“Democracy from Above,” timeline 1: 1886-1983

1886 • The American Federation of Labor is founded.

1905 • A group of prominent socialists, including Norman Thomas, Upton Sinclair, and J.G. Phelps Strokes found the League for Industrial Democracy.

1919 • Jay Lovestone joins the National Organizing Committee of the Communist Party of America.

1921 • Max Shachtman joins the Workers Council, a small organization strongly critical of the Communist Party USA's closed nature, urging instead the creation of an open, non-underground party. • Worker's Council helps form the Workers Party of America.

1923 • Max Shachtman becomes a leader in the Communist Party.

1928 • In a move led by Jay Lovestone, Max Shachtman is expelled from the Communist Party for his allegiance with Leon Trotsky. He subsequently forms the Communist League of America.

1929 • Jay Lovestone is expelled from the Communist Party of America. He subsequently goes to work with the president of the United Auto Workers.

1933 • Max Shachtman writes “Communism and the Negro Question,” moving the Communist League of America into a position to support racial struggles from a Marxist perspective.

1934 • The Communist League of America assists in leading the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike. • The American Workers Party assists in leading the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike. • The Communist League of America and the American Workers Party merge to form the Workers Party of the United States. Max Shachtman begins editing the party's journal, the New International.

1935 • Due to the rise of industrial strikes, particularly in 1934, the Congress of Industrial Organizations is formed to act as a umbrella organization and coordinating body for the various industrial unions.

1936 • Members of the Workers Party of the United States begin to organize within the Socialist Party of America; the result is an offshoot organization, the Socialist Workers Party. Some of the Socialist Workers Party's demands are the unification of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress for Industrial Organizations. • Bayard Rustin joins the Young Communist League USA, the youth wing of the Communist Party USA.

1940 • A split occurs in the Socialist Workers Party concerning the line of defense for the Soviet Union and adherence to Marxist philosophy in general. Shachtman leads a faction calling for the rejection of dialectical imperialism and rejection of the Soviet Union on the grounds that it has engaged in a process of imperialism. This faction formally splits and rejoins as the Workers Party.

1941 • A faction develops inside the Workers Party around CLR James, positioning the Soviet Union as a 'state capitalist' model. This faction became increasingly involved in liberation movements concerning oppressed minorities. • Following the Communist Party USA's mandate to abandon civil rights work, Rustin leaves the party and continues working for racial equality with A. Philip Randolph. • Freedom House is founded.

1942 • Bayard Rustin helps set up the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE).

1943 • Jay Lovestone becomes the director of the International Ladies' and Garment Workers Union.

1944 • Jay Lovestone joins that American Federation of Labor's Free Trade Union Committee. • American Federation of Labor member Irving Browne goes to work in Europe for the OSS.

1945 • Irving Browne arrives in Paris and begins to organize, with American Federation of Labor support, a series of anti-communist unions.

1946 • The Workers Party launches a subsidiary organization, the Socialist Youth League.

1947 • CLR James' tendency leaves the Workers Party to rejoin the Socialist Workers Party. • Jay Lovestone becomes an affiliate of James Jesus Angleton, one of the founders in the newly- minted CIA. • Bayard Rustin initiates the Freedom Rides.

1949 • The Workers Party renames itself the Independent Socialist League. • The Independent Socialist League supports a purging of Communist Party-linked unions inside the Congress of Industrial Organizations. • Jay Lovestone and Irving Browne assist the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in receiving Marshall Plan funds for anti-communist activities.

1950 • The Congress for Cultural Freedom, a left-wing anti-communist advocacy organization, is founded in West Berlin. Members include John Dewey, Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol, and Irving Browne. Funding for the organization comes from the Ford Foundation and the CIA.

1955 • The American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merge to form the AFL-CIO. George Meany becomes president of the new organization, with A. Philip Randolph acting as vice president. Max Shachtman begins acting as an unofficial adviser to Meanyand Randolph. • The League for Industrial Democracy's Michael Harrington dispatches Tom Kahn and Rachelle Horowitz, loyal followers of Max Shachtman and members of the Socialist Youth League, to assist Bayard Rustin in organizing the Montgomery Bus Boycotts.

1956 • USAID and the Ford Foundation initiate a student-exchange program between the Catholic University of Chile and the University of Chicago's economics department, in hopes of spreading market orthodoxy in the country as a counter-point to Marxist-derived economics.

