ABSTRACT
When the Free Trade Union Committee of the American Federation of Labor (AFL-FTUC) introduced their anti-communist cause to Europe, they quickly discovered that their earliest and most trusted partners resided in the north. This article explores how the Nordic region formed a cohesive and influential network during these initial stages of American labor’s Cold War abroad. By highlighting the Nordic labor leaders, ‘the lumber merchants’ in the parlance of the AFL-FTUC, as committed ideological partners of the Americans, the article contends that they did not simply bow to U.S. hegemony, but challenged, mediated, and strengthened the Americans’ strategy. The article thereby contributes to positioning the Nordic labor movements as critical actors within international labor diplomacy during the early Cold War.
KEYWORDS:
Introduction
Irving Brown, representative of the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC), entered Europe in 1945 to initiate its campaign against the influence of Soviet communism. Brown traveled on behalf of a poorly funded organization that lacked committed continental partners, a base of operations, and a cohesive strategy. Brown’s first ports of call were the Scandinavian capitals of Oslo, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. The choice was strategic. Brown intended to nurture connections born out of the war to key social democrats. In one of his first reports home, Brown concluded that it was in Scandinavia that the AFL’s ‘best friends in Europe’ could be found. In the coming years, as Brown’s network grew, finances improved, and international tensions rose, Scandinavian labor leaders proved to be invaluable partners for the AFL.
The U.S.-Scandinavian labor relationship was never limited to a simple and singular choice – how much to accede to American hegemony. Rather, Scandinavian labor officials worked as trusted connectors, advisors, and facilitators for a vast range of activities and developments in the Nordic region – consisting of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, Iceland and Finland – and beyond. In these capacities, Scandinavian actors helped foster a transatlantic labor community, as well as create channels for both overt and covert economic aid and intelligence sharing. An exploration of the Nordic dimension of the AFL’s international network therefore serves to deepen the understanding of the early development of American labor’s Cold War abroad. That is the ambition of this article, which centers upon the question: How did the AFL-FTUC’s regional Nordic network develop and evolve, and how did Nordic labor leaders engage with the Americans’ strategic agenda and operations?
Following the opening of the archives of FTUC officials Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown in the late 1990s, historians, led by Anthony Carew, began to explore the inner life of the AFL’s shadowy Cold War apparatus. Understandably, special emphasis was placed on documenting the organization’s relations to the CIA, a decades‑long subject of controversy after allegations to that effect arose in the late 1960s (Carew, Citation1998; Hughes, Citation2011). Subsequent research unraveled various threads of Lovestone and Brown’s global operations (Carew, Citation2018; Waters & Goethem, Citation2013). Yet, within studies of the complex history of the AFL’s international activities – in which operations in France, Italy, and West Germany understandably figure prominently – the importance of Nordic labor actors has largely been overlooked, misunderstood, or limited to bilateral relations (Radosh, Citation1969, chap. 8; Schuhrke, Citation2024, chap. 1). Among the Nordic countries, the connections between American labor and their counterparts in Denmark and Finland, respectively, have drawn more attention from historians, while similar connections to Sweden and Norway remain largely unexamined (Fields, Citation2020; Knudsen, Citation2012; Majander, Citation2007).Footnote1 Finnish historian Mikko Majander has gone furthest in approaching the Nordic region as an integral area of Cold War labor operations, highlighting how Scandinavian labor leaders were central facilitators for intricate arrangements that secured secret American financial support to hard-pressed Finnish social democrats in the early 1950s (Majander, Citation2009).
This article broadens this scope and explores such connections in greater depth based on extensive archival research. We approach the Nordic region as a network dimension, that is, a geographically based cluster in the broader cobweb of AFL-FTUC connections and operations. We trace the development of this dimension from 1944 to 1957, marking the most internationally influential period of the AFL-FTUC, as well as the period when its connections to the Nordic countries were most intimate. As Nordic labor leaders were among the earliest and most trusted European partners of the AFL, an analysis of the Nordic dimension gives insight into why and how the formative and rapidly expanding FTUC network emerged and evolved into its eventual form. To understand the impact of the AFL-FTUC interaction with Nordic labor, it is important to begin by analyzing the original point of departure, when the first crucial connections were forged. The analysis therefore begins in 1944, the moment the AFL, disregarding the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, embarked on its Cold War crusade.
Establishing connections, 1944–46
A lone Nordic guest was present to see the founding of the Free Trade Union Committee at the AFL’s convention in New Orleans, in November 1944. The Norwegian labor leader Haakon Lie had spent much of the war in exile after his escape from German-occupied Norway in September 1941. Since late 1942, he had traveled extensively in the United States to gather funds for the Norwegian labor movement’s resistance activities as well as its humanitarian aid. It had been a highly successful venture, especially due to the strong support Lie received from the American labor movement. While there had only been limited U.S.-Scandinavian labor contacts before the Second World War, Lie became an important driver for a deeper and stronger transatlantic labor relationship during his years of exile. He was, however, not the only Nordic labor official to visit the U.S. during the war, and it is worth also mentioning the visits of the long‑serving leader of the Norwegian Federation of Labor (LO), Konrad Nordahl, and renowned Swedish social democratic economist Gunnar Myrdal (Jackson, Citation1990). Yet no other Nordic labor leader established anything resembling Haakon Lie’s personal network and level of influence on the American labor scene. During the war, he established remarkably intimate relations with leading figures in both warring labor federations – the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the AFL. Lie’s proficiency as a speaker and his good connections with national labor leaders paid off in securing monetary support. In fact, Norway came to hold the position of the second largest recipient after France for the U.S. labor war relief program to occupied countries in Europe, reaching approximately $625,000 during the Second World War (Lie, Citation1982, p. 193). Through years of fundraising and network building, Lie became a household name in two milieus from which the AFL-FTUC would emerge: the Jewish Labor Committee and the Labor League for Human Rights (Van Goethem, Citation2013, p. 14).
