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.