Today one often hears pleas for civility in political discourse and behavior. The Second District electoral contest between U. S. Representative Mike Michaud and his Republican challenger Jason Levesque is a study in advanced civility and political decorum in comparison with the bitter Second District race in 1906. (Redistricting in 1960 reduced the number of Congressional Districts to two.)

In that year the American Federation of Labor (AFL) under its helmsman, President Samuel Gompers, made its political debut as a national organization when it entered the political field via Maine’s Second Congressional District to defeat Republican Congressman Charles E. Littlefield of Rockland.

Littlefield was one of the nation’s champions of the use of the injunction in labor disputes (the “Gatling gun on paper”) and insisted that labor unions be embraced under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which was designed to prohibit contracts and combinations in restraint of trade.

Gompers remarked: “Of all members of Congress, no one stood more conspicuous as an antagonist to the interests of labor and the people than Charles E. Littlefield of Maine. Not only his speeches in Congress and elsewhere, but his conduct as a member of the Judiciary Committee and of the Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, and his manner in personal conferences demonstrated beyond question that by voice, pen, and vote he stood among the foremost as the exponent and defender of predatory wealth, and advocate not only to the trust, corporations, and monopolies, but even of the worst features in connection with them.” Gompers was determined to defeat the man who “conspicuously, unceasingly and arrogantly” opposed labor legislation, “who always played the role of subservient tool of corporate wealth and vested interest,” and who never supported any measure “calculated to uplift humanity.”

The campaign witnessed the active participation of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which was organized in 1895 to promote the trade interests of its members. In 1903, with the growth of the trade union movement, the NAM adopted a strong anti-union stance. David M. Parry, president of the Association, was a strong advocate of “the individualistic social order” and the orthodox classical liberal model of a government-free, self-regulating and self-correcting capitalistic mode of production. He maintained that organized labor knew only one law, “the law of physical force — the law of the Huns and Vandals, the law of the savage,” and that their leaders were “disciples of revolution.” He described unionism as “a system that coerces and impoverishes the worker, ruins the capitalist, terrorizes our politicians and destroys trade–a system which seems hopelessly and irredeemably bad, a bar to all true progress, a danger to the state, and a menace to civilization.” For Parry, the AFL was an “unAmerican institution” and “the fountainhead of inspiration which breeds boycotters, picketers, and socialists.” The NAM leader urgently declared that the world had to be freed from the “despotism” of the labor movement in order to secure the inalienable rights of employees to make their own contracts and for employers to run their own businesses. Romantic images of the worker and the legitimacy of labor unions were countered with negative images such as “muscle trusts,” “industrial buccaneers,” partisans of “vicious class legislation, ad infinitum.

The Lewiston Evening Journal succinctly announced the ideological conflict and campaign when, on June 8, 1906, its columns shouted “PRES. GOMPERS VS. LITTLEFIELD.”

In 1913, the The World (New York) published some of the 20,000 letters, telegrams, reports, expense accounts and related memoranda which disclosed the activities of a lobbyist, field agent and strike-breaker for the NAM who had worked in the Littlefield-Gompers campaign. The materials were subpoenaed by the Senate Lobby Investigating Committee and the House Investigating Committee, and a stunned nation witnessed a cascade of evidence which described the abuse of its political institutions.

A snapshot of the maze of information subpoenaed contained descriptions and reports of activities involving the Littlefield campaign. They clearly revealed the close relationship between the NAM and its “friend” and ideological companion, Littlefield, its secretive provision of spies and funds into the campaign, and its invention of a labor party (Independent Labor League) to siphon votes from the Democratic Party and its candidate Daniel J. McGuillicudy of Lewiston. A former member of the state Democratic Committee reported a plot to assassinate Gompers while the labor leader campaigned against Littlefield on Vinalhaven Island. Money from the NAM was reportedly used “to corrupt voters, buy whiskey, and used for general campaign expenses . . . money bought the election.” Many Democrats were prevented from going to the polls “as planned,” i.e., by providing them with enough free whiskey to insure that they could not exercise their powers as free and independent citizens in “Mr. Total Abstainer Littlefield’s district,” etc. In McGillicuddy’s words, “There was no depth of political debauchery that was not sounded, no field of corruption that was not exploited. Every device of political knavery known . . . was put into operation.”

The election was impacted by contentious local issues (e.g., prohibition and taxation of wild lands), and one in which McGillicuddy’s voice was virtually muffled on national issues, leaving that political turf to Gompers. It was further complicated by ideological differences within the House of Labor. The Socialist Party of Maine offered its own candidate for the Second District slot, Walter Pickering of Auburn, a member of Local No. 415 of the Boot and Shoe Workers Union in Auburn, an affiliate of the Lewiston-Auburn Central Labor Union, an organization which claimed over 3,000 members.

Littlefield defeated McGuilliccudy by a margin of 18,708 to 17,346, a reduced plurality, which Gompers accepted as a “moral” victory.

These brief glimpses of the Second District election in 1906 suggest that they would hardly serve as a template for those desirous of nobler civic behavior or for the ideal textbook model of democracy in action. Many observers of today’s political events might view the election of 1906, with its ideological exchanges between capital and labor, the role of government in the economy, and the corrupting role of money in the political process, as having a contemporary ring to it, since it captures some of the realism of political life and serves as a reminder that perpetual surveillance of the political process is necessary to secure a semblance of the political ideal.

Charles A. Scontras

Historian and Research Associate

Bureau of Labor Education

University of Maine

Orono, ME