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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
The Democratic and Republican parties have dominated the U.S. political scene since the Civil War. The development of a viable alternative to these two corporate parties through the formation of a political party that could effectively represent the interests of working people has been a priority objective of the Left for more than a century. By the turn of the twentieth century, mass-based socialist parties rooted in the working class were flourishing in virtually every country in Western Europe. Yet Britain and the United States stood apart from this insurgency, as working people remained content with the nebulous promises of liberal reformism, and with the limited options presented by the politics of the lesser evil.
In frustration, one strand of thought within the socialist movement began advancing the idea of an intermediate stage, a nominally independent party that would not advance a socialist vision, but which would instead seek to gain incremental social reforms. Such a party, of necessity, could only constitute a pallid substitute for a mass-based socialist party. Socialist proponents of this perspective argued for the creation of a labor party, a party based directly on the affiliation of trade unions, in distinction to a third party founded on individual memberships and established on a program designed to appeal to middle-class reformers.
The labor party question has divided the U.S. Left for a century and more, and yet labor parties have been few in number, and transitory in nature. Third parties have occurred more frequently and have achieved greater success. Still, none of these middle-class reform parties have succeeded in becoming genuinely independent parties. In the end, third parties have either dissolved or been absorbed back into the two party system.
I have focused on several critical moments in the history of this debate. In addition, I have brought the issue up to the present by analysing Ralph Nader's presidential campaign of 2000. I have closely examined each of the electoral formations involved, while observing the reaction within the socialist movement to these formations. My work begins with a study of Henry George's campaign for mayor of New York City in 1886, followed by a look at the controversies within the Socialist Party at its zenith, from 1909 to 1912. It proceeds to an analysis of the Conference for Progressive Political Action and Senator Robert La Follette's presidential campaign of 1924, and, then, to an examination of the debates within the Socialist Party in relation to Fiorello La Guardia's 1937 campaign for mayor of New York City as a candidate of the American Labor Party. In the final chapter, I set the Nader campaign within this historical context.
HENRY GEORGE AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS
In 1886, Henry George stood at the head of an independent municipal ticket initiated by the New York City Central Labor Union. George was well known as a social reformer and as the author of the single-tax theory of taxation, which sought to levy a property tax on land and landed property as the primary source of public revenues. Trade union officials sought out George as a candidate for mayor, convinced that only a celebrity could defeat the entrenched Democratic Party machine of Tammany Hall. His candidacy generated enthusiastic popular support. Indeed, it is possible that Henry George would have been elected mayor of New York City had there been an accurate tallying of the votes, but Democratic Party regulars made sure of their continuing stranglehold over City Hall through the use of fraud and coercion.
For Friedrich Engels, Henry George's campaign promised to become a crucial turning point for the U.S. working class. Engels was optimistic that the success of the New York campaign would spark the formation of a nationwide labor party, and he urged socialists to work for George's election. In his view, such a nationwide labor party would quickly be transformed into a genuinely socialist party, since, once in motion, the U.S. working class would soon catch up to its European comrades.
Engels was mistaken at every level. The United Labor Party emerged out of the George campaign, but it soon disintegrated, with its leaders, including Henry George, scurrying back into the two party system. Furthermore, even before this collapse, socialists had been expelled from the ULP for challenging George's ideological control over the new party.
The first chapter traces the Henry George campaign from the 1886 election through the demise of the United Labor Party, counterposing the actual events in New York to the assessment of those events by Engels in London.
THE SOCIALIST PARTY AND THE LABOR PARTY
Socialists in the United States were so disillusioned by the Henry George campaign that they resolved to remain aloof from any future third party formation. In 1901, only 15 years after George's campaign for mayor, the Socialist Party was formed from the merger of two smaller organizations. Over the next decade, the SP grew into a mass party. By 1912, the Party had more than 120,000 members, a press that was read by several hundred thousand sympathizers, and a presidential candidate, Eugene Victor Debs, who had become a respected, even revered, national figure.
The Socialist Party ultimately failed to establish itself as a credible alternative to the two mainstream parties, but not because its members were lured back into the fold. It was undermined in part by two bitter splits in which the moderate leadership pushed more radical elements out of the Party, but, more important, it was crushed by government repression for its opposition to World War I.
