5

A Wedding Without a Honeymoon

The merger of the AFL and CIO resolved none of the important, long-standing differences between them over international affairs. Indeed, initially these were exacerbated. The leaders from the former separate wings disagreed fundamentally over how to respond to broad developments in the Cold War, and in that context it proved difficult even to make progress in the short run in merging the international apparat of the two organizations. The question of how strong the American identification with the ICFTU should be, and whether undertaking some activities by the FTUC independently of the international risked damaging that relationship, was fiercely contested for two years. At bottom it turned on the intractable issue of how organized labour should address the challenge of communism in the international labour arena. Not until December 1957, and under much international trade union pressure, was it finally agreed that the FTUC would be closed down, with a broad commitment to channel the American effort through the ICFTU. By this point, the FTUC was, in any case, a weakened body, with its secret source of funding drying up and its scope for operating with much effect in Europe significantly diminished because of changes in the political climate in Germany, France, and Italy.

The AFL-CIO’s international focus began to turn to Africa, a developing front in the Cold War. Here a new theatre of operations opened up as the anti-colonial movement, led to an important degree by trade union centres infused with the spirit of nationalism, forced the question of home rule and independence to the top of the political agenda. While attempting to operate within the broad framework of ICFTU policy, the AFL-CIO became increasingly critical of the international, firstly as it struggled to service its African affiliates adequately, and then as it floundered in the wake of the pan-African tide that swept the continent in the closing years of the 1950s. Around a shared criticism of the ICFTU leadership’s deficiencies in this particular area, it proved possible for George Meany and Walter Reuther temporarily to join forces in seeking a sweeping change in the top leadership of the ICFTU. The Americans led the campaign to force the retirement of the ICFTU’s first general secretary, Jaap Oldenbroek, thereby paving the way for a fresh start with a reinvigorated organization and, just possibly, a less centralized modus operandi that would attract the enthusiasm of American labour.

Organizational Paralysis at Home: Conflict over “Neutralism” in India

The lack of agreement on basic aspects of AFL-CIO overseas policy and practice at the time of merger left international staff from the two wings of the movement in limbo. Under the stopgap leadership of George Brown—new to the field and lacking authority—the international affairs department was directionless. The question of how policy would be developed or who would implement it was unclear, as was the new international affairs committee’s relationship to the FTUC. George Brown complained that he was being kept out of policy making, but Jay Lovestone told him dismissively that “policy” had never been part of his remit. Meanwhile, Brown’s deputy, Mike Ross, bridled at having to play nursemaid to someone he described as a “small, naïve fool.”1

Members of the new international affairs committee meeting in February 1956 had no stomach for addressing the future of the FTUC or the question, closely related to it in AFL-CIO eyes, of whom to support for the ICFTU’s newly created position of director of organization. Irving Brown had his eye on this job, but Lovestone advised him to forget the idea. Given the right director, Meany and Lovestone had hoped to diminish the authority of General Secretary Oldenbroek, their bête noir. However, Lovestone recognized that Irving Brown would never be nominated by a divided American leadership, and he anticipated what he termed “the paralysing and bankrupt bureaucracy at the helm of the ICFTU” to continue unchanged.2 Mike Ross described this first meeting in Bal Harbor as a lethargic gathering of mostly aging leaders whose main interest was in playing gin rummy. Jim Carey tried to generate a discussion of Lovestone’s role but, ever the one for wisecracks, succeeded only in baiting Meany with his jibe that the latter had won Lovestone from Dubinsky in a hand of rummy. He asked, “Why the hell should AFL-CIO foreign policy be determined by the fact that Lovestone didn’t sell enough subscriptions to the Daily Worker in 1929 and got kicked out of the party?” Meany snapped that he was ready to discuss the matter “any time”; other committee members thought better and agreed to defer consideration until another day.3

Lovestone came away from Bal Harbour feigning confidence about his own position following private reassurances from Meany. He informed Brown: “I have a very specific and definite understanding . . . with George.” The work of the FTUC would be “continued and expanded,” with its name unchanged. Meany’s plan was for it to be removed from ILGWU control and taken “in-house” by the AFL-CIO, with Lovestone also transferring his employment to the federation. Meanwhile, he kept his head down and continued putting out the Free Trade Union News. The only visible change was the substitution of “AFL-CIO” for “AFL” on the masthead, but with the volume and issue numbers indicating continuity with the original Lovestoneite journal first published in 1946.4

Victor Reuther seethed at this and other anomalies. George Brown’s request for permission to publish an international affairs department bulletin for overseas distribution had been turned down pending a decision on the status of the FTUC. What right, Reuther now asked, had the Free Trade Union News to speak for the AFL-CIO when neither the federation’s director of international affairs nor its director of publications had any input? Moreover, the FTUC’s staff had not transferred to the merged body, so why was the Lovestoneite, Harry Goldberg, allowed to pass himself off as an AFL-CIO representative? And most fundamental of all, how was the FTUC being financed? With the AFL-CIO’s increasing financial commitments to the ICFTU, there could be hardly any money to spare, so did it mean that the FTUC was still being kept afloat by sub rosa payments?5

Such keenly contested office politics were a reflection of sharp differences among the federation’s leaders over the state of the Cold War. Topping that agenda was the process of de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union by the “new look” Bulganin-Khrushchev leadership and the consequent easing of cold-war tension. The four-power Geneva summit of July 1955 had been the first attempt to resolve East-West differences since Potsdam a decade earlier, and the Reuthers gave a warm welcome to the subsequent opening of doors to East-West cultural exchanges. In contrast, Lovestone was filled with “shame and disgust” when he heard that Walter Reuther had cabled congratulations to President Eisenhower for his part in generating “the spirit of Geneva.” As he told CIA director Allen Dulles, Geneva was “a colossal catastrophe.”6

In similar vein, Lovestone interpreted Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” in February 1956 essentially as a tactical ploy to woo developing countries. It merited utmost suspicion and provided the best possible justification for the expansion of the FTUC’s independent activities in the Third World. For this reason, Lovestone welcomed the prospect of the FTUC being freed from David Dubinsky’s tutelage. The garment workers’ leader was proving increasingly unreliable in the struggle with the Reuthers, and as for the FTUC’s roots within the ILGWU, Lovestone explained: “We have outgrown it. We need more authority.”7

The sharpest of international differences at the time of the merger saw George Meany and Walter Reuther publicly at odds over the recent Indo-Soviet treaty of friendship signed by the Bulganin-Khrushchev leadership and India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. A long-term critic of America’s policy of ringing the USSR with military alliances, Nehru had recently joined with Tito and Nasser in launching the Non-Aligned Movement. In a speech in New York scripted by Lovestone and delivered before a gathering of international trade union leaders present for the merger, Meany denounced Nehru’s self-proclaimed “positive neutrality”: “No country, no people, no movement can stand aloof and be neutral in this [cold-war] struggle. Nehru and Tito are not neutral. They are aids and allies of Communist imperialism.” Sitting beside him, Reuther bit his tongue, determined to avoid public disagreement so soon after the unity conference. However, the remarks caused outrage in India and Asia more generally. K. P. Tripathi, the general secretary of the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), was present for Meany’s speech and reacted by raising the possibility of the INTUC withdrawing from the (Western) ICFTU. The US ambassador to India also sought out Meany to explain how damaging to international relations his remarks were.8

When Walter Reuther proposed to go to India himself to help repair the damage to relations with the country’s trade unions, the INTUC and the government of India quickly stepped forward to issue a joint invitation to visit for eleven days in April 1956. Reuther wrote to secretary of state John Foster Dulles calling for a change in US foreign policy to prioritize economic over military aid to allies. At a press conference in New York before departing, he also made clear his disagreement with Meany’s assessment of Nehru.9 Treated as an international statesman in India, Reuther toured extensively and addressed large crowds, stressing everywhere his opposition to the military emphasis in current US aid programs. He dined privately with Nehru, addressed MPs in the Indian Parliament, and expressed support for India’s non-aligned status, describing Nehru as “truly one of the great statesmen of the world.” Speaking as a union leader, he reiterated his view that the free trade union emphasis should not be on negative anti-communism so much as positive action for social justice.10

Meany was most upset at being publicly repudiated by Reuther. Two weeks after the UAW president’s return, he retaliated by nominating Irving Brown to attend the INTUC congress. Reuther may have been in India as a personal guest of Nehru, but Brown would be the official representative of the AFL-CIO, his fraternal greeting bearing a warning to India’s trade unions of the danger of the USSR’s growing influence in the region. David Dubinsky felt some sympathy for Meany but criticized his choice of Brown as fraternal delegate; it was tantamount to a declaration of war on Reuther—better, he thought, to let the “red head’s” enthusiasm burn itself out as such “spasms” frequently did.11 Victor Reuther kept the pot boiling by picking a fight with the AFL-CIO publicity department over its reluctance to give general circulation to the recording of Reuther’s controversial press conference. And throughout the spring of 1956, public utterances by Walter Reuther and George Meany, together with extensive coverage of the Meany-Nehru dispute in the Free Trade Union News, kept alive the awareness that there were fundamental foreign policy differences between the two labour leaders.12

Reuther and Meany clashed at a bad-tempered session of the AFL-CIO executive committee shortly after his return from India. Citing Walter Reuther’s remarks to the press and his brother’s efforts to have them disseminated more widely within the labour movement, Meany protested: “I am not used to working in this sort of atmosphere.” Reuther countered that certain former AFL staff members seemed to have a vested interest in causing trouble and insisted that “Lovestone doesn’t speak for me.”13 Briefing the press anonymously on this acrimonious exchange, Lovestone suggested that Reuther was still trying to live down his former communist ties and that his primary aim was “to cut Lovestone’s throat” in order to get even over the smashing of the WFTU and Reuther’s failure to fight the communists in the UAW in the 1930s. Lovestone hoped to be the ultimate beneficiary of this animus between Reuther and Meany, but privately he and Brown continued to worry at the prospect of the FTUC being closed down.14

Yet neither Reuther nor Meany wanted disagreement over international issues to undermine hopes for the unified labour centre. Both had invested much in the new organization, and however fiercely contested international matters might be, these differences had to be contained. Reuther was keen to secure agreement on the AFL-CIO’s first major unionizing campaign among American textile workers, and Meany was beginning to be immersed in the problem of eradicating corruption within a number of AFL-CIO affiliates, for which he needed all the allies he could muster. Not for the last time, labour’s domestic problems forced the contending factions temporarily to tone down their differences on foreign policy.

