Fellow Worker Sam Dolgoff (1902-1990)

Anatole Dolgoff, Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016.

Andrew Cornell, "A History of Vanguard". libcom.org.


But we have a glowing dream
Of how fair the world will seem
When each man can live his life secure and free;
When the earth is owned by labor
and there's joy and peace for all
In the Commonwealth of Toil that is to be.

the chorus of Ralph Chaplin's song "Commonwealth of Toil", 1923

Sam Dolgoff was an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) lifer. He discovered anarchism after being expelled from the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL, aka Yipsels) as a teen. He joined the IWW in 1922 and was an active member until his death in 1990. His son Anatole Durruti Dolgoff has written a loving portrait of Sam and the small vibrant anarchist milieu in the US during the 20th century, which also provided my political education. The title Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff is taken from Paul Berman's obituary for Sam in the Village Voice on November 13, 1990. He quotes Sam: "You always need a left. And within the left, you need a left. And within the left of the left, you need a left. And in that left, you need a left. And that left is me!" Sam was a little tipsy, but that was Sam Dolgoff. Sam remained faithful to the classic anarcho-syndicalist principles of IWW and the IWA (International Worker Association, the anarcho-syndicalist international) all his life despite the changing fashions on the left.

Sam Dolgoff was born in the shtetl of Ostrovno in present-day Belarus in 1902. His family immigrated to NYC in 1905, where he lived in the Bronx and the Manhattan Lower East Side most his life. Sam was apprenticed to a house painter at age 11, a profession he remained in his entire life ("a doctor of smearology" in Sam's words). He hated school, and in those days of child labor, had to support his family. The IWW and anarchist movement became his university, like so many working-class intellectuals on the left. He could have become professional organizer or union bureaucrat for District 9 of the Painter's Union, but instead chose to be a common worker and IWW evangelist. He would not become a boss, nor reconcile himself with AFL business unionism. Anatole Dolgoff reports that the IWW reached a maximum membership of 100,000 in 1923; by 1930 its numbers had declined to 10,000. Its last stronghold was the Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union (MTW-IWW) which represented seamen throughout the Americas 1913-1950.

Sam contributed to an unending string of anarchist publications and organizations over his lifetime: the Road to Freedom journal in NYC and the Chicago Free Society Group in the 1920s; the Vanguard group and journal in NYC in the 1930s; the Spanish Revolution monthly 1936-38; the Libertarian League and its journal Views and Comments in the 1950s; the Libertarian Book Club 1946-present; and the Libertarian Labor Review later renamed Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 1986-present.

As an independent scholar, after a long day of physical labor, he produced four well regarded books: Bakunin on Anarchy (1971), The Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936-1939 (1974) ; The Cuban Revolution: A Critical Perspective (1974); and Fragments: A Memoir (1986). His Cuba book criticizes Castro's repression of Cuban anarchists and dissidents, displeasing the New Left and some of his old comrades, like Dave Dellinger and David Wieck. His Spain book documents the grassroots social revolution during the Spanish Civil War. It also recounts the role of Russian GPU agents in murdering POUM leader Andres Nin, anti-Stalinist Marxists, and anarchist militants. These were Sam's comrades and friends, and he wanted the facts known. Consequently he was not romantic about the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, which was largely a Communist Party outfit. This may disturb some leftish readers.

I met Sam and his wife Esther Dolgoff in the 1970s. Our group Philadelphia Solidarity, and later Wooden Shoe Bookstore, was friendly with the NYC IWW, which included Sam and Esther, the Living Theatre troupe, and journalist Mel Most who became a good friend. We hosted a performance of the Living Theatre at the Christian Association on Penn campus in the early 1970s. 

