The text, Scraping By, by Seth Rockman is unique in the fact that the prosperous city of Baltimore in the 1800’s and the wealthy elites that reside in it are more or less exposed. Rockman examines the city from the rock bottom. Historians and textbooks often exclude the main ideas and arguments of this book. Baltimore falsely claimed all who worked hard had the chance to be successful. The actual reality was that the impoverished working-class had a minute opportunity to change hard labor from a career into only a stage in their life; impossible might be a better word to describe their opportunities to thrive and prosper. Baltimore was truly built on the blood and sweat of the unskilled laborers. After Seth Rockman outlines his arguments …show more content…
The rich were able to become richer, whereas the poor could basically only get poorer. This is how Rockman described the unfair market of Baltimore in the 1800’s. As an upper-class employer, the labor market was easy to take advantage of. There was an excess of poor people that were looking for work and would do whatever was necessary to get a job. Both free and unfree laborers worked the same jobs alongside each other. This increased the number of individuals looking for a job and allowed for the wages to be lowered. As a result, profit was maximized for the employer. The use of both free and unfree labor “ensured that labor and those performing it would be understood interchangeably as commodities, while leaving all working people increasingly exposed to the vagaries of the market” (Rockman 233). This supports Rockman’s argument about how the upper-class utilized the labor pool as a commodity to get richer. Employers were able to hire and fire workers as they pleased because they could easily replace them with someone else who was willing to do the same work for possibly lower wages. To add to labor being a commodity, when cotton became more popular in the South, slave-owners began to do whatever they could to keep their slaves so they could sell them for much more than they bought them for. During this time, Rockman described how free slaves were in much danger to be captured and sold away. The ruthlessness Rockman describes of the elite is the reason they were able to prosper and why the working-class could
Thomas W. Hanchett is a historian, who taught urban history and history preservation at Young Town State University and Cornell University. Hanchett is now currently working at the Levine Museum of New South in Charlotte as the staff historian and he is also the author of Sorting Out the New South City. Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte 1875-1975. The book is filled with his remarkable outpouring ideas that talks a lot about Charlotte during 1875-1975. He breaks down the content of the book into eight different tables and fifty-eight figures to help reader to understand his idea with a broader sense.
During the nineteenth century, the abolition of slavery did not lead to many positive changes for former slaves. This was due the fact that a majority of newly freed slaves did not achieve anything close to political equality. An example can be seen in the period of “radical reconstruction” in the southern of United States, where freed blacks were able to gain full political rights and power but it came with the harsh price of segregation laws, virulent racism, denial of voting rights along with a wave of lynching that continued into the twentieth century. The economic lives of slaves also did not improve dramatically either. With the rise of the highly dependent labor like sharecropping, it had soon replace slavery and the reluctance
The Gilded Age was an age of rapid economic growth. Railroads, factories, and mines were slowly popping up across the country, creating a variety of new opportunities for entrepreneurs and laborers alike. These new inventions and opportunities created “...an unprecedented accumulation of wealth” (GML, 601). But the transition of America from a small farming based nation to a powerful industrial one created a huge rift between social classes. Most people were either filthy rich or dirt poor, with workers being the latter.
As industry exponentially grew after the Civil War, the need for labor and materials to power newly-created manufacturing giants caused new social classes to form: the rich corporation owners and the poor laborers. Unfathomably rich Robber Barons, or plutocratic American Capitalists, dominated the economy and industry and profited from the slave-like work of millions of poor laborers during this time period. Moreover, the poor working class and the rich further divided by distribution of wealth. Therefore, exploitation of capitalism widened the gap between the rich and poor classes of America, and both newly-formed classes developed reasons for the change.
On top of this, he argues that the white middle class are unrelenting with their methods of depriving black advancement in American society. Knowledge of this incites many blacks to occupy dead-end jobs, or to settle for mediocrity in the face of adversity. A large number of black males in America find themselves forced to take jobs that offer no security, or socioeconomic growth. He also contends that many blacks are not very literate and therefore left behind in cultural revolutions like the information age. For twelve months between 1962 and 1963, Liebow and a group of researchers studied the behavior of a group of young black men who lived near and frequently hung around a street corner in a poor black neighborhood in downtown Washington, D.C. Liebow’s participant observation revealed the numerous obstacles facing black men on a day-to-day basis, including the structural and individual levels of racial discrimination propagated by whites in society.
During the Industrial revolution in America, there were two classes. Those two were corporations and the industrial workers. The industrial work force were treated kind of like slaves for the most part. On the other hand, the corporations like mangers and CEO`s were very rich and did not really care for their employees. Conflict and cooperation influence so many factors of developments.
