Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America

As the United States entered the nineteenth century, the highly skilled artisans who worked in their own homes to create customized items for individual patrons were replaced by large-scale operations in which unskilled workers produced identical units in quantity and at lower cost. Rarely did these laborers ever meet the men and women who ultimately purchased their goods. A single cobbler no longer made the entire shoe; in his place was a series of faceless workers, each completing one discrete function. By the mid-1820s, not only shoes but also such items as furniture, carriages, rope, barrels, brushes, cigars, hats, and candy were all being produced in factories. At the same time, a growing supply of women, children, and recent immigrants depressed the wages being paid to workers, forcing them to toil longer and longer hours. Only by pooling the earnings of husband, wife, and children could a family eke out even a bare subsistence—people who fell into debt would, like serfs from medieval times, be thrown into prison.

The new system of production created class distinctions that were inconsistent with the democratic principles laid down by the Founding Fathers only a few decades earlier. For in stark contrast to the burgeoning multitudes of common laborers, there emerged a new class of “merchant capitalists” to reap the rewards of the first generation of Americans who earned their livelihoods not by making goods but by hiring and managing workers, by selling the products at whatever price the market would bear, and by investing those profits to accumulate enormous wealth. American laborers, suddenly confronted by developments that seemed beyond their control and feeling powerless in the hands of their increasingly prosperous employers, formed the nation’s first trade unions.

The country’s leading newspapers had scant regard for the struggling new movement launched by the laborers, siding instead with the merchant capitalists and the growth that they symbolized as harbingers of what eventually would become an American version of the Industrial Revolution that had taken fire in England. The leaders of the fledgling Labor Movement in the United States recognized the need to communicate with their members, so they founded an early instance of the dissident press. During the late 1820s and early 1830s, some fifty labor weeklies appeared, most of them in the industrializing Northeast.¹

The earliest and most important of the labor papers was the Mechanic’s Free Press in Philadelphia, published from 1828 to 1831; although the paper survived only three years, it boasted a circulation of 2,000—an impressive figure during a time when even the largest New York daily claimed a circulation of only twice that number. A second significant labor paper was the Free Enquirer, published in New York City from 1828 to 1835. The most long-lasting of the dissident voices was the Working Man’s Advocate, published in New York City from 1829 to 1849.²

The rise of a dissident press created by American laborers coincided with the period of democratic revolution credited to Andrew Jackson, the first self-made man to ascend to the presidency. In concert with the themes popularized by the rough-hewn Tennessean who was elected to the White House in 1828, the labor publications reflected the concerns of an awakened working class during a time of social, economic, and political turbulence. The common purpose of the publications was to ensure that American workers did not become an industrial underclass merely adding to the power and abundance of their overlords, the merchant capitalists. The papers called for an end to economic conditions that were making life intolerable for American workers, while also identifying and crusading for reforms that were key to the well-being of the American everyman.

The dissident papers quickly attracted a devoted following. Because many workers were illiterate, men and women with some education often purchased the papers for their co-workers and read them out loud on street corners and in churches, town halls, and other gathering places to crowds that often numbered 100 or more. Indeed, the fact that laborers came together to hear what the various editors had to say served to stimulate a sense of fraternity among the increasingly disenfranchised workers.

The Labor Movement made its first appearance in Philadelphia in 1827 when representatives of fifteen trades—from carpenters and machinists to hatters and shoemakers—formed the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations. The union, which soon attracted some 2,000 members, was primarily concerned with what the founders saw as a lack of democracy in political affairs; elected officials were catering to the rich, the union men said, while ignoring the poor.

