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Searching for Ludwig Lore

I’m back in FOIA hell.

Some time in the last decade, the FBI began methodically transferring the dead case files of dead Communists to the National Archives and Records Administration. This is a disaster for scholarship on American Communism. If the FBI retains a file, they quickly review it to redact the names of agents and spies and then email you a pdf at no cost to you. If NARA possesses the file, they put you in a ridiculously long queue to meticulously review the file. Years later they’ll tell you that you can get a pdf copy of the file for 80 cents a page (there are often hundreds if not thousands of pages). In the alternative, you can absurdly travel to College Park, MD to view the files on one of their computers and email it to yourself! I’m lucky that I began researching We Always Had a Union in 2006, but I regret that many of the names that I encountered during my research are in the dreaded “third tier of processing” with a decade-long backlog.

Worse, both NARA and the FBI now frequently claim that no record exists, when it clearly does because of the subject’s notoriety and because someone else has fucking cited the released, redacted file!!!

I’ve been chasing Ludwig Lore’s file for over four years. Lore was a founding member of the Communist Party, and a key member/supporter of the Amalgamated Food Workers union (among many other roles in his fascinating life). To the extent that his name is remembered, it’s as the Party’s first coded heresy–”Loreism”–a 1925 stand-in for Trotskyism before the Russians were ready to let the world know that Trotsky was being sidelined. The controversy roiled the Amalgamated, pushing one breakaway faction towards the AFL and gangster domination. I’m convinced that I found Lore in Michael J. Obermeier’s FBI file, as a Confidential National Defense Informant warning in 1942 that the volunteer German-American Labor Committee was a plot to determine the repatriate Soviet-allied German exiles to post-war Germany. I’d love more confirmation, but the FBI claims they shipped his file off to NARA (after initially claiming to not recognize the name) and NARA found only two files related to Lore (neither his actual file, 65-NY-14920).

His grandson got his hands on Lore’s file, and wound up writing a book on him, Firebrand: Journalist Ludwig Lore’s Lifelong Struggle Against Capitalism, Stalinism and the Rise of Nazism. Unfortunately, David Lore passed away shortly after self-publishing this piece of family genealogical history that, as a retired investigative reporter, wisely realized might be of interests to scholars of early American Communist and anti-fascist history. The younger Lore didn’t quite get as neck-deep into the twists and turns of the Comintern and the different Party lines as to truly make sense of his grandfather’s complicated political life, but he did get the impression that, while serving as an international correspondent for the New York Post newspaper (back when it was liberal!) Ludwig Lore was not only an informant for the US government, but he may have been a double agent for the Soviets.

I recently double-checked on my outstanding FOIA request to NARA for Lore’s file and found that they administratively closed it three years ago. So, I did a deeper Google search to see if someone else had acquired the file and posted it to archive.org or governmentattic.org. I found Svetlana Chervonnaya’s DocumentsTalk website. Chervonnaya is a Russian scholar of (among other things) Soviet espionage. She acquired Lore’s FBI file from Jeff Kisseloff, who’s written about the Alger Hiss case (yes, there’s a Lore connection; Whittacker Chambers was a regular visitor to the Lore home).

Chervonnaya cross-checked Lore’s FBI file with a book on Soviet espionage byJohn Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr and concluded that one spy, coded “Leo,” was actually Ludwig Lore. This is fascinating, if true. It doesn’t make sense on the surface, but on a deeper level it’s a total a-ha moment. When Lore was excommunicated from the Communist Party of the United States, he was burned. He was a renegade, an enemy, ostracised and criticised. The Daily Worker never stopped denouncing him for the last two decades of his life. This would have made for an excellent cover for becoming a spy for the Soviets, along with Lore’s continued desire to be of use to the world Communist movement. One development that coincided with the 1925 “Loreism” controversy is that the Soviets tightened up their spy operation. From 1919-1925, Communist activists who got involved in the Comintern might also be involved in cloak-and-dagger espionage. After 1925, there was a hard line. Americans engaged in political activity, and were left in the dark about Soviet espionage. A Party activist who wanted to aid the movement as a spy would essentially renounce their US citizenship. They’d quit the Party, change their name and break all contact with their American comrades. They’d become members of the Russian party, and subject to its discipline.

Lore didn’t do that. He retained his public identity as a newspaper columnist and public speaker. It seems that he just gathered and passed on useful information. Was Lore a double agent? I’d like to find out. Again, it’s pretty clear to me that he did become a Confidential National Defense Informant for the US. His name is redacted, but he makes too much sense as the source of one particular report (issued only a few months before he died). It’s possible he did both at the same time. It’s also quite likely that, as a member of the Jewish diaspora who’s been raising alarms about the rise of Naziism since at least 1932 that he was appalled by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and immediately broke ties with the Communists and decided to work with whoever was most credibly going to try to stop the Nazis.

