Undoing the Liberal World Order: Progressive Ideals and Political Realities Since World War II 9780231554466

Citation preview

U N D O I N G T H E L I B E R A L WO R L D O R D E R

UNDOING THE LIBERAL WORLD ORDER

PROGRESSIVE IDEALS and

POLITICAL REALITIES SINCE W O R L D WA R I I

LEON FINK

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2022 Leon Fink All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fink, Leon, 1948– author. Title: The liberal world order : democratic ambitions and political realities since World War II / Leon Fink. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021027458 (print) | LCCN 2021027459 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231202244 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231202251 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231554466 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Liberalism—United States—History—20th century. | Internationalism. | United States—Foreign relations—20th century. Classification: LCC E744 .F525 2022 (print) | LCC E744 (ebook) | DDC 320.51097309/04—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027458 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027459

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover image: Dreamstime

TO S U E , F O R M A K I N G WO R K I N G F R O M H O M E L E SS WO R K A N D M O R E H O M E

•

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: LEFT- LIBERAL APOSTLES IN THE COLD WAR ERA 1

I. LABOR-LIBERALISM AND T H E P O ST WA R O R D E R 1 5 1. THE BRETTON WOODS BOOMERANG: LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM, 1944– 2016 17

2. THE GOOD POSTWAR: GERMAN WORKER RIGHTS, 1945– 1950 46

3. THE LIBERAL EMBRACE OF LABOR ZIONISM: ISRAEL, 1948– 1973 75

viiiCO NTENTS

I I . L I B E R A L A N T I CO M M U N I S M 9 5 4. ANTICOMMUNISM AS SOCIAL POLICY: COSTA RICA, 1944– 1980 97

5. SIREN SONG OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: U.S. MISSIONS TO INDIA, 1952– 1975 126

I I I . L I B E R A L N AT I O N A L I S M O N T R I A L 1 6 3 6. THE QUEST FOR A TWO- STATE SOLUTION: ISRAEL, 1973– 2000 165

7. THE LONG ARM OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: SOUTH AFRICA, 1970– 2000 191

CONCLUSION: BEYOND HUMANITARIANISM 227

Acknowledgments 237 Notes 245 Index 295

INTRODUCTION Left-Liberal Apostles in the Cold War Era

A

merican liberals once envisioned a world that would be free, democratic, and prosperous. A combination of military and economic might combined with confidence in the nation’s political ideals convinced many that the decades following World War II would be stamped as an “American century.” Largely accepting their nation’s responsibility to resist communist influence while expanding trade around the globe, liberals nevertheless preferred to think of the U.S. role in the world as one of sustenance, not dominance. This book is an attempt to explain both why the postwar liberal dream proved a fantasy and why we should not let it go. More recently, in keeping with global trends, those in the U.S. centerleft have largely reined in their ambitions, attempting to protect the country’s most basic national security and economic interests at the least possible cost while largely giving up any attempt to sway others to our values or long-term goals. The unipolar world that presented itself once the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 has proved far less amenable to American initiative than anticipated. Rather than confidently presiding over a new world order, would-be progressive reformers have found themselves reacting to a myriad of new threats and dilemmas, be it collapsing Third World states, humanitarian interventions, Islamic radicalism, the fracture of a united Europe, climate denigration, a global pandemic, or the rise of China as a contending world hegemon.

2INTRO D U C TIO N

The recent neoisolationism is not only a product of Trumpian populism or hypernationalism. Although Barack Obama’s trips to Berlin and then Cairo in 2008 and 2009 raised hopes of a new era of liberal democracy and international idealism, by the time he left office, ethnonationalism was on the rise everywhere. Today’s Democrats, as witnessed most recently by both the 2020 presidential election campaign and the early months of the Biden administration—while expounding energetically on many domestic issues—have had little to say when it comes to world affairs, except for where and how fast we can pull back from current military commitments. Trade and climate change are, to be sure, two exceptions—where domestic concerns inevitably spill across borders— yet, even here, there is more hand-wringing on the liberal side of the political spectrum than expansive or visionary building plans. This is a sharp change from the half century that followed World War  II. American liberals, in particular, had plans for a better world. They championed the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-torn Europe and the Point Four Program for technical assistance to developing countries. Through the Bretton Woods agreements, they advanced a framework to secure a growing global marketplace, free from the shocks of wild currency swings and cushioned against balance-of-payments crises. The same regard for economic abundance plus modest welfarism that had cushioned U.S. society against class conflict could, they believed, prove a convincing bulwark against communist political infiltration. In Germany, the epicenter of some of the greatest of the twentieth century’s tragedies, liberals oversaw the writing of a new, democratic constitution and, closely related to it, the rebuilding of a powerful, democratic labor movement. But democratic state building and economic development—both carried out in the midst of a competitive, sometimes deadly conflict with international communism—proved to be more difficult than liberals imagined. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy in Latin America erased some of the sting of previous American neocolonialism, but fear of communism soon converted much of official U.S. policy into fierce opposition to calls throughout the region for revolutionary change. With a few exceptions, like Costa Rica, social reform regimes fell to right-wing dictatorships across Central America and the Caribbean. Meanwhile, grand liberal initiatives like Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress stumbled.

L E F T- LIBE RAL AP OSTLE S IN TH E COLD WA R ER A 3

Elsewhere in the world, transforming liberal vision into practice proved equally complicated. Amid the postwar refugee crisis in the Middle East, liberals made an early commitment to the refugee state of Israel. But what initially seemed an ideal test case of democratic, even socialdemocratic, development soon confronted complicated and seemingly intractable problems of internal demography as well as regional power politics. The Carter administration’s embrace of “human rights” in the 1970s—itself a reconsideration of the grounds for liberal interventionism in a post–Vietnam War world—despite some early successes soon bogged down in the face of such complexities. Perhaps most dramatically, it yielded the first Camp David Accords and set off a decades-long, frustrating search for a resolution of Arab-Israeli tensions rooted in the concept of dual sovereignty and the search for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In Africa and Asia, liberals generally welcomed the explosion of new, decolonized states and identified with popular demands for democratic self-government as well as economic growth. But, there, too, political realities intervened. Across three decades, American democrats wooed Indian prime minister Nehru with the latest Western development plans. Yet despite the service of three prominent liberal ambassadors— Chester  A. Bowles, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan—little advance was registered on key indices of poverty and social welfare. Even as liberal reformers grew increasingly cynical regarding American aims and capacity for intervention, whether in the form of aid or active military intervention, there were still moments that stoked the fires of a deep-seated liberal idealism, especially when it came to human rights. Perhaps the most successful example of a human rights approach to foreign policy was reflected in the antiapartheid movement, when both liberals and radical social activists pressured the U.S. Congress to impose stringent economic sanctions on South Africa in 1986, helping to free Nelson Mandela from prison and opening a path to multiracial democracy. All told, liberal prescriptions proved imperfect at best and all too often ill-founded if not blatantly hypocritical. In the end, liberals proved themselves if not clueless then largely ineffective in providing solutions that worked. Yet the American postwar reformers were not without

4INTRO D U C TIO N

significant accomplishments. They banished the specter of fascism and established global norms for both economic and political conduct among nations. Promoting principles of religious and racial tolerance at home, liberals willingly embraced a world of cultural difference abroad and rested their own prosperity on the stability of an interdependent global economy. There was once an idealism evident in American foreign policy making that is missing in the politics of today’s global order and without which the American ship of state is rudderless. Neither an outright celebration nor a blanket condemnation of U.S. postwar policy, this book identifies a track of international engagement that has unfortunately slipped from public memory. As the cases discussed in the book demonstrate, when not deflected by military operations or overrun by profit-seeking business interests, American liberals took steps abroad in pursuit of an expansive vision of social and industrial democracy. The connection of U.S. advocates to a broad variety of players and political configurations on the ground defines a swath of historical experience outside the better-known contours of U.S. imperial dominance, a territory of multiple possibilities. Moving through a series of world trouble spots where high-minded ideals of policy makers confronted a messier reality, I come to grips with what went right, what went wrong, and what we might carry forward as lessons for a better future.

R As with most scholarly commitments, this one comes with a personal back story. I thought I was done with “liberalism” years ago. It was true that at age eight (in 1956) I eagerly accompanied my mother into the polling booth and proudly pulled the lever for Adlai Stevenson. As a freshman at Harvard, I remember pointedly refuting the arguments of a canvasser for the Young People’s Socialist League, informing him that his program was neither workable nor necessary. As if to prove my point, by spring 1968, in my sophomore year, I regularly trooped to New Hampshire and then back home to Indiana for the very liberal McCarthy campaign to end the war in Vietnam. But the war did not end, Nixon was elected, and by 1971, only months into a doctoral program in labor history that highlighted the fissures of class conflict in American capitalism, I had had enough. Breaking a period of tension that I thought had

L E F T- LIBERAL APOSTLES IN THE COLD WAR ERA5

grown up between me and my liberal Jewish parents, I wrote home, “Now I freely admit to being a socialist of some stripe with a wideranging critique on many levels of contemporary American society.” “A Marxist analysis,” I assured them, “is the only way to get at complex reality.” Moreover, considering the blindness of liberals to forces like imperialism, to anything but a simplistic attitudinal interpretation of racism, etc., I can only ask, what kind of positive response does liberalism offer today? Even [John Kenneth] Galbraith sees the only possible opening for the Democrats to the left in terms of program. Is it really any wonder that people (especially youth and blacks) have moved so swiftly away from stock liberalism?1

Almost fifty years later, then, why do I want to give the liberals of the postwar era a second look? And especially in the area of foreign policy, where their actions (or inaction) had once so alienated me and many of my peers? A simple answer is that the world has changed and that humane alternatives to a liberal path forward have mostly dried up. Part of the failure was on the left. The bottom-up, democratic social movements that we had counted on to challenge inequality at home and imperialism and militarism abroad proved no match for complex political systems of privilege and control. Almost everywhere one looked, “socialist” regimes abroad collapsed, whether from outside repression (Chile, Dominican Republic), succumbing to Soviet clientelism (Vietnam, Ethiopia), personal authoritarian rule (Zimbabwe, Nicaragua), or some combination of all the above (Cuba). Generally speaking, the “liberation” movements that cozied up to the Russian or Chinese state showed no more respect for democratic processes and individual liberties than their sponsors. Moreover, the collapse of the Soviet empire, for all its longexposed weaknesses, effectively undermined credible counter planning on behalf of any independent Marxist left. Yet the bogeymen of our time are mostly on the right. Wrapped around ethnonationalist and even neofascist populisms, an antiliberal authoritarianism crusades around the world, playing off mass poverty, inequality, and powerlessness among the many. So who will bear the cudgels for a democratic future? Surely, it must be some combination of liberals and social democrats.

6 INTRO D U CTIO N

What’s in a label? In assessing the domestic political world since World War II, Americans may quarrel about the exact meaning of the ideological labels “liberal” and “conservative”—and, more recently, “progressive” and “populist”—but it is clear that they find them useful, even indispensable, descriptors of the contending actors around us. But things are sometimes different when it comes to foreign policy. The terms applied to the domestic sphere rarely appear, let alone dominate, in foreign policy discussions. Whether in the form of consultative congressional “bipartisanship” or deference to a presumed presidential prerogative, foreign policy, however indelicately arrived at, is often projected as a matter of unitary “national interest,” rather than a spillover from domestic political disputes. Even as an untold number of differences and interests regularly divide public opinion and policy makers on any given foreign policy conflict—intervention or not, counterbalancing impacts on U.S. prices and jobs, even identification of allies and adversaries—the issues do not conventionally or commonly resolve themselves along the same axes as domestic politics. Such a gap between conceptions of the “political” and the “diplomatic” took firm root in the early Cold War era and is particularly associated with the pragmatist or “realist” writings of George Kennan, especially American Diplomacy (1951). With an emphasis on international power politics and a wariness of moralistic commitments (as well as disdain for public opinion), diplomatic professionals preferred to see themselves as attempting to define a “clearheaded formulation of policy built on well-defined national goals, displaying a firm grasp of international conditions, and leading to the mobilization of power sufficient to overcome anticipated obstacles and realize the desired goals.”2 Such Cold War sangfroid doubtless found its apotheosis in the international machinations, both productive and disastrous, of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.3 That is not to say, however, that political ideology does not figure prominently within foreign policy thinking and policy making. As Michael Hunt (drawing on the tradition of William Appleman Williams and his Tragedy of American Diplomacy) emphasized in a pathbreaking 1987 study, the very idea of the national interest encompassed “core foreign-policy ideas” amounting to a “civil religion formulated to hold

L E F T- LIBE RAL AP OSTLE S IN TH E COLD WA R ER A 7

an ethnically, racially, regionally, and religiously diverse country together.” With roots in the nineteenth century, American foreign policy thinking, according to Hunt, developed by the mid-twentieth century into a selfrenewing “Cold War ideology” focused on themes of race, antirevolution, and American greatness—in short, an expansionist politics that Hunt initially imagined could be best countered only by an oppositional neoisolationist or “republican” restraint. Just how unsatisfactory was the paradigm of foreign policy ideology defined as engagement versus disengagement, however, was evident in Hunt’s own post-9/11 rethinking. In the 2009 afterword to his study, the author allows that “rather than calling for a more modest foreign policy, I would now praise mid-twentiethcentury U.S. leaders for following a visionary policy that included the Bretton Woods reforms for the international economy, the creation of the United Nations and other international organizations, the assertion of basic human rights . . . and the priority given to economic recovery and relief.” 4 In identifying some of the fissures in postwar policies—“bad” Vietnam and imperialism, “good” Bretton Woods and defense of human rights—Hunt’s analysis opens the door to a wider discussion of the role of ideology and politics in foreign policy than he himself had introduced. At the core of such discussion, I suggest, should be a reconsideration of self-consciously “liberal” values and goals in postwar diplomacy.5 Across the half century and more since the end of World War II, liberal moralism, however sober or misty-eyed, has regularly jostled with pure power politics in the implementation of U.S. policies abroad. From the occupation of West Germany to the battle against apartheid, Undoing the Liberal World Order connects domestic political culture with diplomatic history in a distinctive synthesis. In doing so, it explains why, after a promising start, America’s most ambitious foreign policy initiatives fell flat in the late twentieth century. With a focus on U.S. government leaders, their foreign counterparts, and civil society activists, I aim at once to reclaim the relevance of a liberal vision in world affairs and to identify its limitations when and where they were actually applied. The book moves through a series of world trouble spots where highminded ideals of liberal policy makers confronted a messier reality. Mixing diplomatic history with global political economy as well as the

8 INTRO D U CTIO N

national political histories of the several affected countries, each chapter takes a narrative form that highlights the relation of the liberal tradition to the historical crisis at hand. The elements of liberal democratic internationalism, in short, were internally complex and perhaps even self-contradictory. The conviction that “a world composed of a community of democratic nation-states . . . would contribute by the same token to a peaceful international order”—as originally affirmed by Woodrow Wilson and reaffirmed by Franklin Roosevelt—was sorely tested in the post–World War II decades.6 Both modern nationalism and liberalism, the historian Jill Lepore reminds us, “were formed [in the nineteenth century] out of the same clay.” That “the boundaries of government should coincide in the main with those of nationalities,” John Stuart Mill wrote as early as 1861, “is in general a necessary condition of free institutions.” “National self-determination” was thus how Wilson had projected the most important principle of the post–Great War order, yet the prevalence of power blocs and colonial empires long postponed that dream. In the post–World War II order, the dream could play out on a grander scale.7 But under what principles would a new round of state building and rebuilding proceed? Postwar liberals thought they had the answer. In taking up the rebuilding process in places like Germany and Japan, a sagacious group of New Dealers, as the historian Tony Smith has documented, proposed a menu of democratic reforms that included “strong labor unions, land reform, welfare legislation, notions of racial equality, and government intervention in the economy.” In these countries, moreover, they were able to ally with “many convinced democrats awaiting deliverance from fascism and communism alike.” In much of the rest of the world, and especially in lands still dominated by older, agrarian socioeconomic hierarchies, the liberals were not so fortunate. In 1946, the United Nations numbered thirty-five member states; by 1970, membership, mainly swelled by the newly independent nations, had grown to 127.8 Moreover, it was precisely in these underdeveloped areas, including many lands only newly freed from European colonization, that the Cold War between U.S. and Soviet influence bore down with particular intensity. How, in such circumstances, would liberal policy makers balance commitment to democracy and broadly based social welfare in new nation-states with the impulse to fight communism? Just how far liberals

L E F T- LIBE RAL AP OSTLE S IN TH E COLD WA R ER A 9

were prepared to go down a military, confrontational path against communism and how singular was their commitment to that end versus others would test the principles and define the politics of many contemporaries. It is inevitable that some initial skepticism may surround the very category at issue. Who counts as a liberal—a term often thrown around fast and loose, sometimes with pride but often in denigration—when and where? In identifying postwar liberalism with a more pointedly progressive developmental vision, I am intentionally raising the stakes of judgment about the application of the label. In political science circles, by contrast, it is common to treat the category in more fixed, comparativestructural terms. A recent overview of presidential foreign policy by the international relations expert Joseph  S. Nye  Jr. thus confidently lists every administration from FDR through Obama (albeit with hesitation about Trump) as an extension of the Wilsonian-inspired “liberal international order.”9 In two major works, John Ikenberry similarly sketches the history of a two-hundred-year-old project to build world order, one that has accommodated Americans of widely divergent political views, from hardcore laissez-faire advocates to social democrats to neoliberals. The “open and loosely rule-based” liberal order, by such a yardstick, “can be contrasted with closed and non-rule-based relations—whether geopolitical blocs, exclusive regional spheres, or closed imperial systems.”10 Less in pursuit of a “system” of liberal internationalism than in the fate of left-liberal projects abroad, I train my focus here on foreign policy as an extension of domestic-based political commitments. Hopefully, this distinction need not pose an insurmountable problem for the reader. First, at least in this study, we are looking almost entirely within the ideological precincts and strategic leadership of the Democratic Party. For the early postwar years (encompassing chapters 1–4 on Bretton Woods, Germany, Central America, and Israel), we are talking about the New Dealers and the direct heirs of the Franklin Roosevelt vision of an Atlantic Alliance, a Good Neighbor policy for Latin America, and the fundaments of a peaceful pathway toward economic growth and decolonization of the prewar world of great power empires. In these early chapters I also regularly invoke the role of the Democrats’ most powerful constituency, organized labor. By the time of Vietnam and the consequent split between “hawks” and “doves” in Democratic Party

10 INTRO D U C TIO N

ranks, we will follow most closely the antiwar “left-liberals” (as distinct from “centrists” or “moderates”) who were determined to pursue a vigorous policy toward both peace and economic development despite surrounding Cold War conflicts (as in India, chapter 5). An important legacy of liberal values in U.S foreign policy, moreover, persisted into the post-Vietnam era. The Carter administration’s projection of “human rights,” for example, carried implications across several geopolitical theaters. Perhaps most dramatically, it yielded the first Camp David Accords (chapter  6). Another, more successful version of human rights momentum was reflected in the antiapartheid movement (chapter 7). Liberal assumptions and policy examined here offer test cases of a political vision applied in widely different contexts. The case study method I adopt is also more than a matter of convenience. Curiously, the critics of U.S. power as much as its champions tend to accept an overly coherent, ideologically consistent, and unipolar view of American global interests. Thus, in identifying Bretton Woods and the GI Bill of Rights as the “high-water mark” of the quest for a “New Deal for the World,” Elizabeth Borgwardt joins others in assuming a quick fadeout of liberal energy abroad by the late 1940s and its replacement by commitment to “free enterprise” and Cold War priorities.11 In a generally clear-eyed assessment of “internationalism” across the period, Michael Kazin likewise identifies a strain of “optimistic globalism” that reached its “zenith during the heyday of the New Deal order” then collapsed when “liberals naively imagined that a bond with their elite counterparts in other nations could weaken or break down barriers of geography, history, and culture.”12 Even after Vietnam, Samuel Moyn asserts, the Democratic Party was still victimized by “the credo of American exceptionalism; in their heart of hearts they still considered the U.S. the ‘indispensable nation,’ as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later called it.”13 These case studies not only belie a too-early endpoint to the liberal project abroad—as in the first two examples—but also the assumption of a continuing uniformity of policy thinking. Such characterizations also miss the fact that international relations are always (at least) a two-way street and that the United States was reacting to the will of others as often as it was defining the terrain of conflict. In this sense, the very conceit of a “New Deal global order”—and its

L E F T- LIBE RAL AP OSTLE S IN TH E COLD WA R ER A 1 1

demise—surely exaggerates the power and responsibility of the United States in relation to other actors. So long as the metropolitan core is associated with the development of workers’ rights and powerful welfare states and the periphery identified only with much weaker states and extreme economic inequality and exploitation, we are likely to miss crucial interactions across the postwar years. The remedy for an otherwise constricted analysis is less to extend the chronology of the New Deal era than to widen the geopolitical lens of analysis. As we will see in these place-based narratives, an expansive vision of social and industrial democracy characteristically found its postwar staging ground on the periphery of the postwar order, from the rubble of reconstruction Germany to creative corporatism in Central America to the founding eras of Israel and India and ultimately to the struggle versus apartheid in southern Africa. Of course, even Bretton Woods, the centerpiece of the postwar global trading order, must be understood as part of a multipolar world. To make sense of this decentered terrain, these case studies delve deeply into the complexity of U.S. leadership and politics while also attending to the dynamics on the ground in their relevant international theaters. The book moves in rough but necessarily overlapping chronological order and is tethered to three large organizing themes. Befitting my own training as a labor historian, readers will note the saliency of the themes of social class, economic development, and grassroots politics in each chapter. As the three chapters making up part 1, “Labor-Liberalism and the Postwar Order,” attest, the rudiments of early postwar internationalism were, in important ways, defined by labor questions (employment, trade, and trade union rights) and organized labor’s influence. Chapter 1 points to the paradox of a liberal, reform-oriented economic order linked to the principle of free trade. Chapter 2 reflects what may have been the highpoint of labor-liberal influence in shaping the contours of post-Nazi Germany. Projecting the most concentrated example of labor-liberal state building, chapter  3 examines the first two decades of U.S.-Israeli civic ties. A persistent theme, indeed likely the centerpiece of liberal policies abroad, concerned economic and social development, or state building. These issues take center stage in part 2, “Liberal Anti-Communism.” Together, Costa Rica after 1944 (chapter  4) and India under Nehru’s

12INTRO D U C TIO N

influence, from 1947 to 1973 (chapter 5), proved early tests of American principles. Among the biggest challenges facing postwar liberal policy makers were the perceived threat of communist expansion, the problem of world hunger and mass poverty, and the complexity of nation building in a multipolar environment. The Vietnam War inevitably caused hesitancy and even general opposition in liberal circles toward further military interventionism. That did not mean detachment, however, from global engagement. Amid multiple crises abroad, some spoke more directly to liberal core values and vision than others. Part 3, “Liberal Nationalism on Trial,” examines two such cases. Reprising the narrative of U.S.-Israel relations, chapter 6 takes up the Carter years and the intractable challenge of sovereignty for Palestinians as well as Jews in the same lands. In chapter 7, I track the influence of civil rights movement idealism on one of the high watermarks of liberal foreign policy victories, the collapse of apartheid in South Africa. Venturing beyond the assessments of the Cold War era, the conclusion fastens on a notable shift in emphasis among liberal-democratic policy makers during the Clinton and Obama administrations. Amid the simultaneous dissolution of superpower rivalry and a globalized economic order, I take note of a loss of any transformative social-economic agenda among those self-consciously imbued with progressive values. Instead, in the face of a seemingly unending stream of local and regional crises, the most prominent liberal ideological chord emerges as one of humanitarianism, human rights, and “atrocity prevention.” Such emphasis, whatever its virtue and even necessity in the moment, has proven utterly inadequate in addressing yawning social inequalities or buttressing democratic self-governance. This last chapter also identifies several points of departure for a more hopeful future. Internationally, a “new Bretton Woods” conference should be summoned to reorder the terms of global commerce in ways that raise Third World living standards via debt forgiveness while also protecting the First World working class from precipitous disruption. The same urgency that once built the postwar economic order, however, also beckons today along two other gradients—slowing climate change (and adapting to extreme weather and land loss) and countering viral outbreaks. By highlighting the global nature of public health concerns,

L E F T- LIBE RAL AP OSTLE S IN TH E COLD WA R ER A 1 3

the current COVID-19 pandemic inevitably draws attention to the absence of effective global coordination on the most basic of human needs. In addition to intergovernmental initiatives, left-liberalism wants a new jolt of ideological vigor. To counter the rise of strongmen around the world, progressive parties need a new alliance—something on the order of the Caribbean Legion that once (at least faintly) challenged Central American dictatorships—to advocate for the norms of democratic selfgovernment as a transcendent human value. Finally, the ideological compass of liberal nationalism—that is, a stable, rights-bearing citizenry within a separate nation-state—requires some readjustment. With mass migration creating polyethnic societies filled with citizens and noncitizens alike, human rights need protection beyond the confines of national borders. Regional relationships and regional solutions—perhaps beginning with labor migration and carbon-reduction agreements across the Americas and then extending to joint Israeli-Palestinian sovereignty over a troubled land—suggest the terms of a new century of liberal engagement, innovative forms of world governance, and equitable socialeconomic development. Distinct in form and content from the challenges facing previous generations, these are among the tasks that will one day define a new liberal world order.

I L A B O R- L IBE R AL ISM AND TH E   P OST WAR ORD ER

F

D

uring the final years of World War II and continuing through the end of the Truman administration and beyond, New Dealers, Democratic congressional advocates, and their labor allies stamped U.S. foreign policy with a characteristic international outlook. Economically expansive yet committed to democratic norms both in government and the workplace, labor-liberalism vied from the beginning with strictly business- or strictly security-conscious priorities, even as competition and confrontation with a communist world dominated by the Soviet Union and China also heated up. This section zeroes in on three closely related spheres of postwar liberal policy: expansion of economic production and commerce through rules and institutions established at Bretton Woods in 1944 (chapter 1), U.S. (and British) “tutelage” of Germany’s rebuilding industrial relations system (chapter  2), and American support for the new Israeli state as a developmental model for other new states (chapter 3).

1 THE BRETTON WOODS BOOMERANG Liberal Internationalism, 1944–2016

W

e rightly identify Adam Smith, that avatar of nineteenthcentury capitalism, as the first great champion of free trade, a “liberal system of free exportation and free importation.”1 Ever since, the term “liberal” has proved something of a conceptual moving target, or, perhaps more accurately, a term assigned by time to two different worlds of meaning. The first, or “classic liberal” moment— itself a revolt against mercantilism—emphasized the rights of private property, free markets, and free trade. The second—associated in the United States with the New Deal and in Europe with new liberalism or social democracy—denoted a more robust state intervention in the economy to the ends of full employment, workers’ rights, and the general social welfare. How remarkable, then, that for some thirty years after World War II, some of the most effective advocates of free trade—the core doctrine of The Wealth of Nations—were found among the most advanced of modern-day liberals and social-democratic labor union leaders. This policy direction took tangible form within the confines of the postwar international monetary order of fixed exchange rates pegged to the dollar (itself convertible to gold) defined first by the 1944 agreement at Bretton Woods and overseen by the newly constituted International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (soon to be known simply as the World Bank). Soon paired

1 8  L ABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

with the crucial aid packages of the Marshall Plan for Europe (1948) and Point Four (1949) for the developing world, the system aimed from the beginning to facilitate trade and reduce tariff barriers. An oft-voiced ideal of the time was that of an ever-expanding customs union, “the idea that maximizing output required free movement of the various factors of production.”2 Despite a few outliers, the left-liberal coordinators of the post-FDR New Deal quickly assented to the Bretton Woods policies. For their part, both giant U.S. labor federations, the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (rivals rather than collaborators at the time), voiced full-throated support for the Marshall Plan and the general Bretton Woods formula. And why not? Its promise of economic growth, jobs, aid, and trade was largely realized during a postwar era of extensive labor influence associated with the heyday of social democracy in Europe and a fulsome welfare state elsewhere. The French demographer Jean Fourastié called the time les trentes glorieuses, and the economists Claudia Goldin and Robert A. Margo, referring to the lessening of wealth divides, labeled it the “Great Compression.”3 Yet we are already well familiar with the denouement of the postwar success story. It is now commonplace to speak of a transition in socioeconomic policy from social democracy to neoliberalism. The decline of the trade unions as an organized social bloc and vector of political influence is most commonly and obviously associated with the upshots of globalization: deindustrialization accompanying the liberalization of investment and opening of new manufacturing markets in the “developing” world.4 To many eyes today, the liberal system of trade appears less a panacea for economic decline and more like its chief culprit. Especially since the financial crisis of 2008, most social-democratic and labor commentators (not to mention new right-wing populist forces) express suspicion if not downright hostility to the liberal investment and trade policies that served as carriers of ever-wider deregulatory currents. In labor circles, in particular, scattered complaints beginning in the 1960s had swollen into a torrent of opposition by the 1990s. From NAFTA (1994) to the WTO’s negotiating rounds (1995) to the even more controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership of Nations (TPP), “international free trade” met determined albeit often futile opposition from organized labor forces, environmental

TH E BRETTO N WO O DS BO O M ER A N G1 9

activists, as well as select business interests in individual developedcountry settings. Only with the worldwide rise of national-populist impulses—and particularly the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016—did U.S. support for business internationalism give way to a more snarling bilateralism when it came to trade agreements. Reflective of the new mood, the United States abandoned the TPP in January 2017, and, rather than renewing NAFTA, both Trump and congressional laborliberals claimed credit for exacting slightly more constrictive terms from a new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in January 2020.5 Precisely with a focus on the trade question, this opening chapter follows a continuous thread across postwar decades often divided conceptually between the Boom (roughly 1950–1973) and Post-Boom (1973–2016) eras.6 Notwithstanding dramatic variations across time in their social and economic impacts, tensions in ideology and practice already apparent by the end of World War II continued to play out across these years. Both the Boom and Post-Boom years were fundamentally conditioned by national accommodations to a world-economic market, and both tilted ideologically, until very recently, toward free trade, or as the term is applied here, to a continual lowering of tariff barriers. It is the central argument of this chapter that the West’s noncommunist left (and especially the labor movements who composed their most loyal constituency) only slowly and inadequately ever addressed the contradictions built into the international postwar order in which they occupied a vital part.

L A BOR AND THE FREE -T RA DE ROL L ER- COASTER

As a key ingredient of an integrated world-capitalist economy, “free trade” has experienced a roller-coaster of reactions, and nowhere more so than in U.S. labor circles. Anti–free trade sentiment predominated across labor’s ranks from the late nineteenth century well into the 1930s. Even as radical critics regularly ridiculed the tariff debate as a capitalist project diverting workers from their own class interests—and the AFL maintained official neutrality on the issue after 1882—many unions tended to support tariff protections favored by their employers. John Jarrett, an

2 0  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

early leader of the powerful iron and steel workers, lobbied hard for a high tariff, while Samuel Gompers, the cigar workers’ chief and future AFL president, neatly conjoined restrictions on immigrants with those on foreign products. By the beginning of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a “Buy American” campaign sparked by the publicist William Randolph Hearst Jr. and especially directed at Japanese producers again attracted an entire phalanx of trade union support, coordinated by AFL vice president Matthew Woll. Even the notorious Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which placed a 59 percent surtax on most imported goods, won Woll’s endorsement.7 Yet a more free trade–oriented political bloc had also been building since the late nineteenth century. In the coming years what the economic historian Michael Huberman calls a programmatic odd couple—an alliance of the supporters of both “international trade” and “labor standards”—would capture the imagination of American progressives and European social democrats. Making tariff reduction (and thus an expanding market economy) “conditional on the adoption of a package of labor regulations and social entitlements” attracted labor as well as other adherents. The Belgian Labor Party theorist Emile Vandervelde first spread the doctrine of free trade combined with domestic protections (or social insurance) from market risk. German socialists, under Edouard Bernstein, for example, backed such a program in 1899, while New South Wales premier Henry Parkes used land tax revenues to finance social programs to balance the negative effects of free trade on wages. Similarly, Lloyd George’s famous 1909 People’s Budget for redistributive programs was also known as the Free Trade Budget.8 In the United States, Wilsonian Democrats pushed the same agenda. Within a rhetorical framework of antimonopoly and antiprivilege, a Democratic Congress passed the Underwood Simmons Act of 1913, the biggest tariff reduction since the Civil War. As in Britain, the move toward free trade was also arguably balanced by the biggest pro-labor and social-democratic initiatives in the nation’s history, including the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914), the LaFollette Seamen’s Act (1915), a progressive income tax (1916), and disability insurance or workers’ compensation for federal employees (1916). In World War I, Wilson idealized an image of a harmonious world commercial and social order knit together by “free and fair competition, prosperity, and peace for all.”9 The image

TH E BRETTO N WO O DS BO O M ER A N G21

was initially burnished in both the League of Nations and the ILO— institutions dedicated to that odd-couple world of open international markets and rising international labor standards but one that arrived effectively stillborn. Congressional setback to Wilson’s League of Nations plans, uneven economic situations after World War I, and the clashing nationalisms of the 1920s pointed to retreat from—not expansion of— liberal internationalism, at least for the time being.10

LE SSONS OF THE GREAT DEP RESSI ON A N D WORL D WA R I I

The political calculus on the trade issue changed dramatically once again by the mid-twentieth century, as lessons learned during the rise of Nazism and World War II congealed Allied policy commitments to liberal internationalism. Albeit no brief (especially among labor partisans) for Adam Smithian laissez-faire, commitment to a new world trading order was broad and deep. Fearing a return to the economic retrenchment, disastrous protectionism (particularly given the negative judgment by now attached to the Smoot-Hawley tariff), and autarchic nationalism characteristic of the Depression Era, many observers in the early postwar years also laid the blame for the war itself on the regimented economies of Hitler’s Germany and Emperor Hirohito’s Japan. Especially before a reorientation of popular and historiographic focus on the racial ideologies of the Axis powers, it was precisely the “controlled economies” of Hitler’s Germany and Hirohito’s Japan that were understood by many early postwar actors as the leading source of the catastrophe. According to the economic historian Benn Steil, it was thus less New Deal programs and more Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s free-trade agenda that first won over the future Marshall Plan architects Dean Acheson, Averill Harriman, and Will Clayton to the Democratic Party.11 As the New Left historians Joyce and Gabriel Kolko classically argued, free trade soon served as a sine qua non of postwar American international policy. As they put it, the “conjunction between an Americansponsored internationalist ideology—what U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes called ‘the establishment of a liberal trading system and the

2 2  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

attainment of an expanding world economy’—and objective national necessity was made, and it was to grow with time.”12 Initial U.S. occupation policy in Germany emphasized twin themes of “deconcentration” of industry and “decartelization” (or breakup of interlocking directorates) as a means of extirpating the “authoritarian conservatism” of Germany’s industrial elites.13 Although Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold’s radical deconcentration plans would ultimately be turned back by Cold War security interests and the desire for economic recovery, the initial policy thrust clearly challenged the legitimacy of Germany’s reigning business interests. “The German Government and the German people as a whole have never accepted the doctrines of economic liberalism which run through American history,” declared Attorney General Francis Biddle. “I propose that we break the power of the German monopolistic firms . . . to put its industries into a form where they will no longer constitute a menace to the civilized world.”14 From Arnold’s 1942 Board of Economic Warfare emerged a succinct diagnosis, authored by staff member James Stewart Martin, of the roots of German military aggression: a “Rhineland group” of industrialists, freed from normal market restraints by cartel manipulations, had effectively overproduced, creating an economic crisis whereby Germany “must export or die.” Big business and the Nazis then “combined to carry out a program of heavy industrial expansion, regardless of economic consequences, and then try [sic] to counteract those consequences by looking for a man on horseback.”15 Modern-day scholars have characterized the fascist powers in related terms. Japan’s New Order, the historian Andrew Gordon notes, “shared with the two European cases [Germany and Italy] the objective of funneling the energies of a glorified national body (whether the Volk or the Yamato race) into a quest for military hegemony, autarchic economic empire, and an antidemocratic, hierarchical political and economic order at home.”16 Volker Berghahn likewise highlights the competing logics of the relatively open Anglo-American marketplace and the German system of tightly woven cartels that ultimately collaborated with Hitler’s expansionist aspirations. From an economic perspective, asserts Berghahn, the war was fought over which of “two ‘models’ of capitalist organization would apply to Europe and elsewhere.”17 To be sure, Manichean distinctions between “free” versus “controlled” economies can

TH E BRETTO N WO O DS BO O M ER A N G23

easily be overdrawn. At least until world war broke out, as the economic historian Tony Freyer points out, not only German but British economists had accepted the need for anticompetitive business regulation, rejecting the U.S. antitrust tradition, which itself, while declaring “cartels per se illegal” comfortably accommodated “ubiquitous U.S. multinational firms.”18 Nowhere had the free/unfree dichotomy among political-economic systems resonated more powerfully than in U.S. liberal and trade union circles. The generally conservative craft union coalition around the AFL had long identified free labor with its own self-reliant and anti–state welfarist, or “voluntarist,” principles. Even as the more militant CIO of the 1930s depended from its beginnings on state-based power to offset employer domination and even as both federations moved into close cooperation (including a no-strike pledge) with federal authority during World War II, “independence” from government remained a core principle of both U.S. and British trade union doctrine. It fit neatly alongside a larger left-liberal commitment to an equilibrium of business and labor interests rather than the domination of one or the other, a position articulated within a body of “pluralist” thought developed since the turn of the century by the British Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb and the University of Wisconsin labor economist John R. Commons.19 Yet, as was the case with the critique of “closed” Axis power economic systems, U.S. labor-liberals also applied the free-labor model to interstate relations in the form of a commitment to the “open” flow of commerce. Only unencumbered access to markets and raw materials, the New Dealers and their successors became convinced, could assure the continuing growth of the American and the worldwide democratic, industrial order. A drastic, 25 percent decline in overall world trade between 1929 and 1932 contributed to a decided U.S. policy turnaround. Not surprisingly, there was a strong political calculation as well in the Democrats’ shift away from the Republicans’ decade-long restrictionism.20 Suggestive of the overall change in thinking is the memoir of Toni Sender, a prominent feminist and left-wing German-Jewish journalist and legislator from Frankfurt who had fled to the United States in 1935, where she would ultimately play an important wartime coordinating role for the OSS’s Labor Desk. Echoing the views of prominent New Dealers, her 1939 autobiography underscores the Weimar era’s general drift toward “autarchic”

FIGURE 1.1  Toni Sender, an important early labor internationalist, socialist journalist, and legislator from Frankfurt who fled to the United States and helped coordinate the OSS Labor Desk.

Source: Reuther Library, Wayne State University, (24931) Toni Sender, Workers Education Local 189, AFT. Photo dated 1951. Photographer unknown. Collection, AFT, American Federation of Teachers, Education.

TH E BRETTO N WO O DS BO O M ER A N G25

high tariffs on agriculture and steel imports as the work of “small but powerful groups of economic royalists.” “Our goal must be,” wrote Sender, “the lowering of tariffs until the final disappearance of all customs’ duties.”21 Critical institutional building blocks of the new policy began in 1934 with the U.S. Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA), the brainchild of Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull. The RTAA allowed for unprecedented presidential discretion in the reduction of tariffs.22 Soon after, in February 1942, came Article VII of the Anglo-American Mutual Aid Agreement, which fortified the previous year’s Lend-Lease Agreement, specifically committing Britain to relax its Imperial Preference trade restrictions. Of greater and better-known consequence, the July 1944 Bretton Woods Conference formed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, both of which pointedly also sought the elimination of trade impediments as a goad to expansion of foreign investment. By 1947, the first General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) produced multilateral cuts in trade barriers. Across the 1940s and 1950s, following a newly constituted economic consensus, the United States continually dropped its own tariff rates and pressed its allies to do the same. The Trade Expansion Act of 1962 accelerated change by acceding to a GATT governing board request for across-the-board (versus an earlier commodity-by-commodity) tariff cuts, a process catalyzed further by the creation of the office of a U.S. trade representative. Following the by-now-dominant doctrine of “trade liberalization,” the Kennedy Round of GATT (1964–1967) “cut the average tariff on manufactured goods worldwide by 35  percent,” while “the percentage of U.S. trade, excluding oil and agriculture, on which tariffs were more than 15 percent plummeted from 63 percent to 15 percent.”23 By the time of the Cold War, both free-labor and free-trade concepts had been honed as political tools in international discourse. Even as the modern concepts of the “free world” and “free countries” may have originated in the propaganda of the Allies versus the fascist Axis powers in World War II, they took on more common and sustained use as a chief, self-designated synonym of Western noncommunist powers arrayed against the Soviet bloc and its allies—and nowhere more so than in the realm of labor relations.24

2 6  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

In an important sense, the principle of “free” trade unionism also came to imply “free-trade” unionism. Though opposition to governmentcontrolled unions in communist regimes or to affiliation with communistlinked movements outside the Soviet bloc were the American labor model’s best-known calling cards, there was more to it, as first articulated by the AFL’s Free Trade Union Committee in 1946, than mere anticommunism. Tellingly, the major reordering of postwar international labor organizations—including withdrawal of both the CIO and the British TUC from the communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) and creation of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) in 1949—occurred over support versus opposition to the basic free-trade stipulations of the Marshall Plan.25 Moreover, dockworker members of the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), whose general secretary, J. H. Oldenbroek, would become the first leader of the ICFTU, actually unloaded Marshall Plan goods in defiance of Communist Party–called strikes.26 Henceforth, the specifically economic as well as political restrictions of liberty within communist regimes melded smoothly in left-liberal rhetoric. Sender, now acting as ICFTU liaison to the United Nations, helped in the early 1950s to expose the network of Soviet labor camps, an effort that would ultimately lead to prohibitions on forced labor in both ILO conventions and a UN covenant.27

T H E LABOR- L IBERA L EMBRACE OF FR EE T RA DE

It was not American conservatives but rather left-liberals who most eagerly championed the new internationalist economic order. There is no better testament to this fact than the intentions of the oftenacknowledged co-creators of the Bretton Woods institutions, Harry Dexter White (the brilliant assistant to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. who would only later be unmasked as a Soviet spy) and British economics dean John Maynard Keynes. In their economic advice, both men were liberals par excellence, determined to embed international markets in state-sanctioned systems of regulation that would maximize employment and working-class social welfare. Although the

TH E BRETTO N WO O DS BO O M ER A N G27

two economists divided on a few matters—Keynes attempted in vain to resist U.S. dominance over the dispersal of funds from any new postwar economic agencies, for instance—they agreed on the basic principles. After the disasters of the prewar years, the point was to reduce barriers to international trade and capital flows by encouraging economic cooperation among the nations. This goal could only be achieved, they were convinced, by a mixture of autonomous exchanges, or free-trade, and central planning.28 Institutionally, the result was a structure that would include both a currency stabilization fund (ultimately realized in the IMF) and a central bank to avert balance-of-payments collapses. As conceived by its framers, this “central world bank” would be initially capitalized at a hefty $10 billion for purposes of reconstruction, relief, and economic recovery. Access to this New Deal–like agency, White and Keynes imagined, would be available not only to the Western powers but to the Soviet Union and its client states as well. Ideally, economic recovery of the West would also usher in a new era of international cooperation and tolerance between liberal capitalist and state socialist regimes. A commitment to Keynesianism generally defined the ranks of those who presided over U.S. international economic policy at the end of the war, thereby attracting the support of New Deal liberals and a bevy of leftists besides, who, according to the historian Landon Storrs, believed the new international order could ultimately “improve the outlook for socialism in the United States.” As Felix Cohen, a Socialist Party member and associate solicitor for the Department of the Interior, wrote privately in 1943, “We shall have to justify beneficent works in Europe by applying bad names [i.e., nationalistic self-interest] to the work we shall be doing.” At the forefront of early conceptions for the Marshall Plan and the United Nations, Storrs notes, was a “cluster of progressive economists”—including Lewis Lorwin, Thomas Blaisdell, Mary Dublin Keyserling, and Paul  R. Porter—all “serious intellectuals,” “socialists,” and “feminists.”29 Even a left-wing critic of the final version of the Marshall Plan like former U.S. vice president Henry A. Wallace—who challenged Truman’s program on the grounds that it would “divide Europe into two warring camps”—subscribed to its underlying “open door” philosophy. Instead of an anti-Soviet military alliance, as envisioned for NATO, Wallace, who was also the Progressive Party candidate for

2 8  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

president in 1948, proposed a U.S.-Soviet agreement defined by a mutual reduction of armaments and unrestricted trade.30 In the end, the Bretton Woods institutions never got off the ground in quite the manner that their authors had proposed. By December  1945, the Soviets had already decided that they could not tolerate IMF oversight and walked out of the international discussions.31 By that time, anticipated funding for the World Bank had been drastically reduced, and U.S. financial interests made clear they would not support the “central bank” or “international clearing union” ideas championed in different ways by Keynes and White. Not surprisingly, more radical proposals introduced at the talks also fell to an American veto. One of the most imaginative of these was the Australian Labor Party’s so-called positive approach, which would have attached an “unemployment agreement” to trade pacts. That is, it would commit Western trading partners to limit their unemployment rates to 5  percent and thus maintain high-wage, highdemand national economic policies.32 Overall, then, wishful thinking largely carried the day at Bretton Woods when it came to the effects of the new world economy on employment and labor issues, in contrast to tangible reality checks placed there on capital markets. IMF and World Bank funds, for example, were authorized to deal with national budgetary deficits but not trade deficits, which effectively also left the problem of unemployment solely in national hands. Notably, even as the postwar framers authorized institutional interventions to protect countries from the free fall of national currencies, they did little—despite their lofty rhetoric—to monitor (let alone regulate) employment or wages.33 Supportive of the general principles embodied in the Bretton Woods negotiations, the U.S. labor movement and its international allies incorporated the concept of free trade into their larger commitment to a prosperous free world vouchsafed by collective bargaining. The CIO, in particular, joined a cross-class bloc, including commercial and investment bankers, retailers, and capital-intensive firms promulgating what the political scientist Thomas Ferguson calls “multinational liberalism.”34 As early as 1943, the CIO endorsed the renewal of the RTAA. As the industrial relations scholar Peter Donohue summarized, “Increased domestic and foreign consumption appeared to [Sidney] Hillman and other CIO leaders the key to maintaining full employment, and prevention of

TH E BRETTO N WO O DS BO O M ER A N G29

postwar economic depression and union destruction.”35 Anticipating the Marshall Plan’s focus on growth as the solution to the world’s economic problems, the CIO’s Committee on Latin American Affairs in 1944 openly opposed tariffs while endorsing free immigration across national borders.36 To underscore the breadth of popular support for the new international trade and aid regime, Secretary of State George Marshall addressed the CIO convention in 1947, only months after the unveiling of the European Recovery Program.37 Quickly, a slick pamphlet designed for mass distribution would herald “The Promise of Bretton Woods— 5,000,000 Jobs in World Trade.”38 With comparable if later-arriving enthusiasm, the AFL hierarchy also climbed aboard the Marshall Plan in 1947, joining with its CIO counterpart in appointing labor advisors Clinton S. Golden and Bert M. Jewell to the Economic Cooperation Administration. Through the 1950s, AFL and subsequent joint AFL-CIO conventions backed world trade liberalization, endorsing expansion of the IMF and World Bank loans abroad.39 And, despite rising concerns among lagging export sectors, especially steel and textiles, the AFL-CIO backed the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, once “trade adjustment assistance”—offering government-financed retraining, relocation, and extended employment insurance—was added to the mix.40 Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Truman, Philip Kaiser, whose brother Henry served as associate general counsel for the AFL, helped sell the Marshall Plan abroad. As he would later testify, he particularly sought to overcome doubts among European trade union leaders whose “motley strains of Marxism, anarchosyndicalism, and Christian socialism . . . prevented them from seeing the difference between American competitive capitalism and their own national monopoly capitalism built on old feudal structures.” 41 Together, it is fair to say, the actions of the two wings of the U.S. labor movement sustain the historian Charles Maier’s judgment of the period’s liberals: They placed productivity and growth ahead of equality or even antimonopoly as the ultimate economic objective. “The true dialectic,” writes Maier of American advisers in Europe in the 1940s, “was not one of class against class, but waste versus abundance. The goal of economic policy, abroad as at home, was to work toward the latter.” 42 From the ranks of U.S. labor-liberals, the one systemic corrective to the Bretton Woods architecture came and went very quickly. From early

FIGURE 1.2  1948 CIO pamphlet extolling the Bretton Woods agreements.

Source: AFL-CIO Meany Library, “The Promise of Bretton Woods,” bound pamphlets, 1935–1951, RG 34-002, Box 36/42, George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archives.

TH E BRETTO N WO O DS BO O M ER A N G31

on, textile workers—whose product was highly vulnerable to price fluctuations—had sounded the largest alarm within union ranks about the effects of untrammeled free trade. While refusing to renege on RTAA renewal, both CIO and Truman administration officials thus proposed in 1945 to assuage the concerns with a new International Trade Organization (ITO). The ITO, which required ratification by the U.S. Senate and then acceptance through GATT protocols, would work parallel to RTAA renewals, combining further trade openings with tangible commitments in employment, development, and investment. After several stumbling steps toward ITO development, however, the plan came apart under combined business opposition and sweeping Republican gains in the 1950 congressional elections. To save RTAA renewal in 1951 and the larger GATT vision, Truman and even his labor-liberal allies gave up on the ITO charter.43 In short, by the 1950s, the vision of economic growth and development fueled by international trade and investment dominated Western social-democratic thinking. As the ILO’s director-general David  A. Morse declared at the European Regional Conference in 1954, European economic growth required “removal of international trade barriers [for] in the long run, of course, a higher level of economic activity is the only means of enabling standards of living to be raised on a sound basis.” 44 The general accommodation to the world marketplace consummated at Bretton Woods, however, did not represent a simple victory of American interests. Outside the regimented economies of the communist bloc and communist-linked trade union federations, both European labor and the left found much to like in the machinery of Bretton Woods and the subsequent Marshall Plan. For decades to come, economic growth combined with redistributive politics (through progressive taxation and an expanding social wage) would serve as the point of departure for progressive domestic policy. As Labour deputy prime minister Herbert Morrison explained in 1947, “the battle for socialism is the battle for production.” Few on the noncommunist left would have disagreed.45 Equipped with a “peace dividend,” ultimately devolving their defense expenditures onto the United States, Western Europe from 1948 to 1973 experienced what the economist Barry Eichengreen calls a “veritable golden age of economic growth.” 46 No wonder the TUC quickly joined the AFL and CIO in coordinating a positive labor response to the Marshall Plan.47 If

3 2  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

this came at the expense of a previous commitment to workers’ control or further socialization of the economy, the mass constituencies appeared well disposed to make the sacrifice. Amid steadily rising living standards, both European Social Democratic (or Labour) and ChristianDemocratic (or Conservative) parties opted at most for planning, expanded welfarism, and a “stable niche” for trade unionism (often via coordinated, industrywide bargaining, as in France and Scandinavia) in national industrial relations policy.48 Across the Boom Era, U.S. liberal politicians and economists would continually make the case for more relaxed borders across which both goods and people could flow. In 1956, a progressive advocate like Chester Bowles might anticipate opposition to tariff reduction from Southern textile interests and “some people of old American stock and of moderate means whose sense of economic and social security has been challenged by the rise of vigorous newcomers whose families came more recently from Europe.” Yet he could equally take heart from the fact that “such internationally minded Southerners as Walter George, Lyndon Johnson, William Fulbright, Lester Hill, John Sparkman, and John Sherman Cooper . . . will almost certainly support a consensus which more squarely faces up to the new, hard, emerging realities in world affairs.” 49 Similarly, by the late 1960s, the economist and liberal presidential adviser John Kenneth Galbraith (who will again appear alongside Bowles in chapter  5) would declare that for the United States as well as Europe, “within limits, market access is now the thing.” However “inconvenient” the contemporary low-wage competition from Japan or Hong Kong, Galbraith was confident that “social security and modern fiscal policy provide the cushioning effect on national economies which were once provided much more imperfectly by tariffs.”50 For some three decades, in fact, the Bretton Woods umbrella proved an effective attempt to rebuild war-damaged economies, stabilize exchange rates, and maximize international trade. As the historian Eric Rauchway pithily summarizes: “War-damaged nations recovered, as did their export levels. Poorer countries began to develop. Business downturns in one country—even if that country was the United States—did not translate into worldwide recessions. The International Monetary Fund began actively to lend money to aid nations through their individual crises.” In this initial period of global reintegration, Keynesian-influenced experts

TH E BRETTO N WO O DS BO O M ER A N G33

behind the IMF assumed that their organization’s stated goals of “high employment and income levels” would necessarily be advanced by the “expansion and balanced growth of international free trade.” Or, as the Egyptian representative to the Bretton Woods conference put it, so long as trade was liberalized and richer countries bought increasingly from poorer ones, there need be “no conflict” between the developed and developing world.51

TRA DE IN PRACTICE V ER SU S TRA DE IN PRINCIP LE

If the postwar noncommunist West (including labor movements and liberal and social-democratic parties) was willing to commit to expanded trade in principle, in point of economic practice it was not so simple. Even ILO chief Morse’s declaration of faith in the free flow of commerce was wrapped in an acknowledgment that “in only one case”—and this the relatively modest free-trade area of the Benelux Economic Union— was the removal of restrictions fully put into practice. The problem, in a nutshell, was political: “No country,” allowed Morse, “can afford to accept policies for freer economic relations which may be designed to benefit everyone in the long run if the immediate result will be to create unemployment in some places where it cannot be readily absorbed.” A case in point was the reported declaration by French premier Pierre Mendes-France, before the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe, that “the varying levels of wages and social benefits as reflected in the costs of production of the various countries were obstacles to further experiments in economic cooperation.”52 Even as the U.S. government, with help from international business interests, refashioned a more open economic world order, there developed a great many lumps of national resistance and self-protection within Boom Era market expansion. To be sure, these did not rise (or perhaps it’s better to say sink) to the level of World War II–era GermanJapanese cartelization and autarchy. Precisely because of the example of the Nazi cultivation and consolidation of privately owned cartels— most famously in the case of the German chemical conglomerate IG

3 4  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

Farben—such hindrances to competition and top-down market controls were generally shut down by the Allies after the war. Whereas the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 had already eliminated such business combinations in the United States, the postwar Treaty of Rome in 1957 set similar limits among European states. The relevant rule governing the latter-day European Union prohibits “all agreements between undertakings, decisions by associations of undertakings and concerted practices which may affect trade between Member States and which have as their object or effect the prevention, restriction, or distortion of competition within the common market.”53 Still, while stopping short of total and coordinated top-down methods of production or marketing controls, coordinated state, business, and labor policies did reappear across much of Europe and among U.S. allies in Asia in the postwar years. American monitors in Europe in 1951, for example, were decidedly unhappy with what they labeled “restrictive business practices.” Whether it was the price of alcohol in Austria, textiles or electric irons in France, or cement in Great Britain, continuing the “private agreements between domestic producers and cartel agreements cutting across national lines” resulted in artificially higher prices, lower productivity, and slackened economic growth. According to the State Department, the Soviet Union was scoring Cold War propaganda points by declaring themselves “enemies of cartels” and condemning the West as “supporters of private arrangements which result in a lower standard of living for the working man.” Generally speaking, the United States accommodated such arrangements as one of the costs of the Cold War, even though such policies distorted the liberal market model in ways that would ultimately attract growing alarm and corresponding corrective “neoliberal” attention by business elites beginning in the 1970s.54 Three cases serve to illustrate how coordinated or “nonliberal” capitalist economies fit into the postwar world order of free trade and free labor as championed by the United States.55 In societies like Germany and Japan, economic institutions, argues the economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck (using the theorist Karl Polanyi’s terms), were more “socially embedded” than in “liberal” capitalist societies like the United States. That is, whereas the latter seek to “liberate markets and contracts from social constraints and collective obligations,” the former “try to do the

THE BRETTON WOODS BOOMERANG35

opposite.”56 Built on longstanding corporatist (Germany) or feudalhierarchical (Japan) traditions, in the postwar period, each of the two defeated world powers, as overseen by the more liberal United States (and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom), made crucial readjustments.57 The capstone to what we might summarize as postwar neocorporatist arrangements—separating an authoritarian past from an aspiring democratic future—was “the inclusion of organized labor.”58 With support from both British and American labor movements, German trade unionism (as we will see in chapter 2) quickly revived and helped impose a renovated version of a Weimar-rooted industrial democracy on otherwise reluctant industry leaders. The West German “economic miracle” arose under an AdenauerErhard regime in 1950s generally committed to GATT-sanctioned “freetrade ideals.”59 Still, the first postwar decade witnessed a vigorous contest among German conservative political and economic factions, who only reluctantly formalized anticartel principles in 1957 legislation. Symbolically, offers the historian Volker Berghahn, the move sealed the transfer of the nation’s economic future to large manufacturing firms with a keen stake in international trade like Volkswagen, Bayer, Siemens, and Thyssen.60 Still, as a charter member of the EEC, Germany would remain “protected” by a series of nontariff discriminations versus the United States and other non-European imports. Even in the case of tariff reductions, it is worth noting that in the early GATT rounds, the United States, for diplomatic reasons, took the deepest tariff cuts. Indeed, it was not until the GATT’s Kennedy round from 1964 to 1967 that multilateral agreements opening entire economic sectors internationally took effect.61 Developments in Japan were in some respects more volatile. Lack of a strong, prewar democratic tradition; the singularity of American occupation; and recurrent fears regarding communist influence in the labor movement all conditioned a series of policy reversals in early postwar Japanese industrial relations. To counter the emperor’s zaibatsu regime of rule from above, initial postwar moves by General MacArthur’s SCAP headquarters effectively freed the hands of democratic forces, including a new constitution guaranteeing worker rights and welfare measures in 1946, together with a progressive Labor Standards Law of 1947, which incorporated a full range of ILO-derived protections.62 Workers began taking full advantage of the new postwar climate. Communist-infused

3 6  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

union ranks exploded from five thousand in October 1945 to nearly five million by December of the following year. But the hammer came down hard. Over the course of two years, MacArthur’s command post outlawed factory takeovers and mass demonstrations, forced the cancellation of a general strike called for February  1947, denied public sector workers the right to strike, summarily fired some 12,000 communist trade union activists, and effectively endorsed a new employer association dedicated to the defense of employer prerogatives. With the fortunes of an autonomous labor movement severely set back, political-economic initiative passed largely to an enterprise-based labor culture and trade unionism only occasionally interrupted by incipient rebellion.63 Just as international geopolitical factors may have enhanced organized labor’s influence in postwar Germany while openly taming it in Japan, so too did they permit German (and indeed Europe-wide) and Japanese bending and evasion of U.S. free-trade policy. To encourage economic development (and loyalty) among “free-world” allies, as the historian Judith Stein has documented, U.S. foreign policy encouraged capital investment abroad, while holding domestic markets open even to countries that were themselves practicing a variety of nontariff barriers to U.S. exports. “Free trade,” she writes, “was the snake in the postwar Garden of Eden. . . . Rejection would produce ‘jungle warfare’ in trade and make the EEC into an isolationist, anti-U.S. bloc. This became the standard refrain. Any agreement was better than no agreement because the free world was in danger.” 64 The logic of de facto protectionism within an explicitly free-market world trading order was particularly compelling for Japan. With interlocking big businesses again controlling the heights of the Japanese economy by the end of the occupation in 1952, SCAP, according to the historian John Dower, “naively presided not only over the transfer of its own authority, but also over the institutionalization of the most restrictive foreign trade and foreign exchange control system ever devised by a major free nation.” 65 Even as key U.S allies, West Germany and Japan demonstrated the tensions between the ideals and practice of “free-trade unionism” and “free trade.” Israel is another case. As a close ally and chief recipient of postwar aid, Israel also notably veered far from American-based postwar economic principles. From the beginning of the Zionist enterprise, well before creation of the Jewish state in 1948, Israel’s labor order and economy was

TH E BRETTO N WO O DS BO O M ER A N G37

embedded to a remarkable extent in extraeconomic, nonmarket principles and practices. Dominated until the late 1970s by a Histadrut-Mapai (Labor Party) design of self-conscious “labor Zionism,” the incipient Israeli state did everything in its power to control population (including emigration and immigration), labor markets, and investment toward the ends of a high-wage, relatively homogeneous, and autonomously Jewish national economy.66 It was for an extended time easy to confuse the policies of the Histadrut, or Zionist Labor Federation, with those of the Israeli state itself. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had previously served as Histadrut’s general secretary, and the Histadrut had long organized some 75 to 80 percent of the labor force while controlling some 20 percent (including major conglomerates) of economic enterprises.67 For good measure, as a variant on the so-called Ghent system of Belgium and Sweden, the Histadrut administered most health insurance and pension coverage through the mid-1990s.68 The frame of Israeli wage policy, as the economic historian Michael Shalev emphasizes, was “recognizably corporatist,” with an ever-active state balancing internal interests in the face of persistent trade deficits. A long cycle of economic growth, which began in 1954 and ended with the Yom Kippur War in 1973, was rooted “in varying combinations at different times” in “capital inflow, mass immigration, military-industrial activity, and territorial expansion”—all corollaries of corporatist policies and state structure.69 The case of Israel illustrates how countries might for decades mix and match engagement in the free-flowing trade of the world market with a distinctly nonliberal set of development policies. And, in an era of widespread global economic growth, such eclecticism worked. Since its founding, Israel experienced an annual average growth rate of 10  percent, a rate bested only by Japan. This buoyancy extended even to occupied Palestinian territory from 1967 to 1973.70 Generally speaking, the flexibility of national economic planning—or calibrating Keynesian demand management and redistributionist social policies within an increasingly open-world trading order, a policy compromise that some analysts called “embedded liberalism”—served most Western nations well for decades. As the political economist Dani Rodrik writes of an era characterized by what he calls a “shallow form of economic integration,” the aim of the Bretton Woods–GATT regime was never free trade tout

3 8  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

court. Instead, “it was to achieve the maximum amount of trade compatible with different nations doing their own thing. In that respect the institution proved spectacularly successful.”71 Alas, the global sea could not forever lift all boats.

L ABOR’ S L AST SUP P ER

There is one moment in time that captures labor-liberalism at the height of the postwar boom. In 1972, Joseph Almogi, the Israeli minister of labor, welcomed 450 representatives of labor, management, government, and universities from twenty-one other states to the wide-ranging International Conference on Trends in Industrial and Labor Relations (ICTILR) in Jerusalem.72 Almogi spoke confidently of the superiority of the “free collective bargaining system” over either dictatorial (rightwing) or totalitarian (communistic) forms of labor coercion and strike suppression or even well-intentioned but still “inefficient” and “unenforceable” forms of “permanent compulsory arbitration.”73 Strong labor unions in free societies, concluded the minister, set the historical and conference agenda for two further questions. The first involved worker participation in decision making and “incomes policy.” That is, a recognition that “a more just and rational distribution of the national income depends not only on the level of salary but also on the standard of services offered to the citizens by the State.” Equally important, social policy must necessarily grapple with direct and indirect taxation. And with perhaps only slight exaggeration, one of the host country’s labor law professors boasted that the labor federation in his state could “achieve almost any labour legislation it thought desirable.” In perfect harmony with the vision of the host, the West German labor minister Otfried Wlotzke allowed that the laws in his own country already aimed not only at the “social protection” of the individual worker but also “self-government” and “participation of workers in the decisionmaking process at plant level and partly also in management.” Granting that the shared authority over company decision making could still be improved upon, Wlotzke insisted that the key question “during the forthcoming years will be not whether workers’ participation in the

THE BRETTON WOODS BOOMERANG39

decision-making process of management on the basis of joint responsibility will be intensified, but how this will be done.”74 The positive tenor toward both labor reforms and general state of the political economy represented at the conference is in part explained by its sponsor, the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations of Cornell University, a beacon of mainstream postwar industrial relations theory. Despite some cautions and misgivings among the delegates, these tribunes of the postwar labor order reflected a confidence that bordered on complacency about the economic systems in which they took part. As if to underscore the optimism of a moment when trade union representation ranged from 30 percent to 80 percent across the industrialized world, the international labor relations expert Everett  M. Kassolow mused about the hypothetical problem: “What happens when everyone organizes?” He pointed out the quite imaginable paradox that when everyone is organized, the labor movement’s “very size calls for greater responsibility and control from the center, and limits on the unions’ traditional expression of power, the strike.”75 Surely, such a problem would have been welcomed by most trade unions across the globe. With the advantage of hindsight, however, two notable absences strike us about the international industrial relations discourse of the early 1970s. The first is that the developing world, or Global South, was not there to participate or offer perspective. The second, related, is the inattention to the international economy in general. In particular, the topic of world trade and its effect, actual or potential, on domestic labor systems simply did not enter discussion.

NEOL IBERA L ISM AN D T HE A N TI- FREE-TRADE B AC K LASH

Only months after the ICTILR conference, the 1973 OPEC oil embargo formally ruptured the era of planned capitalism on which so many of the conference’s working assumptions were based. A quintupling of oil prices set off cascading inflation, even as worldwide industrial production and investment slowed. The lethal and heretofore unknown combination was soon identified as “stagflation,” and no known Keynesian

4 0  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

instruments beckoned as an obvious cure. With worldwide business struggling to sustain profit margins, employers and their political allies rebelled at the edifice of regulation and social welfarism, which now appeared an expensive luxury they could no longer afford. The moment proved inviting to those advocating long-marginalized “classic liberal”— now relabeled as neoliberal or market-fundamentalist—doctrines of political economy and tended to tilt the political order to new-style, antilabor conservatives. As the sociologist Monica Prasad summarizes, neoliberal policies encompassed “taxation structures that favor capital accumulation over income distribution, industrial policies that minimize the presence of the state in private industry, and retrenchment in welfare spending.”76 Unintentional though unimpeded, a neoliberal agenda quickly took control of the international economic order. Dating to the budgetary strains of the Vietnam War, the United States had been facing severe balance-of-payments deficits, a condition that led to massive speculation against the dollar and huge dollar outflows to U.S. trading partners. Initially, by untying the dollar from gold convertibility in 1971, the Nixon administration tried to maintain fixed exchange rates, but by 1973 this strategy too proved unavailing, and the state-centered financial system negotiated at Bretton Woods came undone. What took its place was a financial regime of floating exchange rates accompanied by faster-paced, instant capital flows and constantly readjusting currencies. Private investment, already spread out through multinational corporations on a global chain, sought both lower-cost producers (hence, the “race to the bottom”) and consumers everywhere. Trade openings to the East, particularly China’s rise as a world power, ultimately consolidated these tendencies. The sense of a borderless world economy was spiked by a digital revolution in communications (email and internet) and shipping (containerization, megaships, and the deregulation of air travel). At the same time, except for the luxury of the ever-expanding U.S. deficit (an exception that the rest of the dollar-dependent world economy had to indulge), governments had to pay close attention to their own balanced budgets, on pain of capital flight and destabilizing inflation. In a perfect storm, neoliberal policies came nearly everywhere to rule the roost. Crowned by the succession of the GATT by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, the new deregulatory orthodoxy, in Rodrik’s words, replaced the

TH E BRETTO N WO O DS BO O M ER A N G41

“moderate globalization” that had previously defined the Bretton Woods decades with a new era of “hyperglobalization.”77 The resulting shift in social power ultimately alarmed labor and social-democratic constituencies. Well before globalization was generally recognized for its destructive impact on many of the industries of the developed world, labor-liberals had begun to react against a perceived boomerang arising from the Bretton Woods order. The economic crisis of the 1970s and the threat posed by rising import levels led a weakened organized labor movement to reevaluate its traditional pro-freetrade stand and adopt more restrictionist views. Following a failed effort in 1967 to get support from the International Metalworkers Federation for a USWA proposal to “harmonize U.S. steel imports with domestic production,” for example, U.S. labor began to push for some of the same unilateralist, protectionist gestures worthy of the nationalism or regional-bloc interests of America’s Cold War allies.78 In particular, the Nixon Administration in 1971 and 1972 exacted “voluntary restraint” agreements on Japan and other producers to restrict imports of steel, woolens, and synthetic fabrics. A very restrictive trade bill, vociferously opposed by multinationals as well as the EEC but favored by a Democratic House of Representatives, only narrowly failed to secure Senate passage in 1970. More radical, still, was the AFL-CIO-backed BurkeHartke Bill of the same year, which combined traditional tariff protections and new restrictions on job-killing capital investment abroad with a proposed administrative commission to restrict imports in any sector to the average quantity of their presence from 1965 to 1969. Not surprisingly, the proposal triggered a bipartisan (as well as international) storm of opposition, and the bill never came up for a vote. The years 1981 and 1982 brought another recession, which combined with a coincident cratering of U.S. new car sales and spurt in Japanese imports. This spurred the last great protectionist push of the Cold War era. “Domestic content” legislation, attempting to force manufacturers to source their products in the United States, swept the Democratic House but predictably was turned back by a Republican Senate, even before facing a certain veto from President Reagan. Richard Ottinger, a congressman from upstate New York, reflected the bitterness of rustbelt voters: “[We] have been acting like Uncle Sucker. We have seen our entire industrial base eroded, and we have done nothing to counter it.”79

4 2  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

Although failing to gain legislative traction, these protest measures proved a forerunner to the anti-NAFTA, anti-WTO, and anti-fasttrack political mobilizations of the more explicitly globalization-era consciousness.80

CONCLUSION

The competitive forces commonly associated with post-1970s globalization were born nearly three decades earlier, when they were generally warmly welcomed by liberal-progressive voices among the victors of World War II. Of course, it is always easier to embrace a doctrine (like free trade or global integration) in the abstract than in practice. Especially outside the United States, national legislatures and trade unions showed no hesitancy in demanding and erecting shelters from competitive winds that threatened to erode labor and living standards. Still, the failure of the international labor-left—both intellectuals and party–labor movement institutions—to anticipate or offer systemic alternatives to the ravages of the developing international economy carried serious consequences. As it happened, the International Conference on Trends in Industrial and Labor Relations convened for a second and final time in Montreal in 1976. Amid a rapidly changing economic climate, more than five hundred participants attended, representing fourteen countries and seven international organizations.81 Unlike the first gathering, the discussion now inevitably emphasized “external” (meaning international) influences. Delegates, for example, variously attempted to integrate into their analysis several global factors, beginning with high rates of inflation following the escalation of world oil and commodity prices and, directly related, “unacceptably” high unemployment following the world recession of 1974, which had only “intensified a feeling of frustration and cynicism toward the system.”82 Although they did not discuss trade issues, other new trends that demanded attention included the impact on labor markets and labor relations of a worldwide migrant flow and the rise of multinational corporations not only in expanding production to new

TH E BRETTO N WO O DS BO O M ER A N G43

geographic platforms but in “transferring production facilities as a labor relations tactic.”83 If the international commercial order attracted increasing criticism from the trade unions in the 1970s, the remedies they proposed were at once partial, fractured, and ineffectual. Rather than any inclusive countervision to the free-trade hegemony of Bretton Woods, Western labor and social-democratic representatives turned to various forms of ad hoc protectionism. Beginning with fears around its domestic textile and steel industries, the United States, for example, secured temporary “voluntary” export restraints from competitors like Japan. All the while, continuing tariff reductions (as in the Trade Act of 1974) were accompanied by expanded trade adjustment assistance for industries (and workers) hurt by “fair” competition, even as U.S. labor partisans proposed but failed to advance far more drastic restrictions on trade like the BurkeHartke Bill of 1972.84 Aside from their general inefficacy—always threatening reciprocal recrimination and a souring of international relations among trading partners—the unilateral protectionist measures politically positioned organized labor and its allies as provincial if not revanchist naysayers to a seemingly inevitable, ever-more-integrated world economy. In the end, we might ask, how much were Western labor and socialdemocratic forces hoisted on their own petard when it came to the depredations of neoliberalism? It is surely not fair to paint them as naïfs in certain areas of the regnant, corporate-dominated world economy. The moves toward privatization, fiscal austerity, and financialization (or effective deregulation of banking and insurance sectors)—all surely critical to neoliberalism—have occurred only over the dead bodies of trade union opposition and frustrated socialist, labor, or (in the United States) left-liberal legislators. In short, to paint “labor” as losers in these areas is not to tar them as collaborators in their own destruction. The contribution, even centrality, of free trade to the creation of the current global order, however, also cannot be denied. And on this issue, at least, the intellectual and political left seems to have been caught largely unprepared. In particular, freer trade between the West and the Global South provided a happy prospect so long as the main manufacturing products were heading south, but not so happy once global manufacturing

4 4  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

platforms, taking advantage of cheap labor as well as the communications and transportation revolution, reversed that product flow. With few exceptions, therefore, no one pushed past the initially rosy prospects and returns from an open trading economy in the early postwar years to demand governing principles (as was done with world currencies, for example) that might have subsequently cushioned whole industries, regions, or nations from sudden and catastrophic social disruption. Only with rising alarm since the 1990s about the uneven consequences of globalization, especially for workers across the developed Western countries, have progressive drafters of international trade policy attempted to offer palliative correctives to the structural foundations of world trade agreements. The labor and environmental side agreements to the 1994 NAFTA constituted a symbolic breakthrough, but practically speaking, as the conservative, pro–free trade Heritage Foundation recognized at the time, they were “largely meaningless.”85 Political skepticism toward free-trade pacts has only grown in the intervening years. Right-wing populism, triumphant in the U.S. presidential election of 2016 and equally manifest across Europe, inevitably looks to nationalist and nativist solutions to economic distress. Against rising antiglobalization emotions, President Barack Obama argued in vain in October  2015 that the proposed TPP agreement—stipulating minimum wage, working hours, and occupational safety regulations among twelve countries, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Australia, and, additionally, enhanced union rights in Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei—went further on labor standards than any previous trade pact.86 Whether such measures could ever stem the tide of declining union influence and offshoring in the increasingly “postindustrial” West seems dubious. Even as the terms of world economic integration emerge, for the first time in some respects, under critical scrutiny, the organized agents of workers’ power are weaker than ever. Rather than an up-and-down vote on one more multilateral trading arena, what is needed is a more comprehensive set of principles that apply to all agreements affecting trade, credit, worker welfare, and the environment. In short, a revised and sustainable Bretton Woods for the twenty-first century. With a few singular exceptions, like the “positive approach” of the Australian delegates at Bretton Woods in 1944 or the push for an ITO the

TH E BRETTO N WO O DS BO O M ER A N G45

following year, world economic integration proceeded heedless of any systematic, legislative concern for employment and worker living standards. Across the Western world, left-labor representatives had scored many victories against capitalist forces at the regulative and redistributive level. Yet these were almost all at the national (or at most regional bloc) level. Initially content to manage their own homes, they let others set the rules for East-West and North-South connections and were virtually powerless when a new stage of global market integration upended their bargaining power. In particular, the isolation of trade and monetary reform from other crucial economic issues should likely be considered one of the pivotal explanations for the ultimate decline of liberal designs within an expanding global economy.

