www.UsHumans.net: Chapter 15
The changing way of life in the United States during the 19th century as we switched from working our own family farm within the neighborhood to being factory workers
The description of everyday life in the following pages is a summary of Jack Larkin's The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840. Occasional details are from Firsthand America, A History of the United States by Virginia Bernhard, David Burner, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and John McClymer. When you are in the area of Worcester, Massachusetts you can see Larkin's book come to life at the Old Sturbridge Village, see www.osv.org. (The Sturbridge website has many images of everyday life, machines, and buildings and some 360-degree panoramic images of the grounds and buildings.) Visit www.memorialhall.mass.edu for images through the last few centuries. See also www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures and http://louisdl.louislibraries.org and http://memory.loc.gov/ammem. Visit www.pbs.org/wnet/colonialhouse for information about the Colonial House project along with panoramic displays. At www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp you will find the Making of America digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The details of crafts, technologies, and procedures summarized here were taken from Colonial Craftsmen and the Beginnings of American Industry by Edwin Tunis. The summary of the growth of business comes from Industrializing America, The Nineteenth Century by Walter Licht. As you read each sentence below, you might like to compare the aspect of life it describes to that of your own today and to those of the other times and places encountered in this book. For many persons who live in the U.S. today, these were the ways of their great-grandparent’s great-grandparents great-grandparents.
Larkin says that the everyday life consists of everything that is taken for granted. Politics, the wider economy, and the more-powerful are never completely ignorable but are of concern to us only sporadically. What concerns women, men, children, farmers, laborers, and artisans are the routines and seasons of work, their home and the moments of marriage and birth, sickness and death, traveling, sex, singing and dancing, visiting and social gatherings. In Firsthand America the authors quote Mr. Dooley, who said in 1906 that "History is all about what people died for but not what they lived for."
In Chapter 9, we saw that gatherer-hunter individuals make their own clothing, utensils, and decorations from raw materials that are readily available. In this respect, each person is a "jack of all trades." Gatherer-hunter societies are egalitarian in that each person has equal access to the tools needed for life.
The quality of goods is seen to increase when states develop because specialists have the luxury of spending their entire lifetimes making a particular item. We saw that trainer-apprentice relations began with the first cities of Mesopotamia. For thousands of years, these handmade items were very expensive so that only the wealthiest members of society could afford to buy them. Our museums are full of the gold, silver, and gemstone items of the wealthier of the past. Most of us instead make do with anything that is handy.
The previous chapter contained a brief discussion of the Industrial Revolution. We saw that after the year 1760 or so, our Industrial Revolution's factories began to make inexpensive, mass-produced items. The long-term relation between apprentice and trainer began to disappear as the need for skilled artisans decreased since less skill was needed to monitor and operate the new machinery. The factory workers were also the consumers of the items being made in the factories and this meant that the number of utensils, clothing, and decorations in the average home grew from 20 to 200 or even 2,000 items. However, the ups and downs of the business cycle meant that factory workers held less control over their continued well-being than had been the case while they were farmers. The efforts of farmers directly impact the quality of their own lives, which depends on no one else.
Our Industrial Revolution involved the related processes of industrialization, urbanization, commercialization, and capitalism in what Licht describes as "the expansion of the marketplace to include the buying and selling of everything." Licht explains that the market society is as old as the first farming villages. What changed with the emergence of our Industrial Revolution's factory was the "pervasiveness of the market."
Handmade items are expensive and are made in low quantities. The mechanical capacity of the factory to produce large quantities of low cost items both created and then responded to an increased demand. As we began buying more manufactured products, the number of factories increased to provide them. Keep in mind that manufacturing output and consumer demand remain closely related and that unemployment levels and the business-cycle are due to both demand and output levels.
We will see that in the United States, business organizations grew to cover state-sized regions by the year 1850, nation-sized regions by the year 1900, and by 1950 they began to operate globally. We will also see that "Big Government" came as a delayed response to the social consequences of our switch from farming to factory work, and we'll see that Big Business has always been decades ahead of Big Government's attempt to govern them.
Nothing about today's big business, big government, community, and neighborhood makes any sense until we read Larkin's description of the changes in our way of life that occurred as we switched from being farmers to factory workers. The books by Frans De Waal, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, the Gies, and Larkin (plus that of the Miringoffs, which we'll meet in Chapter 22) should be the next books you read.
We have seen that there are endless differences in the details of the way of life of each group of persons around the world. The cultural details of different groups of us humans are sometimes different even if one compares two groups separated by the short distance of a day's travel, which is the range of quick communication. The cultural details of one group of persons are also seen to change through time. In brief, one might say that cultures change about every one hundred miles (sixty km) and every one hundred years. For example, the ways of the people of the United States in the year 1800 were different than they were in the year 1900, and that differed from its form in the year 2000.
When cultural details change in a single generation it makes grown persons feel uneasy. But children think that the only culture that is "natural" and makes any sense or seems "real" is the one in which they grew–no matter how different it is to that of their parents' childhood. For the people of the northeastern U.S., the magnitude of the farmer-to-factory-worker changes was greatest during the years 1820 to 1850–a time span of little more than a generation.
Still today, the cultures of each of the world's industrialized nations are very much unique, but they also share many things in common, including wage work, urbanism, commercialism, capitalism, big-business, job-hopping, big-government, welfare-states, and relatives living in distant cities. To better understand today's commercial and industrial way of life we will next have a look at how we lived before we became factory workers. We will see that many changes occurred as we moved from life on the family farm to life as factory workers. We want to understand this important transition period of our past.
The transition to industrialization is occurring in many regions of the world today. Understanding the magnitude of the cultural changes that occurred during this transition in the U.S. may also help you understand the magnitude of the transitions occurring in those in regions industrializing today.
Colonial beginnings and immigrants from the world
Throughout history, kings, queens, and city-states have created trading posts in foreign lands. For example, Carthage in Africa began as a Phoenician outpost. In the sixteenth century, European nations and kingdoms began to create foreign plantations that would produce large quantities of a locally-available crop or product. For example, large plantations were making molasses and rum in the West Indies, while rice and tobacco were grown in the southern area of the future U.S. In this "mercantile" system, a charter would be drawn bestowing a monopoly to a person or group for the trade of a certain product or for the land of a colonial region. The products of each colony were mostly to be sold in the home nation while some was sold throughout Europe and in the other colonial areas. Part of the profit went to the crown. In the colonies, goods made in Europe typically cost triple the price paid in Europe. At this time in history, the wealth of a nation was being measured in terms of the amount of gold that its ruler possessed.
To avoid competition, the colonies were forbidden to make the same products made by its home nation. Tunis says that England forbade the export of tools to make cloth from wool. Wood was scare in England but not in the North American colonies. It takes acres of forest to melt iron ore and obtain pig-iron, which is free of most impurities. The colonies were allowed to make pig iron but could not further refine it into wrought-iron, or make any final iron products, such as pots or tools; that was to be done only in England.
Bargain-seeking colonists illegally traded with other nations and with pirates. John Hancock was that signer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence who wrote, he said, "in letters large enough for the King to read." (Still today, we say "sign your John Hancock here.") Tunis says that the fact that John Hancock was wanted in England for smuggling didn't hurt his reputation in the colonies.
Instead of solely attempting to extend the crown's wealth, people were also moving to the colonial regions in search of a better personal life. (Still today, about seventy million persons–1% of the world's population–are moving around the globe for the same reason.) Throughout the years 1700 through 1900, typically 2 percent of the population were leaving a handful of European nations for the American colonies.
In Everyday Life in Early America, David Freeman Hawke says that different persons chose to go to the colonies for many different reasons, all having to do with their pursuit of a better life. Some sought their chance to own their own farmland, others went in search of religious freedom or adventure, and still others were after relief from a broken heart. (You might like to visit www.virtualjamestown.org for a virtual tour of Jamestown. Be sure to see the PBS video Colonial House at www.pbs.org/wnet/colonialhouse.) Very few emigrants were peasant farmers or unemployed workers. To choose to make the move required some financial resources in addition to a certain sense of adventure–just as it still requires today. About half were workers or farmers. The other half were urban artisans who could afford the cost of passage and often became farmers in the New World though they had no previous experience in farming.
When we moved from Europe to the New World during the seventeenth century we could take few possessions. When these items wore out they could not be easily replaced because only a portion of the old society and its techniques had yet been taken to the New World. Since the initial colonists did not constitute an entire economy, many industries were absent in the New World for many decades. It cost too much to obtain these items from the homeland. Forks disappeared from the early, North American colonies for several decades. In his book The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-century New Mexico, Andrew L. Knaut describes how one Spaniard left for the mission lands in New Mexico dressed and equipped like every other Spaniard but when he returned just five years later he was dressed and equipped like every other New Mexican.
During the 1700s, the people of New England, which is the northeastern area of the future U.S., were trading wood, fruit, butter, cheese, and cows to the people of the sugar plantations on the islands of the West Indies. These islanders had no wood and were not self-sufficient in the production of food. The islanders exchanged rum, and molasses to make into rum, for the wood and transportable food of the New Englanders. It was about a one-week long boat trip between these two regions.
There were many merchant ships trading items between various regions of the world. For example, in 1784 Robert Morris sailed with a load of ginseng from the U.S. to sell in China. There he picked up tea, silk, chinaware, and cotton cloth to sell in the U.S. He made a profit of $40,000 for the year's journey. Other merchants would sail up the Pacific coast to pick up furs and hides while selling other goods to the people of that area.
The population of the English colonies in the area of the future United States was 4,600 persons in the year 1630, 65,000 twenty years later in 1650, 105,000 in 1670, 215,000 in 1690, 600,000 in 1730, and 1,250,000 in 1750. This means that the population grew from zero to one million through its first century. The population of the U.S. was two million in 1770, four million in 1790, 5.3 million in 1800, sixteen million in 1840, and 76 million in 1900. In 2002 the U.S. population was 290 million persons. In 1800, half the population of the U.S. were immigrants from England, but by 1900, the population consisted of more Irish and Germans than English.
Europe's population increased from 140 million in 1750 to 260 million in 1850. Between 1815 and 1860, about five million persons (or 2%) of those of us living in Europe moved to the U.S. Notice also that the transplanted Europeans' children grew up in a culture that was a bit different from that of their parent's childhood.
As the U.S. population increased by a factor of four through the years 1790 to 1840, the urban population grew by a factor of eight. Half the increase was due to immigration. For example, in 1820 a wave of Celtic persons left their homeland seeking industrial jobs in the northeast. Many Irish immigrants took jobs building the canals and railroads of the Northern U.S., just as many Chinese persons would arrive to build the Western railroads forty years later. The number of immigrants grew between the years 1840 and 1900 as the U.S. population increased by another factor of five. In the last fifty years our population has increased by 85%. Typically, half the population increase of the U.S. is due to immigration while the other half comes from births within the borders. Both halves drive the expansion of the economy.
By 1900, there were large German and Scandinavian populations in the mid-western plains, Chinese and Japanese communities existed in the Pacific West, and the southwestern U.S. had a significant Spanish population. The Southwest had been a Spanish colony and then belonged to Mexico until it became part of the U.S. due to the war between the U.S. and Mexico (se www.history.vt.edu/MxAmWar/INDEX.HTM) during the years 1845-1848. In the early 1900s, many immigrants came from Eastern and Southern Europe, included Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Italy. (You might like to visit the Library of Congress website at www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jb/progress/ellis_3 to see part of the 1903 film Emigrants Landing at Ellis Island. You might also try http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/lcmp002.m2a10987.)
This wide mix of peoples from throughout much of the world is readily apparent whenever we glance at a list of names, such as occurs in a set of mailboxes, membership tables, the name-lists in the backs of books, and in movie credits and such. A list of just fifty names will contain some from each of many different nations. But a list of fifty names, for example in England, will contain almost nothing but English names.
Nineteenth-century European travelers often commented that the cities of the U.S. had a familiar appearance but strange ways were found just outside town. They were surprised by the size of the nation and the diversity of people and languages: German in Eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey; Dutch in New York and New Jersey; English in New England, and Gaelic in Western North Carolina and in South Carolina. By 1840, the Dutch and Gaelic languages largely disappeared from the U.S. The $15 million Louisiana Purchase of 1803 added Spanish and French languages to the U.S. mix.
Weber explains that Napoleon had just acquired the state-sized region of Louisiana from Spain when he in turn sold it to the U.S., and that the U.S. instead interpreted this transaction to involve the nation-sized region from Louisiana clear to Montana. In Firsthand America, the authors explain that Napoleon was thinking of growing a colonial empire in Louisiana but lost interest after losing a large part of a 30,000-man army that was trying to put down a western Hispaniola slave uprising, which created the Republic of Haiti. Without this uprising there might have been French-speaking regions in both Quebec and Louisiana.
Already by the year 1800, the spoken English of the U.S. was being pronounced differently than in England. For example, the word missionary is pronounced mis-sion-ry in England but mis-sion-air-ee in the U.S. This is similar to the differences between European Spanish and American Spanish. Going backward in time, spoken English from the 16th century is only 10% incomprehensible but 12th century English is a wholly foreign language. For example, my friend Hester Amstel explains that the one-syllable word "knight" was pronounced with two syllables as "ka-nicht," which explains something about why it's spelled this funny way today.
Differing agricultural economies of the early U.S.: northern family farms, middle commercial farms, and southern tobacco and cotton plantations
We have seen that humans first began farming in Ancient Mesopotamia about 10,000 years ago. Our subsequently invented cities required many new occupations but usually 90%, have continued to be occupied as farmers. This was still the case for those of us in the United States in the year 1800 but increasingly less so in each subsequent decade. In the United States in 1800, about 10% of us were self-employed artisans and shopkeepers and another 10% of us were hired laborers but 80% of us were farmers; this number would become 40% by the year 1900, and 1% by the year 2000. As we industrialized, the percentage of us living in urban areas would grow from 10% in the year 1800 to 40% in the year 1900.
As has been the case for every farming family in the previous 10,000 years, our activities were tied to the local agricultural seasons of planting and harvesting. Weddings and births were clumped around those months of the year that allowed a break in agricultural activities. For 10,000 years, much of the daily conversation between farmers has involved the weather and crops and sometimes the health and multiplication of livestock.
Each season, most of us spent many hours behind the plow. One farmer in Connecticut, Horace Clarke, wrote in his diary in 1837: "I have followed that plow for more miles than any man ever did or will ever do." (See www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=2287 for a photo of men plowing.) For the last 10,000 years–until the last century–everyone knew what the purpose of a plow was and what it looked like. Many of us big-city residents aren’t too sure of its purpose. (Visit http://www.agclassroom.org/gan/ for time lines of the history of U.S. agriculture.)
Initially, the U.S. existed only along the Atlantic coast but there were differing economic systems within this geographical strip. The northeast had single-family farms that consumed most of what it produced while the South had large plantations that produced a single cash crop but little food of its own. The middle states contained commercially-sized farms that provided food for the Southern plantations.
The northeastern or New England area consisted mainly of small family farms that consumed most of what they produced; the rest was bartered at the local General Store. There were no plantations or tenant farms in New England. One important factor in hampering the development of large scale farms in New England was the lack of navigable east-west rivers that would have connected the inland areas to the sea.
The Mid-Atlantic region, which includes New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, was already producing 15% of the world's iron by the year 1800. It also contained commercially-sized, grain producing farmsteads. These farms were selling food to the single cash-crop plantations of the South who were not growing much of their own food. Later, the westward expansion of the nation brought commercially-sized farms to Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Wherever farmland could be profitably used this way, there would be both increasing land prices and land speculation.
These commercial farms were worked by the family members. Before the practice was outlawed in 1776, the family was often helped by one or more indentured servants. From 1600 to 1776, half the immigrants arrived as indentured servants. Mainly, these persons worked on the commercially-sized farms of the Mid-Atlantic area rather than on the single-family farms of the northeast or on the large-scale, slave-labor farms of the South.
Indentured servants came from all walks of life, but most were young and poor–75% were male, see www.nps.gov/hamp/lancaster1.htm. An indentured servant agreed to work for seven years for a person who would pay the boat-fare for his or her travel from Europe to the Americas. The numbers of European's moving to the Americas as indentured servants rose and fell in reaction to the ups and downs of the European economy and with the occurrence of war. In the colonies, indentured servants sometimes ran away for one reason or another, as did Benjamin Franklin. Newspapers typically contained ads offering rewards for their return.
The people of the urban centers of New York City and Philadelphia obtained their food from the surrounding farmers, as we saw has had to be the case for every city since the first ones of Ancient Mesopotamia. These port cities were filled with merchants who handled various items. For example, Robert Henderson shipped Pennsylvania flour to Charleston, South Carolina which he traded for rice and indigo. (The use of indigo to make blue dye was developed a few thousand years ago in India.) These seaport cities were handling imports and exports between the U.S., the Caribbean, and Europe. In colonial times, these port cities prospered most whenever the plantations of the West Indies were able to buy their products.
Maryland and Virginia contained large tobacco plantations that were selling their crop both locally and abroad. The economic prosperity of the tobacco states rose and fell with the price of tobacco. Tobacco was a local crop within the colonies so it was cheap and duty free. For the early history of tobacco, visit www.nps.gov/colo/Jthanout/TobaccoHistory.html, www.nps.gov/colo/Jthanout/TobaccoCultivation.html, and www.lib.ncsu.edu/exhibits/tobacco/thistory.html.
Tobacco is cured by hanging its broad leaves to dry in a barn. It is then taken to a tobacconist who ages it for several months, twists it into ropes, and adds molasses, honey, licorice, mint, lemon, vebena, salt, roses, or potash, which is a poisonous insecticide. (Visit www.rjrt.com/smoking/ingredientsCover.aspx for a very long list of ingredients in today’s cigarettes!) One of the first techniques for curing tobacco was to bore a hole in the end of a log and then fill it with tobacco. After some months had past, the log would be split open to recover the tobacco "plug."
People would either squeeze a piece of tobacco between their cheek and gum for "chewing," smoke it in a pipe–which was done by both men and women–or it would be "snuffed" into the nostrils. Some snuff was packaged for sale in either dried cow bladders or esophagi. Much attention was given to the fashions of snuff boxes, which were made from any and all materials and in many shapes and sizes. Tunis suspects that chewing and snuffing were done because of the difficulty of lighting a pipe, which could be done only when near a fireplace.
Almost everybody was chewing. Every tavern floor in the nation was stained with tobacco. One British traveler said that even courtrooms were full of tobacco. The defendant was spitting, as were the lawyers, the judge, the audience, the witnesses, and the jury, too. He says that "Everywhere, from Congressional halls to church rooms, was filled with incessant and remorseless spitting." (You might like to visit http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/europeans/habits.html to read descriptions of tobacco habits written by contemporary–and contemptuous–Europeans traveling the U.S.) Women stopped using tobacco in the Northeastern U.S. around 1820, but grandma still smoked her pipe in the South and the West until about 1840. Wealthy gentlemen began smoking Havana cigars in 1762 when Israel Putnam brought three donkey loads of Cuban cigars to the English colonies. Cheaper and more pungent cigars were soon being made in Maryland and Kentucky. The first cigar factory in the U.S. was built in Connecticut in 1812 and produced 1,500 hand-rolled cigars per day.
The large plantations of the South (the states of North and South Carolina and Georgia) more closely resembled the mercantile plantations of the West Indies than the small family farms of the northeast, but the South also had some small family farms while the West Indies had none. Many settlers came to this region after having lived for some years on a plantation in the West Indies. The plantation owner often lived in a distant city and hired a manager to oversee the operations of the business. These Southern plantations were producing tobacco and rice for export. Since cotton was increasingly being used by the English textile factories, it would soon become the South's major crop. All farming efforts were devoted to this commercial activity. Instead of growing their own food, plantations relied on imports from the Mid-Atlantic region. The South didn't import finished clothing and such because the people of the plantations were making their own. Being self-sufficient in these items meant that the region did not have the village commerce centers that existed in New England, as described below.
Rapid westward expansion of twenty miles per year
The area of the U.S. grew by a factor of three during the years 1790 to 1840 by continually expanding westward. During this time, the portion of the U.S. population living east of the Appalachians decreased from one in seven to one in four. Through a span of one hundred years–which is only four generations–the nation's western frontier moved about 2,000 miles (3,200 km) in total, which is equivalent to twenty miles per year. This was about four hundred miles (640 km) per generation. (Since central and western states typically have a width of about four hundred miles, each represents a generation of expansion.) At first the "West" occurred in Western New York and Pennsylvania but it soon moved to Ohio, then Indiana, and then Illinois. It also moved from Virginia to Kentucky and Tennessee, and then to Missouri and Arkansas. To preview a documentary about the expansion into Ohio during the 1780s, visit either the PBS website at www.mariettaonline.com/ohiocompany or www.openingthedoorwest.com. The expansion consisted of people moving from the Eastern U.S. and from Europe. They were often in search of farmland because it was considered to be the source of life for a family. We can almost envision this expansion in a sort of leapfrog manner, as family after family moved just west of the previous family to obtain their own farmland. Many families who moved westward would linger a while and then move again further west.
This westward expansion occurred by continuing the two-hundred-year-old practice of forcing the resident Indians off their own land through violent means, see www.colorvisiontv.org/programs/rage/dreamer. Remember that, depending on a region's climate, those of us humans who are natives of North and South America were living in either urban cities, farming villages, or gatherer-hunter bands. Some examples of American cities in various times and places include Cahokia, the Incan City of Machu Picchu, and the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. There had been many farming villages in the region of the Southern U.S. The people living there were referred to as “the civilized tribes” but were murdered just the same. For example, in 1811 General William Henry Harrison fought a battle against the Shawnee natives of Florida at Tippecanoe, who were lead by Chief Tecumseh. Hundreds of persons were killed but the action brought glory to Harrison who became president in January 1841. Harrison died just three months later–after catching pneumonia during his lengthy inaugural speech. John Tyler was Harrison’s vice president. During his presidential campaign, Harrison used the “catchy” slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler too." Tyler succeeded Harrison as president and was later elected to the Confederate House of Representatives in 1862.
Smallpox and other Old World diseases arrived with the first European explorers and conquistadors and killed 50 to 90 percent of many previously-existing, local populations. The total population of the continent fell from one hundred million persons in the year 1500 ad to thirty million persons by 1600 ad. We can hardly imagine its disruptive effects on a social group and the misery of losing so many family members. The area of the future United States contained at least five million of us Native Americans before the arrival of Europeans, but our population shrank to just one-half million by the year 1800 and one-quarter million by 1900. Already by 1830, few native Americans remained in the Eastern U.S. along the Atlantic.
The Cherokees of Georgia wrote a Constitution and declared themselves to be an independent nation. An 1831 Supreme Court decision suggested that the U.S. government was duty-bound to keep intruders from Cherokee land. Instead, during the 1830s 60,000 surviving Native Americans from the areas of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and North and South Carolina were forcibly marched to the Oklahoma "Indian" territory. In 1838, one in ten Cherokees died along the route of the Trail of Tears, see www.trailoftears.org and http://ngeorgia.com/history/nghisttt.html. The Indian removal-wars then shifted to the states of the Midwestern plains during the years 1840 to 1870, as described in Death on the Prairie, the Thirty Year Struggle for the Western Plains, by Paul I Wellman.
One day in 1899, the area of Oklahoma designated as Indian reservation land was instead made available to the citizens of the United States through the humongous horse race known as the Land Rush–some in the family of my great-great-grandparents took part in this. Just forty years later, conditions during the Dust Bowl caused many Oklahomans to leave for California and other states. For a contemporary account of the land rush, visit www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/landrush.htm. Visit www.pan-tex.net/usr/l/drlocke for a personal account. Links to many photos are given at www.hanksville.org/sand/realprop/gof.html, and several other accounts are given at http://nativenewsonline.org/history/hist0422.html.
Social and economic classes and enslaved people
The European-Americans had forgotten the social classes of their old countries. For example, a coach driver did not feel he was of a lower class than that of his passengers, as was expected in Europe. One British traveler described how he could not comprehend the driver's view of his own social place. European travelers who were visiting the U.S. said they were not treated with the respect that they felt their station deserved and that the U.S. workers were unwilling to be subservient. When special meals were requested, they instead received rancid bacon. Workers would go out of their way to provide slow service just to let "uppity" guests know they were not impressed by their opinion of being of a more-noble class. Larkin says that "the uppity would receive the democratic rudeness that assumed or presumptuous superiority seldom fails to experience." In the U.S., by 1824 knee-dips and bowing between adults were relics of the past but children continued to be taught to show this respect to elders until 1840. British travelers said they had trouble telling who was who in the U.S. because social distinctions were less-clearly spelled out. Persons were instead considered to be equals and would even be seen shaking hands with each other.
Wigs were common in the English colonies. Tunis says that a person might make an annual contract with a barber for the upkeep and curling of a wig. People were bald under their wigs, and so wore turbans when they removed their wigs at home. After the Revolution, wigs began to be replaced with hats which soon grew to be as tall as a person's head by the year 1820–President Lincoln wore such a hat. Politicians continued to wear traditional European wigs until about 1830. Andrew Jackson's presidency (1829-1837) was celebrated as representing the common people, he even drank and danced on the table during his inauguration. He held meetings in the White House that were open to all citizens.
But the land of social equals still showed a number of economic levels including the largest urban merchants, plantation owners, professionals, middle-sized farmers, storekeepers, artisans, smaller and hard-pressed common farmers, landless laborers, and slaves. As the Declaration of Independence brought the United States into existence, one in six of us were slaves.
During the years 1600 to 1800, ten million of us humans from Africa were enslaved and taken to North and South America. (You might like to visit http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aointro.html. For first-person accounts of slavery, visit http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/voices. You might like to view Unearthing Secret America at the PBS website at www.pbs.org/saf/1301/features/archeology.htm. Also visit www.history.org/Foundation/journal/summer03/enslaved.cfm to view "In Mind and Heart" with the Enslaved of Yesteryear.) About 20% of us died on the boat journey because we were given subsistence rations and were packed so tightly into ship-compartments that we could barely move. No sanitary facilities were available in these compartments. We died of the flu, dysentery, smallpox, and from severe mental depression. Some of us humans treated some other of us humans in this manner because we did not consider the “different” people to be fellow human beings.
The climate and flora of the Southern U.S. resembled that of West Africa. We African-American slaves introduced rice cultivation to South Carolina and our experience in animal husbandry was used in managing livestock. We adapted our use of grass and reed to make baskets and mats and used palmetto leaves for fans, brooms, and chairs. We also knew of swamps, fishing, and the use of alligators (which Europeans had never seen) to protect livestock. We continued to make our own earthenware pots and bowls. We also brought our knowledge of herbal medicines. Some of these things were described above in the description of those of us humans who are Yoruba.
Individuals from many different African cultures were mixed together as we were enslaved. Also notice that as we were moved from our home culture to the New World, the culture of our children born in our new home was already different from that of our own childhood. Our children's culture was a combination of African and enslaved-American. With each generation our children's culture was increasingly different. A newly arrived enslaved person knew what it was to have been previously un-enslaved. Our children, who were born enslaved, could only imagine from the tales of elders what life was to be not enslaved.
Those of us who resisted would soon be killed by our enslavers. Whenever one of us was killed as a penalty for disobedience, all other slaves within miles were gathered and made to watch. For example, one man was threatened with five hundred lashes if he didn't stop preaching the gospel to other slaves, so he ran off. When he was later caught in Greenville, South Carolina he was burned alive as all other slaves from within twenty miles were forced to watch. In Charleston, South Carolina in 1822, Denmark Vesey was grabbed while trying to begin a slave uprising, see http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart1.html#0106. Thirty-five of us slaves were hung en-masse and left to dangle for some hours to strike fear into all similarly minded slaves. Nat Turner is another person who led a slave insurrection in Virginia in 1831. There are many other examples.
