Introduction

This book is about American trade unions and how their efforts in the international field during the Cold War helped decisively to shape our modern world. Today, in an age when the strength of organized labour is much diminished, it requires an effort of memory to recall that, for many decades, trade unions in America and Europe were a substantial force in national politics, whose views on matters of foreign and defence policy, no less than domestic affairs, had to be listened to by governments. Organized labour was a key player throughout the years of ideological confrontation between East and West—here a contributor to cold-war antagonisms, bringing the Cold War into the heart of trade union practice, there a vocal critic of dangerous cold-war initiatives by governments, but never a mere bystander. Indeed, understanding the role played by organized labour is essential to understanding the course and social dimension of the Cold War.

The present work has its roots in research I undertook in the late 1970s and early 1980s on the Marshall Plan, a formative development in the early Cold War. My focus then was the American trade union contribution in shaping the Marshall Plan and helping to administer it, and the impact this had on national labour movements in Europe. Although the American labour movement gave overwhelming backing to the Marshall Plan, the trade unions did not speak with a single voice on international matters. A fault line broadly corresponding to, but not exactly coterminous with, the organizational split between the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) reflected different philosophical emphases. National trade union centres in Europe, beneficiaries of Marshall aid, were acutely aware of these American differences, and their reaction to developments in the aid program was conditioned by this understanding. Inevitably, international labour diplomacy was made complicated by such factors.

Among the records of the Marshall Plan administration are occasional stray items of internal trade union correspondence that had found their way into government files. They show not mere philosophical differences between the two American camps but at times animosity of a vitriolic nature between people engaged in labour aspects of the program. To me, this suggested a possible promising field for further research that would carry the story forward beyond the Marshall Plan years. However, the relevant archival material was not then available.

A good deal of documentation from the CIO was already accessible in the Walter Reuther Archives, though the AFL-CIO had yet to release material covering AFL international work from the end of World War II to the merger with the CIO in 1955, as well as subsequent international records of the unified organization. I spent several years pestering the AFL-CIO in the late 1980s and early 1990s for access to these papers. Not until 1992 was I allowed to see President George Meany’s international correspondence for the limited period up to 1960. More years were to elapse before I gained access to the vitally important papers of international staffers Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown.

The individuals who are central to this study have long since passed from the scene. They were key players in their day, and their personal biographies make them seem, at times, like characters from a Le Carré novel. Foremost among them were Lovestone and Brown. Jay Lovestone, one-time leader of the American communist party before falling afoul of Stalin in the late 1920s, went on to lead his small, anti-Stalinist Communist Party (Opposition) (the “Lovestoneites”) and gradually sought a toehold in the mainstream American labour movement in the 1930s. Irving Brown became a Lovestone acolyte in the early 1930s, while still a student activist. He remained close to his leader throughout that decade while working for organized labour in the garment trades and auto industry in positions obtained through Lovestone’s influence.

With their communism in the past, in 1945 the two were reunited as a close-knit team in the AFL’s newly formed Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC), through which the AFL planned to operate overseas. Still in a master-apprentice relationship, with Lovestone as the FTUC’s executive director in New York and Brown as its field representative in Europe, they shared a particular understanding of the role of organized labour based on their political grounding in Leninism, a mindset of central control and secrecy that never left them even as they operated as professional anti-Stalinists. The FTUC provided a congenial platform for their anti-communism, but they were never entirely defined or restricted by its policies. They had their own agenda and would refer in private to their “project.”

In the late 1940s and 1950s, they established themselves as the chief foreign policy advisors to the handful of men who determined AFL international policy. Here, three people were especially important. The first was Matthew Woll, chairman of the FTUC and leader of the photo-engravers’ union, a diminutive figure who seemed a relic of an earlier age, given his penchant for wearing wing collars and striped pants. Indeed, back in 1924, when Samuel Gompers, the founding president of the AFL, died, Woll had hoped to succeed him. The second was David Dubinsky, a refugee from Tsarist persecution who had been schooled in the ways of organized labour as a member of the Jewish Bund. In the United States, he rose to become the strong man of the powerful Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the FTUC’s biggest financial backer. Finally, there was George Meany, of Irish-Catholic descent, who had worked as a New York plumber and had risen through labour’s ranks to become the AFLs pugnacious secretary-treasurer. Initially, the FTUC operated a de facto collective leadership, but over the years, and especially after he was elected AFL president, George Meany became the most powerful figure. It was through him especially that Lovestone and Brown sought to exert influence through to the closing years of the Cold War.

