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The life of American workers in 1915

• percept 10y ago
  Absent: "union"
  • Kristine1975 10y ago
    The Industrial Workers of the World was founded in 1905 in Chicago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_Worl... There was also the Women's Trade Union League, founded in 1903, and the American Federation of Labor, founded in 1886.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • dalke 10y ago
      I find percept's comment hard to interpret. I believe it's meant to point out that unionization isn't directly mentioned, even though the effects of the unionization fight are mentioned in passing. Eg, it says "labor leader Joe Hill was arrested", but doesn't say why that's notable. It says there was labor unrest, and thousands of strikes by workers who wanted higher wages and an 8-hour work day, but doesn't mention that the labor movement had been pushing for an 8 hour day/48 hour week for decades. (See http://bportlibrary.org/hc/bridgeport-at-war/strikes-for-the-eight-hour-day-in-summer-1915-bridgeport/ http://bportlibrary.org/hc/bridgeport-at-war/strikes-for-the... for a description of the Bridgeport strike, which does mention the unions, and strikes by non-unionized workers.) It never mentions the name of a union. But it does mention the fraternal organizations "Freemasons, the Knights of Columbus, Rotary, and the Elks, ... and the Kiwanis Club".
  • update 10y ago
    > On January 19, labor leader Joe Hill was arrested on murder charges and executed 21 months later. I looked into this fellow. One really interesting bit is that he seems to have been executed for a crime he didn't commit, because he refused to give an alibi. > His most famous songs include "The Preacher and the Slave" (in which he coined the phrase "pie in the sky"[4]), "The Tramp", "There is Power in a Union", "The Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones—the Union Scab", which express the harsh and combative life of itinerant workers, and call for workers to organize their efforts to improve working conditions.[5] > In 1914, John G. Morrison, a Salt Lake City area grocer and former policeman, and his son were shot and killed by two men.[6] The same evening, Hill arrived at a doctor's office with a gunshot wound, and briefly mentioned a fight over a woman. Yet Hill refused to explain further, even after he was accused of the grocery store murders on the basis of his injury. Hill was convicted of the murders in a controversial trial. Following an unsuccessful appeal, political debates, and international calls for clemency from high-profile figures and workers' organizations, Hill was executed in November 1915. After his death, he was memorialized by several folk songs. His life and death have inspired books and poetry. > The identity of the woman and the rival who supposedly caused Hill's injury, though frequently speculated upon, remained mostly conjecture for nearly a century. William M. Adler's 2011 biography of Hill reveals new information about his alibi, which was never introduced at his trial.[7] According to Adler, Hill and his friend and countryman, Otto Appelquist, were rivals for the attention of 20-year-old Hilda Erickson, a member of the family with whom the two men were lodging. In a recently discovered letter, Erickson confirmed her relationship with the two men and the rivalry between them. The letter indicates that when she first discovered Hill was injured, he explained to her that Appelquist had shot him, apparently out of jealousy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hill
  • diyorgasms 10y ago
    Yeah it's a shame that our government still doesn't acknowledge its role in killings of labor organizers and union members. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_United_States_labor_disputes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Unite...
    • ommunist 10y ago
      Government is a legal fiction. It has no morale, no shame. People have that. And you know, those who carry morale or shame are biased to have higher mortality rate.
    • jackhack 10y ago
      The feds even ordered troops to open fire and aircraft to drop bombs against coal miners in West Virginia, to protect the companies' interests: http://www.wvculture.org/history/minewars.html http://www.wvculture.org/history/minewars.html
• thatfrenchguy 10y ago
  "Over the next two decades, however, streetcar lines either were bought up and then closed down by automobile companies or simply went bankrupt." Ah, America.
  • my_first_acct 10y ago
    A bit oversimplified. See Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy#Role_in_decline_of_the_streetcars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... The article is about the "General Motors streetcar conspiracy"; the link jumps to the section where other factors in the decline of streetcars are discussed.
  • jklinger410 10y ago
    Let the market decide!
  • bluedino 10y ago
    Remember that in 1915 there were only 100 million people in the US. There are a little over 300 million now. Picture how big the US is, almost 4,000,000 square miles. A country like England has 50 million people in just 50,000 sq miles. Sure, there were a few rail lines running across the country, but building the nations highway system, plus the luxury of the general population to own cars really allowed people to travel the country for business and pleasure. Without the automobile the country wouldn't have been as well connected and arguably wouldn't have became what it did.
    • astazangasta 10y ago
      We can have a national highway system AND light rail around cities. We can have growth AND equality. We can have an energy intensive economy AND environmental sustainability. Beware false dichotomy.
