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March 18 - March 29, 2019
Roughly 40–45 percent of American disposable income went to food in the late nineteenth century, and poor people spent the highest percentage of their income on subsistence. They could not afford to be picky. Until the 1890s and the growth of refrigeration, the poor had no place to store food, and they had little ready cash. As a result they bought food daily and in small quantities and always paid a premium. With little space to cook in crowded and often stifling apartments and little time after long hours of labor, workers, like workers elsewhere since the beginning of the industrial
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Refrigeration reduced spoilage, particularly of dairy products and meat, and decreased food-borne disease. Ice can claim credit for perhaps 50 percent of the improvement in nutrition in the 1890s, and with it the beginning of the rise in average height.106
Industrial accidents annually produced greater casualties, although not higher death rates, than Americans experienced in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican American War, and the Indian Wars. Mining, railroad work, construction, and labor in the steel and iron mills produced a toll of dead and injured to make it seem that the nation was producing “an army of cripples.”
Statistics are woefully incomplete, but between 1850 and 1880 the likelihood that American males between ten and fifty would die from accidental death rose by two-thirds, from 7 percent to 12 percent of total deaths. In 1860 railroad accidents accounted for fewer than 1 percent of the deaths among this male cohort; in 1890 the figure jumped to 3 percent. The dangers of work rose in every industrial country in the late nineteenth century, but they rose faster and higher in the United States, where work was more dangerous than elsewhere and far more dangerous than it would be a century later.21
By 1880 Leadville, with 14,820 inhabitants, was the second-biggest city in Colorado behind Denver, with 35,000, which said as much about the comparative lack of Coloradans as about the size of Leadville. One-third of the residents were immigrants: Irish, Cornish, Canadians, and Germans. Leadville was, as a traveler noted in Colorado, part of an “organized system of capitalists or corporations … The poor man, instead of working for himself is a day laborer for hire.” Mining meant industrial labor, and in the West, as in the East, industrial labor attracted a disproportionate number of
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Racial discrimination, and the exclusion of women from the vote, formed the greatest stains on democracy, but they were not the only ones. Gerrymandering remained ubiquitous, and it undercut equal representation. In Wisconsin the population of state legislative districts in 1887 ranged from 6,226 to 35,388, making a vote in the least populous district worth 5.68 times that in the largest district.
Corporations were already moving to a new device, the holding company, to escape the restraints imposed by state laws, and the Sherman Antitrust Act accelerated that movement. That no one voted against the bill in the House, and only one opposing vote was cast in the Senate, when it passed on July 2, 1890, demonstrated how little immediate danger the act posed to corporations.
Carnegie balanced his ability to make money with a serious engagement with ideas. This set him apart from other tycoons. His success in steel illustrated how American industry worked, the competitive pressures that shaped it, and the government programs that favored it. His own carefully cultivated image as the poor and grateful immigrant who pulled himself up by the bootstraps served to enshrine him along with Edison as symbols of the success of individualism and free labor. His writings demonstrated a real engagement with the problems of great wealth among pressing poverty. In thinking about
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By the 1890s, Carnegie had publicly distanced himself from the everyday running of his company. He presented himself as the businessman philosopher who had changed his responsibility from producing wealth to dispersing it for the benefit of society. He claimed that he, too, was a workingman; he granted the legitimacy of unions and attacked strikebreaking. Or at least this is what he said. His actions were somewhat different. He systematically undermined unions, increasingly pushed for reduced wages, and ultimately demanded ironclad contracts that would prohibit his employees from unionizing.
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Carnegie’s workers died and were injured in shocking numbers; they worked twelve-hour days in brutal conditions, six and eventually seven days a week. They worked amidst open furnaces, molten iron and steel, unstable stacks of beams and ingots, and exploding machinery. In the summer, the mills themselves might as well have been furnaces.
The twelve-hour day only worsened the strain. For this work, a furnace man got $2.25 for a twelve-hour shift and unskilled labor $1.40. Most workers got less than $2.00, and wages were dropping. There were no old men. If death or injury did not claim them, they quit before fifty.
His praise of Senator Leland Stanford, who founded Stanford University, as an example of how to disperse a fortune, ignored both how the fortune originated—like Carnegie’s, in public subsidies—and that the federal government was preparing to sue to retrieve the unpaid loans, which threatened to close the new university. It also presumed that Stanford’s wealth attested to his competence, to which few who knew Stanford would swear.
Male social life and drinking gravitated to a new, largely working-class institution, the saloon. By the 1890s Carnegie’s twelve-hour day was unusual. In Massachusetts the usual workday had shrunk to ten hours. The gradual decline of the working day and the limited space available to workers in their tenements and small houses, which left workers no room to entertain or meet friends at home, made the saloon a preferred site for male camaraderie.
Just as liberals had blamed the supposed racial deficiencies of black people for the failure of Reconstruction and blamed political corruption on immigrants, Walker blamed the racial deficiencies of immigrants for the growing social and economic problems that Riis described.
The House of Morgan often collaborated with the Jewish bankers in syndicates and avoided public expressions of anti-Semitism, but J. P. Morgan and his associates were old-stock Protestants, whose social network excluded Jews. By the turn of the century, Morgan designated his firm and the Baring Brothers as the only “white firms in New York.”
Like Booker T. Washington in a speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, she offered black workers as an alternative to striking immigrants. Pettey and other middle-class blacks, however, bridled at Washington’s willingness to confine virtually all black education to vocational education. She accepted class barriers; she resisted racial barriers. The South that middle-class black North Carolinians imagined would reward the “Best People,” both black and white.
The home remained the gravitational center of American thinking. The home had never seemed so endangered.
To increasing numbers of Americans, a dangerous inequality formed the rotten fruit of a system that had escaped their control. Larger and larger firms dominated the economy by the 1890s, wielding a power that seemed to match those of the governments that often enabled and abetted them. The economy produced the “dangerous classes,” the very rich and the very poor.
By the standard markers of health and well-being, life had grown worse, not better, for most Americans.
When Debs asked, “What is to be done?” part of the answer was easy, and Populists, Republicans, and most Democrats agreed on it: disavow Grover Cleveland and, as far as possible, prevent him from doing any more damage. So complete was the disaster of the Cleveland administration that the election should have been no contest at all. The events of the preceding four years had seemingly killed the chances of Democrats as the party of small government. Most members of Cleveland’s party treated him like an animated corpse, slowly decaying in the White House. He was an unpleasant and unfortunate
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It might seem that in this great age of invention and innovation, it was the inventors who pushed society forward. But Thomas Edison served more as a symbol of invention and less as the thing itself. Actual invention resulted from the hands and minds of tens of thousands of American tinkerers and mechanics.
Grant wrote that although he did not rejoice at the suffering of the South, whose soldiers had fought valiantly, their cause was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
Douglass embraced the idea of free and equal competition. He praised labor and said all that black people deserved was fair play and a chance to improve themselves. But he also said, “It is not fair play to start the negro out in life, from nothing and with nothing, while others start with the advantage of a thousand years behind them.”
They were certain that with slavery erased they had perfected the republic. The ensuing years, however, had sobered them and turned them inward. They had become more inclined to self-scrutiny, fuller of experience, but not “morbid or despondent.”
