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IN recent years American historians have shown great interest in the labor and radical literature of the Jacksonian period. This literature is taken to manifest the beginnings of a substantial labor movement in the United States. In particular it is the thesis of those historians that a substantial movement of eastern wage earners, led and inspired by the radical anticapitalistic elements among Jackson's supporters, became a significant part of the great Jacksonian revolution. The evidence for this thesis, which might be called the Jackson wage-earner thesis, is, I think, worth further consideration. A number of figures and movements have been taken to represent an advanced radicalism, closely kindred to modern radicalism. The problem, however, is not only ideological; it is semantic and psychological. The evidence has frequently rested on generous and broad assertions in editorials, pamphlets, manifestos, petitions, and party programs. Are these so-called radical leaders truly radical, and in what sense? Are the many so-called working men's movements and parties of the period truly movements of wage earners and are they truly anticapitalistic? Can we take at face value not only the assertions but also the very terminology of the time? The Jackson wage-earner thesis has recently been presented in its most explicit and cogent form by Arthur Meier Schlesinger, jr., and it is convenient therefore to center the discussion on a few representative figures and movements which have been cited in his Age of Jackson. An early figure is Langton Byllesby. Byllesby has been described as an Owenite pamphleteer and his book Observations on the Sources and Efjects of Unequal Wealth (I826) as an attempt to restate Owenism without the anti-religious bias but public sentiment was not prepared for the book, coming as it did before the Jacksonians were conscious of their mission as champions of labor. Now, it is as a poet that we first hear of Byllesby; indeed he had a knack for rhyming. In I8I3, while in Philadelphia, Byllesby, who dabbled in inventions throughout his life, was commissioned to prepare a poetical defense of patent rights and turned out the anonymous satire Patent Right Oppres-
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