First Convention
The First Convention of the CPPA was held in Cleveland at the city auditorium. Close to 600 delegates attended the proceeding representing international unions, state federations of labor, branches of cooperative societies, state branches and national officers of the Socialist, Farmer-Labor, and Progressive Parties as well as the Committee of Forty-Eight, state and national affiliates of the Women's Committee on Political Action, and sundry individuals. Very few farmers were in attendance.
The Credentials Committee reported unfavorably on the credential of William Mahoney as an individual, while not denying the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party a right to a seat, citing his acts during and after the St. Louis Conference as well as his active participation in the June 1924 St. Paul Convention of the Federated Farmer-Labor Party, a gathering perceived to have been an appendage of the Workers Party of America and previously condemned by the National Committee of the CPPA.
The National Committee had previously requested that Wisconsin Senator Robert M. LaFollette make a run for the presidency. The Cleveland Convention was addressed by the Senator's son, Robert M. LaFollette Jr., who read a message from his father accepting the call and declaring that the time had come "for a militant political movement independent of the two old party organizations." LaFollette declined to lead a third party, however, seeking to protect those progressives elected nominally as Republicans and Democrats. LaFollette declared that the primary issue of the 1924 campaign was the breaking of the "combined power of the private monopoly system over the political and economic life of the American people." After the November election a new party might well be established, LaFollette stated, around which all progressives could unite.
The National Committee was directed to issue a call for formation of a new national political party after the November election, to be held at a Special National Convention of the CPPA in January 1925. An extensive platform of the CPPA was adopted by the 1924 Convention. The National Committee was extensively enlarged.
Read more about this topic: Conference For Progressive Political Action
Famous quotes containing the word convention:
“No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius—a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“Every one knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister’s friends can’t or won’t. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)