Excerpts from “Muddy Boots & Ragged Aprons”
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the American
economy underwent a dramatic transformation. At the begin-
ning
of the Civil War, the United States was still an overwhelm-
ingly
agricultural country: four of five Americans made their
living
off the land. By 1900, the United States had become the
world's
foremost industrial power, easily outstripping Great
Britain,
its nearest rival. No part of the nation remained unaf-
fected;
as the twentieth century began, Americans labored in
the
steel mills of Alabama, the oil fields of Texas, and the
sweatshops
of San Francisco. The heart of industrial America,
though,
lay in a corridor of northeastern and Midwestern
cities,
extending from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston,
through
Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, to Chicago and
St.
Louis.
To
maintain this vast complex of factories, mills, and shops,
industrialists
required millions of workers, many skilled in
particular
trades such as carpentry and iron molding, many
more
with no skills save the stamina to endure long hours and
brutal
working conditions. Industry's demand for labor, in
turn,
triggered massive shifts in population. In part, the move-
ment
was internal. Between 1865 and 1900, millions of
Americans,
black and white, left their farms for the factories. It
was
more common for American industry to draw its workers
from
beyond the United States, however. In the latter half of
the
nineteenth century, fourteen million immigrants poured
into
the country in search of work, and in the process they
fundamentally
altered the face of urban America.
Prior
to industrialization, the United States had been popu-
lated
largely by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, African
Americans,
and Native Americans. The immigrants of the late
nineteenth
century, in contrast, came primarily from Poland,
Russia,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Greece, Italy, and the
other
nations of southern and eastern Europe. Speaking no
English,
dressed in traditional clothes, carrying all their posses-
sions
in a few suitcases, immigrants often struck native-born
Americans
as little more than the Old World's "wretched
refuse."
Employers, however, welcomed the newcomers as a
seemingly
endless source of unskilled laborers. Immigrants
thus
crowded into the cities of the industrial belt; in 1900, 35
percent
of Chicago's citizens and 37 percent of New York's citi-
zens
were foreign-born. In these cities, immigrants did their
best
to recreate the world they had left behind, building
Catholic
churches and Jewish synagogues, opening ethnic
stores
and social clubs, publishing foreign-language news-
papers.
Writing in 1876, the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz
captured
the texture of life in the Polish neighborhoods of
Chicago.
"The morning sun rising from the waters of Lake
Michigan,"
he wrote, "illuminated Polish inscriptions and
names
on the buildings. . . . Doors and windows began to open
. .
. and the first words I heard were uttered in Polish. A few
minutes
later I caught sight of the Church of St. Stanislaus
Kostka.
. . . About eight o'clock in the morning flocks of chil-
dren
began to swarm here on the way to the school maintained
by
the priests and situated beside the church."
The
industrialization process had already swept through
Detroit
by 1900. In 1865, Detroit had been a frontier town with
a
population of 45,000. Forty years later, it was a major manu-
facturing
center of 285,000, the nation's thirteenth largest city.
As
in other northeastern cities, immigrants accounted for most
of
the population growth; according to the best available study,
77
percent of all Detroiters were either foreign-born or the
children
of foreign-born parents in 1900. Together, industrial-
ists
and the workers they attracted made the city into a patch-
work
of factories and ethnic neighborhoods. Employers built
their
shops either along the riverfront or, increasingly, in the
northern
end of town, near the intersection of Woodward
Avenue,
the major north-south artery, and East Grand
Boulevard.
Workers filled in the remainder of the city, carving
it
into a series of tight-knit ethnic enclaves. Detroit's large
German
population dominated the city's east side, particularly
along
Gratiot Avenue; the growing Polish population settled in
the
northeast, north of the German neighborhood; and the
Russian-Jewish
population settled to their west, along Hastings
Street;
African Americans—a minuscule 1.5 percent of the
population—were
increasingly segregated into a narrow band
of
streets on the eastern edge of downtown; and the Irish con-
trolled
the lower west side, along Michigan Avenue, though
their
hold on the area was already slipping. Few of these areas
fit
the stereotype of an ethnic ghetto. They were not crowded
with
multistory tenements, nor were their streets crammed
with
pushcarts. Most of Detroit's ethnic neighborhoods, rather,
were
lined with small, single-family homes. Detroit's immigrant
workers,
in fact, were more likely to own their own homes than
were
the city's native-born whites.
