Development of the Middle Class in two minutes
- Corporations with customers in every state needed managers, bookkeepers, salesmen, and clerks, and these white-collar workers drew salaries instead of wages.
- The census counted 154 stenographers in 1870 and more than 112,000 in 1900, and by 1900 most were women, who earned more than mill hands but less than men in offices.
- Public high schools, college enrollment, land-grant colleges, and the second Morrill Act of 1890 widened opportunity, and Fisk, Howard, and Meharry trained Black teachers, ministers, and doctors.
- Frank Sprague's electric streetcars began in Richmond in 1888. Salaried families bought homes in streetcar suburbs, and on Sundays the cars carried crowds to amusement parks and Coney Island.
- Department stores such as Macy's, Wanamaker's, and Marshall Field's sold goods at marked prices, Montgomery Ward's mail-order catalog began in 1872, and advertising paid for magazines like the Ladies' Home Journal.
- Domestic service stayed the largest job for women, often held by immigrants and Black women, and store clerks worked long hours for low pay while the Consumers' League (1891) campaigned for change.
- On the exam: expect continuity and change questions on class, gender, consumer culture, and Horatio Alger's rags-to-riches myth; the topic links to Progressive reformers and 1920s consumer culture.
Topic 6.10 key terms
- Utopian novel
A story set in an imagined perfect society, written to criticize the real one. Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) pictures a peaceful, orderly America in the year 2000 next to the Gilded Age he wanted to fix.
- Nationalism (Bellamy's)
Bellamy's program: the nation owns all industry as one great corporation and gives every citizen an equal share of what it produces. He called it Nationalism, not socialism, and his followers took the name.
- Nationalist clubs
Local clubs, the first founded in Boston in December 1888, that campaigned for Bellamy's ideas. Here 'Nationalist' means national ownership of industry, not patriotism. There were over 150 by 1890.
- New middle class
The growing group of salaried white-collar workers, such as clerks, typists, teachers and managers, who worked with paper and people instead of tools and earned salaries instead of wages. Corporations created most of these jobs.
- Middle class
The growing group between the rich and the poor: salaried managers, clerks, salespeople and engineers, plus the doctors, lawyers and storekeepers who served them. After 1870, corporations, schools and colleges made it grow fast.
- White-collar (salaried) workers
Employees paid a salary, a set sum for the job instead of a wage for the hour, whose work generally isn’t manual. By 1910 they held more than a fourth of all nonfarm jobs. The name itself only appeared around 1910, so nobody in these pictures used it.
- Feminization of an occupation
When women become the majority in a line of work. Jobs that did, such as teaching, nursing and clerical work, usually lost status and paid lower wages and salaries.
- Morrill Acts (1862, 1890)
Federal laws granting land to states to fund colleges of agriculture and engineering. The 1890 act withheld money from states that barred Black students unless they also funded separate colleges for them.
- Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs)
Colleges founded to educate African Americans, most of them after the Civil War, when nearly all white colleges refused to admit them. Fisk, Howard, Morehouse and Meharry Medical College are examples.
- Streetcar suburb
A neighborhood at the edge of a city, built along an electric streetcar line. It let workers live miles from their jobs.
- Restrictive covenant
A clause in a deed that bars an owner from selling or renting to certain groups. In plain words: this land may never go to anyone who is not white. Developers began writing them in the late 1800s, and they spread widely after 1900.
- Domestic service
Paid household work such as cooking, cleaning and laundry. In 1890 it was the most common paid job for American women, and immigrant women did much of it in Northern cities.
- Consumer culture
A way of life built around buying goods and paying for leisure, made possible by mass production, salaries, streetcars and advertising.
- Department store
A large store selling many kinds of goods under one roof, at prices marked on each item. R. H. Macy in New York and Marshall Field in Chicago made it popular in the late 1800s, and shopping became a favorite pastime.
- Mail-order catalog
A thick book of goods that companies like Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck mailed to customers, mostly farm families, who ordered by mail and got their goods by rail. Sears’s catalog became famous as the “wish book.”
- Advertising
Paid promotion of brand-name goods. In the 1880s and 1890s, advertisers’ money let magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal sell for as little as ten cents a copy, and it helped make shopping a favorite pastime.
- Consumers’ League (1891)
A New York group of shoppers and working women that used buying power as a reform tool. Its White List named stores that paid fair wages and gave workers seats and reasonable hours. It is an example of women’s voluntary organizations pushing for social reform.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Asleep in Boston
1887 → 2000
Key terms: Utopian novel, Nationalism (Bellamy's), Nationalist clubs, New middle class
Boston, May 30, 1887. Julian West is twenty-nine, rich, and can't sleep.