The Carleton Hotel Agreement

The fundamentals of AFL-CIO international work and the status of the FTUC were eventually addressed at an informal dinner at the Carleton Hotel in Washington in June 1956 attended by George Meany, Walter Reuther, David Dubinsky, and Jake Potofsky. Agreements were reached to support the candidacy of the Canadian steelworkers’ leader, Charles Millard, for the key post of ICFTU director of organization—so ending the year-long stalemate—and to raise a levy of members to finance the work of the new department.15 These commitments paved the way for a parallel agreement to close down the FTUC as a separate operation twelve months hence, provided that the ICFTU’s organization department was functioning. At that point, consideration would be given to placing Irving Brown on Millard’s organizing staff or assigning him to other work as an ICFTU field representative. Until then the FTUC would operate under the auspices of the international affairs committee and would continue to publish the Free Trade Union News, but now in conjunction with the international affairs department. The deal gave Walter Reuther essentially what he had long been pressing for.16

Meany was most reluctant to have a Reuther-supported candidate for this key ICFTU post, having earlier deemed Millard unacceptable because he was “a socialist and a Canadian,” and adding for good measure that Canadians were simply “tools of the TUC who are stooges of the [British] Foreign Office.” But he was outvoted at the Carleton Hotel meeting, with David Dubinsky siding with Reuther and Potofsky and even moving support for Millard’s candidacy. To his FTUC colleagues, Dubinsky justified his action in terms of the need to end the standoff with Reuther. But he also tried to reassure them by arguing that since Millard was likely to fail in such a demanding job, the pressure would be off to close down the FTUC. Lovestone rejected this analysis, telling Dick Deverall: “I think the entire strategy of Dubinsky was false and I think Mr. Meany made a mistake in yielding to it. . . . It doesn’t speak very well for the leaders of our movement to propose knowingly people unfit for such high jobs. . . . The effect will be very bad.” Elsewhere he wrote: “No-one in the [AFL-CIO] Executive Council has confidence in Millard . . . [who is] incapable of handling the job . . . [and a] fourth rater.”17 Millard had not sought the post but was willing to take it on, informing Oldenbroek that he did so to block an “unwelcome choice”; he had in mind Irving Brown. He also intended to confront Meany over the issue of his being a socialist and the suggestion that he would be a tool of the British.18

News of the Carleton Hotel agreement went round the international labour movement like wildfire. Observing the reaction of the ICFTU secretariat, Lovestone noted that “the rats in Brussels are jubilant,” while from London a demoralized Irving Brown reported that “the Tewson et al. crowd are the proverbial cat that swallowed the canary.” Desperately hoping to close down the story circulating that the FTUC’s days were numbered, Lovestone wrote to DGB president Walter Freitag: “These rumours are malicious lies . . . inspired by the Communists.”19 There was nothing he could do about the choice of Millard, but the possibility of the FTUC being wound up twelve months hence was too much for him to contemplate and had to be resisted.

Following the Carleton Hotel meeting, George Meany spent some days vacationing at Unity House, the garment workers’ holiday centre in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. It was a favourite haunt, somewhere to wind down and play cards with Dubinsky. But Lovestone began to pester him daily with news and gossip of “Reuther activities.” He forwarded a report from Dick Deverall—newly installed at ICFTU headquarters as special assistant to Assistant General Secretary Gottfurcht—that spoke of the “hatred” felt for Meany and Dubinsky by ICFTU officials and staff alike.20 After comparing notes with Omer Becu at his ITF office in London, Brown also complained of “the Meany cave-in,” the “policy of appeasement,” and the fact that their friends in Europe felt “let down.” He, too, was unconvinced by Dubinsky’s reasoning that Millard was unlikely to make a success of the organization department, thereby obviating the need to wind up the FTUC. “No matter how the baloney is sliced, it remains, baloney—which means, as Becu kept repeating, ‘a Reuther victory.’ . . . When is the President of the AFL-CIO going to understand that there is an international cabal against him and anyone who goes along with him?”21

Figure 6.  Relaxing over a hand of gin rummy, David Dubinsky (right) and George Meany. The two differed over the continued usefulness of the FTUC as well as over its links to the CIA. Courtesy of the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, ILR School, Cornell University.

Forwarding these reports, Lovestone wrote Meany apologetically: “I did not want to strike any jarring note for your vacation . . . [but] I prefer forthrightness and frankness above all.” He asked for clarification of the status of the FTUC. Did “discontinuation” refer to “head office activities” or only to “fieldwork”? More generally, he objected to the implication that the chances of the FTUC surviving depended on a negative assessment of Millard’s achievements after twelve months:

Brown, Goldberg and I—are entitled to the protection of an official clarification so that the Commie-type factional apparatus working within the AFL-CIO will at least not have a fully free hand. . . . One does hate like hell to see the results of years of work and soundness of position . . . rubbed away, gnawed away, nibbled away.

Lovestone pressed Meany to issue a statement countering the “misrepresentation and poisonous atmosphere in Brussels.”22 Irritated by his pestering, Meany instructed him to travel to the Poconos to talk the matter through. The upshot of their meeting at Unity House was agreement that Lovestone would draft a letter for Meany to send to Becu and Oldenbroek putting a new slant on the Carleton Hotel agreement.23

Lovestone’s draft redefined the role of ICFTU director of organization almost exclusively in terms of the battle against communism. The future of the FTUC and other international activities of the AFL-CIO would be “reviewed” a year hence against Millard’s performance in this area. The letter, which Meany sent to Becu and Oldenbroek, warned against believing press reports that a definite decision had been taken to close down the FTUC. The new formulation gave Lovestone something to cling onto. Irving Brown was under instruction to read it into the record at the ICFTU’s July executive board meeting when the appointment of Millard was being discussed. Lovestone was satisfied and predicted that it would come as “a bombshell in the camp of the phonies and disrupters.” As for the British TUC: “Perhaps after this letter is read, the Colonial Office cronies will change their mind on the Millard proposition.”24

George Meany stayed away from the July 1956 meeting of the ICFTU executive board, in Brussels, at which Millard’s appointment was confirmed; as Lovestone explained, it was because of his low opinion of Oldenbroek and the “entire ICFTU set-up.” Brown read out Meany’s reinterpretation of the Carleton Hotel understanding and reported back that it had deflated the triumphalism of those present who willed the end of the FTUC. In reality, there was much criticism of this AFL-CIO attempt to lay down conditions for the appointment; board members protested that Millard was being set up to fail. His compatriot, Donald MacDonald of the newly formed Canadian Labour Congress, and the TUC’s Tewson both took exception to the notion that Millard would be “on probation” for a year. Victor Reuther supported their argument and, claiming to be the voice of a united AFL-CIO, disavowed the AFL’s original intention for the new organization department to operate independently of Jaap Oldenbroek.25

Despite Meany’s letter, Millard’s appointment was unanimous. Isolated within the meeting, Brown found it an uncomfortable experience, dubbing it “the worst ever.” He reported home that Victor Reuther had seized every opportunity to set himself against the FTUC. With evident feeling, he described the atmosphere as he sat beside Reuther in the meeting; the conference room was “dull,” the speeches were “dull,” and “on my right sits a viper.”26 In contrast, and clearly intent on underscoring Irving Brown’s isolation, Victor Reuther telephoned Meany on arriving back in the United States to report “the most constructive executive board he had ever attended.” Events seemed to be moving the Reuthers’ way, and Walter had a spring in his step. He was keen for an update on progress in implementing the terms of the Carleton Hotel agreement. What steps were being taken to redeploy Irving Brown, either as an assistant to Millard or as an ICFTU field representative? Had the money owing from the new levy been paid to the ICFTU? What moves were afoot to bring the FTUC under the supervision of the AFL-CIO international affairs committee?27

Figure 7.  The CIO’s Jim Carey (left), Victor Reuther, and Irving Brown, at the ICFTU congress in Tunis, July 1957. Brown had also been seated beside Reuther a year earlier, at meeting of the ICFTU executive board in Brussels. “On my right,” he commented, “sits a viper.” Courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.

Reuther would soon be further cheered by news that Brown was out of the running for appointment as Millard’s departmental deputy. With little hesitation, Millard chose as his assistant none other than Jay Krane, the epitome of all that Lovestone found unacceptable in the ICFTU secretariat. It was read as a deliberate throwing down of the gauntlet and inevitably fuelled FTUC resentment. But Millard reassured his new number two: “Don’t worry about Meany and his reactions to your appointment. . . . We have passed the point where we can afford to let him call the tune on such matters. . . . The majority rather than the minority, no matter how powerful, must prevail.” To Victor Reuther he wrote: “we might just as well find out now who is going to call the tune as far as my close associates are concerned.”28

If Meany had been forced to give way over the appointment of Millard, the purse strings were under his control and he still held back on contributions to finance the work of the organizing department. Refusing to commence payment of funds from the membership levy from the date of its introduction in 1955, he claimed that it was only payable from the time of Millard’s appointment twelve months later. Again Dubinsky found himself in disagreement; it was wrong to withhold necessary funding while at the same time criticizing the ICFTU as ineffective. But nothing the garment workers’ president could say would budge Meany. When Millard subsequently filed a progress report showing the AFL-CIO in arrears to the tune of $47,808, Meany’s pique led him to suspend payment for a further nine months.29 Jim Carey later withdrew from the international affairs committee in protest. The decision caused resentment among other national centres and calls for the AFL-CIO to “put up or shut up.” Lovestone dismissed this as “yapping from Europe” that might prompt the AFL-CIO to curtail contributions still further. “If Lord Tewson and Lady Oldenbroek want to put pressure that way, they will begin to be without American dollars,” he warned.30

Meany’s antipathy toward the ICFTU resulted in a similarly parsimonious response in the first instance when the ICFTU appealed for “solidarity funds” for Poland following the workers’ uprising in Poznań in June 1956—a curtain raiser for the even more dramatic popular revolt in Hungary that would follow in November. It placed Irving Brown in an embarrassing position, and he wrote to Meany arguing the need to support the ICFTU’s important anti-communist work. His own credibility in Europe was at stake. The AFL-CIO’s negative response was leading it up a blind alley and handing the advantage to its opponents within the ICFTU. He wrote: “Our friends are few and the resistance to our militant, dynamic anti-communism is varied. . . . It is difficult to work in committees, in organizations with other nationalities if one is deprived of the complete moral and material support of this base.”31

Figure 8.  Mike Ross, director of International Affairs for the CIO, 1945–55, and for the AFL-CIO, 1957–63. Victor Reuther never trusted Ross, Irving Brown regarded him as “nice, ineffective and pliable,” while Ross himself wondered whether Jay Lovestone had ever really left the Communist Party. Courtesy of TUC Library Collections, London Metropolitan University.

These were dog days for the FTUC, which, apart from continuing to publish the Free Trade Union News, was barely limping along. “The Committee finds itself absolute[ly] broke and [with] not enough money to operate with,” Lovestone informed Dubinsky. Chairman Matt Woll had died in June, without anyone designated to replace him even as co-signer of cheques. It left Lovestone unable to meet a request from Brown for money for Spanish trade unionists operating in exile. “I have no authority,” he explained helplessly. “I can’t initiate anything big . . . until such time as. . . . Well!”32

The FTUC’s line of communication to the international affairs department in Washington was through Mike Ross, but Lovestone was never sure what to make of the new assistant director. Privately, Ross had informed him that if ever the merger fell apart, he would stay put and sever his connection with the CIO wing. Heartened, Lovestone noted that “somehow or other, I have a feeling that Mike is genuine.” But, more recently, Ross had ordered Henry Rutz to exclude copy supplied by Lovestone for the international affairs department’s bulletin, explaining that it was likely to offend some executive council members. When Lovestone confronted him directly over this, Ross dissembled, claiming that the type had been “overset.” Unimpressed, Lovestone duly complained to Meany about the episode.33

Ross was undoubtedly correct in noting the strong differences that existed between members of the international affairs committee. Following a row with Meany, the mild-mannered Potofsky was soon to resign as committee co-chairman, giving ill health as the cause, though the real reason was his inability to work with Meany in such an embittered atmosphere. Meany then offered the post to Reuther, but the autoworkers’ leader declined it. Something more substantive than musical chairs was needed if harmony were to reign in the international affairs committee.34

Waning of FTUC Influence Within European Labour

There was now diminishing scope for Irving Brown to be effective in Europe; despite the challenges faced in West Germany, France, and Italy, it was harder for him to build alliances in the labour movement. The political climate was unhelpful and his material resources were shrinking. Back in 1949, Walter Schevenels had predicted that Brown would have nothing to offer Europeans but money, and now his main funding source was drying up.

