How the lunchpail became — and remains — a symbol of the working class

While running for the Mississippi governorship in 1975, Charles Finch — better known to his constituents as Cliff — endeavored to establish himself as “the workingman’s candidate.” One day each week while on the campaign trail, he’d work alongside the state’s laborers: operating construction equipment, digging ditches, pumping fuel, pricing groceries and even installing a car engine. 

To Finch’s credit, this wasn’t a complete political put-on. In the 13 years between his service in World War II as a howitzer gunner and his graduation from the University of Mississippi School of Law, Finch worked as a bulldozer driver, a log hauler, a campus police officer, a dragline operator and a cotton measurer, so he wasn’t exactly a stranger to manual labor. 

In an interview with TIME Magazine, Finch described taking breaks while on the job sites he visited: “When I sit down and open up my lunch box with that man or that woman who has been working side by side with me, sweating just like me, they know that I am sincere.” 

Finch encapsulated that sentiment in a motif that he carried through his campaign, a lunch pail bearing his name; it’s a design that was eventually used during his term as governor, appearing on some employees’ badges and car tags. However, he was far from the first to draw a connection between political ideology and how Americans carried their food to work. For generations, the lunch pail has been a symbol of the working class — something generations of politicians have played into, up until today.

Following the Industrial Revolution, fewer Americans worked at the family farm, where going home for lunch every day was a viable option. In the Smithsonian National Museum of American History exhibit “Taking America to Lunch,” the curators have gathered what they refer to as the “first generation” of American lunchboxes: a striking red coffee tin that’s been outfitted with a spindly handle, a green cigar box with latch and an illustration of the turtle on the side, and lots and lots of metal buckets. 

“American industrial workers have often carried their lunch in plain metal buckets,” the exhibition notes read. “Since the mid-19th century, miners, factory workers, dock hands, and other laborers have used sturdy dinner pails to hold hard-boiled eggs, vegetables, meat, coffee, pie, and other hardy fare.” 

Eventually, plain buckets gave way to specially designed lunch pails and lunch boxes made with workers in mind. For instance, in 1887, John Robinson, a Black inventor from West Virginia, filed a patent for a pail. In his application, he wrote: 

Be it known that I, John Robinson, a citizen of the United States, residing at Coal Valley, in the county of Fayette and State of West Virginia, have invented new and useful improvement in dinner pails of which the following is a specification. My invention is an improvement in dinner pails for workmen; and it consists in the peculiar construction and combination of devices that will be more fully set forth hereinafter.

Robinson’s updated pail had separate compartments for food and liquids and was designed so items within could be heated using a small lamp. Then, according to the Smithsonian, in 1904, “‘thermos’ vacuum bottles began keeping workers’ drinks hot or cold until the noon whistle blew,” and that same decade they began designing lunchboxes, too. 

In the ensuing years, the lunch pail’s association with manual laborers was solidified. By the time the Herman Miller furniture company introduced cubicles in 1964 — thereby unintentionally condemning generations of future workers to an eternity of sad desk salads with windowless views —the term “lunchpailers” (or just “pailers”) had been in circulation for about a decade to refer to 9-5ers who worked outside an office, according to “The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang.”

While lawmakers like Cliff Finch certainly positioned themselves as lunch-pail Democrats — generally defined as prioritizing no-nonsense, yet traditionally liberal policies that benefit working-class Americans — that term wouldn’t gain much political traction until the mid-1980s and early ’90s, at which time that particular strain of politician was already being declared a dying breed. 

In a November 1988 New York Magazine story headlined “Mount Losemore” about some Democrats who worried “that their political party has become a permanent left-wing minority faction,” writer Joe Klein declared Hubert Humphrey, the former vice president and Minnesota senator, “the last of the lunch-pail Democrats.” 

“No doubt the senator also knew his way around the alphabet of federal programs,” Klein wrote. “But it was his curiosity about people, the joy he took from talking with them, that made him a master politician.” 

Just a few years later, Al Gore was criticized by some for attempting to hearken to Humphrey’s approach in the 1992 election. As political commentator and “Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics” author John Avlon wrote in 2004, Gore was “determined to cast himself as an old school, labor lunch-pail Democrat in the tradition of Hubert Humphey and Walter Mondale. This strategy was problematic in a number of ways, not least because it wasn’t particularly convincing.” 

These days, “lunch-pail Democrat” isn’t so much a salient political label as it is a political ideal against which to measure contemporary candidates. When Hillary Clinton knocked back whiskey shots in an Indiana bar called Bronko’s Restaurant and Lounge while on the 2008 presidential campaign trail, some saw her as “transforming into a white lunch-pail populist,” while others simply saw a caricature of what politicians think working-class Americans want from them. 

In 2012, the late political commentator Ed Schultz declared Joe Biden “the face of the lunch-bucket Democrats” during an MSNBC panel. “He’s been their connection,” Schultz continued. “He understands their uprising, he is the middle class, he grew up middle class.”

How many Americans take their lunch has, of course, radically changed following the pandemic, as more and more of the office set work from home at least some of the time. In a survey of remote workers by Restaurant Business, nearly half reported they made lunch at home, while delivery and leftovers were both popular follow-up options. Regardless, no lunch pail in sight. As to whether or not the “lunch-pail Democrat” remains, that seems a question perhaps best answered by this upcoming election cycle.