The red-baiting and retirement of Van Jones remind me that labor unions were always the first target of McCarthy style campaigns. Unions became very strong after the 1930's and conservative corporate leaders knew they had to fight back. Red-baiting has divided and crippled the labor movement throughout its entire history but it was taken to new levels in the 50's.
I ran across a 1937 speech titled "Labor and the Nation" by John L. Lewis, probably the most significant single person in the history of organized labor. He helped push anarchists and radicals out of the United Mine Workers in his early career so he was no friend of communism.
What strikes me about the speech is how little the players and tactics have changed since the 1930's, although things are less violent today. His comments remind me of the astroturf polluter rallies against climate change legislation and the organized sabotage of health care forums.
The United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and similar groups representing industry and financial interests, are rendering a disservice to the American people in their attempts to frustrate the organization of labor and in their refusal to accept collective bargaining as one of our economic institutions.
These groups are encouraging a systematic organization of vigilante groups to fight unionization under the sham pretext of local interests. They equip these vigilantes with tin hats, wooden clubs, gas masks and lethal weapons and train them in the arts of brutality and oppression. They bring in snoops, finks, hatchet gangs and Chowderhead Cohens to infest their plants and disturb the communities.
Fascist organizations have been launched and financed under the shabby pretext that the C.I.O. movement is communistic. The real breeders of discontent and alien doctrines of government and philosophies subversive of good citizenship are such as these who take the law into their own hands.
No tin-hat brigade of goose-stepping vigilantes or bibble-babbling mob of blackguarding and corporation paid scoundrels will prevent the onward march of labor, or divert its purpose to play its natural and rational part in the development of the economic, political and social life of our nation.
Lewis may have been too quick to drive radicals out of the union, but he understood how accusations of communist infiltration were used to advance a corporate agenda. His comments even foreshadow how coal and oil interests are trying to frighten farmers today with the same style of propaganda they used to divide farmers from labor 70 years ago.
Labor has suffered just as our farm population has suffered from a viciously unequal distribution of the national income. In the exploitation of both classes of workers has been the source of panic and depression, and upon the economic welfare of both rests the best assurance of a sound and permanent prosperity.
In this connection let me call attention to the propaganda which some of our industrialists are carrying on among the farmers. By pamphlets in the milk cans or attached to machinery and in countless other ways of direct and indirect approach, the farmers of the nation are being told that the increased price of farm machinery and farm supplies is due to the rising wage level brought about by the Committee for Industrial Organization. And yet it is the industrial millions of this country who constitute the substantial market for all agricultural products.
It's funny how relevant speeches from American history are to modern issues. Then it was breaking up monopolies, forming unions, or getting social security. Today it's climate change, health care, and getting back the right to organize. But it's always about whether government should be a tool to serve the interests of powerful business leaders or a tool in the hands of the people to create a more fair and just economy. It's all the same struggle.