Before the Storm (7 page)

Goldwater loved the road, and he logged more miles than any other chairman in history. Whenever possible he booked talks on the side, at venues like the Marion County, Illinois, Soldiers and Sailors Reunion, the Southern Nevada Knife and Fork Club, the Michigan Christian Endeavor Convention—and, especially, with veterans' groups like the American Legion and businessmen's
redoubts like the free-market-worshiping National Association of Manufacturers, where he nearly always brought down the house. He attacked the liberals who were taking charge of the Democratic Party and the Republicans who seemed to want the country to adopt a “dime store New Deal” (New Deal programs, only cheaper)—a daring message in a season when nonpartisan bonhomie was close to a Washington religion. Conservatives, accustomed to party officials who blew into town to crow about the latest Republican successes keeping up with the Lyndon Johnsons, began taking notice. So did the media;
Time
ran a short, glowing profile of Goldwater in 1955 entitled “Jet-Age Senator with a Warning.”

But by the time Eisenhower's second term approached, Goldwater's prospects looked if anything to be diminishing. Some among the GOP leadership began wondering whether a man whose best speech was a defense of Joe McCarthy was quite the man to represent a party wracked by internal dissension ; others were hardly aware of what he stood for at all. Eisenhower confidant Paul Hoffman, in a polemic in
Collier's
the week before the 1956 election entitled “How Eisenhower Saved the Republican Party” (answer: by making it more like the Democrats), divided legislators to Eisenhower's right into two categories: “unappeasables” and “faint hopes.” Goldwater was a faint hope.

He would not be mislabeled for long. The national collegiate debating topic for the 1957-58 school year was “Resolved—that the requirement of membership in a labor union as a condition of employment should be illegal.” Nineteen fifty-eight was the year of the right-to-work debate. Right-to-work was Barry Goldwater's issue. When he arrived in Washington, Goldwater, a military buff and an outdoorsman, had asked Bob Taft for berths on the Armed Services and Interior Committees. He was put on Banking and Labor instead. Goldwater protested that he had run a department store, not a bank; that his stores had never had unions because the workers had never wanted one. Taft said he wanted a businessman on these committees. The decision shaped a political destiny.

 

In 1957 the Democrats began control of the Senate. That made the former minority counsel of the Government Operations Committee's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Robert F. Kennedy, the majority counsel. Investigations was Joe McCarthy's old fiefdom. Determined to reclaim the subcommittee's good name—and also determined to give his brother, who was a member of the committee, a leg up on the field for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination—Robert Kennedy began an inquiry into corruption among contractors providing clothing for the military. The trail led him to the Mafia's spectacular success making trade unions—especially the giant transport union,
the Teamsters—its playground. He convinced Senator John McClellan to chair a select committee to investigate.

The series of hearings that followed were an extraordinary success. Americans sat glued to their TV screens for months on end as the panel questioned thugs with names like Thomas “Three-Finger Brown” Lucchese, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, and Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo. Two Chicago racketeers were brought to testify straight from the Illinois State Prison in Joliet, handcuffed together. Teamsters president Dave Beck Sr., asked if he knew one Dave Beck Jr., replied, “I decline to answer this question on the grounds it might open up avenues of questions that would tend to incriminate me.” Jimmy Hoffa, elected Beck's successor at a convention at which only 4.8 percent of the delegates were legally entitled to vote, answered one question, “To the best of my recollection I must recall on my memory I cannot remember.” RFK's staff was pulling consecutive sixteen-hour stretches, processing six hundred letters a day from frightened victims of harassment, crisscrossing the country to interview anyone and everyone with information that might help nail a case, tracing phone calls all the way down to third and fourth parties to a hustle. They turned up millions of dollars of diverted—stolen—union dues. Genuine evil was being exposed. And through it all, Democrats gave fulsome praise to the vast majority of the nation's unions that were honest, decent, and patriotic. After fearing a smear job at the outset, many unionists ended up praising the work the three years of hearings did to clean up their movement.

All of the hearings, that is, except the one pursued in early 1958 by the select committee's junior member, who had been put on the panel only at the last minute when Joe McCarthy died: Barry Goldwater. Since he was on the Labor Committee, the Republican leadership decided he must know something about labor.

