American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  As usual, the biggest city exhibited the most repulsive living conditions. We need not see these conditions only through late twentieth-century eyes; Jacob Riis saw at the time. Horrified as a thirteen-year-old. in Copenhagen by a tenement built over a river and infested with rats, Riis had come in 1870 to a New York City in which those conditions were worsened tenfold. After knocking about for a few years mining coal, laying bricks, farming, and peddling, and after many a night in noisome lodging houses, he landed a job with the Evening Sun as an investigative journalist (then called police reporter). Later, he took up a free-lance career of writing books and articles and giving lectures. His knack for being both factual and graphic, both compassionate and unsentimental, gave great force to his reporting.

  Suppose we look into a tenement on, say, Cherry Street? he asked his readers in his first and perhaps most famous work, How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890:

  “Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and you might stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. Not that it would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. They have little else. Here where the hall turns and dives into utter darkness is a step, and another, another. A flight of stairs. You can feel your way, if you cannot see it. Close? Yes! What would you have? All the fresh air that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall-door that is forever slamming, and from the windows of dark bedrooms….”

  Riis had a special sympathy for tenement children, as though he had given up hope for their parents. He investigated the death rate of infants. In one tenement some years back, he noted, of 138 children born during a three-year period, 61 had died, most of them before their first birthday.

  “Listen! That short hacking cough, that tiny helpless wail—what do they mean?” It was a baby dying.

  “ ‘It was took all of a suddint,’ says the mother, smoothing the throbbing little body with trembling hands. There is no unkindness in the rough voice of the man in the jumper, who sits by the window grimly smoking a clay pipe, with the little life ebbing out in his sight, bitter as his words sound: ‘Hush, Mary! If we cannot keep the baby, need we complain—such as we?’ ” “Such as we,” Riis echoed.

  He was sensitive to the city’s endless variety, even while he shared some of the stereotypes of the time. The Irishman, he noted, was the true cosmopolitan immigrant, sharing his lodging impartially with Italian, Greek, and “Dutchman.” A map of the city designating nationalities, he said, would show an extraordinary crazy quilt.

  “The city on such a map would fall into two great halves, green for the Irish prevailing in the West Side tenement districts, and blue for the Germans on the East Side.” But intermingled was an odd variety of tints.

  From down in the Sixth Ward, upon the site of the old Collect Pond that in the days of the fathers drained the hills which are no more, the red of the Italian would be seen forcing its way northward along the line of Mulberry Street to the quarter of the French purple on Bleecker Street and South Fifth Avenue, to lose itself and reappear, after a lapse of miles, in the ‘Little Italy’ of Harlem, east of Second Avenue. Dashes of red, sharply defined, would be seen strung through the Annexed District, northward to the city line. On the West Side the red would be seen overrunning the old Africa of Thompson Street, pushing the black of the negro rapidly uptown, against querulous but unavailing protests, occupying his home, his church, his trade and all, with merciless impartiality.

  For many immigrants, black or any other color, home life was work life and work life was home life; they toiled for “sweaters.” A sweater’s shop, according to a reporter for Harper’s Weekly, “is generally one of the two larger rooms of a tenement flat, accommodating from six to fifteen or twenty ‘sweating’ employees—men, women, and children. In the other large room of the flat are his living, sleeping, and cooking arrangements, overflowing into the workroom. Employees whom he boards, who eat at their work, and who sleep on the goods, frequently complete the intimate connection of home and shop.” Many a New England textile mill—including some located in pristine valleys near running streams—housed whole families in wings attached to the plant itself, so that employees moved from home to work without ever passing through the green.

  The unholy wedlock of home and shop made it all the easier to sweat women and children. But the condition of children could be appalling whether at home or in a factory and, indeed, they often took their parents’ jobs. Fannie Harris, thirteen, was interrogated in 1895 by a committee of the New York legislature. She had worked for six months in a necktie plant, earning $2 for a sixty-hour week.

  What did she do with that two dollars? “Gave it to my mamma.”

  Did her mamma give her anything to spend? “Yes, sir ... two cents every week….”

  Now, had she been to school in this country? “No.”

  Could she spell cat? “I forgot.”

  Did her mamma work? “Now she ain’t working because I am working, but before, when I didn’t work, she worked.…”

  Her papa, she said, did not work because he was ill. When an “inspector” told her to quit work and go to school, her mother forbade it.

  Dorothy Richardson, an orphan from rural Pennsylvania who had been a country schoolteacher and then sought a “genteel job” in New York City, finally gave up and decided to take almost any work she could get. She was turned away by two cigar factories for lack of experience; took a job as a learner in a book bindery at $3 a week but kept on looking; turned down a position in a small store at $3.50 for an eighty-seven-hour week; declined employment at $1.50 in an artificial flower sweatshop; and finally took a job at $3 in a paper box factory. Quitting this work, she went through the process all over again, ending up as a laundry “shaker” until the owner offered a promotion to the wrapping department, at the same time making “some joking remarks of insulting flattery,” and pinching her bare arm. She left.

