Introduction
1.Most manufacturing jobs are in factories, but not all. Some are in retail establishments, like bakeries, or even in homes. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment, Hours and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National),” http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet (accessed Sept. 24, 2016).
2.Heather Long, “U.S. Has Lost 5 Million Manufacturing Jobs Since 2000,” CNN Money, Mar. 29, 2016, http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/29/news/economy/us-manufacturing-jobs/; The World Bank, World Data Bank, “Employment in Industry and World Development Indicators” (based on International Labour Organization data), http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.IND.EMPL.ZS, and http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=2&series=SL.IND.EMPL.ZS&country= (accessed Sept. 24, 2016); Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, 2017 (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016), 179.
3.For life on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, see Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Row, 1981) (French life expectancy, 90), and E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962), 22–43. See also Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter, and Annabel Gregory, Height, Health and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 292; Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 71–72; and Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook, 2017, 303, 895, 943.
4.Tim Strangleman, “‘Smokestack Nostalgia,’ ‘Ruin Porn’ or Working-Class Obituary: The Role and Meaning of Deindustrial Representation,” International Labor and Working-Class History 84 (Fall 2013), 23–37; Marshall Berman, “Dancing with America: Philip Roth, Writer on the Left,” New Labor Forum 9 (Fall–Winter 2001), 53–54.
5.“modern, adj. and n.” and “modernity, n.” OED Online. September 2016. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/120618 (accessed September 17, 2016); Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 208–09; Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” in M. Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, eds., Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
6.Size can be measured in different ways. I have defined it by number of employees. As a labor historian, that seems natural, coming from an interest in the lived experience of workers and class relations. There are other useful ways to define scale that would lead to the selection of a different set of factories to study. If we were to look at the size of factory buildings, in the current era the massive aircraft factories of Boeing and Airbus would rise to the fore, huge structures that go on and on but have within them fewer workers than many more compact plants. To understand the ecological impact of large factories, we might define size by the acreage of the sites on which production facilities are located. By that standard, chemical plants and, especially, atomic-fuel and weapons complexes exceed in size most of the factories discussed in this book. My definition of size is somewhat arbitrary, but it serves well the focus of this study on the linkage between the factory and modernity.
7.Gillian Darley, Factory (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), and Nina Rappaport, Vertical Urban Factory (New York: Actar, 2016) are exceptions, but are heavily architectural in their tilt.
Chapter 1
“LIKE MINERVA FROM THE BRAIN OF JUPITER”
1.Prior to 1721, only a few British industries had centralized production facilities and these, by later standards, were quite small, like the Nottingham framework knitting workshops that employed several dozen workers apiece. In Central and Western Europe, there were a few large-scale, unmechanized manufacturing operations. Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain, 1700–1820 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 212; Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. II (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 329–38. U.S. figure calculated from 1850 census data in U.S. Census Office, Manufacturers of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1865), 730.
2.The Derby silk mill is generally considered the first factory in England, the pioneer in the Industrial Revolution. There were at least a few earlier production facilities that had some if not all the characteristics of modern factories, including the sixteenth-century silk mills in Bologna, which developed some of the machinery and organization that the Lombes later copied. Anthony Calladine, “Lombe’s Mill: An Exercise in Reconstruction,” Industrial Archeology Review XVI, 1 (Autumn 1993), 82, 86.
3.Calladine, “Lombe’s Mill,” 82, 89; William Henry Chaloner, People and Industries (London, Frank Cass and Co., Ltd., 1963), 14–15. An 1891 fire destroyed most of the building, which was reconstructed on a smaller scale. It now houses the Derby Silk Mill museum.
4.S. R. H. Jones, “Technology, Transaction Costs, and the Transition to Factory Production in the British Silk Industry, 1700–1870,” Journal of Economic History XLVII (1987), 75; Chaloner, People and Industries, 9–18; Calladine, “Lombe’s Mill,” 82, 87–88; R. B. Prosser and Susan Christian, “Lombe, Sir Thomas (1685–1739),” rev. Maxwell Craven, Susan Christian, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., Jan. 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16956.
5.John Guardivaglio, one of the Italian workers who had come back with John Lombe, helped set up the mill near Manchester. Tram could be made from raw silk imported from Persia, easier to get than the higher-quality Italian or Chinese silk needed for organzine. Calladine, “Lombe’s Mill,” 87, 96–97; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 202–03; Jones, “Technology, Transaction Costs, and the Transition to Factory Production,” 77.
6.Daniel Defoe, A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, 3rd. ed., vol. III (London: J. Osborn, 1742), 67; Charles Dickens, Hard Times for These Times ([1854] London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 7, 1.
7.James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, vol. III (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1906), 121.
8.Though India was the most prominent center of cotton textile production, there were others, including Southeast Asia, the Arabian Gulf, and the Ottoman Empire, where artisans turned out imitations of Indian cottons. Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Cotton Textiles in the Indian Subcontinent, 1200–1800,” 17–41, and Giorgio Riello, “The Globalization of Cotton Textiles: Indian Cottons, Europe, and the Atlantic World, 1600–1850,” 274, in The Spinning World: A Global history of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850, ed. Riello and Parthasarathi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 17–41.
9.Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 126; Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures or An Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain (1835; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967), 12.
10.D. T. Jenkins, “Introduction,” in D. T. Jenkins, The Textile Industries (Volume 8 of the Industrial Revolutions, ed. R. A. Church and E. A. Wrigley) (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), xvii; Riello, Cotton, 127.
11.Riello, Cotton, 172–73, 176; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 205.
12.Fustians were easier to produce than all-cotton fabric because flax warps were less likely than cotton to break during weaving.
13.Riello, “The Globalization of Cotton Textiles, 337–39; Riello, Cotton, 217, 219.
14.In the 1850s, the United States supplied 77 percent of the raw cotton imported by Britain, 90 percent by France, 92 percent by Russia, and 60 percent by the German states. Between 1820 and 1860 the number of slaves in Mississippi and Louisiana, mostly growing cotton, rose from 101,878 to 768,357. R. S. Fitton and A. P. Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights 1758–1830: A Study of the Early Factory System (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), 347–48; Riello, Cotton, 188, 191, 195 (Marx quote), 200–207, 259; Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), 197; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014), 243; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 256.
15.Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, [1835]), 11; R. L. Hills, “Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton, ‘Why Three Inventors?’ ” Textile History 10 (1979), 114–15.
16.Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 115; Deborah Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 78; David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 57. European commentators and historians long claimed that Indian wages were far below British ones, leading to lower prices for cotton products, but recently some historians have challenged this view. For a restatement of the orthodox position, see Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 64; for a reassessment suggesting near parity of wages, see Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 35–46.
17.Jenkins, “Introduction,” x; Franklin F. Mendels, “Proto-Industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process,” Journal of Economic History XXXII (1972), 241–61; S. D. Chapman, “Financial Restraints on the Growth of Firms in the Cotton Industry, 1790–1850,” Textile History 5 (1974), 50–69; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 182.
18.Hills, “Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton,” 118–23; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 236; Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 61–68, 76–78, 94–97; Adam Menuge, “The Cotton Mills of the Derbyshire Derwent and Its Tributaries,” Industrial Archeology Review XVI (1) (Autumn 1993), 38.
19.Berg, Age of Manufactures, 236, 239, 244, 248, 258; George Unwin, Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1924), 30–32, 71, 124–25; Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 85; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class ([1963] London: Pelican Books, 1968), 327, 335; Jones, “Technology, Transaction Costs, and the Transition to Factory Production,” 89–90.
20.Chaloner, People and Industries, 14–15; Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 98–99, 192–95, 224–25.
21.Small four-spindle, hand-powered spinning frames, built from Arkwright’s plans for a demonstration model, can be seen at the museums in Cromford and Belper. Hills, “Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton,” 121; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 236, 239, 242, 246; Menuge, “The Cotton Mills of the Derbyshire Derwent,” 56 (Arkwright quote).
22.John S. Cohen, “Managers and Machinery: An Analysis of the Rise of Factory Production,” Australian Economic Papers 20 (1981), 27–28; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 19, 24, 40–42.
23.Jenkins, “Introduction,” xv.
24.Berg, Age of Manufactures, 40–41, 231–32, 282–83; Pat Hudson, The Genesis of Industrial Capital: A Study of the West Riding Wool Textile Industry c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 137; Jones, “Technology, Transaction Costs, and the Transition to Factory Production,” 89–90; Roger Lloyd-Jones and A. A. Le Roux, “The Size of Firms in the Cotton Industry: Manchester 1815–1840,” The Economic History Review, new series, vol. 33, no. 1 (Feb. 1980), 77.
25.V. A. C. Gatrell, “Labour, Power, and the Size of Firms in Lancashire Cotton in the Second Quarter of the Nineteenth Century,” Economic History Review, new series, vol. 30, no. 1 (Feb. 1977), 96, 98, 112; Jenkins, “Introduction,” xv.
26.Berg, Age of Manufactures, 23–24; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 208–11; Robert Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3–4.
27.Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers, 4th ed. (London: Charles Knight, 1835), 211–23.
28.Gatrell, “Labour, Power, and the Size of Firms,” 96–97, 108; Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (1890; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1920), 8th ed., IV.XI.7, http://www.econlib.org/library/Marshall/marP25.html#Bk.IV,Ch.XI.
29.Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 184–85.
30.Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 41; Jones, “Technology, Transaction Costs, and the Transition to Factory Production,” 71–74; Jenkins, “Introduction,” xiii; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 23–24, 190, 246; Hudson, Genesis of Industrial Capital, 70–71. Marx discussed the issue of economies of scale and the rise of the factory system at great length in Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 ([1867] New York: International Publishers, 1967), chap. 13 and 14 (“Cooperation” and “Division of Labour and Manufacture”).
31.Jenkins, “Introduction,” x–xii; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 24; Hudson, Genesis of Industrial Capital, 81, 260; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 299, 302.
32.Gatrell, “Labour, Power, and the Size of Firms,” 96–97, 107.
33.On British forms of wealth, see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 113–20, 129–31. Willersley Castle now is a Christian Guild hotel. Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 91, 94–98, 102, 169, 246; R. S. Fitton, The Arkwrights: Spinners of Fortune ([1989] Matlock, Eng.: Derwent Valley Mills Educational Trust, 2012), 224–96; Frances Trollope, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong the Factory Boy ([1840] London: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1968), quote on 76.
34.Local church towers, however, did rival the mills in height. Mark Girouard, Cities & People: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 211–18; Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types (London: Routledge, 1993), 263.
35.Fitton, The Arkwrights, 30, 50, 81.
36.Fitton, The Arkwrights, 30, 81; Thomas A. Markus, “Factories, to 1850,” The Oxford Companion to Architecture, vol. 1, ed. Patrick Goode (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 304–05; Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 200–207, 211–12; Malcolm Dick, “Charles Bage, the Flax Industry and Shrewsbury’s Iron-Framed Mills,” accessed Mar. 29, 2017, http://www.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/charles-bage-the-flax-industry-and-shrewsburys-iron-framed-mills/; Markus, Buildings and Power, 266–67, 270–71, 281–82; Menuge, “The Cotton Mills of the Derbyshire Derwent,” 52–56.
37.A. J. Taylor, “Concentration and Specialization in the Lancashire Cotton Industry, 1825–1850,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, I (1949), 119–20; Markus, Buildings and Power, 275. Not all power looms were situated in sheds; some manufacturers built multistory weaving mills. See Colum Giles, “Housing the Loom, 1790–1850: A Study of Industrial Building and Mechanization in a Transitional Period,” Industrial Archeology Review XVI (1) (Autumn 1993), 30–33. On the spread of the sawtooth roof, first called the “weave shed roof,” to the United States, see Betsy Hunter Bradley, The Works: The Industrial Architecture of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 192–93.
38.The first Cromford mills, though near the Derwent, were powered by a sough draining a lead mine and a brook, not the river itself. Fitton, The Arkwrights, 28–29.
39.Steam power was first used in a cotton mill in 1789, but water remained the most common power source for several decades. An 1870 industrial census found that cotton mills used more power from steam engines than any other industry. Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 103; Unwin, Samuel Oldknow, 119; Markus, Buildings and Power, 265–66; Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not, 155; Dickens, Hard Times, 22, 69; W. Cooke Taylor, Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire, 2nd ed. (London: Duncan and Malcolm, 1842), 1–2.
40.In the first report of the Factory Commission, Edwin Chadwick described an elevator as “an ascending and descending room, moved by steam.” Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 32–33, 44–54 (“upright tunnels” on 45); Markus, Buildings and Power, 275, 280–81; Gray, The Factory Question, 92–93.
41.The Round Mill, built between 1803 and 1813, remained standing until 1959, when in the course of its demolition four workers were killed. Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 221; Markus, Buildings and Power, 125; Humphrey Jennings, Pandemonium, 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, ed. Mary-Lou Jennings and Charles Madge (New York: Free Press, 1985), 98; Belper Derbyshire, Historical & Genealogical Records, “Belper & the Strutts: The Mills,” July 20, 2011, http://www.belper-research.com/strutts_mills/mills.html.
42.The housing Arkwright built in Cromford is still occupied. The row houses had lofts for weavers, who bought yarn from Arkwright and whose wives and children worked in his mill. Fitton, The Arkwrights, 29, 187; Arkwright Society presentation at Cromford Mills, May 15, 2015; Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 97, 102–04, 246; Chris Aspin, The First Industrial Society; Lancashire, 1750–1850 (Preston, UK: Carnegie Publishing, 1995), 184; Unwin, Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights, 95.
43.Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 246, 252; Unwin, Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights, 191; Fredrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 205.
44.Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 240–44; Unwin, Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights, 178.
45.Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 150, 283–84, 312; Fitton, The Arkwrights, 146, 151; John Brown, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, An Orphan Boy (1832), reprinted in James R. Simmons, Jr., ed., Factory Lives: Four Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiographies (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2007), 169; Cohen, “Managers and Machinery,” 25; Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 174, 199; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 422. The classic study of the change from task-oriented to time-oriented work is E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (Dec. 1967), pp. 56–97.
46.Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 43; Ellen Johnston, Autobiography (1869), reprinted in Simmons, Jr., ed., Factory Lives, 308; Aspin, First Industrial Society, 92; “knocker, n.” OED Online. September 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/104097; “knock, v.” OED Online. September 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/104090.
47.Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 97; Gray, The Factory Question, 136; Giorgio Riello and Patrick K. O’Brien, “The Future Is Another Country: Offshore Views of the British Industrial Revolution,” Journal of Historical Sociology 22 (1) (March 2009), 4–5.
48.Taylor, Notes of a Tour, 4.
49.Robert Southey, Journal of a Tour in Scotland in 1819, quoted in Jennings, Pandemonium, 156; Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class (New York: Random House, 1974), 34–40, 60–61; Riello and O’Brien, “The Future Is Another Country,” 6; Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or the Two Nations (London: Henry Colburn, 1845), 195; Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852; New York: International Publishers, 1963), 15.
50.Trollope, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, 236–37; Flora Tristan, Promenades dans Londres (Paris, 1840), quoted in Riello and O’Brien, “The Future Is Another Country,” 5.
51.Dickens, Hard Times, 69; Aspin, First Industrial Society, 4, 239–41.
52.It was a measure of how quickly the system was spreading that Taylor used the metaphor of machinery to describe society, a usage unusual before the eighteenth century. Gray, The Factory Question, 23–24; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 209; Taylor, Notes of a Tour, 4–5; “machinery, n.” OED Online. September 2016. Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/111856.
53.Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 341; Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 20–22, 474.
54.Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 226; Katrina Honeyman, “The Poor Law, the Parish Apprentice, and the Textile Industries in the North of England, 1780–1830,” Northern History 44 (2) (Sept. 2007), 127.
55.Brown, Memoir of Robert Blincoe, 115–18, 132, 173; William Dodd, A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd, A Factory Cripple, Written by Himself (1841), reprinted in Simmons, Jr., ed., Factory Lives, 191, 193–95; Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 98–99, 103, 226; Fitton, The Arkwrights, 152, 160–61; Honeyman, “The Poor Law,” 123–25; Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 171, 179–80, 299, 301; Jennings, Pandemonium, 214–15.
56.Some mills withheld part of the wages of workers on contract until the end of each quarter as further insurance against their departure. Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 104–06, 226, 233; Aspin, First Industrial Society, 53, 104.
57.Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not, 3–4, 53–54. See, for example, Thomas E. Woods, Jr., “A Myth Shattered: Mises, Hayek, and the Industrial Revolution,” Nov. 1, 2001, Foundation for Economic Education, https://fee.org/articles/a-myth-shattered-mises-hayek-and-the-industrial-revolution/; “Wake Up America,” Freedom: A History of US (PBS), accessed Dec. 8, 2016, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/historyofus/web04/.
58.Livesey quoted in Aspin, First Industrial Society, 86. See also, Brown, Memoir of Robert Blincoe, 91, 109, 138–39.
59.Trollope, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, quote on 186.
60.The equation of British factory workers with West Indian slaves was used not only by critics of the factory system but also by defenders of slavery, who argued that slaves were actually better off than mill workers. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 220; Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England, 202, 204, 207–08; Disraeli, Sybil, 198; Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 1–2.
61.Southey, Journal of a Tour in Scotland in 1819, quoted in Jennings, Pandemonium, 157–58; Robert Southey, Espiella’s Letters, quoted in Aspin, First Industrial Society, 53.
62.Gallagher, Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 6–21 (quotes on 7 and 10).
63.Jennings, Pandemonium, 230; Taylor, Notes of a Tour, 1–2, 30.
64.Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class, 45–46.
65.Jennings, Pandemonium, 231.
66.Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 154–57, 180–83; Paul L. Younger, “Environmental Impacts of Coal Mining and Associated Wastes: A Geochemical Perspective,” Geological Society, London, Special Publications 236 (2004), 169–209.
67.William Blake, Collected Poems, ed. W. B. Yeats ([1905] London: Routledge, 2002), 211–12. Blake’s original manuscript, with the punctuation used here, can be seen at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_did_those_feet_in_ancient_time#mediaviewer/File:Milton_preface.jpg (accessed Dec. 6, 2016). Steven E. Jones, Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism (New York: Routledge, 2006), 81–96.
68.By 1881, the Lancashire population had doubled again, to 630,323. GB Historical GIS / University of Portsmouth, Lancashire through time | Population Statistics | Total Population, A Vision of Britain through Time (accessed Oct. 5, 2016), http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/unit/10097848/cube/TOT_POP. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 16; Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 78–79.
69.Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 116–17.
70.Taylor, Notes of a Tour, 6–7. For a different view, stressing the infection of both mill owners and workers by greed, see Robert Owen, Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Hart, Rees, and Orml, 1817), 5–9.
