Tenements

Good? Bad? Some of both? What do you think?

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Tenements

The nineteenth century fascinates me. It is the transition period from feudal/agricultural economies to industrialization.  It certainly wasn’t a clean, smooth transition. It isn’t over, and I suspect that it really never will be. There are vast benefits, overall, to the transition to industrialization, but also disadvantages.

While it’s not a central point and I won’t dwell on it, we’d do well to consider the landed aristocracy in England, and in parts of the USA, in the nineteenth century. Landed aristocracy is synonymous with feudalism.  Feudalism is top down, with the king granting land to relatives, loyal administrators and military heroes, who then subdivided to lower level aristocrats.  But land is just land.  To make it pay, aristocrats would need to develop the land. They developed farmland, markets, and mining, when there were minerals to mine. Whatever enterprise seemed to suit the estate, the capable aristocrat exploited.  And of course he didn’t do it himself, he oversaw others doing the work.

With variations, that’s how it was for centuries, millennia, even. When you consider how limited and cumbersome transportation was, each estate had to be largely self-sufficient.  Each estate grew its own food, created its own housing from local materials. And manufactured (largely hand-made) items to be used locally.

After centuries of sailing ships that could traverse the world, albeit slowly and at small scale by today’s standards, the steam engine was developed.  Steamships could be bigger, carry more freight, and sail anywhere regardless of the winds.  Steam locomotives were developed that made massive freight shipments available to anywhere that was worth building a railroad. And steam engines made energy available to run a new thing called ‘factories’. There have always been factories at some scale or another, but factories as we now know them became a thing around the beginning of the nineteenth century, the early 1800s. The name we generally use for this development is ‘capitalism’.

This set the stage for a full-on assault on the feudal system. And that takes us back to the landed gentry and their self-sufficient estates.  It is land that made the aristocracy rich. And it is land that gave them control over citizens. But fairly suddenly, it was possible for a person to become wealthy without owning much land. These were the capitalists. The first factories produced textiles at a rate that had been unimaginable not too many years previous. The sewing machine, invented in the mid-nineteenth century, made it possible to quickly sew the manufactured textiles into clothes at a remarkable rate.  That made clothes fairly cheap for an average person.  We take clothes for granted.  It didn’t used to be like that.  How full would your closet be, if you had to spin thread from flax, weave it on a hand loom in your living room, and then hand sew it into clothes?  Would not your wardrobe be a bit thinner than it now is?

But factories need workers.  Where did they come from?  The farms. Nobody forced people to leave farms and work in factories.  Farm life was not lucrative generally.  It was just another form of poverty.  Factory work was not lucrative either, but it was an improvement.

So, we have factories and we have workers.  And we have so much production capacity that huge amounts of raw material have to be shipped in, and huge amounts of finished product need to be shipped out.  Those factories could never have happened without the aforementioned improvements in shipping.  For the first time in forever, people bought goods as much or more than they produced them personally.  More and more stuff came from farther and farther away.  And since people were less dependent on subsisting on a small plot of land, enlarged cities and factory towns grew.

So we had a mass migration from estates to towns and cities. This was happening very rapidly as factories moved beyond producing textiles, to large scale manufacturing of furniture, kitchen implements, farm implements and so forth.  In mere decades, families went from producing nearly everything they owned on their own land, to buying most of what they owned and working in factories. 

Money became a ‘thing’.  We can barely imagine a life, an economy, without money.  But when you produce everything yourself, money is of far less importance.  Now, money was the center of economic life. In fact, money as we now know it, still didn’t exist.  Various banks printed their own money.  But as people became more mobile, not tied to a specific piece of land, and as they could ride trains and steamboats for far greater distances than previously practicable, universal currency, recognized everywhere, became more desirable.  There had always been national currencies, but now they became exclusive.

