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Jay Lovestone
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Accessed: 10/2/18
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Jay Lovestone
Jay Lovestone circa 1917
Born Jacob Liebstein
December 15, 1897
Moǔchadz, Grodno gubernia, Lithuania (then Russian Empire)
Died March 7, 1990 (aged 92)
Manhattan, New York City, United States
Alma mater City College of New York
Occupation political activist
Years active 1919-1982
Political party Socialist Party of America, Communist Party USA, AFL-CIO
Opponent(s) Joseph Stalin, William Z. Foster, James P. Cannon
Partner(s) Louise Page Morris
Jay Lovestone (December 15, 1897 – March 7, 1990) was at various times a member of the Socialist Party of America, a leader of the Communist Party USA, leader of a small oppositionist party, an anti-Communist and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helper, and foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL-CIO and various unions within it.
Biography
Background and early life
Lovestone was born Jacob Liebstein into a Litvak family in a shtetl called Moǔchadz in Grodno Governorate (then part of the Russian Empire, now in Grodno Region, Belarus).
The territory of present-day Belarus was considered a "Lithuanian" area at the time. [1] His father, Barnet, had been a rabbi, but when he emigrated to America he had to settle for a job as shammes (caretaker). Barnet came first, then sent for his family the next year. Lovestone arrived with his mother, Emma, and his siblings, Morris, Esther and Sarah at Ellis island on September 15, 1907. They originally settled on Hester Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side, but later moved to 2155 Daly Avenue in the Bronx. The family did not know their dates of birth precisely, but they assigned Jacob the date of December 15, 1897.[1]
Young Liebstein was attracted to socialist politics from his teens. While imbibing all the ideological currents in the vibrant New York Yiddish and English radical press, he was particularly attracted to the ideas of Daniel De Leon. It is not known whether he ever joined de Leon's Socialist Labor Party, but he was one of the 3,000 mourners who attended his funeral on May 11, 1914.[2]
Liebstein entered City College of New York in 1915. Already a member of the Socialist party, he joined its unofficial student wing, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. He became secretary and then president of the CCNY chapter. He also met William Weinstone and Bertram Wolfe in ISS, who would go on to become his factional allies in the Communist Party. He graduated in June 1918. On February 7, 1919 he had his name legally changed to Jay Lovestone. That year he also began studying at NYU Law School, but dropped out to pursue a career as a full-time Communist party member.[3]
The Communist years (1919–1929)
His first foray into what would become the American Communist movement began in February 1919, when the left wing elements in the Socialist Party in New York began to organize themselves as a separate faction. Lovestone was on the original organizing committee, the Committee of 15, with Wolfe, John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow. That June he attended the National Conference of the Left Wing.[4] He sided with the Fraina/Ruthenberg faction that opted to create a National Left Wing Council that would attempt to take over the Socialist Party. He stayed with this group after it reversed its stance, and joined the National Organizing Committee in founding the Communist Party of America on September 1, 1919, at a convention in Chicago.
In 1921, Lovestone became editor of the Communist Party newspaper, The Communist, and sat on the editorial board of The Liberator, the arts and letters publication of the Workers Party of America. Upon the death of Charles Ruthenberg in 1927 he became the party's national secretary. From about 1923, the CP developed two main factions, the Pepper–Ruthenberg group and the Foster–Cannon group. Lovestone was a close adherent of the Pepper–Ruthenberg tendency, which was to be centered in New York City and to favor united-front political action in a "class Labor Party", as opposed to the Foster–Cannon group, which tended to be centered in Chicago and were most concerned with building a radicalized American Federation of Labor through a boring from within policy.
In 1925 the leader of the Pepper–Ruthenberg faction, John Pepper, returned to Moscow for work in the apparatus of the Communist International, raising Lovestone's status to that of a chief lieutenant in a new Ruthenberg–Lovestone pairing. Foster and Cannon, on the other hand, parted ways, with Alexander Bittelman assuming the mantle as Foster's chief factional ally, while Jim Cannon built his power base in the party's legal defense mass organization, the International Labor Defense (ILD).
With the Soviet Bolshevik party riven by a succession struggle following Lenin's death in January 1924, the factions in the US eventually corresponded with factions in the Soviet leadership, with Foster's faction being strongly supportive of Joseph Stalin and Lovestone's faction sympathetic to Nikolai Bukharin. As a result of his trip to the Comintern Congress in 1928 where James P. Cannon and Maurice Spector accidentally saw Leon Trotsky's thesis criticizing the direction of the Comintern, Cannon became a Trotskyist and decided to organize his faction in support of Trotsky's position. Cannon's support for Trotsky became known before he had fully mobilized his supporters. Lovestone led the expulsion of Cannon and his supporters in 1928.