Neighboring plantations traditionally took turns providing feasts and celebrations for the others of the area, and this is how many of us slaves met our spouse. It is surprising to people today that those of us who were slaves often married a person who lived on a nearby plantation. We slaves could travel on Sundays to visit them but only if we had a properly-signed card and stayed on the main road–otherwise we would be taken as a runaway. It may not be surprising that there was no limit to the efforts that us men would expend in getting over to our girlfriend's plantation. For those of us Americans who were slaves, the extended family was crucial in child rearing since us parents were still forced to work even while caring for our infants. It also occurred that after marrying a person enslaved on the same plantation and then having children, either of the parents or any of the children might be sold and moved to another plantation.
When we were released from enslavement, after the Civil War of 1861-1865, we had already been Americans for many generations. But it took still another hundred years, until the Civil Rights events of the 1960s, to make the previously proclaimed U.S. ideals of "the land of opportunity and the pursuit of happiness" begin to mean "for all Americans." You might visit www.mecca.org/~crights/cyber.html for a history of the civil rights struggle. For the numerous Civil Rights sites of the National Park Service, visit www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/civilrights.
In 1790, only 5% of the U.S. population lived in towns having more than 2,500 persons but by 1840 this had doubled to 10%. (We saw above that the city of Cahokia had a much larger population of 10,000 to 20,000 persons around the year 1150 ad.) By 1840, Boston's population had reached 90,000 and New York City contained 312,000 people. Already by then, rural people said that the big-city dwellers "rushed like they were heading for a good dinner or running from a bailiff and that their faces showed knit eyebrows and compressed lips."
The largest cities of the U.S. were the seaports of Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The cities had merchants, artisans, laborers, mariners, ox- and horse-driving teamsters, and marginal rural folk. Goods were bought and sold, imported and exported. The cities imported European fashions, songs, dances, books, and ideas and passed them along to the surrounding countryside. The city's family households also took care of the sick, orphaned, and widowed.
Inequality of wealth was more apparent in the urban areas than it was in the family farms of New England. In 1800 in Philadelphia, the wealthiest 10% of us owned 90% of the taxable property, while about 30% of us lived in poverty and another 15% of us were indentured servants and slaves. About 10% of us were merchants. The average profit margin for us merchants was 12% of gross sales.
Most cities still relied on roaming pigs to keep the streets clean, except for Charleston, which had buzzards (remember the scavenging pigs of Ancient Mesopotamia). The roaming pigs converted the trash into pork that the poorest of us would eat. One visiting farmer said "the city streets were so littered that road surfaces hadn't been seen in years and that the city was so noisy he couldn't sleep." City streets have always required one to exercise care in aiming their steps. Both town and countryside contained the odors of animals, manure, rotting food, un-emptied chamber pots, alcohol, and tobacco.
Boston's public water system was built in 1652. (We saw that irrigation and fresh water systems were built in Ancient Mesopotamia about 5,000 years ago.) A person, called a pump-log-borer, bore holes lengthwise through logs using an auger with addable extensions. These extensions were added, one-by-one, to increase the length of the drill so it could create an increasingly deeper hole through the length of the log. It took some talent to bore a hole straight enough that id didn't cut through the walls of the log. One end of the resulting wood pipe was tapered while the other was recessed so that a series of such sections could be joined together. Mutton fat was used to seal the joints. Most towns built their water systems in the late 1700s and used wooden pipes until well into the 1800s. As towns became large, greater water pressures were needed than could be withstood by mutton-sealed wooden pipes so wooden pipes were replaced with metal ones.
Somehow we tend to think we are different humans today than we had been in the past. For example, we think that we are the first humans to have fads but even these have always occurred. In 1784, a hot air balloon in France was invented that could actually lift people off the ground in an unbelievable defeat of gravity. A fad of balloons then engulfed the U.S. Clothing fashions included little balloons on hats and pins. The word "balloon" was used to attract attention to everything; one farmer's sign described the vegetables he was trying to sell as "fine balloon string beans." Fads help keep us entertained. Clothing fashion changes as quickly as people can muster money for new clothes. In The Spanish Frontier in North America, Weber gives another example in that the name for the state of California came from a popular travel-adventure novel. It is easy to believe that if a New World were discovered today, many of us would be moving there to pursue an increased opportunity for life. There would be many news reports and movies depicting the adventures. The name of this new land could easily be taken from one of these movies.
As had occurred since the time of the first cities in Mesopotamia, industry in the U.S. before the year 1800 was composed entirely of small shops with people crafting items by hand. Compared to a modern, mass-production factory, working by hand is slow but much more personal. A day's work might result in the casting of one spoon, sometimes three.
Tunis explains that there were four kinds of shops. There were craftspeople who did custom work to order in what was called "bespoke work." Retailers simply bought and sold goods. Other artisans made items which they sold on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. There were specialists who performed some direct service for people–for example, those people who traveled the country offering to repair shoes or metal pans or some other specific object. These travelers often arrived in the morning, discussed the work needed with the farm owner for a few hours, did the work, and then spent the night in the home of that customer. Other travelers might sell these items from a wagon–sometimes from a wheelbarrow. These travelers did most of their work during April through October, when the roads were least miserable.
The city had many shopless hawkers shouting their offer of goods or services as they walked the streets, perhaps pushing a cart full of goods. For example, there were wood sellers, charcoal burners, rag buyers (for paper making), broom sellers, chimney sweeps, scissor grinders, meat butchers, fish sellers, game hunters, and milk sellers. The milk seller carried milk through the streets in big copper cans and ladled it into the customer's container right at their front door. Tunis describes the old joke about a hard of hearing person sticking a trumpet through a barely open door and getting milk in it.
In the city, each shop placed a sign above its entrance. The sign was usually a three-dimensional object depicting the shop's business, a shoe or tooth for example, but some signs were just a flat painting. A customer did not have to be able to read to understand these signs. Some craft shops illegally displayed the heraldic arms of their trade's English Guild, though few persons could recognize those now-foreign symbols. A tavern sign was either a jug or a portrait of a presumably important person. Tunis says that in 1776, every "King George Tavern" changed its name but not its portrait. (For a photo of a typical sign hung outside a tavern, visit www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=7792.) Tobacco shops customarily hung a picture of an Indian, supposedly because Indians had introduced tobacco to the Europeans. One tobacco shop in Baltimore in 1775 had an old ship mast carved into the figure of a standing Indian and by 1850, every tobacco shop had a similar figure standing at its entrance. Shops had signs but homes needed no identifying numbers. Before street addresses were common, people would tell incoming travelers to "Go to the Inn on River street and ask anyone you see to point out my house."
Every shop was run by its owner, who might also have an employee or an apprentice. It was rare for a shop to have more than a few workers. As we saw for Medieval Europe, the "shop" was a room within the home that simultaneously served as living quarters, workshop, inventory warehouse, and retail showroom. The shop owner obtained materials, discussed custom jobs with customers and directed apprentices. Shop owners and their spouses did the retailing and accepted payment in most any form–usually farm products. A shop in a city might advertise that this "country pay" was accepted. A silversmith's newspaper ad might also mention some cheese he or she had to sell. If coins were exchanged they were usually Spanish Dollars. These were cut into eight pieces or bits; two bits made a quarter dollar, hence the term.
A craftsperson was not as specialized as today. For example, a printer was an editor, typesetter, book binder, book publisher, book seller, and book repairer (re-sewing covers onto books), and usually made the local newspaper. A printing shop also sold writing paper, ruled paper–whose rulings were hand drawn in the shop–for keeping accounting records, pen quills, ink, and sealing wax (for sealing folded papers for privacy in correspondence). A printing shop often made its own ink from either foreign or local, organic materials; some printers made a surplus of ink to sell to other printers.
Printing presses were expensive and finicky to operate. They were made by only a few persons, still following the Gutenberg design. The first printing press in the American continents arrived in Mexico in the 1550s–the second in Lima, Peru in 1584. In 1638, the first press to be used in the English colonies was setup in the cellar of Harvard College.Printers published religious books, translations of Greek and Latin classics, history, school texts, official proclamations, apprenticeship contracts, and almanacs. An almanac contained weather predictions, moon phases, tides and schedules of courts, post riders, ferries, and freight wagons. When needed, space was filled with jokes and home remedies.
Type was also expensive, as it had to be imported from Europe. The typical printing shop owned one set of type and so printed in a single font. Type pieces were kept in a case having separate sections for each letter. To create a page of text, individual letters had to be placed into a block, which would then be smeared with ink, covered with a sheet of paper, and finally pressed. Individual letters of type were hand placed into that block, at a rate of almost one per second. Tunis explains that the typesetter grabbed type from this case without having to look at the case, just as a typist today doesn't have to look at the keys. Small letters were more frequently used and so were placed in a "lower case" within closest reach of the typesetter. Larger letters were used less frequently, and so were grabbed from a more-distant "upper case." We still use these terms today to refer to upper and lower case letters. By the year 1900, the typical printing shop owned type for three hundred different fonts; by 2000, a computer could hold tens of thousands of fonts.
In the early colonies, paper came from Europe only. If a boatload of paper was late in arriving then the press might come to a halt. Later, local paper was made from cloth rags gathered from the community. The rags were chopped into pieces, wet, left to decay for a few months, and then stamped into sheets. Many processes were experimented with while trying to better refine paper. In Asia, paper has always been made from wood; this was not done in the U.S. until recently. (This also means that toilet paper was being used in China in the ninth century ad but not until last week in the Western World.) Colonials tried making paper from corn husks, straw, pine cones, seaweed, moss, or wool but did not know enough chemistry to break down these materials. Papermaking involves complicated chemistry. Today, paper mills are common in the forested Southern U.S.
A newspaper typically contained four pages and was shared around the community until it was worn out. Its two outer pages usually contained local ads while the inner pages contained literary works and local commentaries along with three-month-old news stories from foreign exchanges. Many newspapers also made their way to other regions of the colonies, keeping each colony informed of the others. A local newspaper printer would reprint articles contained in papers received from other colonies. On January 14, 1768, when Anne Catherine Green's newspaper contained but a half-sheet she explained that her meager content was due to bad weather blocking the arrival of other newspapers.
Most occupations were learned through on-the-job apprenticeships, including those of merchants, lawyers, doctors, carpentry, clergy, and most every craft. Apprentices were not paid in cash wages. We will see below that even a helper on a farm was most-often paid in lodging or through the system of exchanging goods and help that existed between neighboring family farms.
The apprentices traded their labor for the master's training and usually lived in the master's home and ate with the master's family. The housewife prepared food and clothing for her children and for the apprentice. This means that the master not only taught the apprentices but housed and fed them, too. Not only the apprentices but also any other shopworker typically lived in the shop-owner's house and were fed as a single family. Some apprentices lived in the home of a wealthy master while others lived under poorer conditions; some were even beaten. The apprentice typically worked "sunrise to sunset" but also took part in the chores and activities of the household. An apprentice could travel home for occasional visits.
Most apprentices signed a seven-year contract with their trainer. (Today we enroll in college.) If apprentices ran away before completing the contract-period, the trainer had the legal power to have them found and returned to work. The town's tavern often had a few posters showing rewards for runaway apprentices. At the end of the training period, apprentices–now journeymen–would move away to open their own shop. Sometimes a Southern plantation would hire Northern journeymen long enough to teach their "mysteries" to slaves, who would then perform that task for the plantation and often for the people of the entire county.
The labor surplus of Europe benefitted trainers over apprentices because it enabled trainers to charge a teaching fee to the learner's family. In the labor-short colonies, orphaned or illegitimate children could become apprentices. They could less often do so in Europe. Also, the powerful craft guilds of Europe did not redevelop in the colonies.
After crossing an ocean–a journey of a few weeks duration–in pursuit of a better life, we would frequently move yet again, still in pursuit of a better life. This move might be across town or across a few hundred miles of land. Notice that since the time in which we were gatherer-hunters, each and every time a family has moved they were in search of a better opportunity to pursue life. Still today, we move across town, the nation, or the world for this same reason.
Since the United States began, it has been common for a family to move every few years. It is often found that 25% to 65% of the persons in one town would have moved elsewhere between successive governmental censuses, which occur every ten years. In Boston, each year about one-fourth of the families moved to another home elsewhere in Boston. Around the year 1800, New York City had the convention of ending leases on May first of each year. There were so many families and shops moving on this day that the streets were filled with carts and furniture “as if everyone were running from the plague.” Western land had an enormous pull on us farmers. Those of us who had made one move toward the nation's west were likely to move again even farther west, perhaps to the leading-edge of that moment's western frontier. Still today, we continually emigrate from one state to another in pursuit of a better life.
Travel has been common since the beginning of the U.S. Back in Europe there were millions of persons who had never been “beyond the sound of the parish bell.” Most of the traveling in the U.S. was done on foot. Still in 1840, only half of farming families had even a single horse and almost no horses were kept in the urban areas. You might see three family members riding on one horse. Thousands of us walked two miles to school, four miles to church, and ten miles to a weekly event. (My friend Datman Escher's grandparents said they had to walk uphill both ways to school, see www.worldofescher.com/gallery/jpgs/P14L.jpg.) If we walked more than fifteen miles we would spend the night before returning.
Some of us had two-wheeled carts pulled by a horse. These were easily overturned and upon smashing into pieces would impale passengers with their debris, as happened in 1818 to two drunken sailors while passing a bottle in Newbury, Massachusetts. Beginning in 1800, four-wheeled vehicles were starting to be seen and by 1820 they had become the most common vehicle. These four-wheeled wagons could also be used on the farm, and for hauling goods across the county. Commercial freight wagons began to appear and quickly grew in size to be pulled by as many as eight horses. Tunis says that these wagons differed little from those made in Roman times.
In the U.S., the earliest coaches were nothing but wagons with a few rows of forward-facing benches nailed onto them. Later, they were enclosed and had two benches that faced each other to facilitate conversation. For many years, a third backless seat continued to be placed between the other two with nothing but a strap of leather for the passengers to lean against. Larkin explains that "nine persons squeezed their cleanliness and tobacco into these coaches." A tenth passenger could choose to ride outside in the weather next to the driver–for full fare but also with full ventilation. The wind and the rain came right through the cracks and the leather-curtained viewing holes. If these leather curtains were strapped down then the passengers were simply tossed around in the dark. All the passengers had to get out and walk up every step hill because the horses could not pull them.
Along the journey each person would try to guess who the others were and what sort of person they were–often while pretending to be someone else. The passengers might debate politics or theology. (While riding a cross-country bus at age nineteen, I had similar fun pretended to have various reasons for my journey and following the advice of my wise, old uncle who had told me to “never let the truth interfere with a good story.”) You might like to read about a fourteenth-century coach trip in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, or you might like to read Travel in the Ancient World by Lionel Casson. For first-person accounts of travel in the U.S., visit the two websites at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/lhtnhtml/lhtnhome.html and http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/europeans/front.html.
Few stage lines existed between the years 1700 and 1800 but then their numbers quickly increased. In 1786, a journey from Boston to New York City took four to six days, depending on the weather. By 1830, stagecoaches were making this trip in just 1.5 days, and after 1840, railroad trains would make the trip in just twelve hours. Today it requires four to six hours by car. By 1835, the Boston area had 600 coaches per week traveling along one hundred lines at the good-weather speed of eight or nine miles per hour (13 or 14 km/hour). We also started putting spring suspensions onto the coaches.
Coaches suffered from runaway horses and broken axles. The holes and stumps in the "roads" would overturn a coach and sometimes cause injuries to the passengers. Overturns were expected on long journeys. For example, one New York City to Cincinnati coach was overturned nine times during its round-trip journey. On such long journeys, not only would the passengers fall asleep but the driver would also (a dozen sleeping persons being dragged behind a team of horses). One sleeping driver fell off the coach, caught his coat in the wheels, and was killed.
Traveling for pleasure was becoming easier and cheaper. We could more easily make a two-hundred-mile (320 km) trip to visit parents and siblings. Some more-wealthy newlyweds started a fashion of traveling to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon. Travel in 1835 was three times faster and three times cheaper than it had been in just 1790 but it was still costly. A stagecoach trip from Boston to Providence, Rhode Island cost two day's wages for a skilled artisan. From Boston, it cost eight-day's pay to go to New York City but two month's pay to go to Ohio.
By 1840 there were 15,000 freight drivers on the road. They were called "crackers" for their constant attempts to speed their horses by cracking their whip. Rougher taverns began to appear on the major roads for the rougher travelers. A traveler could rent a bed for the night in one of these taverns. Often, two or three strangers had to share a single bed. (There's an old saying that "politics makes strange bedfellows.") When we rented a bed for the night, we found that it contained the insects of each and every one of the previous guests. If we asked the tavern operator for soap, we surprised them.
In the northeastern United States at the start of the 1800s, we were living in communities of single-family farms. A typical family lived in a small house located on their own farm land, not in town. Each farmhouse was within sight of those of a number of other family's because the farmhouses were separated by the lengths of the farmland. New England was so densely occupied that you could see the candlelight of your neighbor's homes from your own front door. In Our Own Snug Fireside, Images of the New England Home 1760 - 1860, Jane C. Nylander explains that as you approached your neighbor's doorway you would likely hear the whir of the spinning wheel (see www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=15517) and the thump of the butter-churn (see www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=3422). Dwellings were more scattered in the less-populated South, and along the Western Frontier, a family might go weeks without seeing another person because people were scarce.
In New England, towns were not residential centers as they were in Europe. They were instead small commercial centers that contained a handful of craft shops and a general store, sometimes two. There was also a public building that served as both church and town meetinghouse. The town might have a tavern that served food, and that tavern might have a bed for travelers to share. The villages of the European predecessors of the U.S. residents also contained a few shops but mainly contained the homes of the area's farmers. Each day, European farmers would walk from the village to work in their fields, so villages tended to be spaced apart by this walking distance. The villages of the U.S. were commerce centers only and were not sleeping areas for farmers.
Initially, several transplanted European families would live together in a town from which their farmlands stretched radially outward. But land was so abundant that the very next generation would move out to the center of their farmland. The expectation of obtaining abundant farmland was often the reason for transplanting the family from Europe to New England in the first place. Hawke points out that the transplanted persons had no plans of changing their culture as they moved to the New World. Each group setup life in their new home to match that of their old European culture. Notice that the culture of their children was no longer European; it was European-American.
The South had very few villages. Tunis says that even a county seat had nothing but a church, a blacksmith, and an "ordinary," which was an inn where travelers spent the night and ate whatever they got. In contrast to Northerners who always went to a nearby village to see a smith and such, the South's smaller farmers went to a nearby plantation for things they couldn't do themselves. For example, few persons could do their own blacksmithing.
Since the land of the U.S. was covered by essentially one large forest, the space for each home was obtained by cutting away the forest trees, one by one, with an axe. As a clearing was being finished in one field, the clearing of the next field had already been started by cutting away bark to kill its trees. Many travelers commented that Americans would not let a tree stand anywhere. Some of the techniques used to clear land are described at www.osv.org/learning/DocumentViewer.php?DocID=778.
Home design changed little from 1600 to 1800. Until 1750, homes were not aligned with the street but to catch the southern sun. European immigrants continued to build homes in the fashion of their old country. Sometimes brick was used but mostly homes were constructed with heavy wooden posts and beams held together by mortise and tendon joints in which each board fits into a slot within the next board. Several homes can be seen at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/every/housing.htm.
A house builder was called a housewright. Housewrights usually built a home from trees cut down right in the yard of the owner. To cut boards from a felled tree, a string was covered in red ochre dust, stretched tightly over the bark covered log, and then snapped to leave a straight red line on the log. A line was snapped onto both the right and left edges of the log to guide the axe cut. A sixteen foot (five meter) oak could be squared in two hours with an axe. It was usually too difficult and expensive to haul ready-to-use lumber from a sawmill.
The sides of any log that would be visible in the finished house would be smoothed with adze and plane by a person called a joiner. (Axes, adzes, and planes were made by a blacksmith who forged pieces of iron and steel brought from Europe or India; India produced the best steel, which was needed for every cutting edge.) Any wall that was assembled but still lying on the ground would be raised into place with the aid of the neighbors. Since there were no closets, the joiner might make a lidded box to hold clothing and such. Later, some drawers were built under the box, and yet later, the box was all drawers–a dresser. Only the largest homes had two floors, and in this case it was the joiner who made the stairways and their balusters.
Knowledge of the more-easily built log home was brought to the colonies later by Swedes and became the typical home of the Western Frontier family. These families hoped to build something more permanent in the near future but often lived in their log home for a generation or two. (We have all heard that Abe Lincoln was born in a log-cabin that "he built with his own hands!") For a photo of a log cabin, visit the Arlington Heights Historical Museum at www.ahmuseum.org/AboutTheMuseum/Buildings/LogCabin/LogCabin.htm.
There was a much wider range in home sizes around the year 1800 than occurs today. Most were one-room homes, but about one-third of them had a second story that was used for sleeping. (Today’s suburban neighborhoods contain miles of homes that differ little in size but come in three colors.) The fanciest homes were found in the cities. The oldest surviving homes that we see today were not the typical small homes but were the largest, or those that had a famous resident, because those were more likely to remain standing.
During the 1800s, our homes in the northeast were built by a local expert and were typically 32 by 22 feet (10 x 7 meters) in size but many were either half or double this size. A home typically had a cooking area at one end and a sitting area at the opposite end, which contained a few cushionless, wooden chairs. The walls of the house were usually bare because paintings were expensive. Only 10% of families could afford a single painting or engraving–these would usually depict the homeowner. Mirrors were so expensive that usually just one could be afforded. The windows had no curtains and the floors had no carpets. The house contained no insulation at all so the summer heat and winter cold could only be endured. We took turns washing at the sink with water; soap was used only to clean clothing. It was common to see mothers picking lice from the heads of their children.
Collecting, emptying, and cleaning the chamber pots was a daily chore. The chamber pots were used to avoid a freezing nighttime walk to the woods. By 1820, English factory-made pots were cheap enough that all but the poorest homes had one (Still today we say "I'm too poor to have a pot to pee in"). Since the contents of a pot were often thrown through an open window or door, archaeologists often find broken chamber pots right outside the windows. The pots presumably landed there because a person's grip was lost while trying to toss its contents. Indoor bathrooms did not exit in New England. Some city-homes had an outdoor pit for garbage and waste, but many persons simply threw the contents of their chamber pot into the street; there was a common story about a couple being hit on their way to a wedding.
Bedrooms were rare. Only the wealthiest homes had a separate bedroom for use by the parents. Sometimes part of a one-room home was sectioned off to create a separate sleeping quarter for the parents, but then this area would not receive any heat from the fireplace. Sometimes children slept above in the unfinished rafter space, as we saw Kalapalo children do. Babies slept in their mother's arms until they were weaned. The bed was placed in a corner of the house; its mattress was stuffed either with straw or with chicken feathers. Many families slept in the bed at night and then sat on it during the day because it was their only "chair."
If two beds were available then all of the females of the family slept in one of the beds along with any female hired help and any female guests that might spend the night. Similarly, all the males slept together in the other bed. This meant that we became used to being surrounded by the warm bodies of our siblings and came to miss that after our siblings had moved out. Combining warmth this way helped us make it through the cold winter nights whose temperatures went below freezing. We can now see why travelers would share a bed with strangers who happened to be staying at the same tavern. When pots became cheap and our homes began to have separate sleeping areas, we began to place private basins, pitchers, and wash-stands in them. Some people started washing their entire body–and more often than once per year. A few wealthy homes had indoor water taps.
Usually three candles provided the light for an entire house. A large office of ten persons typically used just eight candles and the personnel tried to work near the daylight windows. Only the wealthiest homes could use more than a few candles; some might fill a chandelier with several candles. Outside the house were dark nights and bright stars, as can be seen today only when far from city lights. On the farm, one day each year was spent making candles from melted animal fat. People in the city would instead buy candles from one of the city's candle-makers. Back in Europe, a wealthy church or home might purchase cleanly burning candles made from bees wax. Visit http://collections.ic.gc.ca/HandCraftTrade/domestic/candlemaking_video.html for a video clip depicting the steps in candle making. The wealth of homes could be differentiated simply by the number of candles burning within them. The wealthiest 1% of urban homes contained the early version of a piano called a pianoforte. As you strolled in the afternoon past the homes within a wealthy neighborhood, you would hear tunes being played by the daughters within those homes.
Just as our homes did not contain any areas separated for specific uses, neither did the farmyard. Piles of wood were anywhere and everywhere. Our pigs and cows wandered throughout the yard and our chickens wandered throughout our home. The outside area was seen as a place for work. There were no grassy lawns, enclosed yards, or sunshade–due to our habit of removing every tree. Our yards were chaotic and our homes might be in need of repair. Home repairs required an imaginative use of available materials because factory-made replacement parts did not exist. The cracks in a log home were filled with mud, and some doors that wouldn't shut were simply allowed to hang sideways from one corner. Since glass was rare and expensive, we repaired broken windows by stuffing them with rags, hats, or bags.
Only the wealthiest of us could afford to paint our homes until chemical factories came into existence to mass-produce inexpensive paint. After 1840, the fashion developed to paint homes and to surround a yard with a picket fence that would be painted white. We also started planting decorative flowers around our homes. Some commercial villages in New England began to paint every building in town in white. These painting and planting fashions took a few decades to spread toward the southern and western U.S.
Food, food-storing, and cooking
Food was stored by placing it underground, as we had done for 10,000 years. It was also preserved using the more recent discoveries of salting, drying, or smoking. In a large home, a year's supply of pig meat was slaughtered on a single day, packed into a 25 by 4 by 3 feet (8 by 1.3 by 1 meters) salt box for ten days, hung on rafters to be smoked for two days, and then left to be eaten throughout the winter. (Recall that in Ancient Mesopotamia, Inanna was the power in the storage house and became the last piece of green meat at the very end of winter.) Other foods were also hung to dry from the ceiling or rafters inside the home. Game meat–including deer, possum, and raccoon–was a more-regular part of our diet along the Western Frontier than in the Northeast, where there was a decrease in the numbers of these animals. Fresh meat was then available only after the autumn pig slaughter.
Some wealthy families in the Mid-South filled a large pit with winter ice that could then be used in the summer. In Gleanings From Long Ago, Ellen Mordecai says one person warned that ice in the summertime "went against nature." Visit www.nps.gov/hamp/virtualtour/vtmansionproperty.htm#icehouse to see an ice house and visit http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/awal.1555 for a video clip of ice harvesting around the year 1900. Recall that the Medieval Chinese used fast boats to move ice from north to south.
Since apple trees were abundant in the Northeast, apple cider was stored in barrels for the year and was alcoholic. We drank it at every meal, so did our children. Alcohol also came in the form of rum distilled from molasses that came from the West Indian Islands. After 1790 we began distilling grain. Immigrants from Germany brought beer making knowledge. Recall that for 7,000 years, clean water has been the hardest thing for each group of persons to obtain.
After 1750, those of us who lived in New England began to have a more varied diet than other regions by growing squash, turnip, and cabbage that we then kept through the winter in the root cellar, which consists of dirt piled against the bottom of the house. Those of us in the southern U.S. began growing sweet potatoes. A Georgian friend of mine says Southerners discovered collared greens were edible during periods of hunger in the Civil War. Each of these foods remain somewhat regional still today.
