This is the second of two volumes, and it is not a pamphlet. It runs to more than two hundred thousand words, sixteen chapters, a bibliography of several hundred titles, a subject index and a name index. It was produced by a named editorial board — B. Y. Mikhailov as editor-in-chief, with N. V. Mostovets and G. N. Sevostyanov — and, unusually for a Progress title, the preface tells you exactly who wrote what. Mikhailov took the preface, Chapters I–IV, VI, XVI and the conclusion; I. I. Zhmykhova took Chapters V, IX, XIV and part of VI; V. A. Korolkov Chapters VII and VIII; A. P. Medvedev X and XI; P. A. Shishkin XII, XIII, XV and part of XVI; A. N. Shlepakov part of XIII. The preface also corrects the attribution of Volume I, because the English edition reorganised its chapters. These are academic historians of the Academy of Sciences establishment, and the preface says they worked in the National Archives of the United States, in the archives and libraries of the major American unions, and at the Catholic University in Washington, Cornell, Wisconsin and California. The bibliography bears this out: it cites Record Group 202, the records of the National War Labor Board, down to the individual folder.
Volume I ended in 1939. This one covers late 1939 to 1965, and the preface says a third volume on the postwar period was "presently in preparation."
The date on the spine is 1979. The date of the text is not. The Russian title page reproduced in the front matter reads Istoriya rabochego dvizheniya v SShA v noveishee vremya, tom vtoroi (1939–1965), and everything inside the book points to the turn of the 1970s. The American secondary literature in the bibliography effectively closes around 1968–70; the latest American item is the New Program of the Communist Party U.S.A., New York, 1970. The conclusion carries the narrative down to a Teamsters–UAW conference of May 1969 and then says so explicitly: "Events in 1965–1970, which go beyond the chronological bounds of the present study, only confirm the need to take this development into account." The apparent exceptions prove the rule — the Marx, Engels and Lenin citations run to Progress English editions of 1973, 1974, 1975 and 1976, which is the ordinary translation-desk practice of swapping Russian references for whatever English Progress volumes were on the shelf when the translator sat down. Strip those out and you have a text finished around 1970 or 1971, in the early Brezhnev years, and exported in English nine years later. Read it as a book of about 1970. It reads like one: the last living presence in it is George Meany, and the future it gestures at is the Alliance for Labor Action.
A great deal, and the reader should have that first.
Soviet labour history of the United States had one large structural advantage over most of what was being written in American history departments at the same date: it assumed that class conflict was the organising fact of American life and went looking for it. That assumption is a distortion when it is applied mechanically. Applied to the American 1940s, it produced narrative history of a subject that American academic historiography was, at the time, largely neglecting. The chapters on the wartime strike wave, on the Little Steel formula and the wage freeze, on the 1943 coal crisis and the passage of the Smith–Connally Act over Roosevelt's veto, on the government seizure of Montgomery Ward, on the great strike upsurge of 1945–46 and on Taft-Hartley are researched, dated, sourced from The CIO News, the AFL Proceedings, the union press and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and they are readable. When the authors say that in 1943 there were 3,752 work stoppages, of which 430 were in coal, accounting for nearly seventy per cent of all man-days lost, they footnote it. That is what a working historian does.
The book is also, on its own terms, honest about the limits of what labour won. It does not pretend the strikes succeeded. Its verdict on Taft-Hartley is that "reaction succeeded in imposing the Taft-Hartley Act on the working class. This was a serious defeat for the broad masses of working people," and it lays the defeat at the door of a labour movement that was politically too weak to stop it.