Despite the West German move to join NATO, at the time of the merger, Brown and Lovestone were both particularly exercised over a perceived lack of enthusiasm for the Atlantic Alliance, fearful that in its desire for reunification the country might be tempted to reach a separate understanding with the Soviet Union. In this respect, the SPD and DGB caused Lovestone more concern than the arch-conservative Chancellor Adenauer, whom he had praised in spring 1955 as “all that stood between us and chaos . . . and the loss of Europe to the Russians.” His confidence in Adenauer did waver briefly in September when, caught up in the “spirit of Geneva,” the chancellor visited Moscow for talks that established diplomatic relations. Lovestone complained that it was a “grovelling” visit and a “disastrous cave-in.” But in a world where so few people could be trusted, Adenauer was still a more dependable ally than most, and Lovestone’s faith in “Der Alte” would soon be restored, whereas his tendency to fulminate against the two wings of the German labour movement for being partners in a foolish “pacifist campaign” continued throughout the decade.35

In 1956, Irving Brown was still hopeful of being able to generate an active, labour movement campaign against the threat of domestic communism in West Germany. Recent communist gains in trade union and works council elections had caused some alarm in sections of the DGB and SPD, and Brown wrote of his new hopes for building on this welcome reaction by reviving an idea he had long harboured of establishing some central agency within or alongside the DGB to concert ongoing anti-communist activities among shop stewards and works councillors. He talked of a permanent factional organization capable of producing factory newspapers, leaflets, manuals, and guides to communism and with capacity to organize factory-level meetings. His key co-operator in this venture was Otto Stolz, the deputy director of the DGB weekly, Welt der Arbeit, who was also associated with Brown through the Congress of Cultural Freedom. Brown told Meany that he had also discussed this idea with Fritz Heine of the SPD national executive, Ernst Scharnowski, head of the DGB in West Berlin, and the centre’s international secretary, Ludwig Rosenberg, along with others “whose names cannot yet be mentioned.”36

It is quite possible that Brown’s efforts in this area lent encouragement to the pro-Atlantic wing among members of the construction and other unions who came to identify with the SPD’s right-wing Kanalarbeiter group, but nothing more was heard of his more ambitious plan as presented to Meany in January 1956. Given the prevailing lack of enthusiasm for NATO among West Germans, Brown was unlikely to draw support from among the trade union mainstream, and his main co-collaborator, Stolz, who resigned his post with the DGB in 1957, was later expelled from the SPD for associating with an anti-communist organization the party judged to be altogether anti-labour.

Lovestone and Brown were never on intimate terms with the topmost DGB leaders. They had not been close to Chairman Walter Freitag, and they were unimpressed by the field of candidates to succeed him in 1956. Reporting on the 1956 congress that elected Willi Richter as the new chairman, Brown regretted the DGB’s preference for a low-key international role. Lovestone was particularly disappointed by the foreign policy resolution that equated the lack of freedom and dignity in the East with the evils in the West; such relativism was never acceptable.37 He also damned Willi Richter with faint praise, rating him “not a strong man” and unlikely to hold onto the job for long—his one saving grace being that he was “a nice fellow.” Brown soon concluded that Richter was “kidding us along” in calling for more cooperation within the ICFTU, and that they would need to put pressure on him when he came as a guest to the AFL-CIO convention in 1957, where “both you and Meany and myself can be a little more blunt and direct.”38 However, Richter proved to be made of sterner stuff than Brown imagined.

The simple fact was that the sympathies of Meany and Lovestone were always more with the Christian Democrat Konrad Adenauer, given his commitment to the Atlantic Alliance, than with the SPD and DGB. An important moment in restoring their close bond with the chancellor following his lapse in seeking talks with the Soviet leadership was at a congenial one-to-one meeting between Meany and Adenauer in June 1956 in the course of an official visit to Washington. It contrasted with a visit later in the year by SPD leader Erich Ollenhauer, who also hoped to benefit politically from a White House reception, or at least an enthusiastic welcome by the AFL-CIO, so bolstering his domestic standing ahead of Germany’s federal election in September 1957. But as Victor Reuther recognized, following Adenauer’s visit, Meany was reluctant to display the same warmth to the SPD chairman.39

Significantly, a call by Germany’s Catholic bishops for workers to vote for the CDU in the 1957 elections, and to abandon the DGB in favour of its Christian rival, saw Lovestone pointedly advise Meany against jumping into the fray on behalf of the DGB. As AFL president, he had done precisely that and to great effect in 1953 when he warned Adenauer against retaliating for the DGB’s partisan support of the Socialists by launching a rival Christian trade union centre aimed at splitting the movement. But this time Lovestone considered that it was better to remain silent.40 Indeed, a well-publicized pronouncement by Lovestone in 1957 that an SPD victory would be damaging to West Germany was itself of considerable assistance to Adenauer’s successful re-election campaign. Commenting on the influence that Lovestone had on the chancellor, Der Spiegel was drawn to observe that while Adenauer made much political capital from the fact that the SPD’s deputy leader, Herbert Wehner, was a one-time Comintern representative and aide to communist party leader Ernst Thalmänn, the chancellor was careful never to mention his own close links to Lovestone, who had once been an actual leader of a national communist party.41

The political climate was also an impediment to Irving Brown’s work in France, where the central issue was the war in Algeria. The communists had emerged as the largest party in France’s National Assembly elections in January 1956, but Brown drew comfort from the outcome of subsequent negotiations to form a government that eventually produced an SFIO-led coalition with Guy Mollet as prime minister. Brown particularly approved of the way Force ouvrière’s leaders had manoeuvred behind the scenes in helping to block the undesirable prospect of Pierre Mendès France emerging as leader of a popular front administration. But within days the political climate changed completely, with Mollet adopting a hard line against Algeria’s nationalists rather than, as Brown had hoped, seeking a peaceful settlement of the colonial war. Brown reported a “debacle” in the making, correctly predicting that Algeria would become the Mollet government’s “graveyard.”42 It would also make his own work in France particularly difficult and even dangerous.

Brown’s main focus in 1956 was to support Algeria’s emerging nationalist trade union movement—an act of considerable courage in the circumstances. His first contact with dissident Algerian members of the CGT had been in 1952 when he was approached for assistance in establishing a breakaway national trade union centre. His Algerian interlocutors on that occasion were soon arrested; it would be four more years before an embryonic, pro-nationalist trade union organization re-emerged in the form of the Union générale des travailleurs algériens (UGTA), which Brown assisted and guided toward affiliation with the ICFTU. However, his efforts on behalf of UGTA coincided with the new repressive measures against Algerian nationalists directed by Mollet’s minister resident, Robert Lacoste.

Faced with a deteriorating situation in Algeria, the ICFTU named a delegation, including Brown, to seek talks with Prime Minister Mollet and then proceed to Algeria to consult with moderate nationalist elements. However, before they left France, Lacoste singled out Brown from the rest of the delegation and banned him from entering Algeria, claiming that “under the pretext of trade unionism” he was “carrying out hazardous activities with dubious characters.” It was alleged that he was working with the CIA to help finance a trade union centre aimed at undermining French influence throughout North Africa. Brown responded by denying that he had been engaged in passing money to anyone. Whether that was true or not, it is possible that the French authorities had intercepted his correspondence with Lovestone urging the need for UGTA to affiliate to the ICFTU speedily before it was upstaged by the rival Union des syndicats des travailleurs algériens.43

A month later Lacoste again publicly denounced Brown in a speech to the Council of the Republic, referring to him as “a master corrupter” in North Africa—a phrase originally coined by the CGT’s leading communist, Benoît Frachon. George Meany wrote to Mollet, protesting at Brown’s exclusion from Algeria and Lacoste’s efforts at character assassination.44 However, the French government refused to reconsider its exclusion order, and Brown felt betrayed when fellow members of the ICFTU delegation suggested that he stand down so as to enable them to proceed to Algeria. It was evident that he lacked allies in this quarter. “There is practically no day that passes without some reference [within the ICFTU] to Lacoste’s phrase of ‘master corruptor,’” he wrote. “How Oldenbroek would love for Lacoste to prove some of his fantastic charges.”45 There was now a proposal that he be substituted by Victor Reuther on the delegation, causing Lovestone to instruct Brown: “Victor is a foul rat. . . . Vote against his being put on any North African Commission.” In the event, the ICFTU decided to call off the mission, but not without leaving considerable rancour within the FTUC at the lack of solidarity shown toward its European representative.46

While Brown’s wholehearted backing for the nationalist cause in Algeria was earning him notoriety in French government circles, it also put him at odds with his erstwhile close allies in the Force ouvrière leadership, especially André Lafond and Raymond Le Bourre, who were open supporters of the government’s repressive colonial policy. Not only was Brown’s scope for collaborative work with them thus severely constrained, his personal safety in France was threatened and friends advised him to “get out.” He opted to remain, but his status as a resident was soon under threat. In the course of 1957 the French foreign minister informed the US ambassador that Brown might have to leave the country. The reason advanced was that he was not performing a trade union function so much as interfering in domestic politics. The minister alleged that Brown had recently visited certain political figures in northern France and that soon afterward they had become the owners of new cars. These developments naturally put a strain on Brown’s family and led to his wife giving up their Paris apartment and returning alone to the United States in summer 1957.47

The fall of the Mollet government in 1958 and de Gaulle’s return to power backed by dissident elements of the military did finally prompt Brown to seek safety outside France for a couple of months. In a move reminiscent of his departure from Paris in 1954 during the l’Affaire Dides, he feared reprisals by rogue elements within the police, and in coded language—referring to himself in the third person—he wrote to Lovestone:

Paris activity of certain milieux has all the signs of a “complot” [conspiracy] which can be very ugly and dirty. Our friend refuses to fall into a trap and has therefore chosen the next month or so to visit a number of countries. . . . In France there is a steady evolution to an authoritarian system in which certain police services are becoming a state within a state.

He asked that mail be addressed to Lucien Tronchet in Geneva, telling Lovestone that he would be calling in there occasionally to collect it.48

Brown’s evasive action was evidently prompted in part by fear that his close dealings with Force ouvrière since 1948—and especially his links to André Lafond—risked being exposed. Lafond was involved in the coup that brought de Gaulle back to power and was identified with a right-wing movement to establish armed militia groups within trade unions. FO general secretary Bothereau pressed him to step down, but Lafond refused, threatening to go public with information on the centre’s internal affairs that would inevitably include dealings with Brown.49 Unless Lafond were forced out, Brown’s secrets were still safe, yet his difficulties renewed hopes among his American opponents that he would now be exposed. The tantalizing prospect of gaining access to the French Sûreté’s dossier on Brown led Bill Kemsley to suggest:

If I was close to the French socialists I’d try to find [Jules] Moch’s ear. . . . Moch was formerly Minister of the Interior and undoubtedly still has friends there. Shouldn’t be too difficult to arrange just a peek into the Brown file. And such a peek might well pay off by getting just enough ammunition to isolate one of the greatest cancers in the body union.50

Personal rancour between members of what was now a “united” American labour movement remained extreme.

