Locofocos

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Locofoco
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Cartoon celebrating defeat of Locofocoism, 1840

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

History

The faction, originally named the Equal Rights Party, was created in

William Leggett
.

The name Locofoco derived from "locofoco, a kind of friction

Jacksonians used such matches to light candles to continue a political meeting after Tammany men tried to break up the meeting by turning off the gaslights.[2]

The Locofocos were involved in the

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

The Locofocos never controlled the party nationally and declined after 1840, when the federal government passed the

Whig opponents, both because Democratic President Martin Van Buren
had incorporated many Locofoco ideas into his economic policy, and because Whigs considered the term to be derogatory.

In general, Locofocos supported

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
(then a newspaper editor).

Ralph Waldo Emerson said of the Locofocos: "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, an influential newspaper publisher and parliamentarian, became sympathetic to the Locofocs after meeting Andrew Jackson in 1829.[6][7] Frustrated by Tory control of Canadian politics, Mackenzie led the 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion and proclaimed a short-lived "Republic of Canada" during the Patriot War with help from American militias.[7] Locofoco Abram Smith and many others would become active in American Hunter’s Lodges dedicated to ending British rule in Canada.

Mackenzie was imprisoned for violating the Neutrality Act during the Patriot War, but pressure from sympathetic Locofocos and others forced President Martin Van Buren to pardon Mackenzie in 1840.[8] William Lyon Mackenzie later became an American citizen and Locofoco politician before returning to Canada.[9]

Origin of name

The name Loco-foco was originally used by John Marck for a self-igniting cigar, which he had patented in April 1834.[10][11] Marck, an immigrant, invented his name from a combination of the Latin prefix loco-, which as part of the word locomotive had recently entered general public use, and was usually misinterpreted to mean "self", and a misspelling of the Italian word fuoco for "fire".[11] Therefore, Marck's name for his product was originally meant in the sense of "self-firing". It appears that Marck's term was quickly genericized to mean any self-igniting match, and it was this usage from which the faction derived its name.

The Whigs quickly seized upon the name, applying an alternate derivation of Loco Foco, from the combination of the Spanish word loco, meaning mad or crack-brained, and foco, from "

Know Nothings, Free Soilers, Conscience Whigs, and Temperance Whigs.[14][15][16]

In popular culture

  • Fleshies recorded "Locofoco Motherfucker" on Kill The Dreamer's Dream (2001), which interpreted contemporary politics by reference to the locofoco movement.[17]

See also

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. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica History & Society: Locofoco Party
  3. 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. JSTOR 136825
    .
  7. ^
    S2CID 142863197
    .
  8. ISBN 978-1-55028-767-7
    .
  9. 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. ^ a b 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. ISBN 9780195392432
    .
  15. ISBN 0-19-504100-3
    .
  16. 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

External links

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