Republicans and Big Labor: GOP-Union Outreach Before Franklin Roosevelt

Republicans and Big Labor, a Failed Courtship (full series)
GOP-Union Outreach Before Franklin Roosevelt | Wagner and Taft-Hartley
The Two Minds of Tricky Dick | Reagan-Bush and Beyond

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Key Points

• There is nothing new about Republican politicians trying to court labor bosses.
• Before the second Trump administration, the Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford administrations all appointed Big Labor supporters as Labor Secretaries.
• Those efforts did not fundamentally change Big Labor’s leftist political outlook.
• Rather than appealing to union bosses, conservative policymakers should follow the Taft-Hartley consensus approach that empowers individual workers.

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The appointment of Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the former Republican congresswoman from Oregon, as labor secretary came with one principal qualification for the job: the endorsement of Teamsters Union boss Sean O’Brien (and the tacit backing of other labor union bosses including Randi Weingarten). Groups like American Compass—which, it must be remembered, is extensively funded by the very liberal Hewlett Foundation—praise her nomination and other actions like attempts by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) to exhume the labor policies of Obamanomics as a new approach for the Republican Party.

One former senator has written,

Unfortunately, many leaders in that group, who now occupy influential positions in the Administration, are convinced that to survive politically the G.O.P. must “buy” the support of big union leaders by yielding to their demands. This despite the evidence of recent elections, which show that no leader can deliver the so-called “labor vote” and that Republicans have been supported by rank-and-file workers when they disregarded demands of union leaders and supported measures aimed at protecting and expanding individual worker rights.

But former Sen. Joseph H. Ball (R-MN) wrote those words in 1953, not 2025. A review of the history shows that Republican political figures chasing the votes of working men and women have repeatedly sought to collaborate with union bosses who claim to speak for the American worker, and the record is poor both electorally and institutionally. The best that can be said for the efforts of Republican administrations from McKinley to George W. Bush—and likely extending to the current efforts of the second Trump administration—is that they have not fundamentally altered the general, slow progress toward the Taft-Hartley Consensus approach of affirming voluntarism in union participation, protecting the public from labor dispute fallout, and subjecting union operations to public scrutiny that their extensive private powers demand.

GOP-Union Outreach Before Franklin Roosevelt

During the later Gilded Age and the Progressive Era (roughly spanning from 1880 to 1930), the two major political parties were far less ideologically delineated than they would be in the Cold War era, to say nothing of the more recent history defined by harsh ideological polarization. That is not to say that proto-ideological distinctions did not exist: Democrats tended to side with agrarian populists and big-city immigrant workers in disputes with regional business magnates supported by Republicans.

The presidential campaigns of William Jennings Bryan, who sought to benefit those classes with a loose “free silver” monetary policy, illustrated the populism of the age. Opposing Bryan was President William McKinley, a business-friendly small-c conservative who supported the gold standard and was backed by a political machine built by Cleveland businessman Mark Hanna.

Hanna, who was appointed as a U.S. senator for Ohio in 1897, and McKinley saw themselves as modernizers. While Hanna raised major campaign funds from the business titans of his day, the two men wanted harmony between employers and the fledgling labor unions of the turn of the century. They would jump into action just before the 1900 presidential election to intervene in a strike against the anthracite coal mines of Pennsylvania. Sen. Hanna and banking tycoon J.P. Morgan mediated with the presidents of coal-hauling railroads and mine operators, pressuring them to offer the striking members of the United Mine Workers a raise and formalized grievance procedure. The union took the offer even though it did not include union recognition, and the strike was called off a week before the election. Sen. Hanna would later help organize the National Civic Federation, a coalition of labor union leaders (including AFL head Samuel Gompers) and business representatives who had committed to working with organized labor.

In 1901, the re-elected President McKinley was assassinated and succeeded by a Hanna rival, Theodore Roosevelt. And a year later, the anthracite coal miners struck again. The Roosevelt administration was deeply involved in negotiating an end to the dispute, with Commissioner of Labor Statistics Carroll Wright sent by Roosevelt to conduct fact-finding. Wright’s fact-finding did not settle the dispute, and by October 1902 Roosevelt did something unprecedented, calling on union and management representatives to dispute before him and other senior officials. Management proved intransigent, and the strike continued.

Ultimately, the Roosevelt administration, with help from J.P. Morgan, cajoled management to agree to the appointment of a government commission to arbitrate the dispute in exchange for the union going back to work and not insisting on recognition. The parties agreed, and the Anthracite Coal Commission, which included a labor union official and various industry experts, conducted a survey of the coalfield regions and then three months of hearings. The commission ultimately awarded half the pay increase the strikers wanted, half the hours reduction they wanted, and a board to arbitrate future disputes equally divided between employee and management representatives.

Twenty-four years later, the Coolidge administration was dealing with repeated labor troubles on the railroads, despite enactment of a series of labor-regulations laws in the industry. Labor and management negotiated a legislative compromise to finally settle decades of often-violent strife. That compromise was codified as the Railway Labor Act of 1926, which is notable for being the first federal law guaranteeing workers’ power to organize into labor unions and to compel employers to bargain with labor union representatives. Coolidge’s successor, Herbert Hoover, would appoint railroad union leader William Doak as his second secretary of labor, and he supported the union-supporting Davis-Bacon Act, which mandates union-rate pay on federal construction projects to this day.

Shortly before the Great Depression turfed Republicans from control of any arm of the federal government until 1947, labor Republicans made one more legislative effort. The Norris-LaGuardia Act, backed by future party-switching Sen. George Norris (R-NE) and future New York City Mayor Rep. Fiorello LaGuardia (R-NY), sought to restrict the common usage of injunctions to end strikes and prohibit contracts that forbade workers from joining unions (known as “yellow dog contracts”). President Herbert Hoover signed the law.

The pre-FDR Republican efforts did very little to endear institutional organized labor to the GOP. The American Federation of Labor found more “friends” to elect in the Democratic Party, especially after the Woodrow Wilson administration and a Democratic Congress promised to exempt labor union activities from antitrust laws and restrict anti-strike injunctions and pushed through the Clayton Antitrust Act to accomplish those goals. The Supreme Court, under a Republican-appointed majority, constrained the application of the Clayton Act’s anti-injunction rules to secondary boycott actions, limiting its practical application until the Norris-LaGuardia Act strengthened the restrictions on court action.

The efforts did presage part of the Taft-Hartley consensus that would emerge later. All the policies pursued by the pre–New Deal Republicans sought to ameliorate the fallout from labor disputes in industries critical to the national economy such as coal production and the railroads. Taft-Hartley would respond to the fallout from labor disputes made worse by New Deal labor legislation.

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In the next installment, unions overplay their hand and Congress imposes a bipartisan solution.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/republicans-and-big-labor-a-failed-courtship-part-1/