The Chicago Media, the Labor Movement and the Struggle over Taft-Hartley

• In Event: The 2009 Crisis of Neoliberalism: Marxist Scholars on Rhetorics of Stability and Change

Abstract

The strike wave that rocked U.S. industry in 1946-47 was an unprecedented display of militancy on the part of the American working class. In response, employers launched a political and propaganda offensive designed to demonize labor unions and weaken workers’ rights to organize. The culmination of this offensive was the passage of the Taft-Hartley Labor-Management Relations Act of 1947, which effectively outlawed mass pickets and required union officials to sign affidavits affirming that they were not Communists. While there have been a few studies of the national news media’s treatment of Taft-Hartley (Ash, 1948; Fones-Wolf, 1994 ) and some investigation of the public relations tactics employed by both sides in the debate over its passage (Champney, 1948; Fones-Wolf 1994; Fones-Wolf, 2006), not much has been written about the way the media in Chicago dealt with the issue. Drawing on a much larger work-in-progress on the history of Chicago journalism, this paper looks at how the city’s press covered this controversial legislation and examines the communication strategies employed by Chicago’s unions to counter the media’s pro-Taft-Hartley propaganda.

Ash, Philip. 1948. The Periodical Press and the Taft-Hartley Act. The Public Opinion Quarterly. Vol 12, No 2. pp. 266-271.
Champney, Freeman. 1948. Taft-Hartley and the Printers. The Antioch Review, Spring, pp 49-62.
Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth A. 1994. Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Fones-Wolf. Elizabeth A. 2006. Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Author

• Stephen Macek, North Central College