REVIEWS: Labor, Lovestone, and the CIA
Seligman, Ben B.
AMERICAN LABOR AND UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY, by Ronald Radosh. New York: Random House. 463 pp. $10.00. RELUCTANTLY, one must deal harshly with this book. I say reluctantly because the...
...how Gompers tangled with Arthur Henderson, head of the British Labour party...
...Such unions, in their view, were essential to democracy...
...Frequently, the seminars provided effective covers for CIA maneuvering...
...Sharp criticisms should be applied to unions today, yet there is no better instrument for workers to improve their immediate conditions than the trade unions...
...Of course, all this does not diminish the incredible chutzpah of the AFL-CIO's operation today...
...Radosh presents this part of the story in great detail, following the gyrations of the right-wing socialists—John Spargo, William English Walling, A. M. Simons, Phelps Stokes —as they panted for government approval and sponsorship of junkets to Europe...
...Its author, who teaches history at Queensborough Community College and is an advocate of the New Left, had a brilliant opportunity to write a significant work...
...how Algie Simons, an active socialist and author of a standard work on social conflict, managed to generate praise for Benito Mussolini...
...and on and on for 300 pages...
...There was a quid pro quo—a shorter work day (at least on government projects...
...Some scholars may want to learn about the tricky involvement of Samuel Gompers with the Wilson administration...
...Does he actually believe that union members are so far apart from their leaders on "anticommunism...
...and labor's admission through the side door of the White House...
...It's high time the author awakened to the facts of life: the American worker is often as xenophobic as any know-nothing fundamentalist...
...According to Radosh, the marriage (or seduction...
...Does he know how unions function...
...When little care is given to the craft of writing, the result will be soporific...
...More serious problems stemmed from the way American union representatives—an Irving Brown or a Richard Deverall—went about pitting groups of foreign unionists against one another in an effort to isolate Communists...
...The unions came to do the government's bidding...
...He tells how the Stockholm Conference, called by the moderate Soviets in 1917, was torpedoed...
...The new industrial union federation served as a government created instrument that enabled sophisticated corporate leaders to overcome the resistance to change of both old-style laissezfaire capitalists and the old-line craft unions that refused to accept a statist structure...
...The nonsense telescoped in this sentence makes the history of the CIO a weird jumble in which fact and fantasy coalesce, making FDR infinitely more prescient than he ever was...
...To the New Left anything that a union does —be it striking, sitting down, or bargaining —is "class collaboration...
...One trouble with the book is its unstated premise that the American worker replicates Marx's heroic proletarian...
...how Gompers failed to impress the French socialists...
...Only a small part of the tale is currently visible...
...Suddenly, young men with crew cuts and mysterious backgrounds appeared to set up seminars in Latin America or Africa or Asia to teach workers how to bargain collectively, American style...
...Balderdash...
...Perhaps he could not find more to say, for a goodly part of the history remains buried in the archives of the CIA, the State Department, and the International Affairs Department of the AFL-CIO...
...Whenever a showdown threatened at AFL– CIO Executive Board meetings, Reuther managed to have other business to attend to...
...ALL THIS may be useful history, but there are some strange things in this book that reveal its origin in dissertation drafts, article scraps, and New Left ideology...
...Such notions simply reveal the deficiencies of their political ideas...
...The unions' present-day participation in Cold War machinations is infinitely more sinister than Gompers's support of the Allied cause in 1918...
...Arnold Zander, who was avidly interested in trips around the world, wasn't the only union president to establish an international affairs department subsidized by CIA foundations...
...The New Left might ask itself what this country would be like had there been no union movement...
...Some 300 pages are devoted to a snail-paced description— actually a chronicle—of labor's foreign policy in World War I. Then comes a sudden leap to 1945 and the rise of Jay Lovestone and all that follows, a lugubrious tale that Radosh dispatches in about 150 pages...
...That may be sad, but it is true...
...The AFL, and later the AFL–CIO, wanted to have in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere unions that would be carbon copies of the American business union...
...The definitive study of labor, Lovestone, and the CIA is yet to be written...
...At least half a dozen other unions in Washington copied Zander's performance...
