Economics of the Late Victorian Era
With the power of wealth and concentration of industry, the tremendous development in machinery, and power to drive machinery; with the improvement of the tools of labor, so that they are wonderfully tremendous machines, and with these all on the one hand; with labor, the workers, performing a given part of the whole product, probably an infinitesimal part, doing the thing a thousand or thousands of times over and over again in a day-labor divided and subdivided and specialized, so that a working man is but a mere cog in the great industrial modern plant; his individuality lost, alienated from the tools of labor; with concentration of wealth, concentration of industry, I wonder whether any of us can imagine what would be the actual condition of the working people of our country to-day without their organizations to protect them. What would be the condition of the workingmen in our country in our day by acting as individuals with as great a concentrated wealth and industry on every hand? It is horrifying even to permit the imagination full swing to think what would be possible. Slavery! Slavery! Slavery! Demoralized, degraded slavery. Nothing better (Gompers 102).
Girls could hold down clerk jobs in stores and make $5 to $6 a week, only professionals made $18 a week. Economics in the US was changing quickly after the close of the Civil War. This was good for stockholders because they had more power in the company. Even though the farm jobs rose, the non-farm jobs were more popular and prosperous. Queen Anne houses! yielded to California bungalows as the nation's residential ideal. In the Victorian Era, for the first time in history, industry became more important than agriculture. Agricultural prices went down and did not come up until after 1910. Most Americans felt that the country was going to improve itself. They went straight to the state and federal government. The middle years of the 1890s was a time of depression. There was a brief fear of a civil war. In the steel mills many men worked twelve-hour days and seven-day weeks. Because of industrialization, farmers were leaving their farms for other occupations.
Common topics in this essay:
Park Michigan,
Reform Bill,
Zealand Australia,
Victorian Era,
Regency Period,
Motor Company,
Christian God,
Shortly Chartism,
West South,
Worker-Management Confrontations,
boardman 21,
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upper class,
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boardman 16,
wealth concentration industry,
workers own,
united steel,
assembly line,
1 victorian era,
people using,
sherman antitrust act,
industry boardman,
value manufacturing products,
immigrants lived poverty,
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Acceptance Essays
