David J. Saposs

In 1900, he quit school after fifth grade[1] and worked in beer breweries (including the Blatz and Schlitz brewering companies[1]) in his teens to help support his family.

[1][2][4][7][8] In 1920, he became an economic consultant to the Labor Bureau, Inc. (founded by George Henry Soule Jr. along with Evans Clark and Alfred L. Bernheim) through 1922.

[1][2][3][8] At Columbia, he became close friends with William Morris Leiserson, later a colleague at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

[4][9] In 1934, Saposs became research director for the Twentieth Century Fund's newly founded labor unit and remained an associate there through 1945.

[1][5][7][8] In 1935, Saposs became a research consultant to the United States Department of Labor (USDOL), for whom he wrote a report on company unions.

[10] The research conducted under Saposs' leadership proved critical to winning over the Supreme Court of the United States, which held in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, 301 U.S. 1 (1938) that the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) was constitutional.

The AFL allied with anti-union Democratic Representative Howard W. Smith to attack the National Labor Relations Board.

[14] But Smith and others attacked Saposs as a communist, and the United States Congress defunded his division and his job on October 11, 1940.

[2][15] Later in 1940, Republican Nelson Rockefeller hired Saposs as a consultant on labor issues to him for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in the White House through 1942.

The University of Wisconsin's archive assesses Saposs as follows: Although Saposs was a militant liberal and an early critic of Communist intervention in the American labor union movement, the House Committee on Un-American Affairs accused him of being a red, and he was forced to resign from the NLRB.