At the convention in New Orleans, the AFL stated a goal of raising one million dollars from its members for its Free Trade Union Fund. Haakon Lie had taken part in the preparatory conference for the fundraising campaign, and at the convention presented a formal letter to AFL internationalist Matthew Woll (AFL Convention [AFL], Citation1944; Labor League for Human Rights, Citation1944). In it, Lie laid out the needs for reconstruction of the Norwegian labor press, which he estimated at no less than $96,700, while stressing the wider implications of such support:
I wish to stress the significance of eventual help to the reconstruction of our trade-unions being given direct from the American labor movement. Labor in Norway, will after the war, make the closest possible cooperation with the U.S., one of the main planks in its foreign policy. The closer contact we can achieve, the easier it will be to conduct such a policy. (Lie, Citation1944c)
As Haakon Lie presented it, a strong Norwegian labor movement would be an engine for intimate relations between Norway and the U.S. That was a daring claim on behalf of a movement that had for most of the interwar period been dominated by radical socialism, pro-Soviet sentiments, and deep skepticism toward capitalist America – orientations Lie knew many of his party comrades still held (Sundvall, Citation2016). This mattered little, though, as few Americans knew much about Norway and even less about the state of its labor movement. Haakon Lie, on the other hand, knew how to sweet-talk his American audience. However, he would have to work to earn the money. At the preparatory conference, his AFL acquaintances made it clear that they regarded it as Lie’s ‘goddammed duty’ to take part in a six-week fundraising tour, as he was among ‘the few representatives of European labor who knew how to speak to American workers’ (Lie, Citation1944b).
The AFL’s agenda for establishing the FTUC had a significantly longer-term perspective than the previous war relief fundraising. The FTUC was to provide general organizational support to ‘free’ labor movements abroad in peacetime. ‘Free labor’ was understood as unions and federations not subjected to state power or controlled by governments, but rather independent democratic organizations fighting for the interests of voluntarily organized workers. The antidote to this was the ‘totalitarian’ model of labor-state relations. Likening the Soviet trade unions to the corporativist labor fronts of the fascist states, AFL President William Green made fervidly clear in December 1944 that such workers’ organizations were ‘diametrically opposed’ to the ‘fundamental philosophies and objectives’ of American labor (Green, Citation1944). On that basis the AFL would dismiss any postwar cooperation with representatives of the Soviet Union and actively counteract communist influence wherever it could. The AFL’s militant rejection of the labor organizations of the U.S.A.’s war ally was out of sync with the widespread admiration for the Soviet ‘workers state’ in much of the European labor movement. The result was international isolation for the AFL, especially after it refused to support the creation of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) in the summer of 1945 (Van Goethem, Citation2013, p. 19). Although not opposed to its anti-communism in principle, Haakon Lie feared that the AFL’s attitude would weaken rather than strengthen the cause of democratic labor internationally (Lie, Citation1944a). In Lie’s eyes, the AFL could and should be an essential counterweight to Soviet and communist influence in Europe, whose non-communist labor movement badly needed financial support to rebuild its organizations after years of occupation and war.
However, the results of the AFL free trade union fundraising drive were meager. Haakon Lie lamented its shortcomings in a letter to a party comrade in London in February 1945. Still, he trusted that ‘somehow the funding will be provided, although not, as expected, from the trade unions or shop floors’ (Lie, Citation1945). From where then would the funding come? Haakon Lie’s comment suggests that he was familiar with the U.S. federal government’s substantial secret subsidies to the labor war relief program, and that he now hoped for some similar arrangement for the AFL-FTUC. It is worth noting how well-connected Haakon Lie was with the government intelligence agency who throughout the war funneled vast sums of money to The Labor League for Human Rights: The Office of Strategic Service (OSS) (Van Goethem, Citation2013). In fact, an old social democratic party comrade of his from Norway, the American-born Bjarne Braatøy, had recently risen to the position of Deputy Chief within the OSS after being recruited from the Scandinavian section of the Office of War Information (OWI) (Brandal & Sundvall, Citation2023). It was Bjarne Braatøy who in 1942 opened the first important doors for Haakon Lie to the U.S. labor scene, most notably to the Jewish Labor Committee and the textile union movement of New York. Braatøy also connected Lie to Arthur Goldberg, the OSS officer and former labor lawyer responsible for the covert labor program toward occupied Europe. Lie was aware of both men’s employment for U.S. intelligence (Lahlum, Citation2009, p. 181). Based on available evidence, we cannot judge if or how much Haakon Lie knew about the close war cooperation between the AFL and the OSS. Regardless, he was undoubtedly able to make an educated guess about the real origins of much, if not most, of the monetary support for the Norwegian labor movement. The AFL-OSS partnership laid the groundwork for the subsequent Cold War cooperation between the AFL and OSS’s successor, the CIA, which would again involve substantial dollar transfers.
When Irving Brown was appointed the AFL’s representative in Europe, finances were highly uncertain and his mission faced strong headwinds. The AFL had few international friends. Considering the connections established and the amount of war relief given to Norwegian labor during the war, it should then come as no surprise that Brown’s first destination in liberated Europe was Scandinavia. Inviting representatives of American labor relief agencies had been discussed in the Norwegian LO and Labor Party before Haakon Lie returned to Norway, but it was upon Lie’s arrival in Oslo after years abroad that these plans gained momentum. Bursting with energy and with a clear sense of mission, Lie immediately established himself as a driving force in Norway for a wide range of projects, among them the strengthening of relations with the United States. Reflecting his abilities and energy, the Labor Party soon elected Lie General Secretary, the most strategically important position in the highly centralized party apparatus responsible for overseeing both internal and external correspondence. Lie coupled his formal power with informal and unconventional creativity that made effective use of resources and contacts by circumventing cumbersome bureaucratic processes. This flexible approach was appreciated by Lie’s American partners, among them the labor attaché at the American embassies in Oslo and Copenhagen, former OSS-officer Walter Galenson. In 1945, Galenson was – according to himself – practically ‘taken over’ by Haakon Lie (Sundvall, Citation2019; Weisz, Citation1992). Besides fostering a lifelong friendship (), Lie opened doors for him to leaders of the Norwegian LO and labor party and secured Galenson’s assistance on different projects. In fact, Lie even put Galenson to work for his party’s campaign for the parliamentary election, a delicate breach of diplomatic etiquette that bears all the hallmarks of Lie’s pragmatic approach to politics. ‘That’s the way Haakon operated, you see, he pressed everybody into service’, Galenson later recalled (Galenson, Citation1996). Walter Galenson’s tenure as a diplomat in Denmark and Norway was short-lived, lasting only until 1946. Yet, in his new position as labor specialist at Harvard University, he would continue to serve as a liaison between labor officials in the United States and Scandinavia on an informal basis.
