Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars

8. Labor’s Counter-Reformation: The American Federation of Labor and the End of Reform

C H A P T E R E I G H T Labor’s Counter-Reformation The American Federation of Labor and the End of Reform In early November 1933, Maximilian Litvinoff, the foreign affairs commissar of the Soviet Union, arrived in Washington to negotiate a deal with the new U.S. president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the depths of the Depression, business leaders pleaded with Roosevelt to restore diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and allow American companies to resume trade with Russian firms. The heads of General Motors, International Business Machines, Curtiss-Wright, and the Pennsylvania Railroad eagerly waited for word as Roosevelt’s State Department negotiated with Litvinoff.1 William Green, the AFL president, fretted. The AFL had opposed recognition of Russia since the October Revolution, but now it seemed inevitable. Green issued a public “memorandum” to Roosevelt, outlining the sordid history of Communist incursions in American institutions; it was “information that ought to be catalogued in the home of every American,” Green wrote, “a blacklist of hated interlopers and destroyers.” Reminding Roosevelt of the AFL’s extensive experience as “the first line of defense” against Communism , Green aimed to show “the imperative necessity, in Labor’s opinion” of demanding guarantees from Litvinoff that “none of the various agencies of international Communist propaganda will function in the United States.”2 The United States recognized the Soviet government, as Green expected. Roosevelt extracted a promise from Litvinoff that the USSR would cease Communist propaganda in the United States, as Green had requested. Still, neither government seemed to take the pledge very seriously. In fact, Communist organizing escalated sharply, as the Communist Party’s new legitimacy burnished its appeal for many Americans. The episode was symptomatic of the Labor’s Counter-Reformation 143 AFL’s relationship to the Roosevelt administration. Frequently FDR and his staff gave AFL complaints a polite hearing but little credence, especially when they concerned Communism. Stymied by New Dealers, labor conservatives sought new allies in Congress. The AFL joined conservative capitalists and farmers in protesting the incursions of the New Deal state. They voiced a common critique: technocratic officials, insulated from popular pressure and insensitive to local conditions, arrogated authority from rightful leaders and deranged settled social and economic relations. Labor conservatives who had limited say in the creation of New Deal labor policy also came to deplore the meddlesome officials appointed to administer it.Within months of the passage of the Wagner Act, the AFL fractured into two hostile camps. Unionists who opposed the AFL’s conservative leadership split off from the AFL, forming a Committee of Industrial Organizations. With powerful backing from the New Deal state, the CIO thrived. Those who remained behind in the AFL seethed. Labor conservatives felt increasingly alienated from the coalition of industrial workers, liberals, and radicals committed to an interventionist welfare state that was coalescing in the Democratic Party. In a few short years, the nation’s political economy had been transformed, and the AFL’s place in it seemed much smaller. Feeling isolated and embattled, labor conservatives reached out to other opponents of the new regime who sought to hem in the New Deal, reduce progressives’ congressional majority, and end reform. Labor conservatives criticized the Roosevelt administration’s labor policy, backed Republicans and conservative Democrats in the 1938 midterm elections, and collaborated with the National Association of Manufacturers and the Liberty League to curtail the Wagner Act and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). AFL attacks on Roosevelt gained little traction with union members or the general public, but their complaints about the CIO and the Communists struck a chord. In a strange coincidence of history, in 1935 the Communist Party resumed efforts to organize within mainstream unions, just as the CIO was forming. The emergence of a hostile Nazi regime in Germany frightened the Soviet Union into seeking alliances with liberals in governments and unions everywhere, and, accordingly, American Communists seized on the CIO and the New Deal. Communism thus became commingled with the CIO from its birth. This relationship enraged and astonished labor conservatives, as did the Roosevelt administration’s evident unconcern about the matter. As the Popular Front Communist Party abandoned its old sectarianism and championed an expansive social-democratic vision, labor conservatives in- 144 From Commonsense Anticommunism to Red-baiting sisted that Communism was genetically totalitarian and anti-American. In the 1930s, this position put them at odds with the New...