Now I’m thinking about writing a book about a handful of prominent early Communists (James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman, Jay Lovestone, Benjamin Gitlow and Ludwig Lore) who spent the 1930’s trying to get the Communist International to over-rule the Russian party (i.e. Stalin) and reorient the worldwide Communist movement back to the vision that they signed up for in 1919. These five men, of course, go on to have remarkably bizarre influence on the course of history (in their own ways).

(If this sounds like I’ve abandoned the previous project I mentioned, that’s not entirely the case, but I am feeling very meh about my first chapter draft and feel like I should have more than one project going to keep me sane.)

And, so, I continue to research. One additional, fascinating tidbit I came across. Looking into Ben Gitlow’s papers, some of which are deposited at the University of North Carolina, I checked for Lore’s name in correspondence files from the 1930’s. Now, Gitlow was particularly harsh about turning on Lore in 1925. “We were pretty mean and heartless about Lore,” he confessed years later. “But at the time we did not even question the ethics of hounding an innocent scapegoat at the behest of the Comintern leaders,” he wrote in 1939.

The Gitlow archive has one letter from Lore, dated October 1, 1937:

Dear Comrade Gitlow,

Would you be kind enough to mimeograph 300 “Lecture Subjects” as included, at your earliest convenience.

Thanks, greetings,

Ludwig Lore

Fascinating, if not terribly illuminating. A week ago, I would have assumed neither man ever spoke to each other after 1925. Now, I wonder if Gitlow tried to recruit him to any of his own external oppositionist movements. Or if Cannon, Shachtman or Lovestone did the same. If Trotsky shared any opinions about Lore’s value to the Trotskyist movement. And how much of Lore’s contact with his erstwhile comrades was in order to helpt the Soviets keep tabs on their activities.

I’ll be fascinated to continue this research.

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“Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not want to be organized?”

The AFL and CIO merged in 1955, and union organizing–particularly measured by union win rates in NLRB elections–began a long, slow decline. Although the labor movement in New York City took an additional four years to unite, when they finally did they pioneered new organizing in the public sector and health care–pointing the way towards a labor movement that could survive Reagan and worse.

I could–and probably will–keep writing different versions of this lede. This is why I found Dave Kamper’s new piece at the Forge interesting. Its main thrust is trying to find reasons to be optimistic about the revival of the labor movement after the Teamsters’ UPS victory, and the relatively successful Amazon and Starbucks organizing. It’s mostly fine; a reasonable amount of navel-gazing, nostalgia and a bit of scientific reasoning of a middle aged guy who’s dedicated his life to the theory that we can’t have political or social democracy without a strong labor movement and worked his ass off towards that end. Which is to say, it’s the sort of thing I would have written if I could have been arsed.

Instead, since I’m trying to make my bones as an historian, this pull quote from George Meany–a very commonly cited one–caught my interest:

Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not want to be organized? . . . Frankly, I used to worry about the membership, about the size of the membership. But quite a few years ago, I just stopped worrying about it, because to me, it doesn’t make any difference.

Along with Kamper’s interpretation:

I kept coming across that quote, and the more I looked at it the more I was sure that it was a misquote or taken out of context or he was joking or that there was some kind of mitigating factor, because surely, the titular leader of the American labor movement couldn’t have thought that, right? I ended up spending a few hours at the Minneapolis Public Library, where I pulled the microfilm of that interview in US News and World Report.

It wasn’t a misquote. It wasn’t taken out of context. It really was the President of the AFL-CIO saying he didn’t care about organizing members. Oh. My. God.

I think Kamper’s take on Meany, in this instance, lacks context. Unions were organizing. Lane Windham’s Knocking on Labor’s Door effectively validates the labor movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s for doing the work that we half-century-later armchair quarterbacks accuse Meany et. al. of abandoning. It’s just that union organizing drives–among southern workers, women and workers of color– crashed against an epic union-busting drive that we could only recognize with decades of hindsight.

Meany’s quote is a case of sour grapes, as unions began to lose more NLRB elections. Of course, the reason is that employers began to stretch the bounds of the law before realizing they could break it with impunity. Meany, who came of age in a time where people chose to be in a union and fought for it found it galling that workers would vote against a union.

And since unions were still delivering decent contracts for their members, he said “fie on them” to workers who would vote against unionization. But unions never stopped organizing. Meany’s words had no chilling effect. Unions just continued to organize and get clobbered until some got more strategic about campaign planning and targeting in the mid-1980’s, culminating in the Sweeney-era “organize or die” push.

