1.1 From Columbia to the National Recovery Administration

Wolman joined Columbia in the 1931–1932 academic year, assuming responsibility for graduate labor courses. At the time, the labor field was heavily dominated by economists with a heavy institutionalist orientation, often with progressivist roots. Although the term labor economics had appeared in the scholarly literature by the mid-1920s (Blum 1925; Brissenden 1926), industrial relations remained the prevailing designation for the discipline. Indeed, nearly all leading universities had established courses on labor problems under this rubric, and Columbia was no exception. Upon his arrival, Wolman took over the “Economic Aspects of Industrial Relations” course (Economics 115–116), previously taught by Henry R. Seager, as well as two graduate seminars: “Unemployment” (Economics 321–322) and “Social Insurance” (Economics 301–302), the latter co-taught with Ralph H. Blanchard. Meanwhile, Paul F. Brissenden, another labor specialist at Columbia, taught at the Business School. Wolman’s tenure as a full-time academic was destined to be short-lived. In June 1933, following in the footsteps of Columbia colleagues such as Rexford G. Tugwell, Raymond Moley, and Adolf A. Berle Jr., he joined the Roosevelt administration. His first role, effective June 15, was as a labor advisor to NRA Administrator General Hugh S. Johnson in the industrial section.³ Only four days later, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins appointed him chair of the newly established NRA Labor Advisory Board (LAB). Wolman recounts a significant episode regarding this appointment. Perkins had sought his advice on a list of nominees for the LAB, which excluded Sidney Hillman. Perkins hesitated to include Hillman, fearing it would antagonize the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the dominant labor union federation in the U.S. At that time, the AFL did not recognize the Amalgamated, and Hillman, throughout his career as a trade unionist, often clashed with AFL leaders.⁴ Nonetheless, Wolman insisted that Hillman’s name be added to the list. As Wolman later shared in the interview:

I looked over the list and I said to Frances Perkins: “Where is Hillman?”

You see, Hillman was at that time an outlaw. That is, his Union wasn’t in the AFL … They’d been fighting the AFL ever since 1915. The AFL had been fighting them.

“Well,” she said, “you know, there’d be a lot of objection to Hillman. This is all an AFL crowd, and you’re representing him.”

I said, “I don’t represent him.” I was out of the union by that time, you see, and I said, “Anyway, I don’t represent him, and he ought to be on the board.”

I knew it would break his heart if he wasn’t on. “Well,” she said, “I guess I can get him accepted,” and she did. So that was the board I had.

In addition to Hillman and Wolman, the NRA Labor Advisory Board (LAB) eventually included several notable figures: George Berry of the International Pressmen and Assistants’ Union of North America; John Frey of the Metal Trades Department, American Federation of Labor; Joseph Franklin, President of the International Boilermakers’ Union; William H. Green, President of the American Federation of Labor; Father Francis Haas of the Catholic Welfare Council; John L. Lewis, President of the United Mine Workers of America; and Rose Schneiderman, Secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League. The LAB was empowered to collaborate with the NRA Industry Advisory Board (IAB) and representatives from labor and industry to draft codes governing minimum wages, maximum work hours, and fair-trade practices. On August 1, 1933, Wolman was appointed—alongside NRA Administrator Hugh S. Johnson and Deputy NRA Administrator Nelson Slater—to a board tasked with mediating disputes under the newly approved cotton textile code.⁵ This code promised significant improvements for labor, including a 40-hour work week, a minimum weekly wage of $12 in the South and $13 in the North, and the prohibition of child labor. It also included a commitment to implement Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which guaranteed workers the right to unionize and engage in collective bargaining.⁶ In practice, however, these promises were undermined by what Wolman describes in his interview as the “unreasonable requests of the unions,” which demanded a 30-hour work week and higher minimum wages. Wolman recounts, “That was the first little storm, but it blew over, and then we went from that to others.”⁷

On August 5, 1933, Wolman and Walter C. Teagle, President of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and Chair of the NRA’s Industry Advisory Board, collaborated—under President Roosevelt’s approval—to establish the National Labor Board (NLB). The NLB was created to resolve strikes and industrial disputes arising from NRA codes. Senator Robert F. Wagner was appointed chair of the NLB, with Wolman serving as one of six members appointed on August 5.⁸ Wolman also acted as chair during Senator Wagner’s absence overseas. The NLB’s most notable contribution was the development of what became known as the “Reading Formula” (Morris 2004). Interestingly, Wolman does not address this pivotal achievement in his interview. The Reading Formula introduced a systematic approach to resolving strikes. It required both parties to call a truce during the NLB’s investigation, mandated the reinstatement of all striking workers without discrimination, facilitated secret ballot elections for union representation conducted by the NLB, and ensured that a union winning majority support in a bargaining unit would serve as the exclusive representative for all workers in that unit, including those who had not voted for the union. The Reading Formula proved instrumental in resolving numerous labor disputes, including strikes at silk mills in Paterson, New Jersey; silk mills in Allentown, Pennsylvania; tool and dye factories in Detroit, Michigan; and coal mines in Illinois (Schlesinger 1958, 147).

At the same time, however, the principles of majority rule and representational exclusivity imposed by the Formula became a source of conflict with employers, particularly those whose (typically smaller) company unions were losing representation elections to worker-controlled unions (Vittoz 1987)⁹. The NLB quickly initiated mediation efforts. Wolman and Teagle negotiated an agreement to address industry concerns, but President Roosevelt rejected it on September 15¹⁰. By December, the situation had deteriorated to the point that major employers ceased bringing their labor disputes to the NLB (Irons 1982). Roosevelt intervened decisively, tipping the balance in favor of labor by issuing Executive Order 6580 on February 1, 1934. The order authorized the NLB to conduct union representation elections upon demonstration of substantial employee interest, explicitly stating that representatives chosen by a majority of those voting would “represent all the employees … for the purpose of collective bargaining” (quoted in Irons 1982, 211). Additionally, the Order empowered the Board to report non-compliant employers directly to the NRA.

Three days later, however, NRA Administrator Hugh Johnson and his general counsel Donald Richberg issued an official statement repudiating Roosevelt’s support for the majority rule principle. Their interpretation of Order 6580 asserted that the “selection of majority representatives does not restrict or qualify in any way the rights of minority groups of employees or of individual employees to deal with their employer.” The statement further concluded that collective bargaining “can be lawfully carried on by either majority or minority groups, organizing and selecting such representatives in such manner as they see fit” (quoted in Irons 1982, 211–212). This interpretation caused significant division within the NLB. Wolman viewed it as a vindication of his preference for minority rule and plurality representation, while Green and Lewis reacted angrily, perceiving it as a betrayal of labor.¹¹ As Lewis later remarked, “I do not criticize Mr. Richberg for any personal reason, … [but] I am critical because in his interpretation he has driven a knife to the very heart of labor in this country” (National Labor Relations Board 1935, 195). Sensitive to these criticisms from labor leaders, Roosevelt responded on February 23 by amending the Executive Order. The amendment authorized the NLB to bypass the NRA in reporting violations directly to the Justice Department and stripped the NRA Compliance Division of its power to review Board findings. Buoyed by this presidential support, the Board swiftly implemented the majority rule principle (Irons 1982, 212). Frustrated by Roosevelt’s intervention and the increasingly regulatory approach to labor relations, Wolman attempted to resign from the NLB the following day but was persuaded to withdraw his resignation by Roosevelt himself, Johnson, and Wagner.¹² Also as a consequence of these internal disagreements, the NLB ceased to exist in the summer of 1934, when it was replaced by the first National Labor Relations Board.