Each house had a fireplace for cooking. The fire also provided light and was the only source of heat in the winter–except that it could heat just one side of your body and could not heat any separated sleeping room. You might have a burning-hot back toward the fire while facing away and holding a frozen dishrag in your hands. The chimney required continual cleaning or else it would catch fire. One person said that a simple way to give the chimney a quick cleaning was to drop a chicken down it from the roof and let its wildly flapping wings remove some of the soot. (My physicist friend says she cleans the tube of her optical instrument by pushing a cat through it.) In a genealogy book about some of my family's great-grandparent's great-grandparent's great-grandparents (see the reading list, below), the Bennetts describe a little bit of life in New Hampshire and Vermont around 1820. The Bennetts explain that many household items were placed around the fireplace: the bird gun and its powder horns were hung above on the wall, strings of apple and pumpkin were drying above, and alongside were bellows, pots, and utensils. The fireplace was constantly burning, accompanied by the sound of crackling logs. If the fire went out, a dish full of live coals might be fetched from the nearest neighbor or a spark would be struck from flint. Sometimes punk material was gathered from a rotten maple tree, dried, and kept handy because sparks from the flint would easily ignite this material (no-doubt this was discovered by accident just before the ensuing living-room stomp-dance was performed). A slow-burning fire could be started within a hollow elm, where it could get little air and might burn for weeks, and used to supply coals to kindle the fire in the home's fireplace. Some men carried flint and steel to light their tobacco pipes. Each fireplace burned an amount of wood that was about 8 by 8 by 4 feet in volume (200 cubic meters). To obtain firewood, we would cut down a tree, trim its branches, and then hitch it to the oxen to be dragged to the front door where it would then be cut up and used in the fireplace.
We cooked our meals by placing heavy metal pots directly into the hot coals or at the edge of the fireplace. Some of us hung our pots above the fire from a crane that could be swung over the fire. The typical home had just a few pots and cooking utensils. Within the fireplace, a smaller fire might be pulled off to a side whose heat was less intense and could be used to warm certain foods. Different heats were used for different purposes just as is done today.
Until after 1800, the family ate from the same large bowl of food, with their own utensil, and passed around a single drinking vessel for all to drink from just as their European ancestors had done and were still doing. Manners called for you to wipe your mouth with the tablecloth before drinking from this vessel. Around age sixteen, George Washington recorded one hundred rules of manner, see The Exercise of a Schoolboy at www.history.org/Almanack/life/manners/rules2.cfm. You might compare this to the 1951 film about teenage etiquette available from the Open Video Project at www.open-video.org/details.php?videoid=4324.
Plates were often made of wood or pewter. Forks continued to be in use in Europe but did not exist in the early colonies for several decades. When forks did later appear, they were held and operated upside down compared with European usage. (You might watch for this difference in movies or television shows from these two continents.) Before industrialization reduced the price of utensils and furniture and such, we used any available item as a utensil, including seashells for spoons, sharp pointed sticks for forks and knives, and conveniently shaped logs for chairs and tables. After industrialization, we used ceramic instead of wooden plates, drinking glasses instead of tin cups, and a butcher knife that actually had a handle.
European immigrants found that meat was eaten every day by the residents of the U.S.; in Europe, commoners rarely ate meat. The huge land area of the U.S. allowed room for a larger number of cattle and pigs. New York City residents bought $12 million in food in 1841. Of this, 39% was spent on meat, 25% on grain, 22% on dairy products, and 10% on vegetables (compare these percentages with your own). Half the meat was beef and one-quarter was pork. In the U.S., bread was usually made from wheat; only 1% of the native-born population had even heard of the cheaper oat bread that was common in Europe.
For 750,000 years, gatherer-hunters had been cooking over an open fire (as was mentioned above in the discussion of the archaeological excavation in Choukoutien, China). During recent centuries we moved the open fire into a hearth (or fireplace) within our home. We still cooked in the same manner except that we placed a strong metal bar across the flames from which we would hang cooking-pots. At the beginning of our Industrial Revolution, huge quantities of lowcost iron were being produced for the first time and used for many things. In 1813, the cast iron plow began to replace the metal-covered wooden plow. John Deere introduced a steel plow in 1837 that was strong enough to turn tough prairie sod.
The cast-iron cooking-stove appeared around the year 1820 and changed our cooking technique for the first time since our invention of fire 750,000 years earlier. It took a few decades for its usage to spread across entire countries. One woman said that the first time she started a fire in her stove it seemed like magic. Instead of turning meat on a stick placed over the fire, the iron cooking-stove had topside heating surfaces placed at waist height. Heavy iron pots no longer had to be lifted into and out of the blazing hot flames of the fire. Since stoves used just one-third as much wood as did the open fireplace, less wood had to be chopped on the farm or purchased in the city. In 1838, one family who was the first in their town to purchase a cooking stove was told by the other townspeople that it would poison them all but instead, within two years most everyone had one. Cookbooks quickly appeared for this new-fangled machine just as they would 150 years later when microwave ovens first appeared. (You can see a video history of nineteenth-century household utensils by visiting the Library of Congress website at www.loc.gov/rr/program/journey/household.html.)
Our life began within our own warm and crowded home, with the neighborhood's women clamoring and shouting in the Kalapalo fashion while men waited outdoors. More often mom gave birth while standing than while lying down. In the frontier west, dad was often the only person around so mom would sit in his lap for support while giving birth. (Visit www.dohistory.org for the diary of a midwife.) Mothers and children often died during birth.
One woman said that six of her friends had died while giving birth. If the baby wasn't emerging, the neighborhood women would try to turn it and sometimes had to decide within a few moments that to save at least the mother they might have to pull the baby out in pieces. In Life in a Medieval Village, Francis and Joseph Gies said that whenever a woman died during childbirth, the midwife was expected to quickly cut her open to remove the baby in hopes of saving at least its life (see Chapter 14). It is guaranteed that within the last few centuries, one of your grandmothers lost a child or her own life in this way. (What are the maternal mortality rates around the world today? The WHO reports that there are 0.2 maternal deaths per 1,000 births in the developed world but 8 per 1,000 in Africa. The worldwide average is 4 maternal deaths per 1,000 births. For the full report, visit www.who.int/reproductive-health/publications/maternal_mortality_2000/mme.pdf. See also Making Pregnancy Safer at http://w3.whosea.org/pregnancy/main.htm.)
Doctors did not assist in births until after the 1840 arrival of the tools for troublesome births. For several years after that, the doctor would have been surrounded by many critics while attending childbirths. It took a few more decades for the house-calling doctor to spread from the wealthiest urban areas to the rural areas. Childbirth slowly changed from the anciently-communal female event to the private relation between a woman and her doctor. (Visit www.who.int/reproductive-health/global_monitoring/data.html for the latest WHO table Proportion of births attended by skilled health personnel - Estimates by country.)
Nursing typically lasted twelve to fifteen months, often until after the child's second summer had ended. It had been noticed that nursing decreased the number of infections occurring at the end of the hot summer season. Of course there was much daily discussion in the neighborhood about whose baby was sick, whose was not, and what each mother and father were doing differently. Back in our biological past, such discussion began the very moment that we had sufficient language to do so.
The average European family had five persons but in New England the average family size grew to be six persons. Later, as New England's population became more dense and farmland became filled, the area's average again dropped to five persons per family. This number also remained high along the Western Frontier until its residents had been there for a generation or so, then it too would decrease. (As Richard Feynman says, you can picture a thin, north-south line of larger families, and how the line itself moves westward with the settlers.)
In 1798, 20% of rural homes were occupied by two families but this number had decreased to just 10% by 1850. Until 1850, one in five of our families had eight or more persons, but today, just one in twelve have this number. This means that in the early 1800s children were seen everywhere, much more so than occurs today. (The average is 2.7 persons per family in the U.S. today.) In the 1800s it was common for a home to include extra, unrelated persons, including co-workers, kinfolk, or lodgers. The dairies of the Ward family of Massachusetts shows that throughout a thirty-year period, they kept eleven to sixteen guests in their home. They were wealthy enough to afford to do this. Prosperous families could house more kin, employ more workers, and have longer staying guests.
A more-prosperous family might have a live-in helper who was a girl or boy from a poorer family working toward establishing their own future farm. (A girl was paid about one-fourth as much as a boy.) These youths would work for one or two years at one farm before switching to work for another. Children from homes with "more children than means" could be bidded out until adulthood to help with a more-prosperous family's chores, see www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=5897. A poor family with little land might send their eight-year-old to work and stay at a nearby farm, trading labor for food and shelter. As they became mid-teenagers, they would frequently return home to help in their parent's own home. See www.mayflowerfamilies.com/enquirer/servitude.htm for some examples.
As a girl approached marrying age, she might begin having extended visits with nearby relatives. As she met the neighbors of these relatives, she would be meeting increasing numbers of potential spouses. These visits were necessary because there were just a handful of potential spouses within a day's walk of her own home. Women usually married between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three.
The agricultural season encouraged most of us to marry after the time-consuming harvest and before the coldest part of the winter had set in. Most marriages occurred in late November or early December. We didn't yet have the tradition of wearing white or giving gifts, but the entire neighborhood would come to the house to celebrate with dancing and heavy drinking. Most everyone would spend the night by packing into the house and onto the bed.
In 1800, about one in three couples were already pregnant when they got married but only 1 in 5.5 in 1840. (Bennett reports that today 40% of first-births are premarital, 12% were premaritally conceived, and 30% occur out-of-wedlock). Illegitimate births were not even recorded in the public birth records. Abortions were sometimes used to end a pregnancy; if the child could not yet be felt to move then it was considered to be legal. In 1800, women continued to have children into their forties. Since many adults died before our youngest children had left the house, fewer parents experienced an empty nest and grand-parenting was less common.
Each day was filled with hard physical exertion for all, but no one complained of the work because they had no idea there could be any other way. In 1800, a single person alone could not handle all the duties needed to make a home function. Meals were prepared from scratch, clothing was kept in repair, the house and farm needed repair, crops and animals were tended, a few surplus items were made for sale, and socializing was done. Until the twentieth century, all of these chores were done by hand as it was a hand-made world. How many hours per week does your family spend doing these things, and what sort of things do you now do with your “spare time”?
A child went to work young. Daniel Drake of Mayslick Kentucky described his childhood chores. At the age of eight he rode on the horse to steady it while his father plowed. He planted seeds as his father covered them. He weeded. He stood guard over the crops by throwing rocks at squirrels and crows. He cared for stock, and he chopped and hauled wood. At eleven he was given an old gun to scare pests from the field. At twelve he held the plow and guided the horse, himself. At thirteen he split rails and built fences. By sixteen he was doing a full man's work in the fields. At the age of ten, Daniel's sister Lizzy, was sent to a farm one mile away to watch over twins and their aged father for an entire week. She had complete charge of the house. She woke up at five o'clock in the morning. walked a distance to get water, made breakfast, and got the children ready for school. She then cleaned the dishes and began preparing dinner. A few years ago, when I visited the Kentucky farm of a friend, I could not believe the number of hours per week of farm work their teenagers were doing. I grew up in the big city and worked around the home barely one hour per month.
We women worked in the farmyard milking the dairy cows and feeding the chickens and hogs. (Skim milk and swill for the hogs would be poured into a trough dug out of a big log.) We maintained the vegetable garden and spent many hours cooking at the fireplace. Every woman knew the preservation crafts of salting, pickling, and smoking. Bread was made in the home, including wheat, rye, Indian, and Johnnycake. Inside the house we churned milk into butter by vigorously shaking it for about an hour and then kneading it with our hands or with wooden paddles. The Ward family made eighty pounds (35 kg) of butter per week, using eighty pans, to barter at the local General Store. Visit http://collections.gc.ca/video/handcrafttrade/buttermaking.ram for a video clip depicting the steps in butter making, and see www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=3422 for a photo of a woman churning butter.
Not every household had the knowledge required to make cheese. First, milk was poured into a stomach lining taken from a calf. This lining contained acids that solidified milk into curd. After this was done, a press was used to squeeze the whey from the curds. (Oh, so that's what those old nursery rhyme words mean.) Then it was left to age by covering in wax. In effect, the calf's stomach acids would partially digest the milk and turn it into cheese that could be stored for long periods without spoiling.
Coffee and sugar were becoming more widely available. Tea had long been England's beverage, but in the year 1800, only half of U.S. homes had daily tea. In the New World, coffee cost less than tea because coffee was grown in the New World; consequently, by 1830 it was more popular than tea. Coffee was obtained in bulk form and then ground and pounded. Sugar had been an expensive luxury item but as its price fell it became more-widely used. It came in the shape of a tapered-cone, about six inches in height (15 cm), and then sugar scissors were used to cut off little pieces from the cone. The doors of our homes had no locks but both tea and sugar were kept in locked boxes.
Most homes home had a spinning wheel used to twist fibers into thread. A photo of a spinning wheel can be seen at http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=75. We spent many hours spinning thread, day after day. The mother of a household would delegate spinning to their daughters, hired help, or to an older unmarried women who lived in the house, hence the term "old spinster." Thread and clothing was also made from flax plants, though it required extra effort. (Flax was picked in midsummer, allowed to partially rot in water, fragmented, had its splinters removed, and then spun into thread.) Usually, spun thread was taken to town to trade for cloth but some of us had looms to make our own cloth. This cloth could also be traded in town. Many households exchanged goods or labor with a not too distant family that did have a loom.
All but the wealthiest families made their own clothes. It took many hours of work to sew the entire family's wardrobe so we did not have several copies of each item. We women usually had two sets of work clothes and a third set used only on special occasions. Since clothes were not easily replaced, we kept the clothes in a functioning condition for as long as possible by mending them often. We bought children's shoes oversized and stuffed them with rags while the child was growing into them. A southern plantation might have to quickly make one hundred new shirts before the previous one hundred were worn out. We also had to wash the clothes by scrubbing and pounding on them within tubs. This was usually done on Monday or Friday but some of us washed clothes just once a month. Harriet Beecher Stowe said that this day-long chore resulted in "bleached, par-boiled fingers." Women's work was less varied through the seasons than was that of the men but was more varied through the day. Women were usually trying to do four things at once, all while tending to the children.
Urban women had much the same chores as had rural women, but those of us poorer urban women struggled ever harder to scratch out a living. The most-leisured women were those who presided over a wealthy home. She might have only to make pastries between social visits while her live-in help prepared and served meals. She might also choose to wash the delicate China cups herself. Her day was less wearing than for the vast majority of women in the United States.
The work of us men involved the barn, gates, fields, pastures, and woodlands. It included such things as cleaning cow stalls, maintaining gates and fences, and working the crops. During the cold Northern winters there was no work to do in the fields. We then chopped wood, repaired harnesses, and took long social visits.
For entertainment and socializing, many of us drank heavily at the town's tavern. The per-capita rate of consumption of alcohol was triple today's rate. In 1827 the city of Rochester, New York had one-hundred taverns for 80,000 persons, which is one for each eighty persons. Women drank in small amounts and were rarely seen drinking in a tavern. The temperance advocates of the 1820s estimated that men drank fifteen times as much as did women. Entertainment also consisted of various forms of gambling. Card and dice games were common, and many towns had a horse-race route on the outskirts of town. Bets were also placed on bloody fights between pairs of about any types of animals, including roosters, dogs, dogs and chained bulls, and dogs and bears. Eventually, we decided this was just pointless brutality.
As for the Mesopotamians and Kalapalo, superstitions guided many aspects of the daily actions of New England farmers. Astrology guided the timing in weaning a calf and even in weaning our own babies. We would do, or leave undone, certain things during certain signs of the zodiac, and certain crops would be planted only during certain phases of the moon. For example, the December hog slaughter had to avoid a waning moon or it was feared that the pork would whither and shrink in the barrel. Trouble with cattle, or even butter or cheese, could still bring accusations of witchcraft. Why do you suppose our grandparents would do things this way? They would answer "Because it has always been so."
Families bartered goods at the General Store
Tunis explains that in the fourteenth century, European "grossers" wholesaled spices and produce. We saw this occurring in the Medieval Fairs. During the 1600s, grossers began also to retail items which would not spoil and the spelling was changed to "grocer," as we know it today. Most every New England village had a general store, and they sold goods in bulk because individual packages did not yet exist. (In the next chapter, we’ll see that by the 1950s the general stores were being replaced by self-serve supermarkets.)
Currency was rarely used in the general store or in any other transaction. Any currency that was used was usually foreign. Instead families bartered for goods at the village shops by bringing butter, eggs, bee's wax, feathers, axe handles, hats, thread, and some crops to exchange for dry goods, cloth, nails, molasses and rum. (More and more cloth was being made in the new factories in England, and soon in New England, also.) The values of the exchanged goods were agreed upon through haggling. Several families sometimes formed a train of wagons to take their surplus products to a more-distant but larger town that had a larger market. Much of this surplus was being exchanged with the plantations of the West Indies.
Within the home, hired help was not paid in cash. Instead, helpers would move into your house and exchange their labor for your food and clothing. The hired help became a part of the family, just as we saw above for apprentices.
Agricultural and social events
There is very short time-span in which a hay field is ready to be cut and rolled into bundles. To do this quickly, the neighboring families combined efforts and the nearby town would be emptied as its merchants closed shop to join in the project. Haying was handled with the excitement of a battle. Lines of people with long-handled scythes worked across the field. A slow cutter would receive friendly insults. Young men considered haying to be a physical challenge and a contest. They strived to be given the distinction of being the best mower or to be assigned head of a group. This work lasted fourteen to sixteen hours through the long summer day, from dawn until dusk–even later during the bright light of a full moon. Cutting hay required the most work of all. Visit www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=765 for a painting of a group at work in the hay field and www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=2437 for a photo of the scythe that workers swung to cut the hay.
Oats, rye, wheat, corn, and potatoes were harvested later in the year and did not require such a frantic rush as did haying. Threshing grain was done in the 10,000-year-old labor-intensive fashion. Since cotton was hard to pick, only the most dexterous avoided cuts and bleeding fingers and hands. While picking cotton, those of us who were slaves were driven, sometimes to exhaustion, by the threat of the ever-present whip.
Hawke explains that Europeans had used the word corn to stand for grains or cereals in general. The Europeans who had moved to the U.S. began using the word corn to refer also to New World maize. Native Americans began planting and harvesting maize about 7,000 years ago. The archaeologist MacNeish has spent many years studying the first locations in which maize was being farmed. He found that the original, wild version of maize had just a few small kernels, but that after several thousand years of selection by us humans it has developed into today's version. Throughout the U.S., the main crop of the transplanted Europeans continued to be Native American maize or “corn” because it was found that it would grow in most every soil and climate and that it could be eaten by people, our pigs, and our cows–who would be allowed into the fields to eat the stalks after we had gathered the corn ears. Corn fields are seen to extend from coast to coast for hundreds of miles (1.6 km) at a time in the U.S. today and in most every other nation, too.
As a family harvested their cornfield, they stacked the ears into a number of high piles. Neighboring families would come over to help remove the corn husk from each ear. Groups were assigned to each pile and then races would occur. Finding a lucky red ear meant pending courtship. (For a photo of a 1910 cornhusking bee, visit www.kentuckyexplorer.com/nonmembers/00-10057B.html and to see a video of the 1940 State Cornhusking Championship, visit www.wisconsinstories.org/2001season/making_history/makinghistory_video.html.) Shucking corn was an occasion for celebration, and every celebration involved heavy drinking and dancing.
A young man, not yet of courting age, would play a fiddle while everyone danced. People of every class danced to the fiddle, including the poorest farmers and the wealthiest ball room attendees. The fiddling and dancing would start when the candles were lit and end at three o'clock in the morning unless a contest was called to see who could dance the longest. The fiddle was brought to the U.S. by the peoples of every European region. Still in 1800, the people of the U.S. were dancing to the same jigs and reels as were the people of Ireland, England, and Scotland. (See the bibliography for some musical samples.) We sang songs that were already centuries old. For example the long-popular Chevy Chase ballad had roots in a fourteenth-century Scottish border battle. These traditional songs were learned while growing up so nobody bothered writing them down, making them harder to collect by later researchers.
Until about 1800, the dancing fashion was the contra dance in which women and men formed opposing lines while each couple moved in predetermined patterns. Around 1800, a new four-couple dance arrived from France and would continue in time as the more-recent square-dance. Young people took right to it and complained when older people insisted on doing the older line-dances. Some of these younger people would then do the contra dance wrong on purpose to spite their elders. The next dancing fashion to arrive from Paris was the valse of 1821 and had individual pairs moving about as they pleased in an intimate face-to-face embrace. (Visit http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/dihtml/dihome.html for videos depicting the dance steps of the last five centuries.) Each new dancing or clothing fashion would first arrive in the large port cities and, through the next few years, slowly move outwards into the rural countryside. Even later, each would eventually make their way out to the Western Frontier.
Every social event was also an occasion for courting, and couples acted with a freedom that surprises today's more sexually restrained age. For example, couples were allowed to sleep in the same bed together but only if fully clothed, or if separated by a board, or if each were wrapped in their own cloth sack–a bundling bag (for a discussion and image, visit www.threerivershms.com/bundling.htm). This is not all that surprising since family members, hired-help, and strangers were sharing beds all over the country for warmth's sake.
We drank heavily at barn raisings, hay cutting, felled-tree clearings, and weddings. The temperance movement of the 1820s curtailed our nationwide excess by cutting our average alcohol consumption by two-thirds before 1840. In 1851, Maine passed a law prohibiting alcohol and twelve other states temporarily followed along. Horace Greely said that the reduction in drinking represented a great change in public sentiment. (More recently we have seen similar changes in public sentiment generated against littering in the 1960s and drunk driving in the 1990s.)
Women gathered for quilting parties and apple parings. While removing apple peels, a young girl would look for those that spelled the initials of her future husband. The finished quilt adorned a person's bed and embodied the work and skill of the neighborhood. Around the year 1840 in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware we began to sign our own squares. When young women met for a quilting party, it would be followed by the arrival of young men who would shout hurries from outside the home while waiting for the after-quilting dance.
While working or socializing we would discuss the world. One day Francis Underwood recorded the sequence of topics at a social gathering. First measles and whopping cough were discussed, then a reported bear sighting, followed by discussions of absent neighbors and the marriage prospects of some neighborhood youngsters. They then discussed how the clock of a newly deceased man hadn't run for years but struck forty-four times, which was his age, at the moment he died. (Richard Feynman discusses a similar event in The Meaning of it all, Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist.) One day in January 1804, nineteen-year-old Zeloda Barrett of New Hartford, Connecticut was writing in her diary when she decided to list the subjects of her parent's conversation with their neighbors. These were the pigs, the democrats (Jefferson's party had just defeated the Federalists), the terms of a local property dispute, a woman's sore finger, a colonel's promotion to general in the state militia, and a heated discussion about assigning family arrangements in the congregational meetinghouse.
There were many social visits. Mary White kept a thirty-year diary in which she recorded her social visits. During a typical week she would have ten visitors at her own home and she would visit three or four other homes. In 1835, unmarried Pamela Brown of Plymouth, Vermont kept a diary. She went to every funeral in Plymouth and often sat up with the neighborhood's sick. Four or five times per week she went to visit at a friend's house or had them visiting at her own house. These visits would often last for two or three days. She also went to visit nearby relatives in other towns. After harvest she went to weekly dances, singing schools, and quilting parties–all without adult supervision. In 1824, the recent mother Ann Jean Lyman said that "the conflicting claims of society and children made her curtail her visiting." Visiting was less frequent during the busier agricultural months and the cold winter months. The country store was also a place for meeting and gossiping. There would be talk about livestock and produce, sickness and health, births and marriages.
In the cities neighbors would visit each other's home several times per day. (The city also contained countless strangers.) Wealthy urbanites developed an increasingly complicated etiquette determining how often one person or family should visit another and who should visit whom. The rules involved kinship, business, and politics. They were burying themselves behind “a system of exclusion as rigorous as that of aristocratic England but without the guards and knights.”
Social events and work including much singing. European travelers said that those of us who were slaves had good voices, sang in tune, and had a rich and distinctive musical style that revealed both the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They also said we would all participate instead of having just one person performing solo in front of a silent audience as occurred in the churches of the Europeans. For centuries, church singing consisted of all members trying to sing simultaneously in a manner that sometimes lacked in tone and synchronization. Between 1770 and 1820, talented groups went around the country training a portion of each congregation who would then comprise a church choir. In turn, that better-trained choir would attempt to lead the rest of us with their more-proper singing. Some churches had one lead singer who would sing out a sentence alone that was then repeated by the entire congregation. Organs were added to help direct the members. Some churches leaders would sing out "fa-sa-la" to help direct the group in a style that lives on in the "sacred harp singing" of Alabama.
The neighborhood met each Sunday at the town church. The church building was shared by several sects who took turns using it, and it was also the town meeting house. In the colder North, wine might freeze in the unheated building during the service. We brought our family pets and let them roam around the building during the sermon. Chickens and turkeys would walk through the building and might even roost on the pulpit. On Sunday, some families put all toys away and conducted religious readings; play and laughter might even be forbidden. Some described Sunday as a peaceful day while others said it was busy. The unchurched would lounge on Sunday or drink heavily with neighbors.
We saw that each city and village of Europe had its own festivals and holidays, but as their former residents scattered and blended into the communities of the New England, few of these holidays survived transplantation to the New World. Easter was celebrated by us Catholics who were only a minority. Some of us boys in seaport towns celebrated the November 5th Gunpowder Plot against the House of Parliament by building large bonfires. Those of us who were Irish would celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but Halloween had not yet made its way from Ireland.
Thanksgiving had always been celebrated by us Wampanoag. Around the year 1600 there were about 12,000 of us Wampanoag living in forty villages in what would become Eastern Massachusetts. After contact with European guns and germs, our number would decrease to just 400 in the year 1675. (You might like to visit www.tolatsga.org/wampa.html.) The pilgrims first celebrated Thanksgiving with the Wampanoag in 1621, and then that holiday spread outward from New England to the rest of the nation. By 1819 it was an official holiday in six states and would later become the nation’s most important holiday. Apprentices would travel home for Thanksgiving, and siblings might travel hundreds of miles to meet at their parent's home.
Christmas was celebrated but we had not yet begun to exchange gifts or to decorate our homes, except for us Pennsylvanian Germans who decorated a tree just as we had done in Europe. Those of us in the dual Dutch and English heritage of New York City burned a yule log and told the story of St. Nicholas. In 1822 the Reverend Clement Moore wrote Twas the Night before Christmas, which you might like to read once while looking for elements of daily life from the year 1822 (see www.nyise.org/moore). Some of us New Yorkers began giving candy and toys, filling the city's stores with shoppers the day before Christmas. By 1830 this had spread to some other parts of the Northeast.
The New England area was the only region of the U.S. having public elementary schools in the year 1800. Some New England school houses were funded from local taxes or from exchanging goods that the local residents brought to the schoolhouse. Sometimes the area's families would bring a load of wood for the school to use or they might bring a load of something that the teacher could trade for other supplies. There was one school house for every two to four square miles (three to six square km).
Through the 1700s, people were beginning to imagine educational opportunity for every child instead of it existing only for the children of the more-elite members of our society. Through the 1800s, public education became a reality in much of the world. By 1850 in the U.S., every state had public schools at both the elementary and secondary levels. But still, only the children of the wealthiest of us could attend college. That would change through the 1900s.
Horace Mann of Massachusetts was a politician, educator, and humanist who said “Be ashamed to die before you have won some battle for humanity,”see www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/horacemann.html. In the 1840s, he argued that Universal education would guarantee the nation's political and economic stability and that it should become a public matter for the public's good and not remain a luxury of the elite. He said that it would prepare informed and intelligent citizens and that in a Republic, ignorance is a crime. We must prepare children to become good citizens, develop their capacities, enrich their minds, and imbue their hearts with the love of truth and duty and a reverence for all things sacred and holy. We agree with this today. We consider education an important part of being human, one that should be denied from nobody.
In 1820, the curriculum of the New England public school was planned to be more practical than the Greek and Latin schooling of past centuries. Parents believed the purpose of school was to teach children enough reading, writing, and arithmetic to enable them to add up a bill of purchase and to read and understand things like property deeds, the almanac's astrological recommendations, and especially the bible. A particular Reader and Speller pair became popular because they also taught moral habits. (One high school that I attended told us we were ready for the world if we could do no more than add and subtract well enough to balance our checking account and figure out which price was cheaper per ounce: thirty-two ounces for $3 or sixteen ounces for $2.) Teachers soon added geography, history, and science.