2 THE GOOD POSTWAR German Worker Rights, 1945–1950

P

ostwar liberal policy makers had to think big and small at the same time. While they tried on the one hand to erect a new, worldwide webbing for world commerce, they contended on the other hand with a myriad of ground-level social rebuilding projects, of which the most pressing was war-torn Germany itself. Under Allied occupation, and general U.S. dominance, what became West Germany went through a fast and drastic change of social power after the final collapse of the Nazi regime in May 1945. In perhaps no other arena of daily life was the change more dramatic than in the transformation of social relations at work. Well before the war’s end, the Americans, together with their British allies, had been anticipating a future for trade unions and worker participation. Only a functioning democratic system, in their eyes, could staunch the possibility of future totalitarianisms, and no social institution beckoned more readily than the unions as a check on runaway dictatorship or the interlocking business-state hegemony that had characterized the Nazi-era economy. Given their simultaneous concern with cartels, moreover, it is noteworthy that the Allied Control Council Law No. 22, permitting factory works councils as part of larger trade union legitimacy, was signed in April  1946, months before corresponding decartelization legislation.1 Similarly, in Japan, General Douglas MacArthur’s SCAP authority officially reestablished a strong union presence

THE GOOD POST WA R47

with both the Labor Union Law in December 1945 and the Labor Relations Adjustment Law the following year. Overall, a U.S. government dominated by former New Dealers determined to create both legal structures and a social climate where “free” trade unionism would flourish, and, no doubt, the industrial relations (IR) systems of most new and rebuilding states in the noncommunist world were linked in some measure to U.S. ideals and influence. Yet organized worker power proved not only distinctive in each country but also often quite different from that in the United States. The legal spine of what would become the postwar West German IR  system rests on a few essentials. Allied Control Council Law No. 22—representing the loose Four Power administration that shared authority with the military governors of each allied zone (U.S., British, French, and Soviet)—at once repealed top-down Nazi corporatism and supported the principle of worker participation in industry via voluntary works councils. The latter were in part an attempt to stem a wave of radical shop-steward actions initiated by communist militants within the reforming Ruhr Valley trade union movement.2 Then, in January 1947, under the eye of occupation authorities, the Ruhr’s coal, iron, and steel, the so-called Montan industries, reached agreement with worker representatives on “parity co-determination,” or shared power, giving trade union representatives near-equal authority to that of management on company supervisory boards—an agreement that was incorporated into the Adenauer government’s broader Codetermination Law of 1951.3 Legislative institutionalization actually reined in the codetermination principle—limiting employees to a one-third minority representation outside the Montan industries—even while setting it on a permanent footing. The other key prop to the West German IR model was the Works Constitution Act of 1952, which followed up Council Law No.  22 with formal authorization for workshop-level, labor-management committees over company welfare and human relations policies.4 Undergirding all postwar legislation was the new West German Constitution, or Basic Law, ratified in May 1949. Notably, Article 9 of the Basic Law guaranteed the “freedom of association” to workers, and subsequent interpretation from the Federal Constitutional Court extended the right to file a “constitutional complaint” to the court for individuals or trade unions in the case of alleged violation of basic freedoms.5 These measures set the

4 8  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

context for social relations at the workplace in West Germany and in the reunited Federal Republic of Germany since 1990. Confined for an initial two decades within Adenauer’s narrow codetermination formula, the German unions under Social Democratic Party (SPD) governments of the 1970s succeeded in expanding the model, an effort crowned by the Codetermination Act of 1976, which provided a renewed “parity” principle for industry as a whole, albeit still in an administratively compromised form.6 Although its own trade union membership and density ultimately fell sharply under the influence of both deindustrialization and East-West reunification in the 1990s, postwar Germany would continue to outpace its U.S. counterpart by almost any measure of worker power or welfare.7 That the structural roots of (West) German labor power were laid in a period of Allied occupation and effective U.S. supremacy raises important questions. Who was responsible for the postwar power shift on German soil, and how did both labor unions and factory councils (via the institutionalization of codetermination) emerge with such authority in postwar German society? The role of the American occupiers in shaping the general contours of the new democratic German constitution is not news. It is the purpose of this chapter, however, to examine two relatively neglected forces: the supportive acts of both U.S. liberals and British Labour Party figures within the occupation administration together with the speedy reinvigoration of the German labor movement, as aided by its Anglo-American labor allies. At the international level, this was one of labor-liberalism’s finest hours.

R The Americans and their British allies began planning for a German labor revival well before the end of the war. Both the highest counsels of the U.S. intelligence service and the U.S. military government in Germany (or OMGUS) envisioned worker rights and the institutional heft of a labor movement as a crucial part of the “return” of the German nation to the civilized world. As early as spring 1942, the influential Chicago labor attorney (and future secretary of labor and Supreme Court justice) Arthur Goldberg joined William Donovan’s fledgling wartime intelligence operation (the future Office of Strategic Services, or OSS), which

THE GOOD POST WA R49

FIGURE 2.1  Arthur J.

Goldberg, in U.S. Army uniform (1944–1946), took a keen interest in European labor networks and headed the OSS Labor Desk, then later served as secretary of labor, Supreme Court justice, and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Source: Arthur J. Goldberg Papers, Library of Congress.

worked closely with its British counterpart. From early on, Goldberg took a keen interest in European labor networks. Initially working out of the New York field office under future CIA chief Allen Dulles, Goldberg soon moved to the London desk, where he charted pockets of anti-Nazi resistance through the sailor contacts of the International Transport Worker’s Union’s (ITF) Belgian secretary, Omer Becu. The U.S. government also linked its security operation to the AFL’s foreign policy czar Jay Lovestone, the clothing workers’ leader and CIO lieutenant Jacob Potofsky, and left-liberal opinion leaders like Freda Kirchwey, editor of the Nation. But it was Goldberg himself (whom we will meet again in chapters  3 and 5) who smoothed sometimes fraught relations between the spy agency and the State Department, in cooperation with State’s

50  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

point man on intelligence, Adolf A. Berle (who will take on larger significance in chapter 4).8 A key recruit for Goldberg in London was Hans Gottfurcht. A Jewish Social Democrat and former administrator of the Berlin-centered union of commercial assistants, Gottfurcht had escaped internment by the Gestapo in 1938 and taken refuge in Amsterdam and then London. As early as 1940, he appealed to the Trades Union Congress’s (TUC) general secretary Walter Citrine to involve “German trade unionist refugees” “in the fight for the overthrow of Hitlerism.” Rather than “waste” such activists “by treating them as enemy aliens or suspecting them of fifth column activities,” Gottfurcht urged that “their great experience, their knowledge of the German working class movement and of the German people in general ought to be fully utilized for propaganda purposes.”9 Although delayed for more than a year by the forced internment of Gottfurcht and thousands of others in 1940–1941 as “enemy aliens” at Liverpool’s Camp Huyton, the plan bore tangible fruit during the summer of 1943 in the form of the TUC-sponsored German Trade Union Centre in Great Britain, which Gottfurcht served as chair.10 As the war wound down, Gottfurcht was playing an increasingly important role, via his OSS contacts, in helping reorganize German trade unions. He also helped revive the SPD infrastructure by providing the advancing American forces with “guides” knowledgeable about both worker organization and extant antifascist resistance.11 In the process, Gottfurcht tamped down the political anxieties of his Allied hosts, insisting that his Social Democrats, once triumphant, would reach for a cross-class social peace rather than attempt a revolutionary socialist takeover of large industrial firms. Throughout this period, while collecting information on resistant trade unionists, debriefing German prisoners, and even teaching classes of U.S. servicemen, Gottfurcht most often communicated with another German refugee, Toni Sender, coordinator of the Office of European Labour Research, a thinly veiled front for the OSS Labor Desk.12 The OSS brought a distinctly labor-oriented view to postwar planning for Germany. As the historian Rebecca Boehling has documented, American thinking in the mid-1940s reckoned with three main policy options. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s hard-line view (presented in his 1944 “Program to Prevent Germany from Starting a World War III”) imagined punitive ruralization and long-term pacification of

THE GOOD POST WA R51

the population by Allied governments. Contrariwise, the State Department’s “soft peace” evoked a fast-track normalization of relations and business-friendly revitalization of Germany’s core economic strength. In the middle, an “Other Germany” approach emphasized a tutorial role overseeing transition to a democratized social order within a modernizing economy.13 This latter, social-democratic vision was most effectively articulated through the OSS Research and Analysis Branch, which recruited field experts like NLRB counsel Mortimer Wolf and émigré German scholars including the liberal social scientists Franz Neumann and Sigmund Neumann (no relation) as well as more left-wing talents like the philosopher Herbert Marcuse and the U.S.-born economist Paul Sweezy. Drawing on their fears of a 1918-style revolution from below and of the deep-seated reactionary nature of the German business elite, the academic advisers pushed for a support of trade unions as an agent of democratic social stabilization.14 As close partners of Roosevelt’s New Deal and win-the-war policies, the American labor movement also took great interest in the European and Japanese postwar settlements. Cooperation by both the AFL and CIO with German trade unionists near the end of the war continued into the postwar reconstruction effort in the American zone. Sidney Hillman, CIO political leader and president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (and who had just served on Roosevelt’s War Production Board), visited Berlin in October 1945 and set the tone for a “bottom-up” rebuilding of the labor movement.15 AFL president William Green, for his part, formed the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC) in 1944 with a onemillion-dollar operating budget to rebuild “free and democratic trade unions” across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Built on the Jewish Labor Committee’s efforts to rescue victims of Nazism during the war years, the FTUC was the brainchild of the influential labor leaders Matthew Woll (a skilled craft union president appointed by Roosevelt to the National War Labor Board) and International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ president David Dubinsky. It functioned primarily through its permanent European representative, Irving Brown, a former labor organizer and close associate of Jay Lovestone, the ex-communist and now virulently anticommunist and influential policy adviser to Dubinsky. According to the political scientist Roy Godson, Brown “knew almost every important noncommunist European trade union leader, met frequently

52  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

with cabinet ministers and Socialist party leaders in most Western European countries and with the exiled leaders of Eastern Europe, and had ready access to [U.S. Occupation Chief General Lucius] Clay and [General] Eisenhower and every Marshall Plan administrator and United States ambassador in Europe.”16 The liberal/social-democratic vision of U.S. organized labor also took significant institutional form within OMGUS, as directed by Military Governor General Lucius Clay. Born in Marietta, Georgia, in 1898, the son of a conservative U.S. senator, Clay was the youngest U.S. Army officer of his rank when appointed brigadier general in 1942. Directing the construction of large projects such as dams and airports in the 1920s and 1930s and building ties to influential political figures like the New Deal brain truster Harry Hopkins and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, Clay was a proven administrator when be became military governor in 1944. Politically, his instincts when it came to labor relations were conservative but also smoothly pragmatic. His summary of U.S. policy aims issued in July 1946 emphasized “a vigorous trade union program” alongside the restoration of early elections, freedom of the press, and “reeducation of the population under Allied control.”17 As Clay explained in his 1949 memoir, “We have made no greater or more important effort in the development of a new Germany than re-establishing a strong organized labor movement.” In the U.S. zone, Clay presided over something of a two-headed administrative body: the Economics Division led by John J. McCloy and filled with bankers and corporate executives and the Labor Relations (aka Manpower) Division, which recruited heavily from AFL, CIO, and NLRB staff.18 No mere tabula rasa greeted Clay’s administration when it began setting up shop in Germany in October 1944. Rather, the victorious armies were presented from early on with a subject population already equipped with their own customs and aspirations, which, however suppressed during the Nazi years, struggled to reassert themselves in the new body politic. Indeed, German worker self-activity reemerged even before the Allied armies had pounded the final nails into the Nazi coffin. Works councils under a variety of names sprang up from an “informal understanding” among former Weimar trade union activists in the last days of the war and first days of peace.19 Observers from the occupying Allies were amazed. As a sympathetic Major E. A. Bramall reported to the TUC from the Hanover region, in the

THE GOOD POST WA R53

very first month of the occupation (April  1945), “Works Councils were elected everywhere in, as far as can be ascertained, a perfectly regular manner.” Indeed, as Bramall explained, even in a period when the Trade Unions have been theoretically non-existent they have in fact been carrying on, thorough the temporary Committee, their normal functions and have, in fact, saved a lot of trouble to [the] military government by negotiating with a similar “non-existent” employers’ organization on such difficult questions as the purging of Nazis from the factories and the heavy redundancy of office and supervisory staffs in factories which were carrying on during the war with inflated labour forces of foreign workers.20

Similar examples abounded. A report from Karl van Berk, a young miner, on the initiative he took together with an older SPD militant and a communist who had just emerged from two years in jail in establishing one of the first works councils in a Ruhr colliery is indicative. “The Nazis [were] gone,” explained Van Berk. “Rubble [was] left, the staff needed new direction, so we three took it over until a proper election could be held.”21 Altogether, in a period of internal and external revulsion from business-Nazi ties, the resurgent German labor movement and left-wing political organizers were not waiting for anyone to challenge the topdown, herr-in-haus managerial tradition long manifest in German basic industries.22 With remarkable volatility and ubiquity, then, organized German workers quickly imposed themselves on the occupation authorities as a force to be reckoned with. Although immediate postwar factory occupations by communist-led Antifas (short for antifascist) committees were easily turned back, Allied authorities convinced themselves that a more widespread working-class revolt could only be staunched by an ameliorative, democratic decision-making structure. To this end, German Social Democrats and trade union reformers had a ready prescription, namely, a reanimation of the centralized labor federations of the postWorld War I Weimar Republic. Indeed, the “reappropriation” of Weimar—albeit one hedged by redirection from the Allies—constituted the prime testing ground of the Bundesrepublik’s democratic content and nowhere more so than in relation to the “Labor Question.”23

54  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

As Germany’s sole liberal-democratic experiment, however foreshortened and unstable, the Weimar model would prove a still-useful prop from which the nation’s postwar parties could appeal for renewed international legitimacy. For matters of industrial relations, moreover, the Weimar model conveniently offered both conservatives and social democrats a base from which to imagine political as well as national renewal. Based on the temporary wartime pact between the Social Democratic leader and German president Friedrich Ebert and Army Quartermaster Wilhelm Groener and its effective postwar extension as arranged by the Ruhr industrialist Hugo Stinnes and the trade union leader Carl Legien, the Weimar constitution of 1919 recognized trade unions as the sole legitimate representatives of workers (as opposed to pseudorepresentation from above) and permitted workers’ councils, or Betriebsratte, in workplaces of fifty or more employees. Although in practice such Weimar codetermination hardly flourished, its basic principles provided an effective launching pad for postwar labor demands.24 While reacting to the moves of the German workers, OMGUS strategy also greatly depended on General Clay’s staff, particularly its Manpower Division as represented by field officers working from both London and the U.S. zone. This combination brain trust and administrative skeleton approached its work with three goals in mind: rebuild a functioning collective bargaining and social welfare regime, ensure that there be no backsliding toward Nazi influence, and prevent production slowdowns and work stoppages.25 Almost to a man (notably, it seems no women were assigned to the task), OMGUS’s uniformed labor affairs staff projected a political vision in accordance with, if not to the left of, those tendencies that defined the policies of the homegrown New Deal or the two great organized labor federations in the United States. David Morse, a regional attorney for the NLRB and who served as army captain and then major in North Africa, was appointed first chief of the Labor Division before deferring to a more senior military figure, Brigadier General Frank  J. McSherry. Chief adviser to the director was Joseph Keenan, who had emerged from the ranks of the Chicago construction trades to serve under Hillman on the War Production Board and its chief of statistics, David Saposs, the University of Wisconsin–trained industrial relations expert and NLRB economist.26

THE GOOD POST WA R55

Several of the officers on the ground, in fact, had first entered political life as socialists. Topeka-born, twenty-two-year-old Newman Jeffrey, for example, joined the Socialist Party after graduating from the University of Kansas in 1932, then worked for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers as an organizer and labor educator.27 His fellow socialist George Shaw Wheeler, from the state of Washington, also served on staff at the NLRB and War Production Board before being plucked for the Manpower Division’s denazification unit and stationed in Germany.28 Louis Wiesner, likewise, was barely thirty years old when he became involved in postwar Germany’s labor affairs. Born in Port Huron, Michigan, he had become radicalized as an undergraduate at Michigan State and joined both the Socialist Party and (briefly) the Young Communist League, including picket duty outside Lansing’s Fisher Body plant in 1936. Subsequently, as a history graduate student at Harvard, he began dissertation research on the early French Socialist Party, when the war interrupted his studies. Bad vision kept him from active duty, so he instead entered the Foreign Service and was accepted into the State Department’s newly established labor attaché program, eventually deploying to London, from where he followed General Patton’s quick Third Army strike across Germany. Alongside a young Captain Henry Rutz, labor officer for the Twelfth Army Group who also had ties with the Wisconsin Federation of Labor, Wiesner helped compile a file of trade union exiles and underground social-democratic operatives, including Willy Brandt in Sweden and Ernst Reuter in Turkey.29 Even among a politically experienced and dedicated cohort, Paul Porter was something of a standout, with well-formed intentions for what he hoped to accomplish upon arrival in Germany just a month after D-Day as one of the labor attachés assigned to General Omar Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group. As a student at Kansas City Junior College in the late 1920s, he had heard the Women’s Trade Union League leader Sarah Green’s “stirring talk regarding women in garment factories” and a year later declared himself a socialist. After meeting Norman Thomas in Cleveland and still just twenty years old in 1928, he took a job organizing college campuses for the Student League for Industrial Democracy. The following year, he witnessed the intense labor conflicts across Southern textile country in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and in Marion and Gastonia, North Carolina. During the course of one organizing trip, he met and

56  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

reportedly recruited the author Sinclair Lewis to the Socialist Party, while beginning a more extended friendship with Lewis’s wife, the reporter Dorothy Thompson. When another decade of frenzied work for socialism and labor organizing ended in a diagnosis of tuberculosis, Porter “retired” into a more settled life as a labor editor in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but then sometime in the early 1940s took a job with the federal bureaucracy in Washington, DC. It was there, during his regular carpool ride (occasioned by gas rationing), that he overheard Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White expound on Treasury Secretary Morgenthau’s postwar plans, with which Porter vigorously disagreed. According to his own retrospective testimony, “the idea of stripping Germany of its industry [as proposed by Morgenthau and White] which should have been used instead for the recovery of Europe stirred me very much and I decided that I would do what I could by going into military government to oppose the Morgenthau Plan. I applied for a job in the Manpower Division . . . [and] in March 1945 I went to London.” Like several of his fellow labor experts, Porter was first dispatched to OMGUS headquarters in Wiesbaden, but after three months he was transferred back to London and put to work on a peculiar labor problem as a “coal expert”: The British had responsibility for the operation of the coal mines in the Ruhr. The American Army at the time had the responsibility for the occupation force there. The British had established a workday ending at 6 in the evening. The Americans had established a 5 o’clock curfew. So, as the miners came out of the mines our soldiers were arresting them. I was sent to mediate the conflict between the commanders of the British and American forces. We worked out a reasonable agreement and that made me a coal expert.30

Befitting their determination, in principle, to resurrect the better angels of the German people and the country’s cultural traditions, reported OMGUS interactions with the subject population were overwhelmingly constructive, if somewhat selective. As General Clay would later summarize, “We had much advice from those who professed to know the so-called German mind. If it did exist, we never found it;

THE GOOD POST WA R57

German minds seemed to us to be remarkably like those elsewhere.”31 The OMGUS labor officer Louis Wiesner likewise fondly recalled an encounter in Neustadt with a badly crippled concentration camp survivor who begged the labor officer to be allowed to set up a trade union. Even more remarkably, in Berlin, Wiesner met Hanna Bornowski, a “half-Jewish and Social Democratic” woman who had miraculously lived out the war in her own apartment and afterward taken photos for the Red Cross and helped set up a cooperative kitchen in the Wilhelm Leuschner Institute, named after the trade union leader who helped mastermind the failed plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. According to Wiesner, the GIs’ overture to Bornowski had come through another former Socialist Party activist, George Silver, a CIO department store union officer in Philadelphia, who not only willingly violated the army’s nonfraternization policy by “du-zening” (that is, using the German familiar “you” form) the natives but also fell in love with Hanna. In 1948, the two returned together to Philadelphia as husband and wife.32 Despite their vigorous support, in principle, for the reemergence of a German labor movement and speedy return of German self-government, liberal overseers of the German recovery quarreled internally over two key points of policy. What form of labor organization should be encouraged or tolerated? And what role would organized labor be allowed in shaping the Basic Law of the new West German state? The first question, dating to the beginnings of U.S. occupation in 1944 and not finally resolved until mid-1946, hinged on how much liberty to allow the Germans in taking advantage of a trade union infrastructure that had survived Hitler and the war. Once in power, the Nazis had quickly outlawed the Weimar trade unions, which had been established on both religious (for example, Catholic) and political (for example, socialist or communist) foundations, and replaced them with the statecontrolled Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF). But with the Nazi state reeling and with help from both British and U.S. intelligence services, the British-based Landesgruppe began fashioning plans for a unified new labor central command (einheitsbewegung), formally unconnected to party or sectarian organizations but with strong de facto SPD inclinations. To that end, already in 1945 emergent postwar trade union leaders were pushing the Allied authorities not only to recognize labor unions as

58  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

legitimate agents within civil society but also to allow them to function across the circumscribed Allied zonal governments as a protonational movement. The idea, it seems, met an initial roadblock of strange bedfellows. Evidenced from the beginning was the distinction between trusting Germans in principle and trusting them in fact. Collaboration of the German trade unionists with their immediate governors in the heavily industrialized British occupation zone played a crucial role in the long run in defining the postwar IR order, yet nowhere were feelings on the subject of German workers more complicated than among the British occupiers. British influence emerged twofold, at once from the political outlook of an expansive Labour Party government under Prime Minister Clement Atlee and from an internationally active trade union movement centered on the TUC.33 In interacting intensively with their German counterparts, these twin poles set much of the initial foundation for what only later would become recognized as the “European model” of social-political development. At the formal political level, the postwar democratic left in Britain and Germany quickly found common ground. Ideologically, British Labour stalwarts and German revisionist socialists like Eduard Bernstein had cultivated ties going back to the pre–World War I decade. Such ties only deepened among the SPD leaders exiled in Britain during the war years, when “the British party,” as they were known in émigré circles, looked to import aspects of British parliamentarism into the postwar German constitution. The move toward a common-core social-democratic program in both countries was further facilitated by the figure of T. H. Marshall, the distinguished British sociologist, who took an active role in the government both as a wartime analyst of Germany for the Foreign Office and subsequently as an educational advisor with considerable clout in spreading the postwar Labour government’s social vision to its German counterparts. Together, Marshall’s famous concept of “social citizenship,” first elaborated in a lecture in 1949 and in published form a year later, fit neatly not only with the energetic welfare-state plans of Lord William Beveridge and Aneurin Bevan but equally with the early ambitions of SPD and trade union leaders like Kurt Schumacher and Hans Böckler for the selective socialization of industry, central planning, and workplace codetermination.34

THE GOOD POST WA R59

Bilateral trade union ties likewise enjoyed an extended history. It is not the focus here, but international trade union cooperation from the 1890s through the post–World War I International Labor Organization had regularly pivoted on a British-German axis. The ITF, for example, which joined seamen, port workers, and rail and road transport unions under a common roof, while originating in London had switched its headquarters to Hamburg before returning to its British base after the Great War.35 Amid World War II, it was thus not unnatural that German trade unionists, persecuted and disbursed by the Nazis, should attempt to regroup with British help into the Landesgruppe. The TUC provided a crucial link in these matters. Indeed, within four months of V-E Day, the former transport workers’ leader Ernest Bevin, as minister of labor in the wartime coalition government, formally invited the TUC to advise the Control Commission regarding the restoration of German unions. A revived German labor federation, the Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB), first established itself in the British zone in April 1947 and by July claimed over two million members.36 Bilateral ties took on something of a relief mission in the “British Aid for German Workers” project organized in London in 1948. Beginning with the sending of secondhand clothing and food parcels, the organization, which boasted the eminent Labour political representatives Fenner Brockway and Caroline Ganley and intellectuals including Bertrand Russell and Otto Kahn-Freund among its executive committee, set as its aim “the helping of socialists and trade unionists because we knew we could not, with our small resources, help everybody, and those people who had suffered under the Nazi Regime because of their convictions needed our help most.” Among its initiatives, the Children’s Hospitality Scheme conveyed nearly five hundred German youngsters to short-term British “foster-parents” in 1949 alone.37 Not surprisingly, therefore, General Clay would recall that OMGUS was never as popular with rank-and-file union members as the British military government, “which represented a Labor [sic] government.”38 Yet even a sympathetic British Labour government initially trod softly in reauthorizing German labor power. As an early memorandum from the British military government had cautioned, “a representative and stable trade union movement . . . will not spring up overnight.” Rather, a “firm foundation” must be sought, from which “the German people . . .

FIGURE  2.2  The British Trade Union Congress organized several emergency relief operations for German workers, including the Children’s Hospitality Scheme, which conveyed nearly five hundred German youngsters to short-term British “foster-parents” in 1949 alone.

Source: MSS.292/809.2/3 TUC Papers, Modern Records Centre, Warwick University, access courtesy of librarian Martin Sanders.

THE GOOD POST WA R61

build slowly and well.”39 What such language covered up was a deep and continuing suspicion of the German capacity for democratic selfgovernment. Under these circumstances, the planning among the German trade unionists for a unified, industrial unionist future—having learned their own lesson from a past of multifold internal division— encountered considerable initial obstacles. As an anonymous advisor to the TUC general council opined, the military’s policy that a revived trade union movement “must grow from below . . . and not be created from the top is the right one. . . . Don’t let us forget that that whole construction of the AF [Arbeitsfront] suits the German mind of centralization, militarism and dictatorship from above. . . . And after the Allies have adopted the policy of decentralization it would be ridiculous to allow the Trade Union movement to develop to the opposite.” 40 The breadth of such suspicions was evident in both the French and American as well as British limitation on union organization beyond a specific occupation zone.41 (Indeed, it is worth noting that even the communistleaning World Federation of Trade Unions, still wary of grassroots German sentiments, officially balked at “too rapid reconstitution” of the larger labor movement in early 1946.)42 As British Major Ashley Bramall explained, “exactly that reason which promotes the support of the Trade Unionists, that the united organization, if it is at all successful, will be an enormously powerful force in the country,” initially drove the occupying forces to oppose it.43 Exemplary of the Allies’ uncertainty, here, was the deputy labor minister and IR expert Sir Frederick Leggett’s October 1945 report to Citrine on a just-completed visit to Germany. Leggett made clear that among the Allies, it was indeed the British who would need to take the initiative toward the German trade unionists: the Americans, he explained, were not pressing forward on the issue of trade union organization, preferring to focus on the creation of a localized shop steward structure; the Soviets, on the other hand, “were working on the principle of organization from the top downwards.” Yet, clearly, Leggett’s own reported conversations with German leaders revealed that the two sides would first need to overcome some difficult stumbling blocks: He told them quite frankly that in Britain . . . there was considerable disappointment that the Trade Union Movement in Germany had not

6 2  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

made any response to the earlier pleas made to them from 1931–33 to resist Hitler and subsequently to prevent the German nation going to war. The [German] leader said in regard to his trade they had authorized a strike but in view of the considerable volume of unemployment which existed in 1933, no strike had taken place. There appeared to be a good deal of complacency about the attitude of the Trade Union Movement and there was no doubt that the Trade Unionists wanted the outside world to look at the period as a matter of past history and to shake hands as friends as if nothing had happened.44

Even sharper rhetorical blows were exchanged through the early months of 1946. The Hanover labor leader Albin Karl, former president of the local Factory Workers’ Union, linked internationally to the British Transport and General Workers’ Union, and who had served two terms of imprisonment and a short time in a Nazi concentration camp, tried hard to mollify Allied fears of the Germans’ single “General Union” (or Einheitsgewerkschaft), for which fledgling organizations in every occupied zone had already expressed strong interest. Such a formation, he argued, would be both more “influential” and “practical”; indeed, its very universal coverage would give individual members more, not less, protection. The Allies should remember, counseled Karl, that the 1933 debacle occurred not with the desired General Union in place but with an “individual unions” structure. The German leaders, moreover, were already visibly beginning to bristle at perceived British condescension. “The ordinary Trade Unionist now asks the question ‘why ask our views and get us to take a democratic decision if these are not to be taken into account?’ The core of our Trade Unionists have remained democratic even during the Nazi period and cannot understand such methods.” 45 In response, however, the British trade union tutors were unyielding. “We have to be quite frank with you,” wrote the delegation’s secretary and future TUC chairman H. L. Bullock, “because the future peace of Europe may depend upon it.” There is apparently in the German character a feeling of comfort if they are ordered to do things. For example, we understand that you have never had the same system of local government with autonomous Town Councils, County Councils, etc. that we have in this country . . . and so

THE GOOD POST WA R63

the German rank and file officer has been deprived of the valuable administrative experience which his British colleague often secures. And it is this trait in the German character . . . which has made it possible for the Nazis not only to take control but, having secured control, to stifle all popular feeling against their outrageous policies and instructions.46

Given such raw sentiments, it proved fortunate at each corner of the Anglo-American-German labor triangle that there remained cooler heads in play. By the coincidence of the relatively longue durée of international connections, British and German trade unionists could vouch for each others’ basically good intentions. One facilitator, in just this regard, proved to be the future dean of British industrial relations studies, Allan Flanders, who in 1946 was serving as director of the Political Department of the British Control Commission. Flanders, it happened, had honed his own core political commitments as well as close acquaintance with the German language and political world during a threeyear internship with a tiny German socialist organization, the International Sozialisticher Kampfbund (ISK) in 1930 through 1933, under the leadership of the ethical-socialist German philosopher Leonard Nelson.47 While determined, like his British coworkers, to resist an undifferentiated Einheitsgewerkschaft, Flanders counseled calm on the main issues of mutual trust. “Today,” he wrote following a gathering of labor organizations in Bielefeld in August 1946, “we scarcely need to worry about the German unions. The great majority of trade union leaders are either longtime democrats and staunch opponents of the Third Reich or younger servants whose democratic sympathies and intentions can hardly be doubted.” This being the case, Flanders counseled his superiors, the quickest possible reconstitution of the trade union federation “will provide the strongest bulwark for [German] democracy. Now, while the Communists are relatively weak and with little influence in the trade unions, is the moment to put democratic leadership firmly in the saddle. From then on, the Germans can again be responsible for their own economy.” Based on the Bielefeld understandings, British authorities and Hans Böckler came to substantial agreement on the terms of labor’s initial institutional integration in Lubeck in October 1946.48

6 4  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

Suspicion of popular organizations of any kind was not surprising given the determination of the conquerors to make sure of the loyalty of the subject population. Yet more than fear of disloyalty likely explains the resistance of otherwise socialist-leaning figures in the Manpower Commission in counseling generals McSherry and Clay against a quick and robust trade union recovery. Morse, for example, a former New Deal labor administrator, arrived in Germany after overseeing the disestablishment of the fascist syndicalist system, determined to apply a similar clean sweep.49 Amid his first weeks on the job, and following a particularly wrenching visit to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, Morse (who a decade before had changed his name from Moscowitz) confided to his former mentor, William Leiserson, using the “personal stationary” of the Gestapo founder and Luftwaffe commander Herman Goring (then in custody before his subsequent death sentence and suicide at Nuremburg), of his basic distrust of the German public: They are not defeated as a people at all, and under their docility is a strong defiance and readiness to get going again for the strong nationalization of Germany and her hope for a new victory. You see it in their bearing and in their eyes. You feel it in the atmosphere if you are at all sensitive. In addition, I feel strongly that the guilt for what has been done by Germany rests with the great majority of the German people. . . . The vast network of concentration camps and horror camps spreads uniformly throughout Germany and Austria, many parallel to main highways. People know when they live next to slaughter houses.50

The grisly reports trickling in from the liberation of the concentration camps inevitably affected those who were now being sent to administer the defeated population. In April 1945, for example, General McSherry himself heard news that at Buchenwald the wife of one of the SS officers had personally selected victims on the basis of their tattoos, then had the victims skinned, with their skin tanned and made into souvenirs.51 Together, a general suspicion of German popular culture and disdain for Weimar trade union leaders, whom he blamed for the lack of organized resistance to Hitler’s rise, visibly weighed on Hillman. While supporting German postwar reparations to the rest of war-torn Europe (which would require continued industrial production), he and Morse

THE GOOD POST WAR65

pushed against the more cautious General Clay to remove all holdovers from the DAF.52 As early as February 1945, Hillman advised McSherry to adopt stern guidelines toward an occupied Germany: “No leniency should be envisioned in the treatment of Germans, including German workers. We are not given the mission to establish an ideal labor pattern for Germany. It is a mistake to offer to German workers during the early stages everything that may eventually benefit them.” By June, the general had followed up with a no-strike order as well as a provisional two-year ban on the recognition of trade unions.53 There was also an element of postwar politics at stake in the German labor policy decisions. The London-centered Landesgruppe, Hillman feared, had drawn too close to the gathering hard-line foreign policy that he identified with both Meany’s AFL and Walter Citrine’s TUC. Until his premature death in July 1946, Hillman pushed for a postwar accommodation with the Soviet Union and international worker solidarity, to be adjudicated by the World Federation of Trade Unions, which he helped birth in October 1945 in Paris.54 A neutral and ultimately reunified Germany was crucial to this vision and, in the meantime, just as Morgenthau and others had earlier advocated, better to slow down the process of German state formation. On the ground in Germany, such assumptions inclined Hillman and those he influenced to adopt a more “grassroots” (what the Germans called Aufbau von unten) strategy of factory-based worker organization.55 This position, pushed most forcefully by George Wheeler and Mortimer Wolf, as well as Joe Keenan, and initially endorsed by both General Clay and General McSherry, emphasized the election of shop stewards for works councils elected on three-month terms, of which there were some three thousand by the end of the fall of 1945.56 Alas for grassroots supporters, however, advocacy of works councils over trade unions quickly devolved into incipient Cold War–era frictions. Both trade union advocates on the ground and anticommunist labor centers in the United States and Britain quickly identified the grassroots strategy with German communists who championed it as a way to hold off SPD dominance in the labor movement (even as the Soviet zone itself countenanced no such decentralization of worker power). As early as August 1945, for example, Keenan, perceived by his AFL superiors as a patsy for Hillman, was summoned home for reeducation by Jay

6 6  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

Lovestone. By November, Major Rutz was openly working with former trade union leaders, and Major Alfred Bingham, the labor officer for Wurttemburg-Baden, together with the labor relations chief Newman Jeffrey were defying the no-recognition order by permitting a regional “trade union league,” or proto–labor federation, at the regional level.57 Wheeler’s influence, meanwhile, quickly diminished as rumors, fanned by Lovestone, circulated of his communist sympathies. Called back to Washington in October for a civil service review, his job was temporarily saved by testimony from Hillman’s ally David Morse, as well as by McSherry. The general avowed that Wheeler had “shown no indication he is a party member or has any leanings or desires to become one. He is no doubt a liberal, but our government has a great many liberals in its employ.”58 In any case, with Hillman’s death, the tide had run out on the grassroots advocates. A chastened Keenan, whom Wheeler would remember a decade later as the “half-drunk . . . representative of corrupt Chicago trade unionism and monopoly capital,” joined forces with the “trade unionist” faction to work against the authority of the works councils. General Clay agreed with them, adding a concern (according to the later reminiscence of Morse) that any temporizing “would weaken the occupation forces and it might play into the hands of the Communists . . . [thus better to] keep the structure and modify it rather than liquidating it and starting over.” The trade unionists got their way. Wolf left Germany in January 1946, while McSherry, whom the trade unionists had also accused of deferring to leftist influence, was replaced in April.59 Wheeler himself hung on briefly in a diminished role, until in spring 1947 he shocked the OMGUS command with the announcement that he was quitting to take an academic teaching appointment in Prague. He quickly emerged as an unabashed critic of West German unions for “selling out” the workers’ interests and importing what he called “TaftHartley principles” into the U.S. zone, allegedly even exploiting food aid for narrow, self-serving ends.60 In the coming McCarthy era, he would be excoriated as a traitor and “man without a country.” Nevertheless, when, following the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Wheeler chose to return to his native land, he found belated if quiet acceptance and a teaching position at a college in his native Washington State

THE GOOD POST WAR67

thanks, in part, to a generous letter of recommendation from General Clay.61 Over the course of the years 1946 through 1948, the German trade unions would indeed reassert themselves. The “grassroots” works councils would remain as well, albeit in a decidedly subordinate role, once Clay announced in April 1946 that works council elections were “not a prerequisite” to trade union formation.62 Focused on production, employment, and individual grievances at the plant level, the councils would customarily defer to the unions when it came to wages, hours, and other major collective bargaining issues. While still pushing back against the German trade union leaders’ preference for a single, highly centralized federation, moreover, OMGUS soon acquiesced in the move toward trade union consolidation. In March  1946, unions in the U.S. zone formed federations at the state (or Laender) level, and by the end of the year some one million workers, or 25 percent of the industrial labor force, were enrolled in thirteen unions across the U.S. zone. This was still only half the size of the organized workforce in the British sector. The Bizone, or joint U.S./British authority established in January  1947, witnessed continued union growth, including the creation, three months later, of the DGB, the powerful German trade union federation whose very structure signaled a compromise between the reach for unity and democratic accountability.63 By July 1948, five million trade unionists were registered across the three western zones (although the French denied interzonal organizations until 1949), and the Bizone unions showed enough muscle by November  1948 to call a twenty-four-hour general strike to protest low wages and high prices.64 A second, if less internally combustible, set of conflicts between the occupying powers and German working-class representatives occurred on the way to codetermination on the factory floor, or what the Germans called Mitbestimmung. In the same period as the precedent-setting agreement of coal and steel industry leaders with the trade union leadership, reforming state and regional legislatures eagerly pushed both to codify the Weimar-based principles of worker representation at the workplace into law and for selective nationalization of key economic enterprises. While British authorities were generally tolerant, if not altogether sympathetic, on both counts, the ideas met decided opposition from the American authorities and from German business interests.

6 8  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

OMGUS effectively bought time against the enactment of any socialdemocratic measure by appealing to constitutional process. For his part, General Clay recognized that, while formally unaffiliated, three-quarters of German trade unionists backed the SPD and favored some form of socialization of industry. Yet it was premature, he argued, to allow any social legislation in a single state that might ultimately compromise the options for the reunified country as a whole. It was “our duty,” his 1950 memoir emphasized, “to point out the merits of free enterprise.” 65 Insisting he would not intervene in laws that might ultimately pass at the national level, Clay took advantage of the formative period before May 1949 to hold socialism at bay. He thus pushed the British government in 1947 to walk back its commitment to nationalization of the mines in North Rhine–Westphalia. Similarly, in the spring of 1948, when the Hessian state parliament passed an ambitious codetermination bill— allowing broad representation for workers in personnel, welfare, and economic production and planning matters, including access to company records and positions on company boards of directors—Clay again decidedly stepped in. The bill would normally have gone to the regional Laenderrat to secure zonewide compliance. Instead, after sitting on the measure for weeks, OMGUS arbitrarily vetoed the bill’s most radical provisions, then dissolved the larger Laenderrat authority altogether.66 In general counseling against state interference in the economy and upholding instead the “free labor” principles favored by most American political leaders as well as AFL officials, the OMGUS Manpower Division declared in 1947 that “German unions [must] thoroughly learn the lessons that a collective bargaining agreement is a more flexible instrument for reflecting the changing needs of their membership than the same provisions enshrined in laws. Political action should be the last rather than the first resort of trade unions.” 67 Aside from denazification, which proved less a challenge on the labor front than anticipated, the Western occupation authorities also patrolled for communist influence. On this front, moreover, they were effectively assisted by a sturdy TUC-DGB alliance cemented by the Landesgruppe. From the late 1930s on, the British Colonial Office had developed close ties with TUC officers, with the joint aim of securing “British-oriented, non-communist trade unions” in any liberated territories. Such ties were again strengthened with the dawning of the Cold War, as Foreign

THE GOOD POST WA R69

Secretary (and former leader of the Transport and General Workers Union) Ernest Bevin reconnected with his old TUC friends, including some who would willingly cooperate with the new covert-action unit of British intelligence, the Information Research Department.68 The TUC’s anticommunist turn, moreover, fit perfectly comfortably alongside the politics of the Landesgruppe. Still reeling from earlier and savage interwar, interunion conflicts, the Landesgruppe leaders (including the former Köln metalworker Hans Böckler) were also determinedly anticommunist.69 At the end of the war, the social-democratic forces were strategizing against the influence of the communist-dominated Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (FDGB) across trade union circles. In June 1946, for instance, Gottfurcht worried openly regarding the reconstitution of the German Actors’ Union under the direction of Wolfgang Langhoff, a Brechtian actor who, with American help, had recently been repatriated from Switzerland. As Gottfurcht reported to TUC General Secretary Walter Citrine, “[Langhoff] has a well-earned reputation as a fine artist, but most people in Military Government do not realise that he is, at the same time, one of the most intelligent and determined propagandist[s] of his party.” As a countermeasure, Gottfurcht urged the DGB affiliates to send other “actor trade unionists” on a speaking tour of the country.70 Similarly, the Foreign Office representative M. L. Priss warned the TUC’s Albert Carthy to beware “the extent of communist penetration of the Works Councils.” Like the government, TUC officials immediately acknowledged that “the danger that Workers Council machinery might be used in defiance of, or in competition with, the Trade Union Movement, has been, as you know, one of the questions which have concerned the TUC since our first post-war contacts with the German Trade Union Movement.”71 Even when some British unions joined the outrage of communist-linked unions around the world at the seizure off a Polish ship of a leftist German trade unionist by British police—producing a Hungarian accusation that “it seems Hitler[’s] work is carried out not only by American capitalist government but also by [the] English Labour Government persecuting [the freedom fights of working people]”—the TUC declined to take action on the matter.72 Indeed, only in relation to what they ultimately considered overzealous and extreme anticommunist vigilance on the part of their American

70  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

counterparts did the British and DGB types strike a moderate pose. Gottfurcht thus counseled the TUC’s International Department in 1949 that German trade unionists on international missions were increasingly being turned back at the U.S. border: “When scrutinizing prospective visitors, USA authorities have refused visas to people who have been Communists 20 years ago and good social democrats ever since.”73 For a few years, therefore, space for what the Atlee types called a social-democratic “Third Force” (that is, between capitalism and socialism) seemed to have opened up as a viable option for European domestic policy.74 Even the Americans, who were aggressively moving into Europe, especially via the AFL’s Free Trade Union Committee under Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, were initially tolerant of national, and pan-European, differences on economic policy within the limits of the anticommunist Western bloc.75 Only with the creation of NATO in 1949, the tightening of an Atlantic-European partnership simultaneous to the collapse of Britain’s distinct global role, and the Labour Party’s defeat at the polls and ouster from office in 1951 did the transnational supports for German social democracy visibly weaken. As U.S. leadership, at once anticommunist and increasingly antisocialist, visibly spread across the Western Alliance over the coming decade, pragmatic necessity—equally evident in Anthony Crosland’s influential The Future of Socialism (1956) and the SPD’s Godesberg Program of 1959—gradually reshaped the electoral message on the left to accommodate itself to a market-driven, new world order not yet visible in the immediate postwar years.76 As it happened, the social-political foundations of the West German settlement occurred just as the balance of power had begun to swing against the leverage of the postwar left, yet in circumstances where the more progressive tendencies from both the British and American zones still proved telling. Even as the fundaments of the pro-labor National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act were attacked on the home front by business critics and an ascendant Republican-dominated Congress at home, U.S. occupation authorities generally stood by the working arrangements that ceded the unions considerable day-to-day influence in the fledgling German economy. It was Böckler and Ludwig Rosenberg, as DGB British zone leaders, however, who hammered hardest for institutionalized union power in industry rather than accept a U.S.-style

THE GOOD POST WA R7 1

“business unionist” model based only on contract bargaining over wages and benefits. Moreover, even as General Clay openly expressed fear of the power grab implicit in workers’ councils, British authorities acceded to the priority demands of their German trade union partners.77 More than for the Americans, in short, a central preoccupation of the British Labour presence in Germany involved commitment to trade unionism as a crucial building block to postwar democracy. Whereas American governmental authorities moved quickly from democracy building to an emphasis on West Germany’s economic growth, the British under the Atlee Labour government were at once more sympathetic to trade union power and warier of full-scale German reindustrialization. Initially supportive of outright nationalization of industries, Atlee and Bevin effectively provided additional pressure from the left on the German negotiators.78 As a result, concludes the historian Volker Berghahn, when some American “steel people” tried to apply pressure against the Montan Mitbestimmung in 1947, they arrived in the newly created Bizone “too late” to make a difference, even though they would soon help turn the tide against further accommodation to trade union demands.79 When the ultraconservative Ruhr industrialist Hermann Reusch retrospectively assailed the acceptance of the parity principle in the iron and steel agreement as the “result of brutal blackmail by the trade unions,” he may well have had more than German trade unionists alone in mind.80 To be sure, it required a continuing push by a trilateral force of liberallabor advocates—British and American as well as German—to secure the principles of codetermination in German law. Amid early German parliamentary skirmishing, for example, William Henderson, the Labour government’s whip in the House of Lords, refuted both French and Benelux objections, pledged Britain’s official support to the Montan Mitbestimmung as an agreement “reasonably satisfactory to all parties concerned.”81 Nelson Cruikshank, a former New Dealer and now the Labor Division’s director of the Marshall Plan administration in Europe, similarly congratulated both the DGB and ICFTU for overcoming “the intervention of American industrialists” in the policy process.82 Yet as the issue continued to stew within a period of rising German domestic political acrimony, the probusiness German press disseminated critical comments from abroad on codetermination, including that of former

72  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

British Labour minister Alfred Robens and AFL president William Green. In the latter case, within a general restatement of voluntarist trade union principles, the ailing Green (only months before his death in November 1951) had responded to a written question in a way that seemed to denigrate core assumptions behind the German industrial relations plan, going so far as to affirm the “right of those who own industrial firms to manage said firms without interference from outside sources.”83 While Hans Gottfurcht secured a quick “clarification” from the TUC disavowing Robens’s objections, J.  H. Oldenbroek, general secretary of the newly created International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), personally intervened to get newly installed AFL president George Meany to back off Green’s criticism, allowing that if such arrangements as Mitbestimmung constituted “anomalies” in the American context, their establishment in Germany was nevertheless “fully understandable.”84 Unity in labor’s ranks proved a necessary if not by itself a sufficient component in pressing the Montan Mitbestimmung on the new German parliament in 1951. Chancellor Adenauer, remembering the social unrest in the Ruhr that had accompanied Germany’s 1918 revolution and fearing new internal divisions with the outbreak of the Korean War, was determined to play the role of social conciliator. No fan of parity representation for workers—and determined to prevent it from spreading to other sectors of the workforce—he nevertheless drew on social-Catholic principles to support a certain measure of codetermination by workers, in general, and to accede to the parity principle in this exceptional case. In doing so, Adenauer also cunningly separated the DGB from left-SPD factions who demanded a confrontation over nationalization of industry with his CDU/CSU government. Altogether, Adenauer’s political pragmatism, combined with an economic boost to the country delivered by economic minister Ludwig Erhard’s currency reforms and suspension of price controls, helped the CDU/CSU coalition triumph over Kurt Schumacher’s socialist SPD and secure West Germany as a reliable U.S. ally in the Cold War.85 The very presence and intervention of the ICFTU in German politics was also a sign of a new postwar liberal-labor order. The product of the political storm unleashed by the Marshall Plan and growing rift between communist and noncommunist sections within the postwar World

THE GOOD POST WAR73

Federation of Trade Unions (1945–1949), the ICFTU basically took flight when the TUC, which had heretofore monopolized the top leadership of the WFTU, gave up the ghost and, along with the comparatively leftleaning American CIO, also withdrew from the former, now politically deadlocked, world federation. Oldenbroek of the ITF was elected to what would prove a long term as ICFTU general secretary. Key staff of the new organization included Gottfurcht, from his new home in Switzerland, and Toni Sender, who effectively served as the organization’s representative (via funding from the American Federation of Labor) at the United Nations.86 In short, by the end of the decade, and as if by some unseen alchemy, the British and German, as well as the better-heeled American, trade union groups seemed to have carved a durable place for themselves in the postwar political economy.87 The history of the postwar labor policy in West Germany is in keeping with the historian Tony Judt’s larger insight in 2005 about postwar Europe: “Post-nationalist, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today’s Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety. Shadowed by history, its leaders implemented social reforms and built new institutions as a prophylactic, to keep the past at bay.”88 If perhaps not quite so haphazard or defensive as Judt imagined—after all, the fundaments of the German IR structure all drew on strong and extended precedent—his summary does nicely capture the insecure and even foreboding feelings with which both the Allied occupiers and their German hosts attempted to resurrect a more sure-footed twentiethcentury democracy on German soil. In the long run, however, what may have mattered most was that the new Germany was also constructed as a distinctly “industrial democracy,” a term that should occupy at least as much retrospective conceptual space as more common reference to the “social market” economy, the term promoted by the Adenauer-Erhard Christian Democratic Union. To be sure, Judt pays eloquent testimony to developments that “emerged belatedly—and largely by accident—[as] the ‘European model’ ”: Embracing everything from child-care to inter-state legal norms, this European approach stood for more than just the bureaucratic practices of the European Union and its member states; by the beginning of the

74  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

21st century it had become a beacon and example for aspirant EU members and a global challenge to the United States and the competing appeal of the “American way of life.”89

Perhaps more fully to be appreciated, then, is how the “European model” took root under the very noses of—and in some important respects was tangibly aided by-- the American and British occupiers.90 At least in the case of postwar West German labor relations, the periphery of the free world took on a more statist outlook with a substantially more-empowered trade union movement than was the case in its allegedly hegemonic epicenter. Looking back from the dominance of a neoliberal, deregulatory period of economic development, Germany appears with parts of the rest of continental Europe to have leaned in a contrary direction, still committed to state-based social welfarism and social partnership at the workplace.

3 THE LIBERAL EMBRACE OF LABOR ZIONISM Israel, 1948–1973

I

f the catastrophe wrought by Hitler’s Germany demanded a democratic rebuilding project in Germany itself, it of course also left huge scars on other peoples, and on no group more than Europe’s surviving Jewish remnant. From its birth pangs in 1948 to President Clinton’s post-Oslo Camp David summit in 2000, the state of Israel has enjoyed a special relationship with American liberals, albeit one that witnessed two somewhat discordant stages. The first involved a rescue mission for a decimated European Jewry, the second (see chapter 6) a search for longterm security and mutual justice alongside its Arab and Palestinian neighbors. In the face of active Arab hostility and State Department indifference at least extending through the early 1960s, postwar liberals effectively adopted Israel as a cause celebre.1 The Zionist project’s attraction for American liberals, moreover, went beyond its identity as a post-Holocaust refugee state, a place where European Jewry and its allies could begin to rebuild shattered lives. Rather, enthusiasm for Israel among many Jews and non-Jews alike derived from identification with its larger statebuilding project—a vibrant, if noisy, political democracy; Labor-Zionist ideals reflected in both the Histadrut (Labor Federation) and venerable leadership of the Mapai (Labor) Party; and the image of communal selfsacrifice associated with youthful adherents of the kibbutzim. Amid interrupted momentum for post–New Deal economic reforms at home

76  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

and generally uncertain prospects, at least outside Europe, for further democratic development abroad, America’s own liberal reformers not only celebrated the Israeli example but burnished it as a model for the larger class of “developing” countries.2 To be sure, there was always one sticking point in the embrace of Israel, and that was the resolution of what was initially identified as the “refugee issue,” a concern that mushroomed (for both Israelis and Americans) into the “Palestinian problem” by the late 1960s. As stalwart defenders of the young Jewish state, American liberals were slow to acknowledge, let alone identify, with the unresolved grievances of the 750,000 Arab-Palestinians who were expelled or who otherwise fled across the new national borders in the state’s creation, not to mention the extended second-class citizenship of the remnant Israeli-Arab population, which, beginning at approximately 150,000 in 1948, reached nearly 400,000 people, or 14 percent of a country of three million inhabitants, by 1970 (and nearly 21 percent, including East Jerusalem, by 2019).3 The continuing failure of interstate diplomacy to resolve either Arab/Israeli or Palestinian refugee issues together with rising Palestinian nationalism inevitably pressed the issue onto a larger public consciousness. Especially after the Palestine Liberation Organization made common cause in the late 1960s with an already militarized Al Fatah in adopting guerilla tactics and a war on civilian targets, neither Israel nor its liberal allies could risk further temporizing of the issue.

“MIRACL E OF ISRAEL”

Even as a skeptical and frosty State Department sharply delimited aid to the new “Hebrew state” that the United Nations and President Truman had recognized in 1948, Israel from its beginnings clearly had friends in high places.4 Alongside the president’s own Jewish confidants like Eddie Jacobson, Samuel Rosenman, and David K. Niles, leading New Dealers, progressive Christian clergy and intellectuals, and a powerful, laborcentered bloc within the Democratic Party all established early, sustained contacts with Israeli leaders.5 The long-serving Brooklyn congressman Emanuel Celler, despite describing himself as a “Johnny-come-lately” to

T H E LIBE RAL E M BRACE O F LABO R ZI ON I SM77

the Zionist fold, emerged during World War II as effective leader of the congressional pro-Israel bloc. A grandson of German immigrants and a campaigner since his election to Congress in 1923 against ethnic-origin quotas in U.S. immigration laws, Celler was an early champion for the admission of Jewish refugees and, subsequently, for a “Jewish state”— that is, a secure territory with a Jewish majority and sovereignty over citizenship and immigration rights. His fervor was evident in the special “spirit” he discovered during his first visit to Israel in October 1948: There was wit, and there was humor, and there was, over all, a sense of being glad to be alive and the relishing of each moment of life. . . . From the woman who wrote the script of the daily radio news report for “The Voice of Israel” to the garbage collector, there was pride in participation. . . . So many of the political words have become threadbare, I am almost afraid to use them, but I can find no substitute for the word “democracy.” 6

Celler’s enthusiasm for the new state prevailed on prior doubters, including his own Reform rabbi, the distinguished Eugene J. Sack. “Some of us may have felt in the past that there were better places in the world for a Jewish Homeland than that classic battleground of Antiquity, that Bridge between Empires at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean, where Jewish States have existed and been destroyed before,” counseled Sack in a sermon, which he privately credited to Celler’s wisdom, but now, “in 1948 with a million Jews living there, and struggling to maintain themselves,” there was no longer room for “disagreement amongst men of good will anywhere.”7 Dissent from the Zionist project had, indeed, characterized much of the liberal community before the state’s creation. Leading Jewish intellectuals and artists, including Rabbi Judah Magnes and Albert Einstein (cofounders, along with Chaim Weizmann, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) as well as Hannah Arendt and Yehudi Menuhin, had joined the philosopher Martin Buber in 1942 in advocating for a nonreligious, binational state; prioritizing Arab-Jewish reconciliation over refugee imperatives, they ultimately opposed the United Nations’ partition plan in favor of trusteeship over the territory, an option soon drowned out at once by political developments in Washington, DC, and by Israeli and Arab actions on the ground. Practically

78  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

speaking, little more was heard from those Zionists practicing what Buber called “Hebrew Humanism.”8 Soon, from his House seat, Celler would cultivate closer U.S.-Israel diplomatic ties and push back against the perceived “Arabist” tilt of both the Marshall- and Acheson-, and then, after 1952, the Dulles-led State Department.9 He had help from a large, liberal cast of characters. Many of the most rock-ribbed liberals—and liberal institutions—of the New Deal era became early and passionate advocates for the state of Israel. Party standard bearer Adlai Stevenson, for example, returned from a 1953 trip to Jerusalem convinced of “how much in common have the Arabs, Jews, and Christians who have shared the Sacred City for so long.”10 By 1954, Celler had cobbled together a bloc of twenty-five Democratic liberal stalwarts to campaign against any arms aid to Arab states— including even strategic U.S. friends like Saudi Arabia—which, in addition to remaining in a “technical state of war against Israel,” were imposing against it an economic boycott and blockade. Signatories represented leading New Deal liberal voices, including the senators Hubert Humphrey (MN), Paul H. Douglas (IL), Glenn Beall (MD), and Herbert Lehman (NY) and the congressmen John  D. Dingell (MI), John  W. McCormack (MS), Peter Rodino (NJ), Hugh Scott (PA), and Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. (NY).11 In a more quotidian sign of cooperation, as early as 1953, the Democratic liberal senators Philip Hart (MI) and Gale McGee (WY) as well as the New York liberal Republican Jacob Javits had jumped aboard what would prove an epic if ultimately frustrated project to erect a U.S.-funded Statue Shalom (à la the French gift of the Statue of Liberty) in the Haifa harbor.12 Among the most influential of the early postwar pro-Israeli voices, perhaps, were those of former FDR Treasury secretary Henry Morganthau Jr. (still a political force in the 1950s), Nation Associates president Freda Kirchwey, and national icon Eleanor Roosevelt, all of whom had campaigned for looser immigration policies for displaced persons, and especially Jewish children, since the early 1940s.13 Indeed, other than Celler, perhaps no one better expressed the liberal commitment to Israel than the renowned former first lady, especially in her “My Day” reports, the syndicated daily newspaper column that ran, virtually uninterrupted, from 1935 to 1962. Nor did Mrs. Roosevelt veer far from the passions of the congressman. Echoing Celler’s discovery of a special Israeli spirit, she greeted Morganthau and her own grandson

T H E LIBERAL E M BRACE O F LABO R ZI ON I SM79

upon their return from Israel in November 1948 and marveled at the way “men and women labor side by side at the same tasks” and feel a “great sense of creative achievement.”14 Assuming the chair of the New York United Jewish Appeal campaign in 1951, she contrasted the Israeli cooperatives (kibbutzim and moshavim) run on a “democratic and socialistic basis” to the more coercive Russian rural collectives and upheld the former as a model of progressive regional development: “I believe that a country, in which deserts have been reclaimed and where in spite of the tremendous influx of immigrants the standards of health have been raised and education is being provided for the majority of the people, cannot help but be a growing democratic force in the area in which it is established.” At Tiberias, the city on the Sea of Galilee that she visited during her first trip to the region in 1952, she found the mixture of exuberance and ethic of hard work evident among the Jews of seventeen different nationalities “like the American spirit”: “There is imagination to accomplish great projects and no fear of undertaking them.”15 What Eleanor Roosevelt, like most visitors to the new state, did not explore were the circumstances of its Arab citizens. Her only mention of the subject came on a February  21, 1952, visit to Nazareth, where, she reported, “the Arabs [had] surrendered to the Israeli army, so there was no destruction, and the Arabs stayed in the town. As far as one can see, all goes peacefully forward in a normal manner.” In truth, the Arab normal was never the same as for Israeli Jews. Although the only legal distinction—that is, until 2018 “nation-state” legislation prioritized Jewish self-determination while demoting Arabic from official-language status—between Jewish and Arab citizens was that Arabs were not required to serve in the Israeli army, that fact carried considerable baggage, as both housing and many job benefits accrued only to veterans.16 Until 1966, moreover, normality for Arab citizens was also hedged by Defense Laws that limited land acquisition, journalistic expression, and even free movement of a community seen as a potentially dangerous fifth column, but this was not an issue in the American liberal press.17 Mrs. Roosevelt, for example, acknowledged that “as a minority, [Arabs] have certain grievances. But, by and large, with eight representatives in the Knesset (the parliament), they have a voice, as citizens of Israel, to demand redress for their wrongs.”18 For Roosevelt as for most of its wellwishers, the never-fulfilled claim of the Jewish state (in its declaration of

8 0  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

independence) to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex” and to “guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture” took a back seat to seemingly more pressing claims of security and statebuilding initiatives.19 In an important sense, then, liberalism in both places might be said to have served as an aspirational tableau, sincerely felt but applied selectively. Of course, alongside the protection of the Israeli state from hostile neighboring powers, American liberals regularly wrestled with what they initially called the problem of “Arab refugees”—an issue that would evolve (at least for them) into the “Palestinian question” by the mid1960s. Starting from an understanding that would not be reversed in Western scholarship until the findings of Benny Morris and the Israeli “New Historians” of the 1980s, American liberals largely held the approximately 750,000 original refugees responsible for their own displacement.20 Eleanor Roosevelt repeated the conventional wisdom in late 1951 that “the Arabs were induced to flee not by them [the Israelis] but by outside influence,” and thus “why should the new state of Israel take people, who would be dangerous citizens . . . back into the country?” Roosevelt, like others, continued to profess sympathy for the refugees—“No one can blame the poor people who left Israel [and who] were told that in a few weeks they would be back and would receive not only their land and belongings but that of the Israelis, who would be driven into the sea”—and believed that “every effort should be made . . . to resettle those who can return to Israel. The rest should be indemnified and settled where they are needed in Arab countries.” The latter impulse had also directed the efforts of Kirchwey and other Nation Associates, including the writer and former diplomat Archibald MacLeish and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to press for a $300 million refugee fund and a $500 million development fund through U.S. and UN auspices for the neighboring Arab countries. An attempt both to soften the bitterness of the refugees’ plight as well as to foster a path to peaceful cooperation between the warring parties, such efforts, however short-circuited in practice, nevertheless notably emphasized resettlement over repatriation as a solution.21 For American liberals, Israel’s tenth anniversary in 1958 offered ground for hope and celebration for what seemed the almost unlimited

T H E LIBE RAL E M BRACE O F LABO R ZI ON I SM81

potential of the young state. The year, for one, marked the publication of the book Exodus, the historical novel that extolled both the heroism and idealism of Israel’s creation; likened its tough, battle-scarred sabras to America’s own pioneer generation; and won a readership and a subsequent film audience that evoked comparisons of influence with Gone with the Wind. Uris’s epic only solidified the popular—and what would later be recognized as an “orientalist”—image of Israel as a miracle growth in infertile soil. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion himself had thus confidently likened Israeli settlers in 1951 to American pioneers, both groups being modernizers having to overcome a wilderness of savages to survive.22 The Arab antagonists in the novel likewise appeared as a people who had “exhausted themselves in ten decades of fighting,” whose “once mighty cities were decimated and a dry rot fell on the flowering oases,” a culture where “cunning, treachery, murder, feuds, and jealousies became a way of life.”23 All in all, then, Israel—following the short-term frisson of the 1956 Suez crisis, in which an angry President Eisenhower, over Celler et al.’s objections, forced Israel to back off its acquired Sinai conquest in exchange for short-lived guarantees of access to the Suez Canal—had emerged not only as a powerful and respected regional player but also an avatar of successful, liberal-democratic development.24 Following a visit in 1957, Hubert Humphrey declared Israel “a progressive, democratic, political and economic oasis in the desert of feudalism and economic imbalance and inequity.” A year later, addressing a tenth-anniversary celebration in Haifa, Congressman Celler would similarly exult at the “Miracle of Israel”: We, the people of the United States, the largest democracy in the world, have every reason to rejoice in the existence and growth of this nation, the smallest of democracies. . . . The idea of the dignity of man, the preciousness of life, the worth of the individual, the idea of government by law, summed up in what we call democracy, will bring ultimately a rebirth of that whole region where the true enemies of the Arab people— disease, poverty, and illiteracy—will be recognized as such, and where hatred will yield to constructive cooperation.25

Perhaps not surprisingly, its generally progressive-liberal image in the American mind helped cement early and enthusiastic support for the

8 2  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

Jewish state from Reform Jewish synagogues and communities, the most numerous of organized Jewish religious population in the United States. Throwing off its pre-state skepticism toward religious nationalism and temporizing its critique of Orthodox Jewish control of religious matters, the Union of Reform Judaism as early as 1950 offered all-out moral and material support for Israel, calling for aid to the fledgling state by both the United States and the United Nations, while counseling individual Jews to buy Israeli bonds. Likewise, in 1957, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main pro-Israel lobby in the United States, counseled Senator Humphrey to tune out the anti-Zionist messages of a minority of “fear mongers” in the Jewish community, like the American Council for Judaism, in favor of the effusively pro-Israel resolutions of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.26 By 1965, such support continued, now buttressed by demands that the United States supply Israel with arms, even as Israel was instructed to seek peace wherever possible with its Arab neighbors.27

“I SRAEL WEA RS A UNIO N LA B EL”

Although many quarters of the American public rallied to the defense of Israel both as the “saving remnant” of European Jewry and a lonely outpost of democratic government in the Middle East, liberal enthusiasm for the Jewish state responded to more than just a survivalist test or appreciation for its democratic institutional structure.28 In short, one cannot dismiss the particular affinity in its formative years of Histadrutdriven Labor Zionism in Israel, cemented by the nearly thirty-year political hegemony of the Labor (Mapai) Party, with American liberalism, as anchored in a discrete vision of social-economic development. Reared in the struggling Yishuv of the 1920s, the Histadrut (literally, the General Organization of Workers in Israel) proved a prime tool of what the historian Ran Chermesh labeled a “state within a state.” Part economic engine, part cultural revival movement, part welfare service, and part trade union federation, the Histadrut grew up hand in hand with the Labor Party, which by the early 1930s had gained political control of the Jewish

T H E LIBERAL E M BRACE O F LABO R ZI ON I SM83

FIGURE 3.1  Seen here with NAACP leader Roy Wilkens in 1972, Prime Minister Golda

Meir (1969–1974), who rose from childhood in Milwaukee to kibbutz and Histadrut activist, proved an important link between American liberals and the Labor Party of David Ben-Gurion. Source: LC-USZ62-99916 (b&w film copy neg.), LOT 13454-2, no. 6 [P&P], Library of Congress.

Mandate in Palestine. Taking charge of an initially huge state-run sector of the economy, it effectively united and organized the national labor force: as late as 1977, 65 percent of the total Israeli population was affiliated and then dispersed to their relevant trade unions.29 It was no wonder, although in international comparative terms still exceptional, that, career-wise, so many of the leading lights of the early Israeli state— including David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Levi Eshkol, and Moshe Sharett—emerged through the ranks of the Histadrut. As Celler exulted before a Labor-Zionist Committee in New York City in November 1948, “without the work and complex organizations of Histadrut, the achievements of Israel would have been impossible, whether it be in central marketing or overall care of the sick. And I say, too, without the principle of

8 4  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

collective discipline and mutual aid Palestine so quickly would not have absorbed hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Labor Zionism has reason to be proud.”30 Crucial to its international relations strategy, Israel’s labor-based, state-building project had long nourished powerful ties with U.S. labor unions. Within three years of Histadrut’s formation, Max Pine, leader of the United Hebrew Trades, an old association of German-Jewish socialists in New York City, gathered leaders of the two great garment worker unions—the International Ladies Garment Workers (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACWU)—to sponsor a fundraising drive for Jewish workers in Palestine.31 Although initially disdaining identity as Zionists—as Bundists preferring in principle a secular commonwealth to a religious state—both the ILGWU’s David Dubinsky and the ACWU’s Sidney Hillman emerged as early and lifelong champions of Israel. Thus neither the larger AFL-versus-CIO split at the end of the war nor the increasingly bitter disputes over Democratic Party foreign policy—with Hillman backing the left-wing American Labor Party and Dubinsky championing the anticommunist Liberal Party factions— deflected the garment leaders from crucial early support for the new Jewish homeland. As the historian Adam Howard has documented, they even succeeded in 1944 in getting AFL president William Green and CIO president Philip Murray (who were otherwise not on speaking terms) to serve as co-chairs of the American Jewish Trade Union Committee for Palestine. “The American labor movement,” proclaimed its first declaration, “is completely in favor of, and supports the aims of their Jewish co-trade unionists—to help in the rebuilding of Palestine as a Jewish Commonwealth.”32 Of the Labor-Zionist leaders, likely no one better spanned the U.S.Israel bridge than first labor minister–cum–prime minister Golda Meir. Born Golda Mabovitch in Kiev in 1898, she followed her family (now the Meyersons) to the railway yards of Milwaukee in 1906 before migrating again to the Yishuv (and again altering her name) in 1921. Decades later, when addressing the AFL-CIO constitutional convention, as her biographer Francine Klagsbrun relates, Meir brought an audience including George Meany, Hubert Humphrey, Bayard Rustin, and Secretary of Labor George Shultz to their feet with her opening line: “My dear friend, Mr. Meany . . . I have been looking around for the Carpenters’ sign. That

T H E LIBE RAL E M BRACE O F LABO R ZI ON I SM85

is the one my father belonged to.”33 Her own career ladder was tightly bound to the rise of the Histadrut. As a key member of the organization’s secretariat, she participated in the construction of a broad-based Histadrut community: creating a school for workers’ children where children ate lunch courtesy of food from Histadrut companies, investing money in Histadrut Bank Hapoalim, organizing workers’ concerts, and establishing medical insurance via the Histadrut sick fund even as her husband worked at Solel Boney, a Histadrut construction and contracting company.34 In general, the Histadrut made good on a socialdemocratic wish list that rivaled any of its European counterparts in the 1950s. An eight-hour workday, a weekly Sabbath holiday, and guaranteed paid vacation, national health and disability insurance, unemployment relief, benefits for women including twelve weeks of paid maternity leave, up to a week of state-paid hospitalization for births, and a prohibition on women’s night work—all these were part of Mapai’s and Golda Meir’s political legacy.35 As the Israeli state solidified in the face of continuous threats from its Arab neighbors, the U.S. labor movement also stepped up its own efforts. By the mid-1960s, such ties had been signaled by the dedication in Israel of the William Green Cultural Center (after the AFL leader), the Philip Murray Memorial Center (after the CIO head), the David Dubinsky Soccer Stadium, and an ILGWU-named hospital in Beersheba.36 Similarly, the beneficiaries of Histadrut’s annual Humanitarian Awards read, in chronological order after 1950, as a virtual Who’s Who of U.S. labor liberalism: Alben Barkley, Harry S. Truman, William O. Douglas, Eleanor Roosevelt, Averell Harriman, George Meany, Walter  P. Reuther, David Dubinsky, Jacob Potofsky, Arthur Goldberg, USWA president David McDonald, African American labor and civil rights champion A. P. Randolph.37 Of more tangible significance than the awards themselves, moreover, were the labor movement’s financial and political lobbying contributions to the new state via two important initiatives. Rooted in the so-called Gewerkschaften campaigns of the 1930s, in which American trade union Bundists had offered direct aid to the Histadrut, the first took the form of the Israel Bonds Campaign. In 1950, Golda Meir, David Dubinsky, and the Israeli Jewish Agency secretary Eliezer Kaplan hit on an alternative to constant, desperate pleas for individual contributions in the form of

8 6  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

Israel Bonds. The concept was simple: the state of Israel would sell government bonds, similar to U.S. savings bonds, and repay them when due with interest.38 Even before the official campaign, American labor and the Histadrut had been experimenting with the basic formula. As early as May  1948, Meir had met with David Dubinsky and arranged an unprecedented $1 million loan to the fledgling state. Secured in June, the loan was repaid within five months, in return for which the union floated the state an additional half-million dollars.39 Shortly thereafter, Dubinsky and the AFL raised an additional $6 million in bonds for a lowincome housing complex for eight thousand families, effectively a loan that would be paid off fifteen years later. Officially launched at a Madison Square Garden rally addressed by Ben-Gurion on May 10, 1951, the bond drive, combined with United Jewish Appeal gifts and private investments, quickly mushroomed into a heretofore unimaginable $1.5 billion program. Among its biggest organizational bulwarks were American labor unions. After serving as chief legal adviser to the CIO (and overseeing the legal merger of the two great labor federations in 1955), it was again Arthur Goldberg who counseled the AFL-CIO on the legality of an early, daring bond purchase: the AFL bought $10 million worth of Histadrut industrialization debentures, which was in turn matched with $10 million from the Israeli government and backed by another $20 million from Histadrut pension funds. Moreover, Dubinsky recruited additional buy-ins from individual unions, most notably the steelworkers and garment internationals.40 A decade before the United States would even sell weapons to Israel, let alone buttress the fledgling state with any direct aid dollars, the bond campaign proved an important lifeline. Labor also contributed to Israel’s lobbying behemoth, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Created in the same year as the first bond drive, AIPAC (originally the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs but in 1959 adopting a name change to avoid conflict with earlier non-Zionists), like the bond drive, was also initially very much a “liberal” cause. I. L. “Sy” Kenen, its director from 1951 to 1974, had helped organize Local 1 of the left-wing Newspaper Guild in Cleveland amid a struggle for a five-day, forty-hour workweek and had subsequently been elected to the guild’s international executive board and also received the Heywood Broun Memorial Award before leaving journalism to assume the position of director of information for the American Emergency

T H E LIBE RAL E M BRACE O F LABO R ZI ON I SM87

Committee for Zionist Affairs in New York in 1943. For Kenen, the jump from unionism to Labor Zionism seemed a short one. Once AIPAC was formed, Kenen occasionally disagreed with Israeli politics, but publicly, both on the dais and also in the pages of the organization-subsidized Near East Report, he backed the Israeli government official line and willingly registered as a foreign lobbyist. Through the early 1980s, moreover, AIPAC’s officialdom, though outwardly nonpartisan and making no explicit political endorsements or campaign donations, largely situated itself within liberal-Democratic circles. Thus, immediately after Kenen, Morris Amitay, an aide to Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff, succeeded him as director, followed by Thomas A. Dine, a former aide to the senators Frank Church and Edmund Muskie, while future CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer initially assumed Kenen’s duties at Near East Report.41 Aside from concern with the new state’s basic security and its affinity with liberal notions of democracy and social security, liberals also upheld Israel as a model of noncommunist but progressive development for the larger developing world. Again, Democratic liberals and the American labor movement, increasingly with support from the State Department, helped enable international Israeli influence out of all proportion to its size or homegrown resources. Interestingly, the rationale for what would emerge by the early 1960s as extensive cooperation was established in the comparison of Israel to another postcolonial state. As chair of the House of Representatives Committee on Refugees, a subcommittee of the larger Judiciary Committee, which he would also chair beginning in 1949, Celler connected the fate of Israel with that of India. Expressing strong support for expanded Indian as well as Jewish immigration quotas in early 1947, he urged independence leaders to “cast off the intolerable British yoke forthwith.” In the same period, moreover, in ongoing, supportive correspondence with Nehru’s sister (and future ambassador to the United States) Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Celler encouraged direct Israeli-India ties, particularly a student exchange program.42 Similarly, and against the backdrop of the Korean War, the Histadrut columnist (and confidant to the AFL foreign policy guru Jay Lovestone) Eliezer Leiabne warned that if further communist advances were to be prevented, “Western countries must help Asian countries to find export markets for agricultural products and to

8 8  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

improve production methods, institute agrarian reforms and democratic development.” Tellingly, he counseled that “Israel’s special position among the family of nations makes [it] possible and necessary for that state to act as a medium for extending technical development and economic expansion throughout Asia, opening the continent for advanced European standards.” Ideally, concluded Leiabne, “it might be possible for the state of Israel to collaborate closely with India and other nations working to combine social progress with national independence and loyalty to the United Nations.” 43 Although (on both ideological and pragmatic political grounds) close, bilateral ties between Israel and India never fully blossomed, the idea of the Jewish state as a model for other developing-world societies did enjoy extended currency and some practical experimentation. In 1957, for example, Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, the pan-Africanist leader of the first of the sub-Saharan African states to declare independence, established close economic ties to Israel. Indeed, the general secretary of the Ghanaian labor federation openly cited the Histadrut structure, mixing trade unionism and state-centered economic development, as a “pattern” for the nation’s future. Soon, grassroots Israeli economic development projects were also operating in Mali, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar.44 Something of the spirit of such exchanges is reflected in the reminiscence of Maida Springer, the Afro-Caribbean activist who, while serving as the AFL-CIO’s representative in Africa across the 1950s and 1960s, visited Kenyan health clinics in the company of Prime Minister Meir: My idea at the time was that if I spent nine months in Israel learning some of the techniques in their system of the kibbutz and the moshav, it could be replicated in Africa with the needed changes. As I moved around Israel I saw their techniques as having great possibilities because this country was small. It was a desert. They made flowers grow. They made food grow. I was very excited about Israel.45

Such affinities also found fuller institutional expression with the opening in 1960 of the Afro-Asian Institute for Cooperative and Labour Studies in Tel Aviv. With scholarship funds provided by the AFL-CIO

THE LIBERAL EMBRACE OF LABOR ZIONISM89

and its constituent unions—with AFL-CIO president Meany as co-chair and both Dubinsky and the UAW’s Walter Reuther on its board of directors—and directed by the Histadrut, the institute sponsored a series of short courses, including three weeks of fieldwork in cooperative settlements or various industries, both in English and French, for developingcountry men and women trade union leaders. Within two years, more than five hundred students from forty countries matriculated through its programs; by 1972, the total number of participants, including some twenty-five seminars held in students’ home countries, had reached 3,700, drawn from eighty-seven countries.46 Thus, in the same era that the State Department was boosting Alliance for Progress development programs across Latin America, Israel was serving as a similar, if much smaller, hub for liberal development plans across Asia and Africa. In effectively outsourcing trade union leadership training in the Third World to an openly social-democratic state, the vociferously anticommunist and pro–free enterprise Meany stepped gingerly around the core principles of his working partner. “In Israel,” Meany allowed in 1961, the Histadrut has found it necessary to accept and advance a mixed economy. The public sector of Israel’s economy represents a very large part of agriculture, finance, mining and transportation. I have been told that socialism has advanced much further in Israel than anywhere else. I don’t know whether that is so or not. But I do know that when the Histadrut talks of socialism in Israel, it does not have in mind the so-called socialism of Communist Russia, Communist China, or Communist Yugoslavia.

