The Catholic Church and the Knights of Labor: Background Information (Part II)

Now, as an experiment in understanding the clothing choices of citizens past, let's take away the sneakers, t-shirts, skirts, and jeans and give you one set of clothes that you will wear every day. This set of clothes is made from a rough wool called "homespun" that your mom made for you last year. Trying it on, you say there is no way you are going to wear this for even one day, because it is itchy, ugly, and fits wrong. Having tried on this homespun, you come to appreciate your specially-selected, multicolored, comfortable collection of clothes. When you are told that most Americans wore homespun back in the early 1800s you wonder how they could have stood wearing the nasty cloth for even a single day!

The very variety of your clothing choices, indeed, that you have such choice, dates back to the rise of the factory system in the early nineteenth century. Prior to the factory, a selection of relatively cheap, ready-made clothing was simply not available. In order to possess the variety of clothes we do today, one had to be extremely wealthy. Before the industrial changes of the nineteenth century, the clothing of the rich was made by tailors. A gentlewoman wore silk gowns, lace-trimmed hats, and embroidered gloves. A colonial gentleman attired himself in finely tailored threads: ruffled shirts, lace cuffs, silk stockings and buckled shoes. These upper-class individuals looked very fine and they knew it-a man or woman wearing such clothes was instantly recognized as a member of the elite. Most colonial Americans, however, donned their homespun daily and beheld the rich fabrics worn by the wealthy among them with envious admiration.

The emergence of the ready-made clothing industry, however, narrowed the quality clothing gap between the wealthy and those of more modest means. By the 1840s one could find a butcher in a suit not much different than the one worn by the banker. In significantly lowering the cost, textile mills made good quality clothing accessible to ordinary families. Very poor families and slaves did not share in the abundance, but most Americans' basic wardrobe expanded.

With time, the abundance would spread out beyond the clothing industry so that all kinds of goods, from soap to furniture, were mass-produced and available to middle-income folks. The democratization of goods became possible through dramatic shifts in the economy, methods of production, and the nature of work itself. Collectively, these changes were part of the nineteenth century industrial revolution, a term used to describe the economic transformation that began in the late eighteenth century with the introduction of new technologies of production in Great Britain and the United States. There were two stages to the industrial change, a first industrial revolution that occurred between 1790 and 1850 and a second industrial revolution that unfolded between 1870 and the early twentieth century.

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The first industrial revolution relied on the steam engine, machines for spinning thread and weaving cloth, and furnaces to make iron ore into a finished metal that could be used to make a range of products. The first factories produced the cloth used to make the clothing discussed above. In 1814 Francis Cabot Lowell brought plans for a power loom, a device used to weave thread into fabrics, from Britain to the United States and built the first integrated textile factory in Massachusetts. At first the mills were built near the rivers that powered them, but when coal mined in Pennsylvania became available in large quantities, it became possible to run mills using coal-powered steam engines, and companies began building them in other geographical locales in New England as well. By the 1850s, the United States was home not only to several textile factories, but to coal-powered furnaces that produced metals used to make machinery such as sewing machines and agricultural equipment.

The new goods were carted to the villages, towns, and cities across the nation over the new transportation networks veining the country beginning with a canal system in the 1820s, and spreading through the spectacular rise of the rail system throughout the century. Miles of canals and rivers brought manufactured goods to upstate New York and towns further west, while the rails brought new products and produce across state boundaries with speed that astounded Americans.

A second industrial revolution built on the first began in the late 1870s. Not only did factories grow larger and more complex, but the transportation and communication networks that were started during the earlier period were expanded. By 1900, 193,000 miles of railroad track crisscrossed the country. Without this development of communication and transportation networks, the coordinated and high-volume flow of goods that made the United States an industrial giant would not have been possible. If factories were going to produce more goods, the goods had to be moved into the hands of consumers--fast and accurate modes of communication and transport were essential.

Yet another series of technological developments fueled this period of industrial change further. Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone in 1876 made instantaneous communication across long distances possible, allowing even more efficient planning of goods delivery. The development of the electric light bulb in 1879 by Thomas Edison paved the way for lighted streets and factories, which in turn meant the possibility of longer working and business hours. With the development of a system of electrical generation and distribution in 1881, Edison indirectly ensured that factories and offices could be run by electric power generated by a power plant, making their creation easier and location choices more numerous.

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The new applications of science to industrial processes generated a range of new products, from typewriters to canned soup. Thanks to developments in the processing of metals, for example, lighter and stronger steel replaced the heavier and weaker forms of iron used to build rails and other machinery. New methods of production took hold in a range of industries. Cigarettes, for example, took a long time to produce-an expert could roll only about four per minute. Cigarette manufacturers like the Duke family of North Carolina were on the lookout for a machine that could rapidly roll cigarettes, thereby increasing production. In 1880 eighteen-year-old James Bonsack developed such a machine, and though it was at first unreliable, J.B. Duke took a chance and invested in several of the machines.

