Before unions gained power, the United States was a Third-World country.

[coti]

We did not have a modernized, civil society in the late 1800's and early 1900's. The middle class was weak to non-existent.

Born in that era, you had a 90% chance of, basically, being poor as hell. If you weren't born to wealthy parents, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that you would be destitute or next to it. Serious industrialization came with all of the increased efficiencies benefiting the owners.

It was just the same as all of these "developing" countries we look down upon today. That's where we were, though we had some geographical blessings.


It was only unions and the work of the Roosevelts that changed that, that brought our country to the strength and respectability that makes us so exceptional today.

It's amazing that all of that has been forgotten.

[jberryhill]

1. It's true

[Angry Dragon]

2. the radical right republican Masters want that time again

When the Masters of the right speak the lemmings follow

[OHdem10]

3. The Unions have made such contributions .

[frylock]

4. anyone who is against unions should be beaten severely with a copy of sinclair's "the jungle"

joking of course.

[hfojvt]

5. sorry, that is just preposterous

In the 1880s the United States was about as prosperous as any country on earth. Most of the people lived in the country and worked on their own farms, or lived in small towns, providing services to the farmers. Inventions like the cotton gin and the mechanical reaper (1831) were greatly increasing agricultural production. There was plenty of land, unlike in crowded Europe. A Swiss settler in 1840 wrote back to relatives in Switzerland "Come to America, I have more land than the President of Switzerland" and the Swiss came by the hundreds and settled in Wisconsin. Granted, in that first brutal winter they sometimes wondered "why did we come here to die in this hellhole" but after a few decades they considered themselves fairly prosperous, and they were fruitful and multiplied.

Oh, there was doubtless a large percentage of poverty, but nowhere near 90%. Again, I will quote the sociologist E.A. Ross from 1905 (who is quoted in my relative's economic textbooks) "The master error of the social Darwinists is to see in the economic struggle a twin to the struggle for existence that plays so fateful a part in the modification of species. The fact is, the scramble for money or place, though it be as desperate as the fight of clawed beasts, HAS CEASED to be a clear case of life or death. Only at the bottom steps of the social staircase do men compete from hunger. Above them men work themselves into the madhouse or the grave, not for bread, but for jam on the bread." "Foundations of Sociology" 1905 p. 340 emphasis mine

This is not to say that industrialism did not create a huge explosion of even much greater wealth and that unions did not help to make it more equally distributed, but that life in 19th and 18th century America was not one of complete privation and misery.

[Enthusiast]

6. This is a part of history they

do not want you to be aware of. That is a fact.