The industrial republic: a study of the America of ten years henceSinclair, Upton
History
The industrial republic: a study of the America of ten years hence
Sinclair, Upton
Socialism -- United States; United States -- Economic conditions -- 1865-1918; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
“So Daniel Davenport of Bridgeport, Conn., spoke to the members of the
Georgia Industrial Association, at their annual convention at Warm
Springs, Ga., last week. This association was one of the earliest to
recognise the depressing effect of restrictive labour legislation upon
the cotton manufacturing of New England; its members fear that similar
legislation in the South would be followed by even more disastrous
consequences, and what has injuriously affected the more hardy and older
establishments of the North, would, they believe, stunt the growth of
the infant industries of the South, if it did not actually crush them.”
I made an effort in “The Jungle” to show what is happening to the wage
earner in our modern highly concentrated industries, under the régime of
a monopoly price and a competitive wage. I spent seven weeks in
Packingtown studying conditions there, and I verified every smallest
detail, so that as a picture of social conditions the book is as exact
as a government report. But the reader does not have to take my word for
it, there are any number of studies by independent investigators. Let
him go to a library and consult the American Journal of Sociology for
March, 1901, and read the reports of a graduate of the University of
Chicago, who investigated the conditions in the garment-trade in that
city. Here were girls working ten hours a day for forty cents a week.
The average of all the “dressmakers” was but ninety cents a week, and
they were able to find employment on the average only forty-two weeks in
the year. The “pants-finishers” received a dollar and thirty-one cents,
and they were employed only twenty-seven weeks in the year. The general
average in the entire trade was less than two dollars and a half a week,
and the average number of weeks of work was only thirty-one, _making an
average yearly wage for a whole industry of seventy-six dollars and
seventy-four cents per year_. Or let the reader get Mr. Jacob A. Riis’s
pictures of conditions in the slums of New York. In his book, “How the
Other Half Lives,” Mr. Riis states that in the block bounded by Stanton,
Houston, Attorney and Ridge streets, the size of which is two hundred by
three hundred feet, are two thousand two hundred and forty-four human
beings. In the block bounded by Sixty-first and Sixty-second streets,
Amsterdam and West End avenues, are over four thousand. Jack London, in
his “War of The Classes,” quotes the Rev. Dr. Behrends, speaking of the
block bounded by Hester, Canal, Eldridge and Forsyth Streets: “In a room
twelve feet by eight, and five and a half feet high, it was found that
nine persons slept and prepared their food. In another room, located in
a dark cellar, without screens or partitions, were together two men with
their wives and a girl of fourteen, two single men and a boy of
seventeen, two women and four boys, nine, ten, eleven and fifteen years
old—fourteen persons in all!” Apropos of this it may be well to add that
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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