During the Roaring Twenties, a Utahn's candidacy for president sought to shake up America's two-party politics. 

• Cover art by Jimmy Sultan

A sultry summer greeted the assembled delegates to Chicago in July of 1920, but their proceedings became even more stifling by the poor ventilation of their venue and the heated feelings of their factions. Whether farmer or unionist, Socialist or reformer, teacher, minister or war veteran, these delegates had gathered for a serious task—the formation of a new political party.

Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox—the respective presidential candidates for the Republican and Democratic camps—inspired little enthusiasm for what was shaping up to be a lifeless election. Looking for someone more dynamic and progressive, most of the assembled delegates began their convention with a preference for Wisconsin's Robert M. La Follette or even imprisoned Socialist Eugene V. Debs, but both refused entreaties.

With an unruly crowd jockeying for control, the defection of some moderates over the party platform and little agreement in sight on a candidate, the convention appeared at times to be on the verge of evaporating. Cutting through this muggy maelstrom, however, was the sound of the hammer wielded by temporary chairperson Parley Parker Christensen (1869-1954), a lawyer from Salt Lake City.

"Christensen, who stood well over six feet tall, was handsome, articulate, and genial, and he conveyed the impression of being in charge without seeming dictatorial," wrote historian John Sillito in 1986. "Moreover, he appeared at the convention each day in a freshly pressed white suit. When the time came to select a presidential nominee, in the words of one observer, 'all eyes turned to the man clad in pristine white.'"

• As chairman of the Farmer-Labor Party nominating convention, Parley Christensen made a striking impression in his crisp white suits.

One participant further elaborated to newspapers at the time: "Christensen came to the front without a dramatic gesture that served to stampede the convention, but by a natural selection working as it can when men revert to that kind of political gathering, almost extinct in this country, in which the rank and file determine their destiny from the floor."

Nominated for president through what would become known as the Farmer-Labor Party—with Cleveland's Max Hayes as a running mate—this was to be Christensen's most memorable time in the national limelight and the pinnacle of his lengthy career. Not until Evan McMullin's independent run in 2016 would Utah produce another candidate for the American presidency.

More than a century has passed since Christensen's run and the corridors of American politics remain sweltering for its varied participants. As the nation awaits the final tally from another high-stakes election, City Weekly invites readers to become acquainted with "the man clad in pristine white" and how he sought to bring in some fresher air.

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• Merrill Cazier Library
• Parley Christensen served as an educator, city attorney and state lawmaker before running for president in 1920.

Agronomist to Attorney
Delivered in a crude dugout of Weston, Idaho and raised in Newton, Utah, Parley Christensen was born to Peter and Sophia Christensen, Danish immigrant farmers who had come to the United States in the 1860s. Running a binding machine as a teenager, Christensen's left hand slipped, got caught and ultimately lost two fingers. The injury made farming a difficult endeavor and redirected his future to the classroom.

Obtaining a degree in education at the University of Deseret in 1890, Christensen worked as a teacher and principal in the schools of Murray and Grantsville and became involved in local Republican politics, serving as Tooele County's Superintendent of Schools from 1892 to 1895 and as Secretary of the Utah Constitutional Convention.

According to a 1974 study by Sillito, Christensen—a Unitarian—made enough of an impression on his Latter-day Saint neighbors through his personality and aptitude that "they chose him to serve as City Attorney, even though he had no legal degree."

Upon his graduation from law school in New York at Cornell University, Christensen returned to Utah in 1897 and set up a practice in Salt Lake City, becoming active in numerous local welfare organizations and societies. In 1901, he became prosecuting attorney for Salt Lake County, demonstrating, in Sillito's estimation, "a tendency for independent thinking as well as support for reformist causes."

"Shortly after taking office," Sillito recounted, "a group of workers, clad in overalls, invaded the City and County Building and demanded to see the County Attorney. When Christensen appeared, the laborers complained to him that the Glenn Construction Company, which had secured several municipal contracts, were compelling their employees, in violation of Utah law, to work 10 or 12 hours each day. After listening to their case, Christensen surprised the workers by agreeing that the company was in violation of the law, and he pledged to take their case to court. Ultimately, the court agreed that the company was violating the law and the eight-hour day was standardized for future contracts."

Apparently, such experiences were not isolated events.

As could be expected, Christensen's support for labor rights and contempt of partisan patronage elicited the displeasure of Utah's Republican Party leaders, municipal contractors and those whom Christensen later termed the "bosses and bosslets" under Sen. Reed Smoot, all of whom dominated state party selection processes.

Although he later served as a member of the Utah House of Representatives under the banner of Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Republicans—nicknamed the "Bull Moosers"—Christensen's long-standing tension with entrenched party powers drove him to other political pastures.

