How the CIO Tried to Prevent the Cold War
In the 1940s, Soviet and US labor unionists arranged for exchanges between their countries to promote goodwill and help prevent a dangerous rivalry. The largely forgotten effort serves as a reminder of how the Cold War might have been averted.
New York CIO leaders and a delegation of ten Soviet trade unionists sit on the stage at Carnegie Hall on August 6, 1945. Eleanor Roosevelt is seated in the front row between Sidney Hillman and Vasily Kuznetsov. (Photo courtesy of the University of Maryland Libraries Special Collections)
On the night of August 6, 1945, as the evening papers hit the streets with breaking news of the US military using a “terrible new weapon” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima earlier that day, about 2,500 working-class New Yorkers gathered at Carnegie Hall to learn about organized labor’s role in fostering world peace.
Hosted by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) — the dynamic labor federation that had successfully unionized millions of workers over the previous decade — the event’s honored guests were ten Soviet trade unionists who were touring the United States.
“We see in the unity of the international labor movement the guarantee of . . . achieving success in the struggle against the dark forces of fascism unleashed by the Second World War,” Vasily Kuznetsov, head of the Soviet delegation and chair of the USSR’s All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (AUCCTU), told the crowd. “In this unity we see the guarantee for a peaceful life in the future, free from fear of aggression.”
Demonstrating the importance of the event, the recently widowed Eleanor Roosevelt was also on hand to welcome the foreign visitors and received a ten-minute standing ovation. “There is no better way to world peace than to bring about a better knowledge of each other between the peoples and nations,” she said. “The Congress of Industrial Organizations represents a great section of our people and the Russian delegation a great section of the people of the USSR. I am sure that what we learn about each other by means of this visit will have a far-reaching effect.”
Like many others, Roosevelt and Kuznetsov understood that with Allied victory at hand, the world was entering a critical new period in which the remaining two superpowers — the United States and Soviet Union — would have to choose between either cementing their fragile wartime alliance or squaring off against one another in a dangerous rivalry.
Sidney Hillman, the politically influential president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and cofounder of the CIO, put it plainly that evening when he warned the audience about the ongoing threat posed by right-wing, anti-union, and pro-capitalist forces in the United States. “These forces . . . never wanted to see [fascism] utterly destroyed,” he said. “Today with Hitler gone and Hirohito teetering, they are busy hatching plans to use the vast power of America to win world domination for themselves.”
“As part of their program,” Hillman continued, “they are sharpening their attack against American labor and American democracy. Reaction has not been routed. It has only made a strategic retreat. It will soon return to the offensive.”
History would soon prove Hillman right. Over the next four years, a new, corporate-manufactured Red Scare would sweep the nation, leading to passage of the devastatingly anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act and the onset of a decades-long Cold War that served to undermine progressive, worker-led movements around the globe.
But in 1945, the Cold War was not yet a reality. The CIO’s largely forgotten effort to prevent it from happening serves as a reminder of how world history might have gone in a different direction — toward diplomacy, solidarity, and socialism instead of militarism, imperialism, and worker exploitation.
A United Nations for Labor
In the latter years of World War II, the labor federations of the Allied nations — including the CIO, the Soviet AUCCTU, the British Trades Union Congress, the French Confédération Générale du Travail, and several others — sought greater cooperation with each other in the hope of strengthening working-class influence over economic and social policy in the postwar international order. They particularly sought to establish a new World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) to function as a kind of United Nations for labor.
Like the incipient UN, the proposed WFTU would include both communists noncommunists with vastly different political systems and ideologies, but all with a shared opposition to fascism and commitment to multilateral diplomacy. In February 1945, some two hundred union leaders from over thirty countries and colonies met in London to begin laying the groundwork for the WFTU. Kuznetsov was there on behalf of the AUCCTU, while the CIO’s representatives included Hillman, United Steelworkers president Philip Murray (who was also president of the CIO itself), and United Auto Workers (UAW) president R. J. Thomas.
Notably absent were any representatives of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) — the older and larger US trade union body — whose leaders vowed to boycott the WFTU because it included the Soviets. While the CIO had always been relatively tolerant of communists, and several of its affiliated unions were led by members or fellow travelers of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), the AFL’s more conservative officials were uncompromisingly anti-communist, as they had been for decades.
George Meany, the AFL’s secretary-treasurer (and future president), openly mocked the idea of having anything to do with Soviet trade unionists a couple months after the London conference. “What could we talk about?” he asked rhetorically. “The latest innovations being used by the secret police to ensnare those who think in opposition to the group in power? Or, perhaps, bigger and better concentration camps for political prisoners?”
