Subject: M-I: Paper Summaries (AHA, Seattle), "The Election of 1896..." (fwd)
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 1998 15:17:50 -0500 (EST)
From: "hoov" <hoov-AT-freenet.tlh.fl.us>


forwarded by Michael Hoover

Forwarded message:
> Date:         Wed, 28 Jan 1998 12:46:26 -0500
> From: "Ballard Campbell, H-SHGAPE (by way of Richard Jensen
>               <h4900-AT-apsu01.apsu.edu>)" <CAMPBELL-AT-NEU.EDU>
> Subject:      Paper Summaries (AHA, Seattle), "The Election of 1896..."
> To: SOCIAL-CLASS-AT-listserv.uic.edu
> 
> Abstracts of papers presented at the panel entitled:
> "Explorations in American Exceptionalism: The Election of
> 1896 and the American Working Class," held at the AHA,
> Seattle, Jan. 1998.  This panel was sponsored by SHGAPE.
> *******************************************************************
> The Populist Betrayal of Labor: Organized Labor and the People's Party in
> Ohio, 1890-1901
> 
> Michael Pierce
> Ohio State University
> 
> By examining the People's party in Ohio, the paper makes three arguments.
> First, organized labor's support for the People's party was much more
> significant than historians have realized. In Ohio the central labor bodies
> of the state's four largest cities -- Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, and
> Toledo -- endorsed political action through the People's party as did the
> state's most powerful union, the United Mine Workers of America (U.M.W.A.).
> Ohio trade unionists, though, expanded the People's party's Omaha platform
> by calling for the collective ownership "of all such means of production
> and distribution as the people may elect to operate."  Ohio trade unionists
> were not alone in working with the People's party.  Throughout the
> industrial Midwest, in cities such as Chicago, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis,
> organized labor formed alliances with the People's party. U.M.W.A. national
> president John McBride merged his Ohio labor party with the state's
> People's party just four months before he defeated Samuel Gompers for the
> presidency of the American Federation of Labor in December of 1894.
> Throughout the mid-1890s the A.F.L. was, in fact, evenly divided between
> those like McBride who wanted the Federation to enter the partisan arena
> through an alliance with the People's party and those like Gompers who were
> weary of partisan activity.  Second, instead of welcoming the support of
> organized labor, the leaders of the People's party sought to rid the party
> of labor's radical influence.  The party's leadership's emphasis on free
> silver was, in part, an effort to rid the party of labor radicals.  As the
> National Watchman, the organ of the People's party's national leadership,
> declared, concentrating on the free coinage of silver was a way of avoiding
> "the destructive doctrines of socialism."  Third, the collapse of the
> People's party following the fusion of 1896 undermined the efforts of trade
> unionists, like McBride, who wanted to challenge the emergence of corporate
> capitalism through the creation of a labor-Populist alliance.  The fusion
> splintered the labor-Populists in Ohio and throughout the industrial
> Midwest.  Most former labor-Populists joined the Bryan-led Democratic
> party, while a sizable number joined the Socialist Labor party.  Without
> political unity, trade unionists could not advocate the type of broad-based
> political reform found in Ohio's People's party platform.  McBride and his
> allies abandoned their attempt to transform the A.F.L. into a political
> movement challenging the rise of corporate capitalism.  Instead, labor
> pursued what historian Julie Greene has called "pure and simple politics,"
> the idea that labor should avoid partisanship and only support legislation
> directly benefiting labor.  As the Columbus Trades and Labor Assembly
> declared in 1901, wage-earners are "men of vastly different ideas, purposes
> and means" and "it is impossible to unite these [men] on any composite
> program," therefore the aims of labor "must necessarily be simple, and the
> limits narrow."  By adopting "pure and simple politics" and implicitly
> accepting the rise of corporate capitalism, trade unionists abandoned the
> type of broad-based reform that characterized the European trade unionism.
> 
> 
> Politics After Populism: The Working Class in Providence, RI, 1896-1936.
> 
> Eve Sterne
> Duke History Department
> 
> Abstract of paper presented at SHGAPE, at the 1998 AHA
>         This paper uses a case study of Providence, RI, to demonstrate
> that voting restrictions were a significant factor in the decline in
> popular political engagement in this country after 1896.  As emancipation,
> immigration and industrialization flooded the electorate with
> 'undesirable' voters, and as those voters flexed their electoral muscles,
> states and cities across the country disfranchised electors who were
> black, foreign-born, female or working-class.  This impulse grew more
> marked after the noted if failed electoral upsurge of 1896.  In the first
> decades of this century, literacy tests, gender requirements, poll taxes,
> registration procedures, early poll closings, and violence and other
> extralegal means conspired to keep a significant proportion of voters from
> the polls.
>         The property requirement was the tool by which Rhode Island's
> elites maintained an iron grip on political power.  Until 1928, Rhode
> Islanders needed to own $134 in real or personal property in order to vote
> in municipal elections.  This rule prevented about 60 percent of
> registered voters (and undoubtedly a much higher proportion of potential
> voters) from participating in city government.  This was the level of
> government most active in citizens' lives at that time.  It was the level
> at which working people elsewhere wielded the greatest influence and at
> which "progressive" reformers achieved some of their most notable
> victories.
>         In Providence, by contrast, local government was tightly insulated
> from the demands of working people.  State government (with the help of a
> rotten borough system) remained in the hands of a corrupt, pro-business
> Republican machine that crushed most attempts at workplace or electoral
> reform.  The property requirement also sent working people a very clear
> message that their citizenship -- by which I mean their rights as members
> of the American polity -- was to be limited on the basis of their class
> position.
>         The quest to repeal the property rule was the centerpiece of the
> reform agenda in Progressive Era Providence.  Repeal was seen as the
> prerequisite for real social change, and the struggle for repeal by
> necessity distracted activists from other goals.  It was not until 1928
> that the requirement was overturned and the Democrats (long identified as
> the workers' party in Rhode Island) assumed control of both state and city
> government for the first time since 1856.  Rhode Island experienced its
> "Progressive Era" two decades late, as changes that had eluded reformers
> in the 1910s were implemented in the 1930s.
>         Voting restrictions (in Providence and across the nation) help to
> explain some of the Progressive Era trends over which historians have
> puzzled: a steady decline in turnout rates between 1896 and 1928; the
> ability of working people to mobilize more effectively at the workplace
> than at the polls; and the limits of progressive reform.  These
> restrictions also call into question the theory that most American workers
> rejected socialism because they could vote.  In considering the multiple
> factors that contributed to the "decline in popular politics" after 1896,
> scholars need to pay more attention to limits on the right to vote.


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