U.S. Labor and Political Action, 1918-24: A Comparison of Independent Political Action in New York, Chicago, and Seattle

Andrew Strouthous's book U.S. Labor and Political Action starts where so many books about the American labor movement do—questioning Werner Sombart's thesis about the absence of a labor party. Distinguishing his study from the old school of labor history, Strouthous explores the “missing workers party” without relying on the theoretical framework provided by American exceptionalism. To him, the failure to build a labor party involved the balance of class forces more than any ideological commitment to liberalism in the United States. Strouthous studies the balance of working class forces in New York, Chicago, and Seattle after World War I. In his comparative analysis, he takes into account both the industrial structure of each city and whether progressives or radicals dominated state labor federations. The author convincingly shows that Samuel Gompers, the longtime head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), battled against the labor parties in those cities without any guarantee of victory. It was only in 1924, when the AFL ended its policy of nonpartisanship and backed Robert La Follette, the candidate for the Conference for Progressive Political Action, that Gompers's opposition to a working class party finally prevailed.