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Joseph Kovner (c. 1910–1994) was a 20th-century American lawyer and government official, best known as assistant general counsel to Lee Pressman for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s and 1940s and then attorney with the Justice Department.
In 1934, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale Law School, where he was editor of the Yale Law Review.
In 1936, he moved to Washington, DC, where he served as counsel on the U.S. Senate Committee on Railroad Finance.
In 1941, Kovner's name appeared in an "Investigation of Un-American Activities and Propaganda" special report as former editor of the IJA Bulletin. By 1941, his name appeared as a member of the national committee of the National Lawyers Guild. (By 1941, the IJA had merged into the NLG.)
In early 1937, prior to the outbreak of the Little Steel Strike, Kovner wrote an early report that persistent, entrenched anti-union efforts by steel industrialists throughout the 1930s rendered the CIO dependent on "decisions and administrative rulings of a reinvigorted NLRB" and on support from the courts. He noted that court decisions did not take note of a company's union status." Also, issues like "union bargaining and minority rights were not answered." Later, Kovner recalled that the CIO viewed the NLRB "as essentially doing the work of the CIO."
Later in 1937, Pressman sent Kovner and Meyer Bernstein into towns affected by the Little Steel Strike.
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In 1939, Kovner, Smith, and Bernstein helped Pressman prepare CIO testimony against the American Federation of Labor and against industrialist charges against the National Labor Relations Act.
Later, Kovner recalled:
Pressman was the power guy. He was the man who would push things on the power front. He would take a position and go forward with it, and would catch up with the law.In 1941, Kovner and Smith broke with Pressman as factionalism developed with the CIO over its policies. A central issue was CIO's foreign policy, heavily influenced by Pressman's push for pro-Soviet stance. For example, after the Hitler-Stalin Pact became public in September 1939, Pressman remained pro-Soviet, while Kovner and Smith let anti-Nazism guide them. In early years of World War II, the pact led Pressman to oppose the Lend Lease Act. Kovner and Smith also supported the policies of the CIO's new president Philip Murray, while Pressman remained loyal to founding president John L. Lewis. Smith moved to work with John Brophy, while Kovner moved over to work with Allen Haywood. Pressman replaced them with Eugene Cotton.
In 1948, Kovner appeared before the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Kovner was again in front of a Senate committee in February 1949 during debates over the CIO supported repeal of the
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In 1951, through questioning of Nathaniel Weyl by the U.S. Department of Commerce's loyalty board, Dublin Keyserling came to be questioned. Her appointment book of 1938 showed a list of attendees (at a Communist-affiliated conference by the Industrial Relations Institute in Mexico City) that included Joseph Kovner, CIO lawyer.
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(One biography of Silbergeld mentions that Joseph Kovner "was a liberal lawyer who was ousted from his government job by the House Un-American Activities Committee" who then moved to New Hampshire and only returned to Washington "when the political climate had changed enough.")
Kovner and his wife were Quakers. In Washington, they were members of the Florida Avenue Friends Meeting and the Bethesda Friends Meeting. Later, in Guilford, Maryland, they joined the Homewood Friends Meeting.
Carol Weiss King's biographer Ann Fagan Ginger describes Kovner as "very bright, able, and decent, a compassionate person amid the sharks of the New York legal world" who, leading the IJA Bulletin editors, "argued out the jurisdiction and style of their new periodical with care."
Kovner died age 84 on April 30, 1994, of congestive heart failure following pneumonia in Brooklandville near Baltimore, Maryland.
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