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Industrial Revolution

So many things changed with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The revolution came about as a product of the Transportation Revolution, which made the movement of goods easier and substantially cheaper. The market for manufactured products, especially textiles, greatly expanded. Hard workers were needed to produce these goods. Industry soon greatly expanded and new cities and towns sprung up to accommodate people at the newly opened factories and mines. However, while the growing industry in the United States greatly benefited the country, it did not necessarily better the lives of the individuals who were behind it. Due to the fact that laborers were forced to live in crowded and deteriorating housing and work in horrible conditions with little independence many people banded together to enact reforms to improve working conditions.
First of all, the living conditions many laborers endured were horrendous. The way piano manufacturer William Steinway describes the tenement housing system truly paints a disturbing picture. "The average workingman's family has one room in which they cook, wash, iron, and live, and one or two, or possibly three, bed rooms, of which generally one or two are dark rooms, without any windows, or without admitting God's pure air" (Firsthand, 67). Steinway was an immigrant from Germany who rose from working as an apprentice to becoming an industrialist. He was a witness at the Senate Committee on the Relations between Labor and Capital of 1883, which was organized in response to the rising number of industrial workers and their frequent strikes, and also because of the growing friction between management and labor due to firms growing larger. Steinway also said, in regards to the housing situation, "…I consider one of the greatest evils under which workingmen live, especially in the city of New York, is the horrors of the tenement houses-the terrible rents that they have to pay" (Firsthand, 67). The committee collected...