is that the people living in this filth and despair counted themselves the lucky ones to have gotten out of Europe with it's calcified class system. At least here they had some hope of escaping their hideous circumstances.

However, this is what the Republicans want to return US labor to and they're already part of the way there. Look at the doorways after dark in any city for proof.

... they now have more class/economic mobility than we do.

because their austerity measures are even worse than ours are as the handful of insanely wealthy men tries to hold on to all the money they've stolen over the years.

As an economy goes sour, misers hoard, and banks are loath to lend. That means no seed money for startups that were once the path to jumping up a class or two.

A great book by him. More photos and info in it.

And with the modern decimation of unions, we can expect a return to similar conditions.

+1,000

Children smiling now and then but the adults are always sullen and dour. With good reason! Life was fucking HARD!

Long exposure photos of the day required that people hold a pose for several seconds. People were often instructed to hold a fixed expression while the photo was taken. Looking dour for a few seconds was easier than smiling.

The photos of the kids skipping is actually quite wonderful.

because they had bad teeth. Without modern dentistry most people were losing their teeth in their 30s. A toothless grin is not really something you want to show off.

But now they'll be in color.

We can thank PROGRESSIVES for the much better standard of living that our nation enjoys today.

bringing us back to a "simpler time"

I think I met the family who lived in one of those houses in the Cairo pics, back in 1978. Even back then, Cairo was in a state of decay, with bars on shop windows, which I thought was quite odd for a town of 6,000.

that they want to 'take our country back'. This what they want to take us back to.

level set-up, steps to one shop & one half in the basement...

i can't pull out the name. it looked similar though.

...found it. trash & vaudeville at 4 st marks. still there...or was when the wiki was written...



Trash and Vaudeville is actually two stores, one on top of the other, located at 4 St. Mark's Place in Manhattan, New York. It is associated with the clothing styles of punk rock and various other counter culture movements. The store has occupied the same location in St. Mark's Place, a punk rock mecca, since the early 1970s. They are famous for supplying stars like The Ramones and Debbie Harry of Blondie with clothing during the golden age of punk rock in the 1970s and 80s, as they still do today. They also dress wrestlers and movie stars . In 2005 Trash and Vaudeville supplied alternative rock band Hoobastank with some of the clothing they wore on the Family Values Tour that summer.



i guess that's pretty close? it looks like it's right next door.

During my trips to NYC, I've never been anywhere near that place myself.

The closest I've ever been to it was The Strand

looks like it is/was right next door to where that early photo was taken. check out the door ornamentation, matches exactly.

It's a few doors down, same block. That accounts for the the similar archway.

why so many came to the USA in those days. They could not have been writing about streets of gold when they wrote back home. It would be interesting to have some comparable pics of the places they came from to see just why. In the case of my own family who quickly moved west to farm, etc. they came to escape being dragged into religious wars. Several of my ancestors were fairly wealthy and could afford to buy land and businesses in the Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa areas. Most decendants still live in this area.

The prospects of a better life were very appealing -- if not you, then for your children. Millions were willing to sacrifice the known demons for the chance at bettering themselves in an unknown land. Some returned to Europe -- but most stayed here.

PBS has done several series on the immigrant experience, by ethnic groups. They're pretty popular, because naturally people tune in to have a look at the family album, as it were. I learned some things about my Irish kin I had certainly not known before.

As for child labor, it was a terrible curse. I'm not sure when compulsory schooling really kicked in, but it was a help in diminishing child labor. Families didn't want to hurt their children, but they desperately needed every penny to buy food and pay for rent, and there were no laws against it.

The photos taken in the slums and factories were a salutary shock to the American psyche, and helped tremendously in rousing the conscience of the public. It took a long time to outlaw the practice of putting even small children to work at adult jobs, but those photographs were searing.

Farmers usually had large families and everyone on a farm works.. The oldest daughter usually looked after younger kids, and everyone else had jobs..hard ones..

Schooling & "pampering" children has not long been a feature of the not-rich

... and sunshine, which children who were working the bobbins in cotton mills or piecework in tenement slums were clearly not getting.

The settlement houses -- also the notion of progressive social workers, often religious -- were a great thing for helping people assimilate and learn about their new country. There were classes in English, literacy, and even cooking. Cooking was important because what they saw in the markets was sometimes strange, and many didn't have the knowledge of how to keep their kids from getting nutritional deficiency diseases like rickets. Oddly enough, by today's thinking, the origins of things like the Pledge of Allegiance and Columbus Day were part of the assimilation effort by the schools and government. Columbus Day was a big nod to the influx of Italians, and the Pledge was a reminder of where they were and who they aspired to be.

I'm sure that the GOP would just love to bring back such "delightful" practices.

The photo of the cigar wrappers was particularly intriguing. They were making $3.75 for wrapping 1000 cigars, or approximately 1 cent for 3 cigars! A week's work of wrapping 3000 cigars would bring in around $11.25, or the equivalent of approximately $225 today.

Last edited Tue Jun 18, 2013, 01:16 AM - Edit history (1)

Certainly not my German-born great-grandfather, who was making a decent living in the Midwest as a furniture-maker at the time those photos were taken.

And he had a skill, and he made excellent furniture, some of which is still in use 100 years after he made it.

So I'm not sure how you equate "squalor" with "freedom".

I'm not at all equating squalor and freedom. My whole point is, the good old days weren't as good as the RW would like to say.

Yes, most of the American population may have not been poor, but the poor had it tougher back then, from what I know. Yes, there were less laws, regulations and government agencies ("freedom", in RW speak), but when you were poor, you were at the mercy of whatever you could scrounge up from hard work and receive from private charity. They were only "free" to die from their poverty or live a very miserable existence.

I think, overall, America is much better off today than in 1895. Of course the RW disagrees with me, but they are wrong. Squalor does NOT equal freedom. Squalor indicates a government indifferent to the welfare of the poor, who should have basic decent housing, clothing, medical care, and food.

The RW undoubtedly would blame ALL of the poor in those photos for their plight. That's not fair or accurate. I hope we understand each other now

I see where you're coming from now.

It was pretty tough for a lot of people back then, to be sure. Wages were pretty low (like the $11.75/week for wrapping 3000 cigars), coal miners, loggers and other resource workers were often paid in company scrip rather than cold, hard cash, children were often forced to work instead of going to school, and before 1906 there was no national standard for food quality. And no workman's comp until 1911. So the right-wingers of the time probably would have blamed the less fortunate for their plight. Of course, there were also reformers who worked to improve those conditions, like Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair, and Robert LaFollette, to name a few.