1957 • At the urging of Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. sets up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

1958 • The Independent Socialist League merges with the Socialist Party of America.

1959 • Aryeh Neier launches the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) as the youth wing of the League for Industrial Democracy, with funding provided by the AFL-CIO.

1960 • A conference organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, CORE, and the SDS leads to the creation of the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

1961 • President John F. Kennedy puts together a committee to draw up policy recommendations for Latin America; one member of the committee, Robert Alexander, was a member of the League for Industrial Democracy and had studied in Latin America on behalf on the AFL-CIO. • Based on the recommendations of the committee, President Kennedy launches the Alliance for Progress, an aid program that would seek to strengthen trade ties with the United States as a peaceful alternative to communism. The Commerce Committee for the Alliance for Progress is also established, with members representing top financial and industrial firms with Latin American interests. A Labor Advisory Committee is also established, with numerous members from the AFL-CIO taking staff positions, including Lane Kirkland. The chairman of the organization was Arthur Goldberg, a lawyer who had assisted in the 1955 merger that created the AFL-CIO.

1962 • The SDS drafts the Port Huron Statement, symbolizing the break between the Old and New Left. • Jay Lovestone and Irving Browne help set up the AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development, which, with funding from the CIA and USAID, work on promoting moderate unionism in developing countries as a counter to the spread of communism. Additional funding also came from the Alliance for Progress.

1963 • Jay Lovstone becomes the director of the AFL-CIO's International Affairs Department and begins to funnel CIA funds to anti-communist activities in Latin America. • The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a brainchild of A. Philip Randolph, takes place. Tom Kahn ghostwrites many of the speeches that day. • Tom Kahn ghostwrites A. Philip Randolph's address at the AFL-CIO's annual convention, a speech that triggered significant support from the union for the Civil Rights movement. • Tom Kahn is writes a piece on Civil Rights in the New York City intellectual magazine Commentary at the behest of Norman Podhoretz.

1964 • Michael Harrington take control of a crumbling League for Industrial Democracy, and move it into partnership with the AFL-CIO. As this organizations to organize itself along Shachtman's theories, Kahn dismisses the rhetoric of participatory democracy emanating from the SDS. He becomes executive director of the League. • Dismayed by the right-ward drift of the League for Industrial Democracy, Aryeh Neier leaves and joins the ACLU, which had been founded two decades earlier by League member Roger Baldwin

1965 • With funding from the AFL-CIO, the A. Philip Randolph Institute is founded by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. The Institute begins urging the creation of the Freedom Budget, a federal subsidization of housing, education, and an annual income. The name 'Freedom Budget' is suggested by Max Shachtman. • The Alliance for Progress begins working with the Ford Foundation in enlarging the “Chile Project,” started in 1956, to Latin America-wide enterprise.

1967 • The magazine Ramparts reveals that the CIA has been funding organization such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the AFL-CIO, either directly or through philanthropic foundations like the Ford Foundation. • In the aftermath of the Ramparts scandal, Democratic congressman Dante Fascell proposes a bill that would create an international body dedicated to 'promoting democracy' abroad, operating separately from the intelligence community. • McGeorge Bundy, a former State Department figure and president of the Ford Foundation, maneuvers the philanthropy to begin funding CORE at the expense of the more radical and anti- capitalist players in the Civil Rights movement. 1968 • Walther Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, asks Tom Kahn to write a speech for Hubert Humphrey to try to build an alliance between the candidate and the anti-war left. Humphrey declines to denounce the bombing campaigns.

1969 • Tom Kahn awards Hubert Humphrey the League for Industrial Democracy's “Man of the Year” award. Anti-war protestors were forcibly removed from the event, and many members of the League, including Michael Harrington, took steps to distance themselves from the events.

1971 • Tom Kahn joins the campaign committee for Senator Henry Jackson as a speechwriter. At the same time, Max Shachtman became an active supporter of Jackson, feeling like the candidate could provide a counter-balance to the anti-war members of the Democrat Part.