In 1980 Esther translated Joseph J. Cohen's The Jewish Anarchist Movement in the United States: A Historical Review and Personal Reminiscence (Philadelphia: Radical Library, 1945) from Yiddish. Cohen lived in Philadelphia and was the editor of the anarchist newspaper Freie Arbeiter Stimme. The book included lots of Philadelphia radical history. We made an unsuccessful effort to publish her translation, which was a great disappointment to Esther. We were too disorganized and too broke. I sent her manuscript to the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan a few years ago. We did reprint a couple chapters which I'm trying to recover. 

I always enjoyed visiting them at their cozy coop apartment on East Broadway overlooking the Williamsburg Bridge on the East River. They were always entertaining young radicals, their habit of a lifetime.

As an older person myself now, I appreciated Anatole's human account of Sam and Esther's last years. It is a dilemma we all face. Anatole and his friends organized an around-the-clock cadre to care for his parents in their last few years. When Esther died, Sam would not move, and Anatole did not want to disrupt Sam's life unnecessarily.  At this moment, an old friend of the Dolgoff's and long-time activist with the Catholic Worker, Roger O'Neill, volunteered to move in and care for Sam. There is something poetic about this. Sam was an old bohemian friend of Dorothy Day, often spoke at the Friday Night Meetings at the Catholic Worker House, and occasionally sparred with her about the authoritarian, hierarchical Catholic Church. So, the last year of his life, he was cared for by a Catholic anarchist from the Catholic Worker, who didn't care that Sam was a principled atheist. This was the informal anarchist community that surrounded Sam and Esther all their lives. The IWW and the Catholic Worker still exist; that anarchist community probably does not.

Thank you Anotole Dolgoff for this beautiful homage to your parents. Yours for OBU (One Big Union), Frank Gerould.

The Two Gilded Ages in America

 Fraser, Steve, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015.

Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner named the post-Civil War era of waste and excess “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873). The term derives from Shakespeare's King John: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily… is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” It was Mark Twain's first best seller, but rarely read today. It's probably time for a revival.

Now we live in the second Gilded Age in America. Labor historian Steve Fraser compares the two gilded ages, the first 1865-1932 and the second 1970 to the present, in his recent The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. The interlude in between saw FDR's New Deal and the golden age of capitalism post-WWII with the growth of labor unions and a modest welfare state (Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, Keynesian economics). Evidently Thomas Piketty charts the same developments in his opus Capital in the Twenty-First Century.  Both gilded ages saw growing wealth and income inequality. Steve Fraser argues the marked difference between the two periods- the first engendered intense class warfare, socialist parties, and rising living standards, whereas in our present gilded age, the working class has acquiesced to austerity and insecurity. Most young people do not expect to do as well as their parents. Fraser paints a gloomy picture.

Steve Fraser

Fraser knows how to write. He was an editor at Basic Books and other publishing houses, and guest scholar at a bunch of universities. He studied labor history at Rutgers with my LeftBook comrade Murray Sklar in the mid 1970s. He also has a colorful Philadelphia connection. As a young student  revolutionary, he was sent to Temple University to found a chapter of Progressive Labor Party in Fall 1967. He subsequently broke with, or was expelled from PLP, for joining Lyndon LaRouche's (aka Lyn Marcus) faction then called the SDS Labor Committee, later known as the National Caucus of Labor Committees, and became its local leader in Philadelphia. Fraser had his moment in the spotlight in those turbulent years when Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo raided his apartment in April 1969, and charged him and his roommate with a bomb plot. Fraser and co-defendant Richard Borgmann were ably defended by Philadelphia legal luminaries Bernard Segal and David Rudovsky. Charges were dropped in 1971, the same year Rizzo was elected Mayor of Philadelphia. Fraser then left the Labor Committee in a split in 1971, which exonerates him from the LaRouche craziness that followed. Details of this episode can be found in How it all Began: The Origins and History of the National Caucus of Labor Committees in New York and Philadelphia (1966-1971), by Hylozoic Hedgehog, the nom de guerre of a former NCLC member on the LaRouche Planet website. These years surely gave Fraser a thorough Marxist education, for better or worse.