Movement leaders recognized the value of disseminating their concerns to a larger audience through a dissident press, calling for the creation of labor publications in each and every community of consequence in the United States. That desire took an important step forward in April 1828 with the founding of the Mechanic’s Free Press.³

After Philadelphia workers organized, the Labor Movement next expanded to New York, where it encompassed not only urban workers but also farmers in rural areas. These laborers, like their Pennsylvania counterparts, placed a priority on establishing their own dissident publications, including the Free Enquirer and Working Man’s Advocate. Neither of the papers confined its circulation to New York state but also attracted subscribers in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.⁴

The movement spread rapidly to other areas, with workers organizing in some sixty cities and towns by the early 1830s. Many of the groups recognized the important role that communication plays in the stability and growth of a social movement, so they committed the energy and resources necessary to establish their own papers. Voices of worker discontent founded between 1828 and 1832 included the Spirit of the Age in Rochester, Workingmen’s Advocate in Boston, and Delaware Free Press in Wilmington.⁵

In a phenomenon that would be repeated throughout the history of the dissident press, mainstream newspapers greeted the labor papers with hostility. The Commercial Advertiser, a New York City daily, labeled the labor editors “poor and deluded” men who were “the slime of this community,” and the Wayne County Patriot in rural New York state called the working-class press “rabble” and demeaned the working-men-turned-journalists by calling them members of the “Dirty Shirt Party.”⁶

The harsh words came as no surprise to the labor editors, who considered the mainstream press an enemy of the American worker. The Mechanic’s Free Press said point blank that general-circulation newspapers spoke only for the “aristocracy of wealth” and “either entirely neglected” poor people or spoke about common men and women “only with contempt. The great mass of newspapers and periodicals are thus mischievously involved in doing worse than nothing” for the poor because their driving mission was to “pay court to the rich.” The Working Man’s Advocate criticized mainstream papers as well, accusing them of speaking exclusively for the capitalist “gentry” who had “grown fat” by oppressing the working class.⁷

The labor editors assured their readers that they would be unremitting in support of the common worker. Mechanic’s Free Press editor William Heighton told readers that he had founded his paper to help “raise the productive classes to that condition of true independence and equality which their practical skill and ingenuity, their immense utility to the nation, and their growing intelligence demand.” Heighton, a shoemaker by trade, was not afraid to flex his editorial muscle, boldly stating that “the working classes are the blood, bone, and sinew of the nation,” while the merchant capitalists were modern-day “money changers” who must be driven “from the temple of freedom.”⁸

When the Free Enquirer added its voice to the nascent dissident press, it also pledged to speak up on behalf of American labor, urging the men and women of the working classes to “Arise then in your strength.” The New York weekly consistently criticized the nation’s power elite, saying: “The poor have no laws; the laws are made by the rich and of course for the rich.”⁹

Although no image of William Heighton survives, the masthead that he created for the Mechanic’s Free Press provides a visual symbol of the dissident labor press of the early 1800s.

The Working Man’s Advocate echoed the sentiments of its two journalistic predecessors. Workers had been “entirely excluded from the advantages derivable from our free institutions,” the New York weekly said, promising that it would be unflagging in its support of the poor: “It will be our object to draw the line as distinctly as possible between society living luxurious and ideal lives, and those groaning under oppression and miseries.” The Advocate stated unequivocally that it was prepared to engage in open rebellion on behalf of American labor. “The Working classes have taken the field, and never will they give up the contest till the power that oppresses them is annihilated,” the Advocate thundered. “We discern symptoms of a revolution which will be second to none save of ’76.”¹⁰

The Advocate stated with confidence: “A new and important era is about to take place, an era fraught with good to the producing classes. To aid in hastening the approach of this political millennium shall be our aim.”¹¹

One specific issue the labor press championed was reducing the number of hours that employees worked. As the United States had begun to industrialize, factory owners had succeeded in gaining widespread acceptance of the “sun to sun” system of labor; workers were expected to be on the job before sunrise and not to leave until after sunset. What’s more, the stern New England spirit invested the “industrious habit” of working twelve or more hours a day, six days a week with the sacred character of a moral—if not a religious—precept.¹²

So when the labor papers advocated a shorter workday, they ran counter not only to the interests of the factory owners but also to the teachings of the church. The fact that supporting the ten-hour workday became a goal of the labor press demonstrated that this early instance of dissident journalism, like others that would follow, had no intention of shying away from uphill struggles.

