¹ McKee, National Conventions and Platforms, p. 251.
In the meantime Henry George, whose Progress and Poverty had made a profound impression upon public thought, had become in 1886 a candidate for mayor of New York City, and polled the phenomenal total of 68,110 votes, while Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican candidate, received 60,435, and Abram S. Hewitt, the successful Democratic candidate, polled 90,552. The evidence of popular support which attended Henry George’s brief political career was the prelude to a national effort which culminated in the formation of the United Labor party. Its platform was similar to that of the Union party, except that the single tax now made its appearance. This method contemplated the “taxation of land according to its value and not according to its area, to devote to common use and benefit those values which arise, not from the exertion of the individual, but from the growth of society,” and the abolition of all taxes on industry and its products. But it was apparent from the similarity of their platforms and the geographical distribution of their candidates that the two labor parties were competing for the same vote. At a conference held in Chicago to effect a union, however, the Union Labor party insisted on the complete effacement of the other ticket and the single taxers refused to submit. In the election which followed, the Union Labor party received about 147,000 votes, largely from the South and West and evidently the old Greenback vote, while the United party polled almost no votes outside of Illinois and New York. Neither party survived the result of this election.
In December, 1889, committees representing the Knights of Labor and the Farmers’ Alliance met in St. Louis to come to some agreement on political policies. Owing to the single tax predilection of the Knights, the two organizations were unable to enter into a close union, but they nevertheless did agree that “the legislative committees of both organizations [would] act in concert before Congress for the purpose of securing the enactment of laws in harmony with their demands.” This coöperation was a forerunner of the People’s party or, as it was commonly called, the Populist party, the largest third party that had taken the field since the Civil War. Throughout the West and the South political conditions now were feverish. Old party majorities were overturned, and a new type of Congressman invaded Washington. When the first national convention of the People’s party met in Omaha on July 2, 1892, the outlook was bright. General Weaver was nominated for President and James G. Field of Virginia for Vice-President. The platform rehabilitated Greenbackism in cogent phrases, demanded government control of railroads and telegraph and telephone systems, the reclamation of land held by corporations, an income tax, the free coinage of silver and gold “at the present legal ratio of sixteen to one,” and postal savings banks. In a series of resolutions which were not a part of the platform but were nevertheless “expressive of the sentiment of this convention,” the party declared itself in sympathy “with the efforts of organized workingmen to shorten the hours of labor”; it condemned “the fallacy of protecting American labor under the present system, which opens our ports to the pauper and criminal classes of the world and crowds out our wage-earners”; and it opposed the Pinkerton system of capitalistic espionage as “a menace to our liberties.” The party formally declared itself to be a “union of the labor forces of the United States,” for “the interests of rural and city labor are the same; their enemies identical.”
These national movements prior to 1896 are not, however, an adequate index of the political strength of labor in partisan endeavor. Organized labor was more of a power in local and state elections, perhaps because in these cases its pressure was more direct, perhaps because it was unable to cope with the great national organization of the older parties. During these years of effort to gain a footing in the Federal Government, there are numerous examples of the success of the labor party in state elections. As early as 1872 the labor reformers nominated state tickets in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. In 1875 they nominated Wendell Phillips for Governor of Massachusetts. In 1878, in coalition with the Greenbackers, they elected many state officers throughout the West. Ten years later, when the Union Labor party was at its height, labor candidates were successful in several municipalities. In 1888 labor tickets were nominated in many Western States, including Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Of these Kansas cast the largest labor vote, with nearly 36,000, and Missouri came next with 15,400. In the East, however, the showing of the party in state elections was far less impressive.
In California the political labor movement achieved a singular prominence. In 1877 the labor situation in San Francisco became acute because of the prevalence of unemployment. Grumblings of dissatisfaction soon gave way to parades and informal meetings at which imported Chinese labor and the rich “nobs,” the supposed dual cause of all the trouble, were denounced in lurid language. The agitation, however, was formless until the necessary leader appeared in Dennis Kearney, a native of Cork County, Ireland. For fourteen years he had been a sailor, had risen rapidly to first officer of a clipper ship, and then had settled in San Francisco as a drayman. He was temperate and industrious in his personal life, and possessed a clear eye, a penetrating voice, the vocabulary of one versed in the crude socialistic pamphlets of his day, and, in spite of certain domineering habits bred in the sailor, the winning graces of his nationality.
Kearney appeared at meetings on the vacant lots known as the “sand lots,” in front of the City Hall of San Francisco, and advised the discontented ones to “wrest the government from the hands of the rich and place it in those of the people.” On September 12, 1877, he rallied a group of unemployed around him and organized the Workingman’s Trade and Labor Union of San Francisco. On the 5th of October, at a great public meeting, the Workingman’s party of California was formed and Kearney was elected president. The platform adopted by the party proposed to place the government in the hands of the people, to get rid of the Chinese, to destroy the money power, to “provide decently for the poor and unfortunate, the weak and the helpless,” and “to elect none but competent workingmen and their friends to any office whatever.… When we have 10,000 members we shall have the sympathy and support of 20,000 other workingmen. This party,” concluded the pronouncement, “will exhaust all peaceable means of attaining its ends, but it will not be denied justice, when it has the power to enforce it. It will encourage no riot or outrage, but it will not volunteer to repress or put down or arrest or prosecute the hungry and impatient, who manifest their hatred of the Chinamen by a crusade against ‘John,’ or those who employ him. Let those who raise the storm by their selfishness, suppress it themselves. If they dare raise the devil, let them meet him face to face. We will not help them.”
In advocating these views, Kearney held meeting after meeting, each rhetorically more violent than the last, until on the 3d of November he was arrested. This martyrdom in the cause of labor increased his power, and when he was released he was drawn by his followers in triumph through the streets on one of his own drays. His language became more and more extreme. He bludgeoned the “thieving politicians” and the “bloodsucking capitalists,” and he advocated “judicious hanging” and “discretionary shooting.” The City Council passed an ordinance intended to gag him; the legislature enacted an extremely harsh riot act; a body of volunteers patrolled the streets of the city; a committee of safety was organized. On January 5, 1878, Kearney and a number of associates were indicted, arrested, and released on bail. When the trial jury acquitted Kearney, what may be called the terrorism of the movement attained its height, but it fortunately spent itself in violent adjectives.
The Workingman’s party, however, elected a workingman mayor of San Francisco, joined forces with the Grangers, and elected a majority of the members of the state constitutional convention which met in Sacramento on September 28, 1878. This was a notable triumph for a third party. The framing of a new constitution gave this coalition of farmers and workingmen an unusual opportunity to assail the evils which they declared infested the State. The instrument which they drafted bound the state legislature with numerous restrictions and made lobbying a felony; it reorganized the courts, placed innumerable limitations upon corporations, forbade the loaning of the credit or property of the State to corporations, and placed a state commission in charge of the railroads, which had been perniciously active in state politics. Alas for these visions of reform! A few years after the adoption of this new constitution by California, Hubert H. Bancroft wrote:
Those objects which it particularly aimed at, it failed to achieve. The effect upon corporations disappointed its authors and supporters. Many of them were strong enough still to defy state power and evade state laws, in protecting their interests, and this they did without scruple. The relation of capital and labor is even more strained than before the constitution was adopted. Capital soon recovered from a temporary intimidation… Labor still uneasy was still subject to the inexorable law of supply and demand. Legislatures were still to be approached by agents… Chinese were still employed in digging and grading. The state board of railroad Commissioners was a useless expense,… being as wax in the hands of the companies it was set to watch. ¹
¹ Works (vol. XXIV): History of California, vol. VII, p. 404.