Public opinion, organized labor, and the limits of new deal liberalism, 1936-1945

Studies in American Political Development

Volumn 25, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 162-189

  Schickler, Eric ^a   Caughey, Devin ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84856380056     PISSN: 0898588X     EISSN: 14698692     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898588X11000101     Document Type: Review

References (157)

1. See James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933-1939 (Lexington: For the Organization of American Historians [by] University of Kentucky Press, 1967).
2. Joseph Alsop and Turner Catledge, The 168 Days (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1938);
3. Susan Dunn, Roosevelt's Purge: How FDR Fought to Change the Democratic Party (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010);
4. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal
5. see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
6. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989);
7. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, "Regimes and Regime Building in American Government: A Review of the Literature on the 1940s," Political Science Quarterly 113, no. 4 (1998-1999).
8. Ira Katznelson and John S. Lapinski, "Congress and American Political Development: Missed Chances, Rich Possibilities," Perspectives on Politics 4, no. 2 (2006).
9. See Jerrold Rusk, A Statistical History of the American Electorate (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2001), 234.
10. David R. Mayhew, America's Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere, James Madison Through Newt Gingrich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
11. See Devin Caughey, "The Mass Basis of the 'Southern Imposition': Labor Unions, Public Opinion, and Representation, 1930s-1940s" (paper presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA, Sept. 1-4, 2011), which explores this and related questions.
12. Brinkley, The End of Reform.
13. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal;
14. Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, "Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933-1950," Political Science Quarterly 108, no. 2 (1993).
15. Nelson Lichtenstein, "Politicized Unions and the New Deal Model: Labor, Business, and Taft-Hartley," in The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism, ed. Sidney Milkis and Jerome Mileur (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002).
16. David Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
17. Howell John Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, 1982);
18. Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
19. William Edward Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 35, 188-89.
20. Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order, 153-6;
21. Taylor E. Dark, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
22. For leftist critiques of the Wagner Act, see Christopher Tomlins, The State and the Unions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985);
23. Michael Goldfield, "Worker Insurgency, Radical Organization, and New Deal Labor Legislation," American Political Science Review 83, no. 4 (1989);
24. Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For compelling refutations of such arguments,
25. see Sean Farhang and Ira Katznelson, "The Southern Imposition: Congress and Labor in the New Deal and Fair Deal," Studies in American Political Development 19 (2005): 5-6;
26. Robert H. Zieger, The CIO: 1935-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
27. Lichtenstein, "Politicized Unions and the New Deal Model," 124. Given the generally pro-labor occupants of the White House, the group most dissatisfied with this arrangement was business. In 1939, when a Roper poll sampled business executives, asking which New Deal program they disliked the most, the resounding answer was the Wagner Act.
28. See Edwin Amenta, et al., "Bring Back the WPA: Work, Relief, and the Origins of American Social Policy in Welfare Reform," Studies in American Political Development 12 (1998), and Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s.
29. Farhang and Katznelson, "The Southern Imposition";
30. Nelson Lichtenstein, "From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining," in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989);
31. Lichtenstein, "Politicized Unions and the New Deal Model."
32. For a more positive assessment of labor's place in the emergent New Deal order, see Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order. As Orren and Skowronek observe, the literature on the 1940s has had a "glass half full" / "glass half empty" aspect: The 1933 to 1950 period encompassed both major triumphs and disappointments for labor-oriented liberalism. The political terrain had shifted with the Wagner Act and related victories; the battle now was over the meaning of those victories for future politics. In other words, to say that labor's place in the postwar political economy did not match the aspirations of New Deal labor-oriented reformers of the late 1930s does not challenge the notion that the Wagner Act constituted a significant political transformation;
33. Orren and Skowronek, "Regimes and Regime Building in American Government."
34. See, for example, James B. Atleson, Labor and the Wartime State: Labor Relations and Law During World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
35. See especially Katznelson, Geiger, and Kryder, "Limiting Liberalism"; Farhang and Katznelson, "The Southern Imposition."
36. Farhang and Katznelson, "The Southern Imposition," 2. Anthony Badger uses the term "schizophrenic" to describe the Democratic Party in this period;
37. Anthony J. Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, reprint of the 1989 ed. (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 271.
