In the middle of July, Teamsters general president Sean O’Brien gave a speech at the Republican National Convention. He declared, “The Teamsters are not interested if you have a D, R, or an I next to your name. We want to know one thing: What are you doing to help American workers?” A day after O’Brien’s address, Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, wrote of the virtues of a pro-labor conservatism. He claimed that O’Brien’s speech should be a call to return to the Republican tradition of Theodore Roosevelt — a tradition political scientist John Gerring called “National Republicanism.”
That period in the party’s history might sound similar to the Trumpian tunes of today. Roosevelt, William McKinley, and William Howard Taft called for instituting high tariffs, developing national manufacturing, and rejecting the free-market ideology so closely associated with modern Republicanism. In that era, advocates of free-market theories were seen as cranks whose “knowledge of Political Economy was obtained in the closet.”
In some sense, Hawley isn’t wrong to hearken back to that time. From the 1830s to the 1930s, US 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, not long after his rabble-rousing crusades for the common man, William Jennings Bryan went on to champion biblical literalism in the Scopes trial). Social life at this time was tremendously unequal, violent, and volatile. The richest captains of industry wielded immense power over politics and the media.
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 workers could have their cake and eat it too.
That was the idea, anyway. In 1908, Gompers’s AFL endorsed Democrat William Jennings Bryan for US president. 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, when he lost the election, Gompers was punished. The Republican Party, on winning a major victory, went about making life much harder for labor. Shortly after the election, Gompers was actually sentenced to prison time for advocating a boycott (he won his appeal).