Taking the lead in this contentious battle, as he would in many others, was William Heighton of the Mechanic’s Free Press. Born in England in 1800, Willy Heighton came to America with his family when he was still a toddler. Like many newcomers arriving during that early wave of immigration, the Heightons came without much means but with an abundance of determination. Everyone in the family went to work in the shoemaking trade that Willy’s father had mastered in the old country, with the youngest member of the family playing with wooden blocks and a favorite cloth ball only a few feet from where his mother cut and stitched leather in the small cottage that doubled as the Heighton home and workplace. Although Willy soon joined his parents and siblings in creating finely crafted footwear, the family could not compete with the factories that produced more boots at a lower price. While still an adolescent, Willy was sent into a boot factory so that at least one member of the family would be earning a steady wage.¹³

Every day for the next fifteen years, Willy Heighton crawled out of bed in the morning darkness so he would be at his machine by 5 a.m. He then cut the heels for men’s boots—two and seven-eighths inches wide, three and three-eighths inches long, one and one-fourth inch thick—for seven hours, stopping for half an hour at midday to eat the lunch his mother had packed for him. Willy then resumed the monotonous cutting, careful to keep his fingers away from the sharp blade—there was no such thing as insurance or workman’s compensation in case of injury—for either six or seven more hours, depending on how many boot orders had piled up. Regardless of whether he left the factory at 6:30 or 7:30 p.m., it was already dark as he walked home. So Sunday was the only day of the week that the young man had any chance whatsoever of seeing the sunlight in the crowded south Philadelphia neighborhood where he and the other laborers lived.

Willy Heighton sacrificed his boyhood and early manhood to the boot factory, receiving no formal classroom education and learning to read only because he studied by the light of a candle after his workday had ended.

By then married to the former Ann Beckley, a fellow factory worker, and the father of a young daughter, Heighton could not bear the thought that his wife—and, he knew, eventually their daughter as well—would lose both her health and her looks before she turned thirty unless he found a way for them to escape from industrial slavery. So he quit his job, used his scant savings to buy a used printing press, and launched what he could justly claim to be the first dissident newspaper in America. With Ann working at his side setting the lead type, Heighton published his first issue. “To the working public generally we appeal for support in consideration of the fact that this is the only journal now in existence,” Heighton wrote in his debut issue, “devoted to their interest.”¹⁴

Heighton asked laborers to pay two dollars a year for a subscription and to purchase the items they saw advertised in his paper. The Free Press’s large circulation within Philadelphia’s working class, Heighton assured his readers, “renders it a valuable medium through which buyers and sellers can make known their wishes”—his four pages were dotted with small ads for clothing, pencil cases, and the services of a blacksmith. The paper’s finances were always tenuous, however, and Heighton’s requests for support from his readers became increasingly intense as time passed and revenue grew scarce. “Your patronage is most desperately desired,” he wrote in 1830. In exchange for the support of his readers, Heighton promised to fight tirelessly for increased rights for American labor—beginning with a ten-hour day.¹⁵

Heighton asserted that “thousands yet unborn will reap the advantages, should the labourer succeed” in shortening the workday. With regard to the precise rationale for reducing the standard hours of labor, Heighton argued that workers needed more time to learn to read and then to educate themselves about current issues—essential steps, he charged, if workers were to fulfill their obligations as informed citizens. As long as the “sun to sun” work schedule prevented laborers from becoming informed, the former shoemaker wrote, employers would succeed in “perpetuating amongst us invidious and artificial class distinctions, unnatural and unjust inequalities.”¹⁶

The Working Man’s Advocate used a drawing of a brawny fist clutching a hammer to communicate the strength of the early labor press.

