National Association of Manufacturers Launches Massive Anti-Union Propaganda Campaign After Strike Wave

The National Association of Manufacturers launches a massive multi-faceted propaganda campaign in response to the unprecedented 1946 strike wave, when nearly 10 percent of the US workforce goes on strike including major actions by the United Auto Workers against General Motors, United Steel Workers against U.S. Steel, and United Electrical Workers against General Electric. NAM’s main propaganda agency, the National Industrial Information Council (NIIC), orchestrates publicity circulating 2 million copies of cartoons, 4.5 million copies of newspaper columns written by pro-business economists, 2.4 million foreign language news pieces, and 11 million employee leaflets. The campaign displays 45,000 billboards seen by an estimated 65 million Americans daily, while NAM’s film series is viewed by approximately 18 million people.

NAM promotes its anti-union message through nationally syndicated radio programs including “The American Family Robinson,” a folksy drama of small-town American life that didactically warns of “foreign” socialist theories and reassures listeners of business leaders’ beneficence. The campaign runs advertisements criticizing the New Deal, with one ad carrying the headline “The American Way is to the Right” over an image implying government investment would lead to Nazism and communism. NAM distributes “educational” materials to schools, libraries, religious leaders and women’s clubs promoting the “indivisibility thesis” that free enterprise, democracy, and individual liberty form an inseparable “tripod of freedom.” The organization circulates campaign materials to workplaces and public spaces based on communication theorists’ belief that repetitive exposure to emotion-laden messaging can influence viewers on a subconscious level.

The campaign’s messaging, informed by NAM’s late 1930s efforts to delegitimize the New Deal and labor unions, advocates for lifting wartime price controls, abolishing the Office of Price Administration, and restricting union power. Nearly 10 percent of the US workforce striking represents an explosion too large to ignore, and business demands a political response. With a newly elected Republican majority in Congress following the 1946 midterm elections, NAM gets its political response. As Congressman Donald O’Toole of New York later reveals, the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 is prepared “sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, by the National Association of Manufacturers,” with Republican Joseph Ball of Minnesota telling attendees of the 1946 NAM convention that the pending legislation “will bear down most heavily on unions.” The NAM propaganda campaign establishes the template for corporate messaging against labor that continues through ALEC, Americans for Prosperity, and other Powell Memo-inspired infrastructure.