Industry and human welfare

Front matter

Book * G^

GoKTight^

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.

Introduction

The inspiration of this small book has been a desire to ascertain and to state the major effects of the rise of the factory system upon the welfare of the American people. To achieve such a result adequately calls for time and resources far beyond those at any command. I am conscious of the hazards of undertaking to do briefly during the all too rare leisure hours and days at the disposal of a working newspaper writer a task worthy of the undivided attention of a group of scholars. Perhaps, however, the very brevity of this work will suggest to others the desirability of portraying the scenes and the changes upon a truly generous canvas.

I have endeavored first to describe the condition of the American people during those years when factories were but prophecies. In doing this I have been actuated by the belief that it would be difficult to understand the results of the factory system until the way of life of those who came before the industrial revolution had been envisaged. In piecing together this picture of the condition of the people at the beginning of the nineteenth century I have utilized the researches of many students. Where references would seem to serve the purposes of readers I have in footnotes indicated my authorities. The sources used have been both primary and secondary. Chief reliance has been placed x Introduction

in the historic governmental reports and in the monographs of various students. But I have been at all times aware of the heavy obligation which all workers in this field owe to such men as Professor John R. Commons, John B. McMaster, William B. Weeden, Victor S. Clark, and others whose researches are now the classics of American industrial history.

As I have followed this study I have been driven irresistibly to the conclusion that the well being of the people of this country lies within their own choosing. Throughout the history of the nation social control has been exercised through the national and state governments. Industry has been directed in accordance with the purposes of those who happened to be dominant at the time. Laissez-faireism has been a doctrine useful to the owners and managers of industry. It has seldom been appealed to as an argument to defeat the wishes of those who possessed property and political privileges. It has been chiefly a rein upon legislation designed to alleviate the condition of the poor. This has not been wholly a conscious process. The advocates of economic anarchy, which is an uncharitable translation of the French phrase laissez-faire, have seldom been aware that they were practicing social control in behalf of the owners of factories while they preached industrial drift to workers. But for all the unconsciousness of the development the record is not the less convincing.

In making this study many inviting by-paths have been crossed. American industrial history is richly suggestive. Un worked fields are many. One of the most promising is a study of the hazards which working

Introduction xi

people historically have encountered. A fruitful chapter of such a work would recount the fortunes of the debtor prisoners. The change from a system of imprisonment for debt to public insurance against the hazards of industry measures a social revolution. Of necessity this matter had to be excluded from detailed consideration. Other questions of equal and even of greater importance have had to be pushed aside. Among the most tempting of these is the problem of the migration of people which has followed the progress of factories. The population of the country has been redistributed by industrial need. An agricultural people has been moved to towns and cities. A wide range of issues has been created by the shift. Congestion, transportation, housing, recreation, community organization are some of the unanswered questions occasioned by the movement of people from the country to the city in response to factory demand. Consideration of these matters would, however, lead too far afield from the proper limits of this book. So, too, the alluring questions of industrial control have been avoided. These are germane to the central problem of stating the consequences of the rise of the factory system upon human welfare. The question of space has again been imperative. A brief volume cannot infringe upon the prerogatives of an encyclopedia. Industrial government with all its related problems, so charged with significance for the future of society, has accordingly been avoided.

I wish here to acknowledge my obligation to Miss Mary Van Kleeck, director of industrial studies of the Russell Sage Foundation, John A. Fitch of the New xii Introduction

York School for Social Work, Professor William E. Dodd of the University of Chicago, and Miss Lilian Brandt, all of whom generously read my manuscript and who saved my book from slips which it would otherwise have carried. I do not wish, however, to suggest that any of these friends bears any responsibility for the opinions herein expressed. Finally I would express my appreciation to the editor of this series, Edward T. Devine; and to Paul U. Kellogg, editor of the Survey, for that generous treatment of an associate's time without which this work could not have been performed.

William L, Chenery

Contents

PAGE

Introduction vii

CHAPTER

Chapter I

The history of industry in America calls to mind Goethe's ironic saying : "Whatever one desires in youth one has in age in abundance." For to a remarkable extent the growth of mechanical production in the United States has fulfilled the desires of some of the founders of this republic. Responsive to a request from the House of Representatives in 1791, Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury wrote a brilliant argument in behalf of the development of manufacturing. He set forth advantages which the United States might get from manufactures. As a nation we have attained much of what Hamilton foresaw. Some of the benefits forecast became the serious social evils which in subsequent generations threatened the health of the republic. Only too adequately did the mature nation reach the goals of its youth. The aspirations of the fathers fulfilled in the lives of the children created conditions which now call for statesmanship not less alert and vigorous than that of the original great advocate of American industry.

