The Cook County Labor Party did not enter the primary elections; instead it entered directly the city election of 1 April 1919. It urged workers to abstain from the primaries, and afterwards triumphantly proclaimed that 100,000 had stayed away from the polls. It is most probable that the abstention of the CCLP from the primaries was a disadvantage, but it was a decision born of necessity. For, as we saw earlier, the party was still trying to complete its ward
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organization.
By late February the Majority's campaign was in full flow for the April election. Its priorities were distinctly different to those of
the two main parties. Workers were urged not to take part in the primaries. The second major concern was that labour should take a holiday to picket the polls, to ensure that votes were honestly cast and counted. The opposition labour faced was the incumbent Republican Mayor and a split Democratic Party. Nockels believed that the main candidates were Fitzpatrick and Thompson. He was right about the latter
^^Majority. 12 April 1919.
^ Majority. 22 February I9I9; David Fickes Simonson," The Labor Party Of Cook County, Illinois, 1918-1919", (MA, University of Chicago,
1959), pp. 26-27.
but wrong on the first. Even the two divided Democrat candidates out- polled Fitzpatrick. He believed the real choice facing workers was between these two "main candidates". Thompson was a puppet of the Gas Company as was his main opponent Sweitzer. Fitzpatrick called them the
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gas-house twins.
Roger Horowitz has stressed that the 1919 municipal programme of the Labor Party for the Mayoral campaign was a contemporary version of the 1894 Chicago People's Party programme. Aligned with the Populist People’s Party, the Chicago organization was controlled by the Chicago
labour movement. Horowitz emphasises that the 1919 campaign
concentrated on "cleaning up Chicago". It won support from civic reform elements by advocating the municipal ownership of utilities and
transport, a democratic school board, improved working conditions, better sanitation, just taxation and liberal use of referendum, initiative and recall. Horowitz believes that there was a dichotomy between the aspirations raised in "Labor’s Fourteen Points" and the actual politics of the campaign, and that the more radical demands for nationalization and democratization of industry had been dropped from the campaign. Thus he surmises that the Party had "failed to raise
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issues which directly related to workers as a class".
It is true that the municipal programme was a narrow one, but the actual campaign did not strictly adhere to it. Chicago labour
leaders, and their supporters, used militant and class terms at many of the big campaign rallies held in Chicago. Of course there was a massive gap between the militant rhetoric offered by the campaigners and the solutions actually proposed, but, as we shall see below, it was not irrelevant to the experience of Chicago workers. It was also a rhetoric far to the left of that used in the 1920 James Duncan Mayoralty
campaign in Seattle.
Fitzpatrick used his platform to highlight the poverty of workers and the brutality of the police against those who struck to change conditions, linking his campaign to issues that were important to union activists. During 1917-1919 the CEL organized mass recruiting drives in meatpacking and steel, and Fitzpatrick did not fail to draw the links between the political and industrial. He attacked the excessive profits of the "Meat Kings" at the expense of the workers in
^^Majority, 22 February, 1 March 1919. ^Horowitz, pp. 24, 29.
the packing business. This was a prelude to the further intensification of an organizing drive in the Stockyards in June 1919. He challenged his opponents to state if they had a programme to ameliorate a
situation where profits came out of the stomachs of workers. If the Labor Party was put into power, it had a programme that would rapidly relieve "oppressed" workers. Fitzpatrick pulled no punches; he attacked the anti-labour record of everyone of his opponents. Most of his fire was concentrated on Thompson; he told how he had bullied striking streetcar men into submission and especially mentioned his use of police against striking women garment workers. Fitzpatrick addressed the Labor Party of Cook County on the "Steel Situation". The CFL were determined to get unorganized steel workers into the AFL. Fitzpatrick and W. Z. Foster played a prominent role in the campaign, and the Majority gave the campaign extensive coverage.^
The Majority stressed that the election battle was between big business and labour: "United Capital would meet United Labor" at the ballot box. Here was a rhetoric far more militant and class-conscious than the progressive or "Americanist" tones of the Seattle Union Record. Neither Lincoln or Marx were invoked, but the language was closer to Marx's than Lincoln’s. Of course the rhetoric was more militant than any proposed solution; it would be the state legislature
oc
that would carry out immediate reforms, not workers’ revolution. " Frank Walsh spoke on Fitzpatrick’s behalf during the campaign. He defended the Russian Revolution and called for "Hands Off Russia", for an end to all kings and a free Ireland. When it came to the situation in America he remained just as radical in his critique. High profits, low wages, poverty and inhumane conditions were attacked. The situation could only be resolved by workers’ control and industrial democracy. However, by industrial democracy he meant co-operation between employer and employees. Workers would be given an equal voice with that of the employer, not overall control. However, perhaps as an antidote to the radical speeches of the campaign, the Majority published just before election day appealed to voters to help prevent revolution. This could only be done by letting labour put over its constructive programme.
Majority. 8, 15 March 1919; Notice of Cook County Labor Party meeting 13 March 1919, Fitzpatrick Papers, box 8, folder 58, Chicago Historical Society; Halpern, pp. 33, 47.
Those who opposed the Labor Party were stoking the fires of revolution. This was a far more conciliatory tone than that of a few days
earlier.^