As
they were wont to do, civic boosters continually
pointed
to Detroit's expansion as proof of the city's economic
vitality.
"Talk of business depression passes over Detroit as
lightly
as water from a duck," a typical promoter proclaimed.
"The
goods [Detroit's businesses] produce are better con-
structed
and better finished than those of almost any other city
that
might be mentioned." There was something to those
claims,
of course; Detroit's manufacturers and workers did pro-
duce
an unusually large number of goods requiring skilled
labor.
In 1900, though, Detroit's economy was largely driven by
the
demand of its larger neighbors, such as Cleveland, Buffalo,
and
Chicago. For the most part, Detroit's plants supplied those
cities
with the hardware or machinery that their much larger
factories
needed to produce or distribute finished products. At
the
turn of the century, more than a quarter of Detroit's work-
ers
labored in the metal trade, producing castings, sheet metal,
valves,
and pipes, and the city's largest employer, American Car
and
Foundry, built railroad cars for the Chicago market. For all
its
rapid growth, then, until 1900 Detroit remained in the
second
tier of industrial cities, an adjunct to, rather than a dri-
ving
force of, the nation's economy.
Then
the automobile came to Detroit.
The
workers who poured into Detroit in the 1910s and 1920s
did
not fit any single mold. As in the late nineteenth'century,
the
majority of newcomers came from eastern and southern
Europe.
Most of these immigrants were Poles, who by 1920
had
become the city's largest ethnic group. Russians consti-
tuted
the second largest group of European immigrants, fol-
lowed
by Italians, Hungarians, Slavs, and Greeks. When World
War
I blocked European immigration, white and black south-
erners
streamed into Detroit to fill the void; according to
Detroit
Urban League records, more than a thousand African
Americans
arrived in Detroit each week in 1920. Throughout
the
1910s and 1920s, workers from poorer-paying northern in-
dustries,
and even from the factories of Britain and Germany,
made
their way to Detroit.
Once
in the city, workers immediately began looking for
work,
not an easy task even in the best of times. Frank
Marquardt's
first experience at a factory gate is fairly typical.
The
American-born son of a German steelworker and his wife,
Marquardt
was fifteen years old in January 1914 when he ar-
rived
in Detroit from Braddock, Pennsylvania, hoping to land
one
of the precious jobs at Ford. "I will [never forget the sight
that
greeted us when we walked toward the Ford employment
office,"
he recalled years later. "There were thousands of job
seekers
jam-packed in front of the gates. It was a bitterly cold
morning
and I had no overcoat, only a red sweater under a thin
jacket.
I don't know how long we stood in that crowd, but I
became
numb from the cold." Despite his difficult first en-
counter,
Marquardt was lucky. Although he was not hired at
Ford,
he did secure a job in the auto industry, filing castings at
the
Metal Products Company, a parts supplier. That is not par-
ticularly
surprising. Marquardt was young, white, and male; he
spoke
English, and he was familiar with factory life—precisely
the
attributes the auto industry found most attractive in a po-
tential
employee.
A
newcomer's background largely determined the type of
work
he or she would secure in Detroit. Auto companies
tended
to hire American, English, and German men for skilled
and
semiskilled jobs such as tool and die or machine work,
whereas
they favored Polish, Hungarian, and Slavic men for
unskilled
positions, such as assembly work. Auto plants were
less
likely to hire Jewish and Italian men, more than half of
whom
turned instead to the service sector, often working as
small
shop owners or street peddlers. Most automakers stead-
fastly
refused to hire African-American men and women and
white
women for all but the lowest-paying and least desirable
jobs.
