Work in the coal breakers is exceedingly hard and dangerous
Crouched over the chutes, the boys sit hour after hour, picking out the pieces of slate and other refuse from the coal as it rushes past to the washers. From the cramped position they have to assume, most of them become more or less deformed and bent-backed like old men. When a boy has been working for some time and begins to get round-shouldered, his fellows say that “He’s got his boy to carry round wherever he goes.” The coal is hard, and accidents to the hands, such as cut, broken, or crushed fingers, are common among the boys. Sometimes there is a worse accident: a terrified shriek is heard, and a boy is mangled and torn in the machinery, or disappears in the chute to be picked out later smothered and dead. Clouds of dust fill the breakers and are inhaled by the boys, laying the foundations for asthma and miners’ consumption. I once stood in a breaker for half an hour and tried to do the work a twelve-year-old boy was doing day after day, for ten hours at a stretch, for sixty cents a day. The gloom of the breaker appalled me. Outside the sun shone brightly, the air was pellucid, and the birds sang in chorus with the trees and the rivers. Within the breaker there was
Source: John Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the Children (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906).
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Chapter 2 Using Primary Sources: Industrialization and the Condition of Labor46
blackness, clouds of deadly dust enfolded everything, the harsh, grinding roar of the machinery and the ceaseless rushing of coal through the chutes filled the ears. I tried to pick out the pieces of slate from the hurrying stream of coal, often missing them; my hands were bruised and cut in a few min- utes; I was covered from head to foot with coal dust, and for many hours afterwards I was expectorating some of the small particles of anthracite I had swallowed.
I could not do that work and live, but there were boys of ten and twelve years of age doing it for fifty and sixty cents a day. Some of them had never been inside of a school; few of them could read a child’s primer. True, some of them attended the night schools, but after working ten hours in the breaker the educational results from attending school were practically nil. “We goes fer a good time, an’ we keeps de guys wots dere hoppin’ all de time,” said little Owen Jones, whose work I had been trying to do. How strange that barbaric patois sounded to me as I remembered the rich, musical language I had so often heard other little Owen Joneses speak in faraway Wales. As I stood in that breaker I thought of the reply of the small boy to Robert Owen. Visiting an English coal-mine one day, Owen asked a twelve-year-old lad if he knew God. The boy stared vacantly at his questioner: “God?” he said, “God? No, I don’t. He must work in some other mine.” It was hard to realize amid the danger and din and blackness of that Pennsylvania breaker that such a thing as belief in a great All-good God existed.
C O N C L U S I O N
When he was a graduate student, the future historian and president Woodrow Wilson protested that he had to learn “one or two hundred dates and one or two thousand minute particulars” about “nobody knows who.” He took comfort in knowing that he would easily forget this “mass of information.”5 The sources in this chapter represent another set of “minute particulars.” From them we can learn any number of forgettable facts, from the annual wages of laborers to the number of children working full-time in 1880. By themselves these facts are not useful; contrary to the cliché, they do not “speak for them- selves.” Rather, they have meaning and interest only when historians select order, and arrange them. Some historians, for instance, might be guided by a desire to understand or explain the growth of unions in the late nineteenth century. Others might work with these and other sources to explain how in- dustrial growth influenced family or gender relations.
Historians’ concerns, and therefore what the “thousand minute particu- lars” tell us, are also influenced by contemporary concerns. Americans still
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47Notes
debate the proper role of the government in their society, the regulation of business, the value of labor unions, the usefulness of “schemes” for helping people, and the desirability of letting people rise or fall on their own. Just as such debates help to frame the questions historians ask about the past, answers to these questions lend historical perspective to the de- bates. The questions in this chapter are thus part of the ongoing dialogue between the past and present. And if you compare your answers to this chapter ’s questions to those of your classmates, you will see that all of you did not come to the same conclusions. Historians do not always agree about the answers to their inquiries either. In fact, debate is at the heart of their discipline.
These sources further demonstrate that historians must do more than just select certain facts; they must also know what people in the past perceived and believed. In this case, we need to understand workers’ circumstances as well as what they thought about those circumstances. In fact, as we shall see in Chapter 3, primary sources are often more valuable to historians for the opin- ions and biases they reflect than for the facts that they contain.
F U R T H E R R E A D I N G
Margaret F. Byington, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (1910; repr., Pittsburgh, Pa.: University Center for International Studies, 1974).
Lizabeth A. Cohen, “Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working-Class Homes, 1885–1915,” in Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Culture, ed. Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986).
Melvyn Dubofsky, Industrialism and the American Worker, 1865–1920 (Arlington Heights, Ill.: AHM Publishing Corp., 1975).
Joshua Freeman et al., Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. II (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992).
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Modern Library 2002; originally published in 1906).
John Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the Children (London: Macmillan and Co., 1906).
N O T E S
1. Investigation by a Select Committee of the House of Representatives Relative to the Causes of the General Depression in Labor and Business, 45th Cong., 3rd sess., Misc. House Doc. No. 29 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1879), pp. 310–321.
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Chapter 2 Using Primary Sources: Industrialization and the Condition of Labor48
2. Robert Green McCloskey, American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 32.
3. Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor Reports (1878, 1881), in The Trans- formation of American Society, 1870–1890, ed. John A. Garraty (Columbia: Univer- sity of South Carolina Press, 1968), p. 88.
4. Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics Report (1884), in The Transformation of American Society, 1870–1890, ed. John A. Garraty (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968), p. 120.
5. Quoted in James A. Henretta, The Origins of American Capitalism (Boston: North- eastern University Press, 1991), pp. xv, xvi.
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49
The primary sources in this chapter were produced by late nineteenth- century Indian reformers and by Native Americans. They illustrate the biases often found in primary source material.
Sources 1. “Land and Law as Agents in Educating Indians” (1885) 2. The Dawes Act (1887) 3. A Cheyenne Tells His Son About the Land (ca. 1876) 4. Cheyennes Try Farming (ca. 1877) 5. A Sioux Recalls Severalty (ca. 1900) 6. Supervised Indian Land Holdings by State, 1881–1933 7. A Proposal for Indian Education (1888) 8. Instructions to Indian Agents and Superintendents of Indian Schools
(1889) 9. The Education of Indian Students at Carlisle (1891) 10. Luther Standing Bear Recalls Carlisle (1933) 11. Wohaw’s Self-Portrait (1877) 12. Taking an Indian Child to School (1891) 13. A Crow Medicine Woman on Teaching the Young (1932) 14. Percentage of Population Over Ten Illiterate, 1900–1930