4

The AFL and CIO Abroad
From Rivalry to Merger

The emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as a player on the international stage following its withdrawal from the WFTU in 1949 was an unwelcome development for the AFL and revived old animosities. The two organizations had worked alongside one another in the administration of Marshall aid and were cooperating in the rearmament program that accompanied the war in Korea. Government agencies now looked to the two wings of the American labour movement to work abroad in tandem, but the AFL was unwilling to accept the CIO as a partner. Despite the fact that the CIO had purged its communist-led unions at a cost of a quarter of its membership in 1949–50, the AFL feared that it still included people regarded as security risks whose presence would compromise the anti-communist crusade at the heart of AFL activity abroad. Thus the attempt by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to draw the CIO into the funding arrangement for overseas labour programs that it had already established with the AFL was met by complete opposition from the latter. The AFL’s partnership with the CIA suffered in consequence, although funding of operations by the Free Trade Union Committee continued on a diminishing scale until 1958.

The CIO was hardly less anti-communist than the AFL, but its approach to fighting communism was different and involved demonstrating the greater effectiveness of free trade unionism in advancing the material interests of workers. Opposed to the “negative anti-communism” of which the AFL was accused, Walter Reuther’s dictum at the founding congress of the ICFTU—“neither Standard Oil nor Stalin”—guided the CIO’s approach. Focusing on core union activities, its program aimed to strengthen foreign unions in their essential dealings with employers. The CIO also prioritized work undertaken through the ICFTU. Yet the steadily deteriorating relationship between the AFL and ICFTU in the early 1950s accentuated differences in international policy and practice between the two American centres. The friction over international affairs persisted even as the two wings negotiated merger terms during 1953–55. Indeed, international issues presented the single most difficult challenge in the pursuit of labour unity in the United States and were hardly dealt with in the protracted pre-merger talks. When eventually unification was achieved within the AFL-CIO in December 1955, all the major differences over international affairs remained to be resolved.

The AFL at Odds with the CIA

There was never a golden age in the AFL’s relations with the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) and its successor, the CIA, and within eighteen months of the start of their formal funding arrangement, mutual mistrust was all too apparent. Disputes between Lovestone and his contacts in intelligence had been ongoing from the outset. He balked at their reluctance to share information freely with him. He resented the CIA’s assuming the right to manage FTUC field staff and to utilize Irving Brown on more general intelligence work outside the field of labour. Lapses in security resulting from too many people being privy to confidential information also troubled him.1

Problems over finance were, of course, central. In the final months of 1950, the renewal of Irving Brown’s “French budget” was put on hold as a consequence of the restructuring of the OPC within the CIA. The OPC’s buccaneering days under Frank Wisner were coming to an end. A new CIA director, General Walter Bedell Smith, was installed in October 1950 to take firmer control. With Allen Dulles, former head of the OSS in Europe, as Bedell Smith’s new deputy, Wisner would gradually lose influence over labour programs—“stripped of all union labels,” as Lovestone noted.2 But another important factor in the program review was the imminent arrival on the international stage of the CIO, which had only recently established its own international affairs committee. Senior figures in both the Marshall Plan and CIA had been hoping for a new, combined AFL and CIO labour operation in Europe, and Lovestone’s intelligence was that the Marshall Plan (now the MSA) head in Europe, Milton Katz, was querying the value of Brown’s financial assistance to Force ouvrière.

These various issues were on the agenda at a top-level meeting with Bedell Smith and Wisner to review progress in the labour program in November 1950. Attending for the AFL were Dubinsky, Woll, Meany, Lovestone, and Carmel Offie, the latter a significant figure in the Lovestone-CIA operation for some years in the first half of the 1950s. To Lovestone’s complaint that the funds involved were not all that large, Wisner countered that in addition to upward of $250,000 channelled to the FTUC over the previous year there had been considerable sums available from Marshall Plan “counterpart funds” for labour projects in France and Italy.3 This went to the nub of the matter. Counterpart funds, or “sugar funds,” served a number of functions. They existed to finance major social and economic projects in Marshall Plan countries. Five percent was placed in an “Administrator’s Fund” to cover American administrative costs in Europe, and within this fund was an amount for use on secret, unvouchered projects. The Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) had access to this money, and so did the CIA, and between them there was always a potential problem of conflicting aims, especially now that the CIO was bidding for a role in the labour program.4

Very tentatively, Bedell Smith introduced the hypothetical question of future CIO participation. Woll immediately rejected the idea, with Lovestone noting that it would present a security risk because of the CIO’s penetration by communists.5 Meany chipped in with names, dates, and places where the CIO had proved to be a security liability and stated that he would prefer to withdraw the FTUC from the funding arrangement rather than work in tandem with the organization. But wasn’t the CIO already benefiting from CIA assistance? On this point, the CIA chiefs were evasive. Wisner conceded that approaches had been made to bring the CIO into the labour program, but he assured the meeting that, if the CIO were to have a partnership role, its activities would have to be controlled by a small group who would be sworn to secrecy. Only when the CIO met such conditions would he be prepared to deal with it on a project-by-project basis. This didn’t satisfy Lovestone, who wanted to know whether money hadn’t already gone to the CIO. Wisner prevaricated and asked for discussion to be deferred before finally admitting that he had learned that some of the funding for a recently arranged CIO mission to Europe was from a division of the CIA. In closing the meeting and attempting to damp down fears, Bedell Smith expressed doubt that the CIO would ever be included in the world of secret funding. For Lovestone, this was hardly reassuring. The outcome was an agreement that Offie, acting for the FTUC, and Wisner would draft a charter of operations clarifying the respective roles and responsibilities of the FTUC and CIA.6

Lovestone’s fond hope was to negotiate a better funding arrangement, to which end he submitted a proposal for the FTUC to be allocated a block grant that would avoid close financial monitoring by the CIA. He also resurrected the idea of having his friend Raymond Murphy, of the State Department’s EUR-X branch, assigned to the office of the CIA director as a direct channel of liaison, but the CIA would not bite. Discussions between Wisner and Offie continued for some weeks, but without agreement.7 Allen Dulles was becoming increasingly influential, and with him came a more discriminating attitude toward the various programs then in existence. Some were to be terminated, others scaled down, whereas, for some of the intelligence gathering outside the labour field that Irving Brown had engaged in, there was scope for an increase in activity. The CIA position was that the FTUC operation still had some usefulness, but the agency was not going to let Lovestone have the free rein he sought.

Lovestone was scathing about his contacts in intelligence, remarking on their “irresponsibility” and “slovenliness.” He told Brown that his relations with Wisner were strained, the latter complaining that he was a hard man to work with. In that case, Lovestone snapped, “Maybe he better try the other crowd”—referring, of course, to the CIO. The FTUC reacted by cutting back on some activities that were not strictly “labour” in character. In Berlin, where two members of UGO’s Ostburo, “Diderich” and “Mueller,” had been cleared by US intelligence and supplied with papers for clandestine operations in the Eastern zone, Lovestone objected to their being too close to the CIA and wrote them off as “damaged goods.” Another casualty of the FTUC’s more selective approach was support for Franc-Tireur. Elsewhere Brown was advised to scale down his efforts on behalf of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Lovestone was concerned at the prospect of the agency coming between himself and Brown. He feared being sidelined while Brown’s intelligence-gathering activities beyond the FTUC’s immediate concerns were encouraged. To avoid this, the two men talked of restricting the flow of intelligence they passed on to the agency, with Lovestone insisting that all confidential information be channelled through him.8

The CIA responded in kind: Lovestone’s long-term friend Henry Kirsch was removed from his post as director of the NCFE’s American Contacts Division precisely because, as former assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle put it, he was a “Lovestoneite” and hence unacceptable.9 Brown was particularly concerned that the renewal of his “French account” was still stalled and, in protest, dragged his feet over the agency’s plan to station Leon Dale as its financial administrator in his Paris office, telling his handlers that under no circumstances could they use the FTUC’s name until such time as his budget was confirmed. He returned to Washington in February 1951 for further negotiations with the CIA. On the grapevine, Lovestone learned of agency complaints of Brown’s “roughness and brusqueness” during this meeting.10

With key issues still unresolved—most notably the proposal to admit the CIO into the world of intelligence-funded labour programs—a further top-level conference with Bedell Smith was held at New York’s Waldorf Hotel in April 1951. The meeting went badly and degenerated into a shouting match, as Dubinsky’s subsequent account made clear:

We told them they [CIO] would ruin things [in Italy], but they wouldn’t stay out. General Smith kept sounding more and more dictatorial at our conference. Finally, Lovestone said to him: “You’re a general, but you sound like a drill sergeant.” When he protested, I said to Smith, “You’re not telling us what to do: we are from the labour movement.” Then I turned to Matt Woll and said, “Why are we sitting here, let’s get out.” And that was good-bye.11

Lovestone then wrote to clarify matters with Sam Berger, labour advisor to Averell Harriman and de facto intermediary between the State Department, CIA, and FTUC, who often acted as post box between Lovestone and Dulles:

1 The Fizz kids have a perfect right to do business with whom they want. 2 We have the same right ourselves. 3 The decision of the Fizz kids to do business with the CIO is . . . cheap opportunist and petty political patronage. . . . 4 [It] . . . is an attempt dictated by aspiring politicians like the one in Paris [Katz] who developed the theory that the trouble with European labour is that it has met American labour and only one wing of it—the AFL.

In tones that suggested they were approaching the parting of the ways, he told Berger: “A lot of the problems that have been placed on your shoulders should no longer be a source of interest or grievance to you. Consider that phase just that much water over the dam.”12 In reality the relationship between the AFL and the CIA was by no means over; it continued in this particular form, though on a gradually diminishing scale, until 1958. Lovestone persisted in demanding more favourable terms, sometimes bullying, sometimes cajoling, and on one occasion, in an apparent show of compassion, appearing at Allen Dulles’s hospital bedside. But Dulles had Lovestone’s measure. He hired Tom Braden, an old OSS hand, urbane and well connected, to oversee relations with the FTUC, and Braden himself was soon keen to draw the CIO into the trade union program.13 Lovestone could huff and puff, but he had little choice but to accept the existing situation.

