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Redeeming Time
Protestantism and Chicago's Eight-Hour Movement, 1866â"1912
By William A. Mirola UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09679-2
CHAPTER 1
A City of Industrial and Religious Extremes
Whether it is the nineteenth century or the twenty-first century, Chicago remains a city on the move and one that is difficult to describe definitively as a result (D. Miller 1996; Pacyga 2009). Yet from its beginning, Chicago, more than other urban centers in the late nineteenth century, was recognized as a city of extremes (D. Miller 1996). But it was its industrial development and its religious life that set Chicago apart most from its urban peers. The city embodied the economic transition from a preindustrial order, supported by merchants, farmers, artisans, and small producers, to the new capitalist order dominated by capitalists who held control of the new large-scale industrial factories. In economic terms, the concentration of capital in the city, the use of steam power to increase productive efficiency, the scale of manufacturing firms, and the size of its labor force all grew rapidly in scope and scale (Jentz and Schneirov 2012). Aided by the railways and demands for goods of all kinds as a result of the Civil War and Southern Reconstruction, Chicago's transformation into a manufacturing giant and hub for transcontinental mobility and commerce was firmly fixed by the 1860s (D. Miller 1996; Pacyga 2009).
But the disruptive social consequences of speedy industrial expansion were also beginning to make themselves felt. Within a decade of its founding, not only was Chicago becoming known as a center for trade, but it was also establishing class divides that would make it infamous as a center of industrial conflict. Donald Miller (1996, 135) reports data from the 1848–49 U.S. Census that showed that the top 10 percent owned 94 percent of the city's growing wealth (the top 25 percent owned all of it), while the bottom 74 percent were classed as "destitute." The divide between the haves and have-nots was expanding as a direct result of and in proportion to the city's economic growth.
But while the reality of Chicago's economic opportunities was available for a relatively small number, the dream that it was available to all would not be deterred. More and more people from a diverse range of economic and ethnic backgrounds arrived in the city daily. The dramatic nature of the transformation of the population can be exemplified in one report that during one twenty-four-hour period in 1857, thirty-four hundred immigrants arrived in the city by rail (Pierce 1940, 2:6). Initially fed by an influx of native-born workers from New England and those from Britain, Chicago's labor force was quickly supplemented by a steady stream of workers arriving from Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia. By 1860 more than 80 percent of all of its workers were foreign-born (Jentz and Schneirov 2012, 18). U.S. Census data in table 1 show that Chicago tripled its population between 1860 and 1870. Between 1870 and 1880, a decade dominated by the Great Fire, a prolonged economic depression, and the great railroad strike of 1877, Chicago grew by another two hundred thousand people. The city's population doubled again by 1890, 77 percent of whom were foreign-born, and it increased again by another seven hundred thousand at the start of the twentieth century. And though immigrants increasingly fed the ranks of Chicago's working classes, early on they also fed the ranks of employers. Jentz and Schneirov (2012, 40) point out that Chicago's economic growth was so great during the 1860s that it presented opportunities for immigrants to become manufacturers themselves and that foreign-born men, primarily of British and German decent, owned 64 percent of Chicago manufacturing establishments by 1870.
But whether destined to be workers or employers, the city's immigrants were drawn by the prospect of making money. Monetary gain was so much a part of Chicago's history that it provoked reformer William T. Stead to observe: "This vast heterogeneous community, which has been collected together from all quarters of the known world, knows only one common bond. They are staying to make money. The quest for the almighty dollar is their Holy Grail" (1894, 123). And Rev. Stead was on target: making money was the order of the day, every day, in Chicago. Although New York City dominated the industrial and commercial life of the nation, Chicago was not far behind, ranking sixth nationally in 1880 in the number of manufacturing establishments but third in numbers of employees, wages, invested capital, and profits (Pierce 1940, 3:533). By 1900 it was the nation's second-largest industrial center. Dominant among its industries were meatpacking, printing, lumber and furniture construction, garment making, wagon manufacturing, and the railroads. Furthermore, some of the most renowned nineteenth-century industrialists, merchants, and businessmen claimed Chicago as home. Among these were some of the most prominent and familiar industrialists such as George Pullman, Cyrus H. McCormick, Marshall Field, Potter Palmer, Philip D. Armour, Gustavus F. Swift, and Arthur A. and Charles P. Libby. But there were many more whose names figure in the history of the eight-hour movement, such as banker Lyman Gage, wholesale dry goods purveyor John V. Farwell Jr., and building-trade employers H. G. Loomis and E. B. Phillips.
