American Labour’s Cold War Abroad: From Deep Freeze to Détente, 1945-1970 by Anthony Carew: A Review Essay

With Anthony Carew’s new book, we are much closer to having a definitive empirical history of US Labor’s foreign policy operations across this 25-year period, including the AFL’s, the CIO’s, and the AFL-CIO’s foreign operations between 1945 and 1970. Based on extensive archival research and personal interviews by a careful and extremely meticulous scholar, we now have more details than all-but-a-few specialists may want to know. While not the first book to cover this subject, nor particular aspects of this subject, Carew’s intervention adds greatly to what we know and, in a number of ways, re-establishes the groundwork from which future works on this subject must build.