Some scholars, like historian Eric Davin, hold the CIO leadership responsible. In the early 1930s, local labor parties ran candidates in at least twenty-three areas and won control of the local government of Berlin, New Hampshire. Central labor councils in at least ten other places advocated building a national labor party, as did state labor federations in New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. At the 1935 AFL convention, which led to the creation of the CIO, various unions submitted proposals for a labor party; a resolution endorsing the idea only narrowly failed.
But by 1936, John L. Lewis, president of the
United Mine Workers of America (UMW) and the CIO, and Sidney Hillman, head of the ACWA, had founded Labor’s Nonpartisan League — a move designed to ensure the CIO would remain loyal to the ostensibly pro-labor Roosevelt.