A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  According to the progressive economist Frank Streightoff, low wages, irregular employment, and “the physical and nervous strain of his work” debauched the working man and caused him to spend his money wildly:

  In his intellectual and moral life the workman is by no means all that could be desired. He thinks and talks impurely, his home life is largely a matter of convenience, there is often little or no spiritual comradeship between husband and wife. The saloon exacts a terrible tribute, both directly in money, and indirectly in physical and mental suffering. Amusement tends strongly to the sensual, dancing leads frequently to gross immorality …

  The solution to what Streightoff called “the amusement problem” was “social and literary functions similar to those so much enjoyed in the settlements, and by instruction public lectures upon subjects of real educational value.” Similarly, in her study of working women in Boston, Louise Marion Bosworth found spending on “innumerable forms of amusement and indulgence” and blamed it on overwork. “Long hours and low wages do not supply the surplus vitality demanded for the proper enjoyment of these evening privileges” such as lectures, classical music concerts, and classes at settlement houses, where immigrants were taught to be American. “If the wages were sufficient to provide nourishing food and generally comfortable living conditions, and if the working day were short enough to allow more time for recuperation, the working girl might make good use of these chances for intellectual, physical, and social development.” As Horowitz puts it, “In numerous unexamined ways, the budget studies” undertaken by progressives “attacked immigrant and working-class culture, hoping to replace it with the bourgeois emphasis on self-help and personal discipline.”

  Opposition to shopping grew especially severe during World War I, when bourgeois disgust over the new working-class culture took the form of well-organized campaigns against drinking, prostitution, and venereal disease, and in the moral condemnation of working-class spending habits. Shortly after the United States entered the war in 1917, Senator Porter McCumber issued a warning about the “moral dangers resulting from our orgy of opulence.” He said that “this revelry in extravagant habits, this unquenchable demand for amusements, for continuous mental intoxicants” threatened to bring the nation to its knees. A number of government officials and intellectuals saw the war as an opportunity for America to redeem itself by renouncing its desire for more stuff. When the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National War Labor Board reported in 1918 that on average, “wage earners and the low or medium salaried families” had more than doubled the percentage of their spending on items other than food, shelter, and clothing since 1875, government policymakers and intellectuals set out to establish a “minimum comfort” budget for working-class families that would be frugal and thus patriotic. Leading progressive economist Stuart Chase, who in 1917 joined the Federal Trade Commission and publicized an ascetic “War Budget for the Household,” wrote that it was “not only a personal necessity but a patriotic duty to eliminate waste and extravagance” by cutting back on luxuries and that to be a good American was to eliminate spending on “baubles, surfeits, and poisons that serve no rational human need, and only succeed in polluting and perverting our national life and character.” Chase hoped that Americans would embrace a new frugality “in peace no less than in war.”

  THE HIGHEST OF HEELS

  Had the ascetic ideals of nineteenth-century America remained dominant, there would be no movie theaters, no shopping, and no weekend. But those ideals were eroded by a generation of young Americans who simply chose to live differently. This is the story of a revolution, but a revolution without leaders or manifestoes or militias. It was driven by hundreds of thousands of obscure working-class women—women such as the Jewish garment workers on the Lower East Side who went uptown to shop for flowered hats and to Coney Island to shop for boys; packinghouse workers from the Polish section of Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago who went to the movies several times per week; and Italian sausage makers in South Philadelphia who shopped at Wanamaker’s “every chance we got.”

  Agnes M. was one such revolutionary. Born in 1883 in Treves, a German city on the border with France, Agnes was raised by nuns at a Catholic reform school, where she lived for most of her childhood, and by a mother who was “very stern” and “was almost a stranger to me.” In a memoir she wrote for a magazine in 1903, Agnes told of how at the age of fifteen she began work as an unpaid apprentice for a milliner, laboring from eight o’clock in the morning until six o’clock and sometimes as late as nine o’clock in the evening. Despite a life filled with restraints, Agnes was “used to plenty of play.” She flirted with boys, danced, “had a good voice for singing,” and had “plenty to say for myself.” Though the boys and girls at her school were kept separate, she “found means of conversing” and fell in love with “a tall, slim, thoughtful, dark-haired boy named Fritz.” The couple carried out their illicit relationship through the bars of the fence that divided the playground. When they were caught laughing at one of the nuns, Agnes was whipped on the hands with a rod.

  While working for the milliner, she began to think of leaving her life: “I grew more and more tired of all work and no play, and more and more anxious to go to America.” Her mother, who “could not understand that I wanted amusement,” finally surrendered to her wish for freedom and sent her to live with her sister in New York City. For the first time, Agnes made her own money and could spend it as she pleased. “I wanted more pleasure,” she remembered. She took a job as a baby nurse for a wealthy family, in part because it gave her more free time. Agnes seized her days off. She traveled with friends to the beaches of Long Island and Brooklyn. “If we go on a boat, we dance all the way there and all the way back, and we dance nearly all the time we are there.” But the place that moral reformers called “Sodom by the Sea” was her favorite destination. “I like Coney Island best of all,” she said. “It is a wonderful and beautiful place.”

