WHO WERE THE LOCO FOCOS AND WHEN WILL THEY RISE AGAIN?

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Dec. 23, 2024

In New York City 1835, a working-class faction within the predecessor of today's Democratic party attempted to seize control of the party and reshape its agenda. 189 years later, the Loco Focos are all but forgotten. 

In the wake of Democrat's defeat in the 2024 national elections and total loss of power in Washington, D.C., it's a good time to remember them because they won. For seven years, from 1837 to 1844, they “dominated national Democratic Party doctrine." 

When the fight was over, the rebels celebrated while the losers vanished into the Manhattan night. Suddenly the packed, cavernous room was darker than the street outside. The vanquished shut-off the gas that powered the lights before they left.

"Let there be light!," someone yelled, and a single, solitary match flared to life in the dense crowd. Then another, and another.

"A host of fire-fly lights are in the room—loco-foco matches are ignited, candles are lit," one of the rebels, Fitzwilliam Byrdsall, wrote in his first-hand account. "It is a glorious illumination!"

Byrdsall and his comrades were a rebel faction of the Democratic-Republican party, the predecessor of today's Democratic party. They'd just defeated party leadership, inside their New York headquarters, Tammany Hall. 

To the rebels, their party had lost its way. It "had become a monopoly aristocratic party," Byrdsall wrote. It was time "to bring back the Democratic party to the principles upon which it was originally founded."

The rebels put their plan into action on Oct. 29. After physically ejecting the party elite from Tammany Hall, the rebels adopted their own ticket of candidates for the upcoming election, their own electors for the national nominating convention and passed their own party platform.

They also passed a resolution to make presidential elections by "direct vote of the people."—and for one four-year term only. They supported "short terms of all offices, and strict responsibility to the people."

Another resolution declared: "That, in a free state, all distinctions but those of merit are odious and oppressive, and ought to be discouraged by a people jealous of their liberties."

When they finished, Byrdsall recounted, "some thousands of the meeting, bearing torches, candles, &c., marched up the Bowery, cheering their democratic fellow-citizens on the way." 

The next day, partisan newspapers representing the rebels' political opponents, the Whig party, published what Byrdsall calls "grave and ridiculous" reports about the revolt that openly celebrated “divisions in the ranks of the Democracy."

The Whig press dubbed the rebels "Loco Focos" because Loco Foco was the brand of the matches they'd used to keep their meeting going. Whigs used it as a pejorative euphemism for "radical" and "extremist"—in the same way Republicans of today have weaponized "woke" against Liberals. 

Formally, the Loco Focos were the Equal Rights Party. The party grew out of the Workingman's Party, which itself only lasted two or so years, 1828-1830.

"Most of the measures advocated by the former were decidedly popular with the latter, and both were equally hostile to banks and other monopolies," Byrdsall reports. 

Specifically, Loco Focos opposed slavery and the death penalty, and they supported women's rights and freedom of speech for abolitionists (which was being suppressed much like pro-Palestinian speech is today).

"The new race is stiff, heady and rebellious," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of the generation that came of age between 1820 and 1840 in Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England. "They are fanatics in freedom; they hate tolls, taxes, turnpikes, banks, hierarchies, governors, yea, almost all laws."

Emerson made the Loco Foco generation sound almost like Anarchists, but if the "equal rights" in the Loco Foco's formal name meant anything it meant those rights had to be guaranteed by a fair and impartial law applied to all—the opposite of classical Anarchism.

Still, this limited-government core of Loco Foco philosophy explains why Libertarian historians have been drawn to it.

In 1919, Progressive historian William Trimble assessed in a treatise on the Loco Focos that they were "a nascent proletarian party, while the Democratic party of the time was essentially agrarian and the Whig commercial and capitalistic." 

Loco Foco leadership formally voted to separate from the Democratic-Republican party on Jan. 11, 1836, three months after temporarily taking Tammany Hall. The rank-and-file confirmed the split by majority vote on Jan. 20. They accused the party of "defrauding" and "interfering" with voters.

"We no longer recognize Tammany hall as a temple of true democracy," the Loco Foco resolution declared. "We will not be the dupes of usages over which the people have no real control."

The Loco Focos elected ward representatives and held a convention, adopting a party charter over several day-long meetings starting Feb. 9. 

"We ask that the blessings of government, like the dews of Heaven, should descend equally on the high and the low, the rich and the poor," their charter declared. "We ask the repeal of all unequal, unjust, unconstitutional laws, granting powers or privileges to portions of the community, to the divesting of the rights and manifest injury of the majority." 

