Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.
Karl Marx
The working class made itself as much as it was made.
E.P. Thompson
In 1883 Illinois passed an “Act to secure all children the benefit of an elementary education.” Between then and 1910 the compulsory education law was amended seven times. The Act was seemingly effective: by 1930 approximately 97 percent of the 7–13 age cohort attended school. But what is of greater interest is the increasing level of school attendance of children over 14. As Table 1 indicates, for the 14–15 age cohort, school attendance of native white children of native parentage increased from 80.6 percent to 96.3 percent; for native white children of foreign or mixed parentage, from 66.3 to 94.4 percent; for white foreign-born children, from 54.9 to 94.3 percent; and for blacks from 80.1 to 93.1 percent. A similar upward trend, equally as dramatic, was exhibited by the 16–17 age cohort: for native white children of native parentage school attendance increased from 41.4 percent in 1910 to 64.2 percent in 1930; for native white children of foreign or mixed parentage increased from 22.6 to 54.7 percent; for white foreign-born children, from 12.9 to 50.4 percent; and for blacks, from 38.9 to 56.9 percent. While it is true that for both age cohorts significant differences existed in 1910, and some differences still existed in 1930, what is perhaps more striking is the identical upward tendency in all groups. The question then, is, why? Why did more and more children, irrespective of population group, stay on longer and longer at school?
1 Marx, K., “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonanparte” in Marx, K. and Engels, F. Selected Works, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1951), I, p. 225; Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class (Hammondsworth, 1968), p. 213.Google Scholar
2 See Abbott, E. and Breckinridge, S., Truancy and Non Attendance in the Chicago Schools (New York, [1917] 1970), Chs. 1, 2.Google Scholar
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14 Hence the title of this paper. See Thompson, , The Making of the English Working Class, which Thompson writes, “The changing productive relations and working conditions of the Industrial Revolution were imposed, not upon raw material, but upon the free-born Englishman — and the free-born Englishman as Paine had left him or as the Methodsits had moulded him. The factory hand was also the inheritor of Bunyan, of remembered village nights, of notions of equality before the law, of craft traditions. He was the object of massive religious indoctrination and the creator of political traditions. The working class made itself as much as it was made.” (p. 213).Google Scholar For a similar argument, see Gutman, H., “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” American Historical Review, 78 (June 1973): 442, where Gutman differentiates between “society” and “culture.” CrossRefGoogle Scholar Finally, it is to be noted that while a full analysis of class formation would investigate the conditions under which a working class class-consciousness emerges, class consciousness is not a necessary consequence or feature of the process of class formation.Google Scholar
17 Analogous arguments have been made by a growing number of British and American historians in recent years concerned with the explanation of working class culture. In addition to Thompson's and Gutman's works already cited, see Thompson, E.P., “Time, Work, Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, 38 (1967): 56–97; Foster, J., Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1974), especially Chapter 7; Gray, R.Q., The Labor Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford, 1976); Jones, G.S., “Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class,” Journal of Social History (Summer, 1974): 460–508; Pollard, S., “Factory Discipline in the Industrial Revolution,” Economic History Review (1968): 254–271: Reid, D., “The Decline of Saint Monday, 1766–1876,” Past and Present 71 (1976): 76–101; Thomas, Keith, “Work and Leisure in Pre-Industrial Societies,” Past and Present, 29 (1962): 50–62; Sewell, W., “Social Change and the Rise of Working-Class Politics in Nineteenth Century Marseilles,” Past and Present, 65 (1974): 75–109. See also Marrus, M., “Social Drinking in Belle Epoque,” Journal of Social History, 7 (1974): 115–141; Tilly, L. and Scott, J., “Women's Work and the Family in Nineteenth Century Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (1975): 36–64; Laurie, B., “Nothing on Compulsion: Life Styles of Philadelphia Artisans, 1820–1850,” Labor History 15 (Summer 1974): 327–336; Walkowitz, D J., “Statistics and the Writing of Working Class Culture: A Statistical Portrait of the Iron Workers in Troy, New York, 1860–1880,” ibid., 416–461; Faler, Paul, “Cultural Aspects of the Industrial Revolution, Lynn, Mass.; Shoemakers and Industrial Morality, 1826–1860,” ibid., 367–394; Faler, P. and Dawley, A., “Working-Class Culture and Politics in the Industrial Revolution: Sources of Loyalism and Rebellion,” Journal of Social History 10 (Summer 1976): 466–481; R, and Lynd, H., Middletown (New York, 1929), Pts. I, II; Kornblum, W., Blue Collar Community (Chicago, 1974); Mills, C. W., White Collar (New York, 1951), Pts. II, III; Sennett, R., Families Against the City (New York, 1974), Pts. II, III; Griffen, C., “Workers Divided: The Effect of Craft and Ethnic Differences in Poughkeepsie, New York, 1850–1880,” in Thernstrom, S. and Sennett, R. (eds.), Nineteenth Century Cities (New Haven, 1969), pp. 49–97; Sennett, R. and Cobb, J., The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York, 1972); Farber, B., Guardians of Virtue: Salem Families in 1800 (New York, 1972); Alt, J.A., “Beyond Class: The Decline of Industrial Labor and Leisure,” Telos, 28 (1975): 55–80; Pleck, E., “Two Worlds in One: Work and Family,” Journal of Social History, 10 (1976): 177–195; Kohn, M., Class and Conformity: A Study in Values (Homewood, II, 1969); Dawley, A, Class and Community (Cambridge, 1976).Google Scholar
