Pressure politics 111particular issues coming before government. This has enabled them to take a
more aggressive attitude towards government policy, pursuing more positive
aims, rather than simply defending themselves against attack.
Labour and politics
The paradoxical position of labour in the United States has been expressed
by V.O. Key as ‘a numerically great force in a society adhering to the doctrine
of the rule of numbers, yet without proportionate durable political power as
a class’. We have already seen some of the special factors in American history
that have contributed to the spectacle of a highly industrialised society in
which socialism has been of negligible importance – the lack of any true feu-
dal tradition, the open character of American society in the nineteenth cen-
tury, the influence of the moving frontier of settlement. Yet although these
factors help to explain the absence of any significant socialist party, they only
serve to explain in part the weakness of labour as a political force. Part of
the explanation lies in the general dispersion of constitutional authority and
political power, which has militated against the growth of any national politi-
cal organisation based upon an appeal to a single principle or a single group.
Similarly, the diverse make-up of the American population, the great variety
of ethnic and religious elements, has tended to fragment the labour force
and to prevent the development of any cohesive attitudes or organisations
based upon a specifically labour approach to politics. The lack of any ideologi-
cal impulse on the part of the working class was reinforced by the absence
of any truly conservative attitudes at the other end of the social scale, at
least until the post-Second World War period. The acceptance of change was
built into the American philosophy, so that there was no need for a political
force based upon the demand for change as an end in itself. All these fac-
tors helped to create a situation in which labour became a series of interest
groups rather than a political party.
It is not only that labour has not wanted to become an independent po-
litical force, however; for American unionism has also, in one sense, failed
even as a movement with the aims of improving wages and working condi-
tions. Union membership has declined steadily over recent decades. In 1980
the proportion of the working population represented by unions was 21 per
cent, but by 2005 only 12.5 per cent of wage and salary earners were union
members; in a few states the proportion of workers in unions was very small
indeed – in South Carolina only 2.3 per cent and in North Carolina only
2.9 per cent. The union movement has also failed in other ways which have
affected its political influence. Some sections of the movement have been
associated with racketeering and criminal activities, which have brought
organised labour into disrepute, the extreme example being the Longshore-
men’s Union in New York and Jersey City, which for many years was virtually
run by racketeers, enforcing their authority by gangsterism and maintain-
ing their position through their connections with local political machines.