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Facing the Future—Labour’s World in 1945

Blustery weather typical of mid-September greeted delegates attending the first postwar conference of the British Trades Union Congress, held in 1945 at Blackpool’s Winter Gardens on the Lancashire coast. On Wednesday, 12 September, midway through the conference, the forecast called for a mix of clear skies and showers, with winds from the Atlantic freshening to gale force. Prime minister Clement Attlee was to deliver the keynote address that day—his first public speech since Labour’s landslide general election victory in July. During the intervening period, he had attended the Potsdam Conference, along with Joseph Stalin and Harry Truman.

The prime minister was well received. He spoke of the task of building a new world order, a task that governments alone could not complete. It required the painstaking efforts of the peoples of the world. Nor could it be fashioned according to fixed models or nostrums. Atlee was acutely aware of looming political problems in the old colonial world and the new Soviet sphere, and he warned in particular against assuming that democratic practices widely accepted in Britain were “necessarily either practicable or desirable in, say, Eastern Europe or India.” Yet the speech looked ahead with optimism to the “New Jerusalem” that Atlee and the trade union delegates present felt was now on the horizon.

Following Attlee’s address, the conference resumed its discussion of domestic affairs, notably proposals to speed up the demobilization of the armed forces. Then, in mid-afternoon, during a natural break in the debate, the conference took time out for one of a number of greetings from fraternal delegates representing foreign trade union centres. Earlier, Léon Jouhaux, of the French Confédération générale du travail (CGT)—recently released from a German prison and soon to become a Nobel Peace laureate—had spoken passionately of the importance of international trade union unity in the victory over Nazism. He had been followed by Mikhail Tarasov, of the Soviet All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (AUCCTU), who stressed much the same theme: the future of mankind and lasting peace, declared Tarasov, depended mainly on the unity of the working class of all countries. Now it was time for a message of greeting from the fraternal delegate of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a ritual part of annual TUC conferences since 1894. But this was to be no platitudinous speech by an American brother on a “holiday swing” through Europe. Outside the Winter Gardens, the predicted gale from the Atlantic Ocean had failed to materialize: inside the conference hall, it was about to hit with a force.

George Meany at the TUC, September 1945: Laying Down a Marker

At fifty-one, George Meany, the AFL’s secretary-treasurer, was making his debut at a British trade union conference. He was a burly 220-pound cigar-smoking Irish American from the Bronx, once described by the New York Times labour correspondent as “a cross between a bulldog and a bull.” A plumber by trade, for the past twenty-five years he had been working his way up the union hierarchy as a full-time official, but Meany was not yet the household name he would later become. He had come to Blackpool to explain his organization’s deep disagreement with the British TUC over a central issue of trade union international policy. The AFL would not be accepting an invitation to attend the World Labour Conference that the TUC, along with the Soviet AUCCTU and the American Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), were jointly convening in Paris less than two weeks later and that was likely to lead to the creation of a new international body, a World Federation of Trade Unions.

The Paris conference was a follow-up to a preliminary gathering convened in London in February that the AFL had also boycotted. There were three simple reasons for its refusal to attend. The AFL was not prepared to associate with the Soviet trade unions, which it did not regard as authentic. Nor was it was willing to join forces with the CIO, a breakaway from the AFL of less than ten years’ standing, which it accused of weakening organized labour by practising “dual unionism.” A third issue was the AFL’s legalistic contention that any attempt to restructure the international labour movement should have been initiated by the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), the established international centre to which both the TUC and AFL belonged.

With the dawning of postwar reconstruction, international trade union relations were of particular importance, and since the AFL had not participated in the preliminary World Labour Conference in London, the remarks by this largely unknown American visitor were likely to be of interest. Unusual for a fraternal address, delegates remained in their seats as conference chairman Ebby Edwards introduced him—“Comrade” George Meany.

Observing protocol, Meany opened his speech with the polite sentiments that such occasions demanded. Expressing admiration for the indomitable courage shown by the British people during six years of war, he noted that, although he was paying his first visit to the TUC, he felt as though he was addressing old friends. But, leaving the niceties behind, he quickly came to his main theme—the attitude of the AFL to international labour cooperation. On this, he warned the delegates, he intended to be very frank.

Regarding first the position of the International Federation of Trade Unions, housed since the fall of France in the TUC’s headquarters, with TUC general secretary Sir Walter Citrine as its long-serving president, he confessed to an element of puzzlement. Through their prominent role in organizing the London and Paris World Labour Conferences, Citrine and IFTU general secretary Walter Schevenels had been acting without a mandate or directive from the IFTU itself. And with Citrine sitting just two seats from him, Meany went on in accusing tone:

To make a rough analysis of the picture, as we see it, the two principal officers of the IFTU have been engaged for the past two years in an open effort to dissolve, or in other words to destroy the organization they are supposed to represent. We . . . do not understand nor can we approve of such activity. No reasons of expediency can explain or condone these actions.