  What Agnes most liked to do was dance. Most remarkably, like the slaves who pitied the awkward moves of their masters, Agnes looked down upon the elite and the moral reformers who believed that Coney Island and dance halls were beneath them. “The trouble is that these high people don’t know how to dance,” she said. “I have to laugh when I see them at their balls and parties. If only I could get out on the floor and show them how—they would be astonished.”

  Like many in this generation of renegade young women, Agnes threw off the cultural expectation that she should marry immediately. “I don’t want to get married yet, because when a girl marries, she can’t have so much fun—or rather, she can’t go about with more than one young man.” In New York she found a “tall, dark” man and was impressed that he was an assistant in a large grocery store “and soon will go into business himself.” But she thought that she might marry him for a more important reason. “I like him, because I think he’s the best dancer I ever saw.”

  Agnes M. was part of a massive movement of women into the streets. In the early nineteen hundreds, nearly 60 percent of all women in New York City aged sixteen to twenty worked outside the home, most were single, and a substantial number lived alone. These were dangerous, renegade “women adrift.” According to historian Kathy Peiss, they “pushed at the boundaries of constrained lives” by refusing to limit themselves to the obligations of daughters, wives, and mothers. They were the first generation of American women who lived to a great degree for their own pleasures and freedom. Taking jobs freed them from their fathers’ homes and reduced their economic dependency on men. Though they often hated their work, they loved the liberties it brought them. By bringing them out of the confines of the home and away from the regulation of parents and police and priests and rabbis, the world of work gave a generation of women the kind of freedoms that previously had been enjoyed only by very “bad” ladies. For the first time in American history, great numbers of women made their own wages, spent their own money, lived much of the day on their own, walked the streets u
nescorted, and established their own liaisons with men. Ironically, many saw work as an avenue to pleasure. “Far from inculcating good business habits, discipline, and a desire for quiet evenings at home,” says Peiss, “the workplace reinforced the wage earner’s interest in having a good time.”

  Moral reformers and vice investigators noticed greater numbers of women in previously male domains. By the 1910s, according to Peiss, “women increasingly frequented saloons.” A Committee of Fourteen investigator took note of this tendency in 1917 when he observed that not all the women in a West Side saloon were prostitutes: “2 of the women that were here seemed to be respectable, they had been out marketing and had their market bags with them.” Working-class women also opened the door to gambling. Historians have found evidence that women in large cities during this period were avid players of daily lottery games known as “policy” or “numbers.” One newspaper reported that “many of the players are women who live in the tenement districts and spend almost every cent they earn in playing ‘gigs,’ ‘horses,’ and ‘saddles.’”

  These women typically worked ten to twelve hours a day at taxing, menial labor but shocked many with the energy they still had for fun. The manager of a dressmaking factory noted with amazement that her employees “all took Sunday for a gala day and not as a day of rest. They worked so hard having a good time all day, and late into the evening, that they were ‘worn to a frazzle’ when Monday morning came.” This ferocious love of pleasure was perhaps best articulated by a New York saleswoman who helped many of these women prepare for nights out: “You see some of those who have complained about standing spend most of the evening in dancing.” This was of no small concern to employers, such as the training supervisor at Macy’s. “We see that all the time in New York,” he said, “many of the employees having recreation at night that unfits them for work the next day.”

  Another Committee of Fourteen investigator in 1914 observed the loose behavior of women workers in a restaurant: “They were putting on their aprons, combing their hair, powdering their noses, … all the while tossing back and forth to each other, apparently in a spirit of good-natured comradeship, the most vile epithets that I had ever heard emerge from the lips of a human being.” Even at Macy’s, where managers worked to enforce the highest standards of respectability among the female employees, one investigator found “salacious cards, poems, etc., copied with avidity and passed from one to another, not only between girls and girls, but from girls to men.” Though not all the workers behaved with such wanton disregard for proper behavior, there was “more smutty talk in one particular department than in a dance hall.” Many working-class women formed social clubs in which, according to Peiss, “young women’s desire for social freedom and its identification with leisure activities spilled over into behavior unsanctioned by parents and neighbors, as well as middle-class reformers.” Female mail-order clerks at Siegel-Cooper Dry Goods Store formed the Bachelor Girls Social Club as a place where “we enjoy our independence and freedom.” In many clubs, independence and freedom meant shattering conventional notions of womanhood. One club member reported to a moral reform group that “in all [clubs] ‘they have kissing all through pleasure time, and use slang language,’ while in some they ‘don’t behave nice between young ladies.’”

  Like nineteenth-century slaves who dressed above their station, working-class women of the early twentieth century crashed through the limits placed on their bodies. Middle-class author Bertha Richardson remarked in 1904,

  Did you ever go down to one of our city settlements full of the desire to help and lift up the poor shop girl? Do you remember the chill that came over you[?] … There must be some mistake, you thought. These could not be poor girls, earning five or six dollars a week. They looked better dressed than you did! Plumes on their hats, a rustle of silk petticoats, everything about them in the latest style.

