From Utopia to Mill Town
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From Utopia to Mill Town II by Maury Klein ---------- III I I INTRODUCTION-Industrialization became an tion of hundreds of employees under one roof to important feature of the United States economy by tend machines for a daily (or weekly) wage rep- the 1840s. Much ofAmerican manufacturing in its resented a massive change for society. Instead of early phases was rather primitive; certain sectors of independent producers, manufacturing became the economy moved pretty much as they had for large-scale with a few owners and hundreds and the previous fifty to one hundred years. Shoemak- then thousands of wage-earners. Instead of inde- ing, barrel-making, grain milling, food processing, pendence for each citizen in economic endeav- iron manufacturing, and other important enter- ors, the factory workers encountered prises did not exhibit striking new forms oforgani- dependence-dependence upon employers for zation or ofmachinery. Great advances were most work and wages. The textile manufacturers thus evident in two areas-transportation and textile became one of the first American enterprises to production. Using the steam engine on railroads experience the turmoil of labor relations, the and steamboats catapulted Americans to the fore- struggle between workers and owners over the front ofeconomic change in matters of transporta- distribution of earnings and shop conditions. tion. But textile production perhaps garnered even The following selection chronicles the story more public attention. Textiles were in the first of an early textile enterprise at Lowell, Massachu- sixty to seventy years of the industrial revolution setts. It traces Lowell's transition from an attempt the activity that employed the most sophisticated to create the perfect industrial community to a machinery and created the greatest amazement profit driven, impersonal manufacturing center. It due to the outpouring of cloth that came from the also examines the unique role ofwomen in its early machinery. Indeed, for the early part of the indus- work force. While reading it, students should be trial revolution, the textile mill was the symbol of aware of a number of questions. How did the economic advance. Boston Associates' approach to industrialization But textile production, as the symbol of the differ from that found both in England and else- industrial revolution, also portended massive so- where in the United States? How successful was cial alterations. The organizational form of tex- their early experiment? What made Lowell a tile plants was the factory and the use of wage unique mill town, especially in its early years? Why labor. Prior to the textiles plants, in both Great were women recruited as the first labor force? Who Britain and the United States, most cloth produc- were these women, and where did they come from? tion (or production of anything else for that mat- Did they benefit from employment at Lowell? Why ter) was accomplished by workmen living at or why not? What events illustrate the transforma- home tending handicraft machines. The new tion of Lowell from a hoped-for utopia to a typical technology of cloth manufacturing destroyed an mill town? What factors account for this fundamen- older craft system of production. The congrega- tal change? -Editors 65 Part One: The Associates If Lowell and its social engineering impressed visitors, the mill workers dazzled them. Here was They flocked to the village of Lowell, these visi- nothing resembling Europe's Untermenschen t that tors from abroad, as if it were a compulsory stop doomed proletariat whose brief, wretched lives on the grand tour, eager to verify rumors of a uto- were squeezed between child labor and a pauper's pian system of manufacturers. Their skepticism grave. These were not men or children or even was natural, based as it was on the European expe- families as found in the Rhode Island mills. Instead rience where industry had degraded workers and Lowell employed young women, most of them fresh blighted the landscape. In English manufacturing off New England farms, paid them higher wages centers such as Manchester, observers had stared than females earned anywhere else (but still only into the pits of hell and shrank in horror from the half of what men earned), and installed them in sight. Charles Dickens used this gloomy, putrid dormitories under strict supervision. They were cesspool of misery as a model in Hard Times. young and industrious, intelligent. and entirely re- while Alexis de Tocqueville wrinkled his nose at spectable. Like model citizens of a burgeoning re- the "heaps of dung, rubble from buildings, putrid, public they saved their money, went to church, and stagnant pools" amid the "huge palaces of indus- spent their leisure hours in self-improvement. try" that kept "air and light out of the human habi- More than one visitor hurried home to an- tations which they dominate. A sort of black