The AFL’s position was simple and straightforward. They would neither seek nor accept membership in an organization that granted recognition to the AFL’s rival in America, the CIO. This was not a case of petty organizational jealousy but rather of intense hostility on the part of the AFL to a breakaway organization that was guilty of dividing the American labour movement and hampering labour’s effort in the fight against fascism. Meany referred to the significant effort of the AFL in contributing more than $100 million toward the relief of victims of fascism, contrasting it with the isolationist position of the CIO leadership, strongly influenced by communists. He reminded the audience that these CIO leaders, who were now promoting international labour unity through the World Labour Conference, had campaigned against American involvement in the war during the years of the Soviet-German friendship pact, picketing outside the White House with placards proclaiming that “the Yanks are not coming.” Addressing the charge that the AFL was now being isolationist, he insisted that the AFL was as internationalist as the TUC, but “if fidelity to the principles of true democracy isolates us from the intellectual acrobats who get their daily direction for their daily vocal exercises from the Daily Worker we are happy and proud of our position.”

Meany was no spellbinding orator, one to capture or sway an audience with mellifluous phrases or theatrical delivery. But he was forceful, self-confident, and direct, and he warmed to his theme as he now took aim at his second target, the Soviet trade unions. “Let there be no mistake,” he thundered:

We do not recognize or concede that the Russian worker groups are trade unions . . . [but] are formally and actually instruments of the State. . . . These so-called unions are designed to protect the interests of the Soviet State even if this means that the interests of the workers themselves must be subordinated or injured. These so-called trade unions actively support the Soviet system of worker blacklists and deportations to labour camps.

Muttering in the conference hall had grown louder as Meany developed his argument, and now, in an unprecedented display of anger toward a fraternal delegate, members of the audience attempted to interrupt. There were hisses, catcalls, and cries of “Shame!” and “Tommyrot!” Forced to shout to restore order, the chairman appealed to the conference to give the AFL spokesman a hearing. Unfazed, Meany pressed ahead with his message, goading his pro-Soviet critics by asking rhetorically, what common ground could there be with the Soviet trade unions? What was there to talk about? “The latest innovation being used by the secret police to ensnare those who think in opposition to the group in power,” he suggested, “or perhaps bigger and better concentration camps for political prisoners?”

Turning to the workings of the World Labour Conference and the kind of politicized international trade union organization that was likely to emerge, he referred to the preliminary gathering in London, noting acidly that he was “impressed by the amazing turnout of delegates from the Crown Colonies” and “impressed too by the spontaneous creation and representation of large trade unions in liberated and ex-enemy countries where no unions had existed a few weeks before.” But he was still more impressed by the way the CIO and the Soviet AUCCTU had brushed aside the TUC’s intention that the gathering should be only consultative and exploratory and had caused it to focus more on political issues than trade union concerns. The AFL, he stressed, would not cooperate in the creation of “a world super state of labour designed to influence the economic and political affairs of all nations.”

As an alternative, he repeated the AFL’s willingness to pursue international trade union unity through the IFTU, an approach that would automatically exclude the Soviet trade unions and the CIO, neither of which was a member of that body. Concluding on a note of amity that ran counter to what had gone before, he expressed the bright hope that as the AFL “travelled down the road to a better future” it would enjoy the companionship and cooperation of the TUC, their “old and honoured friend.”

Inevitably, Meany’s speech had injected a discordant note. It was not his style to dissemble, even in the interests of politeness. Plain speaking was his stock-in-trade. The fact that he was in England undoubtedly influenced his tone. Of Irish descent, he was no Anglophile, and as the years to come would show, he was easily irritated by what he and other American trade unionists often took to be the supercilious style of TUC officials who adopted the lofty pose of elder statesmen in international gatherings. Nor did it help that Citrine was “Sir Walter,” the first of a long line of British trade union “knights” with whom he was forced to deal. The sarcastic reference to the preliminary World Labour Conference being packed with delegations from the “Crown Colonies” reflected his abomination of British colonialism. His negative assessment of the Soviet trade unions and his bitterness toward the CIO were entirely in keeping with the views of the AFL leadership. And given the haste with which these organizations were working to create a new world trade union body, Meany probably believed that he had nothing to lose by being outspoken. Indeed, this was a definitive public warning on behalf of the AFL that it was ready to part company with former allies over the issue.

As Meany sat down, TUC president Edwards was quick to rule that a fraternal delegate’s speech was not open for debate. He was anxious to assure the American that the leaders of the TUC would want an opportunity during his visit to discuss with him their approach to the coming World Conference, but he stressed, as the Daily Worker report noted, “to tremendous cheers” that the TUC’s firm objective was “to promote greater unity among the working class of the world.” George Meany was then presented with “a good British watch.” With just a trace of good-humoured sarcasm reflecting the strained atmosphere that had descended on the conference, President Edwards assured him that this was a gift and not “lend lease” (which, to British consternation, had been recently and abruptly terminated by the Americans). With some relief, he then announced that the conference would now move into private session before adjourning for the day.1

The chairman had also expressed the hope that other fraternal guests would avoid entering into a debate over issues raised by Meany. That evening Soviet representative Mikhail Tarasov complained formally to the TUC about Meany’s attack but was told that he would not be allowed a public platform to answer the charges. Tarasov then drafted a letter to the TUC protesting Meany’s “hostile and insulting calumnies” and declaring that his speech would provoke deepest resentment among the ranks of Soviet workers. The speech, he wrote, was as much an insult to the CIO and the TUC, but he had drawn comfort from the loud protests of delegates who had also demonstrated their resentment.2

Meany’s message was at odds with the prevailing sentiment in favour of international trade union unity. A few months earlier, Walter Schevenels, general secretary of the IFTU, had referred to the widespread “mystical appeal of trade union unity” in 1945, a unity that necessarily embraced the Soviet Union.3 In Britain, enthusiasm for the USSR was at a peak in the wake of Red Army heroism on the Eastern front and the Anglo-Soviet entente in war production industries since June 1941. The cheerfully irreverent call by returning British troops of “Joe for King” reflected a positive, popular image of Stalin in the country’s workshops. Hopes for the continuation of the spirit of the Great Power alliance were entirely understandable in the context of 1945. Nonetheless, in the trade union movement in Europe and North America, there was plenty of pre-war experience to suggest that cooperation with the unions of the USSR might prove difficult.