The treatment of Black workers is better than the period's reputation would suggest, and better than a good deal of the American labour history then in print. The book gives the constitutional colour bars of twelve AFL international unions, sets them against the 1940 UAW constitution, and then goes to the wage data: of 9,825 Black workers at Ford, 6,457 were on the heaviest jobs, in the foundry, the rolling shops and at the open furnaces; at Ford-owned Briggs the rates for jobs that had become the "privilege" of Negroes ran between 25 and 60 cents an hour against a Ford average of 90 cents. It gives the founding of the National Negro Labor Council at Cincinnati in 1951, an organisation that would wait decades for serious American scholarly attention. It records that of the twenty-nine members of the AFL-CIO executive council only two were Black, and it reports A. Philip Randolph's three resolutions at the 1959 convention and Meany's answer to him: "Who the hell appointed you guardian of the Black members of America?" (The book is retranslating from Russian; the phrasing American accounts give is slightly different. The substance is not in dispute, and Meany's outburst is the single most quoted sentence of that convention.)
And there is Chapter VIII, "US Labor in the Cold War Period. The CIO Purge," which is the best chapter in the book and one of the reasons this volume is worth republishing. It narrates the destruction of the CIO left in 1949–50 as what it was: a purge, carried out by a bureaucracy, at the behest of a foreign policy. It quotes the 1949 convention resolution against the United Electrical Workers — "We can no longer tolerate within the family of CIO the Communist Party masquerading as a labor union" — and calls it what it is. It gives the constitutional amendment that armed the executive board with a power of expulsion. It notes Harry Bridges's warning that the amendment "put an end to real democracy in the CIO," and it draws the parallel the expelled unions themselves drew, that the Murrays and Haywoods were now doing to them exactly what the Greens and Wolls had done to the CIO thirteen years earlier. The conclusion counts the cost: "the expulsion of progressive unions, with a total of over a million members." A reader who wants to know what was done to the eleven unions, and who does not want it minimised, will find the account here more forthright than in a good deal of mid-century American writing.
That is the case for the book. It should be taken seriously, because everything that follows depends on the reader believing that this introduction is not simply hostile.
Turn to Chapter I, where the Smith Act is introduced. The book gives the date correctly — the Alien Registration Act, passed 28 June 1940 — names Howard W. Smith of Virginia, summarises the provisions, and then says this:
During World War II it was directed against espionage and subversive organizations of the fascist countries; however, it was later used by reactionary circles in the struggle against progressive, democratic working-class organizations, particularly the Communist Party.
Every clause of that sentence is false in the same direction. The Smith Act was not, during the war, "directed against espionage and subversive organizations of the fascist countries." Its first use was against a trade union. On 1 April 1941 a federal grand jury at St Paul, Minnesota, returned an indictment naming twenty-nine people, beginning: "one Vincent Ray Dunne, Carl Skoglund, James P. Cannon, Farrell Dobbs, Miles B. Dunne, Felix Morrow, Grace Carlson, Oscar Coover, Harry DeBoer, Jake Cooper, Max Geldman, Carlos Hudson, Alfred Russell, Edward Palmquist, Rose Seiler, Albert Goldman, Oscar Schoenfeld, George Frosig, Emil Hanson, Dorothy Schultz, Kelly Postal, Clarence Hamel, Carl Kuehn, Roy Orgon, Ray Rainbolt, Grant Dunne, Harold Swanson, Walter Hagstrom and Nick Wagner" — officers and members of the Socialist Workers Party and of Minneapolis Teamsters Local 544. The text of that indictment was printed in Fourth International, vol. 2 no. 7, August 1941. Eighteen of them were convicted. They were sentenced, as the Fourth International editorial of February 1945 records, "on the very day that the United States declared war," and they served thirteen months; six came out of Danbury and Sandstone in October 1944 and the remaining twelve were paroled on 24 January 1945.
These were not obscure people. Local 544 had been Local 574, and in 1934 its leadership — the Dunne brothers and Carl Skoglund, working through an extra-legal organising committee because they were too new in the union to hold office — had led the Minneapolis truck drivers through the three strikes that, with Toledo and San Francisco, broke the deadlock of the early Depression and made the industrial union upsurge possible. James P. Cannon's account of it, "The Great Minneapolis Strikes," appeared in Fourth International in May 1944 and is the eighth chapter of his History of American Trotskyism. What brought the prosecution in 1941 was that Local 544 had voted to leave the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, that Daniel Tobin appealed to the White House, and that the administration wanted the leading organised opponents of its war policy off the board before the war began.
