page_title: Committee of 48
section_title: July 1920 Conventions
hierarchical_section_title: Committee of 48 / Organizational history / July 1920 Conventions
caption_attribution_description: Dudley Field Malone (1882 - 1950), lawyer and member of the Democratic Party
context_page_description: The Committee of 48 was an American liberal political association established in 1919 in the hope of creating a new political party for social reform to stand in opposition to the increasingly conservative Republican and Democratic parties. Named in recognition of the 48 states of the US to signify the desire to construct a broad national movement, the moderate progressives of the Committee of 48 attempted without success to form such a third party with sympathetic activists from the labor movement in 1920.
  The group then became one of the key constituents in the Conference for Progressive Political Action in 1922, a movement culminating in the independent candidacy of Robert M. La Follette for President of the United States in 1924.
context_section_description: A grand unification convention designed to bring together liberal forces around a new third party was opened in Chicago on July 10, 1920. The gathering brought together the Committee of 48 with representatives of the Single Tax movement, with a view to further combining with the convention of the Labor Party of the United States, due to start in the same city two days later. Also joining the eclectic gathering of 539 accredited delegates were adherents of other political organizations, including the Non-Partisan League, the Northwest Farmers' National Council, the Triple Alliance of the Northwest, the Consumers' League, and other organizations.
  Lack of harmony was evident from the outset, with incompatible programmatic goals and Presidential desires evident, the Single Taxers insistent upon a Single Tax plank in the new party's platform and threatening to bolt the convention if the favorite of the Committee of 48, "Fighting Bob" La Follette of Wisconsin, were to be nominated to head the ticket. Simultaneously, closed door unity negotiations were begun between representatives of the Committee of 48 and the Labor Party with a view to joining the two conventions in a new organization to challenge the so-called "old parties" of American politics, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
  The unification effort was quickly on the rocks, however, as two days of preparatory meetings of conference committees of the two organizations proved unable to agree upon a common program. Bad feelings were in evidence, with at least one member of the Labor Party charging the Committee of 48 with being "plutocratic philanthropists trying to use the Labor Party." Moreover, the "Forty-Eighters" found themselves internally divided between a more conservative bloc based in the East, including top organizational leaders J.A.H. Hopkins, Allen McCurdy, and Amos Pinchot, and a more radical segment of newcomers hailing largely from the Western states, the most prominent spokesman for whom was lawyer Dudley Field Malone.
  The matter of central difference between the two groups related to the proposed unified organization's position on nationalization of industry, with the Labor Party camp and the Western radical members of the Committee of 48 in favor of the proposition while the Eastern leadership of the "Forty-Eighters" deeming the matter "pre-revolutionary idealism" that was far in advance of political realities. Rumors circulated that Western adherents of the Committee of 48 believed their Eastern-based leadership, clearly unhappy with the direction in which the convention was headed, to be stalling unity negotiations in order to bring the unity convention to a stalemate and thereby preserve their organizational independence and personal control.
  On July 12, the first day of their own scheduled convention, Labor Party activists at the convention therefore issued the Committee of 48 an ultimatum: to either proceed with amalgamation the next day on terms suitable to the Labor Party or else the Labor Party would forward alone, nominating its own candidate for President of the United States and writing its own program in its own name. The Hopkins-McCurdy-Pinchot bloc refused this proposition, and no unification of the two rival organizations was achieved. The Labor Party of the United States went on to nominate Utahn Parley Parker Christensen to head its ticket and conducted its own campaign in the 1920 campaign.
  The Eastern leaders of the Committee of 48 attempted to put the best face on their inability to construct a unified third party for the November 1920 election, with Allen McCurdy declaring the failure to have been "inevitable," while counterintuitively declaring that the inability of the July conventions to unite having revealed "more clearly than ever the necessity for a new party." In McCurdy's view, unification had failed owing to the failure of the convention to accept the desires of "the responsible leadership of the Committee of 48" to establish a "great coalition party" of "believers in American progress," in which organized labor
caption: Attorney Dudley Field Malone, spokesman for the pro-unity forces in the Committee of 48 at the July 1920 Convention.
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