Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,133

This is the grave of Fred Hartley.

Born in 1902 in Harrison, New Jersey, this person, responsible for one of the worst laws in American history, didn’t grow up super wealthy. He chose to serve the elites, he wasn’t born into their families. He just went to the local public schools and then Rutgers. He was interested in politics almost immediately, very much as a Republican. He graduated from college in 1923 and immediately ran for the position of library commissioner in Kearny, New Jersey. He did that for a couple of years and then became police and fire commissioner in the same town. In 1928, he ran for Congress and won. He had done nothing but politics in his life and he would do nothing but that for a good long time.

Hartley was as much of a pro-business, anti-worker, anti-New Deal hack as you could dream of being. Now, it’s almost impossible to track northern politics from this period to now. Remember that the only two states FDR lost in 1936 were Vermont and Maine. As a general rule, liberal states now were reasonably liberal states then, but not always. And district by district, forget about it. So this area of New Jersey, which is just over the Hudson from New York City, was extremely conservative and had no tuck for the New Deal at all. I’m not really sure why–there were a lot of factories there but I doubt the factory owners lived there. In any case, generally Republicans got wiped out in New Jersey, as they were and should have been around the country during the Great Depression. But not Fred Hartley. Unfortunately, he managed to hang out repeatedly. Some of his elections were quite close, but he always won.

Well, Hartley wasn’t anything too special for most of his time in Congress. Nothing unusual there. I hardly ever cover guys who never made it past the House. Most of them never do anything of note. The body is just so large and there’s so little power in each member of Congress. But there’s this one thing. This one very bad thing….

In the 18 months after the end of World War II, American workers went out on strike in record numbers. In 1945, nearly 3.5 million workers struck. The next year, 4.6 million workers went on strike throughout the United States, the greatest number for one year in American history. Workers wanted to bring back pre-war militancy for the post-war world. UAW president Walter Reuther called for a national strike against GM on November 21, 1945, worked to negotiate higher wages with other companies, and forced GM to accede to the new wage standards when the strike ended in March 1946. Akron rubber workers went on strike for the 30-hour week, Camden shipyard workers walked off the job to demand laid off colleagues be rehired, Detroit workers engaged in ninety wildcat strikes in September and October 1945.

The most significant of these was in Oakland. Like most of the other big strikes at this time, it wasn’t really about radical politics. In fact, it was the AFL, not the CIO with its communist unions, that called it. There was a political goal–mobilize the workers to support Democrats and get rid of the Republican Knowland machine that dominated Oakland and to no small extent California. Over 100,000 workers participated in the three day Oakland General Strike in December 1946.

All of this infuriated right wing hacks like Fred Hartley. Out of this came the infamous Taft-Hartley Act, one of the worst laws in American history. Now, Robert Taft was the best-known far right figure in the country at this time. He wanted to be president and he thought his path was to return America to the days of Calvin Coolidge. It didn’t work out for him, but in 1947, he thought it very well might. Interestingly, once he realized he would never be president, he became more moderate. It was almost like the hate wasn’t totally real. In any case, Taft thought his path should include repealing the labor movement’s gains over the previous decade. But he needed a partner in the House. And that partner was Fred Hartley.

The Taft-Hartley Act banned most of the actions labor used in the 1930s and mid 40s to force companies to recognize unions and to give working people a voice in American life, including wildcat strikes, secondary picketing, mass boycotts, the closed shop, and union donations to federal political campaigns. States were allowed to pass right-to-work laws that would force unions to represent people in the workplace who did not pay dues. It also expanded the ability of the government to get injunctions to end strikes if the strike impacted national health and safety, which the courts have defined quite broadly over the past 65 years. It allowed companies to terminate anyone in a supervisory position who did not follow the company line on labor issues. Finally, it required union leaders to pledge they were not members of the communist party, which for some CIO unions was a major blow. Harry Truman vetoed this. Not that he wouldn’t sign anti-union legislation, but he thought this went way too far for the problems he believed existed. Congress immediately overrode that veto.

Note again that the strike wave of 1946 was not communist. In fact, the communists largely opposed it. Since they were still pretty much in rapture with the Soviet Union, they preferred to continue the no-strike pledge of World War II so the U.S. could help rebuild the USSR. It was all just an excuse to crush labor. And it largely has succeeded doing so. Fred Hartley’s sole meaningful addition to American life has been hamstringing the labor movement up to the present. Organized labor has still never been able to repeal any of this on a national life, even the right-to-work garbage. It almost did in 1966, but Everett Dirksen cared more about stopping that than Lyndon Johnson did about helping the labor movement and it died.

What’s interesting to me about this is that Hartley did not hold meaningful higher political ambitions at this time. He decided to retire from Congress right after this. For some reason I don’t understand, he threw his hat in as a write-in candidate for the Senate in 1954, but received less than 1% of the vote. Otherwise, he just attended to his business interests and working for corporate America to lobby against unions. Hartley died in 1969. He was 67 years old. May he burn in Hell.

Fred Hartley is buried in Fairmount Cemetery, Newark, New Jersey.

If you would like this series to visit other American unionhaters, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. All my favorite people. Robert Griffin, sponsor of the Landrum-Griffin Act, is in Long Lake, Michigan and Nathan Shefferman, the leading strikebreaker of the postwar era, is in Chicago. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.