In the 1990s democracy and market freedom are often discussed as though they were either synonymous or interchangeable. The experience of workers in the United States reveals that as government became more democratic, what it could do to shape daily life became more restricted. The extent and failures of workers' efforts to exercise power through the political parties provide insights and warnings from the nineteenth century to guide our thinking about the twenty-first.

When industrialization began in the United States, both free and bound labor supplied commodities whose flow was dominated by merchant capital, while the legacy of the Revolution made possible the inclusion of white males from society's lower strata in the active citizenry.

The voting rights and freedom of association enjoyed by working-men hastened the dismantling of personal forms of subordination, most dramatically in the brief moment when African Americans claimed those rights after the destruction of slavery. Nevertheless, neither white nor black workers fashioned the new rules for a society based on wage labor. Both the shaping of economic development and the allocation of poor relief were effectively insulated from democratic control, while new forms of social domination disguised as freely contracted market and familial relationships were sanctioned by the courts, by the newly restructured police and military forces, and by the criminalization of unemployment.

Workers' use of their access to political power on behalf of their visions of the commonweal challenged, but never defeated, the new style of class rule, which both strengthened government and limited its sphere of action.