1.2 The interview: March 13, 1957; conducted by Donald Shaughnessy. (Wolman 1961, 24–28)

So I went on to Columbia in ’31. You know what kind of a year ’31 was, and ’32 still worse. In ’33 came the N.R.A. in the course of my life already, I’d come to know a good many people—Frankfurter, Frances Perkins, whom I knew in New York. Frances Perkins was now secretary of labor. Frankfurter and others were advisers to General Hugh Johnson, who had been chosen or was contemplated as choice for director of the N.R.A.

I was called up one day and asked to meet Frankfurter for breakfast, at the apartment of a friend of his, a Dr. [Alfred E.] Cohn, an old friend of Frankfurter’s. I guess he’s dead now. He was a very well-known doctor, a famous doctor at Harvard. We had breakfast together.

After that breakfast, I went off with Frankfurter to Bernard Baruch’s house on upper Fifth Avenue where there was a great galaxy of people—General Johnson, Baruch, and others and we just chatted about the N.R.A. Somewhere along in there, I can’t remember the hour or the day, I got a call from Frances Perkins: would I become the chairman of the Labor Advisory Board of the N.R.A.?

Well, I had to think fast about that, and I said, “Yes.”

Then a few minutes later I got a call from General Johnson: would I become chairman of the Labor Advisory Board!

Well, I accepted and I went to Washington. We started, June 15th, just about the time the law was passed, and right away we had offices in the new Department of Commerce Building. I didn’t move then. I commuted from New York and I moved later. This is 1933. The law was passed on the 15th of June and signed by the President.

My job was to organize the Labor Advisory Board—there were two advisory boards at that stage of the game, the Industry Advisory Board, of which [Walter C.] Teagle, then President of Standard Oil New Jersey, was chairman, and the Labor Advisory board, of which I was chairman. Frances Perkins gave me a list of people who were supposed to be on this Labor Advisory Board—William Green, John L. Lewis, George Berry of the International Pressmen and Assistants’ Union of North America, John Frey of the International Molders and Foundry Workers Union of North America, Rose Schneiderman representing the women, Father [Francis J.] Haas, later Bishop of Grand Rapids, ostensibly representing the non-union people. I looked over the list and I said to Frances Perkins: “Where is Hillman?”

You see, Hillman was at that time an outlaw. That is, his Union wasn’t in the AFL [American Federation of Labor], and there was no C.I.O. [Congress of Industrial Organizations]. They’d been fighting the AFL ever since 1915. The AFL had been fighting them. They’d tried to get in. I’d gone to see [Samuel] Gompers in the twenties about getting them off their limb. Gompers was favorable, but the old U.G.W. [United Garment Workers] was adamant and wouldn’t let them in.

“Well,” she said, “you know, there’d be a lot of objection to Hillman. This is all an AFL crowd, and you’re representing him.”

I said, “I don’t represent him.” I was out of the union by that time, you see, and I said, “Anyway, I don’t represent him, and he ought to be on the board.”

I knew it would break his heart if he wasn’t on. “Well,” she said, “I guess I can get him accepted,” and she did. So that was the board I had.

One upshot of that was that Hillman got into the AFL; I did that. He didn’t stay in long, because they formed the C.I.O., and he got out, together with Lewis and others. But I got the Amalgamated into the AFL.

Q: How’d you work that?

Wolman: Well, it was complicated. I’ll tell you about that. Let’s go on with the skeleton.

I went on, as I told you, in June, and I’d come up here (New York) and teach one day a week, and I saw things about the N.R.A. that I began not to like particularly, and I said, “I am going to get out.”

I decided to get out towards Christmas of that year, the end of the year (’33). Meantime trouble, or threatened trouble, broke out in the automobile industry. Another thing happened before I started to get out. When the N.R.A. got under way, strikes broke out through the country, naturally, because one of the features of the N.R.A. was the famous section 7 of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which enunciated this freedom to organize free from coercion, and whatnot. That of course resulted in strikes for organizing purposes.

So, at the request of the Labor Advisory Board and the Industrial Advisory board, the President set up a National Labor board composed of representatives of the two boards—not through law—there wasn’t a law about this—this was an executive order, and it had the general mandate of trying to keep the peace. On that board, on the employer’s side, were Teagle, [Gerard] Swope of General Electric, Louis Kirstein of Filenes; and on the labor side John L. Lewis, William Green, and myself.

Now, when we met, Swope proposed Senator [Robert F.] Wagner as the chairman. I didn’t know him then. The others said, “All right,” and he was elected chairman, but he was in Europe. So I was designated acting chairman, and the task of organizing the board fell into my hands, until Wagner came back. So in the early stages of this, I very ran and, and organized that board.

1.3 The interview: June 2, 1960; conducted by Jerold Auerbach. (Wolman 1961, 167–175)

Q: I think your first appointment under President Roosevelt was as chairman of the Labor Advisory Board.

Wolman: Yes. It started with the textile code, because that was a depressed industry, standards in it were very low, and the industry wanted that treated early and so did the unions. The union had very little position in the textile industry at that time—it hasn’t very much now, for that matter. So that seemed to be an ideal industry to begin with, and we had a lot of sessions on it, about how long the work week should be, what the minimum wage should be, and so on. We discussed that back and forth, and I used to come home here during the weekend.

We discussed this so exhaustively that you wouldn’t have thought anything could possibly be left over. When I was home one weekend, I got a long telegram from General Johnson, did I approve the textile code, as chairman of the Labor Advisory Board? It had a 40-hour week maximum and a minimum wage commensurate with that, I’ve forgotten what it was, but it was higher than anybody there was getting as a minimum wage. It seemed to be the thing we’d talked about, and so I wired back, I did approve, there was no question in my mind.

Then there was hell to pay. The members of the Labor Advisory Board were against the whole thing. They didn’t want a 40-hour week, they wanted a 30-hour week. This was all political monkey business, which is what you’ve to look for if you’re going to write labor history. And the minimum wage they wanted was much higher. They knew they weren’t going to get it, and the fact is that [Thomas] McMahon, the president of the United Textile Workers, would have been willing to settle for 50 hours a week, because they were working 60 and 70, when they had work.

Well, that was the first little storm, but it blew over, and then we went from that to others.

Now, when you begin to make these codes, and you have these two advisory boards, and you’re bringing in a third advisory board before long—though I don’t recall the date—you had to organize yourself so that the labor people, the labor part of the board, had representation for the terms of the code. Not only the labor people, but the others who were assumed to have an interest in it. So we began to set up labor advisors for each code, and this was interesting to me, because I’d been in the government service for a while on the Council of National Defense back in World War I and the War Industries Board and at the Peace Conference, and I used to go down occasionally to some unemployment conferences back when Hoover was Secretary of Commerce, so I had worked for the government for a long time in various ways. And I found that by September 15^th—only three months after I came—I was employing about 500 people, not many of whom I really knew, and that a great establishment was built up. As I look back over it, I think it was damn nonsense; we didn’t need them all. And we didn’t.

Well, that’s the way government grows. That’s another side of this. Once it grows like that, you don’t reduce it very quickly.

Q: How were these codes hammered out? Would your board prepare a code, while the Industry Board prepared something?

