Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865-1920

by Michael K. Rosenow

Overview

Michael K. Rosenow investigates working people's beliefs, rituals of dying, and the politics of death by honing in on three overarching questions: How did workers, their families, and their communities experience death? Did various identities of class, race, gender, and religion coalesce to form distinct cultures of death for working people? And how did people's attitudes toward death reflect notions of who mattered in U.S. society?
 
Drawing from an eclectic array of sources ranging from Andrew Carnegie to grave markers in Chicago's potter's field, Rosenow portrays the complex political, social, and cultural relationships that fueled the United States' industrial ascent. The result is an undertaking that adds emotional depth to existing history while challenging our understanding of modes of cultural transmission.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252097119
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	04/15/2015
Series:	Working Class in American History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Michael K. Rosenow is an assistant professor at the University of Central Arkansas.

Read an Excerpt

Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865â?"1920

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By Michael K. Rosenow

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09711-9

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CHAPTER 1

The Marks of Capital

The Accident Crisis and Cultures of Industrialization, 1865–1919

At the turn of the twentieth century, Big Bill Haywood, hard-rock miner turned union leader and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) spokesman, used to say, "I've never read Marx's Capital, but I have the marks of Capital all over me." He began to acquire his scars early in his life. At the age of nine, his stepfather took him to work in a western mine. Later, his mother bound him to a farmer for a term of six months, where Haywood learned labor discipline by way of a whip. Upon leaving home at the age of fifteen, he once again entered the mines to earn a living. In the 1890s, he fell victim to one of the many hazards of the occupation and was injured. The time he spent recuperating allowed him to learn about a new union in the West—the Western Federation of Miners. Even before he embarked on a career as IWW organizer, Haywood could point to the marks of capital on his body.

Although Haywood's life and career as an agitator were extraordinary, his work experiences were far more common among workers toiling in the United States' evolving industrial economy between the Civil War and World War I. The changing techniques of production, the reorganization of labor, and the growing intensity of class conflict created the conditions in which hundreds of thousands of American workers were, like Haywood, marked by capital. The marks were both physical and emotional. Workers' bodies bore the brunt of workplace accidents and occupational diseases. Their emotions suffered the disorienting cultural transformations of an age that slowly strangled the nineteenth-century notions of republican independence. Changing ideas about work and citizenship threatened to marginalize the nation's producers. One way to grasp the extent, and the effects, of these changes is to focus on the marks that industrial capitalism left on workers' bodies.

Statistical estimates of industrial fatalities across the United States during the period ranged between 25,000 to 80,000 per year, while between 300,000 and 1.6 million workers sustained serious injuries. In the first decade of the twentieth century, newspapers reported that working in America's industries was more dangerous than being a soldier in the mid- to late nineteenth century. The Chicago Tribune wrote that industry killed 80,000 more in four years than the two armies of the Civil War. Railroads alone produced a "yearly Gettysburg," causing 40,000 casualties per annum. Such dramatic numbers demonstrated that dangerous workplaces were a central component of the United States' industrial ascent. They also, to a certain degree, set the country apart from its economic rivals in Europe. In 1908 the British Colliery Guardian bluntly proclaimed, "There is one record to which our transatlantic cousins may lay claim without fear of emulation; for in the matter of safeguarding its workmen, the United States enjoys the unenviable reputation of being the most backward of the civilized nations" Economic, social, cultural, and political changes facilitated what historian John Fabian Witt has termed the "industrial accident crisis."

Why did the United States lead the world in workplace casualties between the Civil War and World War I? How did ideas about the body—and the classed, raced, and gendered meanings mapped to it—facilitate the industrial accident crisis and impact workers' experiences with death? The industrial accident crisis was one aspect of the transformations that occurred in the United States between the Civil War and World War I. Exploring its causes and consequences reveals how Americans developed cultures of industrialization to give meaning to industrial work and position the people who performed it in the larger social body.

Using "the body" as a category of analysis provides the fullest exploration of how workers and observers interpreted and, in some cases, justified the human cost of industrialization. When invoking "the body" scholars conjure a variety of interrelated meanings. First, studying "the body" necessarily involves recognizing the corporeality of human subjectivities. In other words, historical actors experienced their lives through their material presence as a body, as owners of arms and legs, fingers and toes. They felt pleasure and pain; they bled and healed; they worked and loafed; they ate and starved. Second, studying "the body" recognizes it as a site of regulation and discipline. Third, "the body" as a category of analysis reveals that representations of bodies and the discourses mapped to them had profound effects on human experiences. Fully understanding the industrial accident crisis requires an acknowledgment of each of these three elements. As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes in his theory of habitus, historical changes are mapped to the body, "so that the body reveals the effects of social power." The body also reveals the effects of economic power. A key to understanding the industrial accident crisis and workers' experiences with death and dying is to look at how workers' bodies were sites of regulation and representation.

