[Footnote: A paper recently read before the Society of Arts, London.]
By D. PIDGEON.
The United States of America are, collectively, of such vast extent, and,
singly, so individualized in character, that to speak of their labor
conditions as a whole would be as impossible, in an hour's address, as to
describe their physical geography or geology in a similar space of time. I
shall, therefore, confine what I have to say this evening on the subject
of labor and wages in America to a consideration of the industrial
condition of certain Eastern States, which, being essentially
manufacturing districts, offer the best instances for comparison with the
labor conditions of our own country. That this field is of adequate extent
and of typical character may be inferred from the fact that the three
States composing it, viz.. New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut,
contain together nearly one-half of the whole manufacturing population of
America, while Connecticut and Massachusetts are the very cradle of
American manufacture, and the home of the typical Yankee artisan. In
addition, the State of Massachusetts is distinguished by possessing a
Bureau of Statistics of Labor, whose sole business is to ventilate
industrial questions, and to collect such facts as will afford the
statesman a sound basis for industrial legislation. We shall find
ourselves, in the sequel, indebted for spine of our chief conclusions to
this excellent public institution.
If we ask ourselves, at the outset of the inquiry, "Who and what are the
operatives of manufacturing America?" the answer involves a distinction
which cannot be too strongly insisted upon, or too carefully kept in mind.
These people consist, first, of native-born, and, secondly, of alien
workers. The United States census, reckoning every child born in the
country as an American, even if both his parents be foreigners, I would
make it appear that only six and a half millions out of its fifty millions
are of alien birth, but, for our purpose, these figures are misleading.
There is a vast difference, in many important respects, between
"Americans" derived from a stock long settled in the States and
"Americans" with two or even with one alien parent. In the former case,
the hereditary sense of social equality, the teaching of the common
school, and the influence of democratic institutions, produce a certain
type of character which I distinguish by the epithet "American" because it
is of truly national origin. In the latter case, the so-called "American"
may really be a German, an Irishman, an Englishman, or a Swede, but the
qualities which I would distinguish by the word "American" have not yet
been developed in him, although they will probably be exhibited by his
later descendants.
Setting the census figures aside, therefore, we find, from the
Registration Reports of Massachusetts, that fifty-four out of every
hundred persons who die within the limits of this State are of foreign
parentage. Now bearing in mind that Massachusetts is essentially a Yankee
State, where comparatively few European emigrants settle, it seems
probable that, going back several generations, the numbers, even of
Massachusetts men, who may be truly called "Americans" would dwindle
considerably. These men, however, the children of equality, of the common
school, and of democratic institutions, may be considered as leaven,
leavening the lump of European emigration, and shaping, so far as they
can, the character of the American; people that is yet to be.
Native American labor is best described by reference to a recent past,
when it filled all the factories of the United States, and challenged, by
its high tone, the admiration of Europe. At the beginning of this century,
public opinion in America was most unfriendly to the establishment of
manufactories, so great were the complaints of these made in Europe as
seats of vice and disease. Thus, when Humphreysville, the first industrial
village in America, was built, in 1804, by the Hon. David Humphreys, who
wished to see the colony independent of the mother country for her
supplies of manufactured goods, parents refused to place their children in
his factories until legislation had first made the mill-owner responsible
both for the education and morality of his operatives. Similarly, when the
cotton mills of Lowell, and the silk mills of Hartford, began to rise,
between 1832 and 1840, the American people held the capitalist responsible
for the moral, mental, and physical health of the people whom he employed,
with the result that all England wondered at the stories of factory
operatives, and their so-called "refinements," which were given to this
country by writers like Harriett Martineau and Charles Dickens.
Lowell, between the years 1832 and 1850, was, perhaps, the most remarkable
manufacturing town in the world. Help, in the new cotton mills, was in
great demand, and what were then thought very high wages were freely
offered, so that, in spite of the national prejudice against factory
labor, operatives began to flow from many quarters into the mills. These
people were, for the most part, the daughters of farmers, storekeepers,
and mechanics; of Puritan antecedents, and religious training. In the mill
they were treated kindly, and, although their hours were long, they were
not overworked. A feeling of real, but respectful, equality existed
between them and their employers, and the best hands were often guests at
the houses of the mill owners or ministers of religion. They lived in
great boarding-houses, kept by women selected for their high character,
and it is of these industrial families, and of their refined life, that
observers like Dickens, Lyell, and Miss Martineau spoke with enthusiasm.
