Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865

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AMERICAN STORIES

that education and an activist government could lift poor immigrants out of

despair, ill health, and foreign ways that were not conducive to success in the

world’s greatest democracy.

New inventions, new investments of money into large corporations, new

immigrants, and a shared belief that all could rise through hard work and

just pay set into motion the juggernaut of the U.S. economy. The frenzied

growth of cities, of industries, of the whole nation caused unprecedented

chaos, and from the chaos came experimentation—utopian thinking, unions,

city parks—that tried to make sense and harmony out of the disorder and

dislocation that accompanied rapid change.

Sadie Fr

owne: Sweatshop Seamstress

Imagine moving from rural Poland or Russia to New York City in 1890.

People in the Old Country traveled either on their own two feet or in the back

of a donkey-drawn wagon. They spoke Polish, Russian, German, and—if

they were Jewish—Yiddish (a mixture of medieval German and Hebrew),

but not English. Almost everyone farmed (except for the Russian Jews who

were conﬁned to small towns known as shtetls), and women were known to

do an equal share of the farm’s work. Jewish communities tended to be con-

servative,

women and men sitting segregated in the synagogue, with Sabbath

attendance essentially mandatory. Change had tiptoed carefully into village

life, custom, poverty, and history often chasing away innovation. That had

been Sadie Frowne’s life until the age of ten, when her father died. After that,

though Sadie’s mother was resourceful and strong, they had trouble getting

even their daily black bread and onions, let alone ﬁnding the money to pay

the six-dollar-a-month rent on their two rooms. One of Sadie’s aunts, Fanny,

had already gone to America. When Sadie turned thirteen, Aunt Fanny took

up a collection from relatives in America to book passage for Sadie and her

mother to join them all in New York City.

After twelve days in steerage—the dank, smelly belly of the ship, where

Sadie “thought we should die”

—they arrived at the gateway to opportunity.

Towering above them was the Statue of Liberty, which Sadie called “the big

woman with the spikes on her head,” which had just been dedicated in 1886.

The statue itself had also come by boat to America, a gift from the people

of France, shipped in 214 crates and assembled in the States, much like the

immigrant communities themselves. In the same way that Sadie’s American

relatives had pooled the money for her transit, it was the impoverished people

of New York who cobbled together $100,000 in pennies and nickels to pay

for the statue’s pedestal—the poor welcoming the poor. Sadie did not men-

tion

Ellis Island, which opened in 1892, so she probably arrived before that

A MOSAIC OF AMERICAN LIFE

date. Mother and daughter found work common to female migrants: sewing

and domestic service, respectively. Sadie got room and board and was paid

nine dollars a month. Although not much money, Sadie saw this salary as fair,

considering she was merely a “greenhorn.” Her mother, however, began sew-

ing

undergarments for nine dollars a week: “high class work,” Sadie called it.

Sadie had food, a roof, and spending money. She and her mother were doing

well for the ﬁrst time since the death of Sadie’s father three years before.

As was particularly common for the millions of Jews who came to America

after 1880, Sadie wanted to assimilate—to become American—as quickly as

possible. She worked hard at it.

ll too soon, Sadie’s mother’s “consumption” (probably tuberculosis) wors-

ned fatally after she caught a cold touring the city at night. Sadie was left with

no mother and a funeral to pay for, which ﬂattened her meager savings. “And

now I had to begin all over again,” Sadie recalled, except this time she was “all

alone.” Throughout the 1800s, women on their way to the United States rarely

traveled without a man, except for the Jews and the Irish. Unattached Jewish

girls often got sent on ahead before other members of the family could afford

to leave the old country. During the ﬁrst great surge of Irish emigrants, from

1845 to 1855, more Irish women than men migrated to the States, and many

did so by themselves. At ﬁrst, young Irish women in New York City took to

domestic work, which had been done almost exclusively by black women for

the previous 200 years. By 1850, more than 75 percent of household workers

in New York City were Irish girls. Many of them seemed to feel a mixture of

thankfulness for the work, annoyance at the condescension of their bosses, and

jealousy that they cared for a family’s needs but did not have a family of their

own. After her mother’s death, Sadie Frowne moved from domestic service

to a sweatshop’s sewing machine right along with many of the working girls

of the North and Southeast. And like so many of her peers, on the factory

ﬂoor Sadie risked injury, sexual harassment, arbitrary wage cuts, death, and

belittling comments as common as pinpricks from the sewing machine. As

Sadie said, “I was often called a ‘stupid animal.’”