Even before becoming IFTU president in 1928, Walter Citrine had more experience than most of face-to-face dealings with Soviet trade union leaders. He had been the TUC’s assistant general secretary for barely a year in 1925, and was actually on an official visit to the USSR, when he was summoned home early to take the reins at the TUC on the sudden death of the general secretary. Three years later he added to his responsibilities the presidency of the IFTU. Over the next seventeen years he made strenuous efforts to widen the organization’s membership beyond its European base. To this end, he shuttled extensively between North America and the USSR while all the time safeguarding the organization’s essentially social democratic concept of trade unionism, with its respect for parliamentarism and instinct for working closely with democratic socialist parties. The imminent World Labour Conference was in no small part the long-term consequence of those efforts.

Playing on growing fears of both fascism and communism, in 1937 Citrine had successfully canvassed the AFL to join the IFTU. Part of the AFL’s reason for agreeing to do so was to close the door to possible membership in the IFTU by the newly emerging CIO, since affiliation was restricted to one centre per country. When, in 1939, the TUC proposed that the IFTU also invite the Soviet trade unions to join, the AFL threatened to withdraw, and the idea was voted down.4 However, in 1941, Citrine was in tune with the British trade union groundswell of support for the Soviet Union that resulted in the establishment of an Anglo-Soviet Trade Union Committee aimed at increasing military production to equip the Red Army fighting on the Eastern front. It met several times and promoted an extensive program of Anglo-Soviet factory exchange visits.

After Pearl Harbour, Citrine turned his attention to broadening the committee membership to embrace American trade unions and so mirror in the field of organized labour the Great Power alliance at government level. Canvassing the Americans, he explained to the AFL leadership that pro-Soviet sentiment in Britain meant that a link-up with their unions had been unavoidable. But he sought to reassure them that the organization was in dependable hands and that the TUC itself had taken the lead in this initiative rather than allow its more avid pro-Soviet members to control the British component. Nonetheless, the AFL rejected the proposed three-way link-up, agreeing only to form a separate AFL-TUC Committee. Citrine’s subsequent efforts to bring the CIO into this joint body also failed because of AFL opposition. Unlike the Anglo-Soviet Committee, the AFL-TUC body only ever met once, and then in a strained atmosphere. The CIO remained on the sidelines, causing its president, Philip Murray, to remonstrate that the CIO was tired of “being kicked around like a trade union waif in this field of international labour collaboration.” To escape from isolation, Murray then successfully pressed the TUC to initiate moves that would eventually lead to the World Labour Conference of 1945.

In issuing the call for this conference, the TUC’s hope was that attendees would discuss the prosecution of the war effort (this, in Citrine’s eyes, being the overriding purpose of the conference), as well as the question of reconstruction once peace had been restored, including possible reorganization of the world labour movement. “We intend,” Citrine had insisted “that the voice of [the] Trade Unions shall be heard in the formation of any peace treaty or any post-war reconstruction.”5 The AFL felt betrayed by this latest British move to establish an all-inclusive world body and vainly hoped to enlist the support of the British minister of labour, Ernest Bevin, the former powerhouse of the British transport union, whom they understood was at odds with Citrine over his approach to the reorganization of the international labour movement. In fact, Citrine himself was still torn over the best way forward and hoped that somehow the IFTU would play a decisive role in uniting the unions of the allied powers.

The concerns of trade unions were not the only factors involved in this search for labour unity. The initiative leading to the World Labour Conference had government backing of the three big allied powers. In his wartime shuttling between the United States and the USSR, Citrine had been operating in no small measure as an emissary of the British government in pursuit of strategic wartime policy. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden made clear his sympathy for the Soviet AUCCTU line that a completely new international body needed to replace the IFTU. Prime minister Winston Churchill was invited to address the preliminary conference in London, but because of his absence at the Yalta summit his deputy Clement Attlee delivered the government’s greetings. As a reflection of government approval, all the delegates to the preliminary conference were invited to meet the king and queen. Likewise, the World Labour Conference proper in September 1945, held in the grand setting of Paris’s Palais de Chaillot, had the stamp of approval of both the French and Soviet governments: delegates attended a dinner hosted by Chairman of the Provisional Government General Charles de Gaulle and a reception at the Soviet Embassy.

