When we celebrate the Declaration of Independence, it’s important to Thomas Jefferson himself believed that each new generation needed to make the American creed its own. And everyone from slaves to women to working people did just that as we see in Frederick Douglass’ great speech “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?,” the early feminist manifesto “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, Seneca Falls,” and the much lesser known “Working Men’s Declaration of Independence.”
This last is centrally important to because while Americans are largely aware that the battle for inclusion involved long and heroic abolition, civil rights and women’s movements, struggles around issues of class have all too frequently been relinquished to the dustbin of history.
What the early Working Men’s Party history shows is class rebellion is as American as apple pie and was seen as a fulfillment of the Jeffersonian project.
In 1829, the Working Men’s Party issued its own Declaration, which mimicked the Declaration of Independence but then went on to note that working people needed their own party because “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were things that “the rich enjoy exclusively.”
Written by George H. Evans and published in the Working Man’s Advocate in New York and the Mechanics Free Press of Philadelphia, the Declaration begins by extensively citing Jefferson before pivoting to workers’ issues:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights against the undue influence of other classes of society, prudence, as well as the claims of self-defense, dictates the necessity of the organization of a party, who shall, by their representatives, prevent dangerous combinations to subvert these indefeasible and fundamental privileges. All experience hath shown, that mankind in general, and we as a class in particular, are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves, by an opposition which the pride and self-interest of unprincipled political aspirants, with more unprincipled zeal or religious bigotry, will willfully misrepresent.”
The Working Men’s list of grievances included a tax system “most oppressively on one of society and being scarcely felt by the other” as well as “unequal and oppressive” laws, and “private incorporations” that functioned by “favoring one class of society to the expense of the other, who have no equal participation.”
From there, they went on to critique religious societies, the credit system and the political structure that favored the rich. This class-based reinterpretation of Jefferson was further explored by Working Men’s Party fellow traveler Thomas Skidmore who in “The Rights of Man to Property” explains why it was necessary to refine the Jeffersonian creed:
“Whoever looks over the face of the world, and surveys the population of all countries; our own, as well as any and every other; will see it divided into rich and poor; into the hundred who have everything, and the million who have nothing. If then, Mr. Jefferson, had made use of the word property, instead of ‘the pursuit of happiness,’ I should have agreed with him. … In the pursuit of happiness, is property of no consequence? Can anyone be as happy without property of any kind, as with it? Is even liberty and life to be preserved without it? … If, then, even the rights of liberty and life, are so insecure and precarious, without property — how very essential to their preservation is it, that ‘the pursuit of happiness’ — should be so construed, as to afford title to that, without which, the rights of life and liberty are but an empty name?”
Today, many would argue that after a century of progress toward including working people more fully into the mainstream of American democracy, we are now quickly moving in the wrong direction. Truly, unless we do something profound to reverse the growing chasm between the rich and the rest of us, the ideal of Jeffersonian democracy will soon be nothing more than the “empty name” Skidmore accused it of being.
So this Fourth of July, make a toast to Thomas Skidmore, the Working Men’s Party, and the rebellious spirit of those American patriots of old who rejected the notion that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (and property) should be things that “the rich enjoy exclusively.”
Miller is a local author, professor at San Diego City College and vice president for the American Federation of Teachers, Local 1931. He lives in Golden Hill.
