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The article below as written by Warren Creel
and originally appeared in the March 1946 issue of Fourth International
magazine. Warren Creel was formerly
Secretary of the Educational Bureau of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor
Association.
In 1944, the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party ended twenty-six years of
activity as an independent party by merging with the Democrats. The party
was eliminated by a bureaucratically forced merger although it was still a
strong political force. The Farmer-Labor candidate for governor had been
defeated in 1938, after eight years of electoral victories. Yet up to the
merger the party was still polling 38 percent of the vote in state
elections, more than the Minnesota Democratic Party.
The Farmer-Labor Party's quarter century of activity provides the
longest experience with a labor party that U.S. history offers up to the
present. The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Association was a genuine labor party.
It was not just a pro-labor party; it was a party of organized labor, a
political federation of labor unions.
The Minnesota Association was started by a convention of the Minnesota
State Federation of Labor, and was largely financed by a per-capita tax
from the affiliated unions, which included practically the whole trade
union movement. Unions in Minnesota carried on the party's political work
as a regular union activity.
The Farmer-Labor Party contained another class element, a current of
middle class political protest, based particularly on the farmers and small
businessmen. The relation between these two class elements, working class
politics on the one hand, and middle class or petty-bourgeois politics on
the other, played a large part in governing the party's life, and finally
brought about its death. It was a variable relation, shifting from
cooperation to opposition at various stages of the movement.
The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party started in 1918, at the end of the
First World War and took form from the class pattern of its time. This
pattern has changed greatly since then.
The seed of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party was in the Socialist Party,
which reached its height just before the First World War. The Socialist
weekly Appeal to Reason had a circulation of a million, with two to four
million printed for special editions. Other Socialist periodicals had mass
circulations. The Socialist Party elected mayors in Milwaukee, Minneapolis
and elsewhere.
The Socialist movement of that day sprang, not from capitalist decline,
but from capitalist growth. Large-scale enterprises were taking over the
economic scene. Monopolies were ousting the small businessmen. Capitalism
was changing America from an agricultural to an industrial nation, forcing
out the farmers by the debt and mortgage foreclosure route.
While the workers organized against capitalism for working class
reasons, a separate movement of the middle class attacked capitalism for
reasons of its own.
The American petty bourgeoisie, the middle class, steadily reduced and
circumscribed by capitalism, formed a series of political movements in the
hopeless attempt to stop the historical development that had doomed them.
The Populists, who merged with the Democratic Party and became the William
Jennings Bryan Democrats, and the Bull Moosers behind Theodore Roosevelt,
the phony "trust-buster," and the various "money crank"
movements, were some of the expressions of this petty-bourgeois protest
against capitalism.
Many of the best and most far sighted of
these middle class protesters, both small business men and farmers, joined
the Socialist Party, and helped make it the mass movement that it was. But
they also helped import their non-working class tendency into the Socialist
Party.
A Fraudulent Alibi
In the Minnesota labor movement before the First World War, as in other
states, a large and active Socialist group constantly advocated political
action by labor. The labor bureaucrats, who were Republican politicians
themselves, found an easy excuse by pointing to the bugaboo of the
"conservative, backward farmers." In Minnesota the population was
evenly divided 50 percent urban, 50 percent rural during this period. When
a resolution for political action was debated at a labor convention the
bureaucrats would agree that labor needed political action, but they would
say, "You can't win an election without the farm vote, boys, and the
farmers are conservative, they are anti-labor, they always vote Republican,
so it's useless to try."
That notion exploded in 1916 when the farmers organized the Nonpartisan
League and swept into office a state 'ticket and a legislature in North
Dakota in their first election campaign.
The Nonpartisan League soon grew into a mass movement covering the
Middle West, putting its candidates into office in a large group of states,
and then was liquidated so thoroughly that the scope of the movement is
almost forgotten. It was strictly a farmers' group, a small proprietors'
party, an organization of petty-bourgeois political action.
