Taft-Hartley Act

Audience

The audience for the Taft-Hartley Act included the entire adult population of the United States, but it was especially designed to appeal to critics of the labor movement and, more specifically, to the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the newspapers and magazines that advocated modifications in the nation's labor law, and the law firms and corporations that had lobbied for the legislation. The audience also included core constituencies of the Republican Party antagonistic to unions and a public opinion aroused against unions by the business organizations' publicity campaign and hostile press coverage of strike actions. Liberal Republican senator George Aiken of Vermont estimated in May 1947 that the National Association of Manufacturers had spent at least $100,000,000 on antilabor publicity. Public opinion polls showed manual workers as the only group supporting a presidential veto of the act in June 1947.

Antilabor sentiment among the general public had developed owing to a variety of factors. With reconversion to a civilian economy, there were hopes that consumer goods would soon be more available, but there were also layoffs, a short-term decline in total production, and anxieties about the future strength of the economy. With the public's experience of postwar shortages of consumer goods, occasional interruptions of normal routines as the result of strikes, and negative media coverage of alleged labor abuses, antilabor sentiment grew. Truman's shift from proposing fact-finding legislation to supporting the steelworkers' strike to seizing the coal mines and proposing the drafting of railroad strikers contributed to a low Democratic turnout in November 1946, while Republicans turned out their vote and won control of Congress. The fact that much of the remaining strength of the Democrats in Congress was concentrated in southern states, where unions were weak and not influential within the Democratic Party, led the majority of Democrats to join in responding to the antiunion climate by voting for the Taft-Hartley Act.