“A Dilatory Stratagem”: Taft-Hartley, American Enka, and the Defeat of Organized Labor in the Postwar South

Abstract

Abstract“A Dilatory Stratagem” argues that the national Taft-Hartley Act (1947) emboldened southern employers to use permanent replacement hiring to undermine organized labor and eradicate union locals soon after World War II. Extensive archival research in union records, government documents, and newspapers, as well as oral history interviews conducted with former employees, tells the story of the 1950 strike at the American Enka Rayon plant in Morristown, Tennessee. Although largely unknown, the Enka strike became the subject of national congressional hearings and demonstrated the importance of permanent replacement hiring in management's anti-union toolbox well before the 1970s.