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11. CAPITALISM ... AND INDUSTRIAL GROWTH

RISING SOCIAL TENSIONS

CONTENTS

The fast-growing and highly disadvantaged Industrial working class

The flood of desperate people flocking to America

Their destination: the fast-growing American cities

Protecting business interests ... against working-class interests

Blacks were still blocked socially by a deep racism in White America

The American Indians – at the point of political and cultural extinction

        Note:  this page also includes no textual material – but is simply a grand collection of pictures from the era

THE FAST-GROWING AND HIGHLY DISADVANTAGED INDUSTRIAL WORKING CLASS

Oil boom at Pioneer Run, Pennsylvania
American Petroleum Institute

Young "Breaker Boys" in Pennsylvania
Lewis Hine / National Archives

Child Labor in South Carolina - 1908
National Archives

Child Laborer, Newberry, S.C. 1908.
The overseer said apologetically, "She just happened in."  She was working steadily
Lewis W. Hine – National Archives

A girl is being taught the operation of a spinning machine
George Eastman House

"Some of the doffers and the Supt. Ten small boys and girls about this size out of a force of 40 employees. Catawba Cotton Mill. Newton, NC"
By Lewis Hine, December 21, 1908
National Archives

Child Laborers in Indiana Glass Works, Midnight, Indiana – 1908
Photographer: Lewis W. Hine
National Archives
THE CHEAP LABOR POOL IN AMERICA WAS ALMOST INEXHAUSTIBLE DUE TO A FLOOD OF DESPERATE PEOPLE FLOCKING TO AMERICA IN THE HOPES OF FINDING A LESS GRINDING LIFE HERE

An Italian family arriving in America
New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

"Immigrants Landing at Ellis Island"
National Archives

Immigrants landing on Ellis Island

Ellis Island
New York Public Library

A waiting room on Ellis Island(the Ellis Island facility processed an average of 4000 people a day, 2,000 of which had to stay overnight)
New York Public Library

An immigrant mother and daughter at Ellis Island

THEIR DESTINATION NEARLY ALWAYS PROVED TO BE THE FAST GROWING AMERICAN CITIES – WHICH WERE FAST MOVING AWAY FROM THE  ANGLO-PROTESTANT CULTURE OF TRADITIONAL AMERICA

New York City – after 1900
Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn Michigan

New York's Lower East Side
Lewis Hine Collection / New York Public Library

"Hester Street, New York City"
By an unknown photographer, ca. 1903
National Archives

Mulberry Street – New York City – 1900 (the center of the city's "Little Italy"
Library of Congress

Mulberry Street, New York's Lower East Side
Library of Congress


Life in America proved not to be quite as easy as some had hoped

Italian immigrant family working at home in a New York tenement making artificial flowers

Life in the tenements could be very tough

"5 cents a spot" – lodgers in a Bayard Street Tenement in New York's Lower East Side


For some, the new life proved to be downright cruel

The Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire – New York City, March 25, 1911
(some of the 46 young seamstresses who leaped to their death from the 10th story building – locked in by their employers; 100 others died in the fire itself)
PROTECTING BUSINESS INTERESTS ... AGAINST WORKING-CLASS INTERESTS

The Pullman Strike

George Pullman – owner of the Pullman Palace Car Co. (specializing in private luxury cars for the very wealthy American elite)

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One of George Pullman's Pullman Palace Car Co. private luxury cars – The Countess
Library of Congress

Federal troops sent to Chicago by President Cleveland to break the Pullman strike – 1894
Library of Congress

Deputies awaiting strikers at the Williamsburg (Brooklyn)Sugar Plant – 1910
Library of Congress LC-B2-2045-6

Ladies Tailors strikers – 1910
Library of Congress

Woolen mill strikers at Lawrence, Massachusetts menace strike-breakers – 1912
Library of Congress

Woolen mill strikers at Lawrence, Massachusetts menace strike-breakers – 1912
Library of Congress

Woolen mill strikers at Lawrence, Massachusetts confronted by state militia – 1912
Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-23725)

Strikers firing a pistol at private guards at the Standard Oil refinery in Bayonne, NJ – June 1915
BLACKS WERE FINDING THAT THEIR PATHS TO PERSONAL SUCCESS WERE STILL BLOCKED BY A DEEP RACISM IN WHITE AMERICA

William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois (1868-1963)

Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington

Library of Congress

Scene from the first truly full-length movie (158 minutes),  Birth of a Nation – 1915 (A Civil War and Reconstruction epic directed by Kentuckian D.W. Griffith; the movie extolled the Ku Klux Klan for its defense of "traditional American values")
AND THE AMERICAN INDIANS WERE JUST ABOUT AT THE POINT OF POLITICAL AND CULTURAL EXTINCTION

Sioux chiefs visiting Washington, D.C. – October 15, 1888

The City Court at Guthrie, Oklahoma after the land rush of 1889

Sioux chief Sitting Bull

Anthropologist W.J. McGee and the Maricopo Indian exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair



Go on to the next section:  American Progressivism

  Miles H. Hodges