The CIO in Europe

The key figure in CIO international operations was Victor Reuther, the youngest brother of Walter Reuther, president of the UAW since 1946 and soon also to become CIO president, in November 1952. Standing just under six feet tall, of upright bearing, Victor Reuther was a powerful orator, with a resonant baritone voice, and was regarded as the intellectual member of the Reuther family. His politics were to the left of Walter’s, and over the years he retained a more radical image as a socialist. Together with Walter and a third brother, Roy, he had been a founder member of the UAW-CIO in the 1930s. He was thus ranged against Jay Lovestone during the factional struggle for control of the autoworkers’ union in the late 1930s, when the former communist party secretary worked as chief of staff to Homer Martin and supplied him with a network of Lovestoneite organizers, including Irving Brown. Deep personal animosity, the bitter legacy of that period, coloured Reuther’s relations with Lovestone and Brown throughout the remainder of their working lives and had an incalculable impact on American labour’s conduct of international affairs for a generation.14

On winning the presidency of the UAW, it took two years for Walter Reuther to consolidate his hold on the organization. However, by 1948, as a strong supporter of the Marshall Plan, he was able to turn his attention to international questions, which became the direct responsibility of his youngest brother. To his existing role as UAW education director, Victor Reuther thus added an international dimension as co-director of the US side of the Anglo-American Productivity Council, an outgrowth of the Marshall Plan, under whose auspices he undertook a number of trips to Europe. In 1948, he was also a member of the CIO delegation to the second ERP trade union conference in London, where he took the lead in criticizing the administration of Marshall aid and the program’s failure to make the welfare of European workers its top priority. He insisted that Europeans were justified in suspecting ulterior motives, arguing that US aid should not be for the purpose of exporting American capitalism, and concluding that “there must be a full recognition of the right of the people here to establish democratic socialism.” Also present that day was Jay Lovestone, who, twenty years later, derided the fact that Reuther had made a “speech for socialism” when this was not an issue for the conference.15

Victor Reuther spent a month in summer 1948 travelling in France, Germany, and Austria, taking particular note of the extent to which Irving Brown and the AFL had been able to do a “hatchet job” on the CIO as a result of its membership in the WFTU and its failure to date to have its own distinct presence in Europe. That would need to be corrected. The Reuthers themselves had played no role in CIO dealings with the WFTU, were free from any personal identification with its operations, and were among the loudest labour voices then calling for the CIO to disaffiliate. Equally strong was their backing for the concomitant purge of communist-led unions from the CIO in the wake of multiple differences generated by the Cold War. An opportunity was now opening up to recast CIO international policy shorn of any need for communist apologetics and reflecting the radical democratic values of the CIO, of which the UAW was an exemplar. The idea of having a higher-profile CIO presence in Europe with Reuther, like Irving Brown, performing the role of roving ambassador was beginning to germinate. By the end of 1948, friends and enemies of the Reuthers in the international field were conscious of the presence among them of a new “big shot” in the shape of Victor Reuther.16

His international activities were interrupted in May 1949 when he was the victim of an assassination attempt. He lost an eye and sustained shotgun wounds to his arm and collarbone when he was shot through the window of his house in Detroit. Fear for his own and his family’s safety now provided an extra reason for him to work overseas in an international capacity. That same year the UAW affiliated to Konrad Ilg’s International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF), the union becoming a powerful force and financial mainstay of the IMF. Formerly an organization in which Irving Brown had exercised influence, the IMF would now be the Reuther brothers’ international power base, with Victor increasingly on the scene to offer guidance to Ilg and successor general secretaries.

Victor Reuther reappeared in Europe in May 1950 just as his personal reservations about the administration of Marshall aid were beginning to be echoed more generally in the American labour movement. A combined AFL and CIO delegation, commissioned by the ECA to assess the situation in France after two years of pressure for improved productivity under Marshall aid, reported on the program’s “serious threat to the welfare of workers” and lack of protection against wage cuts or anything to “prevent the direct benefits of increased production made possible by the Marshall Plan aid from going entirely to the employer.” Suggested policy responses ranged from, on the one hand, insistence on the secondment to the ECA/MSA of American trade union representatives who would provide heft to its labour programs, to, on the other hand, the development of an independent CIO program that would nevertheless be financed from Marshall Plan counterpart funds.17 Victor Reuther featured in both approaches.

Speculation that the Marshall Plan’s supremo in Europe, Milton Katz, had offered Reuther the post of chief labour advisor to the ECA hung heavily over the FTUC’s meeting with CIA director Bedell Smith in November 1950.18 Likewise, AFL leaders were fully aware that a proposed international policy program drafted by Reuther was under consideration within the CIO and that he had been named to lead a mission to Europe in January–February 1951 to take stock of what might be needed in a CIO program directed from Paris. As Lovestone suspected, and as Wisner reluctantly confirmed at the November meeting with the FTUC, funding for the CIO’s delegation came from the CIA. On delivering the report of the delegation to the CIO in February 1951, Reuther was immediately appointed its permanent European representative, with instructions to open an office in Paris. The FTUC’s dramatic walkout from the April 1951 meeting with Bedell Smith, essentially over the role of the CIO, followed just over a month later. Lovestone’s stringer in London, Irish-born newspaperman Jack Carney, reported what could only have been unwelcome news: “Victor Reuther is being played up in these parts. He is the new international figure. Walter Reuther at the moment is the darling of both the Tribune and the New Statesman. The guy who can command such varied support is going places.”19

Competing Approaches of CIO and AFL

The international program drafted by Reuther for the CIO was intended as a medium-term commitment that would be taken over in due course by the ICFTU. The CIO had no plans to remain indefinitely in the field as an independent player. Its operation was never large; Victor Reuther had a staff of only three—Lew Carliner in charge of publications, Helmut Jockel assisting with work in Germany, and, most importantly, Charles (Chip) Levinson, until recently a technician with the ECA, who would be a close collaborator of Reuther in Europe throughout the 1950s.20

Yet from the moment in February 1951 when Reuther was installed in a dingy Paris office at 15 rue du Temple in a run-down district near Les Halles, he set about trying to alter the thrust of US labour activities in Europe, and especially in France and Italy. He rejected the AFL emphasis on wooing national leaderships, the practice of buying the loyalty of those Europeans most willing to denounce communism, and the playing of favourites as between the competing sections of the non-communist labour movement. In contrast, he saw the need to galvanize members at shop floor level to fight for basic union principles.21 The focus would be on strengthening union capacity to achieve economic gains by working with the grain of Marshall Plan productivity initiatives when these conformed to trade union principles. The aim was to help build rank-and-file confidence through self-activity and the use of militant action where necessary.

Reuther was critical of the AFL’s “negative anti-communism” that left it more adept at breaking political strikes than fighting for better conditions. Rather than engaging in cloak-and-dagger activities, he believed the best way to defeat communism was to build an effective trade union base to represent the economic interests of members, thus leaving them less susceptible to communist demagoguery. The unions needed to put their members’ interests first rather than appear as a stage army in the Cold War. “Neither Standard Oil nor Stalin” was the way his brother Walter had put it at the ICFTU founding congress. Taking the wrinkles out of the bellies of the poor was the best antidote to the appeal of communism.

Lovestone and Brown derided Reuther’s approach as “belly communism”; it was folly to see communism simply as a product of unfilled economic needs. For them the ideological battle against Moscow had to be waged more directly. AFL activities already under way or in preparation in Italy and France reflected Brown’s concern to “take on” the communists. Even in West Germany, where there was little risk that communist policies would enjoy general acceptance, Brown bemoaned the ideological “flabbiness” of the unions and their failure to respond in kind to communist propaganda. It irked Lovestone that Reuther—a “boy scout” with a penchant for clichés about “butter before guns”—had been invited to address the 1951 May Day rally in Berlin. Lovestone felt it reflected poorly on the judgment of the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB), and it led him to spend some weeks in Germany immediately afterward in the hope of counteracting some of Reuther’s “vicious, demagogic propaganda.” He reported back to George Meany that Reuther had promised lavish funds for Germany. “Where he expects to get the money you can guess as well as I.”22 Meanwhile, Brown’s immediate priority for the German labour movement was to encourage the formation of a joint SPD-DGB committee to take inventory of the communist party’s strength. He hoped for the establishment of a German “counter-action squad” along the lines of the Mediterranean Committee, charged with weeding out fellow travellers from holding office in unions and works councils, checkmating possible attempts at sabotage in industries such as transport and docks, and organizing anti-communist demonstrations throughout the country. He also wanted to see the DGB put more effort into support for the Ostburo in Berlin originally created by UGO and which he admired for “keeping the Eastern zone pot boiling.”23

In France, Brown focused on possible organizational splits among the communists, hoping to capitalize on a growing malaise within the PCF that he detected and associated with the extended absence of party leader Maurice Thorez, who had suffered a stroke and was now convalescing in Moscow. In this situation, the PCF was prone to sharp swings in direction between legal-parliamentary and extra-parliamentary activity. The latter was evident in the increase in anti-American street protests occasioned by the arrival of the new NATO commander, General Matthew Ridgway. Events such as the purges of leading party members André Marty and Charles Tillon, accused of being police spies, Georges Guingouin, the wartime resistance leader in Limoges, and Auguste Lecoeur, a leading critic of Thorez’s dictatorial style, led Lovestone and Brown to believe in the possibility of destabilizing the PCF from within and the encouragement of splinter movements. “I am a great believer in the notion that the best way to fight the enemy is from inside his own home,” Lovestone wrote Brown. To this end, Brown was “running” contacts who were in touch with dissident communists in the North and the Midi and were engaged in building an informal opposition group. Georges Guingouin was prominent among them, and when Auguste Lecoeur was expelled from the PCF, Brown was quickly in contact with him and guiding him to the CIA, a pattern that was to be repeated whenever a prominent communist left the party.24

Similarly in Italy, Brown was also keen to exploit internal tensions in the CGIL and capitalize on divisions emerging in the Italian communist party. Rather than it being a task for the non-communist unions, in his view this required a quite separate operation using what he termed a “politico-syndicalist” approach that avoided all publicity. American support would enable a small committee of trade union members who still belonged to CGIL unions to publish a journal and build up a secret network of cadres within the centre. He talked ambitiously about “integrating all of the diverse opposition tendencies into a more unified policy approach [to] . . . prepare for the next break in CGIL which must come.”25 A practical example was in Trieste, where, on the back of a split among communists between the pro-Moscow majority and a smaller Titoist group, the AFL collaborated with the US embassy in an attempt to help anti-communists win control of the maritime union. In August 1952, Brown and Carmel Offie were in Italy specifically to discuss this project with Ambassador Dunn.26

In contrast, Victor Reuther’s central concern in France and Italy was to overcome the organizational divide in the labour movement resulting from splits between secular and church-linked unions. Hitherto in France, the AFL had concentrated exclusively on the secular Force ouvrière, distancing itself from the Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens (CFTC), especially as the latter became more amenable to united front tactics with the communist-led CGT. Seeking a change in emphasis, Reuther hoped to work with both of these non-communist centres and help them develop a more effective labour movement. The CFTC contained a vigorous left-wing minority among its membership attracted by the idea of membership in the ICFTU, and taken as a whole the national centre was a more substantial organization than FO.27 In his initial discussions in Europe with Milton Katz, Reuther complained about the way Irving Brown had vetoed ECA-MSA assistance to the CFTC and had also threatened reprisals against any organization accepting help from the CIO.

