THE US LABOR MOVEMENT has long been implicated in the country’s wars abroad. In a famous December 1940 radio address, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked unions and bosses to come together in the fight against global fascism by rapidly converting the US peacetime economy into a wartime one. “I appeal to the owners of plants, to the managers, to the workers, to our own government employees to put every ounce of effort into producing these munitions swiftly and without stint,” he said. “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.”
Coming as it did a decade into the Great Depression, Roosevelt’s address was welcomed by many in the US labor movement. Walter Reuther, a young and ambitious UAW official who would go on to become the union’s longest-serving president, was among those who echoed Roosevelt’s call, proposing that the unused capacity of the auto industry be transformed into a massive fighter plane production unit churning out “500 planes a day.” Such enthusiasm anticipated the enormous benefits unions would soon reap from the wartime economy—chief among them a massive growth in membership numbers thanks to pro-union government policies in war-related industries. In the decades following Allied victory in 1945, the US weapons industry remained crucial to the economy thanks to the Cold War demand for “military preparedness,” which led to the emergence of what Dwight Eisenhower—the last army general to become US president—dubbed the military-industrial complex. Labor officials, many of them fierce anti-Communists, accepted or even encouraged such Cold War militarism on the grounds that the weapons industry provided good-paying union jobs.
Organized labor’s alliance with the military-industrial complex persisted comfortably until the late 1960s, when pressure from the anti-Vietnam War movement began to challenge the prevailing consensus. Reuther, now a veteran labor leader, had initially supported the war in the name of battling Communism and remaining close to Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson. But as the anti-war movement grew, Reuther started making tepid calls for a negotiated peace, fully coming out against the war once Johnson announced he was not seeking reelection in 1968. “We must mobilize for peace rather than for wider theaters of war in order to turn our resources and the hearts, hands, and minds of our people to the fulfillment of America’s unfinished agenda at home,” he said.