This chapter primarily focuses on how others—principally those Americans who mainly observed, rather than participated in, wage work—reinterpreted work and viewed workers. To understand how workers experienced death, it is necessary to understand some of the broader forces that shaped their lives. Cultures of industrialization developed that focused on disciplining bodies, celebrating progress, imagining industrial work, and representing workers. A worker's death thus interacted with layers of meanings that came to define the industrial era, which in turn produced a fifth culture of industrialization: protest. Beliefs associated with each of these offered particular interpretations of workers' lives and deaths.

Cultures of Order: Corporeality and the Industrial Imperative

Experiences of work and what it meant to be a worker changed over the course of the nineteenth century. New England textile factories epitomized early industrial development. From there, innovations in production crawled across the northeastern landscape. Transportation improvements—first roads and canals, then steamboats and railroads—quickened the pace. Americans witnessed veritable explosions of economic growth in the decades following the Civil War. Shops, mills, and factories hummed, as workers sweated over their tools and innovative machines made mass production in fields and cities part of the American system. Manufacturers recorded on average a fivefold increase in production between i860 and 1900. The gross national product surged as well, witnessing a sixfold increase over the last three decades of the century, despite two severe depressions from 1873 to 1877 and from 1893 to 1897. This industrial expansion catapulted the United States to a position of economic power on the world stage. In 1860 the United States had trailed Great Britain, France, and Germany in industrial output. By 1900 the United States produced more than its three closest economic rivals combined.

Historians refer to these broad changes as the Industrial Revolution for good reason. Americans' everyday lives were transformed. They increasingly moved from farms to factories, as industrialization restructured the labor market. In 1820 more than 90 percent of Americans worked in agriculture. By 1870 the figure had shrunk to just over 50 percent, and by 1890, for the first time in U.S. history, a majority of Americans worked in nonagricultural pursuits. These population movements were not enough to satisfy the demand for labor that bustling enterprises required. Immigrants landed on American shores with dreams of economic opportunity. In most cases, they joined the industrial workforce in growing cities like New York, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. Between i860 and 1900, the industrial workforce quadrupled from 1.5 to 6 million. Among the many other changes to daily life wrought by industrialization, the United States was becoming a nation of wage earners.

The second half of the nineteenth century became a struggle to come to terms with these vast changes. Industrialization did not merely change how people traveled or communicated, the goods they purchased, or where they worked or lived. The economic and social changes forced Americans to grapple with the meanings of work and the beliefs associated with wage labor. Ideas of freedom and independence had a long history of being envisioned through representations of work and bodily experiences.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, when a majority of Americans worked the land or sought the independence associated with artisanal labor, Jeffersonians and Jacksonians alike associated liberty and the fulfillment of the republican promise with the ability to control one's own labor. When Jefferson extolled the virtues of the yeoman farmer and skilled artisan, he mapped the meanings of independence and freedom to white, usually male, bodies. This embodied representation of freedom helps explain much about the early nineteenth century. Nonwhites—a category that at various times encompassed American Indians, African slaves, or Irish immigrants—became the "others" against which freedom and the advance of civilization could be measured. Americans justified expropriating American Indian lands and tightening the chains of slavery as necessary to maximizing the opportunities available to whites. Inspired by a sense of manifest destiny, whites pushed westward. They warred with Mexico. They defended slavery and the patriarchal relationships between men and women. Toward midcentury Abraham Lincoln and other Republicans came to criticize the institution of slavery through the rhetoric of free labor, further cementing the connection between the body and its control, on one hand, with liberty and the realization of the American dream, on the other. These ideas and movements were never beyond reproach, whether from antiwar Whigs, from the rising movement for women's equality, or from abolitionists. But the idea of free labor provided a powerful trope that attracted believers in the white republic.

The economic boom that followed the quieting of the guns of the Civil War forced Americans to reevaluate traditional cultural symbols. Farmers bore the full brunt of the economic changes. Squeezed by higher operating costs and diminishing crop prices, many were forced away from the land. In Kansas, one of the areas hardest hit, creditors foreclosed on more than eleven thousand mortgages between 1889 and 1893. As the number of farm mortgages and foreclosures testified, fewer Americans could aspire to the ideal of the Jeffersonian independent farmer. The number of Americans who owned property declined precipitously in the last decades of the century. In 1870 between 50 and 56 percent of household heads claimed property holdings. In 1901 only 19 percent of U.S. families owned their own homes. The pedestal on which Americans had placed the agricultural producer as a symbol of freedom and independence was being whittled away. The symbol tottered on the brink of the unattainable.

To replace the smallholding farmer, Americans had to think about new symbols better fit for the industrial era: the inventor, the industrialist, the capitalist, the wageworker. Like the streets of growing urban areas, these were messy and contested categories. Which of these could perform the cultural work of Jefferson's farmer or Jackson's frontiersman? Which could represent the unbounded optimism of success, social mobility, and strength of American character? Was America's future after 1865 to be determined by the elite ranks of the Vanderbilts, Fisks, Goulds, Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Morgans? Or would the producing classes of workers and farmers continue to be held aloft as the pride of the country and revered as the source of liberty and prosperity?