Figure 1. Americans visiting Haakon Lie’s log cabin in the woods north of Oslo, spring 1946: Marjorie and Walter Galenson (US labor attaché in Denmark and Norway) and Irving Brown of the AFL. Photo: Haakon Lie (private collection).
In mid-1945, owing much to the Galenson-Lie partnership, the Norwegian LO extended an invitation to the AFL, the CIO, and the Jewish Labor Committee, which was soon mirrored by similar invitations from the Swedish and Danish labor federations (Osborne, Citation1945a, Citation1945b). In late October, Irving Brown of the AFL and Charles Zimmerman of the Jewish Labor Committee headed for Scandinavia, while a CIO representative cancelled last minute. Notably, both Brown and Zimmerman were former ‘lovestonites’, members of Jay Lovestone’s oppositional Communist Party of the U.S.A., and had stayed loyal to Lovestone when he broke up the party and turned vehemently anti-Communist as a reaction to Stalin’s terror of the late 1930s (Carew, Citation2018, pp. 20, 25; Morgan, Citation1999). When establishing the FTUC, the AFL’s top brass had chosen Jay Lovestone and his protégé Irving Brown to lead the crusade, clearly hoping for ruthless efficiency from such connoisseurs of the shadowy world of international communism.
Irving Brown’s impressions from Scandinavia were articulated in his first reports home as AFL-FTUC representative. From Oslo, Brown reported a tight program of excursions, public events, and meetings with leaders – a ‘real, grand welcome’ orchestrated by Haakon Lie. On the status of the Norwegian labor movement, Brown concluded:
Their approach to problems and their organization are very close to ours and they want to continue friendly relations. But everywhere one goes it is clear that the problem of the Russians, both externally and internally, overshadows their work. One cannot handle this issue in the same way in Norway as we do in the U.S.A. and I have not tried to press them, but have at the same time tried to make clear our position. (Brown, Citation1945a)
Americans ‘could do a lot for real democracy in Europe by economic aid’, claimed Brown, and Norway was ‘really a fine place to start’. He therefore recommended the AFL to increase the level of support that had already been discussed for allocation to Norway, raising the sum to $25,000. It was of utmost importance to give such support at this crucial juncture: ‘The dividends that this will pay now and for the future is beyond human imagination or any bookkeeping calculation’, stressed Brown (Brown, Citation1945a).
From Sweden, Brown reported on disappointment that the AFL had boycotted the WFTU, as Swedish labor leaders considered the Americans to be ‘natural allies’ who could offer a counterweight to the Soviets in such an arena: ‘The role of Russia hangs ominously over the Swedes and they show it’ (Brown, Citation1945b). Moving on to Denmark, Brown reported on talks with LO chairman Eiler Jensen, who had called for the AFL to advocate ‘liberal international economic policy’ to the U.S. government, ‘so that the democratic countries in the west will receive economic aid’. Jensen was, according to Brown, also eager for more British and American ‘propaganda and action’ on ‘trade unionism and democracy’ to counter the misleading propaganda of the Soviets (Brown, Citation1945b). After completing his Scandinavian tour, Brown concluded that the ‘Scandinavian trade unionists are really our best friends in Europe and, from what I have seen of Europe, the sanest and most intelligent’ (Brown, Citation1945c). Years before the Marshall Plan, the Scandinavian labor leaders had impressed on Brown the importance of a benevolent U.S. trade policy for a democratic future for Europe:
The more one thinks of the Scandinavian problems the more convinced one becomes that the European economic problem cannot be solved without developing an economic and industrial base to replace the German economy that has been eliminated. Can America fill the gap, politically and economically, that we have helped to creat[e] by our war production and military machine? Will the liberators of to-day become the oppressors of tomorrow for the Europeans? This is America’s first post-war problem in Europe. Our international economic policy becomes a number one priority if we are to help reconstruct Europe on the basis of Democracy – the alternative is a Russian dominated continent. (Brown, Citation1945b)
Another important stem from which AFL-FTUC’s Nordic network would grow in the coming years was the Jewish Labor Committee’s connections to Sweden. Charles Zimmerman had been directed there to assess the political situation in Europe, where the JLC still held contacts with the remnants of the ravaged Bundist movement. Considering the JLC’s powerbase in the textile trades around New York City, where Jewish immigrants with ties to the Bundist movement in Eastern Europe were highly represented among both leaders and rank-and-file members, the milieu was significantly more aligned with European socialist perspectives than most of the American labor movement, as well as more experienced in international solidarity work. As the Bundists had fought communists tooth and nail in Russia, Poland, and the Baltic republics since the Russian Revolution, they were well prepared for – and indeed pioneered – the new combat lines of the Cold War. Thus, the JLC’s position on Soviet communism largely mirrored that of the AFL-FTUC, and their operations often developed in sync, spurred on by significant overlap in personnel. Neutral Sweden had taken on an increasingly important role for the Jewish-American labor movement during the Second World War, becoming a hub for social democratic and Jewish refugees from central and eastern Europe, including subsequently influential actors connected to the ‘Little Stockholm International’ (Stjernholm, Citation2023; Vivekanandan, Citation2016). The JLC had used Sweden as a base to support Jewish and social democratic labor movements in Nazi-occupied Europe. Now, with Germany defeated and the Soviet Union tightening its control over much of eastern Europe, the JLC reoriented its efforts toward supporting Jewish and non-Jewish organizations fighting communist oppression in Eastern Europe. Once again, Sweden offered a well-connected base whose strong and sympathetic labor movement possessed vital connections to countries in the East, particularly the Baltics.
Upon arrival in Stockholm, Zimmerman and Brown connected with Paul Olberg, the JLC’s Swedish representative. Emerging from the Jewish Bund in Latvia, Olberg had, over the course of various exile stays in Sweden and Germany, developed a broad European network of former social democratic Mensheviks and Bundists. Olberg worked strenuously to lay the groundwork for the Americans’ visit and facilitate meetings for Brown and Zimmerman with top figures in the Swedish labor movement. The group found the Swedes receptive to their pleas to allow refugees from countries in the Soviet sphere to stay in Sweden, as well as to issue visas for 250 German laborites expelled from the Sudetenland. In return, the JLC pledged to sponsor refugees in Sweden or in transit to the United States or British-controlled Palestine. The visit proved an early foray into a productive relationship between the New York-based wing of the American labor movement and Scandinavian labor leaders, who united to combat both antisemitism and communism internationally (Blomqvist, Citation2022, pp. 30–33; Pat, Citation1945a, Citation1945b).