The crucial difference, for the American trade union leaders, was that the Israeli state, for all its prominence, “is not under the absolute and total control of one party. Through their various parties, through the trade unions, through sundry voluntary organizations, the Israelis control their public and private economic institutions. . . . What is important and decisive here it that this control is contested in free elections.” 47 Histadrut leadership was, in turn, equally tactful and ideologically circumspect in its response to its chief international benefactor. As its American representative declared,

9 0  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

The Histadrut is especially proud of the fact that it has succeeded in inculcating the students [at the Afro-Asia Institute] with awareness of the ascendancy of democratic values and with the faith and consciousness that [a] country can make a rapid transition into the 20th century through individual freedom of choice in contrast to the dictatorial forced marches of totalitarian regimes.48

No more effusive embrace of the Jewish state was likely ever uttered than Meany’s own testimonial a decade later that “Israel Wears a Union Label.” 49 It is thus not an exaggeration to suggest that by the mid-1960s Israel was serving as something of an avatar of American liberal values applied abroad. Unbeknownst to either party, Meany’s commemoration of American and Israeli labor ties came just as both were about to experience a political shakeup and long-term decline in national influence. On the U.S. side, officials of the labor federation had already split bitterly with antiwar and “new politics” forces within the Democratic Party in 1972, and they were never again able to fashion a jobs and welfare policy (let alone a foreign policy) that could command consensus support from the fractious and increasingly diverse ranks of the American working class. But for the Israelis too, a changing economy and the experience of two major national wars largely displaced the Histadrut and its accompanying Labor-Zionist ideal as an organizing center of Israeli social life. Indeed, as early as the mid-1950s, the state monopolies, joint military-civilian Nachal brigades, as well as the kibbutzim and Moshav cooperatives associated with Histadrut influence were increasingly criticized as inefficient and sources of disunity by second-generation leaders like Moshe Dayan, hero of the Suez Crisis and the Six-Day War. In their place, the country gradually adapted itself to the international economy. As the defense industries became a huge source of investment and as the Six-Day War opened internal markets in the West Bank and Gaza, while also tapping a new reserve of unskilled workers, a boom economy papered over significant internal institutional change. “No longer expected to serve as the standard-bearer of a national liberation movement,” as the industrial sociologist Ran Chermesh put it, the Histadrut over the next few decades came to resemble the AFL-CIO, that is, as an increasingly subordinate part of an autonomous labor relations regime.50

T H E LIBE RAL E M BRACE O F LABO R ZI ON I SM91

ISRA EL I- A RA B WA RS A N D THE L IBERAL CONSC I EN C E

Not surprisingly, as Israeli security issues increasingly meshed with larger Cold War polarities, the distinctiveness of a specifically liberal or social-democratic foreign policy agenda inevitably narrowed. In Israel’s earliest years, it had maintained something of a go-between, nonaligned status between the big-power blocs. Still grateful for both the Red Army’s role in World War II and Soviet support for its UN nomination, as well as wanting to maintain a diplomatic line to potential Soviet Jewish emigrants, the Israeli government steered clear of combat commitments in Korea. Furthermore, left-leaning Histadrut members, including representatives of the pro-Soviet Mapam Party, had risked the wrath of the AFL’s Jay Lovestone in trying to hold onto membership in the World Federation of Trade Unions, which included numerous Communist Party–controlled delegations, until following most other Western national labor federations into the pro-American, determinedly anticommunist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) in 1953. As late as 1964, when Israel’s foreign minister Abba Eban crossed the United States in supporting a seat for China at the United Nations, the Jewish state continued to thread its own way through an increasingly bipolar world order, even as isolation from U.S. influence was never an option.51 Once the Soviets threw their military weight behind Egypt’s Gamel Abdul Nasser and supported his nationalization and anti-Israel blockade of the Suez Canal in 1956, the direction of Israeli Cold War alignment was pretty well set. Afterward, even as the Eisenhower regime effectively pressured Israel to return its captured Sinai territory, an underlying security symbiosis remained in play between U.S. and Israeli interests. Israel’s battlefield prowess, thanks to French arms in 1956, and its extended strength and stability in an unstable region commanded respect and made it a player within the Western security alliance.52 As such, the 1961 plea of the once-powerful Jewish Agency and World Jewish Congress leader Nahum Goldmann for Israel to take the lead toward a more “neutralist” Middle East aroused a harshly negative response both from American Jewish leaders like Celler and from Israeli state officials like Ben- Gurion.53

92  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

To be sure, Israel’s own pivot to pro-American alignment on the larger Cold War map required some dexterous political footwork. As late as January 1966, for example, Mapai leaders had attended the Non-Aligned Movement’s Tashkent Conference (aimed at easing the India/Pakistan conflict), and Israel (whose own founding father Ben-Gurion had once enjoyed a friendship with Ho Chi Minh in Paris) initially supported calls for “negotiation” of the Vietnam War in parallel to its call to Arab leaders to sit down for recognition talks with the Jewish state. Yet once a new Soviet-Arab alliance attempted to link the Arab cause to other “anticolonialist” and “national liberation” campaigns, Israel bitterly resisted: “Israel,” declared Abba Eban, “is not alien to the Middle East.”54 Breaking a previous barrier, the purchase of U.S.-made tanks in 1965 and later the acquisition of additional fighter aircraft effectively sealed an Israeli switch from France to the United States as its chief strategic partner. By the spring of 1967, the imminence of an Arab attack following Nasser’s expulsion of UN buffer troops in the Sinai, closing of the Straits of Tiran (Israel’s only access to oil shipments), and predictions by the PLO and others that the Islamic world was about “to rise as one man to throw the Jews into the sea” brought an American public reaction that burst all partisan bounds.55 For Jews, 1967 gave rise to a “Never again” sentiment, turning the still-open wound of the Holocaust into a community battle cry. “The American Jewish community,” as Guy Laron documents, “was terrified by Nasser’s threat and . . . Jews all over the country were liquidating their assets and raiding their bank accounts, savings, and deposit boxes, and wiring the money to the ‘Israel Emergency Fund.’ ”56 Outside the organized Jewish community, as well, solidarity with Israel was also broad and commanding, uniting Martin Luther King Jr., Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir on the left with the John Birch Society on the right. Even normally reliable Soviet allies like Fidel Castro dissented from the authorized communist, pro-Arab line: “true revolutionaries,” he declared, “never threaten a whole country with extermination.”57 For their part, even as they worried about “an intensification of conflict, vigilance, and tension” in the aftermath of the war, American liberals generally identified Israel’s victory as one of the great triumphs of good versus evil. “Militarily last June’s victory of Israeli arms,” reflected the Nation contributor Stanley Wolpert, “remains little less than a ‘miracle’

T H E LIBERAL E M BRACE O F LABO R ZI ON I SM93

of strategy, tactics, and national spirit, an example to the world of what the union of science, intellect, faith and desperation may accomplish.” Nasser, continued Wolpert, “has done for Israel what ‘Bull’ Connor did for the civil rights movement.”58 The U.S. liberal bloc held remarkably firm for military assistance to Israel in 1967 even as it had staked itself to increasingly vociferous opposition to American interventionism in the Southeast Asian war theater. Antiwar “doves” no doubt felt more need than Cold War “hawks” to carefully distinguish their positions on the two theaters of conflict, but for the most part they did so without hesitation. Despite prior assurances of his support for Israel (declaring to Jewish leaders that he would be an even “better friend” than JFK),59 President Johnson had made clear his annoyance at the antiwar stance of the American Jewish community. In June 1966, for instance, the interdenominational Synagogue Council of America pleaded with the president to maintain the diplomatic peace offensive in Vietnam championed in the United Nations by the liberal Jewish icon and recently appointed ambassador Arthur Goldberg. Similarly, antiwar congressional liberals simultaneously turned up the proIsrael pressure. Thus, when Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the Senate that the United States had “no treaty obligations” to Israel, Senator Joseph Clark (PA) responded that Americans “would not stand for the destruction of Israel.” This was the same senator who, after supporting the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964, had entered the front ranks of antiwar opposition; indeed, analysts blame Clark’s call for an immediate, unconditional suspension of bombing together with strident support for gun control for the loss of his seat in 1968, after which he would go on to lead the U.S. branch of the World Federalist Society.60 The liberal senators Albert Gore Sr. (TN), Mike Mansfield (MT), and Frank Lausche (OH) likewise urged invocation of the Eisenhower Doctrine, justifying use of force “against aggression from any country controlled by international communism,” in response to the threats of Egypt and Syria. Even Senator Wayne Morse (OR), who had opposed both the 1957 resolution behind the Eisenhower Doctrine as well as the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, joined his colleagues in urging the application of standing statutes for the defense of Israel.61 Generally speaking, the liberal alliance behind the Israeli state stood remarkably firm. The African American political community is a case in

9 4  LABO R- LIBERALISM AND THE POSTWAR ORDER

point. The Congressional Black Caucus leaders John Conyers and Charles Diggs Jr., for example, joined a 1970 A. Philip Randolph Institute appeal of “Black Americans for U.S. Support to Israel,” demanding the shipment of the full number of fighter jets requested by the Israeli defense minister.62 The Nation, now under the editorship of Carey McWilliams, summed up the liberal two-step of yes-to-Israel, no-to-Vietnam. Emphasizing the Arab-tilted past imbalance of military aid to the region as well as Israel’s right to defend itself, the liberal beacon, like the antiwar Democrats, simultaneously held the United States accountable for a runaway global arms race and disdain of more peaceful means of conflict resolution. “Before we can expect the Israelis and Arabs to abstain from force,” read a Nation editorial, “we must show some inclination to refrain ourselves. . . . How [it asked rhetorically] can the United States provide effective leadership in the long-term process of reconciliation and settlement in the Middle East as long as the Vietnamese War drags on?” 63 Across two decades, in short, Israel’s hold on U.S. left-liberals who adopted an interventionist but also democratic and reform-oriented program abroad remained strong. Ironically, however, the very forces that helped reinforce Israel’s own strength and security also increasingly raised qualms among many of its heretofore most steadfast allies. That is a story that will be related in chapter 6 in the context of changing times in both the United States and the Middle East.

II L I B E RAL ANT ICO MM UNISM

F

T

he Cold War—or, more specifically, how far to go to check the communist challenge in the Third World—frayed and ultimately split the U.S. postwar liberal bloc. Ex–New Dealers had determined to draw a firm line against direct Soviet expansionism in Asia (for example, the Korean War) as well as Europe (for example, the Berlin airlift), but how to cope with the communist presence where it mixed with larger anticolonialist or national-democratic impulses to which the liberals also subscribed? Should liberals side with business interests and conservative zealots in the State Department and CIA who demanded that any would-be ally choose up sides in the East-West conflict? The issue, of course, came to a head in the Vietnam conflict, when two Democratic administrations and the main body of the labor movement, the AFL-CIO, backed the escalation of a counterinsurgent warfare across Southeast Asia, while a gathering opposition—drawing strength from an antiwar movement on the ground and speaking from a variety of intellectual, religious, and political perches—ultimately prevailed within the councils of the Democratic Party in 1972, identifying “new liberal” foreign policy aims with noninterventionism, decolonization, economic development, and humanitarian assistance. This section captures the dilemmas of liberal anticommunism at two critical junctures. With a focus on early postwar Latin America—and the fates of Costa Rica and Guatemala in particular—chapter 4 captures the juncture between Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor intent and the rising

9 6 LIBERAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

pressures on U.S. policy makers to intervene against communist subversion in Central America and ultimately in Cuba. “Old” liberals like Adolf Berle were caught in the middle, while “‘new” liberals like Martin Luther King  Jr. pointed in decidedly a new direction for foreign policy. Aside from the dilemmas of intervention versus nonintervention, the chief liberal policy quandary settled on the hows and whys of international development politics. The key battlefront of the “development wars” was likely Nehru’s India, to which, as chapter  5 demonstrates, the United States sent its best liberal minds.

4 ANTICOMMUNISM AS SOCIAL POLICY Costa Rica, 1944–1980

I

f the United States could help fashion admirable social-democratic foundations in the rebuilding of war-torn Europe and likewise throw a lifeline to the struggling new state of Israel, could it not perform a similar service in its own hemispheric backyard? The blueprint was clear enough. With the declaration of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy in his inaugural address of 1933, followed quickly by U.S. support for an official abrogation of armed intervention into the affairs of neighboring states backed by formal annulment of the interventionist Platt Amendment, New Dealers determined to open a wide southern front in their vision of international political and economic development. Following the U.S. example, they imagined a stepladder of countries, each defined by a market-driven, capitalistic economy but also checked by democratic self-correctives, including an organized labor movement. Nor was this a goal seemingly beyond reach. In the context of the worldwide fight against fascism, pent-up demand for its raw materials and agricultural commodities, and surging trade union growth, Latin America—a region long prey to oligarchy, strongmen, and dictatorship— seemed to be poised for its own version of a “democratic spring” at the end of World War II. Indeed, by mid-1946, of twenty Latin American nations, only five states remained without some formal measure of representative government.1 Yet, even as carrot-and-stick diplomacy had

9 8 LIBE RAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

helped bring Mexican and Brazilian troops into combat on the side of the Allies, while also helping to suppress German influence in Argentina, the end of the war confronted U.S. policy makers with a series of new dilemmas. For liberals near the seats of power, the perceived threat of communism, centered in the Soviet Union and a growing Soviet bloc but also representing a significant element within the continent’s trade unions, complicated a simple endorsement of anti-imperialism, social welfare, and labor rights.2 All in all, American liberals—Roosevelt and Truman administration officials as well as representatives from the U.S. labor movement—were at once hopeful and wary of political developments south of the border. They took heart from the writing of a progressive constitution in Cuba in 1940 and the election, four years later, of reform-minded president Ramón Grau over the picked successor of strongman Fulgencio Batista. They likewise cheered what seemed an opening toward pluralist democracy when the Mexican revolutionary government renamed itself the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and initiated the first primary election of candidates (other than president) in December  1946. Similarly, Victor Haya de la Torre and José Luis Bustamente led a socialdemocratic party to power in Peru, the democrat Rómulo Betancourt was installed over the old oligarchy as president of Venezuela, and, perhaps most surprisingly, in Guatemala democratic revolution in 1944 replaced one of the continent’s oldest strongmen with a progressive military regime, which then quickly abided by the election to the presidency of the university philosophy professor Juan Arévalo. In the latter case, the United States perhaps most conspicuously showed its sympathies, denying dictator Jorge Ubico a last-minute appeal for aid and sending its most influential regional ambassador, Spruille Braden, to Arévalo’s inauguration.3 Even in regimes traditionally resistant to U.S. influence, the signs seemed at least briefly to be pointing upward for American liberals, as Brazil’s General Getulio Vargas took the first steps in dismantling his authoritarian Estado Novo, while in Argentina, even Juan Peron (a man whom liberals hated) had buttressed authority seized through a war-time military junta with overwhelming popular electoral support in 1946. Altogether, it was a time, as Betancourt would later recall, when “with ballots or with bullets, the peoples were bringing democrats to power.” 4 The United States initially encouraged all such moves,

ANTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY99

beginning with a November 1944 announcement by the assistant secretary of state and leading left-liberal Adolf A. Berle expressing preference for democratic regimes and extending through the February–March 1945 Chapultepec conference, which called for collective security against the fascist threat.5 The very range of Latin American regimes, however, posed a series of tests for U.S. policy makers. In the European theater, they were quick to identify the chief threats to democratic renewal: recalcitrant employers and neofascists on the one hand and Soviet-identified communist movements and organizations on the other. In Europe, that left a healthy “middle ground” of Catholic, Christian-Democratic, liberal, republican, labor, and noncommunist socialist parties—and accompanying trade union federations—with which to do business. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the water was often murkier. Among the dilemmas—what were U.S. democrats to make of (or how strongly to oppose?) Latin American military strongmen? How unacceptable, in turn, were the noncommunist but heavily statist, so-called corporatist regimes in Brazil, Argentina, and even Mexico? A basic breach separated most U.S. liberals from their post-1930s Latin American counterparts, who almost universally combined democratic with strong statist and even socialist commitments.6 Most importantly, how best to combat Latin American communism, an enemy without a state (at least until Cuba in 1960)? The results, in most cases, tipped U.S. postwar hemispheric policy away from any priority on liberal state building and toward other, often repressive, ends. How liberal advisors and would-be policy makers in such circumstances sought, nevertheless, to make a difference is our concern here. This chapter most closely tracks an admittedly exceptional case of postwar development. There is any number of bad to horrific examples of U.S. intervention in Central America, well documented in many scholarly studies. If  U.S. influence held democracy at bay in Honduras for decades and long propped up the dictator Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, it perhaps took its bloodiest toll in Guatemala, where the United States plotted and financed a coup in 1954, then backed a repressive regime that presided over a thirty-six-year brutal civil war that cost the lives of an estimated 200,000 civilians.7 By contrast, post–World War II Costa Rica emerged from a stormy decade of political conflict with an untidy but ultimately peaceful and democratic social-welfare

10 0 LIBE RAL ANTICO M MUN I SM

state—certainly an anomaly in the hemisphere.8 Might the course of this moderately progressive regime have proven reproducible and served as a template for others? By setting Costa Rican events within the larger context of the region, I hope to identify the main ligaments of exceptionalism as well as the toxic trunk of the dominant course of U.S.–Central American relations.

T HE L ATIN AMERICAN PROB LEM I N THE L IBERAL MIND

If there was an American official at the end of World War II with a portfolio to extend the democratic preferences of the New Deal administration south of the border, that person was likely Adolf A. Berle. A Bostonborn child prodigy and proud of it—entering Harvard College at fourteen and the youngest Harvard Law graduate at age twenty-one—Berle (as his biographer assures us) “set no modest goals for himself” and aspired to be no less than “the Marx of the shareholding class,” a social seer who would steer “between the proletariat and plutocracy” toward a middle path of “corporate liberalism,” a community-sensitive form of regulated capitalism.9 He first connected to Latin America when the U.S. Army assigned him to the Dominican Republic, then under U.S. military occupation, in 1918, before being dispatched to Paris and Versailles to join a liberal brain trust around President Woodrow Wilson that included Joseph  C. Grew, Walter Lippmann, William Bullitt, and the historian Samuel Eliot Morison.10 As a professor of corporate law at Columbia University, he became famous for his coauthored work with Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1931), a careful argument on behalf of governmental regulation of the marketplace (including labor and social welfare protections) rather than trust-busting that would long resonate in New Deal circles.11 In a recent treatment of liberal thought across the twentieth century, the writer Nicholas Lemann appropriately chooses Berle as a stand-in for the New Deal era, the chief theorist for the vision of corporate capitalism tamed by a strong, democratic state.12

ANTICOMMUNISM AS SOCIAL POLICY101

As assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs throughout the war years, Berle mixed immediate U.S. security priorities with the broader principles of the president’s noninterventionist Good Neighbor Policy. In dealing with Brazil (where he would serve as ambassador in 1945–1946), for instance, the State Department praised its dictator General Getulio Vargas for declaring war and even sending troops against the Axis, while gently calling for commitments to future democratization. Such kid-glove treatment contrasted with diplomacy toward Argentina, where a similarly authoritarian-statist regime augmented its sins by active trade with the Germans through the early years of the war. Withholding of recognition from such a “fascist” regime and plans for a possible “peacekeeping” force (initially aimed at Argentina) via a reorganized Pan-American Union were hallmarks of Berle’s hemispheric service, as was his stillborn proposal for a Brazilian version of the TVA. While supporting the military overthrow of Vargas, Berle clashed with the State Department over its cozy connections to U.S. oil interests, which he called “colonizing capital.” Attempting to reanimate Brazilian democracy, the American ambassador even welcomed the return of a legalized Communist Party into the mix of the nation’s electoral forces. Generally chafing under the Anglo-European focus of Dean Acheson’s State Department, Berle left his government post in 1946 but remained a vociferous advocate for developmental assistance to the hemisphere even as props for such programs were drastically scaled back. There would be no Latin American Marshall Plan, or at least not until Berle helped revive the idea via President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress.13 In the interim (that is, between the Truman and Kennedy years), Berle clung to influence in Washington, DC, as a Democratic Party adviser with deep contacts in the foreign policy establishment, including a personal friendship with CIA director Allen Dulles. (As Secretary of State Dean Rusk would later compliment him that when it came to Latin American affairs, “all roads led to Berle.”)14 For liberal Democrats as much as their conservative Republican counterparts led by Eisenhower’s secretary of state (and Allen’s older and more conservative brother) John Foster Dulles, the postwar foreign policy pendulum swung demonstrably toward the perceived communist menace. Liberal political energies split between continuing

102LIBERAL ANTICO M MUN I SM

advocacy of state-inflected development policy at home and a fierce anticommunism abroad that circled the wagons against all those unwilling to openly align with U.S. security and business interests. Eclipse of Latin America’s democratic spring quickly led to a recrudescence of military dictatorship. The general direction of the new era was signaled in multiple centers: Somoza’s coup and subsequent repression against labor and the left in Nicaragua beginning in 1947; the overthrow of Venezuela’s elected President Gallegos by General Perez Jimenez in 1948, forcing Romulo Betancourt into a decade’s roving exile; the 1948 seizure of power in Peru by General Manuel Odria from the democratic coalition government of President José Luis Bustamente; and the replacement of the Cuban Autenticos by the Batista regime in Cuba in 1952. Berle’s career neatly captures the conflicting pulls on a prominent liberal conscience. He had fought as early as 1940 to rid the National Lawyers Guild of communists and in 1947 became New York Liberal Party chairman, leading the charge against the state’s Labor Party and Henry Wallace–style Democrats. The problem, as he saw it, was not ideology but the protection of democratic institutions. “We can get along very nicely with a Socialist Britain,” he counseled his questioning daughter in early 1948. “For that matter we can get along with a Communist Britain if doctrine were the only issue. But it isn’t. Communism today means iron control by Russia—military, ideological, police, and the all the way through.”15 And already by 1952, Berle was training his foreign policy sights on “the problem of Communist Government in Guatemala.” As he would instruct his fellow liberal Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Guatemalan government was no longer “an American movement at all” but a likely staging ground for a coming “Russiancontrolled dictatorship.” Even allowing for the need for many of the social reforms enacted under the newly elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz, Berle insisted that such programs could be accomplished by native, noncommunist talents or by U.S.-inspired initiatives. In any event, the “Russian” influence in Guatemala must be kept at bay. Berle reported that he had arranged a meeting on the subject with Assistant Secretary of State Nelson Rockefeller, who “can work a little with General [sic] Eisenhower on it.”16

A NTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY1 03

EL D O CTOR: POL ITICA L FOU N DAT I ON S OF COSTA RICAN WEL FA RI SM

Between the forces of oligarchy and repression on the one hand and U.S. intolerance for communist-influenced movements on the other, the space narrowed considerably after 1947 for democratic state building outside North America and Europe. Nevertheless, two neighbors with considerable political interaction seemed particularly well poised for liberal, democratic development at the end of World War II. Although different in their demographic makeup and social structure, both Costa Rica and Guatemala (after 1944) were governed by well-educated, elected leaders with wide-ranging programs of modernization and social reform. Both nations also were positively disposed to U.S. influence. In retrospect, they also serve—both for the overlap of forces that coursed through their national histories and for their sharply different political outcomes—as symbols of the limits of the contemporary liberalAmerican vision. Costa Rica had long prided itself on a record of democratic exceptionalism. Lack of deep mineral wealth or a significant surviving indigenous population militated against the social hierarchies and forced labor of much of the rest of the region. Securing its independence (initially granted in 1838) once popular forces drove out proslavery filibusters under William Walker in 1856, Costa Rica steadfastly practiced electoral democracy after 1869. As early as 1885, more of its voting-age male population was registered to vote than in Great Britain, and by the early twentieth century, Costa Rican democracy boasted universal male registration and a 70  percent electoral turnout, despite brief blemishes of authoritarian and nepotistic rule.17 The distinctive character of the country’s economic development contributed to its democratic institutional leanings. Unlike the landholding oligarchies of neighboring countries, Costa Rica’s coffee crop rested on widespread landowning among smallholders coordinated by a commercial elite of processors and exporters. Absent a significant indigenous population, moreover, the country also never resorted to a large standing army, since contending elites lacked the recruiting base used in other countries for armed militias. Even the one source of classic foreign control of the economy, the banana, was

10 4LIBE RAL ANTICO M MUN I SM

geographically confined to the Atlantic rainforest region and thus had little effect on the coffee-dominated social and political structure that had already been created in the rest of the country.18 Still, it was the social and political consequences of the Great Depression and World War II that first lent a forward-looking, social-democratic character to the Costa Rican political economy. Even as the country’s first general strike had helped bring down the dictatorship of Federico Tinoco Granados in 1920, renewed rumblings, beginning with the formation of the Communist Party of Costa Rica and, related, a sustained and militant strike of banana workers in 1934, shook the complacency of at least some sections of the country’s dominant and heretofore only mildly liberal National Republican Party (PRN). No one, however, was quite prepared for the full-on populist program enacted by Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia.19 Calderón Guardia—affectionately known as “el Doctor”—was one of several larger-than-life figures who dominated Costa Rica politics in the postwar years.20 Most dramatically, his 1942 Social Guarantees program, an adaptation of both Mexican precedents and International Labor Organization (ILO) recommendations, included a wide-ranging Labor Code that guaranteed trade union and collective bargaining rights, the eighthour day, a minimum wage, and no arbitrary dismissals, and an equally ambitious Social Security system financed through payroll taxes.21 In other notable moves, Calderón advanced the Pan-American Highway and rechartered the country’s long-dormant University of Costa Rica. Not surprisingly, such an energetic agenda ran into immediate and strenuous opposition from the country’s business elite and conservatives even in his own party. Ideologically, el Doctor adopted the top-down statism that had defined the older, right-wing legacy of the PRN (and led it to support Franco in the 1930s) but turned it to more radical social outcomes in a Costa Rican version of the “populist” trajectories of Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. Certainly, Calderónismo never entirely lost its authoritarian sense of entitlement: with family connections dating to the early twentieth century, to take the most prominent example, Calderón formed an enduring friendship with the Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza, who served as godfather to Calderón’s son.22 At the political core of the Calderónista regime and legislative majority lay a triangular working alliance with Costa Rica’s new Catholic

ANTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY1 05

archbishop Victor Manuel Sanabria and a small but well-organized Communist Party led by Manuel Mora. The latter (along with the writer and banana workers’ leader Carlos Luis Fallas) had fashioned a reformist, comunismo criollo (creole communism) in the years of the Popular Front and, as did the party in the United States, had willingly worked with more powerful political groups to advance the Social Guarantees, even as it never officially joined the government.23 To further secure Calderón Guardia’s program, Mora formally dissolved the nation’s Communist Party in 1943 in favor of the less provocative Popular Vanguard Party (PVP), discountenancing revolution and antireligious doctrine in order to build “a powerful bloc of all progressive national forces” in support of Calderón and “based on the Papal Encyclicals.”24 For his part, Sanabria, who was appointed archbishop of San José at the age of forty-two in the same year that Calderón Guardia took office, immediately endorsed the new president’s election as “one of the greatest triumphs” in the nation’s history; he also sent his young assistant Father Benjamin Núñez to Catholic University in Washington, DC, for intellectual grounding in social-Catholic doctrines and in preparation of the pastoral letter “On the Just Wage.”25 Sanabria made clear that he intended to overcome past criticism of the church hierarchy for “doing little or nothing for the laboring people (classes humildes).”26 Fully endorsing the Social Guarantees, the archdiocese also established a new Catholic labor federation— Rerum Novarum (CCTRN)—initially promoted as a spiritual complement to the left-dominated labor body—headed by Father Núñez.27 Despite bitter resentment from conservative business sectors attached to the former PRN leader León Cortés, Allied war interests together with the Roosevelt administration’s commitment to its Good Neighbor Policy initially inoculated Costa Rica from American meddling during the Social Guarantees years. Altogether, signs pointed to a warm relationship between Costa Rica state’s social Christianity and the Roosevelt administration. As early as 1941, Calderón Guardia surveyed PanAmerican Highway construction from the cockpit of a U.S. Army bomber. In 1942, he joined in an FDR birthday celebration and a year later led the U.S. vice president, Henry Wallace, in a motorcade through the streets of San José.28 The balance of power tipped quickly, however, as internal opposition to the Calderón Guardia government was augmented by new

10 6 LIBE RAL ANTICO M MUN I SM

developments. In particular, a liberal, social-democratic resistance emerged from middle-class circles less concerned with the social welfare measures within Calderónismo than two other factors: increasing evidence of authoritarian, patronage-heavy rule inside the country and the nation’s seemingly ambiguous alignment in the expanding Cold War without. The animating center of such liberal opposition was a group of former high school friends, originally influenced by Marxism (including a few who went on to study in Chile alongside Salvador Allende), who first coalesced as intellectual activists at San José’s Center for the Study of National Problems (CEPN). Disdainful of both Soviet-style communism and the top-down order (however dressed up in social reform trappings) that they recognized in the Costa Rica government, the self-declared centristas looked abroad to political models like Peru’s Haya de la Torre, Venezuela’s Betancourt, and the Puerto Rican liberal-democratic reformer (and future governor) Luis Muñoz Marín.29 Their ire at PRN “corruption” particularly spiked in the transition (the Costa Rica constitution denies consecutive terms) from Calderón Guardia to his handpicked successor Teodoro Picado, a scholarly lawyer more moderate in tone than El Doctor but whose electoral landslide (75  percent vote) in 1944 was marred by widely confirmed instances of ballot stuffing. The U.S. government scrambled to keep up with the growing tensions in Costa Rica. Already breaking with the spirit of Good Neighbor noninterventionism as early as 1944, the FBI and State Department were keeping a close watch on Calderón’s ties to the indigenous communist forces. They considered various means to disrupt the regime—whether by detaching Picado from the PRN-PVP alliance or by supporting outside “shock troops” to invade and take over the country—despite Calderón’s own procapitalist declarations.30 The international labor movement, already bitterly separated by competing Cold War allegiances, proved an early, important quiver in the anti-Calderón arsenal. In early 1947, Rerum Novarum’s Father Núñez openly adopted pro-American, anticommunist policies and reached out to both business leaders at home and to the American Federation of Labor abroad. The key connecting agent for the latter was Serafino Romualdi. Effectively extending the operations of the Free Trade Union

A NTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY1 07

Committee, the AFL’s Europe-centered anticommunist command post headed by Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, Romualdi began work in Latin America as the direct representative of David Dubinsky, the internationalist but fiercely anticommunist leader of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, on whose newspaper staff he had served during the 1930s. In the early 1940s, Romualdi helped organize the antifascist Italian diaspora in Latin America, including creation of the Congress of Free Italians in Montevideo, Uruguay, which declared solidarity with Allied war aims. After the war, Romualdi found himself back at the ILG as the appointed official AFL representative for Latin America, ultimately directing the region-wide, anticommunist InterAmerican Regional Organization of Workers (ORIT).31 Labor-liberals like Romualdi took on a challenging task: defeat communist encroachment and extend liberal democracy, with particular attention to the defense of trade union rights. The power of the region’s communist-led labor movements actually unraveled fairly quickly. The initial target for Romualdi and friends was the WFTU’s Latin American representative, the Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina (CTAL), of which Mora’s PVP was one constituent. The brainchild of Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the peripatetic and somewhat eclectic Mexican Marxist (who never officially joined the Communist Party but vigorously endorsed the Popular Front strategy after a visit to Moscow in 1935) and head of the Federation of Mexican Workers (CTM), the CTAL had once drawn praise from Washington for its wartime no-strike pledge.32 The general postwar political move to the right in the region, however, left the CTAL in a vulnerable spot. Internal rupture within the CTM (Toledano was expelled in 1948) weakened it at its base. In addition, Romualdi-AFL entreaties helped detach contingents from Chile, Peru, and Cuba, while governmental crackdowns nearly everywhere else put the organization on the run. Meanwhile, an increasingly hard-line stand from the Kremlin, so at odds with Mora’s tack in Costa Rica, generally also limited the flexibility of CTAL affiliates.33 Growing interlabor tensions and the rising stakes of the conflict were apparent in late 1946, when both Lombardo Toledano and Romualdi came to San José to rally the locals on opposite sides of the growing worldwide labor divide.34

10 8LIBE RAL ANTICO M MUN I SM

FI GUERES, A RÉVA LO, AND THE ST R A N G E PATH TO SOCIAL DEMOC RACY

The most capable and ambitious of Calderón Guardia’s antagonists proved to be the social democrat José Figueres Ferrer (popularly known as Don Pepe). If Calderón Guardia represented a kind of populist paternalism (including a willingness to accommodate all interest groups—be they communists, Catholics, or even neighboring dictators—to remain in power), Figueres, the son of a wealthy Spanish-born physician, was fired by a more ascetic, secular-democratic faith. Following four years of intermittent study in the United States, he had returned to Costa Rica in 1928 to build up a successful coffee plantation and rope manufactory on land he christened La Lucha sin Fin (The endless struggle). Within a decade he had not only further enriched his family’s holdings but emerged as the country’s most prominent centrista, a self-conceived social-democratic revolutionary, addressing the workers on his farm as “comrades,” albeit without any call to class struggle. Domestically, Pepe’s social-economic program never veered far from Calderón Guardia’s: the vision of a “Second Republic,” which Pepe’s Social Democratic Party (PSD)—the party to which he was attached until the creation of the more durable Party of National Liberation (PLN) in 1951—promised mainly to supplement the country’s Labor Code with several further measures, including women’s suffrage and selective nationalization of energy, communications, and public services. In 1942, however, a fiery anti-Calderón speech had landed Pepe in jail and two years of self-exile in Mexico. This baptism as a domestic political rebel, combined with contacts apparently cultivated in the U.S. (where he also met his first wife), turned Pepe into a rather singular transnational operative. Together with a few hundred fellow democratic exiles from Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and a scattering of other centers, Pepe helped found the Caribbean Legion— formalized in Guatemala City on December 16, 1947, by the Caribbean Pact—with no less an ambition than to topple the region’s dictators and reconstitute the old Central American Republic as a viable democratic confederation. Alternately counseling armed resistance and civil noncooperation in the style of the French resistance to Nazi occupation, the Caribbean Legion likely stirred young minds more than it frightened the region’s strongmen. Despite a supply of arms and some secret training of

A NTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY1 09

FIGURE  4.1  José

“Don Pepe” Figueres, visiting former president Harry S. Truman in 1959, proved U.S. liberals’ best hope in Central America.

Source: Harry S. Truman Library and Museum.

volunteers in Mexico, projected campaigns against Somoza in Nicaragua and Trujillo in the Dominican Republic quickly fizzled out.35 Still, as signaled by the location of the Caribbean Legion’s first meeting, the reform forces in Costa Rica—and across the region—had, since 1944, gained an important ally in Guatemala’s forty-four-year-old president, Juan José Arévalo. Influenced, as was Costa Rican Calderónismo by the 1930s program of Mexican cardenismo, social revolution in Guatemala was initially more of a middle-class affair. In the midst of the

110 LIBERAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

Roosevelt-era retraction of U.S. support for Central American dictators, student demonstrations and widespread strikes had toppled long-time strongman rule in both El Salvador and Guatemala. With overwhelming popular support, the philosophy professor Arévalo returned to his native land from Argentinean exile and was elected president in the country’s first free election.36 Searching for a left-liberal, noncommunist “middle ground” in a country with only a small and long-repressed communist party and labor movement, Arévalo described his program as one of “spiritual socialism,” a political brew that bore strong resemblance to prior Mexican, Argentinean, and Costa Rican “populist” measures.37 Guatemala’s fragile new democracy sought international allies where it could; Arévalo hoped the Caribbean Pact could create a broader alliance of progressive democratic states in the region. Given that his economic and social programs did not diverge substantively much from Calderónismo, it seems likely that it was the already long-established Calderón Guardia friendship with Somoza as well as the realpolitik of Central American national rivalries that turned Arévalo into an ally of Figueres.38 Persuasively lumping Picado’s “corrupt” government with that of the region’s dictatorships like Somoza’s Nicaragua, Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, and Carias’s Honduras, Figueres convinced Arévalo that a revolutionary Costa Rica could prove a launching ground for a larger “liberation” of all of Central America. All the aid insurrectionary forces would need, he counseled, would be a transfer of arms that Arévalo was already holding courtesy of the recent failed invasion of the Dominican Republic. When in February  1948 incumbent president Picado and candidate Calderón Guardia (seeking another term) pressed a compliant Congress not to recognize the publicly announced electoral victory of the conservative publisher Otilio Ulate Blanco, with whom Figueres was temporarily allied, the country plunged into a constitutional crisis.39 Even as the PVP mobilized to support the government, Figueres unleashed the “revolutionary” forces of the Caribbean Legion, initially overwhelming poorly supplied government troops under the direction of the security minister (and the president’s brother) René Picado across sparsely settled areas of the country. As armed conflict spread, international friends of Figueres played the communist card to discredit the Costa Rican government and call for U.S. intervention. A quickly formed Costa Rican

ANTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY1 1 1

League Against Communist Domination lobbied officials, issued regular bulletins, and staged protest rallies; on its behalf, liberal luminaries like the Peruvian Aprista leader Victor Raúl de la Torre openly invoked the recent overthrow of Czechoslovakia’s noncommunist Benes regime as a warning against communist expansionist aims.40 Such appeals had tangible repercussions. In May  1948, a U.S.-engineered OAS resolution declared, “The activity of international communist politics is incompatible with the American concept of liberty.” By early 1948, the Picado government found itself unable to supply its national arsenal; not only was it closed out of American arms markets, but potential regional suppliers like Nicaragua or Mexico were also warned off—with no similar embargo applied to Figueres-friendly Guatemala.41 Costa Rica’s civil war ended quickly. What had started on March 12 was over by late April. After several weeks of inconsequential maneuvers, the critical blow was struck when the Guatemalan-backed Army of National Liberation under Figueres overwhelmed the government’s defense forces at both the port of Limón and the country’s second city of Cartago. By this time, over two thousand had died in unprecedented Costa Rican violence. With the massing of both PVP irregular “mariachis” in San José and Somoza’s Nicaraguan troops, at President Picado’s invitation, advancing across the border—a pause ensued. Through the ministrations of newly appointed U.S. ambassador Nathaniel P. Davis, the warring parties were brought together and agreed to a settlement.42 Still holding the upper hand militarily, Pepe ultimately won the day, prevailing over all other negotiators and accepting nothing short of a quick and “revolutionary” transfer of power, during which a Figueres-led military junta would rule for eighteen months before returning power to civilian rule—under a now officially recognized president-designate Ulate.43 In the final act of settlement, Mora secured a signed commitment from Father Núñez (on behalf of Figueres) promising to maintain the country’s social legislation, including the Labor Code and social security system, and to respect the PVP’s civil and property rights—anticipating, however unrealistically, continuing participation in the future constitutional order. Mora, Picado, and Calderón then fled the country (the former to Mexico, the latter two initially to Nicaragua) on April 21, ending the armed conflict.44 In what he hoped was a final sealing of the deep social breach left by the civil war, Figueres also formally abolished the Costa Rican army

112LIBERAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

(leaving only the national police force) on December  1, 1948. This outwardly selfless and idealistic move was likely linked to more pragmatic considerations. Instantly dissolving still-smoldering Calderónista internal remnants (who had dominated the country’s regular army), demilitarization at once inoculated Costa Rica from any future charges of aggressive intent toward its neighbors and served as a ready justification for appeals to more powerful international allies.45

D O N PE PE, A DOL F BERL E, AND T HE C AU SE OF L IBERA L A N TICOMMUN I SM

The shooting war was over in Costa Rica, but the political wars— including a potential destabilization of the country—would linger for another decade. In the balance lay one answer to a larger question: how viable was a “liberal” (that is, noncommunist but democratic and socialwelfarist) developmental path in the region? From the beginning, the biggest losers of the revolution were the communists and their associated militant labor movement. Among the early acts of the junta was outlawing of the Communist Party and, in clear violation of the addendum agreement, derecognition of PVP trade unions and even the arrest and selected murder of key militants who remained at large in the country.46 In contrast, Rerum Novarum was recognized as the country’s only legitimate trade union federation. The Catholic Church–based federation, however, had never developed the grassroots base of PVP, and, despite extensive financial support from the AFL-CIO, the record indicates that labor organization remained anemic for decades to come. That a new archbishop, following the death of Sanabria in 1951, expressed comparatively little interest in worker welfare further weakened institutional support for Rerum Novarum.47 On the other hand, not only did it maintain the social security measures of the Labor Code, but the junta, under its new labor minister Father Núñez, also added additional layers of protection for rural workers, dispute resolution via labor courts, and a commitment to women’s voting rights (to be first instituted under the elected Ulate government). More dramatically still, the junta’s Decree Laws 70 and 71 imposed a

ANTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY1 1 3

10 percent wealth tax and nationalization of the banks.48 “The administration of money and credit,” declared the provisional president, “ought not be in private hands any more than the distribution of water and the mails.” 49 Right-wing business and military sectors were aghast and outraged at Figueres’s social program.50 Despite continuous opposition, however, once Pepe was elected president on the PLN ticket in 1953 (following the Ulate hiatus), his rule showed little loss of its former thunder.51 Rhetorically admonishing his American friends with a pledge of “No more economic occupation!” and proposing (albeit in vain) a system of sliding commodity prices to boost the economies of developing countries, he bore down on the United Fruit Company with a deal only slightly less confiscatory than the policy enacted at the same moment in neighboring Guatemala. Ideologically, Figueres continued to bob and weave among available socioeconomic options. Identifying welfarist Denmark as his model, he characteristically declared, “Our movement is not in any sense a Marxian revolution. It is really a revolution of the middle class.”52 Internally, the figuerista regime notably stabilized labor relations thanks to a jerry-built system of top-down social compromise. Not only did the Costa Rican government and its favored Rerum Novarum labor federation effect economic outcomes, but AFL-ORIT forces and even the U.S. State Department were permitted to function with some autonomy in Costa Rican internal affairs. In early December 1951, for example, the AFL representative Romualdi sought advice from the U.S. consulate’s labor attaché about the best way to get recalcitrant banana workers (split geographically between a communist-leaning remnant in the southwest, an independent group in the central region, and Rerum Novarum along the northeast coast) to adopt a more “constructive approach” in talks with the United Fruit Company. In particular, Romualdi queried, if ORIT were to send in its most seasoned Latin American organizer to coordinate the noncommunist unions, “would the Company honestly cooperate with the union and help it consolidate its hold over the workers without pretending that its leaders act more as Company agents than genuine leaders of workers?”53 For a time, it seems, U.S. foreign policy and a kind of liberal corporatism within Costa Rican labor affairs neatly dovetailed. As a further extension of the collaborative arrangement, it is evident from AFL correspondence that both the AFL and the Figueres

114LIBERAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

regime continued to try to supplement Rerum Novarum’s always-shaky finances.54 Finally, Figueres himself, when seeking election to the presidency in 1952, successfully petitioned ORIT to dispatch Father Núñez’s protégé Luis Alberto Monge to “return” to Costa Rica for assistance in mobilizing working-class voters during the campaign season.55 Somewhat ironically, then, at least for those who had long preached the necessity of “free trade unionism,” future advances for workers in Costa Rica visibly depended directly on political power and patronage. Despite the initiatives of the Figueres government, internal political divisions continued to threaten, as they had since 1948, to mushroom beyond the country’s borders. Most dramatically, against the backdrop of anticommunist fears leading up to and following the Guatemalan coup of June  1954, Figueres’s enemies gleefully played the red card. In protest of the Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, who had exiled Figueres’s friend Rómulo Betancourt, Figueres had already annoyed the U.S. State Department by refusing to attend the March 1954 Caracas conference that would adopt an anticommunist resolution aimed at the Arbenz government in Guatemala. Although no friend of Arbenz, Figueres had urged caution in destabilizing a democratically elected government, proposing a wait-and-see game to include an appeal to United Fruit for a region-wide contract while also lobbying for action against Somoza as a priority over military action in Guatemala.56 Figueres’s analysis, as communicated to Berle, framed Arbenz as a “weak and compromising” leader who had had to rely on the communists for want of alternatives in a country with “reactionary landowners protecting a peonage system under which they prospered with semi-serf Indians.” Yet, Figueres reasoned, if Arbenz could emerge with a tangible settlement from the United Fruit Company (UFCO) that had gained monopoly control over the country’s banana economy, he might then be strong enough politically to distance himself from the communists.57 Quickly, however, Figueres’s enemies also now saw a chance to draw blood. His former ally Ulate went so far as to accuse the inveterate anticommunist Figueres of communist sympathies.58 Figueres himself publicly warned that Thomas Whelan, Somoza’s friend and U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua, was fanning the flames of anti–Costa Rican interventionism. More ominously, a few hundred insurgent recruits were reported to be training in Nicaragua, with their activities likened to those of the

ANTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY1 1 5

Guatemalan rebel army that had rallied around the coup leader Castillo Armas from their base in Honduras. Even the chief of the Costa Rican legislative opposition, Mario Echandi, added his voice to an appeal for direct military intervention by the then newly installed Guatemalan dictator. Anticipating a larger invasion, a P-51 fighter plane, apparently dispatched to Managua by the Venezuelan dictator Perez Jimenez, strafed the Costa Rican capital. By May 1954, when the U.S. ambassador to San José left the country without explanation even as Figueres was receiving uncertain signals from UFCO representatives in the midst of a search for a region-wide contract, the sense of panic and growing conspiracy was palpable.59 The stage was set for a pivotal showdown about U.S. intentions in the region. Perhaps more pointedly, it was D-Day for labor-liberals to save one of their own. Fortunately for Figueres, he had garnered support in the United States from a united bloc of socially progressive, democraticminded anticommunists—including Berle, Muñoz Marín, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Illinois senator Paul Douglas—a group who would later be considered under the label “Cold War liberals.” 60 Encouraged by both Schlesinger and Berle, Pepe addressed gatherings of the quintessentially liberal Americans for Democratic Action and Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom on more than one occasion. Among his publicly identified boosters Figueres could also count on such luminaries as Robert LaFollette, Walter White of the NAACP, Eleanor Roosevelt, Pearl Buck, and even Milton Eisenhower, the distinguished, nonpartisan brother of the president.61 Even as Figueres adroitly cultivated his American contacts, a sympathetic U.S. press cast him in reassuring hues. A Charlotte Observer columnist dubbed him a “witty gentle intellectual who like Adlai [Stevenson] is heartily hated by nearly all of the musclemen of Central America.” More caustically, a Detroit Free Press critic called him an “egghead intellectual” and “darling of the noncommunist left-wing crowd in New York, particularly of Adolf Berle, Jr.” 62 It was indeed Berle, more than anyone else, who emerged as Figueres’s saving angel. First established during a quick visit in March 1953 to check a Somoza-inspired insinuation that Costa Rica was veering dangerously leftward, the Figueres-Berle friendship had blossomed quickly. Effectively acting as a minister without portfolio, Berle judged that he had found a kindred spirit, a politician who, in a sea of hostility, could still

116 LIBE RAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

raise a banner of optimistic, liberal reform. Don Pepe, Berle privately noted in the midst of his visit, was no communist but rather “an antiCommunist liberal about comparable with [Democratic] Sen. [Herbert] Lehman of New York.” 63 On a New Year’s visit in 1955, the Berles, including Adolf’s wife, Beatrice Bishop Berle, a physician, and son Peter, were clearly not only entranced by Pepe’s presidential hospitality in both San José and the La Lucha farmhouse but by the president’s direct engagement with citizens on the street. According to her own memoir, Beatrice confided to Figueres that “in a small country like Costa Rica, popular democracy is possible. Last night your people wanted to touch you, to speak to you personally, to know you and your family and have you know them. This give and take is impossible in a large country like the United States, except through the mass media, in which facts and personalities are manipulated and distorted.” Berle waxed poetically to Don Pepe that Costa Rica “stands out as a gleaming jewel which has kept the faith in a tangled hemisphere.” 64 So impressed were the Berles with the virtues of the Costa Rican president that Berle senior insisted that son Peter spend the next summer cutting sisal as an ordinary worker—“so that he may penetrate beyond the surface of ordinary life”—on the Figueres farm.65 The personal connections stretched in other directions as well. Even as Berle was protecting Figueres from regional predators, his connections with the Costa Rican president helped him secure a real estate investment there.66 The friends of Figueres turned up in his greatest moment of need. Beneath the storm clouds gathering around Costa Rica in 1954, Berle worked his extensive contacts to connect the Costa Rican president with a White House emissary, the CIA’s former covert action chief Thomas Braden, as well as United Fruit executives, all to establish Figueres’s “respectable” policy intentions.67 In addition, in the U.S. Congress, Berle’s close friend, Senator Paul Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois, beseeched Dulles to protect Figueres, a “genuine liberal,” from “highly reactionary dictatorships.” The gambit worked, and in the nick of time. An expeditionary force from Somoza’s Nicaragua—with support from the dictatorships of Venezuela and Guatemala—invaded Costa Rica in early January 1955. Virtually bereft of aircraft of its own, a new air force was “formed overnight” on January 16 with the purchase from the United States of four P-51 Mustang fighters, at the cost of $1.00 per plane, and a

ANTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY1 1 7

DC-3 transport reoutfitted as a bomber, and the rebels were quickly routed.68 The United States had firmly put its thumb on the scales in defense of Costa Rica’s liberal constitution. Even Vice President Richard Nixon personally intervened on a trip to the region to dampen any crossborder initiatives from either Nicaragua or Guatemala.69 The noisy international backlash that had earlier greeted news of the U.S. role in the Guatemalan coup may in this case have ultimately served as a hedge among U.S. policy makers against further adventurism. In one of the ironies of Cold War statecraft, cold-blooded intervention in one country may have inadvertently saved the day for its neighbor.70 One other factor likely militated in favor of a nonmilitary resolution in Costa Rica, the historian Kirk Bowman suggests: the absence of an army eliminated the possibility of an effective extraparliamentary oppositional route to power.71 Following the coup threats of 1954–1955, liberal Costa Rica experienced one more crisis on its path to long-term political stability. Since the civil war, Figueres had regularly triumphed over enemies and rivals, but the victories had come at the cost of a deep social fissure within the country. Thousands of Calderónistas had been jailed, hundreds remained in exile, and each election brought the possibility of further division and potential chaos. Beginning in 1955 and culminating in 1958, something refreshing happened in Costa Rica—an unexpected move toward amnesty for those convicted of civil war–era political crimes and the internalization of a normative competitive party system. Following a mass public petition campaign led by the church as well as opposition parties, the issue came to a head in the 1958 presidential elections. With the PLN vote split between two candidates even as it maintained control of the legislative assembly, the opposition coalition (the Democratic Opposition Movement, or MDO), led by Figueres’s archenemy Mario Echandi, which had campaigned on a promise to bring back Figueres’s continuing nemesis Calderón Guardia from exile, won a plurality of the vote. After some hesitation and apparently even serious consideration of annulling the election, Figueres (and the leading PLN candidate Francisco Orlich) not only accepted the outcome but themselves took the first steps toward what would become a comprehensive amnesty by 1961.72 Henceforth, agitated Costa Rica settled down. Although undoubtedly frustrated by his party’s electoral defeat, temporary removal from the

118LIBE RAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

domestic maelstrom allowed Figueres to operate briefly on a larger political stage. Basking in the new stability of Costa Rican democracy, Pepe sought once again, as in the heyday of the Caribbean Legion, to evangelize on behalf of a revolutionary democratic mission for Central America. Pepe’s friend Romulo Betancourt had also resumed office as elected president in 1958, and the time again seemed propitious for a larger democratic offensive. One result was the International Institute for Labor Research (IILR), established in 1960 as a New York–based think tank with an offshoot on Pepe’s farm at La Lucha for training young leaders across the hemisphere. The same social-democratic forces also established a new journal, Combate (after Camus), with support from figures like Betancourt, Haya de la Torre, the U.S. Supreme Court justice William  O. Douglas, and the venerable U.S. socialist leader Norman Thomas.73 A further sign of the PLN’s intended place under a would-be left-liberal international canopy was the appointment of the international labor leader (and future Costa Rican president) Luis Alberto Monge as Costa Rica’s first ambassador to Israel in 1963.74 All told, the Figueres forces again trained their sights on rolling back the region’s dictatorships, initially funneling both arms and public support to the Cuban revolutionaries fighting Batista. Once Fidel took power, Figueres and his group of left-liberals made several attempts to bring him in as their ally. At a U.S. congressional hearing, Figueres had publicly rebuked past U.S. policy on Latin America: “When American boys have been dying, your mourning has been our mourning. When our people die, you speak of investments. Then [in clear reference to the abuse Vice President Nixon had taken in his trip to Caracas in 1957] you wonder why we spit.”75 The influence of the region’s noncommunist left, however, remained limited. Despite persistent lobbying on the diplomatic front by Figueres, Berle, and friends, President Eisenhower’s State Department refused to budge from its steadfast support of dictators in Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, and self-styled expeditionary forces aimed at either target proved once again feeble and unavailing.76 As the historian Jordan Schwarz recounts, when Figueres visited Castro in March 1959, “he anticipated a warm reception as one of the few Latin American leaders to aid Castro’s revolution with arms.” Castro, however, pointedly rejected Pepe’s rather verbose appeal on behalf of the pro-American

ANTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY1 1 9

democratic forces. “We cannot be with the Americans who are today oppressing us!” answered Fidel, whose own second-in-command in the 26th of July Movement, Ché Guevara, had been personally radicalized by the Armas takeover in Guatemala. The new Cuban leader went on to disparage most of the continent’s democratic leaders as “agents of American imperialism” and even to question Costa Rica’s Second Republic as not a “real revolution,” for failing to radically uproot its inherited social structure.77 If Castro’s personal slight and forthcoming alignment with the Soviet Union did not in themselves diminish the Pepe/Costa Rican model as a plausible one for democratic change, other events did. Pepe was still riding high when President Kennedy turned to Berle and FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy in hatching his Alliance for Progress in 1960. Figueres (with support from Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith, whom we will meet again in chapter 5) emerged among the Alliance for Progress’s most outspoken advocates outside of the United States, calling for long-range economic planning, support for “democratic-progressive movements,” and “diverse social systems in different countries.” Within months, however, regional popular support for the alliance was substantially dashed by the Bay of Pigs fiasco.78 In a single blow, Figueres-style progressivism had been reduced to little more than a footnote as a regional policy option. In a sympathetic but dismissive take, the American liberal organ The Progressive could address its Costa Rican commentary within a special Latin American issue in 1961 under a section entitled “The Struggling Midgets of Central America.”79 The Bay of Pigs, in fact, underlined a growing split in U.S. liberal ranks, one that further diminished the role of “moderate” socialdemocratic allies like Figueres. On one side stood older anticommunist liberals like Berle. Summoned back into action by JFK as a kind of roving chairman of an interdepartmental task force on Latin America, Berle provided the most influential inside voice in favor of the Bay of Pigs invasion but then saw his political stock among administration advisers plummet quickly thereafter.80 In this case, he even overruled his friend Figueres, who had hinged his support for invasion on a simultaneous “democratic” attack on Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. In his last act of public service, the septuagenarian Berle also blessed President Lyndon Johnson’s armed intervention in the Dominican Republic in

120 LIBERAL ANTICO M MUN I SM

1965 to block an uprising on behalf of the once-deposed but stillcontending social democrat Juan Bosch. LBJ, he allowed, had been faced with “terrible” alternatives, but in the end the “incapacity of Latin Americans to govern themselves, let alone take a hand in world politics, compels the United States to take care of itself and . . . the Latin Americans however much they dislike it.”81 As he explained ruefully to Figueres, Berle had concluded that “all countries did not have the advantage of organizing geniuses like yourself in Costa Rica or like Betancourt in Venezuela.”82 Such undiluted hostility to Third World social movements, especially those brushed with communist influence, met increasing opposition on the American left. Only weeks after the Cuban invasion, Martin Luther King Jr. declared that the United States had done “not only a disservice not only to its own citizens but to the whole of humanity in dealing with the Cuban situation. There is a revolt all over the world against colonialism, reactionary dictatorship, and systems of exploitation.”83 By 1967, such critiques, although born in Latin America, were being carried over with ever greater force against the policies of Cold War liberals in Vietnam. Not only King, SNCC, CORE, and the Students for a Democratic Society but also senators like Ernest Gruening, Mark Hatfield, Eugene McCarthy, and George McGovern were attacking U.S. foreign policy as a “new form of colonialism.”84 The “new liberal” and “new left” ranks of the 1960s and 1970s activists now expressed a strident opposition to U.S. interventionism in terms far more radical than had been articulated but ignored earlier by U.S. friends like Figueres. Indeed, by the 1970s, when popular movements erupted against U.S.backed regimes in Nicaragua and other parts of Central America, all previous dalliances between the region’s reformers and the U.S. government became suspect. As if to confirm Fidel’s worst insinuations about U.S. manipulation of the region’s noncommunist “progressives,” Ramparts magazine in 1967 exposed two decades of secret CIA funding of AFL-CIO foreign policy initiatives, including AFIL and ORIT, in the region. Years later, it would emerge that both the IILR and Combate had also surreptitiously received substantial funding from the CIA through a third party.85 Don Pepe went out more quietly as a national leader than he came in. His last presidency, from 1970 to 1974, was necessarily taken up with the

ANTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY1 21

country’s growing economic problems. Costa Rica’s chief commodities, coffee and bananas, faced falling prices even as an attempt to stir a more mixed economy by the Central American Common Market, founded alongside the Alliance for Progress in 1960, also faltered, given the insufficient buying power from the region’s poor.86 In desperation, Figueres tried other measures. U.S. intelligence in early 1971 reported a secret electoral alliance between Figueres and the PVP’s Manuel Mora in return for the reestablishment of trade (particularly a major coffee purchase) and diplomatic ties with the USSR. In a possibly related move, the older Figueres harkened back to the young revolutionary who had vowed to topple the region’s dictators and stand up to Yankee economic domination. Both before and after his election in 1970, Figueres offered strong rhetorical support to the Sandinistas in their attempt to overthrow the Somoza regime in Nicaragua. And there was likely more beneath the surface. Recent excavation of KGB reports from the period reference a $300,000 Soviet “loan” (via the Costa Rican Communist Party) to support his presidential campaign and apparent acquiescence in Sandinista training missions on Costa Rican soil that would ultimately aid in the overthrow of the dictator in July 1979. Figueres, in short, proved a consistent but not always compliant anticommunist force in the hemisphere.87 Alas, financial connections of another type dragged down Pepe’s reputation by the end of his term. Having invited the fugitive investor Robert Vesco to set up shop in Costa Rica in 1972, Figueres could not easily disassociate himself or his party from the taint of Vesco’s growing notoriety.88 Overall, one must allow that post–civil war Costa Rica had attained an exceptional international public image as a not only peaceful but modern, progressive, and tolerant society. The party of Figueres long dominated Costa Rican politics, including one term by the former ORIT leader Monge and two terms by Oscar Arias, who in 1987 would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for helping resolve the region’s multiple civil wars. Yet, not only did Figueres’s long-time nemesis, Calderón Guardia, return to public life inside Costa Rica in 1958, but he ran again (unsuccessfully) for the presidency in 1962, then served as his country’s ambassador to Mexico until his death in 1970. Indicative of his family’s extended political drift rightward, his son, Rafael Ángel Calderón Fournier (born during his parents’ exile), assumed the presidency in 1990, on a conservative Social Christian ticket.

122LIBERAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

Only the communists and the left-wing labor movement, which had in many ways inaugurated the social welfare guarantees that had helped define the country’s distinctive developmental pattern, were left out of Costa Rica’s celebratory legacy. Even here, however, there is something of a happy caveat. Dating to the young Republic, Costa Rica’s Legislative Assembly had issued a “Distinguished Citizen” award, the Benémerito de la Patria. Not surprisingly, when in 1966 it inaugurated a special Salón de Beneméritos, Figueres was its celebrated honoree. In time, the national historical consensus encompassed Calderón Guardia, too, within the folds of the Benémerito (in 1974, four years after his death). And in subsequent years, again posthumously, three prominent PVP members—the writer and CP cofounder Carmen Lyra (1976), the trade union leader and prize-winning novelist Carlos Luis Fallas (1977), and, finally, in 1998, Manuel Mora himself—were deemed fit for national memorialization.89

H URR A H FOR COSTA RICA N LI B ER A LI SM, WITH ON E HAND CL A P P I N G

Costa Rica’s “exceptionalism” in the hemisphere sprouted in the 1940s and crested sometime in the 1970s. As the sociologist James Mahoney has documented, from 1960 onward, the country maintained the highest health and life expectancy, one of the highest annual growth rates in the hemisphere, and exceptional standards of health and educational achievement, even as its social policies narrowed the income gap among its citizenry.90 Internationally, the country also remained a beacon of nonmilitary paths to dispute resolution. At the same time, it had retreated from social-democratic experimentation in the face of a region-wide economic downturn; by the 1980s, neither social democracy nor social Catholicism figured much in PLN appeals. What remained was the country’s democratic tradition and relative social stability: these, combined with an unprecedented infusion of U.S. AID funds—per capita behind only Israel, Vietnam, Egypt, and Jamaica in what the agency’s 1998 report labeled “the Sandinista windfall”—helped cement Costa Rica’s international reputation as a successful model of development.91

A NTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY1 23

On its surface, the Costa Rica story offers evidence that a progressivedemocratic and even social-democratic alternative to communism was possible in the Third World, not just in the industrialized West. So long as a country’s main players steered clear of Soviet ties (and prevented those with such ties from gaining power), then it might not fear destabilization from the United States. A further brace for such an argument would contrast the fate of Guatemala under Arbenz (and particularly the U.S.-financed coup of 1954) to that of Costa Rica under Figueres. Arbenz, by such a reading, likely “tripped the wire” toward intervention less by radical social policies at home—including even the agrarian reform bill of 1952 aimed at UFCO properties—than unmistakable strategic alignment between the government and the communist Guatemalan Workers Party (PGT). An official “minute of silence” declared by the Guatemalan Congress in March  1954 in honor of the one-year anniversary of the death of Stalin sent a clear signal to all critics of the regime; expulsion from the country in the same period of four leaders of the anticommunist (and AFL-backed) National Union of Workers (UNTL) proved the last straw for Romualdi, ORIT, and the AFL.92 In the end, fears of further redistribution of property and an open declaration of neutralism pushed insurrectionary plans that had been drawn up during the Korean War— but heretofore countermanded at the top—into activation.93 That crucial elements of the U.S. liberal elite—alongside conservative Cold Warriors like Secretary of State John Foster Dulles; his brother, the CIA’s deputy director Allen Dulles; Undersecretary of State General Walter Bedell Smith; and Ambassador John Peurifoy—had joined the interventionist consensus was signaled in the moves of Berle, who willingly brushed aside Figueres’s expressed qualms about involving ardently right-wing forces in the Arbenz overthrow.94 Other liberal and labor forces followed suit: the AFL’s president, George Meany, immediately sent warm congratulations to General Castillo Armas upon his seizure of power. Among major American publications, only the left-liberal Nation was quick to sense the depth of the tragedy in the making. As its publisher Freda Kirchwey wrote only a month into the coup: Little did the Administration care that that government had been freely elected and represented about 95 per cent of the voting strength of the country. What the State Department could not tolerate was Guatemala’s

124LIBERAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

toleration of Communists in key places—though not in the government itself—and its defiant insistence on following its course of energetic reform along lines which cut into major American interests. . . . The defeat of the Arbenz government, along with its supporters, has provided a sample of Washington’s cold-war strategy in the Western hemisphere.95

Soon, however, many of those who had counseled or tacitly accepted intervention had second thoughts. Until Vietnam, the Guatemalan coup and its aftermath of dictatorship and violent attack on civilians as well as suppression of democratic social movements would stand to many latterday liberals as one of the worst mistakes of the Cold War era. Romualdi, who spent months after the coup trying in vain to reestablish representative trade union institutions and some semblance of land reform in Guatemala, looked back in 1967: “Unfortunately,” he suggested, the wave of post-coup anticommunism there “threatened to sweep away the labor movement itself.”96 Thirty-three years later, another American liberal spokesman, President Bill Clinton, similarly regretted the U.S. role in a thirty-six-year-long civil war ultimately rooted in the 1954 coup. “For the United States,” said Clinton, “it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake.”97 Setting them side by side, the histories of Costa Rica and Guatemala offer a stark reminder that postwar political and social development, albeit under the same umbrella of U.S. geopolitical hegemony, could take sharply different paths. Even if, as this summary narrative indicates, Costa Rica had found a way to thread the needle of significant socialdemocratic reform without invoking the anticommunist wrath of its northern neighbor, it did so on the basis of so many peculiarities as to taint the result for more general usage. In the first place, an old-style Latin American “populist” ruler, Calderón Guardia—in league with a militant, communist-directed labor movement as well as a Catholic hierarchy (and this well before the arrival of liberation theology) committed to a regime of social justice—proved essential to Costa Rica’s progressive development. Second, we must credit the calendar itself, for the gestation period of Costa Rica’s social state was just “right,” that is, the later years

A NTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY1 25

of World War II and its aftermath, when the U.S. New Deal state was still eager to enhance antifascist and then Keynesian development possibilities and just before U.S. leaders became preoccupied with the communist threat above all else. Finally, the Costa Ricans enjoyed the “gift” (as in West Germany) of a noncommunist opposition to the old order that, as in the Figueres case, was almost as dedicated as were the communists to a radically redistributionist economic policy, if not robust trade unionism. As we have seen, a complex combination of inside and outside actors propelled an idiosyncratic example of welfarist development in Costa Rica. In the same era, once-influential social-democratic leaders in more powerful countries like Venezuela and Peru ultimately stumbled and turned to the right under both U.S. and domestic pressures by the late 1950s.98 Once Arévalo in Guatemala had left the scene, no other reformer in the region approximated the combination of political acceptability and acumen represented by Figueres. American liberals, then, had found their man (and perhaps even their country), but in doing so, they had also all but ensured that no one else could follow this singular example. In theory, the Americans possessed alternative strategic choices. They might have gone all in with the Caribbean Legion, openly allying with organized insurgency against the region’s dictators. They might have exercised a greater degree of patience with nationalist-communist forces, waiting until the latter moderated themselves or collapsed under their own political-economic contradictions. They might have offered at least qualified support to the region’s “democratic-populist” regimes, allowing that “strongman” rule might sometimes prove a useful stage in national economic development. Instead, they chose to withhold their commitment until a Senator Lehman figure turned up in the highlands of Central America. The dominant story would thus remain that of oligarchies plus U.S.-backed military force versus communist-centered insurgencies. Decades of blood and bitterness and continuing underdevelopment would follow on this liberal default.

5 SIREN SONG OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT U.S. Missions to India, 1952–1975

N

either as direct threat nor as willing client did South Asian or Southeast Asian states occupy the same space for U.S. policy makers as did Latin America. Yet, well before their fateful, costly commitment to test the domino theory in Vietnam, American liberals had fastened on India as a crucible of their deepest hopes and fears. “Just as China seems destined to be the test of communism,” the twenty-fiveyear-old student activists Clare and Harris Wofford breathlessly reported in 1950, “so India is the coming test of democracy.” On a grant from the student fellowship movement, the Woffords embraced India as the home of Gandhi (whose teachings later led them to association with Martin Luther King  Jr.’s nonviolent struggle), the “world’s greatest revolutionary,” and Nehru, “the world’s best liberal.” But Nehru, seemingly weary and lacking strength for another epic battle, was proving feckless before the “revolution” that was “coming in full fury out of Asia.” One way or another, the revolution, evident in China and Korea, was coming: the only question was “whether the few liberals, the democrats of the earth, can so transform themselves that they can help turn it to good service for humanity.” What was needed, the Woffords insisted, was massive engagement by the West—“a New Deal for all of mankind.”1 What the young Woffords were putting on the table was, for many liberals, the key question of the hour: the question of development.

S IREN S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T1 27

As the Red Scare and a conservative business tide defined domestic politics during the last years of the Truman administration, unrepentant New Dealers looked for other venues where they could still make their mark. For some, like Chester  A. Bowles, the most recent governor of Connecticut, electoral defeat opened the door to a new challenge as presidential foreign policy advisor and service as an ambassador abroad. For others, like the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the academy proved not only a shelter from the political storm but a laboratory for expansive Keynesian policy prescriptions that would have a profound effect across the next quarter century. That both these left-liberal icons developed important parts of their careers at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi reflects

FIGURE 5.1  Ambassador Chester Bowles meets with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal

Nehru, 1951. Source: Chester Bowles Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

128LIBE RAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

something of the shifting priorities animating the liberal conscience of the era. Even as race relations and civil rights would animate the liberal left on the home front, twin themes of democracy and economic development abroad defined the agenda for many kindred activists and policy makers. For progressives like Galbraith and Bowles, India and its venerated national leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, seemed not only the most promising of the many newly independent states but the key testing ground for liberal-democratic alternatives to communism in the Third World. With the right ideas and sufficient resources, both Nehru and his American friends were convinced, India could find the path to both sustained growth and pluralistic democracy. While later identified with a crude and cult-like faith in “modernization”—that is, the promotion of a nexus of factors, including industrialization, urbanization, and education, believed necessary for social progress—the efforts of these 1950s–1960s liberals reveal, on closer inspection, considerable political and intellectual complexity. In particular, both Nehru and his American collaborators attempted to steer a course that advanced economic output, both agricultural and industrial, on the one hand, and democratic governance via a participatory civic culture across the Indian countryside, on the other. That they failed was less because they were heedless of the overreach of modernization models than the inherent (or at least deep-seated) difficulty of maintaining a sustainable balance in pursuit of their dual goals. Initially, a village-oriented and agricultural-focused program of “community development” seemed neatly to combine both political and economic ends. When the program failed to deliver, a more single-minded growth metric took over the Indian planning agenda both in New Delhi and Washington, DC. Neither the Nehruvian state nor the left-liberal development agenda ever fully recovered.

N EW DEAL ER IN DELHI

It was not surprising that the young Woffords’ infatuation with India, both as crisis center of the postwar world and potential vessel of engagement of liberal ideals, led them to an early and sustained alliance with

SIR EN S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T1 29

the peripatetic Chester Bowles.2 Born into a comfortable Massachusetts family of ardent antislavery Republicans, Bowles, at age forty, had forsaken a lucrative career in business and advertising as well as the political predilections of many of his former Choate and Yale University classmates for World War II service in the Office of Price Administration (OPA), at the time the biggest federal agency after the Postal Service. Initially serving as his home state Connecticut’s tire ration administrator, he was plucked by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1943 to relieve Leon Henderson as OPA director. Flanked by a stable of young economic talents including Galbraith, Bowles would ardently defend the need for price controls, incurring the lifelong enmity of conservatives like Senator Robert Taft. As the OPA ended during a bitter strike wave in 1946, Bowles quickly turned his attention to foreign affairs, serving in November– December as a delegate to the first UNESCO conference in Paris and special assistant to the UN secretary-general, while also becoming head of the UN Appeal for Children. Then, in 1948, Bowles won an uphill battle for the governorship of Connecticut—running and governing as an ardent New Deal liberal—but two years later, he was defeated for reelection. Rather than further test himself in political waters (and having lost favor in his own party by initially opposing Harry Truman’s presidential bid), Bowles made known that he was available for a foreign posting. Deferring on an initial invitation to the Philippines, he surprised Truman with ready acceptance of an opening in India.3 Under Bowles’s ministrations, a relative diplomatic backwater soon became a thriving center for liberal policy making in the international arena. Bowles wasted no time in embracing what the State Department labeled a “maximum hardship” post. Upon arrival in Delhi, he gathered a lackluster embassy staff and told them he would arrange for immediate transfers for anyone who was unenthusiastic about his current posting; he wanted “no martyrs with a grin-and-bear-it complex.” As a family, Chet and his wife, Steb, abandoned the official ambassadorial residence for more modest lodgings and generally adopted an informal lifestyle, including a preference for bicycles, square dancing, and casual conversation with their Indian neighbors; Steb immediately immersed herself in Hindi classes and enrolled their children in Indian public schools. As a demonstration of his personal commitment, within eighteen months the new ambassador crossed India east-west fourteen times and north-south

130 LIBERAL ANTICO M MUN I SM

six times, reportedly covering some sixty thousand miles, while giving more than one hundred speeches and twenty-five press conferences. More than his predecessor, the career foreign service officer Loy Henderson, Bowles reportedly “liked the people and loved the country.” 4 There was soon talk in the Indian newspapers of a “new kind of diplomacy.” As the media correspondent and Bowles’s good friend Edward O. Berkman crowed only a few months into Bowles’s term, “From all accounts, you’ve made the greatest conquest of India since Tamerlane.”5 Defying longstanding images back home of India as a country permanently entrapped in ignorance, disease, and poverty—with service on the subcontinent colloquially christened the “dysentery belt”—Bowles sought to mobilize American support for a nation of 360 million people “working earnestly and with considerable success to solve their country’s staggering problems.” Idealizing the new Indian democracy in an essay in the fall 1952 issue of Foreign Affairs, Bowles wrote: Last winter India held her first nation-wide election. One hundred and six million citizens cast their votes. This is a higher percentage of those eligible to vote and is likely to go to the polls this year in our American elections. They came by bullock cart, by bus, by truck and on foot, and the women voters were as numerous as the men. There was free speech, and some of it very free indeed. Yet violence was rare, and there was no scandal.6

Among prominent postwar liberals, Bowles was by no means alone in placing his bets on India. Virtually upon arrival, he was actively courting an influential national network that included Eleanor Roosevelt, Adolf Berle, Justice William  O. Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, Walter Lippmann, and even the psychologist and advertising guru Edward Bernays. In this work he was aided by the prior work of the India League of America (ILA), an organization led since 1944 by the textile entrepreneur J. J. Singh and representing a Nehruvian perspective abroad while attending to immediate interests in the diaspora. Among long-serving representatives on the ILA executive committee were Walter White of the NAACP; the labor leaders Philip Murray, Walter Reuther, and A. Philip Randolph; and the political figures Hubert Humphrey and Emanuel Celler, the latter of whom had secured an exemption for Indians from

S IRE N S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T1 31

the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1946. In short, the ILA together with the more academic roster of the National Committee for India’s Freedom had long drawn sympathetic attention to the affairs of the subcontinent.7 To this circle and beyond, Bowles communicated a liberal, anticommunist message with which all of them would have readily agreed: with communism on the rise in the Third World, India could stand as a beacon of democracy and economic progress, but only if the United States acted with intelligence and dispatch to meet the needs of the masses of Indian people.8 From the beginning, Bowles and other left-liberals stepped carefully around Truman-Acheson priorities on national security. Defined by enunciations like the Marshall Plan, Truman Doctrine, and NSC-68 (the top-secret policy document drafted by Paul Nitze in 1950 that called for rapid rearmament), all designed to demonstrate American fortitude in the face of perceived Soviet threats, the policy atmosphere hardly encouraged innovative gestures toward the “undeveloped world”—and certainly not major investment in New Deal–type commitments beyond Europe. As a tipoff of the administration’s basic inclinations, the president told the new ambassador a year after Nehru’s first state visit to the United States, “The first thing you’ve got to do is find out if Nehru is a Communist. He sat right in that chair and talked just like a Communist.”9 With its focus on military readiness, Bowles and likeminded liberals feared that the Acheson policy ignored the plight of the world’s poor and their relation to long-run U.S. interests. As Berkman insisted, to Bowles’s emphatic agreement: “Our key problem in the colonial East [is] the coexistence, often in close physical proximity, of brutally downtrodden populations on the one side, and a colossal new half-Asiatic state [USSR] that has declared war on poverty (at least publicly) on the other.”10 As such, mere “technical assistance” for the developing world, as announced in Truman’s Point 4 Program in 1949, might well prove too little, too late. Beyond such indifference on the part of State Department higher-ups, a bigger problem for the liberal agenda abroad, already quite evident in Congress by 1951, was the worsening domestic political climate that accompanied the passions of the Korean War. Again, Berkman minced no words in warning his long-distance confidant: “The atmosphere here has shifted from hysteria to hysteria’s aftermath: a kind of frozen

132LIBERAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

timidity. . . . We’re not going to outmaneuver the Soviets by mere counter-punching, by calling them worse names than they call us. We need an affirmative, creative approach.”11 For Bowles in India, an “affirmative, creative approach” meant a combination of liberal anticommunist argument, social science theory, and person-to-person diplomacy with Prime Minister Jawarhalal Nehru. Accepting the premise of a Cold War competition with communist influence from both the USSR and China, Bowles’s liberal Cold War–ism challenged the harder-line militarism of Dean Acheson and then John Foster Dulles in emphasizing both the complexity or polycentrism of the communist world and the priority of economic and political versus military terrains of struggle. On an ideological plane, Bowles was convinced that the American experiment, as the “first successful revolution versus colonialism,” offered the basis for alliance with decolonizing countries across the globe. Choosing Washington’s Birthday for a gala reception at the embassy, he explained, “This is 1776 in the colonial world.” There was no gainsaying the exploitation that Indians, like other Third World peoples, had suffered at the hands of their colonial masters. In terms that might have been borrowed from Marxist textbooks, he described India as “a vast agricultural appendage of industrial England, supplying cheap raw materials and providing a readily profitable market for England’s products.”12 Having shaken off their imperialist rulers, “vast populations,” wrote Bowles in 1952, “are struggling to take shape as modern nations.” The Soviets, he warned, had long been aware of the larger stakes of the Third World challenge; as Lenin had prophesied, “For World Communism, the road to Paris lies through Peking and Calcutta.”13 Bowles was confident nonetheless that liberal democracy would prevail: “By pursuing sympathetic, intelligent and patient policies the West will find it possible to work with most of the Asian nations on the basis of mutual respect and understanding in the building of a more stable world.”14 After a hesitant, uncertain start, Bowles soon came to respect Nehru as a kindred liberal spirit. Both voluble talkers once at ease, Nehru and the U.S. ambassador met frequently, as much as four times a week for encounters of twenty minutes to three hours. With the exception of the topic of Kashmir (Nehru’s much-beloved ancestral home), on which he refused all argument, Bowles reported that Nehru “is the most articulate man I ever heard in personal conversation.” More importantly,

S IR E N S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T1 33

according to the ambassador, however well schooled in Marxism and admiring of Soviet industrialization, the prime minister knew that socialism was “too narrow to be workable,” hated dogmatism of all kinds, and embraced a “thorough pragmatist, whatever will work” approach to the question of economic development. Overselling his point, Bowles claimed that the Congress Party’s plans for a welfare state and mixed economy “[turn] out to be hardly more radical than the economic program of Winston Churchill’s Conservative Government in England.”15 Unlike the U.S. State Department, Bowles accepted Nehru’s insistence on official nonalignment between the West and East power blocs as a necessary accommodation to geopolitical realities. Nehru, Bowles reported to his superiors, viewed nationalism, not communism, as the world’s prime political force and anticipated the breakup of the SinoSoviet alliance. None of this should worry a far-sighted American government, insisted Bowles. As he pointed out in public advice to his diplomatic successors in 1955, the Bandung Conference on Afro-Asian Unity (the first nonaligned summit) had pointedly picked April  19, the 180th anniversary of the Battle of Concord and Lexington, for its opening day and began its proceedings with the reading of “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere!”16 Both India’s independence and self-assertion on the world stage, Bowles suggested, were phenomena worth cultivating, not stifling.