The last writer has made us acquainted, in her "Mind among the Spindles,"
with the height to which intellectual life once rose in Lowell mills,
before the wave of Irish emigration, following on the potato famine, swept
native American labor away from the spindles. The morality of the early
mill-girls, again, was practically stainless, and, strict as the rules of
conduct were in the factories, these were really dead letters, so high was
the standard of behavior set and sustained by the mill-hands themselves.
Such was the character of native American labor, less than forty years
ago, and such, almost, it still remains in those, now few, centers of
industry where it has been little diluted with a foreign element. Nowhere
is this so conspicuously the case as in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and
especially in the western valleys of the former State, where important
mill-streams, such as the Housatonic, the Naugatuck, and the Farmington,
are lined with mills still largely manned by native Americans.
Aside from wages, which will be separately considered, the housing,
education, sobriety, and pauperism of any given industrial community form
together the best possible test of its social condition. In regard to the
housing of labor, there is no more important fact to be discovered than
the proportion of an operative population who possess in fee simple the
houses in which they dwell. This proportion among the wage-earners of
Massachusetts is remarkably high, one working man in every four being the
proprietor of the house in which he lives. Of the remaining three-fourths,
45 per cent. rent their houses, and 30 per cent. are boarders. With regard
to inhabitancy, the average number of persons living in one house in
Massachusetts is rather more than six, while the average number of the
Massachusetts family is four and three quarter persons. Hence, lodgers
being excepted, almost every operative family in this State lives under
its own roof, while one fourth of all such roofs are owned by the heads of
families dwelling therein.
I leave, for a moment, the agreeable task of describing one of these homes
of native American labor, and pass on to the question of education, whose
universality among native Americans is perhaps most vividly illustrated
by the following facts. Of 1,200 persons born in Massachusetts, whether of
native or foreign parents, only one is unable to read or write, while four
Germans and Scotch, six English, twenty French Canadians, twenty-eight
Irish, and thirty-four Italians, out of every 100 emigrants of these
nationalities respectively are illiterate. The total number of public,
elementary, and high schools in the United States is 225,800, or about one
school for every 200 of the entire population, and one for, say, every
fifty of the 10,000,000 pupils who attended school during the census year
of 1880. Finally, referring once more to Massachusetts, there are nearly
2,000 free libraries in this single State, or one to every 800
inhabitants, and these, together, own 3,500,000 volumes, and circulate
8,000,000 of volumes annually.
With regard to sobriety, it is well known that local option succeeds in
closing the liquor saloons in very many operative American towns, and with
the happiest results. The county of Barnstaple in Massachusetts, for
example, with a population of 32,000 souls, and having no licensed liquor
saloons, yields a crop of only three convictions per annum for
drunkenness. The county of Suffolk, on the other hand, with a population
of nearly 400,000, and a license for every 175 of its inhabitants,
acknowledges one drunkard for every 50 of its population. The labor in one
case is nearly all native; in the other, largely foreign.
It is almost, if not quite, impossible to obtain the statistics of
pauperism in America. The "indoor" poor, as paupers in almshouses are
called, can be found and counted with comparative ease, but how can the
outdoor paupers be found? It is no use inquiring for them from door to
door, and the poor-master's disbursements are so limited in amount that
his bills for pauper relief become mixed up with other items, so that they
cannot be separately stated. The total number of paupers resident in
American almshouses is 67,000, or about one in every 70,000 of the whole
population. In England, we have still one pauper in every fifty thousand
of the population. Such being the more important aspects of native
American labor, as displayed by the statistician, it is time for the
social observer to give his account of a typical American artisan's home.
We are at Ansonia, in the Naugatuck valley, one of the chief towns of
"Clockland," where, within a radius of twenty miles, watches and clocks
are made by millions and sold for a few shillings apiece. Our friend Mr.
