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13 State/Local Significant Others The People’s Republic of Burlington caption on a Vermont bumper sticker Over nearly two centuries now there have been parties that established themselves as influential participants in the electoral and policy-making processes of their communities or states. For some the accomplishment has come as a single event: for example Walter Hickel’s 1990 gubernatorial election on the Alaskan Independence Party line. The benchmarks of significance are more often a good bit deeper than that. Some of these parties have even managed to become major actors within their limited territorial scope. But as electoral agents with clout and impact, parties of this type are confined (or virtually confined)—or they limit themselves by choice—to their own communities or states. It would be a mistake to discount the importance of these nonnational partisan actors. As politicians and political scientists often point out, in America all politics really is local politics. It is not that the leaders of these parties have no interest in national affairs. They are likely to grasp the impact of federal policy on their localities and states. Many of their parties nominate or endorse candidates for president. Some have offered and even elected congressional candidates. There have even been those parties that visualized their movements in national terms but did not develop organizations commensurate with their visions. Today ballot-certified state Working Families parties operate in New York and in Connecticut , South Carolina, Delaware, Oregon, and Vermont. Though they are linked in spirit and cooperate with each other, these state Working Families parties have never convened a general meeting to select national officers and or taken any other step requisite to creating a national party organization.1 Local and State Parties in the Nineteenth Century Many nonnational parties arose and ran their course in the nineteenth century. That is not surprising given nineteenth-century Americans’ preoccupation with local issues and events and the absence of true national news media at the time. State/Local Significant Others 201 Labor, Farmer, and Related Class-Based Parties Parties of workers and the poor grew up in the Northeast: first, near the end of the 1820s, the Working Men’s Party in Philadelphia and in New York the State Guardianship Party. The ephemeral Locofoco Party appeared in New York City in 1835 and after that the Anti-Rent Party around 1839.2 The Locofocos had split away from their city’s Tammany Democratic machine. At a demonstration they held at Tammany Hall they underscored their departure by lighting candles known at the time as locofocos. It was outsiders who gave the Locofocos their informal name.3 Local Labor parties grew up in post–Civil War Virginia, Wisconsin, and Arkansas . Radicalized farmers set up antimonopoly parties in California, Oregon, and most of the states in the Midwest in the 1870s. These nineteenth-century agrarian and labor parties were important precursors of the coalitions of workers and farmers that came to be organized as the national Greenback and People’s parties as well as of the Socialist parties that emerged in time. Henry George, whose radical “single tax” plan had won him fame and a nationwide following of hundreds of thousands but also the undying enmity of many conservatives , ran for mayor of New York in 1886.4 Campaigning as the nominee of the local United Labor Party, George took on the entrenched, corrupt Tammany machine. According to the official count (said to have been grossly manipulated by Tammany), he won 31 percent, second only to Tammany’s Abram S. Hewitt with 41 percent. Young Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican nominee, came in third at 28 percent. The earliest of the labor parties had pressed for suffrage expansion to encompass working-class white men. The general histories of the nineteenth-century state and local labor parties document their legitimate, inevitable, and necessary push for labor rights, limits on working hours, and the regulation of workplace conditions. But racism and nativism also affected nineteenth-century labor movements. Born in 1877, the California Workingmen’s Party found in nativism and race its reason to exist. Under Denis Kearney’s leadership, the party became notorious for agitation around the slogan “The Chinese must go!” Its appeal spread like wildfire through the Golden State. Just two years after its birth, the Workingmen’s Party won the San Francisco mayoralty and took possession of city government there. The party was implicated in mob...

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