Jay Lovestone
Early history
Jay Lovestone, 1897-1990, born Jacob Liebstein in Lithuania. He emigrated with his parents in 1907 to New York's Lower East Side. A student activist at the City College of New York, he became a socialist and was a founding member of the Communist Party of America in 1919 which merged with another faction in 1921 to form what became the Communist Party USA.
In 1921, Lovestone became editor of the Communist Party newspaper, The Communist. Upon the death of Charles Ruthenberg in 1927 he became the party's national secretary. The party was divided into three factions, the Ruthernberg-Lovestone faction, the Cannon faction and the Foster faction which differed over a number of issues. The Cannon faction was the smallest and worked with the Foster faction. The Ruthernberg-Lovestone faction represented the vast majority of the party. With the Communist Party of the Soviet Union riven by a succession struggle following Lenin's death, the factions in the US eventually corresponded with factions in the Soviet leadership with Foster's faction being strongly supportive of Stalin and Lovestone's faction sympathetic to Bukharin. As a result of his trip to the Comintern Congress in 1928 where he, and Maurice Spector were accidentally shown Trotsky's thesis criticising the direction of the Comintern, James P. Cannon became a Trotskyist and decided to organise his faction in support of Trotsky's position.
Cannon's support for Trotsky became known before he had fully mobilised his supporters. Lovestone led the purging of Cannon and his supporters for Trotskyism in 1928.
When Bukharin was purged from the Soviet Politburo in 1929, Lovestone suffered the consequences. A visiting delegation of the Comintern asked him to step down as party secretary in favour of rival William Z. Foster. Lovestone refused and departed for the Soviet Union to argue his case. Lovestone argued that he had the support of the vast majority of the Communist Party and should not have to step aside. Stalin responded that he "had a majority because the American Communist Party until now regarded you as the determined supporters of the Communist International. And it was only because the Party regarded you as friends of the Comintern that you had a majority in the ranks of the American Communist Party".
When he returned to the US, Lovestone was forced to pay for his insubordination though obstenively he was expelled from the party not for challenging Stalin but for his support of Bukharin and the Right Opposition and for Lovestone's theory of American Exceptionalism which held that capitalism was more secure in the United States and thus different, more moderate strategies should be persued by socialists than elsewhere in the world, an argument that contradicted Stalin's views and the new Third Period policy of ultra-leftism promoted by the Comintern.
Communist Party (Opposition)
Lovestone and his friends had thought that they commanded the following of the mass of party members but on their attempt to found a new party in 1930 which they optimistically named the Communist Party (Majority Group). When the new group attracted only a few hundred members it changed its name to the Communist Party (Opposition). They were aligned with the International Communist Opposition which had sections in fifteen countries.
The CP(O) later became the Independent Communist Labor League and then, in 1938, the Independent Labor Leage of America before dissolving in 1941. The party published the periodical Workers' Age (originally Revolutionary Age), which was edited by Bertram Wolfe, along with a number of pamphlets.
Anti-communist activities
Despite Lovestone's opposition to Stalin, Soviet archives declassified after the fall of the USSR indicate that Lovestone engaged in spying on behalf of the Soviet Union probably in hopes that he would one day be rehabilitated by Moscow and restored to his former position in the Communist Party USA. By the end of World War II, however, he had become an active anticommunist founding with Irving Brown the Free Trade Union Commission or American Institute for Free Labor Development, an organisation sponsored by the AFL which worked internationally organizing labor unions, in Europe and Latin America, which were not Communist controlled. In connection with that work he cooperated closely with the CIA, feeding information about Communist labor union activities to James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's counterintelligence chief.
Union activities
Lovestone and Wolfe formed a base within Local 22 of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) in New York City which was led by Charles S. Zimmerman, a member of Lovestone's party. Lovestone was tapped by ILGWU and American Federation of Labor leader David Dubinsky to try to destroy the rival Congress of Industrial Organizations and its affiliate the United Auto Workers. He tried to engineer a takeover of the union and removed the Communist Party from its position of influence but he failed.
In 1943, Lovestone beceme the became the director of the International Ladies' and Garment Workers' Union's (ILGWU) International Affairs Department.
In 1944, AFL leader George Meany made Lovestone head of the
Free Trade Union Committee a semi-secret AFL department that became known as the "Cold War division" and was obstensively responsible for promoting the rights of free trade unions around the world. In practice, the FTUC was responsible for intelligence work against left-wing unionists and collaborating with first the OSS and then the CIA to undermine Communist and left wing influence in the international union movement and provide intelligence to the US government.
In 1949, Lovestone became executive secretary of the new International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) which had similar aims to the FTUC. He remained there until 1963 when he became director of the AFL-CIO's International Affairs Department (IAD) which covertly channelled millions of dollars from the CIA to anti-communist activities internationally, particularly in Latin America .
He held that position until 1974 he was expelled from the AFL-CIO upon discovery of his longstanding CIA connections.
Reference materials
Lovestone donated his extensive records to the Hoover Institute. An associate Louise Page Morris has also donated her correspondence. Lovestone's Amazon.com, for a more reasonable price try ---
- Fred Hirsch, An Analysis of Our AFL-CIO Role in Latin America or Under the Covers with the CIA, 1974, 57 pages, look for this on ---
