Showing papers in "Journal of Social History in 1992"

The End Justified the Means: Boarding and Rooming in a City of Homes, 1890–1951

Abstract: In the late nineteenth century, many people, and quite a number of families, accommodated themselves by lodging in someone else's home.1 The arrangement suited everyone. Lodgers got inexpensive housing while hosts supplemented their often meagre incomes. Before the turn of the century, however, attitudes hardened against the practise. Reformers, most of whom were middle class, worried about the physical effects of overcrowding and the moral consequences of strangers sharing private family space. Many hosts apparently shared this concern, and aspired to greater privacy. At the same time some lodgers sought freedom to lead their own lives without feeling that they were being watched. Scholars have agreed that, after the turn of the century, rising incomes combined with changing attitudes to bring about the decline and social marginalization of lodging. Higher incomes, of course, made it possible for more lodgers and hosts to live apart. As lodging went into a decline, its social character is supposed to have changed. Relations between lodger and host became more distant. Instead of "boarding", lodgers increasingly "roomed".2 Hosts enjoyed greater privacy as lodgers ate, socialized, and had their clothes cleaned elsewhere. Indeed, it has been said that lodgers preferred not to stay in private homes but instead clustered in dedicated rooming houses. Here they found a peer culture that permitted greater freedom of action. This freedom was enhanced as small, converted dwellings were replaced by larger purpose-built lodging houses and, from the 1920s, by cheap apartment buildings.3 Lodging houses and apartment buildings undermined any tendency for occupational groups of lodgers to cluster and associate. At the same time the growth of apartments provided a preferable alternative to lodgings, so that only the socially marginal-the transient poor-were left in rooming houses. The result was anonymity and anomie. This interpretation of the social history of lodging's decline is plausible. Indeed, in the long run and in at least some respects, it is undeniably valid. But, especially as it pertains to the first half of this century, it is largely speculative. We do not know when, and at what pace, rooming supplanted boarding. Evidence that distinguishes between roomers and boarders is scarce, and has rarely been presented.4 The anonymous nature of lodging has probably been overemphasized. Contemporary observers and historians of lodging have concentrated upon the situation in the larger cities, notably Boston and Chicago, where larger rooming houses (and, later, apartments) were most common and where anonymity reached its extreme. At the same time, most have focused upon one half of the overall picture: either the family home and the household economy, or the larger rooming house and the urban subculture that it made possible.5 In so doing they have made it difficult to make truly comparative statements about the relative importance of the private home as a source of lodging accommodation. Most seriously, they have confined their attention largely to the nineteenth century when lodging was in its heyday. As a result, the social history of lodging's decline

Catholics and Apprentices: An Example of Men's Philanthropy in Late Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract: On April 18, 1883 eighty men gathered in a ramshackle theater on the outskirts of Lyon to hear Dom Bosco, charismatic father of Turinese working class youth, bless the founding of a new charitable organization. The abbe Louis Boisard had founded the Apprenticeship Workshops, an industrial enterprise organized according to Christian principle, promising to transform needy youths into skilled craftsmen and committed defenders of the Church. Dom Bosco's audience surely expected pious exhortations, reminders of the duty incumbent on those blessed with a fortune to provide for those without. Dom Bosco, however, depicted a nightmare vision: hordes of working poor without religion rebuking their masters, their evil passions whipped up by demagogues. He followed it with an urgent call to arms:

Liberating the captives - independent watchtower as an avatar of colonial revolt in southern africa and katanga, 1908-1941

Abstract: There is no country in the world where grievances are not widely felt. In a free country the subject has the means of expressing them and of himself attempting their removal. In Africa native opinion has neither the means of expression nor the means of action. And when grievances are laid at the door of an alien government, when its demands fall on all and its services are felt by none, education enables growing numbers to reflect upon and nurse their grievances until some way of resistance offers, however foolish or criminal or hopeless it may be. Norman Leys to S. H. Oldham on the eve of the Chilembwe Rebellion of 19152

