A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF INDEPENDENT WORKING-CLASS POLITICS: THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR AND THIRD PARTY MOVEMENTS IN NEW YORK, CHICAGO, AND SEATTLE, 1918-1924 Andrew George Strouthous University College London University of London PhD Thesis June 1996 ProQuest Number: 10105674 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10105674 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 In memory of my parents Ellen and George, and to the arrival of my nephew Jamie CONTENTS Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. From Reconstruction to Labour Parties: The Crucible of War 17 3. False Dawn, Independent Labour Politics in New York 1919-1920 59 4. One Step Forward: The Birth of the Labor Party, Chicago 1919-1920 89 5. A Long and Winding Road: Seattle 1918-1920 132 6. New York Farmer Labor Party and Socialist Party Unite: A Suicide Pact? Independent Political Action in New York 1921-1924 169 7. Two Steps Back: Red Flag to White Flag: Chicago 1921-1924 216 8. Duncan's Last Stand: Seattle 1921-1924 248 9. Conclusion 278 Appendix 296 Bibliography 297 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many individuals and institutions provided help and support in completing this dissertation. Thanks are especially due to Rick Halpern for his generous support and encouragement that went beyond the bounds of duty. I would not have started this project without the History Department of University College London award of a Postgraduate Teaching Studentship. Thanks are due to the Heads of the History Department, past and present, for their support. I would like to thank the following for the provision of funds for research trips: The Central Research Fund, University of London; John F. Kennedy Institute, The Free University, Berlin; The Hale Bellot Fund, University College London; Arthur and Mary Burchell Fellowship, British Association of American Studies; The Royal Historical Society. Thanks are also due to Peter Alexander and Ian Birchall, who read the complete thesis, providing perceptive comments and corrections. The Seminars of Comparative Labour and Working Class History, and New Approaches to Socialist History provided a useful forum in which to discuss the ideas contained in this thesis. Lesley Bogden, Inter-Library Loans Librarian, University College London, made the Seattle Union Record possible. I would also like to thank the staff at the following: the Tamiment; the Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division; the Chicago Historical Society; the National Archives, Washington DC. I received much generous hospitality on my visits abroad. In particular I would like to thank Ronnie Geller, Pete Gillard, Phil Naylor, Jim Portnoy and Debbie Seaborn. The following provided comments and support, or just good company: Jim Cronin, Christella Vincent, Rachael Walker, Neil A. Wynn, Ruth Gaborak, Farhang Morady and Caroline O ’Reilley. Thanks to Paul Buhle, Roger Horowitz and Stanley Shapiro for papers, essays and articles. CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION This comparative study of independent working-class politics in New York, Chicago and Seattle between 1918 to 1924 is inspired by the debate over the absence of a working class party in the USA. Ever since Werner Sombart asked, "Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?" historians and social scientists have contested the answer.^ The weakness of socialism is not a problem unique to the USA. Indeed mass socialist parties are a rare phenomenon; they only exist in a few countries. Seen in this light there is nothing particularly unusual about the American situation. However Sombart was questioning the absence of a working-class party in a country he considered to 9 have an advanced working-class. ^Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism In The United States?, (White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976; orig. 1906). 2 There is an extensive range of literature concerning the absence of a working class party or third parties in general. Some like Richard Oestreicher, Urban Working Class Political Behaviour and Theories of American Electoral Politics. 1870-1940, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); and the following: Murray S. Stedman, Jr and Susan W. Stedman, Discontent at the Polls: A Study of Farmer and Labor Parties 1827-1948. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1967); C. M. Rehmus, Doris B. McLauglin, and F. H. Nesbitt (eds). Labor and American Politics. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1978), have related working class electoral behaviour to the US electoral system. Others such as Steve J. Rosenstone, Roy L.Behrand, Edward H .Lazarus, Third Parties in America: Citizen Response to Major Party Failure, (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1984) have considered the issue without a stress on working class activity to create its own party, but on the failure of third parties in general. One common theme in all these studies is the antipathy of the US INTRODUCTION electoral system to new parties, making the vote for a third party a wasted vote. It is this, rather than a lack of discontent, that for these authors explains the continuing attachment to the main parties. David J. Saposs, Left Wing Unionism: A Study of Radical Policies and Tactics, (New York: Russell and Russell,1967; orig. 1926); William English Walling, American Labor and American Democracy. Vol 1 (New York: Workers Education Bureau of America, 1926); Gary Marks, Unions in Politics: Britain. Germany and the United States in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.(Princeton. NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1986) have focused on the craft nature of the AFL as an explanation of labour’s failure or refusal to build its own party. Mink links this theme to the issue of immigration. The relationship between ethnic groups and native labour is an explanation which is one well rooted in exceptionalist historiography, and the literature is far too extensive to list here. The consequences of ethnicity for working-class political activity will be considered in the case studies that follow (Chapters three to eight). Patricia Cayo Sexton, The War on Labor and the Left. (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1991) argues against this explanation, emphasising the repressive nature of the American State and bosses. Philip Taft, Labor Politics American Style. (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1968), suggests that AFL state federations, if well organized, could look after the political and legislative needs of union members. Thus strong union organization made a third party redundant. Stanley Shapiro has concentrated on the relationship between progressives, labour and the state. The failure of progressivism to reestablish itself after the war is for him a major explanation for the non-existence of a third party. See Stanley Shapiro, "The Great War and Reform: Liberals and Labor" Labor History,12:3,(Summer 1971); Stanley Shapiro, "The Passage of Power: Labor and the New Social Order", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society,120:6 (December 1976). Jean Heffer and Jeanine Rovet, Why Is There No Socialism in the U S . (Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1988) provides a collection of essays debating the issue inside the framework of exceptionalism. More recently William E. Forbath, in his Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement, (Cambridge, MA. : Harvard University Press 1991) has claimed to have found the missing answer. The use of injunctions forced the AFL to abandon any long term political strategy of its own in favour of political patronage from the main parties. Though there is some truth in this, Forbath applies his theory to the whole of the AFL, ignoring factional and regional differences. CHAPTER ONE 7 Compared to the situation in other advanced capitalist countries, such as Britain and Germany, the political accomplishments of American organized labour were extremely limited. However, at the time of Sombart’s treatise the future of labour parties in the other two countries was by no means certain, even though by the end of the first two decades of the twentieth century, organized labour in Britain and Germany had built independent political parties. These parties were reformist parties that believed in making change by utilizing the existing political and economic system. Both parties opposed revolution and, while not particularly radical, they represented working class interests through their direct link to the organized working class. It is the absence of this type of labour party in the USA that concerns •) this dissertation. It is not the intention to consider this question in an ahistorical sense, but rather to ask "why was it in the period that followed the First World War, that US labour's attempt to establish its own party failed?" Nor is this dissertation directly concerned with the debate over "exceptionalism". It concurs with Aristide R. Zolberg’s view that "the 'exceptionalist' tradition and its mirror image,'the end of ideology' approach, are so bound up in ideological controversy that they have outlived their usefulness as intellectual frameworks suitable for contemporary research". In rejecting the exceptionalist framework it is not intended to deny that the American working-class has its own distinctive history and development. If it did not, there would be no need for this study. It is not distinctiveness that is rejected here but, to quote Zolberg, the method of evaluating "working-class formation by positing one national pattern as the theoretic norm in relation to which all others are treated as deviant cases".