American Alliance for Labor and Democracy

[1] At this gathering a convincing majority of the party's 200 assembled delegates voted in favor of a manifesto known to posterity as the St. Louis Resolution which branded President Woodrow Wilson's decision to enter World War I as "a crime against the people of the United States and against the nations of the world" and called for "continuous, active, and public opposition to the war" and "vigorous resistance to all reactionary measures.

"[1]Gompers submitted his proposal to the Wilson administration for approval, getting the green light from the Council of National Defense and from the Committee on Public Information headed by George Creel.

[3] The latter organization was so taken by the idea that it came to make the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy one of the primary unofficial agencies through which the Committee on Public Information operated.

[4] Preliminary organization of the AALD took place at a meeting held on July 28, 1917, at the Continental Hotel in New York City attended by prominent pro-war socialists John Spargo, Robert Maisel, and J. Graham Phelps Stokes.

[7] George Creel of the Committee on Public Information set to work stifling the ability of the People's Council to hold a convention anywhere, writing to one Minnesota correspondent that the anti-militarist organization was composed of "traitors and fools" and encouraging him to mobilize conservative civic organizations to pass resolutions against the People's Council and to directly meet with newspaper editors on the matter.

[11] Fitzpatrick brazenly dodged an order by AF of L officials to establish an AALD branch in the city and ignored all correspondence directed to him from the organization's New York headquarters.

[4] Included among these was a delegation of four British labor leaders who were brought over and toured around America in an attempt to build support for the war effort among union members.

[14] Director of the AALD, Robert Maisel, declared that "we plan to make this loyalty week demonstration one of the most powerful blows yet dealt at enemy propaganda in America.

[5] Papers related to the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy and the People's Council of America may be found in the Frank Leslie Grubbs collection, housed at the Hoover Institution archives at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.