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
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Notes
Anthony Carew, “The American Labor Movement in Fizzland: The Free Trade Union Committee and the CIA,” Labor History 39 (1998); Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster (New York: Random House, 1999). The author would like to thank Ohio Northern University for providing funding that helped pay for research on this chapter, Geert van Goethem and Amsab for hosting the conference that made this book possible, and Dr. Patricia Sione of Cornell University’ Kheel Center for her kindness in facilitating research.
Stephen Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
On Cheddi Jagan, see in particular Clem Seecharan, Sweetening “Bitter Sugar”: Jock Campbell, The Booker Reformer in British Guiana, 1934–66 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2005);
Colin A. Palmer, Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power: British Guiana’s Struggle for Independence (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010);
Cheddi Jagan, The West on Trial (St. John’s, Antigua: Hansib, 1997 ed., 1966).
Romualdi, Presidents and Peons: Recollections of a Labor Ambassador in Latin America (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1967).
Gordon K. Lewis, The Growth of the Modern West Indies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), 289–309.
In this vast literature, see in particular, Nicholas Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s classified account of its operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999);
Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992);
Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982).
O. Nigel Bolland, Struggles for Freedom: Essays on Slavery, Colonialism, and Culture in the Caribbean and Central America (Belize City: Angelus Press, 1997), 275–277;
Robert J. Alexander with Eldon M. Parker, A History of Organized Labor in the English-Speaking West Indies (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 79–82.
Governor of British Honduras to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, “Monthly Political Report: September, 1951,” October 7, 1951, CO 1031/136, “Monthly Political Reports for British Honduras,” National Archives (United Kingdom) (henceforth, NAUK); Weekly Contributions: latin American Division, ORE, CIA, February 28, 1950; Assad Shoman, Belize’s Independence and Decolonization in Latin America: Guatemala, Britain, and the UN (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 48, 49–50, 57.
Christopher Andrew, Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 459–460.
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© 2013 Robert Anthony Waters, Jr. and Geert van Goethem
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Waters, R.A. (2013). More Subtle than We Knew: The AFL in the British Caribbean. In: Waters, R.A., van Goethem, G. (eds) American Labor’s Global Ambassadors. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137360229_10
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