The greedheads and machine politicians in charge of the New York Democratic Party had a problem in the mid-1830s: increasing numbers of their membership were becoming aware that their state party had fallen under the control of greedheads and machine politicians. Even more distressing to the establishment Dems of the era was the realization that the ideological purists and holier-than-thou social justice warrior types were beginning to organize a resistance to a system of patronage and influence-peddling with which the Establishment was quite content.
Things looked a little different from the rebel perspective:
…with the visible fact that the sovereignty of the people over the legislature had passed into the hands of chartered institutions — all these, and other circumstances, contributed to excite hostility against chartered monopolies and the politicians who sustained them. Consequently, the Republican Party became divided within itself.The History of the Loco-Foco, or Equal Rights party, its movements, conventions, and proceedings, F. Byrdsall, 1842
Rendered into modern American English: “It was obvious that the legislature had ceased to care about the little guy and was owned by corporations; for this and other reasons, some Jacksonian Democrats* were so pissed at their political leadership and the business interests pulling their strings that the party factionalized.”*[as late as the 1830s, members of the party that would eventually become the Democrats referred to themselves as “Republicans,” harking back to the Jeffersonian tradition of “Democratic-Republicanism.” The Republican Party that we know and despise today wasn’t founded until 1854.]
The disaffected Dems’ understanding of what they were up against needs no temporal transliteration:
The despotism of the […] Party, with its aristocratic usages and organization, was so energetic and pervading in those days, that it required both moral and physical courage to openly attack an established dynasty of monopolies, with its vassal office-holders and political committees. Besides, it was held as an indisputable truth, that nothing could justify a disorganizer, and that he who attempted for any cause whatever to disturb the harmony of the party, was a monster to be shunned and hated by every true democrat.ibid. (emphasis mine – u.m.)
Fortunately, this conflict happened so long ago that there is no plausible analogy to today – so please, join me below the fold for a little diversion from the incessant fighting between the followers of Hunker Hillary and those of Barnburner Bernie.
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(author’s note: this diary draws substantially from some of my earlier work at Daily Kos and other notable, now-shuttered sites like Never In Our Names and Progressive Historians – please refer to the Historiorant at the end of the diary for a full accounting of my self-plagiarization – u.m.)
Locofocoism
I understand that the Democratic Party as it existed in 1835 bears very little resemblance, organizationally and policywise, to the Democratic Party of today, so please spare the flames on that front. It is also true that some of the issues which drove the First Locofocos no longer incite political passion – by the late 1800s, populist types were firmly on the side of paper money, and the tariff hasn’t been much of an issue since before the time of the Great War – but Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry lists a few other Locofoco beliefs that we definitely share:
Locofoco Party, in U.S. history, radical wing of the Democratic Party, organized in New York City in 1835. Made up primarily of workingmen and reformers, the Locofocos were opposed to state banks, monopolies, paper money, tariffs, and generally any financial policies that seemed to them antidemocratic and conducive to special privilege.Some aspects of Locofocoism wouldn't make sense in the modern day – the objection to paper money, for example. On the other hand, paper money wasn't issued by the federal government in the Age of the Locofocos, but rather by private banks and land speculators; breaking their backs was the objective of Andrew Jackson's admittedly stupid Specie Circular. In contrast to the populists of a few decades later, who were seeking soft currency as a means of driving down their own debt, the people who opposed paper currency in the 1830s were doing so because they saw it as the wealthy being permitted to create their own capital out of thin air.
Though at first blush it might make them look like free-trade advocates, Locofocos opposed tariffs for a similar reason: tariffs protected American industrialists from cheaper foreign competition, which allowed them to exploit American workers by paying them less while charging them more for the products that were available. Tariffs were seen as a means of the wealthy shielding themselves from the vagaries of the marketplace, like the way contemporary progressives view the profit-protection clauses of the TPP.
