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Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts
. “Noisy plants grew silent for days, weeks, or months at a time. Adult men congregated on streets where adult men had been seen only on Sundays and after dusk.… Rumors of jobs brought hundreds of workers to the gates of individual factories. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, the recurrence of such scenes was for many Americans a source of anxiety and apocalyptic visions.”
    Dramatic changes swept the country throughout this period. The railroad, telegraph, and transoceanic steamer converted local and regional markets into national and global ones, exposing farmers and tradesmen to new competition. Likewise, transformational new industrial technologies—among them, the move from “batch” to“flow” processes in the making of many commercial and industrial goods—rewarded scale, punished small workshops, and left many workers with obsolete skills and careers.
    Deflation was a fixture of the period; prices fell by nearly 40 percent between 1870 and the mid-1890s. As a result, debtors struggled terribly. Farmers, who typically carried debt from season to season, saw the price they could get for their crops fall year after year, a result of the opening of vast new swaths of land for cultivation. In many cities, meanwhile,the availability of jobs oscillated wildly. National unemployment rose above 16 percent in the depressions of 1873–77 and 1893–97.
    The economy as a whole was by no means stagnant during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Fueled by new technologies, trade, and masses of immigrants to man new factories, it grew extremely quickly, and great fortunes were amassed by a new class of rising industrialists, whose ostentatious displays of wealth inspired Mark Twain to caustically name the period the Gilded Age.
    But particularly after 1880, most people didn’t share in this prosperity. Income inequality was likely higher near the end of the nineteenth century than at any other time in American history. In 1896, the social scientistCharles Spaur estimated that the richest 1 percent of the American population held more than half the nation’s wealth; the poorest 44 percent, on the other hand, held 1.2 percent. According to the economic historian Benjamin Friedman, in 1895perhaps half of America’s families were making less than they had made in 1880, fifteen years earlier.
    Unemployment became a widespread social problem for the first time during this period. Previously, most Americans had lived on farms. Paid work had come and gone, but home industry—farming, canning, clothes making, and so on—had made the notion of unemployment largely foreign. In the mid-nineteenth century, even the textile mills of New England had been staffed largely by young unmarried women, many of whom lived on local farms—not by a permanent labor force. But by the 1870s, these women had beensupplanted by a permanent force of factory workers. As industry rose in scope and scale, cities grew larger and denser, and farm plots were squeezed out. Residents came to depend exclusively on wages to buy food and pay the rent. “For workers,” Keyssar wrote, “the sting of joblessness became sharper and more penetrating. For middle-class critics, observers, and reformers, the phenomenon became more visible.”
    Some of these critics were struck, in particular, by the helplessness of the urban unemployed, who could not fall back on the more generalized skills of previous generations, and who sometimes seemed too dispirited to try. Wrote one observer in
The Atlantic Monthly
in 1878:
    I have been in scores of the homes of unemployed workingmen, in different parts of our country, during the last five years, where the chairs, tables, and bedsteads were all worn out and breaking down, so that in many instances there was not a safe or comfortable seat in the house. Yet the furniture had all been bought of dealers at high prices … and these workingmen were not able to