Searching this volume for any of it returns nothing. "Minneapolis" appears twice — once as a city where a peace committee was formed in the late 1940s, once as a place of publication in the bibliography. "Local 544" appears once, and it is a General Motors local in Pittsburgh. Dunne, Skoglund, Cannon and Dobbs are not in the name index. The Socialist Workers Party is not in the subject index; the two entries under "Socialist Workers' Party" refer to an Italian split of 1947.
There is a reason for the silence sharper than mere neglect, and the reader is entitled to it. On 16 August 1941 the Daily Worker published its judgement on the Minnesota indictments. Fourth International quoted it the following October:
The American people, whose independence as a nation, together with that of the people of Great Britain and the Soviet Union is endangered and at stake in the fight for the defeat of Nazi Germany, can find no objection to the destruction of the Fifth Column in this country. On the contrary, they must insist upon it. The leaders of the Trotskyist organization which operates under the false name of 'Socialist Workers Party,' deserve no more support from labor and friends of national security than do the Nazis who camouflage their party under the false name of 'National Socialist Working Party.'
The Communist Party of the United States welcomed the first prosecution under the Smith Act. Eight years later, in 1948 and 1949, its own leaders were indicted and convicted under the same statute, and this book narrates those trials at length, with real indignation and with a proper eye for Judge Medina's slum properties. It also narrates, sympathetically and in detail, Earl Browder's own imprisonment: "On March 27, 1941, he was arrested and sentenced to four years in jail." March 1941 — the same season, the same administration, the same Attorney General. One prosecution is in the book. The other is not. That is not an oversight in a work of this scale, with this apparatus, by historians who had read the American union press.
The second problem is the 1939–41 line, and here the falsification is done not by an assertion but by a chronology.
The book's Chapter I is titled "Labor and the War in Europe. 'Keep America Out!'" and it argues, accurately, that isolationism was the dominant mood of American workers in 1939–41. It then places the Communist Party inside that mood while claiming it stood outside it. "From the very first days of the war it condemned isolationism and passiveness and demanded vigorous US action to restore peace." Two sentences later: "Time and again it declared that the war in Europe was the second imperialist war." Both statements are in the same paragraph. The 1940 platform is quoted straight: "Not a cent, not a gun, not a man for war preparations and the imperialist war. Resist the militarization and armaments program."
What the book will not say is when, or why, that stopped being the line. It manages this with one sentence: "In the second half of 1940, transformation of the imperialist war into an anti-fascist, people's war became increasingly apparent." The date is wrong and is wrong on purpose. The Communist International held that the war was an imperialist war until 22 June 1941. The American party's line changed when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and it changed within days. Backdating the transformation to "the second half of 1940" allows the reversal to be described as the gradual ripening of an objective process rather than as an instruction. The word "pact" does appear, in a single defensive paragraph — the Soviet Union, having been failed at Munich, "was left with no other alternative than to delay a confrontation with fascist Germany by concluding a nonaggression treaty with it." There is nothing about the secret additional protocol signed on the night of 23 August 1939, or about Poland, or about what the Comintern's sections were told to do with the line they had been carrying since 1935.
The point is not that the Soviet Union should have had no diplomacy. It is that a book about the American labour movement in 1939–41 which cannot name the day the American party changed sides on the central political question of those years has disqualified itself as a guide to those years.
Chapter VI narrates the no-strike pledge fairly at the level of institutions — Hillman's memorandum of 24 November 1941, the December conference, the founding of the War Labor Board on 12 January 1942, the Combined Labor War Board. It even concedes the resistance:
However, it would be an oversimplification to say that all American workers were enthusiastic about making the sacrifices involved on the no-strike decision. There were those who did not agree with this decision and demanded that work be stopped if employers rejected union demands... Even in this militant union, where democratic traditions were always strong, the politically conscious workers and their leaders had to work hard to gain acceptance of the decision not to strike during wartime. Resolutions to that effect twice failed to pass at UAW conventions.
