During the late 1880’s, Joe Beefs Canteen was seen as a part of the underworld but also a place of equality. Located in the Waterfront of Victorian Montreal, this tavern regulated many working class people along with others who lived in poverty. This tavern was not just a place to have a pint, it acted as an aid for shelter, sickness, hunger and even unemployment. Joe Beefs Tavern was owned by former sergeant Charles Mckiernan, was an iconic figure to many people because of his generosity and dedication to helping others. Unfortunately, Mckiernan’s acts of kindness were hazardous in the eyes of the middle class people and posed a threat to the social peace(stanz 1). These acquisitions along with the rise of similar goal oriented organizations, lead to the decline of Joe Beefs Tavern. Although Joe Beefs had a problem with rowdyism and violence (p.33, 2), inequality was never an issue and at this time equality was hard to come by. Mckiernan ran his tavern like a platoon; strict and efficient. The tavern resembled “a museum, a saw mill and a gin mill jumbled together by an earthquake...
George J. Barnsby, Socialism in Birmingham and the Black Country: 1850-1939 (Wolverhampton: Integrated Publishing Services, 1977). David Englander, ‘The National Union of Ex-Servicemen and the Labour Movement, 1918-1920’, History, February 1991, Volume 76, Issue 246, pp. 24-42. Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 30 November 1954, col 54 and 18 March 1930 col 2050 – 2052. David Howell, ‘Simmons, Charles James ‘Jim’ (1893-1973), Dictionary of Labour Biography, Vol XIII (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 339-352. Michael Hughes, ‘The Development of Methodist Pacifism’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society, Volume 53, October 2002, pp. 203 - 215. Jim Simmons, Soapbox Evangelist (Chichester: Janay Publishing Company, 1972). The Times (London, England), 20 Mar 1930, 8 Feb 1949, 19 Aug 1975.
As a progressive, Jane Addams committed herself as a social servant to the community in an attempt to fulfill the promise of democracy to everyone rather than a small elite group. Addams’s dedication to communitarian purposes as opposed to individualist gains can be attributed to her upbringing and her remarkable respect for her father, John Huy Addams. Although John Addams was extremely wealthy, his neighbors appreciated and respected him because of the benefits he brought to their community, such as a reliable mill, a railroad, a bank, and an insurance company (5). Remembering the respect her father earned from their community, Jane Addams did not see her father “as an overbearing capitalist dictator from the Gilded Age but as a self-made steward from an era when leaders put the community's interest alongside their own” (5). Jane Addams’s father did, in fact, influence her way of thinking, regarding the devotion to community service. She looked to her father for guidanc...
Despite being celebrated for its industrial achievements, the very foundation by which society was predicated on in the Gilded Age crumbled as labor unrest grew. This sense of discontent on the part of laborers is demonstrated through the Haymarket Affair of 1866. Among those tried for the crime was August Spies, who in his “Address of August Spies,” compromises his own life by persistently undermining the legitimacy of the State to emphasize the determination of the collective for which he views himself as a “representative.” In his attempt to illuminate the injustices of the State and foreshadow the unremitting turmoil that will emerge with his murder, Spies simultaneously showcases the divisions within society at the time. Consequently, because it is a product of its time period, the “Address of August Spies” can be used not only as a means of understanding the Haymarket Affair but the dynamics of society as a whole.
Chants Democratic, by Sean Wilentz examined the emergence of New York’s labor class during the Jacksonian era and in essence revealed Artisan Republicanism. Wilentz offered a unique perspective in his historical analysis of the social and political labor histories during 1788 through 1850. Wilentz stressed the importance of the republicanism ideology in the creation of a working class that was instrumental in a pre-industrial New York. The author stressed the significance in both the political histories and social histories of the early nineteenth century by incorporating political ideologies and labor union descriptions. He further integrated these insights by means of articulating the social working conditions and lives of small masters, journeymen, and artisans to show their respective importance to the creation of the working class scruples. Chants Democratic iterated not only on the formation of the labor class in America, but also illuminated the changes within this new social class by exploring how antebellum New York’s population began to live and think.
Mark Peterson’s 1994 photograph, Image of Homelessness, compares the everyday life of the working class to the forgotten life of the lowest class in society. In the image, the viewer can see a troubled homeless man wrapped in a cocoon of standard manipulated 12in by 12in cardboard boxes and yarn. The yarn is what is keeping the man and box tied to the red bench. This bench has chipped paint and is right in front of a black fence. Underneath the bench is dirt and debris from the dead fall leaves. The center focal point is the homeless man on the bench. He is the focal point because he is the greatest outsider known to man. Behind this man is vibrant life. There is pulsating people crossing the clean street, signs of life from all the advertising on store windows, families walking and blurred cars filled with
Michael MacDonald’S All Souls is a heart wrenching insider account of growing up in Old Country housing projects located in the south of Boston, also known as Southie to the locals. The memoir takes the reader deep inside the world of Southie through the eyes of MacDonald. MacDonald was one of 11 children to grow up and deal with the many tribulations of Southie, Boston. Southie is characterized by high levels of crime, racism, and violence; all things that fall under the category of social problem. Social problems can be defined as “societal induced conditions that harms any segment of the population. Social problems are also related to acts and conditions that violate the norms and values found in society” (Long). The social problems that are present in Southie are the very reasons why the living conditions are so bad as well as why Southie is considered one of the poorest towns in Boston. Macdonald’s along with his family have to overcome the presence of crime, racism, and violence in order to survive in the town they consider the best place in the world.
