One of the few photographs of the Halifax Explosion. Photograph: Library and Archives, Canada.
A German chemist who worked on designing poison gas in World War I and who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918 for his work on nitrates, Fritz Haber was born on December 9, 1868, at Breslau, Germany (modern-day Wroclaw, Poland). Both his parents were Jewish. His father, Siegfried Haber, was a well-known merchant in Breslau, and his mother, Paula, died when he was a child. Haber was educated at the University of Heidelberg, where he studied under Robert Bunsen, and he then went to the University of Berlin where he worked with A. W. Hofman. He then went to the Technical College of Charlottenburg (now the Technical University of Berlin), where he studied under Carl Liebermann. On leaving the university, Haber worked at his father’s business developing chemicals.
From 1894 until 1911 Haber worked in Karlsruhe, where he and Carl Bosch developed what became known as the Haber process. This involved using high temperatures and high pressure to lead to the catalytic formation of ammonia from hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen. After this, Haber went to Zurich, Switzerland, where he worked with Georg Lunge at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. From 1911 until 1933 most of his research took place at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical and Electrochemistry at Berlin-Dahlem.
During World War I, Haber was active in working on aspects of chemical warfare. He developed the gas mask, which had absorbent filters. He was also involved in developing chlorine gas and other gases that were used against Allied trenches on the Western Front. Much of his research was pitted against that of Victor Grignard, the French Nobel laureate for Chemistry in 1912.
Haber married Clara Immerwahr in 1901, and they had a son, Hermann, born in the following year. After Haber started developing poison gases for war, including overseeing the first successful use of chlorine gas on April 22, 1915, at the Second Battle of Ypres, Clara tried to get her husband to stop this work. She was also a chemist and was appalled at the use of his knowledge in war. She committed suicide by shooting herself on May 15, 1915, with Haber leaving for the Eastern Front that same day to supervise the release of poison gas against the Russians. Haber quickly noticed that death resulted either from exposure to a high concentration of gas for a short time or exposure to a low concentration over a long time. He used these to create Haber’s Rule, a mathematical relationship between the concentration and the exposure.
In 1918 Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his role in the Haber process—the prize had been reserved in 1916 and 1917. The Haber process was a major advance in industrial chemistry as it helped with the production of many nitrogen products that were used as fertilizers, explosives, and chemical feedstock. Production before had been from natural deposits of sodium nitrate, of which much of the world’s supply came from Chile. The availability of cheaper fertilizer helped lead to an increase in food production, and some credited Haber with averting a possible worldwide food shortage because of the rapid increase in the population. Some pessimists had even suggested what amounted to a Malthusian catastrophe, based on the predictions of Thomas Malthus, by which the increase in population would rapidly outstrip the supply of food.
Subsequent to his winning the Nobel Prize, Haber researched into various combustion reactions, including the separation of gold from seawater, and he published some papers on the topic. However, he ended his research in this field, concluding that the concentration of gold in seawater was much lower than some earlier scientists had suggested. He also worked on various absorption effects and aspects of electrochemistry. Although Haber had been much criticized for his work on poison gas in World War I, he had defended it by claiming that death was the same however it was inflicted. In 1932 Haber was awarded the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society.
With the rise in anti-Semitism in Germany, Haber converted to Christianity. By this time he had remarried. However, this did not prevent persecution when the Nazi Party came to power. He left Germany and went to Cambridge, England, where he worked for a few months. He then considered taking up a position at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot in the Palestine Mandate. However, on January 29, 1934, Haber died from a heart attack while staying in a Basel hotel in Switzerland. He was cremated, and his ashes, as well as those of his first wife, were interred at the Hornli Cemetery in Basel. His second wife, Charlotte (née Nathan), whom he had married in 1917, and their two children, Ludwig “Lutz” and Eva, settled in England, with Hermann, his son by his first marriage, immigrating to the United States and committing suicide in 1946. Lutz Fritz Haber, one of his two surviving children, became a historian and in 1986 wrote The Poisonous Cloud, which was a history of chemical warfare in World War I. His daughter, Eva Lewis, has been interviewed several times about the role her father played in World War I.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Charles, Daniel. Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare. New York: Ecco, 2005.
Goran, Morris. The Story of Fritz Haber. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967.
Haber, Lutz Fritz. The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Hogg, I. V. Gas. New York: Ballantine, 1975.
Langer, W. L. Gas and Flame in World War I. New York: Knopf, 1965.
Szöllösi-Janze, M. “Pesticides and War: The Case of Fritz Haber.” European Review 9 (2001): 97–108.
The Halifax Explosion occurred on December 6, 1917, at the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The harbor was bustling with activity as World War I brought increased demands for shipping to and from the harbor. Two ships collided, and one, a French ammunition ship, the Mont-Blanc, caught fire and exploded. The resulting explosion destroyed property, including schools and homes, for miles around and left approximately two thousand dead and nine thousand more injured. It was the most devastating man-made explosion in history until the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Halifax harbor and the surrounding areas had grown thanks to international demand due to the First World War. Ships from Allied and neutral nations alike docked at the harbor to take on supplies ranging from food and clothes to weapons and ammunition. Canadian troops and supplies bound for the Western Front also embarked at Halifax. Many ships headed for Europe formed convoys just out of the harbor for mutual protection during the Atlantic crossing. The rapid increase in activity also brought needed supply businesses to the area, such as increased warehouses, railroads, stores, and military facilities. A general population boom accompanied these industries.
The biggest drawback to this influx of shipping activity was that the Narrows, the shipping lane that separated Halifax and Dartmouth, was not large enough to handle the amount of traffic, especially given the confusion and lack of regulation on ships coming and going. The French Mont-Blanc left port on the morning of December 6, 1917, loaded down with explosives that included two hundred tons of trinitrotoluene and other incendiary devices. Very soon, the Mont-Blanc collided with the Imo, a Norwegian vessel also trying to navigate the Narrows. The Mont-Blanc caught fire, and her crew abandoned ship and rowed to the Dartmouth side. The unmanned ship, now on fire, floated back toward Halifax. It came to rest at Pier 6, where people watched the vessel burn. Just after 9 a.m. the Mont-Blanc exploded, leveling structures for miles around and killing nearly two thousand people and wounding nearly nine thousand others. The blast created a mushroom cloud filled with debris that covered the city. The explosion also created large waves that swamped vessels and poured into the city. After the immediate effects of the explosion subsided fires spread throughout Halifax. Many were killed from the blast outright, while others were killed from glass and wood shrapnel and other debris sent flying by the destroyed homes, businesses, churches, and schools. The harbor and many of the docked ships, some already loaded with men and supplies, were also destroyed.
Loss of life was mitigated by the rapid organization and response of relief agencies that included the military and rescue workers already stationed at Halifax, with support from across Canada and from the United States. Supplies poured in immediately, and empty ships and buildings were quickly converted to makeshift hospitals. Hospitals in nearby towns took in as many of the wounded as they could while relief agencies and civilians helped clean up and house those who now found themselves homeless. In the immediate aftermath many thought that the Germans had caused the explosion. Once the true cause had been discerned, charges were brought against both ships. Ultimately no criminal charges were levied, and it was declared an accident. There are several monuments and museums created as a memorial to those that died in the explosion. Another lasting reminder is that the people of Halifax donate a large Christmas tree to the city of Boston as a continued thanks for their help during the relief efforts following the explosion.
One of the few photographs of the Halifax Explosion. Photograph: Library and Archives, Canada.
See also: Anarchism; Bhopal Catastrophe; Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station; Factory System; Great Chicago Fire of 1871; Haymarket Affair; Seveso Disaster; Texas City Disaster; Three Mile Island; Times Beach, Missouri, Disaster; West Fertilizer Company Explosion (2013).
—Antonio Thompson
Further Reading
Armstrong, John Griffith. The Halifax Explosion and the Royal Canadian Navy: Inquiry and Intrigue. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: University of British Columbia Press, 2003.
Flemming, David. Explosion in Halifax Harbour: The Illustrated Account of a Disaster That Shook the World. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: Formac Publishing, 2004.
Mac Donald, Laura M. Curse of the Narrows. New York: Walker and Company, 2005.
Mildon, Catherine M. Exploded Identity: A Saga of the Halifax Explosion. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: Crown Publishing, 2004.
Hall, Charles Martin (1863–1914)
An American inventor and engineer, Charles Martin Hall became well known for his process for the production of aluminum. His electrolytic process for the cheap extraction of aluminum resulted in it becoming far cheaper than it had been beforehand and ensured that aluminum would become the first new metal to gain widespread use in the world since the prehistoric discovery of iron.
Charles Martin Hall was born on December 6, 1863, at Thompson, Ohio, the son of the Reverend Herman Bassett Hall and Sophronia (née Brookes). Herman Bassett Hall was from Vermont and Sophronia was from Ohio. There were two sons and five daughters in the family—Ellen J., Emily B., Julia B., Charles Martin, Edith M., and Louisa A. Hall—and they moved to Oberlin, Ohio, in 1873. Charles Hall attended Oberlin High School, and in 1880 he went to Oberlin College, a selective liberal arts college, from where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1885. Since he was young, Martin had been interested in scientific experiments. One of the men who encouraged him was Frank Fanning Jewett, a professor of chemistry whose home is now preserved as the Oberlin Heritage Center. In it there is a re-creation of the woodshed experiment that Hall made in 1886. The original Hall family house is also preserved but the woodshed is no longer there.
On February 23, 1886, Hall was able to produce the first samples of aluminum after having worked on it for several years. Helped by his older sister, Julia Brainerd Hall (who had also studied under Jewett), the method was essentially to pass an electric current through a bath of alumina that had been dissolved in cryolite. Recent scholarship suggests that she may have been crucial in this experiment. This resulted in the formation of deposits of aluminum in the base of the retort. On July 9, 1886, Hall filed for his first patent, narrowly beating the French scientist Paul Héroult. In 1893 the U.S. courts accepted that Hall had invented the process first, giving him “priority of invention.” However, the process is still often called the Hall-Héroult process.
Initially failing to find backing for the project in Ohio, Hall went to Pittsburgh, where he combined his resources with the metallurgist Alfred E. Hunt. Together they established the Reduction Company of Pittsburgh, and they built the first large-scale aluminum plant, starting the first commercial manufacture of aluminum in 1888. This manufacture reduced the price of aluminum to 0.5 percent of its previous price, making it cheap enough to use for a vast number of extra uses and to make its use very common around the world. It became one of the most common nonferrous metals used in the world. The company was subsequently renamed the Aluminum Company of America, and it is now called Alcoa. As a major holder of stock in the company, Hall became very wealthy, and by 1900 annual production levels reached eight thousand tons. He gained his master’s degree from Oberlin College in 1893, with a doctorate in law in 1910.
Refining the process, Hall continued researching and fine-tuning his inventions for the rest of his life, and in total he received twenty-two U.S. patents, most of which were on the production of aluminum. In 1890 Hall became vice president of Alcoa, a position he held for the rest of his life, and he also served on the Oberlin College Board of Trustees. In 1911 Hall was given the Perkin Medal, the highest award for industrial chemistry in the United States.
Charles Martin Hall lived at Niagara Falls in New York, and in the 1900 census he described himself as “vice-president, factory.” He died on December 27, 1914, at Daytona, Florida, and he was buried at the Westwood Cemetery in Oberlin. He was unmarried. In his will, proven after his death, he donated large sums of money to Oberlin College, and a statue of him—appropriately made in aluminum—was unveiled at the college. It was moved many times and is now on a large, granite block on the second floor of the new science center at the college. In 1997 the production of aluminum by electrolytic process was designated as a National Historical Chemical Landmark by the American Chemical Society.
Charles Martin Hall
The company, Alcoa, is now the third largest producer of aluminum in the world, with its principal headquarters in New York and its operational headquarters at Pittsburgh. In 2006 it employed 129,000 people, with a revenue of U.S. $30.4 billion and a net income of U.S. $2.248 billion.
See also: Mining.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Craig, Norman C. “Charles Martin Hall—The Young Man, His Mentor and His Metal.” Journal of Chemical Education 63, no. 7 (1986): 557–59.
Craig, Norman C., and Christian M. Bickert. “Historical Metallurgy: Hall and Héroult—The Men and Their Invention.” CIM Bulletin 79, no. 892 (1986): 98–101.
Trescott, Martha M. “The Story behind the Story: Julia B. Hall and Aluminum.” Journal of Chemical Education 54, no. 1 (1977): 24–25.
Hall, Lloyd Augustus (1894–1971)
An African American chemist who contributed much to the science of food preservation, especially in the curing and preservation of meat for sale in supermarkets and elsewhere, Lloyd Augustus Hall transformed the nature of the food industry in the United States, and also the world. It was probably one of the most important developments in preserving food since refrigeration. He was born on June 20, 1894, at Elgin, Illinois, the son of Elisha A. Hall and Isabel (née French). His grandfather was one of the first Baptist preachers in the area, and his father was a Baptist minister at the same church. Lloyd Hall attended the high school in Aurora and then studied chemistry at Northwestern University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree, and then he worked as a chemist at the Department of Health Laboratories in Chicago, becoming a senior chemist in 1917 and briefly attending the University of Chicago as a graduate student.
With the start of the U.S. involvement in World War I and the United States sending soldiers to France, Hall was commissioned as lieutenant and worked as assistant chief inspector of powder and explosives at the Ordnance Department. Facing discrimination in the army, Hall put in for a transfer, and over the next nine years he worked at a number of chemical laboratories, often as a consultant. His first work was as the chief chemist of John Morrell & Co., Ottumwa, Iowa, in 1919 to 1921, and then at the Boyer Chemical Laboratory Company in Chicago in 1921. He was president and chemical director of the Chemical Products Corporation of Chicago in 1922 to 1925. In 1925 he was hired by Griffith Laboratories to work on food science, devoting much of the rest of his career to this. He remained at Griffith as chief chemist and director of research until 1946 and was technical director from 1946 until 1959. He remained connected with the company as a consultant after then.
Hall’s first major work was to try to cure meat, especially to improve the system known as “flash-drying,” which was used by Griffith Laboratories. It had been originally devised by a German chemist named Karl Max Seifert, who used solutions of sodium chloride and a number of secondary salts that were sprayed on hot metal and then dried quickly. This led to the production of crystals of the secondary salts, which were encased in the shell of sodium chloride. In 1934 Seifert had patented the process and sold the rights to Griffith Laboratories.
Enoch L. Griffith, the owner of Griffith Laboratories, was keen on using this process to cure meat. He felt that the use of nitrates and nitrites might also work to achieve this. Hall helped develop and improve the system and never claimed to have invented it, despite this appearing in many books and newspaper articles. However, he certainly took a major role in the development of meat curing by adding hygroscopic agents such as corn sugar and also glycerine to inhibit the caking of the powder. As a result, most of Hall’s patents in meat curing are concerned with attempts to prevent the caking of curing composition or remedying the ill effects that are caused by anticaking agents.
Lloyd Hall was also heavily involved in investigating the role that spices have in the preservation of food. It had already been discovered that some seasonings had a natural antimicrobial property. Hall researched along with Carroll L. Griffith, and they discovered that some spices also contained bacteria as well as spores from yeast and some molds. To counter the ill effects of the bacteria and mold, Hall and Griffith patented a method of sterilization of spices in 1938. This involved exposing the food to ethylene oxide gas, which is still used as a fumigant. In fact, ethylene oxide gas was used in many countries until recently, when health concerns led to its use on food being banned in the European Union and in Japan. However, it is still used to treat and sterilize medical equipment.
Over many years Hall studied the effects of antioxidants to prevent the spoiling of food, which was common with the rancidity of fats and oils. Unprocessed vegetable oils included natural antioxidants such as lecithin, which slowed spoilage. Hall developed ways to combine these compounds with salts and other materials.
Writing extensively on many topics connected with his work, Hall was the assistant editor of Beta Kappa Chi Journal in 1948 to 1949 and editor of The Vitalizer, published by the Chicago section of the Institute of Food Technologists in 1948. He was consultant editor for the next two years. He was also a member of the editorial advisory board of Food Processing magazine from 1952 until 1956, and a member of the advisory board of Chemical and Engineering News in 1957 to 1960. Hall was also a member of many social and community organizations, including being on the advisory board of the Los Angeles State College, the YMCA movement, as well as the Kenwood Neighborhood Redevelopment Corporation.
During World War II, Hall was a member of the scientific advisory board of the Commission on Food Research at the War Department, 1943 to 1948. Retiring from Griffith Laboratories in 1959, Hall took up a position as a member of the research advisory board at Truesdail Laboratories Inc., from 1960. Hall was a consultant for the Food and Agriculture Organization, and from 1962 until 1964 he was a member of the American Food for Peace Council. Hall was a member of many intercollegiate fraternity organizations, including Alpha Phi Alpha, the first Greek-letter fraternity established for African Americans. He retired to Altadena, California, and died on January 2, 1971, at Pasadena, and was buried at the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Brodie, James Michael. Created Equal: The Lives and Ideas of Black American Innovators. New York: W. Morrow, 1993.
Kessler, James H., J. S. Kidd, Renée A. Kidd, and Katherine A. Morin. Distinguished African American Scientists of the 20th Century. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1996.
Halliburton Energy Services is a large, U.S.-based multinational corporation that operates in more than 120 countries in the world. It has extensive political ties in the United States and has been at the forefront of criticism from media organizations around the world, mainly over its role in the invasion of Iraq in the Gulf War (2003). It is often used as an example of the military-industrial complex, and the profits made by Halliburton are criticized by commentators and journalists around the world.
The company was established by Erle Palmer Halliburton (1892–1957) and his wife, Vida (née Taber), who were involved in the cementing of oil wells in Burkburnett, Texas, later moving their business, then called the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company, to the Healdton Field near Ardmore in Oklahoma. Erle Halliburton was born in Tennessee, and his wife was from Illinois. Erle worked as an oilfield worker in California before moving to Texas as a consulting engineer.
In 1920 the company was reorganized and became the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company, and in the following year it moved its headquarters to Duncan, Oklahoma, and was incorporated in 1924. Erle Halliburton was the president and general manager from 1920 until 1947 when he became the chairman of the Board of Directors. In 1948 the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1957 it acquired the Welex Jet Services of Fort Worth, Texas, and three years later it shortened its name to Halliburton Company, moving its headquarters to Dallas, Texas, in the following year.
Halliburton Company gradually increased in size with the acquisition of Brown & Root of Houston, Texas, in 1962. By 1982, with the energy industry in decline, it already employed 115,000 workers, and in 1988 it diversified, buying Geophysical Service Incorporated from Texas Instruments and establishing Halliburton Logging Services in the same year. It also bought Gearhart, but the downturn in the economy meant that it had a workforce of about seventy-three thousand in 1991.
After the Gulf War (1991), crews from Halliburton were involved in bringing 320 burning oil wells under control. At about the same time Dick Cheney, the U.S. Secretary for Defense, paid Brown & Root Services more than $8.5 million for them to undertake a report on behalf of the Pentagon to study the possible use of private military forces to serve with U.S. military personnel in combat zones. By this time Halliburton itself was involved in a number of scandals. One was over Halliburton Logging Services selling six-pulse neutron generators to Libya in violation of U.S. federal sanctions, and Halliburton had also sold dual-use oil drilling equipment to both Libya and Iraq in violation of U.S. federal regulations. In 2001, in spite of U.S. sanctions against Iran, the Wall Street Journal reported that a company called Halliburton Products and Services Ltd., incorporated in the Cayman Islands but using the logo of Halliburton Energy Services, had an office in Tehran. As no U.S. citizen was employed at the office and the company was officially registered in the Cayman Islands, it did not violate the Trading with the Enemy Act, which had been enacted in 1917 and was still in force.
In 1995 Thomas H. Cruikshank, who had been chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton since 1989, was replaced by Dick Cheney, the former Defense Secretary. In 1998 Halliburton merged with Dresser Industries, and one of the directors of Dresser, Prescott Bush, became a director of Halliburton. These close business links between Cheney and the Bush family have been the center of the controversies that have dogged the company since then. In 2001 Cheney became U.S. vice president, and subsequently Halliburton and its subsidiaries have been involved in major U.S. government contracts.
With the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s, Halliburton had been involved in providing services to the U.S. peacekeeping forces there, including food, laundry and transportation. They expanded their role in the Gulf War (2003), which led to the invasion of Iraq. Halliburton had been asked to draw up contingency plans in case of fires in the Iraqi oil wells and also to secure the oil wells and get them ready for production after a U.S. invasion.
After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in which a significant amount of the Iraqi government infrastructure was destroyed, Halliburton was involved in much of the reconstruction work. They managed to get the oil pipelines working again, although they faced many problems emerging especially from the deterioration of the security situation in the country. The Halliburton contracts in Iraq generated some $13 billion in revenue, with higher figures quoted when Halliburton subsidiaries are included. The actual profit margin remained low, sometimes as low as 2 percent, unlike their core energy business that was far more profitable in percentage terms. However, there have been many persistent allegations of Halliburton inflating the costs of their operations in Iraq, with audits by various government bodies and private companies showing some “questioned costs.” Much has been made of this—and also the connections between Dick Cheney and Halliburton—in investigative reports published in newspapers around the world, and in television documentaries either about Halliburton specifically or about the military-industrial complex in general. In April 2004 Halliburton became the only company directly referred to by Osama bin Laden because of the profits made in Iraq.
Halliburton currently employs fifty thousand people around the world, and maintains its headquarters in Houston, Texas. It has a second headquarters in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, where Halliburton’s chairman and CEO David J. Lesar lives and works.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Briody, Dan. The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004.
