Legacies
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Despite the persecution of leading activists, the vision of social movement unionism that sought to connect union to community was not completely bliterated, though it was put into practice by the most committed cadre under isolated and repressive circumstances, hidden beneath the surface of the intense anticommunism of the period.

One notable example took place in a struggle almost completely vanquished from the official memories of St. Louis civil rights struggles, and led by Wagner Electric worker and Communist Party (CP) member Hershel Walker, one of the original nutpickers' union supporters, under the aegis of the National Negro Labor Council. '

The campaign demanded that Sears Roebuck retail stores hire African American women as sales clerks. Their struggle was relentless, lasting six days a week for nine long months, and the core group included a number of white and black workers from the electrical plants.

Despite support from the black shoppers, official civil rights organizations in the city refused to ally, though the black Ministerial Alliance and the mayor of Kinloch did openly support the effort.

Their tenacity, despite harassment by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and St. Louis police Red Squad officials, paid off when Sears, embarrassed of the bad publicity as well as FBI and police surveillance in front to their stores, finally agreed to the demands.

 
 
 

Another example took place in Louisville, Kentucky, about 70 miles from District 8's Tell City local, where workers at International Harvester organized under the Farm Equipment Workers (FE) in 1947. District 8 gave steady assistance and advice to the local, especially in constructing a community campaign that continued before and after the FE merged with the UE in 1952. That campaign developed into a full-fledged effort for job rights in the plant and civil rights in Louisville .

Sentner urged FE Local 236 and two other Left locals in Louisville to hire Carl and Anne Braden in 1948 as joint editors for their labor paper. This experience launched the Bradens on a path that led to influence in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, especially among youth. (In his eloquent 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King cited Anne Braden as one of the cadre of white supporters who recognized the need for strong resistance strategies to racial oppression.)

The Sentners and Bradens became close friends as they faced prosecutions based on charges of subversion.

 
Carl and Anne Braden and their children, in 1954
  photo taken from Catherine Fosl's book on Anne Braden, which I recommend
   

Workers in the Midwest communities where District 8 had organized were unable to present a unified voice as they faced the disinvestment that reduced unionized jobs from the 1950s and beyond.

In 1954, management at Emerson, Wagner and Century undertook a campaign to “break the industry pattern,” the agreement designed to take wages out of competition by forcing the independents to follow the wage pattern at General Electric.

At the time, Sentner wrote that the was evidence that the old National Metal Trades Association (NMTA) “bunch” were still operating collectively, with the same designs they had had since the turn of the century. Emerson was the strategic leader in St. Louis and the Midwest for these developments, and their efforts had global repercussions.

Buck Persons, Emerson Electric's new president, provoked a 1954 strike in order "to decide who was going to run the business.” .

Buck Persons, CEO, Emerson, 1954
 
   

After ten weeks on strike, the union agreed to forego wage increases, help eliminate waste, improve quality, and reduce costs.

The wage concessions did not prevent the company from shortly thereafter deciding to aggressively pursue a decentralization of production policy, announcing that its St. Louis work force would be “employed only if the company could expand its military business.”

Emerson established its first satellite motor plant in Paragould , Arkansas , where wages were 40 percent below those in St. Louis and where the local business and government officials not only provided subsidies to build the plant but also pledged support for a “nonunion environment.”

Lloyd Austin remembered the intense feelings wrought by being unable to confront realistically what was happening, and the glib attitude of the officials of the union he had fought to build. "The company brought those motors back to St. Louis and had workers put a cover on them so they could get the union label [affixed to the motor]. They paid a few workers real well at the St. Louis plant to do that. I couldn't believe it! And the union went along with it!"

1954 Emerson Electric Strike
 
 
   

The critical alliance of labor with military Keynesianism of the Democratic Party and the Cold War agenda facilitated mainstream unionists' acceptance of capitalist disinvestments in this period.

Defense contracts from the Cold War military buildup, Korean War and Vietnam War spending kept many Emerson workers employed even as the company's commercial business left the area, a direct subsidy that took the political heat off the disinvestment campaigns, as was obvious by Emerson's announcement.

