Long before Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez set Republican panties on fire with their open embrace of democratic socialism, an American laid out a political philosophy that captured the spirit of equality.
Two decades before Karl Marx published “The Communist Manifesto,” a New York machinist named Thomas Skidmore, who had once taught school in Princeton and Bordentown, argued that American democracy could never be truly free while a small class of proprietors owned the world and everyone else owned no part of it.
Skidmore, born Aug. 13, 1790, in Newtown, Connecticut, was a precocious child who began teaching school at age 13. He spent his early adulthood traveling through the young republic, including several years teaching in New Jersey.
Skidmore taught in Princeton and Bordentown before moving on to Richmond, Virginia, and Edenton and New Bern, North Carolina. He later tried his hand as an inventor in Wilmington, Delaware, and Philadelphia before settling in New York City in 1819, where he worked as a machinist.
In 1829, Skidmore co-founded and led the New York Working Men’s Party, one of the earliest labor parties in the United States. The party advocated a 10-hour workday, abolition of debtors’ prisons, and universal public education. In its first election, it captured 31% of the vote and elected two state legislators.
That same year, Skidmore published “The Rights of Man to Property!” — a roughly 400-page treatise arguing that the concentration of property made genuine liberty impossible.
He wrote that there were “but two classes: proprietors, and non-proprietors; those who own the world, and those who own no part of it.”
His proposed remedy was extraordinary even by the standards of the era.
Skidmore called for a state constitutional convention that would abolish debts, take possession of existing property and redistribute it in equal shares to every adult citizen — regardless, he specified, of race or sex. He proposed abolishing inheritance, with the estates of the dead returned to a common fund and distributed to young people as they came of age.
He also advocated abolishing private charity, banks and corporate charters.
The program anticipated by decades some of the questions about property, class and economic power that would later become associated with European socialist movements. But Skidmore developed his arguments within the political culture of the early American republic, grounding them in the revolutionary-era language of natural rights and political equality.
His ideas eventually brought him into conflict with moderates in his own party, including reformer Robert Dale Owen. In December 1829, Skidmore was shouted down at a party meeting and expelled amid disputes over what his opponents considered excessive radicalism.
He responded by launching another organization, the Agrarian Party, in 1830, but it performed poorly at the polls.
Skidmore died Aug. 7, 1832, during the cholera epidemic that swept New York City. He was six days short of his 42nd birthday.
His brief political career might have ended there, but his writings preserve an important chapter in the history of American radicalism.
Skidmore’s 1829 book has been described as the “first American synthesis of egalitarian and producerist ideas.” Yet his name largely disappeared from popular accounts of American political history.
His life also complicates the familiar portrayal of socialism and radical economic egalitarianism as ideas imported into the United States from Europe.
Long before Marx and Friedrich Engels published “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848, Skidmore was attacking concentrated wealth, inherited economic privilege and the political power that flowed from ownership. And before he became a leader of New York’s emerging working-class movement, he had lived and worked in New Jersey communities that were themselves part of the rapidly changing economy of the early republic.
His arguments grew from distinctly American disputes over whether the promises of the Declaration of Independence could coexist with extreme inequalities of property and economic power.
Skidmore is one of 26 figures profiled in James Devine’s new book, “Socialism Is as American as Apple Pie: Restoring the Socialist Conscience of the American Republic,” which argues that the socialist tradition is native to America rather than foreign and traces its roots through more than two centuries of U.S. history.
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