chapter 3

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the late 1700s. It involved the replacement of muscle power with machine power, made more possible thanks to the development of the steam engine. In later years, other forms of energy (electricity, the internal-combustion engine, nuclear power, etc.) came into play. The constantly improving technology (tools) of the Industrial Revolution resulted in dramatically rising productivity: more products being created with less labor. This created the possibility of fabulous increases in the profits of businessmen, the possibility of rising living standards for working people, and ongoing conflicts over which possibilities would be realized.

Machines and Labor

The spread of the Industrial Revolution to the United States in the early 1800s dramatically changed workers, workplaces, and the United States as a whole. In the “high-tech” industries of the early 1800s, water- or steam-powered machines were used to increase production. Textile mills relied on waterfalls to power their machine looms. By the 1830s, steam engines were used on ships, railroads, and in a growing number of factories. However, the replacement of steam for hand power was just one aspect of the changes wrought by industrialization.

Originally, the new textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts were seen as providing an ideal opportunity for New England farm girls to earn extra money for their families while at the same time bettering themselves through benevolently supervised workplaces and communities set up by the employers. Within a few years, however, the drive for increased profits caused the factory-owners to drive their young workers harder and harder—and then turn to the labor of poor immigrants whom they hoped to be able to boss around more easily. Workplaces grew larger, and textile factories employed hundreds of children, young women, and men. Wages were low, hours long, conditions increasingly poor. Many New England factories especially relied on indigent women and children who were forced to work at jobs no one else would take.

It is not the case that factories grew bigger because of any technical needs inherent in industrialization. Employers were simply looking for more effective ways to control their labor force, which enabled them to maximize their profits by squeezing more work out of their employees. When an employer pays wages to a worker, he is simply buying that worker’s ability to work: the trick then is to squeeze out from the wage-worker as much actual work as possible. Even small employers found that by dividing the work process, which gave them more control over the labor of their workers, they could maximize production and profits.

In 1776, for example, shoemakers were generally self-employed artisans who produced entire shoes at their own, often leisurely, pace. By the 1840s, skilled shoemakers had given way to shoe workers, each of whom made just one part of the shoe for their employer, often laboring twelve to sixteen hours a day. The product of their labor was then sold to Northern city dwellers, farmers, or to Southern planters who bought cheap shoes for their slaves. In 1850, the Lynn, Massachusetts, Board of Health found that overwork and poverty meant that shoemakers had a life expectancy twenty years lower than farmers. Nonetheless, industry attracted many new migrants to cities, which grew at an enormous rate and increasingly became the site of the rising factory system.

Because of the high cost of land in New York City, no large factories developed there. Instead, tens of thousands of men, women, and children produced ready-to-wear clothing in small sweatshops or in their own homes. New York’s large immigrant population created a vast reserve army of the unemployed and wages remained painfully low. Tailors bitterly explained that a man needed the employment of his wife and several children to survive in the trade. Thousands of single women were tailors, and they often lived on the edge of starvation. After a few years of intense work, seamstresses could be identified on the street by the stooped shoulders and deteriorated vision that inevitably crippled them.

Factories influenced other parts of the economy. As relatively cheap factory-made shoes and textiles became widely available, fewer and fewer families made their own shoes or spun their own fabric. Farmers no longer ground their grain at home but took it to a local flour mill. The drive to produce goods for the market drove not only industrialists but farmers. The growth of industrializing European cities created a growing outlet for Southern cotton as well as Northern grain. Large amounts of flour would be ground in mechanized mills, shipped across upstate New York on the Erie Canal (much of it dug by Irish immigrants), and then shipped to Europe. As people began to purchase more manufactured goods, the relative importance of the cash economy grew. Even small-scale farmers produced more cash crops during the growing season and increasingly worked for wages in the winters.

 

The Rise of Labor Organizations

The experience of working for wages for an entire lifetime was still relatively rare. Prior to the 1820s, even most tailors, shoemakers, or other artisans expected to work for others until they learned the trade and went into business for themselves. Most early factory workers in Lowell’s textile mills (especially the large number of young women) only worked a few years, saving money to begin their own homes. Being permanently tied to an employer for your livelihood seemed incompatible with republican virtues of self-reliance and independence. Skilled factory workers, well-off artisans, or craft workers such as carpenters often looked down on poor workers or factory hands, especially women and recent immigrants from Ireland or Germany. Workers especially feared becoming “wage slaves,” an indication of the growing interpenetration of the free and slave labor systems.