Read that again with the vocabulary of the book in mind. "The politically conscious workers and their leaders" is this book's standing phrase for the Communists and those around them. The sentence therefore says, without meaning to, exactly what the American Trotskyists said at the time: that the left in the UAW spent the war working to hold the ranks to a pledge the ranks did not want. What the book omits is everything that made the charge stick — the Communist-backed "incentive pay" proposal beaten at the October 1943 UAW convention, the Party's denunciation of the 1943 miners, the manoeuvres at the 1944 convention where a rank-and-file caucus took thirty-six per cent of the vote for outright repudiation of the pledge and was then out-procedured. That last account was written up in Fourth International, vol. 5 no. 10, October 1944, by Art Preis, who described "the Addes-Frankensteen-Stalinist unpopular proposal to approve the speedup 'incentive pay' system" and the "shyster trick" by which reaffirmation was finally carried.
Art Preis is the one American Trotskyist this book acknowledges, and it does not know that it is doing so. In the historiography chapter it takes up Labor's Giant Step: Twenty Years of the CIO (New York, 1964), notes that Preis was "a long-time contributor to the weekly Militant, in which the first nine chapters of his book were published," and then explains: "The weekly was the mouthpiece of the Socialist Party, once influential in the American labor movement." It was not. The Militant was, and is, the paper of the Socialist Workers Party — the party of the eighteen Minneapolis defendants — and Preis was a member of it and its labour editor. The book goes on to say that his views were "formed under the influence of right-wing Socialists and avowed Trotskyites," which loses the affiliation a second time, and to complain that "primitively and slanderously he divides the CIO leaders into 'Stalinists' and their opponents."
Whether this is a translation slip or a deliberate laundering, the effect is one and the same. The book has picked up the single most substantial history of the CIO written from the American revolutionary left, a book which devotes considerable space to the Minneapolis strikes and to the Smith Act prosecution — and has managed to review it without the word "Socialist Workers Party" appearing anywhere. Then the conclusion lists the standard-bearers of the American revolutionary tradition: "Eugene Debs, William Haywood, John Reed, Charles Ruthenberg, William Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Eugene Dennis, Henry Winston and Gus Hall." Two of those men were still alive and running the Communist Party when the list was drawn up. None of the men who led the Minneapolis strikes is on it.
The book's account of the Browder crisis is its longest sustained piece of political history, and much of the detail is accurate: the Bridgeport speech of 12 December 1943, the January 1944 National Committee sessions, Browder's Madison Square Garden speech of 10 January, the dissolution of the Party into the Communist Political Association at the twelfth convention on 20 May 1944, Foster's isolation, the Duclos article in Cahiers du communisme in April 1945, its republication in the Daily Worker on 24 May, the reconstitution of the Party at the thirteenth convention in July, and Browder's expulsion in February 1946. It gives the membership loss: 63,044 in mid-1944, 52,824 by January 1946.
The frame around the detail is a fiction, and it is the standard one. Browder is a personal deviation — "Browder and his followers proved to be deserters of this kind," a right-opportunist faction analogous to Lovestone in 1927, whose "almost dictatorial behavior" stunned an unprepared membership, and against whom a healthy party eventually asserted itself with fraternal help from the French comrades. On this account the Party's wartime line was never in question; only Browder's postwar perspective was.