71.Engels wrote this not long after leaving his first stint at his family’s cotton mill in Manchester, a job he himself abhorred and was to return to for another two decades. Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England, 9–12, 153, 174, 199–202.
72.The Condition of the Working Class in England was an enormously influential book, both in the development of Marxism and in perceptions of Manchester and the Industrial Revolution. However, it had no immediate impact in the English-speaking world, since it did not appear in English until 1886, more than forty years after its publication in German, when an American edition came out. It was not published in England until 1892. Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England, 134–38; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 209; Hunt, Marx’s General, 81, 100, 111–12, 312.
73.For the history of debate over factory legislation, see Gray, The Factory Question.
74.Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 418; Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 17–18, 171, 179–80, 290, 299–301.
75.Taylor, Notes of a Tour, 3–4, 46, 237–38, 330.
76.Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, quoted in Jennings, Pandemonium, 35. Marx and Engels shared the belief that the rise of the factory system represented progress for mankind, in their eyes laying the basis for a new, more democratic, egalitarian, and productive social system. See, for example, Hunt, Marx’s General, 323–24.
77.Gray, The Factory Question, 100–101, 103–04; Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 295.
78.Taylor, Notes of a Tour, 80–82, 223–24; Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 334–38; Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 27, 156, 278.
79.Gray, The Factory Question; Valenze, The First Industrial Woman, 5.
80.B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison, A History of Factory Legislation (London: P.S. King & Son, 1911).
81.Gray, The Factory Question, 23–24, 59–60, 72, 88 (quote from Factory Commission First Report), 130; Michael Merrill, “How Capitalism Got Its Name,” Dissent (Fall 2014), 87–92.
82.Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 195.
83.Marx devoted Chapter X of the first volume of Capital to “The Working-Day,” capital’s “vampire thirst for the living blood of labour,” including a detailed discussion of the Factory Acts. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 231–302 (“struggle” on 235; “vampire” on 256). Engels analyzed the Factory Acts in The Condition of the Working Class in England, 191–99.
84.Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 219; Hunt, Marx’s General, 1, 7, 179, 198, 234. As Hunt repeatedly points out, Engels’ years as a cotton mill manager supplied Marx not only with detailed information about how the business worked but with the financial support he needed to write Capital.
85.Janice Carlisle, “Introduction,” in Simmons, Jr., ed., Factory Lives, 27–28. See also David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiography (London: Europa Publications, 1981), and Kevin Binfield, ed., Writings of the Luddites (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 2004) for how limited the sources are for working-class views of the factory system.
86.In Against Technology, Steven E. Jones traces the changing understanding of Luddism in British and American culture up through the twentieth century.
87.Berg, Age of Manufactures, 262; E. J. Hobsbawm, “The Machine Breakers,” in Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour ([1964] Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), 7–26; Fitton, The Arkwrights, 51, 53–55.
88.There is an extensive literature of Luddism. Particularly useful were Hobsbawm, “The Machine Breakers”; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, chap. 14 (“An Army of Redressers”); and Kevin Binfield, ed., Writings of the Luddites (quoted letter on 74).
89.Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 570–91, 608–18.
90.Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 42, 259; Aspin, First Industrial Society, 67; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 211, 297–346, 616–21; Marx, Capital, vol. I, 431–32.
91.Jones, Against Technology, 9, 47; Hobsbawm, “The Machine Breakers,” 9–16.
92.Thompson, however, questioned Engels’s depiction of cotton workers making up the nucleus of the emerging labor movement. Aspin, First Industrial Society, 55; Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England, 24, 137, 237; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 211, 213.
93.Not only were workers unable to vote but also the districts in which mills were located were vastly underrepresented in Parliament as a result of the way seats were apportioned. Aspin, First Industrial Society, 56–57, 153–54; Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (Hammondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1963), 18–19.
94.Pelling, History of British Trade Unionism, 24–29; Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 196.
95.Hobsbawm summarizes the major outbreaks of unrest in Britain between 1800 and 1850 in Labouring Men, 155. See also Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 287, 366–67; Pelling, History of British Trade Unionism, 29–33, 36–37, 43–44, 46–49; and Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 308, 706–08, 734–68.
96.Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 48–50, 62, 71. Walt Rostow made a similar claim in W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 33–34, 54.
97.See, for example, Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (Auburn, AL: Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 1998), 613–19. Von Mises writes of early factories, “The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job,” ignoring the fact that the state performed that function for them. On hanging Luddites, see Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 627–28, and Lord Byron’s eloquent speech in the House of Lords against making machine breaking a capital crime, http://www.luddites200.org.uk/LordByronspeech.html (accessed Oct. 7, 2016).
98.Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 55; Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 194; Aspin, First Industrial Society, 15–17, 23–30; Mechanics’ magazine, Sept. 25, 1830, reprinted in Jennings, Pandemonium, 176–79; J. C. Jeaffreson and William Pole, The Life of Robert Stephenson, F.R.S., vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1866), 141; Tony Judt, “The Glory of the Rails” and “Bring Back the Rails!,” The New York Review of Books, vol. 57, no. 20 (Dec. 23, 2010), and vol. 58, no. 1 (Jan. 13, 2011).
99.Timothy L. Alborn, Conceiving Companies; Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 182–83; Jennings, Pandemonium, 311–12; Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 121.
100.G. W. Hilton, “The Truck Act of 1831,” The Economic History Review, new series, vol. 10, no. 3 (1958): 470–79; Hutchins and Harrison, History of Factory Legislation, 43–70; Hunt, Marx’s General, 184–86.
101.Gray, Factory Question, 140, 163; Aspin, First Industrial Society, 185. On paternalism, see Joyce, Work, Society and Politics, esp. 135–53, 168–71, 185.
102.Brontë, Shirley, 487–88; Pelling, History of British Trade Unionism, 43–49; Carlisle, “Introduction,” in Simmons, Jr., ed., Factory Lives, 63–65.
103.Engels, “Principles of Communism,” quoted in Hunt, Marx’s General, 144.
1.Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (London: Chapman and Hall, 1842), 152–64 (quote on 164); [John Dix], Local Loiterings and Visits in the Vicinity of Boston (Boston: Redding & Co., 1845), 44; Michael Chevalier, Society, Manner and Politics in the United States: Being a Series of Letters on North America (Boston: Weeks, Jordan and Company, 1839), 128–44 (quotes on 136, 142, 143); Anthony Trollope, North America ([1862] New York: Knopf, 1951), 247–55 (quote on 250).
2.Marvin Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness; The European Response to American Industrialization, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 32–43, 92–95, 105–08; Dix, Local Loiterings, 48–49, 75, 79; Chevalier, Society, Manner and Politics in the United States, 133, 137.
3.Caroline F. Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture: A Study in Industrial Beginnings ([1931] New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), 17–18, 30. Three of the most important histories of the New England textile industry were written by women: Ware’s Early New England Cotton Manufacture; Vera Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town; A Study of Chicopee, Massachusetts (Northampton, MA: Department of History of Smith College, 1936); and Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads; New England’s Mill Girls and Magnates (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949). At the time, economic history (and academic scholarship more generally) was almost exclusively a male enterprise. Perhaps they were drawn to the subject by the large number of female textile workers. In an appreciation of their contributions, Herbert Gutman and Donald Bell wrote that the three “extended the boundaries of American working-class history beyond those fixed by John R. Commons and others described as this subject’s founding fathers. Their books . . . offered new ways to think about working-class history. . . . Their perspectives differed, but all asked new questions about the early history of New England capitalism and wage labor.” Long before the current vogue in the history of capitalism, these extraordinary scholars were writing just that. Herbert G. Gutman and Donald H. Bell, eds., The New England Working Class and the New Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), xii.
4.George Rogers Taylor, “Introduction,” in Nathan Appleton and Samuel Batchelder, The Early Development of the American Cotton Textile Industry ([1858 and 1863] New York: Harper & Row, 1969), xiv.
5.George S. White, Memoir of Samuel Slater: The Father of American Manufactures: Connected with a History of the Rise and Progress of the Cotton Manufacture in England and America (Philadelphia: Printed at No. 46, Carpenter Street, 1836), 33–42; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014), 152–54; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 19–23; Betsy W. Bahr, “New England Mill Engineering: Rationalization and Reform in Textile Mill Design, 1790–1920,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware, 1987, 13–16.
6.Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 26–27, 29–30, 60, 82, 227.
7.Following the English example, Slater and other southern New England mill owners set up Sunday schools for their child workers. Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 22–23, 28, 30–32, 245–47, 284–85; Samuel Batchelder, Introduction and Early Progress of the Cotton Manufacture in the United States (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1863), in Appleton and Batchelder, Early Development of the American Cotton Textile Industry, 46, 74.
8.Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 17, 28, 50–55.
9.Nathan Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, and Origin of Lowell (Lowell, MA: Proprietors of the Locks and Canals on Merrimack River, 1858), in Appleton and Batchelder, Early Development of the American Cotton Textile Industry, 7; Robert Brook Zevin, “The Growth of Cotton Textile Production After 1815,” in Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 139; Taylor, “Introduction,” in Appleton and Batchelder, Early Development of the American Cotton Textile Industry, 9. Lowell also was in contact with machinists in Rhode Island who could build spinning equipment. See, for example, Wm. Blackburns to Francis Cabot Lowell, June 2, 1814, Loose Manuscripts, box 6, Old B7 F7.19, Francis Cabot Lowell (1775–1817) Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts.
10.Director’s Records, Volume 1, MSS:442, 1–2, Boston Manufacturing Company Records, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Allston, Massachusetts; Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 8–10, 26; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 63, 138, 147–48.
11.Carding was done on the first floor, spinning on the second, and weaving on the third and fourth. In 1820, after it built a second mill, Boston Manufacturing employed about 230 to 265 workers, of whom roughly 85 percent were women and only 5 percent “boys.” Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 1; Richard M. Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System,” in Robert Weible, Essays from the Lowell Conference on Industrial History 1982 and 1983: The Arts and Industrialism, The Industrial City (North Andover, MA: Museum of American Textile History, 1985), 19, 24, 26; U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service, “National Register of Historical Places Inventory—Nomination Form,” Boston Manufacturing Company (accessed Jan. 16. 2015), http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NHLS/Text/77001412.pdf; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 64.
12.Peter Temin, “Product Quality and Vertical Integration in the Early Cotton Textile Industry,” Journal of Economic History XVIII (1988), 893, 897; Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 9–12; Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 147; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 65, 70–72; Zevin, “The Growth of Cotton Textile Production,” 126–27.
13.The original two Waltham mills are still standing, but in altered form, having had their pitched roofs replaced by flat ones and the space between them filled in by subsequent construction. Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 66; Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System,” 24–25; “National Register of Historical Places Inventory—Nomination Form,” Boston Manufacturing Company.
14.While the first mill established the basic framework for production, the second mill established the physical template for future mills. Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System,” 29, 34; Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 14.
15.Batchelder, Introduction and Early Progress of the Cotton Manufacture, 81; Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite, 30–31, 50; Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 9; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 83; Laurence Gross, The Course of Industrial Decline: The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Mass., 1835–1955 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 12; Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 59; Betsy Hunter Bradley, The Works: The Industrial Architecture of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93.
16.Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 63, 139, 145, 184; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 6–7, 229.
17.Recent accounts that stress the global nature of the cotton industry include Prasannan Parthasarathi and Giorgio Riello, eds., The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Beckert, Empire of Cotton. On U.S. cotton exports, see Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 189–91.
18.Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 4–5; Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 23–24; Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, shelf number 1, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Records, Baker Library, HBS, 5, 15; Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 36.
19.Mills of this design still can be seen across large parts of New England, many now converted to condominiums, office space, warehouses, artists’ studios, museums, or cultural centers or sitting abandoned.
20.Merrimack purchased from Boston Manufacturing the right to use machinery it had designed and patented. All the space in the five mill buildings was not initially filled with equipment, but the company soon purchased additional machinery. Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, shelf number 1, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Records, 5, 51–54; Bradley, The Works, 93, 113–14, 125–28, 133–35, 139; Bahr, “New England Mill Engineering,” 13, 21, 27, 40–41, 44–45; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 7. For an example of the concern about fire, see the 1829 report by a committee of the Merrimack Board of Directors about measures “to render the mills at Lowell more secure from fire,” in Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, shelf number 1, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Records, 61, 63–65.
21.Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite, 47–50, 47–50; Thomas Dublin, Farm to Factory: Women’s Letters, 1830–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 5–8; Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 28–29; Samuel Batchelder to Nathan Appleton, Sept. 25, 1824, and William Appleton to Samuel Batchelder, Oct. 8, 1824, in Minute Books, v.a – Directors, 1824–1857; Proprietors, 1824–64, Hamilton Manufacturing Company Records, Baker Library; F-1 Records 1828–1858, 26–27, Bigelow Stanford Carpet Co. collection, Lowell Manufacturing Company records, Baker Library; Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 38, 42. A list of the various Lowell textile firms, their officers, and principal stockholders appears in Shlakman, 39–42.
22.Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System,” 25–30.
23.Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Records, 23, 25–26, 81; Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System,” 38–39; Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 24; Lowell Manufacturing Company Records, 1828–1858, 66–68; Dublin, Farm to Factory, 5–8; U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1840,” June 15, 1998, https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab07.txt.
24.Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 25–26, 36–37, 39–42.
25.Local workers were hired for construction work associated with the mills. But even for that, some outside workers—like Irish canal diggers—were brought in. Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite, x, xi, 56, Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 24–25, 49, 64–65; Tamara K. Hareven and Randolph Lanenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory City (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 16.
26.The Lowell Machine Shop, separated from Canals and Locks in 1845, employed 550 workers, making it a giant among machine shops, turning out not only textile equipment but also planning machines, steam boilers, mill shafting, and even locomotives. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 60; United States Census Office, Manufacturers of the United States in 1860 (Washington, DC: 1865), 729; “Statistics of Lowell Manufactures. January, 1857. Compiled from authentic sources.” [Lowell, 1857], Library of Congress (accessed Jan. 28, 2015), http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/rbpebib:@field(NUMBER+@band[rbpe+0620280a]); David R. Meyer, Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 205.
27.Some companies did introduce new types of spinning machines, which could operate at higher speeds. Dublin, Farm to Factory, 5–8; Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite, 55, 69–71; Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: The Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 6; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 37, 42; Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System,” 34, 38.
28.The companies eventually replaced their original waterwheels with more efficient water turbines. Even after the Civil War, they only gradually installed steam engines. As late as the 1890s, the Boott mills were getting half their power from water. Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 19–20, 42–43; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 144–45. For a comparison of the cost of steam and water power, see “Difference between the cost of power to be used at Dover the next 15 years and a full supply of water,” Box 6, Vol. III–IX, Nov. 1847, Amos Lawrence Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
29.Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 37; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 86–87; “Statistics of Lowell Manufactures. January, 1857.”
30.Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 30–31, 37, 42, 50–53; David A. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers & The Mechanized Factory System, 1815–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 69–70; Chandler, The Visible Hand, 68–71.
31.Hareven and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 9–10, 13–16.
32.Even after it ballooned in size, Amoskeag continued to be run by a single treasurer, working out of Boston. Hareven and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 16. The best overview of the development of American management remains Chandler, The Visible Hand.
33.New-York Daily Tribune, Jan. 17, 1844. For the experience of young women in British cotton mills, see Deborah Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 103–11.
34.Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite, 31–34; Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 13; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 12–13, 198–99, 203. Slave labor also was used in the cotton industry in Egypt, where the first mechanized equipment was introduced at the same time as the Waltham mills were being built. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 166–68.
35.Dublin, Women at Work, 5, 31–34, 141; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 131, 270–71, 276; Dublin, Farm to Factory, 13–14; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 217–18.
36.Dublin, Women at Work, 26, 31, 64–65; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 130, 138–40. When in 1826 Merrimack Manufacturing was planning to print calicoes, it sent its treasurer, Kirk Boott, to England “for the purpose of procuring a first rate Engraver, or such as he can get,” as well as to gather information “which he may think will be useful in manufacturing, printing or machine building.” Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, shelf number 1, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Records, 32–33. 1857 percentage calculated from “Statistics of Lowell Manufactures. January, 1857.”
37.Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 212–15, 220–21; Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 82–83, 89; Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 49; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 163–64, 166–68.
38.Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 224–25; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 256–57. Thomas Dublin found among a sample of workers at the Hamilton mill in Lowell that those who never married worked on average 3.9 years; those who did, 2.4. Dublin, Farm to Factory, 110.
39.Burlington Free Press, Dec. 5, 1845; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 200, 263; “Regulations to Be Observed by All Persons Employed in the Factories of the Middlesex Company” (1846); “General Regulations, to Be Observed by All Persons Employed by the Lawrence Manufacturing Company, In Lowell” (1833); “Regulations to Be Observed by All Persons Employed by the Lawrence Manufacturing Company” (1838); and “Regulations for the Boarding Houses of the Middlesex Company” (n.d.), all in Osborne Library, American Textile History Museum, Lowell, Massachusetts; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 150, 152, 157–60; Dublin, Women at Work, 78–79.
40.Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 66–67, 90; Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 59; Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 30–87.
41.Augusta Harvey Worthen, The History of Sutton, New Hampshire: Consisting of the Historical Collections of Erastus Wadleigh, Esq., and A. H. Worthen, 2 parts (Concord, NH: Republican Press Association, 1890), 192, quoted in Dublin, Women at Work, 55; population of Sutton from New Hampshire Office of Energy and Planning, State Data Center (accessed Feb. 6, 2015), https://www.nh.gov/oep/data-center/documents/1830-1920-historic.pdf; Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle, or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1898), 69–70; Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work, 111–18.
42.Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 8. Dublin’s Farm to Factory presents an excellent selection of letters from female mill workers.
43.The Lowell Offering and Magazine, May 1843, 191; Dublin, Farm to Factory, 69, 73; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 22–27, 30, 38–40.
44.The Lowell Offering and Magazine, January 1843, 96; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 42–43, 78–79, 82–83, 113–14.
45.According to Harriet Robinson, in 1843 there were “fourteen regularly organized religious societies” in Lowell. Robinson, Loom and Spindle, 78; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 97; Dublin, Farm to Factory, 80–81; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 256–59.
46.Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 38, 85–86, 110, 112; Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 98–101, 103–07; Dublin, Women at Work, 136–37. As Dublin points out, the expiration of patents taken out by the Waltham-Lowell group and advances in equipment design elsewhere made it easier for new companies to compete. On the relative cost of raw cotton and labor, see, for example, “Boston Manufacturing Company Memo of Cloth Made and Cost of Same … 25th August 1827 to 30th August 1828” and “Appleton Co. Mem. of Cloth Made to May 30, 1829,” both in box 1, folder 16, vol. 42, Patrick Tracy Jackson Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
47.Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Records, 142; Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 98–99; Dublin, Women at Work, 89–90, 98, 109–11, 137.
