The figurative leader of the AWP was Muste, but it had a structure and values that lent its far-left radicalism a highly democratic and collaborative quality.
The AWP is best known in labor history for its leadership of the successful 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite Strike, which foreshadowed the creation of the United Auto Workers union.
Instead, the AWP brought the mass of unemployed to bear as a powerful vehicle for solidarity with the auto parts factory workers on the picket lines.
A few others, such as Louis Budenz and Arnold Johnson, did not accept the rapprochement with Trotskyism and instead joined the Communist Party, considering its adoption of the Popular Front to be analogous to what the AWP had tried to accomplish with its "American approach."
Others, such as Hook and Rorty, became political independents but remained, for a time, largely sympathetic to the Workers Party of the United States.