In Hamilton's judgment the independence and prosperity of the new republic would be furthered by the national protection and stimulation of a variegated industry. The steam engine had not then become a practical tool and only the new inventions in use in the English textile mills had begun to make clear the outlines of modern industry. But Hamilton saw lucidly the enormous potentialities of manufacturing. He was eager to persuade the feeble federal government to nurture industry and mechanical invention. He was willing to do this at a time when even the most populous and influential states were still predominantly agricultural.

The effectiveness with which Hamilton's policies were put into practice by his countrymen became the admiration and wonder of later travelers from Europe. The United States built rapidly according to the plans designed by the first Secretary of the Treasury. The thing which the great protagonist of industry and his immediate successors did not see, however, was that the social organization and the political principles which were adapted to handicraft industry and to agriculture might prove grievously inadequate in that complex, impersonal, industrial society whose attractions he set forth with logic and with eloquence. Hamilton sought to change the method of production, but he was not aware that mechanical industry involved the creation of entirely new human relationships. Consequently, while he pleaded for the nurture and for the protection of industries which then had hardly been conceived, he did not know that the people of the country also required protection against the devastating influences of the new order. Because he did not know this, because generations passed before America became conscious of it, because even to-day the full reality is not commonly accepted, the industrial problem exists.

"The expediency of encouraging manufactures in the United States, which was not long since deemed very questionable, appears at this time (1791) to be pretty generally admitted," Hamilton was able to say. He pointed out what now seems almost too obvious for utterance, namely, that the employment of machinery forms an item of great importance in the general mass of the national industry, and then he turned to some of the details of the progress he proposed. The following paragraphs show the line of his reasoning as plainly as they foretell some of the evils which even to-day are unconquered :

"The cotton mill, invented in England within the last twenty years, is a signal illustration of the general proposition which has just been advanced. In consequence of it, all the different processes of spinning cotton are performed by means of machines, which are put in motion by water and attended chiefly by women and children; and by a smaller number of persons, in the whole, than are requisite in the ordinary mode of spinning. And it is an advantage of great moment that the operations of this mill may continue with convenience during the night as well as during the day. The prodigious effect of such a machine is easily conceived. To this invention is to be attributed, essentially, the immense progress which has been so suddenly made in Great Britain in the various fabrics of cotton.

"This is not least valuable of the means by which manufacturing institutions contribute to augment the general stock of industry and production. In places where those institutions prevail, besides the persons regularlyengaged in them, they afford occasional and extra employment to industrious individuals and to families, who are willing to devote the leisure resulting from the intermissions of their ordinary pursuits to collateral labors, as a resource for multiplying their acquisitions or their enjoyments. The husbandman himself experiences a new source of profit and support from the increased industry of his wife and daughters, invited and stimulated by the demands of the neighboring manufactories.

"Besides this advantage of occasional employment to classes having different occupations, there is another, of a nature allied to it, and of a similar tendency. This is the employment of persons who would be otherwise idle, and in many cases a burthen on the community, either from the bias of temper, habit, infirmity of body or some other cause, indisposing or disqualifying them from the toils of the country. It is worthy of particular remark, that, in general, women and children are rendered more useful, and the latter more early useful, by manufacturing establishments than they would otherwise be. Of the number of persons employed in the cotton manufactories of Great Britain, it is computed that four-sevenths nearly are women and children; of whom the greater proportion are children and many of them of a tender age."*

This line of argument was touched again when Hamilton was urging the development of the iron industry. Thus he said:

"The United States already in great measure supply themselves with nails and spikes. . . . The first and most laborious occupation in this manufacture is performed by watermills; and of the persons afterwards employed, a great proportion are boys, whose early habits of industry are of importance to the community, to the present support of their families, and to their own future comfort."

These conditions deemed so desirable by the great constructive statesman of American industry and finance have been in part the evils against which subse-

* Works of Alexander Hamilton, Volume 3, Manufactures, page 207 and following.

quent generations have waged increasing warfare. Hamilton, in fact, advocated industry as a means of creating the circumstances which as soon as manufacturing was firmly entrenched were recognized as perilous to the national well-being. He reckoned among the advantages of industry the list of what the present day regards as wrongs. Child labor, employment of women and children at night, the regarding of manufacturing employment as a source of supplementary income rather than as the basis of living for those employed by it, continuous industry, — these are a vital part of the social problem created by the development of manufactures. Nevertheless, they are precisely what Hamilton advocated. Only too well in these respects has the republic fulfilled the ambitions of its youth.

