City of Clerks: Office and Sales Workers in Philadelphia, 1870-1920 (review)

City of Clerks is a well-conceived and generally well-executed study of the physical, social, and working worlds of clerks and salespeople in Philadelphia during the "age of smokestacks." It complements the more detailed descriptions of low-level white-collar work and workers found in studies such as Susan Porter Benson's Countercultures (1986) or Walter Friedman's Birth of a Salesman (2004) by providing a broader view of the lives and environment of big city clerks and salespeople. This wider focus allows the reader to better understand both how low white-collar workers worked and how they lived in the new "City of Clerks."

Bjelopera begins with a brief overview that puts changes to clerical and sales work in the context of the rise of big business. This will be a familiar ground to many readers. Not surprisingly, Bjelopera stresses the tremendous growth in the number of clerks, a tenfold increase in Philadelphia during the period of his study, which provided the critical mass that made a group identity possible. He also provides a brief overview that traces the incomplete transition of clerical work from a step on the path to business ownership or top management to a partially feminized position women held until they married and men held until they retired or died.

Bjelopera then turns his attention to the composition of the workforce, the ways aspiring clerks gained the education they needed, and how they sought employment. Curiously, he says little about what they actually did on the job. Here and throughout City of Clerks, he relies heavily on the records of Strawbridge and Clothier's, a local department store that employed over 5,000 near the turn of the century, and the Pierce School, a local business college that specialized in preparing clerks for the new workplace. Bjelopera provides some fascinating glimpses into the ways students received job training. Curriculum at the Pierce School was loosely organized, with most students choosing cafeteria style from offerings in applied classes such as bookkeeping, penmanship, or stenography as well as more general courses in mathematics and English. To give students practical experience, school officials established the Banking and Business Department where students ran a virtual economy featuring mock businesses buying and selling imaginary goods but using standard business forms and correspondence.

Bjelopera uses these sources well but, particularly in the case of the Pierce school, sidesteps the question of how representative the experiences he documents were of Philadelphia's clerks. The city's well-developed public school system trained far more clerks than Pierce, which averaged somewhat less than 2,000 students per year for most of this period, but is undiscussed.

Bjelopera breaks the most new ground in the final three chapters that provide an interesting series of windows into the after-hours lives of Strawbridge and Clothier's clerks and Pierce alumni. He skillfully blends labor and urban history to provide a reasonably comprehensive view of how and where young, single clerks and salespeople spent their free time. Bjelopera claims that for many clerks their jobs significantly shaped their social lives. Clerks and salespeople formed mutual interest societies, social clubs, and sports teams, all based on workplace connections. These after-hours experiences offered workers a rich social life of baseball, bicycling, choral music, mandolin instruction, as well as more passive entertainments such as trips to local amusement parks, movies, plays, and occasional out of town vacations. Although much of this was benign, some activities such as clerk's proclivity for black-faced minstrel shows were sharply exclusionary. In addition to showing how clerks lived, he shows how young, single clerks congregated in the same parts of town, often living in furnished rooms near the business district, which left them without significant family support or supervision. Together, these activities created a life-style that was as much a part...