Abstract
In January 1947, Serafino Romualdi led an American Federation of Labor (AFL) delegation to Buenos Aires. Assigned to Latin America as the AFL’s regional representative that year, Romualdi sought to foster an ideology of liberal labor internationalism that called for the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively for labor independence from the state, and for the defense of private property rights. An Italian immigrant who had fled Mussolini’s Italy, he fiercely opposed both Fascism and communism, but found the specter of such “totalitarian” ideologies lurking under the surface of existing international labor organizations (most notably the World Federation of Trade Unions, WFTU). Furthermore, he believed that freedom was synonymous with liberalism and that formal ties between labor and the state served to erode freedom. Romualdi spoke fluent Spanish, traveled frequently throughout Latin America, and enjoyed substantial high-level contacts with the region’s political and trade union leaders. He was, in other words, uniquely suited to the job. Through Romualdi’s efforts, the AFL—and after 1955 the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations)—became active in efforts to liberalize Latin America’s trade union movements even before the US government provided a systemic commitment to such efforts.1
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Notes
Because this chapter analyzes AFL and, after the 1955 merger, AFL-CIO activities from the 1940s to the 1960s, and because it is primarily organized thematically rather than chronologically, I will frequently use the abbreviation AFL/AFL-CIO. Prior to 1955, the CIO was also active in the international labor movement. However, it differed ideologically from the AFL and, after the merger, the AFL officials led the Confederation’s international efforts. On Romualdi’s background as well as the background of the AFL’s activities in Latin America after World War II, see Serafino Romualdi, Presidents and Peons: Recollections of a Labor Ambassador in Latin America (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1967).
Romualdi, 49–63; Glenn J. Dorn, Peronistas and New Dealers: U.S.-Argentine Rivalry and the Western Hemisphere, 1946–1950 (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 2005), especially 140–146.
Ibid; U.S. Department of State, Blue Book on Argentina: Consultation among the American Republics with Respect for the Argentine Situation: Memorandum of the United States Government (New York: Greenberg, 1946);
Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946–1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) offers the most complete exploration of Argentine labor history during the Peronist and post-Peronist period.
Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008);
Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds., A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010);
Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile & the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). For a sense of some of the work being done at the intersection of US foreign relations history and labor history, see “Special Forum: Workers, Labor, and War: New Directions in the History of American Foreign Relations,” and the commentary on that forum, in Diplomatic History 34 (2010).
John Milton CooperJr. , Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900–1920 (New York: Norton, 1990), 3;
Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008).
David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999);
Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1962);
Edmund F. Wehrle, Between a River and a Mountain: The AFL-CIO and the Vietnam War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987);
Howell John Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).
Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).
Hogan, The Marshall Plan; Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
Robert H. Zieger, The CLO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
A fast-growing literature is developing that deals with the effect of modernization theory on US foreign policy. See especially Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000);
David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003);
Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
The most important work of modernization theory from a policymaking perspective is W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1960).
The AFL-CIO opposed dictatorships throughout the hemisphere and regularly provided statements against those from a variety of ideological backgrounds, from Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic to Fidel Castro in Cuba. In addition to ibid, see Statement by the AFL-CIO Executive Council on Meeting of American Foreign Ministers, August 16, 1960, RG 1–027 Office of the President, 58/6, Reports/Serafino Romauldi [sic], 1960, GMMA; Draft Resolution Submitted by Committee on Inter-American Affairs, “The Danger of Communist Infiltration,” undated, RG 1–027 Office of the President, 58/5 Reports/Serafino Romauldi [sic], 1958, GMMA; Minutes, AFL-CIO Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs, January 29, 1957, RG 1–027 Office of the President, 58/4, Reports/Serafino Romauldi [sic], 1956–1957, GMMA; Stephen G. Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
For a useful discussion of democracy in Latin America, especially between World War II and the late 1940s, see Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1–18;
Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, “Introduction: The Postwar Conjuncture in Latin America,” and “Conclusion: The Postwar Conjecture in Latin America and its Consequences,” in Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944–1948, eds., Bethell and Roxborough, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Bethell and Roxborough’s argument can also be found in Bethell and Roxborough, “The Impact of the Cold War on Latin America,” in Origins of the Cold War: An International History, eds., Melvyn P. Leffler and David S. Painter (New York, 1994).
Minutes, AFL-CIO Inter-American Affairs Committee, August 16, 1960, RG 1–027 Office of the President, 58/6, Reports/Serafino Romauldi [sic], 1960, GMMA; Statement by the AFL-CIO Executive Committee, “The Latin American Aid Program,” February 28, 1961, RG 1–038 Office of the President, 61/20, ICFTU-ORIT, 1961–1962, GMMA. Memo, Rubottom to Dillon, April 23, 1959, FRUS, 1958–1960, 5: 557–559; Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 1956–1961: The White House Years (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 516;
Burton Kaufman, Trade and Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy, 1953–1961 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
Latham, 69–108; Eisenhower, The Wine Is Bitter, xii; Jeffrey F. Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2007); Statement by the AFL-CIO Executive Council, “Political Relationship with Latin America,” February 28, 1961, RG 1–038 Office of the President, 61/20, ICFTU-ORIT, 1961–1962, GMMA; Report, Conference of AFL-CIO Unions Involved in Inter-American Activities, undated (October 9, 1961 meeting), RG 1–038, Office of the President, 61/20, ICFTU-ORIG, 1961–1962, GMMA; Statement by the AFL-CIO Executive Council on the Alliance for Progress, February 26, 1962, RG 1–038 Office of the President, 61/20, ICFTU-ORIT, 1961–1962, GMMA (“necessary means…” quotation). The Alliance for Progress included a labor advisory committee on which the AFL-CIO was represented. See also Statement by the AFL-CIO Executive Council on the Punta del Este Meeting of American Foreign Ministers, February 26, 1962, RG 1–038 Office of the President, 61/20, ICFTU-ORIT, 1961–1962, GMMA, which specifically declared Cuba as incompatible with the inter-American system and endorsed that nation’s expulsion from the Organization of America States.
For an overview of Latin America’s Cold War, with emphasis on episodes of violence, see Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
An alternative interpretation is provided by Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
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© 2013 Robert Anthony Waters, Jr. and Geert van Goethem
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Walcher, D. (2013). Reforming Latin American Labor: The AFL-CIO and Latin America’s Cold War. In: Waters, R.A., van Goethem, G. (eds) American Labor’s Global Ambassadors. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137360229_8
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