From the WSJ Opinion Archives
BOOKSHELF
Freedom's Labors
Lane Kirkland worked for more than his union.
He may not be much remembered today, but Lane Kirkland, president of the AFL-CIO from 1979 to 1995, was a great man, and not only as a labor leader. He was an architect of America's victory in the Cold War and a person of considerable intellect whose sense of history--and of American interests--was often well ahead of the curve.
Policy makers now urge us, post 9/11, to reduce our dependence on Saudi oil; Kirkland was making that case 30 years ago when he was second-in-command to George Meany at the AFL-CIO. President Bush has placed democracy at the center of our foreign policy; Kirkland was advancing the argument 25 years ago. The Kurds are a key to our hopes for the future of Iraq; Kirkland was supporting their claims in the 1970s. When American liberals sought an accommodation with what they thought was a rising Soviet Union in the 1980s, Kirkland chided them for appeasing our nemesis. And when Reaganites didn't know what to make of the emerging Solidarity movement in Poland, Kirkland championed its cause. It was Solidarity's strength that showed--to those willing to see--that the Soviet colossus had feet of clay.
It is impossible to overstate the momentousness of such events, and yet they have fallen into a shadowy disregard, eclipsed by recent history. What is more, Kirkland has become, Soviet-style, a nonperson to the labor movement he once led. Fortunately, Arch Puddington's engaging "Lane Kirkland: Champion of American Labor" returns this extraordinary man to the pantheon of American heroes. Mr. Puddington, who knew Kirkland and his circle, draws on his personal contacts to re-create the lost world of a grounded labor leadership that was as tightly attached to America as it was to the pursuit of social justice.
Kirkland was born in 1922 in the segregated South Carolina mill town of Newberry, where his father, a cotton merchant, was later bankrupted by the 1929 crash. A "child of the New Deal," in Mr. Puddington's phrase, Kirkland never forgot President Roosevelt's role in combating pellagra (a disease caused by malnutrition) and in bringing electricity to the rural South. Part of the "greatest generation," Kirkland learned the importance of military preparedness as a merchant seaman crossing the Atlantic in World War II, when he saw ships go down because their convoys didn't have military escorts. He came from an antiunion family, but at sea he was introduced to the labor movement and joined the Masters, Mates and Pilots Association.
After the war Kirkland took night courses at Georgetown with an eye toward a career in the foreign service. But his life was changed, Mr. Puddington notes, when he attended a lecture by William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor. Like his predecessor, Samuel Gompers, Green was a "business unionist." That is, he fought for a labor movement consistent with American values, a movement that got the best deal for workers without straying into the brambles of radicalism. Green mentioned that he was looking for staff members, and Kirkland leapt at the chance. His career in labor would last for the next 47 years.
When Kirkland took over from George Meany in 1975, deindustrialization was depleting the ranks of America's private-sector unions. Kirkland's measured arguments, and his sense of fair play, commanded respect in both union halls and the halls of power in Washington. But he was unable to reverse the globalization-driven decline in union membership. (His successors, while pushing the labor movement leftward, have had no better success.)
But there was more to Kirkland's sense of mission than numbers. He believed that labor, at its best, represented an ethic of brotherhood and solidarity that had something to teach the rest of society. He often criticized American corporations for doing business with our enemies. He argued that free societies were best for trade unionists. Thus he pushed the Reagan administration into supporting democratic reform for Central America, and he resisted the unionists who backed the proto-communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Given the choice, Kirkland insisted, "people will always choose freedom."
For all Mr. Puddington's careful chronicling, his book is far more than a biography. Among much else, he describes the coup by public-sector unions that forced Kirkland from office in the mid-1990s and thereby traces the decline of the Democratic Party. Trade unionists once bound the party to the life of workaday America. But no longer. The Democrats are now the party of the very poor and of upper-middle-class ideologues.
In 1972, Kirkland's close ally, Al Barkan, responded to George McGovern's presidential nomination by declaring: "We aren't going to let those Harvard-Berkeley Camelots take over the party." But they did. Kirkland never understood why being a liberal meant that you had to support the Sandinistas or demonize your political rivals. One can only imagine what he would make of a Democratic Party led by Howard Dean.
Mr. Siegel is the author of a forthcoming book about Rudolph Giuliani titled "Prince of the City," from Encounter Press. You can buy "Lane Kirkland" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
