Wendell Phillips: “The Foundation of the Labor Movement”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

After the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 that mandated equal suffrage for black men, Phillips disbanded the American Anti-Slavery Society, only to embrace the rapidly developing labor movement. In that year he ran unsuccessfully for governor of Massachusetts as the Workingman's Party candidate, and the following year found him at that party's state convention, where he helped draft that party's platform before delivering this speech.

For Phillips, this transition from abolitionism to labor reform seemed logical and necessary. His long-beloved Massachusetts increasingly featured drab factory towns and demoralized wage workers, not the democratic society of educated, independent laborers he had always celebrated. At the same time, labor violence had begun erupting in several northern states and also in England and France. “Wage slavery” for whites now seemed to Phillips to constitute democracy's most threatening source of oppression and social instability. To combat it, Phillips demanded that laborers be placed on a level of parity with capitalists by securing an eight-hour workday, equal pay for workers of both genders, and laws requiring cooperative investments by workers in the incorporation of all new companies. Hardly a Marxist, Phillips clearly sought to harmonize the interests of labor and capital, not to seek the overthrow of the latter by the former.

The resolutions introducing Phillips's speech make clear how compelling the analogy seemed to be between the now-abolished system of chattel slavery in the South and the emerging system of wage slavery. Warnings that the nation was being captured by an “aristocracy of capital” clearly echoed Phillips's earlier warnings about the dangers posed by all-powerful slaveholders. At the same time, the specific remedies proposed for labor's benefit illustrate how fundamentally different abolitionism and labor reform actually were and how drastically Phillips's role had changed when moving from one to the other. Instead of demanding revolutionary measures such as northern disunion, Phillips now advocated piecemeal legislative actions. Rather than seeking the wholesale transformation of public opinion while condemning all forms of politics, Phillips now courted the voters.

The speech itself, however, also demonstrates that deep continuities united Phillips's abolitionist past with his advocacy of labor's cause. First, he clearly regarded the latter cause as arising as the logical consequence of the former. Once the masses had “claimed emancipation from actual chains” and had successfully “claimed the ballot,” equal labor rights became, in his view, the “last movement” required for securing American democracy. Further continuities can be identified in Phillips's defense of the labor movement, even in its most violent forms, as a means for securing social order. Clearly echoing his strenuous defenses of armed abolitionist resisters such as Elijah Lovejoy and John Brown, Phillips praised the revolutionaries of France's First International for attempting to seize Paris and bring revolution through force of arms. To him, as always, such violence represented not lawless anarchy, but instead patriotic resistance to corrupt disorder spawned by tyrants—necessary preludes to peaceful democracy ruled by an enlightened public through the ballot box.