Irving Brown lamented the fact that the bad odour generated by the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising had still failed to stall the growth of communist influence within organized labour in Western Europe. “One can feel the slow but steady conceding by labour to co-existence, neutralism, outlawing of atom bomb tests, disarmament, various forms of anti-Americanism,” he intoned.51 Yet, in Italy, the most immediate challenge to the FTUC policy of unwavering support for CISL and the four-party Christian Democrat-led coalition government was the call for a “turn to the left”—a policy of the non-communist left.

The idea of the much-discussed opening to the left was to heal the decade-long breach between Pietro Nenni’s socialists (PSI) and Giuseppe Saragat’s social democrats (PSDI), thereby opening up the prospects for a future centre-left government. It posed a direct challenge to the common front of communists and Nenni socialists that had existed since the end of the war but was now being called into question following the Soviet action in Hungary in 1956. Nenni had handed back his Stalin Peace Prize, and the electoral pact between the two parties was downgraded to a commitment merely to consult over policy. It was a strategy clearly intended to liberate Italian socialists from the communist embrace, but Lovestone understood the dynamic quite differently. He had no doubt that “socialist unity” was simply a clever ploy orchestrated from Moscow under which Nenni’s task would be to “soft pedal and occasionally utter a cuss word” against the communist party while using his “wrecking crew” to break up the Christian Democrat–led coalition and manoeuvre Italy into a neutralist position. Irving Brown saw the likely consequence in the shape of a growing tendency toward an Italian form of “Bevanism” among Saragat’s forces, with dire implications for the free trade union movement. While stationed in Rome as FTUC representative, Harry Goldberg had warned against such a development, but following the merger he was recalled to the United States, leaving no permanent American trade union presence to argue against the realignment on the centre-left.52

The Reuthers, by contrast, were keen to exploit the new political mood in Italy, especially when their persistent lobbying for embassy support for the Unione italiana del lavoro (UIL) began to pay off. Although smaller than the communist-led CGIL and the former Catholic CISL, UIL’s membership was drawn from supporters of both the PSI and PSDI, and it was therefore was of pivotal importance if the consolidation of centre-left political forces was to extend into the trade union field. Victor Reuther advised his brother: “The general political situation in Italy makes the climate ideal for a push on the trade union front.”

Working through the International Metalworkers’ Federation, and in partnership with the German and Swedish metalworkers, the UAW focus was on strengthening the metalworking membership of both UIL and CISL at the expense of the communist-led CGIL. Their project was given a significant lift in 1956 when, in a wholly new departure, UIL benefited from a $160,00 grant for training purposes from the International Cooperation Administration (ICA)’s (successor to the MSA and FOA) productivity unit in Rome. The scale of the support took all but those most closely involved by surprise. As an astonished Bill Gausmann, labour information officer in the American embassy in London, reported to Victor Reuther: “The next hot rumour is Italy. . . . Someone in America—and it isn’t at all clear who—has sunk a big chunk of dough into Italy unbeknownst to the ICFTU. . . . [It] all sounds too weird for words. . . . TUC as well as myself would appreciate any light you could throw on this one.”53

The American intention had been to divide this ICA grant between CISL and UIL, but the former procrastinated over the fine print and UIL scooped a bigger-than-intended share. The sum enabled UIL to open a training school at Anzio that soon became part of an ambitious training program by the IMF conducted by Charles Levinson and aimed at devolving the focus of trade union activity from the level of the confederations—UIL and CISL—to the respective industrial federations of metalworkers—UILM and FIM. The IMF objective was to build the industrial unions with a rank-and-file leadership trained in the ways of militant economic unionism. Five thousand local activists were trained in the late 1950s, the seeds of a shop steward system that would begin to establish a presence with the growth of plant bargaining in the early 1960s and come into its own fully during Italy’s “hot autumn” of 1969. In the opinion of IMF general secretary Adolphe Graedel, it was the most important trade union development in Italy since the formation of UIL in 1950.54 Without doubt it marked a sharp move away from the pattern of FTUC influence over the non-communist trade unions in Italy.

Arguably one European country where Irving Brown still felt confident enough to intervene as in the past was Greece, where, in 1957, he acted decisively to counter an emergent united front within the trade unions. In national elections the previous year a leftist coalition including the communists came close to winning power. The following summer the trade union centre GSEE, led by Fotis Makris, joined with Greek communists in a rolling general strike that continued for several weeks. On the eve of this action, Brown travelled to Athens to warn Makris against participation. If it failed, he argued, it would be a catastrophe for the labour movement, whereas, if it succeeded, it would still only be a victory for the communists. When Makris rejected his advice, Brown interceded with ministers in the conservative Karamanlis government hoping to mediate a settlement to the dispute. In what was seen as an attempt to break the strike, he made it clear to all concerned that the planned action did not have American support. He also retaliated against Makris by diverting money intended for his GSEE faction to Dimitris Theodorou, who led a rival faction in Salonika.55

Brown’s intervention in Greece aroused Victor Reuther’s ire, and he wrote to Walter Schevenels at the ICFTU: “We are eager to dig deeper into this so as to have some frank discussions at the highest level in the AFL-CIO so as to put an end to this kind of unilateral interference in the internal affairs of ICFTU affiliates.”56 Greek government officials put a price tag of $200,000 on the cumulative amount previously channelled to the GSEE by Irving Brown—a claim that Makris was understandably keen to deny. In private correspondence, Brown observed wryly: “There would not have been a Makris or a GSEE if it had not been for our continuous aid and assistance since the days of 1947.”57

Brown’s pre-eminence as American interlocutor in Greek trade union affairs began to be challenged in 1958 when a version of the IMF’s training scheme already operational in Italy was then extended to Greece. It set a pattern for similar initiatives in other industries and led to a coordinated attempt by international trade secretariats in transport, food, oil, chemicals, textiles, and mining to strengthen the organization of the unions, running in parallel with an ICFTU-led scheme to wean Greek unions away from their historic dependency on government finance. Brown was skeptical that the program would succeed, confident that little could be done “to save the Greeks from themselves.” But he chose to stay away from the country for the time being, figuring that his presence might provide the ICFTU with an alibi or allow it to scapegoat him when its program inevitably failed. He calculated that the AFL-CIO would have to go in again later to “pick up the pieces,” noting with sarcasm that so long as the ICFTU did not interfere “too badly,” it would be possible for the AFL-CIO to get “the Greek thing back on the rails, at least for a little while.”58

The Developing Focus on Africa

With the future of the FTUC uncertain, and following his mission to India as fraternal delegate at the INTUC congress in April 1956, Brown spent much of the rest of the year focused on North Africa, an area with which he was already familiar and from where his interests would soon extend to sub-Saharan Africa. Back in May 1954 he had spoken out on African issues at the first ever Bilderberg Conference of international affairs luminaries. As a member of an American delegation that included Paul Nitze, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and C. D. Jackson, on that occasion Brown had warned of the turbulent times ahead if the Europeans did not tackle problems brewing in Africa. Now, in the summer of 1956, he acted as chaperone to the AFL-CIO’s internationally inexperienced secretary-treasurer, Bill Schnitzler, on a landmark visit to Tunisia, following a tour of European trade union centres. In affording Schnitzler some international exposure, Brown hoped to convince him of the need for a continuing role for the FTUC. Lovestone derived mischievous pleasure from their chosen itinerary, telling Brown: “It is good to know Sir Vincent Oldenbroek is puzzled by the trip to Tunisia. The more puzzling, the more pain and the more pain the more progress for some people.”59

In fact, Schnitzler and Brown were in Tunisia as honoured guests at the congress of the trade union centre, Union générale tunisienne du travail (UGTT), soaking up plaudits for the important assistance the AFL, and Brown in particular, had given Tunisian nationalists over many years in their campaign for independence. The AFL had long since adopted a principled stance against colonialism, willing to risk offending allies such as Force ouvrière and the British TUC in the process. Lovestone had correctly argued that the continuation of colonialism would play into the hands of communists within the nationalist movement. Brown more than anyone had been responsible for cultivating relations with Habib Bourguiba, the moderate pro-Western nationalist leader who, with France recently granting independence to the country, had now become Tunisia’s first prime minister. Lovestone regarded him as the best alternative to Colonel Nasser as a potential leader of the Arab world.

The AFL had entertained Bourguiba at its convention in 1951, having appealed personally to President Truman to overturn a State Department rejection of his application for a visa. When the French colonial authorities subsequently stepped up repression of nationalist trade unions in Tunisia, Brown had supervised the distribution of $350,000 in aid.60 And when nationalist sentiment then spilled over from Tunisia to Morocco, it was Lovestone who supplied the funds to launch a purely Moroccan trade union centre.61 Now basking in the gratitude of his UGTT hosts, Brown was seated next to Prime Minister Bourguiba among the distinguished guests. Following the congress he and the prime minister travelled together to Paris, and Brown agreed that he would assist in drafting a request for aid for Tunisia—including military aid—to be submitted to the US government.62

A concurrent development that helped pull together the threads of Brown’s growing interest in Africa as a theatre of activity was the ICFTU’s decision in 1956 to convene a regional conference of African affiliates for January 1957. Brown had supported such an initiative since it was first proposed in the ICFTU executive board in 1954. The hope was to launch an African regional organization such as already existed for Latin America, Asia, and Europe to guide ICFTU policy and service affiliates. However, the European centres with a colonial interest in Africa—especially the TUC, FO, and the Belgian FGTB—had dragged their feet for two years, and Brown now feared that African unions would turn away from the ICFTU in disillusionment.63

To help with arrangements for the ICFTU’s regional conference, the youthful and extremely able general secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labour (KFL), Tom Mboya, was assigned to the Brussels headquarters in 1956 to prepare documentation. Following his stint there, Mboya—as much a nationalist politician as a trade union leader—undertook a three-month lecture tour of the United States in the autumn of 1956, establishing contact with AFL-CIO leaders for the first time and, after meeting Jay Lovestone, contributing articles to the Free Trade Union News that the ICFTU secretariat judged to be “unfriendly.” Mboya’s main purpose in the United States was to raise funds for studentships and for the construction of an elaborate headquarters for the Kenyan labour centre. The ICFTU had previously turned down a KFL request to finance this building project on grounds that it was a misuse of the labour movement’s scarce resources. However, the AFL-CIO was willing to step in and donated $35,000 toward the cost of the new headquarters. This act of generosity was to be hugely controversial within the international labour movement. Victor Reuther advised his brother, Walter, against the UAW giving Mboya money for the building, as such appeals were supposed to be coordinated through the ICFTU. The AFL-CIO’s donation was widely read as an indication of the Americans’ readiness to “interfere” in Africa and would greatly influence the atmosphere in which the African regional conference took place some weeks later.64

The ICFTU’s regional conference was staged in Ghana’s capital, Accra, suffused by an atmosphere of nationalist pride; the country’s formal independence was only weeks away, and Prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, black Africa’s most prominent politician, was the keynote speaker. The AFL-CIO had no territorial stake in Africa, and the ICFTU had not seen fit to extend an invitation. Nonetheless the federation sent a delegation including Brown and Schnitzler, and the latter delivered a sharply worded speech drafted by Lovestone criticizing Europe’s colonial record and announcing the AFL-CIO’s determination to stop the US government “appeasing colonial interests.”