Fairly suddenly, cities are burgeoning with workers at these new factories.  Where to house them? Tenement housing was built rapidly, aided by new construction materials and techniques made possible by the very industrial system that made them necessary in the first place. To say the times were tumultuous is to put it mildly. There have been crowded cities going back as far as anyone knows. But there was nothing that compares to the nineteenth century migration from farmland around Europe and the rest of the world, into US cities. And yes, other cities in the world expanded, as capitalism expanded.

Add to that something that I am only now becoming more aware of.  We all know of the Irish potato famine, which was deadly to thousands of Irish.  But in reality, the crop failures were endemic to other parts of Europe, and set off a mass migration of its own. It turns out that the lack of crop failure in the USA at the time was an attraction to European immigrants who were desperate to go someplace more survivable. As the USA struggled with both the economic and moral issues of slavery, it also struggled with mass immigration from Europe.  Especially after the civil war, with freed slaves ultimately migrating to the North for a better, if not ideal, life. This is the same time that Europeans were flooding in. And it is also the time that many Appalachians moved to the cities for an easier life.  Was there stress?  You’d better know it.

There was competition for both jobs and housing. That competition tended to hold wages down and rents up. Still, overall, the standard of living tended to improve. Lighting, that at the beginning of the nineteenth century was largely supplied by whale oil, was subsequently supplied by kerosene from that newly developed mineral, petroleum.  And where there is petroleum there is often natural gas, which was piped throughout the cities for lighting and stoves. Less and less wood and coal was burned for heat and light. Now, cities didn’t turn black with soot and foul air from burining wood and coal. Well, at least not as much as before.

Cholera was prevalent in cities. With no plumbing, sanitation was at a minimum.  But cities started running both water and sewer lines and people became much healthier both from cleaner water and cleaner air.

At the end of the nineteenth century electricity started doing the work of steam engines in factories and providing lighting everywhere. Coal was burned to make the electricity, but at least that coal was burned at a power plant outside the city, not in people’s fireplaces and in factories nearby. (My own home, built in the 1880s, has three chimneys with ten flues, each designed for coal fires.  And that’s just ONE home in the city. Do the math, so to speak.)

So, what about those tenements?  Were they as bad as people say?  Yes.  And no. It’s not as if the people who left their farm for the city had left posh digs.  They left shanties and shacks to come to the city. For decades, the living was rough.  The close quarters invited disease. The competing cultures brought intolerance and violence. But modern developments in manufacturing and technology did bring about a much higher standard of living than what people knew on farms.  At the start of the nineteenth century, no one, rich or poor, had electricity or indoor plumbing. Few had central heat and no one had air conditioning. Most had no clothes beyond what they made by hand, starting with making their own thread. 

By the end of the nineteenth century, most had electricity and indoor plumbing. Most had more living space than they had known before. Housing varied, but for most it was far better than in previous years.

That, in brief, is why the nineteenth century fascinates me.  Too many people think of the people and the times of the nineteenth century as something static and oppressive. It was far from static, and became less and less oppressive. I think the technological change and improvement advanced at a faster rate then than at any other time, before or since.

But here’s something that causes me apprehension.  Is it better to live poorly on your own land, fully (or almost fully) in control of your own life?  Or is it better to have a more comfortable life, but to live that life largely under the direction (under the thumb) of others? This is one of them there rhetorical questions.  We must all pick and choose.  But can we all at least agree that we have the right to pick and choose.  Let’s not have anyone presume that their choice must be everyone’s choice.

Capitalism inevitably led to collective labor organizations.  It had to happen.  It should happen. Political parties take sides, but it’s more and more difficult to discern which side is which.

All that leaves scant room for an individual to make his own way, his own way. But it’s still possible.  I know, because I’ve done it.  I have not totally escaped either capitalism or collectivism, but I have faced them on my own terms, as well as possible. I live in a house of the nineteenth century, largely with nineteenth century furnishings. But I’m no fool.  I’ve got the electricity, the heat, and the AC.  My house and I, we bridge the gap about as well as it can be done.

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