ﬁrst Sadie sewed six days a week, earning ﬁve dollars. She shared a

room with a girl named Ella, who worked at the same sweatshop. Unlike

many tenements that had no windows, Sadie and Ella’s apartment had two,

though an elevated train rumbled right in front of the building, stirring up

“a great deal of dust and dirt” in the summer. That still left the back, where

early morning sun streamed through the windows. With her portion of the

rent costing only a dollar and a half, Sadie had plenty left over for tea, cocoa,

canned vegetables, bread, potatoes, milk, fruit, butter, meat, ﬁsh, and laundry.

She bought fresh meat, rather than the gray dregs left over at the end of the

week, which sold for considerably less and tasted considerably worse. She had

AMERICAN STORIES

cocoa for breakfast, an oil stove for cooking codﬁsh, the beaming morning

sun, and an oil lamp for evening reading—especially useful once she enrolled

in nighttime English classes. Nothing had come to Sadie Frowne easily, but

she had “a dollar a week to spend on clothing and pleasure,” a good deal

more than she had been left with in Poland. With each strike of adversity,

Sadie had adjusted and her prospects had improved. This was fairly common

for young Jewish immigrants whose parents instilled in them a drive to get

educated, to work their way out of manual labor, and to fully embrace the

best parts of American life. The old country held bitter memories. The new

country smelled of sweets.

oon, Sadie moved into a rooming house in a different section of New York

“where so many of my people”—other Polish Jews—lived. She got hired at

a new factory and earned a wage increase of ﬁfty cents a day, a substantial

raise when weekly fresh cuts of beef were only costing her sixty cents and six

eggs went for thirteen cents. This sweatshop was in a brick building where

there were fourteen sewing machines staffed by two women and twelve men.

While Sadie made ﬁve and a half dollars a week, the men made as much as

sixteen dollars. Though she noted the discrepancy, she did not complain at

ﬁrst. She did, however, complain about what today would be called sexual

harassment. During the ﬁrst weeks at the new job, when the men “passed me

they would touch my hair and talk about my eyes and my red cheeks, and make

jokes.” Sadie cried and threatened to leave if this “rudeness” did not stop. The

“boss” told the men not to “annoy” Sadie, and a young gallant named Henry,

“tall and dark” with big, brown eyes, threatened to knock out anyone who

mistreated her. With a stoic, forgiving nature, Sadie merely said, “It was just

that some of them did not know better, not being educated.” With the help of

Henry and the boss, Sadie set aside the harassment. Later she would attend

to a more pressing problem: wages and solidarity. In the meantime, Sadie

found her rhythm.

ix days a week, eleven to twelve hours a day, Sadie and her fellows

made “all sorts of cheap underskirts, like cotton and calico for the summer

and woolen for the winter, but never the silk, satin or velvet underskirts.”

Even had she produced silk blouses or satin ties, Sadie would have made

little more money. Her workdays began at six in the morning, after a splash

of coffee, some bread, and a bite of fruit. She worked till noon, took a brief

lunch, and usually carried on till six at night. Exhaustion kept her company:

“the machines are all run by foot power, and at the end of the day one feels so

weak that there is a great temptation to lie right down and sleep.” Accidents

were nearly as common as weariness, a moment’s inattention all that was

necessary for the needle to plunge into a fatigued ﬁnger: “where the needle

goes through the nail it makes a sore ﬁnger, or where it splinters a bone it

A MOSAIC OF AMERICAN LIFE

does much harm. Sometimes a ﬁnger has to come off. Generally, tho, one

can be cured by a salve.”

Sweatshop

workers had to be tough, but after work they wanted to have

fun, too. The culture that birthed Buffalo Bill, bicycles, and the Ferris Wheel

(introduced at the 1893 Chicago exposition) was not short on entertainment.