Lovestone and Brown were the two representatives who, on behalf of the AFL and, later, the AFL-CIO, interacted with officialdom in the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and the leadership of other national trade union centres abroad. It was largely through their negative reporting of developments within the ICFTU and their wounding personal criticisms of its leadership that the latter’s relations with the Americans became increasingly bitter and recriminatory in the 1950s and 1960s. The profound consequences of this for the cohesiveness of the international labour movement constitute a central theme of this book.

Other national labour centres had their foreign policy specialists, but they were typically backroom functionaries of a second order rather than, as with Lovestone and Brown, influential operatives engaged in high politics and sensitive labour diplomacy. The latter moved in altogether more exalted circles, having ready access to White House staff, State Department officials, and topmost CIA personnel at home, while abroad they mixed freely with heads of government, cabinet ministers, and ambassadors.

As the archival records amply show, it was Lovestone and Brown who dominated the scene, setting out the information, ideas, and strategies that essentially fixed the agenda for the AFL-CIO and its activities abroad. But beyond being significant “players,” Lovestone and Brown were also major chroniclers of events through their extensive correspondence and reportage. In dense correspondence that spanned thirty years, they sometimes managed a double exchange of letters a week between New York and Paris. It was almost invariably business correspondence, with a deadly serious focus on the “big issues” in international affairs as they interpreted them. Much of it fed into briefings for George Meany. Other letters were private, an exchange of thoughts between two men sharing a strong ideological bond and with a special mission within the labour movement.

On the most sensitive issues, such as the financing of American trade union programs overseas—frequently from US government sources and of a covert nature—they wrote in a thinly disguised code. Yet, at the same time, they were frequently indiscreet in their discussion of events and personal criticisms of colleagues in their field. It is this that makes their letters so richly revealing as commentary on the Cold War and indispensable for an understanding of how events were perceived, possibilities assessed, and policy proposals developed.

The Lovestone-Brown archival collections lifted the lid on the handling of international affairs within the AFL and beyond, making it possible to write about the subject in detail for the first time. Based on material from these sources, in 1998 I wrote an article for Labour History, “The American Labour Movement in Fizzland: The Free Trade Union Committee and the CIA,” reviewing the relationship between the AFL and the world of intelligence during the early years of the Cold War. One year later, Ted Morgan’s groundbreaking biography of Lovestone, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster (1999), drew upon the same source material. However, Morgan concentrated heavily on Lovestone’s communist years and his subsequent drift back to the mainstream labour movement in the 1930s, while passing up the chance to delve deeply into his postwar work for the AFL and AFL-CIO in the admittedly obscure world of international trade union politics, with its complex institutional structure.

In more recent years, as academic fashion has shifted away from institutional histories of the labour movement, the Lovestone-Brown collections seem to have been relatively little consulted. Certainly, no one has attempted to tackle in detail the central issue of American labour’s often fraught relations with its partners in what became known during the Cold War as the “international free trade union movement,” with the ICFTU as its most prominent agency. Yet there has long been a need for a study of international labour affairs that details the role of Lovestone and Brown, and it is to address this gap that the present volume covering the first twenty-five years of the Cold War has been written.