Among the Europeans present it was regarded as a provocative intervention. Hitherto, the Americans had limited themselves to calling on the ICFTU to act with more urgency in the colonies: now the AFL-CIO was hinting at a more direct role for itself in Africa. Through the $35,000 gift to the KFL and Schnitzler’s crowd-pleasing speech in Accra, Brown considered that they had demonstrated to African trade unionists that “the American unions can do the job.”65 In this, the AFL-CIO was a step ahead of the Eisenhower administration’s evolving policy for Africa. Two months later, Vice President Nixon made a groundbreaking tour of seven African countries during which he told labour leaders of his admiration for the work of Irving Brown—“a personal friend” for over a decade—and later submitted a report recommending the establishment within the State Department of a Bureau of African Affairs. Its first head would later consult Brown on how to “handle the labour angle”—a harbinger of what the AFL-CIO representative considered “a real labour programme.” Pointing out to Meany that the Soviet Union had just established a special academy in Moscow to study African problems, Lovestone now argued that Africa had become the “real battleground” and “the next field of the big test of strength” between the super powers.66

Rowing Back on the Carleton Hotel Agreement

The summer tour of Europe and North Africa by Irving Brown and Bill Schnitzler in 1956 had concluded with an appearance at the TUC annual conference, where Schnitzler was the American fraternal delegate. They were present to hear the British coalminers’ communist general secretary, Arthur Horner, call for the re-establishment of the wartime Anglo-Soviet Trade Union Committee and learned that the new leader of the large transport workers union, Frank Cousins, was also planning to send a fraternal delegation to the USSR. TUC general secretary Vincent Tewson had offered no objection to the latter announcement provided that the purpose of the Soviet visit was to gather “technical and industrial information.” Reporting on these developments, Brown deplored, not for the first time, the lack of strong leadership within the TUC and predicted a complete acceptance of exchange visits with the Soviet bloc within a year.67 It was grist to Lovestone’s mill, and with Schnitzler echoing the warning, he sounded the alarm to Meany:

Frankly, the bankruptcy of the TUC leadership as personified by the role of the pompous clerk [Tewson] is a cause for deep concern. . . . The frontal challenge of the Communists to guide or, at least to influence profoundly, the politics of the TUC is of the greatest concern to American labour . . . [and] to the entire international labour movement. . . . I cannot think of a more serious blow to the ICFTU than a pollution and permeation of the TUC at a dangerous level by pro-Moscow elements in Britain.68

Lovestone persuaded Meany to convene a special meeting of the AFL-CIO international affairs committee the following month to discuss the situation facing the ICFTU in the context of the Soviet Union’s “new look.” For this, Lovestone was charged with drafting a document dealing with “the encroachments and encirclement to which the situation is being rapidly and dangerously subjected.” It would include proposals aimed at strengthening ICFTU opposition to union visits to the Soviet bloc.69

Lovestone’s document contained ten proposals intended for submission to the ICFTU’s next executive board meeting in November. Mostly they called for existing policy to be applied more vigorously, including stepped-up anti-colonial campaigning. The two main proposals came first and last on the list and were a clear expression of mistrust of the present leadership. One called for the establishment of an advisory committee to assist the ICFTU’s department of organization under Millard to achieve its objectives. The last proposal was for another ad hoc committee to conduct a catch-all review of the ICFTU’s record since its formation and recommend ways to improve its performance.70 The effect of these two key proposals was clearly to undermine the Carleton Hotel understanding of three months earlier whose thrust had been to close down the FTUC and throw American labour’s international effort behind the ICFTU. Now it was the ICFTU, and especially its recently established department of organization, that was to be placed under critical review.

Once again Meany had no plans to attend the November executive board and argue personally for the AFL-CIO’s proposals. Instead, his intention to tour Latin American trade union centres at that time was taken as a reflection of his true priorities. Irving Brown was again tasked with introducing the proposals at the board meeting. He was to represent them as the unanimous view of the AFL-CIO international affairs committee, though Jim Carey made it clear to Meany that he had opposed them vigorously and would not now support them.71 Rather than fall out publicly with Meany, Walter Reuther also chose not to attend the board. It had been billed as an important meeting in that Charlie Millard was scheduled to map out his long-term plans for vital organizing activities. However, reacting against what was widely recognized as a vexatious American ploy, the DGB’s new president, Willi Richter, came late, Vincent Tewson attended only on the final day, and the Nordic unions stayed away altogether.72

In the event, the Americans found themselves once again outmanoeuvred. Little time was allotted to debate Lovestone’s proposals; Brown was the only person to speak in favour, while the British intervened to denounce them as unacceptable. Vincent Tewson argued that Millard didn’t need a three-man advisory committee looking over his shoulder—but rather someone to do the organizing work. Likewise the proposed ad hoc panel to pronounce on the ICFTU’s effectiveness since its foundation was attacked as unacceptable: the assumption that the performance of the ICFTU had been useless since its inception was simply wrong. Unstated, but adding passion to Tewson’s opposition, was his concern at recent news of the AFL-CIO interfering in a British colony through its generous grant to Tom Mboya for the KFL headquarters building.

From the secretariat, only Millard intervened—to ask Brown whether the AFL-CIO proposals had the unanimous support of its international affairs committee. “Yes” was the answer. Most present would have known that this was not so. There were no plans for further discussion until the board met during the following summer’s congress in Tunis—too late for the proposals to frame that congress’s agenda as Lovestone had hoped. In that respect, it was another bad day at the ICFTU for the AFL-CIO representative, with Jay Krane recording that Brown took “an awful shellacking.”

Distraught at the outcome, Brown cabled Lovestone: “Our proposal treated scandalously. . . . Organization completely British controlled. Situation impossible and sterile.” Still smarting a week later, he wrote from a hotel room in Istanbul: “What a fiasco—the ICFTU now led by Oldenbroek, Millard and Krane. How can we go on? Or should we go on? More of this later when I am more restrained and balanced. You can guess what I would like to do.”73

Despite this setback, there was no let-up in the effort by Lovestone and Brown to highlight for Meany’s benefit the lack of firm anti-communist direction of the ICFTU. In this, Millard provided an easy target, his public pronouncements revealing an unwillingness to deal in anti-communist rhetoric or denunciations of the neutralist yearnings of many trade unions in the developing world. Brown considered his approach to be “anti-anti-communist,” while Lovestone told Meany: “Some people might say Millard should be given a chance. . . . For my two cents worth . . . Mr. Millard should be given no chance to violate them [ICFTU policies], not even for minutes, let alone months or years.” The TUC—always regarded as the power behind Oldenbroek—was also targeted for criticism, especially now that it seemed to be looking for a showdown over the AFL-CIO’s threatened interference in colonial affairs.74

In spring 1957, a Times of London leader, clearly informed by TUC thinking, defended Oldenbroek’s leadership of the ICFTU while identifying Lovestone as the villain of the piece:

The fighting had previously all been on one side. The TUC and other organizations withdrew before every attack . . . anxious to avoid dissension which might hamper American trade union unity. Now . . . they . . . ask that all American representatives should behave as cooperative members of the international.75

Lovestone read the piece as evidence of an international conspiracy against the AFL-CIO that involved both Reuther and the British Colonial Office. He warned Meany: “You are the one they are after. I am . . . merely the whipping boy.” The charge made was that the AFL-CIO stood for “negative anti-communism.” Lovestone fumed: “This is the rub. They just hate to be anti-communist.” Rolling together trade union issues with developments on the world stage, he held that the TUC line was prompted by resentment at Eisenhower’s forcing the French and British governments to end their recent military intervention at Suez. Retaliation by Britain had now come in the field of international labour policy because, Lovestone maintained, it was the one area where they felt they had an advantage over the Americans, given the “divided and paralyzed” state of the US labour movement. The problem dated back to the merger—what he referred to as the AFL’s “original sin.”76

Meany responded to the Times leader in a letter criticizing the TUC’s role in Britain’s colonies—he had in mind particularly the TUC’s recent action over Cyprus, where a guerrilla war for colonial independence was now raging—and he stated defiantly that the AFL-CIO had no intention of withdrawing the ten-point program, least of all its advocacy of a more aggressive fight against colonialism.77

The very future of the ICFTU was now uncertain as the Tunis congress approached. How much longer could it withstand destabilizing tactics by the AFL-CIO and the denial of material resources necessary for its basic tasks? Was continued AFL-CIO membership in the ICFTU even assured? And with the TUC—happy to ignore ICFTU policy when it got in the way of its own independent policy in the colonies—threatening a confrontation with the Americans over the ten-point program, how long before open conflict broke out between the international’s two largest affiliates?

Throughout the first half of 1957, leading up to the ICFTU’s Tunis congress, Walter Reuther tried patiently to restrain Meany, hoping to penetrate his “mental iron curtain” by calling for an end to “this cold war” with the ICFTU. He made clear that he was no longer prepared to go along with Lovestone setting the international affairs committee’s agenda, and he threatened to stay away from meetings unless members had the chance to discuss fully policy statements such as the recent ten-point program. He warned that if Meany continued to attack the ICFTU, he would be forced to oppose him publicly at the Tunis congress.78 Reuther was convinced of the need ultimately to remove Lovestone from his strategic position at Meany’s elbow, but he reckoned that a start in that direction might be made by ending Irving Brown’s role as de facto permanent AFL-CIO representative in the councils of the ICFTU. To this end, he was prepared to strike a deal with Meany under which both Brown and Victor Reuther would cease to attend executive board meetings as his and Meany’s substitutes. In effect, he was prepared to sacrifice his brother and right-hand man in international affairs, in order to be rid of the contentious figure of Irving Brown with his slanted reporting of ICFTU affairs.79 Finally, to clear the air with other leading affiliates of the ICFTU, he proposed that he, Meany, and senior AFL-CIO vice presidents travel to Europe for informal talks with their counterparts. Meany was agreeable, but it proved impossible to arrange a meeting ahead of the Tunis congress.

