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Introduction
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Introduction Between the world wars, the conservative leaders of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) played a paradoxical role in American politics.They were leading proponents of popular anticommunism, and steadfast opponents of statutory restrictions on Communist organizing. In contrast to other antiradicals , AFL leaders advocated a commonsense approach to Communism. Doubting the capacity of the law to distinguish between legitimate militancy and subversive radicalism, labor conservatives disapproved of legislation outlawing sedition. Instead they pursued a voluntarist program of evangelizing about the evils of Communism and excluding Communists from AFL unions. In the aftermath of the first Red Scare, labor conservatives formed a crucial backstop against reaction. In the late 1930s, the situation changed. Alienated from the New Deal order and at odds with liberal union leaders in the competing Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), labor conservatives abandoned commonsense anticommunism for calculated red-baiting. AFL leaders backed new antisubversive laws such as the Smith Act and the Hatch Act and strategically smeared federal labor officials and CIO competitors as Communists. The history of labor anticommunism recasts our understanding of the origins of popular anticommunism and McCarthyism. Historians often treat anticommunism as a conspiracy of capitalists and conservatives who whipped the nation into a red-baiting hysteria after World War II in order to reverse the New Deal order. After enduring a merciless onslaught intended to roll back labor’s recent gains, labor unions yielded to pressure and drove Communists and leftists out of their ranks. In these accounts, unions appear as the victims of anticommunism rather than as critical organizers and sustainers of the movement.1 On the other hand, many historical studies of labor and anticommunism examine internecine wars among workers and union officials from the late 1930s through the McCarthy era. This literature often empha- 2 Introduction sizes how purging union radicals leached vitality from the labor movement, casting labor anticommunism as a “conflict that shaped American unions.”2 There is much to learn from this scholarship, but there is also more to the story, because the fight over Communism reverberated far beyond the house of labor. Labor anticommunism was a conflict that shaped the American state. Labor leaders did more than decide on union policy toward Communism . From the outbreak of World War I to the attack on Pearl Harbor, unions played a critical role in shaping federal legislation and policy on policing political radicals. Unionists had a unique perspective on Communism before the Cold War. The Communist Party (CP) was tiny and marginal in the interwar years, and few Americans encountered actual Communists. The party devoted most of its energy to recruiting workers, and especially members of AFL unions (even though the AFL was relatively small as well, representing less than one in ten workers before the Wagner Act). Thus in 1935 the AFL justly declared itself America’s “first line of defense” against Communism .3 During much of this period, the legal status of unionism itself was also dubious. In this context, AFL leaders thought seriously about the proper posture of the state toward domestic subversion, debating whether a policy could be contrived that distinguished between seditious conspiracy and militant but loyal labor protest. In the process, they crafted a distinctly laborist politics of civil liberties that rejected statutory limits on speech and assembly and opposed the expansion of federal political policing but acquiesced in ad hoc state repression of radicals.Thus AFL president William Green could simultaneously testify publicly against empowering the Department of Justice (DOJ) to pursue Communists—and privately request assistance from the Bureau of Investigation (BI) in identifying Communist unionists, as he did in 1930. It was a highly nuanced approach. This nuance challenges historians to make sense of seeming contradictions in the federation’s stance. Different strands of historical scholarship contain pieces of the story. Traditional accounts of the history of civil liberties discuss the role of radical unions in free-speech fights but omit evidence of labor’s collaboration in antiradical repression. Historians of radical labor movements such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) identify some of these instances of collaboration but overlook the AFL’s reluctant defense of the rights of Communists and Wobblies to speak and organize. Meanwhile, although its anticommunist rhetoric was unvaryingly antagonistic, the federation ’s position on anticommunist repression changed over time. The consistency of the AFL’s polemics obscures alterations in its policy.4 [3.90.33.254] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:20 GMT) Introduction 3 This book untangles...