As the century progressed, the concentration of the economic and social power and wealth of these men and their families created for them a world within a world in Chicago. Especially in the years following the Great Fire of 1871, the wealthy were insulated from the negative effects of the industrial expansion they helped bring about, and they rebuilt their homes in more exclusive areas south and north, while the west side became increasingly the domain of the working classes (Pacyga 2009; Cantwell 2012). The upper classes exerted their influence over society less through direct control of politics and more through creating exclusive social spaces and institutions through which they maintained their economic and cultural control (Jaher 1982; Khan 2011). Prosperous employers lived in the segregated neighborhoods near the lakeshore, building mansion next to mansion as a conspicuous display of their upper-class status. Beyond living in isolation, their wealth also allowed them to socialize in isolation. Belonging to the same exclusive clubs, the Board of Trade, and churches, attending only social functions given by others in one's class, sending children to the same elite preparatory schools and colleges, and encouraging intermarriage to build family alliances were all crucial ways for the elite to create a class identity that was visible along Michigan Avenue, Prairie Avenue, and State and Rush Streets.
The social isolation of Chicago's elite had a contradictory element to it as well. While the upper classes preferred to socialize with others like themselves, they reveled in the public displays of wealth and conspicuous consumption that achieved this period's naming as the "Gilded Age" by Mark Twain and others. The extravagant displays of the wealthy were simultaneously something to be marveled at as well as deplored. The Chicago Tribune gave front-page coverage to sumptuous balls and parties given by the city's well-to-do. Then, as now, the lives of the upper classes were something akin to a fairy tale that many Chicagoans of lesser means followed devotedly. The upper classes were the celebrities of their day. However, not every aspect of elite lifestyles went without criticism. For example, when Marshall Field spent seventy-five thousand dollars on a seventeenth birthday party for his son in 1886, the public, religious, and labor presses united in their belief that this was a needless waste of money when so many in the city were without basic necessities. However, when millionaires such as John D. Rockefeller helped fund the construction of the University of Chicago and its seminaries, fewer voices were raised in protest.
But wealth from expanding industrial interests did more than create a material paradise for elites in Chicago; it also shaped how upper-class individuals, especially those who were employers, viewed the world of work and the workers themselves. Insofar as work itself was concerned, the preindustrial communitarian morality that privileged the rights of the community as a community to benefit from productive enterprises had been replaced by the culture of the free market and moral values that made private property preeminent (Tilly 1978; Cantwell 2012). Market forces inevitably worked for the good of the community, so it was argued, as long as individual employers were free from regulations or other constraints on their single-minded pursuit of profit. Employers had the absolute right to order productive processes, including the wages and hours of their employees free from any outside interference. Such interference was to be opposed as impractical, dangerous, and un-American, whether it came from workers themselves, consumers or others in the broader community, religious leaders, or politicians (Haydu 1999; Isaac 2008). If social disparities of wealth resulted from industrialization, it was not the fault of employers; rather, it was due to the moral inferiority of workers, prone to laziness and intemperance, or their unwillingness to work hard and improve their condition in life. Workers and consumers alike either had the right to accept the employment or goods they were presented with or were free to go elsewhere. This new morality of work, rooted in the market economy, was the bedrock logic on which upper-class employers stood when confronted by efforts to reform industrial conditions. Jentz and Schneirov argue that, in their exclusive community institutions, upper-class employers became "politically self-conscious" (2012, 59), transforming and dominating political life by acting collectively as an elite interest group, challenging any law or ordinance that hurt their economic interests.
As the nineteenth century progressed, employers faced ever more challenges to their economic, political, and social power in the city. Chicago not only became famous for its explosive industrial growth and upper-class extravagance, but also became notorious for the horrendous conditions that accompanied its economic development and the intensity of labor reform movements to change or end them. Extreme economic hardship for workers was the price of unregulated industrial expansion. Long hours, low wages, life-threatening working conditions, and the constant of unemployment were taken-for-granted realities under the new industrial economy. A lack of state regulation, due in part to organized resistance from employer blocs, meant that the ebbs and flows of capitalist expansion were attended by frequent depressions that cycled through at least once a decade. Some were more severe than others for the city's economic elite, but all devastated workers. Typically, in the manufacturing establishments that didn't shutter their doors, employers slashed wages and, where possible, mechanized production to further cut costs (Jentz and Schneirov 2012, 156). When the economic recoveries finally arrived, bringing economic rewards to the industrial barons such as John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie, they brought little more than the possibility of jobs to desperate workers (Foner 1982; Duis 1998). Thousands of workers, including ever-greater numbers of transient workers, more familiar as tramps, competed for jobs following depressions, driving down wages and increasing hours, as employers could set the terms for hiring. For other residents, including Protestant clergy, it became more and more difficult either to remain ignorant of the life conditions the city's immigrant workers faced or to remain unencumbered by the intensifying conflicts between capital and labor.