It is necessary to consider these questions alongside the changes in the workplace to understand and explain the industrial accident crisis and the changing environments of workers' deaths. As manufacturers reorganized work processes and sought to maximize efficiency to better compete in the marketplace, they also fostered interpretations about what the changes meant. Workers offered their own interpretations—sometimes in agreement with employers and sometimes in staunch opposition. Americans created cultures of industrialization that helped them come to terms with the changes swirling around them. These evolving, and sometimes contradictory, beliefs and attitudes about work and workers' bodies help explain the industrial accident crisis.

One culture of industrialization, the desire to impose order on the workplace and discipline the workforce, developed as a means to rationalize production and maximize efficiency. Americans in the industrial era seemed caught in cycles of innovation. Efficiency, speed, and order became central tenets of the manufacturing classes. Manufacturers sought success by reorganizing production and fundamentally changing the rhythms and relationships of work. This happened in numerous ways across different industries. The factory system spread where practicable, replacing home production and the small shop. Machines made hand tools obsolete and, along with the division of labor, created massive ranks of semi- and unskilled wage earners.

Manufacturers, business leaders, and bankers all sought to carve some sort of order out of the chaos of the rapid industrial expansion. They confronted the challenges of intense competition, and the workplace became a battlefield. It pitted the disciples of discipline against the perceived purveyors of disorder, which could assume the form of inefficient production methods, slow distribution networks, or the workers themselves. The culture of industrialization that emerged from this battle for control of the workplace placed great value on individualism and the authority of capital to dictate the terms of labor. Although workers mounted challenges at nearly every turn, manufacturers sought to regulate and discipline workers' bodies to better control the workplace. The quest to rationalize production and construct stricter regimes of discipline around workers' bodies provided a key factor in explaining why the United States led the world in workplace casualties.

After the Civil War, manufacturers refined the factory system and fundamentally changed the environment of work. Factories featured power-driven machinery, the integration of different production processes at a single site, an elaborate division of labor, and new methods of administration based on overseers and foremen. Machines did more than replace manual labor. They increased production to dizzying figures in some cases. Before James Bonsack patented a cigarette-making machine in 1881, the most highly skilled handworkers produced 3,000 a day. One of Bonsack's machines produced more than 70,000 in a ten-hour day. By the late 1880s, one cigarette machine could make 120,000 per day. "Fifteen such machines could fill the total demand for cigarettes in the United States in 1880," historian Alfred Chandler notes, "and thirty could have saturated the 1885 market." The invention of comparable machines in other industries transformed manufacturing. Factory owners planned their workspaces carefully to facilitate the most expeditious flow of materials through the plant. Increased efficiency meant increased production.

Industrialists hoped this formula would lead to profits and therefore adopted the factory system in increasing numbers. Until the 1840s, the factory system had been primarily limited to the textile industry. By 1880 Carroll D. Wright estimated in the introduction to the census of manufactures, "Of the nearly three millions of people employed in mechanical industries of this country at least four-fifths of them are working under the factory system." As more Americans worked in factories, the size of the workplaces grew as well. As early as the 1870s, large factories dotted the North. The Cambria Iron Works in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, employed six thousand workers. Both the Standard Oil Works in Cleveland and the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia employed more than twenty-five hundred people. By 1900 443 factories employed more than one thousand wage earners, and over 1,000 factories employed between five hundred and one thousand workers. Historian Daniel Nelson estimates that "the 'average' plant in 11 of 16 industries more than doubled in size" during the last third of the nineteenth century.

Concentration of production helped manufacturers capitalize on economies of scale; it also began a process of transferring the power of production from workers, especially artisans, to employers. Before mechanization, or in industries such as iron and steel where mechanization was more difficult, skilled workers could better dictate the terms and pace of their work. Employers combated workers' control in a number of ways. Where possible, they emphasized the transition to machinery and increased reliance on technology, which boosted efficiency but also eroded workers' influence. Cyrus McCormick Jr. used such tactics during a heated labor dispute at the Chicago reaper works in 1885 and 1886. He dismissed an entire group of unionized molders and replaced them with molding machines and unskilled laborers to tend them. Workers were reduced to machine tenders rather than knowledgeable craftsmen plying a trade. Employers like McCormick reasoned that machines did not ask for higher wages or shorter hours.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865â?"1920 by Michael K. Rosenow. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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Table of Contents

Title

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: In Search of John Henry’s Body

1. The Marks of Capital: The Accident Crisis and Cultures of Industrialization, 1865–1919

2. The Power of the Dead’s Place: Chicago’s Cemeteries, Social Conflict, and Cultural Construction

3. Every New Grave Brought a Thousand Members: The Politics of Death in Illinois Coal Communities,

4. As Close to Hell as They Hoped to Get: Steel, Death, and Community in Western Pennsylvania, 1892

Conclusion: (Un)Freedom of the Grave

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

Herbert G. Gutman Award, Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA), 2009.

— Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA)

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