua Freeman, “Delivering the Goods: Industrial Unionism during World War II,” 570–93. Although I have some disagreements with Sparrow's interpretation of industrial relations policy, I applaud his book as a whole for raising the level of discussion on state building and for compelling me to sharpen my own thinking on the issue.
41. Katznelson and Pietrykowski, “Rebuilding the American State, 301–39
42. Michael K. Brown, “State Capacity and Political Choice: Interpreting the Failure of the Third New Deal”; Ira Katznelson and Bruce Pietrykowski, “On Categories and Configurations: Further Remarks on Rebuilding the American State,” and
43. Michael K. Brown, “On Evidence and Interpretation: Reply to Katznelson and Pietrykowski, all in Studies in American Political Developmerit 9 (Spring 1995): 187-228. Brown is critical of Katznelson and Pietrykowski's argument that there was a true battle between a developmental and fiscalist approach to organizing the state and argues that it was rather a contest between two variants of the fiscalist approach. Of interest here is not so much which of these interpretations is correct, but the importance of a particular kind of partisan alignment in determining the ultimate shape of the state. Such a motive force for state development can work as well with either interpretation.
44. Ira Katznelson et al. Limiting Liberalism, 283-307. This article does discuss the U.S. Employment Service, but this agency managed labor supply and had no responsibility for resolving disputes during the war.
45. On Roosevelt and the early mobilization, see James M. Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York, 1956), 457-61
46. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York, 1995), 175-200
47. Paul Cuff, “War Mobilization, Institutional Learning, and State Building in the United States, 1917-1941,” in Mary O. Furner and Michael Lacey, eds. The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States (New York, 1993), 409-19
48. Koistinen Warfare and Power Relations in America, 91–95
49. Dubofsky, The State and Labor, 173–78
50. Katznelson et al. “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933-1950,” 283–307.
51. Interview, Frances Perkins, Columbia Oral History Program (Microfilm edition), Book VIII, 209–10, [hereafter Perkins Interview]
52. Interview, Isador Lubin, Columbia Oral History Program (Microfilm edition), 123–27, 204-6 [hereafter Lubin Interview]
53. Steen Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor, (New York, 1991), 452-58
54. Matthew Josephson, Sidney Hillman: Statesman of American Labor, (New York, 1952), 503-65
55. Richard Polenberg, War and Society: The United States, 1941-1945 (Philadelphia, 1972), 7-8
56. Richard J. Purcell, Labor Policies of the National Defense Advisory Commission and the Office of Production Management May 1940 to April 1942 (Washington, D.C. 1946), 168-69
57. Gregory Hooks, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex: World War IPs Battle of the Potomac (Urbana, 1991), 100-103.
58. Gardner Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 7 November 1940 and 13 November 1940, both in OF 407, Box 2, Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Library, Hyde Park, N.Y. [hereafter Roosevelt Papers]; Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 458-65; Josephson,Sidney Hillman, 518-28, Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935-1955 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 102-10.
59. New York Times, 26, 27, 28, and 29 November 1940.
60. On the role of Stimson and Knox in the mobilization apparatus, see Attorney General Robert Jackson, “Memorandum to the President,” 29 April 1941, Box 141, Robert Patterson Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington D.C. [hereafter Patterson Papers]
61. See also Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped American Unions (Princeton, 1977), 166-76, and
62. Paul A. C. Koistinen, “The Hammer and the Sword: Labor, the Military, and Industrial Mobilization, 1920-1945” (Ph.D. diss. University of California, Berkeley, 1965), 106-13
63. Gregory Hooks, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex, 85–86
64. Bruce Catton, The War Lords of Washington (New York, 1948), 23.
65. On Hillman's health, see Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 406–8, 490, 499.
66. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Strikes in 1941 and Strikes Affecting Defense Production, Bulletin #711 (Washington, D.C. 1942), 1, 4, 29
67. Bureau of Demobilization, Civilian Production Administration, Industrial Mobilization for War: History of the War Production Board and Predecessor Agencies, 1940-1945 (Washington, D.C. 1947), 121-40
68. “Unemployment in September, 1941,” Monthly Labor Review (November 1941): 1346-47
69. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Strikes in 1941 and Strikes Affecting Defense Production, Bulletin #711 (Washington, D.C. 1942), 6-7.