Goldwater had learned how to think about unions from the Phoenix lawyer Denison Kitchel. The son of a partner at a prominent Wall Street law firm, Kitchel was set to follow in his father's footsteps when, in 1934, he shocked his blue-blooded family by announcing that he was moving to Arizona. (“What are you going to practice on out there, cows?” his father asked.) He embraced his adopted land with the zeal of the convert. Once he had been a liberal. Now Kitchel seethed with resentment at the Eastern Establishment. He had joined the
Arizona
Establishment—who looked east for their loans (New York controlled a quarter of the nation's banking reserves), leased their land from Washington (the federal government owned almost half of Arizona's land), and, if they were baseball fans, listened to Harry Caray's broadcasts of the St. Louis Cardinals, the closest major league team. Kitchel married Naomi Douglas, niece of the baron who had created the copper empire in the southeast corner of
the state, now owned by the mining company Phelps Dodge. He became Phelps Dodge's labor counsel. He became Barry Goldwater's best friend.

For decades Phelps Dodge had operated as its own law in southeast Arizona. When Governor Hunt brokered a settlement to a 1915 strike that was favorable to the workers, and called in the National Guard to protect the deal, the company responded by bankrolling Hunt's defeat in 1916 by the suspicious total of 30 votes. The next year the mining company staged a dawn raid in which gun-toting agents herded union miners and “any suspicious-looking person” onto manure-laden cattle cars, hauled them across the state line, and dropped them off in the middle of the desert. Forced migrations were not unheard of in American industrial history. This one was the worst ever. It ended with two dead.

Not much had changed in Bisbee by the time Kitchel arrived in the 1930s. Another union-organizing drive began, and Phelps Dodge responded by firing the union members. But in Washington, everything had changed. The new Wagner Act had chartered the National Labor Relations Board, which ordered Phelps to hire the union workers back—and give them back pay. The company appealed all the way to the Supreme Court in 1941. Felix Frankfurter, Kitchel's professor at Harvard Law, handed down a decision that declared Kitchel's argument “textual mutilation”—and enshrined federal labor law's “Phelps Dodge rule” forcing companies to hire union members, which would haunt Kitchel for the rest of his days. Yet the humiliation had an upside. For Kitchel was among the first corporate lawyers to grasp the new reality of the Roosevelt era: the unions could no longer be beaten by intimidation, or even by being outlasted in strikes, let alone with industrial reenactments of the Trail of Tears. Now the name of the game was politics.

The key battleground was over right-to-work laws. The Wagner Act dictated that if a majority of workers at any company chose a union to represent them, that union became the sole bargaining agent for all the workers in the company. That stipulation posed a knotty problem: if a worker enjoyed the benefits of a contract whether he joined the union or not, why should he join? Labor's solution was to demand “union shop” provisions in contracts, requiring that all new hires must join up within a certain time. But from management's perspective, that provision didn't just give unions power on the shop floor; it gave them a steady, guaranteed stream of dues, ensuring the unions unprecedented
political
power to press their liberal agenda in Washington and every state capital in the country.

But management had its own special advantage. The same year that Kitchel argued in front of the Supreme Court, the right-wing
Dallas Morning News
ran an editorial headlined “MAGNA CARTA.” It proposed an amendment to
the Constitution to make forcing a worker to join a union illegal—protecting the “right to work.” It was a masterstroke. Now, pressing for right-to-work laws, companies could wield the most potent symbol in the American civil religion : liberty. Unions were left in the rhetorical dust. Labor lawyer Arthur J. Goldberg was left to defend the union shop by claiming that unions weren't exactly voluntary organizations in the first place, but more like armies: they required conscription to exist. That didn't sound very American.

The right achieved a major victory when the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 gave states license to pass their own right-to-work laws. (Arizona was the first to do so.) Every year afterward liberals fought to repeal the union shop exemption, and conservatives fought to preserve it—and to pass more state right-to-work laws. When the American Federation of Labor merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955, creating a confederation that represented a quarter of the civilian workforce, and heavily funded its political arm, the Committee on Political Education, the stakes were raised appreciably. In Arizona, Kitchel implored Gene Pulliam to give a group of businessmen a Sunday column in the
Republic
, “Voice of Free Enterpise,” to run alongside the one he had given to the Arizona Labor Federation. Labor bosses, the typical businessmen's column would explain, were guilty of “the boldest bid for economic and political power ever made by any group since the founding of our nation.” For if they could “arrange it that everyone who works has to be a union member in good standing the money rolls in automatically.” With that money they could “overwhelm all who seek election to public office without their endorsement.” Companies who had fought all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to fire workers whenever and however they liked, who had workers' blood on their hands, could now effectively style themselves as the worker's best friend.

