American Experiment (176 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing job, nothing job,

I return to Italy;

Comrades, laborers, good-bye;

Adieu, land of “Fourth of July.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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