Edwin Markham and 20th Century Labor Reform

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Check out the Horrmann Library's Edwin Markham Digital Archive to read Markham's personal correspondence.

Edwin Markham

Edwin Markham reading "The Man With the Hoe"

With the publication of his poem “The Man With the Hoe ” in 1899, Edwin Markham became a leading voice in the discussion of labor reform, paving the way for the muckraking exposés of the early 20th century. As the development of industrial labor sparked a countrywide reform movement, Markham’s publications issued a national call to arms for working class Americans. Traditionally, public opinion requires leadership to be heard. Edwin Markham, motivated by a profound passion for social justice and universal human rights, became the voice of the laboring people.

After seeing a reproduction of Jean François Millet’s painting with the same name in 1886, Markham penned “The Man With the Hoe” which was published on January 15, 1899 in the San Francisco Examiner(1). After two weeks of advertising, The Examiner paid Markham twenty-five dollars for the poem, the most that paper paid for original poetry (2). “The Man With the Hoe” was translated and published in forty languages world-wide and it is thought that the poem was copied in over one hundred thousand journals (3). Not only was it celebrated for its achievements in poetic and literary style, the poem evoked a certain power among people. It spoke of the political injustices against the working class and was read as a timeless expression of the social atmosphere for the majority of Americans (4). In one publication of “The Man With the Hoe” Markham added personal notes after the poem. In his notes, he writes of the Hoeman:

“…this stunned and stolid peasant is the type of industrial oppression in all land and in all labors. He might be a man with a needle in a New York sweat-shop, a man with a pick in a West Virginia coal mine, a man with a hod in a London alley, a man with a spade on the banks of Zuyder Zee. The Hoeman is the symbol of betrayed humanity, the Toiler ground down through the ages of oppression, through ages of social injustice. He is the man pushed away from the land by those who fail to use the land, till at last he has become a serf, with no mind in his muscle and no heart in his handiwork.” (5)

Before the year was over, Markham republished “The Man With the Hoe” as part of a poetry anthology called “The Man With the Hoe and Other Poems.” Several of the poems focus on the lifelong struggles and sweat of the working class. This new collection reflects his growing involvement and passion for labor reform as well as his progressive ideals.

Later, in 1914, Markham co-authored Children in Bondage: A Complete and Careful Presentation of the Anxious Problem of Child Labor- its Causes, its Crimes and its Cure with Benjamin B. Lindsey and George Creel. While the book was not at all popular in bookstores, it reflects Markham’s abhorrence of child labor at the fault of industrialization as well as his humanitarian beliefs.(6)

In the emerging labor reform movement, Edwin Markham’s “The Man With the Hoe” not only brought the author instant fame, but also became an anthem for the working class. His poetry spoke of laborers, oppressed, over-worked, and exploited, as the products of an industrialized society. Throughout “The Man With the Hoe and Other Poems,” Markham’s poetry sympathizes with the plight working man and issues a cry for help to the nation. Markham truly was the 20th century’s “laureate of labor.”

(1) Sigfried T. Synnestvedt,“Bread, Beauty, and Brotherhood: The Ethical Consciousness of Edwin Markham,” Dissertation: Ph. D. at the University of Pennsylvania, 1959, 9-10.

(2) Synnestvedt, 7.

(3) Andrew Hendrickson, “The Life and Works of Edwin Markham,” Dissertation: Master of Arts of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York, August 1930, 24.

(4) Joseph W. III Slade, “Edwin Markham: A Talented Failure: A Critical Biography.” Dissertation: Ph.D. at New York University, New York, 1971, 6-7; Hendrickson, 24.

(5) Edwin Markham, “The Man With the Hoe,” (New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1900), 23.

(6) Slade, 313; Synnestvedt, 315.