18 It is important that the difference between “class” as I use it in this paper and “class” as used by liberal historians and sociologists be made explicit. Class is usually used to signify the existence of a group in a stratification system in which different indices of inequality coalesce, for example, educational attainment, occupation, income. “Class” as I have used it here, refers not to some index of inequality, but to the structure of social relations in a capitalist society, specifically a wage labor system in which class relations are defined in terms of the sale and purchase of labor power. Accordingly, the class position of the working class is characterized by the sale of labor power on the labor market for wages. There is thus a clear difference between the kind of questions asked by historical demographers—questions for the most part located within an inequality problematic concerned with issues of inequality, its correlates and its reproductions through education—and the kind of question I have addressed in this paper: questions concerned not with inequality, but the class structure of social relations in capitalist societies. For a further discussion, see my “Capitalism and Schooling: A History of the Political Economy of Education in Chicago, 1880–1930.” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, 1978), Chapter I.Google Scholar
19 The nature of the evidence utilized (much of cross-sectional data), and the neglect of any kind of statistical analysis, underline the fact that this paper represents only the beginning of a larger research project on the making of the Chicago working class, focusing particularly on the role of education, in which I will attempt to assess the significance of the major factors involved in the making of the Chicago working process, and to test statistically the relationships among child labor, home ownership, and school attendance. Accordingly, a comprehensive account of school attendance, child labor, and other aspects of the educational behavior of the Chicago working class will require a complex series of multiple regressions to test for the interrelationships among variables such as size and regularity of income, source of income (husband, wife, children, boarders, and lodgers), length of school attendance, years in America, school performance, home ownership, ethnicity, and place of birth. For instance, it could be reasonably hypothesized that school attendance goes up as income goes up, perhaps with a time lag, holding ethnicity constant; a multiple regression analysis would provide what, to coin a phrase, might be called the coefficient of “the marginal propensity to consume, viz., the rate at which consumption expenditures vary as income changes). Again, it would be important to explicate the impact of home ownership and the extent of impact of boarding and lodging on school attendance and child labor: was the former directly related and the latter inversely related to child labor? How strong was the relationship between ethnicity on the one hand and home ownership, child labor, and boarding and lodging on the other hand? What are the connections between different stages of the family life cycle and school attendance, child labor, ethnicity, and home ownership? Are there systematic determinative relations between position in the social division of labor (or work experience) and other aspects of working class culture (as Foster, Gray, Bowles and Gintis, Edwards, Dawley, and others have recently argued), including educational behavior? The question promises to be a particularly important and exciting one to answer.Google Scholar
20 See Department of the Interior, Census Office, Tenth Census, 1880, Population (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1881), Vol. 1, p. 870; Bernett, E.H., “The Chicago Labor Force 1910–1940.” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1949), Appendices E-1 and E-3.Google Scholar
21 See Cressy, P.F., “Population Succession in Chicago 1898–1930,” American Journal of Sociology, 44 (1938): 59–70.Google Scholar
22 U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports (Washington, D.C., 1911), Vols. 26–27, 307–308.Google Scholar
23 Derived from U.S. 13th Census by Burgess, and Newcomb, C., Census Data of the City of Chicago, 1920, p. 56.Google Scholar
24 Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistic, Report (1884), 135–391. Some 2,129 families were studied, of which only 354 were residing in Chicago, a major weakness of the study, for to include Chicago's families on a proportional basis would necessitate including something over 1,300 Chicago families in the sample used. Since the economic condition of the Chicago working class was much more difficult than that of the State as a whole, the IBLS figures perhaps grossly inflate the economic welfare of the Illinois working class.Google Scholar
