Booknotes: Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853–1920

New Arrival:

• Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853–1920 by Gregg Andrews (LSU Press, 2024).

From the description: Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853–1920 "is the first comprehensive examination of a workhouse in the United States, offering a critical history of the institution in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Using the Old St. Louis Workhouse as a representative example, award-winning historian Gregg Andrews brings to life individual stories of men and women sentenced to this debtors’ prison to break rocks in the quarry, sew clothing, scrub cell floors and walls, or toil in its brush factory."

Obviously, this is a penal system history and not a Civil War history. Though the extensive period covered in the book includes the years 1861-65, nearly all of the text examines the postwar era and beyond. One might be interested in finding out how the unprecedented turmoil in St. Louis caused by secession and Civil War affected how the workhouse was run, but it doesn't appear (at least by my cursory thumb through) to be something addressed by the study. It is mentioned that the end of the Civil War in 1865 marked the beginning of a steep rise in prosecuting vagrancy offenses as a widespread effort to control who was on the streets.

More from the description: "Most inmates, too poor to pay requisite fines, came through the city’s police courts on charges of vagrancy, drunkenness, disturbing the peace, or violating some other ordinance." The casting of such a wide net led to workhouses becoming "overcrowded and inhospitable facilities that housed hardcore felons and young street toughs along with prostitutes, petty thieves, peace disturbers, political dissenters, “levee rats,” adulterers, and those who suffered from alcohol and drug addiction. Officials even funneled the elderly, the mentally disabled, and the physically infirm into the workhouse system."

Treatment of prisoners in the St. Louis workhouse was very harsh. More: "The ordinance that created the St. Louis complex in 1843 banned corporal punishment, but shackles, chains, and the whipping post remained central to the institution’s attempts to impose discipline. Officers also banished more recalcitrant inmates to solitary confinement in the “bull pen,” where they subsisted on little more than bread and water."

Such records of mistreatment led to the facility being targeted by concerned reformers. According to Andrews, "(t)he best opportunity for lasting change came during the Progressive Era, but the limited contours of progressivism in St. Louis thwarted reformers’ efforts. The defeat of a municipal bond issue in 1920 effectively ended plans to replace the urban industrial workhouse model with a more humane municipal farm system championed by Progressives."