School attendance was not yet mandatory. Classes opened after harvest and closed before planting-season began. Often, two- and three- years-olds went along to school with their older siblings. Children were kept at home whenever they were needed for farm work. Most five- to fifteen-year-olds spent three to eight weeks per year in school. Since the Western Frontier had fewer schools, it often occurred that frontier children had the opportunity to learn to read and write only if their parents could teach them. Higher education was expanding in the East but it was not meant for women and especially not meant for women to use in pursuing professions. About 75% of the population could read and write. Law forbid us slaves to become literate–slave-owners knew to try to restrict minds–but still many of us learned to be carpenters, metalsmiths, tanners, harness-makers, shoemakers, and fiddlers and such.
Mutually beneficial exchange of help among community members
Almost every home exchanged goods and labor with their neighbors. A few days help in harvesting might be traded for help in spinning thread, shucking corn, or peeling apples. Some firewood or meat might be traded for the loan of a horse or wagon or maybe for a few weeks' pasturing of a cow. Neighboring families exchanged goods, utensils, and the help of themselves and their children. Nylander says "we exchanged daughters just as we exchanged pots." A new neighbor would quickly become entangled in the local system of exchanging goods and help. No money was paid in these help-exchanges; little money even existed. Neighboring families maintained mental balance sheets about which neighboring family owed, or was owed, some amount of help. Neighbors exchanged help in doing many chores, but especially in those that were large or had to be done so quickly that the combined efforts of many persons were required. Since a large hay field is best harvested on a singularly appropriate day, the help of many persons from the community is beneficial in accomplishing this chore. These examples of mutual aid among neighbors is similar to those of other times and places. We saw that a Yoruba farmer might join a work group in which the members worked together on a single farmland at a time and that Medieval European village farmland was often marked into strips belonging to individual farmers but the entire farmland was worked by the community.
We have seen that our natural predisposition to form mutually beneficial societies manifests itself into many different forms of societies. Our biological ancestors first formed societies because they found it mutually beneficial to exchange assistance in any task that was larger than could be handled by one individual–for example, in looking for food or watching for predators. We can now see that the farming families of 1820 New England were simply doing the same thing. Throughout our history, in the culture of each moment we exchange help in any task requiring the efforts of more than one individual. Life in big cities today has less-frequent reasons to exchange one-on-one mutual assistance with our neighbors because very few chores require the efforts of more than one person or more than a few moments.
During the switch from farming to factory work, there was much contemporary discussion among our elders about the readily apparent lessening in community ties since factory workers were finding less numerous reasons to exchange help with their neighbors than had their farming parents. We take today's arrangement for granted because it is the culture of our youth, but many of us naturally feel ill-at-ease when experiencing insufficient ties with our community. Yet we do continue exchanging help with our neighbors today each and every time an opportunity arises, usually because a task is larger than one person can handle (moving day might be an example). Comparing today's culture with that of our great-grandparent's great-grandparents enables us to see that we exchange help with other persons in every manner that is necessary and mutually beneficial in the culture of the moment. In the year 1820 in the U.S., this meant exchanging help for such things as peeling the apple and corn harvests, and clearing fields of felled-trees and rocks.
Some of us who live in the big city today sometimes get an ill feeling in our stomach about our seemingly insufficiently-connected society. Neighbors still help each other today the instant a need arises but it often requires a natural disaster to produce a visible need to which we then innately respond without having to first think about it. We are then relieved whenever we see an exchange of help because it makes us feel that we are members of a society after all. Our mutually beneficial exchange of help today merely occurs in a less directly-visible manner as each of us contributes to the operation of our society by working our daily job. Our civilization is the sum of the efforts of each of us. On the surface, our daily lives today seem more independent of the other members of our community but our mix of specialized occupations actually makes us more interdependent today than we have ever been in the past. Our interdependence is visible from our front porches as the traffic seen to occur as everyone is going about their daily jobs that combine into our civilization. Our civilization operates today only because of the combined efforts of all of us doing our daily job. Each of us contributes our life's effort in keeping our civilization going and in its progress.
The urge we feel and the inner desire we have to exchange help today is the same feeling and mental state experienced by our first social-primate ancestors whether we are exchanging help in the primate search for gatherable berries and warning of predators or danger or in the more modern chores of harvesting the hay crop or simply holding the door open for the next person. The urge we feel today to exchange help is the same urge felt by the first humans. What does it mean to be a social primate? We live together in a group and exchange assistance for our mutual benefit on any chore requiring more than the efforts of a single individual. The term "social primate" might not mean a whole lot to you but your emotions and feelings do. Think of a recent helping situation that you were involved in and recall the feeling you had. The inner feeling that propels you to do this has been occurring within your ancestors for a few million years. As Johnston explained, that feeling is like a little emotional packet that has traveled through time connecting you to the first humans and even to your more-remote, social primate ancestors. Today's individual acts of mutual assistance are due to the same innate drive to cooperate that has existed since we first became social primates.
Looking closely at the interactions between neighbors in the past helps us to understand the role of neighbors in our lives today. Our society consists of our collection of neighbors, and as has been the case since the first human societies, we form a society because there are a number of mutually beneficial ways in which we can exchange help. Otherwise we would go it alone. We are not going it alone today but are cooperating in a social group. As it is often said, some of us today might choose to be a hermit on a mountain but none of us has to choose to live in cooperating, social groups; that is what we do naturally. Instead of a pack of twenty primates, our social group has come to consist of the people of an entire nation–even the entire world.
Put yourself in this place. Imagine yourself as member of a species of solitary, wandering animals. When you encounter another individual you both have to decide whether to move away from each other or to cooperate in activities. You choose to separate. But a changing environment has the effect that those individuals who instead choose to cooperate and share with others in the search for food and the avoidance of predators were more likely to live long enough to have children. This predisposition is a major component of our biological heritage and it remains with us today. We are unable to ignore our predispositions making us parenting mammals and social primates. Without having to first think about it, we seek spouses, we raise children until they in turn have their own children, and we live in social groups exchanging assistance on any chore requiring more than the efforts of a single individual.
The civil calendar was filled with seasonal militia musters, annual local and state elections, and periodic sessions of the circuit-court. On these occasions, the town held foot races, pony races, and wrestling contests (as did the Kalapalo) while experiencing a general uproar. The Fourth of July celebration was the midsummer festival. Each state required all able-bodied men to meet for military drill for two or three days in both the spring and fall. Many of us hated to do this and made a travesty of it by arriving drunk, without our gun.
Guns had been invented just a few centuries before this time. In Life in a Medieval Village, Frances and Joseph Gies explain that back in Europe, only noblemen were allowed to own guns, and before guns existed, only those persons having more than a specific amount of wealth were allowed to own crossbows. But in the New World, everybody owned and used guns, and every male citizen was a member of a state militia. The people of the U.S. are today debating the meaning of their Constitutional right to bear arms. The Second Amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” People today are unsure if the right involves only the militia or every citizen. The historical description of the Gies makes one ask if the amendment writer meant that gun ownership should not be restricted to just nobleman. (In Chapter 13 we saw that the Dalai Lama recommends that we remove guns from the Earth, and in Chapter 22 we'll ask how to end gun violence by ending the reasons for crime.)
Public executions were the ultimate in violent gatherings. In Castille, Maine in the year 1811, one execution began with a parade of light infantry with artillery on their perimeters. This was followed by the sheriff leading a cart carrying the condemned man's coffin. The condemned man was tied with ropes and wore a burial shroud. He was followed by eight ministers and more troops. At the end of the parade was a fife and drum band playing the death march. Throughout the U.S., public hangings brought enormous crowds and confirmed the power of the law and the solidarity of society against the offenders. The crowds were mostly men and sometimes their sons, and would make for big business at the taverns. Sometimes a tavern would hire a guard to place in the condemned prisoner's cell to ensure he did not commit suicide and cheat the tavern out this profitable event.
Each town and county courthouse had whipping posts and stocks. Public pain and suffering were the punishment for most everything except murder, which was punished by death. We would be flogged for petty theft. A counterfeiter would have an ear cut off. We would have a letter 'M' branded on our forehead if we committed manslaughter. The screams of the punished were meant to be heard all around town. Larkin explains that some people, including John Hancock, felt that these sorts of punishments were more of an insult to humanity than a deterrent to crime. See www.history.org/Foundation/journal/spring03/branks.cfm for Bilboes, Brands, and Branks: Colonial Crimes and Punishments.
In the 1820s we stopped whipping and branding convicted persons, though Delaware continued public floggings until almost 1900. We began instead to place them into prison houses "where convicts would have time for moral reflection." The first U.S. prison was built in Auburn, New York in 1821, but we ended debtor's prison in the 1830s. Some of us today wonder whether the harsh ways of prisons are improving behavior or making it worse, see http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/channel/blog/2005/03/explorer_maximum.html. Public hangings began to stop in the 1830s because the general population came to the consensus that the events lowered the public to the same brutal level as that of the murderer. The debate has recently renewed but without any mention of our past experience with public executions.
A family's work was done right on their own farm and their work directly sustained their own lives. Their future was in their own hands and not dependent on any outside and uncontrollable forces, other than the weather and their health. For example, a cut from the simplest accident could become infected and cause your death. Your family could only watch helplessly as life left you within a matter of days. Our lives began in our own home and ended in our own home, with everyone around us. Our family made a coffin, cleaned our body, and then carried us out by the trees and buried us there.
One in six of us died before reaching the age of one. Most couples had seven or eight childbirths so most parents knew what it was like to lose an infant. When an infant died, it was in its mother's arms. Larkin explains that what is now seen as a disastrous stroke of fate was the expected experience of most families back then. One in sixty-five pregnancies resulted in miscarriages or stillbirths (today it's 1 in 650). We slaves lost about one in three of our children due to low birth weight, too little food, and too little nursing while mom was working in the plantation fields.
Many of us lost a parent and a brother or sister while we were still children and lost a young adult within the extended family. Even worse was the fact that if a disease killed one person in your home then it would likely kill a couple others, too–or even all five of your children. About one in ten of us died between the ages of one and twenty-one so that overall, one in four of five of us died before reaching the age of twenty-one. Only half us slaves lived to be an adult.
Larkin explains that disease and bodily discomfort could rarely be cured, only endured. The accidents that each of us accumulated through life were easily visible from the way we limped or moved; typically, one in ten of the persons at any gathering would show the effects of the poorly-repaired broken bones of their past. It was so common to see somebody have a three-minute bout of malarial shaking that the event was treated in a matter-of-fact manner.
Many of our infants died of the intestinal infections that became common at the end of the hot summer. As we saw above, it was common for mothers to nurse until after the end of their baby's second summer to help combat these infections. Whooping cough, diphtheria, spoiled food, measles, mumps, chickenpox, parasites, yellow fever, and scarlet fever entered a city and simply ran their course. Back then, more-quickly acting diseases killed us before more-slowly acting strokes and heart disease could get around to it. Many adults died of typhoid fever, bacterial dysentery, and viral or bacterial pneumonia. Tuberculosis (more commonly called consumption) killed as many as 25% of us adults. An open wound was dangerous because tetanus, gangrene, and blood poisoning could not be dealt with. The colder north had less disease than did the tropical south: wherever there were swamps there was malaria.
Yellow-fever makes a person vomit black material. The fever would arrive at a port city but since it was spread by mosquitos it was not able to move inland very far. In 1793, it killed 10% of us in Philadelphia. Gravediggers went down the street shouting for us to bring out our dead. Larkin says that if our friend even acted as if they were in mourning, we would avoid them until after the disease had left town. In June 1832, Asiatic cholera arrived in Quebec from India, and newspapers reported its spread across the nation. By July it had spread to Philadelphia and Cincinnati, then Boston and Baltimore, and on to New Orleans by August. Within a city, disease hit all ages and wealth-levels more equally because no medicines existed and everyone lived within a few feet of each other. But the wealthy were more-able to move temporarily away from a city experiencing an epidemic.
The only successful medical remedies were broken-bone setting, quinine for malaria, and tooth extraction, which ended the pain in your mouth but sometimes led to a fatal infection. Toothbrushes were not used. In fact, if you were simply seen with a toothbrush you would be mistaken for a dentist. Surgery was a desperate attempt for a cure because painkillers or numbing chemicals were not known until ether was first used in 1842, see http://americanhistory.si.edu/archives/d9120.htm. Instead, your only aid was the physician's speed. As the "cure" for most every ailment, doctors gave their patients chemicals that would either make them go to the bathroom or vomit violently. Sometimes they would use a pointed metal tool to let blood out. These severe "remedies" usually just made us all the weaker, but everyone was willing to try any root or herb rumored to help–and took it at the astrologically correct time. We also turned to the age-old arts of the Indian and African shaman or a similar frontier grandma. Since there were no guaranteed cures, we instead used alcohol and opium as pain killers.
Barbers performed surgeries in medieval times, but by Henry VIII's time, surgery at the barber shop was confined to just tooth pulling and blood letting. While releasing blood, a patient grasped a bloody staff around which were spiraled white bandages that became striped with blood. For this reason, the red and white striped pole became the barber’s symbol. Barbers performed bleedings in the U.S. until the 1830s.
Tunis explains that in the city, people might go to an apothecary shop, describe their symptoms, and on the basis of this alone receive a collection of herbs from the attendant–as still occurs in some herbal shops today. The apothecary gathered plants, dried and processed them, and sold the results in small bottles. The bottles had to be obtained from Europe until a local glass maker moved into the area. Rather than using expensive European cork, bottles were stoppered with wood and wax. Anyone who cared to do so would open a medical shop, as no license or exam was required. The State of Connecticut specifically chose not to issue medical licenses to avoid promoting a monopoly of medical care. Tunis says that the public confidence in patent medicines and quacks was boundless, as it still is today, but that back then the government did not provide people with protection in spite of themselves.
Just before the year 1800 it was discovered that if you were given a small amount of smallpox material then you would suffer just a mild case and then become immune to its future infections. Some families decided that the benefits outweighed the risks and had every member of the house given such an inoculation at the same time. A "smallpox" sign would be then posted on the house and each day for the next two weeks supplies would be left at an agreed upon place as the house was shut off from the rest of the world. Since one or more members of the family would sometimes die in this attempt to keep everyone in the family free of smallpox, it was a tough decision for two parents to make. Edward Jensen perfected his smallpox vaccination in 1820. Finally in the 1980s, we humans made a concerted effort to remove smallpox from the entire planet. For the history of smallpox, visit www.mayoclinic.com/health/smallpox/DS00424/DSECTION=7&.(One goal of this book is for the overall flow of civilization to become more visible, enabling us to choose more meaningful goals for our combined futures, such as the removal of disease. Which of today’s efforts do you feel are the most meaningful? Do you feel we are wasting our efforts in any way? Are there any actions today which benefit a few of us at the expense of the rest of us?)
During your illness, a person from your family or a neighbor would stay up all night watching over you. Many persons spent several days per year doing this. (Today it is the hospital staff that sees to us.) One woman said that during a four-month period she had watched over a friend, another friend's child, and a cousin. If strangers took ill while passing through town, they too would be put up and watched over.
When a person died, Rosemary leaves were spread around to “ward off any danger from the corpse” and all pictures and mirrors were covered with white cloths. The family and the neighborhood mourned together. The town's bell ringer would ring three times for a child, six for a woman, and nine for a man and then ring as many times as the age of the deceased. This told everyone who it was so that they could head for that person's home.
The funeral involved heavy drinking and maybe a musket volley (remember the Kalapalo arrows). Mourners at the funeral did not wear black but the coffin might be painted black. (In the 1600s, the English colonists did not use coffins but instead wrapped the dead in cloth.) For the six to twenty-four months that followed the death of her husband, a widow often wore black clothes. Around the year 1830, people stopped having the neighborhood-wide funeral supper. Funerals began to be attended by just the immediate family and friends, and elaborate sermons and services came to replace the community gathering.
Our average height is a measure of the nutritional levels of our society. In 1780, the average height for free persons in the U.S. was 5'8" (173 cm) and 5'7" (170 cm) for us slaves, while in Europe the average height was 5'5" (165 cm). The abundant land and more-scarce population in the U.S. allowed for more food per person, especially more meat, but there were still years of better and worse harvests and real deprivation for us poorest persons.
Our shorter average life-span in previous centuries was due to the much larger percentage of us who died as infants and children, not to a drastically shorter maximum lifetime. If we managed to survive childhood and also to reach the age of twenty, then we most often lived until we were sixty-five. In the U.S. today this has been stretched to just seventy-two for men and eighty for women. Since our immune system builds through the early years of life as we catch and overcome various viral and bacterial infections, we humans often have fine health between the ages of twenty and sixty, but beyond that age, we are more susceptible to life-threatening illnesses. This is as true today as it was in the distant past. During recent decades, we have learned that simple sanitation, clean water, and basic health care is all that is needed to avoid having our babies die before reaching the age of one. In fact, we will see in Chapter 22 that a nation's infant mortality rate today is a measure of its ability to put basic health knowledge into practice and that a poor rate is easily improved by implementing a simple, national strategy. In all previous ages, our life could be cut short at any moment due to the infection of a simple cut, but we now use antibiotics to avoid such an unnecessarily shortened life. (It typically costs me $100 to obtain antibiotics, including $70 for the visit to the doctor's office and $30 for the medicine itself.) In recent decades, our increased understanding of basic health and sanitation has enabled most of us to survive childhood and live through a few adult illnesses. And at the age of sixty or seventy, instead of dying from a previously-fatal illness, many of us undergo a medical procedure (typically costing $50,000 in the U.S.) that allows us to live another decade or two. Ten years after the first such procedure, we often undergo another. If we live to be sixty-five in the U.S. today then we usually live until we are eighty-five.
This means that our science, technology, and Industrial Revolution have recently given us something more than a few utensils and decorations for our homes in exchange for our decreased community ties and our lifetime of less self-determined, wage-earning and wage-depending lives. With each passing year we are becoming better-able to avoid unnecessarily shortened lives. We have built our civilization as a tool to better-enable us to live. Unshortened lives and the mutual health of ourselves and our children are meaningful goals for our mutual civilization–imperial invasions are not. Today, health care is a mutually beneficial way in which we are exchanging help within our society.
Only life matters, not the number of utensils and decorations found in our homes. This means that our civilization–which consists of the combined efforts of individuals at home, in government, and in business–should arrange that health care is available to every person in the world so that fewer of us are robbed of our full life. In many nations today, health care is simply another department of the government's protections, as are the police and fire departments, so that every citizen has access to an unnecessarily shortened life. Life is a precious gift for each of us. Equally. (You might like to let your government know the budget portions or amounts you feel should be spent on health care, education, and the military and such.)
Health care is a new and meaningful development in the flow of civilization. (Keep in mind also that for a few million years we have been naturally recovering from nearly every ailment–except for about one per person per lifetime–simply because of the workings of our immune system and that for the last 50,000 years, our immune system has been the secret to the success of the shaman.) Health care first became successful around the year 1940, beginning with antibiotics and penicillin for simple ailments and anesthetics for surgery. Rather than a sick person paying a shaman for help or a birthing couple paying for the aid of a midwife, the entire populace now puts its health-care money into one large pot from which subsists our medical industry. But this allows the price of a single surgery to be greatly increased as its cost is shared by many persons not having surgery.
During the last few decades in the U.S., there has been a continued search to find how much we can be made to pay to avoid an unnecessarily shortened life. The current results of this on-going hunt is seen as a typical sixty-year-old person receives $50,000 worth of life-saving surgery in a single hospital visit. As a result, in the U.S. today we have “the best health-care that a person can buy with a lifetime's savings.” Surgery typically costs ten times more in the U.S. than it does in Thailand where the same tools and techniques are used, see www.bangkokhospital.com. (By the way, half the medical doctors practicing in the U.S. received their training abroad.) Compared to a citizen of Europe, each U.S. citizen pays twice as much each year on health care, see http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/indic/indic_52_1_1.html. The health-care portion of the U.S. family budget has increased from 2% to 20% during the last few decades. This means that today, health-care accounts for 20% of the economy. Our government accounts for another 30% (half of which is spent on the military) so that together, health-care and the government along with its military account for half the transactions in the U.S. while everything else accounts for the remaining half.
An unnecessarily shortened life is not meant to be a luxury for just the richest of us or for those of us who can be made to pay the highest price that can be desired by those of us who operate our health industry. Are we not all equal? Do some of us deserve to live longer than others? Do some of us deserve to die at age sixty because our family cannot afford the needed surgery? Do some of us deserve to die as a child because our family cannot afford simple antibiotics? What would that child's contributions to society have been? What is the purpose of our mutual society? We may already have learned that our health industry is no place for profit-based business. Should our health-care system be run as a profit-generating industry? Those of us who live for profit believe that nothing can be done without an unrestrained profit motive. Do military generals have a profit motive? Do our fire and police departments operate through a profit motive? Should government or business run our health care industry? We have seen that our government sometimes operates inefficiently and that our business operators sometimes take billion-dollar salaries to administer large enterprises. As our health-care system takes in money, what portions of this income is being spent on equipment, buildings, laundry, research, administrators, doctors, nurses, staff, legal fees, corporate officers, advertising, and shareholder distributions and such? Should the people of a nation strive for a health-care system that minimizes costs, maximizes lifetimes, or maximizes profits? Which persons within our society should make such an important decision? The answer of course is all of us.
We are currently deciding how to arrange for the health care of the people of each nation. It may be that individuals will use their wages to purchase health care as it is needed or health-care payments might instead be made through the indirect wages that are taxation followed by governmental redistribution or instead, it might be paid by some combination of the two. Instead of paying a fee directly to our doctors, in the U.S. we pay a larger fee to our health insurance companies who in turn pay the doctors. The money that pays for health-care will come from all of us no matter how we distribute the fees. Life is not meant only for those of us who are wealthy enough to pay medical fees. Having a full life is not contingent upon a sufficient monetary fee unless you feel that money is the meaning of life. If we have the know-how and technology to live a long and healthy life then it is the highest human sin to withhold access to this knowledge and technology from any of us, for any reason.
Colonial crafts, technology, and industry were brought by European immigrants and evolved from the techniques of the first cities of Mesopotamia
Humans have solved every problem that has come their way, but solutions are typically found after some fumbling in the dark. Notice also that a solution never precedes the problem and that problems evolve with each generation. (We sometimes have trouble understanding that a group of people will not solve a problem before it has come their way.) The techniques of our ancestors show that they were very clever in solving the problems of their generation. Humans are clever creatures, but keep in mind that our technology and civilization have been built using our animal mind that is not too different from those of our animal cousins. The techniques and procedures of our civilization–built with the mind of a parenting and social gatherer-hunter–are the combined sum of the solutions obtained by all of the persons throughout the planet and throughout all previous generations. Once a technique or procedure has been developed, it is quickly adopted by every group of people currently experiencing a need for that solution. This is illustrated by Ralph Linton's description of the global diffusion of techniques and inventions, which was quoted in Chapter 9. Our solutions are continually refined through time by the contributions made by all of us. (For the history of technology, you might like to visit some of the links found at http://shot.press.jhu.edu/Reference/links.htm.)
The following details of colonial crafts and industry are taken from the book by Tunis. You might enjoy reading each of his books about colonial and frontier living. The dates and descriptions of the ancient origins of techniques are given by Frances and Joseph Gies in Cathedral, forge, and waterwheel and from other books cited in Chapters 1and 12. In the following pages, we'll look at a few aspects of colonial technology and have a glimpse of their more ancient origins. For example, we were making baskets and boats when we were still gatherer-hunters, before the time of the first farming villages. We have been making wooden furniture since the time of our first permanent houses–much furniture has been found in Ancient Egyptian tombs. During the early years of the U.S., whenever a basket became worn out, someone in the family simply gathered some material to make another. Until the last century, basketmaking techniques had been passed from parent to offspring for thousands of years. Shipmaking was done in ancient times and evolved from prehistoric experience. In prehistoric times, bands of humans migrated by boat to Australia and even to the most remote islands of the oceans.
The forested colonies built many ships for European merchants and navies, including the new style of fast moving clippers that could outrun pirates but carried less cargo than did the older design. In 1774, one-third of England's merchant ships were made in the colonies. Shipmaking combined a wide range of crafts and specialists, including ropemakers, sailmakers–who made hemp or linen sails–and the craftspeople who made the brass ornamentation. Carpenters used their eye and experience–and some steam–to bend wood, as a ship has few straight boards. They also searched the forest for naturally shaped pieces of wood that could be cut from, for example, the area of a limb branching from its trunk. They also selected those pieces of wood having the appropriate grain direction for specific boat parts so that the piece would best bear its expected load. Blacksmiths made iron blocks, pulleys, anchors, chain, rudder pieces, cannon, and the iron bands that were wrapped around masts. By custom, the oldest sailor would christen a newly finished ship.
Since the time of the first humans, we have been using animal parts to make tools. During colonial times, horn and turtle shell was used for many purposes. For example, we have all seen pictures of people carrying their gunpowder in a horn (made from bull's horn.) For most uses, the end of the horn was cut off and the remainder boiled, slit lengthwise, heated, and pressed flat in a screw press. Turtle shells were similarly prepared. Horn or turtle was used for combs, lens holders, and snuff box tops and such. Scraps might be made into buttons. A thin slice of horn was somewhat transparent and so was used in a lanthorn, which is a lantern with windows of horn rather than glass.
We saw that Ancient Mesopotamian farmers took their grain to thrashers who kept a portion for their service. Grinding grain into flour using mortar and pestle, was a daily chore for each family. Rather than personally grinding meal-sized amounts of grain with mortar and pestle, pairs of large, horizontal stones began to be used to grind continuous amounts of grain. The upper stone of the pair was rotated on top of the lower, stationary stone. Grain was poured through a hole in the center of the upper stone and then moved radially outward as it was crushed between the moving stones. The resulting flour emerged from the outer edges of the stones.
The Gies explain that the horizontal waterwheel was probably invented in Armenia around the year 200 bc. At that time, the Chinese began using water power to rotate the upper grinding stone, while the Romans began using animals for this purpose. Waterwheels east of Persia were typically horizontal but were vertical west of Persia. Persians invented a horizontal windmill in the seventh century ad. The use of vertical windmills had made its way to Europe in the twelfth century ad. Since the wind was caught edge-on, in pinwheel fashion, the entire building or at least its roof frequently had to be turned towards the wind. For schematics of windmills, visit http://webserv.nhl.nl/~smits/windmill.htm.
In an overshot waterwheel, water fills buckets at the top of a vertical, rotating wheel so that the weight of the water forces the wheel to rotate as the water falls. Water is collected behind the closed gate of a stream dam during the night and then allowed to flow over the wheel during the day. Overshot waterwheels were more expensive to build than were undershot wheels, in which water current strikes the bottom of a vertical, rotating paddlewheel forcing it to spin. The paddles partially dip into the water as the wheel spins. The paddled wheel could also be oriented horizontally. In the heavily forested colonies, wheels and their gears were nearly always made from wood rather than metal. The Gies show that an overshot waterwheel produces eighty to one-hundred-twenty times the power of an animal-turned mill and ten to twenty times the power of an undershot wheel. You can see animations of various water wheels and mills at the Old Sturbridge Village website at www.osv.org (click education, for teachers, classroom materials, and then mills and waterpower). You can also go directly to http://www.osv.org/education/WaterPower.
In the year 1000 ad, England had only about 100 mills, but the Doomsday book lists 5,624 mills in the year 1086 ad–not quite a century later. Georges Duby has calculated that this amounts to one mill for every forty-six peasant households and shows that the peasant diet was switching from boiled, un-ground porridge to baked bread. A person can live off two or three pounds or one kilogram of bread per day. (About three kilograms or 6.5 pounds of potatoes have to be eaten per day to get sufficient nutrients to remain alive.)