Bryce, Robert. Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate. New York: Public Affairs, 2004.
Juhasz, Antonia. The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. New York: Regan Books, 2006.
Hamilton, Alexander (1755/1757–1804)
Alexander Hamilton was, over the course of his life, an army officer, lawyer, Founding Father, politician, statesman, financier, and political theorist. He was a leader in calling for the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and he was one of the two chief authors of The Federalist Papers. He was also one of the founders of the Federalist Party, but his greatest contribution was the creation of the banking and financial system that allowed the new nation to survive and his recognition that eventually commerce and industry would be the foundations of the American economy.
Hamilton was born in Nevis, in the West Indies, in 1755 or 1757. As a youth, he showed great intellectual promise, and in 1772 he was sent to the colonies by a benefactor to complete his education. He graduated from Kings College, later Columbia University, and while there he became involved in the revolutionary movement.
During the Revolutionary War, Hamilton served as aide-de-camp to George Washington, who later appointed him the first Secretary of the Treasury. In this position he became a close confidante of Washington and exerted great influence over the direction of policy during the formative years of the U.S. government. He believed in the importance of a strong central government and persuaded Congress to use the “necessary and proper,” or elastic clause of the Constitution, to pass far-reaching laws. These included the funding of the national debt, federal assumption of the state debts, the creation of a national bank, a system of taxation involving tariffs on imports, and excise taxes.
Hamilton was one of the founders of the Federalist Party, the first American political party, which he built up in the 1790s using Treasury Department patronage, networks of elite political leaders, and aggressive newspaper editors. His primary political adversary was Thomas Jefferson, who, with James Madison and others, created the opposition party that came to be known as the Jeffersonian Republicans. They opposed the ideas of a strong central government and attempted, without much success, to block all of Hamilton’s plans.
At the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, Hamilton served for a short time in the Continental Congress and then opened his own law office in New York City. He was successful, and in 1784 he founded the Bank of New York, which today is the oldest bank in the country. In 1786 he attended the Annapolis Convention and drafted the resolution calling for a Constitutional Convention. He was one of three delegates from New York to the convention, but he had little influence there because the other two delegates were opposed to the creation of a strong central government.
Although he had reservations about the first draft of the Constitution, thinking it did not create a strong enough government, Hamilton became a leader in the campaign for ratification. Along with John Jay and James Madison, he wrote a masterful defense of the Constitution now known as The Federalist Papers. The work consists of eighty-five essays, of which Hamilton wrote fifty-one, Madison twenty-nine, and Jay five. These essays were influential in bringing about the successful ratification of the Constitution.
Hamilton served as Secretary of the Treasury from 1789 to 1795. Early in his term of office, in 1790 and 1791, he submitted five reports that laid the groundwork for a financial revolution in the American economy. These reports were: First Report on Public Credit (January 14, 1790), Operations of the Act Laying Duties on Imports (April 29, 1790), Second Report on Public Credit (December 14, 1790), Report on the Establishment of a Mint (January 28, 1791), and Report on Manufacturing (December 5, 1791).
All of Hamilton’s proposals became bases of policy, except the Report on Manufacturing, which was shelved by Congress. It was nevertheless important historically because it presented a clear vision of the dynamic industrial economy that would one day develop in America. There was significant debate, but as for his other proposals Congress soon passed legislation providing for the assumption of the states’ debts, the funding of the national debt, the creation of a national bank, the creation of a mint, and an elaborate system of duties, tariffs, and excises. In less than five years, Hamilton had replaced the fragmented and chaotic financial system of the Confederation period with a modern and stable system that gave investors the confidence to invest in government banks. But there was opposition. Jefferson and Madison believed that Hamilton’s plans stretched the meaning of the Constitution, and as leaders of the newly created Republican Party, they defended the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted narrowly to prevent the federal government from becoming too powerful. There was also violent opposition. Farmers in western Pennsylvania, who derived most of their income through the sale of whiskey, rebelled against the excise tax in 1794 hoping to force its repeal. But the government sent a strong military force to the area and put down the so-called Whiskey Rebellion with little bloodshed.
After leaving public office in 1795, Hamilton continued to practice law and remained involved in local, state, and national politics. His outspoken nature and fiery temper often caused him trouble, and finally he was challenged to a duel by Vice President Aaron Burr. Burr wanted to run for governor of New York, but he was challenged by Hamilton, who referred to him as a man not fit for the office. Stung by the insult, Burr demanded satisfaction, and on July 12, 1804, he shot and killed his adversary.
Alexander Hamilton set a precedent as a cabinet member, developing federal programs, writing them up in report form, pushing for their approval by appearing in person to defend them on the floor of Congress, and then implementing them. His interpretation of the Constitution, especially of the “necessary and proper clause,” laid the foundation for the later growth of a strong and activist federal government.
Alexander Hamilton, portrait by John Trumbull.
See also: American System (American School of Economics); Bank of the United States; Democratic Party; United States.
—Kenneth E. Hendrickson Jr.
Further Reading
Brookhiser, Richard. Alexander Hamilton: American. New York: Free Press, 1999.
Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.
Ellis, Joseph J. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. New York: A. Knopf, 2002.
Fleming, Thomas. Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Flexner, James. T. The Young Hamilton: A Biography. New York: Fordham University Press, 1999.
Hammond, John Lawrence Le Breton (1872–1949)
An historian and journalist, he was born on July 18, 1872, at Drighlington, Yorkshire, England, the second of the eight children of Vavasour Fitz Hammond Hammond, the local rector, and his wife, Caroline (née Webb). Growing up in the village of Drighlington, close to both Bradford and Leeds, John grew up in a household where his father was a supporter of the British prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. Educated at Bradford Grammar School, he proceeded to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he was known for his radical views. Elected secretary of the Oxford Union in November 1894, he worked for Sir John Brunner, the Liberal member of parliament for Cheshire. He started writing, and in 1901 he married Lucy Barbara Hammond, the seventh and youngest child of Reverend Edward Henry Bradby, the headmaster of Haileybury College, and who had studied at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
The Hammonds lived in Hampstead, London, and then moved to a farm near Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire. Lawrence Hammond joined the Royal Field Artillery in World War I. However, he soon left, and with his wife, the couple continued writing. In 1911 they had written The Village Labourer, and this was followed by The Town Labourer (1917), then The Skilled Labourer (1919). They wrote a biography, Lord Shaftesbury (1923), and then The Rise of Modern Industry (1925). The three books on laborers and their other books soon became some of the best-known works on English rural history and the period of the Industrial Revolution. Lawrence Hammond also wrote for the Manchester Guardian. He died on April 7, 1949, and his wife died on November 16, 1961.
—Justin Corfield
John Hammond’s book, The Town Labourer, published by the Left Book Club.
Further Reading
Clarke, P. Liberals and Social Democrats. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Weaver, Stewart A. The Hammonds: A Marriage in History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
———. “Hammond, (John) Lawrence Le Breton (1872–1949).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Han-Yeh-Ping Iron and Coal Company
The Han-Yeh-Ping Iron and Coal Company was located in the city of Daye (Ta-yeh), in Hubei province, in east-central China, and in two nearby centers, taking its name from Hankoy, Ta-yeh (the Wade-Giles rendering of Daye), and Pingxiang (then Pinghsiang). Situated on the south bank of the Yangzi River and about fifty-five miles (ninety kilometers) southeast of Wuhan, the provincial capital, there was a plentiful supply locally of iron, copper, and coal at Daye. As a result, there had been a government smelter there since at least the eighth century, during the Tang dynasty. In 1974 archaeologists excavated the site of a mine and copper smelter that might be even older, possibly dating back as far as the Zhou dynasty (1122–255 BCE) and the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). The production of iron and copper during the Ten Kingdoms period and the Nan (Southern) Tang period that followed led to the settlement becoming known colloquially as the “Great Smelter.”
Following the Self-Strengthening Movement of Li Hongzhang, which operated in China from 1861 until 1895, during which government sponsorship of industries was established in China that were run by Chinese, the decision was taken to expand the iron and copper production at Daye. A factory was built at Hankou to help in the production of steel rails, which would be needed for the railroad that was being planned to link Beijing and Hankou. Iron ore from the mines at Daye was taken to Hankou for smelting.
The work on the plant at Daye was started in 1890 by the Viceroy Chang Chihtung, and the work there lasted for three years. During that time two blast furnaces were installed, each capable of an output of fifty tons per day, and there were also twenty puddling furnaces each with two steam hammers, two five-ton Bessemer converters, a twelve-ton Siemens-Martin furnace, a rail mill, a bar mill, a plate mill, and also a firebrick factory together with a mechanical workshop.
This business was initially run by the government, but it lacked the right machinery and faced considerable management and government intransigence, with long delays in decision making. They also had a problem sourcing coke for the blast furnaces. As a result, the company floundered, and in 1895 the Chinese government decided to sell it to local capitalists and investors, and Sheng Kung-pao, the then head of the China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Company, took over as the leading shareholder. Sheng Kung-pao immediately sought to purchase a coal mine, and initially he considered the one at Magan Shan but rejected it as the coal had too much sulfur in it. He then turned his attention to the Pingxiang coalfield, which had just been discovered.
To help structure the new works properly, V. K. Lee, the director of the Hanyang Works, went to the United States and Britain to study how iron and steel works operated there. He took with him Thomas Bunt, the president of the Shanghai Society of Engineers, as his technical adviser, and also Gustav Leinung, who was the chief engineer of the colliery at Pingxiang. On their return they decided that major changes would need to be made and that the plant would have to be enlarged.
In 1908, to help integrate the various operations in the region, the Hanyang Ironworks at Hankou, the iron ore mines at Daye, and the coal mines at nearby Pingxiang in Jiangxi province were all merged together into the Han-Yeh-Ping Iron and Coal Company, the name incorporating the location of the three arms of the business.
However, the business did not fare much better. The upheavals in China surrounding the Chinese Revolution of 1911 to 1912—which started in nearby Hankou—led to the company being sold in 1913 to its Japanese creditors. The Japanese planned to expand it themselves, but because of World War I, they were unable to source the machinery from Europe or from North America. This presented them with serious problems, but they kept on some of the old management, with Sun Pao-chi as the chairman and Li Ching Fong as the vice chairman. V. K. Lee remained with the company as general superintendent, and as a result much of the work there went into abeyance. In 1922 it had capital stock of $50 million.
Gradually the Japanese started to take over mines elsewhere in China, and their steel plants and mines in Manchuria started to undercut the prices of competitors in China. As a result, industry at Daye and Hankou started to decline, although the Japanese did start production there again during the period from 1939 until 1945, when they were anxious for pig iron for their war effort. After the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, the new government of the People’s Republic of China enlarged the facilities at Wuhan, and these became major producers of iron and steel in 1957, taking over from the production at Daye.
See also: Capitalism; Factory System; Great Leap Forward; Imperialism.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Cheng, Ming-ju. The Influence of Communications, Internal and External, upon the Economic Future of China. London: G. Routledge & Sons Ltd., 1930.
Feldwick, W., and W. H. Morton Cameron. Present Day Impressions of the Far East and Prominent and Progressive Chinese at Home and Abroad. London: The Globe Encyclopedia Company, 1917.
High, Stanley. China’s Place in the Sun. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922.
Remer, C. F. Readings in Economics for China, Selected Materials with Explanatory Introductions. New York: Garland Publishing, 1980.
Hardie, James Keir (1856–1915)
A British labor leader and politician, he organized the Independent Labour Party in 1893, and in 1906 he became the first leader of the Labour Party in Parliament.
Keir Hardie was born in Scotland and went to work in the mines in 1866 at the age of ten. As he grew older he became involved in the labor movement; he led strikes and helped form unions. Eventually (1886), he became secretary of the Scottish Miners Federation and chairman of the Scottish Labour Party (1889). He also founded and edited a newspaper, The Labour Leader, in 1889.
Meanwhile, in Great Britain, a new phase of socialist thought had emerged. It went by the name of guild socialism, and it was originated by members of the Fabian Society, founded in London in 1883 to 1884. Fabians believed in evolutionary socialism rather than revolution, and they used public meetings and lectures, research, and publications to educate the public. Important early members included George Bernard Shaw and Sydney and Beatrice Webb.
Influenced by the Fabian ideology, Hardie went into politics and was elected to Parliament in 1892 as an independent labor candidate. The next year, Hardie and his followers founded the Independent Labour Party, through which they hoped to bring the socialist message to the people in a way they could understand. The aim of the Independent Labour Party was the collective ownership and control of the means of production, to be achieved through parliamentary action, social reform, the pressure of labor, and democracy in local and central government. Its platform was very sympathetic toward unions, and in its active work among unions its speakers usually avoided mention of revolution, class warfare, and Marxist concepts in general. Their approach was to emphasize ethical, nonconformist, and democratic points of view, which appealed to British workingmen.
J. Ramsey MacDonald soon joined the Independent Labour Party, and during the remainder of the 1890s the party devoted its chief efforts to winning the trade unions for independent political action. They had some success, and in 1899 the Trades Union Congress passed a resolution calling upon all working-class organizations to send delegates to a meeting where ways and means would be devised to secure more representatives of labor in Parliament. This resolution laid the foundation for the creation of the British Labour Party.
Pursuant to this resolution, a committee was formed consisting of four members: a liberal, a radical and Fabian, a social democrat, and a socialist. Two members were also selected from the Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Fabian Society. They were: J. Ramsay MacDonald, Harvey Quelch, H. R. Taylor, George Bernard Shaw, E. R. Pease, and Hardie.
The committee decided to call a conference to decide what to do next, and this conference met in London in February 1900 with 120 delegates present, representing over five hundred thousand workers belonging to trade unions and socialist organizations. The conference appointed a Labour Representation Committee of seven trade unionists, two members of the Independent Labour Party, two of the Fabian Society, and two of the Social Democratic Federation. The committee set to work at once to enlist the support of trade unionists, and in September 1900 they placed fifteen candidates in the field for the general election. Two of these candidates, Hardie and one other, were successful.
Interest in the work of the committee then increased, largely due to the Taff Vale decision that allowed the courts to force unions to pay for damages caused by strikers during labor disputes. Subsequently, two large fines were levied upon the Railway Workers Union and the South Wales Miners, which further excited the unrest of the ranks of labor who feared that union treasuries could be wiped out if such a precedent continued to be followed.
The next general election came in 1905, and the Labor Representation Committee placed fifty candidates in the field. Of these, twenty-five were elected. At that time the Miner’s Federation was the only large union not affiliated with the Committee. When it came in a few years later, labor forces in Parliament increased to forty. By that time, the Committee had come to be known as the British Labour Party.
Hardie’s last major effort was to join with those socialists who undertook a failed attempt to persuade their colleagues in the belligerent nations to oppose the war that broke out in the summer of 1914. He died in 1915.
James Keir Hardie is still remembered as a founding member of the British Labour Party, which remains a vital part of the British political system today (2008). Twelve years after its founding, in 1918, it became a socialist party with a democratic constitution, and by 1922 it had supplanted the Liberal Party as the official opposition party (the Conservative Party was in power). In 1924 J. Ramsay MacDonald formed the first Labour government with Liberal support. The party was out of power from 1935 to 1945 when a spectacular recovery brought in Clement Attlee’s government, which ruled until 1951. Between 1945 and 1951, Labour introduced a system of social welfare that included a national health service and extensive nationalization of industry. Labour regained power under Harold Wilson (1964–1970) and again in 1974 to 1979, but it foundered due to economic problems and declining relations with its trade union allies. In 1983, Michael Foot, a left-wing socialist, proposed such a radical program that Labour suffered a massive defeat. Foot was then replaced as party leader by Neil Kinnock, who sought to move the party back to the center. He succeeded, but it was not until 1997 that Tony Blair and his “New Labour” agenda brought Labor back to power.
Keir Hardie
See also: General Strike of 1926; Boer War, 1899–1902; Capitalism; Collective Bargaining; Marx, Karl; Toynbee, Arnold; Trades Union Congress; Women’s Industrial Council (Britain).
—Kenneth E. Hendrickson Jr.
Further Reading
Brand, C. F. British Labour’s Rise to Power. London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1941.
Cole, G. D. H. Economic Planning. New York: Knopf, 1935.
Hardie, James Keir. From Serfdom to Socialism. London: G. Allen, 1907.
Laidler, Harry W. British Cooperative Movement. New York: Co-operative League of America, 1917.
Lee, H. W., and Edward Archibald. Social Democracy in Britain: Fifty Years of the Socialist Movement. London: Social-Democratic Federation, 1938.
MacDonald, J. Ramsay. Socialism, Critical and Constructive. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1924.
McHenry, D. E. The Labour Party in Transition, 1931–1938. London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1938.
Shaw, George Bernard. The Socialism of Shaw. New York: Vanguard Press, 1927.
Webb, Sydney, and Beatrice Webb. The Constitution of a Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain. New York: Longmans, 1920.
James Hargreaves is one of the most prominent names of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. He is credited with the invention of the spinning jenny, one of the first textile machines that greatly speeded the production of cotton cloth by simultaneously spinning eight threads. Little is known of Hargreaves as a person. He was born in Oswaldtwistle, England, in 1720. He received no formal education and was never taught how to read or write. He worked first as a carpenter and then as a handloom weaver near Blackburn; he had a strong interest in engineering. In the eighteenth century, the Lancashire textile workers enjoyed a degree of independence and control of their time, and the more intelligent among them sought to increase their freedom by improving their simple machinery. Hargreaves contributed to this progress by introducing improved methods of carding cotton by hand. Carding is the process of disentangling the fibers in the mass of raw cotton and laying them side by side in a filmy roll. Around 1762 Robert Peel (1750–1830), cotton manufacturer and pioneer of calico printing, sought his assistance in constructing a carding engine with cylinders that may have originated with Daniel Bourn, but this was not successful. In 1764, inspired by seeing a spinning wheel that continued to revolve after it had been knocked over accidentally, Hargreaves invented his spinning jenny.
In fact, at the time Hargreaves invented his jenny, the demand for yarn was beginning to outstrip the supply for at least two reasons. Since the 1750s, John Kay’s flying shuttle had doubled the weavers’ output and made them dependent on several spinners. Moreover, there was a considerable increase in British exports after 1760. The first jennies had horizontal wheels and could spin eight threads at once. To spin on this machine required a great deal of skill. A length of roving was passed through the clamp or clove. The left hand was used to close this and draw the roving away from the spindles, which were rotated by the spinner turning the horizontal wheel with the right hand. The spindles twisted the fibers as they were being drawn out. At the end of the draw, the spindles continued to be rotated until sufficient twist had been put into the fibers to make the finished yarn. A piecer was needed to rejoin the yarns when they broke. The thread that the machine produced was coarse and lacked strength, making it suitable only for the filling of weft, the threads woven across the warp.
The early history of the jenny is obscure. At first Hargreaves’s jenny was worked only by his family, but then he sold two or three of them, possibly to Robert Peel, who took a close interest in its construction. Hargreaves did not apply for a patent for his spinning machine until 1770, and therefore others copied his ideas without paying him any money. Hargreaves encountered other difficulties. His first spinning jenny was dismantled in 1767 by spinners fearing the possibility of cheaper competition; two years later more of his machines were destroyed. In 1776, the West Country experienced widespread popular sabotage of almost every form of machinery associated with the woolen industry. Three years later, a mob around Blackburn demolished every carding engine and all the jennies that used more than twenty-four spindles, as well as other machines using water or horse power. The local oppositions and labor riots in which Hargreaves’s house was gutted forced him to flee to Nottingham, which offered a favorable environment for innovation. The introduction of the jenny in the late 1760s occurred when wages were low and food was scarce, so workers attacked the labor-saving device. In more stable times, the jenny might have been accepted.
In Nottingham, Hargreaves entered into partnership with Thomas James and established a cotton mill in Hockley. It is not obvious why the jenny, which was worked by manual power, should have been housed in a factory. James almost certainly wanted to keep Hargreaves’s invention a secret as long as possible. In 1770 he followed the example of Richard Arkwright and sought to patent his machine, bringing a legal action for infringement against some Lancashire manufacturers, who offered £3,000 in settlement. Hargreaves held out for £4,000, but he was unable to enforce his patent because he had sold jennies before leaving Lancashire. Arkwright’s “water twist” was more suitable for the Nottingham hosiery industry trade than jenny yarn, and in 1777 Hargreaves replaced his own machines with Arkwright’s. When he died on April 22, 1778, he is said to have left property valued at £7,000. His widow received £400 for her share in the business. Once the jenny had been made public, it was quickly improved by other inventors, and the number of spindles per machine increased. In 1784, there were reputed to be twenty thousand jennies of eighty spindles each at work in Great Britain. The jenny greatly eased the shortage of cotton weft for weavers. Though the Hargreaves jenny was restricted by its design to a small number of spindles, it nevertheless enabled the cotton industry to begin a great, new advance that become one of the major sectors of the Industrial Revolution.
See also: Factory System; France; Jacquard, Joseph Marie; Luddites and Ned Lud; Spinning Mule; Textile Industry.
—François Jarrige
Further Reading
Horn, Jeff. The Industrial Revolution. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007.
Timmins, Geoffrey. Made in Lancashire: A History of Regional Industrialization. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.
Weightman, Gavin. The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Creation of the Modern World (1776–1914). London: Atlantic, 2007.
