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This project endeavors to retain conflict as a central category in political history. It offers a history of labor and politics in San Francisco from 1901 to 1911 to demonstrate that conflict was the determinative dynamic in city politics and industrial relations as parties, unions, employers, and reformers fought to control the mechanisms of public authority and workplace conditions. The advent of the Union Labor Party (ULP) in 1901 turned the city’s industrial strife into an explicitly political contest with varied and far-reaching results. The purpose of this project, therefore, is to consider the ways in which the presence of a viable labor party affected political conditions in a period of labor and employer militancy and progressive ascendency.
The ULP functioned as organized labor’s political intervention to contest the growing synergy between militant, consolidated corporations and progressive politicians. The waterfront strike of 1901 demonstrated that city hall, through its control of the police, irregular security services, and other mechanisms of public authority, had the power to affect the outcome of industrial disputes and that the reformist administration then in office would yield to employer demands in the name of reestablishing law and order. When in power, the ULP acted as a genuine, if imperfect, counterweight for labor which created a safer strike environment for unions during a period of aggressive open shop agitation from organized employers. Yet because it was in essence a defensive action to maintain the viability of unionism in San Francisco, the party lacked the political economic vision necessary to transcend its core base in organized labor, causing the party to imitate progressive rhetoric about nonpartisanship and social harmony rather than offer an alternative model of social and economic relations.
The adversarial relationship between progressives and organized labor is a core feature of this narrative. The point at issue was not whether organized labor could influence progressive policymaking, but whether progressives could tolerate an independent labor party in control of the executive and legislative arms of the one of the state’s leading cities. Progressive efforts to undermine the ULP indicate that they could not, an insight that cuts through later scholarly emphasis on the shared racial outlook of the white majority, the big tent view of progressive ideology, and the working relationship between organized labor and progressive legislators. Progressives in San Francisco drew the line at labor in politics and the conflict between these two camps played out for control of the mechanisms of public authority.