John Vachon photo of a Minneapolis employment agency, 1939. Source: Library of Congress

BackStory’s Labor Day Special

A History of Work and Labor Relations in the U.S.

08.30.19

To mark the Labor Day holiday Brian presents a compilation of BackStory’s best stories about work and workers. Why were so many employers keen on hiring children in the 19th century? When was computing considered women’s work? And what happened when almost a million Mexicans were expelled from the US to free up jobs for white workers?

Labor Day; labor; labor history

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Segments

How Old Are You?

By the late 19th century, manufacturing was exploding and so were manufacturing jobs. In a search for cheap labor, many companies employed children and though reformers wanted to put a stop to it, it was difficult because the government couldn’t prove the ages of the workers. Historian Susan Pearson explains how the birth certificate changed all of that.

Labor Day; birth certificate; child labor laws; labor; labor history; labor shortages; manufacturing

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Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Speaker 2: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Brian Balogh: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh. If you’re new to the podcast, each week along with my colleagues Ed Ayers, Joanne Freeman, and Nathan Connolly, we explore a topic of American history that’s been in the news.

Brian Balogh: This week to help you prepare for the Labor Day holiday, we’re giving you the chance to hear some of BackStory’s best segments on the world of work and the rights of workers. First, an insight into the fact that workers aren’t always as old as you would expect.

Brian Balogh: By the late 19th century, manufacturing in the United States was exploding. Machines were stitching together shirts, cutting leather, rolling cigars, and forging steel. To keep up with all that production, factories needed workers and lots of them. Company managers met that demand with children. Many even preferred children. Kids were docile, less likely to strike, and best of all cheap.

Susan Pearson: About 20% of children in 1900 are working outside the home for wages.

Brian Balogh: This is historian Susan Pearson. I spoke to her about child labor in the United States.

Susan Pearson: One thing that industrialization does is it de- skills labor, and the great advantage of unskilled labor for employers is that they can pay children so much less than they have to pay an adult male to perform the equivalent task.

Brian Balogh: It was one thing for kids to help out on the family farm, but industrial jobs were something else all together. Working in factories and mines was dangerous and hard, with the workday often stretching beyond 12 hours. You know those photos you’ve seen of forlorn looking children standing next to machines three times their size? Those pictures were part of reformers’ efforts to outlaw child labor in factories. But progress was slow, in part because the government couldn’t prove how old anybody was.

Susan Pearson: Even in states that are able to pass laws that regulate children’s labor. So say New York state passes a law in the 1880s that says you’ve got to be 14 years old to work in a factory. Okay. Well, how do you prove that? How do you know what children are 14, and which are 13, and which are 12?

Brian Balogh: The answer? The birth certificate. Today, every American citizen has one, but in the 19th century, parents recorded the birth of their children in the family Bible, if at all. Pearson says in the 19th century, age was a fuzzy concept.

Susan Pearson: A lot of people didn’t keep careful track of when their children were born or when they themselves were born. If you think about it, in the 19th century there weren’t a lot of reasons you needed to know your exact birth date. So when census takers would come around and ask people how old they were, they would give very round numbers. They would say, I’m about 25 or I’m close to 30.

Brian Balogh: So if so many children were working, why were some other people so concerned about those children working, especially in factories?

Susan Pearson: They would have told you that child labor is wrong because it stunts the physical and mental growth of children who work in industrial settings. However, historians have different explanations for why child labor becomes a problem, and that really has to do with changing ideas about childhood itself and what it is that childhood is for. Right? That children should be kept away from the adult world in their own kinds of activities that are developmentally appropriate. So they should be in school, not working. They should be playing, not working. They should be shielded from premature contact with adult activities like going into saloons, or coming in contact with vice, or any of the kinds of mixing that children and adults routinely used to do.

Brian Balogh: Once the states actually started requiring a registration of births and then requiring birth certificates in order to work, how did the families react?

Susan Pearson: A lot of families were not happy. Clearly the child labor reformers, they are at war with working class conceptions of childhood, of the fuzziness of chronological age, and of working class household economy. And those parents, we might look at them and think they were greedy, or selfish, or didn’t understand what children really need. Chances are they were operating from a worldview in which all family members contribute to the financial wellbeing of the household. As soon as they’re big enough to work, everybody’s put to work. That’s how it had always been. What changed was that the kind of work children could do became industrial.

Brian Balogh: But we haven’t talked about how the kids felt about this. Did they like working?