48.Dublin, Women at Work, 90–102.
49.Dublin, Women at Work, 93–96; Robinson, Loom and Spindle, 84. One version of the original song began: “What a pity that such a pretty girl as I, Should be sent to a nunnery to pine away and die!” with the chorus: “So I won’t be a nun, I cannot be a nun! I’m so fond of pleasure that I cannot be a nun.” https://thesession.org/tunes/3822 (accessed Feb. 7, 2015). For the growth of the labor movement before the Civil War, the most comprehensive account remains John R. Commons et al., History of Labor in the United States, vol. I ([1918] New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966).
50.There were a few later strikes in other mill towns and a small strike by immigrant workers in Lowell in 1859. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 235, 241; New-York Daily Tribune, May 14, 1846; Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness, 146–47; Dublin, Women at Work, 203–05.
51.Massachusetts restricted children under twelve and Connecticut children under fourteen to ten hours work a day. New Hampshire established ten hours as a day’s work for everyone, but allowed contracts calling for longer working hours, rendering the law all but meaningless. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 242–49; Dublin, Women at Work, 108–22.
52.Much later on, left-leaning historians perhaps made too much of the walkouts and agitation. For extended discussions of the protests which emphasize their importance, see, for example, Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, and Dublin, Women at Work. By contrast, Ware, earlier, was somewhat dismissive of the turnouts, which she wrote “were really less strikes than demonstrations, unorganized outbursts led by a few inflammatory spirits who had little idea what they were to achieve but who raised the girls to a state of great excitement” and noted that “Public sentiment did not generally support ‘striking females.’” Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 275, 277.
53.David Crockett, An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1835), 91–99; John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (New York: Penguin, 1977), 81; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 208.
54.For extended discussions of this evolution, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), and Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, esp. chap. 1 and 2. See also, Lawrence A. Peskin, “How the Republicans Learned to Love Manufacturing: The First Parties and the ‘New Economy,’” Journal of the Early Republic 22 (2) (Summer, 2002), 235–62, and Jonathan A. Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), esp. 233–35.
55.John G. Whittier, “The Factory Girls of Lowell,” in Voices of the True-Hearted (Philadelphia: J. Miller M’Kim, 1846), 40–41.
56.Seth Luther, An Address to the Working Men of New England on the State of Education and on the Condition of the Producing Classes in Europe and America, 2nd ed. (New York: George H. Evans, 1833), 19.
57.Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness, 165; Emerson quoted in Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, 124–25. Earlier, Emerson had hailed manufacturing for freeing New England from the need to farm under uncongenial conditions: “Where they have sun, let them plant; we who have it not, will drive our pens and water-wheels.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson, and Waldo Emerson Forbes, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson with Annotations, vol. IV (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 209.
58.Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 115–18.
59.As late as 1853, there were over 1,800 children under fifteen working in Rhode Island manufacturing establishments, including 621 between ages nine and twelve and 59 under the age of nine. Luther, An Address to the Working Men of New England, 10, 21–22, 30; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 210; Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 86, 213.
60.Trollope, North America, 253; John Robert Godley, Letters from America, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1844), 7–11; Edward Bellamy, “How I Wrote ‘Looking Backwards,’” in Edward Bellamy Speaks Again (Chicago: Peerage Press, 1937), 218, quoted in Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, 192. Relative industry size from Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 180.
61.Herman Melville, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” Harper’s magazine, Apr. 1855, 670–78; Scott Heron, “Harper’s Magazine as Matchmaker: Charles Dickens and Herman Melville,” Browsings: The Harper’s Blog, Jan. 13, 2008, http://harpers.org/blog/2008/01/harpers-magazine-dickens-and-melvilles-paradise-of-bachelors/.
62.Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, 90–93.
63.Luther, An Address to the Working Men of New England, 29.
64.Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness, 115–16, 119, 130–35, 139–41, 146.
65.Dublin, Women at Work, 139–40.
66.U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 106; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 227–232; Dublin, Women at Work, 138–39.
67.Dublin, Women at Work, 134, 140–44, 155, 198; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 83.
68.Dublin, Farm to Factory, 187; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 37, 42–43, 79; Nelson, Managers and Workers, 6; Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860–1912 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), xiv–xv, 28, 75; Hareven and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 10.
69.Dublin, Farm to Factory, 187; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 80, 142; Hareven and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 18–19, 202–03; Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort, 29–30, 75, 82–83, 97 (quote).
70.Accounts of the death toll from the Pemberton collapse vary considerably, from 83 to 145. Clarisse A. Poirier, “Pemberton Mills 1852–1938: A Case Study of the Industrial and Labor History of Lawrence, Massachusetts,” Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1978, 81–84, 191–93; Polynesian [Honolulu], Mar. 3, 1860; New York Times, Jan. 12, 1860, and Feb. 4, 1860; The Daily Dispatch [Richmond, Virginia], Jan. 16, 1860; The Daily Exchange [Baltimore], Jan. 12, 1860; New-York Daily Tribune, Jan. 16, 1860; Alvin F. Oickle, Disaster in Lawrence: The Fall of the Pemberton Mill (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2008); Bahr, “New England Mill Engineering, 68–71; Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort, 18–19.
71.By the time Hine visited Amoskeag, children under age sixteen actually made up only a small part of the New England textile workforce: 2.0 percent in New Hampshire, 5.7 percent in Massachusetts, and 6.0 percent in Rhode Island, compared to 10.4 percent nationally and 20.3 percent in Mississippi. Hareven and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 33; Arden J. Lea, “Cotton Textiles and the Federal Child Labor Act of 1916,” Labor History 16 (4) (Fall 1975), 492.
72.Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 88–90; Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort, 7, 47–62, 77.
73.In the racialist language of the day, which many socialists shared, Berger went on to say, “White men and women of any nationality will endure a certain degree of slavery, but no more. The limit of endurance seems to have been reached in Lawrence.” House Committee on Rules, The Strike at Lawrence, Hearings before the Committee on Rules of the House of Representatives on House Resolutions 409 and 433, March 2–7, 1912 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1912), 10–11. There is a large literature on the 1912 strike. An excellent account can be found in Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969).
74.Hareven and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 11, 336; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 165, 190–95, 225–29; Mary H. Blewett, The Last Generation: Work and Life in the Textile Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1910–1960 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990).
75.British population does not include Ireland. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope, 4; B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750–1993 (London: Macmillan Reference, 1998), 4, 8; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, 8.
Chapter 3
“THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION”
1.Joshua Freeman et al., Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 2 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), xii–xx; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 20, 1876; J. S. Ingram, The Centennial Exposition, Described and Illustrated (Philadelphia: Hubbard Bros., 1876); Linda P. Gross and Theresa R. Snyder, Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2005); John E. Findling, ed., Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851–1988 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 57–59; Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 9–37; Centennial Photographic Co., “[Saco] Water Power Co.—Cotton Machinery,” Centennial Exhibition Digital Collection Philadelphia 1876, Free Library of Philadelphia, CEDC No. c032106 (accessed Mar. 20, 2015), http://libwww.library.phila.gov/CenCol/Details.cfm?ItemNo=c032106. See also Bruni Giberti, Designing the Centennial: A History of the 1876 International Exhibition in Philadelphia (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002).
2.On the national divides at the time of the exhibition, see Freeman et al., Who Built America? vol. 2, xx–xxiv.
3.When Whitman visited the Centennial Exhibition, he reportedly sat for a half hour in silence before the Corliss engine. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 150–58, 163–64; Andrea Sutcliffe, Steam: The Untold Story of America’s First Great Invention (New York: Palgrave, 2004); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 73–96; Edmund Flagg, The Far West: or, A Tour Beyond the Mountains, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), 17–18; John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (New York: Penguin, 1977), 141; Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 15–16.
4.Walt Whitman, Two Rivulets: Including Democratic Vistas, Centennial Songs, and Passage to India (Camden, NJ: [Walt Whitman], 1876), 25–26; Marx, Machine in the Garden, 27. There is a very large literature on the railroad and modernity. See, for example, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
5.Giberti, Designing the Centennial, 2–3; “Manufactures of Massachusetts,” The North American Review 50 (106) (Jan. 1840), 223–31.
6.The Crystal Palace burned down in 1936. Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Benjamin quoted in Robert W. Rydell, Worlds of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 15.
7.Many exhibits for the New York fair were not ready when it opened, damping down attendance. Unlike the profitable original, it ended in bankruptcy. Charles Hirschfeld, “America on Exhibition: The New York Crystal Palace,” American Quarterly 9 (2, pt. 1) (Summer 1957), 101–16.
8.Pauline de Tholozany, “The Expositions Universelles in Nineteenth Century Paris,” Brown University Center for Digital Scholarship, http://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/worldfairs.html (accessed Mar. 27, 2015). For a list of nineteenth- and twentieth-century international expositions and fairs, see Findling, ed., Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 376–81.
9.Report of the Board of Commissioners Representing the State of New York at the Cotton States and International Exposition held at Atlanta, Georgia, 1895 (Albany, NY: Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Co, 1896), quote on page 205; C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913: A History of the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1951), 123–24.
10.Jill Jonnes, Eiffel’s Tower: The Thrilling Story Behind Paris’s Beloved Monument and the World’s Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count (New York: Viking, 2009); “Origins and Construction of the Eiffel Tower,” http://www.toureiffel.paris/en/everything-about-the-tower/themed-files/69.html, and “All You need to Know About the Eiffel Tower,” http://www.toureiffel.paris/images/PDF/about_the_Eiffel_Tower.pdf (both accessed Oct. 21, 2016); Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies ([1979] Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 8–14.
11.Letter published in Le Temps, Feb. 14, 1887, reprinted in “All You Need to Know About the Eiffel Tower.”
12.“Représentation de la tour Eiffel dans l’art,” http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repr%C3%A9sentation_de_la_tour_Eiffel_dans_l%27art; and Michaela Haffner, “Diego Rivera, The Eiffel Tower, 1914,” the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, https://www.wellesley.edu/davismuseum/artwork/node/37002 (both accessed Apr. 1, 2015). For a different reading of the iconography of the Eiffel Tower, with less emphasis on its importance as a symbol of industrialism and the mechanical age, see Gabriel Insausti, “The Making of the Eiffel Tower as a Modern Icon,” in Writing and Seeing: Essays on Word and Image, ed. Rui Carvalho Homem and Maria de Fátima Lambert (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2006).
13.Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone,” translated by Donald Revell, http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/zone. For an alternative, more literal translation by Charlotte Mandell, see http://www.charlottemandell.com/Apollinaire.php (accessed Apr. 2, 2015).
14.Blaise Cendrars, “Elastic Poem 2: Tower,” trans. by Tony Baker, GutCult 2 (1) (Winter 2004), http://gutcult.com/Site/litjourn3/html/cendrars1.html.
15.The great nineteenth-century expositions were not only about industry and consumer goods. They also celebrated national identity and greatness as manifested in the arts and empire. And empire was tightly linked to ideas of racial hierarchy, a theme that bluntly recurred in fair after fair. Technological and racial advance were inextricably linked. See Auerbach, Great Exhibition of 1851, 159–89; Joseph Harris, The Tallest Tower: Eiffel and the Belle Epoque (Bloomington, IN: Unlimited Publishing, 2004), 88–89, 107–08; Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 21–22; Rydell, Worlds of Fairs, 19–22; Findling, ed., Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 79, 181, 183.
16.Guy de Maupassant, La Vie Errane, Allouma, Toine, and Other Stories (London: Classic Publishing Company, 1911), 1–4.
17.Auerbach, Great Exhibition of 1851, 128–58; Freeman et al., Who Built America? vol. 2, xxiii.
18.Auerbach, Great Exhibition of 1851, 132, 156; Friedrich Engels to Laura Lafarge, June 11, 1889, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1889/letters/89_06_11.htm (accessed Apr. 4, 2017); Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 335–36.
19.The Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel, published by U.S. Steel in ten editions between 1919 and 1985, provides encyclopedic information on iron- and steelmaking, including their history. For a history and analysis of this remarkable volume, see Carol Siri Johnson, “The Steel Bible: A Case Study of 20th Century Technical Communication,” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 37 (3) (2007), 281–303. See also Peter Temin, Iron and Steel in Nineteenth-Century America: An Economic Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 13–17, 83–85.
20.Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848–1875 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 39, 54–55; Temin, Iron and Steel, 3–5, 14–15, 21. For the difficulties in producing rails, see John Fritz, The Autobiography of John Fritz (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1912), 92–101, 111–15, 121–23, 149. Overman quoted in Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 47.
21.In addition to iron ore and fuel (charcoal, coke, or sometimes anthracite coal), limestone was put into blast furnaces to help form slag out of impurities. Temin, Iron and Steel, 58–62, 96–98, 157–63; U.S. Steel, The Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel (Pittsburgh, PA: U.S. Steel, 1957), 221–25.
22.Krause, Battle for Homestead, 48–49; David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 11–12. For a firsthand account of puddling, see James J. Davis, The Iron Puddler; My Life in the Rolling Mills and What Came of It (New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1922).
23.Temin, Iron and Steel, 66–67, 85, 105–06, 109–13; Fritz, Autobiography of John Fritz, 91–135; Marvin Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness: The European Response to American Industrialization, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 162–63.
24.Krause, Battle for Homestead, 52–65; Temin, Iron and Steel, 125–27, 130, 153; David Brody, Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era (1960; New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 8.
25.Some companies also integrated backward, buying or leasing ore mines and making their own coke. Temin, Iron and Steel, 153–69, 190–91; Brody, Steelworkers in America, 10–12; William Serrin, Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town (New York: Random House, 1992), 56–59.
26.Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, 213; Harold James, Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 47, 53; Gross and Snyder, Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition, 83; Schneider Electric, 170 Years of History (Rueil-Malmaison, France: Schneider Electric, 2005), 3–5, 20–22 (http://www.schneider-electric.com/documents/presentation/en/local/2006/12/se_history_brands_march2005.pdf).
27.Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 6–7; David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 405; U.S. Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United States—1900; Census Reports, vol. VII—Manufactures, part I (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Office, 1902), 583, 585, 597.
28.U.S. Steel, Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel; Carnegie quoted in Brody, Steelworkers inAmerica, 21.
29.Michael W. Santos, “Brother against Brother: The Amalgamated and Sons of Vulcan at the A. M. Byers Company, 1907–1913,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 111 (2) (Apr. 1987), 199–201; Davis, Iron Puddler, 85; John Fitch, The Steel Workers (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910), 36, 40–44, 48, 52. William Attaway’s novel, Blood on the Forge ([1941] New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), set in Pittsburgh at the end of World War I, gives a good sense of the rhythms of steelwork, with its alternate periods of exhausting labor and waiting for the next burst of activity.
30.Harry B. Latton, “Steel Wonders,” The Pittsburgh Times, June 1, 1892, reprinted in David P. Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red”: Homestead 1892 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 13–15; Fritz, Autobiography of John Fritz, 203; Brody, Steelworkers in America, 9; Mark Reutter, Sparrows Point; Making Steel—The Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 18.
31.Fitch, The Steel Workers, 3; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the English Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 1 (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1872), 370–72. I was pointed to Hawthorne’s statement by John F. Kasson, who quotes part of it in Civilizing the Machine, 142.
32.Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 192, 200, 270–71; Joseph Stella, “In the Glare of the Converter,” “In the Light of a Five-Ton Ingot,” “At the Base of the Blast Furnace,” and “Italian Steelworker” (accessed Apr. 28, 2015), http://www.clpgh.org/exhibit/stell1.html; W. J. Gordon, Foundry, Forge and Factory with a Chapter on the Centenary of the Rotary Press (London: Religious Tract Society, 1890), 15; John Commons et al., History of Labour in the United States, vol. II ([1918] New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966), 80.
33.Hawthorne, Passages from the English Note-Books, 371; Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 62; Joseph Stella, “Discovery of America: Autobiographical Notes,” quoted in Maurine W. Greenwald, “Visualizing Pittsburgh in the 1900s: Art and Photography in the Service of Social Reform,” in Greenwald and Margo Anderson, eds., Pittsburgh Surveyed: Social Science and Social Reform in the Early Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 136; Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), 401.
34.Nasaw, Carnegie, 164; Mary Heaton Vorse, Men and Steel (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 12; Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 60; Gunther quoted in Reutter, Sparrows Point, 9.
35.For a vivid account of the tumultuous struggles of the Gilded Age, see Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence; The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015), chap. 4–6, especially chap. 5 on industrial strife.
36.The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers was created by an 1876 merger of the Sons of Vulcan with two unions of rolling mill workers. Brody, Steelworkers in America, 50–53; Preamble to the Constitution of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, reprinted in Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red,” 17; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 9–22.
37.Some companies continued to just make iron goods, without the intensely competitive ethos of the dominant steel producers. Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 22–36; Brody, Steelworkers in America, 1–10, 23–28, 31–32.
38.Krause, Battle for Homestead, 177–92; Nasaw, Carnegie, 314–26.
39.Nasaw, Carnegie, 363–72. See also Krause, Battle for Homestead, 240–51.
40.Joshua B. Freeman, “Andrew and Me,” The Nation, Nov. 16, 1992; Nasaw, Carnegie, 406.
41.Frick had made a fortune producing coke before joining forces with Carnegie. Most of the charges against workers were dropped after acquittals in the first trials. The Local News, July 2, 1892, New York Herald, July 7, 1892, Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette, July 25, 1892, and Robert S. Barker, “The Law Takes Sides,” all in Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red,” a wonderful compilation of essays, contemporary accounts, photographs, and drawings about the 1892 battle; Freeman, “Andrew and Me”; Krause, Battle for Homestead; Nasaw, Carnegie, 405–27.
42.Russell W. Gibbons, “Dateline Homestead,” and Randolph Harris, “Photographers at Homestead in 1892,” in Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red,” 158–61.
43.Nasaw, Carnegie, 469; Anne E. Mosher, Capital’s Utopia: Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, 1855–1916 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 66–67; Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 41; Brody, Steelworkers in America, 56–58, 60–75.
44.Hamlin Garland, “Homestead and Its Perilous Trades; Impressions of a Visit,” McClure’s Magazine 3 (1) (June 1894), in Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red,” 204–05; Dreiser in Nasaw, Carnegie, 470; Fitch, The Steel Workers, 214–29; Serrin, Homestead, 175–76.
45.Floyd Dell, “Pittsburgh or Petrograd?” The Liberator 2 (11) (Dec. 1919), 7–8.