The charter conditioned party membership on signing the party's "Declaration of Principles." Among other things, signers pledged "Hostility to any and all monopolies by legislation, because they are a violation of the equal rights of The People."

The infant Equal Rights Party was immediately targeted with withering criticism from Whigs and Democratic-Republicans.

"The cholera itself scarcely carried with it more terrors," the chairman of the Albany General Committee of the Democratic-Republican party wrote Pres. Martin Van Buren on Nov. 14, 1837.

"Nothing has ever so much alarmed and disturbed the peace and tranquility of the good people of this state," the committee added, "as the dread of loco-focoism."

Pres. Van Buren was a New Yorker who had served as state Attorney General, governor and U.S. senator. He remained deeply involved in state politics and was in touch with Loco Focos too.

Besides direct criticism from both Democratic-Republicans and Whigs, what Byrdsall calls "the prostituted press of both parties" also rained calumny down on the rebels. He singles out the New York Times for criticism repeatedly, calling it both “the cherished organ of the oldest and wisest of the monopoly Democracy" and "the organ of the aristocracy of the Democracy." 

Byrdsall actually collected all the pejorative descriptors the newspaper used to smear the Loco Focos. Most speak for themselves but "Fanny Wright Men" deserves an explanation because it shows women's rights were among the "equal rights" Loco Focos fought for.

"Fanny Wright was a rebel who pursued equality for all," a biography published on the website of the American National Women's Hall of Fame says. Born in Scotland 1795, Wright died in Ohio 1852. She was the "first American woman to speak publicly against slavery and for the equality of women."

"She lived according to her own ideals," the hall emphasizes, "rather than society’s dictates."

Loco Focos lost a three-way contest for New York's governor in 1836, but won down-ballot races by allying with Whigs and running fusion candidates to punish Democrat-Republicans who refused to join them.

Their biggest victory was winning over Pres. Van Buren. He incorporated their anti-monopoly, anti-bank ideals into his economic policy, delivered by a special Message to Congress in 1837. It is not the "legitimate object" of Government "to make men rich," Van Buren's message said, or "to confer special favors on individuals or on any classes of them." 

Pres. Van Buren's message "made mighty men" of Loco Foco leaders, New York Governor and Conservative, Tammany Democrat William L. Marcy acknowledged . A New York Times editorial warned Van Buren his position was "in direct opposition" to "the views of a large majority of his political friends."

Some historians say the biggest Loco Foco success came in 1840 when Pres. Van Buren signed the Independent Treasury Act into law which ended Government's reliance on private banks along with its dependence on the wealthy individuals who owned them—which added considerably to their wealth and to an equally considerable reduction of the fisc.

After this, many Loco Focos returned home to their mother party, which welcomed them and their ideas back with open arms and dropped "Republican" from its name. Trimble’s 1919 Loco Foco treatise observed its "about this time ... the modern Democratic party" begins to take shape. 

But soon Democrats would split again, this time over slavery. 

Loco Focos became abolitionist "Barnburners" while the Conservative Democrats who supported slavery became "Hunkers." In 1848, the Loco Foco/Barnburner faction transformed again by joining with anti-slavery "conscience" Whigs to form the Free Soil Party—which opposed slavery's expansion into new states.

Then, in the 1850s, Free Soilers helped build the Republican party we know today: voting for Abraham Lincoln which led to the end of slavery—the worst of any 18th century American monopoly.

Anothony Comegna, a Libertarian historian, argue there's even more to Loco Foco history. He traces their influence through American politics and culture far-and-wide.  Among other things, Comegna points to former New York Governor Silas Wright as a "locofoco fellow-traveler who may have become president in 1848 if not for his untimely death."

He even includes Thomas Cole, landscape painter and co-founder of the Hudson River School of art, in his long list of Loco Foco descendents.

"For at least two full generations, the Loco-Focos spread a radical anti-corporate republican ideology," Comegna wrote, "and made significant and under examined marks on American intellectual and cultural history."

One unquestionable Loco Foco accomplishment, recognized by Trimble, is that the group "gathered up in a series of declarations and constitutions the formulations of the radical democracy which had been worked out in the previous decade and disseminated them."

For example, the Declation of Principles above.

These documents, reprinted by Byrdsall in his reported memoir, set a blueprint for would-be reformers to follow, should they decide to seize control of the Democratic party to make it speak for working-class Americans.

When will the Loco Focos rise again?

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