Widowhood and Patriarchy in Seventeenth-Century France

Abstract: On 12 January 1623, the municipal commis au gretfe "went to the house where Mr. Charles Germont [a notary] died situated in this town of Nantes near the presbitery of St Croix . . . [and] in a top room on the second floor . . . found the body of the deceased.' In the presence of Louise Lucas, Germont's widow, and his brother, the official proceeded to affix the seals of the municipality to the doors and locks of the residence.l This first step towards the division of community property was taken before the corpse was out of the house. Years might pass, however, before the ultimate partition of the entire estate after the widow's death, and her position during this interlude was characterized by ambivalence. Widows did become heads of households and enjoyed the legal rights associated with that position. Households were the basic units of social organization in early modern France and household status profoundly shaped the situation of the entire population. Freed from the constraints of marriage, widows were legally entitled to manage their own property, make contracts alone, and remarry without the permission of their families. The household organization of early modern society, historians have argued, translated these legal gains into new status and autonomy, at least for widows whose households were financially

A ‘Brave and Daring Folk’? Shopkeepers and Trade Associational Life in Victorian and Edwardian England

Abstract: Trade associations are generally acknowledged to have occupied a critical position in the shopkeeping community of early twentieth-century England.2 Yet surprisingly historians have made little attempt to reconstruct the precise mechanics of such associational activity.3 This study, which focuses on associational life in one representative provincial centre, Leicester,4 attempts to explain how associationalism both fostered the emergence of a parochial shopkeeping subculture, oriented around specific trades, and transformed shopkeeping politics. First, an investigation of this sub-culture explains the genesis of important structural changes within the business community. Trade solidarity caused shopkeepers to reassess their relationship with other retailers, leading for the first time to the development of divisions within the shopkeeping community based on a collective self-consciousness. The consequence was the gradual emergence of a clear-cut division within the shopkeeping world between two fractions: "principal' (specialist) shopkeepers and "domestic' (general) shopkeepers. The thrust of the argument is that by the early twentieth century principal shopkeepers emerged as a group whose members drew their social identity from their trade, and its accompanying sub-culture, rather than, as in earlier years, their association with the wider community. Second, local investigation also suggests that late nineteenth-century associationalism was responsible, in large part, for shopkeepers' changing political expectations. An examination of shopkeeper activism in Leicester goes some way to reinterpreting the current orthodoxy that shopkeepers occupied a marginal role in the political life of the nation. Historians such as Geoffrey Crossick and Michael Winstanley argue with some confidence that nineteenth-century British shopkeepers were politically impotent. This was in direct contrast with their continental counterparts who were leaders of right-wing lower-middle-class militancy.5 Certainly, as both Geoffrey Crossick and Michael Winstanley argue, British shopkeepers "remained committed to mainstream party politics."6 Both Liberals and Conservatives were sympathetic to shopkeeping concerns by the early twentieth century; however, in a stable community neither party needed shopkeepers as allies against potential threats to the established order.7 This allows Crossick to conclude that as a political force shopkeepers were not essential in Britain.8 However, just because shopkeepers were not required as political saviours does not mean that their political activities should be ignored. Indeed, it is precisely because shopkeepers accepted "mainstreampolitics' that their own unique political/trade sub-culture developed as it did in the late nineteenth century.

