I would refer you to a book length pictorial essay called How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890). What most people who celebrate this period fail to understand is that there was a severe price in human suffering for all that wealth just as there is today. And all the talk in the world about progress is meaningless if well over half the population does not enjoy the fruits of that grand design. Unfortunately, then life now the wealth accumulated at the top. I am currently finishing three books on this period. All are from a leftist perspective and all are enlightening and are concerned with getting to the history from a revisionist perspective.
The first is a head turner because it argues that it wasn't the actions of the people or the media that created the many government trgulations that we have all learned came out of the progressive era but that in fact most of what we think we know is myth and it was business itself annoyed by the changed that were happening at the state level and the desire to keep the minor players in many areas on the sidelines that instigated and helped institute the changes that myth has erroneously attributed to the people. It is by Gabriel Kolko and is titled The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900=1916 (1963).
The second one is the book from which the except I typed is from, and is a ground up social history that talks about where the people lived, how they lived, and how they worked and played and were abused during this period, and the third is only peripherally concerned with this period as an early example of mostly failed poor people's movements from a theoretical perspective, and that is Piven's book which I will be quoting from some more. But I quoted from in another thread. Her take is that for the most part such movements get subsumed and victimized from the inside and the outside. On the inside they fall victim to leadership in that the people who aspire to lead want to formulate long lasting movements to ensure longevity and are therefore at odds with the people they lead who want results now and on the outside from government officials and business interests who are determined to get peace at the lowest possible cost. And that generally involved some kind of government intervention. So for Piven what these movements generally obtain as solutions are things that the powers that be had already begun instituting, like the meat inspection regime that had already begun before Upton Sinclair wrote a word about the stockyards or the filthy conditions surrounding the production of sausage. And why was this inspection regime instituted? It was certainly not because of anything Sinclair wrote.
Government certified inspections were instituted because the Europeans were a huge market for American meat producers and as they do today the Europeans abhorred the lack of inspection by American producers and for a period boycotted American meat products. The meat industry, wanting to gain some credence with the European market and get the boycott lifted, itself petitioned the government for a meat inspection regime but argued over who was to pay for it, whether business or the taxpayer. At this time there was no income tax so the government was a little less likely to foot the bill on this. This was all occurring in the decade before The Jungle (1906) was being researched and written. Indeed, Sinclair himself wasn't writing about the meat industry as much as the conditions and trials and tribulations of a hard working immigrant population and how they were getting ripped off at every turn, but the media concentrated on the scenes from the slaughter houses instead of how the immigrants were being taken to the cleaners at every turn.
This is the pattern that both Kolko and Piven find over and over again. The people only ever get what government and business are either willing or ready to give and not much more than that. In other words, the poor in spite of what people like Howard Zinn and Nell Painter say or try to show are mostly at a distinct loss when it comes to petitioning the government.
We only win those cases where our interests coincide with the interests of business because in the end it is the interests of business that prevail. So the next time someone starts going off about BIG government, just remember whatever is going on in government is either a result of business acquiesces or is being actively and directly put forward by some business interest for their own selfish monetary gain. When I occasionally ask the anti-government types here how many lobbyists they have, I am not being facetious; I am trying to make a serious point. If they have none, and they always have none, they generally try to change the subject. Why? Because they know that the idea of individual people with lobbyists is mostly ludicrous. And since that is what really runs Congress, they know they can't win that argument.
