The Working Men's Parties (whose members were known as "the Workies") were the first labor-oriented political organizations in the United States. The first Working Men's Party was founded in Philadelphia in 1828. Similar parties were also established in New York City and Boston. Additionally, party member George Henry Evans established the Working Man’s Advocate, the first labor newspaper, in 1829.
The political platforms of the Working Men's Parties included such planks as state-supported public education, universal male suffrage, protection from debtor imprisonment and compulsory service in the militia, and shorter working hours. The Workingmen's Party attacked both the Whigs and the Democrats for their lack of interest in labor, and they achieved sizable votes in municipal elections.
Despite some local electoral successes, the Workingmen's Parties effectively died out in the early 1830s. Likely causes for this decline and disappearance include lack of experience with political organization, factional disputes over doctrine and leadership, and incursions by the increasingly pro-labor Democratic Party.
Famous quotes containing the words working, men and/or party:
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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