Political history lives on an elevated plane. In much academic work, the battle of ideas or competing interests tends to displace personal motives, chicanery, what we might go so far as to call corruption. Such resolute idealism may seem naïve when applied to a country like the United States, where there is abundant and often incontrovertible evidence of personal motives and profit-seeking in politics. It is especially ludicrous in the context of the Gilded Age, at the end of the nineteenth century, when railroad owners bought entire legislatures and city machines such as Tammany Hall fixed elections, seemingly at will. Mark Lause’s book explores the seamy underbelly of Gilded Age politics – or are we perhaps inspecting the main trunk of the body? – through the person of William A.A. Carsey, counterfeit labor figure, fake trade unionist, master of the astroturfed party or movement.
Lause takes us through an entertaining survey of Carsey’s long career as a professional interloper in the world of labor politics from the 1870s through the 1890s. After serving in the Union Army during the Civil War, Carsey aligned himself with the infamous Tammany Hall Democratic machine, stepping neatly onto the great conveyor belt of Gilded Age con men. His scam involved the paper political party, ostensibly catering to working-class interests, which he would use to infiltrate or merge with actual, budding political movements. This malign Forrest Gump of the Gilded Age labor world appeared at the conventions of parties ranging from the National Labor Union’s National Labor Party in the early 1870s to the Greenbackers in the late 1870s, the Anti-Monopoly Party in the mid-1880s, and the Populists in the 1890s. His goal in all these cases, and others, was to divide and derail these parties and ultimately draw their members back to the Democratic Party. Along the way, he used his presidency of these paper parties to speak before congressional committees in favor of the Western Union telegraph monopoly and other businesses willing to subsidize his work.
Lause’s book is worth reading simply as a thoroughly enjoyable narrative of how political operatives gamed universal male suffrage for their own ends, and those of their superiors. His exploration of Carsey’s work is a telling reminder of why contemporary labor figures, from Terence Powderly to Samuel Gompers, looked on electoral politics with such suspicion. Their moral stance on that issue owed much to hard-earned experience. But Lause goes further. What if the central question of US labor history – why no successful socialist or labor party ever emerged – could be partly explained by the phenomenon that Carsey represented? Put another way, did promising steps taken towards a US labor party, first by the NLU, then the Greenbackers, followed by independent labor parties built by Knights of Labor in the mid-1880s, and then the Populist revolt in the 1890s, falter because of agent provocateurs of Carsey’s ilk? Certainly, in Lause’s telling, Carsey turns up at almost every promising Gilded Age moment when a labor party seemed poised to win some success and had a real base of organizing working-class support behind it. With his metaphorical demolition crew, he then helps to wreck National Labor Union.
We should not give Carsey too much credit for these failures, and Lause does not exaggerate his importance. A labor movement where shysters and astroturfers could wreak so much havoc must have already contained broader weaknesses that they could exploit. The favored ideological underpinnings of that movement, especially Greenbackism and anti-monopolism, were easily drained of their essence and only retained in rhetorical form by the major parties, as Carsey endeavoured to do and Lause shows well. Yet, we should not retreat completely to such structural arguments. When the labor movement is weak – as it was for much of that period – the opportunities to build a successful labor party are rare, and the odds of their success are low. In such conditions, a political wrecking ball like Carsey can matter disproportionately. If the failure of American workers to build a labor party owes much to wider forces, it is also the product of contingency. Some of labor’s failures might have turned out otherwise. It is in the latter category that Carsey’s career takes on real significance.
He also resurfaces in other interesting places. One of his many vehicles, the Knights of Industry, emerged as a major player at the Terre Haute meeting of trade unionists that led to the formation of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions – the direct predecessor to the American Federation of Labor. When the actual trade unionists arrived at the convention and noted the high number of unrepresentative delegates of the Carsey variety, they wisely called a second convention limited to confirmed trade union representatives. Even when labor and reform figures across the country began to catch on to Carsey’s scams in the early 1890s, and his space to influence political developments accordingly declined, he was still able to play a role in returning Populists to the Democratic fold.
Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice illustrates that we cannot understand American politics, and the specific failure of American workers to build their own party, without understanding the work of venal, opportunistic, and cynical people and motives. Lause reminds us that this failure was not simply the product of repression or disinterest. Republicans and Democrats alike used every means, legal or otherwise, to maintain their hold on electoral politics. Nor has the political process become more exalted since. The means by which Carsey undermined radical third-party challenges, collapsing them and drawing their wreckage back into the two major parties, remain weapons in the arsenal of both Democrats and Republicans. That is a warning to anyone still hoping for a labor alternative to the two major parties.
