Arkansas and Florida Become First States to Pass Right-to-Work Laws Through Racist, Anti-Semitic Campaign

Arkansas and Florida become the first two states to enact “right-to-work” laws on November 7, 1944, following campaigns led by Vance Muse and the Christian American Association that explicitly frame anti-union legislation as essential for maintaining racial segregation and Jim Crow labor relations. The Christian American Association, founded by Muse in Houston in 1936 with backing from Southern oil companies and Northeastern industrialists, champions “Right-to-Work” as a full-blown political slogan. The term itself comes from Dallas Morning News editorial writer William Ruggles, who on Labor Day 1941 called for a constitutional amendment prohibiting the closed or union shop. Muse visits Ruggles and secures the writer’s blessing to campaign for state laws, with Ruggles suggesting the name “right-to-work.” Muse’s own grandson later describes him as “a white supremacist, an anti-Semite, and a Communist-baiter, a man who beat on labor unions not on behalf of working people, as he said, but because he was paid to do so.”

The Arkansas Farm Bureau Federation and allied industrialists underwrite the Christian American Association’s 1944 campaign to secure a Right-to-Work amendment for the Arkansas constitution after being pleased with the organization’s success in passing an anti-strike measure. While Muse and the Christian Americans help with campaigns in California and Florida, they lead the Arkansas campaign. During the Arkansas campaign, the Christian Americans insist that Right-to-Work is essential for the maintenance of the color line, using segregationist views as their primary argument against unions. Muse equates union growth with race-mixing and communism, employing overtly racist rhetoric. In the wake of the Arkansas vote, Vance Muse boasts of his success, stating regarding the amendment: “Our amendment helps the nigger; it does not discriminate against him. Good niggers, not those Communist niggers.” He offers the Christian American Association’s services to those in other states wanting to bankroll similar campaigns.

The Christian American Association campaigns also employ anti-Semitic messaging, framing Right-to-Work laws as means to maintain Jim Crow labor relations and beat back what Muse characterizes as a Jewish cabal to foment revolution. As Vance Muse’s co-worker and wife Maria confesses in 1943, “Christian Americans can’t afford to be anti-Semitic outwardly, but we know where we stand on the Jews, all right.” The organization tones down its anti-Semitic rhetoric by the early 1940s due to waves of anti-Semitism emanating from Hitler and Nazi Germany. The 1944 Arkansas and Florida victories establish right-to-work laws as a tool for maintaining white supremacy and suppressing multiracial labor organizing, with 14 states passing such legislation by 1947 when conservatives in Congress successfully include Section 14(b) in the Taft-Hartley Act authorizing states to ban union shop agreements. The explicitly racist origins of right-to-work legislation demonstrate how corporate anti-union campaigns exploit and reinforce structural racism to divide workers and prevent class solidarity, establishing a template that continues through the Southern Strategy and ALEC’s coordinated state legislative campaigns.