How Wage Earners Lived 333Out of doors, city life for the poor was almost
equally squalid. Slum streets were littered with
garbage and trash. Recreational facilities were almost
nonexistent. Police and fire protection in the cities
were pitifully inadequate. “Urban problems” were
less critical than a century later only because they
affected a smaller part of the population; for those
who experienced them, they were, all too often,
crushing. In the mid-1850s large numbers of children
in New York scrounged a bare existence by begging
and scavenging. They took shelter at night in coal
bins and empty barrels.
In the early factory towns, most working families
maintained small vegetable gardens and a few chickens;
low wage rates did not necessarily reflect a low stan-
dard of living. But in the new industrial slums even a
blade of grass was unusual. In 1851 the editor Horace
Greeley’s New York Tribune published a minimum
A girl stares blankly as the manager of an employment agency suggests her suitability as a maid or housekeeper. The lady, seated, ponders
whether the girl will do. The sign on the wall reads, “Agent for Domestics: Warranted Honest.” This painting is by William Henry Burr, 1849.
Source: Assession no. 1959.46 Collection of The New-York Historical Society.
weekly budget for a family of five. The budget, which
allowed nothing for savings, medical bills, recreation,
or other amenities (Greeley did include 12 cents a
week for newspapers), came to $10.37. Since the
weekly pay of a factory hand seldom reached $5, the
wives and children of most male factory workers also
had to labor in the factories merely to survive. And
child labor in the 1850s differed fundamentally from
child labor in the 1820s. The pace of the machines had
become much faster by then, and the working environ-
ment more debilitating.
Relatively few workers belonged to unions, but
federations of craft unions sprang up in some cities,
and during the boom that preceded the Panic of
1837, a National Trades Union representing a
few northeastern cities managed to hold conventions.
Early in the Jackson era, “workingmen’s” political par-
ties enjoyed a brief popularity, occasionally electing a