The Communist opposition years (1929–1941)
Jay Lovestone with David Dubinsky speaking at a union rally in the 1930s
When Stalin purged Bukharin from the Soviet Politburo in 1929, Lovestone suffered the consequences. A visiting delegation of the Comintern asked him to step down as party secretary in favor of his rival William Z. Foster. Lovestone refused and departed for the Soviet Union to argue his case. Lovestone insisted that he had the support of the vast majority of the Communist Party and should not have to step aside. Stalin responded that he "had a majority because the American Communist Party until now regarded you as the determined supporters of the Communist International. And it was only because the Party regarded you as friends of the Comintern that you had a majority in the ranks of the American Communist Party".[5]
When he returned to the US, Lovestone was forced to pay for his insubordination and was expelled from the party – ostensibly not for challenging Stalin, but for his support of Bukharin and the Right Opposition and for his theory of American exceptionalism, which held that capitalism was more secure in the United States and thus socialists should pursue different, more moderate strategies there than elsewhere in the world. That contradicted Stalin's views and the new Third Period policy of ultra-leftism promoted by the Comintern. Lovestone and his friends had thought that they commanded the following of the mass of party members and, once expelled, optimistically named their new party the Communist Party (Majority Group). When the new group attracted only a few hundred members it changed its name to the Communist Party (Opposition). They were aligned with the International Communist Opposition, which had sections in fifteen countries. The CP(O) later became the Independent Communist Labor League and then, in 1938, the Independent Labor League of America before dissolving in 1941. The party published the periodical Workers' Age (originally The Revolutionary Age), which was edited by Bertram Wolfe, along with a number of pamphlets.
Union and anti-communist activities
Lovestone had, while within the Communist Party, played an active role in the Party's labor activities, primarily within the United Mine Workers, where the party supported the revolt led by John Brophy against John L. Lewis's leadership. His allies within the party, particularly Charles S. Zimmerman, had a great deal of power within the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union prior to the debacle of 1926. After his expulsion, Lovestone formed a base within ILGWU Dressmakers Local 22, to which Zimmerman had returned after his expulsion from the CPUSA. Lovestone and Zimmerman worked their way into the good graces of ILGWU President David Dubinsky, who had been their fiercest enemy before their expulsion.
With Dubinsky's support, Lovestone went to work for Homer Martin, the embattled President of the United Auto Workers, who was attempting to drive his political rivals out of the union by charging them with being communists. Martin's and Lovestone's tactics, however, only succeeded in unifying all of the disparate groups in the leadership of the union at that time into a single coalition opposed to Martin and, unintentionally, enhancing the reputation of CP members within the union. The UAW's Executive Board, with the support of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), proceeded to oust Martin, who left to form his own rump version of the UAW. Lovestone followed him for a time.
Lovestone had maintained his relationship with Dubinsky throughout this period; Dubinsky helped finance Martin's new union and worked for its affiliation with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In 1943, Lovestone became the director of the International Ladies' and Garment Workers' Union's (ILGWU) International Affairs Department. Dubinsky also helped Lovestone find work in 1941 with an organization favoring the United States' entry into World War II. Dubinsky had concerns that Lovestone's past role in the Communist Party would taint him and suggested that Lovestone change his name; Lovestone declined to do so.
In 1944, Dubinsky arranged to place Lovestone in the AFL's Free Trade Union Committee, where he worked out of the ILGWU's headquarters. Along with Irving Brown he led the activities of the American Institute for Free Labor Development, an organization sponsored by the AFL which worked internationally, organizing free labor unions in Europe and Latin America which were not Communist-controlled.
In connection with that work he cooperated closely with the CIA, feeding information about Communist labor-union activities to James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's counterintelligence chief, in order to undermine Communist influence in the international union movement and provide intelligence to the US government. He remained there until 1963 when he became director of the AFL-CIO's International Affairs Department (IAD), which quietly sent millions of dollars from the CIA to aid anti-communist activities internationally, particularly in Latin America.[6]
In 1973, AFL-CIO president George Meany discovered that Lovestone was still in contact with Angleton of the CIA, who was conducting illegal domestic spying activities, despite being told seven years earlier to terminate this relationship.[7]
Meany chose to force Lovestone out by issuing an instruction with which he knew Lovestone would not comply. On March 6, 1974, he informed Lovestone that he wanted to close his New York office, stop publication of Free Trade Union News, and transfer Lovestone and his library and archives to Washington, D.C. When Lovestone argued he could not relocate his library of 6,000 books, he was dismissed, effective July 1.[8] Lovestone's successor, Ernie Lee, maintained a low profile during his tenure from 1974 through 1982 and significantly scaled back the AFL-CIO's aggressive advocacy of a hawkish, anti-détente foreign policy.[8]
Death and legacy
Lovestone died on March 7, 1990, at the age of 92.[9]
Jay Lovestone's massive accumulation of papers, today encompassing more than 865 archival boxes,[10] were acquired by the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University in 1975, where they remained sealed for 20 years.[11] The material was opened to the public in 1995 and was a source for author Ted Morgan, who published the first full-length biography of Lovestone in 1999.[11] An associate, Louise Page Morris, later supplemented the collection with her correspondence—according to other reports, Morris "spent 25 years as Lovestone's lover."[12][13]
Lovestone's Federal Bureau of Investigation file is reported to be 5,700 pages long.[14]
Works
Communist Party years
• The Government — Strikebreaker: A Study of the Role of the Government in the Recent Industrial Crisis. New York: Workers Party of America, 1923.
• Blood and Steel: An Exposure of the 12-Hour Day in the Steel Industry. New York: Workers Party of America, n.d. [1923]
• What's What About Coolidge? Chicago, Workers Party of America, n.d. [c. 1923] alternate link
• The La Follette Illusion: As Revealed in an Analysis of the Political Role of Senator Robert M. La Follette. Chicago: Literature Department, Workers Party of America, 1924.