The Nonpartisan League built on the farm following of the old Socialist
Party; the organizers would go into a county with the list of subscribers
to the Appeal to Reason as their starting point. The League won immediate
mass support, gaining startlingly prompt election success. In Minnesota it
soon gained a large membership. The League scored substantial achievements
in economic and social legislation in several states. But it set itself no
goals beyond this, and even during its victories fell to pieces. In the
space of a few years the national Nonpartisan League went through its
complete evolution ending in death.
The First World War brought a crisis for organized labor which was
attacked by a nationwide open shop drive, and in Minnesota by anti-union
prosecutions of a particularly vicious Minnesota Public Safety Commission.
While this emergency turned labor's eyes to a political defense, the
Nonpartisan League put a stop to the labor bureaucrat's stall about the
impossibility of getting the farmers into motion. It was labor's move.
At a convention of the Minnesota State Federation of Labor in July 1918,
Socialists who were delegates from numerous unions offered a resolution
calling for a state labor political convention. In the war atmosphere, many
delegates were afraid to sign the resolution for fear of being labeled
pro-German. But the resolution was nonetheless passed and the State
Federation called the unions to a convention which set up the Working
People's Nonpartisan Political League. The labor movement took as its model
the farmers, who had been called "backward" for so many years.
At first the labor and farm leagues worked jointly in the election
campaigns. In 1923 the separate leagues were merged into the Farmer-Labor
Federation, and later the name was changed to Farmer-Labor Association.
This was the membership organization, made up of both affiliated unions,
paying a per capita tax of two cents a member a month, and Farmer-Labor
clubs, with membership dues of a dollar a year.
The rise of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor
Party was not an exceptional one-state development, but part of a national
political upsurge in the postwar period which brought the organization of
similar Farmer-Labor parties in many states, and the national campaign for
LaFollette for President in 1924. The exceptional state feature was this,
that during its rise the Minnesota party was given official labor
sponsorship and organized labor party machinery. While in other states
Farmer-Labor parties were formed by a few unions, in Minnesota the State
Federation of Labor issued the call to the whole labor movement. The
Minnesota Farmer-Labor Association drew its finances from a per capita paid
by stable union organizations.
"Declaration of
Principles"
Out of all the nationwide organizations, the Minnesota movement, having
official organized labor backing, was the only one to survive.
In spite of continued loyalty from Minnesota farmers, and a continued
strong farm vote, the dues-paying membership in rural counties dropped to
almost nothing in a few years, and the function of financing the
Association fell completely on the labor unions through the 'Twenties.
In various detailed points the
Association's "Declaration of Principles" expressed its general
aim, to serve as the political arm of the working people, without
differentiation between workers and farmers.
The Farmer-Labor movement seeks to unite
into a political organization all persons engaged in agriculture and other
useful industry, and those in sympathy with their interests, for the
purpose of securing legislation that will protect and promote the economic
welfare of the wealth producers.
And further,
It maintains that the prevailing inequality of opportunity is due to
special privileges and monopolistic advantages, which can and should be
abolished by legislative action.
It declares that the government at present is dominated by the few
and its powers are used to serve special interests. Money and credits,
market and exchange facilities, the means of transportation and
communication and the natural resources and other basic industries of the
nation are practically monopolized by an industrial and financial
oligarchy, which is in a position to extract tribute from all who live by
labor and to keep great masses of people in a condition of unemployment and
destitution by manipulating the productive powers of the nation.
It aims to rescue the government from
the control of the privileged few and make it function for the use and
benefit of all by abolishing monopoly in every form, and to establish in
place thereof a system of public ownership and operation of monopolized
industries, which will afford every able and willing worker an opportunity
to work and will guarantee the enjoyment of the proceeds thereof, thus
increasing the amount of available wealth, eradicating unemployment and
destitution, and abolishing industrial autocracy.
