La Follette Civil Liberties Committee Begins Investigation Exposing Corporate Union-Busting and Industrial Espionage

The Senate Subcommittee on Education and Labor, chaired by Senator Robert M. La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin, begins hearings on June 6, 1936, launching a four-year investigation that systematically exposes the violent and illegal tactics American corporations use to suppress union organizing. The La Follette Civil Liberties Committee produces over 14,000 pages of testimony and 75 volumes of exhibits documenting corporate espionage, private armies, strike-breaking, and the systematic violation of workers’ constitutional rights—the most comprehensive exposure of corporate labor suppression in American history.

The committee’s investigation reveals that major American corporations employ thousands of labor spies through private detective agencies to infiltrate and disrupt unions. The Pinkerton Detective Agency alone provides labor espionage services to over 300 corporations, with agents rising to leadership positions in unions to report on organizing activities and foment internal dissent. The committee discovers that General Motors paid nearly $1 million over two years to detective agencies for labor espionage, while Republic Steel, U.S. Steel, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, and Bethlehem Steel maintain private arsenals including rifles, revolvers, shotguns, and tear gas grenades to deploy against striking workers. Ford Motor Company’s “Service Department” under Harry Bennett operates as a private army numbering in the hundreds, using violence and intimidation against union supporters.

The committee exposes the “Mohawk Valley Formula,” a systematic corporate union-busting strategy developed by Remington Rand that becomes a model for employer resistance to the Wagner Act. Hearings reveal detailed evidence of corporate coordination to defeat organizing campaigns, including propaganda techniques, front groups like “citizens’ committees” and “back to work” movements, and collaboration with local police to violently suppress strikes. The committee’s findings support passage of the Byrnes Act (1936) prohibiting interstate transportation of strikebreakers and contribute to public support for union organizing during the CIO’s industrial union drives. The La Follette Committee demonstrates how thorough congressional investigation can expose corporate lawbreaking, though the infrastructure of labor suppression it documents is never fully dismantled and resurfaces in modified forms through subsequent decades.