Around 150 years ago, a father and daughter held hands in the fierce glare of a Pennsylvania steel mill: a grizzled older man and his dark-eyed daughter, their faces lit by smoldering ore. Few knew what the pair were doing there, but 12-year-old Florence Kelley understood. Her papa, Congressman William Darrah “Pig Iron” Kelley, was instructing her in the family business. Together, they would fight for working people, including the laborers doing this dangerous job. It would be a long-term project, he explained: His generation would “build up great industries in America,” and hers would fight to “see that their product is distributed justly.”
American history has plenty of political father-son duos—the Adamses and Bushes come to mind—but the Kelleys are something rarer. From the 1830s to the 1930s, Will and Florie crusaded and campaigned for abolition and women’s suffrage, against lynching and child labor, for social security and the eight-hour workday. They made friends with Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt, but also with steelworkers, seamstresses and sharecroppers. In an age of crisis, the Kelleys wrought an empire of reform, even when they exasperated each other. For the last century and half, we’ve been living in the country that the Kelleys forged. And as we grapple with many of the problems they confronted themselves—income inequality, racial hatred, heightened partisanship—there’s much to learn from this father-daughter duo.
Will Kelley was born poor, in North Philadelphia, in 1814. A childhood of hard labor left him with an abiding outrage at employers’ treatment of the working people. So as a young man in the 1830s, he began climbing soapboxes at labor rallies, thundering out attacks on inequality to audiences of journeymen and apprentices. Unlike many demagogues who pit different groups against each other, Will made a point of speaking to the entire working class: white and Black, native-born and immigrant, male and female, adult and child. He also stood out for his height (6-foot-3), his lean frame, his shabby clothing and his deep, rumbling voice, which made his speeches sound, the Chicago Tribune said, “like an eloquent graveyard.”
Will’s focus on working people led him to a ferocious denunciation of slavery—in his mind, the ultimate violation of the dignity of labor. In Philadelphia, he battled streetcar segregation and found jobs for Black friends he’d grown up with. After winning a seat in Congress representing West Philadelphia in 1860, Will helped organize companies of Black soldiers during the Civil War, was one of the early advocates for Black voting rights, helped pass the 13th Amendment banning slavery and helped write the text of the 15th Amendment, forbidding voting discrimination based on race.