In comparison to Europe, the United States has been relatively free of class consciousness, but Americans have been acutely aware of race and ethnicity, with racial and ethnic prejudices often reinforced by differences in status. This tendency was strong in the Gilded Age in large part because of the huge influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe and China and by the migration of African Americans from the country into the city. The newcomers for the most part secured “foreign jobs”—the least desirable tasks at the lowest pay—and lived in poor housing in ethnic enclaves in city slums. Their poverty added to the contempt in which they were regarded (because of their Catholicism, Judaism, skin color, or strange tongues) by the children of earlier immigrants. Irish Americans were caricatured unmercifully in Harper’s Weekly by Thomas Nast (an immigrant from Germany), while eastern Europeans were disparaged as “Hunkies,” southern Europeans as “Dagos,” and Jews as “Sheenies.”
Ironically, while racial and ethnic prejudices were strengthened by status in the society at large, the same prejudices were echoed even within the working class, which was also divided by ethnic and religious differences. Employers like Captain William Jones, who managed Andrew Carnegie’s J. Edgar Thompson Steel Works, preferred to hire “young American boys judicially mixed” in ethnic backgrounds. However, this was not easily accomplished in the 1880s in Pennsylvania’s anthracite regions. The Knights of Labor was predominantly Irish, and the Amalgamated Association of Miners was English, Welsh, and German. Both unions tried, unsuccessfully, to attract either Slavs (who were mostly Poles) or Italians. By 1897, following the Lattimer massacre of immigrant strikers, the United Mine Workers had managed to unite the various ethnic groups. Even then, their leader John Mitchell still had to remind them that the coal they dug was not Irish coal or Slavic coal, but simply coal.
Industrial conditions were sufficiently harsh during the Gilded Age for workers to join labor unions, but workers were not class conscious enough to create a significant radical labor movement to overthrow, either peacefully or violently, the capitalist system. Apart from divisive ethnic and religious diversity, working-class consciousness was also hampered by the widespread belief in and hope for upward social mobility, a dream shared by virtually all Americans. Although very few individuals rose from rags to riches—Carnegie was a spectacular exception—modest gains were registered. The children of immigrants were often more skilled and enjoyed better housing than their parents, and their children were apt to be better educated, to own property, and to climb a rung up the social ladder. The American dream was realized, not spectacularly, but in small increments over generations, and these gains were sufficient to keep the hopes of all alive. Americans were also extremely mobile, and their frequent moves were made in anticipation of a better life.
The American political system also served to mute working-class consciousness. With universal male suffrage (blacks voted in large numbers in the South from the 1860s to the 1890s), most workers had the vote and thus were courted by the major parties. Although both the Republicans and Democrats had elitist leaders, they paid sufficient attention to labor to discourage the growth of labor or socialist parties. For example, both parties stressed that their opposite views of the TARIFF issue would benefit workers and their families. The labor vote divided between the two major parties and was further subdivided into ethnic and religious groups with little love for each other. Moreover, there was no solidarity between rural and urban laborers. Attempts to build a farmer-laborer political alliance failed most spectacularly in the 1896 presidential campaign of William Jennings Bryan. Workers felt more comfortable with William McKinley’s promises of industrial prosperity with sound money and protection than Bryan’s promise of farm relief through inflation.
See also immigration.
Further reading: Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964); Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973).
World History