70. For accounts of union mobilization, see Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (New York, 1970), 727-67, and
71. Zieger, The CIO, 90–140.
72. “Summary of Labor Bills,” n.d. Entry 75, Box 474, Record Group 202, National War Labor Board Papers, National Archives, Washington D.C. [hereafter NWLB Papers].
73. See also Andrew A. Workman, “Manufacturing Power: The Organizational Revival of the National Association of Manufacturers 1941-1945,” Business History Review 72 (Summer 1998): 279-317.
74. William H. Davis, “A Plan to Minimize Interruptions in the Production of Defense Materials by Mutual Agreement Between Managements and Workers,” n.d. Box 8, William H. Davis papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison [hereafter Davis Papers]; Davis Papers
75. George Martin, Madam Secretary: Frances Perkins (Boston, 1976), 242, 283-86
76. Dubofsky, The State and Labor, 108
77. Hillman Testimony, Inquiry as to Nationaldefense Construction: Hearing before the Committee on Military Affairs, 8 April 1941, House, 77, 1st sess. (Washington, D.C. 1941), 104.
78. “Minutes of the Second Meeting, Twentieth Century Fund Special Committee on the Role of Government in Labor,” Box 41, File: “Twentieth Century Fund, William M. Leiserson Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison [hereafter Leiserson Pa* pers]; “Labor and Collective Bargaining Studies, 1934-1949” n.d. Twentieth Century Fund Papers, Twentieth Century Fund, New York City [hereafter Twentieth Century Fund Pa* pers]; New York Times, 4 September 1934.
79. For the role of various groups of industrial relations policy intellectuals in the development of labor policy before and during the war, see James A. Gross, The Making of the National Labor Relations Board: A Study in Economics, Politics, and the Law, 1933-1937 (Albany, N.Y. 1974)
80. James A. Gross, The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board
81. Ronald W. Schatz, “From Commons to Dunlop: Rethinking the Field and Theory of Industrial Relations,” in Nelson Lichtenstein and Howell Harris, eds. Industrial Democracy in America, 89–91
82. Peter Irons, The New Deal Lawyers (Princeton, 1982)
83. Christopher L. Tomlins, The State and the Unions
84. Howell J. Harris, “The Snares of Liberalism? Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Shaping of Federal Labour Relations Policy in the United States, ca 1915-1947,” in Stephen Toliday and Jonathan Zeitlin, eds. Shop Floor Bargaining and the State: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York, 1985), 151-98
85. Daniel Ernst, “Common Laborers? Industrial Pluralists, Legal Realists, and the Law of Industrial Disputes, Law and History Review 11 (Spring 1993): 59-100
86. Mark Barenberg, “The Political Economy of the Wagner Act: Power, Symbol, and Workplace Cooperation,” Harvard Law Review 106 (May 1993): 1379-1496
87. Jeffrey Manza, “Policy Experts and Political Change During the New Deal” (Ph.D. diss. University of California, Berkeley, 1995), 89-292; and
88. David Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York, 1996), 108-27.
89. The term “industrial pluralist” is now used quite generally to describe the postwar system of industrial relations. The first developed use of this term may be found in Katherine Van Wezel Stone, “The Post-War Paradigm in American Labor Law” Yale Law Journal 90 (June 1981): 1509-80.
90. For Stone, postwar industrial relations thinkers shared an ideology that falsely characterizes the workplace as a “mini-democracy” in which the corporations and the unions bargain on equal terms, advocated the substitution of a system of grievance procedures to resolve disputes in lieu of direct action or legal procedures, and that they are generally responsible for the sorry state of the labor movement after the 1970s. Whatever the merits of this interpretation (for a vigorous, and largely convincing, point-by-point critique of Stone's argument, see Matthew Finkin, “Symposium: Directions in Labor Law—Concern for the Dignity of the Worker: Revisionism in Labor Law” Maryland Law Review 43 [Fall 1984]: 22–90), the term industrial pluralist has come to stand as a broad label for those professors and lawyers in the postwar field of industrial relations and, more narrowly, to a clearly identifiable network of policy intellectuals who followed the ideas of Commons, as distinguished from those of the “legal realists,” “Hawthorne school” industrial psychologists, and advocates of other labor relations strategies.
