The Korean War solidified the Cold War in official United States foreign policy. It brought sharply increased annual military budgets, an emergency mobilization program, and further chilled debate on foreign policy. The differing responses of the IUE-CIO and the UE to the Administration’s war policy and to changes following the Korean War is the subject of this chapter. How the unions responded to these developments tells us much about the fortunes of organized labor in the United States at the time and since.

In September 1950, when 600 UE delegates gathered in New York for the annual convention, they had the attention of the national commercial press. The shooting war on the Korean peninsula was then barely three months old. By this time, the CIO, now without its “left wing” unions, had already offered the Truman Administration “unqualified endorsement for the prompt steps to end Communist aggression” and called for labor representation in the emergency mobilization program. What, the media wondered, would the UE, largest of the recently expelled “left” unions, say about the Korean situation?

Some of the country’s most strident voices, suggesting that events in Korea signaled a new and intensified stage in the global struggle with Communism, raised the specter of the “left wing” unions in strategic sectors of the economy disrupting the war effort through strikes or sabotage. Those unions, some pointed out, represented workers in the western copper mines, in electrical plants involved in military production, and on the west coast docks. The UE delegates, well aware of the circumstances and the pressures on the union, debated the issue at length, both in the resolutions committee and on the convention floor.

President Fitzgerald’s opening remarks demonstrated this awareness when he pledged “100 percent support for the American forces” in Korea, but he also asserted that “we have the right and solemn duty to discuss and analyze the causes of war.” The president went on to say “if a UE member thinks it was US foreign policy that led us into this mess, it does not necessarily make him a traitor to his country.” While Fitzgerald thus attempted to defuse the media speculation, the union still had to adopt a comprehensive foreign policy position.

This was done only after hours of debate. The resolution finally reported out of committee and eventually adopted by the delegates reflected the varying points of view still existing in the union even after the losses of the previous spring’s Labor Board elections. As delegate Cliff Cameron observed during the floor debate, the resolution was a “compromise” that represented hours of work by the resolutions committee. The resolution made no specific mention of Korea but, instead, called on the government to

1. Keep foreign policy out of the hand of big business…;
2. Use our money and resources to support democratic governments and to rebuild economies which will provide trade and jobs…;
3. Refuse military or financial support for corrupt or totalitarian regimes anywhere;
4. Participate in a meeting of the great powers, including Russia, to work for peace and non-use of atomic weapons;
5. Make the United Nations the instrument of all peoples throughout the world to win better living standards, peace, and security.

The committee had succeeded in crafting a resolution that satisfied virtually all the delegates, but two hours of floor debate still transpired before they voted approval. George Bobich of local 610 in Western Pennsylvania’s Turtle Creek Valley reflected a widely held sentiment when he argued that the nation’s foreign policy was an extension of domestic policies which the union opposed. He pointed out that the delegates had “sat here all week criticizing the domestic policy of the leaders of our government and the dirty rotten deal” being perpetrated on the American people, and he continued, “the foreign policy of these leaders is no different from the domestic policy…. They can’t be different, it is one program….” Similarly, Francis Bradley, business agent of local 107 favored the resolution because “the bosses who oppress people at home are the same as those who oppress people abroad. The people who wanted to put a dictator in the White House are the ones who have made US foreign policy today.”

The UE convention, therefore, adopted a position which may be summarized as “support the troops, but work to end the war, bring them home and work for a comprehensive plan for world peace.” Here, the union in fact held to the positions it had taken over the previous three years. By declining to endorse explicitly the Administration’s Korea policy, the UE placed itself outside the safe boundaries of what has been called the “in house” debate in foreign policy, not an easy place to be in the early 1950’s.

Here we should pause and consider the significance of the role the UE played by adhering to its foreign policy positions. In the chilling atmosphere of the deepening Cold War, any discussion of foreign policy was restricted to what has been called the “in house” debate. Policy makers might, for example, discuss “how the American empire should be administered, but not whether there should be an American Empire.” They might disagree about when to use military force and when to use other forms of influence abroad, but not over the desirability of advancing the interests of the empire. The author who used this term did so in referring to the 1960’s and the Vietnam War, but the concept can readily apply to the period of the 1950’s as well. Robert Tucker (reluctantly) credits the “radical left” of the Vietnam period with expanding the debate by questioning the basis of the policy—the assumption that America had a right to empire in the first place.