Backed into the Corner
With America's entry into World War I, the domestic landscape experienced no shortage of tectonic shifts in terms of political temper and living conditions. Government suppression of political radicals through its "Red Scare" of public opinion had turned any left-wing reform movement into a suspect act of subversion begging for industrial courts and syndicalism laws.

Full wartime employment produced high levels of turnover and strike activity, farm prices tumbled, wages were shrinking, bankruptcy was skyrocketing and the growing ranks of migratory laborers were receiving the brunt of the blame. Immigration was in the process of being limited through quotas and national origin laws, thus heightening general feelings of racial otherness and political estrangement.

David Montgomery, in a 1987 article for International Working-Class History, pointed out that it was in this period that big business puffed "welfare capitalism" for all it was worth, shaping workers' use of their time for the purpose of capital accumulation through an explosion of amenities and services.

"After all," Montgomery wrote, "the productive capacity of the American economy by 1920 was more than sufficient to have secured everyone a comfortable existence without feverish toil or unemployment, if that had been the purpose to which it was directed."

Having found little redress or vision within the country's two major parties, it was under the aforementioned conditions that assorted labor and reform groups had gathered in Chicago to establish what became the Farmer-Labor Party. Desirous to both win votes as well as to disseminate its ideology, it was perhaps bound to displease whole swathes of its own constituency, some of whom prioritized winning over ideology, or vice versa.

The party functioned under numerous handicaps, possessed limited funds and received scant support from newspapers, observed historian Hamilton Cravens for the Pacific Northwest Quarterly.

"Paradoxically," he wrote, "many of the very forces responsible for the formation of the Farmer-Labor party ... helped to defeat it, to push it into an ideological corner by itself where its political opponents could stigmatize it as 'radical' and 'un-American.'"

Even so, such daunting handicaps didn't bother Parley Christensen throughout the campaign.

"He doesn't seem to care very much whether he is elected to office or not," noted the San Francisco Call in its coverage of the campaign. "He is the candidate of a group and never needs to straddle any issue in order to pacify large numbers of powerful but conflicting supporters. He knows he can't be President. But he knows also that he can be a gadfly. ... Whatever happens he is content to wander around the country, conducting a guerrilla warfare with his tongue."

One interviewer for the same newspaper later remarked that Christensen displayed none of the "oily suavity" one usually expects in a political candidate: "He is a hail-fellow-well-met sort of person and is possessed of an open frankness that is more characteristic of a blacksmith or a boilermaker, say, than a calculating, carefully spoken man of law. ... He may be asked a direct question without preliminaries and will answer with equal directness."

Following his nomination, Christensen returned to Utah to speak to supporters and hailed the Farmer-Labor Party's platform—already branded as dangerous and radical in various newspapers—as nothing more than an American effort to "move the capital from Wall Street to Washington, where the Constitution placed it." He then engaged in an extensive cross-country campaign to advocate his party's plan for national relief.

"Either the working people have got to have a voice in the control of industrial affairs or they are going to become industrial serfs," he told a reporter in California, "and you and I—though I am an attorney—and all others who are not of and for the exploiters, are going to be relegated to a lower class caste."

Ahead of His Time
What was this "radical" platform that so scandalized the party press and political bigwigs? Citing the U.S. Constitution's description of governmental power being derived from the consent of the governed to serve rather than rule, the Farmer-Laborites asserted that in America, the rights of the people had been seized by a few for their personal enrichment and for imperialistic ventures of exploitation.

Denouncing the "fraudulence" of World War I and the greed that had allegedly issued from post-war treaties, the Farmer-Labor Party proposed the following planks among their ideas for reconstruction:

—The restoration of civil liberties (free press, asylum, trial by jury) that had been abridged since the start of the war; repeal of "espionage" and "criminal syndicalist" laws; a recall option for limited-term Federal judges and the protection of all workers to strike.

—Withdrawal of American participation in economic exploitation of conquered countries. On top of calling for abolishment of secret treaties and economic/military conscription, the platform also sought American withdrawal of "dictatorship" over the Philippines, Hawaii, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Samoa and Guam. It sought an international community of nations that were disarmed, where "there shall be no more kings and no more wars."

—Child labor laws, equal suffrage for all, public ownership and operation of utilities and natural resources, a social security system, a federal department for education, an antecedent to the Civilian Conservation Corps, the taxation of war-acquired wealth, sufficient compensation for soldiers and disabled veterans, an agriculture based on use rather than profit and a labor bill of rights.

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• Chase Thomas noted that many Farmer-Labor positions have entered the modern mainstream.

Looking over the platform today, Chase Thomas, senior policy director of the progressive nonprofit Alliance for a Better Utah, was struck by some of the measures that have advanced into the American mainstream over the ensuing 100 years with regard to universal suffrage, unemployment insurance and a standard 8-hour working day.

"Specific elements of the platform are not as relevant," Thomas wrote to City Weekly, "but the themes of economic inequality and a desire for the working class to have a say are still at play in our political landscape."