• American Imperialism: The Menace of the Greatest Capitalist World Power. Chicago: Literature Department, Workers Party of America, n.d. [1925]
• The Party Organization. (Introduction.) Chicago: Daily Worker Publishing Co., n.d. [1925]
• Our Heritage from 1776: A Working Class View of the First American Revolution. With Wolfe, Bertram D. and William F. Dunne, New York: The Workers School, n.d. [1926] alternate link
• The Labor Lieutenants of American Imperialism. New York: Daily Worker Publishing Co., 1927
• The Coolidge Program: Capitalist Democracy and Prosperity Exposed. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1927 (Workers library #2)
• Ruthenberg, Communist fighter and leader (Introduction) New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1927
• 1928: The Presidential Election and the Workers. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1928. (Workers library #4) Yiddish
• America Prepares the Next War. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1928. (Workers library #10)
• Pages from Party History. New York: Workers Library Publishers, n.d. [February 1929].
Communist opposition years
• "Twelve Years of the Soviet Union," The Revolutionary Age, Vol. 1, no. 1 (November 1, 1929), pp. 7–8.
• The American Labor Movement: Its Past, Its Present, Its Future. New York: Workers Age Publishing Association, n.d. [1932].
• What Next for American Labor? New York: Communist Party of the United States (Opposition), n.d. [1934]
• Marxian classics in the light of current history. New York City, New Workers School 1934
• Soviet Foreign Policy and the World Revolution. New York: Workers Age Publishers, 1935 alternate link
• People's Front Illusion: From "Social Fascism" to the "People's Front." New York: Workers Age Publishers, n.d. [1937].
• New Frontiers for Labor. New York: Workers Age Publishers, n.d. [1938]
Post-radical years
• The Big Smile: An Analysis of the Soviet "New Look." With Matthew Woll. New York: Free Trade Union Committee, American Federation of Labor, 1955
• Communist and Workers' Parties' manifesto adopted November-December, 1960; Testimony of Jay Lovestone, January 26, February 2, 1961 Washington, D.C. United States Government Printing Office, 1961
Footnotes
1. Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster. New York: Random House, 1999; pp. 4-6.
2. Morgan, A Covert Life, pp. 8-10.
3. Morgan, A Covert Life, pp. 10-13.
4. Fanny Horowitz, "Minutes of the National Left Wing Conference," Department of Justice/Bureau of Investigation files, NARA M-1085, reel 936. Corvallis, OR: 1000 Flowers Publishing, 2007.
5. Stalin, Joseph (1931). "Stalin's Speeches on the. American Communist Party: Delivered in the American Commission of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, May 6, 1929 and In the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International on the American Question, May 14th, 1929". Originally published by Central Committee, Communist Party USA, New York.
6. Victor Reuther The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976; pgs. 411-427.
7. Morgan, A Covert Life, pp. 350-351.
8. Morgan, A Covert Life, pg. 351.
9. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/09/obit ... -dies.html
10. Grace M. Hawes, "Register of the Jay Lovestone Papers, 1906-1989," Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.
11. Elena Danielson, "A Fierce, Freedom-Loving Man," Archived 2008-07-05 at the Wayback Machine. Hoover Digest, issue 1999#1, January 30, 1999.
12. Berman, Paul (28 March 1999). "Under the Beds of the Reds". New York Times. Retrieved 27 February2013.
13. Powers, Thomas (11 May 2000). "The Plot Thickens". New York Review of Books. Retrieved 27 February 2013.
14. Random House, Publisher description for A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster
Further reading
• Robert J. Alexander, The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981.
• Victor G. Devinatz, "Reassessing The Historical UAW: Walter Reuther's Affiliation with the Communist Party and Something of Its Meaning — A Document of Party Involvement, 1939", Le Travail, 2002.
• Fred Hirsch, An Analysis of Our AFL-CIO Role in Latin America or Under the Covers with the CIA.San Jose, CA: F. Hirsch, 1974.
• Paul LeBlanc and Tim Davenport (eds.), The "American Exceptionalism" of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929-1940: Dissident Marxism in the United States, Volume 1. Leiden, NL: Brill, 2015.
• Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist & Spymaster. New York: Random House, 1999.
External links
• Grace M. Hawes (ed.), "Register of the Jay Lovestone Papers, 1906-1989," Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, 2008.
• Obituary from The New York Times
See also
• Communist Party of the USA (Opposition)
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/2/18
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
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-- Fritz Kramer and Jay Lovestone – Lovestone ran the CIA projects for the AFL-CIO. Kramer is Kissiner’s rabbi (who is somehow connected to Lovestone – this needs further exploration with Colson).
-- Approved for Release 2004/10/28: CIA-RDP88-01314R0003000180002-2
Jay Lovestone
Jay Lovestone circa 1917
Born Jacob Liebstein
December 15, 1897
Moǔchadz, Grodno gubernia, Lithuania (then Russian Empire)
Died March 7, 1990 (aged 92)
Manhattan, New York City, United States
Alma mater City College of New York
Occupation political activist
Years active 1919-1982
Political party Socialist Party of America, Communist Party USA, AFL-CIO
Opponent(s) Joseph Stalin, William Z. Foster, James P. Cannon
Partner(s) Louise Page Morris
Jay Lovestone (December 15, 1897 – March 7, 1990) was at various times a member of the Socialist Party of America, a leader of the Communist Party USA, leader of a small oppositionist party, an anti-Communist and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helper, and foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL-CIO and various unions within it.
