In some sense, Hawley isn’t wrong to hearken back to that era. From the 1830s to the 1930s, American politics was characterized by intense and sometimes violent cultural conflict (the fight over Prohibition makes today’s culture warriors seem like peaceniks), a sectional division in the working class (Catholic and Southern white voters supported Democrats, while Protestants and black voters supported Republicans), and a fiery populism that, for all its virtues, could slide into crankery (remember that William Jennings Bryan, laudable for his populist thunder, went on to champion biblical literalism in the famous Scopes trial). Social life at this time was tremendously unequal, violent, and volatile. The richest captains of industry lorded over a corrupt political system, their media influence so large and profound that alternative voices had almost no oxygen.
In many ways, it really does feel like we’ve returned to America’s high Gilded Age.
In this context, Samuel Gompers, then president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), famously argued that labor’s political strategy ought to consist of “rewarding our friends and punishing our enemies” in both major parties. Given that labor was too weak to form its own independent party, he hoped that playing each side off the other might get them to compete for labor’s votes, eventually unlocking a virtuous cycle of reform where labor might have its cake and eat it too.
That was the idea, anyway.
In 1908, Gompers’s AFL endorsed Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was a populist who spent the entire campaign railing against the business elite and their chosen candidate, the Republican William Howard Taft. Bryan was undoubtedly a friend to labor and deserved the endorsement, but for this Gompers was punished. The Republican Party, upon winning a major victory, went about making life much harder for labor. Shortly after the election, Gompers himself was actually sentenced to prison for advocating a boycott (he won his appeal).
The parties, it seemed, did not vigorously vie for labor’s affection in the spirit of cooperation and uplift. Instead, the Republican Party adopted a cooler attitude. As if big business needed any aid in their already lopsided battle against labor, President Taft was instrumental in helping to organize the US Chamber of Commerce, an organization O’Brien rightly called “a union for big business” on Monday. Meanwhile, the Democrats, gradually and then rapidly, came to champion labor as the hero of their appeals.
As Gompers would himself witness, the national developmentalism of the Republicans was fundamentally about building up the nation’s wealth, not redistributing it. Whatever interest they may have had in using the strong arm of the state to grow profits, they had little will to use it to foster equality. In 1908, Taft was asked what was to be done about workers who, through no fault of their own, were thrown out of work for long stretches of time. He replied, “God knows. They have my deepest sympathy.”