38. For an early, innovative analysis of the impact of sectional political economy on congressional decision-making with respect to labor and other policy domains, see Richard Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development: 1880-1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
39. Lichtenstein, "Politicized Unions and the New Deal Model."
40. See Brinkley, The End of Reform, 12-13.
41. See also Alonzo L. Hamby, Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973).
42. For a critique of the claim that New Deal reformers seriously contemplated a fundamental restructuring of the economy, see Michael Brown, "State Capacity and Political Choice: Interpreting the Failure of the Third New Deal," Studies in American Political Development 9, no. 1 (1995).
43. On consolidation, see Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order;
44. Hamby, Beyond the New Deal. For accounts of how the Second World War changed the liberal agenda
45. see Edwin Amenta and Theda Skocpol, "Redefining the New Deal: World War II and the Development of Social Provision in the United States," in The Politics of Social Policy in the United States, ed. Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988);
46. David R. Mayhew, "Wars and American Politics," Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 3 (2005).
47. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise ;
48. Harris, The Right to Manage ;
49. Meg Jacobs, "'How About Some Meat?': The Office of Price Administration, Consumption Politics, and State Building from the Bottom Up, 1941-1946," Journal of American History 84, no. 3 (1997);
50. Lichtenstein, "From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining";
51. Jonathan Bell, The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
52. Richard Polenberg, "The Decline of the New Deal, 1937- 1940," in The New Deal: The National Level, ed. John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and David Brody (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1975), 255.
53. See, e.g., Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth Jacobs, "Brothers' Keepers?," Social Science and Modern Society 44, no. 5 (2007);
54. Hazel Erskine, "The Polls: Government Role in Welfare," Public Opinion Quarterly 39 (1975);
55. Michael Schiltz, "Public Attitudes Toward Social Security, 1935-1965," (Washington, DC: Social Security Administration, 1970);
56. Jacobs, "'How About Some Meat?'";
57. Christopher Ellis and James A. Stimson, "Symbolic Ideology in the American Electorate," Electoral Studies 28 (2009). Page and Shapiro's comprehensive survey of American public opinion extends back to the mid-1930s, but many of the polls we examine were not available for direct analysis at the time that book was written;
58. see Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992), 42-46.
59. See, for example, Hadley Cantril, "The Issues-As Seen by the American People," Public Opinion Quarterly 8, no. 3 (1944);
60. Zieger, The CIO;
61. Brinkley, The End of Reform, Chapter 9.
62. Adam J. Berinsky and Eric Schickler, "The American Mass Public in the 1930s and 1940s [Computer file]." Individual surveys conducted by the Gallup Organization, Roper Organization, NORC, and The Office of Public Opinion Research [producers], 1936-1945: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut [distributor] (2011);
63. Adam J. Berinsky, et al., "Revisiting Public Opinion in the 1930s and 1940s," PS: Political Science and Politics 44(3) (2011): 515-520.
64. Robert M. Eisinger and Jeremy Brown, "Polling as a Means Toward Presidential Autonomy: Emil Hurja, Hadley Cantril and the Roosevelt Administration," International Journal of Public Opinion Research 10, no. 3 (1998);
65. Robert M. Eisinger, The Evolution of Presidential Polling (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The FDR Presidential Library in Hyde Park, NY, contains a wealth of largely unstudied material devoted to the work of Hurja and Cantril.
66. Jean M. Converse, Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987);
67. Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
68. Igo, The Averaged American.
69. Converse, Survey Research in the United States.
70. George F. Lewis, Jr., "The Congressmen Look at the Polls," Public Opinion Quarterly 4, no. 2 (1939).
71. See, for example, George Gallup, "Public Opinion Polls Important in Democracy," Washington Post, August 6, 1939.
72. These works include Matthew A. Baum and Samuel Kernell, "Economic Class and Popular Support for Franklin Roosevelt in War and Peace," Public Opinion Quarterly 65 (2001);
73. Gregory PUBLIC OPINION, ORGANIZED LABOR, AND THE LIMITS OF NEW DEAL LIBERALISM, 1936-1945 167
74. A. Caldeira, "Public Opinion and The U.S. Supreme Court: FDR's Court-Packing Plan," American Political Science Review 81, no. 4 (1987);
75. Newman and Jacobs, "Brothers' Keepers?";
76. Helmut Norpoth, Victor Lange, and Michael Morzenti, "Voting in Wartime: The 1944 Election" (paper presented at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, 2009);
77. Schiltz, "Public Attitudes Toward Social Security";
78. Kay Lehman Schlozman and Sidney Verba, Injury to Insult: Unemployment, Class, and Political Response (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979);
79. M. Stephen Weatherford and Boris Sergeyev, "Thinking about Economic Interests: Class and Recession in the New Deal," Political Behavior 22 (2000).