As immediate aims the party fought for labor rights and labor strength
and protection of labor organization, for better prices for farm products,
relief from farm debts, and strengthening of farm cooperative
organizations. It campaigned for "honest government" and fought
the corrupt old parties.
It always pressed the point that the two-party system was a fraud, that
the workers and farmers couldn't win in a choice between two old parties,
both controlled by the capitalist class.
The effect of this Farmer-Labor program was electrifying. The members sacrificed to finance
campaigns. They distributed literature; made house-to-house drives to
register voters, etc., build the party of the working class, "to
promote the economic welfare of the wealth producers."
Why Party Survived
Victory in each immediate election is not necessary for a party's
survival so, long as it has this class orientation. Its very existence is a
victory. The labor members of the party feel well rewarded for their
campaign efforts by getting a few spokesmen into effective positions. And
they are right, for a spokesman who is a servant of the labor party is a
great gain.
Thus, a few Farmer-Laborites in the Minnesota state legislature were
able to force real concessions for both farmers and organized labor in the
'Twenties. The record of legislation, especially farm legislation, won by a
Farmer-Labor minority in the Minnesota state legislature is phenomenal.
When the party began getting majorities in the 'Thirties, the
petty-bourgeois office-holders who had jumped on the band. wagon put
forward the idea. that only majorities and election victories can count,
because that's all that can count for jobs for office-holders. They set to
work to weaken the program and turn away from the class line to appeal to
everybody, so as to always have the majority and the election victory.
Dropping the class orientation for victory at any price brought defeat and
eventually killed the party. ,
The prosperity of the 'Twenties was a "lean time for political
protest movements. The, Minnesota party, however, was able to survive the
general decline that killed off the national Farmer Labor movement
precisely because of its stable organized labor backing. While the
Minnesota FLP suffered along with the rest. it continued to be, not a third
party, but the second party. Minnesota politics was a fight between the
Republican and Farmer-Labor parties, with the Democratic Party a poor
third, even through the Coolidge prosperity era.
The first election campaign of the
Farmer-Labor Party, in 1918, gave this vote for governor (to the nearest
thousand):
1918 FINAL ELECTION FOR GOVERNOR OF MINNESOTA
Farmer-Labor, David H.
Evans........................112,000
Republican, J. A. A.
Burnquist........................ 167,000
Democrat, Fred E.
Wheaton..............................77,000
In 1920 the candidates were run in the
final election under the name "Independent." (All votes show
larger than 1918. because the suffrage amendment had given women the
vote.)
1920 FINAL ELECTION FOR GOVERNOR OF MINNESOTA
Independent, Henrik
Shipstead.........................281,000
Republican, J.A.O. Preus..................................
416,000
Democrat, L. C.
Hodgson...................................81,000
The party's percentage of the vote, it will
be noted, had dropped badly. In 1922 the movement abandoned
"nonpartisan" tactics altogether, fought all the way through the
primaries and general election under the Farmer-Labor name, and came very
close to victory, with the Democrats still nowhere:
1922 FINAL ELECTION FOR GOVERNOR OF MINNESOTA
Farmer-Labor, Magnus Johnson........................
295,000
Republican, J.A.O.
Preus....................................310,000
Democrat, Edward Indrehus..........................
......80,000
In 1922 the party elected two Farmer-Labor congressmen and a
senator.
Even in 1928, which marked the low point in the party vote, it kept its
second position, exceeding the Democrats by a small margin. In 1930, with
the outbreak of the depression, the party elected the first Farmer-Labor
governor and started the eight years of Farmer-Labor state administration.
In the farmer and labor alliance trouble did not develop in the form
that might be expected, as a conflict between the interests of the two
groups. In Minnesota the farmers and labor cooperated very well on the
level of immediate issues. The farmers were most favorably impressed by
what the labor movement was willing and able to do for them.
However the genuine farmers as well as pseudo-farmers--small town
bankers and lawyers--were an influence for retreat from a working class
orientation. When the movement was taking shape there were sharp battles
over opportunist steps, such as the nomination of Henrik Shipstead for U.S.