The issue of the ten-hour workday also gave Heighton the opportunity to demonstrate his commitment to creating an open forum—that is, providing space not only for the editor’s opinion but also for those of his readers—that would become a hallmark of the dissident press. Heighton made room, for example, for a lengthy letter from a man who was so outraged by the long workday that he insisted that European laborers were better off than American ones. “In this free country (as they call it),” the man wrote, he worked “from 5 o’clock in the morning until 7:30 in the evening,” while his workday in Europe had been 6 a.m. until 6 p.m. Even though he worked two and a half hours longer in the United States, the man continued, his income was exactly the same as in his homeland.¹⁷

Like other dissident editors who would follow in his path, Heighton was not satisfied merely to argue on paper, as he also appealed directly to the Philadelphia City Council. In his many face-to-face encounters with the councilmen, Heighton demanded that the elected officials make “ten hours the standard day’s work.”¹⁸

The other labor papers joined the Free Press campaign. The Free Enquirer expanded on the concept that Heighton had initiated with the city council by preparing resolutions for several northeastern state legislatures on the subject of shortening the workday—and then lobbying hard for their passage. The Working Man’s Advocate also published a flood of editorials on the subject, insisting that forcing workers to labor twelve and fourteen hours was a “gross imposition” on their freedom.¹⁹

Another issue that appeared prominently in the early labor press revolved around the legions of youngsters who, with the rise of industrialization, had joined the work force. Of primary concern was the fact that the factories robbed boys and girls of their childhoods—and often their health—when they were only ten years old, or even younger.

Considering William Heighton’s personal experience of being sent into factory work at an early age, it was not surprising that his Mechanic’s Free Press spearheaded the attack on this issue. In 1830, he published the first study that documented the relationship between child labor and illiteracy. According to the findings, only one in six children employed in Philadelphia factories was able to read or write his or her own name. The study revealed other grim realities related to child labor as well. It reported that some impoverished parents who knew they could not educate all of their offspring decided to select one child to send to school while the other members of the family continued to work. The plan failed, however, when the greedy merchant capitalists got wind of it; employers adopted a policy that if parents took even one child from the factory, the entire family would be fired.²⁰

Fueled partly by his own frustration at having lost his childhood to factory work, Heighton went far beyond simply reporting the facts, as he also wrote blistering editorials against factory owners who took advantage of working-class youths. “Unless something is done by our government to compel those misanthropes to treat the children in their employ like human beings,” the editor raged, “the result of their present infamous practices will be grievously destructive to the liberties of the people.”²¹

The Free Press was not the only journalistic voice raised against child labor. The Free Enquirer reported that a staggering forty percent of American factory workers were between the ages of seven and sixteen. The only time working-class children could study, the paper continued, was on Sunday and after nine o’clock at night the other six days of the week, when the children were too exhausted to concentrate. “The opportunities allowed for children and youth employed in manufactories to obtain an education suitable to the character of American freemen,” the Free Enquirer protested, “are altogether inadequate.” The editors of the paper also drafted recommendations and sent them to several state legislatures, insisting that the elected officials pass laws to reduce the number of children employed in factories.²²

Coverage of child labor in the Working Man’s Advocate took a strongly human approach that reflected the experiences of its editor, George Henry Evans. Born into a middle-class English family in 1806, Evans emigrated to America at age fourteen and began working at a New York printing plant. Having endured ten years of manual labor before founding the Advocate, Evans was fully aware of the conditions that working-class boys and girls faced. “Scarcely time allows them to take their scanty meals, they retire to their beds at night worn down and exhausted with excessive labour; hence they are deprived of any privilege except working, eating and sleeping.” The Advocate used this bleak image to blame child labor for the problems that were increasingly plaguing the nation. “Is it to be wondered at,” the paper asked, “that our country has become the great theatre of mobs—yea, we may say murderers too—when we remember that the poor and their children in manufacturing towns and districts are kept in ignorance and regarded but little superior to the beasts that perish?”²³

Closely related to the campaign to reduce child labor was one to guarantee that every American child received an education. In the 1820s, only the vaguest consideration was given to the needs of children who could not afford tuition to private institutions, with at least one million youngsters between the ages of five and fifteen “scarcely knowing what a school was.” Working-class parents realized, however, that unless their children received an education, those boys and girls would be doomed to the same back-breaking labor and deprivation that the parents were forced to endure. So the demand that the government provide every child, regardless of the family’s socioeconomic position, with the opportunity to attend school was paramount to the emerging Labor Movement—and labor press.²⁴

