That the objective was to remove the influence of labor from the debating chambers of the law makers and concentrate power among the elites as the "new deals" were pointing toward a socialist America and undermining those elites.
Are there any historical documents that support this contention or is it a conspiracy theory?
This is the quote that got me thinking.
As early as 1947 a State Department public relations officer remarked that "smart public relations [has] paid off as it has before and will again." Public opinion "is not moving to the right, it has been moved-cleverly-to the right." "While the rest of the world has moved to the left, has admitted labor into government, has passed liberalized legislation, the United States has become anti-social change, anti-economic change, anti-labor."
The quote in context. from 20min to about 27min You have to drag the slider along the bar to reach 20.
While I don't often ascribe to much that Chomsky says, he's more or less correct here, but not in a conspiracy theory sort of way.
There was a concerted effort by many organizations to shift US opinion to the right -- or at least away from what they saw as 'left.' Organizations including the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and many smaller employer organizations took part in what was essentially a massive PR campaign to persuade Americans that the 'left' was bad for the average American. Some argue that many of the larger unions (UAW, USW, etc.,) were at least partially complicit in this campaign.
IMO, from a union perspective, their participation in this PR campaign began with the Treaty of Detroit in 1950. This settlement of long-running labor disputes essentially put the established economic order in concrete: union members would get regular wage increases and benefits in exchange for ceding control of the shop floor back to the employer. Many, including myself, see this move as the beginning of the end of the US labor movement. It changed from an attempt at class-based action to a return to AFL-style business unionism where each group essentially watched its own and very few others.
Chomsky sees this as a sort of gov't takeover of labor, partially enabled by an apathetic, self-absorbed public who bought the PR campaign that the 'right' served up. I think he, and many other historians from the left see an American public that would organize into the class-based group of activists but for the persistent intervention of gov't and their actors. While I of course do not deny that such actions have taken place, I see the average American as nearly totally uninterested in matters of class, choosing to focus more on maximizing their own self-interest.
For a fantastic take on this see Elizabeth Fones-Wolf's masterwork, Selling Free Enterprise.
Other books include Howell Harris' The Right to Manage, Sidney Fine's Without Blare of Trumpets, Jack Metzgar's Striking Steel, Lawrence Richards' Union-Free America, and many, many more. Start with Fones-Wolf if you're interested in this stuff. She does a really good job on the subject.