From its founding, the Socialist Party was deeply divided between radicals and moderates, with the labor party one of the issues in dispute. Moderates in the Socialist Party leadership looked to the rapid electoral success of the British Labour Party as a model. In Britain, a small social democratic party, the Independent Labour Party, had acted as the catalyst to the creation of a mass-based political party linked directly to the trade unions.
Influential moderates within the Socialist Party sought to emulate the British experience. Yet the rank and file of Party activists, whatever their political orientation, were committed to building a distinctly socialist party. Since calls for the formation of a labor party were met with a crescendo of hostility, labor party advocates within the SP opted to work through clandestine networks.
The second chapter examines the Socialist Party in its heyday, focusing on the efforts of a substantial segment of the SP's leadership to convince progressive union officials to initiate a public call for a labor party. It also examines the volatile debates that ensued within the Socialist Party as news of these secretive maneuvers leaked out to the general membership.
THE LA FOLLETTE CAMPAIGN
The next two chapters focus on the turbulent years following World War I, culminating in 1924 in Senator Robert La Follette's independent presidential campaign. The majority of those in the left-wing of the Socialist Party had left in 1919, certain that the Russian Communist Party would set the strategic guidelines for revolutionaries around the world. Most of those who remained in the SP looked to the British Labour Party as an attractive alternative. Hopes for a labor party in the U.S. were rekindled when the myriad craft unions within the railroad industry, representing 1.5 million workers, became interested in forging a broadly based coalition of progressive forces.
The railway system had been nationalized during World War I, and then returned to private ownership in 1920. Trade union membership mushroomed under William McAdoo, the government's director general of railroads and the Secretary of the Treasury. With privatization came a devastating assault on wages and working conditions, as the railroad corporations sought to reverse the gains achieved during the war. Even narrowly focused craft union leaders came to see the virtues of returning the railroads to social control under a quasi-public authority.
Only a mass movement held the potential for reversing the privatization of the railroads. Railroad union leaders looked to progressive farmers, and even to the Socialist Party, for support. In February 1922, the first meeting of the Conference for Progressive Political Action was convened in Chicago. The Socialist Party eagerly attended, its leaders convinced that the CPPA would serve as the basis for an independent labor party. Yet most of the railroad union leaders never gave the slightest indication that they were prepared to break with the two party system. Only in the summer of 1924, when the Tea Pot Dome oil reserve scandal had eliminated McAdoo as a tenable presidential candidate, did railroad union officials rally behind the idea of an independent presidential campaign.
Not only did La Follette gain the organizational backing of the CPPA and the railroad unions, he even succeeded in gaining the endorsement of Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor. The 1924 election remains, to this day, the only time that the AFL supported an independent candidate for president. When Gompers insisted that the AFL set the direction for the campaign at the Congressional level, La Follette and the CPPA agreed. La Follette then proceeded to wield his influence to block socialist candidates whose candidacies might have caused the defeat of those moderate Democrats supported by the AFL. Unwilling to jeopardize their links to the CPPA, the leaders of the Socialist Party pressured locals to withdraw Congressional candidates in closely contested elections. Only a small left-wing grouping openly challenged the underlying assumptions of the labor party perspective, while criticizing the Party's willingness to subordinate its politics within La Follette's progressive coalition.
When the votes were counted, La Follette's received 16 percent of the total tally, while carrying his home state, Wisconsin. For the railroad union leaders, the campaign had been a dismal failure. The CPPA was quickly dissolved and the AFL, and the railroad unions, resumed their roles as loyal supporters of the Democratic Party. La Follette died a few months after the campaign, and the progressives were swept up into the New Deal a few years later. For the Socialist Party, the La Follette campaign had been a disaster, undercutting its ideological cohesion and undermining its organizational underpinnings. Nevertheless, the moderate majority remained committed to the labor party perspective. Debs was one of the few to hail the collapse of the CPPA, for it had left the Party free to pursue a truly socialist politics.
TROTSKY, THOMAS AND LA GUARDIA
During the period from 1936 to 1938 the Socialist Party, as well as the U.S. Left, was again divided by the labor party question. The New Deal policies of President Franklin Roosevelt commanded overwhelming support within the working class. Thus, any challenge to the two party system was bound to remain small and marginalized. Yet the 1930s were also the years of the Great Depression, a time when many young people were radicalized well beyond the bounds set by New Deal reforms. Furthermore, the militant organizing drives led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the mass production industries brought millions of workers into a more politicized milieu, where the idea of an independent labor party was up for debate.