As the CIO and the rest of the Allied nations’ unions were trying to build world labor unity, the AFL launched a new international arm in 1944–45 called the Free Trade Union Committee, which was determined to divide foreign labor movements into rival camps of communists and anti-communists. In the first few years after World War II, this committee would deliberately provoke debilitating splits in the French and Italian labor movements along nascent Cold War battle lines, eventually becoming a willing partner and financial beneficiary of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Soviet Delegation
The AFL’s anti-communists were hardly alone in wanting to break the US-Soviet alliance upon the war’s end. Corporate America and conservative Republicans were keen to sow fear about communist “infiltration” into US institutions as an excuse to roll back the pro-worker reforms of the New Deal that they so deeply resented. Additionally, an emerging cadre of liberal hawks and economic planners in the incoming Truman administration — puffed up by the American monopoly on nuclear weapons and intent on creating a new, US-managed international capitalist system — believed a confrontation with the Soviets was inevitable.
Fully aware of this, and convinced that a rivalry with the USSR would empower conservative and corporate interests to attack organized labor, the CIO invited a delegation of AUCCTU representatives to visit the United States for three weeks in late July and early August 1945 to foster union-to-union goodwill. Comprising seven men and three women, the delegation included leaders from the USSR’s naval transport union, garment workers’ union, scientific workers’ union, and woodworkers’ union, as well as the head of the AUCCTU’s wages division.
They visited several cities including Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Washington, DC. Hosted by local CIO leaders wherever they went, the Soviet trade unionists inspected steel mills, tractor works, meatpacking plants, piano factories, furrier shops, and other workplaces, asking the employees about their wages and hours and why there weren’t more women workers. In New York, they not only appeared alongside the former first lady at Carnegie Hall, but were also personally welcomed to City Hall by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
Kuznetsov, the leader of the delegation, spoke English thanks to his time working at Pittsburgh’s steel mills and studying at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in the early 1930s. Previewing what would become a long and successful career as a Soviet diplomat, he deftly answered provocative questions from US reporters in several press conferences during the 1945 tour.
Asked whether he believed Soviet communism was superior to American capitalism, Kuznetsov replied that “for our country, our working class, our system is not bad.” He argued that having a state-run economy had enabled the USSR to withstand and ultimately defeat the previously unstoppable Nazi war machine after Germany invaded Russia. “Our system permitted us to mobilize our resources quickly,” he said. “It enabled us to transfer our industries speedily to the east, to rebuild them there, and to produce the military equipment we needed.”
When asked by reporters if he planned to confer with the CPUSA during the trip, Kuznetsov answered that “we have a different purpose in coming here,” namely developing a friendship with the CIO. Nevertheless, American communists were unsurprisingly thrilled about the Soviet trade union delegation, with the Daily Worker hailing the visit as “a new page in the relationship of the USSR and US.”
Though several union officials within the CIO were either members or supporters of the Communist Party, it was the CIO’s noncommunists like Hillman and Murray — who had both been close allies of the late Franklin D. Roosevelt and remained loyal to his vision of postwar international cooperation — who played a leading role in encouraging fraternal ties with Soviet labor.
“Unfortunately, there are those who prefer to sow seeds of distrust and suspicion, who magnify the social and cultural differences into unbridgeable gulfs, and who seek to divide rather than unite the world,” Murray said. In forging an amicable relationship with the AUCCTU, the CIO president said he hoped “to prevent the division of the world into hostile blocs and to eliminate hostility against the great people whose cooperation was so essential to . . . victory and whose continued friendship and cooperation is equally essential for lasting peace and world prosperity.”
CIO Delegation
In October 1945, the WFTU held its founding convention in Paris. Immediately afterward, eleven CIO leaders who had participated in the gathering flew to the Soviet Union at Kuznetsov’s invitation.
Over the course of one week, they visited factories and shipyards in and around Moscow and Leningrad, attended AUCCTU meetings, saw Vladimir Lenin’s tomb at the Kremlin, met with US ambassador Averell Harriman, and attended a ballet at the Bolshoi Theater, where they were “accorded a friendly ovation by the audience.” They learned about the Soviet Union’s extensive social-security system, which included free medical care, benefits to pregnant women, old-age pensions, and money for funeral expenses.
The US delegation included labor officials who would soon be pushed out of the CIO over their alleged communist ties, including United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE) president Albert Fitzgerald, International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers president Reid Robinson, CIO press director Len De Caux, and CIO general counsel Lee Pressman. But the group ironically also included some of the men who would lead the soon-to-come anti-communist purges, such as CIO secretary-treasurer James B. Carey, National Maritime Union president Joseph Curran, and Textile Workers Union president Emil Rieve.
