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nydus/The History of the Great American FortunesPublic

This work examines the origins of large American fortunes by analyzing the social and industrial systems that facilitate their accumulation. The author seeks to move beyond both celebratory narratives and sensationalist critiques to provide a factual, systemic interpretation of how these vast concentrations of wealth are formed.

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER VI

$1.50 to $2.00 a week for board, leaving families behind depending upon them for support. They labor frequently in marshy grounds, where they inhale pestiferous miasmata, which destroy their health, often irrevocably. They return to their poor families broken hearted, and with ruined constitutions, with a sorry pittance, most laboriously earned, and take to their beds, sick and unable to work. Hundreds are swept off annually, many of them leaving numerous and helpless families. Notwithstanding their wretched fate, their places are quickly supplied by others, although death stares them in the face. Hundreds are most laboriously employed on turnpikes, working from morning to night at from half a dollar to three-quarters a day, exposed to the broiling sun in summer and all the inclemency of our severe winters. There is always a redundancy of wood-pilers in our cities, whose wages are so low that their utmost efforts do not enable them to earn more than from thirty-five to fifty cents per day.... Finally there is no employment whatever, how disagreeable or loathsome, or deleterious soever it may be, or however reduced the wages, that does not find persons willing to follow it rather than beg or steal."

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