Working Class in Cities and Suburbs

Since the beginnings of American urbanization, the working class has constituted a significant presence in cities in terms of its numbers, contributions, and influence. Workers not only provided the labor that built cities and kept their economies running; by the 19th century, they had significantly shaped the politics and cultures of cities. Workers also made their way into suburbs from the earliest years, diversifying the character of the suburban environment.

In America's earliest, preindustrial seaport cities, the working class lived and worked in compact, diverse neighborhoods. Working people fell into three categories: free laborers, indentured servants, and unfree labor. They worked as carpenters, coopers, porters, blacksmiths, domestics, and common laborers, among other things, performing the work essential to driving the early economic growth of cities. In the 17th century, free skilled and semiskilled workers often earned enough to own property and live comfortably. They often lived in close proximity to the middle and upper classes, sharing spaces of work and social life. Indeed, it was common for artisans, journeymen, and apprentices to live and work under the same roof. This social integration was a defining quality of the preindustrial “walking city” of the 17th and 18th centuries.

By the late 18th and early 19th centuries, increasing social stratification, a maturing economy, and rising [Page 889]land values changed life for the urban working class. As the gap between rich and poor widened, and as the market economy matured and early manufactories appeared, working people found their chances for property ownership and upward mobility constricted. It became increasingly difficult for a working person to rise to the status of independent artisan, a person who owned his own workshop and tools. Most workers found themselves consigned to the status of permanent wage earners and renters. Social and spatial patterns in cities changed under these pressures. Neighborhoods began to segregate by class, with the wealthy in the city core (where land was most valuable), the middle classes in a surrounding belt, and workers on the periphery. Indeed, working people were the “first suburbanites,” inhabiting the less desirable, less accessible city outskirts where conditions were dire and services few.

Freed from the paternal gaze of employers, working people soon carved out their own independent neighborhood life and culture centered on taverns, clubs, and journeymen's associations. Ultimately, this context became a springboard for the independent political and economic mobilization of workers in the early 19th century. Embracing the ideology of artisan republicanism, these workers fought for autonomy, control, and independence in economic life as a means of restoring a virtuous, independent citizenry, which they believed was becoming corrupted by the unfettered spread of free-market capitalism. This movement took hold most powerfully in New York City, where workers formed local workingmen's parties from 1829 to 1832. Although these parties never gained control of city hall, they did achieve modest popular support and were among the first political parties in the United States organized at the local level.

These economic and social trends only intensified in the 19th century with the rise of the industrial city. Industrialization unfolded unevenly across American cities but had reached a peak by the late 19th century. In larger cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, the industrial economy was diverse enough to create a very complex, diverse working class divided by skill, race, sex, and nationality. Industry introduced new patterns of work marked by mechanization, the diminution of skill, low wages, and wage dependency.

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