  Even female factory workers dressed far above where they were expected to be. During a 1909 strike of shirtwaist makers in New York City, a reporter for Collier’s Weekly magazine was stunned to see the high fashion on display:

  Lingerie waists were elaborate, puffs towered; there were picture turbans and di’mont pendants… . This was a scene of gaiety and flirtation. My preconceived idea of a strike was a somber meeting where somber resolutions were made, … “But they don’t look as if they had any grievance,” I objected. It is always painful to renounce a preconceived picture.

  Newspaper reports of the strike similarly noted that the picketing women, none of whom earned above a poverty wage, were “in their best gowns, were picturesque enough, and looked far from starving or downtrodden” and “all looked prosperous.” Mary Augusta LaSelle, author of The Joy in Work and other moral lessons for young women, reported in 1914 that:

  comparatively few girl wage-earners dress in a proper manner when at their work. The hat is usually freakish, either in size, shape, or color … the wide collar is of cheap and gaudy lace; the suit is of inappropriate material and color; the much embroidered and oftentimes unclean lingerie waist is too low in the neck and too short in the sleeves, and many times insecurely fastened in the back … the feet even in January are enclosed in gauze stockings and pumps with the highest of heels … the girl who wears the fresh tailored waist with its clean white collar and tidy little jabot or tie presents a far more attractive appearance than does the flashily-dressed girl in her attempts at finery; and in any store or office the girls who are most quietly and tidily dressed are, as a rule, the ones who are of greatest service to their employer …

  Just as nineteenth-century whites attacked slaves for “foolishly” imitating aristocrats in their dress, LaSelle called the high aspirations of working-class women stupid:

  The unsuitable dressing of the working girl is also due to the fact that she lacks sufficient judgment to discriminate concerning a style of dress suitable to a woman of wealth who rides down the avenue in her limousine, who walks in her thin silk stockings and tiny slippers only upon thickly-carpeted floors, and whose gorgeous hat may not be out of place when it adorns the head of a wearer in a private equipage. The working girl’s hat, shoes, dress, and general attire are in too many cases a fantastic imitation of the costly costumes of women of large incomes. It seems difficult for our girls to discriminate between a style of dressing suitable to a wealthy woman of leisure and that suited to a girl in an office on a salary of possibly $12 per week; or to distinguish between really valuable clothing and pinchbeck imitations.

  Women such as these were also the vanguard of a new sexual revolution.

  When researchers surveyed one thousand public school children in New York in 1910, nearly 90 percent of the girls but only one-third of the boys reported they knew how to dance. According to Peiss, in the large public dance halls “promiscuous interaction of strangers was normative behavior.” A vice investigator in 1917 described the scene in one of the city’s more reputable dance halls:

  I saw one of the women smoking cigarettes, most of the younger couples were hugging and kissing, there was a general mingling of men and women at the different tables, almost every one seemed to know one another and spoke to each other across the room, also saw both men and women leave their tables and join couples at different tables, they were all singing and carrying on, they kept running around the room and acted like a mob of lunatics let lo[o]se.

  Moral reformer Julia Schoenfeld reported that in New York dance halls “vulgar dancing exists everywhere, and the ‘spiel,’ a form of dancing requiring much twirling and twisting, … is popular in all.” The kind of social dance called “spieling,” in which a couple spun around seemingly out of control, “particularly cause[d] sexual excitement” because of “the easy familiarity in the dance practiced by nearly all the men in the way they handle the girls.” One investigator who observed this new culture reported that “most of the girls are working girls, not prostitutes, they smoke cigarettes, drink liquors, and dance [dis]orderly dances, stay out late and stay with
any man, that pick them up first.”

  Dancing, which became massively popular in the 1920s, was central to the sexual revolution. In 1924, in New York City alone, six million women and men attended dance halls. Over 10 percent of the women and men between the ages of seventeen and forty in New York went dancing at least once a week, and the numbers were almost certainly comparable in other large cities. This was a trend among whites and blacks, immigrants and native born, and virtually every ethnicity. For the first time in American history, women and men socializing, dancing, and displaying their sexuality in public was both commonly accepted and practiced by the majority. More than sixty city governments attempted to regulate the styles of dancing in the dance halls to make it less sexual and “safer” for young women, but the dance craze grew only stronger through the 1920s and into the 1930s and 1940s.

  WOMEN AGAINST GIRLS

  When feminists spoke of “freedom” for women, they did not mean the freedom of desire. Bertha Richardson spoke for her fellow feminist reformers when she reported that after seeing well-dressed working girls, “you went home thoughtful about those girls who wasted their hard-earned money on cheap imitation, who dressed beyond their station, and you failed to see what enjoyment they got out of it.” The mission of women’s leaders was clear: “to those who have little and try to look as if they had more, we teach morals and standards.” The feminist social worker Lillian Wald, who founded the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side of New York City, recalled her failure to change one young woman’s love of material pleasure. “A girl leading an immoral life was once sent to me for possible help,” Wald remembered in her memoir. Raised in poverty, the girl had worked demonstrating products in a department store,