Senator in 1922. The farmers, of course, considered themselves as holding
the party on the correct middle of the road. As Marx explained, the petty
bourgeois, pulled two ways by his double class position, "inwardly
flatters himself that he is impartial 1 and has found the right equilibrium
. . ."
In Association conventions the farm and labor delegates represented
entirely different types of organizations. The farm delegations came from a
few small or even inactive clubs, since the dues-paying rural membership
dropped away after the first wave of organization. Yet they cast convention
votes all out of proportion to their membership, because the Association
constitution allotted votes by areas in proportion to Farmer-Labor strength
in the state election. As long as the party's farm vote held up, which it
did, delegates from a few small rural clubs voted for half the Farmer-Labor
Association.
The labor section was basically a political federation of labor unions,
a, genuine labor party organization. It had in operation the elementary
machinery that is necessary for real working class politics. Political
activity started in the affiliated labor union locals, where political
discussion, reports of political delegates, and political campaign activity
were part of the regular business of each meeting, and payment of
per-capita to the labor political organization was a constant part of the
budget. Delegates from the unions of each city met in monthly meetings or
oftener, as the Farmer-Labor Association city central committee. This went
on month after month and year after year.
In the cities, on the fringe of the political federation of unions there
were other organizations, also part of the Farmer-Labor Association, and
also sending delegates to the Farmer-Labor central committee. These were
mainly Farmer-Labor clubs; some other organizations, such as Socialist
Party locals also were affiliated. All these organizations played a
secondary role to the unions, until the days of decline of the party.
A functioning labor party organization, based on the unions, is a
powerful means of holding the party to a class program. The petty-bourgeois
politicians wanted to turn the party away from the class program and toward
compromise. They soon saw that they would have to begin by eliminating the
labor party form of organization and they tried it. The leader in this
attempt was F. A. Pike of the Nonpartisan League. Pike was a Democrat, not a
farmer but a lawyer, the Nonpartisan League's attorney. He was state
chairman of the "Farmer-Labor Party" which was the non-membership
skeleton "organization" required by the state election law for
all parties on the ballot. He proposed liquidating the membership
organizations and operating with only ordinary election machinery like the
two old parties.
Some of the story of this struggle was
retold in the May 13, 1925 issue of the movement's state newspaper (then
the Farmer-Labor Advocate, later named Farmer-Labor Leader):
A peculiar conflict of opinion has prevailed within the Farmer-Labor
movement since its organization. Many of the supporters coming from the old
political parties cannot see the necessity for maintaining active
organization and educational work between campaigns. These voters have not
yet been able to discover the vital difference between the Farmer-Labor
Party and the old capitalist parties....
Perhaps the most intense discussion of party affairs arose out of the
campaigns of 1922-23 over the difference of views between the state
chairman of the Farmer-Labor Party, F. A. Pike, and state chairman of the
Working People's league, [ex-Socialist] Wm. Mahoney....
Mr. Pike, as head of the Farmer-Labor Party, took the position that it
was identical with the old parties in form and method and that it was not
permissible nor necessary for it to assume any other functions than that
prescribed by the state law creating and governing political parties. On
his side of the controversy were a large number of persons who did not have
a fundamental grasp of the Farmer-Labor movement and considered it simply a
variation of the old parties.
On the other side, Mr. Mahoney and,
others maintained that the Farmer-Labor movement and the party that represented
it was fundamentally different from the old parties, and required an
entirely different form of organization to accomplish its purpose.
Pike was defeated at a convention in St.
Cloud by a coalition of trade unionist and Communist Party forces. This set
the movement on the path of labor party organization and cleared the way
for the merger of the labor and farm leagues into the Farmer-Labor
Federation. The following year the trade unionists expelled the Communists
and changed the name to Farmer-Labor Association.