Although it promoted industry as well as slavery, the government was hostile to trade unionists. Unions were frequently labeled “conspiracies” and banned by law. In 1836, a New York judge fined twenty union tailors, lecturing them that unions were an “unlawful combination” that limited the “liberty” of employers. These “un-American” unions were “mainly upheld by foreigners,” in the good judge’s opinion. The city’s unions rallied over 25,000 New Yorkers, 10 percent of the city, to protest this trial. Up in Boston, the young carpenter and labor agitator Seth Luther, in tones reminiscent of old Tom Paine, scoffed that “the Declaration of Independence was the work of a combination, and was as hateful to the traitors and tories of those days as combinations among workingmen are now to the avaricious monopolist and purse proud aristocrat.” Many male unionists did not extend this level of solidarity toward women workers. In 1819, New York’s tailor’s union threatened to go on strike against the increasing number of women tailors in their trade, arguing that their presence was helping to depress wage rates. On the other hand, Seth Luther argued that “unless we have the female sex on our side, we cannot hope to accomplish the object we have in view.”

As industrialization advanced, so did efforts of the growing class of wageworkers to protect their rights and dignity. “As our fathers resisted unto blood the lordly avarice of the British ministry,” proclaimed the striking factory girls of the Lowell textile mills, “so we, their daughters, never will wear the yoke that has been prepared for us.” Similar sentiments motivated union organizing among an increasing number of occupations: carpenters, typographical workers, masons, shoeworkers, textile workers, cigarmakers, and others. Some sought to create independent workers’ parties, many were absorbed (and ultimately frustrated) by the Democratic Party that was reorganized under the rags-to-riches slaveowner Andrew Jackson. Labor reform struggles for such things as the ten-hour workday also attracted much working-class support. “Our cause is the cause of truth—of justice and humanity,” Seth Luther proclaimed, adding: “Let us be determined no longer to be deceived by the cry of those who produce nothing and who enjoy all, and who insultingly term us—the farmers, the mechanics, and the laborers—the lower orders—and exultingly claim our homage for themselves as the higher orders—while the Declaration of Independence asserts that ‘All men are created equal.’”

Hard Times

But fluctuating and volatile economic realities made it difficult to sustain labor organizations. The Industrial Revolution resulted in a vast increase in the production of most goods which often outstripped effective demand; the result was severe depressions or “gluts.” Employers’ drive for efficient production threw large numbers of employees out of work but politicians believed that if the government intervened to help unemployed workers it would destroy their sense of self-sufficiency. Thus private charity and public relief were both meager and punitive. Workingmen’s Parties and unions often argued that governments should provide public works, and at the local level, their demands were sometimes met. However, publicly run unemployment insurance or schools (to educate the poor and take children out of the labor market) or other “safety net” programs would not be implemented until decades later. As a result, when hard times came, as they inevitably did, the old, the very young, the crippled, and unlucky suffered. Families often lost what few possessions they had and sometimes starved.

Of all sectors of the U.S. labor force, blacks had the hardest time of all. While slavery had been abolished in the North by the early 1800s, most white Americans continued to ostracize and oppress African Americans. Blacks were denied employment in most industries. Generally forced out of skilled trades by competing white workers, a majority of black workers could only find lower-paid unskilled labor, and this too was often denied them as unskilled immigrants from Ireland and other impoverished European regions flooded the job market. It was deeply ingrained in the dominant culture—and struck deep roots in the consciousness of most native-born and immigrant white workers—that blacks were inferior beings. White workers generally believed that it would be degrading to work beside such inferiors or to see them receive equal wages, and most employers were very much of the same mind. For many free blacks only the most menial jobs—“drive a carriage, carry a straw basket after the boss, and brush his boots, or saw wood and run errands,” as one free black put it—were available, and some families were able to survive only through the labor of black women working as laundresses.

While free blacks were poorer than white workers, blacks’ meager earnings supported a wide range of abolitionist newspapers. African Americans often had firsthand experience with the brutalities of slavery and consequently their brand of abolitionism was far more militant than that of well-heeled white moralists. In the early 1800s, many white abolitionists still wanted to resolve the blight of slavery from U.S. soil by resettling blacks in Africa or in black-ruled Haiti (after that Caribbean island country’s momentous antislavery revolution and liberation wars of 1791–1803). Only free blacks and white radicals in the U.S. abolitionist movement wanted simply to abolish slavery and secure equal rights for all irrespective of color.

In general, all nonwhite workers faced persecution in the growing Republic. California and Texas had been part of Mexico but were taken over by the United States through the Mexican War of the 1840s. The majority population of the Mexican Americans, who were there first, were generally barred from voting and were forced into the lowest level of the economy. By the 1840s, California attracted not only numerous white settlers, but also Chinese who came to the “golden mountain” to work as miners and railroad workers. Chinese immigrants received an especially vicious reception by white workers. Their thrift and efficiency angered white workers who accused them of being tools of monopolists who conspired to lower the price of labor. Anti-Chinese laws succeeded in restricting immigrants to a handful of menial jobs such as laundry worker, laborer, and street peddler. One historian referred to the Chinese as the “indispensable enemy” of the labor movement in California, because opposition to “coolie labor” was a central rallying cry of white workers.