Harrison, Frederic (1831–1923)
A British jurist and historian, and leading thinker of Positivism, Frederic Harrison was born on October 18, 1831, in London. His family was originally from Leicestershire, where they had been yeoman farmers for many generations. His father was Frederick [sic] Harrison, a prosperous merchant, and his mother was Jane (née Brice), originally from Belfast, Ireland. Frederic Harrison was educated at King’s College School, London, from 1842 until 1849, and after a brilliant academic career there, he won a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford University. Harrison graduated from Oxford with a second class in the first examination held for classical honor moderations, and he gained a first class in literature and humanities with a fourth class in law and history. He was then called to the bar by Lincoln’s Inn in 1858, working as a barrister for fifteen years, most of the time spent fairly aimlessly. He married Ethel Berta Harrison in 1870, and they had four sons: Bernard O., Austin F., Godfrey Denis, and Christopher René. As boys, one of their tutors was George Gissing, the novelist, who became a family friend; the two younger sons went to Clifton College. By 1880 they were living at 38 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, with a housemaid, a lady’s maid, a cook, a nurse, an under housemaid, and a sixteen-year-old footman.
As a barrister, Harrison initially concentrated on equity cases. However, he wanted to become an academic, and he wrote on several historical topics. Two of his articles in the journal Westminster Review were very well received. One, about Italy, was read by the Italian politician Count Cavour, who wrote to Harrison to commend him on the thoughts. The other was sharply critical of a book that had just been published. Some years later, Harrison worked with Lord Westbury on the codification of the law. Particularly interested in the role of the working class, he was a member of the Trades Union Commission of 1867 to 1869 and was secretary to the Commission for the Digest of the Law in 1869 to 1870. From 1877 until 1889 he was professor of Jurisprudence and International Law under the Council of Legal Education, and in 1877 he was in France as a special correspondent for The Times during the constitutional crisis that led to the fall of Marshal MacMahon, the first president of the French Third Republic.
Becoming increasingly radical in his politics, Harrison contested the parliamentary seat for the University of London in 1886, and he was defeated by Sir John Lubbock. Three years later he was elected as an alderman of the London County Council, becoming acknowledged as a Progressive in municipal matters.
Essentially, Positivism for Harrison encapsulated the use of strict scientific method as the basis for theories, tracing its origins to the early nineteenth-century philosopher Auguste Comte. Harrison soon became a follower of the positive philosophy that was being promoted by Richard Congreve. However, it was not long before he was in conflict with Congreve himself, and Harrison led the Positivists, who split from the mainstream movement and in 1881 founded Newton Hall, Fetter Lane, London, where supporters of Harrison started meeting on a regular basis. Harrison became president of the English Positivist Committee in 1880, holding that position until 1905. The system of strong social ethics made Positivism popular as a philosophical concept, but many of those interested in it would not go as far as viewing it as a full-fledged religion, which some of its ardent advocates felt that it was.
In 1888 he completed a biography of Cromwell, and in 1892 he was the editor of the Positivist New Calendar of Great Men. His works, The Choice of Books (1886) and Early Victorian Literature (1896) were both well received, as was his biography of the Dutch ruler William the Silent that followed in 1897. In 1900 he wrote Byzantine History in the Early Middle Ages, followed by two more biographies: Ruskin (1902) and Chatham (1905). As was the custom of the period, he also wrote a “romantic monograph,” Theophano (1904), followed by a tragedy in verse, Nicephorus (1906). His last books included Autobiographic Memoirs (1911), The Positive Evolution of Religion (1912), The German Peril (1915), On Society (1918), Jurisprudence and Conflict of Nations (1919), Obiter Scripta (1919), and Novissima Verba (1920). He was also the Rede lecturer at Cambridge University in 1900, the Washington lecturer at the University of Chicago in 1901, and the Herbert Spencer lecturer at Oxford University in 1905. He was also vice president of the Royal Historical Society, and he received honorary degrees from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Aberdeen. In 1899 Wadham College, Oxford, made him an honorary fellow.
In May 1915, Frederic Harrison’s youngest son, Christopher René Harrison, died of wounds on the Western Front. He had trained as an architect, practicing in England and then in Argentina, before returning to England to enlist as lieutenant in the Leicestershire Regiment. Frederic Harrison had moved to the city of Bath, in the west of England, in 1912, and he became a local celebrity, conferred with the honorary freedom of the city in November 1921. He died on January 14, 1923, survived by his widow and his other three sons.
Frederic Harrison
See also: Marxism; Socialism.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Harrison, Austin. Frederic Harrison: Thoughts and Memories. London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927.
Sullivan, Harry R. Frederic Harrison. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1983.
Vogeler, Martha S. Frederic Harrison: The Vocations of a Positivist. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
These experiments were detailed by a group of experts who studied the Hawthorne Works located on the outskirts of Chicago. A manufacturing plant of the Western Electric Company, the Hawthorne Works had been established in Cicero, Illinois, in 1905. The studies that were carried out there from 1924 until 1932 were done to see how it was possible to make workers more productive. This was especially in terms of whether they became increasingly productive in response to changes in a number of variables. The overall aim was to see how large companies could increase productivity easily.
The work involved industrial and occupational psychologists and also people studying organizational behavior under instructions from Elton Mayo and others. Initially they concentrated on the positions of two women who worked on a conveyor belt, later expanding their study to include four others. The suggestions to increase productivity included changes in pay. This did not include an increase in pay rates but with the pay for the group based on their overall production, rather than on individual production rates.
Another issue involved the provision of work breaks. When the women were given six five-minute breaks, the overall output was reduced as the women had to get back into the routine of work after each break in their working cycle. It was found that two five-minute breaks worked better than two ten-minute breaks. It was also found that if food was available or provided during the break, there was an increase in productivity.
The next issue was over the overall length of the working day. The study was able to show that when the working day was reduced by thirty minutes, overall production actually increased. However, when it was shortened more than thirty minutes, although the output per hour increased, the overall output decreased. Thus they recommended that the hours be cut to an eight-hour day, as any longer was counterproductive.
Other factors studied involved the effects of the lighting conditions, the organizational structure, the degree to which they were supervised and consulted, and other general working conditions. Essentially, it did show that the more care taken to individual employees, the better their performance, and that ill treatment of employees was counterproductive from an economic, as well as a moral, point of view.
The overall conclusions that Mayo drew from the studies covered three basic areas. The first was that the aptitude of individuals when measured by industrial psychologists were not able to predict accurately performance in the workplace. The results that the industrial psychologists were able to calculate was essentially the potential of the employee, whereas their actual productivity was dictated by many other factors.
The second conclusion was that the major effect on productivity was the informal organizational atmosphere within the factory. Previous studies of the workforce showed that workers were either dealt with as a collective mass or as isolated individuals, both operating within a formal chart that highlighted the hierarchical positions and responsibilities that formed the management structure of the company in question. The work in Hawthorne demonstrated that the individual behavior of the supervisors and foremen and how they managed to develop a rapport with the workers was the most important factor into whether employees did carry out their work, and how efficiently they went about it. A bad supervisor, or one who did not treat employees individually, led to a major fall in the output of all the workers under them regardless of the threats that they were able to use.
The Hawthorne researchers believed that the major factor that influenced productivity was the norms of the work group, with most people regarding that workers felt that they came to accept that there would be a norm for “a fair day’s work.” As a result, people working in production tended to structure their work at what they felt were the normal levels expected. As a result, even if workers were able to produce more and even if they were financially rewarded for more, the level of output did not increase for any sustained period. Although this had long been suspected, the researchers at Hawthorne were the first to be able to tabulate it systematically.
The overall conclusion of the Hawthorne researchers was that the workplace is a microcosm of a social system. Made up from a number of independent parts, human behavior tends to be able to be altered for short periods of time by some factors but will often return to a normal level that is, in turn, dictated by how the workers are treated and respected.
See also: Industrial and Organization Psychology.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Adair, John G. “The Hawthorne Effect: A Reconsideration of the Methodological Artifact.” Journal of Applied Psychology 69, no. 2 (1984): 334–45.
Gillespie, Richard. Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Jones, Stephen R. G. “Was There a Hawthorne Effect?” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 3 (November 1992): 451–68.
Landsberger, Henry A. Hawthorne Revisited. Ithaca: New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, 1968.
Mayo, Elton. Hawthorne and the Western Electric Company: The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization. London: Routledge, 1949.
Roethlisberger, Fritz J., and W. J. Dickson. Management and the Worker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939.
Trahair, Richard C. S. The Humanist Temper: The Life and Work of Elton Mayo. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2005.
On May 4, 1886, a riot occurred near Haymarket Square in Chicago between workers and the city’s police. Someone threw a bomb, killing seven policemen and an indeterminate number of civilians in the blast and the ensuing shooting. The incident climaxed the class tension that had been building between labor and business in the city. Conflict surged around demands for an eight-hour day—the main goal of the American labor movement in the late nineteenth century—and underscored ethnic tensions since many of the laborers were immigrants of German and East-European origin. The ensuing outrage over the riot and the death of the policemen effectively killed the burgeoning anarchist/socialist movement and set back union and labor efforts across the United States.
The meeting in the Haymarket in the evening of May 4 was in response to a confrontation between police and striking workers the evening before at McCormick Reaper Works, during which the police had opened fire. The Haymarket meeting was reportedly peaceable. However, as the last speaker was winding down around 10:20 p.m., a column of armed policemen approached the group of several hundred listeners. The police ordered the meeting to disperse. Eyewitness accounts differ as to what exactly happened next, but a dynamite bomb landed at the front line of the police. After the bomb detonated, gunfire erupted mainly from the police, who in their confusion shot even at each other. Chaos ensued as people fled for their lives. The next day found a city terrified of a violent anarchist conspiracy. Chicago became home to the nation’s first major Red Scare as newspapers demanded vengeance for the policemen’s deaths. A flurry of arrests of prominent anarchist and socialist speakers and leaders followed. For the next several months, city authorities squelched civil liberties such as free speech and freedom of the press in the name of public safety. Union activity came to a halt as striking workers found themselves blamed in part for the bombing. The eight-hour movement declined, and many workers returned to their jobs defeated.
Although no one was certain who threw the bomb, eight men—Samuel Fielden, George Engel, Michael Schwab, Adolph Fischer, Louis Lingg, Oscar Neebe, August Spies, and Albert Parsons—were arrested and tried for murder. These men had all endorsed violence at one time or another. The prosecution, headed by Julius Grinnell, argued that they were part of an anarchist conspiracy to commit murder and were as guilty as the actual bomb thrower. Citizens throughout the city and the nation condemned the defendants even before they went on trial and demanded the death penalty. The jury was stacked with businessmen, who all admitted that they were biased, but Judge Joseph Gary insisted that the trial was fair. Evidence neither specifically linked any of the defendants to the throwing of the bomb nor to any conspiracy, but all eight were nevertheless found guilty on August 20, 1886. Seven were sentenced to death, and Neebe was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Six months after the verdict, the defense lost its appeal at the Illinois State Supreme Court. Anarchist and radical labor politics in Chicago and Illinois collapsed.
In October 1887, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the appeal, with defense lawyers arguing that the prosecution had violated the defendants’ constitutional rights. However, in early November, the Supreme Court ruled that it did not have jurisdiction over this case, since constitutional violations were only relevant in federal cases. The final option to save the defendants’ lives was for Illinois governor Richard James Oglesby to commute their sentence. Pleas and petitions from all over the world were delivered to the Oglesby’s office. On November 10, Lingg committed suicide in his prison cell by exploding a dynamite cap in his mouth. That afternoon, Governor Oglesby commuted the sentences of Fielden and Schwab to life imprisonment. He upheld the death sentences of the other four, and on November 11, 1887, Spies, Fischer, Engel, and Parsons were hanged. They became martyrs to countless thousands of workers throughout the world. After a massive public funeral, the men were buried on November 13. Their deaths profoundly affected many, including Emma Goldman and Mother Jones, both of whom became labor activists themselves. In addition, the Haymarket incident eventually fused with the celebration of May Day as International Workers’ Day in 1890, as the eight-hour workday movement regained popularity. In June 1893, a monument was placed on the graves of the martyrs, and thousands traveled from the World’s Fair in Chicago to see it. That same month, Illinois’s new governor, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned Neebe, Fielden, and Schwab.
However, labor issues in Chicago were not easily resolved. The Haymarket Affair remained prominent in the popular memory, revived during the Red Scares after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 and as the United States entered World War I in 1919 to 1920. In addition, activists invoked the Haymarket memory during the crisis surrounding the trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927 and during violent labor struggles in Chicago in the 1930s. In 1969 and 1970, the militant Weathermen faction of the Students for a Democratic Society attacked a monument to the police officers killed during the riot. City officials moved it to an area closed to the public. In 2004, the city dedicated a new monument that better reflected both sides of the issues that clashed on that May evening in 1886.
An attack on a police wagon near McCormick’s Reaper Works.
See also: Communism; Socialism.
—Sarah McHone-Chase
Further Reading
Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
David, Henry. The History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American Social-Revolutionary and Labor Movements. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1936.
Green, James. Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America. New York: Pantheon, 2006.
Roediger, Dave, and Franklin Rosemont, eds. Haymarket Scrapbook. Chicago: Kerr, 1986.
Werstein, Irving. Strangled Voices: The Story of the Haymarket Affair. New York: Macmillan, 1970.
Haywood, William Dudley “Big Bill” (1869–1928)
William D. “Big Bill” Haywood was one of the most radical and successful American labor leaders and enemies of capitalism in the early twentieth century. Physically imposing with a thunderous voice and total disrespect for the law, he mobilized unionists, intimidated company bosses, and often found himself facing prosecution. From 1908 to 1918 he led the Industrial Workers of the World, one of the nation’s most militant unions.
Haywood was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on February 4, 1869, and began work as a miner at the age of nine. He was deeply impressed by the Haymarket Affair followed by the trials and executions of 1886 and 1887, and he said later that these events inspired him to a life of radicalism. The Pullman strike of 1894 further strengthened his interest in the labor movement, and in 1896, while he was working in a silver mine in Idaho, Haywood listened to a speech by Ed Boyce, president of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). He immediately joined the union, and by 1900 he had risen to a position on the executive board. In 1901, he joined the newly formed Socialist Party of America.
When Boyce retired in 1902, he recommended that Haywood and Charles Moyer assume joint leadership of the union. This proved to be a difficult arrangement because Moyer was cautious by nature, favoring negotiations over strikes and violence. Haywood, on the other hand, had no compunctions and was a master at rallying working-class audiences. The campaign for an eight-hour day became one of his principal causes, and he was willing to do anything in order to force mine owners to an agreement.
Beginning in 1902, the WFM, the mine owners, and the Colorado government became locked in a long struggle known as the Colorado Labor Wars. This violent series of events took thirty-three lives. In one single incident at the Independence, Colorado, train depot on June 4, 1904, thirteen nonunion workers were killed by an explosion as they waited for a train. Haywood was the main suspect, and a virtual open season on unionists began. When former Colorado governor Frank F. Steunenberg was assassinated in 1906, Haywood was arrested and charged with the murder. While awaiting trial in the Boise, Idaho, jail, he busied himself reading. Among his favorite selections were such diverse works as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution. From his jail cell he ran for governor of Colorado on the Socialist ticket, designed new WFM posters, and took a correspondence course in law. When the jury found him not guilty in May 1906, Haywood hugged his supporters and shook hands with each juror.
Meanwhile, Haywood had played a major role in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World. At a convention in Chicago in 1905, Haywood, along with Eugene V. Debs, leader of the Socialist Party, and Daniel De Leon, founder of the radical Socialist Labor Party, and some of the more radically inclined members of the Western Federation of Miners, dominated the proceedings and brought forth the IWW declaring that the universal economic evils affecting the working class could be eradicated only by a universal working-class movement. They envisioned their creation as “one great industrial union” embracing all industries and founded on the premise of class struggle recognizing the irrepressible conflict between the capitalist class and the working class. They advocated direct action as a means to victory, by which they meant the use of such tactics as the general strike, boycott, and sabotage.
In 1908, after Moyer ousted Haywood from his executive position with the WFM, he turned his full attention to the Industrial Workers of the World, and by 1915 he had become the leader of that organization. The IWW appealed to the great class of unorganized, unskilled workers, especially certain groups of Eastern factory workers, such as those in the textile mills of the East and the migratory workers of the West. From 1909 to 1917 it was a very aggressive organization and led a number of major strikes. Strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts (1912), and Paterson, New Jersey (1912), attracted national attention. In Lawrence, when strikers sent their children, ill clad and hungry, out into the streets, the “Wobblies,” as the IWW people were known, found them places to stay. During the Paterson strike they rented New York City’s Madison Square Garden for a massive labor pageant. Haywood and his colleagues believed that local strikes such as these would bring about capitalist repression that in turn would lead to a general strike and eventually a workers’ commonwealth.
The methods and the revolutionary language of the IWW aroused the hostility of the public and inclined it to condone the extralegal methods used by communities to rid themselves of this group. Then, the opposition of the IWW to the war brought them into direct conflict with the government, which further curtailed their operations. In 1918, during World War I, Haywood was convicted of violating the federal espionage and sedition acts by calling a strike in wartime. After serving a year in prison, he jumped bail while awaiting an appeal and fled to Moscow, where he became a trusted adviser to the new Bolshevik regime. He died in Moscow on May 18, 1928, and his body was cremated. Half his ashes were entombed in the Kremlin near his friend John Reed, and the other half went to Chicago to be buried near the monument to the Haymarket anarchists who had inspired his life of radicalism.
Soon after the end of World War I the Socialist Party went into swift decline, as did the IWW. In fact, the labor movement as a whole, including such organizations as the American Federation of Labor, was severely weakened during the conservative era of the 1920s and did not recover and begin to flourish again until the New Deal period of the 1930s.
See also: Factory System; Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich; Capitalism; Child Labor; Corporation and Incorporation; Debs, Eugene “Gene” V.; Depression of 1893; Lawrence Textile Strike; Lowell Mills; Paterson Silk Strike of 1913; Pullman, George Mortimer; Sweatshop.
—Kenneth E. Hendrickson Jr.
Brissenden, Paul F. The IWW: A Study in American Syndicalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1920.
Carlson, Peter. Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983.
Conlin, Joseph R. Big Bill Haywood and the Radical Union Movement. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1969.
Dubofsky, Melvyn. We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Flank, Lenny. I.W.W., A Documentary History. St. Petersburg: Red and Black Publishers, 2007.
A British inventor who designed a machine that massively hastened the making of lace, John Heathcoat was born on August 7, 1783, at Duffield, near Derby, in the English Midlands. He was the son of Francis Heathcote [sic], a farmer who lived at Long Whatton, Leicestershire, and his wife, Elizabeth (née Burton). After finishing his schooling locally, as a teenager John Heathcoat was first apprenticed to a hosiery manufacturer named Swift. However, the relationship did not work out well, and the indentures were cancelled. He was quickly apprenticed to William Shepherd, who lived near Loughborough, and he made ribbed stockings and also worked as a framesmith. It was during this apprenticeship when Heathcoat worked out some improvements that could be made in the making of the warp-loom.
When he finished his apprenticeship, Heathcoat started working for Leonard Elliott, a framesmith who lived in Broad Street, Nottingham, who was also involved in setting up textile machines in Nottingham. He then saved up enough to buy the business and start work on his own account. He became fascinated by the lace-making machine that had just been invented, and in about 1803 he moved to the nearby village of Hathern, where he had worked as an apprentice for Samuel Caldwell some years earlier. There he wanted to construct his own lace-making machine, which would be able to produce lace much more cheaply and quickly than making it by hand. He analyzed that some of the thread went in longitudinally and others were threaded diagonally. He decided to incorporate some of the design on the weaving loom using the longitudinal threads as the warp and the rest for the weft. This led to some problems with the bobbins evenly distributing the thread, but he managed to overcome them, making a mesh. There were a few other difficulties, but through patience, Heathcoat worked out a way of improving on his design. In 1808 he took out Patent no. 3151, known as the “horizontal pillow,” which led to Patent No. 3216 in the following year for the full machine. The machine was acknowledged at the time to be the most complicated machine that had been produced up to that date, and Heathcoat was only aged twenty-four.
In 1805 Heathcoat had moved to Loughborough, where he had started work on improving the machine he eventually patented. For that reason it is often known as “Old Loughborough,” although it is often called the “bobbin-net machine.” After getting his first patent, Heathcoat entered into a partnership with Charles Lacy, a point-net maker from Nottingham. With extra capital this meant that by 1816 the two were running fifty-five frames at the factory at Loughborough, and also making money by allowing other people to use the machines under license. When William Morley, a machine builder, tried to make his own machine, Heathcoat and Lacy took him to court for infringing their patent. They won the case.
On the night of June 28, 1816, Luddites attacked the factory at Loughborough owned by Heathcoat, Lacy, and John Boden, another business partner brought into the operation, destroying all fifty-five frames in use and burning all the lace. The Luddites were protesting the cost of lace falling so dramatically through these new machines. The company then sued the county authorities for damages and was awarded £10,000. However, the magistrates insisted that the money had to be spent in the county of Leicestershire, but Heathcoat refused to rebuild the factory in Loughborough, or in fact anywhere else in the county. He was also worried that the Nottingham lace makers would also attack his factory. As a result, the partners turned down the money, dissolving the partnership with Lacy. Heathcoat formed a new partnership with John Boden, and the two bought a mill located at Tiverton, Devonshire, where the power would be provided by water wheels in the River Exe.
