Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853–1920

Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853–1920
Author :
Publisher : LSU Press
Total Pages : 254
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780807183274
ISBN-13 : 080718327X
Rating : 4/5 (27X Downloads)

Book Synopsis Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853–1920 by : Gregg Andrews

Download or read book Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853–1920 written by Gregg Andrews and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2024-10-29 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853–1920, is the first comprehensive examination of a workhouse in the United States, offering a critical history of the institution in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Using the Old St. Louis Workhouse as a representative example, award-winning historian Gregg Andrews brings to life individual stories of men and women sentenced to this debtors’ prison to break rocks in the quarry, sew clothing, scrub cell floors and walls, or toil in its brush factory. Most inmates, too poor to pay requisite fines, came through the city’s police courts on charges of vagrancy, drunkenness, disturbing the peace, or violating some other ordinance. The penal system criminalized everything from poverty and unemployment to homelessness and the mere fact of being Black. Workhouses proved overcrowded and inhospitable facilities that housed hardcore felons and young street toughs along with prostitutes, petty thieves, peace disturbers, political dissenters, “levee rats,” adulterers, and those who suffered from alcohol and drug addiction. Officials even funneled the elderly, the mentally disabled, and the physically infirm into the workhouse system. The torture of prisoners in the hellish chambers of the St. Louis Workhouse proved far worse than Charles Dickens’s portrayals of cruelty in the debtors’ prisons of Victorian England. The ordinance that created the St. Louis complex in 1843 banned corporal punishment, but shackles, chains, and the whipping post remained central to the institution’s attempts to impose discipline. Officers also banished more recalcitrant inmates to solitary confinement in the “bull pen,” where they subsisted on little more than bread and water. Andrews traces efforts by critics to reform the workhouse, a political plum in the game of petty ward patronage played by corrupt and capricious judges, jailers, and guards. The best opportunity for lasting change came during the Progressive Era, but the limited contours of progressivism in St. Louis thwarted reformers’ efforts. The defeat of a municipal bond issue in 1920 effectively ended plans to replace the urban industrial workhouse model with a more humane municipal farm system championed by Progressives.


Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853–1920 Related Books

Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853–1920
Language: en
Pages: 254
Authors: Gregg Andrews
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2024-10-29 - Publisher: LSU Press

GET EBOOK

Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853–1920, is the first comprehensive examination of a workhouse in the United States, offering a critical history of the
Wendell Phillips, Social Justice, and the Power of the Past
Language: en
Pages: 492
Authors: A J Aiséirithe
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-11-01 - Publisher: LSU Press

GET EBOOK

Born into an elite Boston family and a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School, white Massachusetts aristocrat Wendell Phillips’s path seemed
Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South
Language: en
Pages: 212
Authors: Michael S. Frawley
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2019-05-08 - Publisher: LSU Press

GET EBOOK

In the aftermath of the Civil War, contemporary narratives about the American South pointed to the perceived lack of industrial development in the region to exp
The Slaveholding Crisis
Language: en
Pages: 416
Authors: Carl Lawrence Paulus
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-01-03 - Publisher: LSU Press

GET EBOOK

In December 1860, South Carolinians voted to abandon the Union, sparking the deadliest war in American history. Led by a proslavery movement that viewed Abraham
Defying Disfranchisement
Language: en
Pages: 337
Authors: R. Volney Riser
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2010-05-24 - Publisher: LSU Press

GET EBOOK

In Defying Disfranchisement, R. Volney Riser documents a number of lawsuits challenging various requirements---including literacy tests, poll taxes, and white p