Counterfeiting Labor's Voice

Confidence man and canny operative, charlatan and manipulator--William A. A. Carsey emerged from the shadow of Tammany Hall to build a career undermining working-class political organizations on behalf of the Democratic Party. Mark A. Lause’s biography of Carsey takes readers inside the bare-knuckle era of Gilded Age politics. An astroturfing trailblazer and master of dirty tricks, Carsey fit perfectly into a Democratic Party that based much of its post-Civil War revival on shattering third parties and gathering up the pieces. Lause provides an in-depth look at Carsey’s tactics and successes against the backdrop of enormous changes in political life. As Carsey used a carefully crafted public persona to burrow into unsuspecting organizations, the forces he represented worked to create a political system that turned voters into disengaged civic consumers and cemented America’s ever-fractious two-party system.

“Lause, one of our most talented historians of nineteenth century America, spotlights the influential political huckster William A. A. Carsey. More than a century before the Tea Party’s phony ‘grass roots’ mobilizations, the underhanded techniques Carsey and his allies employed kept laborers from forming their own independent political organizations. An excellent study with a convincing answer to the age-old question: why no Labor Party in the U.S.?” --Chad E. Pearson, author of Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century

Mark A. Lause is a professor in the department of history at the University of Cincinnati. His many books include Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era and Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class.