History
Background
In the late 1820s, corruption was rampant in the municipal administration of New York City. Public services like street lighting were rendered by friends of the politicians who got monopolies for almost no payment to the city. "Charter dealers", among them Samuel B. Romaine, bribed assemblymen in Albany to get a large number of banks chartered. These banks issued their own currency with which working men were paid but which was not well accepted by the commerce, and devaluated quickly. Contractors built houses, but did not pay the workers after delivering the house, without consequences.
A reform movement had also emerged, with the organized agitation of the trade unions of New York City leading to the adoption on a citywide basis of the 10-hour working day, replacing the former 11-hour standard. [2]
In an effort to avert a return to the longer working day, a mass meeting of "mechanics and others" was held on April 23, 1829. [3] The mass meeting passed a resolution promising not to work past the current "just and reasonable" 10 hour standard and indicating that the names of violators of this restriction would have their names published in the press as enemies of labor. [2] A strike fund was also collected. [2]
An organizational meeting followed on April 28, [4] at which a so-called Committee of Fifty elected to coordinate what was believed to be a forthcoming strike action. [2]
Convention
This strike was not to be, however, as the city's employers abruptly ended their plan to impose an extension of the working day. [2] This capitulation did not end the Committee of Fifty, however, with the erstwhile strike committee instead submitting a report late in the summer of 1829 calling for establishment of a political party of the workers to contest the forthcoming fall elections. [2]
This report was accepted by another mass meeting and the New York Working Men's Party was born, following the precedent established the previous year by the organized labor movement of Philadelphia. [2]
Chief among Committee of Fifty was a 39-year old machinist named Thomas E. Skidmore (1790–1832), who authored most of the group's resolutions for the electoral campaign. [5] Skidmore also presided over a convention held at Military Hall in New York City on October 19, 1829, at which a set of resolutions, largely authored by Skidmore, was passed.
The party program of 1829 called for the grant of 160 acres of land to every man and to every unmarried woman over age 21, to be held perpetually until the owner's death. [5] All land holdings in excess of 160 acres were to be confiscated by the government for redistribution, according to the Skidmore-authored party resolution. [5] The party also adopted resolutions against the hereditary transmission of wealth and against exclusive privileges and monopolies. Bankers were denounced as "the greatest knaves, impostors and paupers of the age." [5] The program also called for a program of communal education of children, a plank favored by one of the secretaries of the Working Men's Party, Robert Dale Owen (1801–1877), son of the utopian communalist pioneer Robert Owen. [4]
The new party named a slate of candidates for the November elections, including representatives of a variety of trades for seats in the New York State Assembly. [6] The new party engaged in political fusion with organizes seeking to defeat Tammany Hall in races for the New York State Senate. [5]
At the end of October 1829 a weekly newspaper was launched in support of the new labor political movement, the Working Man's Advocate, published by the English-born George Henry Evans (1805–1856), a self-described "mechanic." [7]
Election of 1829
The Working Men's Party put forward a full slate of candidates for the New York State Assembly in the November election of 1829. [8] These included a number of working men from the bench, including two machinists, two carpenters, a cooper, a printer, a painter, and a silversmith, among others. [8]
On a very short timetable between its formation, nomination of candidates, and the fall election, the candidates of the Working Men's Party performed acceptably well in a three-way race with the Democratic Party dominated by Tammany Hall and the National Republicans. [8] Final results showed the Tammany Democrats winning 8 of 11 contested legislative seats, the National Republicans winning 2, [8] and one candidate of the Working Men's Party emerging victorious — Ebenezer Ford, President of the Journeymen Carpenters Society. [9]
In the simultaneous elections for citywide office, the Working Men's Party received about 6,000 votes to Tammany Hall's 11,000, helping to stymie Tammany from gaining an outright majority in the Common Council.
Reaction
The emergence of the fledgling organized workers' movement in the electoral process represented a threat to the leaders of the established political parties, who attempted to appropriate for themselves some of the reform measures garnering broad popular support. [3]
In January 1830, a bill for the better security of mechanics and other laborers of New York City was introduced in the State Assembly by Silas M. Stilwell. The Tammany men immediately took it up as if it were their own, voted for it, and secured the credit of its adoption, when it became a law. Among other things, it required, under penalties, the owner of a building to retain from the contractor the amount to be paid to the workers.