Susan Pearson: Most of them did. There’s a lot of testimony even among the reformers who think that they’re protecting these children, they find all the time when they go into factories that the children want to be there, and they are even proud of the work that they do, and the money that they bring into their families. The National Child Labor Committee employee, a guy named Owen Lovejoy, went and visited kids in the coal mines in Pennsylvania, and he wrote the typical breaker boy who’s a boy who works in the coal mine, is proud of his breaker and both of its daily output. And he goes on to say they’re proud about how fast they can work, how accurately they can work, but also, and I quote, “They’re proud of the independence, which personal economic value gives him in the home.”

Brian Balogh: Hmm. So what impact does this have when it’s fully in place? Let’s say by 1940, how does this change manufacturing?

Susan Pearson: It makes it much harder to work before the age of 16, which is the standard that the Fair Labor Standards Act creates. It also works in conjunction with compulsory schooling laws to change the nature of the workforce as a whole. So in 1900, only 10% of youth aged 14 to 17 are attending high school. By 1940 when the fair labor standards act is in place, that has jumped to 73%. So that’s a seven fold increase in the number of young people that are staying in the workforce past the age of 14.

Brian Balogh: When you started doing your research, did you expect a piece of paper to have such a dramatic impact on the labor force, the workforce in manufacturing?

Susan Pearson: I did not. I didn’t know how central it was to child labor reform. I thought that it would be on the periphery, one of many things at the birth certificate did. But the more I did the research, the more I discovered that it was really this campaign against child labor that was the first time that birth certificates were used as identification documents in this way.

Brian Balogh: Is the birth certificate just a symbol of government’s increased role in kind of mediating between workers and employers?

Susan Pearson: In some sense, yeah, it is. It’s certainly not the only example from this period, from the late 19th and early 20th century where you see everything from the Pure Food and Drug Act, which was passed in 1906, to efforts in the states to regulate the number of hours per day and per week that employees can work, to regulating the kinds of work that women can do. There’s a large national movement to try to control the terms of industrial production in the United States.

Brian Balogh: Right, and you can add workers compensation and worker safety laws to that.

Susan Pearson: Absolutely.

Brian Balogh: Susan Pearson is a historian at Northwestern University and the author of The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Children and Animals in the Gilded Age. She’s currently working on a book about the history of, you guessed it, that birth certificate.

The Deported

During the 1930s, a little known event known as Mexican Repatriation expelled between 500,000 and two million Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals to ease unemployment for white Americans. Brian talks to scholars Christine Valenciana and Francisco Balderrama.

Labor Day; Mexican-Americans; deportation; repatriation; unemployment

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Brian Balogh: I don’t need to tell you that the debate about foreign labor, putting pressure on American jobs and American workers is very much in the news. But did you know that in the 1930s between 500,000 and 2 million Mexican-Americans and Mexican nationals were expelled from the US? It was known as the Mexican repatriation, and it was intended to ease unemployment for white Americans.

Brian Balogh: There was never a coordinated program or top down mandate from President Hoover or Roosevelt to expel people of Mexican descent, but the White House did set the tone by staging raids across the country to deport Mexican American families. In 2016, Ed spoke to Francisco Balderrama to find out more about how these repatriation programs worked.

Francisco B.: This expulsion of Mexican nationals and American citizens of Mexican descent is done frequently because of the argument there’s not enough jobs, that jobs were for real Americans.

Ed Ayers: Balderrama says that Mexican nationals were targeted because they were one of the more recent immigrant groups to arrive at the start of the 20th century.

Francisco B.: And the key thing to keep in mind that in more prosperous times, particularly the Roaring 1920s, Mexican workers were regarded as essential. But now with the Great Depression, they are regarded as foreign, they’re regarded as unwanted, they are regarded as they’re not supposed to be here.

Ed Ayers: The private sector also tried to get Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans to leave the country. In some cases, businesses would simply refuse to hire Mexican workers.

Francisco B.: At the same time, we have private businesses, we have US Steel, Southern Pacific Railroad, that are telling their Mexican workers, You would be better off in Mexico, and providing them with transportation to the border and to Mexico.

Ed Ayers: Anti-Mexican sentiment was so pervasive that it even trickled down to local governments. Balderrama says Los Angeles County is a perfect example.

Francisco B.: And it’s important to focus on LA County, because it had the largest concentration of Mexican nationals and American citizens of Mexican descent at that historical moment. And it became kind of the model about how to do this elsewhere in the country.

