When will people on the left get smart and build the wherewithal to prevent this from happening yet again?

William A. A. Carsey was a covert operative working for the Democratic Party in the late 19^th century, who infiltrated labor organizations and other independent political groups with the goal of sabotaging them, coopting their messaging, and siphoning votes to the Democratic Party.

Mark A. Lause, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Cincinnati, has written an illuminating biography of Carsey called, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice: William A. A. Carsey and the Shaping of American Reform Politics.

The book helps to explain the limitations of the U.S. two-party system and difficulties experienced by independent political organizers in the country.

Lause calls Carsey a “pioneer of modern astro-turfing.”

He says that Carsey foreshadowed modern-day Democratic Party covert operators who have transformed the Green Party into an “allied outrider of the Democratic Party” and set up front groups—like MoveOn.org and Brand New Congress—whose primary purpose has been to channel discontented voters into the Democratic Party.^[1]

When Carsey joined the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) in 1872-73, he tellingly functioned as an agent provocateur urging self-destructive confrontation with the police.^[2] Carsey also promoted conservative platforms in other labor organizations of which he was part.^[3]

Born to immigrant parents on New York’s Lower East Side in 1841, Carsey played professional baseball before serving in the Union Army in the Civil War. Afterwards, he embellished his war record, claiming to have served in General William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea.^[4]

Following the end of the war, Carsey became active in union politics as a bricklayer and builder and became associated with the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall political machine, which dominated New York City politics through patronage.

From the 1870s through the 1980s, Lause wrote, “few national gatherings of labor organizations to launch labor reform parties took place without [Carsey’s] presence.” Through the Gilded Age, Carsey served as “the most persistent and patient Democratic field operative, laboring assiduously to mislead, misdirect, and destroy efforts to sustain independent political parties.”^[5]

The latter goals were achieved through restructuring the parties to make them unworkable, or by “guiding them into fusion with the Democrats or shaping them as predetermined dead-end single-shot protests.”^[6]

The Gilded Age of American history was known for sweeping social inequality, exploitative working conditions, vast market fluctuations, conservative politics and elite political corruption.

Ascendant labor organizations sought to establish an independent party that would genuinely represent working class interests, as they did in other Western industrialized nations like Britain and France where viable labor and socialist parties emerged.

In the United States, however, Carsey proved to be a key figure in thwarting these efforts. The Socialist and Populist parties had some success at the turn of the 20^th century but were not able to alter the conservative political structure in the U.S.

The Populist Party declined after the Democrats recruited its leader, William Jennings Bryan, and made him their candidate for president in the 1896 election while the Socialist Party faded into obscurity in the face of the repression of the First Red Scare after World War I.

A Political Pimp and Traitor to the Cause of Labor

Carsey’s job was particularly important coming at a time of growing labor militancy and Republican Party dominance in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Democrats at the time were associated with slavery and secession.

In 1874, Carsey launched the New York-based Industrial Political Party with Charles A. Dana, an assistant Secretary of War in the Lincoln administration and owner and editor of The New York Sun, which he had transformed into a Democratic Party organ.

The main purpose of the party was to get disaffected voters to the polls who would then vote for Democrats, since the Industrial Political Party only ran candidates for a few local offices and endorsed many Democratic Party candidates.^[7]

Lause wrote that Carsey’s activities “reflected a general disposition among Democrats to coopt and defang insurgent impulses.” Carsey achieved this by “creating a labor reform party radically disconnected from working people that existed only on paper, or more accurately, in the papers.”^[8]

In the late 1870s, Carsey served as a member of the governing body of the National Greenback Party where he espoused radical rhetoric but urged would-be insurgents to cast their lot with the Democratic Party in elections.^[9]

Another organization that Carsey helped form, the Knights of Industry, opposed strikes and government ownership and supported jingoistic rhetoric. It was described by the Central Labor Union of New York as “the trick of a political trickster.”^[10]

Periodically, Carsey would run for public office in order to “take the wind out of the sails of any possible genuine independent [candidate],” according to Lause.^[11]

When testifying before a congressional committee on the labor question, he called for cutting government spending, moderate regulation that would not injure business, and ending of practices that “grind down the laboring class and employ Chinese and others, against whom American laborers could not compete, because the latter cannot live as the former do.”^[12]

According to Lause, these latter comments exemplify Carsey’s effort, adopted more recently by Donald Trump and the GOP, to channel working class grievances into nativism, with Carsey raising alarm about a “swarm of foreigners driving out native laborers.”^[13]