46.Bethlehem Steel later purchased the Sparrows Point mill, which during the 1950s was the largest steel complex in the world. Mosher, Capital’s Utopia, 73–74; Reutter, Sparrows Point, 10, 55–71.
47.Mosher, Capital’s Utopia, 73–127.
48.Brody, Steelworkers in America, 87–89; Mosher, Capital’s Utopia, 74, 102; Reutter, Sparrows Point, 50.
49.For many years after its formation, U.S. Steel functioned essentially as a holding company, with its many subsidiaries operating independently. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 359–62; Nasaw, Carnegie, 582–88.
50.To prevent workers from sieging or seizing the mill, U.S. Steel redirected a river on the site into a concrete channelway, a moat separating the plant from the town. James B. Lane, “City of the Century”: A History of Gary, Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 27–37; Brody, Steelworkers in America, 158; Mosher, Capital’s Utopia, 177; S. Paul O’Hara, Gary, the Most American of All American Cities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 19–20, 38–53.
51.Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 25.
52.In Taylor’s account, all the iron loaders eventually achieved the high rate, but independent evidence indicates that only one worker was able to carry anything like forty-seven tons of pig iron a day over an extended period. Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980); Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, esp. chap. 6; Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), 85–123. See also Charles D. Wrege and Ronald G. Greenwood, Frederick W. Taylor, the Father of Scientific Management: Myth and Reality (Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin, 1991).
53.Brody, Steelworkers in America, 31–40, 170–73; U. S. Steel, Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel, 314; Fitch, Steel Workers, 43, 60, 166–81.
54.Fitch, The Steel Workers, 57–64.
55.Steel mills in Maryland also hired a substantial number of black workers. Homestead was something of an exception in the strong solidarity between the Eastern European laborers and the English-speaking skilled workers, before and during the 1892 clash. Brody, Steelworkers in America, 96–111, 135–37; Henry M. McKiven, Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 41; Paul Kraus, “East-Europeans in Homestead,” in Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red,” 63–65. For an evocative portrait of Slovak steelworkers in Braddock, Pennsylvania, see Thomas Bell’s novel Out of This Furnace ([1941] Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976).
56.Strictly speaking, these were not steelworkers; they worked in a factory that built steel railway cars. Brody, Steelworkers in America, 125, 145–70; Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. IV: The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905–1917 (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 281–305.
57.“Labor,” in Eric Foner and John A. Garrity, eds., The Reader’s Companion to American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 632; Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991), 146–47.
58.Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” The North American Review 148 (391) (1889): 654.
59.Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 88; Whiting Williams, What’s on the Worker’s Mind, By One Who Put on Overalls to Find Out (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920); “WILLIAMS, WHITING,” in The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (accessed May 5, 2015), http://ech.case.edu/cgi/article.pl?id=WW1; Nasaw, Carnegie, 386. There is a vast literature on Progressive Era reform. A good place to start is Michael McGeer, Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
60.The Pittsburgh Survey examined the whole region and its economy, but steel dominated the study and was the main subject of several volumes. Greenwald and Anderson, eds., Pittsburgh Surveyed.
61.In 1920, the Supreme Court dismissed the antitrust case against U.S. Steel. Brody, Steelworkers in America, 147, 154, 161–71; Fitch, The Steel Workers, 178–79.
62.Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 61–76; union data calculated from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, part 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 126, 177; Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 121–40, 144 (quote).
63.David Brody, Labor in Crisis: The Steel Strike of 1919 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1965), 45–51, 59–60.
64.The most thorough accounts of the steel organizing drive and the 1919 strike are William Z. Foster, The Great Steel Strike (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1920), and Brody, Labor in Crisis. Except where otherwise noted, I have drawn from them.
65.Freeman et al., Who Built America? 258–61.
66.For the strike in Gary, see Lane, “City of the Century,” 90–93. For a gripping portrayal of the strike from the point of view of black workers, see Attaway, Blood on the Forge.
67.The actual demands of the striking workers were far from radical, dealing, very concretely, with hours, wages, and union recognition. See Brody, Labor in Crisis, 100–101, 129. The New York Times, like many newspapers, gave heavy coverage to the strike. From September 23 through September 26, the Times ran three-line banner headlines about the strike on its front page that emphasized the strike’s size and violence.
68.Foster, The Great Steel Strike, 1; Vorse, Men and Steel, 21; John Dos Passos, The Big Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936).
Chapter 4
“I WORSHIP FACTORIES”
1.Henry Ford, “Mass Production,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, 13th ed. (New York: The Encyclopædia Britannica, 1926), vol. 30, 821–23; David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1984), 1, 218–19, 224; Helen Jones Earley and James R. Walkinshaw, Setting the Pace: Oldsmobile’s First 100 Years (Lansing, MI: Public Relations Department, Oldsmobile Division, 1996), 461; The Locomobile Society of America, “List of Cars Manufactured by the Locomobile Company of America,” http://www.locomobilesociety.com/cars.cfm, and “U.S. Automobile Production Figures,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Automobile_Production_Figures (both accessed Feb. 6, 2017); Joshua Freeman et al., Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 2 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 277.
2.Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1, 228. My discussion of the development of the Ford system draws heavily from Hounshell’s superb study.
3.Edward A. Filene, The Way Out: A Forecast of Coming Changes in American Business and Industry (Garden City, NY: Page & Company, 1924), 180; Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 74.
4.Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 4–8, 15–50.
5.Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848–1875 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 44.
6.John A. James and Jonathan S. Skinner, “The Resolution of the Labor Scarcity Paradox,” Working Paper No. 1504, National Bureau of Economic Research, Nov. 1984.
7.Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 115–23; Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 196.
8.Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 240, 249–53; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 240–43.
9.Until 1915, Ford partner James Couzens played a central role in the Ford Motor Company, developing many of its innovative practices and contributing greatly to its overall success. Keith Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1948), 9–27, 43–46.
10.Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford, 44–45; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 224.
11.Stephen Meyer, The Five Dollar Day; Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 16, 18; Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations ([1776] London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 6–7; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 227.
12.Though various accounts at the time and after, including by the Ford company, have claimed that by the time of the introduction of the assembly line complete interchangeability of parts had been achieved, apparently for several years some filing and grinding of parts on the assembly line occurred. Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford, 42, 46, 68–77; Ford Factory Facts (Detroit, MI: Ford Motor Company, 1912), 46–47, 49; Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons: 1957), 522; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 219–20, 224–25, 230–33; Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 10, 22–29; Jack Russell, “The Coming of the Line; The Ford Highland Park Plant, 1910–1914,” Radical America 12 (May–June 1978), 30–33.
13.Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: The Origins of the New Factory System in the United States 1880–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 21–23; David Gartman, “Origins of the Assembly Line and Capitalist Control of Work at Ford,” in Andrew Zimbalist, ed., Case Studies on the Labor Process (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 197–98; Ford, “Mass Production,” 822; Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 29–31; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (1867: New York: International Publishers, 1967), 380.
14.Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 237–49; Gartman, “Origins of the Assembly Line,” 201.
15.Russell, “The Coming of the Line,” 33–34, 37 (includes Ford quote). Photographs of cars and trucks being assembled using the craft method at various early vehicle companies can be seen in Bryan Olsen and Joseph Cabadas, The American Auto Factory (St. Paul, MN: Motorbooks, 2002).
16.Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 250–60.
17.Gartman, “Origins of the Assembly Line,” 199, 201–02.
18.Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 249–53; Russell, “The Coming of the Line,” 38; Lindy Biggs, The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology, and Work in America’s Age of Mass Production (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 27.
19.Joyce Shaw Peterson, American Automobile Workers, 1900–1933 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 43; Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 40–41; Biggs, The Rational Factory, 133–34; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 534.
20.Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 10, 50; Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 53; Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Census of Manufactures, 1919 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1923), 355, 374–75; Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope, 27; Nelson, Managers and Workers, 9.
21.Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 288. A selection from the very large Ford collection of photographs documenting the Highland Park plant can be viewed online at https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/.
22.David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor; the Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 133–35, 238–40.
23.Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 77–78, 80–85, 89–93, 156; Russell, “The Coming of the Line,” 39–40.
24.In 1926, Ford reduced the workweek from six days to five, becoming one of the first major industrial companies to institute the forty-hour week. Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 95–168; Peterson, American Automobile Workers, 156; John Reed, “Why They Hate Ford,” The Masses, 8 (Oct. 1916), 11–12.
25.Nelson, Managers and Workers, 101–21; Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 236–38; Reed, “Why They Hate Ford”; Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 114, 156–57.
26.Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 107–09; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), lxxxvi– lxxxvii, 286, 302, 305.
27.Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 197–200; Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 291–342. See also Harry Bennett, We Never Called Him Henry (Greenwich, CT: Gold Medal Books, 1951).
28.Biggs, The Rational Factory, 89–94. The Piquette Avenue plant is still standing. It now houses a museum and can be rented for corporate parties, weddings, and bar mitzvahs. See http://www.fordpiquetteavenueplant.org/ (accessed Sept. 8, 2015).
29.Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 225–26; “Industry’s Architect,” Time, June 29, 1942; Grant Hildebrand, Designing for Industry: The Architecture of Albert Kahn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 26–27. Some of Kahn’s early work can be seen in W. Hawkins Ferry, The Legacy of Albert Kahn (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1970).
30.George N. Pierce became the manufacturer of Pierce-Arrow automobiles. Nelson, Managers and Workers, 15–16; Betsy Hunter Bradley, The Works: The Industrial Architecture of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 155–58; Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 28–43; Albert Kahn, “Industrial Architecture” (speech), May 25, 1939, Box 1, Albert Kahn Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Smith, Making the Modern, 59.
31.Biggs, The Rational Factory, 93–102, 110; Kahn, “Industrial Architecture.”
32.Smith, Making the Modern, 41–42, 71; Biggs, The Rational Factory, 78, 109, 120–25; Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 52.
33.I thank Jeffrey Trask for making this point to me. See Gillian Darley, Factory (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 157–89.
34.Biggs, The Rational Factory, 103–4, 150; Ford Factory Facts (Detroit, MI: Ford Motor Company, 1915) is an expanded and updated version of the 1912 booklet.
35.Both the Lingotto plant and the New York Packard service building are still standing. The former was converted into a cultural, hotel, office, retail, and educational complex by Renzo Piano; the latter now houses a car dealership. Jean Castex, Architecture of Italy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 47–49; Darley, Factory, 10–12; Christopher Gray, “The Car Is Still King on 11th Avenue,” New York Times, July 9, 2006.
36.Photographs of all of the mentioned buildings appear in Ferry, The Legacy of Albert Kahn, except for the Joy house, which is in Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 74. On Kahn’s automobile projects and his firm organization, see Olsen and Cabadas, The American Auto Factory, 39, 65; George Nelson, Industrial Architecture of Albert Kahn, Inc. (New York: Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1939), 19–23; Smith, Making the Modern, 76–78, 85–87; and Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 60, 124.
37.Olsen and Cabadas, The American Auto Factory, 39; Biggs, The Rational Factory, 138–40, 151. For Ford tractors, see Reynold Wik, Henry Ford and Grassroots America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 82–97.
38.Biggs, The Rational Factory, 146, 151; Writers’ Program of the Works Progress Administration, Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 221–24; Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). Kingsford is now owned by The Clorox Company. The Clorox Company, “A Global Portfolio of Diverse Brands” (accessed Sept., 13, 2015), https://www.thecloroxcompany.com/products/our-brands/.
39.The Rouge foundry also made parts for Fordson tractors. Biggs, The Rational Factory, 148–49, 152; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 268, 289.
40.Nelson, Industrial Architecture of Albert Kahn, Inc., 132; Biggs, The Rational Factory, 129, 141–57; Kahn, “Industrial Architecture”; Ferry, The Legacy of Albert Kahn, 113–16, 120–22, 129–301; The Reminiscences of Mr. B. R. Brown Jr., Benson Ford Research Center, Dearborn, Michigan; Works Progress Administration, Michigan, 220–21; Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 91–92, 99, 102–08, 172–82. On Kahn’s and Ford’s antimodernism, see Albert Kahn, “Architectural Trend” (speech), April 15, 1931, Box 1, Albert Kahn Papers; Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 259–75; and Smith, Making the Modern, 144–55 (though Smith’s interpretation is very different than mine).
41.In addition to Highland Park and River Rouge, Ford built major manufacturing plants in Canada and England that built finished cars and trucks and supplied parts to foreign branch plants. As employment at the Rouge grew, it shrank at Highland Park. In 1929, when the average number of hourly employees at the Rouge was 98,337, at Highland Park it was only 13,444. After the stock market crash, employment at the Rouge fell but remained substantial. Edmund Wilson, The American Earthquake (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), 219–20, 234, 687; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 210, 365–66, 542–43; Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope, 207–08; Bruce Pietrykowski, “Fordism at Ford: Spatial Decentralization and Labor Segmentation at the Ford Motor Company, 1920–1950,” Economic Geography 71 (4) (Oct. 1995), 386, 389–91; Historic American Engineering Record, Mid-Atlantic Region National Park Service, “Dodge Bros. Motor Car Company Plant (Dodge Main): Photographs, Written Historical and Descriptive Data” (Philadelphia: Department of the Interior, 1980); Ronald Edsforth, Class Conflict and Cultural Consensus: The Making of a Mass Consumer Society in Flint, Michigan (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 77; New York Times, May 31, 1925, Apr. 9, 1972; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 263–301; Biggs, The Rational Factory, 148; Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 185–205; The Reminiscences of Mr. B. R. Brown Jr.
42.Not everyone, though, was enthralled. European carmaker André Citroen, after reporting that his visit to Dearborn left him “greatly impressed by the power of Ford’s production and his marvelous industrial creations at the River Rouge plant,” added “regrettably, the artistic element is absent. Nothing about Ford or his plant suggests a trace of the finer esthetic qualities.” Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 260–61; Olsen and Cabadas, The American Auto Factory, 61, 63, 67, 70–71; New York Times, Apr. 22, 1923.
43.Kahn also helped design both the General Motors and Ford exhibitions at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. John E. Findling, ed., Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851–1988 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 22; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1–2; Grandin, Fordlandia, 2; Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim, and Dickran Tashjian, The Machine Age in America 1918–1941 (New York: The Brooklyn Museum and Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 27; Nelson, Industrial Architecture of Albert Kahn, Inc., 97; Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 206, 213; Works Progress Administration, Michigan, 286, 292–93; New York Times, Apr. 9, 1972; U.S. Travel Service, U.S. Department of Commerce, USA Plant Visits 1977–1978 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, n.d.).
44.David Roediger, “Americanism and Fordism—American Style: Kate Richards O’Hare’s ‘Has Henry Ford Made Good?’,” Labor History 29 (2) (Spring 1988), 241–52.
45.John Reed, “Why They Hate Ford,” 11–12; Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 88.
46.Edmund Wilson, “The Despot of Dearborn,” Scribner’s Magazine, July 1931, 24–36; Roediger, “Americanism and Fordism—American Style,” 243; Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991), 259–70; Filene, The Way Out, 199, 201, 215–17, 221. On Ford’s anti-Semitism, see Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 146–60.
47.John Dos Passos, The Big Money ([1936] New York: New American Library, 1969), 70–77, and Alfred Kazin’s introduction to this edition, xi–xii. Cecelia Tichi expanded on Kazin’s observation in Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 194–216.
48.Smith, Making the Modern, 16–18; Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night ([1932] New York: New Directions, 1938); Upton Sinclair, The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America (Emaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1937); Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: A Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932).
49.Darley, Factory, 15–27, 34; Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, 23, 29; Kim Sichel, From Icon to Irony: German and American Industrial Photography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995); Leah Bendavid-Val, Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. (Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1999).
50.Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1963), quotes on 18, 33, 40, 49; Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White, quote on 74. Bourke-White may have been inspired by O’Neill’s play, in which one character says “I love dynamos. O love to hear them sing.” Eugene O’Neill, Dynamo (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), 92.
51.Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, 69; Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White, 87–89; Life, Nov. 23, 1936; William H. Young and Nancy K. Young, The 1930s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 156. “Margaret Bourke-White Photographic Material, Itemized Listing” is a comprehensive list of her photographs at the Margaret Bourke-White Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, including her factory photographs, https://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/b/bourke-white_m.htm#series7 (accessed Sept. 23, 2015). For Hine, see, for example, Jonathan L. Doherty, ed., Women at Work: 153 Photographs by Lewis W. Hine (New York: Dover Publications and George Eastman House, 1983).
52.Sheeler’s portfolio of Rouge photographs can be seen at the Detroit Institute of Art website for the 2004 exhibition “The Photography of Charles Sheeler, American Modernist” (accessed Sept. 23, 2015), http://www.dia.org/exhibitions/sheeler/content/rouge_gallery/hydra_shear.html. Sharon Lynn Corwin, “Selling ‘America’: Precisionism and the Rhetoric of Industry, 1916–1939,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2001, 17–79, 158; Carol Troyen, “Sheeler, Charles,” American National Biography Online Feb. 2000 (accessed Sept. 24 2015), http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00795.html; Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, 24, 78, 218–19; Smith, Making the Modern, 111–13. The Ford company returned to the strategy of selling cars through imagery of the magic and majesty of their production in a 1940 film it commissioned, Symphony in F, shown at the New York World’s Fair. It can be seen at “Symphony in F: An Industrial Fantasia for the World of Tomorrow,” The National Archives, Unwritten Record Blog, Mar. 3, 2016, https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2016/03/03/symphony-in-f-an-industrial-fantasia-for-the-world-of-tomorrow/.
53.Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 355–56; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 282–83. For Sheeler’s photomontage “Industry,” see Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, 24, 218. American Landscape is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art; Classic Landscape in the collection of the National Gallery of Art. See also River Rouge Plant, Whitney Museum of American Art, and City Interior, Worcester Art Museum. Amoskeag Mill Yard # 1 and Amoskeag Canal are in the collection of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. Amoskeag Mills #2 is in the collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas. Hine’s Amoskeag photographs are owned by the Library of Congress and can be viewed at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=Amoskeag%20hine (accessed Nov. 4, 2016). Bourke-White’s Amoskeag photographs are in Oversize 5, folders 31–35, Margaret Bourke-White Papers.
54.Smith, Making the Modern, 194; Troyen, “Sheeler, Charles.”
55.Carol Quirke, Eyes on Labor: News Photography and America’s Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 273–74; Corwin, “Selling ‘America,’” 127; Life, Nov. 23, 1936; Nov. 14, 1938.
56.Sharon Lynn Corwin stresses, contrary to the standard account and to Terry Smith, that workers do appear in Sheeler’s Rouge photographs and are critical to their meaning. Corwin, “Selling ‘America,’” 23; Fortune, Dec. 1940.