91. See Christopher L. Tomlins, “The New Deal, Collective Bargaining, and the Triumph of Industrial Pluralism,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 39 (October 1985): 19-34
92. Daniel Ernst, “Common Laborers? Industrial Pluralists, Legal Realists, and the Law of Industrial Disputes,” Law and History Review 11 (Spring 1993): 59-100
93. Mark Barenberg, “The Political Economy of the Wagner Act: Power, Symbol, and Workplace Cooperation,” Harvard Law Review 106 (May 1993): 1379-1496
94. Manza, “Policy Experts and Political Change During the New Deal,” 89–292. The second of these meanings is adopted here in part to place this argument within the debate over the role of prewar policy intellectuals and also because it provides a useful means of describing the ideas of people like Leiserson and Davis. Care must be taken, however, so as not to reify the ideas of industrial pluralists. They were a contentious bunch who, like intellectuals generally, were prone to change their minds, accept compromises, and even to learn from their experiences and mistakes.
95. On Commonss ideas, see John R. Commons, Institutional Economics: Its Place in Political Economy (New York, 1934), 241-42
96. Ernst, “Common Laborers?” 62–69
97. Schatz, “From Commons to Dunlop, 89–91
98. Clarence underlin, Visions of a New Industrial Order: Social Science and Labor Theory in America's Progressive Era (New York, 1992), 113-29.
99. Harry A. Millis, “Some Observations on Labor and a National Defense Program,” 15 June 1940, Box 8; Edwin Witte to Evans Clark, 1 July 1940, Box 9
100. “Minutes of Special Meeting of the Labor Committee,” 21 June 1940, 2 July 1940, 30 October 1940, and 6 December 1940, Box 9
101. William H. Davis, “A Plan to Minimize Interruptions in the Production of Defense Materials by Mutual Agreement Between Managements and Workers,” n.d. Box 8, all in Davis Papers. Davis's plan was based in part on the Railway Labor Act, which he and Leiserson believed to be a model for Commons-style government intervention in labor relations.
102. See William Leiserson, Right and Wrong in Labor Relations (Berkeley, 1938), 73-86
103. William Leiserson, Labor's Right to Organize, Day and Hour Series 22 (Minneapolis, 1939), 13-19.
104. See also Dubofsky, The State and Labor, 100–101, for a less rosy view of the Railway Labor Act.
105. Dr. John Boland to William H. Davis, 2 December 1940, Box 9, unprocessed section, Davis Papers; Interview, William H. Davis, Columbia Oral History Program, micro I, 1959, 78 [hereafter Davis Columbia Interview]
106. Hillman testimony, Inquiry as to Nationaldefense Construction: Hearing before the Committee on Military Affairs, 8 April 1941, House, 77, 1st sess. (Washington, D.C. 1941), 104
107. New York Times, 14 March 1941.
108. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, D.C. 1958), 236.
109. NAM organized only manufacturing companies and hence excluded many sectors of the economy from its membership. Even among manufacturers it directly represented, at its height in 1945, only 14,500 employers, about 5.5 percent of the total number of manufacturers. See Richard W. Gable, “A Political Analysis of an Employers' Association: The National Association of Manufacturers” (Ph.D. diss. University of Chicago, 1951), 187-88, and
110. Workman, “Manufacturing Power”: 284–93.
111. The CCUS was a much broader organization than NAM, comprised of more than seventeen hundred affiliated local groups and trade associations with a combined membership of three-quarters of a million, but its main purpose was to gauge and project “business opinion,” not impose policies on its members. Despite questions as to their ability to represent the interests of American industry at large, NAM and CCUS were considered by policymakers to be the most legitimate choices available to serve such a role in negotiations with the government. See Donald C. Blaisdell, Economic Power and Political Pressures (Washington, D.C. 1941), 25-37.
