More subtle than we knew: The AFL in the british caribbean

Abstract

The first thing that comes to mind when most of us think about the AFL-CIO’s Cold War foreign policy is the reflexive anticommunism of its leaders such as George Meany, the honest plumber who quickly turned from fighting Nazis to fighting Communists, and the man who tutored him on the international Communist conspiracy, Jay Lovestone. Lovestone was the former leader of the Communist Party USA. By the 1950s, he had become such an anti-Communist that he called the CIA a bunch of "fizz kids" because their anticommunism lacked seriousness in analysis and operation.1