ABSTRACT
The American labor movement created some of the first proletarian parties in the world, the Workingmen’s Parties established by the city central unions of the Northeast during the late 1820s and early 1830s. The program of those labor organizations included demands for a ten-hour working day, the abolition of imprisonment for debt, free public schools, the end of the death penalty, mechanics’ lien laws insuring the payment of salaries in case of bankruptcy-and above all free homesteads for settlers in Indian lands. The ascendancy of Andrew Jackson in 1828 led to their eventual assimilation by the left wing of the Democratic Party, which combined inflammatory diatribes against the “money power” and democratic reforms for poor whites with an amazing leniency toward the brutalities of the lords of the lash. It is true that that was only a continuation of the Jeffersonian Republican tradition, but the new development was particularly ominous because, by embracing the working class, it gave to the nascent American labor movement its distinctly racist character.