Medieval peasants took their grain to the miller who ground it while the peasant waited. The miller then gave back their grain in the form of flour–minus the portion that was the miller's fee. That is, each peasant took home the same grain he or she had brought, only it was now in the form of flour. We saw that medieval lords were requiring each unfree peasant family to take their harvested grain to the manor’s grinding mill where about one-thirteenth of the grain was taken as a fee for its use. This made some peasants mad enough to return to eating boiled porridge rather than baked bread. Peasants did not like to have to haul their grain to the mill, nor to stand in line waiting for their turn to have their grain ground into flour. Landlords allowed free tenants to pay a fee to skip to the front of the line, which predictably angered us peasants. In addition, free tenants paid just one-twenty-fourth of their grain. Tunis says that since the time of Chaucer, millers had a bad reputation because some would make a secret hole to catch extra flour for themselves.
In eighteenth-century New England, some mill owners began buying grain from farmers and selling previously sacked flour. In this case, farmers did not go home with the same grain they had brought. There were no lords in the colonies but farmers still showed the same sort of impatience toward anyone trying to skip to the front of the line. The miller's share was now regulated by law and fines were paid to the offended person when a miller was caught cheating. Milling stones began to have both large and small holes to allow both coarse and fine flour to be ground. Some persons traveled the country working as mill-stone sharpeners.
Our civilization has always needed power to operate its tools. Our own muscles provided that power until we began inventing pulleys and levers. Mills came much later. We will see below that around the year 1850, steam engines quickly replaced water and wind powered mills. Today's factories use electric motors that obtain their power from distant, electrical power generating plants. These plants burn coal or gas to spin electromagnetic generators. Nuclear powered electrical generating plants were developed in the 1950s. There is much debate today about our current and future sources of energy.
Bread making is as old as the first farmers. We saw that much of an ancient Mesopotamian family's day was spent preparing bread. Tunis says that Medieval bakers cheated so regularly that London bakers came to be required to give the "baker's dozen" of thirteen rolls to assure customers of their money's worth. New Amsterdam (later renamed to New York City) had a bake shop by 1648. A mayor's monthly duties might include weighing each baker's bread loaves, which were required to be eight pounds (3.5 kg). Today, bread is made in large factories and shipped for hundreds of miles to supermarkets. A loaf no longer weighs eight pounds.
Eighteenth-century bakers began work way before dawn and worked half-dressed because of the intense heat of the ovens. The baker kneaded two hundred pounds (100 kg) of dough with strong hands, cut loaf-sized pieces to rise, and placed them into the oven. To picture the oven, imagine two fireplaces, one above the other, with wood burning in the lower fireplace heating dough placed in the space within the upper fireplace, which held no wood. The slow rate of cooking resulted in a thicker crust then we usually see today. Bakers kept their supply of yeast alive indefinitely by feeding it a paste of flour and mashed potatoes each night.
The colonial baker usually obtained flour from the miller, but people sometimes brought in dough that they had prepared at home to have it baked by the baker; they might initial their dough to be assured they got back that which they had brought. A customer might choose to bring cloth in which to wrap bread carried home from the baker. (Today, we take our grocery sacks for granted.) Bakers did not make pies; they were made by the pie maker, who made little else. To set the curls of a wig, sometimes a wigmaker brought a wig to be baked in the baker's oven. Visit www.history.org/Almanack/life/trades/tradewig.cfm for photos and information about the wigmaker.
From the city’s best smelling shops we turn to the worst smelling shops, the tanners. Most every colonial village was within smelling range of a tannery–and dreaded the days that the wind blew straight from the tannery. We saw that Ancient Mesopotamian cities were divided into zones to keep such industrial districts away from residential areas. The procedures used to tan hides have come down to us from our gatherer-hunter ancestors, who were learning to make clothing and such from animal hides. In fact, this knowledge allowed us humans to spread from the warm equatorial regions of the Earth toward its frosty poles. Since ancient times, tanning involved soaking animal skins in the sorts of chemicals readily available, including tan bark from oak trees, animal dung, salt, lime, water, and alum. Cow, ox, horse, buffalo, and moose hides were tanned while the thinner skins of calf, sheep, pig, deer, and goat were tawed. The tanned or tawed hides or skins were kept in a pit for a year and then dried and beaten to make them softer. Only in the last few decades has our understanding of chemistry resulted in any significant change in the tanning process.
For thousands of years, leather has been our multi-purpose material. Some leather items made in the English colonies include shoes, boots, breeches, book covers, gloves, drumheads, sieves, saddles, animal harnesses, and the protective aprons of the metalsmith along with their bellows. Carriage tops and their curtains were made of leather and the body of a carriage was suspended from stretched leather strips to provide some cushion against the bumps. (Visit www.history.org/Almanack/life/trades/tradewhe.cfm for more information about making wheels for carriages, wagons, and riding chairs.) In the last few decades, rubber and plastic have been added to our list of multi-purpose materials.
A New England farming family might try themselves to tan the hide of its dead cow or instead choose to take the hide to an expert tanner who would do a better job. The tanner returned the tanned hide to the family who brought it but kept half in payment for the service. The tanner also kept the hair, which was sold to plasterers to hold their lime mortar together, and the offal, which was sold to peddlers who sold it to gluemakers. The family might next take their tanned hide to a shoemaker, who would use that specific piece of hide to make shoes for that customer. Eventually, the shoemaker began selling previously-made shoes for less money than charged for making shoes from hide brought by a customer. For photos and information about shoemaking, visit www.history.org/Almanack/life/trades/tradesho.cfm.
The shoemaker was called a cordwainer, see www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/lalonde/SCA/shoe.html, until about the year 1700. (These unrecognizable words show that such occupations are older than our modern language, just as we saw that some Kalapalo ceremonies contained words so old that their meaning had been forgotten.) The shoemaker made holes to attach buckles but did not attach any; instead, the purchaser would attach their own buckles. Shoe and boot soles were made from the thick hide that occurs near an animal's backbone. Thinner, belly hide is used for shoe uppers. It is tanned by being placed in hen dung for just a week. The so-called "cat whipper" was a shoe repairer who traveled from farm to farm. Tunis says that the family might have the cat whipper use tanned hide from their own cow to repair any of their shoes that "still had wear in them." Similarly, the traveling tinker repaired spoons, dipper handles, basins, and pewter plates and bowls.
We saw that five thousand years ago, Ancient Mesopotamians were herding sheep and making cloth and clothing from the fleece of sheep. The removed fleece was cleaned and then combed to remove tangles and impurities and to get the fibers to form parallel rows. Yarn is then spun by twisting fibers between one's fingers and thumb, into an increasingly longer thread. This was done entirely by hand until the invention of the spinning wheel. The Gies state that the first illustration of a spinning wheel is from Baghdad in the year 1237 ad. Yarn is then wove into cloth on looms and dyed with those organic materials found to produce fashionable colors. The colonials found that logwood made a brownish red color, peachwood or brazilwood made a red and purple color, black oak bark made yellow, and blue was obtained from indigo. The fuller then cleaned the woven, woolen cloth of grease by rubbing clay into the cloth and then washing away the clay as it held onto the grease. The fuller also compacted the fibers, raised the nap, and then cut away any unevenly raised nap with long scissors. The cloth was taken to the tailor to be made into clothing. The Gies explain that silk was made into cloth in China as early as 3000 bc. Japan and India first learned the Chinese secret and then Alexander the Great took it back to Greece from India. Arabs first took cotton cloth to Spain in the tenth century ad.
The entire cloth making process is ancient. Hodges shows pictures of Mesopotamian and Egyptian looms from before 3000 bc and one from Ancient Greece around the year 600 bc. Looms were incrementally improved every century or so; the improvements would slowly bounce back and forth between lands as distant as China and Europe with transmission through India and the Islamic equator. We saw in Chapter 14 that the first factories of our Industrial Revolution developed as cloth merchants acquired the looms of the weavers and brought them into a central shop. Looms have been used in every city, on every continent. Today's mechanized looms are not too different from ancient designs.
Tunis says that colonialist John Pierson employed twenty Yorkshire families in cloth making. Pierson setup his shop in Rowley, Massachusetts in 1683. Tunis also describes the clever manner in which the movement of loom parts were planned to produce a final pattern. In England in 1776, James Hargreave (who did not have a daughter named Jenny) made his "spinning Jenny" which simultaneously spun cotton from eight spindles. (For a photo of a Spinning Jenny, see www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=5679.) Yarn was woven by hand until Edmund Cartwright patented a power loom in 1785, which began to be used in the English factories. We'll learn more below about the early water powered cloth mills built in Lowell Massachusetts in the 1820s. (Chapter 18 contains a short description of today's global cloth industry.)
Patterns were being printed on cotton cloth in India before the year 1600 ad. Adventurers took some back to England where other types of cloth began to be printed. The cloth was covered with an unconnected repetition of a single picture, which was applied with a dye-covered woodcut block. This block had been gouged away everywhere except where the lines of the pattern existed, leaving them as one-eighth inch (3 mm) high ridges. These ridges imprinted the pattern of dye onto the material. Typically, flowered patterns were printed.
This technique was used to print both cloth and wallpaper. In France in the early 1700s, Jean Papillon made the first repeating block pattern and this lead to the use of continuous rolls of wallpaper. The first continuous wallpaper arrived in the colonies from England in 1730. After 1750, it was also bought from China. The oldest known colonial-made wallpaper was printed in 1794 by William Poyntell, who advertised that it was cheaper than whitewashing and hid dirt and fly specks.
Tunis tells how Ben Franklin convinced the cloth printer John Hewson to emigrate from England to the U.S. Hewson illegally took his cloth printing knowledge out of England, which was trying to protect its monopoly on these techniques. England put a high price on Hewson's head when he fought in the Revolution. George and Martha Washington wore some of his gown patterns.
While cloth is woven, felt is made by boiling and beating fibers into a matted form. Felt hats were popular. Britain tried to limit hatmaking in its colonies by restricting the number of apprentices each hatmaker could train. Still, in 1732 Boston and New York each produced ten thousand hats. By 1774 there were forty-three hat makers in Philadelphia. Felt hats were made from sheep's wool; later, they were also made from imported llama wool. Fur hats were usually made from beaver, which almost drove them to extinction, but cheaper versions were made from otter, seal, muskrat, or rabbit. Since the fashionably curled edges of a felt hat will unravel in a hard rain, many hat makers were kept busy re-blocking hats. A person who could not afford this service instead wore flat brims.
Mining, ore processing, and blacksmithing
We have seen that people were using gold, copper, and silver about 10,000 years ago. At first, these metals could be found right on the ground but mines were soon dug to obtain more of these metals. Archaeologists have found some ancient mines which were dug using deer antlers and such as tools. Gold nuggets were often found in streams. Hodges says that around 3,000 bc in Mesopotamia, after much trial and error experimentation, it was found that mixing a little tin with copper made bronze. Bronze is much harder than pure copper and is easier to cast due to its lowered melting point. By 2,000 bc, there are records of goat-skin bellows being used to raise the temperature of a fire by blowing air into it. The bellows replaced the smaller blow pipe previously used and allowed larger objects to be cast.
On the ground, metals are found mixed with many other chemicals in a conglomeration called ore. The metal is separated from the ore by melting the mixture in an oven. Much copper ore was unusable because the sulfur it contained released gas upon heating and made the resulting metal porous. The Mesopotamians found that the sulfur gases were eliminated from ore by roasting before being melted. This made copper ores more often usable and resulted in a more-pure metal.
Precise amounts of pure tin could be mixed with pure copper to create bronze with specific properties. For example, high tin content was used to make mirrors and other objects needing relatively little hardness. Tools and weapons were made from a mixture of 8% tin with 92% copper. Less tin made bronze more easily hammered, as is needed in applications where the bronze can not be annealed–for example, in attaching bronze knives to bone handles. Bronze tools then replaced the stone tools our ancestors had been using for a few million years.
Iron ore can be found in most every region of the Earth, but it is much more difficult to work than is copper or gold. In addition, iron melts at a higher temperature than does copper; this higher temperature was first obtained in a furnace about 2,000 bc. The use of iron was less widespread because the processes needed to get it into useful form are very different from those producing useable copper or gold. Since it took several centuries of effort to find these processes, iron did not become widely used, except for weapons, until about 1000 bc. The Hittites were the first people to regularly use iron.
When iron is separated from ore, it is a hard but spongy mass. Iron has to be hammered while red hot to be forged into a solid bar. Since it quickly cools while being hammered it has to be repeatedly reheated. Two pieces of iron can be joined only by hammering them together while they are red hot. This requires tongs to hold the hot metal, a heavy hammer made of iron, and an anvil–none of which are needed to work copper or gold
The Gies describe ironworking in the Medieval ages. During the tenth and eleventh centuries ad, craftspeople in Milan, Italy were making much of the metal tools used throughout Europe, including swords, helmets, and chain mail. Silver was mined in Saxony, tin in Cornwall, and iron in the Carpathians and Balkans. At this time, Northern Europe's sole source of iron consisted of pieces of metal gathered from bogs.
Tunis gives the following description of colonial ironworking at the Hopewell furnace near Reading, Pennsylvania in the year 1770. (For the Saugus Iron Works National Park, visit www.nps.gov/sair.) The workers and their families lived on the premises at the Hopewell furnace. The management, who lived in the "big house," operated a store, school, and a blacksmith shop in Hopewell. The furnace was large enough to hold four tons (2,000 kg) of ore, flux, and charcoal. It had to be egg-shaped to support the weight of these materials, which were dropped in from an embankment built next to the top of the furnace. Every furnace through history had to be located near its source of ore and its source of fuel because the furnace consumed forests by the square mile (2.5 square km) to supply the energy needed to melt and purify the ore. The process also required flux in the form of limestone or oyster shells. By weight, three parts of flux were needed for every five parts of ore.
Furnaces removed more Virginia trees than did farmers, tanbark grinders, or lumber mills. Trees were cut down and made into charcoal to power the furnace. To make charcoal, cut lumber was stacked into a dome shape, about thirty feet (ten meters) across and nine feet (three meters) high. The dome had many air inlet tubes which were opened and closed to allow the right amount of air into the stack to keep it burning slowly for about two weeks so that the lumber turned into charcoal. The workers got little sleep while monitoring the burning dome of wood. The resulting charcoal was used in the furnace to melt ore. The wood used by the Hopewell furnace in one year could be stacked four feet (1.3 meters) high and 7.5 miles (12 km) in length.
Two large bellows were used to blow air into the furnace through a nozzle, whose tapered shape increased the speed of that air. The bellows were operated by a waterwheel which drove shafts, connecting rods, pistons, and air intake and exhaust valves. (Later, these mechanical devices went right into use inside automobile engines, which are miniature furnaces.) As air was exhausted from one bellow into the furnace, air was being pulled into the other bellow. This resulted in a more continual flow of air into the furnace.
The fire burned in the furnace for thirty to forty weeks while components were continually added to the top and molten iron was removed from the bottom.. Slag, which is the lighter debris that floats to the top of the molten conglomeration, was skimmed off the top every hour. Twice a day, a stopper was removed from the bottom of the furnace to let molten iron flow out. This was low quality "pig iron" and was sold to be refined into a more pure form–wrought iron–by further heating and pounding.
The molten pig iron flowed out of the bottom of the furnace and into a series of branching trenches. The main trenches lead to a few molds forming 60 pound (130 kg) "pigs." Other trenches lead to smaller, potter-made molds to form iron cooking pots and pans and such–despite being forbidden by British law–and backplates for fireplaces. A backplate is placed at the back of fireplace, behind the fire. It protects the bricks and also radiates heat into the room containing the fireplace. The pieces for those revolutionary iron cooking stoves were made this way, as were the later steam engine parts. In a few pages, we will see how the scale of the iron-making process was increased as the Industrial Revolution matured and large corporations developed.
Wrought iron was formed into standard sized bars that were bought by the blacksmith. The blacksmith often bought bars 3 by 1.5 inches (7.5 by 4 cm) and eight feet (three meters) in length. Thin bars, 1/8 by 1/4 inches (0.3 by .1 cm) and five feet (150 cm) long, might next be cut into nails, while larger bars might be made into "wrought iron" gates and certain ornamental items, including chandeliers, candle holders for home and street lighting, weather vanes, sign holders, and some locks and lock boxes. These items might also be made of brass, copper, or silver. Each nail was individually formed by cutting and then forming a head and pointed end–so its not such a surprise that wooden joints and wooden nails were more common than were metal nails. Some people bought the metal rods to make their own nails. Nails sizes were "six penny" and "eight penny" and such, which meant the price per hundred. We still use these terms today.
Gunsmiths used iron to make rifles, see www.history.org/foundation/journal/Autumn00/gunsmith.cfm. Every colonist had a flintlock rifle and used it to kill game. These rifles could not shoot accurately for much of any distance but could effectively propel shot to kill birds. The Kentucky long rifle, invented in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, could shoot accurately for two hundred yards (meters).
The blacksmith was called a "smithy" rather than a "blacksmith." For photos and more information, visit www.history.org/Almanack/life/trades/tradebla.cfm. Smithys made shoes for horses and oxen, did animal doctoring, made tools, implements, hardware, cooking-pot hooks, waffle irons, stew pots, dippers, strainers, toasters, hinges, latches, and tongs. The smith made a few of these items to have in stock but most were made as bespoke work. Tunis points out that before our Industrial Revolution, no factory was making these items in quantity: they were being made one at a time, when requested, in a hand made world. Nor did there exist separate showrooms containing ready-to-buy products.
Lead, tin, pewter, copper, brass and silver working
The plumber worked with lead to make pipes and musket balls and such. To make shot, molten lead was poured into a copper pan that had holes in its bottom. As the lead dripped out it naturally formed spherically shaped balls. As these balls fell to the ground they cooled off enough to become solid before landing in a bucket of water. Larger spheres require more time to cool and so were dropped from a higher point. Shot towers were built as high as 200 feet (65 meters) for this purpose. Such a tower might be only ten feet (3 meters) in diameter. The cooling lead spheres were dropped from a platform and fell on the inside of the tower. To separate the non-round spheres, which would not shoot straight, the shot was allowed to roll down a plank; round shot rolled straight down to the bottom while non-round objects rolled off the side and were later re-melted.
The tinsmith, who was called a whitesmith, bought squares of tin plated iron sheets from Europe. (The tin coating helps prevents rusting.) No tin was made in the U.S. until 1830. Many everyday utensils were made from tin because of it low cost. The tinsmith formed sheets into boxes, cylinders, and cones and then combined combinations of these shapes to make dippers, pails, cups, and candle holders. The walls of a tin lantern had many holes to let light out. Since those holes also happened to protect the candle from the wind, a person could see their way to the outhouse during a dark and windy night.
Pewter is mostly tin. It is easily bent, stretched, or compressed and its low melting point makes it easily poured into molds. Unlike iron, hammering doesn't harden pewter, and pewter is too soft to retain detailed impressions, as does silver, so objects made with it are left smooth and undecorated. Pewter is too soft to make knives and forks but makes fine spoons, plates, bowls, teapots, pitchers, buckles, tankards, lamps, and buttons. Tunis says that before there were plastic baby bottles having rubber nipples, pewter bottles with pewter nipples were used. Pewter has been used in China for 2,000 years, and in they year 1348 ad, English pewterers organized a guild.
During the years 1720 through 1767, the value of pewter imported to the colonies exceeded the combined total of silver, tinware, and furniture. (Visit www.history.org/Foundation/journal/Winter03-04/foundry.cfm for the article Cast in the Colonial Mold about molding pewter, brass, and bronze.) Pewter items were repeatedly melted and recast. For example, a family could take three pewter spoons to a pewterer and get two back that were either in better condition or in better fashion. Pewter was cast in wood, copper, or brass molds that were obtained from a mold maker. A newly opened pewterer might have just three molds and be able to cast only spoons, bowls, or plates, but an older pewterer would have many molds. If one family in a village had a spoon- or button-mold then soon every other family in the area had identical spoons and buttons.
We saw above how iron is ore is mined and processed. Copper was similarly mined and smelted and formed into large sheets weighing 1200 pounds (2600 kg) that were five by seven feet (1.6 x 2.3 meters) and one inch (2.5 cm) thick. These sheets might next be mixed with zinc to make brass or hammered into thinner sheets. A large hammer would be raised on an egg-shaped camshaft that was driven by a waterwheel and then the hammer was allowed to fall with a "thwak" under its own weight onto the sheet.
A colonial coppersmith purchased these sheets and used shears six-feet (two meters) in length to cut it into smaller pieces. Copper objects were not cast, instead tools were used to bend, pound, mark, and cut copper sheets into funnels, and tea pots, and such. Large copper pails and pots were made for dyers, fullers, hornsmiths, hatmakers, distillery stills, and steam engine boilers. Some pots and pans were copper but most were iron; however, a copper tea kettle was considered more attractive than one made of iron. A copper spout was made by soldering a flat, pattern sheet into a tube and then temporarily filling it with lead so that it could be bent into shape without crumpling. The lead was then removed by heating. Poisonous accumulations were always covered by tinning the inside of a tea kettle or of any other side of a copper item that would touch food.
Brass was not made in the colonies. Colonial brassworkers bought ingots made in Europe and then cast buttons, candlestick holders, turncocks, valves, navigational instruments, and bells. (The article Brass Founder at www.history.org/Almanack/life/trades/tradefou.cfm describes the sand-casting of brass.) A large bell was cast by making clay models of its interior and exterior, aligning these two opposing pieces in a pit, and then filling the space between them with molten copper. Tunis mentions that Adam Smith discussed the twenty-five steps needed to make a brass pin in his book The Wealth of Nations.
A silver item can either be cast or made from sheets. A pot, pitcher, or bowl would be made from sheets while their handles and feet would be cast as solid pieces. The soldered seams of the sheets would become nearly invisible in the final item. A burin might be used to engrave lines onto the silver object by gouging out some of the metal. Other times, the object was temporarily filled with pitch and then the engravings were hammered onto its surface. A line was formed by a series of hammer strikes.
Between the years 1634 and 1776, there were 500 silversmiths in the colonies. Silversmiths, see www.history.org/Almanack/life/trades/tradesil.cfm, melted the customer's silver coins and out-of-fashion utensils to make another item for them. (Just as in clothing, it took several years for the latest European silver fashions to reach the colonies.) In 1697, Queen Anne tried to discourage coin melting by making them with highly pure silver that was so hard it held less-sharp engraving. English silversmiths countered this by either using less engraving or by diluting the silver with an impurity. Since Spanish coins were the most common currency found in the colonies, Queen Ann’s change had less effect on colonial smiths.
Faience was made before 4000 bc by Ancient Mesopotamians in an attempt to duplicate natural and expensive lapis lazuli stone. Hodges says the first step toward making true glass occurred when faience was accidentally melted. Today's glass is a similar fusion of quartz, soda, and lime. At first, the Mesopotamians were using abrasives to cut and polish the finished product, just as they worked hard stone, but it was later found that the material was more easily molded while it was hot. For more information about glassmaking, visit www.fsus.fsu.edu/SchoolInformation/SchoolRelations/Partnerships/Exhibitions/trialbyfire/main.asp. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass. By 2000 bc, glassworking techniques had improved in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Many colors were being created, and after 1500 bc, lead was being added to make the resulting glass more shiny and to keep it from contracting while cooling. Lead had been considered a waste product of copper smelting since 3000 bc because it was too soft to be used in tools, but now it was finding other uses.
Hodges says the techniques of glassblowing could not be developed until iron technology had advanced enough to make blowtubes. This occurred in Syria during the first century ad and was then spread by the Romans. (Hodges also says that the rate of Roman technological innovation decreased when they came to rely on the labor of slaves rather than their own cleverness.) The Gies explain that the secrets of Syrian glassblowing were taken to Venice in 1277 ad and that Muslim artisans taught the techniques to the Venetians who then built a European monopoly in fine glass manufacturing. Stained glass windows began being used in European churches in the seventh century ad.
Colonial glassmaking was largely begun by Jan Smedes, who transplanted a Dutch glassworks to New Amsterdam in 1654, and by the Bavarian Casper Wister, who built a New Jersey plant in 1737 employing experts from Rotterdam. Glassmaking secrets were being guarded, just as every factory today keeps its techniques secret. Wister also made window glass. Tunis says that a colonial home might remove and store these valuable panes before going on a long journey.
Glass "bends" light and so came to be used to make lenses. (We saw in Chapter 2 that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon and that this "bending" is described by Maxwell's equations.) We saw that the Europeans inherited their knowledge of lenses from the Islamic world–for example, through their use of the Arabic textbook on optics The Optical Thesaurus, written in 1038 ad by Alhazen. Around the year 1300 ad, Roger Bacon first suggested using lenses to aid people's vision. Within a century, it was a common practice. A person simply tried several lenses to find which was most helpful. Tunis says that early eye-lenses were rumored to enable one to see into the future, to make the blind see, and to make illiterate persons literate. After the year 1500, people who were sensitive to light began using Venetian green glass to reduce glare. People who had trouble seeing both nearby and distant objects carried two different lenses until Ben Franklin first made "bifocals" in 1786. Lenses were spherically shaped: convex lenses help one see nearby objects while concave lenses help one see distant objects. In 1825, George Airy found that cylindrically shaped lenses helped those with astigmatism, which is a slightly misshaped eye that sees better vertically than horizontally. During the eighteenth century, lenses were not yet hung from ears and noses as we do today.
Galileo first used a telescope to make observations of the moon and planets in the year 1609 (see Patrick Moore's Watchers of the Sky and http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/observations/jupiter_satellites.html.) He reported that when viewed with his telescope, planets were seen to have the shape of a disk but stars remained point-like. He also said that hundreds of stars could be seen that were invisible to the unaided eye. The material of the Milky Way had been debated since the time of the first humans, but Galileo’s lense enabled him to report that it simply consisted of innumerable stars. He described the craters of the moon and estimated the height of one lunar "mountain," which was actually the side of a crater, to be 20,000 to 25,000 feet (7500 meters). Its true height is 18,000 feet (6000 meters). Galileo also reported that Venus cycles through the same phases as does the moon. His report that four moons were revolving around Jupiter came as a blow to those who thought that the Earth was the center of the Universe in that all the stars and planets revolved around a stationary Earth. The rings of Saturn were barely discernible in these early telescopes, and there were many imaginative explanations of these blurry objects before they were clearly seen to be rings.
Galileo is important in that he was one of the founders of the scientific method. He fully realized the value of making repeatable measurements, as described in Chapter 2. Newton deduced his general motion equation after considering the results of many experiments, such as those made by Galileo involving the motion of objects on inclined planes (for his original texts, see www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/Galileo_Prototype/). Science was really born at that time; before then, we were only intellectualizing–that is, guessing from our arm chairs. Our tool-making arts are much older than our scientific procedure.
We can see that cloth, metal, and glass making techniques were not invented twenty years ago, nor at the start of the Industrial Revolution, but have a history that began with our first farming villages. The techniques of our civilization have been evolving since then. We also see that our homes had few utensils and decorations, and that these were hand made until the mass production techniques of the factory were developed in England around the year 1760 ad.
English mechanics were sought to build the first U.S. factories
In the previous chapter we saw that our Industrial Revolution began in England and consisted of the factory that brought many workers together in a single building. To maintain its advantages, England tried to outlaw the exportation of its new factory machinery, its designs, and even its operators, who were called "mechanics" because they worked with mechanical gears. Customs agents made inspections to monitor who and what was leaving England because other nations were anxious to obtain information about these new techniques.
Only about 150 English machinery builders are known to have managed to emigrate to the U.S. with their knowledge of English mills. Though these persons typically had little experience, they helped build the first factory machinery in the U.S. The designers of machinery in the U.S. could make use of abundant local wood while European designers used more iron due to the lack of local wood. Also, the U.S. labor force of available workers was much smaller than that of England so the U.S. mechanics had to try to design machines that required fewer attending workers.
