A Return to Gompers

Teamsters general president Sean O’Brien gave a speech at the Republican National Convention two days ago. In that speech, O’Brien declared, “The Teamsters are not interested if you have D, R, or an I next to your name. We want to know one thing: what are you doing to help American workers.” It was an insistence that the union is not beholden to any party or candidate.

A day after O’Brien’s speech, Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, wrote of the virtues of a pro-labor conservatism. He claims that O’Brien’s speech should be a call to return to the Republican tradition of Theodore Roosevelt — a tradition that John Gerring called “National Republicanism.”

That period of the party might sound similar to the Trumpian tunes of today. Roosevelt, William McKinley, and William Howard Taft called for high tariffs, developing national manufacturing, and a rejection of 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 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…