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AF of L Leaders and the Question of Politics in the Early 1890s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

J. F. Finn
J. F. Finn
Affiliation:
St Paul's College of Education, Rugby
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Extract

Between December 1893 and December 1895, the American Federation of Labor engaged in a running controversy over independent political action. It began at the Federation's annual convention of 1893, when T. J. Morgan proposed a political programme which was submitted to a referendum, and it ended when the New York convention of 1895 passed a resolution proposed by J. F. O'Sullivan of Boston, which banned party politics from the deliberations of the conventions. The climax was reached in the convention of 1894 at Denver, Colorado. There the political programme was debated for two days before being rejected. The Preamble of the programme committed the Federation to forming its own political party independent of the two existing parties; it was followed by eleven planks, most of which were traditional demands of labour. The sole exception was the tenth plank which demanded ‘The collective ownership by the people of all the means of production and distribution’. The debate centred on this plank, although Plank 3 (‘a legal eight-hour workday’) and Plank 4 (‘sanitary inspection of workshop, mine, and home’) were hotly discussed. In the end Plank 10 was amended to a land monopoly plank on the proposal of August McCraith, a printer, and this amendment made it clear that the convention had rejected the collectivism of the programme.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , December 1973 , pp. 243 - 265
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

1 Proceedings of 13th AF of L Convention, pp. 37–8.

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