S. is an Ansonia mechanic who occupies a house with a basement of cut
stone and a tasteful superstructure of wood, having a wide veranda,
kitchen, parlor, and bed-room on the ground floor and three bedrooms
above. The house is painted white, adorned with green jalousies, and
surrounded by a well-tilled quarter acre lot. Its windows are aglow with
geraniums, and from its veranda we glance upward to the wooded slopes of
the Green Mountain range, and downward to the River Naugatuck, whose blue
mill-ponds look like tiny Highland lakes surrounded by great factories.
Within, a pleasant sitting-room is furnished with all the comforts and
some of the luxuries of life, the tables are strewn with books, and the
walls decorated with pretty photographs. Mr. S.'s wife and daughter are
educated and agreeable women, who entertain us, during an hour's call,
with intelligent conversation, which, turning for the most part on the
events of the War of Independence, is characterized by ample historical
knowledge, a logical habit of mind, and a remarkable readiness to welcome
new ideas. No refreshments are offered us, for no one eats between meals,
and, in private houses, as in the public refreshment rooms, where native
labor usually takes its meals, nothing stronger than water is ever drunk.
Such are the homes of men whom I would distinguish as "American" artisans,
and such, also, are those of many foreign workmen who have been long under
native influence.
It is not in the valleys of Massachusetts, however, that the greatest
manufacturing cities of the Union are to be found, the towns already
referred to containing usually only a few thousand inhabitants, and being
still, for the most part, rural in their surroundings. They are, indeed,
the fastnesses, so to speak, to which the Yankee artisan has retired,
after having been almost literally swept out of the great manufacturing
cities by successive waves of emigrant labor, chiefly of Irish and
French-Canadian nationality. To these great cities we must now turn for
examples of a condition of operative society which contrasts most
unfavorably with that which has already been sketched; it being,
meanwhile, understood that a penumbral region, of more or less mixed
conditions, graduates the brightness of the one into the darkness of the
other picture.
The city of Lowell, whose brilliant past is so well known, exemplifies, on
that very account, better than any other manufacturing town in the States,
the character of recent alterations in American labor conditions. The
mill-hands, formerly such as I have described them, have been almost
entirely replaced by Canadians and Irish, who have given a new character
and aspect to the Lowell of forty years ago. "Little Canada," as the
quarter inhabited by the former people is called, exhibits a congeries of
narrow, unpaved lanes, lined with rickety wooden houses, which elbow one
another closely, and possess neither gardens nor yards. They are let out
in flats, and are crowded to overflowing with a dense population of
lodgers. Peeps into their interiors reveal dirty, poorly furnished rooms,
and large families, pigging squalidly together at meal times, while
unkempt men and slatternly women lean from open windows, and scold in
French, or chatter with crowds of ragged and bare-legged children, playing
in the gutters.
The Irish portion of the town has wider streets, and houses less crowded
than those of "Little Canada," but is, altogether, of scarcely better
aspect. Slatternly women gossip in groups about the doorways. Tawdrily
dressed girls saunter along the sidewalks, or loll from the window-sills.
Knots of shirt-sleeved men congregate about the frequent liquor-saloons,
talking loudly and volubly. No signs of poverty are apparent, but
everything wears an aspect of prosperous ignorance, satisfied to eat,
drink, and idle away the hours not given to work. Such is the general
aspect of operative Lowell to-day; but some of the old well-conducted
boarding-houses remain, sheltering worthy sons and daughters of toil.
Similarly, the outskirts of the city are adorned with many pretty white
houses, where typical American families are growing up amid wholesome
moral and physical surroundings, and enjoying all the advantages of
schools, churches, libraries, and free institutions which the Great
Republic puts everywhere, with lavish profuseness, at the service even of
its least promising populations.