Rather than letting the endless toil kill her joy, Sadie lifted her head at night

and went off in search of fun. “But you must go out and get air, and have

some pleasure,” she said. “So instead of lying down I go out, generally with

Henry.” New York City was a wonderland for those with a coin or two to

spare. She went to Coney Island, with its “good dancing places . . . Ulmer

Park [for] picnics.” Sadie could date freely, dance wildly, and eat what she

wanted. Her parents were dead, and she was her own guardian, earning an

independent wage.

anything, this growing female independence deﬁned America as differ-

ent

from other countries. Nowhere else in the world did a young woman have

such a chance to earn a living and make her own decisions about sexuality,

marriage, or even a night out on the town. Sadie’s degree of independence,

however, was still unusual for young women at the turn of the American cen-

tury

. “Modesty” remained the password into polite society for eligible girls,

particularly those with parents or brothers concerned about respectability. As

for Sadie, she intended to drink in the humor and the tragedy, forgetting neither

her past nor her present. “I am very fond of dancing,” she said, “and, in fact,

all sorts of pleasure. I go to the theater quite often, and like those plays that

make you cry a great deal. ‘The Two Orphans’ is good. Last time I saw it I

cried all night because of the hard times that the children had in the play. I am

going to see it again when it comes here.” There must have been a morning

price to pay for her fun, but America had a mechanical answer for just about

everything, including tired workday mornings. With innocent amazement,

Sadie said, “I have heard that there is a sort of clock that calls you at the very

time you want to get up, but I can’t believe that because I don’t see how the

clock would know.” (Bedside alarm clocks started to gain popularity in the

late 1870s in the United States.) When she said this to an interviewer in 1902,

Sadie gave away how close she still was, in some ways, to the Polish village

where she had been born.

Although

Sadie Frowne could be stoic about mangled ﬁngers, she was

willing to agitate for better pay. But as a contemporary of Sadie’s, Rose Sch-

eiderman, said, “no one girl dare stand up for anything alone.” Sadie Frowne,

a fun-loving seamstress from Poland, needed support to get better pay. She

needed a union, and there were many to choose from by 1900. Workingmen’s

associations, essentially an early form of union, stretched back into the 1700s

in the Americas. The associations provided camaraderie and helped members

AMERICAN STORIES

of certain professions set standards, thus drawing a line between, say, a “profes-

sional” tailor and an amateur. But the ﬁrst national union in the United States

did not form until 1869, largely in response to the radical changes overcoming

the workplace. Machines were replacing humans (if slowly at ﬁrst), and skilled

laborers were being replaced by expendable immigrant drones who could be

taught to repeat one or two tasks over and over again. The ﬂood of immigrants

gave factory owners a replenishing supply of disposable workers, people who

needed jobs so desperately they would work for impossibly low wages, for

abysmally long hours, and in very dangerous conditions. The nation’s ﬁrst

national union had a mouthful of a name: The Noble and Holy Order of the

Knights of Labor. The Knights of Labor—nobody in America had the time to

use the full name—began as a secret organization of tailors in Philadelphia.

Within a few years it blossomed into a fairly all-inclusive union. The Knights

would take women, blacks, skilled craftsmen, and unskilled laborers. On the

other hand, it excluded liquor dealers, lawyers, stockbrokers, and professional

gamblers. By 1886, the Knights of Labor claimed to have 700,000 members.

Although the number may have been inﬂated, the membership was certainly

in the hundreds of thousands, a testament to workers’ hunger for representa-

tion and help.

The Knights of Labor advocated for an end to child labor and

equal pay for the sexes. Ending child labor was not necessarily a humanitarian

cause. The use of children in factories and mines drove down the wages, it

was argued, making it harder for adults to earn a living wage. By no means

was everyone in America opposed to child labor. Parents and older siblings

often inducted the younger members of the family into the ways of the loom,

the coal-sorting box, or the bobbin. Circa 1900, when Sadie Frowne and her

fellow workers went on strike, there was an average of 4,000 strikes annually

across the nation. Sadie belonged to a garment workers’ union, the “United

Brotherhood of Garment Workers,” which took in “the cloakmakers, coatmak-

ers, and all the others.”

