Labor Conditions Quotes
This quotation shows that in 1922 a major state prison was operated at a profit with NO COST to the taxpayer. They key was that the Warden was an experienced successful businessman who put the prison into a number of different businesses which paid the expenses and taught the inmates marketable skills like stone carving. The model however has been opposed by businesses in the area which saw the prison as competition and labor unions which saw the model as taking jobs away from honest, non-criminal workers and not paying high wages.
This quotation was a the description of the nail manufacturing operation using slave labor on Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello. Note the almost romantic scene that the author paints of slavery and forced child labor. That is why this is a very important quotation. This biography of Jefferson, written for a young audience, was typical of material written about the South and slavery from the late 19th century till the late 20th century. The South was still resentful about losing the war, and there was still, late in the 19th century, negative feelings in the rest of the nation about the South’s lack of patriotism and worse their basic morality of having not only supported but fought to maintain the cruel, evil institution of slavery. Many wanted to get these sectional feelings behind them and move forward. One way was to do much revisionist history about the institution of slavery and the reasons for the Civil war. Books, plays, and later films, and the school curricula, were designed to edit out or minimize the brutality and cruelty of slavery. And the reasons for the Southern rebellion was not any longer only to maintain slavery, but more palatable, almost noble reasons were substituted for the reality that slavery was the only major reason for the Southern rebellion. Maintaining a different culture and way of life, freedom from Federal intrusion in state and local affairs, honor and others were then new given reasons, and the problems of Reconstruction for the South exaggerated to justify the then Jim Crow American era of legal discrimination and lynching. This passage came from a book that was so popular with young people, that it was published again in a new edition as late as 1961. Most white Americans, growing up in the 20th century learned this version of events and many vestiges of it could be seen, even in the 21st century. In the 1970s, with an end to legal segregation, attention turned to the culturally and historically distorted views, and slowly schools began to change curricula. However, in the Southern States, in order to prevent the schools from departing from the false, romantic view of Southern Slavery, local schools where not allowed to select their own textbooks and in many cases even their own library books.
When TR was the NYC Police Commissioner, Riis had given him midnight tours of the precincts so Roosevelt could see for himself what the police were and were not doing. When he became Governor, his labor inspectors never reported the terrible sweatshop conditions that the newspapers were writing about. So TR asked Riis to arrange some personal “visits”. The two of them alone would show up at a sweatshop in the middle of the day and the governor would simply introduce himself to the owner, who dared not prohibit the Governor from coming in and then asking questions of workers and managers. Even in modern times that would not happen in a large state. The Governor then realized that the state labor inspectors were not doing their jobs and covering up the problems. Major changes took place.
At the end of the 19th century, there were no private pensions for industrial workers nor was their A Social Security system of any other provision for retirement as workers age. Nor was their any Medicare or welfare system then established. Gompers’ description was then accurate.
Eleanor Roosevelt frequently was the political surrogate for where handicapped husband. However, she became respected and loved for she went just about everywhere including places where no President would be allowed by the Secret Service.
She was writing about the textile mills of Manchester, England in the Industrial Revolution. Workers’ wages were so low that many of them could not feed themselves and their family decently