Reuther faced a more complex situation in Italy. Though dominated by Catholics, CISL was formally a non-confessional organization, and the AFL considered it the best prospect for building a secular anti-communist union movement in Italy. In contrast, Reuther saw CISL as the product of a premature merger pushed through by the AFL in a bid to “colonise” the organization. Italy’s Social Democrats and Republicans also regarded CISL as a church-run body and, like Reuther, believed UIL to be a potentially more attractive refuge for CGIL members who might think of quitting the organization out of disillusionment with their communist leaders. UIL had received no help from the FTUC, and Reuther was determined to correct that situation with funding from the Marshall program. At the same time, he hoped to encourage united action with CISL. Before leaving for Europe, he had discussed his thinking with David Dubinsky, and there was agreement between them over the need to change State Department policy in Italy and especially to have Tom Lane removed as labour attaché.28

Conduits for Marshall Plan/CIA Finance

Less than a month after establishing his office in Paris, Reuther requested a meeting with Milton Katz and Irving Brown in which he appealed for closer liaison between the two wings of the US labour movement and the ECA along with financial support by the latter for UIL. Brown took great exception to the way the meeting had been called, without an agenda and without any prior attempt by Reuther to reach an agreed trade union position ahead of the meeting.29 However, Katz sympathized with Reuther’s approach, and, as Lovestone soon gleaned from remarks made by Allen Dulles, the CIA was evidently willing as well to give some encouragement to CIO work in Italy. Lovestone notified Brown that money was going to “Art Goldberg’s law firm [CIO] . . . I am now convinced that Victor and his friends are operating not only with a lot of Cat Nip [counterpart funds via Katz] but with the aid of substantial injections from Dr Fizzer.”30 Indeed, the CIO would shortly have two men, Frank Bellanca and Joe Salla, in Genoa examining the prospects for cooperation between UIL and CISL dockers in keeping the port open to American shipping—an operation potentially in competition with Ferri-Pisani’s Mediterranean Committee.

This Genoa project was a first, cautious initiative arranged between CIO international affairs director Mike Ross and Tom Braden, who had been appointed head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division three months earlier.31 In correspondence with Ross, Braden expressed hope that the CIO would do “a hell of a job” but stressed that its two representatives in Genoa were only there on an exploratory basis and were not to impinge on Irving Brown’s terrain. This point had been agreed on in advance between the CIO’s Jake Potofsky and David Dubinsky.32 Braden noted that the CIA still had doubts about the reliability of UIL, and so he hoped that Bellanca would refrain from making any commitments to the centre. He also stressed the need for Ross to preserve security and to keep word of the assignment from Lovestone: “I have had a couple of complaints about my friendship with you from our New York friend [Lovestone] via a fellow in this town named Sam [Berger]. . . . He seems to know a little but is not sure and has jumped at some wrong conclusions . . . so keep it quiet for both our sakes.”33 In fact, Lovestone was fully aware of Bellanca’s presence in Genoa, warning Meany darkly: “There is trouble ahead. We wonder where the CIO is getting the dough.”34

Evidence points strongly to further CIO-CIA collaboration later in 1951 in the battle for control of the Finnish labour movement. Lovestone certainly suspected that this was happening through CIO covert funding of the social democrat–led unions. On a trip to the United States in the autumn of 1951, during which he had a meeting with Victor Reuther, SAK general secretary Olavi Lindblom purchased seven Buicks and three Chevrolets that were subsequently sold in Helsinki for 1.2 million Finnish marks, making a healthy profit and helping to fund the social democrats’ struggle with the communists for control of SAK. Thirty years later, Lindblom recorded in his autobiography that while in the United States he was handed a cheque for $20,000 that he used to purchase the ten cars. He did not name the donor, though Lovestone’s reaction at the time makes it clear that it was not the AFL.35

Lovestone was naturally curious as to the source of this donation and confided his suspicions to Brown in a letter reminding him that the AFL was not currently engaged in any transactions in Finland: “As you know, we are no longer in the lumber business [i.e., Finland] . . . I do know that the Fizzlanders have become great admirers of the Laplanders.” Two weeks later, after further inquiries, he wrote Brown: “The Fizzmaniacs have made a heavy investment in the lumber business but they didn’t use our brokerage house. We have nothing to do with that. When you get up to the north country it would be most interesting for you to use your nostrils.”36 Whether or not the CIO was the source of the initial $20,000, Lindblom certainly looked to the CIO for further funding. In a letter to Victor Reuther two months later he described in detail the trade union campaign against the communists in the north of Finland and requested $65,000 worth of assistance in kind—preferably in the form of twenty Chevrolets or outboard motors to an equivalent value. These, too, could be sold in Finland and so realize funds for the campaign within SAK.37

Whatever encouragement Reuther might have been receiving from the CIA during his early months in Europe, he encountered serious obstruction at US embassy level. The labour attachés in Paris and Rome, Dick Eldridge and Tom Lane, were hostile to his wider aim of working with the French CFTC and Italian UIL, and this forced him to go over their heads and raise the issue with the two ambassadors concerned. In October 1951 he became embroiled in a furious row with Ambassador David Bruce in Paris, and threatened to report the embassy’s obstructiveness to higher levels in Washington. Irving Brown dismissed Reuther’s petulance as a sign of frustration at the lack of embassy support for his “hair brained schemes.” He also made a point of seeing Bruce personally to assure him of the AFL’s full backing for his stand against the CIO. Following the clash with Bruce, Reuther also sent a sharply worded letter to Ambassador James Dunn in Rome demanding a change in the embassy’s attitude toward UIL and claiming that the centre was “considerably handicapped” by a policy that was both “wrong and unwise.” He called specifically for the replacement of Tom Lane as labour attaché and warned that Dunn’s response might well need to be discussed between the CIO leadership and the White House.38

Organizing and Training

Reuther’s detailed plans for 1952–53 revolved around two related projects intended to energize the combined non-communist wing of the French and Italian labour movements and to be conducted under the umbrella of the ICFTU. First, there was to be a concerted and well-funded recruiting campaign.39 Supporting this was an ambitious plan for the creation of an ICFTU training college in Europe that would equip a corps of activists and secondary leaders with the skills thought to be lacking among European trade unionists. Yet, as initiatives that would depend heavily on American funding, these ICFTU projects were broached at a singularly inopportune time. Reuther’s early months in Europe had coincided with the deterioration in relations between the AFL and the ICFTU following Vincent Tewson’s controversial assumption of the presidency. In the ensuing standoff between Meany, on the one hand, and Tewson and Oldenbroek on the other, the AFL clearly regarded Reuther as being in Tewson’s camp. Yet, for months, Brown had been warning Oldenbroek that he was making a mistake in treating the CIO as if it were the equal of the AFL. And as long as he did so, Oldenbroek could expect difficulties because of the AFL’s belief that it spoke for the real American labour movement.40 Now Reuther’s suggested organizing and training program was unveiled precisely as AFL-ICFTU relations hit rock bottom and the AFL began its year-long boycott of the ICFTU.

These two CIO-inspired projects were particularly contentious because of the way they were to be financed. The organizing drive alone was expected to cost up to £50,000 ($140,000) at a time when the ICFTU’s total budget for activities in Europe was only a tenth of that. The balance would need to come from the new Regional Activities Fund (RAF), but the AFL had withheld any contribution, while harbouring grave misgivings about the source of the CIO’s proposed contribution—some $200,000 (later officially recorded as $150,000).

The CIO had announced this contribution following a meeting of its international affairs committee in November 1951. In the course of the meeting it became evident that the CIO did not have such an amount to spare. Mike Ross then explained that the CIO’s three-man delegation to Europe led by Victor Reuther earlier in the year had been paid for from government funds, a fact that most committee members were probably learning for the first time. It was in this context that the meeting agreed that a delegation comprising President Philip Murray, International Affairs Committee Chairman Jake Potofsky, and Walter Reuther should see “top people in Washington”—meaning MSA Administrator Averell Harriman, now based in the White House and responsible for ironing out differences between the CIA and MSA. That meeting with Harriman would review CIO complaints about the obstruction Victor Reuther was encountering in the Paris and Rome embassies, but it would also be about access to counterpart funds for the CIO’s overseas program.41

Figure 3.  Walter Reuther (left), Vincent Tewson, and George Meany, at the December 1952 meeting of the ICFTU executive board. In the standoff with Meany, Tewson was assumed to enjoy the sympathy of Reuther and the CIO. Courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.

From the outset Lovestone doubted that the CIO’s much-publicized $200,000 pledge to the RAF could be met from union funds. He challenged CIA deputy director Alan Dulles on this and suggested knowingly that the agency had made “a very handsome Christmas present to Sir Vincent Oldenbroek.” Dulles protested that he knew nothing of such a gift: “It was without my knowledge.” But as Lovestone observed, it was a “typical lawyer’s answer, and not a categoric denial that would withstand a lie detector test.”42 In the intensely competitive climate of the period, the AFL leadership also arranged to meet Harriman in January 1952, aiming to block any concessions that he might be inclined to grant following the CIO’s representations. At the AFL meeting with the MSA administrator, Lovestone challenged Harriman and his labour advisor, Sam [“the Prophet”] Berger, as to the basis on which Victor Reuther had “joined the nouveau riche set.” Harriman chose to interpret this as a question about MSA funds for UIL and denied that any had been agreed. But Lovestone remained suspicious of the entire basis of CIO international funding, telling Brown that: “there must have been some blood transfusion into Victor’s carcass by the Fizz maniacs.”43 In reality, the $200,000 figure was still only a pledge, and although government funds had yet to be paid over, Lovestone was undoubtedly correct in suspecting that the CIO was angling to obtain a good deal of its finance for international work from US government sources.44

In other respects, the meeting of the AFL leaders with Harriman left them satisfied that there would be no significant concession to the CIO’s approach in Italy. According to Lovestone, they had received assurances from Harriman that “the firm employing the Prophet [ECA/MSA] would do nothing to assist the UIL except perhaps on occasion include one of them on a team or trade union outfit visiting our country for ECA. [. . .] We were pledged . . . there would be nothing down there now which would give the impression of pursuing an anti-AFL course.”

The AFL also successfully argued against the CIO’s call for the sacking of labour attaché Tom Lane. This was a measure of the AFL’s hostility toward the CIO, since the federation also greatly resented the role played by Lane and regarded his profligate distribution of cash to CISL as counterproductive. Yet George Meany spoke out against replacing the labour attaché; it was evidently more important for him to prevent the CIO from being able to claim a victory in securing Lane’s scalp.45 Not only did the AFL trump the CIO in these encounters with Harriman, it also retained the edge over the CIO in dealing with the CIA. True, Lovestone was losing influence within the NCFE, but Brown was recalled to Washington in March 1952 for top-level meetings with Dulles at which he would “go over the entire European situation—library, budgetary and every other way.” There was to be no equivalent meeting involving Reuther and the agency.46 While in Washington, Brown also consulted the AFL leadership over the boycott of the ICFTU that had just begun. But Lovestone knew that the CIA business was the principal reason for Brown’s trip and so insisted that his travel expenses claim be submitted to the agency.47

Initial planning for the ICFTU’s CIO-inspired organizing project began in January 1952. Having failed to contribute to the RAF, the AFL was never more than peripherally involved. In any case, as a born conspirator, Irving Brown was wary of open discussion of such plans for organizing, even within the ICFTU. Confidentiality was paramount, and he doubted that a committee of fifteen trade union representatives could maintain the secrecy he felt was essential. Unsure of whether to participate at all, he turned to Lovestone and was told to attend the meetings but not to speak. Lovestone’s instruction captured perfectly the FTUC attitude: “Keep them in suspense. Don’t show your hand. Hear what is being planned. You can act later. But patience will only lend interest and in some cases promote anxiety.”48 The AFL’s boycott announced shortly afterward certainly ratcheted up the degree of anxiety felt in the ICFTU while confirming Brown in his role as a mere spectator.

