Filling a Gap

...Once inside, these uncouth folks were quick to notice that their ancestors could nowhere be found in the pages of the history books...

...As forests were felled, heating costs rose...

...There was a significant amount of violence among family members, however, and divorce was not uncommon...

...One-tenth of the city's inhabitants were black...

...Not surprisingly, Ronald Reagan's America producedabacklash, with calls for a return to "true" history and its heroes...

...At the time of the American Revolution Philadelphia was the second largest city in the British Empire, with as many as 40,000 inhabitants...

...Reviewed by Joseph E. lllick Professor of History, San Francisco State University Not so long ago, the American past was presented as anarrativeof theactivities of the elite—white males who were generals, politicians or businessmen (sometimes all three...

...Add in the price of clothing and it is easy to see why working-class families "generally lived on the edge of, or occasionally slightly above, the subsistence level, and both spouses had to work to maintain that position...

...No one would want to be guilty of such an omission today...

...Similarly, the poor were three times as likely to die in childbirth, twice as likely to die of tuberculosis...

...In 1800 there was a bigger gap between rich and poor than ever before, with the middle class enjoying mixed success...

...Sources seldom if ever before exploited—songs and stories, paintings and photographs, artifacts, account books and census reports—have become standard references, along with methodologies for utilizing them...

...As Smith observes, "the uncertainty and instability that marked the material existence of laboring Philadelphians extended to their family lives as well...

...For what we see is "an intensely insecure environment...

...Those two unheroic characters take us on a Philadelphia walking tour that clearly was not designed by the Chamber of Commerce...

...Free blacks, while even more economically restricted than laboring whites, seem to have been more successful in overcoming social oppression to form families, establish intimate personal relationships, and build a stable and successful community...

...But the poorer people Smith has focused on (laborers, merchant seamen, and two lesser groups of artisans, shoemakers and tailors) tended to remain propertyless throughout the latter half of the 18th century...

...Lower-class males showed confidence in their spouses by empowering them in their wills, and these same wills treated children equitably...

...Since most poor Philadelphians were either immigrants or native migrants, they were an ethnically and racially heterogeneous group of humble backgrounds...

...There is no mention here of Thomas Jefferson or the Declaration of Independence, Betsy Ross or Valley Forge...

...After the War there was Irish and French immigration, supplemented by migration from the countryside...

...Inhabitants of the port city had access to a variety of food, yet laboring families usually existed on flour, cornmeal and rice, plus whatever they could raise themselves...

...Disease abruptly ended life, business cycles sent people to the almshouse, material success was often fleeting, working men and women worried daily about how to make ends meet, and family relationships were in transition...

...We write only the past that the present demands...

...Their income did not increase, nor were they able to move up the occupational ladder...

...Although home construction flourished, workers were usually tenants or boarders, even during the Revolution when rents soared...

...Billy G. Smith's The "Lower Sort": Philadelphia's Laboring People, 17501800 uncompromisingly represents the new...

...Growth had taken place despite high levels of mortality because of the Irish, Scotch Irish and German immigration...

...I find myself humbled by Smith's scholarship...

...The consequence of this discovery was a transformation of American (and not only American) history...

...America, and especially the Quaker City with its famous Franklin, has been depicted time and again as the land of opportunity...

...The book opens with Peter Carle, a heretofore unknown laborer, searching for work, and washerwoman Susannah Cook, doing her marketing...

...The high death rate was countered by a high birth rate (children were born to fertile women every two to three years), giving the city a youthful age structure...

...Entrepreneurs Benjamin Franklin and Robert Morris appear briefly, but only for purposes of comparison...

...The enormous amount of research that underlies the findings in The "Lower Sort" is evident not only in Smith's footnotes, tables and graphs (which are carefully subordinated to the text), but also in six exceptionally clear and useful appendices that show where and how the author gathered his material...

...Computers have made the work easier, yet the same historical studies could have been conducted in precybernetic days if we had perceived the need...

...Smallpox was the major cause of death until the yellow fever epidemics in the 1790s, which were four times as likely to do in the lower as the upper class...

...Philadelphia's great wealth, derived primarily from commerce but aided by shipbuilding and housing construction, was unequally distributed from the outset...

...But the GI Bill, post-World War II prosperity and the need for people capable of managing a technologically sophisticated society forced open the doors of colleges and universities to the unwashed masses...

...The Great Man approach gave way to the study of minorities, ethnics, women, and workers...

...The 1987 California framework for teaching history in the public schools, to cite one example, mandates a return to narrative, chronological history as well as biography, while acknowledging that the study of the past must be based on the cultural diversity of the present...

...Women suffered poverty more than men...

...they have settled for a theoretical compromise between the old and the new...

...When I published Colonial Pennsylvania: A History (1976), one of 13 volumes brought out to celebrate the bicentennial of the American Revolution, I largely neglected the lower sort for lack of knowledge about them...

...The fact that all family members had to work diminished the economic power of men—not necessarily a negative change...

...The migration patterns meant that laboring families, smallerthan the Philadelphia average, had left their kin behind...

...In most cases the reactionaries have been able to get only part of what they want...

...The poor, who became destitute in times of crisis, composed as large a part of Philadelphia's population (one-fourth to one-third) as of any comparable European city...

...The way the "lower sort" coped with such an uncertain world is the stuff of Smith's volume...