Between a River and a Mountain: The AFL-CIO and the Vietnam War
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Between a River and a Mountain: The AFL-CIO and the Vietnam War
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Overview
"Stunning in its research and sophisticated in its analysis, Between a River and a Mountain is one of the best studies we have of labor and the Vietnam War."
--Robert K. Brigham, Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations, Vassar College
"Skillfully blending diplomatic and labor history, Wehrle's book is a valuable contribution to the ever-widening literature on the Vietnam War."
--George Herring, University of Kentucky
"Wehrle has written a compelling and original study of the AFL-CIO, the South Vietnamese labor movement and the Vietnam War."
--Judith Stein, Professor of History, City College and Graduate School of the City University of New York
"With this important book, Edmund Wehrle gives us the first full-fledged scholarly examination of organized labor's relationship to the Vietnam War. Based on deep research in U.S. and foreign archives, and presented in clear and graceful prose, Between a River and a Mountain adds a great deal to our understanding of how the AFL-CIO approached the war and in turn was fundamentally altered by its staunch support for Americanization. Nor is it merely an American story that Wehrle tells, for he also presents fascinating information on the Vietnamese Confederation of Labor and its sometimes-strained relations with U.S. labor."
--Fredrik Logevall, Cornell University
Edmund F. Wehrle is Assistant Professor of History, Eastern Illinois University.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472025794 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 02/11/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 609 KB |
About the Author
Edmund F. Wehrle is Assistant Professor of History, Eastern Illinois University.
Read an Excerpt
Between a River & a Mountain
The AFL-CIO and the Vietnam War
By Edmund F. Wehrle
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2005
University of Michigan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-09900-9
Chapter One Free Trade Unionism
Why did a labor movement devoted to domestic, economic concerns become so intensely consumed by affairs overseas-so much so that its involvement in the Vietnam War wrought wounds still painful even today? Historians have approached this question from a variety of vantage points, alternatively constructing explanations around the obsessive anticommunism of organized labor's leadership, the prestige and status foreign affairs offered supposedly parochial trade union leaders, or the jobs provided by the cold war economy. While each interpretation contains seeds of veracity, the real roots of American organized labor's all-consuming internationalism are deeper and more complex.
Asked about their remarkable engrossment with foreign affairs, labor leaders such as George Meany invariably referred to free trade unionism. No mere throwaway line, the term encapsulated the aspirations and ambitions of a generation of trade union leaders-ideals largely responsible for labor's tragic involvement in the Vietnam War. Principally, this ideology meant that independent trade unions were essential components of democracies-the sole defense of workers against a multitude of threatening interests and institutions. To be deprived of the opportunity to join an autonomous trade union, operating independent of business, government, church, or other potentially corrupting influences, was to be denied a basic human right. Countries restricting independent trade unions could not rightfully be called democracies. Such preoccupations with autonomy were not unique to U.S. labor. Indeed, Vietnamese organized labor struggled with surprisingly similar concerns.
The anticommunism driving mainstream post-World War II labor in the United States flowed directly from its fixation with trade union independence, and as such it should be viewed (alongside full-employment economics) as a principal component of free trade unionism. The proliferation of "unfree" labor unions, such as those in communist countries, represented menacing precedents mandating vigilant opposition.
Yet not all mandates of free trade unionism were as clear. The ideology emerged, in fact, as an imperfect resolution of an identity crisis-a crisis perhaps best understood in terms of two rival sets of ideals, each proposing to pilot organized labor through the turbulent early decades of the twentieth century. The first, championed most articulately by Samuel Gompers, prescribed the absolute separation of labor and the state, with independent, potent trade unions focusing solely on immediate job-related issues. The second ideology, the "new unionism," associated largely with Sidney Hillman, envisioned close labor-government cooperation in a corporate state structure.
Free trade unionism emerged as an amalgam of the two approaches. Led by George Meany, free trade unionists accepted many of the basic tenets of the new unionism, in particular industrial organization and the efficacy of political alliances. Yet Meany and his followers also preached the gospel of labor autonomy with an uncompromising rhetoric differing little from that of Gompers. Simultaneously, however, especially on issues of foreign policy, free trade unionists worked closely with the state in a manner absolutely consistent with Hillman's approach. The Meany and Hillman camps did sharply part company on the issue of international communism. Hillman and his followers advocated tolerance of world communism. Free trade unionism, conversely, divined a world starkly divided-West versus East, freedom versus slavery.
After World War II, free trade unionism eclipsed both Hillman's corporatism and the entrenched "voluntarism" still practiced in isolated corners of the AFL. Yet until its demise in the 1960s free trade unionism as practiced by the AFL-CIO remained an unsatisfying, self-contradictory settlement of labor's identity crisis, in which key principles, labor-state separation in particular, incessantly would be stretched, bent, and finally shattered by the Vietnam War. Because the history of organized labor and the Vietnam War is largely the story of trade union independence betrayed, the ideological edifices erected by labor leaders, in which autonomy and anticommunism competed as primary goals, require some elaboration.