T H E M AGIC OF COMMUN ITY DEV ELOP MEN T

The aid package that Bowles prepared in close collaboration with Nehru in November 1951 bore the imprint of necessity as well as imagination. Buttressing Nehru’s own first Five-Year Plan (1951–1956) with its focus on select irrigation projects and agricultural production, the initial $54 million Point 4 allotment for India was aimed directly at the country’s food crisis. A five-million-ton grain shortage required a major infusion of U.S. grain imports—paid for partly by cash, partly by loan—drawing on a foreign exchange fund that then inevitably detracted from needed investments in steel, transportation, and other vital infrastructure for India’s industrial future.17 Enhancing India’s own food production capacity

134LIBE RAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

and, particularly, incentivizing its producers were the first targets of Bowles’s efforts, which established him as a kind of informal agricultural planner-in-chief throughout his first ambassadorial term. Nehru’s own ministerial notes record an auspicious meeting with Bowles in 1951 about a “tentative proposal” for development. “He made it clear to me that this was entirely his own proposal and that, thus far, he had not heard from the [U.S.] Government about it. He had only sent it to them two or three days ago . . . [but] he wanted to . . . get my reactions without waiting for [their] reply.”18 Essentially, what Nehru described (and quickly approved) was a private rollout of what would quickly become the priority project for Bowles and his allies, namely, a plan and philosophy they called Community Development (CD). The core concepts for the India program that Nehru and Bowles coinaugurated enjoyed genuinely international parentage. Bowles credited his commitment to meetings he had attended in the late 1940s with Y. C. James Yen, a Chinese adult literacy reformer (and fellow Yale alumnus) who had initially worked in France with Chinese laborers during World War I and later championed a program of people’s schools, health centers, farming cooperatives, and village industry in North China under Sun Yat-sen. Despite his own growing disaffection with the Nationalist regime’s preoccupation with military measures against the Communists, Yen convinced his congressional admirers in 1948 to set aside 10 percent of the U.S. aid package—known as the “Jimmy Yen provision”—for rural development. Although the resulting Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction was soon cut short by the Maoist victory, the agency was transplanted to Taiwan, where it was credited with substantial success in improving crop and animal stock, irrigation projects, soil improvement, rural credit programs and cooperatives, and health and birth-control programs. Shortly after his nomination as ambassador, Bowles wrote Yen, “I would like nothing better than the opportunity to put your ideas to work in India on a growing scale.”19 Besides Yen and the Chinese example, inspiration for India’s version of community development percolated up from the New Deal through the Ford Foundation. As the historian Jess Gilbert has documented, the New Deal Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) represented not only the bureaucratic elitism or “high modernism” often associated with the giant dam-building, flood

SIREN SONG OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT135

control, and power-generating projects of the 1930s but also a tradition of smaller-scale community-centered programs that proved to have extended policy legs. In particular, the USDA’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE), staffed by a bevy of institutional economists from the University of Wisconsin, established a vast network of extension projects involving farmers and their neighbors in meaningful ways. As a counterpart to the initiatives of the engineers, such community-centered focus on decentralized development reflected what Gilbert calls a “low modernist” alternative within and outside the TVA.20 Not surprisingly, then, Bowles sought out Arthur E. Morgan, the first head of the TVA, during his work in India.21 Discouraged by Big Ag domination of the postwar USDA, several of the leading hands within the wartime BAE gravitated abroad. Among them were future leaders of the Ford Foundation in India and key facilitators of Nehru’s community development program. In a fateful convergence, the year 1951 witnessed both the start of India’s first Five-Year Plan and the emergence of the Ford Foundation, suddenly blessed with the majority of the founding family’s company stock, as the world’s largest philanthropic agency. In the aftermath of the Communist takeover in China, the Ford Foundation’s president, Paul Hoffman—a former Studebaker Motor Company president and first administrator of the Marshall Plan—determined that India should serve as a preeminent testing ground for the foundation’s development principles. Coinciding with Bowles’s arrival as ambassador, Hoffman quickly arranged meetings with Nehru and Finance Minister C. D. Deshmukh, and soon the former BAE sociologist Douglas Ensminger was appointed the foundation’s incountry director, with a primary focus on the new community development program. At least two other old BAE stalwarts, M.  L. Wilson, a former director of the agricultural extension program, and Carl C. Taylor, from the Farm Population and Rural Welfare Division, would soon join him.22 India’s development program represented a marriage of modernist engineering and bottom-up democratic process. Designed to integrate expertise from above with participation from below, community development was always as much a process as a plan, an aspiration as much as tangible reality. Nehru gave quick assent to the idea, especially its core concept of community organizing. “In all our planning,” he told his

13 6 LIBERAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

aides in December 1951, “we have not laid sufficient stress, at least in execution, on the importance of the human material.” Convinced by impressive results at three government-sponsored seed projects—the agricultural Etawah villages development site in Uttar Pradesh; the Pakistani refugee town of Nilokheri in the Punjab; and the more industrial Faridabad, another migrant center, near New Delhi—he agreed with the need to integrate village services into a single administrative field. The Etawah project, for example, as first conceived by Albert Mayer, the American architect and Bowles’s friend, self-consciously celebrated Gandhian village autonomy and extension techniques of person-to-person education. Faridabad likewise drew the developers’ interest because its impressive array of government-funded homes, schools, and hospitals had largely been built by the settlers themselves.23 As the beginnings of community development took hold, Bowles would happily report on the contrast of villages with projects and “those countless other villages sunk in indifference or hopelessness, the litter and dirt everywhere, the children scurrying away and peeping out uncertainly from behind mud walls, the women nowhere to be seen, the hangdog look of many of the men.”24 As Ensminger somewhat patronizingly pointed out in a booklet for “our village people,” the project involved a vast educational agenda, defusing knowledge from “block staff” to village workers to indigenous village leaders and ultimately individual families. Not unlike the settlement houses established during the U.S. Progressive Era for new immigrants, villagers needed to be educated “to want a better life,” defined primarily as increasing agricultural production, expanding cottage industries, enrolling one’s children in a village school and themselves in literacy classes, adopting higher standards of cleanliness and sanitation, and ultimately “developing a regular savings habit.”25 A full decade after their initial engagement, Ford’s principal liaisons to India were still expressing prideful satisfaction (and only barely dawning doubts) about the “unprecedented social, economic, and political laboratory” in which they had participated.26 In endorsing the project, the prime minister’s only caveats were an insistence on keeping U.S. aid administratively separate from the FiveYear Plan, so the latter would not be seen as being dependent on a foreign power. Linking the liberal-democratic aspirations of both donor and recipient countries, the program was launched, ceremoniously, on

S IREN S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T1 37

October 2, Gandhi’s birthday. With one hundred “village workers” dispatched to each of fifty-five initial “community development areas” (each containing an average of 200,000 people), it was hoped to make an immediate impact on some 11 million people. In addition to generalists recruited among the villagers themselves, who would proselytize for new more efficient farming methods, school attendance, and sanitation (malaria) control, a set of engineering and health experts would be dispatched to each area. For Bowles, who had been its chief government cheerleader, the combined experiments from Ford and the Indian government were to be only the beginning. The ambassador was already drafting a proposal for an expanded $250-million-per-year program for four consecutive years, facilitating the establishment of six hundred community centers and sixty thousand village workers across a full third of the entire Indian countryside, a project presumed of sufficient scope to jumpstart the nation’s agricultural self-sufficiency. As Nehru reported to his secretary, Bowles “exhibited an extreme eagerness to go ahead as speedily as possible with these community projects and to produce substantial results within the next two to four years.”27 As a liberal corrective to both a profit-maximizing capitalist marketplace and to heavy-handed state interference, community development ostensibly fulfilled the democratic principles of the young Indian state. The concept, however, was also haunted by an internal tension. “Community” in the Indian case suggested the autonomy of local decision makers and respect for “authentic” traditions and self-defined boundaries rooted deeply in time and space; “development,” on the other hand, implied transformation and, especially, economic growth, a goal defined from the outside and linked to powerful forces distant from local actors. In India, the twinned objectives were also linked to the legacies of the infant state’s two key “founders”: Gandhi’s vision was closely tied to the integrity of “village democracy,” whereas for the social-democratic, Cambridge-educated Nehru, the emphasis was always on the strength of the nation in a wider world. Indeed, as Nehru had put it in an open argument with Gandhi in 1945, “A village is backward intellectually and culturally and no progress can be made from a backward environment.”28 Oddly enough, Bowles’s problem with Nehru was the opposite of that of mainstream State Department and congressional observers, who described him as a “volatile and quick-tempered, pro-communist,

138 LIBE RAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

high-class, aristocratic, and stiff-necked Hindu.”29 Bowles found him to be a firm and sympathetic ally and friend yet too cautious in pushing through changes in his own country. Administratively, by running community development through his own governmental ministry, Nehru sapped its capacity for innovative vigor and permitted regional and local political elites to interfere with its grassroots, participatory purpose. On a more macro level, he failed to push the sweeping land reforms that Bowles and other liberals believed had lifted Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea onto a surer path of growth and prosperity. As Bowles concluded in a confidential report in July 1952: Nehru’s weakness is not any tendency towards dictatorship. Rather, it is his unwillingness, while praising China’s land reforms, actually to press States to take action here;[30] his failure to set up administrators with clear-cut emergency powers; and his love of talk and give and take in the House of the People [or Lok Sabha, the representative parliamentary chamber] where invariably he puts his opponents to flight. In other words, danger lies not in arbitrary action, but in reluctance to get down to realities, to cut red tape, and to move ahead.31

As he neared the end of his term (not yet knowing if he might be reappointed), Bowles privately confessed that CD was going “much too slowly for my liking.” His biggest worry, he told Ted Berkman, concerned the “extortionate land rentals, often 50–60% of the crop,” in Indian villages. Meanwhile, the Nehru government, “which so many of our people look on as semi-Communist, is actually very conservative. We are constantly hoping that it will move far enough to the left to tackle these problems and fill the political vacuum . . . before it is filled by the Communists.”32 Bowles, in fact, privately inclined toward the more sweeping reform promises of the left-splinter Praja socialists, led by Jayaprakash Narayan and Minoo Masani, over the lumbering compromises of the multifaction Congress Party.33 Nehru, for his part, never committed all (or even most) of his government’s eggs to the community development basket. Despite occasional gestures in a “Gandhian” direction, the prime minister and his party proved determined “modernists,” and the Nehruvian state preferred high modernism to the veneration of cultural or economic tradition. The

SIREN SONG OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT139

creation of the National Planning Commission, chaired by the prime minister, with its Soviet-modeled Five-Year Plans for industrial takeoff, proved a telling indication of the state’s intended direction. The statistician Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, who effectively served as overlord of Indian planning in the 1950s, favored top-down engineering models for development as well as socialist internationalism. American experts, too, ultimately gave community development short shrift. Within the East-West ideological tug-of-war, the United States pushed agricultural over industrial production but generally identified with an export-oriented developmental vision, while the Russians (as well as Nehru and Mahalanobis) pushed for economic self-sufficiency based on import-substituting industrialization (or ISI in the parlance of the time), as had occurred earlier in the Soviet Union. With the Soviets willing to subsidize government-owned industry like the Bhilal steel plant, India’s second Five-Year Plan (1956–1961) leaned heavily toward industry and central planning. Buoyed by a couple of unexpectedly buoyant harvests and a temporary abatement of the Indian food crisis, the second Five-Year Plan, as the historian David Engerman notes, reduced spending on the rural sector by a third, and even the Ford Foundation, community development’s chief Western investor, never gave community development more than a third of its in-country budget.34 A more quirky but perhaps equally revealing indicator of the dominant developmentalist mindset at work in India occurred during a six-week Asian concert tour in 1952 by the world-famous American violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Championing India’s promise (while also beginning a lifelong affinity with the practice of yoga), Menuhin came away from his trip concerned with the “almost virgin state” of “Western music” there, and the finding prompted not just cultural but serious political concern. “Infinitely subtle, sophisticated, and highly developed” in its own right, Asian music (and here he included both Indian and Japanese forms), noted Menuhin, “stress[es] the environment rather than the individual.” Lacking the personality and inventiveness of a “great composer,” the tradition “tends to confirm social stratification and the forces of inviolate tradition.” Serious Western music, by contrast, “inspires men to action, to self-expression, to change, and what may be regarded as ‘progress.’ ” A musical development program in India, argued Menuhin—and here he outlined a specific request to both Bowles and the prime minister—must first confront the

140 LIBE RAL ANTICO M MUN I SM

problem of “a terrible dearth of pianos in this country.”35 As remarkable as was the diagnosis—Orientalism avant la lettre—of Indian cultural deficits by the musical artist was the response by the head of state. Nehru communicated Menuhin’s concerns to Finance Minister Deshmukh, and the prime minister concurred on the need to find a “place for Western music in India. Our cultural standards, in almost every direction, appear to be going down. If we live in a shell of our own, we shall not be able to check this downward trend.”36 In U.S. domestic politics, by 1952 liberals like Bowles had pinned their hopes on the presidential candidacy of Adlai Stevenson, the Illinois senator. As John Kenneth Galbraith would later note of the erudite Stevenson, “he was a leader [who] stood above the crudities of the political scene.”37 Bowles had offered Stevenson what campaign advice he could, convinced, mistakenly, that the hard-line rhetoric of the “DullesEisenhower approach” to foreign policy made it “extremely vulnerable”: What Dulles is trying to do is to convince people that without war or any other messy complications, we can by some magic bring about revolutions in China and the satellite areas of Eastern Europe which will bring the Soviet Empire tumbling down in ruins. All that’s needed is some radio transmitters, some foreign agents prepared to do the dying for us, and a plentiful supply of cloaks and daggers. . . . If only the situation were that easy.38

The ever-cautious Stevenson, however, as Berkman relayed the news to his friend, was proving no match for the hero of D-Day and the buoyant postwar hopes of a mass audience fed by a new mass media. In the midst of the campaign, Eisenhower’s vice presidential running mate Richard Nixon skillfully wriggled out of a charge of political bribery in his famous “Checkers speech”: Berkman described it as “18-karat Goebbels, slickly adapted to American folk values.” “This,” he wrote ominously, “now becomes more than a Presidential campaign; it is a test of American social and political maturity; of how deeply our comic-strip, Readers Digest culture has corrupted the fundamental thinking capacity of the people.”39 Befitting his position and optimistic temperament, Bowles was never so apocalyptic in facing the prospect and subsequent reality of the

S IREN S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T1 41

Democratic electoral loss. Even after he had stepped down from his ambassadorship, he continued to lobby the new administration and the State Department for more aid to India. To a significant degree, however, rejection of his elaborate proposed aid package, beginning with an expanded commitment to community development for the 1953 fiscal year, put an end to U.S. co-sponsorship of Indian master plans for development. This outcome was sealed by Congress well before the presidential election that would put an end to Bowles’s initial ambassadorial term.40 In fact, it was Southern Democrats, not Republicans, who had first skewered Bowles’s Indian appropriation bill. At the hearing where Bowles testified in 1952, Tom Connally, the Texas senator and Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, openly mocked the “gimme crowd that’s up here today,” and the Georgia representative James G. Davis similarly declared that he “was not in favor of taking on India’s responsibilities to feed her rapidly increasing population and her sacred monkeys.” 41 The combination of executive and congressional disinterest in long-term aid projects blunted the initial iteration of a “liberal option” in foreign policy and development thinking. Bowles would return to New Delhi for a second ambassadorial term during the Kennedy-Johnson years (1963– 1969); he was older and no less eager, but he would arrive with a decidedly different developmental portfolio.

AM BASSADOR GA L BRAITH A N D A N A B B REV I AT ED DECA DE OF DEVELO P MEN T

Following Bowles’s initial departure from India in early 1953, strong connections between U.S. liberals and the Nehruvian state continued, if perhaps never again with the optimistic, transformative faith of their initial embrace. This much was evident upon President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961: the liberals were back in town and, with them, revival of long-dormant hopes of a coming, global liberal tide. Influencing Bowles’s own attraction to the Massachusetts senator was Kennedy’s cosponsorship of an ad hoc aid package for India in 1958.42 At first, the New Frontier seemed to promise major new developmental aid commitments. Nestled alongside the famous Cold War pledge “to pay any price, bear

142LIBERAL ANTICO M MUN I SM

any burden . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” Kennedy’s inaugural address also reached out to the developing world after a  year in which seventeen countries in Africa alone had achieved independence: To those new States whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. . . . To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.

Kennedy had been so impressed by the theories of the MIT economic historian Walt Rostow that he had named the former Yale wunderkind (with a PhD in economics at age twenty-four) a special adviser on national security matters. Rostow’s now-classic formulation identified in clear and simple prose the five stages of growth needed for a country to jump from “traditional” to a self-sustaining “high mass-consumption” economy. Thanks to its second and third Five-Year Plans, suggested a confident Rostow, India had successfully passed through the crucial “takeoff” phase of development. Whether it continued on such a promising path, argued Rostow and his MIT colleague Max Millikan, still depended on outside resources. “The problem”—that is, the financial commitment to complete the process—concluded Rostow, “lies not in the mysterious East, but in the inscrutable West.” Directly appropriating Rostow’s language, Kennedy’s March  1961 Special Message on Foreign Aid identified “an historic opportunity for a major economic assistance effort by the free industrialized nations to move more than half the people of the less-developed nations into self-sustained economic growth.” In September, the president fulsomely endorsed what the UN General Assembly had just proclaimed to be a Decade of Development.43 Outwardly, many signs pointed to a smooth, even redoubled commitment to the development project across the Kennedy-Johnson years. Measured materially, U.S. community development aid to India climbed from $89.8 million in 1958 to $194.6 million in 1960 and then leaped

S IR EN S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T1 43

again to a high of $465.5 million in 1962. And such direct aid did not even count the $2 billion-plus in U.S. surplus grain delivered across those years through the Agricultural Trade and Food Assistance Act of 1954 (PL-480), which allowed for repayment in the local (in this case, rupee) currency on an extended timetable.44 In a gesture of more than symbolic significance, the United States also continued to deploy its most sympathetically liberal official talents to New Delhi. At Kennedy’s invitation, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith eagerly stepped into the ambassadorial post in 1961. The triangle of security, joint prosperity, and morality through which the president packaged his still only vaguely defined foreign policy initiative certainly echoed with the idealism of older, New Deal–nurtured liberals like Bowles and Galbraith. Bowles had bolted from Stevenson to the Kennedy forces early in the 1960 campaign and as official campaign foreign policy advisor had even fancied appointment as secretary of state before, somewhat grudgingly, accepting the prestigious if ill-defined number-two position of undersecretary of state under Dean Rusk. Like Bowles, Galbraith had early on joined a coterie of former Stevenson-supporting liberals in the Kennedy camp. As an ardent, Canadian-born and University of Cambridge–educated Keynesian, he had served energetically in the OPA under Bowles and then joined Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, and others in cofounding the Americans for Democratic Action in 1947. Ideologically, Galbraith was clearly to the left of Stevenson, whom he served as chief speechwriter in 1956. Still, as a former tutor of Kennedy’s at Harvard, Galbraith had continued to offer advice on world affairs and economics upon request. To be sure, he was only one of multiple Harvard or ex-Harvard types at the presidential table, and his connection, especially once dispatched to New Delhi, necessarily proved more fleeting. The others, including Galbraith’s good friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, not to mention the Republican secretary of the Treasury C. Douglas Dillon, not only formed part of an ultimately more decisive inner circle but also more eagerly embraced the instruments of power and authority—especially willingness to use military force—than Galbraith’s ironic, congenitally skeptical mind readily countenanced. Still, Galbraith took seriously Kennedy’s repeated swipes at the brinkmanship rhetoric of the Dulles years, his disinclination to trust generals

144LIBERAL ANTICO M MUN I SM

to make policy, and his basic sympathy for the world’s poor.45 In early 1958, Galbraith had attempted, in a memorandum of “self-criticism” sent to key Democrats, to frame a set of foreign policy principles around which “true” liberals could rally. Invoking a theme that would also soon appear in the concluding pages of his forthcoming bestseller The Affluent Society, he challenged the two-party consensus on the need for an endless arms race and unyielding toughness toward the Soviets: “The mood of the [Democratic] party on foreign policy has come to be marked by a strenuous rejection of anything that suggests compassion, idealism, or even hope.” Calling for negotiations wherever possible with the Russians and Chinese, he also urged that foreign aid be uncoupled from mere selfinterest. “Both foreigners and our own people (as distinct from the Republican press) will like it better if we admit to a degree of natural kindliness. And neither Christ nor Santa Claus is regarded as subversive by the average voter.” 46 Not surprisingly, a few liberals in the party like Stevenson and Senator Hubert Humphrey quickly saluted Galbraith for trying to rein in Democratic overemphasis, as Humphrey put it, “upon arms, rockets, and missiles.” Others were more guarded; Lyndon Johnson thanked Galbraith for supplying much “food for thought,” which he judged “as always . . . provocative.” Likely most meaningful to Galbraith was the effusive response from Senator Kennedy, who found the document “congenial with many thoughts which I myself have had over the past months.” “For my own part,” added Kennedy, “I intend to give special attention this year to developing some new policy toward the underdeveloped areas, a field I know you also have special interest and far greater competence.” 47 No wonder reform spirits were bright in January  1961. For the first time in a decade, idea people, including those with openly socialdemocratic perspectives on both foreign and domestic policy, held significant seats at the table. As Galbraith reported to his diary about his postinauguration meals in the White House basement: “conversation is much like that at the Harvard Faculty Club, perhaps because it involves the same people.” 48 Both the “development” and the broader liberal community had reason to celebrate when Galbraith arrived in New Delhi in early 1961. For one, he enjoyed the rare favor of the American president and the Indian prime minister. Keeping with the intimacy of their prior friendship, Kennedy willingly indulged candid reports from

SIR EN S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T1 45

the ambassador outside official channels. In a characteristic early missive, for example, Galbraith drily reported that his “first speech [in India was] sufficiently devoid of content to please State Department.” 49 And he was equally at ease with Nehru, whom he would ultimately consider his closest foreign confidant next to Roy Jenkins, the British Labour Party leader.50 As self-confident men of the world, intellectuals who had both studied at Trinity College, Cambridge (Nehru once confessed to Galbraith with a likely twinkle that he would be “the last Englishman to rule in India”), they could equally argue policy and politics, enjoy good food and wine, and compare notes on beautiful women (including Jacquelyn Kennedy), all the while maintaining a debonair reserve.51 More substantively, not only was Galbraith—perhaps behind Paul Samuelson—the country’s best-known Keynesian economist, but he was also an urbane critic of American provincialism and materialism and a forceful policy advocate on the left edge of what was thought politically possible within the Democratic Party. As early as 1952, for example, while deflecting his old friend Paul  M. Sweezy’s Marxist ascription of Third World backwardness to colonialism and imperialism, he had determined to conduct his own systematic investigation of the problem of poverty.52 An initial visit to India in 1956 further whetted his appetite. Given his general renown, it was not surprising that it was to Galbraith that Bowles wrote in the late 1950s for ideas on how to use excess U.S. food and industrial capacity to help the “undeveloped areas” of the world and Galbraith whom he recommended to Nehru as a U.S. authority on development.53 To be sure, Galbraith’s writing on the subject was more descriptive and synthetic than dispositive. A 1958 article in Foreign Affairs seemed intended more to undercut the bugaboo of Indian “socialism” and fear of “five year plans” than to offer guidance on any particular path forward: “By almost any test,” Galbraith insisted, “the economy of India is less responsive to public guidance and direction than that of the United States.” Neither pure free enterprise nor state socialism could work in India, he suggested; rather, he endorsed the “pragmatic” development efforts apparent in selective public enterprises and irrigation efforts combined with the village-based community development program.54 Apart from his own teaching and short essays on the subject, a distinctive and pointed policy prescription on development from Galbraith never appeared. Curiously, his most famous book, The Affluent Society

146 LIBE RAL ANTICO M MUN I SM

(1958), began, following his original India trip, with a Guggenheim fellowship as an inquiry into the question “Why Are People Poor?” Back in the United States, the project went, as he put it, “astray”; rather than delve more deeply into what he would briefly signal as a “Malthusian horror” and a condition of poverty judged “not remarkable” in India, he turned to a diagnosis of both the affluence and ills of a society where the very “survival of poverty is remarkable.”55 As ambassador, Galbraith wittily confessed that he was limited in voicing big thoughts: “The State Department in Washington, no doubt quite understandably, takes a dogin-the-manger attitude toward policy-making; it may not do it itself, but it doesn’t want ambassadors doing it instead.” The best he could offer while in service was a series of pithy and entertaining, but hardly revisionist, short lectures to his Indian audiences. Taking an eclectic approach to the causes of poverty, his genteel arguments pricked the government from both right (as when championing more public-private development) and left (deeper land reform) but noticeably eschewed any programmatic commitment to one agricultural policy over another.56 Perhaps because Nehru admired Galbraith’s nerve in criticizing Americans’ misplaced emphasis on private consumption, he was ordinarily willing to accept the professor’s dissection of Indian shortcomings. Rather than refute Galbraith’s description of India’s inefficient public enterprises as examples of “post-office socialism,” for example, Nehru tried to turn it to constructive ends. “Every person who has advised us,” he told his legislature in 1956, “whether it is an American like Professor Galbraith, or a great Russian leader like [Soviet foreign minister André] Mikoyan has told us, ‘do not interfere with your enterprises, give them responsibility, give your executive responsibility, do not interfere.’ We cannot sit down every day and control public enterprises from Parliament, it cannot be done.”57 Looking back across the long decade of the 1960s, the portfolio handed “development”-oriented liberals like Galbraith and the recycled Bowles was booby-trapped from the outset in at least two major respects. First, the Kennedy (and later Johnson) inner circle proved to be so obsessed by communism as both a military and political-diplomatic threat that it overshadowed all other foreign policy priorities and initiatives. As Galbraith privately despaired in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961: “The same people who erred before are diligently promoting

S IR E N S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T1 47

error again.”58 And Bowles had it worse: his sin of publicly confessing his lonely dissent within the tight circle of decision makers not only put him in the doghouse of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy but began his slow and steady fall from grace and influence within top policy circles; he returned to India in 1963 less a conquering hero than a politically wounded warrior. Quite apart from personality conflicts, the Decade of Development proved in the end to be a decade of expanding war that overshadowed resources and focus on any other developing-world ends. Even as the soaring rhetoric of the New Frontier drifted over the Ganges, a harder edge was also always apparent in U.S.-India relations. India, having taken the lead in the Non-Aligned Movement at conferences in Bandung (1955) and Belgrade (1961), found it impossible for the developing world to act as a pacifying bloc between the superpowers, when the latter continually insisted on the participants choosing up sides. Within a few years, India herself became embroiled in armed conflicts with two “developing” neighbors: China (the Sino-Indian War, 1962) and, because of the always-simmering Kashmir conflict, Pakistan (the Indo-Pakistani War, 1965). Meanwhile, both Kennedy and Johnson, having once disdained the brinkmanship of the Dulles years, were soon at least equally preoccupied by the communist threat around the world. Still stung by Cuba’s conversion to communism and ever wary of both Chinese and Russian intentions, the Kennedy administration moved deeper into military commitments in Southeast Asia. Not surprisingly, then, the docket of meetings and memos for both Galbraith and Bowles across the 1960s was often more crowded with the subjects of Cuba, Laos, Pakistan, and Vietnam than the question of Indian development.59 In the end, the hard edge of their counterinsurgency mission left little room for maneuver with a “neutral” ally abroad even as it also bitterly divided a once-united Democratic Party at home. The vicissitudes of international realpolitik alone are insufficient to explain the loss of verve in a two-decade-long liberal embrace of development politics. After all, a whole segment of the liberal intelligentsia— with both Bowles and Galbraith among them—themselves shared Prime Minister Nehru’s own early critique of the Vietnam War and challenged (if initially only in private counsel) their leaders’ preoccupation with the domino theory and a monochromatic communist threat. What also suffered, albeit more slowly and subtly, in liberal policy minds was a faith in

148LIBE RAL ANTICO M MUN I SM

joint economic and democratic political development. By the end of the 1960s, war or no war, it would be hard to identify a distinctively leftliberal or social-democratic foreign policy approach for the developing world outside of a general preference for economic aid over military interventionism. The problem first showed up in the stumbling path of India’s community development plan itself. Expanding by the government’s own determination to thirty times its original size within a decade and stretching across the entire country with an elaborate village council structure, the community development rage had not only swept India but, as the historian Daniel Immerwahr has documented, popped up in some sixty other countries. By the beginning of the 1960s, however, a combination of administrative malfeasance, grain shortages, and regularly missed growth targets slowed the community development juggernaut.60 Notwithstanding the excitement attending its original demonstration projects, published reports indicate neither a spur to agricultural productivity nor an awakened village public sphere, despite multiple millions of dollars invested and the deployment of thousands of trained village workers. Partly, it seemed, the program had succumbed to exaggerated expectations. At the outset Bowles had overebulliently anticipated “some fifty percent more income in those villages [affected by the development plan] in the next three years,” a result that would then facilitate further investment in schools, hospitals, and even small industries. Optimism was fueled by initially rising agricultural output, even if largely accomplished by expansion of acreage rather than by productive efficiencies.61 Outside influences also took their toll. As early as 1957, a government report on community development by a Gujarati Congress leader, Balwantrai Mehta, complained of stifling turf wars and bureaucratic overreach—wherein a single village worker was required to prepare 286 reports!62 Meant to “kindle a new sense of community . . . instead it had been diverted into an officially controlled bricks and mortar programme of public works, devoid of almost any popular dynamic.” Subsequent investigations likewise found a pattern of such irregular attendance at panchayat meetings such that village production plans, the anticipated product of intense communal involvement, were “nothing but paper plans casually prepared by village level workers in consultation with a couple village elders.” Perhaps worse, what began as shramadan (or voluntary

S IR EN S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T1 49

unpaid labor for community ends) devolved into a system of fines for those who did not participate. Sizing up the program in retrospect and finding “no sustained attempt at involving the people,” the Sri Lankan economist Garvin Karunaratne judged community development “a total failure.” 63 It was the kind of top-heavy, administrative “corruption” that the diasporic writer V. S. Naipaul would satirize following his own visit to the motherland in 1962: A contractor dug, say, one hundred cubic feet of earth. He sent in a bill for two hundred. Now it was precisely to frustrate such adventurousness that the Indian Civil Service method of checking and counter-checking had been devised. The contractor’s claim had to be verified; the verification had to be endorsed; and the endorsement, to be brief, had to be approved. . . . It was all regulated and above board; everything, the engineer said, smiling as he used the civil service phrase, went “through proper channel.” 64

In short, unable to transform its initiating democratic vision into a reality on the ground, the reputation of community development soon merged with that of a larger, heavily regulated economy that was popularly lampooned as the “license permit raj.” 65 Given the depressing field reports during its lifetime, it is not surprising that India community development progenitors like the Ford Foundation began to pull back. By 1960, they, like other experts, were beginning to embrace a more technological turn in planning, promoting the intensive use of fertilizers on large farms, with social equity and “integrated” village development demoted to lesser consideration. In the face of damaging monsoons and disastrous grain harvests in 1957–1958, which produced the first of several food crises, the Indian government directed village workers to drop other activities and work exclusively on food production.66 Galbraith thus arrived in New Delhi at an already fraught, transitional moment in applied economic development practice. In the gradual retreat from community development, a macroeconomic emphasis on national wealth creation and a technological fix to the food deficit had taken center stage in American policy circles. The problem that was generally analyzed as chronic agricultural stagnation was treated in two

15 0 LIBERAL ANTICO M MUN I SM

dramatically different ways. First, and for as long as it happily coincided with American farmer interests, the PL-480 program was regularly expanded until shipments that had averaged three million tons of wheat annually in the 1950s reached as high as ten million tons after the devastating Bihar drought in 1966.67 Second, beginning in the late 1950s and continuing through the 1980s, scientific knowhow and outside investment turned increasingly to seeds and fertilizer. The Ford Foundation and the Indian government in the 1960s followed the lead of Rockefeller Foundation–funded agronomists led by Norman Borlaug in pushing new strains of wheat and rice—previously tested in Mexico and the Philippines—into widespread application in India. In truth, the liberal ambassadors were also beset by early doubts as to the proper game plan for Indian development policy. Galbraith, in particular, seemed flummoxed from the start by the scope of the challenge before him. As Gurcharan Das, a Harvard undergraduate, would recall a summer 1961 visit to the embassy: I had expected Galbraith to be happy at the prospect of living in a country that was practicing his ideas. Instead, I found him gloomy and ambivalent. During lunch, he expressed serious concerns about excessive state controls on the Indian economy. He confessed it might be better to have more private enterprise in a country at India’s stage of development. His own ideas, he felt, were more suited to an affluent society.68

Ambassador Bowles was only slightly more directed. As a fallback from what was already seen as failed community development and disappointing early crop yields during the third Five-Year Plan (1961–1966), he tried in his second term to encourage modernization within the agricultural sector. With no prospects for serious land redistribution and low crop prices a structural barrier to radical reform, the new hybrid grain programs offered the most tangible beacon of hope. To encourage such innovations, Bowles toured the country in the company of the distinguished Yale economist and political scientist Charles Lindblom, a liberal pragmatist who disdained sweeping historical explanations and grand social cures. Taking the Indian sociopolitical structure as a given—a position consonant with the findings of his widely heralded

SIREN S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T1 51

1959 article “The Science of Muddling Through”—Lindblom departed India confident that with careful management and application of expert farming techniques, a modest 5 percent annual gain in agricultural production (up from the 3 percent existing rate) was still possible, even without a “more fundamental social transformation in rural India.” 69 In what by the late 1960s had become known as the “green revolution,” wealthy landholders applied expensive fertilizers to wheat and rice fields on large, irrigated farms and reaped the benefit of higher yields.70 Outwardly, despite a few near-catastrophic crop failures, the program worked well: from the early 1960s through the late 1980s, India more than doubled its food-grain production.71 When combined with continuing but reduced U.S.-subsidized grain imports, expansion of indigenous production effectively brought an end to the decades-long Indian “food crisis” and attendant fears of major famine. For a time, the science of liberal technocrats as applied to the land had compensated for the failures of any larger-scale social-economic planning on the home front. Even as hunger was staved off, however, Indian economic development in a larger sense stalled across the Galbraith and “Bowles2” years. The problem was both internal and external. By keeping domestic food prices low, the period witnessed an initial rise in the general standard of living and greater access to consumer goods. Such positive consequences of the green revolution for urban dwellers and successful large farmers, however, were offset by growing distress among small farmers, squeezed by ever-increasing prices of fertilizer and marginal losses in productivity. Such popular discontent only further slowed the adoption of efficient agrarian business practices. Meanwhile, planning during the third FiveYear Plan, 1961–1966, shifted away from specific programs and projects to preoccupation with a foreign exchange crisis as negotiated via international trade, investment, and loans secured through the Development Loan Fund and World Bank. Both fears of dependency on the West in India and uncertainty in the United States about the size of its surplus (thereby triggering an about-face from the United States farm lobby, now wary of diminishing the stock of products sold at market prices) soon rendered the food subsidies an unreliable crutch to U.S.-Indian cooperation.72 U.S. impatience with India’s slow-moving economic reforms approached a boiling point early in President Lyndon Johnson’s elected term in office.

152LIBE RAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

As the historian Barry Riley documents, by 1964 food subsidies to India had reached one-fifth of the total U.S. wheat production. Convinced that Indian leaders were refusing to give sufficient attention to agricultural productivity (by relying on public investments rather than market incentives) within the national budget, Johnson “repeatedly informed members of his staff, he’d be damned if he was going to continue to have the United States do the heavy lifting in their stead.” As a result, rather than fully reauthorize the PL-480 agreement, scheduled to terminate in June  1965, he and Agricultural Secretary Orville Freeman placed food aid on a renewable, “short-tether” basis, with the president personally reviewing agricultural output figures every thirty days. Since India’s policies by this time were irrevocably aligned with the U.S. emphasis on technology and production incentives, the Big Brother pressure was not appreciated in New Delhi. While compelled to deliver his government’s position to their Indian clients, Bowles would later comment, “It is a cruel performance. The Indians must conform; they must be made to fawn; their pride must be cracked.”73 By this time, bilateral relations were also overlain by larger foreign policy pressures, especially strident differences of opinion between Indian and American officials over the Vietnam War. Once Indira Gandhi took the helm of government in 1966, relations with the United States plummeted further. The ever-hopeful Bowles tried in vain to repair the damage. He argued to superiors in 1965 that a 40 percent “Big Push” in development aid (presumably for seeds, soil, and land reforms)—or “no more than the cost of ten days of warfare in Vietnam”— could boost India’s growth rate beyond Lindblom’s calculations to a more satisfying 7 percent per annum.74 Neither the U.S. government nor the World Bank would listen. Tired of being pushed by Bowles on Indian aid, Johnson acidly quipped to Nehru during a Washington meeting, “You’re lucky to have two ambassadors, yours and mine!”75 Unable to effect policy either in India or at home, Bowles, by the end of his term, was both frustrated and, according to his biographer Richard Dauer, “profoundly disheartened.” As Bowles confessed to his diary amid the shock of North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive in February  1968: “America as seen from a perspective of 10,000 miles appears to be a sick country, with the wrong priorities and with the inability to understand how others think and feel.”76

SIREN SONG OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT153

AM BASSA DOR MOYN IHA N AND T HE FR AY I N G OF THE U. S. - IN DIA FRIENDSHI P

However one described the state of America after 1968, there is no question that U.S.-Indian relations, at least at the governmental level, suffered a severe nose dive. The combination of a Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy that probed for openings to China by way of Pakistan and an Indira Gandhi who turned left (including bank nationalization) to protect her domestic flank did not augur well for reconciliation. When the United States suspended military aid to India as a consequence of the IndoPakistan War of 1971 and India followed with the signing of the twentyyear Indo-Soviet Friendship Treaty, relations hit rock bottom.77 The U.S. Peace Corps suspended its once-robust presence in India in 1972, and official technical assistance programs in India were halted a year later.78 Aside from American involvement, India’s own social-economic fortunes experienced waves of bitter frustration across the 1970s and 1980s. The end of one emergency—the Indian food crisis of the early 1960s—it appears in retrospect only provoked another. By the time of Nehru’s death in 1964, confidence was running thin not only in the prospects for community development but in the original ISI plan to lift the nation and its people out of poverty and into a sustainable, industrial future. Investment of the nation’s limited foreign currency reserve went instead to the purchase of fertilizer and construction of fertilizer factories; this would reach at most 20 percent of Indian farmland (mostly aimed at a swath of large wheat-growing farms in the north of the country). “In the countryside,” as the historian Nick Cullather explains, “interventionist strategies based on land reforms, community development, and khadi industries gave way to acceptance of existing structures of ownership and status.” Despite their limited results, he argues, the earlier Nehruvian policies—codified in both the Five-Year Plans and community development—had at least declared a public “commitment to equity.” “Without it, the ruling party lost its universality and much of its charisma.”79 The dean of Indian historians, Sarvepalli Gopal, who published his three-volume biography of Nehru in 1984, believed that Nehru had the right inclinations but, as exemplified by his anemic land reforms, did not push them far enough: “From Nehru’s effort to build by stages a socialist utopia has emerged an India safe for businessmen to make

15 4LIBE RAL ANTICO M MUN I SM

profits in and for a new class of landlords to preserve its property and enforce social subordination.” The Princeton political scientist Atul Kohli in 1987 likewise identified the “Achilles heel” of the contemporary Indian state with the “mismatch between the statist model and the limited capacity of the state to guide social and economic change.” Kohli observed that “three decades of planned economic development have failed to improve the living conditions of India’s poor.” Paltry land reform (outside of rare exceptions like West Bengal under Communist legislative influence), part of a larger “failure to institutionalize elements of lower-class interests within the state,” he suggested, was seriously eroding the popular support and legitimacy of Nehru’s Congress Party.80 An inexorable drift away from aid and development policy packages for India was subtly sealed by Nixon’s appointment of the Harvard sociologist and former Johnson aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan as U.S. ambassador in 1973. Like his prior, more liberal diplomatic counterparts, Moynihan too had enjoyed an earlier period of stimulating contact with left-wing Indian thinkers while a graduate student at the London School of Economics in early 1950s. By the time he arrived in New Delhi, however, both he and the administration he served had relegated the U.S.India connection to a far lower priority than its predecessors. As U.S. aid programs slowed to a trickle, Moynihan could generally stir little interest in any new initiatives (or even a visit from higher officials) to the subcontinent. The United States, as he wrote privately at the time, was no longer offering economic advice, and the embassy staff had become increasingly passive: “[there are] no Orville Freemans here.” Former ambassador Kenneth Keating, who bridged the period from Bowles2 to Moynihan, privately sympathized that he well understood his successor’s apparent “inability to establish a warm, if not to say intimate relationship with the Indian head of state: [There] was a standing joke in the Department while I was in India since every time I came back the first question [Assistant Secretary of State Joseph] Sisco asked was, ‘How is your sex life with Indira?’ ”81 Nor, it seems, was Moynihan pushing any new agenda. Rather, as something of a confessed lapsed liberal, Moynihan playfully entertained all sorts of political-economic ideas without committing himself to any consistent ideological course. Following a visit with Treasury Secretary

S IR E N S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T1 55

George Shultz, a Nixon confidante, in June  1973, Moynihan’s diary uncritically notes, “He asks about [foreign] aid: is Milton Friedman not right, that it only enables the poor nations to avoid doing those things that would get them out of poverty [?]”82 Not surprisingly, Moynihan quickly drew fire from left-leaning Indian voices. Unlike earlier ambassadors (presumably like Bowles or Galbraith) who had stood up on foreign policy issues as “basically their own men,” the political scientist Usha Mahajani assailed Moynihan in the Indian National Herald as a man who demonstrated “as much firmness in his own views as a lump of putty.”83 Largely content to focus on restoring a relation of mutual respect with Prime Minister Gandhi, his one, not insignificant, achievement on the economic front was the piloting through the U.S. Congress of significant rupee debt relief from the PL-480 program, allowing the Indian government more discretion over its own financial resources. In the previous decade, Moynihan had also played a large role in a fractious set of debates among U.S. liberals over welfare and poverty programs, including the domestic version of community development. Ironically, even as the Indian community development program was sputtering, its motivating idea enjoyed something of a revival (or perhaps an “Indian summer”) in the United States. Both Kennedy’s Peace Corps and Johnson’s War on Poverty drew directly from the earlier international experiment. Bowles’s old acolyte, Harris Wofford, helped devise the Peace Corps and served as the program’s associate director under Sargent Shriver, while another dedicated assistant, Edward Logue, took up the cause of urban renewal.84 The link to the domestic war on poverty, which Shriver also oversaw, was just as clear. As assistant secretary of labor and policy planner, Moynihan would exult (apparently unaware of the on-the-ground complications of the concept abroad) in 1966: From the time of the Point Four program the American government has been sponsoring programs of community development in backwards nations throughout the world. The program was and is a great popular success, and the idea of doing something of the sort through Community Action Programs with the “underdeveloped peoples of the United States” came as a direct and obvious carryover.85

15 6 LIBE RAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

Moynihan’s own evaluation of governmental programs changed quickly. Harsh blowback from liberal and African American activists to the “Moynihan Report” on the ills of the Black family and his own growing disenchantment with the militancy of the antiwar movement helped push Moynihan toward collaboration with a budding “neoconservative” intellectual crowd around the Public Interest and within the Nixon administration. In the process, he penned a stinging repudiation of the entire community action concept in his 1969 polemic Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty.86 Disillusionment with his earlier liberal idealism still seemed to hang heavy on the Moynihan who arrived in New Delhi; his staffers reportedly dismissed the agency that had once fielded the program’s largest single national contingent as the “Peace Corpse.”87 The Moynihan who ultimately departed Delhi in 1975 had not exactly warmed to his host country. Taking up the position of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Moynihan, in the eyes of the historian Daniel J. Sargent, bristled at the Third World as “illiberal, anti-capitalist, and anti-American.” Within months, even hard-boiled Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, fearing a diplomatic “disaster,” prevailed on Moynihan to resign.88 As for Galbraith, only later did he again think broadly about the problem of development. The result was a lecture series he offered in 1977 at the University of Geneva and published two years later as The Nature of Mass Poverty. By this time, the problem (at least in his own mind) had proven all but intractable. The book, he noted, had its origins in the early 1960s in India, where the United States had “a large and costly program of assistance to Indian agriculture” aimed at increasing food supplies and lessening near-universal rural poverty. “But,” he explained, “I soon became persuaded that our efforts were sadly misguided and that the error extended on to the Indians with whom we worked.”89 Removed from the nitty-gritty of both policy making and international diplomacy, Galbraith’s latter-day skepticism led him away from economic tinkering (at least for the Third World) altogether. Since World War II, he pointed out, only four or five formerly poor societies had made the leap from poverty to relative abundance for their masses of people: Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Israel, and South Korea, and their trajectories were not readily reproducible or even easily identifiable using classic economic development variables. Their relative success, he argued, was not a

S IRE N S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T1 57

matter of land and natural resources, inheritance of (or resistance) to imperialism, or even “socialist” versus “capitalist” control of resources. It was, rather, dependent on a much more complex set of historical contingencies, and this left no obvious formulas for those currently stuck in impoverished stasis. The enigma defined by what he called the “equilibrium of poverty” (that is, the ratio of land to population), “accommodation” (the resignation of the poor to their fate), and the “technical inertia of the village” was likely only treatable by exogenous measures, in particular effective birth control and mass migration either to cities or abroad.90 Galbraith’s growing disenchantment with ambitious, governmentaided programs for the Third World was more than supplemented by a new breed of spirited free market–oriented economic planners. A case in point is the changing career and prescriptions of Jagdish Bhagwati, one of India’s most distinguished economists. With teaching posts in the 1960s at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta and Delhi University (and winning the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal of the Indian Econometric Society in 1974 for his work on international trade) before taking up positions at MIT and Columbia University, Bhagwati’s scholarship and public advocacy paralleled the changing contours of professional wisdom in developmental economics. In an influential early work in 1970, Bhagwati and his wife, Padma Desai, offered a pointed critique of India’s “generally inefficient framework of economic policies designed to regulate the growth of [Indian] industrialization.” Still, theirs was a carefully qualified critique: “India,” they argued, “did not plan too much; in certain important ways it just planned inadequately,” focusing too much on production targets and too little on costs. Notwithstanding an extended indictment of current regulatory practices, they insisted that “none of the improvements in the planning of trade, industrialization and related economic policies which we have advocated . . . are incompatible with the basic objectives of a socialist society which stresses distributive justice, equality and the eradication of material poverty.”91 In subsequent years, Bhagwati and other leading economists traveled a long political and intellectual distance from this initially modest critique. By 1983, the Indian-born, Oxford-trained Deepak Lal—who would subsequently enjoy extended consultancies with the United Nations, ILO, the World Bank, and the Indian Planning Commission as well as a

15 8LIBE RAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

professorship at UCLA—was blasting any encroachment on the classic, nineteenth-century argument for free trade as “Dirigist Dogma,” or unwarranted government intervention in the processes of economic development.92 Lal would ultimately become closely associated with a scholarly analysis of the “Hindu rate of growth,” or, as he called it more formally, the “Hindu equilibrium,” basically a caste-defined economy enduring for centuries without substantial productivity or income gains. The Nehruvian state, in this formulation, simply added socialist ideological pretension to a Brahmin, bureaucratic approach to state management.93 By 2013, Bhagwati would defend the series of neoliberal or deregulatory reforms introduced in 1991 by Finance Minister Manmohan Singh from charges of deference to an overweening “Washington Consensus.” Rather, as he and his coauthor Arvind Panagariya—a Columbia University economist and vice president of an Indian government think tank under Prime Minister Narendra Modi—suggested, the change emerged as a popular reaction to an “unsustainable” move toward socialism, including nationalization of banks, oil companies, and coal mines, by Indira Gandhi in the 1970s.94 For many of those looking back from India’s post-2000 boom years, the Nehruvian state appeared as a dreary “License Raj.” As the popular writer Gurcharan Das would proclaim in the aftermath of what he called the “golden summer of 1991”: The old Congress-dominated centralized Raj is as completely in the past as the British Raj. The new India is increasingly one of competition and decentralization. And now, thanks to our intellectual capital and the opportunities opened by technology and globalization, we face the very real prospect of conquering the pervasive poverty that has characterized the lives of the majority of the people. . . . Never before in recorded history have so many people been in a position to rise so quickly.95

To what degree such a breathlessly optimistic prescription could sustain itself in practice requires a narrative beyond the chronological scope of this chapter. What is clear is that all of its basic assumptions were framed outside the regulated market or social-democratic tradition that had once animated both Indian state builders and their American liberal allies.

SIREN SONG OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT159

GLOBA L IZATION AND TH E EN D OF DEVELOPMEN TA L L IBE R A LI SM

Looking back on the trajectory of New Deal liberals from the end of World War II through the 1960s, it is convenient to tie their political demise to their own complicity in the debacle of the Vietnam War. As the SDS leader Carl Oglesby addressed the antiwar march in Washington, DC, in November 1965, “Think of the men who now engineer that war—those who study her maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President himself. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals.”96 It was a group condemnation soon elaborated by David Halberstam’s influential work The Best and the Brightest (1969). Indeed, the very term “liberal” in the era so lost its critical edge that younger and college-educated idealists fled from the identity in droves. Increasingly, instead of “liberal,” antiwar and civil rights activists adopted the oppositional moniker “radical”—whether or not they affirmatively subscribed to a more systemic, New Left critique of capitalism and imperialism. Among the latter, groups like the Union for Radical Political Economics, founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1968 pressed for a “revolutionary transformation of American capitalism into a distinctively new form of socialism.” Its cofounders included the young Harvard economics postdoc Samuel Bowles, the son of the U.S. ambassador.97 In point of fact, as Halberstam makes clear, not all the liberal advisors of the era were guilty as charged: when it came to the war and the military buildup leading to it, Bowles and Galbraith (and also Arthur Goldberg) were among the few prominent dissenters in the higher policymaking circles. Although ardent anticommunists, these officials had for years mistrusted the military-first tendencies evident throughout the Acheson-Dulles-McNamara/Rusk years of American foreign policy making. They preferred negotiation with what they recognized as an internally divided communist world buttressed by a strong accent on economic and political development of potential Third World allies. Although rarely framed in stark opposition to the more hawkish wing of the Democratic Party foreign policy apparatus, the “liberal antimilitarists” had formed a small but persistent tendency within the party

16 0 LIBE RAL ANTICO M MUN I SM

evident at least since the first Adlai Stevenson candidacy. In addition to his personally consequential dissent from the Bay of Pigs decision, Bowles had counseled accommodation with Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia and then tried in vain to appeal to President Johnson’s populist roots to “capture the imagination of Vietnamese peasants” with radical land reform.98 Following a tour to Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos in August 1966, Bowles found his perennial optimism resurfacing in the hope that a liberal program might still bring success to the war effort: “In the last 15  years, a substantial minority of us have been arguing that military power will not in itself succeed in crushing a revolutionary movement and that political turbulence can be eliminated only by the establishment of a sound society in which individuals are given as sense of participation, the right to own land, education, etc. . . . Vietnam could be the turning point in this situation.”99 Galbraith, likewise, had long tried within proper channels to stem the tide of escalation in Southeast Asia. “These jungle regimes,” he had written JFK in 1961 with no small touch of cultural condescension, “are going to be a hideous problem for us in the months ahead . . . as a military ally the entire Laos nation is clearly inferior to a battalion of COs [conscientious objectors] in WWI.” And things were certainly no better in Vietnam, where, he concluded, the South Vietnamese leader Diem “has alienated his people.”100 In 1965, Galbraith, now retired from government duty, joined antiwar teach-ins, while still trying to appeal to the president to ignore “the official crap” about winning the war.101 Finally, after continuing frustration with Johnson’s policies, he jumped ship in 1968 to challenge the president’s reelection. After failing to draw the senators Robert Kennedy or George McGovern into the race, he threw himself into the dissident campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy, raising money, writing speeches, and even serving as McCarthy’s floor leader at the summer’s Democratic National Convention.102 The antiwar activists were stymied by the support of party regulars for Vice President Hubert Humphrey at the convention, but their time was coming. One could certainly say that with Senator George McGovern’s presidential nomination in 1972 and Senator Frank Church’s investigation into foreign intelligence abuses in 1975–1976 that the wisdom of Bowles, Galbraith, and their confederates had gained a temporary ascendancy, if hardly permanent supremacy, in their party.103

S IREN S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T1 61

Alas, antimilitarism, or resistance to the dispatch of troops in support of undemocratic regimes, defined at most an incomplete foreign policy. On balance, it proved a “center” that could not easily hold. Despite their considerable intellectual and emotional claims, the antiwar liberals were considerably less sure when it came to larger policy prescription. Antiimperialist but also procapitalist, and ambivalent about the proper role of the state in economic affairs, they delineated no clear path for policy makers to follow. Generals, bullies, and dictators were out, but what should democratic regimes—or international bodies that presumed to represent them—do with their principles and sovereignty? In short, how best to ensure a better life for their citizens? What one might call the liberal (or even the radical) critique of interventionism arguably left something unspoken regarding America’s projected relations with the rest of the world. It was the “negative” counterpart to what for Chester Bowles had once been the “positive” program of economic development. General disillusionment with planning— especially in the form of any integrated state-and-society or economyand-democracy models—consigned development strategy largely to the realm of market forces and “free trade” pacts. The same disaffection that had, by the early 1960s, effected state-centered planning programs at the international level had, by the 1980s, spread to economic development thought as a whole. Development studies experts thus point to a “convergence of criticism from the left and right,” with failure of developmental takeoff assigned either to the state or Western civilization itself.104 In the former case, hope was soon invested in a “neoliberal turn.” Buoyed by the collapse of communism and the Soviet bloc, expanded global markets coupled with the new “structural adjustment,” the deregulatory orthodoxy emanating from the World Bank and IMF, did indeed boost Indian as well as world GDP. Yet the policy shift did little to resolve the problems of global poverty and inequality or to buttress democratic institutions in postcolonial settings. The Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, among others, openly worried by the mid1990s about a single-minded emphasis within global political-economic strategies on the “liberalization” of markets “without a corresponding focus on the much-needed broadening of social opportunities.” Allowing that Singh’s 1991 policies had touched off “some essential reforms,” in India, Sen nevertheless pointed to “a deep complementarity between

16 2LIBE RAL ANTICO M M UN I SM

reducing, on the one hand, the overactivity of the state in business regulation and the “underactivity of the state in the continuing neglect of elementary education and other social opportunities.”105 Sen’s concerns about the ultimate instability of neoliberal policy making proved all too prescient. The cry of “Corruption!” combined with the yearning for a strong executive (even a “strongman”) who promised to redress the grievances of the popular masses and restore national honor echoed around the world, and nowhere more so than in India. At the same time, economic growth across the Global South, however socially imbalanced internally, also touched off deep political resentments in the industrial heartlands of the West. By the dawn of the new millennium, a sharp and nasty reaction against the old parties, East and West, and in some cases against even the deliberative democratic process itself, challenged a once-resonant democratic creed.

III L I B E R AL NAT IO NALISM O N  T RIAL

F

A

lthough still very much engaged with the big-power politics endemic to the Cold War, international conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s confronted liberals with questions distinct from the polarities of communism and anticommunism. Just how and how far to press bedrock liberal principles of self-government dominated the politics of the Middle East and southern Africa in these years. In the Middle East, as chapter 6 suggests, the very retreat from frontline engagement by the Soviet Union exposed the fragility of a U.S. hegemony in a region of bitterly quarreling mini-states. The quandary was particularly apparent when American liberal actors, during the Carter administration, attempted to mobilize an arsenal of stratagems— diplomatic, economic, and military—to bring a more settled peace to a region that, as recently as 1972, had seen Israel effectively reproach Arab attacks with a furious counteroffensive that left it in continuing control of its 1967-enhanced territories but also with a mounting problem of Palestinian radicalism on its hands. In a move with repercussions continuing to the present moment, U.S. liberal state actors attempted to solve the regional problem on the basis of secure, internationally recognized borders for each people. But what happens when two peoples effectively occupy the same space? Was the “two-state solution” proposed by Carter and his advisors (and Clinton and Obama after them) not only brave and difficult but foolhardy?

16 4LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

If the Israeli-Palestinian case pitted abstract principles against more complicated political realities, apartheid South Africa presented liberals with a relatively unclouded moral imperative: the question was not whether to compel an end to race-based rule, but how. Both the agency of change and the deeper assumptions behind it were foregrounded in the antiapartheid struggle. Just as it had in domestic politics, a multipronged civil rights movement in alliance with South African freedom fighters showed a capacity to move mountains but not necessarily to find a successful path of democratic regional development.

6 THE QUEST FOR A TWO- STATE SOLUTION Israel, 1973–2000

E

uphoria in the United States from Israel’s smashing 1967 and 1973 military victories was laced with a discordant undercurrent of concern. Aside from raising big-power tensions over the future control of territory in the region, the Six-Day War consigned a massive new Arab Palestinian population to Israeli military control. If the Israelis had previously largely ignored their Arab minority (roughly 16 percent of Israel’s total population in 1967),1 numbers that now more than doubled with the addition of East Jerusalem (immediately annexed in 1967), the West Bank, and Gaza made that response more difficult. In another challenge to a heretofore largely consensual pro-Israel message in the United States, growing numbers of African American and Native American voices across the late 1960s criticized racial stereotypes that had long bolstered justifications of Israeli settlement and right to rule. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)–Fatah alliance, which had been conducting guerilla raids against the Jewish state since 1964, gathered strength after 1967 by linking its “liberation struggle” message to the string of successful insurgencies against colonialists in Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam; from now on, it proclaimed, “armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine.”2 The 1967 events also spurred a new era of intellectual combat. The Columbia University professor Edward Said, most famously, began to lay the groundwork for what would, a decade later, become Orientalism, his

16 6 LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

signature critique of the condescension and hostility with which the West generally treated Arab subjects. Organizationally, a growing sense of grievance spawned the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG), which quickly adopted a militantly anti-Israel stance.3 Similarly, the Black Power–oriented Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as well as the avowedly revolutionary Black Panthers soon reflected a tendency on the left edge of both the antiwar and civil rights–cum–Black Power movements to identify Zionism as little more than another form of imperialism. As partners of the Black radicals, the white-anarchist Yippies (many from Jewish family backgrounds) also sounded the alarm. “If Moses were alive today,” wrote Jerry Rubin in July 1970, “he’d be an Arab guerrilla.” A year later, Abbie Hoffman likewise distanced himself from the Jewish state: “I am very pro-Jewish but anti-Zionism.” 4 Even a few erstwhile fervent Israel supporters broke rank. The journalist I. F. Stone counseled the Jewish state not to make its new-found military swagger a security threat of its own. Rather than “remain a western outpost in an Afro-Asian world casting off Western domination,” Israel, he wrote in Ramparts, must “join the Third World.”5 On the left, Israeli military success had clearly come with some political cost. As Abba Eban would later reflect, the 1967 war “transformed David into Goliath overnight.” 6 Faced with growing criticism, left-liberals in both the United States and Israel generally continued to mount a strong political defense of the Jewish state. What did change, however, were the terms of the defense case. As Israel’s survival seemed less in doubt, its long-term stability appeared to rest on a successful negotiated settlement with its Arab neighbors, a process that itself required some accommodation of Palestinian grievances. By the time of the Carter administration, liberal Democrats, still proclaiming a love for Israel but also nursing a sometimes fractious, multiethnic constituency in their own party, found themselves at increasing loggerheads with the actually existing Israeli government on the question of a peace settlement. Their response—from Carter to Clinton (and indeed through the Obama administration, although the latter takes us beyond the range of this discussion)—was to press for an independent, self-governing Palestinian entity. The Israelis themselves were not unaware of the pressures felt by their American allies. Mapai leaders made a conspicuous display (for both

T H E Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE S OLUTI ON 1 67

domestic and foreign consumption) of their own attempts to lift Palestinian conditions and welfare, if always within security-defined limits. In a pamphlet aimed at an American labor audience in 1970, for example, the Histadrut boasted of its concern for the sixty thousand Arab workers who daily came to work in Israel from the West Bank on the Histadrut principle of “equal pay for equal work,” a formula that nearly tripled the average West Bank wage. While attempting to provide the same trade union protections it offered Israeli members, the Histadrut refrained from offering the transient workers full Histadrut membership: “otherwise,” offered one union official, “it might look as though we were taking a step toward annexation of the West Bank.”7 Old allies offered a similar refrain. AFL-CIO delegations to Israel regularly reported positively on ongoing attempts at economic development in Arab villages as well as examples of Israeli-Arab friendships at work.8 As early as 1967, Black labor and civil rights leaders like A. Philip Randolph and Whitney Young berated groups like the SNCC for threatening the Black-Jewish alliance with their attacks on Israel. Again, in 1975, in the face of rising anti-Israel agitation at home and abroad, the AFL-CIO’s A. Philip Randolph Institute, under Bayard Rustin’s direction, unveiled the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee (BASIC)—including such luminaries as Barbara Jordan, Leontyne Price, Roy Wilkins, and Andrew Young—to condemn the international economic “blacklist,” or boycott of firms that dealt with Israel or had Jewish owners: “We have fought too long to root out discrimination from our land,” declared BASIC’s statement of principles, “to sit idly while foreign interests import bigotry into America.”9 At the same time, BASIC demanded an explanation from the Histadrut for constructing two “cooperative villages” in Duvalier’s Haiti and officially protested the state visit to Israel of Balthazar Johannes Vorster, South Africa’s prime minister.10 Despite a wave of criticism, the Israeli government generally struck an outwardly confident tone, and one without visible deference toward the Palestinians. Even many Labor supporters backed the call of the new Land of Israel movement to allow settlements in the occupied territories.11 Arie Eliav, a decorated Israeli war veteran, was quickly dismissed by Prime Minister Golda Meir as secretary-general of Mapai in 1971 when he pushed for a quick and direct return of the occupied territories to local Palestinian rule.12 Among American stalwarts, Congressman

16 8LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

Celler equally rejected any such Israeli initiative: “It would indeed be disastrous for Israel to yield to Egypt and withdraw from Sinai and the Gaza Strip without safe and secure border agreements. It would be like giving your adversary all your aces.”13 If Israel’s hard-line stance against settlement dismantlement, refugee repatriation, or unilateral return of territory increasingly challenged the Democratic Party’s avowed commitment to “bring the parties into direct negotiations toward a permanent political solution based on the necessity of agreement on secure and defensible national boundaries,” most of the leadership stood by their old friend. Both principle and practical electoral calculations played a role here. When Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin all but openly endorsed Nixon’s reelection in 1972, Democrat George McGovern not only repudiated an anti-Israel ad by one of his supporters but publicly called for enhanced arms transfers as well as a move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.14 The unyielding position of Israeli supporters at home and abroad was further sealed by the hard-line stance of nearly the entire Arab world: in the Khartoum Declaration of September  1967, eight Arab states reiterated their “three nays” toward Israel—no recognition, no direct negotiations, and no peace treaties.15 Ironically, the decisive defeat of the Arab attack on the Jewish state in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War actually raised the profile of the Palestinian issue on the international stage. With an emergency airlift from the United States, the Egyptian and Syrian armies had been routed and with them their Soviet advisors. Precisely because Israeli military supremacy appeared no longer in doubt, however, the Palestinians and their military-political arm, the PLO, increasingly picked up international and select U.S. support as both victims and resisters of Zionist hegemony. At the same time, however, PLO attacks on the Israeli civilian population threatened to dominate all discussion (especially in the United States) of the larger regional conflict. Although rooted in earlier fedayeen (or Arab commando) attempts to infiltrate and disrupt Israeli civil society, a new era of resistance was heralded when the Progressive Front for the Liberation of Palestine (a PLO affiliate) shifted in 1968 from local targets to the global arena. Beginning with attacks on the Israeli national airline, El Al, a spate of PLO airline highjackings culminated in the 1972 PLO–Black September murders and hostage taking at the Munich Olympics. Even as it encountered significant military setbacks

T HE Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE S OLUTI ON 1 69

across the decade—expulsion from Jordan by the Hashemite regime in 1970, losses to Phalangist and Syrian army units in 1975–1976 in Lebanon, and finally evacuation at the hands of the Israeli army from Beirut in 1982—the PLO remained the dominant, internationally recognized voice of the Palestinian people. Whether and how to draw it into productive settlement talks long confounded American negotiators. Even as PLO leaders after 1969 rhetorically accepted all resident Israelis into an imagined secular-democratic state, they still refused to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state in any part of Mandate Palestine.16 For the most part, the American liberal and social-democratic left steadfastly defended Israel against growing diplomatic isolation as well as military attack. Following the Yom Kippur War and the pressures of the OPEC boycott, the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) founder, Michael Harrington, counseled antiwar forces to distinguish between aid to Vietnam and Israel: “There is an enormous difference,” he wrote, “between a dictatorship in Indochina which has provoked the bloody opposition of a significant percentage of its people and the social democratic regime in Israel.”17 Just how far left-liberals would go on behalf of Israel was evident in the case of the outspoken New York congresswoman Bella Abzug. Abzug had been elected to Congress in 1971 as an ardent Labor Zionist as well as a leading feminist and steadfast Cold War critic; year after year she opposed any further appropriations for the Vietnam War or continued military aid to any of several other autocratic regimes blessed by American largesse. Yet, like McGovern and several other antiwar liberals, she also notably pushed for a long-term arms agreement with Israel, including a supply of state-of-the-art F-4 fighter jets, as an alleged source of stability in the Middle East. Yet by the time of her attendance as congressional advisor to the U.S. delegation at the United Nations’ International Women’s Year conference in Mexico City, tensions over the Palestinian issue, as the historian Sato Masaya has documented, had forced Abzug to juggle her political commitments. Initially attempting to unite First and Third World women around the exploitation of domestic workers by multinational corporations, she was incensed at the delegates’ support of language equating Zionism with racism and colonialism. Accusing an “anti-Israel bloc” of manipulating the assembled women, Abzug successfully urged the U.S. delegation to vote against the final Declaration of

170 LIBERAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

Mexico. As she replied to a critic at the 1980 IWY conference in Copenhagen, “I’ll tell you what Zionism is. It’s a liberation movement for a people who have been persecuted all their lives and through human history.”18 For many like Abzug, the first response to criticism of Israel was solidarity. As late as 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon following the nearassassination by Abu Nidal of the Israeli ambassador to Britain, even such normally staunch critics of U.S. interventionism as Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden initially defended the move.19 At the same time, frustration at what was seen as Israeli resistance toward any meaningful accommodation of Palestinian suffering was increasingly manifest on both a global and domestic front. The same UN General Assembly that suspended South Africa from membership in 1974 overwhelmingly affirmed the legitimacy of struggle against colonial domination “by all available means”—with only Israel on the record in opposition.20 That Israel, in response to the loss of its former African friends to the Arab boycott, had opened military as well as commercial ties to Pretoria only further inflamed anti-Zionist hostility. Perhaps the most famous response, following up on the IWY conference earlier that year, was the passage of the “Zionism is racism” resolution at the UN General Assembly in November 1975. While fending off Security Council sanctions, even the U.S. representative to the United Nations, William Scranton, in March  1976 openly condemned Israeli settlement activity and called its occupation of East Jerusalem “illegal” and an “obstacle to peace.”21 The shift in left-liberal thinking was evident in the Nation’s ponderous editorial position following the October  1973 War, which called for consideration of “new forms, new relationships, new arrangements.” “Federated states, binational entities, interim U.N.-sponsored agencies,” the editors suggested plaintively if vaguely, “can be so created that the occupied areas . . . can become buffer zones. Means must be found by which all parties, including the Palestinians, can participate in the administration of those territories. It is folly to think that peace can be achieved by permitting one side to exclude the other from territory to which both have valid claims.”22 Even within the Jewish community, a small but distinguished set of liberal critics (including Sam Rubin of Fabergé cosmetics; Nahum Goldmann, a former president of the World Jewish Congress; and the rabbis Joachim Prinz and Balfour Brickner)

T H E Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE S OLUTI ON 1 7 1

formed Breira (or “Alternative”) to demand territorial concessions and negotiations with the PLO.23 Finally, within the U.S. Congress, a new and impassioned proPalestinian voice was raised when James Abourezk, of South Dakota, the son of Lebanese-Christian immigrants, was elected to a Senate seat in 1972. An antiwar liberal otherwise closely linked to the “new politics” vision of his mentor, George McGovern, Abourezk first broke his silence on Middle East matters in 1972 after Israeli planes bombed Lebanese refugee camps following the Black September attack at the Munich Olympics. Teaming up with other Arab-American professionals and moderates to form the National Association of Arab Americans, Abourezk also made common, if usually futile, cause with J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in calling for greater “evenhandedness,” that is, restrictions, on further arms aid to Israel.24 His nonconformity within liberal ranks extended to an implicit defense of the 1973 oil embargo: “The Arabs,” he reported to his home-state constituents, “do not understand why the United States has provided the war material used against them when they have done nothing against the United States.”25 Similarly, in early 1975, during what he called the “shrill hysteria” infecting the majority of his Senate colleagues in deference to the “Israeli lobby,” Abourezk argued vigorously for direct negotiations with Yasser Arafat, head of the PLO.26 Despite such irrepressible assertiveness, Abourezk’s foreign policy dissents came to naught. Stuart Eizenstat, President Carter’s domestic policy adviser, retrospectively dismissed Abourezk’s interventions: “he was never a player.”27

JI M M Y C ARTER AND THE TWO- STAT E SOLUT I ON

In the end, it was not an old-school State Department “Arabist” but Jimmy Carter, a newcomer on the national political scene, who reset American liberal discourse about the region by placing the “two-state solution” and the creation of a Palestinian state as a priority of U.S. foreign policy. To be sure, as the Carter administration took office in 1977, a full decade after Israel had secured control of formerly Arab lands pursuant to the 1967 and 1973 wars, there were few attractive options

172LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

regarding the disposition of the conquered Palestinian territories. Neither colonial absorption of a subject people (effectively a new-model apartheid) nor democratic integration of Jewish and Palestinian peoples in one, secular, binational state appealed as possible or at least publicly acceptable models to any major party in the conflict. An alternative with recurrent but always dim or short-circuited appeal imagined a return of East Jerusalem and at least the West Bank to Jordan in some kind of revised pre-1967 Palestine-Jordan federation. Both insistent Palestinian demands for independence and the relative weakness of the Hashemite Kingdom even within the Arab world, however, rendered such an option unlikely from the beginning.28 The only credible remaining model, at least in the eyes of Americans and most other leading international players, was that of a new state of Palestine, an independent, self-governing territory, yet one shorn of a military capability that could threaten Israeli security. For the Carter administration—eager to demonstrate a post-Vietnam flexibility in American policy making—the option appeared made to order. It was both a “nationalist” solution outside of dichotomous East-West Cold War alignments and one that might project an economic development model to Third World peoples. The two-state solution beckoned as a compromise between total deference to Israeli security on the one hand and full restoration of Arab-Palestinian claims to their homeland on the other. Outside George Wallace, as his biographer and former domestic adviser Stuart Eizenstat observes, Jimmy Carter was the most conservative Democrat competing for the presidential nomination in 1976, ultimately dispatching more-liberal favorite sons like Jerry Brown, Frank Church, “Scoop” Jackson, Mo Udall, and Fred Harris. Reputedly “tight as a tick” on fiscal issues (he even once considered selling off Camp David) and generally unengaged with labor and social welfare issues, Carter nevertheless emerged as an ardent progressive-liberal on foreign policy as well as on “social” issues like civil rights and women’s equality.29 Bedecked by quotations from Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas as well as a Reinhold Niebuhr encomium that “the sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world,” Carter’s cheerful campaign autobiography promised a turn from “the tragedies of Cambodia and Viet Nam—the shock, embarrassment and shame of Watergate—[and]

