In the 'eighties, this old French-Southern-German city began to recover from the ruin of her Southern trade. Little by little she took heart, for the great Southwest was being settled. There was a new field in which to build up trade. To-day St. Louis is the great wholesale and jobbing depot, the manufacturing city for that vast stretch of territory known as the Southwest.
Since 1890, great fortunes have been amassed—most of them, indeed, in the past ten years. There has been a rapid growth of industry. The old Southern city has become a soft-coal factory center. A pall of smoke hangs over the center of the city where the factories roar and pound. In the midst of this gloom the workfolk are creating rivers of beer, carloads of shoes and woodenware, millions of garments and bags, and the thousand and one things necessary to fill the orders of hundreds of traveling salesmen in the Southwest territory—and in the South, too, for St. Louis is winning back some of her old-time trade.
And the toil of their lifting hands and flying fingers has wrought a golden age for the men who control the capital and the tools. The men who manage have been shaking hands in their clubs for the past decade and congratulating themselves and each other over their drinks. "Yes, St. Louis is a grand old business town. Solid! No mushroom real-estate booms, you know, but a big, steady growth. New plants starting every month and the old ones growing. Then, when we get our deep waterway, that's going to be another big shove toward prosperity.
"Nice town to live in, too! Look at our handsome houses and clubs and public buildings. Never was anything like our World's Fair in the history of men—never! Look at our parks, too. When we get 'em linked together with speedways, where'll you find anything prettier?" Thus the money-makers in this heavy German town.
But what about the employees—the clerks and the factory workers? Have they been "in" on this "big shove toward prosperity?" Have they found it a "nice" town to live in?
No, to each count. For the people at the bottom of the ladder—for the people who tend machines, dig ditches, and stand behind the notion counter—St. Louis is a smoky town, where people have gray lungs instead of pink; a town where franchise grabbing and an antiquated system of taxation have their consequence of more than New York city rents. A town whose slums, says Lee Frankel, are the worst in the country. A town where wages are low (in some occupations twenty-five per cent lower than in New York City); where employment is irregular, the speeding-up tremendous, the number of women entering industry steadily increasing, and where the influx of immigrant labor is pulling down the wage scale and the standard of living.
The average wage of the shoe-workers in the East is $550 per year. In St. Louis it is $440 if work is steady—and rents are higher than in New York City.
It must be remembered that this sum is an average, and that thousands of shoe-workers earn, less than $440, for full-time work. The same is true of thousands engaged in other kinds of manufacture and in department stores.
Somehow the town looks different from the two ends of the ladder.
The government of Missouri and St. Louis has been about as little adapted to the needs of the industrial worker as it well could be. Men have been concerned not so much with social justice as with government protection for money-making schemes.