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"We Took Great Store of Codfish and Called it Cape Cod:" Bartholomew Gosnold Sails Along Northeastern North America, 1602: “We Took Great Store of Codfish and Called it Cape Cod:” Bartholomew Gosnold Sails Along Northeastern North America, 1602

Compared to the French, Spanish, and Dutch, the English were slow to develop an interest in North American colonization By the later part of the sixteenth century, however, a group of interested and well-connected Englishmen with experience in Irish colonization began to consider permanent settlements in North America. Bartholomew Gosnold undertook a small prospecting expedition on the vessel Concord in 1602, passing down the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts to explore the northern Virginia coast. Gosnold was the first European to see and set foot on Cape Cod—which received its name for its abundance of cod fish—and built a small fur trading station there. The successful voyage enticed English colonization efforts to turn toward this part of North America. Four years later, Gosnold commanded a voyage to bring the first colonists to Jamestown, Virginia. Several accounts of the 1602 prospecting expedition quickly appeared in print.; this complete one was first published by Samuel Purchas in 1625.

Gabriel Archer:

The said captain did set sail from Falmouth the day and year above written accompanied with thirty-two persons, whereof eight mariners and sailors, twelve purposing upon the discovery to return with the ship for England, the rest remain there for population….

The seventh of May following, we first saw many birds in bigness of cliff pigeons, and after divers others as petrels, coots, hagbuts, penguins, mews, gannets, cormorants, gulls, with many else in our English tongue of no name. The eighth of the same the water changed to a yellowish green, where at seventy fathoms we had ground. The ninth, we had two-and-twenty fathoms in fair sandy ground, having upon our lead many glittering stones, somewhat heavy, which might promise some mineral matter in the bottom, we held ourselves by computation, well near the latitude of 43 degrees.

The tenth we sounded in 27, 30, 37, 43 fathoms, and then came to 108. Some thought it to be the sounding of the westernmost end of Saint John’s Island; upon this bank we saw sculls of fish in great numbers. The twelfth, we hoisted out hawser of our shallop, and sounding had then eighty fathoms without any current perceived by William Streete the master, one hundred leagues westward from Saint Mary’s, till we came to the aforesaid soundings, continually passed fleeting by us sea-oare, which seemed to have their movable course towards the north-east; a matter to set some subtle invention on work, for comprehending the true cause thereof. The thirteenth, we sounded in seventy fathoms, and observed great beds of weeds, much wood, and divers things else floating by us, when as we had smelling of the shore, such as from the southern Cape and Andalusia, in Spain. The fourteenth, about six in the morning, we descried land that lay north, &c., the northerly part we called the north land, which to another rock upon the same lying twelve leagues west, that we called Savage Rock (because the savages first showed themselves there); five leagues towards the said rock is an out point of woody ground, the trees thereof very high and straight, from the rock east-north-east. From the said rock came towards us a Biscay shallop with sail and oars, having eight persons in it, whom we supposed at first to be Christians distressed. But approaching us nearer, we perceived them to be savages. These coming within call, hailed us, and we answered. Then after signs of peace, and a long speech by one of them made, they came boldly aboard us, being all naked, saving about their shoulders certain loose deer skins, and near their wastes seal skins tied fast like to Irish dimmie trousers. One that seemed to be their commander wore a waistcoat of a black work, a pair of breeches, cloth stockings, shoes, hat and band, one or two more had also a few things made by some Christians; these with a piece of chalk described the coast thereabouts, and could name Placentia of Newfoundland; they spoke divers Christian words, and seemed to understand much more than we, for want of language could comprehend. These people are in color swart, their hair long, uptied with a knot in the part of behind the head. They paint there bodies which are strong and well proportioned. These much desire our longer stay, but finding ourselves short of our purposed place, we set sail westward, leaving them and their coast. About sixteen leagues south-west from thence we perceived in that course two small island, the one lying eastward from Savage Rock, the other to the southward of it; the coast we left was full of goodly woods, fair plains, with little green round hills above the cliffs appearing unto us, which are indifferently raised, but all rocky, and of shining stones, which might have persuaded us a longer stay there.

The fifteenth day we had again sight of the land, which made ahead, being as we thought an island, by reason of a large sound that appeared westward between it and the main, for coming to the west end thereof, we did perceive a large opening, we called it Shoal Hope. Near this cape we came to fathom anchor in fifteen fathoms, where we took great store of codfish, for which we altered the name, and called it Cape Cod. Here we saw sculls of herring, mackerel, and other small fish, in great abundance. This is a low sandy shoal, but without danger, also we came to anchor again in sixteen fathoms, fair by the land in the latitude of 42 degrees. This cape is well near a mile broad, and lieth north-east by east. The captain went here a shore and found the ground to be full of pease, strawberries, whortleberries, &c., as then unripe, the sand also by the shore somewhat deep, the firewood there by us taken in was of cypress, birch, witch-hazel and beech. A young Indian came here to the captain, armed with his bow and arrows, and had certain plates of copper hanging at his ears; he showed a willingness to help us in our occasions.

The sixteenth, we trended the coast southerly, which was all champaign and full of grass, but the island somewhat woody. Twelve leagues from Cape Cod, we descried a point with some breach, a good distance off, and keeping our luff to double it, we came onto the sudden into shoal water, yet well quitted ourselves thereof. This breach we called Tucker’s Terror, upon his expressed fear. The point we named Point Care; having passed it we bore up again with the land, and in the night came with it anchoring in eight fathoms, the ground good.

The seventeenth, appeared many breaches round about us, so as we continued that day without remove.

The eighteenth, being fair we sent forth the boat, to sound over a breach, that in our course lay of another point, by us called Gilbert’s Point, who returned us four, five, six, and seven fathoms over. Also, a discovery of divers islands which after proved to be hills and hammocks, distinct within the land. This day there came unto the ship’s side divers canoes, the Indians apparelled as aforesaid, with tobacco and pipes steeled with cooper, skins, artificial strings and other trifles to barter; one had hanging about his neck a plate of rich copper, in length a foot, in breadth half a foot for a breastplate, the ears of all the rest had pendants of copper. Also, one of them had his face painted over, and head stuck with feathers in manner of turkey-cock’s train. These are more timorous than those of the Savage Rock, yet very thievish.

The nineteenth, we passed over the breach of Gilbert’s Point in four or five fathoms, and anchored a league or somewhat more beyond it; between the last two points are two leagues, the interim along shoal water, the latitude here is degrees two third parts.

The twentieth, by the ship’s side, we there killed penguins, and saw many sculls of fish. The coast from Gilbert’s Point to the supposed isles lieth east and by south. Here also we discovered two inlets which might promise fresh water, inwardly whereof we perceived much smoke, as though some population had there been. This coast is very full of people, for that as we trended the same savages still run along the shore, as men much admiring at us.

The one-and-twentieth, we went coasting from Gilbert’s Point to the supposed isles, in ten, nine, eight, seven, and six fathoms, close aboard the shore, and that depth lieth a league off. A little from the supposed isles, appeared unto us an opening, with which we stood, judging it to be the end of that which Captain Gosnold descried from Cape Cod, and as he thought to extend some thirty or more miles in length, and finding there but three fathoms a league off, we omitted to make further discovery of the same, calling it Shoal Hope.

From this opening the main lieth south-west, which coasting along we saw a disinhabited island, which so afterward appeared unto us: we bore with it, and named it Martha’s Vineyard; from Shoal Hope it is eight leagues in circuit, the island is five miles, and hath 41 degrees and one quarter of latitude. The place most pleasant; for the two-and-twentieth, we went ashore, and found it full of wood, vines, gooseberry bushes, whortleberries, raspberries, eglantines, &c. Here we had cranes, stearnes, shoulers, geese, and divers other beards which there at that time upon the cliffs being sandy with some rocky stones, did breed and had young. In this place we saw deer: here we rode in eight fathoms near the shore which we took great store of cod,—as before at Cape Cod, but much better.

The three-and-twentieth we weighed, and towards night came to anchor at the north-west part of the island, where the next morning offered unto us fast running thirteen savages apparelled as aforesaid, and armed with bows and arrows without any fear. They brought tobacco, deer-skins, and some sodden fish. These offered themselves unto us in great familiarity, who seemed to be well-conditioned. They came more rich in copper than any before. This island is sound, and hath no danger about it.

The four-and-twentieth, we set sail and doubled the Cape of another island next unto it, which we called Dover Cliff, and then came into a fair sound , where we rode all night; the next morning we sent of one boat to discover another cape, that lay between us and the main, from which were a ledge of rocks a mile into the sea, but all above water, and without danger; we went about them, and came to anchor in eight fathoms, a quarter of a mile from the shore, in one of the stateliest sounds that ever I was in. this called we Gosnold’s Hope; the north bank whereof is the main, which strecheth east and west. This island Captain Gosnold called Elizabeth’s isle, where we determined our abode: the distance between every of these island is, viz. From Martha’s Vineyard to Dover Cliff, half a league over the sound, thence to Elizabeth’s isle, one league distant. From Elizabeth’s island unto the main is four leagues. On the north side, near adjoining unto the island Elizabeth, is an islet in compass half a mile, full of cedars, by me called Hill’s Hap, to the northward of which, in the mouth of an opening on the main, appeareth another the like, that I called Hap’s Hill, for that I hope much hap may be expected from it.

The five-and-twentieth, it was that we came from Gosnold’s Hope. The six-and-twentieth, we trimmed and fitted up our shallop. The seven-and-twentieth, there came unto us an Indian and two women, the one we supposed to be his wife, the other his daughter, both clean and straight-bodied, with countenance sweet and pleasant. To these the Indian gave heedful attendance for that they shewed them in much familiarity with our men, although they would not admit of any immodest touch.

The eight-and-twentieth we entered counsel about our abode and plantation, which was concluded to be in the west part of Elizabeth’s island. The north-east thereof running from out of our ken. The south and north standeth in an equal parallel. This island in the westernside admitteth some in creeks, or sandy coves, so girded, as the water in some places of each side meeteth, to which the Indians from the main do often-times resort for fishing of crabs. There is eight fathoms very near the shore, and the latitude here is 41 degrees 11 minutes, the breadth from sound to sound in the western part is not passing a mile at most, altogether unpeopled and disinhabited. It is overgrown with wood and rubbish, viz. Oaks, ashes, beech, walnut, witch-hazle, sassafras, and cedars, with divers others of unknown names. The rubbish is wild pease, young sassafras, cherry-trees, vines, eglantines, gooseberry bushes, hawthorn, honeysuckles, with other of like quality. The herbs and roots are strawberries, raspberries, ground-nuts, alexander, surrin, tansy, &c. without count. Touching the fertility of the soil by our own experience made, we found it to be excellent for sowing some English pulse; it sprouted out in one fortnight almost half a foot. In this island is a stage or pond of fresh water, in circuit two miles, on the one side not distant from the sea thirty yards, in the centre whereof is a rocky islet, containing near an acre of ground full of wood, on which we began our fort and place of abode, disposing itself so fit for the same. These Indians call gold wassador, which argueth there is thereof in the country.

The nine-and-twentieth, we labored in getting of sassafras, rubbishing our little fort or islet, new keeling our shallop, and making a punt or flat-bottom boat to pass to and fro our fort over the fresh water, the powder of sassafras, in twelve hours cured one of our company that had taken a great surfeit, by eating the bellies of dog fish, a very delicious meat.

The thirtieth, Captain Gosnold, with divers of his company, went upon pleasure in the shallop towards Hill’s Hap to view it and the sandy cove, and returning brought with him a canoe that four Indians had there left, being fled away for fear of our English, which we brought into England.

The one-and-thirtieth, Captain Gosnold, desirous to see the main because of the distance, he set sail over; where coming to anchor, went ashore with certain of his company, and immediately there presented unto him men, women, and children, who, with all courteous kindness entertained him, giving him certain skins of wild beasts, which may be rich furs, tobacco, turtles, hemp, artificial strings colored, chains, and such like things as at the instant they had about them. These are a fair-conditioned people. On all the sea-coast along we found mussel shells that in color did represent mother-of-pearl, but not having means to dredge, could not apprehend further knowledge thereof. This main is the goodliest continent that ever we saw, promising more by far than we any did expect for it is replenished with fair fields, and in them fragrant flowers, also meadows, and hedged in with stately groves, being furnished also with pleasant brooks, and beautiful with two main rivers that (as we judge) may haply become good harbors, and conduct us to the hopes men so greedily do thirst after. In the mouth of one of these inlets or rivers, lieth that little isle before mentioned, called Hap’s Hill, from which unto the westernmost end of the main, appearing where the other inlet is, I account some five leagues, and the coast between bendeth like a bow, and lieth east and by north. Beyond these two inlets we might perceive the main to bear up south-west, and more southerly. Thus with this taste of discovery, we now contented ourselves, and the same day made return unto our fort, time not permitting more sparing delay.

The first of June, we employed ourselves in getting sassafras, and the building of our fort. The second, third, and fourth, we wrought hard to make ready our house for the provision to be had ashore to sustain us till our ship’s return. This day from the main came to our ship’s side a canoe, with their lord or chief commander, for that they made little stay only pointing to the sun, as in sign that the next day he would come and visit us, which he did accordingly.

The fifth, we continued our labor, when there came unto us ashore from the main fifty savages, stout and lusty men with their bows and arrows; amongst them there seemed to be one of authority, because the rest made an inclining respect unto him. The ship was at their coming a league off, and Captain Gosnold aboard, and so likewise Captain Gilbert, who almost never went ashore, the company with me only eight persons. These Indians in hasty manner came towards us, so as we thought fit to make a stand at an angle between the sea and fresh water; I moved myself towards him seven or eight steps, and clapped my hands first on the sides of mine head, then on my breast, and after presented my musket with a threatening countenance, thereby to signify unto them, either a choice of peace or war, whereupon he using me with mine own signs of peace, I stepped forth and embraced him; his company then all sat down in manner like greyhounds upon their heels, with whom my company fell a bettering. By this time Captain Gosnold was come with twelve men more from aboard, and to show the savage seignior that he was our captain, we received him in a guard, which he passing through, saluted the seignior with ceremonies of our salutations whereat he nothing moved or altered himself. Our Captain gave him a straw hat and a pair of knives; the hat awhile he wore, but the knives he beheld with great marveling, being very bright and sharp; this our courtesy made them all in love with us.

The sixth, being rainy, we spent idly aboard. The seventh, the seignior came again with all his troop as before, and continued with us the most part of the day, we going to dinner about noon, they sat with us and did eat of our bacaleure and mustard, drank of our beer, but the mustard nipping them in their noses they could not endure: it was a sport to behold their faces made being bitten therewith. In time of dinner the savages had stole a target, wherewith acquainting the seignior, with fear and great trembling they restored it again, thinking perhaps we would have been revenged for it, but seeing our familiarity to continue, they fell afresh to roasting of crabs, red herrings, which were exceeding great, ground nuts &c. as before. Our dinner ended, the seignior first took leave and departed, next all the rest saving four that stayed and went into the wood to help us dig sassafras, whom we desired to go aboard us, which they refused and so departed….

The eighteenth, we set sail and bore for England….The three-and-twentieth of July we came to anchor before Exmouth.

Source: Gabriel Archer, Gosnold’s Settlement at Cuttyhunk (Boston: Old South Work, 1902), 1–11.

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A Letter Home From Massachusetts Bay in 1631: A Letter Home From Massachusetts Bay in 1631

Over 20,000 migrants from England crossed the Atlantic to the new colony of Massachusetts Bay in the decade of the 1630s. This sudden influx of settlers became known to historians as the “Great Migration.” Once in New England, they quickly dispersed to various towns. About forty families followed Sir Richard Saltonstall and the Reverend George Phillips four miles up the Charles River to found the community of Watertown in July 1630. Many had relocated from the East Anglian region of England, where William Pond, the correspondent’s father, lived. These families attempted to set up a familiar farm economy based on grain and livestock, but early dreams of an easy trade with the Indians proved elusive. Their concerns focused on feeding themselves and achieving economic sufficiency.

__ Pond to William Pond, March 15, 1631

To my loving father William Pond, at Etherston in Suffolk give this.

MOST LOVING & KIND FATHER & MOTHER, My humble duty remembered unto you, trusting in God you are in good health, & I pray remember my love unto my brother Joseph & thank him for his kindness that I found at his hand at London, . . . I know, loving father, & do confess that I was an undutiful child unto you when I lived with you & by you, for the which I am much sorrowful & grieved for it, trusting in God that he will guide me that I will never offend you so any more & I trust in God that you will forgive me for it. My writing unto you is to let you understand what a country this New England is where we live. Here are but few [Indians], a great part of them died this winter, it was thought it was of the plague. They are a crafty people & they will [cozen] & cheat, & they are a subtle people, & whereas we did expect great store of beaver here is little or none to be had. They are proper men & . . . many of them go naked with a skin about their loins, but now sum of them get Englishmen’s apparel; & the country is very rocky and hilly & some champion ground & the soil is very [fruitful], & here is some good ground and marsh ground, but here is no Michaelmas. Spring cattle thrive well here, but they give small store of milk. The best cattle for profit is swines & a good swine is her at £5 price, and a goose worth £2 a good one got. Here is timber good store & acorns good store, and here is good store of fish if we had boats to go for & lines to serve to fishing. . . . & people here are subject to diseases, for here have died of the scurvy & of the burning fever nigh too hundred & odd; beside as many lie lame & all Sudbury men are dead but three & three women & some children, & provisions are here at a wonderful rate. . . . If this ship had not come when it did we had been put to a wonderful straight, but thanks be to God for sending of it in. I received from the ship a hogshead of meal, & the Governor telleth me of a hundred weight of cheese the which I have received part of it. I humbly thank you for it. I did expect two cows, the which I had none, nor I do not earnestly desire that you should send me any, because the country is not so as we did expect it. Therefore, loving father, I would entreat you that you would send me a firkin of butter & a hogshead of malt unground, for we drink nothing but water, & a coarse clothe of four pound price so it be thick. For the freight, if you of your love will send them I will pay the freight, for here is nothing to be got without we had commodities to go up to the East parts amongst the Indians to truck, for here where we live here is no beaver. Here is no cloth to be had to make no apparel, & shoes are a 5s a pair for me, & that cloth that is worth 2s 8d is worth here 5s. So I pray, father, send me four or five yards of cloth to make some apparel, & loving father, though I be far distant from you yet I pray you remember me as your child, & we do not know how long we may subsist, for we can not live here without provisions from old England. Therefore, I pray do not put away your shop stuff, for I think that in the end, if I live, it must be my living, for we do not know how long this plantation will stand, for some of the magnates that did uphold it have turned off their men & have given it over. Besides, God hath taken away the chiefest stud in the land, Mr. Johnson & the lady Arabella his wife, which was the chiefest man of estate in the land & one that would have done most good.

Here came over 25 passengers & their came back again four score & odd persons, & as many more would a come if they had wherewithal to bring them home, for are many that came over the last year which was worth two hundred pounds afore they came ought of old England that between this & Micahelmas will be hardly worth £30. So here we may live if we have supplies every year from old England, otherwise we can not subsist. I may, as I will, work hard, set an acre of [English] wheat, & if we do not set it with fish & that will cost 20 s., if we set it without fish they shall have but a poor crop. So father, I pray, consider of my cause, for here will be but a very poor being, no being without loving father, your help with provisions from old England. I had thought to come home in this ship, for my provisions were almost all spent, but that I humbly thank you for your great love & kindness in sending me some provisions or else I should & mine a been half famished, but now I will, if it please God that I have my health, I will plant what corn I can, & if provisions be not cheaper between this & Michaelmas & that I do not hear from you what I was best to do, I purpose to some home at Michaelmas.

My wife remembers her humble duty unto you & to my mother, & my love to brother Joseph & to Sarey Myler. Thus I leave you to the protection of Almighty God.

Watertown, New England, [no signature]

Source: Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd Series, vol. 8 (Boston, 1892–1894), 471–73.

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Metacom Relates Indian Complaints about the English Settlers, 1675: Metacom Relates Indian Complaints about the English Settlers, 1675

Metacom or King Philip, leader of the Wampanoags near Plymouth colony, led many other Indians into a widespread revolt against the colonists of southern New England in 1675. The conflict had been brewing for some time over a set of longstanding grievances between Europeans and Indians. In that tense atmosphere, John Easton, Attorney General of the Rhode Island colony, met Philip in June of 1675 in an effort to negotiate a settlement. Easton recorded Philip’s complaints, including the steady loss of Wampanoag land to the Europeans; the English colonists’ growing herds of cattle and their destruction of Indian crops; and the unequal justice Indians received in the English courts. This meeting between Easton and Metacom proved futile, however, and the war (which became the bloodiest in U.S. history relative to the size of the population) began late that month.

So Philip kept his Men in Armes. Plimoth Gouverner required him to disband his Men, and informed him his Jealousy was false. Philip answered he would do no Harm, and thanked the Governer for his Information.

The three Indians were hungry, to the last denied the Fact; but one broke the Halter as it is reported, then desired to be saved, and so was a littell while, then confessed they three had dun the Fact; and then he was hanged. And it was reported Saussomon before his death had informed of the Indian Plot, and that if the Indians knew it they wold kill him, and that the Heathen might destroy the English for their Wickedness, as God had permitted the Heathen to destroy the Israellites of olde. So the English were afraid and Philip was afraid, and both increased in Arms. But for forty Yeares Time, Reports and jealosys of War had bin very frequent, that we did not think that now a War was breaking forth; but about a Week before it did, we had Cause to think it would. Then to endeavor to prevent it, we lent a Man to Philip, that is he would come to the Ferry we would come over to speak with him. About four Miles we had to come; thither our Messenger come to them; they not aware of it behaved themselves as furious, but suddenly appeased when they understood who he was and what he came for, he called his Counsell and agreed to come to us; came himself unarmed, and about 40 of his Men armed. Then 5 of us went over, 3 were Magistrates. We sate very friendly together. We told him our business was to endeavor that they might not receive or do Rong. They said that was well; they had dun no Rong, the English ronged them. We said we knew the English said the Indians ronged them, and the Indians said the English ronged them, but our Desire was the Quarrell might rightly be decided, in the best Way, and not as Dogs decided their Quarrells. The Indians owned that fighting was the worst Way; then they propounded how Right might take Place. We said, by Arbitration. They said that all English agreed against them, and so by Arbitration they had had much Rong; many Miles square of Land so taken from them, for English would have English Arbitrators; and once they were persuaded to give in their Armes, that thereby Jealousy might be removed, and the English having their Arms wold not deliver them as they had promised, untill they consented to pay a 1OOpo, (100 pounds)and now they had not so much Sum or Muny; that they were as good be Idled as leave all their Livelihode.

We said they might chuse a Indian King and the English might chuse the Governor of New Yorke, that nether had Case to say either were Parties in the Differance. They said they had not heard of that Way, and said we honestly spoke, so we were perswaided if that Way had been tendered they would have accepted. We did endeavor not to hear their Complaints, said it was not convenient for us now to consider of, but to endeavor to prevent War; said to them when in War against English, Blood was spilt, that engaged all Englishmen, for we were to be all under one King; we knew what their Complaints wold be, and in our Colony had removed some of them in sending for Indian Rulers in what the Crime concerned Indians Lives, which they very lovingly accepted, and agreed with us to their Execution, and said so they were abell to satisfy their Subjects when they knew an Indian sufered duly, but said in what was only between their Indians and not in Towneships, that we had purchased, they wold not have us prosecute, and that that they had a great Fear to have any of their Indians should be called or forced to be Christian Indians. They said that such were in every thing more mischievous; only Disemblers, and then the English made them not subject to their Kings, and by their lying to rong their Kings. We knew it to be true, and we promising them that however in Government to Indians all should be alike, and that we knew it was our King’s will it should be so, that altho we were weaker than other Colonies, they having submitted to our King to protect them, Others dared, not otherwise to molest them;so they expressed they took that to be well, that we had littell Case to doubt, but that to us under the King they would have yielded to our Determinations in what any should have complained to us against them.

But Philip charged it to be dishonesty in us to put off the Hearing the just Complaints, therefore we consented to hear them. They said thay had bine the first in doing Good to the English, and the English the first in doing Rong; said when the English first came, their King’s Father was as a great Man, and the English as a littell Child; he constrained other Indians from ronging the English, and gave them Corn and shewed them how to plant, and was free to do them any Good, and had let them have a 100 Times more Land than now the King had for his own Peopell. But their King’s Brother, [Massasoit] when he was King, came miserably to die by being forced to Court, as they judge poysoned. And another Greavance was, if 20 of their honest Indians testified that a Englishman had dun them Rong, it was as nothing; and if but one of their worst Indians testified against any Indian or their King, when it pleased the English it was sufficient. Another Grievance was, when their King sold Land, the English would say, it was more than they agreed to, and a Writing must be prove against all them, and some of their Kings had dun Rong to sell so much. He left his Peopell none, and some being given to Drunknes the English made them drunk and then cheated them in Bargains, but now their Kings were forewarned not for to part with Land, for nothing in Comparison to the Value thereof. Now home the English had owned for King or Queen, they would disinheret, and make another King that would give or sell them these Lands; that now, they had no Hopes left to keep any Land. Another Grievance, the English Catell and Horses still increased; that when they removed 30 Miles from where English had any thing to do, they could not keep their Corn from being spoiled, they never being used to fence, and thought when the English bought Land of them they would have kept their Catell upon their owne Land. Another Grievance, the English were so eager to sell the Indians Lickers, that most of the Indians spent all in Drunkness, and then ravened upon the sober Indians, and they did believe often did hurt the English Cattel, and their King could not prevent it. We knew before, these were their grand Complaints, but then we only endeavored to persuaid that all Complaints might be righted without War, but could have no other Answer but that they had not heard of that Way for the Governor of Yorke and an Indian King to have the Hearing of it. We had Cause to think in that had bine tendered it would have bine accepted. We endeavored that however they Should lay down the War, for the English were to strong for them; they said, then the English should do to them as they did when they were too strong for the English.

Source: John Easton, “A Relation of the Indian War” in A Narrative of the Causes Which Led to Philip’s Indian War (Albany: J. Munsell, 1858), 5–15.

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"The uncommon increase of Settlements in the back Country": Sir William Johnson Watches the Settlers Invade Indian Lands: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

“The uncommon increase of Settlements in the back Country”: Sir William Johnson Watches the Settlers Invade Indian Lands

As North American colonists, eager for land, spilled over the Appalachian Mountains in the 1750s, British concern and Indian anger over the expansion rose. Sir William Johnson, a migrant from Ireland who had settled in central New York, was a British official with ties to the Iroquois; in 1756 he was appointed superintendent of Indian Affairs for the northern colonies. In 1772, after British victory in the Seven Year’s War, he wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, describing the abuses of the traders and the Indians’ complaints about the settlers. Johnson feared the loss of authority by the established government, and judging of the settlers that “they are in general a lawless sett of People. ”

Sir William Johnson to the Earl of Dartmouth.

Johnson Hall Nov 4th 1772

My Lord

I have had the honor the receive your Lordships letter of the 2d of Sept[embe]r with the inclosures acquainting me with His Majestys Royal Intentions respecting the Government on the Ohio and directing that I should signify the same to the Six Nations which I had an immediate opportunity of doing, as I shall shew your Lordship presently.

My last letter to the Earl of Hillsborough was No 18 of the 29th of June, on which (as I presume it is in your hands) I need not to add more than to remind your Lordship that I therein gave an account of the departure of the 6 Nations Deputys for the second great Congress at Sioto and of the murder of the eight Mississagaes & Chippewaes by one Ramsey a small Trader on Lake Erie in which he appeared to have been actuated by wanton cruelty more than by any other consideration. Since that letter I received an account that the conferences to the Southward were ended, and about a fortnight since, the Cheifs and principal Warriors of the Six Nations came to this place where they held a Congress and related the transactions of their Deputies, a Copy of the most material parts whereof, I have now the honor to transmit to your Lordship, —The Sum of what they said was, That as the Waubash Indians, Kicapous & Piankashaws notwithstanding they waited for them a considerable time did not attend the Congress at Sioto, by reason or under pretence that some of their people had last year been killed by a party of Six Nations & Cherokees, the Deputys laid their Belts and Messages before those present reprimanding those concerned with their past misconduct, and charging them with what they had to say to those absent, which they promised faithfully to deliver. The Deputys likewise demand[e]d those mischeivous Belts &ca. which had been circulating & particularly those said to have gone from Agaustarax a Seneca Cheif of great influence, but without the knowledge of the rest of the Six Nation confederacy. The Indians there accordingly directed all the adjoining Nations to collect all such Belts as were liable to suspicion, on which several Belts were brought in, and delivered to the Deputys, some of which came from the West side of Mississipi containing assurances of Assistance and advising all Nations to rise against the English but the Belts from Agaustarax were not in the hands of any then present, having been stopped by the Cherokees. However the Deputies were assured that they should be collected, and that the Cheifs of all the Nations there absent as well as present should shortly bring them, and attend a General Congress at Onondaga where they would hear the sense of all the Six Nations and ratify all proceedings. The Belts before mentioned were delivered up to me by the Deputies and one of them, which is one of the largest I have seen is evidently a French Belt, and from what I can find came from Mons[ieu]r St Ange on the Mississippi in the name of the French King, which St Ange was an active Commander under the French and is now I am of opinion a secret Agent to heighten the Prejudice of the Indians, and prepare them for cooperat[in]g with the Enemy in case of a War.

As these Indians however have not fulfilled their promise in coming to the Grand Fire place (as it is called) at Onondaga within the time limited, I spoke warmly to the whole confederacy charging them to see that these people attended without further delay, or that these remaining Belts were immediately delivered into my hands, which the Six Nations have promised to see performed, as well as that at the proposed congress they will convince all Nations of their fidelity to Us, and their resolutions to compell the rest to act in the same manner as a proof that they the Six Nations have no part in their designs[.]

They next represented the great irregularities in the present state of the Indian Trade, the promises made to them that the same should be put on a good footing, the want of Regulations therein the abuses committed by Traders rambling where they pleased with strong liquors and the General discontentment amongst all the Nations on that account, to which I made them the best answer I could considering the little prospect there is of any such Regulations being made in the Colonies.. Just before their departure I was honored with your Lordships second letter and accordingly communicated to them His Majestys Intentions respecting the Establishment of a Government on the Ohio which I observed would rather be attended with advantage to them & to their Allies than the contrary. That it was in consequence of their public Sale at the greatest Congress ever held and therefore it was their duty to support their just rights, and remove any evil impressions which a few weak People their Dependants had conceived thereon to all which they made suitable answer. I likewise advised them to withdraw the Senecas of Ohio from thence and sett1e them nearer their natural friends as at present by their Connections with others they bring disgrace & suspicion on their own confederacy, and this I was the readier induced to do, as Kayashota, the cheif of those on Ohio, a man of universal influence was present & had privately assured me that it was agreeable to him.

I shall now, my Lord, beg leave to offer my thoughts on some of the foregoing particulars in as few words as possible, and first with regard to the new Government I have the strongest reasons to beleive that the Six Nations are disposed to consider it in a favorable light, and that the Tribes who since the Cession have appeared otherwise have no just pretension or Title there, at the same time I should remark that as all Indians are naturally jealous of their liberties and extremely suspicious of our designs. And as the reduction of Canada, the imprudence of our own people since that event, and the artifices of our secret enemies all contribute to encrease these sentiments in the Indians, It is not at all surprising if any amongst them particularly, to the Southward should alltho' they accord to the Cession be alarmed a any uncommon increase of Settlements in the back Country all which whatever else may have been surmised must be attributed to this cause following, They discover that the back inhabitants particularly those who daily go over the Mountains of Virginia employ much of their time in hunting, interfere with them therein, have a hatred for, ill treat, Rob and frequently murder the Indians, that they are in general a lawless sett of People, as fond of independency as themselves, and more regardless of Governm[en]t owing to ignorance, prejudice democratical principles, & their remote situation. The Indians likewise perceive & frequently observe that our Governments are weak & impotent, that whatever these people do their Jurys will acquitt them, the Landed men protect them, or a Rabble rescue them from the hands of Justice, The truth of all which I am equally sensible of, the Indians are therefore certain that they will he troublesome neighbors and that they can expect no redress from them. These are material considerations which principally induced me to extend the purchase a little farther down the Ohio, the Indians; being willing to sell it, but more especially as I knew that at that time these frontier People were daily pushing into that fertile country and would continue to do so without any title whatsoever (a circumstance they little regard) & that the Colonies, would not, or could not prevent them, this would have been such a disgrace to Government, that I judged it most politick to purchase it for His Majesty, than farther to discover our weakness to the Indians by admitting their Title to Lands which were dayly settling without any Title at all, and contrary to His Majestys orders but as matters now stand a proper authority in the hands of th e Governor of that new Colony with a judicious management at the beginning, joined to the assistance which I shall give by myself and my Deputy in that Country may I am hopefull obviate the difficultys that at first occur, but should some differences at first arise from the Jealous disposition of Indians or any of the causes before mentioned, the establishm[en]t of a Government there will in the end prove a prudential measure, and in proportion to its powers appear to the Indians as the most necessary check that could have been given to the unrestrained licentiousness which prevailed long before the Cession, was daily gathering strength, and, would have done so had no purchase ever been made in that country.

The proper regulation of Trade at certain fixed places there, is a material consideration, and indeed the neglect of the Colonies since it has been left to them, the vast Cargoes of Rum carried into the Indian Country & the unrestrain[e]d conduct of the Traders has occasioned much dissatisfaction and is likely to produce very bad consequences, whilst the Ideas of Oeconomy which prevail in America & the different Interests of the Colonies afford very little hopes of any accordation of Sentiments that might be productive of any salutary establishments.

The Common Traders or Factors who are generally rapacious, ignorant & without principle pretending to their merchants that they can not make good returns unless they are at liberty to go where and do as they please, & present extravagant gain being too much the Object and the only object of all, they are tempted in pursuit of it to venture amongst the most distant Stations where they are daily guilty of the most glaring impositions—of the fatal effects of Rum (so often requested by the Indians not to be brought amongst them) I have Just received a fresh instance in the murder of a Trader and his two servants on Lake Huron by some of the Nation whose people were killed by Ramsay. The Trader sold them Rum and neglecting to leave them, though advised by themselves to do so, on being refused more liquor, they seized it got intoxicated a squabble ensued, which ended in the death of the Trader and his Servants, The Nation have promised to delver the murderer but I doubt it much, as the murders committed by Ramsey can not be easily forgotten by them especially when disguised by Liquor which they always consider as a mitigation of the offence. As I expect to have the honor to write your Lordship soon on the subjects proposed to the Six Nations, I have only at present to request that your Lordship will honor me with His Majestys commands touching any part of this letter that may require it, and that you will pardon its immoderate length as my Zeal would not permit me to abridge a subject which appeared to me of some Importance. I have the honor to be with great respect

My Lord

Your Lordships

Most obedient and

Most faithfull Servant

W JOHNSON

Source: E.B. O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Albany, N.Y.: Weed, Parsons, 1853), Vol. 8, 314–17.

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"I Wove To-day": Elizabeth Fuller Grows Up in Rural Massachusetts: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

“I Wove To-day”: Elizabeth Fuller Grows Up in Rural Massachusetts

Farm households depended heavily on the work of women and children. At first children were assigned simple tasks; later they learned chores that were differentiated according to gender roles. In the 1790s, young unmarried women such as Elizabeth Fuller pursued work in the dairy or in home manufacturing along with their housework and garden tasks. Fuller lived in the central Massachusetts town of Princeton; her diary recorded her health, social activities, and any unusual events in her life. Mostly, she faced a regular round of household tasks such as making cheese or baking pies. She often washed, carded, and spun wool, since her most significant labor was the household textile production that provided most farm families with their clothing.

Oct 1790

13 — Mrs. Perry, Miss Eliza Harris, Miss Sally Puffer, and Miss Hannah Haynes, and Wareham, and Rebekah Hastings were baptised by immersion. — I was fifteen to-day.

14 — A hard storm. Mr. Eveleth was buried.

18 — Pa and Ma set out for Sandwich. I am quite sick, don’t sit up but very little.

21 — I was so bad that we sent for Dr. Wilson. When he came he told me I had a settled Fever.

1790 Nov.

5 — Nathan Perry here about an hour this eve. I am a good deal better, have been out of my room two or three times. 8 o’clock Pa and Ma came home, we were over joyed to see them, but had done expecting them.

7 — Sabbath, no preaching in town.

11 —Timmy went to mill.

14 — Sabbath. Mr. Sparhawk preached, came here at night.

19 — Nathan Perry here this evening.

20 — Leonard Woods here this morn. Mrs. Perry here this afternoon a visiting.

21 —Sabbath. Mr. Brown of Winchendon preached.

22 — Revd. Mr. Brown breakfasted with us this morning. He is an agreable pretty man.

23 — Mr. Gregory killed a cow for Pa.

24 — We baked two ovensfull of pyes. — Mr. Nathan Perry here this eve.

25 — Thanksgiving to-day we baked three ovensfull of pyes. There was no preaching so we had nothing to do but eat them. The pyes were a great deal better than they were last Thanksgiving for I made them all myself, and part of them were made of flour which we got of Mr. H. Hastings therefore we had plenty of spice.

26 — Mr. Ephriam Mirick here. Pa went to town meeting.

27 — Mr. Gregory killed our hogs to-day.

28 — There is no preaching in this town. There came a considerable snow last night.

30 — Caty Eveleth was married the 22nd inst.

1790 Dec.

1 - I went to Mr. Perry’s to make a visit this afternoon, had an excellent dish of tea and a shortcake. — Betsey Whitcomb at work there. Had a sociable afternoon.

2 — Silas Perry here to-day before sunrise. Pa is very poorly having a very bad cough. I am a good deal afraid he will go into a consumption. Oh! if my soul was formed for woe how would I vent my sighs My grief it would like rivers flow, from both my

streaming eyes. I am disconsolate to-night.

4 — I minced the Link meat.

6 — Timmy has gone to the singing meeting.

11 —Sabbath. David Perry here to borrow our singing book.

16 — John Brooks here killing our sheep. A severe snow storm.

17 — Very cold. I made sixteen dozen of candles.

19 — Sabbath cold enough to freeze fools but I was so wise I would have gone to meeting had not Ma kept me at home. I had not sense enough to more than balance my folly. Pa went to meeting, got there time enough to hear three hims and the prayer, but it was as much as ever he did. Mr. Lee preached.

21 —James Mirick is here, says Ephraim is gone to Fitzwilliam to bring Mrs. Garfield and her household stuff down.

22 — David Perry here to get Timmy to go to the singing school with him.

24 — I scoured the pewter. Pa went to Fitchburg.

26 — Sabbath. Stormy weather. We all stayed at home. Pretty warm.

28 — Cold and pleasant to-day. Pa sold his mare, is to have eleven dollars and a cow. Pa and Timmy went to Mr. Holden’s in Westminster to drive the cow home. She behaved so bad they did not get her farther than Mr. Dodd’s. Mr. Woods here to borrow some books of Pa.

30 — Very pleasant. Mr. Eveleth’s personal estate vendued. Pa and Tim gone there.

31 — Cloudy and cold, evening. Mr. Nathan Perry herethis evening.

...

1791 Mar.

1 — Pa went to Mr. Stephen Brighams to write his will. Ma began to spin the wool for Pa’s coat. I card for her & do the household work.

2 — Ma is a spinning.

3 — Ma spun three skeins. — Nathan Perry here. — Pa is gone to Mr. Hastings this eve.

4 — Mrs. Perry here to spend the afternoon.

5 — Ma spun.

6 — Sabbath, no Meeting in Town.

7 — very warm. Anna Perry here visiting. — I made 18 dozen of candles & washed.

8 — Ma spun.

9 — Miss Eunice Mirick here a visiting this afternoon.

10 — Warm and rainy. — Francis Eveleth here to borrow our singing Book. Ma spun.

11 — Rainy weather. Mr. Thomson here to-day after rates. Mr, Parmenter here, bought two calf skins of Pa, gave him ten shillings apiece. — David Perry here. — Timmy went to Mr. Brooks.

12 — David Perry here to-day.

13 — Sabbath no Meeting.

14 — March Meeting Mr. Crafts asked a dismission, had his request granted without the least difficulty, so now we are once more a free people ha ha, he is going to Weymouth to keep shop a going out of Town this week 'tis thought he has not much to carry with him I do not know nor care what he has.

15 — Revd. Mr. Rice & Mr. Isaac Thomson here. Mr. Rice Dined here.

16 — Pa went to Mr. Bangs to-day.

18 — Capt. Clark here this evening.

19 — John Brooks here to-day. — Nathan Perry here for the newspaper. — Ma spun two skeins & an half of filling yarn.

20 — Sabbath. Pa went to church Mr. Saunders Preached, he is one of Stephen Baxters classmates, the going was so bad that none of the rest of our Family went to hear him.

21 —- Cold. Mr. Brooks here.

22 — Pa went to Mr. Bangs.

23 — Pa went to Mr. Rolphs to-day. On the 13th inst. Miss Caty Mirick was Married to Mr. Joshua Eveleth.

24 — Mr. Brooks here to-day to get Pa to write a Deed of Mr. Hastingses Farm for him.

25 — Ma finished spinning her blue Wool to-day.

26 — Ma went to Mrs. Miricks to get a slay Harness. Mrs. Caty Eveleth came home with her.

27—Sabbath very pleasant I went to church. Mr. Rolph Preached. — Esqr. Woolson here to tarry all night.

28 — Esqr. Woolson went from here this morning. A man here to-day that was both deaf and dumb, he is Son to a Merchant in London, he went to sea & the ship was struck with Lightning & which occasioned his being deaf & dumb, he could write wrote a good deal here. He was a good looking young Man, about 25 he wrote his name Joel Smith. I really pitied him. I went to Mrs. Miricks & warped the piece.

29 — Mrs. Garfield came here to show me how to draw in Piece did not stay but about half an hour.

30 — I tyed in the Piece & wove two yards.

31 — Fast. I went to Meeting all day. Mr. Rolph preached half of the day & Mr. Saunders the other half. Mr. Saunders is a very good Preacher & a handsome Man. — David Perry here this evening to sing with us.

1791 April

1 — I wove two yards and three quarters & three inches to-day & I think I did pretty well considering it was April Fool day. Mr. Brooks & Mr. Hastings here to get Pa to do some writing for them.

2 — I wove three yards and a quarter,

3 —Sabbath. I went to church. — an anular eclipse of the sun, it was fair weather. 4— I wove five yards & a quarter. Mr. Cutting here this eve.

5 — I wove four yards. Mrs. Garfield & Mrs. Eveleth who was once Caty Mirick here a visiting. —The real estate of Mr. Josiah Mirick deceased is vendued to-day. (eve) Timmy has got home from the vendue Mr. Cutting has bought the Farm gave 255£ Sam Matthews has bought the part of the Pew gave eight dollars.

6 — I got out the White piece Mrs. Garfield warped the blue, came here & began to draw in the Piece.

7 — I finished drawing in the Piece & wove a yard & a half. Sam Matthews here to-day.

8 — I wove two yards & a quarter.

9 — I wove two yards & a quarter.

10 — Sabbath. I went to church in the A.M. Mamma went in the P.M. she has not been before since she came from Sandwich.

11 —I wove a yard & a half. Parmela Mirick here to see me.

12 — I wove to-day.

13 — Mrs. Brooks here a visiting. I wove.

14 — I got out the Piece in the A.M. Pa carried it to Mr. Deadmans. Miss Eliza Harris here.

15 — I began to spin Linnen spun 21 knots. I went to Mr. Perrys on an errand. Pa went to Mr. Matthews to write his will & some deeds. He has sold Dr. Wilson 20 acres of Land & given Sam a deed of some I believe about 25 acres.

16 — Pa went to Mr. Matthews again. — I spun 21 knots.

17 — Sabbath I went to church all day Mr. Davis Preached Mr. Saunders is sick.

18 — I spun two double skeins of Linnen.

19 — I spun two double skeins.

20—I spun two double skeins. — Ma went to Mrs. Miricks for a visit was sent for home. — Revd. Daniel Fuller of Cape Ann here to see us.

21—Revd. Mr. Fuller went from here this morn. Ma went to Mrs. Miricks again. — I spun two skeins. — Sukey Eveleth & Nabby here to see Nancy.

22 — I spun two double skeins O dear Quadyille has murdered wit, & work will do as bad, for wit is always merry, but work does make me sad.

23 — I spun two skeins. Nathan Perry here. — Ware-ham Hastings at work here.

24 — I went to church. Mr. Thurston Preached. — Mr. Saunders is sick.

25 — Leonard Woods here all this forenoon, brought Hoi-yokes singing Book. Left it here.

26 — Pa went to see Mr. Saunders. I Pricked some tunes out of Holyokes Singing Book.

27 — I spun five skeins of linnen yarn.

28 — I spun five skeins of linnen yarn. Pa went to Sterling.

29 — I Pricked some Tunes out of Holyokes singing Book. I spun some.

30 — I spun four skeins to-day.

1791 May

1 —Sabbath I went to Meeting to-day.

2 — I spun five skeins to-day.

3 — I spun five skeins to-day.

4 — I spun two skeins to-day finished the Warp for this Piece. — Nathan Perry worked here this P.M.

5 — I spun four skeins of tow for the filling to the Piece. I have been spinning, Pa went to Worcester to get the newspaper. Nathan Perry here this eve.

6— I spun four Skeins to-day.

7 — I spun four Skeins to-day.

8 — Sabbath. I went to church A.M. Mr. Thurston preached. Mr. John Rolph & his Lady & Mr. Osburn her Brother & a Miss Anna Strong (a Lady courted by said Osbourn) came here after Meeting and drank Tea.

9 — I spun four skeins. Mr. Thurston here this P.M. a visiting he is an agreeable Man appears much better out of the Pulpit than in.

10— I spun four Skeins to-day.

11 — I spun four skeins.

12 — I spun four skeins. Lucy Matthews here.

13 — I spun four skeins. — Ma is making Soap. Rainy.

14 — I spun four skeins. Ma finished making soap and it is very good.

15 — I went to church A. M. Mr. Thurston Preached he is a ——. — Mr. Rolph drank Tea here.

17 — I spun four skeins to-day.

18 — I spun four skeins of linnen yarn to Make a Harness of. — Ma is a breaking.

19 — I spun two skeins and twisted the harness yarn.

20— Mrs. Garfield came here this Morning to show me how to make a Harness, did not stay but about half an Hour. — Mrs. Perry & Miss Eliza Harris here a visiting.

21 — I went to Mrs. Miricks and warped the Piece.

22 — I went to church in the A.M. Mr. Saunders preached gave us a good sermon his text Romans 6th Chap. 23 verse. For the wages of Sin is Death.

23 — I got in my Piece to-day wove a yard.

24 — Wove two yards & an half.

