American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Nothing job, nothing job,

  I return to Italy;

  Comrades, laborers, good-bye;

  Adieu, land of “Fourth of July.”

  Immigrant or not, a few American workers could establish their own work routines. Some were able to create their own “five-day week,” for example, long before either legislators or employers established it. They did this through weekend celebrations so hearty that they would arrive at the shop on Monday in no condition for work. Employers sometimes responded by shifting payday from Saturday to midweek.

  The impact of these many conflicting forces on working-class solidarity was inevitably a highly mixed one. In some cases, cultural influences reinforced solidarity—workers suffering discrimination in housing, for example, or sensing hostility to their religion, might well be reinforced in their class attitudes. But more typically in situations of “cross-pressures,” the heterogeneous forces won out, especially where immigrants peopled the work force. Radicals charged—often correctly—that corporation heads deliberately sowed disunity among their employees. But the main source of working-class division was a constellation of cultural forces—including the tendency of many workers to dream that they too could rise to the top of the industrial heap.

  The myth of rags to riches was a potent one, for it answered the questions of those who pointed to Americans’ egalitarian creed, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence and other official scrolls, and asked: How come? The catechismal answer was, individual opportunity and reward. Only money separated the lower class from the upper classes; to rise to the upper classes, one had only to make more money. Anyone could do this.

  Such answers ignored the fact that far more than money cut the lower classes off from opportunity: poor health, inadequate education, low motivation, crude speech and clothes, damaged self-esteem, dire poverty. Indeed, by the late nineteenth century something insidious and ominous was taking place in the vaunted land of liberty and equality—the continuation or creation of sets of social outcasts who comprised virtually an array of castes, who could not break out of their castes, and hence could hardly hope to rise through the class hierarchy.

  Few Americans of the day would have admitted that the land of the free had a caste system. Castes were alien, something one found and deplored in India. Black slaves had formed a kind of caste before the Civil War, it was granted, but had they not been liberated? It slowly became evident, however, that a black caste not only persisted in the South after Emancipation but that other castes endured or were developing in the United States, if a system of castes was defined as a closed and tenacious structure of social inequality, both in perceived status and in access to needed goods—a structure from which it was virtually impossible to escape, no matter what talents and virtues a person might possess.

  Some caste systems might be founded almost entirely on possessions or income, with the poorest so marked by physical and psychological want that they could not break out of their low caste, as in India. This was true to a degree in America, as in the case of impoverished immigrants. But caste in this country was largely ethnic and racial. Money was the warm solvent of social class, given enough time, but money could not wash away caste walls.

  The wealthy Jews who settled Manhattan’s sixties and seventies, east of Fifth Avenue, could testify to this. These were the Seligmans, Loebs, Strauses, Lilienthals, Morgenthaus, Rosenwalds, and a score of other families of German origin. Such families, Stephen Birmingham judged, were the closest thing to “Aristocracy—Aristocracy in the best sense—that the city, and perhaps the country, had seen.” They had fine houses, servants, carriages, country estates, and of course lots of money. With their leadership in New York finance and their close ties to Washington, they had a measure of economic and political power.

  But they could not join Manhattan’s Four Hundred or the exclusive men’s clubs or other select circles; in this sense they were social outcasts. As in centuries past, they took refuge in their own community and solidarity—in “our crowd,” with its active social life, in intermarriage among elite Jewish families, partnerships within the family, wills and trusts that tied generations together. They also took refuge in their own hierarchy. Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal had arrived in Manhattan as early as the mid-seventeenth century, some on a bark that came to be known as the “Jewish Mayflower.” Numbering Baruchs, Nathans, Cardozos, Hendrixes, they stood for old wealth, fine manners, and established Judaism. The Sephardim tended to look down on the more recently arrived German Jews, with their “pushy” ways, show-off clothes and jewelry, loud speech, and status insecurities. In their turn the Germans, proud of their own background, education, and culture, clung to their own clubs and ran down the hordes of other Ashkenazic Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, with their coarse speech, dress, and manners.

  Even the upthrust hand of the Statue of Liberty, in its temporary home at Fifth Avenue and 26th Street, seemed to separate Sephardic Jews from the Germans. The latter, according to Birmingham, were put off by Emma Lazarus’s line, “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” They may have arrived penniless, but they were not human litter. Raising Jewish money to put Miss Liberty on Bedloe’s Island became largely a Sephardic effort.

  Poor Jews in ghettos could not afford such fine airs. Fleeing the oppression and persecution in Eastern Europe—especially the pogroms that had erupted in Russia after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881—these immigrants had survived the adventurous crossing of Europe, the fetid Atlantic steerage, and the callous examination by immigration officials, only to land in a new ghetto in New York or other cities. Dumped ashore on the Battery, a youth of sixteen walked into the stench and noise of the Lower East Side, where dirty children played in the street and noisy, sweating Jews pushed peddlers’ carts, and wondered, “Was this the America we had sought? Or was it only, after all, a circle that we had travelled, with a Jewish ghetto at its beginning and its end?”