Gary B. Nash writes his piece, “Social Change and the Growth of Pre Revolutionary Urban Radicalism” as secondary source to articulate his thoughts about the poor living conditions in Boston, Philadelphia and New York during post war time of the later part of the 18th century. Gray Nash who is PhD graduate from Princeton University, produces concrete arguments to inform the people of the late 1960’s about actual history that conflicted with social development and advancement after the war with France and Native Americans. Nash utilizes credible historical documents to highlight the unbalanced and radical quality of life for city dwellers, especially around clustered and poverty stricken areas on the Eastern coast of the colonies. Even though
The Civil War not only abolished slavery, but also threw the significant challenge of rebuilding a war-torn nation. Although initiated with the best hopes and intentions, the ‘Reconstruction’ of the USA had collapsed miserably for it had failed to establish a nation with equal rights for all. As a consequence, class discrimination and racial injustice had engulfed the American society. Besides having similarities and differences, the struggles for racial justice in the late 19th century and the struggles for economic justice in the Gilded Age are not only reminders of the failed ideology of the reconstruction, but are also evidence which shows us that the upper class of the society in that era were reluctant about the upward mobility of the poor.
All throughout history there have been divisions between different races and classes. However, during the Gilded and Progressive eras, this rift heightened. The Gilded Age was a time of industrial growth which brought new technologies, businesses, and more.
Firstly, the owners of land ownership in the southern colonies rapidly pooled their land, forming a large-scale farms, which, respectively, required much more labor. Second, the price of tobacco, the main crop of the South, in the 1660s fell and remained at a low level, forcing all the planters to sell cheaper. Third, as population growth in England and at the same time reduced to improve living conditions, the number of people who wanted to go to America as indentured workers, reduced - thus the number Servent also declined. Fourth, the laws of Virginia and other colonies were aimed at the worsening situation of black workers and ultimately led to legitimize the system of slave labor. Although theoretically black workers were free men, in fact, they had to put up with infringement of their civil, legal and property rights.
He speaks about the story of Clyde Ross, a black man who fled horrible conditions in Mississippi to find work in Chicago. Like many Americans Ross dreamed of owning a home. However, the only way for a black person to buy a home in Chicago in the mid-twentieth century was to buy from predatory “contract” sellers who charged unbillable rates with few legal protections for buyers. Clyde said “To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, I took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza.” Like many blacks in Chicago at the time he got two jobs just to keep up with the payments of the house, overall being kept away from his
“The South grew, but it did not develop,” is the way one historian described the South during the beginning of the nineteenth century because it failed to move from an agrarian to an industrial economy. This was primarily due to the fact that the South’s agricultural economy was skyrocketing, which caused little incentive for ambitious capitalists to look elsewhere for profit. Slavery played a major role in the prosperity of the South’s economy, as well as impacting it politically and socially. However, despite the common assumption that the majority of whites in the South were slave owners, in actuality only a small minority of southern whites did in fact own slaves. With a population of just above 8 million, the number of slaveholders was only 383,637.
The market revolution, which started in 1815, transformed worker lives, and improved the nation vastly; although it also dropped the economy as well. The traditional market, which was based upon power generated by animals and water, was slow in activities such as transportation. The growing nation underwent peace, which then catalyzed the reform of the organization of the economy. As such, transportation was heavily improved upon, along with manufacturing, banking, and commercial law. However, there were also two panics during the time that occurred that led to many Americans who were anxious and uncertain about working in the country.
The Industrial Revolution brought to America new technologies to manufacture and produce goods in quantities unseen before. In the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution new companies were learning how to monopolize and take advantage of the public, these companies would eventually effect America in more ways then one. During the late 1800’s and the early 1900’s many working class individuals lived in poverty because of the formations of monopolies and trusts. A trust is a basically another word for monopoly, which means one large business that corners a market and has no competition allowing it to raise their prices however they choose.
Approximately three Southern states change their approach on forced labor without compensation, African American slaves would work for an amount of cash that was, generally, given to the masters of the slaves; However, some of these African American were freed and, therefore, kept all the earnings. In the mid 1800’s southern states, slavery was progressively headed towards salary base employment which would boost the states economically. Furthermore, Northern states were already using such economic structure to boost labor in the industrial region, which led to divide the country into sectors of specialized commodities. Southern state were no longer the only major contributor of economic growth, the Northern states were in large in foreign demands for cotton in the years of 1815-1843 as industries boomed in