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The American Labor Party (1936-1956) was America's most electorally successful labor party, helping elect presidents and holding the balance of power in New York politics. Its collapse due to factional warfare and Cold War pressures offers crucial lessons for building lasting working-class political power today through economic democracy, worker ownership, and community control.
How the rise and fall of America's most successful labor party informs today's fight against oligarchy, wealth concentration, and the housing crisis
When people hear about "The Labor Party" today, they often ask: didn't we already try this? What happened to the last Labor Party in America? The answer reveals both inspiring achievements and critical lessons about building independent working-class political power.
The American Labor Party wasn't a fringe movement or theoretical experiment—it was one of the most electorally successful third parties in 20th century American politics. Founded in July 1936 by needle trades union leaders including David Dubinsky of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the ALP wielded extraordinary influence in New York politics for nearly two decades.
The party's founding coalition brought together over 200 affiliated unions representing hundreds of thousands of workers. The ILGWU alone contributed nearly $142,000 to the 1936 campaign—demonstrating genuine labor movement investment. This wasn't a personality cult or fringe operation: it was organized labor creating independent political power.
The electoral results were remarkable. In 1936, the ALP delivered 274,924 votes for FDR—providing his margin of victory in New York State. In 1937, the party gave Mayor Fiorello La Guardia 482,790 votes (21.6% of his total), making the ALP the second-largest party in New York City. The party consistently provided the margin of victory in major elections, forcing both Democrats and Republicans to compete for ALP endorsement.
Most impressively, Vito Marcantonio served seven terms in Congress (1934-1951) running on ALP and fusion lines—longer than any other radical third-party politician of the 20th century. Through masterful constituent service and genuine community organizing in East Harlem, Marcantonio demonstrated that labor politics could win and hold power.
The ALP elected numerous state legislators, city council members, and local officials. It pioneered multiracial political coalitions decades before the civil rights movement, helping elect the first Puerto Rican state legislator and the first Black city councilman in New York. The party championed racial equality, workers' rights, and social democracy when these positions were considered dangerously radical.
If the American Labor Party was so successful, why did it fail? The answer holds critical lessons for building independent labor politics today.
Internal factional warfare destroyed the party from within. Despite constitutional provisions barring Communists from membership, the ALP never enforced these restrictions. Communist Party members joined through Communist-led unions, creating factional divisions from the start. Anti-communist leaders like Dubinsky and Alex Rose fought left-wing factions led by Hillman and Marcantonio over organizational control and ideological direction.
The decisive break came in May 1944. After left-wing delegates won 620 of 750 state committee seats in primary elections, Dubinsky and Rose led their supporters out to form the Liberal Party of New York. The ILGWU's withdrawal eliminated the ALP's financial backbone—the same union that poured $142,000 into the party in 1936 gave $50,000 to seed the new Liberal Party instead.
Cold War anti-communism proved devastating. The ALP's 1948 endorsement of Henry Wallace for president, whose Progressive Party opposed the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, confirmed for many Americans that the party had become a Communist front. McCarthyism created a toxic political environment where any association with Communism meant political death. The ALP refused to distance itself from pro-Soviet foreign policy positions, cementing its marginalization.
Hostile legislation targeted the party's electoral tactics. The Wilson-Pakula Act of 1947 prevented cross-filing without party permission, specifically designed to stop Marcantonio's tactic of winning Democratic and Republican primaries simultaneously. This enabled major parties to "gang up" on ALP candidates. When Marcantonio lost re-election in 1950 to a fusion candidate backed by Democrats, Republicans, AND the Liberal Party, it effectively ended the ALP as a viable electoral force.
The collapse was swift and total. From 509,559 votes for Wallace in 1948, the party fell to 64,211 presidential votes in 1952—an 88% decline in four years. By 1954, the ALP received less than 50,000 votes in the gubernatorial race, causing it to lose automatic ballot status. On October 7, 1956—twenty years after its founding—the American Labor Party voted to disband, financially bankrupt and politically isolated.
The American Labor Party's dissolution didn't end the use of "labor party" terminology. In 1973, Lyndon LaRouche founded the U.S. Labor Party (USLP)—a fraudulent organization that appropriated labor language while having zero connection to legitimate labor movements.
The USLP received no support from actual unions. Instead, it physically attacked labor activists through "Operation Mop-Up," resulting in at least 60 assaults against Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party, and Black Power activists. The organization operated as a personality cult around LaRouche, transformed from ostensible leftism to far-right extremism by 1977, and disbanded in 1979 after garnering just 40,043 votes (0.05%) in LaRouche's 1976 presidential campaign.
This distinction matters: The American Labor Party was a genuine labor movement with real union backing and electoral success. The U.S. Labor Party was a cult that appropriated labor terminology to mask authoritarianism and violence. Understanding this difference is critical for anyone studying labor party history in America.
