Lovestoneites

LOVESTONEITES. The term “Lovestoneites” is a designation for the “Right Opposition” led in the United States by Jay Lovestone from the time of their collective expulsion from the Communist Party in 1928 to their formal dissolution in 1941. Not a movement like Trotskyism or Maoism, the Lovestoneites distinguished themselves in two regards. First and foremost, their highly placed union connections gave them disproportionate influence in the needle trades and, indirectly, among automobile workers. Their small but vital intellectual following produced work of high quality, if limited influence within the Left. As unionists and authors after 1940, they also made a significant impact as Cold War operatives.

Jay Lovestone was born 1898 in Lithuania and emigrated to the United States in 1907. He emerged from City College of New York as leader of the Socialist Club, both articulate and fanatically devoted to the extreme wing of Russian Revolution supporters who favored an “underground” organization. He edited, from the “underground,” the Communist, noted for its shrillness and factionalism. By the middle 1920s, Lovestone became the chief lieutenant of Charles E. Ruthenberg, whose factional strength centered in the needle trades—that is, among New York Jews. Upon Ruthenberg’s death, Lovestone reached his highest office, deputy secretary-general of the Workers (Communist) Party, from which post he directed the expulsion of real and suspected Trotskyists.

Moving from extreme left to right within the Communist spectrum, Lovestone became the foremost proponent of “American Exceptionalism.” According to this perspective, little could be expected from a largely corrupted American population, in the midst of imperialist-laden prosperity, but Communists could cultivate trade union contacts and non-Communist intellectuals. This perspective had the considerable virtue of encouraging a rethinking of Communist policies in a more open fashion and permitting a hitherto unacceptable latitude in work with non-Communist intellectuals and activists. Thus Bertram Wolfe, Lovestone’s ideological aide, led the Party’s Workers School into a period of near amity with a variety of Marxist intellectuals; meanwhile Charles (Sasha) Zimmerman, leading figure of International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) Local 22, sought to apply a policy of stabilization to the generally hectic Communist union politics.

Lovestone’s support for Nikolai Bukharin, proponent of “Right” policies within the Comintern, cost him and his followers leadership of the Party in 1929, following a confrontation in Moscow with Joseph Stalin. Expelled, the dissident Communist Party (Majority), so called, actually took only a few hundred members along, but these included Zimmerman and Wolfe. Throughout the early to mid-1930s, the Communist Party Opposition urged internal reform of the Soviet Union while defending the Russian regime’s socialist bona fides from capitalist and Trotskyist criticism. Meanwhile, ILGWU Local 22 became for a time the largest single union local in America, and Lovestone along with his supporters found themselves in steady alliance with ILGWU leader David Dubinsky and the aging but still-vital Yiddish-speaking anarchist faction. Lovestone himself evolved an institutional-syndicalist formula similar to that of earlier pro-American Federation of Labor (AFL) anarchists, “everything in and through the unions.” Local 22, indeed, conducted an extraordinarily vigorous educational and leisure apparatus, almost rivaling that of the Socialist or Communist movements. Individual Communists, often vigorously in opposition to Zimmerman’s policies, for critical periods of the 1930s–1940s supported the Zimmerman leadership and participated in the leisure and fraternal activities until their virtual liquidation at the end of the 1930s.

Meanwhile, the Lovestoneite organ Revolutionary Age, later renamed Workers Age, became the most literate of the Marxist weeklies in the United States. Bertram Wolfe and Will Herberg (later to become a conservative theologian), among a small crew of others, wrote intelligently on politics, economics, culture, and science. Taking a middle position between Trotskyists and Communist regulars, the Lovestoneites sought to support positive developments in the Soviet Union while increasingly committing themselves to criticisms of bureaucracy. The New Workers School, directed by Wolfe, sought to continue the more open atmosphere of the 1920s efforts and incorporate more Marxism than the increasingly social democratic Rand School.

The Lovestoneites proper, however, established no significant recruitment either among workers or intellectuals. Like the Trotskyists, they established contacts (some would say “spies”) in Socialist Party youth circles of the middle 1930s, most notably in the Revolutionary Policy Committee. Individual Lovestoneites found themselves at the helm of new union locals, but the Lovestoneites lacked a messianic international figure like Trotsky and a grand strategy such as the formation of a new International. Under the guidance of Lovestone, moreover, they seemed to prefer maneuver among leaders over public appeals for their own cause and organization. Revolutionary Age/Workers Age never found its audience beyond “insiders.” Nor did Lovestone, Wolfe, Will Herberg, and the small handful of others distinguish themselves as public intellectuals until they had broken entirely with the Left.