“The Eye Must Entrap the Mind”: Army Spectacle and Paradigm in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract: Spectacle is an intrinsic dimension of armies and conflict,1 but the impact of army spectacle upon nineteenth-century Britain has been neglected by scholars. This omission is puzzling, for a number of writers, most notably Max Weber, have claimed that the military serves as a metaphoric model of organization in civilian society, yet no scholarly work has examined the appeal of the military show or the relationship between this spectacle and the adoption of the military paradigm in civilian life.2 The present study seeks to examine this significant but neglected subject by focusing on values inherent in the military paradigm which were adopted by British society. The nineteenth century is particularly appropriate for two reasons: first, the long French wars made the greatest military impact on British society of any previous period in history, and second, between 1815 and 1855 the army reached the high point of its sartorial brilliance.3 Military spectacle was undeniably conspicuous during this era, and the first part of this article will examine the public's fascination with this display, demonstrating that the show's enormous popularity led to the adoption of military themes in civilian culture. The second part will examine how values which were visually inherent in the military imagery became an inspirational model and paradigm in a variety of non-military endeavors, all of which were linked with social control and largescale organization, but especially with institutions. These relationships have been overlooked, in part because the subject is complicated in several ways. The small size of the army and its deliberate isolation from the public in barracks might mislead a scholar to believe that the contacts between soldiers and civilians were of limited importance.4 The public's attitude toward the army was also paradoxical, and the civilian response to the military often depended upon context. During peacetime, civilians often neglected and ignored the military or complained that it was a wasteful expense,5 yet during a European war, many of these same people gave wholehearted support to the armed forces.6 This very ambivalence shows that historians cannot view the homeservice army only in terms of its role as an internal police force or as a political issue: these views fail to note the enormous attraction of the spectacle, an omission largely shared by recent works on the era's popular entertainment and recreations.7 But soldiers were a most unlikely group for admiration, for on one level, the army was viewed by Britons with mistrust and distaste, due to poor discipline and its forming a sub-culture in British life.8 The Other Ranks were commonly seen as being pathetic slaves in red coats-the passive machinery in an engine of oppression, and therefore most un-English but also as coarse, drunken, louts whose brawls with civilians and each other were a widespread problem. They were also despised as lazy wastrels and the outcasts and dregs of society; the officers were often viewed as violent, drunken scoundrels and arrogant snobs, and all ranks had a reputation as unprincipled seducers.9

Streetwalkers, Degraded Outcasts, and Good-for-Nothing Huzzies: Women and the Dangerous Class in Antebellum St. Louis

Abstract: Mid-nineteenth century law enforcers struggled to preserve social order. This task, however, often entailed managing crime rather than eliminating criminal or disruptive behavior. For example, in order to address the crime, disorder, and immorality associated with "fallen women," the municipal police attempted to regulate or control illicit sexual activity.1 Such a strategy encouraged law enforcers to arrest some fallen women but to protect others. Ironically, the police often supported and assisted those women who engaged in the sex trades most consistently and who were, by middle-class standards, most "depraved," while they vigorously pursued and apprehended women who had scant contact and often no contact at all with illicit or illegal activities in the city. Immoral or disruptive women posed special problems for nineteenth-century policemen and policymakers. Many city officials believed that fallen women were extraordinarily dangerous. Not only did such women commit immoral and often illegal acts, but their behavior also contaminated innocent young men, many of whom subsequently became drunkards and criminals.2 Thus municipal officials held fallen women responsible for much of the crime committed by men. Arresting these women, therefore, promised to reduce violence, disorder, and property crime, as well as immorality. But midSnineteenth-century public officials were poorly prepared to battle women criminals. Legislators expected men to commit most offenses, and they framed laws in order to address male criminals.3 Statutes designed to eliminate wanderers, for example, often specified the punishment for the "wayfaring man"; laws concerning pauperism, vagrancy, and drunkenness frequently contained similar language.4 Regulating the moral conduct of women posed considerable difficulties as well. The moral indiscretions that frightened middle-class reformers often seemed unimportant to working-class policemen and trivial to judges struggling to maintain social order. Similarly, the machinery of the criminal justice system remained ill suited for female offenders. Although women began to be arrested and incarcerated in increasing numbers during the antebellum period, neither prison facilities nor the regimen imposed as punishment seemed appropriate for these criminals.5 Few states, for example, had institutions for

