TheLocofocos (also spelledLoco Focos orLoco-focos) were a faction of theDemocratic Party in the United States that existed from 1835 until the mid-1840s.
The faction, originally named the Equal Rights Party, was formed inNew 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 theWorking Men's Party, which had existed from 1828 to 1830.[1] The group advocated forlaissez-faire policies and opposedmonopolies. Its leading intellectual figure was editorial writerWilliam Leggett.
The name Locofoco derived from "locofoco," a type of frictionmatch. It originated when a group ofJacksonians 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 theFlour 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 theIndependent Treasury Act. The legislation ensured that the government would not resume its involvement in banking, a key demand of the faction.[4] During the1840 election,Whig opponents applied the term Locofoco to the entire Democratic Party, both because Democratic PresidentMartin Van Buren had incorporated many Locofoco ideas into his economic policy, and because the Whigs considered the term derogatory.
In general, the Locofocos supportedAndrew Jackson and Van Buren. They advocatedfree trade, greater circulation ofspecie, and legal protections for labor unions, while opposing paper money, financialspeculation, and state banks. Notable members of the faction includedWilliam 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, andWalt 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]
Locofocoism influenced Canadian politics throughWilliam Lyon Mackenzie. Mackenzie, a newspaper publisher and parliamentarian, became sympathetic to the movement after meetingAndrew Jackson in 1829.[6][7] Frustrated byTory dominance in Canadian politics, he led theUpper Canada Rebellion of 1837 and proclaimed a short-lived "Republic of Canada" during thePatriot War, with support from American militias.[7] LocofocoAbram Smith and others became active in AmericanHunters' Lodges, which sought to endBritish rule in Canada.
Mackenzie was imprisoned for violating theNeutrality Act during the Patriot War, but pressure from sympathetic Locofocos and other supporters led PresidentMartin Van Buren to pardon him in 1840.[8] Mackenzie later became an American citizen and a Locofoco politician before eventually returning to Canada.[9]
The termLoco-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 prefixloco-—which, as part of the wordlocomotive, had recently entered common usage and was often misinterpreted to mean "self"—with a misspelling of the Italian wordfuoco ("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 wordloco ("mad" or "crack-brained") andfoco (fromfocus orfuego, 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 theRepublican Party, which drew support from formerurban Workingmen Locofocos, anti-slaveryKnow Nothings,Free Soilers,Conscience Whigs, andTemperance Whigs.[14][15][16]
Loco Foco.
John Marck self igniting cigar.
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