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Employment office of the Armstrong Association, circa 1912. Image from the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University Libraries. Accessed via the Goin’ North project . Episode 2.08: Laboring Philadelphians The Alley Cast Download In our Season 2 finale, we look at the people who have been there throughout all of the other episodes—the laborers! We also try to consider what types of labor today share the physical toll and the meager wages with laborers of the past.Some resources for more information on the topics in this episode:Check out Billy Smith’s books: Much of our conversation with Smith centered on hisThe Lower Sort: Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750–1800,but he has a great new book out about the Yellow Fever epidemic,Ship of Death: A Voyage that Changed the Atlantic World.For primary sources on the Great Migration in Philadelphia, there’s no better place than GoinNorth.org.To learn about the contemporary unions we mentioned, check out their websites: the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON)and UNITE HERE PhillyThanks again to our season sponsors Linode and Temple University’s History Department as well as the companies and organizations which sponsored episodes along the way, the Carpenters’ Company of Philadelphia, Beyond the Bell Tours, The Center for Art in Wood. Thanks also to the Philadelphia Cultural Fund for their support of the Elfreth’s Alley Museum and the Museum Council of Greater Philadelphia which awarded us a micro grant which directly supported this second season of The Alley Cast.SOURCESBlakney, Sharece, “Armstrong Association of Philadelphia,” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia: https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/armstrong-association-of-philadelphia/Grubbs, Patrick, “General Trades Union Strike (1835)” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia: https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/general-trades-union-strike-1835/Kelleher, Deirdre, “Immigration, Experience, and Memory : Urban Archaeology at Elfreth's Alley, Philadelphia” (Dissertation) Temple University, 2015.Laurie, Bruce, Theodore Hershberg, and George Alter, “Immigrants and Industry: The Philadelphia Experience, 1850-1880,” Journal of Social History 9, no. 2 (Winter 1975)Licht, Walter, Getting Work : Philadelphia, 1840-1950Newman, Simon P., Embodied History, Chapter 1: Almshouse Bodies.Sendroff, Lily, “The Case For the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights: ‘Called Essential, Treated As Expendable,’” Ms. 8/11/2021Sivitz, Paul and Billy G. Smith, “Philadelphia and Its People in Maps: The 1790s,” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia: https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/philadelphia-and-its-people-in-maps-the-1790s/ Smith, Billy G. “The Vicissitudes of Fortune: The Careers of Laboring Men in Philadelphia, 1750–1800” in Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Stephen Innes.Theodore, Nik, “Regulating Informality: Worker Centers and Collective Action in Day-Labor Markets,” Growth and Change 51, no. 1 (2020)TRANSCRIPTImagine a meandering walk from the piers of Philadelphia toward Elfreth’s Alley in 1790. Sailors scurry up the rigging of brigantines as stevedores carry off the ship’s cargo, and load it onto hand carts, with which carters will whisk that cargo away to its final destination. Heading inland, we’re passed by a young woman carrying two full buckets of water fetched from a well; she will use it to wash the clothes of her employer’s entire household, soaking, scrubbing, and wringing out each piece with the same strength she displays in carrying the water. There is a building under construction, and men hauling lumber to the site.Were we to complete the same walk in 2021, we might pass landscapers tidying up the park at Race Street Pier, street cleaners sweeping the sidewalk, a trash collecting crew driving down Elfreth’s Alley, and myriad other working Philadelphians. These jobs, both in the 18th century and the 21st, are neither well-compensated nor prestigious. Yet they are essential to the life of the city.Welcome to the Alley Cast, a podcast from the Elfreth’s Alley Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We trace the stories of people who worked, lived, and encountered this special street for over 300 years. While the stories we tell often center on Elfreth’s Alley and the surrounding Old City neighborhood, we also explore threads which take us across the city and around the globe.This season is all about work, and in this season finale we will be discussing laborers in Philadelphia, past and present.Episode 8: Laboring PhiladelphiansBut what do we mean when we talk about “laborers”? The census records for Elfreth’s Alley list people working as laborers from the 18th century through the mid-20th century and many laborers have already popped up in this season of the Alley Cast: In the boarding house episode, the boarding house thief required the assistance of a laborer to bring in their luggage--a laborer almost certainly not in on the ruse. Isaac Zane, the master carpenter, employed at least a couple laborers throughout his career. Before wood became cabinets, trees had to be felled and transported