57.Like Bourke-White, Driggs grew up familiar with the world of industry; her father was an engineer for a steel company. Rivera and many of the Precisionists shared a past engagement with Cubism. Corwin, “Selling ‘America,’” 145–48, 159–62, 165; Barbara Zabel, “Louis Lozowick and Technological Optimism of the 1920s,” Archives of American Art Journal 14 (2) (1974), 17–21; Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, 237–42, 343; Linda Bank Downs, Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals (New York: Norton, 1999), 21.
58.Downs, Diego Rivera, 22, 28.
59.Henry Ford offered a chauffeured Lincoln to Rivera and Kahlo to use in their exploration of the city, but Rivera thought it would be embarrassing for artists to be seen in such luxury, so he accepted a more modest car from Edsel instead. Mark Rosenthal, “Diego and Frida”; Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera, “April 21, 1932”; Linda Downs, “The Director and the Artist: Two Revolutionaries”; and John Dean, “’He’s the Artist in the Family’: The Life, Times, and Character of Edsel Ford,” all in Rosenthal, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit (Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts, 2015). On the impact of the Depression on Detroit, see Steve Babson with Ron Alpern, Dave Elsila, and John Revitte, Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town (New York: Adama Books, 1984), 52–60.
60.Rosenthal, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, 102–03, 219.
61.Rivera’s depiction of the machinery and processes at the Rouge, working from sketches, photographs, and information provided by Ford engineers, is remarkably accurate. The one major exception is the giant stamping machine in the south wall panel. Rivera painted an older model machine—the one Sheeler had photographed—rather than the one then in use. (Rivera may have worked from the Sheeler photo.) Apparently Rivera preferred the anthropomorphic qualities of the older machine. For a detailed description and analysis of the murals and their relationship to actual Rouge activity, see Downs, Diego Rivera.
62.Rosenthal, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, 103–07, 182; Detroit News, Mar. 22, 1933, and May 12, 1933. Before returning to Mexico, Rivera completed a series of murals for the leftist New Workers School in New York City that included a portrayal of the Homestead strike. See David P. Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red”: Homestead 1892 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 218. The Rouge appears in another Detroit mural, painted in 1937 by WPA artist Walter Speck for the headquarters of United Automobile Workers Local 174. It now is in the Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit. See “Collection Spotlight: UAW Local 174 Mural,” Oct. 20, 2016, https://reuther.wayne.edu/node/13600.
63.In another painting Kahlo began in Detroit, Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States, the Highland Park powerhouse appears in the background. Downs, Diego Rivera, 58–60; Rosenthal, “Diego and Frida: High Drama in Detroit,” and Solomon Grimberg, “The Lost Desire: Frida Kahlo in Detroit,” in Rosenthal, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
64.Charles Chaplin, Modern Times (United Artists, 1936); Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 319–20; Charles Musser, “Modern Times (Chaplin 1936),” (accessed Sept. 30, 2015), http://actionspeaksradio.org/chaplin-by-charles-musser-2012/); Joyce Milton, Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 336, 348, 350; Mark Lynn Anderson, “Modern Times” (accessed Sept. 30, 2015), http://laborfilms.org/modern-times/; Edward Newhouse, “Charlie’s Critics,” Partisan Review and Anvil, Apr. 1936, 25–26 (includes quote from Daily Worker review); Stephen Kotchin, Magic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 184; Octavio Cortazar, Por Primera Vez/For the First Times (El Instituto Cubano, Lombarda Industria Cinematografia, 1967). In an odd coda, after the completion of Modern Times, Paulette Goddard and Chaplin ended their romantic relationship and Goddard went on to have one with Rivera. In a mural Rivera painted in San Francisco in 1940, Unión de la Expresión Artistica del Norte y Sur de este Continente (The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on This Continent), he included images of Chaplin, Kahlo, and Goddard eyeing each other suspiciously and a mashup of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue and a Detroit Motor Company stamping machine, a rare return to a theme of Detroit Industry. David Robinson, Chaplin, His Life and Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 509; City College of San Francisco, “Pan American Unity Mural,” (accessed Oct. 1, 2015), https://www.ccsf.edu/en/about-city-college/diego-rivera-mural/overview.html.
65.Ruth McKenney, Industrial Valley (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 261–62.
66.For an overview of this era, see Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire, 1945–2000: The Rise of a Global Empire, the Democratic Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 2012).
67.There is a large literature about labor upsurge of the 1930s, but the best single account remains Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker 1933–1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970).
68.In addition to Bernstein, Turbulent Years, see, Ronald W. Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Daniel Nelson, American Rubber Workers and Organized Labor, 1900–1941 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Sidney Fine, The Automobile Under the Blue Eagle: Labor, Management, and the Automobile Manufacturing Code (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964).
69.Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 509–51; Henry Kraus, The Many and the Few: A Chronicle of the Dynamic Auto Workers ([1947] Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). See, also, Sidney A. Fine, Sit-down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).
70.Joshua Freeman et al., Who Built America? 395; Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 551–54, 608–09, 613; Steve Jefferys, Management and Managed: Fifty Years of Crisis at Chrysler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 71–77; Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 17–33.
71.Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 54–60; Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 432–73.
72.Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 478–98; Zieger, CIO, 79, 82.
73.Zieger, CIO, 121–31.
74.No similar size election again would be held until 1999, when seventy-four thousand home-care workers in Los Angeles were sent ballots to determine if they wanted union representation. John Barnard, American Vanguard: The United Auto Workers during the Reuther Years, 1935–1970 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 153–64; Zieger, CIO, 122–24; Los Angeles Times, Feb. 26, 1999.
75.Joshua Freeman, “Delivering the Goods: Industrial Unionism During World War II,” Labor History 19 (4) (Fall 1978); U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789–1945 (Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), 72. See also Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II ([1982] Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003).
Chapter 5
“COMMUNISM IS SOVIET POWER PLUS THE ELECTRIFICATION OF THE WHOLE COUNTRY”
1.Detroit Sunday News, Dec. 15, 1929. Photographs of the plant site and construction are in box 10, Albert Kahn Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. See also “Agenda for Meeting with Russian Visitors—Saturday, June 13, 1964,” Russian Scrapbooks, vol. II, box 13, Kahn Papers; Those Who Built Stalingrad, As Told by Themselves (New York: International Publishers, 1934), 29; Alan M. Ball, Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 124; New York Times, Mar. 29, 1930, May 18, 1930; Margaret Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931), 118–27.
2.V. I. Lenin, “Our Foreign and Domestic Position and Party Tasks,” Speech Delivered to the Moscow Gubernia Conference of the R.C.P.(B.), Nov. 21, 1920, Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1966), 419–20.
3.Edward Hallett Carr and R. W. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926–1929, Vol. I–II (London: Macmillan, 1969), 844, 898–902; Alexander Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–1928 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 164–65; J. V. Stalin, “A Year of Great Change, On the Occasion of the Twelfth Anniversary of the October Revolution,” Pravda 259 (Nov. 7, 1929), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1929/11/03.htm; Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 32 (quoted passage), 69–70, 363, 366.
4.Arens went on to become a leading industrial designer, working for some of the best-known American corporations. Barnaby Haran cites Arens’s comments in his article “Tractor Factory Facts: Margaret Bourke-White’s Eyes on Russia and the Romance of Industry in the Five-Year Plan,” Oxford Art Journal 38 (1) (2015), 82. The full text is in New Masses 3 (7) (Nov. 1927), 3. On Arens, see “Biographical History,” Egmont Arens Papers Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, accessed Feb. 23, 2016, http://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/a/arens_e.htm#d2e97.
5.Of course, there always were some government-owned factories, particularly to produce armaments. As discussed in Chapter 4, at times these played an important role in the development of production techniques.
6.On the impact of scientific management and mass production in Europe, see Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970 (New York: Viking, 1989), 285–323; Judith A. Merkle, Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), esp. 105, 136–223; Charles S. Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History 5 (2) (1970), pp. 27–61; and Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
7.Lenin was particularly attracted to Gilbreth’s work (as other Russian communists would be) because, by simplifying motions for completing tasks, it claimed to increase productivity without increasing the exploitation of workers as speedup did. S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories 1917–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 7–12; Merkle, Management and Ideology, 105–06, 179; Daniel A. Wren and Arthur G. Bedeian, “The Taylorization of Lenin: Rhetoric or Reality?” International Journal of Social Economics 31 (3) (2004), 287–99 (quote from Lenin on 288); V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism; A Popular Outline ([1917] New York: International Publishers, 1939).
8.Lenin’s remarks about Taylor were soon translated into English, circulated in the United States, and frequently quoted in business circles. Wren and Bedeian, “Taylorization of Lenin,” 288–89; Merkle, Management and Ideology, 111–15 (quote on 113).
9.Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed; Trotsky: 1879–1921 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 499–502; Merkle, Management and Ideology, 118–19; Kendall E. Bailes, “Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism, 1918–24,” Soviet Studies 29 (3) (July 1977), 374, 380–83.
10.Merkle, Management and Ideology, 114–20; Bailes, “Alexei Gastev”; Vladimir Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia: Industrialization and Social Change in a Planned Economy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 101–02; Wren and Bedeian, “Taylorization of Lenin,” 290–91; Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, 498–501.
11.An earlier All-Russian Conference on Scientific Management had been organized by Trotsky in 1921, but failed to resolve the differences between the two sides of the debate. Bailes, “Alexei Gastev,” 387–93; Kendall E. Bailes, “The American Connection: Ideology and the Transfer of American Technology to the Soviet Union, 1917–1941,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (3) (July 1981), 437; Wren and Bedeian, “Taylorization of Lenin,” 291.
12.When a delegation from the Ford Motor Company visited Gastev’s institute in 1926, they deemed it “a circus, a comedy, a crazy house,” “a pitiful waste of young people’s time.” Merkle, Management and Ideology, 123; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 93–94; Bailes, “Alexei Gastev,” 391, 393; Timothy W. Luke, Ideology and Soviet Industrialization (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 165–66; Wren and Bedeian, “Taylorization of Lenin” 291–96; Ball, Imagining America, 28–29.
13.My discussion of RAIC is based on Steve Fraser, “The ‘New Unionism’ and the ‘New Economic Policy’,” in James E. Cronin and Carmen Sirianni, eds., Work, Community and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900–1925 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983).
14.William Z. Foster, Russian Workers and Workshops in 1926 (Chicago: Trade Union Educational League, 1926), 52; Erlich, Soviet Industrialization Debate, 24–25, 105–06, 114.
15.Erlich, Soviet Industrialization Debate, xvii–xviii, 140, 147, 161; Smith, Red Petrograd, 7–8, 10–12; Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 1891–1991: A History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 112.
16.Bailes, “The American Connection,” 430–31; Hans Rogger, “Amerikanizm and the Economic Development of Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (3) (July 1981); Hughes, American Genesis, 269; Dana G. Dalrymple, “The American Tractor Comes to Soviet Agriculture: The Transfer of a Technology,” Technology and Culture 5 (2) (Spring 1964), 192–94, 198; Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons: 1957), 255, 673–77.
17.Foster also claimed that Soviet workers accepted piecework and Taylorism because “The benefits of increased production flow to the workers, not to greedy capitalists.” William Z. Foster, Russian Workers, 13, 54; New York Times, Feb. 17, 1928 (“Fordizatsia”).
18.In seeing socialism as the outcome of a combination of Soviet rule with American methods, Trotsky was not only echoing Lenin but also voicing a common Bolshevik belief. In 1923, for example, Nikolai Bukharin declared “We need Marxism plus Americanism.” Rogger, “Amerikanizm,” 384. The Trotsky quotes come from his essay “Culture and Socialism,” Krasnaya Nov, 6 (Feb. 3, 1926), translated by Brian Pearce, in Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life and Other Writings on Culture and Science (New York: Monad Press, 1973).
19.The Five-Year Plan was a highly detailed document, running more than 1,700 pages long. Erlich, Soviet Industrialization Debate; Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 894, 896; Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 4, 139, 146–48.
20.There perhaps was a cultural element in the Soviet embrace of industrial giantism as well; Russia, before and after the revolution, had a general predilection to monumentality, evident, for example, in buildings from the Hermitage to the never completed Moscow Palace of Soviets. My thanks to Kate Brown for this point. Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 844, 898–902; Erlich, Soviet Industrialization Debate, 67–68, 107–08, 140; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 27; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 33–38.
21.Bailes, “The American Connection,” 431; Merkle, Management and Ideology, 125; Rogger, “Amerikanizm,” 416–17.
22.Another American, Bill Shatov, supervised a second, large early Soviet project, the Turksib railway, but that was a very different story; Shatov was a Russian-born anarchist, active in the United States in the Industrial Workers of the World, who returned to Russia in 1917. Hughes, American Genesis, 264–69; Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 900–901; Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia, 76–88; Sonia Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns’: How an American Architect and a Soviet Negotiator Jump-Started the Industrialization of Russia: Part II: Saul Bron,” Industrial Archeology 37 (1/2) (2011), 8–9. Melnikova-Raich’s article is the second part of her revelatory examination of the role of American companies and experts in Soviet industrialization based on extensive research in both U.S. and Soviet archives. On Shatov, see the Emma Goldman Papers, Editors’ Notes (accessed Jan. 11, 2016), http://editorsnotes.org/projects/emma/topics/286/.
23.Adler, “Russia ‘Arming’ with Tractor”; Maurice Hindus, “Preface,” in Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia, 14–15; Dalrymple, “The American Tractor Comes to Soviet Agriculture,” 210; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 3.
24.The Soviets planned to produce a tractor based on an International Harvester model, receiving cooperation from the company without paying it royalties. New York Times, Nov. 5, 1928, May 5, 1929, and May 7, 1929; Sonia Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns’: How an American Architect and a Soviet Negotiator Jump-Started the Industrialization of Russia: Part I: Albert Kahn,” Industrial Archeology 36 (2) (2010), 60–61, 66; Economic Review of the Soviet Union, Apr. 1, 1930.
25.Detroit Free Press, May 14, 1929, and June 1, 1929.
26.Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 61, 66–68; New York Times, July 1, 1929, Mar. 29, 1930, May 18, 1930, and Mar. 27, 1932; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 38–45, 50–56 (Ivanov quote on 52), 206; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 84–85; Rogger, “Amerikanizm,” 383–84.
27.New York Times, June 19, 1930; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 13, 62.
28.Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part II,” 9–11, 23–24; New York Times, May 5, 1929, May 7, 1929, June 1, 1929; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 677–78, 683; Richard Cartwright Austin, Building Utopia: Erecting Russia’s First Modern City, 1930 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004), 12.
29.Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part II,” 11–12; Michigan Manufacturer and Financial Record, Apr. 19, 1930; Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 40; Betsy Hunter Bradley, The Works: The Industrial Architecture of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 22; Austin, Building Utopia, 5–6, 13–19.
30.Austin, Building Utopia, 31–43, 59–101, 121–39; New York Times, Dec. 2, 1931.
31.In April 1930, the Soviet Automobile Construction Trust decided it had been a mistake to ask Austin to design the autoworkers’ city: “If Americans are specialists in automobile construction, they are certainly far from specialists in designing Socialist town [sic] for the Soviet Republics.” Nonetheless, even in the radical socialist vision for the city there was some American influence. One of the key figures involved, architect and educator Alexander Zelenko, had spent time in the United States, including visits to Hull House in Chicago and the University Settlement in New York, where he was influenced by the ideas of John Dewey. New York Times, Dec. 16, 1929, Apr. 11, 1931, Mar. 27, 1932; Yordanka Valkanova, “The Passion for Educating the ‘New Man’: Debates about Preschooling in Soviet Russia, 1917–1925,” History of Education Quarterly 49 (2) (May 2009), 218; Austin, Building Utopia, 45–53, 84–85, 161–68; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 366.
32.The very popular Soviet novel Cement, by Fyodo Vasilievich Gladkov ([1925] New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1973), vividly portrays the huge obstacles and heroic efforts involved in Soviet industrialization. For first-person accounts in English of work on First-Year Plan projects, see Those Who Built Stalingrad and John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1942).
33.On-site reports include The Detroit Sunday News, Dec. 15, 1929, and New York Times, Nov. 21, 1930. Time coverage includes “Great Kahn,” May 20, 1929, “Austin’s Austingrad,” Sept. 16, 1929, and “Architects to Russia,” Jan. 20, 1930.
34.Saul G. Bron, Soviet Economic Development and American Business (New York: Horace Liveright, 1930), 76, 144–46.
35.Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 60–63; New York Times, Jan. 11, 1930; “Architects to Russia,” Time, Jan. 20, 1930; Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85; Detroit Free Press, Jan. 18, 1930; Detroit Times, Mar. 17, 1930.
36.“Industry’s Architect,” Time, June 29, 1942; Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 62–66, 75.
37.The design of the tractor to be produced in Chelyabinsk and much of the engineering for its manufacture was done at a Detroit office that had twelve U.S. and forty Soviet engineers. Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 69–71.
38.Those Who Built Stalingrad, 56-58, 261; Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia, 188. Of course, not speaking Russian and unfamiliar with the circumstances, it is quite possible that Bourke-White and other American observers failed to fully understand what they were seeing and its causes.
39.New York Times, Nov. 7, 1930, Nov. 24, 1930, Dec. 27, 1930, Sept. 28, 1931, Oct. 4, 1931, Apr. 14, 1934; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 522; Meredith Roman, “Racism in a ‘Raceless’ Society: The Soviet Press and Representations of American Racial Violence at Stalingrad in 1930,” International Labor and Working-Class History 71 (Spring 2007), 187; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 64–66, 161, 164, 228–29, 261, 263.
40.New York Times, July 20, 1930; Austin, Building Utopia, 190–91; Victor Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 93, 101.
41.New York Times, July 20, 1930; May 11, 1931; May 14, 1931; May 18, 1931; Dec. 2, 1931 (Duranty), May 18, 1932; Austin, Building Utopia, 190–91, 197; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 35; Reuther, Brothers Reuther, 88, 93, 101, 110.
42.Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 69; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 158; New York Times, Dec. 2, 1931.
43.The following account of Magnitogorsk is based primarily on Stephen Kotkin’s brilliant history, Magnetic Mountain, and the first-person account by American John Scott, who worked in the plant, Behind the Urals.
44.“Mighty Giant” from USSR in Construction, 1930, no. 9, p. 14. The Nizhny Tagil plant looked very much like a Kahn factory, but apparently only Soviet specialists were involved in designing, building, and starting it up, including many veterans of First Five-Year Plan projects. See USSR in Construction, 1936, no. 7 (July).
