American Industrialization And Immigration

This song, written for the Yiddish theatre around 1900 by Hyman Prizit and Abe Schwarz, is a evenhandedly good summation of the essay The Uprooted, written about 50 eld later by Oscar Handlin. The second expectant wave of immigrants during the last half(a) of the nineteenth century consisted of peasant farmers from Eastern and Southern Europe as well as S dischargedinavia, forced off of lands that had sustained them for generations, no yearlong able to extract a living from it, or fleeing perse courseions and repressive, quasi-feudal g everywherenments.The had heard of Amerika, where the streets were pave with gold and land was there for the taking. Often spending all they had, those who survived the carrefour arrived and tack together the streets paved not with gold, but with the billet, sweat and toil of those who were victimised to create gold for elite ruling classes that were often more tyrannic than those they had fled. The difference was in the nature of the exploitat ion and oppression. Whereas in the Old Country, fleshly violence had most often been the tool of oppression Cossacks, private police, etc. in the industrial-capitalistic U. S. , the oppression was economic. Those who deemled the means of production, then as now, though l matchlesssome(prenominal) of maximizing and internalizing profits while minimizing and externalizing costs. Human life meant nothing to the industrial capitalist everyplacelords. Had not the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery, they would have happily enslaved the vernalcomers in order to keep themselves in luxury. A few of the immigrants were able to track down the cities, and even fewer managed to acquire land and establish farms.Most however effectuate themselves trapped in a governance that not exclusively cut them off from the land, entrapping them in a virtual jungle of concrete, brick and stone, but found their very lives subject to economic cycles, manipulations and machinations they could neither un derstand nor control. When employment was available, the demands of the incarnate leeches robbed the immigrant laborers of the comforts of family, culture and even religious faith, since pretenders were often required to work seven days a week.In Ethnic Enclaves and the Workers Saloon, Roy Rosenzweig describes how the workers of one city were able to take back some power from their bodied overlords, and how the unique character of this city made it even viable. Worcester Massachusetts was strange in a number of ways. Unlike m both industrial towns, it was not located near a navigable river nor a source of unexampled materials. Additionally, during the wave of corporate mergers and acquisition that took place during the first Robber world power era around the turn of the 20th century, most of the factories in Worcester managed to wait under local control.Control was the operative word, here the families who started Worcesters industries almost controlled the community. As in large port cities such as Baltimore, immature York and Boston, the immigrant workforce was a mixed lot who often could not visit beyond their own ethnic and religious differences to certainize that as workers, they overlap many of the same problems. In addition, the control of city politics by the industrial capitalists made it difficult for working-class people to get relate in the system in any sort of active way. This, combine with the carrot of paternalism (i. e., faith-based initiatives, charity organizations, educational programs) and the stick of repression (threat of firings if workers were suspected of union activity, tracking of personal information and the use of company spies) helped the elite classes maintain control over the workforce (88). As the ethnic landscape grew more diverse, the single ethnic communities began to circle the wagons, metaphorically speaking the results were an interweaving of church, fraternal lodge and family that allowed create a suppo rt system for the various communities who were, often as not, at odds with each other.This in combination with the more structured, disciplinarian and magisterial structure in the workplace that inhibited socialization, gave rise to the saloons literal alcohol addiction establishments as the working class began to have more leisure time. Whereas in earlier times, drinking and socializing on the job (primarily in artisan and agricultural industries) was permissible, in the more mechanized industrial workplace, it was not (more because the bosses precious more control over their workers rather than out of any real concern for their safety, one suspects).This also had the effect of separating the male from home and family to a greater degree (89). U. S. history appears to run in cycles, with a pendulum that swings from an egalitarian, collectivised economic model in which the parsimoniousness serves the people, to a quasi-feudal, hyper-capitalistic, laissez-faire system in which a few ruthless individuals claw their way to the prime of the socio-economic ladder and become economic leeches, literally feeding off of the blood and sweat of honest laborers while contributing little, if anything to the betterment of society (cases in point the Walton (Wal-Mart) family, Paris Hilton and the Bush dynasty). analogous at present, the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries was a period of capitalism run amuck, justified by a sick, twisted perversion of Christianity preached by a murderous sociopath over four hundred years before in Geneva, Switzerland. Like the gothic Catholicism, Calvinism has been used to justify authoritarianism dominance by a patriarchal, unauthorised aristocracy, whose only interests are in the accumulation of wealth and power over society.Human needs and even lives mean nothing to these predators (although their Congressional lap-dogs and lickspittles are not above moralizing about a culture of life as long as it involves people who ar e either still in the womb, are vegetative, or anyone else for whom they themselves dont need to take any direct responsibility). The tragedy is that the concept of the sweatshop and worker exploitation has never totally disappeared, despite the efforts of the saloons and the union movements that ultimately grew from them.In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt literally saved capitalism from itself with the in the altogether Deal that among other things, strengthened worker protections and the right to form a union. For about four decades, these policies resulted in the establishment of a solid core class corresponding to the yeomanry that Thomas Jefferson himself said was the bedrock of a democracy. Like the first middle class of the U. S. , which existed between 1790 and 1840, this middle class was politically savvy and involved.When this activism forced an end to their highly profitable war in Vietnam, the politicians and their corporate backers in the war industries responded with a new brand of conservatism which was really the same kind of predatory, robber baron economics that FDR had act to end. The ultimate goal of right aways neo-conservatism is to end democracy and switch it with feudalism by destroying the middle and working classes something Reagan and his three successors have been doing sort of effectively.Since the labor laws that would have permitted a return to child labor, sweatshops and twelve-hour, seven-day-a-week work schedules would be hard to overcome, this labor was simply shipped overseas to nations where such things were permitted. This not only allowed corporate capitalists to maximize profits to obscene levels on the backs of these workers, it also robbed American workers of their livelihoods, and has put much of the middle class in such economic insecurity, they have little time or inclination for activism.This was made possible by a number of things Reagans intentional failure to follow through the Sherman Act, and the elim ination of the tariffs that financed a great deal of the federal government for two hundred years. This was followed by Free Trade agreements that are in fact let loose for large corporate interests, but exact a heavy set on everyone else, and the transfer of the commons that which the citizens of a nation hold in ownership collectively to private, predatory, profit-driven corporations.The results are clear, if not generally spoken of my a bought-and-paid-for corporate media 46 million U. S. citizens with no access to health care, the final stage and continuing neglect of a major port city, the rape of a foreign country on behalf of private corporate oil interests ( be protected in large part by a private, well-paid mercenary army while U. S. ground troops go without the most basic necessities), the downslope of public education, the sell-out of U. S.industry and infrastructure to foreign interests, the near-destruction of the middle class as wealth is stolen through regres sive taxes and transferred to economic parasites such as the Walton family. Handlin paints an accurate double of a time that not only was, but is in great danger of returning. The only hope for the U. S. is suggested by Rosenzweig, which is actually being seen today on the Internet. Todays Progressive on-line blogs and chatrooms are the new Saloons, where the issues outlined above long ignored or misunderstood by a citizenry lulled by the panen et circensem of today are finally being discussed.While the majority of Republicrats and Demopublicans in Congress continue to thumb their noses at the citizens they admit to represent as they continue to enable a dysfunctional, sociopathic, twice-unelected president and his fascist-leaning cohorts, todays technology has made it impossible to hide the corruption and fall completely. History runs in cycles. Just as the last quarter-century has seen the return of exploitatory Robber Baron capitalism, so has the Internet provided Saloons wh ere the working class can once again take back what is rightfully theirs and create an economy that serves people not the other way around.