The contemporaneous answer to precisely this account was published in Fourth International, vol. 6 no. 7, July 1945, while the American party was still conducting the discussion. It makes two points that this book cannot. The first is that the Daily Worker had acclaimed the line before it reviled it: on 12 January 1944 the paper called Browder's programme "creative Marxism – unhampered by ritual mechanical orthodoxy – a free Marxist mind at work," and Browder himself, presenting it to the May 1944 convention, said it contained "no element of socialism in it." The convention gave him an ovation and endorsed it unanimously. The second is that Foster and Duclos both approved the general line of Browder's wartime policy and confined their objection to the postwar forecast — that the American party's real turn had come in June 1941, "after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union," and that neither the critique of 1945 nor the reconstitution of 1946 touched it. Whatever one makes of the polemic, the documentary point stands on its own: a party that unanimously endorses a policy in May 1944 and unanimously condemns it as a betrayal fourteen months later has told you something about how its decisions were arrived at, and this book's chronology is arranged so that the reader will not notice.
Which returns us to the best chapter. Chapter VIII describes the expulsion of the CIO left with real force but cannot answer the question it raises. Eleven unions with over a million members, entrenched in electrical manufacturing, on the waterfront, in metal mining, in furs, were broken in about a year with very little resistance from the rest of the movement. The book's explanation is external — the cold war, the anti-Communist hysteria, the Taft-Hartley affidavits, a working class "disoriented" and standing "on the sidelines." All of that is true and none of it is sufficient.
The answer that the book cannot print was printed in Fourth International, vol. 10 no. 11, December 1949, in an editorial review of the Cleveland convention. It defends the expelled unions without reservation — the expulsions were a bureaucratic seizure of the CIO, the "thought-control" precedent would be turned next on anyone who fought the leadership on purely trade union grounds, and the National Maritime Union proved it within weeks. And then it says why the left had no defence:
The measure of Stalinist betrayal can be gauged from the direction of the attack against them at the CIO convention. It came from the left! The Stalinists were pilloried for their strikebreaking at Montgomery-Ward during the war, for their proposal for a permanent no-strike pledge, for the miserable agreements signed by UE, for lack of democracy in their unions, for serving the interests of the Soviet foreign office rather than the American workers.
And: "The Stalinists have been struck down with a weapon they themselves fashioned – slavish obedience to 'CIO policy.'" A movement that had spent a decade teaching that opposition to the leadership was disloyalty could not appeal to the right of opposition when the leadership turned on it. That is the causal link between Chapter VI and Chapter VIII of this book, and it is the link the book is constructed to break.
One further silence deserves naming, because the book's record on Black workers is otherwise so much better than average. The hate strikes of 1943 and the Detroit riot of June 1943 — the largest violent event in American domestic life during the war, fought out in and around the war plants — are absent. The word "riot" is applied only to the 1960s.
Take the research and discard the chronology. The chapters on wages, on the Little Steel formula, on the strike statistics, on Taft-Hartley, on the scientific and technological revolution and its effect on employment, on discrimination in hiring and in the unions, and above all on the CIO purge, are the work of historians who did the reading and went to the archives. The chapters that touch the Communist Party's own conduct — Chapters I, III and VI, and the historiography chapter — are the work of the same historians writing under a constraint they could not name, and should be read against the record.
The record is available. Art Preis, Labor's Giant Step: Twenty Years of the CIO (1964), is the book this volume attacks and misattributes, and it is where the American reader will find the Minneapolis strikes, the wartime revolt against the pledge and the Smith Act case set out at length by a participant. James P. Cannon's The History of American Trotskyism carries the 1934 strikes in the words of one of the people who directed them. The files of Fourth International between 1940 and 1956 run exactly parallel to this book's subject, month by month, and are cited above by volume, number and date; the Minneapolis indictment is printed in full in the issue for August 1941.
What this volume was for is not obscure. Somebody in Moscow at the end of the 1960s wanted a full-dress scholarly history of the American working class that would establish two things: that the United States was riven by class conflict its own historians would not describe, and that the Communist Party of the United States, whatever its misfortunes, had been the continuous revolutionary thread through all of it. The first proposition is largely true and the book proves it well. The second required removing a union, a strike, a prosecution and a party from the historical record, and it is in the removals — not in the arguments — that the book tells you most about the institution that commissioned it.