Robin Archer, Why is There No Labor Party in the United States?
Robin Archer, Why is There No Labor Party in the United States?, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2007. pp. xv + 348. US $35.00 cloth.Historians, political scientists and labour movement activists have long sought to explain why--in contrast to other advanced industrial societies and despite a history of often ferocious class struggle--there has never been a successful labor party in the United States. From the Philadelphia Workingman's Party set up in 1828, to the brave efforts of Eugene Debs, to the Farmer-Labor parties of the desperate 1930s, generations of dedicated activists sought to build class-based political parties, yet none have survived to break the stranglehold of the two-party system.
Every so often a book emerges to challenge old assumptions, and Robin Archer's thoughtful new study does this admirably, offering radically new answers to the US labor party puzzle. In the process, Archer invites us to take a fresh look at American 'exceptionalism' as a whole. According to standard interpretations--long the stuff of undergraduate history and political science textbooks--the American workers failed to build an enduring class-based labor party for three interrelated reasons: the dominance of liberalism, established democratic institutions, and general material prosperity. This explanation rests largely on a comparison of the late nineteenth century American experience with that of older societies in Europe. Archer, however, argues convincingly that a more valid comparison is with Australia--which, like many European countries, does have a successful labor party. He concludes that
comparison of the extent to which the main potential explanatory factors were present in [both] the United States and Australia casts doubt on many of them by demonstrating that they were common to both countries (p. 233).
Both Australia and the USA were 'new', frontier societies, 'born modern', with many common social, economic, political and cultural characteristics. Yet, while the Australian trade unions laid the foundations for a strong and enduring labor party in the 1890s, a similar attempt across the Pacific at the same time failed dismally. Archer carefully examines a number of potential explanatory factors, which he groups into three broad categories: economic and social factors (prosperity, union organisation, farmers, race and immigration); political factors (early suffrage, electoral system, federalism, presidentialism, the courts, repression, the party system); and ideas and values (social egalitarianism, individual freedom, religion and socialism) (p. 19). He concludes that while there were some crucial differences between the two societies, and these provide us with explanations, these are not the ones usually advanced to explain the failure of the US labor party.
Conventional wisdom has it that it was economic prosperity that sank the socialist and/or labor party ship in the United States. Perhaps the earliest statement of this thesis is to be found in Werner Sombart's famous 1905 study Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (Macmillan, London, 1976). Sombart's broadly accepted explanation was that American socialist utopias had foundered on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie. Sombart argued that because American workers enjoyed such high living standards in comparison with their European cousins, they saw no need for socialism. The same explanation is generally offered to explain the lack of a class-based labor party. Archer takes issue with this 'meat and pudding' thesis. While agreeing that American workers did enjoy considerably higher real wages than their European counterparts, he points out that by the late nineteenth century, Australia was the richest country in the world and its workers enjoyed an even higher standard of living than their US cousins. This, however, did not prevent them from building a labor party. In both countries, too, there was the potential to draw small farmers and workers into common cause. Nor does the common explanation of the existence of democratic institutions, which deprived working-class agitators of a rallying point, provide a convincing explanation. While white male American workers did enjoy the right to vote much earlier than was the case in Europe, this was also true of Australia, as Archer reminds us. The same was also true of greater social egalitarianism and the commitment to individual freedom, which were apparent in both societies despite the pretensions of Australian 'bunyip aristocrats' and neo-feudal captains of industry in the USA.
So, if there were so many similarities between the two countries, why is that the Australian unions decisively plumped for a labor party in the 1890s while the American Federation of Labor decisively rejected the idea at its 1894 congress and regularly reiterated its opposition thereafter? Archer contends that while the anti-labor party intrigues of the Samuel Gompers leadership provide part of the answer, by itself this is insufficient. More important in Archer's eyes are four other factors: 'the weakness of the new [industrial] unionism, the level of repression, the political salience of religion, and socialist sectarianism' in the USA as compared with Australia. Political organisation along class lines was undoubtedly helped by inclusive, industrial-style unionism, as is generally recognised by studies of the emergence of the British Labour Party. Unions in both Australia and the USA had typically been organised along craft lines, but from the 1880s there were attempts to set up inclusive 'new' unions on an industrial basis. These were much more successful in Australia at this stage, partly because the level of repression against them in the USA was much greater than in Australia. The US mineworkers' union came perilously close to collapse in the 1890s and Eugene Debs' American Railroad Union was actually destroyed as a result of state repression. American industrial union leaders were generally more sympathetic to the labor party idea than their craft union colleagues, but their overall weight of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was much less than in Australia where the 'new' unions were much stronger and leaders such as the Australian Workers Union's W.G. Spence were central to the creation of the new party following union defeats in the 1890s.
Archer also argues that the most influential American union leaders were terrified--rightly or wrongly--that creating a labor party might weaken or even destroy the union movement. Unions, they argued, had to be ethnically and religiously inclusive organisations and a new party risked splitting workers along the Catholic-Protestant and liturgical-evangelical divide. America was already marked by a much higher degree of religious sectarianism and religiosity than Australia and religion impacted on politics: working-class evangelical Protestants tended to support the Republican Party, while Catholics and liturgical Protestants tended to support the Democrats. Attempting to straddle the sectarian divide might well prove disastrous, and there was, besides, no guarantee that the workers would abandon their traditional parties. Archer argues that while religious sectarianism was a factor from time to time in Australia, at the time of the birth of the Labor Party during the 1890s, it was of negligible importance.
The AFL leaders were also wary of sectarianism of a different type. While many of them were themselves socialists of one type or another--Gompers was proud of his connections with Marx and Engels in the International Workingmen's Association, for example--they were well aware of the fractiousness of socialist sects and their potential to split a labor party. Given the dogmatism of Daniel De Leon's Socialist Labor Party and its ambivalence towards syndicalist organisation, they might have had a point. In comparison, Archer argues, Australian socialists tended to be less doctrinaire than their US counterparts, so potentially divisive sectarianism was not so much of an issue.
American 'exceptionalism' is a well-worn theme, explored by many authors, some of them in an intentionally celebratory way. America, according to this discourse, is an 'exceptional' society because of the dominance of its core characteristics of liberalism, democracy and prosperity. Archer's analysis casts doubt on this thesis and impels us to question what is really distinctive about American society. He suggests that the conventional list of defining characteristics is not actually characteristic and that 'Certainly none of them are exceptional'. Where American society is distinctive is in the extraordinary 'strength and sway of religion' which competes strongly with 'American' values such as liberalism, secularism, egalitarianism and democratic institutions. He concludes that it was 'state repression [and] the political salience of religion' that 'helped make the United States exceptional in at least one respect' for 'they helped leave it without a labor party' (p. 243).
JOHN TULLY
Victoria University
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| Author: | Tully, John |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Labour History - A Journal of Labour and Social History |
| Article Type: | Book review |
| Date: | Nov 1, 2008 |
| Words: | 1379 |
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