The American Labor Party's experience offers crucial lessons for building independent labor politics in 2025. The modern Labor Party emerges in a context that's both similar and different from 1936, facing challenges that demand we learn from both the ALP's successes and its failures.
The challenges today are even more severe than the 1930s. Three billionaires now control more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans—concentration exceeding even the Gilded Age. Corporate consolidation has reduced competition across industries from airlines to agriculture. Housing has been financialized into an investment commodity, with private equity firms buying up single-family homes while working families face skyrocketing rents. Union density has fallen from 35% in 1954 to under 11% today.
Unlike the ALP, which emerged from already-powerful needle trades unions, today's Labor Party must build in a landscape where organized labor has been systematically weakened by decades of neoliberal policy. Yet we also benefit from lessons the ALP learned the hard way about factional discipline, democratic accountability, and the importance of maintaining independence from both major parties AND from authoritarian ideological movements.
The modern Labor Party's response is grounded in economic and political democracy—building on the ALP's pioneering vision of worker power while avoiding the sectarianism that destroyed it.
The modern Labor Party's approach to oligarchy and wealth concentration centers on democratizing economic power itself. Rather than accepting capitalism's concentrated ownership structure, we're building alternatives that put workers in control.
Worker cooperatives and employee ownership represent the foundation of economic democracy. The Labor Party's platform includes direct federal support for worker-owned businesses: grants, low-interest loans, tax incentives, and specialized offices to assist with cooperative transitions. We're not just talking about better jobs—we're talking about workers owning the businesses where they work.
This includes revised bankruptcy laws that facilitate worker-led acquisitions of failing businesses, ensuring employees can transition into ownership without inheriting unsustainable debts. When corporations fail, workers shouldn't lose their livelihoods—they should have first opportunity to reorganize as cooperatives.
Sectoral bargaining extends beyond individual workplaces to industry-wide collective bargaining, strengthening labor power across entire economic sectors. Combined with the full repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, this restores workers' rights to solidarity strikes, secondary boycotts, and general strikes—the collective action that built the American labor movement.
The housing crisis exemplifies how financialization destroys communities. When Wall Street firms treat homes as investment portfolios, working families get priced out of entire neighborhoods. The modern Labor Party's response is comprehensive: removing housing from speculative markets and ensuring community control.
Our housing platform bans corporate ownership of single-family homes by hedge funds and private equity firms, while implementing progressive taxation that forces the sale of large residential portfolios. We're not just regulating bad actors—we're changing who gets to own housing in the first place.
Nationwide rent stabilization caps increases at 3% annually while establishing just-cause eviction protections, mandatory relocation assistance, and tenant rights to purchase their units when owners sell. A national vacancy tax targets corporate-owned properties left empty for speculation, with funds redirected to affordable housing development.
Cooperative housing initiatives receive federal support through specialized lending, tax incentives, and programs that help apartment buildings transition to resident ownership. This moves beyond traditional public housing toward community-controlled alternatives that build long-term wealth for working families.
Economic democracy requires political democracy—and that means breaking corporate control over our political system. The modern Labor Party supports constitutional amendments establishing that corporations are not people and overturning Citizens United's legalization of unlimited corporate political spending.
Automatic voter registration, ranked choice voting, and abolishing the Electoral College ensure every person's voice counts equally. Meanwhile, ending corporate lobbying and requiring full transparency in political donations prevents wealth from buying political influence.
Supreme Court reform through term limits and ethics rules addresses the judicial branch's corporate capture, while DC statehood and filibuster reform remove structural barriers to democratic governance.
The Labor Party's anti-monopoly platform goes beyond traditional antitrust enforcement to actively promote community-controlled alternatives to corporate dominance. We're strengthening enforcement in tech, agriculture, and healthcare while empowering new public or cooperative market entrants.
Media consolidation threatens democratic discourse, so we're capping the number of affiliate stations any company can own while providing grants for locally owned independent outlets. Public social media platforms free from corporate advertising models offer alternatives to surveillance capitalism.
Public banking through postal banking services and expanded credit unions provide community-controlled financial services, while community investment grants funded by bank penalty fees support local small businesses and public schools.
Unlike the historical USLP's bizarre foreign policy positions (including endorsing Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter), the modern Labor Party promotes international accountability and human rights. We support joining the International Criminal Court, strengthening global accountability mechanisms, and using international law to address corporate environmental destruction.
Climate justice includes international reparations for environmental devastation caused by resource extraction, while debt cancellation for post-colonial nations addresses illegitimate debts imposed by institutions that profited from historical exploitation.
The American Labor Party's experience teaches us that electoral success alone doesn't guarantee lasting power. The ALP won major elections and held the balance of power, yet still collapsed within two decades. Why? Because electoral victories without deep organizational infrastructure and ideological clarity prove unsustainable.
