The American labor movement seemed poised on the threshold of unparalled success at the beginning of the post-World War II era. With the rise of the industrial unionism, unions represented more laborers than ever before and federal power insured collective bargaining rights. And CIO unions wanted the state to play the leading role in wages and social welfare. CIO leaders favored national power-sharing mediated by a strong state that organized national economic bargaining by unions, business, and government comparable to that enjoyed by their European counterparts. But postwar liberal pluralism had no place for such class-based groups, with a benign state responsible for leveling the playing filed. Class itself became a suspect and discarded category. Within the CIO, a furious battle had raged since the beginning of the Cold War around the question of anticommunism and support for Truman`s Cold War. Earlier, many non-Communist liberals and social democrats had been willing to work within anyone who struggled for workers` rights. The Communist Party had played an important role in the creation of many CIO unions. But as the postwar employer onslaught on the New Deal and workers` power made increasingly successful use of anticommunism, many non-Communist leaders became fervent anti-communists, advocating driving communist influence from the CIO. And By the early 1950s, the CIO joined the long time anticommunist American Federation of Labor in seeing themselves as legitimate members of a broad liberal coalitions. They believed that union strength, social reform, and engineered society could be combined with a successful fight against communism. From the passage of the Taft Hartley Act in 1947, designed to undermine labor`s new power, to the expulsion of much of the left-led progressive unions from the CIO, charged as dominated by Communists, to the witch hunting atmosphere which crushed democratic efforts of all kinds all contributed to an inward directed, more restrictive and conservative labor movement. The pro-business mobilization by union supported administration revealed that the unions were viewed by business and government as simply one more special interest group. Anticommunist unions had seen themselves as part of the progressive force that would ``contain`` communism at home and abroad. However, they discovered that it was they who had been contained.