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. 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. 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. 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. 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. The new party engaged in political fusion with organizes seeking to defeat
Tammany Hall in races for the
New York State Senate.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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." This was followed by another meeting one week later, at which the majority belong to the Owen-Evans group. Those dissenting from the communal boarding school educational model were expelled.
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. 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. The party nominated an individual from
Orange County for
governor, but he declined and no replacement was chosen. 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. The party was the progenitor, to some extent, of the
Locofocos. ==See also==