The records of the Labor and Farm Party consist of files pertaining to the founding of the party, its steering committees, its 1984 and 1986 campaigns, and community activities and outreach. Campaign issues during the election years of 1984 and 1986 are particularly well documented. The lack of a centralized book of minutes makes decoding the party's day-to-day operations difficult, but an abundance of clippings interfiled with virtually every series serves to highlight the major events in the party's history.
The records are divided into five series: ADMINISTRATIVE FILES, CONFERENCES AND ACTIVITIES, INTERNAL PUBLICATIONS, SUBJECT AND CAMPAIGN FILES, and VISUAL MATERIALS.
The ADMINISTRATIVE FILES contain party correspondence, information on allied parties, financial records and publicity materials.
CONFERENCES AND ACTIVITIES assembles the closest analog to a series of minutes the collection has. The Founding File records the proceedings of the party's official founding conference, to its last major convention in 1987. This series covers the party's major meetings; both its internal meetings as well as conferences in which the party participated. Of particular note is the 1984 Labor and Farm Party convention, which records the lead-up to and the break with the Labor and Farm Party's founder, William Osborne Hart.
INTERNAL PUBLICATIONS consists of material written and published by the party itself. The largest part of this series is the Commonwealth drafts, which contains a complete run of the draft copies of the party's print publication, the Wisconsin Commonwealth, from 1983 to 1985. The Essays file documents the party's intellectual leanings and stance on many issues. The Revised Strategy and Structure Proposal, from late in 1987, may offer evidence about the causes of the party's decline.
SUBJECT AND CAMPAIGN FILES contains the bulk of the records produced during the party's various spirited campaigns. Its strongest coverage is of Christensen's race against Russell and Risser in 1984, and of its effort to unseat Les Aspin in 1986. The subject files contain many issues briefings the party accumulated during the races, which were likely material reviewed by the candidates in preparation for debates, speeches, and press conferences. Of note are the Iran/Contra files, which contain Mary K. Baum's personal recollections of Nicaragua and the Contras following an investigatory visit there, and a “stump” file of material gathered in preparation for the 1988 election, but never used.
The VISUAL MATERIALS series contains various editorial cartoons collected by the Labor and Farm Party, in addition to facsimiles of artwork they commissioned from editorial cartoonist Brooke Konopacki for their campaigns, and some maps used by the Labor and Farm Party, including an internally published book of ward maps used in the 1984 election.