Although the conference process began as a “consultative and exploratory” exercise, the CIO and AUCCTU delegates soon combined to seize the initiative, moving decisively toward the launch of a new world body. Both Citrine and Schevenels saw the danger and delivered warnings about mixing politics and trade unionism. However, brushing aside their appeals for caution and a continuing role for the IFTU, the preliminary conference appointed a committee to draft a constitution and prepare in short order for the conference in Paris in September where the new World Federation of Trade Unions would be launched. In effect the TUC had now lost control of the process it had initiated, and AFL leaders held it responsible. Meany was quick to describe this hoped-for cooperation with the Russians as “grovelling in the dust of false unity which would replace one form of totalitarianism with another.”6 More pointedly, AFL president Bill Green denounced Citrine as a “traitor.”7

Without doubt, Walter Citrine was stung by such American criticism. The day following Meany’s address at the TUC conference was given over to debating international policy, and the general secretary made little effort to disguise his extreme annoyance at the personal attacks he had suffered at the hands of AFL leaders. Referring to “misrepresentation” and “abuse” levelled at the TUC, he called for the exercise of restraint before irreparable harm was done to the international labour movement. He dismissed as less than forthright (“trifling with grave issues”) Meany’s suggestion that the IFTU should have been the body to convene the World Labour Conference, since the AFL had made it abundantly clear that it would strenuously object to such a conference.

As for Meany’s criticisms of the Soviet trade unions, Citrine assured the delegates that the TUC was well aware of the way they operated. They worked in a different environment, experienced different problems and so had different structures. But he made light of this, suggesting that there could be no cause for complaint when government at the highest level consulted unions. To loud applause, he remarked that it was something he would welcome in Britain. Refusing to pass judgment on the unions in the Soviet Union, he argued:

The Russian method of defending the interests of their working people . . . may be radically different from ours, but I do not think that any of us has the right to charge a great Trade Union Movement like the Soviet trade unions as being devoid of the purpose of defending the interests of its members.

Over 120 delegates had asked to speak in the TUC’s international debate, but the conference chairman was anxious not to allow further expression of hostility to the AFL. This would surely have been the consequence of prolonged discussion. He pointed out that Citrine had not been trying to score debating points against Meany, and he won the delegates’ agreement to treat Citrine’s statement simply as a progress report and to move on. Later in the day, in what might be seen as President Edwards’s final parting shot, following a plodding address by the second AFL fraternal delegate, postal union leader Bill Doherty, dealing with the AFL’s domestic program (including details of the latest pay rates of US postmen), the chairman noted that the latter’s contribution had at times “sacrificed eloquence for knowledge” but thanked him nonetheless for a speech that, he said pointedly, was “as good a one as I have heard from a representative of the AFL.” George Meany, it is safe to say, had definitely got up the noses of the TUC. It would not be the last time.8

The Birth of the World Federation of Trade Unions

When the World Labour Conference proper met in Paris two weeks later, Walter Citrine made a final unsuccessful effort to preserve a role for the IFTU while delaying the creation of a new global trade union body. In the event, he merely managed to safeguard jobs for IFTU staff in the new federation while failing to secure the general secretaryship for Walter Schevenels, who had to settle for one of the three posts of assistant general secretary. The top position went to Louis Saillant of the French CGT, who had made his reputation as a leader of the wartime resistance. Though not a communist party member, Saillant was the Soviet nominee for general secretary and, interestingly, had arrived at the preliminary conference directly from Moscow and in the company of the Soviet delegation. Citrine himself was elected president. The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) formally came into being on 3 October 1945, representing the first time since 1919 that the division at international level between communist and non-communist labour movements had formally been bridged. There were some who harboured reservations about the initiative, but the tidal wave of general enthusiasm for unity in the labour movement simply washed over them. As British steelworkers leader Lincoln Evans, a dedicated anti-communist, noted, it was impossible “to ignore Russia, at least in the European movement. . . . We are bound to make our peace with them.” Skeptical though he was, there was always a chance that the WFTU might work, and so it had to be given an opportunity to prove itself.9

Citrine surmised that fourteen of the twenty-one members of the new federation’s executive committee were either communists or dependent on the Soviet Union. But the founding conference had received assurances that no single large organization would be allowed to dominate the federation, and Citrine believed that together with the CIO president, Sidney Hillman, he could probably contain the Russian trade union leader V. V. Kuznetsov. There was nothing particularly radical about the WFTU’s stated objectives, which Hillman viewed simply as a global version of the New Deal. Even so, Citrine warned the federation against allowing political objectives to intrude into trade union activities:

Our job here is to build a Trade Union International . . . to carry on practical day to day Trade Union work . . . [and] to secure practical results for the individual members of our Unions. I say that because some of the speakers seem to be under the impression that our job is to build a Political International. I heard one speaker say yesterday that his organization . . . wished to establish Socialism. However laudable those desires may be the World Federation of Trade Unions is not the medium whereby that is to be done. If once we get into the maze of politics . . . this International will perish.10

The big unresolved issue at the founding congress was the future relationship between the new federation and the international trade secretariats (ITSs) that linked national unions according to their trade or industry and were firmly rooted in the bread-and-butter aspects of day-to-day trade unionism. The WFTU constitution envisaged their complete integration and subordination within its structure as mere trade departments. However, the trade secretariats themselves insisted on retaining their autonomy in matters of industrial policy, and their leading spokesman, J. H. Oldenbroek of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), was personally opposed to membership in the WFTU. He told the congress that no one but the secretariats themselves were entitled to decide on their future.