The increasingly intertwined activities of JLC and AFL-FTUC were even more apparent when aiding refugees from Eastern Europe and particularly the Baltic countries, which the Soviet Union had occupied and annexed during the war. Given expanding importance within the AFL-FTUC’s nascent Cold War, U.S. labor’s assistance to anti-communist refugees frequently relied on the Baltic Sea connections of Nordic labor leaders. While Sweden was the most direct route for accessing the Baltic Sea, the record of these operations reveals the interconnectedness of the Nordic labor movements. For instance, for delivery of AFL-FTUC CARE packages ‘into the hands of our Baltic friends’, Lovestone first shipped them to Haakon Lie in Oslo, who thereafter ensured they entered Sweden ‘free of duty’ enroute to their final destination (Lie, Citation1948c; Lovestone, Citation1948). Likewise, in 1946, Lie helped establish contacts between a Polish diplomat at the Stockholm embassy and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), whose headquarters housed both the JLC and AFL-FTUC. Subsequently, in 1948, when the same Polish diplomat, now based in Oslo, communicated to the Americans his wish to defect, Rose Pesotta of the ILGWU turned to Lie to arrange covert passage on Norwegian shipping to the U.S. (Pesotta, Citation1948).
While Haakon Lie proved useful for American labor’s refugee assistance, his influence was magnified during operations in Scandinavia, where Lie formed the driving force behind the AFL-FTUC’s financial commitments to Norway. Nonetheless, despite Brown and the AFL’s consistent contact with their Scandinavian counterparts, tangible cooperation was limited by several factors: the AFL’s decision to stay out of the WFTU, its focus on countries such as Italy, France, and Germany, and constrained financial resources. To Haakon Lie’s frustration, it took time before the promised financial support from the AFL to Norwegian labor materialized. In early 1947, Lie tactfully reminded Jay Lovestone of the earlier pledge for financial support for Norwegian labor’s printing presses. With reference to the strained economic situation, Lovestone acknowledged the pledge by granting the Norwegians a $5,000 loan on behalf of the AFL (Lovestone, Citation1947a, Citation1947b). Even though resources were scarce, a private fundraising initiative a few months later showed that Haakon Lie could still count on the solidarity of American labor friends. In the summer of 1947, Walter Galenson appointed himself ‘treasurer of the American Friends of the Norwegian Labor Party’ and went out of his way to raise funds (in mostly AFL unions) for a brand-new station wagon for the party in support of its electioneering efforts. It was to replace an ‘old wreck that Haakon pieced together from a car graveyard that won’t last the summer’ (Galenson, Citation1947a, Citation1947b). Eight months later, Galenson could inform Lie that a Willy-Overland Jeep was on its way to Norway: ‘We know that this vehicle will be used to further the aims for which both American labor and the Norwegian Labor Party stands: the furtherance of democracy and the advancement of the living standards of the workers’ (Galenson, Citation1948). This serves as an illustration of the level of solidarity and sense of common cause that had developed between the AFL and Norwegian labor. It extended to the labor movements of all the Nordic countries – in no small part thanks to Haakon Lie’s personal role as a key networker strategically nurturing a transatlantic community. In the tumultuous waters of European labor in the first postwar years, the Scandinavian countries became safe havens and natural ports of call for Irving Brown and other AFL affiliates traveling abroad. This created the basis for a confident and productive cooperation as the Cold War intensified.
Cold War maneuvers, 1947–49
1947 was a watershed year for the AFL’s activities abroad, and its relationship to Nordic labor moved into a new phase. With the escalation of Cold War tensions in the international trade union movement and within the national labor movement on both sides of the Atlantic, the AFL and its Nordic partners explored new avenues for cooperation. The first pivotal issue was the Marshall Plan. Soon after it was introduced, in June 1947, Lovestone and Brown seized on it as a golden opportunity to drive a wedge into the WFTU. In August, at the International Conference of Metalworkers’ Federations in Copenhagen, Brown passionately advocated for two key objectives: the convening of a labor conference aimed at discussing and endorsing the Marshall Plan, and for the establishment of a new trade union international (Knudsen, Citation2012, p. 83). In the following months he worked tirelessly to achieve these goals by creating what Anthony Carew refers to as a ‘embryonic free trade union centre’ - a support base for the AFL, in which Nordic labor leaders came to play a central role (Carew, Citation2018, p. 58). In light of his 1945 plea to Irving Brown for American economic aid for the European democracies and more ‘propaganda and action’ on ‘trade unionism and democracy’, it should come as no surprise that Eiler Jensen joined Haakon Lie as a prominent Scandinavian labor supporter of the Marshall Plan. When the plan became more tangible in late 1947, they both worked within their labor movements to promote the plan and partnered with Brown in his efforts to gather broader European labor support.
With Haakon Lie taking the lead, the Scandinavians took a strategic advisory role vis-à-vis the AFL, trying to moderate and steer the Americans’ strategic approach. Lie seems to have agreed with the AFL in late 1947 that an East-West split in international trade union cooperation was both inevitable and desirable. Yet he was concerned that key AFL leaders with international clout – specifically David Dubinsky (president of the ILGWU), Matthew Woll (AFL vice president), Jay Lovestone, and Irving Brown – had a too simplistic understanding of the situation in Europe and lacked a fine-tuned sense of timing. Lie expressed this view in conversation with Walter Galenson, who quoted him in a confidential letter to Charles Zimmerman in November 1947:
Right now the Russians are trying to use the WFTU to stop the Marshall plan. If they succeed, the split will come automatically – caused by the Communists. That is a much better conclusion than will occur if the AFL [bears the blame] for causing the split. Neither Dubinsky, Woll, Lovestone – nor Irv – know Europe well enough to act entirely correctly in this very serious manoeuvring. The time is not yet ripe for a split in the WFTU, and when the break comes, it must be the Communists who call it forth. Time works for us just now. But a hothead like Irv can be dangerous just now. (Galenson, Citation1947c)
This call for caution probably did its rounds in ILGWU headquarters in New York, where both JLC and FTUC had their main offices. Lie clearly intended to make his opinion known, as he also reached out to ‘Irv’ Brown directly in a letter: ‘We have things to discuss concerning your mission to Europe. I may be misinformed, but I am afraid of your going too fast. Just now time works for us’ (Lie, Citation1947). In mid-December, after attending an international socialist conference in Antwerp, Lie spent several days with Brown in Paris. Lie assured him that the Norwegians and eventually all the Scandinavians would agree to convening a labor conference on the Marshall Plan and that he had been encouraged by the French and British socialists to take the initiative (Brown, Citation1947; Weisz, Citation1994).
