Between a River and a Mountain

Every historical field has its lacunae, those studies that scream to be completed but that no one ever takes on. Labor history's missing pieces are particularly obvious. Over the years the field has produced countless fine studies of relatively small unions operating in out-of-the-way places. But there is still no book on the largest labor organization in American history, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (afl-cio) of the 1950s and 1960s, nor is there a scholarly biography of its immensely powerful long-time president, George Meany. The problem is largely political: labor historians love militants, and Meany's afl-cio was about as conservative as a labor organization gets. Edmund F. Wehrle's Between a River and a Mountain begins to fill the gap by exploring one key example of the afl-cio's conservatism: the federation's unstinting support for the American war in Vietnam. For many labor historians—and more than a few labor activists—the afl-cio's pro-war stance is one of the federation's darkest marks, a painful symbol of the stultifying effects uncompromising anticommunism had on the post-World War II labor movement. Wehrle offers a more complex interpretation. To be sure, Meany and his closest advisors were rabid cold warriors. But Wehrle argues that their anticommunism must be seen as part of a larger ideological commitment to “free trade unionism” (p. 20). The afl-cio leadership believed, Wehrle says, that human rights depended on the development and preservation of free and independent unions. Excessive government interference in union affairs threatened to undermine those rights. So Meany declared his fealty to antistatism at home, even as he fought furiously for a Keynesian federal economic policy. And he devoted himself to the global struggle against Soviet-style totalitarianism, most notably by promoting noncommunist trade unions in those parts of the world where the Cold War threatened to turn hot

Biography · Conservatism · Economic history · Ideology · Interpretation (philosophy · Labor history · Labor relations · Political science · Politics · Symbol (formal · Vietnam War · World War II · History · Labor Movements and Unions · Law