Fraser's account of the first gilded age highlights the working class resistance to waged labor, or “wage slavery” according to the nascent socialist movement. He observes that 80% of Americans were self-employed in 1820. By 1940, the self-employed constituted only 20% of workers. The disappearance of the artisan tradition and its replacement with waged labor during the long 19th century was tumultuous. Before the Civil War Harriet Beecher Stowe saw the emancipation of the slaves and the working classes as one: “the war for the rights of the working classes of mankind as against the usurpations of privileged aristocracies.” Workers fought over wages, the length of the workday, and union representation. Between 1886 and 1893 state governments would call out the National Guard more than 100 times to deal with labor turmoil. Fraser surmises the bloody labor confrontations at Homestead, Ludlow, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, et al threatened a second Civil War. It generated socialist politics and unions, and eventually social concessions from the bosses and the state during the Progressive Era pre-WW1 and the New Deal.

Today we live in the new gilded age, with equally extreme economic inequality. Fraser recounts the deindustrialization of US economy, the eclipse of the labor movement, growth of casual sweatshop labor, and the erosion of pensions and the social safety net since 1970. He says, “National politics over the last half century has polarized between efforts to defend and restore the New Deal order, and relentless attempts to repeal and replace it with something even older.” Whereas in the first gilded age capitalism was ascendant, now it is decaying. Capitalist assets are sold off, mortgaged, or moved to low wage countries. Marxist economist Paul Mattick Jr. sees in the years following the golden age of capitalism (1945-1970), the classic Marxian case of a declining rate of profit. The usual Keynesian nostrums for managing the economy and securing full employment have not worked. Wages and benefits have been cut steadily hollowing out the middle class. Rich conservatives have promoted laissez-faire economics, revanchist patriotism, religious fundamentalism, and nativism as the magic solution to every problem. In Tea Party patron saint Ayn Rand's immortal words, “Booty is truth.” Money rules.

Steve Fraser doesn't have any remedies to offer us. He is nostalgic about the class conscious workers in the 19th century America, the pre-WWI Socialist Party, and victories during the New Deal. Perhaps the  Fortress Walmart associates, retail and fast-food workers, adjunct university teachers, and immigrants will revolt against austerity and decline. Perhaps something unexpected will occur, like the civil rights revolution in the 50s and 60s, the LGBT and woman's movement, the CIO in the 30s, something unforeseen. Bernie Sanders unexpected success running as a socialist in the Democratic primaries could become such a movement. 

But the left also needs self-examination. Communism in the former Soviet Union and Social Democracy in Europe do not offer attractive models for socialism here. The left needs fresh creative thinking that may diverge from the master thinkers of the 19th century. We have a rich tradition, but shouldn't be captivated by it. We need to offer practical solutions for the world we live in today. For example, Finland is launching an experiment in guaranteed basic income, and eliminating much welfare state bureaucracy. This is not socialism, but merits attention. While we're waiting for the glorious non-violent social revolution, waiting for the Messiah, we could indulge in speculative thinking and experiments in democratic socialism, or libertarian communism if you like. Fraser notes the fervor of 19th century radicals produced innumerable utopian colonies and cooperatives, and a best selling utopian literature that converted many to labor's cause. Laurence Gronlund Cooperative Commonwealth, Edward Bellamy Looking Backward, and Henry George Progress and Poverty reached a mass audience in the 1890s. Socialist doctrine was not yet set in stone. There were many socialist schools of thought. We need to recover that sentiment.

Despite Steve Fraser's often gloomy history, as socialists we believe there is an alternative to capitalism. In Sidney Hillman's words in 1918, “[we] can hear the footsteps of the Deliverer… Labor will rule and the World will be free.” We will not be dismayed.

Urban Workers in Philadelphia 1815-1828

Egnal, Freda. The Urban Worker in Philadelphia: 1815-1828. Senior Thesis in American History, 1961. Madison: University of Wisconsin.

