The Industrial Revolution and Labor

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The Industrial Revolution and Labor
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Industrialization and Historians

• Triumphant view
• -- celebrated industrialization with little or
  no criticism
• Progressive historians
• --robber baron view and threatened American
  ideas expressed by founding fathers
• Business history school
• --shifted focus from the personality of the
  industrialist to the nature of competitive
  capitalism
• --emphasized abilities of these leaders and
  companies for bringing efficiency to industry
• New Left
• large-scale business enterprise not inevitable
• forged to stem tide of competition by turning to
  govt for help
• feared democratic upsurge against corporate
  capitalism at turn of century

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The Industrial Age

• Eads Bridge and Industrial America
• Secession and rise of Republican Party
• Morrill Tariff (1861)
• high protective tariff for industry
• Homestead Act (1862)
• Pacific Railroad Act (1862)
• subsidizes RR construction and expands market
• National Banking Acts (1863,64)
• natl banking system and currency
• What is big business?
• Scale of business and diffused ownership
• greater fixed capital and more production
• large, bureaucratic management system
• greater geographic scope
• numerous economic functions
• Contemporary example of corner market v. Vons

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Robber Barons?
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Carnegie and Rockefeller

• Andrew Carnegie and Steel
• vertical integration control entire production
  and distribution from resources to delivery
• John D. Rockefeller and Oil
• horizontal integration combining similar
  producers into larger group to control market
• Competition, cartels
• Standard Oil trust
• Significance These two men represented the
  primary methods used to expand size and market
  share of industry as well as became symbols of
  new wealth and power.

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Gospel of Wealth

• Social Darwinism
• survival of fittest and laissez faire
• Gospel of Wealth
• natural economic aristocracy
• politicians not naturally selected
• govt to protect property and maintain order
• poverty inevitable and so govt cant interfere
• rich should give back on their terms

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Workers, Unions, and Strikes in the Industrial Age
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Workers and Historians

• Commons School/Institutional School
• focus on institutions like unions rather than
  workers
• explored why pure and simple unionism won out
  over socialism
• focused mostly on workplace and little on life,
  politics, and culture outside workplace
• New Labor History (1960s-70s)
• looked beyond the workplace and labor-management
  relations to who were the workers, their ideas
  and values, working-class culture, and other
  non-workplace experiences
• influenced by Neo-Marxist like Thompson who
  looked at class consciousness
• new issues like class, republicanism, and
  community added
• Recent labor history
• introduced gender and race to compete with class
  analysis

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Workers in the Industrial Age

• Class and American society
• Freedom means economic independence
• workers defend the American Revolution
• Changing composition
• wage workers increase by 3X
• Diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender
• immigration

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Working Conditions

• Some gains in wages and less hours
• Accommodation to factory life
• high industrial accident rate
• Chronic underemployment
• no safety nets
• Wage labor as permanent condition
• increased deskilling of workforce

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Knights of Labor v. AFL

• Open to all producers, skills, races, sex
• ideology shaped by political/social consequences
  of industrialization
• Goals
• coops, education, 8 hr day
• save the republic
• Methods and Success
• Strikes, political activity and election
  victories
• Failure and Collapse
• lost strikes, failed coops
• major parties coopted leaders and ideas

• Skilled workers/ few women and races
• Ideology of pure and simple unionism
• Goals wages, hours, conditions, unions
• Methods organize workers/no political parties
  but support friends of labor
• Success largest union, good govt relations by
  WWI
• Failure limited membership

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Strikes and Conflicts

• Haymarket Riot (1886)
• Demise of Knights of Labor
• Homestead steel mills (1892)
• lockout and Pinkertons
• Pullman Boycott (1894)
• Pullman Palace Car company
• Debs and ARU boycott
• AFL refuses to aid ARU
• Significance These strikes indicate the
  profound depths of class conflict in the
  industrial age and helped encourage Americans to
  confront this problem.
• Unions and Strike Today?
• Grocery stores and Wal Mart

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Reforming Visions in the Early Industrial Age

• Politics of Paralysis
• Balance of power
• Party loyalty
• Traditional Ideas
• Weak central govt class conflict party loyalty
• Henry George
• Progress and Poverty
• Land as source of ills
• Single Tax
• Edward Bellamy
• Looking Backward
• Utopian society

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Web Links

• http//members.aol.com/TeacherNet/Industrial.html
• http//homicide.northwestern.edu/context/movements
  /haymarket
• http//www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/h
  aymarket/haymarket.html
• http//www.boondocksnet.com/gallery/political_cart
  oons.html
• http//ehistory.osu.edu/osu/mmh/steel/default.cfm
• http//ehistory.osu.edu/osu/mmh/gildedage/
• http//ehistory.osu.edu/osu/mmh/laborconflict/
• http//memory.loc.gov/ammem/awlhtml/