In contrast, Victor Reuther took a leading part in planning the organizing drive. Focusing on Force ouvrière in the first instance, the strategy was to help its industrial federations become more effective bargaining agents under new French collective bargaining law and thus able to deliver greater benefits to their members. In part, unions were encouraged to increase their level of dues and professionalize their services to members, with the ICFTU providing a subsidy to offset any short-term loss of dues income. The plan envisaged FO achieving financial self-sufficiency by 1954 as a consequence of an expanding membership attracted by collective bargaining gains. The fond hope was that in the foreseeable future the combined strength of the non-communist unions—FO and CFTC—would more than match that of the CGT.49 In broad outline this was also a project to woo French workers from their historic, exclusive reliance on political mobilization with the pursuit of benefits through national legislation and to steer them toward a state of self-reliance through devolved collective bargaining activity. The real test would be in Marshall Plan “pilot plant” schemes intended to raise levels of productivity based on new methods of working and higher negotiated wages.50

Reuther proposed a coordinating role for the international trade secretariats in organizing specific industries. Yet only the International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF) was primed to begin activities, having a costed program and a modest budget of $18,000 (two-thirds intended for France, one-third for Italy). Reuther himself, as the American representative on the IMF executive committee, had become a powerful voice, exerting a strong influence on the aging general secretary, Konrad Ilg, and he was given to making pronouncements in the name of all the IMF’s American affiliates. Through his prominent role within the IMF, Reuther hoped to establish a presence among Italian metalworkers belonging to CISL, whose secretary, Franco Volonté, had requested $30,000 to finance organizing activities. Konrad Ilg responded with an offer of assistance for organizing at FIAT and other key plants, conditional on Volonté accepting an IMF “controller.” But when Ilg informed him that he had Reuther in mind for this task, Volonté replied pointedly that the union would prefer someone it regarded as a “friend.” Shortly afterward, public statements critical of CISL made by Reuther caused offence and CISL secretary Pastore was led to complain to Oldenbroek. The CIO’s hoped-for entrée to CISL was killed off at birth.51

Meanwhile, Brown looked in vain for ways of blocking Victor Reuther’s influence in the IMF. His once-prominent position within that trade secretariat had faded, but he encouraged the machinists’ international representative, Rudy Faupl, to play a more energetic role. When that ploy failed, he tried to exploit a growing divide between Reuther’s autoworkers and the steelworkers’ union by siding with the latter’s international representative, Elmer Cope, in IMF policy discussions. AFL reckoning was that Victor Reuther didn’t always act with full CIO authorization and that existing animosities within the organization could perhaps be intensified. As Lovestone observed: “I think Victor is playing a lone hand in a number of situations.”52 In Italy, Brown stepped into the breach left by Reuther’s failed attempt to woo CISL’s metalworkers: by the end of 1952, with his own source of funds, he was channelling $1,500 a month to Volonté with the promise that a longer-term package of help might be put together in early 1953. In addition, he was making efforts to bolster the standing of the social democrat minority in CISL, who had been treated as outcasts by their own party during the formation of UIL. Brown’s purpose was to counter the persistent charges that CISL was a purely Christian organization.53

Given the scale of the task it set itself, especially in France, the CIO’s strategy for organizational change was never likely to achieve much in the short run; indeed, the high hopes that the non-communist metal unions operating within the MSA pilot plant scheme for steel foundries would point the way forward soon proved to be illusory. The scheme’s success depended on workers gaining through collective bargaining a “fair” share of the benefits of rising productivity. However, French employers resisted such an outcome while, within the Marshall Plan, American business interests drowned out the voices of labour advisors who argued for a better deal for the French unions. Within a few months, Reuther was forced to conclude that the pilot scheme was “a disgrace . . . a labour exploitation programme,” while his assistant, Charles Levinson, warned of the damage that was being done to the FO metalworkers by their participation: “If it continues you can kiss FO goodbye within a year.”54

Reuther then pulled the plug on the pilot plant scheme by withdrawing his support, in the process helping to promote a successful revolt among FO metalworkers against continued participation by the organization’s confederal leadership. By the end of 1952, FO and UIL had withdrawn from the French and Italian pilot schemes, the French Christian CFTC was deeply disaffected by its experience, and the CISL leadership was under strong rank-and-file pressure to redefine its approach to the issue of productivity. By changing tack and helping to extricate FO and UIL from involvement in the pilot schemes, the CIO had preserved its own credibility. However, in the process Reuther had ruffled the feathers of some senior trade union figures, especially in France.

The CIO’s proposal for the establishment of an ICFTU training college in Europe was no freer from AFL criticism than had been the scheme for organizing. The MSA was prepared to make significant funding available for the project, but only on the basis that the AFL and CIO cooperated in the venture. Yet the “team psychology,” as Lovestone dubbed it, was unacceptable to the AFL, which refused to support the ICFTU project. Brown saw the college as an “an abstraction,” its emphasis on classroom instruction simply serving to provide cover for the “factional work” that Reuther was planning to undertake with Marshall Plan money.55

In contrast to the standard fare of training for organizing, administration, and collective bargaining in the ICFTU scheme, Brown favoured a more ideological curriculum. A flavour of his preferred approach to training can be glimpsed from his own plans for activity in the Lyon area of France. With its important armament firms, chemical plants, coal mining, and railway centre, it was a key location in the rearmament program that accompanied the Korean War. As Brown reported to the FTUC, he was concerned to ensure that anti-communist forces were strong enough “to protect the major industries in the area.” His proposal was to send carefully selected activists from Lyon across the Swiss border to Geneva to attend the Centre d’ education syndicale internationale, where his close associate, Lucien Tronchet, the Swiss building workers leader, ran what Brown freely conceded were “indoctrination programmes.” The aim was to strengthen the anti-communist forces in Lyon by having one or two trained men in each factory, a vanguard highly conscious of their membership in an activist network.56

Denied the funds for a full-fledged college, the ICFTU was forced to scale back its training plan. However, it acquired from the Swedish trade unions a residential home, La Brevière, in the Compiègne woods close to Paris, and there launched a first training program from March to May 1952 for 126 militants from FO’s mining, transport, and metalworking unions. The ICFTU kick-started the program with $22,000 allocated from its Regional Activities Fund, while simultaneously seeking ways of tapping into Marshall Plan funds to sustain the program over the longer term. To this end, assistant general secretary Hans Gottfurcht and Walter Schevenels, now the secretary of the ICFTU’s European Regional Organization, were in close contact with MSA officials in trying to identify ways of securing grant aid for the project. The ICFTU’s ploy was to set up an Educational Trust Fund registered in the United States through which to attract money from government sources and charitable funds. It prompted a warning from Lovestone: “the contamination of Schevenels in his present position and his present manipulations will go a long way towards estranging our relations with the European movements.” Within the ICFTU, Brown argued against seeking funds from government sources, as distinct from grants from charitable trusts. Yet Brown’s position offered no foolproof solution, and Matt Woll still worried that the Ford Foundation, run by what he described as “subversive” elements, might serve as a conduit for MSA money to the ICFTU.57

Headed up by former ECA Administrator, Paul Hoffman, the Ford Foundation had indeed become a home-away-from-home for Marshall Plan alumni following government service, providing continued funding for several projects that had originated as part of the aid program. Particularly troubling to the AFL was that Clinton Golden, former CIO vice president and until recently chief labour advisor to the ECA, had become a Ford Foundation trustee and that the former Marshall Plan supremo in Europe, Milton Katz, was now associate director of the fund. The MSA and the Ford Foundation were indeed combining in an effort to channel funds to the ICFTU Trust. Katz persuaded Sam Berger to encourage both AFL and CIO to apply for Ford funding for educational programs. The proviso was that the two centres would have to agree to act as joint trustees over what Lovestone termed “any assistance to be given to Sir Vincent’s stockholders overseas.” When Berger put the suggestion to him, Lovestone turned him down flat, claiming to be concerned to protect the ICFTU from any taint of sub rosa funding. As he explained: “what I am afraid of is that all this will enable the Commies in their typical demagogic fashion to denounce the [ICFTU’s] Brussels bureau as a Ford international.”58

With or without an ICFTU Educational Trust Fund, Reuther was determined to access MSA funds, and in June 1952 the MSA channelled $23,000 to the ICFTU via his Guarantee Trust bank account, without mention of the original source. Oldenbroek gratefully recorded that “trade union circles in the U.S.A.” had donated the sum: “The CIO has paid the money into our account on behalf of the donators [sic].”59 The “CIO” gift was almost identical to the cost of the first series of courses at La Brevière, and its availability enabled the ICFTU to avoid scaling back the courses to weekends only. Indeed, it was now possible to roll forward the training program into the autumn of 1952. “I’m sure you know what that means,” commented Brown in forwarding the news to Lovestone. “This sum of money . . . is only one of many others which have been spent or squandered in France.” However, he also noted that there was no “Fizz” involvement in the transaction: these were “sugar funds” courtesy of the Marshall Plan.60

Yet CIA funding was still needed if the La Brevière program was to continue to the end of 1953, thereby training 840 additional activists as planned. To this end, sometime in the summer of 1952 Tom Braden of the International Organizations Division travelled to Detroit and passed $50,000 to Walter Reuther for use by Victor Reuther in assisting unions in France and Italy. This CIA transaction was revealed by Braden fifteen years later in a bid to counter allegations by Victor Reuther of more recent CIA funding of AFL-CIO international work.61 On top of this, additional funding for the CIO appears to have been arranged by Ford Foundation trustee Clinton Golden. It was donated under the Ford label although it actually originated from the Michigan Fund—a CIA front.62

At Reuther’s insistence, ICFTU training at La Brevière was extended to CFTC as well as FO members. As he hoped, one of the consequences was to increase the prospects for joint activity between the two centres. However, his efforts in support of the more left-leaning section of the French Christian trade unions had contributed to a near split in the CFTC in 1952, and his attempt to force the pace of non-communist trade union cooperation in the metal industries antagonized the leadership of both FO and the CFTC. Early in 1953, the two general secretaries, Robert Bothereau (FO) and Maurice Bouladoux (CFTC), were considering a formal protest to the CIO over such interference. Reuther had also upset a section of the FO metal union, for which he was widely criticized at the IMF executive committee. As Irving Brown reported, “the red headed American saviour has been somewhat rebuffed.” IMF general secretary Ilg complained that Reuther tended to support only the activities by the federation that he, himself, controlled. On the other hand, Ilg’s deputy, Henry Svensson, apportioned the blame equally between the AFL and CIO, arguing that their rivalry had reduced the effectiveness of any organizing campaign among French and Italian metalworkers. Reuther was certainly unafraid of stepping on others’ toes, and CFTC president Gaston Tessier, for one, made it clear that he would be happy to see him return to the United States.63

Yet Victor Reuther could claim that he had reinforced American links with the more militant sections of the French Christian trade union movement. That would pay dividends in the long run as the strength of church influence waned. Likewise in Italy, CIO support for UIL certainly reinforced the determination of its social democratic members to retain organizational independence and so offer a potential refuge for socialist members of the CGIL disenchanted with their own communist leadership. In early 1953 Reuther was pressing within the CIO for expansion of the European program, seeking an increase in the budget to $4,000 per month (a 30 percent rise) and requesting the appointment of a full-time representative in Italy and other staff with responsibility for specific industrial sectors in Europe.64 At the same time, Bill Kemsley of the MSA education branch, and a close ally within the UAW, had secured a grant of $118,000 for the IMF to train organizers to work in the French and Italian metalworking industries. Despite a rear-guard effort by Irving Brown and Rudy Faupl of the IAM to hold up approval of the program, a contract to finance the scheme was signed in the summer of 1953.65 The CIO office in Paris was now effectively the base for the IMF campaign in France, with Reuther directing ten full-time organizers in the field and, in provocative fashion, attributing the recent progress made to the absence of the AFL from the ICFTU organizing drive. This had been a great help. “Ever since the end of the War the strong trade union centres in Europe have had a hopeless attitude about what might be done in France and Italy,” he told the CIO international affairs committee.66 Fortunately that phase had now ended.