112. On the prewar period for NAM and CCUS, see Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1935 (New York, 1994), 166-203, and
113. on the inadequacy of both business and labor organizations to serve as corportist peak associations during the war, see Willard, “Labor and the National War Labor Board,” 79–113.
114. “Minutes National Defense Labor Problems Subcommittee,” 13 February 1941, Box 2, Group 1412, Papers of the National Association of Manufactures, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Del. [hereafter NAM Papers]
115. Koistinen, “The Hammer and the Sword,” 99–104
116. New York Times, 10 December 1940
117. Harris, Right to Manage, passim.
118. Minutes of Meetings, Executive Council of the American Federation of Labor, 7 February 1941, 2–6, and 11 February 1941, 14-16
119. George Meany Memorial Archives, Silver Springs, Md. [hereafter AFL Minutes]; New York Times, 12 February 1941.
120. Philip Murray to William H. Davis, 12 December 1940, Box 9, unprocessed section, Davis Papers; Zieger, The CIO, 143-44. This proposal was echoed by United Auto Workers (UAW) leader Walter P. Reuther, who captured headlines with his assertion that the auto industry could be converted to produce 500 planes a day under an industrial council. Walter P. Reuther, “500 Planes a Day—A Program for the Utilization of the Automobile Industry for Mass Production of Defense Planes,” in Walter P. Reuther: Selected Papers, Henry M. Christman, ed. (New York, 1961), 1-12
121. New York Times, 1 January and 12 February 1941
122. “Murray Flays Proposal for Mediation Board Urges Defense Plan,” CIO News, 17 March 1941.
123. “Defense Industries Labor Board” n.d. Reel 17
124. Records of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Holdings of the Labor-Management Document Center, Microfilm edition, Martin P. Catherwood Library, Cornell University [hereafter ACWA Papers].
125. Philip Murray, 28 February 1941, Reel 17, ACWA Papers
126. “Murray Flays Proposal for Mediation Board Urges Defense Plan,” CIO News, 17 March 1941.
127. Interview, William H. Davis, Cornell University, 25 June 1958, Tape 3, Side 2, p. 6 [hereafter Davis Cornell Interview]; Gardner Jackson to Franklin Roosevelt, 13 November 1940, OF 407, Box 2, Roosevelt Papers; Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vok 17 (New York, 1972), 169-71, 174-79, 193
128. Richard W. Gable, NAM: Influential Lobby or Kiss of Death? Journal of Politics 15 (1953): 254-73
129. Alfred S. Cleveland, WNAM, Spokesman for Industry? Harvard Business Review 26 (1948): 353-69.
130. wThe National Defense Mediation Board Is Established, Executive Order 8716,’ ’ThePublic Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel Rosenman, ed. The Call to Battle Stations (New York, 1950), 76-80.
131. See Philip Schmitter, “Still the Century of Corporatism?” in Fredrick B. Pike and Thomas Stritch, eds. The New Corporatism (Notre Dame, 1974)
132. Leo Panitch, “Recent Theorizations of Corporatism: Reflections on a Growth Industry,” British Journal of Sociology 31 (June 1980): 159-87
133. Leo Panitch, “The Development of Corporatism in Liberal Democracy,” and
134. Gerhard Lehmbruch, “Liberal Corporatism and Party Government,” both in Comparative Political Studies 10 (April 1977).
135. See Willard, “Labor and the National War Labor Board, 1942-1945,” 79–113, for an excellent discussion of corporatism and the NWLB.
