In September 1870, the convention of the Massachusetts Labor Reform Party unanimously adopted those words as part of its platform. The 250 delegates who gathered in Worcester, the second-most industrial city in Massachusetts, were preparing for the upcoming November 1870 election. They were searching for a way to stand up for labor’s own interests. Since labor is currently pondering how to prepare for another important election, there’s much we can learn from what happened in 1870.
Before the Civil War, Massachusetts was the center of Northern opposition to slavery, but when that bloody conflict ended, peace did not bring justice. The gigantic expansion of industry and the railroads which took place after the war allowed the “robber barons” to make huge fortunes. Obscene riches for the wealthiest capitalists meant misery for working people.
In 1865, the average skilled mechanic in Massachusetts worked 10 hours a day. A factory worker toiled 11-13 hours; bakers worked up to 17 hours a day. Child labor was common. At that time, Boston was the fourth-largest manufacturing center in the country, a hub of the shoe and textile industries. The city included thousands of impoverished immigrant workers; many had fled the Irish famine years before.
In 1869, Massachusetts workers established the Labor Reform Party. Organized just three weeks before an election, the party campaigned vigorously under the slogan “Equal Rights for All.” The party polled 10 percent of the vote statewide in 1869 and elected more than 20 people to the state legislature.
At its 1870 convention, the Massachusetts Labor Reform Party came out in favor of the 10-hour day for factory workers as a first step toward the eight-hour day. The assembly endorsed equal pay for women for equal work. It opposed moves by Massachusetts factory owners to exploit Chinese immigrant workers through the contract labor system.
In a unanimous vote on the first ballot, the convention selected as its candidate for governor one of the most controversial figures in Massachusetts. Before the Civil War, Wendell Phillips had been a leader of the fight against slavery, the most eloquent and radical of the abolitionist public speakers. After the war, Phillips threw himself into the struggle for labor rights, declaring that the cause of labor was a continuation of the fight against slavery.
As soon as the 1870 campaign got underway, the Labor Reform Party came under attack. The Republican Party issued a public statement expressing indignation that any other party would claim to represent labor. Most newspapers condemned the Labor Reform Party. Many of Phillips’ former allies in the movement against slavery deserted him. Some town postmasters refused to distribute campaign literature from the Labor Reform Party – just as they once had refused to distribute newspapers denouncing slavery.
Shortly before Election Day, the Labor Reform Party sent Phillips on a two-week speaking tour. “The Democratic Party proposes nothing,” Phillips declared. “What does the Republican Party propose? Nothing! … The Republican Party is dead. It has nothing in the world to do but rot; that is the duty it owes to society.” Phillips’ eloquence and passion forced the newspapers in Boston – and even those in New York and other states – to pay attention to the Labor Reform Party campaign in Massachusetts.
On Election Day, the Massachusetts Labor Reform Party won one third of the vote in the working-class areas surrounding Boston. Phillips was not elected, but that had never been in the cards. From the beginning, the Labor Reform Party’s purpose had been to force a discussion of the issues. In that, it succeeded.
That effort could not be finished within one election cycle or even within a few years. Wendell Phillips pointed that out in his speech to the party’s state convention in Worcester when he said:
“You don’t kill a hundred millions of corporate capital, you don’t destroy the virus of incorporate wealth, by any one election. The capitalists of Massachusetts are neither fools nor cowards; and you will have to whip them three times and bury them under a monument weightier than Bunker Hill, before they will believe they are whipped. … The first duty resting on this convention, which rises above all candidates and all platforms, is that it should keep the labor-party religiously together.”
In one of his speeches during the campaign, the Labor Reform Party’s fiery candidate for governor told his listeners that four words should be inscribed “in letters of gold” over every ballot box: “Here labor never forgives!” That was good advice in 1870, and it’s even better advice now. How many times have we seen elected officials vote for measures which attack the working class and then receive labor’s support in the very next election campaign? How many times have we been told that we have no choice but to vote for the lesser of two evils? While it only existed for a short time, the Massachusetts Labor Reform Party deserves a place in history because its 1870 campaign was one of the first efforts to break that cycle and to establish labor’s political independence. It’s up to all of us to find new ways to continue that effort under different conditions.