organization to challenge the so-called "old parties" of American politics, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The unification effort was quickly on the rocks, however, as two days of preparatory meetings of conference committees of the two organizations proved unable to agree upon a common program. Bad feelings were in evidence, with at least one member of the Labor Party charging the Committee of 48 with being "plutocratic philanthropists trying to use the Labor Party." Moreover, the "Forty-Eighters" found themselves internally divided between a more conservative bloc based in the East, including top organizational leaders J.A.H. Hopkins, Allen McCurdy, and Amos Pinchot, and a more radical segment of newcomers hailing largely from the Western states, the most prominent spokesman for whom was lawyer Dudley Field Malone. The matter of central difference between the two groups related to the proposed unified organization's position on nationalization of industry, with the Labor Party camp and the Western radical members of the Committee of 48 in favor of the proposition while the Eastern leadership of the "Forty-Eighters" deeming the matter "pre-revolutionary idealism" that was far in advance of political realities. Rumors circulated that Western adherents of the Committee of 48 believed their Eastern-based leadership, clearly unhappy with the direction in which the convention was headed, to be stalling unity negotiations in order to bring the unity convention to a stalemate and thereby preserve their organizational independence and personal control. On July 12, the first day of their own scheduled convention, Labor Party activists at the convention therefore issued the Committee of 48 an ultimatum: to either proceed with amalgamation the next day on terms suitable to the Labor Party or else the Labor Party would forward alone, nominating its own candidate for President of the United States and writing its own program in its own name. The Hopkins-McCurdy-Pinchot bloc refused this proposition, and no unification of the two rival organizations was achieved. The Labor Party of the United States went on to nominate Utahn Parley Parker Christensen to head its ticket and conducted its own campaign in the 1920 campaign. The Eastern leaders of the Committee of 48 attempted to put the best face on their inability to construct a unified third party for the November 1920 election, with Allen McCurdy declaring the failure to have been "inevitable," while counterintuitively declaring that the inability of the July conventions to unite having revealed "more