In an article called “Dr. Brownson and the Workingman’s Party Fifty Years Ago,” published in The Catholic World of May, 1887, Father Hecker has himself made some interesting references to his experiences in the latter field, and upon these we shall draw heavily for our own account of this period of his life, supplementing them with whatever bears upon the subject in the memoranda already referred to.

Concerning the inception of this party, to which all three of the young Heckers belonged in 1834, we have a better statement in Dr. Brownson’s Convert than we know of elsewhere.  Brownson was for a time actively interested in it, and in 1829 established a journal in support of its principles somewhere in Western New York.  From him we learn that it was started in 1828 by Robert Dale Owen, Robert L. Jennings, George H. Evans, Fanny Wright, and a few other doctrinaires, foreign-born without exception, in the hope of getting control of political power so as to use it for establishing purely secular schools.  Their advocacy of anti-Christian and free-love doctrines had so signally failed among adult Americans that the slower but surer method of educating the children of the country without religion had dawned upon them as more certain to succeed.

“We hoped,” writes Dr. Brownson, “by linking our cause with the ultra-democratic sentiment of the country, which had had from the time of Jefferson and Tom Paine something of an anti-Christian character; by professing ourselves the bold and uncompromising champions of equality; by expressing a great love for the people and a deep sympathy with the laborer, whom we represented as defrauded and oppressed by his employer; by denouncing all proprietors as aristocrats, and by keeping the more unpopular features of our plan as far in the background as possible, to enlist the majority of the American people under the banner of the Workingman’s party; nothing doubting that, if we could once raise that party to power, we could use it to secure the adoption of our educational system.”

This party, however, both as an engine in politics and as a fitting embodiment of his private views, Dr. Brownson soon abandoned.  He was not truly radical, in the evil sense of that word, at any period of his career, and the theories of the leaders soon became insupportable to his moral sense.  But he remained true to the cause of the workingmen while abandoning the organization which assumed to voice their needs and their wishes.  Probably these more ulterior aims of their leaders were never fully appreciated by the rank and file of those who followed them.  Yet the genesis of the present purely secular school system, against whose workings and results nearly all Christian denominations are too late beginning to protest, is clearly traceable to the propaganda carried on half a century ago by men and women whose only half-veiled warfare against Christianity, property, and marriage was then an offence in the nostrils of our people at