25 — Election. I wove three Yards to-day. — Mrs. Perry here a few moments.

26 — I wove three Yards to-day. The two Mrs. Matthews here to Day. I liked Sam’s Wife much better than I expected to. — Miss. Eliza Harris here about two Hours.

27 — I wove five Yards to-day.

29 — Pleasant weather. Pa went to Sterling. My Cousin Jacob Kcmbal of Amherst came here to-day.

30 — General Election at Bolton. — Mr. Josiah Eveleth & Wife & Mrs. Garfield here on a visit.

1791 June

1—Moses Harrington carried off Mr. Hastings old shop.

2—Elislia Brooks here to-day.

5—I made myself a Shift. — Mrs. Perry here a visiting. Nathan Perry here this evening.

6—Sabbath. No Meeting in Town. Elisha Brooks here to see if there was a meeting.

7—I made myself a blue worsted Coat.

8—Aaron & Nathan Perry here. — Pamela Mirick here a visiting this afternoon.

9—Mrs. Brooks here a visiting. — I helped Sally make me a blue worsted Gown.

10—I helped Sally make me a brown Woolen Gown.

12—Sally cut out a striped lutestring Gown for me.

13—Sabbath I went to church. Mr. Green Preached.

14—Aaron Perry here.

15—I cut out a striped linnen Gown. — Sally finished my lutestring.

16—Rainy weather. Ma cut out a Coattce for me. —Salmon Houghton breakfasted with us. — Elisha Brooks spent the afternoon here.

17—Ma, Sally & I spent the afternoon at Mrs. Miricks.

18—Cool. Sally finished my Coattee.

19—I finished my striped linnen Gown. Mr. Soloman Davis here. Sabbath.

20—I went to Church, wore my lutestring, Sally wore hers we went to Mr. Richardsons & Dined. —rained at night.

21—Pleasant weather. Mr. Bush here.

22—Capt. Moore here to-day. Put in my dwiant Coat & Sally & I quilted it out before night.

23—Sally put in a Worsted Coat for herself and we quilted it out by the middle of the afternoon. Very pleasant weather.

24—I made myself a Shift.

25—Very hot weather. — Abishai Eveleth here.

27—Rainy, unpleasant weather. I stayed at home all day.

Source: Francis E. Blake, “Diary Kept by Elizabeth Fuller,” History of the Town of Princeton (Princeton, Massachusetts: Town, 1915), 1: 303–11.

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"Is It Not Enough that We Are Torn From Our Country and Friends?": Olaudah Equiano Describes the Horrors of the Middle Passage, 1780s: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

“Is It Not Enough that We Are Torn From Our Country and Friends?”: Olaudah Equiano Describes the Horrors of the Middle Passage, 1780s

In one of the largest forced migrations in human history, up to 12 million Africans were sold as slaves to Europeans and shipped to the Americas. Most slaves were seized inland and marched to coastal forts, where they were chained below deck in ships for the journey across the Atlantic or “Middle Passage,” under conditions designed to ship the largest number of people in the smallest space possible. Olaudah Equiano had been kidnapped from his family when he was 11 years old, carried off first to Barbados and then Virginia. After serving in the British navy, he was sold to a Quaker merchant from whom he purchased his freedom in 1766. His pioneering narrative of the journey from slavery to freedom, a bestseller first published in London in 1789, builds upon the traditions of spiritual narratives and travel literature to help create the slave narrative genre.

The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast, was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled, and tossed up to see if I were sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions, too, differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke (which was very different from any I had ever heard), united to confirm me in this belief. Indeed, such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment, that, if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would have freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country. When I looked round the ship too, and saw a large furnace of copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate; and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. When I recovered a little, I found some black people about me, who I believed were some of those who had brought me on board, and had been receiving their pay; they talked to me in order to cheer me, but all in vain. I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair. They told me I was not, and one of the crew brought me a small portion of spirituous liquor in a wine glass; but being afraid of him, I would not take it out of his hand. One of the blacks therefore took it from him and gave it to me, and I took a little down my palate, which, instead of reviving me, as they thought it would, threw me into the greatest consternation at the strange feeling it produced, having never tasted any such liquor before. Soon after this, the blacks who brought me on board went off, and left me abandoned to despair.

I now saw myself deprived of all chance of returning to my native country, or even the least glimpse of hope of gaining the shore, which I now considered as friendly; and I even wished for my former slavery in preference to my present situation, which was filled with horrors of every kind, still heightened by my ignorance of what I was to undergo. I was not long suffered to indulge my grief; I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything. I now wished for the last friend, Death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across, I think, the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely. I had never experienced anything of this kind before, and, although not being used to the water, I naturally feared that element the first time I saw it, yet, nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the side, but I could not; and besides, the crew used to watch us very closely who were not chained down to the decks, lest we should leap into the water; and I have seen some of these poor African prisoners most severely cut, for attempting to do so, and hourly whipped for not eating. This indeed was often the case with myself.

In a little time after, amongst the poor chained men, I found some of my own nation, which in a small degree gave ease to my mind. I inquired of these what was to be done with us? They gave me to understand, we were to be carried to these white people’s country to work for them. I then was a little revived, and thought, if it were no worse than working, my situation was not so desperate; but still I feared I should be put to death, the white people looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner; for I had never seen among any people such instances of brutal cruelty; and this not only shown towards us blacks, but also to some of the whites themselves. One white man in particular I saw, when we were permitted to be on deck, flogged so unmercifully with a large rope near the foremast, that he died in consequence of it; and they tossed him over the side as they would have done a brute. This made me fear these people the more; and I expected nothing less than to be treated in the same manner. I could not help expressing my fears and apprehensions to some of my countrymen; I asked them if these people had no country, but lived in this hollow place (the ship)? They told me they did not, but came from a distant one. “Then,” said I, “how comes it in all our country we never heard of them?” They told me because they lived so very far off. I then asked where were their women? had they any like themselves? I was told they had. “And why,” said I, “do we not see them?” They answered, because they were left behind. I asked how the vessel could go? They told me they could not tell; but that there was cloth put upon the masts by the help of the ropes I saw, and then the vessel went on; and the white men had some spell or magic they put in the water when they liked, in order to stop the vessel. I was exceedingly amazed at this account, and really thought they were spirits. I therefore wished much to be from amongst them, for I expected they would sacrifice me; but my wishes were vain — for we were so quartered that it was impossible for any of us to make our escape.

While we stayed on the coast I was mostly on deck; and one day, to my great astonishment, I saw one of these vessels coming in with the sails up. As soon as the whites saw it, they gave a great shout, at which we were amazed; and the more so, as the vessel appeared larger by approaching nearer. At last, she came to an anchor in my sight, and when the anchor was let go, I and my countrymen who saw it, were lost in astonishment to observe the vessel stop—and were now convinced it was done by magic. Soon after this the other ship got her boats out, and they came on board of us, and the people of both ships seemed very glad to see each other. Several of the strangers also shook hands with us black people, and made motions with their hands, signifying I suppose, we were to go to their country, but we did not understand them.

At last, when the ship we were in, had got in all her cargo, they made ready with many fearful noises, and we were all put under deck, so that we could not see how they managed the vessel. But this disappointment was the least of my sorrow. The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died — thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable, and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable. Happily perhaps, for myself, I was soon reduced so low here that it was thought necessary to keep me almost always on deck; and from my extreme youth I was not put in fetters. In this situation I expected every hour to share the fate of my companions, some of whom were almost daily brought upon deck at the point of death, which I began to hope would soon put an end to my miseries. Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much more happy than myself. I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and as often wished I could change my condition for theirs. Every circumstance I met with, served only to render my state more painful, and heightened my apprehensions, and my opinion of the cruelty of the whites.

One day they had taken a number of fishes; and when they had killed and satisfied themselves with as many as they thought fit, to our astonishment who were on deck, rather than give any of them to us to eat, as we expected, they tossed the remaining fish into the sea again, although we begged and prayed for some as well as we could, but in vain; and some of my countrymen, being pressed by hunger, took an opportunity, when they thought no one saw them, of trying to get a little privately; but they were discovered, and the attempt procured them some very severe floggings.

One day, when we had a smooth sea and moderate wind, two of my wearied countrymen who were chained together (I was near them at the time), preferring death to such a life of misery, somehow made through the nettings and jumped into the sea; immediately, another quite dejected fellow, who, on account of his illness, was suffered to be out of irons, also followed their example; and I believe many more would very soon have done the same, if they had not been prevented by the ship’s crew, who were instantly alarmed. Those of us that were the most active, were in a moment put down under the deck; and there was such a noise and confusion amongst the people of the ship as I never heard before, to stop her, and get the boat out to go after the slaves. However, two of the wretches were drowned, but they got the other, and afterwards flogged him unmercifully, for thus attempting to prefer death to slavery. In this manner we continued to undergo more hardships than I can now relate, hardships which are inseparable from this accursed trade. Many a time we were near suffocation from the want of fresh air, which we were often without for whole days together. This, and the stench of the necessary tubs, carried off many.

During our passage, I first saw flying fishes, which surprised me very much; they used frequently to fly across the ship, and many of them fell on the deck. I also now first saw the use of the quadrant; I had often with astonishment seen the mariners make observations with it, and I could not think what it meant. They at last took notice of my surprise; and one of them, willing to increase it, as well as to gratify my curiosity, made me one day look through it. The clouds appeared to me to be land, which disappeared as they passed along. This heightened my wonder; and I was now more persuaded than ever, that I was in another world, and that every thing about me was magic.

At last we came in sight of the island of Barbadoes, at which the whites on board gave a great shout, and made many signs of joy to us. We did not know what to think of this; but as the vessel drew nearer, we plainly saw the harbor, and other ships of different kinds and sizes, and we soon anchored amongst them, off Bridgetown. Many merchants and planters now came on board, though it was in the evening. They put us in separate parcels, and examined us attentively. They also made us jump, and pointed to the land, signifying we were to go there. We thought by this, we should be eaten by these ugly men, as they appeared to us; and, when soon after we were all put down under the deck again, there was much dread and trembling among us, and nothing but bitter cries to be heard all the night from these apprehensions, insomuch, that at last the white people got some old slaves from the land to pacify us. They told us we were not to be eaten, but to work, and were soon to go on land, where we should see many of our country people. This report eased us much. And sure enough, soon after we were landed, there came to us Africans of all languages.

We were conducted immediately to the merchant’s yard, where we were all pent up together, like so many sheep in a fold, without regard to sex or age. As every object was new to me, everything I saw filled me with surprise. What struck me first, was, that the houses were built with bricks, in stories, and in every other respect different from those I had seen in Africa; but I was still more astonished on seeing people on horseback. I did not know what this could mean; and, indeed, I thought these people were full of nothing but magical arts. While I was in this astonishment, one of my fellow prisoners spoke to a countryman of his, about the horses, who said they were the same kind they had in their country. I understood them, though they were from a distant part of Africa; and I thought it odd I had not seen any horses there; but afterwards, when I came to converse with different Africans, I found they had many horses amongst them, and much larger than those I then saw.

We were not many days in the merchant’s custody, before we were sold after their usual manner, which is this: On a signal given (as the beat of a drum), the buyers rush at once into the yard where the slaves are confined, and make choice of that parcel they like best. The noise and clamor with which this is attended, and the eagerness visible in the countenances of the buyers, serve not a little to increase the apprehension of terrified Africans, who may well be supposed to consider them as the ministers of that destruction to which they think themselves devoted. In this manner, without scruple, are relations and friends separated, most of them never to see each other again.

I remember, in the vessel in which I was brought over, in the men’s apartment, there were several brothers, who, in the sale, were sold in different lots; and it was very moving on this occasion, to see and hear their cries at parting. O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you — Learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you? Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends, to toil for your luxury and lust of gain? Must every tender feeling be likewise sacrificed to your avarice? Are the dearest friends and relations, now rendered more dear by their separation from their kindred, still to be parted from each other, and thus prevented from cheering the gloom of slavery, with the small comfort of being together, and mingling their sufferings and sorrows? Why are parents to lose their children, brothers their sisters, or husbands their wives? Surely, this is a new refinement in cruelty, which, while it has no advantage to atone for it, thus aggravates distress, and adds fresh horrors even to the wretchedness of slavery.

Source: Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. 2 vols. (London: Author, 1789), Vol. 1, 70–88.

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The Canal Boat: Nathaniel Hawthorne Travels the Erie Canal: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

The Canal Boat: Nathaniel Hawthorne Travels the Erie Canal

In the decades after the American Revolution, improvements in transportation facilitated the growth of internal commerce in the United States. State and local governments planned turnpikes, roads, and canals, and New York State built the grandest one of the era: the Erie Canal. The Erie Canal was constructed at public expense by thousands of laborers between 1817 and 1825. The canal stretched 364 miles from Albany to Buffalo and linked the new nation’s heartlands in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley with New York City and the Atlantic coastal trade. Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded his travels along the waterway in this 1835 sketch, noting the traffic in goods and people along with the rise in commercial activity along its path. The canal and other improvements, however, also threatened farmers ’abilities to withstand the market’s fluctuations and maintain local sufficiency.

I was inclined to be poetical about the Grand Canal. In my imagination, De Witt Clinton was an enchanter, who had waved his magic wand from the Hudson to Lake Erie, and united them by a watery highway, crowded with the commerce of two worlds, till then inaccessible to each other. This simple and mighty conception had conferred inestimable value on spots which Nature seemed to have thrown carelessly into the great body of the earth, without foreseeing that they could ever attain importance. I pictured the surprise of the sleepy Dutchmen when the new river first glittered by their doors, bringing them hard cash or foreign commodities, in exchange for their hitherto unmarketable produce. Surely, the water of this canal must be the most fertilizing of all fluids; for it causes towns—with their masses of brick and stone, their churches and theatres, their business and hubbub, their luxury and refinement, their gay dames and polished citizens—to spring up, till, in time, the wondrous stream may flow between two continuous lines of buildings, through one thronged street, from Buffalo to Albany. I embarked about thirty miles below Utica, determining to voyage along the whole extent of the canal, at least twice in the course of the summer.

Behold us, then, fairly afloat, with three horses harnessed to our vessel, like the steeds of Neptune to a huge scallop-shell, in mythological pictures. Bound to a distant port, we had neither chart nor compass, nor cared about the wind, nor felt the heaving of a billow, nor dreaded shipwreck, however fierce the tempest, in our adventurous navigation of an interminable mud-puddle—for a mud-puddle it seemed, and as dark and turbid as if every kennel in the land paid contribution to it. With an imperceptible current, it holds its drowsy way through all the dismal swamps and unimpressive scenery, that could be found between the great lakes and the sea-coast. Yet there is variety enough, both on the surface of the canal and along its banks, to amuse the traveller, if an overpowering tedium did not deaden his perceptions.

Sometimes we met a black and rusty-looking vessel, laden with lumber, salt from Syracuse, or Genesee flour, and shaped at both ends like a square-toed boot; as if it had two sterns, and were fated always to advance backward. On its deck would be a square hut, and a woman seen through the window at her household work, with a little tribe of children, who perhaps had been born in this strange dwelling and knew no other home. Thus, while the husband smoked his pipe at the helm, and the eldest son rode one of the horses, on went the family, travelling hundreds of miles in their own house, and carrying their fireside with them. The most frequent species of craft were the “line boats,” which had a cabin at each end, and a great bulk of barrels, bales, and boxes in the midst; or light packets, like our own, decked all over, with a row of curtained windows from stem to stern, and a drowsy face at every one. Once, we encountered a boat, of rude construction, painted all in gloomy black, and manned by three Indians, who gazed at us in silence and with a singular fixedness of eye. Perhaps these three alone, among the ancient possessors of the land, had attempted to derive benefit from the white man’s mighty projects, and float along the current of his enterprise. Not long after, in the midst of a swamp and beneath a clouded sky, we overtook a vessel that seemed full of mirth and sunshine. It contained a little colony of Swiss, on their way to Michigan, clad in garments of strange fashion and gay colors, scarlet, yellow and bright blue, singing, laughing, and making merry, in odd tones and a babble of outlandish words. One pretty damsel, with a beautiful pair of naked white arms, addressed a mirthful remark to me; she spoke in her native tongue, and I retorted in good English, both of us laughing heartily at each other’s unintelligible wit. I cannot describe how pleasantly this incident affected me. These honest Swiss were an itinerant community of jest and fun, journeying through a gloomy land and among a dull race of money-getting drudges, meeting none to understand their mirth and only one to sympathize with it, yet still retaining the happy lightness of their own spirit.

Had I been on my feet at the time, instead of sailing slowly along in a dirty canal-boat, I should often have paused to contemplate the diversified panorama along the banks of the canal. Sometimes the scene was a forest, dark, dense, and impervious, breaking away occasionally and receding from a lonely tract, covered with dismal black stumps, where, on the verge of the canal, might be seen a log-cottage, and a sallow-faced woman at the window. Lean and aguish, she looked like Poverty personified, half clothed, half fed, and dwelling in a desert, while a tide of wealth was sweeping by her door. Two or three miles further would bring us to a lock, where the slight impediment to navigation had created a little mart of trade. Here would be found commodities of all sorts, enumerated in yellow letters on the window-shutters of a small grocery-store, the owner of which had set his soul to the gathering of coppers and small change, buying and selling through the week, and counting his gains on the blessed Sabbath. The next scene might be the dwellinghouses and stores of a thriving village, built of wood or small gray stones, a church-spire rising in the midst, and generally two taverns, bearing over their piazzas the pompous titles of “hotel,” "exchange,“ "tontine,” or “coffee-house.” Passing on, we glide now into the unquiet heart of an inland city—of Utica, for instance—and find ourselves amid piles of brick, crowded docks and quays, rich warehouses and a busy population. We feel the eager and hurrying spirit of the place, like a stream and eddy whirling us along with it. Through the thickest of the tumult goes the canal, flowing between lofty rows of buildings and arched bridges of hewn stone. Onward, also, go we, till the hum and bustle of struggling enterprise die away behind us, and we are threading an avenue of the ancient woods again.

This sounds not amiss in description, but was so tiresome in reality, that we were driven to the most childish expedients for amusement. An English traveller paraded the deck with a rifle in his walking-stick, and waged war on squirrels and woodpeckers, sometimes sending an unsuccessful bullet among flocks of tame ducks and geese, which abound in the dirty water of the canal. I, also, pelted these foolish birds with apples, and smiled at the ridiculous earnestness of their scrambles for the prize, while the apple bobbed about like a thing of life. Several little accidents afforded us good-natured diversion. At the moment of changing horses, the tow-rope caught a Massachusetts farmer by the leg, and threw him down in a very indescribable posture, leaving a purple mark around his sturdy limb. A new passenger fell flat on his back, in attempting to step on deck, as the boat emerged from under a bridge. Another, in his Sunday clothes, as good luck would have it, being told to leap aboard from the bank, forthwith plunged up to his third waistcoat button in the canal, and was fished out in a very pitiable plight, not at all amended by our three rounds of applause. Anon, a Virginia schoolmaster, too intent on a pocket Virgil to heed the helmsman’s warning—“Bridge! bridge!” —was saluted by the said bridge on his knowledge-box. I had prostrated myself, like a pagan before his idol, but heard the dull leaden sound of the contact, and fully expected to see the treasures of the poor man’s cranium scattered about the deck. However, as there was no harm done, except a large bump on the head, and probably a corresponding dent in the bridge, the rest of us exchanged glances and laughed quietly. Oh, how pitiless are idle people!

The table being now lengthened through the cabin, and spread for supper, the next twenty minutes were the pleasantest I had spent on the canal—the same space at dinner excepted. At the close of the meal, it had become dusky enough for lamplight. The rain pattered unceasingly on the deck, and sometimes came with a sullen rush against the windows, driven by the wind, as it stirred through an opening of the forest. The intolerable dullness of the scene engendered an evil spirit in me. Perceiving that the Englishman was taking notes in a memorandum-book, with occasional glances round the cabin, I presumed that we were all to figure in a future volume of travels, and amused my ill-humor by falling into the probable vein of his remarks. He would hold up an imaginary mirror, wherein our reflected faces would appear ugly and ridiculous, yet still retain an undeniable likeness to the originals. Then, with more sweeping malice, he would make these caricatures the representatives of great classes of my countrymen.

He glanced at the Virginia schoolmaster, a Yankee by birth, who, to recreate himself, was examining a freshman from Schenectady college, in the conjugation of a Greek verb. Him, the Englishman would portray as the scholar of America, and compare his erudition to a schoolboy’s Latin theme, made up of scraps, ill-selected and worse put together. Next, the tourist looked at the Massachusetts farmer, who was delivering a dogmatic harangue on the iniquity of Sunday mails. Here was the far-famed yeoman of New-England; his religion, writes the Englishman, is gloom on the Sabbath, long prayers every morning and eventide, and illiberality at all times; his boasted information is merely an abstract and compound of newspaper paragraphs, Congress debates, caucus harangues, and the argument and judge’s charge in his own lawsuits. The bookmonger cast his eye at a Detroit merchant, and began scribbling faster than ever. In this sharp-eyed man, this lean man, of wrinkled brow, we see daring enter prise and close-fisted avarice combined; here is the worshipper of Mammon at noonday; here is the three-times bankrupt, richer after every ruin; here, in one word, (Oh, wicked Englishman to say it!) here is the American! He lifted his eye-glass to inspect a western lady, who at once became aware of the glance, reddened, and retired deeper into the female part of the cabin. Here was the pure, modest, sensitive, and shrinking woman of America; shrinking when no evil is intended; and sensitive like diseased flesh, that thrills if you but point at it; and strangely modest, without confidence in the modesty of other people; and admirably pure, with such a quick apprehension of all impurity.

In this manner, I went all through the cabin, hitting everybody as hard a lash as I could, and laying the whole blame on the infernal Englishman. At length, I caught the eyes of my own image in the looking-glass, where a number of the party were likewise reflected, and among them the Englishman, who, at that moment, was intently observing myself.

The crimson curtain being let down between the ladies and gentlemen, the cabin became a bed-chamber for twenty persons, who were laid on shelves, one above another. For a long time, our various incommodities kept us all awake, except five or six, who were accustomed to sleep nightly amid the uproar of their own snoring, and had little to dread from any other species of disturbance. It is a curious fact, that these snorers had been the most quiet people in the boat, while awake, and became peace-breakers only when others ceased to be so, breathing tumult out of their repose. Would it were possible to affix a wind instrument to the nose, and thus make melody of a snore, so that a sleeping lover might serenade his mistress, or a congregation snore a psalm-tune! Other, though fainter sounds than these, contributed to my restlessness. My head was close to the crimson curtain—the sexual division of the boat—behind which I continually heard whispers and stealthy footsteps; the noise of a comb laid on the table, or a slipper drops on the floor; the twang, like a broken harp-string, caused by loosening a tight belt; the rustling of a gown in its descent; and the unlacing of a pair of stays. My ear seemed to have the properties of an eye; a visible image pestered my fancy in the darkness; the curtain was withdrawn between me and the western lady, who yet disrobed herself without a blush.

Finally, all was hushed in that quarter. Still, I was more broad awake than through the whole preceding day, and felt a feverish impulse to toss my limbs miles apart, and appease the unquietness of mind by that of matter. Forgetting that my berth was hardly so wide as a coffin, I turned suddenly over, and fell like an avalanche on the floor, to the disturbance of the whole community of sleepers. As there were no bones broken, I blessed the accident, and went on deck. A lantern was burning at each end of the boat, and one of the crew was stationed at the bows, keeping watch, as mariners do on the ocean. Though the rain had ceased, the sky was all one cloud, and the darkness so intense, that there seemed to be no world, except the little space on which our lanterns glimmered. Yet, it was an impressive scene.

We were traversing the “long level,” a dead flat between Utica and Syracuse, where the canal has not rise or fall enough to require a lock for nearly seventy miles. There can hardly be a more dismal tract of country. The forest which covers it, consisting chiefly of white cedar, black ash, and other trees that live in excessive moisture, is now decayed and death-struck, by the partial draining of the swamp into the great ditch of the canal. Sometimes, indeed, our lights were reflected from pools of stagnant water, which stretched far in among the trunks of the trees, beneath dense masses of dark foliage. But generally, the tall stems and intermingled branches were naked, and brought into strong relief, amid the surrounding gloom, by the whiteness of their decay. Often, we beheld the prostrate form of some old sylvan giant, which had fallen, and crushed down smaller trees under its immense ruin. In spots, where destruction had been riotous, the lanterns showed perhaps a hundred trunks, erect, half overthrown, extended along the ground, resting on their shattered limbs, or tossing them desperately into the darkness, but all of one ashy-white, all naked together, in desolate confusion. Thus growing out of the night as we drew nigh, and vanishing as we glided on, based on obscurity, and overhung and bounded by it, the scene was ghost-like—the very land of unsubstantial things, whither dreams might betake themselves, when they quit the slumberer’s brain.

My fancy found another emblem. The wild Nature of America had been driven to this desert-place by the encroachments of civilized man. And even here, where the savage queen was throned on the ruins of her empire, did we penetrate, a vulgar and worldly throng, intruding on her latest solitude. In other lands, Decay sits among fallen palaces; but here, her home is in the forests.

Looking ahead, I discerned a distant light, announcing the approach of another boat, which soon passed us, and proved to be a rusty old scow—just such a craft as the “Flying Dutchman” would navigate on the canal. Perhaps it was that celebrated personage himself, whom I imperfectly distinguished at the helm, in a glazed hat and rough great-coat, with a pipe in his mouth, leaving the fumes of tobacco a hundred yards behind. Shortly after, our boatman blew a horn, sending a long and melancholy note through the forestavenue, as a signal for some watcher in the wilderness to be ready with a change of horses. We had proceeded a mile or two with our fresh team, when the tow-rope got entangled in a fallen branch on the edge of the canal, and caused a momentary delay, during which I went to examine the phosphoric light of an odd tree, a little within the forest. It was not the first delusive radiance that I had followed. The tree lay along the ground, and was wholly converted into a mass of diseased splendor, which threw a ghastliness around. Being full of conceits that night, I called it a frigid fire; a funeral light, illumining decay and death; an emblem of fame, that gleams around the dead man without warming him; or of genius, when it owes its brilliancy to moral rottenness; and was thinking that such ghost-like torches were just fit to light up this dead forest, or to blaze coldly in tombs, when, starting from my abstraction, I looked up the canal. I recollected myself, and discovered the lanterns glimmering far away.

“Boat ahoy!” shouted I, making a trumpet of my closed fists.

Though the cry must have rung for miles along that hollow passage of the woods, it produced no effect. These packetboats make up for their snail-like pace by never loitering day nor night, especially for those who have paid their fare. Indeed, the captain had an interest in getting rid of me, for I was his creditor for a breakfast.

“They are gone! Heaven be praised!” ejaculated I; “for I cannot possibly overtake them! Here am I, on the ‘long level, ’at midnight, with the comfortable prospect of a walk to Syracuse, where my baggage will be left; and now to find a house or shed, wherein to pass the night.” So thinking aloud, I took a flambeau from the old tree, burning, but consuming not, to light my steps withal, and, like a Jack-o'-the-lantern, set out on my midnight tour.

Source: Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Canal Boat,” New-England Magazine 9 (December, 1835), pages 398–409.

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The Lowell Mill Girls Go on Strike, 1836: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

The Lowell Mill Girls Go on Strike, 1836

by Harriet Hanson Robinson

A group of Boston capitalists built a major textile manufacturing center in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the second quarter of the 19th century. The first factories recruited women from rural New England as their labor force. These young women, far from home, lived in rows of boardinghouses adjacent to the growing number of mills. The industrial production of textiles was highly profitable,and the number of factories in Lowell and other mill towns increased. More mills led to overproduction, which led to a drop in prices and profits. Mill owners reduced wages and speeded up the pace of work. The young female operatives organized to protest these wage cuts in 1834 and 1836. Harriet Hanson Robinson was one of those factory operatives; she began work in Lowell at the age of ten, later becoming an author and advocate of women’s suffrage. In 1898 she published Loom and Spindle, a memoir of her Lowell experiences, where she recounted the strike of 1836.

One of the first strikes of cotton-factory operatives that ever took place in this country was that in Lowell, in October, 1836. When it was announced that the wages were to be cut down, great indignation was felt, and it was decided to strike, en masse. This was done. The mills were shut down, and the girls went in procession from their several corporations to the “grove” on Chapel Hill, and listened to “incendiary” speeches from early labor reformers.

One of the girls stood on a pump, and gave vent to the feelings of her companions in a neat speech, declaring that it was their duty to resist all attempts at cutting down the wages. This was the first time a woman had spoken in public in Lowell, and the event caused surprise and consternation among her audience.

Cutting down the wages was not their only grievance, nor the only cause of this strike. Hitherto the corporations had paid twenty—five cents a week towards the board of each operative, and now it was their purpose to have the girls pay the sum; and this, in addition to the cut in the wages, would make a difference of at least one dollar a week. It was estimated that as many as twelve or fifteen hundred girls turned out, and walked in procession through the streets. They had neither flags nor music, but sang songs, a favorite (but rather inappropriate) one being a parody on “I won’t be a nun. ”

"Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I-

Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?

Oh ! I cannot be a slave,

I will not be a slave,

For I’m so fond of liberty

That I cannot be a slave."

My own recollection of this first strike (or “turn out” as it was called) is very vivid. I worked in a lower room, where I had heard the proposed strike fully, if not vehemently, discussed; I had been an ardent listener to what was said against this attempt at “oppression” on the part of the corporation, and naturally I took sides with the strikers. When the day came on which the girls were to turn out, those in the upper rooms started first, and so many of them left that our mill was at once shut down. Then, when the girls in my room stood irresolute, uncertain what to do, asking each other, “Would you? ” or “Shall we turn out?” and not one of them 1laving the courage to lead off, I, who began to think they would not go out, after all their talk, became impatient, and started on ahead, saying, with childish bravado, "I don’t care what you do, I am going to turn out, whether any one else does or not;‘’ and I marched out, and was followed by the others.

As I looked back at the long line that followed me, I was more proud than I have ever been since at any success I may have achieved, and more proud than I shall ever be again until my own beloved State gives to its women citizens the right of suffrage.

The agent of the corporation where I then worked took some small revenges on the supposed ringleaders; on the principle of sending the weaker to the wall, my mother was turned away from her boarding-house, that functionary saying,“Mrs. Hanson, you could not prevent the older girls from turning out, but your daughter is a child, and her you could control.”

It is hardly necessary to say that so far as results were concerned this strike did no good. The dissatisfaction of the operatives subsided, or burned itself out, and though the authorities did not accede to their demands, the majority returned to their work, and the corporation went on cutting down the wages.

And after a time, as the wages became more and more reduced, the best portion of the girls left and went to their homes, or to the other employments that were fast opening to women, until there were very few of the old guard left; and thus the status of the factory population of New England gradually became what we know it to be to-day.

Source: Harriet Hanson Robinson, Loom and Spindle or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (New York, T. Y. Crowell, 1898), 83–86.

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"For Oregon!" Settlers From Illinois Describe the New Territory, 1847: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

“For Oregon!” Settlers From Illinois Describe the New Territory, 1847

On June 15, 1846, the United States and Britain signed a treaty dividing the Oregon Territory—which at that time stretched into British Columbia—at the forty-ninth parallel. The acquisition of Oregon, like the acquisition of Texas, was part of President Polk’s program of territorial expansion. In 1847 the Illinois Journal, a newspaper based in Springfield, Illinois, decided to publish letters from former Illinoisans who had been tempted by the promise of Oregon and emigrated there. Readers curious about what life was like in the wild, northern territory got a mixed bag of reviews. While all the settlers agreed that the region was healthy, they had different views regarding its climate, soil, water, timber—and its overall capacity to provide permanent happiness to restless Americans. The newspaper’s selections from these letters are included here.

Mr. Wm. Neily writes from Oregon, under date of 11th of April last—

“In my estimation, the Oregon country has been considerably over-rated in some respects. The Willamette Valley is the principal country susceptible of farming, and for this purpose the soil is very rich and handsomely situated; but as a general thing, the country is destitute of timber. The timber used for farming purposes is principally fir.—Though there is a considerable quantity of oak, it is short and scrubby,—not much of it fit for rails. The productions of Oregon have also been overrated. From the best information I could get concerning the wheat crops, they would not average over fifteen bushels to an acre, though it is true the last year was unfavorable. With the right sort of farming, 25 bushels may be raised to the acre on the average. Grass remains green all the winter in the valleys, but I do not think we can raise much corn in this country. The winter of 1845- was pleasant, but the last winter was cold and there was a good deal of snow. Some of the cattle of the last emigrants, which came into the valley poor, died last winter. The rainy season continues to the middle of April, and sometimes till May. It seldom rains during the summer.”

Mr. Isaac Statts, in a letter to a friend, dated “Polk County, Oregon, April 8, 1847,” says—

“I am highly pleased with this country, and so far as I can now say, shall spend the remainder of my days in it. It has assuredly the most healthy climate in the world. Many persons now here who have removed from State to State, in search of health and found it not, are now hearty and robust, capable of performing any kind of labor.—Grass has been very fine and abundant for the last six weeks. When wheat is well put in, you can safely count on 30 bushels an acre. Hemp, tobacco and flax do well here. It is a good country for sheep. There is sufficient water power to carry on manufacturing to any extent. I have built my house in a commanding situation, and have a fine view of the country for ten miles around, and it is quite refreshing on a warm summer’s day to feel the invigorating breeze from the Cascade mountains.—We have a most excellent spring within sixty yards of our house, near which we have made our garden. I am convinced that this is as fine a country as can be found. Any man disposed to be industrious and who would be satisfied any where, would be satisfied in this country.”

Mr. Hezekiah Packingham, formerly of Putnam County, in this State, thus writes to his brother under date of “Willamette Valley, March 1, 1847:”

“I arrived in the Wallamette [Willamette] Valley on the 30th of September, and my calculations are all defeated about Oregon. I found it a mean, dried up, and drowned country. The Yam Hill is a small valley, destitute of timber. I soon got sick of this place, and then went to the mouth of the Columbia river. I can give Oregon credit for only one or two things, and these are, good health and plenty of salmon, and Indians; as for the farming country there is none here—wheat grows about the same as in Illinois; corn, potatoes, and garden vegetables cannot grow here without watering. The nights are too cold here in summer. The soil is not as good as in Illinois—the face of the country is hilly, and high mountains covered with snow all summer, and small valleys—the mountains and hills are covered with the heaviest timber that I ever saw. We have had a very hard winter here, snow fell two feet deep, and lay three weeks, by reason of which hundreds of cattle have died of starvation. The thermometer fell to three degrees above zero.—Prairie grass here is the same as in Illinois. There is no timothy or clover. Mechanics are very numerous here. Of the ships that sailed from New York last April, but one arrived, and she was ice bound for 50 days, in latitude 59 1–2. It is supposed the other has gone to her long home. A United States man-of-war was recently wrecked at the mouth of the Columbia. Money is very scarce here—and they have a kind of currency here (orders on stores and scrip)—they value property very high, but if they would put things at cash prices, they would be about the same as they are in the States. Oregon is rapidly filling up with young men, (but no girls,) of whom two-thirds are dissatisfied, and many would return to the States if they were able, but the road is long and tedious, and it is hard for families to get back; my trip was pleasant until I got to the South Pass—after that the country was rugged, and bad roads. Tell young men if they intend coming to Oregon, to drive no teams unless it is their own. We were uninjured by the Indians, though they were very saucy—they have no manners; they worship idols, and I saw one of their gods at the mouth of the river. There is no society here except the Camelities [Carmelites?] I shall return to the States next spring. Don’t believe all that is said about Oregon, as many falsehoods are uttered respecting the country.”

The following is a letter from Mr. Elijah Bristow, formerly a resident of M’Donough County, in this State. He left home in the spring of 1845, for the purpose of exploring California and Oregon in view of a future settlement. It is stated in the Monmouth Atlas (from which paper we copy his letter) that “Mr. B. was a resident of McDonough county of some twenty years, and is reputed to be a man of excellent judgement, discriminating mind, with little of the visionary. He is 60 years of age.”

"Pleasant Hill, Oregon, April 4, 1847.

"On the 8th of March, 1846 we left the Sacramento, in California, and after traveling thirty-five days, we reached the head of the Willamette valley in Oregon. As soon as I had rested I commenced looking at the country. I have examined it with a jealous eye; and have come to the conclusion that the Creator has placed Oregon at that point of the globe where it will ever be healthy. It has a good soil, is well watered, and has excellent timber.—The country is not as extensive as I had anticipated, but there is much unexplored. I have settled on Pleasant Hill, in the forks of the Willamette, 150 miles above ship navigation, and 60 or 70 miles from Alsea Bay, supposed to be a ship harbor.

People can live here with half the labor they can in Illinois. Stock live without corn. Wheat never fails; it will come up three years without sowing, and it is not known how much longer, but the last crop was the best. I have seen here the best that I ever saw any where: 56 bushels per acre measured. Rust is not known. We have two crops of grass a year; for as soon as the fall rain sets in the grass springs up and continues green all winter. Oats grow well; they are almost an evergreen. Turnips are raised weighing 18 lbs., and beets out of all credit. Cabbage, potatoes and other vegetables come well when it is not too dry,—Corn does but poorly, owing to the cool nights (made so by the sea breezes), but sufficient corn can be made to fatten pork, &c. Sheep, I think, will do well. Every family should bring ten ewes. They drive better than cattle. There is a plenty of bear, deer and elk near Pleasant Hill; and I could catch a plenty of fish if I had time. It does not rain as much in the winter as I anticipated. Last winter we had twenty-eight snows and fifteen times the valley was white. Many cattle of the last year’s emigration died; but those that were here before did well. The new emigrants were obliged to feed their cattle on wheat in order to winter them. I have conversed who have been here thirty-eight and forty years who never saw so hard a winter before. We can have every variety of climate, for two days' ride will carry us from the sultry plains to the region of eternal snow. This country is not without its objections. The greatest I can see is, that it rains a little too much in winter and not quite enough in summer. The time of harvesting is very dry. The water is as pure as ever bubbled from the earth. Some people here are much dissatisfied not finding every thing they wished. The principal cause of dissatisfaction is the difficulty of obtaining such things as they need, in this new country where every thing is scarce and high. Wheat $1, cash. Sharpening prairie plow $1. Dressing gun $2, and other things in proportion. There are many claims for sale. Some are going back to the States. f you see any of them you will not hear the truth, for they exaggerate to a person’s face. There are many of the best of claims not taken and will not be for years. The Willamette is a noble river with a rapid current to the falls. I have been to the mouth of the Columbia—do not like it. It is well described by Lewis and Clark. I do not think Puget Sound a very good farming country, though some like it. I have been induced to tear myself loose from the embraces of a kind and affectionate family in order to seek an asylum where under the direction of a kind Benefactor we could better our condition: and I am the worst deceived man you ever saw, if I have not found that place. All I regret is, that I did not get my consent to it years before. No country can present a better prospect for health at least. Many here have gained their health since they left the States. There are many who were miserably poor when the[y] left the States, who could no sell their property for from $3000 to $4000.

You would do well to come to Oregon if you can only get an outfit for your places; for I would not give a claim on Pleasant Hill for all three of your farms. When I look around and make full extimate [estimate] of all the prospects that are apparently eligible I can hardly enjoy myself as a christian should. My whole soul is in this thing. Tell B*** to come along, and if there are any others you have confidence in persuade them to come; for I think I am not deceived. You know I am no enthusiast. I have endeavored not to exaggerate, and you know this in my common way of writing. I have therefore said but little, but you may know from what I do that I am much pleased. It requires work to live as in other places. But we can do with less labor and responsibility, (after we get fixed,) the stock wintering without grain. The farmer has little else to do but to reap and sow his wheat. I know I may be censured for advising you all so strongly to come to Oregon: for it would be almost a miracle if all so large a family should be pleased. But I have done what I know to be my duty: as you are all young. Your mother and myself are getting old but we shall live many years longer here no doubt than in Illinois. You may think the journey will be attended with many difficulties, but if you will fix as I advise it will be no killing job, for I tell you honestly, that if you were all here with only an outfit and two year’s clothing, with three cows per family, you would be better off than you now are with all you have. You will find the journey a summer excursion or a pleasure trip, if you are not too anxious. I have never repented for a single moment my undertaking; for it is the best effort of my life. Get good strong wagons, with five or six yoke of oxen to each, and make light yokes. Bale all your feathers, extra bedding, &c., by making a box to fit a mould: lay in an envelope, pack your feathers, &c. as closely as possible: secure by means of the envelope; knock the box about; make the bales small, so as to be easily handled. Bring all your books in trunks or light boxes, your meat and flour (not superfine) in sacks.

Bring a tea-kettle, bake oven, and skillet: use tin dishes on the road. Some people have only a frying pan to keep house with on the road, live principally on beans and soup, mush and milk, with meat occasionally. Stop in the buffalo country and dry meat; waste not a particle of anything; give none to the Indians. Admit then not into your camp. Get a tin can with a small top and cap to fit, and you can have butter all the way. Rise early and keep moving. Do not push or fret your cattle by whipping them, for they will give out on the latter part of the road, where they are most needed—never get irritated. The road is the place to try men’s souls; those who are clever there will be clever anywhere. Start by the 20th of March, and be at St. Joseph’s on the first of May almost at the peril of your lives! Be up and better yourselves! Loitering will never do! Pick your company; get among Christians, if possible. Strive to be in the first company. Methinks that if I could see you all here well, I could say with Simeon of old, “Now Lord lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.” Now my dear family adieu! and may the God of peace preserve you wholly till we are all permitted to meet on this distant shore, and again unite our voices in singing those solemn lays which have so often cheered our hearts whilst I was with you, and the memory of which, causes me to sigh for the society of my long absent family.—Adieu. Your’s in hope of a blessed immortality.

ELIJAH BRISTOW.

Source: Illinois Journal (Springfield, Illinois), November 11, 1847.

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"It Was a Mournful Scene Indeed": Solomon Northup Remembers the New Orleans Slave Market: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

“It Was a Mournful Scene Indeed”: Solomon Northup Remembers the New Orleans Slave Market

The slave auction was one of the most barbaric practices of the harsh system of slavery. The slave trade within the United States destroyed families and tore apart communities, especially after 1840 when slavery was extended into the newer lands of the lower South and Southwest. Planters in the older settled areas of the upper South could realize substantial profits selling enslaved people, and New Orleans became the center of the trade. The resulting forced migration involved hundreds of thousands of African Americans. Some moved with their masters, but the migration also tore apart slave families residing on different plantations. Others were sold on the block, as Solomon Northup described in his Twelve Years a Slave. Narrative of Solomon, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841.

The very amiable, pious-hearted Mr. Theophilus Freeman, partner or consignee of James H. Burch, and keeper of the slave pen in New-Orleans, was out among his animals early in the morning. With an occasional kick of the older men and women, and many a sharp crack of the whip about the ears of the younger slaves, it was not long before they were all astir, and wide awake. Mr. Theophilus Freeman bustled about in a very industrious manner, getting his property ready for the sales-room, intending, no doubt, to do that day a rousing business.

In the first place we were required to wash thoroughly, and those with beards, to shave. We were then furnished with a new suit each, cheap, but clean. The men had hat, coat, shirt, pants and shoes; the women frocks of calico, and handkerchiefs to bind about their heads. We were now conducted into a large room in the front part of the building to which the yard was attached, in order to be properly trained, before the admission of customers. The men were arranged on one side of the room, the women on the other. The tallest was placed at the head of the row, then the next tallest, and so on in the order of their respective heights. Emily was at the foot of the line of women. Freeman charged us to remember our places; exhorted us to appear smart and lively, - sometimes threatening, and again, holding out various inducements. During the day he exercised us in the art of “looking smart,” and of moving to our places with exact precision.

After being fed, in the afternoon, we were again paraded and made to dance. Bob, a colored boy, who had some time belonged to Freeman, played on the violin. Standing near him, I made bold to inquire if he could play the “Virginia Reel.”He answered he could not, and asked me if I could play. Replying in the affirmative, he handed me the violin. I struck up a tune, and finished it. Freeman ordered me to continue playing, and seemed well pleased, telling Bob that I far excelled him - a remark that seemed to grieve my musical companion very much.

Next day many customers called to examine Freeman’s “new lot.” The latter gentleman was very loquacious, dwelling at much length upon our several good points and qualities. He would make us hold up our heads, walk briskly back and forth, while customers would feel of our hands and arms and bodies, turn us about, ask us what we could do, make us open our mouths and show our teeth, precisely as a jockey examines a horse which he is about to barter for or purchase. Sometimes a man or woman was taken back to the small house in the yard, stripped, and inspected more minutely. Scars upon a slave’s back were considered evidence of a rebellious or unruly spirit, and hurt his sale.

One old gentleman, who said he wanted a coachman, appeared to take a fancy to me. From his conversation with Burch, I learned he was a resident in the city. I very much desired that he would buy me, because I conceived it would not be difficult to make my escape from New-Orleans on some northern vessel. Freeman asked him fifteen hundred dollars for me. The old gentleman insisted it was too much, as times were very hard. Freeman, however, declared that I was sound and healthy, of a good constitution, and intelligent. He made it a point to enlarge upon my musical attainments. The old gentleman argued quite adroitly that there was nothing extraordinary about the nigger, and finally, to my regret, went out, saying he would call again. During the day, however, a number of sales were made. David and Caroline were purchased together by a Natchez planter. They left us, grinning broadly, and in the most happy state of mind, caused by the fact of their not being separated. Lethe was sold to a planter of Baton Rouge, her eyes flashing with anger as she was led away.

The same man also purchased Randall. The little fellow was made to jump, and run across the floor, and perform many other feats, exhibiting his activity and condition. All the time the trade was going on, Eliza was crying aloud, and wringing her hands. She besought the man not to buy him, unless he also bought her self and Emily. She promised, in that case, to be the most faithful slave that ever lived. The man answered that he could not afford it, and then Eliza burst into a paroxysm of grief, weeping plaintively. Freeman turned round to her, savagely, with his whip in his uplifted hand, ordering her to stop her noise, or he would flog her. He would not have such work - such snivelling; and unless she ceased that minute, he would take her to the yard and give her a hundred lashes. Yes, he would take the nonsense out of her pretty quick - if he didn’t, might he be d—d. Eliza shrunk before him, and tried to wipe away her tears, but it was all in vain. She wanted to be with her children, she said, the little time she had to live. All the frowns and threats of Freeman, could not wholly silence the afflicted mother. She kept on begging and beseeching them, most piteously not to separate the three. Over and over again she told them how she loved her boy. A great many times she repeated her former promises - how very faithful and obedient she would be; how hard she would labor day and night, to the last moment of her life, if he would only buy them all together. But it was of no avail; the man could not afford it. The bargain was agreed upon, and Randall must go alone. Then Eliza ran to him; embraced him passionately; kissed him again and again; told him to remember her - all the while her tears falling in the boy’s face like rain.