The Moscow trials and the Spanish Civil War, but also the changing character of American trade unionism, turned the Lovestoneites in a conservative direction. Growing disbelief in the guilt of the defendants in the trials crystallized into a complete hostility to Stalin’s leadership. Support for the Spanish Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers Party of Marxist Unification), previously aligned with the thin international stratum of Bukharin supporters (Germany’s Heinrich Brandler the most distinguished, with the Indian leader M. N. Roy a close second), reinforced this drift.

Lovestone’s own alliance with the AFL against the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had a more immediate practical effect upon Lovestoneite activity. Dubinsky, fanatically anticommunist but also deeply resentful of the wide influence exerted by his former mentor, Sidney Hillman, bitterly opposed CIO influence within the needle trades and in its organs, and he often denounced Communist influence on the CIO. With Dubinsky’s cooperation, Lovestone therefore placed his personal operatives with Homer Martin, erratic factional leader of the young United Auto Workers, and guided Martin in his group’s withdrawal from the CIO union into an avowedly anticommunist (and essentially racist) AFL affiliate. Among the lower level followers actively seeking to split the UAW, a future CIA operative in European labor, Irving Brown, would become Lovestone’s chief protege and George Meany’s trusted aide in global anticommunist operations.

By 1941, the Lovestoneites (by this time renamed the International Labor League of America) announced dissolution—a virtually unknown act in the Left. While urging members to join the fast-fading Socialist Party, the leadership had set itself upon a more severe path. Lovestone, along with his lieutenant Brown, moved into the highly placed Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC), originally established to aid European unionists but reorganized as the AFL’s anticommunist organ overseas. Working in close concert with the U.S. State Department and Central Intelligence Agency, the FTUC (and later, in a combined AFL-CIO, the International Department) became the bastion of anticommunism within American labor officialdom. Lovestone, intimately close to George Meany and for decades author of his foreign-policy papers, also edited Free Trade Union News. In an important sense the personal architect of interventionist trade union policy, Lovestone facilitated the entanglement of the American “New Right” and the AFL-CIO leadership, whose American Institute for Free Labor Development and other regional equivalents received substantial funds from private conservative sources and the National Endowment for Democracy. In essence, Lovestone had established an intelligence community beachhead within labor for such successors, within the AFL-CIO leadership, as Meany’s adviser Max Shachtman (architect of AFL-CIO support for the Vietnam War) and teacher’s union president Albert Shanker (foremost international neoconservative union leader of the 1980s). Charles Zimmerman, in his later years, was chair of Social Democrats USA, a socialist split with highly placed representatives and allies in the Reagan administration’s foreign policy apparatus.

Bertram Wolfe, himself in later years established at the Hoover Institution, much-touted “think tank” of the “Reagan Revolution,” played a similar if considerably less significant role in Russian studies. His notable Three Who Made a Revolution, the most scholarly of the early anticommunist studies, may be said to have disappeared among the flock of post-1960s works of varying ideological character.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 brought a final chapter to the Lovestone saga. The impact of the Lovestone group’s working within the AFL-CIO and spending tens of millions of dollars had had scarce influence on the collapse of Communism. Nor did their affiliates successfully displace former government-guided and now independent Communist unions. But the very intensity of this effort, combined with a relative indifference to the steady AFL-CIO decline at home, fed the rift with labor reformers. Shortly after John Sweeney succeeded Lane Kirkland as president of the AFL-CIO in 1995, the International Department was defunded to a large degree and its longtime leaders retired. The new “Solidarity” department of the AFL-CIO, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, would have an uneven record of support for unionists around the globe, including at least some notable for their support of what was termed “American interests.”

Alexander, Robert. The Right Opposition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.

Buhle, Paul. “Spies Everywhere.” Radical History Review 67 (Winter 1997).

Carew, Anthony. American Labour’s Cold War Abroad: From Deep Freeze to Detente, 1945-1970. Edmonton: AU Press, Athabasca University, 2018.

Morgan, Ted. A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist and Spymaster. New York: Random House, 1999.

Rathbun, Ben. The Point Man: Irving Brown and the Deadly Post-1945 Struggle for Europe and Africa. Montreux: Minerva Press, 1996.

Register of the Jay Lovestone papers. Online Archive of California. https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf4q2nb077/