With no agreement reached at the congress, this matter was left to be resolved through negotiation. Walter Citrine had previously favoured a subordinate role for the trade secretariats in an enlarged world trade union international, but he now changed tack and made it a condition of the TUC’s continued membership in the WFTU that there had to be agreement between the federation and the secretariats on the terms of their relationship. It was a “get-out” clause for the TUC should relations within the WFTU sour. It also created an issue around which those hostile to the “political” WFTU could agitate and organize.

Just over two months following the formation of the WFTU, the last rites were performed over the IFTU when its general council met for a final time in London. The AFL was not represented and wrote objecting to the idea that the organization be dissolved. But with the two principal officers, Citrine and Schevenels, having already decamped to the WFTU, it was decided to wind up its affairs on 31 December 1945. To handle residual financial matters a board of trustees was established. For doubters it offered the promise that the organization might still be revived should the WFTU fail. The AFL leaders were incensed at the way the IFTU had been killed off, adding to their feeling of betrayal and creating a lasting source of acrimony.11 However, they were not the type simply to bemoan their defeat. Contesting the field of international labour with the WFTU now became their central focus. A whole new field of international activity was about to open up for them.

The Free Trade Union Committee

Despite the prominent role played by AFL president Samuel Gompers in the formation of the International Labour Organization (ILO) after World War I, the AFL had been traditionally isolationist, its involvement in international affairs relatively recent. It was at the urging of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), with its large Jewish and Italian membership and under the dynamic immigrant leader, David Dubinsky, that the AFL first began to look outward and raise money for trade union victims of Nazism and fascism in the mid-1930s. In the process it helped to rescue many labour activists from persecution in Europe.

Once America was in the war, both wings of the labour movement participated in the international relief effort, and large sums of money were raised to help trade unionists working underground in the various resistance movements in Europe. From late 1943 the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was responsible for channelling much of this aid through its Labor Division based in London. Its agents included American trade unionists with language skills working alongside refugees from the labour movements of enemy countries. For the AFL the key body in coordinating the wartime relief effort was the Labor League for Human Rights, with Abraham Bluestein as executive director. Again largely a garment workers’ initiative, the labour league was established as a semi-independent organization under the umbrella of the federation, its leading offices held by senior AFL figures. The AFL’s affiliates were free to identify or not with its program and to contribute financially.

After the Normandy landings, with the end of the war in sight, attention focused more on the revival of European trade unionism where it had been officially suppressed. For this activity the AFL convention in 1944 voted to establish a Free Trade Union Fund, with a target of $1 million. A “Finance Committee” consisting of AFL president Bill Green; Matthew Woll, a past president of the photo-engravers’ union; David Dubinsky; George Meany, and Dan Tobin, president of the teamsters union, was appointed to distribute money collected, and a sixteen-strong executive board was created with formal responsibility for oversight of the fund. However, the executive board never met, and the finance committee soon became simply the “Free Trade Union Committee” (FTUC)—the only tangible reflection of the unions that had contributed to the Free Trade Union Fund. The FTUC was formally established as a component part of the Labor League for Human Rights with the same personnel acting as officers.12 And as executive secretary they hired Jay Lovestone.

The Rise of Jay Lovestone

Powerfully built, forty-seven years old with fair hair, Jay Lovestone had been born Jacob Liebstein in 1897, in Poland, and was aged nine when his Jewish family emigrated to America and settled in the Bronx. He studied at the City College, New York, and planned to be a lawyer, but having been caught up in the tide of enthusiasm for the Bolshevik revolution he became a founding member of the Workers Party of America, the American communist party, and began to work full-time in the revolutionary cause.

As a prominent member of this small, sectarian organization, waging bitter fights against socialists and anarchists as well as rival communists, Lovestone made lasting enemies in the labour movement. At twenty-nine he succeeded to the leadership of the party, but his position was immediately threatened when he balked at Stalin’s then ultra-leftist policies. Travelling to Moscow in 1929 in an attempt to resolve his differences with Stalin, he found himself caught up in the deadly battle between the Soviet party secretary and Nikolai Bukharin, the party theorist with whom he had developed a warm relationship. Stalin’s line in 1929 was that capitalism was in a state of collapse, whereas Lovestone, influenced by Bukharin, argued the case for “American exceptionalism,” the view that American capitalism was far from dead. In private conversation with Stalin he pledged his loyalty and pleaded to be given a chance as party leader in America. But having been deemed to be a “right deviationist,” he was removed from the leadership. Indeed, Lovestone was lucky to escape from Moscow with his life.

