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Common Laborers? Industrial Pluralists, Legal Realists, and the Law of Industrial Disputes, 1915–1943
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2011
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At the turn of the twentieth century, when highbrow political thinkers rebelled against the consensual epistemology and ethics of the Victorians, when they argued, as William James did, that “neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer,” when they declared themselves to be living in “a world where truth and justice are to be carved from culture rather than found already etched in reason,” they created an unprecedented problem in liberal political and legal thought. Previous thinkers could take the individual as the fundamental political unit and attribute to “him” a capacity for knowing and doing right that “he” shared with all God's children (as “commonsense” moral philosophy held) or all participants in a consensual, organically developing society (as historicist scholarship had it). Armed with such premises, they could confidently judge diverse social practices against universal standards of conduct.
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References
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111. Arnold, Folklore, 4; Thurman Arnold, “Labor Technique,” review of When Labor Organizes, by Robert R.R. Brooks, Yale Review, n.s., 27 (Winter 1938): 418–19. For a defense of the sit-down strike by one of Arnold's colleagues, see Green, Leon, “The Case for the Sit-Down Strike,” New Republic 90 (March 24, 1937): 199–201.Google Scholar On Remington Rand and its “Mohawk Valley formula,” see Bernstein, Irving, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 (Boston, 1970), 478–79.Google Scholar
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113. “Statement of Thurman W. Arnold, Assistant Attorney General of the United States before the Temporary National Economic Committee with Respect to the Application of Antitrust Laws to Labor Unions, Thursday, February 13, 1941,” p. 1, File 60–194–0, Box 3496, Department of Justice Papers, Record Group 60, National Archives; see Brinkley, Alan, “The New Deal and the Idea of the State,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary (Princeton, 1989), 90–91.Google Scholar
114. My figures are based on an excellent research paper written under my direction, W. Kenneth Ferree, “Antitrust Policy and the Labor Exemption: Thurman Arnold's Prosecutions of Labor Organizations” (Georgetown University Law Center, 1991). I am grateful to Mr. Ferree for permission to cite his findings. I have also profited from consulting research materials generated by another student, Laura L. Spaulding, while preparing her paper, “The Folklore of Thurman Arnold” (Georgetown University Law Center, 1989). The three CIO locals were fishermen's unions located on the West Coast.
115. Arnold's lawyers intervened on the side of CIO unions in several jurisdictional disputes between the two federations. Arnold to Robert H. Jackson, February 21, 1941, in Voltaire and the Cowboy, 313; Thurman Arnold, “Statement of Thurman W. Arnold, Assistant Attorney General of the United States, before the Temporary National Economic Committee, with Respect to the Application of Antitrust Laws to Labor Unions,” February 13, 1941, p. 4 (“T.N.E.C. Statement”), File 60–194–0, Box 641, Department of Justice Papers.
116. Arnold to D. R. Barnecle, November 18, 1939, File 60–194–0, Box 644, Department of Justice Papers, reprinted in Arnold, Thurman W., Bottlenecks of Business (New York, 1940), 249–53Google Scholar; Arnold, “T.N.E.C. Statement,” February 13, 1941, p. 2.
117. American Federation of Labor, “Analysis of Thurman Arnold's Statement Made before the T.N.E.C. on February 13th, 1941,” pp. 1, 8, File 60–194–0, Box 3496, Department of Justice Papers.
118. Epstein, Henry, “Against Application of Anti-Trust Laws to Labor Organizations,” in Trade Unions and the Anti-Trust Laws, ed. Johnson, Julia E. (New York, 1940), 188Google Scholar (Address before the National Lawyers' Guild, Washington, D. C, January 12, 1940); “The Folk-Law of Thurman Arnold,” International Juridical Association Monthly Bulletin 8 (December 1939): 53, 61–64, reprinted in ibid, 219; Lerner, Max, “Trust-Buster's White Paper,” New Republic 103 (September 16, 1940): 390.Google Scholar
119. Kirchwey, Freda, “Blunderbuss,” Nation 149 (December 2, 1939), 597Google Scholar; AFL, “Analysis,” 14; Henry Epstein to Franklin D. Roosevelt, November 21, 1939, File 60–194–0, Box 645, Department of Justice Papers.
120. On the Legal Process school, see Wellington, Harry, Labor and the Legal Process (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; Peller, Gary, “Neutral Principles in the 1950s,” Michigan Journal of Law Reform 21 (Summer 1988): 561–622.Google Scholar
121. Arnold to Arthur Sulzberger, January 25, 1940, in Voltaire and the Cowboy, 304. See also Thurman Arnold, “The Antitrust Laws and Labor,” in Trade Unions and the Antitrust Laws, 88, 91, 92 (Address delivered before American Labor Club, New York City, January 27, 1940).
122. The Cahns themselves drew the connection between pro-consumer and public-interest lawyering. Edgar S. and Cahn, Jean Camper, “Power to the People or the Profession? The Public Interest in Public Interest Law,” Yale Law Journal 79 (May 1970): 1005–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also McCraw, Thomas K., “Regulation in America: A Review Article,” Business History Review 49 (Summer 1975): 179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
123. Hamilton, Walton, “Anti-Trust v. the Trade Union,” New Republic 102 (April 15, 1940): 496.Google Scholar
124. Arnold, Bottlenecks, 289, 280–81. On Arnold's “progressive moralism,” see Ayer, Douglas, “In Quest of Efficiency: The Ideological Journey of Thurman Arnold in the Interwar Period,” Stanford Law Review 23 (June 1971): 1052–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the demise of the progressives' notion of a unitary public good and the rise of pluralism in political culture, see Rodgers, Daniel T., Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (New York, 1987), 176–211.Google Scholar
125. Arnold to Freda Kirchwey, December 14, 1939, in Voltaire and the Cowboy, 298; Arnold to Lerner, December 20, 1939, in ibid., 299; Arnold to Reed Powell, February 21, 1941, in ibid., 317.
126. Arnold to Reed Powell, April 19, 1941, in Voltaire and the Cowboy, 318–19; Arnold to Edwin E. Witte, November 22, 1941, File 6–194–0, Box 645, Department of Justice Papers; Arnold, Thurman W., “Labor's Hidden Hold-Up Men,” Reader's Digest 38 (June 1941): 136–40.Google Scholar
127. Witte, “Mr. Arnold's Proposed Antilabor Amendments, 452–53, 455–56, 457–58.
128. Fumer, Mary O., “Knowing Capitalism: Public Investigation and the Labor Question in the Long Progressive Era,” in The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences, ed. Furner, Mary O. and Supple, Barry (Cambridge, 1990), 244–45.Google Scholar
129. Ibid., 286.
130. See Stone, “Post-War Paradigm.”
131. Sollors, Werner, Beyond Ethnicity: Descent and Consent (New York, 1986), 13Google Scholar; see also Sollor's, “Of Mules and Mares in a Land of Difference; or, Quadrupeds All?” American Quarterly 42 (June 1990): 167–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
132. Arnold, Symbols, 10; Hook, Sidney, “The Folklore of Capitalism: The Politician's Handbook—A Review,” University of Chicago Law Review 5 (April 1938): 345–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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