Although the CIA had been widely funding foreign labor unions for more than fifteen years and some of the agency's labor activities were revealed in Tom Braden's Saturday Evening Post article, the Katzenbach committee did not specify unions as the type of organizations the CIA was barred from financing. At the 1968 Council on Foreign Relations meeting at which Bissell spoke, Meyer Bernstein, the Steelworkers Union's Director of International Labor Affairs, commented:the turn of events has been unexpected. First, there hasn't been any real problem with international labor programs. Indeed, there has been an increase in demand for U.S. labor programs and the strain on our capacity has been embarrassing. Formerly, these foreign labor unions knew we were short of funds, but now they all assume we have secret CIA money, and they ask for more help.
Worse yet, Vic Reuther, who had been alleging that others were receiving CIA money, and whose brother's receipt of $50,000 from CIA in old bills was subsequently disclosed by Tom Braden, still goes on with his charges that the AFL-CIO has taken CIA money. Here again, no one seems to listen. "The net result has been as close to zero as possible. We've come to accept CIA, like sin." So, for example, British Guiana's [Guyana] labor unions were supported through CIA conduits, but now they ask for more assistance than before. So, our expectations to the contrary, there has been almost no damage.
-- The CIA and The Cult of Intelligence, by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks
Biography
Background and early life
Lovestone was born Jacob Liebstein into a Litvak family in a shtetl called Moǔchadz in Grodno Governorate (then part of the Russian Empire, now in Grodno Region, Belarus).
Shtetlekh (Yiddish: שטעטל, shtetl (singular), שטעטלעך, shtetlekh (plural))[1] were small towns with large Jewish populations, which existed in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Shtetlekh were mainly found in the areas that constituted the 19th century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, Galicia (Ukraine) and Romania. In Yiddish, a larger city, like Lviv or Chernivtsi, was called a shtot (Yiddish: שטאָט, German: Stadt); a village was called a dorf (דאָרף).[2] In official parlance the shtetl was referred to as "(Jewish) miasteczko" (Ukrainian: мiстечко, Polish: miasteczko, Belarusian: мястэчка, Russian: местечко).[3]
-- Shtetl, by Wikipedia
The territory of present-day Belarus was considered a "Lithuanian" area at the time. [1] His father, Barnet, had been a rabbi, but when he emigrated to America he had to settle for a job as shammes (caretaker). Barnet came first, then sent for his family the next year. Lovestone arrived with his mother, Emma, and his siblings, Morris, Esther and Sarah at Ellis island on September 15, 1907. They originally settled on Hester Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side, but later moved to 2155 Daly Avenue in the Bronx. The family did not know their dates of birth precisely, but they assigned Jacob the date of December 15, 1897.[1]
Young Liebstein was attracted to socialist politics from his teens. While imbibing all the ideological currents in the vibrant New York Yiddish and English radical press, he was particularly attracted to the ideas of Daniel De Leon. It is not known whether he ever joined de Leon's Socialist Labor Party, but he was one of the 3,000 mourners who attended his funeral on May 11, 1914.[2]
Liebstein entered City College of New York in 1915. Already a member of the Socialist party, he joined its unofficial student wing, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. He became secretary and then president of the CCNY chapter. He also met William Weinstone and Bertram Wolfe in ISS, who would go on to become his factional allies in the Communist Party. He graduated in June 1918. On February 7, 1919 he had his name legally changed to Jay Lovestone. That year he also began studying at NYU Law School, but dropped out to pursue a career as a full-time Communist party member.[3]
The Communist years (1919–1929)
His first foray into what would become the American Communist movement began in February 1919, when the left wing elements in the Socialist Party in New York began to organize themselves as a separate faction. Lovestone was on the original organizing committee, the Committee of 15, with Wolfe, John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow. That June he attended the National Conference of the Left Wing.[4] He sided with the Fraina/Ruthenberg faction that opted to create a National Left Wing Council that would attempt to take over the Socialist Party. He stayed with this group after it reversed its stance, and joined the National Organizing Committee in founding the Communist Party of America on September 1, 1919, at a convention in Chicago.
In 1921, Lovestone became editor of the Communist Party newspaper, The Communist, and sat on the editorial board of The Liberator, the arts and letters publication of the Workers Party of America. Upon the death of Charles Ruthenberg in 1927 he became the party's national secretary. From about 1923, the CP developed two main factions, the Pepper–Ruthenberg group and the Foster–Cannon group. Lovestone was a close adherent of the Pepper–Ruthenberg tendency, which was to be centered in New York City and to favor united-front political action in a "class Labor Party", as opposed to the Foster–Cannon group, which tended to be centered in Chicago and were most concerned with building a radicalized American Federation of Labor through a boring from within policy.
