Part 568: Chicago Industrial Exhibit at Brook’s Casino, 1907
In 1907, Thomas G. Moses recorded that one of his projects was “Brook’s Casino Exhibit of the sanitary and unsanitary workrooms in Chicago,” noting that it was “ some stunt.” He wrote, “I had to go among some awful places to get some sketches for the work and not far from the studio.” He was talking about the Chicago Industrial Exhibit held at Brooke’s Casino from March 11-17 in 1907.
In 1905, the Chicago Woman’s Club held a conference on Women in Modern Industry. Two years later they sponsored the Chicago Industrial Exhibit. This event was held to depict current industrial conditions, representing the labor that fed and clothed the “modern” world. There were many displays that contrasted sanitary shops with insanitary shops and unacceptable conditions. Moses helped create displays that revealed the hard and material side of life that occurred in factories and workshops. One of the objects of the overall exhibit was to influence legislation to investigate of the conditions of working women and children at the time.
There were “Process Exhibits in Modern Industry” that showed groups of young men and girls working in their trades, depicting shop conditions, the hours of work, how workers are paid by the piece and not the hour, the speed, the skill and the overall youth. There were booths that depicted, “A Night Scene in a Glass Factory in Pennsylvania,” “The Coal-breakers,” “Boy miners three miles from daylight,” “Stogie-making in Pittsburg,” “Rag-stripping,” “The Custom Tailor Shop,” and “Cash Girls and Delivery Boys.” Other areas depicted boot and shoe making, glove making, printing/bookbinding, candy wrapping, bakeshops, woodworking factories, laundry facilities, and much more.
There was a handbook that accompanied the Chicago Industrial Exhibit including many photographs of the displays. Here is the link: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89058507294;view=1up;seq=9 It is a very insightful publication that depicted the “sweated industries” of the time, women in industry, protected machinery and occupational diseases.
During the conference, presentations discussions “The Child in Industry,” “Risks in Industry,” “The Power of the Consumer Over Industrial Conditions,” “The Immigrant in Industry,” “Women’s Fitness For Industrial Life,” “Women in Industry – Special Problems,” “Industrial Education,” “Women in Industry – Remedies,” and “Demonstrations in the Evolution of Textile Processes.”
In the “Sweated Industries” area a group of typical Chicago tenement houses were constructed so that the contents of several rooms were clearly seen from without. The purpose of the exhibit was to promote remedial legislation covering sweating in food and clothes products, and to improve conditions tending to lower the health and morals of the workers in the sweated trades, by attracting the attention of the public to the conditions as they existed.
There was also an exhibit of an “Insanitary Tenement Sweatshop- old-fashioned foot-power shop.” The handbook noted, “In a room such as this a child with scarlet fever was recently found sleeping in a pile of sweatshop clothing. Several members of the family were finishing pants in this room when discovered. In this particular case the place was closed by a Factory Inspector, and the clothing disinfected by the Health Department. How largely the recent epidemic of scarlet fever in Chicago was due to the fact that the clothing is manufactured in tenement houses under such conditions as these is a matter of conjecture. This shop is shown in opposition to the sanitary clothing shop with mechanical power.”
In this brochure there were some interesting statistics that provides a little peak into the history of working women:
-Of married women, 5.6% were gainfully employed
-Of gainfully employed women, 14.5% were married.
-There was a noted lack of occupation opportunity for women. In 1840, there were 140 employments open to women. By 1907, women were employed in 295 occupations, but over 86% were found in only 18 of these occupations.
The handbook stated, “Men seem to be crowding women out.”
Similarly, we remember why child labor laws were instituted. In 1907, the National Child Labor Committee called attention to the fact that there were no less than 450,000 children under 16 years of age at work in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits in the United States. This number did not include the thousands of children under ten years of age who sold newspapers and merchandise in the streets, nor the children classed as agricultural workers. The handbook included the statement, “The vast army of children, deprived of educational opportunities, stunted in growth, subjected too often to immoral influences, is a constantly increasing menace to our civilization.” In the history of the United States, that is really not that long ago.
To be continued…