  Few women had it worse than those who lived among wealth and display—household domestics. Their work was generally back-breaking, tedious, and lonely, with few minutes of their own in sixteen-hour workdays. Attracted to the work by the promise of a comfortable home and good food, one found her room to be “a few hard chairs and two soiled quilts.” The food might be inadequate, the master of the house sexually aggressive, the mistress’s attitude demeaning. “You’re never sure that your soul’s your own except when you are out of the house,” one domestic commented.

  In the 1880s, a maid typically worked seven days a week, started at six and finished at her bedtime, around ten—unless her mistress was entertaining, in which case she had to remain on call until the guests left, perhaps around midnight. She was allowed out one evening a week and every other Sunday afternoon and evening. “Thus she was,” according to Robert Smuts, “usually on call for over 100 hours a week,” with most of the labor a grinding, monotonous routine. The lack of privacy and autonomy was especially galling to the more spirited. Shops and factories like the New England textile mills regularly drew off the more ambitious and restless of these young women.

  The city ghettos, the tenements, the sweatshops, the attics and the basements of great houses—these were not mere misery. Many of these sweated workers managed to cope, to endure, even to love and to laugh. Yet the social data of the time, however inadequate in exactness and scope, carry their own damning implications. Manufacturing wages, according to Clarence Long, rose from slightly more than a dollar a day in 1860 to a bit over a dollar and a half in 1890—a very gradual increase, considering the economic expansion of this period. Real wages rose at the same rate, since a steady decline in the cost of living made up for Civil War inflation. Adult men on the average received three-quarters more wages than adult women, and two and a half to three times as much as children and youths. At the same time, Philip Armour had a yearly income in excess of $1 million, John D. Rockefeller could count on $3 million annually just in Standard Oil dividends, and Andrew Carnegie—who once “couldn’t imagine” what to do with the princely sal
ary of $35 per month—made as much as $25 million in a single year.

  But even these statistics could hardly convey a sense of the enormous class disparity in income, food, housing, hours of toil, leisure, self-esteem—in happiness. Nowhere, perhaps, were the working and living conditions of the poor more sharply etched than in Pittsburgh.

  Merely to enter the steel works was a daunting experience—the electric cranes moaning and rattling as they swept overhead; fiery tongues of molten slag hissing out from the hearths; the steel emerging from the blooming mill and moving to allotted places; and then the first encounter with the pit itself, brimming with red-hot steel brighter than the day outside. Men clustered around furnaces, prodding the molten masses until tiny streams of fire broke through, then jumped back in the nick of time as great ladles tilted back and spouted out a torrent of incandescent steel.

  In this inferno, men stood on platforms so hot their spit sizzled; every so often they slapped their clothes to stop them from breaking into flames from the sparks; they recoiled from the maddening screech of cold saws biting into steel, leaving the air filled with particles that infested throat and lungs; poured out sweat that immediately dried in front of a dozen ovens each holding fifty or more tons of molten steel. They stood in recurrent danger of dying from hot metal explosions, falling into the pit, or encounters with cranes or locomotives. And they did this for hours on end, though with occasional rests as machines needed more time. Typically, steel mills operated twenty-four hours a day, so that the men had to work in either two shifts of twelve hours or three shifts of eight. Many men working twelve-hour days changed every two weeks from day work to night work or back, requiring them to work a terrible twenty-four hours straight at the “turnover.” The twelve-hour day lasted until well after the turn of the century.

  “Home is just the place where I eat and sleep,” a steel worker said. “I live in the mills.” Wives had to rise at five or so to prepare breakfast, perhaps go to work themselves, then serve supper fourteen hours later to an exhausted husband still deafened from the roar of the mills. Each of the mill towns in the Pittsburgh area came to have its splendid Carnegie library, with especially generous collections of books on metallurgy and mechanical arts. But few steel workers had the time or energy to visit the steel magnate’s libraries.

  Workers—particularly immigrants—lived in homes clustered around the mills along the rivers or hanging on the bluffs of the south side. Most of the steel hands, Stefan Lorant wrote, “lived in rickety shanties, ramshackle cottages, filthy, overcrowded tenements with primitive sanitation and toilet facilities.” Wages, never unduly high, dropped sharply during the early 1890s. Workers, however, were allowed to gaze across ornate iron fences at the steel bosses’ gingerbread mansions and other palaces, as expensive, ornate, and overstuffed as anywhere in America—homes such as Henry Clay Frick’s “Clayton,” four stories high with an enormous portico, Mrs. William Thaw’s “Lyndhurst,” the Phippses’ “Grandview,” the Westinghouses’ “Solitude.” Pittsburgh capitalists and workers had combined to make the city the steel capital of the world, outstripping Essen and Birmingham and all other American steel centers; but in the process the links between them, both on the job and in the community, were more and more frayed and broken.

  In contemplating how the other half lived, Jacob Riis concluded that the source of most social evils lay in people’s housing and city environment. In the tenements, he decided, “all the influences make for evil; because they are the hot-beds of the epidemics that carry death to rich and poor alike; the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the insane asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a round half million beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain a standing army of ten thousand tramps with all that that implies; because, above all, they touch the family life with deadly moral contagion. This is their worst crime, inseparable from the system....” It was the system above all that challenged Riis’s social imagination.