The essential advantage which Hamilton sought was the labor-saving utility of machinery. To save labor has in fact been the one and persistent object of industrial invention everywhere. The intensity of the early American desire for labor-saving methods of production is attributed to the partially occupied condition of the land and to the temptation of a superlative abundance of unexploited natural resources. Every man saw riches in sight if he could obtain labor. To understand plainly the salient effects of industry upon human welfare it is therefore needful to take this fact into consideration. It was a determining national motive. To comprehend the effects the new industry engendered in the United States, it is also necessary to recall to mind the state of the American people during the years immediately preceding the establishment of the factory system. Unless in fact the work and life of the people for whose well-being Hamilton and others urged the fostering of manufactures are pictured it is difficult to see in perspective what have been the consequences of industry for human welfare in this country.

One hundred and twenty-five years ago the factory system had hardly been conceived in the United States. To-day we are the greatest manufacturing nation. At the dawn of the nineteenth century the United States was a sparsely settled strip bounded by the Atlantic and by the Appalachian ranges, a pioneer country supported chiefly by agriculture. The century which ended with the outbreak of the World War saw the rise and maturing of the factory system under a government which through the Monroe Doctrine claimed primacy over two continents. Within the space of those few generations the isolated colonial settlements of Napoleon's time had become the continental citadel of strength to which the Great Powers turned for aid in time of need. In this cosmic drama the rise of the factory system in America has played a notable role. Worshippers of power and of magnificence may find indeed an altar for their prayers and their thanksgiving in industrial America. The multiplication of riches, the development of luxury, and the growth of might, attributable to machine manufacture, are the familiar products of our industrial revolution. But what has happened to the individual American by reason of these vast changes? How has industry affected human welfare? Is life happier and more carefree for the majority of men and women and children in this land because of the new industry? Is the day of the skilled artizan more filled with satisfaction? And how has the common laborer fared ? How, again, have women and children of the working classes been affected? Is work under the factory system a better regime for them? Does life offer more to them than their great-great-grandparents secured? What are the outstanding changes in human welfare occasioned by the rise of mechanical industry?

During the years between the end of the American revolution and the beginning of the era of railroad transportation in 1830, factories took firm root in the United States. The necessities of the colonists, suddenly cut off by the war of independence from the customary English supplies, caused men of Alexander Hamilton's outlook to realize the need for the establishment of manufactures in the new nation. The experience of the country during the War of 18 12 emphasized the lesson. Many considerations — local, sectional, national, and international — tended to reinforce the arguments made in behalf of mechanical industry. In an amazingly short time the United States from Massachusetts to Baltimore became an industrial nation. The first cotton factory was established in Rhode Island in 1790 by Samuel Slater. The rapid development came after 181 5, and by 1830 the new industrial order was entrenched.* What then was the state of the American people during the first decades of the nineteenth century? In particular, what was the condition of the working classes ?

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the * Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1885, page 162.

people of the United States, it has been observed, neither believed nor practiced their political professions of human equality. Politically the United States was a government of, by, and for the property holders. A man could not vote in most states unless he owned property, and in many states unless he complied with certain religious tests. A woman could never vote save by an oversight, as in New Jersey, where a hastily drafted constitution had neglected to exclude women. Citizenship in the colonies was like membership in a corporation. The possession of stock or property was a prerequisite to voting and to holding office. The ownership of fifty acres of farm land or of equivalent property was the customary test. Property voted; men did not. Taxation without representation, was the revolutionary war cry. The political revolution which preceded the change in our industrial system tended, it is true, to eliminate the property qualifications for the suffrage. But it was not until the eighteen-twenties that the greatest battles were fought for manhood suffrage. As late as 1837 the attitude of property holders toward the extension of the ballot was expressed as follows in the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention :

"But, Sir, what does this delegate propose?" said a defender of franchises for the upper classes. "To place the vicious vagrant, the wandering Arabs, the Tartar hordes of our large cities on a level with the virtuous and good man? . . . These Arabs, steeped in crime and vice, to be placed on a level with the industrious population is insulting and degrading to the community. . . . I hold up my hands against a proceeding which confers on the idle, vicious, degraded vagabond a right at the

The Pioneer Nation g

expense of the poor and industrious portion of this commonwealth." *

The right was merely that of suffrage, and the men termed Tartar hordes steeped in vice and crime were only those whose property was insufficient to qualify them for the ballot. Political power throughout the United States, during the years when the present industrial system was being created, was exercised by a minority of property owners. How small that minority was may be estimated from the vote on the constitutional convention in Massachusetts — a convention called to extend the franchise. In that state only men who owned real estate which brought in an income of three pounds annually, or who had other property to the extent of sixty pounds, were permitted to participate in elections. In 1820 the population of Massachusetts was 523,287. There were 142,588 free white males over sixteen years of age.f Only 18,349 men voted on the question of holding a constitutional convention. J The men who could not vote, who had no real share in the determination of public affairs, were vastly more numerous than the voters.