to Philadelphia, whether down the Delaware River or all the way from the Caribbean and this certainly relied on laborers, both enslaved and free.But what did that term mean at various times and what does it mean today? The term “laborer” seems like a broad one, in many ways--it can simply mean someone who works. But historically it has been applied to much narrower groups of people, in ways that have a lot to do with class, race, and gender.In this episode, we’re going to try to unpack some of the limits that have been applied to the label and try to look beyond the label.We do need a working definition of the word, and a quick look at a few dictionaries suggests that a laborer is someone doing manual labor for wages. They often use that other word that we’ve been talking about this season “unskilled.” Yet all work deserves dignity and we are going to continue to interrogate the usefulness of formal training as the only facet of work worth rewarding.Let’s look at laborers in early Philadelphia--looking at the first United States Census we find four Alley residents listed as laborers: Philip Hartnot, Henry Sharp, Jacob Snyder, and Peter Bicknell. It’s a small sample size but it tracks with trends over at least the next century: they are male and they are white. Yet clearly, there were people who were neither male nor white doing manual labor, and many of them were doing so for wages. Historian Seth Rockman, in his fascinating work on 19th century Baltimore, showed how it was useful to look at the whole class of laboring people at the bottom of the economy, looking not just at those who were labeled as laborers but to include enslaved and indentured workers as well. Rockman successfully used accounting ledgers to track some of these workers, and we hope to eventually do the same here in Philadelphia, but we have not completed that time-intensive work yet.Instead, looking at our favorite sources--the city directories and the census--can give us an idea of where those who were called laborers lived in early Philadelphia. A map by Paul Sivitz and Billy G. Smith shows that the majority of laborers in the 1790s lived at the North, South, and Western extremes of Philadelphia--basically at the edge of town. But the map also shows that laborers crowded into the narrow alleyways that cut through blocks between the more prominent streets, places such as Elfreth’s Alley, where housing was relatively affordable and there was still access to the port and other places to find work in the city.But we want to try to understand more about laborers than where they lived. How can we learn about the lives of a whole class of people who, by virtue of their poverty, their transience, and often their lack of education didn’t leave much of a trace in the historic record? I talked to historian Billy G. Smith, one of the scholars who has managed to do just that.Billy G. Smith: Because nobody writes their own life story, or if they did, it doesn't still exist. So we've got lots and lots of things like on the famous founding fathers, where you get all of their writings, but you can get virtually nothing written by these people. So you've got to go in different ways. Look at official records, like tax lists are used on house directories quite a bit to our criminal directory. So wherever sort of people encounter government agency, and that government agencies recorded something taxes, and censuses to, then you can track a lot of these people. These kinds of official documents give a narrow view of each person’s story, but taken as a whole, can offer insights about a whole class of people. As one example, Smith used these records to reconstruct the diet of Philadelphia’s poor, or as they were often called, “the lower sort.”Smith :Well, the records that I stumbled across, once again, were official records, and they were official records of the ALMS house. And also, I think I use some from Pennsylvania hospital for the sick poor. And the ALMS house recorded every day, what they bought in terms of foodstuffs, so I could track those foodstuffs over a 50 year period, the cost, and also with the diet itself was everything from peas to flower to tea. And what I did was take that as sort of a minimal diet, that more than likely, would be familiar to a laboring class person who was not in the ALMS house, something of that sort. So that was just a great cache of records. But it took a long time to process things like that. On a day by day basis, I must say, I wouldn't have the energy or patience anymore, it was good. I did all that when I was young. But it's a, it's a pretty minimal diet, I'm, it's, they do have probably more meat, for example, just to pick one item than you would have if you were in Britain. But there's actually more variety perhaps, than we might commonly think, in the 18th century for a lower class person or vegetables in the summertime in the springtime,Scholar Simon P. Newman looked at some of those same sources--the collections of the Almshouse and the Pennsylvania Hospital--and used the admission records to learn about the ways in which the people coming to these institutions for help were judged to be deserving or undeserving of that help. These judgments were made purely on the appearance and behavior of the person asking for help, and so the records often include