Wolman: The administration would pretty well prepare the code. Then it would be discussed by representatives of industry for that code. Take the clothing code. There would be preparation of the code by the industry in conjunction with the administration and then that would go to the union and they’d discuss the matter back and forth and see if they finally couldn’t agree. That was what these labor advisory boards were for. So the city was studded with labor advisors, coming from all parts of the earth—you didn’t know who they were or what they’d done, and that’s where some of the trouble began. It wasn’t my trouble, because I didn’t stay there.

Q: I notice in August you were appointed to the Cotton Textile Industry’s Planning and Supervisory Council, to remedy some of the wage and collective bargaining provisions.

Wolman: Yes – that being the first code, I was appointed to that.

Q: What kind of difficulties did you encounter?

Wolman: Violations of the code; charges of alleged violations; charges from the other side that the terms were too onerous. You try to deal with them as you do with any such episode, try to see some way of handling it, to say this is about what it ought to be anyhow, you have to bear with it—or try to make some modification.

Q: Do you think the code approach was an effective one?

Wolman: Well, that’s another question. I don’t think the whole thing was effective. You see, the whole purpose of this was to reduce the volume of the unemployment in the United States. Well, whatever I may have thought when I went into it, I didn’t continue to think it very long. I don’t think it had a damn thing to do with volume of unemployment in the United States. All of the objective historical evidence is that this was the longest period we ever had in the history of the United States with a very high rate of unemployment, reduced only by the Second World War. So I’m perfectly clear on the record, as I look at it in retrospect and after long experience with it, anyway long enough to see my way through it, this was not a cure for unemployment. I’m clear about that. There are people who still believe it was, however, and why they do, I don’t know. I don’t think it was any cure for unemployment.

Q: Was there any other cure for unemployment?

Wolman: Well, you know what unemployment is like. Take that period—and I don’t want to go into detail on this now because it will take far afield—but take that period. A relaxation of government regulation would have been much more fruitful in increasing the volume of employment than these methods. For example, the rate of wages went up from June ’33 to December ’33, 30 percent. That’s a bad thing to do, trying to get employment that way, whatever your theory might be. Now, I don’t mean to say that it wasn’t a good thing to do. Maybe it was just. But a just thing to do which leaves you with a 15, 16 percent unemployment over a long period of time isn’t very just to these people who are out of work, if you believe they could back get back to work otherwise, as I do.

Q: Was your Labor Advisory Board a difficult group to handle?

Wolman: Well, they were, at times. Not so much at first but afterwards they could be more difficult. You see, I had friends on it, and the difficulties changed over a period of time.

Of course, when this board got started, Green was pretty hostile to Hillman. I don’t think he was, necessarily, personally, but his people were. They resented the fact that Hillman had any representation. So when it came to the clothing code, the president of the then AFL union (Hillman being out of the AFL) insisted on appearing at the code hearing as representing the clothing workers, and I wouldn’t permit it. We had a big row on that and Green threatened to resign, but he was dissuaded. Anyway, that gave the Amalgamated the strategic position there, because it was recognized as the representative of the clothing workers at that time. So the first row, difference of opinion, on that board was an old one, due to the fact that the Amalgamated was what the AFL called an outlaw union, and they didn’t like it—don’t like them now, for that matter, except their complexion has changed.

Well, we went along like that and that was all right. John Lewis was an old friend of mine. The board began to line up a little bit on this, and I was interested to see that Lewis and Berry became very friendly with Hillman which had very great effects later—because when the CIO appeared in the picture later, they made the coalition, you see. Not Berry, though Berry was sympathetic with them, but Lewis and Hillman made a coalition which really carried on the organizing campaigns that led to the creation of the CIO, produced the foundations of the CIO. There wouldn’t have been a CIO. if it hadn’t been for those men—their ability and their experience and their money. They threw in a lot of money, it takes a lot of money to organize.

So, that’s the way it lined up. I can’t remember all the incidents, but there’s one that stuck in my mind. We came to the Copper code. That you wouldn’t remember, but in the annals of industry of that time, copper was just flat on its back. It had no business at all. Unemployment was terrible. One of the members of the board was John Frey, an awfully nice fellow. He was the literary man representing labor – the editor of the Molder’s Journal. He wrote some. He had a theory that the higher the unemployment rate in industry, the higher the minimum wage should be and the lower the maximum hours per week – so that if you had a 20 per cent unemployment rate you’d have hours per week of 30, and if you had a 30 per cent unemployment, you should have a maximum of 20 hours. A perfectly cockeyed and ridiculous idea, and known to be that by these men, because they were fairly practical men – I know Hillman was.

Well, we got to the Copper Code, and we were doing with it what we were doing with all codes, 40 hours week, commensurate minimum wage, and so on. They told me, my members of the Board told me, they didn’t want a 40-hour week, they wanted a 30-hour week. So I said to them – we discussed the matter for a while in my office, all the members of the Board were there – I said, ”This is an industry which is in a pretty bad economic position. I think you ought to hear the industry before we decide what we’re going to do.”

They agreed with that, and I communicated with the industry and told them to send a representative to the Labor Advisory Board to tell them what the state of affairs was. They did. Then the representative left, and I said, “What’s your will? What are your wishes about this?”

30-hour week and commensurate minimum wage.

I said, “Well, I am sorry, gentlemen, but I can’t get along with you on that. I think it’s unsound. I turned to John Frey and said, “You write the majority report, but I’m going to send in a minority report.” I polled the Board, because it was an important issue, and Hillman knew damn well that that wasn’t right, but nevertheless, playing politics, he went along with them. So they made their recommendation. I knew they weren’t going to get it anyway, because who’s going to give them a 30-hour week at such a time? That’s how we reached really our first break. I didn’t stay long after that, although I didn’t leave government service until the next year.

Otherwise our relations were fair. I don’t think John Lewis liked me very much and I no longer liked him.

1.4 Auto Labor Board

During the Roosevelt administration, Wolman also played a pivotal role in the early organization of the automotive manufacturing industry. The automobile companies had been among the most resistant anti-union employers since the passage of the NIRA. By early fall 1933, when Roosevelt signed the auto industry code, not a single union of automobile workers was affiliated with the AFL (Dubofsky 1994). In addition to provisions on wages, the code addressed other working conditions and specifically allowed employers to hire and fire based on “merit”—a clause that unions alleged was used by automobile companies to discharge union activists. William Green, president of the AFL and a member of the NLB, expressed his concerns about the merit clause to Roosevelt, who agreed that such a provision would not be included in any future codes. Meanwhile, largely due to the efforts of Francis J. Dillon, the General Organizer in charge of the AFL’s Detroit office, unionization gained momentum across the auto industry. However, dissatisfaction with general working conditions also increased. On March 4, 1934, auto workers at Buick, Fisher Body, and Hudson voted to strike unless employers recognized their unions, reinstated workers dismissed for union activities, and implemented a 20 percent wage increase. The situation was complex. On one hand, the auto manufacturers negotiated from a position of strength; their businesses did not depend on NRA support, and they were resolute in their opposition to bargaining with the AFL, virtually at any cost (Bernstein 1969, 95–96). On the other hand, William Collins, the AFL representative for the industry, had no real intention of allowing a strike to proceed. Believing that the automobile workers were insufficiently organized to successfully challenge the industry giants, Collins used the strike threat as leverage to secure better employment conditions and build workers’ confidence (Fine 1963, 213–214).