The new lace-making frames built at Tiverton were much larger than those at Loughborough, incorporating a few new designs. Heathcoat took out a number of new patents over the forthcoming years to protect the improvements he had made to his machines. He dissolved the partnership with Boden in 1821, and he continued with the factory until he retired from business in 1843. In 1832 he patented, along with Henry Handley, MP, a steam plough that would assist with planned agricultural improvements in Ireland. Unfortunately, it was far too heavy and sank into a muddy field, leaving no trace of it. On December 12, 1832, Heathcoat was elected as Member of the British Parliament for Tiverton, remaining their representative until April 23, 1859. He rarely made a speech in the House of Commons, but he did sit on a number of committees where his advice was often sought. Tiverton had dual representation in the Parliament, and the other Member of Parliament from 1835 until 1859 was Lord Palmerston, prime minister from 1855 until 1858 and again from 1859 until 1865. Palmerston paid tribute to Heathcoat’s sense of propriety, patriotism, and independence of mind.
Heathcoat always felt that it was his duty to return something to the community, and he opened some schools in January 1843. He resigned his seat in Parliament in 1859 because of ill health. He died on January 18, 1861, at Bolham House, Tiverton, and he was buried in the churchyard of St. Peter’s, Tiverton, three days later. He was survived by his widow, Ann Chamberlain, daughter of William Cauldwell of Hathern, Leicestershire, whom he had married on September 6, 1802, at Hathern, and also by their two daughters. Their only son died many years earlier.
See also: Textile Industry.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Felkin, William. History of Machine-Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures. Cambridge: W. Metcalfe, 1867.
Allen, Walter Gore. John Heathcoat and His Heritage. London: Christopher Johnson, 1958.
One of the leading British industrial engineers in the early nineteenth century and a pioneer in the use of locomotives in mining, William Hedley came up with the system of coupling wheels to prevent the locomotive being pushed forward or dragged backward by the weight of the load. He was born on July 13, 1779, at Newburn, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and he went to school at Wylam. When he was twenty-one, he was appointed to work as a “viewer” or manager at Walbottle Colliery, Northumberland, a young age for that position, which shows that the management of the mines had great confidence in him. He then took up the same position at the Wylam Colliery, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne, close to where he had been born. He was also, at the same time, manager of the Blagill lead mine in Alston, Cumberland. From 1808 he had acquired an interest in a shipping company.
The main problem at the Wylam Colliery was taking the coal from the mines to the River Tyne, from where it could be taken on barges. This was very expensive. Hedley closely followed the developments in the locomotives and the railroads. He was greatly influenced by the work of John Blenkinsop who, in 1812, had designed the Salamanca, a twin-cylinder steam train that operated at the Middleton Colliery Railway. However, this had used wheels with teeth that locked into the tracks, making the whole apparatus expensive to make. As a result, he developed the smooth wheel and rail system for which he received a patent on March 13, 1813. He laid smooth rails at Wylam soon afterward.
William Hedley felt that the locomotives were far too heavy for the track that was available. He also studied the designs of William Chapman of the Butterley Company and the locomotive engines devised by Richard Trevithick. Hedley felt that if the wheels were joined in pairs, if one of them slipped, the other would be able to counteract. At that time, the owner of the mine, Christopher Blackett, had just replaced the wooden wagon way with iron-flanged plate rails. Hedley tried his system of having two wheels coupled together on a test carriage hauled by men. This showed that the system would work with various different loads, and Hedley then used the system along with a locomotive constructed to the designs drawn up by Richard Trevithick. This had a single cylinder and a simple straight that connected the fire tube to the boiler. This engine did not work out well, and Hedley diagnosed the problem as being insufficient steam generated by a single cylinder.
As a result of the first experiment, Hedley built a second engine. In this, he was helped by Timothy Hackworth, his foreman, and also Jonathan Foster, his principal engine-wright. This time he used the twin cylinder design of John Blenkinsop and Matthew Murray, and a return attached to the tube boiler. This second locomotive was the famous Puffing Billy, which first operated in 1813 and was the first commercial adhesion steam locomotive. It was used to haul coal chaldron wagons from the Wylam Colliery to the docks at Lemington-on-Tyne. Another engine was constructed soon afterward and became known as Wylam Dilly. Hedley quickly patented his system of coupling the wheels.
The main problem of the design was that when using wheels coupled together there was far more wear to the track. To try to counteract this, the engines were rebuilt with a twin, four-wheeled bogie, and the wheels were made without flanges to use on flanged plate rails. By about 1830 the rails were replaced with stronger-edged rails, and flanged wheels being reintroduced—the design is still being used today.
In 1822 during a strike of keelmen, Hedley’s shipping interests were threatened. He then decided to use his new locomotive engine on a barge, working it with paddles. Steamboats had already been invented by Jonathan Hull, and this project of Hedley’s did not work well. Two years later Hedley took over the Crow Trees Colliery near Durham, and then the colliery at Callerton, near Wylam. In 1828 he moved to Shield Row and rented the South Moor Colliery. At Callerton, he made major improvements to the system of pumping out water from the mines, a system subsequently used by many other mines around the country, although initially it did receive savage criticism in the press.
William Hedley died on January 9, 1843, at Burnhopeside Hall, near Lanchester, Durham, and was buried at Newburn. He was survived by four of his sons, with Thomas leaving much of his fortune to endow the Northumberland bishopric. His descendants remained involved in the coal-mining industry until the mines were nationalized in 1942. A charitable foundation was established in his name in 1971 using money from the nationalization. Puffing Billy, the oldest surviving steam locomotive in the world, is now preserved at the Science Museum in London, with a replica built and run for the first time in 2006 at Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum, near Stanley, Durham. Wylam Dilly, the second oldest surviving steam locomotive, is held at the Royal Museum in Edinburgh.
See also: Railroads.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Archer, Mark. William Hedley: The Inventor of Railroad Locomotion on the Present Principle. London: Crosby Lockwood, 1885.
Brooks, Philip R. B. William Hedley: Locomotive Pioneer. Tyne and Wear Industrial Monuments Trust, 1980.
Hedley, O. D. Who Invented the Locomotive Engine? London: Ward Lock, 1858.
Ransom, P. J. G. The Victorian Railway and How It Evolved. London: Heinemann, 1990.
Heineken, Alfred Henry “Freddy” (1923–2002)
The president of Heineken International, Freddy Heineken was the grandson of Gerard Adriaan Heineken, who established the brewing company in 1864 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Freddy Heineken was able to buy back the company into family hands by taking control of just over half of the shares in the firm. After this, he established the brand around the world.
Born on November 4, 1923, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the son of Henry Pierre and Carla Heineken, Alfred Henry Heineken was always destined to work for the company that his grandfather had started in 1863. The family story is that Gerard Heineken persuaded his mother to invest her money in the company because Gerard claimed that it would result in much less drunkenness as more people would drink beer, and hence fewer people would drink gin. Entering the company Heineken on June 1, 1941, during the German occupation of the country, Freddy was keen on advertising the product, and he did so actively and passionately. Later he commented, “Had I not been a beer brewer, I would have become an advertising man.”
At the end of the war, the Heineken Company had survived. However, Freddy was keen on expanding it, especially to the United States. He had been with his mother, brother, and sister to New York in 1936 when he was twelve, and he recognized its emergence as the major economic power. He flew from Ireland to New York in April 1946, went back to the Netherlands, and flew back in January 1947. Altogether he spent two years in the city, where he went around to many hotels, offering them samples of Heineken. Not only did it allow him to study the advertising campaigns by the Anheuser-Busch company of Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch, it also led to him meeting and marrying Lucille Cummins, an American from Kentucky, who was from a family of bourbon whiskey distillers. They had one daughter, Charlene.
In 1951, Freddy Heineken moved to the company headquarters in Amsterdam, and he started running the advertising department. One of his first changes was to use green as the company color, with its bright red star and the black banner with the Heineken name in white. He later noted, “I don’t sell beer, I sell warmth.” Freddy’s father had been forced to sell the company in 1942, and Freddy always wanted to buy it back. This he managed in 1954 when he bought it by establishing Heineken Holdings, of which he held a majority stake, and he used this to buy 5.005 percent of the shares in Heineken International. As chairman of the board of directors of the company from 1971 until his resignation in 1989, he helped expand the company considerably. Up until then it was largely unknown outside the Netherlands, and he wanted to establish it as a worldwide business concern.
Heineken had already been sold in the United States. Indeed, it claims that it was the first brewer to sell in the United States after the end of Prohibition in 1933. In 1960 it sold a million cases of beer in the United States. However, by 1960 it had raised this to fifty-three million cases. In 1968 Heineken expanded by acquiring its Dutch rival Amstel, and then it bought the Irish company Murphys of Cork, which brewed stout.
Soon Freddy Heineken was one of the richest businessmen in Europe. In 1964 he established the Dr. H. P. Heineken Foundation in honor of his father. It is responsible for awarding cash prizes for pioneering work in the fields of biochemistry and biophysics. He later established a new foundation in his own name for sciences and the arts.
However, in November 1983, Freddy Heineken and his chauffeur, Ab Doderer, were kidnapped and held for ransom for thirty-five million Dutch guilders (U.S. $12 million). For three weeks they were chained in concrete cells before they were freed by the Dutch police, but only after the family had already paid $10 million in ransom payments. It was a traumatic experience for both men, and more so because it was some time before three of the kidnappers were caught and jailed. Eventually, most of the gang members were captured, some having fled overseas.
Freddy Heineken cut back his public appearances, and in 1989 he gave up his official control of the brewing company, but he continued to help from behind the scenes for some years later. It was not until November 2001 that he resigned as the chairman of the holding company. By that time his daughter, Charlene, had taken over the running of the company, and she and her children retain the majority ownership of the shares. Heineken remained the best-selling imported beer in the United States until 1998 when Corona of Mexico outsold it. Freddy Heineken died on January 3, 2002, from pneumonia, at his home in the Dutch port of Noordwijk. His fortune passed to his daughter.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Jacobs, M. G. P. A. and W. H. G. Maas. Heineken History. Amsterdam: Heineken, 1992.
———. The Magic of Heineken History. Amsterdam: Heineken NV, 2002.
Mayle, Peter. Thirsty Work: Ten Years of Heineken Advertising. London: Pan Macmillan, 1983.
Meller, Paul. “Alfred Heineken, 78, Dies; Made Dutch Brewer a Giant.” New York Times, January 5, 1002, B.7.
Henry John Heinz was an entrepreneur who developed new techniques for the production of safe, mass-produced preserved food. He contributed to the development of a new industry, food processing. His company, H. J. Heinz, became one of the largest food processors in the United States. Processed food has transformed the way Americans prepare and consume food in their homes.
Heinz was born on October 11, 1844, in Birmingham, Pennsylvania, the son of German immigrants. He first became involved with food processing as a child growing up in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania, where his father had acquired a brickworks in 1850. Heinz produced homemade bottled horseradish, which he peddled to local homemakers and later grocers in Pittsburgh as well. As a marketing device he sold his product in clear glass bottles since competitors used green glass jars to conceal the fact that they adulterated their product with fillers. In 1869 Heinz founded a company with his neighbor, L. Clarence Noble, to grow and bottle food. One room of a two-story brick house that had been the childhood home of Heinz, but from which the family had at that point moved, served as a combined factory, office, and warehouse. Their first product was bottled horseradish using the preservation method invented by the Frenchman Nicolas Appert. Initially Heinz & Noble expanded quite quickly to produce a range of condiments. The company soon outgrew its Sharpsburg accommodation, and they moved to Pittsburgh in 1872. The company was hit hard by the aftermath of the financial panic of 1873, however, and when credit became increasingly difficult to secure the company went bankrupt in December 1875.
Heinz soon recovered from this setback. His family raised money for him, with his brother, John, and his cousin, Frederick Heinz, founding a new company in 1876: F. & J. Heinz Company. He introduced a variety of new products, including tomato ketchup, red and green pepper sauce, cider vinegar, apple butter, chili sauce, mincemeat, mustard, tomato soup, olives, pickled onions, pickled cauliflower, and the first processed sweet pickles to be sold in the United States. The development of modern canning equipment by Edwin and O. W. Norton in 1883 allowed Heinz to diversify into the production of canned foods and achieve success with various varieties of canned vegetables and fruits. He also spent a considerable amount of time at his factory developing improved canning technology himself. During the 1880s Heinz also first manufactured what was to become an iconic product: Heinz baked beans. In 1888 Heinz brought out the shares of his brother and renamed the company the H. J. Heinz Company.
By the late 1880s the company had outgrown its initial location in Pittsburgh. A new site was acquired in Allegheny City (annexed by Pittsburgh in 1906), and in 1890 work was begun on the construction of a new factory with a floor area in excess of sixteen acres. This allowed him to adopt mass production. Heinz made sure that the factory was designed for the strictest cleanliness. Heinz also adopted an early form of welfare capitalism. He had a large auditorium, gymnasium, dining rooms, an indoor swimming pool, a shower bath, and a library constructed for the benefit of his employees. They received gifts during the holidays and were able to participate in an annual excursion to a site chosen by majority vote.
Heinz reorganized his company as a corporation in 1905. His son, Howard, became his assistant. The company had become one of America’s largest and most profitable businesses. In 1907, in addition to the Pittsburgh factory there were twelve branch factories, twenty-eight branch warehouses, and sixty-seven salting stations, and it employed four thousand people. The company also cultivated twenty thousand acres of land, and it required the assistance of over forty thousand people to harvest the crops. Heinz manufactured over two hundred products, considerably more than the famous “57 varieties” he had adopted as his company’s slogan in 1896.
One of most serious challenges facing Heinz in the early twentieth century was the use of chemical adulterants by his competitors. The introduction of federal regulation of the production, labeling, and sale of processed and preserved foods was a major reform of American Progressivism. Heinz was a staunch supporter of the elimination of the abuses in the food-processing industry revealed by the writer Upton Sinclair in The Jungle (1906) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s chief chemist, Harvey Wiley. In 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act was enacted, although it was less strict than Wiley and Heinz had advocated. Nonetheless, the legislation had the beneficial effect of outlawing the practices of many of Heinz’s competitors who had sacrificed quality to gain competitive advantage through lower-cost products.
Heinz died on May 14, 1919, and he was succeeded by his son, Howard. Howard Heinz continued his father’s strategy of expanding the company through internal growth. During the Great Depression of the 1930s he introduced two new lines: baby foods and ready-to-serve quality soups. They helped the company survive the depression. In 1941 Howard Heinz was succeeded in turn by his son, H. J. Heinz II. He took the company public in 1946. He was the last family member to head the company. H. J. Heinz II’s son, H. J. Heinz III, chose a different career path. After serving in the U.S. Air Force he was elected by special election in 1971 to the U.S. House of Representatives. He was reelected twice. In 1976 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he served until his death in an airplane accident in 1991. Senator Heinz’s widow, Teresa Heinz Kerry, has used the Heinz fortune to become one of America’s major philanthropists, specializing in health care, women and health, and the environment.
Henry J. Heinz was one of the pioneers of mass production and used it to build one of the most successful food processing companies in the United States. He was one of the first American entrepreneurs to recognize that this system of manufacturing could result in the exploitation of the workforce. His response was an early form of welfare capitalism. Heinz also successfully campaigned for the government regulation of his industry to protect the public from unclean, adulterated foods.
See also: Vertical Integration.
—Richard A. Hawkins
Further Reading
Alberts, Robert C. The Good Provider: H. J. Heinz and His 57 Varieties. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973.
Koehn, Nancy F. “Henry Heinz and Brand Creation in the Late Nineteenth Century: Making Markets for Processed Food.” Business History Review 73, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 349–93.
An American scientist and a founding member of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science (a precursor of the Smithsonian Institution), he was also an inventor of several devices. The unit of inductance, the henry, was named after him.
Joseph Henry was born on December 17, 1797, at Albany, New York. His parents, William Henry and Ann (née Alexander), were migrants from Scotland. Joseph Henry’s father died when he was young, and he went to a small school in Galway, New York, and then was apprenticed as a watchmaker and silversmith. He was interested in the theatre and briefly considered being an actor. However, he became fascinated by science and entered the Albany Academy in 1819. He initially hoped to study medicine and then decided to take up engineering.
To help him through his studies at the Albany Academy, he started teaching. In 1826 he was appointed professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at the Albany Academy. His early experiments were into magnetism, and he was able to make some batteries that were later to prove crucial in the development of the telegraph and also the dynamo. Joseph Henry did discover the property of self-inductance, but Michael Faraday did so at the same time in Britain, and Faraday is credited with the discovery.
Joseph Henry also became interested in the properties of lighter-than-air gases and met with Thaddeus Lowe, a balloonist from New Hampshire who was designing balloons. With the outbreak of the American Civil War, Lowe had tried to interest the Union side in using balloons for reconnaissance on Confederate positions. Henry supported Lowe, who formed the Union Army Balloon Corps and then became an aeronaut with the Army of the Potomac.
In 1875, Alexander Graham Bell visited Joseph Henry with his idea of establishing a telephone service. Professor Henry invited Bell to address the Washington Philosophical Society and spoke in favor of Bell’s idea. Joseph Henry died on May 13, 1878, in Washington, D.C.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Coulson, Thomas. Joseph Henry: His Life and Work. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950.
Haydon, F. Stansbury. Military Ballooning during the Early Civil War. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Moyer, Albert E. Joseph Henry: The Rise of an American Scientist. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.
An American entrepreneur and philanthropist, Milton Hershey was born into a Mennonite family at Derry Church, Pennsylvania, on September 13, 1857. His father, although an ambitious man, failed at a number of businesses in the region, compelling the family to move to Nine Points in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Once there, young Milton, who had little formal education, began an apprenticeship with a printer in nearby Gap. By 1872, his mother arranged for an apprenticeship to Joseph Royer, who owned a confectionery shop in Lancaster. With his apprenticeship completed in 1876, nineteen-year-old Hershey began his own confectionery business in Philadelphia. Despite the help and support of his family, his initial business venture failed after six years.
Hershey’s next move was to join his father, who had moved to Denver, Colorado, leaving the rest of the family behind. Hershey worked for a candy maker, who taught him how to make caramels using fresh milk. By 1883, Hershey returned to the East Coast and established a business in New York City on Sixth Avenue. Sadly, this second business collapsed, and Hershey returned to Lancaster. Within a short period of time, Hershey raised the necessary money to open a business there producing caramels. This third enterprise, the Lancaster Caramel Company, flourished. By 1893 Hershey wished to expand the company, returning to his interest in making chocolates using fresh milk.
Knowing the value of popular Swiss-made chocolate and familiar with the recent presentation of German chocolate-making machinery at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Hershey purchased some German machinery and had it shipped to Lancaster. Here, after the incorporation of the Lancaster Caramel Company and the establishment of the Hershey Chocolate Company, Hershey began production of chocolate products, including baking chocolate, cocoa, and chocolate coating for his caramels.
He began to develop new markets as part of the consumer goods revolution in the United States. Heretofore, chocolate confections were specialty items beyond the budgets of regular Americans. Hershey believed that, with the aid of technology and the application of mass production processes, he could produce milk chocolate products at a cost affordable to American consumers, and he decided to concentrate his efforts there. In 1900, he sold the successful Lancaster Caramel Company for $1 million, which provided him sufficient capital to pursue his chocolate dream. Regional sales in Pennsylvania soared as Hershey attracted a mass audience for his affordable chocolates. The continual growth of the Hershey Chocolate Company goaded him to seek a new factory with expanded production capacity. Realities of production dictated the location of the new facility. It must be near a ready supply of fresh milk, the one ingredient that was most perishable.
For both sentimental and practical reasons, Hershey returned to Derry Township where he had been born, in the heart of dairy farming in central Pennsylvania. The region had two other valuable assets. Because of his own roots, Hershey felt attracted to and comfortable with the social norms and the work ethic of the residents within the region. Secondly, with the developing industrialism in nearby Harrisburg and Steelton came convenient transportation infrastructure linking Derry to the ports of Philadelphia and New York. Necessary raw materials such as cocoa beans and sugar could be shipped on railroads cheaply into central Pennsylvania. Hershey broke ground at the site of the present-day factory along the Dauphin-Reading Turnpike in 1903. The decision to move the plant to relatively virgin ground also permitted Hershey to construct his vision of a model town. Believing that workers needed certain amenities, such as clean surroundings, recreational facilities, and educational opportunities, he funded a company community that included single- and two-family homes along tree-lined streets. Workers could either rent or purchase homes on very generous terms granted by the Hershey Improvement Company. The Company also used its cooperative organization to maintain low utility rates and exempt tenants from real estate taxes. Hershey provided an inexpensive public transportation system and constructed an amusement park, which opened on April 24, 1907. Attracting thousands from outside the community, the park drew additional revenue to the region and advertised the company and its products. Over time Hershey established other amenities including a zoo and a public garden.
During the early twentieth century, the company prospered, but it also weathered some serious threats. The outbreak of World War I forced Hershey to develop alternate sources of sugar. He planned on opening a sugar refinery in Cuba, but before doing so he purchased as much sugar as he could in order to maintain production. Unfortunately, wartime demands and government intervention had inflated sugar prices tremendously. When the war ended, and with it market pressures and subsidies, the price of sugar collapsed, leaving Hershey with a huge stock of expensive sugar to use. His competitors, meanwhile, reaped profits exploiting the lower commodity prices. To maintain liquidity and save the company, Hershey was forced to remortgage many of his assets for a short period of time at the war’s end.
