On the Make (American History and Culture) by Brian Luskey

Author:Brian Luskey [Luskey, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press reference
Published: 2010-01-01T02:00:00+00:00

Home, Sweet Home

Dr. Edward Dixon’s reference during the early closing movement to the clerk who moved into a “fifth-rate boarding-house” exhibited a concern shared by parents and ministers that many young men who traveled to the nation’s growing cities in search of clerkships would be separated from the domestic influence of their loving families and the paternal oversight of their employers. While they enjoyed independent living in boardinghouses, young rural immigrants and their urban counterparts hoped to exhibit self-control and develop a discerning eye for the urban dangers that threatened their prospects for economic and social advancement.6

My sample from the 1855 New York State census shows that nearly 60 percent of clerks boarded in private residences, boardinghouses, hotels, or businesses (see table 1.4). They were not an anomaly in the urban population—historians have estimated that between one-third and one-half of urban Americans lived in boardinghouses. Surely, many clerks considered these living arrangements to be interim homes, just as they believed their clerkships were temporary stepping stones to mercantile riches. Bourgeois observers who tried to differentiate between boardinghouse and home argued that the latter was more clearly representative of domesticity, the ideology that presented the hearth as a haven from the vexing competition of the capitalist market. Yet they were concocting fictional distinctions: family ties continued to shape boarding clerks’ lives, and in a few cases these young men lived with brothers, sisters, or parents in boardinghouses. Clerks’ urban experiences were filtered through day-to-day relationships with beloved sisters and mothers, surly or benevolent boardinghouse keepers, and fellow boarders.7

Boardinghouse keepers, caught uneasily in the debate about the culturally desirable separation of the respectable home from the market, often attempted but ultimately found it difficult to distinguish their establishments as refined environments. Contemporary assessments of boardinghouse life, such as Thomas Butler Gunn’s comic Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses, suggest that many boardinghouses muddled the meanings of class and ethnicity in the city. Native-born Americans lived with European immigrants, and many clerks resided in disreputable boardinghouses. In the “dirty” boardinghouse operated by an Irish woman in a “mean street on the east side of town,” Gunn’s narrator lived next door to “two rough, good-humored laboring-men” as well as the purported “aristocrats of the place,” who included a besotted “dispensary doctor,” a wholesale downtown fish exporter, and “a dry-goods clerk from the store below” the boardinghouse. During his residence at a seedy boardinghouse located “midway between East Broadway and the [East] River,” he found a “Tipperarian,” a widow and her daughters, a sailor-turned-policeman and his family, “a hatter, attorney’s clerk, and a jappaner or dealer in ornamental furniture.” They were joined by a “red-haired dry-goods clerk, who found favor in the eyes of the landlady’s daughter, and propitiated the mother and [her] married sister by presents of ribbons.” Of course, it might have been possible for clerks to develop strong associations with fellow commercial and professional men who were born in the same country and ignore others living in their boardinghouses. Yet as in other

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