For the first time during his administration, Roosevelt intervened directly in the negotiations. On March 25, 1934, he announced his decision: the automobile companies would be removed from the jurisdiction of the NLB and placed under a newly established Automobile Labor Board (ALB), which would operate within the NRA administrative structure but remain “responsible to the President of the United States” (Bernstein 1969, 184). The ALB comprised three members: the union representative, Richard Byrd, secretary of the AFL federal local at the GM Truck plant in Pontiac; the employer representative, Nicholas Kelley, counsel for the Chrysler Corporation; and the neutral chairman, Wolman, who accepted the appointment with considerable reluctance. According to Wolman, the new board was given a threefold mandate:

The agreement was a very simple agreement: 1) it created a board to administer the terms, and the board was composed of an impartial third person, a representative of the industry and a representative of the union. Then, it was authorized to deal with these questions, all growing out of alleged or real grievances these people had said they had in the automobile industry—that they’d been victimized, so the agreement provided that something be done about alleged discrimination; 2) that something be done about setting up a seniority system in the industry; and 3) that arrangements be made or something be done to see to it that there was a machinery that permitted representatives of the employees who wanted to act through representatives to deal with representatives of the employer. It legalized representation of some kind or another, insofar as an agreement of this kind could legalize it, and it could.

On the closely related issues of discrimination and seniority, employers showed somewhat greater willingness to compromise. It was agreed that the ALB would have the authority to review charges of discrimination for union activity, provided that the labor organization filing the complaint submitted to the ALB a list of the employees it represented (Bernstein 1969, 184–185). However, in his interview, Wolman dismissed the issue of discrimination as largely baseless, claiming it was limited to a few isolated cases. This perspective is notable given that in May 1934, as Sidney Fine (1963, 152) documents, management voluntarily agreed to reemploy 1,129 workers. With regard to seniority, the settlement specified that in cases of workforce reductions or increases, “such human relationships as married men with families” should take precedence, followed by “seniority, individual skill and efficient service.” While management had previously determined layoffs and rehiring at its sole discretion, this provision represented a clear victory for organized labor (Fine 1959, 193).

The issue of representation, however, proved far more contentious. On December 7, 1934, the ALB announced an election plan intended to establish a bargaining agency for each plant under its jurisdiction.¹³ The ALB. plan diverged significantly from the election procedures utilized by other government labor boards, beyond its attempt to introduce proportional representation. While most other representation elections were initiated by a trade union’s complaint of being denied recognition, ALB elections were prearranged for the majority of plants covered by the auto code, regardless of whether an organized group had requested an election. Typically, such elections presented a direct choice between a trade union and a company union; however, in ALB elections, individuals could not vote for any organization. Furthermore, voters were not necessarily indicating their own union affiliation, even if they had one. Rather, they were expected to vote based on the affiliation of their chosen candidate—provided they knew what that affiliation was and wished to disclose it on the ballot.¹⁴ The AFL opposed these elections not only due to these procedural differences but also because they were conducted on company property and because the organization objected to the principle of proportional representation. As a result, the AFL advised its members to abstain from participating in the elections. The ALB conducted a total of sixty-three nominating elections and sixty-two final elections, with each round attracting participation from over 160,000 workers. In the primary elections, 68.6 percent of voters did not indicate any affiliation for their chosen candidate, while 13.3 percent identified their candidate as belonging to one of the employee associations, and only 8.6 percent indicated an affiliation with the AFL. Although bargaining agencies were established in the plants following these elections, they generally failed to operate effectively. Many workers viewed them as little more than company unions under a new guise (Fine 1959, 194–195).

The ALB’s rulings provoked significant backlash within the labor movement, with Wolman widely blamed for what many saw as blatant concessions to company unions. The ALB became so closely associated with Wolman that it was frequently referred to as the “Wolman board.” Speaking on behalf of the AFL’s newly established United Auto Workers, Green stated that employees in the auto industry who “believed that they might bargain collectively under the schema created by the Wolman Board” had come to realize that “the so-called ‘bargaining committees’ set up by the board are actually little more than committees controlled by the employer exactly as the company unions which he openly instituted” (National Labor Relations Board 1935, 205). Dillon, one of the most respected AFL leaders in Detroit, expressed even harsher criticism, accusing the ALB of betraying the workers. He specifically condemned Wolman for refusing to negotiate the plan with the unions. Dillon’s forceful critique of the ALB deserves to be quoted in full:

Dr. Wolman told me that they had decided to conduct elections immediately; and I asked him if he had consulted with the company. He said that he had. I asked him if the plan was agreeable to the company, and he said that it was.

This Board has, in my judgment, betrayed the people who were responsible for its establishment. They have failed dismally in carrying out either the spirit or the intent of the agreement. They have been unfair to the President of the United States. They have destroyed the faith of thousands of workers in governmental agencies, and diminished substantially the possibility of establishing a proper and legitimate employer-employee relationship in the auto mobile industry without resort to industrial strife, with all of its attendant evils, sufferings, and sacrifices.

No governmental agency was ever launched or established under more auspicious circumstances than was this board. No board ever received a more hearty cooperation from the American Federation of Labor than did this board. The resources of our entire organization were at their disposal. We insisted, over a long period of time, that our people conform to their decisions and cooperate with them in every effort to bring about the ideals and the purposes of the President of the United States.

I say to you now that no board has proved to be a greater failure than has this board. No governmental agency has ever made a more substantial contribution to the continuance of misery, to the perpetuation of industrial servitude, and the abolition of inherent rights long enjoyed by the citizens of our Republic than has the repudiated Wolman Automobile Labor Board. Its principles and its policies may be utilized as constituting useful material for magazine articles or college textbooks, where theories predominate and dreams of master minds are expounded; but the working man who stands upon the production line in America’s greatest industry, working at an ever-increasing speed with the oncoming of each production season, cannot comprehend the value of complicated theories when bread and employment are involved (United States Congress 1935, 246).

Dillon (246–247) emphatically concluded that “The phrases and the ideas propounded by Dr. Wolman … mean nothing except the inculcation of contempt and hatred, which form a bitterness in the hearts of workers that constitutes an actual menace, not only to this industry but likewise to the very foundation of our Government and its free institutions.”¹⁵

The ALB experience also marked the definitive rupture between Wolman and Hillman. Before the election plan was officially announced, Hillman made an unsuccessful appeal to his old friend, attempting to dissuade him from supporting proportional representation (Josephson 1952, 375). On November 9, 1934, Hillman succeeded in arranging a meeting with President Roosevelt at the White House to address the situation in automobile labor. The timing was critical, as the automobile code was set to expire that very day unless the President extended it. Major manufacturers had demanded the continuation of the existing agreement under Wolman’s leadership of the ALB. At the meeting, Hillman advocated for revising the existing automobile code, banning company unions, and explicitly called for Wolman’s removal from the ALB. He also proposed the creation of a special commission to investigate the causes of labor unrest in the auto industry. The result of this meeting was a presidential compromise. The next day, Roosevelt announced a three-month extension of the existing automobile code, as requested by the companies, while also committing to “institute a study which may contribute toward improvements in stabilizing the [automobile] industry” (Fine 1963, 367), as urged by the unions. The study was assigned to Leon Henderson, a figure recommended by Hillman.¹⁶ Released in mid-February, the Henderson report was openly critical of the ALB’s management of employer representation. While collective bargaining was beyond the investigation’s scope, Henderson opined that many of the auto workers’ grievances could be resolved if collective bargaining facilities were “fully extended” (368). The AFL, led by Green, welcomed the report as a validation of its stance, further deepening tensions between Wolman and organized labor (Keeran 1975, 281). By late April 1935, leaders of the newly formed Officers Association of the Automobile Industrial Employees, representing sixteen bargaining agencies in Detroit, petitioned Roosevelt to remove Wolman from the ALB, citing his alleged “lack of cooperation” (Fine 1963, 342). Although Roosevelt declined this request, Wolman’s tenure as a public servant soon came to an end. The ALB was dissolved following the Supreme Court’s declaration of the NIRA’s unconstitutionality on May 27, 1935, and Wolman quietly left the tumultuous New Deal scene.