Back in the United States, Lovestone regrouped his supporters into the Communist Party (Opposition) (CPO), later known as the Independent Labor League of America, or more commonly as “the Lovestoneites.” Throughout the 1930s he maintained organizational links abroad with other communist opposition groups while being careful not to criticize Stalin publicly and even defending the execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev in the early show trials. At home he rejected the “dual unionism” that was the Comintern line in its posited Third Period of capitalism. Indeed, after his former party colleague and garment workers’ member Charles (Sacha) Zimmerman had renounced the communist tactic of forming a separate clothing workers’ union, Lovestone backed him in 1932, when he successfully ran for office on a Lovestoneite platform as president of ILGWU Local 22, the union’s second largest local with 30,000 members. Under Zimmerman’s powerful leadership, Local 22 became Lovestone’s base in the labour movement for the rest of the decade. His odyssey would now gradually take him back to labour’s mainstream, his direction of travel evident in 1934, when David Dubinsky, the recently elected international president of the ILGWU and rising star in the AFL, invited him to speak at its convention.13

When the CIO, with a significant communist presence among its leadership, broke away from the AFL in 1937, Dubinsky arranged for Lovestone to act as advisor to Homer Martin, the first president of the United Automobile Workers (UAW), who was engaged in a desperate struggle for control of the new union against a left wing of communists and socialists. With generous financing from the ILGWU, Lovestone became, in effect, chief of staff to Martin. The battle for control of the UAW lasted from 1937 to 1939, when Martin was defeated. The price of having fought the left wing of the UAW in the CIO for two years was that Lovestone had now added to his list of enemies the Reuther brothers. He would have to contend with them in the international field from the late 1940s onward.

Not until the end of the 1930s did Lovestone formally break with the Comintern, outraged at Stalin’s execution of Bukharin in 1938 and, in the context of the Spanish Civil War, opposed to the campaign waged by Moscow against the POUM, with which the Lovestoneites had close links. Once World War II broke out, he insisted that there was no longer room for “isms” in American politics and that what he called the “cherished illusions” of radicalism were sterile. He duly dissolved the Independent Labor League at the end of 1940. With the destruction of organized labour in much of continental Europe, he now reckoned that American trade unionism could become the decisive force in the field of international labour. Its new role would be to spearhead the fight against all forms of totalitarianism.14

Lovestone Goes to War

With the communist opposition movement now a thing of the past and Lovestone looking to embed himself in labour’s mainstream, Dubinsky gave him a further helping hand by arranging a job for him as head of the labour division of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which was subsequently renamed Citizens for Victory.15 In this position, he was responsible for drumming up trade union support for Roosevelt’s policy of aiding British resistance to Hitlerism and countering powerful isolationist tendencies in the American labour movement. It involved raising funds to support the underground labour movements in Europe, and it was here that Lovestone acquired his first experience of tapping government for assistance with what he described as “technical arrangements to facilitate our work.” When the OSS Labor Division’s operations in Europe began, Lovestone was able to supply its director, Arthur Goldberg, with over thirty letters of introduction to key European labour movement activists.16 He, too, tried to join the OSS but was rejected on grounds of political unreliability. Likewise he failed to land a post in the Department of Labor, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) registering horror that he was even being considered for such government work. “Lovestone cannot be completely trusted,” stated an FBI report. “Informants have stated that he continued working for the OGPU [forerunner of the KGB] after being expelled from the Communist Party . . . may still be a Communist.” It was a charge he never completely shook off. Indeed, he was subject to regular surveillance by the FBI until the late 1950s, and particularly during the years 1951 to 1954.17

Only when Lovestone became executive secretary of the AFL’s Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC) in 1944 did he find a new role that fully engaged him. Based in the ILGWU head office on 7th Avenue, in New York, and on Dubinsky’s payroll, Lovestone would henceforth work closely with the top leadership of the AFL, which, besides Dubinsky, included Matthew Woll, the longest-serving first vice president of the federation, and the secretary-treasurer, George Meany, who had a particular interest in international affairs—both men Catholics and staunch anti-communists. With Lovestone in their midst they seemed an unlikely team, but Dubinsky assured Meany: “The son of a bitch is OK: he’s been converted.”18

Among the FTUC leaders, Dubinsky was, arguably, the most dynamic and imaginative, but as the Jewish leader of a non-craft union, with his heavily accented speech, he was conscious of being somewhat apart, and within the FTUC he was content to let Matthew Woll be the front man. Qualified in law and with a pompous manner, the sixty-five-year-old Woll had first been elected president of the small International Photo-Engravers’ Union of North America forty years earlier, and his experience of international labour affairs dated back to 1915, when he had been AFL fraternal delegate to the British TUC. He had expected to succeed Sam Gompers as AFL president in 1924 but, outmanoeuvred by miners’ leader John L. Lewis, who secured the post for his nominee Bill Green, Woll had to settle for being chair of innumerable AFL committees. In 1944, he added to these the chairmanship of the FTUC and remained for many years its public face.19 As for George Meany, in the generally undemanding role of AFL secretary-treasurer he set about claiming the field of international affairs as his own, though only after becoming president in 1952 did he really begin to assert his authority.

As well as being chairman of the FTUC, Matt Woll held the chair of the AFL’s International Labor Relations Committee. The relationship between the two bodies became an enduring source of confusion. The international affairs committee was clearly an integral part of the AFL structure, whereas the FTUC represented only those unions that chose to contribute to the Free Trade Union Fund. It was not part of the AFL’s formal structure and became in effect a convenient vest pocket operation controlled by fewer than half a dozen leading figures. With overlapping membership, the AFL international affairs committee and the FTUC concerned themselves with the same international issues. In practical terms the key difference was that whereas the international affairs committee discussed developments abroad and committed the AFL to lines of policy, it was the FTUC that had the necessary funding from a more restricted group of AFL unions and became responsible for implementing policies on the ground. In short, it controlled the money for programs overseas and engaged the personnel to conduct the operations. The relationship between the two bodies was conveniently opaque and would become a contentious matter in subsequent years when the FTUC came under attack for conducting its own program without full accountability.