Sadie

and her garment-stitching unionists were in luck. Local factories

conceded, and “we only have to work nine and a half hours a day and we

get the same pay as before. So the union does good after all in spite of what

some people say against it that it just takes our money and does nothing.”

Other workers in other unions had not been so lucky. Starting with the general

railroad strike of 1877 (when 100 workers died in clashes with ten different

state militias), federal troops, state militias, city police, and hired gangs of

enforcers typically bruised and jostled union strikers. In 1886 at Haymarket

Square in Chicago, a strike against the McCormick factory (which made large

farm equipment) ended in the deaths of six police ofﬁcers and 100 civilians,

many of whom had intended only to watch the demonstrations. During the

1894 Pullman strikes, 14,000 militia clashed with members of Eugene Debs’s

A MOSAIC OF AMERICAN LIFE

American Railway Union: thirty-four strikers died. In response to these kinds

of abuses, some workers turned to more radical organizations, the Industrial

Workers of the World (IWW) serving as the best-known example. Begun

in 1905 and led by the human bear William “Big Bill” Haywood, the IWW

branded itself with a famous motto: “The working class and the employ-

ing

class have nothing in common.” With a nationwide appeal, the IWW

thrived for a decade in the Paciﬁc Northwest—home to droves of migratory

laborers—where it pioneered the “free speech” movement. “Wobblies,” as

IWW members were called, often pulled such antics as tying themselves to

power poles so that police could not drag them off to jail as they lectured audi-

nces in lumber towns about the evils of capitalism and the coming revolution

of the common man. The IWW attracted socialists. Sadie Frowne, apparently,

was interested not in high-minded economic rhetoric but in higher stacks of

dollars at the end of the week. “The next strike,” she said, “is going to be for

a raise of wages, which we all ought to have. But tho I belong to the union I

am not a Socialist or an Anarchist”—admitting, incidentally, “I don’t know

exactly what those things mean.”

Sadie

may not have read either Karl Marx’s Das Kapital or his Communist

Manifesto (the founding books of communism), but she did value education.

Having

studied “reading, writing, and arithmetic” for two years at a public

school, she had mastered English well enough to gobble novels. One of her

favorites let her feel as if she “were the poor girl . . . going to get married to

a rich duke.” Education, however, had more purposes than the enjoyment of

literature in a new language. Education gave Sadie social power: “it is good

to have an education; it makes you feel higher. Ignorant people are all low.

People say now that I am clever and ﬁne in conversation.” She was setting

herself apart from the greenhorns, the people fresh off the boats who had not

had “a chance to learn anything in the old country.”

Sadie’s other method of distancing herself from greenhorns was through

clothing:

Some of the women blame me very much because I spend so much money

on clothes. . . . But a girl must have clothes if she is to go into high society

at Ulmer Park or Coney Island or the theatre. Those who blame me are the

old country people who have old-fashioned notions, but the people who

have been here a long time know better. A girl who does not dress well is

stuck in a corner, even if she is pretty, and Aunt Fanny says that I do just

right to put on plenty of style.

Cloaked in her “plenty of style,” Sadie intended to continue enjoying “jolly

parties.” Young men, of course, liked to talk to her, but Sadie would not go

AMERICAN STORIES

out “with anyone except Henry,” the gallant who had saved her from the

unwanted attention of the men at the factory. Sadie was in a position to have

choices in the future: “Lately [Henry] has been urging me more and more

to get married—but I think I’ll wait.” One can imagine Sadie’s dead mother

either smiling or rolling over more than once in her grave.

Ida

Tarbell: Muckraker

Nineteenth-century laws reﬂected America’s agrarian past. Large-scale indus-

try

with absentee owners, hierarchies of managers, and relatively unskilled

workers was a new arrangement. Legislators were not certain if they should

regulate factories and mines (“Absolutely not!” screamed most owners).

Legislators were also not certain that they could regulate industry. The federal

Constitution was vague. But loggers’ and miners’ advocates told many stories

of broken bodies, orphans, and widows. Even if legislation could and should be

passed, Republicans and Democrats disagreed about what degree of interfer-

ence

was warranted. Three things, however, forced lawmakers’ hands: labor

disturbances in the form of strikes, often ending in terriﬁc violence; mounting

numbers of industrial fatalities, often gruesome; and journalists who exposed

the worst problems of American industry, from the perspectives of both the

worker and the consumer.