Debate of benefits and drawbacks of industrialization
Many persons in the U.S. were trying to smuggle machinery secrets from England to the U.S. For example, while ambassador to France in 1787, the future U.S. president Thomas Jefferson was involved in a plot with Tench Coxe to obtain English machinery secrets. Tench Coxe was one of many persons who were advocating the increase of industrialization and its new manufacturing ways in the U.S. They founded many "societies for the advancement of manufacturing and useful arts." They published pamphlets and filled the press with discussions. They also interviewed British immigrants and imported factory machines.
Alexander Hamilton and Tench Coxe argued that industrialization would bring fiscal stability to the new nation, utilize its spare capital, decrease its dependence on foreign goods, and help to build war machines. They said that industry and agriculture would each purchase the other's products. They also said that the factories would provide jobs for women and children, but this was one thing that most other people most wanted to avoid. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson warned that in England, factories resulted in rural depopulation and urban growth, poverty stricken wage-earners, increased inequality of wealth, and increased social tension and uprisings. They asked if we would be better off to stick to our agricultural society. This public discussion was similar to the more recent discussions about the benefits and evils of the computer and the internet. Looking back, which of Franklin and Jefferson's predictions came true? Notice that similar discussions occur in any nation currently debating whether or not to industrialize its economy.
Debate over the role of government in any coming industrialization
During the first decades of the U.S., there was much discussion about whether or not the country should mimic the European kingdoms and become a mercantile nation of state monopolies. In one form this might have meant that the U.S. government would attempt to seek profit from involvement in selected market activities in sorts of "state-owned" enterprises. This question was forgotten only after private parties were seen to be pursuing every opportunity. Licht says that a good description of the U.S. from 1776 to 1820 is that it was shedding its mercantile past. No one knew what industrialization would bring for the U.S. but everyone did know that it would not be built from centralized power, aristocratic privilege, or from government-granted favors for monopolistic licenses.
From the start, the U.S. government was setup to guard against centralized power. While discussing the beginnings of industrialization, no one thought that the U.S. government should dictate the efforts of industry. In the next chapter we will see that by the year 1900, our government would come to be forced to play an increased role in economics–whether it wanted to or not–in response to the growth of our businesses. We will see that industrial companies would grow to be regional in size within a few decades, nationally-sized by the year 1900, and that they have always grown faster than our government has been able to react to govern them. "Big Government" came as a delayed response to the social consequences of our switch from farming to factory work. In Chapter 18 we will see that today, our businesses are global in scope while government is not at all.
Production techniques mixed as industrialization requires power and decades to mature
Licht explains that the process of industrialization in the U.S. occurred in a sporadic manner that required several decades to develop and then spread. It was not the case that the entire nation choose to industrialize and then did it one Tuesday. The nation did industrialize but over several decades, and throughout these decades, handmade items continued to be made in small shops and in home-based shops, too. The nation did urbanize but this happened through the commercialization of everything in a capitalistic manner. Licht says that a better term than "industrialization" is "an expansion of the market to include the buying and selling of everything."
The mechanization of manufacturing resulted in social changes as the factory caused a shift from skilled apprenticeship training to unskilled machinery operators and to the abandonment of live-in helpers. We began to be paid for our labor in cash wages rather than in credit for goods. In addition, the large rate of population growth, which was typically doubled by immigration, promoted unregulated market activity. In turn, the runaway market activity promoted social unrest–as occurred for example, during the labor strikes of the 1880s and 1890s.
After the year 1790, some of our shop-owners were increasingly using water-power (steam-power after 1840) to obtain enough energy to drive the machinery that could increase our production levels. Just as a person today who begins a house-painting company will prefer to use a painting machine to boost production. Think of two shop-owners in 1800 discussing the use of the newfangled water-powered machinery to increase their helper's productivity and think of two shop-owners today discussing the use of the newfangled computer to increase their helper's productivity.
The factories knew only to produce the same items of daily life that we had always been using. National markets emerged for chairs, tables, drawers, pots, hats, brooms, shoes, books, and farm implements. Some factories wove cotton and wool into fabric while others turned chair legs. In recent decades we have taken the average number of washing machines and televisions per home to be a measure of a region's industrial output, but in the early 1800s, output was measured in terms of the average number of factory-made shirts, chairs, brooms, spoons, dishes, and pans per home.
Until steam power became available, factories had to be located in the more-remote places where water power was available. Factory builders could take advantage of water power only if the shop were located by, or moved to, a source of water power such as a river or a waterfall. Wherever a river could supply water power, there would soon be a factory. New England has many year-round streams (as also occurred in England) so that by 1830 there were hundreds of water powered factories along these waterways. This was the beginning of industry in the U.S.
Notice also that the mechanical factory’s dependence on waterways meant that large cities had few water-powered factories. New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia continued instead to have numerous small shops. One of the few, large-scale factories in the cities was William H. Horstmann's label, ribbon, and thread shop which he opened in Philadelphia in 1815. By 1854, he employed four hundred to five hundred persons in a five-story building while the average Philadelphian firm employed just eight persons. Most of the city factories had to wait for steam-power to arrive after 1850 before they could mechanize their operations. Before then, some small shops did use hand- or foot-powered machines.
The first communities of factory workers began to surround these industrial towns, as was the case for Manchester, New Hampshire. There were about four hundred of these small, mill villages in New England by 1820. These villages might contain a store and a few multiple-family homes. Most of these villages would in turn disappear by the end of the 1800s as the steam engine allowed their factories to be moved into larger cities. It also occurred that some mill villages were replaced by coercive, company towns.
The handmade, low volume manufacturing within city shops could not compete with the lowcost, mass production factories. These shops did not try to directly compete with the factories; instead, they made smaller quantities of more customized items. The independent artisans had to work in their shops for longer hours and less money to offer their alternative to the products of the mass-production factories. The factories were not able to quickly modify their machinery to produce small quantities of variations of products. Philadelphia and New York City had numerous small and medium sized shops; they were often located in cellars and attics and made many different products.
Licht explains that industry continued to be a mixture of many small shops and a few larger factories. In fact, the U.S. simultaneously contained every sort of economic activity known to us humans, including gathering and hunting, subsistence farming, tenant farming, commercial agriculture, fishing, lumbering, mining, crafting, slavery, wage-labor, apprentice labor, home production by the family, and bartering of goods and services.
No employees exist for the first factories
It is surprising that the earliest U.S. factories had trouble finding employees, but this happened because most everyone already had a job on the family farm. (Since most everyone today hires themselves out for wage-labor to a business, it is hard to imagine a time when practically no one was doing this.) The shop-owner-turned-mechanized-factory-operator tried many different ways to obtain workers. In the first few decades, women and children were often hired to do most of the work in a factory. Some operators hired entire families of the poorest of us who lived nearby and expected parents to keep their children working at the machines. It was often found that these families would work at one factory for some months and then move on to another factory in a continual search for a better arrangement. At some factories, wages were paid in terms of rent in the factory homes and in credit for goods that were obtainable from nearby stores that had arrangements to sell the factory's products. That is, we traded our labor for rent and for some products. Other factory operators began to pay us employees in cash wages.
As Samuel Slater finished a management apprenticeship in a cotton mill in England in 1787, he read in a news article that the Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufacture and the Useful Arts had awarded John Hague £100 for making a water-powered machine to straighten cotton fibers for high-volume spinning. (Such promotional awards continue to be used today, such as the recent prize for the first private spaceflight, see www.xprizefoundation.com.) In 1789, Slater disguised himself as a farm laborer to get through British Customs and emigrated to New England. Slater then worked in a New York City spinning-jenny factory and heard that Moses Brown was trying to establish a textile works in Providence, Rhode Island. Since there were few knowledgeable persons in the U.S., Slater got Brown to agree to give him a good share of the profits in return for his mechanical expertise. With Brown's money and Slater's knowledge, they built dozens of cotton mills in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. To staff their factories, they tried to hire orphans from the area and to contract with families for work in their mills. Day-wage immigrants began arriving in the 1830s and 1840s who would work in the factories for lower wages.
For 10,000 years, every farmer in the world has worked from dawn till dusk. Since we were already used to working twelve-hour days, the factories continued this habit. The more hours we worked, the more would be the factory's output. But factory hours proved to be much more monotonous than farm work had been. (My most miserable job consisted of stapling a piece of felt to the wire frame of a mattress, once every few seconds throughout the day. I also had miserable work as a collator while the boss repeatedly shouted “No talking. Work Faster.”) It required a worker's constant attention to keep the various parts of a mechanical device operating. Some workers would sabotage the complicated machines to slow the pace of work. By 1830 we were already beginning to push for a ten-hour work day.
Corporations for pooling business funds
Starting a business in the U.S. was less restricted than in Europe due to the absence of guilds. Where parliamentary or legislative action used to be required to create a corporation, individual states began simply to require that a few forms be filled out. But starting assets were still needed to begin a company. For the first time in the U.S., business entities were being formed that combined money from several unrelated investors to begin commercial projects that would not be directly operated by those investors. Before this time, two relatives or friends might pool together their own knowledge and labor to begin a business.
One way for people to pool their resources is by forming a corporation. A corporation is a permanent organization that continues to exist even as its operators and directors come and go. A corporation comes into existence by selling stock in its operations. People invest money in the corporation by purchasing its stock. If the corporation makes a profit then it is distributed among its stockholders; if it loses money then it will obtain additional funds from its stockholders. A small group of persons are hired to make decisions for the corporation. These persons are paid a salary and may also own stock in the company. Today, many small businesses are setup as corporations because those are viewed to be more-permanent than are sole-proprietorships.
Lowell mills operated by northeastern girls, then immigrants
Frances Cabot Lowell received a math degree from Harvard and became a Boston merchant. In 1810, he went to England to search for new investment opportunities while claiming he was there for "health reasons." He took only mental notes as he visited several textile mills, so that as he left England he had no written documents for the customs officers to confiscate. Lowell then formed a corporation with Nathan Appleton and raised $400,000 from other wealthy families to build a state of the art spinning and weaving mill that would manufacture cloth through an entirely mechanized procedure that began with raw cotton. Lowell hired the mechanic Paul Moody to construct their first water-powered mill, which was built in 1814 in Waltham, Massachusetts. Since it soon exceeded its available water power, Lowell raised eight million dollars from eighty wealthy families through the next fifteen years. He then moved his factory about fifty miles (eighty km) north of Boston to the site that would become the town of Lowell, Massachusetts. By harnessing the power of the Merrimack River Waterfalls, the town grew from a few farmer fields in 1820 to an industrial town of twenty-two mills by 1830. Its population was 20,000 persons in 1840. (For the Lowell National Park, see www.nps.gov/lowe.)
The Lowell mills were much larger than any other and needed many employees. Initially in 1820, workers in the Lowell mills were young women from the farms of New Hampshire and Vermont. The women typically worked for a year or two before marrying. It was a bit of a radical change for some of us twenty-year-old girls to be accumulating money. We earned money to do with as we pleased but had to work eleven-hour days and lived in crowded boarding houses near the factory. An older and respectable widow would supervise the boarding house and encourage us to follow the 10 O'clock curfew and to attend church on Sunday. (These are just the sorts of assurances you would expect before allowing your child to live and work in one of those newfangled and distant factories.) In 1834 Davy Crocket toured Lowell's "mile of gals" and said they were well-dressed, lively, and genteel. As one form of entertainment, the girls pitched in together for a subscription to a Paris fashion magazine. The Lowell girls published their own periodical, The Lowell Offering, containing discussions of their experiences and thoughts. The girls also objected strongly to each proposed wage reduction or increase in working hours or machinery speeds.
In the 1830s and 1840s, the Lowell girls were being replaced by immigrants who would work for lower wages. (In the coming chapters, we will see that factories are in a perpetual search for cheaper labor, and moved first to those regions of the U.S. that temporarily had cheaper labor, and then to the successive regions of the world that temporarily have the cheapest labor.) At this time, many immigrants were arriving from the farms and famines of Ireland. With the resulting glut of persons who would work for low wages, one Lowell manufacturer was quoted in 1855 to say "I regard people just as I regard my machinery and I'll keep them for as long as they'll work for what I'll pay them; those people are part of my machinery." It had taken just thirty-five years for this manufacturer's greed to grow to sufficient magnitude that money was more important than humans. By 1855 there were 52 mills in Lowell, employing 8,800 women and 4,400 men and making 2.25 million square yards (square meters) of cloth per week.
Factory clothing replaces homemade
This huge amount of cloth would be turned into manufactured clothing and meant that we farmers were making less and less of our own clothing. We women stopped having to spin thread at home and so had more time for other things. From the very start, factories make only as much product as is being bought by consumers. Since factory-made clothing began to replace homemade flax clothes, little flax was grown after 1835. Factories also produced buttons, bonnets, and ribbons.
In the first decades of the 1800s, the emerging industry of the North penetrated further and further into rural New England. By then, the scale of commerce had grown to the extent that the New England factory products began to be transported all the way to the South and to the Western Frontier, which we have seen continually moved further west. It took yet more time for these items to be widely used there. (New fashions still originated in the capitals of Europe, appeared a few months later in the seaports of America. and took additional time to work their way out into the countryside and to the West.)
Handmade shoes and instruments
Licht explains that a final product often had a complicated history. For example, a fiber might be combed and carded in a country home on an outwork basis, spun by machine in a mill, woven by artisans in an urban shop, and then dyed or printed in a small manufacturing plant. Not all products were made in central factories or even through mechanical means. For example, shoes were mostly made through outwork in the home in which shoe components were taken to a family who would make the final shoe. (In 1977, my sister worked in her own home lacing components into leather purses. The component were brought by a merchant who later returned to collect the finished purses.)
Shoes became the major product of the town of Lynn, Massachusetts. Tunis says that Philip Kerkland opened the first Lynn shoe shop in 1636 and that in the early 1700s, one Lynn shop had forty shoemakers, each working independently to make an entire shoe. Around 1750, Thomas Adams Dagys divided a shoe into its components, each of which were assigned to a different worker. These shoe pieces were then taken to a home to be sewn together into the final shoe. In the 1830s, shoe production was moved to large centralized workshops (as we see today in Southeast Asia). Soles were then being nailed rather than stitched. By 1835, those of us who were working in these New England workshops were hand-making fifteen million shoes per year; not coincidentally, the population of the U.S. was about fifteen million persons.
While mechanical production techniques led the way in Lowell’s cloth factories, these techniques occurred much later in the shoemaking business. Sewing machines were not used in the shoemaking process until the 1850s and 1860s (visit http://.americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=187 for a photo of an early sewing machine). Until then, shoemaking artisans–rather than the machinery–were controlling the final shoe design. Few shoes are made in the U.S. today. (The news today often mentions Asian shoemakers working for $5 per week and the American shoe-sellers who purchase those shoes for $5 and then market them in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. for $100 each, as described in Chapter 18 below.)
William J. Young was born in 1800. At the age of thirteen he became an indentured apprentice and in 1825 inherited his trainer's business. His company handcrafted surveying instruments and is another example of an unmechanized factory. As the nation expanded westward, land speculation created a demand for his instruments. By 1850, his twenty employees were making 150 instruments per year. He paid them well so that they would not open competing shops.
Varieties of products fill our homes
Oil lamps began to be used in 1810 that were as bright as ten candles, and by 1830, many city-homes had a lamp or two. The Standard Oil company began by producing this type of oil after the Civil War ended in 1865. Standard oil quickly monopolized the distillation plants in order to control the supply side of “supply and demand” and thus obtained large profits. (Still in 2005, the supply side can be similarly limited in the U.S by having too few distillation plants.)
On the outskirts of Baltimore in 1821, one company built a coal distillation plant to produce gas that was piped to nearby homes and businesses to be burned for lighting. Since the installation and usage of gas in a home cost as much as the average person's annual wage, not many persons chose to purchase this newfangled convenience. By 1830, gas lighting was available in Boston, New York City, and in Philadelphia where there were 700 customers by 1836.
The earliest paint manufacturing shop in New England was opened in Boston in 1700 by Thomas Child. He supplied paint to those Boston homes that could afford that luxury. In 1784 Sam Wetherill (born in 1739) began making paint by grinding lead and mixing it with oil and pigments. In the 1840s his sons built a larger paint factory. For the first time, paint was cheap enough that our wooden homes were commonly being painted. (The Great Depression closed the Wetherill business in 1933.) Henry Sherwin and Edward Williams formed the Sherwin-Williams Company in 1866.
Eli Whitney, see www.eliwhitney.org, built a firearms factory in which he put into practice the European idea of making identical and interchangeable parts. This allowed one broken part to be replaced with another just like it rather than having to replace the entire machine. (Today's cost of repair-labor for many of our electrical appliances and gadgets has made us return to replacing wholes instead of components). His factory grew to have ten apprentices. In 1794 Eli Whitney invented his cotton gin that separates cotton fibers from seeds.
In the previous year, 1793, the South's cotton production was 10,000 five-hundred-pound (230 kg) bales. England's textile factories were purchasing, processing, and selling huge amounts of cotton, and within a few decades, New England's factories was also. The demand for cotton and the production of cotton quickly increased together until cotton had become the world's main commodity. The South's cotton production grew to 335,000 bales in 1820 and then to one million bales in 1835. This was a 100-fold increase in forty years. Throughout this time, over half the cotton was being exported–100 million pounds in 1820 and 300 million pounds in 1830. Since the cotton used in Northern factories came from the slave-labor of Southern plantations, northern factories were processing slave-labor cotton.
Mass-produced items are less-expensive but are also less decorated. For example, between 1800 and 1830, the number of chairs per household doubled but their hand-carved hearts and crowns had been eliminated. As an item began to be mass produced, local craft styles and their detailed distinctions also became less pronounced. As factories began to make carpets, curtains, mirrors, and upholstered furniture these things began to cost less so that more and more homes were able to afford them. By 1830, 20% of homes had a carpet. In 1840 the invention of an inexpensive printing process, the lithograph, began to bring art to the walls of the common home. European and Chinese dishware began to have images printed onto them and these too started to appear in the average home. Only one house in ten had a watch before inexpensive watches were mass produced. Tunis says that their repeated breakdown kept the local watch repairer busy. Mass-produced clocks began to be cheap enough that more could afford to have them so that by 1830, two-thirds of rural craft shops had one. Still today, there exists the idea that a stand-up "grandfather clock" can bring a certain distinction to a home. Before industrialization, these items had been available to only the wealthier families but now an average home could afford them. Poorer families had to wait a few more decades before prices had sufficiently lowered that they too could purchase these items.
The earliest factory products were being worn or decorating our homes. At the time, there was much discussion about the increasing number of mirrors, curtains, and carpets in the home. Much of the post World War II industrial boom in the U.S. involved the production and purchase of labor-saving devices such as washing machines. At the time, there was much discussion about the average number of such devices in the home. In fact, Cold War comparisons sometimes rated nations by these numbers. Korten explains that lately, electronic gadgets that fill time are being produced and purchased, including televisions and games.
The South chooses to remain agricultural
Industrialization was suited to some regions of the U.S. while others remained agricultural. (As has always been the case, each region of the world has its own culture and a unique history.) The southern U.S. had the soil and climate to grow a large share of the world's main commodity, cotton, and so remained an agricultural region while the North industrialized. In 1860, the South's manufacturing capacity was 15% of that of the North. The South's Gross Product ranked among the world's top ten but was just 10% as large as that of the northern U.S. Manufacturing in the South was less inviting because of many reasons but mainly because of the success of cotton. The long-successful, wealthy elite had no interest in changing the system that they headed. They had no interest in putting their money into manufacturing or anything else. Besides the landed elite, few others had the money needed to build factories. The South had little interest in industry until after World War II. Whether or not a nation begins to industrialize today similarly depends on many such aspects of society.
Nearly all of us who were enslaved in the South were working on plantations. Just 5% of us were working in factories in 1860. The manufacturing that did occur in the South was done mainly by us slaves. A factor in the lack of Southern factories is that those of us who enslaved others avoided uprisings by never allowing many slaves in a single place, as would have occurred in a factory. The difference in labor costs made Southern, slave-labor factories two or three times as profitable as were Northern factories.
We can imagine the thrill that some business owners would have today if no wages had to be paid. A typical business spends one-third of its sales income on its labor force, one-third on materials and other outside purchases, and has one-third left for investments, executive wages, and the profits that are the owner's wages. Each of these percentages varies from one company to the next, and there are extreme cases. For example, in some years the U.S. Postal Service has spent 80% of its income on labor costs.
In the U.S. there were four roads to industrialization: there were mill villages that employed family labor in the home, there was slave-labor industry, there were one-industry factory towns, and there was diversified, urban manufacturing. Industry in the U.S. brought inventors together with wealthy investors, and it grew from the outside help of English mechanics who encountered idea-spurring isolation in the U.S. The early lack of labor to run machinery was soon succeeded by floods of immigrant labor. (Still today, people all over the world are leaving the family farm to seek work in the factories of a nearby city.) The large population growth of the westward-expanding U.S. expanded the markets. Half this population growth was fueled by immigrants who are, by definition, unafraid of change. The population of the U.S. mostly welcomed new machinery while in some other nations machinery was seen as a threat that might replace workers. The mix of natural resources, capital, labor, ideas, and artisans was allowed to develop into new opportunities unimpeded by custom, except for the culture of the Southern elite. Many cultural and economic elements played a role in the adoption and development of industrialization of the U.S. If a nation today chooses to begin industrialization, it faces a very different world that is already full of previously industrialized nations.
Many of us factory workers struggle to earn money for bread and rent
Most seventeenth-century persons who transplanted their families to the New World colonies came from the middle class. Peasants could not afford the trip and wealthy people did not want to leave. The result was that the colonies contained a smaller range in economic class. (Imagine plucking the middle 2% of the people of your nation today and moving them to a new area to restart society.) The people of the colonies had shed the European system of nobles but after 1820 or so, they were beginning to be threatened with subjugation by new "economic nobles." This was creating a new "noble" in the land of equals.
Many in the U.S. were bothered by the rising importance of money and by the cold and uncontrollable business cycles. Since the time of the first cities and artisans, typically just 10% of us were involved in business, and business mostly meant selling utensils and decorations to only the wealthiest of us. Business cycles were much less pronounced and they affected a smaller portion of us. Only the price of cereals mattered to most of us. The population as a whole was more affected by intermittent years of widespread disease or poor crop production. By the way, the business cycles also impeded the rise of U.S. labor unions until the 1880s because developing unions were repeatedly bankrupted by them. Early unions did not survive the economic downturn of 1819, nor did a second development of unions survive the downturn of 1839.
Those of us in the city who were poor lived in one-room homes that had dirt floors and scant furnishings. We would use any broken or discarded utensils we could find and continued to use sharp sticks for forks and shells for spoons. This lifestyle remained more common on the Western Frontier for a few decades longer than in the East because it took that long for the inexpensive, factory-made products to spread that distance from the northeast. In the urban east, the homes of us poor persons were within a few blocks of the homes of wealthier persons. The difference between homes of the western frontier and the urban east was similar to the difference between rich and poor homes of the big cities until the eastern factory goods made it all the way to the western frontier.
The homes and possessions of us Slave-Americans were comparable to those of the urban poor. Our health, as measured by our height and life-span, was also similar to that of the urban poor. Typically, three of us adults and eight children lived in homes that were ten by ten feet (three by three meters) in size. Those of us who owned slaves chose to build for them minimal homes in the manner of the cheapest contemporary building style. We provided minimal furniture and dishware. Often broken and discarded furniture was all that we made available. No candles were supplied. Certain aspects of the material quality of life and the health of us Slave-Americans might have been comparable to those of poor-Americans but there is no comparison between enslaved and free humans.
Those of us who were of the working class instead rented homes. These houses were built by manufacturers or by small scale real estate businesses that built row homes. The poorest city dwellers crammed into tiny apartments, where often a family plus a few boarders lived in a single room. The cheapest rooms were the unfurnished cellars. While making a house call in 1849, one Boston doctor found thirty-nine persons living in a flooded cellar. The patient was lying on a plank placed between two stools, and there was a dead infant sailing around the room in its coffin. (Visit www.tenement.org for panoramic views of tenement houses.) What sorts of living conditions occur in today's lowest-wage areas of the world, such as the Asian regions where many shoes are made? In Chapter 21 we will have a look at the daily life of some of us who live in a poor area of the U.S. today.
The increasingly harsh economic life for some of us meant an increasing amount of crime in the city, mostly in the lower class areas of the city. In response, the less-affected business and higher-class areas called for the creation of a police force–as other large cities were doing. Unfortunately, we came up with the unimaginative solution of using police forces to fight poor living conditions and dismal hopes for the future. In addition to the newly added expense of police forces, cities began to pay to install water and sewer systems, street lighting, schools, and fire departments. Fires could level an entire section of town, and disease spread in the big cities. There were cholera epidemics in 1832 and 1849 that killed thousands.
The average annual wage of $250 per worker did not support a family; three or four family members had to work to get enough money to pay rent and to buy bread and clothes. Despite this, 2% of the population of temporarily suffering European nations were continuing to move to the U.S. in search of factory jobs or farm land and a chance to beat the odds and live a good life. The temporarily suffering nations were those experiencing war or an economic downturn. In New York City, the percentage of foreign-born residents increased from 20% in 1820 to 50% in 1850, when they comprised 80% of the wage-earning workforce.
Many of us recent immigrants wrote to our families back in the old country about the harsh life in the U.S. factories but said also that we believed we had a chance of doing well for the family. (Do you feel the same way today?.) The letter might recommend that several other family members should make the move "but not John because he couldn't handle it." We move around the world for the same reasons today and often find the same harsh conditions as we are forced to take the lowest paying jobs; as is occurring, for example, in the migration from farming villages to the big-city factories of Asia and Latin America.
From 1820 through 1860, there was little change in the standard of living for working class people because both wages and the cost of living rose together. Most were not able to improve their level of living even after working for a lifetime. Throughout these decades there was an increasing separation between the quality of life of unskilled workers, skilled workers, employers, and professionals. The lower class had swelled and become a visible mass of glaring inequality such as had not before occurred in the colonies.
By 1850, each city developed economic rings that surrounded the city's center. The poorest of us would live in the oldest structures in the city center, while those who could afford transportation would live farther outward from the center. Professionals and such lived near the edge of the city. Each economic region of the city also had its own churches, schools, retail stores, and organizations. By the 1840s, many cities had become larger than could be handled by a town meeting so representative systems began to be used.
The city dwellers of the U.S. now confronted increased contrasts between wealth and poverty, but still growing numbers moved to the cities to work and live. Poverty, disease, and illiteracy became more concentrated and apparent as cities grew in size, and we were witnessing an increase in the number of persons enduring poor living conditions. This caused some of us to question the very foundations of capitalism.
In 1845 the New York Daily Tribune made a series of reports on the city's working conditions. The reporter, George Foster coined the term "sweating" for the "sweat-shops" of the textile industry just twenty-five years after the Lowell mills were built. (You might visit http://americanhistory.si.edu/sweatshops/intro/intro.htm http://americanhistory.si.edu/sweatshops/ffchain/source.htm,and www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire.) Textiles were made by subcontracting clothing work to the lowest bidding sewing shop. The competition of small but numerous sewing-shops made for very low bids and higher profits for those taking the bids. Sweat-shop workers were not paid a living wage and were forced to rent cellars shared by at least two families. They often worked sixteen hours per day. Any person willing to work for these wages was hired to do an unskilled job, making a small portion of a product without having to first undergo years of apprenticeship training. During times of slow business, workers managed to live by eating cheap food, taking many small odd jobs, and by relying in part on charity relief.
The portion of us who became wage-earners rather than farmers continued to grow. There were discussions back in the farming villages about some of us factory owners taking advantage of laborers by decreasing wages and giving unfair treatment. As early as 1827, some of us were publicly condemning the greed of some business persons. The ability of some business persons to treat others unfairly was just emerging. (Has such unfairness increased or decreased since then? Does our culture now accept unfairness to be the way of life just as peasants accepted the existence of manor lords? Do either wage-earners or peasants accept unfairness in any degree? Is that a mutually beneficial society?)