Concerning the Lowell mill-hands of to-day, I prefer, before my own
observations, to quote from an article entitled "Early Factory Labor in
New England," written by a lady, herself one of the early mill-girls, and
published in the "Massachusetts Labor Bureau Keport for 1883." She says:
"Last winter, I was invited to speak to a company of the Lowell
mill-girls, and tell them something of my early life as a member of their
guild. When my address was over, some of them gathered round and asked me
questions. In turn, I questioned them about their work, hours of labor,
wages, and means of improvement. When I urged them to occupy their spare
time in reading and study, they seemed to understand the need of it, but
answered, sadly, 'We will try, but we work so hard, and are so tired.' It
was plain that these operatives did not go to their labor with the
jubilant feeling of the old mill-girls, that they worked without aim or
purpose, and took no interest in anything beyond earning their daily
bread. There was a tired hopelessness about them, such as was never seen
among the early mill-girls. Yet they have more leisure, and earn more
money than the operatives of fifty years ago, but they do not know how to
improve the one or use the other. These American-born children of foreign
parentage are, indeed, under the control neither of their church nor their
parents, and they, consequently, adopt the vices and follies instead of
the good habits of our people. It is vital to the interests of the whole
community that they should be brought under good moral influence; that
they should live in better homes, and breathe a better social atmosphere
than is now to be found in our factory towns."
The city of Holyoke, another great cotton center, having 23,000
inhabitants, is in some respects the most remarkable town in the State of
Massachusetts. It was brought into existence, 35 years ago, by the
construction of a great dam across the Connecticut River; and, around the
water power thus created, mills have sprung up so rapidly that the
population, whose normal increase is eighteen per cent. every ten years in
Massachusetts, has doubled, during the last decade, in Holyoke. But eighty
out of every 100 persons in the city are of foreign extraction, the
prevailing nationality being French-Canadian, a people who are so rapidly
displacing other operatives, even the Irish themselves, in the
manufacturing centers of New England that they must not be dismissed
without remark.
The Canadian-French were recently described in a grave State paper as a
"horde of industrial invaders," and accused of caring nothing for American
institutions, civil, political, or educational; having come to the States,
not to make a home, but to get together a little money, and then to return
whence they came. The parent of these immigrants is the Canadian
_habitan,_ a peasant proprietor, farming a few acres, living
parsimoniously, marrying early, and producing a large family, who must
either clear the soils of the inclement north, or become factory
operatives in the States. They are a simple, kindly, pious, and cheerful
folk, with few wants, little energy, and no ambition; ignorant and
credulous, Catholic by religion, and devoted to the priest, who is their
oracle, friend, and guide in all the relations of life. Such are the
people--a complete contrast with Americans--who began, some twelve years
ago, to emigrate to the mills of New England. They came, not only
intending to return to their own country with their savings, but enjoined
by the Church to do so. Employers, however, soon found out the value of
the new comers, and Yankee superintendents preferred them as operatives
before any other nationality, not only on account of their tireless
industry and docility, but because they accepted lower wages, and kept
themselves clear of trade-union societies. Thus, finally, it has come
about that nearly 70 per cent. of the cotton operatives at Holyoke are of
French-Canadian origin, and the social condition of all these people is
precisely similar to that which has already been described as
characterizing the inhabitants of "Little Canada" in Lowell.
It has already been said that the average rate of inhabitancy is six
persons per house in the State of Massachusetts, but the presence of the
French in Holyoke actually doubles the inhabitancy of the whole town, with
what effect upon their own special quarter may easily be imagined.
Probably nowhere in Europe could there be found more crowded houses, and
worse physical conditions of life, than in the quarters inhabited by
certain alien operatives in many manufacturing towns of the United States.
Sharp contrasts as they are, these sketches fairly picture the heights and
depths of industrial conditions in a region which, as I would again remind
you, contains nearly one-half of all the factory operatives in America.
More than this, while the States in question would yield to no others
their claims to represent advanced civilization, Massachusetts, the
creation of the Puritan refugees, and the cradle of American independence,
stands confessedly at the head of all her sister States for enlightened
philanthropy. There are no greater lovers of right, honorers of industry,
and friends to education in the world than its people, yet the present
social condition of Holyoke and of Lowell, as of many other manufacturing
cities, would have shocked all America thirty years ago, and been
impossible less than half a century back. It is time we should ask, How is
America going to treat a problem, formerly the danger and still the
perplexity of Europe, for which democratic institutions have failed to
furnish the solution once confidently, but unfairly, expected from them?