Freeman damned her, calling her a blubbering, bawling wench, and ordered her to go to her place, and behave herself; and be somebody. He swore he wouldn’t stand such stuff but a little longer. He would soon give her something to cry about, if she was not mighty careful, and that she might depend upon.

The planter from Baton Rouge, with his new purchases, was ready to depart.

“Don’t cry, mama. I will be a good boy. Don’t cry,” said Randall, looking back, as they passed out of the door.

What has become of the lad, God knows. It was a mournful scene indeed. I would have cried myself if I had dared.

See full text at the University of North Carolina’s Documenting the American South

Source: Solomon Northup, Twelve Years A Slave (Auburn, N.Y.: Derby and Miller, 1853), 78–82.

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"We Are Not the Degraded Race You Would Make Us": Norman Asing Challenges Chinese Immigration Restrictions: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

“We Are Not the Degraded Race You Would Make Us”: Norman Asing Challenges Chinese Immigration Restrictions

California had a few thousand Chinese immigrants in 1850. By 1852, the number swelled to 20,000, constituting almost a quarter of California’s work force. Chinese who toiled in mines and worked as shopkeepers were welcomed, even recruited, at first. But nativist sentiment to curtail Chinese immigration grew as the number of immigrants increased. John Bigler, the state’s first Governor, called for immigration restriction in 1852, citing Chinese immigrants’ inability to assimilate as European immigrants had. Norman Asing, a restaurant owner and leader in San Francisco’s Chinese community, assailed the governor for his anti-Chinese stance and utilized the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution against Bigler’s claims of the danger of Chinese immigration. But Asing’s argument also embraced some of the era’s racist assumptions about African Americans and Native Americans.

TO HIS EXCELLENCY GOV. BIGLER

Sir: I am a Chinaman, a republican, and a lover of free institutions; am much attached to the principles of the government of the United States, and therefore take the liberty of addressing you as the chief of the government of this State. Your official position gives you a great opportunity of good and evil. Your opinions through a message to a legislative body have weight and , and perhaps none more so with the people, for the effect of your late message has been thus far to prejudice the public mind against my people, to enable those who wait the opportunity to hunt them down, and rob them of the rewards of their toil. You may not have meant that this should be the case, but you can see what will be the result of your propositions.

I am not much acquainted with your logic, that by excluding population from this State you enhance its wealth. I have always considered that population was wealth; particularly a population of producers, of men who by the labor of their hands or intellect, enrich the warehouses or the granaries of the country with the products of nature and art. You are deeply convinced you say “that to enhance the prosperity and preserve the tranquility of this State, Asiatic immigration must be checked.” This, your Excellency, is but one step towards a retrograde movement of the government, which, on reflection, you will discover; and which the citizens of this country ought never to tolerate. It was one of the principal causes of quarrel between you (when colonies) and England; when the latter pressed laws against emigration, you looked for immigration; it came, and immigration made you what you are— your nation what it is. It transferred you at once from childhood to manhood and made you great and respectable throughout the nations of the earth. I am sure your Excellency cannot, if you would, prevent your being called the descendant of an immigrant, for I am sure you do not boast of being a descendant of the red man. But your further logic is more reprehensible. You argue that this is a republic of a particular race—that the Constitution of the United States admits of no asylum to any other than the pale face. This proposition is false in the extreme, and you know it. The declaration of your independence, and all the acts of your government, your people, and your history are all against you.

It is true, you have degraded the Negro because of your holding him in involuntary servitude, and because for the sake of union in some of your states such was tolerated, and amongst this class you would endeavor to place us; and no doubt it would be pleasing to some would-be freemen to mark the brand of servitude upon us. But we would beg to remind you that when your nation was a wilderness, and the nation from which you sprung barbarous, we exercised most of the arts and virtues of civilized life; that we are possessed of a language and a literature, and that men skilled in science and the arts are numerous among us; that the productions of our manufactories, our sail, and workshops, form no small share of the commerce of the world; and that for centuries, colleges, schools, charitable institutions, asylums, and hospitals, have been as common as in your own land. That our people cannot be reproved for their idleness, and that your historians have given them due credit for the variety and richness of their works of art, and for their simplicity of manners, and particularly their industry. And we beg to remark, that so far as the history of our race in California goes, it stamps with the test of truth the fact that we are not the degraded race you would make us. We came amongst you as mechanics or traders, and following every honorable business of life. You do not find us pursuing occupations of degrading character, except you consider labor degrading, which I am sure you do not; and if our countrymen save the proceeds of their industry from the tavern and the gambling house to spend it on farms or town lots or on their families, surely you will admit that even these are virtues. You say “you desire to see no change in the generous policy of this government as far as regards Europeans.” It is out of your power to say, however, in what way or to whom the doctrines of the Constitution shall apply. You have no more right to propose a measure for checking immigration, than you have the right of sending a message to the Legislature on the subject. As far as regards the color and complexion of our race, we are perfectly aware that our population have been a little more tan than yours.

Your Excellency will discover, however, that we are as much allied to the African race and the red man as you are yourself, and that as far as the aristocracy of skin is concerned, ours might compare with many of the European races; nor do we consider that your Excellency, as a Democrat, will make us believe that the framers of your declaration of rights ever suggested the propriety of establishing an aristocracy of skin. I am a naturalized citizen, your Excellency, of Charleston, South Carolina, and a Christian, too; and so hope you will stand corrected in your assertion “that none of the Asiatic class” as you are pleased to term them, have applied for benefits under our naturalization act. I could point out to you numbers of citizens, all over the whole continent, who have taken advantage of your hospitality and citizenship, and I defy you to say that our race have ever abused that hospitality or forfeited their claim on this or any of the governments of South America, by an infringement on the laws of the countries into which they pass. You find us peculiarly peaceable and orderly. It does not cost your state much for our criminal prosecution. We apply less to your courts for redress, and so far as I know, there are none who are a charge upon the state, as paupers.

You say that “gold, with its talismanic power, has overcome those natural habits of non-intercourse we have exhibited.” I ask you, has not gold had the same effect upon your people, and the people of other countries, who have migrated hither? Why, it was gold that filled your country (formerly a desert) with people, filled your harbours with ships and opened our much-coveted trade to the enterprise of your merchants.

You cannot, in the face of facts that stare you in the face, assert that the cupidity of which you speak is ours alone; so that your Excellency will perceive that in this age a change of cupidity would not tell. Thousands of your own citizens come here to dig gold, with the idea of returning as speedily as they can.

We think you are in error, however, in this respect, as many of us, and many more, will acquire a domicile amongst you.

But, for the present, I shall take leave of your Excellency, and shall resume this question upon another occasion which I hope you will take into consideration in a spirit of candor. Your predecessor pursued a different line of conduct towards us, as will appear by reference to his message.

I have the honor to be your Excellency’s very obedient servant,

NORMAN ASING

Source: "To His Excellency Gov. Bigler," in Daily Alta California (San Francisco: May 5, 1852).

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"We Are Not Entirely Out of Civilization": A Homesteader Writes Home in 1873: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

“We Are Not Entirely Out of Civilization”: A Homesteader Writes Home in 1873

Moving to the Great Plains meant building a home on broad, flat, and treeless prairies. Borrowing from the Plains Indians and earlier pioneers in Kansas, Mattie Oblinger and other homesteaders built sod houses. They cut the prairie sod deep and wide, laid it up like giant bricks, and fit the bricks together snugly without mortar. Mattie and her husband Uriah obtained their land through the Homestead Act of 1862, claiming and improving their 160 acres over five years. Other lands for farmers became available from the vast acreages of public land given to the railroad companies as subsidies. The Oblingers and other settlers formed communities of young families with a rough social equality and common concerns about crops, religion, and social isolation. They faced a series of hardships on the land in the 1870s: blizzards, droughts, and grasshoppers, as well as low crop prices. Mattie died in childbirth at the age of thirty-six.

Letter from Mattie V. Oblinger to George W. Thomas, Grizzie B. Thomas, and Wheeler Thomas Family, June 16, 1873

Fillmore County Neb

June 16th 1873

Dear Brother & Sister & all of Uncle Wheelers

Thinking you would like to hear from us and hear how we are prospering I thought I must write you a letter and to fulfill the promise I made when I last saw you

The reason I have not written sooner I have not had the time I have wrote a letter almost every sunday to send home and that has occupied most all my leisure time Sunday is rather a poor day for us to get a chance to write too for we have went to Church and sunday school every sunday I have been here two sundays we went about 9 miles the rest of ther time we went to Giles the next preaching will be at Giles which is in two weeks The man that preaches is quite old and is a baptist minister but when he preaches he makes no distinction in denominations We have a good sunday school in progress now I suppose there must be about fifty enrolled We have not the means yet to carry on sunday school yet as they do in older settlments but we have our bibles and hymn books and we all gather together and read a lesson and then ask questions and sing and offer prayers and I think we do about as much good as any sunday school I know it is not quite so interesting as if we had money to buy papers and books I think we have Just as enterpriseing people here as any where There was methodist preaching yesterday about four miles from here Mr Elliotts and us had intended to go but it threatened rain and it was so late when our sunday school and society meeting was out that we did not go I think there will be a methodist preaching place established in the neighborhood before long as there was a methodist preacher around a few days ago hunting up the scattered members in the country He said the conference had sent him here so you see we are not entirely out of civilizatian I know if you was here you would not think so I have just as good neighbors as I ever had any where and they are very sociable I was never in a neighborhood where all was as near on equality as they are here Those that have been here have a little the most they all have cows and that is quite a help here I get milk & butter from Mrs Furgison who lives 1/4 of a mile from us get the milk for nothing and pay twelve cents a pound for butter she makes good butter Most all of the people here live in Sod houses and dug outs I like the sod house the best they are the most convenient I expect you think we live miserable because we are in a sod house but I tell you in solid earnest I never enjoyed my self better but George I expect you are ready to say It is because it is somthing new No this not the case it is because we are ... on our own and the thoughts of moveing next spring does not bother me and every lick we strike is for our selves and not half for some one else I tell you this is quite a consolation to us who have been renters so long there are no renters here every one is on his own and doing the best he can and not much a head yet for about all that are here was renters and it took about all they had to get here Some come here and put up temporary frame houses thought they could not live in a sod house This fall they are going to build sod houses so they can live live [sic] comfortable this winter a temporary frame house here is a poor thing a house that is not plastered the wind and dust goes right through and they are very cold A sod house can be built so they are real nice and comfortable build nice walls and then plaster and lay a floor above and below and then they are nice Uriah is going to build one after that style this fall The one we are in at present is 14 by 16 and a dirt floor Uriah intends takeing it for a stable this winter I will be a nice comfortable stable A little ways from the door is a small pond that has watter the year round we use out of it for all purposes but drinking and cooking We have the drinking water cary about 1/4 of a mile and the best of water We have two neighbors only 1/4 of a mile from us

I must stop and get supper

Supper is over and dishes washed I wish I had a cow or two to milk I would feel quite proud then think will get one after harvest Uriah is going up near Crete to harvest The wheat and Oats looks well here but there is not so much sown as in older settlements each man calculates to do his own harvesting in this neighborhood this year there is several men going from this settlement in to older ones to get harvesting Mrs Elliot and I are talking of staying together while our men go harvesting Almost every man here does his own work yet for they are not able to hire I think it will be quite different in a few years Uriah has 23 acres of sod corn planted it looks real well I tell you it is encourageing to have out a lot of corn and all your own We have a nice lot of Squashes and Cucumbers & Mellons & Beans comeing on There was a striped bug worked some on our squashes but did not bother our other vines We have our Potatoes and cabbage up at Giles as they do not so well on sod I set a hundred & thirty cabbages last week they are every one growing We have the nicest patch of early rose potatoes in the neighborhood will not be long until we will have new potatoes We have fared pretty well in the potato line as Uriah bought ten bushel when I come to Crete he bought for seed and to use we will have plenty until new potatoes come If nothing happens we will have a nice lot this fall I have nice Tomatoes plants comeing on I want to set more Tomatoes and Cabbage this week I get Garden vegetables in Giles garden I could not make garden here as we had no sod subdued and I have such good neighbors they said they would divide their garden vegetables I planted a lot of beet seed in Mrs Alkires garden they look real nice Uriah is breaking sod to day he will soon have 40 acres turned over then it will be ready to go into right next Spring It looks like it was fun to turn the sod over here there are no roots or stpumps to be jerkinking the plows out It has been very warm for a few days and it makes old buck pant considerable he is almost fat enough for beef old bright is not so fat so he gets along the best

We have had an immense lot of rain here this season but I guess this has been the general complaint every where I think we had the hardest storm saturday night or evening that has been since I come the wind blew very hard I do not know how long it lasted for I went to sleep and the wind was blowing yet We can not notice the wind so much in a sod house as in a frame Giles a Doc came home with us yesterday I heard them & Uriah laughing about going out to see if the fences was blown down I looks very strange to me to see Crops growing here and no fence around them They have a herd law here and the stock a man has for use about home he must Lariett them out his other cattle he puts them in herds in the neighbor hood gets them herded for 25 cts per month The prarie looks beautiful now as the grass is so nice and green and the most pretty flowers I can not tell how many different kinds I have noticed I have seen three Antelopes one Jack Rabbit and one swift and lots of prarie squirrels I thought when I left the timber I would not see any more birds but there are lots of them here some that are entirely different to any I ever saw in Ind There is more Rattle snakes here than there are garter snakes in Ind Uriah has killed two on our place there are not so plent right in our neighborhood as they are three miles east of here near a prarie dog town some men over there have killed as high 18 & 20 John how is this for high hardly any one gets bit with them they are mostly black rattle snakes Sam has sold out to Mr Mc Clanin. McClain he had not improved as much as the law requested he should and he was afraid some one would jump his claim and then he would be out he sold very cheap only got fifty dollars I ask him if he was going back with out secureing a peice of land he said no Ill bet I dont go back home with out owning some of this nice prarie he said he was bound to have land here He is going to buy RR land and then he will not have to stay by it I think he will go to Ind this fall I have not heard him say for certain This is a lonely place for a single man for there are not many young ladies here for them to go with but there are lots comeing on a little too young for Doc Uriah Cook started for Minnesota last monday he bought eighty acres one mile east of us paid one hundred & twenty five dollars he has a very pretty 80 He set no time to come back Geo do you and Grizzie of comeing west yet if you do I wish you would come here I am quite sure you would like the country for it is as pretty and good as it can be of course it has some draw backs as all other places do Ella is fat and hearty she said I should tell you to come over and bring Earny she often speaks of him I got her a little kitten last evening she is trying to comb it We are all well hope this will find you all well and Aunt Eliza getting better I washed to day Now Geo I send this in your name but I want you to besure and give it Uncle Wheels too as postage is scarce I thoughgt this would do all I want you all to besure and write soon We send our love and best wishes from

U W O & M V Oblinger

Direct to Sutton Clay County Neb Excuse letter paper

Source: Nebraska State Historical Society, Digital ID, nbhips1109

Source: Uriah W. Oblinger Collection, Nebraska Historical Society, from Prairie Settlement: Nebraska Photographs and Family Letters, American Memory, Library of Congress. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/nbhihtml/pshome.html

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Reading the Fine Print: The Grandfather Clause in Louisiana: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

Reading the Fine Print: The Grandfather Clause in Louisiana

In the post-Reconstruction era, Southern states mobilized a vast campaign of suffrage restriction—fraud, registration laws, and literary tests—in an effort to disempower African Americans and maintain Democratic party dominance. Although these restrictions were most often directed at black voters, those that barred voting on the basis of literacy or ownership of property also affected poor whites. Many northerners supported suffrage restriction as well. Between 1889 and 1913, nine states outside the South added restrictions requiring voters to read English, and ostensible reforms like the secret ballot were often directed at pushing out foreign-born and illiterate voters. One form of voting restriction aimed specifically at African Americans was the Grandfather clause that allowed men to register to vote only if they could have voted in 1867 (before African Americans were allowed to vote in the South) or descended from an 1867 voter. This excerpt from the Louisiana law of 1898 was typical of many such restrictions. The cumulative effect of the different restriction efforts was to reduce overall voting levels by more than a third and black voting rates by almost two thirds.

[Article 197] Sec. 3. He [the elector] shall be able to read and write, and shall demonstrate his ability to do so when he applies for registration, by making, under oath administered by the registration officer or his deputy, written application therefor, in the English language, or his mother tongue, which application shall contain the essential facts necessary to show that he is entitled to register and vote, and shall be entirely written, dated and signed by him, in the presence of the registration officer or his deputy, without assistance or suggestion from any person or any memorandum whatever, except the form of application. . . .

Sec. 4. If he be not able to read and write, as provided by Section three . . . then he shall be entitled to register and vote if he shall, at the time he offers to register, be the bona fide owner of property assessed to him in this State at a valuation of not less than three hundred dollars . . . and on which, if such property be personal only, all taxes due shall have been paid. . . .

Sec. 5. No male person who was on January 1st, 1867, or at any date prior thereto, entitled to vote under the Constitution or statutes of any State of the United States, wherein he then resided, and no son or grandson of any such person not less than twenty—one years of age at the date of the adoption of this Constitution, and no male person of foreign birth, who was naturalized prior to the first day of January, 1898, shall be denied the right to register and vote in this State by reason of his failure to possess the educational or property qualifications prescribed by this Constitution; provided, he shall have resided in this State for five years next preceding the date at which he shall apply for registration, and shall have registered in accordance with the terms of this article prior to September 1, 1898, and no person shall be entitled to register under this section after said date. . . .

A separate registration of voters applying under this section, shall be made by the registration officer of every parish. . . .

The registration of voters under this section [5] shall close on the 31st day of August, 1898, and immediately thereafter the registration Officer of every parish shall make a sworn copy, in duplicate, of the list of persons registered under this section, showing in detail whether the applicant registered as a voter of 1867, or prior thereto, or as the son of such voter, or as the grandson of such voter, and deposit one of said duplicates in the Office of the Secretary of State . . . and the other of said duplicates shall be by him filed in the office of the Clerk of the District Court of the parish. . . .

All persons whose names appear on said registration lists shall be admitted to register for all elections in this State without possessing the educational or property qualification prescribed by this Constitution, unless otherwise disqualified, and all persons who do not by personal application claim exemption from the provisions of sections 3 and 4 of this article before September 1st, 1898, shall be forever denied the right to do so. . . .

Source: "Constitution of the State of Louisiana, Adopted May 12, 1898," in Walter L. Fleming, ed., Documentary History of Reconstruction, Vol. 2 (Cleveland, Ohio: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1906), 451–453.

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A Mule Spinner Tells the U.S. Senate about Late 19th century Unemployment: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

A Mule Spinner Tells the U.S. Senate about Late 19th century Unemployment

Fall River, Massachusetts, mill worker Thomas O’Donnell (who had immigrated to the U.S. from England eleven years earlier) appeared before the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor on October 18, 1883, to answer the panel’s questions about working-class economic conditions. An unemployed mule spinner for more than half of the year, he described the introduction of new production methods at the Fall River, Massachusetts, textile factory where he worked as a mule spinner (a worker who tended the large yarn-making machines). These changes allowed the mill’s owners to employ children, and they also left the mule spinner unemployed for much of the year. O’Donnell described the sharp decline in his family’s living standards that followed and the ways they struggled to make ends meet.

BOSTON, MASS. October 18, 1883.

THOMAS O’DONNELL examined.

By the CHAIRMAN:

Question. Where do you live?

Answer. At Fall River.

Q. How long have you lived in this country?

A. Eleven years.

Q. Where were you born?

A. In Ramsbotham, England.

Q. Have you been naturalized here?

A. No, sir.

LIFE OF A MULE-SPINNER.

Q. What is your business?

A. I am a mule-spinner by trade. I have worked at it since I have been in this country—eleven years.

Q. Are you a married man?

A. Yes, sir; I am a married man; have a wife and two children. I am not very well educated. I went to work when I was young, and have been working ever since in the cotton business; went to work when I was about eight or nine years old. I was going to state how I live. My children get along very well in summer time, on account of not having to buy fuel or shoes or one thing and another. I earn $1.50 a day and can’t afford to pay a very big house rent. I pay $1.50 a week for rent, which comes to about $6 a month.

Q. That is, you pay this where you are at Fall River?

A. Yes.

Q. Do you have work right along?

A. No, sir; since that strike we had down in Fall River about three years ago I have not worked much more than half the time, and that has brought my circumstances down very much.

Q. Why have you not worked more than half the time since then?

A. Well, at Fall River if a man has not got a boy to act as “back-boy” it is very hard for him to get along. In a great many cases they discharge men in that work and put in men who have boys.

Q. Men who have boys of their own?

A. Men who have boys of their own capable enough to work in a mill, to earn 30 or 40 cents a day.

CHILD LABOR NECESSARY TO THE EMPLOYMENT OF PARENTS.

Q. Is the object of that to enable the boy to earn something for himself?

A. Well, no, the object is this: They are doing away with a great deal of mule-spinning there and putting in ring-spinning, and for that reason it takes a good deal of small help to run this ring work, and it throws the men out of work because they are doing away with the mules and putting these ring-frames in to take their places. For that reason they get all the small help they can to run these ring-frames. There are so many men in the city to work, and whoever has a boy can have work, and whoever has no boy stands no chance. Probably he may have a few months of work in the summer time, but will be discharged in the fall. That is what leaves me in poor circumstances. Our children, of course, are very often sickly from one cause or another, on account of not having sufficient clothes, or shoes, or food, or something. And also my woman, she never did work in a mill; she was a housekeeper, and for that reason she can’t help me to anything at present, as many women do help their husbands down there, by working, like themselves. My wife never did work in a mill, and that leaves me to provide for the whole family. I have two children.

HARDSHIP OF UNDERTAKERS. AND DOCTORS. BILLS UPON THE POOR.

And another thing that helped to keep me down: A year ago this month I buried the oldest boy we had, and that brings things very expensive on a poor man. For instance, it will cost there, to bury a body, about $100. Now, we could have that done in England for about 5 pounds; that would not amount to much more than about $20, or something in that neighborhood. That makes a good deal of difference. Doctors' bills are very heavy—about $2 a visit; and if a doctor comes once a day for two or three weeks it is quite a pile for a poor man to pay.

Q. Will not the doctor come for a dollar a day?

A. You might get a man sometimes, and you sometimes won’t, but they generally charge $2 a day.

Q. To operatives?

A. Oh, all around. You might get one for $1.50 sometimes.

Q. They charge you as much as they charge people of more means?

A. They charge as much as if I was the richest man in the city, except that some of them might be generous once in a while and put it down a little in the end; but the charge generally is $2. That makes it hard.

ONE DOLLAR AND A HALF A DAY FOR NINE MONTHS

TO SUPPORT SIX PEOPLE TWELVE MONTHS

I have a brother who has four children, besides his wife and himself. All he earns is $1.50 a day. He works in the iron works at Fall River. He only works about nine months out of twelve. There is generally about three months of stoppage, taking the year right through, and his wife and his family all have to be supported for a year out of the wages of nine months—$1.50 a day for nine months out of the twelve, to support six of them. It does not stand to reason that those children and he himself can have natural food or be naturally dressed. His children are often sick, and he has to call in doctors. That is always hanging over him, and is a great expense to him. And then if he does not pay the bill the trustee law comes on him. That is a thing that is not properly looked after. A man told me the other day that he was trusteed for $1.75, and I understood that there was a law in this State that a man could not be trusteed for less than $10. It seems to me there is something wrong in the Government somewhere; where it is, I can’t tell.

Q. How much money have you got?

A. I have not got a cent in the house; didn’t have when I came out this morning.

Q. How much money have you had within three months?

A. I have had about $16 inside of three months.

Q. Is that all you have had within the last three months to live on?

A. Yes, $16.

SUPPORTING A FAMILY ON $133 A YEAR.

Q. How much have you had within a year?

A. Since Thanksgiving I happened to get work in the Crescent Mill, and worked there exactly thirteen weeks. I got just $1.50 a day, with the exception of a few days that I lost because in following up mulespinning you are obliged to lose a day once in a while; you can’t follow it up regularly.

Q. Thirteen weeks would be seventy-eight days, and, at $1.50 a day, that would make $117, less whatever time you lost?

A. Yes. I worked thirteen weeks there and ten days in another place, and then there was a dollar I got this week, Wednesday.

Q. Taking a full year back can you tell how much you have had?

A. That would be about fifteen weeks' work. Last winter, as I told you, I got in, and I worked up to about somewhere around Fast Day, or may be New Year’s day; anyway, Mr. Howard has it down on his record, if you wish to have an exact answer to that question; he can answer it better than I can, because we have a sort of union there to keep ourselves together.

Q. Do you think you have had $150 within a year?

A. No, sir.

Q. Have you had $125?

A. Well, I could figure it up if I had time. The thirteen weeks is all I have had.

Q. The thirteen weeks and the $16 you have mentioned?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. That would be somewhere about $133, if you had not lost any time?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. That is all you have had? A. Yes, sir.

Q. To support yourself and wife and two children?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. Have you had any help from outside?

A. No, sir.

Q. Do you mean that yourself and wife and two children have had nothing but that for all this time?

A. That is all. I got a couple dollars' worth of coal last winter, and the wood I picked up myself. I goes around with a shovel and picks up clams and wood.

DIGGING CLAMS TO EKE OUT AN EXISTENCE.

Q. What do you do with the clams?

A. We eat them. I don’t get them to sell, but just to eat, for the family. That is the way my brother lives, too, mostly. He lives close by us.

Q. How many live in that way down there?

A. I could not count them, they are so numerous. I suppose there are one thousand down there.

Q. A thousand that live on $150 a year?

A. They live on less.

Q. Less than that?

A. Yes; they live on less than I do.

Q. How long has that been so?

A. Mostly so since I have been married.

Q. How long is that?

A. Six years this month.

Q. Why do you not go West on a farm?

A. How could I go, walk it?

TOO POOR TO GO WEST.

Q. Well, I want to know why you do not go out West on a $2,000 farm, or take up a homestead and break it and work it up, and then have it for yourself and family?

A. I can’t see how I could get out West. I have got nothing to go with.

Q. It would not cost you over $1,500.

A. Well, I never saw over a $20 bill, and that is when I have been getting a month.s pay at once. If some one would give me $1,500 I will go.

Q. Is there any prospect that anybody will do that?

A. I don’t know of anybody that would.

Q. You say you think there are a thousand men or so with their families that live in that way in Fall River?

A. Yes, sir; and I know many of them. They are around there by the shore. You can see them every day; and I am sure of it because men tell me.

Q. Are you a good workman?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. Were you ever turned off because of misconduct or incapacity or unfitness for work?

A. No, sir.

Q. Or because you did bad work?

A. No, sir.

Q. Or because you made trouble among the help?

A. No, sir.

Q. Did you ever have any personal trouble with an employer?

A. No, sir.

Q. You have not anything now you say?

A. No, sir.

Q. How old are you?

A. About thirty.

Q. Is your health good?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. What would you work for if you could get work right along; if you could be sure to have it for five years, staying right where you are?

A. Well, if I was where my family could be with me, and I could have work every day I would take $1.50, and be glad to.

Q. One dollar and fifty cents a day, with three hundred days to the year, would make more than you make now in three or four years, would it not?

ONLY A DOLLAR’S WORTH OF COAL IN TEN MONTHS.

A. Well, I would have no opportunity then to pick up clams. I have had no coal except one dollar’s worth since last Christmas.

Q. When do the clams give out?

A. They give out in winter.

Q. You spoke of fuel—what do you have for fuel?

A. Wood and coal.

Q. Where does the wood come from?

A. I pick it up around the shore—any old pieces I see around that are not good for anything. There are many more that do the same thing.

Q. Do you get meat to live on much?

A. Very seldom.

Q. What kinds of meat do you get for your family?

A. Well, once in a while we gets a piece of pork and some clams and make a clam-chowder. That makes a very good meal. We sometimes get a piece of corn beef or something like that.

Q. Have you had any fresh beef within a month?

A. Yes; we had a piece of pork steak for four of us yesterday.

Q. Have you had any beef within a month?

A. No, sir. I was invited to a man’s house on Sunday—he wanted me to go up to his house and we had a dinner of roast pork.

Q. That was an invitation out, but I mean have you had any beefsteak in your own family, of your own purchase, within a month?

A. Yes; there was a half a pound, or a pound one Sunday—I think it was.

Q. Have you had only a pound or a half a pound on Sunday?

A. That is all.

Q. A half pound of pork?

A. Yes. About two pounds of pork I guess we have had in the month, to make clam-chowder with, and sometimes to fry a bit.

Q. And there are four of you in the family?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. How many pounds of beefsteak have you had in your family, that you bought for your own home consumption within this year that we have been speaking of?

A. I don’t think there has been five pounds of beefsteak.

Q. You have had a little pork steak?

A. We had a half a pound of pork steak yesterday; I don.t know when we had any before.

Q. What other kinds of meat have you had within a year?

A. Well, we have had corn beef twice I think that I can remember this year on Sunday, for dinner.

Q. Twice is all that you can remember within a year?

A. Yes—and some cabbage.

Q. What have you eaten?

A. Well, bread mostly, when we could get it; we sometimes couldn’t make out to get that, and have had to go without a meal.

Q. Has there been any day in the year that you have had to go without anything to eat?

A. Yes, sir, several days.

Q. More than one day at a time?

A. No.

Q. How about the children and your wife—did they go without anything to eat too?

THE CHILDREN CRYING FOR FOOD.

A. My wife went out this morning and went to a neighbor’s and got a loaf of bread and fetched it home, and when she got home the children were crying for something to eat.

Q. Have the children had anything to eat to-day except that, do you think? A. They had that loaf of bread—I don’t know what they have had since then, if they have had anything.

Q. Did you leave any money at home?

A. No, sir.

Q. If that loaf is gone, is there anything in the house?

A. No, sir; unless my wife goes out and gets something; and I don’t know who would mind the children while she goes out.

Q. Has she any money to get anything with?

A. No, sir.

Q. Have the children gone without a meal at any time during the year?

A. They have gone without bread some days, but we have sometimes got meal and made porridge of it.

Q. What kind of meal?

A. Sometimes Indian meal, and sometimes oatmeal.

Q. Meal stirred up in hot water?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. Is it cold weather down there now?

A. It is very cold now.

SCANT CLOTHING IN COLD WEATHER.

Q. What have the children got on in the way of clothing?

A. They have got along very nicely all summer, but now they are beginning to feel quite sickly. One has one shoe on, a very poor one, and a slipper, that was picked up somewhere. The other has two odd shoes on, with the heel out. He has got cold and is sickly now.

Q. Have they any stockings?

A. He had got stockings, but his feet comes through them, for there is a hole in the bottom of the shoe.

Q. What have they got on the rest of their person?

A. Well, they have a little calico shirt—what should be a shirt; it is sewed up in some shape—and one little petticoat, and a kind of little dress.

Q. How many dresses has your wife got?

A. She has got one since she was married, and she hasn’t worn that more than half a dozen times; she has worn it just going to church and coming back. She is very good in going to church, but when she comes back she takes it off, and it is pretty near as good now as when she bought it.

Q. She keeps that dress to go to church in?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. How many dresses aside from that has she?

A. Well, she got one here three months ago.

Q. What did it cost?

A. It cost $1 to make it and I guess about a dollar for the stuff, as near as I can tell.

Q. The dress cost $2?

A. Yes.

Q. What else has she?

A. Well, she has an undershirt that she got given to her, and she has an old wrapper, which is about a mile too big for her; somebody gave it to her.

Q. She did not buy it?

A. No. That is all that I know that she has.

Q. You have had $1 or $2 worth of coal last winter?

A. I think it was a quarter of a ton, and I believe it was $2.25 worth.

Q. Is that all you have had?

A. That is all I had last winter. All the rest I picked up—wood.

Q. Did you try to get work?

A. I was working last winter.

Q. You say that a good many others are situated just like you are?

A. Yes, sir; I should say as many as a thousand down in Fall River are just in the same shape, if not worse; though they can’t be much worse. I have heard many women say they would sooner be dead than living. I don’t know what is wrong, but something is wrong. There is an overflow of labor in Fall River.

Q. Why do not these people go out West upon farms and go to farming?

A. They have not got the means. Fall River being a manufacturing place, it brings them in there; and when the mills in other places stop for want of water that brings them into Fall River. I think there are quite a lot of them that have come from Lowell and Lawrence these three or four weeks back—whatever brings them.

Q. Is there anything else that you want to say to the committee?

A. Well, as regards debts; it costs us so much for funeral expenses and doctors. expenses; I wanted to mention that.

The CHAIRMAN. You have stated that. It is clear that nobody can afford either to get sick or to die there.

The WITNESS. Well, there are plenty of them down there that are in very poor health, but I am in good health and my children generally are in fair health, but the children can’t pick up anything and only get what I bring to them.

Q. Are you in debt?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. How much?

A. I am in debt for those funeral expenses now $15—since a year ago.

Q. Have you paid the rest?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. You live in a hired tenement?

A. Yes; but of course I can’t pay a big rent. My rent is $6 a month. The man I am living under would come and put me right out and give me no notice either if I didn’t pay my rent. He is a sheriff and auctioneer man. I don.t know whether he has any authority to do it or not, but he does it with people .

Q. Do you see any way out of your troubles—what are you going to do for a living—or do you expect to have to stay right there?

A. Yes. I can’t run around with my family.

Q. You have nowhere to go to, and no way of getting there if there was any place to go to?

A. No, sir; I have no means nor anything, so I am obliged to remain there and try to pick up something as I can.

Q. Do the children go to school?

A. No, sir; they are not old enough; the oldest child is only three and a half; the youngest one is one and a half years old.

Q. Is there anything else you wanted to say?

A. Nothing further, except that I would like some remedy to be got to help us poor people down there in some way. Excepting the Government decides to do something with us we have a poor show. We are all, or mostly all, in good health; that is, as far as the men who are at work go.

Q. You do not know anything but mule-spinning, I suppose?

A. That is what I have been doing, but I sometimes do something with pick and shovel. I have worked for a man at that, because I am so put on. I am looking for work in a mill. The way they do there is this: There are about twelve or thirteen men that go into a mill every morning, and they have to stand their chance, looking for work. The man who has a boy with him he stands the best chance, and then, if it is my turn or a neighbor’s turn who has no boy, if another man comes in who has a boy he is taken right in, and we are left out. I said to the boss once it was my turn to go in, and now you have taken on that man; what am I to do; I have got two little boys at home, one of them three years and a half and the other one year and a half old, and how am I to find something for them to eat; I can’t get my turn when I come here.

He said he could not do anything for me. I says, “Have I got to starve; ain’t I to have any work?” They are forcing these young boys into the mills that should not be in mills at all; forcing them in because they are throwing the mules out and putting on ring-frames. They are doing everything of that kind that they possibly can to crush down the poor people—the poor operatives there.

Source: U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Report on the Relations Between Labor and Capital, Vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1885), 451–457.

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Slumming Among the Unemployed: William Wycoff Studies Joblessness in the 1890s: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

Slumming Among the Unemployed: William Wycoff Studies Joblessness in the 1890s

Even before the 1890s depression struck with devastating force in 1893, large numbers of jobless men and women competed in tight labor markets and faced homelessness. One of the best first-hand descriptions of “what it is to look for work and fail to find it” comes from political economist Walter Wycoff’s two-volume study of The Workers: An Experiment in Reality, first published in 1899. Wycoff had abandoned his studies at Princeton to seek a more concrete appreciation of social problems. His record of his two years spent as a common laborer became an early classic of sociological writing.

CHAPTER I: THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED

ROOMS OF THE YOUNG MEN’s CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION, CHICAGO, ILL.

Saturday Evening, December 5, 1891.

A new phase of my experiment is begun. Hitherto I have been in the open country, and have found work with surprising readiness. Now I am in the heart of a congested labor market, and I am learning, by experience, what it is to look for work and fail to find it; to renew the search under the spur of hunger and cold, and of the animal instinct of self-preservation until any employment, no matter how low in the scale of work, that would yield food and shelter, appears to you the very Kingdom of Heaven; and if it could suffer violence, it would seem as though the strength of our desire must take that kingdom by force. But it remains impregnable to your attack, and, baffled and weakened, you are thrust back upon yourself and held down remorselessly to the cold, naked fact that you, who in all the universe are of supremest importance to yourself, are yet of no importance to the universe. You are a superfluous human being. For you there is no part in the play of the world’s activity. There remains for you simply this alternative: Have you the physical and moral qualities which fit you to survive, and which will place you at last within the working of the large scheme of things, or, lacking these qualities, does there await you inevitable wreck under the onward rush of the world’s great moving life?

That, at all events, is pretty much as it appears to-night to Tom Clark and me. Clark is my “partner,” and we are not in good luck nor in high spirits. We each had a ten-cent breakfast this morning, but neither has tasted food since, and to-night, after an exhausting search for work, we must sleep in the station-house.

We are doing our best to pass the time in warmth and comfort until midnight. We know better than to go to the station-house earlier than that hour. Clark is in the corner at my side pretending to read a newspaper, but really trying to disguise the fact that he is asleep.

An official who walks periodically through the reading-room, recalling nodding figures to their senses, has twice caught Clark asleep, and has threatened to put him out.

I shall be on the alert, and shall warn Clark of his next approach, for after this place is closed we shall have long enough to wait in the naked street before we can be sure of places in the larger corridor of the station, where the crowding is less close and the air a degree less foul than in the inner passage, where men are tightly packed over every square foot of the paved floor.

We are tired and very hungry, and not a little discouraged; we should be almost desperate but for one redeeming fact. The silver lining of our cloud has appeared to-night in the form of falling snow. From the murky clouds which all day have hung threateningly over the city, a quiet, steady snow-fall has begun, and we shall be singularly unfortunate in the morning if we can find no pavements to clean.

In the growing threat of snow we have encouraged each other with the brightening prospect of a little work, and for quite half an hour after nightfall we stood alternately before the windows of two cheap restaurants in Madison Street, studying the square placards in the windows on which the bills of fare are printed, and telling each other, with nice discriminations between bulk and strengthening power of food, what we shall choose to-morrow.

It is a little strange, when I think of it, the closeness of the intimacy between Clark and me. We never saw each other until last Wednesday evening, and we know little of each other’s past. But I feel as though the ties that bound me to him had their roots far back in our histories. Perhaps men come to know one another quickest and best on a plane of life, where in the fellowship of destitution they struggle for the primal needs and feel the keen sympathies which attest the basal kinship of our common humanity. Ours are not intellectual affinities — at least they are not consciously these—but we feel shrewdly the community of hunger and cold and isolation, and we have drawn strangely near to each other in this baffling struggle for a social footing, and have tempered in our comradeship the biting cold of the loneliness that haunts us on the outskirts of a crowded working world.

Early on last Wednesday morning, in the gray light of a cloudy day, I began the last stage of the march to Chicago. A walk of something less than thirty miles would take me to the heart of the city.

There is an unfailing inspiration in these early renewals of the journey. Solid food and a night of unfathomable sleep have restored the waste of tissue. I set out in the morning with a sense of boundless freedom, with an opening day and the whole wide world before me, with my heart leaping in the joy of living and in high expectancy of what the day may hold of experience and of insight into the lives of my fellow-men.

On this particular morning there is added fulness and freshness in that inbreathing which gives the zest of life. Long had Chicago loomed large to my imagination, and now it stood before me, its volumes of black smoke mingling with the leaden sky in the northern horizon.

How much it had come to mean to me, this huge metropolis of the shifting centre of our population! The unemployed were there, and I had not seen them yet; hundreds lived there who are fiercely at war with the existing state of things, and their speech was an unknown tongue to me, and my conventional imagination could not compass the meaning of their imaginings; and then the poor were there, the really destitute, who always feel first and last of all the pressure upon the limits of subsistence, and who in the grim clutch of starvation underbid one another for the work of the sweaters, until the brain reels at the knowledge of the incredible toil by which body and soul are kept together. All this awaited me, the very core of the social problem whose conditions I had set out to learn in the terms of concrete experience.

Nor was I insensible to the charm of other novelties. I have been pressing westward through a land unknown to me. Gradually I am beginning to see the essential provinciality of a mind which knows the Eastern seaboard, and has some measure of acquaintance with countries and cities and with men from Ireland to Italy, but which is densely ignorant of our own vast domain, and shrinks from all that lies beyond Philadelphia as belonging to “the West,” which sums up the totality of a frontier, where man and nature share a sympathetic wildness, and sometimes vie in outbursts of lawless force. I have not yet reached “the West” in any essential departure from the social and industrial structure of the East. And from the new point of view, “the West ” recedes ever farther from my sight, until impatient desire sometimes spurs me to a quicker journey, in the fear that the real West may have faded from our map before I reach it, and I may miss the delight of vital contact with the untamed frontier.

Moreover, I could but feel a student’s kindling interest in the larger vision of this great centre of industrial life. Its renaissance with augmented vigor from the ashes of its earlier history.“The swelling tide of its swarming people until the fifteen hundred thousand [1.5 million] mark is reached and passed, and the mounting waves of population roll in, each with the strength of an army of fighting men. ” The vastness of its productive enterprises, where all the shrewd economies of modern commerce reveal themselves, and where skill and organizing power and the genius of initiative win their quick recognition and rewards, and men of parts pass swiftly from the lowest to the highest places in the scale of productive usefulness and power. And then the splendid vigor of its nobler living, its churches and public schools and libraries and wise philanthropies, and its impatient hunger after art, which impels it to lay eager, unrelenting hands upon the products of a score of centuries, and, in a single day, to call them “mine.”

But I was fast nearing the goal of my desire, and the claims of pressing needs were crowding out the visions of the morning. I had passed through the wilderness by which the Pittsburg & Fort Wayne Railroad enters the outskirts of Chicago. As far as the eye could reach had stretched a dreary plain broken by the ridges of sand-dunes, among which stood dwarfed oaks, and gnarled and stunted pines, and the slender, graceful stems of white-barked birches, on whose twigs the last brown leaves of autumn rustled in the winter wind. Upon my right I saw at last the broad bosom of the lake, gleaming like burnished steel under the threatening sky, and breaking into a line of inky blackness where it lapped the pebbles on the beach.

Presently I learn that I am in South Chicago, and I note the converging lines of railways that cross the streets on the level at every possible angle, and the surface cable-cars, and the long line of blast-furnaces by the lake, and elevators here and there, and huge factories, and the myriad homes of workingmen. It is all a blackened chaos to my eyes, rude and crude and raw, and I wonder that orderly commerce can flow through channels so confused.

But the streets are soon more regular, and for some time I have been checking off, by their decreasing numerals, the approach to my journey’s end. I am in the midst of a seemingly endless suburban region. There are wide stretches of open prairie, cut through busy city streets; there are city buildings of brick and stone standing alone, or in groups of twos and threes, stark and appealing in their lonely waiting for flanking neighbors; and there are comfortable wooden cottages set with an air of rural seclusion among trees, and having lawns and garden areas about them; and then there are whole squares built up like the nuclei of new communities with conventional three-storied dwellings, and the varied shops of local retail trade, and abundant saloons.

Early in the afternoon I stop to rest on the platform of the Woodlawn station of the Illinois Central Railway. For some time I have had glimpses within a highly boarded enclosure of towering iron frames, with their graceful, sweeping arches meeting at dizzy heights, and appearing like the fragmentary skeletons of mammoths mounted in an open paleontological museum.

The suburban trains are rushing in and out of the station with nearly the frequency of elevated trains in New York, and not far away are lines of cable-cars, where a five-cent fare would take me, in a few minutes, over the weary miles which intervene to the business portion of the town. But I have not one cent, and much less five, and if I had so much as that it would go for food, for I am tired, it is true, but I am much hungrier than tired.

There is a hopeful prospect in the air of immense activity in this neighborhood. I have easily recognized the vast enclosure beyond as Jackson Park, and the steel skeletons as the frames of the exposition buildings. Thousands of men are at work there, and the growing volume of the enterprise may furnish a ready chance of employment. I am but a few steps from the Sixty-third Street entrance, and, in my ignorance, I am soon pressing through, when a gatekeeper challenges me, civilly:

He is roused in an instant, and he steps threateningly toward me, his voice deepening in anger.

At the gate I stand my ground in the right of a citizen and explain that I am looking for work, and am hopeful of a job from one of the bosses.

Not far away there are many new buildings going up, huge, unlovely shells of brick that even at this stage tell plainly their struggles with the purely utilitarian problem of a maximum of room accommodation at a minimum of cost. I walk toward the nearest one, pondering, the while, the meaning of the word hobo, new to me, and having an uncomfortable feeling that, for the first time, I have been taken, not for an unemployed laborer in honest search of work, but for one of the professionally idle.

It has begun to rain, a dreary, sopping drizzle, half mist, half melting snow, heavy with the soot of the upper air, and it clings tenaciously, until my threadbare outer coat is twice its normal weight, and my leaking boots pump the slimy pavement water at every step.

For two hours or more I go from one contractor to another, among the new buildings, asking work. The interviews are short and decisive. The typical boss is he who is moving anxious-eyed among his men with attention fixed upon some detail. He hears without heeding my request, and he shouts an order before he turns to me with an imperative“No, I don’t want you!” and sometimes an added curse.

When I emerge from this touch of nature and high art it is upon a stately boulevard of double drives and quadruple rows of sturdy elms which line the bridle-paths and wide pavements. Mile after mile I walk, tired and hungry and wet, and quite lost in wonder. Is there in the wide world a city street to match with this? Rising in a paradise of landscape gardening it stretches its majestic length like the broad sweep of another Champs Elysees, flanked by palaces of uncounted cost and unimagined horror of architecture, opening here to a stretch of wide prairie, and closing there to the front of a “block” of houses of uncompromising Philistinism and decorations of “unchastened splendor,” and reaching, at times, its native dignity in a setting of buildings which tell the final truth of the elegance of simplicity.

It has grown dark when I enter Michigan Avenue, and again my way stretches far before me, this time under converging lines of lights that seem to meet at an almost infinite distance. The sense of infinity is heightened by the floating mist, in which the nearer lights play with an effect of orange halo about them, and the farther lamps shine in an ever vaguer distance behind their clinging veils of fog.

Scarcely a soul is in the street. It is a residence quarter of much wealth, and like all else that I have seen so far, of strangest incongruities. Houses of lavish cost and shabbiest economy of taste, so gorgeous that you can scarcely believe them private homes, give way, at times, to lines of brown fronts precisely like those which in unvarying uniformity of basement and “stoop” and four-storied facade, flank miles of dreary side-streets in New York. These yield in turn to churches and apartment-houses and hotels and clubs—all creating an atmosphere of wealth and of social refinement, while almost interspersed with them are homes of apparent poverty and certainly of gentility on the ravelled edge of things. And bursting now through all this medley is the clanging, rumbling rush of railway traffic. I can scarcely believe my eyes at first, but under the frowning walls of a towering armory I am held up by the downward sweep of the gates of a railway crossing, on the dead level of the avenue, and am kept there until a freight-train has crawled past its creaking length.