I have chosen to ignore the doubtless sound advice of colleagues that a slim volume covering the entire period of the Cold War would have more appeal to a general readership. I am more persuaded by the view that the time for a detailed treatment of key episodes in this saga is long overdue. This volume therefore ends with the AFL-CIO’s momentous 1969 decision to withdraw from the ICFTU, which thereby lost its largest affiliate and its biggest source of finance. Forsaking multilateralism, the AFL-CIO thus chose to “go it alone” in its battle against communism. A second volume will address the lonely years of American isolation that followed and the AFL-CIO’s cautious road back to partnership with other national centres in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I approach the history of this period through two broad narrative strands. The first is the AFL-CIO’s relations with leading free trade union centres in Europe, most importantly the British Trades Union Congress (TUC). The TUC had, since the early years of the twentieth century, assumed a leadership role in international labour affairs, and the AFL was determined to challenge its primacy in this field. In practice, this meant working to undermine the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), which the TUC and the CIO had helped to set up in partnership with the trade union centre of the Soviet Union. It would then involve replacing the WFTU with a new “free” trade union international, the ICFTU, and, within that body, forcing the pace in anti-communist programs and the movement for colonial freedom. In the latter field, which saw Americans pitted against the trade unions of the old colonial powers of Europe, the AFL was motivated by a genuine concern for national independence movements. But its anti-colonialism was also inextricably linked to the anti-communist struggle, reflecting the American conviction that European foot dragging over decolonization inevitably played into the hands of communists and fellow travellers among trade union leaders in the emerging African and Asian labour movements.

Despite its leading role in fomenting the breakup of the WFTU and in creating the ICFTU, the AFL quickly concluded that the new international body was more susceptible to European than American influence. From the earliest days, a pattern developed in which the AFL identified the ICFTU secretariat as part of “the problem.” It accused the staff of being insufficiently forceful in the anti-communist cause and too cautious in implementing programs aimed at empowering workers in countries seeking colonial independence. AFL support for the ICFTU became half-hearted, its attitude toward the leadership increasingly hostile. The ICFTUs first two general secretaries were forced to resign, largely under American pressure. And eventually the AFL-CIO quit the organization, believing that it no longer served American interests. International solidarity fell victim to a perception that the ICFTU stood in the way of the full-blooded anti-communism that the AFL-CIO regarded as the motivating force of the international labour movement.

The second narrative thread in my account deals with the recurrent tension over international affairs between the AFL and the CIO, and then between leaders of the former independent centres in the merged AFL-CIO. Much of this was a product of historic rivalries dating back to the 1930s, but it acquired a new salience in the 1950s over the contrasting philosophical approaches of AFL president George Meany and CIO president Walter Reuther, who led the autoworkers’ union and was Meany’s chief rival for the leadership of the US labour movement. Their differences covered both domestic and international matters, but they also stemmed from the CIO leader’s burning ambition to replace Meany as president of the merged AFL-CIO.

That Reuther was staunchly anti-communist and, no less than Meany, a keen critic of European colonialism suggested to many that their policy differences were exaggerated and that the main issue dividing them was Reuther’s personal ambition. However, Reuther differed from Meany in that his anti-communism was couched in the more liberal language of “peaceful co-existence,” together with a willingness to dialogue with ideological opponents. Moreover, his political instincts were broadly social democratic, with the result that he enjoyed more common ground with European trade union counterparts than Meany ever did. In turn, this closeness to the Europeans affected the internal balance of the ICFTU.

Meany supporters believed that Reuther undermined American labour’s ability to present a united front abroad; he was viewed as an ally of the Europeans and the ICFTU secretariat and thus as an obstacle to the attainment of American objectives within the ICFTU. The UAW president’s stance made for a structural weakness on the American side that was only ended when Reuther, frustrated by the internal politics of the AFL-CIO, eventually withdrew the UAW from it in 1968. In turn this hastened the American centre’s own departure from the ICFTU the following year. Union fragmentation at home and abroad was now the order of the day.

George Meany had rarely invested much faith in the ICFTU. He had threatened withdrawal before and had now delivered on that threat. To close observers it was half expected. Indeed, a perceptive observer of Meany’s performance at a tumultuous British TUC congress twenty-five years earlier during his first ever visit to Europe would not have been surprised by his behaviour in 1969. It was on that earlier occasion that Meany first spelled out to a foreign audience his views on trade union contacts with communists. World War II had ended, the new Cold War with the USSR was in the wings, and the launch of the WFTU was imminent. And it is here then that the story begins—at the TUC Congress, Blackpool, England, September 1945.