Christine V.: This is an interview with Mrs. Amelia Valenciana.

Francisco B.: Christine Valenciana has spent the past four decades collecting stories of those affected by this depression era repatriation, including her mother’s.

Christine V.: Okay, Mama, why don’t you start by telling me where you’re from, first.

Amelia V.: Los Angeles, California.

Christine V.: When were you born?

Amelia V.: April 10, 1926.

Ed Ayers: Valenciana recorded this interview back in 1971. It was part of a college oral history project. She collected the voices of people who’d been affected by LA County’s repatriation program.

Christine V.: My grandfather, [inaudible 00:12:55] Castanera, who had been here in Los Angeles since 1909, he was employed as a stone mason, brick layer, skilled craftsmen. And then there’s no work for him.

Amelia V.: You know that he was here. He was left in with a family, you know, couple of children to raise and no work, living off of welfare. We went to Mexico because my dad asked the county, he asked to be sent.

Christine V.: My mother was nine years old when this happened. She had never been to Mexico.

Amelia V.: Because my dad asked us who wanted to go with him. We told him yes, you know, that our place was with him. He was our father. We weren’t gonna be left here and be made wards of the state. That’s what we would have been, wards of the state. So we left with my father.

Christine V.: Mama, do you know if you’re sure if he has the county?

Amelia V.: He told me that he asked the county, that he wanted to be sent back to Mexico. So I guess, I guess they paid for our fare, Christine.

Ed Ayers: Many of Valenciana’s interviewees said the same thing. No one had forced them to go to Mexico. Rather, their families wanted to go back ,and they went of their own accord.

Christine V.: Perhaps listeners are going to say it’s voluntary. Well, that’s the easy way out. And that’s not really looking at the complexity of the problem. We’re really looking at human beings. I mean, I can’t believe that my grandfather, who had been here since 1909, had any intentions of ever returning to Mexico.

Ed Ayers: But she says Los Angeles County actively encouraged people to leave. One of the county officials who ran this program was Rex Thompson. He was the head of charities for Los Angeles County during the early 1930s. Valenciana interviewed him in the early 1970s. Thompson acknowledged that he weighed the costs of providing aid to a Mexican family versus sending them to Mexico.

Rex Thompson: Well, you had thousands of Mexican nationals who were out of work. A Mexican family were costing us $110 a month. I can remember those figures. We could ship them back and feed them well and decently by train for $74 a family.

Francisco B.: You know, there was a campaign to, you know, get Mexicans to be removed. And so the county agencies, they would send out people. They were recruiters, basically.

Rex Thompson: Social workers that were Americans of Mexican decent but naturally fluent in the language or that were Mexican national fluent in the language to go out, and I want to emphasize, offer repatriation to these people. Well, I’m glad to say that they were a proud people, and most of them didn’t want to be on relief.

Francisco B.: That interview is very important because it really is the voice and the thinking of the time of the policymakers, and the predominant voice that people think they’re doing something good. I mean, he really believed that what he did was the greatest humanitarian act that could have been done.

Ed Ayers: The reality was harsher. Balderrama says these social workers didn’t explain the full consequences of repatriation.

Francisco B.: According to American law, that if a county pays for your transportation to return to Mexico or to go to Mexico, then your stamped that you can’t reenter the country.

Christine V.: Well, in the case of my grandfather, his passport, and again, he had been here since 1909… stamp it deported. Well, he had no way to get back here.

Ed Ayers: Balderrama says that more than half of those who went to Mexico during the Great Depression were American citizens.

Francisco B.: Well, simply it’s unconstitutional because you cannot deport an American citizen from his or her country.

Ed Ayers: Many of them were children who’d never even been to Mexico.

Amelia V.: Because the kids, you know, used to pick on me because I was an American citizen. There are a lot of people who did discriminate against us because we were Americans. We didn’t belong there. I was in a strange… Now here, the Anglos discriminate against us because we’re Mexicans. So really where do we belong?

Ed Ayers: Valenciana his mother eventually made it back to the United States, but many others never returned to the land of their birth.

Francisco B.: It’s a lost generation. I mean, there are people that were lost in Mexico, people without the documentation. People that were denied, you know, their right to a life as an American.

Ed Ayers: It’s hard to know if these programs actually provided more jobs or relief for so-called real Americans. But Valenciana thinks that’s beside the point. If the government wants to ease unemployment, it should try to help all Americans.