In early January 1948, Brown reported to Lovestone that he had just had an ‘off the record’-meeting in Copenhagen with the presidents of the trade union federations of Scandinavia, Konrad Nordahl, Eiler Jensen, and Axel Strand, and a trade union representative from Finland (probably Olavi Lindblom). According to Brown, Jensen had promised to do ‘everything in his power’ to get the Scandinavian trade unionists to endorse the proposal for an international labor conference on the Marshall Plan but that the British TUC was holding back the process (Brown, Citation1948b). A few days later, however, Haakon Lie could assure Brown that foreign secretary and former TUC president Ernest Bevin was on board: ‘I got my conference on the Marshall-plan. Bevin had already agreed when I arrived, so it was an easy job to put it over. […] I am mighty proud today. Local boy did well in London’ (Lie, Citation1948a). The reference to himself as ‘local boy’, which Brown parroted some days later by congratulating on ‘local boy who made good!’, was part of a joking jargon between them, that saw an even more peculiar manifestation a week later: ‘Dear Irv: I am still doing my best to serve my masters: the American imperialists’ (Brown, Citation1948a; Lie, Citation1948b). This correspondence reveals the level of personal trust that had developed between Haakon Lie and Irving Brown and the extent to which they coordinated their joint efforts together and with allies like Eiler Jensen for their common goal of European labor support for the Marshall Plan. This is underlined by the explicit confidentiality in the letters going back and forth between Lie and Brown in January and February 1948. For example, Brown informed Lie ‘completely off the record’ about his discussions with the Nordic trade union leaders in Copenhagen (Brown, Citation1948a). Lie reciprocated two days later:
Off the record: representatives for the Labor parties and the T.U.C.s in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden will meet in Stockholm February 7 and 8. On the agenda is (among other items): The Marshall Plan. Yours Haakon. (Lie, Citation1948b)
At this meeting of the Cooperation Committee of the Nordic Workers Movement (SAMAK) in Stockholm, the Scandinavian social democratic parties and trade union federations jointly decided to support the Marshall Plan, while frustrated Finnish labor representatives had to abstain from the discussions due to Soviet diplomatic pressure on Finland. At the meeting, Haakon Lie strongly advocated for the Nordic trade union federations to leave the WFTU and to work to create a separate labor organization for the Marshall countries (Bjørnsson, Citation2012, pp. 123–124). Lie had now clearly stated his support for the AFL agenda, but, for many of his Scandinavian colleagues, this was too drastic a step for the moment.
One month later, in early March 1948, a few weeks after the shocking communist coup in Czechoslovakia, an international labor conference was finally held in London under the auspices of the British TUC. It forced wavering European labor movements to finally choose sides. The West European labor movements united behind the Marshall Plan, creating a deep rift within the WFTU (Carew, Citation1987, p. 77). Even as his hard work thus bore fruit, the process had been riddled with frustrations and tensions between the AFL and the British TUC, whom Irving Brown feared was taking the play away from him (Carew, Citation2018, p. 61). The evidence suggests that Haakon Lie’s role was that of an intermediary between the British and Americans. It is worth noting that Lie’s call for caution to the AFL in November 1947, was very much in line with the approach of key British labor strategists with whom Haakon Lie had a very close relationship: Ernest Bevin and the British Labour Party’s international secretary Denis Healey (Insall, Citation2010. Bevin and Healey’s shared position on foreign affairs was formulated in the pamphlet; Healey, Citation1947). Lie’s advice to the Americans was given shortly after a visit by Healey to Oslo, and it is likely that Healey and Lie there agreed that it would be best if the call for moderation of the American ‘hothead’ came from a trusted Norwegian – and not the resented British.
As the European Recovery Program (ERP) came into effect, its labor dimension was more pronounced in Scandinavia than elsewhere in Europe. This was largely due to enthusiastic promotion by the social democratic parties and the significant involvement of American labor, with the ERP missions in both Norway and Sweden led by trade union officials (Carew, Citation1987, p. 82). Arranging trade union delegations to the U.S. became an early focus for the ERP and Haakon Lie seized upon the opportunity to lead the very first labor delegation from Europe under the auspices of the program (Sundvall, Citation2024). From start to finish, Lie was in charge of the round trip to the American industrial regions in December 1948 and January 1949. The delegation’s first destination in the U.S. was the ILGWU headquarters in New York, where Jay Lovestone greeted the Norwegians. At the meeting, Haakon Lie explained his agenda:
We are going to write a report on American trade unions when we go back. The main purpose of this trip is to make these people see how Americans work and how to counter-act communists in the shops. (Conference of Norwegian Labor Delegation at ILGWU headquarters [ILGWU], Citation1948)
Afterward Haakon Lie wrote a delegation report that would be disseminated widely in Europe by the ERP administration (Sundvall, Citation2019). The connection to the AFL made it possible for Lie and other Scandinavians to use the Marshall program for a transatlantic labor agenda. It was also a backchannel that could be used in efforts to influence American economic policies. One notable example is a letter by Eiler Jensen to Irving Brown from February 1950, which eventually reached both AFL’s William Green and CIO’s Phillip Murray, where the Danish unionist appealed for a delay of liberalization efforts as it would be premature and damaging to European trade (Jensen, Citation1950).
Amid the WFTU slow but irrevocable fracture, Eiler Jensen served as the Scandinavian representative on the executive board. Even though he seems to have agreed on the inevitability of the breakup, he differed with Brown and the AFL on how best to proceed, emphasizing the importance of following correct protocol (Schmidt, Citation2016). It was a difference in tactic and timing more than one of fundamental strategy and thus a situation not unlike Lie’s divergence with the same AFL actors the year before over the best course to take in relation to the Marshall Plan and international labor organizations. The Scandinavians were valuable allies who gave the Americans both necessary support on important issues, yet also pushback and critical advice. Finally, when in late 1949 the AFL’s long‑held goal of an anti-communist replacement of the WFTU materialized in the establishment of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), it should come as no surprise that Haakon Lie was considered to the post of general secretary of the organization. Yet, even though Irving Brown lauded him as ‘one of the few courageous and intelligent labor leaders in Europe’, Lie was in the end not considered eligible to the post as he was primarily identified with the political rather than the trade union labor movement (Brown, Citation1949a). In addition, there was nothing suggesting that Lie wanted to relinquish the position as General Secretary of the Norwegian Labor Party. Furthermore, the FTUC’s ambitions were just as effectively supported by him on an informal basis. As the Cold War intensified in the shadow of the Korean War (1950–53), Lie and his Nordic labor colleagues again would constitute valuable backchannels for American influence.