80. For a description of quota-sampling practices, see Adam J. Berinsky, "American Public Opinion in the 1930s and 1940s: The Analysis of Quota-Controlled Sample Survey Data," Public Opinion Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2006).
81. See Elmo Roper, "Sampling Public Opinion," Journal of the American Statistical Association 35, no. 210, Part 1 (1940).
82. Steven Ruggles et al., "Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0" (Minneapolis: Minnesota Population Center, 2004).
83. Adam J. Berinsky and Eric Schickler, "The American Mass Public in the 1930s and 1940s," (National Science Foundation, Collaborative Research Grant, 2006);
84. Adam Berinsky et al., "Revisiting Public Opinion in the 1930s and 1940s."
85. Cantril, "The Issues," 83-97.
86. Eric Schickler and Kathryn Pearson, "Agenda Control, Majority Party Power, and the House Committee on Rules, 1937- 52," Legislative Studies Quarterly 34, no. 4 (2009).
87. Eric Schickler, Kathryn Pearson, and Brian D. Feinstein, "Congressional Parties and Civil Rights Politics from 1933 to 1972," Journal of Politics 72 (2010);
88. Eric Schickler, "New Deal Liberalism and Racial Liberalism in the Mass Public, 1937-1952" (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, Sept. 2-5, 2010).
89. On the centrality of organized labor to liberal aspirations, see e.g., J. David Greenstone Labor in American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1969).
90. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal, 166.
91. Daniel Bell, "Industrial Conflict and Public Opinion," in Industrial Conflict, ed. Arthur Kornhauser, Robert Dubin, and Arthur M. Ross (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954).
92. Zieger, The CIO.
93. George Gallup, "Causes of the Swing to the Right Analyzed," Washington Post, November 14, 1938;
94. Walter Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968);
95. Michael Wreszin, "The Dies Committee," in Congress Investigates, ed. Arthur Schlesinger and Roger Bruns (New York: Chelsea House, 1975).
96. Kevin J. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
97. Elihu Katz, "The Two-Step Flow of Communication: An Up-To-Date Report on an Hypothesis," Public Opinion Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1957):
98. See also Elihu Katz and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955). Zaller's work on elite cues and opinion flows also relies on panel data or a well-timed series of repeated items, as well as detailed information on respondents' media consumption and political information;
99. see John R. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
100. Atleson, Labor and the Wartime State. As Workman argues, however, the WLB was clearly seen by participants at the time as a union ally, and its decisions gave a muchneeded boost to unions that were in a vulnerable position;
101. AndrewWorkman, "Creating the NationalWar Labor Board: Franklin Roosevelt and the Politics of State Building in the Early 1940s," Journal of Policy History 12 (2000).
102. See also Lichtenstein, "Politicized Unions and the New Deal Model";
103. Zieger, The CIO.
104. see Arthur Kornhauser, "Are Public Opinion Polls Fair to Organized Labor," Public Opinion Quarterly 10 (Winter 1946-47).
105. Martin Glaberman, Wartime Strikes: The Struggle Against the No Strike Pledge in the UAW During World War II (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1980);
106. Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
107. Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II: With a New Introduction by the Author (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), xxii.
108. Brinkley, The End of Reform, 225-26.
109. Hadley Cantril and Mildred Strunk, Public Opinion, 1935-1946 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 561.
110. see Fay Calkins, The CIO and the Democratic Party (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).
111. See Daniel A. Powell, "PAC to COPE: Thirty-Two Years of Southern Labor in Politics," in Essays in Southern Labor History: Selected Papers, Southern Labor History Conference, 1976, ed. Gary M. Fink and Merle E. Reed (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 247. The more conservative AFL, on the other hand, remained largely "respectable" in the South during this period;
112. Roger Biles, The South and the New Deal (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 101.
113. Zieger, The CIO.
114. Floyd M. Riddick, "The First Session of the Seventy-Eighth Congress, January 6-December 21, 1943," American Political Science Review 38, no. 2 (1944).
