The Populist President of the American Federation of Labor: The Career of John McBride, 1880-1895.

In early August of 1894, John McBride, the president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), announced his intention to form an Ohio labor party and to merge the party with the state's People's party. Historians who have examined the Federation's stance toward political action have mistakenly concluded that McBride shared Samuel Gompers' union philosophy. Gompers's unionism went by a number of names-business unionism, trade unionism, voluntarism, pure and simple unionism, prudential unionism-but it rested on two fundamental assumptions. First, Gompers saw an inherent and unalterable conflict between employers and those who worked for wages. This led Gompers and like-minded unionists to eschew alliances with farmers, small producers, and shop keepers. Second, Gompers saw the conflict between labor and capital as essentially economic in nature. In the past decade, scholars have attempted to explain the decline of labor republicanism and the rise of business unionism in hopes of understanding the conservative nature of American politics. For in the United States alone among Western industrialized nations, the labor movement did not organize politically after the turn of the century to challenge the emergence of large-scale corporate capitalism.