American Labor Party

AMERICAN LABOR PARTY. Throughout its eighteen-year life span, the American Labor Party (ALP) pushed New York state politics to the Left. With the ALP decline, the rightward, hawkish trends within the political wing of the labor movement triumphed.

In April 1936, David Dubinsky, President of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, and Alex Rose, the President of the Hatters Union, led an amalgam of Socialist Party-related trade unions and fraternal organizations to encourage these traditionally Socialist-voting constituencies to comfortably cast their ballots for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Endorsing only Roosevelt for President and Herbert Lehman for Governor, the newly launched ALP easily exceeded its goal. In a few short months, the party’s enthusiastic electioneering garnered 274,925 votes for Roosevelt and Lehman, a tally much larger than expected. These votes came mostly from New York City’s working-class Jewish neighborhoods, where residents in large numbers traditionally voted for the Socialist Party.

The ALP advanced a Left-leaning, if non-socialist program. Its 1937 Declaration of Principles stipulated that there should be “a sufficiently planned utilization of the natural economy so that coal, oil, timber, water, and other natural resources that belong to the American people . . . shall be protected from predatory interests.” In practice, however, the ALP subordinated outright socialist appeals to a fierce devotion to the New Deal. What most distinguished the ALP from the Democratic Party was its blatantly class-oriented stance: its name contained the word “Labor,” and it used the slogan “Don’t Scab at the Ballot Box.”

The Communist Party quickly grasped that the American Labor Party’s program coincided with the rise of the Popular Front, a worldwide movement focused on coalescing Communists, Socialists, and liberals to halt the advance of fascism. New York State’s Communist Party made building the ALP its electoral priority. Led by Vito Marcantonio, the seven-term radical who represented East Harlem in the US Congress, a Communist-influenced wing steadily gained ascendancy. In 1944, after a hard-fought primary, a record-breaking turnout of ALP’s enrollees voted for the Left caucus. Along with calls for cooperation with the Soviet Union in a struggle against fascism and, later, against McCarthyism, the ALP championed the interests of Jewish Americans, Italian Americans, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and other minorities. Supporters of the ALP’s defeated social-democratic wing launched the militantly anti-Communist Liberal Party, predominantly middle class but backed by several major unions and especially Dubinsky’s ILGWU.

The American Labor Party proved critical to the electoral successes of New York City’s two most important progressive leaders, Fiorello La Guardia and Marcantonio. Both remained ALP members from its inception until long after its heyday. In the 1937 mayoral race, the ALP polled 482,790 mayoral votes for La Guardia, more than 36 percent of his vote, a percent it duplicated in La Guardia’s third run for office in 1941. In tandem with the results for his mentor, the new party provided almost 45 percent of Marcantonio’s votes for his 1938 re-election to Congress. Without the ALP, La Guardia almost certainly would have been a one-term mayor, the fate of all previous reform mayors. At a time when almost every other major American city continued to be ruled by a political machine, the ALP allowed progressive municipal politics to flourish in New York City.

The ALP’s main political bases continued to be working-class Jewish neighborhoods, where it often achieved second-party status, and African American communities. Only in El Barrio, East Harlem’s Puerto Rican community, did the ALP become the majority party. In part because of LaGuardia and Marcantonio’s ALP affiliation, Italian Americans, after Jewish Americans, cast the highest percentage of ALP voters among New York City’s many European-derived nationalities. In the nine elections from 1938 to 1949, the ALP contested citywide, it averaged 13 percent of the vote, from a low of 9.6 percent during the fractious period of the German-Soviet Nonintervention Pact (1939 to 1941) to 21 percent for La Guardia’s first-term mayoral election in 1936. Although the ALP had pockets of support in various upstate cities, in the six statewide elections it contested between 1938 and 1948, the ALP averaged only 3.1 percent of the total statewide vote. The boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and, to a much lesser degree, Queens, contained districts where the ALP held the balance of power. The ALP’s adroit leadership leveraged these advantages.

The American Labor Party did not fully operate as an independent party. In its earliest years, a faction that had split away from the Socialist Party and renamed itself the Social Democratic Federation wielded power. By1943, the Communist Party had become the dominant force. This development proved to be an advantage because the fledgling party had access to the resources of its much stronger sponsor. While absorbed in election campaigns, the ALP also proved to be a fulcrum for a powerful Popular Front movement that involved a wide range of organizations.

The American Labor Party’s effectiveness depended on the peculiarities of New York State’s electoral system. New York allowed for “cross endorsement,” which permitted a candidate to enter two or more primary elections, thereby creating the possibility of forming “fusion tickets.” The ALP mostly proffered its endorsements to the Democratic Party candidates, but on occasion, also to the Republican Party’s candidates. When both major parties forwarded unacceptable candidates, the ALP ran candidates solely under its banner. This arrangement placed enormous pressure, especially on the Democratic Party, to nominate bona fide liberal candidates. On occasion, running solely on its own ballot line, the ALP elected candidates to the state and, once, to the state senate. In addition to Marcantonio, in a special election in 1948, Leo Isacson, running solely on the ALP line, won a congressional district in the East Bronx. He was defeated in the general election by a candidate carrying the endorsement of nearly every other party.

