Anthony Carew, American Labour's Cold War Abroad

Reviewed by: American Labour's Cold War Abroad: From Deep Freeze to Détente, 1945–1970 by Anthony Carew Denis Clark Anthony Carew, American Labour's Cold War Abroad: From Deep Freeze to Détente, 1945–1970 (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press 2018) In American Labour's Cold War Abroad, Anthony Carew reconstructs "the admittedly obscure world of international trade union politics, with its complex institutional structure." (6) Carew, an Honorary Visiting Reader in International Labour Studies at the University of Manchester, has been researching and publishing on this subject for decades, and the book reflects his considerable expertise. American Labour's Cold War Abroad principally focuses on the afl-cio (American Federation of Labour-Congress of Industrial Organizations) and, in particular, on the activities of five men: Irving Brown, Jay Lovestone, George Meany, and Walter and Victor Reuther. The depth of analysis on these major figures in U.S. labour history, spread over 25 years, is the strength of this book. Yet further exploration of broader contextual and historiographical questions would do more to engage non-specialists. These five men became powerful figures in international trade union circles because, as Carew documents extensively, they controlled and handed out a steady supply of money. Lovestone controlled the afl's Free Trade Union Committee, Brown was Lovestone's protégé and the primary contact with dozens of overseas unions, and Meany was the longtime afl/afl-cio president. All three were committed anti-communists who advocated the principle of "free" [End Page 320] trade unionism. In other words, they opposed engagement with unions in communist countries, which did not operate in a free society and were closely connected to the state. Walter Reuther, the president of the United Auto Workers (uaw), and his brother Victor, were lesser figures internationally but orchestrated several overseas operations. U.S. labour largesse began with Brown, who dispersed funds to non-communist trade unions in France and Italy so that they could gain the upper hand over their communist competitors. From the late 1950s, Brown turned his attentions to trade unions across decolonizing Africa and in Japan, India, and South Vietnam, though with mixed results. Victor Reuther, meanwhile, joined a project to build trade union capacity and promote democracy in Latin America, while both Reuthers supported the Johnson administration's policy of "building bridges" to the Eastern Bloc. Carew's research shows that many afl-cio activities abroad depended in part on U.S. government funds, including clandestine sources. This builds on his revelatory article, "The American Labor Movement in Fizzland: The Free Trade Union Committee and the cia," which showed that the cia had helped to fund some of Brown and Lovestone's activities in the 1940s and 1950s (Labor History 39, no. 1 (1998): 25–42). American Labour's Cold War Abroad shows that while cia funds dried up by about 1958, the U.S. Agency for International Development continued to contribute to U.S. labour's overseas operations in the 1960s. Despite this reliance on state funding, the book's main figures considered themselves essentially independent agents who acted on their personal ideological convictions. Carew, based on his extensive examination of private papers, portrays Brown in particular as operating very much on his own initiative, to the point that some of his funds lacked accountability. Yet the activities of American labour representatives also occurred, for the most part, in places where the U.S. government aimed to contain the spread of Soviet-backed communism, real or imagined. Government policy is important context, but it receives little attention in the book. A fuller discussion would have made for a more convincing assessment. Brown, Lovestone, Meany, and the Reuthers worked for broadly the same aims, but as Carew demonstrates clearly, they were hardly a united front in their overseas activities. Ideological differences were important – the Reuthers were ideologically to the left of Meany and Lovestone – but personal rivalry characterized the relationship between the afl men and the Reuthers by the 1960s. This culminated in the late 1960s when Walter Reuther took the uaw out of the afl-cio and tried to take a separate place in the International Conference of Free Trade Unions

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