By: Cristopher Avello
It was industrialization at the end of the 19th century that transformed cultures, marked by the expansion of capitalist development and a massive surge in the power of factories, iron, and steam locomotives in the Northeast, that structured society.
The immigrant miners’ lives were shaped by fear of traveling away from their families and by the possibility of not returning to see their children, a concern that Gutman linked to laborers working on independent contracts. Coal miners labored in underground tunnels; intense working conditions in the eastern regions, filled with explosive dynamite exploding daily. Pits, full of deadly gases, filled with man-made extraction mines primarily for generating electricity that powered common appliances in the homes of society and businesses. Gutman spoke about workers developing black lung disease while working in the mines. Also, societal coal mines relied on workers who brought consistent work habits and hard-labor expectations from their diverse backgrounds, Gutman said. Immigrant miners considered themselves distinct because of the dark working conditions, which resulted in daily accidents that limited their workdays. Industry strikes shut down mines each day; protests revealed how low wages were earned from six-day workweeks and 12-hour days. By the end of the 19th century, Miners united to form the United Mine Workers of America in 1890, giving them power over their workforce. But frequent recessions led to recurrent unemployment, and immigrants’ expectations changed.
When discussing American development, studies have shown that an increasingly narrow economic analysis was driven by the growth of the working class. For example, a foreman’s crew of skilled miners could simply extract several tons of coal a day from the fields in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and, over time, extend North into Ohio, where landowners and corporations shipped coal to urban markets on large railroads.
Rising tensions in the workforce brought order to diverse factory industries amid intense competition; these groups of people exhibited different patterns of cultural adaptation. During the industrialized period, corporations hired workers off the bus and steered them towards labor work. These big businesses controlled societies in run-down neighborhoods or created monopolies like Standard Oil, which brought order to the region, and if talks of forming unions resurfaced, capitalists would smash any attempts at reform. Capitalists and Corporations believed that skilled laborers provided for their families, and that factories caused large-scale uprooting. Corporations began leaning towards systematic industry structures, characterized by boom-and-bust periods, that were closely related to the social needs of English commands. But even as cultures lowered their education levels, families did not dissolve easily. Mining operations underwent technological transformations driven by large amounts of capital, replacing blasting machines with electric cutting machines.
Saloon Era
Saloons emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century as a necessity or convenience for the four-day workweek. Saloons embraced the working man with alcohol while manufacturers grew angrier. Saloons would furnish free lunches on the counters, where men could help themselves to meat, opportunities to escape their stuffy homes, and the chance to learn about world corruption. Saturday nights were usually the biggest nights to enter your favorite saloon; they would be supplied with music that fulfilled its social function; saloons kept their doors open all night, and the saloon flourished on a keen insight into the sociology of people and their wants. With saloons encouraging the formation of clubs of men in the same trade, it was evident that they were able to find temporary relief and assistance in finding work from saloons owned by the brewing companies. Workers absent on Mondays after long drinking weekends would be displaced for their disorderly habits.
A drinking place is where you would find a man on the falls, out of mill work, and not in the best of conditions – is how I would describe “Blue Monday.” The workers proved to be lazy craftsmen if not served hot coffee and a bouquet at 7 a.m. The transition for immigrant men into the American working society affected the systematic mechanizations, incidentally increasing bureaucracy, without support from traditional habits, the people lived like serfs in a region controlled by politics and the press.
Lowell Factory
A clockwork factory of women busy in cotton mills, free from their rural families, living in maintained boarding houses. At time’s hiding a brilliant glare, at other times mild; that was philanthropic manufacturing colleges.
Women laborers also experienced tension with American work rules, at times acting up in a disobedient manner, refusing to work, or mutinying amongst other skilled laborers over irregularities in their pace of work.
Gutman described opposite sex working relationships as, laborers and their wives, frequently, rioting for resisting Yankee missionary and combatting military efforts for making them plant cotton instead of corn.
Finally, he suggested that these immigrants would have much rather stayed in their native countries and run their mills, but landowners or land renters weren’t making much profit with the rise of factory machines, yet to make things worse laborers would start riots, and end up busting up mining properties to punish employers. Gutman attributed the tension to the demands imposed by the regularities and discipline of factory labor. Which brings me to my second topic on what historians of American Industrialization should focus on, and that’s the rise of corporations and monopolies. Their impact on the economy and social structures formed the Populist Party, which campaigned against corporate power and economic inequality. In the end, Gutman clarified, how laborers would join trade unions to secure their place in the workforce, and that this theory reflected immigrants’ disposition to seek self-protection.
References
The US Coal Industry in the Nineteenth Century
Michael P Johnson (1998) Johnson’s Reading the American Past, vol. 2
Locke, Joseph (1877) the American Yawp textbook
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