Carsey was a close ally of New York Governor David Bennett Hill (1885-1891), a Democrat who promoted moderate labor reforms but believed that “there is no place in honorable American politics for the political guerrillas who do not attach themselves to either of the great political armies.”^[14]

New York City in the 1880s had no less than ten “third parties,” all of which claimed to advocate for the cause of the discontented, but were really little more than “deliberate ploys by one or the other of the major parties—or a faction thereof—to weaken the voting strength of their rival.”^[15]

Lause wrote that “not only did some of them [independent political parties] hope to siphon votes from the opposition, but they also sought to multiply insurgent options in order to dissipate their impact.”^[16]

In reading this, one cannot help but think of the hapless presidential campaigns of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Cornel West, Jill Stein and a bevy of other independent candidates running in the 2024 race.

In 1881, Carsey moved into the leadership of a nonpartisan anti-monopoly league whose purpose was to break up chartered corporate monopolies dominated by Republicans and replace them with new monopolies in which Democrats participated.^[17]

Subsequently, he helped to form a new labor party that became preoccupied with “protective tariffs and foreigners rather than wages, working conditions, and the length of the workday.”^[18]

The party made a point of criticizing the writings of Henry George, a brilliant left-winger who galvanized people with his vision of a more humane political economy. Carsey blasted George as “a crank, come from no one knows where.”^[19]

A student of socialist history later recalled Carsey’s party as prone to ideological hairsplitting to such an extent that one of its main leaders “developed schizophrenia and split with himself.”^[20]

With his cover blown, Carsey was denounced by members of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) as a “fraud with no right to speak in the name of labor.”

The Knights of Labor expelled him from its 1892 convention in Omaha, Nebraska, where Knights of Labor leader Terence V. Powderly blasted him as a “traitor to the cause of labor.”^[21]

The American Nonconformist and Kansas Industrial Liberator, a voice of the mid and southwestern-based Farmers Alliance, referred to Carsey as a “vulgar fraud and corrupt ruffian” who fit in well with “the political pimps and cesspool cleaners for the two old parties that oft times join the Alliance and other reform organizations for the purpose of deceiving and misleading the honest people.”^[22]

Plenty of Heirs

Sadly, there were many charlatans and pimps like Carsey to take his place after he died.

Carsey’s heirs include provocateurs who infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panther Party in the 1950s and 1960s in order to coopt and destroy them, and Democratic Party operatives who have infiltrated media organizations and set up astro-turf organizations to channel leftist activism into the Party.

Since its takeover by the Clintonite “New Democrats,” the Democratic Party is increasingly beholden to corporate interests intent on gutting core New Deal programs and advancing hawkish and arch-imperialistic foreign policies.

Lause concludes that “the work of Carsey became the professions of Lee Atwater, Michael Deaver, and other” seasoned political operatives known for their skilled public relations campaigns that involve the manipulation of public opinion.

Carsey’s spirit was evident during the 2020 Democratic Party primary when the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) manufactured new political candidates who decided to drop out of the race on the eve of Super Tuesday and urged their followers to support Joe Biden against Bernie Sanders who was more progressive.

According to Lause, “the century after Carsey’s death saw growth of the mechanisms of conscious misrepresentations into the mass production of disinformation, the strategic cultivation of mistrust, an ideology of deliberate dysfunctionality and pervasive civic demoralization.”^[23]

Today, the United States promotes itself as a model democracy that must lead the world in a crusade against political authoritarianism. Carsey’s career, however, shows that America is far from a model democracy. Rather, it is an oligarchy that uses hired political hitmen to undermine popular movements and sustain its predatory rule.

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1. Mark A. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice: William A. Carsey and the Shaping of American Reform Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2024), xiv, xii. ↑

2. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 1. ↑

3. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 14, 15. ↑

4. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 8. Carsey was a catcher. His son, Wilfred “Kid” Carsey became a major leaguer who won over 100 games as a pitcher. ↑

5. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, xi. ↑

6. Idem. ↑

7. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 33. An added benefit was that his leadership of the party gave Carsey credentials to participate in various labor conventions. ↑

8. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 34. ↑

9. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 49, 52. ↑

10. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 73, 76. ↑

11. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 52. ↑

12. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 51, 77. ↑

13. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 51. ↑

14. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 80. ↑

15. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 54. ↑

16. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 81. ↑

17. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 82, 83. ↑

18. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 103. ↑

19. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 108. ↑

20. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 105. ↑

21. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 112, 119, 121. ↑

22. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 120. ↑

23. Lause, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice, 140. ↑

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