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"The Life of the Street Rats" (1872) by Charles Loring Brace

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"The Life of the Street Rats" (1872) by Charles Loring Brace

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There are thousands on thousands in New York who have no assignable home, and "flirt" from attic to attic, and cellar to cellar; there are other thousands more or less connected with criminal enterprises; and still other tens of thousands, poor, hard-pressed, and depending for daily bread on the day's earnings, swarming in tenement-houses, who behold the gilded rewards of toil all about them, but are never permitted to touch them…

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Letter to the editor, New York Tribune, July 2, 1881

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Letter to the editor, New York Tribune, July 2, 1881

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"The nation has reached a point in its growth where its policy should be to preserve it heritage for coming generations, not to donate it to all the strangers we can induce to come among us."

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"We have become the world's melting pot. The scum of creation has been dumped on us. Some of our principal cities are more foreign than American. The most dangerous and corrupting hordes of the Old World have invaded us... What brought these Goths and Vandals to our shores? The manufacturers are mainly to blame."

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Samuel Gompers, What Does Labor Want? August 28, 1893

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Samuel Gompers, What Does Labor Want? August 28, 1893

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The organized working men and women, the producers of the  wealth of the world, declare that men, women and children, with human brains and hearts, should have a better consideration than inanimate and dormant things, usually known under the euphonious title of “Property.”. . . We demand a reduction of the hours of labor, which would give a due share of work and wages to the reserve army of labor and eliminate many of the worst abuses of the industrial system now filling our poor houses  and jails. . . .

Labor . . . insists upon the exercise of the right to organize for self and mutual protection. . . . That the lives and limbs of the wage-workers shall be regarded as sacred as those of all others of our fellow human beings; that an injury or destruction of either by reason of negligence or maliciousness of another,  shall not leave him without redress simply because he is a wage-worker. . . .

And by no means the least demand of the Trade Unions is for adequate wages.

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"The Life of the Street Rats" (1872) by Charles Loring Brace 

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"The Life of the Street Rats" (1872) by Charles Loring Brace 

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"Children, who were orphans, or who had run away from drunkards' homes, or had been working on the canal-boats that discharged on the docks near by, drifted into the quarter, as if attracted by the atmosphere of crime and laziness that prevailed in the neighborhood. They were mere children, and kept life together by all sorts of street-jobs-helping the brewery laborers, blackening boots, sweeping sidewalks, "smashing baggages" (as they called it), and the like. Herding together, they soon began to form an unconscious society for vagrancy [crime] and idleness. Finding that work brought but poor pay, they tried shorter roads to getting money by petty thefts, in which they were very adroit [good at].

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Jacob Riis, "How the Other Half Lives," 1890.

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Jacob Riis, "How the Other Half Lives," 1890.

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The 135,595 families inhabited no fewer than 31,000 different tenements. I say tenements advisedly, though the society calls them buildings, because at least ninety-nine per cent. were found in the big barracks, the rest in shanties scattered here and there...
Still the great mass of the tenements are shown to be harboring alms-seekers [beggars]. They might almost as safely harbor the small-pox. That scourge is not more contagious than the alms-seeker's complaint. There are houses that have been corrupted through and through by this pestilence [disease], until their very atmosphere breathes beggary. More than a hundred and twenty pauper [extremely poor] families have been reported from time to time as living in one such tenement.

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This 16-year-old boy lost his leg and arm in an industrial accident at a spring factory in 1908. He received no compensation for his injuries.

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Jonathan Rees, Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2013)

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Jonathan Rees, Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2013)

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Cities in America date back to the beginning of the colonial period, but the tendency for new industrial factories to be located in or near urban areas meant that cities grew much faster during the late 19th century than ever before. This trend was most apparent in large cities like New York, which expanded from approximately half a million to around 3.5 million people between 1850 and 1900, and Philadelphia, which increased in size from slightly more than 100,000 inhabitants to more than 1.2 million people over the same period. During the last half of the late 19th century, Chicago proved to be the fastest growing city in the world. Overall, 15.3 percent of Americans lived in cities in 1850. By 1900, that percentage had increased to 39.7, and kept growing

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"Today three-fourths of its people live in the tenements, and the nineteenth century drift of the population to the cities is sending ever increasing multitudes to crowd them. The 15,000 tenant houses that were the despair of the sanitarian in the past generation have swelled into 37,000, and more than [1.2 million] persons call them home." - Jacob Riis, 1890.

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The fire that began at 4:30 pm 100 years ago today started on the 8th floor and spread quickly upwards, igniting machine oil and flammable piles of cotton scraps and shirtwaists on the factory floor. The workers rushed to escape but found the main stairs chained shut (the bosses didn’t want them taking breaks or stealing shirts and routinely searched them before they could leave the building.) While some made it out via the single freight elevator, others were pushed to their deaths in the elevator shaft. The flimsy fire escape came unmoored from the building in the heat, killing many more.

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Steinbeck in the Schools | Center for Steinbeck Studies

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Steinbeck in the Schools provides free educational resources for teachers and students. Find reading guides, lesson plans, and more for the works of John Steinbeck.

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This five-year-old boy worked at an oyster plant in 1911, running barefoot on cracked shells as he retrieved buckets of shellfish to shuck. The company hired many children of his age to shuck oysters for as little as 30 cents a day.

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Noon hour. All are employees. The unguarded wheel and belt at the left are sinister neighbors for little girls' arms, skirts and braids. There was no factory inspection in South Carolina

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“It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Elzbieta[character in story]. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white--it would be dosed with borax and glycerin [chemical], and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it.”

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Total snowfall reached 40 ft and h undreds of men buried in avalanche, frozen still clutching shovels or picks .