Donations to the Free Trade Union Fund were slow coming in—the much-touted $1 million target remained a distant prospect—and there was little for the FTUC to do for the first half of 1945. In the meantime it was another ILGWU-sponsored body, the American Labor Conference on International Affairs (ALCIA), that was most actively focused on postwar strategy for labour. Its chairman was Raphael Abramovitch, a former leading Menshevik and assistant to Julius Martov, the leader of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. After the 1917 revolution, Abramovitch escaped from Russia and led the party in exile while editing its paper, the Socialist Courier. For twenty years, he also served as Berlin and then Paris correspondent of the Jewish Daily Forward and up to 1945 was Dubinsky’s chief consultant on international affairs. ALCIA’s secretary was Varian Fry, a Harvard academic who had previously worked in France for the Emergency Rescue Committee on behalf of fugitive intellectuals. ALCIA’s role was to develop plans for postwar reconstruction and to publish the quarterly journal International Post-War Problems.20

In April 1945, Matthew Woll commissioned a memorandum from ALCIA on possible activities in Europe. Drafted by Fry, the document envisaged the likelihood of Europe dividing between Soviet- and Western-controlled blocs. Nine months before Winston Churchill made the term famous in his Fulton speech, Konrad Ilg, general secretary of the Geneva-based International Metalworkers Federation (IMF), spoke of an “iron curtain” running through Europe. Varian Fry shared Ilg’s fear. In his mind the trade union enemy would not be capitalist employers so much as western European communism backed by the USSR. The preliminary World Labour Conference had taken place in London a few weeks earlier and, reading between the lines, Fry assumed that it would give birth to an organization under heavy communist influence.

Fry’s memorandum to the FTUC identified France and Italy as the two problem countries, both with powerful communist groups in the labour movement. The climate of the time made it almost impossible for any labour leader in these countries to speak out strongly against Soviet influence, and any attempt to split the unions between communists and non-communists would be impractical. Still it was necessary to try to build what Fry called “centres of moral and spiritual resistance against communist propaganda and plans for domination.” This would require the publication of newspapers and other literature. He proposed a budget for the next twelve months of $250,000 for grants and subsidies to these centres of resistance. He also recommended that $10,000 be set aside to cover the cost of sending a representative to Europe for a longer period to make the necessary contacts within the labour movement for distributing literature.21 The memorandum was discussed at a meeting of the FTUC on 11 June 1945, especially Fry’s proposal to send a representative to France to “look over the territory and get in personal touch with union leaders” as a preliminary to helping the free trade unions organize. The appointment in October of an FTUC representative to Europe was a direct outcome of this discussion.

The specific proposal had come from ALCIA, which for a short period rivalled the Labor League for Human Rights as an influence on AFL international policy. But ALCIA’s role would soon come to an end. Various factors were at work here. Its social democratic chairman, Raphael Abramovitch, viewed the labour movement in its wider sense as involving both political and industrial wings, whereas the traditional “pure and simple” values of the AFL militated against the idea of giving help to political groups. But more important were sectarian and personality differences. Abramovitch came from a different political tradition and was not part of the Lovestone circle, and with Lovestone running the FTUC there would be no role for “outsiders,” especially in producing literature for overseas consumption, the proposed mechanics of which Varian Fry had outlined in a memorandum to Dubinsky in August 1945. This proposal of ALCIA’s was not acted upon for eighteen months, by which time ALCIA had been elbowed aside by the FTUC after being bypassed in the decision to send a representative to Europe.22 But it also took some time for Lovestone himself to establish his own authority within this constellation of agencies spawned by the AFL. The FTUC began life as a subordinate body of the Labor League for Human Rights, and until Lovestone could fully assert himself it was Abraham Bluestein, the league’s executive secretary, who had overall responsibility for the exploratory mission to Europe by the FTUC’s newly appointed field representative. That representative’s name was Irving J. Brown.

Irving Brown—Lovestone’s Acolyte

The son of Jewish parents, Irving Brown was raised in the Bronx, where his father, a milk delivery driver, was a member of the teamsters union. He was thirty-three when the FTUC sent him to Europe as its representative in 1945. Five feet eight inches tall, with dark-rimmed spectacles that survived all changes in fashion, he had brown eyes and a mop of wavy dark brown hair, and was invariably dressed in the same rumpled dark suit, grubby collar, and stained tie. A New Yorker to the core, he was unmistakably a man with “hustle.”

In the thirties, Brown had put himself through New York University, where he studied economics and became president of the Social Problems Club. He had briefly been a member of the Workers Party prior to Jay Lovestone’s break with Stalin, and at NYU had cast the deciding vote in favour of inviting Lovestone to speak on campus when the student body was divided over the issue. This was his first encounter with the man who would become his mentor. On graduating, Brown married Lillie Smith, who was employed as Lovestone’s secretary.

Brown became Lovestone’s protégé, the latter obtaining part-time work for him as a researcher for ILGWU Local 22 and as a lecturer on labour economics in ILGWU adult education programs. Toward the end of 1936, Lovestone arranged for him to be hired as an organizer for the Homer Martin–led UAW working out of Baltimore, Western Michigan, St. Louis, and finally South Chicago, where he became a key part of the Lovestoneite faction during the internal battle with the union’s left for control of the organization. By the end of the decade he had risen to the position of regional organizer for the Eastern United States and became a member of the executive council of the UAW-AFL formed by Martin following his loss of control of the original union.