It all seems a meaningless chaos at the first, but soon I feel the pulse of the life within it, a young life of glorious vigor and of indomitable resolve to attain what it so strongly feels though vaguely knows. And here and there I can see the promise of its fair fruition in lines of strength and power and beauty, where the hand of some true master has wrought a home for the abiding of good taste.

Soon there is an abrupt end of buildings on my right, and the land fades away into an open plain, and from out the sleet-swept darkness beyond comes faintly the sound of “crisping ripples on the beach.”I know that I am at my journey’s end, for I have begun to catch glimpses of Ossa-piled-on-Pelion structures which rise in graceless lines into the black night. I come up all standing before one of these, a veritable Palazzo Vecchio, huge, impenetrable, vast, bringing into this New-World city something of the sense of time and density of the Piazza della Signoria.

Here, too, the avenue is almost deserted, and I turn sharply under the massive battlements of this Florentine palace, to where the glare of many lights and the counter-currents of street-crowds attract me. Across Wabash Avenue I pass on to State Street. My eye has just begun to note the novelties of the scene when it falls upon the figure of a young man. He stands in the middle of the pavement at the corner, and swiftly hands printed slips of white paper among the moving crowd. Many persons pass unheeding, but a few accept the proffered notice. I take one, and I stop for a moment on the curb to read it. Its purport as an invitation to attend a Gospel meeting has become clear to me, when I find the young man at my side. He wears a heavy winter ulster that reaches to his boot-tops, and its rolling collar is turned up snugly about his ears. On his hands are dog-skin gloves, and the rays of street-lights glisten in the myriad drops of half-frozen mist that cling like heavy dew to the rough, woollen surface of his coat. I must cut a figure standing there, wet and travel-stained, my teeth chattering audibly in the cold night air, and it is plainly my evident fitness as a field for Christian work that has drawn to me the notice of this young evangelist.

The place is crowded with men—workingmen many of them—and many are plainly of that blear-eyed, bedraggled, cowering type which one soon learns to distinguish from the workers. Men pass freely in and out with no disturbance to the meeting, and watching my chance I soon slip into a vacant seat near the great stove that burns red-hot half way up the room. Ah, the luxury of the warmth and the undisputed right to sit in restful comfort! Again and again, in the afternoon I had sat down on the steps of some public building, but from every passing eye had come a shot of questioning suspicion, and once a patrolling officer ordered me to move on with a sharp reminder that “the step of a church was no loafing place.”

Deeper and deeper I sink into my seat. A warm, seductive ease enfolds me. I dare not fall asleep for fear of being turned into the street. And yet the very hint of going out again into the shelterless night comes over me in the dim sense of fading consciousness as a thought so grotesquely impossible that I nearly laugh aloud. Out from this warmth and light and cover into the pitiless inhospitality of the open town? Oh, no, that is beyond conceiving! And all the while I know—such is the subtlety of our instinctive thinking—that it is the awful fear of this that conquers now the overmastering sleep which woos me.

The men are singing lustily under inspiring leadership and to the accompaniment of a cornet and harmonium. Short prayers are offered, and fervent exhortations, interspersed with hymns, are made, and finally the men are urged to “testify.”

I follow in vague anxiety the change of exercise, but no clear idea reaches me; for in full possession of my mind is the haunting fear of a benediction which will send us out again. But while the men are speaking in quick succession there begins to pierce to the benumbed seat of thought a sense of something very living. Their speech, in simplest, homeliest phrase, is of things most intimate and real. They speak of life—their own sunk to deepest degradation. They tell the story of growing drunkenness and vice, of hope fast fading out of life, of faith and honor and self-respect all gone, and at last the outer dark wherein men live to feed their passions and blaspheme until they dare to die, or death anticipates the courage of despair. And then the purport of it all shines clear in that they have to tell of a Divine hand reached out to them of trembling hope and love reborn, of desire after righteousness breathing anew in a prayer for help.

Now I am all vividly alive and keen, for, standing straight not far from where I sit, is a grand figure of a man. He is bronzed, deepchested, lithe, and in the setting of his shoulders there is splendid strength, which shows again in the broad, clean-cut hands that quiver in their grip upon the seat in front. He has the modest bearing of a gentleman, and his unfaltering voice vibrates with a compelling sense of deep sincerity.

He sits down, and a hymn is given out and sung, but the truth which has found lodgement in our hearts is the living truth of a human life reclaimed. We have listened to the story of the prodigal from his own lips. We have heard again the cosmic parable of wandering and return; the mystery of creation, and fall, and recreation by a power divine; the great, irrefutable witness to the Truth in the history of a lost soul come to itself and returning to the Father’s House.

In the midst of the singing the leader walks quietly down the aisle to the rear. Two ladies are there struggling in a vain effort to quiet an old man. They have come to help in the conduct of the service, and the old man has increasingly claimed their care, for he is drunk and is growing violent. I have noticed him in his restless movements. Upon his stooping figure he wears an old army coat and cape that are dripping with the rain. His gray mustache and beard are long and matted, and stained all round his mouth with the deep brown of tobacco-juice. His unkempt hair falls in frowsy masses about his ears, and his lustreless eyes, inflamed and expressionless, bulge from their swollen sockets.

In an instant the leader’s strong hand is upon him, and with no commotion above the sound of song the old man is soon without the hall, and the leader back in his place again singing as heartily as ever.

When the meeting ends the crowd moves slowly and listlessly toward the door, as though its prevailing mood were aimless beyond the dull necessity of passing the time. The fine rain and melting snow are still falling through the mist. The men drift away singly or in groups of twos and threes, under the flickering lights, their heads bent slightly forward and their bare hands thrust into the side-pockets of their trousers.

In the crush about the foot of the aisle a young man speaks to me:

I see at a glance that he is far more respectable than I, and my first mental attitude is one of hospitality to further evangelizing effort. But I shift at once, for without awaiting for a reply from me, he adds:

I tell him my name, but he evidently considers it not a serviceable one, for he ignores it from the first, and consistently makes use of “partner.”

We walk together in the direction of State Street, and Clark explains to me that we must not go to the station until after midnight, a fact which he had learned, and the reasons for it, from an acquaintance in a cheap lodging-house where he had spent the night before.

At the corner I hold Clark for a moment until my eyes have caught the character of the street. It is wide, with broad pavements on each side, and is lined with great business houses of retail trade, the “department store” the prevailing type. The shop-windows are ablaze with electric lights, and gorgeous as to displays which are taking on a holiday character. Whole fronts of some of the buildings are fairly covered with temporary signs, painted in gigantic letters on canvas stretched on wooden frames, and vying fiercely in strident announcements of “sweeping reductions” and “moving,” and “bankrupt,” and “fire sales.”

There is little noise upon the street aside from the almost constant swishing rush of cable-cars and the irritating clangor of their gongs. The crowds had wholly disappeared. There are a few pedestrians, who hold their umbrellas close above their heads, and step briskly in evident haste to get in out of the stormy night, and we pass men of our own type who are drifting aimlessly, and now and then a stalwart officer, well-booted and snug under his waterproof, with his arms folded and his club held tight in the pressure of an armpit.

We are walking south along the west side of State Street. There is a swift social decline here, for every door we pass is that of a saloon and above us hang frequent transparencies which advertise lodgings at ten and fifteen cents, while across the way are the flaring lights of a cheap theatre.

I follow him down a narrow passage whose faint light enters through a stained-glass partition, which hems it in along the inner side wall of the building. Through a door at the end of the passage we enter a large room brilliantly lighted, and I follow Clark to an iron stove at one side in which a coal fire burns furiously. In the corner near us are three men, slouching, listless, weary specimens of their kind, who are playing “Comrades” with a gusto curiously out of keeping with their looks of bored fatigue. One has a harp, another a violin, and the third drums ceaselessly upon a piano of harsh, metallic tone.

There are a dozen round tables in the room, and at these are seated small groups of men and women drinking beer. Some of the men are workmen, but most are loafers, not of the tramp but of the rough civic type.

The women are young, most of them very young, and there is little trace of beauty and almost none of hard brutality in any face among them. They are simply commonplace. As a company the women lack the hale robustness of the men. They are mostly little women, of slight figures, and some add to this a transparency of skin and a feverish brightness of the eye which clearly mark the sure burning of consumption. A few are cast in a sturdier mould, and, with faces flushed with drink, they look strong and healthy. All seem warmly dressed in cheap, worn garments suited to the season, and there are many touches of finery and some even of taste in their shabby winter hats. Each carries a leather purse in her hand, or allows it to lie on the table before her with her gloves. The hands of nearly all of them are bare, and you see at once that they are large and coarse and very dirty.

Suddenly you note that the social atmosphere is one of strangest, completest camaraderie. The conversation is the blasphemous, obscenest gossip of degraded men that keeps the deal level of the ordinary unrelieved by anger or by mirth, and varying only with the indifferent interchange of men’s and women’s voices.

The naturalness and untrammeled social ease have blinded you for a time to what you really see, and the

Source: Walter A. Wycoff, The Workers: An Experiment in Reality (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 1–39.

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"I Will Kill Frick": Emma Goldman Recounts the Attempt to Assassinate the Chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company During the: Homestead Strike in 1892: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

“I Will Kill Frick”: Emma Goldman Recounts the Attempt to Assassinate the Chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company During the: Homestead Strike in 1892

by Emma Goldman

Henry Clay Frick, chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, was demonized by labor for his role in the violent Homestead strike in 1892 in which a pitched battle was fought between strikers and company-hired Pinkerton detectives. Known for his uncompromising and cruel tactics, Frick became an obvious target for labor activists looking to make a statement during the protracted strike. In this excerpt from her autobiography, Living my Life, radical Emma Goldman described how fellow radical Alexander Berkman decided to murder Frick during the Homestead strike.

It was May 1892. News from Pittsburgh announced that trouble had broken out between the Carnegie Steel Company and its employees organized in the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. It was one of the biggest and most efficient labour bodies of the country, consisting mostly of Americans, men of decision and grit, who would assert their rights. The Carnegie Company, on the other hand, was a powerful corporation, known as a hard master. It was particularly significant that Andrew Carnegie, its president, had temporarily turned over the entire management to the company’s chairman, Henry Clay Frick, a man known for his enmity to labour. Frick was also the owner of extensive coke-fields, where unions were prohibited and the workers were ruled with an iron hand.

The high tariff on imported steel had greatly boomed the American steel industry. The Carnegie Company had practically a monopoly of it and enjoyed unprecedented prosperity. Its largest mills were in Homestead, near Pittsburgh, where thousands of workers were employed, their tasks requiring long training and high skill. Wages were arranged between the company and the union, according to a sliding scale based on the prevailing market price of steel products. The current agreement was about to expire, and the workers presented a new wage schedule, calling for an increase because of the higher market prices and enlarged output of the mills.

The philanthropic Andrew Carnegie conveniently retired to his castle in Scotland, and Frick took full charge of the situation. He declared that henceforth the sliding scale would be abolished. The company would make no more agreements with the Amalgamated Association; it would itself determine the wages to be paid. In fact, he would not recognize the union at all. He would not treat with the employees collectively, as before. He would close the mills, and the men might consider themselves discharged. Thereafter they would have to apply for work individually, and the pay would be arranged with every worker separately. Frick curtly refused the peace advances of the workers' organization, declaring that there was “nothing to arbitrate.” Presently the mills were closed. “Not a strike, but a lockout,” Frick announced. It was an open declaration of war.

Feeling ran high in Homestead and vicinity. The sympathy of the entire country was with the men. Even the most conservative part of the press condemned Frick for his arbitrary and drastic methods. They charged him with deliberately provoking a crisis that might assume national proportions, in view of the great numbers of men locked out by Frick’s action, and the probable effect upon affiliated unions and on related industries.

Labour throughout the country was aroused. The steel-workers declared that they were ready to take up the challenge of Frick: they would insist on their right to organize and to deal collectively with their employers. Their tone was manly, ringing with the spirit of their rebellious forebears of the Revolutionary War.

Far away from the scene of the impending struggle, in our little ice-cream parlour in the city of Worcester, we eagerly followed developments. To us it sounded the awakening of the American worker, the long-awaited day of his resurrection. The native toiler had risen, he was beginning to feel his mighty strength, he was determined to break the chains that had held him in bondage so long, we thought. Our hearts were fired with admiration for the men of Homestead.

We continued our daily work, waiting on customers, frying pancakes, serving tea and ice-cream; but our thoughts were in Homestead, with the brave steel-workers. We became so absorbed in the news that we would not permit ourselves enough time even for sleep. At daybreak one of the boys would be off to get the first editions of the papers. We saturated ourselves with the events in Homestead to the exclusion of everything else. Entire nights we would sit up discussing the various phases of the situation, almost engulfed by the possibilities of the gigantic struggle.

One afternoon a customer came in for an ice-cream, while I was alone in the store. As I set the dish down before him, I caught the large headlines of his paper: “LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN HOMESTEAD — FAMILIES OF STRIKERS EVICTED FROM THE COMPANY HOUSES—WOMAN IN CONFINEMENT CARRIED OUT INTO STREET BY SHERIFFS.” I read over the man’s shoulder Frick’s dictum to the workers: he would rather see them dead than concede to their demands, and he threatened to import Pinkerton detectives. The brutal bluntness of the account, the inhumanity of Frick towards the evicted mother, inflamed my mind. Indignation swept my whole being. I heard the man at the table ask: “Are you sick, young lady? Can I do anything for you?” "Yes, you can let me have your paper,“ I blurted out. ”You won’t have to pay me for the ice-cream. But I must ask you to leave. I must close the store." The man looked at me as if I had gone crazy.

I locked up the store and ran full speed the three blocks to our little flat. It was Homestead, not Russia; I knew it now. We belonged in Homestead. The boys, resting for the evening shift, sat up as I rushed into the room, newspaper clutched in my hand. “What has happened, Emma? You look terrible!” I could not speak. I handed them the paper.

Sasha was the first on his feet. “Homestead!”he exclaimed. “I must go to Homestead!” I flung my arms around him, crying out his name. I, too, would go. “We must go tonight,” he said; “ the great moment has come at last!” Being internationalists, he added, it mattered not to us where the blow was struck by the workers; we must be with them. We must bring them our great message and help them see that it was not only for the moment that they must strike, but for all time, for a free life, for anarchism. Russia had many heroic men and women, but who was there in America? Yes, we must go to Homestead, tonight!

I had never heard Sasha so eloquent. He seemed to have grown in stature. He looked strong and defiant, an inner light on his face making him beautiful, as he had never appeared to me before.

We immediately went to our landlord and informed him of our decision to leave. He replied that we were mad; we were doing so well, we were on the way to fortune. If we would hold out to the end of the summer, we would be able to clear at least a thousand dollars. But he argued in vain—we were not to be moved. We invented the story that a very dear relative was in a dying condition, and that therefore we must depart. We would turn the store over to him; all we wanted was the evening’s receipts. We would remain until closing-hours, leave everything in order, and give him the keys.

That evening we were especially busy. We had never before had so many customers. By one o’clock we had sold out everything. Our receipts were seventy-five dollars. We left on an early morning train.

On the way we discussed our immediate plans. First of all, we would print a manifesto to the steel-workers. We would have to find somebody to translate it into English, as we were still unable to express our thoughts correctly in that tongue. We would have the German and English texts printed in New York and take them with us to Pittsburgh. With the help of the German comrades there, meetings could be organized for me to address. Fedya was to remain in New York till further developments.

From the station we went straight to the flat of Mollock, an Austrian comrade we had met in the Autonomie group. He was a baker who worked at night; but Peppie, his wife, with her two children was at home. We were sure she could put us up.

She was surprised to see the three of us march in, bag and baggage, but she made us welcome, fed us, and suggested that we go to bed. But we had other things to do.

Sasha and I went in search of Claus Timmermann, an ardent German anarchist we knew. He had considerable poetic talent and wrote forceful propaganda. In fact, he had been the editor of an anarchist paper in St. Louis before coming to New York. He was a likable fellow and entirely trustworthy, though a considerable drinker. We felt that Claus was the only person we could safely draw into our plan. He caught our spirit at once. The manifesto was written that afternoon. It was a flaming call to the men of Homestead to throw off the yoke of capitalism, to use their present struggle as a stepping-stone to the destruction of the wage system, and to continue towards social revolution and anarchism.

A few days after our return to New York the news was flashed across the country of the slaughter of steel-workers by Pinkertons. Frick had fortified the Homestead mills, built a high fence around them. Then, in the dead of night, a barge packed with strike-breakers, under protection of heavily armed Pinkerton thugs, quietly stole up the Monongahela River. The steel-men had learned of Frick’s move. They stationed themselves along the shore, determined to drive back Frick’s hirelings. When the barge got within range, the Pinkertons had opened fire, without warning, killing a number of Homestead men on the shore, among them a little boy, and wounding scores of others.

The wanton murders aroused even the daily papers. Several came out in strong editorials, severely criticizing Frick. He had gone too , far; he had added fuel to the fire in the labour ranks and would have himself to blame for any desperate acts that might come.

We were stunned. We saw at once that the time for our manifesto had passed. Words had lost their meaning in the face of the innocent blood spilled on the banks of the Monongahela. Intuitively each felt what was surging in the heart of the others. Sasha broke the silence. “Frick is the responsible factor in this crime,” he said; “he must be made to stand the consequences.” It was the psychological moment for an Attentat; the whole country was aroused, everybody was considering Frick the perpetrator of a cold-blooded murder. A blow aimed at Frick would re-echo in the poorest hovel, would call the attention of the whole world to the real cause behind the Homestead struggle. It would also strike terror in the enemy’s ranks and make them realize that the proletariat of America had its avengers.

Sasha had never made bombs before, but Most’s Science of Revolutionary Warfare was a good text-book. He would procure dynamite from a comrade he knew on Staten Island. He had waited for this sublime moment to serve the Cause, to give his life for the people. He would go to Pittsburgh.

“We will go with you!” Fedya and I cried together. But Sasha would not listen to it. He insisted that it was unnecessary and criminal to waste three lives on one man.

We sat down, Sasha between us, holding our hands. In a quiet and even tone he began to unfold to us his plan. He would perfect a time regulator for the bomb that would enable him to kill Frick, yet save himself. Not because he wanted to escape. No; he wanted to live long enough to justify his act in court, so that the American people might know that he was not a criminal, but an idealist.

“I will kill Frick,” Sasha said, "and of course I shall be condemned to death. I will die proudly in the assurance that I gave my life for the people. But I will die by my own hand, like Lingg. Never will I permit our enemies to kill me."

Source: Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Alfred Knopf, Inc., 1931) 83–88.

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Gimme A Break! Mark Twain Lampoons the Horatio Alger Myth: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

Gimme A Break! Mark Twain Lampoons the Horatio Alger Myth

The ideology of success—the notion that anyone could make it with enough hard work—was widely promoted in Gilded Age America. One of its most famous proponents was the author Horatio Alger, whose novels showed how poor boys could move from “rags to respectability” through “pluck and luck.” Between the late 1860s and his death in 1899, Alger published more than 100 of these formulaic stories about poor boys who made good more often because of fortunate accidents than because of hard work and denial. Not all Americans, however, bought into this ideology of success. Mark Twain’s 1879 short story, “Poor Little Stephen Girard,” took satirical aim at the poor-boy-done-good theme that permeated dozens of Alger stories.

The man lived in Philadelphia who, when young and poor, entered a bank, and says he: “Please, sir, don’t you want a boy?” And the stately personage said: “No, little boy, I don’t want a little boy.” The little boy, whose heart was too full for utterance, chewing a piece of licorice stick he had bought with a cent stolen from his good and pious aunt, with sobs plainly audible, and with great globules of water rolling down his cheeks, glided silently down the marble steps of the bank. Bending his noble form, the bank man dodged behind a door, for he thought the little boy was going to shy a stone at him. But the little boy picked up something, and stuck it in his poor but ragged jacket. “Come here, little boy,” and the little boy did come here; and the bank man said: “Lo, what pickest thou up?” And he answered and replied: “A pin.” And the bank man said: “Little boy, are you good?” and he said he was. And the bank man said: “How do you vote?”—“excuse me, do you go to Sunday school?” and he said he did. Then the bank man took down a pen made of pure gold, and flowing with pure ink, and he wrote on a piece of paper, “St. Peter”; and he asked the little boy what it stood for, and he said “Salt Peter.” Then the bankman said it meant “Saint Peter.” The little boy said: “Oh!”

Then the bank man took the little boy to his bosom, and the little boy said, “Oh!” again, for he squeezed him. Then the bank man took the little boy into partnership, and gave him half the profits and all the capital, and he married the bank man’s daughter, and now all he has is all his, and all his own too.

My uncle told me this story, and I spent six weeks in picking up pins in front of a bank. I expected the bank man would call me in and say: “Little boy, are you good?” and I was going to say “Yes;” and when he asked me what “St. John” stood for, I was going to say “Salt John.” But the bank man wasn’t anxious to have a partner, and I guess the daughter was a son, for one day says he to me: “Little boy, what’s that you’re picking up?” Says I, awful meekly, “Pins.” Says he: “Let’s see ‘em.” And he took ’em, and I took off my cap, all ready to go in the bank, and become a partner, and marry his daughter. But I didn’t get an invitation. He said: “Those pins belong to the bank, and if I catch you hanging around here any more I’ll set the dog on you!” Then I left, and the mean old fellow kept the pins. Such is life as I find it.

Source:

Mark Twain, “Poor Little Stephen Girard,” in Carleton’s Popular Readings, Anna Randall-Diehl, ed., (New York, 1879), 183–84. See Also:"Selfish wealth is never good": A Worker's Definition of Success Horatio Alger's American Fable: "The World Before Him"

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Wheel of Fortune: Frances Willard Discovers the Bicycle: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

Wheel of Fortune: Frances Willard Discovers the Bicycle

Frances Willard (1839–1898), leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), was a complex and energetic figure in American feminism and social reform. Willard and the WCTU upheld traditional notions of gender and Victorian ideals of the “true woman,” but she was also willing to use these notions as part of a larger demand for female citizenship. Although Willard proclaimed the virtues of traditional domesticity for women, she was not bound by those conventional ideas in her own private life. After an unhappy engagement to Charles Henry Fowler, she never married. For many years, she lived with Anna Gordon, who served as her secretary as well as her aide and confidante. Willard’s spirit of personal adventure and liberation led her to take up bicycle riding in her fifties, the last decade of her life. As she described in her enthusiastic book about the experience, A Wheel within a Wheel; How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, she viewed the “conquest” of the bicycle as similar to the mastery that women needed to achieve over the "wider world."

From my earliest recollections, and up to the ripe age of fifty-three, I had been an active and diligent worker in the world. This sounds absurd; but having almost no toys except such as I could manufacture, my first plays were but the outdoor work of active men and women on a small scale. Born with an inveterate opposition to staying in the house, I very early learned to use a carpenter’s kit and a gardener’s tools, and followed in my mimic way the occupations of the poulterer and the farmer, working my little field with a wooden plow of my own making, and felling saplings with an ax rigged up from the old iron of the wagon-shop. Living in the country, far from the artificial restraints and conventions by which most girls are hedged from the activities that would develop a good physique, and endowed with the companionship of a mother who let me have my own sweet will, I “ran wild” until my sixteenth birthday, when the hampering long skirts were brought, with their accompanying corset and high heels; my hair was clubbed up with pins, and I remember writing in my journal, in the first heartbreak of a young human colt taken from its pleasant pasture, “Altogether, I recognize that my occupation is gone.”

From that time on I always realized and was obedient to the limitations thus imposed, though in my heart of hearts I felt their unwisdom even more than their injustice. My work then changed from my beloved and breezy outdoor world to the indoor realm of study, teaching, writing, speaking, and went on almost without a break or pain until my fifty-third year, when the loss of my mother accentuated the strain of this long period in which mental and physical life were out of balance, and I fell into a mild form of what is called nerve-wear by the patient and nervous prostration by the lookers-on. Thus ruthlessly thrown out of the usual lines of reaction on my environment, and sighing for new worlds to conquer, I determined that I would learn the bicycle. . . .

Let me remark to any young woman who reads this page that for her to tumble off her bike is inexcusable. The lightsome elasticity of every muscle, the quickness of the eye, the agility of motion, ought to preserve her from such a catastrophe. I have had [only one] fall. . . . I have proceeded on a basis of the utmost caution, and aside from . . . one pitiful performance the bicycle has cost me hardly a single bruise.

They that know nothing fear nothing. Away back in 1886 my alert young friend, Miss Anna Gordon, and my ingenious young niece, Miss Katherine Willard, took to the tricycle as naturally as ducks take to water. . . . Remembering my country bringing-up and various exploits in running, climbing, horseback-riding, to say nothing of my tame heifer that I trained for a Bucephalus, I said to myself, “If those girls can ride without learning so can I!” Taking out my watch I timed them as they, at my suggestion, set out to make a record in going round the square. Two and a half minutes was the result. I then started with all my forces well in hand, and flew around in two and a quarter minutes. Not contented with this, but puffed up with foolish vanity, I declared that I would go around in two minutes; and, encouraged by their cheers, away I went without a fear till the third turning-post was reached, when the left hand played me false, and turning at an acute angle, away I went sidelong, machine and all, into the gutter, falling on my right elbow, which felt like a glassful of chopped ice, and I knew that for the first time in a life full of vicissitudes I had been really hurt. Anna Gordon’s white face as she ran toward me caused me to wave my uninjured hand and call out, “Never mind!” and with her help I rose and walked into the house, wishing above all things to go straight to my own room and lie on my own bed, and thinking as I did so how pathetic is that instinct that makes “the stricken deer go weep,” the harmed hare seek the covert.

Two physicians were soon at my side, and my mother, then over eighty years of age, came in with much controlled agitation and seated herself beside my bed, taking my hand and saying, “O Frank! you were always too adventurous.”

If I am asked to explain why I learned the bicycle I should say I did it as an act of grace, if not of actual religion. The cardinal doctrine laid down by my physician was, “Live out of doors and take congenial exercise”; but from the day when, at sixteen years of age, I was enwrapped in the long skirts that impeded every footstep, I have detested walking and felt with a certain noble disdain that the conventions of life had cut me off from what in the freedom of my prairie home had been one of life’s sweetest joys. Driving is not real exercise; it does not renovate the river of blood that flows so sluggishly in the veins of those who from any cause have lost the natural adjustment of brain to brawn. Horseback-riding, which does promise vigorous exercise, is expensive. The bicycle meets all the conditions and will ere long come within the reach of all. Therefore, in obedience to the laws of health, I learned to ride. I also wanted to help women to a wider world, for I hold that the more interests women and men can have in common, in thought, word, and deed, the happier will it be for the home. Besides, there was a special value to women in the conquest of the bicycle by a woman in her fifty-third year, and one who had so many comrades in the white-ribbon army that her action would be widely influential. . . .

It is needless to say that a bicycling costume was a prerequisite. This consisted of a skirt and blouse of tweed, with belt, rolling collar, and loose cravat, the skirt three inches from the ground; a round straw hat; and walking-shoes with gaiters. It was a simple, modest suit, to which no person of common sense could take exception.

As nearly as I can make out, reducing the problem to actual figures, it took me about three months, with an average of fifteen minutes' practice daily, to learn, first, to pedal; second, to turn; third, to dismount; and fourth, to mount independently this most mysterious animal. January 20th will always be a red-letter bicycle day, because although I had already mounted several times with no hand on the rudder, some good friend had always stood by to lend moral support; but summoning all my force, and, most forcible of all, what Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson declares to be the two essential elements—decision and precision—I mounted and started off alone. From that hour the spell was broken; Gladys was no more a mystery: I had learned all her kinks, had put a bridle in her teeth, and touched her smartly with the whip of victory. Consider, ye who are of a considerable chronology: in about thirteen hundred minutes, or, to put it more mildly, in twenty-two hours, or, to put it most mildly of all, in less than a single day as the almanac reckons time—but practically in two days of actual practice—amid the delightful surroundings of the great outdoors, and inspired by the bird-songs, the color and fragrance of an English posygarden, in the company of devoted and pleasant comrades, I had made myself master of the most remarkable, ingenious, and inspiring motor ever yet devised upon this planet.

Moral: Go thou and do likewise!

Source: Frances Willard, A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle (1895). Reprinted in Stephanie Twin, Out of the Bleachers (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1979), 104–5, 112–114.

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"Our Misery and Despair": Kearney Blasts Chinese Immigration: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

“Our Misery and Despair”: Kearney Blasts Chinese Immigration

Anti-Asian agitation characterized politics in the American West, particularly labor politics, in the late-19th century. Labor leaders like Denis Kearney and H. L. Knight of California’s Workingmen’s Party often resorted to popular racist arguments to justify the exclusion of Chinese immigrants. In this 1878 address, Kearney and Knight described the Chinese as a race of “cheap working slaves” who undercut American living standards and thus should be banished from America’s shores. While rare, some in the labor movement challenged the racist appeals of leaders like Kearney and Knight.

Our moneyed men have ruled us for the past thirty years. Under the flag of the slaveholder they hoped to destroy our liberty. Failing in that, they have rallied under the banner of the millionaire, the banker and the land monopolist, the railroad king and the false politician, to effect their purpose.

We have permitted them to become immensely rich against all sound republican policy, and they have turned upon us to sting us to death. They have seized upon the government by bribery and corruption. They have made speculation and public robbery a science. The have loaded the nation, the state, the county, and the city with debt. They have stolen the public lands. They have grasped all to themselves, and by their unprincipled greed brought a crisis of unparalleled distress on forty millions of people, who have natural resources to feed, clothe and shelter the whole human race.

Such misgovernment, such mismanagement, may challenge the whole world for intense stupidity, and would put to shame the darkest tyranny of the barberous past.

We, here in California, feel it as well as you. We feel that the day and hour has come for the Workingmen of America to depose capital and put Labor in the Presidential chair, in the Senate and Congress, in the State House, and on the Judicial Bench. We are with you in this work. Workingmen must form a party of their own, take charge of the government, dispose gilded fraud, and put honest toil in power.

In our golden state all these evils have been intensified. Land monopoly has seized upon all the best soil in this fair land. A few men own from ten thousand to two hundred thousand acres each. The poor Laborer can find no resting place, save on the barren mountain, or in the trackless desert. Money monopoly has reached its grandest proportions. Here, in San Francisco, the palace of the millionaire looms up above the hovel of the starving poor with as wide a contrast as anywhere on earth.

To add to our misery and despair, a bloated aristocracy has sent to China—the greatest and oldest despotism in the world—for a cheap working slave. It rakes the slums of Asia to find the meanest slave on earth—the Chinese coolie—and imports him here to meet the free American in the Labor market, and still further widen the breach between the rich and the poor, still further to degrade white Labor.

These cheap slaves fill every place. Their dress is scant and cheap. Their food is rice from China. They hedge twenty in a room, ten by ten. They are wipped curs, abject in docility, mean, contemptible and obedient in all things. They have no wives, children or dependents.

They are imported by companies, controlled as serfs, worked like slaves, and at last go back to China with all their earnings. They are in every place, they seem to have no sex. Boys work, girls work; it is all alike to them.

The father of a family is met by them at every turn. Would he get work for himself? Ah! A stout Chinaman does it cheaper. Will he get a place for his oldest boy? He can not. His girl? Why, the Chinaman is in her place too! Every door is closed. He can only go to crime or suicide, his wife and daughter to prostitution, and his boys to hoodlumism and the penitentiary.

Do not believe those who call us savages, rioters, incendiaries, and outlaws. We seek our ends calmly, rationally, at the ballot box. So far good order has marked all our proceedings. But, we know how false, how inhuman, our adversaries are. We know that if gold, if fraud, if force can defeat us, they will all be used. And we have resolved that they shall not defeat us. We shall arm. We shall meet fraud and falsehood with defiance, and force with force, if need be.

We are men, and propose to live like men in this free land, without the contamination of slave labor, or die like men, if need be, in asserting the rights of our race, our country, and our families.

California must be all American or all Chinese. We are resolved that it shall be American, and are prepared to make it so. May we not rely upon your sympathy and assistance?

With great respect for the Workingman’s Party of California.

Dennis Kearney, President

H.L Knight, Secretary

Source: Dennis Kearney, President, and H. L. Knight, Secretary, “Appeal from California. The Chinese Invasion. Workingmen’s Address,” Indianapolis Times, 28 February 1878.

See Also:Fair's Fair: McDonnell Argues for Acceptance of Aliens The Fight Begins at Home: Jewett Defends Asian Immigrants

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"Certain Fundamental Truths": The AFL Protests Unemployment: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

“Certain Fundamental Truths”: The AFL Protests Unemployment

The spreading economic depression of 1893 stirred the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which was sometimes guilty of focusing primarily on the needs of its own members, to call for broad measures that would benefit all working people. The AFL urged the unemployed to hold mass demonstrations. The federation also organized “federal labor unions” of the jobless. New York’s organized labor movement also protested, as seen in this September 1893 appeal signed by local and national labor leaders, including Samuel Gompers. Although the resolution primarily called on the city to provide “immediate relief and public employment,” it also suggested that the state and federal governments should provide for the unemployed. This claim was part of a long-term shift in which working people and others came to see the needs of the jobless as more than a local obligation (in the manner of traditional poor relief). Only with the New Deal of the 1930s were such demands realized.

A hundred thousand men, women, and children are nearing the verge of starvation in this rich metropolis of these free United States. Hundreds of thousands of others are within but a short distance from want and its attendant suffering, misery and crime. From all the manufacturing and commercial centres there comes the anxious demand for work, soon we fear to be followed by the despairing cry for bread.

The fields of our matchless domain have blossomed with promise of an abundant harvest and beneath our feet is stored the wealth of ages, of metals and of minerals for the needs of men. The cattle reed upon a thousand hills and our forests covering empires of states crown the earth with glory. All nature smiles with the abundance of prosperous peace. The sword of war is sheathed and pestilence has withdrawn its destroying hand. Invention has quickened production and lessened cost. Electricity and steam have conquered time and space. The North and South, the East and remotest West are one, a grand indissoluble union of independent states. The hands of labor, skilled in every craft, answer the will of an intelligent, industrious, peace-loving people. The untaught, foreign born, oppressed for ages beneath the heel of usurping power, have come to these shores, as our fathers came, to seek a higher and a happier life. The forces of nature and the right good will of millions of workers on farm and sea, in mill and mine, and in all the enterprises of this new world of free men, are united to make this country the home of plenty—the garden and forum of the world.

A few thousand men and women enjoy the opulence of eastern potentates, while abject millions grovel in the dust begging for work and bread. This is the industrial and social exhibit of our Columbian year.

Against these conditions and their inevitable results and against the underlying causes that make poverty the normal condition of the wage-laborer, we, the organized workers of the city of New York, voicing as we do believe the organized labor of the world, enter our serious and determined protest and warning.

In this hour of distress and danger we call upon all citizens of all religious and political faiths, to give their most careful consideration to our appeal, and to the methods and measures herein set forth. The authors of the Declaration of Independence before severing the colonies from the mother country wisely set forth certain fundamental truths and upon the basis of these eternal verities erected the temple of political freedom.

So, we, mindful of the power of error and prejudice against any seeming departure from the beaten paths of human experience as in duty bound, make this declaration of the reasons that prompt our action and justify the methods and measures proposed.

We do not believe that the industrial and social system so firmly entrenched, can be changed for the better by declaration or demand, by edict of rulers, by laws of legislative assemblies, by individual or corporate experiments by riot or by the deadly anger of class hate.

We believe that so radical a change as we contemplate must be obtained by the slow process of evolutionary development.

That the methods and measures by which the world of workers to-day enjoy better conditions than those of other times and the greater purchasing power of a day’s work in the United States over that enjoyed by the laborers of other countries are the methods by and through which labor will receive its full measure of justice and equity.

We believe that the organization of wage-workers in trade unions is the purest guarantee of a peaceful solution of the world-wide problem: “How to abolish poverty.”

That the wage system of labor can be succeeded by a better one only through the increase of the purchasing power of a day’s work.

That increased wages (or increased purchasing power) reduces profit upon labor.

That a constant increase in wages and in reduction of profits will make a capitalistic or employing class unprofitable and unnecessary, thus eliminating classes and establishing equity.

That the reduction of the hours of labor increases wages without increasing the cost of production, and is a measure upon which the full power of the labor movement should be directed.

We also believe that in times of great distress, whether caused by the upheavals of nature, by earthquakes, floods, or cyclones, or when caused by man’s folly, ignorance, or avarice, as in the case of pestilence, fire, financial panics, and periods of industrial stagnation, it is the duty of all men to give relief to the suffering, to care for the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter the houseless. We, therefore, call upon all to contribute funds for the unemployed, who wait for work in vain, and whose wives and little ones are starving in our streets.

That as a city is a co-operative corporation in which all citizens are shareholders, and all other residents guests or sojourners, no one citizen has the right to live in extravagant luxury while the other wants for the needs of life. We therefore call upon the Mayor and the Board of Aldermen of the city of New York to convene in special session and there devise ways and means in the same manner, and to the same effect, as they would in the case of flood, fire, or pestilence.

That as food obtained by work is more enjoyable than food obtained, even as a right, without work, we ask the city authorities to provide ways and means for the commencement and continuance of public works, and the employment of the new unemployed directly and not by contract.

That the same reasons that prompt us to call upon the officers of our city for appropriations for immediate relief and public employment, also prompt us to call upon the Governor of the State, and the President of the United States, to call attention by public proclamation and by legislative action to the same end, and in such manner as the fundamental law will permit.

In that immortal document that sounded the death-knell of kingcraft, the signers there to set forth a challenge and defiance to that social and industrial system, that rests upon the same foundation and upholds the theory of the divine rights of kings.

In the declaration: “That all men are born possessed with certain inalienable rights, among which are the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” will be found the keynote to a new and yet grander declaration of labor’s independence from the monarchical control of the industrial system

The right to life carries with it the right to means of life.

The right to liberty carries with it the right to that economic independence without which political liberty is void.

The right to the pursuit of happiness carries with it the right to all the opportunities and privileges that are necessary to the securing of happiness.

The administrative, executive and legislative acts herein called for are in line with precedents heretofore established. From its earliest days to these closing years of the century all the functions of government have been used not only for the security of property, but for the increase of capital. Bonuses for the establishment of new industries, and for the continuance of profitable investments, had been frequent. Appropriations had been made and the credit of municipalities, of states and of the United States Government had been granted and leased to capitalistic corporate and private enterprises, and the tariff costs have been placed upon the product of foreign manufactures. All and several of these have been granted under the plea that such bonuses, credits, appropriations and tariffs were granted and loaned for the good of all the people.

The confidence of all the people in the peaceful methods of agitation, organization and action, is worth more to the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of the people, and for the protection of property than the confidence of bankers in any financial system.

As humane men and women we entreat you to listen to the cry of labor for work and bread. As patriotic citizens we proclaim that those who control the industries and the finance of the United States are responsible for the employment and non-employment of labor, and we demand of them immediate relief for the victims of a system inherited from the ages of wrong with which the poor have been oppressed.

Source: Samuel Gompers, Chris Evans, Andrew J. Smith, Thos. C . Walsh, Henry Weismann, Jos. Barondess, Henry White, The American Federation of Labor, “To the People of the United States,” New York, August 21, 1893 in The Carpenter, 13 (September 1893): 9.

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"When We Worked on Shares, We Couldn't Make Nothing": Henry Blake Talks About Sharecropping after the Civil War: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

“When We Worked on Shares, We Couldn’t Make Nothing”: Henry Blake Talks About Sharecropping after the Civil War

In some ways, emancipation and Reconstruction broke the power of white southern planters over their labor force. Freedpeople negotiated with planters over how the land would be cultivated and how they would be compensated. African-American families worked small plots independently, sometimes obtaining land for cash or, more commonly, for a fixed share of the year’s crop; this latter practice was known as sharecropping. By 1870, sharecropping was the dominant means by which African Americans could gain access to land in the South. Still, freedpeople desired independent proprietorship. In this interview, African-American farmer Henry Blake recalls how black land ownership became an elusive goal as unequal power relations between white and black hardened and the Ku Klux Klan’s terrorist campaigns increased. Blake’s narrative and many others were recorded during an ambitious New Deal (1936–38) program of interviews with ex-slaves. Despite unfamiliar interviewers and distant memories, these first person accounts are an unparalleled resource.

I was born March 16, 1863, they tell me. I was born in Arkansas right down here on Tenth and Spring Streets in Little Rock.... My father was a skiffman. He used to cross the Arkansas river in a ferry-boat. My father’s name was Doc Blake. And my mother’s name was Hannah Williams before she married....

My father’s master was named Jim Paty. My father was a slavery man. I was too. I used to drive a horsepower gin wagon in slavery time. That was at Pastoria just this side of Pine Bluff, about three or four miles this side. Paty had two places, one about four miles from Pine Bluff and the other about four miles from England on the river.

When I was driving that horsepower gin wagon, I was about seven or eight years old. There wasn’t nothin‘ hard about it. Just hitch the mules to one another’s tail and drive them ’round and 'round. There wasn’t no lines. Just hitch them to one another’s tail and tell them to git up.

We ginned two or three bales of cotton a day. We ginned all the summer. It would be June before we got that cotton all ginned. Cotton brought thirty-five or forty cents a pound then.

I was treated nicely. My father and mother were too. Others were not treated so well. But you know how Negroes is. They would slip off and go out. If they caught them, he would put them in a log hut they had for a jail. If you wanted to be with a woman, you would have to go to your boss and ask him and he would let you go.

Daddy wan sold for five hundred dollars, put on the block, up on a stump, they called it a block. Jim Paty sold him. I forget the name of the man he was sold to, Watts, I think it was.

After slavery we had to get in before night too. If you didn’t, Ku Klux would drive you in. They would come and visit you anyway. They had something on that they could pour a lot of water in. They would seem to be drinking the water and it would all be going in this thing, They was gittin' it to water the horses with, and when they got away from you they would stop and give it to the horses, When he got you good and scared he would drive on away. They would whip you if they would catch you out in the night time.

My daddy had a horse they couldn’t catch. It would run right away from you. My daddy trained it so that it would run away from any one who would come near it. He would take me up on that horse and we would sail away. Those Ku Klux couldn’t catch his. They never did catch him. They caught many another one and whipped him. My daddy was a pretty mean man. He carried a gun and he had shot two or three men. Those were bad times. I got scared to go out with him. I hated that business. But directly it got over with. It got over with when a lot of the Ku Klux was killed up.

In slavery time they would raise children just like you would raise colts to a mare or calves to a cow or pigs to a sow. It was just a business. It was a bad thing. But it was better than the county farm. They didn’t whip you if you worked. Out there at the county farm, they bust you open. They bust you up till you can’t work. There’s a lot of people down at the state farm, at Cummins, that’s where the farm is ain’t it, that' a raw and bloody. They wouldn’t let you come down there and write no history. No Lawd! You better not try it. One half the world don’t know how the other half lives. I’ll tell you one thing if those Catholics could get control there would be a good time all over this world. The Catholics are good folks.

That gang that got after you if you let the sun go down while you were out, that’s called the Pateroles. Some folks call ‘em the Ku Klux. It was all the same old poor white trash. They kept up that business for about ten years after the war. They kept it up till folks began to kill up a lot of ’em. That’s the only thing that stopped them. My daddy used to make his own bullets.

I’ve forgot who it is that that told us that we was free. Somebody come and told us we’re free now. I done forgot who it was.

Right after the war, my father farmed a while and after that he pulled a skiff. You know Jim Lawson’s place. He stayed on it twenty years. He stayed at the Ferguson place about ten years. They’re adjoining places. He stayed at the Churchill place. Widow Scott place, the Bojean place. That’s all. Have you been down in Argenta to the Roundhouse? Churchill’s place runs way down to there. It wasn’t nothing but farms in Little Rock then. The river road was the only one there at that time. It would take a day to come down from Clear Lake with the cotton. You would start 'round about midnight and you would get to Argenta at nine o’clock the next morning. The road was always bad.

After freedom, we worked on shares a while. Then we rented. When we worked on shares, we couldn’t make nothing, just overalls and something to eat. Half went to the other man and you would destroy your half if you weren’t careful. A man that didn’t know how to count would always lose. He might lose anyhow. They didn’t give no itemized statement. No, you just had to take their word. They never give you no details. They just say you owe so much. No matter how good account you kept, you had to go by their account and now, Brother, I’m tellin‘ you the truth about this. It’s been that way for a long time. You had to take the white man’s work on note, and everything. Anything you wanted, you could git if you were a good hand. You could git anything you wanted as long as you worked. If you didn’t make no money, that’s all right; they would advance you more. But you better not leave him, you better not try to leave and get caught. They’d keep you in debt. They were sharp. Christmas come, you could take up twenty dollar, in somethin’ to eat and much as you wanted in whiskey. You could buy a gallon of whiskey. Anything that kept you a slave because he was always right and you were always wrong it there was difference. If there was an argument, he would get mad and there would be a shooting take place.

And you know how Negroes is. Long as they could git somethin', they didn’t care. You see, if the white man came out behind, he would feed you, let you have what you wanted. He’d just keep you on, help you get on your feet, that is, if you were a good hand. But if you weren’t a good hand, he’d just let you have enough to keep you alive. A good hand could take care of forty or fifty acres of land and would have a large family. A good hand could git clothes, food, whiskey, whenever be wanted it.

Source: Henry Blake, Little Rock, Arkansas Federal Writer’s Project, United States Work Projects Administration; Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

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Yale Professor William Graham Sumner Prescribes Laissez-Faire for Depression Woes: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

Yale Professor William Graham Sumner Prescribes Laissez-Faire for Depression Woes

With depression looming as a continual threat to the U.S. economy in the late 19th century, Americans debated how the government should respond to hard times—a question still unanswered today. Manufacturers—then as now—usually took the position that government should not interfere with the workings of the “free market.” Manufacturers found support for their laissez-faire positions in the speeches and writings of the leading academic experts of the day. On August 22, 1878, Yale faculty member William Graham Sumner testified before a select committee of the U.S. House of Representatives charged with investigating the Causes of the General Depression in Labor and Business. Sumner preached a strict “hands-off” approach to ameliorating the widespread economic dislocations then plaguing the country.

Mr. SUMNER appeared before the committee by invitation.

The CHAIRMAN: Please to state your occupation.

Mr. SUMNER: I am professor of political and social science in Yale College.

The CHAIRMAN: How long have you held that position?

Mr. SUMNER: I have been in that chair for six years.

