Vaughn Davis Bornet

The Pattern of Labor’s Party Allegiance

WHILE CONTEMPORARIES knew full well that the American Federation of Labor, as a national body, did not endorse a presidential candidate or political party in the election of 1928, it can now be shown (by assembling bits and scraps of data)1 that meaningful choosing of sides at lower levels did take place. Of course, the Executive Council of the A. F. of L. did not choose between Alfred E. Smith or Herbert C. Hoover, and it officially ignored the candidacies of Norman Thomas and William Z. Foster. But the formal “nonpartisan” attitude adopted after much debate by the Council and lived up to by President William Green by no means meant that many individual labor leaders, local unions, city centrals, some state federations, and a few international unions would refrain from outright partisanship. Cumulatively, their expressions of support are sufficient to provide a conclusion seldom given in general accounts of the election: substantial elements in the American trade union movement supported in 1928 the candidate of one party—the Democratic Party—well before the New Deal and its Wagner Act, the rise of the C. I. O., and the birth of personalized labor partisanship for President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Labor Politics in a Democratic Republic

THE YEAR 1928 had come and gone, and with it departed another of the Presidential Elections required every four years by the Constitution of the United States. At every level of government during the year, vast arrays of elective officials in office had been forced to offer themselves up to the judgment of the electorate at the ballot box, for there were other citizens who challenged their right to continue to govern; these also appealed to the electorate to help them achieve their objective. In most instances both the incumbent candidates and those who contested their future right to the administration of government office were nominees of political parties. Those parties were normally the Republican Party, born on the eve of the nation’s Civil War, and the Democratic Party, descended from Jefferson and Jackson. Also contesting at the presidential level were a Socialist Party in existence since the turn of the century, and a Communist Party in its second campaign —both organized bodies with aspirations for power. All four would live on after the ballots were counted.

Thomas Appeals to “Workers” and “Progressives”

THE SOCIALISTS came out of their 1928 convention rejuvenated in spirit. A column written during the convention by one leader radiated confidence. Workingmen and women might be giving lip service to the prosperity god, wrote McAlister Coleman, but in their hearts they knew they were worshipping false images. He claimed that the Socialists spoke as “the sole interpreters and spokesmen for the great masses of America’s workers.” They therefore considered themselves to be, in the words of H. G. Wells, “watchers and guardians of the order of the world.” The coming political campaign would be one more engagement in the long battle for human freedom and happiness.1 The Convention had been enough “to make you hold up your head and stick out your chest and be all-fired proud of the fact that you are a Socialist.”2

The Socialists Organize for Struggle

THE SOCIALIST PARTY of the United States called itself in 1928 the party of factory, farm, mine, and office workers: “the producing classes.”1 It proclaimed that every great political struggle in American history had been a struggle for property interests,2 and it called politics a matter of class power.3 The party led by Norman Thomas had a goal toward which to work: the socialist state. How did the leaders of this tiny party expect to attain that goal in a democratic nation? Was its participation in the election of 1928 in any sense a cloak for revolutionary plotting? Did the party descended from Eugene V. Debs and inherited by Morris Hillquit, Norman Thomas, and others really differ in any vital sense from the Workers (Communist) Party? It is important to know the form that Socialists hoped trade union political activity would take in the United States. The basic change they intended to make in the American two-party system needs to be analyzed and weighed. This is an attempt to describe from public and various manuscript materials the fascinating activities of the Socialist Party in the Presidential campaign of 1928.

Foster Appeals to The “Proletariat”

THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN of the Communist Party can be fully comprehended only by those who understand the threat it offered the American trade-union movement. To A. F. of L. leaders of the day this was obvious. To an undercover agent of the United States Department of Labor in the Far West the matter was equally plain. Reporting secretly, he wrote, The communists here [state of Washington] that are members of the various unions are pretty well known but proving that they are actually members of the party seems to be and is a very difficult task. All of them will sidestep a direct question as to their membership and in that they differ from the average I. W. W., the latter proud of his membership, hating the A. F. of L. and wanting the wide world to know it. Without access to the membership rolls it is well-nigh impossible to bring proof of membership, without which it seems impossible to suspend or expel them from their respective local or international unions.1