1.5 The interview: June 7, 1960; conducted by Jerold Auerbach. (Wolman 1961, 203–228)

Wolman: Now in 1934, and either late ’34 or early ’35, there were threats from Detroit that unless there was intervention from the government, there would be trouble in the automobile industry. Well, you see the whole purpose of the NLRA and the whole bundle of labor policies (labor and economic policies) was to bring on economic recovery, and anything that threatened to interrupt or stop this economic recovery was anathema to the administration, no matter who tried it. It didn’t mean that they’d treat it all exactly the same way, but they didn’t like it, and a strike in the automobile industry which was just on the point of recovering wasn’t anything that would please Washington at all.

So there came these protestations and telegrams and heaven knows what, out of Detroit, to Wagner and to the President and to General Johnson, that there was trouble brewing in Detroit unless the government intervened. That gives you another insight into the whole statement of [Arthur M.] Schlesinger’s, about being uncertain. There wasn’t a damn thing uncertain about it, except that nobody then was able to sit down, and know all the things Schlesinger knows in retrospect and say what would have been done in 1934.

So there was great activity going on at that time. Now, this is a digression, but it leads into the story. During this activity there were deep differences of opinion in the labor movement. There were all kinds of conflicting ambitions, and there was the old AFL craft crowd that wanted to do this their own way and decide if people were organized, whom they belonged to. There were among the AFL people some leaders who didn’t want to organize at all, and of course they said this was like wartime and they spent a lot of money to get the union but as soon as the war was over they’d get out—it wasn’t worth the effort and “we don’t want them anyhow.” It wasn’t just regular craft unions that said this—people like the Shoeworkers Union said, “What’s the use of having these fellows in?”

But there was that difference of opinion. You can’t wish it away now. The history is a very interesting history, how these things are done in the United States.

So then Wagner and Board said, “Let’s have a hearing on this. Wire to Bill Collins, he’s the chief organizer in this—the AFL and some local independent unions. Francis Dillon was his assistant. He said, “We’ll hold a hearing.” I don’t recall if this was early ’35 or late ’34, but it was in there.

They had the hearing in one of the assembly rooms of the new Department of Commerce building. The Board sat on the platform. I was on the board then. And there was this delegation of several hundred of the newly organized automobile workers, airing their grievances. I listened to that all day, I remember, as a member of the board. There was anything we could do about it in particular, but anyhow, we had this hearing.

What was the nature of the protest? It was this—that they were trying to organize and they were being victimized by the automobile companies, who wouldn’t let them organize. If a man showed any activity in organization, he’d be fired or demoted for a long time or fail to be taken back in the right order—the usual thing. You could guess what they were in advance if you knew anything about it. That’s what they kept saying, and I remember some of them made a very deep impression on me. You never know what goes on in these places, unless you get close to it. I didn’t know at the time that I’d ever see this more closely, so it was a very interesting thing for me. I remember particularly one woman who testified, and she had something like a cold—anyway, she was hard to hear. She worked at General Motors A.C. Spark Plug, and she’d been victimized if anybody had, I thought that was a sad performance on the part of the automobile industry.

Well, then the thing left the Board and went over into the President’s hands. When the President called the industry in and wanted them to deal with the union, they said they wouldn’t deal with the union but they’d deal with the President. So the union dealt with the President and the industry dealt with the President, and they finally knocked out an agreement, which created the Automobile Labor board.

The agreement was a very simple agreement: 1) it created a board to administer the terms, and the board was composed of an impartial third person, a representative of the industry and a representative of the union. Then, it was authorized to deal with these questions, all growing out of alleged or real grievances these people had said they had in the automobile industry—that they’d been victimized, so the agreement provided that something be done about alleged discrimination; 2) that something be done about setting up a seniority system in the industry; and 3) that arrangements be made or something be done to see to it that there was a machinery that permitted representatives of the employees who wanted to act through representatives to deal with representatives of the employer. It legalized representation of some kind or another, insofar as an agreement of this kind could legalize it, and it could.

The implementation of this agreement was put into the hands of the Board, and we assembled out there in March, 1935. It was a very interesting board, a very interesting history.

Q: Who else was in this board with you?

Wolman: Well, Nicholas Kelley, who was the general counsel for Chrysler, was the employer member of the board, and Richard Byrd, one of the younger automobile workers, who worked in the Pontiac plant of General Motors and have been active out there, was the employee member from the union.

We assembled there in 1935. What we had was this mandate to enforce. If you follow this closely, you’ll see what the forces are that work in a situation of this kind. You have an opportunity to see this, to learn about these forces. You learn about a lot of different things that are otherwise pure abstractions—like it’s an abstraction with Schlesinger to say the whole thing was proportional representation. Well, we didn’t have any proportional representation at any time. What he calls proportional representation was not. It’s a term used inaccurately to describe something, but I’ll come to what it was we had and why we had it.

Anyway, the board got together, and with this mandate, the board had to decide what its priorities were and what it was going to do first. Now, you will recall that the board was charged with doing away with discrimination, with making arrangements for seniority, and with promoting machinery for representation. We met and talked this over in great detail, and reached a unanimous decision, to this effect: that since the feeling out there was exacerbated by the view of many people in the situation that your job was in jeopardy if you engaged in legitimate union activity, we decided to go after the question of discrimination first.

Then the Board called in Collins, or I did, speaking for the Board, and said to Collins: “Now, what I want is a list of the discrimination cases. We’ll start with General Motors”—that being the biggest firm there, having the biggest employment. “Take that list and try to get as many of those people as you can back to work right away. That will take the heat off this thing. Then, those that can get back, right or wrong—we’ll hold hearings and decide whether they should be ordered back or not.” That was the proposition. It seemed to us a very appropriate thing to do. If there were some people who’d lost their jobs, it certainly would relieve the situation if some of them went back on their jobs, and what remaining cases there were, we would hear. There might have been some question, could we order anybody back to work? We never raised that question, and I’m damn sure that if we’d ordered them back, they’d have gone back.

Well, anyway, much to my surprise, Collins said he didn’t want that. Here’s Collins, ha was the chief organizer and spokesman for the AFL and a veteran AFL man—later became organizer for AFL in New York. He didn’t want that, and I said, “Why don’t you want that? What’s the matter with that?”

“We don’t want them sent back to work. We want them ordered back to work by you.”

I said, “How do you know I’m going to order them back to work? In the first place, in order to order them back to work I have to hold hearings, and that takes a long time, as you know. We have to set these cases, have to get the witnesses and so on. Then, it may turn out that they’re not to be sent back to work. I don’t know what the decision of the Board will be. I don’t know anything about these cases.

I said, “I can’t understand this.“ You see, this is strategy now. “It seems to me the appropriate policy for the Board is the one we’ve decided on, and that’s what we’re going to pursue. So you give me the list of people you claim were discharged or discriminated against, in all the General Motors plan, anywhere—Detroit, Michigan, Saginaw, St. Louis, wherever they are.”

