Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

by Rick Perlstein

The same year that Kitchel argued in front of the Supreme Court, the right-wing Dallas Morning News ran an editorial headlined “MAGNA CARTA.” It proposed an amendment to the Constitution to make forcing a worker to join a union illegal—protecting the “right to work.” It was a masterstroke. Now, pressing for right-to-work laws, companies could wield the most potent symbol in the American civil religion : liberty. Unions were left in the rhetorical dust. Labor lawyer Arthur J. Goldberg was left to defend the union shop by claiming that unions weren’t exactly voluntary organizations in the first place, but more like armies: they required conscription to exist. That didn’t sound very American. The right achieved a major victory when the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 gave states license to pass their own right-to-work laws. (Arizona was the first to do so.) Every year afterward liberals fought to repeal the union shop exemption, and conservatives fought to preserve it—and to pass more state right-to-work laws.