Shawn Teigen, president of the nonpartisan Utah Foundation, agreed.

"To my mind," Teigen expressed in an email, "Parley was ahead of his time." He noted that much of the Farmer-Labor platform could be considered a way of life today, although the party's call for the repeal of the Espionage Act and the nationalization of utilities and natural resources still strays from what he calls the "normalcy of 100 years later."

To these kinds of proposals, Teigen believes that Utah voters today would likely be turned off. The specificity of the overall platform, Thomas opined, would likely be another factor against it for modern voters, who would be sure to find something with which they did not agree.

The Gadfly in Winter
Well, as things turned out, the 1920 election showed the lowest level of voter participation since the 1830s, with Republican Warren G. Harding winning both the popular vote (60%) as well as the electoral one (76%). The Democrats received the remainder, although Socialist Eugene Debs received 3.41% of the popular vote, followed by Parley P. Christensen—who showed up on the ballot in only 18 states—with 0.99% of the popular vote. Christensen's greatest base of support emanated from northern farming states like Washington.

Following the presidential election, Christensen embarked on an international tour to study global conditions. He traced his familial steps in Denmark and developed a lifelong interest in Esperanto. Upon his return, he told reporters in New York of his impressions of the post-WWI landscape, having found "less democracy" than before.

"Our war for democracy wrecked the world and while it more than doubled the millionaires, it quadrupled the breadlines," he continued. "The present system of waste, extravagance, and profit has wholly failed."

In his later years, he took up residence in Los Angeles, California, where he served as councilman for the city's 9th District from 1935 to 1937 and then again from 1939 to 1949. The fiery gadfly within him never left, however. In 1936, for instance, he stoutly refused complimentary tickets to the Olympic Games track and field trials, both because of the Games' Nazi sponsorship as well as for the pressure tactics of city police upon local merchants into buying tickets.

While much more could be gleaned from Parley Christensen's life, his legacy of reform and political activity through third-party action continues to pose vexing questions for today's American politics.

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• Dylan McDonnell said the major parties are incentivized to limit the reach of third-party candidates.

Reshuffling the Deck
When asked what remains the biggest factor for the success of third-party efforts in this country, first and foremost to Dylan McDonnell's mind was ballot access. McDonnell—a former vice chairperson for the Libertarian Party of Utah—cited the differing threshold requirements from state to state in even registering alternative parties.

"The parties making the rules to get on the ballot are also incentivized to keep as few options as possible on the ballot," he observed. "Members from each of the two parties often decry voting third party as 'throwing away your vote' without realizing there are benchmarks that parties can reach by getting ballot access."

Specificity in policy and office objectives are a must in McDonnell's view, as are name recognition, a budgeted plan and prime social conditions.

"I like to joke that one can gauge the political climate by how many times you hear someone say, 'The lesser of two evils,'" he added.

McDonnell cautioned, however, that there is a difference between those "idealists" who sincerely wish to shape the overall debate and "grifters" who hop onto a third-party bandwagon for quick money.

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• Alex Cragun said ballot initiatives have proven to be more popular than many Utah candidates.

Sure, major parties have an advantage in terms of funding and infrastructure, but Alex Cragun—a former executive director of the Utah Democratic Party with experience in numerous political campaigns—sees opportunity for third-party candidates to introduce policy ideas, work on reforms and, in some cases, wield considerable background influence in the event of a split vote.

"You have to be nimble, you have to be scrappy and you have to find people who are willing to put in the work to effectively educate people about who they are and why [voters] should support them," Cragun said of the ideal candidate. Such people "aren't necessarily political but are community connected," and are likely found at school board meetings and city councils.

"The issues you run on are not always the most important aspect," Cragun acknowledged, "it's how you present yourself and how you're communicating with folks."

While the political atmosphere in Utah has been largely dominated by a conservative slant over the last couple of generations, Cragun finds that Utahns generally don't see themselves as "political" people—yet given the right concern, they do take action.

"We've seen over the years fewer and fewer Utahns identifying with political parties and it harkens more to kitchen-table issues," Cragun said. "The most popular candidates that Utah has had weren't actual people—they were ballot initiatives."

Cragun hopes that more local citizens get involved in the democratic process, both locally and nationally. As the state and country become more and more diverse, he asserted, such looming troubles as climate change, international conflicts and unsustainable domestic appetites will continue to haunt our lives, stemming as they do from a longstanding cultural insistence on unlimited growth and endless convenience.

"Local issues are going to be the impetus to the reshuffling of our political ideology," he stressed. "We all share the same issues, but it is to the benefit of the wealthy of this country to continue to let us be divided by things like sexuality, race, class, etc."

Or, as Parley Christensen observed to Utah's Park Record in 1910: "The bosses would have us be-still, stand-still, stand-pat, be reactionary."

And we know how much use Christensen had for that kind of politics.