Figure 4.  Victor Reuther, the key figure in the CIO’s overseas operations—a “big shot” to Mike Ross, a purveyor of “vicious, demagogic propaganda” to Jay Lovestone. Courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.

International Issues and the “Unity Process”

If persistent conflict between AFL and CIO marked their relations in the international field, the trend was different in domestic affairs. By the early 1950s, philosophical and policy differences that had divided the movement since the mid-1930s were fading, and when in November 1952 the old guard leaders, Bill Green and Phil Murray, died within weeks of each other, to be replaced by George Meany and Walter Reuther, prospects for rapprochement were greatly enhanced. Immediately following his election as AFL president, Meany announced that his only instruction from the executive council was to seek reunification of American labour and that he was willing immediately to appoint members to a joint unity committee to negotiate with the CIO. Two weeks later, Reuther also endorsed the objective of unity and agreed to formal talks beginning in 1953.67

Throughout this process, which moved forward by fits and starts over a two-year period, it was Meany who showed the most commitment to unity. Early on he sensed that Reuther might merely be going through the motions and warned him that he would not spend an undue amount of time on the talks if there were no likelihood of progress.68 Reuther’s lack of decisiveness reflected the diminished strength of the CIO following the expulsion of communist-led unions in 1949 and the relative weakness of his own position, subject as he was to constant sniping from opponents unreconciled to his leadership and critical of his style. As a consequence the CIO president’s hand in negotiation with Meany was weakened.

In February 1955, agreement was reached in principle to merge by the end of that year, though to the very end Meany feared that Reuther might be looking for a way out. The most contentious matter—international affairs—had been left to the last and still remained unresolved. This troubled Reuther, though Meany seemed less concerned, confident of being able to “handle” it to his satisfaction with the help of Reuther’s less ardent CIO union colleagues once the merger was complete. Even before the name of the organization had been formally agreed on, Meany was certainly assured enough to instruct builders to inscribe “American Federation of Labor—Congress of Industrial Organizations” in marble on the new Washington headquarters then under construction.

Throughout the negotiations, the conduct of international affairs was the subject of a fierce internal struggle, the two centres vying for advantage on key issues. Most contentious were the related questions of whether the new centre should continue with an independent program of activities through the FTUC and how the merged organization would relate to the ICFTU. Still in its infancy, the ICFTU was struggling to make an impact in the first half of the 1950s. The absence of cohesion between the two American affiliates and George Meany’s deep mistrust of General Secretary Jaap Oldenbroek created fundamental problems. Against this background, the prospect of a unified American labour movement captured the imagination of many Europeans, offering hope that the large affiliates would then all “get behind” the ICFTU.69

Following his election as CIO president, Walter Reuther recalled his brother from Paris and in October 1953 appointed him as his administrative assistant based in the CIO’s Washington headquarters with responsibility for the international field. The Paris office was closed at the end of 1953, with Victor Reuther’s assistant, Charles Levinson, transferring to the IMF staff. Though it appeared to reflect a scaling down of CIO ambitions abroad, Walter Reuther claimed it signalled a “considerable increase” in the CIO’s international effort, now to be channelled into ICFTU programs.70

In late 1953, the CIO revived the idea—dormant since 1950—that the TUC, AFL, and CIO, the “big three” affiliates, should each appoint an ICFTU assistant general secretary and so help strengthen the Brussels secretariat. Victor Reuther told his CIO colleagues that the ICFTU was “in crisis and cannot survive if something is not done to strengthen it.” Most understood the proposal to mean that Irving Brown and Mike Ross would fill the posts earmarked for the AFL and CIO.71 It offered a way of tackling the problem of rivalry between the two centres. Through this proposal, the CIO was also hoping to reset the agenda for the discussion of international issues in what were proving to be difficult negotiations over unity conducted with a weak hand.

CIO secretary-treasurer Jim Carey worked hard to sell the proposal, discussing it with Meany, Tewson, and Oldenbroek. Claiming a greater consensus than was in fact justified for the principle of “all through the ICFTU,” Carey kept up the momentum by submitting the proposal for adoption at the ICFTU’s executive board meeting in November–December 1953. It was presented as a formula for the “intensification of the work and strengthening of the personnel of the ICFTU secretariat.”72

Initially, Carey’s enthusiastic “boosterism” caught the AFL off guard, causing uncertainty and a hint of disagreement in FTUC ranks. Always less committed to the independent program and financial link with the CIA than his FTUC colleagues, Dubinsky was already querying whether it was wise for the FTUC to be providing help on an almost permanent basis to organizations such as the Mediterranean Committee. Defensively, Brown reassured him that the CIA funding was on a diminishing basis and the organizations concerned were beginning to show signs of self-sufficiency.73 Dubinsky was also open to the CIO’s proposal for additional assistant general secretaries and was willing to give it a year’s trial. He supported the idea of Irving Brown being one of the appointees, proposed recalling Henry Rutz from his field posting in Germany, and was already cutting back on the ILGWU’s material help to the FTUC.74

Distracted by the unity negotiations, Meany also dithered over the CIO proposal, unwilling to reject it but unsure of how to respond. The result was that for a time in October–November 1953 uncertainty began to surround the future of the AFL’s independent program.75 Meany seemed willing to consider having an AFL appointee as ICFTU assistant general secretary, if only to keep a close watch on Oldenbroek. But his readiness to abandon the independent AFL program was more in doubt, and deep down his animosity toward the ICFTU was undiminished. Walter Reuther was convinced that Meany would abandon the ICFTU if he could do so without wrecking the free trade union movement.76

Lovestone was very conscious of the danger posed by the CIO initiative, viewing it as a ploy to disguise its “defeat” in Europe while at the same time neutralizing the AFL. He told Brown: “Our reports are that there is a desperate and expanding drive, particularly against you by Victor and his friends and that no effort is being spared to have you close your office at the same time that the CIO closes its Victor record shop.” He scoffed at the idea of Brown going to work for the ICFTU: “no self-respecting union official (other than a refugee) would work with Oldenbroek with his temperament, arrogance, sneer and incompetence.” And as for the proposal that the TUC should also be entitled to appoint an assistant general secretary, it was “too silly for words,” since the person currently in post, German-born Hans Gottfurcht, who had spent the war in London, was now a naturalized Briton.77

He pulled out all the stops in arguing within the FTUC for a continuation and expansion of the existing independent program, managing for the time being to restore unity in the committee. The key to bringing Dubinsky back into line was Lovestone’s argument that the AFL should not renege on its policy of opposition to “big power” domination of the ICFTU that was implicit in Reuther’s proposal. This was a point on which the AFL had been consistent from the outset.78 He also made much of the fact that Omer Becu, the ICFTU president recently elected with strong AFL backing, had not been consulted by the CIO. Becu had heard of the “all through the ICFTU” approach only late in the day and was annoyed to find that it had been placed on the agenda for the next executive board meeting, the first board meeting over which he would preside.79 FTUC officers were thus persuaded that Jim Carey’s advocacy was not motivated by a genuine concern for the ICFTU but was merely a factional manoeuvre. As the AFL’s spokesman at the executive board, Brown was instructed not to oppose the proposed increase in the number of ICFTU assistant general secretaries, but neither to seek a post for the AFL. Brown congratulated Lovestone for holding the line and having “prevented a calamity . . . a lot of important work would have been wrecked by any summary closing up of our independent work abroad.”80

Discussion of the CIO initiative at the ICFTU’s November–December 1953 executive board reflected a general mood of caution. The TUC and AFL both steered clear of any reference to that part of the proposal to end independent activities. Mike Ross’s presentation of the CIO’s case for structural reform of the ICFTU was generally regarded as lacklustre, giving Brown the impression that he was neither committed to it nor personally interested in becoming an assistant general secretary. Playing for time, Brown called successfully for more consultation.

That meeting proved to be the high point for the CIO’s proposal to strengthen the ICFTU secretariat. Support for it drained away noticeably in subsequent months. Within the CIO executive board, the Reuthers fulminated against “the Lovestone crowd” whose “evil influence” would keep the ICFTU “ineffective and in constant turmoil.” “This is the last International,” insisted Victor Reuther, and only the CIO working with the TUC could save it. “The alternative is to let Lovestone nullify every step and let the ICFTU die.”81 Attempting to keep the proposal alive, Walter Reuther offered to attend in person the next discussion scheduled for the ICFTU emergency committee in March 1954 if George Meany would also attend. However, Meany was unavailable, and he later noted that for several months thereafter Reuther seemed to lose interest in the unity process, missing meetings and seeing little of his opposite number. It was clearly related to CIO disappointment over AFL refusal to cooperate in the international field.82

Defence, Rearmament, and Soviet Communism’s “New Look”

Of course, how the AFL and CIO related to the ICFTU was all about means to an end. The end in question—the objective of international trade unionism—was still very much a matter of contention. For the AFL, everything was secondary to the battle against communism, whether waged through a reformed ICFTU or independently. All issues were judged in terms of whether they helped or hindered that fight. And from Stalin’s death in March 1953, with the “new look” emanating from Moscow suggesting that his successors might be bent on a more emollient approach, the key issue for the AFL was the danger of the West letting down its guard in response to this changing climate.

