Summary Of Scraping By Seth Rockman

The free market system of the early United States was the greatest hotbed for prosperity and opportunity that the planet had ever seen and was reliant upon a free labor market that enabled ordinary people to achieve extraordinary goals in pursuing their economic self-interest and happiness. This perspective of capitalism, epitomizing an agent of freedom and upward mobility in the early republic, is one often taken by those assessing the free citizens who achieved in their pursuit of happiness. However, in his book, Scraping By, Seth Rockman sets out to reassess these previous inclinations, associated with the economy and labor force of the United States in the 1800s, by laying out a web of conclusive research on the jobs, welfare, and social issues presented to those laborers participating in
He opens the introduction with a story of street scrapers, those who maintained horse manure, whom were in the process of demanding higher wages for their difficult jobs. For these street scrapers, wage labor was not a stepping stone to independence, but a drain on their energy that kept them scraping for a living. Rockman compares this story to those of many others that shared this common life of arduous, unskilled, labor that netted no economic security in return. The introduction points out that what many would call the “American Dream,” was only available to those Americans who could “best assemble, deploy, and exploit the physical labors of others,” for whom economic failure was much more likely than the upward mobility often associated with this era. Rockman goes on to present some other controversial information such as ideas about social status amongst wage laborers and the topic of capitalism in the early United States. He states that employers would readily combine workers of different nativities, colors, ages, sexes, and legal conditions in the same enterprise, undermining ideas about a social hierarchy amongst laborers, especially those between whites