In the New England Magazine of January, 1890, Dr. J. F. Jameson reported his computations of the early voting in Massachusetts and elsewhere. He says :

"Taking all the excluded together, we may venture to bring our own figure down to 16 or 17 per cent, and may conclude that in round numbers about one-sixth of the

* Penn. Con., 1837 : Debates 2, 487. Quoted in "Suffrage in the United States," by Kirk H. Porter, University of Chicago Press, 1918.

t United States Census, 1820.

t Niles* Weekly Register.

io Industry and Human Welfare

population of old Massachusetts, or say 55,000 men, 50,000 of them in Massachusetts and 5,000 in Maine, were entitled to vote in 1776. . . . About 16 per cent of the inhabitants could vote if they chose. How many of them did so? . . . The number of those who actually did vote in those ten years (1780-1789, inclusive) amounted to just about three per cent." *

The property and other qualifications for voting in Massachusetts were near enough like conditions in the other states to give a fair picture of the degree of political self-government exercised by the American people in the decades prior to the development of mechanical industry.

The qualifications for holding office, furthermore, were stricter than those for voting. In spite of the assertion of state constitutions that all men are born equally free and independent and that therefore all just government originates from the people and is instituted for the general good, the holding of office was in practice of, by, and for privileged property holders. McMaster well says: "The poor man counted for nothing. He was governed, but not with his consent, by his property-owning Christian neighbors. He was one of the people, but he did not count as such in the apportionment of representation. In short, the broad doctrine that governments derived their just powers from the consent of the governed was not accepted by the 'Fathers.' The most they were ready to admit was that all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the taxpayer."! This condition had an enormous influence on the development of industry in this country.

* No change for some decades.

t "Rights of Man in America/' Cleveland, Ohio, 1893, page 21.

The Pioneer Nation n

Political power was utilized to direct the growth of manufacturing industry and that power was wielded strictly in the interest of the property-holding group who had historically possessed the franchise. "L'etat, c'est moi" was, and to a considerable extent still is, the emblem of American property owners, just as truly as it was the startled expression of an indiscreet French king.

Industrially the population was predominantly rural and agricultural. As late as 1820 less than five per cent of the American people lived in cities of 8,000 population and over.* In 1790 there were but five cities in the United States having a population of 8,000. Their combined population was less than 100,000, forming only 2.4 per cent of the population of the country. The great majority of Americans, perhaps 95 per cent, were countrymen at the time that the foundations of the industrial system were laid. A majority now live in the cities. Farmers were of many classes. The richest were masters of principalities. They were aristocrats whose lives and whose views were fashioned upon European ideals. The republican court which President Washington himself maintained at Philadelphia satisfied the punctilious requirements of visiting French nobility. From the estates of gentlemen who sought to develop in this country an old world social order the holdings of farmers varied in size and value to the poor clearing of the pioneer. Manufacturing was a home industry carried on chiefly by farmers and their wives and chil-

* "A Century of Population Growth in the United States Government," Census Bureau, Washington, 1909, page 14.

dren and servants, and by wandering mechanics. The artizan was sometimes a freeman and often an indentured servant or a slave. Yet his was the ingenuity which invented many of the technical processes upon which the factory system was later built.

Skilled workers in Maryland and southward were largely slaves and indentured servants. In Pennsylvania at the beginning of the nineteenth century it has been estimated that one-half of the artizans were redemptioners, so-called. The redemptioner was the immigrant who was bound to serve a term of years in payment for his passage overseas. During his servitude he or she could be sold from master to master after the manner of slaves. The indentured servant and his variant, the redemptioner, were always potentially free men and seem to have been counted as such in the first censuses. Yet while he served the bondsman's status was close to that of a slave. The system of servile labor was furthermore as old as the colonies. It had grown out of the apprentice system. From the very beginnings of Maryland and of Virginia men and women had been imported to do the work of the plantations. The capture and enslavement of Africans tended to supplant white servitude in the South but the system of indentured servants was continued well into the nineteenth century. Men and women willing to settle in the United States and lacking the price of the passage were induced to sign papers of indenture. The master of the ship or some merchant who had advanced the transportation expenses would dispose of these immigrants on the arrival of the ship at Philadelphia or Baltimore, or at some other port. This trade was carried on in full force until 181 7.* Isolated cases were mentioned as late as 1835.

