Taft-Hartley Act

About the Author

The Taft-Hartley Act combined features of the Senate's Taft bill and the House of Representative's Hartley bill. The authors of both bills, which had many elements in common, drew on the 1940 Smith Committee investigation of the NLRB. Representative Howard Smith was involved in the drafting of the Hartley bill, with much of the drafting taking place in his congressional office.

Elected to the Senate in 1938, Robert A. Taft of Ohio was the son of the former president William Howard Taft. He was a leader of Republican conservatives and isolationists, chair of the Republican Policy Committee, and chair of the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee in the Eightieth Congress. Taft believed that rank-and-file workers were being misused by union leaders. Representative Fred Hartley, Jr., of New Jersey, chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1928 and retired at the end of the Eightieth Congress.

Assisting in the drafting of the Hartley bill, in addition to Representative Smith, were several attorneys and representatives of large corporations, who consulted closely with the National Association of Manufacturers. House Majority Leader Charles Halleck, an Indiana Republican and key figure in the attempt to pass the Case bill in 1946, secured the services for the House Committee on Education and Labor of Gerald Morgan, a District of Columbia attorney with corporate clients, as chief drafter of the bill. Others involved in writing the Hartley bill were William Ingles, a lobbyist for Allis-Chalmers, J. I. Case, and Inland Steel; Theodore Iserman, an attorney for Chrysler; and Gerald Reilly, a former NLRB member disliked by unions who became a lobbyist for General Electric and General Motors in 1949. The Hartley bill was reviewed by the House Republican Steering Committee and submitted on the House floor on April 10, 1947. Members of the House Committee on Education and Labor had the bill read to them on April 10 and April 11. The minority had two days to draft its report, and the committee voted to approve the majority Hartley bill on April 12, 1947.

In drafting the Taft bill, individuals with NLRB experience played important roles, including Reilly, special counsel to the committee and the key author; Thomas Shroyer, counsel to the committee; and Robert Denham, an NLRB trial examiner known as an opponent of the Wagner Act. The Democratic minority had a chance to voice its ideas, and Senator James Murray, a Montana Democrat, presented a substitute bill that was defeated by a wide margin. In the conference committee reconciling the two bills, Morgan, Reilly, and Shroyer were key advisers. Although the press painted the Taft bill as mild, Taft himself stated that the Senate bill included “three-fourths of the objectives ‘pressed on us very strenuously by employers'” (Lee, p. 73). The final legislation was closer to the House version.