Labor Action special May 1956: Labor Needs Its Own Party!

• Why Labor Needs its Own Party - Towards a basic realignment in US politics
• Trade Unions and Politics - The Giant in Short Pants
• Support the Fair-Dealers? Labor and the Democrats
• Pages from Labor's History

Any discussion of politics in the United States must sooner or later get around to the question of a "third" party.

Some caution against having "too many" parties. Others insist that another major party could only be a "protest" movement that could never win. Still others insist that the "two-party system" is so deeply entrenched in American life that it can never be replaced. Then there are those who warn against "class" parties, praise the virtues of "broad coalitions" that represent all the people and shun concentration of too much power in too few hands.

The union movement is already deep in politics, and not because it is weak but because it is so strong. Basic industry is organized, and labor, by its sheer economic power, is able to win concessions from the employer. But what it wins on the industrial field is taken away in the legislative hall

Remember . . .? Back in 1948, Truman upset the pollsters by his unpredicted victory, after a whistle-stop campaign in which he hauled out all of the best phrases of the Fair Deal and polished them up. In a moment of glowing gratitude, he told the press next day, "Labor did it!"

In fact, labor had a great part in doing it. It was done against the propaganda of the one-party press, against the apathy of the Democratic machine itself, and in spite of the fact that Truman himself had done little or nothing as president to make labor happy.

In the history of the American labor movement there is a moral and a lesson for the labor movement of today: the need for and the inevitability of independent working-class political action.

In the past century the voice of independent labor politics has often 'been low, but seldom mute; and in innumerable instances it was loud, clear and full of promise.

A recent column by the N. Y. Post's Murray Kempton gives an incident which lights up the relationship between the rising tide of the Negroes' struggle for civil rights and contemporary American liberalism.

Inasmuch as liberalism is the dominant political ideology of the labor movement, such an illumination also reveals a good deal about the relations between the Negroes' heroic battle for democracy and the political views and actions of the unions.

The Liberal Party of New York is a unique type of political organization. Nothing like it exists anywhere else in the United States.

Despite this uniqueness, an understanding of the Liberal Party can be very helpful to anyone who wants to understand American labor politics at mid-century, precisely because this party exhibits in a striking and harshly developed form many of the characteristics and trends which exist in the rest of the field of labor politics in a less clear-cut way.

Behind the facade of a war-economy prosperity, two tremendous phenomena have occurred, both of them still unfolding: the unification of the labor movement and the struggle of the American Negro.

It would be a mistake to observe these in isolation from one another. The two big parties must enlarge their activities in their competing efforts to win these two largest segments of the population; the labor and Negro movements must, in turn, be deeply involved in these efforts.