[read the text of Virginia's "Right to Work" Legislation]
The Virginia General Assembly passed legislation that prohibited compulsory union membership (the closed shop) in January 1947. This so-called Right to Work (RTW) law made the union organization of work places much more difficult to achieve. RTW was a backlash against the gains workers made between 1933 and the end of World War II, when New Deal legislation and successful organizing drives produced an American work force that was 35 percent organized. RTW's passage in Virginia, however, was also made possible by the Cold War's development and the Virginia Democratic Party's support for Jim Crow segregation.1The Democratic Party was the only party of significance in Virginia between Reconstruction and Richard Nixon's successful Southern Strategy in the 1968 and 1972 elections. For much of this period, Harry Flood Byrd's Democratic machine dominated Virginia politics. Harry Byrd was Democratic governor of Virginia from 1925 to 1929 and served in the United States Senate from 1933 to 1970. At first, Byrd supported President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, but became increasingly antagonistic toward the president as his term in office extended into the '40s.
By the mid-1930s, Virginia Democrats were split into two factions: a New Deal coalition of liberal whites, blacks, and organized labor on one side and on the other, the dominant, conservative Byrd machine that defended Jim Crow and sought to squash organized labor. The Byrd machine, often referred to simply as the "Organization," established its dominance at the state, county, and town/city levels by appealing to rural, white residents (Southside Virginia provided the Byrd machine with its base of support) and middle-class and elite Virginians from all over the Commonwealth, who, in turn, came out to vote for Organization candidates in large numbers.2
The Democratic Party's liberal faction, on the other hand, was crippled by a Jim Crow system that prevented African-Americans and many urban, working-class whites from voting. The literacy test and the poll tax--a fee people had to pay in order to vote--were Virginia's preferred Jim Crow devices for keeping "undesirables" away from the polls. These laws worked in different ways: the literacy test was a "judgement call." A white election official listened to voters read a section of the Virginia Constitution and decided who was literate and who was not. According to this official, most whites were literate and most blacks were not.
The poll tax was aimed at stopping both blacks and poor whites from going to the polls. Many historians have demonstrated that the poll tax was administered in ways that would create significant problems for poor folks of both races who tried to vote. For instance, the tax was due six months before the election and you had to save your receipt and take it to the polls with you. Furthermore, these rules were often enforced only on the people who they were meant to keep out of a voting booth.3
Although whites of lesser means did not face the racial violence that blacks encountered if they tried to vote, Virginia's poll tax did keep the more than 100,000 AFL and CIO members in Virginia from gaining significant political power during the Byrd machine's reign. The voter turn-out statistics from the 1945 election that placed Organization candidate William Mumford Tuck in the governor's chair demonstrate just how effective Jim Crow was in keeping both African-Americans and urban, working-class whites away from the polls. In 1945, 366,000 voting-age African-Americans lived in the Commonwealth, but only about 38,000 were registered to vote and no more than half that number actually voted.
While black Virginians were barred almost completely from the polls, the overall vote in this election shows how few Virginians, white or black, actually voted. Tuck won the election by a landslide margin of 112,355 to 52,386. This total of 164,741 votes represented just 9.4 percent of eligible Virginia voters. It's not surprising that Organization candidates consistently supported and defended the poll tax and literacy test.4
The lack of political power among African-Americans and urban, working-class whites that helped elect Tuck and many other Byrd machine candidates also smoothed the way for RTW's passage. RTW, however, needed a sponsor to move it through the General Assembly. Governor Tuck became that sponsor. Elected after twenty-five years as a state Senator from the Southside's Halifax County, William Tuck made organized labor an issue as soon as he took office in 1946. 5
The immediate post-World War II years were marked by a great deal of industrial conflict all over the United States. Virginia was no exception. The Seafarers' International Union, the United Mine Workers of America, the National Federation of Telephone Workers, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) all called major Virginia strikes in the years immediately following the war. The IBEW strike against Virginia Electric and Power Company (VEPCO) would play a direct role in the rise of Virginia's RTW laws.6
After signing legislation in January 1946 that prohibited government employees from joining unions, Governor Tuck sought to stop the IBEW's strike against VEPCO before it even started. The IBEW had asked for a 17 and-a-half cent per hour wage increase, but VEPCO refused. Much to Tuck's dismay, a strike was called for April 1, 1946. In private, Tuck declared, "I'll be damned if they are going to cut the lights out in Virginia. This is as bad as Jesse James or Dillinger . . . and they'll not get away with it as long as I'm governor . . . If the union leaders try to cut the lights out in Virginia, I'll salivate them. I'll give them unshirted hell!"7