With the Martin forces finally defeated, Brown was hired by the AFL as a representative in its organization department, based in Washington. He subsequently transferred briefly to the International Association of Machinists (IAM) with the prospect of becoming its research director. But in June 1943 he was nominated by the AFL for service in the War Production Board, initially having responsibility for advising on labour aspects of aircraft production but eventually becoming deputy to the board’s vice chairman for labour production, Joe Keenan, secretary-treasurer of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, who was also on secondment to the government.

There followed a period during which much of Brown’s activity was shrouded in mystery. In April 1945, he transferred within government service to the Federal Economic Administration (FEA), responsible for advising on economic policy for countries under military occupation. In the case of Germany, it favoured restricting the level of industrial production in line with Morgenthau proposals for the pastoralization of the country. Brown, who bore the title Director of the Labor Division, disagreed with this policy and its negative implications for German trade unionism. Faced with this official policy, he resigned from the FEA in September 1945. In fact, people who were close to him at the time testify that he never really worked for the FEA at all.

The FEA had responsibility for recruiting civilians for positions in military government, and at the urging of the prominent socialist, Paul Porter, almost as soon as he joined the FEA, Brown signalled a readiness to transfer to the Manpower Division of the US Office of Military Government in Germany. That same month he was due to be posted to Germany along with colleagues Newman Jeffrey of the UAW and David Saposs, a consultant to the White House’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. In the event, Brown didn’t go with them, but he did spend some months in Europe, and it was assumed by these colleagues that at this point he established a relationship with the OSS.23 These months remain a mystery. Brown hardly ever spoke about the period in later years, and he gave few details that could be verified. Intriguingly, an obituary notice by the AFL-CIO’s African-American Labor Center, of which he was later director, briefly states that “in the final months of World War II, Brown acted as labour representative with U.S. occupation forces in Europe” and “worked with labour leaders exiled from Vichy France and Norway.”24

It is impossible to corroborate these sketchy accounts of wartime activities. OSS files provide no indication of Brown’s involvement with them. Likewise, among Norwegians who were prominent in the resistance and historians of the Norwegian underground there is no apparent knowledge of any role played by Brown. Norwegian Labour Party secretary Haakon Lie, who later knew Brown well in connection with CIA-financed support for the Finnish labour movement, noted that “if Brown was in Norway in wartime, he never mentioned it.”25

Adding to the confusion, a biography of Brown by a journalist friend, Ben Rathbun, compiled on the basis of numerous discussions with him and published after his death, goes much further, claiming that Brown was actually working with the OSS as early as 1944 or even 1943 while formally employed by the War Production Board. According to Rathbun, to afford him cover during wartime visits to Europe, the intelligence service allegedly provided documentation under the signature of the secretary of state notifying his agency chiefs in the board, the Federal Economic Administration, and the heads of US foreign missions in London and Salzburg that he was there on a short and appropriately vague assignment. In this account, Brown claimed to have dealt in London with OSS head Bill Donovan, Labor Division Chief Arthur Goldberg, and Director of Organization (and eventually director of the CIA) William Casey in 1944–45, while “working on post-war programmes for the underground in Eastern Europe.” Moreover, Rathbun recounts that, two days after D-Day, Brown parachuted into France behind “Allied [sic]” lines and was similarly due to parachute into Norway in November 1944 when the plan was scrapped because of fog.26

It is hard to know what to make of this. Elsewhere, Rathbun’s biography of Brown is riddled with factual errors big and small and has been largely dismissed by people who were close to the subject. Brown was always happiest when operating in the shadows and seemed to have little interest in having his life’s work recorded. In his later years, he did talk idly about writing an autobiography and got as far as a possible title, which, perhaps revealingly, was “From Resistance to Resistance.” But it went no further than that. Traditionally guarded about giving much away to interviewers, he might well have been stringing Rathbun along with tall tales after a liquid lunch.27 Equally, Rathbun’s obvious inattention to detail might have extended to a deliberate gilding of the lily in the interests of creating a more exciting yarn.

However inflated Rathbun’s account, there appears to be enough smoke to indicate a certain amount of fire and that Brown was indeed inducted into the world of secret intelligence in the closing stages of the war. Why he should have been selected for such work—making contact with French trade unionists when he spoke no French, discussing sabotage with Norwegian partisans when he knew nothing of sabotage, and generally having no international experience—is puzzling. All that is certain is that Irving Brown was close to Jay Lovestone and that the latter was beginning to make his own contacts with US intelligence.

Irving Brown’s departure for Europe as a one-man advance guard in the AFL’s battle against the WFTU followed by just six weeks George Meany’s stormy appearance at the TUC conference and by three weeks the launch of the WFTU in Paris. The decision to dispatch him had been taken hurriedly, without time to elaborate a clear strategy or program of action. The situation was fast moving, and the fear that developments already in train in the international labour movement might quickly help embed communism in Europe dictated the need for an American labour presence. Brown would have to play things by ear. But he was to be no mere observer, and his early interventions were to leave an impact on organized labour for a generation or more to come.