Olson and the FLP
The struggle against the forces led by Pike forecast the party struggle
of the 'Thirties, when another lawyer from the Democratic Party, named
Floyd B. Olson, was to try again to substitute old party forms for the
labor party machinery.
Floyd Olson, a capable, courageous and spectacular politician, had been
county attorney in Minneapolis for several years, and had made himself
immensely popular. The depression offered the Farmer-Laborites a chance of
victory in 1930, and they wanted Olson as standard-bearer. As a condition
of accepting the nomination, he demanded that the Association convention
vote him a free hand in making appointments. The convention granted it.
Olson promptly proceeded to set up an organization of "Olson
All-Party Committees," outside the Association. These were made up of
band-wagon climbing Republicans, Democrats, and political opportunists of
every stripe, who supported Olson on the promise of state jobs, or other
political deals. The task of the "All-Party" politicians was to
campaign on the "good man" platform. Meanwhile the Association
was to keep on getting votes for the Farmer-Labor program.
The campaign of Olson and his supporters was an open effort to
"slur over contradictions and differences," and to "unite
people of different views and tendencies, and subordinate clarification of
their differences to success in the organization struggle." Such an
aim required them to get rid of the Association. Olson began his attempt to
replace and eliminate the Association immediately after he was elected. But
he ran into trouble, and a lot of trouble.
This labor party, even though it was divided within itself by its
two-class composition, even though it was crippled by limitation to one
state, even though at this time it lacked leadership conscious of the
party's role and organizational needs, still this labor party showed an
amazing vitality, a capacity to absorb punishment. and keep moving forward.
Olson went into office as the first Farmer-Labor governor, but he
appointed old party politicians from the "All-Party" machine to
policy-forming state posts, and even appointed a Republican as State
Personnel director, in charge of hiring for all state jobs. Naturally,
state patronage went to "All-Partyites." The loyal
Farmer-Laborites stood out in the cold for a while before they woke up to
what their idol was doing, and then they started a party struggle which
boiled in the movement for years.
The struggle couldn't be resolved as Olson had planned it, because even
the state jobs did not succeed in building up the "All-Party"
machine into a party to replace the Association. The Association just did
not submit to being eliminated. In spite of political patronage starvation
it grew, until it forced substantial political recognition from Olson. When
Olson came up for re-election he was forced to recognize the strength of
the Association.
Yet through the years the political opportunists slowly gained. They
outmaneuvered the rank-and-file Farmer-Laborites, principally by exploiting
and betraying the loyalty of the members to the party. The
"All-Party" politicians themselves could accomplish little in the
fight, because they couldn't command respect or trust from the party's rank
and file. It always had to be politicians from the Association who served
as cover.
The worker members had strong organizational loyalty. Even when
skeptical, they preferred to try almost anything before forcing a break
that would jeopardize their party. The protesting worker Farmer-Laborites,
in the various committees from the state Association, from local clubs and
affiliated unions would confer again and again with state and party
officials on their grievances. What the workers wanted, at bottom, was to
take the situation into their own hands and do it their way, but the matter
was always presented to them as if they did not have that choice. It was
made to appear that they had to choose between accepting a bad bargain or
breaking ranks and injuring the whole organization. Faced with this choice
the workers often backed down, "for the good of the party."
Various items of the Farmer-Labor program, on which the administration
had been delaying, finally saw some action as a result of Association
pressure. In the end the administration yielded on the patronage issue,
which was a burning one in years of unemployment like 1932 and 1933. A
system of preferred lists was set up for state jobs, made up on
endorsements from Farmer-Labor clubs. Although some big policy forming jobs
went to "All-Partyites," a Farmer-Labor endorsement became
necessary for the general run of state jobs.
In this period the Association grew by leaps, previously unorganized
counties were covered with Farmer-Labor clubs in a rush, and the club
membership began to rival the affiliated unions in size. By the convention
of 1934 for the first time all counties of the state had Farmer-Labor
organizations. There was no guarantee of the political interest of the new
members. A large part of them eventually came to be controlled through
their state jobs, and acted as a state employee machine in the Association.
