Locofocos

The Locofocos (also spelled Loco Focos or Loco-focos) were a faction of the Democratic Party in the United States that existed from 1835 until the mid-1840s.

Cartoon celebrating defeat of Locofocoism, 1840

History

The faction, originally named the Equal Rights Party, was formed in New York City as a protest against the city's regular Democratic organization, Tammany Hall. It consisted of a coalition of anti-Tammany Democrats and labor union veterans of the Working Men's Party, which had existed from 1828 to 1830.^[1] The group advocated for laissez-faire policies and opposed monopolies. Its leading intellectual figure was editorial writer William Leggett.

The name Locofoco derived from "locofoco," a type of friction match. It originated when a group of Jacksonians used such matches to light candles in order to continue a political meeting after Tammany supporters attempted to break it up by turning off the gaslights.^[2]

The Locofocos were involved in the Flour Riot of 1837. In February of that year, they held a mass meeting in New York City's City Hall Park to protest the rising cost of living. When the crowd learned that flour had been hoarded at warehouses on the Lower East Side, hundreds rushed to the warehouses, leading to the arrest of 53 people. The New York State Assembly blamed the Locofocos for the unrest and opened an investigation into the group.^[3]

The faction never gained control of the Democratic Party nationally and declined after 1840, when the federal government passed the Independent Treasury Act. The legislation ensured that the government would not resume its involvement in banking, a key demand of the faction.^[4] During the 1840 election, Whig opponents applied the term Locofoco to the entire Democratic Party, both because Democratic President Martin Van Buren had incorporated many Locofoco ideas into his economic policy, and because the Whigs considered the term derogatory.

In general, the Locofocos supported Andrew Jackson and Van Buren. They advocated free trade, greater circulation of specie, and legal protections for labor unions, while opposing paper money, financial speculation, and state banks. Notable members of the faction included William Leggett, William Cullen Bryant, Alexander Ming Jr., John Commerford, Levi D. Slamm, Abram D. Smith, Henry K. Smith, Isaac S. Smith, Moses Jacques, Gorham Parks, and Walt Whitman, who at the time was a newspaper editor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson described the Locofocos as follows: "The new race is stiff, heady, and rebellious; they are fanatics in freedom; they hate tolls, taxes, turnpikes, banks, hierarchies, governors, yea, almost all laws."^[5]

Canada

William Lyon Mackenzie

Locofocoism influenced Canadian politics through William Lyon Mackenzie. Mackenzie, a newspaper publisher and parliamentarian, became sympathetic to the movement after meeting Andrew Jackson in 1829.^[6][7] Frustrated by Tory dominance in Canadian politics, he led the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 and proclaimed a short-lived "Republic of Canada" during the Patriot War, with support from American militias.^[7] Locofoco Abram Smith and others became active in American Hunters' Lodges, which sought to end British rule in Canada.

Mackenzie was imprisoned for violating the Neutrality Act during the Patriot War, but pressure from sympathetic Locofocos and other supporters led President Martin Van Buren to pardon him in 1840.^[8] Mackenzie later became an American citizen and a Locofoco politician before eventually returning to Canada.^[9]

Origin of name

The term Loco-foco was originally used by John Marck for a self-igniting cigar, which he patented in April 1834.^[10][11] Marck, an immigrant, coined the name by combining the Latin prefix loco-—which, as part of the word locomotive, had recently entered common usage and was often misinterpreted to mean "self"—with a misspelling of the Italian word fuoco ("fire").^[11] Marck's intended meaning for the name was "self-firing." The term was soon generalized to refer to any self-igniting match, and it was from this usage that the political faction derived its name.

