Farmer-Labor Party

FARMER-LABOR PARTY. Created at a chaotic convention held in Chicago in July 1920, the Farmer-Labor Party (FLP) represented the amalgamation of the Labor Party of Illinois, sister labor parties in Connecticut, Indiana, New York, Ohio, and Utah, and radical elements in the Committee of Forty-Eight, a progressive organization containing the remnants of the “Bull Moose” Progressive Party of Theodore Roosevelt. Positioned close to the Socialist Party on many issues, the FLP seemed to many socialists or former socialists the way forward in American politics. In 1924 Robert M. La Follette’s Progressive ticket would nearly complete the absorption of the badly fading socialist movement into nonsocialist third-party politics. Meanwhile, the farmer-labor movement proved to be the US Communists’ first venture, however unsuccessful, into mass electoral maneuvers.

The powerful Chicago Federation of Labor, with the nonsocialist but radical John Fitzpatrick (1871–1946) in its lead, and the associated Illinois State Federation of Labor, directed by its president, John H. Walker (1872–1955), supplied the FLP its strongest support. In November 1919 the Illinois laborites hosted a convention in Chicago where eight hundred delegates representing thirty-four states and the District of Columbia created the National Labor Party. Reflecting Fitzpatrick’s influence, the new party selected Chicago as its headquarters and made plans to hold a convention in that city in July 1920 to unite with agrarian and progressive groups, draft a platform, and select a presidential ticket. The convention issued a “Declaration of Principles” that called for disarmament, expanded civil rights and civil liberties, the eight-hour day and the forty-hour week, and the nationalization of “all the basic industries.”

Similarly, the Committee of Forty-Eight was organized in Saint Louis about a month after the Chicago labor party convention. At that time, the 300 delegates in attendance agreed on a platform advocating public ownership of transportation, public utilities, and natural resources; a tax policy designed to force idle land into use; and full and equal civil, political, and legal rights for all, regardless of sex or color. Moreover, the Forty-Eighters also called for the creation of a new, broadly based national party and made plans to meet in Chicago in July 1920 as well.

Though the expressed goal of the two groups, meeting separately but advocating amalgamation, was cooperation and joint action, the relationship between them was tense from the start, and there was mutual suspicion. Some leaders of the Committee of Forty-Eight feared that the new party would be dominated by labor elements who advocated excessive nationalization of the economy. Ultimately, a number of Forty-Eighters bolted their own convention and affiliated with the National Labor Party. The delegates reconstituted themselves as the FLP, although only a few agrarian organizations, including the Nonpartisan League, endorsed the new party. Moreover, the party was not affiliated with the recently organized Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota and other similar groups. Initially, most of the delegates favored La Follette for president. Ultimately, the Wisconsin senator refused the nomination, on the grounds that the platform was too radical, and on the second ballot delegates turned to Parley P. Christensen (1869–1954), a little-known Utah lawyer who had chaired the Forty-Eight convention, to serve as the presidential candidate. Though unknown nationally, Christensen had a long career in Utah politics. Beginning as a Republican, he gradually broke with the party leadership over the issue of political reform and affiliated with the Progressive Party in 1912. After service in the Utah state legislature, where he championed a number of progressive measures, Christensen helped form the Utah Labor Party in 1919. He had been active as an attorney defending members of the Industrial Workers of the World detained at Camp Douglas, Utah, during the war, and as the legal counsel for the streetcar workers’ local in Salt Lake City. Christensen’s ties to the labor movement brought him to the attention of the Justice Department, which had him under surveillance prior to his nomination and throughout the campaign.

