Workingmen and Free Schools in the Nineteenth Century: A Comment on the Labor-Education Thesis

Abstract

THERE WAS FOR MANY YEARS a well-established generalization in American historical scholarship which assumed a direct relationship between the demands of workingmen for free public schools and the establishment of free public schools in certain eastern states in the early nineteenth century. Within the last decade the labor-education thesis has undergone some modification, so that more recent statements allow room for the role of the upper middle class in the building of free schools. (1) Evidently what had been a relatively well-accepted thesis underwent extensive revision within a decade. The focal period for the labor-education hypothesis is the Age of Jacksonian Democracy. The Jacksonian era presents a most promising point of departure, because the year 1829 marked the organization of the Workingmen's Party in New York City. Since the platform of the Workingmen's Party contained a strongly worded plank endorsing public education, the Workingmen seemed to fit ideally the needs of the advocates of the labor-education thesis. Yet there is a distinct possibility that some historians had built their case solely on the activities of a single short-lived political organization. The establishment of free public schools in one state, New York, was a long-term struggle not to be resolved until late in the nineteenth century and,