The CHAIRMAN: Of course, you have made the relations of capital and labor a study in the performance of your regular duties?

Mr. SUMNER: Yes, sir; that is my professional duty.

The CHAIRMAN: Have you given any special attention to the condition of labor and of business generally at the present time in the United States?

Mr. SUMNER: That is within the range of my professional studies. I have studied it and given all the attention I could to it, and I have availed myself of all the means that I know of for forming ideas about it. I should like to say that the means of forming ideas about it on the part of professional economists are very meager and unsatisfactory. It is exceedingly difficult for any person, however well trained he may be, to embrace this whole subject of the causes of the present depression in the United States; and he would be a very bold man indeed who should claim that he had sounded the whole question. I am certainly not in that position before this committee. I should think that that question ought to be carefully considered in two different points of view. There has been very great industrial reaction over the whole world during the last five or six years, and the United States have, of course, participated in the general state of industry and commerce over the whole world. They have had their share of it. There have been other local and peculiar circumstances in the United States which should be considered by themselves as combining with and intensifying here the effects produced by general causes the world over. Now, I do not know any one in the world who has undertaken to study the whole question of the present commercial crisis over the world in all its bearings, or who has ventured to publish his opinion as to what the cause of this general depression may be, because I am sure that any professional economist would regard that as a subject of enormous magnitude, and would be very timid about any of his conclusions in regard to it. I do not care to enter into that. . . .

Mr. RlCE: What is the effect of machinery on those laborers whom for the time being it turns out of employment?

Mr. SUMNER: Of course, a loss of income and a loss of comfort. There are plenty of people in the United States to-day whose fathers were displaced from their labor in some of the old countries by the introduction of machinery, and who suffered very great poverty, and who were forced to emigrate to this country by the pressure of necessity, poverty, and famine. When they came to this country they entered on a new soil and a new system of industry, and their children to-day may look back on the temporary distress through which their parents went as a great family blessing.

Mr. RICE: But the fathers had to suffer from it?

Mr. SUMNER: They had to suffer from it.

Mr. RICE: Is there any way to help it?

Mr. SUMNER: Not at all. There is no way on this earth to help it. The only way is to meet it bravely, go ahead, make the best of circumstances: and if you cannot go on in the way you were going, try another way, and still another, until you work yourself out as an individual.

The CHAIRMAN: Your idea is that the introduction of machinery has improved the condition of a great many people, although individuals have had hard times in the transition?

Mr. SUMNER: Individuals and classes have had to go through it. What is the reason anybody ever came to America originally? A few came because they had some religious ideas which they wanted to carry out, but they were an insignificant part of the migration to America. The people who came to America came because they were uncomfortable in the old countries, because there was distress and pressure upon them, because they were mostly at the bottom and worst off, and the chance for them was to get to a new soil where it would be easier to get a living and to struggle forward. That is what they all came to this country for. They never abandoned their old homes because they liked to do so. They disliked it very much.

Mr. RICE: Then the pressure of necessity is one of the prime elements in the progress and civilization of mankind?

Mr. SUMNER: Yes; we have been forced to progress, and that is the reason why we have made it. . . .

The CHAIRMAN: You said just now that we had a sparse population on a very productive soil, and therefore that if there is distress here there must be some artificial causes for it. Do you admit that there is what you call distress among the laboring classes of this country?

Mr. SUMNER: No, sir; I do not admit any such thing. I cannot get any evidence of it. There is only one single fact before the public, so far as I know (and I have been looking for facts), with reference to the number of unemployed persons, and that is the report of Mr. Wright, of Massachusetts, in which he puts down the number of unemployed persons in that State as 28,000, men and women (21,000 men). Whatever may be said in the way of using figures one way or the other, I do not know practically of any evidence that is before the people of the United States to-day except that statement. That statement was carefully made by a trained man who understands his business in that line, and who took all the care he could to collect the data which are given to us. Now the State of Massachusetts is perhaps quite as badly off as any State in the Union, perhaps worse off. When you go into the agricultural communities you find that they are not in any such condition at all. If there is any State worse off than Massachusetts it is Pennsylvania, on account of the coal and iron depression, and I should not wonder if they were worse off there. But there is another thing. A vast number of these people have, of course, family connections, and those people who are supposed to be unemployed are not in a condition bordering either upon starvation or crime. They do not take to the road as tramps, they do not beg, and they do not steal; that is, they do not beg publicly. The chief centers of distress, I should think, from any observation, were the large cities. In all the large cities there are vast numbers of persons who have no regular and steady means of support, who live by irregular occupations and in nondescript ways. These people do not like to leave the cities; they will not leave the cities. In times of slack industry and commerce, of course they find it harder to get a living than at other times; and I suppose that there are in all our cities great numbers of these persons. Furthermore, I should say that this kind of distress where it exists is a great deal deeper and more widespread among clerks, salesmen, bookkeepers, office men, and all that range of occupations than among any other class . . . .

Mr. SUMNER: That brings right on another point which I want to speak about. Up to the time that the crisis of 1873 came, the general opinion of all persons acquainted with business here at that time would be this: that nobody wanted to pay and wind up; nobody wanted to liquidate; everybody wanted to renew his obligations, to extend his operations, because he expected a rise in the market still further. Everybody’s confidence in the market was such that he did not want to pay his debt. He thought he was sure to be able to pay his interest on it, and he wanted to make every transaction, as far as possible, the basis for another transaction, so as to extend his operations and get profit on his larger capital. When the crisis of 1873 came, it just shook that confidence, and everybody turned around and began to ask himself whether his inventory figures were good or not—whether the figures at which he had rated his property were correct. He knew that he had debts, and then he had to ask himself whether he was solvent, if he did not pay his debts very soon. He found that prices began to fall, and he found that it was all in vain for him to inventory his property at so much, and then his debts at so much, and his margin at so much. By and by the question was, whether his margin was not wiped out. Everybody, I think, set to work immediately, with the natural good sense of every individual, to discharge his obligations and to reduce his debts, and to pay up and bring his affairs into close order again just as fast and steadily as he could; and the establish and solidify the credit transactions which had been opened up to that time. A great many people found themselves insolvent, and have failed and have gone out of the account. But the natural good sense of every man simply showed him what he ought to do. Every individual had to reduce his expenditures, to economize as much as he could, and to turn in his capital as rapidly as he could to the liquidation of his obligations. In other words, the people of the United States have been, within the last five years, accumulating capital with great rapidity, in order to turn it in to pay their debts. But they have been saving money. Every man has reduced his expenditures, and has contracted his obligations in that way. That, of course, is one great reason for the slackness in trade. When people are not buying goods, if they can possibly help it, of course, trade is dull. That runs through everything. It runs through manufactures and everything else. When people are all avoiding expenses as much as possible, a dullness of trade is produced.

The CHAIRMAN: And all that leads necessarily to a slack demand for labor?

Mr. SUMNER: Of course.

The CHAIRMAN: And the laborer suffers?

Mr. SUMNER: Certainly.

The CHAIRMAN: I do not know whether you are ready to take up the question of remedies. Do you think that there is any remedy that may be applied by legislation or otherwise to relieve labor from the consequences of this speculative era?

Mr. SUMNER: And every one must do the best he can.

The CHAIRMAN: Can legislation do anything toward relieving this accumulation of labor by transferring it to some other place where labor is in request or can be utilized?

Mr. SUMNER: Legislation might do a great deal of mischief, but nothing else. There is one other point which I would like to bring on in this connection because it bears on that point. I have not said as much as I want to yet about the protective tariff.

The CHAIRMAN: Do you want to go on with it at this point?

Mr. SUMNER: Yes. Of course we have had to put up with very heavy taxation since the war. That could not be helped, and taxation is nothing but a burden. We have got to carry it and to make the best of it. It is one of the inevitable hardships of life. But, then, there is the entirely different question of paying in taxes for protection; that is, taxes that are paid by the people, not for the government, but for the protection of manufacturers. In the first place, any taxes of that kind (and we have had frightful ones laid on in this country, unexampled ones) that are laid on for that purpose are a dead burden to the people, coming out of the war with all their other difficulties upon them. In the second place, if you protect anybody, you have got to undertake to decide what things ought to be done in this country. As you [to Mr. Rice] suggested a while ago, some people think it necessary that we should work iron in this country, whether it is profitable or not; that is to say whether it is as profitable as something else that could be done or not (for that is the real question). Now, if the legislature makes up its mind that there are some things that ought to be done here, and sets to work to lay protective duties, in order to force those things to be done, there will be some other consequences which we must take into account. One of them will be, right away, that you will force the industry of the country into disproportionate development.

We have heard a good deal within a few years past about over-production. I do not know what in the world over-production can mean. You cannot give any intelligible definition of it. The only thing that is possible in that direction is not over-production in any sense at all, but disproportionate production. To illustrate that: If you want to build houses, you have got to have wood and brick and lime and nails, &c. (the component materials), to go into the building. If you have wood and nails and lime enough to build 1,000 houses, and you have brick enough to build 2,000 houses, you have a disproportionate production; and the bricks for 1,000 houses have got to lie idle until you can bring up the production of lumber and nails and plaster to the limit of 2,000 houses, in order to fill out the necessary composition with the bricks, and to use them up. That disproportionate production is the only kind of over-production that I know anything about. Now, when you lay on a protective tariff for the purpose of developing certain industries, one great trouble is, that you bring about that disproportionate production. Is such a disproportionate production possible in a natural state of things? Not at all. The law of supply and demand makes it utterly impossible. You cannot produce brick for 2,000 houses when the other materials are only sufficient for 1,000 houses, because the bricks would immediately begin to be reduced in their market price. You would have your warning. But, when you have this protective system in force, the first thing you know is that you have brought out a disproportionate production of commodities in those particular lines.

The next result that you must look out for is that you will draw your population to the particular localities which you have artificially decided on by law. You have invited the population and encouraged them, as it is called, to come to places, and to occupy themselves in occupations into which they would not have gone naturally if things had been left to take their own course. For instance, you can produce a congestion of population in the iron districts (they have got it now in Pennsylvania, and perhaps would like to get rid of it) by deciding that you want to force iron production whether the circumstances of the country call for it or not; but because it is a good thing to have, you gather your population together there where they would not have gone had they been left to distribute themselves just where the greatest profit called them . . . .

Mr. SUMNER: . . . I suppose that the only other question which you want to ask me is the one which you did ask; that is, about the remedies. Of course, I have not any remedy to offer for such a state of things as this. The only answer I can give to a question like that would be the application of simple sound doctrine and sound principles to the case in point. I do not know of anything that the government can do that is at all specific to assist labor—to assist non-capitalists. The only things that the government can do are general things, such as are in the province of a government. The general things that a government can do to assist the non-capitalist in the accumulation of capital (for that is what he wants) are two things. The first thing is to give him the greatest possible measure of liberty in the directing of his own energies for his own development, and the second is to give him the greatest possible security in the possession and use of the products of his own industry. I do not see anything more than that that a government can do in the premises. . . .

The CHAIRMAN: The grievance complained of is that, in the operations of society, certain persons, who are just as deserving as others, find it impossible to get any employment at all. They say that society owes them a living; that, if they cannot get work at private hands, the public should intervene for the time being and provide some place where their labor could be employed, and where they could get a livelihood. They claim that they are just as industrious and meritorious as other citizens; and the proposition is for government to intervene and provide them with employment. What have you got to say tothat? Can that be done?

Mr. SUMNER: Sir. The moment that government provided work for one, it would have to provide work for all, and there would be no end whatever possible. Society does not owe any man a living. In all the cases that I have ever known of young men who claimed that society owed them a living, it has turned out that society paid them—in the State prison. I do not see any other result. Society does not owe any man a living. The fact that a man is here is no demand upon other people that they shall keep him alive and sustain him. He has got to fight the battle with nature as every other man has; and if he fights it with the same energy and enterprise and skill and industry as any other man, I cannot imagine his failing—that is, misfortune apart.

Source: U.S. Congress, House, Investigation by a Select Committee of the House of Representatives relative to the Causes of the General Depression in Labor and Business etc, 45th Cong.3d. Session, Mis. Doc. No. 29 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1879).

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Bryan's "Cross of Gold" Speech: Mesmerizing the Masses: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” Speech: Mesmerizing the Masses

The most famous speech in American political history was delivered by William Jennings Bryan on July 9, 1896, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The issue was whether to endorse the free coinage of silver at a ratio of silver to gold of 16 to 1. (This inflationary measure would have increased the amount of money in circulation and aided cash-poor and debt-burdened farmers.) After speeches on the subject by several U.S. Senators, Bryan rose to speak. The thirty-six-year-old former Congressman from Nebraska aspired to be the Democratic nominee for president, and he had been skillfully, but quietly, building support for himself among the delegates. His dramatic speaking style and rhetoric roused the crowd to a frenzy. The response, wrote one reporter, “came like one great burst of artillery.” Men and women screamed and waved their hats and canes. “Some,” wrote another reporter, “like demented things, divested themselves of their coats and flung them high in the air.” The next day the convention nominated Bryan for President on the fifth ballot. The full text of William Jenning Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech appears below. The audio portion is an excerpt. [Note on the recording: In 1896 recording technology was in its infancy, and recording a political convention would have been impossible. But in the early 20th century, the fame of Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech led him to repeat it numerous times on the Chautauqua lecture circuit where he was an enormously popular speaker. In 1921 (25 years after the original speech), he recorded portions of the speech for Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana. Although the recording does not capture the power and drama of the original address, it does allow us to hear Bryan delivering this famous speech.]

Listen to Audio:
I would be presumptuous, indeed, to present myself against the distinguished gentlemen to whom you have listened if this were but a measuring of ability; but this is not a contest among persons. The humblest citizen in all the land when clad in the armor of a righteous cause is stronger than all the whole hosts of error that they can bring. I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty—the cause of humanity. When this debate is concluded, a motion will be made to lay upon the table the resolution offered in commendation of the administration and also the resolution in condemnation of the administration. I shall object to bringing this question down to a level of persons. The individual is but an atom; he is born, he acts, he dies; but principles are eternal; and this has been a contest of principle.

Never before in the history of this country has there been witnessed such a contest as that through which we have passed. Never before in the history of American politics has a great issue been fought out as this issue has been by the voters themselves.

On the 4th of March, 1895, a few Democrats, most of them members of Congress, issued an address to the Democrats of the nation asserting that the money question was the paramount issue of the hour; asserting also the right of a majority of the Democratic Party to control the position of the party on this paramount issue; concluding with the request that all believers in free coinage of silver in the Democratic Party should organize and take charge of and control the policy of the Democratic Party. Three months later, at Memphis, an organization was perfected, and the silver Democrats went forth openly and boldly and courageously proclaiming their belief and declaring that if successful they would crystallize in a platform the declaration which they had made; and then began the conflict with a zeal approaching the zeal which inspired the crusaders who followed Peter the Hermit. Our silver Democrats went forth from victory unto victory, until they are assembled now, not to discuss, not to debate, but to enter up the judgment rendered by the plain people of this country.

But in this contest, brother has been arrayed against brother, and father against son. The warmest ties of love and acquaintance and association have been disregarded. Old leaders have been cast aside when they refused to give expression to the sentiments of those whom they would lead, and new leaders have sprung up to give direction to this cause of freedom. Thus has the contest been waged, and we have assembled here under as binding and solemn instructions as were ever fastened upon the representatives of a people.

We do not come as individuals. Why, as individuals we might have been glad to compliment the gentleman from New York [Senator Hill], but we knew that the people for whom we speak would never be willing to put him in a position where he could thwart the will of the Democratic Party. I say it was not a question of persons; it was a question of principle; and it is not with gladness, my friends, that we find ourselves brought into conflict with those who are now arrayed on the other side. The gentleman who just preceded me [Governor Russell] spoke of the old state of Massachusetts. Let me assure him that not one person in all this convention entertains the least hostility to the people of the state of Massachusetts.

But we stand here representing people who are the equals before the law of the largest cities in the state of Massachusetts. When you come before us and tell us that we shall disturb your business interests, we reply that you have disturbed our business interests by your action. We say to you that you have made too limited in its application the definition of a businessman. The man who is employed for wages is as much a businessman as his employer. The attorney in a country town is as much a businessman as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis. The merchant at the crossroads store is as much a businessman as the merchant of New York. The farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day, begins in the spring and toils all summer, and by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of this country creates wealth, is as much a businessman as the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of grain. The miners who go 1,000 feet into the earth or climb 2,000 feet upon the cliffs and bring forth from their hiding places the precious metals to be poured in the channels of trade are as much businessmen as the few financial magnates who in a backroom corner the money of the world.

We come to speak for this broader class of businessmen. Ah. my friends, we say not one word against those who live upon the Atlantic Coast; but those hardy pioneers who braved all the dangers of the wilderness, who have made the desert to blossom as the rose—those pioneers away out there, rearing their children near to nature’s heart, where they can mingle their voices with the voices of the birds—out there where they have erected schoolhouses for the education of their children and churches where they praise their Creator, and the cemeteries where sleep the ashes of their dead—are as deserving of the consideration of this party as any people in this country.

It is for these that we speak. We do not come as aggressors. Our war is not a war of conquest. We are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity. We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned. We have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded. We have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came.

We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!

The gentleman from Wisconsin has said he fears a Robespierre. My friend, in this land of the free you need fear no tyrant who will spring up from among the people. What we need is an Andrew Jackson to stand as Jackson stood, against the encroachments of aggregated wealth.

They tell us that this platform was made to catch votes. We reply to them that changing conditions make new issues; that the principles upon which rest Democracy are as everlasting as the hills; but that they must be applied to new conditions as they arise. Conditions have arisen and we are attempting to meet those conditions. They tell us that the income tax ought not to be brought in here; that is not a new idea. They criticize us for our criticism of the Supreme Court of the United States. My friends, we have made no criticism. We have simply called attention to what you know. If you want criticisms, read the dissenting opinions of the Court. That will give you criticisms.

They say we passed an unconstitutional law. I deny it. The income tax was not unconstitutional when it was passed. It was not unconstitutional when it went before the Supreme Court for the first time. It did not become unconstitutional until one judge changed his mind; and we cannot be expected to know when a judge will change his mind.

The income tax is a just law. It simply intends to put the burdens of government justly upon the backs of the people. I am in favor of an income tax. When I find a man who is not willing to pay his share of the burden of the government which protects him, I find a man who is unworthy to enjoy the blessings of a government like ours.

He says that we are opposing the national bank currency. It is true. If you will read what Thomas Benton said, you will find that he said that in searching history he could find but one parallel to Andrew Jackson. That was Cicero, who destroyed the conspiracies of Cataline and saved Rome. He did for Rome what Jackson did when he destroyed the bank conspiracy and saved America.

We say in our platform that we believe that the right to coin money and issue money is a function of government. We believe it. We believe it is a part of sovereignty and can no more with safety be delegated to private individuals than can the power to make penal statutes or levy laws for taxation.

Mr. Jefferson, who was once regarded as good Democratic authority, seems to have a different opinion from the gentleman who has addressed us on the part of the minority. Those who are opposed to this proposition tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank and that the government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson rather than with them, and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of the government and that the banks should go out of the governing business.

They complain about the plank which declares against the life tenure in office. They have tried to strain it to mean that which it does not mean. What we oppose in that plank is the life tenure that is being built up in Washington which establishes an office-holding class and excludes from participation in the benefits the humbler members of our society. . . .

Let me call attention to two or three great things. The gentleman from New York says that he will propose an amendment providing that this change in our law shall not affect contracts which, according to the present laws, are made payable in gold. But if he means to say that we cannot change our monetary system without protecting those who have loaned money before the change was made, I want to ask him where, in law or in morals, he can find authority for not protecting the debtors when the act of 1873 was passed when he now insists that we must protect the creditor. He says he also wants to amend this platform so as to provide that if we fail to maintain the parity within a year that we will then suspend the coinage of silver. We reply that when we advocate a thing which we believe will be successful we are not compelled to raise a doubt as to our own sincerity by trying to show what we will do if we are wrong.

I ask him, if he will apply his logic to us, why he does not apply it to himself. He says that he wants this country to try to secure an international agreement. Why doesn’t he tell us what he is going to do if they fail to secure an international agreement. There is more reason for him to do that than for us to expect to fail to maintain the parity. They have tried for thirty years—thirty years—to secure an international agreement, and those are waiting for it most patiently who don’t want it at all.

Now, my friends, let me come to the great paramount issue. If they ask us here why it is we say more on the money question than we say upon the tariff question, I reply that if protection has slain its thousands the gold standard has slain its tens of thousands. If they ask us why we did not embody all these things in our platform which we believe, we reply to them that when we have restored the money of the Constitution, all other necessary reforms will be possible, and that until that is done there is no reform that can be accomplished.

Why is it that within three months such a change has come over the sentiments of the country? Three months ago, when it was confidently asserted that those who believed in the gold standard would frame our platforms and nominate our candidates, even the advocates of the gold standard did not think that we could elect a President; but they had good reasons for the suspicion, because there is scarcely a state here today asking for the gold standard that is not within the absolute control of the Republican Party.

But note the change. Mr. McKinley was nominated at St. Louis upon a platform that declared for the maintenance of the gold standard until it should be changed into bimetallism by an international agreement. Mr. McKinley was the most popular man among the Republicans ; and everybody three months ago in the Republican Party prophesied his election. How is it today? Why, that man who used to boast that he looked like Napoleon, that man shudders today when he thinks that he was nominated on the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. Not only that, but as he listens he can hear with ever increasing distinctness the sound of the waves as they beat upon the lonely shores of St. Helena.

Why this change? Ah, my friends. is not the change evident to anyone who will look at the matter? It is because no private character, however pure, no personal popularity, however great, can protect from the avenging wrath of an indignant people the man who will either declare that he is in favor of fastening the gold standard upon this people, or who is willing to surrender the right of self-government and place legislative control in the hands of foreign potentates and powers. . . .

We go forth confident that we shall win. Why? Because upon the paramount issue in this campaign there is not a spot of ground upon which the enemy will dare to challenge battle. Why, if they tell us that the gold standard is a good thing, we point to their platform and tell them that their platform pledges the party to get rid of a gold standard and substitute bimetallism. If the gold standard is a good thing, why try to get rid of it? If the gold standard, and I might call your attention to the fact that some of the very people who are in this convention today and who tell you that we ought to declare in favor of international bimetallism and thereby declare that the gold standard is wrong and that the principles of bimetallism are better—these very people four months ago were open and avowed advocates of the gold standard and telling us that we could not legislate two metals together even with all the world.

I want to suggest this truth, that if the gold standard is a good thing we ought to declare in favor of its retention and not in favor of abandoning it; and if the gold standard is a bad thing, why should we wait until some other nations are willing to help us to let it go?

Here is the line of battle. We care not upon which issue they force the fight. We are prepared to meet them on either issue or on both. If they tell us that the gold standard is the standard of civilization, we reply to them that this, the most enlightened of all nations of the earth, has never declared for a gold standard, and both the parties this year are declaring against it. If the gold standard is the standard of civilization, why, my friends, should we not have it? So if they come to meet us on that, we can present the history of our nation. More than that, we can tell them this, that they will search the pages of history in vain to find a single instance in which the common people of any land ever declared themselves in favor of a gold standard. They can find where the holders of fixed investments have.

Mr. Carlisle said in 1878 that this was a struggle between the idle holders of idle capital and the struggling masses who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country; and my friends, it is simply a question that we shall decide upon which side shall the Democratic Party fight. Upon the side of the idle holders of idle capital, or upon the side of the struggling masses? That is the question that the party must answer first; and then it must be answered by each individual hereafter. The sympathies of the Democratic Party, as described by the platform, are on the side of the struggling masses, who have ever been the foundation of the Democratic Party.

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard. I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.

My friends, we shall declare that this nation is able to legislate for its own people on every question without waiting for the aid or consent of any other nation on earth, and upon that issue we expect to carry every single state in the Union.

I shall not slander the fair state of Massachusetts nor the state of New York by saying that when citizens are confronted with the proposition, “Is this nation able to attend to its own business?”—I will not slander either one by saying that the people of those states will declare our helpless impotency as a nation to attend to our own business. It is the issue of 1776 over again. Our ancestors, when but 3 million, had the courage to declare their political independence of every other nation upon earth. Shall we, their descendants, when we have grown to 70 million, declare that we are less independent than our forefathers? No, my friends, it will never be the judgment of this people. Therefore, we care not upon what lines the battle is fought. If they say bimetallism is good but we cannot have it till some nation helps us, we reply that, instead of having a gold standard because England has, we shall restore bimetallism, and then let England have bimetallism because the United States have.

If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

Source: Official Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention Held in Chicago, Illinois, July 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, 1896, (Logansport, Indiana, 1896), 226–234. Reprinted in The Annals of America, Vol. 12, 1895–1904: Populism, Imperialism, and Reform (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1968), 100–105.

See Also:"I Am a Democrat and not a Revolutionist": Senator David Bennett Hill Defends the Gold Standard "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman Addresses the 1896 Democratic Convention

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"I Am a Democrat and not a Revolutionist": Senator David Bennett Hill Defends the Gold Standard: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

“I Am a Democrat and not a Revolutionist”: Senator David Bennett Hill Defends the Gold Standard

The most famous speech in American political history was delivered by William Jennings Bryan on July 9, 1896, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but it was preceded by two other significant speeches. The subject under debate was the currency plank in the Democratic platform. The majority of members of the resolutions committee had endorsed the free coinage of silver at a ratio of silver to gold of 16 to 1. (This inflationary measure would have increased the amount of money in circulation and aided cash-poor and debt-burdened farmers.) In the ensuing debate, Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina spoke for the majority, framing the silver issue as a sectional one. His disastrous performance dashed his hopes to be the silverite candidate for the U.S. presidency. The speakers for the minority position, including Senator David Bennett Hill of New York—whose speech is excerpted here—defended President Cleveland and the gold standard.

I am a Democrat, but I am not a revolutionist. My mission here today is to unite, not to divide—to build up, not to destroy—to plan for victory, not to plot for defeat. The question which this convention is to decide is: What is the best position to take at this time on the financial question? In a word, the question presented is between international bimetallism and local bimetallism. If there are any different points in it, they are not represented either in the majority or in the minority report. I therefore start out with this proposition, that the Democratic Party stands today in favor of gold and silver as the money of the country; that it stands in favor neither of a silver standard nor of a gold standard, but that we differ as to the means to bring about the result. Those whom I represent and for whom I speak—the sixteen minority members of the committee—insist that we should not attempt the experiment of the free and unlimited coinage of silver without cooperation of other great nations. It is not a question of patriotism, it is not a question of courage, it is not a question of loyalty, as the majority platform speaks of it. The minority has thought it was simply a question as to whether we were able to enter on this experiment. It is a question of business. It is a question of finance. It is a question of economics. It is not a question which men, ever so brave, can solve. I think, Mr. President, that the safest and best course for this convention to have pursued was to take the first step forward in the great cause of monetary reform by declaring in favor of international bimetallism. I know that it is said by enthusiastic friends that America can mark out a course for herself. I know that that idea appeals to the pride of the average American, but I beg to remind you that if that suggestion be carried out to its legitimate conclusion, you might as well do away with our international treaties.

[Senator Hill continued at considerable length, criticizing in great detail the platform reported by the majority, and stating the attitude of the minority. He said that the platform had been loaded with irrelevant issues, and that it was ill considered. He closed with the following words:]

I oppose this platform because I think it makes our success more difficult. I want the grand old party with which I have been associated from boyhood to live. And I have looked forward to the time when it shall be securely intrenched in the affections of the American people. I dislike the Republican party. I dislike all their tenets. I have no sympathy with their general principles, but I do think that we are here to-day making a mistake in the venture which we are about to make. Be not deceived. Do not attempt to drive those Democrats out of the party who have grown gray in its service, in order to make room for a lot of Republicans and Populists who will not vote your ticket at all. My friends, I speak more in sorrow than in anger. You know what this platform means to the East. But bad as it may be to us, it will be more calamitous to you if, after taking all these risks, you do not win the fight. My friends we want the Democratic party to live. We want to build it up, not to tear it down. We want the principles of Jefferson and Jackson to win. We want no greenback currency on our pledges. We want no paper currency issued by the government. We want to stand by the principles to which we have clung during the history of the country. If we keep in the good old paths of the party we shall win, but if we depart from them we shall be lost.

[As Senator Hill concluded there was a demonstration of enthusiasm exceeding any previous outbreak.]

Source: Public Opinion, Vol. 21 (16 July 1896): 70.

See Also:Bryan's "Cross of Gold" Speech: Mesmerizing the Masses "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman Addresses the 1896 Democratic Convention

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"Pitchfork Ben" Tillman Addresses the 1896 Democratic Convention: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

“Pitchfork Ben” Tillman Addresses the 1896 Democratic Convention

The most famous speech in American political history was delivered by William Jennings Bryan on July 9, 1896, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but it was preceded by two other significant speeches. The subject under debate was currency, a central issue in the 1896 presidential election. The issue was whether to endorse the free coinage of silver at a ratio of silver to gold of 16 to 1. (This inflationary measure would have increased the amount of money in circulation and aided cash-poor and debt-burdened farmers.) Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina supported the measure, but misjudged his audience by framing the silver issue as a sectional one. Tillman’s fiery and strange appearance only reinforced the belief of some delegates that he was a madman. His disastrous performance dashed his hopes to be the silverite candidate for the U.S. presidency.

When this convention disperses, I hope my fellow citizens will have a different opinion of the man with the pitchfork from South Carolina. I am from South Carolina, which was the home of secession. [Great hissing.] Oh, hiss if you like. There are only three things on earth which can hiss—a goose, a serpent, and a man, and the man who hisses the name of South Carolina has no knowledge whatever of its grand history. But I tell you I do not come from the South Carolina of 1860, which you charge brought about the disruption of the Democratic Party. The war there declared was for the emancipation of the black slaves. I come now from a South Carolina which demands the emancipation of the white slaves. You charge that in 1860 South Carolina brought about the disruption of the Democratic Party. I say to you now that I am willing to see the Democratic Party disrupted again to accomplish the emancipation of the white slaves. New York for twenty years or more has been the one dominant factor and dictator of the National Democratic Party. While we want to thank New York and Connecticut and New Jersey for the aid extended to us in the past, I want to say to you here that we have at last recognized in the South that we are mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, while the great states I have named have eaten up our substance. My friends say this is not a sectional issue. I say it is.

[Great scenes of disorder then ensued, and quiet was restored with difficulty. Many times the senator was interrupted, but he went on:]

I deny utterly that there is any sectional feeling over this silver issue. I have been in the East ten days, and nine-tenths of the voters in those States are for silver. The Democratic and Republican political machines, by the use of money, have stifled the sentiments of the people on this money question.

[References by the speaker to Senator Hill brought a renewal of the storm, and Senator Tillman was obliged to raise his voice to a shout as he ended:]

As Grover Cleveland stands for gold monometallism, we have repudiated him. We are diametrically opposed to his policy, and why should we write ourselves down as asses and liars? They ask us to say that he is honest. Well, in reply I say he signed a contract for bonds in secret, with one of his partners as a witness. Nobody disputes his boldness or obstinacy. He had the courage to overthrow the Constitution of the United States when he overrode the rights of the citizens of Illinois and sent federal troops into this state. You ask us to indorse his fidelity. In reply, I say he has been faithful unto death—the death of the Democratic Party. We have denounced him in South Carolina as a tool of Wall Street, and what was prophecy then is history now. Senator John Sherman’s speech in the Senate in support of the Administration’s money policy was but the certificate of a Cleveland Republican. I tell you that the Democratic Party of the United States will turn out the party in this fall’s election if it dares indorse Grover Cleveland here. I tell you you dare not go before this country after indorsing the Cleveland administration. We of the South have burned our bridges behind us so far as the Eastern Democrats are concerned. We have turned our faces to the West and they have responded. I have only a few more words to say, and I know that you will be asked to do this by time-serving politicians, the men who follow and never lead public opinion. Once again I say to you that we must refuse to indorse the Cleveland Administration or go before the country stultified.

Source: Public Opinion, Vol. 21 (16 July 1896): 69–71.

See Also:Bryan's "Cross of Gold" Speech: Mesmerizing the Masses "I Am a Democrat and not a Revolutionist": Senator David Bennett Hill Defends the Gold Standard

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Six Families Budget Their Money, 1884: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

Six Families Budget Their Money, 1884

These six family budgets collected by the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1884 show the range of family incomes and spending patterns within the working class. Although skill level was probably the most important determinant of wages, relatively few male breadwinners were able to earn a “family wage”—enough to support their wives and children decently. Most families pooled their members’ wages in what historians call the “family economy.” The wages of children and teenagers often meant the difference between a modicum of comfort and mere survival, and women who were not working for wages sometimes brought in money by operating home-based businesses such as washing clothes or keeping boarders. Women also contributed to the family’s economic survival by managing the household budget, sharing resources with other female householders, and scavenging for discarded food, clothes, and fuel. Unlike current times, prices were not constantly rising in the late-19th century, and the period’s declining prices (particularly food prices) allowed a modest, gradual improvement in working-class living standards.

AMERICAN COAL MINER

EARNINGS: Of father $250

CONDITION: Family numbers 7 - husband, wife, and five children, three girls and two boys, aged from three to nineteen years. Three of them go to the public school. Family live in 2-room tenement, in healthy locality, for which they pay $6 per month rent. The house is scantily furnished, without carpets, but is kept neat and clean. They are compelled to live very economically, and every cent they earn is used to the best advantage. Father had only thirty weeks work during the past year. He belongs to trade union. The figures for cost of living are actual and there is no doubt the family lived on the amount specified.

FOOD:

Breakfast—Bread, coffee, and salt meat.

Dinner—Meat, bread, coffee, and butter.

Supper—Sausage, bread, and coffee.

COST OF LIVING:

Rent $72

Fuel $20

Meat $20

Groceries $60

Clothing $28

Boots and shoes $15

Dry goods $20

Trade union $3

Sickness $10

Sundries $5

Total $253

ENGLISH IRON AND STEEL WORKER

EARNINGS:

Of father $1,420

Of son, aged fourteen $300

Total $1,720

CONDITION: Family numbers 6 - parents and four children; two boys and two girls, aged from seven to sixteen years. Three of them attend school, and the other works in the shop with his father. Family occupy their own house, containing 9 well furnished rooms, in a pleasant and healthy locality. They have a good vegetable and flower garden. They live well, but not extravagantly, and are saving about a thousand dollars per year. Father receives an average of $7 per day of twelve hours, for his labor, and works about thirty-four weeks of the year. Belongs to trade union, but carries no life insurance. Had but little sickness during the year.

FOOD:

Breakfast—Bread, butter, meat, eggs, and sometimes oysters.

Dinner—Potatoes, bread, butter, meat, pie, cake, or pudding.

Supper—Bread, butter, meat, rice or sauce, and tea or coffee.

COST OF LIVING:

Fuel $55

Meat $100

Groceries $300

Clothing $75

Boots and shoes $50

Dry goods $50

Books, papers, etc. $10

Trade union $6

Sickness $12

Sundries $50

Total $708

IRISH COAL MINER

EARNINGS:

Of father $420

Of son, twenty-one years of age $420

Of son, eighteen years of age $420

Of son, sixteen years of age $150

Total $1,410

CONDITION: Family numbers 6 - parents and four children, three boys and one girl. The girl attends school, and the three boys are working in the mine. Father owns a house of six rooms, which is clean and very comfortably furnished. Family temperate, and members of a church, which they attend with regularity. They have an acre of ground, which they work in summer, and raise vegetables for their consumption. They have their house about paid for, payments being made in installments of $240 per year. Father belongs to mutual assessment association and to trade union.

FOOD:

Breakfast—Steak, bread, butter, potatoes, bacon, and coffee.

Dinner—Bread, butter, meat, cheese, pie, and tea.

Supper—Meat, potatoes, bread, butter, puddings, pie, and coffee.

COST OF LIVING:

Rent $240

Fuel $10

Meat $200

Groceries $700

Clothing $80

Boots, shoes, and dry goods $70

Books, papers, etc. $15

Life insurance $18

Trade union $3

Sickness $4

Sundries $75

Total $1,415

IRISH LABORER

EARNINGS: Of father $343

CONDITION: Family numbers 5 - parents and three children, two girls, aged seven and five, and boy, eight. They occupy a rented house of 4 rooms, and pay a rental, monthly, of $7. Two of the children attend school. Father complains of the wages he receives, being but $1.10 per day, and says it is extremely difficult for him to support his family upon that amount. His work consists in cleaning yards, basements, outbuildings, etc., and is, in fact, a regular scavenger. He also complains of the work as being very unhealthy, but it seems he can procure no other work.

FOOD:

Breakfast—Black coffee, bread, and potatoes

Dinner—Corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes.

Supper—Bread, coffee, and potatoes.

COST OF LIVING:

Rent $84

Fuel $15

Meat and groceries $180

Clothing, boots and shoes, dry goods $40

Sundries $20

Total $339

ITALIAN LABORER

EARNINGS: Of father $270.00

CONDITION: Family numbers 5 - parents and three children, all boys, aged one, three, and five. Live in one room, for which they pay $4 per month rent. A very dirty and unhealthy place, everything perfectly filthy. There are about fifteen other families living in the same house. They buy the cheapest kind of meat from the neighboring slaughterhouses and the children pick up fuel on the streets and rotten eatables from the commission houses. Children do not attend school. They are all ignorant in the full sense of the word. Father could not write his name.

FOOD:

Breakfast—Coffee and bread.

Dinner—Soup.

Supper—Coffee and bread.

COST OF LIVING:

Rent $48

Fuel $5

Meat and groceries $100

Clothing, boots and shoes, and dry goods $15

Sickness $5

Total $173

SCANDINAVIAN LABORER

EARNINGS:

Of father $240

Of daughter, aged seventeen $340

Of son, aged fifteen $200

Total $780

CONDITION: Family numbers 5 - parents and three children, two boys, aged fifteen and seven, and a girl, aged seventeen. Live in a 4-room house, and pay $10 per month rent for the same. House is comfortable, but poorly furnished, and is in unhealthy location. Family attends church. Their expenditures exceed their income .

FOOD:

Breakfast—Meat, potatoes, bread, and coffee.

Dinner—Lunches .

Supper—Soup, bread, and meat.

COST OF LIVING:

Rent $120

Fuel $15

Meat and groceries $300

Clothing, boots and shoes, dry goods $120

Books, papers, etc. $5

Sickness $40

Sundries $250

Total $850

Source: Illinois Bureau of Statistics, Third Biennial Report, (Springfield, Ill.: 1884).

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Outside Looking In: Byington on Homestead's Women: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

Outside Looking In: Byington on Homestead’s Women

In 1892, Homestead, Pennsylvania, was the site of one of the most dramatic strikes in U.S. history. The Carnegie Steel Company’s ultimate victory resulted in the destruction of a once-powerful union of skilled iron and steel workers. By 1907, almost 7,000 workers toiled at the Homestead plant for the U.S. Steel Corporation. In 1907–1908, the Russell Sage Foundation undertook an intensive study that attempted to understand the dramatic changes that had reshaped Homestead and other industrial communities. The resulting six-volume report, written by progressive social reformers, included Margaret Byington’s Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town, first published in 1910. This excerpt from Byington’s study depicted work and home life for the immigrant women of Homestead. Byington’s account, while sympathetic to the immigrants who comprised the bulk of the steel town’s labor force, was written from the perspective of an outsider. She emphasized women’s limited participation in the paid labor force in steel mill towns like Homestead, yet she provided repeated testimony regarding the multiple economic and social roles of women in Homestead as managers of family finances and family relationships.

One morning I entered a two-room tenement. The kitchen, perhaps 15 by 12 feet, was steaming with vapor from a big washtub set on a chair in the middle of the room. The mother was trying to wash and at the same time to keep the older of her two babies from tumbling into the tub full of scalding water that was standing on the floor. On one side of the room was a huge puffy bed, with one feather tick to sleep on and another for covering; near the window stood a sewing machine; in the corner, an organ,—all these, besides the inevitable cook stove upon which in the place of honor was simmering the evening’s soup. Upstairs in the second room were one boarder and the man of the house asleep. Two more boarders were at work, but at night would be home to sleep in the bed from which the others would get up. Picture if you will what a week or a season means to a mother in such a home, the overwork, the brief respite from toil—to be increased afterward—when the babies come?

Yet it is even more disastrous to the children both in health and character. In the courts studied, out of 102 families who took lodgers, 72 had children; of these, 25 families had two, 10 had three, and seven had four. There were 138 youngsters in all. A comparison of births and deaths of children under two . . . shows that among the Slavs one child under two years of age dies to every three children born; among the English-speaking Europeans, one dies to every seven born; among the native whites and colored, one to every five. In the crowded Second Ward, taking all races, one child under two dies to every three born,—compared with one to every four in the First Ward, one to every five in the Fifth, one to every eight in the Third, and one to every seven in the Fourth.

Against many of these deaths was the physician’s entry “malnutrition due to poor food and overcrowding”; that is, the mother too poor, too busy, and too ignorant to prepare food properly, rooms over-tenanted, and courts too confined to give the fresh air essential for the physical development of children. A priest told me he believed that the taking of lodgers caused the appalling death rate among the babies in his parish. Neither preaching nor pointing out to women personally the folly of the economy had sufficed to check the habit.

Not only is the mother too busy to give much time to her babies, but she also suffers from overwork during pregnancy and from lack of proper care afterward. Housework must be done, boarders must be fed, and most women work until the day of confinement. In accordance with their home customs, almost all of them employ midwives and call a doctor only in an emergency. I was told by a local physician that nearly half of the births in Homestead, the large proportion of them among the Slavic people, were attended by midwives. These women, who charge $5.00 or $10, include in their services the care of both woman and child for several days, and thus perform the services of trained nurse as well as doctor. While of the 21 midwives registered in Homestead, five or six have diplomas from schools of midwifery abroad, most of them are ignorant and are careless about cleanliness. In a paper before the Allegheny County Medical Society, Dr. Purman, a local physician, reported numerous instances where both mother and child had suffered serious injury from the ignorance of these women.

The necessity for mothers to be up and at work within three or four days adds to the harm. In at least 10 of the 29 Slavic families visited, special reference was made by the Slavic investigator to the ill health of the mother due to overwork and to lack of proper care during confinement. The strength to bear much doubtless comes to these women from years of work in the fields, but the change to the hot kitchens where their work is now done undoubtedly entails a strain which not only injures them but lessens the vitality of the children. This weakened condition at birth combines with the inadequate food and insufficient air and the neglect which comes through over-burdening the mother to produce the appalling infant death rate in these courts.

Yet sometimes as you watch the stunted, sickly looking children, you wonder if the real tragedy does not lie rather in the miserable future in store for the babies who live, many of them with undervitalized systems which may make them victims either of disease or of the dissipation that often fastens upon weak wills and weak bodies.

Keeping lodgers ruins the training as well as the health of the children. The overworked mother has neither time nor patience for wise discipline. As the men who work on night turns must sleep during the day, crying babies must not be allowed to disturb this uneasy rest. All this adds to the mother’s weary irritation and makes it harder to maintain any sort of uniform control. This failure of intelligent discipline was noticeable in most of the families I visited, where cuffs and sharp words were the usual form of correction. One of the Protestant missions which tried through mothers' meetings to give the women some suggestions as to child training, found them too busy to come. Fortunately, however, the children who attend the public schools receive some training. This the parents value. A teacher in the Second Ward school said that while she had a great deal of trouble in teaching the Slavic children obedience, she at least found the parents willing to uphold her in whatever action she took.

Even more serious is the injury to the moral tone of the Slavic community caused by the crowding together of single men and families. In only four instances in the courts studied were lodgers found in families where there were girls over fourteen, but even younger children learn evil quickly from the free-spoken men. With the husband at work on the night shift the situation is aggravated, and reports are current of gross immorality on the part of some women who keep lodgers; two or three actual instances came to my knowledge from unquestioned sources. Since half the families in the courts studied used the kitchen as a sleeping room, there was close mingling of lodgers and family among them. This becomes intolerable when families living in but two rooms take lodgers. This was true, as we have seen, in 71 instances. Even when extreme crowding does not exist, family and lodgers often all sleep in the kitchen, the only warm room, in winter.

Certainly there is little to quicken mental and spiritual development in these crowded tenements where there is neither privacy nor even that degree of silence necessary for reading. We agree in the abstract that the individual needs room for growth, yet complain of the stunted mental stature of these people who have the meagre development of seedlings grown in a mass.

Moreover, families who live in narrow quarters have no room for festive gatherings. In the evening a group often gathers around the stove gossiping of home days, playing cards, drinking, and playing simple musical instruments. On the Saturday after pay day the household usually clubs together to buy a case of beer which it drinks at home. These ordinarily jovial gatherings are sometimes interrupted by fights and the police have to be called in. One officer who had been on the force for nine years said that these men were generally good-natured and easygoing, and in all his experience he had never arrested a sober “Hunkie”; it was when they were drunk that the trouble began. The punishment usually inflicted for disorderly conduct in Homestead, a small fine, has little deterrent effect among the Slavs. It is indeed currently said that some are proud of having a large fine imposed, as they feel that it indicates increased importance. Usually, however, they gather without disturbance simply to chat and drink, to pass the hours after the day’s work.

The women have few opportunities for relaxation. Sometimes they gossip around the pump or at the butcher’s, but washing, ironing, cleaning, sewing and cooking for the boarders leave little time for visiting. The young people perhaps suffer most from the lack of home festivities. A two-room house has no place for games or “parties,” or even for courting; there is not even space enough, to say nothing of privacy. So young folks are driven to the streets for their gayety. Almost the only time when the house is really the scene of festivity is when those primal events, birth, and marriage, and death, bring together both the old-time friends and the new neighbors.

On most of these occasions, whether weddings, christenings or funerals, joy and grief and religious ceremony are alike forgotten in a riotous good time. The weddings are the gayest affairs in the life of the community. After the morning service at the church, all return home if the house is big enough, and if not, they go to a hall, and there the dancing begins. Each man pays what he can, usually a dollar, for the privilege of dancing with the bride, and the money—their form of a wedding present—helps furnish the home for the young couple. At one wedding during the winter $75 was thus received, but the girl by evening felt that she had earned the money. In the afternoon the drinking begins and by midnight the revel is at its height. The neighborhood considers a family under obligation to provide these festivities. I was told of one pathetic instance where a woman, as she was very ill, did not invite any one to her baby’s christening. Her offended neighbors refused to visit her, but when she died they were ready enough to come to the funeral and share in the drinking.

Some old-world customs, too, are maintained which seem strangely at variance with new-world conditions. All summer over the doors and windows are seen dried, smoke begrimed branches from which the faded leaves hang disconsolately. These decorations are part of a joyous religious festival in the spring time similar to those that added merriment to the village life at home. At Eastertide they keep up an old custom, said to date from pagan days. On Monday the men go about with willow branches and switch the women until they make them a present, while on the following day the women retaliate by throwing water on the men.

