Richard M. Valelly's Radicalism in the States: The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and the American Political Economy
Green, James
RADICALISM IN THE STATES: THE MINNESOTA FARMER-LABOR PARTY AND THE AMERICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY, by Richard M. Valelly. University of Chicago Press, 1989. xviii +258 pp. $29.95. Why is there no...
...In Minnesota an independent political movement quickly led to the creation of a radical third party, which exercised real power in the 1920s and 1930s...
...Instead of a "loose aggregation of well meaning idealists," Mahoney helped create a federation that could make policy democratically, collect funds, mobilize party workers, and prevent candidates from making deals with the old parties...
...All these conditions existed in Minnesota during and after World War I. Valelly's analysis is helpful, but it also begs some questions...
...If he had taken this historical analysis of insurgency a bit further, to examine the roots of electoral activism more deeply, he might have told us more about the role of a chastened but mature socialist left in creating a new independent political party...
...The second problem is that labor parties, indeed, all insurgent third parties (excepting the Republicans), have failed in the past, primarily because of winner-take-all elections that institutionalized the two old parties...
...Following the failure of the Populist and Socialist movements midwestern radical insurgents tried to capture the old parties through the Nonpartisan League...
...The Farmer-Labor party faced a crisis as the Great Depression came on, but for reasons Valelly does not provide, Floyd Olson won election as governor on the Farmer-Labor ticket in 1930...
...The New Deal created a new interestgroup structure while the federal policies rendered state-level policy initiatives less important...
...Third parties have a dismal history at a national 102 • DISSENT Books level...
...But the most important problem, Valelly argues, was that the New Deal created a new political economy, new policies, and new interest groups that "organized out of American politics" the kind of state-level radicalism that flourished in Minnesota...
...In any case, LaFollette was a onetime candidate who showed little interest in building a permanent third party...
...Why is there no labor-based radical political party in the United States...
...Why were party loyalties in Minnesota so flaccid, and why was the Democratic party so weak...
...Valelly, a political scientist at M.I.T., writes with an open mind about the possibilities of radicalism and a good sense of history...
...Olson's reelection to two more terms made the party an institution able to dispense patronage...
...The AFL-CIO split in Minnesota gained rancor from a bitter war between the Trotskyists (influential leaders among Twin City Teamsters) and the communists...
...Thus the Party's successful years in Minnesota came to an end...
...As a result, in the general election that same year the new party won stunning support...
...The incentives for the entrepreneurs who mobilize voters are still in presidential politics...
...The general conditions giving rise to electoral radicalism included an unfettered capitalist economy directed by Republicans and endured by hardpressed fanners and workers—a political economy we have experienced again in the Reagan-Bush years...
...Richard Valelly's instructive study of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor party, Radicalism in the States, will be welcomed by students of electoral politics and those interested in alternatives to the two-party system...
...In conclusion, Valelly considers whether statelevel insurgent politics might return in the 1990s...
...Valelly does mention the importance of the Debsian Socialist party in producing "political entrepreneurs...
...Furthermore, since the federal legal and administrative structure created by the New Deal continues to centralize government, Valelly finds it difficult to imagine state-level policy solutions viable enough to attract voters...
...The FarmerLabor party's gubernatorial candidate lost by only two percentage points, and its senatorial candidate won election to Congress with 47 percent in a three-way race...
...However, at state and local levels independent politics has a more interesting history, as we learn from studies of the People's party's electoral success in the 1890s, when radicals were elected on third-party tickets and on fusion tickets when a Democrat or Republican endorsed the Populist program...
...But the Socialists and labor unionists who were influential in the Minnesota League quickly decided that the strategy of boring from within an old party would not duplicate the North Dakota triumph...
...Like the North Dakota League, the Minnesota insurgent group adapted to the existing party system rather than trying to change ingrained voting habits...
...Valelly perceptively notes that an "active partisan infrastructure" already existed to support the party, which had rarely been true in previous third-party efforts...
...The book does take political history seriously once popular insurgency assumed the form of a fanner-labor party...
...First, organized labor has always been too weak and too self-involved to be the basis of a new party, which could only succeed as a coalition effort of progressive groups—a real Rainbow...
...Mayor Van Lear only narrowly missed reelection on this ticket, despite the wartime mood of antiradicalism...
...The national Democratic party worked to squelch political insurgency...
...The insurgent presidential candidacies of Senator Robert LaFollette in 1924 and former Vice President Henry Wallace in 1948 signaled the end rather than the beginning of alternative political formations...
...Through the new Working People's Non-Partisan Political League, trade unionists created a new Farmer-Labor party in 1922...
...Those who argued for a new party had tasted some success when machinist Thomas Van Lear won election to the Minneapolis mayor's office in 1916 on the Socialist ticket...
...But this is a minor criticism...
...In the Republican party primary that year, the League's candidate, Charles Lindbergh, Sr., polled 43 percent of the vote...
...Mahoney's plan increased the power of organized labor in the new FarmerLabor Federation...
...By favoring the CIO, some of whose leaders were prominent communists, the New Deal's Labor Board helped exacerbate the AFL's hostility to the new unions...
