Thomas Skidmore (reformer)

Thomas Skidmore (August 13, 1790 - August 7, 1832) was an American political reformer and philosopher; he was the leader and co-founder of the New York City Working Men's Party when it first emerged in the fall of 1829. He was also the author of an ambitious and controversial political treatise, The Rights of Man to Property!, first published in 1829.

Life

Skidmore was born in 1790 in rural Connecticut, in the town of Newtown. He became a schoolteacher at the precocious age of thirteen, before moving to Wilmington, Delaware, and then Philadelphia, to try his hand as an amateur inventor. He moved to New York City in 1819, where he worked as a machinist and become involved in labor politics. In 1829, he emerged as an important public figure at the center of the nascent New York City Working Men's Party, which fought for a ten-hour working day, the abolition of debtors' prison, universal public education, and expanded political suffrage, among other things. He was forced out of the party in December 1829, largely because other labor leaders considered his ideas too radical. He died August 7, 1832, during the cholera epidemic that swept through the city in that year.

Philosophy

Skidmore was an early critic of economic inequality in America. He argued that wealthy Americans had accumulated vast riches by exploiting the labor of the working poor, or by taking advantage of special privileges and favors from government, and that a fairer distribution of property was essential to a free and fair society. "Whoever looks at the world as it is now," he wrote in The Rights of Man to Property!, "will see it divided into two distinct classes; proprietors and non-proprietors; those who own the world, and those who own no part of it."^[1] He believed that labor—the labor of so many ordinary, hard-working people—was the source of American wealth, and that American workers had been dispossessed of lion's share of the value of their labor. He therefore argued for a new economic beginning for all Americans: all property in the United States should be divvied up and redistributed, in equal shares, to American citizens. From that point on, Americans would own their share as private property, and would relinquish it only when they died. Private inheritance would be abolished, and the wealth of the deceased would be pooled into a fund and reserved, in the future, for young people when they reached the age of 18. Upon reaching that age, all Americans would inherit a generous sum of money, understood as their birthright, to get them started in adult life.

Skidmore's ideas were radical for his time, and they were ultimately rejected by the Working Men's Party. In addition to his proposals for economic reform, he condemned slavery and he argued that all Americans—including women, Native Americans, and black Americans—should have the right to vote.

References

• Skidmore, Thomas. The Rights of Man to Property!. New York: 1829.
• Pessen, Edward. "Thomas Skidmore, Agrarian Reformer in the Early American Labor Movement," New York History, Vol. 35, No. 3 (July, 1954), pp. 280–296.
• Pessen, Edward. Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1967.
• Wilenz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the rise of the American working class, 1788-1850. London: Oxford University Press, 2004.