American Experiment (175 page)

The most characteristic and most harmful feature of post-Civil War Southern farming was the “crop lien system” with its ubiquitous furnishing merchant—a system that in Woodward’s view “came to be more widespread than slavery had been, for it was no respecter of race or class; and if it be judged objectively, by its economic results alone, the new evil may have worked more permanent injury to the South than the ancient evil.” A contemporary observer, Charles Otken, described it as a “vast credit system whose tremendous evils and exorbitant exactions have brought poverty and bankruptcy to thousands of families, … crushed out all independence and reduced its victims to a coarse species of servile slavery.”

As with sharecropping, the crop lien system was an invention of the postwar South, emerging out of the havoc of the war. Its prime causes were the lack of money and banks in rural areas of the South and the poor transportation facilities, especially the lack of good roads—all of which left farmers tied to purely local markets and suppliers. Originally serving black farmers mainly, particularly sharecroppers, the crop lien system spread throughout the South in tandem with the proliferation of cotton-growing, hooking in as many as 80 to 90 percent of all farmers, black and white, poor and middle class, without much distinction. Sometimes merchants became landlords to fifty or a hundred tenants as they gained title to more and more of their customers’ land to settle debts. Sometimes landlords moved into town, opened stores, and sold goods to their own tenants and croppers.

All too often the result was a local rural monopoly of credit, supplies, and marketing. Typically a farmer would sign a contract with the merchant in January or February, when it was time for the soil to be prepared for cotton planting. The farmer would agree to give the merchant a lien on the entire crop for the coming year as payment for the purchase on credit of all provisions. These contracts were strictly enforced under lien laws that were enacted by most Southern states after the war. Every week or two for the rest of the year, from spring planting until harvesting in the late fall, the farmer would ride into town and “buy” various supplies—food, such as cornmeal, pork, flour, and lard, most of which the farm family could have provided for itself; farm supplies like fertilizer and a plow point; possibly some calico or other clothing material. The credit prices charged
by the merchant were generally 40 to 100 percent higher than if the farmer had paid in cash.

The merchant would make a note in the ledger for each transaction; the farmer would leave the store each time a little deeper in debt, not knowing exactly how much since only the merchant kept records. At “settlin’ up” time in November or December, the farmer brought the hard-earned cotton to the gin, where it would be ginned, bagged, tied, weighed, and handed over to the merchant, who would then deliver the verdict. Most often the farmer did not succeed in “paying out,” meaning that he would have to sign a new contract, thus sinking even deeper in hock to the “furnishing man,” one notch further into peonage.

Some Southerners defended the furnishing merchant as a pawn of Northern capital who had to pay exorbitant interest rates himself and took big risks in providing credit to farmers, especially in outlying areas; and though most merchants were moderately well off, few ever got rich. But the crop lien system must shoulder the blame for much of the South’s ills. For the furnishing merchants, who demanded that more and more cotton be grown despite its falling price, were the major force preserving the one-crop economy and preventing diversification into grains and other foodstuffs that clearly would have improved the conditions of Southern farmers. “No cotton, no credit” was law everywhere the crop lien system had dominion, and this led to the depletion and wreckage of both the soil and the men and women who cultivated it. Though blacks were hit hardest by the merchants, who undoubtedly discriminated against them one way or another, the agricultural stagnation afflicted everyone in the South to varying degrees. The more cotton was sown, the more poverty was reaped.

There was always a final way out. Matt Brown, a poor black farmer in Mississippi, contracted for supplies from the Jones store in Black Hawk from 1884 to 1901. His accumulating debt was nearing $500 when a final entry appeared in the ledger—”marking it off” for a coffin and burial costs.

Another escape was possible, especially for blacks: an overground move to the North and West. Blacks in Chicago numbered about 4,000 in 1870; within twenty years they multiplied over threefold. The newcomers came largely off the nation’s farms, and especially the farms of the South—part of a mighty population movement that would continue for decades and store up social dynamite for the future.

