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CHAPTER 6 The Conflictual Politics of Consensus Building II: The Development of the Internal Security Program I have read as carefully as time allows the proposed report of the Committee on Socialism and Communism.... I am particularly in agreement with the emphasis placed on Communistic influences in connection with labor. -Emerson Schmidt, United States Chamber of Commerce At some later stage of the proceeding you might [have a problem] with the matter the Major mentioned a short time ago, namely, developing a suspected subversive character who is merely a militant union man and probably persuading the investigator without too much effort, I gather. -John Fanning, Munitions Board Industrial Labor Relations Committee This chapter steps back from the political bargaining process that followed U.S. intervention in Korea and examines the constellation of business elites, bureaucracies, and members of Congress that supported the effort to remove the influence ofradicals from American life. This policy current and the internal security program it sought provided an institutional linkage between antilabor and antiradical domestic policies and Cold War national security policy. It made these domestic policies part of the national security policy planning process and gave effective control over them to conservative bureaucracies with links to sympathetic members of Congress and interested groups outside the government. In short, it gave the otherwise skeptical American right a stake in the Cold War. The internal security program predated NSC 68 and the Korean War by several years, but it remained a relatively small operation until mid1950 . Without the conditions outlined in this chapter, the linkage between anticommunist domestic and foreign policies might not have emerged and persisted after 1950. By the time of the Korean War, antilabor elements of the business community knew that an industrial security program run by 131 132 Building the Cold War Consensus the Department of Defense could be helpful to them. Similarly, the FBI, an organization closely tied to conservative members of Congress, had been able to establish itself as the principal government bureaucracy concerned with internal security and to make its agenda a component of the overall national security program. This arrangement greatly facilitated the efforts ofNationalist Republicans in the Congress to link the internal security program to the rearmament effort after the beginning of the Korean War. "Russia abroad and labor at home" American business leaders were increasingly concerned about the growing power of the labor movement after World War II.I While labor activism had long been a concern of business, the issue became increasingly salient in the immediate postwar era. As unions sought to regain ground they believed they had lost under the wartime strike prohibition, 1946 saw more workers involved in job actions than in any previous year-and a higher proportion of the total workforce than in any year since 1919.2 Business reaction to the increased labor militancy varied, but it eventually converged around an effort to secure legislation reducing the power of the labor movement. McQuaid (1982, 140-49) notes that the major business organizations, including the National Association of Manufacturers, the Council for Economic Development, the Business Roundtable, and the United States Chamber of Commerce, generally adopted a pragmatic course of action seeking to contain the labor movement rather than to abolish it. The success of this strategy formed the basis for what Charles Maier (1977, 611-18) terms the "politics of productivity," in which an ostensibly apolitical focus on economic growth superseded concerns about the distribution of wealth in society. Like the acceptance of Cold War foreign policy, the acceptance of the politics of productivity was not unproblematic.3 Some in the leadership of the labor movement-especially in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)-remained committed to further redistributive social change. Among these labor radicals were a small but significant number of communists . While Kampelman's estimate (1957, 14-23) that communists had "control or effective control" of up to 40 percent of CIO unions may be somewhat overstated, the influence of communists and other leftists in the labor movement is undeniable. For example, Len De Caux, the editor of the CIO News, and Lee Pressman, the organization's general counsel, were party members. There had been conflict within the CIO over the role of communists since the organization's founding. After World War II, this conflict The Conjlictual Politics of Consensus Building II 133 increasingly centered on issues of foreign policy, as anticommunist labor leaders attacked leftist opposition to the Truman administration's increasing hostility toward the Soviet Union...

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