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Introduction
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction Two dramatic incidents of violent working-class protest stand at either end of this study. The ‹rst occurred in April 1950, at the port of the French city of Nice. A mob—organized by communist trade unionists—gathered to protest the French war in Indochina. As the rabble grew unruly, it forcibly boarded a ship loaded with war supplies destined for Southeast Asia. Rampaging through the vessel, the mob destroyed everything in its wake, eventually catapulting an artillery-launching ramp into the Mediterranean Sea.1 Twenty years later, in May 1970, New York City “hard hat” construction workers, resentful of the eruption of “unpatriotic” peace protests against the recent Cambodian invasion, spontaneously descended on an antiwar demonstration in Manhattan, savagely beating scores of protesters. These episodes, separated by just over two decades, represent very different reactions to costly and painful wars in Vietnam, yet each suggests the deeply held passions of working people in response to complicated, frustrating , foreign engagements. In America’s Vietnam War, a disproportionate number of combatants came from blue-collar backgrounds—to the extent that it is remembered today as a “working-class” war. But beyond the prominent presence of the sons of workers on the front lines, from the early 1950s to the fall of Saigon in 1975 the leadership of American organized labor also was deeply involved in unfolding events in Vietnam.2 Indeed, the AFL (American Federation of Labor), and subsequently the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations), played pivotal roles following both violent clashes. In response to the 1950 communist riots in France, the European representative of the AFL, Irving Brown, organized counterprotests to undermine the sabotage campaign. Two decades later, Jay Lovestone, the director of the AFL-CIO’s International Affairs Department, helped orchestrate a series of hard hat rallies in New York City following the clash between construction workers and protesters. Indeed, in several decades of bitter opposition to communism in Southeast Asia and support for the American war, the AFL-CIO helped shape the contours of U.S. involvement in Vietnam—and the war in turn reshaped the American labor movement. To a generation of progressive-minded unionists and intellectuals, the federation ’s hawkish stance on Vietnam seemed an unforgivable error, the product of a mindless anticommunism that poisoned dreams of an activist labor movement working in coalition with a revitalized Left. The 1970 hard hat demonstrations, in particular, still stir painful memories. “The possibility of igniting trade union passion among America’s young was lost as images of pro-war hardhats charging anti-war marchers ‹lled television screens,” re›ected Richard Trumka, current secretary treasurer of the AFL-CIO.3 Labor historians, a particularly politically engaged breed, have echoed Trumka’s view. In his ‹rst book, historian Nelson Lichtenstein lamented the “sclerotic and increasingly unimportant” state of the labor movement and regrettably tied its decline to the AFL-CIO’s support for “a vigorous prosecution of the Vietnam War.”4 Trumka and Lichtenstein are correct in identifying the Vietnam War as a crucial turning point for organized labor. But both the AFL-CIO’s pro-war stance and the way that hard-line approach back‹red so terribly are far more complex than has generally been understood. In its foreign policy, the federation could be chauvinistic, intolerant, obdurate, and even paranoid, but its position on the Vietnam War was much more than simply the product of a myopic, knee-jerk anticommunism. First and foremost the federation’s support for the war rested on its hopes that a substantial and politically savvy labor movement in South Vietnam, the Vietnamese Confederation of Labor (CVT), might be transformed into a vehicle for social, political, and economic reform.5 Founded by nationalists formerly allied with the Viet Minh, in its two decades of existence the CVT represented an authentic force for democracy in a troubled country. In their enthusiasm for the CVT, representatives of American labor went so far as to tout the organization as a potential “paramilitary” force, capable of challenging the Viet Cong in the trenches. Separated by deep cultural chasms, relations between U.S. labor and its South Vietnamese counterpart were not always placid. But the AFL-CIO offered a valuable lifeline to the CVT, and at heart the two organizations, operating in very different environments, had much in common and even suffered the same fundamental contradictions. In particular, both organizations idealized independence of action, both striving to be autonomous actors, free of the...