Freda Egnal

My comrade Freda Egnal from our monthly Philadelphia LeftBook discussion group kindly shared her unpublished Senior Thesis with me, which I enjoyed, and will recount. Her advisor/professor was a young historian Leon F. Litwack, who later won the Pulitzer Prize in History and National Book Award for Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery in 1979. His specialty is the history of African-Americans since slavery. Freda did remarkable detective work at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the University of Wisconsin unearthing the early days of organized labor in Philadelphia. Her thesis was written 20 years before Phillip Foner, William Heighton: Pioneer Labor Leader of Jacksonian Philadelphia, With Selections from Heighton's Writings, and Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850 addressed the same subject at length. “Philadelphia has a strong claim to be the center of the early labor movement,” she says.

Philadelphia has always been regarded as a center for small manufacturing (now sadly much diminished), and it began during this period. The first American factory is generally considered Lowell's textile mill in Waltham MA in 1817. The period between 1815 and 1830 marked the introduction of machinery and the factory system in Philadelphia. Prior to mills and factories, manufacture was done in homes and small workshops. Sometimes the apprentice even lived in the master's home. Goods were made to order, or bespoke goods. Often half the wages were paid in groceries or credits. Ambitious apprentices would establish their own workshops, or acquire land and become freeholders.

Capitalism was being born. Manufacturers began to produce for market, on speculation. An expanded market was made possible by the revolution in transportation. New roads and canals suddenly made shipping possible and affordable. The state was investing in infrastructure big time. Merchant-capitalists borrowed money, and introduced mass production, creating a division of labor, and the devaluation of artisan labor. Urban workers were a mix of skilled and unskilled: artisans in the building trades and crafts; manual laborers building roads or canals, hauling; service workers, servants, shopkeepers; and, of course, child labor. Freda reports on wages and the cost of living during this period. She cites labor historian John R. Commons, “the American worker received higher wages than his counterpart in Europe and England, yet worked harder and longer hours.” Twelve hours a day, six days a week constituted the norm in 1820. In summer daylight hours often extended the workday to 15 hours.

There were early efforts at labor organizing in Philadelphia. The first recorded strike, or turn-out, was in 1786 by the printers for a minimum six dollars a week wage.  Carpenters and cordwainers (shoemakers) also conducted early organizing. The Philadelphia Typographical Union organized in 1802 may be the first identifiable trade union. They not only fought for better wages and working conditions, but also established benevolent features for sickness and funeral expenses, and a strike fund. It seems printers have always been labor aristocrats. Perhaps they were better educated, or more skilled, and felt they could make bolder demands on business owners. Unions were not legally protected, of course. They are hardly protected today, 200 years hence. Sometimes workers won their demands; other times they were prosecuted under English common law for conspiring to raise their wages.

In 1819 the US experienced it first depression creating widespread unemployment. This put an end to the early trade societies and trade unions. The labor movement had to recreate itself in the 1820s as the economy recovered. Workers at the Navy Yard, millwrights, and machine workers began to agitate for the ten hour day. The growing industrial activity ultimately led to the formation of the first trade union which transcended craft lines, the Mechanics Union of Trade Associations in fall 1827. Many historians mark this as the beginning of the labor movement in the US. Fifteen unions in Philadelphia, learning from their earlier failures, joined together. They declared, “We the Journeymen Mechanics of the City and County of Philadelphia, conscious that our condition in society is lower than justice demands it should be, and feeling our inability, individually, to ward off from ourselves and families those numerous evils which result from an unequal and excessive accumulation of wealth and power into the hands of a few, are desirous of forming an Association, which shall avert as much as possible those evils which poverty and incessant toil have already inflicted and which threaten ultimately to overwhelm and destroy us.” Sounds very contemporary. The language was influenced by William Heighton and Ricardian socialist ideas, recounted in Phillip Foner's later book William Heighton: Pioneer Labor in Jacksonian Philadelphia. The Mechanics Union published its own newspaper, organized a workingman's library, and ran its own independent candidates for elected office in 1828, which was unsuccessful. This was the high watermark for class consciousness in the early 19th century Philadelphia. Unions would again recede in the 1830s.