115. Brinkley, The End of Reform.
116. See, for example, Paul Frymer, Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008);
117. Ken I. Kersch, "The New Deal Triumph as the End of History? The Judicial Negotiation of Labor Rights and Civil Rights," in The Supreme Court and American Political Development, ed. Ronald Kahn and Ken I. Kersch (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006).
118. Herbert H. Hyman et al., Interviewing in Social Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954).
119. The online appendix, available at http://igs.berkeley.edu/schickler/docs/ Schickler-Caughey-online-appendix-2011. pdf, includes these figures.
120. See Simon Topping, Lincoln's Lost Legacy: The Republican Party and the African American Vote, 1928-1952 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2008) on the GOP's uneven efforts to win back African American voters.
121. Ellis and Stimson, "Symbolic Ideology in the American Electorate."
122. George H. Gallup, ed. The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls, Great Britain, 1937-1975 (New York: Random House, 1976), 103, 22, 88-89.
123. George H. Gallup, ed. The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls, France, 1939, 1944-1975 (New York: Random House, 1976), 11, 21, 44.
124. Andrea Louise Campbell, How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
125. Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994);
126. Robert C. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998);
127. though see Gareth Davies and Martha Derthick, "Race and Social Welfare Policy: The Social Security Act of 1935," Political Science Quarterly 112, no. 2 (1997), for a nonracial explanation for occupational exclusions.
128. David L. Porter, Congress and the Waning of the New Deal (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1980);
129. Schickler and Pearson, "Agenda Control."
130. Bars Higher Grant," The New York Times, April 1, 1939.
131. Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril, The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968);
132. James A. Stimson, Tides of Consent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
133. see Robert W. Mickey and Eric Schickler, "Battles over National Health Insurance during the New and Fair Deals and Their Legacies," unpublished manuscript (2008). A systematic comparison of health politics in the United States and Britain is provided by Lawrence R. Jacobs, The Health of Nations: Public Opinion and the Making of American and British Health Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
134. For accounts of business efforts to shape public opinion, see Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise;
135. Jacobs, "'How About Some Meat?'";
136. Richard S. Tedlow, "The National Association of Manufacturers and Public Relations during the New Deal," Business History Review 50, no. 1 (1976).
137. For a general discussion of Congress members' actions in the "public sphere," see Mayhew, America's Congress.
138. See, for example, Bell, The Liberal State on Trial;
139. Jacobs, "'How About Some Meat?'".
140. Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order.
141. Bell, The Liberal State on Trial, 25-26.
142. Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 12.
143. James A. Stimson, Michael B. Mackuen, and Robert S. Erikson, "Dynamic Representation," American Political Science Review 89, no. 3 (1995)
144. Edward L. Gibson, "Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Democratic Countries," World Politics 58 (2005);
145. Robert W. Mickey, "The Beginning of the End for Authoritarian Rule in America: Smith v. Allwright and the Abolition of the White Primary in the Deep South, 1944-1948," Studies in American Political Development 22, no. 2 (2008).
146. David R. Mayhew, Party Loyalty Among Congressmen: The Difference Between Democrats and Republicans, 1947-1962 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966);
147. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal.
148. Cf. Brinkley, The End of Reform.
149. James A. Stimson, Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings, 2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999).
150. See also Robert S. Erikson, Michael B. MacKuen, and James A. Stimson, The Macro Polity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008);
151. Christopher Wlezien, "The Public as Thermostat: Dynamics of Preferences for Spending," American Journal of Political Science 39, no. 4 (1995).
152. Ellis and Stimson, "Symbolic Ideology in the American Electorate," 398.
153. Campbell, How Policies Make Citizens.
154. Sidney Verba and Kay Lehman Schlozman, "Unemployment, Class Consciousness, and Radical Politics: What Didn't Happen in the Thirties," Journal of Politics 39 (1977).
155. Bell, "Industrial Conflict and Public Opinion."
156. David Vogel, "The Power of Business in America: A Re-Appraisal," British Journal of Political Science 13 (1983).
157. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1955).