Six months into the merger negotiations, George Meany and Walter Reuther passed through London en route to the July 1953 ICFTU congress in Stockholm and were entertained separately at the House of Commons, following which both gave press conferences. Their important differences over international policy could not be disguised. Asked by British reporters about Prime Minister Churchill’s interest in East-West dialogue, Meany answered with a disparaging reference to Neville Chamberlain: “We do not want appeasement with a long cigar any more than with an umbrella.” By contrast, the following day Reuther told the press that free nations had a moral responsibility to explore every possible means of talking out the world’s problems. He was also dismissive of Meany’s fear of appeasement; no responsible leader in Europe was advocating it.83

At the Stockholm congress itself, Meany’s differences with the TUC’s Vincent Tewson over the threat of communism were also on full display, their set speeches at the opening ceremony parading divergent assessments almost as point and counterpoint. Tewson welcomed signs of a change in the attitude of the new Soviet leadership, while Meany insisted that a tactical switch did not mean an accompanying change in the basic Soviet aim of world domination. Tewson was for caution; Meany insisted it was no time for backsliding under the pretext of caution. Tewson warned against talk or action that undermined the promise of international talks; Meany noted that no dictator in history had ever been converted to a policy of reason or human decency by appeasement.84 An editorial in the AFL News-Reporter subsequently commented witheringly that Tewson’s presidency of the ICFTU had “disappointed those who had expected the ICFTU to assume an aggressive role and take a firm stand in international affairs opposing communism.”85

In dealings with mainstream European labour leaders—deep-dyed anti-communists almost to a man (there were no women in this world)—Meany would still shake his head at their tame acceptance of big power spheres of influence as defined by the Yalta agreement and the “false notions” of co-existence now being promoted. Writing in the Free Trade Union News, he expressed “deep shock” at British Labour’s support for the recognition of communist China. In a litany of wrongs, he found it guilty of “appeasing, rewarding, recognizing, banqueting or doing ‘business as usual’ with totalitarian aggressors” while all the time exuding “apathy, appeasement, complacency, neutralism and a false sense of security.” With some bitterness he maintained that too many Europeans were attracted to totalitarian Russia and China even as they turned their back on America “because we do not pretend to be socialist.” In his formulation, they preferred “socialism without democracy” to “democracy without socialism.”86

In Europe, attitudes to the proposed European Defence Community (EDC) and especially German rearmament were the litmus test. Irving Brown worried about an emerging perception among European workers that the main danger came from the burden of defence spending rather than from Soviet communism. From France, where “peace campaigns” were much in evidence and the National Assembly refused to ratify the EDC Treaty, Brown reported in alarmist terms that the country was in “complete chaos and confusion politically . . . and morally” and “practically three-quarters in the Soviet camp.” Even formerly reliable Force ouvrière leaders such as International Secretary André Lafond were reckoned to be losing their political bearings on the question of the EDC.87

In Brown’s view, the political situation in Italy was no better. There his main effort was to establish a program to train an elite force of disciplined, anti-communist trade unionists at FIAT’s Turin plant, capable of standing up to the communist leadership in the workplace and “politically and physically ready to fight and resist to the end.” This initiative was meant to complement the US government’s offshore procurement policy for Italy under which US defence contracts would only be awarded to firms that committed themselves to a policy of weeding out communists from their workforce. Brown was successful in persuading FIAT management to cover 50 percent of the cost of the program but was unable to win backing from the US embassy in Rome or the CIA to match FIAT’s financial contribution.88

In Germany, the death of Kurt Schumacher in 1952 had robbed the social democrats of their most effective anti-communist leader, and Lovestone and Brown were unimpressed by those about to take the helm. “Pygmies on parade” was Lovestone’s assessment of upcoming figures such as Willy Brandt, Fritz Erler, and Carlo Schmidt.89 Whereas the Reuthers were clearly supportive of the SPD, there was little AFL enthusiasm for the party in the 1953 federal elections, where the social democrats went down to defeat. Lined up solidly behind the SPD, the DGB also disappointed the AFL, with Brown complaining that it continually punched below its weight and failed to speak out against Soviet foreign policy. When, following the 1953 election, Chancellor Adenauer threatened to retaliate for the (formally non-party) DGB’s partisan support for the SPD by fostering a rival Christian trade union organization, it was to the Reuthers that the DGB leadership first turned for assistance.90 Yet it was from George Meany that the centre received its most effective backing.

The DGB’s relationship to the SPD hardly followed the Gompers maxim of rewarding friends and punishing enemies, but Adenauer’s threat to split the movement was too much for Meany to countenance. He promptly delivered a stern warning to the chancellor and urged the German people: “don’t let this government take the first false step which will lead . . . down the path to war.”91 DGB chairman Walter Freitag privately acknowledged that Meany’s intervention had saved the unity of the German labour movement, but his organization remained wary of the AFL. As Lovestone complained to former Schumacher aide, Fritz Heine:

Your colleagues continue to be plagued with the notion that the CIO is the more progressive organization, the more militant. Perhaps some of them have the notion that they have more Socialist ideology in common with them. . . . That . . . doesn’t bode well for international labour understanding and cooperation.92

The DGB’s continuing wariness of the AFL was evident from its resistance to the Americans having a seat on the ICFTU’s German-led “Berlin Committee” set up after the Berlin uprising to extend the ICFTU’s intelligence-gathering activities in the Eastern zone and to foster links with anti-communist groups there. The committee’s German chairman, Albin Karl, justified the DGB stance, saying that Irving Brown’s approach to the task in hand went beyond trade union work and involved “politics.” For Brown, this highlighted “the nasty side of the Germans”: not only were they against the AFL, he wrote, but also against those among their own members who were “really fundamentally and basically anti-communist.”93 The deep resentment that George Meany would later show for the German labour movement’s lack of gratitude for American favours rendered can be traced back to this period.

Once the French National Assembly had rejected EDC Treaty, it was no longer possible for the German labour movement to avoid discussing as an alternative the idea of rearming the country under the 1954 Paris Accords and, beyond that, German membership in NATO. Adenauer made an unprecedented visit to the DGB headquarters to appeal personally to Walter Freitag for support for the policy, but to no avail. At Brown’s urging, Meany then went over the head of the DGB leadership and issued a public “appeal” to German trade unionists, arguing that the Paris Accords were the “indispensable next step in developing international democratic unity . . . to deter further Soviet aggression” and that “the readiness . . . to defend one’s own free country and to cooperate with other people in the preservation of peace . . . must never be confused with aggressionist militarism.”94 The appeal had a major impact: it was seized upon by Adenauer, who quoted it approvingly in a speech ahead of the ratification vote in the Bundestag and urged all German workers to read it. Christian Democrat deputies welcomed it in the debate on ratification, and trade unionists among their ranks backed the government line, thus guaranteeing ratification of the accords.

Lovestone travelled to Germany to be present for the Bundestag vote and boasted that Meany’s appeal had hit the country “like a thunderbolt.” It was, he wrote, “one of the soundest, timeliest, most helpful, effective and historic steps ever taken by the AFL in international affairs.” The AFL’s voice was the “first and only voice” raised against opposition to the accords. The ICFTU was silent and the TUC was “floundering leaderless and without a sense of direction or inspiration.”95 After meetings with top leaders of the SPD and DGB, he reported home optimistically that the worst, in terms of relations with the German labour movement, was over. Whether the DGB leadership would now come to trust the AFL remained to be seen. But there could be no doubt that Meany’s intervention had helped forge an important bond between himself and Chancellor Adenauer that would grow in importance over the coming decade. While the Reuthers looked to Willy Brandt as a future leader of the SPD, Meany was more comfortable in dealing with the conservative Christian Democrat, Konrad Adenauer.

The Ross-Brown Axis and “Unorthodox” Financing

Victor Reuther’s reassignment to take charge of international affairs for the CIO in 1953 was at the expense of Mike Ross, who had been the responsible officer since 1945. Ross was reassigned to Europe in 1954, his remit being to liaise with the ICFTU and the European trade union centres in building support for the CIO’s reform package. But early on he confided in Irving Brown his intention to tell Meany privately that the ICFTU’s real need was for an experienced director of organization with a team of organizers seconded from affiliates to work for the ICFTU in developing counties, rather than three additional assistant general secretaries. There was no indication that Ross had shared this thinking with his CIO superiors. He was no devotee of Walter Reuther, and his relationship with Victor Reuther was distinctly frosty. At the same time, his predisposition to cooperate with Brown made him an object of suspicion for the younger Reuther.96

For their part, Brown and Lovestone were unsure whether to embrace Ross or keep him at arm’s length. Brown had known him for several years and regarded him as no threat. Ross was “at best too weak to base any hopes for the future.” He was “nice, ineffective and pliable,” Brown wrote to Lovestone: “I would not expect him to be a very strong tree on which to lean,” though “I regard [him] as a personal friend.” Lovestone concurred: “He is a lazy, weak character. . . . Otherwise he is quite a decent fellow, but the woods are full of them.” Nonetheless, the Ross-Brown relationship grew stronger in the months ahead in parallel with the stately progress of the merger talks. In a similar way, Victor Reuther maintained friendly relations with the AFL’s decidedly “non-Lovestoneite” representative at the ILO, Phil Delaney. It was obvious to the FTUC that the Reuther leadership viewed Ross as an outsider, whereas they regarded him as infinitely preferable to Victor Reuther. But they were also discomfited by Oldenbroek’s clear preference for Ross rather than Brown to represent a unified American centre in the ICFTU following the merger.97 It was in this spirit of condescension laced with a measure of cautious mistrust that Lovestone and Brown came to regard Mike Ross as the “acceptable” face of the CIO in international affairs, someone they could work with and even control when, three years later, he became the nominal head of the international affairs department of the merged AFL-CIO.

The Ross-Brown link came into its own as the CIO and AFL played cat and mouse in their search for funding for international work in 1954–55. A legacy of Reuther’s spell in Europe was the well-oiled channel through which government aid funds were accessed through former CIO staff now engaged by the MSA/Foreign Operations Administration (FOA) productivity division—graphically characterized by Brown as “Victor’s stooges” carrying out “termite operations in Europe.”98 The key intermediary was Bill Kemsley, who had previously steered MSA funds to the IMF for use by Victor Reuther. He was now responsible for various disguised subsidies to the ICFTU through such devices as FOA bulk purchase of ICFTU publications and FOA payment for training materials developed by the ICFTU for its own purposes but also “available” for use by the American centres.99

Kemsley was happy to resort to subterfuge, proposing a fictitious organization and personnel as conduits for FOA payments, telling ICFTU assistant general secretary Gottfurcht privately:

Anything that I had to address to you officially on this would be under the phoney title. I am sure you can understand that such things as this are somewhat commonplace in MSA operations. . . . Please do not give any publicity as it will get me into the soup. . . . Please drop me a line at my home address and let me know your reaction.100

Gottfurcht was willing to play ball, though beyond a certain point he recoiled in view of the risk involved. Responding to a further unorthodox funding proposal in mid-1954, he told Kemsley that he was deluded if he thought he could operate this way without running into trouble:

Neither Oldenbroek nor I can take the risk of being challenged on this matter as accepting anything through the back door would be in direct contravention of existing decisions. . . . Have a word about it with Vic. . . . Tell him that it would be extremely dangerous if anyone knew of our private correspondence.101

The MSA/FOA Labor Advisory Committee, comprising Victor Reuther, Phil Delaney, and Art Lyon of the railroad brotherhoods and based in Washington, had general oversight of FOA relations with the labour movement but was never going to blow the whistle on such transactions.102 Irving Brown did, however, complain bitterly when, representing the AFL, Delaney failed to object to FOA funding of scholarships worth $26,000 for ICFTU training in Brussels. In mitigation, Delaney pleaded that the amounts were too small to make a fuss about and that in any case Reuther and Lyon would have outvoted him. Guessing that some of the FOA projects might somehow be CIA-related, and alluding to one of Brown’s aliases, Delaney suggested mischievously that he hadn’t dared oppose them in view of “Walgreen’s relationship with Fizzland.”103

To arrest this milking of the MSA/FOA productivity budget, Meany arranged for FOA Administrator Harold Stassen to appoint Brown and Ross as a two-man vetting team for suggested projects in Europe. In due course, they were presented with a list of proposals, often with incomprehensible titles and little explanatory detail. With no time to investigate fully, many items were nodded through, although Brown insisted on referring back to Meany those involving the ICFTU, including an item under which it was to receive $90,000 for labour education.104 Increasingly suspicious of Ross’s tendency to defer to the more forceful Brown, Victor Reuther gave him a dressing down: “I am somewhat confused and disturbed by reports . . . that you are not sympathetic to the idea of FOA providing . . . assistance. . . . I should like to hear directly from you as to your attitude. . . . I would appreciate your giving support to these projects.” Ross explained his caution in terms of the sensitive state of play in the unity talks. But he was also unhappy with the sub rosa channels, noting pointedly that one of the named sources of finance was a “Philip Murray Foundation.” In all his years of working closely with Murray, he had never heard of such a trust.105

As for FTUC funding arrangements, its independent operations were diminishing in the course of 1953–54, and a question mark hung over the relationship with the CIA. Dubinsky remained disenchanted and pressed Lovestone for a stocktaking of “the whole Fizzlandia situation,” complaining that the information available to him was “inadequate and incomplete.” But what alternative was there to CIA backing? “I cannot see how we can make a real mark in the world merely by declarations and by having a correct position,” wrote Brown. They needed to be backed up with “some essentials” that the trade unions were unable to supply: “Considering the odds against which we are fighting . . . I cannot conceive of an effective fight which is conducted only on moral grounds.” Lovestone reassured him: there was no disagreement between the two of them over the basic issue of “Fizzlandic navigation,” but relations with the agency had to change.

