Guy Otto Farmer

Guy Otto Farmer (September 13, 1912 – October 4, 1995) was an American lawyer and civil servant.

Farmer was born September 13, 1912, to Harbert and Kate (Bell) Farmer of Foster Falls, Virginia.

He had seven brothers and two sisters.

His father was a coal mine foreman, and when Farmer was an infant the family moved to the small town of Maybeury, West Virginia.

He was raised in Maybeury, worked in coal mines during school vacations, and graduated from a local high school.

He enrolled at West Virginia University, earning his bachelor's degree in 1934 and his law degree in 1936.

He was admitted to the bar the same year he received his J.D. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Alpha Delta, and the Order of the Coif.

He won a Rhodes Scholarship in December 1935, and studied at the University of Oxford from 1936 to 1937.

After returning to the United States, Farmer took up residence in Washington, D.C., in 1937, and in 1938 joined the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as an attorney.

He later was appointed a regional attorney in both Los Angeles and Minneapolis, where he oversaw other NLRB staff attorneys.

From 1943 to 1945, he was associate general counsel at the NLRB's national headquarters.

In 1945, Farmer left the NLRB and joined the D.C. firm of Steptoe & Johnson.

Among his many clients at the firm was the Bituminous Coal Operators Association, a group of coal mining companies which bargained as a group with the United Mine Workers of America.

Taft had co-authored the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, legislation which significantly restricted the use of the strike, outlawed the closed shop, imposed a new class of unfair labor practices (ULPs) on unions, and gave states the right to enact right-to-work laws.

Farmer became a partner in the firm in 1949.

On September 15, 1950, Robert N. Denham resigned as General Counsel of the NLRB.

Farmer was among those named as under consideration by the Truman administration as a successor to Denham.

Among these was McCarthyism, a strong fear of communism which gripped the United States from 1950 to 1954.

Another was the change in political control of the government.

Paul Herzog had been nominated to a second five-year term on the Board on July 24, 1950, and confirmed by the Senate on July 31.

In November 1952, Republican Dwight Eisenhower was elected President of the United States, and the Republican Party won majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives.

However, the most influential figure on labor relations and labor law was not Eisenhower but Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio.

But after the Republican sweep of 1952, Herzog privately told his friends that he wanted to leave the agency.

He was Chairman of the United States National Labor Relations Board from July 1953 to August 1955.

After leaving government service, he represented the Bituminous Coal Operators Association, the collective bargaining arm of the bituminous coal mining industry in the United States.

A number of political factors led to Farmer's appointment as chair of the NLRB in 1953.

Throughout the spring of 1953, the House Committee on Education and Labor and the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare conducted hearings designed to lay the groundwork for ideological and doctrinal changes at the NLRB once President Eisenhower was able to appoint a majority of the Board's members.

Gerard Reilly, a former NLRB member who had helped draft the Taft-Hartley Act, later wrote that the hearings made it clear that the NLRB under chair Paul M. Herzog had construed the law broadly to rein in employers but adopted a narrow view when it came to union ULPs.

Witnesses testified that the Board had restricted employer free speech, crafted loopholes to permit unions to engage in secondary boycotts, found new "rights" that permitted unions to challenge employer lockouts, infringed on states' rights, permitted bargaining during the term of the collective bargaining agreement, and expanded the legal list of mandatory bargaining subjects.

Eisenhower's opportunity to radically change the composition of the NLRB came earlier than anyone thought.

The political status of the Board deteriorated throughout the spring of 1953.

In addition to the House and Senate labor board hearings, the Eisenhower administration embarked on a series of private, high-level negotiations to further amend the Taft-Hartley Act and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

Martin P. Durkin, president of the United Association of Plumbers and Steamfitters, had been appointed Secretary of Labor but was considering leaving the department because of opposition within the administration and lack of agreement on the Taft-Hartley and NLRA amendments.

Herzog, who had once been on the faculty at Harvard University, began seeking appointment to the faculty of the college.

On May 1, 1953, Herzog announced that he would resign as chair of the NLRB effective June 30, 1953.

President Eisenhower's staff quickly selected Farmer as Herzog's replacement.

Publicly, Farmer was portrayed as a political independent.

He had few personal associations with management and his professional contacts were perceived as legal and contractual rather than ideological.

But privately, Farmer was well known as a strong conservative, an avid proponent of states' rights, and an early and avid political backer of Eisenhower.

But Farmer was passed over in favor of George J. Bott (who remained General Counsel for most of Farmer's term as chair of the NLRB, his term of office ending on December 20, 1954).