Taking a Snapshot of American Life from the 1870s to the 1890s

Economic Reminders and What Is Happening to Workers

 

Traits

What Is Happening in America?

Economic Reminders

General changes

1872  – Mail order – Montgomery Ward

1880  – Woolworth – “Five and Ten Cent Store”

1880s – Mail order – Sears, Roebuck, and Company

1867 – $50M in advertising

1900 – $500M

Railroads

1870s+ – Government aid (all levels) $500M + $179M acres

1883 – 4 standard time zones

1886 – South – standard gauge

Depression

1894 – ¼ railroads bankrupt

1893 – 15,000 businesses closed

1894 – 2.5M unemployed (17-19% of work force)

South’s per
capita income

1860 – 60% of North’s

1900 – 40% of North’s

South’s
manufacturing

From1880 to 1900, climb of 2 X

In % = Climb to 10% of total US manufacturing

What’s happening to workers?

Averages, national

Pre-1900

60-hr., 6 day/week

20 cents/hr. if skilled

10 cents/hr. if not

Average income – $400-$500/yr.

Minimum cost of living – family of 4 = $600/yr.

1880-1914

Real wages Ý $7/yr – that’s about a 1% Ý

(for $400, .0175; for $500, .0104)

Factory,
South

12 hrs/day – frequently women/children

½ pay rate of North

Tobacco $100/yr. in NC

Cotton 60 hrs/week – 15 cents/day

Children,
employed

1880s – Drop from 17% to 12% of children (over age 10) employed

1890s – Climb to 18%.

1900 – 1 in 10 girls employed

1900 – 1 in   5 boys employed

Women,

employed

1870  – 15% over age 16 employed

1890s – Climb from 3.7M to 5M women employed

1900  – 20% of white women (5.3M); 25% of black women

wage = average ½ of men

 


What Is Happening to Workers (Continued) and to Farmers

 

Traits

What Is Happening in America?

What’s happening to workers?

Cattle
drovers

1867 – 1st drive to railhead

1871 – 700,000 (peak)

1886-87 – blizzard

Trail boss $125/month – white

Hands – average 8 men – ½ black or Mexican

Miners,
in West

Corporate mines in the post-boom period

1870s – 1/30 disabled, 1/80 dead

Anti-Chinese movement

Miners,
coal in

Midwest
and East

14 hrs/day; 1/3 injured, 1/12 died in mines

Pre-1890  – English and Irish

Post-1890 – SE Europeans

1894 – strikes in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio

1900 – 25,000 boys under 16 in mining

 

Traits

What Is Happening in America?

What’s happening to farming?

Mid-West

1873  $1.16/bushel - wheat

1874  $0.95/bushel

1889  $0.70/bushel

1874  $0.64/bushel  - corn

1875  $0.42/bushel

South

1867 – 33% farms – tenancy

1900 – 70% farms – tenancy

tenant – tenant “owned” crop

sharecropper – owner “owned” crop

furnish merchant – interest to 50%

1870 – 3.1M cotton bales

1880 – 5.7M cotton bales

1881

$0.11/pound  - cotton (10 cents/pound break even)

1890

$0.085/pound

1894

$0.046/pound

 


What Is Happening Politically and Demographically?

 

Traits

What Is Happening in America?

Political Reminders

1877-1887 – 8 of 10 voters voted

1890s – city reform – Examples:  Chicago Civic Federation; National Municipal League

What is the urban/rural pattern?

Cities:

Over 80% immigrant in Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, New York City

1869 – 9 cities 100,000+

1890 – 28 cities 100,000+

Central core = skyscraper + elevator + tenement + settlement house + parks - working class

Suburbs = subways + streetcars - middle class

Rural response: Populism

What migrations are occurring?

1877-1890 – 6.3 M immigrants
- from N and W Europe
- to NE or Midwest US cities (mainly)

1880-1917 – 17.9M immigrants – mainly Catholics and Jews and unskilled

- 20.2% from NW Europe

- 18.5% from E Europe

- 27.1% from Central Europe

- 24.3% from S Europe

What’s the response?

Examples:

1882 Chinese Exclusion

1887 American Protective Association formed – Clinton, La.

What’s the black situation?

1879 Exodusters

1880s Some Southern blacks to industrial cities

1881 Tuskegee Institute – Alabama – Booker T. Washington

1883 Civil Rights Cases – not on individual actions

1895 Atlanta Exposition speech - Washington

1896 Plessy v. Ferguson

1896 National Association of Colored Women

What’s happening to prohibition?

1873 – women’s march against saloons, dealers

1874 – Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) – 1000 organizations, 26K members

1888+ - Republicans, state-level, social activists – prohibition laws

1895 – Anti-Saloon League (uniting Protestant churches)

 


What Is Happening to Social, Cultural, and Intellectual Life?

 

Traits

What Is Happening in America?

 

What’s happening to family and role of women?

Birth control – 1870s – laws to restrict sale of devices/abortions

Divorce – 1880 – 1/21 marriages

 

1870 – 7,000 high school graduates

1872 – 100 colleges, universities admit

1873 – Supreme Court – A degree did not guarantee right to apply to be admitted to the bar (Myra Bradwell case).

1875 – Supreme Court – Citizenship did not guarantee right to vote (Minor v. Happersett).

1890 – General Federation of Women’s Clubs

1890 – National American Woman Suffrage Association – re-merged

1890 – 4 states women’s suffrage – WY, UT, CO, ID

What’s leisure?

1883 – 3-ring circus

1876 – National League – baseball

1879-1885 – museums – St. Louis, Detroit, Cincinnati

What are people reading?

1866 – Horatio Alger – Ragged Dick: or, Street Life in New York (total 106 books)

1868-69 – Louisa May Alcott – Little Women

1876 – Mark Twain – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

1877 – Anna Sewell – Black Beauty

1880 – Lew Wallace – Ben Hur

1883 – Ladies’ Home Journal

1885 – Good Housekeeping

1900 – Theodore Dreiser – Sister Carrie

What is happening with religion?

Social Darwinism

Social Gospel

What is happening with theories of society?

1879 Progress and Poverty – Henry George – “single tax”

1880s Social Darwinism - William Graham Sumner, Andrew Carnegie

1881 A Century of Dishonor – Helen Hunt Jackson

1883 Dynamic Sociology – Lester Frank Ward

1888 Looking Backward – Edward Bellamy

1890s Social Gospel

1890s Pragmatism – William James

1893 Frederick Jackson Turner – “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”

1901 Frank Norris – The Octopus (railroad)

 

 

 


Sources Used for This Data

The data in the tables is from:

§  Robert A. Divine’s The American Story

§  Alan Brinkley’s The Unfinished Nation

§  Edward L. Ayers’ American Passages

§  General reference books, including the Encyclopedia of American History (edited by
Jeffery B. Morris and Richard B. Morris)

 

 

Copyright C. J. Bibus, Ed.D. 2004

 

WCJC Department:

History – Dr. Bibus

Contact Information:

281.239.1577 or mailto:cjb_classes@yahoo.com

Last Updated:

2004

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