Philadelphia's Radical Heritage 1827

This is a talk I gave at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration in Philadelphia, when I was a member. Restoration was originally a Universalist Church founded in 1820 in Philadelphia.

Good morning. My name is Frank Gerould. I have been a member of this congregation since 1990, which qualifies me as one of the old heads. This morning we are going to do a little history of our radical forbears in Universalism in early 19^th century Philadelphia.

In April, I went on my annual pilgrimage to the Socialist Scholars Conference, now called the Left Forum, at Cooper Union in NYC with some of my socialist comrades, and found this book William Heighton: Pioneer Labor Leader of Jacksonian Philadelphia by Philip Foner in the bookstalls in the basement there. Foner was the dean of American labor history, who taught at Lincoln University and Rutgers-Camden until his death in 1994. The appendix has selections of William Heighton’s writings and speeches, including, remarkably, an address delivered to the Universalist Church in Callowhill Street on Wednesday evening, November 21, 1827. Heighton was a labor journalist and organizer of the first central labor body in American History, and a Universalist.

According to Bruce Laurie in Working People of Philadelphia 1800-1850, there were four Universalist congregations in Philadelphia in 1830: our congregation on Lombard Street, one in Northern Liberties, one in Kensington, and a fourth not identified. So this address happened at the Northern Liberties branch of the Universalists.

To begin, Sandy Fulton will talk about the early history of Universalism, then Paul Mack will read some excerpts form Heighton’s address to the “Mechanics and Working Classes” at the Universalist Church. When you are listening to Paul, notice the level of language delivered to a 19^th century audience from an artisan laborer with little formal education. The complete address is 20 pages, and must have taken two hours to deliver. Then I will talk about William Heighton and the social movement of the times. Then comments and questions as time permits.

William Heighton: Pioneer Labor Leader of Jacksonian Philadelphia

From 1818 to 1820, depression visited upon America. In 1820, 20,000 in a population of 100,000 were unemployed in Philadelphia. In addition, even those who managed to stay employed took severe wage cuts. Most of the few Philadelphia unions died in the mid-1820s. Shoes, clothing, furniture, carriages, bricks, rope, cigars, brushes, barrels, candy, and hats were produced in large but not mechanized factories. In Manayunk, the textile industry became fully established with water-powered spinning and weaving machines. In Kensington and Moyanmensing textile factories also emerged, although much of the work continued to be performed by outworkers.

Even when the economy improved, workingmen felt an increasing sense of injustice- long hours, overbearing employers, and constant fear of unemployment. For a growing number of workers, living conditions were declining at an alarming rate. Forced to live in crowded dwellings, in tenements and basement hovels, they were without the benefits of fresh air, sunlight or rudimentary sanitary facilities. The stagnant pools of sewage in the streets provided a natural home for the scourge of cholera, which swept the city leaving hundreds dead who could not escape to the countryside.

So this is what moved William Heighton to advocate for the cause of labor in Jacksonian Philadelphia. He noted there were “but few indeed who produce wealth that ever enjoy it; while those who produce nothing, enjoy it with all its attendant blessings and comforts.” William Heighton was a 28-year old cordwainer in 1827 (a leatherworker who made things of cordovan, esp. shoes) who played an important role in the creation and shaping of the early American labor movement. Heighton was born in Northampshire, England in 1800, and came to America as a young man. He went to work in the shoemakers’ trade in Southwark in present day South Philadelphia. He had little formal education, but had some biblical training and was familiar with a number of economic works of the time. Like many artisans and mechanics, Heighton was influenced by the ideas of the classical British economist David Ricardo. Ricardo argued that only labor adds value to natural resources, and the price of every product is determined by the work put into it. This is called the labor theory of value- a theory that prevailed among classical economists thought the mid 19^th century- most notably Marx. Ricardo, like Adam Smith, also believed in laissez-faire, free trade and free markets.