In 1925 the leader of the Pepper–Ruthenberg faction, John Pepper, returned to Moscow for work in the apparatus of the Communist International, raising Lovestone's status to that of a chief lieutenant in a new Ruthenberg–Lovestone pairing. Foster and Cannon, on the other hand, parted ways, with Alexander Bittelman assuming the mantle as Foster's chief factional ally, while Jim Cannon built his power base in the party's legal defense mass organization, the International Labor Defense (ILD).
With the Soviet Bolshevik party riven by a succession struggle following Lenin's death in January 1924, the factions in the US eventually corresponded with factions in the Soviet leadership, with Foster's faction being strongly supportive of Joseph Stalin and Lovestone's faction sympathetic to Nikolai Bukharin. As a result of his trip to the Comintern Congress in 1928 where James P. Cannon and Maurice Spector accidentally saw Leon Trotsky's thesis criticizing the direction of the Comintern, Cannon became a Trotskyist and decided to organize his faction in support of Trotsky's position. Cannon's support for Trotsky became known before he had fully mobilized his supporters. Lovestone led the expulsion of Cannon and his supporters in 1928.
The Communist opposition years (1929–1941)
Jay Lovestone with David Dubinsky speaking at a union rally in the 1930s
When Stalin purged Bukharin from the Soviet Politburo in 1929, Lovestone suffered the consequences. A visiting delegation of the Comintern asked him to step down as party secretary in favor of his rival William Z. Foster. Lovestone refused and departed for the Soviet Union to argue his case. Lovestone insisted that he had the support of the vast majority of the Communist Party and should not have to step aside. Stalin responded that he "had a majority because the American Communist Party until now regarded you as the determined supporters of the Communist International. And it was only because the Party regarded you as friends of the Comintern that you had a majority in the ranks of the American Communist Party".[5]
When he returned to the US, Lovestone was forced to pay for his insubordination and was expelled from the party – ostensibly not for challenging Stalin, but for his support of Bukharin and the Right Opposition and for his theory of American exceptionalism, which held that capitalism was more secure in the United States and thus socialists should pursue different, more moderate strategies there than elsewhere in the world. That contradicted Stalin's views and the new Third Period policy of ultra-leftism promoted by the Comintern. Lovestone and his friends had thought that they commanded the following of the mass of party members and, once expelled, optimistically named their new party the Communist Party (Majority Group). When the new group attracted only a few hundred members it changed its name to the Communist Party (Opposition). They were aligned with the International Communist Opposition, which had sections in fifteen countries. The CP(O) later became the Independent Communist Labor League and then, in 1938, the Independent Labor League of America before dissolving in 1941. The party published the periodical Workers' Age (originally The Revolutionary Age), which was edited by Bertram Wolfe, along with a number of pamphlets.
Union and anti-communist activities
Lovestone had, while within the Communist Party, played an active role in the Party's labor activities, primarily within the United Mine Workers, where the party supported the revolt led by John Brophy against John L. Lewis's leadership. His allies within the party, particularly Charles S. Zimmerman, had a great deal of power within the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union prior to the debacle of 1926. After his expulsion, Lovestone formed a base within ILGWU Dressmakers Local 22, to which Zimmerman had returned after his expulsion from the CPUSA. Lovestone and Zimmerman worked their way into the good graces of ILGWU President David Dubinsky, who had been their fiercest enemy before their expulsion.
With Dubinsky's support, Lovestone went to work for Homer Martin, the embattled President of the United Auto Workers, who was attempting to drive his political rivals out of the union by charging them with being communists. Martin's and Lovestone's tactics, however, only succeeded in unifying all of the disparate groups in the leadership of the union at that time into a single coalition opposed to Martin and, unintentionally, enhancing the reputation of CP members within the union. The UAW's Executive Board, with the support of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), proceeded to oust Martin, who left to form his own rump version of the UAW. Lovestone followed him for a time.
Lovestone had maintained his relationship with Dubinsky throughout this period; Dubinsky helped finance Martin's new union and worked for its affiliation with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In 1943, Lovestone became the director of the International Ladies' and Garment Workers' Union's (ILGWU) International Affairs Department. Dubinsky also helped Lovestone find work in 1941 with an organization favoring the United States' entry into World War II. Dubinsky had concerns that Lovestone's past role in the Communist Party would taint him and suggested that Lovestone change his name; Lovestone declined to do so.
In 1944, Dubinsky arranged to place Lovestone in the AFL's Free Trade Union Committee, where he worked out of the ILGWU's headquarters. Along with Irving Brown he led the activities of the American Institute for Free Labor Development, an organization sponsored by the AFL which worked internationally, organizing free labor unions in Europe and Latin America which were not Communist-controlled.
Some causes which have been supported by NED largesse were the following:
• Over $400,000 to the Center for Democracy, a New York-based foundation run by Soviet emigres which has used the Soviet human rights network, tourists, and "experienced" travelers to gather political and military information on the U.S.S.R. The Center has also smuggled American films with anti-Soviet themes (White Nights, Red Dawn and The Assassination of Trotsky) into the Soviet Union. [1]
• Several hundred thousand dollars since 1985 to La Prensa, the anti-Sandinista newspaper in Nicaragua, which can only be viewed as part of the Reagan administration's campaign to overthrow the government; several million more has been allocated to support organizations opposing the Sandinistas in elections scheduled for 1990. [2]
• Newspapers in other developing countries, including Grenada, Guyana, and Botswana. [3]
• Translation into Polish of a book that accuses the Soviet Union of a World War II massacre of Polish Army officers. The book was to be smuggled into Poland. [4]
• $400,000 a year to the Solidarity trade union in Poland, to clandestinely print underground publications, as well as funds for other political organizations, youth groups, and churches. This is in addition to several million dollars allocated to Solidarity by the U.S. Congress. [5]
• $830,000 to Force Ouvriere, the French anti-communist trade union which the CIA began funding in the 1940s.