The one substantive change agreed to by the international affairs committee was to bring to an end George Brown’s feeble leadership of the international affairs department and to appoint Mike Ross as titular head. What effect this would have on the balance of contending forces in the AFL-CIO was unclear. As Bill Kemsley in the ICFTU’s New York office noted: “No one seems certain of Mike’s relations (or lack of them) with Lovestone. Many however think he has the same government connections.” But with Ross lacking Lovestone’s drive and influence with George Meany, he was hardly likely to set a new tone, and it soon became evident that decisions on international affairs were being taken without his involvement. Kemsley still reckoned that Meany would try to oust Oldenbroek as ICFTU general secretary at the Tunis congress in July, replacing him with Omer Becu. Certainly he had no doubt that Lovestone was “determined to scuttle the ICFTU.”80

At the AFL-CIO executive council in June just ahead of the Tunis congress, Reuther finally succeeded in having Meany agree to withdraw the contentious ten-point program from the ICFTU agenda, the latter recognizing that the climate wasn’t right. Belatedly Brown had cautioned Meany against being seen to oppose Jaap Oldenbroek, noting that although the general secretary was prone to trim from time to time, on the fundamentals of ICFTU policy he was not vulnerable to criticism. Omer Becu, who was planning to stand down as ICFTU president out of disdain for Oldenbroek, was the person on whom Lovestone and Brown had pinned their hopes as a possible candidate for the post of general secretary, but he now lacked the stomach to challenge Oldenbroek for his job, and there was no other credible candidate in the offing. A further factor was that Meany was currently preoccupied domestically with the problem of corruption in the teamsters union, and with this sordid affair making headlines abroad, it was hardly the best time for the AFL-CIO to be projecting itself as moral leader of the international labour movement or seen to be throwing its weight around within the ICFTU.81

The previous autumn’s campaign against the ICFTU leadership thus petered out. Meany now told Ross and Lovestone that his instinct was “to play the game on an easy basis” in Tunis and “support passively” the re-election of Oldenbroek as general secretary. Meanwhile, Schnitzler was given the job of extricating the AFL-CIO from the corner into which it had painted itself. He duly wrote to Oldenbroek requesting the removal of the ten points from the executive board agenda, explaining coyly that “we learn of a number of misunderstandings that have arisen as to our motives in making this proposal.”82

Lovestone found this policy reversal hard to take. In a rearguard action, he urged Schnitzler, who was to lead a second-string American delegation at the Tunis congress—Meany and Reuther had opted for discretion and chose not to go to Tunis—to do his utmost to persuade Omer Becu to stay on as ICFTU president by assuring him that “this is the last time we impose on you.”83 It was all in the interest of derailing the possible candidature of the Swedish metalworkers’ leader, Arne Geijer, a close ally of Reuther in the IMF. However, Becu declined to play along, and in the event, Geijer was the overwhelming choice of the congress for ICFTU president. From the Reuther standpoint, his election in Tunis opened up the prospect of more constructive work through the ICFTU.84

Membership in the AFL-CIO’s delegation at Tunis was a miserable experience for Lovestone; after only two days he was contemplating asking to be called home.85 Yet the congress offered some comfort to the AFL-CIO. In particular, a resolution critical of the labour legislation in Britain’s East African colonies was adopted, along with a decision to send a delegation to investigate the situation. This one development helped create a climate conducive to continued AFL-CIO involvement in Africa. Around it a meeting of minds would later develop between Meany and Reuther that was to have particular significance for the future leadership of the ICFTU.

The Atlantic City Accord—and Aftermath

As the AFL-CIO’s 1957 convention in Atlantic City loomed, the continued existence of the FTUC was still the main bone of contention in both the federation and the wider international labour movement. Walter Reuther won some backing for his position at a meeting of the executive council in August with an attack on Lovestone’s obsession with Soviet affairs. At issue was a lengthy draft document analyzing the current power struggle within the Kremlin that he had prepared for the meeting. Reuther exploded with impatience:

I am sitting here representing my union as a trade unionist. I am not sent here to participate in the exercise of semantics of dialectical materialism. . . . I don’t know what the internal power play is in the Soviet bureaucracy. I don’t know really where Bulganin fits in terms of Zhukov and how many notches Zhukov came up in the power struggle. . . . I want to fight them, but I will be damned if I want to analyze the internal manipulations.86

Victor Reuther noted that “the sentiment was rather overwhelmingly for getting back to a more practical trade union participation in international affairs.” To hasten such changes, he pressed for a firm date when the year’s notice to the FTUC would at last run out. In a related move, he also took aim at Lovestone’s undue influence on labour attaché appointments and, as a first priority, argued that the time had come for the Lovestone-approved attaché in London, Joe Godson, to be replaced.87

The fate of the FTUC was finally settled during the AFL-CIO convention in Atlantic City in December 1957 at the long-delayed informal meeting with leaders of the ICFTU’s main European affiliates that Reuther had first proposed in the summer. The event found Meany still preoccupied with the internal issue of corruption and the imminent expulsion of the teamsters union, with little time to spend in defending Lovestone and his operation. At the “summit” meeting on Sunday, 8 December, attended by Jaap Oldenbroek, Arne Geijer, Willi Richter, and Vincent Tewson, along with members of the AFL-CIO international affairs committee, Meany bowed to the general will of his invited guests and finally agreed to terminate the activities of the FTUC. Lovestone was to relocate to Washington and work in the international affairs department as deputy to Mike Ross, while continuing to have responsibility for editing the Free Trade Union News. Irving Brown would remain as European representative based in Paris and serve as executive secretary to the AFL-CIO’s representatives at the ICFTU executive board but with full powers when (as was frequently the case) they were not present. As the British labour counsellor put it, it was “an unexpectedly satisfactory agreement.”88

This concession allowing Brown to remain in Europe was small comfort to him. He had recently complained to Lovestone: “As far as we are concerned, we can yell, complain, etc., but the Brussels bureaucracy has things in hand. We are not in the works since the division back home permits Oldenbroek and company to counter anything that I propose or push. I have never felt so helpless and frustrated.”89 For some months to come he was in an unsettled state. To a vague suggestion by Lovestone that he might replace Phil Delaney, who was vacating the post of worker delegate at the ILO, his hangdog reply was that “controversial people do not get such assignments.” On another occasion, he gave vent to his disillusionment: “I am convinced more than ever there is no future for me in this whole business—in terms of what we originally set out to achieve.”90

Lovestone hand-delivered an anguished letter to Meany at his hotel room in Atlantic City, incredulous at the New York Times report of the agreement that he reckoned had the hand of Reuther and Carey all over it:

I was pained and puzzled no end by the astounding revelation in today’s New York Times. . . . Once again the [British] Colonial Office has succeeded in opening wide the doors for Communist agents. . . . If they [Reuthers] persist in the factional drives as they have in the past, then the results of the last twenty-five years of American labour activity in the international field will still be more gravely jeopardized. I am sure you do not mind my being frank and forthright with you.91

For the Reuthers, the “Atlantic City Accord,” as it came to be known, was naturally a gratifying outcome. “At long last, I think we have reached a turning point, and for the better,” wrote Victor Reuther. With their Swedish ally, Arne Geijer, presiding over the ICFTU, there seemed genuine hope for a fresh beginning in relations with it.92 Soon after the Atlantic City meeting, the chairmanship of the federation’s international affairs committee also changed hands. The experiment with Meany and Potofsky as co-chairs had not been a success—Potofsky finding it impossible to work with Meany—and George Harrison, the widely respected president of the railroad clerks who was considered independent of Reuther and Meany factions, now became chairman amid hopes that he would be able to bring the parties together.93 Whether the accord would have a lasting effect on the AFL-CIO’s conduct of foreign policy, as Victor Reuther believed, remained to be seen.

In fact, Lovestone quickly regained his swagger, reassuring Dick Deverall: “I shall be continuing all the work I did under the new title. Please note there is no mention of any dissolution of the Free Trade Union Committee. It can always be brought back since it was never dissolved.” Two weeks later, as the chimes for the New Year rang out, he boasted: “I have been buried many times and I’ve had my carcase picked at. There will be many a vulture forced down before getting at me. I take a special delight in strangling vultures before they get to me.”94 Arnold Beichman, close to Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone and responsible for handling press relations in the ICFTU New York office, similarly refused to believe that the effect of the changes would be as far-reaching as some hoped, quickly pointing out to colleagues in the Brussels headquarters that Lovestone still continued to enjoy Meany’s confidence and that, despite his being crestfallen, Irving Brown’s position was still very strong.95 Other seasoned observers shared that view and declined to write off Lovestone. Arnold Steinbach, director of the Federal Department of Labor’s Office of International Affairs, advised the British labour counsellor that the FTUC executive secretary was likely to “lose all battles but the last one.” He would certainly not take this loss lying down.96

Nonetheless, open conflict within the AFL-CIO over international issues now subsided. The signs were that Meany was prepared to accept the new settlement. Less than a year on from Atlantic City, Lovestone urged him to press again for ICFTU acceptance of his ten points but there was no response, and Reuther was satisfied that Meany was “playing fair.”97 “Very much of the old spirit of initiative and drive in the international work is gone,” Lovestone complained. He believed that Meany’s forced “retreat” and Reuther’s growing influence reflected the ideological flabbiness that was spreading within the Western alliance: “appeasement, confusion, self-deception and suicidal actions are gripping the entire western world,” and were also becoming embedded in the labour movement. Coexistence was the order of the day, as reflected in the increasing number of East-West exchanges in various fields—cultural, political, and labour.98

Engaging with Pan-Africanism

What gave Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown renewed heart was the scope opening up for influencing the direction of African trade unionism, especially in the context of American plans for a major training program for the coming generation of African leaders. After attending the ICFTU’s Tunis congress in 1957, A. Philip Randolph, the black president of the sleeping car porters’ union, had visited East Africa at Tom Mboya’s invitation to assess training needs. On returning home, Randolph won AFL-CIO agreement to earmark $50,000 for the launch of an African training scheme.99 The federation’s instinct was to conduct the training in the United States, and within a matter of days, with little attempt at wider consultation, Lovestone arranged for Maida Springer, a black staffer from the garment workers, to travel to Africa in October 1957 to select the first batch of students. The ICFTU was disturbed by this precipitate initiative, considering training to be its responsibility. The State Department was also concerned that the AFL-CIO initiative might damage Anglo-American relations, and for the next several weeks confusion over responsibility for the program reigned until the Atlantic City meeting in December, where one of the key concessions made by Meany was for the $50,000 to be handed over to the ICFTU and for it to lead the program.100

Launching the training program was now seen as a test of the ICFTU’s capacity to deliver results, though from the outset it ran into opposition. The TUC, in particular, opposed the plan to set up a residential college; it would be costly and involve training comparatively few students, whereas a team of peripatetic teachers would be able to offer courses to larger numbers at lower cost. There were disputes over the staff to be engaged and nature of the curriculum, which the TUC in particular feared would be too political. In fact, the TUC was rapidly finding itself at odds with the ICFTU over its own independent work in African colonies, or, as Tewson put it, over its right “to be concerned about people who carry British passports.” The British rejected Millard’s plea that all TUC aid to its colonies be routed through the ICFTU. And when Oldenbroek tried to insist, the TUC spoke of being at “breaking point,” warning that in future it might not contribute to the recently established International Solidarity Fund (to which it had so far pledged £500,000 over three years) that was now to become the permanent fund for ICFTU development and organizing work. Bill Gausmann, labour press officer in the American embassy in London, noted: “The British brothers are tending privately to write off the ICFTU. It is difficult to disagree with their assessment.”101 Millard began to threaten resignation over the lack of cooperation from the TUC, whereas Brown was buoyed up by this deterioration in TUC-ICFTU relations, viewing it optimistically as “the biggest and most decisive turning point in the international labour movement.”102

Leading Africans were also highly critical of the ICFTU’s plans. They regretted that the AFL-CIO was no longer in charge of the training program and were angered to have first learned of this from the press. They also resented not being consulted about new plans to locate the training college in Uganda’s capital, Kampala. Mboya issued a report on behalf of three East African trade union centres that held the European leadership of the ICFTU at fault for the international’s past lack of attention to Africa. The East African unions were insistent that they would not tolerate the posting of a British union official as ICFTU representative in the region in future. In contrast, Mboya complimented George Meany for his “wide vision and interest in the problems of underdeveloped countries.”103 In follow-up correspondence with Meany, Mboya reinforced his preference for the Americans, telling him: “The position is very definitely one which requires urgent and immediate attention if the ICFTU connections in Africa are to be saved.”104 There was more in this vein in further letters from the KFL president, pressing the right buttons in assuring Meany that he was keeping on top of “the communist menace” in Kenya (in fact, there was virtually no indigenous communist threat) while soliciting more American funding for his headquarters building.105

The Reuthers were also concerned over the friction surrounding the African labour college. They recognized that the various strands of the Atlantic City accord—which had ruled that training in Africa was the responsibility of the ICFTU—might unravel altogether if its program failed. When Mboya complained that a Willys jeep, originally presented by the autoworkers for the use of the African labour movement, was effectively under the control of the ICFTU and locked away for use only when one of its officials was in the region, it could hardly fail to register with them.106 And beyond the problems associated with the training program, the ICFTU’s continuing delay in establishing the permanent African Regional Organization (AFRO) that the regional conference in Accra had called for in January 1957 was becoming a source of worry for the UAW leadership.