The labor theory of value had enormous influence in working class circles during the Jacksonian era, and some economic thinkers known as the Ricardian Socialists. They opposed the unequal distribution of wealth under capitalism, which resulted in the accumulation of large amounts of capital in the hands of the few. They were the intellectual precursors to Marxian socialism and social democracy which would come later in the 19^th century. Other influences on Heighton were John Gray’s A Lecture on Human Happiness, which Heighton reprinted in his labor newspaper, the Mechanics’ Free Press, and Robert Owen, the British industrialist and utopian socialist. Owen is considered the father of the cooperative movement, who pioneered reforms of the factory system in Europe. He proposed intentional cooperative communities with public kitchens, universal childcare and education for youth, and humane workplaces. He spoke before joint Houses of Congress in 1824, and in Philadelphia at the Franklin Institute in June 1827. He founded an experimental community in New Harmony, Indiana in 1825, which failed after two years.

Much to Heighton’s credit, he thought the solution to poverty was through a workingman’s movement in their own community, especially through the intelligent use of the vote (rather than retreating to some remote frontier). In the address Paul read, Heighton advocates nominating their own candidates who will serve the interests of working people. He led the creation of a powerful central association of Philadelphia journeymen’s societies to collect and administer strike funds, direct strikes, and organize new unions. The Mechanics Union of Trade Associations was officially established in January, 1828. The preamble, written by Heighton, read like the Declaration of Independence:

“We, the Journeymen Mechanics of the City and County of Philadelphia, conscious that our condition in society is lower than justice demands it should be, and feeling our inability, individually, to ward off from ourselves and families those numerous evils which result from an unequal and very excessive accumulation of wealth and power into the hands of a few, are desirous of forming an Association, which shall avert as much as possible those evils which poverty and increasing toil have already inflicted, and which threaten ultimately to overwhelm and destroy us.”

At its height, the Mechanics Union of Trade Associations had 18 member unions in 1830, representing 2000 dues paying members. It founded six new trade societies and beneficial societies. Trades included tobacconists, ladies cordainers, printers and compositors, blacksmiths and whitesmiths (a worker in whitemetals, esp. tinsmith), leather workers, saddlers and harness makers. The finance committee of the MUTA collected ten cents monthly dues from the membership to build a strike fund, which was a new development

in the labor market of Philadelphia. Workers could now endure a strike with strike benefits.

Another venture for Heighton was a workingman’s library and newspaper, which he mentions in his address. In September 1827, the Mechanics Library Company was opened in North Alley. It became a clearinghouse of ideas, forum for discussions, and a meetinghouse for all regardless of trade. A regular feature was a Wednesday evening debate designed to encourage the growth of the workingman’s movement. Membership was $1.00. Over 100 volumes and many periodicals could be read in its single room during the long hours the library was open.



Chestnut & Bank St., Philadelphia

The Library also edited and published the Mechanics’ Free Press, the first newspaper in America for workers and edited entirely by workingmen. The four-page, five-column weekly carried on the masthead “A Journal of Practical and Useful Knowledge” edited and published by a committee of the Mechanics Library Company of Philadelphia. It lasted from 1828 to 1835, and had average weekly circulation of 1500-2000, when the major Philadelphia paper claimed on 4000. I would like to read the old issues. Philip Foner reports that the paper reprinted some articles from the abolitionist press, and treatises like Gray’s Lecture on Human Happiness, poetry from its working class readers, as well as issues on educational and labor reforms.

