In the days before modern collective bargaining laws, spontaneous acts of collective violence could seem a useful path of action to workers without recourse to other means of solving their problems.

California workers benefited more, in the long run, from political experiences imported by Forty-niners from the East Coast and other countries. The Irish—the largest group of Europeans—brought their traditions of anticolonial organizing to America. German artisans, though fewer in number, carried their experience of craft organizations and socialist politics in their flight from the failed European revolutions of 1848. English workers came with Chartist ideas of republicanism. Such streams of political thought—along with currents of homegrown American revolutionary traditions—fed the formation of unions and short-lived but influential workingmen’s parties in the eastern states in the 1820s and 1830s.

The early workers’ organizations supported free universal public education and extending suffrage to white working men (in the earliest days of the republic, nonproperty owners couldn’t vote). The parties called for the abolition of prison labor and the end of imprisonment for debt. They were sympathetic to unions, whose members wanted dependable, secure employment with higher wages and shorter hours of work.