45.“Super-American tempo” from USSR in Construction, 1930, no. 9, p.14. On the weather, see http://www.weatherbase.com/weather/weather.php3?s=83882&cityname=Magnitogorsk-Chelyabinsk-Russia (accessed Jan. 26, 2016) and Scott, Behind the Urals, 9–10, 15. For many Americans besides Scott, cold was a defining feature of their experience in the Soviet Union. When Victor Herman, who accompanied his father to the Gorky auto plant, attended a Kremlin celebration of the first vehicles to come off the line, the first thing he noticed was the warmth in the banquet hall, realizing that he had not been “really all-over warm” since arriving in the country. Victor Herman, Coming Out of the Ice (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 53.
46.Kotkin and Scott both extensively discuss the use of unfree labor. See, also, William Henry Chamberlin, Russia’s Iron Age (Boston: Little, Brown, 1934), 51–53; Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 101.
47.In addition to Kotkin and Scott (quoted passage on 159), see Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’” Part II, 19; Herman, Coming Out of the Ice; and Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades, 58–59.
48.Scott, Behind the Urals, 204–05, 277–79.
49.Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades, 45; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 16; Robert C. Allen, Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 92–93, 102–06. On the difficulty of obtaining accurate Soviet economic data, see Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, Red Globalization: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 12–19.
50.Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 70, 363; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 79–83.
51.Scott, Behind the Urals, 16; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 168–73.
52.Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 35; Scott, Behind the Urals, 144; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 189. Tensions about shifting gender roles are a major theme in Cement, Gladkov’s widely read novel about the struggle to reopen a huge, prerevolution cement factory.
53.Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 39; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 98.
54.Scott, Behind the Urals, 138, 152, 212–19; Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 87; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 214–15.
55.Scott, Behind the Urals, 40; Katerina Clark, “Little Heroes and Big Deeds: Literature Responds to the First Five-Year Plan,” in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 197; Reuther, Brothers Reuther, 98–99; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 52–53. Oddly, artificial palm trees seemed to have been something of a rage in the Soviet Union; when Ernst May and a team of German architects entered the country in 1929 to design new industrial cities, they found artificial palms common in railway waiting rooms. Ernst May, “Cities of the Future,” in Walter Laqueur and Leopold Labedz, eds., Future of Communist Society (New York: Praeger, 1962), 177.
56.Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 49, 55–56, 95–103; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 37; A. Baikov, Magnitogorsk (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1939), 19, 30–31; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 67, 182–92, 290–91; Scott, Behind the Urals, 235–36.
57.Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 38; Scott, Behind the Urals, 234; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 108–23.
58.Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 80–82; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 212–19.
59.Clark, “Little Heroes and Big Deeds,” 190–92; Susan Tumarkin Goodman, “Avant-garde and After: Photography in the Early Soviet Union,” in Goodman and Jens Hoffman, eds., The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 23, 31–32; Lydia Chukovskaya, Sofia Petrovna (1962; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 4. Chukovskaya’s novella was not published in Russian until 1962 and in English until 1967.
60.For a comparison of documentary photography in the United States and the Soviet Union, see Bendavid-Val, Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. (Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1999).
61.Over time, the magazine began covering more varied topics, including political events, the army, ethnic groups, distant regions of the country, and sports. USSR in Construction, 1930–1941; USSR in Construction: An Illustrated Exhibition Magazine (Sundsvall, Sweden: Fotomuseet Sundsvall, 2006); University of Saskatchewan Library, Digital Collections, USSR in Construction, “About” (accessed Feb. 5, 2016), http://library2.usask.ca/USSRConst/about; Goodman, “Avant-garde and After,” 27–28; Bendavid-Val, Propaganda and Dreams, 62–65.
62.SSSR stroit sotsializm (Moskova: Izogiz, 1933); USSR in Construction: An Illustrated Exhibition Magazine (press run data); B. M. Tal, Industriia sotsializma. Tiazhelaia promyshlennost’k VII vsesoiuznomu s’ezdy sovetov [Industry of Socialism. Heavy Industry for the Seventh Congress of Soviets] (Moscow: Stroim, 1935).
63.Goodman, “Avant-garde and After,” 15, 17; USSR in Construction, 1930, no. 1.
64.Goodman, “Avant-garde and After,” 22–27, 38. Leah Bendavid-Val stresses similarities between Soviet and U.S. photographers in Propaganda and Dreams, which includes photographs of Magnitogorsk by Debabov, Albert, and Petrusov. For more extensive collections of Petrusov’s work, see Georgij Petrussow, Pioneer Sowjetischer Photographie (Köln, Germany: Galerie Alex Lachmann, n.d.) and Georgy Petrusov: Retrospective/Point of View (Moscow: GBUK “Multimedia Complex of Actual Arts,” Museum “Moscow House of Photography,” 2010).
65.Entuziazm (Simfonija Donbassa), Ukrainfilm, 1931. Filmmakers like Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, who used avant-garde techniques to pursue revolutionary themes, drew considerable attention outside of the Soviet Union, but domestic audiences preferred more conventional entertainment. Jens Hoffman, “Film in Conflict,” in Goodman and Hoffman, The Power of Pictures.
66.The Soviets also published in English a collection of letters from foreigners who worked in the Soviet Union. Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part II,” 17–18; Cynthia A. Ruder, Making History for Stalin; The Story of the Belomor Canal (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998); Those Who Built Stalingrad; Baikov, Magnitogorsk; Garrison House Ephemera (accessed Nov. 13, 2016), http://www.garrisonhouseephemera.com/?page=shop/flypage&product_id=546; Sixty Letters: Foreign Workers Write of Their Life and Work in the U.S.S.R. (Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1936).
67.Duranty’s articles on Soviet industry are too numerous to individually cite. For Chamberlin, see Russia’s Iron Age. On American academic experts and intellectuals, see David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), esp. 5–6, 9, 156–57, 166, 237 (Fischer quote).
68.Hans Schoots, Living Dangerously: A Biography of Joris Ivens (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 74–81.
69.Bourke-White returned to the U.S.S.R. in 1941, when she photographed Moscow during German bombing raids, Stalin in the Kremlin, and the front line. Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia (quotes on 23 and 42); Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1963), 90–104, 174–88; Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 128– 32; Haran, “Tractor Factory Facts.”
70.To compare Bourke-White’s Soviet and U.S. textile mill photographs, see Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia and Bourke-White, “Amoskeag” (1932), reproduced in Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim, and Dickran Tashjian, The Machine Age in America 1918–1941 (New York: Brooklyn Museum and Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 234. Bourke-White also took similar photographs at the American Woolen Company in Lawrence, Massachusetts. For an interesting discussion of her Soviet work, see Haran, “Tractor Factory Facts.”
71.A drop in grain production during the first years of collectivization, combined with the export of grain, exacerbated the food crisis. Sanchez-Sibony, Red Globalization, 36–53 (Stalin quote on 51); Bailes, “The American Connection,” 433, 442–43; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 150, 198; Scott, Behind the Urals, 86–87, 174; Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 74–75; New York Times, Mar. 26, 1932; Detroit Free Press, Mar. 29, 1932; Daily Express, Apr. 19, 1932; Detroit News, Apr. 24, 1932; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 682.
72.Merkle, Management and Ideology, 132; Bailes, “The American Connection,” 442–44; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 54, 198; Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 285–86, 297–99; Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 75–76; Scott, Behind the Urals, 230–31.
73.Bailes, “The American Connection,” 445; Chamberlin, Russia’s Iron Age, 61–65; R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison, and S. G. Wheatcroft, eds., The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 95, 155; Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 5, 178.
74.Wikipedia, “Alexei Gastev” (accessed Nov. 12, 2016), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksei_Gastev; Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part II,” 17–20; Patrick Flaherty, “Stalinism in Transition, 1932–1937,” Radical History Review, 37 (Winter 1987). Bill Shatov, who had returned home from the United States and supervised the Turksib railway project, was exiled to Siberia in 1937 and executed the following year. Emma Goldman Papers, Editors’ Notes (accessed Jan. 11, 2016), http://editorsnotes.org/projects/emma/topics/286/. For an account of the long imprisonment, Siberian exile, and eventual return to the United States of a young American worker at the Gorky auto plant, see Herman, Coming Out of the Ice.
75.Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928–1941 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1986), 126–27, 261–66; Erlich, Soviet Industrialization Debate, 182–83; Allen, Farm to Factory, 152, 170–71; Flaherty, “Stalinism in Transition,” 48–49.
76.After their revolution, the Soviets (like the French) introduced a new organization of time, replacing the weekend with a system of one day off work during every five days (four days in the metallurgy industry), later switching to one day off every six days, before ultimately returning to more conventional timekeeping. Filtzer, Soviet Workers, 91–96, 156; Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 92–117; Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 4, 42–45.
77.Most of the twenty thousand Stalingrad Tractor Factory workers were evacuated as the battle broke out. The factory was rebuilt after the war. The Nizhny Tagil Railroad Car Factory also was converted to military production, and, like the Chelyabinsk plant, continues to produce both military and civilian equipment, employing thirty thousand workers in 2016. Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 68–69, 71–73; Reuther, Brothers Reuther, 102–03; Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades, 61–62; Jochen Hellbeck, Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2015), 89; “History—Chelyabinsk tractor plant (ChTZ)” (accessed Jan. 18, 2016), http://chtz-uraltrac.ru/articles/categories/24.php; New York Times, Feb. 25, 2016; Scott, Behind the Urals, vii–viii, 63–65, 103.
78.John P. Diggins, Up from Communism ([1975] New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 189–98; Christopher Phelps, “C.L.R. James and the Theory of State Capitalism,” in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Filtzer, Soviet Workers, 270–71.
79.Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 126–76, 198–201; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 206–07, 318–19; Filtzer, Soviet Workers, 233–36; Federico Bucci, Albert Kahn: Architect of Ford (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 92.
80.If anything, Freyn thought the Soviets were a bit too democratic; it would be better if “more decisions might be made by responsible individuals rather than by committees and commissions.” Edmund Wilson, “A Senator and an Engineer,” New Republic, May 27, 1931; “An American Engineer Looks at the Five Year Plan,” New Republic, May 6, 1931; Detroit News Apr. 24, 1932.
Chapter 6
“COMMON REQUIREMENTS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION”
1.Many of Burnham’s arguments had been put forth earlier by Bruno Rizzi, but received little notice outside of small, left-wing circles. At roughly the same time, C. L. R. James broke with Trotsky to describe the Soviet Union as “state capitalist,” with productive enterprises collectively owned by a reemerging capitalist class through the government. Ultimately, the United States, too, James argued, would become state capitalist. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution ([1941] Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960); Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast; Trotsky: 1929–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 459–77; Christopher Phelps, “C.L.R. James and the Theory of State Capitalism,” in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
2.These paragraphs draw substantially from David C. Engerman, “To Moscow and Back: American Social Scientists and the Concept of Convergence,” in Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism.
3.http://brooklynnavyyard.org/the-navy-yard/history/ (accessed Mar. 29, 2016). For a popular overview of the role of private business in wartime defense production, see Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (New York: Random House, 2012).
4.To undertake the war work, Kahn’s firm grew from four hundred to six hundred employees. Hawkins Ferry, The Legacy of Albert Kahn (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 25–26.
5.To expand the labor pool for Willow Run, Ford opened up jobs to women, who eventually made up 35 percent of the workforce. However, in a departure from its policy at Highland Park and the Rouge, the company all but spurned African Americans. Willow Run workers eventually achieved productivity far above the airplane industry norm. The latest use of the Willow Run factory grounds has been as a test site for driverless cars. Sarah Jo Peterson, Planning the Home Front: Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons: 1957), 242–47; Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 160–74; Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 121–32; New York Times, June 6, 2016.
6.Not all the workers at other airplane manufacturers were housed in single plants; Republic and Grumman built auxiliary factories near their main plants to bring work nearer to where workers lived, reducing problems with commuting and housing. T. P. Wright Memorandum for Charles E. Wilson, Mar. 21, 1943, box 7, National Aircraft War Production Council, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO; Ferry, Legacy of Albert Kahn, 25, 127–28; Tim Keogh, “Suburbs in Black and White: Race, Jobs and Poverty in Twentieth-Century Long Island,” Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 2016, 53–56, 77; T. M. Sell, Wings of Power: Boeing and the Politics of Growth in the Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 19; John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), 142–43.
7.“Bethlehem Ship,” Fortune, Aug. 1945, 220; Bernard Matthew Mergen, “A History of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America, 1933–1951,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1968, 2–3, 103–04, 134–37, 142; [Baltimore] Evening Sun, Dec. 8, 1943; Apr. 5, 1944; Apr. 20, 1944; May 15, 1944; July 1, 1944; Karen Beck Skold, “The Job He Left Behind: American Women in Shipyards During World War II,” in Carol R. Berkin and Clara M. Lovett, eds., Women, War, and Revolution (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), esp. 56–58; Eric Arnesen and Alex Lichtenstein, “Introduction: ‘All Kinds of People,’ ” in Katherine Archibald, Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity ([1947] Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), xvi, xxxi–xxxv; Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire, 1945–2000: The Rise of a Global Empire, the Democratic Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 2012), 21; Peterson, Planning the Home Front, 279.
8.For the impact of World War II on the American working class, see Joshua Freeman, “Delivering the Goods: Industrial Unionism during World War II,” Labor History 19 (4) (Fall 1978); Nelson Lichtenstein, “The Making of the Postwar Working Class: Cultural Pluralism and Social Structure in World War II,” The Historian 51 (1) (Nov. 1988), 42–63; Gary Gerstle, “The Working Class Goes to War,” Mid-America 75 (3) (1993), 303–22. Dorothea Lange and Charles Wollenberg, Photographing the Second Gold Rush: Dorothea Lange and the East Bay at War, 1941–1945 (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1995).
9.Jack Metzgar, “The 1945–1946 Strike Wave,” in Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, and Immanuel Ness, eds., The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2009); Art Preis, Labor’s Giant Step: Twenty years of the CIO (New York: Pioneer Press, 1965), 257–83.
10.Ronald W. Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 105–64; Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, 282–98; Freeman, American Empire,119–24; Labor’s Heritage: Quarterly of the George Meany Memorial Archives, 4 (1992), 28; Joshua Freeman, “Labor During the American Century: Work, Workers, and Unions Since 1945,” in Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., A Companion to Post-1945 America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); Ruth Milkman, Farewell to the Factory: Auto Workers in the Late Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Charles Corwin in New York Daily Worker, Feb. 4, 1949, quoted in Karen Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 114; Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 30–45 (quote on 39).
11.Daniel Nelson, American Rubber Workers and Organized Labor, 1900–1941 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 82–83, 234–45, 257–64, 271, 307–09, 315–17; Charles A. Jeszeck, “Plant Dispersion and Collective Bargaining in the Rubber Tire Industry,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1982, 31, 47–54, 106–08.
12.The Bloomington plant swelled to more than eight thousand employees after RCA began producing televisions there, but the company eventually shifted much of the production first to Memphis and then Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 10, 15, 17, 22–35, 42–43.
13.In a further effort to avoid interruptions in production, General Motors, unlike Ford, made it a policy to use outside suppliers for a majority of the parts and accessories that went into its vehicles. Douglas Reynolds, “Engines of Struggle: Technology, Skill and Unionization at General Motors, 1930–1940,” Michigan Historical Review 15 (Spring 1989), 79–80; New York Times, Aug. 12, 1935; Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 208.
14.Jeszeck, “Plant Dispersion,” 33–35; “Flying High,” Kansas City Public Library, http://www.kclibrary.org/blog/week-kansas-city-history/flying-high, and “Fairfax Assembly Plant,” GM Corporate Newsroom, http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/company_info/facilities/assembly/fairfax.html (both accessed Apr. 5, 2016); Schatz, Electrical Workers, 233. On war-related industrial development in the Southwest, see Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
15.Metzgar, “The 1945–1946 Strike Wave”; Freeman, American Empire, 39–41; Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 93–97; Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 138–39.
16.Kim Phillips-Fein, “Top-Down Revolution: Businessmen, Intellectuals and Politicians Against the New Deal, 1945–1964,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2004, 220; Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000), 60–71; Tami J. Friedman, “Communities in Competition: Capital migration and plant relocation in the United States carpet industry, 1929–1975,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2001, 22, 70–76, 201–04.
17.Schatz, Electrical Workers, 170–75; Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 97–114.
18.Schatz, Electrical Workers, 233–34.
19.Schatz, Electrical Workers, 234–36; Freeman, American Empire, 303–06; Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 128–29; James C. Cobb, The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Friedman, “Communities in Competition,” 111–66.
20.See, for example, Martin Beckman, Location Theory (New York: Random House, 1968); Gerald J. Karaska and David F. Bramhall, Locational Analysis for Manufacturing: A Selection of Readings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969); and Paul Krugman, Geography and Trade (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), esp. 62–63 for discussion of Akron.
21.Counter to the common management view, the productivity of unionized workers often exceeded that of nonunion workers. Roger W. Schmenner, Making Business Location Decisions (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982), vii, 10–11, 124–26, 154–57, 239; Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 104; Lawrence Mishel and Paula B. Voos, eds., Unions and Economic Competitiveness (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1992).
22.Kimberly Phillips-Fein, “American Counterrevolutionary: Lemuel Ricketts Boulware and General Electric, 1950–1960,” in Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism, 266–67; John Barnard, American Vanguard: The United Auto Workers during the Reuther Years, 1935–1970 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 483; Cowie, Capital Moves, 53–58. See also Friedman, “Communities in Competition,” 380–81, 403–21.
23.Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 130–35.
24.Steve Jefferys, Management and Managed: Fifty Years of Crisis at Chrysler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 155; Historic American Engineering Record, Mid-Atlantic Region National Park Service, “Dodge Bros. Motor Car Company Plant (Dodge Main): Photographs, Written Historical and Descriptive Data” (Philadelphia: Department of the Interior, 1980), 20.
25.Freeman, American Empire, 115; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1967 Census of Manufactures, vol. 1: Summary and Subject Statistics (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), table 1 (pages 2–4).
26.Charles Fishman, “The Insourcing Boom,” The Atlantic, Dec. 2012; Mark Reilly, “General Electric Appliance Park,” in John E. Kleber, ed., The Encyclopedia of Louisville (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 333–34.
27.“The Rebirth of Ford,” Fortune, May 1947, 81–89. The Evans photographs are now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and can be seen at http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/281891 and http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/279282 (accessed Apr. 11, 2016).
