Chicago in the 1890s was a busy place, so I will include only a few of the more interesting social movements and happenings here.
Hull House
This is the view of Hull House most people are familiar with, in its built out, final state (colorized).
When my protagonist arrives to teach kindergartners and older children, it was a former mansion in a bleak, garbage-strewn neighborhood.
The Eight Hour Day
Image courtesy of wikimedia.
A popular tune featured lyrics that summed up the cause: “We mean to take things over. We’re tired of toil for naught, but bare enough to live on; never an hour for thought. We want to feel the sunshine; we want to smell the flowers. We’re sure that God has willed it and we mean to have eight hours. We’re summoning our forces from shipyard, shop and mill. Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what we will!” Asking that work be limited to 8 hours, even for children or women, was considered a radical, socialist idea.
“Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will!”
As the beneficiaries of this movement, it’s hard for us to appreciate how radical this was at the time, when piecework factories and most jobs expected 12 hour days, and no weekends off.
A nation-wide strike was called for May 1st. No trouble occurred on May 1. Across the country, 340,000 workers took the day off, peacefully marching and singing through the streets. In Chicago, Albert Parsons, a well-known anarchist, led 80,000 protesters up Michigan Ave.
A few days later, strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works were attacked by police with billy clubs, as 300 scabs walked into the factory. At closing time, a crowd of locked-out workers were standing at the factory’s exit, when police ran at them, guns drawn.
Shots were fired into the retreating crowd and at least six were killed. This set the stage for the Haymarket Affair.
The eight-hour day movement was worldwide. Chicago supporters were marching for it when they were shot at by police at the McCormick plant. This was the immediate cause of the rally held by socialists and anarchists at the Haymarket intersection. A massive number of police were sent there to “prevent trouble.” Shots were fired by police and a bomb was thrown into the crowd of police. That violence, and the trial that followed, became an international cause celebre, and led to the establishment of May Day as the commemoration on behalf of working people.
The Sanitary Canal – 1891
After multiple outbreaks of cholera and typhus due to the discharge of sewage and business waste directly into Lake Michigan, the source of the city’s drinking water, a massive engineering project was launched to build the Sanitary Canal to divert some of that water from the Chicago River into the Mississippi. Downstream communities were not pleased to received the effluent from the city and the stockyards.
Then they sank water tunnels on the lake bed a miles out from the lakeshore and built “cribs” (round towers) over them to pull drinking water a distance they thought was far enough out to guarantee it would be clean.
It wasn’t. They had to redo it again a few years later.
The earth-moving equipment developed for this effort is impressive, and the equipment and techniques used were later applied to the construction of the Panama Canal. The other fact of interest was that labor recruiters brought black men from the South to work on the project, the first black migration into the city.
The Columbian Exposition of 1893 was approaching and Chicago leaders wanted to dispel Chicago’s reputation as a dirty and disease-ridden place (TB and smallpox were rampant in the tenements, but elsewhere as well.) The Canal was a great first step, but after the first effort, they recognized they had to go even farther out in the lake for clean water.
The Exposition widely advertised the first water purification system for guests to fill up their own bottles with the purest water. But this technology was never extended to the city residents.
(courtesy WBEZ website)
Slaughterhouses
By 1900 the stockyards at Union Stockyards covered 475 acres, and Chicago’s meat processing industry employed 25,000 people and produced 82% of the meat consumed in the United States. (Source: Scientific American). At their height, the women working there numbered almost 1000, with the number of children nearly as many.
Women in the sausage and trimming rooms.
Women also worked at the Pullman factory, and on the trains themselves. (As maids).
Sewing tablecloths and seat covers for the Pullman company.
On the cutting edge, even then
