We find it at work at first in the decade of the thirties at the very
beginning of the labor movement. It then took the form of a demand for a
free public school system. These workingmen in Philadelphia and New York
discovered that in the place of the social democracy of the
Declaration, America had developed into an "aristocracy." They thought
that the root of it all lay in "inequitable" legislation which fostered
"monopoly," hence the remedy lay in democratic legislation. But they
further realized that a political and social democracy must be based on
an educated and intelligent working class. No measure, therefore, could
be more than a palliative until they got a "Republican" system of
education. The workingmen's parties of 1828-1831 failed as parties, but
humanitarians like Horace Mann took up the struggle for free public
education and carried it to success.
If in the thirties the labor program was to restore a social and
political democracy by means of the public school, in the forties the
program centered on economic democracy, on equality of economic
opportunity. This took the form of a demand of a grant of public land
free of charge to everyone willing to brave the rigors of pioneer life.
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