To celebrate the Monthly Labor Review’s centennial, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is taking a look back at the last 100 years. One of the articles in this series — “The life of American workers in 1915” — is eminently fascinating and shows in stark relief just how far we have come in America since then.
Life in the U.S. certainly was not nasty, brutish and short a century ago. But it was almost primitive relative to what we have in front of us today. And it’s the sort of crushing existence that socialism — yes, even Bernie Sanders’ “democratic” version of that poisonous system of government — would take us back to.
Don’t think so? Below is a glimpse of how things looked back then, according the article. Consider the contrasts with today’s life in America, and then rejoin us at the bottom of this post.
• “If you were alive in 1915, chances are you rented your house or apartment; the ratio of renters to homeowners was about 4-1 in 1920.”
• “The typical home of a working-class family was crowded, somewhat disorderly, and without modern conveniences.”
• A “family of nine has a boarder to help pay the rent. He is a night worker, and in the daytime can always be seen asleep in one of the beds. … There is a bath tub, but the clothes wringer and last winter’s sleds are always kept in it. This is not the home of a very poor family.”
• “Apparently, several children in the described family shared a bed, and the family members may have all shared the same bedroom. Few of the homes of working-class families had running water, and almost none had running hot water.”
• “Whether or not your abode was a single-family home or a crowded tenement, it probably was heated by a potbelly stove or by a coal furnace in the basement.”
• “Your home probably wasn’t yet wired for electricity; less than a third of homes had electric lights rather than gas or kerosene lamps.”
• “If your home had an indoor toilet, the toilet likely was located in a closet or a storage area. It would be a few more years until it was common for toilets, sinks, and bathtubs to share a room.”
• “If you didn’t work at home, you also may have traveled to your job by foot, or you may have gotten there on horseback or by mule.”
• “The predominant occupation group was that of craftsmen, laborers, and operatives, and professional and technical workers — today’s largest group — made up less than 5% of all workers.”
Things are quite different now, and none of the advances we enjoy — take for granted, even — has been brought to us by socialism, not even today’s better working conditions, for which the socialist labor movement takes credit. All have been the products of free-market capitalism. It is the lone system that has the structural incentive — the profit motive — that drives people to produce the advances we’ve seen.
Socialism has the exact opposite effect. It motivates people to live off of others, and requires coercion and force. That’s a plan for disaster, as any reading of the history of the last 100 years will show. It’s not coincidental that the Cubas, North Koreas, Venezuelas, Greeces of 2016 look a lot like the America of 1915.