Although the ICFTU was held to blame for this delay, there were also important differences between its East African and West African affiliates that had held up progress, and these highlighted an issue central to the future shape of free trade unionism in Africa. The Ghana TUC under John Tettegah wanted to hold off forming the regional organization pending unity with the French-speaking national centres of West Africa, led by Guinea’s Ahmed Sékou Touré, that were outside the ICFTU fold. The latter centres favoured a purely African trade union organization unaffiliated with either the ICFTU or WFTU and “neutral” in cold-war terms. It was a formula that would later underpin the All-Africa Trade Union Federation (AATUF), and it already had a growing number of supporters, including some ICFTU affiliates disillusioned with the international’s performance in Africa. Ranged against Tettegah on this issue was Tom Mboya, who, though critical of the ICFTU on many issues, strongly identified with the West and was wary of the concept of African “neutrality” that the Soviet Union and the WFTU supported as a means of weaning African labour away from the ICFTU camp. Support for “neutrality” in trade union term clearly involved a risk of being drawn into the Soviet orbit.107

With the ICFTU yet to give institutional form to the African unions’ desire for a regional organization, pan-African sentiment was on the rise throughout the continent and threatened to leave the ICFTU behind. The issue of trade union neutrality was high on the agenda at the launch of the All-Africa Peoples’ Conference (AAPC) in Accra in December 1958, a gathering of utmost importance in the unfolding struggle against colonialism. Among the two hundred delegates attending from fifty organizations and twenty-five African territories, trade unionists played a prominent role and in their separate meeting took a decision in principle to form an All-Africa Trade Union Federation. Kwame Nkrumah, the driving force behind the conference and its host, selected Tom Mboya as its chairman, while John Tettegah served as assistant secretary. Irving Brown, Maida Springer, and George McCray (an American lecturer at the African training college in Kampala) attended on behalf of the AFL-CIO and made a significant contribution on the conference fringes.

Brown was particularly influential, convening a “social get-together” of delegates on the eve of the conference and then serving as English-French translator during the conference’s special trade union session, managing thereby to inject himself into the debate. Among the delegates he met was Patrice Lumumba, a postal clerk from the Congo and a member of the AAPC steering committee. Brown formed the opinion that he was politically sound; he would soon be in correspondence with him, arranging to send French-language copies of the Free Trade Union News. By their presence, the Americans assisted Mboya in his successful effort to defer a final decision on whether the planned AATUF would insist on trade union neutrality and require member centres to disaffiliate from international organizations outside Africa. But it was no more than a temporary victory; indeed, there would soon be a move within the AAPC steering committee to unseat Mboya himself as an agent of the United States.108

African nationalist passion spread like wildfire as news of the deliberations in Accra was broadcast throughout the continent. There were mass disturbances, first in Portuguese East Africa and then in the Belgian Congo, after Lumumba returned home from the conference calling for national independence. “The two hundred million people of Black Africa have awakened from her slumber,” a jubilant John Tettegah wrote to Brown.109

Just two weeks after the conference, Brown’s initial optimism turned to anxiety as he warned Meany: “the tide is definitely beginning to run against us and especially against the ICFTU.” Events risked speeding out of control. “Pan-Africanism was pregnant with many evils and dangers,” “black racialism” was in the air, and there were increasing signs of “communist penetration.” The conference had “opened up possibilities to the Soviet bloc which did not exist previously, especially in the British territories.” And with more states due to achieve independence in the coming twelve months, he worried that “we may soon see a much stronger, neutralist, pro-Soviet policy in Africa.” His perception was that the TUC and ICFTU were losing prestige, while the AFL-CIO suffered from identification with the ICFTU in general and more specifically for having surrendered control of the African training program. To strengthen AFL-CIO influence, he recommended that Maida Springer and George McCray remain in Africa on a permanent basis. Irving Brown was finally putting his post–Atlantic City depression behind him, and on a personal note he told Ross: “This second visit to Africa got under my skin. It makes me rather more frustrated than ever that we seem to be so inactive.”110

Wondering whether he had conveyed a sufficient sense of urgency, Brown “beseeched and urged” Lovestone to do everything in his power to get Meany to act. Lovestone needed no prompting, having already told the AFL-CIO president in his customary apocalyptic style:

Had it not been for American labour’s activities in the past and the participation of the AFL-CIO representatives in this Accra Conference, our country and the free world would have been out in the cold here entirely and the movement towards African freedom would . . . have been completely in Moscow’s grip. As it is we still have a good chance. It is clear that the help which you once gave to Tom Mboya and the KFL has been more than rewarded in deed.111

Inclined now to regret the concessions made at Atlantic City that had left the AFL-CIO too much a bystander in international affairs, Meany was spurred into action by these reports. He wrote to Oldenbroek offering to send a team of black American labour organizers to Africa to help “stem the anti-ICFTU tide.” Fatally for ICFTU relations with the AFL-CIO, Oldenbroek turned down the offer, preferring to highlight what he described as the “remarkable progress” being made in the continent. AFL-CIO executive councillors were indignant at being cold-shouldered in this way, and at their winter meeting in February 1959 called on the US government to establish an economic and technical assistance program for Africa, resolving at the same time to assemble a team of labour officials qualified to work on such a program.112

In contrast to the trade unions of the European colonial powers, the AFL-CIO position was to support the pan-African movement as an expression of African solidarity opposed to all that colonialism represented. As a fluid concept, Pan Africanism produced different strands and competing spokesmen. At one end of the spectrum was the Marxist-tinged version of Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea’s President Sékou Touré, with their common goal of political and economic union to tackle the fragmented legacy of colonialism. They pursued their objective with aid from Moscow, where they were seen as Africa’s only genuine revolutionaries. In marked contrast were the moderate views of Tom Mboya, for whom pan-Africanism was a means of engaging with the West on the basis of freedom and equality in place of colonial exploitation. For the AFL-CIO, the aim from the outset was to prevent pan-African sentiment form turning the labour movement eastward, while at the same time demonstrating a firm commitment to the idea of “Africa for the Africans.”113

Reuther Turns Against Oldenbroek

Of crucial significance in this situation was Walter Reuther’s growing acceptance that Oldenbroek’s complacent attitude toward the rapidly moving developments in Africa was jeopardizing the position of the ICFTU. On this issue he regarded Meany’s criticism of the general secretary as justified. What confirmed his view was a meeting with Mboya in spring 1959, when the Kenyan was visiting the United States. Mboya persuaded him that time was running out for the ICFTU, with the distinct possibility of unions in Africa deserting the international for a neutral pan-African body.114

Mboya himself was already under challenge in Kenya, where hitherto he had been the dominant figure in nationalist politics as well as general secretary of the KFL. On the trade union front, he faced a growing breakaway movement within the KFL that he only temporarily averted by expelling six of his nine executive committee members. As the leading pro-Western voice of pan-Africanism, he was opposed more widely in Africa. Even as Mboya was in the United States in 1959 meeting Reuther, Prime Minister Nkrumah, who resented the prestige Mboya derived from being standing chairman of the AAPC, was manoeuvring to remove him from its steering committee and eventually from the chairmanship. Mboya’s warning to Reuther proved prophetic; eight months later, Nkrumah called a preliminary conference to plan for a new All-Africa Trade Union Federation, the date for which clashed with plans to inaugurate the African Regional Organization (AFRO) that the ICFTU had for so long delayed convening. The challenge to the ICFTU was direct: Ghana’s John Tettegah told Mboya that if he failed to attend the AATUF conference, he would be viewed as a “traitor”: from the outset AFRO faced an organizational split.115

From this point, it was Walter Reuther who led the campaign to oust Jaap Oldenbroek. At a meeting with ICFTU president Arne Geijer in May 1959, the two men decided that the general secretary had to go; he was simply too complacent in the face of the existential challenge to the ICFTU.116 And when Charles Millard again threatened to resign in early 1959 because of the lack of cooperation of the big affiliates, there were no voices asking him to reconsider; increasingly the talk was of the need for a “clean sweep” at the top of the ICFTU, with Oldenbroek, Millard, and Jay Krane all targeted for replacement.

Inevitably, attention once again focussed on ITF general secretary Omer Becu as a potential successor to Oldenbroek. Brown phoned him see whether he was interested in the job. Becu’s response was equivocal, but Brown took it to mean “‘Barkis is willin’,” and he advised him to talk it over with the AFL-CIO leadership. Becu was sufficiently interested in the job to cross the Atlantic within days for meetings with Reuther, Lovestone, and Meany. He told them again that he wouldn’t challenge Oldenbroek directly for the job at the 1959 ICFTU congress, but he would be available if the post became vacant. As Lovestone summed it up, it boiled down to Becu being “ready to accept whatever someone else will fight for and get.” Brown had long since ceased to regard the ITF general secretary as a potential saviour, though he reckoned that if he were surrounded by “strong men”—and that meant the Americans getting involved and remaining involved—he would be willing to pursue a policy line acceptable to the AFL-CIO. As for the man himself, Brown had little enthusiasm: “[Becu] is okay—but are we sure. . . . No one can be sure. . . . We have to take a chance because there is no one else. It is the ‘lesser evil.’”117

The first opportunity to begin the process of removing Oldenbroek was the ICFTU executive board meeting in late June 1959 in West Berlin. In the course of this, Meany led a three-man delegation, with Arne Geijer and Willi Richter, to see Oldenbroek to inform him that he no longer had their confidence. Meany warned that if he continued in office, the AFL-CIO would reduce its involvement in the ICFTU and refuse to pay the 20 percent increase in affiliation fees that the board meeting had just agreed to. But Oldenbroek faced them down and refused to resign. He was aged sixty-one, and he told them that he intended to stand for re-election and serve one more term.118 Once back in the United States, Meany was adamant that if there were no change in leadership at the December congress, the entire AFL-CIO relationship with the ICFTU would have to be reviewed. Reuther, too, was unwavering: “We cannot continue to permit the domination of the ICFTU by the inflexible personality of Oldenbroek. . . . If we do not act at the December congress, then we might forfeit our opportunity. History will not wait.”119

Figure 9.  Jaap Oldenbroek, general secretary of the ICFTU, 1949–60, in Stockholm, addressing the ICFTU’s July 1953 congress. By 1959, Walter Reuther saw the ICFTU as dominated by his “inflexible personality.” Courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.