28.Warren Bareiss, “The Life of Riley,” Museum of Broadcast Communications—Encyclopedia of Television (accessed Apr. 11, 2016), http://www.museum.tv/eotv/lifeofriley.htm. See also George Lipsitz, “The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs,” Cultural Anthropology 1 (4) (Nov. 1986), 355–87.
29.Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor ([2002] Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 148–62, 215–18; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Manufactures, 1972, vol. 1, Subject and Special Statistics (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 68; Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society; A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Freeman, American Empire, 303–06, 344–49; Metzgar, Striking Steel, 210–23.
30.Anders Åman, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era; An Aspect of Cold War History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 76; Sonia Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns’: How an American Architect and a Soviet Negotiator Jump-Started the Industrialization of Russia: Part II: Saul Bron,” Industrial Archeology 37 (1/2) (2011), 21–22; “History—Chelyabinsk tractor plant (ChTZ)” (accessed Jan. 18, 2016), http://chtz-uraltrac.ru/articles/categories/24.php; New York Times, Feb. 25, 2016; Stephen Kotkin, Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), xii–xiii, 2, 5.
31.Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 80–81.
32.Alan M. Ball, Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 162.
33.Most of the housing in Avtograd consisted of apartments for individual families in five to sixteen story buildings. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades, 81–109; Wall Street Journal, Apr. 11, 2016.
34.KAMAZ, “History,” https://kamaz.ru/en/about/history/ (accessed May 2, 2017).
35.Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades, 112–24; Wall Street Journal, Apr. 11, 2016; KAMAZ, “History”; KAMAZ, “General Information” (accessed May 2, 2017), https://kamaz.ru/en/about/general-information/.
36.Czechoslovakia was exceptional in having a large communist party with substantial popular support. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 129–39, 165–96; Åman, Architecture and Ideology, 12, 28–30, 147; Mark Pittaway, “Creating and Domesticating Hungary’s Socialist Industrial Landscape: From Dunapentele to Sztálinváros, 1950–1958,” Historical Archaeology 39 (3) (2005), 76, 79–80.
37.Romania never had a “first socialist city” of the sort found elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Åman, Architecture and Ideology, 77 (“cult of steel”), 81, 147, 157–61; Ulf Brunnbauer, “‘The Town of the Youth’: Dimitrovgrad and Bulgarian Socialism,” Ethnologica Balkanica 9 (2005), 92–95. See also Paul R. Josephson, Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth? Technological Utopianism under Socialism, 1917–1989 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 65–119.
38.Åman, Architecture and Ideology, esp. 33–39, 102–03, 158, 162; Pittaway, “Hungary’s Socialist Industrial Landscape,” 78–81, 85–87; Brunnbauer, “‘The Town of the Youth,’” 94, 98–111; Katherine Lebow, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–56 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 46, 52–56.
39.Paweł Jagło, “Steelworks,” in Nowa Huta 1949+ [English version] (Kraków: Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa, 2013), quote on 18; Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 19–26, 36–40, 69; Alison Stenning, “Placing (Post-)Socialism: The Making and Remaking of Nowa Huta, Poland,” European Urban and Regional Studies 7 (Apr. 2000), 100–01; Boleslaw Janus, “Labor’s Paradise: Family, Work, and Home in Nowa Huta, Poland, 1950–1960,” East European Quarterly XXXIII (4) (Jan. 2000), 469; H. G. J. Pounds, “Nowa Huta: A New Polish Iron and Steel Plant,” Geography 43 (1) (Jan. 1958), 54–56; interview with Stanisław Lebiest, Roman Natkonski, and Krysztof Pfister, Nowa Huta, Poland, May 19, 2015. The largest U.S. Steel mill, in terms of employment, the Bethlehem Steel Sparrows Point complex, had 28,600 workers in 1957 and a capacity of 8.2 million tons a year. The U.S. Steel mill in Gary, Indiana, peaked at an estimated 25,000 workers in 1976. In 1996, with only 7,800 workers remaining, it produced 12.8 million tons of steel. Mark Reutter, Sparrows Point; Making Steel—The Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 10, 413; Chicago Tribune, Feb. 26, 1996.
40.Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 37–40; 61–62, 74–77, 82–88, 92–93, 97–98, 103; Janus, “Labor’s Paradise,” 455–56; Poland Today 6 (7–8) (July–Aug. 1951), 14. Photographs of the construction of Nowa Huta, including of female plasterers, can be seen in Henryk Makarewicz and Wiktor Pental, 802 Procent Normy; pierwsze lata Nowej Huty [802% Above the Norm: The Early Years of Nowa Huta] (Kraków: Fundacja Imago Mundi: Vis-à-vis/etiuda, [2007]).
41.Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 65, 71, 157–58; Paweł Jagło, “Architecture of Nowa Huta,” in Nowa Huta 1949+, 26.
42.Leszek J. Sibila, Nowa Huta Ecomuseum: A Guidebook (Kraków: The Historical Museum of the City of Kraków, 2007); Jagło, “Architecture of Nowa Huta”; Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 29–35, 41–42, 71–73; Åman, Architecture and Ideology, 102–103, 151–53; Nowa przestrzeń; Modernizm w Nowej Hucie (Kraków: Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa, 2012). For U.S. comparison, see Freeman, American Empire, 12–27, 136–39.
43.Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 3, 146–49; Åman, Architecture and Ideology, 151; stamps: https://www.stampworld.com/en_US/stamps/Poland/Postage%20stamps/?year=1951 and http://colnect.com/en/stamps/list/country/4365-Poland/theme/3059-Cranes_Machines (accessed Nov. 25, 2016); Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–56 (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 360, 372, 377–78, 384–85 (quotes from Ważyk in her translation on 384); Andrzej Wajda, Man of Marble (Warsaw: Zespól Filmowy X, 1977). See also Marci Shore, “Some Words for Grown-Up Marxists: ‘A Poem for Adults’ and the Revolution from Within,” Polish Review 42 (2) (1997), 131–54.
44.Brunnbauer, “’The Town of the Youth,’” 96–97, 105; Janus, “Labor’s Paradise,” 454–55; Pittaway, “Hungary’s Socialist Industrial Landscape,” 75–76, 82–85.
45.Judt, Postwar, 172; Janus, “Labor’s Paradise,” 464–65; Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 45, 47, 50–51, 56; interview with Lebiest et al.
46.Janus, “Labor’s Paradise,” 459–64; Brunnbauer, “‘The Town of the Youth,’” 105; Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 124–25, 138–45; Pittaway, “Hungary’s Socialist Industrial Landscape,” 87.
47.Sztálinváros was renamed Dunaújváros in 1961. Josephson, Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth?, 85–86; Applebaum, Iron Curtain, 459; Pittaway, “Hungary’s Socialist Industrial Landscape,” 88–89.
48.Paweł Jagło, “Defense of the Cross,” in Nowa Huta 1949+, 39–40; Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 161–69.
49.Paweł Jagło, “Anti-Communist Opposition,” in Nowa Huta 1949+; Stenning, “Placing (Post-) Socialism,” 105–06; Chicago Tribune, June 10, 1979.
50.Kraków environmentalists often blamed the steel mill for the severe air pollution in the city, but prevailing winds took emissions from Nowa Huta eastward, away from the city, not toward it. Local plants, industry west of Kraków, coal-burning furnaces, and growing traffic were more responsible. Maria Lempart, “Myths and facts about Nowa Huta,” in Nowa Huta 1949+, 50.
51.Judt, Postwar, 587–89; Stenning, “Placing (Post-)Socialism,” 106; Jagło, “Anti-Communist Opposition.”
52.The official government-recognized union tacitly supported the 1988 strike, though with its own, more modest demands. The discussion of Solidarity in Nowa Huta is drawn primarily from Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 169–76, and my interview with Lebiest et al. See also Jagło, “Anti-Communist Opposition”; New York Times, Nov. 11, 1982, Apr. 29, 1988, May 3, 1988, and May 6, 1988; and Judt, Postwar, 605–08.
53.Interview with Lebiest et al.
54.“Poland Fights for Gdansk Shipyard,” BBC News, Aug. 21, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6956549.stm; “Gdansk Shipyard Sinking from Freedom to Failure,” Toronto Star (accessed May 6, 2016), https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/01/27/gdansk_shipyard_sinking_from_freedom_to_failure.html).
55.New York Times, Nov. 27, 1989; interview with Lebiest et al.; Jagło, “Steelworks,”19–20; Stenning, “Placing (Post-)Socialism,” 108–10, 116.
56.New York Times, Oct. 6, 2015, and Oct. 7, 2015.
57.Harold James, Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 39; Werner Abelshauser, The Dynamics of German Industry: Germany’s Path toward the New Economy and the American Challenge (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 3, 85–86, 89.
58.Though in some respects the Wolfsburg plant was modeled on River Rouge, Volkswagen did not integrate backward to make all its parts, instead purchasing many from a network of closely connected suppliers. Abelshauser, Dynamics of German Industry, 91–104, 108–09; Volker R. Berghahn, The Americanization of West German Industry 1945–1973 (Lemington Spa, NY: Berg, 1986), 304–09.
59.Werner Abelshauser, Wolfgang Von Hippel, Jeffrey Allan Johnson, and Raymond G. Stokes, German Industry and Global Enterprise; BASF: The History of a Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 487–99 (quote on 488); New York Times, Oct. 27, 2014; “BASF Headquarters” (accessed May 16, 2016), https://www.basf.com/us/en/company/career/why-join-basf/basf-at-a-glance/basf-headquarters.html.
60.New York Times, Oct. 6, 2015; Gillian Darley, Factory (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 187–89.
61.Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 99–113 (“citadels” on 109), 127, 158; Beinin, “Egyptian Textile Workers Confront the New Economic Order,” Middle East Research and Information Project, Mar. 25, 2007, http://www.merip.org/mero/mero032507; Beinin, “The Militancy of Mahalla al-Kubra,” Middle East Research and Information Project, Sept. 29, 2007, http://www.merip.org/mero/mero092907; “The Factory,” Al Jazeera, Feb. 22, 2012, http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/revolutionthrougharabeyes/2012/01/201213013135991429.html; “Mahalla textile workers’ strike enters eighth day,” Daily News Egypt, Feb. 17, 2014, http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2014/02/17/mahalla-textile-workers-strike-enters-eighth-day/; Alex MacDonald and Tom Rollins, “Egypt’s Mahalla textile factory workers end four-day strike after deal reached,” Middle East Eye, Jan. 17, 2015, http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/egypts-mahalla-textile-factory-workers-end-four-day-strike-after-management-agreement-260129749.
Chapter 7
“FOXCONN CITY”
1.Pun Ngai, Shen Yuan, Guo Yuhua, Lu Huilin, Jenny Chan, and Mark Selden, “Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese Workers’ Struggles from a Global Labor Perspective,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17 (2) (2016), 166; Jason Dean, “The Forbidden City of Terry Gou,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 11, 2007. Ngai, Chan, and Selden have written the most important study of Foxconn and of Apple in China, Dying for an iPhone, from which I have greatly benefited. It is forthcoming in English but available in Spanish and Italian editions, Morir por un iPhone (Bueno Aires: Ediciones Continente S.R.L., 2014) and Moirire per un iPhone (Milan: Jaca Books, 2015).
2.To offset the wage hikes, Foxconn also raised its prices. New York Times, May 25, 2010, June 2, 2010; Elizabeth Woyke, The Smartphone: Anatomy of an Industry (New York: New Press, 2014), 135–36; Bloomberg Businessweek, June 7, 2010, Sept. 13, 2010; “Foxconn’s Business Partners Respond to Suicides,” CCTV Com English, May 20, 2010, http://english.cntv.cn/program/china24/20100520/101588.shtml; “Foxconn Shares Dive on Suicides,” CCTV Com English, June 29, 2010, http://english.cntv.cn/program/bizasia/20100528/102843.shtml; “Foxconn to Hike Prices to Offset Pay Increase,” CCTV Com English, July 22, 2010, http://english.cntv.cn/20100722/104196.shtml; “Foxconn Hikes Salaries Again in South China Factory After Suicides,” CCTV Com English, Oct. 1, 2010, http://english.cntv.cn/program/20101001/101698.shtml.
3.Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 13, 2010; James Fallows, “Mr. China Comes to America,” The Atlantic, Dec. 2012.
4.For various statements of the number of employees at the Foxconn Shenzhen factories in 2010, see “Foxconn Hikes Salaries Again in South China Factory After Suicides,” CCTV Com English, Oct. 1, 2010; Bloomberg Businessweek, June 7, 2010, Sept. 13, 2010; New York Times, May 25, 2010; Pun Ngai, Migrant Labor in China: Post-Socialist Transformations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 101, 119. See also Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work,” New York Times, Jan. 21, 2012 (“unimaginable”).
5.Foxconn factories outside of China are generally much smaller, in some cases modest-sized assembly plants serving local markets, built to circumvent tariffs. Some Foxconn factories make parts or finished products for multiple clients, including Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Cisco, GE, Amazon, HP, Dell, Motorola, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Nintendo, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Acer, and Lenovo. Others serve just one client or even make only one product. Ngai, Migrant Labor, 105; Rutvica Andrijasevic and Devi Sacchetto, “Made in the EU: Foxconn in the Czech Republic,” WorkingUSA, Sept. 2014; Devi Sacchetto and Martin Cecchi, “On the Border: Foxconn in Mexico,” openDemocracy, Jan. 16, 2015, https://www.opendemocracy.net/devi-sacchetto-mart%C3%ACn-cecchi/on-border-foxconn-in-mexico; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; New York Times, Mar. 29, 2012; David Barboza, “China’s ‘iPhone City,’ Built on Billions in Perks,” New York Times, Dec. 29, 2016.
6.Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; New York Times, Dec. 11, 2013; “BBC Documentary Highlights Conditions at a Chinese iPhone Factory, But Is It All Apple’s Fault?” MacWorld, Dec. 19, 2014, http://www.macworld.com/article/2861381/bbc-documentary-highlights-conditions-at-a-chinese-iphone-factory-but-is-it-all-apples-fault.html.
7.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 102; Boy Lüthje, Siqi Luo, and Hao Zhang, Beyond the Iron Rice Bowl: Regimes of Production and Industrial Relations in China (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2013), 195, 198; Hao Ren, ed., China on Strike: Narratives of Workers’ Resistance, English edition edited by Zhongjin Li and Eli Friedman (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 11, 201–03; Jennifer Baichwal, Manufactured Landscapes (Foundry Films and National Film Board of Canada, 2006).
8.David Barboza, “In Roaring China, Sweaters Are West of Socks City,” New York Times, Dec. 24, 2004; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 102.
9.New York Times, Nov. 8, 1997, Mar. 28, 2000; Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 173; Richard P. Appelbaum, “Giant Transnational Contractors in East Asia: Emergent Trends in Global Supply Chains,” Competition & Change 12 (Mar. 2008), 74; “About PCG,” http://www.pouchen.com/index.php/en/about/locations, and “Yue Yuen Announces Audited Results for the Year 2015,” http://www.yueyuen.com/index.php/en/news-pr/1147-2016-03-23-yue-yuen-announces-audited-results-for-the-year-2015 (both accessed June 3, 2016); International Trade Union Confederation, 2012 Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights—Vietnam, June 6, 2012, http://www.refworld.org/docid/4fd889193.html.
10.Some ten thousand Soviet technicians were posted to China to help with the industrialization drive, while nearly three times that many Chinese went to the Soviet Union for training. Carl Riskin, China’s Political Economy: The Quest for Development Since 1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 53–63, 74; Nicholas R. Lardy, “Economic Recovery and the 1st Five-Year Plan,” in Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 14: The People’s Republic, part 1: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1949–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 157–60, 177–78.
11.Riskin, China’s Political Economy, 64, 117–18, 125–27, 133, 139, 161–65; Kenneth Lieberthal, “The Great Leap Forward and the Split in the Yenan Leadership,” in MacFarquhar and Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 14; Stephen Andors, China’s Industrial Revolution: Politics, Planning, and Management, 1949 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 68–134. By the 1990s, Anshan had become China’s largest industrial enterprise, employing some 220,000 workers. “Anshan Iron and Steel Corporation,” in Lawrence R. Sullivan, Historical Dictionary of the People’s Republic of China, second edition (Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 24–26. See, also, Cheng Tsu-yuan, Ashan Steel Factory in Communist China (Hong Kong: The Urban Research Institute, 1955).
12.Andors, China’s Industrial Revolution, 144–47, 158–59.
13.Andors, China’s Industrial Revolution, 135–42.
14.While there was a push during the Cultural Revolution for the despecialization of factories, there apparently was not an effort to despecialize the work of individual workers in the production process, even as they were given expanded roles in management and other aspects of factory function. Andors, China’s Industrial Revolution, 160–240.
15.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 11, 15.
16.Henry Yuhuai He, Dictionary of the Political Thought of the People’s Republic of China (London: Routledge, 2015), 287; Michael J. Enright, Edith E. Scott, and Ka-mun Chang, Regional Powerhouse: The Greater Pearl River Delta and the Rise of China (Singapore: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 6, 36–38.
17.Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 1, 7.
18.Gabriel Kolko, Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace (London: Routledge, 1997); The World Bank, “Vietnam, Overview,” Apr. 11, 2016, http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/vietnam/overview; Nguyen Thi Tue Anh, Luu Minh Duc, and Trinh Doc Chieu, “The Evolution of Vietnamese Industry,” Learning to Compete Working Paper No. 19, Brookings Institution (accessed Aug. 13, 2016), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/L2C_WP19_Nguyen-Luu-and-Trinh-1.pdf.
19.Enright, Scott, and Chang, Regional Powerhouse, 6, 12, 16, 36, 38–39, 67–68, 74, 98, 101–02, 117.
20.Enright, Scott, and Chang, Regional Powerhouse, 75, 98, 108; Andrew Ross, Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade—Lessons from Shanghai (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 24–26; Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 13, 2010.
21.Enright, Scott, and Chang, Regional Powerhouse, 47.
22.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 2, 20–21, 25, 32, 76–78.
23.The Guardian, July 31, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/31/china-reform-hukou-migrant-workers; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 4-5; Ngai, Made in China, 36, 43–46.
24.For an interesting portrait of life in a state-owned factory during the 1980s, see Lijoa Zhang, “Socialism Is Great!” A Worker’s Memoir of the New China (New York: Atlas & Co., 2008). See, also, Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 35–36; Ross, Fast Boat to China, 57.
25.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 35, 93, 128–29; “Workers Strike at China Footwear Plant Over Welfare Payments,” Wall Street Journal, Apr. 16, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304626304579505451938007332; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 186.
26.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 31. For an in-depth comparison of systems of manufacturing in China, see Lüthje, Luo, and Zhang, Beyond the Iron Rice Bowl.
