The Pittsburgh Press (September 16, 1944)
Background of news –
Labor in politics
By Bertram Benedict
Sidney Hillman and his CIO Political Action Committee, working ardently for the reelection of President Roosevelt, have become major issues in the 1944 election campaign.
On Wednesday, Senator Brewster (R-ME), mixing his metaphors a little, said:
Mr. Hillman is an albatross hung about the neck of the Democratic Party. He gave the Democratic Party in Maine the kiss of death.
At the annual convention of the United Mine Workers at Cincinnati on Tuesday, President John L. Lewis came out vehemently for the defeat of President Roosevelt. It remains to be seen whether the Democrats will be able to set off Mr. Lewis’ indirect support of Governor Dewey against Mr. Hillman’s support of President Roosevelt.
While Mr. Lewis was attacking Mr. Roosevelt at Cincinnati, the convention of the CIO United Auto Workers at Grand Rapids was evincing much enthusiasm for the President’s reelection.
All this contrasting pro-Dewey and pro-Roosevelt activity in the ranks of organized labor in the United States would seem strange in any industrial nation of Europe, for European labor normally tries to achieve its ends in the political field through a labor or socialist party of its own, instead of through a “capitalist” party.
The Workingmen’s Party
However, it was the United States which produced the earliest attempt at a labor party on something of a national scale. In 1828, the Workingmen’s Party was organized in most of the large Eastern cities. In some states, it formed political alliances with agrarian political groups. The new party won some minor political victories, but soon disintegrated.
After the Civil War came the National Labor Union, then the National Labor and Reform Party. These got tied up with the agitation for cheaper currency, and amalgamated with the Greenback Party. In 1878, Greenback-Labor parties polled about a million votes in the elections for Congress.
The 1880s were the powerful era of the Knights of Labor, which in the ‘90s was eclipsed by the newly-formed American Federation of Labor. The Knights in their period of decline had pinned their faith to political action, and that was incessantly pointed to by Samuel Gompers, presiding genius of the AFL, as one reason why the Knights were displaced by the AFL.
The Gompers policy
Mr. Gompers insisted that in the political field American labor should follow a policy of rewarding its friends and punishing its foes, instead of dissipating its strength by running candidates of its own.
In 1924, the AFL did join with the railroad brotherhoods, the Socialist Party, the Farmer-Labor Party, and certain agrarian and liberal groups to sponsor the presidential candidacy of the late Senator Robert M. La Follette. Although Mr. La Follette polled more than one-half as many votes as John W. Davis, the Democratic candidate, he carried only his own state, Wisconsin.
The La Follette defeat is always adduced by labor leaders who oppose a separate labor party with a separate labor ticket. They also adduce the failure of the Socialist Party to get anywhere in American politics. And, finally, they are adducing the growing political ineffectiveness of the British Labor Party, which today seems much weaker than when it took office (as the plurality, not a majority party) in 1924 and again in 1929.