The State, the Church, and the School are all doing their best to prevent
the lapse to lower conditions which seems to threaten labor in the States,
each of them trying their utmost to "make Americans" of alien laborers, by
means of the political, religious, and educational institutions of the
country. How inadequate these unaided agencies are for the accomplishment
of their gigantic task is nowhere so clearly realized as in the common, or
free, schools of the States. These, in districts such as I have
distinguished as "American," are filled with boys and girls, of all ages
from five to eighteen, whose appearance and intelligence bespeak high
social conditions. Whatever the occupation which these young people may
ultimately adopt--and all of them are destined for work-a-day lives--an
observer feels quite sure that they are more likely to raise the character
of their several employments, than to be themselves degraded to lower
social levels, on quitting school.
But no similar confidence in the future of American labor is engendered by
visits to the schools where sits the progeny of alien labor. In the case
of the Canadians, indeed, parents and priests alike bend all their
energies to the establishment of "parochial schools," which, if they
forward the cause of the Church, do little for education in the American
sense of requiring good citizens, even more than good scholars, at the
hands of the national teachers.
The primary schools of great industrial towns, such as Fall River, the
Manchester of America, are filled, to quite as great an extent as similar
schools in Europe, with ignorant, ragged, and bare-footed urchins. These
children are, indeed, no less well cared for and taught than their Yankee
fellows, and one cannot sufficiently admire the energy and enthusiasm with
which school-teachers generally endeavor to "make Americans" of their
stolid and ragged little alien charges. In these cases, however, where
often the children have had no schooling at all before they are old enough
to work, it is quite clear that the school cannot do all that is required
to raise the labor of to-day up to the levels it occupied in the past.
And, if the school itself is ineffective in this regard, how much more so
must be the Church, to which immigrant youth is a comparative stranger; or
those democratic institutions which are based, to quote the words of
Washington himself, upon "the virtue and intelligence of the people."
Whether the present condition of labor in America will ever again be
lifted to the levels of the past depends, in truth, less upon the State,
the Church, and the School, than upon the part which the American employer
is taking or about to take in this question. It is impossible for any
unprejudiced observer to be long in the States, and especially in the New
England States, without coming to the conclusion that a large number of
employers are very anxious about the character of the labor they employ,
and willing to assist to the utmost of their power in improving it. In
spite of the love of money and luxury which is so conspicuous a feature of
certain sections of American society, a high ideal of the proper function
of wealth has arisen in the States, where large fortunes are chiefly
things of recent date, among large and influential classes having an
enlightened regard for the best welfare of the country. This regard finds
expression now in the establishment of a factory, managed with one eye on
profits and another on the elevation of the artisan, and now in the
endowment of free libraries or similar institutions, offering
opportunities of improvement to all.
To give only a few instances of the former movement: Mr. Pullman, the
great car-builder, has recently established, on Lake Calumet, a vast
system of workshops and workmen's homes, a description of which reads like
a chapter from More's "Utopia." The Waterbury Watch Company has lately
built a factory, employing 600 hands, on similar lines to those of Mr.
Pullman. Cheney Brothers' silk mills at South Manchester remain now, after
Irish labor has entirely taken the place of native hands, at almost the
same high level as that which, in common with Lowell, they held forty
years ago. Messrs. Fairbanks, of St. Johnsbury, in Vermont, conduct a
large establishment, where every married _employe_ owns a house in the
village, almost an Eden for beauty and order, which has grown up around
these remote but remarkable scale works. Similarly, the Cranes at Dalton,
in Massachusetts; Messrs. Brown, Sharpe and Co., at Providence, Rhode
Island; Mr. Hazard at Peacedale, Narragansett; and last, not least, Col.
Barrows, at Willimantic, in Connecticut, have all succeeded in restoring
the past conditions of native American labor among operatives, now, for
the most part, of alien origin.
I wish that time permitted me to sketch, however briefly, the mills to
which I have last alluded. It must suffice to say that the devoted labors
of Col. Barrows, President of the Willimantic Thread Co., have succeeded
in creating, out of Irish labor, social conditions of industrial life
which approach ideal perfection as nearly as the work of imperfect man can
possibly do. And, better still, the high morality and intelligence of Col.