Christine V.: In terms of unemployment, well, who has the right to be employed? Who has the right to make that determination?

Amelia V.: I feel that this country should have done something for their citizens instead of getting rid of them like the way they did.

Ed Ayers: Valencia is a Professor Emerita in Education at California State University, Fullerton. And Balderrama is Emeritas Professor at California State University, Los Angeles, and coauthor of Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. Christine Valenciana and Francisco Balderrama helped us tell that story.

Binary Coeds

Computer programmers are all male nerds, right? Well not originally. With the help of historians Nathan Ensmenger and Margaret O’Mara, BackStory producer Andrew Parsons brings us the story of early computer programmers, who were almost all women, and how that trend flipped.

Labor Day; computer science; gender stereotypes

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Brian Balogh: Think of computer programmers and you’d be forgiven for thinking: Nerds. And nerds are mostly men.But historians are starting to nuance the story of early computer programming, and when producer Andrew Parsons went to investigate in 2015 he discovered that computing was once a woman’s world.

Andrew P.: In 1945, a military run lab at the University of Pennsylvania created one of the first electronic computers to calculate missile trajectories. The job of programming calculations into this machine went to some of the best computing minds in the industry, the ones previously doing the computing.

Margaret O.: The term computer was first applied to refer to a person and that person was a woman.

Andrew P.: This is Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington. She says for decades before electronic computers, women were human computers, the ones actually doing the math. When electronic computers were invented, the job of programming these machines went to women.

Margaret O.: Early on, the idea of programming a computer, actually making the software work, was considered to be kind of a glorified, you know, telephone operator or glorified secretary that all you had to do was plug the wires in the right plug and then that would make it work. That the real artistry was in designing the hardware, the computer, and that was what the men on the teams did.

Andrew P.: But these women were more than just secretaries. Most had advanced degrees in mathematics. They were computing complex equations and feeding them into the machines. All the more these computers for massive wall-size behemoths, they were finicky and broke down a lot. Computer science historian Nathan Ensmenger says the women programming the first computers in the ’40s had to creatively troubleshoot the machines.

Nathan E.: It very quickly became apparent that programming the computer was as hard, if not harder, than building it. And so these women very quickly assumed a much more prominent role in making these computers work.

Andrew P.: By the late ’60s and early ’70s, Ensmenger says, computer programming was seen as a growth industry for women. In 1967 the magazine, Cosmopolitan, known for puff pieces and sex advice columns ran an article entitled Computer Girls.

Jane Adams: I don’t know of any other field outside of teaching where there’s as much opportunity for women.

Andrew P.: This is Jane Adams quoted in the article. She was the Director of Education of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Jane Adams: Soon mothers will be telling their daughters, “Study your arithmetic so you can become a computer girl.” The Cosmo article quotes the now legendary computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper as saying, “Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are naturals at computer programming.”

Andrew P.: Ensmenger says it might be easy to brush this article off as a puff piece, if not for the actual numbers. He says at least 30% of programmers through the 1970s were women.

Nathan E.: 30% is quite high. At least when we look at comparable professions like engineering or accounting or architecture, that number is quite high.

Andrew P.: As the 1970s progressed, Margaret O’Mara says computer programming was seen as something that was compatible with mothers who wanted to make their own schedules. They could work from home. It was family friendly.

Margaret O.: I found these, you know, these stories that these companies that are trying this out and doing it as a way to keep their programming workforce more diverse. And that’s the great irony is that that somehow very quickly goes away.

Andrew P.: So what happened? How did an industry where programming was all women become one that many say is hostile towards women? Well first off, in the 1960s it was clear that programming software was going to be the future of computing. MIT and Stanford founded now legendary computer science programs. O’Mara says the distinctively male programmer we see in the media today has its roots in the labs that those universities and environments that are not welcoming to women.

Margaret O.: They are pulling all-nighters, are not showering. They are sitting in front of computer terminals. It’s like a frat house without the beer. You know, that’s kind of where the legend begins.

Andrew P.: By the 1980s the legends where guys like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, the image of the weird, brilliant computer hacker, captured the media’s attention. Now, to be fair, there are many factors that pushed women out of programming in the ’80s. Coding jobs were becoming better paid, attracting more men. Male dominated corporations were also starting to take over, but that legend mattered. It was showing up in storylines for major movies, and Ensmenger says it started to shape industry notions of who should be a programmer.