In other superficial habits of life they show themselves eager to adopt American customs. This tendency is clearly—sometimes humorously—exemplified in the quickness with which they adopt our style of clothing. The men on Sunday can often be differentiated from the American workmen only by the unmistakable Slavic type of face. Even in their own homes the women quickly adopt the machine-made cotton wrapper and on Sunday the streets blossom with cheap ready-made adornments. I was fairly startled by one apparition in a gay pink hat, crude blue skirt, and green silk waist that no grass in Homestead could hope to vie with, all products of a department store, which evidently gave the wearer a proud sense of being dressed like other Americans. As I stood Easter Sunday watching the kneeling women, the mass of vivid colors showed how easily they copy the less desirable habits of their native born sisters. If opportunity offered they would doubtless be as ready to pick up our customs in other more essential matters.

Lack of intercourse, however, hinders. The Slavs must keep up their own festivities the more because they cannot join in the amusements of the rest of the community. To the better class of entertainments they are not welcomed, and to others the difference in speech is still a barrier. Obviously the theatre, and even in a measure the nickelodeons, are uninteresting to those who cannot understand the language. Thus cut off from what little normal amusement Homestead offers, they cling to the few festivities their limited opportunities make possible.

In summer there are of course more chances for recreation; trolley rides and picnics in the park make a welcome variety from the heat of the courts. The following statements, taken from the notes of the Slavic woman who assisted in making the investigation, tell the story simply:

They do not go to amusements of any kind on account of being so poor and feel so badly after they have finished their day’s work.

Husband and wife go to the lodge dances, which they enjoy very much. Wife goes to the five cent theatres, to the parks in the summer and for trolley rides. Is fond of all kinds of amusements and goes when they can afford it.

The family have no amusements at all outside of their own home, simply because they cannot afford it. They would like to be able to go to some places of amusement, if they could spend their Sundays at home in a pleasant way. The mother and children go to church every Saturday evening to say the rosary, which is one of their chief pleasures.

Starting in with such a household as that described at the opening of this chapter, how far do any of these Slavic families succeed in working out ideals they have set for themselves?

If we turn from the crowded courts with their two-room tenements to the homes of some who have attained their ambitions, we find conditions that show an inherent capacity for advancement in the race. As an illustration, note the change in type in two houses, the homes of families from the same place in the old country, the one newcomers, the other among the “oldest inhabitants” of the Slavic community. The first family live in a one-room tenement, where even though the furniture includes only absolute necessities, it is hard to keep all the crowded belongings in order. On wash-day morning the disorder is increased. Nevertheless, the home is kept as neat as the circumstances permit, and the bright pictures on the wall are proof of a desire to make it attractive. As the man earns only $9.90 a week, they must keep their rent low if bills are to be paid and anything laid by for the future. In the other picture, the “front room” with its leather-covered furniture is in a five-room house which the family owns. The sacred pictures with their vivid coloring relieve the severity of the room while they also reveal the religious note in Slavic life, for if happiness is to stay with the family, the priest must come yearly to “bless the home.” This family after many years in America has, by hard work and thrift, succeeded in obtaining a real home.

Turning from this visible evidence of the way in which an individual Slavic family has prospered, we find in the mill census that the number of skilled, and therefore highly paid members of the race, are few. Of the 3,603 Slavs in the mill in 1907, 459 were ranked as semi-skilled, 80 as skilled. The Slovaks from Austro-Hungary are the most numerous of the race in Homestead, and were the first of this stock to come here. Among them we find proportionately a slightly larger number of semi-skilled workers. [They formed 51.7 per cent of all the Slavs in the mill in 1907, 60.1 per cent of the semi-skilled Slavs, and 56.2 per cent of the skilled Slavs.]

We have seen that of the budget Slavs still earning laborers' wages, a third had been here over ten years; it is apparent, however, that individuals are slowly making their way into skilled work—a movement which, as the older English-speaking men drop out, is probably bound to increase. In the 29 immigrant families keeping budgets all of the men who earned $12 or more a week had been here over five years. It is interesting to note that some had come here when they were very young, eleven, fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen years old; for example, a tonnage worker had been here ten years; a man at one of the furnaces earning $3.50 a day, seventeen years, and a machinist who earned about the same amount, eighteen years. Even with the higher wages, their families continue to make sacrifices to secure the desired property more rapidly. A helper at one of the open-hearth furnaces, who had been here for seven years, was earning $2.50 to $3.00 a day. The husband and wife still took in two boarders, so that with their two children there were six people in a two-room house, which was but scantily furnished. They had a bank account of at least $400. Another Slav, the head of a family of three, had been here ten years and was working on tonnage, in good times earning about $6.00 a day. They, too, lived in a two-room house, but it was neat and from their standpoint probably seemed large enough as they had no lodger. They had purchased the farm in the old country and besides had a $500 bank account. Again, take a family of six. The father, still only about thirty years old, had been here for over fifteen years. Out of his wages—about $3.50 a day at fairly skilled work in the mill—he was buying a small house with a garden. He was naturalized and the family stood as a fair type of our new citizens. They took no lodgers, but the limitations imposed by such thrift as they practiced are illustrated by the notes on this household made by my interpreter. Herself a Slav, their circumstances were a matter of no special interest, and she therefore wrote her notes with no attempt to add “local color” such as a person of another race would have put into them. To her the statement was simply one of facts:

Conditions of Work:

The man works on day and night shifts alternately.

Home:

They don’t own their own home, on which there is a mortgage. The man gives all his earnings to his wife and when he needs any spending money, he asks for it.

Furniture:

They live in two rooms comfortably furnished, one a living room and the other a bed room. They have a sewing machine on which the mother does the sewing for her family. Does her washing by hand.

Clothes:

They wear plain clothing. The woman does all her own mending with care. The father buys ready-made clothing. They have a change of clothing for Sundays, of a fairly good quality.

Food:

They buy their food at grocery stores; don’t get all at one store. They live principally on vegetable diet, not using much fruit. The man works hard and they are obliged to have good substantial food. The family eat their evening meal together.

Woman’s Work:

The woman does her own work at home, but does not earn anything outside, her time all being taken up with caring for her family.

Lodges:

The man belongs to St. Stephen’s Lodge, and his wife belongs to St. Catherine’s, both church lodges. They attend one meeting every month unless something to prevent. When not able to go, they send in their dues. The man gets $5.00 a week sick benefits, also a death benefit of $1,000 to his family after his decease. His dues are $2.00 monthly and the wife’s dues are $1.00 a month. In case of death of the woman the family gets $700. The wife’s reasons for belonging to above lodges is that their family may have benefits paid by the lodges in case of a death, either father or mother.

Health:

This man is in good health. The woman is not in good health, having gone to work too soon after her confinement was attended by a midwife. She did not have proper care during her confinement. The children are sickly. One of them had typhoid fever.

Education:

There are four children, the oldest seven years and now attending public school. The only reading matter they have is his Lodge paper, which he gets once a week.

Accidents:

The man had one accident, but no help from the Carnegie fund.

Drink:

The man drinks at home and sometimes at saloons. Pays for himself. He does not get intoxicated. The woman drinks a little when she has it at home.

Amusements:

The man goes only when his lodge gives a dance, it being expected of every member to buy tickets. Neither he nor his wife ever attend theatres, on account of being kept at home with their family. The woman cannot remember having been to any of the parks or amusements of any kind.

It is by such thrift that some of the Slavs attain their ambition to own a home. An official in the foreign department of one bank said he knew of 25 Slavs who had purchased homes in 1907. Sometimes these families continue to live in the Second Ward. One family, for example, had bought an eight-room house on one of these busy streets. The four rear rooms they rented, but with evident regard for appearances lived themselves in the four that faced the front. With the aid of the rent from the rear tenement they had succeeded in freeing the house from the mortgage. The families more often, however, move further from the mill. One I knew bought a house on the hill with two porches and a big yard where they kept chickens. While they had only succeeded in paying $500 on the $1,700 the place cost, now that a son was at work they hoped to be able to clear the debt. In the meantime they truly rejoiced in being on the hill above the smoke and away from the bustling courts.

The English-speaking families on such streets rarely extend a cordial welcome. A woman who lives next door to a Slavic family told me that some of the neighbors objected because they were rather noisy and drank a good deal, though she herself found them pleasant enough.

All the Slavs who prosper, however, do not try to buy property here. Some prefer a bank account. It is authoritatively stated that about 1,600 Slavs have savings bank accounts in Homestead ranging from $100 to $1,000, and even in a few instances to $1,500. Occasionally this zeal for saving gets a setback. A few years ago a Slav ran an “exchange bank” in Homestead and when he had secured a goodly sum departed. One family was so discouraged at losing the $400 it had on deposit with him, of hard earned savings, that the woman ceased to take boarders and the man to work hard.

Yet not all the extra money goes into bank accounts and houses. If we compare the budgets of the 10 Slavic families spending more than $15 a week with the average of the 42 budget families (of all races) in the same expenditure groups, we shall find that the former increase their expenditures along much the same lines as do the other peoples, though it is to be noted here, as in the general averages, that the Slav spends a slightly larger per cent for food and a slightly smaller per cent for rent.

If, on the other hand, we compare the Slavic families spending over $15 with those spending less than $12 we find that the expenditures which have increased less rapidly than the income are the essentials, food, rent, fuel, and clothing; that insurance increases a little more rapidly, but that the great part of the increased pay goes for more distinctly cultural expenditures.

This comparison, though fragmentary, suggests that on the whole these Slavs made a wise use of their increased earnings—that there is an actual increase of expenditure for every item, but that by far the largest gain is in that sphere which stands for the less material side of life, church, education, recreation and savings.

For most Slavic households, however, the increased income which would make such increased expenditure possible must be looked for not from the man’s wages, but, at least in the first years, from other sources. We have seen how the first recourse of the young couple is to keep lodgers and the cost to health and childhood that involves. Time goes on, brings children, and household expenses rise, and even with increased earnings, tends to keep the couple at this double work.

Source: Margaret F. Byington, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910), 145–157.

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Telling Tales: Byington's Study of Homestead: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

Telling Tales: Byington’s Study of Homestead

Homestead, Pennsylvania, was in many ways the prototypical early twentieth-century mill town. Located seven miles up the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, the first steel mill was built in Homestead in 1881. In 1892, Homestead was the site of one of the most dramatic strikes in U.S. history. The Carnegie Steel Company’s ultimate victory resulted in the destruction of a once-powerful union of skilled iron and steel workers. By 1907, almost 7,000 workers toiled at the Homestead plant for the U.S. Steel Corporation. In 1907–1908, the Russell Sage Foundation undertook an intensive study that attempted to understand the dramatic changes that had reshaped Homestead and other industrial communities. Written by progressive social reformers, the six-volume Pittsburgh Survey emphasized the devastating impact of industrial life on those who labored in the nation’s factories. The following excerpt is from Margaret Byington’s Pittsburgh Survey volume, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town, first published in 1910. In the spirit of the Progressive-era effort to scientifically document conditions, the book also included photographs (by the famous documentary photographer Lewis Hine) and detailed family budgets.

From the cinder path beside one of the railroads that crosses the level part of Homestead, you enter an alley, bordered on one side by stables and on the other by a row of shabby two-story frame houses. The doors of the houses are closed, but dishpans and old clothes decorating their exterior mark them as inhabited. Turning from the alley through a narrow passageway you find yourself in a small court, on three sides of which are smoke-grimed houses, and on the fourth, low stables. The open space teems with life and movement. Children, dogs and hens make it lively underfoot; overhead long lines of flapping clothes must be dodged. A group of women stand gossiping in one corner, awaiting their turn at the pump,—which is one of the two sources of water supply for the 20 families who live here. Another woman dumps the contents of her washtubs upon the paved ground, and the greasy, soapy water runs into an open drain a few feet from the pump. In the center a circular wooden building with ten compartments opening into one vault, flushed only by this waste water, constitutes the toilet accommodations for over one hundred people. Twenty-seven children find in this crowded brick-paved space their only playground; for the 63 rooms in the houses about the court shelter a group of 20 families, Polish, Slavic and Hungarian, Jewish and Negro. The men are unskilled workers in the mills.

This court is one of many such in Homestead; one of hundreds of similar courts in the mill towns of the Ohio valley. The conditions produced by the incoming of these alien workers form one of the unsolved problems of the steel district.

Two elements in the old country feed the population of these crowded sections: the ambitious young men, with no ties, unless to aged parents; and the men with wives, sometimes with children, who come over here to make a better home for them. They are all stimulated by the successes of their friends, who perhaps have returned with savings that seem fortunes. Often these people mortgage their all for the passage money and if they fail here no place is left to which they can go back. From quiet villages they come to this smoky town; from labor in the open fields to heavy work in the yards and thundering sheds of the mill.

As employment is steady and the workman’s needs are simple, the wages seem large. The newcomer if a single man finds groups of his fellow workers living in close quarters—three or four in a room—who are enjoying life and saving money at the same time. So he too begins to save, and presently, if he has a family at home, sends for them to join him. If he is single, he sends for his sweetheart or marries some girl of his race, whom he meets in the mill-town courts of an evening or at church or at one of the lodge dances. If she has been at service here, she too will likely have a small account in the bank. Then, as the family grows and expenses increase, they resort to the old expedient and begin themselves to take boarders. Children come and grow up. The man’s wage does not increase; as he is a “Hunkie” the chances are that he will remain a laborer. Most of these men come intending some day to go back with a thousand dollars—men of property. But even if they return once to the old country, they often turn again to America; growing attached to the new world, they become permanent residents.

An occasional family, when the man gets into tonnage work or when the children reach earning age and add their wages to the common fund, achieves a long desired happiness; they move to a separate house in the suburbs, perhaps even to one of their own. But to many the crowded court with its isolation from the rest of community continues to be America.

While there were no definite figures available as to the number of these foreigners in Homestead in 1907, two Slavs intimately acquainted with the foreign colony estimated that there were between 6,000 and 7,000. When the mills were running full in October, 1907, 3,603 Slavic men were at work there, forming 53.2 per cent of the total number of employees. As 1,092 of these were single men, the estimate as to the total Slavic population is probably fairly accurate. The rapid increase in numbers is shown by the fact that while there were no Slavic churches in the town in 1896, there are now Polish, Slovak, and Lithuanian Roman Catholic churches, a Slovak Greek Catholic church, a Hungarian Reformed church, and one or two Slavic Protestant missions. These churches hold property the value of which is estimated at $400,000.

Numerous national distinctions divide this body of immigrants as a whole, but of these the English-speaking community is in large measure ignorant; to the rest of the town they are all just “Hunkies.” Of the Slavs employed in the mill in 1907, 51.7 per cent were Slovaks, 15 per cent Magyar, 10.2 per cent Romanian, 9.6 per cent Russian, 6 per cent Polish, 3.6 per cent Lithuanian, 3.9 per cent miscellaneous. (For convenience in this book, as already noted, Magyars, Letts, etc., are spoken of as Slavs. Though not of the blood, they come from the same general district in mid-Europe and are part of the same wave of immigration.) Between some of these groups, such as Slovaks and Hungarians, Poles and Russians, feuds dating back many centuries still provoke quarrels in this new-world town. The crowded courts bring them into close and sometimes irritating contact, and as yet there have been few amalgamating forces to counteract the old hatreds. Rather the segmentation of churches and lodges, due to differences in language, tend to keep alive these old antagonisms.

In spite, however, of these national conflicts the Slavs are of similar temperament. Like the Irish who preceded them here, they are in most instances in their own country the ruled rather than the dominant race, and the majority come from agricultural countries, where money is scarce, where living conditions are of the poorest, where hard work in the open air has developed rugged strength. With them they bring the standards of village life, reflecting its crude sanitation (counterbalanced in the old environment by the unlimited supply of fresh air), its bare existence and its low levels of comfort.

The mode of living which we find among the Slavs is in a measure due to a conflict between the nature of community life and industry in America, and the customs and conditions that prevail under a different civilization. In some measure, at least, wages, housing conditions, opportunities for relaxation, conform to the “standards of living” of the influential group in a town, in Homestead, the standards of the native whites. The forces of imitation and self-respect make it easier for a native to achieve these standards, but the newcomers must live under conditions which are not determined by their kind. Moreover, the ambition of most in coming to this country is financial, or largely so; and the determination to get ahead, even at risk of immediate health and happiness, accentuates the problems which their presence creates. They come, then, with this background of meagre surroundings, but with a vision of future riches. They come as prospectors come, ready for any hardships that may help them reach their goal, and with the passive endurance that has been characteristic of their race. Those early dreams of money to be picked up in the streets of the new world are bygones no doubt, but these Slavic adventurers bring with them, nevertheless, the expectation of returning some day men of wealth—wealth made up of savings from American pay.

Their labor is the heaviest and roughest in the mill, handling steel billets and bars, loading trains, working in cinder pits; labor that demands mostly strength but demands that in large measure. They work usually under the direction of an English-speaking foreman whose orders they often fail to understand. Accidents are frequent, promotions rare. In 202 families in the courts studied, 88 percent of the men belonged to the unskilled group, a proportion roughly true for the mill as a whole. (The somewhat higher average of skill among the Slavic budget families is due to the fact that representative units from each of the economic groups were selected; also that the investigator belonged to one of the oldest Slavic families and her acquaintance included many of the most prosperous.) Only 2.2 per cent of the Slavs in the mill are skilled. Some of the men about the furnaces thus work up by slow degrees to be skilled or at least semi-skilled, but in the main, the Slavs have as yet small prospect of advancement. (The sons occasionally enter occupations outside the steel mills which they think more desirable. Two were reported to be drivers for livery-stables and one a roofer. But these young men did not earn much more than their fathers.) Of the 21 budget families whose men were earning laborer’s wages, five had been here from five to nine years, two from ten to fourteen years, and four had been here fifteen years or over. If the rank and file are to satisfy their ambitions they must do it on less than $2.00 a day, or leave Homestead.

Moreover, the Slavs find their work quickly affected by an industrial depression. During the winter of 1907 they were the first to be laid off. Many returned to Austria-Hungary; many could not go. In a group of 295 Bulgarians only 115 had work, while among 212 Russians, 131 were unemployed. The stories of these months of idleness and privation were pathetic. Remittances to wives and old people in Europe dropped off, bank deposits lessened, and goods were purchased on credit till future wages were heavily mortgaged. As Americans were sometimes given laboring work formerly done by Slavs, the latter bore more than their share of a burden that seriously affected the whole community. The company’s policy of caring for its skilled workmen by giving them labor that would normally have been done by the unskilled, was in certain ways estimable; but it made the winter a desperate one for such of the unskilled foreigners as could not return to their own country.

The steel industry, then, requires these strong men to do its heaviest labor, pays them its lowest wage, with little prospect of advancement and with the chance that they will be first to suffer if work grows slack. What for its part does the town offer? The section where the Slavs live is in itself gloomy. The level ground in the Second Ward cut off from the river by the mill and from the country by the steep hill behind, forms a pocket where the smoke settles heavily. There are oases in these wards, sections of street with yards and trees, but for the most part here on the original site of the town, garden plots as well as alleys have been utilized on which to build small frame houses till the blocks are all but covered. While these houses are sometimes built in haphazard fashion, they usually surround such a court as that described at the outset of this chapter. For our cinder path led us directly to the heart of the crowding and the sanitary evils of the steel town.

To determine the extent of such congestion, with the help of the Slavic member of my staff I made a study of 21 courts in the Second Ward . . . where yards, toilets and water supply are used in common. In these courts lived 239 families (of these, 168 were Slovaks, 22 Hungarians, 16 Russians, 10 Poles and 23 Slavs of other origins), 102 of whom took lodgers. Fifty-one families, including sometimes four or five people, lived in one-room tenements. One-half the families used their kitchens as sleeping rooms. Only three houses had running water inside, and in at least three instances over 110 people were dependent on one yard hydrant for water.

Each court is shut in between the houses facing the street and a similar row facing the alley at the rear which cuts the block in half. A narrow passage serves as an outlet. Some of the houses are four or six-story buildings, but more than half in the courts studied were but two stories high with four rooms each. (Only four had more than six rooms.) This type usually shelters two families each; one family living in the room opening upon the street and the upstairs room above it; the other, in the two rooms looking into the court.

In summer, to give some through ventilation to the stifling rooms, doors leading to the stairway between the front and rear rooms are left open. As the families are often kin this opportunity for friendly intercourse is not unwelcome. Indeed, the cheerful gossip about the hydrant that enlivens wash day, like the card playing in the court on a summer evening, suggests the neighborliness of village days. Nothing in the surroundings, however, bears out the suggestion. Accumulations of rubbish and broken brick pavements render the courts as a whole untidy and unwholesome. Some of the houses have small porches that might give a sense of homelikeness, but for the most part they are bare and dingy. As the houses are built close to the street with only this busy court behind, the tenant can scarcely have that bit of garden so dear to the heart of former country dwellers. Only here and there a little bed of lettuce with its note of delicate green or the vivid red of a geranium blossom brightens the monotony. Dreary as is the exterior, however, the evils to the dwellers in the court lie deeper; in the inadequate water supply, in meagre toilet facilities, and in overcrowding.

The deficiency in the water supply is serious. In the 21 courts only three families, as stated, had running water in their homes. In no court were fewer than five families using one yard hydrant or pump, while in exceptional instances it was the sole supply of as many as twenty. As waste-water pipes were also lacking in the houses, the heavy tubs of water had to be carried out as well as in, and this in a smoky town where a double amount of washing and cleaning is necessary. When the weather permitted, the heavy washes were done in the yard. The pavement of a populous court covered with tubs, wringers, clothes baskets, and pools of soapy water, is a poor playground for children.

The toilet accommodations, while possibly more adequate than the water supply, are a menace to health in consequence of the lack of running water. There was not one indoor closet in any of these courts. The streets of Homestead all have sewers, and by a borough ordinance even the outside vaults must be connected with them. These are, however, ordinarily flushed only by the waste water which flows directly into them from the yards. When conditions become unbearable, the tenants wash the vaults out with a hose attached to the hydrant. As long as the closets remain in the yards, it is difficult to introduce a system of flushing because of the danger that the pipes will freeze in winter. The vaults are usually in the center of the court only a few yards from the kitchen doors, and create from the point of view either of sanitation or decency, an intolerable condition. While occasionally three or four families must use one compartment, usually only two families do so. But even this means frequently that the closets are not locked and that no one has a special sense of responsibility for their condition; in consequence they are often filthy.

The Slavic courts of Homestead typify the conditions which result when an industrial district is invaded by hundreds of unskilled immigrant laborers, largely single men, largely country people, who want a place to sleep for the least possible cash. Most of the petty local landlords who provide these quarters care nothing for the condition of their places and regard the wages of these transients as fair spoils.

Source: Margaret F. Byington, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910), 131–137.

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Debs Attacks "the Monstrous System" of Capitalism: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

Debs Attacks “the Monstrous System” of Capitalism

In 1912, four candidates battled to become President of the United States. Republican incumbent William Howard Taft and Democrat Woodrow Wilson, a moderate governor, represented the two major parties. Former President Theodore Roosevelt, angered over what he felt was a betrayal of his policies by Taft, his hand-picked successor, abandoned the Republican party and founded the Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party. While all four candidates appealed directly to working-class voters, whose votes would prove decisive, by far the most radical platform in the campaign was that of the Socialist Party nominee, Eugene V. Debs. Running for the fourth time, Debs called for the abolition of capitalism rather than for its reform. In this speech accepting the party’s nomination he proclaimed the Socialist Party “the party of progress, the party of the future.” Debs finished last in the contest, receiving 900,000 votes.

It is with a full sense of the responsibility it imposes and the service it exacts that I accept the nomination for president tendered to me by the Socialist party of the United States. Personally, I did not wish the nomination. It came to me unsought. It came as summons to service and not as a personal honor.

Every true member of the Socialist party is at the party’s service. The confidence of his comrades is to him a sacred trust and their collective will the party’s law.

My chief concern as a presidential candidate is that I shall serve well the party, and the class and the cause the party represents.

Socialist Party Different

The Socialist party is fundamentally different from all other parties. It came in the process of evolution and grows with the growth of the forces which created it. Its spirit is militant and its aim revolutionary. It expresses in political terms the aspiration of the working class to freedom and to a larger and fuller life than they have yet known.

The world’s workers have always been and still are the world’s slaves. They have borne all the burdens of the race and built all the monuments along the track of civilization; they have produced all the world’s wealth and supported all the world’s governments. They have conquered all things but their own freedom. They are still the subject class in every nation on earth and the chief function of every government is to keep them at the mercy of their masters.

The workers in the mills and factories, in the mines and on the farms and railways never had a party of their own until the Socialist party was organized. They divided their votes between the parties of their masters. They did not realize that they were using their ballots to forge their own fetters.

But the awakening came. It was bound to come. Class rule became more and more oppressive and wage slavery more and more galling. The eyes of the workers began to open. They began to see the cause of the misery they had dumbly suffered so many years. It dawned upon them that society was divided into two classes - capitalists and workers, exploiters and producers; that the capitalists, while comparatively few, owned the nation and controlled the government; that the courts and the soldiers were at their command, and that the workers, while in a great majority, were in slavish subjection.

When they ventured to protest they were discharged and found themselves blacklisted; when they went out on strike they were suppressed by the soldiers and sent to jail.

They looked about them and saw a land of wonderful resources; they saw the productive machinery made by their own hands and the vast wealth produced by their own labor, in the shadow of which their wives and children were perishing in the skeleton clutch of famine.

Began to Think

The very suffering they were forced to endure quickened their senses. They began to think. A new light dawned upon their dark skies. They rubbed the age-long sleep from their eyes. They had long felt the brutalizing effect of class rule; now they saw the cause of it. Slowly but steadily they became class conscious. They said, “We are brothers, we are comrades,” and they saw themselves multiplied by millions. They caught the prophetic battle cry of Karl Marx, the world’s greatest labor leader, the inspired evangel of working-class emancipation, “Workers of all countries, unite!”

And now, behold! The international Socialist movement spreads out over all the nations of the earth. The world’s workers are aroused at last. They are no longer on their knees; their bowed bodies are now erect. Despair has given way to hope, weakness to strength, fear to courage. They no longer cringe and supplicate; they hold up their heads and command. They have ceased to fear their masters and have learned to trust themselves.

And this is how the Socialist party came to be born. It was quickened into life in the bitter struggle of the world’s enslaved workers. It expresses their collective determination to break their fetters and emancipate themselves and the race.

Is it strange that the workers are loyal to such a party, that they proudly stand beneath its blazing banners and fearlessly proclaim its conquering principles? It is the one party of their class, born of their agony and baptized in the blood of their countless brethren who perished in the struggle to give it birth.

Hail to this great party of the toiling millions whose battle cry is heard around the world!

Doesn’t Plead for Votes

We do not plead for votes; the workers give them freely the hour they understand.

But we need to destroy the prejudice that still exists and dispel the darkness that still prevails in the working-class world. We need the clear light of sound education and the conquering power of economic and political organization.

Before the unified hosts of labor all the despotic governments on earth are powerless and all resistance vain. Before their onward march all ruling classes disappear and all slavery vanishes forever.

The appeal of the Socialist party is to all the useful people of the nation, all who work with brain and muscle to produce the nation’s wealth and who promote its progress and conserve its civilization.

Only they who bear its burdens may rightfully enjoy the blessings of civilized society.

There are no boundary lines to separate race from race, sex from sex, or creed from creed in the Socialist party. The common rights of all are equally recognized.

Every human being is entitled to sunlight and air, to what his labor produces, and to an equal chance with every other human being to unfold and ripen and give to the world the riches of his mind and soul.

Economic slavery is the world’s greatest curse today. Poverty and misery, prostitution, insanity, and crime are its inevitable results.

The Socialist party is the one party which stands squarely and uncompromisingly for the abolition of industrial slavery; the one party pledged in every fiber of its being to the economic freedom of all the people.

So long as the nation’s resources and productive and distributive machinery are the private property of a privileged class the masses will be at their mercy, poverty will be their lot and life will be shorn of all that raises it above the brute level.

New Progressive Party

The infallible test of a political party is the private ownership of the sources of wealth and the means of life. Apply that test to the Republican, Democratic, and Progressive parties and upon that basic, fundamental issue you will find them essentially one and the same. They differ according to the conflicting interests of the privileged classes, but at bottom they are alike and stand for capitalist class rule and working-class slavery.

The new Progressive party is a party of progressive capitalism. It is lavishly financed and shrewdly advertised. But it stands for the rule of capitalism all the same.

When the owners of the trusts finance a party to put themselves out of business; when they turn over their wealth to the people from whom they stole it and go to work for a living, it will be time enough to consider the merits of the Roosevelt Progressive party.

One question is sufficient to determine the true status of all these parties. Do they want the workers to own the tools they work with, control their own jobs, and secure to themselves the wealth they produce? Certainly not. That is utterly ridiculous and impossible from their point of view.

The Republican, Democratic, and Progressive parties all stand for the private ownership by the capitalists of the productive machinery used by the workers, so that the capitalists can continue to filch the wealth produced by the workers.

The Socialist party is the only party which declares that the tools of labor belong to labor and that the wealth produced by the working class belongs to the working class.

Intelligent workingmen are no longer deceived. They know that the struggle in which the world is engaged today is a class struggle and that in this struggle the workers can never win by giving their votes to capitalist parties. They have tried this for many years and it has always produced the same result to them.

The class of privilege and pelf has had the world by the throat and the working class beneath its iron-shod hoofs long enough. The magic word of freedom is ringing through the nation and the spirit of intelligent revolt is finding expression in every land beneath the sun.

The solidarity of the working class is the salient force in the social transformation of which we behold the signs upon every hand. Nearer and nearer they are being drawn together in the bonds of unionism; clearer and clearer becomes their collective vision; greater and greater the power that throbs within them.

Hosts of Freedom

They are the twentieth-century hosts of freedom who are to destroy all despotisms, topple over all thrones, seize all sceptres of authority and hold them in their own strong hands, tear up all privilege by the roots, and consecrate the earth and all its fullness to the joy and service of all humanity.

It is vain to hope for material relief upon the prevailing system of capitalism. All the reforms that are proposed by the three capitalist parties, even if carried out in good faith, would still leave the working class in industrial slavery.

The working class will never be emancipated by the grace of the capitalists class, but only by overthrowing that class.

The power to emancipate itself is inherent in the working class, and this power must be developed through sound education and applied through sound organization.

It is as foolish and self-destructive for workingmen to turn to Republican, Democratic, and Progressive parties on election day as it would be for them to turn to the Manufacturers‘ Association and the Citizens’ Alliance when they are striking against starvation wages.

The capitalist class is organized economically and politically to keep the working class in subjection and perpetuate its power as a ruling class. They do not support a working class union nor a working-class party. They are not so foolish. They wisely look out for themselves.

The capitalist class despise a working-class party. Why should the working class give their support to a capitalist-class party?

Capitalist misrule under which workingmen suffer slavery and the most galling injustice exists only because it has workingmen’s support. Withdraw that support and capitalism is dead.

The capitalists can enslave and rob the workers only by the consent of the workers when they cast their ballots on election day.

Every vote cast for a capitalist party, whatever its name, is a vote for wage-slavery, for poverty and degradation.

Every vote cast for the Socialist party, the workers' own party, is a vote for emancipation.

We appeal to the workers and to all who sympathize with them to make their power felt in this campaign. Never before has there been so great an opportunity to strike an effective blow for freedom.

Capitalism Doomed

Capitalism is rushing blindly to its impending doom. All the signs portend the inevitable breakdown of the existing order. Deep-seated discontent has seized upon the masses. They must indeed be deaf who do not hear the mutterings of the approaching storm.

Poverty, high prices, unemployment, child slavery, widespread misery and haggard want in a land bursting with abundance; prostitution and insanity, suicide and crime, these in solemn numbers tell the tragic story of capitalism’s saturnalia of blood and tears and shame as its end draws near.

It is to abolish this monstrous system and the misery and crime which flow from it in a direful and threatening stream that the Socialist party was organized and now makes its appeal to the intelligence and conscience of the people. Social reorganization is the imperative demand of this world-wide revolutionary movement.

The Socialist party’s mission is not only to destroy capitalist despotism but to establish industrial and social democracy. To this end the workers are steadily organizing and fitting themselves for the day when they shall take control of the people’s industries and when the right to work shall be as inviolate as the right to breathe the breath of life.

Standing as it does for the emancipation of the working class from wage-slavery, for the equal rights and opportunities of all men and all women, for the abolition of child labor and the conservation of all childhood, for social self-rule and the equal freedom of all, the Socialist party is the party of progress, the party of the future, and its triumph will signalize the birth of a new civilization and the dawn of a happier day for all humanity.

Source: Eugene Debs, “Speech of Acceptance,” International Socialist Review (October, 1912).

See Also:Hear TR's Speech "The Liberty of the People" Hear Wilson's Speech "On Labor" Hear Taft's Speech "On Popular Unrest"

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The Shame of the Cities: Steffens on Urban Blight: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

The Shame of the Cities: Steffens on Urban Blight

In the 1890s, changes in printing technology made possible inexpensive magazines that could appeal to a broader and increasingly more literate middle-class audience. Given the reform impulses popular in the early 20th century, many of these magazines featured reform-oriented investigative reporting that became known as “muckraking” (so named by President Theodore Roosevelt after the muckrake in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress who could “look no way but downward, with a muckrake in his hands”). In October 1902 McClure’s Magazine published what many consider the first muckraking article, Lincoln Steffens' “Tweed Days in St. Louis.” The “muckrakers” wrote on many subjects, such as child labor, prisons, religion, corporations, and insurance companies. But urban political corruption remained a particularly popular target, and in 1904 Steffens collected and published his writings on St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York as The Shame of the Cities. The Introduction, below, suggested his overall conclusions about political corruption.

Introductionand Some Conclusions

This is not a book. It is a collection of articles reprinted from McClure’s Magazine. Done as journalism, they are journalism still, and no further pretensions are set up for them in their new dress. This classification may seem pretentious enough; certainly it would if I should confess what claims I make for my profession. But no matter about that; I insist upon the journalism. And there is my justification for separating from the bound volumes of the magazine and republishing, practically without re-editing, my accounts as a reporter of the shame of American cities.

They were written with a purpose, they were, published serially with a purpose, and they are reprinted now together to further that same purpose, which was and is—to sound for the civic pride of an apparently shameless citizenship.

There must be such a thing, we reasoned. All our big boasting could not be empty vanity, nor our pious pretensions hollow sham. American achievements in science, art, and business mean sound abilities at bottom, and our hypocrisy a race sense of fundamental ethics. Even in government we have given proofs of potential greatness, and our political failures are not complete; they are simply ridiculous. But they are ours. Not alone the triumphs and the statesmen, the defeats and the grafters also represent us, and just as truly. Why not see it so and say it?

Because, I heard, the American people won’t “stand for” it. You may blame the politicians, or, indeed, any one class, but not all classes, not the people. Or you may put it on the ignorant foreign immigrant, or any one nationality, but not on all nationalities, not on the American people. But no one class is at fault, nor any one breed, nor any particular interest or group of interests. The misgovernment of the American people is misgovernment by the American people.

When I set out on my travels, an honest New Yorker told me honestly that I would find that the Irish, the Catholic Irish, were at the bottom of it all everywhere. The first city I went to was St. Louis, a German city. The next was Minneapolis, a Scandinavian city, with a leadership of New Englanders. Then came Pittsburgh, Scotch Presbyterian, and that was what my New York friend was. “Ah, but they are all foreign populations,” I heard. The next city was Philadelphia, the purest American community of all, and the most hopeless. And after that came Chicago and New York, both mongrel-bred, but the one a triumph of reform, the other the best example of good government that I had seen. The “foreign element” excuse is one of the hypocritical lies that save us from the clear sight of ourselves.

Another such conceit of our egotism is that which deplores our politics and lauds our business. This is the wailof the typical American citizen. Now, the typical American citizen is the business man. The typical business man is a bad citizen; he is busy. If he is a “big business man” and very busy, he does not neglect, he is busy with politics, oh, very busy and very businesslike. I found him buying boodlers in St. Louis, defending grafters in Minneapolis, originating corruption in Pittsburgh, sharing with bosses in Philadelphia, deploring reform in Chicago, and beating good government with corruption funds in New York. He is a self-righteous fraud, this big business man. He is the chief source of corruption, and it were a boon if he would neglect politics. But he is not the business man that neglects politics; that worthy is the good citizen, the typical business man. He too is busy, he is the one that has no use and therefore no time for politics. When his neglect has permitted bad government to go so far that he can be stirred to action, he is unhappy, and he looks around for a cure that shall be quick, so that he may hurry back to the shop. Naturally, too, when he talks politics, he talks shop. His patent remedy is quack; it is business.

“Give us a business man,” he says (“like me,” he means). “Let him introduce business methods into politics and government; then I shall be left alone to attend to my business.”

There is hardly an office from United States Senator down to Alderman in any part of the country to which the business man has not been elected; yet politics remains corrupt, government pretty bad, and the selfish citizen has to hold himself in readiness like the old volunteer firemen to rush forth at any hour, in any weather, to prevent the fire; and he goes out sometimes and he puts out the fire (after the damage is done) and he goes back to the shop sighing for the business man in politics. The business man has failed in politics as he has in citizenship. Why?

Because politics is business. That’s what’s the matter with it. That’s what’s the matter with everything—art, literature, religion, journalism, law, medicine,—they’re all business, and all—as you see them. Make politics a sport, as they do in England, or a profession, as they do in Germany, and we’ll have—well, something else than we have now, if we want it, which is another question. But don’t try to reform politics with the banker, the lawyer, and the dry-goods merchant, for these are business men and there are two great hindrances to their achievement of reform: one is that they are different from, but no better than, the politicians; the other is that politics is not “their line.” There are exceptions both ways. Many politicians have gone out into business and done well (Tammany ex-mayors, and nearly all the old bosses of Philadelphia are prominent financiers in their cities), and business men have gone into politics and done well (Mark Hanna, for example). They haven’t reformed their adopted trades, however, though they have sometimes sharpened them most pointedly. The politician is a business man with a specialty. When a business man of some other line learns the business of politics, he is a politician, and there is not much reform left in him. Consider the United States Senate, and believe me.

The commercial spirit is the spirit of profit, not patriotism; of credit, not honor; of individual gain, not national prosperity; of trade and dickering, not principle. “My business is sacred,” says the business man in his heart. “Whatever prospers my business, is good; it must be. Whatever hinders it, is wrong; it must be. A bribe is bad, that is, it is a bad thing to take; but it is not so bad to give one, not if it is necessary to my business.” "Business is business“ is not a political sentiment, but our politician has caught it. He takes essentially the same view of the bribe, only he saves his self-respect by piling all his contempt upon the bribe-giver, and he has the great advantage of candor. ”It is wrong, maybe,“ he says, ”but if a rich merchant can afford to do business with me for the sake of a convenience or to increase his already great wealth, I can afford, for the sake of a living, to meet him half way. I make no pretensions to virtue, not even on Sunday." And as for giving bad government or good, how about the merchant who gives bad goods or good goods, according to the demand?

But there is hope, not alone despair, in the commercialism of our politics. If our political leaders are to be always a lot of political merchants, they will supply any demand we may create. All we have to do is to establish a steady demand for good government. The bosses have us split up into parties. To him parties are nothing but means to his corrupt ends. He “bolts” his party, but we must not; the bribe-giver changes his party, from one election to another, from one county to another, from one city to another, but the honest voter must not. Why? Because if the honest voter cared no more for his party than the politician and the grafter, then the honest vote would govern, and that would be bad—for graft. It is idiotic, this devotion to a machine that is used to take our sovereignty from us. If we would leave parties to the politicians, and would vote not for the party, not even for men, but for the city, and the State, and the nation, we should rule parties, and cities, and States, and nation. If we would vote in mass on the more promising ticket, or, if the two are equally bad, would throw out the party that is in, and wait till the next election and then throw out the other party that is in—then, I say, the commercial politician would feel a demand for good government and he would supply it. That process would take a generation or more to complete, for the politicians now really do not know what good government is. But it has taken as long to develop bad government, and the politicians know what that is. If it would not “go,” they would offer something else, and, if the demand were steady, they, being so commercial, would “deliver the goods.”

But do the people want good government? Tammany says they don’t. Are the people honest? Are the people better than Tammany? Are they better than the merchant and the politician? Isn’t our corrupt government, after all, representative?

President Roosevelt has been sneered at for going about the country preaching, as a cure for our American evils, good conduct in the individual, simple honesty, courage, and efficiency. “Platitudes” the sophisticated say. Platitudes? If my observations have been true, the literal adoption of Mr. Roosevelt’s reform scheme would result in a revolution, more radical and terrible to existing institutions, from the Congress to the Church, from the bank to the ward organization, than socialism or even than anarchy. Why, that would change all of us—not alone our neighbors, not alone the grafters, but you and me.

No, the contemned methods of our despised politics are the master methods of our braggart business, and the corruption that shocks us in public affairs we practice ourselves in our private concerns. There is no essential difference between the pull that gets your wife into society or for your book a favorable review, and that which gets a heeler into office, a thief out of jail, and a rich man’s son on the board of directors of a corporation; none between the corruption of a labor union, a bank, and a political machine; none between a dummy director of a trust and the caucus-bound member of a legislature; none between a labor boss like Sam Parks, a boss of banks like John D. Rockefeller, a boss of railroads like J. P. Morgan, and a political boss like Matthew S. Quay. The boss is not a political, he is an American institution, the product of a freed people that have not the spirit to be free.

And it’s all a moral weakness; a weakness right where we think we are strongest. Oh, we are good—on Sunday, and we are “fearfully patriotic” on the Fourth of July. But the bribe we pay to the janitor to prefer our interests to the landlord’s, is the little brother of the bribe passed to the alderman to sell a city street, and the father of the air-brake stock assigned to the president of a railroad to have this life-saving invention adopted on his road. And as for graft, railroad passes, saloon and bawdy-house blackmail, and watered stock, all these belong to the same family. We are pathetically proud of our democratic institutions and our republican form of government, of our grand Constitution and our just laws. We are a free and sovereign people, we govern ourselves and the government is ours. But that is the point. We are responsible, not our leaders, since we follow them. We let them divert our loyalty from the United States to some “party”; we let them boss the party and turn our municipal democracies into autocracies and our republican nation into a plutocracy. We cheat our government and we let our leaders loot it, and we let them wheedle and bribe our sovereignty from us. True, they pass for us strict laws, but we are content to let them pass also bad laws, giving away public property in exchange; and our good, and often impossible, laws we allow to be used for oppression and blackmail. And what can we say? We break our own laws and rob our own government, the lady at the customhouse, the lyncher with his rope, and the captain of industry with his bribe and his rebate.

The spirit of graft and of lawlessness is the American spirit.

And this shall not be said? Not plainly? William Travers Jerome, the fearless District Attorney of New York, says, “You can say anything you think to the American people. If you are honest with yourself you may be honest with them, and they will forgive not only your candor, but your mistakes.” This is the opinion, and the experience too, of an honest man and a hopeful democrat. Who says the other things? Who says “Hush,” and “What’s the use?” and “ALL’S well,” when all is rotten? It is the grafter; the coward, too, but the grafter inspires the coward. The doctrine of “addition, division, and silence” is the doctrine of graft. “Don’t hurt the party,” "Spare the fair fame of the city,“ are boodle yells. The Fourth of July oration is the ”front“ of graft. There is no patriotism in it, but treason. It is part of the game. The grafters call for cheers for the flag, ”prosperity,“ and ”the party,“ just as a highway man commands ”hands up,“ and while we are waving and shouting, they float the flag from the nation to the party, turn both into graft factories, and prosperity into a speculative boom to make ”weak hands,“ as the Wall Street phrase has it, hold the watered stock while the strong hands as the Wall Street phrase has it, hold the watered stock while the strong hands keep the property. ”Blame us, blame anybody, but praise the people," this, the politician’s advice, is not the counsel of respect for the people, but of contempt. By just such palavering as courtiers play upon the degenerate intellects of weak kings, the bosses, political, financial, and industrial, are befuddling and befooling our sovereign American citizenship; and—likewise they are corrupting it.

And it is corruptible, this citizenship. “I know what Parks is doing,” said a New York union workman, “but what do I care. He has raised my wages. Let him have his graft!” And the Philadelphia merchant says the same thing: “The party leaders may be getting more than they should out of the city, but that doesn’t hurt me. It may raise taxes a little, but I can stand that. The party keeps up the protective tariff. If that were cut down, my business would be ruined. So long as the party stands pat on that, I stand pat on the party.”

The people are not innocent. That is the only “news” in all the journalism of these articles, and no doubt that was not new to many observers. It was to me.

When I set out to describe the corrupt systems of certain typical cities, I meant to show simply how the people were deceived and betrayed. But in the very first study—St. Louis—the startling truth lay bare that corruption was not merely political; it was financial, commercial, social; the ramifications of boodle were so complex, various, and far-reaching, that one mind could hardly grasp them, and not even Joseph W. Folk, the tireless prosecutor, could follow them all. This state of things was indicated in the first article which Claude H. Wetmore and I compiled together, but it was not shown plainly enough. Mr. Wetmore lived in St. Louis, and he had respect for names which meant little to me, but when I went next to Minneapolis alone, I could see more independently, without respect for persons, and there were traces of the same phenomenon. The first St. Louis article was called “Tweed Days in St. Louis,” and though the “better citizen” received attention the Tweeds were the center of interest. In “The Shame of Minneapolis,” the truth was put into the title; it was the Shame of Minneapolis; not of the Ames administration, not of the Tweeds, but of the city and its citizens. And yet Minneapolis was not nearly so bad as St. Louis; police graft is never so universal as boodle. It is more shocking, but it is so filthy that it cannot involve so large a part of society. So I returned to St. Louis, and I went over the whole ground again, with the people in mind, not alone the caught and convicted boodlers. And this time the true meaning of “Tweed Days in St. Louis” was made plain. The article was called “The Shamelessness of St. Louis,” and that was the burden of the story. In Pittsburgh also the people was the subject, and though the civic spirit there was better, the extent of the corruption throughout the social organization of the community was indicated. But it was not till I got to Philadelphia that the possibilities of popular corruption were worked out to the limit of humiliating confession. That was the place for such a study. There is nothing like it in the country, except possibly, in Cincinnati. Philadelphia certainly is not merely corrupt, but corrupted, and this was made clear. Philadelphia was charged up to—the American citizen.

