Under Construction: Frames, Culture, and American Labor’s Postwar Embrace of “Free Enterprise”

Abstract

The empirical literature on social movement framing has largely neglected the processes by which frames are made. This paper addresses this lacuna through a study of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) embrace of “free enterprise” in its postwar program in the 1940s. Conventional accounts present the CIO’s use of consensual language in this period as a reflection of the labor federation’s rightward ideological drift, but a close examination of the processes involved in the construction of the “free enterprise” frames reveals a more complicated story. Drawing from archival research, I show that free enterprise was viewed with suspicion and antipathy within the organization, which is reflected in early drafts of the program literature. I also demonstrate that the decision to ultimately embrace “free enterprise” was rooted in a defensive strategy, one that was shaped in part by the leadership’s perception of American political culture at the time.