The Whigs quickly adopted the term as a political epithet, offering an alternative derivation from the Spanish word loco ("mad" or "crack-brained") and foco (from focus or fuego, meaning "fire").^[12] In this interpretation, the name suggested that the faction—and later the Democratic Party as a whole—was the "focus of folly."^[13] The use of Locofoco as a derogatory label for Democrats persisted into the 1850s, even after the dissolution of the Whig Party and the formation of the Republican Party, which drew support from former urban Workingmen Locofocos, anti-slavery Know Nothings, Free Soilers, Conscience Whigs, and Temperance Whigs.^[14][15][16]

In popular culture

• The punk band Fleshies recorded the song "Locofoco Motherfucker" on their 2001 album Kill the Dreamer's Dream, which referenced the Locofoco movement in its interpretation of contemporary politics.^[17]

See also

• Specie Circular
• Preserved Fish
• Young America Movement

References

1. Byrdsall, Fitzwilliam (1842). The History of the Loco-Foco or Equal Rights Party. New York: Clement & Packard. pp. 13–14. Loco Foco.
2. "Locofoco Party". Encyclopædia Britannica. Britannica.com.
3. Lause, Mark (2018). Long Road to Harpers Ferry. London: Pluto Press. pp. 70–71. ISBN 9781786803252.
4. "Locofoco Party". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved March 14, 2017.
5. Kauffman, Bill (20 April 2009). "The Republic Strikes Back". The American Conservative. Retrieved 26 August 2015.
6. MacKay, R. A. (1937). "The Political Ideas of William Lyon Mackenzie". The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science. 3 (1): 1–22. doi:10.2307/136825. ISSN 0315-4890. JSTOR 136825.
7. Bonthius, Andrew (2003). "The Patriot War of 1837-1838: Locofocoism with a Gun?". Labour / Le Travail. 52: 9–43. doi:10.2307/25149383. ISSN 0700-3862. JSTOR 25149383. S2CID 142863197.
8. Sewell, John (October 2002). Mackenzie: A Political Biography. James Lorimer Limited. ISBN 978-1-55028-767-7.
9. Gates, Lilian F. (1996-07-25). After the Rebellion: The later years of William Lyon Mackenzie. Dundurn. ISBN 978-1-55488-069-0.
10. Jones, Thomas P, ed. (November 1834). "American Patents". Journal of the Franklin Institute. XIV (5). Pennsylvania: 329.
11. Bartlett, John Russell (1859). A Dictionary of Americanisms (2nd ed.). Boston: Little, Brown and Company. pp. 252–3. John Marck self igniting cigar.
12. "loco-foco". Etymonline. Retrieved 2018-03-29.
13. "Loco Foco". Caroll Free Press. Carrollton, Ohio. 22 April 1836. Retrieved 27 August 2015.
14. Howe, Daniel Walker (2007). What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. Oxford University Press. pp. 545-546. ISBN 9780195392432.
15. Gienapp, William E (1987). The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856. Oxford University Press. pp. 16–66, 93–109, 435–439. ISBN 0-19-504100-3.
16. Maisel, L. Sandy; Brewer, Mark D. (2008). Parties and Elections in America: The Electoral Process (5th ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 37–39. ISBN 978-0742547643.
17. "Johnny NoMoniker on Outsight Radio Hours". archive.org. Retrieved 9 September 2019. the idea of that song is basically contrasting … the idea of reactionary movements before labor organized really into the unions we have today, reactionary movements of the 19th Century, with today

Further reading

• Degler, Carl (1956). "The Locofocos: Urban 'Agrarians'". Journal of Economic History. 16 (3): 322–33. doi:10.1017/s0022050700059222. JSTOR 2114593. S2CID 154090227.
• Greenberg, Joshua R. Advocating The Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800–1840 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 190–205.
• Hofstadter, Richard (1943). "William Leggett, Spokesman of Jacksonian Democracy". Political Science Quarterly. 58 (4): 581–594. doi:10.2307/2144949. JSTOR 2144949.
• Jenkins, John Stilwell. History of the Political Parties in the State of New-York (Suburn, NY: Alden & Markham, 1846)
• Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Age of Jackson. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953 [1945]) For a description of where the Locofocos got their name, see Chapter XV.
• Trimble, William (1921). "The social philosophy of the Loco-Foco democracy". American Journal of Sociology. 26 (6): 705–715. doi:10.1086/213247. JSTOR 2764332. S2CID 143836640.
• White, Lawrence H (1986). "William Leggett: Jacksonian editorialist as classical liberal political economist". History of Political Economy. 18 (2): 307–324. doi:10.1215/00182702-18-2-307.
• Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (1984).
• Wilentz, Sean. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005).

External links

• "Locofoco" . Encyclopedia Americana. 1920.