Labor Party (United States, 19th century)

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Labor Party was the name or partial name of a number of United States political parties which were organized during the 1870s and 1880s.

Contents

History

In other states there were groupings known variously as United Labor Party, Union Labor Party, Industrial Labor Party, Labor Reform Party, or simply Labor Party. [3]

Activity and legacy

These parties were made up in varying proportions of members of the American Federation of Labor and Knights of Labor, socialists, Greenbackers, and even anarchists. They challenged the Republicans and Democrats primarily in local elections and state elections, but not at the presidential level. For varying reasons, none of these organizations maintained their existence as separate parties. The constituents and activists became involved either in one of the major parties (as in the Chicago example) or in such movements as the Populists (which in urban areas drew heavily on former Labor Party advocates), or the Socialist Party of America, and their various splinter groups.

There is no direct continuity between any of these organizations and the Union Labor Party of early 20th-century San Francisco, California; nor with the Duluth, Minnesota Union Labor Party which elected William Leighton Carss to Congress and various candidates to city offices in that region in the early 20th century, before merging into the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party. [4]

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References

  1. "Party Lines in the West; Decrease of Republican Votes in Wisconsin. A Combination Which May Give the State to the Democrats - The Political Situation in Illinois" New York Times , July 16, 1888, p. 1
  2. "Wisconsin Greenbackers", Lake Geneva Herald September 5, 1884; p. 7, col. 6
  3. Hillquit, Morris. History of socialism in the United States. New York, London: Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1903. OCLC   1822618, p. 271.
  4. Hudelson, Richard & Ross, Carl. By the ore docks : a working people's history of Duluth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ISBN   0-8166-4636-8 pp. 144-150.

Further reading