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By Root 7799 0

Skidmore and Byllesby believed something had gone terribly wrong in city and country, that social inequality and privilege were on the rise, that the republic was being undermined from within, that the new industrial system was immoral in its promotion of a lust for quick riches, individualism over community, and speculation, gambling, and usury. Such propositions had deep roots in the republican tradition. So did the argument that nonproducing parasites were able to appropriate the wealth labor created because government had granted them monopolistic rights. This diagnosis came bundled with its own prescription: the producing classes should elect men who would abolish the monopolies that bred aristocrats.

WORKINGMEN’S ADVOCATES

In April 1829 a crowd of more than five thousand mechanics turned out for a meeting in the Bowery to protest a rumored scheme by employers to lengthen the ten-hour day. After resolving to fight any such move, the gathering appointed a Committee of Fifty and instructed it to prepare a report on “the causes of the present condition of the poor.” In setting up this counterpart of the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism “great care was taken to have no ‘Boss’ on the committee,” recalled George Henry Evans, one of the workingmen’s leaders and the party’s first historian. The committee labored over summer and fall, under the influence of member Thomas Skidmore.

On October 19 another mass meeting of “Mechanics and other Working Men” assembled, heard the Fifty’s report, and invited “all those of our fellow-citizens who live on their own labor, AND NONE OTHER,” to join them in supporting an independent slate of candidates in the upcoming November elections for the state assembly. The meeting also adopted a platform for what soon would be called the Workingmen’s Party (Brooklyn would form its own such organization). They unanimously endorsed the essence of Skidmore’s program, calling for “equal property to all adults.” They also backed Fanny Wright and Robert Dale Owen’s demand for equal educational opportunity and elected Owen himself secretary. Signaling their anticlerical bent, they called for an end to tax exemptions on ministers and church properties. They also briskly denounced government-created “chartered monopolies,” urging the wider community to “destroy banks altogether.” Banks flooded society with “rag money”—depreciated banknotes—that were often bought at steep discount by employers and used at face value to pay employees’ wages. The Workingmen advocated a purely metallic currency—so-called hard money—employing the sophisticated argument that bank-created inflation led to a rise in prices, a rise in imports, a fall in exports, an outflow of specie, and then an inevitable contraction and depression.

The Workingmen also advocated a mechanic’s lien law, a plank that appealed greatly to the carpenters, masons, and stonecutters who were major supporters of the new party. In the 1820s boom, contractors bid low to get a job, then gave workmen only part of their pay (perhaps 25 percent), promising the balance later. Later never came. Instead, the contractor pocketed the remainder and declared insolvency, making it impossible to collect monies due. The Workingmen proposed a law giving a lien on the building to all those who had been employed in erecting it. The propertied fought this vigorously, saying it would discourage investment.

Proclaiming that “we have nothing to hope from the aristocratic orders of society” and that “our only course to pursue is, to send men of our own description, if we can, to the Legislature at Albany,” the Workingmen, using an elaborately democratic procedure, nominated eleven candidates: two carpenters, two machinists, a painter, a whitesmith, a brassfounder, a printer, a cooper, a grocer, and a physician.

The new party decided it needed a newspaper. George Henry Evans, who had brought out Wright and Owens’s Free Enquirer, now launched the Workingman’s Advo-cate from his office on Thames Street, where he served as editor, compiler, and printer. The first issue, on