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Popular Culture Review
a competency is within reach of every man who is disposed to exercise
ordinary industry and frugality; and the labouring population is prosperous
and happy.
In this address, Stuart proposed that America was essentially a classless society
because of its laws against inherited privilege, that all workingmen had within
their hands the means to their own improvement, that, as proof of this. New World
wage earners were already prosperous compared to the Old World, and that, therein,
capital’s and labor’s interests were the same.‘^ This conservative approach entails
an organic vision of the American economy. Specifically, it postulates that capital
and labor do not have divergent interests, but are essentially serving the same end.
By this argument, reform is a matter of providing means by which the working
classes can improve themselves for the overall health of the republic.
Radical reformers answered the questions raised by the new economy in very
different ways. Whereas conservative reformers saw industrialization as a natural
outgrowth of the artisan system and therein envisioned a refined version of the
master-journeyman synergetic relationship, radical reformers perceived the capitahst
class as a crime against the labor theory of value and the “nobility of work.” The
rise of evangelical social reform in the 1820s also produced a reactionary foil in
New York City. For example, in 1825, a group of small masters and journeymen
artisans (shoemakers, stonecutters, printers) formed the Free Press Association to
celebrate Thomas Paine’s birthday and to promote speakers and distribute
“freethought” works (Paine’s Theological Works and Volney’s Ruins o f Empire
among them).‘^ However, instead of promoting rationahsm only, this organization
sought to warn against an “ecclesiastical threat” and claimed that “our country is
saturated with...vile, pernicious tracts.”*^This is, in effect, a subtle first salvo against
the conservative reform ideals of General Society members like Joseph Brewster
and the organic reform they sought to institute.
The rational, egalitarian and “anti-clerical” efforts of these groups was bolstered
by the arrival in New York of Robert Owen (1821). Owen, by this time, had achieved
international fame through his work A New View o f Society and the controversies
he had fostered in the Edinburgh Review. Specifically, Owen claimed that manual
labor was the source of wealth. By this argument, those that own but do not produce
by their own labor were essentially “parasites.” In addition, private property
represented “unearned profit” and organized religion represented a “source of
oppression.” *^These ideals confirmed the free thinkers’ antipathy toward reform
organizations like the General Society and inspired home-grown New York
Owenites like Dr. Cornelius Blatchly who claimed that “labour is cheated of its
true reward by power, rank, interests, rents, imposts and other impositions.”-**
Mike Walsh is the best and most colorful example of the radical reformist