Between ‘Fizzland’ and Finland, 1949–57’
‘I neither make or take promises lightly’, wrote Jay Lovestone in a confidential letter to Irving Brown in June 1950: ‘I am in a hell of a battle trying to get purchases for Finnish lumber’ (Lovestone, Citation1950a). Nine months later, ‘the northern lumber deal’ was on the move, with new shipments arriving: ‘I have an encyclopedia of 15 volumes at hand ready for consultation. I have written the lumber merchants they can plan and plant and execute their sowing campaign on the basis as per the specifications in these volumes’ (Lovestone, Citation1951c). A week later, Lovestone expressed tempered optimism for further supplies: ‘There is a likelihood that I might be able to do a little better later. But you see I have no confidence in the promises of the Fizzers’ (Lovestone, Citation1951b). Unintelligible in fragments, historians have established that the thinly veiled codes in these documents refers to dollar sums (‘volumes’) channeled from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, ‘the Fizzers’) through the AFL-FTUC to certain Nordic labor partners (‘the lumber merchants’). There has however, remained uncertainty about the code ‘lumber’. According to Anthony Carew it refers to activities related to Finland, while Quenby Olmsted Hughes claims it refers to Norway (Hughes, Citation2011, p. ix; Carew, Citation2018, pp. 118, 381). In our assessment, they are both right. The covert activities found in Lovestone’s codes, along with the AFL-FTUC’s view of Europe, come into sharper relief in the context of the Nordic network dimension that developed over the preceding years.
With the crystallization of East-West power relations, the Scandinavian labor movements’ involvement in AFL-FTUC activities reached new heights. On the European scene, Haakon Lie worked closely with Irving Brown on propaganda and cultural initiatives targeting Soviet communism. The most notable was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, established in 1950 with secret financial support from the CIA, in which Lie was a close confidant and partner of Irving Brown, a trust formalized in Lie’s position as alternate member for Brown in the organization’s executive committee for three years (1950–53) (Sundvall, Citation2019). Scandinavians furthermore proved key door openers to a country that had taken on a strategic significance in the context of the Cold War: Finland. As Lie developed his connections to U.S. labor and intelligence community, he kept his Finnish labor colleagues in mind. With its proximity to Leningrad and concessions to the Soviet Union following the Continuation War (1941–44), both Finns and the Western allies feared for Finland’s continued political independence. Fears escalated following the February 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia, which seemed to lay a blueprint for how Soviet-backed parties could overthrow democratically elected governments. It was thus a relief when the terms of the Treaty of Friendship, Mutual Assistance and Co-operation between Finland and the Soviet Union in April 1948 recognized Finland’s independence, encouraging the West to strengthen political and economic ties to the country, especially its lumber industry (Fields, Citation2015, pp. 118–119).
Still, concerns persisted, and battlelines emerged within the powerful Finnish labor unions, with the communists and social democrats contesting members and resources. As a 1949 report from Väinö Leskinen, Party Secretary of the Finnish social democrats, to Irving Brown argued, ‘The key to the Finnish political situation is in the hands of the labor movement’, which formed a ‘state in the state’ (Leskinen, Citation1949). Thus, when communists organized a strike in summer 1949, the social democratic government under K.-A. Fagerholm sent in the police and military to reestablish control, leading to the death of two workers in Kemi in northern Finland. ‘Finland will never be a Czechoslovakia’, Fagerholm afterward justified to a Norwegian journalist (Majander, Citation2009, p. 137, authors’ translation).
The Finnish Social Democratic Party (SDP) found sympathy and support for their actions from the West. With direct cash injections difficult due to the postwar restrictions on currency flows, the SDP’s western comrades took advantage of the Finnish government’s reduced taxes on luxury imports marked as charity donations, which had been established to combat the continued lack of purchasing power in Finland. While political parties across the spectrum, including the Finnish communists, took advantage of these low tariffs to supplement meager revenue from membership dues, the SDP proved particularly adept at taking advantage of the system. According to Mikko Majander, it was through such measures that the Swedish labor movement and Finnish-Americans channeled financial aid to the SDP and its affiliates, sending items like coffee, cigarettes, nylon stockings, and fruit that could be sold or given away as lottery prizes to provide liquid cash. The Norwegian labor movement, often with Lie’s direct involvement, was also active; however, in Majander’s estimation, ‘In economic terms, the Norwegians’ most important support for the SDP was that they built a bridge to the godfathers in the West’ (Majander, Citation2009, p. 147, authors’ translation.). From 1949, two of these godfathers became largely synonymous, as the AFL-FTUC increased its operations funneling CIA funds to European labor movements. The CIA-AFL partnership was a marriage of convenience, as the CIA needed access to the AFL’s extended labor network and the AFL-FTUC needed money to fully realize its ambitions abroad.
Finland was an early target for such financial support, which took several different forms. Since Marshall Aid was not an option for Finland, due to the country’s complicated relationship with the Soviet Union, the AFL-FTUC presented a promising alternative. Irving Brown made his first trip to Finland in autumn 1949, meeting with Leskinen and other social democrats. In lieu of Marshall Aid, Brown wrote to Lovestone that the Finns required $500,000 to truly deal the communists ‘a fatal blow’. Perhaps it was too much money, Brown admitted, but it was a small price to pay for ‘the finest group of men in the European labor movement’ (Brown, Citation1949b).
