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→First Term: CIO & CPUSA
On November 16, 1933, when the Roosevelt administration granted diplomatic recognition to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Soviet Union pledged itself to refrain "from interfering in any manner in the internal affairs of the United States." That occurred three weeks after the founding of the [[Comintern]] affiliated [[American League for Peace and Democracy]]. Other Comintern affiliates sprung up in the ensuing years, including the [[American Youth Congress]] in 1934 and the [[League of American Writers]] in 1935. [[NKVD]] officers traveled the country in the guise of diplomatic and consular officials, conducting [[espionage]] activities <ref>[https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/venona-soviet-espionage-and-the-american-response-1939-1957/10.gif Anonymous letter to Hoover], undated (received 7 August 1943), National Security Agency Venona Collection. "[[SEMENOV]] works in AMTORG, is robbing the whole of the war industry in America. SEMENOV has his agents in all the industrial towns of the U.S.A., in all aviation and chemical war factories and in big industries."</ref> freely and offering bribes. On 28 February 1934 Elliott Roosevelt, son of the President, and [[Anthony Fokker]] each received half a million dollars for selling fifty military aircraft to the Soviet government. <ref>John T. Flynn, ''The Roosevelt Myth'', (New York: Devin-Adair, 1948).</ref>
On November 16, 1933, when the Roosevelt administration granted diplomatic recognition to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Soviet Union pledged itself to refrain "from interfering in any manner in the internal affairs of the United States." That occurred three weeks after the founding of the [[Comintern]] affiliated [[American League for Peace and Democracy]]. Other Comintern affiliates sprung up in the ensuing years, including the [[American Youth Congress]] in 1934 and the [[League of American Writers]] in 1935. [[NKVD]] officers traveled the country in the guise of diplomatic and consular officials, conducting [[espionage]] activities <ref>[https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/venona-soviet-espionage-and-the-american-response-1939-1957/10.gif Anonymous letter to Hoover], undated (received 7 August 1943), National Security Agency Venona Collection. "[[SEMENOV]] works in AMTORG, is robbing the whole of the war industry in America. SEMENOV has his agents in all the industrial towns of the U.S.A., in all aviation and chemical war factories and in big industries."</ref> freely and offering bribes. On 28 February 1934 Elliott Roosevelt, son of the President, and [[Anthony Fokker]] each received half a million dollars for selling fifty military aircraft to the Soviet government. <ref>John T. Flynn, ''The Roosevelt Myth'', (New York: Devin-Adair, 1948).</ref>
By 1935 membership in labor unions had sunk to a low figure as a result of the depression. There were men around the President at this time that saw the tremendous possibilities of organizing labor as a political force. An industrial union is one in which all the people engaged in a single industry are included without regard to the type of skills at which they work. The industrial union was the one great instrument by which all labor could be organized and the President was urged to promote this idea as the starting point in building up a powerful political labor movement. There were three large industrial unions at that time John L. Lewis’s ¬UMW, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union of David Dubinsky and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of Sidney Hillman.
Roosevelt sent for John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers (UMW), and William Green, head of the American Federation of Labor (A.F. of L.). Green and the A. F. of L. opposed the idea of industrial unions and refused, but under the leadership of Lewis, a new group of unions was formed called the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The year 1936 was a period of furious organizing work by it among the unskilled workers of the country.
As John L. Lewis and Dubinsky and Hillman set about organizing millions of workers they were immediately up against the problem of finding skilled organizers to promote and manage the new unions.
There had been in the United States a Communist labor organization known as the Trade Union Unity League which took its instructions directly from Moscow. It is estimated that ten or fifteen thousand Communists were in these unions. In 1934, Moscow directed the Communist party in the United States to dissolve the Trade Union Unity League unions and to march the members of those unions into the American Federation of Labor. The purpose was not to advance the cause of labor unions or to get better working conditions for the members, but to use the apparatus of the labor union as an instrument of revolution. The Communist leaders saw in the rise of the CIO a better opportunity for their own revolutionary objectives than in the A. F. of L. and instructed their members to withdraw from the A. F. of L. and go into the CIO. The CIO leaders on their part saw ready to hand several thousand trained union organizers and eagerly sought and used their talents. Some of these men were known to be Communists, but the CIO leaders imagined that they could utilize their special aptitudes for organization while at the same time suppressing their revolutionary energies. They were to learn the hard way, as we shall see.
Lewis was interested in bringing into existence industrial unions like his own, in which he had always believed. Roosevelt was interested in bringing into American labor unions as many voters as possible and in capturing their leadership to be used to build up a powerful labor faction which could control the Democratic party and which he and his allies could control through the vast power of the government and the vast powers of the labor leaders, along with the immense financial resources that so great a labor movement would have. The Communists were interested in getting into key positions as union officers, statisticians, economists, etc., in order to utilize the apparatus of the unions to promote the cause of revolution.
== Second Term ==
== Second Term ==