AFL and AFL-CIO International Affairs Department, Jay Lovestone Files

Born Jacob Liebstein in Lithuania on December 24, 1898, Jay Lovestone immigrated to the United States with his family in his first year. As a teenager in the New York City public schools, Lovestone embraced Socialism and, in 1919, a year after graduating from the City College of New York, helped found the American Communist Party. In 1921, he became editor of The Communist, the American Communist Party's official publication and in 1922 assumed the position of national secretary for the party. Lovestone, an active participant in the factional disputes within the Communist Party during the 1920s, was ousted from leadership of the American Communist Party in 1929 by Joseph Stalin for his anti-Stalin views and for his support of Nicholai Bukharin in the Comintern. That same year, Lovestone and his followers founded the Communist Party of the United States, later known as the Independent Labor League of America. This anti-Stalin group was widely known as "Lovestonites." The group disbanded in 1940.

Jay Lovestone began his relationship with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in the late 1930s. In 1943, he accepted his first major position in the labor movement when he became the director of the International Ladies' and Garment Workers' Union's (ILGWU) International Affairs Department.

By 1940, Lovestone had concluded that the Communist movement, which he once had considered the salvation of the working class, was a totalitarian conspiracy devised by a Soviet leadership intent on world conquest. In the early 1940s Lovestone was a leader of the Committee to Defend America, an organization supporting England and other allies. In 1943, he accepted his first major position in the labor movement when he became the director of the International Ladies' and Garment Workers' Union's (ILGWU) International Affairs Department. The following year he became the executive secretary of the Free Trade Union Committee, an organization that was directly opposed to the Communist-influenced World Federation of Trade Unions.

By 1944, Lovestone had left his position at the ILGWU to become the executive secretary of the AFL's newly formed Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC). Established as a sub-committee of the AFL's Labor League for Human Rights (LLHR), the FTUC worked to provide assistance to groups and individuals around the world who expressed an interest in establishing "free democratic trade union movements."

In 1949, many Western labor organizations formed the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), and Lovestone assumed the title of executive secretary and worked there until 1963.

From 1958 to 1963, he was international publications director and assistant international affairs director of the AFL-CIO. Throughout this period, Lovestone acted as an advisor to the AFL and later the AFL-CIO on foreign affairs' matters.

In 1963, Lovestone was named director of the AFL-CIO's International Affairs Department (IAD), a position he held until his retirement in 1974. The AFL-CIO formed the IAD after the 1955 merger to promote what it termed "free trade unionism" throughout the world. IAD tried to encourage cross-cultural understanding, cooperation, and awareness among international labor groups and assisted developing countries and their nascent labor unions through educational exchange programs. Succeeding George Brown (1955-1958) and Michael Ross (1958-1963), Lovestone served as the IAD's director from 1963 until his retirement in 1974.

During his tenure, he helped establish the AFL-CIO's reputation as one of America's staunchest anticommunist organizations. He cooperated with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in its European and Latin American anticommunist activities ; participated in the organization of the American Institute for Free Labor Development in 1961 and developed its program to counter Communist influence in Latin America, train labor leaders, and promote American-style union programs; and organized the African-American Labor Center, AIFLD's African counterpart.

Upon his retirement, Lovestone acted as a consultant to the AFL-CIO and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. He died in 1990.

Notes:

Washington Post, Saturday, March 10, 1990.

Tony Carew, Labour Under the Marshall Plan: The Politics of Productivity and the Marketing of Management Science (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), pp. 59-69; Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992), pp. 238-39, 295-97.