City of Clerks

Office and Sales Workers in Philadelphia, 1870-1920

Jerome P. Bjelopera

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780252072277, 9780252029776
• eBook ISBN: 9780252090554
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Below the middle class managers and professionals yet above the skilled blue-collar workers, sales and office workers occupied an intermediate position in urban America's social structure as the nation industrialized. Jerome P. Bjelopera traces the shifting occupational structures and work choices that facilitated the emergence of a white-collar workforce. His fascinating portrait reveals the lives led by Philadelphia's male and female clerks, both inside and outside the workplace, as they formed their own clubs, affirmed their "whiteness," and challenged sexual norms. 

A vivid look at an overlooked but recognizable workforce, City of Clerks reveals how the notion of "white collar" shifted over half a century.

1 Clerking and the Industrial-Era White-Collar Workforce

Industrialization profoundly influenced American society and culture,¹ with mechanization, incorporation, and immigration spurring the expansion of the blue-collar workforce. In the last three decades historians have focused much attention on the men and women who toiled in these jobs, but our understanding of the clerks, bookkeepers, stenographers, typists, and salespeople who worked in the stores and offices of industrial America remains partial at best.² Arno J. Mayer offers several reasons American and European scholars have paid less attention to lower-level white-collar workers. He argues that academicians have little sympathy for this social group. Mayer pointedly asks, “Could it be that social scientists are hesitant to expose the aspirations, life-style, and world view of the social class in which so many of them originate and from which they seek to escape?”³ He contends that study of powerful elites or the working class and poor—the poles of Western social structure—has preoccupied scholars. They have neglected the middle. Most convincingly, Mayer describes the lower middle class’s structure as complex, unstable, constantly changing, and thus difficult to study.⁴ As Mayer’s criticisms suggest, defining the position of office and sales workers in America’s class structure poses problems. Their status in society shifted as the nation industrialized, and their location in the urban social order during the age of smokestacks must be described within the context of the entire nonmanual (white-collar) workforce. In the walking city full of artisans and small businesses of the early nineteenth century, clerical work served largely as training for men who were destined to become small-business owners in the preindustrial economic order. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, office and sales employment was transformed. This sector of the workforce grew tremendously, in sheer numbers surpassing both the professional and proprietary categories of white-collar work. In addition, women increasingly entered the previously male realms of the office and selling floor. The growth of clerical opportunity and the expansion of women’s employment in office and sales jobs undermined the connections that this type of work had with apprenticeship for young men. The small, mostly male workforce that had worked behind the desks and sales counters of the walking city thus developed into a large and distinct occupational segment that included vast numbers of women in the industrial work world.

Two major factors make the Philadelphia of 1870 to 1920 an interesting city in which to view the early development of the industrial-era white-collar world. First, Philadelphia does not easily fit the typical urban, northern model of industrialization. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, northern industrial cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Chicago quickly developed economies based on heavy industry. In each of these cities several large-scale industries dominated development from the start.⁵ At the same time, Philadelphia maintained a highly varied economy. The city’s industrial firms came in all sizes. Product diversity, a wide variety of work settings, product and operation specialization, and family ownership colored Philadelphia’s industrial complexion.⁶ The city’s blue-collar workforce was thus not concentrated in any one industry. In the early twentieth century this broad array of production encouraged the city’s Chamber of Commerce to dub Philadelphia the “Workshop of the World.”⁷ Occupational variety also largely held true for Philadelphia’s clerical workforce. The city’s clerks and bookkeepers worked for a broad assortment of manufacturing and commercial interests ranging from huge department stores to small offices. The second factor making the city a fascinating backdrop for the study of lower-level white-collar workers concerns its ethnic makeup. The coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania siphoned off many of the unskilled immigrants who landed in Philadelphia. Millions of others favored the heavy industrial work to be found in the Midwest. This movement drastically affected the city’s social structure.⁸ Philadelphia did not experience the large waves of New Immigrants that washed over America’s heavy industrial heartland. In the fifty years after the Civil War, Philadelphia’s immigrant population never climbed higher than 27 percent of the total population, which especially featured Old Immigrant groups such as the Irish and Germans. Throughout the period about one-half of the city’s denizens were native-born with native-born parents. During the same fifty-year period, at least three-fourths of those inhabiting New York and the metropolises ringing the Great Lakes were immigrants or their American-born children.⁹