For white or black to migrate from country to city during the 1870s was not always to plunge into dark tenements and crowded streets. For years,
over half the families in the coal and iron regions around Pittsburgh had chickens, livestock, or vegetable gardens next to their homes, and pigs and goats could be seen in abundance in Brooklyn and on the streets of Manhattan as far south as the forties.

The relentless tide of industrialism, however, engulfed these little farms and backyards and other green places, leaving blocks of unpainted or grimy brick tenements in their place. Small cities as well as big were transformed. Lynn, an old Massachusetts seafaring and shoe-making town, was changed from a community of gardened cottages to a city of boarding-houses and triple deckers first clustered on Main Street and then spreading throughout the factory area. Living places could never escape the noise or stench of the mill, for workers had to live close enough to hear the shriek of the factory whistle. As early as 1880, according to John Cumbler, Lynn historians were penning “nostalgic works on how the city had changed.”

As usual, the biggest city exhibited the most repulsive living conditions. We need not see these conditions only through late twentieth-century eyes; Jacob Riis saw at the time. Horrified as a thirteen-year-old. in Copenhagen by a tenement built over a river and infested with rats, Riis had come in 1870 to a New York City in which those conditions were worsened tenfold. After knocking about for a few years mining coal, laying bricks, farming, and peddling, and after many a night in noisome lodging houses, he landed a job with the
Evening Sun
as an investigative journalist (then called police reporter). Later, he took up a free-lance career of writing books and articles and giving lectures. His knack for being both factual and graphic, both compassionate and unsentimental, gave great force to his reporting.

Suppose we look into a tenement on, say, Cherry Street? he asked his readers in his first and perhaps most famous work,
How the Other Half Lives,
published in 1890:

“Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and you might stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. Not that it would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. They have little else. Here where the hall turns and dives into utter darkness is a step, and another, another. A flight of stairs. You can feel your way, if you cannot see it. Close? Yes! What would you have? All the fresh air that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall-door that is forever slamming, and from the windows of dark bedrooms….”

Riis had a special sympathy for tenement children, as though he had given up hope for their parents. He investigated the death rate of infants. In one tenement some years back, he noted, of 138 children born during a three-year period, 61 had died, most of them before their first birthday.

“Listen! That short hacking cough, that tiny helpless wail—what do they mean?” It was a baby dying.

“ ‘It was took all of a suddint,’ says the mother, smoothing the throbbing little body with trembling hands. There is no unkindness in the rough voice of the man in the jumper, who sits by the window grimly smoking a clay pipe, with the little life ebbing out in his sight, bitter as his words sound: ‘Hush, Mary! If we cannot keep the baby, need we complain—such as we?’ ” “Such as we,” Riis echoed.

He was sensitive to the city’s endless variety, even while he shared some of the stereotypes of the time. The Irishman, he noted, was the true cosmopolitan immigrant, sharing his lodging impartially with Italian, Greek, and “Dutchman.” A map of the city designating nationalities, he said, would show an extraordinary crazy quilt.

“The city on such a map would fall into two great halves, green for the Irish prevailing in the West Side tenement districts, and blue for the Germans on the East Side.” But intermingled was an odd variety of tints.

From down in the Sixth Ward, upon the site of the old Collect Pond that in the days of the fathers drained the hills which are no more, the red of the Italian would be seen forcing its way northward along the line of Mulberry Street to the quarter of the French purple on Bleecker Street and South Fifth Avenue, to lose itself and reappear, after a lapse of miles, in the ‘Little Italy’ of Harlem, east of Second Avenue. Dashes of red, sharply defined, would be seen strung through the Annexed District, northward to the city line. On the West Side the red would be seen overrunning the old Africa of Thompson Street, pushing the black of the negro rapidly uptown, against querulous but unavailing protests, occupying his home, his church, his trade and all, with merciless impartiality.