Throughout their trip, the American trade unionists saw reminders of the many sacrifices the Soviet people had endured to defeat the Nazis. One example was the bombed-out Kirov machine manufacturing plant in Leningrad, where workers had continued building vital war materiel even as the factory came under intense German shelling, leaving 750 dead.
“We’ve seen the price you have paid to establish freedom for all peoples of the world,” Fitzgerald said to a group of Kirov workers. “We in America are determined that no force within or without is ever going to turn us against your people again.”
Heading the delegation was Carey, who had previously served as the UE’s president before losing his reelection bid to Fitzgerald in 1941 (which he blamed on the union’s communist faction).
“We have been deeply moved by the personal warmth and friendship shown to us,” Carey told Soviet reporters at the end of the visit. “It has greatly strengthened our own determination as CIO representatives to do everything within our power to cement our cordial relations with the Soviet trade unions and to establish even closer unity between our two great countries for the maintenance of lasting peace and for growing prosperity and democratic progress.”
Cold War
Of course, the dream of international labor unity and world peace was not to be.
Several developments in the late 1940s were to blame. For example, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act’s requirement that union officials sign affidavits swearing they weren’t members of the Communist Party, and the controversy over whether to comply, drove a wedge between the CIO’s communists and noncommunists. Similarly, the WFTU became divided over whether to support the Marshall Plan, Washington’s aid program designed to integrate postwar Western Europe into the emerging US-managed international capitalist system (and sideline the region’s popular communist parties in the process).
In 1946, Walter Reuther — a young and ambitious union official — was narrowly elected president of the UAW. Eager to consolidate his control over the autoworkers’ union, Reuther proceeded to oust communists and their allies from union leadership positions, and soon began a campaign to rid the CIO of communists altogether.
Less than four months after Reuther’s ascension to the UAW presidency, Sidney Hillman died suddenly of a heart attack at age fifty-nine. With one of the CIO’s most powerful advocates for US-Soviet friendship out of the picture, anti-communists like Reuther could have more sway over the labor federation’s policies.
Amid escalating tensions between Washington and Moscow over Europe’s political and economic future, American communists and their allies made one last attempt to stop the budding Cold War in 1948 by supporting the third-party presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace — a liberal New Dealer and former vice president under FDR who favored peaceful coexistence with the Soviets. While the CIO’s top officers, including Murray, stood by Truman in the election, leaders of some of the CIO’s communist-friendly affiliates like the UE backed Wallace.
But Truman won, and Wallace failed to carry a single state, revealing the political isolation of those who opposed the Cold War. A full-fledged Red Scare swept the country, propelled by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Reuther and the CIO’s other anti-communists convinced Murray the time was right for a final break with communists and their fellow travelers.
In January 1949, the CIO withdrew from the WFTU, ostensibly due to disagreements with the Soviet trade unions over the Marshall Plan. Alongside the AFL, British Trades Union Congress, and other Western-aligned labor federations, the CIO cofounded the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions later that same year to be an anti-communist rival to the WFTU — officially killing the vision of postwar international labor unity.
At the CIO’s convention in November 1949, the UE (which had recently merged with the smaller Farm Equipment Workers union amid anti-communist raids by the UAW) was formally cast out of the labor federation simply because its leaders had supported the failed Wallace campaign. The International Union of Electrical Workers was founded on the spot to go out and begin stealing the UE’s members. Carey, who had led the delegation to the USSR four years earlier, was appointed as the new union’s president.
Over the next several months, nine other communist-allied unions would be expelled from the CIO, not because they were corrupt or doing a poor job representing their members at the bargaining table, but because they refused to get behind the Cold War and Red Scare. As a result of these purges, the CIO lost around one million members — including many of its most effective and dedicated organizers — becoming a shell of its former self. Five years later, with Reuther now at the helm, the CIO would be folded into the larger AFL.
The merged AFL-CIO became one of the most notoriously anti-communist American institutions in the late twentieth century, frequently cheerleading US imperial wars and partnering with the State Department and CIA to undermine left-wing labor movements overseas. While the ostensible voice of US labor was busy carrying out a global anti-communist crusade (the subject of my new book), corporate America waged an all-out assault on the working class at home and abroad.
As Hillman had warned in August 1945, the Cold War split the labor movement and allowed right-wing, anti-worker forces to regroup and reassert their dominance over the United States and much of the world — illustrating why it is in labor’s interest to stand against jingoism, anti-left political repression, and the inherent militarism of so-called great power competition.