Nathan E.: Corporations begin to believe that in order to be a good programmer, you must also be obsessive and antisocial. They hire programmers who are like that, and before you know it, you have a programming group full of antisocial, obsessive, largely men.

Andrew P.: Ensmenger says this boys club environment crept into standard industry practice too. For example, all programmers know something called a “reference image.”

Nathan E.: If you want to display your latest graphical filter or your image processing technique, you’ll use a reference image to show how your technique differs for others.

Andrew P.: Since the 1970s, most programmers have used the same image, that of a Playboy playmate. Don’t forget, this was that time when the industry was actually welcoming to women, but that image emerged from, you guessed it, a university lab and it stuck.

Nathan E.: And it’s been published in hundreds of academic papers, but the fact that computer scientists don’t see it problematic that this highly sexualized image is used in their discipline, I think, is a reflection of the larger culture.

Margaret O.: Culture really matters. Culture matters in the beginning, middle, and end of the story. And when we talk to women who have been really successful programmers, have been very successful technical women, a lot of them will say, “Well, the way that I did it is I just, I had to get a thick skin. I had to not worry about the fact that I was the special unicorn. I was the only woman in the room.”

Eileen Hagan: As a software developer there were many, many days when I would walk into every meeting I was in, I was the only female.

Andrew P.: This is Eileen Hagen, a vice president at the tech company Intuit. She was at IBM in the mid ’80s and says that culture expressed itself in little ways. No handshakes for her at meetings, asking her to go get coffee.

Eileen Hagan: I got chastised once for wearing pants to work instead of a dress or a skirt. You had to work a little harder to gain the respect of your peers. I think it’s just really that simple.

Andrew P.: The perception of computer programming as a boys club has had a big impact. O’Mara says the percentage of women enrolled in computer science programs peaked in the early 1980s, and it continues to decline today.

Margaret O.: Google just, you know, for example, released its diversity numbers in terms of gender diversity and racial diversity earlier this year, and at Google the technical workforce is 17% female, 17%.

Andrew P.: There’s no silver bullet to solve the tech industry’s diversity problem. Some say it starts with encouraging girls to get into math and science in lower grades. Some say it’s about actively recruiting women into Silicon Valley jobs, and others say it’s about changing the industry culture so when women arrive in tech, they stay. But Ensmenger says perhaps there’s another solution to consider.

Nathan E.: I think it’s telling the history correctly, that the stories we tell about the history of computing are largely mythologies, not real history.

Brian Balogh: That story was brought to us by producer Andrew Parsons. To read more about this history, check out Nathan Ensmenger’s book The Computer Boys Take Over and Margaret O’Mara’s Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Next Silicon Valley.

Slaves for Hire

You would think that, by definition, an enslaved person earns no wages. But Historian Gregg Kimball tells Ed about the phenomenon of “hiring out” enslaved persons prior to the Civil War, and how this introduced some slaves to the world of wages.

Labor Day; indentured servitude; slave trade (domestic); slavery; wages

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Brian Balogh: You would think that one of the things that makes an enslaved person a slave is that they are not paid. But when Ed spoke to the historian Gregg Kimball in 2014, he described the phenomenon of hiring out enslaved persons prior to the Civil War.

Brian Balogh: In the 1850s, thousands of enslaved people from rural plantations spent at least part of the year living on their own in Richmond. Other enslaved people lived in the city all the time and moved about independently, but in most cases they remained somebody else’s property.

Gregg Kimball: It is a very strange concept. But what happened was you have say a tobacco factory owner, and he needs a certain number of hands, and he goes to sometimes a middleman, sometimes directly to the master and says, “Let’s have a dual contract and I’ll hire your slave for a year.” And the master gets that money. He is, the slave is hired to the factory for that period of time.

Ed Ayers: Would the slave get anything out of this?

Gregg Kimball: Well, typically they did not get any of the direct payment that went to the master. But you know, the demands labor, you may be in the season where you’re working a lot of hours, and it could be that the slave is only supposed to work for X hours a day, and you need them to work what we would call overtime. Well, sometimes the slave would be remunerated, you know, paid for that time directly. And that was that little crack in the system where some industrial slaves actually had cash in their pockets.

Ed Ayers: Why didn’t they just make them work harder? Why didn’t they just say, “No, you’re staying here Saturday afternoon. And I want you to come in on Sunday too and make more of these barrels.”