...Such unbelievable amorality—interfering with unions in other nations, splitting legitimate organizations because they had Communist leaders (though often the membership was not Communist), breaking strikes (the Marseilles dock strike of 1947 being a case in point) and bragging about it, helping the CIA overturn legitimate governments in Latin America, and more—all this could only have had its roots in a virulent animosity to any kind of leftist politics and thinking...
...232...
...The key records are buried and it may take years to unearth them...
...The book has no life, no style, and generates about as much interest as a Mary Worth cartoon...
...Yet there are some choice morsels he might have put on the table, particularly those wellknown to Washington cognoscenti before Ramparts magazine blew the whistle...
...Those facts Radosh has discovered are interpreted from the view of the New Left...
...Radosh's chief complaint—a supportable one—stems from American labor's continuous nosiness about the political complexion of foreign unions...
...If they did not exist they'd have to be created...
...Does he think that the leadership would find it so difficult to "sell" the membership on this issue...
...Nor, I may add, does he give absolution to Walter Reuther: despite the UAW president's continual bickering with George Meany over foreign issues, the two men were not that far apart, says Radosh...
...Thus a native xenophobia became an item of export and, as Radosh does demonstrate, fitted very well into the longrange outlook visible on the banks of the Potomac...
...The book lacks balance...
...The book, however, is inept...
...how the Social Democratic League was established to offset the socialist militants...
...Of course, the events Radosh does relate (and most of these are not unknown) are interesting but, sad to say, he relates them poorly...
...Actually, for all their mischief, the Browns and the Deveralls were not always successful...
...Often they might just as well have taught negotiating techniques to the Eskimo, for all the interest that their pupils had in these subjects...
...In the introduction, Radosh suggests that FDR helped the CIO because he knew that industrial unions would assist "the corporations [in maintaining] their hegemonic control over American society...
...When, oh when, will the New Left display a sense of balance (I almost said of reality) when it comes to labor unions...
...Some New Left writers—not Radosh—have even suggested that workers would do better by striking without unions...
...The fact, like it or not, is that in the area of foreign affairs members and leaders happen lafgely to agree...
...Throughout, the CIA footed the bill...
...Leftist unions are still powerful in France, Italy, and Japan...
...Really...
...He has bobbled his chance...
...This only reveals that they know little of the strategy of industrial conflict...
...The electrical workers, for example, would have gotten nowhere against General Electric in the recent 14-week strike had they followed such stupid advice...
...Yet it should be obvious to anyone who has tried to follow the wanderings of the AFL–CIO on other continents that the space allotment ought to have been reversed...
...but the urgent questions now concern George Meany, Jay Lovestone, Irving Brown, and the Central Intelligence Agency...
...the "right" to organize...
...how a Gompers meeting in Italy was inadvertently cancelled only to be filled at the last moment by soldiers (this episode is so hila230 BOOKS rious that even Radosh's deadly prose can't diminish its comedy...
...He seems accurate enough in describing the Guatemalan and Dominican interventions: in these deplorable episodes there appears little doubt but that American union "foreign affairs" men lent a hand...
...was consummated during World War I when Gompers recanted his early pacificism to become, like so many other liberallabor devotees, an unqualified supporter of the Allied Powers...
...how the Root Commission tried to tell the Russians what to do...
...It turns the workers' bitter struggle of the 1930s to organize and claim a place in society into nothing but a capitalist plot...
...And as it turned out in many instances, for foreign 231 BOOKS workers, the seminars were one way of getting a trip to the big city or even a junket through the United States...
...But here too Radosh's recital leaves much untold...
...Small wonder that American labor visitors to foreign countries are frequently suspect...
...The New Left evidently prefers a ragged army to a coordinated disciplined struggle...
...That some organizations might have preferred reform to five-cents-an-hour suggested to Gompers and his successors anarchism, or worse, bolshevism...
...I say reluctantly because the topic —union involvement in overseas affairs— is an important one...
...What causes the reader really to blink is Radosh's belief that union leaders would not have operated as they did in the foreign field had rank-and-file members been informed...
Vol. 17 • May 1970 • No. 3
