This early history created significant methods of repression, political and industrial networks, as well as ideology and rhetoric that reverberated through the 20th century. The Cold War in the working class removed critical perspectives on capitalism, reinforced a moderate and conservative labor officialdom, and led to conformity with the state on foreign policy issues.Īnticommunism as a response to workers’ movements developed long before the Bolshevik Revolution and founding of the Soviet Union or the post–World War II onset of the Cold War.

In the hottest moments of the postwar development of domestic anticommunism, unions and their members were vilified and purged from the labor movement, forced to take loyalty oaths, and fired for their association with the CP. While the Communist Party of the USA (CP) was a hierarchical organization straitjacketed by an allegiance to the Soviet Union, the unions it fostered cultivated radical democratic methods, while anticommunism often justified opposition to militancy and obstructed progressive policies. It reinforced conservative positions on union issues even in the period before the Cold War, and forged the alliances that influenced the labor movement’s direction, including the campaign to organize the South, the methods and structures of unions, and US labor’s foreign policy positions. Anticommunism preceded the founding of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, and this early history affected the later experience.

The US working class and the institutional labor movement was shaped by anticommunism.

John L. Lewis by Melvyn Dubofsky