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Blue-Collar Empire tells the shocking story of the AFL-CIO's global anticommunist crusade-and its devastating consequences for workers around the world.Unions have the power not only to secure pay raises and employee benefits but to bring economies to a screeching halt and overthrow governments. Recognizing this, in the late twentieth century, the US government sought to control labor movements abroad as part of the Cold War contest for worldwide supremacy. In this work, Washington found an enthusiastic partner in the AFL-CIO's anticommunist officials, who, in a shocking betrayal, for decades expended their energies to block revolutionary ideologies and militant class consciousness from taking hold in the workers'movements of Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Investigates how the CIA tried to influence scholars and governmentsDuring the early Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency created dozens of funding fronts to support work that aligned with CIA goals, from clandestine operations and research to liberal anticommunist programs. While investigative journalists and congressional inquiries exposed many of these fronts, little is known about their daily internal workings. With a specific focus on the 1950s and 1960s Asia Foundation, Cold War Deceptions provides a rare view into the bureaucratic functioning of a covert operation in which most employees did not know they were working for the CIA. Drawing on the foundation's extensive surviving archival records and thousands of pages of declassified CIA documents, David H. Price examines how the foundation, secretly created and funded by the CIA, tried to shape Asian political, economic, intellectual, and cultural developments during the early years of the Cold War. Uncovering how unwitting scholars were used to support pro-American and anticommunist positions, Price considers how political forces shaped disciplinary knowledge and how these past events connect to the present.

How the CIA used American unions to undermine workers at home and subvert democracy abroadBlue-Collar Empire tells the shocking story of the AFL-CIO's global anticommunist crusade—and its devastating consequences for workers around the world.Unions have the power not only to secure pay raises and employee benefits but to bring economies to a screeching halt and overthrow governments. Recognizing this, in the late twentieth century, the US government sought to control labor movements abroad as part of the Cold War contest for worldwide supremacy. In this work, Washington found an enthusiastic partner in the AFL-CIO's anticommunist officials, who, in a shocking betrayal, for decades expended their energies to block revolutionary ideologies and militant class consciousness from taking hold in the workers'movements of Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

This book examines the United States neoconservative movement, arguing that its support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was rooted in an intelligence theory shaped by the policy struggles of the Cold War. The origins of neoconservative engagement with intelligence theory are traced to a tradition of labour anti-communism that emerged in the early 20th century and subsequently provided the Central Intelligence Agency with key allies in the state-private networks of the Cold War era. Reflecting on the break-up of Cold War liberalism and the challenge to state-private networks in the 1970s, the book maps the neoconservative response that influenced developments in United States intelligence policy, counterintelligence and covert action. With the labour roots of neoconservatism widely acknowledged but rarely systematically pursued, this new approach deploys the neoconservative literature of intelligence as evidence of a tradition rooted in the labour anti-communist self-image as allies rather than agents of the American state. This book will be of great interest to all students of intelligence studies, Cold War history, United States foreign policy and international relations.

The Cold War began almost immediately after the end of World War II and the defeat of the Nazis in Europe. As images of the Nazis'atrocities became part of American culture's common store, the evil of their old enemy, beyond the Nazis as a wartime opponent, became increasingly important. As America tried to describe the danger represented by the spread of Communism, it fell back on descriptions of Nazism to make the threat plain through comparison. At the heart of the tensions of that era lay the inconsistency of using one kind of evil to describe another. The book addresses this tension in regards to McCarthyism, campaigns to educate the public about Communism, attempts to raise support for wars in Asia, and the rhetoric of civil rights. Each of these political arenas is examined through their use of Nazi analogies in popular, political, and literary culture. The Nazi Card is an invaluable look at the way comparisons to Nazis are used in American culture, the history of those comparisons, and the repercussions of establishing a political definition of evil.

Priests of OurDemocracy tells of the teachers and professors whobattled the anti-communist witch hunt of the 1950s. It traces the political fortunesof academic freedom beginning in the late 19th century, both oncampus and in the courts. Combining political and legal history with wrenchingpersonal stories, the book details how the anti-communist excesses of the 1950sinspired the Supreme Court to recognize the vital role of teachers andprofessors in American democracy. The crushing of dissent in the 1950simpoverished political discourse in ways that are still being felt, and FirstAmendment academic freedom, a product of that period, is in peril today. Incompelling terms, this book shows why the issue should matter to everyone.

Moses Finley (1912-1986) was one of the most widely read scholarly historians and journalists of his age, having grown famous with The World of Odysseus; and he exercised a transformative influence on the study of the history of Greek and Roman antiquity. In this centenary volume distinguished ancient historians and Americanists analyse Finley's political and intellectual evolution, and attempt to understand the paradoxes of the young leftist and victim of McCarthyism whose work owes more to Weber than to Marx and of the young Jewish scholar (Moses Finkelstein) who distanced himself from Jewishness.

Between the Great War and Pearl Harbor, conservative labor leaders declared themselves America's'first line of defense'against Communism. In this surprising account, Jennifer Luff shows how the American Federation of Labor fanned popular anticommunism but defended Communists'civil liberties in the aftermath of the 1919 Red Scare. The AFL's'commonsense anticommunism,'she argues, steered a middle course between the American Legion and the ACLU, helping to check campaigns for federal sedition laws. But in the 1930s, frustration with the New Dealorder led labor conservatives to redbait the Roosevelt administration and liberal unionists and abandon their reluctant civil libertarianism for red scare politics. That frustration contributed to the legal architecture of federal anticommunism that culminated with the McCarthyist fervor of the 1950s.Relying on untapped archival sources, Luff reveals how labor conservatives and the emerging civil liberties movement debated the proper role of the state in policing radicals and grappled with the challenges to the existing political order posed by Communist organizers. Surprising conclusions about familiar figures, like J. Edgar Hoover, and unfamiliar episodes, like a German plot to disrupt American munitions manufacture, make Luff's story a fresh retelling of the interwar years.