How did farmers have it easier/worst than urban workers in the 1800's?

Question

Thank You!
(homework help)

This is for a college online class so no, he doesn't know I'm asking.
Thank you for your concern :)

Answer 1

I'm assuming that your question is a general one, in terms of the national position of farmers (and farm-owners, including plantation owners in the south) for most of the 19th century. Conditions varied by state and according to the time — for example, by the 1890s the national position of farmers was beginnning to significantly erode and the rise of populism (Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech) partly reflected this.

With these assumptions, I think that, on balance, farmers had it better — economically, soically, and politically — than urban workers through most of the 19th century.

In the pre-Civil War era the agrarian interest included plantation owners in the south as well as farmers in the settled areas of the country and the expanding frontier. Though extremes of wealth were divided between big city entrepreneurs (e.g., Astor) and plantation owners, in general much of the wealth of the country was centered, and was growing, in the farms and small towns of America. There is also some truth in some of the pro-slavery polemicists arguments that the northern workers were a poor, opppressed, class whose freedom didn't (immediaely) translate into economic benefit.

Until the end of the 19th century, the dynamic of American society was driven (or, in later decades, was significantly affected) by the expansiion of settlement on the frontier (this seems to be factually true independently of the significance of the Frontier Theory, in one form or another). Only in the later decades of the 19th century did this begin to diminish. Free immigration to the U.S. became a central tenet of American political and social culture partly because growth of an urban working class through immigration of poorer groups (the great waves in succession of Irish, Italian, and East Euroean immigration in particular) provided a labor reserve that enabled innovative industry to develop without the incubus of high labor costs or well organized challenges to the practices of the great post-Civil War wave of entrepreneurial capitalism and industrialization. As the centers of industry and economic activity developed, a political shift occurred. Urban bosses and political gangs (e.g., Tammany in New York, the Cook County machine in Chicago, etc.) organized the mass of the urban population and conferred some benefits in return for mass votes. The unsavory aspects of this have tended to be emphasized by historians, and the machines themselves were opposed by reformers (e.g., Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson before they became President) but reform versus bossism also can be seen as an established class trying to stop the shift to a politics based on a rising class by focusing on the least savory aspects of this process. From the end of the 19th century onward, economics, social status, and politcal change contributed to the ascendancy of the urban worker over the rural interest, a reversal of the situation that prevailed nationally for most of the 19th century.

Answer 2

An idea: Why don't you ask a farmer? Or, email an agricultural museum or college?

I think there might be less physical labor required nowadays because of all the farm equipment, air conditioned tractor cabs, mp3 players, mobile phones, access to technology and weather reports, etc. However, farmers today, to make a profit, usually have to have a large operation going on--with hundreds of acres, or thousands of head (pigs, cattle, etc.), $100,000+ tractors and heavy eqipment... and because of all of this, the stress level could be much higher since so much more is at stake just to make a profit.

Answer 3

Farmers didn't have to worry about falling into a vat of ground beef and end up becoming sausage.

Answer 4

The answer isn't in your textbook???
Homework?? At 10:30 a.m. in the morning??
Does your teacher know you are asking CLASSWORK questions on Yahoo Answers???