Locofoco

This is a word that has a twisted and tortured past.

On or about the year 1834 (patented 16 April 1834), a man named John Marck of New York created and marketed a self-lighting cigar.  The tip was coated with ingredients that when rubbed by friction, the cigar lit without aid of embers or candle.

There are three etymological derivations suggested by historians.

1.  Called by Marck a "locofoco cigar", in imitation of the relatively new word "locomotive", which by the uneducated was supposed to mean, self-moving.  Railroad trains were only just coming online at this time.

2.  From Latin, loco foci meaning in lieu of fire.

3.  More likely from Italian, fuoco meaning fire.

At about this same time, Lucifer matches were created using similar constituent chemicals and materials.  Giving off a sulfurous odor when lit, these slender wooden sticks were struck by friction and ignited when the  mixture of antimony sulfide, potassium chlorate, gum, and starch was rubbed quickly.  Lucifer, of course, was Biblical, the "light bearer", thus a slight misnomer.  This stick brought fire as well as light.  By an odd tangent, locus in quo was a circumlocution for Hell, and thus often itself became a circumlocution for the devil.  Some feel the matches "locofoco" were derived in parallel to this idea.

While all well and good, and these items certainly used eventually by western Rhode Island when WVP was a little boy, the political meaning is more consequential.

For our purposes, we follow Howe.

The locofocs emerged within the workingmen's wing of the Democratic party in New York City, but they did not always support trade unionism ... they got their name from a meeting on October 29, 1835, in Tammany Hall... The party regulars nominated their slate of candidates for the coming municipal election and declared the meeting adjourned; when disaffected workers' delegates tried to prolong the meeting in order to contest the outcome, the organization turned out the {natural gas} gaslights.  But the insurgents had come prepared with candles and newly invented sulfur friction matches, called "locofocos" (or "lucifers").  Able to proceed with the meeting, they fielded a slate of their own ... by 1837, the Locofocs had gained enough concessions from the regulars to return to the party fold ... although sarcastically called "locos" ("mad" in Spanish) by their critics, the Locofocos took pride in their name.  [See reference * below]

This is another example of how the Phillips family in little Foster, Rhode island followed not Connecticut, nor Massachusetts, but New York politics.  While not radical, this portion of Foster seemed determined to follow the new Democratic party and garner male suffrage and other rights proposed by New York factions.

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*[What hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, Daniel Walker Howe, "The New Economy", p. 544.  Online references use the year 1834, but we follow the historian Howe here.]