The paper also championed the Philadelphia Workingman’s Party to run its own candidates for public office. The program for the party became a platform for labor parties throughout the US during the Jacksonian era: a call for a free, tax supported school system to replace the hated “pauper schools”; the abolition of imprisonment for debt; abolition of all licensed monopolies (meaning banks especially); abolition of the prevailing compulsory militia system; no regulation of religion; and direct election of officer by a vote of the people. The platform also addressed economic issues, protested unsanitary and overcrowded housing, the right to form trade unions, and proposed a ten-hour work day. It even demanded “sufficient hydrant water pressure for the accommodation of the poor.” Public education for the children of the poor as well as the rich was a key demand. At this time, Pennsylvania provided schools for the poor if a family could not afford tuition. In practice, these schools were woefully under funded, and there was a stigma attached to attending them. The Philadelphia workingmen demanded education for their children not as “a grace and bounty for charity, but as a matter of right and duty.”

The Workingman’s Party ran 39 candidates for state and national office in 1828, receiving less than 10% of Jackson’s Democratic Party vote, which is the story of third parties in America. In 1829 the Party ran candidates dually endorsed with the Democratic Party in Philadelphia, and became power brokers in many city districts. Sixteen Workingmen candidates were elected. Of course, this led to the eventual absorption of the Workingman’s Party and its issues into the Democratic Party. 1831 was the last campaign for the first labor party in the world.

Foner reports that Heighton left Philadelphia in 1830 after the collapse of the Philadelphia Workingman’s Party. I think he burned out. He achieved a secure (if neglected) place in the history of the American labor movement. He initiated the Mechanics Union of Trade Associations. He founded the first labor paper, the Mechanics Free Press, and the first labor party, the Philadelphia Workingman’s Party. He wrote and distributed many popular pamphlets advancing the cause of social and economic equality.

In June 1833, the Pennsylvania legislature abolished imprisonment for debt, and in 1834 it passed laws establishing comprehensive free public schools and taxes to support them. Labor won a victory.

Let me finish with some tidbits I found about Universalism in Philadelphia in Bruce Laurie’s Working People of Philadelphia 1800-1850. The minister of our congregation from 1818 to 1825 was a prominent freethinker named Abner Kneeland. He was friend and champion of Robert Owen, the British utopian socialist, and also Frances Wright, a famous feminist and abolitionist from Scotland. He introduced Owen at his Franklin Institute engagement in 1827, and shared the stage with Frances Wright on many occasions in Philadelphia. Among her controversial activities was founding an interracial community called the Nashoba Commune in a suburb of Memphis in 1825, and conducting 30 freed slaves to Haiti in 1830. Abner Kneeland was automatically disfellowshipped by the New England Universalist General Convention in 1830 when he renounced Christianity.

Bruce Laurie recounts in a chapter called “Radicals: Thomas Paine’s Progeny”, that Universalism and Free Thought were the most important rationalist currents, products of the liberal humanism of the Enlightenment. Taken together, there were about 2000 Universalists and Free Thinkers (or as they preferred, Free Enquirers) on the rolls of the churches and societies in 1830 in Philadelphia, about 4/5 of which were Universalists. He also tells this story about the cholera epidemic of 1832 that took a heavy toll in Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods. Thousands crowded into churches in search of solace and reassurance. Leading Protestant clergy called a meeting to consider remedial action, attracting 250 clergy of various sects. A resolution was passed with only two dissenters calling for a day of fasting and prayer “as means of averting the scourge and inducing the Lord to be gracious.” The lone dissenters, Zelotes Fuller and Abel Thomas, two Universalist ministers, argued large prayer meetings risked spreading the epidemic, and fasting would reduce one’s resistance. They were denounced as infidels.

Broadside, Philadelphia 1829

So we are the progeny of Thomas Paine and infidels.

Foner, Philip S. William Heighton: Pioneer Labor Leader of Jacksonian Philadelphia, With Selections from Heighton's Writings. New York: International Publishers, 1991.

Laurie, Bruce. Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.