With the panic of 1837 the mills were closed, thousands of unemployed workers were thrown upon private charity, and, in the long years of depression which followed, trade unionism suffered a temporary eclipse.It was a period of social unrest in which all sorts of philanthropic reforms were suggested and tried out.
Measured by later events, it was a period of transition, of social awakening, of aspiration tempered by the bitter experience of failure.
In the previous decade Robert Owen, the distinguished English social reformer and philanthropist, had visited America, and had begun in 1826 his famous colony at New Harmony, Indiana.His experiments at New Lanark, in England, had already made him known to working people the world over.Whatever may be said of his quaint attempts to reduce society to a common denominator, it is certain that his arrival in America, at a time when people's minds were open to all sorts of economic suggestions, had a stimulating effect upon labor reforms and led, in the course of time, to the founding of some forty communistic colonies, most of them in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio."We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform," wrote Emerson to Thomas Carlyle; "not a reading man but has the draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket." One of these experiments, at Red Bank, New Jersey, lasted for thirteen years, and another, in Wisconsin, for six years.But most of them after a year or two gave up the struggle.
Of these failures, the best known is Brook Farm, an intellectual community founded in 1841 by George Ripley at West Roxbury, Massachusetts.Six years later the project was abandoned and is now remembered as an example of the futility of trying to leaven a world of realism by means of an atom of transcendental idealism.In a sense, however, Brook Farm typifies this period of transition.It was a time of vagaries and longings.People seemed to be conscious of the fact that a new social solidarity was dawning.It is not strange, therefore, that--while the railroads were feeling their way from town to town and across the prairies, while water-power and steam-power were multiplying man's productivity, indicating that the old days were gone forever--many curious dreams of a new order of things should be dreamed, nor that among them some should be ridiculous, some fantastic, and some unworthy, nor that, as the futility of a universal social reform forced itself upon the dreamers, they merged the greater in the lesser, the general in the particular, and sought an outlet in espousing some specific cause or attacking some particular evil.
Those movements which had their inspiration in a genuine humanitarianism achieved great good.Now for the first time the blind, the deaf, the dumb, and the insane were made the object of social solicitude and communal care.The criminal, too, and the jail in which he was confined remained no longer utterly neglected.Men of the debtor class were freed from that medieval barbarism which gave the creditor the right to levy on the person of his debtor.Even the public schools were dragged out of their lethargy.When Horace Mann was appointed secretary of the newly created Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837, a new day dawned for American public schools.
While these and other substantial improvements were under way, the charlatan and the faddist were not without their opportunities or their votaries.Spirit rappings beguiled or awed the villagers; thousands of religious zealots in 1844 abandoned their vocations and, drawing on white robes, awaited expectantly the second coming of Christ; every cult from free love to celibate austerity found zealous followers; the "new woman"declared her independence in short hair and bloomers; people sought social salvation in new health codes, in vegetarian boarding-houses, and in physical culture clubs; and some pursued the way to perfection through sensual religious exercises.
In this seething milieu, this medley of practical humanitarianism and social fantasies, the labor movement was revived.In the forties, Thomas Mooney, an observant Irish traveler who had spent several years in the United States wrote as follows*:
"The average value of a common uneducated labourer is eighty cents a day.Of educated or mechanical labour, one hundred twenty-five and two hundred cents a day; of female labour forty cents a day.Against meat, flour, vegetables, and groceries at one-third less than they rate in Great Britain and Ireland;against clothing, house rent and fuel at about equal; against public taxes at about three-fourths less; and a certainty of employment, and a facility of acquiring homes and lands, and education for children, a hundred to one greater.The further you penetrate into the country, Patrick, the higher in general will you find the value of labour, and the cheaper the price of all kinds of living....The food of the American farmer, mechanic or labourer is the best I believe enjoyed by any similar classes in the whole world.At every meal there is meat or fish or both;indeed I think the women, children, and sedentary classes eat too much meat for their own good health."* "Nine Years in America" (1850).p.22.
This highly optimistic picture, written by a sanguine observer from the land of greatest agrarian oppression, must be shaded by contrasting details.The truck system of payment, prevalent in mining regions and many factory towns, reduced the actual wage by almost one-half.In the cities, unskilled immigrants had so overcrowded the common labor market that competition had reduced them to a pitiable state.Hours of labor were generally long in the factories.As a rule only the skilled artisan had achieved the ten-hour day, and then only in isolated instances.Woman's labor was the poorest paid, and her condition was the most neglected.A visitor to Lowell in 1846 thus describes the conditions in an average factory of that town:
