“Things Are Different Down Here”: The 1955 Perfect Circle Strike, Conservative Civic Identity, and the Roots of the New Right in the 1950s Industrial Heartland

Abstract

AbstractThe article examines the history of the violent 1955 Perfect Circle strike to join the growing body of labor history scholarship that rejects the existence of a postwar “labor-management accord.” Contrary to previous depictions of a postwar “class peace,” the small-town industrial Midwest stood as a key battleground between unionized workers and competitive-sector employers such as the Indiana-based Perfect Circle Corporation, a small, family-owned manufacturer, a model welfare capitalist firm, and one of the nation's leading automotive parts producers. Driven by their desire to hold down labor costs and their own antistatist ideology, Perfect Circle's owners had opposed the New Deal and, by the late 1930s, had shed their previous provincialism to join the national political coalition of business conservatives in the National Association of Manufacturers to secure the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. During the Cold War era, even while they were extending their political reach and expanding their operations overseas, Perfect Circle's owners sought to forge labor-management unity by promoting a quaint vision of “heartland consensus,” a conservative civic identity that management was convinced would render unions unnecessary. As with many business conservatives, Perfect Circle owners tried to rid their plants of unions by tapping into an interlocking network of well-financed right-wing policy groups to mount an extensive employee educational program and public relations campaign in defense of “free enterprise.” Despite Perfect Circle's vigorous efforts to undercut unionization, by 1953 the majority of workers at all four of its east-central Indiana plants voted to affiliate with the United Auto Workers (UAW). Conflict between labor and management culminated in the violent 1955 strike, in which Perfect Circle handed the UAW a decisive defeat while enjoying widespread support from the regional and national press. The strike became a conservativecause célèbreduring the 1957 national “right-to-work” campaign and a centerpiece of the Senate's 1958 McClellan “Labor Rackets” hearings, which launched Barry Goldwater's bid for the 1964 presidency. The article concludes that Perfect Circle and many other employers not only continued to contest unions in the 1950s but also played a neglected but important role in the formation of the New Right.