That Time FDR Sent In The Military To Break The Strike

June 9, 1941, in labor history!

Employees at North American Aviation, Incorporated, assembling the cowling on Allison motors for the P-51 fighter planes, Inglewood, Calif., October 1942. Photo by Alfred T. Palmer

On June 9, 1941, the military, with support from the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the United Auto Workers, ended the North American Aviation strike in Los Angeles. This remarkable moment showed the transition away from the era of the mass strike and toward both the no strike pledges of World War II and the alliance between CIO leadership and the Roosevelt administration to depress leftist strikes.

The newly organized American industrial workforce was far from a coherent force. The CIO brought millions of Americans into the organized labor movement after 1937, but what did that mean? Political divisions within unions between leftists and, well, less leftists often threatened to tear them apart. That was especially salient after 1939, when all of a sudden, communist leadership turned from opposing Hitler to opposing American intervention on the orders of Comrade Stalin. Of course this would change again dramatically when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, at which point the communists transformed overnight to opposing any strike that would get in the way of war production and wanted to suppress any worker activity that would get in the way of helping the revolutionary state.

But that change hadn’t happened yet at the beginning of June 1941.

North American Aviation was founded in 1927 and soon became a contractor for American military airplane production. General Motors bought most of the company in 1933. So when the United Auto Workers successfully organized GM after the Flint sit-down strike in 1937, it moved to bring North American Aviation under its banner too. The American Federation of Labor, being forced to organize industrially finally to compete with the new CIO unions, tried to counter. The International Association of Machinists also wanted to unionize the workplace. The workers had a vote and they chose the UAW.

But UAW leadership in this plant was pretty far to the left, more so than those in Detroit, and the UAW’s move into military factories had made the Roosevelt administration quite nervous. A strike at Vultee Aircraft in the summer of 1940 had led to a victory for the UAW but also denunciation from leading administration officials who were often supportive of labor, claiming the union had endangered national security. Sidney Hillman himself, labor’s conduit to the administration, openly criticized the strike. CIO leadership was quite responsive to these complaints, worried that too many strikes would undermine the shaky national support for industrial unionism.

So when the UAW went into North American Aviation, CIO leadership said it was more or less going to take over the leadership of it and make sure that communists didn’t dominate the union and that strikes, if needed, would be a last resort. UAW national leadership was largely OK with this, as internal dissension within the union over communism remained strong but most of the top leaders were not communists. This led to the rise of Richard Frankensteen, who along with the Reuther brothers was the most important person in the early UAW and who was the personal choice of new CIO head Philip Murray to lead this intervention.

Frankensteen was smart enough to leave the real organizing to the locals and they did well. The union organized around a 75 cent an hour pay rate and a 10 cent raise for higher skilled workers. But North American Aviation would not budge on this. Frankensteen called for a strike authorization vote. That’s different than voting on a strike. It’s voting on a threat, with workers being able to tell management that the union can now call a strike whenever it wants. But union leadership also agreed that if no strike took place, the eventual wage increase would be retroactive to May 1, meaning a nice bonus check for all workers. This was effectively a low-level no-strike pledge. But the rank and file workers did not see it that way.

On June 4, workers on the night shift decided to go on strike. The local leader of the workers, Henry Kraus, didn’t even hear about this until the next morning. He had no choice but to set up the strike given the workers’ preemptive actions. There were 4,000 workers on the picket line by noon. This infuriated the Roosevelt administration. Secretary of War Henry Stimson demanded that FDR crack down. Just a few days earlier, on May 27, FDR had issued the Declaration of Unlimited National Emergency, which effectively claimed that strikes in national defense plants were the equivalent of fifth columnist activity. But smarter voices in the administration urged that the UAW and CIO be given a chance to end this themselves, as there would be real political consequences to just sending in the military. So they gave Frankensteen a chance to work it out.

Frankensteen had until June 9. CIO head Phil Murray was not going to stand up to the administration, seeing bigger fish to fry than defending a bunch of commies at a California defense plant. Frankensteen gave a speech on June 7 that was broadcast nationally, attacking the “infamous agitation and vicious underhanded maneuvering of the Communist Party.” The next day, he attempted to speak to the workers directly, but they shouted him down in a plan organized by the plant’s communist workers.

So after that, Stimson won the day. The workers would not listen to Frankensteen and production needed to continue. With Sidney Hillman’s known approval and probably Murray’s approval as well, Roosevelt signed an executive order to send in the military to bust this strike. Twenty-five hundred soldiers showed up on the morning of June 9. The communists tried to reenter the plant but the military stopped them. The strike was over, busted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and CIO leadership. Said Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox: “We met one of our most serious difficulties head-on when we took over the plant. It has had a profound psychological effect and from now on I think our troubles from that source will grow less.” That was true.

This surprised a lot of people on the ground, who believed that the “strike gets the goods,” as unionists like to think today. But that’s just a talking point that is not empirically grounded. It’s entirely dependent on the context. It’s true enough that many strikes in the 1930s and early ‘40s were grassroots efforts controlled by local leaders. But that was before it was clear the US would be entering World War II soon. National security would triumph over anything else. Moreover, a month later, this strike never would have happened, not after Hitler attacked Comrade Stalin and communists became committed to working to win the war.

The CIO issued statements condemning the use of troops, but in fact CIO leadership did not actually believe that in this case. They just needed to say it to make rank and file union members believe it. If you are shocked that labor leaders would lie to the rank and file, don’t be. It happens all the time.

FURTHER READING:

Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II

Martin Halpern, UAW Politics in the Cold War Era

Jennifer Luff, Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars

Paul A.C. Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1940-1945