27.The wages and benefit contributions of export factories in high-cost regions would not have been enough to support locally-living families and the services provided to them, the cost of “social reproduction.” Enright, Scott, and Chang, Regional Powerhouse, 192, 250; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 32–35.
28.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 83–104, 123; Hong Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor Control: A Case Study of Three Electronics Factories in China,” International Labor and Working-Class History 73 (Spring 2008), 92; Anita Chen, China’s Workers Under Assault: The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 12; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Duhigg and Bradsher, “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work”; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 7, 184.
29.For a fine, painful portrait of a migrant worker family and their trips back home, see the documentary film Last Train Home, directed by Lixin Fan (EyeSteel Films, 2009). Ngai, Migrant Labor, 30–32; Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor Control,” 85, 98–99; U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The Employment Situation—May 2014,” http://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_06062014.pdf (accessed July 16, 2016); Michael Bristow, “China’s holiday rush begins early,” BBC News, Jan. 7, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7813267.stm; Ross, Fast Boat to China, 16; New York Times, Jan. 26, 2017.
30.As in China, in Vietnam migrant workers form a large part of the workforce in foreign-owned factories, especially near Ho Chi Minh City. See Anita Chan, “Introduction,” in Chan, ed., Labour in Vietnam (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 4.
31.In addition to the Peter Charlesworth photography of workers making Reebok shoes, see, for example, Dong Hung Group, “Shoe Manufacturers in Vietnam” (2012), http://www.donghungfootwear.com/en/phong-su-ve-dong-hung-group.html, which includes factory photographs and a video showing the processes used for making sneakers. See, also, Tom Vanderbilt, The Sneaker Book: Anatomy of an Industry and an Icon (New York: New Press, 1998), 78–80.
32.For EUPA, see the documentary film Factory City (Discovery Channel, 2009). Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Dean, “The Forbidden City of Terry Gou”; Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics ([1890] London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1920), 8th ed., IV.XI.7, http://www.econlib.org/library/Marshall/marP25.html#Bk.IV,Ch.XI (accessed Sept. 22, 2014); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 25.
33.For Appelbaum’s analysis, on which I lean heavily, see Appelbaum, “Giant Transnational Contractors.”
34.The classic discussion of the importance of the link between manufacturing and distribution is Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). See also, Nelson Lichtenstein, “The Return of Merchant Capitalism,” International Labor and Working-Class History 81 (2012), 8–27; http://www.clarksusa.com/us/about-clarks/heritage (accessed July 19, 2016).
35.Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire, 1945–2000: The Rise of a Global Empire, the Democratic Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 2012), 343–54.
36.Vanderbilt, Sneaker Book, 8–25, 76–88.
37.Boy Lüthje, “Electronics Contract Manufacturing: Global Production and the International Division of Labor in the Age of the Internet,” Industry and Innovation 9 (3) (Dec. 2002), 227–47.
38.There is a large literature on changes in retailing. In addition to Appelbaum, “Giant Transnational Contractors,” particularly useful works include Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works—and How It’s Transforming the American Economy (New York: Penguin, 2006); Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution; and Xue Hong, “Outsourcing in China: Walmart and Chinese Manufacturers,” in Anita Chan, ed., Walmart in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
39.For a pioneering critical look at modern branding, see Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Picador, 1999). Lüthje, “Electronics Contract Manufacturing,” 230 (Nishimura quote); Marcelo Prince and Willa Plank, “A Short History of Apple’s Manufacturing in the U.S.,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 6, 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/12/06/a-short-history-of-apples-manufacturing-in-the-u-s/; Peter Burrows, “Apple’s Cook Kicks Off ‘Made in USA’ Push with Mac Pro,” Dec. 19, 2013, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-18/apple-s-cook-kicks-off-made-in-usa-push-with-mac-pro; G. Clay Whittaker, “Why Trump’s Idea to Move Apple Product Manufacturing to the U.S. Makes No Sense,” Popular Science, Jan. 26, 2016, http://www.popsci.com/why-trumps-idea-to-move-apple-product-manufacturing-to-us-makes-no-sense; Klein, No Logo, 198–99.
40.Vanderbilt, Sneaker Book, 90–99; New York Times, Nov. 8, 1997; Klein, No Logo, 197–98, 365–79; Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, “As Apple Grew, American Workers Left Behind,” Nov. 16, 2011, http://americawhatwentwrong.org/story/as-apple-grew-american-workers-left-behind/; David Pogue, “What Cameras Inside Foxconn Found,” Feb. 23, 2012, http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/what-cameras-inside-foxconn-found/.
41.Lüthje, “Electronics Contract Manufacturing,” 231, 234, 236–37; Boy Lüthje, Stefanie Hürtgen, Peter Pawlicki, and Martina Sproll, From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen: Global Production and Work in the IT Industry (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 69–149; Appelbaum, “Giant Transnational Contractors,” 71–72.
42.For the container revolution, see Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
43.David Barboza, “In Roaring China, Sweaters Are West of Socks City”; Oliver Wainwright, “Santa’s Real Workshop: The Town in China That Makes the World’s Christmas Decorations,” The Guardian, Dec. 19, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2014/dec/19/santas-real-workshop-the-town-in-china-that-makes-the-worlds-christmas-decorations.
44.Ngai et al., “Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese Workers’ Struggles,” 169; Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2014; Adam Starariano and Peter Burrows, “Apple’s Supply-Chain Secret? Hoard Lasers,” Bloomberg Businessweek, Nov. 3, 2011, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-03/apples-supply-chain-secret-hoard-lasers; and Adam Lashinsky, “Apple: The Genius Behind Steve,” Fortune, Nov. 24, 2008, http://fortune.com/2008/11/24/apple-the-genius-behind-steve/ (Cook quote).
45.In 2004, Foxconn employed five thousand engineers in Shenzhen alone. Duhigg and Bradsher, “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work”; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Lüthje et al., From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, 191.
46.Lüthje, Luo, and Zhang, Beyond the Iron Rice Bowl, 188–89; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone.
47.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 102–03; Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor Control,” 88–89.
48.Lüthje, Luo, and Zhang, Beyond the Iron Rice Bowl, 197; http://www.yueyuen.com/index.php/en/about-us-6/equipments (accessed Dec. 20, 2016); Dean, “The Forbidden City of Terry Gou”; lecture by Pun Ngai, Joseph S. Murphy Institute, City University of New York, Feb. 23, 2016.
49.Barboza, “In Roaring China, Sweaters Are West of Socks City”; Lu Zhang, Inside China’s Automobile Factories: The Politics of Labor and Worker Resistance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 8, 23, 60; interview with Qian Xiaoyan (First Secretary, Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the U.S.A.), New York, Apr. 16, 2015; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 115–19. For Vietnamese government policy, see Nguyen Thi Tue Anh, Luu Minh Duc, and Trinh Doc Chieu, “The Evolution of Vietnamese Industry,” 14–24.
50.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 66, 72, 78; Ngai, Made in China, 2–3, 55–56, 65–73; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 96.
51.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 86, 101; Emily Feng, “Skyscrapers’ Rise in China Marks Fall of Immigrant Enclaves,” New York Times, July 19, 2016; Ross, Fast Boat to China, 164–65; Richard Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein, “A New World of Retail Supremacy: Supply Chains and Workers’ Chains in the Age of Wal-Mart,” International Labor and Working-Class History 70 (2006), 109.
52.Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 97.
53.Ngai, Made in China, 32; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 5–9, 27.
54.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 120–23, 128–29; Ngai et al., “Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese Workers’ Struggles,” 174; Duhigg and Bradsher, “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work”; Wall Street Journal, Dec. 18, 2012. See also Lüthje et al., From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, 184–87.
55.Charles Duhigg and David Barboza, “The iEconomy; In China, the Human Costs That Are Built Into an iPad,” New York Times, Jan. 26, 2012; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 7, 184; Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor Control,” 89, 92. For comparison, see William Dodd, A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd, A Factory Cripple, Written by Himself, reprinted in James R. Simmons, Jr., ed., Factory Lives: Four Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiographies (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2007).
56.Chen, China’s Workers Under Assault, 10, 12, 23, 46–81; Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor Control,” 91–92; Ngai et al., “Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese Workers’ Struggles,” 172–74; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 ([1867] New York: International Publishers, 1967), 424; Jee Young Kim, “How Does Enterprise Ownership Matter? Labour Conditions in Fashion and Footwear Factories in Southern Vietnam,” in Chan, ed., Labour in Vietnam, 288; Ngai, Made in China, 80, 97.
57.“The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (1990–2014)” (accessed Aug. 4, 2016), libcom.org, https://libcom.org/blog/xulizhi-foxconn-suicide-poetry.
58.Serious as these problems are, large plants generally have better health and safety equipment and records than smaller parts suppliers with fewer resources and less subject to international scrutiny. Under pressure from Nike, conditions in the factory in Vietnam were improved and more use was made of less toxic water-based solvents. New York Times, Nov. 8, 1997, Apr. 28, 2000; Chen, China’s Workers Under Assault, 82–97; Duhigg and Barboza, “The iEconomy”; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Lüthje et al., From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, 187.
59.Some Chinese factories consciously mix workers from different regions on production lines, to undercut worker solidarity. Others, usually smaller, recruit workers from particular regions or even villages, so that hometown bonds extend into the workplace and dormitories. Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 129–30; Lüthje et al., From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, 190; Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor Control,” 93, 97–98.
60.Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 13, 2010; Duhigg and Bradsher, “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work”; Lüthje, Luo, and Zhang, Beyond the Iron Rice Bowl, 187; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 201–03; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 119, 130; Fallows, “Mr. China Comes to America,” 62. See also Factory City.
61.Unlike in China, the reduction of poverty in Vietnam has not been accompanied by a large increase in inequality. World Bank, [China] “Overview,” http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/china/overview#3; World Bank, “China” [Data], http://data.worldbank.org/country/china; and World Bank, [Vietnam] “Overview,” http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/vietnam/overview, all accessed Dec. 2, 2016. Chinese strike data derived from Chinese Labour Bulletin “Strike Map,” http://maps.clb.org.hk/strikes/en; U.S. data from United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers, 1947–2015,” http://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkstp.t01.htm (both accessed Aug. 16, 2016).
62.For overviews of strikes in China, see Ren, ed., China on Strike; Lee, Against the Law; James Griffiths, “China on Strike,” CNN.com, Mar. 29, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/28/asia/china-strike-worker-protest-trade-union/; and China Labour Bulletin’s extraordinary interactive “Strike Map.” See also New York Daily News, Jan. 11, 2012; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Duhigg and Barboza, “The iEconomy.”
63.The Vietnamese government is generally more supportive of worker strikes against foreign companies than the Chinese government and has less often used repressive power against them. Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, “Workers’ Protests in Contemporary Vietnam” and Anita Chan, “Strikes in Vietnam and China in Taiwanese-owned Factories: Diverging Industrial Relations Patterns,” in Chan, ed., Labour in Vietnam; “10,000 Strike at Vietnamese Shoe Factory, USA Today, Nov. 29, 2007, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-11-29-vietnam-shoe-strike_N.htm; “Workers Strike at Nike Contract Factory,” USA Today, Apr. 1, 2008, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/economy/2008-04-01-1640969273_x.htm; “Shoe Workers Strike in the Thousands,” Thanh Nien Daily, http://www.thanhniennews.com/society/shoe-workers-strike-in-the-thousands-16949.html; “Vietnamese workers extract concessions in unprecedented strike,” DW, Feb. 4, 2015, http://www.dw.com/en/vietnamese-workers-extract-concessions-in-unprecedented-strike/a-18358432 (all accessed Aug. 8, 2016); International Trade Union Confederation, 2012 Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights—Vietnam; Kaxton Siu and Anita Chan, “Strike Wave in Vietnam, 2006–2011,” Journal of Contemporary Asia, 45:1 (2015), 71–91; New York Times, May 14, 2014; Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2014, June 19, 2014.
64.Both the shrinking rural population and the gender imbalance stem in part from China’s one-child policy. Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; “Urban and rural population of China from 2004 to 2014,” Statista (accessed Aug. 16, 2016), http://www.statista.com/statistics/278566/urban-and-rural-population-of-china/; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 21–23; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 35, 114.
65.Bruce Einhorn and Tim Culpan, “Foxconn: How to Beat the High Cost of Happy Workers,” Bloomberg Businessweek, May 5, 2011, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-05-05/foxconn-how-to-beat-the-high-cost-of-happy-workers; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 114–15; Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor Control,” 96; Chen, China’s Workers Under Assault, 9.
66.Zhang, Inside China’s Automobile Factories, 57–59; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 117–18; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone.
67.For films dealing with Chinese factories and migrant workers, see Elena Pollacchi, “Wang Bing’s Cinema: Shared Spaces of Labor,” WorkingUSA 17 (Mar. 2014); Xiaodan Zhang, “A Path to Modernization: A Review of Documentaries on Migration and Migrant Labor in China,” International Labor and Working-Class History 77 (Spring 2010).
68.For the factory as a sales tool, see Gillian Darley, Factory (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 157–89. In China, EUPA seems something of an exception, allowing filmmakers and photographers to document its factory. For examples of tightly controlled tours, see James Fallows, “Mr. China Comes to America,” and Dawn Chmielewski, “Where AppleProducts Are Born: A Rare Glimpse Inside Foxconn’s Factory Gates,” Apr. 6, 2015, http://www.recode.net/2015/4/6/11561130/where-apple-products-are-born-a-rare-glimpse-inside-foxconns-factory.
69.Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 13, 2010; Xing Rung, New China Architecture (Singapore: Periplus Editions, 2006); Layla Dawson, China’s New Dawn: An Architectural Transformation (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2005).
70.Neil Gough, “China’s Fading Factories,” New York Times, Jan. 20, 2016; Feng, “Skyscrapers’ Rise in China Marks Fall of Immigrant Enclaves”; Mark Magnier, “China’s Manufacturing Strategy,” Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2016.
71.For example, compare two collections of images by the pioneer American photographer Lewis W. Hine: Hine, Men at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern Men and Machines ([1932] New York: Dover, 1977), and Jonathan L. Doherty, ed., Women at Work: 153 Photographs by Lewis W. Hine (New York: Dover, 1981). Of course, gender patterns have varied over time and place, with more women working in heavy industry in communist countries than capitalist ones and gender imbalances diminishing over time.
72.Countless examples can be seen by doing a Google search for images of Chinese factories.
73.For Burtynsky, see http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/site_contents/Photographs/China.html (accessed Dec. 2, 2016); for Gursky, see, for example, Marie Luise Syring, Andreas Gursky: Photographs from 1984 to the Present (New York: TeNeues, 2000).
Conclusion
1.Kenneth E. Hendrickson III, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Industrial Revolution in World History, vol. III, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 568; R. S. Fitton, The Arkwrights: Spinners of Fortune ([1989] Matlock, UK: Derwent Valley Mills Educational Trust, 2012), 228–29; Timothy J. Minchin, Empty Mills: The Fight Against Imports and the Decline of the U.S. Textile Industry (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013), 31; Tamara K. Hareven and Randolph Lanenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory City (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 10–11; Gray Fitzsimons, “Cambria Iron Company,” Historic American Engineering Record, National Park Service, Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., 1989; William Serrin, Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town (New York: Random House, 1992).
2.Lindsay-Jean Hard, “The Rouge: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow,” Urban and Regional Planning Economic Development Handbook, University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Dec. 4, 2005, http://www.umich.edu/~econdev/riverrouge/; Perry Stern, “Best Selling Vehicles in America—September Edition,” Sept. 2, 2016, http://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/autos-passenger/best-selling-vehicles-in-america-%E2%80%94-september-edition/ss-AAiquE5#image=21.
3.Laurence Gross, The Course of Industrial Decline: The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Mass., 1835–1955 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 44–45, 102–03, 229, 238–40.
4.Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, “The Meanings of Deindustrialization,” in Cowie and Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 4. There is a large literature on deindustrialization. In addition to this volume, see the cluster of articles on “Crumbling Cultures: Deindustrialization, Class, and Memory,” ed. Tim Strangleman, James Rhodes, and Sherry Linkon, in International Labor and Working-Class History 84 (Oct. 2013).
5.Paul Wiseman, “Why Robots, Not Trade, Are Behind So Many Factory Job Losses,” AP: The Big Story, Nov. 2, 2016, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/265cd8fb02fb44a69cf0eaa2063e11d9/mexico-taking-us-factory-jobs-blame-robots-instead; Mandy Zuo, “Rise of the Robots: 60,000 Workers Culled from Just One Factory as China’s Struggling Electronics Hub Turns to Artificial Intelligence,” South China Morning Post, May 22, 2016, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/1949918/rise-robots-60000-workers-culled-just-one-factory-chinas. See also Wall Street Journal, Aug. 17, 2016.
6.Rich Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein, “An Accident in History,” New Labor Forum 23 (3) (2014), 58–65; Ellen Barry, “Rural Reality Meets Bangalore Dreams,” New York Times, Sept. 25, 2016.
7.Kevin Hamlin, Ilya Gridneff, and William Davison, “Ethiopia Becomes China’s China in Global Search for Cheap Labor,” Bloomberg, July 22, 2014, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-22/ethiopia-becomes-china-s-china-in-search-for-cheap-labor; Lily Kuo, “Ivanka Trump’s Shoe Collection May Be Moving from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Made in Ethiopia,’” Quartz Africa, Oct. 8, 2016, http://qz.com/803626/ivanka-trumps-shoe-collection-may-be-moving-from-made-in-china-to-made-in-ethiopia/; Chris Summers, “Inside a Trump Chinese Shoe Factory,” Daily Mail.com, Oct. 6, 2016, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3824617/Trump-factory-jobs-sent-China-never-come-back.html.
8.For variations of the factory under different social systems, see Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism (London: Verso, 1985), and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
9.The documentary film After the Factory (Topografie Association, 2012), comparing efforts in Lodz, Poland, and Detroit at postindustrial reinvention, suggests the possibilities and limitations of such strategies.
10.4-traders: “Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd.,” http://www.4-traders.com/HON-HAI-PRECISION-INDUSTR-6492357/company/, and “Pegatron Corporation,” http://www.4-traders.com/PEGATRON-CORPORATION-6500975/company/, both accessed July 5, 2016, and “Yue Yuen Industrial (Holdings) Ltd.,” accessed Jan. 1, 2017; “Fast Facts About Vanguard” (accessed Jan. 3, 2017), https://about.vanguard.com/who-we-are/fast-facts/; Calvert Social Investment Fund, “Annual Report,” Sept. 30, 2016, 4, 7.