Since the founding of the colonies, the women of America had been more

or less prevented from participating in public decision making. Then along

came the abolitionists, including capable Amazons like Sojourner Truth and

unﬂappable belles like the Grimké sisters. They broke through the gender

silence, and the echo of their voices only grew louder as succeeding genera-

ions of American women picked up all manner of banners: temperance, labor

reform, female suffrage, and in general any cause or malady that could be

written or lectured about. The same “cult of domesticity” that had required

women to raise young Americans with moral fortitude and decency could be

bent to a more social role. If women were responsible for maintaining the

moral barometer of the nation, ought they not take these responsibilities into

the streets, the alleys, and the factories?

he ﬁrst two professions into which women strode were teaching and

writing. Women became educators for two reasons external to their own

desire for independent fulﬁllment. The growth of schools during the early

1800s was so rapid that there simply were not enough qualiﬁed men available

to teach by the late 1830s. Second, in an unabashed sign of the times, male

school administrators realized that they could hire women at a fraction of

men’s salaries. To protect these unattended young women from the supposed

dangers of independence, ”many school boards prohibited their teachers from

A MOSAIC OF AMERICAN LIFE

anything they regarded as a potential impropriety, ranging from riding in a

carriage with a man to being out after 8 p.m.”

In other places—particularly

the Midwest—it was common for single female schoolteachers to live with a

local family, who often demanded that the teacher pay rent by washing clothes,

scrubbing dishes, and helping care for babies or toddlers: most likely not a

schoolteacher’s idea of quality room and board. Writing for a living, however,

did not necessarily bring the complication of upsetting social customs. A

writer could do her work from home.

The

Civil War had been a watershed for women, an opportunity to show

their faces publicly. North and South needed ofﬁce workers, and women got

recruited. When the numbers of dead and wounded bodies started to mount,

revealing an acute shortage of nurses, women came to the rescue, though men

and women alike were reluctant to have delirious men tended to by angelic

ladies. One suggestion was to recruit only “plain”-looking women as nurses.

War is a kind of frontier that breaks down tradition and custom. With thirty

years of abolitionist lecturing, teaching, magazine writing, and nursing now

behind them, it became less of a shock (for everyone) to have women out in

the workaday world. Ida Minerva Tarbell was born in 1857, right in the midst

of the erosion of gender barriers. Within thirty years, good jobs and even some

good colleges were available to women willing to hazard the less-and-less

frequent taunts of those men who could not abide the changes. In 1880 Ida

Tarbell graduated from Allegheny College in Pennsylvania with a degree in

science, the only woman in her graduating class.

fter a brief teaching stint, Tarbell found her true gift: writing biographies.

She started with Madame Roland, a French revolutionary, and then skipped to

two of history’s biggest players: Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon Bonaparte.

Her series on Lincoln greatly expanded the circulation of the magazine she

was writing for, McClure’s. Popularity and success gave Tarbell freedom and

choice. She chose John D. Rockefeller as her next subject—or victim, as it

felt to Rockefeller. From 1902 to 1904, Tarbell serially published The History

of the Standard Oil Company, a damning portrayal of Rockefeller’s rise to

power and fortune. Her research was meticulous, the result of two years of

digging through archives and court records. But like all writing—no matter

how much “evidence” gets used—Tarbell’s assertions about Rockefeller were

arguments, not deﬁnitive, objective truth. Decades later, in her autobiography,

Tarbell accused capitalists like Rockefeller of practicing an “open disregard

of decent ethical business.”

Although he did operate as a monopoly (at one

point owning enough of the oil production facilities in the United States as to

be responsible for 90 percent of the output), Rockefeller paid high prices for

his corporate acquisitions, and he tried (at least by the relative standards of the

late 1800s) to treat workers well. He retired from business in 1911 and devoted

AMERICAN STORIES

the rest of his life to philanthropy. But Tarbell’s coverage of Rockefeller’s life

spoiled what might otherwise have been at least a mixed reputation.

