Labor Party

LABOR PARTY. A vision of a broad front led by the Left, the hope for a “Labor Party” remained recurrently an issue and source of deep controversy from the early 1870s onward. During the era of the First International, the Lassallean wing, especially notable in Chicago, seized on the labor-party concept as means to reach the masses. The Workingmen’s Party of Illinois, scarcely successful in electoral terms, became a medium for Chicago German-Americans to launch a local socialist press and begin the formation of socialist-led unions. In New York, political survivors of the anti-Marx faction threw themselves into the Industrial Workingman’s Party mayoral campaign of 1874. Other local groups with socialist influence organized in Newark, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia. After the formal dissolution of the International and a brief flurry of electoral success followed by many failures, socialists supported the Greenback Labor Party of 1880. Success proved fleeting and brought political fragmentation upon themselves.

Nevertheless, socialists eagerly joined with local labor-party efforts in 1886–1888. In many places, they posted real (if temporary) electoral advances and established a working relationship with non-socialist labor activists. The United Labor Party campaign by Henry George in New York was the most spectacular and one of the most successful. By the end of the decade, the movement had disintegrated, and labor political activity mainly reverted to the two-party system. Bitterly disillusioned with this experience, socialists for the most part (with temporary exceptions, as in Illinois of the early 1890s) opted out of non-socialist third-party experiments. Populism, however, attracted many who would become socialists by way of reform movements.

The formation of the Socialist Party in 1901 sealed this rejection of non-socialist parties for a considerable period. Individual local or regional figures defected to labor party movements. But only once—in 1910–1912, when the American Federation of Labor seemed to approach an outright endorsement of a labor party—did prominent socialists (including A. M. Simons and Robert Hunter) suggest the option of sinking socialist support into a broader movement. Party loyalists, Eugene Debs included, opposed this policy as political betrayal. The subsequent right-ward shift of the American Federation of Labor ended the controversy. Only with the virtual collapse of the Socialist Party following the 1919 split did many socialists (acting as individuals) support a Farmer-Labor ticket, with erstwhile Cleveland socialist editor Max Hayes as vice-presidential candidate.

During the 1920s, Communists reluctant to abandon their expectations of insurrection were brought into line by Lenin and by Comintern representatives such as John Pepper (J. Pogeny), whose For a Labor Party (1922 and 1923) articulated a new official position. Yet this support for a prospective labor party remained abstract, as coalitions of labor reformers and radical intellectuals proved unable to create a new political movement. Only during 1932–1936 did the labor party prospect once again look hopeful, as unionists disillusioned with Franklin D. Roosevelt passed called for an independent labor ticket. In this interim, Communists and many independent radicals expressed great hope for such a venture.

The list of towns where local labor or farmer-labor parties fielded candidates for office in the early 1930s includes Cambridge, New Bedford, and Springfield, Massachusetts; Berlin and Lincoln, New Hampshire; Danbury and Hartford, Connecticut; Buffalo and New York City, New York; Allentown, Philadelphia, and the Beaver Valley of Pennsylvania; Akron, Canton, and Toledo, Ohio; Detroit, Hamtramck, and Port Huron, Michigan; Chicago and Hillsboro, Illinois; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Everett and Gold Bar, Washington; and San Francisco, California.

In addition, in at least ten other communities central labor unions endorsed the idea of a labor party, as did the state federations of labor in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey, and Wisconsin. More than 150 Connecticut union locals endorsed the formation of a labor party, as did the Maine Textile Council. In Indiana the Gibson County Central Labor Union won the support of nine union locals and the Kokomo Central Labor Union for the formation of a local labor party. In 1935, fourteen trade unions and farm organizations in South Dakota founded a state Farmer-Labor party. National unions such as the United Textile Workers, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the American Newspaper Guild endorsed the formation of an independent labor party, as did the Southern Tenant Farmers Union.

At the 1935 convention of the American Federation of Labor no less than thirteen national unions submitted proposals for the endorsement of a labor party. Indeed, the labor party resolution almost passed, with a vote of 104 (including a majority of delegates representing central labor unions and state federations of labor) to 108 against the resolution.

However, Roosevelt’s deft engagement of reform issues in the 1936 campaign, and the enthusiasm of ethnic constituencies for him, doomed the labor party effort. Communist complicity—through support for the American Labor Party, an indirect support for Roosevelt, and a mere half-step from the two-party system—seemed to end all serious prospects. Some observers, including Trotskyists, hoped that John L. Lewis, turning against Roosevelt’s 1940 reelection bid, might lead a new labor party. Lewis instead supported Wendell Willkie. Thereafter, as Communists lobbied within the Democratic Party or attempted to create a trans-class alternative (Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party), discussion of a labor party became fanciful and remained, in sloganeering terms, largely to the Trotskyists.

By the 1970s–1980s, the discussion of a labor party had become an occasional warning by individual labor leaders to a Democratic party jettisoning its New Deal commitments, with only a relative few seriously arguing the point. Tony Mazzocchi, sometime high official and perennial influence within the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, led the formation of Labor Party Advocates in 1991, endorsed by several large unions. In 1996 the Labor Party held its first national convention, endorsed by the United Mine Workers, Longshoremen, American Federation of Government Employees and the California Nurses Union, in what had become the most serious effort since the 1940s to build such a movement. That effort faded amidst conflicts over the strategy of breaking with the Democratic Party or supporting progressive Democrats. After the 2000 elections, but most especially after the death of founder Tony Mazzocchi in 2002, the prospects seem muddled by the more successful efforts of the Working Families Party in several states to endorse selective Democrats while creating the foundation for a third-party movement.

Bernstein, Samuel. The First International in America. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1962.

Davin, Eric Leif and Staughton Lynd. “Picket Line and Ballot Box: The Forgotten Legacy of the Labor Party Movement, 1932-1936,” Radical History Review, #22, Winter, 1979-1980, and DavinBooks, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2018.

Davin, Eric Leif. “The Very Last Hurrah: The Defeat of the Labor Party Idea, 1934-36,” in Staughton Lynd, Ed. “We Are All Leaders” The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.

Kipnis, Ira. The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952.

Pepper, John. For a Labor Party: Recent Revolutionary Changes in American Politics. Chicago: Workers Party of America, 1923.