The battle for Main Street, United States of America: Welfare capitalism, boosterism, and labor militancy in the industrial heartland, 1895--1963 (Indiana)

On October 5, 1955, the small industrial town of New Castle, Indiana, stood in the national spotlight after a gunfight at Perfect Circle's piston ring foundry. The gunfight was the climax of a violent eleven-week strike between local unions affiliated with the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and the Perfect Circle Corporation, a conservative automobile parts manufacturer whose main plant was located in the nearby village of Hagerstown. The 1955 Perfect Circle strike challenges the conventional assumption of a post-World War II labor-management “accord.” Viewed from the perspective of small-town America, “stalemate”—and not consensus—best describes postwar class relations.; The Perfect Circle strike represented the culmination of a longer history of conflict over civic authority in the American heartland. The strike originated in the movement that brought industry to the heartland in the late 1890s. In New Castle, civic boosters recruited out-of-town factories to promote industrial prosperity and civic harmony. In smaller Hagerstown, the Teetor family established its authority through its ownership of the town's only significant industry and a combination of welfare capitalism and civic philanthropy. In the late 1920s, blue-collar workers began mobilizing through their local Democratic Party and, later, the United Auto Workers to supplant—but not vanquish—the reigning business orthodoxy with a more inclusive democratic order.; In the immediate postwar years, business and labor staunchly defended their respective visions of civic order. This lack of consensus was most evident in a competitive sector firm such as Perfect Circle, which used Cold War fears and favorable state court rulings to oust the UAW from three of its east-central Indiana plants during the 1955 strike. In 1957, Indiana business groups exploited the violence surrounding the strike to pass the first “right-to-work” law in a heavily unionized Midwestern state. The U.S. Senate's McClellan Committee held hearings on the strike a year later that portrayed local labor militancy as form of organized crime. In these ways, the Perfect Circle strike foreshadowed the conservative assault on unions during the 1980s, when oligopolies firms, encountering the same competitive pressures that Perfect Circle faced in the 1950s, ended their “civilized relationship” with national unions.