William Heighton wrote in his Mechanic’s Free Press that securing a proper education for every working-class child was “the first and most important” objective of his paper. “This is the rock on which the temple of moral freedom and independence is founded; any other foundation than this will prove inadequate to the protection of our liberties.” Heighton called the lack of schooling for poor children flagrant proof that “the labourer has been defrauded” of his rights as an American citizen. The editor wrote and submitted two bills to the Pennsylvania legislature calling for universal education, and then propelled them forward with rhetorical muscle: “The productive classes of the nation will be united; and their union will obtain that which has so long been cruelly denied them—a general and republican system of education!”²⁵

The importance the Working Man’s Advocate placed on universal education was clear from the motto it carried each week at the top of page one: “All children are entitled to equal education,” and from the item it positioned as number one on its list of measures that working men sought: “Equal Universal Education.” The paper repeated its demand for state-supported schools hundreds of times. “The very existence of a free, popular government,” read a typical editorial, “depends upon the distribution of knowledge.”²⁶

The Free Enquirer agreed with its two journalistic cohorts that educating working-class children was the top priority; the paper differed with the other labor voices, however, as to exactly what kind of educating was needed.

Robert Dale Owen, co-editor of the Enquirer, had been educated in a progressive boarding school in Switzerland, and was convinced that all American children, whatever their class, should have the same experience. So the Enquirer demanded that the federal government create boarding schools where all children would receive not only the same instruction but also the same food, clothing, and housing—all at public expense under a system of state guardianship.²⁷

Standard day schools would not guarantee the children of laborers an equal education, Owen argued, because their living conditions would remain deficient. “If the children from these state schools are to go every evening, the one to his wealthy parent’s soft carpeted drawing room, and the other to his poor father’s or widowed mother’s comfortless cabin, will they return the next day as friends and equals? He knows little of human nature who thinks they will.”²⁸

Although neither the Mechanic’s Free Press nor the Working Man’s Advocate directly endorsed the Enquirer’s boarding-school proposal, each gave its subtle support. When Owen wrote a series of essays explaining the benefits of the concept, the Free Press and Advocate both reprinted the series on their front pages.²⁹

Mainstream papers, by contrast, attacked the boarding-school proposal with a vengeance. New York City’s Evening Journal called the idea “one of the wildest fancies that ever entered into the brain of any fanatic!” Focusing on the controversial fact that creating boarding schools would mean that children would have to live apart from their parents, the Evening Journal accused Owen of attempting “to sever those strong ties of affection that keep families together.”³⁰

But it was not just the boarding-school proposal that the mainstream press criticized, as many papers attacked any form of tax-supported education. They complained not only that building and maintaining public schools would be too heavy of a financial drain on taxpayers but also that the time necessary to educate all Americans would destroy the country. “The peasant must labor during those hours of the day which his wealthy neighbor can give to the abstract culture of his mind,” wrote Philadelphia’s National Gazette, “otherwise, the earth would not yield enough for the subsistence of all: the mechanic cannot abandon the operations of his trade for general studies.” If poor children were allowed to attend school, the upper classes would soon lose “most of the conveniences of life,” the establishment paper continued, and, before long, “languor, decay, poverty, and discontent would be visible among all classes.”³¹

The labor publications were not deterred, continuing to demand an education for every American child. “Let every man remember that it is not for himself alone that he acts, but for posterity,” Owen wrote in the Free Enquirer. “If it be too late to secure the blessings of education for himself, it is time he was up and doing to secure them for his children.” To the mainstream press argument that tax-supported schools would be too expensive, Owen reacted with outrage: “The funds that should have been appropriated to a rational system of general education at the expense of the state have been shamefully squandered and misapplied.”³²

The antiquated practice of throwing people into jail because they could not meet their financial obligations was still very much in effect in 1820s America. Imprisonment for debt clearly burdened only members of the working class—indeed, threatened to turn more than a few citizens of the world’s greatest democracy into vassals—and, therefore, became another target of the early labor press. The scope of the phenomenon was, indeed, appalling. At the close of the decade, some 75,000 people nationwide were being jailed each year because of debts, with most of the cases involving sums of less than twenty-five dollars.³³

