solved to support
only such candidates for the legislature and city council as would
pledge themselves to the interests of "the working classes." The city
was organized, and a delegate convention was called which nominated a
ticket of thirty candidates for city and county offices. But nineteen
of these nominees were also on the Jackson ticket, and ten on the
Adams ticket; and both of these parties used the legend "Working Man's
Ticket," professing to favor a shorter working day. The isolated labor
candidates received only from 229 to 539 votes, while the Jackson party
vote ranged from 3800 to 7000 and the Adams party vote from 2500
to 3800. So that labor's first excursion into politics revealed the
eagerness of the older parties to win the labor vote, and the futility
of relying on a separate organization, except for propaganda purposes.

Preparatory to their next campaign, the workingmen organized political
clubs in all the wards of Philadelphia. In 1829 they nominated
thirty-two candidates for local offices, of whom nine received the
endorsement of the Federalists and three that of the Democrats. The
workingmen fared better in this election, polling nearly 2000 votes in
the county and electing sixteen candidates. So encouraged were they by
this success that they attempted to nominate a state ticket, but the
dominant parties were too strong. In 1831 the workingmen's candidates,
who were not endorsed by the older parties, received less than 400 votes
in Philadelphia. After this year the party vanished.

New York also early had an illuminating experience in labor politics. In
1829 the workingmen of the city launched a political venture under the
immediate leadership of an agitator by the name of Thomas Skidmore.
Skidmore set forth his social panacea in a book whose elongated title
betrays his secret: "The Rights of Man to Property! Being a Proposition
to Make it Equal among the Adults of the Present Generation; and
to Provide for its Equal Transmission to Every Individual of Each
Succeeding Generation, on Arriving at the Age of Maturity." The party
manifesto began with the startling declaration that "all human society,
our own as well as every other, is constructed radically wrong." The new
party proposed to right this defect by an equal distribution of the land
and by an elaborate system of public education. Associated with Skidmore
were Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright of the "Free Enquirer," a paper
advocating all