Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market During the Nineteenth Century

by David Montgomery

Book Overview

In the 1990s, democracy and market freedom are often discussed as though they were synonymous or interchangeable. What the experience of workers in the United States actually reveals is that as government became more democratic, what it could do to shape daily life became more restricted. This original and significant work examines the relationship between workers and government by focusing not on the legal regulations of unions and strikes, but on...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521483808
• ISBN13: 9780521483803
• Release Date: March 1995
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 204 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Workers in the discursive regime of 19th century US

In one or two instances in this book the author's discussion is a little lacking in focus but overall the author does his job. The job in this book was to survey the predominant opinions of elites and the working class toward the place of laborin 19th century American life. The author uses primary sources but also makes use of quite a few of the works of other authors. He surveys a myriad of subjects of the 19th century US. He starts off with a discussion of indentured servitude in the U.S, which lasted into the mid-19th century. He discusses how elites and the nascent American labor movement in the early 19th century used common law and Jeffersonian traditions to argue about the rights of labor in American life. He describes the evolution of the customs of workers at the Harper's Ferry military arsenal, which evolved in tandem with the spread of capitalism in the United States. He surveys how the proletariat of New York expressed themselves politically through ethnic and religious based political machines. Working people in urban areas often served in paramilitary formations on behalf of these political machines and engaged in street warfare against other political groups. He shows how charity was increasingly co-opted by the wealthy after the mid-19th century. This conservative approach to charity argued that the poor were lazy and mentally deficient and should only receive assistance if they agreed to hard labor. This approach was used in New York in the mid-1870's. From 1873 to 1878/79 there was an economic depression in the United States. Wealthy charity advocates convinced the city government of New York that they should provide the "deserving poor" with assistance while at the same time the police arrested other paupers, close to a million people, on charges of vagrancy. He discusses the role of the military in relation to the workers movement. Labor activists often felt ambivalent about military formations in America life. The experience of military service in the Civil War shaped a positive strain in the views of some workers toward military culture. The fact that the government continued to expand access to pensions for war veterans and widows of veterans throughout the 19th century was an additional military related factor that could help workers. However the Civil War also saw the imposition of marital law against mine workers resisting military conscription in parts of Pennsylvania. Then of course there was the terrible anti-conscription riot of July 1863 when thousands of white working class persons rampaged throughout the city, looting the homes of the rich, engaging in violence against prominent Republicans and lynching African Americans. The anger of the New York rioters was stoked in large part by the fact that the Federal goverment's military draft law allowed people to avoid conscription by paying the government $300, which, of course, only the rich could afford to do. In the 1870's and 1880's communities of organized u