  In Chicago, a very different sort of man came to somewhat the same conclusion. By the 1880s, George M. Pullman had built the greatest railroad car-building organization in the world. Son of a general mechanic in New York State, he had shown remarkable innovating and organizing abilities even in his early years. After inventing a sleeping car in which back and seat cushions could be joined to make a berth—a concept that has hardly changed to this day—he had gone on to develop the combined sleeping and restaurant car, the dining car, the chair car, the vestibule car. Convinced that good housing was essential to people’s well-being, he decided on a great experiment in a vacant area nine miles south of Chicago—a model city, centered on workshops, designed to refine and uplift his workers’ character. It was to be both a business and a community venture. A self-respecting, well-mannered worker, he calculated, would be both a happier person and a better employee.

  Amid feverish activity the town was soon completed, adorned with lawns and shrubs, spacious factories, wide streets, and even “imitation-bronze street lamps with cone-shaped gloves and white porcelain shades.” Visitors came from near and far to admire; a French economist concluded that “some brain of superior intelligence, backed by long technical experience, has thought out every possible detail.” Here, as in the sweatshop ghettos, the distinction between work and home was blurred. Nothing in the town seemed apart from the workshop or workplace. Had George Pullman found the key to work-home integration, employer profit, employee happiness, and social progress?

  Social Class and Social Outcast

  “Now in all states,” Aristotle said, “there are three elements: one class is very rich, another very poor, and a third in a mean.” A city, he added, ought to be composed, as far as possible, “of equals and similars; and these are generally the middle classes.” A large middle class prevented the rich, the strong, and the lucky from dominating the poor, and the envious poor from plotting against the rich. “Great then is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens have a moderate and sufficient property; for where some possess much, and the others nothing, there may arise an extreme—either out of the most rampant democracy, or out of an oligarchy....”

  Americans in the late nineteenth century could boast of a burgeoning middle class, but they could not deny gross disparities between the rich and the poor. Jacob Riis and others who wrote of these extremes did not exaggerate; sophisticated economic analysis many years later would demonstrate that the 1860s and early 1870s constituted one of the “highest income inequalities in American history,” comparable only to the 1913–1916 period and to the late 1920s, just before the collapse of stock prices. Combined regional and class disparities, as between Southern farm laborers and New York City craftsmen, were extreme indeed in the 1870s.

  This glaring contrast between the lot of rich and of poor, a contrast that could be observed unforgettably within a mile’s walk in almost any big city—what did it mean to the Americans of the day? To the great majority, not very much. Like the dying child’s parents that Riis visited, they accepted their lot. Some harbored hopes: that they might still get a lucky break from the ever-turning roulette wheel of American capitalism; that their children would succeed if they did not; or that the virtuous poor would at least receive their reward in the Hereafter. Some of the poor also believed in the doctrine of rags to riches, the survival of the fittest; but the doctrine reflected more hope than reality. Even in Pittsburgh—reputedly the home of “shirtsleeve millionaires” like Carnegie—the iron and steel magnates “were largely the sons of businessmen, from upper-middle-class and upper-class backgrounds,” according to John Ingham. Yet the myth persisted.

  The condition and outlook of industrial labor posed the cardinal questions of the 1880s. The creation of new and immensely larger units of production, along with modernized technology and constantly expanding mechanization, tended to homogenize and flatten the “level of existence” for hundreds
of thousands of workers. The common work experiences that resulted laid the basis for the class solidarity that Marxists predicted. But powerful forces were working in other directions. The dynamism of technology in itself was a disruptive force, constantly interrupting work routines. The spread of technology varied widely, as a result of the play of the market and the availability of capital, with the result that some workers might be operating eighteenth-century machines while others were, technologically, entering the twentieth century. Thus skilled craft workers, accustomed to “controlling production” on the shop floor, often had to yield to the impersonal dominion of the machine.

  The main divisive forces, however, lay more in the workers than in their machines. The American working class, Gutman reminds us, was continually being “altered in its composition by infusions, from within and without the nation, of peasants, farmers, skilled artisans, and casual day laborers who brought into industrial society ways of work and other habits and values not associated with industrial necessities and the industrial ethos.” These persons brought their own cultures into the factories and the factory towns. They lived in their own social and political worlds composed of churches, schools, unions, political “machines,” baseball lots, even libraries, and—ubiquitously—saloons or “beer gardens.” They were not suddenly divested of this world as they passed through the factory gate.

  Amid this cultural diversity, immigrants and their offspring made up by far the most distinct and autonomous grouping. Of the 14,000 or so common laborers employed in the big Carnegie Pittsburgh plants, over 11,000 were Eastern Europeans. Underpaid, often given the meanest tasks, especially vulnerable to industrial accidents, these workers might have constituted a vast pool of militant opposition to the bosses. Sometimes they did—but more often they were the victims of illiteracy and misinformation, of intolerance and discrimination on the part of other employees as well as employers. Many, moreover, had no desire to stay in the United States. Often single, or married but with their wives left behind in the old country, they planned to save their money and return home. Their yearning for home was often sharpened by their work experiences. Wrote an Italian youth: