Problems of the Industrial Age by Mr. Stahl

Past Times for the Young

18cranem — 2016-10-17 17:18:04 UTC

Young children in the late 1800’s didn’t have many places to play in fact they had none. The children’s playground of the 1800’s was the street and generally the games they played weren’t like ones we play nowadays, their games generally included mischief and vandalism. Some children broke windows others decided it would be fun to smash street lamps. According to the Mayor of New York City some young people even amused themselves by “Shooting Police”. In the summer when it was blazing hot children bunched up on the docks to catch a nice breeze since it was illegal to go for a nice relaxing swim. Though not all street games involved mischief in fact Stickball and Football were a common sight to see and in 1895 playgrounds even started to show up to the scene giving children a place to play. Though as more and more immigrants came to the United States the lots used as playgrounds were turned into living areas.

Naturally when playing on the streets property damage can be a common thing complaints from businesses were numerous and soon police started to respond but very harshly one boy even supposedly being shot for playing Football on Thanksgiving in the streets.

Dismal Classrooms

18boglere — 2016-10-17 17:18:40 UTC

Classrooms throughout the country were not made well. For starters, they couldn’t contain the amount of children they had to hold. Most classes contained between 90-100 students, double the amount they were made for. Students had no room to move around, and two to three students shared one desk.The buildings were poorly maintained, and usually didn’t have good lighting. This made it difficult for students to see and read. Also, air quality was poor. Laws typically required each student to have at least 1800 cubic feet of fresh air per hour, while in reality students had three.

18magisterc — 2016-10-17 17:19:18 UTC

Adulteration

Common practice among bakers and grocers of the 1800s where they would add additives (preservatives) into their foods to make them last longer. Customers would end up finding big pieces of copper in their bread and candy was found to have harmful toxic ingredients as well. There was a cholera epidemic of 1832 that was said to be caused by infected fruit.

Accidents.Back in the late 1800’s early 1900’s, safety was not a top priority for workers. Aside from the steel mills, the railroad industry was the most deadliest of jobs to workers. In 1890, one railroader out of 306 was killed and one out of thirty was injured. A workforce of 749,301, there was a yearly death of 2,451. That number rose in 1900 to 2,675 and 41,142 injured. In 1883 the railroads started to take notice to the workers safety and shut down dangerous jobs on the railroads.

18hutchinsonw — 2016-10-17 17:21:20 UTC

Drug addiction

18bartolaccim — 2016-10-17 17:22:52 UTC

Drug use was a major problem in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The biggest drugs that most people were addicted to were Opium and Morphine. Some accounts stated that drug addicts outnumbered alcoholics in their towns. Many Ex soldiers and babies would also become drug addicts due to pills given to them in the war and cough syrup containing doses of morphine. The main problem to all these addicts were careless doctors prescribing opiates to just about anyone who needed relief to their problem.

New York was full of garbage in the 1860s and through the 1880s. The state didn’t have any continuous sanitation system at the time. People would throw their trash and all their waste into the streets of New York. The streets in Manhattan were so bad that people couldn’t even get across the street or even just walk from block to block. It was overcrowded and full of filth.

18sundink — 2016-10-17 17:24:08 UTC

Slum dwellers were the losers in the system of classes. The people in this category produced and inhabited crime, drunkenness, disease and early death. This was created as result to the growth of cities and population. Many big cities of the country were infected with these people. The cities would consist of street after street of areas lacking sanitation, drainage, ventilation, light and safety. The worst of the cities were those of New York. They estimated around 500,000 people lived in New York’s slums. Giving you perspective, that was about half of the city’s population. The people of these slums suffered. The poor sanitation was one of the biggest effects. Health inspectors witnessed sights of dirt-filled sinks: children urinating on walls, etc. The hierarchy of these slums left the bottom cellar dwellers as a location of extra washed down filth.

18lynchl — 2016-10-17 17:25:31 UTC

spoilsmen and plunderers

18gonzalesg — 2016-10-17 17:25:45 UTC

The government, well under criminal influences, were extremely corrupt. They favored wealthy and already powerful politicians, giving them even more power. With this, the common person had difficulty with the unfavorable laws. For example, the tweed ring, a group of corrupt politicians, robbed its city of 160 million dollars. Every important city job was twisted into a unethical political based work, whether it be police or a municipal commissioner, for the sake of earning money.

Child Labor

woodhousejordan25 — 2016-10-17 17:26:22 UTC

Child labor was a widespread practice that was encouraged by industry, agreed to by parents, and generally ignored by the government. The children would make $1.50 to $2.50 a week. Instead of going to school children would often go to work in the factories. Children had the same working hours as adults. So they often worked fourteen hour days. In 1842 Massachusetts made the law that children under twelve could only work ten hours per day. In 1870 there was about 700,000 child workers. Then in 1900 it increased to 1,752,187 child workers.

Strikes

18passantem — 2016-10-17 17:26:58 UTC

Strikes:

Between the years 1881 and 1900 there was 2,738 labor strikes in America. In total 6 million workers participated in strikes. Strikes were often blamed on socialists, anarchists, or untrained immigrants who were “unfamiliar” with how things worked. A lot of times strikes were a last resort because of how hard things were with abuse and economic issues. Authorities were harsh and the public often agreed with how they handled it. For example, The Homestead steel strike of 1892 twenty people were killed and over 5 thousand militiamen were brought in to dismiss thousands of workers.

Four-Legged Polluters

18whitemans — 2016-10-17 17:27:18 UTC

In the late 1800’s cities faced several problems dealing with pollution. These problems were caused by animals such as pigs and horses. Pigs roamed the streets looking for food. While they did this, the left behind waste that polluted the air. Public places like squares and parks were “public hogpens”. Not only were there pigs in the city there were lots of horses. In New York, there were about 150,000 horses that each left around 25 pounds of waste every single day. There were piles of waste on all of the streets and these piles attracted swarms of flies and caused a horrible scent. Oscar Wilde commented [about the stench], “They made granite eyes weep.”

Street Crime

18fritzk — 2016-10-17 17:27:31 UTC

Street crime was a big problem in the late 1800’s. People started to invest their money in revolvers to carry around with them. After the sun went down all the crime got even worse and if you wanted to go anywhere you had to carry some type of weapon around with you or have a police-man.

whitneylthomason — 2016-10-17 17:27:46 UTC

The yellow fever had taken thousands of lives before Dr. Walter Reed traced the disease back to a virus which was carried by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. There were multiple epidemics throughout America. People attacked by this deadly disease turned yellow and died. This virus was so serious that in the Spanish-American War soldiers were more scared of it than bullets.

Problems for working conditions

18henryj — 2016-10-17 17:28:13 UTC

Working Conditions:

Workers had to work in 117°F heat in a smoky workplace. Workers were lucky to get paid $1.25 a day. Aged workers were given jobs as sweepers or submentials and to work 12 hour shifts for 75¢ a day. Workers were exposed to poisonous gases. Their eyes were exposed to metal grindings.

Beware! This was about the process of meat-packing and the dangers of buying the slaughtered meats. The meats were dangerous to buy and eat because this was before electricity and refrigeration, so the meat would go bad very quickly. The rich people could get the best parts of the slaughtered animal, but the poor people had to settle for the cheapest cuts of the meat, which was often decayed and full of diseases. The New York Council of Hygiene said in 1869, “Undergo spontaneous deterioration and becoming absolutely poisonous.”

18mcginnj — 2016-10-17 17:28:24 UTC

drinking

18elchikg — 2016-10-17 17:30:07 UTC

Drinking in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s were said to be paralleled by their eating habits. Both were frenzied and excessive. Since the beginning of this drinking inhabitants they recorded that the consumption of alcohol was rising from 8 gallons in 1878 to 17 gallons in 1898. The causes of drinking were both ethnic and social. Each successive group carried a bottled spirit tradition. Germans had the beer and irish had the malt liquor. The poor conditions that some lived in gave them the drive to drink more than others. When the beginning of this booze boom started the number of saloons that opened up had a ratio against churches and other religious places of 1 to 300 roughly. In new york the people who had an alcohol addiction were confined to an asylum for inebriates on blackwell's island. If they could not beat it they were sent back they were known as rounders.

Lynching was one of the darkest times in the U.S history. Between 1882 and 1903 at least 3337 people died. An example of lynching is when in 1893 a black man was lynched for accepting the office of a postmaster. Also one was kidnapped and publicly burned at the stake with extreme torture while women and kids helped kindle the flames. The men who did the lynching had no feeling or guilt in participating these acts. 99% of the cases no arrests were ever made.

18solteszd — 2016-10-17 17:33:09 UTC