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repair it, or even to make new stools on which to sit while eating their food. They had been at work in shops, mills, or factories, and when these closed had so little power of self-help that months of idleness passed without anything being done to make their homes more comfortable. In such cases, everything that comes into the house, or that is used about it, must be bought, and requires money for its purchase.
    Migration rose to unprecedented levels in the last quarter of the nineteenth century—the word
tramp
came into common usage—as masses of jobless men and families sought work. (Walking was the primary form of everyday transportation, so switching jobs usually meant changing residence too.) In the rootlessness and resettlement that characterized the period, one can find early glimmers of modern community life. Extended families split apart and never reunited;communities became more transient, and the bonds within them weakened.
    Both the economy and the material circumstances of American families have changed so much since those times that they are almost unrecognizable. (There was no government safety net to speak of then, and most families had meager savings at best.To feed themselves, the urban unemployed sometimes bought table scraps from local eateries for a few pennies a day.) But certain echoes from that time can be heard today. Then, as now, blue-collar workers were vastly more vulnerable than white-collar workers to job loss. (In 1885, among Massachusetts men,unemployment stood at 33 percent for longshoremen and at about 24 percent for general laborers, nail makers, lathers, masons, and ship carpenters. By contrast, it was just 3 percent for bookkeepers, clerks, and salesmen, and 2 percent for merchants and dealers.) Then, as now,job loss was hardest to overcome for older workers, who typically had great difficulty finding work again. (Seniority was seldom an effective ward against layoffs, except in small towns.)
    And then, as now, some of the most intense worries among the struggling and unemployed involved the future of their children. “My oldest girl is fourteen and my boy twelve,” wrote T. T. Pomeroy, a shoemaker living in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in the 1890s, “and my wife was telling at the breakfast table this morning what she was going to do with them. The girl is going through the high school, and she is going to teach school. The boy is going through high school and is then going to the school of technology.” But this was just a fantasy, made bitter by its impending disintegration. “I was just thinking how hard it was that I couldn’t do this for them,” Pomeroy continued. “I have got to take my children out of school next year and hand them over to the task master.”
    I N HIS 2005 book,
The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth
, Friedman observed that as people struggled during the late nineteenthcentury, many of them came to resent the status, opportunities, and progress of others. Politics and, indeed, all aspects of public life became meaner and less inclusive. Job riots spread and anti-immigrant sentiment swelled. In 1882, Congress subjected new immigrants to a head tax and banned Chinese immigrants altogether. In 1887,a group of white nativists in Clinton, Iowa, founded the American Protective Association, an anti-immigrant group that also denounced Catholics; by 1894, its membership had swelled to 2.5 million people nationwide—or about one out of every fourteen adults.
    Vigilante violence—lynching, beatings, arson, murder—rose sharply as the years went by. (According to one estimate,one person was lynched every two days, on average, between 1889 and 1898.) By the end of the 1890s, wrote C. Vann Woodward, a historian of the South, that region had become a “perfect cultural seedbed for aggression against the minority race,” one nurtured by a long agricultural depression culminating in the acute distress that followed the panic of 1893.
    The deterioration in race