The working class has served as an integral part of our capitalist society; as the building blocks, and producers of the goods that supply and support our country, the working class and working poor have faced many struggles to gain working rights. The histories of labor movements in the United States are often silenced from the mainstream culture; while we take our current union laws for granted, long forgotten are the bloody battles that took place to secure these rights. The ideological issues facing our modern day working class have shown to stem from the same socially constructed ideals that existed during past labor wars, such as the Colorado Coal Strike. The Coal Strike of 1913-1914 culminated in the Ludlow Massacre; this event showed how media coverage played off of cultural stereotypes of the working class and resulted in the raised consciousness among the strikers. The way the strike was presented to the public was shrouded in cultural symbology of poverty, and through these very symbols the strikers formed an identity of solidarity.
In “Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South,” Jacquelyn Hall explains that future generations would need to grapple with the expenses of commercialization and to expound a dream that grasped financial equity and group unanimity and also women’s freedom. I determined the reasons for ladies ' insubordination neither reclassified sexual orientation parts nor overcame financial reliance. I recollected why their craving for the trappings of advancement could obscure into a self-constraining consumerism. I estimated how a belief system of sentiment could end in sexual peril or a wedded lady 's troublesome twofold day. None of that, in any case, should cloud a generation’s legacy. I understand requirements for a standard of female open work, another style of sexual expressiveness, the section of ladies into open space and political battles beforehand cornered by men all these pushed against conventional limitations even as they made new susceptibilities.
While the materialism of the 20’s faded into the economic depression that followed, and the glow of the 1950’s was dimmed by the onset of communist fever, both decades proved to be successful and iconic in the way that they brought about massive prosperity, and because youth found new ways of expressing themselves and inviting progress. Unfortunately, not all outcomes were good, and both eras triggered an onslaught of racial tension that would continue well into the future.
Accurately established by many historians, the capitalists who shaped post-Civil War industrial America were regarded as corrupt “robber barons”. In a society in which there was a severe imbalance in the dynamics of the economy, these selfish individuals viewed this as an opportunity to advance in their financial status. Thus, they acquired fortunes for themselves while purposely overseeing the struggles of the people around them. Presented in Document A, “as liveried carriage appear; so do barefooted children”, proved to be a true description of life during the 19th century. In hopes of rebuilding America, the capitalists’ hunger for wealth only widened the gap between the rich and poor.
McCullough offers a detailed account of the events of the Johnstown Flood as well as a thorough description of prior events, consequences, newspaper coverage and public opinion. McCullough makes a firm argument for the responsibility of man, and asserts the blame on the necessary people, therefore I feel he makes a fair and accurate assertion which I would agree with. By balancing his argument and depicting reasons why the flood was both a “work of man” and a “visitation of providence”, he illuminates not only the issues surrounding the Johnstown Flood, but on a broader scale he makes a powerful statement on the 19th century class structures that dominated ‘The Gilded Age’ of Victorian America. Throughout the book, I found the defining and most fundamental quote to be that of a New England newspaper that concluded, “The lesson of the Conemaugh Valley flood is that the catastrophes of Nature have to be regarded in the structures of man as well as its ordinary laws.”
The problem with society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the equality of all persons was few and far between. The bourgeoisie was in control of all the power and the proletariats were basically under their control. It was as if the bourgeoisie “originated out of the old medieval peasant class, in opposition to the medieval titled aristocracy.” [ii] They had taken over everything; the oppressed class lived by their rules and ways of life. Their way of life was not a happy one; family was based upon money instead of love. “Capital developed in the same proportion as the class of laborers developed.” ii Life then seemed simple for those living the life of the bourgeoisie, b...
...y as “the root of all evil” would be too simplistic; what she suggests, rather, is that the distribution of wealth in mid-nineteenth-century America was uneven, and that those with money did little to effectively aid the workers whose exploitation made them rich in the first place. In her portrayals of Mitchell and the “Christian reformer” whose sermon Hugh hears (24), she even suggests that reformers, often wealthy themselves, have no useful perspective on the social ills they desire to reform. Money, she seems to suggest, provides for the rich a numbing comfort that distances them from the sufferings of laborers like Hugh: like Kirby, they see such laborers as necessary cogs in the economic machinery, rather than as fellow human beings whose human desires for the comfort, beauty, and kindness that money promises may drive them to destroy their own humanity.
A famous poet by the name of Horace once said, “Life is largely a matter of expectations.” Whether these expectations are produced within or those expressed by others, we go on living the standards of how we are supposed to; no more, no less. In the novel written by S.E. Hinton, “The Outsiders”, groups are often put in roles with specific limitations, some of which they put on themselves, while others were expectations from external sources. Moreover, in this novel conjectures played a major role in day to day situations displayed in the text. Both the Socs and the Greasers had roles with reputations to maintain; whether or not it was a good or bad reputation, they still felt the need to live up to the notions placed on them, both as individuals and as a group.
...ture, “we must first begin by understand[ing] the complex but deeply valued meaning of work and place that formed the backdrop against which deindustrialization was staged” (67). With Linkon and Russo’s emphasis on Youngstown’s representations of social and class conflict it becomes apparent that anyone who grew up in a town that based its identity on labor could relate. The problem is not in the past it is in the future. With a better understanding of the struggle of work and place, the youth of today can help mend Youngstown’s identity by building upon the gap on working class solidarity that was created not so long ago. The connection then would be “the struggle for meaning in Youngstown would not end with the closing of the mills” however it will end when the people no long believe in themselves” (130). That is when the connection is lost between work and place.