1972 • Henry Jackson loses the presidential candidacy to George McGovern. • Tom Kahn goes to work for George Meany at the AFL-CIO, alongside Lane Kirkland. • Tom Kahn's office at the AFL-CIO becomes integrated with the union's International Affairs department, headed by Irving Browne in Paris. • Following the lead of Bayard Rustin, the Socialist Party of America is reorganized as the Social Democrats USA (SD/USA). Membership heavily interlocks with the AFL-CIO and the League for Industrial Democracy. • The Coalition for Democratic Majority is launched with the intention of bringing together anti- New Left and pro-labor democrats. Much of the Coalition's membership interlocks with the SD/USA and the AFL-CIO. • With the support and training of the AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development, well-off sectors of the Chilean population set off a major trucking strike that paralyzes the country, under the leadership of socialist president Salvador Allende. A subsequent financial crisis ensues, and talks begin in military channels to remove Allende from power.

1973 • The Chilean military, led by Augusto Pinochet, conducts a coup against Allende. Once in power, Pinochet begins to crack down on left-wing activists and labor unions. At the same time, he staffs his economic department with graduates from the Alliance for Progress and Ford Foundation's graduate program, leading the country to become a laboratory for proto-neoliberal economics.

197? • Bayard Rustin joins Freedom House.

1974 • Tom Kahn begins editing the AFL-CIO's Free Trade Union News.

1976 • CIA director George H.W. Bush creates a small unit, dubbed Team B, to assess the agency's intelligence reports on the Soviet's missile build-up. One member of the Team, Paul Wolfowitz, was a former Henry Jackson staffer and a member of the SD/USA. • Team B charges that the CIA has been downplaying the threat posed by the Soviet military apparatus. Team B reorganizes as Committee on the Present Danger, a pro-war lobbying organization full of members from the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, the SD/USA, and the AFL-CIO. • Several members of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, including the SD/USA's Penn Kemble, circulate anonymous memos that President Carter's nomination to head up arms negotiations, Paul Warnke, was 'soft' on the Soviet Union.

1977 • George Agree conducts a study at Freedom House of German democracy promotion organizations, and recommends the creation of similar complex in the United States. The American Political Foundation, however, is launched, with a membership being drawn from the Democrat and Republican parties, the State Department, (including Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski), the AFL-CIO (including Lane Kirkland), and the SD/USA (including Eugenia Kemble, sister of Penn Kemble). • Bayard Rustin publishes a defense of the UNITA guerrilla movement in Commentary; it is reprinted and published by the SD/USA. • Tom Kahn creates the AFL-CIO's Free Trade Union Institute.

1978 • Based on the earlier attempts in 1967 and the report drafted by George Agree, congressmen Dante Fascell and and Donald Fraser propose the creation of an Institute for Human Rights and Freedom to operate as a “quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization.” The proposal, however, falls to catch on.

1979 • SD/USA and Committee on the Present Danger member and self-professed “AFL-CIO democrat” Jeane Kirkpatrick publishes the essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” arguing that the US should support authoritarian states if it is the nation's best interest. • Lane Kirkland becomes president of the AFL-CIO.

1980 • The AFL-CIO begins funding the Solidarity movement in Poland. Lane Kirkland successfully lobbies Zbigniew Brzezinski for political support.

1981 • Ronald Reagan is elected president, and some thirty-third members of the Committee on the Present Danger assume positions in his administration. These include SD/USA members Jeane Kirkpatrick, Elliot Abrams, and Paul Wolfowitz. • An anti-Sandinista lobbying organization, the Friends of the Democratic Center in Latin America (PRODEMCA). Numerous principles of the SD/USA, the AFL-CIO, and the Coalition for a Democratic Majority become members.

1982 • President Reagan gives a speech as Westminster Palace in London calling on for a 'global democratic revolution.' • In response to Reagan's speech, USAID provides $300,000 to the American Political Foundation to study the logistics of democracy promotion. Building on congressmen Dante Fascell and Donald Fraser's work, they propose the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), with the AFL-CIO's Free Trade Union Institute serving as a working model.

1983 • The NED is formally established, and four subsidiary bodies are either designed or adapted to serve under it: the National Democratic Institute (or NDI, aligned with the Democrat Party), the International Republican Institute (or IRI, aligned with the Republican Party), the Center for International Private Enterprise (or CIPE, aligned with the Chamber of Commerce), and the Free Trade Union Institute. Numerous SD/USA and AFL-CIO members stock the organization's body.