It's not clear how one `salivates' another or what `unshirted hell' is, but Tuck's strategy for stopping the strike was, at best, undemocratic, and at worse, fascist. On March 29, 1946, Tuck drafted all VEPCO employees into the unorganized state militia. The draft notices read:
You are hereby notified that you have been drafted by the commander and chief of the land and naval forces of Virginia, the Hon. William M. Tuck, governor of Virginia, into the service of the Commonwealth to execute the law which requires VEPCO to provide electric service to the people of Virginia customarily served by it.8The draft notice also granted VEPCO employees a temporary suspension of military duty so long as the company was "conducting operations without interruption by a strike."9 If the IBEW did go out on strike, however, the VEPCO employees' inactive status would be revoked and they would become active members of the state militia. These newly drafted soldiers' first mission would be to run the power plants during their own strike! Tuck also made his new IBEW draftees "subject to the military law of Virginia, and for disobedience to orders or other offenses against said law you are subject to such lawful punishment as a court martial may direct."10Despite serious questions about the legality of making workers into strike breakers in their own strike and a storm of protest from Virginia's labor leaders, Tuck stood by his actions. The IBEW backed down, called off its strike, and eventually negotiated a settlement with VEPCO.11
The developing Cold War also helped Tuck defend his actions in the VEPCO/IBEW dispute, as conservative Byrd supporters accused Virginia's labor leaders of harboring Communist sympathies. Virginia was not the only place where organized labor faced such accusations, but Anti-Communism and McCarthyism did look a bit different below the Mason-Dixon Line. The historian W.J. Cash summed up southern hostility toward organized labor in this equation: "labor unions + strikers = Communists + atheism + social equality with the Negro."12
Tuck and the Byrd machine capitalized on the perception that organized labor was a Communist front that favored black equality. The CIO's 1946 launch of "Operation Dixie"--an effort to organize more southern workers--only served to heighten these fears among Virginia's white conservatives. "Operation Dixie" also seemed to convince Governor Tuck that further action was necessary to curtail organized labor's influence in Virginia's political and economic life.
The Virginia General Assembly met every other year in even-numbered years during the 1940s. No session, therefore, was scheduled for January 1947, but Tuck called a special session explicitly to consider right-to-work legislation.13 He proposed two bills: the first was designed to prevent strikes against public utilities (like VEPCO). The second, which embodied RTW, would eliminate the closed shop. Tuck said these bills were not motivated by a desire to restrict organized labor but were "designed to preserve the liberty of the individual workman" and to insure "that his right to earn a livelihood . . . would not be dependent upon the whims of an arbitrary, unscrupulous or despotic [ie. Communist] union leadership."14 Tuck apparently believed that working people's `right to earn a livelihood' should depend on the `arbitrary, unscrupulous or despotic' whims of capital. Ernest B. Pugh, leader of Virginia's CIO, had a more accurate interpretation of the two anti-labor bills: "The utilities bill should thus be called `a bill to preserve and protect the profits of utilities companies,'" Pugh asserted, "while the right-to-work bill should be labeled `a bill to launch Virginia into the union busting business.'"15
The legislature passed these two bills despite labor's vehement opposition. The House approved the RTW bill 77 to 20 while the Senate favored it 32 to six. The ban on strikes at public utilities passed in the House 90 to six and in the Senate by a 37 to one margin. The only senator who voted against the utilities bill was Lloyd M. Robinette. As the representative of a United Mine Workers stronghold in Western Virginia, Robinette had long opposed the Byrd machine. After the vote, he said, "Labor is being made the whipping boy of this legislation . . . . Labor, whether organized or not, becomes the serf of the Commonwealth under this bill."16 Virginia had become a right-to-work state.
Analysis:
The Byrd machine's dominance of Virginia politics helps explain why these bills passed the state legislature with such ease. The House and Senate were both firmly in the Organization's hands when Tuck called the special session to consider the anti-labor legislation. Indeed, the Organization was probably stronger than it had ever been in 1947. The Richmond News Leader argued that RTW was strictly about providing the Byrd machine with even more political clout: "The State Democratic machine has acted deliberately and in cold blood to retain power to strike back at those who would dispute its supremacy."17
Certainly, Virginia's labor unions never had the numerical strength or political influence that organized labor possessed in Northern states. How could Virginia labor achieve a position of power and influence when the anti-labor, Byrd machine dominated state politics during the New Deal--a period that saw the labor movement grow so spectacularly in other parts of the nation? One might argue that the Organization achieved dominance because Virginia voters showed their support for the Byrd machine's hostile view of organized labor by electing anti-labor, Byrd candidates. This might be true if Virginia were not in the South. It is, however, and the profoundly racist, anti-democratic Jim Crow voting laws that kept both African-Americans and working-class whites away from the polls provide a far more compelling explanation for labor's political weakness and the Byrd Machine's dominance.