With some improvements, the machines were soon manufacturing 120,000 cigarettes a day. At the time, cigarette demand wasn't high enough to absorb the vast new quantities being produced, so J.B. Duke launched an aggressive advertising campaign to promote smoking (The links between smoking and cancer weren't as obvious as they are today, so Duke could easily get away with promoting an unhealthy habit.). He also established regional sales offices to promote his product. Cigarette sales jumped, and by 1890 J.B. Duke controlled the largest tobacco industry in the world. Innovative and ambitious businesspeople like Duke made the most of the new technologies becoming available, turning themselves into millionaires. Andrew Carnegie took advantage of the new technologies in metal production and built a huge steel empire in western Pennsylvania. John Rockefeller revolutionized oil production... the list of entrepreneurial achievements in the late nineteenth century is a long one.

Where, we now ask, did the rise of the new industries leave the laborer?

A Tight Spot: Laboring in Industrial America (Top of Page)

The rise of the large factories in the late nineteenth century dramatically transformed the nature of work. The new industries were "capital intensive," meaning that there was more capital and less labor than in the older industries-more cash had to be put into building the factories and stocking them with equipment, but they relied less on human labor than the older factories. Entrepreneurs paid close attention to building factories that would produce efficiently and according to market demand, which they learned to cultivate through the kind of advertising campaigns pioneered by J.B. Duke. Sales and distribution networks grew. Managers were recruited to coordinate and monitor production and distribution.

The new equipment, the relentless emphasis on efficiency, the investor's need for returns on the greater investments required to construct modern factories-all of these factors left the free laborer in a tight spot. Some of the new industrial machinery, such as the kind you'd see in a textile factory, required skilled workers to run it properly. Other factories, and other parts of factories employing skilled workers, needed cheap unskilled workers to do one thing over and over again (not unlike the Starbucks barista that makes one latte after another). In short, huge shifts were occurring in the nature of work, with more and more people leaving the countryside for factory work, training of workers for different kinds of skilled labor, displacement of workers whose skills in the older factories were no longer needed, and a vast need for workers to perform routinized labor efficiently. The United States became a huge producer of jobs in the nineteenth century, and immigrants had flocked into the country to fill them.

During the earlier period of industrial change Irish, British, Chinese, and Germans came to fill jobs in coal mines, textile factories, and railroads. Immigrants from Ireland, Britain, and Germany continued to migrate to the United States after 1880, but they were joined by many others, and in all 23 million immigrants made their way to American shores between 1880 and 1920. During this later period, three quarters of the immigrants came from Europe, while non-Europeans came from China, Japan, the Philippines, and Mexico. Compelled to leave their home countries due to changing economic circumstances there, immigrants came in search of economic opportunities that seemed to elude them at home.

Yet, when these immigrants came, they were most often handed the most tedious and difficult jobs in industrial America: Greeks, Italians, Japanese and Chinese built and maintained the railroads out West, Irish and Slovaks mined coal in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Poles worked on the killing floors in Chicago's meatpacking plants, Italians and Jews worked in the garment industries of New York City.

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Nor were these immigrants, on the whole, paid well. With so many people available to fill such jobs, employers could easily pay unlivable wages. If one person quit the assembly line, another could easily be found to take his or her place. Many jobs were so simple that children could perform them; children could be worked harder and paid less that adults, and they were. In short, for a great mass of Americans, "free labor" in the sense of bargaining fairly for a good wage in exchange for honest and dignified work was not an option. While some did indeed gain wealth in the United States, many worked ten to twelve hours in dangerous factories, yet lived out their entire lives in grinding poverty or returned to the homeland in disgust. Others remained, and hovered close to the poverty line, terrified that employers might cut wages or lay them off at any time. And there were no laws to prevent exactly that from happening.

Consider the not-unusual case of Thomas O'Donnell, a British immigrant employed by a New England textile factory in 1883. O'Donnell made $1.50 a day when he had work. Though he worked hard, his factory did not employ workers on a regular basis. Only thirty years old, O'Donnell could nonetheless find no other jobs in his town. Desperate for income he needed to feed his family that year, he told of how he ventured out and foraged for "a couple dollars' worth of coal last winter, and the wood I picked up myself. I goes around with my shovel and picks up clams and wood." Still, in the year 1882-83 he made a total of $133 with which to support himself, his wife, and two young children. Things were not as expensive as they are today, but that $133 did not go very far even in 1883: In a year he and his family had eaten meat twice, bread for most meals, and whole days had passed without him tasting a single morsel of food.⁸ Thomas O'Donnell wanted to work more hours for more pay, but the factory owners began laying off workers for long periods of time after a strike years earlier. Moreover, men who had sons or young male relatives old enough to come to work to assist the adults were given priority over men like O'Donnell, who son was still too young for such responsibility. Hence O'Donnell felt forced to take work from the factory that had employed him for years for wages that clearly would not support his family.

How was it that some individuals, Andrew Carnegie for example, could emigrate to America penniless and make a fine living, while many others, like O'Donnell, craved work yet had such a hard time finding it? The fact was that the United States in the late nineteenth century was as much a land of poverty as it was a land of wealth. In his famous late-nineteenth century study of poverty in New York City, How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis reported that in that city, 10% of the people that died between 1885 and 1890 had received paupers' burials. Current estimates are that about 40% of all Americans lived in poverty in 1900. Many of these people, moreover, were working poor, unable to earn wages to make a decent living because their employers were not compelled to pay those wages. Unions arose to address the issue.

Contiue to Part III of Background

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⁸"Immigrant Thomas O'Donnell Laments the Plight of the Worker, 1883," in Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman and John Gjerde, eds. Major Problems in American History, Volume II: Since 1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002)