As Right-To-Work (for less) Laws proliferate, it's worth remembering that they originated as a means to maintain Jim Crow Labor Relations in the South and to beat back what was seen as a Jewish conspiracy.

No one was more important in placing Right-To-Work on the Conservative Political Agenda than Vance Muse of the Christian American Association, a larger-than-life Texan whose own grandson described him as “a White Supremacist, an Anti-Semite, and a Communist-baiter, a man who beat on Labor Unions - not on behalf of Working People, as he said, but because he was paid to do so.”

The idea for Right-To-Work Laws came from Dallas Morning News Editorial Writer William Ruggles, who on Labor Day 1941 called for a constitutional amendment prohibiting the closed or Union Shop.

Muse visited Ruggles soon thereafter and secured the writer’s blessing for the Christian American Association’s campaign to outlaw contracts that required Employees to belong to Unions.

Ruggles even suggested to Muse the name for such legislation - Right-To-Work.

Muse had long made a lucrative living lobbying throughout the South on behalf of Conservative and corporate interests or, in the words of one of his critics: “Playing rich industrialists as suckers.”

Over the course of his career, he fought women’s suffrage, worked to defeat the Constitutional Amendment prohibiting Child Labor, lobbied for high tariffs, and sought to repeal the eight-hour-day law for Railroaders.

Muse first attracted national attention through his work with Texas Lumberman John Henry Kirby in the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution.  That committee sought to keep President Roosevelt from being re-nominated in 1936, on grounds that the New Deal threatened the South’s racial order.

Despite its name, the Southern Committee received funding from prominent Northern Anti-New Deal industrialists and financiers, including Alfred P. Sloan and the du Pont brothers.

Among Muse’s activities on behalf of the Southern Committee was the distribution of what Time called “cheap pamphlets containing blurred photographs of the Roosevelts consorting with Negroes,” accompanied by “blatant text proclaiming them ardent Negrophiles.”

In 1936, Muse incorporated the Christian American Association to continue the fight against the New Deal, offering up a toxic mix of anti-Semitism, racism, anti-Communism and Anti-Unionism.

Supporters of the Association considered the New Deal to be part of the broader assault of “Jewish Marxism” upon Christian free enterprise.

The organization’s nominal head, Lewis Valentine Ulrey, explained that after their success in Russia, the “Talmudists” had determined to conquer the rest of the world and that “by 1935 they had such open success with the New Deal in the United States, that they decided to openly restore the Sanhedrin,” that is, both the council of Jewish leaders who oversaw a community and the Jewish elders who, according to the Bible, plotted to kill Christ.

According to Ulrey, this “modern Jewish Sanhedrin” - which included Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and NAACP Board Member Rabbi Stephen Wise - served as the guiding force of the Roosevelt Administration and the New Deal government.

Vance Muse voiced the same Anti-Semitic ideas in simpler terms: “That crazy man in the White House will Sovietize America with the federal hand-outs of the Bum Deal - sorry, New Deal or is it the Jew Deal?”

By the early 1940s, the Christian American Association, like many Southern Conservatives, focused much of their wrath on the Labor Movement, especially the CIO.

The Association solicited wealthy Southern planters and industrialists for funds to help enact Anti-Union Laws and thus break the “strangle hold radical Labor has on our government.”

To Read The Rest Of This Labor News Story, Go To: www.labornotes.org/blogs/2017/08/racist-who-pioneered-right-work-laws