The Impact of Industrialism
I
ndustrialization Benefits the Middle Class:
Some Americans reaped the benefits defended by the industrialists. National wealth and income grew significantly between the late 1800s and the 1920s. Many middle-class Americans experienced greater comforts and conveniences in daily life. Industries’ technological advances enabled members of the middle and upper classes to talk with one another on the telephone, drive automobiles, eat fresher produce, and buy ready-made clothing. In 1907 Sears’ general catalog, known as the “Farmer’s Bible,” boasted over three million consumer goods for rural and urban shoppers. Department stores and management offices, new since industrialism, created thousands of new jobs for managers and technical workers. Clerical and sales positions also grew, and were filled mostly by an expanding female work force. In addition, a few industrial skilled workers were able to save enough money to move to better locations, buy property, or send their children to college.
Life for Average Americans
Most Americans at the turn of the century, however, viewed industrialism through a lens of drudgery and hardship. The majority of the population still used candlepower in their homes, has no indoor plumbing or heating, cooked on wood-fed stoves, and could not afford a telephone. They endured faulty water and sewage systems that failed to prevent pollution, typhoid, and cholera in urban centers. Only one quarter of the population owned property so most workers lived in crowded city tenements or employer-owned company towns. Employers often demanded high rent from company town residents, and paid their workers in scrip, a form of currency only valid in employer-owned stores, which had inflated prices. And although philanthropists like Stanford and Carnegie established universities for research and practical education, a mere 7% of Americans had a high school diploma in 1900. Finally, laborers had neither the time nor the money to enjoy the modern social organizations, country clubs, university alumni networks, and otherwise exclusive social clubs- that catered to the wealthy.
Industrial Working Conditions
Whether they toiled in steel mills, coal mines, garment factories, shipyards, or on railroad tracks, American laborers often faced deplorable working conditions. Men and women regularly worked 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week. In Carnegie steel mills, which operated continuously, two shifts were used. Once a month, when the shifts exchanged hours, laborers were required to stay for 24 hours straight. Industrial workers labored these long hours under intensely unhealthy conditions. In steel mills, the floors were so hot that water sizzled on them. In a furnace room, Bessemer converters belched fire and sparks. Hundreds of men were killed while working next to molten steel. Thousands of women, jammed elbow to elbow in sweatshop assembly lines, suffered permanent back injuries from crouching over tiny work spaces all day and night. Garment factories were stiflingly hot, and in the summer with the windows open, women worked amidst swarms of flies. Women worked so rapidly in garment factories they often plunged their sewing machine needle right through their fingers or bone, but had to keep on working. In addition to harmful working conditions, industrial laborers’ repetitious work evoked the feeling of becoming a machine. Modern industrial labor was especially dehumanizing and demoralizing for assembly line workers, who dreaded their destiny was to “become a hand-not a brain-not a soul-deadened into a part of a machine.”
Industrialism and Women
The rapid expansion of industry required a larger work force. Industrialists recruited women, children, ethnic minorities, and immigrants to play greater roles in industrial production. Women’s roles shifted significantly during the Industrial era, as more and more women entered the public work force. In particular, you, single woman carved a niche in newly created secretarial and sales positions in city department stores and “white collar” offices. For immigrant women, such as Jews in New York and Chicanas in Los Angeles, gainful employment was a crucial part of their families’ economic stability. By 1910 over 70% of all Jewish girls 16 years and older were working. However, women were usually paid less than the men in comparable positions. For example, female labors in the textile mills were paid 50% less than males working the same hours, and in some southern mills, pay for women worked dipped down to 10 cents for a 10-hour work day.
Child Labor
At the encouragement of poverty-stricken families and competitive businesses, approximately 1.75 million child laborers joined the industrial work force in the late 1800s. These laborers were mostly between the ages of 10 and 15, but some were as young as six. Boys and girls worked up to 15 hours a day in coal mines, canning factories, tobacco plants, and garment factories. Child labor was especially common in coal mines, especially after the U.S Geological Survey boosted the development of national mining efforts in 1879. Industrialists recruited children, usually small boys aged 10 to 12, to bend over mine chutes and pick out slate pieces from the coal. Common injuries in the mines included back deformities from long periods of hunching over, asthma from inhaling dust clouds, and cut, crushed, or broken fingers. Occasionally, a boy became mangled in the machinery or fell down a chute and turned up smothered to death. Many other industries employed and similarly harmed children, at the least stunting their growth from poorly ventilated and dimly lit workrooms, and at the most causing illness and death. For example, in tobacco operations, child laborers suffered from various problems, such as “sores on lips, cheeks, and hands… breathing the poison with which the room is saturated… skin diseases… nervous and hysterical complaints are common, the direct result of poisoning by nicotine.”
Minority and Immigrant Laborers
While white laborers worked in both skilled and unskilled jobs, nonwhite laborers were forced into mostly unskilled positions with low wages. Excluded from skilled positions, African Americans entering the work force after the Civil War sought unskilled jobs in factories rather than positions as domestic servants that hearkened back to slavery. African Americans competed for the menial jobs with immigrants from Mexico and China. To keep their jobs, workers from both groups accepted the lowest pay and toughest work schedule, often working seven days a week. For example, Chinese workers in San Francisco in 1889 made up 92% of the city’s cigar workers, an unskilled position paying $287 annually. That same year, mostly white laborers claimed 91% of San Francisco’s jobs as seamstresses and tailors, skilled positions paying $588 annually. Such differentiation of pay motivated many Chinese to opt for self-employment in such businesses as laundries and restaurants.
Business managers recruited various ethnic labor groups, whom they pitted against one another to the benefit of the industry. For example, they hired ethnic minority workers to break up labor union strikes, and pretended to support African Americans by establishing a black labor union called the American Unity Labor Union. Because African Americans appeared to side with business, white laborers bombed their homes, sent them threatening letters, and attacked them in public.
Low Pay and Reasons to Stay
However, despite the abysmal working conditions, most workers were grateful for employment in factories. Having left extreme poverty in rural America, southern and eastern Europe, China, and Mexico, most workers sought to keep jobs as long enough to return home richer, rejoin a wife or husband, or buy land in the United States. The work force had a competing supply of labor, including several million immigrants ready to work cheaply and over one million former soldiers returning home after the Civil War. Industrial managers were anxious to maximize factory efficiency, so they were quick to dismiss for any signs of slowness. With the constant threat of being fired, some industrial workers near the end of the nineteenth century were willing to take home pay as low as $5 a week, or 8 cents an hour. Even at the turn of the century, steel workers were paid 16 cents an hour, which kept thousands of families living at the poverty level.