Social workers and government officials made many efforts in the 1880s and 1890s to find out how working 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 government 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 improvement 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 discontent pervades the masses.”
The discontent had many causes. For some, poverty was still the chief problem, but for others, rising 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 selfserving, were essentially correct. The rich were growing 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 subordinate status of large numbers of them.”
World History
