Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars by Jennifer Luff (review)

Jennifer Luff's Commonsense Anticommunism is an unusually good book about a subject usually dealt with poorly. Luff discusses the trade union philosophy of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and delineates how those principles shaped the AFL's attitudes toward and approaches to the Communist Party in the United States and toward civil liberties more generally in the period from World War I to the U.S. entry into World War II. She skillfully lays out how Samuel Gompers's concerns about German attempts to manipulate the labor movement to keep the United States out of the First World War fused with his long-standing hostility to Socialists and other radicals who also supported non-intervention. These differing concerns ultimately spurred the AFL to adopt an overtly patriotic stance. In line with this stance, AFL leaders secretly established intelligence cooperation with Ralph Easley of the National Civic Federation and with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Luff then examines how the AFL's tactics and its views about free speech and civil liberties evolved in the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s as it sought to counter attempts by Communists and other radicals to infiltrate and influence the labor movement.

Although Luff's focus is on labor movement anti-Communism and attitudes toward civil liberties, in the process she also presents astute glimpses of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover, Easley, and the Dies Committee. Her research in primary records and papers is impressively deep and matched by a comprehensive and insightful reading of the relevant secondary literature.

In too many historical accounts the wide array of different types and motivations for opposition to Communism are forced to conform to a caricature of a demonic McCarthyism of the 1950s. Luff's account of labor anti-Communism, however, is history with nuance, sensitivity to the times, and a close reading of documentary evidence. Mainstream labor leaders, she argues, displayed consistent hostility to Communism and other form of subversive radicalism, but this attitude masked changing tactics and strategies depending on historical circumstances. In the aftermath of World War I and well into the 1930s the AFL leadership pursued what Luff calls "a commonsense approach to Communism." She elucidates how the AFL's long-standing distrust of the regulatory state and some lessons learned from its World War I experience led it to disapprove of sedition legislation and oppose overt use of state police powers to defeat subversion. Realistically judging that Communism appealed only to a small minority of U.S. workers, the AFL "pursued a voluntarist program of evangelizing about the evils of Communism and excluding Communists from AFL unions" (p. 1). The consequence, Luff notes, was that the AFL directly or indirectly was a significant barrier to the goals of those such as Easley, earlier its ally, who sought to create a federal internal security and political surveillance state in the 1920s and 1930s.

Nonetheless, as Luff documents, the AFL's attitudes changed in the late 1930s.

As competition with the upstart rival Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) intensified—and angered by the National Labor Relations Board's bias toward the CIO (blamed, with some justification, on covert Communist influence), key AFL leaders, with John Frey in the fore, shifted to support of anti-subversion laws, endorsed passage of the Smith Act, and cheered on the Dies Committee's pursuit of Communists in the government. Luff also notes that while the AFL shifted from its commonsense anti-Communism to a more governmentally coercive "Red scare" approach, the circumstances of the times and revulsion at the Communist Party's warm endorsement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact induced the ACLU and CIO anti-Communists to shift from their de facto alliance with Communists to embrace the equivalent of the AFL's earlier voluntarist anti-Communism.

Luff departs from conventional historiographical stereotypes in regard to labor anti-Communism. Her close attention to the evidence...