not accept IAM right away. After IAM finally did join the AFL, AFL President Samuel Gompers urged IAM to drop its whites-only rule. But IAM maintained racial segregation, arguing that it needed to retain southern members. IAM chief Talbot's wanted the union to be a fraternity of white men born in the United States who possessed good moral character. Though the AFL president urged the dropping of the color bar, member unions routinely discriminated against Black workers through racial exclusion policies on the local level which the AFL rarely commented on. 1920s–1940s The Machinists' membership reached 300,000 during World War I which at the time made it the largest union in 1918. As the war ended and wartime production came to an end membership dropped to 80,000 in 1923. Membership declined in 1933 to only 50,000 due to the effects of the Great Depression. Of those 50,000 members, 23,000 workers were unemployed. In 1935 the machinists started to organize with the airline industry. In 1936, the Boeing Company in Seattle, Washington, signed the industry's first labor agreement. By 1938, the IAM negotiated the first union agreement in air transportation with Eastern Air Lines. In 1944 IAM union members established an education department to publish a supplemental journal. This journal would be published weekly by the Machinist the IAM newspaper. Eventually the Journals production was cut back to twice a year and was voted out of existence in 1956. It was replaced with a quarterly magazine entitled The IAMW journal. Break with AFL The break was over a failure of the AFL to settle a jurisdictional dispute between IAM and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America as well as the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees of America. IAM disaffiliated with the AFL in 1945. In 1947 Congress passed the Taft Hartley Act, officially known as the Labor-Management Relations Act, which placed restrictions on union activities. This act also contained provisions that made closed shops illegal and outlawed boycotts. The second section of the Taft Hartley Act was controversial because it allowed states to pass right-to-work laws, which enabled them to regulate the number of union shops. Furthermore, the machinists worked with AFL unions to repeal the act. The limitations imposed on union political activity by this act led to the creation of the Machinists' Non- Partisan Political League. In 1948, Lodge 751 went on strike