Remember, just five percent of eligible blacks actually voted in the 1945 gubernatorial election that put William Tuck in office. Tuck moved up to the US Congress in 1953, where he became the architect of Virginia's "massive resistance" to public school desegregation. In 1956, Virginia held a special election to authorize the center piece of Tuck's massive resistance strategy: state-funded tuition grants for sending white children to private schools. Although the population of Congressman Tuck's Southside district was 44 percent African-American, just 521 blacks were registered to vote in this election. Registered white voters outnumbered registered blacks by an 11 to one margin in the district. Such lopsided ratios were the norm all over Jim Crow Virginia.18
Calculating how many pro-labor, working-class whites Jim Crow kept away from the polls proves more difficult. More than a few historians have argued that white, working-class Virginians were content to let their "betters" control state government, and some data supports this conclusion. A 1946 survey of the Virginia electorate revealed that many white adults well into middle age had never voted. When asked why they did not vote, these folks often said: "I just never thought much about elections" or voting is only for the "quality folk."19 The stereotypes invoked by this explanation make me suspicious of it. Perhaps working-class whites actually did not think much about elections or actually did feel that elections should be left to the ruling class. It seems instructive, however, to think about what these people might have left out when answering survey questions asked by a stranger. A more complete response might have been: "I don't think much about elections because I can't afford the poll tax" or voting is for the "quality folk because they can afford the poll tax."
It's safe to say that Jim Crow played an enormous role in electing the Organization-dominated legislature that passed RTW in 1947. Comparing national voter turn-out statistics to those from Virginia during the period of RTW's creation and institution demonstrates just how important Jim Crow was to the Byrd machine. In the 1944 presidential election, 55.9 percent of the country's eligible voters went to the polls; in 1948, it was 53 percent; in 1952, it was 63.3 percent. In Virginia, by contrast, the percentage in 1944 was 22.3 percent; in 1948, it was 21.6 percent; in 1952, it was 29.9 percent. Virginia's puny electorate was lily white, had a ratio of middle-class and elite, anti-labor types that far exceeded their representation in the general population, and contained few working-class folks from urban areas, union or non-union, who were more likely to support anti-Byrd, pro-labor candidates.20
Although the white middle class and elite Virginians clearly dominated the electorate, it would be folly to argue that a coalition of African-Americans and working-class, urban whites would have stopped RTW had they been permitted to vote. Jim Crow poisoned interracial social relations of all kinds to such a startling degree that cooperation between the two groups against the dominant Byrd machine was impossible.
The development of Tuck's massive resistance plan illustrates this point. In the midst of Virginia's struggle against Civil Rights, an Organization supporter said, "This [resisting school desegregation] will keep us [the Byrd machine] in the saddle for twenty-five years. Why, we'll even have organized labor with us."21 Sadly, this person was right. The vast majority of white Virginians, regardless of their class or union affiliation, supported resistance to desegregation.22 Still, a genuine coalition between blacks and urban, working-class whites was not necessary to give the anti-labor, Byrd machine some competition at the polls. Working-class whites did not have to like African-Americans to vote for pro-labor and/or anti-Byrd machine candidates. The important thing was that Jim Crow prevented both groups from turning out to vote in numbers that would challenge the Byrd machine's dominance.
Much to the Right's dismay, we do not live in the 1940s and '50s anymore. Jim Crow is gone and while white racism still exists, Virginia's labor movement is certainly capable of creating an interracial coalition. Such a coalition, however, will not be enough to effectively challenge RTW. The way I see it, attacking and defeating RTW will require a coalition of union members, union supporters, Leftists of all persuasions (Greens, Socialists, New Party and Labor Party members) liberal Democrats, students, intellectuals, and anyone else you can find. This coalition also must also be black, Asian, white, Latino, gay, and straight.
Many of these folks will support repealing RTW because they already believe it is a terribly repressive law. For the unconvinced, there is the history of RTW's creation. My feeling is that many progressives of all races, classes and sexual orientations do not support organized labor partly because the Commonwealth has never really had a strong labor movement, but also because they think organized labor (in the North as well as the South) is racist, sexist, and homophobic. Those of us inside the labor movement know that organized labor has changed a lot over the last twenty years--look at the diversity within your unions and among the people who attend the CLC meetings--but no one else does. Linking RTW to Virginia's oppressive, Jim Crow past will help reach progressives by demonstrating that Virginia's labor movement is serious about creating social, political, and economic justice for all people.
