Changing Images of American Democracy and the Scottish Labour Movement

Abstract

Mid-Victorian Scotland was a remarkably homogeneous society, and the milieu, in which the labour movement developed, had very long traditions of social repression and economic backwardness. A system of democracy inherited from the Calvinist revolution of 1559, social mobility and the comparatively superior educational opportunities of working class children were, in the considered opinion of a large number of journalists, clergymen and members of Parliament, the dominant characteristics of Scottish democracy. In practice, the educational opportunities and social mobility open to the working classes were severely circumscribed by the conditions industrial capitalism had engendered; and in the mid-1860s the labour movement, though influenced by the traditions – and the mythology – of Scottish democracy, looked to America for their model of a democratic society.