The First Loco-Focos
For a splinter group of a state party apparatus, the Locofocos were able to erect a pretty wide tent. This was due to two principle factors: the large number of grievances to which the Establishment had exposed itself ensured that a wide variety of folks would be willing to organize to air them, and the personality and leadership of a newspaper editor named William Leggett. The chronicler of the Locofoco movement, Recording Secretary Fitzwilliam Byrdsall, describes Leggett in terms that sound familiar to anyone who’s been following the 2016 Democratic Primary:
[Leggett was] utterly immovable by either friend or foe when he believed himself to be in the right. He was decidedly the contrary of those despicable politicians, who, in their regard for expediency, think they have a right to compromise principles. Whatever cause he espoused, he gave his whole heart to it, and expressed his views with a vehement energy that carried his readers along forgetful of length or time.His views did not center around destroying the Democrats, nor did he wish to organize some sort of hegira into minor-party irrelevancy. Leggett understood that his party was rotten from the top down – that money, privilege, and power had caused the elites to lose their connection to the party’s roots, in both the philosophical and demographic senses. Thus, his stated purpose in founding what he named the Equal Rights Party was to
“bring back the Democratic party to the principles upon which it was originally founded.”It’s important to note that the Locofocos weren’t trying to split from the party – like their modern descendants, they were hoping to resurrect a spirit that was suffering from years of depredations by the party elites and their lackeys. Byrdsall points out that
These Methodists of Democracy introduced no new doctrines, no new articles, into the true creed; they only revived those heaven-born principles which had so long been trodden under the foot of Monopoly.In other words, the Locofocos were about restoration, not revolution – but they were willing to use the tactics of populism (and a few ideas that could be considered revolutionary) to get the corrupted Democratic house back in order. They were, in fact, quite positive about the role government could play in protecting people from the abuses of the wealthy – unlike the Teabaggers, they were not anti-government nihilists – and they went on to have a profound influence on the Democratic Party for years after their brief flash across the political stage.
Strike a Match
Before the name became associated with a political splinter group, “Loco-Foco” referred to a brand of sulfur-tipped match of the “strike anywhere” variety – a new exploitation of the chemical sciences of the 1830s. There are several stories regarding the etymology of the term itself, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter if it is Spanish for “crazy lights” or a vaguely-Italian combination of “locomotion” and “fire,” since the name took on an entirely different meaning when it entered the American political lexicon.
William Leggett and his fellows attempted to make their voices heard at a party meeting held in Tammany Hall (in the pre-Tweed days) on October 29, 1835. The Establishment was trying to push the nomination of a House candidate of whom the rank-and-file did not approve, and tried first to pack the meeting with (likely paid) supporters of their chosen man. When that didn’t work, they shut off the gas lamps and plunged the hall into darkness, hoping that the lack of light would cause the dissenters to give up and go home. It was a tactic that had worked in the past, but this time, the good guys had armed themselves with Loco-Foco matches, by which light they continued the meeting. It also proved to be a name that stuck.
They might’ve called themselves the Equal Rights Party, but after the Tammany incident, the newspapers quickly dubbed them “locofocos.” Though it was probably intended to be derogatory, the rebellious Dems warmed to the name pretty quickly. In his history of the group, Byrdsall wears and assigns “Locofoco” as a badge of honor; luminaries like James Fennimore Cooper and Ralph Waldo Emerson proudly counted themselves members. Locofocos relentlessly pushed what was, for that era, a left wing agenda, even as they pushed back against the counterrevolutionary memes belched out by the mainstream press.
And what was the situation in the media in the mid-1830s? Again (and alas), remarkably similar to the one in which we find ourselves in the mid-2010s: most of the organs of public discourse were in the hands of the elites, and they brooked very little dissent from the party line. Standing up to his fellow editors was an act of singular bravery for William Leggett and those who believed in him:
With all the gallantry of ancient chivalry, [Leggett] counted not the personal cost to himself, but openly attacked monopoly of every kind, and exposed and beat down the sophistries and subterfuges of the Albany Argus, the New York Times, and the prostituted press of both parties.books.google.com/… Byrdsall, pgs 18-19.
How To Piss Off The Party Elite, 1830s-Style
It was that very “prostituted press” that the establishment called upon when Leggett finally crossed the line and needed to be told he was being drummed out of the party. Byrdsall cites an 1835 Washington Globe article (actually, he says he’s including the excerpt so that “the reader may comprehend the horrid despotism of party, under the regime of monopoly”) that chortles over the heresy that was finally going to put an end to William Leggett and his meddlesome Locofocos:
But he has at last, and we are glad of it, taken a stand which must forever separate him from the Democratic Party. His journal now openly and systematically encourages the Abolitionists." books.google.com/… ibid. [emphasis Byrdsall’s – u.m.]Clearly, he had to go. Advocating the ending of slavery? That was crazy talk, apostasy of the first order. Slaves made wealthy people a lot of money; abolishing the "peculiar institution" in the name of some human rights unicorn would be tantamount to a jobs-killing over-burdensome federal-meddling regulation - and if there’s one thing that 19th- and 21st-century monopolists have in common, it’s a shared hatred of things that might diminish the bottom line. Even whispering of abolition would have been highly disruptive to a party that still counted significant numbers of Southerners in its ranks, and whose Northeastern elites tended to play coy when questioned about where all their money came from.
Abolitionism was still quite fringey in the mid-1830s. William Lloyd Garrison, Robert Purvis, and Theodore Weld had founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in Ohio in 1833, and they started to evangelize the message at Lane Theological Seminary the following year. To have been an abolitionist in New York in 1835, then, would have meant that one was willing to side with the smallest of minorities against the most entrenched of powers in the name of what is right and true.