The Mechanic’s Free Press again took the lead on this issue. William Heighton, as a former shoemaker and now as a newspaper editor, knew all too well that financial stability was fragile for the American worker, forever subject to the whims of a fluctuating economy over which the individual man or woman had scant control. So Heighton attacked the imprisoning of debtors as unfair. “A law that makes poverty a crime and a poor man a felon, after those very laws have made poverty inevitable,” he wrote, “is not only cruel and oppressive, but absurd.” As would be the case with other dissident journalists and their efforts to change society, Heighton took direct action by drafting and sending to the Pennsylvania legislature a resolution to abolish the medieval punishment.³⁴

The Working Man’s Advocate joined the battle. “Imprisonment for debt we believe to be a remnant of the feudal system,” one editorial read, “calculated only for barbarians, disgraceful to the age and country in which we live.” The labor weekly supported its commentary by providing compelling examples of exactly how preposterous some of the cases were. One item reported that poverty was so widespread in New York State’s Monroe County that each year one person in every ten families was imprisoned because of unpaid bills, with one case involving an outstanding payment of a mere twenty-five cents. Another Advocate article disclosed that a man who owed only two cents was forced to remain behind bars for thirty days. In perhaps the most outrageous instance of all, a woman was thrown into jail and her children placed in an orphanage because she owed less than four dollars.³⁵

All of the instances of injustice described in the Free Press and the Advocate—those related to imprisonment for debt as well as other issues—involved white workers, as neither paper spoke up on behalf of the group of American laborers who were, during the period, suffering under the most heinous form of human oppression: chattel slavery. The two papers were entirely silent about white men buying, selling, and abusing Americans of African descent, opting not to give their editorial support to the Abolition Movement that was in its beginning stages in the 1820s. The Free Enquirer was the only early labor paper to condemn slavery. The Enquirer insisted that “every friend of liberty must earnestly long to see some peaceful but effectual mode suggested and adopted to wash off this stain [of slavery] from the escutcheon of American freedom.”³⁶

The most broad-based initiative undertaken by the embryonic labor press was to help make the working class a major player in American politics. This effort had the potential not only to allow laborers to regain their status as first-class citizens that the early stages of industrialization had taken from them, but also to advance the various other issues that the workers and their papers valued. Shortening the workday, reducing child labor, creating state-supported schools, abolishing imprisonment for debt—they could all be achieved if labor could be transformed from a mass of powerless individuals into a united political force that the major parties could ignore only at their own peril.

The dissident labor papers were so dissatisfied with the state of American politics in the late 1820s that they urged workers to reject both major parties of the day and nominate their own candidates. “So long as the people will be satisfied with the sound of a name, such as Federalist or Democrat,” William Heighton wrote in his Mechanic’s Free Press, “so long will they have the shadow instead of the substance.”³⁷

Heighton began the effort to politicize American labor soon after founding his paper in the spring of 1828, counseling readers that “the ordinary mode of effecting nominations of candidates, and of conducting elections” for Philadelphia City Council and the Pennsylvania legislature tended “to concentrate in the hands of a few, what should be the property of all.” As with other issues, Heighton did not confine his endeavor to newsprint, however, but plunged directly into the rough-and-tumble of political activism. In this instance, that meant crafting a resolution urging the members of Philadelphia’s various trade societies to come together to nominate candidates “to represent the interests of the working class” and thereby to found a third political party. The workers heeded Heighton’s call, gathered for the meeting, and formed the Working Men’s Party—with the Free Press as its official organ.³⁸

By the fall of 1828, Heighton’s effort had reaped its first dividends, with the new party electing twenty-one candidates to local offices in Philadelphia and the surrounding communities. The shoemaker-cum-editor-cum-political operative was jubilant: “The result has been equal to our most sanguine expectations.”³⁹