On bad nights he slept in a stone room under his house. A mesmerist put him under.
That night the house burned. Everyone assumed Julian West burned with it.
In 2000 a doctor digging a cellar found the vault.
Dr. Leete
…and you have slept exactly one hundred and thirteen years, three months, and eleven days.
Julian West
At my feet lay a great city. Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings…
No poverty, no strikes, no money.
Everyone got an equal share of what the nation made, drawn on with a card. Bellamy called it a credit card. In 1888.
Julian West was made up. His readers were real. They bought hundreds of thousands of copies, and they formed clubs to build his future.
Julian West
…a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road.
Julian West
The driver was hunger…
In 1887 the new passengers were clerks, typists, teachers and managers. What would they do with their salaries? Shop, climb, give, or change the system?
White Collars
1868–1900
Key terms: Middle class, White-collar (salaried) workers, Feminization of an occupation, Morrill Acts (1862, 1890), Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs)
The coach’s new passengers came out of the corporations.
A company with customers in every state needed managers, bookkeepers, salesmen, and floors of clerks.
They drew a salary, not a wage, and kept their collars white.
In 1874 a rifle maker in Ilion, New York, began selling the typewriter. It typed only capital letters.
In 1870 the census counted 154 stenographers. By 1900, more than 112,000. Three in four were women.
The census counted “stenographers and typewriters.” She was the typewriter. She earned more than a mill hand or maid, and less than the man at the next desk.
In Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick, a shoeshine boy pulls a merchant’s son from the river. His reward: a clerk’s desk at ten dollars a week.
Rags to riches? No. Rags to respectability, and a new name. Real tycoons rarely started in rags. Most grew up comfortable.
The ladder to that desk was school. States required children to attend, and cities built public high schools.
College enrollment nearly quadrupled between 1870 and 1900. By 1900, more than a third of the students were women.
Land-grant colleges taught farming and engineering. An 1890 law told states: admit Black students, or fund separate colleges for them.
Fisk, Howard, and Meharry trained Black teachers, ministers, and doctors, who mostly served their own communities.
Julian West
…the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out of them and falling to the ground…
A salary wasn’t a fortune. One bad panic could put a clerk back on the rope.
The End of the Line
1888–1896
Key terms: Streetcar suburb, Restrictive covenant, Middle class, Domestic service, Consumer culture
The clerk went home on a streetcar.
In February 1888, Frank Sprague’s electric streetcars began climbing the hills of Richmond. Within a few years, most big cities had them.
Cities grew out along the lines like fingers. Land at the end of the line was cheap, and the ride downtown was quick.
Mass-produced lumber and nails made a house affordable on a salary.
Frederick Law Olmsted designed Riverside, near Chicago, with curving roads and lawns: a village in a park.
Some buyers wanted grass and quiet. Many also wanted neighbors who looked like them. Some developers wrote that into the deeds.
Meet the Wellers of Flatbush, Brooklyn, December 1896. They’re a composite family. Every object in their house is real.
The family’s out shopping. Let yourself in.
In 1890, one American working woman in three was a servant. In Northern cities, many were Irish immigrants. Much of the middle class’s free time ran on their work.
Streetcar companies built amusement parks at the ends of their lines, to fill the cars on Sundays. By 1896, a nickel could carry you from downtown Brooklyn to Coney Island.
Ladies’ Mile
1872–1896
Key terms: Department store, Mail-order catalog, Advertising, Consumers’ League (1891)
The Wellers had a list and a river to cross.
Ada and Nell Weller rode the El to Sixth Avenue. New Yorkers called that stretch of stores Ladies’ Mile.
Electric light made the windows glow. Christmas had become a season for shopping.
Inside, nearly everything sat under one roof, each item with a marked price. Nobody haggled.
Macy’s in New York, Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia and Marshall Field’s in Chicago made shopping a pastime.
Farm families shopped by mail. Montgomery Ward’s first catalog, in 1872, was a single sheet. By 1897 the Sears catalog ran to 786 pages.
Magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal cost a dime, because advertisers paid for them. Kodak’s whole pitch fit on one line.
Behind the counters, young women stood from eight in the morning, often without a stool.
Many earned four or five dollars a week. Cash girls, some of them children, earned under two.
In 1891 shoppers and saleswomen formed the Consumers’ League of New York. Josephine Shaw Lowell was its president.
They wrote a standard for a fair store: six dollars a week, seats, equal pay regardless of sex. Eight stores made the first White List.
The League did the math on Christmas 1895: sixteen big stores, six hundred thousand unpaid evening hours. Shopping could be a kind of politics too.