When wages were increased, they rarely kept pace with costs of living for workers. Although for some workers wages were reported to have increased from between 15 to 100 percent, clothing costs went up at least 100 percent, fuel costs from 85 to 122 percent, rent 66 percent, and the prices of certain foodstuffs 133 percent. In 1883 workers' annual wages were reported to be some $200 below the estimated cost of living (Foner 1982, 498; Duis 1998). When Pullman workers struck against extraordinary wage cuts in 1894, the contradictions between wages and the cost of living for most workers were played out in the extreme (Carwardine 1894, 69). As Carwardine, himself a Methodist minister in Pullman, reported:
Wages are paid at the bank. When they go to the bank to receive their two-week pay the half months rent is taken out, and the paycheck cashed. After deducting rent the men invariably had only from one to six dollars or so to live on for two weeks. One man has a pay check in his possession of two cents after paying the rent. Another I saw the other day, for seven cents. The man had worked as a skilled mechanic at ten hours a day for twelve days, and earned $9.07. He keeps a widowed mother, and pays the rent, the house being in his name. His half-month's rent amounted to $9.00. The seven cents was his, but he never claimed it.
Though they initially received relatively good wages for skilled work, workers faced similar scenarios in the meatpacking industry, whose wages and steady employment were continually dropped in the face of mechanization, seasonal layoffs, and an influx of unskilled laborers, including many women (Barrett 1987; Pride 1987). Barrett's (1987, 91) study of working-class life of packinghouse workers includes a 1911 report that the gap between the average weekly wage for male heads of households and the minimum cost of weekly expenses was $5.73 ($9.67 in earnings compared to $15.40 in costs) and that 30 percent of families reported facing such a gap.
The length of the workday was an equally stressful part of life among Chicago workers. Prior to 1881, bakers worked an average of one hundred hours per seven-day workweek, which figures to more than fourteen hours' work per day. Gasworks employees worked eighty-four hours per week, blast-furnace workers averaged seventy-two hours, while streetcar conductors put in seventy hours each week. The majority of other workers, male and female, were held to sixty-hour workweeks, with the exception of women employed in sweatshops that could be forced to put in sixteen-hour days over seven-day weeks (Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics 1892, 393). Many others, especially immigrants from central Europe, faced irregular working hours in the length of both the workday and the workweek in the meatpacking plants (Barrett 1987). By 1900 the majority of workers (approximately 65 percent of 76,513 employees in 767 establishments surveyed by the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics) still worked between ten and thirteen hours daily (Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics 1902, 270).
But low wages and long workdays were only two of the more readily documented difficulties workers faced. If one was native-born and spoke English, one had a clear advantage in carrying out the routine details of urban life, such basic things as asking for directions, haggling with merchants, and reading rental contracts and the like. Upton Sinclair describes the life of a fictional family of Lithuanian immigrants working in the stockyards, for whom, as newcomers and non-English speakers, even the most mundane activities posed threats.
There were many such dangers, in which the odds were all against them. Their children were not as well as they had been at home; but how could they know that there was no sewer to their house, and that the drainage of fifteen years was in a cesspool under it? How could they know that the pale-blue milk that they bought around the corner was watered, and doctored with formaldehyde besides? When the children were not well at home, Teta Elzbieta would gather herbs and cure them; now she was obliged to go to the drugstore and buy extracts—and how was she to know that they were all adulterated? How could they find out that their tea and coffee, their sugar and flour, had all been doctored; that their canned peas had been colored with copper salts, and their fruit jams with aniline dyes? And even if they had known it, what good would it have done them, since there was no place within miles of them where any other sort was to be had? (1905, 79)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Redeeming Time by William A. Mirola. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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