 
1970s brochure, Emerson Electric
   

The subsidy was facilitated by Stuart Symington, whose political clout as Air Force Secretary and then as senator kept contracts coming to Emerson and other St. Louis area companies as he sounded (false) alarms about the "Soviet advantage" and advocated "preventive war" with the Soviet Union.

 
Symington, first Secretary of US Air Force
 
The commercial business decentralization policy was also pushed by General Robert Wood of Sears, whose obsession with reducing union influence was revealed in one of the few investigations of employer behavior since the LaFollette committee, the Senate's McClellan hearings in 1957.
"General" Robert Wood, CEO of Sears
 
   

These hearings exposed Sears' financial backing of Labor Relations Associates, a management consulting firm that had ties to the underworld.

District 8's old nemesis, Fred Bender, made an appearance at the hearings, revealing he was one of the consulting firm's operatives. He testified that he established company unions in the St. Louis area for a five-figure salary.

The hearings showed that Whirlpool (which took over the Seeger company in 1955) had paid over $136,000 for anti-labor operatives to keep its new plants union-free.

But the committee never explored "General" Wood's role in pushing Sears contractors toward decentralization campaigns.

Moreover, the hearings resulted in attention to union, not company, corruption.

 

 
  Above: McClellan Hearings, 1957. Chairman John McClellan of Arkansas (left) was a staunch segregationist. Most of his political career was dedicated to blocking democratic rights for black citizens in Arkansas. When he took charge of the Senate select committee by introducting a right-to-work amendment to an early civil rights bill. The Kennedy brother Senators gained fame from the McClellan committee as well.  

Left: Women in the Whirlpool assembly line in Evansville, 1955. Whirlpool was determined that its other locations would remain union-free.
   
Emerson's profits from the motor division rose sharply because of the combination of runaway shops and increased defense contracts, catapulting Emerson as a major player in the motor business by 1961. By the 1970s, Emerson had overtaken GE as the largest motor manufacturer in the world. It was a political economy that had been fixed with the means to undercut workers power, even at the height of unionization. Under the leadership of Charles Knight, the new president of Emerson in 1977, Emerson took center stage, continuing to use the company's growing economic power to help eliminate the last vestiges of unionism in the motor industry. Along the way, from Paragould to Juarez , Mexico , and Seoul , South Korea , and every step of the way it used community alliances to exert a political economy of control. By 1997, Emerson closed its factories in St. Louis.
A memo showing Emerson Electric was looking for married women with no children to staff its defense assembly plant in Juarez, Mexico. By the 1990s, even moving of defense jobs to foreign countries was not a political threat, as it would have been 30 years before. Corporate control of economic and political decision-making rose as the politics of the Right ascended the political scales.
 

Meanwhile, similar decentralization strategies linked to defense spending took hold in Evansville , Indiana , where for instance Servel garnered U.S. Air Force contracts, but gradually transferred its refrigeration line, influenced by Sears' agenda.

The crushing of the Left in the labor movement mattered greatly in the lack of clear understanding and strategy toward capitalist disinvestments.

There was no counterstrategy on the part of labor, and really very little interest in organizing around the power struggle that this represented, from the mainstream labor movement..
 
Ruthenberg, pictured here in 1951, helped to organize the John Birch Society Robert Welch, chief organizer of the John Birch society
 

By the time the labor movement started to confront this seriously in the 1980s, a full scale “New Right” movement had constructed a cultural politics that replaced the agenda of economic power struggles.

This was a remarkably effective politics of Christian moralism, patriotic nationalism and only slightly veiled racism that trumped the politics of class.

Interestingly, that politics owed a debt to Servel's Louis Ruthenberg, a board member of the John Birch Society, the organization that helped give birth to the New Right. The society constructed a popular conservatism that denounced liberal reforms as a masquerade of elite subversion by Communists that needed to be countered by Christian Americanism. Much of their literature seemed lifted from Servel's playbook against District 8 from 1946-1955.

It is well to consider that the antiunion NMTA cohorts such as St. Louis independents, Ruthenberg, in conjunction with operators like Sears, networking with other NMTA firms had constituted the front lines of a battle to check labor's power.

It is well to keep in mind that their strategies were an updated repackaging of those invented by the Citizens' Industrial Association at the turn of the century, the countersubversive community-based strategies to take on workers one at a time.