For the first time in sixteen years, in 1946, the Republicans took control of Congress, winning majorities in both the House and the Senate. And for the second time in twelve years, the threat of a genuinely united American working class forged a tactical alliance between big corporations in the North and their racist pro–Jim Crow Southern allies. It didn’t take long after the new Congress was sworn into power in 1947 to gut the NLRA. Congress passed the Labor-Management Relations Act (commonly referred to as Taft–Hartley for the bill’s lead sponsors, Ohio Republican Robert Taft in the Senate and New Jersey Republican Fred Hartley in the House), a sweeping amendment to the NLRA that was so extreme it was vetoed by President Harry Truman. But the racist, anti-worker, pro-corporate majorities in Congress had enough power at that point to override Truman’s veto.

The list of changes was significant. It included making it permissible, once again, for employers to use paid work time to actively campaign against unionization; a ban on sympathy strikes and boycotts; an end to wildcat strikes (where workers simply walk off the job with no notice, sometimes in defiance of their unions, not just their employer); an end to the closed shop (whereby employers could hire only people who were union members); the creation of so-called right-to-work laws, which gave states the option to make union membership voluntary; and a clause mandating that union leaders and members had to sign affidavits stating they had not been a member of the Communist Party or socialist parties. With the zeal of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s inquisitions, the practical impact of this last provision was that thousands of the most successful rank-and-file organizers were purged from the unions, regardless of whether they had ever been official members of any party.