A History of Trade Unionism in the United States | Page 5

to unimpeachable contemporary
reports. Little did such treatment of the poor accord with their newly
acquired dignity as citizens.
Another grievance, particularly exasperating because the government
was responsible, grew in Pennsylvania out of the administration of the
compulsory militia system. Service was obligatory upon all male
citizens and non-attendance was punished by fine or imprisonment. The
rich delinquent did not mind, but the poor delinquent when unable to
pay was given a jail sentence.
Other complaints by workingmen went back to the failure of
government to protect the poorer citizen's right to "life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness." The lack of a mechanic's lien law, which would
protect his wages in the case of his employer's bankruptcy, was keenly
felt by the workingmen. A labor paper estimated in 1829 that, owing to
the lack of a lien law on buildings, not less than three or four hundred
thousand dollars in wages were annually lost.
But the most distinctive demands of the workingmen went much
further. This was an age of egalitarianism. The Western frontiersmen
demanded equality with the wealthy Eastern merchant and banker, and
found in Andrew Jackson an ideal spokesman. For a brief moment it
seemed that by equality the workingmen meant an equal division of all
property. That was the program which received temporary endorsement
at the first workingmen's meeting in New York in April 1829. "Equal
division" was advocated by a self-taught mechanic by the name of
Thomas Skidmore, who elaborated his ideas in a book bearing the
self-revealing title of "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," published in 1829. This Skidmorian program was better
known as "agrarianism," probably from the title of a book by Thomas
Paine, Agrarian Justice, as Opposed to Agrarian Law and to Agrarian
Monopoly, published in 1797 in London, which advocated equal
division by means of an inheritance tax. Its adoption by the New York
workingmen was little more than a stratagem, for their intention was to
forestall any attempts by employers to lengthen the working day to
eleven hours by raising the question of "the nature of the tenure by
which all men hold title to their property." Apparently the stratagem
worked, for the employers immediately dropped the eleven-hour issue.
But, although the workingmen quickly thereafter repudiated
agrarianism, they succeeded only too well in affixing to their
movement the mark of the beast in the eyes of their opponents and the
general public.
Except during the brief but damaging "agrarian" episode, the demand
for free public education or "Republican" education occupied the
foreground. We, who live in an age when free education at the expense
of the community is considered practically an inalienable right of every
child, find it extremely difficult to understand the vehemence of the
opposition which the demand aroused on the part of the press and the
"conservative" classes, when first brought up by the workingmen. The
explanation lies partly in the political situation, partly in the moral
character of the "intellectual" spokesmen for the workingmen, and
partly in the inborn conservatism of the tax-paying classes upon whom
the financial burden would fall. That the educational situation was
deplorable much proof is unnecessary. Pennsylvania had some public
schools, but parents had to declare themselves too poor to send their
children to a private school before they were allowed the privilege of
sending them there. In fact so much odium attached to these schools
that they were practically useless and the State became distinguished
for the number of children not attending school. As late as 1837 a labor
paper estimated that 250,000 out of 400,000 children in Pennsylvania
of school age were not in any school. The Public School Society of
New York estimated in a report for 1829 that in New York City alone
there were 24,200 children between the ages of five and fifteen years

not attending any school whatever.
To meet these conditions the workingmen outlined a comprehensive
educational program. It was not merely a literary education that the
workingmen desired. The idea of industrial education, or training for a
vocation, which is even now young in this country, was undoubtedly
first introduced by the leaders of this early labor movement. They
demanded a system of public education which would "combine a
knowledge of the practical arts with that of the useful sciences." The
idea of industrial education appears to have originated in a group of
which two "intellectuals," Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright, were
the leading spirits.
Robert Dale Owen was the eldest son of Robert Owen, the famous
English manufacturer-philanthropist, who originated the system of
socialism known as "Owenism."