It was impossible in the space of a magazine article to cover in any one city all the phases of municipal government, so I chose cities that typified most strikingly some particular phase or phases. Thus as St. Louis exemplified boodle; Minneapolis, police graft; Pittsburgh, a political and industrial machine; and Philadelphia, general civic corruption; so Chicago was an illustration of reform, and New York of good government. All these things occur in most of these places. There are, and long have been, reformers in St. Louis, and there is to-day police graft there. Minneapolis has had boodling and council reform, and boodling is breaking out there again. Pittsburg has general corruption, and Philadelphia a very perfect political machine. Chicago has police graft and a low order of administrative and general corruption which permeates business, labor, and society generally. As for New York, the metropolis might exemplify almost anything that occurs anywhere in American cities, but no city has had for many years such a good administration as was that of Mayor Seth Low.

That which I have made each city stand for, is that which it had most highly developed. It would be absurd to seek for organized reform in St. Louis, for example, with Chicago next door; or for graft in Chicago with Minneapolis so near. After Minneapolis, a description of administrative corruption in Chicago would have seemed like a repetition; Perhaps it was not just to treat only the conspicuous element in each situation. But why should I be just? I was not judging; I arrogated to myself no such function. I was not writing about Chicago for Chicago, but for the other cities, so I picked out what light each had for the instruction of the others. But, if I was never complete, I never exaggerated. Every one of those articles was an understatement, especially where the conditions were bad, and the proof thereof is that while each article seemed to astonish other cities, it disappointed the city which was its subject. Thus my friends in Philadelphia, who knew what there was to know, and those especially who knew what I knew, expressed surprise that I reported so little. And one St. Louis newspaper said that “the facts were thrown at me and I fell down over them.” There was truth in these flings. I cut twenty thousand words out of the Philadelphia article and then had not written half my facts. I know a man who is making a history of the corrupt construction of the Philadelphia City Hall, in three volumes, and he grieves because he lacks space. You can’t put all the known incidents of the corruption of an American city into a book.

This is all very unscientific, but then, I am not a scientist. I am a journalist. I did not gather with indifference all the facts and arrange them patiently for permanent preservation and laboratory analysis. I did not want to preserve, I wanted to destroy the facts. My purpose was no more scientific than the spirit of my investigation and reports; it was, as I said above, to see if the shameful facts, spread out in all their shame, would not burn through our civic shamelessness and set fire to American pride. That was the journalism of it. I wanted to move and to convince. That is why I was not interested in all the facts, sought none that was new, and rejected half those that were old. I often was asked to expose something suspected. I couldn’t; and why should I? Exposure of the unknown was not my purpose. The people: what they will put up with, how they are fooled, how cheaply they are bought, how dearly sold, how easily intimidated, and how led, for good or for evil—that was the inquiry, and so the significant facts were those only which for evil—that was the inquiry, and so the significant facts were those only which everybody in each city knew, and of these, only those which everybody in every other town would recognize, from their common knowledge of such things, to be probable. But these, understated, were charged always to the guilty persons when individuals were to blame, and finally brought home to the people themselves, who, having the power, have also the responsibility, they and those they respect, and those that guide them.

This was against all the warnings and rules of demagogy. What was the result?

After Joseph W. Folk had explored and exposed, with convictions, the boodling of St. Louis, the rings carried an election. “Tweed Days in St. Louis” is said to have formed some public sentiment against the boodlers, but the local newspapers had more to do with that than McClure’s Magazine. After the Minneapolis grand jury had exposed and the courts had tried and the common juries had convicted the grafters there, an election showed that public opinion was formed. But that one election was regarded as final. When I went there the men who had led the reform movement were “all through.” After they had read the “Shame of Minneapolis,” however, they went back to work, and they have perfected a plan to keep the citizens informed and to continue the fight for good government. They saw, these unambitious, busy citizens, that it was “up to them,” and they resumed the unwelcome duties of their citizenship. Of resentment there was very little. At a meeting of leading citizens there were honest speeches suggesting that something should be said to “clear the name of Minneapolis,” but one man rose and said very pleasantly, but firmly, that the article was true; it was pretty hard on them, but it was true and they all knew it. That ended that.

When I returned to St. Louis and rewrote the facts, and, in rewriting, made them just as insulting as the truth would permit, my friends there expressed dismay over the manuscript. The article would hurt Mr. Folk; it would hurt the cause; it would arouse popular wrath.

“That was what I hoped it would do,” I said.

“But the indignation would break upon Folk and reform, not on the boodlers,” they said.

“Wasn’t it obvious,” I asked, “that this very title, ‘Shamelessness,’ was aimed at pride; that it implied a faith that there was self-respect to be touched and shame to be moved?”

That was too subtle. So I answered that if they had no faith in the town, I had, and anyway, if I was wrong and the people should resent, not the crime, but the exposure of it, then they would punish, not Mr. Folk, who had nothing to do with the article, but the magazine and me. Newspaper men warned me that they would not “stand for” the article, but would attack it. I answered that I would let the St. Louisans decide between us. It was true, it was just; the people of St. Louis had shown no shame. Here was a good chance to see whether they had any. I was a fool, they said. “All right,” I replied. “All kings had fools in the olden days, and the fools were allowed to tell them the truth. I would play the fool to the American people.”

The article, published, was attacked by the newspapers; friends of Mr. Folk repudiated it; Mr. Folk himself spoke up for the people. Leading citizens raised money for a mass meeting to “set the city right before the world.” The mayor of the city, a most excellent man, who had helped me, denounced the article. The boodle party platform appealed for votes on the strength of the attacks in “Eastern magazines.” The people themselves contradicted me; after the publication, two hundred thousand buttons for “Folk and Reform” were worn on the streets of St. Louis.

But those buttons were for “Folk and Reform.” They did go to prove that the article was wrong, that there was pride in St. Louis, but they proved also that that pride had been touched. Up to that time nobody knew exactly how St. Louis felt about it all. There had been one election, another was pending, and the boodlers, caught or to be caught, were in control. The citizens had made no move to dislodge them. Mr. Folk’s splendid labors were a spectacle without a chorus, and, though I had met men who told me the people were with Folk, I had met also the grafters, who cursed only Folk and were building all their hopes on the assumption that “after Folk’s term” all would be well again. Between these two local views no outsider could choose. How could I read a strange people’s hearts? I took the outside view, stated the facts both ways,—the right verdicts of the juries and the confident plans of the boodlers,—and the result was, indeed, a shameless state of affairs for which St. Louis, the people of St. Louis, were to blame.

And they saw it so, both in the city and in the State, and they ceased to be spectators. That article simply got down to the self-respect of this people. And who was hurt? Not St. Louis. From that moment the city has been determined and active, and boodle seems to be doomed. Not Mr. Folk. After that, his nomination for Governor of the State was declared for by the people, who formed Folk clubs all over the State to force him upon his party and theirs, and thus insure the pursuit of the boodlers in St. Louis and in Missouri too. Nor was the magazine hurt, or myself. The next time I went to St. Louis, the very men who had raised money for the mass meeting to denounce the article went out of their way to say to me that I had been right, the article was true, and they asked me to “do it again.” And there may be a chance to do it again. Mr. Folk lifted the lid off Missouri for a moment after that, and the State also appeared ripe for the gathering. Moreover, the boodlers of State and city have joined to beat the people and keep them down. The decisive election is not till the fall of 1904, and the boodlers count much on the fickleness of public opinion. But I believe that Missouri and St. Louis together will prove then, once for all, that the people can rule when they are aroused.

The Pittsburgh article had no effect in Pittsburgh, nor had that on Philadelphia any results in Philadelphia. Nor was any expected there. Pittsburgh, as I said in the article, knew itself, and may pull out of its disgrace, but Philadelphia is contented and seems hopeless. The accounts of them, however, and indeed, as I have said, all of the series, were written, not for the cities described, but for all our cities, and the most immediate response came from places not mentioned, but where similar evils existed or similar action was needed. Thus, Chicago, intent on its troubles, found useless to it the study of its reform, which seems to have been suggestive elsewhere, and Philadelphia, “Corrupt and Contented,” was taken home in other cities and seems to have made the most lasting impression everywhere.

But of course the tangible results are few. The real triumph of the year’s work was the complete demonstration it has given, in a thousand little ways, that our shamelessness is superficial, that beneath it lies a pride which, being real, may save us yet. And it is real. The grafters who said you may put the blame anywhere but on the people, where it belongs, and that Americans can be moved only by flattery—they lied. They lied about themselves. They, too, are American citizens; they too, are of the people; and some of them also were reached by shame. The great truth I tried to make plain was that which Mr. Folk insists so constantly upon: that bribery is no ordinary felony, but treason, that the “corruption which breaks out here and there and now and then” is not an occasional offense, but a common practice, and that the effect of it is literally to change the form of our government from one that is representative of the people to an oligarchy, representative of special interests. Some politicians have seen that this is so, and it bothers them. I think I prize more highly than any other of my experiences the half-dozen times when grafting politicians I had “roasted,” as they put it, called on me afterwards to say, in the politicians I had “roasted,” as they put it, called on me afterwards to say, in the words of one who spoke with a wonderful solemnity:

“You are right. I never thought of it that way, but it’s right. I don’t know whether you can do anything, but you’re right, dead right. And I’m all wrong. We’re all, all wrong. I don’t see how we can stop it now; I don’t see how I can change. I can’t, I guess. No, I can’t, not now. But, say, I may be able to help you, and I will if I can. You can have anything I’ve got.”

So you see, they are not such bad fellows, these practical politicians. I wish I could tell more about them: how they have helped me; how candidly and unselfishly they have assisted me to facts and an understanding of the facts, which, as I warned them, as they knew well, were to be used against them. If I could—and I will some day—I should show that one of the surest hopes we have is the politician himself. Ask him for good politics; punish him when he gives bad, and reward him when he gives good; make politics pay. Now, he says, you don’t know and you don’t care, and that you must be flattered and fooled—and there, I say, he is wrong. I did not flatter anybody; I told the truth as near as I could get it, and instead of resentment there was encouragement. After “The Shame of Minneapolis,” and “The Shamelessness of St. Louis,” not only did citizens of these cities approve. but citizens of other cities, individuals, groups, and organizations, sent in invitations, hundreds of them, “to come and show us up; we’re worse than they are.”

We Americans may have failed. We may be mercenary and selfish. Democracy with us may be impossible and corruption inevitable, but these articles, if they have proved nothing else, have demonstrated beyond doubt that we can stand the truth; that there is pride in the character of American citizenship; and that this pride may be a power in the land. So this little volume, a record of shame and yet of self-respe

Source: Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (New York: McClure, Philips & Co., 1904), 1–18.

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Andrew Carnegie's Ode to Steelmaking: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

Andrew Carnegie’s Ode to Steelmaking

Known best by his knack for moneymaking, turn-of-the-century steel magnate Andrew Carnegie nonetheless found a moment to pen a one-sided poetic tribute to the “eighth wonder” of the world—steel manufacturing in his Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, plant. This brief poem reflected how he (and other contemporaries) viewed the monumental process of steelmaking. The poem was notable for its use of passive voice and the absence of workers—miners, railroad men, or blast furnace crews—from the process by which “one pound of solid steel” came to be.

The eighth wonder of the world is this:

two pounds of iron-stone purchased on

the shores of lake Superior and

transported to Pittsburgh;

two pounds of coal mined in Connellsville

and manufactured into coke and

brought to Pittsburgh;

one half pound of limestone mined

east of the Alleghenies and

brought to Pittsburgh;

a little manganese ore,

mined in Virginia and

brought to Pittsburgh.

And these four and one half pounds of material

manufactured into one pound of solid steel

and sold for one cent.

That’s all that need be said

about the steel business.

Source: Harold Livesay, Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business (Boston: Little Brown, 1975), 189.

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"For the Further Benefit of Our People": George Pullman Answers His Strikers: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

“For the Further Benefit of Our People”: George Pullman Answers His Strikers

For workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company in the 1890s, home was the company town of Pullman, Illinois, and rent was deducted from their wages. While owner George Pullman touted it as a model town, the men and women who labored there during the 1893 depression endured starvation wages, deplorable living and working conditions, and, worst of all, Pullman’s paternalistic control over all aspects of their lives. Workers appealed to the American Railway Union (ARU), which organized a nationwide strike and boycott against Pullman. In this open letter in the Chicago Herald in June 1894, as the strike began, Pullman explained his motives for cutting wages during the economic depression of 1893.

In the first week of May last there were employed in the car manufacturing department at Pullman, Ill., about 3,100 persons. On May 7, a committee of the workmen had an interview by arrangement with Mr. Wickes, vice-president, at which the principal subject of discussion related to wages, but minor grievances as to shop were also presented, and it was agreed that another meeting should be held on the 9th of May, at which all the grievances should be presented in writing. The second meeting was held. As to the complaints on all matters except wages, it was arranged that a formal and thorough investigation should be made by Mr. Wickes, to be begun the next day, and full redress was assured to the committee as to all con-plaints proved to be well founded.

The absolute necessity of the last reduction in wages, under the existing condition of the business of car manufacturing, had been explained to the committee, and they were insisting,, upon a restoration of the wage scale of the first half of 1893, when Mr. Pullman entered the room and addressed the committee, speaking, in substance as follows:

"At the commencement of the very serious depression last year, we were employing at Pullman 5,816 men, and paying out in wages there $305,000 a month. Negotiations with intending purchasers of railway equipment that were then pending for new work were stopped by them, orders already given by others were canceled, and we were obliged to lay off, as you are aware, a large number of men in every department, so that by November 1, 1893, there were only about 2,000 men in all departments, or about one third of the normal number. I realized the necessity for the most strenuous exertions to procure work immediately, without which there would be great embarrassment, not only to the employees and their families at Pullman, but also to those living in the immediate vicinity, including between 700 and 800 employees who had purchased homes and to whom employment was actually necessary to enable them to complete their payments.

"I canvassed the matter thoroughly with the manager of the works and instructed him to cause the men to be assured that the company would do everything in its power to meet the competition which was sure to occur because of the great number of large car manufacturers that were in the same condition, and that were exceedingly anxious to keep their men employed. I knew that if there was any work to be let, bids for it would be made upon a much lower basis than ever before. (NOTE.—The selling prices of passenger, baggage, box, refrigerator and street cars in the last two years have fallen by percentages, varying in the separate classes, from 17 to 28, the average reduction, taking the five classes together, being 24 percent.)

"The result of this discussion was a revision in piecework prices, which, in the absence of any information to the contrary, I supposed to be acceptable to the men under the circumstances. Under these conditions, and with lower prices upon all materials, I personally undertook the work of the lettings of cars, and by making lower bids than other manufacturers I secured work enough to gradually increase our force from 2,000 up to about 4,200, the number employed, according to the April pay rolls, in all capacities at Pullman.

"This result has not been accomplished merely by reduction in wages, but the company has borne its full share by eliminating from its estimates the use of capital and machinery, and in many cases going even below that and taking work at considerable loss, notably the 55 Long Island cars, which was the first large order of passenger cars let since the great depression and which was sought for by practically all the leading car builders in the country. My anxiety to secure that order, so as to put as many men at work as possible, was such that I put in a bid at more than $300 per car less than the actual cost to the company. The 300 stock cars built for the Northwestern road and the 250 refrigerator cars now under construction for the same company will result in a loss of at least $12 per car, and the 25 cars just built for the Lake Street elevated road show a loss of $79 per car. I mention these particulars so that you may understand what the company has done for the mutual interests and to secure for the people at Pullman and vicinity the benefit of the disbursement of the large sums of money involved in these and similar contracts, which can be kept up only by the procurement of new orders for cars, as you know, about three fourths of the men must depend upon contract work for employment.

"I can only assure you that if this company now restores the wages of the first half of 1893, as you have asked, it would be a most unfortunate thing for the men, because there is less than sixty days of contract work in sight in the shops under all orders and there is absolutely no possibility, in the present condition of affairs throughout the country, of getting any more orders for work at prices measured by the wages of May 1893. Under such a scale the works would necessarily close down and the great majority of the employees be put in idleness, a contingency I am using my best efforts to avoid.

"To further benefit the people of Pullman and vicinity we concentrated all the work that we could command at that point, by closing our Detroit shops entirely and laying off a large number of men at our other repair shops, and gave to Pullman the repair of all cars that could be taken care of there.

"Also, for the further benefit of our people at Pullman we have carried on a large system of internal improvements, have expended nearly $160,000 since August last in work which, under normal conditions, would have been spread over one or two years. The policy would be to continue this class of work to as great an extent as possible, provided, of course, the Pullman men show a proper appreciation of the situation by doing whatever they can to help themselves to tide over the hard times which are so seriously felt in every part of the country.

“There has been some complaint made about rents. As to this I would say that the return to this company on the capital invested in the Pullman tenements for the last year and the year before was 3.82 percent. There are hundreds of tenements in Pullman renting for from $6 to $9 per month, and the tenants are relieved from the usual expenses of exterior cleaning and the removal of garbage, which is done by the company. . . .”

On the question of rents, while, as stated above, they make a manifestly inadequate return upon the investment, so that it is clear they are not, in fact, at an arbitrarily high figure, it may be added that it would not be possible in a business sense so to deal with them.

The renting of the dwellings and the employment of workmen at Pullman are in no way tied together. The dwellings and apartments are offered for rent in competition with those of the immediately adjacent towns of Kensington, Roseland, and Gano. They are let alike to Pullman employees and to very many others in no way connected with the company, and, on the other hand, many Pullman employees rent or own their homes in those adjacent towns. The average rental at Pullman is at the rate of $3 per room per month. There are 1,200 tenements, of varying numbers or rooms, the average monthly rental of which is $10; of these there are 600 the average monthly rental of which is $8. In very many cases men with families pay a rent seemingly large for a workman, but which is in fact reduced in part, and often wholly repaid, by the subrents paid by single men as lodgers.

On May 10, the day after the second conference above mentioned, work went on at Pullman as usual, and the only incident of note was the beginning by Mr. Wickes, assisted by Mr. Brown, the general manager of the company, of the promised formal investigation at Pullman of the shop complaints.

A large meeting of employees had been held the night before at Kensington, which, as was understood by the company, accepted the necessity of the situation preventing an increase of wages; but at a meeting of the local committee held during the night of May 10 a strike was decided upon, and accordingly the next day about 2,500 of the employees quit their work, leaving about 600 at work, of whom very few were skilled workmen. As it was found impracticable to keep the shops in operation with a force thus diminished and disorganized, the next day those remaining were necessarily laid off, and no work has since been done in the shops.

The pay rolls at the time amounted to about $7,000 a day, and were reduced $5,500 by the strike, so that during the period of a little more than six weeks which has elapsed the employees who quit their work have deprived themselves and their comrades of earnings of more than $200,000.

Source: Reply of the Pullman Company, U.S. Strike Commission, Report and Testimony on the Chicago Strike of 1894 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895), 578–80. Reprinted in Thomas G. Manning, The Chicago Strike of 1894 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 4–7.

See Also:Are Sleeping Cars Protected by the Constitution? Mr. Dooley on the Pullman Strike Father Knows Best?: Strikers Denounce Pullman

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"Please, Let Me Put Him in a Macaroni Box" The Spanish Influenza of 1918 in Philadelphia: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

“Please, Let Me Put Him in a Macaroni Box” The Spanish Influenza of 1918 in Philadelphia

In 1918 and 1919 the Spanish influenza killed more humans than any other disease in a similar period in the history of the world. In the United States a quarter of the population (25 million people or more) contracted the flu; 550,000 died. In the early 1980s, when historian Charles Hardy did interviews for the Philadelphia radio program “The Influenza Pandemic of 1918,” he was struck by the painful memories as many older Philadelphians recalled the inability of the city to care for the dead and dying. In these excerpts from Hardy’s radio program, Clifford Adams, an African American from the South; Anna Lavin, a Jewish immigrant; Anne Van Dyke and Elizabeth Struchesky; and Louise Abruchezze, an Italian immigrant, discussed their shared experience in Philadelphia—shocked by the scale of the influenza outbreak, none could fathom the lack of respect shown for those who had died.

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Clifford Adams: They were stacked up in the cemetery and they couldn’t bury them. I was living on 31st St. then. And that was a two-way street then, you know, and it’s one-way now. But people that died over this way had to be buried over this way and they used to have a funeral procession coming this way. And they used to be crossing. You had, they had to come to this bridge, coming one way or the other. And people would be there. And I would be layin' in there and I says, I looked out the window and says, “There are two funeral processions. One going one way and one going the other way meeting like that.” And that’s the way it was. There wasn’t a lot of comforts in those days. But it didn’t worry me. I was taking care of myself. What I mean, I wasn’t thinking about it. I wasn’t knowing whether I was going to die or what. I was just figuring it’s got me, and eveything else is going on.

Anna Lavin: The undertaker just ran, I don’t know how many, into their wagon and took them to the cemetery and that was it and had to dig your own grave. I mean, the families had to dig their own graves. Grave diggers were sick and that was the terrible thing.

Anne Van Dyke: They didn’t even bury the people. They found them stuck in garages and everything.

Elizabeth: Yes, oh, it was terrible, the flu.

Van Dyke: You had to go, my mother went and shaved the men and laid them out, thinking that they were going to be buried, you know. They wouldn’t bury 'em. They had so many died that they keep putting them in garages. That garage on Richmond Street. Oh, my gosh, he had a couple of garages full of caskets.

Charlie Hardy: Full of bodies?

Elizabeth: Bodies! On Thompson and Allegheny, Schedpa. He used to get the people and take them out and pile them in the garage. And people smelled something and they notified him. There he’d take the people out of the coffin and put them in the garage and give the coffin to somebody else and got paid for it. He lost his license and all. The smell would knock you, it would run down through the alley, so they caught up with him. People used to die. Oh, they used to die. It was an awful disease.

Louise Apuchase: We were the only family saved from the influenza. The rest of the neighbors all were sick. Now I remember so well, very well, directly across the street from us, a boy about 7, 8 years old died and they used to just pick you up and wrap you up in a sheet and put you in a patrol wagon. So the mother and father screaming. “Let me get a macaroni box.” Before, macaroni, any kind of pasta used to come in these wooden boxes about this long and that high, that 20 lbs. of macaroni fitted in the box. “Please, please, let me put him in the macaroni box. Let me put him in the box. Don’t take him away like that.” And that was it. My mother had given birth to my youngest sister at the time and then, thank God, you know, we survived. But they were taking people out left and right. And the undertaker would pile them up and put them in the patrol wagons and take them away.

Source: Interview done by Charles Hardy for WHYY-FM radio programThe Influenza Pandemic of 1918, Philadelphia, 1984. Courtesy of Charles Hardy, West Chester University.

See Also:"He'll Come Home in a Box": The Spanish Influenza of 1918 Comes to Montana "There Wasn't a Mine Runnin' a Lump O' Coal": A Kentucky Coal Miner Remembers the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919

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Kissing Rudy Valentino: A High-School Student Describes Movie Going in the 1920s: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

Kissing Rudy Valentino: A High-School Student Describes Movie Going in the 1920s

Fears about the impact of movies on youth led to the Payne Fund research project, which brought together nineteen social scientists and resulted in eleven published reports. One of the most fascinating of the studies was carried out by Herbert Blumer, a young sociologist who would later go on to a distinguished career in the field. For a volume that he called Movies and Conduct (1933), Blumer asked more than fifteen hundred college and high school students to write “autobiographies”of their experiences going to the movies. In this motion picture autobiography, a high school “girl” talked about what the movies of the 1920s meant to her.

I am a girl—American born and of Scotch descent. My grandparents came to America from Glasgow, Scotland, and grandfather became a minister (Presbyterian). Mother was the youngest of nine children and was born in New York. Dad came from New York also; his parents were of Scotch and English stock. I was born in Detroit, July 1, 1913. I have one brother. Stating us in order of birth, we are: Mary, 16, and Edward, 12.

My religious denominations have been varied. Mom put me in the cradle-roll of a Congregational Church, but I have been a member of the Lutheran, Presbyterian, Christian Science, and Methodist Episcopal churches. All of which indicates that either I’m very broad-minded religiously or unable to make up my mind. The latter is more plausible. Was a member of a Camp Fire Girls group for several years and was greatly interested in its activities. I reached the second rank in the organization.

My mother has no occupation. One calls her a housewife, I guess, but she isn’t home enough for that. She travels in the winter and fall. Dad is a Lawyer. My real father is dead. He died when I was very young. His work was in the appraisal business. My clearest picture of him is playing his violin. He played beautifully. Mother plays the piano and when she accompanied him I used to listen for hours. I love music. . . .

I have tried to remember the first time that I went to a movie. It must have been when I was very young because I cannot recall the event. My real interest in motion pictures showed itself when I was in about fourth grade at grammar school. There was a theater on the route by which I went home from school and as the picture changed every other day I used to spend the majority of my time there. A gang of us little tots went regularly.

One day I went to see Viola Dana in “The Five Dollar Baby.” The scenes which showed her as a baby fascinated me so that I stayed to see it over four times. I forgot home, dinner, and everything. About eight o’clock mother came after me—frantically searching the theater.

Next to pictures about children, I loved serials and pie-throwing comedies, not to say cowboy ‘n’ Indian stories. These kind I liked until I was twelve or thirteen; then I lost interest in that type, and the spectacular, beautifully decorated scenes took my eye. Stories of dancers and stage life I loved. Next, mystery plays thrilled me and one never slipped by me. At fifteen I liked stories of modern youth; the gorgeous clothes and settings fascinated me.

My first favorite was Norma Talmadge. I liked her because I saw her in a picture where she wore ruffly hoop-skirts which greatly attracted me. My favorites have always been among the women; the only men stars I’ve ever been interested in are Tom Mix, Doug Fairbanks and Thomas Meighan, also Doug McLean and Bill Haines. Colleen Moore I liked for a while, but now her haircut annoys me. My present favorites are rather numerous: Joan Crawford, Billie Dove, Sue Carol, Louise Brooks, and Norma Shearer. I nearly forgot about Barbara LaMar. I really worshiped her. I can remember how I diligently tried to draw every gown she wore on the screen and how broken-hearted I was when she died. You would have thought my best friend had passed away.

Why I like my favorites? I like Joan Crawford because she is so modern, so young, and so vivacious! Billie Dove is so beautifully beautiful that she just gets under your skin. She is the most beautiful woman on the screen! Sue Carol is cute ‘n’ peppy. Louise Brooks has her assets, those being legs ‘n’ a clever hair-cut. Norma Shearer wears the kind of clothes I like and is a clever actress.

I nearly always have gone and yet go to the theater with someone. I hate to go alone as it is more enjoyable to have someone to discuss the picture with. Now I go with a bunch of girls or on a date with girls and boys or with one fellow.

The day-dreams instigated by the movies consist of clothes, ideas on furnishings, and manners. I don’t day-dream much. I am more concerned with materialistic things and realisms. Nevertheless it is hard for any girl not to imagine herself cuddled up in some voluptuous ermine wrap, etc.

The influence of movies on my play as a child—all that I remember is that we immediately enacted the parts interesting us most. And for weeks I would attempt to do what that character would have done until we saw another movie and some other hero or heroine won us over.

I’m always at the mercy of the actor at a movie. I feel nearly every emotion he portrays and forget that anything else is on earth. I was so horrified during “The Phantom of the Opera” when Lon Chaney removed his mask, revealing that hideous face, that until my last day I shall never forget it.

I am deeply impressed, however, by pathos and pitifulness, if you understand. I remember one time seeing a movie about an awful fire. I was terrified by the reality of it and for several nights I was afraid to go to sleep for fear of a fire and even placed my hat and coat near by in case it was necessary to make a hasty exit. Pictures of robbery and floods have affected my behavior the same way. Have I ever cried at pictures? Cried! I’ve practically dissolved myself many a time. How people can witness a heart-rending picture and not weep buckets of tears is more than I can understand. “The Singing Fool,” "The Iron Mask,“ "Seventh Heaven,” "Our Dancing Daughters,“ and other pictures I saw when very young which centered about the death of someone’s baby and showed how the big sister insisted on her jazz ‘n’ whoopee regardless of the baby or not - these nearly killed me. Something like that, anyway; and I hated that girl so I wanted to walk up to the screen and tear her up! As for liking to cry—why, I never thought of that. It isn’t a matter of liking or not. Sometimes it just can’t be helped. Movies do change my moods, but they never last long. I’m off on something else before I know it. If I see a dull or morose show, it sort of deadens me and the vim and vigor dies out 'til the movie is forgotten. For example, Mary Pickford’s movie—”Sparrows“—gave me the blues for a week or so, as did li’l Sonny Boy in ”The Singing Fool." The poor kid’s a joke now.

This modern knee-jiggling, hand-clapping effect used for accompanying popular music has been imitated from the movies, I think. But unless I’ve unconsciously picked up little mannerisms, I can think of no one that I’ve tried to imitate.

Goodness knows, you learn plenty about love from the movies. That’s their long run; you learn more from actual experience, though! You do see how the gold-digger systematically gets the poor fish in tow. You see how the sleek-haired, long-earringed, languid-eyed siren lands the men. You meet the flapper, the good girl, ‘n’ all the feminine types and their little tricks of the trade. We pick up their snappy comebacks which are most handy when dispensing with an unwanted suitor, a too ardent one, too backward one, etc. And believe me, they observe and remember, too.

I can remember when we all nudged one another and giggled at the last close-up in a movie. I recall when during the same sort of close-up when the boy friend squeezes your arm and looks soulfully at you. Oh, it’s lotsa fun! No, I never fell in love with my movie idol. When I don’t know a person really, when I know I’ll never have a chance with ‘em, I don’t bother pining away over them and writing them idiotic letters as some girls I’ve known do. I have imagined playing with a movie hero many times though that is while I’m watching the picture. I forget about it when I’m outside the theater. Buddy Rogers and Rudy Valentino have kissed me oodles of times, but they don’t know it. God bless ’em!

Source: Herbert Blumer, Movies and Conduct (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1970), 217–218, 220–223.

See Also:From Cowboys to Clara Bow: A College Student's Motion Picture Autobiography Movie Dreams and Movie Injustices: A Black High-School Student Tells What 1920s Movies Meant to Him Frustration versus Fantasy: How the Movies Made Some People Restless

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No Way Out: Two New York City Firemen Testify about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

No Way Out: Two New York City Firemen Testify about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

One of the greatest industrial tragedies in U.S. history occurred on March 25, 1911, when 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist company in New York City. In this brief excerpt from their testimony before the Factory Investigation Commission, New York City Fire Chief Edward F. Croker and Fire Marshall William Beers commented on the safety lapses—the locking of an exit door, the inadequate fire escapes, and the overcrowded factory floor—that led to the deaths of the Triangle workers.

Edward F. Croker, called as a witness, being first duly sworn, testifies as follows:

Direct examination by Mr. Elkus:

Q. Chief, will you tell the Commissioners just how long you have been in the Fire Department, what positions you have held, etc., so that we may have it in on record?

A. I was appointed fireman June 22nd, 1884, and went through the various grades of the department from time to time, until I arrived at the position of Chief of the department; I served in that capacity for twelve years and retired May 1st of the present year. . .

Q. Were you present at the fire of the Triangle Waist Company building?

A. I was, sir.

Q. And you made a careful investigation of that fire, did you not?

A. Yes, sir, I did.

Q. Now, just a word about that. Was that a loft building of the kind you described?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. How many stories high?

A. Twelve stories.

Q. And this fire was on one or more floors in that building?

A. It originated on the ninth.

Q. And they had an out-door fire escape there, didn’t they?

A. On the rear.

Q. And it led down to an enclosed yard?

A. It led down into an enclosed yard.

Q. What did you ascertain were the facts there with reference to the closed doors?

A. Well, from what we could find—what was left of that place up there—I don’t think there was any doubt there was a partition inside of the doorway leading out into the Green Street side of that building, and from the indication of the number of people we found where that partition was, that door was locked, and the door that opened into it, opened on the inside.

Q. Was it locked with a lock and key, or a bolt?

A. A lock and key, but it opened in.

Q. Was it a wooden door?

A. Yes. . . .

Q. Now . . . did the people jump down the shaft as a means to try to escape?

A. Well, we found them in the shaft. We don’t know how they got there. . . .

William L. Beers, called as a witness and, being duly sworn, testified as follows:

Q. Mr. Beers, were you fire marshal of the city?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. Were you connected with the Fire Department, and, if so, for how long?

A. I was with the Fire Department for twelve years, up to November 15, when I retired.

Q. During all that time were you Fire Marshal?

A. Assistant Fire Marshal and Fire Marshal.

Q. Did you visit the Triangle Waist Company Building immediately after the fire?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. Did you make an investigation?

A. I was there all during the evening of the fire, and was there on the ground the next morning at nine o’clock.

Q. Tell us what you observed.

A. The result of my investigation and the taking of testimony for ten days after the fire was that I was of the opinion that the fire occurred on the eighth floor on the Greene street side, under a cutting table, which table was enclosed, and that contained the waste material as cut from this lawn that was used to make up the waists. They were in the habit of cutting about 160 to 180 thicknesses of lawn at one time; that formed quite a lot of waste, which was placed under the cutting tables, as it had a commercial value of about seven cents a pound.

Q. Was it boxed, or just placed on the floor?

A. Well, the boards that were nailed on the legs of the table formed the box or receptacle.

Q. The outside of that receptacle was wood?

A. Yes; it was all wood.

Q. How did the fire start there in that stuff?

A. Well, we formed the opinion that it started from the careless use of a match from one of the cutters. They were about to leave to go home, and in those factories they are anxious to get a smoke just as quick as they get through work.

Q. A man simply lighted a match?

A. Yes; and carelessly threw it under there; then the attention of the occupants was called to it, and they tried to extinguish it before they rang in a fire alarm.

Q. Did you examine the fire escapes of that building?

A. After the fire.

Q. What did you find?

A. I found the fire escape on the rear of the building, which was the only one, and was entirely inadequate for the number of people employed in that building.

Q. Why were they inadequate?

A. Too small and too light, and the iron shutters on the outside of the building when opened would have obstructed the egress of the people passing between the stairway and the platform.

Q. How many people were there on the eighth floor?

A. Something over 250, as I recall it.

Q. How many sewing machines?

A. There was a cutting department, and it was partially used for machines for making fine waists. About 220 persons were on the eighth floor, all of whom escaped.

Q. How did they come to escape?

A. They went down the stairway and down the fire-escape, some of them.

Q. How about the ninth floor?

A. The loss of life was greatest on the ninth floor. There were about 310 people there.

Q. How many sewing machines?

A. 288.

Q. Now, will you tell the Commission whether or not the place was overcrowded with the machines?

A. Yes, sir. All the space that could be utilized there was utilized.

Q. Were any attempts made in that case to extinguish the fire?

A. Yes, there were. They used fire pails there, and then attempted to use the fire hose.

Q. What happened to the fire hose?

A. Well, they claimed they could not get any water to it.

Q. How about the fire pail, why did that not put out the fire?

A. They did not get enough water to put it out. It spread very rapidly. The material is very inflammable, and it travels very fast, and the conditions were there, everything, to build a fire.

Q. How many fires would you say, Marshal, could have been prevented if ordinary precautions were used?

A. You mean in the factories?

Q. Yes.

A. I am not prepared to say Mr. Elkus. I am of the opinion that the precautions that are used to safeguard these premises in the form of installation of fire extinguishing apparatus would have a tendency to keep the fires down to a small size. All fires are of the same size at the start, and I think the loss and damage would be a great deal less by having available apparatus.

Source: State of New York, Preliminary Report of the Factory Investigating Commission, 1912, Vol. II (Albany: The Argus Company, Printers, 1912), 14, 19–20, 21.

See Also:Working for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company

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"The Business of a Factory": A Journalist's Portrait: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

“The Business of a Factory”: A Journalist’s Portrait

In 1897, Scribner’s published a series of articles on “The Conduct of Great Business.” This article by Philip Hubert on a New England textile mill conveyed some of the sense of wonder that Americans felt at the enormous new factories suddenly emerging in what had been primarily an agricultural nation. Although other contemporaries—both agrarian radicals and trade unionists—viewed the new industrial behemoths with skepticism or even horror, middle-class observers like Hubert celebrated the achievements of the capitalists who organized and managed these vast and complex enterprises. Hubert had little interest in or sympathy for the thousands of workers who toiled in the textile mill that he visited, echoing the view that the “character of the machinery” was more important than “the character of the hands.” But his account, including a vivid description of the mill at quitting time, captured the sheer size and dehumanizing impact on workers of the new industrial enterprises.

One hot evening in July last I stood on the brink of a little canal that skirts a row of noble buildings constituting the largest textile mill in New England and perhaps in the world, and watched hundreds and thousands of mill-hands pour over the bridge that connects the mills with the town of which they are the chief support and pride. As the great bell clanged forth its six peals, one could hear the cessation of toil for the day. The mighty turbines, fed by this canal from the Merrimac, ceased to revolve, the great Corliss engines that in recent years have come to the aid of water-power in all big mills, came to a stop; the three hundred thousand spindles, the eight thousand looms, and the thousands of other ponderous machines, ingenious and effective almost past belief, for picking, cleaning, roving, bleaching, printing, drying, and finishing the one hundred million yards of cotton and woolen goods turned out from these mills every year—all this vast mass of machinery, scattered over sixty acres of flooring, came to a stop. Bell-time, as six o’clock in the afternoon is called in all New England mill-towns, had come. In place of the hum and clatter of machinery, the patter of innumerable feet made itself heard. Then the first of the army of five thousand operatives began to come, first by driblets, comprising those who did not need to wash, or did not care to, then the larger streams as the doors of some great room were thrown open, each operative having to go and come by a special staircase in order to avoid the gorging of any particular exit in case of fire, and finally the densestream of humanity, male and female, big and little, until the broad iron bridge was packed and shook under the strain. Browning’s description of the rats as they came in answer to the three shrill notes of the Pied Piper came to my mind.

I hope that should any of the mill-hands of this particular mill ever read these lines they will take no offence at the comparison. The picture was not an unpleasant one; it had just the diversity suggested by the poet. There were men and women, boys and girls, of all ages and colors—even green, and blue, and yellow, and striped—for the operatives in the printing and dyeing shops are as apt to be covered with color as the miller is powdered with flour; here were the fat and the lean, the tall and the short, pretty women and women—less pretty; dark and fair, neat and sloven. And it should be said here that no such squalid poverty saddens the visitor to these mills as can be seen in every manufacturing town in England. Every woman and girl wore shoes; the poor slattern, barefooted, and with a ragged shawl thrown over her head, that one finds by the thousand coming from the cotton-mills of England, was conspicuous by her absence. The women and girls of our manufacturing towns, especially where the native American stock still holds its own, retain a vivid appreciation of pretty things in dress and adornment. In some of the cotton towns, such as Fall River, where the French Canadian and the Irish have driven the Yankee girl from the spindles and the loom, there is less concern for personal appearance than in Lynn, for instance, with its American shoe operatives, or in Manchester with its American thread-makers. Among the more recent recruits to the mills are the Armenians and Polish Jews, of whom there are some in almost all the New England manufacturing towns.

Watching the privates of this army of workers pour forth from the mills where they have been at work since half past six in the morning, with an hour’s rest at noon, and bearing in mind the fact that these mills have been in steady and profitable operation for nearly half a century, the management of this vast machine for turning out and selling one hundred million yards of goods a year will impress any one as possessing as much general interest, and far more human interest, than the processes of manufacture themselves. How is the business conducted, whether the product be cotton-yarn, printed calico, watches, shoes, or bicycles? What are the principles governing the art of making money by the manufacture and sale of articles requiring an army of operatives?

One feature of the manufacturing industries of a country that makes them of perhaps more interest than the agricultural industries, is the constant change in the character of the product, as well as in the methods of manufacture. The farmers' products seldom or never change. The wheat sealed up in Egyptian tombs fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ is found to be identical with that grown in Egypt to-day, and upon being planted yields a similar crop to that now grown. Not only do manufactured objects change every few years, but the field is constantly enlarged by the appearance of new things to make—things not dreamed of a few years ago. Electricity now gives employment to hundreds of thousands of persons whose great-grandfathers never heard of a telegraph, a telephone, an electric light, or a motor. While new farms spring up every day in the wilderness, it is always the same old wheat or corn that results. But every day some new factory begins turning out a product the like of which was never seen before, and, in some cases, let us hope, may not be seen again. More than this, it is not reasonable to suppose that this stream of novelty which began to flow with the printing press, the steam-engine, and the electric spark, will ever cease. It would be strange if we happy possessors of these wonderful tools, unknown to our forefathers, should fail to profit by them, and turn out still more wonderful things in the future. The next century ought certainly to give the world gifts as valuable as steam and electricity. The factories of 1997 will make wonders, of which we have no conception. The field is, however, already so large that one branch of manufacture must be taken as a type of all, and I have selected the making of calicoes as offering the best illustrations of this business of manufacturing. The business problems met with by the man who undertakes to buy cotton, weave, print, and sell it as calico, are similar in kind with those of the man who makes shoes, or lamps, or watches. They involve accurate judgment not only of what the public is asking for, but—far more important—what it is going to ask for; the purchase of raw material, the hiring of labor, the judicious management of an army of people so as to avoid laxity on one hand and strikes on the other, the discovery of new and better processes, the choice of designs, the manufacture itself, finally the disposal of the product by a thousand channels, native and foreign.

Let me, therefore, take a big cotton-mill making and printing its own calicoes, as the type of an American manufacturing business. If a man wants to enter the business of making calicoes, the question of capital is the first consideration. Most of our cotton-mills and paper-mills are stock corporations, largely because of the vast capital needed. The larger the plant the cheaper the product, is an axiom in the cotton business, especially when staple goods, such as sheetings, are to be made. There is always a market here or abroad for American sheeting, and the sales are often made in such vast quantities that the danger of overstocking the market is as nothing compared with fancy dress-goods, shoes, or worsted cloths, the fashions of which change from one year to another. It is not unusual to hear of the sale of thousands of bales of sheetings in one operation. It follows, therefore, that the manufacturer must be ready to take advantage of these periods of profit, so to speak, and be ready with his tens of thousands of bales of goods, where the manufacturer of goods liable to depreciation through change of fashion, such as shoes, hats, fancy printed cloths, etc., does not dare to manufacture much beyond the current demand of the market, and is consequently debarred from manufacture upon the vast scale seen in the mills at Fall River, Lowell, and Lawrence. The capital needed for cotton-mills being therefore very large—the mill I have selected as a type having a capital of three million dollars, and its property being assessed at nearly five millions—the ownership is commonly held by a stock company. . . .

The necessary capital having been subscribed and the manufacture of cotton goods decided upon, the question of site is next to be settled. In the past good water-power has been of the chief importance in the selection of a mill site. The splendid water-power on the Merrimac, at Lowell, Nashua, Lawrence, and elsewhere explained the existence of gigantic mills at these places. Steam, however, is rapidly replacing water-power, notwithstanding the improvements made in turbine wheels. In most of the older mills of New England steam now shares about equally the work with water, while in the new mills it takes almost the whole burden. Of course in factories where the power needed is small, such as in making hats, clothing, shoes, etc., steam has entirely replaced water, the higher cost being of no importance when its greater reliability is considered. As yet electricity has not appeared as motive power, except in small industries. What the tremendous works at Niagara will do in this field remains to be seen. It is easier with electricity to adapt the power to the needs of the day whether they are great or small, than with steam. Mr. Atkinson foresees the ultimate dispersion of these mill armies to their homes, when electric power can be sent from place to place without loss; then, as before the introduction of steam-power, the weaver will work his loom and the spinner his spindles in his own cottage instead of in the big mill. Whether or not the change will be to the benefit of the operative is still a mooted question among experts. One of the agents of a big mill, a man who has studied the problem at close quarters for twenty years, tells me that the change would be a misfortune for the mill-hand. In the mill the worker has the law as his champion in providing good air and light, and in limiting the hours of labor; in his own cottage the hours of labor will be measured only by the endurance of the weaker members of the family, while the sanitary arrangements are apt to be defective as compared to those of a modern mill.

It is commonly admitted that while a man or woman who does some small thing in the manufacture of an article—whether it is piecing the broken yarns of a spinning machine, or cutting the eye of a needle, or gathering matches for boxing—may become marvelously expert, the operator runs the risk of becoming more or less of a machine. The girl who stands at the end of a frame of one hundred spindles and sees a broken thread, catches it with lightning-like rapidity and joins it with a touch; the one who cuts the eyes in needles can do the same thing with a human hair; and the girls who pack matches pick up the requisite number for the box, whether it is one hundred, more or less, without counting them, judging simply by touch whether or not the right number is there, and doing it as fast as the eye can follow the hand. Mr. Ruskin contends, probably with reason, that the minute division of labor that makes such wonders possible brutalizes the laborer, and that if the girl made the whole article instead of doing one operation out of fifty, she would gain in intelligence if not in expertness. From an economic, or rather an industrial point of view, however, manufacturing has to be carried on at present with the greatest subdivision of labor possible. Fierce competition and a small margin of profit demand it. Mr. Ruskin’s dream of a manufacturing community in which the same person shall shear the sheep, clean the wool, dye it, card, spin, and weave it, doing all this in country homes made beautiful with flowers, working but six hours a day, and devoting the rest of the time to reading good books, raising flowers, and singing songs, is a very pretty dream to be made possible only when some philanthropist provides a market at good profit as well as the pleasant conditions for this labor. For the present steam-power is the only power suitable for the work of manufacturing, and this compels the work to be done at one spot. . . .

This minute subdivision of labor which threatens, according to some economists, to make the operative only a part of a machine, and needing to be little more intelligent than one of its wheels, may go on at one end of the industry to be counter-balanced at the other end by a process of aggrandizement. Just as in the large cities the department store is absorbing the smaller shops of its neighborhood, so the large factory of the future may absorb its smaller rivals, not only in the same branch of industry but in many others. There are great mills in New England to-day which not only spin and weave, but print, using wool and silk as well as cotton, something unheard of a few years ago. It is an interesting speculation among experts as to how long it will be before the same gigantic mill will turn out cotton goods, woolen goods, silks, shoes, umbrellas, hats and caps, and writing-paper. The very process that makes the operative merely the attendant upon a machine favors such a development. When there is no sale for cotton, the army of hands will start up the shoe machines, just as, in the department stores, when business is dull at the silk counter the clerks may be put at selling cigars. This may sound extremely fanciful, but there are indications of such a trend. It may be remembered that when, some thirty years ago, a Philadelphia clothier introduced umbrellas as a part of his stock the innovation was widely denounced as a sinful encroachment upon the rights of umbrella shops. Yet to-day it would be hard to say what the department store does not sell; it supplies or attempts to supply all that man needs from a cradle to a coffin. So the first cotton factory that adds shoes to its list of products may excite criticism, but if there is profit in the change it is sure to come. . . .

The business organization of most big factories is simple enough. Almost all cotton-mill properties are managed by a board of directors elected by the stockholders. These directors appoint officers, among whom the treasurer and the agent are the important personages, the first having charge of the finances, the buying of supplies, payment of expenses, and selling of goods; the second having the actual manufacture of the goods under his control, the hiring of labor, the management of the shops or mills. The treasurer of most New England manufacturing corporations lives in Boston, where the goods are sold, and the agent lives near the mills. Taking a big cotton-mill, the agent employs a head or superintendent for each of the important departments, such as the carding, roving, spinning, weaving, bleaching, printing, and packing. Under these superintendents there may be many or few foremen, according to the character of the work. In some departments where the work is all of the same character, each girl of the three hundred in a room doing precisely what her neighbor does, year in and year out, a few foremen suffice. In one room at the mill I have in mind, a room 800 feet long by 70 feet wide, the girls who tend the spindles need small advice, and being paid by the product turned out from their machines, they need small supervision. In other departments, the print works, for instance, there are a variety of operations requiring comparatively few men, but a high grade of intelligence and constant supervision by expert foremen. The transfer of the designs to the copper rolls used in printing, the mixing of the colors, the adjustment of elaborate machinery, all this delicate work requires vast experience. The discipline of such mills is by no means military. In visiting several of the largest of them I was impressed with the friendly relations between superintendents and men. “We never scold,” said the agent of a big mill. 'If a man or girl proves to be habitually careless or idle, a discharge follows; but for small infractions of rules we trust the various foremen to look after their own people. In the sixteen years I have been here we have had no strikes." At half-past six in the morning the bell rings for work to begin; there is an hour’s intermission at noon, and then from one to six it goes on again. On Saturdays all work in most cotton-mills stops for the day at noon. The law limits factory work in Massachusetts to fifty-eight hours a week. In New York State there is no such limit. In some trades, the Lynn shoe shops, for instance, work begins at seven o’clock and there is only half an hour’s stop at noon. In Connecticut, the hours at Waterbury and Ansonia are the same as in Lynn. In the papermills of Massachusetts and Connecticut work begins at half-past six, with an hour at noon.

Opinions differ as to whether or not the growth of the factory system is a blessing to a community, but, as a rule, it is conceded that the standard of intelligence and of living among the mill-hands of New England is not so high now as it was forty years ago. And this, notwithstanding higher wages and shorter hours. In 1850, the average mill-hand earned $175 a year, as against $300 at present, and worked thirteen hours a day as against ten hours to-day. The American farmer’s daughter who worked in the cotton mills fifty years ago has been almost wholly displaced, first by women of Irish and English birth, and more recently by the French Canadian, all representing lower types. The very growth of the mills has tended to do away with certain features of factory life, that worked for good in smaller communities. In the old days, say in 1850, the American girls who made cotton cloth in Lowell, or shoes in Lynn, or thread in Manchester, had their own singing and reading societies, their benevolent clubs, and church sociables. The owner or agent of a small mill in a small town was able to exercise something of a paternal supervision over the few hundred girls or men who might work for him. With the immense increase in mill plants, the force now numbering thousands where it was hundreds fifty years ago, this is impossible. Yet, whether it be as a matter of self-interest or not, the visitor to Lowell, Manchester, Lawrence, Fall River, and other factory centres will find an attempt on the part of mill owners to help the hands after they leave the buildings. Saving societies, libraries, hospitals are common. In Lawrence there are no less than three flourishing co-operative stores patronized exclusively by mill-hands. The rise in power of the unions seems to have made the mill-hands suspicious of all interference with matters outside the mill. One is apt to find a dozen unions in a cotton-mill, and in the shoe shops there are unions for every one of the score or more of operations through which a shoe passes. The factory law of Massachusetts prescribes that wages shall be paid weekly. This rule has been found to work rather disadvantageously so far as saving by the mill-hand goes, for, receiving no large sum of money in a lump, he finds it difficult to spare from the comparatively small weekly wage. Efforts are made almost periodically by many mill corporations to render the homes of the hands more sanitary than they were in earlier years, and attractive with gardens and flowers. In some towns, notably in Manchester, where the mill operatives number many native Americans, some success in this direction has been met with; in other towns, notably the larger centres—Lowell, Nashua, Fall River, Lawrence—where the population is either foreign-born or but one generation removed from it, not much has been effected. The hands live mostly in tenements unadorned with gardens or even grass-plats. A large number of the hands in every factory are young people who have to board, necessitating the existence in all mill towns of large rows of tenements known as boarding-houses, as a rule dreary homes inside and out. The people who live in them, looking upon themselves as temporary inmates or tenants only, cannot be induced to better their surroundings, and will decline to care for the vines and flowers offered to them by their employers. . . .

As in most other trades, strikes are the bane of the factory owner’s existence. With a plant worth perhaps a million dollars brought to a standstill, and perhaps half a million dollars' worth of raw material in process of manufacture, a strike coming at an awkward time of year means tremendous loss.

Next in importance, or perhaps even of more importance than the character of the hands, comes the character of the machinery in use. The entire machinery of a mill may be said to change every twenty years, just as the entire material of the human body is said to change every seven years, or eleven years—I forget which. I asked one mill superintendent, a veteran who has seen the inside of about every mill in the country, what he looked at most carefully upon entering a rival establishment. “First the machinery, then the hands.” Nine-tenths of the machinery used in cotton and woolen manufacture, ninety-nine hundredths of that used in shoe making, and all of that used in paper-mills is made in this country. In cotton-mills we still use English carders, as the machines for cleaning the cotton from small imperfections are called. In return for their carders we have given the English the most important improvement made in cotton manufacture during this generation—the Rabbeth spindle, which makes ten thousand revolutions a minute, as against half that speed with the old-fashioned spindle. It has been estimated by General William F. Draper, an expert on the subject, that the Rabbeth spindle, invented in 1866 by Francis J. Rabbeth, of Ilion, N. Y., has effected a saving of $100,000,000 to this country since its introduction about 1870. In equipping a new factory there is always a certain advantage over older establishments, thanks to changes and improvements in the machinery. What is done to-day in the new mills just finished at the South would astonish the mill-hands of twenty years ago. As a rule, these changes in cotton machinery have been introduced without opposition. The spinning and weaving, for instance, are paid for by the piece, so that the introduction of the Rabbeth spindle, doing twice the work and requiring actually less care and watchfulness on the part of the operator, found its champions as well as its detractors. In some trades, however, the spirit that led to the breaking-up of Arkwright’s spinning frames because they did so much work survives. The shoe manufacturers of Lynn have not yet dared to introduce a certain lasting machine largely employed in Europe and in certain western cities of this country because the lasters‘ trades union forbids its use. According to the leading shoemakers of Lynn, this machine would revolutionize the business. One firm has very recently induced the Lynn lasters’ union to consent to the introduction of two of these machines as experiments, the lasters themselves to try the machines and to fix the conditions under which they may be used if used at all. It is evident that in a big manufactory it is not everything to invent a labor-saving machine; endless tact must be used to induce the unions to allow its use. . . .

In all factory work it is essential to have as complete a system of checks upon defective work as possible, especially since the opposition of the unions to improved machinery has made payment by the piece obligatory. In cotton-mills to-day more than seventy per cent. of the hands are paid by the piece, in shoe factories ninety per cent., in brass-ware factories eighty per cent., and in paper-mills sixty per cent. The visitor to any big cotton-mill will notice that the spools of yarn from the spinners all bear a colored chalk mark, the finished roll of cloth from the looms a similar mark, and so on, from first to last, every piece of work bearing a mark, sometimes red, sometimes blue, all the colors and shades of the rainbow being used, and often two colors together. By this means each piece is traced back. The weaver who finds that the yarn furnished to her is defective in the spinning has only to examine the chalk-mark on the spool to find out who spun it, and so on through the whole operation till the finished piece of goods reaches the packer. . . .

A factory having been put up in a suitable spot, equipped with proper machinery, and a force of competent hands engaged, the important question arises: What kind of goods shall be made? This is a question to be decided by the persons who sell the product of the mill—the selling agents. Under the direction of these agents, the art director, so to speak, of the corporation seeks high and low for designs, takes suggestions where he can, employs designers and artists. We can surpass the world at machinery, but as yet we have to go to Paris for our designs. Each of the big mills where printed goods are made keeps its man in Paris watching the new designs and buying the best he can from the professional designers, of which there are a hundred in Paris, some of them earning as high as $20,000 a year. A designer of international reputation commands his own price, inasmuch as the design makes or mars the product; it sells or does not sell according to the favor the pattern meets with. The question is often asked: How do the men who make designs know what kind of goods the public is going to demand? The designs for next winter’s goods are already finished. How does the artist know that the fickle public is not going to discard all that it has admired this year, and go wild over what it now ignores? This year the colors are faint and suggestive; next year they may be kaleidoscopic in brilliancy. This year ladies' shoes run to a point, next year they may be square-toed. Upon an accurate forecast of the public’s whims in these matters depends success. Well, the truth seems to be that sudden or violent as these fluctuations appear, there is really an evolutionary process involved. Each style or fashion has in it the germs of what is to follow, perhaps visible only to experts, but to be discerned. The designer accents the peculiar attributes of a pattern that has found favor one year in order to create his design for the next season. The short life of a design is somewhat surprising. Out of the six or eight hundred patterns made during this last year by the largest calico-mill in the country it is not likely that ten will be called for two years hence. The designs ( the word design covering the texture of the material as well as its ornamentation) for every class of goods have to be virtually new every year, and the explanation given for this is hardly flattering to the fair wearers of these pretty mousselines, lawns, organdies, cashmeres, serges, and brocades.

“Not only,” said a mill agent, “do fashions change in a bewildering way, and a most expensive way to us manufacturers, but they have a way of changing so radically that new goods may be wholly unsalable if they bear any resemblance to the dress goods in demand last year. Why? Simply because a woman who buys a new dress wants a pattern and a color wholly different from that of her last year’s frock, in order that there may be no question as to its being a new frock. She not only wants a different design, but a very different one, so that he, or more probably, she, who runs may see that it is a new dress.”. . . .

The element of chance thus enters more or less into any manufacture dependent upon changes of fashion. As the styles for summer have to be made in winter, and those for winter in summer, a manufacturer cannot wait to see what the public wants; he has to take his chances. What he has made may or may not meet with favor. If it does not, his whole product will have to be sold at cost or less, to be sent to the confines of civilization. Upon the other hand, fortunes are often made when fashion veers in favor of a particular style of goods. . . .

Some factories, usually very small ones, depend wholly upon novelties. Each year some new trifle comes up upon which the whole establishment is put to work. Holiday goods, the trifles sold by sidewalk peddlers, and many cheap toys are of this class where the ingenuity of the deviser or designer is everything. Of a curious character was a small factory near Philadelphia, devoted wholly at one time to the manufacture of hoaxes sold through advertisement. Among the notable successes of this precious establishment was a device warranted to kill the potato-bug. Thousands of farmers sent their half-dollars in exchange for two little slabs of wood with the directions: “Place the bug between these two blocks of wood and press hard.” This seems scarcely worth noting as an industry, and yet incredible sums of money are made out of the manufacture of things hardly less trivial. Many readers may remember the vogue of a wooden ball fastened to a rubber string, so that the ball when thrown returned to the hand. It is said that the patentee and manufacturer of that toy made $80,000 in one season from it.

The demand for novelties, always novelties, imposes a constant expense and drain upon all manufacturing corporations, and yet it is the novelties that offer the greatest field for profit. Staple goods not affected by fashion must be sold almost at cost because every mill can make them, and the stocks of such goods on hand are always enormous. When orders are scarce and a mill agent hesitates about letting his hands go for fear that he may not be able to get the best of them back in time of need, the force may be used in turning out coarse staple goods, sure to find a market some day. But such work offers only a minimum margin of profit. One case of fancy goods that sell well brings in a larger profit than one hundred cases of some staple article that every mill in the country, North and South, can turn out. Novelty is the cry of all manufacturers. Give us something new to make. Every year the mills of this country turn out from three to five thousand new designs, of which perhaps one thousand find a profitable sale.

A factory having produced a stock of goods from the best designs to be obtained by its agents here and abroad, the next step is to sell at a profit. Twenty-five years ago the mill or factory sold all its goods to the jobbers, who in turn distributed them to the retailers throughout the country. Each mill had its selling agents who undertook to dispose of its product to the jobbers. A retailer could buy nothing directly from the agent of the mill. Within the last ten or fifteen years the small jobber has been eliminated. In 1850 there were half a hundred dry-goods jobbers in New York City and as many in Boston all doing a good business. Today the number has dwindled to half a dozen in each city. The same thing is true of Philadelphia and Chicago. Only a few of the very largest jobbing houses have survived. The selling agents of the mills now go direct to the retailer, because the retailers have in many instances become buyers upon a much larger scale than the small jobber of former days. Go into the Boston or New York office of the agent of any important mill, and you will find plenty of samples and clerks, but almost no buyers. The agent now goes to the buyer. The agent of the largest cotton-mill in western Massachusetts told me that he sent his men to every large drygoods shop in Boston every day, and his partner in New York did the same thing there. At certain seasons Boston and New York, twenty-five or thirty years ago, were overrun with the buyers of dry-goods houses from all parts of the country. There were hotels and even newspapers devoted to these buyers and their doings. Much of this business has passed away. To-day the travelling men, “drummers,” of the mills and the few large jobbing houses that have survived, scour the country, taking their samples to the retailer. A few large jobbers, doing an immense business, still survive in all our large centres because they have the machinery for the distribution of goods in channels where it is not worth the while of the agent to enter—small shops in small towns. The small jobber who gave up business when he found the mills selling directly to the retail shops who could buy even more goods at a time than he could, had neither the capital nor the army of travelling men necessary to do business upon this scale. The jobber who could buy five thousand cases of goods at a time, and had the machinery and the means for disposing of it, survives because the mills sell cheapest to the largest buyer, and the jobber who buys on this scale is more important that even the largest retail store. But the small jobber, buying one hundred cases of the same goods, gets no better terms than the big retailer and has therefore no excuse for being. Some of the big department stores now obtain a monopoly of certain patterns or designs by taking the whole output of the mill, thus doing what was formerly in the power of only the greatest of jobbers.

The object of the country merchant in sending his buyer to New York or Boston every year was to get a more attractive stock than that obtained by his rival on the next block, and at better prices. The buyer comes no more to headquarters. A few big jobbers send their men to him, as I have said, and supplement these visits in the following way: The big jobber’s travelling man, making a specialty, say of the eastern end of Long Island, and having a number of customers in that region, not only takes his samples over the route several times each season, but he promises his customer that when novelties of importance or goods at extraordinarily low prices appear in New York he will take care that some are sent out to this customer. The travelling man has an accurate knowledge of the selling capacity of his customer, and an agreement with him to the effect that the country merchant will take a certain amount of whatever goods the “drummer” may see fit to send him in an emergency. Much depends, as will be seen, upon the judgment of this latter. If he abuses his privilege, there will be trouble. If, on the contrary, he acts with good judgment, he will be invaluable.

Now suppose that one day a certain mill comes to the house in New York with the offer of a big stock of new and fashionable goods, or goods at a remarkably low price; the outside force is called together and an estimate is made of the quantity of such goods that can be distributed. The Long Island man puts down this customer of his for three cases, that one for one case, and some one else for half a case. The jobbing house may be able, by taking the whole country, to buy the whole stock of this pattern from the mill, thus getting exceptional terms and a monopoly of the pattern. The country merchant who gets the goods, of which his rival across the way can get none, will make money or lose it according to their desirability. He may receive too many goods in this way, in which case he can restrict the privilege of the New York house, or he may find that he could have sold five times as much of a cheap and popular style of goods as he received. I have been told of instances in which five thousand cases of printed calicoes, or about eight million yards, have been disposed of in this way in one morning by the largest jobbing house in this country.

The search for a foreign outlet for American manufacturers began more than half a century ago and still goes on. Every year some new market is discovered. Our old competitor, England, fights hard, but we can often beat her on her own ground. Everyone may know that we send our New England cotton-cloth to the British colonies by the thousand cases, but it may be news to many that 25,000 American ploughs went to the Argentine Republic last year, and that the thousands of watches distributed to the Japanese army as rewards of bravery were made in this country. American trademarks have always been and now are of exceptional value the world over, and this notwithstanding the frequent imitations of them practised by foreign competitors in the past. . . .

It should also be said that nearly all the English houses which had imitated American marks, in many cases ignorantly, being instructed to copy certain brands from patterns furnished them by their customers abroad, promptly discontinued the practice when the facts were made known to them. No less than twenty-seven imitations of one American brand were thus voluntarily withdrawn. For years past, however, the export of American cotton goods to India and China has more than resumed its old proportions, the shipments for 1896 having exceeded those of any previous year.

Source: Philip G. Hubert, Jr., “The Businss of a Factory,” Scribner’s, vol. 21 (January-June 1897): 306–331.

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A Thorn in the Side: A Socialist Takes Aim at Gompers: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

A Thorn in the Side: A Socialist Takes Aim at Gompers

During the 1890s, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was faced with both the rising popularity of the People’s Party in rural areas and attempts by the Populist movement to create a farmer-labor alliance. At the same time, socialist trade unionists lobbied for greater political involvement and adoption of several key socialist positions by the AFL. One of those socialist trade unionists was J. Mahlon Barnes, a Philadelphia cigar maker, member of the Cigarmakers’ International Union, and member of the Socialist Labor Party. Barnes was a sharp critic of longtime AFL leader Samuel Gompers. In 1894 he played a key role in the only defeat that Gompers suffered in election to the AFL presidency. In this 1896 speech in Boston, Barnes chided Gompers and like-minded mainstream labor leaders for refusing to endorse socialism and, more generally, any form of direct political action.

And what is pure and simpledom doing to meet the changed conditions which confront us?

By boycotting? How are the unemployed or the employed proletaires to strike with the boycott the great steel rail or structural steel trust, or the Carnegie interests? By walking from home to shop, or from Boston to New York, Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, or Chicago? By not trading in a department store or business house built of structural steel? By not crossing a bridge constructed of steel beams? You would have to stay at home beside the stove, providing it is not boycotted, to do that! Armour telegraphed one of his agents in a small town in Pennsylvania: “See to it that Jones does no more killing.” Armour alone sells meat in that town now—boycotted—shall we become vegetarians?

You might as well attempt to meet Gatling guns in the hands of the militia or steel cruisers armed with revolving guns throwing solid Sterling projectiles with bows, arrows and pop guns as to use the crude and antiquated weapons of the craft guilds of the middle ages, which the trades unions have used against small employers, but they are woefully out of place against the masterly combinations of concentrated and organized capital at the close of the nineteenth century.

You can just about as much batter down monopoly with the boycott and wring material concessions from organized capital through strikes, with the law, the machinery of the State, and the power and armament of government on land and sea against you, as you can batter down the great granite shaft on Bunker Hill with a battering ram pointed with a pumpkin or a labor fakir’s head.

Mind you, we do not undervalue the potency of strikes nor ignore the necessity of boycotts. We Socialists are the best, the most persistent and the most uncompromising strikers and boycotters on earth. . . . But we Socialists desire to extend the power of trades unions and of the working class by uniting political action with economic resistance. We propose to use the highest intellectual weapon known to man; that which has come to us through 600 years of struggle in which the brain and brawn of Roman, Dane, Celt and Saxon and Norman was commingled, and we propose to unite the ballot with the strike and boycott.

In England and the United States trades unions preceded Socialism. Our spirit is now slowly but persistently, and I believe triumphantly, entering the body of the rank and file of organized labor. It has already done so to considerable extent in the large cities, and is gradually permeating the most alert and intelligent men and women in the ranks of labor.

The new trades union has secured a firm foothold, and all the fakirs from fakirdom cannot permanently impede it. . . . In 1894 a popular vote on the now famous tenth plank, out of 5,700 votes cast, 4,300 were for its adoption; the carpenters' vote was an indorsement also, the horse-shoers, shoemakers and miners and street-railway men, although some of their alleged representatives of these crafts at the Denver A. F. of L. convention ignored their instructions because they thought themselves more brainy than their constituents.

Our European brothers are long ago in the political field. . . .

What is all this, let me ask you in all seriousness, but the broader and more-intelligent application of trades union methods? To strike down the representatives of capitalism in the supreme law-making bodies of the world, and placing therein the representatives of organized labor is the kind of a strike that ever can be engaged in.

To refuse to vote money out of the pockets of the people to be expended for powder, bullets and guns, to make your sons bayonet-bearers and cannon-fodder, to orphan your brother and widow your sisters, to break mothers' hearts and fill the land with tears and blood so that plutocracy may survive and barbarism perpetuate itself—that is the most sublime boycott conceivable to the mind of man.

But at the exact point where old trades unionism raises the white flag, Socialism raises the red flag, and insists that there is a class struggle and that capitalism can and must be disarmed at the ballot box, where the workers outnumber its cohorts a thousand to one.

Let me point out to you the fundamental difference between this—the method of Socialism, and the methods of pure and simpledom.

We have had, upon the economic field, such reverses as came to us from Homestead, Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Milwaukee, etc , from which even the most fossilized trades unionist cannot possibly draw more than the “sweet use of adversity.” If concentration of wealth into the hands of the few necessitates the pauperization of the masses proportioned to the perfection of machinery, the reduction of wages and increased precariousness of the position of the wage earners, then it follows that the power of resistance on the part of the worker becomes constantly more feeble—defeats more certain and frequent, and victories like angel’s visits, fewer and farther between. The result is the logical and necessary outcome of conditions—is certain, absolute and inevitable—and it is discouraging and disheartening to trades unionists and all who sympathize with labor.

Mark now the difference. With honest leaders who will preach the truth and labor for class-consciousness, the great lessons taught by the failures will intensify class feeling, rending more and more clearly apparent the necessity of political action, and as every election, municipal, state and national, registers the growth of class-consciousness, we shall go, instead of from defeat to defeat, like scourged hounds, from triumph to victory as our growing numbers pass in review, and as the unconquerable hosts of labor, armed with the freeman’s ballot, come nearer and nearer possessing themselves of the functions of governmental power, legislative, judicial and executive.

I know very well the pure and simple leaders call us dreamers; but are you [not] quite sure that they themselves are either asleep, or blind, or both?

Dreamers! Indeed? So was Moses, marching out of plague-smitten Egypt with hope-uplifted Israel. So was Luther of Worms defying Rome in her pride of power—the noblest of all the noble there. So was Wilborforce, who smote the conscience of England for more than twenty years, until at last his countrymen became ashamed to longer deal in human flesh and blood. And so was Warren, the finest and loftiest type of the Revolutionary hero, when his young life’s blood reddened Bunker Hill, so that fair-browed Freedom should be safe in her new-found Western refuge. And so was Garrison, the iron-hearted, whom you have placed in magnificent bronze overlooking the Commons.

Darkness or light, justice or might, slavery or freedom, Socialism or capitalism, that is the real issue which confronts the world to-day, and it will not down at the bidding of labor fakirs or the politicians, and it must be met and settled, and it will remain unsettled until it is settled right.

Source: Mahlon Barnes, “‘Trades Unions: Their Logical Mission in the Propagation of Socialism,’ Address Delivered under the Auspices of the People’s Union, at Well’s Memorial Hall, Boston, 28 June 1896,” The People (New York), 26 July 1896.

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The Gospel According to Andrew: Carnegie's Hymn to Wealth: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

The Gospel According to Andrew: Carnegie’s Hymn to Wealth

In his essay “Wealth,” published in North American Review in 1889, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie argued that individual capitalists were duty bound to play a broader cultural and social role and thus improve the world. Some labor activists sharply differed with Carnegie’s point-of-view and responded with essays of their own, such as the Pennsylvania trade unionists who protested Carnegie’s gift of a library to the city of New Castle by pointing out that it had been built with the “sweat and blood of thousands of workers.” Carnegie’s essay, below, later became famous under the title “The Gospel of Wealth.” (Click here to hear an audio version of an excerpt from that speech.)

We accept and welcome . . . as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves great inequality of environment, the concentration of business—industrial and commercial—in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these as being not only beneficial but essential for the future progress of the race. Having accepted these, it follows that there must be great scope for the exercise of special ability in the merchant and in the manufacturer who has to conduct affairs upon a great scale. That this talent for organization and management is rare among men is proved by the fact that it invariably secures for its possessor enormous rewards, no matter where or under what laws or conditions. The experienced in affairs always rate the man whose services can be obtained as a partner as not only the first consideration but such as to render the question of his capital scarcely worth considering, for such men soon create capital; while, without the special talent required, capital soon takes wings.

Such men become interested in firms or corporations using millions; and estimating only simple interest to be made upon the capital invested, it is inevitable that their income must exceed their expenditures and that they must accumulate wealth. Nor is there any middle ground which such men can occupy, because the great manufacturing or commercial concern which does not earn at least interest upon its capital soon becomes bankrupt. It must either go forward or fall behind: to stand still is impossible. It is a condition essential for its successful operation that it should be thus far profitable, and even that, in addition to interest on capital, it should make profit. It is a law, as certain as any of the others named, that men possessed of this peculiar talent for affairs, under the free play of economic forces, must, of necessity, soon be in receipt of more revenue than can be judiciously expended upon themselves; and this law is as beneficial for the race as the others.

Objections to the foundations upon which society is based are not in order because the condition of the race is better with these than it has been with any others which have been tried. Of the effect of any new substitutes proposed, we cannot be sure. The socialist or anarchist who seeks to overturn present conditions is to be regarded as attacking the foundation upon which civilization itself rests, for civilization took its start from the day that the capable, industrious workman said to his incompetent and lazy fellow, “If thou dost not sow, thou shalt not reap,” and thus ended primitive Communism by separating the drones from the bees. One who studies this subject will soon be brought face to face with the conclusion that upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends—the right of the laborer to his $100 in the savings bank, and equally the legal right of the millionaire to his millions.

To those who propose to substitute Communism for this intense individualism the answer, therefore, is: The race has tried that. All progress from that barbarous day to the present time has resulted from its displacement. Not evil, but good, has come to the race from the accumulation of wealth by those who have the ability and energy that produce it. But even if we admit for a moment that it might be better for the race to discard its present foundation, individualism—that it is a nobler ideal that man should labor, not for himself alone but in and for a brotherhood of his fellows and share with them all in common, realizing Swedenborg’s idea of heaven, where, as he says, the angels derive their happiness, not from laboring for self but for each other—even admit all this, and a sufficient answer is: This is not evolution, but revolution.

It necessitates the changing of human nature itself—a work of aeons, even if it were good to change it, which we cannot know. It is not practicable in our day or in our age. Even if desirable theoretically, it belongs to another and long-succeeding sociological stratum. Our duty is with what is practicable now; with the next step possible in our day and generation. It is criminal to waste our energies in endeavoring to uproot, when all we can profitably or possibly accomplish is to bend the universal tree of humanity a little in the direction most favorable to the production of good fruit under existing circumstances.

We might as well urge the destruction of the highest existing type of man because he failed to reach our ideal as to favor the destruction of individualism, private property, the law of accumulation of wealth, and the law of competition; for these are the highest results of human experience, the soil in which society so far has produced the best fruit. Unequally or unjustly, perhaps, as these laws sometimes operate, and imperfect as they appear to the idealist, they are, nevertheless, like the highest type of man, the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished.

We start, then, with a condition of affairs under which the best interests of the race are promoted, but which inevitably gives wealth to the few. Thus far, accepting conditions as they exist, the situation can be surveyed and pronounced good. The question then arises—and, if the foregoing be correct, it is the only question with which we have to deal—What is the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded have thrown it into the hands of the few? And it is of this great question that I believe I offer the true solution. It will be understood that fortunes are here spoken of, not moderate sums saved by many years of effort, the returns from which are required for the comfortable maintenance and education of families. This is not wealth but only competence, which it should be the aim of all to acquire.

There are but three modes in which surplus wealth can be disposed of. It can be left to the families of the decedents; or it can be bequeathed for public purposes; or, finally, it can be administered during their lives by its possessors. Under the first and second modes most of the wealth of the world that has reached the few has hitherto been applied. Let us in turn consider each of these modes.

The first is the most injudicious. In monarchical countries, the estates and the greatest portion of the wealth are left to the first son that the vanity of the parent may be gratified by the thought that his name and title are to descend to succeeding generations unimpaired. The condition of this class in Europe today teaches the futility of such hopes or ambitions. The successors have become impoverished through their follies or from the fall in the value of land. Even in Great Britain the strict law of entail has been found inadequate to maintain the status of an hereditary class. Its soil is rapidly passing into the hands of the stranger. Under republican institutions the division of property among the children is much fairer, but the question which forces itself upon thoughtful men in all lands is: Why should men leave great fortunes to their children? If this is done from affection, is it not misguided affection? Observation teaches that, generally speaking, it is not well for the children that they should be so burdened. Neither is it well for the state. Beyond providing for the wife and daughters moderate sources of income, and very moderate allowances indeed, if any, for the sons, men may well hesitate, for it is no longer questionable that great sums bequeathed oftener work more for the injury than for the good of the recipients. Wise men will soon conclude that, for the best interests of the members of their families and of the state, such bequests are an improper use of their means.

It is not suggested that men who have failed to educate their sons to earn a livelihood shall cast them adrift in poverty. If any man has seen fit to rear his sons with a view to their living idle lives, or, what is highly commendable, has instilled in them the sentiment that they are in a position to labor for public ends without reference to pecuniary considerations, then, of course, the duty of the parent is to see that such are provided for in moderation. There are instances of millionaires' sons unspoiled by wealth, who, being rich, still perform great services in the community. Such are the very salt of the earth, as valuable as, unfortunately, they are rare; still it is not the exception but the rule that men must regard, and, looking at the usual result of enormous sums conferred upon legatees, the thoughtful man must shortly say, “I would as soon leave to my son a curse as the almighty dollar,” and admit to himself that it is not the welfare of the children but family pride which inspires these enormous legacies.

As to the second mode, that of leaving wealth at death for public uses, it may be said that this is only a means for the disposal of wealth, provided a man is content to wait until he is dead before it becomes of much good in the world. Knowledge of the results of legacies bequeathed is not calculated to inspire the brightest hopes of much posthumous good being accomplished. The cases are not few in which the real object sought by the testator is not attained, nor are they few in which his real wishes are thwarted. In many cases the bequests are so used as to become only monuments of his folly.

It is well to remember that it requires the exercise of not less ability than that which acquired the wealth to use it so as to be really beneficial to the community. Besides this, it may fairly be said that no man is to be extolled for doing what he cannot help doing, nor is he to be thanked by the community to which he only leaves wealth at death. Men who leave vast sums in this way may fairly be thought men who would not have left it at all had they been able to take it with them. The memories of such cannot be held in grateful remembrance, for there is no grace in their gifts. It is not to be wondered at that such bequests seem so generally to lack the blessing.

The growing disposition to tax more and more heavily large estates left at death is a cheering indication of the growth of a salutary change in public opinion. The state of Pennsylvania now takes—subject to some exceptions—one-tenth of the property left by its citizens. The budget presented in the British Parliament the other day proposes to increase the death duties; and, most significant of all, the new tax is to be a graduated one. Of all forms of taxation, this seems the wisest. Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.

It is desirable that nations should go much further in this direction. Indeed, it is difficult to set bounds to the share of a rich man’s estate which should go at his death to the public through the agency of the state, and by all means such taxes should be graduated, beginning at nothing upon moderate sums to dependents and increasing rapidly as the amounts swell, until, of the millionaire’s hoard as of Shylock’s, at least——-The other half comes to the privy coffer of the state.

This policy would work powerfully to induce the rich man to attend to the administration of wealth during his life, which is the end that society should always have in view, as being that by far most fruitful for the people. Nor need it be feared that this policy would sap the root of enterprise and render men less anxious to accumulate, for to the class whose ambition it is to leave great fortunes and be talked about after their death, it will attract even more attention, and, indeed, be a somewhat nobler ambition to have enormous sums paid over to the state from their fortunes.

There remains, then, only one mode of using great fortunes; but in this we have the true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth, the reconciliation of the rich and the poor—a reign of harmony—another ideal, differing, indeed, from that of the Communist in requiring only the further evolution of existing conditions, not the total overthrow of our civilization. It is founded upon the present most intense individualism, and the race is prepared to put it in practice by degrees whenever it pleases. Under its sway we shall have an ideal state in which the surplus wealth of the few will become, in the best sense, the property of the many, because administered for the common good; and this wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves. Even the poorest can be made to see this and to agree that great sums gathered by some of their fellow citizens and spent for public purposes, from which the masses reap the principal benefit, are more valuable to them than if scattered among them through the course of many years in trifling amounts.

Poor and restricted are our opportunities in this life; narrow our horizon; our best work most imperfect; but rich men should be thankful for one inestimable boon. They have it in their power during their lives to busy themselves in organizing benefactions from which the masses of their fellows will derive lasting advantage, and thus dignify their own lives. The highest life is probably to be reached, not by such imitation of the life of Christ as Count Tolstoi gives us but, while animated by Christ’s spirit, by recognizing the changed conditions of this age and adopting modes of expressing this spirit suitable to the changed conditions under which we live; still laboring for the good of our fellows, which was the essence of his life and teaching, but laboring in a different manner.

This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: first, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the man of wealth thus becoming the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves. . . .

In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves; to provide part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so; to give those who desire to rise the aids by which they may rise; to assist, but rarely or never to do all. Neither the individual nor the race is improved by almsgiving. Those worthy of assistance, except in rare cases, seldom require assistance. The really valuable men of the race never do, except in cases of accident or sudden change. Everyone has, of course, cases of individuals brought to his own knowledge where temporary assistance can do genuine good, and these he will not overlook. But the amount which can be wisely given by the individual for individuals is necessarily limited by his lack of knowledge of the circumstances connected with each. He is the only true reformer who is as careful and as anxious not to aid the unworthy as he is to aid the worthy, and, perhaps, even more so, for in almsgiving more injury is probably done by rewarding vice than by relieving virtue. . . .

Thus is the problem of rich and poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; entrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself. The best minds will thus have reached a stage in the development of the race in which it is clearly seen that there is no mode of disposing of surplus wealth creditable to thoughtful and earnest men into whose hands it flows save by using it year by year for the general good.

This day already dawns. But a little while, and although, without incurring the pity of their fellows, men may die sharers in great business enterprises from which their capital cannot be or has not been withdrawn, and is left chiefly at death for public uses, yet the man who dies leaving behind him millions of available wealth, which was his to administer during life, will pass away “unwept, unhonored, and unsung,” no matter to what uses he leaves the dross which he cannot take with him. Of such as these the public verdict will then be: “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”

Such, in my opinion, is the true gospel concerning wealth, obedience to which is destined some day to solve the problem of the rich and the poor, and to bring "Peace on earth, among men goodwill."

Source: North American Review (June 1889). Reprinted in The Annals of America, vol. 11, 1884–1894 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968), 222–226.

See Also:Carnegie Speaks: A Recording of the Gospel of Wealth

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Gompers Calls for Action Over Cripple Creek: home | many pasts | evidence | www.history | blackboard | reference talking history | syllabi | students | teachers | puzzle | about us

Gompers Calls for Action Over Cripple Creek

The American West’s history of radical unionism at the turn of the century reflects the breadth of nineteenth-century class struggle. In Cripple Creek, Colorado, for example, violent conflict broke out in 1903 between members of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and corporate mining interests determined to crush the union. Before it was over, thirty men were dead and the union was defeated. Though hostile to the Socialist-leaning WFM, American Federal of Labor leader Samuel Gompers issued the following June 20, 1904, statement in support of the striking miners at Cripple Creek.

American Federation of Labor,

Washington, D. C., June 20, 1904

To Organized Labor of America, Greeting:

You are fairly or fully familiar with the outrageous condition of affairs which exists in Colorado, and, therefore, a brief résumé here will be preferable to details which may be learned through another and more convenient source. Suffice it to say that in Colorado to-day all semblance of civil law and constitutional rights are trampled under foot and flagrantly violated. The rule of gun and bayonet is supreme, and doing the bidding of the most unscrupulous organization of men, who are prompted by no other thought or purpose than avarice, greed, and power—the mine owners—organized as the Citizens' Alliance. They have Governor Peabody absolutely under their thumb. He is doing their bidding and carrying out the bargain entered into prior to his election, to prevent the enactment of the eight-hour law by the Colorado legislature, and which enactment is directly commanded by the constitution of that State.

There can be no question as to the fact that this gross violation of constitutional command, the failure to enact an eight-hour law, was the cause of the strike of the enforcement of an eight-hour work-day and the effort on the part of the mine owners to frustrate that effort by every means at their command, and the sending of the military forces by Governor Peabody to overawe the miners and to break the strike. Whatever lawlessness has been committed by either or both sides is due to the first lawless act of governor of Colorado and his continual usurpation of power and exercise of tyranny and brute force.

Surely it is entirely superfluous and unnecessary for us too say that we have no excuse to offer for crime committed no matter by whom and that there are certain policies pursued by the Western Federation of Miners that run counter to those advocated by the American Federation of Labor, but we submit that in the conception—and execution of justice there can not be and ought not to be one rule of law for one and another for the other among our people.

Under the combined domination in Colorado of the mine owners, the governor, and the military forces, the State courts have been unable or unwilling to accord men either a fair trial or any trial at all, or accord them the rights to which they were entitled under the constitution and law of the State and the United States, so that the judiciary in Colorado has largely yielded the civil rights and functions of the court to the combination of plutocracy and militarism.

If the striking miners have been guilty of the crime with which they are publicly charged, they should be arrested, indicted and tried by the courts of the State, and if found guilty by a jury of their peers, punished. But this should be by due process of law provided by the statute and the constitution of Colorado and by our country.

There can be no justifiable excuse for abolishing civil law and civil government in any district of Colorado and establishing military rule so long as there is one district in all the State in which a trial in the civil courts, before an impartial an unprejudiced jury, is possible.

Weeks have elapsed since the dynamite disaster by which many men were killed and wounded at Victor, Colo., yet not one scintilla of evidence, either official or unofficial, has been vouchsafed the public connecting the striking miners or their organization with that disaster. Yet men have been placed under military arrest, thrown into the bull pen without any charge having been made against them by any complainant, judge or grand jury.

The mine owners, under the assumed name of the Citizens' Alliance, have unceremoniously summoned the officers elected by the people and demanded their resignations, and if they either refused or hesitated, ropes with nooses at the end were flung at their feet, the alternative given them for signing their already prepared resignations or be hanged.

Men against whom no charge, either direct or indirect, was made, were dragged bodily from their homes by armed guards, placed on trains and deported from the State.

The Citizens‘ Alliance has declared “Death to unionism in the Cripple Creek district,” and this is evidently its purpose, though its members have for strategic reasons, moderated that declaration. Nor do they have in mind the Cripple creek district alone, but organized labor of the entire country, for all will readily understand that the mine owners’ organization of Colorado, that is the Citizens' Alliance, is an offshoot of the “Parry” species of antagonism, regardless of the attitude which the trade-union movement may take.

In view of the critical situation of affairs in Colorado, and the fact that there is not now and may not for some time be a fair opportunity for the miners of Colorado to have accorded them and maintained by the courts of that State the rights to which the men are entitled, both in accordance with the laws and constitution of Colorado and the United States, we are firmly of the opinion that their only redress is to and through Federal courts of the United States.

And inasmuch as there are unlimited millions at the disposal of the mine owners of Colorado in their lawless and brutal attempt to rob the men of their organization and their liberty (and if they deem necessary of their lives), in the interest not only of the labor movement but in the interest of justice and right, fair dealing, the protection of the rights and liberties and lives—the rights for which the labor movement stands—we appeal to all organized labor and friends to give not only their moral but financial assistance, so that the great questions of constitutional liberty, human rights and civil government may be properly presented and defended and we hope finally proclaimed and sustained by the Federal courts of our country.

A special session of the Colorado legislature must be called at once to comply with the command of the State constitution and enact an eight-hour law with proper penalty provisions against its violation. The legislature must hold to a strict accountability all who have violated statutory, constitutional and fundamental law and human rights. In the meantime every effort should be made by all lovers of their fellows to bring to an amicable adjustment the industrial situations which now obtain in Colorado. The freedom of principles of our Republic, the progress of civilization are hanging n the balance.

Send all financial contributions to maintain the legal rights of Colorado miners to Mr. W. D. Haywood, secretary of the Western Federation of Miners, 625 Exchange Building, Denver, Colo.

Fraternally yours,

[SEAL] SAML. GOMPERS, PRESIDENT

Attest:

Frank Morrison, Secretary,

James Duncan, First Vice-President

John Mitchell, Second Vice-President,

James O’Connell, Third Vice-President,

Max Morris, Fourth Vice-President,

Thos. I. Kidd, Fifth Vice-President,

D. A. Hayes, Sixth Vice-President,

Daniel J. Keefe, Seventh Vice-President,

William J. Spencer, Eighth Vice-President,

John B. Lennon, Treasurer,

Executive Council American Federation of Labor.

Source: U.S. Congress, A Report on Labor Disturbances in Colorado from 1880 to 1904, Inclusive (Washington, D.C., 1905), 278–80.

See Also:Playing for the Press: Strike Coverage by the Media Ideas in Conflict: Opposing Views of the Cripple Creek Strike Union-Busting at Cripple Creek

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The Supreme Court Strikes Down Railroad Regulation

During the “Gilded Age” of the 1880s and 1890s, the influence of large-scale corporations dominated not just the U.S. Congress but also the courts. Nowhere was this more evident than in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the 1886 Wabash case, excerpted below. With Wabash, the Court overturned its 1879 decision (Munn v. Illinois) allowing states to regulate railroads. Perverting the original intent of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court decreed that corporations were legally “persons” entitled to the Amendment’s protections. (Just three years earlier, the Court had ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional on the basis that the Fourteenth Amendment was binding only on states, not individuals, thereby severely jeopardizing the very rights—of freed slaves—the amendment was explicitly designed to protect.) The Wabash case barred states from regulating interstate commerce, asserting that only the federal government could do so. In 1887, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, which railroad barons found more appealing than the more restrictive state laws.

Although the precise point presented by this case may not have been heretofore decided by this court, the general subject of the power of the State legislature to regulate taxes, fares, and tolls for passengers and transportation of freight over railroads within their limits has been very much considered recently. . . and the question how far such regulations, made by the States and under State authority are valid or void, as they may affect the transportation of goods through more than one State, in one voyage, is not entirely new here. The supreme court of Illinois, in the case now before us, conceding that each of these contracts was in itself a unit, and that the pay received by the Illinois railroad company was the compensation for the entire transportation from the point of departure in the State of Illinois to the city of New York, holds that, while the statute of Illinois is inoperative upon that part of the contract which has reference to the transportation outside of the State, it is binding and effectual as to so much of the transportation as was within the limits of the State of Illinois and undertaking for itself to apportion the rates charged over the whole route, decides that the contract and the receipt of the money for so much of it as was performed within the State of Illinois violate the statute of the State on that subject.

If the Illinois statute could be construed to apply exclusively to contracts for a carriage which begins and ends within the State, disconnected from a continuous transportation through or into other States, there does not seem to be any difficulty in holding it to be valid. For instance, a contract might be made to carry goods from Cairo to Chicago, or from Chicago to Alton. The charges for these might be within the competency of the Illinois Legislature to regulate. The reason for this is that both the charge and the actual transportation is such cases are exclusively confined to the limits of the territory of the State, and it is not commerce among the States, or interstate commerce, but it is exclusively commerce within the State. So far, therefore, as this class of transportation, as an element of commerce, is affected by the statute under consideration, it is not subject to the constitutional provision concerning commerce among the States. It has often been held in this court, and there can be no doubt about it, that there is a commerce wholly within the State which is not subject to the constitutional provision, and the distinction between commerce among the States and the other class of commerce between the citizens of a single State, and conducted within its limits exclusively, is one which has been fully recognized in this court, although it may not be always easy, where the lines of these classes approach each other, to distinguish between the one and the

other. . . .

It cannot be denied that the general language of the court in these cases [Munn v. Illinois, and others] upon the power of Congress to regulate commerce, may be susceptible of the meaning which the Illinois court places upon it. . . .

And it must be admitted that, in a general way, the court treated the cases before it as belonging to that class of regulations of commerce which, like pilotage, bridging navigable rivers, and many others, could be acted upon by the States in the absence of any legislation by Congress on the same subject. . . .

The applicability of this language [from Hall vs. De Cuir, 95 U.S. 485] to the case now under consideration, of a continuous transportation of goods from New York to Central Illinois, or from the latter to New York is obvious, and it is not easy to see how any distinction can be made. Whatever may be the instrumentalities by which the transportation from one point to the other is effected, it is but one voyage, as much so as that of the steamboat on the Mississippi River. It is not the railroads themselves that are regulated by this act of the Illinois Legislature so much as the charge for transportation, and in language just cited, if each one of the States through whose territories these goods are transported can fix its own rules for prices, for modes of transit, for times and modes of delivery, and all the other incidents of transportation to which the word “regulation” can be applied, it is readily seen that the embarrassments upon interstate transportation, as an element of interstate commerce, might be too oppressive to be submitted to. “It was,” in the language of the court cited above, “to meet just such a case that the commerce clause of the Constitution was adopted.”

It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the right of continuous transportation from one end of the country to the other is essential in modern times to that freedom of commerce from the restraints which the State might choose to impose upon it, that the commerce clause was intended to secure. This clause, giving Congress the power to regulate commerce among the States and with foreign nations, as this court has said before, was among the most important of the subjects which prompted the formation of the Constitution. And it would be very feeble and almost useless provision, but poorly adapted to secure the entire freedom of commerce among the States which was deemed essential to a more perfect union by the framers of the Constitution, if, at every stage of the transportation of goods and chattels through the country, the State within whose limits a part of this transportation must be done could impose regulations concerning the price, compensation, or taxation, or any other restrictive regulation interfering with and seriously embarrassing this commerce. . . .

We must, therefore, hold that it is not, and never has been, the deliberate opinion of a majority of this court that a statute of a State which attempts to regulate the fares and charges by railroad companies within its limits, for a transportation which constitutes a part of commerce among the States, is a valid law. . . .

Of the justice or propriety of the principle which lies at the foundation of the Illinois statute it is not the province of this court to speak. As restricted to a transportation which begins and ends within the limits of the State, it may be very just and equitable, and it certainly is the province of the state legislature to determine that question. But when it is attempted to apply to transportation through an entire series of States a principle of this kind, and each one of the States shall attempt to establish its own rates of transportation, its own methods to prevent discrimination in rates, or to permit it, the deleterious influence upon the freedom of commerce among the States, and upon the transit of goods through those States, cannot be overestimated. That this species of regulation is one which must be, if established at all, of a general and national character, and cannot be safely and wisely remitted to local rules and local regulations, we think is clear from what has already been said. And if it be a regulation of commerce, as we think we have demonstrated it is, and as the Illinois court concedes it to be, it must be of that national character; and the regulation can only appropriately exist by general rules and principles, which d

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