Though hampered by a lack of funds, few organizers, and the competition of Eugene V. Debs’s presidential campaign from prison, Christensen ran a strong campaign calling for large-scale nationalization of the US economy, amnesty for political prisoners, especially Eugene Debs, expanded civil rights for blacks, extension of civil liberties, and recognition of the Soviet Union. His running mate, Max S. Hayes (1866–1945), further emphasized the socialist presence in the campaign: longtime leader of Cleveland and American Federation of Labor socialists, Hayes had broken with the party over the war issue but remained close to most of its positions. Gathering more than a quarter-million votes in eighteen states, the FLP appeared on its way to becoming a major force on the American Left. Moreover, the spread of the Non-Partisan League movement in the Dakotas reinforced the argument for a farmer-labor coalition.

After the 1920 campaign, the FLP captured the attention of American Communists and presented them with an interesting challenge. American Communists lived in a “sort of clandestine contemplation,” largely foreign-born in composition and isolated from the labor movement. In the mid 1920s, following the Leninist line to affiliate with broader labor-based groupings, Communist Party leaders saw the FLP as representing such an opportunity. By 1923, FLP strength rested primarily among radical elements in the Northwest, not in Chicago, and while Fitzpatrick was the party spokesman, he failed to realize how radicalized the party membership among agrarian and labor elements in the West and Northwest had become, and that he had little influence in highly autonomous FLP groups across the country. These Farmer-Laborites were sympathetic to Communist viewpoints, and especially favored developments in the Soviet Union.

Communists, increasingly eager for influence in farm regions, had two major centers of activity. In the state of Washington, the farmer-labor movement drew upon long-standing Left traditions, in the Dakotas upon highly placed figures in the Non-Partisan League, in Minnesota upon the Finnish American “stump farmers” blacklisted out of the mines, and in sections of Montana upon a genuinely charismatic Communist leader of farmers, three-hundred-pound Charles “Red Flag” Taylor (1884–1967). A veteran of Montana’s Non-Partisan League, Taylor built his weekly Producers News from Sheridan County into one of the best Left papers in the United States, captured the local Republican Party through the Non-Partisan League, and with his fellow leaders joined the Communist Party but hid his membership for several years, serving as a Republican state senator in 1922. Taylor wielded great influence as an editor, agitator, and organizer.

In March 1923 John Fitzpatrick issued a call for a convention to meet in Chicago in July to build “a broad alliance of workers and farmers.” Fitzpatrick himself, a longtime friend of William Z. Foster in the Chicago Federation of Labor, did not necessarily object to the Communist presence in the coalition, and that presence offered American Communists their most respectable opening hitherto. The Socialist Party’s own reservations that the assembled forces were too weak to launch a new major party caused them to hold back and ultimately persuaded Fitzpatrick that a precipitous move would be unwise. By this time, however, most delegates—including, but not restricted to, Communists—had decided on a new electoral policy. “Mother” Jones, among other notables, addressed the gathering. Fitzpatrick’s group split—the Federated Farmer-Labor Party was formed—and not long after the meeting, many organizations pulled back. The Communist-oriented Federated Farmer Labor Party virtually dissolved in the face of the La Follette candidacy.

The FLP, still in Fitzpatrick’s control, supported La Follette’s Progressive Party candidacy, as did the Socialist Party. And in some states, including Utah, the FLP and the Socialist Party worked together, running joint tickets for state and local office. After the disappointing outcome of the La Follette candidacy and La Follette’s death in 1925, the FLP shifted its headquarters to Ogden, Utah, and gradually died out in the late 1920s. Charlie Taylor, along with a handful of others, continued to run, sometimes successfully, on its party line until the end of the decade.

Chicago Federation of Labor Records, 1890-1983. Chicago History Museum. https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/collections/show/230

Dyson, Lowell K. Red Harvest: The Communist Party and American Farmers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Shapiro, Stanley P. “Hand and Brain: The Farmer-Labor Party of 1920.” PhD diss., University of California,-Berkeley, 1967.

Tobin, Eugene M. Organize or Perish: America’s Independent Progressives, 1913–1933. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986.

Weinstein, James. The Decline of Socialism in America, 1919–1925. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967.