time the union's old enemy, the Carpenters union, resumed its jurisdictional war with it. Conditions improved somewhat with the advent of the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration's creation of the Works Progress Administration, a public works project that employed thousands of iron workers and other construction workers. The union was also spurred to organize, particularly in the inside fabricating shops, by the threat of competition from the newly created Congress of Industrial Organizations. The union's membership grew slowly, reaching 40,000 by 1940. World War II, the postwar boom and change The union grew even more rapidly during World War II and the years afterward, reaching 100,000 members by 1948, when John H. Lyons succeeded Morrin as president of the union. His son, John H. Lyons, Jr., succeeded him in 1961. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947, limited construction unions' rights to picket worksites at which non-union contractors were working by barring secondary boycotts. Even with those restrictions, however, the Iron Workers continued to grow in the expansive economy of the 1950s. The union, like most other United States construction unions, had remained nearly all-white for most of its history. That began to change in the early 1960s, as the American civil rights movement began to challenge employment discrimination in the north, then picked up steam in the 1970s as the federal government began using the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to knock down some of the barriers to African-American workers' entry into the industry. Some local unions of the Iron Workers fought integration and affirmative action tenaciously, but usually unsuccessfully. The union also found itself challenged by a change in the business climate in the 1970s, as non-union contractors invaded markets that had been solidly union for years with the support of the Business Roundtable, made up of the heads of General Motors, General Electric, Exxon, U.S. Steel, DuPont and others. The Roundtable also attempted to weaken the Davis-Bacon Act and other legislation that protected construction workers. The Iron Workers and other building trades, caught off guard and used to organizing from the top down, lost large amounts of work to non-union contractors in the decades that followed. Twenty-first century controversies The union's International President, Jake West, pleaded guilty in 2002 to improper use of pension funds and making a false statement on a union report filed with the United States Department of Labor. Joseph Hunt succeeded him. A