These white contract immigrant laborers were an important section of the productive population. Effectually the redemptionersf were slaves for a limited period of time. Englishmen, Irish, Scotch, and later Germans and Swiss, were all the material of the system. Curiously enough, too, most of the German redemptioners were brought in after the War of Independence. In 181 7 three small sailing vessels left the Dutch port Helder with 1,100 redemptioners for New Orleans. During a passage of about four months 503 perished. The survivors were sold to work out their passage. The number of years served by these immigrants in order to redeem their freedom varied. They might work only four years. But if they were indentured while children they might be compelled to serve until the twenty-second or the twentyfourth year was passed. While still in bonds the indentured man or woman had few rights which the master was bound to respect. A redemptioner could not marry except with the permission of his owner. The bondsman could be arrested and imprisoned whereever found if he traveled without a permit. He could be beaten cruelly by way of discipline.

On March 21, 18 17, the following advertisement appeared in the Baltimore American, and it was repeated daily until April 7:

* "White Servitude in Maryland," by Eugene Irving McCormac, Johns Hopkins University Press. Page 109.

t "History of the German Society of Maryland/' by Louis P. Hennighausen, Baltimore, Md., 1909.

"German Redemptioners.

"The Dutch ship 'Johanna/ Capt. H. H. Bleeker, has arrived before this city and now lies in the cove of Wiegman's Wharf; there are on board, desirous of binding themselves for their passage, the following single men: two capital blacksmiths, a rope maker, a carrier, a smart apothecary, a tailor, a good man to cook, several young men as waiters, etc. Among those with families are gardeners, weavers, a stone mason, a miller, a baker, a sugar baker, farmers and other professions." *

Prior to the Revolutionary War the only skilled laborers in the province of Maryland had come as indentured servants from Ireland and England, f Light on the position in society of such mechanics is cast by such newspaper advertisements as the following, which appeared in The Maryland Gazette and Baltimore Advertiser of January 25, 1785:

"Ran away from the subscriber, living on Monocacy, Carroll's Manor, in Frederick county, six miles from Frederick-Town, on the 27th of December last, an indented Irish servant-man known by the name of Patrick Quigley, a shoemaker by trade, of middling stature, well set, of ruddy complection, short black hair, about 5 feet 2 or 3 inches high, 24 years of age; had on and took with him when he absented a felt hat half worn, short blue sailor's jacket, red waistcoat, pair of white cloth breeches, a pair of white and black speckled milled stockings, and a pair of old shoes with steel buckles. Whoever takes up said servant and brings him to the subscriber or secures him in any jail so that his master may get him again shall have, if taken 20 miles from home, Twenty shillings ; if 30 miles, Thirty shillings ; if a farther distance, Three pounds, including what the law allows and reasonable charges if brought to Daniel Hardman, January 8, 1785." t

So far reaching was this system that tradesmen,

* Hennighausen, op. cit., page 59.

t "White Servitude in Maryland," page 35-

t Idem, page 51.

tised for sale. Ballagh relates that "Colonel William Preston of Smithville, Virginia, bought at Williamsburg about 1776 a gentleman named Palfrenan as a teacher for his family; he was a poet and a scholar, a correspondent and a friend of the celebrated Miss Carter, the poetess, and also of Dr. Samuel Johnson

The apprentice system of which the redemptioners were so signal an expression broke down, it is true, during the first decades of the nineteenth century. But the industrial revolution, the change from manual to mechanical production, came about while the ideas and customs of that servile economic system still lingered. Labor had still something of a slave status when New England and the Middle Atlantic States began to erect factories.

Freedom and independent status came ultimately to these redemptioners because of the abundance of the land. After their periods of service had passed the majority set up establishments for themselves on the edge of the wilderness. Many of them founded well known families. Some of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were former bondsmen. The self-made men, so-called, were common in colonial days; and yet, even though every redemptioner was potentially a free man and a citizen, the gulf between the bond and the free was wide.

Such was indentured labor. But beyond the bondsmen were the free artizans to the North and the Negro

* "White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia," by James Curtis Ballagh, Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science, 1895, page 83.

slaves in the South. What was the status of the free artizan at the beginning of the nineteenth century? He was inconspicuous south of Mason and Dixon's line, and to the north as far as Pennsylvania he was in active competition with the redemptioner, who had what was for the period of his service a slave status. The artizan worked from sunrise to sunset. His wages were low. He was esteemed of little significance in the social scale. Nowhere is the position of the propertyless working man in the early years of the republic described more vividly than in a debate in Congress over the pay of soldiers. The Annals of Congress, January 6, 1794, tell plainly what the "Fathers" thought of common folk.