Why did American labor parties never become electorally competitive in the Gilded Age? Since Werner Sombart first posed this question in 1906, historians have offered numerous structural explanations, ranging from racial divisions within the working class to the country’s federal system of government. In Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice: William A. A. Carsey and the Shaping of American Reform Politics, Mark A. Lause argues that many such groups failed primarily because mainstream parties vigorously targeted them in a decades-long campaign of political dirty tricks (xi). Lause, a University of Cincinnati professor emeritus and author of numerous working-class histories, centers his account on the life of William A. A. Carsey, a charismatic New York City conman who worked on behalf of the Democratic political machine based at Tammany Hall to sabotage pro-labor parties between 1872 and 1893.

By narrowly focusing on Carsey, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice demonstrates that such a conspiracy existed and effectively details the types of tactics employed to carry it out. For example, sometimes Carsey would join and then sabotage new pro-labor parties, using his charm to convince members to engage in self-destructive behavior. This is what occurred in 1878, when Carsey posed as a disgruntled bricklayer and labor activist to join the leadership of the local Greenback-Labor Party. Later that summer, Carsey was chosen to lead a New York City delegation to the state convention, where he quickly drummed up outrage over a technical point and then engineered a walkout by his delegation and numerous others. Carsey went on to form his own Greenback-Labor Party faction and nominate himself as its candidate for mayor of New York City. In the weeks before the election, Carsey campaigned vigorously against the original Greenback-Labor Party but said noticeably little against either the Republican or Democratic candidates. In other instances, Carsey split the vote of popular labor parties by creating similarly named organizations, such as when he helped found the “Knights of Industry” to compete with the New York Knights of Labor in 1881, or the “Independent Labor Party” to compete with Henry George’s United Labor Party in 1886.

Carsey’s con lasted until the late 1880s, when pro-labor newspapers began branding him the “bricklayer without a trowel” (112). His career finally ended after several groups—the New York Populist Party, the Knights of Labor, and the Central Labor Union—disavowed him throughout the course of 1893. Having spent twenty-one years sowing chaos among pro-labor movements on behalf of the Tammany Hall machine, he was rewarded with a series of cushy patronage positions in the municipal government, which he held until his death in 1914.

Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice engages with the historiographies of American working-class movements and Gilded Age political machines. Previous historians of the working class have tended to stress the seemingly inevitable structural barriers to the success of an American labor party in this era.Footnote ¹ In contrast, Lause shows that many potentially successful labor parties emerged in Gilded Age New York. Mainstream party leaders were concerned enough about this threat to hire operatives like Carsey and artificially dissipate the momentum of such parties while they were still in the early stages of consolidation. Lause also plausibly argues that absent men like Carsey, one of these pro-labor parties might have eventually supplanted one of their mainstream rivals. He notes, for example, that the Republican Party had been a grassroots insurgency before it supplanted the Whig Party in the 1850s. Furthermore, George’s United Labor Party proved that pro-labor parties had popular appeal during elections like the 1886 New York City mayoral race. Although George officially came in second place to a Democratic rival, the contest was scarred by massive ballot fraud; some historians believe George would have won in a fair contest. Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice also challenges the legacy of political machines like Tammany Hall, which a number of recent histories have characterized as a corrupt yet effective advocate of working-class interests, and a source of material aid to poor supporters through the distribution of municipal patronage.Footnote ² Lause shows that political machines earned this reputation, in part, by ruthlessly eliminating alternatives that could have been more effective champions of such constituencies.

While Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice is tied together chronologically by Carsey’s actions, this book is more a microhistory of Tammany Hall’s secret campaign against pro-labor parties than a biography. The most successful secret campaigns are the ones in which participants leave behind scant evidence. Despite his skills in repeatedly conning working-class organizations and voters, Carsey let his mask slip often enough that a historian like Lause can piece together the real motivations behind his contrary public actions. Because Carsey did not keep a diary and was not the subject of contemporary memoirs, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice relies mostly on newspaper accounts for its primary sources. This source base does create some gaps in the narrative of Carsey’s life, but the painstaking detective work that Lause employs to understand a career that his subject worked hard to keep hidden is truly impressive. Lause also devotes many pages to exploring other mainstream party tricksters brought to light by their interactions with Carsey, such as newspaper editor and partisan-for-hire Walter Shupe, to hint at a much wider effort by the Republican and Democratic Parties to sabotage pro-labor movements.

Written with lively prose, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice provides a fresh perspective on some well-trodden Gilded Age topics. Throughout the book, Lause is keen to highlight modern analogies to his conclusions, arguing that Carsey’s actions were an early form of “astroturfing” made possible by a credulous news media, which neither understood nor could be bothered to investigate seriously working-class concerns. This point could be developed further and would benefit from more evidence of these tactics being used between the 1890s and the present day. Nevertheless, this idea is a thought-provoking one, and an avenue future scholars might explore. At a concise 176 pages, Counterfeiting Labor’s Voice relies on the reader to have some background familiarity with Gilded Age politics; as such, it will mainly appeal to an academic audience.