This chapter focuses on the strong support Poland’s Solidarity movement received from the USA’s largest trade union, the AFL-CIO. At least partly, this chapter shows, the AFL-CIO’s strong advocacy for Solidarity has to be seen within US political debates triggered by the election of Ronald Reagan. In Reagan’s rhetoric, Communist totalitarianism came to denote only the most extreme form of the general threat of the modern state to silently encroach on the lives of individuals. Even as he revived the ideological Cold War, Reagan went on to reshape the social imagery underpinning it – a change that entailed curbing the power of organized labor. Against this background, Solidarity fascinated the AFL-CIO not primarily as an anti-Communist movement, but as a trade union. As Reagan reduced the influence of trade unions, the AFL-CIO invoked Solidarity to argue that it was not human rights as such that expressed the difference between East and West, but a particular human right – freedom of association. In the United States, the chapter demonstrates, Solidarity became a contested icon in a political and intellectual struggle initiated not by different foreign policy aims – in this field, the AFL-CIO agreed with Reagan – but by a reconfiguration of the normative and conceptual world of US politics.