In the preindustrial workplace, male office and sales workers had learned business skills in preparation for the day they would acquire their own small businesses. They were, as Stuart M. Blumin has dubbed them, “businessmen-in-training,” apprentices.¹⁰ The famous nineteenth-century Philadelphia financial magnate Jay Cooke worked a series of clerical jobs before striking into banking. Cooke gained his first exposure to business during his childhood in northern Ohio. He occasionally helped out at his uncle’s dry goods store in the town of Sandusky. In 1835, at the age of fourteen, the young Cooke won his first full-time job at another dry goods business in town. During his year-long stint at this job, the adolescent learned the rudiments of office work. This training helped him land more lucrative positions. He spent a brief period in St. Louis clerking in one of the city’s dry goods establishments. While in the “Gateway to the West,” he took penmanship courses at a writing school, increasing his clerical proficiency. The Panic of 1837 devastated Cook’s St. Louis employers, and the lad returned to Sandusky.¹¹

Soon thereafter, William G. Moorehead, Cooke’s brother-in-law and the owner of a packet-line company operating between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, invited the young man to toil as a clerk in his firm. The sixteen-year-old Cooke seized the opportunity and moved to the “City of Brotherly Love.” His daily routine at the company, the Washington Packet Line, mirrored the pace of work for preindustrial artisans.¹² Even though the teen complained that clerking in the city was all “business and bustle,” frequent periods of relaxation and release punctuated his daily routine at work. The youthful clerk’s typical day began at 5:00 A.M. In the early morning he wrestled with paperwork, such as manifests and waybills. Cooke also arranged for the day’s passengers to be transported by omnibus to the rail depot. At 8:00 A.M. he ate breakfast and took time off to read the morning’s newspapers. Cooke then turned to his daily business correspondence and typically made a trip to the bank. He spent part of the late morning and early afternoon strolling through local parks, because business usually slowed at that time. After this break the clerk picked up passengers arriving at a dock on the Schuylkill River, near the city’s waterworks. On the dock he supervised his company’s runners, or messenger boys, who waited to take care of arriving passengers and kept the firm apprised of the situation at the dock. The runners from competing establishments often tussled over perceived or real slights while waiting for arrivals, and Cooke had to pay fines whenever his workers brawled. Occasionally he was drawn into the melees. Cooke routinely ate dinner at 2:00 P.M. and supper at 8:00 P.M. He devoted the time in between to work and a variety of leisure activities, such as taking walks, seeing productions at local theaters, strolling through museums, or simply stretching out at his desk and gazing through the company’s window at passers-by on Chestnut Street.¹³ While the youthful clerk tired of the more tedious aspects of his job, such as soliciting passengers and sitting in a cramped office, he appreciated the trust his brother-in-law bestowed on him. The teen was allowed to manage Moorehead’s private correspondence. His boss told Cooke intimate details about the business and, when away, even left him with the keys to his private treasury desk.¹⁴ To the increasingly ambitious Cooke, the compensation for the tedium of clerical work was firsthand knowledge of the way a business operated. Of course, the clerk alleviated boredom by engaging in regular leisure throughout the day—reading the daily papers, rambling through the city, taking long meals, and even visiting a nearby hotel’s bar for drinks.

Unfortunately, the business went under late in the summer of 1838. Cooke worked for several months as a bookkeeper in a hotel next door but returned to Sandusky in November. He was not away from Philadelphia for long, however. In April 1839 he returned to take a clerical position with E. W. Clark and Company, a banking firm. Cooke fell in love with banking, relishing the personal attention his bosses gave him. Indeed, the future financier watched them closely as well. He clerked there for just over three and a half years and never worried about becoming mired in a clerical career. Even salary increases were unimportant to him. Cooke was content to learn the banking business and earn the trust of the firm’s proprietors. The young man saw this part of his life as an apprenticeship that prepared him to become a banker. In 1843 the bank made him a partner, and he subsequently rose to national prominence as a financier.¹⁵

The clerical work environment prior to industrialization, while dominated by men, was not exclusively masculine. Some dry goods stores, large and small, featured “shopwomen” who tended the counters and sold goods. George G. Foster, an observer of antebellum life in Philadelphia, noted that the shopwomen who worked in establishments throughout Center City were well-educated, performed as quickly and accurately as male clerks, and had the “ease and politeness of manners worthy of the drawing room.” Typical shopwomen labored in establishments run by their husbands or fathers. These small stores were connected to the family residences, so female clerical employment often involved family ties and represented more an extension of the domestic sphere than a female invasion of the public arena.¹⁶ Significantly, these jobs were not apprenticeships and did not offer women career advancement. Meanwhile, for male clerks and bookkeepers in the first half of the nineteenth century, upward occupational mobility existed as a very real possibility, something that most expected. Indeed, like Cooke, many other nineteenth-century industrial leaders began their careers as office workers. In Pittsburgh a young Andrew Carnegie started his work life as a telegraph messenger boy in 1849, showed great promise, and advanced to telegraph clerk. John D. Rockefeller, who studied bookkeeping in a Cleveland high school, balanced the books of a produce retailer.¹⁷ Although these rags-to-riches examples were extreme, they powerfully insinuated the possibilities of career advancement open to mid-nineteenth-century male white-collar workers.