• $575,000 to an extreme rightwing French group of paramilitary and criminal background, the National Inter-University Union. The funding of this group as well as Force Ouvriere was secret and is known of only because of its exposure by French journalists in November 1985. [6]
• $3 million to the Philippines, "quietly being spent to fight the communist insurgency ... and to cultivate political leaders there." Some of this money was channeled to the National Citizens Movement for Free Elections, which was set up by the CIA in the 1950s to support the presidential campaign of Ramon Magsaysay. [7]
The National Endowment for Democracy, like the CIA before it, calls this supporting democracy. The governments and movements against whom the financing is targeted, call it destabilization. The NED was not an aberration of an otherwise legal, accountable, non-interventionist Reagan foreign policy. Among the other stories of international intrigue and violence of the Reagan era worth noting are:
South Africa: Working closely with British intelligence, the U.S. provided South Africa with intelligence about the banned and exiled African National Congress, including specific warnings of planned attacks by the group and the whereabouts and movements of ANC leaders. [8] As part of South Africa's reciprocation, it sent 200,000 pounds of military equipment to contra leader Eden Pastora. [9]
Fiji: The coup of May 1987 bore all the fingerprints of a U.S. destabilization operation -- the deposed prime minister, Timoci Bavadra, in office only a month after being elected over the conservative former Prime Minister Ratu Mara, was intent upon enforcing the ban upon nuclear vessels in Fiji ports; two weeks before the coup, Gen. Vernon Walters, he of extensive CIA involvement over the years, visited Fiji and met with the army officer who staged the coup; at the same time, Ratu Mara was visiting U.S. military headquarters (CINCPAC) in Hawaii; the AFL-CIO/CIA labor mafia was well represented, working against the nuclear-free Pacific movement; and several other similar components of a now all-too-familiar scenario. [10]
-- Ronald Reagan's Legacy: Eight Years of CIA Covert Action, by William Blum*
In connection with that work he cooperated closely with the CIA, feeding information about Communist labor-union activities to James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's counterintelligence chief, in order to undermine Communist influence in the international union movement and provide intelligence to the US government. He remained there until 1963 when he became director of the AFL-CIO's International Affairs Department (IAD), which quietly sent millions of dollars from the CIA to aid anti-communist activities internationally, particularly in Latin America.[6]
Braden served in the CIA for five years, from 1949 to 1954, rose to a division chief, and later became well known as a newspaper columnist, television host (of CNN's Crossfire), and author. As chief of the agency's International Organizations division, he channeled CIA money to a broad range of anti-Communist cultural groups overseas, and, through the AFL-CIO, into labor unions in Europe. Later, a book he wrote about his large family, Eight Is Enough (New York: Random House, 1975), became the basis for a television series in the 1970s and 1980s.
-- Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors That Shattered The CIA, by David Wise
In 1973, AFL-CIO president George Meany discovered that Lovestone was still in contact with Angleton of the CIA, who was conducting illegal domestic spying activities, despite being told seven years earlier to terminate this relationship.[7]
Labour Operations
Agency labour operations came into being, like student and youth operations, as a reaction against the continuation of pre-World War II CPSU policy and expansion through the international united fronts. In 1945 with the support and participation of the British Trade Unions Congres (TUC), the American Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the Soviet Trade Unions Council, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) was formed in Paris. Differences within the WFTU between communist trade-union leaders, who were anxious to use the WFTU for anti-capitalist propaganda, and free-world leaders who insisted on keeping the WFTU focused on economic issues, finally came to a head in 1949 over whether the WFTU should support the Marshall Plan. When the communists, who included French, Italian and Latin American leaders as well as the Soviets, refused to allow the WFTU to endorse the Marshall Plan, the TUC and CIO withdrew, and later the same year the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU ‡) was founded as a noncommunist alternative to the WFTU, with participation by the TUC, CIO, American Federation of Labor (AFL) and other national centres. Agency operations were responsible in part for the expulsion of the WFTU headquarters from Paris in 1951 when it moved to the Soviet sector of Vienna. Later, in 1956, it was forced to move from Vienna to Prague.
The ICFTU established regional organizations for Europe, the Far East, Africa and the Western Hemisphere, which brought together the non-communist national trade-union centres. Support and guidance by the Agency was, and still is, exercised on the three levels: ICFTU, regional and national centres. At the highest level, labor operations congenial to the Agency are supported through George Meany, ‡ President of the AFL, Jay Lovestone, ‡ Foreign Affairs Chief of the AFL and Irving Brown, ‡ AFL representative in Europe -- all of whom were described to us as effective spokesmen for positions in accordance with the Agency's needs. Direct Agency control is also exercised on the regional level. Serafino Romualdi, ‡ AFL Latin American representative for example, directs the Inter-American Regional Labor Organization (ORIT) ‡ located in Mexico City. On the national level, particularly in underdeveloped countries, CIA field stations engage in operations to support and guide national labour centres. In headquarters, support, guidance and control of all labour operations is centralized in the labour branch of the International Organizations Division.