  For most such Jews the Lower East Side was indeed a ghetto, and they too were social outcasts, taunted even by other immigrants. By 1890 over five hundred persons lived there per acre, a density greater than in the worst sections of Bombay; living conditions, in Irving Howe’s judgment, “were quite as ghastly as those of early-nineteenth-century London.” At least half the employed Jews worked in the garment industry, notorious already for its sixty- to eighty-four-hour workweek and its wages (in 1885) of $7 to $10 a week for men, $3 to $6 for women, and $12 to $15 for whole families. Even more depressing was the Lower East Side environment: the squalor, filth, and disease, the pushing and shoving, and the feverish quest for money that so affronted Jews imbued with older and more spiritual traditions.

  And the Jews were so conspicuous, at least to Jacob Riis. “No need of asking here where we are,” he told his readers as he escorted them into “Jewtown.” The signs along the sidewalk, the manners and dress of the people, “their unmistakable physiognomy,” betrayed their race at every step, Riis said.

  “Men with queer skull-caps, venerable beard, and the outlandish long-skirted kaftan of the Russian Jew, elbow the ugliest and the handsomest women in the land. The contrast is startling. The old women are hags; the young, houris. Wives and mothers at sixteen, at thirty they are old. So thoroughly has the chosen people crowded out the Gentiles in the Tenth Ward that, when the great Jewish holidays come around every year, the public schools in the district have practically to close up.” “Hebrews” were not only overflowing Jewtown, Riis said, but buying up or rebuilding the tenements. He noted the taunts that greeted the invaders. “But abuse and ridicule are not weapons to fight the Israelite with. He pockets them quietly with the rent and bides his time.”

  In their living conditions, poor newly arrived Jews were probably no worse off than Irish and Italians. In a brotherhood of misery, all the “refuse” shared in the conditions of squalor, disease, overwork, and—above all—inescapable crowdedness. Immigration was rising to new peaks in the early 1880s—almost
3 million streamed in during the five years after 1880—and the vast majority settled in New York and other cities. From 1820 to 1900, 17 million arrived from Europe alone—6 million from Germany and Austria, almost 4 million from Ireland, over 3 million from Great Britain, a million and a half from Scandinavia, perhaps a million from Russia and Eastern Europe.

  Invidious distinctions fragmented the fraternity of the poor newcomers. The British were mainly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and they spoke English, if not American. Northern Germans and northern Europeans were mainly Protestants, but did not speak English. Irish spoke English and Gaelic and were mainly Catholic. Most Italians were Catholic and did not speak any form of English. Eastern Europeans had compounded troubles. But no immigrant group was as segregated as the Jews, with their alien languages, customs, costumes, religion, and origins in the strange, far-off shtetls of Eastern Europe.

  Still, all these ethnic groups were white. Whatever they had to overcome in the way of language, custom, low self-esteem, and bigotry, at least they did not have to overcome the color of their skin or a heritage of enslavement. At the bottom of the caste system lay, as usual, black workers and their families, although the conditions of their existence reflected the immense diversity of America.

  Somewhat typical of American cities as a whole, but more harshly symbolic than any, were the work and life of blacks in the nation’s capital. In Washington, D.C., in 1870 there were. 133 black carpenters, 410 black waiters, and one black lawyer. Cheek by jowl with the big marble government buildings were the alleyways lined with brick hovels. Washington had its shantytowns too, such as “Murder Bay”—a “vile place, both physically and morally,” an official reported. Poor blacks were sharply segregated: by century’s end over 90 percent of all alley dwellers were black, making up more than one-fourth of the capital’s Negro population.

  Writing on the “color line” in Manhattan, Jacob Riis observed, “There is no more clean and orderly community in New York than the new settlement of colored people that is growing up on the East Side from Yorkville to Harlem.” He noted particularly their “cleanliness”—in this respect, he said, the Negro was “immensely the superior of the lowest of the whites, the Italians and the Polish Jews, below whom he has been classed in the past in the tenant scale.” Even the Real Estate Record reported agents agreeing that Negro tenants were clean, orderly, and “profitable.” Why, then, did blacks have to pay higher rents for the “poorest and most stinted rooms”? Because whites would not live in the same house with blacks. “Once a colored house,” said the agents, “always a colored house.”

  Race bias prevailed over objective facts. A Welshman traveling to the coal fields of West Virginia was warned that “the niggars were a most treacherous, devilish lot of people” who had to be kept down by being knocked down. On his way, however, he met two young black women of about eighteen, and they spoke to him so sweetly and melodiously that he said to himself, “By jove, if all the niggars are like these girls, I am jolly glad I came down here.” He came to be extremely fond of the blacks who worked in the mines and lived in shacks round about, and came to hate the “contemptible” and “ignorant” whites who treated the blacks so abominably on and off the job.

  Not that the “niggar” was without faults, the Welshman added. “By nature he is an awful thief,” with chickens and turkeys his specialty, “but if you catch him in the act, he is not a vicious thief; he will only turn around and make up some cock-and-bull story to account for it.” He was “outrageously lazy,” and immoral to boot. “They eat, cook, and sleep all through and through—men, women, girls, and boys, makes no difference to them. Few of them go through the form of legal marriage but the greater number live in adultery and when they get tired of one another they change partners.” Still, he liked them.

