490 Chapter 18 American Society in the Industrial Age
Working-Class Attitudes
Social workers and government officials made many
efforts in the 1880s and 1890s to find out how work-
ing people felt about all sorts of matters connected
with their jobs. Their reports reveal a wide spectrum
of opinion. To the question, asked of two Wisconsin
carpenters, “What new laws, in your opinion, ought
to be enacted?” one replied, “Keep down strikes and
rioters. Let every man attend to his own business.”
But the other answered, “Complete nationalization
of land and all ways of transportation. Burn all gov-
ernment bonds. A graduated income tax.... Abolish
child labor and [pass] any other act that capitalists say
is wrong.”
Every variation of opinion between these
extremes was expressed by working people in many
sections and in many kinds of work. In 1881 a female
textile worker in Lawrence, Massachusetts, said to an
interviewer, “If you will stand by the mill, and see the
people coming out, you will be surprised to see the
happy, contented look they all have.”
Despite such remarks and the general improve-
ment in living standards, it is clear, if only from the
large number of bitter strikes of the period, that there
was a considerable dissatisfaction among industrial
workers. Writing in 1885, the labor leader Terence V.
Powderly reported that “a deep-rooted feeling of dis-
content pervades the masses.”
The discontent had many causes. For some,
poverty was still the chief problem, but for others, ris-
ing aspirations triggered discontent. Workers were
confused about their destiny; the tradition that no one
of ability need remain a hired hand died hard. They
wanted to believe their bosses and the politicians when
those worthies voiced the old slogans about a classless
society and the community of interest of capital and
labor. “Our men,” William Vanderbilt of the New
York Central said in 1877, “feel that, although I...
may have my millions and they the rewards of their
daily toil, still we are about equal in the end. If they
suffer, I suffer, and if I suffer, they cannot escape.”
“The poor,” another conservative said a decade later,
“are not poor because the rich are rich.” Instead “the
service of capital” softened their lot and gave them
many benefits. Statements such as these, though self-
serving, were essentially correct. The rich were grow-
ing richer and more people were growing rich, but
ordinary workers were better off too. However, the
gap between the very rich and the ordinary citizen was
widening. “The tendency... is toward centralization
and aggregation,” the Illinois Bureau of Labor
Statistics reported in 1886. “This involves a separation
of the people into classes, and the permanently subor-
dinate status of large numbers of them.”
Working Your Way Up
To study mobility in a large industrial country is
extraordinarily difficult. Americans in the late nine-
teenth century believed their society offered great
opportunities for individual advancement, and to
prove it they pointed to men like Andrew Carnegie
and to other poor boys who accumulated large for-
tunes. How general was the rise from rags to riches
(or even to modest comfort) is another question.
Americans had been on the move, mostly, of
course, in a westward direction, since the colonial
period, but studies of census records show that there
was considerable geographic mobility in urban areas
throughout the last half of the nineteenth century
and into the twentieth. Most investigations reveal that
only about half the people recorded in one census
were still in the same place ten years later. The nation
had a vast reservoir of rootless people. For many, the
way to move up in the world was to move on.
In most of the cities studied, mobility was accom-
panied by some economic and social improvement. On
the average, about a quarter of the manual laborers
traced rose to middle-class status during their lifetimes,
and the sons of manual laborers were still more likely
to improve their place in society. In New York City
about a third of the Italian and Jewish immigrants of
the 1890s had risen from unskilled to skilled jobs a
decade later. Even in Newburyport, Massachusetts, a
town that was something of an economic backwater,
most laborers made some progress, though far fewer
rose to skilled or white-collar positions than in more
prosperous cities.
Such progress was primarily the result of the eco-
nomic growth the nation was experiencing and of the
energy and ambition of the people, native-born and
immigrant alike, who were pouring into the cities in
such numbers. The public education system gave an
additional boost to the upwardly mobile.
The history of American education after about
1870 reflects the impact of social and economic change.
Although Horace Mann, Henry Barnard, and others
had laid the foundations for state-supported school sys-
tems in the 1840s and 1850s (see Chapter 10), most of
these systems became compulsory only after the Civil
War, when the growth of cities provided the concentra-
tion of population and financial resources necessary for
economical mass education. In the 1860s about half the
children in the country were getting some formal edu-
cation, but this did not mean that half the children were
attending school at any one time. Sessions were short,
especially in rural areas, and many teachers were poorly
trained. President Calvin Coolidge noted in his autobi-
ography that the one-room school he attended in rural
Vermont in the 1880s was open only in slack seasons