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day for women. Moreover, the BFL involved itself in election campaigns on the
local, state and, national levels, even organizing an AFL State Political League with
the Maryland-D.C. Federation of Labor. Early in the 1920s, the Baltimore Sun
publicly worried that the BFL and related forces might be able to command a labor
vote of 100,000 in the state. This level of success was, however, never approached.
Also, the BFL showed some desire to play a broader social role in Baltimore
through its radio broadcasts promoting labor's views, its establishment of the
Baltimore Labor College, and its publication of a weekly paper, The
Federationist.

On occasions, the BFL could even involve itself in fairly radical activity. In
1924, representatives of the BFL joined 300 delegates from various farmer and
labor organizations, the Socialist Party, the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper,
and the Jewish Forward newspaper at the Maryland convention for Robert
LaFollette's third-party bid for the presidency of the U.S. The BFL offices served
as the headquarters of the LaFollette campaign in Baltimore, and LaFollette
received nearly 33,000 votes from Baltimore wards in which BFL influence was
reputedly strong. These more radical tendencies in the BFL were the legacy of the
BFL's earlier involvement in Progressive era reform movements and the fact that a
number of radical Progressives, industrial unionists, and even socialists were still
present in the ranks of the organization. Nonetheless, the organizing setbacks of
the 1920s, together with decreasing success in the BFL's political activities, left the
BFL by 1930 weakened by factionalism, with conservatism in the ascendancy in the
organization as a whole and in its component local unions.

The bearers of the more militant traditions of the labor movement in