In fact, he was inching toward a new arrangement that would see the AFL linked to the CIA through the latter’s counter-intelligence division directed by James Angleton, for whom Lovestone’s girlfriend, Pagie Morris, already worked. The emphasis would shift from field operations to intelligence gathering. Once it was agreed on, Angleton would make payments to Lovestone’s shell body—a notional “Samuel Gompers Library,” staffed by Pagie Morris—in exchange for reports from Lovestone. These would originate from Lovestone’s stringers in the field, who would in turn be paid from the “Gompers Library” funds. But the arrangement still needed approval by “the holders of the patent.” Lovestone told Brown: “Our [CIA] friends are interested . . . but you know what the obstacle is.”106

The “obstacle” referred to was a McCarthyite campaign then being waged in the press, inspired by hostile sections of the intelligence community, that portrayed Lovestone and Brown as closet communists. Heading the campaign since 1951 with a series of articles in the New York Journal-American was the right-wing syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler, who claimed that Lovestone and Brown were part of a communist cell responsible for American labour policy overseas while simultaneously benefiting from the support of a US administration blind to the real threat of international communism. The campaign intensified in late 1953 when the assistant secretary of labour, Spencer Miller, approached the FBI with the claim that Lovestone—“a shrewd, brilliant Jew”—was still an active communist agent. Until the storm aroused by these allegations abated, Lovestone’s strategy was to lie low.107

Yet, before that point was reached, Irving Brown was likewise forced to adopt a low profile in Europe for several weeks in autumn 1954 when his close association with the world of intelligence threatened to draw him into a French political scandal that rocked the government of Pierre Mendès France. At the centre of these developments was the newly appointed interior minister, François Mitterand, who in an early ministerial initiative fired Paris’s virulently anti-communist prefect of police, Jean Baylot, and his deputy, Jean Dides. Amid countercharges by Dides that Mitterand had leaked defence secrets to the communist party, and an investigation ordered by the president of France that threatened to expose links between Dides and American secret intelligence, Brown slipped out of the country and went to ground in Germany until the excitement in Paris subsided.108 It was deeply ironic that, at one and the same time, the Lovestone-Brown operation was being attacked as “communist” in the United States and threatened with exposure for supposed ties with anti-communist police work in France.

Hampered by the need for caution at the height of the Pegler-Miller campaign and by Brown’s insecure position in France during l’Affaire Dides, it was only in January 1955 that Lovestone’s plans for a new relationship with James Angleton and the CIA through the “Samuel Gompers Library” began to take shape. Grants in support of the venture from Angleton’s budget would allow Lovestone to pay modest retainers to his stringers overseas—Jack Carney and John Bruegel in Britain, Klaus Dohrn in Switzerland, and Mohan Das in India—who, over the next twenty years, provided him with regular written reports that were shared with Angleton and were known as the “JX reports.” In return, Lovestone gained access to intelligence that crossed Angleton’s desk relating to activities of communists.109

Approaching Merger

The agreement in principle reached by the AFL and CIO in February 1955 to merge by the end of the year concentrated minds and intensified the struggle for advantage in the international field. At a joint meeting of international affairs committee personnel from AFL and CIO that same month, Victor Reuther revived the proposal for the British and American centres each to appoint an ICFTU assistant general secretary. Meany was asked directly whether there were any AFL activities that could not be handled by an adequately resourced ICFTU. He confirmed that there weren’t and observed that the only thing preventing the AFL from relinquishing its independent program was a lack of confidence in Oldenbroek’s leadership. Victor Reuther then drafted a statement proclaiming a newfound unity of purpose: “There is no AFL point of view or CIO point of view. . . . There is an American labour point of view . . . to build the ICFTU into a more effective and dynamic international.” To this end, he claimed agreement that the combined delegations of the AFL and CIO to the ICFTU’s Vienna congress in May would support the CIO’s long-standing proposal for the appointment of assistant general secretaries. He further suggested that George Meany and Walter Reuther put their names to his statement and send it to Oldenbroek. However, when the four FTUC officers discussed it, Meany “hit the roof” and declined to sign. All that the AFL had agreed to, he claimed, was to examine whether the independent work of the FTUC could be handled by a strengthened ICFTU secretariat.110

Lovestone had been quick to remind Meany: “The ICFTU is bankrupt as a leadership. This cannot be remedied by office arrangements in Brussels. . . . It cannot be done by our dropping [independent] activities.” Indeed, he noted that without the AFL’s independent work in the late 1940s, the ICFTU itself would never have come into existence. Yet he was also aware that Dubinsky and Woll were weakening in their support for FTUC activities and wanted to withdraw all its field representatives except Brown. Brown, himself, dismissed the latest episode as “Victor’s manoeuvring.” However, he continued to believe that a more positive AFL approach to the ICFTU was needed. He started from the premise that the organization could be strengthened. It made no sense for the AFL to continue half-in and half-out, simply criticizing the ICFTU’s failures. It was time to “move in on the ICFTU” and for the Americans to start asserting themselves.111

Brown’s alternative to the CIO proposal had at its heart Mike Ross’s earlier idea for the creation of a department of organization within the ICFTU, with the larger affiliates seconding experienced organizers to work under a strong figure as director. To smooth the way for this, Ross had suggested privately to Brown that their two European offices be merged, a proposal that Brown reported to Meany with approval. In pressing the case for an ICFTU department of organization, Brown naturally expected that the AFL would have a decisive say in the choice of director.

Over this issue, Lovestone enlisted the support of ICFTU president Omer Becu, whom the AFL leaders always hoped would act as a counterweight to Oldenbroek. Prompted by Lovestone, Becu now showed an interest in becoming an executive president with special responsibility for organizing.112 The British objected to the prospect of yet another constitutional change made specifically for the benefit of Becu, but Lovestone managed to win broad support for the proposal at the ICFTU’s 1955 congress in Vienna. A high-powered “director of organizing” was to be appointed. Crucially, the person chosen was also to report directly to the executive board rather than to the general secretary, thereby clipping Oldenbroek’s wings and diminishing his standing. Becu lost interest in the post when it became clear that he would not be able to combine it with the presidency, and it was therefore left to Meany to find a possible alternative nominee from the AFL. His inclination was to name Irving Brown.113

Victor Reuther was angry at being outmanoeuvred over the issue of the director of organization in the run-up to the Vienna congress. He felt let down by Mike Ross’s failure to make a strong case for the CIO proposal and was now faced with a quite different proposal from the AFL. In a briefing for the CIO’s delegation he reminded them that in the joint meeting of the two international affairs committees only three months earlier “we got everything”—with the prospect opening up for cleaning out the unsavoury elements of the FTUC’s work. In this category, Reuther listed “Irving Brown’s men . . . his Corsican pistol carriers”; his assistant Leon Dale, “who is more familiar with activities having their source elsewhere than in the labour movement”; Lovestone’s personal connection with the China Lobby; and his “assistant” Pagie Morris, whose activities were also “outside the labour field.”114

Reuther berated Ross once more for his ineffectiveness in advancing the CIO proposal as an agenda item in Vienna:

You can understand how disappointing [sic] a number of us were . . . to find that these basic [CIO] proposals had all but been washed down the drain. . . . A review of ICFTU meetings over the last several years clearly indicates that on too many occasions the independent views of the CIO have not been put forward as vigorously as they might have been.

It was Ross’s tendency to yield to Brown that most troubled Reuther, and he lectured him: “one can have a good personal relationship with Irving Brown without necessarily yielding to his ultimatums . . . or advancing his name for positions of responsibility.”115

Though defeated over the CIO’s particular proposal to strengthen the ICFTU secretariat, Reuther made it clear that Irving Brown would not be acceptable as the nominee of the unified American labour movement for ICFTU director of organizing:

If anyone is so naïve as to think that Irving Brown is a possible choice or that a weak character whom Irving can control will be acceptable, they are even more naïve than those who thought that a few letters chiselled in the stone on the face of the new AFL building would prejudge the decision on the name of the new merged operation. . . . Having won some important victories long overdue . . . I’ll be damned if we are going to . . . see them now washed down the drain for lack of competent people to carry them out.116

The emerging stalemate over the choice of director of organizing reflected the gulf between the warring factions. Despite the high hopes of the Vienna congress, the ICFTU post would remain unfilled for over a year. And the absence of agreement here also frustrated CIO ambitions to see the back of the FTUC. Asked at a press conference in June 1955 about his willingness to recall FTUC representatives from the field, Meany replied that this would take place once the ICFTU had begun its organizing in the field. However, that process was stalled by the absence of agreement on the choice of director of organizing.117 And when Walter Reuther pressed within the unity process for a discussion on the future of the FTUC, Meany resisted all talk of winding it up. The AFL president may have been losing the support of Woll and Dubinsky in this respect, but during a prolonged joint tour of Europe in the summer of 1955, observers noted how Lovestone’s personal influence with Meany seemed to be on the rise. It was certainly a matter of concern to the TUC’s Vincent Tewson, who had once regarded Meany as the most reliable of FTUC’s leaders. Likewise alarmed, American Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas asked Victor Reuther: “Can you give me any hope that the new [union] organization . . . won’t be simply a rather docile sounding board for Lovestone, Brown et al.?”118