I was struck by a question that Alex Press asked at a recent CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies event (in particular, this was a panel on HERE Local 11’s 1990’s organizing revival). The gist of it was, “how much of ‘new’ organizing is really new?”

As I shake off my sense of imposter syndrome as a “labor historian,” this is a question that I am exploring.

There is a continuity of organizing strategies and tactics in the labor movement, going back over a century. But there were definitely periods of transition. At the start of the 20th century, being a union organizer was dangerous; you could get beaten, run out of town or even killed. The most skilled were basically entertainers. Before radio and TV, union rallies were events. An organizer who would entertain and educate helped gain new recruits and activists. But they also made themselves a target for the bosses by being so publicly identified. William Z. Foster changed the game with the Chicago Stockyards campaign in 1916.

Reading Barrett’s and Johanningsmeier’s bios of him, I recognize some of my own work as an organizer. Secret meetings. Make a plan, give out assignments, assess your support. Revise the plan. Stick to the plan. Build towards a strike.

Union organizing went through another sea change when the government got involved and made rules; when there became card checks and elections to determine union support and certify and mandate union recognition and contract negotiations. All of the 1940’s, basically.

A major thread of my forthcoming history of NYC’s hotel workers unions, We Always Had a Union, is the evolution of this union from IWW & W.Z. Foster-style organizing to figuring out an organizing strategy that was not far from what Vinny Sirabella “learned.”

Union organizing evolved again through the 60’s and 70’s. Unions were responding to the hostile environment in the private sector and the make-the-rules-up-as-you-go-along early public sector. Here’s where I find Meany hilarious. He didn’t get it, and it made him mad. He hated the United Federation of Teachers’ drive for union recognition. I expect for this to be a centerpiece of a chapter of my next book, a history of the NYC labor movement from the merger until the fiscal crisis. That the organizers were moving ahead with an election when a tiny minority of the bargaining unit were dues-paying members struck him as dangerous lunacy.

“How many members you got?,” AFT organizer Dave Selden remembers the AFL-CIO chief querying, on the eve of a strike threat in 1960. “Five thousand,” Selden lies. “How many teachers are there?” the old Bronx plumber demands. “Forty thousand,” Selden again lies (There were probably more than 45,000).

“They won’t pay dues to you, but they’ll strike for you. Is that it?” Meany thunders. Meany turns to the president of the NYC Central Labor Council, a natural leader who backed almost any union that got into a jam, the legendary Harry Van Arsdale Jr. “For Christ’s sake, Harry. Can’t someone blow the whistle on these guys?”

Of course, around this same time, even private sector union organizers began to promise, “You won’t pay any dues until we get a contract,” in order to recruit supporters in such a hostile environment.

The next big shift is that one that more of us are familiar with: the late 80’s, comprehensive campaigns, strategic research, Kate Bronfenbrenner’s research, etc. Pretty well-trod ground, in terms of historiography. We’re definitely in a new shift in union organizing strategies now. What does it mean? Beats me. Ask Eric Blanc. I’m going to focus on slightly older history for a little bit.

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Making Sense of the 1950’s Teamsters

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in 1955, with big talk and high hopes for organizing the remaining non-union strongholds in the nation’s economy. Three years later, they were laying off organizers on staff and settling into a routine, on the way to a long, slow decline towards a loss of power, influence and bargaining power.

In New York City, though, the newly merged federation approached new union organizing with something like messianic zeal–pioneering new union organizing in the public sector and in health care, and fighting for a labor college and statewide system of socialized medicine–at least until the fiscal crisis.

That broad sweep of history is, in a nutshell, what I’m researching for my next possible book project: a history of the New York City labor movement from the merger until the fiscal crisis. First, though, the AFL and CIO needed to merge. It took the two local labor councils, the AFL’s Central Trades and Labor Council and the CIO’s Industrial Union Council, four years after Meany and Reuther clasped hands to merge at the local level. A lot of the delay had to do with the Teamsters union. Trawling the New York Times archives, it looks like the Powers That Be were convinced that a united labor movement that included a Teamsters union that could enforce  solidarity picket lines at any company that needed deliveries by truck would be “too powerful.” They began demonizing the Teamsters and Jimmy Hoffa with lurid stories of underworld connections, probably accurate stories about strong-arm tactics that involved sabotage, property destruction and a not-insignificant amount of personal violence in order to trigger Senate hearings into labor racketeering that would end with yet-another anti-union federal law in 1959.