...Subsequently, two other Farmer-Labor governors won terms in office...
...The term "movement politics" appears once but is not explored as a key for understanding the development of activists, as it is in Lawrence Goodwyn's discussion of how the fanners' protest movement created a culture that could sustain the Populist party in the 1890s...
...A recent upturn in support for independent political action in the labor movement is fueled not only by the lack of any health-care or labor-law reform at the national level but by the strikebreaking of some Democratic governors and the capitulation of Democratic state legislators to the antitaxation forces...
...Valelly explains well the reasons for the party's demise: a rural backlash partly due to Governor Olson's involvement in the 1934 Minneapolis general strike, the Republicans' criticism of the Farmer-Labor party's patronage organization, the intense left factionalism in the state's labor movement, and the attacks on Governor Benson, who worked closely with communists in the CIO during the Popular Front days...
...The Nonpartisan League in North Dakota nominated its candidates through the Republican party primary...
...after carrying the 1918 general election, they began to enact progressive programs for farmers and workers...
...In any case, if any of the current talk about alternative political strategies for labor and progressive groups advances, the movement will need to begin at the state and local levels just as farmer-labor insurgency did during the 1920s in Minnesota...
...Mahoney overplayed his hand when he tried to extend his ideas to a national level based on Senator LaFollette's Progressive party candidacy of 1924...
...The AAA also distributed federal benefits through a new bureaucracy and strengthened the fairly conservative Farm Bureau Federation, which practiced New Deal interest-group politics, not farmer insurgency...
...More specific circumstances included (1) a federalism that still gave states some independent policy options that could ameliorate the effects of unfettered capitalism, (2) peculiarities in electoral politics that created "organizational space" that could be "filled" by insurgents at a state level, and (3) "the availability of politicians willing to break with regular party politics...
...Left factionalism and red-baiting hurt this campaign badly, and it soured many progressives in the AFL (which had endorsed the party) on independent politics...
...Insurgent party building had never gone this far, even in states where the Populists had been successful...
...For example, the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) not only undercut the more radical demands of the Farmers' Union and the Olson administration...
...The author believes that electoral politics is necessarily the business of elites, including insurgent ones, rather than the product of mass action...
...Fanner-labor coalitions focused on holding candidates accountable to a radical program rather than forming new parties...
...Why were there so many "political entrepreneurs" waiting to fill up the "organizational space" in that state...
...The Farmer-Labor party there left an instructive history of how radical movement activists built coalitions, devised mobilizing strategies, and developed programs that allowed them to move beyond insurgency to successful party building...
...He makes an important contribution by explaining why state-level radicalism succeeded in a particular time and place and how national developments undermined the Minnesota Farmer-Labor party...
...The New Deal, according to Valelly, filled the organizational and "conceptual space" the Minnesota farmer laborites had occupied...
...The case of federal labor policy is more complicated...
...In the late 1920s the decline of Minnesota labor unions and the AFL's creation of a new, less independent Central Labor Union in Minneapolis led the State Labor Federation to abandon its political action committee...
...Of course, at the moment most progressives, like Minnesota's new junior senator, Paul Wellstone, think the 104 • DISSENT Books Democratic party is open to them, and do not see the need for independence...
...He defied those who worried about the "class character" of the organization and those who red-baited him for his association with communists...
...The last of these, Elmer Benson, was defeated in 1938 by a liberal Republican named Harold Stassen, who endorsed some of the Farmer-Labor party positions on the one hand and red-baited Benson on the other...
...As New Deal policies and interest-group structures break down, as the national Democratic party weakens, and as Republican policies continue, "organizational space for state level radicalism would seem quite large," he suggests...
...These conflicts caused terrible problems for the Minnesota party...
...When the Nonpartisan League moved over to Minnesota from North Dakota in 1918 it encountered stiff opposition from patriotic and business groups, but unlike the Socialist movement, it did not succumb to these attacks...
...At this point, a tough "political entrepreneur," William Mahoney, a Minneapolis socialist and union pressman, moved to make the party more accountable to its constituents (another classic problem with electoral insurgencies...
...Unlike the national American Federation of Labor (AFL), which sanctioned the federal government's attack on the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the antiwar left, the Minnesota State Federation of Labor was radicalized by the attacks of prowar business and Republican elites...
...There are two main problems...
...Strikingly free of the factionalism that haunted the socialist left and of the urban-rural antagonisms that kept the AFL and Populists apart, the farmer-labor coalition moved beyond insurgency in 1919 when the State Federation of Labor committed itself to "permanent political action" and endowed the new effort with its considerable resources...
...But perhaps "the space for state insurgencies" will continue to grow as the voters demand state policies in the absence of federal action—in areas like public education, health care, and housing...
...it had been created by a unified labor movement but a divided house of labor hastened its demise...
...Given the remarkable success the Fanner-Labor party later WINTER • 1992 • 103 enjoyed in Minnesota, I wonder what might have happened if the AFL had pursued this course elsewhere...
...Its leaders joined with the Socialists in pushing the League to run its own independent candidates on a "farmer-labor slate" in the 1918 general election...
Vol. 39 • January 1992 • No. 1