The modern Labor Party takes a different approach: we're building power in workplaces and communities first, using elections as one tool among many. We're organizing tenant unions, supporting workplace organizing, building worker cooperatives, and creating alternative economic institutions. When we win elections, we'll have the organized base to defend those victories and implement transformative policy.
The ALP's dependence on a few large unions proved fatal when those unions withdrew support. The modern Labor Party builds broader coalitions across multiple sectors—tech workers, service workers, gig economy workers, tenant organizers, and small business owners facing corporate competition. We're creating resilient networks that can't be destroyed by any single union's departure.
The ALP's sectarian battles over Communist Party influence consumed energy that should have gone to organizing. The modern Labor Party maintains clear democratic principles and transparent organizational structures. We welcome all workers committed to economic democracy while maintaining standards that prevent authoritarian takeover or personality cults.
Most critically, we're building alternative economic institutions that demonstrate our vision in practice. Worker cooperatives, community land trusts, public banking, and tenant-controlled housing show what economic democracy looks like. The ALP talked about a democratic economy—we're building it piece by piece, creating tangible examples that survive beyond election cycles.
The modern Labor Party draws inspiration from the American Labor Party's successes while consciously learning from its failures. Like the ALP, we believe in independent working-class political power, fusion voting where available, and policies decades ahead of mainstream politics. Like the ALP, we champion racial and economic justice, strong unions, and democratic control of the economy.
Unlike the ALP, we maintain strict democratic accountability and transparent organizational structures that prevent both sectarian takeover and personality cults. We learn from the ALP's factional warfare by building broad coalitions with clear principles rather than allowing ideological purity tests to destroy unity.
We also build deeper than the ALP did—creating alternative economic institutions that demonstrate our vision and survive beyond election cycles. Where the ALP depended on a few large unions, we're building diverse coalitions across sectors. Where the ALP focused primarily on New York, we're organizing nationally with strong local chapters.
We also explicitly reject any connection to the fraudulent U.S. Labor Party of 1973-1979. LaRouche's organization appropriated labor language while attacking actual unions, engaged in violence against progressive activists, and operated as an authoritarian cult. The modern Labor Party has zero organizational, ideological, or personnel connections to that discredited operation.
Our movement is built on transparency, democratic participation, and authentic solidarity with working people. We work directly with labor organizations, tenant groups, and community activists—not against them. We build coalitions across movements for economic justice, racial equity, and environmental protection.
The oligarchy's power comes from concentrated ownership of productive assets—factories, technology, land, and financial institutions. True democracy requires democratizing ownership itself, not just reforming how wealth is distributed.
This means expanding worker cooperatives until employee ownership becomes standard rather than exceptional. It means community control over housing through cooperative ownership and social housing. It means public banking that serves communities rather than shareholders.
It means political institutions that respond to working people rather than corporate donors. Automatic voter registration, ranked choice voting, campaign finance reform, and anti-monopoly enforcement create space for authentic democratic participation.
Most fundamentally, it means organizing for power rather than just policy. The modern Labor Party builds working-class political organizations capable of winning concrete victories while constructing alternative economic institutions that prefigure the democratic economy we're fighting for.
What happened to the American Labor Party? It proved that independent labor politics could win major elections and wield real power—then it collapsed due to factional warfare, Cold War pressures, and dependence on a few large unions. It pioneered multiracial coalitions and policies decades ahead of its time—then sectarianism destroyed it from within.
These lessons shape everything the modern Labor Party does. We build broader coalitions that can't be destroyed by any single organization's departure. We maintain transparent democratic structures that prevent sectarian takeover. We create alternative economic institutions that demonstrate our vision in practice. We organize in communities and workplaces, not just during election cycles.
The oligarchy is real. The housing crisis is real. The concentration of wealth and corporate power are documented facts requiring collective action. Our response is grounded in economic and political democracy: worker ownership, community control, and political institutions that serve people rather than profit.
The American Labor Party showed that labor politics could win. The modern Labor Party will show that labor politics can last—because we're building the deep organizational infrastructure and alternative institutions that the ALP never created. We're not just winning elections; we're transforming how economic and political power operate.
The difference between 1936 and 2025 is that we have the ALP's entire history to learn from. We know what works: fusion voting, balance-of-power politics, policies decades ahead of the mainstream, multiracial organizing. We know what fails: sectarian warfare, dependence on a few large institutions, lack of internal democracy, inability to adapt to changing political conditions.
Join us. This isn't just about elections—it's about building a movement that honors the American Labor Party's vision while learning from its mistakes. It's about creating the lasting working-class political power that the ALP showed was possible but couldn't sustain.
Because when working people organize for democracy at work and in society—with the organizational discipline and strategic clarity the ALP lacked—we become unstoppable.
Ready to build lasting economic and political democracy? Learn more at votelabor.org and get involved with your local Labor Party chapter.