Gregg Kimball: Well, obviously the master would have something to say about that. And masters, while they themselves worked their slaves very hard, they were probably even more careful about how somebody else worked their slaves.

Gregg Kimball: I’ll give you an example. When the Blue Ridge tunnel was being built for the railroad through the mountains, they would not allow hired slaves to work in some of the more dangerous parts of that, particularly the blasting with black powder.s That was done by Irish migrant workers. So that’s kind of telling. You know, masters had to be careful. They had a huge investment.

Ed Ayers: So all that sounds like an advantage that you’d have the chance for overpayment. You know, if you’re a slave who’s hired out to somebody else, it’s hard work, but you’re going to be working really hard no matter what you’re doing. But would people prefer not to be hired out?

Gregg Kimball: I think it was very specific to your situation. One of the advantages to coming to Richmond would be to be part of a much larger black community. Going to, say, First African Baptist church, which had almost 3000 members in 1860, you know, provided a level of community and interaction that you probably wouldn’t get in a plantation setting. But if you were, say, a woman hired into a domestic situation in the city, it could be just as abusive and just as much surveillance as you might encounter on a plantation.

Gregg Kimball: So I think, you know, we have to be real careful with that notion of advantage. But for some industrial workers, I think it did offer a little, you know, crack where they could have a social life that was a little richer perhaps than on a plantation.

Ed Ayers: You know, at this time, the defenders of slavery, including of this system, would have pointed to what they call “wage slavery” in the North and would have said, “What you’re doing there is just as bad here. We take care of the slaves, we pay them for overtime. They can earn enough money to buy their own freedom or that of their family. How can you say that this is less fair than the brutal wage slavery of the North?” What would have been a good rejoinder to that?

Gregg Kimball: I know this will sound perverse, but they did have a point to a certain degree. You know the expression, “Nothing but freedom.” You certainly had the freedom as a working man in the North to, you know, change your employer if you wanted to do that. That wasn’t always necessarily a really practical thing for somebody to do. And in the North you have an evolution away from these craft traditions where people did control their labor to a certain degree towards something that was much more exploitative. So it wasn’t necessarily that they were right about slavery and wrong about the North. Clearly they had a very rose colored view of what they were doing, but they weren’t totally wrong about the “free labor” either.

Ed Ayers: So was slave hiring a sign of the fundamental incapacity of slavery to adapt to a modern industrial world? Or was slave hiring an example of exactly the opposite, that slavery could adapt to even the most advanced technologies? You get one choice there, Gregg.

Gregg Kimball: I think it’s that it could adapt to different circumstances, and that the hiring practice is really just a reflection of its ability to adapt.

Ed Ayers: Do you think it would have spread across the South and to other kinds of environments, or would this only work in an industrial city like Richmond?

Gregg Kimball: Well, I think that some of the more recent work on this has shown that it was more prevalent even in agricultural areas than we might imagine. And don’t forget, even though we think of agricultural industry as this, you know, again, kind of a dichotomy of these two different things, remember even in rural agriculture, particularly some types of agriculture, like sugar for instance, there is a whole processing part that is virtually industrial. So again, I think that enslaved people certainly had the skill, and manufacturers had the impetus to use slaves in these industries, and there’s no reason that those two things couldn’t go together.

Ed Ayers: It’s a truly horrifying vision. Sometimes when I’m out talking about the Civil War and people say, “Well, it would have faded away anyway, you know,” I say, “No, look at Richmond and you’re just seeing what the future would have looked, like and it would have been like South Africa.” I point out that slaves would have been great for doing the main things that happen after emancipation: Building railroads, digging coal mines, all those kinds of things. It’s scary to think about how adaptable slavery was.

Gregg Kimball: That’s absolutely right.

Ed Ayers: Gregg, thanks so much for explaining this really kind of bizarre and complicated world to us.

Gregg Kimball: Well, my pleasure. I’ve been here 28 years in Richmond, and this is one of the most fascinating pieces of its story that I can imagine talking about. So thanks.

Brian Balogh: Gregg Kimball is the Director of Education and Outreach Services at the Library of Virginia. His history of antebellum Richmond is American City, Southern Place.

Brian Balogh: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your questions about history.

Brian Balogh: You’ll find thousands of BackStory segments on almost every aspect of American history @ BackStoryradio.org. Or send an email to BackStory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter at BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Brian Balogh: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, The Johns Hopkins University, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund: Cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 16: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joann Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.