Despite that debacle, Hershey’s Chocolate Company survived and returned to profitability. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the company expanded product lines to meet continued consumer interest. By the onset of the Great Depression the company’s diversified product line included various forms of baking chocolate, syrups, and several different chocolate bars. Now a corporation, Hershey’s deep penetration of both wholesale and retail markets protected sales and saved the company from layoffs. Spared the worst at his own firm, Hershey looked for ways to decrease the regional unemployment as a whole. He began his own public works projects using unemployed workers and local construction materials. The Hershey Community Building, the Hotel Hershey, the Hershey Industrial School, and the Hershey Sports Arena all resulted from his private programs.
The Second World War brought new challenges to both Hershey and his company. As in the first war, Hershey won contracts to provide chocolate to service personnel overseas. However, the harsh and varied climates of the wide-flung battlefronts necessitated drastic innovation. The chocolates had to ship well, have increased shelf life, and demonstrate heat resistance in particular. Company scientists and production teams working at Hershey’s solved these problems, garnering windfall profits for the company and awards from both the U.S. Navy and Army. Like Coca-Cola, Hershey’s chocolate became an icon of the American presence on the battlefield and during the occupation of both Germany and Japan after the war.
Though he was an ambitious and successful industrialist, Hershey practiced a career-long paternalism and philanthropy. In 1909, with his wife, Catherine, who interested herself deeply in such work, he established his first and dearest project, the Hershey Industrial School. The school provided for the education of orphaned boys, many of whom lived and worked on farms which produced milk for the company. In 1918, three years after the death of his wife, Hershey placed his fortune in a trust for the school. During the Depression Hershey established a foundation to provide the financial resources for educational and cultural opportunities for all the residents of his town.
—Christopher Fritsch
Further Reading
Brenner, Joel Glenn. The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the World of Hershey and Mars. New York: Random House, 1999.
D’Antonio, Michael. Milton S. Hershey’s Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire and Utopian Dreams. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
Halbleib, John F. Hershey: Ideal Community for Orphans. Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2005.
Malone, Mary. Milton Hershey, Chocolate King. Champaign, IL: Garrard Publishing Co., 1971.
Historians have long debated why China, despite its numerous technological and economic advantages, failed to cultivate an industrial economy similar to the one that developed in Europe. The “high-level equilibrium trap” hypothesis is one prominent explanation for this historical phenomenon. Developed by Mark Elvin, a scholar of Chinese history, and economist R. P. Sinha, the hypothesis first appeared in Elvin’s 1972 article, “The High-Level Equilibrium Trap: The Causes of the Decline of Invention in Traditional Chinese Textile Industries.” Elvin soon expanded his analysis with the 1973 book, The Pattern of the Chinese Past.
Prior to Europe’s rise to power in the early nineteenth century, China was one of the most powerful and developed nations in the world. Chinese society was characterized by a highly efficient and sophisticated agricultural system, extremely advanced scientific and technological development, significant levels of urbanization, a strong market economy, and an extensive and well-developed network of national and international commerce. European society, in comparison, was vastly poorer, more agrarian, technologically and scientifically underdeveloped, and economically weak.
Despite these dramatic developmental differences, the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century occurred not in China, but in Europe, where it brought about massive economic and social changes. Europe’s Industrial Revolution also greatly contributed to a radical shift in international power relations. By the end of the nineteenth century, China’s status as a world power had declined appreciably, and European nations that had once been unable to compete with Chinese power and influence exerted colonial and quasi-colonial control over key regions of China.
According to the theory of the high-level equilibrium trap, China was unable to maintain the pace of technological innovation it had established prior to the fourteenth century because of economic, demographic, ecological, and geographic constraints. These constraints eventually caused centuries of growth to reach an equilibrium that could not be breached without dramatic technological development, but there was insufficient incentive or capital to develop such technologies. At a simple level, the high-level equilibrium trap theory argues that, given China’s ecological and geographic constraints and its highly efficient economy based on a large population, the rational economic choice for Chinese manufacturers between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was to use existing resources of cheap human labor, rather than mechanical innovation.
The high-level equilibrium trap argues that, prior to the fourteenth century, Chinese technological development produced a highly efficient, well-integrated market economy and a system of agricultural management capable of supporting a very large population. Between the early fourteenth century and the early nineteenth century, these nonmechanized traditional technologies enabled Chinese industry and agriculture to operate more efficiently than early mechanical technologies. Furthermore, China, the world’s most populous nation, was already able to satisfy both internal and international markets using traditional technologies and existing systems of commerce.
As a result of these conditions, manufacturers had no rational economic inducement to invest capital in experimental technological development over existing resources of proven traditional technologies and inexpensive human labor. As these factors slowed the rate of technological innovation, and as the productivity limits of these resources were reached, the Chinese economy and manufacturing industries reached a level of equilibrium, wherein population and income levels reached a level roughly equal to productivity levels, stalling economic growth and leaving little surplus capital available for investment. In order to grow using traditional technology and human labor, Chinese industries would have required significant growth of population and consumption, neither of which could be supported by existing ecological resources.
The industrializing nations of Europe, by comparison, did have an incentive to invest in experimental labor-saving technology, as Europe’s lack of commercial development and small, agrarian population made human labor more costly than in China. Additionally, a history of relatively inefficient land use left Europe with a high ratio of unexploited land and resources compared to population, providing the space and assets needed for expansion. When combined with an influx of capital from the Americas and an acute awareness of the limits of its existing technology to meet prospective markets, these factors created a real incentive for entrepreneurs to invest in early industrial technology, which, while rudimentary, still resulted in cheaper and more efficient labor than did nonmechanized human effort. As a result, Western Europe developed and adopted mechanized industries while China did not.
At the time of its introduction in the early 1970s, Elvin and Sinha’s theory of the high-level equilibrium trap was notable for a number of reasons, and Elvin’s early publications regarding the theory remain seminal, if controversial, within current Chinese historiography. Prior to the development of this theory, Western historiography regarding China’s lack of technological development after the fourteenth century was characterized by sociopolitical analyses, which typically argued that China’s failure to industrialize was the cause of a conservative, antimodernist culture that inhibited change and innovation. Contemporary Chinese economic historiography describing this era, meanwhile, generally argued that this technological stagnation was the result of an exploitative feudal system that, when combined with incipient Western imperialism, drained economic resources and impeded the growth of a capitalist economy capable of supporting private industry and mechanical innovation.
The work of Elvin and Sinha was the most prominent effort produced by an emerging scholarly movement that aimed to address the Western-centric emphasis found in both historical approaches, and to reevaluate empirically unsupported claims about the nature of China’s pre-nineteenth-century economy and culture. In the past few decades, historians, including Elvin himself, have done much to revise, qualify, or refute elements of the high-level equilibrium theory as it was first presented in the early 1970s. However, the high-level equilibrium trap continues to be a popular explanatory model.
Even more significantly, the high-level equilibrium trap provided scholars of this problem in Chinese history with a new research approach that applies economic theory and emphasizes internal economic constraints and ecological realities over sociopolitical causation. This approach has become increasingly popular in recent decades, even among historians who do not necessarily agree with the hypothesis set forward by the high-level equilibrium trap.
See also: Capitalism; China Cotton Mill Owners’ Association; China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Company; Chinese Communist Party; Coal; Dasheng Cotton Mill; Factory; Factory System; Great Leap Forward; Han-Yeh-Ping Iron and Coal Company; Kaiping Mining Company; Malthus, Thomas Robert; Self-Strengthening Movement; Shanghai Cotton Cloth Mill; Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen).
—Skylar Harris
Further Reading
Deng, Gang. The Pre-Modern Chinese Economy: Structural Equilibrium and Capitalist Sterility. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Elvin, Mark. “The High-Level Equilibrium Trap: The Causes of the Decline of Invention in Traditional Chinese Textile Industries.” In Economic Organization in Chinese Society, edited by W. E. Willmott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972.
———. The Pattern of the Chinese Past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973.
Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Mediterranean World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Richardson, Philip. Economic Change in China, c. 1800–1950. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
This was a large number of forced displacements that took place in Scotland and were known in Scottish Gaelic as Fuadach nan Gàidheal [“The Expulsion of the Gael”]. They started in the eighteenth century. In some ways they followed the “Lowland Clearances” and similar (earlier) events in parts of England that saw the depopulation of some rural villages as many people sought work in the cities following the Agricultural Revolution and the subsequent Industrial Revolution.
In Scotland, many crofters living in small villages were subject to the whims of the local chiefs, some of whom treated them well, but others saw them as a free source of labor. These bonds led to a large number of Highland crofters taking part in the Jacobite Uprising, which culminated in the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The British government had been so shocked by this that they decided to introduce a series of laws to prevent any reoccurrence. The Disarming Act of 1716 had been aimed at preventing Highlanders from arming themselves. It had been introduced after the 1715 Jacobite Rising, and it did prevent many Highlanders from being properly armed at the start of the 1745 uprising. However, it was far more rigorously enforced after 1746. There were also new laws against the wearing of tartan kilts. Gradually the chiefs were stripped of their power, and this broke up the traditional clan system.
From the point of view of the English liberal establishment, the moves introduced in Scotland were to modernize the Highlands and prevent crofters from being abused by their chiefs, and to end a semifeudal society. The crofters and cotters were no longer forced to work for chiefs for no pay, but the changes rapidly led to people—including the poor—becoming worried about the increasing insecurity in their lives. More and more of the chiefs started to use their land for large-scale sheep farming, which was more profitable. Some of the crofters managed to find work as shepherds, but others were forced off their land. The towns were unable to cope, and with the Industrial Revolution being far more developed in England than in northern Scotland, it was impossible for small workshops to compete with the prices for goods from the large factories. The result was that many people migrated to Canada.
The second phase of the Highland Clearances started from the 1810s with the eviction of thousands of people. This destroyed the cultural life of the Highlands, and many Scottish people moved to North America and Australia. One of the families that was badly affected by these events was that of Andrew Carnegie.
There were certainly political aspects to the Highland Clearances. The merciless repression that followed the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden did lead to many people being forced off their land for political reasons. With many of the Highlanders being Catholic, there was also a religious dimension. The Highland Clearances certainly devastated the Scottish highlands and also provided much of the workforce for the emerging industrialization in some parts of the United States and Canada. Karl Marx referred to this in Das Kapital, highlighting of the emergence of breeding deer on land that had been used for grazing sheep.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Prebble, John. The Highland Clearances. London: Secker & Warburg, 1963.
Richards, Eric. The Highland Clearances. Edinburgh: Birlinn Books, 2000.
An English reed maker and inventor, Thomas Highs designed the spinning jenny, the water frame, and several other machines that were to heavily influence the Industrial Revolution.
Thomas Highs was born in 1718 in Leigh, Lancashire. His name may well have been Heyes, but it was spelled Highs in the parish register, and that was the spelling used in his lifetime. For most of his early life he lived in Leigh, Lancashire, and he married Sarah Moss at St. Mary’s Church, Leigh, on February 23, 1747. She was the daughter of Henry Moss and Elizabeth (née Halliwell), who had been married in the same church twenty-seven years earlier.
In 1752, he became fascinated by cotton-spinning machinery and started to work with Lewis Paul and John Wyatt of Birmingham—they patented the idea in 1738. They had been involved in the manufacture of drafting rollers, and Highs, working on the project, quickly realized that he needed help and joined forces with the well-known inventor John Kay, a clockmaker who was from Warrington, Lancashire.
Highs continued working on his invention for many months, although John Kay lost interest in it. Highs dubbed his new invention the “spinning jenny.” This took place in 1764. It was a multispool spinning machine that considerably reduced the amount of work needed to produce yarn, allowing a single person to work up to about ten spools at the same time. It was, apparently, named by Highs after his daughter, Jane, according to a later account by a neighbor Thomas Leather, whose father, Richard Leather, owned the public house, the Seven Stars, in Leigh. There is also a suggestion that it might have come from the worked “engine,” as with the Cotton Gin of Eli Whitney. A third possibility exists with the word being a reference to a female ass, which was regarded as a beast of burden that would take a load off the shoulders of men. However, Highs never really finished the design of the spinning jenny, and he returned to working out improvements in drafting rollers, allowing John Kay to work with the Lancashire weaver and inventor James Hargreaves on the manufacture of the spinning jenny.
By this time, Highs had started working on his water frame. When he had perfected it, he gave the design to John Kay so that Kay could make a version of it in metal as Kay, a clockmaker, had the equipment necessary to do this. What followed is disputed, but it appears that Kay obviously discovered the secrets of the machine and was able to see how Highs put the finishing touches to what was to become the water frame. As the spinning jenny had stretched the thread by trapping it in a wooden vice and pulling it out, the water frame, using more power, was able to produce a much harder and stronger thread, which was easier to use for warp than that made by the spinning jenny. Some time after Kay started working on his model Richard Arkwright appeared on the scene. Arkwright was traveling around the region and heard of the design. He then appears to have befriended Kay in his local drinking haunt and managed to get him to divulge the secret. Arkwright then went to Preston along with Kay, where they found an investor. Arkwright offered Kay a job in the new company, and he patented the water frame in 1768 as his own invention. Arkwright also discovered the secret part of the design in the spinning jenny at the same time.
During his lifetime Highs was not credited with his inventions, partly because he never patented them, and also because he was not as effective an entrepreneur as Arkwright. Apparently the two did manage to meet face to face in a Manchester tavern where Highs accused Arkwright of having stolen his invention. Although Arkwright made a fortune from the designs and became famous around England, and indeed overseas, Highs remained in obscurity for most of the rest of his life. However, in 1781, when Arkwright resorted to the law to protect his patents, Highs, Kay, Kay’s wife, and also the widow of James Hargreaves all claimed in court that Arkwright had stolen their inventions, and the courts finally agreed, overturning Arkwright’s patents. Highs died in 1803.
See also: Textile Industry.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Daniels, George William, and Samuel Crompton. The Early English Cotton Industry. London: Longmans Green & Co., 1920.
Lipson, Ephraim. The History of the Woollen and Worsted Industries. London: Routledge, 1965.
Mann, James A. The Cotton Trade of Great Britain. London: Simpkin Marshall, 1860.
Hill, James Jerome (1838–1916)
A Canadian-American railroad executive, he earned the nickname “Empire Builder” because of his control over railroads in the United States and Canada. He was born on September 16, 1838, near Rockwood, Ontario, the third of the four children of James Hill and Anne (née Dunbar). Both the families of his father and mother had immigrated from the north of Ireland to Canada, becoming pioneers in Ontario. His father was a Baptist, and his mother was a Methodist.
James Jerome Hill attended local schools and then went to the Rockwood Academy. When he was fourteen his father died and he had to leave school and work as a clerk in a local store. As a boy he lost the use of one eye, and that made it impossible for him to train as a doctor—his father’s intended career for him. Hill had longed to make his fortune in Asia, but this did not eventuate and he ended up in St. Paul, Minnesota. At that time it was a trading station, and Hill became a clerk for a company operating packet steamboats using the Mississippi. He quickly found that he could use his initiative to do well financially by setting freight rates. As he only had one eye, he was rejected from the army during the American Civil War, but he helped with the 1st Minnesota Volunteers.
In 1865 Hill started his own forwarding and freight business, and he was an agent for the Northwestern Packet Company. With the enlarging of the railroads, Hill recognized that coal would replace wood for firing locomotives, and he formed the Northwestern Fuel Company to supply coal to the railroads. He controlled the company until 1878.
Having followed the progress of the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad Company, he initially worked on transporting material from the railhead inland and into Canada. In some of this, he was in competition with the Hudson’s Bay Company, and he started working with Norman W. Kittson, who became a close business colleague. By the mid-1870s, the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad Company was in a terrible state. It had underinvested in its infrastructure, and it defaulted on its bonds, which had been sold by a Dutch banker. Hill studied the company’s structure and its business potential, deciding that he wanted to buy the company. Getting together with Kittson, and also with the support of George Stephen (later Lord Mount Stephen) and Donald A. Smith (later Lord Strathcona), Hill negotiated for the purchase of the company. Soon afterward he extended the railroad line to the Canadian border, and then he connected with the Canadian railroad that went to Fort Garry (modern-day Winnipeg). It was a great feat, even more so because Hill never received government financial aid nor land grants, and throughout all of this time he always paid dividends to his shareholders, one of the few to manage this.
Gradually Hill extended the rail lines and took over other railroad enterprises, renaming his company the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway Company in 1879. He was the company’s general manager from 1879 until 1881, then vice president for a year, before being president from 1882 until 1907 and then chairman of the board from 1907 until 1912. A Democrat, Hill was a close supporter of the U.S. president Grover Cleveland (president 1885–1889 and 1893–1897), often advising him on railroad matters.
In 1890, Hill merged his various business operations together to create the Great Northern Railway Company. This was a great undertaking, and in 1893 that company had pushed a line through to Puget Sound. In the same year the main rival, the Northern Pacific Company, went into receivership for the second time. It took two years of negotiations for Hill to buy Northern Pacific, fighting a battle against Edward H. Harriman to obtain control over the Burlington & Quincy Railroad. Hill won the battle in the end. Hill and his supporters thought that railroads were exempt from antitrust legislation, and he set about forming the Northern Securities Company as the trustee company for the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway Company, the Great Northern Railway Company, and the Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company. The state of Minnesota argued that this was against the terms of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. In March 1904 this was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled by five votes to four.
By this time Hill was occupied in Canada in work with the Canadian Pacific Railway, and also in the Great Northern Steamship Company that crossed the Pacific, taking goods to and from Japan and China. The latter was very useful as Hill found that there was far more railroad freight being taken from the Eastern states to the Western states, and that if it was possible to take exports to East Asia, it might reduce the number of freight cars that traveled empty.
Hill also became interested in banking, and in 1912 he took control of the First and Second National Banks of St. Paul, merging the two together. He lectured widely and also wrote Highways of Progress, published in 1910. Hill was also generous to shareholders. Once he spent $4 million of his own money on a risky purchase of real estate, and when the venture turned out well, he returned the $11 million of profits into the company.
Hill had married Mary Theresa Mehegan in 1867. Her parents were from Ireland, and she was a Roman Catholic. As a result, Hill endowed a Roman Catholic seminary at St. Paul. In 1915, seventy-four of his friends and admirers subscribed to establish the James J. Hill Professorship at Harvard University. He died on May 29, 1916, at St. Paul, survived by his widow and nine of their ten children.
—Justin Corfield
James J. Hill in about 1875.
Further Reading
Hill, J. J. Highways of Progress. New York: Doubleday, 1910.
———. Brief History of the Great Northern Railway System. n.p., 1912.
Pyle, J. G. The Life of James J. Hill. New York: Doubleday, 1917.
The Industrial Revolution arrived in Japan in the late 1890s. The Hitachi Company, founded in 1910, contributed greatly to the early success of this revolution. Its manufactures helped Japan develop into an industrial powerhouse in the first half of the twentieth century. After World War II, it played an important role in Japan’s economic recovery. Today this giant conglomerate makes a range of products, from computers and camcorders to high-speed trains.
Hitachi, Ltd. grew out of a small electrical repair shop located some eighty miles northeast of Tokyo. The company’s founder, Odaira Namihei, ran the shop, which serviced the local copper mine’s machinery. Odaira also spent time developing his own designs. In 1910 he began building five-horsepower electric motors—the first such motor produced in Japan. Selling the motors was not easy. Japanese companies had grown used to using products produced abroad. Odaira believed that Japan should design and build more of its own equipment and machinery, rather than import it. This became Hitachi’s mission.
World War I made that mission easier to carry out. The seas became battlegrounds, and merchant ships became prime targets. Importing needed equipment and machinery became more and more troublesome. Hitachi geared up to fill the growing demand within Japan. Its biggest job during this period was supplying an electric power company with three ten-thousand-horsepower water turbines. After the war, Hitachi’s business continued to boom as Japan’s industrial growth intensified. It supplied rapidly expanding Japanese industries with machinery and electrical equipment including, in 1924, the first direct-current (DC) electric locomotive built in Japan.
Odaira served as president of Hitachi from 1929 to 1946. During this time, his company began to diversify its product line. It manufactured sonar and radar equipment for Japan’s military, as well as electrical appliances and communications equipment. During World War II, Allied bombers destroyed many Hitachi factories, and the forces that occupied Japan after the war closed down many others. Hitachi was on the verge of bankruptcy when the Korean War began in 1950. The American military needed equipment and machinery, and it turned to Hitachi, whose factories lay just across the strait that separated Japan from South Korea.
Starting in the late 1950s, as Japan’s economy continued its postwar recovery, Hitachi again decided to diversify. The company moved into the growing field of consumer goods. It had success focusing on the newly invented transistor, whose small size, low power usage, and reliability would revolutionize electronics. Hitachi manufactured transistor radios, and later it produced transistor color televisions in the United States, using technology licensed from the RCA Corporation. It also began to research and develop a computer that was based on transistors.
During the next thirty years Hitachi grew its electronics business by manufacturing computer chips, microprocessors, personal computers, and supercomputers. Meanwhile, other divisions of the company also helped the company prosper. Hitachi built the first railcars for the high-speed Japanese “Bullet Train.” It also developed an experimental nuclear reactor, a fast elevator for high-rise buildings, an online banking system, and a specialized electron microscope. But its focus on high-technology electronics yielded the greatest dividends.
