Why Baton Rouge held a massive parade for the NRA
I find a drop of information while I’m researching stories that often go into a well full of unused facts. Every so often, I find an opportunity to collect some of those drops into a bucket and pull them together into a story.
This is one of those instances, thanks to LABOR DAY!
The holiday will always fall on the day of a DESR ride because it’s always celebrated on the first Monday in September. The very first Labor Day celebration happened right here in Baton Rouge!
JUST KIDDING! It was New York, duh. And it happened in 1882. It was made an official federal holiday in 1894 when President Grover Cleveland put his stamp of approval on that document.
So now you know the when, let’s talk about the why. The 1800s was a big time in American history. This was when things were really getting started in terms of the industrial revolution. Although much was being created, a whole lot was being sacrificed, too.
The average American worker was spending about 12-hours a day working, and they were working seven days a week. Children as young as 5 years old were working in the mills and they made less than half as much as an adult. When people like to think about the “good ol’ days,” they tend to forget all the awful, terrible, no-good things that happened right along with it.
Another BIG moment was happening in American history around this time - the Civil War. By the time we get to the 1880s, America was undergoing some serious changes. This is also the time when labor unions started to really get shaking.
Strikes, rallies, and protests were held to bring attention to the poor conditions. Pay was being renegotiated, and people really started to see the power of uniting. Keep in mind, there was violence, too. Change always seems to come with a bit of violence, unfortunately. And racism, always racism. But we’ll get to that later.
First, the good stuff.
The Department of Labor was created on March 4, 1913. This was the agency that created the 40-hour work week (love it or hate it, it’s better than the 84-hour work week, which was pretty standard until then.) They also created the concept of a “weekend.”
The weekend party didn’t last too long because WWI cranked up the following year. Once the war ended, however, America held a party like no other. Everyone was spending money like they were in a rap video. Like most cities in America, Baton Rouge was booming!
Local businesses were popping up left and right around the city. Most of my research starts with the 20s because that’s when the city really started expanding.
All good parties have to come to an end, and for America, the bouncer was the stock market.
October 29, 1929 was Black Tuesday. Billions of dollars were lost and thousands of investors were wiped out. That was the final peg that knocked America into the Great Depression.
It would take about a decade for the country to fully recover, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt came through with some critical legislation that really got the wheels of commerce cranking again.
The “New Deal” was a series of programs and projects that set out to get the country going again. Right after being elected, he gave that legendary inaugural address, “First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Those words still get people fired up today! In just a few months, he put his money where his mouth was.
The National Recovery Administration was created to allow for unions to bargain collectively for higher wages and better working conditions. Now this is where my information drops start getting put in the bucket.
While researching one of our local businesses, I found several names of business owners in one article. They were all participants in a massive NRA parade. Well, you can imagine what I thought when I saw Baton Rouge participating in a massive NRA parade. Hint: Unions were not top of mind.
After digging in, I quickly learned the parade was for the National Recovery Administration and it was a parade to show SUPPORT for the program. Over 5,000 people participated and an estimated 15-25,000 people showed up to watch.
Leading the parade was Oscar K. Allen, who was the first elected governor after Huey Long. Behind him were local public officials, business owners, and educators. The schools shut down for the day so the kids could march in the parade. Businesses closed shop early. The entire city supported this effort and that was evident by the massive swell of support.
What changed?
World War II pushed the country out of its healing phase and right back into another round of sacrifice and scarcity. During the war, the unions swore not to strike and they kept that promise. When the war ended, all bets were off.
In 1946, President Harry S. Truman was in charge of the country and Senator Robert Alphonso Taft Sr. (the elder son of William Howard Taft, the 27th President of the United States) and Congressmen Frederick Allan Hartley Jr. introduced separate bills in the Senate and the House that were eventually conflated into the Taft-Hartley bill.
On the surface, the Taft-Hartley Act was set to do some good things. It defined six additional unfair labor practices, but it also put some pressure on unions. In particular, it made it harder to boycott and to have sympathy boycotts. It also put some additional pressure on union leaders.
Around the same time, the idea of “right to work” came about. Okay, here comes the racism, folks.
Let’s start by defining “right to work.” Basically, it allows the employers to opt out of using unions. Louisiana is a right to work state. This means employers do not have to use a union and the law also makes it an option for employees in a unionized workplace to work for the union or not.
Again, sounds great. But again... racism.
The KKK was a big supporter of right to work laws because working for a union meant potentially being forced to work among people of other ethnicities. So, right to work means workers can get all the benefits of a union, but they didn’t have to pay to join a union. The hope was that right to work would weaken and eventually destroy strong unions.
Louisiana is a right to work state. Certainly, there is a much smaller union presence here than there is in other states. So, I think it certainly worked.
I’m not versed enough to have a stance on unions. Honestly, they’ve never been an influence in my life. In fact, I’ve grown up hearing nothing but bad things about them. But I didn’t know as much then as I do now, so I feel like I need to go back and take a second look with this new filter.
I think we can all firmly say that the state of work is always worth an extended conversation. No, we don’t work 12-hour days, 7-days a week, but is the 40-hour work week necessary, or is it a policy created for a much different time? That’s the fun part of examining our history, we get to learn how we got where we are so we can decide where we want to go next.
Links used in this article
https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/labor-day-1
https://guides.loc.gov/rosie-the-riveter/womens-bureau
https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/new-deal
https://www.dol.gov/general/aboutdol/history/dolhistoxford
https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=66
https://aflcio.org/2017/8/22/right-work-founder-was-klan-fan