The racist history of "Right to Work"

[Cain]

Ames has another bit of contemporary political history up

http://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/right-to-work (may be paywalled)

Here is a description of Vance Muse, creator of the "right to work" movement, from a book by an old celebrated journalist, Stetson Kennedy, the reporter who famously went undercover inside the KKK and wrote a tell-all in the 40's:

"The man Muse is quite a character. He is six foot four, wears a ten-gallon hat, but generally reserves his cowboy boots for trips Nawth. Now over fifty [this is published in 1946—M.A.], Muse has been professionally engaged in reactionary enterprises for more than a quarter of a century."

Among Vance Muse's "reactionary enterprises": He lobbied against women's suffrage, against the child-labor amendment, against the 8-hour workday, and in 1936, Muse engineered the first split in the South's Democratic Party by peeling off the segregationists and racists from the New Deal party, a political maneuver that eventually led to Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, and at last a Republican right-wing takeover of the South, and with it, the collapse of the old New Deal coalition. Which worked out fine for Vance Muse, since he was a covert Republican himself, serving "for years" as the Republican Party state treasurer in Texas.

That first attempt at splitting the Democratic party by peeling away the Southern segregationist-fascists took place in 1936, when Georgia's brutal white supremacist governor, Eugene Talmadge, organized a "grassroots" convention with Vance Muse's help. To stir up anti-FDR and anti-New Deal hate in the South, Vance Muse used photographs he acquired showing First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt being escorted by two African-American professors at Howard University. Muse used that photo to stir up the white supremacists in Georgia, he leaked it to as many newspapers as he could, and he even brandished it around a Senate hearing he was called before in 1936. Those hearings revealed that the anti-FDR "convention" that Vance Muse put on, through his "Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution"— which featured guests of honor like Gerald L K Smith, America's leading anti-Semite and godfather to the modern American Nazi movement — was financed not only by Confederate sponsors like Texan Will Clayton, owner of the world's largest cotton broker, but also reactionary northeast Republican money: the DuPont brothers, J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil, Alfred Sloan of General Motors... That unholy alliance of Northeastern and Confederate plutocrat money financed the first serious attempt at splitting the Southern Democrats off by exploiting white supremacism, all in order to break labor power and return to the world before the New Deal — and to the open shop.

Incidentally, Vance Muse's northern donors — DuPont, Pew, Sloan — were the same core investors in (and board directors of) the first modern libertarian think-tanks of the 40s and 50s, including the Foundation for Economic Education. DuPont, Pew and Sloan funds also seeded the American careers of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard, among others. In other words, Vance Muse's funders built the first layer of the libertarian nomenklatura that Charles Koch later took control of — no surprise, since Koch outfits are credited with making the Michigan "right to work" law possible.

...Getting back to Vance Muse: In 1936, he incorporated in Texas another union-busting outfit called the "Christian American Association" which was closely associated with the Texas Ku Klux Klan as well as the American Legion, a far-right veterans' group used to bust up unions and terrorize minorities and suspected Communists. It was this same Christian American Association which launched the "right to work" anti-union campaign using that very same euphemism.

The transition to our time has been seamless. Charles Koch's father, Fred Koch, made his name in right-wing politics as one of the leaders of the Kansas Right-to-Work movement. The fight in Kansas was more bitter and protracted than in Texas — Kansas had a strong tradition of populism and farmer socialism — but in 1958, they succeeded and the law passed. That same year, Fred Koch co-founded the crypto-fascist John Birch Society with eleven other industrialists, the most powerful grassroots libertarian outfit of the postwar era until his son Charles raised libertarianism to an entirely new level.

Among other things, the John Birch Society taught that President Eisenhower was a conscious active Communist agent taking orders from Moscow; that the Civil Rights movement was a Communist conspiracy and Martin Luther King took direct orders from Moscow; and that the world was controlled by a group of conspiratorial insiders known as the Illuminati; and that America is "a republic, not a democracy."

Politically, its goal was the same as Vance Muse's: reversing "the whole new-deal march toward state socialism" and expunging "the disease of collectivism," in the words of Bircher leader Robert Welch. In other words: union-busting, stripping government benefits and eliminating taxes on the rich. (To understand why Fred Koch and the Bircher libertarians hated Ike so much, imagine today a Republican like Eisenhower who raised the top marginal tax rate to 91%, who poured massive government investments into building roads and schools, who publicly declared his support for Social Security and denounced any Republican who opposed it — you get the point.)

The founder of the National Right To Work Committee in the mid-1950s, Reed Larson, came from Fred and Charles Koch's base in Wichita, Kansas — headquarters of Koch Industries. Fred Koch teamed up with Reed Larson to pass Kansas' Right-to-Work law, and Reed Larson's "National Right to Work Committee" intertwined itself with Fred Koch's John Birch Society.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Very interesting... and oddly, I was just moments ago eyeballing a book called "When Affirmative Action Was White" which seems to tie into this topic.

[Juana]

Thanks, Cain! Very interesting, yeah. I'll have to look into this some more.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

This is an excellent thread, Cain.  Well done.

Arizona is a "right to work" state, and everyone here understands the Orwellian wording of that.  It is the right to lose your job for no reason, the right to work hard for peanuts, the right to be a wage slave.

And the same people that still support it are the same people who bitch about all the Mexicans and East Africans in the Tucson area.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

This is very interesting.

[Junkenstein]

Good find, thanks.

I got a bit of punch in the gut towards the end when it turned towards Levitt. I watched the "freakonomics" video a while ago and never really dug much further into it. I've spent a while reading around on him now. Not the most upstanding of people. Excellent reminder to myself that bullshit comes in many forms and you have to keep questioning everything.

Any recommended reading on US-Workers Union relations anyone? I've got a rough background* and always meant to read more around it.




*- Background is a few Loompanics anthology articles and cartoons and aimless Wikipedia clicking.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Not paywalled. Spreading this around - thanks.