Factionalism
Although Thomas Skidmore had managed to push some of his favored ideas calling for a redistribution of property into the 1829 platform of the Working Men's Party, his ideas were regarded by primary rival Robert Dale Owen as "crude and impractical" and his personal political style reckoned as "somewhat overbearing and dictatorial." [10] Only a minority supported Skidmore's radical ideas about expropriating and evenly dividing property, a minority favored the education-based humanitarian appeal of Owen, Wright, and Evans. [11]
As the year 1829 drew to a close, a meeting of "mechanics and other workingmen" was held in New York City on December 29 to set the future policy of the party. [11] The meeting was chaired by prominent local politician and Skidmore foe Henry G. Guyon, who refused to allow Skidmore to speak. [11] When Skidmore attempted to address the meeting without official sanction, he was howled down. [11] Skidmore's agrarianism-oriented program was defeated and the communal education policies given primacy in the revised Working Men's Party program, with class differentiation and the denial of political liberty to working people directly connected to the current pedagogical model. [11]
Denied access to the floor at the December 29, 1829, meeting and thereby effectively "read out" of the party, [12] Thomas Skidmore and his co-thinkers called a preparatory meeting soon thereafter, with a formal organizational meeting for a new political organization following on February 23, 1830. [13] About 40 party adherents were in attendance to hear a long argument between Skidmore and Working Man's Advocate publisher Evans in which Skidmore charged that the official party had come to be dominated by the wealthy, while Evans accused Skidmore of having made himself "obnoxious to the great body of workingmen." [13]
A May 19, 1830, meeting of the 70-member General Executive Committee of the Working Men's Party dealt a blow both to the Skidmore and Owen-Evans factions, however, granting to party members "the free enjoyment of their own private opinions on all subjects" while simultaneously asserting "never to support any attempt to palm upon any man, or set of men, the peculiar doctrines of infidelity, agrarianism or sectarian principles," dismissing both the equal distribution of property and communal boarding and clothing of children in favor of maintenance of the traditional family unit. [14] This was followed by another meeting one week later, at which the majority belong to the Owen-Evans group. [15] Those dissenting from the communal boarding school educational model were expelled. [15] The Working Men's Party was thereby formally split.
Evans editorialized upon the situation in the pages of his Working Man's Advocate, attributing the split to a "deliberate plot that has been lately unmasked" to subvert the Working Men's Party to the cause of electing National Republican orator Henry Clay as President of the United States. [16]
Elections of 1830 and demise
The majority of the Working Men's Party identified as members of the "Clay Workingmen," whether through personal admiration for their banner-bearer, belief in a protective tariff as a fundamental matter of policy, or sheer opportunism in seeking to use the political movement for personal ends. [17] The Owen-Evans Working Men's Party, a minority at the time of the May 1830 split, attempted to persevere with the party's communal education-oriented program and nominated a full ticket for the local election, including an effort to return Ebenezer Ford to the legislative assembly. [17]
The field was joined by Thomas Skidmore's Agrarian Party, which also called itself the "Original Working Men's Party," which nominated a full ticket for state and city office as well, including running Skidmore for United States Congress and his right-hand man, Alexander Ming, Sr., tapped for State Assembly. [18] The party nominated an individual from Orange County for governor, but he declined and no replacement was chosen. [18]
The result of the 1830 election was a crushing blow for the Owens-Evans Working Men's Party and the Skidmore Agrarian Party alike, with the Working Men's candidate for Governor, Ezekiel Williams, winning just 2,332 votes against the nearly 250,000 votes split by the Democratic and National Republican candidates. [18] Tammany Democrats routed the National Republican proxy "Clay Workingmen" in legislative races, with Ebenezer Ford garnering only 2,329 votes in his losing bid for re-election, barely more than a third of his 1829 total. [18]
With the majority of its adherents absorbed into mainstream politics and no radicals elected, the Working Men's Party movement quickly expired. [19] There is anecdotal evidence that it continued to exist into the early part of 1831, but all traces of its existence are absent from the historical record by the time of the 1831 New York City elections. [20] The party was the progenitor, to some extent, of the Locofocos. [1]
Tammany Hall, also known as the Society of St. Tammany, the Sons of St. Tammany, or the Columbian Order, was an American political organization founded in 1786 and incorporated on May 12, 1789, as the Tammany Society. It became the main local political machine of the Democratic Party and played a major role in controlling New York City and New York State politics, and helped immigrants, most notably the Irish, rise in American politics from the 1850s into the 1960s. Tammany usually controlled Democratic nominations and political patronage in Manhattan for over 100 years following the mayoral victory of Fernando Wood in 1854, and used its patronage resources to build a loyal, well-rewarded core of district and precinct leaders; after 1850, the vast majority were Irish Catholics due to mass immigration from Ireland during and after the Irish Famine of the late 1840s.
Albert Richard Parsons was a pioneering American socialist and later anarchist newspaper editor, orator, and labor activist. As a teenager, he served in the military force of the Confederate States of America in Texas, during the American Civil War. After the war, he settled in Texas, and became an activist for the rights of former slaves, and later a Republican official during Reconstruction. With his wife Lucy Parsons, he then moved to Chicago in 1873 and worked in newspapers. There he became interested in the rights of workers. In 1884, he began editing The Alarm newspaper. Parsons was one of four Chicago radical leaders controversially convicted of conspiracy and hanged following a bomb attack on police remembered as the Haymarket affair.
The National Labor Union (NLU) is the first national labor federation in the United States. Founded in 1866 and dissolved in 1873, it paved the way for other organizations, such as the Knights of Labor and the AFL. It was led by William H. Sylvis and Andrew Cameron.