Between 1870 and 1920 clerical work drastically changed. The modern clerical workforce arose in this era, and U.S. industry incorporated and bureaucratized to process the mountains of information necessary to efficiently and profitably run rapidly growing businesses. From 1890 to 1910, in what has been dubbed the “administrative revolution” or the “managerial revolution,” U.S. businesses vastly expanded their office workforces.¹⁸ In the fifty years following 1870, Philadelphia’s office and sales sector rose from 7 percent to 19 percent of the entire workforce. It went from being a sliver of the working population to a sizable chunk. Larger bureaucracies and the advent of department stores demanded legions of clerks to count the debits and profits as well as to sell goods.¹⁹ Additionally, office and sales work drew more women as the industrial order matured. This constituted their first opportunity to enter white-collar employment in large numbers, and their presence in the white-collar workplace helped transform the very meanings of clerical work. In 1870 about 80,000 clerical workers labored in the United States, but under 3 percent were women.²⁰ By 1920 America’s clerical workforce numbered slightly over 3,000,000, and 45 percent were women. Women dominated certain newly created occupations at the turn of the century, such as typing and stenography. Other occupations, such as clerking, slowly transformed from male- to female-typed jobs. Employers tied the labor of women to the advent of new office technology, particularly the typewriter. Offices especially employed women in the most routinized forms of clerical work, which approximated light manufacturing.²¹ Women dominated the industrial era’s preeminent sales arena, the department-store selling floor, as well. Men occupied all levels of office and selling-floor hierarchies, while male-dominated management relegated women to the bottom tiers, kept them from ascending the corporate ladder, and expected them to leave the workforce once they married. Much like preindustrial shopwomen, these late nineteenth-century women could not harbor any realistic hopes of using their jobs to advance in the masculine business world.

Clerking grew in routinization and mechanization during the industrial period, and particularly in large establishments, its direct association with male apprenticeship diminished. In fact, male clerks and their superiors came to view the most routinized work, while necessary for the successful functioning of bureaucracy, as the purview of women and undesirable for young men. The preindustrial pace of work and office intimacy that Jay Cooke and his fellow clerks experienced faded away. Opportunities for upward occupational mobility declined.²² Despite the changes in the clerical world, however, the shiny preindustrial vision of rapid advancement did not tarnish enough to dissuade men from entering lower-level white-collar employment. Many industrial-era male clerks still clung to dreams of business ownership. Unfortunately for them, the small counting-floor setting in which a shopkeeper passed on the secrets of his trade to his only clerk became harder to find. These more intimate settings had made it easier to learn the tricks of the trade, so to speak. The administrative revolution made it a growing rarity for clerks to work directly with business owners. Rather, they interacted with a wide variety of middle-level managers and received much of their training in specialized schools. Replacing apprenticeship, educational institutions such as clerical high-school programs and business colleges arose to instruct the emerging clerical workforce.²³

Nevertheless, the antiquated, preindustrial dream of using clerical work as a route to small-business ownership tenaciously persisted for industrial-era male office and sales workers. Successful transition from clerical work into the proprietary world, however, required business acumen, monetary resources, and a bit of luck. The story of Joseph Blumenthal serialized by System magazine in 1916 served as an idealized example to industrial-era male clerks who dreamed of climbing into the proprietary ranks. Enough men shared Blumenthal’s experiences to keep the dream of upward mobility alive for countless thousands of their counterparts. In 1898 the twenty-seven-year-old Blumenthal served as a salesman for D. Sulzberger, a Philadelphia extract manufacturer. Blumenthal’s father had worked as a commission salesman, but Jo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Clerking and the Industrial-Era White-Collar Workforce
• 2. In the Office and the Store
• 3. Pursuing “Noble Endeavor”: Educating Clerical Workers at the Peirce School
• 4. After Hours: How the Clerical Workforce Entertained Itself
• 5. Workplace Virtues, Rebellion, and Race
• 6. Home and Neighborhood
• Appendix: Occupational Rankings
• Notes
• Index
• Illustrations