Early social workers who visited the homes of industrial laborers in this period reported enormous differences in the standard of living of people engaged in the same line of work, differences related to such variables as health, intelligence, the wife’s ability as a homemaker, the degree of the family’s commitment to middle-class values, and pure luck. Some families spent most of their income on food; others saved substantial sums even when earning no more than $400 or $500 a year. Family incomes varied greatly among workers who received similar hourly wages, depending on the steadiness of employment and on the number of family members holding jobs.
Consider the cases of two Illinois coal miners, each a decent, hardworking union man with a large family, earning $1.50 a day in 1883. One was out of work nearly half the year; his income in 1883 was only $250. He, his wife, and their five children, ages three to nineteen, lived in a two-room tenement. They existed almost exclusively on a diet of bread and salt meat. Nevertheless, as an investigator reported, their home was neat and clean and three of the children were attending school.
The other miner, father of four children, worked full time and brought home $420 in 1883. He owned a six-room house and an acre of land, where the family raised vegetables. Their food bill for the year was more than ten times that of the family just described. These two solid families were probably similar in social attitudes and perhaps in political loyalties; but they had very different standards of living.
The cases of two families headed by railroad brakemen provide a different variation. One man brought home only $360 to house and feed a wife and eight children. Here is the report of a state official who interviewed the family: “Clothes ragged, children half-dressed and dirty. They all sleep in one room regardless of sex. . . . The entire concern is as wretched as could be imagined. Father is shiftless. . . . Wife is without ambition or industry.”
The other brakeman and his wife had only two children, and he earned $484 in 1883. They owned a well-furnished house, kept a cow, and raised vegetables for home consumption. Although they were far from rich, they managed to put aside enough for insurance, reading matter, and a few small luxuries.
A mother died, a father lost his leg—such calamities shattered poor urban families. Orphaned street urchins formed roving bands that pilfered food and picked the pockets of the well-to-do. Rather than put such children in orphanages, the Children's Aid Society in New York sent them to live with, and work for, farming families. From the 1850s until 1929, over 200,000 orphans were put on trains such as this one and sent to the West.
World History