136. New York Times, 5 April 1941
137. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 744–50
138. Zieger, The CIO, 121–25.
139. “Minutes of the NDMB,” 25 March 1941, Entry 6, Box 3, NWLB Papers
140. NDMB Executive Session Transcript, 10 April 1941, Entry 25, Box 6, 40-45, NWLB Papers
141. See William M. Leiserson, “The Public and Labor Relations,” Survey Graphic (November 1941): 613-14.
142. “Executive Order 8773, June 9 1941,” The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, (1941), 205-9
143. Cochran, Labor and Communism, 176–84
144. Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home, 58–59
145. Wyndam Mortimer, Organize!: My Life as a Union Man, ed. Leo Fenster (Boston, 1971), 166-73.
146. Osgood Nichols, “Public Reaction to Date,” 23 May 1941, Entry 93, Box 597, NWLB Papers; House Committee on Military Affairs, Inquiry as to National-Defense Construction: Hearings before the Committee on Military Affairs 77th Cong. 1st sess. 1941, 10-12, 84.
147. Harris, The Right to Manage, 46–50.
148. Davis Columbia Interview, 94–95
149. Report on the Work of the National Defense Mediation Board, 24–29.
150. “NWLB Press Conference,” 12 November 1941, Entry 32, Box 253, NWLB Papers
151. Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography (New York, 1977), 402; New York Times, 1 and 11 November 1941.
152. Benjamin Stephansky, “The Wartime Industry-Labor Conference of December 17-23, 1941,” Entry 75, Box 475, NWLB Papers. On the CIO plan for labor-management conference, see the New York Times, 1 December 1941, and
153. “Radio Speech by Philip Murray, delivered over the NBC Blue Network,” 8 December 1941, reprinted in CIO Neu/s, 15 December 1941.
154. Lloyd Garrison to President [Franklin D. Roosevelt], 19 November 1941, Box 176, DOL-OS Papers.
155. “The President Calls a Conference to Draft a Basic Wartime Labor Policy,” 11 December 1941, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt
156. Rosenman, ed. The Call to Battle Stations, 533–34
157. Perkins Interview, 205–14.
158. For NAM comment on the idea of an industry-labor conference, see the New York Times, 11 December 1941
159. NDMB Executive Session Transcript, 11 December 1941, Entry 25, Box 6, 3, NWLB Papers.
160. Stephansky, “The Wartime Industry-Labor Conference,” 5
161. “Report of President Green to the Executive Council of the American Federation of Labor on the Conference of Labor and Industry called by President Roosevelt,” n.d. Office of the President, Series II, File B, William Green Papers, George Meany Library, Silver Spring, Md. [hereafter Green Papers]
162. Robert M. Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929-1964 (New York, 1981), 56-62.
163. “Report of President Green to the Executive Council,” Green Papers
164. William H. Davis, Elbert D. Thomas, and Edward F. Pritchard Jr. “Memorandum Report of the Deliberations of the War-Labor Conference Convened by the President in the City of Washington, on December 17, 1941,” Congressional Record, 15 January 1942, 77th Cong. 2d sess. 372-73.
165. Workman, “Manufacturing Power”: 300–317.
166. NWLB Executive Session Transcript, 16 January 1942, Entry 25, Box 8, 8-36, NWLB Papers
167. Stephansky, “Wartime Industry-Labor Conference,” 24–25.
168. Minutes of Meetings, Executive Council of the American Federation of Labor, 12-17 January 1942, 60–62, AFL Minutes
169. CIO News, 5 January 1942, 1
170. W. Jett Lauck Diary, 29, 30, and 31 December, 1941, Reel 2, University of Virginia, Microfilm Edition.
171. On labor during the war, see Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home, 233
172. James Atleson, “The Law of Collective Bargaining and Wartime Labor Relations,” 38–63
173. Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America, xvi, 171.
174. But this approach is not systematically developed. On the larger story of the mobilizaiton, see Koistinen, “The Hammer and the Sword”
175. Bruce Catton, The War Lords of Washington
176. Donald M. Nelson, Arsenal of Democracy: The Story of American War Production (New York, 1946)
177. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War.
178. For sophisticated recent work in this vein, see Brian Waddell, “Economic Mobilization for World War II and the Transformation of the U.S. State,” Politics & Society (June 1994): 165-94
179. Hooks, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex.