Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance

SOCIALIST TRADES AND LABOR ALLIANCE. The first national effort to launch an explicitly socialist labor federation in the United States, the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance (ST&LA) foreshadowed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Communist Trade Union Unity League in some of its ideals and many of its difficulties. “Dual unionism” already had a venerable history in the United States by the 1890s. The Knights of Labor, formed in 1869, and the American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded twelve years later, operated by the early 1880s in sharp competition with each other. At the local level, during the same period, socialistic German-based trades in many cities broke with conservative and often corrupt local federations to found independent citywide labor bodies. Several outright radical unions, notably the Progressive Cigar Makers, fiercely disputed the AFL’s political caution and its hostile attitude toward unskilled or nonwhite workers in particular.

By the early 1890s, a decline of the AFL and near-collapse of the badly reduced Knights of Labor had become marked. Socialist Labor Party members attempted unsuccessfully to seize leadership of the Knights after a promised, then reneged, offer of the Knights’ leaders to make socialist editor Lucien Sanial the new editor of the organization’s official journal. Socialists led New York District 49, one of the most leftwing bodies in the fading movement. Leaders of District 49, in combination with the New York Central Labor Federation, the more radical of two competing New York bodies, also the Brooklyn Socialist Labor Federation, the United Hebrew Trades, and the Newark Central Labor Federation, announced in 1895 the creation of a new labor body, ST&LA.

Convinced that American capitalism, mired in an unprecedented depression, had entered its final crisis, the new federation set out plans to mobilize the working class around unionization but also avowed socialistic aspirations. At first, it received promising signals in particular from New England, where the newly organized Boot and Shoe Workers Union and the National Union of Textile Workers (NUTW) joined the socialistic federation. The NUTW, building upon the recent strengths of the Knights in factory districts of Rhode Island and Southern East Massachusetts, swept in women workers along with men in what might be seen, in retrospect, an anticipation of highly-publicized IWW efforts in Lawrence, Massachusetts, twenty years later. Likewise, in a few sectors of the desperately impoverished needle trades around New York, militants led strikes of the most exploited workers, women and the young. With the promise of industrial unionism, the ST&LA issued more than 200 charters and enrolled between 15,000 and 30,000 members.

Notably, the ST&LA did not successfully draw defecting locals, let alone entire unions, from the AFL, notwithstanding the intense internal hostility toward Samuel Gompers that would dethrone him from the AFL presidency for a year. Neither the existing industrial unions such as brewery, coal- or metal-mining, nor openly socialistic-minded unions such as brewery and the machinists or American Railway Union) trades, could be persuaded to make the leap. In effect, the ST&LA had been limited to bodies where SLP members already played leadership roles.

The ST&LA could neither effect an industrial union movement nor successfully resist the overpowering strength of the AFL. Indeed, by 1896 the SLP had itself begun to disintegrate after the withdrawal of craft-oriented dissidents and their considerable local resources. Soon, internal conflicts shook the new union body. When the ST&LA removed its general secretary for printing advertisements of Democratic and Republican politicians, New York’s Central Labor Federation withdrew, and the labor alliance entered upon a steady decline. By the turn of the century, it had dwindled to a virtual paper organization with a militant program.

Ironically, other unionists had already embarked upon a parallel course, via the Western Federation of Miners, the Western Labor Union, and (as it was renamed in 1902) the American Labor Union, but without the overt claims to socialist politics. ST&LA activists joined with them and others in the formation of the IWW in 1905. While many Socialist Party delegates complained that the ST&LA dominated the founding convention, the ST&LA’s fourteen delegates constituted the fewest of the “big five” labor organizations present. As labor historian Paul Brissenden wrote, the ST&LA’s only domination was its “supremacy of ideas,” specifically the ideas of Daniel De Leon, in a speech delivered shortly before the opening of the founding convention. The vision of a classless society built from industrial union bodies, replacing the political state, owed much to European syndicalism but as much to De Leon’s own unique interpretations of history, shaded by anthropological beliefs in past, stateless societies.

The Daily People, organ of the Socialist Labor Party (but also, in effect, of the ST&LA), remained for a time the only English language daily supporting the new IWW. Thus the nearly defunct socialist union body seemed to have delivered its historical corpus to a more worthy entity. The failure of the IWW to make early headway and its near-fatal decline amidst the recession of 1907-08 prompted a turn against De Leon, the SLP and the ST&LA delegates. The so-called “political clause” in the IWW preamble, advocating political as well as economic organization of workers, had been drafted by Daniel De Leon, and was now seen as a stumbling bloc to the organization’s further progress. The exclusion of the ST&LA in 1908 marked the end of the SLP influence in that organization, and the renewal of the ST&LA, in a sense, through the “Detroit IWW” faction barely surviving for somewhat over a decade.

Brissenden, Paul. The IWW: A Study of American Syndicalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1919.

Buhle, Paul. Marxism in the USA. New York: Verso, 2017 edition.

Daniel De Leon: The Man and His Work. New York: New York Labor News, 1919.

Herreshoff, David. The Origins of American Marxism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967.

Constitution of the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, 1902. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/ConstitutionOfTheSocialistTradeLaborAllianceOfTheUnitedStatesAnd/page/n1/mode/2up