However, the desire to achieve superiority in the fiercely competitive computer business led to a scandal. In 1982 several top Hitachi executives joined in a scheme to steal design secrets from its fiercest rival, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). During a “sting” operation carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the executives tried to buy confidential IBM documents. They were arrested, pleaded guilty, and paid fines. At the same time, IBM sued Hitachi. The two companies settled the suit out of court. As part of the settlement, Hitachi had to pay IBM hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. Hitachi also had to allow IBM to inspect its new software products for five years to be sure none of them contained illegally obtained IBM designs.
The scandal severely undermined Hitachi’s reputation. Many former buyers refused to order Hitachi products. The company worked hard to restore its reputation. Then, in the late 1980s, a deep recession knocked the wind out of Japan’s economy. As the downturn dragged on, Hitachi’s growth slowed and profits declined. To revive the company, its leaders instituted measures to cut costs, modernize the company’s operations, and develop new business strategies. In time the company managed to regain its standing as one of the world’s foremost manufacturers of high-technology equipment.
Research and development continued to be vital to Hitachi’s growth. Its numerous research laboratories and patents could attest to that. In 1995 the company began producing and selling notebook computers in the United States. Ten years later, it unveiled a pair of two-wheeled robots intended to work and interact with people in offices and factories. Each robot could move at nearly four miles per hour and had a vocabulary of some one hundred words. In the intervening years it developed a variety of other high-tech devices. These included a high-speed optical data transmission system, an application processor for mobile phones, and a compact system for analyzing DNA. Through biometrics research, it also produced equipment that could quickly authenticate someone’s identity by reading vein patterns on the person’s finger.
Hitachi has made it part of its mission to look to the future. Its corporate statement, “Inspire the Next,” suggests that it continues to aim to be a world leader in developing new technology for consumers and for industry. At the same time, it vows to be a socially responsible company that respects the human rights of its workforce and creates products that are environmentally friendly.
See also: Fiber Optics; Japan; Microchip.
—David Fasulo
Further Reading
Allinson, Gary D. The Columbia Guide to Modern Japanese History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Fruin, W. Mark. The Japanese Enterprise System: Competitive Strategies and Cooperative Structures. Oxford, United Kingdom: Clarendon Press, 1994. See especially pp. 151–53 and 178–86.
Hitachi Global: About Hitachi. “History, 1910–1959, 1960–1979, 1980–1999, 2000–.” Available at http://www.hitachi.com/about/index.html.
Pederson, Jay P. International Directory of Company Histories 40. New York: St. James Press, 2001. Also available at http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Hitachi-Ltd-Company-History.html.
Adolf Hitler was born in Austria on April 30, 1889. His father, Alois, was illegitimate, and until he was nearly forty years of age he bore his mother’s surname, Schicklgruber. In 1876, he took the name of his stepfather, Johann Georg Hiedler. Exactly how the name was transposed to “Hitler” is unknown, but in any case Adolf was legally born a Hitler.
Hitler dropped out of school at sixteen and spent several years attempting to become an artist. He twice applied for admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, but he was rejected. In 1913, he moved to Munich, and in 1914 he joined the German army. He fought with valor during World War I, and in the process he was wounded and gassed.
After the war, resentful about the defeat and the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, he joined the German Workers’ Party. By 1920, he was head of propaganda for the renamed National Socialists, or Nazi Party, and by 1921 he was the party’s leader. He set out to create a mass movement using unrelenting propaganda, and the party began to slowly grow. In 1923, the Nazis attempted a premature coup in Munich that came to be known as the “Beer Hall Putsch.” Its failure led to Hitler’s arrest and trial for treason. He was sentenced to five years in prison, but he served only nine months. While in prison, Hitler wrote his virulent autobiography, Mein Kampf, in which he laid out his political philosophy and his plans for the future. Regarding inequality of the races as part of the natural order, he exalted the “Aryan Race,” anti-Semitism, anti-communism, and extreme German nationalism.
The economic slump of 1929 renewed his power and influence, and in the Reichstag elections of 1930 the Nazis emerged as the nation’s second largest party and in 1932 the largest. He lost the race for president in 1932, but he entered into intrigues to gain legitimate power, and in 1933 President Paul von Hindenburg invited him to be chancellor. Adopting the title of Führer (leader), he gained dictatorial powers by means of the Enabling Act of 1933. This legislation gave the cabinet legislative power for four years and thus, for all practical purposes, the “Third Reich” was born.
Having secured supreme power and convincing the German people that he was their savior from all things “undesirable,” Hitler then oversaw a great expansion of industrial production and civil improvement. His regime built dams, autobahns, railroads, and other civil works. He cut unemployment by taking women out of the workforce and arms production. The latter was a violation of the Treaty of Versailles, but the Allies did nothing.
Today, it is obvious that Hitler was dedicated to expansion and domination. His efforts began in 1936 when he occupied the Rhineland and sent troops to support the revolt in Spain led by General Francisco Franco. He also established friendly relations with Italy and japan, which eventually led to the Tripartite Treaty of 1940. At the same time, Hitler began to act on his extremist social policies, which were not only based on the alleged supremacy of the “Aryan Race” but also on the assumption that “undesirables” should be eliminated. The “undesirables” included those with disabilities, Jews, Poles, communists, political opponents, Catholics, homosexuals, Russians, and others. It is estimated that between 1939 and 1945 the Germans were responsible for the murder of between eleven and fourteen million people. Of these, at least six million were Jews. The Nazis decided that all Jews should be exterminated according to a plan known as “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
In March 1938, Hitler pressured Austria into unification with Germany. Later that year, as a result of the Munich Agreement, he was allowed to occupy the western part of Czechoslovakia, the so-called Sudetenland. In March of 1939, in violation of the Munich Agreement, he occupied the entire country. Then, in August, Hitler concluded a secret pact with Stalin in which it was agreed that Germany and the USSR would partition Poland and refrain from attacking each other. Subsequently, Germany attacked western Poland on September 3, and the USSR invaded eastern Poland on September 14. Finally, Britain and France declared war on Germany.
In quick succession in 1940, Germany took Denmark, Norway, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. Hitler then ordered bombing raids over Britain in preparation for an invasion, but the Royal Air Force (RAF) fought off the Luftwaffe and there was no invasion. However, on June 22, 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, thus breaking the nonaggression pact. Hitler hoped for a quick victory, but it did not occur, and his forces came to be bogged down deep in Russian territory.
Meanwhile, Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the United States declared war on Japan on December 8. On December 11, honoring the Tripartite Pact of 1940, Hitler declared war on the United States, and thus sealed his doom. It was very unlikely that Germany could defeat a coalition of the United States, the British Empire, and the USSR, a nation with the world’s largest army.
In late 1942, German and Italian forces were defeated in North Africa, thus ensuring that they would never link up with German forces already in the USSR. Then, in 1943 came the titanic battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, both ending in the defeat of the Germans. In the same year the Allies invaded Italy, Mussolini was deposed, and Italy surrendered. Meanwhile, the Red Army steadily drove the Germans back, and on June 6, 1944, the Western Allies landed in Northern France. By late 1944, the Russians were in Central Europe and the Western Allies were advancing into Germany. The war was essentially over, but Hitler would not allow retreat or surrender. Hearing of the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, he hoped for a negotiated peace, but it was not to be. The Allies had agreed on nothing less than unconditional surrender.
By April of 1945 the Red Army had reached the outskirts of Berlin. Hitler and his closest associates barricaded themselves in a bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery and ordered German forces to fight to the death. Many did, but by April 24 Berlin was completely cut off from the rest of Germany, and within a few more days, the Russians were very near the Reich Chancellery. On April 29, 1945, Hitler married his long-time mistress, Eva Braun, and they agreed not to be captured. They committed suicide on the evening of the following day, and on May 7, Germany surrendered to the Allies.
Hitler is generally regarded as a monster, and Nazism is regarded as one of the greatest evils of the twentieth century. Today, historians agree that Hitler envisioned not only the domination of Europe but also control of the entire planet. If he had been able to take England, North Africa, and the Soviet Union, he might have succeeded. The people of the world were fortunate that the Grand Alliance (the United States, Great Britain, and the USSR) succeeded. But it should be remembered that all things are relative. Compared to Hitler, Joseph Stalin was equally monstrous, but in the years 1939 to 1945 he was on the side of the victors.
Adolf Hitler starting the work on the autobahn between Frankfurt and Darmstadt.
See also: Daimler, Gottlieb; Dawes Plan; Fascism; Fokker, Anthony Herman; Ford, Henry; Imperialism; Krupp, Alfred; Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich; Radar; Russia; Speer, Albert; Young Plan.
—Kenneth E. Hendrickson Jr.
Further Reading
Bullock, Alan. Hitler, A Study in Tyranny. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Fest, J. C. Hitler. New York: Harcourt and Brace Jovanovich, 1974.
Kershaw, Ian. Hitler. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.
Payne, Robert. The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler. New York: Praeger, 1973.
Stein, George H. Hitler. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
Stone, Norman. Hitler. Boston: Little-Brown, 1980.
Toland, John. Adolf Hitler. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.
Hobsbawm, Eric John Ernest (1917–2012)
An historian, intellectual, author, and long-standing member of the now defunct British Communist Party, Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm was a British Marxist historian whose research interests included European labor history, Latin American peasant studies, world history, and nationalism. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on June 9, 1917, where his parents were living during the First World War (1914–1918). His father, Percy Hobsbaum, was English, while his mother, Nelly Grün, was from Vienna. The family moved to Vienna after the war, where Hobsbawm lived until the death, first of his father in 1929 and then his mother in 1931, which left him and his sister, Nancy, orphaned. Family in Germany assumed guardianship of both children, where political radicalization during the crisis years of the Weimar Republic made a lasting impression on the adolescent schoolboy.
In Berlin, Hobsbawm was drawn to Marxism, and a teacher recommended he read the Communist Manifesto. Reflecting on this period in his autobiography, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (2002), Hobsbawm writes, “The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist, or at least a man whose life would lose its nature and its significance without the political project to which he committed himself as a schoolboy, though that project has demonstrably failed, and, as I now know, was bound to fail.” After Adolf Hitler’s appointment to chancellor in January 1933, and amid increasing anti-Semitic legislation and sentiment, Hobsbawm’s family immigrated to London, England, where a clerical error changed the spelling of his last name to include the “w” in place of the “u.” Prohibited from becoming a militant Marxist by his guardians, he transferred his political energy into his education and excelled as a student. Graduating from school in 1936, Hobsbawm won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge. He joined the Cambridge student branch of the British Communist Party in the fall of 1936, becoming a leading Cambridge undergraduate communist and remaining a party member for some fifty years.
Hobsbawm earned his degree in 1939 and accepted a student researchship to study agrarian problems in French North Africa. However, his education was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Called up for duty in February 1940, Hobsbawm never left England during the conflict. He served in the Royal Army Educational Corps and the 560th Field Company of the Royal Engineers, a battalion stationed in East Anglia. In 1946 Hobsbawm returned to Cambridge to complete his degree, earning his doctorate in history in 1951 with a dissertation on the history of British Fabianism.
Marxism served as a guiding principle of even Hobsbawm’s early historical research. Although he subscribed to the Marxist base-superstructure model of historical change, he was committed to including both cultural and ideological analyses in his work and is especially interested in the origin and circulation of ideas. Hobsbawm, with other well-known British Marxist historians such as E. P. Thompson and Christopher Hill, was a member of the Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG) from 1946 to 1956 and a founding member of the academic journal Past and Present. Hobsbawm received considerable criticism for remaining in the British Communist Party after the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956, which brought an end to the CPHG when many members withdrew from the organization. Hobsbawm chose to remain a committed communist because of an unwavering and idealistic belief in the possibility of world revolution, a hope he traced back to the Russian Revolution (1917).
Appointed as a lecturer in history at the University of London’s Birkbeck College in 1947, Hobsbawm became a Reader in 1959, and finally, a professor of Economic and Social History in 1970. He was a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, between 1949 and 1955 and a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York between 1982 and 1997. He was named a Fellow of the British Academy in 1978. He was a professor emeritus in the political science department at the New School for Social Research and was the president of Birbeck College, University of London. He has also served as a visiting scholar at MIT, Cornell, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and the Collège de France. Hobsbawm is also an honorary fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named a Companion of Honour of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1998.
Hobsbawm is considered to be one of the most influential and prolific living historians. His earliest work focused on the history of British labor, adopting a class-struggle perspective to analyze working-class experience and the political significance of everyday resistance. In his first full-length book, Primitive Rebels (1959), he examines “archaic” forms of social protest among precapitalist groups of Western and Southern Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth century as they adapted to industrialization and capitalism.
Hobsbawm is best known for his three-volume history of Europe in the nineteenth century. In The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (1962), he traces the origins of the modern world to a period of “dual revolution” in Europe. He argues that the eighteenth-century industrial and economic revolution in Britain resulted in the triumph of capitalist industry, while the French political revolution ushered in an epoch of bourgeois liberalism. In The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (1975), Hobsbawm characterizes the middle third of the nineteenth century as a period of expanding capitalism, consolidating bourgeois legal and economic liberalism across Europe. Lastly, in The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (1987), Hobsbawm traces how confident bourgeois belief in the growth of wealth and progress of empire contained the seeds of its own destruction in devastating war and crisis. Hobsbawm’s history of the nineteenth century remains unsurpassed in breadth and eloquence.
As a follow-up to the series, Hobsbawm has written a short history of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (1994). He aims to explain the causes underlying the decline of European hegemony and the globalizing transformation of the world into a “single operational unit.” More recently, Hobsbawm has published on such diverse topics as nationalism and the discipline of history, democracy, and terrorism. He died on October 1, 2012.
See also: Bolsheviks; Bourgeoisie; Germany; Globalization; Industrial Revolution; Labor Riots; Marx, Karl; Socialism; Soviets, Stalin, Joseph.
—Stephanie Koscak
Further Reading
Hobsbawm, Eric. Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002.
———. Workers: Worlds of Labor. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Kaye, Harvey J. The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984.
Kette, Martin, and Dorothy Wedderburn. “Historian in the Marxist Tradition with a Global Reach.” The Guardian, October 2, 2012.
Samuel, Raphael. The Lost World of British Communism. London: Verso Books, 2006.
Hoffa, James Riddle “Jimmy” (1913–1975)
A controversial U.S. labor leader, Jimmy Hoffa was the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from 1957 until 1971, wielding considerable industrial muscle and political power in the United States. Although initially he championed the poor unionists and promoted many workplace reforms in his earlier career, his leadership of the Teamsters was tarnished by allegations of criminality leading to his eventual jailing.
Born on February 14, 1913, in Brazil, Indiana, James Riddle “Jimmy” Hoffa was the son of John Cleveland Hoffa, a coal driller, and Viola “Ola” (née Riddle). His ancestors were German migrants who had moved to Indiana in the mid-nineteenth century. When he was nine, the family moved to Clinton, Indiana; and then, two years later, they moved to Detroit, Michigan. Young Jimmy Hoffa left school when he was in the ninth grade and found work as a delivery boy. This coincided with the Great Depression, and Hoffa followed the advice of a friend to get work in the food industry on the basis that it generally weathered poor economic times better than many other industries. Hoffa was paid thirty-two cents per hour, with two-thirds of it being redeemable for food from the company. The work practices were bad because although workers had a twelve-hour shift, they were only paid for the time they actually unloaded goods, meaning that they had to remain at the warehouse but could not be guaranteed to be paid for all the time they were there. In 1931, when two workers were dismissed for taking food from a cart to eat, Hoffa called a work stoppage when some strawberries were being delivered. The management was worried the fruit might rot if it was not refrigerated immediately, and they agreed to discuss terms with Hoffa in exchange for the workers unloading the strawberries immediately. On the following day they agreed to Hoffa’s demands that workers would be guaranteed at least half a day’s pay per shift, a pay rise of thirteen cents per hour, and recognition of the union.
When he left the company a year later, Hoffa was employed as a full-time union organizer for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (officially the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America), and business agent for Local 299 in Detroit. Many of the teamster members were badly paid, and some also had deplorable conditions of employment. It was alleged that Hoffa soon used connections in organized crime to help the union deal with threats from employers, some of whom also resorted to criminal associates. Gradually the Teamsters became powerful, and Hoffa himself became controversial for his methods of dealing with disputes. In 1940 the Teamsters Union was the largest in the country. In that year Hoffa became the chairman of the Central States Drivers Council, and two years later he became president of the Michigan Conference of Teamsters. Ten years later, Hoffa was elected as the international vice president of the Teamsters. However, in 1957, after sixty years of membership, the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) expelled the Teamsters.
In 1957 Jimmy Hoffa finally took over the presidency of the Teamsters—his predecessor Dave Beck, president from 1952, was jailed after being convicted on charges of bribery. Hoffa tried where Beck had failed to expand the union and to get all truck drivers around the United States to belong to his union. He also introduced changes that led to the union being heavily centralized, ensuring the union could easily negotiate freight-haulage agreements nationwide. He then set about recruiting people involved in buses and airlines into his union, leading to worry that he would have so much power that if he organized a strike, it could devastate the U.S. economy.
John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were worried about Hoffa’s growing power. Indeed, some conspiracy theorists place Hoffa as involved in the assassination of Kennedy. Some also claimed that Hoffa might have embezzled money from the union, but nothing was proven. During the early 1960s, Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, set about moving against him—the hatred of both men for each other became personal. Hoffa had escaped charges of perjury and wiretapping in 1958. However, under Robert Kennedy he was not so fortunate. In 1964 Hoffa was convicted on charges of attempting to bribe a grand juror, as well as fraud and conspiracy, and he was sentenced to thirteen years in jail. Hoffa’s successor, Roy L. Williams, was also convicted on criminal charges and sentenced to a prison term.
On December 23, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon commuted his sentence to time served on the condition that he would not participate in union activities for ten years. Hoffa was happy to be released but resented the condition imposed on him, and he planned to fight it in the courts. In the afternoon of July 30, 1975, he disappeared from a parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield, near Detroit, just before he was about to meet two Mafia leaders. There have been no conclusive theories about Hoffa’s death, although there have been many theories involving his death at the hands of mobsters, criminals, or others, resulting in many television programs, novels, and films.
Jimmy Hoffa was declared legally “presumed dead” in 1982. Seventeen years later, his son, James P. Hoffa, became the general president of the Teamsters after defeating Ron Carey, a longtime opponent of Jimmy Hoffa during the 1960s who had been president since 1992. In recent years they have heavily recruited workers who are employed in clerical, service, and high-technology roles.
Jimmy Hoffa
See also: Gompers, Samuel.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Moldea, Don. The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters, Rebels, Politicians and the Mob. New York: Paddington Press, 1978.
Sheridan, Walter. The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972.
Sloane, Arthur A. Hoffa. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
The American inventor who developed the first practical caterpillar tracks for use with the tractor, Benjamin Holt was born on January 1, 1849, in Loudon, New Hampshire, the son of William R. Holt, a lumber dealer, and his wife, Abigail L. Holt. Both his parents had been born in New Hampshire, as had their parents. Benjamin was the seventh of eight children. From these beginnings, Holt worked on the family lumber business at Concord, and then he trained as a wheelwright. In 1880 Benjamin Holt was living at Concord, New Hampshire, where he was working as a wheelwright. Both his parents were living with him, as was his older sister, Ellen H. Drake, who had married Henry F. Drake, a conductor on the railroad, and a younger sister, Myra A. Holt, born in 1860.
In 1865 Benjamin’s brother, Charles Holt, moved to California where he established the company C. H. Holt & Company, operating from San Francisco. There he sold hardwoods from his father’s lumberyard to wagon and boat builders. Unfortunately, this was not successful, as the wood that was from the damp New Hampshire climate dried out badly in California. Attempts by Charles Holt to season the wood did not work, so as a result Charles Holt moved inland to the town of Stockton, also in California. In 1883 Benjamin Holt joined his brother in Stockton, journeying on the newly completed transcontinental railway. Benjamin Holt joined Charles, who was now running the Stockton Wheel Company. The climate, which was warm, made it a perfect location to season wood, and as it was connected to San Francisco by a river, it was easy to find contracts there. The two brothers continued working together, trying their hands at building railroad carriages and also streetcars. These ventures were not successful, but they did manage to find much work making mining cars and wagons, as well as farm machinery. By 1900 they had a substantial factory.
It was in connection with this farm machinery that Benjamin Holt had the task of moving heavy vehicles around. After rain, these vehicles often sank into the mud. Also there was the possibility of the machine building up a momentum and being impossible to stop, often leading to it becoming a “runaway” and damaging itself, or causing major accidents that injured or killed people or horses. In fact, this had been a major problem since the invention of the first armored vehicles in the fourteenth century. The Irishman Richard Lovell Edgeworth had, in 1770, come up with the idea of spreading the weight over a larger area by designing wheels that had segmented rims (or fellies), the segments then being linked together. The Englishman James Boydell developed this further in 1854, and then the Italian inventor C. Bonnagente, in 1893, managed to improve on Boydell’s design.
Working on these earlier designs, as well as experimenting and then working rationally through possible solutions, Holt had only a steam traction engine that he nicknamed “Old Betsy.” In 1892 the brothers changed the name of the Stockton Wheel Company to the Holt Manufacturing Company. By this time Benjamin Holt had come up with the idea of a caterpillar track that could be attached to the wheels of the vehicle. This could be used on heavy agricultural and engineering vehicles simply by spreading the load over the larger area in order to prevent vehicles from sinking into the mud. The first “Holt Tracked Road Machine” was trialed on November 24, 1904. This was successful, leading to the manufacturing of these machines for sale to the public. Initially, the track was used on machines to move an internal combustion engine tractor, and gradually it applied to other machines. The patent for this design was, however, owned by Richard Hornsby & Sons, and in 1914, Holt managed to buy the company and merge it into his own operations and form the Holt Manufacturing Company.
