Life in the Iron Mills
This is an excerpt from the paper...
Early American life was based in an industrious, mostly agrarian society where the cultural myth that the new United States of America was the place to go for opportunity was already firmly established. Although iron works were already at work by the 1700s, the first cotton mills in the U.S. did not come into being until after 1789, when Samuel Slater reached the U.S. with the plan for a water frame memorized (Tichi 17-19). By 1845, however, as the economies in places such as Ireland and Germany became depressed through political and social unrest, immigrants began coming to the U.S. to seek the opportunity that it was already famous for (Dinnerstein 12). Between 1845, when the labor organization the Industrial Congress of the United States was established (Tichi 28), and 1854, three million immigrants landed on the east coast to help supply the iron and cotton mills with cheap labor (Dinnerstein 12). By 1857, the U.S. was suffering from widespread economic panic, and by 1858, it was seeking solace in a religious revival (Tichi 30). This began the ascent, for the U.S. into the Industrial Revolution. By 1861, Rebecca Harding Davis had published her novella, "Life in the Iron Mills", preceding the realist movement in the U.S. by ten years. In "Life in the Iron Mills", Davis strives to realistically portray the horrific life of a factory worker, and so better educate the middle and upper classes as to the true state of the union (Tichi 14-15). This paper w
. . .
factures may possibly in their turn bring men back to aristocracy" (in Tichi 85). As factories became larger, the "master" was known less and less as he moved up the economic scale and his employees either stayed static or moved down that same scale.
There is evidence that a concerned public attempted to alleviate some of this. Unions were instituted. Senate investigations were initiated to discover how well the both factory worker and the "workers of color" were doing in comparison to the rest of the country. In both cases, William Weihe and Jesse Claxton, J. G. Going, and N.R. Fielding called for education provided for by the government as a means help overcome some hardships by the poorer classes and to pull them out of the vices of alcohol, gambling, and a wasteful life (Senate Testimony in Tichi 110, 118). Carnegie, however, as a member of the new aristocracy, romanticized poverty and preached hard work and initiative as a way of succeeding in life (Carnegie in Tichi 150-51).
How "Life in the Iron Mills" Compared to its Contemporaries
In Davis' work, she uses the different upper middle class visitors as various ways of depicting society's attitudes towards the poor. Kirby, as owner, determined that most of his emp
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Deborah Hugh, Davis Tichi, Virginia Davis, Sources Davis, Mills Davis, Deborah Davis, Congress United, Schocket Davis, Wolfe Davis, Iron Mills, life iron, iron mills, life iron mills, davis tichi, middle upper, rebecca harding, davis's 'life iron, 'life iron, harding davis's, davis's 'life, harding davis's 'life, iron mills', middle class, middle upper class, 'life iron mills',
Approximate Word count = 2038
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Life in the Iron Mills
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