These conflicting currents were difficult to decipher, and to analyse. The Socialist Party remained an influential force on the Left, although it was overshadowed by the Communist Party, which became increasingly enmeshed within the Democratic Party through its acceptance of the Popular Front. SP activists scoffed at the New Deal, but they still sought to retain their influence within the newly formed CIO unions, and within the broad social movements of that era. This tangled situation was made even more complex by the shifting positions of Leon Trotsky and his supporters. The Trotskyists, after entering the SP in the late spring of 1936, actively participated in the Party's internal disputes until their expulsion in the fall of 1937.
Underlying differences within the SP were crystallized by the La Guardia campaign of 1937. La Guardia had been elected mayor of New York City in 1933, standing as an honest reformer battling the corrupt Democratic Party machine. In July 1936, top union officials in the garment industry, many of them former members of the Socialist Party, launched the American Labor Party as an electoral vehicle to lure socialist voters into voting for New Deal Democrats. After helping Roosevelt to win a second term in 1936, the ALP turned to the municipal election of 1937, and the reelection of Fiorello La Guardia.
In the spring of 1937, the issues raised by the La Guardia campaign ignited a bitter controversy within the Socialist Party, when Norman Thomas withdrew as the socialist candidate for mayor. The Clarity Caucus, the left-wing of the SP, condemned Thomas for undermining the Party's commitment to independent political action. With the SP evenly divided, the Trotskyists could have allied with Clarity, with the very real possibility of defeating Thomas and his supporters. Instead, Trotsky ordered his adherents to provoke an immediate split, convinced that any further effort to build links to social democrats would be pointless, and that Trotskyists had to build their own distinct organizations.
Over the summer of 1937, the Socialist Party went through a wrenching and demoralizing rift. The Trotskyists hammered away at the question of the labor party, insisting that socialists had no role in the formation of a labor party, but should rather concentrate their energies on building the socialist movement.
In October 1937, as the Socialist Party finalized the expulsion of the Trotskyist cadre in its midst, Trotsky determined upon yet another drastic shift in perspective. He concluded that his supporters should become vocal proponents of a labor party. This represented a direct reversal of previous policy, one not justified by developments in the United States. Stalin was ruthlessly purging the Old Bolsheviks who remained in the Soviet leadership, and sending them to concentration camps. At the same time, Trotskyist leaders in Europe were being hunted down and assassinated by the Soviet secret police.
Trotsky came to see the defeat of Stalinism as the central task for revolutionary socialists in the West. In the United States, the Communist Party had entered the American Labor Party, where it soon became an influential force. Trotsky was convinced that the ALP, and other similar third parties, could provide an important arena in which to confront the CP and its call for a Popular Front.
Thus, a year after the contentious disputes around the La Guardia campaign, all of the participants could be found working together within the American Labor Party. Norman Thomas facilitated the entry of individual SP members into the ALP, while the leaders of the Clarity Caucus, disoriented by the split with the Trotskyists, abandoned their opposition to that policy. Finally, the newly formed Trotskyist organization, the Socialist Workers Party, urged its members to enter the ALP, where they cooperated with Socialist Party activists in countering Communist influence.
Throughout these many twists and turns, the American Labor Party remained what it had always been, a trade union pressure group bargaining with the Democratic Party bosses while blocking any effort to initiate a genuine break with the two party system. The collapse of Clarity and the Trotskyists as principled opponents of the ALP represented a pivotal defeat for those interested in pursuing a truly independent politics.
THE NADER CAMPAIGN
The experience of the Socialist Party from 1936 to 1938 represents the last of the historical moments that constitute the subject of this work. My final chapter looks at the most recent experiment in third party politics, the 2000 presidential campaign of Ralph Nader, with the aim of placing this campaign into the historical context set by the preceding case studies.
The unrelenting globalization of capital has significantly altered the logic of the two party system. In the past, the Democratic Party sought to coopt dissident movements with limited reforms. Over the last years, the Democrats have moved to capture the corporate Center. Progressives have been isolated and rendered ineffectual, as the Democratic leadership actively pursues the profit oriented interests of a substantial segment of big business. More fundamentally, the range of social reforms that can be achieved within the capitalist system has been drastically narrowed, as corporations shift vast investments overnight, and at the slightest provocation.
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Excerpted from "True Mission"
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Copyright © 2004 Eric Thomas Chester.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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