For many immigrants, black or any other color, home life was work life and work life was home life; they toiled for “sweaters.” A sweater’s shop, according to a reporter for
Harper’s Weekly,
“is generally one of the two larger rooms of a tenement flat, accommodating from six to fifteen or twenty ‘sweating’ employees—men, women, and children. In the other large room of the flat are his living, sleeping, and cooking arrangements, overflowing into the workroom. Employees whom he boards, who eat at their work, and who sleep on the goods, frequently complete the intimate connection of home and shop.” Many a New England textile mill—including some located in pristine valleys near running streams—housed whole families in wings attached to the plant itself, so that employees moved from home to work without ever passing through the green.

The unholy wedlock of home and shop made it all the easier to sweat
women and children. But the condition of children could be appalling whether at home or in a factory and, indeed, they often took their parents’ jobs. Fannie Harris, thirteen, was interrogated in 1895 by a committee of the New York legislature. She had worked for six months in a necktie plant, earning $2 for a sixty-hour week.

What did she do with that two dollars? “Gave it to my mamma.”

Did her mamma give her anything to spend? “Yes, sir ... two cents every week….”

Now, had she been to school in this country? “No.”

Could she spell cat? “I forgot.”

Did her mamma work? “Now she ain’t working because I am working, but before, when I didn’t work, she worked.…”

Her papa, she said, did not work because he was ill. When an “inspector” told her to quit work and go to school, her mother forbade it.

Dorothy Richardson, an orphan from rural Pennsylvania who had been a country schoolteacher and then sought a “genteel job” in New York City, finally gave up and decided to take almost any work she could get. She was turned away by two cigar factories for lack of experience; took a job as a learner in a book bindery at $3 a week but kept on looking; turned down a position in a small store at $3.50 for an eighty-seven-hour week; declined employment at $1.50 in an artificial flower sweatshop; and finally took a job at $3 in a paper box factory. Quitting this work, she went through the process all over again, ending up as a laundry “shaker” until the owner offered a promotion to the wrapping department, at the same time making “some joking remarks of insulting flattery,” and pinching her bare arm. She left.

Few women had it worse than those who lived among wealth and display—household domestics. Their work was generally back-breaking, tedious, and lonely, with few minutes of their own in sixteen-hour workdays. Attracted to the work by the promise of a comfortable home and good food, one found her room to be “a few hard chairs and two soiled quilts.” The food might be inadequate, the master of the house sexually aggressive, the mistress’s attitude demeaning. “You’re never sure that your soul’s your own except when you are out of the house,” one domestic commented.

In the 1880s, a maid typically worked seven days a week, started at six and finished at her bedtime, around ten—unless her mistress was entertaining, in which case she had to remain on call until the guests left, perhaps around midnight. She was allowed out one evening a week and every other Sunday afternoon and evening. “Thus she was,” according to Robert Smuts, “usually on call for over 100 hours a week,” with most of the labor a grinding, monotonous routine. The lack of privacy and
autonomy was especially galling to the more spirited. Shops and factories like the New England textile mills regularly drew off the more ambitious and restless of these young women.

The city ghettos, the tenements, the sweatshops, the attics and the basements of great houses—these were not mere misery. Many of these sweated workers managed to cope, to endure, even to love and to laugh. Yet the social data of the time, however inadequate in exactness and scope, carry their own damning implications. Manufacturing wages, according to Clarence Long, rose from slightly more than a dollar a day in 1860 to a bit over a dollar and a half in 1890—a very gradual increase, considering the economic expansion of this period. Real wages rose at the same rate, since a steady decline in the cost of living made up for Civil War inflation. Adult men on the average received three-quarters more wages than adult women, and two and a half to three times as much as children and youths. At the same time, Philip Armour had a yearly income in excess of $1 million, John D. Rockefeller could count on $3 million annually just in Standard Oil dividends, and Andrew Carnegie—who once “couldn’t imagine” what to do with the princely salary of $35 per month—made as much as $25 million in a single year.