An Officer of the Neighborhood: A Boston Patrolman on the Beat in 1895

Abstract: For historians of the American police, the nineteenth-century patrolman has been an elusive figure. Scholars have shown how uniformed, formally organized police forces emerged during the antebellum period in such cities as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and during the latter second half of the nineteenth century spread across the United States. Historians realize that somehow as he walked his beat alone, the police patrolman was supposed to help forestall crime, recover stolen property, prevent disorder, and provide other services.1 Yet for the most part, they have been unable to describe a crucial aspect of the policing system, the patrolman's everyday relations with the public.2 Knowledge of the patrolman's activities would shed light on important historical issues concerning the role which the uniformed constabulary played in nineteenth-century urban society. Most historians agree that the history of the police reflects the emergence of bureaucratic, centralized modes of state authority which expanded at the expense of individual freedom of behavior. To some historians, this process means that the police acted simply as agents of the upper class in the ongoing struggle to repress the working class.3 Other historians reject this economic class interpretation, but agree that on behalf of the "respectable classes" the police exercised new forms of social control over the "dangerous classes," groups such as criminals, disorderly single men, and vagrants.4 In a recent study, Allen Steinberg examined the transformation of state powers by investigating Philadelphia's criminal justice system in the nineteenth century. He demonstrated that for much of the nineteenth century, the criminal justice system, characterized by private prosecutions and the sitting of local aldermen as magistrates, was localistic, informal, and highly democratic. In the late nineteenth century, reformers replaced the private prosecutors and alderman magistrates with police and elected trial justices. This change, Steinberg concluded, created a centralized and impersonal judicial process which deprived working-class citizens of the immediate access to the legal system which they previously had enjoyed.5 In the context of an expanding state authority, a historical issue closely related to the function of the police is who controlled them. Although their descriptions of the exact means used to control the police tend to be imprecise, most historians assume that centralized downtown command posts in the city government and police department bureaucracies directed the police. Other historians have pointed toward politicians who manipulated the constabulary to benefit themselves and their supporters.6 The limited perspective of the most common sources of information about the patrolman's work has hindered the efforts of historians to resolve these issues. Job descriptions, for example, encoded in police regulation books tend to be vague, especially in regard to actual behavior on the street. Police departments' annual

The Social and Economic Integration of Spanish Immigrants in Brazil

Abstract: The great wave of European and Asian migration which followed upon the abolition of slavery in 1888 brought some 5 million foreign born migrants to Brazil. In this mass migration, immigrants from Spain played a major role. The three quarters of a million Spaniards who came to Brazil in the next seventy years were vitally involved in the expansion of the Brazilian coffee economy and eventually in the construction of a major urban and agricultural economy in the state of Sao Paulo. They were third in importance nationally after the Italians and Portuguese, but because of their concentration in Sao Paulo, they would rank second in importance in this vital state. The timing of this migration, like that of the Italians, was totally tied to the demands for unskilled agricultural labor in the expanding coffee fields in the western planalto hinterland of the city of Sao Paulo. With the mass desertion of the 150,000 slaves in the expanding paulista coffee fazerEs, the fazendeiros forced the state in 1886 to begin subsidizing foreign immigrants,l a task which the federal government assumed in the following years, and which did not end until 1926.2 It was this subsidization and the real potential for savings and access to land, which finally made the Brazilian labor market attractive to European workers. Though agricultural colonization had brought German and Italian peasants to the southem regions of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Parani in the 19th century, and such planned communities of agriculturalists continued to be constructed even into the 20th century in states as far north as Espirito Santo, these migrations represented an insignificant part of the national labor force. It was the 4 million Africans who came to Brazil from its foundation to 1850,3 who provided the bulk of the agricultural labor in the plantation export crops of sugar, cotton and coffee. These black workers in turn were supplemented by a mixed labor force of mestizos and native born whites. In this context the European migrants were but a small element in a largely subsistence or regional agricultural economy. As late as 1872, they in fact represented no more than 3.8% of the national population, and but 3.5% of the population of Sao Paulo. By 1900 they would be 7% of the national population and a substantial 21% of the population of the state of Sao Paulo.4 In this modern wave of immigration, the Spaniards were an impressive element. Just prior to 1914, they temporarily passed the Italians in importance, and accounted for 22% of all migrants coming to Brazil (see table 1). Like the Italians, the bulk of the Spanish migrants came before 1930, though there would be an important flow again after World War II. But the majority of this migration was tied to the movement of the coffee economy, and to such external factors as the outbreak of European war. Thus, from the data available, it would appear that the Spaniards in the pre-World War I period were primarily drawn to Brazil by the transport subsidization provided by the local State and Federal governments. Thus of the 102,800 Spaniards who passed through the Hospedana dos