The convergence of views between Meany and Reuther on this issue was all the more interesting given that on the substantive question of how organized labour should respond to the Soviet “new look” they were still poles apart. In the course of 1959, Soviet deputy prime minister Anastas Mikoyan, followed later by Communist Party secretary Nikita Khrushchev, visited the United States in the context of the growing crisis in Berlin. Both men sought a meeting with AFL-CIO leaders in the course of their visits. Mikoyan’s request failed get beyond Meany’s desk, but when Reuther heard about it he and two other AFL-CIO vice presidents agreed to meet the deputy prime minister. Meany duly voiced sharp criticism of those who “feel they can meet the Soviet challenge at the conference table.”120 When President Eisenhower subsequently invited Khrushchev for talks at Camp David in September 1959, the Soviet leader asked for an opportunity to address the AFL-CIO convention then meeting in San Francisco. Predictably, Meany declined to be in the same room as Khrushchev, but again Reuther adopted the position that it was always worth speaking to an opponent, and he and a small number of federation leaders arranged a dinner followed by a discussion with Khrushchev. However, Reuther’s request that the AFL-CIO subsequently endorse their action was rejected by the executive council.121 In the event, the attempts at dialogue with each of the Soviet political leaders descended into bad-tempered exchanges, generating more heat than light. Whether anything was achieved beyond gaining international publicity for Walter Reuther is debatable, but it was clear that the disagreement between Reuther and Meany over the former’s willingness to talk to Khrushchev soured the tone of the AFL-CIO convention. In particular, it made it impossible for Arne Geijer to convene an informal meeting in San Francisco of leaders of ICFTU affiliates to further the process of securing agreement on Oldenbroek’s replacement.

Undaunted, and with Meany opting to sit on the sidelines, the ICFTU president persevered throughout the autumn, hoping to coax Oldenbroek into resigning. Yet his best efforts failed, and as the ICFTU’s December congress loomed it seemed the AFL-CIO might not even bother to send a top-level delegation; Meany’s personal attendance in Brussels was certainly in doubt. For Irving Brown, it was a demoralizing state of affairs and highlighted yet again the AFL-CIO’s lack of imagination in dealing with the ICFTU. He argued that more was needed than simply replacing Oldenbroek with Becu, “about whose qualifications we are not too certain.” The AFL-CIO needed to secure recognition by other national centres of its special role within the ICFTU, and he criticized the federation’s leadership for failing to win acceptance of such.122 Again he complained that they had failed to devote sufficient time and energy to make the ICFTU operate successfully, and as a result the organization was now becoming a “tarnished shingle.” He argued that “whether we like it or not, we have . . . contributed to the downgrading of its attractive power.” And while Brown recognized the damage caused by Oldenbroek as a consequence of his “methods of work and character,” he insisted that it was “too simple at this late stage to explain the deficiencies of the ICFTU on the basis of the devil theory of history.”123 It was fair comment, though he bore considerable personal responsibility for the generally negative image of the ICFTU in AFL-CIO circles.

The 1959 congress in Brussels—which marked the tenth anniversary of the ICFTU—proved to be a querulous affair with little to celebrate. Were it not for Chancellor Adenauer’s invitation to George Meany and Jay Lovestone to receive the West German government’s Order of Merit in Bonn while the ICFTU congress was in session a short 200 kilometres away, it is doubtful that the AFL-CIO president would have bothered to cross the Atlantic.124 During a truncated appearance at the congress, Meany spoke out against Western colonialism as being “morally wrong and politically destructive,” and offered help to workers in newly independent countries in spite of the “dead hand” of the ICFTU. British delegates in turn defended their record in the colonies, pointed to the inadequate funding of the ICFTU, and reproached the AFL-CIO for preaching anti-communism to empty bellies in developing countries.125

In the congress’s final session, after Meany had packed and left for home, the issue of the leadership was finally addressed in an anodyne resolution. It called for the appointment an ad hoc committee to review the structure of the international and report back to the executive board six months hence. There was no explicit reference to changing the leading officer, though that was its intention. The committee was a device to negotiate the retirement of Jaap Oldenbroek, its supporters ready to sacrifice him in the interests of harmony. Practically all the speakers in the debate, especially the delegates from developing countries who were just becoming aware of the bitter American-led campaign to ditch the general secretary, condemned it as a deceitful and essentially unconstitutional measure. But it carried nonetheless.126

Although George Meany was nominated to the ad hoc committee, he was already inclined to write off the ICFTU and played but a limited role in its deliberations. The committee’s report was effectively the work of Arne Geijer, who focused on how to strengthen the ICFTU secretariat and came to the unsurprising conclusion that under Jaap Oldenbroek it was not possible to recruit staff of suitable calibre: the idea of appointing assistant general secretaries from the ranks of the largest affiliates was back on the agenda. The question now was to determine whether Omer Becu was still available to replace Oldenbroek, a task for which Walter Reuther assumed personal responsibility. He invited Becu to Detroit for talks in January 1960 and promised an increase in funding for the ICFTU, making clear his support for a clean sweep of the senior officials—Oldenbroek, Millard, and Krane—and for Becu to have freedom to choose among Americans who might go to work for him. More generally, he assured him that he and Geijer would cooperate closely with the general secretary on future plans for the ICFTU, writing: “I believe the three of us working together will be able to keep things moving in the right direction. I am confident that we can bring about effective reorganization of the ICFTU around your leadership and with four competent assistant general secretaries, with greater resources and with effective integration and cooperation of the ITSs.” Under such persuasion, Becu agreed to be a candidate.127

The ad hoc committee’s report was presented at a closed session of the ICFTU executive board in Geneva on 15 June 1960. With Jaap Oldenbroek identified as the root problem, it was proposed that the post of general secretary be “declared vacant.”128 Reuther nominated Becu for general secretary, at which point Oldenbroek finally agreed to resign—but not before Meany made a key concession.

Figure 10.  Walter Reuther (left) and George Meany, at the June 1960 meeting of the ICFTU executive board, in Geneva. Despite deep differences over international policy, the two men briefly united during this meeting to force the resignation of Jaap Oldenbroek. Reuther proposed Omer Becu as his replacement, and Meany made a commitment that, if Oldenbroek agreed to resign, the AFL-CIO would operate abroad strictly within the framework of the ICFTU. Courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.

Ahead of the meeting, Oldenbroek had indicated to Geijer that he would be prepared to stand down if Meany were to give an undertaking to abandon AFL-CIO independent activities. Privately Geijer sounded out Meany on this and received a positive response. In the course of the closed session Geijer then posed the question again, and Meany confirmed to the meeting at large that in future the AFL-CIO would work strictly within the framework of ICFTU programs. On the basis of that commitment, Jaap Oldenbroek tendered his resignation.129 When, next day, Omer Becu was introduced to the board as a putative general secretary, Oldenbroek congratulated him, noted that his resignation had been tied to the commitment by national centres to end independent activities, and observed that if this undertaking were not carried out, he would not expect Becu to remain in the job for very long.130

Having disappointed George Meany for most of the past decade, Oldenbroek had now gone, soon to be followed by those closest to him in the ICFTU secretariat—the “clean sweep” so long talked about by the AFL-CIO leadership.131 Yet, for Jay Lovestone, satisfaction at finally seeing the end of the Oldenbroek era was overshadowed by his misgivings over Meany’s commitment on independent activities. He wrote: “If it were not for such independent activities of the AFL-CIO . . . we would have nothing in Africa. Today the ICFTU could have its flag, its shingle, its dirty linen and nothing else.”132 The issue that had been the cause of such friction over the previous decade had by no means gone away.

That Walter Reuther and George Meany found themselves at one in seeking to replace the ICFTU general secretary in 1960 stood in contrast to their record of disagreement over key international issues in the preceding five years. Whether it was about the emerging alliance between Nehru’s India and the USSR or the question of agreeing to dialogue with Soviet leaders Mikoyan and Khrushchev during their visits to the United States, their responses pointed to sharply differing understandings of the dynamic of the Cold War. Beyond the substantive issues involved was Reuther’s competitive jockeying for position with Meany, with his self-image as an international statesman and his keenness to appear on the world stage as spokesman for American labour plainly irritating the AFL-CIO president.

Following the merger, little progress in the conduct of international affairs had been possible without firm agreement on the future role of the FTUC and its independent activities and, relatedly, clarification of the AFL-CIO’s attitude toward working in partnership with the ICFTU. The litmus test would be the Americans’ willingness to act as “good citizens” of the ICFTU and offer full support to the new organizing department headed by Charles Millard. Yet here the signals were mixed. David Dubinsky’s loss of enthusiasm for the FTUC as a semi-detached body led him to support Millard, thus tipping the AFL-CIO vote in favour of his appointment. Yet the logic of this shift in position seemed to be that Millard would not make a success of the organizing function—indeed that he was being set up to fail—and that in consequence the FTUC would live to fight another day. Fearing the risks involved in “peaceful coexistence” and “appeasement” by the free trade movement, Lovestone declined to accept that independent activities by the FTUC were a thing of the past, and fought a determined rear-guard action against the terms of the 1957 Atlantic City accord under which the AFL-CIO was prevailed upon to wind up the FTUC in favour of ICFTU-led international programs.

Forced eventually to accept what appeared to be a signal victory for the Reuther camp, Irving Brown’s focus now shifted from Europe to Africa, where a new theatre of activity was opening up. The demise of the FTUC and changes in the political climate as they affected the labour movement in various European countries—the impact in France of the colonial war in Algeria and the attendant differences between the AFL-CIO and Force ouvrière, the West German labour movement’s lack of enthusiasm for membership in the North Atlantic Alliance, and the growing attraction for non-communist Italian unions of the political “opening to the left”—had made it more difficult for him to exercise influence in his European bailiwick, whereas Africa seemed to offer promise.

Within the ICFTU secretariat, and among European trade union centres with colonial ties to Africa, the Americans were regarded as interlopers in this theatre of operations. High-profile initiatives such as the financial support the AFL-CIO extended to the Kenyan labour movement, and its major initiative in seeking to assume responsibility for training a cadre of African trade union leaders in the United States, aroused suspicions that it was trying to bypass the ICFTU. Yet the principled stance in opposition to colonialism adopted by the American labour movement over many years, and its support for swift and unimpeded progress toward home rule and independence, found immediate favour with the African trade union leaders who often tended to lead the nationalist movement. The explosion of pan-African sentiment at the end of the 1950s—a major landmark in the drive for decolonization—was initially greeted with American approval, though it was soon apparent to Irving Brown that the African unions risked playing into the hands of “communist” elements within the pan-African movement.

Here the lack of urgency with which the ICFTU approached the requirement to build its organization in Africa proved fatal, especially in the face of growing Soviet and East German interest in helping the independence movement. The ICFTU risked the loss of support of African affiliates that were already attracted by the competing call to establish a “neutral” All-Africa Trade Union Federation. When, backed by the British TUC, General Secretary Oldenbroek declined the AFL-CIO offer to send a team of black American trade union organizers to work with the ICFTU in Africa and inject some urgency into its organizing work, it proved to be the final straw for the Americans. Walter Reuther lined up with Meany over this issue and actually took the lead in campaigning for the general secretary to be replaced. Omer Becu was invited to offer himself as an alternative, doing so on the back of a commitment from Meany to abandon activities independent of the ICFTU. It opened up the possibility of a new start for the ICFTU, especially in its relations with the AFL-CIO. Yet Meany’s commitment over independent activity greatly troubled Lovestone; just how firm a commitment it was in practice became a central issue in the 1960s.