Thomas E. Mann Quotes
The labor movement has failed to capture the support of the public at large.
Thomas E. Mann, Brookings Institution, NBC, John McLaughlin’s One-on-One, July 31, 2005
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Darrow defended many labor leaders and organizers who had been accused of various wrongdoings—sometimes fairly and often on trumped up charges:. In a 1930 letter to Mark Sullivan he further explained:
Vladimir Lenin
This quotation is extremely subtle. Vidal tells us that he has always hated organized labor. He also tells us that the media has always given us one monolithic view of organized labor. He is silent as to whether that view was accurate and justified or in his mind or whether he was just going along with the image created by the media. There is no answer, but it is a quotation that is food for thought. Numerous studies found that at the beginning of the 21st century, the public view of labor union crooked and/or communist leaders was much worse than reality.
Ironically, this view was also held by many of the capitalist “Captains of American Industry” who believed that all unions were revolutionist regardless of the views of the union’s membership or leadership. Even today, there are some who still equate trade unionism with communism and revolution. The majority of the unions and the left never believed that, but the extreme communists and extreme capitalists did than and some do today.
In 1937 there were major automobile and steel strikes. President Roosevelt castigated both sides of the dispute:
Roosevelt shocked the conservative members of his own party with this statement. Labor unions were not then an accepted concept in American society. Anti trust legislation and enforcement was in its infancy and companies in an industry commonly conspired as to price fixing, labor negotiations and market share allocations. TR had a scrupulous sense of fairness and equity.
He had squads of thugs that he would “rent” out to other gangsters for their enforcement activities and to unions to protect themselves from goons and intimidate non union workers. However, he would not let his men work as goons and strike busters or for companies—despite huge pay offers—to keep their workers in line, a common practice at the time.
Ford was then 74 years old and had become a very different man than in his youth when he was the hero of labor. He was very paranoid at this time. He even thought that financiers were actually backing the labor unions because their purpose was to go to war against Hitler who Ford greatly admired and supported. See {642379}. He claimed that the way they would do it is to fund the labor unions so most workers would join unions. This he thought would eliminate competition and lower workers’ wages. When workers’ wages were pushed low enough, the workers would demand American entry into the war to create government spending on armaments and a labor shortage to drive wages up again. There was not a single financier who was actually paying or lending any money to labor unions, and most industrialists other than Ford complained that labor unions would always demand higher wages. Ford’s son Edsel was the chief operating officer of Ford Motor Company, and did his best to work around his father to keep the company healthy and deal with a terrible labor relations problem his father caused.
Thomas E. Mann is the W. Averell Harriman Chair and a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. He primarily studies and speaks on elections in the United States, campaign finance reform, Senate and filibuster reform, Congress, redistricting, and political polarization.
