2021 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Schatz, Ronald W., 1949 author.
Title: The labor board crew : remaking worker-employer relations from Pearl Harbor to the Reagan era / Ronald W. Schatz.
Description: Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2021] | Series: The working class in American history | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020026838 (print) | LCCN 2020026839 (ebook) | ISBN 9780252043628 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9780252085598 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9780252052507 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH : United States. National Labor Relations Board. | Industrial relationsUnited StatesHistory20th century. | Labor laws and legislationUnited StatesHistory20th century. | LaborUnited StatesHistory20th century.
Classification: LCC HD 8072.5 .S327 2021 (print) | LCC HD 8072.5 (ebook) | DDC 331.0973/09045dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026838
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026839
For Cynthia, Lily, and Sam
lamore conquista tutto
Once, when we were walking together in the Yard, I mentioned a news item about a manned flight to Mars. Dunlop smiled and exulted: More worlds to negotiate!
Robert Rosenblatt, Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969
PREFACE
I WAS TRAINED IN LABOR HISTORY and began my career writing about workers, unions, and management at General Electric and Westinghouse; about Philip Murray, the Steelworkers union, and the major steel companies; and about Roman Catholic thinking and action about workers, capitalism, and socialism. While exploring these topics, I kept encountering a small group of professors and attorneys who acted as go-betweens for unions and companies. I didnt know exactly who they were, or their motivations and objectives, but they seemed to appear all the time, and so I decided to look further.
I began by investigating the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, which opened in September 1945 with a handful of faculty, 118 students, mostly young armed forces veterans, and great enthusiasm. It offered classes on union-management negotiations, labor economics, labor law, personnel management, and labor history and offered summer internships. Governor Thomas Dewey delivered the inaugural convocation address. This is not a labor school where dogma will be taught, from which trained zealots will go forth. This is not a management school where students will learn only to think of workingmen and women as items on a balance sheet, the governor declared. It is a school which denies the alien theory that there are classes in our society and that they must wage war against each other. The State of New York will here provide the equipment to abate the fevers which rise from claims and counter-claims which are now the language of industrial relations. CBS Radio broadcast the speech across the country.
I read transcripts of the hearings of the state legislative committee that had proposed the school, pored through administrator and faculty files, and then began interviewing the founding professors. The first question that I always pose in interviews is Tell me about your parents and your upbringing. The replies frequently reveal valuable material unavailable in other ways. One example is Jean Trepp McKelvey, a professor of industrial relations at Cornell who not only taught students on campus but gave classes to trade unionists in factory towns and became a renowned mediator. McKelvey was born to a German-Jewish family in 1909 in St. Louis and grew up in Orange, New Jersey. One of her maternal uncles owned a garment factory in Rochester, New York. Another owned Bergdorf Goodman, the luxury clothing store in Manhattan. Jean attended a progressive high school in Orange during the school year. During the summer, she stayed with her maternal grandparents in Rochester. McKelvey was a studious girl who loved to stay home reading. But she was obliged to spend long afternoons at her grandparents country club, where her relatives sat by the swimming pool, sipping mint juleps and belittling the Russian Jews who worked in their factories.
The experience impelled Jean to decide to study workers and unions when she entered Wellesley College in 1924. Her father was an electric engineer who became friends with Gerard Swope, the future president of General Electric, when they were students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Swope introduced his friends daughter to Otto Beyer, the engineer who organized the acclaimed union-management cooperative system at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Beyer put her in touch with Matthew Woll, the vice president of the American Federation of Labor. Drawing on those connections, McKelvey wrote a prize-winning senior thesis on why Woll, Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and the socialist leaders of the American Federation of Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers broke with American unions traditional resistance to pay by piecework and accepted Frederick W. Taylors system of scientific management in the 1920s. It became the basis of her doctoral dissertation in economics at Harvard and later a book. McKelvey ultimately devoted her life to resolving industrial conflicts.
Early experiences also inspired Vernon (Pete) Jensen, who joined Cornells Industrial Relations faculty in September 1946. Jensen was a Mormon, born and raised in Salt Lake City, where his parents ran a hardware store and a lumberyard. Jensen went on mission for two-and-a-half years after graduating from high school. He traveled through Georgia and the Carolinas seeking converts. In Waycross, Georgia, he met Mormons who had gotten jobs on the railroads by breaking the picket line during the bitter 1922 nationwide railway shopmens strike. Jensen also met former railroad workers forced into sharecropping because they remained loyal to their unions. While hitchhiking in spring 1929, he met Communists who were helping to lead the dramatic strike that swept across cotton mill towns from Tennessee and Virginia through the Carolinas to Georgia.
Several months later, Pete returned to Salt Lake City to enter Brigham Young University. He was planning to study history and teach in a seminary. He saved pocket money for Christmas gifts for his family, but the bank where he had deposited his funds collapsed in mid-December. Jensen went home without presents for his family and was unable to return to college. So he taught school, got married, and, when his wife was transferred, accompanied her to San Francisco. In 1933 Jensen enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley in a seminar taught by Paul Taylor, Americas leading authority on farm labor. I joined a special seminar. There were eight of us. And when we started, who was in there but Clark Kerr and John Dunlop! Kerr and Dunlop were prominent members of the group whose nature I was trying to delineate. Jensen went on to earn a doctorate in labor economics at UC-Berkeley; teach at the University of Colorado and Cornell; write seven books on labor on the docks, in lumber, and in metal mining; and serve as a labor-management mediator and arbitrator during and after the Second World War.