T H E Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE S OLUTI ON 1 73

the doubt and confusion surrounding the economic woes of our nation.”30 Still mindful of his party’s Vietnam debacle, Carter pointedly balanced Cyrus Vance, a lone antiwar critic within LBJ’s inner circle, as secretary of state, with Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-chair of the establishmentarian Trilateral Commission, as national security advisor. Vance, as the writer George Packer points out, was “the kind of establishment figure who would mesh well with Carter’s post-Vietnam worldview.” “A gentleman of the dying WASP establishment,” Vance, in Packer’s words, had been pulled by the “catastrophe of Vietnam” from the “respectable center toward the liberal left—he was sympathetic to Third World grievances, took negotiation as his first principle, and wanted more than anything to resume the thaw in US-Soviet relations.”31 From the beginning of his presidency, Carter sought to move beyond the realpolitik that had largely shaped U.S. moves in the Cold War by invoking the moral legacy of the civil rights movement, which had profoundly affected his own understanding of the world around him. Already in 1975, the progressive foreign policy wing of the Democratic Party, led by the representatives Donald Fraser (MN) and Tom Harkin (IA) had introduced legislation to cut off aid to allies with egregious human rights records. The party’s 1976 platform committee, ranging from the social conservative and recently resigned UN ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan on the right to the antiwar activist Ron Brown on the left, had likewise unified around the human rights theme, and Carter’s own inaugural address equally declared, “Our commitment to human rights must be absolute.”32 As if Vance’s Brahmin profile did not sufficiently signal the break from the past that Carter wanted to display on the world stage, he selected the Atlanta congressman and former civil rights leader Andrew Young as his UN ambassador and Young’s fellow activist Patricia Derian to a newly created position as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs. Then, by cutting aid to Latin American dictatorships, signing the SALT II missile agreement with the Soviet Union, and raising the profile of the Helsinki agreements negotiated under President Ford, Carter attempted to set a new tone, one emphasizing respect for human rights over the use of force in international relations. Carter took pride in losing not a single American soldier to combat on his watch, and even Anatoly Dobrynin, the former Soviet

174LIBERAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

ambassador to Washington, credited him with playing a significant role in the process of liberalization within the Soviet bloc.33 The progressive tilt of the Carter foreign policy did not escape the opprobrium of those used to spinning Democratic Party foreign policy on a familiar axis. The anti-McGovernite Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), established by AFL-CIO leaders, Commentarycentered intellectuals, and other hawkish defense policy advocates in 1972, took particular umbrage at the new administration. As the CDM co-chair and distinguished sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset later recalled, those who were soon labeled or willingly self-identified as “neoconservatives” felt all but left out of Carter’s foreign policy picks and tended to blame Andrew Young for the insult.34 Behind Young, according to the most fanciful minds among the old guard, lay the former left-wing union (and MLK) adviser Stanley Levison, who some fantasized was effectively the “head of the KGB in North America.” It was no wonder that the CDM sympathizer and former Nixon adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan would complain to Eizenstat that Carter was “conservative on domestic policy and liberal on foreign policy and he should be the other way around!”35 As the charter neocon Ben Wattenberg would later explain, there were three pillars of the “pro-LBJ, pro–Scoop Jackson, ‘big-government’ liberalism” to which they had all adhered: “merit” (as opposed to quotas and affirmative action), “internationalism” (versus “the isolationism of the antiwar crowd”) and “economic growth” (rather than radical environmentalism). Beginning with McGovern and continuing through Carter, “the word ‘liberal,’ ” complained Wattenberg, had been “hijacked.”36 Such Carter-era “new liberalism,” at least as applied to foreign policy, likely reached its apogee in Middle East diplomacy. “Even at the height of the Cold War,” observes Eizenstat, “Jimmy Carter made the Middle East peace process his top priority among all the foreign-policy issues confronting the United States.”37 Propelled by Vance and Brzezinski (and only gently countered by the strongly pro-Israel Vice President Mondale and presidential aides Hamilton Jordan and Eizenstat himself) and the report of a Brookings Institution Study Group with which Brzezinski had collaborated, Carter plunged into an intense round of Middle East diplomacy shortly upon taking office. His hope at the outset was for a region-wide settlement, a kind of post-Vietnam agreement between

T HE Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE S OLUTI ON 1 75

Israel and all the major Arab players on the basis of the Six-Day War– ending UN Resolutions 338 and 242, the latter calling for the recognition of the right of all states in the region (read Israel) to live in peace and within secure borders—offering Israel recognition and internationally reinforced borders in exchange for the withdrawal of Israel from occupied territories. Invoking his own religious convictions for peace and reconciliation in the “holy land,” Carter, from the start, emphasized universal access to Jerusalem for Muslims, Jews, and Christians as well as a framework for future Palestinian sovereignty (what he soon indelicately embraced as a Palestinian “homeland”)—all this to be sealed at a reconvening of the Geneva peace conference, a forum previously abandoned in multiple disagreements following the 1973 war ceasefire but one where Carter hoped the Soviets could be drawn in as peaceful rather than subversive competitors.38 Unlike Kissinger-era diplomacy, which focused on big-power agreements while largely avoiding the Palestinian issue, Carter saw the latter as a central and pressing problem. Pushing back against the Cold Warriors who viewed power in polarized, East-West terms, the new “regionalists” in the State Department generally identified Third World selfdetermination and human rights as keys to long-term political and economic stability. Given their underlying respect for self-representation as well as the political lay of the land, they grudgingly accepted the necessity of dealing with the PLO. At the 1974 Rabat conference, the Arab League had effectively recognized the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” thus cutting Jordan out of big-power diplomacy in the region. A 1975 Brookings report already anticipated a Palestinian state dominated by the PLO but one that would also be “inextricably bound” to the state of Israel, geographically and economically, with which it would of necessity cooperate.39 As his memoirs reveal, Vance long recognized Palestinians as “the central, unresolved human rights issue of the Middle East,” the answer to which “almost certainly” would include “a Palestinian homeland and some form of self-determination.” 40 Despite energetic entreaties to key parties—including the sweetener of arms deals to those who would buy into the peace deal—Carter’s grand plan for a Geneva conference faced overwhelming odds. Even Egypt’s Sadat, although heavily invested in the land-for-peace principle (and

176 LIBERAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

desperate for Western aid to jumpstart a sagging economy), hesitated to come on board. Sadat mistrusted the Soviets, whom he had recently expelled as advisers from his country, as well as their client state, Syria. The PLO, for its part, still sticking to its liberationist credo, disdained any talks with Israel unless its statehood was assured in advance; ipso facto, it could not be a formal party to a conference, although hope remained on the American side that it might informally be included in a Jordanian delegation. Meanwhile, Israel and its American friends proved even tougher obstacles. With his country outnumbered at any projected bargaining table and always skeptical of any multilateral negotiation, Prime Minister Rabin was cool from the start to the Carter plan. Though the Labor Party leaders viewed the occupied territories largely as a security, not a religious or nationalist, asset and accepted Resolution 242 in principle, they much preferred to try to leverage piecemeal deals with their neighboring states. Moreover, while willing in principle to cede parts of the West Bank to Jordanian control, they categorically ruled out a Palestinian state under PLO sovereignty. Since the 1967 War, Labor had staked itself to the so-called Allon Plan (after the Labor general and political leader Yigal Allon), which imagined autonomous Palestinian population centers (preferably in Jordanian hands), while maintaining an Israeli hold on all geostrategic assets.41 Then, in May 1977, not only Rabin’s rule but the thirty-year reign of the Israeli Labor Party (now sullied with the disclosure of the prime minister’s illegal foreign bank account) came to an abrupt and unexpected end with the election of Likud leader Menachem Begin, whose party platform resolutely not only rejected the 242 principle but anticipated a massive expansion of new Jewish settlement in “Judea and Samaria.” 42 With prospects dwindling even for the possibility of negotiations, Sadat broke the ice with his dramatic flight to Israel in December 1977; suddenly, the possibility of an Egypt-led agreement, with openings to the rest of the Arab world, was back on the table. Even as Carter pressed on with his initiative, he found the project besieged not just abroad but at home, most notably among his liberal and especially Jewish-liberal base. Although itself discomfited by Begin’s election, AIPAC swung into full mobilization against any pressure on Israel to cede the West Bank or Gaza territories (the obvious keystone of any “Palestinian homeland”). Despite efforts by Vice President Mondale and

T H E Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE S OLUTI ON 1 77

Senator Humphrey to defend the president as “an unswerving supporter of the state of Israel,” the issue was soon too hot to handle.43 In a retrospective interview, the liberal senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT) recalled what that heat was like. After much wrangling between senators, the State Department, and Israeli officials, a five-billion-dollar arms package— including major upgrades for Egypt and Iraq as well as Israel—was set for passage. Then, “a couple days later,” the Israelis changed their mind. Despite the initial hard-won agreement, in a pattern Ribicoff would come to find disconcerting, most of his liberal colleagues backed off their prior pledges. In Ribicoff’s view, the liberal legislators “had no balls” and sheepishly capitulated to the Israeli lobby. “One of the great tragedies of the Israelis,” insisted Ribicoff, “[is that they] take . . . the American Jews for granted. They’ve got them buffaloed, I mean, all of this is, in the long run, it’s bad for the Jews. And they think that they can . . . do anything. And I think they’re contemptuous of the American Jews. They take their money and support, and they think that the Congress is in their pocket.” 44 The fear that the entire Carter initiative might dissolve did stir one significant new development within the Israeli electorate: led by army reservists and intellectuals like the writer Amos Oz, the grassroots Peace Now movement emerged in 1977 and suggested that American negotiators might appeal over the heads of government officials to tap a deep popular yearning for an end to the bitter conflict.45 In the end, Carter-Vance diplomacy did squeeze a partial and temporary victory from the Mideast quagmire in the form of the Camp David Agreement. After thirteen days of unprecedented personal diplomacy in northern Maryland and subsequent trips back and forth among the Egyptian, Israeli, and American stakeholders, Begin and Sadat ultimately signed a peace treaty in Washington, DC, on March 26, 1979. The first part of the guiding Framework for Peace, mandating a rollback of the Israeli presence in the Sinai in exchange for a bilateral normalization of relations, proceeded smoothly.46 A bare four months following the peace treaty, Labor Party leader Shimon Peres reported to U.S. labor leader Lane Kirkland on his just-completed trip to Egypt. Overall, he exclaimed, my first visit to a country which for years was Israel’s greatest enemy, was an extremely moving and important experience. I was very

178 LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

impressed with the leadership of the country and I found a public which bears its poverty with enormous restraint and which wants peace very much. Peace with Egypt seems assured. It is certainly not a passing episode; but it will be difficult for peace to stand on the lone Egyptian leg if other forces, both in our region and elsewhere, do not join in to support it.47

The core of the agreement—crucial if the Palestinians were to fall in with Egypt’s negotiating leadership—was never consummated. Its crucial elements consisted of a slow-motion resolution of the issues of violence reduction and a rollback of West Bank occupation. The signed agreement, witnessed by Carter, Begin, and Sadat, specified a transitional arrangement for up to five years in the West Bank and Gaza: “In order to provide full autonomy [italics added] to the inhabitants . . . the Israeli military government and its civilian administration will be withdrawn as soon as a self-governing authority has been freely elected by the inhabitants of these areas to replace the existing military government.” The accords further specified that Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians would, between them, “define the powers and authority” of the selfgoverning authority upon which the designated five-year transition period would begin. Not later than the third year into the period, final status negotiations were to resolve all issues of boundaries and security arrangements and ensure “the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and their just requirements.” At the same time, the parties agreed that “all necessary measures will be taken . . . to ensure the security of Israel and its neighbors during the transitional period and beyond.” Finally, outside the letter of the agreement, American negotiators, according to Vance’s subsequent documentation of the proceedings, expected the continuation of an Israeli freeze on new settlements as well as a commitment by all parties to an undivided Jerusalem, whose final status, like that of Arab refugees stranded outside the territories, would await further negotiation.48 Any number of disagreements ultimately interrupted—and to this day prevented—the fulfillment of the Camp David process for an IsraeliPalestinian settlement envisioned by Jimmy Carter and his liberal advisors. Newspaper headlines as well as mutual accusations from each side concentrated on continuing cross-border attacks on Israeli civilians on

T HE Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE S OLUTI ON 1 79

FIGURE 6.1  U.S. president Jimmy Carter, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin review troops at the Camp David accords, September 1978, Library of Congress photos.

Source: 1978 Sep. 6, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09788 (digital file from original negative), LC-U9- 36592– 20 [P&P], Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

the one hand and a ten-fold increase of settlement expansion from 1977 to 1984 on the other.49 A crucial obstacle lay in the unresolved meaning of the term “full autonomy” (versus “self-rule”), which Menachem Begin himself had inserted into the treaty language.50 The journalist Jonathan Alter aptly references the “Talmudic debates” between American and Israeli negotiators “over the meaning of autonomy, self-rule, authority, withdrawal, refugees, devolution, and minor modifications.”51 As Peres had explained to his American labor friend, “The Government of Israel sees in Autonomy a long-term solution, in effect an alternative to a Palestinian state which could endanger Israel. The Egyptians see in it a starting point for a solution for the Palestinian entity with a possible inclination towards Jordan.”52 Through the end of the Carter years, the absence of both the PLO and the Jordanians (who were effectively marginalized as interlocutors at the 1974 Arab League summit) at the negotiating table rendered the “self-governing authority” a nonstarter, vitiating progress

18 0 LIBERAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

toward “full autonomy” and/or statehood, however defined.53 In addition, as the long-time Labor minister Abba Eban wistfully observed in 1992, rather than recognize its inherent state-building potential, the Camp David accords were “rejected vehemently by the Palestinian organizations and by most Arab states, opposed by the Soviet Union, ignored by the U.N. and received coolly by the European governments.”54 The Camp David accord, in short, had multiple executioners. Well before the Iran hostage crisis of November 1979 drained the final hopes from Carter’s reelection campaign, Israeli-Palestinian politics had already dealt a serious blow to the liberal political coalition in the United States. In August  1979, UN Ambassador Andrew Young was forced to resign when an unannounced visit with the PLO’s UN observer, Yehdi L. Terzi, was subsequently leaked. Breaking an official U.S. pledge to have no contact with the PLO until it recognized Israel, Young, who was about to assume the presidency of the Security Council, had reached out in hopes of putting off a Security Council vote on Palestinian self-determination. In ignoring diplomatic protocol, Young, already on a short leash given his extemporaneous style, had crossed the president’s peace policy even as he tried to extend it. Citing missed opportunities for negotiations that might have averted wars in Korea or Vietnam, Young pointed to the risks of cutting off communication: “it’s ridiculous policy not to talk to the PLO.”55 Even as the traditionally Democratic Jewish community stopped short of openly applauding Young’s exit, strains in an already-fraying Black-Jewish liberal alliance were immediate. Coming as it did within years of New York City’s racially tense Ocean Hill–Brownsville 1968 teachers’ strike, ongoing court cases over affirmative action, and the 1975 “Zionism-is-racism” resolution of the UN General Assembly, Young’s termination proved as unsettling to the Black community as did his diplomatic initiative to Jewish leaders.56 Richard Hatcher, the mayor of Gary, Indiana, for example, called the Young resignation “a benchmark”: no longer would African Americans automatically accept the U.S. proIsrael slant in the Middle East. More than two hundred Black leaders— including representatives from the NAACP, National Urban League, SCLC, PUSH, and the Congressional Black Caucus—met in New York City and sounded strong statements of protest. As Young affirmed at the time, “blacks tend to identify with Palestinians as oppressed people.” By

T H E Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE S OLUTI ON 1 81

mid-September, SCLC and PUSH leaders including Joseph Lowery, Walter Fauntroy, and Jesse Jackson had toured the Middle East, demanded PLO recognition, and met with Arafat. The storm would pass without changing U.S. policy, but it not only “damaged the Carter Administration’s credibility, domestically and internationally” (as one academic study concluded); it also further unraveled a key political bloc behind most postwar liberal initiatives.57 In the end, the disruptions in the Democratic base from Middle East issues only swelled a tide of bad news for the Carter administration. A miserable economy, coupled with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis, helped capsize the president’s reelection campaign. In a sweeping electoral victory, Ronald Reagan led the Republicans back into the White House as well as control of the U.S. Senate in 1980. Among the signs of Democratic disgruntlement, one figure stood out. In 1976, Jewish Americans, continuing their usual pattern, had lent Carter 70 percent of their vote; in 1980, he received only 45 percent of the Jewish vote (compared to Reagan’s 39 percent, with independent candidate John Anderson making up the gap), the lowest percentage of any modern Democratic presidential candidate.58

CASUALTIES OF CA MP DAV I D

The Middle East pot continued to boil, as did peacemaking attempts to move beyond the original Egypt-Israel agreement. Although Likud and Labor-Likud coalition governments fended off Reagan-era peace plans, a combination of international pressure, outward moderation from PLO leaders (needing a show of legitimacy following the disastrous support for Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf War), and rising frustration on the Palestinian streets (evident in the first intifada in 1987) helped set the table for what would, in the Clinton years, become the Oslo process. The very fact that aid to Israel ($3 billion/year) and Egypt ($2.1 billion) consumed more than a third of the U.S. foreign aid budget propelled the United States to continue to seek a resolution to its longest-running diplomatic headache.59 Beginning with the signing of an initial accord in 1993 between PLO chairman Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak

182LIBERAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

Rabin in Washington, DC, with President Bill Clinton as witness, “Oslo” (named for a prior backchannel communications link encouraged by the Norwegians) recognized the Palestinian Authority as an interim governing body in sections of the West Bank and Gaza, while negotiations intensified for a final settlement. Geared, as was the original Camp David plan, to proposed confidence-building measures across a five-year period, the Oslo process similarly foundered amid continuing mistrust, Israeli settlement expansion, and spreading Palestinian acts of violence. The assassination of Rabin by an Israeli ultranationalist in November 1995 at first seemed only to underscore the futility of the peace process itself.60 Still, the July 2000 meeting at Camp David involving Arafat, another peace-seeking Labor Prime Minister (Ehud Barak), and Clinton produced a “final” settlement offer, the so-called Clinton Parameters, with details never introduced before. A new, demilitarized but self-policed Palestinian state would include all of Gaza, 92 percent of the West Bank (a figure reportedly raised in a final December offer to 94 to 96 percent, based on a 1-to-3 percent land swap with Israel, including a Palestinian corridor from Gaza to the West Bank), seven or eight out of nine Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, and effective control of the sacred alAqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock. In addition to vacating settlements and withdrawing troops (in accordance with a specified, five-year transitional process) outside the now thickly populated corridor around Jerusalem, Israel would maintain three early-warning stations on the West Bank, installations that would also accommodate Palestinian observers. Finally, on the long-intractable refugee issue, Israel proposed monetary compensation to those who had lost property in 1948; resettlement, if desired, to the new Palestinian state; as well as a symbolic gesture including some family reunifications.61 Although the undoing of the Oslo process has, in the United States, generally been laid at the doorstep of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, there were clearly many on both sides who contributed to the continuing reversals. As Dennis Ross, the State Department’s Middle East coordinator and chief representative to the talks, would summarize afterward, “Transformation was required, but each side fell far short of what was required.” In addition to predictable haggling over boundary lines drawn on a map, Ross emphasized, both Israelis and Palestinians

T H E Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE S OLUTI ON 1 83

repeatedly played to their own political bases rather than reach across the aisle, as Sadat and Rabin had once done, to disarm the other. “Israelis,” he summarized, “would expand settlements, confiscate land, demolish houses, build bypass roads, and seize Jerusalem identity cards (effectively expelling Palestinians from their homes in Jerusalem). . . . Palestinians would hold back on security cooperation, engage in incitement to violence, promote grievances, and fail to fight terror acts against Israelis.” 62 Ross and Clinton were ultimately most frustrated with the Palestinian leader. Arafat, who had always vacillated regarding acceptance of the Oslo principles, and now not only rejected the last IsraeliAmerican offers but made no tangible counteroffer. Contemporary commentators, not surprisingly, offered differing explanations for what to would-be-peacemaking Americans appeared as Arafat’s irrational behavior. Some point to the centrality of the “dream of return” (a dream to be effectively buried in the agreement) among his fractious domestic and diasporic coalition. Likewise, the even more radical dream of recovering lost lands had never faded among Fatah militants like Faruq Qaddumi, who, citing the path of the Vietcong in Vietnam, openly advocated the continuation of talks with Israel while continuing a violent struggle against it. In addition, the officially secular PLO was now contending with a new Islamic-identified radicalism, represented since the mid-1980s, by the Iranian-funded Hamas and Islamic Jihad.63 Collapse of the Oslo Accords and the second Camp David talks had both immediate and long-term consequences. As American negotiators continued to search for a compromise agreement, a provocative visit from the hard-line opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount on September 28, 2000, set off protracted violence in the form of a second, more deadly intifada. Quickly, the political stage was also rearranged when Clinton was succeeded by a Republican president, George W. Bush, who lacked the same focus on the Middle East (until the events of September 11, 2001), while in Israel a belittled Barak lost heavily to a revived Likud bloc led by Sharon, who quickly removed Barak’s peace offer from the table. Construction of a massive West Bank “security barrier” dramatically reduced suicide bombings and most other social and economic contacts across the Green Line. Security fears in Israel, only enhanced by a new wave of post-9/11 Islamic radicalism, ultimately built a strong and so-far impregnable base for the expansionist Likud policies of Sharon

184LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

and then, since 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu. Looking back, both Palestinian and critical Israeli commentators have aptly invoked the concept of “prosthetic sovereignty” to describe the truncated authority that the Palestinian Authority has wielded across a few dozen cities and towns in the West Bank since the original Oslo accord.64 As the settlement population skyrocketed and roads and checkpoints criss-crossed the entire territory, “Palestine,” grieved the political scientist Mehran Kamrava in 2016, “lives on only in symbols and folklore and in memories proactively prolonged.” 65

WHAT- IF SCEN A R I O

In retrospect, it was easy for American liberal officials to blame their Middle East negotiating partners for failing to grasp the brass ring of compromise and cooperation when they had the chance. It was even easier when both sides, if perhaps at two different moments, bore the onus for the tragedy of failed results. In the first stage, the Americans most intimately involved in the process pointed mostly to the Israelis. Looking back on the frustrations that bedeviled his own efforts (and those of his negotiator successors Robert Strauss and Sol Linowitz) in the Carter years, Cyrus Vance concluded, “Israel’s retreat from ‘full autonomy’ and its unwillingness to declare a moratorium on the creation of new settlements struck an almost mortal blow to the hopes for success in the West Bank and Gaza.” 66 No Israeli leader, including Rabin, favored a total withdrawal from the West Bank, nor did any countenance an independent Palestinian state. In such circumstances, a Palestinian refusal at this stage to let down its guard on recognition (its negotiating ace in the hole) was perhaps not illogical. By Camp David 2000, however, the offending shoe appeared to be on the other foot. It was then that similar frustration led President Clinton—who had just watched George  W. Bush win the presidency in part by attacking the administration’s Middle East failures—to bang on the table and tell Arafat, “You have been here fourteen days and said ‘No’ to everything. These things have consequences; failure will mean the end of the peace process.” 67 Dennis Ross reached a similar conclusion: “Had Nelson Mandela been the Palestinian

T HE Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE S OLUTI ON 1 85

leader and not Yasir Arafat, I would be writing now how, notwithstanding the limitations of the Oslo process, Israelis and Palestinians had succeeded in reaching an ‘end of conflict’ agreement. In effect Oslo might not have failed if Arafat had been prepared to be a leader and not just a symbol.” 68 In retrospect, not one but two (if one and the same in major content) liberal presidential initiatives on the two-state solution failed and in both cases helped unseat the political parties both in Israel and the United States that supported them. Obviously, no mechanism ensured that American ideals for the peace process would impress themselves as priorities on the warring parties. Trusting to deep-seated Wilsonian reflexes stressing separate nations and self-determination for distinct peoples, American officials fundamentally approached the conflict as a problem of borders. A peace process aimed at building “two states for two nations” emphasized, both by definition and intent, a calendar of physical disengagement between Israelis and Palestinians (especially in the West Bank) and a careful and always contested enumeration of distinct national assets and resources. Rational and implicitly secular in its inspiration, the liberal-developmental model could not easily accommodate messianic impulses or emotionally grounded demands that regularly emanated from either side. In a kind of chicken-and-egg dilemma, it seemed, the parties could not agree on terms of separation until they stopped hating each other. Yet what if a peace agreement, by its nature, depended upon an ongoing, multipronged engagement between the parties rather than a distance between them? On issues of water, energy, economic development, and tourism, as well as respect for historic and sacred places, any outcome for regional welfare ultimately would require a confederation of resources and some degree of cooperation if not consensus. What if, assuming the inseparability of the two peoples as well as their conflicting claims to sovereignty, American liberal interlocutors had concentrated their energy on projects of Palestinian integration and engagement in a pluralistic Israeli society? Even assuming unswerving Israeli commitment to a “Jewish state,” might not some acceptable version of federation and/ or co-governance of resources and territories have been adumbrated at the conference table? Along such lines, as early as the 1980s, the prominent Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh called for all Palestinians to claim voting rights in Israel, initially as a backup (and then as a

18 6 LIBERAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

substitute) to the separationist, two-state thrust of the peace process.69 More recently, Nusseibeh has even suggested that Palestinians forgo “political” rights—at least temporarily ceding the principle of Israel as a Jewish state—for full “civil” rights as a way to regain a “moral lever” in a reopened peace process. “The vision of the peaceful and prosperous future,” he suggests, “may take any of several forms: one state, two states, confederation, federation involving one country or two or three, and so on.”70 If and when pursued, such a move would no doubt provoke rage and conflict from numerous quarters in both the Jewish and Arab worlds. There is no assurance that, by pushing such a “civil rights” rather than an independent-and-separate-nation agenda, the Americans could have coaxed Israelis and Palestinians into agreement. Yet the conflicts that would have ensued—and might still, were this path to be seriously advanced by the Palestinian leadership—might have proven less predictable yet more productive than what in fact transpired since Carter’s Camp David initiative. While anathema to most current sectors of the Israeli public, any attempt to imagine a more pluralistic federation or one-state solution for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence—that is, by untying self-determination from the formal borders of the nation-state—actually resuscitates political formulations deeply ensconced in pre-Mandate Zionist thinking. As the Israeli historian Dmitry Shumsky carefully documents, the idea of a multiethnic “state of all its nationalities” united early Zionist thinkers from Theodor Herzl to Vladimir Jabotinsky to David Ben-Gurion, at least through the 1930s. The latter’s vision, in Shumsky’s paraphrase, crucially anticipated Jews and Arabs living in close proximity: “just as Jews in non-Jewish states should enjoy all civil, individual, and national collective rights as Jews, so too should the future Jewish state place the principle of safeguarding the national collective rights of all its citizens at the foundation of its constitutional political organization.”71 If one does not expect to move the clock backward, neither perhaps should one relatively recent version of state sovereignty be naturalized as the one and only basis to protect the well-being of two affected peoples. The “mutual engagement” versus “separationist” model of a potential Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement highlights one further problem in past liberal policy initiatives coming from the United States. To identify the missing ingredient, we need only shift our gaze from the Middle East

T H E Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE S OLUTI ON 1 87

to southern Africa, as explored in the next chapter. With the notable exception of the case of the Palestinians, U.S. leaders throughout the Cold War attempted (covertly as well as overtly) to gain an ally on both sides of major regional (and especially developing-country) trouble spots. This was notably true, as we have seen, in the cultivation of anticommunist liberal allies like Costa Rica in Central America. It was also the case in post-Rhodesia Zimbabwe and South Africa, where American diplomats, aid, and even arms sometimes flowed to avowedly left-wing factions who were identified as future enablers of orderly rule. Only in Israel does it seem that U.S. governing circles refrained from cultivating, let alone instigating, a faction willing to do business with their favored regime (that is, Israel). Basic ignorance of and distance from Palestinian inner circles and factions likely narrowed the range of possible solutions; still, the bareness of the policy cupboard is striking. Absent an “indigenous” alternative, the United States also puzzlingly refrained from throwing its weight behind the oft-mentioned “Jordanian alternative,” which might have at least bought time for further territorial compromises. Despite its domestic preoccupation with Israeli security—or more likely because of it—Americans have long refrained from telling the Israelis what to do. A state whose creation and early survival effectively depended on international liberal forces (including the Soviet Union) has since proved immune to international pressure.72 Left alone, the status quo of an Israeli state enlarged by a militaryoccupied Palestine projected little hope of a happy future for either of the two peoples. As the material as well as imaginary basis of a viable second state is erased, the gap between the Jewish state and its original labor-Zionist ideals also widened to a chasm, leaving only what the commentator Padraig O’Malley has called the “two state delusion.” In such circumstances, the American-born Israeli academic Daniel Gordis may have accurately gauged the dominant mood of an increasingly conservative Israeli public toward any further gesture of reconciliation. “Arabs,” he writes, “can never be equal in a Jewish state. If the Jewish character of the country is to be safeguarded, Israel’s supporters will have to accept that Israel’s democracy can never be the model of pure liberal democracy that political life in the United States approximates.” In positing “a war that may never end” (except, as he suggests, through a mass “transfer” of the Arab population out of the country), Gordis

18 8 LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

challenged the principles of equality and tolerance central to an American liberal sensibility. The left-wing Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy equally expressed exhaustion with a peace process based on empty liberal rhetoric. Israel, he suggested in 2015, had never been committed to an independent Palestinian state: “For at least 25  years most Israeli statesmen have been lying, misleading the world, the Israelis and themselves until Netanyahu arose and told the truth. Netanyahu said . . . that if he were to be reelected, a Palestinian state would not be established on his watch. Plain and simple, loud and clear.” The old possibilities, in any case, may soon be erased by changes on the ground. As of June 2020, a newly formed government led jointly by Netanyahu and his chief national rival, Benny Gantz, was pushing steadily toward formal annexation of substantial sections of the West Bank.73 With the benefit of hindsight, we might speculate, liberals would have perhaps been better advised not to press the two-state solution upon unwilling parties but rather to pressure, as the dominant party, to apply “liberal” principles of human rights, in one configuration or another, to all who fell within its domain. Liberal support for Israel might then focus on how Jews and Palestinians can peacefully coexist, if not in federation, then at least in two closely coordinated, separate states.74 We should remember how Israel once appeared to embody a kind of left-liberal model for social-democratic development and what such social democracy Israeli-style might have meant for the country’s Arab inhabitants had both Histadrut and Labor Party leaders felt compelled to confront the issue. If only such a process had begun with more determined assimilation of the post-’48 Israeli-Arab population into the Israeli middle class and professional circles. Such a prescription challenges the conventional wisdom among many American and Israeli liberals inclined to blame the obduracy of Yasser Arafat alone for the lack of a peace agreement; they should remember that for some fifteen years before and after Arafat nothing much was achieved. For the moment, a bilateral Israeli-Palestinian solution of any kind seems off the table. The respected Israeli historian (and old friend of the author) Ron Robin, who for years has split his time between New York University and the University of Haifa, calls the confederated one-state idea, à la Yehoshua, as “unrealistic as the now moribund two-state solution.” Privy to an earlier draft of this chapter, he comments that

T H E Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE SOLUTION189

you are still spell-bound by a liberal order governed by secular law and an appeal to universal values that eclipse the ancient enmities of the region. You seem to forget the ever growing role of religion in dictating the politics of the region. The overwhelming presence of religion, and its unwavering rejection of compromise, suggests to me that a current resolution of the conflict in accordance with secular values is not possible.

As a historian, Robin finds comfort only in the longue durée. I see long term developments, often obscured by the white noise of politics. Before our very eyes, universities are creating an embrac[ing] and inclusive middle class, blind to the parochial divisions of Israeli society. The health care field, high tech fields, to mention the two obvious examples, are becoming more and more meritocratic, with growing numbers of Arabs among their ranks. Some time in the future, the new middle class will induce change, and a form of compromise in this region because they will share a subset of values. These values will hopefully eclipse the presence of Dogma on either side.75

No group, it is fair to say, was more flummoxed by the stalemate in Israel than the reliably liberal but heretofore fiercely pro-Israel American Jewish community itself. The first formal fissure appeared in 1996 with the creation of the left-wing Jewish Voice for Peace, which not only opposed the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip but also supported the boycott against Israel through the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. But disenchantment also spread through more mainstream channels. Breaking both with the Netanyahu government and its formidable AIPAC political lobbying machine, the J Street advocacy group formed in 2008 as a “political home of pro-Israel, propeace Americans” to champion the two-state solution in the face of continuing Israeli settlement expansion.76 Although J Street gained traction domestically during the Obama years, even providing something of a Jewish cover for the president’s nuclear deal with Iran, grassroots demands to condition U.S. aid to Israeli concessions toward the Palestinians were rejected by a more cautious leadership. As hopes for a two-state solution further receded in the face of both Israeli intransigence and

19 0 LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

Trump administration disdain toward the Palestinian Authority, some J Street types demanded a new approach to the Israel-Palestine problem. The former Haaretz and New Republic editor Peter Beinart notably broke with the two-state advocates altogether in 2020, calling for a one-state solution and declaring in a New York Times essay that “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State.”77 As for more general liberal American attitudes, it is not surprising that discord has measurably grown between the liberal creed and what liberal Americans see as the Israeli deed: the gap was underscored by a January 2018 PEW Research Center poll that found that only 27 percent of Democrats “sympathized more with Israeli than the Palestinians.”78 The break among those further to the left was even more severe. Michael Harrington’s DSA, according to one older stalwart, was long “the place to go on the left if you were pro-Israel.” Not anymore. By August 2017, even as its numbers swelled following the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign, the organization had also dramatically changed its stance on the Middle East conflict, overwhelmingly adopting a pro-BDS resolution against the “Zionist” state.79 Hope, in short, was running out among those once most committed to a negotiated two-state agreement as a source of peace, reconciliation, and development. In seeking to uphold American values as well as its own national interests in the Middle East, liberal advocates had long focused on a defense of Israeli borders. Agreement on borders, their frustrated efforts might have taught them, was never enough.

7 THE LONG ARM OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT South Africa, 1970–2000

T

oppling the South African apartheid regime was an international project that could claim many authors, including, in at least a strong supporting role, forces that originated in the United States. Certainly, immense, years-long sacrifices from the ranks of the African National Congress (ANC)—including Soviet-supplied armed struggle across several borders—proved necessary if ultimately insufficient ingredients of the liberation movement. Mass mobilizations and strikes by trade unionists, ultimately consolidated in the Congress of South African Trade Unionists (COSATU) in 1985, contributed to the struggle inside the country. All the while, armies of the frontline states across southern Africa reshaped the battlefront in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia, and Angola. Subsequent scholarship also makes clear that the extended deployment of Cuban troops and civilian volunteers to Angola transformed the regional geopolitical calculus, challenging the wall of security around the apartheid regime.1 Historians generally agree, however, that white rule in South Africa (as distinguished from Zimbabwe, the former Portuguese colonies, and Namibia) was ultimately toppled less by direct force than by political and economic pressures imposed by an increasingly exasperated international community. Various forms of embargo and sanctions on South African trade, what we might slyly label a policy of “constructive disengagement,” had taken effect as early as the 1960s, but such measures were

192LIBERAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

dramatically ratcheted up in the 1980s. It was then that a transnational social movement against apartheid made its mark—directly confronting a Reagan administration that had yoked itself to a go-slow policy of “constructive engagement”—with the passage of the U.S. Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 (CAAA).2 Drastically limiting trade and strategic military contacts and accelerating a parallel process of international business and banking divestment from the regime, the CAAA catalyzed a climate of delegitimacy that aided the replacement of the hard-line Nationalist Party leader P. W. Botha with the more moderate F. W. de Klerk, who was looking for an exit strategy. Swiftly thereafter came the unbanning of the ANC and Nelson Mandela’s release from prison on February 11, 1990, after twenty-seven years’ captivity. This culminated in his election as president in the country’s first truly democratic elections in 1994. Although it drew on multiple actors with somewhat divergent agendas, U.S. antiapartheid politics, as I argue here, was fundamentally a “liberal” project, projecting the anticolonialist ethos of the New Deal and Popular Front into a new era and then uniting both liberation-minded leftists and more moderately inclined reformers under a common banner. As such, the CAAA might also be taken as a high-water mark of liberal postwar foreign policy.3 All the more noteworthy, then, that the leaders of this liberal success during a period of general conservative domestic political dominance were African Americans. Working in close proximity and cooperation, the Congressional Black Caucus and the grassroots activists associated with the TransAfrica Forum claimed justifiable credit for this discrete but significant political victory. We train our attention here on the key elements that converged in an exceptional moment of the mid-1980s. Why was South Africa catapulted into the front rank of American activist concerns? And on what historical foundation did the South African campaign build? What was distinctive about the strategy and tactics of TransAfrica under its organizational director, Randall Robinson? How did the aims of what began as a left-wing political demand ultimately become an American consensus, drawing in key Republican congressional leaders as well as a near-unanimous Democratic rank and file? Finally, why, after such meteoric legislative success, did the movement so quickly contract, leaving its organizational bulwark in tatters and its erstwhile leader fulminating in angry self-exile? That

T H E LONG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T1 93

there has been no second act for the antiapartheid movement or, more generally, for a progressive-liberal politics toward the African continent (or, for that matter, the Third World in general) is ultimately a telling sign of the limits of international mobilization in the age of neoliberalism.

RALLYIN G FOR A FRICAN IN DEP EN DEN C E

However initially counterintuitive, the figure of Kwame Nkrumah proves a useful starting point for understanding the quickening of American interest in events in southern Africa. In 1957, Nkrumah became the prime minister of Ghana, when, in a peaceful transition, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain its independence from European colonization. But Nkrumah was also a radical pan-Africanist who embodied a larger all-Africa struggle against the racism, colonialism, and imperialism emanating from the Western powers. With extended stays in both the United States and London dating to his 1935 enrollment at Lincoln College in Philadelphia, Nkrumah had consumed the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and the eclectic Marxist George Padmore. Elements of Black internationalism had circulated for years, notably in the declarations of the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 and, even more pointedly, at the First Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919. Du Bois was a prominent presence at both. The social movements of the 1930s and the scrambling of world power during World War II had brought the issues to the fore. In 1945, Nkrumah attended the pathbreaking Pan-African Congress in Manchester, which explicitly tied the aspirations of African Americans to the “emancipation of all African peoples” and extended its purview even further with a “Hands Off Vietnam!” demand.4 With close ties to the Council on African Affairs, the communist-led organization chartered by Paul Robeson, Du Bois, and others in 1937, Nkrumah sidestepped the organization’s precipitous downfall after a bitter internal split combined with governmental harassment beginning in 1948.5 His own unswerving commitments were evident in the All-African People’s Conference he would host in Accra in

19 4LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

1958. Citing contemporary events in Algeria, the conference agreed that violence was sometimes justified in the fight against colonialism.6 Notwithstanding its revolutionary fervor, Ghana’s independence campaign, coming as it did against the backdrop of the Cold War, was hailed by Western leaders as a model of democratic development and even as a test case for weaning Third World revolutionaries from the temptations of Soviet communism. The Ghanaian leader’s diplomatic importance soon paid off in the magnificent Volta River Hydroelectric Dam, built at President Eisenhower’s personal request by Kaiser Aluminum’s Henry Kaiser.7 Aside from direct grants and technical aid in the form of advisers (including, in the early 1960s, the Peace Corps) from the U.S. government, Ghana and other new states also received considerable attention from the Western trade union movement. Such aid came from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, based in Brussels, as well as the AFL-CIO, which, beginning in the colonial era, had developed ties with African trade unionists like Ghana’s John Tettagah and Tom Mboya from Kenya. The Israeli trade union arm, Histadrut, also contributed substantially to the coordinated program for noncommunist, social-democratic development with its Afro-Asian Institute for Cooperative and Labour Studies, opened in Tel Aviv in 1960.8 In short, the extended campaign for the decolonization of the rest of the continent took off in Ghana with support of U.S advocates ranging from left-wing activists to conservative moderates. Not by chance did the guest list at the country’s independence inauguration include Vice President Richard Nixon, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the UN mediator Ralph Bunche, the labor leader A. Philip Randolph, and the Jamaican social democrat and future prime minister Norman Manley.

KING, DIGGS, A N D EA R LY A N TIA PA RTHEID ACT I V I SM

King’s presence suggests the ways that the mainstream civil rights movement and associated churches also identified with the human rights and welfare of the African peoples. Fresh from the successful Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, King pledged assistance to the newly formed

THE LONG ARM OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT195

American Committee on Africa (ACOA), led by the Congress of Racial Equality’s (CORE) cofounder, George  M. Houser, who, in association with other pacifists and socialists like Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, and Norman Thomas, called for a Gandhian campaign of nonviolent resistance against the apartheid regime. In 1957, for example, in response to a request from the South African author Alan Paton to aid 160 of his countrymen charged with treason for advocating Black rights, a veritable Who’s Who of liberal white Americans joined Randolph and Morehouse College president Benjamin Mays as sponsors of the South Africa Defense Fund. Their numbers included Eleanor Roosevelt, Episcopal Bishop James Pike, the author Lewis Mumford, editor Norman Cousins, AFL-CIO secretary treasurer James B. Carey, social gospel icon Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, and Wall Street reform lawyer Lloyd Garrison.9 Although never allowed to visit South Africa, King regularly stressed the similarities in the obstacles facing civil rights activists in southern Africa and the American South, as did early ANC leaders like Albert Luthuli and Oliver Tambo. In the face of the continuing indifference displayed by Western governments, including the Eisenhower administration, 123 prominent world citizens—among them King and Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Buber, Pablo Casals, and the Tanganyikan leader Julius Nyerere—in what would become an annual tradition, proclaimed December 10, 1957, Human Rights Day and a Day of Protest. The March 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, which took the lives of sixtynine peaceful protestors demonstrating against the pass laws, initiated a new phase in the antiapartheid campaign. Both the ANC and the PanAfrican Congress went underground and adopted armed resistance (occasioning the 1962 arrest and life sentence of Nelson Mandela), while ACOA and allied groups in the United States called for boycotts, divestment, and renewed diplomatic pressure on the regime. A newly formed American Negro Leadership Conference in 1962 called in vain for a face-to-face meeting with President Kennedy to advance a stronger presence for Blacks within professional foreign policy circles and a complete shutoff of arms to the South African government. While never openly espousing violence, neither King nor the NAACP condemned the turn inside South Africa toward sabotage, and King met privately with Adelaide Tambo and other ANC representatives.10 On his

19 6 LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

way to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace in Oslo in 1964, King pointedly stopped in London to give an “Address on South African Independence,” at which he honored previous Nobel winner Luthuli. On Human Rights Day a year later, accompanied by the freedom songs of Pete Seeger and Miriam Makeba, King called for a coordinated international boycott of South Africa. But too few, either in the United States or elsewhere in the West, were listening.11 Alongside King and Bunche, likely the most influential African American participant in the festivities in Accra in 1957 was the Michigan congressman Charles Diggs. In the long run, Diggs, even more than King, proved the link from early protest to concrete action. In 1951, Diggs had effectively inherited the statehouse seat of his father, Charles Diggs  Sr., a funeral home director and Detroit neighbor of Coleman Young, after Diggs Sr. had been convicted and imprisoned for accepting a bribe.12 Three years later, at age thirty-two, Diggs  Jr. won election to U.S. Congress, joining Chicago’s William Dawson and New York City’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. as the only Black members of the House of Representatives. For Diggs, the trip to Accra was transformative. He returned to accept a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and, in keeping with the demands of the All-African Peoples Conference, for which he returned to Accra in 1958, he regularly demanded an end to apartheid.13 Diggs’s position was soon buttressed by President Kennedy’s foreign policy, which pushed for a rapprochement with Ghana and other newly liberated African states. Kennedy mentioned Africa frequently during his 1960 presidential campaign, a point that resonated both with his announced support for the United Nations’ Decade of Development and as a way to curry favor with Black voters without committing to a specific civil rights agenda at home.14 As Kennedy’s undersecretary of African affairs, G. Mennen (“Soapy”) Williams advocated for friendly relations with new African states who would willingly remain neutral (or “nonaligned”) in the Cold War and for tougher policies on white supremacist regimes. Although unwilling to interrupt parallel CIA, Belgian, and separatist Katangese plans for the seizure (and ultimate murder) of the Nkrumah ally Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, the Kennedy administration did succeed in blocking subsequent Katangese separatism, respecting African nationalism by following UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson’s admonition, at least in principle, to “keep the Cold War out of

T H E LO NG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T1 97

the Congo by keeping the UN in the Congo.”15 Playing off foreign policy and domestic political pressures, Kennedy adopted an arms embargo on South Africa in the shadow of the Birmingham, Alabama, bombing that same year.16 Through Williams, he also led a partially successful fight for sanctions against the Ian Smith regime in Rhodesia. The United States joined Britain in an economic boycott, even as the white supremacist regime, with help from U.S. military and business interests, soon found ways around it. For years, however, a larger political push against apartheid was deferred, as the lonely voices of Diggs and a few others were drowned out by the weight of realpolitik. Kennedy, for example, happily courted African leaders like Nkrumah, Guinea’s Sekou Touré, and Tanganyika’s Julius Nyerere (who welcomed early Peace Corps volunteers as well as famine relief) but still sharply limited the maneuvering room of Undersecretary Williams and Ambassador Stevenson when it came to what the latter called points of “self-determination and human rights” in southern Africa. The historian and activist William Minter describes a “bifurcated” policy that in the 1960s came to define the U.S. relations toward southern Africa: While abstaining from any direct support for apartheid, the United States cooperated in all other fields, including the sale of a nuclear reactor and Sidewinder air-to-air missiles to South Africa for “defense” purposes. Similarly, for influential figures like General Maxwell Taylor and the Texas senator John Tower, a military base in the Azores took precedence over any action against the Portuguese colonial overlords. Rather than battle Congress on African aid and a likely showdown over South Africa, Kennedy placed his outermost foreign policy bet on a test-ban treaty with the Soviets.17 Preoccupied with Southeast Asia and big-power politics, President Johnson showed even less interest in Africa (effectively accepting the jailing of Mandela in 1964 as an internal matter), while Kissinger-Nixon foreign policy entirely backed off pressuring the white minority regimes. A secret 1969 National Security Council memorandum concluded that force applied by nationalist groups “is not an appropriate means to bring about constructive change in southern Africa.” Even holdover sanctions on white Rhodesia dating to the mid-1960s were undermined by the 1971 Byrd Amendment, exempting militarily prized chrome from any boycott.18

19 8LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

AN ANTIAPARTHEID MOV EMEN T F ROM THE GROUND U P

Absent diplomatic or legislative progress, antiapartheid initiatives during the 1960s shifted to civil society institutions and grassroots organizing, where the tactics of divestment originated. Drawing on social movements already trained on racism and militarism, organizations like the SNCC and Students for a Democratic Society joined with others, especially liberal religious groups, who had already enlisted in the battle against apartheid. As early as 1963, the United Methodists and United Church of Christ, for example, had called for civil rights–style boycotts of products linked to South Africa. The relative paucity of South African exports to the United States, however, soon convinced ACOA to switch the campaign focus to the international banks more central to the South African economy. Effectively proclaiming the new strategy of divestment, in March 1965 SDS and the National Student Christian Federation picketed Wall Street’s Chase Manhattan Bank to demand that it withdraw its loans to South Africa. Across the next decade, church activists and campus groups took the lead in demanding that their own institutions separate their investments from the taint of apartheid.19 However momentarily inspiring, grassroots efforts went only so far in effecting public policy. The case of the South African singer Miriam Makeba offers something of a window into the growing gap between early, liberal hopes for change and the daily grind of Cold War foreign policy. Recruited to sing in the United States by the singer Harry Belafonte in 1959, she found herself and her songs banned from her native land after Sharpeville in 1960 yet welcome in mainstream American entertainment circles, including JFK’s birthday gala at Madison Square Garden in 1962. By 1968, both Makeba and her new husband, the former SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael, had moved leftward politically and, increasingly embittered with American politics, accepted an invitation from Guinean president Sekou Touré to move to Conakry.20 Overtaken by public preoccupation with Vietnam at the end of the 1960s, progress in the international struggle against apartheid reignited in the next decade. A new geopolitical factor on the African continent was the emergence of armed frontline states, as white rule crumbled both in the former British colony of Rhodesia (with an independent

T H E LONG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T1 99

Zimbabwe emergent in 1980) and, following the 1974 “Colonel’s Coup” against the Portuguese dictatorship, in the Portuguese empire of Angola and Mozambique. As tensions ratcheted up along South Africa’s borders, Western sympathizers rushed to support new states that were themselves still locked in intense internal conflict among contending intertribal and faction-ridden liberation armies.21 A changing political landscape on the home front contributed to the revolt against the foreign policy status quo. By the early 1970s, Vietnam-induced revulsion against Cold War justifications for U.S. actions abroad had helped a “new liberal” alliance of antiwar youth and Black Power constituencies coalesce. Within the African American community, a new bridgehead of influence—connecting younger activists to their more “respectable” elders—came into being in the Diggs-led Congressional Black Caucus. Organized in 1971 in direct response to President Nixon’s refusal to meet with a Black congressional delegation, the CBC’s numbers had grown from four to thirteen members by 1971 and already provided a national platform for the demands of Boston-area Black workers who had challenged the Polaroid Corporation for supplying the South African government with the photographic equipment for the creation of passbooks used to control the Black population. Soon, the newly elected Oakland congressman Ron Dellums served Diggs as an unofficial conduit to the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement, and the CBC followed up with a sanctions bill stopping all investment and trade with South Africa that its members would annually submit to Congress for the next fifteen years.22 Another forum for the assertion of Black Power came in the first National Black Political Convention, jointly convened by the CBC and Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, in March  1972. Prominent from the start of the convention was the challenge to apartheid. The delegates expressed enthusiasm for the tennis star Arthur Ashe’s boycott of South African matches, even as internal division surfaced as to whether to link Palestinian rights openly to the antiapartheid cause (a subject that was ultimately deferred).23 Among other political centers, Washington, DC, manifested the new spirit of radical Black engagement. The Drum and Spear Bookstore, for example, opened less than two months after King’s assassination in the heart of a neighborhood that had just erupted in rioting. Founded by  young writer-activists like the former SNCC workers Charles  E.

20 0 LIBERAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

(“Charlie”) Cobb and Judy Richardson, the store served as a political and cultural center. Like many of his politicized peers, Cobb headed for Tanzania in 1970, the country whose aspirations toward “African socialism” under Julius Nyerere had replaced Ghana as the hub of radical Black internationalism, and returned to Washington determined to contribute to the cause. First, at Howard University’s WHUR, he offered regular reports on Africa, while working alongside the station’s news director Kojo Nnamdi, a Guyanese native who, following a stint with the Black Panthers, had assumed as an on-air surname the first name of Nigeria’s first president, Nnamdi Azikiwe. Then, together with several other DCbased SNCC veterans and under the informal tutelage of the eclectic Trinidadian Marxist  C. L. R. James, Cobb helped organize the Sixth Pan-African Congress (PAC) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1974. A mere two years later, Cobb initiated National Public Radio’s first regular coverage of African affairs.24 Meanwhile, his fellow SNCC worker and bookstore organizer Courtland Cox would serve the so-called Sixth PAC as secretary-general, before joining Mayor Marion Barry’s municipal cabinet during the 1980s.25 Among other bookstore organizers were the married Howard graduate students Marvin Holloway, who would later work as an analyst at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, and Anne Forrester Holloway, who would continue her interest in southern Africa as an aide to Congressman Andrew Young and later serve as U.S. ambassador to Mali.26 In short, even before they could point to major changes in the country’s foreign policy, a network of Black political activists with a keen interest in African—and especially southern African—matters was taking shape in the nation’s capital. For many Americans, Black and white, mention of South Africa after June 16, 1976, became synonymous with another word: Soweto. Soweto was the Johannesburg township where police attacked unarmed schoolchildren protesting the designation of Afrikaans as the newly required language of instruction. More than 175 were killed in the subsequent rioting. Shocked and angry responses echoed around the world. Three hundred demonstrators were arrested at Stanford University alone. In a string of actions, Hampshire College in western Massachusetts became the first institution of higher learning to take concrete divestment action. Leo Robinson, leader of Local 10 of the Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in Oakland, California, first introduced a local boycott

THE LONG ARM OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT201

resolution. Next, the neighboring city of Berkeley first legislated divestment from South Africa–linked banks. And then the state of Wisconsin followed in May 1977 by withdrawing more than $11 million from companies involved in South Africa.27 In Washington, DC, the voice of protest after Soweto was enhanced by the arrival of WPFW, Pacifica Radio’s first minority-controlled station, in 1977. Among its leading spirits was its program director, Denise Oliver-Velez, a former New York Young Lords and Black Panther activist; and Askia Muhammad, a former Nation of Islam journalist who regularly celebrated African Liberation Day on his popular “Jazz and Justice” Tuesday morning show.28 Civic responses to the South African crisis after the Soweto massacre took several forms. Most conspicuous, at least in the popular media, were the so-called Sullivan Principles. In 1977, drawing on his prior experience in advancing the integration of U.S. industrial corporations, the Philadelphia Baptist minister Leon H. Sullivan followed up a lonely protest at a General Motors stockholders meeting with a coordinated code-of-conduct campaign for equal pay and fair employment practices among U.S. firms doing business in South Africa. Even as major players like GM and Coca-Cola joined the campaign, however, results proved decidedly mixed. In affecting only a tiny portion of the South African workforce, they did nothing by themselves to change political structures and, as such, came under increasing criticism from a battery of activist groups.29 Divestment strategies so far had proved equally wanting. University-centered campaigns began after Soweto and spiked again after the murder of the Black Consciousness movement leader Steve Biko in 1977. Such efforts redirected only $50 million in stock over four years out of a country with an estimated $100 billion annual GDP.30 Despite widespread student protests, most universities initially held firm against divestiture. “What we cannot do,” said Williams College trustees in a typical rejoinder, “is jeopardize the financial strengths of the college.”31 But Soweto quickened the pace of antiapartheid community organizing. This is evident in the 1978 founding of the DC-based Southern Africa Support Project (SASP), a women-centered education and activist network that would ultimately prove pivotal in steering the grassroots campaign. Starting in the mid-1970s as a Marxist reading group and then taking inspiration from Africa-centered films like Robert Van Lierop’s 1972 A Luta Continua and the haunting “Johannesburg” lyrics on the

202LIBERAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

FIGURE 7.1  Southern Africa Support Project demonstration, likely organized by Cecilie Counts, against “constructive engagement,” outside South African embassy in Washington, DC (1981?).

Source: Adwoa Dunn-Mouton Collection, African Activist Archive, Michigan State University, used with permission of photographer.

1975 album From South Africa to South Carolina by Gil Scott-Heron (who taught for several years at the District’s Federal City College), SASP was determined to put southern African issues squarely on the political agenda in the nation’s capital. Consider the trajectory of two SASP stalwarts, Cecelie Counts and Sylvia Hill. Counts had grown up under the influence of her grandmother in a politically charged household in East Orange, New Jersey. She remembers early talk of the Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, condemnations of U.S. imperialism, and identifying with the little girls her own age who were killed in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. Soon she was attending protest rallies against racism, the Vietnam War, and Portuguese control of its African colonies. Political events featuring the New Jersey native Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) made a strong impression on her. As early as high school, she was protesting the dearth of Black

T H E LO NG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T203

and African history in her textbooks. For college, she went to Stanford, but her political commitments led her to quickly transfer to Howard. Her and her friends’ politics ran, as she recalls, “beyond liberal.” Ranging from self-designated communists to Black nationalists, they were “radicals,” united in opposition to the thrust of U.S. foreign policy and equally opposed to the range of U.S.-backed dictators from Augusto Pinochet in Chile to the shah of Iran to Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. The DC community that swallowed up Counts was “filled with solidarity.” She recalls visits from Nyerere and Guinea’s Sekou Touré. As part of a thriving activist community, Howard students engaged with African issues through the Paul Robeson Society, while slightly older activists congregated in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. In a heady and intense time, “we just assumed that our phones were tapped,” remembers Counts.32 The young activists readily identified with the radicalism of the ANC, which, as early as its 1955 Freedom Charter, had staked the movement’s future not only to multiracialism and equal rights but to a “share the wealth” platform and land redistribution.33 A few years before Counts, Sylvia Hill had also arrived in DC as a committed young activist. Raised in Jacksonville, Florida, she had first plunged into protest politics at Florida A&M before transferring to Howard and completing a degree in experimental psychology. There she encountered Arthur Pearl, a white radical intellectual and labor activist with a considerable following in critical-education circles. She soon followed Pearl to the University of Oregon’s graduate program in education, where she met her future husband, James Hill, a former SNCC activist. Together they read the liberation pedagogy of Paulo Freire, revolutionary texts from Amical Cabral and Frantz Fanon, as well as Pearl’s own study, Careers for the Poor, on inner-city employment strategies for the War on Poverty.34 A stint at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, followed, during which came the call, communicated from Kwame Nkrumah to a mutual Bermudan friend, to come to Dar es Salaam for the Sixth Pan-African Congress. Sylvia worked closely there with C. L. R. James and his fellow Trinidadian Courtland Cox, and she left Africa with a determination to help movements like Frelimo and the ANC dismantle the systems of colonialism and apartheid.35 Starting with ambitions to build a solidarity network, the practical demands of raising medical supplies quickly convinced her that local organization was

20 4LIBERAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

paramount. Unlike other former comrades like Marion Barry, who had turned to urban politics, she felt that U.S. race relations (and more broadly political power) would not change “until the international order changed,” and to this end she took a teaching position at the Washington Technical Institute (since merged into University of the District of Columbia), with a focus on liberation movements and anticolonialist theory. The SASP contingent set up photo displays on southern African struggles in public parks, organized radiothons on Pacifica and Howard University stations against apartheid, participated in the Boycott Gulf movement against Portuguese control of Angolan oil reserves, and held vigils outside both the South African embassy and the IMF for its late 1970s bank loans to white Rhodesia. Internally, the group debated just how to define the system they were up against: “Was it racism, slavery, imperialism, just what was it?”36 But slowly the network swelled. Their study group met on Sundays in different apartments to discuss everything from classical Marxian texts to Third World socialist and Eurocommunist analyses of the Egyptian-French scholar Samir Amin. Those attending included not only the hardcore activists but professionals like Gay McDougall, director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights; select congressional staffers; and even business and State Department types whose participation Counts likened to a “Clark Kent and Superman” routine.37

CO NGRESSIONAL BL ACK C AUC US A N D THE RISE OF TRANSA FR I C A

By the beginning of the 1980s, four organizations were helping stir the pot of popular agitation. The Washington Office on Africa, established in 1972, acted as a coordinating center for both church and labor union advocacy. The Southern Africa program of American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), with a legacy of activism regarding peace and overseas relief efforts responded directly to the dramatic, nonviolent protests of the Lesotho (and later Johannesburg) bishop Desmond Tutu. With the widest range of activity on the national level, New York–based ACOA

T H E LONG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T205

FIGURE 7.2  TransAfrica leader Randall Robinson with Archbishop Desmond Tutu at the South African embassy demonstration, December 1984.

Source: African Activist Archive, Michigan State University, photograph by Rick Reinhard, used by permission of photographer.

and its affiliated Africa Fund effectively oversaw targeting strategies for the national boycott and disinvestment campaigns.38 Salih Booker, for example, became involved in the anti-apartheid movement after Soweto while a student at Wesleyan University. After inviting Chicago ACOA organizer Prexy Nesbitt to speak on campus, he collaborated with Nesbitt during a summer internship, documenting U.S.-South African economic ties for a report to the Wesleyan Board of Trustees in support of divestment.39 Then came the final organization to have an effect on the antiapartheid scene by the late 1970s, turning its full-time attention to legislative action affecting U.S. foreign policy. Such efforts had started earlier. Following the Lisbon coup in 1974, for example, the liberal senators John Tunney (MA) and Joseph Clark (PA) successfully attached amendments to the administration’s aid packages, blocking military assistance to the

20 6 LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

warring factions in Angola. Promotion of nonintervention in the Black African states and pressure on the white-minority regimes gained further support within the Carter administration, especially from Secretary of State Vance and UN Ambassador Young. Together, a political debt to the southern Black electorate, a heartfelt focus on “human rights,” and an attempt to win allies from the huge bloc of African states (who made up almost one-third of the UN General Assembly) stirred a Carter policy that first tightened sanctions on the white Rhodesian government (including repeal of the Byrd Amendment). Then, with British help, Ian Smith was driven into the Lancaster House agreement, setting the stage for multiracial democratic elections in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe.40 In the same period, in 1980, Diggs was forced to retire from the House of Representatives after a federal conviction for mail fraud in relation to salary kickbacks from his office staff. The Oakland congressman Ron Dellums, who had emerged from Berkeley’s radical political scene and served as the only openly declared socialist member of Congress, stepped forward to lead the sanctions fight.41 That same year, Salih Booker moved to DC to join the small staff at a new organization called TransAfrica (TA), an all-Black effort with personal links to the CBC. As both an independent advocacy organization and unofficial lobbying arm of the CBC, TA forged a new path as the one African American– run foreign policy shop in Washington. The organization formed after September  1976, emerging out of a two-day conference on Rhodesia called by Diggs and Andrew Young. The conference led both to a manifesto on southern Africa drafted by a team of Black political scientists headed by Ronald Walters and plans for a long-term policy arm for Africa and the Caribbean. Diggs’s aide Randall Robinson was named executive director, and Richard Hatcher, mayor of Gary, Indiana, became first chairman of the board. TA drew quick endorsement from many within the nation’s Black political establishment, a set of connections facilitated by Randall’s older brother Max, who in 1978 had become the nation’s first Black co-anchor on ABC’s World News Tonight. Those gathered at Max’s house for TA’s first meeting included Arthur Ashe, U.S. Treasurer Azie Morton, the NAACP leader Benjamin Hooks, the Urban League’s Vernon Jordan, and Delta Sigma Theta sorority president Thelma Daly. Randall Robinson quickly set TA on a busy course. Only months after its creation, he organized a fact-finding trip to Lesotho for

T H E LONG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T207

nine national legislators—including seven CBC members, one Republican (Illinois representative and prospective GOP presidential candidate John Anderson), and one senator, Joseph Biden, from Delaware. To further burnish its public presence, TA in 1981 named Anne Forrester Holloway, who had just returned from Mali, to direct TransAfrica Forum (TAF), its educational and fundraising arm.42 From the beginning of his tenure, Robinson cut a commanding figure. The son of a former football star and beloved coach, he grew up in a virtually all-Black environment in Richmond, Virginia, until serving in Vietnam, where only a medical discharge likely spared him the fate of half of a battalion killed in battle in the Ia Drung Valley. Returning home and following in his father’s footsteps, Randall graduated from Virginia Union University, then proceeded to Harvard Law School, where he was exposed to new ideas and to new racially inspired hurts he never forgot. “The more I read, the more excited and angry I had become,” he would later write of his discovery of the U.S. role in equipping the Duvalier regime in Haiti, imposing Mobutu on Zaire, and the general protection of Portuguese rule and the apartheid regime in southern Africa. As a community activist and legal assistance advocate in Boston in 1972, he took the lead in the Boycott Gulf movement, a commitment that culminated in his arrest in the Harvard president’s office but also put him in touch with Diggs and other influential Black Congressmen, such as Louis Stokes from Cleveland and William Clay from St. Louis. By the mid-1970s, he was running Diggs’s Washington office.43 Ideologically, Randall Robinson and the TA organization occupied the radical, rhetorically exuberant flank of the reformist left-liberalism of its times. Its mixed core of activists, former activists, and government officials spanned a divide that had often bitterly separated self-styled movement “revolutionaries” from Democratic Party “reformers” since the late 1960s. Young TA and SASP activists, for example, openly supported Communist Party–linked liberation movements such as SWAPO, ZANU, ZAPU, MPLA, and FRELIMO, as well as the ANC. In 1980, Salih Booker traveled with Randall Robinson to Cuba. While there, they visited the Isle of Youth, where the Cuban government was supporting schools for future militants from Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua.44

20 8LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

As an offspring of the progressive-liberal Congressional Black Caucus, TA carefully nourished its respectable reputation and disavowed any official Marxist leanings of its own. Openly identifying with democratic socialists like Jamaica’s Michael Manley and Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Robinson stepped gingerly around any direct association with out-and-out communists. Although it would not be until years later that he categorically dismissed communism as an economic system that “has not worked, does not work, and likely will never work,” Robinson was always concerned as an activist with the use in the United States of anticommunism as a free-swinging cudgel against democratic popular movements. “What politically powerful and wealthy corporate Americans have never tolerated easily,” he wrote, “are the ‘communists’ who are really not communists at all. . . . At one time or another Nelson Mandela, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and Michael Manley . . . were called communists by American political and business leaders. None ever was.” 45 TransAfrica began to publish a policy quarterly in 1983 called the TransAfrica Forum. It well reflected the organization’s larger left-liberal, ecumenical identity. An annual foreign policy conference sponsored by the journal in the 1980s, for example, juxtaposed presentations from Ronald Walters, Gary Hart, Michael Manley, and Edward M. Kennnedy.46 The Ghanaian emigrant Nii Akuetteh, who joined the TA brain trust as a research fellow for TransAfrica Forum in 1983, assigns his longtime mentor to a more transnational political orientation. In Akuetteh’s eyes, Robinson joined company with Akuetteh’s own “ideological father” and political hero, Kwame Nkrumah, as a spiritual Pan-Africanist. Recalling his TA years following the man who “wrote fast and beautifully” and spoke with compelling eloquence, Akuetteh always a detected “panAfrican angle” as “sort of a sub-strata” in Robinson’s outlook. The interests of a united Africa (and, by extension, the African diaspora in the Caribbean), by this framework, subsumed left-right and even East-West differences in their urgency. Much of the Cold War rhetoric, insisted Akuetteh, appeared to most TA activists as a “lot of name-calling.” Their proud association with African and diaspora socialist leaders like Nyerere in Tanzania and Haiti’s Aristide made them, in Akuetteh’s reckoning, “radicals in a broad sense.” Taking the side of African independence leaders of various political stripes while downplaying both the ideological polarities imposed by the Cold War and the antidemocratic excesses

T H E LO NG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T209

of the leaders themselves, TA focused on the immediate fight against apartheid. Akuetteh credits his own basic pan-Africanist position to Nkrumah’s inspiration: While Africa represents 1.2 billion people, India similarly 1.2 billion people, and China 1.4 billion, the second two describe single powers, while Africa is divided into fifty-five states. The lesson? “Africans must unite or perish.” 47 From the beginning, TA and likeminded antiapartheid activists conceived themselves as part of an international anti-imperialist struggle. Intended to educate and agitate African Americans about a wide range of world issues affecting them and other Black people around the world, the organization established a broad agenda. Warning against a sole focus on “the elimination of Apartheid— something dangerously close to the American version of the elimination of segregation,” the 1977 Walters manifesto pointed to the larger thrust of region’s “liberation movements”: The point they make is that the problem is who will govern, not civil rights or the nature of the minor adjustments made by the existing governing group, and this point moves beyond the problem of Apartheid to the legitimacy of the political, economic structures of the state. It is precisely here, in its conception of the problem of South Africa that the crucible of U.S. foreign policy lies, and strangely enough, where it has always been, when the interest of white, Western-oriented, capitalist nations conflicted with those of brown or black or yellow majorities.48

Even as they painted rhetorically with a broad ideological brush, Robinson and other movement leaders decided that immediate results mattered more. There was a manifest need, they formally counseled, “to operationalize those policies which have maximum ability to leverage change in the short run.” 49 As the only Black group with a foreign policy focus, TA’s mission was to discover a way to revive the spirit and tactics of the civil rights movement of two decades previous. Like MLK and other earlier civil rights leaders, Robinson would try to tap the liberal idealism that defined the American Dream: reaching for the broadest coalition possible, he would define the antiapartheid ranks as open to “anyone who believes in what our country is supposed to be about.”50 Echoing ANC strategy, TA spelled out its main political demand for a

210 LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

“withdrawal” of all economic, military, technological, scientific, and political engagement with the white-minority regimes, even while acknowledging the sacrifices and hardship that such a withdrawal would inevitably impose on the region’s Black population. Finally, in a gesture to an alternative future, it urged massive and immediate assistance for newly independent states and the refugees and war casualties who increasingly burdened them.51 Even as the antiapartheid cause gained strength from the surge of Black political organizing and congressional representation in the early 1970s, it faced a harsher political climate at home and abroad by the end of the decade. Not only had the optimism attending a Rhodesia/Zimbabwe settlement been counterbalanced by an Angolan war setting the United States and South African proxies against a newly independent Black Marxist government that welcomed Cuban volunteers, but congressional support for nonintervention had also weakened with the 1978 electoral losses of senators Clark and McGovern and with Diggs’s indictment. Liberal Democratic forces were thrown even further on the defensive two years later when the Reagan administration announced, via Secretary of State George Schultz and Undersecretary of State for African Affairs Chester Crocker, its intention to soft-pedal the Carter-era pressures on the white-minority regimes in favor of a new policy of “constructive engagement.” TA and its allies rallied in vain against the administration’s southern Africa policies, just as they would join protests with similarly futile effect on other fronts, including the U.S. invasion of Grenada, the “Contra War” in Nicaragua, and the deployment of nuclear weapons in the Pacific.52 Reagan’s constructive-engagement strategy was predicated on the assumption that the ascendancy of what were seen as “reform” elements within the white-minority government would secure incremental economic improvements for Black South Africans and regional demilitarization agreements that might erode the structures of the apartheid state. No easy way opened, however, for a reform agenda in white South Africa. Any relaxation of control inevitably raised expectations among Blacks, while the very fear of an empowered Black majority led to increasingly brutal governmental measures by the white regime. The “reform” constitution of 1983, featuring a new tricameral parliament, was a case in point. When Blacks—as distinguished from South Asians

T H E LONG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T21 1

and mixed-race groups—discovered that they remained excluded from the franchise, riots erupted across the country, and the United Democratic Front (UDF), the umbrella organization encompassing most of the country’s democratic forces, announced mass protests against a sham democracy. Soon the UDF was cooperating with the newly formed COSATU and the ANC in a combination of boycotts, sabotage, and demonstrations that rendered the state sufficiently “ungovernable” as to precipitate an official state of emergency in July 1995. A mass arrest of Black trade union leaders followed, even as the United States abstained from an otherwise unanimous condemnatory resolution in the UN Security Council, a response to a direct appeal from the year’s Nobel Peace Prize–winning Bishop Desmond Tutu. As antiapartheid activists came under greater and greater assault in South Africa, their American allies responded accordingly. Soon after, the ANC leader Thabo Mbeki made a special appeal to his American friends for support, and Randall Robinson said, “We’ve got to do something.”53 Robinson had already shown a capacity for unconventional tactics. By the time he took over TransAfrica, he was known as an insider with what Charlie Diggs called a “cutting-edge style,” blending legislative advocacy with, for example, street demonstrations against Ian Smith’s visit to Washington in 1978.54 Three years later, in the early days of the Reagan administration, an anonymous State Department functionary had turned over classified files to Robinson that revealed direct collaboration between Secretary of State Alexander Haig and South Africa’s foreign minister, Roelof Botha, for a planned “new chapter” in bilateral relations. These planned relations included attempts to roll back Cuban presence and influence in the region and find common ground on Namibia. TA promptly leaked them to the Washington Post, where they made the front page. The Justice Department, whose young staffer (and future Supreme Court chief justice) John Roberts reportedly accused TA of being a subversive communist organization, threatened to charge TA with theft of government documents before backing off.55 Even in a suit and tie and sitting in a Capitol Hill office, the man whom some friends jokingly called a “Brooks Brothers revolutionary” never drifted far from the struggle. “Change doesn’t come, power is not shared,” Robinson told a Post reporter in 1983. “It is not conceded, it is not gained because people think it is [the] moral and ethical thing to do.

212LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

Power behaves quite naturally, selfishly. To protect ourselves in the world, you have to grab the levers of power.”56 To grab the levers required initiative at various levels of action. The young TA staff member Salih Booker recalls the moment when his 1981 application for a visa to South Africa, which he had expected to be quickly and summarily rejected, resulted in an invitation for an embassy interview. Robinson, as Booker further recalls, not only urged him to sit through the interview (which proved as unavailing as expected) but requested he survey the physical layout of the building.57 Looking back on TA’s strategy, Robinson readily acknowledged a growing impatience with the “letter-writing” he associated with a “fangless liberal church establishment.” TransAfrica “could not hope to win by wiggling the conventional levers.”58 TA’s pivotal mobilization took place on November 21, 1984, when Robinson arranged a meeting between a prestigious group of Black leaders— including DC’s congressional representative and former King lieutenant Rev. Walter Fauntroy, U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Mary Frances Berry, and the Georgetown law professor and former EEOC chair Eleanor Holmes Norton—and the courtly South African ambassador Bernadus G. Fourie. According to plan, Norton left early but retreated only to the steps of the embassy, where a group of reporters, who had gathered there on a tip from TA, would learn that Robinson’s party was actually conducting a sit-in against apartheid and would not be leaving voluntarily. Fourie summoned the police, who arrested the protesters and ushered them out through a sympathetic crowd of Cecelie Counts’s SASP friends. While the three arrested would spend the night in jail, their experience hardly served as a deterrent to others. The “direct action” move signaled by the newly proclaimed Free South Africa Movement (FSAM) hit a popular nerve. The Monday following the Thanksgiving weekend witnessed the first of a daily stream of protests and arrests. Originally scheduled to last one week, the daily 3:00 p.m. arrests at the embassy in DC (with the planned three arrests per day parceled out by picket captain Counts) continued for more than a year, spreading across the country. Within six months, more than three thousand demonstrators had been arrested nationwide, including two thousand at the embassy. Robinson himself would be booked seven times. While charges in DC, under the tolerant and even sympathetic gaze of Mayor Barry, were regularly dropped, a jury trial (which local TA

T H E LO NG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T21 3

organizers had sought as a means to increase publicity) in Chicago ended in acquittal on grounds that the demonstration at the consulate was necessary to stem the larger violence and racial oppression ongoing in South Africa.59 Several years before the popularization of the internet and two decades before the saturation of social media, the genius of the FSAM was to confront authority at sufficient levels to force a public reckoning with the apartheid state. In the year following the embassy sit-in, autonomously organized, nonviolent demonstrations against apartheid grew more intense, especially on American campuses. A three-week blockade of the main administrative building at Columbia University in April  1985 was followed by “camp outs” or “sit-outs” at Princeton, the University of California–Santa Cruz, and the University of Iowa. Later that same semester, Cornell University students added an innovative wrinkle by collecting scraps of wood, tar paper, and plastic, which they used in the construction of a shack in front of the university administrative office. The shack quickly became known as the “shantytown,” and the idea spread. By the next academic year, shantytowns—both a visible symbol of Black South African suffering and a utilitarian locale for rallies and teach-ins—appeared on campus greens at flagship state universities in Washington, Vermont, and North Carolina and at elite private institutions like Middlebury and Wesleyan. At Dartmouth College, right-wing counterprotests only enhanced publicity for the tactic and its divestment demands.60 Meanwhile, William “Bill” Lucy— AFSCME secretary-treasurer, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists president, and a TA board member— took charge of the mobilization of another vital constituency. Established as a national organization in 1973, the CBTU had, since its founding, challenged the conservative Cold War foreign policy of the AFL-CIO and its close cooperation with both the U.S. State Department and the CIA. Under President Lane Kirkland and its hard-line anticommunist director of international affairs Irving Brown, the labor federation had not only ignored the sanctions movement but openly courted rivals of the ANC, like Angola’s Jonas Savimbi and KwaZulu Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, who was honored with the George Meany Human Rights Award even as he openly opposed the disinvestment campaign in 1982.61 The CBTU, by contrast, with support from a few union stalwarts like Josh Williams of the DC Metro Labor Council and mineworkers president

214LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

Richard Trumka, had cut its teeth on the Zimbabwe independence struggle, then worked in close association with Congressman Diggs’s Subcommittee on Africa. At the very moment of the 1984 embassy sit-in, Lucy was on his way to Japan to lobby the global union federation of public service workers to take the lead on UN and ILO antiapartheid resolutions.62 Beyond the appeal of the civil disobedience tactic, Robinson proved adept at harnessing publicity by recruiting a variety of celebrities and sports heroes to the South Africa campaign. The Boycott South Africa movement, backed with the imprimatur of a UN resolution (and quite apart from TA), was already reveling in star power by 1985, when the guitarist Steve Van Zandt collected a bevy of musical talents (including Bob Dylan, U2, Bonnie Raitt, Herbie Hancock, Ringo Starr, Jimmy Cliff, Pat Benatar, and Keith Richards) to record the album and music video “Sun City.” Named after the South African resort, the hit single featured “multiple successive artists singing ‘I, I, I, I, I, I,’ followed by all the artists together singing ‘ain’t gonna play Sun City!’ ” 63 Those celebrities who defied the growing call to boycott the apartheid regime soon felt the sting of public backlash. Frank Sinatra, for example, a left-leaning New Dealer who had once faced HUAC charges, had turned sharply to the right in his twilight years and ultimately embraced both Nixon and the Reagan-era Republican Party, a disposition that also led him to accept an engagement in the name of “constructive engagement” at Sun City in 1981. Such action triggered a boycott, in turn, of Sinatra and other offending artists, including Ray Charles, by the growing international movement. By 1987, when protestors threatened to disrupt an industry Lifetime Achievement Award dinner in Sinatra’s honor, Sinatra bristled but also adapted his public stance to the changing times. As to his Sun City stop, Sinatra explained, “I did not then nor do I now support apartheid, and I resent anyone who contends otherwise.” But would Ol’ Blue Eyes return to Sun City “at the present time”? Sinatra admitted continuing “reservations” about the sanctions and boycott strategy but insisted, “I hope that I am wrong and that it does work.” 64 TA skillfully wove the power of celebrity into its own direct-action protests. Over the course of the first year of protests, Stevie Wonder, Coretta King, Coleman Young, Arthur Ashe, Gloria Steinem, and Harry Belafonte all walked up to the embassy steps to be arrested.65 Ashe, who

T H E LONG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T21 5

shared a childhood past with the sports-minded Robinsons in Richmond, had first galvanized the athletic world with his stand against apartheid. As early as 1969 he had petitioned in vain for a visa to compete in the South African Open (he would place second to Jimmy Connors while also touring Soweto in 1973) and declare, in the spirit of the 1968 Olympic Black Power protest, that “Athletes, especially black athletes, must use every resource at their command to right things that are wrong.” 66 Drawing on his brother’s media connections, Randall Robinson received substantial funding for TransAfrica from the publicists Edward Lewis and Earl Graves, the actors Danny Glover and Bill Cosby, the boxer Sugar Ray Leonard, as well as Ashe, while also crediting renowned Black authors like Maya Angelou and Alice Walker for their support.67 Elsewhere, and again going well beyond TA’s reach, a boycott of South African goods and divestment in its financial institutions by the mid1980s was taking an undeniable toll on an economy that had come to depend on short-term international loans. When foreign lenders refused to renew such loans in August 1985, the government declared a moratorium on debt repayment, triggering a sharp drop in the rand and consequent loss of consumer purchasing power.68 Although the apartheid government vowed to resist all external pressures, a direct political and economic hit from its long-time British and American allies likely could not have been levied at a more vulnerable moment. By the beginning of 1986, some nineteen states and sixty-five cities had already passed laws mandating divestiture of pension funds with firms that did business in South Africa. Most substantive was the action in California. Even as Congress was deliberating on the matter, in August legislation sponsored by the assemblywomen Maxine Waters and Gwen Moore diverted investment in South Africa by three major pension plans with total asset value of more than $65 billon.69

M OVING THE CON GRESSION A L N EEDLE

If the social movement centered on grassroots action and Democratic Party congressional stalwarts was winning the public relations battle, it

216 LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

nevertheless needed substantial defections from the Republican side (especially given the GOP control of the Senate from 1981 to 1986) to secure sanctions legislation and overcome a likely presidential veto. Ultimately, this missing link appeared in the interplay of George Shultz’s State Department with a group of moderate GOP senators who followed Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Richard Lugar in proposing, passing, and sustaining the final version of the CAAA over a presidential veto by a 78-to-21 vote in October  1986. Within a couple years of the momentous vote, Lugar looked back with dispassionate detail on the actions of those motivated by what he called “moral realism.”70 Along with other GOP moderates, such as Kansas’s Senator Nancy Kassebaum, Lugar had initially supported the Shultz-Crocker policy of constructive engagement, which had promised steady reform in place of Carter-era pressure tactics aimed at the Pretoria regime. But without tangible progress—and with further setbacks like the 1984 crackdown on trade union leaders and President Botha’s politically disastrous August 1985 speech that equated further compromise with white “abdication and suicide”—there was little hope that the South African government would cooperate in the dismantling of the apartheid system.71 For the moral realists, some form of international, if still peaceful, coercion now seemed the only option. In November  1984, Lugar and Kassebaum opened Foreign Relations Committee hearings as part of a major review of South Africa policy. The following year, as Senator Weicker (R-CT) and Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) pushed bills to end further investment and ban Krugerrand transactions in the United States, Lugar countered with softer legislation based on the Sullivan principles that would positively reward “progressive” employers while banning further bank loans and computer sales. The administration’s appropriation of Lugar’s main themes in an executive order temporarily short-circuited congressional action, but the worsening situation on the ground (mass arrests and censorship orders) quickly returned the issue to the legislative docket in 1986. By the summer of that year, Dellums surprised even his own party leadership in gaining House passage of a “near-total” embargo and immediate disinvestment bill.72 Lugar followed up by piloting a new Senate bill, effectively mimicking an alternative, slightly more moderate House bill sponsored by Representative William H. Gray III (D-PA) that nevertheless incorporated an

T H E LO NG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T21 7

entire list of sanctions previously anathema to conservatives. In a nutshell, they barred South Africa Airways flights to the United States, imports from industries controlled by the South African government, coal and uranium imports, U.S. loans to the government or any new investment in public or private industry, and even South African deposits in U.S. banks. Only once apartheid policy had certifiably ended, Mandela and other political prisoners had been freed, and talks begun, read the legislation, would sanctions end. Implementation of the CAAA carried several further stipulations. Millions of dollars were set aside in AID funding for scholarships to South African Black high school and college students and for legal assistance to Black political prisoners. All  U.S. firms of more than twenty-five employees were required to abide by the Sullivan Principles. Finally, any foreign government that undercut U.S. trade pressure on the South African government was itself subject to an “unfair labor practice” designation and retaliation under the rules of GATT that governed world trade. The bill passed the Senate by an 84-to14 vote.73 There was more drama to come. Encouraged by Shultz and Chief of Staff Donald Regan to take the sting out of this overwhelming moral verdict from the national legislature with a package of executive orders (as he had done before), President Reagan refused to budge. In Lugar’s reckoning, the president and his intimate circle were blind to the “denial of human freedom” in South Africa that they quickly condemned in communist regimes such as Nicaragua. In the immediate political moment, the president’s team gambled on a delay normally attending all HouseSenate reconciliation proceedings. Instead, Lugar prevailed on House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Dante Fascell (D-FL) to whip the Democrats to simply pass the Senate bill and avoid any referral to conference. Reagan vetoed the legislation but was overridden by a bipartisan Senate vote, 78 to 21. For a most uncommon moment, mused Lugar, the United States was operating with “two foreign policies”—one authorized by Congress, the other by the president and State Department. In the final Senate debate, the North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms warned that the “thrust of this legislation is to bring about violence and revolutionary change and, after that, everlasting tyranny.”74 What explains Lugar’s and other Republican legislators’ break with the foreign policy of their president? In retrospect, it seems clear that it

218 LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

was Botha’s foot-dragging that knocked the supports out from under constructive engagement, losing Lugar and other key Republicans and discouraging even the policy’s champions in the State Department. A conservative Cold Warrior in relation to Russian and Cuban influence abroad, George Shultz, for example, had long reflected liberal convictions on racial matters. As an industrial relations specialist, he had focused on retraining programs for a mainly minority workforce in the meatpacking industry. Then, as Nixon’s secretary of labor, he quickly distinguished himself in 1969 by authoring the Philadelphia Plan, breaking the lock on skilled construction jobs for Black applicants, and serving as informal mediator in the racially explosive Charleston hospital strike. By 1986, while still trying to hold off the congressional liberals, both Shultz and Crocker recognized the need for more diplomatic pressure on the Botha regime. They were aghast at Reagan’s deference to hardcore advisers, including his CIA head William Casey, chief of staff Donald Regan, and speechwriter Pat Buchanan, leading up to the veto override vote. As Crocker would memorialize the moment, “I [dreamed] of jackals tearing at a carcass left by lions on the African veldt.”75 Shultz would later admit that of all the flashpoints of his career as secretary of state (1982–1989), the South Africa issue triggered his deepest personal reactions: “Slavery—its reality, its abolition, and its legacy—has marked the conscience and consciousness of Americans throughout our time as a nation. It has imposed an intense sensitivity and responsibility upon us, not only for our domestic racial situation but also for the problems of black Africa.”76 Essentially, the CAAA triumphed because it had become a chief litmus test of American values. “Just as opposition to Soviet Communism had served as the main measure of American patriotism,” concludes the historian Robert Massie, “so did opposition to apartheid evolve into an index of commitment to racial justice in the United States.” A frustrated Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole would lament that the CAAA had “become a domestic civil rights issue.”77 As if to underscore the national consensus, within days of the veto override, two of South Africa’s biggest U.S. business partners, General Motors and IBM, announced their withdrawal from the country.78 Although no one factor could likely explain the South African government’s ultimate capitulation, the U.S. coordination of Western economic pressures—combining trade sanctions,

T H E LONG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T21 9

corporate divestment, cultural restrictions, and financial sanctions— proved telling.79 In the end, even the Shultz-Crocker team, after a searing political setback, took advantage of CAAA enactment to score a final victory for their preferred version of “constructive engagement.” After a furious set of multiparty negotiations coincident with an aggressive advance by Cuban troops and SWAPO guerrillas, in December  1988 Crocker announced a grand deal on the Angola–West Africa front. The Cubans, pressed by rising state costs, agreed to remove their troops from Angola, while South Africa officially terminated aid to UNITA and announced its own exit from Namibia within three months. SWAPO won the newly independent country’s first free elections in November  1989, and soon SWAPO’s leader Sam Nujoma was elected its first president.80 The conflict on the ground, exacerbated from the beginning by Cold War tensions, slowly softened as superpower détente and the evolving collapse of the Soviet Union allowed moderate voices in the United States and South Africa to paint the liberation movements, in the historian Sue Onslow’s words, as “motivated by national objectives rather than manipulated by external malign forces.”81 Even as this regional settlement reached completion, antiapartheid forces in South Africa themselves also claimed their signal victory. From within the counsels of South Africa’s white National Party, the more conciliatory F. W. de Klerk replaced P. W. Botha as president in September  1989. A month later, in the first tangible results of several years of secret talks between the ANC and government officials, Walter Sisulu and four other ANC militants were released from their Robben Island confinement. In February  1990, following the lifting of a ban on the ANC, the Communist Party, and forty-eight other antiapartheid organizations, Nelson Mandela was also freed after twenty-seven years in prison. More formal negotiations quickly began over the terms of a postapartheid order.82 Mandela first toured the United States in June  1990, drawing overflowing crowds, and a year later, the United States under President George  H. W. Bush declared that South Africa had met the legislative terms for lifting the CAAA’s economic sanctions. By the end of 1993, the South African parliament had approved the one-man/onevote principle for the nation’s future, de Klerk and Mandela had been honored as joint recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the first

220 LIBERAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

all-races election was set for April 1994. In that fateful election, Mandela secured 62 percent of the vote to become the country’s new president; in the interest of the supermajority required to unilaterally amend the old constitution, the ANC established a National Unity Government alongside often bitter rivals in both de Klerk’s National Party and Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party.83 In a tangible link between the South African struggle and its grassroots U.S. allies, former DC study group member Gay McDougall was one of five international observers who helped preside over South Africa’s first nonracial elections.84 Celebration in left-liberal activist circles naturally followed these triple victories: the CAAA’s passage, Mandela’s release from jail, and his presidential election. Ron Dellums, for example, would justly label the CAAA his “greatest achievement,” while Edward Kennedy happily christened Randall Robinson the “101st Senator” for bringing the issue to the national spotlight. The TA organizer Cecelie Counts, who helped coordinate Mandela’s 1990 tour, remembers it, alongside the birth of her child, as “the highpoint of my life.” Proudly pointing to a photo of herself with the South African freedom fighter, Counts says, “I even got to hear him say thank you.”85 Sylvia Hill could not help but think to herself, “We did it!” When she met Mandela face to face, she told him, “We represent the grassroots.”86 And he seemed to know. His second U.S. visit in July 1993 included lunch at TA’s new headquarters, where, after pausing to shake hands with each member of the TA staff, he headed to the second-floor Du Bois reception room to greet a group of Congressional Black Caucus leaders, including Ron Dellums, Maxine Waters, and Charles Rangel.87 For an extended moment, the momentum of the CAAA campaign promised to carry over to other projects. Flush with contributions from individuals and friendly foundations, TA/TAF (the latter entity allowing for 501(c)3 tax writeoffs) secured major bank loans to move into plush new headquarters in 1993, a five-story mansion (the former German embassy) off DuPont Circle. With the idea of building an Africa/Caribbean/Latin American–centered think tank on the order of Brookings or the Heritage Center, TA launched new publications and invited resident scholars to take advantage of a six-thousand-volume Arthur Ashe Memorial Library.88 TA also determined to extend its moral and political

T H E LO NG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T221

clout. In 1994, with the South African conflict nearing resolution, Robinson joined with other celebrities in a hunger strike to challenge the Clinton policy of returning refugees from the Haitian dictatorship imposed after the ouster of elected President Aristide two years before.89 But the collapse of the apartheid regime offered no clear direction to those who had most ardently championed the cause. For all those involved in spurring change on the African subcontinent, no second act followed apartheid’s dismantling. After an initial surge of funds and enthusiasm, TA found it impossible to sustain a political or organizational presence. Before the initial celebration was over, the activists recognized that even their ANC heroes had subtly changed their tune. Behind closed doors on the first Mandela tour, Counts recalls, the activist artist–cum-ANC chief of staff Barbara Masekela made clear to her movement hosts that “it’s time for us to move on. We have to make allies with other groups of people.” In the same period, Robinson found himself excluded from a business development conference with ANC leaders in Johannesburg. Corporate contacts, needed as Mandela first geared up for a presidential campaign and then worried about economic development, took precedence over cultivating solidarity with international grassroots groups. “Now no one,” reflects Hill, was saying that that’s not true. That’s not the point. The point politically is when you ignore your historical allies, you really tell powerful people an important lesson about you that they can ultimately use [you] for their own political advantages. You are also saying that you no longer need citizens as allies because corporate and government political forces are your allies. I think that is a strategic mistake of the highest order for the people of South Africa and all of Africa.90

One moment in October 1994, during Mandela’s first presidential tour of the United States, underscored these new priorities. At the last minute, he cancelled a fundraising breakfast meeting with TA. “I was dumbstruck,” Robinson later wrote about the brush-off that occurred during a time of rising financial stringency in his organization. In response, Robinson declined President Clinton’s invitation to the state dinner with Mandela at the White House, and the parties would require three years to fully reconcile.91

222LIBERAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

For TransAfrica, the challenge of the new moment was at once personal and political. After South Africa, neither Haitian refugees and support for Aristide, nor the Rwanda genocide, nor the HIV/AIDS campaign, nor reparations, nor Jubilee 2000, nor the international debt relief movement—around all of which Robinson and TA valiantly campaigned—could again fill the sails of a mass movement. The historian Donald  R. Culverson concludes that “after sanctions legislation, these diverse actions no longer seemed united by a common purpose.” Or, as Counts more pithily summarizes, there was “nothing as easily digestible about the problems of the world” as apartheid.92 Shortly after 9/11, increasingly strapped for funds and personally exhausted, Robinson quit not only TA but the United States itself, self-exiling to St. Kitts, native home of his wife’s family, where he would continue an active life of writing and occasional teaching.93 Three years before the move, he wrote, “We have won most of the battles in which I have fought. But the price has been dear and I am tired and diminished by the process.” Aside from slights that he perhaps took too personally, Robinson was frustrated at a basic lack of solidarity among people of color, which he attributed to “centuries-old scar tissue that isolate African-Americans from African, African from Caribbean, Caribbean from Afro-Latin—branches of a Black world cast asunder by mean experience, time, and oceans.”94 By this point, internal rancor had all but overwhelmed the once-buoyant organization Robinson had founded. TA’s new president, Bill Fletcher, who took over the organization as president in 2002, believed that Robinson had succumbed to TA’s own publicity, grabbing headlines but neglecting the bridge building needed to maintain the organization. As he told a Philadelphia reporter, “TransAfrica declined as Randall’s star rose.”95 On the international level, a once-revolutionary ANC, now in power, found it impossible to fund the expansive commitments to the rural poor envisioned in its Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), the policy framework drafted by the Mandela government in 1994 to bring the Freedom Charter to life. Indeed, within two years the government had switched to a five-year plan—Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR)—that focused, in classic neoliberal fashion, on privatization of state-owned properties and the removal of exchange controls. From the U.S. side, a bipartisan push by President Clinton and Senator Lugar helped

T H E LONG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T223

enact the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) in 2000. A prime example of market-based and free trade–oriented reform akin to its 1994 NAFTA counterpart, AGOA drew support from most African leaders (including South Africa’s new president, Thabo Mbeki) for its promise of loans, debt relief, and access to U.S. apparel and textile markets in exchange for opening their economies to international business.96 Left-liberal critics, including TA, now watched helplessly as the postapartheid tide defined freedom in more buttoned-down ways. CBTU’s leader, Bill Lucy, for example, cited COSATU and other labor opposition to an agreement signed by the ANC-led government that would impose IMF-style eligibility requirements, thus choking off any hopes for expansive social programs, to obtain AGOA benefits.97 The fact was that the solidarity movement had long since ceded direction of the struggle to indigenous forces as directed by the ANC, and they were in no position to cultivate independent ties to either old UDF- or COSATU-linked opposition voices. As Sylvia Hill explains, “One has to respect the national liberation movement as the architect of its struggle, in this case the ANC, and that is what we did.”98 Fletcher left TA in 2006. He had recognized that there was no consensus among board members about its future direction. “The organization was dominated by nostalgia,” he says. “[They] wanted to return to 1985, but 1985 was not coming back.” There was a basic problem, according to Fletcher, in the framing of the antiapartheid struggle as a “radical civil rights movement struggle.” He remembered an argument in Boston in the 1980s with a TA representative, where Fletcher had anticipated the danger of a postapartheid “black capitalism.” “The TA representative took me to task, saying ‘the movement there [in Africa] is much too radical [for that to happen],’ but it turned out I was right.” Even for Fletcher, the effort to move beyond what he called the “civil rights movement racial paradigm” to a frontal attack on global neoliberal economic policies proved an uphill struggle. Before he left the organization, Fletcher and TA Chairman of the Board Danny Glover raised issues from trade, to the coup against Aristide in Haiti, to Angolan land mines set by the Congolese government, but none of them reanimated the old base of antiapartheid support. In the end, the organization was left with no resources to sustain itself, and to Fletcher the headquarters was so empty “it was almost haunted.” Even the sale of the building and an attempted new set of international conferences could not save TA from a permanently diminished status.99

224LIBERAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

Although socialists like Fletcher were inclined to blame ideological blinders within the antiapartheid movement for its demise—implicitly suggesting that a more direct critique of neoliberalism might have opened a path forward—there are a variety of other explanations for the decline of the movement. Former UN ambassador Donald McHenry, for example, points to the “natural” lifespan of most social movements. Likening TA to the March of Dimes against polio, he suggests it actually succeeded in its task and was then necessarily displaced by other forces. Social movements, Sylvia Hill likewise allows, are “inherently short term” in emotion and energy. Some TA activists recognized that a “free” South Africa now had to go through its own reconstruction. Even if their struggle had required international support, the South Africans needed to feel that they had done it on their own. So when a new ANC-appointed ambassador told TA, “ ‘We don’t need you now, we can do this now,’ what are you going to say? It’s now on them to think about international solidarity.” Speaking of her own antiapartheid circle in Washington, DC, and the sudden removal of Robinson from that scene, Hill cited the difficulty of moving on to the next movement and new issues: “We were tired, getting old, thinking about finances, and retirement . . . though you don’t necessarily hear people acknowledging that.” “There’s a sweep of history,” explains Hill, “that you’ve been in from not being able to enter a store all the way to Nelson Mandela being free, but who will be your next set of allies? [You can search for] the group that can carry you into the next struggle or you can use the remaining part of your life for family and your next fate.”100 In his examination of Latin American solidarity movements and the U.S. left, the historian Steve Striffler points to the limitations of liberal movements that challenged a host of brutal dictatorships in the 1970s on the basis of human rights. Liberal internationalism, by this view, which arose in the empty space of widespread political repression following the eclipse of socialist governments or revolutionary movements, helped suffocate a potentially more “robust left internationalism.” A human rights group like Amnesty International, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977, was “not about mass mobilization in the sense of taking to the streets but mass membership to support well-orchestrated letterwriting campaigns.” In moving from “grassroots organization” to a “professional lobby,” Striffler argues, “subsequent generations of international

T H E LO NG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T225

solidarity activists not only inherited a narrowed political vision from the human rights movement but acquired an organizational infrastructure and analysis that has been ill equipped to deal with the central concern of solidarity since the 1990s: neoliberal capitalism.”101 Striffler explicitly exempts the antiapartheid movement (along with the United Farm Workers support movement) from the era’s dominant trend of “solidarity without politics.” Both exceptions, he maintains, built themselves on “mass rank and file support” and were “less campaigns than movements.”102 As such, the Free South Africa Movement may demonstrate the analytical inadequacy of a strict liberal-versusradical (or socialist) dichotomization of solidarity movements. Although the antiapartheid wave demanded group commitment and even selfsacrifice—that is, it was by no means an individualist letter-writing campaign—neither did it advance expressly social-democratic ends. Ironically, its priority on practical solidarity with the ANC— notwithstanding the latter’s close ties to the South African Communist Party, which long rendered it and COSATU “untouchable” by the AFLCIO—deprived it of any programmatic goals of its own. Ideologically, even as it had begun in a wave of anticolonialist, anti-imperialist, and antiracist agitation, the FSAM ended up championing ardently liberal ideals: democracy, ethnic pluralism, and social welfare unbound by racial preference. As a force that helped destroy the most monstrous system of racial oppression on the planet and that beat back sustained opposition from the president of the United States and Congress, its historical impact was monumental. Indeed, it is worth underlining the degree to which the antiapartheid movement drew not only on the civil rights movement’s tactics and spirit but on its victories (namely, the Voting Rights Act and consequent creation of the Congressional Black Caucus). There is an underlying story here of how liberal domestic reform ultimately had powerful ramifications for U.S. foreign policy. Might the antiapartheid movement have pushed harder toward more transformative goals? And might the advocates and activists have better anticipated the disappointments accompanying apartheid’s disintegration without a larger, more egalitarian transformation of southern African society? Yes and yes. But still, the very power of the civil rights message—whether over apartheid in South Africa or Jim Crow in the United States—was accompanied by a signal weakness. Just as the ANC

226 LIBE RAL NATIO NALIS M ON  TR I A L

initially presented a broad program for the socialization of the South African economy, Martin Luther King Jr. had tried to follow up the Voting Rights Act with his Poor People’s Campaign to address economic inequality. In the end, in both cases, civil and political equality advanced at the expense of economic empowerment for the Black laboring poor. In the United States, a more expansive civil rights movement was stymied by domestic economic opponents (including erstwhile supporters of the legal advances of the movement). Whereas in South Africa, control of needed credit and economic advancement remained in the hands of outside international actors (IMF, World Bank, Western corporations) largely following a script of neoliberal austerity. Postapartheid critics of neoliberalism accurately pointed to a new form of dependency and radical inequality that had settled on South Africa as on much of the rest of the Third World. What was needed to overcome it was presumably a mobilization that encapsulated what Striffler and others envisioned as a new “left internationalism.” Yet such a move would require a reexamination of basic assumptions behind both components of the phrase. What kind of left—incorporating both liberal and socialist principles and spanning the diversity of the American social-racial landscape—was possible? And what mutual support— internationalism—could progressives, confined by discrete national situations and struggles, have brought to one another? The ultimate problem in this regard can be summarized in a one-word question: How?

CONCLUSION Beyond Humanitarianism

T

hrough four post–World War II decades, liberal voices in American foreign affairs sounded notes of confidence and ambition. The evidence abounds in the previous chapters. Erecting an entire new global economic scaffolding. Transforming Germany, the world’s worst human rights offender, into one of its most thriving and socially progressive nation-states. Befriending and protecting a fledgling Israeli democracy. Imagining mutually acceptable national sovereignties for Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. Insisting that anticommunism not facilitate reactionary regimes in Central America. Mobilizing to fight poverty and dependency in India. And merging civil rights idealism with the muscle of a mass movement to support the struggle to topple the apartheid regime in South Africa. True, liberal designs were not always realized. They often encountered powerful oppositional currents and suffered from their own naïveté and internal contradictions. Yet no one would argue that such accomplishments lacked ambition or determination to transform the world—at times in self-evidently left-liberal or social-democratic ways. The era that followed had a very different feel. If there was little missionary zeal to U.S. foreign policy across the Clinton and Obama years—at least any that positively stirred liberal constituencies at home— that is in part attributable to the changing scale and context of American involvements abroad. Both the range of new global threats and the

228CO NCLU S IO N

absence of old ones likely account for some of the discrepancy. As one scholar summarized the foreign policy assumptions crystallized in the Clinton State Department’s Strategic Plan of 1998, the fall of the Berlin Wall and breakup of the Soviet Union required a new set of priorities and objectives for American diplomacy: The old security threat has been replaced by a host of new security threats that must be confronted in new ways. There are the so-called global or transnational issues—terrorism, the spread of infectious disease, degradation of the environment, organized crime and corruption and the devaluing of groups or classes of people—women in some societies, religious or ethnic minorities in others—that foster poverty, political unrest, and illegal immigration.1

The plurality of the challenges and their varying intensity, however, made it difficult to devise a larger foreign policy vision, let alone attach a compelling, encompassing label—like “Good Neighbor,” “Containment,” “Domino Theory,” or the “Alliance for Progress”—to administration policies. In the public eye, at least, initiatives for positive change had largely drained from foreign affairs. In their place stood ad hoc security responses to a fast-changing set of adversaries: regional bullies and dictators in the Mideast and Africa, religious zealots in the Islamic world, or revanchist nationalism in Eastern Europe and Russia. And above them all, the indisputable, rising power of an alternative developmental model in China, which evoked ad hoc, defensive responses from the West more than any grand plan or countervision. Overall, as Richard Holbrooke’s astute biographer George Packer concluded, there was “no Clinton doctrine,” indeed “no Clinton foreign policy” to speak of.2 Little directional difference, in fact, distinguished Clinton- and Obama-era foreign policy thinking from that of their post-Reagan Republican counterparts. A combination of victory in the Persian Gulf War (which most congressional Democrats had voted against authorizing) and reaction to 9/11 generally chastened restraint-minded Democrats. Willingly taking up the cudgels for the New World Order that George  H.  W. Bush proclaimed at the collapse of the Soviet Union, a “tougher” set of Democratic advisers hailing from both academic and centrist think tanks (and serving alongside three Republican secretaries

BEYO ND H U M ANITARIANISM229

of defense within Democratic administrations in William Cohen, Robert Gates, and Chuck Hagel) willingly engaged in military actions from the Balkans to Somalia to Afghanistan and Sudan.3 To be sure, in response to the second Iraq War—and support for it from most Clinton administration stalwarts—frustration swelled in Democratic Party ranks against the conventional Washington wisdom. It was a reaction that helped propel the Obama candidacy in the 2008 campaign. Carefully calibrating his larger dissatisfaction with the U.S. posture abroad, Senator Obama famously castigated Bush’s Iraq intervention as a “dumb war.” 4 Yet disillusionment with campaigns of regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan and a seemingly endless War on Terror carried only limited course corrections. Except for a measured withdrawal of forces from Iraq and at least temporarily defusing Iranian nuclear ambitions, governing liberals in the Obama years proved scarcely more adept than their predecessors at articulating any positive vision or plan for the United States abroad. Afghanistan proved a continuing sinkhole of corruption, postcommunist Russia slid further into autocracy, Eastern Europe adopted democratic constitutions but hardly democratic pluralism, African self-rule remained in thrall to rapacious military regimes, and Central America and Mexico remained swamped by plagues of violence from gangs and drug traffickers. Fending off individual crises rather than engaging grand strategy became the order of the day. In this sense, the most promising moment—the Arab Spring first signaled by massive street demonstrations in Tunisia in December 2010— also proved the most frustrating for liberal internationalists. Eager to reverse past U.S. support for authoritarian regimes in the region yet constrained (as Obama puts in his political memoir) “like a captain on the bridge of an aircraft carrier . . . entirely dependent on a more seasoned and sometimes skeptical crew to execute that change,” Obama heeded the counsel of his more idealistic advisers to “instruct the State Department, Pentagon, CIA, and other government agencies to examine ways the U.S. could encourage meaningful political and economic reforms.” Relevant new policy documents, Obama reports, were “just about ready” in mid-December. “If only our timing had been a bit better.”5 As it was, even as a grassroots revolt against oppressive regimes spread across Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria, Western democracies proved generally feckless in containing the ferocious and effective counter-revolutionary

23 0 CO NCLU S IO N

response. In Libya, for example, the U.S.-led bombing raids that saved Benghazi civilians and toppled strongman Muammar Gaddafi also inadvertently provoked a fatal attack on a U.S. consulate. In Syria, half-hearted military support for Syrian rebels not only failed to remove the Russianbacked dictator Bashar al-Assad but helped touch off the largest refugee flight in modern European history. Perhaps not surprisingly, Samantha Power, a zealous human rights advocate who later became Obama’s UN ambassador, would eventually grudgingly praise a scholarly assessment of Bush’s ultrarealist secretary of state James A. Baker III: “He was no visionary, no innovator: He articulated no grand plan for the country or the world. . . . But somehow in the main, it worked. Things got done.” 6 As Power and other liberal policy makers discovered, the underlying challenges of the recent era—whether economic insecurity, climate change, or infectious diseases—largely eluded translation into effective political mobilization. “Globalization,” the Clintonites had early on recognized, “means that more and more we as a nation are affected by events beyond our borders.”7 Immigration, the balance of trade, and even the cost of living were increasingly defined by supranational dynamics. Yet how to resolve them within the current world order? By the 1990s, the question cut hardest for the world’s democracies. To the extent that democratically elected leaders could no longer address their constituents’ concerns with national political solutions, they encountered a new crisis of legitimacy. Pressures from a competitive world marketplace combined with public debt severely constrained the ability of elected officials to address spreading economic inequality and its attendant social suffering. As the liberal political toolkit hollowed out to focus on neoliberal trade and technology transfers, more conservative political forces harkened to the dark side of nationalism with appeals to ethnocultural differences wrapped in clash-of-civilization arguments. Internationally, a loss of faith in government itself, or at least democratic government, registered across the West. As a phenomenon that fed on itself, liberal self-constraint opened the door in Europe, South America, and even in the United States to a new breed of right-wing populist regimes prepared to spurn much of the legacy of the postwar order. The roster of current world crises is certainly not a brief for further U.S. interventionism gone wild. The point, however, is that no countervailing

BEYO ND H U M ANITARIANISM231

liberal-democratic strategies, outside of ad hoc military actions, have been hatched or planned for an extended period. Despite an often disorienting landscape, liberal thinkers in the era of globalization did unite around the defense of human rights and freedom from torture. In the abstract, the rights approach offered a satisfying ideological bridge between realist and idealist foreign policy alternatives. As President Obama said in his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: “America has never fought a war against a democracy, and our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens.”8 During the Clinton and Obama years, Democratic liberals repeatedly extended themselves into the world’s worst trouble spots to rescue innocents. Such humanitarian initiatives became synonymous with a geography of terror and suffering: Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Burma, Kosovo, Benghazi, Boko Haram (Nigeria), Darfur (Sudan), Aleppo (Syria). Especially after the failure to intervene in the Rwanda genocide of 1994, human rights became the discourse of liberal internationalism, serving less to reshape the world than to apply a salve to its worst injuries. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright explained before the American Legion in 1998, the primal division in the world today “is not as much a clash between cultures and civilizations, it is a clash between civilization itself and anarchy, between the rule of law and no rules at all.”9 Similarly, looking back on her own long crusade against what she called “atrocity prevention,” Samantha Power identified its core message with Obama’s remarks at a rally of the Save Darfur Coalition on the National Mall in April 2006: There are problems in the world that sometimes seem overwhelming. There is so much misery, so much want, so much conflict and cruelty, so much violence. And at times there’s a lack of moral clarity. . . . But this is not one of those times. Today we know what is right and we know what is wrong. The slaughter of innocents is wrong. Two million people driven from their homes is wrong. Women gang raped while gathering firewood is wrong. Silence, acquiescence paralysis in the face genocide is wrong.10

The problem with what we might call the humanitarian reflex is that it proved a poor substitute for sustained political or socioeconomic

23 2CO NCLU S IO N

strategy. As David Rieff argues in his bestselling A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (2002), facing the parade of human disasters treated with humanitarian relief, “You, the viewer, are not in Afghanistan, Cambodia, or Bosnia so much as you are in humanitarian-tragedy land—a world of wicked warlords, suffering and innocent victims, and noble aid workers.” Alas, as he notes in the case of Somalia, intervention directed by a “benign fairy tale” untethered to more complicated political realities can trigger unpredictable and tragic consequences. By now, he suggests, the “experienced relief worker needs no reminder of the new conventional wisdom that there are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems.”11 The sociologist Craig Calhoun similarly elaborates on the dangers of an “emergency imaginary,” wherein the idea of emergency is used to “organize response to quite long-term displacements of people and other forms of suffering.”12 By the end of the Clinton administration, observers noted the irony of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell regularly trying to tamp down the ardor for military interventions rooted in a definition of national security expanded by an infusion of human rights thinking.13 The one-dimensional nature of the humanitarian response—too often detached from local political agency and quick to rely on military means of enforcement—coincided with the exhaustion of a social-political developmental vision in U.S. and international policy circles. In the early postwar decades—and as we have seen in the cases of the Bretton Woods agreements, Germany, Costa Rica, Israel, and India—American liberal engagement meant support both for democratic political allies and for welfarist plans of social advancement. As the historian Amy C. Offner has found for both the United States and her own field focus on Colombia, in the 1960s and 1970s policy makers and intellectuals embraced what they believed was a virtuous circle of “mixed” development: “By design and as a point of pride, every project of purported ‘state-led’ development was in equal measure a private initiative . . . and policy makers routinely debated just which government agency, for-profit corporation, or nonprofit community organization could best carry out a given task under very immediate circumstances.” Then, as fiscal crises affected states in the late 1970s, Offner explains, what had been an ideological mélange of economic resources became increasingly “sorted out” into opposing Keynesian and neoliberal or

BEYO ND H U M ANITARIANISM233

deregulatory toolboxes, with the conventional wisdom in U.S.-identified policy centers (including international lending agencies) tilting markedly toward the latter.14 Without any means except market pressure and military might to champion alternatives in the developing world beckoning to policy makers, left-liberalism shrunk into near irrelevancy. However noble in themselves, humanitarian initiatives could at best save individuals, not restore democratic states or build sustainable economies. Human rights, as the political historian Samuel Moyn concluded, are essential but not enough.15 The accession of Democrat Joseph  R. Biden  Jr. to the presidency in January 2021 raised hopes in many quarters of a new invigoration of liberal foreign policy thinking. Despite a presidential campaign and early administration overwhelmingly focused on the COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying economic crisis, Biden threw out several strong hints of reconnection to the internationalist thinking and liberal values of his Democratic predecessors. Following a full term of slights to traditional democratic alliances in favor of outreach to international bullies and strongmen under President Donald J. Trump, Biden announced to the State Department within two weeks of his inauguration that “America is back. America is back. . . . We must start with diplomacy rooted in America’s most cherished democratic values: defending freedom, championing opportunity, upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law, and treating every person with dignity.” Projecting domestic priorities of racial tolerance and respect for science onto a world stage, the president invoked a favored locution that the United States “will again lead not just by the example of our power but the power of our example.” In one of his few tangible proposals, he promised vaguely to “host a Summit of Democracy . . . to rally the nations of the world to defend democracy globally, to push back authoritarianism’s advance.”16 As welcome as rhetorical reengagement with the world on the basis of venerable values and multilateral institutions may be as a restorative gesture, it remains unclear what difference the Biden administration will make in practice. To put it bluntly, left-liberals will want to know less how Biden is different from Trump and more if and how he might differ from Carter, Clinton, and Obama when it comes to world affairs. What, in short, is his agenda for making democracy relevant and meaningful again for the lives of millions across the globe? If the United States,

23 4CO NCLU S IO N

following its own near-cataclysmic 2020 succession process, convenes a “summit of democracies,” then surely it will need to arrive less as an authority than a supplicant, eager to learn from others. Moreover, no mere celebration of democracy-as-process will prove convincing: aside from the United States’ own deficits, what lessons are to be drawn from the thinness of democratic practice, if not outright authoritarian tendencies, in India, Turkey, Brazil, Hungary, and Mexico? Mr.  Biden needs time to ponder such questions, but clearly, no mere going “back” will restore democratic momentum or inspiration on the world stage. What could revive a liberal-democratic vision at the global level? Here are just a few ideas that emerge largely as continuations of the arguments framed in the foregoing chapters. First, with respect to lessons once learned following the Vietnam War but all too often ignored since, the United States must strive for a liberal internationalism untied from the U.S. military (or liberal interventionist) trigger. Maintenance of a reported 662 bases in thirty-eight countries and active deployment of U.S. troops in 170 countries (as catalogued in 2020) not only distorts our home economy but is likely incompatible with a multilateral approach that emphasizes economic and political suasion over the force of arms in settling international disputes.17 Second, year by year the evidence only grows that peace and prosperity depend on a dramatic reworking of the much-frayed global economic and monetary order. Liberals should seek a new Bretton Woods framework of economic and environmental governance, beginning with negotiations to broker mutually palatable tradeoffs between the interests of the Global North and South, East and West over the rules of trade, finance, and protection of the world’s wetlands and rainforests. For developing countries, the carrots must include debt relief and some subsidy for taking forests and nonrenewable resources out of production. For the industrialized West, incentives might include a formula for emergency, time-delimited tariffs to save vital industries or regions. Besides that, as a source of expanded credit and development funds for use by the IMF and World Bank as well as to raise the cost of currency manipulation, the new economic compact should include a special tax on all international financial transactions that can then be redistributed to meet national needs.18 The protection and advance of a liberal-democratic world economy will require a modulated message toward China. A legacy of Western

BEYOND HUMANITARIANISM235

imperialism and extended exploitation of Chinese weakness demands that a now-powerful Chinese regime maintain a seat in all major international discussions. At the same time, the gross retraction of democratic voice from the people of Hong Kong (not to mention the masses of PRC citizens who never had it) and barbaric treatment of ethnic minorities cannot be countenanced by the international trading order. Coordinated economic and diplomatic pressure within a revised international trading order will impel change or else hasten the eventual collapse of Chinese autocracy under its own weight, as happened in the Soviet Union. The issue of China shines a light on the broader question of the priority of democracy within the liberal foreign policy agenda. The torpor within Western liberal and social-democratic parties can likely only be broken if they reassert a common interest across borders in pushing back against hypernationalist, ethnic exclusionist, and dictatorial and protofascist regimes. Such reawakening is unlikely to emerge from presidential summitry. Much as in the early days of the Second International of socialist and labor parties at the turn of the twentieth century or the Caribbean Legion agitation emanating from democratic Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Mexico in the early 1950s, liberal forces in and out of government must take on greater organizational cohesion. The move could start with a conclave called by global labor unions, environmental, and human rights groups, including progressive fractions from a wide variety of political parties.19 Such a grouping would not only endorse and monitor the functioning of a revised Bretton Woods agreement in the interest of the worlds’ working people but demand sanctions against major human rights violators, not just from China but also from those within the West, including the current governments of Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel. Mention of Israel returns us to the tricky territory of liberal nationalism. Where shall we draw its boundaries? Left-liberals generally want to respect the rights of each people to self-determination, including the right to control migration across its borders and set both security and economic interests as it sees fit. Israel/Palestine, however, is just one prominent example of the ways that liberal-nationalist principles can be upended by the “facts on the ground.” In this case, as the historian Eric D. Weitz has pointed out, “only the support of the international community enabled Jews to achieve [their own nation-state].”20 All the more reason, then, that the integrity of that state—both as a secure homeland for the

236 CO NCLU S IO N

Jewish people and as a protector of the rights of all its citizens—should be a continuing matter of engagement by the world’s other democratic nations. Israel’s American allies should thus be particularly concerned about the Jewish Nation-State Law passed by the Knesset in July  2018, which, in combination with tightening control over Palestinians both in the West Bank and Israel proper, promotes an ethnically bifurcated society.21 Whether in the context of two states or one binational state, it would seem that only some looser and more flexible version of shared sovereignty over land and resources—vouchsafed by a security guarantee (including demilitarization of Gaza and the West Bank) for the Jewish homeland—can possibly resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Such problems also cut closer to home. Among the hemisphere’s biggest problems is the nexus of poverty, narcoviolence, governmental breakdown, and mass emigration emanating from Central America. Yet the problem originates in the United States, not only by supplying today’s market for drugs and weaponry but as the result of a century of domination of the region, whether by avaricious private interests or government policy in the name of stability and anticommunism. As in the Middle East, the only likely liberal-democratic solution requires an expansion of the terms of governance to a regional plane. A regional solution—perhaps beginning with a labor migration and economic investment agreement to spur native-country development while recognizing the U.S. need for a controlled flow of a circulating workforce across borders—is likely the only way to stem domestic political tensions and economic catastrophe along the U.S. southern border at the same time. The conclusion to this book is written during the continuing throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. We can acknowledge that there is not much definitively liberal, democratic, or social-democratic about the nature of this plague or the means evinced internationally to quash it. Certainly, a commitment to science in the treatment of the disease, transparency in the relation of health authorities to the public, and accessibility of all residents to high-quality care are emblematic of a responsible democratic system. More generally, however, what the world will look like—and with what hopes and confidence in its future—once we emerge from quarantine remains unknown. We do know that a new Democratic administration in Washington, DC, will bear the burden of addressing a world in both political and corporal ill health. May the lessons of prior experiments in liberal-democratic diplomacy guide it along its way.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

n more than one respect, this book began in a different place than it ended up. Looking back now, I can see that I melded a few discrete early influences into a common theme and then took advantage of an uncommon variety of resources—including libraries, universities, interview subjects, as well as friends and colleagues—to bring the project home. Two parallel but initially unrelated stimuli first nudged me to focus on the post–World War II period. In 2014, while still teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I happily joined a group of Latin Americanists who were collaborating on a volume of essays about comparative labor law that was ultimately published in 2018 as Labor Justice Across the Americas. While exposing me to a host of fascinating narratives dealing with national histories about which I was mostly ignorant, one case study stood out for what seemed its anomalous direction. That the labor and political history of Costa Rica, as summarized by the historians Ronny J. Viales-Hurtado and David Díaz-Arias, took such a different postwar turn from that of Guatemala, with which I was familiar from a previous project, was intriguing enough that I thought to look into the subject further when I had the chance. Then, in the spring of 2015 I took up the Guest of the Director Fellowship at the international research center Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History (aka re:work) at Humboldt University in Berlin. Already thinking about comparative labor systems (and having years before enjoyed an introduction

238 ACK NOW LE D GM E N TS

to German language and culture via a teaching Fulbright in Munich), I became curious as to how West Germany had emerged from the war with an industrial relations system seemingly so much more progressive than that of its U.S. occupiers. Both topics, I soon learned, mixed labor with political and foreign policy history, and in both a number of Americans whom I would come to identify as “liberals” proved important actors. At some point it dawned on me that my two initial points of curiosity were linked to the larger history of international relations in the postwar era and that this subject—heretofore framed in my mind largely from a combination of pop culture, hazy memory, and a surfeit of survey teaching—deserved a more sustained treatment. In particular, as I suggest in the book’s introduction, my inherited pigeonholing of the era’s political actors as radicals and reactionaries—with “liberals” forming a squishy middle layer between them—was forced to give way to a more interesting and complex set of categories and characters. Early forays into the archival collections of the British Trades Union Congress at Warwick University’s Modern Records Centre (where I received continuing assistance from Senior Assistant Archivist Martin Sanders), the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions at Amsterdam’s International Institute of Social History under the direction of Leo Lucassen, as well as the George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archive at the University of Maryland, also added a myriad of new entries into the postwar left-labor world. While trying to throw early thoughts together, I greatly benefited from re:work’s intellectual firepower as well as social embrace; for the combination of the two, I deeply thank Andreas Eckert, Felicitas Hentschke, Jurgen Kocka, Josef Ehmer, Jurgen Schmidt, Paul-Andre Rosenthal, and Farah Barakat. In addition, for keeping up my courage in the German language while laughing at the same time, I give special credit to Regina Tunke. For early discussions of Indian affairs, I am grateful to the seminar organized by Ravi Ahuja and Nicole MayerAhuja at Gottingen University. If the book’s reach was initially overwhelming, it was also for me a fresh and uncharted adventure. Even better, I had the luxury of time on my hands, retiring from teaching in the spring of 2017 and relocating with my wife, Susan Levine, to Washington, DC, where I ensconced myself and the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History at Georgetown

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS239

University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor (KI). Thanks to the generosity of KI’s director, Joseph McCartin, and Bryan McCann, chair of the history department—and many helpful gestures from the departmental administrators Amy Chidester, Jan Liverance, and Carolina Madinaveitia—I quickly settled into Joe’s office for an extended sabbatical routine. In addition to endless cups of coffee and free photocopying, I enjoyed occasional participation in departmental seminars and listening in on the banter of hardworking and goodhumored graduate students, as well as daily advice and wry commentary from journal managing editor Patrick Dixon. While McCartin and his colleague and another old friend, Michael Kazin, did their best to cushion my transition, I was lucky in another respect. Fortunately, the arrangement of offices in the Georgetown history department placed the room I was occupying directly across from that of the diplomatic historian David Painter, who responded to my many entreaties for foundational enlightenment about the field and its must-read texts. Finally, the DC relocation, also facilitated contact at will with the insuperable collections of the Library of Congress, where the manuscript librarian Ryan Reft helped orient my search, and the George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archive at the University of Maryland, where Julie Greene kindly introduced me to Benjamin Blake, a consummate special collections’ librarian. As my reading about the period widened and deepened, I began to see linkages across time and space that ultimately helped define the parameters of the book. Admittedly, my choices emerged both from objective “facts on the ground” and my own experience and predilections. Of the latter, among my early decisions was not to concentrate on U.S. labor unions but on more directly political actors; this decision was also facilitated by the coincident and most valuable research of my “last” graduate student Jeff Schuhrke, precisely on the AFL-CIO role in the Cold War era. Yet readers will quickly notice that rather than abandon the labor theme, I tried to weave it into the larger tapestry. My labor and economic interests as well as my early readings naturally enough raised the Bretton Woods agreements as a foundational element for any revisionist postwar study. Whereas Germany and the Central American region offered a vital perspective on anticommunism in American foreign policy thinking, I also was determined to follow my liberal and social-democratic subjects into other arenas of engagement and conflict. Several visits to

240 AC K NOW LE D GM E N TS

New Delhi as a participant in semiannual meetings of the Association of Indian Labour Historians (AILH) had already equipped me with a ready curiosity about a country that I knew was a crucial testing ground for the concept of “development.” I had visited Israel and the West Bank on a “two narratives” tour organized from our Chicago Reconstructionist synagogue, a tour I found both enticing and disturbing. Israel’s centrality to the U.S. liberal imagination across the postwar era now beckoned me into its vast historiography, wherein I was also struck by a bifurcation of thematic as well as chronological focus that ended up defining two chapters of the book rather than one. Slow immersion into my new setting in Washington, DC, also sharpened my appreciation for the role of African Americans in our nation’s foreign policy battles. I had originally viewed the antiapartheid fight through the eyes of student protesters who erected “shantytowns” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where I was then teaching. Returning with a historical focus to the subject, conversations with Professor Maurice Jackson at Georgetown and a host of DC-based political activists with various connections to TransAfrica equipped me with a considerably enhanced understanding of the subject. Throughout, my compilation of narratives built on a synthesis of archival and secondary research material. In addition to the libraries mentioned here, I am most grateful to the staff at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University; Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library; the John  F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum; the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum; and the Center for Jewish History. In addition, and largely owing to my felicitous relocation, I was also able to draw on the cooperation of several interview subjects who, by the 1970s, were part of the action I was describing. These included the former government officials Stuart  E. Eizenstat, Donald McHenry, Chester Crocker, and Thomas Dodd. For their insights on African American politics and the antiapartheid movement, I benefited greatly from conversations with Sylvia Hill, Cecelie E. Counts, Nii Akuetteh, Bill Fletcher Jr., Salih Booker, William Lucy, and Mark Bayard. Finally, I am deeply indebted to Georgetown’s Lauinger Library and the staff at its circulation desk, headed by Sandra Marroquin, who together maintained uninterrupted services throughout the period of pandemic.

AC K NOW LE D GM E NTS 241

When it comes to the manuscript itself, I will limit my acknowledgments to those who most directly left their impression on this work. I begin with a tiny few who consented (or were volunteered from outside) to read the entire manuscript. As is my usual practice, Susan Levine first took up my roughest first drafts and kindly marked the spots that needed most immediate surgical attention. Then, I placed a still-early draft in the trusted hands my UIC colleagues Jeff Sklansky and Eric Arnesen, the latter of whom had conveniently transplanted himself and his family to DC several years before my own move. Offering more of a gestalt approach, Jeff wisely pushed me toward a clearer central argument, more direct justification for my choice of subjects, and stronger connective tissues between chapters. Under command to “do an Eric” on the manuscript, Arnesen held my feet to the fire on page after page, equally sensitive to lapses of vagueness and flights of romanticism. Aside from his ever-astute literary criticism, moreover, drawing on his own encyclopedic newspaper.com files for the period, he regularly delivered new reading assignments—with texts attached!—that immeasurably strengthened my evidence and argument. Later, during the outside review process from Columbia University Press, I received substantive but affirming critiques from four anonymous readers. These readers—Steven Brady, Kimberly Phillips-Fein, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Alex Lichtenstein (no relation)—then “unmasked” themselves and imparted further, nononsense criticisms and most valuable suggestions, while challenging me on a few key interpretive points. In specific chapters I also relied on additional experts and colleagues as well as professional forums that I want to credit here. For Bretton Woods (chapter 1), I offered an early draft for presentation at the “Ruptures, Consolidations, Continuities: Reconsidering Global Economic Processes After 1945” conference, June 28–30, 2016, organized by Patrick Neveling and Robert Heinze at the Department of History, University of Berne, Switzerland. I also presented at the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy, directed by Nelson Lichtenstein at the University of California at Santa Barbara. On issues of global finance, I enjoyed a productive back and forth with the eminent sociologist Fred Block. Similarly, on liberalism and its evolving fissures I relied on the counsel of three dear friends: the historiographical dexterity of Ellie Shermer in Chicago; the continuing political acumen of my old Indianapolis

242ACK NOW LE D GM E N TS

sidekick Bill Julian in Davis, California; and the fruits of years of argument about liberalism with Fred Siegel in Brooklyn. I am also grateful to the members of the Newberry Labor History Seminar (especially Jonathan Levi and Jeffrey Sklansky) for a discussion of an earlier draft in February 2016. Adam Goodman and the late Judith Stein also aided me with characteristically close, critical readings. For Germany (chapter 2), two historians who have enjoyed very different professional careers made a huge difference for me. After reading a couple of works by Volker Berghahn, a senior historian of modern German and European history at Columbia University, I (as a total newcomer to the field) wrote him to ask if he thought there might be more to probe regarding American and British influence on postwar West German labor relations. He responded with immediate encouragement (even suggesting I call him at home) and the beginnings of a bibliography on the subject. Such intellectual generosity should be celebrated when it occurs. Then there was the fortuitous case of Michael Fichter. While still working at the Newberry Library, I spent a good six weeks struggling through his published, German-language treatment of the U.S. Army’s relation to the restart of postwar labor relations in West Germany—exactly the topic my curiosity had also settled on. Once in Berlin, I learned that Michael lived there too and arranged by email to have coffee with him. “Hey Leon,” he yelled out once I announced my presence at the appointed spot. It was only then that I learned that Fichter was an American expat from the late 1960s who had actually written his doctoral thesis in English (but for submission, of necessity, in German to the Free University of Berlin, where he has subsequently long served as a labor relations consultant). From that moment we became fast friends, and he has continued to offer kernels of wisdom for my project. For additional helpful commentary on this chapter, I am most grateful to readings and comments from Stefan Berger, Jurgen Kocka, Wolfgang Daeubler, Jonathan Wiesen, Josef Ehmer, and Stefan Wannenwetsch. For reading references and critical responses to the Israel/Palestine narratives (chapters 3 and 6), I was privileged to offer a paper to the Jewish History Colloquium, directed by Arie M. Dubnow at George Washington University, and enjoy stimulating comments from Carmel Chiswick and Lauren Strauss. At different stages of these chapters, Rachel

AC K NOW LE D GM E NTS 243

Havrelock, Michael Zakim, Joseph McCartin, Bill Julian, Sandy Sufian, Robert Johnston, Ron Robin, Benny Morris, Jeffrey Herf, and Yair Tarchitsky all chipped in with reading suggestions or wise commentary, and I also received research assistance from Thayme Hardi Watson. In my Georgetown history department abode, I most benefited from the friendship of Laura Goffman, who helped steer me into new paths of reading and thinking. As previously mentioned, my understanding of Costa Rican history (chapter 4) depended from the beginning on the indispensable scholarship of David Diaz Arias. Ever since my old friend Jeff Gould helped facilitate our acquaintance, David has patiently read and reread my drafts and pointed me to valuable, additional source material. In addition, I am indebted to early readings and critique from Jeff himself as well as from Daniel James, Alex Lichtenstein, and David Painter. Jeff Schuhrke, referenced earlier, graciously supplied me with a rich harvest from his work in the papers of Serafino Romualdi. In addition, a lively session at the DC Labor History Seminar yielded helpful specific queries, corrections, and suggestions from Yevette Richards Jordan, Jay Driskell, Tula Connell, Elisa Smith, Adam Dean, and Patrick Dixon. For keeping my head at least occasionally tuned to events in Central America, I credit my old research and writing partner Alvis Dunn. Mostly my orientation to India (chapter 5) was sustained by continuing discussions over the years with AILH historians like Prabhu Mohapatra, Chitra Joshi, Rana Behal, Ravi Ahuja, and Robert Raman. However, at UIC, I was also lucky to be able to draw on the expertise of Rama Mantena and Sunil Agnani as well as the coincident research of Jeff Schuhrke. Then, when I knew I needed better grounding in the economic authorities of the region, I was grateful for the honest critique of my old colleague Peter Coclanis. On South Africa and the antiapartheid movement (chapter 7), I benefited not only from interviews with but close readings by Salih Booker, Cecelie Counts, Sylvia Hill, and Maurice Jackson. In addition, Peter Cole, Alex Lichtenstein, Andreas Eckert, Jeff Schuhrke, Bill Julian, David Painter, William Lucas, Jeff Bergner, David McKean, and Thomas  J. Duesterberg all provided valuable references and contacts. At a Georgetown History Faculty seminar kindly arranged by Jim Shedel, I received suggestive questions and pointers from Mike Kazin, John Tutino, Joe

244ACK NOW LE D GM E N TS

McCartin, and Patrick Dixon. Finally, in chasing down evocative photos, I am indebted to Richard Knight at the Michigan State University African Activist Archive and the photographer Adwoa Dunn-Mouton. The final stage of this project—finding a publisher, then readying the manuscript for its hoped-for readers—also led me through a few steps I’d never experienced before. For helping me enter this unknown territory, I am indebted to early advice from Peter Agree and Kathy Peiss, following which I had the good fortune (through contact with a new Watergate friend, James Banner) to connect with Peter Bernstein as a literary agent. It wasn’t so much the content of Peter’s suggestions (perhaps, to his chagrin, I often didn’t take his exact advice) but the fact that he kept pushing me to clarify my argument to address a nonspecialist audience that changed my storytelling here. Never have I done so many rewrites. He also helped me find a happy home with Stephen Wesley and Columbia University Press. Stephen was most encouraging from the beginning and not only helped guide me through the gauntlet of outside readers but selectively offered tips of his own that further affected the final presentation here. The associate editor Christian Winting and the production editor Michael Haskell helped with a number of technical matters on the way to final submission of the manuscript, and Robert Fellman, my copy editor, supplied the last, careful ministration to the text, after which Arc Indexing applied a skillful hand. Yet, although many people, subjects, and experiences were new and initially unfamiliar in tackling this project, there were, among the valuable old standbys, one who again proved a godsend. I dedicate this book to her.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: LEFT- LIBERAL APOSTLES IN THE COLD WAR ERA 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

Author to Irving and Beatrice Fink, private letter, spring 1971. Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (1987; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 6. See, e.g., Greg Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman (New York: Metropolitan, 2015); and Barry Gewen, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (New York: Norton, 2020). Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, 189, 216. Hunt’s book, it is worth noting, has no entry for “liberals” or “liberalism” in the index. Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 311–45, quotation at 337. Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation (New York: Liveright, 2019), 40, and Mill quotation at 42; Tony Smith, “Wilsonianism,” in Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, https://www.americanforeignrelations.com/O-W/ Wilsonianism.html. Smith, America’s Mission, 18; U.S. Department of State Archive, “Decolonization of  Asia and Africa,” https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/cwr/98782.htm; U.S. Department of State Archive, “Decolonization of Asia and Africa,” https://2001-2009 .state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/cwr/98782.htm. Joseph S. Nye Jr., Do Morals Matter: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 1–11, 155–80. G. John Ikenberry, A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), xi–xv; G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 18.

24 6  IN T R O D U C TIO N: LEFT- LIBE RAL AP OSTLES I N THE COLD WA R ER A

11. 12.

13.

Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 50–51, 253. Michael Kazin, “The Rise and Fall of Internationalism During (and After) the New Deal Order,” in Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, ed. Gary Gerstle, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Alice O’Conner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 392, 394. Samuel Moyn, “Beyond Liberal Internationalism,” Dissent, Winter 2017, https:// w w w . dissentmagazine . org / article / lef t - foreign - policy - beyond - liberal - inter nationalism.

1. THE BRETTON WOODS BOOMERANG: LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM, 1944– 2016 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

Adam Smith on the “liberal system” of free trade (1776), https://oll.libertyfund.org /quotes/459. Benn Steil, The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 100; Sara Lorenzini, Global Development: A Cold War History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 26–29. Jean Fourastié, Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1979); Claudia Goldin and Robert  A. Margo, “The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-Century,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 107 (February 1992): 1–34. See also Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 1. I am using the term “neoliberal” in the sense commonly invoked by economists and other social scientists after 1970 to refer to policies that would extend deregulatory market reforms. The term has a longer history, adopted as early as the mid-1930s by commentators who turned to the writings of Frederick Hayek and others for a brace against New Deal as well as more openly socialist state regulation of the economy. Angus Bergin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 72. Sabrina Rodriguez, “Trump Shuns Democrats as He Signs Bipartisan USMCA,” January 29, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/29/trump-signs-usmca-into-law -108803. Marc Levinson, “End of a Golden Age,” Aeon, February 22, 2017, https://aeon.co/essays /how-economic-boom-times-in-the-west-came-to-an-end. Dana Frank, Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Boston: Beacon, 1999), 33–55, 56–78, 1888; Adam Dean, From Conflict to Coalition: Profit-Sharing Institutions and the Political Economy of Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 109–10. Michael Huberman, Odd Couple: International Trade and Labor Standards in History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 2–3, 11–12, 63.

1 . TH E BRETTO N WO O DS BO O M ER A N G247

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

Joyce Kolko and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 29–30. The Wilsonian-era labor reforms generally made a positive difference for working people, although the Clayton Act proved more rhetoric than reality, and the LaFollette Seamen’s Act was substantially undermined by administrative inaction. On the latter, see my Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry from 1812 to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 93–116. Jill Jensen, “The United States, the ILO, and the Global Humanitarian Project, 1919– 1954,” unpublished ms. copy, courtesy of the author, 2017, chap. 1. Steil, The Marshall Plan, 88. Kolko and Kolko, The Limits of Power, 29–30. Volker R. Berghahn, The Americanisation of West German Industry, 1945–1973 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986), 15. Qtd. in James Stewart Martin, All Honorable Men (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), 17. Martin, All Honorable Men, 108. Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 237. Berghahn, The Americanisation of West German Industry, 5; see also 28–30. For a contrasting view of German economic interests and the war effort, see J. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Allen Lane, 2006). Tony  A. Freyer, Antitrust and Global Capitalism, 1930–2004 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 62. John W. Budd, Rafael Gomez, and Noah M. Meltz, “Why a Balance Is Best: The Pluralist Industrial Relations Paradigm of Balancing Competing Interests,” in Theoretical Perspectives on Work and the Employment Relationship, ed. Bruce Kaufman (Industrial Relations Research Association, 2004); In the early post–World War II era, pluralist doctrines evolved into modern industrial relations theory in the hands of the German émigré Otto Kahn-Freund at Oxford and John Dunlop, the latter of whose Industrial Relations Systems (New York: Holt, 1958) proved the masterwork in the field. Kahn-Freund, a German Jew who escaped to London in 1933 after a distinguished career as a scholar and Social-Democratic judge in the Weimar Labor Court, soon celebrated the British industrial relations system precisely “because [it is] so little regulated by law.” Applying pluralist theory to the study of workplace relations, KahnFreund would coin the term “collective laissez-faire” in 1959 for what, at least until the 1970s, he maintained was a superior system to state-based models. “What the State has not given,” as he put it, “the State cannot take away.” Lord Wedderburn, “Otto KahnFreund and British Labour Law,” in Labour Law and Industrial Relations: Building on Kahn-Freund, ed. Lord Wedderburn of Charlton, Roy Lewis, and Jon Clark (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 34, 41. Kolko and Kolko, The Limits of Power, 11–16, quotations at 12, 16. Not surprisingly, there was a strong political calculation as well in the Democrats’ shift to a liberal trading system. As the political scientist Peter Trubowitz documents, the FDR era’s international

248 1. TH E BRETTO N WO O DS B OOMER A N G

21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

economic policies were closely related to the “internationalization [of the economy] of the urban Northeast.” Effectively a new “internationalist alliance” united the Northeast with the South, which eagerly embraced economic growth through trade as an alternative to reckoning with the region’s acute internal social divisions of race and class. Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 114–15, 165–66. A. Canto, “U.S. Trade Policy: History and Evidence,” Cato Journal 3 (Winter 1983/1984): 680. Anette Hild-Berg, Toni Sender (1888–1964): Ein Leben in Namen der Freiheit und der sozialen Gerechtigkeit (Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1994), 148. For a compelling overview of trade and labor issues, see Adam Dean, From Conflict to Coalition: Profit-Sharing Institutions and the Political Economy of Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). The RTAA, it is worth noting, overcame strenuous AFL opposition not only in its initial passage but at subsequent renewals in 1940 and 1945. Dean, From Conflict to Coalition, 110, 118–19. Frank, Buy American, 90, quotation at 107. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Free World.” Kolko and Kolko, The Limits of Power, 450. Kolko and Kolko, The Limits of Power, 450. Anthony Carew, “Towards a Free Trade Union Centre: The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions,” in The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, ed. Anthony Carew et al. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), 202–3; ILO Abolition of Forced Labor Convention, No. 105, 1957, https://www.ilo.org /dyn/normlex /en/f ?p=NORMLE XPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C105. Only after White resigned from his treasury post advising the IMF in March 1947 and following his quixotic support for Henry Wallace over Truman in 1948 did revelations—ultimately backed by considerable hard evidence—surface of White’s extended, secret cooperation with Soviet agents. White himself denied any communist connections before hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in August 1948, then only days later succumbed to a fatal heart attack. Although continuingly contested by his own family, his complicity in espionage was confirmed by the report of the bipartisan Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy in 1997. Whatever his ultimate hopes for the Soviet Union, White demonstrated impeccably liberal-Keynesian leanings on economic matters. Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 317–18; Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 157–71, 341. Landon  R.  Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 207–9. Ronald Radosh and Leonard  P. Liggio, “Henry  A. Wallace and the Open Door,” in Cold War Critics: Alternatives to American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years, ed. Thomas G. Paterson (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971), 76–114, quotation at 98.

1 . TH E BRETTO N WO O DS BO O M ER A N G249

32.

33.

34.

35.

Kristina V. Minkova, “The Economic Roots of the Cold War: The IMF, ITO and Other Economic Issues in Post-War Soviet-American Relations,” Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective 12, no.  1 (January  2018): 18–31, https://digitalcom mons.kennesaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1238&context=jgi. Stuart Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s (Melbourne: University of New South Wales Press, 2015), 243–46, quotation at 243. Perhaps most significant in the long run, the function of the Stabilization Fund was also constitutionally humbled. Private banks, with State Department support, gained indirect control over the administration of the IMF and succeeded, in getting the fund, in the economic historian Fred Block’s words, to “enforce the gold standard discipline rather than subvert it.” Financial orthodoxy and an accompanying inclination to budgetary austerity were thus built into the very DNA of the world’s most powerful regulatory body. Fred L. Block, The Origins of International Economic Disorder: A Study of United States International Monetary Policy from World War II to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 46–55, quotation at 54. On the World Bank’s distorting effects on economic development, see also Lorenzini, Global Development, 96. Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment, 237–70. Interestingly, a more sustained if also ultimately dismissed challenge to the rising neoliberal orthodoxy in international economics occurred with regard to food and agricultural policy. Once again, Australian advocates pushed hardest for intervention in international markets. Frank Lidgett McDougall, a key adviser to the Australian high commissioner to London (and former Australian prime minister) S. M. Bruce, by 1938 had already begun discussions with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace about the need for wider world nutrition coordination; as propelled by growing fears about wartime and likely postwar food crises, such concerns would ultimately take tangible form with the establishment of the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in 1945. Beyond a mere consulting body, however, advocates like McDougall, Bruce, and the missionizing British food scientist John Boyd Orr imagined an activist role for the FAO in simultaneously staving off world hunger and advancing world peace. Plans for a “World Food Board” theoretically authorized the FAO, as the historian Wendy Way explains, to “provide long-term credit to food- deficient countries . . . buy and hold stocks of surplus food from exporters, for distribution in time of need and also to help stabilise prices, thereby encouraging greater production in advanced countries [and increasing] world trade.” Despite support from USDA economists and some sectors of Australia’s Labor government, such far-reaching “statism” ran directly against the principles of U.S. trade policy, and the WFB proposal soon devolved into more toothless proceduralism. Wendy Way, A New Idea Each Morning: How Food and Agriculture Came Together in One International Organization (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2013), 293–96, quotation at 292. Thomas Ferguson, “Industrial Conflict and the Coming of the New Deal: The Triumph of Multinational Liberalism in America,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

25 0 1. TH E BRETTO N WO O DS BOOMER A N G

36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

Peter Donohue, “ ‘Free Trade’ Unions and the State: Trade Liberalization’s Endorsement by the AFL-CIO, 1943–1962,” Research in Political Economy 13 (1992): 9, 22, 334– 35. The United Auto Workers’ leader, Walter Reuther, according to his biographer Nelson Lichtenstein, offered the quintessential combination of “the language of American productivity” with “the values of European social democracy.” Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic, 1995), 327–45, quotation at 336. Victor Silverman, Imagining Internationalism in American and British Labor, 1939–49 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 175. Denis MacShane, International Labour and the Origins of the Cold War (London: Clarendon House, 1992), 135. “American Labor and ERP,” “The Promise of Bretton Woods,” 1948, CIO bound pamphlets, 1935–1951, Record Group 34-002, Box  36/42, George Meany Memorial AFLCIO Archives. See also Donohue, “ ‘Free Trade’ Unions and the State,” 9, 22; Steil, The Marshall Plan, 200. Statement of Bert Seidman, economist, AFL-CIO Dept. of Research before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on S. 1094, March 17, 1959, RG 98-002, Box 27/5, Meany Archives. Donohue, “ ‘Free Trade’ Unions and the State,” 56. Philip M. Kaiser, Journeying Far and Wide: A Political and Diplomatic Memoir (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 109, 113–15, quotation at 113. Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 130. Roy Godson, American Labor and European Politics: The AFL as a Transnational Force (New York: Crane, Russak, 1976), 108–9; Howell John Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 136–39. Anthony Carew, Labour Under the Marshall Plan: The Politics of Productivity and the Marketing of Management Science (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 22. Barry Eichengreen, The European Economy Since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 2. “Important Declarations of Policy,” Labour News from Britain, December 14, 1947, RG 98-002, Box 67, Meany Archives. Carew, Labour Under the Marshall Plan, 224–25. The Labour Party’s major nationalizations (e.g., the National Health Service and British Railways) had been accomplished in 1946–1947, before implementation of the Marshall Plan. Chester Bowles, American Politics in a Revolutionary World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 111. John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 149–50. Eric Rauchway, The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (New York: Basic, 2015), xxvii, 196, and generally 169–202.

1. TH E BRETTO N WO O DS BO O MER A N G251

52. 53.

54.

55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

ILO, Report of the Director- General [David A. Morse] for the European Regional Conference, Geneva 1955 (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1954), 3–4. “Cartel from Hell: IG Farben and Hitler’s Nazis,” review of Hell’s Cartels: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine, by Diarmuid Jeffreys, February 2010, http:// www.workers.org.uk/features/feat_0210/ig.html; Wikipedia, “Cartel,” http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Cartel. European “competition policy,” as defined under the Treaty of Rome, initially focused its energies on eliminating barriers within the Common Market. Though undoubtedly moving the member states substantially away from their prior “closed” tendencies, these antitrust policies—not unlike the American act on which they were based—displayed weaknesses “such as the length of time taken to settle cases, a lack of transparency . . . and too much room for politicization.” Umut Aydin and Kenneth P. Thomas, “The Challenges and Trajectories of EU Competition Policy in the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of European Integration 34, no. 6 (2012). Report on “Restrictive Business Practices, in Western Europe,” as communicated from Daniel Goott, Department of State, to Michael Ross, CIO, Oct. 9, 1951, RG 18002, Box 5, Meany Archives. Peter  A. Hall and David  W. Soskice., eds., Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Wolfgang Streeck and Kozo Yamamura, The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism: Germany and Japan in Comparison (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). Both categorical frameworks—“coordinated” and “nonliberal”—implicitly draw on an earlier literature of the 1970s and 1980s framed around “neocorporatism,” with the cases of Germany and Scandinavia most prominently in mind. See, e.g., Colin Crouch, Industrial Relations and European State Traditions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). Wolfgang Streeck, “Introduction: Explorations Into the Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism in Germany and Japan,” in The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism, ed. Streeck and Yamamura, 2, 7–8. Streeck, “Introduction,” 32–33. Streeck, “Introduction,” 33. Konrad Adenauer served as Germany’s first postwar chancellor until 1963, when he was succeeded by his influential economics minister, Ludwig Erhard. Volker Berghahn, Modern Germany: Society, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 204, 241. Irwin, “The GATT’s Contribution to Economic Recovery,” 127–50. John  W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton, 1999), 79–80, 246–47, 292–93. From the Meiji period through World War II, a “zaibatsu” defined a large conglomeration of companies with interlocking, often family-centered, ownership. Andrew Gordon, The Wages of Affluence: Labor and Management in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 8–11, 46. Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 7, 10. For further elaboration on the international politics of steel, see Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America:

2521. TH E BRETTO N WO O DS B OOMER A N G

65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

71.

72. 73. 74. 75.

76.

77.

Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 197–228; Stephen Woolcock, “European Union Trade Policy,” in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics Online (2011), LSE Research Online, http:// eprints.lse.ac.uk. Dower, Embracing Defeat, 546. Zachery Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), esp. 14, 51–52. Joseph Hausman, “Preventing Industrial Disputes in Industrialized Countries: The Israeli Experience,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Trends in Industrial and Labor Relations, January 9–14, 1972 (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Academic Press, 1974), 125; Yehuda Yadin, “Industrial Democracy as a Component in Social Change: The Israeli Approach and Experience,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Trends in Industrial and Labor Relations, January 9–14, 1972, 583. Guy Mundlak, Fading Corporatism: Israel’s Labor Law and Industrial Relations in Transition (Ithaca, NY: ILR, 2007), 69. Michael Shalev, Labour and the Political Economy in Israel (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2011). Herbert (Hanoch) Smith, “Immigration Policy and Migrant Workers,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Trends in Industrial and Labor Relations, Montreal, May  24–28, 1976 (Montreal: Industrial Relations Centre, McGill University, 1977), 209–10. John Gerard Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36 (Spring 1982): 379–415. For elaboration on U.S. labor politics and trade policy in the era of neoliberalism, see James Shoch, “Grappling with Globalization: The Democratic Party’s Struggles Over International Market Regulation,” in What’s Left of the Left: Democrats and Social Democrats in Challenging Times, ed. James Cronin et  al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 210–37; Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (New York: Norton, 2011), 74–75, 233–35. Smith, “Immigration Policy and Migrant Workers.” That this last comment went unchallenged was likely because of the absence from the gathering of delegates from arbitration-friendly Australia or New Zealand. Testimony of Itzhak Zamir and Otfried Wlotzke, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Trends in Industrial and Labor Relations, January 9–14, 1972, 245, 79, 81. Everett M. Kassolow, “What Happens When Everyone Organizes?” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Trends in Industrial and Labor Relations, January 9–14, 1972, 27. Monica Prasad, The Politics of Free Markets; The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 4–5. Block, Origins of International Economic Disorder, 196–99; Fritz  W. Scharpf, Crisis and Choice in European Social Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 3–4, 162–65. Fred  L. Block explains the inner dynamic of the floating rate system:

2. THE GOOD POSTWAR253

78. 79. 80.

81.

82. 83.

84. 85.

86.

