Lane Kirkland
LANE KIRKLAND: ...
LANE KIRKLAND:
Champion of American Labor.
By Arch Puddington. Wiley.
342 pp. $30
In the 2004 election, the Democrats were once again seen as more likely to favor the economic prospects of the average American, while the Republicans were seen as doing a better job of defending national security. But in the past, as Arch Puddington reminds us, one didn’t have to choose. Lane Kirkland was both “a New Dealer and a Cold Warrior,” and one of the last of the Cold War liberals.
Although Kirkland (1922–99) is often remembered for presiding over a decline in the ranks of organized labor, he also stood for principles that American liberalism might do well to remember. As the president of the AFL-CIO from George Meany’s retirement in 1979 to John Sweeney’s challenge in 1995, Kirkland valiantly fought the transformation of liberalism from, as Puddington puts it, a philosophy of “economic growth, equal opportunity, and an informed patriotism” into “a corrosive combination of cultural radicalism, identity politics, and Cold War neutralism.” Kirkland was a leading proponent of Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in Poland in the early 1980s, when scarcely anyone thought it would triumph, and when the foreign-policy establishment worried that open support of Walesa would provoke a Soviet invasion.
Kirkland and President Ronald Reagan agreed on Poland, but not on many other issues. Kirkland believed in the importance of organized labor at home, as a counterweight to corporate interests and as a voice for average Americans. He denounced as overkill Reagan’s firings of the striking air traffic controllers in 1981, and fought the administration’s anti-government strategy of tax cuts for the upper brackets and budget cuts for the lower. In a speech, Kirkland recalled the days when farmhouses lacked electricity, hookworm was widespread, and the elderly were destitute, “before government got on our backs” with the Rural Electrification Administration, the Public Health Service, and Social Security.
Puddington, vice president for research at the nonprofit organization Freedom House, takes us from South Carolina, where Kirkland grew up, to Georgetown University, where he studied foreign affairs, to his presidency of the AFL-CIO, where he sought to help unify the ranks of labor, to his battles with the Clinton administration over the North American Free Trade Agreement. The book closes with what Puddington calls the “coup” against Kirkland by labor dissidents who accused him of devoting too little time to organizing and too much to foreign affairs. Puddington notes dryly that while Sweeney has sharply curtailed the AFL-CIO’s once-heroic involvement in foreign policy, he has had no more success than Kirkland in stemming the loss of union members.
This otherwise excellent book could have been improved in a couple of ways. For one thing, a reader will search long and hard to find any criticism of Kirkland. The rap on presidential candidate Walter Mondale 20 years ago—that he couldn’t name a single issue on which he disagreed with organized labor—applies equally to Puddington’s treatment of Kirkland. In addition, it would be nice to know more about the personal side of Lane Kirkland, including his family life. For instance, five daughters are mentioned fleetingly in the early chapters, never to reappear.
But overall, at a time when organized labor is written off as a slowly dying special interest, Puddington does an admirable job of reminding us of labor’s proud heritage, at home and abroad, as “the only mass constituency” within the Democratic Party “committed to mainstream American values, broad-based reform that transcended racial and gender lines, and a diplomatically engaged and militarily prepared America.”