Committee of 48

The Committee of 48 was an American liberal political association established in 1919 in the hope of creating a new political party for social reform to stand in opposition to the increasingly conservatism of both major U.S. political parties, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

Named in recognition of the 48 U.S. state to signify the desire to construct a broad national movement, the moderate progressives of the Committee of 48 attempted without success to form such a third party with sympathetic activists from the labor movement in 1920.

The group, commonly known as the "Forty-Eighters", became one of the key constituents in the Conference for Progressive Political Action in 1922, a movement culminating in the independent candidacy of Robert M. La Follette for President of the United States in 1924.