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American Trotskyism and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party

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American Trotskyism and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party AMERICAN TROTSKYISM AND THE MINNESOTA FARMER-LABOR PARTY FROM ORIGINS TO 1936 A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University AS In partial fulfillment of 3(? the requirements for the Degree Pol} WST Master. ofp ArtsA r * • In History: The United States by Nicolas Dylan Boorman San Francisco, California May 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read American Trotskyism and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, From Origins to 1936 by Nicolas Dylan Boorman, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in History: The United States at San Francisco State University. Jessica Elkind, Ph.D. Professor of History Professor of History Charles Postel, Ph.D. Professor of History American Trotskyism and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party From Origins to 1936 Nicolas Dylan Boorman San Francisco, California 2017 The American Trotskyist movement was founded in part on proletarian class opposition to all capitalist parties, including two-class “farmer-labor” parties. While they had incompletely assimilated the fundamental difference between a “labor” and “farmer- labor” party, they effectively treated the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party as the class enemy during the 1934 Teamster strikes. However, in late 1934 they began an opportunist adaptation toward the FLP and joined a class-collaborationist bloc with FLP politicians and local union leaders. In the spring of 1935, the Trotskyists gave the FLP critical electoral support and simultaneously launched the Northwest Organizer, the mouthpiece of the bloc. In return, the bloc supported the Trotskyists’ continued control of Teamsters Local 574. Within a year the Trotskyists’ opportunist trajectory led them to enter the FLP and begin an unprincipled struggle against Stalinists and conservative Farmer-Labor politicians for control of this regional bourgeois party. I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My gratitude first to my spouse Kelly and to my parents, who understood best what this project meant to me. Then to Professor Jessica Elkind and the rest of the History faculty, skillful educators who helped equip me to research and write new history. Also to the library and archive staff at San Francisco State University, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, the Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University, and the Marxists Internet Archive. And to Amy Richardson, who went above and beyond copy editing this work (all further mistakes are fully my own). Most importantly I owe my thanks to the research associates of the Prometheus Research Library, who gave me crucial guidance on the ever elusive political implications. With everyone’s help, I was able to finish this two-year program in six years. It is difficult to imagine how long this would have taken without them. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Historiography 11 Chapter 1: The Lessons of La Follette, 1923-29 26 Chapter 2: Questions in Practice, 1929-33 40 Chapter 3: The Heights of the Minneapolis Strikes, 1934 69 Chapter 4: The Road to Critical Support, 1935 100 Chapter 5: The Road to Entry, 1935-36 135 Conclusion 194 Bibliography 204 v 1 Introduction In a country that has newly entered the movement, the first really crucial step is the formation by the workers o f an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is distinguishable as a labour party. - Friedrich Engels on the American workers movement, November 29, 18861 At the birth of the American Trotskyist movement, its leaders knew that a “farmer-labor” party was an enemy force, something that they could never support. But seven years later they began supporting one, and they joined it, and vied for influence in it. Organizations on the revolutionary left have been politically ruined by less, but this particular betrayal was geographically isolated and temporary, a deviation from the Trotskyists’ otherwise principled struggles in the United States as a whole. When the affair came to an end, the policy became a dead letter. For decades, it was considered a closed chapter. Historians have examined the early Trotskyist movement, especially its forces in Minnesota that led the famous 1934 Teamster strikes; historians have also examined the farmer-labor party in question - the Minnesota FLP - the most successful and long- lasting that ever took hold in this country. This research thesis seeks to address the 1 Friedrich Engels to Friedrich Sorge, November 29, 1886, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works, vol. 47 (New York: International Publishers, 1995), 532. 2 mysterious gap at their intersection. From 1928 to 1934 the Trotskyists generally opposed the Minnesota FLP, supporting the Communist Party or running their own candidates against it. Then in 1935 they announced that they would give the FLP critical support. The early years of opposition were consistent with their founding principles; the question is, why did the tendency reverse itself in 1935? When the Trotskyists won the leadership of Minneapolis Teamsters Local 574, they found themselves poised on the leading edge of the nation-wide industrial organizing drives that built the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The 1933-34 strike wave, demonstrating the American proletariat’s capacity to leap from passivity to open rebellion, could very well have been the opening shot of a revolutionary upsurge, and the Trotskyists were determined to defend and extend their achievements as they entered the new period. At the same time, they were forced to fend off powerful enemies - the government, the big corporations, the press, the reactionary leadership of the American Federation of Labor - that would have had them expelled, ostracized, and wiped out as a political force. The Trotskyists reacted to this pressure by appealing for support from the increasingly militant leadership of other local unions, but in doing so they adapted to the Farmer-Labor Party loyalties of the Minnesota labor movement. In late 1934 the Trotskyists initiated a political bloc that included not only these labor elements, but also an outright capitalist politician who had aspirations in the FLP administration; the purpose of the bloc was not only to defend Local 574 and its red leadership, but also to publish a pro-FLP newspaper, the Northwest Organizer. With preparations for the bloc and its organ already underway, the Trotskyist national leadership voted to publicly back the FLP’s candidates in the spring 1935 municipal elections. A great political gulf stands between the Marxist program for the emancipation of the world proletariat and the traditional outlook of the American labor and farmer 3 movements. Marxism is based on the understanding that the development of class societies is bound up with the development of production, that the struggle between classes under capitalism must lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that this dictatorship will abolish all class distinctions, carrying out a transition to a classless, stateless, egalitarian society; Friedrich Engels’ “independent political party” is simply the organizational vehicle essential to spearheading the proletariat’s revolutionary conquest of state power.2 The American labor and farmer traditions, on the other hand, drew primarily from the bourgeois-republican concepts of the equality of citizens and the economic independence of small producers. Populist forces in the 19th and early 20th centuries led urban industrial workers in struggle, but they subordinated their proletarian supporters to their agrarian petty-bourgeois base and bourgeois leadership by liquidating the specific historic interests of the working class into the interests of “toilers” in general. Programmatically, this meant eschewing the socialist revolution in favor of superficial and temporary reforms to the capitalist system. The founding of the Socialist Party in 1901 represented a partial break from the morass of Populist cross-class coalitions, as its political program was shaped first and foremost by the interests of the working class; this was demonstrated in action in the 1912 elections when the SP won nearly one million votes running in opposition to Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the founding of the Workers Party, section of the new Third (Communist) International in the United States, initiated the decisive break between revolutionary Marxism and American petty-bourgeois multi-class ideologies. Like the Populists, the Socialist and Communist parties appealed to and drew support from downtrodden layers of the petty bourgeoisie, including the marginalized masses of rural farming families (the bulk of the SP’s 1912 electoral support came from agrarian regions of Western states). This, however, did not negate their fundamentally 2 Karl Marx to J. Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852. 4 working-class nature or their break with class-collaborationist politics. Even the Bolsheviks adopted the program of “land to the tiller” in order to ensure that the Russian peasantry would support the proletarian dictatorship. The explanation for this lies in the Marxist understanding of the relationship between the party and the class. American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon later summarized this crucial point: “The class character of the party is not determined by the class that supports the party at the moment but rather by the class that the party supports. In other words, by its program. That is the decisive line... The class character of the party is determined first by its program; secondly by its actual policy in practice; and thirdly by its composition and control.”3 By this methodology the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party was a bourgeois party through and through. Its goal was that kinder, gentler capitalism so well known in American mythology. When elected to power the FLP served the bourgeoisie of the Northwest by enacting the necessary balance of stabilizing reforms and brutal state repression that all populist bourgeois parties employ to protect the capitalist order.
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