In particular, history shows that the strength of labor activism in a community directly correlates with its support for the Democratic Party over time. Labor organizing brought the Democratic Party’s message to workers in cities in the heartland in the 1930s and 1940s, and labor’s uneven decline as an economic and political force explains why many of these towns have lurched toward Trumpism — even as some remain resistant to the former president's message.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt courted industrial workers hurt by the Great Depression with enormous success. He encouraged them to see the Democratic Party as the political vehicle to solve their problems and it worked: according to a 1940 survey of Erie County, Ohio — an industrial town — a majority of voters thought that Roosevelt represented the “common people.”
The Wagner Act, passed in 1935, was central to Roosevelt’s pitch. The law gave industrial workers the right to organize, made it illegal for employers to refuse to bargain collectively, and established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to adjudicate disputes between workers and management. The Wagner Act helped revitalize a labor movement that had stagnated during the 1920s.
In response, organized labor, particularly unions affiliated with the newly established Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), supported Roosevelt and helped spread the message that Democrats were the friends of workers.
The symbiotic relationship between organized labor and the New Deal administration that blossomed is evident in the history of three midwestern towns that I visited — one in Wisconsin, one Minnesota, and one in Indiana. In the Wisconsin town, a decades-long history of labor and socialist organizing had waned during the 1920s, but workers were able to revive these organizations during the New Deal, as one labor leader later recalled. And in the other towns, active labor movements emerged and consolidated for the first time in the 1930s, in part aided directly by the Wagner Act. In the Minnesota town, for example, management at the city’s largest plant sought to discourage unionization by establishing a company-run “employees’ association,” which the NLRB ruled illegal. Workers subsequently voted to join a CIO-affiliated union.
The influence of organized labor and its support for the Democratic Party explained why these three towns — and others like them in places across the industrial Midwest — remained a crucial part of the New Deal coalition through the 1950s.
But that began to change during the 1960s and 1970s as race and religion moved to the center of American politics in new ways.