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chapter 18 Jay Lovestone The Cold War is long gone, but the ghosts of that era still walk among us. This is because so many of the political and ideological battles of the twentieth century depended, and still depend, upon our evaluation of a set of regimes whose ideology , for those on the left, was seductively anticapitalist but whose authoritarian statecraft proved reprehensibly brutal. The American labor movement was right in the middle of that fight, because the working class holds a special place in the political imagination of both leftists and reactionaries. Are the unions to be a strategically well-placed lever that can transform all society or, conversely, an ideologically powerful bulwark of the status quo? Thus, from the Bolshevik Revolution until the collapse of the Berlin Wall, no unionist could aspire to lead even a small slice of the movement without asserting his or her views on the character of world Communism, whether it be in Moscow or Milwaukee, Managua or Minneapolis. Communism was the inescapable question , especially in the two decades that bracketed World War II. It revealed itself in almost every election, strike, and organizing campaign; indeed, it was the issue that seared itself into the consciousness of the generation of unionists who passed from the scene only in the last decades of the twentieth century. NomanwasmorecentraltothisargumentthanJayLovestone,whohelpedfound theAmericanCommunistPartyin1919andlivedtoseetheIronCurtainfallseventy years later. His life was consumed by the fate of world Communism, first as one of the American party’s most energetic and creative leaders, then as a man burning in his hatred for the people and ideas to which he had once given such loyalty. Working behind the scenes at George Meany’s AFL-CIO, Ted Morgan describes him at midcentury as “holed up in his office behind piles of reports, working the phones, hatching his plots, spreading his tentacles, whispering his orders.”1 Morgan’s biography of Lovestone is full of intimate detail and eye-popping revelation, but it will not be the last word on Lovestone and his times. Morgan has had access to an enormous Lovestone archive, now housed at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and he has brought to light a good many machinations that Lichtenstein_ContestofIdeas_TEXT.indd 235 5/24/13 8:04 AM 236 intellectuals and their ideas Lovestone himself sought to keep secret. This includes, above all, Lovestone’s testy, quarter-century-long relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as much correspondence with his ambassadorial alter ego, Irving Brown, who actually handed out the clandestine cash packets to the foreign unionists whom Lovestone and the CIA sought to support. And Morgan offers up a juicy account of the serial love affairs undertaken by Lovestone, whose lifelong conduct remained true to the values of a leftish New York bohemian, circa 1919. Unfortunately, Morgan, who has written popular biographies of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, has a tin ear for historical context, especially when it comes to an evaluation of European or Asian labor politics. He largely adopts the shrill, Manichean assessments of Brown and Lovestone as his own. Especially during the crucial postwar decades, this distorts Morgan’s capacity to see just how sectarian and self-serving was the Lovestonite worldview, not to mention the disastrous politics that flowed from it. Morgan is not uncritical of his subject—even Lovestone admirers were appalled at his “apparatchik mentality, deceitful and omissive”—but Morgan’s biography remains essentially hagiographic in structure and sentiment.2 In 1907 Jacob Liebstein immigrated to the United States with his family. He was part of that enormously energetic, highly politicized generation of East European Jews who did so much to rejuvenate American radicalism and found the modern labor movement, or at least that large slice of it that flourished east of the Hudson River. Liebstein entered City College in 1915, became an active socialist, and by age twenty had already begun to play a leading role in the organization that would soon become the American Communist Party. Jacob Liebstein shortly changed his name to Jay Lovestone. Like so many other immigrant Jews, Lovestone wanted to Americanize his persona, but the name change is also significant because, as a Communist, Lovestone was searching for a way that immigrant radicals could link themselves to the larger reform forces in American life. Lovestone, who was a full-time revolutionist, sought to break the party out of the immigrant ghetto, link up the radicalized Finns and Russians with English-speaking workers, and, in the parlance of the day, “burrow...

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