Instead, the activities of the organizations, though scarcely lessened
in intensity, have become centered upon the issues of conditions of
employment.
The drift towards independent labor politics, which many anticipate,
also remains quite inconclusive. A Farmer-Labor party, launched in 1920
by influential labor leaders of Chicago (to be sure, against the wishes
of the national leaders), polled not more than 350,000 votes. And in the
same election, despite a wide dissatisfaction in labor circles with the
change in the government's attitude after the passage of the War
emergency and with a most sweeping use of the injunction in the coal
strike, the vote for the socialist candidate for President fell below a
million, that is behind the vote of 1912, notwithstanding a doubling of
the electorate with women's suffrage. Finally, the same convention of
the American Federation of Labor, which showed so much sympathy for the
ideas of the Plumb Plan League, approved a rupture with the
International Trade Union Federation, with headquarters in Amsterdam,
Holland, mainly on account of the revolutionary character of the
addresses issued by the latter.
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