Grassroots Means Personal

Historiography

American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture

Robert W. Cherny, Ed. 2004

A collection of essays, looking at the period from 1945-1960. The editor said the central question addressed was, “what kinds of relationships existed among the labor unions of the AFL and CIO, the radical left and the conservative right, business and other interest groups in American communities.” Really, this could be boiled down to: what was the relationship between the American communist party and labor leaders, and did McCarthyism enhance the development or retard the labor movement?

These are interesting questions, in the sense that they suggest there was both a “genuine and principled” communism and anticommunism “in the working class communities of the nation,” and that what went on in front of TV cameras in Congress was in some way related to a grassroots conflict. But even so, they are very narrow questions and I think the detailed narratives and oral histories related here need to be understood as a special case. It might even have been a stretch to imply that these types of things were happening in working class communities across the nation, much less that they represented some type of broad social event that mobilized large groups of regular people.

In the first article, Ellen Schrecker pointed out that most labor leaders who joined the communist party “felt it would help them build a strong labor movement. None of them tried to transform their unions into revolutionary organizations.” If they were indeed focused on building organizations that would be effective in promoting the agenda of actual workers, it stands to reason that they would have become disillusioned with the American Communist Party (CPUSA) after time; since it pretty much failed to deal with the reality of American society in the same way it failed to deal with the reality of the Soviet Union. Schrecker criticized the AFL and CIO for being “so thoroughly co-opted that its leaders provided cover for the CIA, and its conventions endorsed the war in Vietnam.” This is a serious indictment, especially in hindsight. Clearly, the leaders of these unions do seemed to have “enlisted in the Cold War” to some degree; but the framing of the discussion avoided the larger issues. To whom was the labor movement supposed to turn for guidance? The CPUSA was useless. The rank and file were, in many cases, conservative working stiffs who did support the war in Vietnam. Remember “America, Love it or Leave it?”

Gerald Zahavi’s oral histories of Schenectady GE workers were also very interesting.  They suggested ethnic and religious dimensions to the working-class encounter with communism that made the picture much richer and more satisfying, while at the same time suggesting that communism was not as central on the streets of company towns in upstate New York as it has become on the pages of some histories. This is the type of thing I’d like to see more of, and I think the book succeeds when it focuses on actual people and lets them tell their own stories. This element of the book was much more successful for me than the outline of labor and church leaders interacting with government and business leaders, which was tedious and didn’t leave me feeling I understood what had really happened.