In the U.S. Census returns for 1910, Benjamin was living with his family at San Joaquin, California, and he is described as a “manufacturer.” With him was his wife, Anna B. Holt, aged forty-two, who had been born in California—her father and mother was from Canada and England, respectively. The couple also had five children: Alfred B. Holt, aged eighteen; William K. Holt, aged seventeen; Anna K. Holt, aged fifteen; Benjamin D. Holt, aged thirteen; and the youngest child, Edison A. Holt, aged twelve, named after the inventor Thomas Alva Edison.
In 1920 Benjamin Holt died and the Holt Manufacturing Company merged with C. L. Best Tractor Company, a company established by Clarence L. Best to form Caterpillar Tractor Company, which later became Caterpillar Inc. Clarence Best was chairman of that company until his death on September 22, 1951. To commemorate Benjamin Holt, a school was named after him, and a street in the northern part of Stockton is named Benjamin Holt Drive.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Haddock, Keith, and Eric C. Orlemann. Classic Caterpillar Crawlers. Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International Publishing Company, 2001.
Orlemann, Eric C., and Ken Berglind. The Caterpillar Century. Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International Publishing Company, 2003.
Wik, Reynold M. Benjamin Holt & Caterpillar: Tracks & Combines. St. Joseph, MI: American Society of Agricultural Engineers, 1985.
The Honda Motor Company Limited, founded on September 24, 1948, is one of the largest Japanese industrial companies involved in engine and automobile manufacture and engineering. It now employs some 167,200 people, and has a net income of $5 billion (2006). Of particular importance to the automobile and motorcycle industry was that Honda was able to very quickly penetrate the U.S. market and emerge as an important supplier of cars in the United States, dominating the U.S. motorcycle industry. Indeed, Honda’s rapid success—known as the “Honda Effect”—has provided a case study for business schools around the world.
The founder of the company, Soichiro Honda (1906–1991), was the son of a blacksmith who then established a business repairing bicycles. He started work as an apprentice as a car mechanic, and then by 1937 he was working on the development of piston rings. He tried to interest Toyota in them, and in 1940 Toyota started purchasing them. The factory was destroyed in the Allied bombing of Japan during the war. As a result, in 1948 Soichiro Honda created his company, Honda Giken Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha (Honda Techno-Research Industrial Company Ltd.), attaching an engine to a bicycle that proved to be a cheap method of travel. These scooters and motorcycles were bought by many people who were unable to afford automobiles after the war. The company gradually turned to making automobiles, although it concentrated on motorcycles for several more years, experimenting with new designs.
In 1958 the American Honda Company was established, and in the following year Honda motorcycles started to be sold in the United States. There they achieved much success, undercutting British manufacturers by taking advantage of economies of scale. Certainly this was the conclusion of the Boston Consulting Group, who was commissioned in 1975 by the British government to explain the rapid rise of Honda and the decline in demand for British cars. However, there have been several studies of the success of Honda, and one, by Richard Pascale, conducted in 1984 and called the “Honda Effect,” came up with a different conclusion. Pascale, at that time working for Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and now with Oxford University, went to Tokyo, where he located and interviewed many Honda executives involved in decisions connected with the move into the United States. He found that the success had more to do with the adaptability of Honda executives, and also their hard work, rather than any long-term strategy. Pascale discovered that Honda initially had planned to introduce large 300 cc motorcycles into the United States, and then later decided to import smaller vehicles. A 1989 study by Gary Hamel and Coimbatore K. Prahalad argued that it was Honda’s success in technology that gave them the edge by enabling them to develop a high power-to-weight ratio for their motorcycles. The oil crisis was also important in making people turn to more fuel-efficient vehicles.
Soichiro Honda always took a great interest in his employees, and later commented, “An employer like me has a job just like everyone else in the plant. It is my job to foresee business trends, make plans to meet them, and thus keep all my men on the job. If I fail to do it, then it is I who should be fired, and not they.” Soichiro Honda retired in 1973, and Kiyoshi Kawashima took over as CEO for the next ten years. The later CEOs have been Tadashi Kume (1983–1990), Nobihiko Kawamoto (1990–1998), Hiroyuki Yoshino (1998–2004), and since 2004, Takeo Fukui.
Much prominence was also given to Honda because of its heavy participation in racing competitions, and Honda motorcycles took part in, and indeed won, races around the world. However, although motorcycle sales in the United States were high, there was not much demand for Honda automobiles, which were exported to Hawaii in 1969 and to California in 1970. Many Americans did not like the small Honda cars, and it was not until 1972 that the Honda Civic started to attract some interest, and many cars were sold after the oil crisis in 1973, which made the running of large cars more expensive. The Honda Civic was one of the most efficient cars on the market at the time, and Honda automobiles started to sell well. The next car, the Honda Accord, was, likewise, successful, and it was not long before Honda started to establish factories in the United States. Volkswagen and Rolls Royce had already started operating in the United States, and Honda opened a factory to build motorcycles at Marysville, Ohio, in 1979. Three years later, Honda automobiles were being made in the United States, mainly in Ohio, but also with plants in Lincoln, Alabama; Timmonsville, South Carolina; and Tallapoosa, Georgia. Later, Honda started opening other plants, including one at Alliston, Ontario, in 1986. It has started building another assembly plant at Greenburg, Indiana.
See also: Automobile; Japan; Japanese Employment System.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Mair, Andrew. Honda’s Global Local Corporation. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994.
Pascale, R. “Perspectives on Strategy: The Real Reason Behind Honda’s Success.” California Management Review, Spring 1984.
Sakiya, Tetsuo. Honda Motor: The Men, the Management, the Machines. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1987.
Sato, Masaaki. The Honda Myth: The Genius and His Wake. New York: Vertical, 2006.
Originally called the Boulder Dam, this is a concrete arch-gravity dam on the Colorado River, which is on the border of the states of Arizona and Nevada. Named by the British Broadcasting Corporation as one of the “Seven Wonders of the Industrial World,” the dam was built between 1931 and 1936 and was formally dedicated by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt on September 30, 1935, and named after his predecessor, Herbert Hoover.
The dam was constructed to produce hydropower on a massive scale. It still provides much of the power needed in large parts of Arizona, Nevada, and some of California. It is also a major tourist attraction with nearly a million visitors each year.
The need to build the dam was to help open up some parts of the United States by impounding the water from Lake Mead. The idea was first seriously studied in 1922 at the initial suggestion of Arthur Powell Davis, the chief of the reclamation service of the Bureau of Reclamation. This had the support of the Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, who was forced from office during the Teapot Dome scandal that rocked the presidency of Warren Harding. Other delays came from the worry of major litigation if there were any problems, and also the division of the power generated. The Mississippi Flood of 1927 made some congressmen come to support the plan for the Boulder Dam, but when St. Francis Dam collapsed near Los Angeles, killing up to six hundred people, there were further worries about the Boulder Dam. Eventually, on December 21, 1928, President Calvin Coolidge signed the bill that authorized the dam.
When work started on the Hoover Dam, the Great Depression had set in and the construction of the dam became one of the major projects highlighted as part of the New Deal. It employed some 5,200 men at the height of the construction contract, barring the use of any “Mongolian” laborers. There were very few African Americans, possibly around thirty, in the workforce. There were some industrial relations problems, and the Industrial Workers of the World sent over some organizers, but they were all arrested by the police in Las Vegas. When the wages of workers was cut, there were some problems, and many workers were ordered off the site. A second strike was also broken as so many of the workers were so desperate for work that they were prepared to stay. Altogether, historians have detailed that 112 people died in the construction of the dam. The first was J. G. Tierney, who drowned on December 20, 1922, during a survey of the site for a dam. His son, Patrick W. Tierney, died on December 20, 1935, and he was the last killed.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Cadbury, Deborah. Seven Wonders of the Industrial World. London: Fourth Estate, 2004.
Dunar, Andrew J., and Dennis McBride. Building Hoover Dam: An Oral History of the Great Depression. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2001.
Hiltzik, Michael A. Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century. New York: Free Press, 2010.
Stevens, Joseph E. Hoover Dam: An American Adventure. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.
Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
The thirty-first president of the United States, Herbert Hoover was an engineer who traveled around the world and made his fortune from mining. Back in the United States, he was Secretary of Commerce at a time when the U.S. economy was booming, and he helped big business by a policy of cooperation with them, rather than confrontation.
Herbert Clark Hoover was born on August 10, 1874, at West Branch, Iowa, the son of Jesse Clark Hoover, a farmer, and Hulda (or Huldah) (née Minthorn), an ordained Quaker minister. The family (originally Huber) came from Ellerstadt, Palatinate, in western Germany, and Andreas Huber immigrated to America in 1738. Herbert Hoover was a middle child—he had an older brother and younger sister. His father died when he was six, and his mother when he was nine. He spent most of his childhood living with relatives in Iowa and then in Newberg, Oregon, and then at Salem, Oregon.
A conservative, he entered New California College (Stanford University) in its first year, and Hoover always claimed to have been Stanford’s first student, having been the first person in the first class to sleep in the university dormitory. He graduated with a degree in geology, and then became an engineer. In 1897 he moved to Western Australia, where Hoover had been appointed as the geologist and mining engineer for the Sons of Gwalia Gold Mine. There were many labor problems at the mines in Australia, and the mine management brought a large number of Italian migrants. Hoover also later worked at Coolgardie.
In 1899 at Monterey, California, Hoover married Lou Henry, who had been also from a Quaker family from West Branch, Iowa, and whom he had met at Stanford. The two went to China, where Hoover was appointed as an engineer near Tianjin (then Tientsin). He was involved in the fighting in Tianjin during the Boxer Uprising, and there he distinguished himself in some actions against the anti-Western Boxers. He and his wife also learned Mandarin Chinese which, many years later, they are said to have used to speak to each other in the White House to prevent some of their conversations being overheard.
The Hoovers then moved to Australia—they had two sons—and Hoover was a mining engineer in Broken Hill, New South Wales, where he discovered large quantities of zinc being dumped in tailings. With the businessman William Baillieu and others, he helped establish the Zinc Corporation (now a part of the Rio Tinto Group). Then Herbert Hoover became a mining consultant. He was already a millionaire by 1914, and he and his wife had begun translating, producing an English version of the 1556 mining manual De re Metallica.
With the outbreak of World War I, Hoover was involved in helping organize the repatriation of 120,000 Americans from Europe. It was his first foray into public life, and he followed this up with his work for the Committee for Relief in Belgium. Then, based in London, he was involved in distributing U.S. food aid in Britain before, in 1917, becoming the head of the U.S. Food Administration. After the war had ended, he was also involved in providing food relief to Germany and to some parts of Russia. This led to criticism that he was feeding people in areas under Bolshevik control, to which he retorted that he was feeding starving people “whatever their politics.”
The Democratic Party sought out Hoover as a possible replacement to President Woodrow Wilson, but Hoover instead decided to devote himself to the Hoover War Collection at Stanford University. Now the Hoover Institution, it has one of the largest collections of material on World War I, and subsequent conflicts, in the world. Hoover also turned to the Republican Party and was nominated for the presidency. With the election of Warren Harding, he became Secretary of Commerce, retaining that position until August 21, 1928, when he resigned to contest the U.S. presidency.
As Secretary of Commerce, he presided over the U.S. economy at a time of great social change and also of economic boom. Men like Henry Ford had become fabulously wealthy, with Detroit emerging as one of the industrial centers in the world. Hoover saw it as his role to encourage good relations between big business and government, and this led a reduction in labor disputes and the promotion of U.S. industry throughout the world. In 1928 Hoover was elected as U.S. president, easily defeating Al Smith. Straight after the election, he went on a goodwill tour of Latin America, including to Argentina. As president, Hoover continued the partnership between government and industry. His policy proved far less effective when the Great Depression started. He wanted a laissez-faire policy, and although he did try some works programs, it was nothing like the scale of that embarked on by his successor Franklin D. Roosevelt, who started the New Deal. Hoover took his election defeat hard. Shantytowns established around big cities came to be known as “Hoovervilles,” and some newspapers described him as “the most hated man in America.”
In retirement, the Hoovers initially remained low key, but he was critical of Roosevelt. He wanted the United States to remain neutral in World War II and urged the United States against an alliance with the Soviet Union. After Pearl Harbor, Hoover gave his full support to the war effort, but Roosevelt never appointed him to any position, although Harry Truman sent him to Germany in 1946 to assess the food situation. An outspoken anticommunist, he attended the Republican National Conventions up until 1960. He was unable to attend in 1964 because of ill health. He died on October 20, 1964.
Herbert Hoover
See also: Capitalism; New Deal.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Burner, David. Herbert Hoover: A Public Life. New York: Atheneum, 1984.
Hatfield, Mark, ed. Herbert Hoover Reassessed. Washington, DC: U.S. G.P.O., 2002.
Hoover, Herbert C. The Challenge to Liberty. New York: Da Capo Press, 1973.
Lloyd, Craig. Aggressive Introvert: A Study of Herbert Hoover and Public Relations Management, 1912–1932. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1973.
Nash, George H. The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Engineer, 1874–1914. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983.
———. Life of Herbert Hoover: The Humanitarian, 1914–1917. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.
———. The Life of Herbert Hoover: Master of Emergencies, 1917–1918. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
Smith, Gene. The Shattered Dream: Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970.
Smith, Richard Norton. An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.
During the period from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the early twentieth century, there occurred in the United States the rapid growth of very large industries often known as “Big Business.” The most important of these dealt in such products as oil, iron and steel, beef, sugar, and tobacco. As they grew, practically all of these industries, and others, followed two routes toward “bigness.” These were horizontal integration and vertical integration. Few in those days could have predicted how significant these business tactics were to become in terms of their influence over American society and economy. In horizontal integration, a company or small group of companies attempt to control a single stage of production completely in order to take advantage of economies of scale and reduce competition.
The successful businesses that had their origins in horizontal mergers before 1895 usually went through a common set of experiences. First, a number of firms would enter an industry, producing goods in large volume in factories that were expensive to build and maintain. For a while, profits would be good and businesses would expand, but soon the market would begin to fill up and business leaders worked to maintain or enlarge their share of the market by cutting prices. When this did not work effectively, they would seek other solutions.
These solutions involved three types of horizontal integration: the cartel, the trust, and the holding company. The first solution attempted by big business leaders during this period was the forming of cartels. A cartel is a loose form of organizational control that can, if properly managed, halt overproduction and falling prices by agreement. There were two major problems with cartels. First, after the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, they were illegal. Second, they did not work since decisions made by the group could not be enforced.
Meanwhile, another form of horizontal growth known as the trust appeared. Pioneered by John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, this technique was popular from 1882 until around 1889. In this form of organization, a group of trustees received the common stock of different corporations in exchange for trust certificates, thereby gaining legal control over the properties of the participating firms. This technique was devised in order to avoid the common-law prohibition against one corporation holding stock in another. However, in 1889, New Jersey passed a law permitting corporations chartered there to own stocks in other such businesses. This move rendered the trust system obsolete and made way for the creation of holding companies. However, the term trust continued to be used in reference to all big businesses.
Rockefeller’s Standard Oil is the classic example of a giant industry that, at one time or another, used all the known methods of combination in order to bring stability to a chaotic industry by imposing central control and reaping enormous profits as a result. There were others, including American Tobacco and American Sugar Refinery, that were equally large and important. All of them, during their developmental years, looked first to the cartel method, then to trusts, and finally to the holding company approach to facilitate their growth. In addition, they were all both horizontally and vertically integrated. In vertical integration, all the stages of production, from the acquisition of raw materials to the retailing of the final product, are controlled by one company.
An understanding of such techniques as these is essential to an understanding of the enormous growth of the American industrial economy that began in the late nineteenth century and which has continued to the present day. Equally important is the fact that their growth led directly to public demands for the regulation of huge businesses. These efforts also began in the late nineteenth century and continue to the present day, but they have been only marginally successful.
See also: Bell, Alexander Graham; Central Pacific Railroad; Depression of 1893; Eight-Hour Day; Ford, Henry; George, Henry; Gompers, Samuel; Great Depression; Insull, Samuel; laissez-faire; New Deal; Powderly, Terence; Roosevelt, Theodore; Roosevelt, Franklin Delano; Sherman Antitrust Act; Veblen, Thorstein; Wilson, Woodrow.
—Kenneth E. Hendrickson Jr.
Further Reading
Galbraith, Sasha. Anatomy of a Business: What It Is, What It Does, How It Works. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Josephson, Matthew. The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934.
Kolko, Gabriel. The Triumph of Conservatism. New York: The Free Press, 1963.
Nevins, Allan. John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1941.
Wall, Joseph F. Andrew Carnegie. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Hotchkiss, Benjamin (1826–1885)
An American inventor and arms dealer, Benjamin B. Hotchkiss became one of the most prolific inventors of weaponry of the nineteenth century, and his designs saw increased use long after his death. Hotchkiss was born on October 1, 1826, into an industrial family that both invented and worked machinery. He grew up in Watertown, Connecticut, and followed the family tradition, first as a tinkerer, and later as a gunmaker working on revolvers for Colt. His first real success came with a cannon shell that he codesigned in 1856 with his brother, Andrew. The Mexican government first purchased this weapon. Continued work led to the Hotchkiss rifled artillery shell, which along with an improvement on the percussion fuses used to fire cannons, enabled rifled cannons of the U.S. Civil War to be the most accurate and used cannons of the conflict.
After the Civil War, in 1867, Hotchkiss moved to France, where he continued to develop advanced weaponry. That same year he established the Hotchkiss Company in France, located not far from Paris. During the 1870s he created early versions of machine guns, bolt-action repeating rifles, and several prototypes of revolving cannons. By the time of his death his business had expanded across both hemispheres. At the time of his death he was developing a machine gun, which later became the Hotchkiss Gun. The company continued production and eventually produced this gas-powered, air-cooled weapon. It was first introduced in 1895, went through several modifications, including a second model in 1900, until ultimately the 1914 Model was produced. The U.S. military used the early versions of the Hotchkiss gun in its war against Native Americans, particularly being used at the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The French also adopted it, and it became one of the primary machine guns used by the French, British, and Americans during World War I. The Japanese military also used the weapon. The World War I “Hotchkiss Gun” was credited as one of the most reliable machine guns available to the Allied Forces. The gun had a simple design that provided for ease of use and few jams or other problems. It was a heavy weapon, weighing fifty-four pounds not including tripod and ammunition, and therefore it could not be easily moved. It had to be fired from a stable platform, such as the tripod, but it was quick to set up and had deadly effectiveness.
Mexican federal soldiers using the Hotchkiss guns against the Zapatistas.
Hotchkiss left a mark on post–World War I military history in that his revolutionary design became the launching board for similar weapon systems through the Second World War and beyond. His French company, Hotchkiss et Cie, added military vehicles and cars to its production line and produced the first armored car with a mounted machine gun in 1909. The company eventually made a wide range of vehicles including ambulances and tanks, as well as motors, in conjunction with their partner companies, including Laffly and the American company Willys. The Hotchkiss Company also absorbed the Delahaye Company and merged with the Brandt Company. Much of this post–World War II production centered on jeep design, manufacture, and parts.
His legacy also has a gentler side. His wife, Maria Bissell Hotchkiss, founded both the Hotchkiss School (1891) and the Hotchkiss Library (1892) in Connecticut. Located in Lakeville, Connecticut, the Hotchkiss School began small as a school for men, it has since become coeducational (1971), and the high school has grown slowly from its original class of 50 to its current enrollment of 570. The Hotchkiss Library, in Sharon, Connecticut, also still exists to serve the local community.
See also: Industrial Revolution; Factory System; Maxim, Hiram; Gatling, Richard.
—Antonio Thompson
Further Reading
Ellis, John. The Social History of the Machine Gun. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
Keller, Julia. Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It. New York: Viking, 2008.
Smith, Anthony. Machine Gun: The Story of the Men and the Weapon That Changed the Face of War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003.
Ware, Pat. M201: The Story of Hotchkiss M201 and the French Jeep. Balby, Doncaster, United Kingdom: Jeep Books Ltd., 2002.
An American inventor and the pioneer of the sewing machine, Elias Howe was born on July 9, 1819, at Spencer, Worcester County, Massachusetts, the son of Elias Howe Sr. and Polly (née Bemis). His father was a farmer who also owned a sawmill; he was a descendant of John Howe, who had become a freeman of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1640.
As a teenager, Elias Howe, the inventor, only occasionally went to school, and when he was twelve, he was hired out to a local farmer to make some money for his family. Because he was often ill, he was not able to help out much in farming, and he tried to work in his father’s sawmill. Through that, he became interested in machinery and was apprenticed in a cotton mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1835. This only lasted for two years, but with the Panic of 1837 following the bursting of a speculative bubble in New York, Elias had to move to Cambridge, where he started working as a machinist operating a hemp-carding machine. This only lasted for a few months before he moved to Boston, where he was apprenticed to Ari Davis, a watchmaker who was also involved in making scientific and surveying equipment for Harvard University. This allowed Howe to become skilled in the making of machines.
Apparently it was one day while he was working for Ari Davis that he heard Davis talk to somebody about the design for a sewing machine. This led Howe to start to design his own machine. Although many books credit Elias Howe with having invented the sewing machine, this was not the case. Some other inventors such as Walter Hunt worked on the idea before him, but Howe was the first to refine their ideas and produce a functional machine. His first design, using a double-pointed needle with the eye in the middle, did not work, but Howe persisted in his work. In 1844 he came up with the idea of a lockstitch, with a needle that operated a little like a very small loom similar to those he had worked with as a teenager. He then managed to devise a new shuttle mechanism with a much lower thread than he had previously used.