A shoemaker named William Heighton, denounced the greed of those who attempted to profit from the labors of others. He said that we are all born equal and are good by nature, and that democracy would be damaged by the growing concentration of wealth. He formed the first labor-based political party, the Working Men's Party of Philadelphia, to promote the end of debtors prison, a prohibition of licensed monopolies, legal protection for labor unions, stopping the use of prison labor contracts, a reorganization of militia recruitment, the payment of wages in hard currency, better public service in poor neighborhoods, and free public schools so all children can obtain knowledge. He said that workers should benefit from their labors and have equal access to education. They should even control the government to guard against injustices being done to them by the wealthy. Other contributors to this debate included Fanny Wright, Robert Dale Owen, John Ferd, Seth Luther, and Thomas Skidmore.
Such injustice has occurred since the first cities of Ancient Mesopotamia but it had never before involved so many persons because never before had such a large portion of the population been employed as wage-earners. The injustice came to involve enough persons for public debate to begin, and this debate continues today. Why do young adults choose to become wage-earners today? Because that is the way of their parents and their culture. It is the way of our group. What is the appropriate level for the quality of life of us workers or of us business owners? Which persons deserve to have a higher quality of life? We'll discuss these topics in Chapter 22.
A large movement to form labor-unions occurred from 1820 to 1840, and involved a good portion of workers–who were still a minority of the entire population. They criticized a society coming to be ruled by supply and demand and to contain undue concentrations of wealth (there were similar complaints in Europe). Already in the 1830s, the Lowell girls responded with work-stopages whenever the mill owners threatened to decrease wages or to increase work loads. For example, one-third of the girls walked off the job in 1836; since inventories happened to be low at this time, the girls won their demands from the factory owners. Other early unions sponsored strikes for decreased hours and for increased wages but these few attempts produced few results. Court rulings went against these early labor associations, and then the economic recession of 1837 to 1843 closed them down. The loss of jobs resulted in the loss of members. It would be many years before unions would reappear.
Interrelated elements of the economy
The recession of 1837 was due mostly to the overproduction that caused many prices to drop by as much as 50% but also by the flood of bank-issued paper money. This began to show us the relations between prices, money supply, inventory levels, inflation rates, unemployment levels, and consumer spending. These things are often discussed in today's daily news, but the fact that these things are also related to the quality of life of workers and business owners is rarely mentioned in the news, as we'll see in Chapter 22.
During the recession of 1837, many of the urban unemployed came close to starving. The doubling of the price of flour resulted in New Yorkers looting flour stores, as described in the article The 1837 Flour Riot of New York City in Joel Tyler Headley's Great Riots of New York, 1712-1873. At this time, Horace Greely advised the unemployed to "Go west." During this recession, eight states defaulted on loans from European banks, ruining their credit for several years.
Economic relationships and cycles quickly became more complicated and pronounced as industrial production and employment and consumer purchases began to involve a larger portion of the population. The first economic slowdown occurred in 1819 with sudden unemployment that was due to the overexpansion of the emerging industry. There would be many more economic bursts and slowdowns to follow. McConnell and Brue (page 144) list the post Civil War slowdowns and show that they occurred during the years 1875-1880, 1884-1885, 1893-1895, 1903, 1907, 1914, 1922, 1929-1940, 1945, 1950, 1954, 1958, 1961, 1970-1971, 1975, 1981, and 1991.
Exchanges and occupations change
Before industrialization, craftpersons were choosing the materials and designs of products, but after industrialization, the merchant-capitalist who operated the factories were instead choosing these things. During the years 1832 to 1836, this caused the craftpersons of most every urban community to hold protests over their decreasing control of the final form of their products. For example, in Philadelphia in 1835, 20,000 craftpersons went on strike. They also demanded the decrease to ten-hour workdays.
Society changed as lifelong craftspersons were replaced with machinery whose operation required little training. Since it takes just a few hours, days, or weeks to train a person to operate a factory machine, increasing numbers of persons were becoming urban factory wage-earners without having to undergo apprenticeship training. This changed society as it meant that the new merchant-capitalists were not taking apprentices into their own home as family members through several years of training. In addition, the wage-earner began to pay cash rent in one home and work in another building for cash wages. As rent was starting to be paid in cash money it was no longer being paid through the ancient help-exchange system that was the apprenticeship contract. This meant that the home rental business switched to being a source of income rather than being the labor assistance of a person you have staying within your own home.
As farmers bought more factory-made implements, many local blacksmiths went out of business. They couldn't compete with the factories that were making cheaper, mass-produced items. Some blacksmiths moved their rural shop to the city to become machinists for the factories. Others remained in the country to become repair shops for these factory-made items. Still others became specialized in axes and such.
The 1800s saw many older occupations disappear to be replaced with a larger number of more-specialized factory occupations. In some occupations, the older, traditional ways continued a few more decades. For example, the store keeper's assistant still lived in the owner's home. Also, since home-building work is always done locally, it continued in the traditional ways for more decades than did other types of work. While most every industry in the U.S. today is controlled by a few nationwide or global corporations, the home construction industry is still the least of all.
In the past we were working on our own farmland to provide directly for our own family's welfare and needs. For example, we would chop wood and then burn it during the winter nights to keep ourselves warm, and we would make food, clothing, and utensils for our own family's use. Seeing the direct fruits of our own labor produces an immediate sense of accomplishment. Now we were beginning instead to perform labor for business owners to provide indirectly for our family's needs. From 1820 on, the home was becoming separate from income-earning work.
Our families that were the most wealthy before the emergence of the factory were also the ones who could most afford to build those factories–and become yet wealthier. Our new factory-ways also greatly increased the number of us who were propertyless city-workers. Our Industrial Revolution's factory resulted in a growing inequality in our income and wealth. For example, the average Boston merchant left $5,000 in land and property to heirs when wages were $0.50 per day or $183 per year. Day-laborer wages were fine for a single person but not for a family. Before factories existed, mom might obtain income from sewing or laundry work or by working as a servant. But after the arrival of factory work, both parents and a child or two might have work in the factory just to cover the cost of rent and food.
One woman pointed out that while young men ponder their choice of future careers, a woman was forced to ponder only the career of her future husband. In many ways, we men treated women as property having no rights of “its” own. Many of the world's men still do this. Many of us women referred to a girl's marriage as "resigning her liberty." Catherine Clinton explained that the plantation mistress was trapped within a system that controlled her, and that in the South cotton was King, white men ruled, and both white women and slaves served the same master (but to differing degrees, we might add).
In the 1840s there were increasing discussions of the injustice of constraining women's lives. Women are half our human assets. We women had almost no legal property rights under the U.S. Constitution of "equals." In fact, we didn't even have rights to our own children in that ex-husbands always kept the children after a divorce. Lucy Stone refused to pay taxes since she was not represented in the government. In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote her Declaration of Sentiments, see www.closeup.org/sentimnt.htm, in the fashion of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, challenging the nation to be true to its founding documents: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." You might like to visit http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vfwhtml/vfwhome.html to see photographs concerning women’s suffrage and view copies of pamphlets at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/naw/nawshome.html.
There were increasing discussions of the injustice of slavery. In 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe explained that the people of the Northern U.S. were beginning to be consumed by the growing magnitude of business greed and this greed's factories were now willingly participating in the enslavement of some of us humans in the Southern U.S. She pointed out that the Northern factories were also using slavery because they were buying cotton grown and picked by us slaves in the South. Stowe made the Northerners understand their own inhumane role in participating in Southern slavery. This helped generate a large increase in anti-slavery sentiment by the people of the North as they realized their own role in the enslavement of some of us humans. When President Lincoln met Harriet, he commended her, allegedly by saying that "She was the lady who wrote that book which started the war." In its first seven years, one million persons–one in thirty-five U.S. residents–bought Harriet's book Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Man That Was a Thing, see http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc.
In 1800 no state except Vermont, New Hampshire and Kentucky would let a person vote unless they met minimum property and taxpaying requirements. This was a continuation of the medieval idea of "having a stake in society" but was inconsistent with our founding document's idea of "equals." (In the U.S. today, we officially believe that every male and female adult over the age of eighteen years has a stake in society.) By 1840, every state except Rhode Island, Louisiana, and Virginia had removed these property requirements. Some regions would instead charge a tax at the voting place to try to keep us poorer persons from voting. This practice was not ended until 1964 with the 24th Amendment. Women were kept from voting until 1920, when the 19th Amendment stopped this restriction. In 1971, eighteen-year-olds became able to vote. (Today, fifteen-year-olds vote in Iran and sixteen-year-olds do so in Germany).
Most of us Irish who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1840s were escaping the potato famine of our homeland, see http://vassun.vassar.edu/~sttaylor/FAMINE. Potatoes had become our staple food in that each of us were eating several pounds of potatoes per day. Potatoes have nutritious contents, but a person has to eat several pounds per day to obtain enough nutrition to survive. One drawback is that potato starch causes tooth decay. Potatoes did not exist in the Old World until the early European explorers had taken them there from the New World, and the initial sample of potatoes taken there was too small to have the necessary genetic variability to survive disease. When a potato disease ruined our potato crop, one million of us Irish died during the years 1845 through 1847 and two million more died by 1860.
In the 1840s, us Irish immigrants began replacing the farmers' daughters in the Lowell, Massachusetts factories. Many of us Irish immigrated to the U.S. in a poor condition. Instead of moving out into the farming areas we stayed in the urban centers of the industrial northeast, where we took any job we could get and had to live in the cheapest section of town. Irish ghettoes grew in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In some places, an irrational fear grew that us Irish Roman Catholics would somehow conspire with pope and priests to take over the country. This fear kept Catholics out of the White House until John Kennedy's election in 1960.
Immigrants were arriving from many nations. For example, a new wave of immigrant German farmers settled in the region enveloped by a line drawn from Cincinnati, Ohio to St. Louis, Missouri and up to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and another 400,000 of us immigrants came from Sweden, Denmark, and Norway to settle in Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. (For more information about the pioneer experience, visit http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/wipionexp.)
John Sturm's autobiography describes his family's 1847 Atlantic crossing in a three-masted ship. His family's journey began with lost food and clothes because their baggage disappeared while on a Rhine River steamboat going to the Antwerp boat dock. Next, the rolling sea kept many persons in a state of seasickness. The ship had just one kitchen shared by every family so each cooked but once every two or three days. One day when a pirate ship approached their own ship, everyone was called on deck to show how many men there were so that the pirates would seek an easier target. The sailors had their own kitchen and cook and mainly ate beans or peas cooked with bacon. This group of travelers was luckier than most of those making the sea-voyage because only one child died during the trip and had to be buried at sea.
About 300,000 of us Chinese immigrated to the U.S. between 1849 and 1880. We were often in search of enough money to return home to purchase land for our family. We worked hard for years and lived on a minimal budget to save this money. Still today, many persons seek temporary work in foreign lands to accumulate money before returning home. Visit http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award99/cubhtml/cichome.html for information about the Chinese experience in California during the years 1850-1925.
Migrating from the eastern end of the U.S. to the western end was also a long and dangerous trip. The "roads" were little more than wide paths full of holes, tree-stumps, and deep ruts created by wagon wheels. It took six weeks to travel from New York City to St. Louis. New Yorkers would travel by land to Buffalo and then take a boat down the Ohio river to Cincinnati or Louisville. About 150 miles (240 km) south of St. Louis, the Ohio river joins the Mississippi and then flows south another 150 miles to Memphis.
To leave the east, a family gathered its horses, dogs, wagons, furniture, farm implements, livestock, infants, children, elderly, and pregnant mothers and headed west down the roads. (Think of placing your family and possessions into a wagon and moving across the country.) When a road caused a wagon to overturn, the families possessions could be damaged. The poorest of us put our belongings in a backpack or handcart and simply walked west. It was unhealthy to spend weeks on the road. Our weaker and more-elderly might be killed by the journey. The trip was often full of unexpected expenses. An extended period of bad weather lengthened the trip's duration and could drain a family's money and supplies, leaving them stranded somewhere along the route. In 1829, the weather and the flu stranded many families in Cincinnati, Ohio. Many families would travel together in a train of wagons, usually sleeping under the wagons at night. In 1825 a Louisville, Kentucky newspaper reported that the road was literally filled with movers several times that week. After a Western area had time to develop commercial activities, a more-wealthy Eastern family could choose to sell their belongings in their old hometown, travel to their new Western home, and then buy replacement items.
Peddlers, freight haulers, and entertainers
Throughout the nation, roads were also filled with thousands of peddlers who would take dry goods, hats, and perfumes and such and sell them door-to-door. For example, one northern peddler traveled the south to sell manufactured clocks, while another peddler covered an area from Cleveland, Ohio to Charleston, South Carolina. (I had a job for a while doing something similar to this.) The road also contained freight truckers who were driving wagons at high speed and yelling at the slow-moving families as they passed. (We are familiar with this rudeness between truckers and families today, for example on Interstate 40 between Memphis, Tennessee and Little Rock, Arkansas.)
Since people were usually starving for novelty, traveling entertainers spent months on the road stopping in town after town. One entertainer traveled with dioramas that depicted historical events and charged a few pennies for people to see them and to hear him explain their stories. In 1836 P.T. Barnum began his traveling circus, averaging two shows per day as he went from Connecticut to Charleston, South Carolina in a six-month cycle. We could then see with our own eyes the strange and exotic animals of the world of which we had only heard. As always, the road also contained beggars and other free spirits.
Roads were few and usually minimally built because road construction required great numbers of men and animals. New England was the oldest part of the country and so had the largest number of roads. In the 1820s and 1830s, local governments increased the pace of road construction and helped enable the westward migration. Some private companies tried to build toll roads but the maintenance cost kept them from being profitable. The U.S. government built the National Road from Cumberland, Maryland to Vandalia, Illinois, see www.nps.gov/fone/natlroad.htm.
Before there were steamboats, river travel was essentially limited to one-way travel. Flat boats, which simply drifted downstream, were used to take items down the Mississippi River to the ocean port of New Orleans where they could be sent on to the Northeastern U.S., the Caribbean, and Europe. At the river's end in New Orleans, these flat boats could only be broken up for lumber and the boat drivers were left to get back upstream anyway they could.
The first steamboats appeared in the U.S. in 1807, had their heyday during the years 1820 to 1850, and then declined in number as they were replaced by railroads. A few can still to be found today. (A steamboat model can be seen at http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=147.) The inventor Robert Fulton put an English-built steam engine and large paddle wheels onto a boat that could move upstream at five miles per hour (eight km/hr). This great speed resulted in some steamboats having names like "Velocepede." In The Changing Years Arch Merrill describes how each steamboat whistle had a different tone and how these boats often got stuck in mud, jammed in shoals, or caught in ice floes. Steamboats traveled on every big river to transport people and cargo between major cities. By 1830 there were 400 steamboats on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers alone. Mississippi steamboats increased the New Orleans cargo from twelve million pounds in 1820 to 200 million pounds in 1850. The steamboats also crossed the Great Lakes to the new towns of Chicago and Detroit, and helped bring the Western U.S. into the nation's economy.
While on a several-day-long steamboat trips, those of us who were first to go to bed could sleep in curtained berths. The rest of us piled onto and under chairs, benches, and tables–right along with many strangers. Thomas Hamilton said that his first night on a Mississippi steamboat drew him the luck of a night's sleep on a table and had one man's knees in his stomach and his own feet on the head of another. The passengers were ministers, drunkards, swearers, fiddlers, dancers, and gamblers. The minister Peter Cartwight tried to sway card players into a discussion of history and astronomy, and he managed to stop a fiddle dance to hold a Sunday sermon.
The steamboats were seen as both a bit of a marvel and a bit of a death trap. Their high pressure steam boilers were a new technology; as usual, we had to learn the hard way about their breakdowns. In 1830, one steamboat boiler exploded at the dock in Memphis and blew fifty persons into the river, killing them all. Most boiler explosions were not caused by poor materials or design but by the reckless daring of inexperienced and insufficiently trained operators who did not fully understand these machines. One third of the steamboats on the Mississippi before 1850 sank from accidents; this is an unbelievable portion. When Charles Dickens traveled U.S. rivers by steamboat, his friends told him to sleep as far as possible from the boiler. Already in 1840, books were being published to thrill us with steamboat and railroad disasters–just as any disaster today is soon followed by purchasable accounts of the incident. Another inconvenience for the passengers was the accepted practice of "running a machine for as long as it will go."
Merrill tells of the steamboat Onondaga being quarantined for weeks, including an entire entertainment troupe, because one of its crew came down with smallpox. The resulting stigma resulted in the Onondaga being blown-up in a well-attended spectacle. Merrill also describes how the people of New York's Finger Lakes remember steamboat rides in the early 1900s, including moonlight cruises and dances. They took box-lunches with boiled eggs and other such long-lasting food. They marveled at the huge glowing engines below deck and watched sweating men shovel coal.
Canals transport people and goods between east and west
The Erie canal began in 1817 as a New York state project but was largely funded by British banks. It was completed in 1825 for a cost of $7 million and earned $0.5 million per year. It ran 363 miles (580 km) from Albany on the Hudson river to Buffalo on Lake Erie and consisted of 18 aqueducts with a total of 83 locks. Initially it was 4 feet deep and 40 feet wide (1.2m x 12 m) but its immediately-heavy traffic resulted in it being expanded to 7 by 70 feet (2.1m x 21m).
A horse path was placed along each side of the canal, see www.history.rochester.edu/canal, so that horses could be hitched by rope to pull freight or passenger barges down the canal. The horses pulled one-hundred-ton freight barges down the canal at a speed of two miles per hour (3.2 km/hr) for a price of one cent per ton-mile. Log-rafts were pulled at a slower pace. Passenger boats could be pulled at a speed of four miles per hour (6.4 km/hr).
While boat rides had always been dangerous at sea, a trip on the Erie canal was like a carnival ride. Passengers often commented that as the canal's strip of water made its way across the land they could just look off to the side of the boat and watch the unoccupied forest pass by. When it opened, it enabled people to travel by boat half way across the country. A person could start in New York City, travel up the Hudson river on one boat and then shift to another boat pulled along the Erie canal all the way to the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. From there they might choose to ride a boat all the way down the Ohio River to the Mississippi River, and on to Memphis and New Orleans.
The Erie canal instantly provided an economical transportation system from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic. We saw earlier that in ancient Rome the price of grain doubled if it had to be transported overland by just fifty miles (80 km). Before the Erie canal was built, the cost to haul grain over the Appalachian foothills to New York City had been three times the market value of wheat, six times the market value of corn, and ten times the market value of oats. The Erie canal meant that these costs suddenly disappeared overnight. It quickly brought Western New York flour to New England and connected the factories of the East to the farmlands of the West. The Erie canal brought so much food to the urban Northeast that one New York City restaurant offered thirty kinds of meat. One person publicly denounced the new commercial food reliance as unhealthy and said that we should eat only bread and drink nothing but water.
Canals were quickly built in many states. One problem for the canals of Indiana and Ohio was that ice and low water closed them for part of the year. By 1840 there were 3,300 miles (5,200 km) of canals costing $125 million, but the canals were quickly replaced with railroads. The people of the U.S. had never built a large-scale engineering project–just factory buildings and their machinery–before the Erie canal. Railroads would be their next project, followed by dams, automobile highways, and spaceships. (In the previous chapter, we saw that the first canals were made to irrigate crops in Ancient Mesopotamia and that the residents of fifteenth-century Timbuktu made a canal to connect their city to a nearby river. Twelfth-century Hangchow had many canals in town and was connected by canal to the Yangtze one hundred [160 km] away.)
The industrialization of the 1830s and 1840s was dramatically topped by the steam locomotive. In the U.S., railroads began to emerge in the 1820s with some short lengths of track. (You might like to browse maps of railroad lines occurring from 1820 to 1900 at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/rrhtml/rrhome.html. See www.jernbanesider.dk/page37.html or www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/vck/locopics.htm for video clips of steam powered railroads.)
Christopher Columbus Baldwin said he was astonished the first time he saw a train moving toward him under its own power because it was "just like a living thing." Before the train, only living things could move under their own power. The trains astounded passengers with lightning speeds of fifteen to twenty miles per hour (25 to 30 km/hour) and with lightning sparks from metal wheels on metal tracks. They compared the train's flash with the stagecoach ride's slow-motion dawning of day.
The railroads also had their own dangers. This was another new technology and we had to learn the hard way about its shortcomings: there were axle and frame failures, derailments, and collisions. Railroad ties and spikes would be thrown upwards through the floors of the passenger compartments, sometimes causing injuries. Trains were the loudest noise ever known, causing the passengers to have to yell to each other. Ash and cinders from their wood-burning engines showered onto passengers who emerged from the trip half-deaf and blackened with soot but thrilled by the speed of travel. Larkin explains that us travelers accepted the risks as the price of rapid travel and that it was an exhilarating experience to participate in the breaking-up of age-old constraints on human movement. Collisions of old trains were soon arranged for entertainment.
In 1828, the Baltimore and Ohio railroad began operating. By 1840 there were 3,300 miles (5,300 km) of both railroad tracks and canals but the canals soon ceased to be used because the railroads were much more popular. Some 9,000 miles of tracks were added during the 1840s and another 22,000 during the 1850s. By the 1860s railroads were the most popular form of long-distance transportation. Notice that these were not needed before long-distance trade and travel were occurring. The amount of railroad tracks grew until the automobile appeared around the year 1900, and then they began to disappear. In turn, automobiles disappeared around the year 2100 as fusion-powered flymobiles began to be used.
Increasingly from 1820 to 1860, the produce of Western farmers was sent to the Eastern population while the manufactured goods of Eastern urban factory workers was sent to the West. In the western farmlands, corn and oats were grown to feed the farmer's own livestock and wheat and flour were grown to send east. Western farms were commercial enterprises with the goal of producing as much as possible to be sold to the market. The farmlands of the upper Mississippi and Ohio valleys could grow five times as much wheat per acre as could the farmlands of the Northeast. These farmers were not simply growing food for their own use as had been done in the single-family farms of New England. Western farms were typically 200 acres (100 hectares) in size and were worked by the family, sometimes with some hired-help. These commercial farms increasingly relied on machines to increase output.
Cities and industry grow and spread Westward
Before 1860, manufacturing in the U.S. was found in tiny and widely scattered spots but from 1865 through 1900 many additional industrial towns emerged. Industrial regions grew in the Northeast, the Middle Atlantic, and the Mid West–but not the South. In 1860, the industrial output of the U.S. was smaller than that of either France, Germany, or Britain. But by 1900, it had grown by a factor of five to become larger than all three of these combined. During this period, manufacturing grew from 32% to 53% of U.S. output. The number of U.S. patents per year grew from 1,000 in 1820 to 5,000 in 1860. With each decade, new industries emerged. For example, in 1859 the first oil well initiated the oil industry. Oil was at first used for light and heat.
Many new industrial cities emerged, especially after the steam engine arrived to provide power in any location. This meant that factories no longer had to be placed along rivers to obtain water-power. Woolen textiles were made in Lawrence, Massachusetts; textiles in Manchester, New Hampshire; grain processing and distribution in Wilmington, Delaware was followed by iron works that produced ships, railroad cars, and carriages; wire rope and cable in Trenton, New Jersey (whose factories also designed and suspended the Brooklyn Bridge, see www.pbs.org/kenburns/brooklynbridge) in addition to pottery made from local materials; cotton mills and locomotives in Patterson, New Jersey; rifles, ammunition casings, machine tools and other metal products in Brideport, Connecticut; clocks and brass products in Waterbury, Connecticut; steam engines, files, flat silverware, and jewelry in Providence, Rhode Island. A 350 mile-long (550 km) line of manufacturing centers grew along the Erie Canal in cities such as Albany, Troy, Schenectady, Utica, Rome, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo.
Throughout the 1800s, Pennsylvania employed and produced more than any other state. Instead of a line of industrial towns, much of the state was involved. Most of the nation's anthracite coal is found in Pennsylvania (See http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/awal.2087 for a video clip about coal mining). The search for Pennsylvania coal mines was accompanied by land speculation. The especially independent nature of those of us humans who will work in a mine led to some dramatic labor strikes; you might like to read about the Molly Maguires. By 1900, Pennsylvania was producing one-sixth of the nation's iron and steel, mostly in companies having 200 to 300 employees each.
Already in 1880, 60% of Ohio workers were employed in manufacturing and Cincinnati's output was third behind just New York City and Philadelphia. Cincinnati made many products in small to medium sized factories that were mostly family owned and operated. It had become the major pork processing center and a major soap manufacturing site too because soap is made from animal fat. Proctor and Gamble was founded there in 1830. After the Civil War, the size of the factories and companies grew. John D. Rockefeller moved to Cleveland in 1854 to be a product merchant but switched to oil as that industry emerged. By 1870 he dominated the oil industry.
Manufacturing in other Ohio towns was more specialized: watches were made in Canton, agricultural machinery in Springfield, steel in Youngstown, railroad cars and office machinery in Dayton, and rubber in Akron. A large population of pottery makers moved from Liverpool, England to found Liverpool, Ohio and continue their specialty. Wagons, glass, and steel were made in Toledo. With every decade the centers of production of wheat, corn, cattle, hogs, and sheep shifted westward, creating first the large cities of St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Louisville, then Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and Chicago, and later Omaha, Kansas City, and Minneapolis.
Licht explains that in 1830, the suddenly realized fact that westward expansion had already been occurring for many years resulted in a sudden burst of land speculation. Its total grew from $2 million to $20 million between the years 1830 and 1836. Bank loans for land development and new industry were being made at a 24% annual interest rate. The economic recession, which began in 1837, caused land sales temporarily to drop to just $1 million in 1842.
Due to the lack of wood in the prairies, people started to make homes out of frames made with 2 by 4 inch (0.75cm x 1.6cm) boards that were simply nailed together instead of being jointed. During the 1830s, there were already daily boatloads of lumber arriving in Chicago from the north. It took about thirty years for this technique to become adopted in the eastern cities who were also beginning to fill street after street with brick homes. By 1900, timber homes and log homes had nearly disappeared.
In 1833 Chicago contained just 150 wooden houses and had just a few shops that sold salt, tea, coffee, sugar and clothing to the surrounding region. When the city was incorporated in 1833, optimists were already buying and selling lots twenty miles (30 km) out of town. These speculators were certain that Chicago would quickly become the commerce distribution center for all lands west. It also became a railroad hub and a shipping center for the Great Lakes region. Within fifteen years, Chicago's population had already reached 100,000 persons. The city was legendary for its mud. Road signs read "No Bottom," "Road to China," and "Man Lost." Firsthand America gives the story of a man who saw a hat in the mud. When he picked it up he found a man's face underneath and so asked if he needed help to get out, but the face replied that he was ridding a good horse who had gotten him out of worse spots. By the 1860s there were huge stockyards and meat packing plants, and there were forests of grain elevators near the railroad yards. The Chicago mills were processing agricultural products, lumber, flour, meat, and liquor for the East. It was also the site of the growing farm implement industry, some of which still have offices there. This mass transfer of goods brought banks, insurance companies, mercantile exchanges, and downtown retailers. The 1892 Columbian Exposition was held in Chicago. Chicago's central location resulted in the two newfangled mail-order companies of Montgomery Wards and Sears-Roebuck to be built there before the year 1900. By 1900 Chicago was an industrial and commercial colossus. Young people flocked there to work and live. By 1910 it had a population of 1.5 million persons–second only to New York City. In Chapter 21 we will meet the grandchildren of two families who moved to Chicago in the 1930s to find work.
