American Workers Party

AMERICAN WORKERS PARTY. During its brief existence as a revolutionary organization (December 1933–January 1935), the American Workers Party (AWP) strove to offer a thoroughly American radicalism, one “rooted in American soil.” A. J. Muste headed the Party; radical intellectuals James Burnham, Sidney Hook, and V. F. Calverton were AWP leaders; radical writers Travers Clement, Lillian Symes, and James Rorty were Musteites; and prominent labor writers J. B. S. Hardman and Louis Budenz took charge of the group’s propaganda and publications. The AWP’s brand of radicalism was articulated mainly by Louis Budenz, the editor of the party’s weekly newspaper Labor Action. The AWP leadership and rank and file also included a number of young working-class graduates of Brookwood Labor College, which Muste headed from 1921 to 1933. The AWP succeeded the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA), a Brookwood-initiated insurgent group calling for industrial unionism. Founded in early 1929, the CPLA became actively involved in strikes and organization campaigns.

The AWP professed to be more militant than the Socialists and more practical and flexible than the Communists, its two chief rivals on the Left. Notwithstanding its “American orientation,” the AWP attracted small groups of older immigrant Finnish-, German-, Yiddish-, and Italian-speaking radicals who also stood apart from the Socialists and Communists. For example, several predominantly German bakery- and food-trades unions in New York, under the influence of longtime radical editor Ludwig Lore, were in the AWP orbit.

The American Workers Party succeeded in competing with the Socialist and the Communist parties most convincingly in the field of unemployed organizing. The Musteite National Unemployed League organized on a township- and countywide basis in areas of Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, North Carolina, and several other states, and won a number of demands from local and state relief agencies. In the Toledo Auto-Lite strike of spring 1934, Muste, Budenz, and local leaders of the Lucas County Unemployed League organized mass picketing by the unemployed in support of a striking local of the American Federation of Labor, gaining national attention when the National Guard was sent in and the union achieved recognition.

From its beginning, the AWP received overtures from the American Trotskyists, and after the latter led another victorious 1934 strike, of Minneapolis teamsters, merger talks began. In early 1935 the AWP combined with the Trotskyist Communist League of America to form the Workers’ Party of the United States. However, the core group of Musteites soon became dissatisfied with the new organization and left to go in various political directions, Muste himself into radical pacifism, Budenz and others into the Popular Front-era Communist Party, and many AWP rank and file into union work.

Bias, Thomas, Paul Le Blanc and Bryan D. Palmer, eds., US Trotskyism 1928-1965, Part I: Emergence. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019.

Breitman, George, Paul Le Blanc and Alan Wald, eds., Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

Myers, Constance. The Prophet’s Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928–1941. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977.

Robinson, Jo Ann Ooiman. Abraham Went Out: A Biography of A. J. Muste. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981.

Pamphlet. “Toward an American Revolutionary Workers Movement.” Statement, 1934. Internet Archive. ttps://archive.org/details/TowardAnAmericanRevolutionaryLaborMovementStatementOfProgrammatic/mode/2up