Philip Sheldon Foner was an American labor historian and teacher. Foner was a prolific author and editor of more than 100 books. He is considered a pioneer in his extensive works on the role of radicals, Black Americans, and women in American labor and political history, which were generally neglected in mainstream academia at the time. A Marxist thinker, he influenced more than a generation of scholars, inspiring some of the work published by younger academics from the 1970s on. In 1941, Foner became a public figure as one among 26 persons fired from teaching and staff positions at City College of New York for political views, following an investigation of communist influence in education by a state legislative committee, known as the Rapp-Coudert Committee.
The Union Labor Party was a San Francisco, California working class political party of the first decade of the 20th century. The organization, which endorsed the doctrine of nativism, rose to prominence in both the labor movement and urban politics in the years after 1901, electing its nominee as Mayor of San Francisco in 1901, 1903, 1905, and 1909.
Labor Party was the name or partial name of a number of United States political parties which were organized during the 1870s and 1880s.
The 1879 New York state election was held on November 4, 1879, to elect the governor, the lieutenant governor, the secretary state, the state comptroller, the attorney general, the state treasurer and the state engineer, as well as all members of the New York State Assembly and the New York State Senate.
Thomas John "Tommy" Morgan, Jr. was an English-born American labor leader and socialist political activist. Morgan is best remembered as one of the pioneer English-speaking Socialists in the city of Chicago and a frequent candidate for public office of the Socialist Party of America. Morgan was also one of the founders and leading figures of the United Labor Party, an Illinois political party which elected 7 of its members to the Illinois State Assembly and another to the Illinois State Senate in the election of 1886. He was married to Elizabeth Chambers Morgan.
William H. Sylvis (1828–1869) was a pioneer American trade union leader who founded the Iron Molders' International Union. He also was a founder of the National Labor Union. It was one of the first American union federations attempting to unite workers of various crafts into a single national organization.
Simon Philip Van Patten (1852–1918) was an American socialist political activist prominent during the latter half of the 1870s and the first half of the 1880s. Van Patten is best remembered for being named the first Corresponding Secretary of the Workingmen's Party of the United States in 1876 and for heading it and its successor organization, the Socialist Labor Party of America, for the next six years. In 1883 Van Patten mysteriously disappeared, with his friends reporting him as a potential suicide to law enforcement authorities. He later turned up as a government employee, however, having abandoned radical politics in favor of stable employment.
The 53rd New York State Legislature, consisting of the New York State Senate and the New York State Assembly, met from January 5 to April 20, 1830, during the second year of Enos T. Throop's governorship, in Albany.
The Socialist Labor Party (SLP) is a political party in the United States. It was established in 1876, and was the first socialist party formed in the country.
The International Working People's Association (IWPA), sometimes known as the "Black International," and originally named the "International Revolutionary Socialists", was an international anarchist political organization established in 1881 at a convention held in London, England. In America the group is best remembered as the political organization uniting Albert Parsons, August Spies, and other anarchist leaders prosecuted in the wake of the 1886 Haymarket bombing in Chicago.
The Locofocos were a faction of the Democratic Party in American politics that existed from 1835 until the mid-1840s.
The International Workingmen's Association (IWA) in the United States of America took the form of a loose network of about 35 frequently discordant local "sections," each professing allegiance to the London-based IWA, commonly known as the "First International." These sections were divided geographically and by the language spoken by their members, frequently new immigrants to America, including those who spoke German, French, Czech, as well as Irish and "American" English-language groups.
Stephen Simpson was born in Philadelphia, the son of George Simpson, a prominent Philadelphia banker. During the War of 1812 he fought in the Battle of New Orleans under General Andrew Jackson. Through his father's connections Stephen became a cashier at the First Bank of the United States where he soon resigned and went to work at Stephen Girard's bank. Soon after he worked as a writer for a local newspaper where he wrote a series of editorials publicly attacking the First Bank of the United States. He later co-founded the Columbian Observer where he continued his public attacks on this bank.
Thomas Skidmore was an American politician and radical political philosopher. Skidmore is best remembered as the co-founder and leader of the Working Men's Party in New York when it first emerged in the fall of 1829. He was forced out of the organization shortly after its initial electoral campaign by moderate leaders of the party on the grounds of Skidmore's excessive radicalism and unbending personality. Skidmore went on to establish another short-lived political organization in 1830, known as the Agrarian Party.
The Workingmen's Party of Illinois was an American political party established in the city of Chicago in December 1873. Founded in the aftermath of a massive demonstration of unemployed workers, the organization ran candidates for the Common Council of Chicago and for United States Congress as well as state office in Illinois in the November 1874 election. The organization is best remembered as one of the constituent parties coming together as the Workingmen's Party of the United States in 1876 — an organization later renamed the Socialist Labor Party of America.
The Working Men's Party was a political organization established in the American city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1828 to promote candidates promoting policies of concern to the working class. The organization was also known as the Workingmen's Republican Political Association from January 1829.
The Social-Democratic Workingmen's Party of North America was a Lassallist socialist party.