      • ommunist 10y ago
        Yes you can. But are you allowed to?
• googletazer 10y ago
  "Workers in 1915 were sometimes required to work too much and other times too little; factory-worker hours could be shortened from one day to the next, leaving workers with a severely reduced paycheck. " The life of your service workforce today with fluctuating, uncertain hours. I don't completely agree with the economics behind fight for $15, but I salute them that they found balls to organize and demand better working conditions and wages.
  • danharaj 10y ago
    Now that we have the Internet it will be much harder to stamp out and erase from history this nascent resurgence of labor politics.
    • ommunist 10y ago
      Quite the contrary. Its a read/write web, and with sufficient permissions simple regular expression can completely rewrite human history. Unless you keep history books in a good order.
    • astronautjones 10y ago
      yet, seemingly easier to convince the working class that labor politics are bad for them
      • astronautjones 10y ago
        I lament that this seems true.
• godzillabrennus 10y ago
  Not to mention that federal taxes to run the federal government during this period were largely dependent on alcohol sales. Prohibition only got passed when an income tax passed. Suddenly the interests of the federal government was in line with workers.
  • tosseraccount 10y ago
    tariffs were the largest source of federal revenue from the 1790s to the eve of World War I, until it was surpassed by income taxes. source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_history_of_the_United_States#Income_for_federal_government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_history_of_the_United...
• IndianAstronaut 10y ago
  Interesting to think that most job fields that exist today existed then. One notable exception being computer programmers, probably the number one occupation of HNers. Wonder what new job field will exist in 2115.
  • j1vms 10y ago
    And also probably a lot of job fields that existed then, that do not exist today considering the Industrial Age was on its way to hitting its peak in the following years.
  • vkou 10y ago
    One can never be sure about the distant future, but my money would be on subsistence farmer.
  • dredmorbius 10y ago
    There's been a tremendous change in the number of recognised employment cateogories over the past 150 years or so. The high-water point for distinct employments came around 1920 in the US, at least according to Census classifications. What you'll see is a shift from farm and ag, and transport categories to first manufacturing and especially railroad categories, then management and various professional classifications. By 1920 most major modern technologies existed, the major exceptions being television (and all its associated work), computers, nuclear energy, and some specific classifications of chemical work. Many of today's jobs might best be considered "complexity management": managing people or things, inspecting or certifying them, training and teaching, sales and marketing (especially), government. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3832wx/occupation_classifications_growth_and_change_over/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3832wx/occupat...
• jhallenworld 10y ago
  Well this was near the Yellow Journalism era, so it's fun to read some of the papers from the time to see what life was like. Really we should find Hearst's "New York Journal" or Pulitzer's "New York World", but they do not seem to be on line. But you can find some: Here is Pulitzer's the "The Evening World" http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030193/issues/1915/ http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030193/issues/191... And a bit from Hearst's "New York Evening Journal" https://archive.org/stream/newyorkeveningjo1219hear#page/n0/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/newyorkeveningjo1219hear#page/n0/...
• ommunist 10y ago
  Fascinating reading. There were nor programmers, neither bots at that time. Conveyor belt existed though ang Mr. Ford was making his black magic from condensed sweat of American workers.
  • rmah 10y ago
    By 1915, multiple waves of automation had already put millions of people out of work in industries as diverse as textiles to bookkeeping. But some other jobs radically expanded and new jobs were invented. The pace of advancement was, from our perspective, staggering. A few decades before and after would radically transform daily life, not just bring a few new toys.
    • dalke 10y ago
      In this day of internet and seemingly constant change, I think it's hard to recognize that change is less drastic now than it was 100 years ago. 100 years ago, a 50 year old would have been born as the first transatlantic cable was laid, and seen the general introduction of the telephone, phonograph, movie projection, airplanes, filing systems (including punched card machines for data), radio, electric lights (which made nightlife possible), the first plastics, ironclad warships, the opening of the Suez and Panama Canals, the first affordable car in the Model T, the explosion of newspapers made possible by Linotype, etc.
      • gozur88 10y ago
        >In this day of internet and seemingly constant change, I think it's hard to recognize that change is less drastic now than it was 100 years ago. Much of today's change is cosmetic, or a matter of added convenience. Flight, electronics, vaccines, antibiotics... those kind of changes affect how you really live. People in the early 20th century imagined we'd have rocket ships, ray guns, 600 year lifespans, and robot servants by now because they were projecting forward based on the speed of change in their own time. Near as I can figure the pace of technological development really slowed down in the 1970s and has continued slowing. Whether this is because something fundamental has created stagnation or, as Tyler Cowen proposed, we've eaten all the low hanging fruit, I couldn't say.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]