A year later, Philadelphia laborers once again had cause for celebration, having successfully elected another twenty of their own to local offices. “It is the finish of the glorious work of the [American] revolution,” Heighton boasted. The 1829 labor victory was so decisive, in fact, that even a mainstream paper, the Free Trade Advocate, acknowledged that the Mechanic’s Free Press had achieved two impressive feats—a weekly circulation of 2,000 and “so formidable an attack upon the ranks of both the political parties” that the workers controlled “the balance of local power.”⁴⁰

Buoyed by the Philadelphia victories, the Labor Movement expanded its political influence into other parts of Pennsylvania. Testifying to the central role that the labor press played in the emergence of the working class as a political force, the first step the leaders took was to circulate the Free Press in localities around the state, including Lancaster, Harrisburg, Erie, Carlisle, and Pittsburgh, as well as in Ohio.⁴¹

Meanwhile, the Labor Movement also gained a foothold in New York State—with labor papers again in the vanguard. The Working Man’s Advocate argued that the only elected officials who would truly represent workers were “those who live by their own labour, AND NONE OTHER.” So the Advocate called its working-class readers to action: “Awake, then, from your slumbers; and insult not the memories of the heroes of ’76 by exhibiting to the world that what they risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour to obtain you do not think worth preserving.”⁴²

New York laborers began to taste success late that fall when they elected one of their own to the state legislature. The Advocate rejoiced, gloating that the victory had come despite the opposition of establishment papers and four men running against the labor candidate. “We have done more than could reasonably have been expected at this election,” the Advocate wrote. “We have, to a certainty, paved the way to future victory.”⁴³

Leaders of the New York branch of the Working Men’s Party expanded into a number of cities around the state, and the results of local elections in the spring of 1830 continued to be impressive. The entire labor ticket won in Syracuse, and all but one worker candidate won in both Troy and Albany.⁴⁴

The workers soon triumphed in cities outside of Pennsylvania and New York, too. Three candidates were elected to local offices in Newark, New Jersey, eighteen to local offices in Wilmington, Delaware, three to the state legislature from Levy County, Delaware, one to the New Hampshire state legislature, and several to local offices and one to the state legislature from New London, Connecticut. The Advocate was so elated with the numerous victories that it boasted that the Working Men’s Party would soon be in a position to nominate candidates for President and Vice-President of the United States.⁴⁵

After laborers had proven themselves to be a formidable force at the ballot box three years in a row, the major political parties decided that the time had come to put the brakes on the upstart new party. After independent strategy sessions, both the Federalists and the Democrats decided the Working Men’s Party was most vulnerable on the fact that it had become affiliated in the public mind with America’s devil incarnate: Frances “Fanny” Wright.

Robert Dale Owen’s co-editor at the Free Enquirer, Wright was a well-educated Scottish woman of independent means. She had arrived in the United States in 1818 and soon had committed her considerable energies and financial resources to several controversial reform efforts. In 1825, she established a commune in Tennessee to prove that African Americans would thrive if they were freed and properly educated. Wright also endorsed marriages between blacks and whites, then outlawed in every state, as the best way to solve America’s race problem. Next, Wright stunned the nation by publicly announcing that women were fully equal to men and should, therefore, participate in all areas of public life.⁴⁶

But Wright was only warming up. In 1827, during a time when propriety banned women from even mentioning the word “sex,” Wright described carnal desire as “the strongest and noblest of human passions” and the source of “the best joys of our existence,” causing her to become known nationwide as the “High Priestess of Infidelity.” Wright next denounced organized religion, proclaiming herself an avowed atheist and arguing that it was wasteful for people to spend their money building churches while the needy went hungry. Wright also campaigned for a redistribution of wealth in which all Americans would give their property and other possessions to the state to be divided equally among members of the various socioeconomic classes.⁴⁷

Owen shared Wright’s commitment to atheism and several other of her iconoclastic views. But it was primarily their mutual support of the American working class that brought the two radical thinkers together first to found the New Harmony Gazette in Indiana and then, in 1828, the Free Enquirer in New York City.

