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How many of you guys have heard of the La Follette Committee?
It was a landmark investigation, one of the most important in American history, into company practices to suppress worker organizing, and one of the most critical actions of the New Deal era.
It was chaired by Wisconsin Progressive Robert La Follette Jr., and it investigated private detective agencies, companies, Hollywood, and big financiers.
What it found effectively amounted to a massive conspiracy to undermine unions. Despite almost every detective agency destroying its records to prevent investigation, it became clear that they employed thousands of spies.
These spies hijacked unions and crashed their support through carefully orchestrated strategies. They also reported all the events within the unions to bosses.
If spying failed, the next strategy was violence. Guns, clubs, gas, bayonets, whatever weapons bosses could buy where used, often through third party hired thugs, to break strikes, regularly killing workers.
Not only did they use open violence, they also used assassinations, false arrests, executions, and assaults hidden as random crime.
After this, strikebreaking was the key tactic. If workers could not be threatened and tricked out of organizing, the next need was to break a strike. To do this, they almost always hired expensive private police forces.
However after its first few years, when it was useful as a favor to the left, the committee became more dangerous than it was worth for the administration, and conservatives began to attack it as a communist riddled subversive institution
At the end of the 1930s it seemed almost doomed from underfunding and attacks. But fortune turned in its favor again when Franklin Roosevelt personally intervened to push for funding to finish the investigation.
But while the committee managed to bring to light a string of horrific labor abuses, it badly struggled to convert public outrage into law. Instead, much of the energy channeled into civil liberties organizations.
As World War Two began, the committee was finally shuttered by the wartime strike pause and the shift from focus on labor issues. However the information it has gathered was used as a constant threat to hang over the heads of companies during the new deal
