MIDDLE CLASS?

Perhaps some people need a history class? In the late 19th and turn of the 20th century, there really was not a middle class. There were wealthy merchants, magnates, tycoons, robber barons and bankers, such as Astor, Huntington, Vanderbilt, Whitney, Rockefeller, Carnegie and their heirs. Everyone else was poor. Working class and unemployed a lot. Women could not even vote until 1920! By 1980, Americans earned about 4 times what they did in 1900, if you adjusted for inflation. The extra amount earned was taken by taxes, it's true, but we lived better than the richest millionaires in many ways--cars, televisions, central heat and air conditioning, and medical care. By 1990, workers could easily afford such things as indoor plumbing, hot water, electricity, and separate rooms for children--but in 1900, only a handful of people earned enough to afford such amenities.

Less that 14% of Americans graduated high school in 1900, less the 3% from a school of higher learning. (By 1999, those figures were 83% and 25% respectively. and college education resulted in a 62% increase in pay for men in 1999, and 65% higher for women.) Average annual pay in 1900 (in 1999 dollars) was $4200; average hourly pay (again in 1999 dollars) in 1909--the 1st year such records were kept--was $3.80. Could you live on that--even without taxes, knowing you had no unemployment or disability insurance, no social security or pension? Absurd.

Benefits comprised just 1% of the average worker's paycheck in 1900. Basically nothing for most workers. If you were lucky enough to be strong and have perfect health, were everyone in your family so lucky? How about in-laws? Because if they were not, you were expected to care for them. On your less than $4/hour paycheck. Life expectancy for the average newborn in 1900 was 46.6 for white males (73.4 in 1995), 48.7 for white females (79.6), and 32.5 for black males (65.2), 33.5 for black females(73.9). Huge change for the better no matter your demographic.

Usually illiterate--there was very little public education. You worked your parents farm or in their shops or taking care of younger siblings. People had no birth control and had many many children--lots of whom died in infancy and childhood. Maybe half survived. But women often died in childbirth as well (in 1915 the maternal mortality rate was 61 per per 1000 live births (and 8 in 1990) and the infant mortality in 1915 was 100 per 1000 live births (and just 7.6 in 1990). It was no picnic! Those women often left many older children who needed care, and the new baby if it survived. No there were no income taxes, but when you lost your job, you froze, wore threadbare clothing, then lost your home and your children starved--and there was no upward mobility to look forward to. You went to work or took care of younger siblings depending on gender.

Factories had begun with the industrial revolution (although in 1900 only 5% of factories were powered by electricity. Thousands of men shoveled coal into furnaces all day long every day. The percentages of workers employed in these worst of the worst types of jobs have declined many times over in the past century.). But before unions, there were no safety regulations and people died daily or weekly in steelworks, constructing high rises, etc. Read Upton Sinclair's expose of the meatpacking industry...it was 1906 before the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were adopted. Factories were unsafe for workers as well as the customers of their products. Few records were kept, but in 1900, 1500 workers died in coal mines and 2550 in railroad accidents (half of worker deaths). Those numbers were 35 and 56 respectively in 1999. For all United States workers, the number of fatalities per dollar of real (inflation-adjusted) GNP dropped by 96 percent between 1900 and 1979. Other jobs did not keep data but conditions were often horrific, esp in steel manufacturing. Only 15% of workers ever collected any money from employers by proving negligence and other common law claims.

See this link for a great article on U.S. worker safety, health, working conditions, etc: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/WagesandWorkingConditions.html From this article the following paragraph describes working conditions:

"Another basic aspect of working conditions is exposure to the weather. In 1900 more than 80 percent of all workers farmed in open fields, maintained railroad rights of way, constructed or repaired buildings, or produced steel and chemicals. Their bosses may have been comfortably warm in the winter and cool in the summer, but the workers were not. A columnist of that era ironically described the good fortune of workers in Chicago steelworks, who could count on being warmed by the blast from the steel melt in freezing weather. Boys who pulled glass bottles from furnaces were similarly protected—when they didn't get burned. By 1990, in contrast, more than 80 percent of the labor force worked in places warmed in the winter and cooled in the summer."

Workers could be fired without cause and had no recourse if a boss absconded with their paycheck. Unemployment in 1900 averaged 5% but workers could count on unemployed periods through the year--tho shorter than 1999 lay-offs. Wages were nothing, and you could be replaced by a 15 year old with no family to support, a strong back and a willingness to do anything....6% of the labor force--1.75 million people--were between the ages of 10 and 15! Many families needed the $$. Some states outlawed child labor but most did not.

At the turn of the century, just 19% of women worked outside the home. Only 1% of the lawyers and 6% of doctors were female. 38% of males over the age of 10 worked on farms, 31% worked in service industries and 31% in goods-producing industries like mining and manufacturing. The average workweek in manufacturing was 53 hours at the turn of the century but declined as low as 34.5 in the 1930s. Paychecks went down with the hours of course. Women worked dawn to dusk because cooking took about 42 hours per week at the turn of the century. By 1981, this figure was cut about in half. Men who worked on a farm also worked dawn to dusk. Men who worked other than farm jobs (60% of the total) worked 10 hours per day, 6 days a week. Men's hours were cut in half by shorter work days, shorter work weeks and the introduction of paid vacations and sick leave.

Homes were small in 1900, and when families had so many children, they were even more crowded. Many jobs were only available in the cities, so huge rural to city migration occurred. Plus blacks had been moving to cities after the Civil War ended. Then came millions of immigrants. They could not buy or rent houses, but had to take apartments--crowded. Construction materials were generally cheap, and there was no electricity, little gas and no sewage or running water (esp in the country). FDR championed rural electricity after the Depression hit as a jobs program. In NYC, tho, the tenement buildings were four to six stories high, with four apartments on each floor, they held two or three families in each apartment, all with no elevator or indoor plumbing--cesspools and outhouses were used for sewage. And people just threw their garbage in the street. But the reformers and scientists stopped that with sanitation laws. 500,000 people per square mile living on the Lower East Side got awfully crowded and smelly!

Henry Ford did not introduce the model T until 1908. Before 1880, horse drawn carriages provided transportation and fowled the streets of cities terribly. In about 1890, electric streetcars were introduced, but one had to be careful not to be struck. By 1900, cities were paving streets, not for cars but bicycles!