some descriptions of them, colored by the biases of the administrators who examined them. To Newman, these descriptions are a valuable insight into the belief systems of the time, but also bear witness to the lives of Philadelphia’s poor. Their scars gained from work or disease or misfortune, their clothes indicating something about their place in society.I want to note that though there were some people who arrived at the Almshouse who couldn’t work, the vast majority were put to work there as a way to defray the cost of their food and shelter and as an attempt to reform them and get them working once they left the almshouse. These were laborers, whether they were considered that at the time or not.I asked Smith for some context for some of the laborers working in early Philadelphia; where did they come from? What kind of work did they do?Smith: So a lot of these labors to go back to those common people are born to, you know, impoverished families, either in America, or there's a great deal of emigration at this point to from Europe, and from Britain. And they're born poor, and they don't learn really any occupational skills, which means you're going to be a laborer, who the kinds of things they do in Philadelphia, is construction work. And there's a lot of that that city is growing incredibly rapidly at the time. So there's building going on everywhere. So you know, you'd be carrying lumber around helping carpenters, things of that sort, loading and unloading ships, the ships that come from Britain, and also the ones that are sent out to the Caribbean and things, you've got to get goods on and off of that. And that's one of the that kind of trade is one of the center parts of Philadelphia, it's one of the reasons it's on the Delaware River there because you can get the ships coming and going. So that's another big occupational job for common everyday workers. In his book “The Lower Sort,” Smith writes that despite the examples of socioeconomic climbers such as Ben Franklin, many laborers remained laborers all of their lives. I asked him about the opportunities and limitations laborers faced when attempting to better their lot in life.Smith: So I think there's two different ways to look at that, that question as to social mobility, economic mobility, and whether you can move up or not up the ladder. And one is sort of individual initiative is what Americans tend to emphasize. But I think the second is societal forces. And you know, what's happening in the society, what's happening in the larger economy and things of that sort, which are beyond your control. So in terms of just individuals themselves, I'm guessing that working hard probably does make a difference. But it's not it's not going to make the you know, the be the item that's going to ensure success by any means. A lot of what might make you successful, if you're starting as a labor over something well known before that is, how do you get trained, what kind of occupational skills do you have, and that's often mostly dependent on your father's position. How wealthy as your father, and whether or not when you get to the age of 12, or 13, whether or not your father is wealthy enough to buy you an apprenticeship in, let's say, a merchant house, in which case you're on the fast track, kind of like maybe going to Harvard or Yale, but that you're on the fast track to, you know, being able to be a merchant, which are the wealthiest people here, or your father doesn't have that money doesn't make you an apprentice to anything, you don't learn any skills. Or maybe your father has a little bit of money and can apprentice you to become a shoemaker, while shoe makers are gonna make a modest living at the house for their entire lives. So that's one of the things is just training. And, you know, that's the luck of the draw, Once the die was cast and someone entered the world of work as a laborer, however, there were occasionally opportunities that presented themselves. Economic booms and getting the right job at the right time could mean that a laborer moved themselves up the tax brackets. At the same time, economic depressions and the cruel anarchy of epidemics lurked on the other side of that coin.Smith: So it's things like that there's business cycles to economic depressions, and also, you know, economic boom times. And for example, to go back to this, you know, when can you move up? Well, if there's any time, it would probably be the 1750s and early 1760s, when the economy booms, and then again, in the 1790s, the first decade of the new nation, when Philadelphia is the capital of the United States at that point. And there, that's your best chance, if you know, if you could control when you were going to be there to be able to move up.”Indeed, Smith’s research shows that during the 1790s, about 20 percent of laborers in Philadelphia acquired marketable occupational skills and became mast makers, coopers, and carpenters. This statistic doesn’t take into account enslaved labor or include a wide variety of women’s work, but is still a remarkable statistic.Having missed out on a plum apprenticeship, these laborers still managed to join the ranks of craftspeople, gaining economic power and prestige. At first glance, early Philadelphia seems to offer an exampl…
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