Although the labor vote is largely
"undeliverable," still where the parties are more or less evenly matched
in strength, that portion of the labor vote which is politically
conscious of its economic interests may swing the election to whichever
side it turns. Under certain conditions[108] labor has been known even
to attain through such indirection in excess of what it might have won
had it come to share in power as a labor party.
The controversy around labor in politics brings up in the last analysis
the whole problem of leadership in labor organizations, or to be
specific, the role of the intellectual in the movement. In America his
role has been remarkably restricted. For a half century or more the
educated classes had no connection with the labor movement, for in the
forties and fifties, when the Brook Farm enthusiasts and their
associates took up with fervor the social question, they were really
alone in the field, since the protracted trade depression had laid all
labor organization low. It was in the eighties, with the turmoil of the
Knights of Labor and the Anarchist bomb in Chicago, that the
"intellectuals" first awakened to the existence of a labor problem.
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