The attempt to replace the Association with an "All-Party"
machine had failed, but the administration captured the Association by the
patronage route. For a time finally came when the Association's state
committee voted on organization issues squarely on job lines, with all the
state employees on the committee voting to uphold the governor, and all the
rest voting against the governor. In the end the administration had a
majority of job-holders on the state committee.
Unbelievable as it seems, with all the advantages on the side of the
politicians, there was still a period of several years of struggle before
the Farmer-Labor members were licked.
The Minneapolis workers found that the Farmer-Labor Party was less
dependable as a class instrument than their unions. Early in the 'Thirties
at the Minneapolis city election the Farmer-Labor voters turned out the
Republican mayor, on the issue that his police had killed two pickets
during the truck strike. The new Farmer-Labor mayor was, not a militant
worker, nor a union worker at all, but a lawyer named Thomas Latimer, a
former Socialist Party candidate for governor. Before many weeks Mayor
Latimer marched in person at the head of his police to escort scabs through
a picket line at the Flour City Iron Works, where later his police
tear-gassed and shot pickets, killing two bystanders.
Latimer was following the advice of certain conservative Minnesota labor
leaders. These bureaucrats were terrified by the strike wave, which was
under the leadership of the Minnesota Socialist Workers Party; they were
alarmed by the rank and-file activity this stirred up, and the militant
leadership this was advancing in the unions. They wanted the Farmer- Labor
mayor to make the labor movement safe for union bureaucracy by stopping
mass strikes and sending all labor disputes to government arbitration.
Latimer created a city Board of Mediation, appointed some employers and
conservative labor officials to it, and called on all strikers to go back
to work without a settlement, leaving their disputes to his board.
When the strikers wouldn't trust their fate to Latimer's Mediation Board
he lost his head and tried to use the police to enforce his "labor
peace" with bullets. Latimer and his kind not only couldn't understand
working class action, they were panic-stricken by it.
But the workers had a hold over the
Farmer-Labor mayor, even such a miserable example as Latimer. Minneapolis
labor boiled. The movement held a protest mass meeting to which it summoned
Latimer and he had to respond. Behind the scenes the party officials
and union leaders tried to close ranks to protect Latimer ("these
protests will embarrass the governor") but, they only succeeded in
keeping him from being bodily thrown' out of office. He remained a
political cripple for the rest of his term.
Aftermath of 1934
Victory
The party officials thought the "radical platform" adopted in
1934 under the workers' pressure would kill the party, but in the 1934
election the Farmer-Labor ticket as a whole polled better than ever before.
Olson was reelected by a good margin, although his personal vote went down
a little from the previous point. It was more a party, and less an
"All-Party" vote. Still the convention's action scared the
Farmer-Labor state officials out of their wits, and they set out again to
get rid of the inconvenient rank-and-file, more precisely the membership
organization form.
One of their plans was to eliminate the Association entirely by merging
with the Progressive Party of Wisconsin. The latter was a LaFollette family
affair, with no membership organization to demand adherence to a program.
The party tops maneuvered frantically. They removed the state secretary of
the Association because he pushed Association policies against Olson's
wishes. They discharged the editor of the Farmer-Labor Leader because he
supported the Association against the "All-Partyites." They
changed the paper's name.
With all their scurrying they couldn't find a substitute for the
Association, nor a way to get along without its votes. The Farmer-Labor
Association continued to stand for a certain program to thousands of
workers and farmers, and they clung to it. The office-holders only
succeeded in tightening up control to stop any more voice from the ranks,
to make more clear the widening gap between the worker members and the
petty-bourgeois politicians in office. They succeeded in adding more and
more to the feeling of the worker members that it was no longer their own
party. Thus they dealt mortal wounds by striking at the basic program of
the movement, "to serve as the, political arm of the working
class." Nevertheless it took four years before the movement suffered
an election defeat, and ten years before the Association could be
liquidated.