  Perhaps the most integrated workers in America, during the late nineteenth century, were the cowhands in the western cattle ranges. About one-third of the 35,000 men who traveled up the trail from Texas during the “heroic age” of the cattle industry, according to the least unreliable estimates, were “Negroes and Mexicans,” with the former outnumbering the latter perhaps two to one. Trailherd outfits often included a black cook, horse wrangler, and trail hand or two, out of a dozen or so men. Blacks were seen as having a special feel for horses and a knack for “singing” to the steers. Veteran black cowhands often showed the ropes to white greenhorns, as a black Cherokee did to a youngster named Will Rogers. In town, however, things were different. Black and white cowhands usually sat toward opposite ends of the bar; a black man might at best eat in the kitchen of a cafe; and a black would never, never enter a white house of prostitution. White cowhands, however, frequented black whorehouses.

  Thus the color line wove its way through the complex fabric of human relationships. And that line deepened and hardened as the years passed. In New York, Riis noted that blacks were arriving from Southern cities bringing skills they could not use in the North, and even among native blacks the “colored barber” was disappearing. In the South, the caste system that had been shaken up by Civil War and Reconstruction was tightening toward the end of the century as a result of the rising Jim Crow system and attitudes of white supremacy. He doubted, said Senator James Vardaman of Mississippi, that the “coconut-headed, chocolate-colored, typical coon” who “blacks my shoes every morning” was fit for citizenship. Lynchings of blacks rose sharply after the early eighties.

  Thousands of black workers moved into industrial cities, where they often took jobs as scabs and found themselves pitted against striking whites. Others moved west; the huge “Kansas Exodus” of 1879 brought thousands of Southern blacks to a state where, with mixed memories of “Bleeding Kansas,” their new neighbors might or might not be friendly. A few blacks moved into the Plains states and points farther west, joining the waves of migration reaching across the western half of the nation. There they encountered a race that was being compressed into another segregated caste—the native Americans called Indians.

  In the 1860s and 1870s the old, grim sequence—migration by white settlers, Indian resistance, violent confrontations, military suppression of the red people, continued migration—was asserting itself as remorselessly as before the Civil War. Only the nature of the migration had changed: whites—and blacks—might now come by train as well as by Conestoga wagon.

  From a high ridge, Cheyennes somberly watched one of the first Union Pacific trains running along new track laid into the Platte forks. Riding down to “see what sort of trail” the train had left, they ingeniously figured how to derail the next “big wagon” with a heavy stick forced into the rails. The next wagon turned out to be a tiny handcar pumped by five maintenance men. As the car jumped high into the air, the men spilled out and fled, only to be hunted down and killed by the Cheyennes. Elated, the Indians bent a rail and derailed a whole train, which they plundered. Soon they were racing over the prairies with bolts of muslin and calico tied to their ponies’ tails and unraveling behind them.

  White men wanted the red people to “settle,” just like themselves. But Ten Bears, of the Comanches, refused to lead his people into a reservation. “I don’t want to settle,” he told a big Indian gathering. “I love to roam over the prairies. There I feel free and happy, but when I settle down I feel pale and die. A long time ago this land belonged to our fathers; but when I go up the river”—the Arkansas—“I see camps of soldiers on its banks. These soldiers cut down my timber; they kill my buffalo; and when I see that it feels as if my heart would burst with sorrow.”

  The Sioux of the Great Plains fit the white stereotype, reflected in Hollywood Westerns and shown on Indian-head nickels, of the nomadic, warlike Indian, living off the open country and the buffalo. The Sioux, indeed, were the nouveaux riches among the western Indians, where wealth was measured not in money but in food and military prowess. They were a martial tribe, cultivating youthfulness, male strength, competitiveness, and individual achievement, as well as female beauty and pur
ity. In their religious fervor, young men tortured themselves in exchange for supernatural power and social prestige. They danced to the point of exhaustion, and suspended themselves from cords and skewers which pierced their skin. A religiously inspired Ghost Dance was the last Sioux uprising. It ended in the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee.

  The Sioux were true nomads. In their encampments the braves, wearing long buffalo skin robes, gathered in a circle at the center of the village. They clustered around a ring of buffalo skulls, over which the older men passed their weapons, prayed, and offered sacrifices. This ceremony prepared them for their imminent departure to seek buffalo for food and heavy winter furs. Then the camp broke. Baggage was loaded onto pack-horses, called “mystery dogs,” while the women walked. The women were responsible for everything but the kill itself and the spiritual rites of the kill—they butchered the downed animals, tanned the hides, dried the meat.

  Other Indians were as settled as any white, though in their own traditions. The Pacific Indians of the Southwest—farmers, town-dwellers, weavers, potters—seemed almost the opposite of the Sioux. Related linguistically to the Aztecs of Mexico, the Zuni and Hopi shared many of their achievements. Dependent on the corn they grew and hence on water, they built elaborate irrigation systems—and organized religious ceremonies around the need for rain. The Hopis conducted their famed snake dance in the hope that the feted reptile would report to the gods such favorable treatment that rain would result.