25 Ibid., pp. 257, 258, 259, 265.Google Scholar
26 Ibid., pp. 269–270.Google Scholar
27 Ibid., p. 302.Google Scholar
28 Ibid. Some actual family budgets provided a more concrete sense of these conditions. Thus, a Chicago German family, husband a baker, earned $450 a year in 1884 when visited by the IBLS. The family expenses were $600 a year. The family consisted of the two parents and three boys, aged 16, 13, and 11. The oldest boy worked, earing $150 a year, so that “if it were not for the assistance rendered by the eldest son, their expenses would exceed their earnings.” Alternatively, Bohemian family was able to save some money each year with the help of the incomes of two boys. Finally, the case of a Scandinavian laborer, earning $405 a year, with a son, aged 11, earning $200, provides an example of a family who, even with the financial help of the boy, could not cover their expenses for the year ($632) with the joint income ($605): “Family members 5 — parents and three children, two boys aged nine and eleven, and one girl seven. Live in a rented house, containing 4 rooms for which $8 per month is paid. House is a frame structure, poorly furnished with no carpets. They overrun their income.” See pp. 359, 371.Google Scholar
29 Testimony of McLogan, P.H., The Relations Between Labor and Capital, I, pp. 576, 570, 575.Google Scholar
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31 Ibid, pp. 403–405. A further 13 of 110 who left because of reasons relating to school did so because they “preferred to work”: 36 because they “didn't like school,” which might easily be interpreted as disguised forms of economic necessity. Talbert limits economic necessity to the 171 cases of “lack of money.” One of the striking features of studies such as Talber's was an extraordinarily tight and economistic definition of economic necessity that not only excluded direct forms of poverty-related phenomena (for example, parental illness or working at home), but also were without any consideration of the nature of the family economy, which includes not only poverty considerations in an absolute sense, but also economic roles, i.e., relative poverty.Google Scholar
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40 U.S. Commissioner of Labor, Seventh Special Report, The Slums (Washington, D.C. 1894), p. 76.Google Scholar
41 Ibid.Google Scholar
42 Source: Abbott, E. and Breckinridge, S., Truancy and Non Attendance in the Chicago Schools (New York, [1917] 1970), Chapter 19.Google Scholar
43 Montgomery, , “The American Girl,” pp. 455–456.Google Scholar
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56 Among the Bohemians, and Moravians, , only 53.6 percent of family income was derived from the earnings of the husband, but 33.8 percent from the earnings of children; yet among south Italians, 67.9 percent of the family income was derived from the husband and 19.7 percent from children. Yet despite this difference in percentages of children's income, both of these groups derived very low proportions of their family income from boarders or lodgers (5.8 percent and 4.2 percent respectively). On the other hand, north Italians (27.7 percent), Magyars (34.0 percent), and Slovaks, (28.9 percent) derived a considerable fraction of their income from boarders and lodgers, but only a relatively small proportion from child labor (13.8 percent, 11.9 percent, 1.2 percent, respectively). It is also noteworthy that Germans and Irish of foreign birth, the two groups which had an annual income of over $1,000, were among the two groups which had the smallest proportion of income from the earnings of the husband and the highest proportion of income from the earnings of children (see Table 6). The Commission also found that of the 2,237 households, 64 percent consisted of a single family without boarders or lodgers; particularly obvious in this regard were the native-born of native father, the native-born German, and Irish, the foreign-born Bohemian and Moravian, German, Irish, south Italian, and Russian Jew. On the other hand, 73.5 percent of the Lithuanians and 74.7 of the Slovaks took in boarders and lodgers. (see Reports, Vols. 26–27, pp. 290–291).Google Scholar
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139 For a useful summary, see Gutman, and Smith, and Schneider, ; but see also Rubin, L.B. Worlds of Pain (New York, 1976); M. Komarovsky Blue Collar Marriage (New York, 1967); Gans, H. The Urban Villagers (New York, 1972); Sennett, R. and Cobb, J. the Hidden Injries of Class Kornblum, W. Blue Collar Community .Google Scholar
140 Thompson, , The Making of the English Working Class, p. 11.Google Scholar
141 Inplicit in the ethnocultural (e.g. Jensen, Kleppner, Allswang) conceptualization of class and ethnicity is the economistic assumption derived from stratification theory that “class” can be reduced to some statistical value representing an index of income, occupation, education or residence, and that “ethnicity” is a nominalistic category denoting place of birth. See Jensen, R. The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict 1888–1896 (Chicago, 1971); Kleppner, P. The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics 1850–1900 (New York, 1970); Allswang, J. A House for All Peoples: Ethnic Politics in Chicago, 1890–1936 (Lexington, 1971).Google Scholar