The movement became weakened especially at its core, the affiliated
unions. The dissatisfaction of the union members led them to demand party
discipline, which demand comes in the normal course of events in a labor
party. But this dissatisfaction was used by the large bloc of labor
officials whose real feelings were against the labor party. Every political
grievance of the union members gave them opportunity to do deadly work.
The labor skates used every opportunity to stir up discontent with the
Farmer-Labor Party, and to channel that discontent away from an attempt to
enforce discipline. They did not want to improve the party, but only to
split the unions away from it. They were in a fine position to deceive the
union members. They denounced the same politicians that the members
denounced, and cursed the same betrayals. They stressed the main issue,
that the party no longer belonged to the workers. Only their remedy was not
to get rid of the petty-bourgeois parasites, but to march out and leave the
party in their hands.
Floyd Olson's early death in 1936 brought
on a scramble for control which speeded all the tendencies of decline in
the party. Elmer Benson, who was elected governor by the Farmer-Labor Party
after Olson's death, was a prisoner of the deals he had made for support
from various blocs in the party. Benson was a small town banker, with no
knowledge of the labor movement and no skill in politics. In the party
struggle he grabbed for allies and hung on.
Perfidious Role of
Stalinists
It was the Communist Party (Stalinists) who cashed in on this situation
through their superior organizing techniques and methods plus their
recklessness resulting from their desertion of working class principles.
Benson and the Stalinists used the Farmer-Labor organization and state
patronage strictly for their own ends. Veteran Farmer-Laborites were
spurned, union organizations rebuked. Union representatives were refused
appointments to see the governor, and labor's program was thrown out the
window by Benson.
Benson's antics brought great satisfaction to the labor skates. They
proclaimed that the movement was in a hopeless mess from Stalinist control,
and could no longer be considered an instrument of labor. They urged the unions
to walk out, and set up separate labor central political committees in each
city, to serve as direct political arms of organized labor. They proposed
such committees as a cure for the sick Farmer-Labor Party, by giving
simon-pure independent labor political action, the genuine article,
representing labor alone and excluding the non-worker elements. In practice
this was a step back to the Gompers method of an "independent"
labor choice between two identically anti-labor old parties. The Farmer-Labor
mess was so bad; and the workers were so sick of the interlopers, that this
proposal succeeded in confusing genuine Farmer-Laborites in the unions. The
labor fakers' proposed "reform," of course, turned out to be a
bridge back to old party politics, to Republican Party politics for most of
the labor skates. The labor political committees didn't give Republican
endorsements, but they tied up the labor movement while the skates
themselves went in droves on "Labor Volunteer Committees for
Stassen."
Some Farmer-Labor militants had welcomed
the Stalinists, expecting them to be allies against the
"All-Party" politicians. But entanglement with the old parties
was exactly the Stalinist plan. They led the fight against a working class
program, and united with any discredited reactionary who would go with
their bloc.
Scuttling of the FLP
The party's retreat from its working class orientation killed it
politically during Benson's administration. In the fall of 1936 he was
elected by the largest majority ever polled for governor in a Minnesota
election. In 1938 Benson was ousted and, the Republican Stassen elected by
the largest majority ever polled except one, the record set by Benson two
years before!
Following this catastrophic defeat, the Association called a post-election
convention, in January of 1939, to cure the ills of the party.
Pre-convention maneuvers showed that the "All-Party"
politicians and. conservative labor leaders planned to use the Stalinists
as scapegoats for the defeat. That convention was reported in this
magazine. (Walter Bierce, "A Party Without a Program," The New
International, March 1939.)
At the 1939 convention the party bureaucrats and labor bureaucrats, in
close teamwork, finished off the Farmer-Labor Party. They used up the whole convention with a
sham battle on the Stalinist issue, and protected their own records by
keeping out every word about program.