Barrow's 1,600 operatives, the comfort and seemliness of their homes, the
cleanly and cheerful character of the mill work, even the refinements of
the music and art schools attached to the mill, can be proved, by hard
figures, to be paying factors in the undertaking, viewed from a purely
commercial standpoint.
So far, I have endeavored to show that a great contrast exists between
what once was and now is the condition of factory labor in America. I
have, further, described certain survivals of an earlier and happier state
of things, and indicated the forces now at work tending to lift the
Holyoke of to-day, for example, to the social levels of old Lowell. I have
given my reasons for believing that the democratic institutions of America
are incapable, unaided, of accomplishing such a task as this charge
implies, and concluded that its accomplishment depends mainly on the
action of the American employer. What this action as a whole, and what,
therefore, the future of labor in America is likely to be, I confess
myself in grave doubt--doubt from which I turn, with something like a
sense of relief, to discuss those economical considerations affecting
wage-earners which have hitherto been made to give place to social
inquiries.
We have now to ask what are the wages of labor in the States, their
relation to the cost of subsistence, and to wages and cost of subsistence
in our own country? Finally, I shall briefly consider certain propositions
of the American political economist which are so inextricably mixed up
with the question of labor and wages in the States that it is impossible
to discuss the one without taking some note of the other.
Until quite recently, no complete investigation, bringing the rates of
wages paid in industries common to the United States and European
countries, has ever been made, although the results of such an
investigation have been constantly and earnestly called for both by the
press and people of America. Permit me to remark, in passing, that we know
little in this country of the desire for full, trustworthy, and accessible
statistics, concerning all matters of national interest, which dominates
the public mind of America; and as little of the willingness with which
American citizens of all classes place the particulars of their private
business at the service of the statistician. This desire for statistical
bases whereon the statesman and economist may build, is vividly
illustrated by that publication, perhaps the most wonderful in the whole
world, entitled a "Compendium of the Census of the United States," issued
with every decade. These volumes, accessible to everybody, and arranged
with marvelous skill and lucidity, offer to the social observer a
complete, accurate, and suggestive survey of every field comprised within
the vast domain of the national interests. An evening's address would not
more than suffice to indicate the scope and appraise the value of this
work, which is a mine wherein, the ore ready dressed to his hand, the
politico-economic or industrial essayist might work for years without
exhausting its riches.
But the United States Census does not treat specifically of wages and
subsistence, and it is to the Massachusetts Labor Bureau that we must
again turn for such information as we now require. Dr. Edward Young,
indeed, the late chief of the United States Bureau of Statistics,
published an elaborate work upon this subject in 1875, but his comparisons
as to the relative cost of living in America and Europe, good in
themselves, are rendered of little value by the absence of such statistics
as would give the true percentage of difference between American and
foreign wages. Several elaborate wages reports were also published between
1879 and 1882, which, while they gave the American side of the question
with great fullness, presented foreign wages very incompletely.
Always, however, impressed with the importance of making an accurate
comparison between wages and the cost of subsistence on the two sides of
the Atlantic, but unable to undertake a very wide inquiry with the funds
at its disposal, the Massachusetts Bureau determined, in the fall of 1883,
upon reducing to narrower limits than heretofore the field of
investigation. Instead of America and Europe, Massachusetts and Great
Britain were selected for comparison, the former as the chief
manufacturing State of America, the latter as her leading competitor.
With this view, a number of agents were sent to gather personally, from
the pay rolls of American and English manufactories, the rates of wages
paid in twenty-four of the leading industries which are common to the two
districts respectively. It was, at first, sought to extend the inquiry to
thirty-five different industries, a number which would practically have
covered the whole ground, but nine of these were finally abandoned for
want of sufficient British information.
It is a perfectly easy thing, as already indicated, to gather wage or
other statistics in the counting-houses of Massachusetts manufactories,
but quite a different matter when a collection of similar information is
attempted in this country, where most proprietors are unwilling, and many
altogether refuse, to give any information regarding their industries.
The following table, of which an enlarged facsimile, marked A, appears on
the wall, specifies the twenty-four industries from which the returns in
question were made, and the number of establishments making such returns
in each industry in either country:
_Table A_.