LABOR: The Most Dangerous Man

In his 6½ action-packed years as A.F.L. representative in Europe, Irving Brown has become one of the Americans that Communists know best—and hate most. In Belgium Communists call him “the grey eminence of the yellow international,” in Italy “Scarface, the notorious American fascist racketeer,” in Prague “the chief union splitter.” Tass has accused him of everything from forging Cominform documents to shipping German virgins to Africa “to amuse young Americans.”* Last week Brown was in Washington reporting to A.F.L. leaders on how he had earned such Red epithets.

After World War II, disciplined Communist cadres, posing as patriots, took over much of the European labor movement. Anti-Communists were trapped, without power or money, in the big, Red-led unions. The Soviet-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions (W.F.T.U.) ensnared Britain’s Trades Union Congress and the U.S.’s C.I.O., and paralyzed their international operations.

Reinforced Concrete. Scorning the W.F.T.U., the A.F.L.’s Free Trade Union Committee (formed in 1944) decided to help rebuild democratic unions in Europe. It handed the Herculean assignment to Brown because he was a well-educated (N.Y.U., Columbia) A.F.L. organizer with a rugged constitution and lots of hustle. Since November 1945, when he arrived in Paris, Brown has learned to speak French, German and Italian, traveled over 500,000 miles, visited 26 countries, dealt with thousands of labor leaders from Karachi to Helsinki.

“Our job,” says Brown, “was to be the reinforcing rods in the concrete. Whereever we could find men who would fight, we had to give them the knowledge that they were not fighting alone.” The full story of Brown’s accomplishments will stay off the record for a long time, but it is already clear that he and the A.F.L.:

¶ Supplied the moral and financial backing to the anti-Communist movements which broke the French and Italian Red-led general strikes of 1947.

¶ Made possible the anti-Communist trade-union federations’ Force Ouvrière in France and C.I.S.L. in Italy. Says André Lafond, a key secretary of F.O.:”‘In the history of European labor, Brown will be more important than all the diplomats put together.”

¶ Sponsored the anti-Communist coalition of free trade unions in Greece.

¶ Helped form the Mediterranean Port Committee, which wrested control of French, Italian and Greek ports from the Communists.

Man at Work. True stories of Brown at work are becoming legends of European labor. In the darkened Lamand Café, in the French mining center of Lens, Brown met in 1946 with six miners. Their leader, tough, 76-year-old Henri Mailly, wore a bullet-holed beret, newly ventilated by a Communist potshot. Said Mailly: “The Communists have everything, even our old union building. But we are willing to fight.” An organization campaign was laid that might, with a key man in each pit.

Within a year, Mailly & Co. had one-third of the miners. Today they have half, and a new brick union hall. Says Brown: “They needed a few francs for a mimeograph machine and a full-time organizer. But most of all they needed to feel they were not alone.” By December 1947, there was enough free union momentum in France to form Force Ouvrière, and old Mailly was on hand when it was born.

Reds on the Run. The fight for the Communist-dominated Marseille docks was probably the toughest. The Soviets had issued orders to keep U.S. arms from being unloaded at French ports. They planned to use the French Communist example for an all-out world campaign.

The offensive against the Reds was led by a rugged, fiery Corsican, Pierre Ferri-Pisani, now 50. He and Brown had met in-Marseille, become friends. With Brown’s help, Ferri-Pisani found “men brave enough,” went to Communist headquarters in Marseille and delivered an ultimatum: “If there is any trouble on the docks, we will not bother with the men you send to cause it. No, within 48 hours we will ask you to pay personally.” Red bosses ran for police protection. The first Communist who tried to fire Ferri-Pisani’s men was chucked into the harbor.

The Communist campaign boomeranged completely. U.S. arms were unloaded at European ports. Says Ferri-Pisani: “Brown was decisive. He was the only one to back us before we even had a union.”

Last December, he was in Helsinki to see the Finnish metalworkers vote to quit the W.F.T.U., as top Soviet union officials looked on. The night before the vote, Koushkin, the head of the Soviet Metalworkers Union, had a drink with Brown, suggested they bury the hatchet. “O.K..” snapped Brown. “You make your revolution against Vishinsky, and I’ll make one against Acheson.” Koushkin walked away, drink unfinished.

Brown runs his far-flung operation from a seven-room, $100-a-month house in Brussels, where he lives with his Berlin-born wife Lillie, a Hunter College graduate, and their nine-year-old son. Brown talks to perhaps 75 callers in his 14-hour day, including Russian exiles, contacts inside Communist Parties, European politicians and American MSA officials. He earns $8,750 a year, runs his operation on less than $2,000 a month, has carefully doled out more than $500.000 of A.F.L. money. His staff consists of only two secretaries and a young assistant.

Partly thanks to Brown, Europe’s Communist unions are currently in serious difficulties. The new Communist line of a “popular front” with the Socialists has failed. The French Communist-run C.G.T. has lost 2,000,000 members since 1949. But the free unions have not taken advantage of the Red slump. Force Ouvrière has not picked up the ex-C.G.T. members.

“The tragedy,” Brown adds, “is that American labor does not move as a united force.” The A.F.L. and C.I.O. are battling each other as bitterly in Europe as they are in the U.S.

Victor Reuther, C.I.O. representative in Europe since early 1951, argues that the Marshall Plan benefited only the employers; Brown insists that without Marshall Plan aid, all Europe would be Communist today. Reuther hammers on his “pork chops are all that count” line; Brown says “the idea that poverty breeds Communism is a dangerous oversimplification.” With his far greater experience, Brown finds Reuther “naive.” Reuther retorts that “Europeans are tired of little men who run around with little black bags.”

Brown’s favorite story concerns a Paris cabbie who gave him a long Communist harangue, climaxed by the cry: “And the most dangerous man in all France is the American spy, Irving Brown!” Brown grabbed the cabbie by his lapels and hissed: “Moi, mon enfant, moi, je suis Irving Brown.” The cabbie went dead white, as if he had seen the devil, and was so weak he could not put out his hand for the taxi fare. Last week in Washington, Irving Brown was filling his little black bag with plans for a lot more anti-Communist deviltry.

* Westbrook Pegler’s line against Brown parallels the Communists’. Says Pegler: “L’Humanité [the French Communist daily] is right in saying that Brown is an agent of the American Government. He certainly is … [Brown] is strictly an independent, irresponsible conspirator fomenting more trouble in the internal politics of nations already troubled by disunity.” Pegler’s Dec. 31, 1951 column approvingly carried seven paragraphs of quotations from a L’Humanité attack on Brown.