MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Let's talk more about workers overall because at least this year, American politicians have been talking a lot about them.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)
SHAWN FAIN: Kamala Harris is fighting for working families.
DONALD TRUMP: Under my plan, American workers will no longer be worried about losing your job.
SCOTT JENNINGS: I'm interpreting the results tonight as the revenge of just the regular old working-class American.
MARTIN: Now, this phenomenon of a working class, per se, goes back to 19th century Britain. That's when British workers during the industrial revolution united to demand rights and political power. They gave birth to a voting class that politicians all over the world still scramble to represent. NPR's Lauren Frayer has this report from Manchester.
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LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: We're standing in this square. There are trams. There are glass office towers. But what happened here?
CHARLOTTE WILDMAN: So Peterloo happened in 1819. It was a protest against the lack of political representation that working people had.
FRAYER: Historian Charlotte Wildman describes how British cavalry charged protesting workers on this square that day in 1819, killing and injuring many. It became known as the Peterloo massacre. Manchester at the time was the world's new hub of industry. But the workers themselves weren't even allowed to vote.
WILDMAN: They have to live in awful, terrible living conditions - 10 people in one room, diseases. But the industrial revolution, those who are benefiting from that are doing very, very well financially.
FRAYER: This huge wealth gap fueled resentment, demands for better working conditions and a new sense of pride in an honest day's work.
WILDMAN: It's also about showing that the working poor are not feckless, drunken, that actually, they are worthy citizens, and they deserve this representation.
FRAYER: Nineteenth century thinkers flocked to Manchester to chronicle the birth of this new class or maybe what some even thought might be a revolution.
So these are the gates here through which...
(SOUNDBITE OF GATE SQUEAKING)
FRAYER: ...Marx and Engels passed to go to this library.
ED GLINERT: Yeah, the library's on the first floor there.
FRAYER: Ed Glinert gives walking tours of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' old haunts in Manchester. The German philosophers spent time here. Engels was managing his father's factory. Marx visited him a lot. And they had a favorite desk at the city's Chetham Library, where they wrote up their theories of class struggle, socialism and revolution. Based on what they witnessed in Manchester, Glinert says...
GLINERT: What Engels and Marx did was turn the working class into a political commodity. For the first time, there was a class analysis of society, which really people hadn't thought of in the past.
FRAYER: And so what started with an 1819 massacre of peasants here gave birth to the world's first trade unions and an idea of equality that has fueled social justice and labor movements around the world.
There's a monument to the Peterloo massacre in Manchester, sort of a mosaic of tiles. I'm standing in the middle of it, and there are arrows that go out from here. One points to Sharpeville, South Africa, 1960 and the Lattimer mine in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. These are all places where there were other workers' and people's uprisings.
Manchester prides itself on being ground zero for working-class values, so much so that the city has a whole museum dedicated to this.
MARK WILSON: So, yeah, you just see some of the posters, placards.
FRAYER: Curator Mark Wilson showed me around the People's History Museum of Manchester, full of old trade union banners.
Representatives from all the countries in Europe and from America...
WILSON: Yeah, yeah.
FRAYER: ...Happened here.
WILSON: And you do have that sort of thread of international solidarity.
FRAYER: International solidarity with workers that started here and has reverberated through political discourse ever since.
Lauren Frayer, NPR News, Manchester.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WORKING CLASS HERO")
JOHN LENNON: (Singing) A working-class hero is something to be. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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