That same year, the Norwegian labor movement donated 255 tons of Israeli oranges to Finland. Haakon Lie, who had maintained his connections with the JLC and, from 1948 onward, the newly established state of Israel, appears to have been a critical facilitator for the deal (Keren-Carmel, 2024, pp. 32–36). The arrangement brokered by the Norwegians involved shipping the oranges first to Sicily and then onward to Helsinki, where the Finnish SDP sold them as a means of fundraising. The deal occurred with at least the awareness of the American embassy in Oslo, whose leading figures were close collaborators with Lie (Majander, Citation2009, pp. 132–134). However, Lie’s later references to the event as the Finns’ own ‘Marshall money’ hints at a more direct U.S. role in bankrolling the venture (Bjørnsson, Citation2012, p. 90). Indeed, such an arrangement fit a pattern of AFL involvement in Finland. In another instance in 1951, ten Buicks donated to Finland from the AFL-FTUC were channeled through the Swedish Social Democratic Party, with eight of the cars being used by Finnish party members while the other two became fund-raising prizes (Bjørnsson, Citation2012, p. 91). The unconventional creativity and pragmatism earlier displayed by Lie were thus expanded in scale, as the Scandinavian labor movements embraced roles as facilitators of U.S. aid to the east.
From the Finnish side, senior members of the labor movement emerged as vital interlocutors in arranging for American support to pass through the Scandinavian third parties. Among the most significant partners for the AFL-CIO were Väinö Tanner (imprisoned leader of the SDP), Väinö Leskinen, and Aku Sumu (President of the Finnish Federation of Trade Unions, SAK) (Brown, Citation1949b, Citation1950; Larkin, Citation1951; Majander, Citation2009). Others, like Arvo ‘Poika’ Tuominen, the Finnish social democratic press correspondent in Stockholm, proved essential in maintaining connections with Swedish labor, prompting Lovestone to crown him ‘the ablest man in the entire Finnish crowd’ (Lovestone, Citation1950a). With this praise came an understanding that the Finnish labor movement was operating under dire circumstances. In response to a suggestion by William Green that the AFL extend an invitation to Sumu and the SAK as part of their efforts to break up the WFTU, Lovestone responded approvingly, reminding Green:
[…] your idea of inviting such a delegation from the Finnish Trade Unions is an excellent one. It requires a lot of courage for these Finnish workers who are practically speaking inside the Iron Curtain, to come to the United States upon the invitation of the President of the A.F. of L. whom Moscow considers its most dangerous enemy. […] Moscow will have more than one severe headache and the W.F.T.U. will be hit a very hard blow. (Lovestone, Citation1950c)
The necessity for the Americans to meet with Finnish interlocutors outside of Finland added to the importance of having Scandinavia as a base of operations (Larkin, Citation1951). In personal meetings and private correspondence, the Finnish social democrats kept the AFL-FTUC abreast of the latest developments in their country. A May 1950 memorandum sent to Lovestone noted the continued fight over the rank-and-file’s loyalty with the communists, who hoped to dominate trade unions ‘in accordance with the well‑known East European revolutionary pattern’. If Finnish social democrats were to prevent a communist takeover, they would require ‘a lot of money’, certainly more than was available from domestic sources. The memorandum presented the exact sum necessary to maintain ‘this fight’: ‘Now we would need 50 million Finnish marks equivalent to about 200.000 dollars, a sum modest as such but of first‑class importance in Finnish conditions’. The following March, Lovestone wrote to Carmel Offie, the intelligence official who had joined the AFL-FTUC after being blacklisted as a homosexual by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Lovestone asked Offie to look into the latest proposals for ‘the Finnish situation’ and ‘For Heaven’s sake get quick action on it!’ Specifically, given that the money for Finland was exhausted, Offie should explore the availability of further ‘volumes’ from the CIA: ‘1. When will our friends turn over to is the additional twenty-five thousand pages they promised? 2. Are they prepared to give further publishing rights?’ (Lovestone, Citation1951a; Sumu & Lindblom, Citation1950).
Ultimately, as Lovestone acknowledged in a letter to Lillie Brown, Irving Brown’s wife, there was only so much that the AFL-FTUC could do by itself. The Americans were reliant on the foreign ‘lumber merchants’ to ‘plant and execute their sowing campaign as per the specifications in these volumes’. The money was made available for the Finns by April 1951, in spite of Lovestone’s complaints that ‘It is hell to try to get things done at this distance’ (Lovestone, Citation1951b, Citation1951c). Distance was magnified by Finland’s inability to join the ICFTU under Stalin’s mistrustful gaze, instead maintaining membership in the ever more communist-dominated WFTU.
While the AFL-FTUC’s connections to the Scandinavian labor movement proved useful in directing anti-communist funding into the region, its role was by no means unassailable. By the early 1950s, tensions were increasing among the Americans, fueled by the mutual class-based disdain between Lovestone, the immigrant labor activist, and the privileged officers of the CIA, whom Lovestone dismissed as the ‘Park Avenue Cowboys’ (Carew, Citation2018, p. 86). Under the new leadership of Alan Dulles, an increasingly professionalized CIA sought to circumvent Lovestone and the FTUC, whom they saw as unreliable, or even acquire their assets directly. The nodes for accessing the Nordic network were thus brought into play. In November 1950, Brown contacted Lovestone to ask him whether he was aware, ‘that Haakon Lie is involved in the Finnish affair and has direct contact with the representatives of the Washington firm in Paris? … [Lie] even went on to say that he is doing things with these people about which I know nothing’. The news of Lie’s direct contact with ‘the Washington firm’—i.e. the CIA – left Lovestone ‘dumbfounded’ and fuming. He resented the ‘dilly-dallying, bluffing and lying’ of the CIA – a long‑running complaint – and painted a dark picture of its potential effects. As he wrote to Brown, referring to a separate incident, likely the CIA’s decision to withhold funds for AFL-FTUC operations in China that resulted in the capture and execution of several agents: ‘Some of our boys have lost their lives in Hong Kong due to such doublecrossing and stupidities. If I can help it, it won’t happen to our Finnish friends’ (Lovestone, Citation1950b; Schuhrke, Citation2024, pp. 81–83; Wilford, Citation2008, pp. 56–57). The CIA increasingly established itself as a competitor, rather than a cooperator, to the AFL-FTUC, directly initiating projects with the still‑important Scandinavian contacts. Despite this mounting hostility, the AFL-FTUC continued to channel CIA funds through the Scandinavian labor movements into Finland until late 1951 (Carew, Citation1998, p. 37).