The convention did nothing but adopt a “purge” rule against
Stalinists, which nobody took seriously.
The role of the labor officialdom appears in the St. Paul Union
Advocate, in its February 2, 1939 issue:
On no less than half a dozen occasions the majority of the Ramsey
County (St. Paul) delegates were on the point of walking out of the
convention, but to definitely wash their hands of the Farmer-Labor Party.
And how the labor skates were urging the unions to that conclusion!
A few days later the Duluth Central Labor Political Committee withdrew
from the Farmer-Labor Association.
That’s what the committee had been created for – to withdraw. A general union exodus followed, leaving
the Association machinery in the hands of the Stalinists, in spite of the “purge”.
In the Minnesota election of 1942 the union bureaucrats went the
farthest in open support of Stassen, paying off because the latter used
every resource of state machinery down to his State Labor Conciliator in
order to force the Minneapolis drivers into Tobin’s AFL union, prohibiting
a vote on whether they preferred 544 CIO, under the leadership of the
Minnesota section of the Socialist Workers Party who had built the drivers
union. Their hands trembling with
gratitude, these skates rushed labor endorsements to Stassen, and Joe Ball,
and any other Republican who would accept a labor endorsement.
In the 1942 general election the Farmer-Labor nominee, Hjalmer Peterson,
a weak candidate of a split movement, with no organized union support,
still polled 38 percent of the vote.
That was the last Farmer-Labor campaign. In 1944 the Farmer-Labor Association was merged into the
Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. The
merger was a Stalinist bureaucratic move from start to finish, perpetrated
in order to demonstrate loyalty to Roosevelt. It was not a Minnesota plan, but part of the same world-wide
Stalinist maneuver that brought the formal burial of the Third
International, and the dissolution of the American Communist Party at the
time.
When we sum up the lessons of Minnesota’s labor party certain main
points stand out:
1. Minnesota’s experience refutes the assertion that the two-party
system of politics is “natural” to the United States. The two-party system was breached when
the class issues were raised.
Conditions for labor party development were not highly favorable, as
the collapse of the movement in the rest of the country showed. Yet the class division in politics
turned out to be the natural one, so natural and so strong that even this
isolated, distorted, diluted and crippled working class party hung on for a
quarter of a century and won victories, and it took the reactionary period
of the Second World War and the abysmal treachery of the Stalinists to kill
it.
2. The Minnesota experience gives evidence against the proposition that
a national labor party in America, in this period, could settle down into a
stable, bureaucratic labor machine, holding the workers in line by
distributing a few reformist crumbs, like the labor and Socialist parties
of Europe in an earlier period. In
Minnesota there was no such stable relationship between the members and the
conservative labor leaders. The bureaucrats
were willing enough; all they wanted was to settle down. But they couldn’t find a way to
manage. They had to settle down
with Stassen.
Labor parties hardened into reformist machines in Europe in the upswing
of capitalism, during a lengthy period when the ruling class had some
degree of security and some substantial economic concessions to offer the
workers. The labor party movement
in the United States by contrast, comes when capitalism and its class
relations are at a later stage, a higher level.
This same high level of class relations, which makes the first steps
slow, will greatly aid the party once it gets a start. The character of the times will not help
the bureaucrats in their efforts to turn the labor party into an efficient
brake to hold back the workers.
3. The Minnesota movement scored its greatest successes when the workers
took the leadership. The workers
had to act for their own class program, not only free from capitalist
politics, but free from non-working class influences in the party’s
ranks. In the coming national labor
party the workers will find the same paramount need to build working class
independence.
Events will confirm the need for independent working class political
action and help them in this task.
The new national labor party movement will develop in a stormier
period of economic crisis, and with a more advanced working class than
existed in America at the time of the previous national labor party
movement. The achievements of the
Minnesota workers under much less favorable conditions have shown the
tremendous power latent in the American working class, only waiting for a
chance to find expression in political growth and struggle.
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