"Tell the Politicians to Keep Their Hands Off": Gompers's Elastic Antistatism
In the strongly worded ideals of Samuel Gompers-the diminutive but supremely self-confident first president of the AFL-lies the genesis of the philosophical approach later known as free trade unionism. From his earliest days at the helm of the AFL in the 1880s, Gompers unceasingly championed a single vision: the exigency of a potent, independent labor movement operating solely in the interest of the laboring classes. Only strong, autonomous trade unions-certainly not the state-could defend the interests of working people. "Tell the politicians to keep their hands off," Gompers pronounced, "and thus ... preserve voluntary institutions and opportunity for individual and group initiative." Often labeled voluntarism, Gompers's approach flowed from a realistic assessment of late-nineteenth-century labor relations in an era of state-sponsored strikebreaking, one-sided court injunctions, and resistance to all forms of unionization. For Gompers, quixotic calls to radicalism and revolution endangered the meager gains of working people, and he brazenly dismissed revolutionary socialists as dangerous "impossiblists." Only an independent labor movement focused on immediate economic issues could effect positive short- and long-term change.
Despite the clarity of his rhetoric, in practice Gompers balanced ideological rigidity with pragmatism. When the early twentieth century brought signs of new flexibility from some business and government leaders, Gompers saw an opportunity. He eagerly joined the National Civic Federation, an organization espousing business-labor-state dialogue as an antidote to the costly labor strife of the times. Increasingly, he involved the AFL in politics, supported social legislation, and forged a working alliance with the Democratic Party.
The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 abetted Gompers's ideological elasticity. Jettisoning earlier predilections toward pacifism, Gompers embraced the war as an epochal confrontation, pitting democracy against tyranny. Practical interests also motivated the AFL chief. Speaking to a Philadelphia audience in 1915, he admitted that "the war has opened up tremendous economic opportunities-some temporary, others permanent." As American doughboys fought in Europe, workers prospered at home, inaugurating in earnest a lucrative, though often awkward, nexus between organized labor and what later became known as the military-industrial complex.
Even those in labor who lacked Gompers's ideological commitment to the war appreciated its material benefits. Frank Rosenblum, an executive of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), advised union vice president Jacob Potofsky that, despite their mutual reservations about the war, as a "question of expediency" they should avoid doing "anything which will antagonize anyone." Fifty years later, in the heat of the Vietnamese conflict, Rosenblum and Potofsky chose the opposite course-open opposition.
Amid the fervor of national emergency, Gompers, seeking to transcend the status of a parochial labor leader, repackaged himself as a national statesman. An immigrant heavily influenced by Marxism as a young man, Gompers always viewed labor affairs from an international perspective and rarely held his tongue on international issues. With the war, he became increasingly outspoken and preoccupied with international events.
It was primarily Gompers's abhorrence of radicalism, however, rather than his appetite for prestige, that drove his internationalism. Already a vehement critic of socialism, Gompers discovered a new enemy in 1917: Russian bolshevism. Quickly, he situated himself as one of the country's most vocal anticommunists. To the point of obsession, he assailed bolshevism as a threat to free labor. Vehemently attacking the Russian revolution, Gompers reaffirmed his ideal of trade union autonomy; the subversion of labor's autonomy would lead inexorably to the horrors of bolshevism. Yet, as the first Red Scare flared, his fervent rhetoric left little room for nuance and no doubt fed the hysteria of the times.
Until his death in 1924, Gompers focused his tireless energy on his campaign against bolshevism. At the behest of President Woodrow Wilson, in the fall of 1918 he traveled to Europe to participate in an allied labor conference, which Gompers aimed to transform into an international labor organization to counter communism. In 1921, he published Out of Their Mouths: A Revelation and Indictment of Sovietism, an exposé of "slave labor" conditions in the future Soviet Union based on interviews with refugees.
In the final years of his life, as a postwar counteroffensive by employers severely weakened trade unionism, Gompers strove to fashion a rhetorical defense of the American labor movement around his critique of communism. In a series of articles in McClure's, he posited the AFL as "Our Shield against Bolshevism." Absent a "labor movement in America devoted to the ideals of liberty ... there would be Bolshevism in America," he charged. The rhetorical juxtapositioning of American labor as the antithesis of communism remained a rallying cry for leading trade unionists through the Vietnam War period.
As early as 1919, then, key components of what later would become free trade unionism already had fused-in particular a relentless emphasis on trade union independence coupled with a vehement anticommunism. And already in evidence was the central paradox destined to plague U.S. trade unionists (and later South Vietnamese labor) for much of the century: the near impossibility of maintaining autonomy while profiting from the myriad opportunities proffered by labor-state cooperation.
Hillman's Corporate Model and the Communism Question
If Gompers remained, at least rhetorically, insistent on absolute trade union independence, by the 1920s new voices were championing an unapologetically corporate formulation-one infusing the state directly into labor relations. At the core of the movement, which was quickly dubbed the "new unionism," was a group of socialist trade unionists and liberal-minded employers in the New York City needle trades, in particular ACWA president Sidney Hillman.