However, other rivalries were also threatening the AFL-FTUC’s relationship with the Scandinavian labor officials. Just like the AFL, the CIO had maintained an office in Paris since the end of the Second World War, albeit more modest than the one run by Irving Brown. The CIO’s office was focused on the federation’s participation in the WFTU, which it had joined, unlike its more skeptical AFL rival. However, upon the CIO’s withdrawal from the WFTU to become a founding member of the ICFTU, the labor federation sought to expand its presence in Europe by utilizing U.S. federal funding (Reuther, Citation1976, p. 332). To begin, CIO President Philip Murray tapped Victor Reuther, brother of United Auto Workers (UAW) president Walter Reuther, to lead a delegation to Europe in January and February 1951. Victor Reuther was a known quantity to the Europeans. In 1948, at a conference on Marshall Aid, Reuther had declared that Europeans must have the full right ‘to establish democratic socialism’ without coercion from the United States or its agents (Carew, Citation2018, p. 112). Over six weeks, Reuther toured the continent, including Scandinavia and Finland, where, as the New York Post later wrote of the trip, ‘the bravest free trade unionists on earth fight for their lives under daily Soviet threats of reprisal’ (Reuther, Citation1976, pp. 333–334). With Victor Reuther’s subsequent appointment as director of the CIO’s Paris office, an alternative pole of the U.S. labor movement was established in Europe, one espousing a more positive and social democratic anti-communism.
As Victor Reuther later recalled, the AFL-FTUC’s heavy-handed, even ‘insulting’ treatment of the European labor movements drove the Europeans into the arms of the CIO (Reuther, Citation1976, p. 338). By their side were the Scandinavian labor movements, especially its Swedish representatives, who frequently partnered with the Reuther brothers in the ICFTU against the AFL (Misgeld, Citation1998). Sometimes, assistance was more material, including the Swedish labor movement lending Victor Reuther the chateau La Brevière in France for his organization of seminars for the next generation of French labor officials (Reuther, Citation1976, p. 338–339). Strong personal connections between Walter Reuther and Swedish LO president Arne Geijer (Lichtenstein, Citation1995, p. 338; Rom-Jensen, Citation2018), mutual antagonism toward the hardline anticommunism propagated by Meany and Lovestone (Carew, Citation1998, p. 40; Wedin, Citation1974), and an increasing orientation toward solidarity with the Global South magnified skepticism toward the intentions and funding of the AFL-FTUC. The official weekly of the Swedish LO, for example, thrashed Brown in a June 1955 article:
His narrow self-complacency, and his flowery speechmaking on bombastic and narrow lines usually have no effect on trade unionists. Even proposals worth considering are degraded and become suspect when they are put forward by so power-intoxicated a type as Brown […] Irving Brown has nothing at all to teach – and everything to learn from others. At the Vienna Congress [of the ICFTU] it seems that the representatives of trade unions in the so-called underdeveloped countries received Brown’s verbal fireworks with evident coolness. They know very well that communism is not the only enemy of democratic trade unionism (Benedict, Citation1955).
The declining fortunes of the AFL-FTUC contributed to an expanding distance to their partners. Anthony Carew notes that the left-leaning ‘political climate’ in Europe left fewer allies for Brown and Lovestone, while CIA funding dried up after the AFL and CIO merged in 1955 (Carew, Citation2018, pp. 145–151). At the same time, support through the AFL became less of an acute need for Haakon Lie and others in the Scandinavian labor movement (Carew, Citation1998, p. 39). Nonetheless, this diminished contact signaled a shift in priorities and orientations rather than a complete break in relations. Geijer, as president of the ICFTU since 1954, for instance supported Brown’s participation in top ICFTU meetings from 1957 onward as an unofficial American representative, despite disagreements with Brown in the ICFTU (Nilsson, Citation2016, p. 93). Moreover, when the former General Secretary of the Icelandic labor federation in 1955 sought FTUC support to combat what he described as a takeover by ‘Communists and other supporters of theirs’, the Nordic contacts remained useful, with financing to Iceland channeled through Eiler Jensen of Denmark, and potentially also Olavi Lindblom and Väinö Leskinen of Finland (Lovestone, Citation1955; Sigurðsson, Citation1955a, Citation1955b).
Such activities nonetheless paled in comparison to the AFL-FTUC’s previous presence. From the front line of American influence in Europe in the immediate postwar period, the AFL-FTUC had been relegated to a sideshow, with waning influence even among its former ‘best friends’, the Scandinavians. Even so, through its strategic partnerships, the AFL-FTUC had accomplished much of what it had set out to do, coalescing European labor movements around its demands for ‘free labor’. According to Brown himself, the accession of Finland into the ICFTU in 1957 during the Khrushchev Thaw was a culmination of these activities:
The entrance of the Finnish Federation of Labor into the ICFTU after many years of remaining neutral is not only a testimony to the courage and anti-Communist nature of the Finnish trade unions but underscores the tremendous amount of work done by the American trade unions to bring this about: especially that was done in the early years to help the Finns to rid themselves of Communist control in trade unions. (Brown, Citation1957)
In carrying out this ‘tremendous’ work, Brown and other cold warriors of the American labor movement had benefited greatly from their partnership with sympathetic Scandinavian labor movements. Not simply the dupes of American imperialists, the ‘lumber merchants’ had proven to be invaluable strategic partners.
Conclusion
This article repositions the Scandinavian labor movements not as passive recipients of U.S. hegemony, but as active, strategic partners in transatlantic labor diplomacy during the early Cold War. Scandinavian labor leaders – including Eiler Jensen and especially Haakon Lie – provided Americans assistance as door-openers, mediators, and hosts of AFL-FTUC activity in the immediate postwar years. Of particular importance to the Americans were the Scandinavians’ access to and knowledge of geopolitically fraught spaces like Finland and the Baltic countries and their willingness to facilitate American covert financing. It is vital to note that the labor leaders who formed the Nordic dimension of labor’s Cold War did not represent the whole labor movement in their home countries. Instead, they largely came from the pro-western wing of the often fractious internal politics of labor parties and unions. Yet, consistently, these were the individuals best placed to shape the foreign affairs of Nordic labor movements, which they did by aiding American labor’s Cold War abroad. More complex than a simple binary of submission or resistance to U.S. hegemony, Nordic labor leaders emerged as strategic and ideological partners to the AFL-FTUC. The code ‘northern lumber’ captures the regional dimension of this partnership. On this transnational level of the Cold War, the Nordic labor movements were active and eager allies of the AFL-FTUC, aiding their agendas, opening doors, and at times modulating the AFL-FTUC’s hard-line anti-communist strategies in a way that arguably made the Americans’ efforts more effective and thereby sharpened Cold War tensions on the European labor scene and beyond.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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