Ida

Tarbell generated intense interest in the machinations of America’s top

capitalists, but she did not by herself spur the federal government to pass new

regulations or laws. Other members of her literary class, however, had exactly

that effect. For example, Upton Sinclair—a socialist—published a novel titled

The Jungle in 1906. He had meant to elicit sympathy for the misused workers

in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. Instead he horriﬁed President Theodore

Roosevelt, the public, and Congress. Within only months, new federal legisla-

tion

provided $40 million for better quality meat inspection. Journalists were

raking the muck, and society was responding.

ederal involvement in the economy resulted from the various phenomena

examined in this chapter: the rush of immigrants into America’s cities and

industries; the headlong rush of industry into a gilded age of vast wealth and

vast poverty; the opportunities for good and for harm opened up by the inven-

tion

of powerful machines reliant on the pulsating surge of electricity. This

new world of screeching trains and disembarking immigrants eager for a fresh

start highlights a human paradox. We cannot always adjust to our inventions

as quickly as we can create them because we do not know what our inventions

will do in the long run. But the logic of a for-proﬁt, capital-investment economy

urges inventors and investors to hurry new products into the marketplace. In

1859, Benjamin Drake ﬁgured out how to drill for petroleum in Pennsylvania,

sparking the ﬁrst oil boom. The internal combustion engine followed shortly,

the mechanical heart of an automobile. One hundred ﬁfty years later, people

are facing the prospect of lasting global climate change—partly a result of the

global car culture made viable by the commercial production of petroleum.

Neither Benjamin Drake nor John D. Rockefeller could have foreseen this

consequence. However, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair saw the daily con-

sequences

of giant corporations. Tarbell watched her father’s minuscule oil

production company lose out to Rockefeller’s. Sinclair exposed the human

body parts, rats, poisoned rats, and rat feces commonly mixed into sausage.

What to do about small farms and small ﬁrms failing in the heat of competi-

tion

from big farms and big corporations is a question that typically divides

people along political and ideological lines.

a summary judgment of Standard Oil Company’s business practices,

Tarbell offered her own rhetorical stab at this question of humanity’s ability

to exceed itself when experimenting (in this case, with a new business type:

the large corporation):

I never had an animus against [Standard Oil Company’s] size and wealth,

never objected to their corporate form. I was willing that they should com-

A MOSAIC OF AMERICAN LIFE

bine and grow as big and rich as they could, but only by legitimate means.

But they had never played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me. I am

convinced that their brilliant example has contributed not only to a weaken-

ing of the country’s moral standards but to its economic unsoundness.

Notes

1. Quoted in Evan Mills, “The Specter of Fuel-Based Lighting.” Science, vol.

308, no. 5726 (Washington: May 27, 2005), 1263.

2. In the digital edition of the Thomas A. Edison Papers, the editors point out

that although he has been quoted as saying “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99

percent perspiration,” Edison mentioned in his notes in 1915, “[T]hey attribute this

saying to me,” he wrote, “but I cannot remember that I ever said it.” The Edisonian,

“New

From the Thomas A. Edison Papers” volume 3, issue 1, State University of

New Jersey Rutgers, http://edison.rutgers.edu/pdfs/The%20Edisonian%20-%20Vol-

ume%203.pdf.

Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time (New York: Simon & Schuster,

2001), 53, 57.

. William Jennings Bryan, Speeches of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Funk

& Wagnalls, 1909), 1: 249.

5. Eugene Victor Debs, Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches (Chicago: Charles

H. Kerr, 1908), 81.

6. Debs, Debs, 84.

. Carlos Scwhantes offers a good explanation in The Paciﬁc Northwest: An Inter-

retive History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 326–334.

8. All statements by Sadie Frowne are from Hamilton Holt, ed., “The Life Story

of a Polish Sweatshop Girl,” The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans As Told

by Themselves (New York: J. Pott, 1906), 34–46.

9. Gail Collins, America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and

Heroines (New York: William Morrow, 2003), 110; see also Women’s Work?: American

Schoolteachers, 1650–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

10. Collins, America’s Women, 198.

11. Ida M. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work: An Autobiography (New York: Macmil-

lan, 1939), 204.

12. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work, 230.