With so much at stake in the unity process for international labour affairs, the personal animosity overlaying long-standing political differences was unmistakable. For the CIO, it was Lovestone who was the real hate figure. Bill Kemsley, a close observer of the FTUC secretary, wrote to CIO colleagues of the need to eradicate the poison of Lovestonism, which “continues to write the policy of the ICFTU, either through positive influence or through the pressures of fear.” Citing the “gangsterism that controls the Marseilles docks; the divisive tactics used in Italy; the splitting of the anti-Takano forces in Japan; the support of corruption in Greece; the attacks on the social democrats in Austria and Germany . . . the all-out support of the dictatorship of Chiang Kai Shek,” he proposed an anti-Lovestone intelligence-gathering exercise aimed at collecting as much information as possible about the former communist party secretary and his associates for dissemination among American labour activists. The problem of Lovestonism had its roots in America, and the process of tackling it needed to begin at home by bringing it into the open. Kemsley was well aware of how difficult it would be to beat him. But he was impatient for action, and in his peroration exhorted Walter Reuther: “The time is now. The people are us. The leader is you. Let’s go.”119

In the opposite corner, Lovestone hammered away at Meany with a simple message: “We are in complete and unbridgeable disagreement with them [CIO]. Unless we organize forces after unity, these demagogic soap boxers and semi-skilled intellectuals will cause far more damage abroad than they were able to do before unification.” He complained that in Germany recently Victor Reuther had been telling DGB officials that Irving Brown was not so much a trade unionist as a government man doing government work with government money. “If he’d said any of those things to me,” wrote Lovestone, “he would have run a strong risk of losing the other eye.” Meanwhile, with Brown’s alarmist reporting from Paris painting a picture of a steadily deteriorating situation in the Cold War—a popular front in the making in Greece; a general let-up in rearmament of NATO countries; the British Labour Party and trade unions “caving in on the smiling cultural front”; Tito’s policy abroad succeeding where the Soviets had failed—Lovestone urged Meany to call Brown home for “a private session before trying to iron out matters with the CIO and some of its soapboxers,” in the final phase of unity talks.120

Unity of Sorts: The Choice of International Affairs Director for the AFL-CIO

The date for the resolution of outstanding decisions on the merger was scheduled for mid-October 1955. Four days before this, Victor Reuther buttonholed Phil Delaney for a drink to ask him what he had heard about plans for the international affairs department and to let him know that the CIO was ready to nominate him for departmental director. “Christ, why are you asking me?” Delaney said. “That’s up to the 7th floor. Don’t get me involved. I don’t want any part of the job. Why don’t you talk to Mike Ross? How about Irving?” But Reuther persisted, telling him, “You are the best one.” Delaney was nervous that word of the conversation would leak out and be wrongly interpreted. Accordingly, he went straight to Lovestone and reported the meeting: “You know, Jay, it is you they are after. He is not after anybody else. I told Victor that he would not stop Mr. Meany if [he] wants to consult Lovestone or take his advice. Who are you to prevent it?” Toying with Delaney, Lovestone feigned incomprehension as to why Reuther would be out to “get him,” given that “I have nothing against him . . . against his mistakes in the UAW when he and Walter refused to fight the communists.” He went on to say, “I am not fighting old battles. I am not looking for titles or jobs. If Victor Reuther wants to talk to me about policies, and that is the only thing I am interested in, I would be glad to talk to him, but he always dodges policy discussions with me.” As the hapless Delaney left the room, he asked anxiously: “This conference between Reuther and me. Nobody knows about it but you and I?” Lovestone reassured him: “I understand.” That same day Lovestone sent a verbatim record of the conversation to Meany and Brown.121

Figure 5.  AFL representative Phil Delaney (left) and Jay Lovestone in July 1953, at the ICFTU congress in Stockholm. A social encounter with Victor Reuther left Delaney anxiously asking Lovestone: “This conference between Reuther and me. Nobody knows about it but you and I?” Courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.

Senior figures from both sides met on 14 October to agree on departmental directorships for the AFL-CIO. For international affairs director the CIO proposed Delaney. The AFL nominated Mike Ross. In both cases they represented the least objectionable member from among the opposite side and yet the person least trusted by their immediate colleagues. To break the deadlock, in a well-rehearsed coup de théâtre, George Meany then proposed the name of Brown. The CIO representatives were aghast—until Meany explained that he meant not Irving but George Brown, one of his administrative assistants who had previously worked as research director for the plumbers’ union. He was a man of little standing in the labour movement with no experience of international affairs. The nomination was simply a way of avoiding the real issue. The CIO side readily agreed to it as a temporary arrangement. Mike Ross was named deputy director. Phil Delaney would continue to concentrate on issues within the ILO. Jay Lovestone was to remain in New York running the FTUC, whose future role was still undecided. It was a situation fraught with unknowns. To guarantee continuity, Bill Kemsley advised the CIO leaders that their best precaution would be to transfer the CIO’s international affairs department to the UAW. Indeed, that would be the chosen course.122

Irving Brown was deflated at the appointment of his namesake. As a tactical manoeuvre it was clever, and he could understand Meany’s motive, but he was unable to disguise his bitterness, telling Lovestone:

From the point of view of human dignity and really trying to do a job, it is a pretty shoddy business. . . . It leaves no room for incentive and makes one want to say: “What’s the use?” The trouble is that you, Jay, and I are taken too much for granted. . . . Frankly it leaves me a bit disgusted and about ready to re-examine what I should do in the future. This is all the more intensified by the kind of campaign that Reuther, Delaney and associated stooges continue to carry on over here among the Europeans.123

The unification of the American labour movement duly took place at the Unity Convention in New York in December 1955, without agreement on basic aspects of international policy and practice. It was also consummated in an atmosphere of intense personal antagonism between key figures. On the very day the convention closed, Lovestone lunched with a reporter from the Washington Post who asked him about the AFL role in splitting the French and Italian labour movements between 1948 and 1950, for details on how much money it was receiving from the CIA, and, tellingly, how it was that when any prominent communist in Europe split from their party they immediately got in touch with Irving Brown. In this connection the reporter mentioned that when Auguste Lecoeur had recently broken with the French Communist Party he contacted Brown, who put him in touch with US intelligence. It was the nature of this last question that convinced Lovestone that the journalist had been primed to ask this by Victor Reuther. Lovestone complained to Meany that the CIO had plants in Fizzland who were seeking to slander the AFL while drawing government salaries.124

Despite the safe launch of the AFL-CIO, there was still no progress in appointing a director of organization for the ICFTU. The latter’s executive board met in New York immediately following the convention with no nominations before it. Only when there was a measure of accord within the AFL-CIO could the ICFTU begin the search for candidates with any real hope of success. Yet during those post-convention executive board sessions, hostility between Victor Reuther and Irving Brown—substituting for Walter Reuther and George Meany—was as raw as ever. At times the two men were in open discord. Reuther demanded to know why, as representatives of the FTUC, Dick Deverall and Harry Goldberg were present at the board meeting, and threatened to protest officially. When Irving Brown objected to a decision by Oldenbroek to name a replacement as secretary of the Asian Regional Organization without prior consultation with the Americans, Reuther intervened to berate him publicly, telling the board: “There are certain people who are not so concerned about the issues, but are interested merely in creating differences where differences do not exist.” And on the ever-contentious question of contacts with Soviet bloc labour organizations, Reuther voiced opposition to the wording of an executive board statement that Meany himself had been responsible for drafting.

Afterward, outside the meeting, Brown confronted Reuther and told him that if he intended to start where he had left off, it would be regrettable, but he could have it that way. “Start?” asked Reuther. “Why, it’s never stopped.”125 The unified AFL-CIO was all of seven days old.

From the outset, mutual mistrust characterized relations between the AFL and CIA over their secret funding arrangement, but the attempt by the agency to extend the scheme to the CIO created a veritable crisis that all but ended their relationship. Financing available for the FTUC programs began to decline, though Jay Lovestone did subsequently reach a separate arrangement with CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton to exchange anti-communist intelligence in return for token payments.

Though not unique to American labour—the TUC also benefited from government grant aid for its work among British Commonwealth trade unions—this American reliance on secret finance from government sources was new. Recognizing that the WFTU was heavily subsidized by the Soviet state, the AFL and CIO both accepted that their work in this field could not be funded from union sources alone. However, the CIO differentiated itself from the AFL in claiming that the government funds it sought were from the Marshall Plan administration and its successor agencies, the MSA and FOA—indeed, counterpart funds that were publicly voted and intended for economic and social programs of benefit to Europe. Yet the CIA also had access to counterpart funds, making it difficult to determine on what basis, and with whose backing, grants to the CIO were made. The Reuthers always claimed to be unaware that money received came from the agency, though it is quite clear that various other attempts by the CIO—and through it the ICFTU—to access MSA and FOA finance were made in the full knowledge that it would prove embarrassing were the source to be made public.

CIO entry into the international field reawakened old animosities with the AFL: ill will at institutional level was compounded by personal animosity between Lovestone and Brown on the one hand and the Reuthers on the other, rooted in their competitive relationship during the unionization of autoworkers in the 1930s. It set the tone of relations between the two camps over international issues for a generation to come.

Though hardly less anti-communist than its rival, the CIO approached international work differently, starting from a critique of the AFL record in helping to split unions in France and Italy and steering the Greek labour movement away from “communist” control—picking favourites among non-communists rather than supporting bona fide unions more broadly. Its preferred course was to strengthen European unions as fighting organizations in a traditional union sense, looking to heal divisions among non-communist unions and so making them better able to defend the interests of workers vis-à-vis employers, a dimension that rarely featured in FTUC calculations.

With mixed results, Victor Reuther’s CIO program emphasized the provision of standard union educational courses to train organizers, help in exposing the exploitative, pro-employer bias of the Marshall Plan’s pilot plant programs, and the need for extensive organizing among French and Italian metalworkers. In contrast, Irving Brown’s predilection was to focus on organizing a tightly knit elite of selected trade unionists equipped specifically for anti-communist campaigning, their training in propaganda techniques explicitly ideological. As applied to aircraft manufacture at FIAT in Italy, the program was conceived in terms of support for the North Atlantic Alliance by equipping union leaders for “the showdown” with communists that Brown and Lovestone anticipated sooner or later. Elsewhere this close AFL identification with NATO was reflected in Lovestone’s judgment that Meany’s 1955 public appeal to German trade unionists to back the Paris Accords (leading to German rearmament and membership in NATO) was the AFL’s most decisive intervention in Europe.

The closure of the CIO’s European operation after two years followed agreement with the AFL to begin merger talks—a drawn-out process lasting over two years in which the lack of accord on international issues was all but total. The CIO urged the AFL to join in working abroad strictly through the ICFTU, whose secretariat would be strengthened by each appointing an assistant general secretary, a measure equally designed to maintain CIO parity of influence with the AFL. Intent on preserving its independent program, the AFL rejected this, seeing it as an unwarranted CIO ploy to claim an equivalent status in circumstances where it considered that the CIO’s European operation had largely ended in failure.

The AFL’s counterproposal to strengthen the ICFTU was through the creation of an all-powerful director of organization. Adopted by the ICFTU as a possible way of breaking the deadlock in the unity talks, the proposal’s unstated purpose here was to clip General Secretary Oldenbroek’s wings, with Irving Brown appointed to this important new post. Such an appointment was unthinkable to the CIO, and consequently the post went unfilled for over a year. In the meantime, driven by domestic imperatives, the unity talks moved slowly to a successful conclusion in December 1955, while remaining deadlocked over basic international issues. At the AFL-CIO’s launch, all important aspects of its international orientation remained unresolved, a condition that would plague the new body for the next two years.