Loved Labor’s Losses: The Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Effects of McCarthyism

Abstract

AbstractThe years immediately following World War II were ones of far‐reaching fear in American society and politics that resulted from chilling relations with the then Soviet Union and the fear of the international and domestic spread of Communism. To deal with the Communist threat, perceived, and actual the American government stepped‐up an earlier anti‐Communist crusade that soon permanently took on the name McCarthyism after its most feared proponent, Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Although few sectors of American society were untouched by McCarthyism in the 1940s and 1950s, American labor was hit especially hard, and one of its chief organizations, the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) chose to purge its most‐left leaning unions, a move that both failed to protect the American labor movement from McCarthyism and cost it its militant edge, all to the long‐term detriment of American working people. Nonetheless, historians traditionally defended the CIOs purge as a necessary and even laudable effort to rid the American labor movement of the menace of Communism. As the long‐term effects of the taming of American labor have become more apparent, however, historians have begun to take a more critical look at the reasons for the purge, as well as seeking more nuanced explanations for the political climate that made the purge possible.