Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. : The Old New Dealer and the Union Democracy Movement
Michael Parrish

In the summer of 1939, Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., then a young attorney barely four years out of law school, became head of the opinion section in the general counsel's office of the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor, an agency charged with enforcement of the last significant reform of the New Deal, the Fair Labor Standards Act. Over the next several years, before shifting to the Lend Lease Administration, Rauh pushed for the broadest possible coverage of the new federal minimum wage of 25 cents an hour, a crusade that brought him into conflict with assorted agricultural interests, small businessmen, several labor unions, and many members of Congress who represented these constituencies. In the aftermath of World War 11, renewing a friendship with Walter Reuther and his brothers, Rauh became Washington counsel and general counsel to the United Automobile Workers Union, a post that catapulted him into the front rank of the nation's labor lawyers and generated the steady income that permitted him and his associates to represent numerous clients caught in the web of Truman-McCarthy era witch hunts, most notably Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, William Remington, John Service and Max Shachtman.

As the UAW's top lawyer and a founding member of Americans for Democratic Action, Rauh also played a leading role in post-New Deal liberal efforts to weaken and ultimately destroy the influence of the American Communist Party inside the auto union, the CIO and various avatars of the Popular Front such as Henry Wallace's campaign for the presidency in 1948. While fighting against efforts to weaken New Deal reforms by means of Taft-Hartley, right-to
2 work laws, and Landrum-Griffin, he also encouraged the development of a citizen's advisory broad for the UAW, opposed the use of union dues for purely partisan political campaigns, and defended union members and former communists trapped in the federal government's Kafkaesque loyalty and security programs.

In the late 1960's and 70's, however, this old New Dealer and major architect of organized labor's new establishment would begin to employ statutes such as the Landrum-Griffin Act against that establishment when he took up the cause of dissident and insurgent candidates inside the United Mine Workers, the United Steelworkers, and even the UAW itself. By representing Jock Yablonski, Ed Sadlowski and Jerry Tucker, among others, Rauh became the chief legal tactician of the union democracy movement and the architect of significant reforms in the nation's labor laws. When Arnold Miller finally won election as president of the UMW, District Judge George Hart, with whom Rauh had battled for years, commented that the latter had achieved the most effective use of the law that he had ever witnessed in his career on the bench. Although Sadlowski failed in his attempt to win the presidency of the steelworkers, Rauh's efforts led to the establishment of a new international office that has been occupied by an African-American, and undoubtedly led to the election of Lynn Williams, a democratic-socialist, as USWA president

Rauh's work in the UMW and steelworkers cases provided the blueprint which was later followed by the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the AUD, and the Justice Department in the Teamsters RICO litigation, especially the one-person, one-vote requirement in the consent decree for elections that put Ron Carey into the presidency of the union. And reformed Teamsters' votes brought John Sweeney and Rich Trumka to the leadership of the AFL-CIO, the most 3 significant event in the labor movement since the founding of the Federation.

From his earliest days in the New Deal, Joe Rauh attempted to navigate and master the inherent contradictions in American labor law that on the one hand sought greater economic security for men and women through collective action and strong union authority, but without the sacrifice of democratic values that often challenged those same assumptions. This paper explores the threads of continuity in Rauh's career from UAW general counsel to spokesman for greater union democracy.