But like those of us who see ourselves derided for our support of a single-payer health care system with universal coverage, Byrdsall sensed that there was another, deeper-seated fear that was motivating the men who ostracized William Leggett. They feared the grassroots – the very populist zeitgeist to which Byrdsall refers in this paragraph, which follows the Globe quote above:
Thus, from head-quarters was the ban of ex-communication fulminated, and the hint was clearly given upon what plea the ban could be extended throughout the empire of the party. Accordingly, on the tenth of October, the Old Men's General Committee adopted the plea and echoed the ex-communication. But as regarded Leggett's abolitionism, could not the "oldest and wisest of the party" also respond with the Globe "we are glad of it too?" It is certain, that they had much more cause of dislike and fear of his "agrarian spirit" in regard to Banks, than to abolitionism. The first was near at hand and portentous to themselves, the latter remote and dangerous only to those at a distance. [emphasis mine – u.m.]Leggett’s response, printed in his paper shortly after the AP’s Globe’s pronouncement is a classic of the genre:
We lose no time in placing the foregoing article conspicuously before our readers, and shall willingly part from such as fall off from us in consequence of the excommunication pronounced by the Washington Globe. But they who stand by us through the evil report…shall have ample occasion to acknowledge that our democracy is of too steadfast a kind to be driven off even by the revilings of those who profess the same political creed with ourselves and act as accredited organs of our party. The principles which govern us in relation to all political questions are such as insure of permanent continuance with the real democracy of the land […]books.google.com/...W. Leggett, A Collection of the Political Writings of William Leggett, Volume 1, New York: Taylor & Dodd, 1840. 72.
The Democrats’ drumming out of William Leggett pretty much ended his movement per se, though the term had such a ring to it that
For a time, Democrats generally were referred to as “Loco-Focos.”books.google.com/… Jackman, History of the American Nation, Vol. 7, 1911. pg. 2034
The party establishment at the time had few precedents from which to draw lessons, so it’s understandable why they might’ve believed that freezing out and exiling a charismatic dissenter would solve their problems in maintaining party unity. Alas, as it’s not true now, it wasn’t true then – the expulsion of William Leggett did nothing to address the basic philosophical differences between the establishment types and their critics among the hoipoloi. One side was motivated by money and a desire for stability; the other by populist anger and an increasing concern for human rights.
Historiorant
In addition to the linked sources, much of this diary draws from earlier HfKs; apologies to those who remember some of the jokes from the first time I told them. Entire chunks of text were repurposed from:
www.dailykos.com/...History for Kossacks: American Politics, ca. 1824-1848 (August 20, 2006)www.dailykos.com/...History for Kossacks: Bleeding Kansas (September 3, 2006)
www.dailykos.com/...History for Kossacks: Martin Van Buren – Before the Presidency (January 3, 2011)
www.dailykos.com/... History for Kossacks: Martin Van Buren – The White House Years (January 9, 2011; unfortunately, I never finished the third episode in this series – might’ve saved myself some work on the Free-Soil part of this diary)
www.dailykos.com/...Hell No! I Am A Loco-Foco (April 11, 2013, written as part of the Hell No! series of diaries that opposed the Grand Bargain, Chained CPI, and cuts to Social Security during budget negotiations that year. Alas, my recommendation that the left wing of the Democratic Party revive a name from its storied past failed to ignite a movement:
I propose that here, at the dawn of what's clearly becoming a broad left-wing backlash against the powerful conservative element which has infiltrated and co-opted our Party, we adopt and promote a name for ourselves that we can live with.Le sigh.
I was a creature of DK3 – the format worked well for the long-form diaries I tended to write – which is why I’ve chosen to structure this one in a manner similar to the HfKs of old (minus the pictures). I have no idea how that’s going to look in the DK5 “lots-and-lots-of-white-space,” mobile-friendly format, but my guess is that this diary is going to appear out of step, both structurally and philosophically, with the Daily Kos of today. Fine. So be it. I didn’t assemble this diary for the flood of new people who came to the Great Orange Satan after Markos declared his site for Hillary; I wrote it for the people who remember the days when we called these things “diaries,” back when ErinFF wanted his fucking account deleted and the best you could hope for from Nyberg was a 3.
Back in those days, the site itself was infused with a bit of Locofocoism – there was always a willingness to crash the gates of the elite, even within our own party. That’s gone, I guess: seems we’ve been instructed that we’re all Hunkerin’ for Hillary now, on account of the AP conducting a telephone survey of superdelegates and an accompanying media blitz of epic proportions. There was a time when Kossacks above, on, and below the rec list would’ve been pretty lit up (so to speak) over such an occurrence; nowadays, it seems like it’s Kossacks shutting off the lights.
Anybody got a match?
