Matthew Woll

Woll also campaigned heavily for the five-day work week, paid vacations and holidays, and health and welfare benefits.

In 1924, when AFL president Samuel Gompers died, Woll was widely expected to take the reins of the organization.

In the early 1930s, Woll helped found and then headed up the AFL's National Committee for Modification of the Volstead Act, an organization seeking repeal of Prohibition.

The work called for federal policies which would encourage a shift from profits to wages in order to expand consumer purchasing power.

Woll believed, as had his mentor and friend, Samuel Gompers, that labor's best hope for survival lay in forging a labor-management entente.

After the war, Woll served as a consultant to the United Nations on trade union issues, and was instrumental in working with Eleanor Roosevelt to incorporate language specifically protecting the right to form and/or join a union into Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

For example, at the AFL-CIO convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1935, Woll bitterly denounced the Wagner Act as a betrayal of the legacy of Samuel Gompers.

A staunch anti-communist, Woll eventually became a confidant of AFL president Samuel Gompers and other like-minded labor leaders such as William Green of the United Mine Workers of America.

Green in particular relied heavily on Woll for advice and policy guidance during his term as president of the AFL.

Woll also became a mentor to Jay Lovestone, the one-time Communist who was expelled from the party only to become a leading opponent of Communism, and an influential AFL-CIO foreign policy advisor.

The Central Intelligence Agency funneled millions of dollars through FTUC in support of American foreign policy goals.

Mild-mannered and courtly, Green strongly believed in an evangelical "Christian cooperation" worldview similar to the social gospel, in which men of good moral character would do right by one another if only they committed themselves to Christ.

They effectively played on Green's Christian idealism and fears of "godless Communism" to neutralize Communist leaders and fellow travellers throughout the labor movement and seek their ouster.