The bespectacled Hillman never lacked for ambition or vision. He dreamed, as historian Nelson Lichtenstein has suggested, of transforming "an immigrant, industrial peasantry into an organized body of social citizens." But, in contrast to Gompers's rhetorical emphasis on self-reliance, Hillman and the new unionists, many of whom were dedicated socialists, eagerly sought the fellowship of intellectuals, political parties, and government officials. "Labor cannot act independently, in isolation from other progressive groups," argued Hillman. He moved instead to forge close working alliances with progressives such as Jane Addams, Clarence Darrow, and Louis Brandeis-ties surpassing anything imagined by Gompers. Both the ACWA and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) promoted social legislation and rabidly sought political alliances-especially with the Democratic Party. With the advent of the New Deal, Hillman forged an intimate personal and working relationship with President Franklin Roosevelt. The ACWA president personally helped draft the labor provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act (an overhaul of labor relations designed along the lines of Hillman's corporate model) and worked closely with the architects of the National Labor Relations Act, Senator Robert Wagner and New Deal economist Leon Keyserling. Finding the AFL less receptive to his ambitious agenda, Hillman joined in founding the Congress of Industrial Organizations. He remained a zealous apostle of the New Deal and became a fixture in Roosevelt's three reelection campaigns.
The new unionism agenda hardly ended at the nation's borders. Born in Jewish Lithuania, Hillman, like Gompers, was an immigrant profoundly sensitive to world affairs. Unlike Gompers, however, Hillman and most of his followers saw little threat from communism, either in the Soviet Union or in the ranks of American labor. Building on corporatist ambitions, Hillman and other CIO leaders worked to incorporate communists, whom they saw as potential "shock troops" for the new unionism, into their planned coalition. Having visited Russia in 1921, Hillman admired the Bolshevik revolutionaries, who shared his intense interest in "democratic Taylorism" and his faith in the potential of industrial production and progress. Hillman later sought to facilitate East-West cooperation by organizing the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), which, according to historian Victor Silverman, "envisioned a corporative world-one ruled by global institutions that would represent all elements of society."
With the outbreak of World War II, Hillman's grand democratic vision gained considerable momentum. Philip Murray, president of the CIO, who (at least temporarily) shared Hillman's policy of tolerance for communists, talked openly of using the war to reorient labor's place in the nation's polity. Modeled on his study of Roman Catholic corporatist teachings (principles that would later shape the Vietnamese labor movement), Murray proposed the formation of tripartite "industrial councils" aimed at fostering harmony among government, labor, and capital. Walter Reuther, a rising activist from the United Auto Workers, proposed his own version of corporatism-his alluring "5,000 planes a day" plan. Such corporate initiatives appeared to be the wave of the future. Hillman and others enthusiastically tied their destinies to the New Deal, envisioning a fully integrated labor movement at the core of a corporate political economy-a synthesis the CIO eventually planned to export worldwide. With unbridled relish, new unionists cast aside the cautiousness of Samuel Gompers and moved swiftly toward socialist-inspired ideals of corporatism. But not all followed without qualms.
The AFL Internationalists
By the early 1940s, Hillman's corporate model appeared to be ascendant. Even rising figures in the less progressive AFL, including George Meany, appropriated the general framework of Hillman's approach. Soon Meany and others of like mind would seize control of the AFL and institute something of a counterreformation, introducing to the federation many of the ideals central to new unionism. Yet amid the dizzying pace of change and opportunity, the AFL reformers concurrently grew apprehensive, fretting that labor had relinquished too much autonomy. Moreover, some-Meany and David Dubinsky in particular-watched with mounting apprehension the growing presence of communists in the American labor movement and the threat of international communism worldwide.
The leader of the emerging AFL internationalists was George Meany-the cigar-chomping, blunt-talking, plumber turned AFL-CIO president, easily caricatured as an Archie Bunker with a national pulpit. Despite his reputation as a narrow "bread and butter" business unionist, Meany was more complex than his popular image. As a young man, he became enamored with Hillman's new unionism and was drawn to the lively socialist-inspired debates over economics, labor, and politics swirling around New York City in the 1920s.
Born in the Bronx in 1894 into a third-generation Irish-Catholic family, Meany received only limited formal education as a boy. Following in his father's footsteps, he joined the potent plumbers Local 463 and quickly ascended to the puissant office of union business agent by the early 1920s. Unlike Hillman's Amalgamated Clothing Workers, which appealed to employers on the basis of mutual interest, construction industry unions operated from positions of brute strength and exclusivity, seeing no need for state interference and enjoying a monopoly on skilled workers and hence the luxury of closed shops and virtual control over work sites. Plumbers in particular evinced an aura of potency, solidarity, and toughness. As a business agent all but equal in power to employers, Meany could shut down a work site instantly if building materials or labor conditions fell short of contract specifications. Out of this background, Meany adopted a hard-edged, straight-talking idiom, frequently curt and dismissive but suggestive of strength and autonomy. Throughout his life, Meany carried himself-even in his dealings with U.S. congressmen, cabinet officers, and presidents-with the self-assurance (at times bordering on arrogance) of a business agent.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Between a River & a Mountain by Edmund F. Wehrle
Copyright © 2005 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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