Well, you know, I had some knowledge of this—I thought I had some knowledge of this, because of this hearing I’d just participated to, in Washington a few months before, I thought there were thousands of cases of discrimination—that the industry was a hotbed of discrimination. So we sat around and waited, and weeks passed, and I called Collins and said, “Where is your list?”

I finally got a list of 21 cases, and even at the bottom of the Depression General Motors employed a couple of hundred thousand people. I said, “Is this all?”

“Well, that’s all we have now.” They had to scrape them together. It just shows you what a lot of monkey business is in this game.

So we looked at the list, and I made an appointment with [William S.] Knudsen and went to him and said, “Here is a list we just got from the union; I wasn’t you to take this up with your people, and if there is no great grievance here on your records, then take the people back to work right away. And where you think you don’t want to take them back, let us know what the cases are, and we will set hearings.”

He said, “all right.” In a couple of days, I heard from him—he took back most of the people, put them back on their jobs. There were a few left over that we had to hold hearings for. I thought that was a great victory, of a kind. I called up Collins and told him that. He wasn’t at all pleased with the outcome of this first step of the thing, when I told him this. A day later, he called me up and said, “The whole thing is a fake.”

I said, “What do you mean, a fake?”

“Well, they’re not taking them back.”

I said, “Well, you tell me about this,” because by this time I figured the dignity of the Board was in question, and I wasn’t going to let anybody get away with that. “You tell me who’s not being taken back.”

So he gave me the name of a woman, and it’s this woman whose case I’d heard in Washington, for whom my heart had bled. I was good and mad then. I called Knudsen and said, “Now, this won’t work unless it’s legitimate—here you tell me these people are being taken back to work, and now the union calls me up and says this person isn’t being taken back to work.”

Well, of course Knudsen didn’t know any more about it than I did. His people had told him. So he said, “Let me check it.” So he checked it and he said, “I understand she was taken back to work.”

I went back to my office and then and called up Collins and said, “I talked to Knudsen about this, at General Motors; they tell me that she’s back at work. Collins said, “Yes, she’s back at work—but not at her old job.” I said, “I didn’t promise her old job. She’s been out for a long time. Is she getting less money?”

“No, she’s not getting less money—but she wants her old job.”

I said, “I can’t promise her her old job.”

“But she’s being discriminated against. And she won’t take this job.” I said, “All right, I’ll put her in our list of cases to be heard.”

Well, this is the way it went. Let me go on with this woman’s case, because it’s rather typical. After a lapse of a little time, we’d seen some cases, not many, we held hearings up in Flint, where this woman was, and late at night we got around to her. That lasted three or four hours because to get the truth I something very difficult. And what did we find? Number one, at the time she was laid off, she wasn’t a member of the union at all; she only joined the union afterwards, so the alleged discrimination (because of union activities) didn’t exist in any case. Now, what happened? She’d worked there for AG Spark Plug a number of years. Through all this, her husband worked for Buick, and he kept working. Then her father got sick, and she took a leave of absence with no terminal date. Finally he died, and then she had to arrange her personal family affairs, so that she was away for a long time. Meanwhile, they’d filled her job. So when she came back, they gave her a job with the same pay, but not the same job. She refused that new job, you see, and that was the basis for her discrimination charge. We didn’t find this out until about 3 o’clock in the morning. She had no basis for a claim of discrimination at all.

This case ran on, you see, for well over a year, through the automobile board—no account of the turmoil, the argumentation that went on, the propaganda—the unions would use anything that was available. But the first thing we learned was that the charge of discrimination didn’t exist on paper, they had no record of it, they had to go and scrape it together. It was months before we got to the cases, and altogether I don’t think we heard more than two or three hundred cases all the time we were there, and we were there a year and a half. That’s a record that people like Schlesinger don’t know anything about, much less understand. That, I think, is one of the problems about writing the history of this period.

Now then, we come to—I’ll come back to the discrimination later—we came to the related question of seniority, because you can discriminate if you violate seniority regulations at will, regularly. You might violate them occasionally for some good reason, but if regularly you violate them, that can be a basis for discrimination. Also, we had been authorized to put in seniority rules, a seniority system. It occurred to us to wonder, how could something like the automobile industry, or any industry, ever have operated without seniority? If you read some of the things that come out now, by pretty intelligent fellows, they read “one of the things the union did was to introduce seniority,” but it just isn’t true. They had had it all right. How would a business operate without seniority—just take men in at will, regardless of their services, let them off at will? You can’t do that. That’s an archaic way to run a plant, and wouldn’t serve their own purpose, selfish as that might be.

Well, anyhow, the evidence of that became clear when we went to the firms and said, “Now, we are ready to tackle this matter of seniority, and in order to do this, we have to have a record of the length of service of your people.” Why should they have such a record if they hadn’t observed it? Sure enough, all the companies, Chrysler, Packard, General Motors etc., gave us their records. We went into consultation both with the unions and the companies, and we reached a joint conclusion, namely, the seniority record would be used to determine what the seniority records of individual employees were and, by and large, men would be laid off in accord with their length of service—those who had the longest service would be laid off last, those with the shortest service laid off first. In hiring the reverse would take place (those who’d served longest rehired first, shortest last), with one exception: where, at the end of a season or the beginning of a new season, when you had quite a few cars coming over the line and new models coming in and highly specialized operations, cutting off the cars of the previous season and beginning the run of the cars of the new season—everybody agreed that then we would allow a tolerance where seniority would not be observed, but that it would not exceed 5 percent of the total labor force. So that was the agreement, on seniority.

Well, we got some cases on violation of seniority, not very many; we have a record of them somewhere. It’s in a report of the Automobile Labor Board. There weren’t very many cases, considering the size of this thing. Some of them were spurious.

Well, I learned this later—I found out after I left that there was a great hullabaloo about the 5 percent rule, which you would expect, where the union, though they’d agreed to it and said it was an appropriate thing to do, were saying it was being used to discriminate against union employees. After a while they were forced to drop this rule. That’s the history of the discrimination on seniority.

Just as in the charges of discrimination otherwise, you always run across interesting cases. These are human problems. They have nothing to do with unions and they would exist whether you had unions or not—where somebody feels something or other—for example, where a man has a way of satisfying his ego and thinking he can get redress for real or fancied grievances, he’ll do it. In an organizing period like this, you can find such things.

I’ve told you, we got some 20 or 21 people from the Union who worked for General Motors. We got one man who said he was a draftsman, a kind of an engineer, and he had been displaced. Well, we went into the case. He was a nice fellow. His eyesight had gone bad. He never was an engineer in the first place, but he did some drafting, one he just couldn’t do it anymore. Well, it was a great blow to his ego, but there was nothing we could do about it. We can’t tell a company to use a man who can’t do his work anymore. That kind of thing arises, with cripples, you see, on the periphery. I ran across that in my Amalgamated days—people who couldn’t make the grade working, who were in the union, and the union would sometimes try to do something about it, but there’s not much you can do.

Q: Was this the only list you got from the union?

Wolman: Later we got more, but as I told you before, when the thing finally ended—we were there a year and a quarter, 1934–35—there were I don’t think altogether more than two or three hundred cases we handled.

Q: There was some union opposition, to you particularly and Donald Richberg.

Wolman: Richberg had nothing to do with us.

Q: Well, you and he were bracketed together.