“With floating exchange rates came much greater volatility in the foreign exchange markets; large swings in the relative value of major currencies were increasingly common. These swings made it difficult for governments to enforce limits on international capital mobility since investors insisted that they be able to hedge against exchange rate risks by diversifying their currency portfolios. Yet, the freeing of capital mobility only further increased volatility in the capital markets.” Fred L. Block, Capitalism: The Future of an Illusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 164; Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox, 70. Stein, Running Steel, 226. Ottinger, qtd. in Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest, 209. On the politics of steel and trade in the United States, see Stein, Running Steel, 197– 228; and John B. Judis, The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of the Public Trust (New York: Pantheon, 2000), 114–15. Alexander C. Pathy, preface to Proceedings of the International Conference on Trends in Industrial and Labor Relations, Montreal, May  24–28, 1976, xi. As the Canadian minister of labor suggested in his opening remarks, if forced to identify “one trend in labour-management relations, [there was] pretty general agreement that the overriding trend is change and an acceleration in the rate of change.” John Munro, remarks, Proceedings of the International Conference on Trends in Industrial and Labor Relations, Montreal, May 24–28, 1976, 3. Munro, remarks, 4. Munro, remarks, 4. Herbert (Hanoch) Smith, “Immigration Policy and Migrant Workers,” 199–212; Everett  M. Kassalow, “Multinational Corporations and Their Impact on Industrial Relations,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Trends in Industrial and Labor Relations, Montreal, May 24–28, 1976, 399–418. Canto, “U.S. Trade Policy,” 683–86. Wesley  R. Smith, “Assessing the NAFTA Side Agreements,” Heritage Foundation, September  30, 1993, http://www. heritage .org /research /reports/1993/09/ bg960nbsp -assessing-the-nafta-side-agreements. Editorial, “Pacific Trade and Worker Rights,” New York Times, November 21, 2015.

2. THE GOOD POSTWAR: GERMAN WORKER RIGHTS, 1945– 1950 1. 2.

3.

Stephen J. Silvia, Holding the Shop Together: German Industrial Relations in the Postwar Era (Ithaca, NY: ILR, 2013), 69. Klaus-Ditmer Henke, Die amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995), 592–605. The fleeting FDGB organization of the West was distinct from the union of the same name that from 1946 came to define the centralized trade union apparatus of the Soviet zone and subsequently East Germany. The “parity principle” in the 1951 codetermination law for coal and steel proved controversial in both concept and design. Both management and labor were each to select

2542. THE GOOD POSTWAR

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

five representatives to a firm’s supervisory board; then, a crucial eleventh member was to be appointed, in principle by agreement among the two parties but ultimately to be elected at the annual meeting of shareholders, a mechanism that inevitably tipped the balance in management’s favor. Still, it was likely the closest western workers and their unions got to coequal authority in industry. Hans-Peter Schwarz, Konrad Adenauer: A German Politician and Statesman in a Period of War, Revolution, and Reconstruction (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1995), 1:563–64. Michael Fichter, Besatzungsmacht und Gewerkschaften . . . 1944–48 (Berlin: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1982), 184–91; T. E. M. McKitterick and R. D. V. Roberts, “Workers and Management: The German Co-determination Experiment,” in Fabian Research Series 12, nos. 148–162 (1952–1953; Fabian Society, Kraus Reprint, 1972), 10–11; Ian D. Turner, Reconstruction in Post-War Germany: British Occupation Policy and the Western Zones, 1945–55 (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 277–88; Volker R. Berghahn, The Americanisation of West German Industry, 1945–1973 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986), 46–50, 211– 230; S. Jonathan Wiesen, West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 182–86; Stephen J. Silvia, Holding the Shop Together: German Industrial Relations in the Postwar Era (Ithaca, NY: ILR, 2013), 46–50, 69. Rudolph Echterhölter, “Legal Aspects of Industrial Relations in the Federal Republic of Germany,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Trends in Industrial and Labor Relations, January  9–14, 1972 (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Academic Press, 1974), 85. Ewan McGaughey, “The Codetermination Bargains: The History of German Corporate and Labour Law,” LSE Law, Society and Economy Working Papers 10/2015, http:// www.lse.ac.uk /law/working-paper-series. West German trade union density topped 40  percent—dwarfing the U.S. postwar peak of 35 percent—of the workforce by 1960 and continued to climb to an early-1980s peak of 50+ percent before leveling off and then falling precipitously following reunification. Both industrial job losses and the absence of an independent (non-state-led) labor organizing tradition in the East was dramatically evidenced in decline of aggregate trade union membership in Germany by almost 3.5 million between 1991 and 1998, reducing density from 50+ percent to 32 percent. The continuing trend would reduce German density to 17.7 percent by 2017, still considerably heftier than the 10.6 figure for U.S. workers and one somewhat assuaged in the German case by the prevalence of sectoral bargaining, where many nonunion workplaces benefited from master contracts in a given industry. “Trade Union Membership and Density in the 1990s,” Eurofound, https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/publications/article/1999/trade-union -membership-and-density-in-the-1990s; Niall McCarthy, “Which Countries Have the Highest Density,” Forbes, June  20, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy /2017/06/20/which - countries -have -the -highest-levels - of-labor-union -membership -infographic/. David L. Stebenne, Arthur J. Goldberg: New Deal Liberal (New York: Oxford, 1996), 19, 30–34; Geert Van Goethem, “Conflicting Interests: The International Federation of

2. THE GOOD POSTWAR255

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

Trade Unions (1919–1945),” in The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, ed. Anthony Carew et al. (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2000), 147–53. TUC, Gottfurcht to Citrine, May  31, 1940, Trades Union Congress (TUC) Papers, Modern Records Centre, Warwick University, UK. Ursula Bitzegeio, Uber Partei-und Landesgrezen hinaus: Hans Gottfurcht (1896–1982) und die gewerkschaftliche Organisation der Angestellten (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf. GmbH, 2009), 259–69. Bitzegeio, Uber Partei-und Landesgrezen hinaus, 328–29. Henke, Die amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands, 633. Working closely with Hans Jahn of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), Sender’s project, spanning 1943 to 1944, focused on intelligence gathering in Germany with an eye on the psychological warfare accompanying that on the battlefronts. Anette Hild-Berg, Toni Sender (1888–1964): Ein Leben in Namen der Freiheit und der sozialen Gerechtigkeit (Koln: Bund-Verlag, 1994), 162–83, 209–26. Rebecca Boehling, A Question of Priorities: Democratic Reform and Economic Recovery in Postwar Germany: Frankfurt, Munich, and Stuttgart Under  U.S. Occupation, 1945–1949 (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1996), 15–16. On  U.S. government–AFL-CIO relations regarding West Germany, see Julia Angster, Konsenskapitalismus und Socialdemokratie: Die Westernisierung von SPD und DGB (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2003), 147–64. Klaus-Ditmer Henke, Die amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995), 573–75; “Mortimer Wolf,” obituary, New York Times, June 14, 1978. G. C. Isaacs to Walter Citrine, October 16, 1945, Trades Union Congress Papers (TUC), Modern Records Centre (MRC), University of Warwick MSS 292/943/11; Fichter, Besatzungsmacht und Gewerkschaften, 143, 153. Roy Godson, American Labor and European Politics: The AFL as a Transnational Force (New York: Crane, Russak & Co., 1976), 38. Clay, qtd. in John Gimbel, The American Occupation of Germany: Politics and the Military, 1945–1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968), 76. Lucius D. Clay, Decision in Germany (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 289. Characteristically, when, after several years of retirement, he joined the management of the Continental Can Company, Clay reached an agreement with steelworkers’ counsel on the first annual wage secured through collective bargaining. Steve Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991), 547–48; Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay: An American Life (NY: Henry Holt, 1990), 574. Michael Fichter, “Aufbau und Neuordnung: Breetriebsrate zwischen Klassensolidaritat und Bertriebsloyalitat,” in Von Stalingrad zur Wahrungsreform: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Umbrechs in Deutschland, ed. Martin Broszat et al. (Munchen, 1988), 487. Bramall to Herbert Tracey, qtd. in letter from Tracey to Citrine et al., September 19, 1945, no. 28a; also no. 23, TUC Papers. Henke, Die amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands, 595. Berghahn, The Americanisation of West German Industry, 7–15.

2562. THE GOOD POSTWAR

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Silvia thus characterizes German postwar IR as “in most respects a refurbished version of the laws of the Weimar Republic and, in some instances, the Second Empire.” Silvia, Holding the Shop Together, 4. Berghahn, The Americanisation of West German Industry, 15–18. Henke, Die amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands, 578. Paul  R. Porter oral history, Harry  S. Truman Library and Museum, https://www .trumanlibrary.gov/library/oral-histories/porterpr. Morse would go on to an extended and distinguished career as the International Labor Organization’s director-general in Geneva. “Newman Jeffrey,” Newman Jeffrey Collection, Wayne State University, https:// reuther.wayne.edu/files/LP000173.pdf. Newman would later serve as international representative for the UAW. “George Shaw Wheeler,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/George_Shaw _Wheeler. Louis  A. Wiesner oral history, interview by Donald Kienzle, September  30, 1992, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/mfdipbib001261/. Reuter would serve as the celebrated mayor of West Berlin from 1948 to 1953, and Brandt, as leader of the SPD, would be elected West German chancellor from 1969 to 1974. On the labor attaché program, see Philip M. Kaiser, Journeying Far and Wide: A Political and Diplomatic Memoir (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992), 113–15; also Joseph R. Fiszman, “The U.S. Labor Attaché: Expectations and Reality,” PhD diss., Michigan State University, 1964. Porter oral history; “Paul  R. Porter,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item /mfdipbib000940/. Clay, Decision in Germany, 281. Wiesner oral history; Hanna [Bornowski] Silver interview, https://collections.ushmm .org /oh_findingaids/RG-50.462.0123_01_trs_en.pdf; Fichter, Besatzungsmacht und Gewerkschaften, 290. See, generally, John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (London: Riverrun, 2016). Stefan Berger, “British Socialism as Perceived in Twentieth-Century Germany,” in Britain as a Model of Modern Society? German Views, ed. Arnd Bauerkamper and Christiane Eisenberg (Augsburg: Wissner-Verlag, 2006), 184–202, quotation at 193. Leon Fink, Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 129, 138. Volker Berghahn, Modern Germany: Society, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 204. TUC, British Aid for German Workers, 1950 report, TUC Papers. Clay, Decision in Germany, 293. Memorandum of the British Military Government, 1945, TUC Papers, Box 11, “German Trade Unions 1945–47.” Anonymous author to Herbert Tracey, September 21, 1945.28B, MRC.

2. THE GOOD POST WAR257

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

W. Leggett to Henry Tewson, October 16, 1945, no. 26, MRC; F. Roy Willis, The French in Germany, 1945–1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 190–91. Report from WFTU to TUC, February 22, 1946, TUC Papers. Bramall to Tracey. Minutes of Walter Citrine Meeting with Sir Frederick Leggett and Henry Tewson, October 6, 1945, Box 11, TUC Papers. Albin Karl to Messrs. Lawther, Tanner, and Bullock (TUC visiting delegation), December 17, 1945; Herbert Tracey to Citrine et al., September 19, 1945, Box 11, TUC Papers. Secretary of Delegation H. L. Bullock to Karl, January 10, 1946, MRC 25a–b. Note: I am surmising that among the three delegates, Bullock was charged with the lead administrative role, since he would, only three years later, step into the TUC chairmanship. The other two British delegates were Will Lawther, president of the National Union of Mineworkers, and Jack Tanner, president of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. Moreover, the conservative, national, and perhaps manly pride that shines through his comment seems to befit someone who, three years earlier in representing the National Union of General Municipal Workers, harkened back to a classic “male provider” ideology in opposing family allowances on the grounds that “they will tend to dig at the roots of a virile Trade Unionism.” Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 289. John Kelly, “Social Democracy and Anti-Communism: Allan Flanders and British Industrial Relations in the Early Post-War Period,” in British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, vol.  1: The Post-War Compromise, 1945–64, ed. Alan Campbell et  al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 192–221. In 1968, Flanders would serve on the controversial Royal Commission on Trade Unions under Lord Donovan, one of the early legislative attempts to reduce the power of union shop stewards on the factory floor. Gloria Müller, Mitbestimmung in der Nachkriegzeit: Britische Besatzungsmacht, Unternehmer, Gewerkschaften (Dusseldorf: Schwann, 1987), 197–99. My translation. David  A. Morse oral history, interview conducted by James  R. Fuchs, July  30, 1977, Harry  S. Truman Library and Museum, http://www.trumanlibrary.org /oralhist /morse2.htm#86. Morse to Leiserson, May 30, 1945, William Leiserson Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society. Buchenwald report, April 1945, Inspection of German Concentration Camps folder, Box 52, Frank J. McSherry Papers, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, PA. David A. Morse oral history. Hillman memo to McSherry, February  24, 1945, Labor folder, Box  52, McSherry Papers. Fichter, Besatzungsmacht und Gewerkschaften, 45–46; Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 547–48.

2582. THE GOOD POSTWAR

55. 56.

57.

58.

59.

60. 61. 62.

63.

George S. Wheeler, Die Amerikanische Politik in Deutschland, 1945–1950 (Berlin: Kongress Verlag, 1958), 40–41. Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 552; Fichter, Besatzungsmacht und Gewerkschaften, 45–47, 76–77. As Fichter indicates, pressure to keep up with Soviet moves, including a quick establishment of factory councils and recognition of trade unions (albeit under party control) in their zone, may have also accounted for McSherry’s support for works councils in the U.S. zone. Roger Morgan, The United States and West Germany, 1945–1973: A Study in Alliance Politics (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 158–59. In an autobiographical reminiscence, Keenan acknowledged with characteristic good humor that when he joined the Manpower Division, “I knew nothing about Germany, nothing at all.” Joseph  D. Keenan oral history interview, February  2, 1971, Harry  S. Truman Library, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/ library/oral-histories/ keenanjd. Frank McSherry to Arthur Fleming, October  17, 1945, George  S. Wheeler folder, Box 59, McSherry Papers. The “Wheeler case” would become prime, if retrospective, fodder for the anticommunist crusade of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Looking back from 1953, for example, McCarthy claimed that in October  1944, then senator and already vice presidential candidate Harry Truman had personally intervened as one of the character references for Wheeler with the Civil Service Review Board—despite the fact that said review took place a year later. Buffalo Evening News, November 25, 1953. Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 552. McSherry was certainly no left-winger. In 1952, he avidly backed Robert Taft for president, in part to ward off the “tricks” of “labor’s PACs” and the threat of “socialism” to “individual freedom.” The communist Wheeler later memorialized the general, perhaps not unfairly, as “an amiable, decent, and not exactly worker unfriendly man” but “weak-willed,” unwilling to fight against others in the chain of command. Undated pro-Taft draft, “Personal Correspondence,” Box  2, McSherry Papers; Wheeler, Die Amerikanische Politik in Deutschland, 37. Looking back, Senator McCarthy’s journalistic acolytes (see also note 58) surely exaggerated Wheeler’s exploits and accomplishments on behalf of Soviet Cold War aims. The columnist Victor Riesel, who doggedly followed investigatory leads on Wheeler for more than a decade, ultimately credited the alleged Soviet agent—albeit without confirmed substantiation or opportunity of response—with effective control over the leaders of the emergent West German labor movement and even responsibility for unleashing damaging inflation in the occupied zone by delivering to the Soviets the original plates for the four-nation “occupation Deutschmarks.” Victor Riesel, “Inside Labor,” Jamestown Post-Journal, July 25, 1962. Wheeler, Die Amerikanische Politik in Deutschland, 66–67. Morgan, The United States and West Germany, 162. Morse oral history, 87; Fichter, Besatzungsmacht und Gewerkschaften, 183–84; Carolyn Woods Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944– 1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 154–63. Julia Angster goes so far as to label the German accommodation to Allied trade union models together with its forsaking of nationalization policy as a “westernization” of

2. THE GOOD POSTWAR259

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

75. 76.

77.

78. 79. 80.

the German labor movement. Julia Angster, “ ‘The Finest Labour Network in Europe’: American Labour and the Cold War,” in The U.S. Government, Citizen Groups, and the Cold War, ed. Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford (London: Routledge, 2006), esp. 467–71. I do not so much disagree as argue for the continuing distinctiveness of the German model. Clay, Decision in Germany, 289–92; Berghahn, Modern Germany, 204; Morgan, The United States and West Germany, 166. Clay, Decision in Germany, 293; Smith, Lucius D. Clay, 538. Gimbel, The American Occupation of Germany, 156–57, 233–36. Qtd. in Fichter, Besatzungsmacht und Gewerkschaften, 248. Hugh Wilford, The CIA, The British Left, and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (London: Frank Cass, London), 40–55. In 1942, for example, the German Trade Union Centre refused to allow a previously expelled communist metalworkers’ union activist into their midst. “Erich Krautter” mss, August 10, 1942, Box 22, “Free German Trade Unions,” TUC Papers. Gottfurcht to Walter Citrine, June 6, 1946, Box 11, “German Trade Unions, 1945–47,” TUC Papers. Priss to Albert Carthy, August 16, 1949; International Department, TUC to M. L. Priss, Foreign Office, August 18, 1949, Box 15, TUC Papers. Ernest Bell to G. Woodcock, International Department re. protest telegrams, May 18, 1949; James A. Dawson, Amalgamated Engineering Union, to Ernest Bevin, May 29, 1949, “Gerhard Eisler,” Box 15, TUC Papers. Hans Gottfurcht to Albert Carthy, May 19, 1949, Box 15, TUC Papers. Christian Haase, “Democratic Citizenship in the Industrial Age: The British Sociologist T. H. Marshall and the Democratisation of West Germany,” in Britain as a Model of Modern Society?, ed. Bauerkamper and Eisenberg, 89–110, quotation at 109. Angster, “ ‘The Finest Labour Network in Europe,’ ” 100–15. Both Angster, “ ‘The Finest Labour Network in Europe,’ ” and Berger, “British Socialism as Perceived in Twentieth-Century Germany,” confirm the moderation of both SPD and DGB political claims, under AFL and CIO as well as U.S. government influence, by the early 1950s. For elaboration, see esp. Julia Angster, “ ‘Safe by Democracy’: American Hegemony and the Westernization of West German Labor,” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 46, no. 4 (2001): 557–572; and Julia Angster, “The Westernization of the Political Thought of the West German Labor Movement,” in German Ideologies Since 1945: Studies in the Political Thought and Culture of the Bonn Republic, ed. JanWerner Müller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 76–98. Peter Hubsch, “DGB Economic Policy with Particular Reference to the British Zone, 1945–49,” in Reconstruction in Post-War Germany: British Occupation Policy and the Western Zones, 1945–55, ed. Ian D. Turner (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 295–97. Berghahn, The Americanisation of West German Industry, 212–13. Volker Berghahn, American Big Business in Britain and Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 314. Reusch, qtd. in Berghahn, The Americanisation of West German Industry, 245.

2602. THE GOOD POSTWAR

81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86.

87.

88. 89. 90.

Will Henderson to Vincent Tewson, TUC, May 9, 1951, no. 17, MRC. Nelson H. Cruikshank (Marshall Plan Labor Division Director) to J. H. Oldenbroek, April 19, 1951, ICFTU Papers. William Green to Erich Kramer, July 14, 1952, ICFTU Papers. [? Risenberger] to J. H. Oldenbroek, September 17, 1952; Gottfurcht to Ludwig Rosenberg, December  19, 1952, ICFTU; Hans Gottfurcht to Ludwig Rosenberg (DGB), December 16, 1952, ICFTU Papers. Hans-Peter Schwarz, Konrad Adenauer, 562–65; Berghahn, The Americanisation of West German Industry, 17–19. Anthony Carew, “Towards a Free Trade Union Centre: The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (1949–1972),” in The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, ed. Anthony Carew et al. (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2000), 200–2; Hild-Berg, Toni Sender, 233. Gottfurcht ultimately “fell between two stools.” In part because of continuing tensions with other trade union leaders but also a basic unease at the thought of returning to live in Germany as a Jew, he never renewed his German residency and instead ended his professional life working with the international trade union movement from a new home in Switzerland. Bitzegeio, Uber Partei-und Landesgrezen hinaus, 358–59, 362–72. Unity on the noncommunist international labor front, it should be noted, did not last long. Objecting to initiatives involving a rapprochement with Eastern European unions, the AFL-CIO withdrew from the ICFTU in 1969 and did not return until 1982. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 6. Judt, Postwar, 7–8. This is reminiscent of Joyce and Gabriel Kolko’s 1972 reflection that one of the frustrations for American postwar policy was “the fact that the other non-Communist states were always eager to retain a very different conception of their national interest from the one that Washington advanced for them.” Joyce Kolko and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 11.

3. THE LIBERAL EMBRACE OF LABOR ZIONISM: ISRAEL, 1948– 1973 1.

U.S. diplomacy did not warm, strategically, toward Israel until its military victory in 1967. As I. L. Kenen, Israel’s most prominent early lobbyist regularly complained, following an initial regional assistance package in 1951, Israeli aid requests were regularly rejected through the 1950s and 1960s, as regional policy tilted toward the UKdominated Baghdad Pact. In 1962, President Kennedy broke a de facto arms embargo by delivering to Israel sophisticated Hawk missiles, not as a grant but rather as a military credit for which Israel went heavily in debt. I. L. Kenen, speech at Cleveland City Club, April  13, 1973, Kenen Papers, Series I, Box  1, American Jewish Historical Society.

3 . T HE LIBE RAL E M BRACE O F LABOR ZI ON I SM261

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

As a state aided by many refugees with advanced, professional training, the Israeli beginning, however impoverished, fit no conventional model of underdevelopment. Always hedged in hyperpolitical terms, today’s critics, for example, seek to delegitimize the state as a “settler colony,” but this seems as analytically imprecise as the more whiggish term “developing country.” No other settler colony (perhaps outside of seventeenth-century New England) was so founded on the principle of refuge or could claim that it was, in a real historical sense, returning to an ancestral home. Leila Farsakh, “Colonial Occupation and Development in the West Bank and Gaza: Understanding the Palestinian Economy Through the Work of Yusif Sayigh,” in Palestine and the Palestinians in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Rochelle Davis and Mimi Kirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2013), 15–34. Jewish and Non-Jewish Population of Israel/Palestine, Jewish Virtual Library, https:// www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org /jewish-and-non-jewish-population-of-israel-palestine -1517-present; Gershom Gorenberg, “The Mystery of 1948,” Slate, November  2011, https://slate.com /news-and-politics/2011 /11 /israel-and-1948-did-israel-plan-to -expel -its-arabs-in-1948-or-not.html; “Demographics of Israel,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia .org /wiki/Demographics_of_Israel. High State Department officials like Dean Acheson and George Ball pointedly feared a deflection of U.S. priorities from the realpolitik of U.S. interests in the regional balance of power as well as access to Arab oil wealth and toward “sympathy” with Israel and the political power of the pro-Israel lobby in Congress. Their critics, in turn, regularly asserted deep-seated anti-Semitism lodged at Foggy Bottom. Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (New York: Oxford, 2006), 112, 215; George W. Ball and Douglas  B. Ball, The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present (New York: Norton, 1992), 33–34, 223–34. Allis Radosh and Ronald Radosh, A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 36–59. Emanuel Celler, You Never Leave Brooklyn: The Autobiography of Emanuel Celler (New York: John Day, 1953), 126–27. Sack to Celler, January 7, 1948, enclosing his January 2, 1948, sermon “Now That We Have a Jewish State,” Box 23, Emanuel Celler Papers, Library of Congress. Daniel P. Kotzin, Judah L. Magnes: An American Jewish Nonconformist (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2010), 274–325, quotation at 298; Menuhin would long pay a price in concert bookings for his political apostasy. See Grace Halsell, “Like Father, Like Son: A Tribute to Moshe and Yehudi Menuhin,” Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs, July  1996, https://www.wrmea.org /1996-july/like-father-like-son-a -tribute-to-moshe-and-yehudi-menuhin.html. Friends of Israel, beginning with President Harry Truman, complained about a proArab tilt in the State Department. Whether a product of well-established ties to Arab leaders and culture, residual anti-Semitism, or economic (read oil) interests, the department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, including undersecretaries of state Loy Henderson, Parker Hart, and Raymond Hare, regularly clashed with pro-Israel advocates from Congress or other agencies. Joseph Kraft, “Those Arabists in the State

2 6 2 3 . TH E LIBE RAL E M BRACE O F LA B OR ZI ON I SM

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

Department,” New York Times, November 7, 1971. Long-time AIPAC director I. L. “Sy” Kenen would later testify that Celler “never needed prompting from us. On the contrary we often had to restrain him. Celler’s long record on Israel’s Washington struggle is virtually a day to day chronicle of the concerns of the Jewish people of his generation.” I. L. Kenen, Israel’s Defense Line: Her Friends and Foes in Washington (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1981), 196. Stevenson, as quoted in Michelle Mart, Eye on Israel: How America Came to View the Jewish State as an Ally (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 94. Celler et al. to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, January 28, 1954, Box 24, Celler Papers. Karl Baehr to George Meany, June  28, 1961, Office of the President, George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archive, University of Maryland; Seth Kaller, https://www.sethkaller .com/item/1684-24890.01-Ben-Gurion-ALS -in-English-Admits-He-Can%E2%80%99t -Find-a-Drawing-of-Proposed-Statue-of-Peace& favorite=1. Geraldine Kidd, Eleanor Roosevelt: Palestine, Israel, and Human Rights (London: Routledge, 2018), 19, 137; on Morganthau, see Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York: Norton, 2011), 332–39. Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, “My Day Index,” Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Digital Edition (2018), https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/index /. “My Day,” November 3, 1948. Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” June 6, 1951; February 20, 1952. Mitchell Bard, “Israeli Arabs: Status of Arabs in Israel,” Jewish Virtual Library, https:// www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org /the-status-of-arabs-in-israel. Anita Shapira, Israel: A History (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 196– 97; Michael Adams, “Israel’s Treatment of the Arabs in the Occupied Territories,” Institute for Palestine Studies, https://www.palestine-studies.org /jps/fulltext/38441. Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” February 21, 1952; March 23, 1956. Israeli Declaration of Independence, May  14, 1948, https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki /Israeli_Declaration_of_Independence. See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). An outlier on the subject of Palestinian displacement was the Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas. In 1952, when Israel passed its Law of Return granting immediate citizenship to Jews immigrating from the Diaspora, he wrote: “An Arab, without too much exaggeration, could complain that the Jews were practicing Hitlerism in reverse.” Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 463. Not surprisingly, far fewer resources were ever designated for Arab refugee relief than the liberals requested. A 1951 report of the newly constituted United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, soon to be folded into the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), noted a gap between $43 million in funds promised and $11 million in funds received. Interim Report of the Director of UNRAPRNE, https://unispal .un.org/UNISPAL .NSF/0/EC8DE7912121FCE5052565B1006B5152.

3 . T H E LIBE RAL E M BRACE O F LABOR ZI ON I SM263

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” December  1, 1951; March  23, 1956; Freda Kirchwey to Celler, December 31, 1951, Box 494, Celler Papers. Mart, Eye on Israel, 57–58. Leon Uris, Exodus (1958; New York: Bantam, 1986), 228. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, 514–17; I. L. Kenen, “Analysis of the Eisenhower Doctrine,” January 13, 1957, Box 503, Celler Papers. Humphrey constituent newsletter, June 8, 1957, in I. L. Kenen Papers, Series II, Box 10, American Jewish Historical Society; “Miracle of Israel” speech, September  17, 1958, Box 506, Celler Papers. Kenen, Israel’s Defense Line, 185. “Positions of the Reform Movement on Israel,” Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, https://rac.org /positions-reform-movement-israel. See, e.g. Melvin I. Urofsky, We Are One! American Jewry and Israel (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1978). Ran Chermesh, A State Within a State: Industrial Relations in Israel, 1965–1987 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), 9, 40. Histadrut still controlled some 20 percent of the Israeli economy as late as 1970. Yehuda Yadin, “Industrial Democracy as a Component in Social Change: The Israeli Approach and Experience,” Proceedings of the International Conference on Trends in Industrial and Labor Relations, January  9–14, 1972 (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Academic Press, 1974), 583. Celler speech draft, November 6, 1948, Box 25, Celler Papers. Adam M. Howard, Sewing the Fabric of Statehood: Garment Unions, American Labor, and the Establishment of the State of Israel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 74–75. Howard, Sewing the Fabric of Statehood, 44, quotation at 57. Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel (New York: Schocken, 2017), 3–4. Klagsbrun, Lioness, 159–60. Klagsbrun, Lioness, 368–70. Adam  M. Howard, “Sewing the Seeds of Statehood: Garment Unions, American Labor, and the Establishment of the State of Israel, 1917–1952,” PhD diss., University of Florida, 2003, 228–31. Histadrut Humanitarian Award, 1973, 1974 lists, George Meany Files, Box 67, Collection No. RG1-038, Meany Memorial Archives. Howard, Sewing the Fabric of Statehood; Klagsbrun, Lioness, 362. Klagsbrun, Lioness, 327. David Dubinsky to Meany, September 27, 1966; Ernest Lee to Meany, April 19, 1966; Dubinsky to Meany, September 27, 1966; Dubinsky to AFL-CIO presidents, November  30, 1966, Box  67, Meany Archives. Altogether, from 1948 to 1958, the National Committee for Labor Israel reportedly raised $27 million for the Jewish state. Howard, Sewing the Fabric of Statehood, 112. Kenen, Israel’s Defense Line, 5–6, 108–13.

2 6 4 3 . TH E LIBE RAL E M BRACE O F LA B OR ZI ON I SM

42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

54. 55.

Celler to Mrs.  Pandit, Minister of Health and Local Self-Government Department, United Provinces, June 17, July 10, 1947, Box 497, Celler Papers. Eliazer Leiabne [Livneh], “The Position of the East—and the Western Democracies,” as translated from Davar, November  3, 1950, Lovestone Files, AFL International Affairs Department, Box 44, Meany Archives; see also Benjamin Siegel, “The Kibbutz and the Ashram: Sarvodaya Agriculture, Israeli Aid, and the Global Imaginaries of Indian Development,” American Historical Review 125 (October 2020): 1175–204. Kofi Tettagah, “Ghana Labour Looks for Change,” African Masses, October 26, 1957, clipping attached to letter from Ehraim Evron to Daniel Benedict, November 20, 1957, Record Group 18-001, International Affairs Dept., Country Files, Box 9 Ghana, Meany Archive; Klagsbrun, Lioness, 437–38. Yevette Richards, Conversations with Maida Springer: A Personal History of Labor, Race, and International Relations (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 233. Klagsbrun, Lioness, 441; Shimeon Amir, Israel’s Development Cooperation with Africa, Asia, and Latin America (New York: Praeger, 1974), 48–49; Arnold Zack, Labor Training in Developing Countries (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964), 169; Jeff Schuhrke, “ ‘Free’ Trade Unionism and Labor, Education,” PhD diss., chapter draft, courtesy of author, 2018; Ben-Zion Ilan to George Meany, April  18, 1963, RG18 , International Affairs Dept., Box 10 Israel, Meany Archive. Meany address to National Committee for Labor Israel, Washington, D.C., June  4, 1961, Box 67, Office of the President, Meany Archive. Ben-Zion Ilan to Meany. Meany telegram to Harry Van Arsdale, New York City Central Labor Council rally, November 5, 1973, Box 67, Meany Archive. Bernard Avishai, The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israeli Democracy (1985; New York: Helios, 2002), 204–5; Chermesh, A State Within a State, 3. On U.S. State Department displeasure with Israeli policy during the Korean War, see Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (New York: Oxford, 2006), 516; Abba Eban to George Meany, June  12, 1964, RG1-038, Office of the President, Box 67 Israel, Meany Archives. Facing fierce U.S. opposition until the Nixon-Kissinger diplomatic initiative, the PRC was not seated at the United Nations until 1971. Zach Levey, Israel and the Western Powers, 1952–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 133. “ ‘Neutralization’ and ‘Integration’ of Israel Urged by Dr. Goldman [sic],” Daily News Bulletin, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, August 7, 1961; Celler to Goldmann, August 15, 1961; Goldmann to Celler, August 22, 1961; Ben-Gurion to Celler, September 4, 1961, Box 502, Celler Papers. Judith A. Klinghoffer, Vietnam, Jews, and the Middle East: Unintended Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1999), 25–26, 66–67, 70. Ahmad Shukeiry, PLO official, paraphrased in Walter Laqueur, “Israel, the Arabs, and World Opinion,” Commentary 44 (August 1967): 50.

4 . ANTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY265

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 158– 59; Guy Laron, The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 209. Klinghoffer, Vietnam, Jews, and the Middle East, 162–63, quotation at 166, 171; Laqueur, “Israel, the Arabs, and World Opinion,” 49–59. Stanley Wolpert, “Second Year of the June War,” The Nation, June 3, 1968, 726–28. Kathleen Christison, Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 109. John J. Kennedy, Pennsylvania Elections, rev. ed. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2014), 46, 49–50. Klinghoffer, Vietnam, Jews, and the Middle East, 103–30. Detroit Jewish News, July 3, 1970. Editorial, “A New Deal for the Middle East,” The Nation 204 (June 26, 1967): 802–4.

4. ANTICOMMUNISM AS SOCIAL POLICY: COSTA RICA, 1944– 1980 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, “Introduction—The Postwar Conjuncture in Latin America: Democracy, Labor, and the Left,” in Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944–1948, ed. Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5. Jon V. Kofas, The Struggle for Legitimacy: Latin American Labor and the United States, 1930–1960 (Tempe: Arizona State University, 1992), 1–4. Steven Schwartzberg, Democracy and U.S. Policy in Latin America During the Truman Years (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 204–6. Betancourt, qtd. in Schwartzberg, Democracy and U.S. Policy in Latin America, xiii. Bethell and Roxborough, “Introduction,” 7. Angela Delli Sante-Arrocha, Juan José Arévalo: Pensador Contemporáneo (Mexico City: B. Costa-Amic, 1962), 14. Bethell and Roxborough, “Introduction,” 5; Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 339–45; Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 3. John H. Coatsworth, Central America and the United States: The Clients and the Colossus (New York: Twayne, 1994), 2. Tiny Uruguay, another state with a comparatively homogeneous population and relatively egalitarian social structure, also boasts of a long, although occasionally interrupted, democratic political tradition. Jordan A. Schwarz, Liberal: Adolf A. Berle and the Vision of an American Era (New York: Free Press, 1987), quotation at vii, 13–17, 62. For Berle’s mature reflection on the social-economic system he had long studied, see his lecture series published as The Twentieth- Century Capitalist Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1955). Here, he hails modern-day capitalism for its “unsurpassed achievement” and for “having left every

2 66 4. ANTICO M M U NIS M AS S OCI A L POLI CY

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

other system in recorded history immeasurably far behind” (2), even as he distinguishes its conglomerate, and regulated, character from free-market shibboleths. “The corporation,” he argues, “almost against its will, has been compelled to assume n appreciable part the role of conscience-carrier of twentieth-century American society. . . . In greater or less degree, the practice of national industrial planning is now familiar throughout great areas of the twentieth century corporate capitalist system” (148, 134). Grew became a distinguished lifelong career diplomat, Lippmann a famous journalist and political commentator; Bullitt served as first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Morison enjoyed a long and much-decorated scholarly career. See, e.g., Robert B. Thompson, “Adolf Berle During the New Deal: The Brain Truster as an Intellectual Jobber,” Georgetown University Law Center, 2018, https://scholarship. law; Leo E. Strine Jr., “Made for This Moment: The Enduring Relevance of Adolf Berle’s Belief in a Global New Deal,” Harvard Law School John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business Discussion Paper no.  968, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3 /papers.cfm?abstract_id=3223450. Nicholas Lemann, Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 23–69. Schwarz, Liberal, 267–304, quotation at 276; Schwartzberg, Democracy and U.S. Policy in Latin America, 30–41. Schwarz, Liberal, x. Berle to Alice Berle, January  16, 1948, Adolf Berle Papers, FDR Library, Hyde Park, New York. Schwartz, Liberal, 159; Diary, October 17, 1952, Adolf Berle Papers. Berle’s increasing Cold War preoccupations in dealing with the Third World were echoed by other leading liberals of his day. Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey, for example, the doyen of the postwar Democratic-liberal bloc in the U.S. Senate, turned on a dime after the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950. From a 1949 demand that the United States “avoid aid to European nations now putting down revolts and attempts at selfgovernment” in Southeast Asia, Humphrey (anticipating his later, loyal service to President Johnson) backed Truman in offering U.S. arms aid to Emperor Bao Dai in South Vietnam. Arnold A. Offner, Hubert Humphrey: The Conscience of the Country (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 79–80. Steven Palmer and Iván Molina, eds., The Costa Rica Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), “Democratic Enigma,” 140–41. James Mahoney, The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in Central America (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), 142–63. The country’s early banana entrepreneurs included Minor  C. Keith, who founded the United Fruit Company in 1899. David Diaz Arias, Crisis social y memorias en lucha: Guerra Civil en Costa Rica, 1940– 1948 (Ciudad Universitaria: University CR, 2015), 11–19. Ian Holzhauer, The Presidency of Calderon Guardia, 10, https://www. academia .edu /694987/The_Presidency_of_Calderon_Guardia_Costa_Rica_[n.d.]; “A Governor

4 . ANTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY267

21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

and Man Faces the Social Problem” [1942], in The Costa Rica Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Steven Palmer and Iván Molina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 136. John Patrick Bell, Crisis in Costa Rica: The 1948 Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 28–30, quotation at 28; Charles D. Ameringer, Don Pepe: A Political Biography of Jose Figueres of Costa Rica (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), 10–11; Juliana Martinez Franzoni and Diego Sanchez-Ancochea, “The Road to Universal Social Protection: How Costa Rica Informs Theory,” Working Paper 383, Kellogg Institute, University of Notre Dame, March 2012. I am drawing here especially on Diaz-Arias, Crisis social; David Diaz-Arias, “Social Crises and Struggling Memories: Populism, Popular Mobilization, Violence, and Memories of Civil War in Costa Rica, 1940–1948,” PhD diss., Indiana University, 2009, 240; an email communication with the author, January 29, 2017. The original Universidad de Santo Tomás, founded in 1844, was closed in 1888, as the government focused on primary education. Bell, Crisis in Costa Rica, 43–48. It was characteristic of this period in Costa Rica that the Labor Code itself was drafted by Oscar Barahona Streber, a lawyer and former communist militant who had gravitated to the social doctrines of the church and developed close personal ties to both the president and the archbishop. Oscar Barahona Streber, http://elespiritudel48.org /resena-biografica-de-oscar-barahona-streber. As Mora explained to his followers at the height of PVP influence in 1947: “In the past we were a sectarian party, tied to a party line of inflexible struggle against the dominant interests; today we’re an enormously flexible organization. . . . Yes, comrades, we are living through a revolution, but not in the common meaning [of the term]. It used to be that our class understood by that word an uprising. We mean by it a change, a breakdown of vested interests, the creation of new institutions, the march towards social justice, that’s what we mean by revolution.” Manuel Mora Valverde, “Debemos entregarlo todo para alcanzar la victoria” (1947), in Discursos, 1934–1979 (San José: Editorial Presbere, 1980), 199–200, 204, author’s translation. Mora was effectively extending the Popular Front beyond its shelf life in other places. In the United States, a similar stance associated with the party leader Earl Browder led to Browder’s ouster as party general secretary in early 1946 and replacement by the more hard-line sectarian Eugene Dennis. James Backer, La iglesia y el sindicalismo en Costa Rica (San Jose: Editorial Costa Rica, 1978), 88, 121; Núñez studied at Niagara University in Buffalo and Catholic University, in Washington, DC, while also communing with Fordham’s president, Father Gannon, and New York’s Cardinal Spellman. Eugene D. Miller, A Holy Alliance? The Church and the Left in Costa Rica, 1932–1948 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), 107n73. Backer, La iglesia y el sindicalismo, 89. Ameringer, Don Pepe, 13; Rudolfo Cerdas Cruz, “Costa Rica,” in Bethell and Roxborough, eds., Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War, 284–85; Archbishop Victor Manuel Sanabria Martínez, Find a Grave, https://www.findagrave .com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=164151932.

2 6 8 4. ANTICO M M U NIS M AS S OCI A L POLI CY

28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

New York Times, September 7, 1941; January 19, 1942; March 23, 1943. Ameringer, Don Pepe, 13–19; Orlando Salazar Mora and Jorge Mario Salazar Mora, Los partidos políticos en Costa Rica 1889–2010 (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Universidad Estatal a Distancia, 2010), 91–94. Diaz Arias, Crisis social, 175–80. For ORIT, see Magaly Rodríguez García, Liberal Workers of the World, Unite? The ICFTU and the Defence of Labour Liberalism in Europe and Latin America, 1949–1969 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 59–79. Serafino Romualdi, Presidents and Peons: Recollections of a Labor Ambassador in Latin America (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1967), 13–29; Diaz Arias, Crisis social, 13–18, 82–83, 122. Victor Silverman, Imagining Internationalism in American and British Labor, 1939–49 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 176–77. Leslie Bethell, ed., Latin America: Politics and Society Since 1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 241–45; Denis MacShane, International Labour and the Origins of the Cold War (London: Clarendon, 1992), 133–35. By the end of 1948, the CTAL had dropped considerably in regional strength, continuing to decline until it officially expired in 1959. Romualdi, Presidents and Peons, 73; Miller, A Holy Alliance?, 187. By 1949, Western anticommunist unions split from the left-aligned World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) to form the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Bell, Crisis in Costa Rica, 87; Charles D. Ameringer, The Caribbean Legion: Patriots, Politicians, Soldiers of Fortune, 1946–1950 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), esp. 138–39; Ameringer, Don Pepe , 30–32, 41. The original Federal Republic of Central America (1821–1841, encompassing the present-day states of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica) quickly foundered in the face of local revolts, Mexican domination, and inadequate infrastructure across the region. The Caribbean Pact added Ecuador to the list of intended coordinating states. Delli Sante-Arrocha, Juan José Arévalo, 27. Kofas, The Struggle for Legitimacy, 170–71. Kyle Longley, “Peaceful Costa Rica, the First Battleground: The United States and the Costa Rican Revolution of 1948,” The Americas 50 (October 1993): 164. A careful review of the 1948 election by two academic scholars concludes that Calderón Guardia likely won the election (e.g., his party still dominated the congressional races) but was counted out by a fraudulent tribunal. Fabrice Edouard Lehoucq and Iván Molina, Stuffing the Ballot Box: Fraud, Electoral Reform, and Democratization in Costa Rica (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 221–22. Kyle Longley, Sparrow and the Hawk: Costa Rica and the United States During the Rise of Jose Figueres (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 73; Kirk S. Bowman, “Fue el compromiso y consenso de las elites lo que llevo a la consolidacion democratica en Costa Rica? Evidencia de la decada de 1950,” Revista de Historia (Costa Rica) 41 (January–June 2000): 113. Following a divorce in 1953, Figueres would take a second North American citizen (of Danish birth) as his bride, a “pattern” that caused some popular resentment in Costa Rica; Longley, “Peaceful Costa Rica,” 161; Jacobo Schifter,

4 . ANTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY269

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

Costa Rica, 1948: Análisis de documentos confidenciales del departamento de estado (San José: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana, 1982), 128–29. Schwartzberg, Democracy and U.S. Policy in Latin America, 173; Schifter, Costa Rica, 1948, 144–47, quotation at 147. Although there is no denying the increasingly anticommunist drift of U.S. diplomatic policy, it is likely misguided to lay the responsibility here on Ambassador Nathaniel P. Davis himself. More than one historian has apparently confused the Costa Rica–assigned Davis with his seemingly more Machiavellian contemporary namesake, the foreign service officer Nathaniel Davis; it was the latter, not the former, who served in many of the world’s conflict zones, from Moscow in 1947 to Chile in 1973 (amid the CIA-inspired coup) and Angola in 1975—but not Costa Rica. “Nathaniel Davis, Diplomat, Is Dead at 86,” New York Times, May 22, 2011. For examples of the mix-up, see Cerdas Cruz, “Costa Rica,” 293; and Schifter, Costa Rica, 1948, 144. Ambassador in Costa Rica (Davis) to the Secretary of State, Telegrams 368–71, April 15; Telegram 373, April 17, 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, the Western Hemisphere [FLUS], vol.  9, U.S. Department of State, https://history.state.gov /historicaldocuments/frus1948v09/ch36?start=31. Pepe reportedly told negotiators that he had no intention to deal with any “corrupt politician” (politico corrumpido), not even the presidential candidate Ulate, whom he had supported, but rather had “come to transform this country.” Schifter, Costa Rica, 1948, 181. Nathaniel  P. Davis, Few Dull Moments: A Foreign Service Career (Philadelphia: Malone and Blunt, 1967), 128–39; Diaz Arias, Crisis social, 270; Longley, “Peaceful Costa Rica,” 170–72; Ameringer, Don Pepe, 63–64. The civil war settlement notably did cost Costa Rica one international ally. When under pressure from the United States Figueres not only muted overt antagonism toward Somoza but also refused (citing a continuing need for self-defense) to return the weaponry donated via Guatemala to the figuerista liberation forces, he caused a permanent break with Arévalo and essentially terminated the Caribbean Legion. Schifter, Costa Rica, 1948, 193–99. Bell, Crisis in Costa Rica, 158. The infamous Codo del Diablo murders of six PVP activists occurred in December 1948: https://www.anep.or.cr/article/memoria-historica-el -codo-del-diablo-1948. ICFTU figures for 1959, for example, indicated a paltry 12,000 union members (or 6.6 percent of wage earners) in Costa Rica, placing it in the lowest-tier category, alongside El Salvador (also 6.6 percent) and surpassing only Panama (1.6 percent) and postcoup Guatemala (0.3 percent) among twenty countries surveyed in the hemisphere. By 1971, as James Backer reports, there only twenty-three collective bargaining agreements in the whole country. Rodríguez García, Liberal Workers of the World, Unite?, table  4, 143; Cerdas Cruz, “Costa Rica,” 298–99. On longer-term developments, see esp. Ronny Viales-Hurtado and David Díaz-Arias, “Labor Justice in Costa Rica, 1821– 2016: A Long-term Analysis,” in Labor Justice Across the Americas, ed. Leon Fink and Juan Manuel Palacio (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017); and Marielos  H.

270 4. ANTICO M M U NIS M AS S OCI A L POLI CY

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65.

Aguilar, Clase trabajadora y organización sindical en Costa Rica, 1943–1971 (San José: Editorial Porvenier, FLACSO, 1989), 79–90. Miller, A Holy Alliance?, 190; Bell, Crisis in Costa Rica, 159. Figueres, qtd. in Ameringer, Don Pepe, 70. Miguel Picado, La iglesia costarricense entre dios y el césar: De 1949 a nuestros días (San José: Ediciones Guayacan, 1989), 29. Longley, Sparrow and the Hawk, 118. Ameringer, Don Pepe, 111–14; Romualdi, Presidents and Peons, 264; Romualdi to Jay Lovestone, “Report on Costa Rica,” August 30, 1954, Box 3, Folder 5, Romualdi Papers, Kheel Center, Cornell University Library. Figueres, for example, pushed for a 50 percent government tax on the company’s profits (he got 30 percent), and he helped institute a new collective bargaining contract, including an enhanced minimum wage, in 1954, with cost-of-living adjustments; Figueres, qtd. in Time 62 (August 10, 1953): 35. Serafino Romualdi to Alex Cohen, December 10, 1951. It is unclear if or how Cohen responded to the request, but by 1954, in a report to his AFL boss Jay Lovestone, Romualdi referred to Cohen as “a bit of a schlemiel” who had turned unsympathetic to Figueres and from whom all AFL cooperation should be withdrawn. Romualdi to Jay Lovestone, “Report on Costa Rica,” August 30, 1954, Box 3, Folder 5, Romualdi Papers. Romualdi to Lovestone. According to Romualdi, within Rerum Novarum, only the Musicians’ Union was “carry[ing] their own weight financially.” Figueres to Romualdi, May 29, 1952, Box 3, Folder 4, Romualdi Papers. Schwarz, Liberal, 315; Diary, March 11, March 31, 1953, Adolf Berle Papers. Diary, March 11, 1953, Adolf Berle Papers. Longley, Sparrow and the Hawk, 120. “Nicaragua: The Chummy Ambassador,” Time, May 16, 1960, http://content.time.com /time/magazine/article/0,9171,894877,00.html; Kirk  S. Bowman, Militarization, Democracy, and Development: The Perils of Praetorianism in Latin America (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2002), 125–26; “Romualdi CR 55,” interview with Serafino Romualdi by Robert J. Alexander, January 25, 1955, Alexander Papers, Rutgers University, Box 6, Folder 61. Ameringer, Don Pepe, 124. Longley, Sparrow and the Hawk, 117–25. “Adlai Lost, Figueres Won, Both Have Much in Common,” Charlotte Observer, April 22, 1955; “Latin Crisis Seen [as] Personality Clash,” Detroit Free Press, January 12, 1955. Diary, March 31, 1953, Adolf Berle Papers. Herbert H. Lehman (1878–1963) enjoyed a long career as a partner in his family’s investment banking firm and then as a New York Democratic political leader, including four terms as governor. Twice elected to the U.S. Senate, in his final campaign in 1950, running on both Democratic and Liberal Party tickets, he defeated not only a Republican but a Labor Party opponent. Adolf Berle to Jose Figueres, January 6, 1956, Adolf Berle Papers. Adolf Berle to Peter Adolf Berle, February 27, 1956, Adolf Berle Papers; Beatrice Bishop Berle, A Life in Two Worlds: The Autobiography of Beatrice Bishop Berle (New York:

4 . ANTICO M M U NIS M AS S O CIAL POLI CY27 1

66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84.

85.

Walker and Co., 1983), 197–98. Beatrice, who had apparently agreed only at Adolf’s insistence to the son’s apprenticeship, writes that Peter returned from his sojourn “pale, thin, tired,” and with a case of amoebic dysentery. “A heavy price to pay for a course in practical sociology, was my silent comment” (198). Adolf Berle to Figueres, Adolf Berle Papers, February 21, 1966. Schwarz, Liberal, 316. Philip  S. Jowett, Liberty or Death: Latin American Conflicts, 1900–1970 (Oxford: Osprey, 2019), 302–4; Kyle Longley, “Resistance and Accommodation: The United States and the Nationalism of José Figueres, 1953–1957,” Diplomatic History 18 (Winter 1994): 23. Three years later, Nixon’s motorcade would be famously attacked by anti-American protesters in Venezuela. Bowman, Militarization, Democracy, 129–30; Ameringer, Don Pepe, 123; Romualdi, Presidents and Peons, 262; Diaz Arias, Crisis social, 318–20. Bowman, Militarization, Democracy, 130–31. Bowman, “Fue el compromiso,” 111–16; Dias Arias, Crisis social, 319. Ameringer, Don Pepe, 148–49. “Luis Alberto Monge Álvarez, 1925–2016,” Socialist International, https://www .socialistinternational.org /news/in-memoriam/luis-alberto-monge-alvarez-1925-2016 -647. Schwarz, Liberal, 322–23, quotation at 323. Ameringer, Don Pepe, 157–63. Schwarz, Liberal, quotation at 324; Ameringer, Don Pepe, 156. On the denouement of the Alliance for Progress, see George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 716–29. Morris  H. Rubin, “Latin America: Dynamite on Our Doorstep,” The Progressive, June 1961, 43–47. James G. Blight and Peter Kornbluh, Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), 91–92, 143. Schwarz, Liberal, 331–34, quotation at 344; Berle to Figueres, February 1, 1966, Berle Papers. On the sad saga of Juan Bosch, see Patrick J. Iber, “ ‘Who Will Impose Democracy?’: Sacha Volman and the Contradictions of CIA Support for the Anticommunist Left in Latin America,” Diplomatic History 37, no. 5 (2013): 1003–5. Berle to Figueres, December 28, 1965, Berle Papers. Brenda Gayle Plummer, “Castro in Harlem: A Cold War Watershed,” in Rethinking the Cold War, ed. Allen Hunter (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 47. Jonathan Rosenberg, How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 177–79, 221–27, quotation at 221. Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 3–4, 55, 68–69; Ameringer, Don Pepe, 165; Iber, “ ‘Who Will Impose Democracy?’ ”

2724. ANTICO M M U NIS M AS S OCI A L POLI CY

86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91.

92.

93.

94.

95. 96. 97. 98.

Walter Lafeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York: Norton, 1993), 186–93. “Costa Rica—Figueres Agreement with Costa Rican Communist Party Chief,” Arnold Nachmanoff to Henry Kissinger, CIA declassified document, March  29, 1971, FOIA Electronic Reading Room, LOC-HAK-13-1-22-1; Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 67–68. Ameringer, Don Pepe, quotation at 180–81, 268–79. Diaz Arias, Crisis social, 320–30; Diaz Arias, “Social Crises and Struggling Memories,” 347. Mahoney, The Legacies of Liberalism, 246. Picado, La iglesia costarricense, 29, 114–17; Christopher Eichstedt, “The Costa Rican National Liberation Party and the Transformation of Social Democracy, 1968–1990,” PhD diss., Indiana University, 2017; James Fox, “Real Progress: Fifty Years of USAID in Costa Rica,” USAID Program and Operations Assessment Report No. 23, November 1998, 1, 3: “If all developing countries had matched Costa Rica’s progress on economic, social, and political indices, there would be fewer complaints about the effectiveness of foreign aid” (41). Further evidence of Costa Rica’s liberal-progressive global reputation was signaled in the role of Pepe’s daughter, Christiana Figueres, as executive secretary of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change, 2010–2018. Romualdi, Presidents and Peons, 241–43; “Political and Labor Situation in Guatemala,” CIA intelligence reports, January 15, March 23, 1954, released as sanitized, CIA Historical Review Program, 2003, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC _0000914144.pdf; https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000917001 .pdf. In the last years of his regime, especially faced with unyielding U.S. opposition, Arbenz drew ever closer to his communist intellectual and trade union friends and officially joined the PGT from his Uruguayan exile in 1957. Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 379. See Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, 229–35; Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 53–55; James Dunkerley, “Guatemala,’ in Bethell and Roxborough, eds., Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War, 325; and Schwartzberg, Democracy and U.S. Policy in Latin America, 215–17. Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, 240–42. “Berle also overlooked the fact that the leaders of the Guatemalan opposition fought not for political democracy, but against social reform; they were, in other words, Somoza’s natural allies and Figueres’s foes” (242). Romualdi, Presidents and Peons, 240–41; Freda Kirchwey, “Guatemala Guinea Pig,” editorial, The Nation 179 (July 10, 1954): 21–24. Romualdi, Presidents and Peons, 244; Kofas, The Struggle for Legitimacy, 197–99. “Clinton Offers His Apologies to Guatemala,” New York Times, March 11, 1999. On the fate of Peru’s Haya de la Torre, see Myrna Ivonne Wallace Fuentes, Most Scandalous Woman: Magda Portal and the Dream of Revolution in Peru (Norman:

5. S IREN S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T273

University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), esp. 296–309; on the turnabout of Venezuela’s Betancourt, see Alejandro Velasco, Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 87–110.

5. SIREN SONG OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: U.S. MISSIONS TO INDIA, 1952– 1975 1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Clara and Harris Wofford, India Afire (New York: John Day, 1951), 2, 237, 331; Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties (1980; Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), 7. As a sign of their closeness, both Woffords would receive credit by Bowles in the writing of Ambassador’s Report (1954). Howard B. Schaffer, Chester Bowles: New Dealer in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 114. Richard P. Dauer, A North-South Mind in an East-West World: Chester Bowles and the Making of United States Cold War Foreign Policy, 1951–1969 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 1–8. Truman was reportedly “appalled” at Bowles’s choice of posts: “I thought India was pretty jammed with poor people and cows wandering around streets, witch doctors and people sitting on hot coals and bathing in the Ganges, and so on, but I did not realize that anyone thought it was important.” Truman, qtd. in Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (New York: Oxford, 2006), 507. Andrew J. Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 20; Dennis Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: The United States and India’s Economic Development, 1947–1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 80. Berkman to Bowles, December  14, 1951, Box  82, Bowles Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. Bowles, “New India,” Foreign Affairs 31 (October 1952): 81. Robert Shaffer, “J. J. Singh and the India League of America, 1945–1959: Pressing at the Margins of the Cold War Consensus,” Journal of American Ethnic History 31 (Winter 2012): 68–103. For example, Bowles to James B. Conant, Harvard University president, October 21, 1952, Box 84, Bowles Papers. Truman, as cited by Beisner, Dean Acheson, 507. Edward O. Berkman to Bowles, January 27, 1952, Box 82, Bowles Papers. Berkman to Bowles, December 14, 1951, Box 82, Bowles Papers. Bowles, Ambassador’s Report (New York: Harper, 1954), 22, 32, 51. Bowles, “New India,” 94 Bowles, “New India,” 79. Bowles, Ambassador’s Report, 107. Chester Bowles, Promises to Keep: My Years in Public Life, 1941–1969 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 494.

274 5 . S IREN S O NG O F E CO NO M IC DEVELOPMEN T

17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

Bowles, “New India,” 83. Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 2nd series, vol. 17 (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1995), “Proposals for Community Development: Note to Ministers for Railway and Transport, November 22, 1951,” 267–70. Dauer, A North-South Mind in an East-West World, 43; “Y. C. James Yen,” New World Encyclopedia, http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Y._C._James _Yen; Y. C. James Yen obituary, New York Times, January 18, 1990. Jess Gilbert, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 6–9, 37–46. On the University of Wisconsin’s public policy tradition, see Leon Fink, The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 63–89. George Rosen, Western Economists and Eastern Societies: Agents of Change in South Asia, 1950–1970 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 10. Eugene S. Staples, Forty Years: A Learning Curve, the Ford Foundation in India, 1952– 1992 (New Delhi: Ford Foundation, 1992), 2–9; Gilbert, Planning Democracy, 187–91, 259–60. Dauer, A North-South Mind in an East-West World, 43–45. Bowles, Ambassador’s Report, 208–9. [Douglas Ensminger], A Guide to Community Development (New Delhi: Government of India, 1957), 4–5, 146–53, 158–62, quotations at 158, 161. Carl C. Taylor, Douglas Ensminger, et al., India’s Roots of Democracy: A Sociological Analysis of Rural India’s Experience in Planned Development Since Independence (Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1965), 1. Bowles, “New India,” 84, in Selected Works, 17:491. By late 1952, Bowles would impress the Indian prime minister enough to urge (through his sister, V. Pandit, the ambassador to the United States) the new Eisenhower administration in vain to consider reappointing him, even across party lines. Nehru cable to Vijayalakshmi Pandit, in Selected Works, November 15, 1952, vol. 20. Staples, Forty Years, 2. The most Gandhian, that is, smaller-scale and communalcentered, principles of community development likely enjoyed their fullest expression in the energetic but ultimately foreclosed experiment between Israeli agronomists, bringing lessons from the kibbutzim, and Gandhi’s followers at the Mohatma’s Sevagram ashram. Benjamin Siegel, “The Kibbutz and the Ashram: Savodaya Agriculture, Israeli Aid, and the Global Imaginaries of Indian Development,” AHR 125 (October 2020): 1175–1204. Rotter, Comrades at Odds, 21. Note that Bowles is acknowledging the fact that within India’s federal structure, the states controlled land policy. Bowles conversation with Prime Minister Nehru and Mrs.  Pandit, Conversation Memoranda reports to State Department, July 15, 1952, Box 91, Bowles Papers. Bowles to Berkman, October 27, 1952, Box 82, Bowles Papers.

5. SIRE N S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T275

33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Bowles, Ambassador’s Report, 117, 192. Praja socialists no doubt also appealed to Bowles for their staunch anticommunism and close ties to U.S. liberals, formally cultivated through the Congress of Cultural Freedom, whose secret funding by the CIA was exposed in 1967. Eric D. Pullin (2011) “ ‘Money Does Not Make Any Difference to the Opinions That We Hold’: India, the CIA, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1951–58,” Intelligence and National Security 26 (2011): esp. 385–89. David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 71–73, 117–58; Sara Lorenzini, Global Development: A Cold War History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 38–40. Menuhin to Bowles, March 28, 1952, Box 89, Bowles Papers. Nehru to C. D. Deshmukh, April 5, 1952, in Nehru, Selected Works. As sympathetic as he was to Menuhin’s request, the prime minister could not promise action on a specific timetable: “we are so overwhelmed with a variety of problems that it is a little difficult to start a new line which has no obvious popular appeal.” Nehru to Menuhin, April 6, 1952, Selected Works. Ambassador Bowles, equally complimentary to the artist, also had deferred on any direct governmental assistance, suggesting instead a benefit concert to raise funds for the pianos. Bowles to Menuhin, May  5, 1952, Bowles Papers. Menuhin, it is worth noting, soon deepened his connections to Indian music. His 1952 trip acquainted him with the tabla player Chatua Lai, the Indian classical vocalist Chatua Lai, and the Bombay Symphony’s conductor Mehli Mehta and his sixteen-year-old son Zubin, all of whose talents he would soon celebrate. In 1963 he met and began collaborating with the classical sitarist Ravi Shankar. Together, their 1967 Angel Record release West Meets East won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Performance and went on to become the best-selling LP in the history of the label. “Yehudi Menuhin’s Desi Connect,” News Minute, https://www.thenewsminute.com /article /yehudi -menuhins - desi - connect-five -indians -who -influenced -his -life -and -music-51807; Clemency Burton-Hill, Year of Wonder: Classical Music to Enjoy Day by Day (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), 183. John Kenneth Galbraith, Name-Dropping: From FDR On (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). Bowles to Stevenson, September 10, 1952, Box 91, Bowles Papers. Berkman to Bowles, September 26, 1952, Box 82, Bowles Papers. Bowles to Edward Bernays, April 15, 1952, Box 82, Bowles Papers. Connally and Davis, qtd. in Dauer, A North-South Mind in an East-West World, 56. Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 332. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 4, 105; John F. Kennedy, Special Message to the Congress on Foreign Aid, March  22, 1961, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws /?pid=8545. For Rostow and Millikan, see esp. David C. Engerman, “West Meets East: The Center for International Studies and Indian Economic Development,” in Staging

276 5 . S IREN S O NG O F E CO NO M IC DEVELOPMEN T

44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, ed. David C. Engerman et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 199–223. Merrill, Bread and the Ballot, 3. David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1969; New York: Modern Library, 2001), 14–15. John Kenneth Galbraith, “Democratic Foreign Policy and the Voter: A Suggestion for Self-Criticism,” in The Selected Letters of John Kenneth Galbraith, ed. Richard  P.  F. Hold (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 128–33, quotation at 132–33. Compare The Affluent Society and Other Writings, 1952–1967 (New York: Library of America, 2010), 598–601. Galbraith, Selected Letters, 134–36. John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 26. Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal, 79. Galbraith, Name-Dropping, 131. On Galbraith, Nehru, and Jackie Kennedy, see Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal, 307. Galbraith, who seemed equally smitten with Jackie, reported that Nehru had hung a picture of himself walking arm in arm with the American First Lady in his upstairs sitting room. The prime minister, like the ambassador, doted as well on the actress Angie Dickinson during her visit. Galbraith to Paul M. Sweezy, January 24, 1952. In a tit-for-tat argument with Sweezy, an old friend, Galbraith pointed to “the case of Haiti . . . the most poverty-stricken of the islands I have seen” and a place without “outside exploitation” or appreciable dependence on foreign markets. “You will see where I am going and now I will take the final step. There is in the area some positive correlation between standard of living in welfare on the one hand and efficient foreign involvement or exploitation on the other. This is a hard pill to swallow—it is even hard for me to swallow.” Galbraith, Selected Letters, 97. Bowles to Galbraith, February  10, 1958; March  25, 1957, Box  15, Galbraith Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, Massachusetts. John Kenneth Galbraith, “Rival Economic Theories in India,” Foreign Affairs 36 (July 1958): 589. Galbraith, The Affluent Society and Other Writings, 381, 584; Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 273–78. John Kenneth Galbraith, Economic Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), ix–x, 13–22, 28–29, 34–35. “We have [reviewed] a great many causes of poverty; nearly all are in some measure convincing and all are partially unconvincing” (19). Nehru, Lok Sabha speech, 1956, in Selected Works, 33:88–89. Galbraith Ambassador’s Journal, 68. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 15–16; Bowles, Promises to Keep, 575–82; Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 407–34.

5. S IREN S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T277

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80.

Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 10, 66–100; Donald E. Voth and Marcie Brewster, “An Overview of International Community Development,” in Community Development in Perspective, ed. James  A. Christenson and Jerry W. Robinson Jr. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989), 280–306. Rosen, Western Economists and Eastern Societies, 15–16. Staples, Forty Years, 13. Garvin Karunaratne, “The Failure of the Community Development Programme in India,” Community Development Journal 11 (April 1976), quotations at 99, 97, 96. V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (1964; New York: Vintage, 2002), 143. Atul Kohli, Poverty Amid Plenty in the New India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 82. Staples, Forty Years, 16; Immerwahr, Thinking Small, 97. Staples, Forty Years, 15; Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 143–45. Gurcharan Das, India Unbound: From Independence to the Global Information Age (2000; New Delhi: Penguin, 2002), 77. “In Memoriam; Charles Edward Lindblom,” Yale News, February  2018; Charles Edward Lindblom, “Has India an Economic Future?” Foreign Affairs, January 1966, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/1966-01-01/has-india-economic-future. Cullather, The Hungry World, 190–204. Schaffer, Chester Bowles, 281. Engerman, The Price of Aid, 143–44, 157, 173, 188–89. Barry Riley, The Political History of American Food Aid: An Uneasy Benevolence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 256–305, quotations at 258, 304; Schaffer, Chester Bowles, 278–82. Bowles, Promises to Keep, 552–54, 537–38. LBJ exchange with Nehru, as relayed by Donald McHenry, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, interview by author, May 7, 2019. Bowles, as cited in Dauer, A North-South Mind in an East-West World, 174. Merrill, Bread and the Ballot, 208. For the sordid history of the U.S. role in the war on Bangladesh, see Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (New York: Knopf, 2013). Engerman, The Price of Aid, 345. Dauer, A North-South Mind in an East-West World, 223.; Cullather, A Hungry World, 203. Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 3:291–96, quotation at 295; Atul Kohli, Democracy and Development in India: From Socialism to Pro-Business (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 108; Atul Kohli, The State and Poverty in India: The Politics of Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1, 69. While Kohli, like Cullather, focuses on the

278 5 . S IRE N S O NG O F E CO NO M IC DEVELOPMEN T

81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86.

87.

88. 89. 90.

effective disenfranchisement of the rural population, the urban working class had earlier been tamed by disabling labor legislation: see, e.g., Leon Fink, “Labour Unionism and the Indian State; or, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Social Democracy,” in The Vernacularization of Labour Politics, ed. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Rana P. Behal (New Delhi: Tulika, 2016), 320–44. Kenneth Keating to Moynihan (DPM), April 9, 1974, Box 355, DPM Papers, Library of Congress. Moynihan notes, DPM chronological files, June 27, 1973, Box 362, DPM Papers. Usha Mahajani, “Daniel Moynihan and Indo-U.S. Relations,” National Herald (India), May 1, 1974, clipping in DPM files, Nathan Glazer folder, Box 354. Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, 4. Another of Bowles’s young assistants in India, Edward Logue, soon spun community development in new ways as New Haven’s city planning director. Lizabeth Cohen, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 36–42. Immerwahr, Thinking Small, 135. On Moynihan’s political shift, compare Immerwahr, Thinking Small, 135–40; and Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Prescient Politician,” in Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The Intellectual in Public Life, ed. Robert  A. Katzmann (1998; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 26–43; see also reviews of Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding by Adam Walinsky, New York Times, October 4, 1998; and Stephan Thernstrom, in Commentary, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/maximum-feasible-misunderstanding -community-action-in-the-war-on-poverty-by-daniel-p-moynihan/. Godfrey Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 198–99, 205, 207–9, 216–17. Upon Moynihan’s departure, relations between the two countries again quickly deteriorated in light of Indian nuclear weapons tests in May 1974 and Prime Minister Gandhi’s “emergency” suspension of civil liberties beginning in June 1975. Suzanne R. Garment, “The American Ambassador,” in Katzmann, ed., Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 126; Despite underlying and deep-set political differences, it is worth noting that Moynihan’s personal relations with both Bowles and Galbraith remained cooperative, even cordial. The new ambassador went out of his way to accommodate an incapacitated Bowles on his last visit to India, and he maintained a respectful personal and intellectual dialogue with Galbraith for years to come. Bowles to Moynihan, October 8, November 21, 1973; Moynihan to Galbraith, December  17, 1973, Galbraith to Moynihan, June  28, 1974, Box 354, DPM Papers. Daniel  J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 198. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Nature of Mass Poverty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), v; Das, India Unbound, 77. Galbraith, The Nature of Mass Poverty, 4, 44–60, 61–75, 91, 104–7, 120–39. At the time of writing, Galbraith seemed unaware of the scandal and controversy associated with

5. S IRE N S O NG O F E CO NO M IC D E VELOPMEN T279

91.

92.

93. 94.

95. 96. 97.

98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105.

Indian sterilization programs. See, e.g., Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 322–23, 338. Jagdish N. Bhagwati and Padma Desai, India Planning for Industrialization: Industrialization and Trade Policies Since 1951 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 499– 500; “Jagdish Bhagwati,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia .org /wiki /Jagdish_Bhagwati; “Padma Desai,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia .org /wiki /Padma_Desai. Deepak Lal, The Poverty of “Development Economics” (1983; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 5; “Deepak Lal,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia .org /wiki /Deepak _Lal. Deepak Lal, The Hindu Equilibrium: India c. 1500 BC–2000 AD, abridged and rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 262–68, 383–90. Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya, Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), 8. Das, India Unbound, 356–57. G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot, The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s (New York: Penguin, 2008), 285–86. Thomas E. Weisskopf, “Reflections on 50 Years of Radical Political Economy,” Review of Radical Political Economics 46, no. 4 (2014): 439; Sam Bowles and Tom Weisskopf, “David M. Gordon: Radical Political Economist and Activist (1944–1996),” Review of Radical Political Economics 31, no.  1 (1999): 1–15; “Herbert Gintis,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Herbert_Gintis. Bowles, Promises to Keep, 575–79, quotation at 575; Schaffer, Chester Bowles, 302–15; David L. Stebenne, Arthur J. Goldberg: New Deal Liberal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 358–63. Bowles, qtd. in Schaffer, Chester Bowles, 307–8. Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal, 92, 132–33. Galbraith, qtd. in Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 420. Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 334. As the Democratic Party Platform in 1972 proclaimed: “We believe that war is a waste of human life. We are determined to end forthwith a war which has cost 50,000 American lives, $150 billion of our resources, that has divided us from each other, drained our national will and inflicted incalculable damage to countless people. We will end that war by a simple plan that need not be kept secret: The immediate total withdrawal of all Americans from Southeast Asia.” http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index .php?pid=29605. Lorenzini, Global Development, 163. Lorenzini, Global Development, 163–65; Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), 127. Note that Sen refers readers to a longer argument developed in Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).

2 8 0 6 . TH E Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE SOLUTI ON

6. THE QUEST FOR A TWO- STATE SOLUTION: ISRAEL, 1973– 2000 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

Ahmad Amrawi, “The Palestinians of 1948,” https://web.archive.org/web/20061010015324 /http://english .aljazeera .net / NR /exeres/85FA6981-D4E6 -42BA-B1DD -87555F30220D .htm; images of Arab population in Israel, https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=ar ab+population+in+israel+1970&id=E8026CBFDAF6129A58EBFB92A84C4D52FCAA B6CE&FORM=IQFRBA. Guy Laron, The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2017), 38–39; see also Yoav Di-Capua, “The Slow Revolution: May  1968 in the Arab World,” AHR 123 (June 2018): 733–38; Jamal R. Nassar, The Palestine Liberation Organization: From Armed Struggle to the Declaration of Independence (New York: Praeger, 1991), 79. On armed insurrectionary mythology within the PLO, see also Rachel Havrelock, River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 266–68. Salim Yaqub, Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 56–58. Rubin and Hoffman, qtd. in Michael  R. Fischbach, The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 19–20. Stone, as quoted in Amy Kaplan, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 112; see also Fischbach, The Movement and the Middle East, 67–68. Elisheva Goldberg, “The Intersectional Jewish-American,” New Republic, September 6, 2018, https://newrepublic.com/article/150993/intersectional-jewish-american; Judith A. Klinghoffer, Vietnam, Jews, and the Middle East: Unintended Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1999), 207–8; Abba Eban, My Country: The Story of Modern Israel (New York: Random House, 1972), 253. For a similar reversal of sympathies in West Germany, see Jeffrey Herf, Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967–1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 75–118. Max Steinbock, “Arabs and Jews Working Together,” 1970, AFL-CIO bound pamphlets, RG34-002, Box 14, Meany Archives. See, e.g., Murray Seeger, “Impressions of Israel and Its Workers,” AFL- CIO American Federationist 90, no. 4 (1983). “Jewish, Civil Rights Leaders Berate SNCC,” Leader-Herald (Gloversville-Johnstown, NY), August  16, 1967; “Black Americans to Support Israel Committee (BASIC),” Box 38, Folder 16, RG9-003, Civil Rights Department, AFL-CIO, Meany Archives. “Jewish, Civil Rights Leaders Berate SNCC”; “Black Americans to Support Israel Committee (BASIC)”; Bayard Rustin press release, June 10, 1976. Zeev Moaz, Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security and Foreign Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 408. Francine Klagsbrun, Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel (New York: Schocken, 2017), 565–66.

6 . T HE Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE SOLUTI ON 281

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

Celler to Mrs.  M. Garmiza, December  23, 1969, Emanuel Celler Papers, Library of Congress. “1072 Democratic Party Platform,” https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/1972 -democratic-party-platform; Jonathan Rynhold, The Arab-Israeli Conflict in American Political Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 61; George McGovern, letter to editor, New York Times, June 16, 1972, Box 346, Celler Papers; in the previous year, McGovern had also met privately with AIPAC leader I. L. Kenen. I. L. Kenen, Israel’s Defense Line: Her Friends and Foes in Washington (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1981), 257. Moaz, Defending the Holy Land, 406–7. Stuart Eizenstat, The Future of the Jews: How Global Forces Are Impacting the Jewish People, Israel, and Its Relationship with the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 106–15; George W. Ball and Douglas B. Ball, The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present (New York: Norton, 1992), 239; Kaplan, Our American Israel, 126–27; Nassar, The Palestine Liberation Organization, 1989–99. Michael Harrington, “The War and American Politics,” Midstream, December 1973, 7. Sato Masaya, “The Cold War, Women’s Politics, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in the 1970s,” Journal of Women’s History 30 (Summer 2018): 125–26. James G. Abourezk, Advise and Dissent: Memoirs of South Dakota and the U.S. Senate (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1989), 171; ‘Hayden Favors Use of Marines in Beirut,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, July 8, 1982. UN General Assembly resolutions, 1974, Part 1 United Nations File, Box  337 Israel, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Papers, Library of Congress. Marjorie  N. Feld, Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle Over Apartheid (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 64–73; Gershom Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967–1977 (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 343–44. Gershom Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967–1977 (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 343. “The Twenty-Five Year Old War,” The Nation, October 22, 1973, 387–88. Feld, Nations Divided, 67–68. Yaqub, Imperfect Strangers, 80–82; Abourezk testimony, Congressional Record, May 1, 1974, deposited in Middle East 14, Foreign Affairs, Box  713, folder 57, James  G. Abourezk Papers, Archives and Special Collections, University Libraries, University of South Dakota. James  G. Abourezk, “Brief History of the Middle East Conflict,” Reports to South Dakota, January 1974, Foreign Affairs, Box 713, folder 42, James G. Abourezk Papers. “Negotiating with the PLO,” New York Times op ed., January 28, 1975. Stuart Eizenstat interview by author, August 27, 2018. Seth Anziska, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 29–33; Abba Eban, Personal Witness: Israel Through My Eyes (New York: Putnam’s, 1992), 497–98; Klagsbrun, Lioness, 565–66; Sol  M. Linowitz, The Making of a Public Man: A Memoir (Boston: Little,

2 8 2 6 . TH E Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE SOLUTI ON

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

Brown, 1985), 212–13; Bernard Avishai, The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israeli Democracy (1985; New York: Helios, 2002), 267; Cyrus Vance, Hard Choices: Critical Years in America’s Foreign Policy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 177. Stuart E. Eizenstat, President Carter: The White House Years (New York: St. Martin’s, 2018), 7; author interview with Stuart Eizenstat, August 27, 2018. Jimmy Carter, Why Not the Best? (Nashville, TN: Broadman, 1976), 9. George Packer, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (New York: Knopf, 2019), 170. Jonathan Alter, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 255–56, 356–57; Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 198–204. Eizenstat, President Carter, 8–9. On the identity and influence of nonconservatives and Mideast policy, see John  J. Mearsheimer and Stephen  M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 128–31. Moynihan, qtd. in Eizenstat, President Carter, 687. Lipset interview, October 23, 1992, Box 86; Wattenberg interview, July 21, 1991, Box 98, Eizenstat Papers, Library of Congress. Eizenstat, President Carter, 409. Eizenstat, President Carter, 409–26. Kathleen Christison, Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 164–65; Steven  L. Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict: Making America’s Middle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 323. “Rabat Summit Conference,” http://countrystudies.us/jordan/16.htm; “October  1974 Rabat Arab Summit Conference,” Palestine Facts, http://www.palestinefacts.org /pf_1967to1991_rabat_1974; “PLO Calls for Palestinian Mini-State,” Young Spartacus 27 (December 1974). References to a “mini-state” abound in contemporary commentary, e.g., David Caploe, “New Look at Israel,” The Nation, July  23, 1977, 70; Vance, Hard Choices, 164. Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire, 39–40, 80–83. Eizenstat, President Carter, 420; Vance, Hard Choices, 163–79. Eizenstat, President Carter, 445–46. Ribicoff interview, March 30, 1992, Eizenstat Papers. It should be noted that with the help of Frank Church, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman—and an additional twenty F-15s for Israel—the administration did ultimately steer the arms sale package through Congress. David S. McLellan, Cyrus Vance (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985), 61–62. On AIPAC’s turn to the right, including its cultivation of strong Republican support, see John Judis, Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,

6 . T HE Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE SOLUTI ON 283

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62.

