Making the World Safe for Workers: Labor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism by Elizabeth McKillen (review)

In this stimulating study, Elizabeth McKillen seeks to expand the boundaries of diplomatic history by inserting class and labor into a discussion of Wilsonian foreign policy in the World War I era. McKillen argues that US working-class opposition to World War I—not only from Socialists and Wobblies, but also from rank-and-file AFL members—played a larger role in influencing Wilsonian internationalism than previous scholarship has recognized. In doing so, McKillen also aims to insert national history, through a foreign policy lens, within a transnationalist framework.

Importantly, McKillen brings borderlands history into the conversation, locating the genesis of leftist disillusion with Woodrow Wilson's international intentions in the turbulent years of the Mexican Revolution, when US military involvement across the border signaled to many on the Left that Wilson's proclaimed goals for peace were a disguise for rank imperialism. At the same time, the opposition of Socialists and anarcho-syndicalists to US foreign policy in Mexico and their involvement with Far Left Mexican labor activists in border-area strikes like Arizona's copper mines, moved Wilson to embrace AFL President Samuel Gompers as a conduit for quelling labor unrest.

This alignment with the AFL against Socialists and Wobblies presaged Wilson's strategic cooptation of AFL leadership to build support for the war among union members, a move McKillen argues was propelled by significant working-class opposition to US involvement in the war. Wilson elevated Gompers to national-level posts like the Council of National Defense and dispatched AFL emissaries on diplomatic missions to Europe, while counting on Gompers to create support for the war among workers whose participation in producing steel for armaments and coal to fuel warships was essential to the allied cause.

McKillen reframes the familiar story of socialist and Industrial Workers of the World opposition to the war, bolstering these examples with four case studies of war resistance by AFL member bodies to demonstrate that working-class antiwar sentiment was broader than historians have acknowledged. McKillen highlights the Seattle Central Labor Council, the United Mine Workers of America, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and the Chicago Federation of Labor, the latter the focus of her previous book. These examples, she asserts, were bolstered by "dozens, and perhaps hundreds of municipal labor councils" that "became active in antiwar agitation during the years from 1914—1917" (96).

These profiles reveal the extent to which ethnic nationalism both fueled war opposition and prevented cross-ethnic solidarity. John Fitzpatrick, the Irish nationalist leader of the Chicago federation, led the way for strenuous antiwar actions to combat British imperialism. While in Seattle, the labor council's strongly antiwar and primarily white, British Canadian union members threaded their anti-imperialist critique with support for immigration restriction and nativist rejection of workers with Asian origins.

But the working-class Left did not merely offer an alternative vision to counter the mainstream momentum that propelled the disappearance of German language classes from high schools and the embrace of "100 percent" Americanism as the United States entered the war in 1917. McKillen also argues that Wilson's alienation of the American Left paved the way for the defeat of the Treaty of Versailles. Centered on fears that the League would provide imperialism with a powerful new framework and the International Labor Organization (ILO) would legitimize global capitalism's domination of labor, leftist opposition found its highest-ranking legislative champion in Senator Robert LaFollette, Sr.

The Southern senators who joined with the antiwar LaFollette in opposition to Senate ratification of the treaty may have been a case of "politics making for strange bedfellows" (238). But given the voting strength of southern senators, who feared the ILO would expand worker rights to sharecroppers and "empower small nations with predominately black populations" (238), the efforts of a man reviled by mainstream politicians for his war stance (Theodore Roosevelt called LaFollette...