Wolman: Well. We may have been bracketed, but I hardly knew him. I mean, I didn’t know him in that way. I’d met him, but I didn’t know him well. I knew him better now. I was no crony of Richberg’s.

Q: Because in February, 1935, there was an article in the Time in which the AFL executive council saw in the automobile code “hostile influence.”¹⁷

Wolman: I’ll tell you the whole story of that. I’m not talking about the code yet. We were operating, in a sense, under the code, and I’m telling you what we were required to do and what we did, with respect to the item in our mandate.

Now I’ll come to the third item: to make possible or promote usage of representation between employees and company. Let me give you an illustration. One day I was called up to Pontiac to see—these were federal unions, you see, I’ll tell you the history of them—they wanted to see me. Pontiac wasn’t very far, less than an hour’s drive. I went into their offices and said, “What do you want?”

“Well,” he said, “here we represent the people in this Pontiac plant, and we want to bargain with the management, and they won’t bargain with me.”

I said, “That’s funny. I don’t understand it, Let me call up the management.” I called up the manager and told him, “I’ve got delegates for the employees here who said that you won’t bargain with them.”

He said, “That’s not true. I’ve been meeting with them every day for a week.”

So I turned to them and said, “He says he’s been meeting with you every day for a week, what about this?”

“Oh yes,” they said, “he’s been meeting with us, but he won’t give us what we ask for.”

“Well,” I said, “I can’t force him to do that, that’s another matter. He’s meeting with you, he’s discussing the matter—that’s as far as we can ask him to go. We can’t ask him to do what you want, we are not authorized to do that.”

That was the notion of the time. All these things were stimulated, either locally or nationally.

Let me go back to the beginning, on this item, to show you what kinds of pressures you were under. Particularly I was under pressures of all kinds. When I took a job like this—I didn’t want to take it, as I told you before, but when I took it I decided I’d use my own judgment, exercise my independence and do what I thought was the proper thing to do, and I wasn’t going to be told by anybody what to do, else I wouldn’t have taken the job. There was nothing in it for me. I’d have had a better life if I’d gone back to my teaching at Columbia at the time.

Well, some of the first things we had to do, when we came, was to get people back to work at the Nash plants in Kenosha and Racine, Wisconsin. They’d been out of work for some time. So we called the union and called the Nash Company, and said we wanted to come out there and hold hearings and see if we couldn’t settle that. The three of us went off to Kenosha to see them, and met with the company and with the union. Nobody could speak to the union there. I had to address the mass meeting of the union representatives in the auditorium, and finally got some kind of an agreement. There was trouble there, of course, but it was Depression trouble. When the Depression came, this firm was in trouble anyway and there just wasn’t any money to be made by anybody. They divided the work equally—because the governor of Wisconsin at that time, or the government of Wisconsin, had decided that all work was to be equally divided during the depression. That was one of their theories. Of course that meant that nobody made any money. That was a very difficult thing.

Anyway, we knocked down a settlement, and they agreed to it, and we took the midnight train back to Detroit. We were all there, Byrd and Kelley and myself, and when we got to Detroit, I found a great big telegram on my desk. I picked it up and looked at it—ok, a letter, a scribbled letter to my friend Byrd….

Well, to get back to Detroit. We found that they’d gone back on strike again. So we got together, and I wasn’t going to go back there. I told Byrd to go back and see that they went to work. He was a member of the union, supposed to represent them, and he said “All right,” he’d do it. We had dinner together, he and Kelley and I. He’d gone to see Collins, or Collins had got hold of him, and Collins had told him not to go. That’s what you call cooperation.

Then I find a telegram from [Edward F.] McGrady, a labor advisor to General Johnson. McGrady said he’d heard from Collins that things weren’t’ working well with the board. (We’d just started.) So the first thing I did was to pick up the telephone and call McGrady and tell him if he was going to run the board from Washington, I was through, he could take it over. I am running this Board, not Washington. I had that problem all the time. McGrady knew that before. He said, “Well, I’m making this protest. I sent this telegram, but you’re actually running it.”

Then I got hold of Byrd and sent him back to work. But that kind of sabotage is what we were dealing with.

Let me tell you another story. We had this discrimination thing, and we were beginning to deal with it. One day, I got a telephone call from a man named Homer Martin. You read about Homer Martin in labor history, where you’ll get a picture of Homer Martin as somebody who never existed. I didn’t know Martin from Adam. It turned out he was the leader of the union in the Kansas City plant plants of General Motors, president of the union down there, and he wanted to come and see me. I said, “All right, come see me.” He came the next morning.

Homer Martin. I learned that earlier he had been a Baptist minister, and his congregation had kind of petered out on him and he’d gone to work on an assembly line in a General Motors plant and worked up in the union later. He was a very agreeable fellow, spoke well, looked nice and all that. He wanted to talk to me about discrimination cases on file in Kansas City, and would like to know how I’d handle them.

“Well,” I said, “this is very hard. Suppose a man was fired because the management said he was drunk on the job. It’s very hard for me to find out whether he was drunk or not. But if he was drunk on the job, he certainly should have been fired—he’s not only a menace to himself but a menace to his fellow workers. And if he hasn’t, he was obviously discriminated against. I’d have to call you, as head of the union, and ask you to tell me truthfully whether he was drunk or not. You would know, I wouldn’t.”

He thought that was very fair. So we chatted a while, and he went off to union headquarters. But the next morning I learned that while he was talking to me, he had pulled the Kansas City plants out on strike. This is all on the record.

I called the company and said, “Do you need the Kansas City output?” They damn well didn’t need it, you see, because, while they were recovering from the Depression, it’s no recovery like you have now, where you knock out seven million—so I said, “All right, let it alone. They’re on strike.”

At the end of the week, Martin calls up from Kansas City and says, “What are you going to do about this strike?”

I said, “What strike?”

He said, “This strike in Kansas City.” I said, “I’m not going to do anything about it. I didn’t call you, you called me. It’s your strike, you decide what to do with it.”

That made me sore as hell. These are episodes.

Now we come to the third mandate, which as you can see is difficult. It’s all right to say, “You bargain.” By the time we got around to this, I knew a fair amount about this industry and I’d seen lots of people in Detroit and around the company offices and so on. Also, in this process, I’d seen some Ford people. Now, Ford was not under our jurisdiction because Ford wasn’t a signatory to the code. When we got there, we found there were grievances among the Ford people, so we made an informal agreement with the Ford people whereby we would call those cases to the attention of the ford management and see if they couldn’t settle them informally. It worked pretty well, although of course we had no authority over them.

Well, then I got called up from Washington, by one of the lawyers of the National Labor Relations Board. I knew him. [Edwin S.] Smith or something. He said, “Do you have jurisdiction over Ford?” I said, “Listen” – it’s a long-distance telephone—“we’re not discussing things like this over the telephone, whether you have jurisdiction or I have jurisdiction. It’s up to you to make up your own mind. I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not representing the National Labor Relations Board.” There’s a big question about that: what the hell he wanted to know for, I don’t know, because it didn’t make any difference. He couldn’t do anything with Ford and we at least did something for the Ford people, who claimed they were victimized, they were out of work and wanted to go back to work. My impression at the time was that these people who worked for Ford were very loyal and had worked there a very long time, which people don’t usually do with a company unless they like it, whatever the conditions may have been.