Not that Hoffa’s a great guy. He enforced segregated union locals (at his majority white members’ request), earned the highest salary and all-expenses-paid perks, dealt his wife in on business deals with employers against whom he bargaining and generally treated the union like a business. These reasons were why the NYC CIO balked at merger, as the head of the AFL CTLC, Martin Lacey, was also the head of the local Teamsters Joint Council. Lacey was anti-Hoffa, and these years coincide with Hoffa’s power grab for the IBT presidency. In NYC, his proxy was a two-bit crook named John DioGuardi, who “organized” six or seven paper locals to beat Lacey’s re-election (the whole matter wound up stalled in court for years).

Thaddeus Russell’s Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class (Knopf, 2001) doesn’t have any of this. It is, nevertheless, a scholarly and even-handed account of Hoffa as union leader that avoids the lurid “cosa nostra” Mafia bullshit and makes a good case that Hoffa, in competition with social democrat-oriented CIO unions, and pursuing pure business unionism, delivered for his members wages and benefits that were among the best for his era. David Witwer’s Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters Union (University of Illinois, 2003) probably makes a stronger case for how the Teamsters’ coercively (and violently) enforced boycotts and jurisdictional picket lines were necessary to organize industries marked by multiple small employers for which the National Labor Relations Board was mostly unhelpful, and how the sensationalized (albeit, still true) charges of “racketeering” and “union corruption” were almost always politically motivated. (He also has nothing on the Martin Lacey saga in New York.)

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The Specificity/Universality of Sinead O’Connor

To the extent that casual music fans (which is to say, most people) know her, it’s as a “one-hit wonder” whose best known song was a cover. It happened to be written by the legendary artist Prince, whose own songwriter demo of “Nothing Compares 2 U” didn’t get released from his vaults until after his untimely death, largely because her performance of it made it hers.

Sinead O’Connor was a hell of a songwriter in her own right, and a screaming banshee and pure force of nature on record and stage (I never got to see her live, alas).

The songs she wrote, including her best one, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” were brilliant, but so idiosyncratically about her that they’ve been deathly-intimidating for another artist to cover.  In that stream-of-consciousness diatribe, addressed to an un-named “you,” a poison pen letter without a standard verse-chorus-verse structure, but with a refrain that alternates between “If I treated you mean / I really didn’t mean to” and “Maybe I was mean / But I really don’t think so,” she pulls the listener in with (hardly universal!)  stanzas like

But you know how it isAnd how a pregnancy can change youI see plenty of clothes that I likeBut I won’t go anywhere nice for a whileAll I want to do is just sit hereAnd write it all down and rest for a while

and just makes you feel it, like it was your life. It is, ironically, Dylan-esque. There was a period in the late 60’s when Dylan addressed a lot of his songs to an unnamed “you.” They were also poison-pen letters: “Positively 4th Street” and “She’s Your Lover Now.” She nearly stole one of his genres! Her reward, in case you’re too young to remember, was getting booed off the stage of Madison Square Garden at a Dylan tribute concert a few weeks after she tore up Pope JP2’s picture on SNL because he covered up the Church’s child sexual abuse scandal. (Dylan fans who can afford expensive concert tickets have always been more about vibes than lyrics or intellectual interpretation.)

If blogs existed in 1992, Sinead O’Connor would have been vindicated in a matter of weeks instead of the decades it still will take for people to realize that she was a truth teller and that the corporate media once again covered up for a bunch of pedophiles.

Besides “Nothing Compares 2 u,” O’Connor always had a great instinct for other people’s songs. Her cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies” was haunting, elegiac. It helped me process Kurt Cobain’s suicide, and that record, Universal Mother, seems to be at hand for many deejays who are trying to process her death.

O’Connor took a long break from putting out records in the 00’s. Her comeback record, 2012’s brilliant How About I Be Me and You Be You, made its centerpiece another cover song. John Grant’s “Queen of Denmark” is, like Sinead O’Connor’s best-written songs, so specific that it would seem to defy being covered. It’s clearly about a simmering break-up between two gay men. A stanza like

I wanted to change the worldBut I could not even change my underwearAnd when the shit got really, really out of handI had it all the way up to my hairlineWhich keeps receding like my self-confidence

is eventually followed by

I hope you know that all I want from you is sexTo be with someone who looks smashing in athletic wearAnd if your haircut isn’t right you’ll be dismissedYou get your walking papers and you can leave now

The specificity of the anger is what makes the song somehow so universal. After the record, Sinead O’Connor apparently made the song a hallmark of her concerts; sometimes performing it as the opener, sometimes as a set-ending climax and sometimes as an encore. But, always, letting out her banshee wail for the chorus:

Why don’t you take it out on somebody else?Why don’t you bore the shit out of somebody else?Why don’t you tell somebody else that they’re selfish?A weekling, coward, a pathetic fraud?