Black workers were typically segregated into foundry or
janitorial
jobs, which many white men rejected, and white
women
were assigned to upholstery or small parts depart-
ments,
where their "nimble fingers" could be put to best use.
There
were not many of these jobs, so many black and women
workers
had no choice but to find work outside the auto indus-
try.
African Americans secured jobs as porters, waiters, domes-
tics,
and the like, and white women worked in stores, in front
offices,
or within their own homes, which they made into
boardinghouses.
As
they struggled to find or keep work, the newcomers also
scrambled
to find lodgings. In 1900, Detroit had a very low
population
density; many of the city's blocks were studded
with
vacant lots. Most of Detroit's workers therefore could
afford
their own homes. Skilled workers could even hope to
enjoy
some of the amenities of middle-class life: new furniture
and
rugs, fresh wallpaper, a few household appliances.
Unskilled
workers naturally expected less—a small house on a
tiny
lot, perhaps—but they nonetheless had the ability to own
property,
which freed them from at least one burden of depen-
dency.
By 1916, though, the demand for housing far out-
stripped
the supply. According to one report, some two
hundred
carloads of household goods lay unclaimed in the
city's
railroad yards while their owners searched for a place to
live.
"Laboring men whose presence is much desired in auto-
mobile
. . . plants," a magazine explained, "are said to be leav-
ing
the city because they can find no place to sleep between
shifts.
Many
of the workers who came to Detroit were young: in
1920,
twenty-five to twenty-nine year old men made up 8 per-
cent
of the city's population, almost double the percentage of
that
age group in the nation as a whole. Many members of the
"suitcase
brigade," as it was known, had little interest in
owning
a home in the city; they simply wanted to rent while
they
worked. Their ability to do so, again, was determined
largely
by their backgrounds. Eastern and southern European
immigrants
generally turned to the boardinghouses in their
ethnic
neighborhoods. Conditions varied widely from neigh-
borhood
to neighborhood. Polish and Jewish newcomers, for
example,
were able to move into established communities,
whereas
Hungarian and Slavic workers did not enjoy the sup-
ports
of existing neighborhoods when they arrived in Detroit.
Many
boardinghouses did not have running water, proper ven-
tilation,
or other basic amenities. Despite such shortcomings,
boardinghouse
owners, themselves often workers, tried to
crowd
as many workers as they could into their small homes, in
one
case, public health officials found fifty-two boarders living
in
a twelve-room tenement. That was unusual, but it was not
unusual
for a boardinghouse to rent the same bed to two work-
ers
on different shifts. One factory hand would sleep while the
other
worked .
No
matter how poor conditions became in immigrant
neighborhoods,
though, they remained far superior to life in
Detroit's
growing African-American ghetto. One hundred
twenty
thousand blacks lived in Detroit by 1930, three hun-
dred
times the number in 1900. Barred from rental units in
most
of Detroit by white realtors and landlords, the vast major-
ity
of African Americans crowded into the lower east side's
black
ghetto. There, they were forced to take whatever lodgings
they
could find. "Seventy five percent of the Negro homes
have
so many lodgers that they are really hotels," an African-
American
activist reported in 1917. "Stables, garages, and cel-
lars
have been converted into homes for Negroes. The pool
rooms
and gambling houses are beginning to charge for the
privilege
of sleeping on pool-room tables overnight." Many
landlords,
black and white alike, charged African Americans
exorbitant
rents while refusing to perform the most basic re-
pairs.
The owner of a home on Hastings Street, in the heart of
the
black ghetto, charged his tenants sixty-five dollars a month,
almost
double the typical rate in white neighborhoods. Yet
when
the hot water pipe burst he did not fix it, and when a
storm
blew out the front window he did not replace it. Little
wonder
that the tenant's infant daughter died of exposure in
the
middle of winter. The case was far from unusual: Detroit's
black
community suffered from an infant mortality rate almost
double
that of white Detroiters.
(Images of
Working-Class Detroit, 1900-1930)
by KEVIN BOYLE
& VICTORIA GETIS