The Communists Organize For Battle

THE POLITICAL CAMPAIGN OF 1928 had neither a beginning nor an ending for the Communist Party. The nominating convention in May was not its beginning. The counting of the votes in November settled nothing with finality. To a certain extent this is true of all parties; yet with the Communists the situation differed considerably. As William Z. Foster announced in his speech accepting the nomination for President: We are not going into the national election campaign solely for the purpose of getting votes…. We also have other bigger objectives…. Our aim must be to arouse the class-consciousness of the masses in a political sense and to mobilize them for struggle on all fronts. Vote-getting is only one aspect of this general mobilization of the workers.1

Jockeying for Party Position

THE METICULOUS PLANNING in American Presidential Elections is conducted by small groups behind closed doors. Leaders make plans; strategies are born; and there is give-and-take which ultimately results in appeals to groups and individuals by the political party and its nominees. The names of possible candidates are advanced for discussion (with one eye on their reception in the press and by recognized groups). Candidates potentially weak in popular appeal are virtually eliminated. Few records of this hidden activity are kept, and it is years before the public hears what really happened—if, indeed, they ever know. There is at election time a choice among alternatives, but the nature and intensity of the alternatives is determined long before much public interest is aroused.

Hoover Appeals To The Laboring Man

ONE CAN HARDLY ACCOUNT for the nomination and election of Republican candidate Herbert C. Hoover in 1928 on the basis of the antagonistic and partisan treatment he has often received in accounts written since that time. We are told, “Leaders like Herbert Hoover had not, by their personal life, been attuned to the wants of inconspicuous people….” Here was “a member of the managerial class” unacquainted with the “daily yearnings of ordinary humankind.”1 Another volume found little good to say about the man elected overwhelmingly in 1928, except that he was a rich and successful man, a good organizer, and a friend of business with a passion for facts.2 Yet another book, on the other hand, found him to be a man with “a vivid record as a humanitarian” who actually “assumed office amid the warm plaudits of his countrymen who hailed him as a brilliant liberal who had earned his position by his distinguished humanitarian and administrative services for over fifteen years.”3 Can this be the same person? It is admitted in at least one textbook—and ought to be better known—that Mr. Hoover “was not regarded with approval by the old-line Republican politicians.”4 Indeed, the favorable portrait of Hoover painted by the Beards in their final “historical judgment which we have reached after more than forty years” has been ignored by some historians who pay qualified tribute to Charles A. and Mary E. Beard in matters of politics and economics.

The Backwash of a Presidential Election

ON ELECTION NIGHT and the days that followed, prominent participants discussed the political meaning of what had occurred in 1928. Norman Thomas thought there had been no unmistakable mandate from the people. The major parties had not been distinguishable from one another.1 An editorial in the New York Times inclined to similar views, asserting that all the traditional issues had been abandoned, platforms had read alike, candidates had spoken much the same, and foreign observers had seen nothing but prohibition separating them.2 Just before the election, on the other hand, a Smith partisan had discerned a basic cleavage, saying, “The difference is between the conception of the Democratic candidate who believes in the regulation of business by Government, and the conception of the Republican Party which has led to control of Government by business.”3 Such narrow observations were not well made, for there were clearly discernible (and less sensationalized) differences between both candidates and parties, as has been made clear in these pages.

Unions in a Prosperous America

MOST AMERICANS FELT a certain sense of security in the year 1928 as they reflected on their past progress, surveyed their present situation, and looked ahead to a clearly predictable future. Most citizens viewed with satisfaction their traditionally democratic way of life. The economic benefits that had come through several centuries of national expansion across a new continent of vast resources had encouraged general faith in the merits of an almost unfettered capitalist system. Leaders in political life tended to assume that the nation (and most of the planet) would be governed increasingly in accordance with the obviously benevolent experience which mankind had gained through countless years of upward movement in Western civilization. Thus there was widespread belief that whatever festering problems of social and economic democracy remained in the nation could eventually be solved by orderly means in progressive stages. The passage of a reasonable period of time would do wonders, even for knotty problems of old. Would not the deserving of the land at length be satisfied and happy? Critics of such concepts as these lacked appeal for the masses of Americans, for whatever the fog in the crystal ball, this was the pervading spirit of the day.