Presenting the origins of RTW as one reason for repealing it will also help us overcome the incredible level of political apathy that currently exists in this country. People seem to need a good deal of clarity and information to support and actually turn out to vote on a political issue. Talking about how Jim Crow prevented almost all African-Americans and many working-class whites from exercising their constitutionally-guaranteed rights and how this injustice led to RTW just might provide that kind of clarity.
I do not know what people think about the Byrd machine in Virginia today. It does not seem likely, however, that our coalition could hold the Organization in very high regard. Those who still approve of the Byrd machine would not vote for repealing RTW no matter what we said. They are the enemy.
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There is plenty more to dislike about Tuck and Byrd: both came close to supporting Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in 1948, both fought hard against the Civil Rights Movement, Tuck was architect of massive resistance to desegregation in Virginia and he was the most massive of resisters to desegregation and all Civil Rights legislation during his time in Congress (1953-1968). Tuck said some pretty outrageous stuff. Commenting on Martin Luther King's assassination, Tuck declared, "Although he [King] openly advocated non-violence, he fermented discord and strife between the races and [he] trampled upon the laws of our country with impunity. . . . Violence followed in his wake wherever he went, until he himself fell a victim of violence."23 I could go on and on with Tuck's statements about how desegregation would pollute the blood of helpless white children, his ruminations on whether blacks were human, his comparison of the Truman administration to the regimes of Hitler and Stalin, and his insistence that anyone who supported labor and/or Civil Rights was a Communist. I won't, though. Suffice to say that there is plenty of material mouthed by the fathers of right to work with which to attack and defeat right to work.
Endnotes:1. William Bryan Crawley, Jr., Bill Tuck: A Political Life in Harry Byrd's Virginia (Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1978); J. Harvie Wilkinson, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics, 1945-1966 (Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1968).
2. Crawley, Bill Tuck: A Political Life in Harry Byrd's Virginia, chapters 1 and 2.
3. See C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, Oxford University Press, 1974 [3d edition]), Woodward, The Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), and Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) for discussions of how Jim Crow voting laws prevented African-Americans and poor and working-class whites from voting.
4. Crawley, Bill Tuck: A Political Life in Harry Byrd's Virginia, p. 70; Andrew Buni, The Negro in Virginia Politics, 1902-1965 (Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1967), p. 142; Commonwealth of Virginia, Votes Cast for Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General, General Election, November 6, 1945 (Richmond, VA: Division of Purchasing and Printing, 1946), pp. 2-3.
5. Crawley, Bill Tuck: A Political Life in Harry Byrd's Virginia, pp. 19-50.
6. The American Social History Project, Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture and Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992); George E. Mowry, Another Look at the Twentieth-Century South (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1973).
7. Quoted in Crawley, Bill Tuck: A Political Life in Harry Byrd's Virginia, p. 94.
8. William Bryan Crawley, Jr., "Governor William Mumford Tuck and Virginia's Response to Organized Labor in the Post World War II Era," Unpublished MA Thesis, Department of History, University of Virginia, 1968, p. 79.
9. Ibid, p. 79.
10. Ibid, p. 79.
11. Crawley, Bill Tuck: A Political Life in Harry Byrd's Virginia, pp. 99-102.
12. W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 362.
13. The special session also considered an education improvement bill, but many saw this as a smoke screen. Martin Hutchinson, anti-organization, Democratic candidate for the Senate whom Harry Byrd defeated in 1946, thought the extra session's purpose was to "strike at labor unions." He believed that "Byrd and his people knew they had lost the laboring people. . . . It is my impression that the session was called for the purpose of hitting at labor." Anti-organization Senator Lloyd Robinette agreed: "In my judgement the extra session . . . was called for the purpose of enacting repressive labor legislation and that the so-called educational program was a mere front." Quoted in Crawley, "Governor William Mumford Tuck and Virginia's Response to Organized Labor in the Post World War II Era," p. 55.
14. Quoted in Crawley, Bill Tuck: A Political Life in Harry Byrd's Virginia, p. 117.
15. Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 10, 1947.
16. Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 17, 1947.
17. Richmond News Leader, January 15, 1947.
18. Robbins L. Gates, The Making of Massive Resistance: Virginia's Politics of Public School Desegregation, 1954-56 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), p. 93.
19. Historian Robert D. Meade conducted this survey. His results appeared in the Richmond Times Dispatch in a four part series, March 31, May 12, July 7, and August 4, 1946.
20. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), pp. 36, 1069.
21. The Washington Post, June 19, 1957. Quoted in Crawley, Bill Tuck: A Political Life in Harry Byrd's Virginia, p. 239.
22. Ibid., p. 239.
23. Ibid., p. 256.