nounce the arrival of a new industrial order. one smoke covers the city .... Under this half daylight capable of producing goods ira abundance without 300,000 human beings are ceaselessly at work. A breaking its working class on the rack of poverty. thousand noises disturb this damp, dark labyrinth, Time proved them wrong, or at best premature. The but they are not at aU the ordinary sounds one Lowell experiment lasted barely a generation be- hears in great cities." fore sliding back into the grinding bleakness of a Was it possible that America could produce an conventional mill town. It had survived long alternative to this hideous scene? It seemed so to enough to tantalize admirers with its unfuJfilled the visitors who gaped in wonderment at the village promise and to reveal some harsh truths about the above the confluence of the Concord and Merri- incompatibility of certain democratic ideals and the mack rivers. What they saw was a planned commu- profit motive. nity with mills five to seven stories high flanked by dormitories for the workers, not jammed together The founding fathers of Lowell were a group but surrounded by open space filled with trees and known as the Boston Associates. all of whom be- flower gardens set against a backdrop of the river longed to that tight knit elite whose dominance of and hills beyond. Dwelling houses, shops, hotels, Boston society was exceeded only by their stran- churches, banks, even a library lined the streets in glehold on its financial institutions. The seed had orderly, uncrowded rows. Taken whole, the scene been planted by Francis Cabot Lowell, a shrewd. bore a flavor of meticulous composition, as if a far-sighted merchant who took up the manufacture painting had sprung to life. of cotton cloth late in life. A trip abroad in 1810 introduced him to the cotton 'mills of Lancashire The contrast-between so pristine a vision and the and to a fellow Boston merchant named Nathan nightmare of Manchester startled the most jaded of Appleton. Blessed with a superb memory and foreigners. "It was new and fresh, like a setting at trained in mathematics, Lowell packed his mind the opera," proclaimed Michel Chevalier, a with details about the machinery shown him by un- Frenchman who visited Lowell in 1834. The Rev- suspecting mili owners. The Manchester owners erend William Scoresby. an Englishman, marveled jealously hoarded their secrets and patents, but at how the buildings seemed "as fresh-looking as if none regarded the wealthy American living abroad built within a year." The indefatigable Harriet for his health as a rival. Martineau agreed, as did 1.S. Buckingham, who Once back in America, Lowell recruited a me- pronounced Lowell to be "one of the most remark- chanical genius named Paul Moody to help repli- able places under the sun." Even Dickens, whose cate the machines he had seen in Manchester. After tour of America rendered him immune to most of much tinkering they designed a power loom, cotton- its charms, was moved to lavish praise on the spinning frame, and some other machines that in town. "One would swear," he added "that every fact improved upon the English versions. As a 'Bakery.' 'Grocery' and 'Bookbindery' and every hedge against inexperience Lowell decided to pro- other kind of store, took its shutters down for the duce only cheap, unbleached cotton sheeting. The first time, and started in business yesterday." choice also enabled him to use unskilled labor, but 66 where was he to find even that? Manchester drew Lowell did not live to witness this triumph. He Its workers from the poorhouses. a source lacking died in 1817 at the age of forty-two, having pro- In America. Both the family system and use of vided his associates with the ingredients of success. apprentices had been tried in Rhode Island with During the next three years they showed their grati- Iittle success. Most men preferred farming their tude by constructing two more mills and a (}wn land to working in a factory for someone else. bleachery. which exhausted the available water But what about women? They were familiar power at Waltham. Eager to expand. the Associates with spinning and weaving, and would make obedi- scoured the ri vers of New England for new si tes. In ent workers. Rural New England had a surplus of 1821 Moody found a spot on the Merrimack River daughters who were considered little more than at East Chelmsford that seemed ideal. The river fell drains on the family larder. To obtain their services thirty-two feet in a series of rapids and there were Lowell need only pay decent wages and overcome two canals, one belonging to the Pawtucket Canal parental reservations about permitting girls to live Company and another connecting to Boston. For away from home. This could be done by providing about $70,000 the Associates purchased control of boarding houses where the girls would be subject to the Canal Company and much of the farmland along the strict supervision of older women acting as the banks.