So that was that. Then these strikes broke out, the Kansas City strike and one in the Chevrolet plant, where there was no particular grievance. Well, these strikes broke out, which upset Washington a good deal, and one day I got a call from the mayor of Detroit, who was the son of Senator [James J.] Couzens, and he said he’d like to have lunch with me. I agreed, and we went to lunch.

He said, “You know, all these strikes and threats of strikes”—there weren’t many—“what do you think about having a big mass meeting out in the ball park?”

I said, “What for?”

“Well, have General Johnson come down and talk to them.”

I said, “Have you asked anybody else about this?”

He said—“Well.”

“Well, in my estimation, it’s perfectly crazy. If you want to find a good way of starting new strikes, that’s just the way to do it. There’s no occasion for this and no reason for it.”

He said, “That’s what everybody has told me, I wanted to check.” He evidently had done this for his father in Washington. I went back to the office, and was quietly in the office when the telephone rang, and it was Robbie, the General’s secretary, a girl. “The General wants to talk to you.” She reflected any mood of the General’s. If the General was angry, she was angry, and so on. I said, “All right, put him on.”

She put him on, and he said, “What do you mean by keeping me out of Detroit?”

I said, “General, I’m not keeping you out of anywhere. You can go wherever you like. But this idea of a mass meeting is a crazy idea. I’m against it, I don’t believe in it.”

He was very mad, because he always regarded himself as a kind of a mass leader; if there was something nobody else could handle he could handle it, etc.

I’d go down to Washington every once in a while. I’d see Frances Perkins. I was still living in New York, and I’d go down every other weekend or so. Often I’d have an appointment to see her. She knew exactly what we were doing, and wanted us to do it. You know why? And this is what needs to be understood when people write about it. They wanted the peace kept, with fairness. They didn’t want any trouble. No administration wants trouble. I told you about the time when Roosevelt saw Edwin S. Smith name on the list for the NLRB and said, “I don’t want him because he’s a troublemaker.”¹⁸ Well, that’s what a sensible administrator would do. He doesn’t want somebody out there who’s always going to stir them up. They’re stirred up enough by themselves.

So they knew what was being done and were in accord with it, as I’ll show you later when we come to a later stage.

Now, then, the question was, what to do. It was perfectly clear that the majority of people, for whatever their reasons, were not members of the union. Some were, but the overwhelming majority was not. And there were many reasons for it. For example, I talked to people in Detroit at some General Motors plants, and they told me they’d been members of the United Mine workers and they didn’t want a union. They’d been losing their jobs one after the other with Lewis and the union, and paying big assessments, and they just didn’t want it. They like it better this way.

We read about these things but it just doesn’t represent any canvas of the ideas of the rank and file. It does, of some of the leaders, yes, but that’s another matter.

One of the great problems is that the leaders want different things as compared to the rank and file. That’s the essence of the problem.

There was no union to which they claimed adherence and loyalty. We had to work out some orderly means of permitting representation to operate for the employees. We thought about that for a long time, and the three of us agreed that we would take a plant, like the Buick plant, and divide it into election districts—this is important—and have an election for nominees for representatives in that district; then hold an election and those elected in each one of these districts would come together in a central committee which would constitute the bargaining agency for that plant, and you’d have bargaining agencies by plant. Not an unusual thing. They called it proportionate representation, but strictly speaking it wasn’t.

Well, how do you do a thing like this? First, I’ll tell you about the procedure, and I’ll tell you what happened. We got the man who was professor of labor at the University of Michigan [Zenas Clark Dickinson], whom I knew well, and said, “Now it’s up to you to conduct this.” Then we, in conjunction with this man, went to the firms and the unions in order to work out the election districts, and the election districts were agreed upon. They were national districts—a group of machinists, a group of this and that—national divisions in the plants.

He set up the election machinery, and the elections were held. They could, if they wished, designate a man as a representative of the union, and some few did, but the majority didn’t. They just voted for their representatives, and this thing was set up.

Well, it became known that this is what we were going to do, and I was exposed to all kinds of threats that this would be the end of my career. If I agreed to this thing, I’d never teach at any respectable university after this. One man representing the AFL met me down here (at the Harvard club) in the morning, when I was getting the train in the afternoon, and there was only one man, and he went off by the window so nobody could hear what he had to say—he was a man I happened to know, too—and said that if I was going back to Detroit, I’d have to make the decision, and if I made the decision for these elections, then my career would be over.

I went back, and we held the election, and these instrumentalities were set up. The unions boycotted them. Some unions did, some didn’t. For example, in an area in which the machinists were the dominant craft, the representative of the Machinist Union was nominated and elected. It was perfectly possible for him to carry on his activity as a representative of that group as well as a member of the central committee, and it worked a hell of a lot better than what they did later, no question about that.

Q: What was the basis of the union hostility to your plan?

Wolman: Well, three bases. One, they didn’t want any elections because they didn’t have union members, not many. Two, they wanted to wait until they had enough members, and then make their demands for majority rule, voting for the union or against the union. Three, and the sit-down strikes proved this, they didn’t have the membership. They couldn’t have won an election. So they had to use sit-down strikes or use force.

Well, anyway, that was the history of what we did for representation. Now, this was a period of flux. It would have worked, if the employers had used it to greater effect than they did, something had to be done. But they didn’t play it fairly: neither did the union. Otherwise it might have worked. Anyway, that’s how things were in ’34 and ’35, and we might as well finish this episode…

Then came the question of the renewal of the Automobile Code. That was some time in ’35 or maybe late in ’34. We’d already held these elections, and the President knew about them. The administration was not critical. Frances Perkins may have been, but if she was she didn’t say anything about it. Anyhow, when the question came up of the renewal of the code, the AFL came out against it because the code was identified in their minds with the Automobile Labor Board, which by that time had become anathema to them, for the reasons I’ve already told you.

Well, then, the President had to decide whether he was going to renew the code. Frances Perkins called me up and wanted to see me, so I came down to Washington and went to her house and had breakfast and talked with her for some time. Then she said, “I’m having lunch with the President, and you can come in and see the President right after lunch.”

I had seen him a number of times in Washington and talked with him. He was a reasonable man to talk to about these things, as I had talked to him when he called me and I told him I didn’t want this job. So I went over to his office, and he’d just finished his lunch and was very cordial. Frances Perkins was there, and she’s an old friend of mine.

He was cordial, and then he said, “Well, what about the automobile situation?”

I said, “Mr. President, you know as much as I do. This is a political situation. You know that as far as I am concerned”—I’d tried to get out a number of times, to quit—I said, “It’s a political situation. The AFL is trying to get more than it’s getting. If I were you I wouldn’t do it, I don’t think it’s there to be gotten. But as far as I’m personally concerned, I simply want to get out of this. I’d like to resign.”

I had my say. Frances Perkins was a friend of mine, but she started to argue with me anyway. Finally she left and he and I sat and chatted together about this in his office, before the fireplace, and he finally said, “Well, I’m going to call Bill Green in, and I am going to say to Bill: ‘Bill see that poker? That red hot poker? If I were you, I wouldn’t touch it.’”

That was the Automobile Code for the auto industry. So then we talked about other things. We talked about elections for the Senate, he was having some trouble with this or that one. Finally I said, “Mr. President, I’ve kept you for a long time, I’ve got to go along.”

He said, “Do you want to see the press?”

I said, “I’d rather not.”

So he let me out the back door, and I went back to New York. I knew the code was going to be renewed, and the code was renewed, much to the disgust of the AFL but they couldn’t do a damn thing about it.