Elias Howe married Elizabeth J. Ames of Boston on March 3, 1841, and they had two children, Jane, born in 1842, and Simon, born in 1844. Another child, Julia, was born in 1846. By that time, Howe became so obsessed with his invention that he gave up working for Davis, who was paying him $9 per week, and lived with his father in Cambridge, devoting all his time to the design of the sewing machine. A friend named George Fisher also helped by allowing the entire extended Howe family to stay with him, and he advanced Howe $500, which helped with buying machines and tools to help him perfect the sewing machine. During the winter of 1844 to 1845, Howe continued to fine-tune his design, and by April 1845 the sewing machine was capable of 250 stitches a minute. In mid-1846 he managed to make another machine, and then he traveled to Washington, D.C., and applied for a patent for the sewing machine.
On September 10, 1846, Howe received a U.S. patent for his design, the first in the United States for a sewing machine that used the lockstitch design. However, there was little interest in the United States for manufacturing the machine, so Howe decided to offer it in England. His brother, Amasa Howe, went to London, and there he sold a third sewing machine that Elias Howe had made to William Thomas, who was a manufacturer of corsets and umbrellas. He received £250 for this, which also gave Thomas the rights for the machine in Great Britain. Thomas, who also made shoes, saw the benefits of using a sewing machine to sew leather, and he persuaded Elias Howe to travel to London, advancing him the cost of the passage for the Howe family. Howe then worked for Thomas for $15 a week for the next eight months to try to make a sewing machine for leather. However, Howe and Thomas argued, and Howe pawned his model and patent papers to get enough money for his family to travel back to the United States, with Howe returning several months later, having to find work cooking on a trans-Atlantic ship.
Elias Howe managed to rejoin his family at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in time to see his wife just before she died. However, Howe also discovered on his return that Isaac Singer and others were making their sewing machines that used the lockstitch design that Howe had invented. A supporter named George W. Bliss, who had bought Fisher’s half-share in the design, advanced enough money to sue Singer and the others. The legal battle lasted from 1849 until 1854. By this time, Elias had remarried, and his second wife, Fanny (or Rose), who was born in England, was twelve years his junior. She helped bring up the three children in Roxbury, Massachusetts, where Elias described himself in the 1850 federal census has being a “machinist.”
The legal case was finally settled in 1854, with Howe winning his battle and earning royalties from Singer. Soon afterward Bliss died, and Howe was able to buy back the full ownership of his patent from Bliss’s estate. The patent expired in 1860, but in March 1861 Howe managed to get it extended for seven years. During that time his royalties from the sewing machine earned him about $4,000 a week. In the 1860 federal census for Fairfield, Connecticut, Elias Howe continued to describe himself as a machinist. With the outbreak of the American Civil War, Howe contributed much of his fortune to the Union cause. He organized his own infantry regiment in Connecticut, which he equipped, although he himself served as a private in it from August 14, 1862, until July 19, 1865.
In 1865 Howe established the Howe Machine Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and by fine-tuning his sewing machine design, he became very wealthy. Two years later his sewing machine won the Gold Medal at the Paris Exhibition. Howe died soon afterward, on October 3, 1867, at Brooklyn, New York, and he was buried at the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. In 1965, The Beatles, in their film Help!, ended with the line, “Respectfully dedicated to Elias Howe who, in 1846, invented the sewing machine.” In 2004 he was inducted into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame.
See also: Textile Industry.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Parkman, Mary Rosetta. Conquests of Invention: Cyprus H. McCormick, Elias Howe . . . New York: The Century Co., 1921.
Salamon, H. N. History of the Sewing Machine, from the Year 1750, with a Biography of Elias Howe Jr. London: n.p., 1863.
In the early twentieth century, workers’ welfare and satisfaction became a serious concern for management. Management theory in the 1920s emphasized the social importance of work and work groups. During the 1930s and the Great Depression, industrial productivity was at an all-time low. Industrial psychologists began evaluating existing industrial conditions to increase worker satisfaction and thus productivity. Such a focus on workers’ sustainability gave birth to the human relations movement, which emphasized the importance of social factors (i.e., worker morale) in influencing work performance. This movement encouraged ideas about the impact of pleasant work environments and good interpersonal relationships among colleagues on productivity. Consisting of the culmination of both sociological research and managerial principles, human relations became an essential element for an evolving workforce.
Building on the workplace efficiency model of Frederick W. Taylor’s scientific management, this movement resulted from the distinguished work of Harvard Business School professor Elton Mayo (1880–1949), who, between 1927 and 1932, conducted a series of manufacturing experiments at the Western Electric Company in Hawthorne, Illinois. A native of Australia, Mayo was a brilliant lecturer and researcher. He taught mental and moral philosophy at the University of Queensland, which led to his investigations in psychopathological testing on World War I shell-shock victims. Teaming with Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), Mayo created an analysis of industry devised from elements of anthropology, psychology, and physiology. He developed a philosophy that focused on the awareness of workers’ mind-sets as essential in understanding industrial needs.
In 1923, Mayo became a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and studied the effects of employee turnover from fatigue. This research took a science-based and multidisciplinary approach that won the attention Harvard Business School dean Wallace B. Donham. Donham petitioned Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell for funds to appoint Mayo to the Harvard faculty. While Lowell doubted the new discipline and the risks and expenses involved, Donham convinced him that Mayo’s unique research would indeed prove influential to both industry and society at large.
Having secured this appointment, Mayo set out to identify the effects of the physical work environment on work productivity. Collaborating with colleagues F. J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson, Mayo began his experiments by evaluating the effects of lighting on productivity. He found that increased lighting increased productivity. Mayo then investigated other factors such as fatigue and monotony, rest breaks, work hours, and temperature. Changes in each factor resulted in marked improvements in productivity. Mayo concluded that workers were not responding to physical changes in the work environment, but to the observation itself. This became known as the “Hawthorne Effect” (i.e., changes in performance resulting from the participants’ awareness of being observed and their expectations concerning their role as research participants).
Since the results from the Hawthorne Experiments revealed that the production of the workers seemed to improve regardless of the experimental manipulation implemented, the rational conclusion indicated that the workers welcomed the attention of the researchers who expressed an interest in them and in improving their job tasks. The experiments were only expected to last one year, but the researchers’ discoveries about motivation and the difficulty creating empirical measurements of the psychological phenomenon expanded the study to last for five years. At the end of this period, Mayo made four basic conclusions: (1) the aptitudes of individuals are imperfect predictors of job performance; (2) informal organization affects productivity; (3) work-group norms affect productivity; and (4) the workplace is a social system. Individual attitudes affecting the physical and mental productivity of workers seemed strongly influenced by social aspects. The studies also revealed that the relations developed between supervisors and workers influenced the way and the spirit in which the workers followed directions. As a result, the Hawthorne researchers considered the workplace as a social system made up of interdependent facets and human relations. Mayo’s human relation movement emphasized the role that social components have in determining worker behaviors. He had apparently demonstrated that worker morale and satisfaction are critical components in job performance.
In the present day, the impact of the Hawthorne studies continues to promote investigation in the human relations arena. Modern researches tend to believe that Mayo’s categorical conclusions were overstated. In addition, a 2009 research project from the University of Chicago reanalyzed the original Hawthorne data and found that other factors also played a role in productivity. Nevertheless, modern researchers do accept as axiomatic the basic principles first illuminated by Mayo and Malinowski in the Hawthorne study.
Human relations, influenced by scientific management, promoted the principles that employers should protect the rights of workers, and it gave employers a productivity incentive to pay more attention to individual worker’s needs. These precepts influenced the development of human resource departments, which acquired power in work organizations. In the past, personnel departments only administered the hiring, firing, discipline, promotion, and compensation of workers. As a result of the human relations movement, human resources as a field has evolved from a traditionally administrative function to recognizing and exploring the link between contented people and organizational success.
—Jessica Buck
See also: Capitalism; Division of Labor; Marx, Karl; Smith, Adam.
Further Reading
Carrell, M. R., and C. Heavrin. Labor Relations and Collective Bargaining: Cases, Practices, and Law, eighth edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2007.
Goetsch, D. L. Industrial Supervision: In the Age of High Technology. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1992.
Katz, H. C., T. A. Kochan, and A. J. Colvin. An Introduction to Collective Bargaining & Industrial Relations. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.
Riggio, R. E. Introduction to Industrial/Organization Psychology, fourth edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003.
Hume, Walter Reginald (1873–1943)
An Australian inventor, Walter Hume designed the first steel-reinforced concrete pipes, which he and his brother manufactured for sale in Australia and overseas. Walter Reginald Hume was born on November 29, 1873, at Fitzroy, an inner suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, the second son of James Hill Hume and his wife, Caroline (née Gill). His father was from Scotland and worked as a professional phrenologist, lecturing around the state, and his mother was from Bristol, England. On October 12, 1887, a month before Walter turned fourteen, his father died, and the teenager had to find work, trying his hand at many things until he finally ended up as a plasterer.
When the depression of the early 1890s hit Melbourne, Walter and his brother, Ernest, had to find work in country towns around Victoria. Much of their work was in farm building and repairing fences, and the two received a patent for a type of fence that was able to keep out vermin. The two established their own workshop in the town of Malmsbury in central Victoria, making this new fence. With much work in South Australia, Walter moved to the nearby state, establishing a factory in the state capital, Adelaide, in about 1904. During a downturn in the economy two years later, however, the two brothers were unable to continue their business and closed their operations in Malmsbury and started making ornamental steel fencing in Adelaide. They worked in this field until 1910, when the two formed the Humes’ Patent Cement Iron Syndicate Ltd. Walter Hume had come up with a new centrifugal process for manufacturing concrete pipes, and he secured a patent for the process in September 1910.
The brick-lined sewers used during the period had wooden or terracotta pipes that were far too expensive for rapidly growing suburbs. Hume’s new method involved pumping concrete into a spinning cylindrical mold lined with reinforcing mesh. The force of the centrifuge flung the concrete around, squeezing out water and making a pipe that was very strong and waterproof yet relatively light. Until World War II, Hume’s company was the only one in Australia to use this technology, exporting it under royalty agreements all around the world. This helped with urban development in Australia and many other countries by making the provision of water, sewerage, and also drainage facilities much cheaper to install.
In April 1911, the Hume Bros Cement Iron Co. Ltd. was incorporated in Adelaide. Walter Hume became the managing director, and he owned a third of the shares. Ernest owned another third, and the remainder was subscribed by South Australians. The business grew slowly, but in July 1920 it expanded to form the Hume Pipe Co. (Aust.) Ltd., incorporated in Melbourne. By this time the company had an effective monopoly on making concrete pipes, but because of wartime restrictions on building, it had not declared any dividends during the war. This new company also had men such as the Australian World War I hero Sir John Monash; South Australian politician Senator A. J. McLachlan; L. J. (later Lord) Clifford; and Thomas Sydney (later Sir Thomas) Nettlefold; and Walter Hume on the board of directors. Walter Hume only owned 14 percent of the initial share capital, but he remained as managing director, and L. J. Clifford was the financial director, and J. A. Cussen was the secretary. In 1923, Ernest Hume left the company to establish the first commercial wireless transmitting station in Adelaide.
By 1922 the company had established a branch in New Zealand, and the following year they had a branch in Singapore. This success led to the formation of Hume Steel Ltd., another company that, from 1923, manufactured steel pipes using a new process of automatic electric arc welding. In spite of the Depression of the 1930s, the company continued to expand, and by the time of Walter Hume’s death in 1943, there were sixty factories in Australia and New Zealand.
On November 23, 1909, at Moonta, in South Australia, Walter Hume married Alice Louisa Bourne (née Mudford). They had five sons and four daughters. Walter’s mother also lived in Adelaide until her death in 1930—she was buried with her husband at St. Kilda Cemetery in Melbourne. All of Walter’s sons joined the family business, working with their father until his death from cancer on July 21, 1943. A Freemason, he was buried in the Presbyterian section of the Springvale Necropolis, a large cemetery in a southeastern suburb of Melbourne. After his death his sons left the main company and formed W. R. Hume Pty. Ltd., running a similar operation in competition with the Hume Steel Ltd., which after 1950 became Hume Ltd. His widow died in 1972.
—Justin Corfield
Snooks, G. D. Hume Enterprises in Australia 1910–1940: A Study in Micro-Economic Growth. PhD Thesis, Australian National University, 1971.
———. “Innovation and the Growth of the Firm: Hume Enterprises 1910–1940.” Australian Economic History Review (March 1973): 16–40.
Huntington, Collis Potter (1821–1900)
A leading U.S. railroad executive, Collis Potter Huntington was one of the “Big Four” who established railroads in the west of the United States—the others are Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker. They built the Central Pacific Railroad, which led to the construction of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States.
Collis Potter Huntington was born on either April 16 or October 22, 1821, in Harwinton, Connecticut, in the United States. He was the fifth of nine children of William Huntington and Elizabeth (née Vincent), both of whose families had settled in the Americas in the seventeenth century. He grew up in some poverty, and when he turned fourteen he started working for a neighbor for $7 per month and board. In 1836 he moved to New York and went into business, managing to save up some capital. In 1842 Huntington and one of his brothers started running a general merchandise business in Oneonta, New York. At the start of the California gold rush in 1848, Huntington decided to go to California, and he made his way there through Panama. On arrival at the goldfields, after one day attempting to mine, he decided that he would establish a business selling supplies for miners and also other material with Mark Hopkins. However, by June 1850, he had returned to Oneonta, appearing in the U.S. federal census there.
In the late 1850s the concept of a transcontinental railway was raised, and Huntington saw the obvious advantages of it. He had been involved in the railroad through the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1860, and his hazardous journey in Panama in 1848 had made him believe that there was a far better solution for travel from the East Coast to the West Coast. He and Hopkins and also two other businessmen—Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker—decided that they could build the railway from California. The four of them formed the Central Pacific Railway, and this formed the western link of the railway. Huntington was believed to be the most ruthless, and it was not long before he had managed to remove Stanford from the firm. On May 10, 1869, the western part of the transcontinental railway, built by Huntington and the others, met at Promontory, Utah, with the Union Pacific Railroad, and the “golden spike” was driven in and the railroad was completed. The railroad made him wealthy, both in terms of the government money offered for its completion and the subsequent use of it.
Huntington then turned his attention to other railroads, the next being the Southern Pacific Railroad, and that company’s first locomotive, C. P. Huntington, was named after him. He then started work on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O), which went from Richmond, Virginia, across West Virginia and then to the Ohio River, where he planned the city of Huntington. At this time the southern part of West Virginia was being transformed with the establishment of coalmines, and the C&O made a fortune in transporting the coal. By this time he was also active in Washington, D.C., as a lobbyist for his own railroad interests, something that made him well known in the U.S. capital. He also became involved in the United States & Brazil Steamship Company, which ran steamers between New York and Brazil, and the Old Dominion Steamship Company, the Market Street Railway of San Francisco, and railroad companies in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio.
During the 1880s, the C&O Peninsula Subdivision extended from Church Hill Tunnel at Richmond down through the Virginia Peninsula to Williamsburg and then to Hampton Roads, where coal piers were established in what was transformed into the city of Newport News. There Huntington established the Newport News Shipbuilding Company, and this became the largest privately owned shipyard in the United States. By this time with the demand for freight cars for the C&O and also for other railroads, Huntington helped finance the Ensign Manufacturing Company, which was incorporated on November 1, 1872. Much of his later life was lived in relative obscurity, although from April 1890 he was president of the Southern Pacific Company. When Stanford, his former partner, took up a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1885, he broke with him. Huntington entered the public gaze briefly when he accused Stanford of using the Southern Pacific Company to help his election to the Senate.
Collis Huntington married Elizabeth T. Stoddard from Cornwall, Connecticut, and the couple adopted a daughter, Clara Elizabeth Prentice (later Prentice-Huntington). She was the niece of Elizabeth Stoddard and married Prince Francis Edward von Hatzfeldt of Wittenberg, Germany, and moved to England. After Elizabeth died in 1883, Collis Huntington married Arabella D. Worsham in the following year. He adopted Arabella’s son by her first husband, Archer M. Huntington. Archer Huntington established the Hispanic Society of America in upper Manhattan, a museum, and library of rare books open to the public. Collis Huntington died on August 13, 1900, at Pine Knot, Adirondacks. He left much of his fortune to his nephew, Henry E. Huntington, who founded the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. Collis Huntington himself left much of his own art collection, as well as $3 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
See also: Brazil; Transcontinental Railroad.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Ambrose, Stephen E. Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Daggett, Stuart. Chapters on the History of the Southern Pacific. New York: A. M. Kelley, 1922.
Evans, Cerinda W. Collis Potter Huntington. Newport News, VA: Mariners’ Museum, 1954.
Russell, C. E. Stories of the Great Railroads. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1912.
The use of hydropower to capture the ability of moving water has been used since ancient times, and waterwheels were used in ancient Egypt and ancient China. By medieval times they had become commonplace throughout Europe, and also in Asia. Indeed, many of the early inventions in the Industrial Revolution had made use of hydropower to run machinery, often through a system of cogs.
Hydroelectric power involves the harnessing of the power of water to convert energy into electricity. Generally, this has involved the building of large dams, which can then create substantial reservoirs. The flow of water is directed through a section of the dam, and this is used for the generation of hydroelectric power. This takes place because the water that is stored or collected at a higher elevation on one side of the dam is then forced through tunnels or pipes into a lower elevation. The difference in levels is known as the “head.” As the water rushes down these pipes, it rotates turbines, which have been located there. These turbines then help drive generators that convert the mechanical energy of the turbines into electricity. Now transformers are also built into the system so that high-voltage current can be transmitted long distances.
The traditional method of generating hydroelectricity is to build a dam that impounds a river and creates a relatively high head. This then means that a smaller volume of water is needed to turn the turbines and generate power. Many of these dams are also located in areas where their presence helps regulate water supplies and prevents flooding. For some of them, the location of the dams is where it may best suit agriculture by helping regulate irrigation, but for others they are placed near cities or factories that use the power. There are also factories that are relocated to be near the dams to make use of the power.
With so many hydroelectric schemes around the world, there have been many modifications. Some of these involve regulating the water so that less electricity is generated in off-peak periods. Alternatively, the water is transferred to a different storage area that can then be used to cope with peak loads. There are also a number of hydroelectric schemes such as those on the estuary of the Rance River in Brittany, France, where the rise and fall of tides has been important, and these have led to ways of harnessing tidal power.
In the 1930s, to help provide employment in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was involved in the construction of dams throughout the country. There were many protests against the seizures of land to make the dams and lakes, and concern about whether or not there should be methods of reducing electricity use rather than increasing sources of it. The process had actually begun before the New Deal with the Hoover Dam, but the TVA accelerated it. Currently only 7.2 percent of electricity in the United States comes from hydroelectric power.
During World War II, the Soviet Union destroyed their massive Dneiper Hydroelectric Station to prevent it falling into German hands (it was rebuilt in 1948), and the 1943 British Dam Buster raids were involved in bombing the dams in the Ruhr, although these were primarily irrigation dams. After the end of the war, the Australian government started its Snowy Mountain River project, which employed many European migrants who moved to Australia to work on a huge hydroelectric scheme in New South Wales. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson offered a “TVA for the Mekong” that would help in the development of the region, in a bid to get Ho Chi Minh to hold back from his attacks on South Vietnam.
In Mozambique the Portuguese built the Cahora Bassa Dam, and during the war of independence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Portuguese showed that this was a part of their continued investment in Mozambique, protecting it from attack by the rebel FRELIMO movement. Currently 96.4 percent of electricity in Mozambique comes from hydroelectricity. In Paraguay 99.8 percent of electricity comes from hydroelectric power, essentially from the Itaipu Dam, which in 1997 generated more than eighteen times the total domestic production of the country and hence provides electricity to Brazil and Argentina. In North Korea, the Japanese constructed the Sup’ung Hydroelectric Plant, which provided more than 90 percent of the electricity for the entire Korean Peninsula until partition in 1945. It was bombed by the UN forces in 1952, causing a blackout in North Korea for two weeks. Since the ceasefire in 1953, North Korea has continued using hydroelectric power, and 67.3 percent of their electricity needs comes from this source. In Norway, 99.3 percent of electricity comes from hydroelectric power, 97 percent in Albania, 92.3 percent in Kyrgyzstan, 81.4 percent in Peru, 75 percent in Ecuador, 61 percent in Canada, 57 percent in Switzerland, 53.8 percent in Sweden, 50 percent in Bolivia, 46.4 percent in Chile, and 19 percent in the Russian Federation. China has embarked on a major hydroelectric scheme, and the Three Gorges Dam has helped generate electricity for the Chinese power grid, where 16.8 percent of electricity comes from hydroelectricity. There has recently been a resurgence in interest in hydroelectricity because of the worry over global warming. Hydroelectricity is an easy source of renewable technology.
See also: Russia.
—Justin Corfield
Further Reading
Llyinykh, I. Hydroelectric Stations. Moscow: MIR, 1985.
Lyndon, Lamar. Hydro-Electric Power, two volumes. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1916.
McCully, Patrick. Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams. London: Zed Press, 2001.
Reynolds, Terry S. Stronger Than a Hundred Men: A History of the Vertical Water Wheel. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 2003.