General policy on labour operations is similar to youth and student operations. First, the WFTU and its regional and national affiliates are labelled as stooges of Moscow. Second, local station operations are designed to weaken and defeat communist or extreme-leftist dominated union structures and to establish and support a non-communist structure. Third, the ICFTU and its regional organizations are promoted, both from the top and from the bottom, by having Agency-influenced or controlled unions and national centres affiliate.
A fourth CIA approach to labour operations is through the International Trade Secretariats ‡ (ITS), which represent the interests of workers in a particular industry as opposed to the national centres that unite workers of different industries. Because the ITS system is more specialized, and often more effective, it is at times more appropriate for Agency purposes than the ICFTU with its regional and national structure. Control and guidance is exercised through officers of a particular ITS who are called upon to assist labour operations directed against the workers of a particular industry. Very often the CIA agents in an ITS are the American labour leaders who represent the US affiliate of the ITS, since the ITS would usually receive its principal support from the pertinent US industrial union. Thus the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees ‡ serves as a channel for CIA operations in the Public Service International, ‡ which is the ITS for government employees headquartered in London. And the Retail Clerks International Association, ‡ which is the US union of white-collar employees, gives access to the International Federation of Clerical and Technical Employees, ‡ which is the white-collar ITS. Similarly, the Communications Workers of America ‡ is used to control the Post, Telegraph and Telephone Workers International ‡ (PTTI) which is the ITS for communications workers. In the case of the petroleum industry the Agency actually set up the ITS, the International Federation of Petroleum and Chemical Workers ‡ (IFPCW) through the US union of petroleum workers, the Oil Workers International Union. Particularly in underdeveloped countries, station labour operations may be given cover as a local programme of an ITS. Within the Catholic trade-union movement similar activity is possible, usually channelled through the International Federation of Christian Trade Unions ‡ (IFCTU). [12] And for specialized training within the social-democratic movement, the Israeli Histadrut ‡ is used.
Labour operations are the source of considerable friction between the DDP area divisions and the stations, on the one hand, and the International Organizations Division (IOD) on the other. The problem is mainly jurisdiction and coordination. The labour operations agents on the international and regional level (ICFTU, ORlT, ITS, for example) are directed by officers of IOD either in Washington or from a field station such as Paris, Brussels or Mexico City. If their activities in a particular country, Colombia, for example, are not closely coordinated with the Bogota station, they may oppose or otherwise interfere with specific aims of the Bogota station's labour operations or other programmes. Whenever IOD labour assets visit a given country, the Chief of Station who is responsible for all CIA activities in his country, must be advised. Otherwise the IOD agent, lacking the guidance and control that would ensure that his activities harmonize with the entire station operational programme, not just in the labour field, may jeopardize other station goals. Continuing efforts are made to ensure coordination between IOD activities in labour and the field stations concerned, but this is also hampered at times by the narrow view and headstrong attitudes of the agents themselves.
On the other hand, IOD agents can be enormously valuable in assisting a local station's labour programme. Usually the agent has considerable prestige as a result of his position on the international or regional level, and his favour is often sought by indigenous labour leaders because of the travel and training grants and invitations to conferences that the agent dispenses. He accordingly has ready access to leaders in the local non-communist labour movement and he can establish contact between the station and those local labour leaders of interest. Such contact can be established through third parties, gradually, so that the IOD agent is protected when a new operational relationship is eventually established. Field stations may call on IOD support in order to obtain the adoption of a particular policy or programme in a given country through the influence that an IOD agent can bring to bear on a local situation, again without the local labour leader, even if he is a station agent, knowing that the international or regional official is responding to CIA guidance.
Measuring the effectiveness of labour operations against their multi-million-dollar cost is difficult and controversial, and includes the denial-to-the-communists factor as well as the value of indoctrination in pro-Western ideals through seminars, conferences and educational programmes. In any case, free-world affiliation with the WFTU has been considerably reduced, even though several leading national confederations in non-communist countries still belong.
-- Inside the Company: CIA Diary, by Philip Agee
Meany chose to force Lovestone out by issuing an instruction with which he knew Lovestone would not comply. On March 6, 1974, he informed Lovestone that he wanted to close his New York office, stop publication of Free Trade Union News, and transfer Lovestone and his library and archives to Washington, D.C. When Lovestone argued he could not relocate his library of 6,000 books, he was dismissed, effective July 1.[8] Lovestone's successor, Ernie Lee, maintained a low profile during his tenure from 1974 through 1982 and significantly scaled back the AFL-CIO's aggressive advocacy of a hawkish, anti-détente foreign policy.[8]
Death and legacy
Lovestone died on March 7, 1990, at the age of 92.[9]
Jay Lovestone's massive accumulation of papers, today encompassing more than 865 archival boxes,[10] were acquired by the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University in 1975, where they remained sealed for 20 years.[11] The material was opened to the public in 1995 and was a source for author Ted Morgan, who published the first full-length biography of Lovestone in 1999.[11] An associate, Louise Page Morris, later supplemented the collection with her correspondence—according to other reports, Morris "spent 25 years as Lovestone's lover."[12][13]
Lovestone's Federal Bureau of Investigation file is reported to be 5,700 pages long.[14]
Works
Communist Party years
• The Government — Strikebreaker: A Study of the Role of the Government in the Recent Industrial Crisis. New York: Workers Party of America, 1923.
