Historians/History

Is the National Archives Preserving or Distorting the Heritage of the New Deal?

by Martin Halpern

Mr. Halpern is a professor of history at Henderson State University and author of Unions, Radicals and Democratic Presidents: Seeking Social Change in the Twentieth Century (Greenwood Press, 2003) and UAW Politics in the Cold War Era (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).

In encouraging students to conduct research on important events in history, historians today have access to a wealth of resources on the Internet. I tell my students to view critically all sources but that sites managed by government agencies and university libraries are generally reliable. My experience with calling to the attention of the National Archives an important error on the www.ourdocuments.gov website will lead me to tell students to exercise due caution at even these sites. The National Archives is presenting to the public a revised version of the National Labor Relations Act as if it were the original document and refuses to correct the error. An agency charged with preserving our nation's documents is failing in its duty to honestly present this important pro-union document to the public. It is distorting rather than preserving the heritage of the New Deal.

Seventy five years ago the New Deal began to shift governmental policies toward giving substantial assistance to the poor, workers, farmers, and home owners, and toward significant involvement in the management of the economy to promote employment and economic growth. Several of the New Deal's most important achievements remain part of the fabric our lives today such as the social security system established in 1935 and the regulations limiting child labor and providing for minimum wages, maximum hours, and overtime pay adopted in 1938.

The initial pro-union thrust of the New Deal's most radical legislation, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, has been significantly weakened by later legislation, most notably the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, and by anti-union administration under Republican presidents. Nevertheless, if we are to gain an understanding of the enlarged role of labor unions in American life that the New Deal fostered we need to appreciate the labor relations system that the 74th Congress led by Senator Robert Wagner and President Franklin Roosevelt put in place in 1935.

The National Labor Relations Act was a one-sided piece of pro-labor legislation. Congress perceived the great imbalance in power between labor and management and sought to encourage workers to join unions, end management interference in union organizing, and compel employers to negotiate with unions selected by a majority of their workers.

Students who turn to the www.ourdocuments.gov website will find the National Labor Relations Act listed among 100 "milestone" documents in our history but they will not find the original legislation. Instead, despite a citation that says the document on the website is the 1935 act as preserved in the National Archives, they will find a revised version of the act with later amendments. Although some of the amendments are documented, most are not. Even if all the amendments were documented, on a project designed to present documents of historic importance, it makes no sense to disguise the content of the original legislation.

I wrote Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States, on December 3, 2007, to bring this problem to his attention. I pointed out that placing on the agency's website and including in the published book, Our Documents: 100 Milestone Documents from the National Archives, a transcript with anti-labor sections opposed by unions as if they were part of the original act would prevent the public from getting "an accurate idea of the pro-labor content of the 1935 law." I also listed factual errors and questionable interpretative judgments in the site's introduction to the document. The final sentence of the introduction gets the date of the Taft-Hartley Act wrong and misleadingly asserts that the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act were "expanded" by the Taft-Hartley and the Landrum-Griffin acts.

James Hastings, Director of Access Programs, replied to my letter on January 4, 2008. He thanked me and said "we are working on correcting the errors that you have pointed out." In response to my follow up query, Mr. Hastings on February 5, 2008, told me "We have added a note to the online transcript to indicate that it is the Act as amended since 1935. See http://www.ourdocuments.gov. We are looking into the possibility of adding an errata sheet to the published volume."

This minimal correction misses the main point of my critique and also allows many errors to remain uncorrected. The public continues to be misled. Why post a transcript of a revised act but an image showing the original one? Why include in the published volume and on the website this "citation": "An act to diminish the causes of labor disputes burdening or obstructing interstate and foreign commerce, to create a National Labor Relations Board, and for other purposes, July 5, 1935; General Records of the United States Government; Record Group 11; National Archives" if the transcript that you are presenting is of the act as amended?

I haven't examined the other documents on the www.ourdocuments.gov website. In a published review of the website in the Journal of American History, Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John McMillian characterize the project as "embarrassingly retrograde" for treating oppressed groups as objects rather than subjects of history, including not a single document written by a woman and one only by a person of color, ignoring social movements, and "its failure adequately (or honestly?) to contextualize the major texts it includes." Certainly at a minimum the National Archives owes visitors to its website an accurate presentation of the texts of the documents that are in its custody.

Perhaps the oddest part of this story is that the National Archives conducted a People's Vote in cooperation with the National History Day and U.S. News and World Report. Did the 1,116 people whose votes made the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 number 57 on the 100 Milestone Documents list have in mind the 1935 act or the act as amended over the next fifty years? Certainly the website lists the original text of the Declaration of Independence, the document ranked first, rather than any of the twenty two alternative declarations authored by feminist, labor, farmer, African American, and Socialist groups over the next two centuries.

In this seventy-fifth year of the New Deal's beginning, it is worth reflecting on a moment when government sought to empower working people and encourage unionization. The National Archives can do a little to contribute to the process by correcting the many errors about the National Labor Relations Act on its website.