The domestic Cold War led to the near-total abolition of New York State’s relatively progressive election laws. In 1947, the State Legislature passed the Wilson-Pakula Act that abolished the “open” primary. Thus, in 1948, Marcantonio, who routinely won one of the major party primaries and in 1942 and 1944 won both major-party primaries, could now run only on the American Labor Party ticket. Despite this enormous barrier, Marcantonio prevailed in 1948 against a Democratic and a Republican-Liberal candidate. Marcantonio’s remarkable victory was overturned in 1950 by three parties ganging up on him. Tripartite cross-endorsements had earlier defeated Isacson and Benjamin Davis.

Marcantonio’s percentage of the 1950 vote actually increased over 1948: great gains were registered in African American neighborhoods and the solid support from El Barrio and Italian Harlem gave him 60 percent of East Harlem’s vote. However, his vote was much less in Yorkville, a primarily German- and Irish American area. Marcantonio was defeated in 1950 by a machine-picked Democrat, James Donavan, running as a fusion candidate on the Democratic, Republican, and Liberal parties’ lines.
The ALP, it its time, made possible a progressive municipal politics in New York City. La Guardia creatively and forcefully used this approach to obtain a fortune in federal funds with which to construct an unrivaled social-democratic metropolis.

Starting from 1933, New York City Council elections had been conducted by a complex proportional-representation system that replaced winner-take-all districts with five borough-wide (county-wide) districts that allocated a number of candidates equal to every 75,000 votes cast. Voters could select candidates by preference, regardless of party designation. This option enabled voters to support third-party candidates without having their votes help elect candidates they opposed. Until the abolition of proportional representation in 1947, the ALP always elected candidates to the New York City Council. More surprisingly, this system enabled the election of two Communists: Brooklyn’s Peter Cacchione and Manhattan’s Benjamin Davis, Jr., tripartite endorsed candidates for three terms and two terms respectively.

Cross-endorsements, where parties endorsed one another’s candidates, also enabled the American Labor Party to compel minority political representation. Oscar Garcia Rivera, the first Puerto Rican officeholder in the continental United States, initially ran as a Republican, then accepted the endorsement of the ALP. Thereby, he was elected to the state assembly in 1937 from El Barrio. The ALP’s nomination also played a decisive role in Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., becoming New York City’s first African American city councilman in 1941 and its first congressional representative in 1944. In 1949, the ALP nominated Ewart Guinier, an African American union officer, as its candidate for Manhattan Borough President. While Guinier was not elected to the office, his substantial vote compelled the Democratic Party and, soon after, the Republican Party, to nominate and ultimately to elect African Americans for these offices.

In the postwar period, the press increasingly identified the ALP as “Communist dominated” and “Communist led.” Registered ALP voters received solicitations asking them to disavow their connections with a Communist front. Increasingly, mobs and small groups used violence against its clubs, street corner rallies, and other activities. In 1945, the ALP could boast having 145 clubs scattered through the city. By collateral repressive measures, trade union locals and fraternal organizations that had provided backing for the party were damaged or dismantled wholesale. From 1948 to 1950, the ALP’s voter enrollment fell by one-half. Nonetheless, in 1949, in a four-candidate field Marcantonio conducted a remarkable campaign as mayoral candidate, garnering nearly 15 percent of the vote citywide.

By the early 1950s, Communist Party leaders had mistakenly concluded that fascism was imminent and that the very continuation of the ALP exposed Party cadre to further legal jeopardy. In 1953, the Party therefore redirected members’ energies into the reform wing of the Democratic Party and other liberal organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples and the American Jewish Congress. A loyal group around Marcantonio persisted, but their efforts proved futile. In 1954, the ALP’s candidate for governor polled 3,000 votes fewer than the 50,000 votes necessary to maintain ballot status. On 7 October 1956, at the dawn of a historic revival of the American Left, the New York State Legislature passed a bill forbidding a political party from using “American” in its name, thereby preventing the ALP’s resuscitation.

Bayor, Ronald. Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians of New York. Second Edition. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2019.

Meyer, Gerald. Vito Marcantonio, Radical Politician. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

Shefter, Martin. “Political Incorporations and Extrusion of the Left: Politics and Social Forces in New York City.” Studies in American Political Development. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.

Waltzer, Kenneth Alan. “The American Labor Party: Third Party Politics in New Deal–Cold War New York, 1936–1954.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1977.