• Blood and Steel: An Exposure of the 12-Hour Day in the Steel Industry. New York: Workers Party of America, n.d. [1923]
• What's What About Coolidge? Chicago, Workers Party of America, n.d. [c. 1923] alternate link
• The La Follette Illusion: As Revealed in an Analysis of the Political Role of Senator Robert M. La Follette. Chicago: Literature Department, Workers Party of America, 1924.
• American Imperialism: The Menace of the Greatest Capitalist World Power. Chicago: Literature Department, Workers Party of America, n.d. [1925]
• The Party Organization. (Introduction.) Chicago: Daily Worker Publishing Co., n.d. [1925]
• Our Heritage from 1776: A Working Class View of the First American Revolution. With Wolfe, Bertram D. and William F. Dunne, New York: The Workers School, n.d. [1926] alternate link
• The Labor Lieutenants of American Imperialism. New York: Daily Worker Publishing Co., 1927
• The Coolidge Program: Capitalist Democracy and Prosperity Exposed. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1927 (Workers library #2)
• Ruthenberg, Communist fighter and leader (Introduction) New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1927
• 1928: The Presidential Election and the Workers. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1928. (Workers library #4) Yiddish
• America Prepares the Next War. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1928. (Workers library #10)
• Pages from Party History. New York: Workers Library Publishers, n.d. [February 1929].
Communist opposition years
• "Twelve Years of the Soviet Union," The Revolutionary Age, Vol. 1, no. 1 (November 1, 1929), pp. 7–8.
• The American Labor Movement: Its Past, Its Present, Its Future. New York: Workers Age Publishing Association, n.d. [1932].
• What Next for American Labor? New York: Communist Party of the United States (Opposition), n.d. [1934]
• Marxian classics in the light of current history. New York City, New Workers School 1934
• Soviet Foreign Policy and the World Revolution. New York: Workers Age Publishers, 1935 alternate link
• People's Front Illusion: From "Social Fascism" to the "People's Front." New York: Workers Age Publishers, n.d. [1937].
• New Frontiers for Labor. New York: Workers Age Publishers, n.d. [1938]
Post-radical years
• The Big Smile: An Analysis of the Soviet "New Look." With Matthew Woll. New York: Free Trade Union Committee, American Federation of Labor, 1955
• Communist and Workers' Parties' manifesto adopted November-December, 1960; Testimony of Jay Lovestone, January 26, February 2, 1961 Washington, D.C. United States Government Printing Office, 1961
Footnotes
1. Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster. New York: Random House, 1999; pp. 4-6.
2. Morgan, A Covert Life, pp. 8-10.
3. Morgan, A Covert Life, pp. 10-13.
4. Fanny Horowitz, "Minutes of the National Left Wing Conference," Department of Justice/Bureau of Investigation files, NARA M-1085, reel 936. Corvallis, OR: 1000 Flowers Publishing, 2007.
5. Stalin, Joseph (1931). "Stalin's Speeches on the. American Communist Party: Delivered in the American Commission of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, May 6, 1929 and In the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International on the American Question, May 14th, 1929". Originally published by Central Committee, Communist Party USA, New York.
6. Victor Reuther The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976; pgs. 411-427.
7. Morgan, A Covert Life, pp. 350-351.
8. Morgan, A Covert Life, pg. 351.
9. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/09/obit ... -dies.html
10. Grace M. Hawes, "Register of the Jay Lovestone Papers, 1906-1989," Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.
11. Elena Danielson, "A Fierce, Freedom-Loving Man," Archived 2008-07-05 at the Wayback Machine. Hoover Digest, issue 1999#1, January 30, 1999.
12. Berman, Paul (28 March 1999). "Under the Beds of the Reds". New York Times. Retrieved 27 February2013.
13. Powers, Thomas (11 May 2000). "The Plot Thickens". New York Review of Books. Retrieved 27 February 2013.
14. Random House, Publisher description for A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster
Further reading
• Robert J. Alexander, The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981.
• Victor G. Devinatz, "Reassessing The Historical UAW: Walter Reuther's Affiliation with the Communist Party and Something of Its Meaning — A Document of Party Involvement, 1939", Le Travail, 2002.
• Fred Hirsch, An Analysis of Our AFL-CIO Role in Latin America or Under the Covers with the CIA.San Jose, CA: F. Hirsch, 1974.
• Paul LeBlanc and Tim Davenport (eds.), The "American Exceptionalism" of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929-1940: Dissident Marxism in the United States, Volume 1. Leiden, NL: Brill, 2015.
• Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist & Spymaster. New York: Random House, 1999.
External links
• Grace M. Hawes (ed.), "Register of the Jay Lovestone Papers, 1906-1989," Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, 2008.
• Obituary from The New York Times
See also
• Communist Party of the USA (Opposition)