But labor was prevailing in the political war—thanks largely to Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers. The son of a German immigrant beer truck driver and militant socialist who raised his sons to save the world, Reuther began his career as a labor organizer in the mid-1930s, just as unions were developing a dazzlingly audacious new tactic: at the opening whistle, activists simply sat down at their machines and refused to leave until the owners agreed to bargain with them. Sit-down strikes were wars, naked fights for power—struggles for control of the factory between the capitalists who owned them and the workers who breathed them life, management advancing with tear gas and blackjacks, the workers making their stand with whatever heavy projectiles they could find. The grandest of all the actions struck GM's giant works in Flint, Michigan. It was a watershed in labor history. At the height of the uprising, in early 1937, the new Michigan governor, Frank Murphy, moved in the militia, and strikers prepared for the inevitable
blows to rain down upon their heads. They never came. Murphy was intervening on the
union
's side—because he owed his office to the UAW's get-out-the-vote effort for him the previous November. This was an enormous lesson, the same lesson learned by Denison Kitchel, and Reuther was among the first labor leaders to grasp it: now the real battles were to be fought and won in the political arena. Previous labor leaders jealously guarded their independence from government. But Reuther rose by combining old-school shop-floor organizing, legislative-floor politicking to create a friendly legal climate, and precinct work to elect the politicians that believed in Walter Reuther's grand left-wing vision, inherited from his father, that business, labor, and government, working together, could more rationally run industries than could private enterprise alone. He never saw his dream fulfilled. But with more and more labor-friendly politicians in Washington and the state capitals willing to back him up, he did manage to negotiate the most splendid contracts—and some of the most liberal laws—American workers had ever won. And that, to his enemies, was bad enough.

Reuther became head of the UAW's General Motors division in the 1940s. He understood the massive, exquisitely calibrated production system of America's biggest corporation better than most of its executives. Knowing that just one small wildcat strike could render half a dozen plants useless, he began consolidating control of his members so that no wildcats would take place. Thus able to promise America's largest corporation what it wanted—labor peace—he was able to gain unheard-of concessions in return: a contractual “cost of living adjustment”; then, in 1955, a historic “guaranteed annual wage” whereby, for the first time, workers would be paid during layoffs—65 percent of full pay when state unemployment compensation levels (which UAW lobbying helped increase all around the country) were added in.

Walter Reuther soon became Public Enemy Number One in the offices of the kind of factory owner who supported Clarence Manion. Bargaining concessions won at the top of the industrial system had a tendency to trickle down as more and more workers demanded the same perks. But if the GMs of the world could afford these concessions—and, indeed, welcomed them because they greatly stabilized a company's labor relations—smaller manufacturers insisted they could not. Moreover, these company leaders believed with religious certainty that in this plague of Reuther-style contracts, which increased wages year by year regardless of productivity, were recipes for inflation. The contracts were also un-American: “Strict seniority without regard to individual merit, equal pay for unequal work,” bathroom fixtures magnate Herbert Kohler said, “—these and similar bargaining demands of union leaders treat the workers en masse, not as individuals.” If on top of supporting unions the government
unbalanced its budget with reckless spending thanks to unions' undue influence in the political realm, inflation might race out of control. Union-shop provisions were the keystone of the entire edifice—so the right-to-work fight was the centerpiece of the effort to do “Reutherism” in. That 1955 GM contract, Clarence Manion railed in one of his first broadcasts, “moved Mr. Reuther close up to the supreme dictatorship of American organized labor as a prelude to a try for the presidency of the United States.” It was “offered at the point of a strike threat to practically every big industry in the country by a labor monopoly that is exempt from the antitrust law and can, therefore, callously disregard the public interest that every other person, corporation, and organization is obliged to serve.” (Reuther, of course, saw it just the opposite: the entire goal of the labor movement was to dignify the individual by removing him from the vagaries of market competition.
This
was the public interest.)