The Effects of Industrialism.

As industries consolidated at the turn of the century, factories grew larger and more dangerous. By 1900 industrial accidents killed thirty-five thousand workers each year and maimed five hundred thousand others, and the numbers continued to rise. The general public became concerned with industrial accidents only when scores of workers were killed in a single widely reported incident, such as the many coalmine explosions or the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in 1911. The average workday varied from industry to industry, but most laborers worked ten-hour days, six days a week for wages that barely covered the cost of living for a family of four. To make ends meet many of these families had little choice but to send their children, sometimes as young as six, to work in the factories. Wages generally rose during the first decade of the twentieth...