2014), 362–64; see also. Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, 111–50. Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security and Foreign Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 435; “Peace Now,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Peace_Now. Linowitz, The Making of a Public Man, 212. Shimon Peres to Lane Kirkland, August 8, 1979, Box 67, Folder 12, Meany Archive. McLellan, Cyrus Vance, 101–12; Vance, Hard Choices, 228–31, appendix, “A Framework for Peace in the Middle East Agreed at Camp David,” 464–68. Linowitz, The Making of a Public Man, 230; I. L. Kenen notes for congressional testimony, 1977, “Settlements,” I. L. Kenen Papers, Series II, Box 15. Linowitz, The Making of a Public Man, 212–13, 226–27; Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 441. Alter, His Very Best, 403. Peres to Lane Kirkland. Jimmy Carter, The Blood of Abraham: Insights Into the Middle East (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993), 43, 108–9. Eban, Personal Witness, 592. Young would subsequently claim that Israeli intelligence had bugged the meeting. Bartlett C. Jones, Flawed Triumphs: Andy Young at the United Nations (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996), 148, quotation at 151. See Jerald Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). “Blacks Seek Closer Arab Ties,” New York Times, August 20, 1979; Jones, Flawed Triumphs, 132–34, 141, 148. Eizenstat, President Carter, 853–58. James D. Boys, Clinton’s Grand Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Post– Cold War World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 85. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, 458; Linowitz, The Making of a Public Man, 234; “A  Chronology of the Middle East Conflict,” Economist, February  9, 2005, https:// www.economist .com /news/2005 /02 /09/a- chronology- of-the -middle - east- conflict; Edy Kaufman, Walid Salem, and Juliette Verhoeven, “Looking Back, Looking Forward: Toward Transforming the Conflict,” in Bridging the Divide: Peacebuilding in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, ed. Edy Kaufman et  al. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006); Raphael Israeli, The Oslo Idea: The Euphoria of Failure (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2012), esp. 201–7. Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Knopf, 2004), 936–38, 943–45; Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, 104; Anziska, Preventing Palestine, 283–84. Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 765–76. Havrelock suggests that unyielding Israeli control of land and water resources also deflated Palestinian expectations

2 8 4 6 . TH E Q U EST FO R A TWO - STATE SOLUTI ON

63.

64.

65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

74.

75.

in the negotiating process. Rachel Havrelock email to author, April 10, 2019; Havrelock, River Jordan, 265–66. Barry M. Rubin and Judith C. Rubin, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 248. Some have laid the responsibility more at Israel’s door, especially intransigence on the settlement issue and constant delays in the withdrawal of troops following the October 1998 Wye River Agreement, which attempted to resume and advance the 1995 Oslo II Accord. See esp. Clayton E. Swisher, The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process (New York: Nation, 2004). Anita Shapira, Israel: A History (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 427– 49; Anziska, Preventing Palestine, 284. Anziska credits the British Israeli architect Eyal Weizman for the term. Mehran Kamrava, The Impossibility of Palestine: History, Geography, and the Road Ahead (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 2. Vance, Hard Choices, 254. Vance’s biographer, the historian David S. McLellan, is even more pointed: “In retrospect one can see that Begin never intended autonomy for the West Bank even under conditions designed to provide Israel the right to protect its security interests during the five-year transition period. . . . Had the Begin government been sincere in its promise of autonomy to West Bank Palestinians, the way would have opened for negotiation with Jordan analogous to Israel’s negotiation with Egypt.” Cyrus Vance, 106. Clinton, qtd. in Rubin and Rubin, Yasir Arafat, 199; Clinton, My Life, 944. Ross, The Missing Peace, 767. Walid Salem and Edy Kaufman, “Palestinian-Israeli Peacebuilding: A Historical Perspective,” in Kaufman et al., eds., Bridging the Divide, 29. Sari Nusseibeh, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 194–217, quotations at 193, 214. Dimitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben- Gurion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 1–23, 220–36, quotations at 236, 22. Eric D. Weitz, A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 366. Daniel Gordis, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 136; Levy, qtd. in Padraig O’Malley, The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine—A Tale of Two Narratives (New York: Viking, 2015), 315. Something along the lines of this less-than-but-more-than-a-state approach has recently been adumbrated by a so-called One Land, Two Peoples movement with adherents, including both Israelis and Palestinians, and with both religious and secular perspectives, arrayed across the Green Line. Paul Scham, “If Annexation Happens,” Progressive Israel, https://www.progressiveisrael.org/if-annexation-happens/. Ron Robin, email to author, June 9, 2019.

7. T H E LO NG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T285

76.

77. 78. 79.

Jewish Voice for Peace, https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org; Maryam Saleh and Ryan Grim, “Theory of Change,” The Intercept, December 14, 2019, https://theintercept.com /2019/12/14/j-street-israel-jeremy-ben-ami/. Peter Beinart op ed., New York Times, July 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07 /08/opinion/israel-annexation-two-state-solution.html. PEW Research Center poll, http://www.people-press.org /2018/01/23/republicans-and -democrats-grow-even-further-apart-in-views-of-israel-palestinians. Abraham Riesman, “How the DSA Went from Supporting Israel to Boycotting the Jewish Ethnostate,” Daily Beast, December  1, 2018, https://www.thedailybeast.com /how-the-dsa-went-from-supporting-israel-to-boycotting-the-jewish-ethnostate.

7. THE LONG ARM OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT: SOUTH AFRICA, 1970– 1999 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

See, e.g. Elizabeth Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Adrian Guelke, Rethinking the Rise and Fall of Apartheid: South Africa and World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Hakan Thorn, Anti-Apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Sue Onslow, ed., Cold War in Southern Africa: White Power, Black Liberation (London: Routledge, 2009). The focus here is limited to the U.S. movement. Other works treat other international centers of antiapartheid agitation, from Bandung and Paris in the 1950s to Britain, Canada, and Sweden after 1960. See, e.g., John Munro, The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonisation, 1945–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 203–45; Thorn, Anti-Apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society, 127–41; and Jon S. Saul, On Building a Social Movement: The North American Campaign for Southern African Liberation Revisited (Halifax, Canada: Fernwood, 2017), 85–134. See, e.g., Guelke, Rethinking the Rise and Fall of Apartheid; Francis Njubi Nesbitt, Race for Sanctions: African Americans Against Apartheid, 1946–1994 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); and Saul, On Building a Social Movement. Munro, The Anticolonial Front, 63. Penny  M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 17–21, 72–73, 114–18; Alvin  B. Tillery Jr., Between Homeland and Motherland: Africa, U.S. Foreign Policy, and Black Leadership in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 72–75; Munro, The Anticolonial Front, 34–35. “All-African People’s Conference,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/All -African_Peoples percent27_Conference. Harcourt Fuller, Building the Ghanaian Nation-State: Kwame Nkrumah’s Symbolic Nationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), xvii.

2 8 6  7. TH E LO NG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RI GHTS MOVEMEN T

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

Yevette Richards, Maida Springer: Pan-Africanist and International Labor Leader (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 105, 182, 189–91. “Funds Needed to Aid So. African Victims,” California Eagle, April 11, 1957. Lewis V. Baldwin, Toward the Beloved Community: Martin Luther King Jr. and South Africa (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 1995), 13–38; “ ‘Top 100’ Ask JFK for Summit Meet,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 15, 1962. Robert Trent Vinson, “Up from Slavery and Down with Apartheid! African Americans and Black South Africans Against the Global Color Line,” Journal of American Studies 52 (2018): 314; Baldwin, Toward the Beloved Community, 49–54. Du Bois was also invited by Nkrumah but was denied a passport. He would later die in self-exile in Ghana on the eve of the March on Washington in 1963. Carolyn P. DuBose, The Untold Story of Charles Diggs: The Public Figure, the Private Man (Arlington, VA: Barton, 1999), 3, 16–18, 62–65. Richard D. Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 30–31; see also Vaughn Rasberry, “JFK and the Global Anticolonial Movement,” in The Cambridge Companion to John  F. Kennedy, ed. Andrew Hoberek (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 118–33. Mahoney, JFK, 246; Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History (London: Zed, 2002), 94–120; Philip E. Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans: John  F. Kennedy’s Courting of African Nationalist Leaders (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 76–77. On the Congo, see esp. Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick, Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Thomas J. Noer, Soapy: A Biography of G. Mennen Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 264–65. William Minter, King Solomon’s Mines Revisited: Western Interests and the Burdened History of Southern Africa (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 188–90; Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans, 112–17. Nancy Mitchell, Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2016), 27–39; Donald R. Culverson, Contesting Apartheid: U.S. Activism, 1960–1987 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999), 41–42; Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (1987; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 184; Noer, Soapy, 294–96. Mimi Edmunds, “The 1960s,” in No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists Over a Half Century, 1950–2000, ed. William Minter, Gail Hovery, and Charles Cobb  Jr. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 2008), 94–97; Culverson, Contesting Apartheid, 43–48; Nesbitt, Race for Sanctions, 75–76. Judith E. Smith, Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014); William Minter, “An Unfinished Journey,” in Minter et al., eds., No Easy Victories, 31. In Mozambique, armed struggle broke out between the Frelimo liberation movement and the white-backed Renamo guerrilla army; in Angola, the Soviet- and Cubanbacked MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) battled Joseph

7. T H E LO NG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T287

22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

Savimbi’s China and then U.S.-supported UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola); while in Zimbabwe, Joshua Nkomo’s African People’s Union (ZAPU) bitterly fought Robert Mugabe’s (African National Union) (ZANU) until combining after national elections in the late 1980s. Nesbitt, Race for Sanctions, 89–96. Faced with continuing protest and an international boycott campaign, Polaroid would announce its withdrawal from South Africa in 1977. Nesbitt, Race for Sanctions, 77, 83. “Drum and Spear Bookstore,” http://www.washingtonart.com/ beltway/drum&spear .html; “Charles  E. Cobb,  Jr.,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Charles_E ._Cobb_Jr. “Sixth Pan-African Congress,” Digital SNCC Gateway, https://snccdigital.org /events /6th-pan-african-congress/. “Anne Holloway, Andrew Young,” Washington Post, November 21, 1979, https://www .washingtonpost .com /archive/ lifestyle/1979/11 /21 /odyssey-of-the-diplomat /8b47b81e -1028–496c-ad86-fd4e45d7da14/. William Minter and Sylvia Hill, “Anti-Apartheid Solidarity in United States–South Africa Relations: From the Margins to the Mainstream,” in The Road to Democracy in South Africa, vol.  3, International Solidarity, part 2 (South Africa: SADET, 2008), 779–80. “Denise Oliver-Velez,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Oliver-Velez; “Askia Muhammad,” Final Call, https://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National _News_2/Askia-Muhammad-celebrates-40-years-on-the-radio.shtml. Robert Kinloch Massie, Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 524–26, 532–34; Baldwin, Toward the Beloved Community, 80; Nesbitt, Race for Sanctions, 92. Minter, “An Unfinished Journey”; Minter, King Solomon’s Mines Revisited, 36, 43; Massie, Loosing the Bonds, 433, 625. “Campus Protests Return, Apartheid the Target,” Transcript (North Adams, MS), May 3, 1978. Cecelie Counts interview by the author, March 28, 2019, Washington, DC. “The Freedom Charter in South Africa,” ThoughtCo., https://www.thoughtco.com /text-of-the-freedom-charter-43417. “New Careers for the Poor,” HistPhil, December 4, 2017, https://histphil.org /2017/12/04 /the -strange - career- of-new- careers -for-the -poor-the - challenge - of- evaluating-the -impact-of-a-great-society-program/. Although unremarked on publicly by U.S. antiapartheid leaders, the Sixth Congress also witnessed a serious split among radical Pan-Africanists, when the young Guyanese Marxist Walter Rodney openly clashed with mentors like C. L. R. James over the congress’s relatively uncritical embrace of the continent’s new Black-led regimes. In an argument with long-term consequences for the African states, including postapartheid South Africa, Rodney (who would be assassinated in 1980) criticized those who would not extend the fight against imperialism to a class-based struggle for a

2 8 8  7. TH E LO NG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RI GHTS MOVEMEN T

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

communist society. Rupert Charles Lewis, Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 167–81. Sylvia Hill interview by the author, May 9, 2019, Washington, DC. Cecelie Counts interview. David  L. Hostetter, American Antiapartheid Activism and the Rise of Multicultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), 43–64; Minter, “Unfinished Journey,” 39–40. Salih Booker interview by the author, April 8, 2019, Washington, DC. Cyrus Vance, Hard Choices: Critical Years in America’s Foreign Policy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 261; Nancy Mitchell, Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2016), 10–15, 134. DuBose, The Untold Story of Charles Diggs, 198–205; Michael Harrington, The LongDistance Runner: An Autobiography (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 46, 195. Phyllis Slade Martin, “A Moral Imperative: The Role of American Black Churches in International Anti-Apartheid Activism,” PhD diss., George Mason University, 2015, 203–4; Randall Robinson, Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America (New York: Dutton, 1998), 100, 107; As a Pan-African scholar-activist, Walters had led a walkout at the African Studies Association meetings in Montreal in 1969 and helped create the parallel African Heritage Studies Association. Hostetter, American Antiapartheid Activism, 71–73. Robinson, Defending the Spirit, 69, 90–94. Salih Booker email to author, November 8, 2019. Robinson, Defending the Spirit, 210, 279. On Mandela’s long publicly suppressed but historically influential role within the South African Communist Party, see, e.g., South African History Online, https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/mandela-and -south-african-communist-party. Transafrica Forum (New Brunswick, NJ: Transafrica Forum, 1982–1996), passim, 1984–1988. Nii Akuetteh interview by the author, March 27, 2019, Washington DC. Ron Walters, Robert Cummings, et al., “TAF Foreign Policy Analysis” (1977), Box 111, Folder 2, TransAfrica Records, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Walters et al., “TAF Foreign Policy Analysis.” David Remnick, “Randall Robinson: From Boyhood Pain to a Crusade Against Apartheid,” Washington Post, February 5, 1985. “TAF Foreign Policy Analysis.” Sylvia Hill explains in an email to the author, October 10, 2019, that TA leaders distinguished their internationalism from descriptions in “the press” that often framed the movement in civil rights terms “because they had very narrow views of why Black people are committed to international activism.” Cecelie Counts email to author, October 17, 2019. J. Brooks Spector, “The UDF at 30,” Daily Maverick, August  22, 2013, https://www .dailymaverick .co.za /article /2013 - 08 -22 -the -udf-at-30 -an- organisation -that-shook -apartheids-foundation/; South African History Online, “Armed Struggle and Popular

7. THE LONG ARM OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT289

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

67.

68.

Resistance,” https://www. sahistory.org. za /article /1960 -1994-armed-struggle -and -popular-resistance; Randall Robinson, Defending the Spirit, 147–48. “Randall Robinson, Witness for Africa,” Washington Post, June 4, 1983. Robinson, Defending the Spirit, 127–35; Booker interview, March 29, 2019. “Randall Robinson, Witness for Africa.” Booker interview, March 29, 2019. Robinson, as quoted in Princeton Lyman, Partner to History: The U.S. Role in South Africa’s Transition to Democracy (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 2002), 30. “Protests Pass 6-Month Mark at Embassy,” Washington Post, May  21, 1985; Massie, Loosing the Bonds, 558–60. Sarah A. Soule, “The Student Divestment Movement in the United States and Tactical Diffusion: The Shantytown Protest,” Social Forces 75 (March 1997): 855–82. Prexy Nesbitt, “Belaboring Liberation in South Africa/AFL-CIO in Africa,” https:// digitalcommons.colum.edu/nesbittwritings/37/. William Lucy interview by author, May 28, 2019, Washington, DC; Counts interview. “Sun City (song)”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Sun_City_(song). Jon Weiner, “When Old Blue Eyes Was Red: The Poignant Story of Frank Sinatra’s Politics,” BLARB (Blog of Los Angeles Review of Books), December  19, 2015, http:// blog . lareviewof books .org /essays /old -blue - eyes -red -poignant-story-frank-sinatras -politics/; Sinatra to James McBeth and George L. Mallory Jr,. April 20, 1987, cited in Michael Beaubien, “Singing for Apartheid; American Artists in South Africa,” Village Voice 27 (November  9, 1982), Box  110, Folder 3, TransAfrica Records, MoorlandSpingarn Research Center, Howard University. Robinson, Defending the Spirit, 156. On Ashe’s antiapartheid politics, see esp. Raymond Arsenault, Arthur Ashe: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 493–514; Allen McDuffee, “When Arthur Ashe Fought to Play Tennis in South Africa,” Timeline, September 29, 2017, https://timeline .com/arthur-ashe-south-africa-99c415a6aee2; see, generally, Hostetter, American Antiapartheid Activism, 95–122. Hostetter, American Antiapartheid Activism, 106, 244, 272. Curiously, perhaps the most famous of recordings to emerge from South Africa at the height of the boycott period technically defied the boycott itself. Paul Simon’s Grammy-winning Graceland album, an eclectic mixture of musical styles and instruments produced in collaboration with several Johannesburg artists, won wide acclaim, but not without controversy. The ANC and politically engaged artists like Billy Bragg protested the production as a violation of the boycott, but Simon took refuge behind the encouragement of Harry Belafonte and the United Nations Anti-Apartheid Committee as well as support from the South African black musicians’ union. “Graceland album,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Graceland_(album). Richard G. Lugar, Letters to the Next President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 215–16.

2 9 0  7. TH E LO NG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RI GHTS MOVEMEN T

69.

70.

71. 72. 73.

74. 75.

76.

77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84.

Chester A. Crocker, High Noon in Southern Africa: Making Peace in a Rough Neighborhood (New York: Norton, 1992), 326; Massie, Loosing the Bonds, 620–25; California 1986 Statutes, chap. 1254 (AB 134, Waters et. al.), chap. 255 (AB 3994, Moore). Lugar credited his shift to the influence of J. Irwin Miller—the chairman of Cummins Engine Co., a lay leader in the National Council of Churches, and, politically, a devoted Rockefeller Republican and longtime Lugar backer—who, after a trip to South Africa with the Ford Foundation, expressed fears of widening violence in the country. Janet Heininger, “Interview with Richard Lugar,” Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate, March  6, 2009, https://www.emkinstitute.org /resources /richard-lugar. Massie, Loosing the Bonds, 586. Lugar, Letters to the Next President, 212–13, 227–31; “Anti-Apartheid,” Avoice: African American Voices in Congress, http://www.avoiceonline.org /aam/history.html. Nesbitt, Race for Sanctions, 142–43; Ronald V. Dellums, Lying Down with the Lions: A Public Life from the Streets of Oakland to the Halls of Power (Boston: Beacon, 2000), 132–33. Lugar, Letters to the Next President, 212–13, 227–47, quotations at 233, 238–40; Lyman, Partner to History, 35–36. Crocker, High Noon in Southern Africa, 331; Massie, Loosing the Bonds, 613–16; Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: 1199/SEIU and the Politics of Healthcare Unionism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). George  P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), 1109–10. To the U.S. president’s great enjoyment, Machel told Reagan the story of the Boer who goes into a bar and, in vain, orders a Chivas Regal and again in vain a Johnnie Walker. When the bartender suggests a Black and White, “ ‘OK’ says the Boer, ‘but pour them into two separate shot glasses’ ” (1117). For an appreciative take on Shultz, more generally, see Ronald Schatz, The Labor Board Boys: Tackling American Conflicts for Fifty Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020), chap. 9. Massie, Loosing the Bonds, 620. Massie, Loosing the Bonds, 622. Massie, Loosing the Bonds, 623–24. Lyman, Partner to History, 36; Crocker, High Noon in Southern Africa, 484–85; Piero Gleijeses, “From Cassinga to New York: The Struggle for the Independence of Namibia,” in Onslow, ed., Cold War in Southern Africa, 201–24; Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa, 126–27. Sue Onslow, “The Cold War in Southern Africa: White Power, Black Nationalism, and External Intervention,” in Onslow, ed., Cold War in Southern Africa, 28–29. Guelke, Rethinking the Rise and Fall of Apartheid, 169, 207. Baldwin, Toward the Beloved Community, 135–42. “Gay McDougall,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Gay_McDougall; Counts interview.

7. T H E LO NG ARM O F TH E CIVIL RIGH TS MOVEMEN T291

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

94. 95.

96.

97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

Dellums, Lying Down with the Lions, 6; Hostetter, American Antiapartheid Activism, 86; Counts interview. “Nelson Mandela Comes to America,” History.com, https://www.history.com/news /nelson-mandela-comes-to-america; Sylvia Hill interview. Robinson, Defending the Spirit, 180–81. William Raspberry, “TransAfrica Comes Into Its Own,” Washington Post, May  14, 1993. Wiley  A. Hall, “Protest by Hunger Strike Inspires yet Depresses,” Baltimore Sun, May 10, 1994. Interview with Sylvia Hill by William Minter, part 2, August 12, 2004, http:// kora . matrix . msu .edu /files /50 /304 /32 -130 -13A3 - 84 - Sylvia%20Hill%202004%2010 -22 -11 .pdf. Counts interview; Robinson, Defending the Spirit, 187–89. Culverson, Contesting Apartheid, 162; Counts interview. See, e.g., Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Dutton, 2000); Randall Robinson, The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other (New York: Dutton, 2002); Randall Robinson, An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President (New York: Basic Civitas, 2007). Randall Robinson, Quitting America (New York: Dutton, 2004), 138; Robinson, Defending the Spirit, 122, 245. Elmer Smith, “Danny Glover’s Activism Is No Act,” Philadelphia Daily News, October  18, 2002, Box  79, Folder 36, TransAfrica Records, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. “South Africa Economy,” Encyclopedia Britannica Online, https://www.britannica .com/place/South-Africa/Economy#ref920783; “AGOA. Info—South Africa,” AGOA, https://agoa.info/profiles/south-africa.html. Adam Habib, South Africa’s Suspended Revolution: Hopes and Prospects (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013), 75–90; for moves toward more neo-Keynesian policies after 2008, see 93–102. Bill Lucy, “Comments to National NAACP Meeting,” July 11, 1998, TA Papers. After the unbanning of the ANC in 1990, the broader-based UDF had officially disbanded; Sylvia Hill email to author, October 10, 2019. Bill Fletcher, Report to the Board of Directors, November  1, 2002, TransAfrica Records, Box 79, Folder 36; Author interview with Bill Fletcher, March 15, 2019. Hill interview. Steve Striffler, Solidarity: Latin America and the U.S. Left in the Era of Human Rights (London: Pluto, 2019), 94–124, quotations at 96, 108–9, 97. Striffler, Solidarity, 110, 184.

2 92CO NCLU S IO N: BEYO ND H U M A N I TA R I A N I SM

CONCLUSION: BEYOND HUMANITARIANISM 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

Thomas W. Lippman, Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), 272–73. George Packer, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (New York: Knopf, 2019), 398. Bob Dreyfuss, “Democrats and Foreign Policy: What Will It Take to Overthrow the Foreign Policy Establishment?” New Labor Forum 28 (July 2019): 20–27; see also James Mann, The Obamians (New York: Viking, 2012). Rosa Brooks, “Dumb Wars,” Foreign Policy, November 11, 2015, https://foreignpolicy .com/2015/11/11/dumb-wars-obama-afghanistan-us-military-iraq-syria. Barack Obama, A Promised Land (New York: Random House, 2020), quotations at 310–12, 640–41. Packer, Our Man, 398; Samantha Power, “Review of Peter Baker and Susan Glaser, The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III,” New York Times Book Review, September  27, 2020, 1, 20; on Libya, cf. Obama, A Promised Land, 659–68. White House, “A National Security Strategy for a New Century,” October 1998, qtd. in Lippman, Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy, 273. Barack Obama, qtd. in Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir (New York: William Collins, 2019), 264. Albright, as quoted in Lippman, Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy, 212. Obama, qtd. in Power, The Education of an Idealist, 164. David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 33–38, quotation at 33, 304. Craig Calhoun, “The Imperative to Reduce Suffering: Charity, Progress, and Emergencies in the Field of Humanitarian Action,” in Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics, ed. Michael Barnett and Thomas  G. Weiss (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 96–97. Lippmann, Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy, 96–97. For a more sympathetic view of the human rights model, see Eric Arnesen, “The Limits of Solidarity in U.S. History,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 17 (December 2020): 85–91. Amy  C. Offner, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), quotation at 16–17, see also 275–89. Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 212–20. “Remarks by President Biden on America’s Place in the World,” address at U.S. State  Department, February  4, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/ briefing-room /speeches -remarks /2021 /02 /04 /remarks -by-president-biden- on-americas -place -in -the-world /.

CO N CLU S IO N: BEYO ND H U M ANITAR I A N I SM293

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

Stephen Wertheim, “America Has No Reason to Be So Powerful,” New York Times, October 15, 2020; Fred L. Block, Capitalism: The Future of an Illusion (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 172. I am drawing heavily here on ideas from Block, Capitalism, 167–73, 195. It is worth noting that Senator Bernie Sanders similarly called for the creation of a worldwide progressive alliance “to combat the forces of global oligarchy and authoritarianism” in an address at Johns Hopkins University in 2018. Dreyfuss, “Democrats and Foreign Policy.” Eric D. Weitz, A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 366. Rael Zreik, “The Israeli Right’s New Vision of Jewish Political Supremacy,” +972 Magazine, October  27, 2020, https://www.972mag.com /israeli-right-jewish-supremacy -segregation/.

INDEX

AAUG. See Association of Arab-American University Graduates Abzug, Bella, 169–170 Acheson, Dean, 21, 101, 132, 261n4 ACOA. See American Committee on Africa Adenauer, Konrad, 35, 47, 48, 72 Affluent Society, The (Galbraith), 144, 146–147 Afghanistan, 229; Soviet Union invasion of, 181 AFL. See American Federation of Labor African Americans: India and activism of, 156; Israel support by community of, 85, 93–94, 165. See also Congressional Black Caucus; Trans-Africa African Growth and Opportunity Act (2000) (AGOA), 222–223 African National Congress (ANC), 191, 195, 203, 219–220, 225–226, 291n98 Afro-Asian Institute for Cooperative and Labour Studies, in Israel, 88–90 AFSC. See American Friends Service Committee AGOA. See African Growth and Opportunity Act

Agricultural Trade and Food Assistance Act (1954) (PL-480), India and, 143, 150, 152, 155 AIPAC. See American Israel Public Affairs Committee Akuetteh, Nii, 208–209 Albright, Madeleine, 10, 231 All-African People’s Conference, of Nkrumah, 193 Alliance for Progress, of Kennedy, 2, 89, 101, 119, 121, 228 American Committee on Africa (ACOA), on South Africa apartheid, 195, 198, 204–205 American Diplomacy (Kennan), 6 American diplomacy, current, 228 American Federation of Labor (AFL): FTUC of, 26, 51–52; Germany workers rights and, 50–51; Goldberg contacts with, 49; ICFTU withdrawal by, 260n87; Israel Bonds Campaign support, 86, 263n40; on Israeli-Palestine solutions, 167; Marshall Plan and Bretton Woods support by, 18, 29, 32–33; Romualdi relationship with, 106–107; RTAA opposition by, 248n23; WWII cooperation by, 23

29 6 IND E X

American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Southern Africa program of, 204 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), 82, 86, 87, 176, 189 American Jewish community, Arab-Israeli tensions response, 92 American Jewish Trade Union Committee, for Palestine, 84 amnesty movement, in Costa Rica, 117 ANC. See African National Congress Anglo-American Mutual Aid Agreement, Article VII of (1942), 25 antiapartheid movement, 198–204 anti–free trade: labor and, 19; neoliberalism and, 29–42, 43 antiliberal authoritarianism, 5 Arab-Israeli tensions, 3, 91–94 Arab-Palestinians refugee issue, 76, 79–80, 165, 262n20 Arab Spring (2011), 229 Arafat, Yasser, 171; Camp David 2000 and, 184–185; Clinton Parameters and, 182; at Oslo Accord, 181–183, 184 Arbenz, Jacobo, 123, 272n92; Figueres on, 114; social reforms of, 102 Arévalo, Juan José, 98, 109–110, 125 Armas, Castillo, 123–124 arms: Kennedy and South Africa embargo on, 197; package dissolution, in IsraeliPalestine, 177, 282n44 Arnold, Thurman, 22 Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG), anti-Israel stance of, 166 Atlantic Alliance, of F. Roosevelt, 9 Baghdad Pact, 260n1 Barak, Ehud, 182, 183 BASIC. See Black Americans to Support Israel Committee Basic Law constitution, in West Germany, 47–48 Batista, Fulgencio, 98

Bay of Pigs invasion, Cuba, 119–120, 146–147, 160 BDS. See Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Beauvoir, Simone de, 92 Begin, Menachem, 176; at Camp David Accords, 179; Camp David Accords peace treaty and, 177–178; West Bank and, 284n66 Ben-Gurion, David, 37, 81, 83, 91 Berghahn, Volker, 22–23, 71 Berkman, Edward O., 130, 131, 138, 140 Berle, Adolf A., 50, 96; background of, 100–101, 265n9; Bay of Pigs invasion support, 119; on Guatemala, 102; Kennedy Alliance for Progress and, 101; Latin America and, 100; liberal anticommunism, Figueres and, 112–122; on Third World, 266n16 Best and the Brightest, The (Halberstam), 159 Betancourt, Rómulo, 98, 102, 106, 114, 118, 120 Bevin, Ernest, 59, 69 Bhagwati, Jagdish, 157–158 Biddle, Francis, 22 Biden, Joseph “Joe,” 2, 233–234 Bizone area, in postwar Germany, 67, 71 Black Americans to Support Israel Committee (BASIC), 167 Black internationalism, Nkrumah and, 193 Black-Jewish liberal alliance, IsraeliPalestine and, 180–181 Black political activists interest, in South Africa apartheid, 199–200, 206–207 Black Power movements, 166 Board of Economic Warfare (1942), of Arnold, 22 Böckler, Hans, 58, 63, 69 Booker, Salih, 205, 206, 207, 212 Boom Era: Post-Boom 1973–2016 years, 19; Western Europe from 1948 to 1973, 31, 33, 35 Botha, P. W., 192, 216, 218, 219

IND EX 297

Bowles, Chester A., 3; as India ambassador, 127, 129, 274n27; influential national network of, 130; liberal, anticommunist message of, 131, 132, 275n33; Lindblom and, 150–151; Nehru meetings with, 127, 132–133; as OPA director, 129; F. Roosevelt and, 129; on Southern tariff reduction opposition, 32; Stevenson support by, 140. See also Community Development plan Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement: Israel and, 189, 190; South Africa and, 3, 200–201, 206, 214, 215, 289n67 Brazil, Vargas in, 98, 101 Bretton Woods liberal internationalism (1944–2016), 2, 7, 9, 10, 15, 44–45; AFL and CIO support of, 18, 29, 32–33; CIO pamphlet support of, 30; Great Depression and WWII lessons, 21–26; IMF and World Bank formation, 25, 27; international IR, 38–39; labor and free trade roller-coaster, 19–21; labor-liberal free trade embrace, 11, 26–33; neoliberalism and anti-free trade, 29–42, 43; protectionism and, 36, 43; Rauchway on influence of, 32–33; Soviets removal from, 28; on stabilization fund, 27, 249n33; trade in practice versus principle, 33–38; White and Keynes as co-creators of, 26–27 British Aid for German Workers project, 59 Brown, Irving, 51–52, 70 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 173, 174 Bullock, H. L., 62–63, 257n46 Bunche, Ralph, 194, 196 Burke-Hartke Bill (1972), 41, 43 Bush, George H. W., 228 Bush, George W., 183, 184 Bustamente, José Luis, 98 Buthelezi, Mangosuthu, 220 Byrd Amendment (1971), 197, 206 Byrnes, James, 21

CAAA. See Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act Calderón Guardia, Rafael Ángel “el Doctor”: Costa Rica departure of, 111; creole communism and, 104–105, 106; Mora and PVP support of, 105; populist programs of, 104, 105; F. Roosevelt relationship with, 105; Social Guarantees program of, 104, 105 Camp David Accords (1979), 3; Begin and Sadat peace treaty at, 177–178; Carter, Sadat, and Begin at, 179; Carter and, 177–178, 179; casualties of, 181–184; disagreements in, 178–179; Framework for Peace of, 177; full autonomy meaning at, 178–180; on West Bank occupation, 178 Camp David Accords (2000), 184–185 Caribbean Legion, 125; Arévalo alliance with, 109–110; Central American dictatorships and, 2, 13; Figueres and, 108–111; termination of, 269n45 Carter, Jimmy, 12; appointments of, 172–173; Black African states nonintervention, 206; Camp David Accords, 177–178, 179; CDM on, 174; civil rights movement and, 172, 173; foreign policy progressive liberal stance, 172–174; Geneva conference plans, 175–176; on human rights, 3, 173–174, 175; Israeli-Palestine state solution and, 171–181; Vietnam War and, 172–173 Castro, Fidel, 92, 118–119 CBC. See Congressional Black Caucus CBTU. See Coalition of Black Trade Unionists CCTRN. See Rerum Novarum CDM. See Coalition for a Democratic Majority CDU/CSU government, of Adenauer, 72 Celler, Emanuel, 76–77, 81, 91, 130–131, 261n9; on Histadrut, 83–84; on Israeli-Palestine solution, 167–168; Israel state support by, 78, 87 Central America, 2, 9

29 8 IND E X

Chermesh, Ran, 82, 90 Children’s Hospitality Scheme, of British TUC, 59, 60 China: liberal democratic internationalism response to, 234–235; rise of, 1, 228 CIO. See Congress of Industrial Organizations civil rights movement: Carter and, 172, 173; South Africa apartheid and, 12, 191–226; U.S., 172, 173, 195, 226 civil war (1948), in Costa Rica, 110–111 Clay, Lucius, 64, 65, 68, 255n18; OMGUS directed by, 52, 56–57, 59 Clayton Antitrust Act (1914), 20, 247n9 Clinton, Bill, 124; AGOA and, 222–223; Clinton Parameters and, 182; missionary zeal in foreign policy, 227; Oslo Accord and, 181–182; Strategic Plan of 1998, 228 Clinton Parameters, of Arafat, Barak, and Clinton, 182 Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), on Carter, 174 Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU), 213–214, 223 Cobb, Charles E. “Charlie,” 199–200 codetermination: German worker rights and workplace, 47, 48, 58, 68, 71, 72; parity principle and, 48, 71, 72, 253n3 Codetermination Act (1976), 48 Codetermination Law (1951), 47, 48 Cold War ideology, 6–7, 10 collective bargaining, 28, 38 collective laissez-faire, Kahn-Freund on, 247n19 communism, 69–70, 107, 207; Calderón on creole, 104–105, 106; German Trade Union Centre and, 259n69; Kennedy concern of India, 146–148; in Latin America, 99; WFTU domination by, 26. See also liberal anti-communism communist-infused unions, in Japan, 35–36 Community Development plan, of Bowles and Nehru: core concepts of, 134; Ford

Foundation and, 135; Gilbert on, 134–135; Kennedy commitment to, 142–143; lack of participation in, 148–149; Menuhin on musical development, 77, 139–140, 275n36; Nehru weakness in, 138; project areas of, 136; TVA, USDA and, 134–135; Yen and Chinese example of, 134 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (1986) (CAAA), 192; Lugar and, 216–218 concentration camps horror, German worker rights and, 64 Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina (CTAL), 107 Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), 192, 204–205, 207–215; Diggs leading of, 199; Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement and, 199, 287n22; TA link to, 206 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO): Bretton Woods support in pamphlet of, 30; German workers rights and, 50–51; Goldberg contacts with, 49; ICFTU withdrawal by, 260n87; Israel Bonds Campaign support, 86, 263n40; on Israeli-Palestine solutions, 167; Marshall Plan and Bretton Woods support by, 18, 29, 32–33; RTAA renewal support by, 28; WWII cooperation with, 23 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 195 Congress of South African Trade Unionists (COSATU), 191, 211, 223 constructive engagement policy, South Africa and, 192, 202; Reagan and, 210, 214; Shultz-Crocker policy of, 216, 218–219 Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe, 33 CORE. See Congress of Racial Equality corporatist traditions, in Germany, 35 COSATU. See Congress of South African Trade Unionists Costa Rica (1944–1980), 11, 97–99; AFL and ORIT in, 113; amnesty movement in, 117; Calderón populist program of, 104, 105;

IND EX 29 9

CCTRN labor federation, 105, 106–107, 111–114; civil war in 1948 of, 110–111; communist-led labor movements and, 107; Communist Party outlawed in, 112; coup of 1954–1955 in, 112–117; CTAL and CTM in, 107; economic problems in 1970s, 121; exceptionalism, 103–104, 122–125; Labor Code of, 112–113, 267n24; Latin American problem in liberal mind, 100–102; League Against Communist Domination of, 111; liberal, anticommunism cause, 112–122; military intervention and conspiracy in, 115; national memorialization in, 122; Nicaragua 1955 invasion of, 116–117; Nixon and, 117; Núñez influence in, 105, 106–107; PVP trade unions derecognition, 112; Romualdi and, 106–107, 113; social democracy path, 108–112; UFCO in, 113–115; U.S. and, 114, 117, 122; welfarism political foundations, 103–107 Counts, Cecelie, 202, 202, 212, 220, 221 coup: Costa Rica 1954–1955, 112–117; Guatemala 1954, 114, 123–124 COVID-19 pandemic, 1, 12–13, 236 creole communism, Calderón and, 104–105, 106 Crosland, Anthony, 70 CTAL. See Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina CTM. See Federation of Mexican Workers Cuba, 5, 98; Bay of Pigs invasion, 119–120, 146–147, 160 Davis, Nathaniel P., 111, 269n41 Dayan, Moshe, 90 Decade of Development, UN, 196. See also Development Decade of India decartelization legislation, in Germany, 46 Democratic Opposition Movement (MDO), in Costa Rica, 117 Democratic Party: American exceptionalism and, 10; humanitarian

interventions by liberals in, 231–232; labor-liberals and, 15; left-liberals in, 10; on liberal trading system, 247n20; on military withdrawals, 2; Vietnam War split in, 9–10 Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB): creation of, 67; as German labor federation, 59; TUC alliance with, 68–69 Development Decade of India, Galbraith and, 141–152 DGB. See Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund Diggs, Charles, 199, 206; background of, 196; South Africa apartheid assistance, 194–197 digital revolution, world economy influenced by, 40 domestic politics, foreign policy compared to, 6 Dominican Republic, 5; Eisenhower dictator support, 118; Johnson armed intervention in, 119–120; U.S. influence in, 99 Don Pepe. See Figueres Ferrer, José Dubinsky, David: Afro-Asian Institute support by, 89; FTUC of, 51; Israel Bonds Campaign of, 84–86, 263n40; Israel support by, 84 Du Bois, W. E. B., 193, 286n12 Dulles, Allen, 49, 101 Dunlop, John, 247n19 Eban, Abba, 91, 92, 166 economic development, 11; Bretton Woods expansion of, 15; in Europe, 29, 31, 33 Eisenhower, Dwight: Ghana Volta River Hydroelectric Dam and, 194; Nicaragua and Dominican Republic dictators support, 118; Suez Canal and, 81 Eisenhower Doctrine, Arab-Israeli tensions and, 93 Erhard, Ludwig, 35, 72 Europe, 1; economic development in, 29, 31, 33; Judt on postwar, 73; Marshall Plan aid packages for, 18; social democracy in, 17

30 0 IND E X

European model, of social-political development, 58 exceptionalism: Costa Rican, 100, 103–104, 122–125; Democratic Party and American, 10 Factory Workers’ Union, Germany, 62 FAO. See Food and Agricultural Organization fascism, 4, 8, 22–23, 97 Federation of Mexican Workers (CTM), 107 feudal-hierarchical traditions, in Japan, 35 Figueres Ferrer, José “Don Pepe”: Arévalo alliance with, 110; army dissolution by, 111–112; Caribbean Legion and, 108–111; last presidency from 1970–1974, 120–121; liberal anticommunism, Berle and, 112–122; PLN and, 108; social democracy of, 108; social-economic program of, 108; Truman and, 109; U.S. support for, 115 Five-Year Plan (1951–1956), Nehru first, 133–134, 136 Five-Year Plan (1956–1961), Nehru second, 139 Five-Year Plan (1961–1966), Nehru third, 151 Flanders, Allan, 63–64, 257n47 Fletcher, Bill, 222, 223, 224 Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), UN, 249n34 food deficit, in India, 149–150 Ford Foundation, India Community Development plan and, 135 foreign policy, U.S., 3–4, 9, 36; Biden liberal, 233–234; Carter progressive-liberal stance on, 172–174; Clinton and Obama missionary zeal in, 227; domestic politics compared to, 6; Hunt on Cold War ideology in, 6–7; labor liberalism and, 15; legislative action on, 205–206; military actions, 229 Framework for Peace, of Camp David Accords, 177 free collective bargaining system, 38

Free South Africa Movement (FSAM), 212–213, 225 free trade: anti-, 19, 29–42; Bretton Woods agreement for, 27; GATT ideals of, 35; labor-liberalism and principle of, 11, 26–33; labor roller coaster with, 19–21; NAFTA and TPP opposition to international, 18; nonliberal capitalist economies post-WWII, 34; post-WWII international policy of, 21; Smith on, 17; Stein on U.S. foreign policy of, 36; unionism, 26, 35, 47; between West and Global South, 43–44 Free Trade Budget, of George, 20 Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC), of AFL, 26, 51–52 FSAM. See Free South Africa Movement FTUC. See Free Trade Union Committee Fulbright, William, 32 full autonomy meaning, at Camp David Accords, 178–180 Future of Socialism, The (Crosland), 70 Gaddafi, Muammar, 230 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 3, 5, 32, 119, 159, 160, 276n52; as India ambassador, 127, 143; India Development Decade and, 141–152; Nehru relationship with, 145; Third World states disenchantment, 156–157 Gandhi, Indira, 153; village democracy vision, 137 GATT. See General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade GEAR. See Growth, Employment and Redistribution General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (1947), 25; free trade ideals of, 35; Germany nontariff discriminations, 35; U.S. tariff reductions and, 35; WTO succession from, 40 Geneva conference, Carter plans for, 175–176 George, Lloyd, 20

INDEX301

German Trade Union Centre, communism and, 259n69 German worker rights (1945–1950), 74–75; AFL and CIO impact on, 51–52; AngloAmerican labor allies and, 48; British TUC, 58–59, 60, 71; concentration camps horror and, 64; decartelization legislation, 46; Factory Workers’ Union, 62; Gottfurcht and trade unions reorganization, 50; Great Britain influence on, 58–60, 71; Hillman on factory-based worker organization, 65; ICFTU presence in German politics, 72–73; OMGUS and, 48, 51–57, 59, 67, 68; parity principle in, 48, 71, 72, 253n3; social rebuilding projects, 46; SPD and trade union reformers, 53–54; trade union powerful force concerns, 61–64; trade unions and worker participation, 46, 52–53, 56–58, 254n7; TUC-DGB alliance, 68–69; Weimar model, 53–54; workplace codetermination, 47, 48, 58, 68, 71, 72; works councils and, 52–53, 65–67, 69–70, 258n56 Germany, 9; Biddle on monopolistic firms of, 22; corporatist traditions in, 35; GATT and nontariff discriminations, 35; Great Depression source of Hitler, 21; Ruhr Valley trade union movement in, 47; trade unionism and, 35. See also Social Democratic Party; West Germany Germany, postwar, 2, 11, 73; Arnold deconcentration policy, 22; Bizone area in, 67, 71; IR system rebuilding in, 15, 47, 58; labor influence in, 35–36; OMGUS administration of, 48, 51–57, 59, 67, 68; OSS labor view of, 50; rebuilding process in, 8; works councils in, 52–53, 65–67, 69–70, 258n56 Ghana: Eisenhower and Volta River Hydroelectric Dam, 194; independence campaign, 194; Israel economic ties with, 88; Kennedy on, 196; Nkrumah as prime

minister of, 193; nonviolence resistance campaign, 195; Western trade union attention to, 194 Gilbert, Jess, 134–135 globalization, 2, 4, 10, 44; India developmental liberalism and, 159–162; liberals on human rights and, 230–231; trade unions decline and, 18. See also liberal international order Global South: free trade between West and, 43–44; ICTILR absence of, 39 Godesberg Program, of SPD, 70 Goldberg, Arthur, 48, 49, 50, 86, 93 Gompers, Samuel, 20 Good Neighbor policy, of F. Roosevelt, 2, 9, 97, 101 Gopal, Sarvepalli, 153–154, 277n80 Gottfurcht, Hans, 72, 260n86; Goldberg relationship with, 50; on TUC, 50, 69; on works councils communist infiltration, 69–70 Great Britain: Children’s Hospitality Scheme, 59, 60; German worker rights and TUC of, 58–59, 60, 71; Labour government and German worker rights, 58–60, 71 Great Compression, of Margo, 18 Great Depression, 20; Hitler Germany and Hirohito Japan as source of, 21; liberal internationalism lessons from, 21–26; nationalism during, 21; RTAA and, 25; world trade decline, 23 Green, William, 51, 72, 84 Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) plan, of Mandela, 222 Guatemala: Arbenz of, 102, 114, 123, 272n92; Arévalo as president of, 98, 109–110, 125; Armas seizure of power, 123–124; Berle on, 102; coup of 1954, 114, 123–124 guerilla tactics, of PLO, 76, 165 Halberstam, David, 159 Haya de la Torre, Victor, 98, 111, 118

302IND E X

Hill, Sylvia, 204, 220, 223; background of, 202–203; on Mandela, 221; on TA, 224, 288n51 Hillman, Sidney, 51, 64; on factory-based worker organization, 65; Israel support by, 84; WFTU and, 65 Hirohito (emperor), 21 Histadrut (Zionist Labor Federation), in Israel, 75, 167; Afro-Asian Institute support by, 88–90; Celler on, 83–84; Chermesh on, 82; Israeli economy control, 263n29; labor organization by, 37; Meany support of, 89; Meir ties to, 84–85; U.S. labor unions ties with, 84 Hitler, Adolf, 21 Holloway, Anne Forrester, 200, 207 Hull, Cordell, 25 humanitarian interventions, 1, 227–229, 236; Biden liberal foreign policy and, 233–234; Democratic liberals and, 231–232; globalization liberal thinkers and, 230–231; liberal democratic internationalism and, 234–235 human rights: Carter on, 3, 173–174, 175; globalization liberal thinkers and, 230–231; Israeli-Palestine state solution promotion of, 188 Human Rights Day and Day of Protest (1957), 195 Humphrey, Hubert, 84, 130, 266n16; Galbraith and, 143, 144; on Israel, 81, 82 Hunt, Michael, 6–7 Hussein, Saddam, 181 hypernationalism, of Trump, 2 ICFTU. See International Confederation of Free Trade Unions ICTILR. See International Conference on Trends in Industrial and Labor Relations ILA. See India League of America IMF. See International Monetary Fund

India, 278n90; African Americans activism and, 156; Celler support of, 78, 87; liberal ambassadors to, 3; liberal anticommunism under Nehru in, 11–12; Sino-Indian War, 147 India, U.S. missions to (1952–1975), 127; Bhagwati and, 157–158; food deficit and, 149–150; Galbraith and Development Decade, 141–152; globalization and developmental liberalism and, 159–162; interventionism in, 153; Johnson economic reforms impatience, 151–152; Kennedy communism concern, 146–148; modernization plan in, 128, 138–139; Moynihan and U.S.-India friendship fraying, 153–158, 278n87; New Dealers in, 128–133; PL-480 agreement, 143, 150, 152, 155; pluralistic democracy goal, 128; Rostow and, 142, 142–143; Vietnam War opinion, 152, 159; C. and H. Wofford, 126, 128, 273n1. See also Community Development plan, of Bowles and Nehru India League of America (ILA), 130 Indo-Pakistani War (1965), 147 Indo-Pakistani War (1971), 153 Indo-Soviet Friendship Treaty (1971), 153 industrial relations (IR) system: Bretton Woods international, 38–39; Germany rebuilding of, 15, 47, 58; Kahn-Freund and Dunlop on, 247n19; Leggett on Germany and, 61–62; in post-WWII Japan, 35–36; in post-WWII West Germany, 47–48, 73, 256n23 Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers (ORIT), Romualdi as director of, 107, 113 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), 17, 27; AFL-CIO support of, 29; American veto of, 28; Bretton Woods formation of, 25; on national budgetary deficits, 28

IND E X 3 03

International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) (1949), 42, 268n34; AFL-CIO withdrawal from, 260n87; German politics presence of, 72–73; Israel and, 91; Oldenbroek of, 73; Sender as UN liaison with, 26 International Conference on Trends in Industrial and Labor Relations (ICTILR), in Israel: Global South absence from, 39; on labor organization, 39; OPEC oil embargo and, 39; Wlotzke on worker self-government, 38–39 International Conference on Trends in Industrial and Labor Relations (ICTILR), in Montreal, 42 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 17, 32, 249n33; AFL-CIO support of, 29; Bretton Woods formation of, 25, 27; on national budgetary deficits, 28 International Trade Organization (ITO), 31, 44–45 International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), 26, 49, 255n12 interventionism, U.S., 3, 120, 123–124, 170, 230; in Costa Rica, 114, 117; in India, 153; liberal critique of, 161; in Southeast Asia, 12, 93, 279n103. See also military interventionism intifada, Palestine (1987), 181 IR. See industrial relations Iran hostage crisis (1979), 180, 181 Iraq War, second, 229 Islamic radicalism, 1, 183–184 Israel, 9; African American community support of, 85, 93–94, 165; ArabPalestinians refugee issue, 76; BDS movement, 189, 190; Dubinsky and Hillman support of, 84; extraeconomic, nonmarket economy, 36–37; Ghana economic ties with, 88; Humphrey on, 81, 82; ICFTU and, 91; ICTILR conference in, 38–39; Jewish national economy, 37; left-liberals response to, 235; Mapai Labor

Party in, 37, 75, 82–83, 167; Palestine independent state opposition, 187–188; E. Roosevelt support of, 78–79; as settler colony, 261n2; Truman recognition of Hebrew state of, 76; UN Hebrew state recognition, 76; U.S. military assistance in 1967, 93, 260n1; U.S. support of new, 15; WFTU membership of, 91 Israel Bonds Campaign, 84–86, 263n40 Israeli-Arab Wars, labor Zionism and, 3, 91–94 Israeli-Palestine state solution (1973–2000), 164; AAUG anti-Israel stance, 166; AFL-CIO on, 167; Arab-Israeli tensions, 3, 91–94; arms package dissolution, 177, 282n44; Black-Jewish liberal alliance and, 180–181; Camp David casualties, 181–184; Carter and, 171–181; Celler on, 167–168; human rights promotion for, 188; Jewish liberal critics, 170–171; Land of Israel movement, 167; mutual engagement model for, 185–187; reflections on, 184–190; Robin on, 188–189; Shumsky on, 186; UN General Assembly on, 169–171; U.S. liberals and, 169, 190. See also West Bank ITF. See International Transport Workers Federation ITO. See International Trade Organization Japan: communist-infused unions in, 35–36; feudal-hierarchical traditions in, 35; Great Depression source of Hirohito, 21; MacArthur SCAP headquarters and, 35–36, 46–47; Nixon voluntary restraint agreements on, 42; post-WWII IR, 35–36; rebuilding process in, 8 Jewish Mandate in Palestine, Mapai Labor Party and, 82–83 Jewish Nation-State Law (2018), 236 Jews: Israel national economy and, 37; liberal critics of Israeli-Palestine state solution, 170–171; Palestinians sovereignty and, 12, 165

3 0 4IND EX

Johnson, Lyndon, 32, 160; Dominican Republic armed intervention, 119–120; India economic reforms impatience, 151–152; on South Africa, 197 Judt, Tony, 73 Kahn-Freund, Otto: on collective laissezfaire, 247n19; on IR system, 247n19 Kaiser, Philip, 29 Kaplan, Eliezer, 84–86, 263n40 Karl, Albin, 62, 257n46 Kassolow, Everett M., 39 Keenan, Joe, 65–66, 258n57 Kenen, I. L. “Sy,” 86–87, 260n1, 261n8 Kennedy, John F.: Alliance for Progress of, 2, 89, 101, 119, 121, 228; on Ghana, 196; India 1958 aid package, 141; India communism concern, 146–148; India Community Development plan commitment, 142–143; South Africa arms embargo and, 197 Keynes, John Maynard, 26–27 Khartoum Declaration (September 1967), 168 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 96, 226, 273n1; on Arab-Israeli tensions, 92; on Bay of Pigs invasion, 120; at Ghana independence inauguration, 194; Human Rights Day and Day of Protest, 195; South Africa apartheid assistance, 194–197; on U.S. and South Africa civil rights movement similarities, 195 Kirchwey, Freda, 49, 80; on Guatemala coup of 1954, 123–124; as Israel state supporter, 78 Klerk, F. W. de, 192, 219–220 labor, 42; anti–free trade and, 19; free trade roller coaster with, 19–21; ICTILR on organization of, 39; Kassolow on organization of, 39; liberal investment and trade policies denouncement, 18; movements of SPD, 65, 68; tariffs reduction support, 20

Labor Code, of Costa Rica, 112–113, 267n24 labor-liberalism: free trade principle and, 11, 26–33; labor Zionism support, 85; post-Nazi Germany and, 11; post-WWII order and, 15; USMCA support by, 19 Labor Relations Adjustment Law (1947), 47 Labor Standards Law (1947), 35 Labor Union Law (1945), 47 labor Zionism (1948–1973), 75, 166; Abzug and, 169; Afro-Asian Institute for Cooperative and Labour Studies, 88–90; Israel Bonds Campaign, 84–86, 263n40; Israeli-Arab Wars and, 3, 91–94; miracle of Israel, 76–82; Suez Crisis and Six-Day War impact on, 90; union label of, 82–90; U.S. labor-liberalism support of, 85. See also Histadrut LaFollette Seamen’s Act (1915), 20, 247n9 Land of Israel movement, 167 Latin America, 102; Berle and, 100; Carter aid cuts to dictatorships in, 173; communism in, 99; democratic political developments in, 98–99; Romualdi antifascist diaspora by, 107; F. Roosevelt, Good Neighbor policy in, 2, 9, 97, 101 League Against Communist Domination, in Costa Rica, 111 League of Nations, Wilson and, 20–21 left-liberals: for challenging dictatorships, 13; in Democratic Party, 10; ideology importance, 13; Israel response from, 235 Leggett, Frederick, 61–62 legislative action, on U.S. foreign policy, 205–206. See also specific legislative acts Lehman, Herbert H., 116, 125, 270n63 liberal anticommunism, 95–96; Bowles message of, 131, 132, 275n33; Costa Rica cause of, 112–122; Figueres, Berle and, 112–122; India under Nehru, 11–12; Núñez policies of, 106–107; of TUC, 69 liberal democratic internationalism: Biden and, 233–234; China response from,

IND E X 3 0 5

234–235; of Wilson and F. Roosevelt, 8, 248n20 liberal international order, 229; Great Depression and WWII lessons for, 21–26; human rights and, 230–231; Nye on presidential foreign policy, 9; of U.S. without military intervention, 234. See also Bretton Woods liberal internationalism liberal movements, Striffler on limitations of, 224–225 liberal nationalism, 13, 163–164 liberal/social-democratic vision, of OMGUS, 52, 68 Lindblom, Charles, 150–151 Lovestone, Jay, 49, 66, 70, 91 Lugar, Richard, 290n70; AGOA and, 222–223; CAAA and, 216–218 MacArthur, Douglas (general), 35–36, 46–47 Mandela, Nelson, 3; GEAR of, 222; RDP of, 222; as South Africa president, 192, 219–221 Manley, Norman, 194 Mapai Labor Party, in Israel, 37, 75; Ben-Gurion and, 83; Jewish Mandate in Palestine and, 82–83; on Palestinian conditions improvement, 167 Margo, Robert A., 18 marketing controls, 34 Marshall, George, 29 Marshall Plan, 2, 21, 131; AFL and CIO support of, 18, 29, 32–33; Europe aid packages of, 18; Kaiser support of, 29; Wallace as critic of, 27–28 Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding (Moynihan), 156 McDougall, Frank Lidgett, 249n34 McSherry, Frank J., 65, 66; concentration camps horror and, 64; at OMGUS, 54–55; Taft support by, 258n59; works councils support by, 258n56

MDO. See Democratic Opposition Movement Means, Gardiner, 100 Meany, George, 72, 84, 123; Afro-Asian Institute support by, 89; on Histadrut, 89 Meir, Golda, 83, 83, 167; Histadrut ties of, 84–85; Israel Bonds Campaign of, 84–86, 263n40 Menuhin, Yehudi, 77, 139–140, 275n36 military interventionism, 2; Costa Rica conspiracy and, 115; to Israel in 1967, 93, 260n1; liberal international order of U.S. without, 234; U.S. foreign policy and, 229; of U.S. in Indo-Pakistani War, 153; Vietnam War and hesitancy for, 12 Minter, William, 197 Modern Corporation and Private Property, The (Berle and Means), 100 modernization plan, in India, 128, 138–139 Mondale, Walter, 174, 176–177 Montan Mitbestimmung, 71, 72 Mora, Manuel, 267n24; Costa Rica departure by, 111; PVP support of Calderón, 105 Morgenthau, Henry, Jr., 26, 50–51, 56, 78 Morse, David, 64, 66; on Bretton Woods politics challenge, 33; on Europe economic development, 31; at OMGUS, 54–55 Moyn, Samuel, 10 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 3, 174; on community action, 156; India ambassador resignation, 156; U.S.-India friendship fraying and, 153–158, 278n87 Murray, Philip, 84, 130 mutual engagement model, for IsraeliPalestine state solution, 185–187 NAFTA. See North American Free Trade Agreement Nasser, Gamel Abdul, 91, 92 national budgetary deficits, IMF and World Bank on, 28

3 0 6 IND E X

National Committee for India’s Freedom, 131 nationalism: during Great Depression, 21; liberal, 13, 163–164; Trump and, 44 National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) (1935), 70 national populism, of Trump, 19 Nature of Mass Poverty, The (Galbraith), 156 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 3, 126, 138; Bowles meeting with, 127, 132–133; Five-Year Plan (1951–1956), 133–134, 136; Galbraith relationship with, 145; Gopal biography of, 153–154, 277n80; India liberal anti-communism under, 11–12; 1964 death of, 153; second Five-Year Plan (1956–1961) of, 139; third Five-Year Plan (1961–1966), 151. See also Community Development plan neoisolationism, Trump populism, hypernationalism, and, 2 neoliberalism, 246n4, 249n34; Bretton Woods anti-free trade and, 29–42, 43; Prasad on policies of, 40; Sen criticism of, 161 New Dealers, 9, 10, 97; on free trade unionism, 47; in India, 128–133; laborliberals and, 15; Sender and, 23–25, 24 new liberalism. See social democracy New World Order, G. H. W. Bush and, 228 Nicaragua: Costa Rica 1955 invasion by, 116–117; Eisenhower dictator support, 118 9/11, 228 Nixon, Richard, 140, 168; Costa Rica and, 117; at Ghana independence inauguration, 194; Japan voluntary restrain agreements, 42; Moynihan India ambassador appointment, 154; on South Africa, 197 Nkrumah, Kwame, 88, 193, 208–209, 286n12 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): international free trade opposition by, 18; labor and environmental agreements of 1994, 44

Núñez, Benjamin (priest): as CCTRN head, 105, 106–107, 111; as labor minister, 112; pro-American, anticommunist policies, 106–107 Nye, Joseph S., Jr., 9 Obama, Barack, 2, 189, 231; missionary zeal in foreign policy, 227; on second Iraq War, 229; TPP agreement and, 44 Office of European Labour Research, Sender of, 50 Office of Military Government, U.S. (OMGUS), 48, 67; Clay direction of, 52, 56–57, 59; liberal/social-democratic vision of, 52, 68; Morse and McSherry at, 54–55; socialists influence, 55–56 Office of Price Administration (OPA), Bowles as director of, 129 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 48–49; labor view of postwar Germany, 50; social-democratic vision of, 51 Offner, Amy C., 232–233 Oldenbroek, J. H., 26, 72, 73 OMGUS. See Office of Military Government, U.S. OPA. See Office of Price Administration OPEC oil embargo, 39, 169 Orientalism, Said on, 165–166 ORIT. See Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers Oslo Accord (1993), 181–184 OSS. See Office of Strategic Services PAC. See Pan-African Congress Palestine: intifada in 1987, 181; Jews sovereignty and, 12, 165; PLO domination of, 175; U.S. support of independent, 166, 172 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO): guerilla tactics of, 76, 165; Palestine domination by, 175; U.S. and international support for, 168

IND EX 3 07

Pan-African Congress (PAC): Cobb organization of Sixth, 200; Nkrumah at, 193 parity principle, in Germany, 48, 71, 72, 253n3 Party of National Liberation (PLN), Figueres and, 108 Persian Gulf War, 228 Peru: Bustamente in, 98; Haya de la Torre in, 98, 111, 118 Picado, Teodoro, 110; as Calderón successor, 106; Costa Rica departure by, 111 PL-480. See Agricultural Trade and Food Assistance Act Platt Amendment, 97 PLN. See Party of National Liberation PLO. See Palestine Liberation Organization Point Four Program, of Truman, 2, 16, 18, 131, 155 Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement, 199, 287n22 Popular Vanguard Party (PVP), 105, 107, 112, 267n24 populism: Calderón programs of, 104, 105; of Trump, 2, 44 Post-Boom (1973–2016) years, 19 post–World War II (WWII), 2; free trade international policy, 21; GATT and, 25; Germany labor-liberalism and, 11; Japan IR, 35–36; Judt on Europe, 73; labor liberalism and, 15; Margo on Great Compression, 18; nonliberal capitalist economies, 34; U.S. policy thinking, 50–51 Prasad, Monica, 40 “Program to Prevent Germany from Starting a World War III” (Morgenthau), 50–51 Progressive Front for the Liberation of Palestine, global targets of, 168 protectionism, Bretton Woods and, 36, 43 PVP. See Popular Vanguard Party

Rabin, Yitzhak, 168, 176; assassination of, 182; at Oslo Accord, 181–182 Randolph, A. Philip, 130, 194 Rauchway, Eric, 32–33 RDP. See Reconstruction and Development Programme Reagan, Ronald, 181; CAAA and, 192; constructive engagement policy, 210, 214; South Africa veto by, 217–218 recession: 1974 world, 42; of 1981 and 1982, 41 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) (1934), 25; AFL opposition to, 248n23; CIO renewal support, 28; Truman and 1951 renewal of, 31 Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), of Mandela, 222 Rerum Novarum (CCTRN) labor federation, 112–114; Núñez as head of, 105, 106–107, 111 Reuther, Walter, 89, 130 Rhodesia-Zimbabwe, multiracial democratic elections in, 206 right-wing dictatorships, in Central America, 2, 13 Robin, Ron, 188–189 Robinson, Randall: background of, 207; celebrities and sports heroes use by, 214–215; civil disobedience tactic of, 212–214; exclusion of, 221; as TA director, 192, 206–214, 222–223; Tutu and, 205 Rockefeller, Nelson, 102 Romualdi, Serafino, 124, 270n53; AFL relationship with, 106–107; as ORIT director, 107, 113 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 143; on Arab-Palestinian refugee issue, 79–80; as Israel state supporter, 78–79 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano: Atlantic Alliance vision, 9; Bowles and, 129; Calderón relationship with, 105; Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America, 2, 9, 97, 101; liberal democratic internationalism of, 8, 248n20

3 0 8IND E X

Rostow, Walt, 142, 142–143 RTAA. See Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act Ruhr Valley trade union movement, in Germany, 47 Rusk, Dean, 93, 101 Rutz, Henry, 55, 66 Sadat, Anwar, 175–176; Camp David Accord peace treaty and, 177–178; at Camp David Accords, 179 Said, Edward, 165–166 SALT II missile agreement, 173 Sanabria, Victor Manuel, 105, 112 Sanders, Bernie, 293n19 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 92 SASP. See Southern Africa Support Project SCAP headquarters, of MacArthur: Japan and, 35–36, 46–47; Labor Relations Adjustment Law, 47; Labor Union Law and, 47 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 102, 119, 143 SDS. See Students for a Democratic Society Sen, Amartya, 161–162 Sender, Toni, 50, 73, 255n12; as ICFTU liaison to UN, 26; New Dealers and, 23–25, 24 settler colony, Israel as, 261n2 Sharpeville Massacre (1960), 195 Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), marketing controls, 34 shipping, world economy influenced by, 40 Shultz, George, 84, 155 Shultz-Crocker policy, of constructive engagement, 216, 218–219 Shumsky, Dmitry, 186 Singh, J. J., 130, 161 Sino-Indian War (1962), 147 Six-Day War (1967), 165, 175; labor Zionism impacted by, 90; political cost of, 166 Smith, Adam, 17 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (1930), Woll support of, 20

SNCC. See Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee social democracy: Costa Rica path of, 108–112; in Europe, 17; of Figueres, 108; OSS vision of, 51 Social Democratic Party (SPD), in Germany: Godesberg Program of, 70; Gottfurcht and, 50; on labor central command, 57; labor movements dominance by, 65, 68; trade union reformers and, 53–54; trade unions under, 48, 58 social-economic development, 13; Figueres program of, 108; OMGUS on German, 52, 68 Social Guarantees program, of Calderón, 104, 105 socialists: influence in OMGUS, 55–56; regimes collapse, 5 social-political development, European model of, 58 Somoza, Anastasio, 104, 269n45 South Africa: Johnson on, 197; Minter on U.S. bifurcated policy in, 197; Nixon on, 197; reform agenda in, 210–211; SWAPO liberation movement in, 207, 219 South Africa apartheid (1970–2000), 164; ACOA on, 195, 198, 204–205; African independence rallying, 193–194; AFSC Southern Africa program, 204; ANC and, 191, 195, 203, 219–220, 223, 225–226, 291n98; antiapartheid movement, 198–204; Black political activists interest in, 199–200, 206–207; boycott, divestment and sanctions in, 3, 200–201, 206, 214, 215, 289n67; CBC and, 192, 199, 204–215, 287n22; CBTU and, 213–214, 223; collapse of, 12; constructive engagement policy and, 192, 202, 210, 214, 216, 218–219; Counts and, 202, 202, 212, 220, 221; Diggs assistance in, 194–197; Hill and, 202, 203–204, 220–221,

IND EX 3 0 9

223–224, 288n51; Kennedy and, 196–197; political and economic pressures, 191–192; SASP and, 201–202, 202, 207; Sharpeville Massacre and, 195; SNCC and SDS on, 198, 199–200; Soweto massacre impact on, 200–201; Sullivan Principles and, 216–217; TA and, 192, 204–215; Tutu and, 204, 205, 211; U.S. antiapartheid politics, 192; U.S. Congress and, 215–226; U.S. foreign policy legislative action, 205–206; Washington Office on Africa and, 204 South Africa Defense Fund, 195 Southeast Asia: U.S. interventionism in, 12, 93, 279n103. See also Vietnam War Southern Africa Support Project (SASP), 201–202, 202; Communist Party-linked liberation movements support, 207 Soviet-Arab alliance, 92 Soviet Union, 26; Afghanistan invasion, 181; Bretton Woods removal by, 28; collapse of, 1, 228 Soweto massacre, South Africa apartheid impacted by, 200–201 SPD. See Social Democratic Party spiritual socialism, of Arévalo, 110 stabilization fund, Bretton Woods on, 27, 249n33 Stein, Judith, 36 Stevenson, Adlai, 4, 78, 140, 160, 196–107 Strategic Plan (1998), of Clinton, 228 Striffler, Steve, 224–225 Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC): on South Africa apartheid, 198, 199–200; on Zionism and imperialism, 166 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), on South Africa apartheid, 198, 199–200 Suez Crisis (1956), 81, 91; labor Zionism impacted by, 90 Sullivan Principles, 216–217 SWAPO liberation movement, in South Africa, 207, 219

Taft, Robert, 258n59 tariffs: Bowles on Southern opposition to reduction in, 32; Germany nontariff discriminations and GATT, 35; labor support of reductions in, 20; RTAA on reduction of, 25; Trade Act on reduction of, 43; Trade Expansion Act on reduction of, 25; U.S. and GATT reductions in, 35 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), India Community Development plan and, 134–135 Third World states, 1, 12; Berle on, 266n16; Carter on human rights in, 175; Galbraith disenchantment with, 156–157; Israel and, 166 Tonkin Gulf Resolution (1964), 93 TPP. See Trans-Pacific Partnership of Nations trade, 2; in practice versus principle, 33–38; restrictive bills in 1971 and 1972, 41 Trade Act (1974), on tariff reductions, 43 Trade Expansion Act (1962), 25, 29 Trade Union Congress (TUC): anticommunism of, 69; Bullock and, 62–63; DGB alliance with, 68–69; German worker rights and British, 58–59, 60, 71; Gottfurcht on, 50, 69; works councils communism concerns, 69–70 trade unions, 35; globalization and decline of, 18; Gottfurcht reorganization of German, 50; postwar Germany works councils versus, 65–67; reformers and SPD, 53–54; under SPD, 48, 58; voluntarist restatement of, 72; West Germany density of, 254n7 trade unions, Costa Rica, 105–107, 112–113 trade unions, Germany: German worker participation in, 46, 52–53, 56–58, 254n7; German worker rights concerns, 61–64 trade unions, Israel: Histadrut, 37, 84–85 trade unions, South Africa: Cosatu, 191, 211, 223

310 IND E X

Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Williams), 6 Trans-Africa (TA), 220–221; Akuetteh and, 208–209; Black political endorsement, 206–207; CBC link to, 206; CommunistParty-linked liberation movements support, 207; direct action move of, 212–213; disbanding of, 224; Fletcher as president of, 222, 223, 224; Holloway director of, 207; Robinson as director of, 192, 206–214; Robinson separation from, 222–223 Trans-Africa Forum, 192 Trans-Pacific Partnership of Nations (TPP): international free trade opposition by, 18; Obama and, 44; U.S. abandonment of, 19 Treaty of Rome (1957), 34, 251n53 Truman, Harry, 29, 261n9, 273n3; for Bowles as India ambassador, 129; Figueres and, 109; Israel Hebrew state recognition, 76; Point Four Program of, 2, 16, 18, 131, 155; RTAA 1951 renewal, 31; Wheeler and, 258n58 Truman Doctrine, 131 Trump, Donald, 189–190, 233; hypernationalism of, 2; national populism of, 19; populism of, 2, 44; USMCA support by, 19 TUC. See Trade Union Congress Tutu, Desmond, 204, 211; Robinson with, 205 TVA. See Tennessee Valley Authority UDF. See United Democratic Front UFCO. See United Fruit Company UN. See United Nations union label, of labor Zionism, 82–90 United Democratic Front (UDF), 211, 291n98 United Fruit Company (UFCO), in Costa Rica, 113–115 United Nations (UN), 7, 8; Decade of Development, 196; FAO of, 249n34;

General Assembly on Israeli-Palestine state, 169–171; Israel Hebrew state recognition, 76; Sender as ICFTU liaison to, 26 United States, 11, 12, 40; civil rights movement in, 172, 173, 195, 226; Congress on South Africa apartheid, 215–226; Costa Rica and, 114, 117, 122; Figueres support from, 115; GATT and tariff reductions, 35; Guatemala 1954 financed coup, 123–124; Histadrut ties with labor unions in, 84; India agricultural production push, 139; influence in Dominican Republic, 99; Israeli-Palestine state solution and liberals of, 169, 190; as Israel strategic partner, 92; liberals accomplishments, 3–4; Minter on South Africa bifurcated policy, 197; Palestine independence support by, 166; PLO support from, 168; post-WWII policy thinking, 50–51; South Africa apartheid and, 192, 205–206; support of new Israel, 15; TPP abandonment by, 19; West Germany economic growth focus, 71; world vision of, 1. See also interventionism, U.S.; military interventionism U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), India Community Development plan and, 134–135 USMCA. See U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement U.S.-Mexico border, regional solution to, 236 U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), 19 Vance, Cyrus, 173, 174, 184, 206 Vargas, Getulio, 98, 101 Venezuela, Betancourt in, 98, 102, 106, 114, 118, 120 Vietnam War, 4, 198–199; Bowles and Galbraith opposition to, 159, 160; Carter and, 172–173; Democratic party split from,

IND EX 3 11

9–10; India opinion on, 152, 159; military interventionism hesitancy, 12 Wagner Act. See National Labor Relations Act Wallace, Henry A., 27–28, 249n34 War on Terror, 229 Washington Office on Africa, 204 Weimar model, for German worker rights, 53–54 welfarism political foundations, in Costa Rica, 103–107 West Bank: Begin and, 284n66; Camp David Accords and occupation of, 178; Israel opposition to withdrawal from, 184; security barrier construction, 183 West Germany: American focus on economic growth of, 71; IR system, 47–48, 73, 256n23; trade union density, 254n7 WFTU. See World Federation of Trade Unions Wheeler, George Shaw, 55, 65, 66, 258n58 White, Dexter, 26–27, 56, 248n29 Wilkens, Roy, 83 Williams, William Appleman, 6 Wilson, Woodrow, 8, 20–21, 248n20 Wlotzke, Otfried, 38–39 Wofford, Clare, 126, 128, 273n1 Wofford, Harris, 126, 128, 273n1 Woll, Matthew, 20, 26, 51–52 Wolpert, Stanley, 92–93

workers: Wlotzke on self-government of, 38–39. See also German worker rights works councils, in postwar Germany, 52–53, 65–67, 69–70, 258n56 World Bank. See International Bank for Reconstruction and Development world economy: Byrnes on liberal trading system and, 21; digital revolution and shipping influence on, 40 World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), 26, 65, 91, 268n34 world trade: AFL-CIO support of, 29; Great Depression decline in, 23. See also free trade World Trade Organization (WTO), 18, 40 world vision, of U.S. liberals, 1 World War II (WWII): AFL and CIO cooperation in, 23; liberal internationalism lessons from, 21–26. See also post-World War II WTO. See World Trade Organization WWII. See World War II Yen, Y. C. James, 134 Yom Kippur War (1973), 37, 168 Young, Andrew, 173, 174, 180, 206 Zionism: Abzug defense of, 169–170; SNCC on imperialism and, 166. See also labor Zionism Zionist Labor Federation. See Histadrut