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The analysis examines the effort to incorporate labor rights into the American conception of civil liberties and the opposition to that endeavor. It focuses on three Senators—Robert Wagner, Robert La Follette, Jr., and Elbert Thomas—and New Deal officials who conceived of the National Labor Relations Act as a cornerstone of the effort to achieve “economic justice” and defended the law against its critics. It examines the opponents, including the National Association of Manufacturers and an anticommunist alliance between southern Democrats and Republicans. An ideological counteroffensive recast the supporters of social rights as un-American opponents of free enterprise and defined civil liberties as protecting the individual from an expansionist state and labor bosses. The analysis demonstrates the multiple causes for the disappearance of ideological space for conceiving that protection from oppressive employers constituted a civil liberty and the displacement of labor rights by the “right to work.”

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Oreskes, Conway and Tyson ask a deceptively simple question: how did so many Americanscome to believe that economic and political freedoms are indivisible from one another? Onepart of the answer involves organized campaigns by trade associations to sell neoliberalprinciples to the American people. This chapter examines one such campaign: the NationalAssociation of Manufacturers’ propaganda effort of 1935–1940. A central part of thiscampaign was the radio show The American Family Robinson. This folksy drama of small-townAmerican life didactically warned of “foreign” socialist theories and reassuredlisteners of the beneficence of business leaders. The program offers a case studyin corporate propaganda. In its bid to convince listeners that the American way of lifedepends on the free market – and that any move toward social democracy presents athreat – the show dramatizes argumentative and rhetorical procedures that continue toshape American political culture.

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From Labor Rights to the Right to Work: Constituting and Resisting Social Citizenship, 1932–1953

4 - How American Businessmen Made Us Believe that Free Enterprise was Indivisible from American Democracy: The National Association of Manufacturers’ Propaganda Campaign 1935–1940

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From Labor Rights to the Right to Work: Constituting and Resisting Social Citizenship, 1932–1953

4 - How American Businessmen Made Us Believe that Free Enterprise was Indivisible from American Democracy: The National Association of Manufacturers’ Propaganda Campaign 1935–1940

Summary