AMERICAN PLAN

The American Plan was an employer offensive against unions in the years immediately following World War I. Spawned in the conservative reaction to the great changes that accompanied the First World War, this anti-union drive was promoted by the National Association of Manufacturers and driven by the anti-foreign violence of nationalist groups like the American Legion and the American Protective League. The American Plan included anti-boycott associations, the open shop drive, and the general message that unions were un-American havens of immigrant radicals.

The American Plan received impetus from the Red Scare, a government campaign against war-time dissent. This campaign peaked with the government's reaction to a huge wave of strikes and anti-capitalist violence that broke out in 1919. Like the American Plan, the Red Scare identified radicalism with immigrants and unions. A. Mitchell Palmer, Attorney General under President Woodrow Wilson, and his ambitious assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, orchestrated the "Palmer Raids," a round-up of immigrants on New Year's Day, 1920.

The combined result of this repressive atmosphere of the American Plan plus the Red Scare was the shrinking of the size of the labor movement. The number of unionized workers, which had grown by 1.5 million from 1917 to 1919, fell again from a total of 5 million in 1920 to less than 3 million in 1929.