When the Federalists and Democrats launched their assaults on the Working Men’s Party in 1830, they focused on Fanny Wright because she was an outspoken woman in an era when American society considered it an offense against God and nature for women to engage in activities outside the home. Mainstream politicians recruited the country’s major newspapers to join their antilabor campaign, prompting a savage editorial onslaught.

In Philadelphia, the Daily Advertiser called labor leaders “advocates of infidelity,” and the American Sentinel accused the Working Men’s Party of nominating candidates known to be Wright’s “disciples.” In New York City, the Courier and Enquirer charged the laborers with promoting the cause of “infidels,” the Evening Journal said the labor press supported universal education only so the editors could “get the children into public schools, and then teach them infidelity,” and the Commercial Advertiser labeled laborers “ravenous wild beasts,” “followers of a crazy atheistical woman,” and miserable beings who were “lost to society, to earth and to heaven, godless and hopeless” because of their association with Wright, a woman guilty of “incest, robbery, and murder.”⁴⁸

The attacks succeeded in derailing the Labor Movement’s early political progress. By the 1831 election, not a single labor candidate nominated for office was elected, and by 1832 the Working Men’s Party had ceased to exist.⁴⁹

Another defeat played out not at the polls but in an editorial office in south Philadelphia. There, the vicious attacks in the nation’s newspapers followed by the voters’ rejection of labor candidates thrust Mechanic’s Free Press editor William Heighton, the founding father of both the labor press and the labor party, into a state of deep depression. As a result, Heighton returned to shoemaking, refusing ever again to commit his time or his talent either to journalism or to the Labor Movement.⁵⁰

Although the triple losses of the Working Men’s Party, William Heighton, and the Mechanic’s Free Press represented severe setbacks for the pioneering labor press, this early instance of dissident journalism had not, by any means, been conquered. With regard to the specific issues at the center of the Labor Movement, the Federalists and the Democrats, as well as the mainstream newspapers that supported the two parties, had come to recognize the power that a unified working class could wield. So, as the Working Man’s Advocate observed at the time, “Many of the reforms called for by the Working Men are now acknowledged to be just and reasonable, and are even advocated by several of the presses which have hitherto supported the party in power.” Indeed, leaders of the major parties and the generations of politicians who were to follow them succeeded in attracting working men and women into their ranks by adopting labor’s most popular demands as their own. Ideas initially discussed only in the labor press became planks in the platforms of the dominant parties—and were transformed from proposals to realities.⁵¹

By 1831, the ten-hour workday had already been established in Philadelphia and, within a few years, became the standard in factories in many cities throughout the country. In 1832, Pennsylvania adopted its first child labor laws, four years later Massachusetts did the same, and ultimately the effort to curtail the number of youngsters working in American industry spread to many other states—a movement that labor historians repeatedly traced to the pages of the Mechanic’s Free Press. In 1834, Pennsylvania passed a law creating tax-supported public schools for all children, an initiative that evolved into the U.S. educational system that liberals and conservatives alike would ultimately look upon with pride. Abolishing imprisonment as a punishment for debt was accomplished in Philadelphia and New York City in 1831, and soon one state after another fell into line and relegated this feudal relic to the Middle Ages where it belonged—another achievement labor historians credited to the early labor press. As for the effort by the labor papers to transform working men and women into a united force at the ballot box, no one familiar with the political history of the United States during the last two centuries can question that labor did, in fact, become a powerful player in American politics.⁵²

One of the most important legacies of the Mechanic’s Free Press, Free Enquirer, and Working Man’s Advocate, then, was their role in successfully transforming measures that were unpopular in the 1820s into key elements in the nation’s progress toward increased democracy during the 1830s and beyond. In addition, the trio of newspapers paved the way for the hundreds of labor papers, including at least fifteen dailies, that would be published during the late 1800s and early 1900s when the American Labor Movement was at its peak. Finally, the three pioneering publications proved—and unequivocally so—that dissident journalism could produce major rewards for the disenfranchised readers that it served, while also having profound impact on the affairs of the nation as a whole.⁵³