In 1831, Cyrus McCormick's horse-drawn hay-reaper could cut ten-times as much wheat per day as could a person with a sickle. But this also meant an end to the community gatherings that used to be necessary for haying. After seeing the community-binding events that were the New England hay-mowings, we can understand, as we saw in Chapter 13, why it is that those of us humans who are Amish believe that a person on a tractor is a lonely person and that it is more human for community members to combine efforts to cut hay as a group, even if it takes more time and effort when using hand sickles. We can now understand why some groups of people still to this day shun the use of community-bond-decreasing machinery.
In 1847 Cyrus McCormick moved his hay-reaper factory to Chicago. By 1885 McCormick had 1,500 employees making 50,000 reapers per year. (In the 1950s, Gregory Pinkus and John Rock developed the birth-control pill through funding by Catherine McCormick, who had married a McCormick heir.) For a picture of the plant, visit www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/fullRecord.asp?id=24887. See a portrait of McCormick at www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/fullRecord.asp?id=8360. (The website has many more related images and photos in its collection at www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/ihc.)
Before there were railroads we drove cattle overland to market, but cattle could lose 60% of their weight during this journey, see http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/awal.0699. Cattle drives were necessary because we could not ship processed meat for any distance. After railroads connected West and East, the cattle were instead shipped by railroad to be slaughtered in the East. Licht describes how Gustavus Swift moved his meat packing plant to Chicago in 1875 with bold plans to slaughter cows there while they were fat and then use cold, northern winter railroad routes to send just their meat to the East. He setup a network of eastern outlets ready to sell this meat as soon as it arrived. In 1881 he also began to fill railroad cars with ice to be able to ship year-round. He built refrigerated warehouses in the East to store the meat for a short time. (At the age of fourteen, Swift had worked in his brother's butcher shop in Massachusetts. By his early twenties, Gustavus had become a cattle dealer and butcher.) Other food processing companies include, Philip Armour, which began a meat packing company, and John Dorrance’s Campbell Soup Company. Dorrance invented a process for condensing soup and storing it in newfangled tin cans that could be stored for long periods and transported over long distances, but he had to ask people to try their first-ever canned meal.
Cigarettes were beginning to be made as a smaller and cheaper, paper-wrapped version of the high-status leaf-wrapped cigars. Merrill mentions that in the early 1900s, New York men still felt that they should smoke cigars not the little cigar-ettes. James Bosnack developed a machine that could roll four cigarettes per second (today’s machines roll 250 per second). In 1884 James Duke bought the rights to all of James Bosnack's machines so that he could easily outproduce his local competitors who then wouldn't have such machines. In 1890 his company made 834 million cigarettes and earned $400,000 in profits from $4.5 million in sales. The same year he merged with four competitors to form the American Tobacco Company.
There was some manufacturing in the cities of Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, and Gary but the remainder of Indiana was involved only in agriculture. Grand Rapids Michigan was the largest producer of furniture in the U.S. while Milwaukee made beer. Minneapolis became a grain storage and processing center while Omaha and Kansas City became meat-packing centers. Moline, Illinois and Davenport, Iowa made agricultural equipment. Detroit, Michigan was a medium-sized manufacturing center until after 1900 when it began producing cars. Chicago, as we have seen, grew to rival New York City. The mountain states mainly produced minerals. Today, there is a line of manufacturing along the Pacific Coast but it is much smaller than that of the East, which includes much of the region between New York City and Chicago.
In 1860, the South was a mixture of many things: small family farms and slave-labor plantations, lower and upper class, coastal and interior, seigniorial and pre-bourgeois, some who preferred federal rights while others preferred state's rights, some industrialists, and some medium-sized commercial farms. And it was fully capitalistic. The South remained a mercantilistic offshoot in that it never tried to produce more than its single, cash crop of cotton for export while importing most all of its needs, and it never made plans to become a whole and independent economy. The South's plantation owners were massing wealth and had no reason to change their economic system–for example, by building factories. The South would have been the fourth richest country if it had become an independent nation in a peaceful, nondestructive manner but the Civil War of 1861-1865 left much of the South in ruins.
The end of slavery meant an entire reorganization of the South's production system in that few of us former slaves understandably had little interest in working for our former owners. When the news of the Northern victory came, many of us slaves threw down our tools and said "You can't make me do your work." Those who had farm land could not find laborers to hire, and the laborers who could farm the land had none to farm The compromise was the system of sharecropping in which a family contracted to work a piece of land and pay rent through a portion, typically half, of the harvested crops (we saw similar contracts in Ancient Mesopotamia). This meant that workers would be their own boss, but the trouble was that we newly-freed slaves had nothing but the clothes on our backs: we had no farming equipment. Economic stagnation and poverty occurred because most every family had to purchase seed and tools and such on credit and the family's annual crop rarely raised enough cash to pay off both the creditors and the landowner. When it occurred that a single merchant was making most of a region's loans, that person would often set the interest rate at will. The farming-family's debts simply carried from one year to the next and meant that the family could not move to new areas in search of better opportunity. Visit http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/28/ for a first-person account of this system.
Creditors insisted farmers grow cotton because it made them especially dependent on the creditor. At the same time, the price of cotton was declining throughout the world due to overproduction in several countries. Many countries, like Egypt, began growing cotton during the Civil War because of the South's wartime decrease in cotton production. This situation was beneficial to Southern creditors and employers in the short term only and resulted in poor economic conditions that lasted for of several decades. Only after World War I did many families manage to move out of the South to the factories of Chicago and other Northern and Western cities.
After 1880, some northeastern textile mills began relocating to the South in search of lower wages; this led to the collapse of the northern textile industry by 1925. This search for cheaper labor continues through today. Those companies that are able will repeatedly move their factory, every decade or so, to the current location of the cheapest labor on the earth, no matter on which continent it is to be found.
Throughout the 1800s in New England, social relationships among neighbors were continually changing but there was no change in the social relationships, values, or power arrangements of the South and almost no plans were made to move away from its cotton-based economy. While the economy of the North grew by 500% from 1860 through 1900, that of the South was stagnant from the end of the Civil War in 1865 until World War II. (But then also, a stagnant economy matters only to economics statisticians and only affects a person if it means trouble finding food each day.) Half the manufacturing growth of the North was due to the increase in its population of worker-consumers through immigration while the other half was due to increases in productivity and capitalization. (These fifty-fifty shares still occur in the U.S. today.) In 1900, 80% of the U.S. workforce was foreign-born.
The stagnation of the economy of the South was due to many choices and factors that resulted in minimal industrial growth. This case shows the large role that generations-old custom and culture play in the decision of a people to industrialize. Some peoples of the world pursue industrial growth while others prefer to keep life the way it has always been. That this was true even in the pro-industry United States, points out that it is a mistake for those of us who are already industrialists to imagine that everyone else in the world also wants to be industrialists.
Industrialization, urbanization, and commercialization
Licht explains that the process was more complex than the common phrase "industrialization and urbanization" can describe. We have seen that the U.S. industrialized through a slow and geographically uneven process. The nation was becoming more urban while a commercial market emerged in which everything began to be bought and sold in search of profit. The nation contained a mixture of wage laborers, family farms, commercial farms, and craft shops. There were industrial towns with large factories mass producing a very narrow range of items at a low cost, and there were also diverse and specialized shops in the large cities that produced smaller quantities of custom, handmade items while being careful not to make expensive versions of the lowcost items that the factories were making. There were also mill villages using the outwork system in which family labor was done in the home, and there were one-industry towns.
Licht also explains that the increased market activity pulled the change to industrialization and urbanization: More products were made as it was found that more people were buying them. In the U.S. in 1776, 90% of us were farmers. As factory-work and industry grew the percentage of farmers dropped to 80% in 1790, 65% in 1840, 50% in 1860, 40% in 1900, and it is just 1% today. Agriculture accounted for 25% of the nation's gross national product in 1900 while today it is 2%. (A similar but more rapid shift has occurred in the more recently industrializing nations. For example, 25% of India’s GNP today consists of agricultural production.) At the same, time the percentage of us who lived in urban areas increased from 10% in 1800 to 20% in 1860, and 40% in 1900, while today it is 75%. In 1860, there were just fifteen cities with a population larger than 50,000 persons, but there are about 2,000 cities in the U.S. today having a population greater than 10,000 persons. (This shows that having 20,000 nuclear bombs for only 2,000 cities can make “sense” only to our generals and political leaders.) Philadelphia's population exceeded 500,000 and New York City's had reached one million.
The industrialization in the U.S. through the years 1800 to 1850 meant that our way of life was changing from that of a mostly self-sufficient, rural farmer–with some help from our neighbors and other community members–to that of an urban, wage-earning laborer-customer. The individuals of our urban society today are not dependent on neighbors to harvest crops but are interdependent as wage-earning laborer-customers.
Beginning around 1830, the railroad companies were the first businesses needing to invent a large-scale organization able to administer an extensive enterprise spread across hundreds of miles or kilometers. For example, in 1840 the managers of the B&O Railroad wrote a manual of procedures that detailed tasks and responsibilities for each employee and setup layers of authority among many levels of managers. This is in contrast to the business enterprises, since Mesopotamian times, which operated in a single building or city. We have seen that throughout previous centuries, long distance trade operated through single merchants moving single cargo loads. By 1860 the railroads had a clear hierarchy and effective organizations in place to separate administration from ownership and to define rules and procedures. They devised a cost-accounting system and had financial officers who tracked the internal flow of revenue, and they learned to divide operations by region or product line. The yet-larger corporations that followed built on the procedures that the railroads had earlier devised.
At first, steam engines obtained their power by burning wood, but coal soon expanded the use of steam engines and enabled their size to be made larger. For photos visit www.ironbridge.org.uk. (It was soon found that coal could be processed into coke, which burns hot enough to make steel and produces methane gas that can be used for street lighting.) Larger steam engines enabled larger factories to be built, which in turn allowed larger corporations to exist. Licht explains that there is a direct relationship between coal, mass industry, and bureaucratic corporations.
Later corporations took what the railroads had learned about large-scale organization and adapted, modified, and expanded it through both foresight and trial-and-error to manage business on a previously nonexistent scale. A corporation that contains thousands of employees and is spread across several states needs a functioning system that, Licht explains, must consist of a basic sales strategy, an organizational scheme, a production system, accounting procedures, company rules and regulations, personnel practices, feedback, and forecasting methods.
As corporations were growing in size, many industries continued to be family owned and operated, producing small batches of specialty goods, and were not involved in the flood of mergers that occurred at the end of the 1800s. In 1880, the average factory in Philadelphia employed just twenty persons–only five had more than 750 employees. The typical business structure continued to be sole proprietorships and partnerships. Large scale corporations were less frequent–as they still are today. Only 10% of our businesses today are large corporations but these account for 90% of all sales.
Sole proprietors compete by selling the most products and services for the least amount of money that will allow them to continue operating and to pay their own living expenses. Consumers want nothing but to pay the lowest price. When the United States first became a nation, it consisted of nothing but sole proprietorships who typically make a profit of 15% of their total sales. This was the background world for the reasoning of Adam Smith's economics, which he published in 1776. Many of today's small businesses continue to compete in this way. Still today, the U.S. has a mix of sole proprietorships, which employ half of us, and larger corporations that employ the other half.
From 1820 through 1900, as a company grew to a large enough size that it could market its products to a large region it would sometimes try to squeeze out all competitors from that region to be able to set prices at a high level. Sometimes two large companies, that both made the same product, would agree on territories in which each had sole right to market their product. They made secret pacts to divide territory and to set prices but also found that these pacts would quickly collapse when one party saw a chance for relative gain because there is no legal recourse against a reneging pact member. The lack of competition enabled each to raise prices. For some companies, much effort was expended trying to secure a monopoly on a product or region so that it could raise prices and increase its profits. We often hear of capitalism being the competition of the free market. But often, a goal of business is to eliminate competition by building monopolies and forging back-room agreements between “competitors.” When half the sales within a particular industry involve but a handful of companies, then that market is said to be monopolized. Those companies search for the highest possible prices chargeable and do not directly compete. Supply and demand sometimes affects price, but more often, prices are controlled through the elimination of competition. Business is often an effort to remove competition, not to promote it. While our business leaders were talking of laissez-faire, saying that government should leave them to "act on their own to compete," they were instead forming agreements to act together to reduce competition, lower costs, and raise prices. This results in maximized profit, which becomes the income for the corporate owners and operators.
The Sherman Antitrust law was enacted in 1890 to fight this practice of secret, price-fixing agreements. Antitrust meant anti price-fixing but was not antimerger; the federal government never made antimerger laws. Before the Sherman Antitrust Law was enacted, price-fixing was done through secret arrangements between companies. This law left competition-controlling and high-price-seeking companies no choice but to switch tactics from secret agreements to public mergers. Our corporations invented the merger as a way to remove competition so that prices could be higher than occurs among competing proprietors.
Large corporations operated across state lines and so could not be governed by a single state. Individual state governments left things in limbo, and no federal laws were passed to control the collusive actions of the owners and operators of some of our corporations. Rockefeller's holding company (as described in the next section) was designed to reduce competition and was illegal under the laws of most states, but corporations quickly exceeded the ability of states to govern them. In Chapter 18 we will see how our big businesses have always been ahead of our government's attempts to govern them, and that today, Big Business is global while government is not at all.
Large corporations could be built through mergers only in those industries where standardized, mass-produced goods could be produced, where machinery could replace labor, and where economies of scale were possible. To put an economy of scale into action required large amounts of capital to buy expensive machinery. Scalable industries include oil, steel, copper, aluminum, chemicals, sugar, alcohol, grain, and tobacco but not clothing, textiles, shoes, lumber, furniture, leather, machine tools, or printing. These excluded industries involve customized products made in small, constantly changing batches and could not be supervised by the corporate bureaucracy–until recently (see Chapter 18).
Beginning in the year 1895 there was merger frenzy. It quickly occurred that five or six corporations dominated each of the industries listed above, except for the aluminum industry which consisted of the single company Alcoa, which is the Aluminum Company of America. The handful of corporations within an industry learned to develop mutually beneficial cooperations to reduce rivalries and avoid being the one forced out of business if strict competition were to break out.
A large corporation might find a few persons who will pay an inordinately large amount of money for a product. From the corporation's view, this selling price is ok as long as enough customers can be found in the world who will pay this price. This is what is meant by "charging what the market will bear." For example, it is ok to charge a price that is so high that a family can afford to purchase your product just once in a lifetime as long as there are enough families out there to keep income coming into the business (think of something your family can afford to do just once in a lifetime, or once per year, month, or week). This results in the highest profit percentage and the most financially secure business. This security is more important than obtaining the largest possible income. If one-tenth of this highest-possible price is charged, there may be twenty times as many customers willing to buy, and this would double the total income but at a lower profit percentage. (Calculus can be used to determine the combination of price and its percentage of willing purchasers that maximizes either income or profit).
Corporate managers in manufacturing businesses tried to control the factory floor by defeating unions, increasing mechanization to replace expensive, skilled workers with unskilled persons, developing increasingly detailed divisions of labor, increasing supervision, adopting the standardization of parts, and using conveyor-belt production techniques. They would offer benefits to encourage allegiance and discipline, setup career ladders to promote loyalty, and consolidate resources through corporate consolidation. The mergers of the 1890s resulted in large companies that could purchase expensive equipment, such as that used in making steel. This steel-making equipment required unskilled labor and so replaced many skilled workers, and lead to lower wages, union busting attempts by the corporation, and large-scale strikes. The corporate managers also learned to influence politics and politicians in an attempt to steer away public and regulatory opposition to their existence; it seems that the actions of some of our corporate executives invoked the "are you trying to cheat me" response that is part of our social-primate intellectual inheritance. Many executives became as rich as only kings and queens had been.
Licht explains that many of those of us of legendary wealth often got that way "by never being jailed for pseudo legal tactics and by never considering the ill effects of our rapacious activities." For example, Jay Gould once tried to gain control of the entire gold supply of the nation through massive buying and by spreading rumors that he was acting on behalf of the U.S. government. He was never jailed for this action though it jeopardized the nation's economy. He also illegally flooded the market with Erie Railroad stock and was forced to flee the state of New York. Gould managed to bribe a New Jersey legislator into passing a new law allowing him to hold the Erie stock within New Jersey.
Many large corporations were formed with the sole aim of immediate profit from the sale of stock. Most did not endure because of a failure to form effective administrative structures and procedures. Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and General Electric are among some of the long-lived corporations. Other business heads, like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, instead built a single, large and enduring company. Carnegie built an efficiently operating steel company that he sold in 1901 for $200 million to U.S. Steel. U.S. Steel was a huge conglomerate assembled by J. P. Morgan, who also assembled General Electric, and International Harvester. Carnegie then became a philanthropist and built libraries in many cities.
Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company began in Cleveland, Ohio. He grew to dominate his market by buying out as many competitors as possible, including fifty companies in Cleveland and eighty in Pittsburgh during the years 1865 to 1868 alone. Standard Oil's main product was kerosene for oil lamps. By 1878, Rockefeller held 80% of the nation's refineries within a single "holding company" whose purpose was to act as a cooperating group in purchases and sales. Because this group, or holding company, was such a large customer, it could control the price at which it purchased crude oil and the price it paid the railroads to transport its refined oil to the market. It was such a large distributor and seller of its processed oil that it could control the price that the dealers and customers paid. Control is achieved, for example, by telling a crude oil supplier that they will purchase something like 80% of its entire stock but at less than the usual price. The next year they again offer to purchase 80% of the supplier's stock but at an even lower price than the previous year.
Legally, this Ohio company couldn't own the stocks of other companies, especially those in other states, or even tell those other companies what to do. In 1890, the Sherman Anti-Trust Law was passed to outlaw corporate combinations, such as Rockefeller's holding company, that monopolized and restrained trade. Licht explains that in response, Rockefeller dissolved the holding company but reorganized into several companies chartered in different states but with interlocking directorships and a key set of executives who maintained control over the whole. (In the coming sections we will see Mills description of the sharing of like-minded directors among corporations.) In 1899, Rockefeller managed to get a law passed in New Jersey allowing him to control all the companies from within a single, New Jersey holding company. This is an early example of the way in which our wide-spread corporations have usually managed to outmaneuver our local government's legislative attempts to keep them from unfairly controlling their market. We will see later how some global corporations are doing this today. Rockefeller also learned to use philanthropy for public relations.
While J. P. Morgan bought companies to merge into something larger, other persons tried to build a company out of singularly important products. George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison, are two examples of persons using this approach. Other large corporations were built by expanding into several markets. For example, Swift built a meat company that bought live animals, processed them, transported them to its distant warehouses, and then sold the meat in its own retail stores. Theodore Vail used Alexander Graham Bell's telephone to create Bell Telephone Company, which that later became AT&T. The large corporation was slow to learn to branch out into multiple industries. For example, Du Pont made only explosives until after World War I, when it began to make paint and synthetic fibers and such. Many of today's big corporations are involved in a wide range of industries, for example Sony is in a range of industries, from electronics to movies.
Labor strikes of the 1880s and 1890s
It had already occurred in the U.S. before the end of the 1800s that the gap between rich and poor had grown such that the top 1% of our population owned 51% of our nation's assets, while the lower 44% owned just 1.2%. The J.P. Morgan interests alone held 341 directorships in 112 corporations with a total capitalization of twenty-two billion dollars, which is more than three times the assessed value of all real and personal property in New England. The top 1% consisted of about 125,000 families who held an average of $264,000 of property. The bottom 44% consisted of 5.5 million families who owned an average of $150 in property, which is not much of an increase over the value of the spoons, candles, and pots owned by the average farming family in the year 1800. The top 12% owned 86% of the property while the lower 88% owned just 14%. The widest gap in wealth occurred in 1929 as the wealthiest 1% owned 59% of the property, but it soon after decreased to about 40%, where it remains today. Today, the top 20% of us receive half our total income while the lower 20% receive just 4% (see Chapter 22). What are these other divisions today, and what were they before industrialization? What is the appropriate division of wages, wealth, and assets among a population? Who is to contribute to its operation and development and how are its benefits to be divided? Who is to make these important decisions? All of us together.
In his article The New Politics within the book 1915, The Cultural Moment, John Buenker explains that the social legislation that occurred around the year 1900 was in response to the common perception of the growing inequality of U.S. society. There was a general resentment of the injustice of the readily visible and widening gap in wealth between poor and rich that occurred within a few decades of the start of our Industrial Revolution. (Do you think there is resentment today between rich and poor nations, or instead, do the people of those nations that an industrialized nation would call "poor" prefer instead to keep their current way of life and avoid the social drawbacks of the "rich" nation?)
Those of us who were the wealthiest persons in the nation had shown much human talent in acquiring half the entire nation's production assets in less than one century. One might shout "I am as rich as the twenty million poorest persons in the nation," right before dying–just as the rest of us do. Extreme wealth is nothing but proof of your ability, or that of your recent ancestors, to gouge and overcharge others. The upper wealth-seekers rig the rules in their own favor but are playing a game in which most of us want no part. It's ok for someone to decide for themselves that acquiring the wealth of millions of others through business is the meaning of life, but these persons are not supposed to cause extra hardship for those they are milking. That violates the agreement, which forms the core of our nature, to cooperate in a mutually-beneficial exchange of assistance instead of having everyone going it alone. It is a bit extreme to have the desire to acquire the wealth of millions of persons. Some of those of us who believe life is about massing wealth have trouble understanding that anyone could imagine any other reason to live, but few of us care about acquiring the assets of other people or nations. Most of us simply feel that success in life means having healthy and happy children and communities. We simply want to laugh and joke with our spouse, family, and friends, to pursue life, and to raise our children in a happy, cooperative, and just community.
Among the population of the U.S., there was a general resentment of these injustices. Throughout the world, there were discussions and reactions to the human rights abuses of industrialization. Industrial labor meant long hours under dangerous and unsanitary conditions. White women and black persons were paid half as much as white men, children much less. Korten explains that the 1890s saw widespread child labor, subsistence wages for 11 out of 12.5 million families, industrial sabotage by employees, numerous nationwide labor strikes, and 35,000 accidental deaths on the job every year. (The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that today about 5,000 persons die on the job every year, see http://stats.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi1.htm, and that another five million are injured.) We have seen that already by the 1840s, there were newspaper reports describing the poor working and living conditions of those of us who had no other choice but to settle for this means of supporting our families. Several members of each nuclear family had to work in the shops in order for the family to get enough money to buy bread and pay rent.
During the 1880s and 1890s there were a large number of violent labor strikes, many of which resulted in the deaths of workers and militia. The workers would generally strike because of their economic insecurity, not from any particular hardship. Many workers felt that their livelihoods were being threatened by the arbitrary decisions of distant executives. About half the strikes were over wages while others involved calls for shorter hours, controls on hiring, or union recognition. About 10% were sympathy strikes. Most strikes lasted fifteen to thirty days and began after announced changes in the rules regarding work assignments, discipline, or layoffs. The workers won in 47% of strikes, lost in 39%, and compromised 14% of the time. In the end, these strikes resulted in an overall increase in wages. The strikes were held to decide whether the security of our corporate owners and operators through sufficiently healthy profits was more important than the security of workers' lives through regularly occurring paychecks that were larger than the minimal amount needed to just barely cover rent and to buy bread.
Licht says that the first generation of us workers to encounter the large corporation were challenging the growing political and economic power of concentrated capital and its threat to democracy. (We will see in Chapter 19 that democracy is a blending of the priorities of all persons without preference to those of any group.) The workers fought injustice when they had believed it to have crossed a line. This was the reaction of the U.S. labor force to the economic injustice of the times–within thirty years of the emergence of large-scale business and within sixty years of the emergence of industry.
Keep in mind that just fifty years before these strikes began to occur, during the lifetimes of the striker's grandparents, most of us had much more control over our own future as we worked on our own family farms. Notice that as one generation chooses to trade its farming community way of life for that of the urban wage-earner-consumer, their children will grow up in culture differing from that of their parent’s youth. Each subsequent generation will believe that the earner-consumer ways are the only way of life because it was the culture of their childhood. Many of today’s city dwellers hear their grandparents describe the strange ways of the farming community.
Real wages had increased by 70% during the years 1865 to 1890 due to the combination of rising wages and falling prices. Prices were falling throughout much of the period 1870 through 1900 because there was an economic depression during the years 1873 through 1878, a recession from 1884 through 1886, and another depression lasting from 1893 through 1897. Unemployment reached as high as 30%. During each year, the typical worker was unemployed for part of the year. Just 25% of workers worked full-time throughout the year while 60% worked just half the year.
This resulted in a such a precarious life for so many of us that a typical family was lucky to make ends meet. Tenant apartments appeared in many cities. Children contributed 40% of the family's income–and were not in school while doing so. When workers earn this little, they stop buying products, which means that factory production is then decreased which in turn results in more layoffs. Mills explains that the eighteenth-century middle class of proprietors had economic and political security, but the new middle class job workers did not. The formerly independent middle class began to become politically and economically dependent on the state.
The striking workers had the support of the community members, who would take to the streets to show their support, and arrest records show that the supporters came from all walks of life. The target of the community uprisings was the property of the corporation. Other local workers would often strike in sympathy. Local shopkeepers often extended credit to strikers, and local newspapers often blasted the governmental officials for being unfair. (In Chapter 19, we will see similar economic support of persons advocating political reform in non-democratic countries.) Since local militias frequently sided with strikers, the local political authorities often had to request more-distant militia, whose arrival might cause an escalation of violence. The strikes were a grass-roots phenomenon prompted by a resentment of economic injustices and anger about hard times and the emergence of the giant and uncontrollable corporation. Organized labor played a smaller role in the upheaval because half the strikes did not involve a formal union.
The revival of the unions began in 1850 after the depression of 1837 to 1843 had ended. As the price of products rose during the 1860s, the number of union members increased because workers wanted corresponding increases in wages. A national labor union formed in 1866 but lasted just five years. The secret organization, the Knights of Labor, lastd from 1869 through 1895. In 1886, Samuel Gompers (see www.history.umd.edu/Gompers/index.htm) created the American Federation of Labor and became the chief spokesman for labor until he died in 1924. Licht says that Gompers challenged the capitalists head-on while Eugene Victor Debs (see www.eugenevdebs.com) challenged the capitalistic system.
There were 474 strikes in 1881, 1,432 in 1886, and 1,717 in 1891, and this made an average of 500 per year during the years 1880 through 1885, 1,000 per year during 1885 through 1890, and 1,300 per year during the 1890s. There were 125,000 striking workers per year during the 1880s and 250,000 per year during the 1890s. This involved as much as 2 to 3 percent of the entire workforce and 10,000 to 30,000 businesses. Just 2% of the strikes involved railroads, while 10% involved coal workers, another 10% involved clothing workers, and 26% involved construction workers. (In the U.S. today, only 15% of workers belong to any union at all–and two-thirds of those union workers are employed by the government.) During the years 1877 through 1900, troops were used 500 times to quell labor unrest, and this showed that our corporate leaders had access to government police and were determined to suppress strikes at all costs. They could also choose to hire strike breakers, who were often new immigrants.
Social critics questioned the obvious difficulties and made suggestions for improvement. Once again, some questioned the very foundations of capitalism. As early as 1860, social reformers were calling for legislation to create agencies that would gather information and statistics on working conditions, standards of living, and worker unrest. From 1870 through 1900, thirty states created such agencies, and in 1885, the U.S. government created the Bureau of Labor Statistics, see www.bls.gov. It began to track wages, hours worked, accidents, family structure, consumption patterns, housing conditions, union membership, working members of the family, strike activity, and union membership. In Chapter 22 we will have a closer look at some of these statistics.
Reformers wanted to make the public more aware of the deteriorating lives of many workers so that legislative relief measures might be put into place. This meant that government would become larger if it were to take on this new function that it never before had to do. But notice also that we can choose either to maintain the quality of workers lives though direct wages from employers or through indirect wages that are redistributions of taxes collected from employers. For some extreme examples, we could be paid no money for our work and instead, receive all of our income through governmental taxation of all employers, or, have no taxes but sufficient wages, or no wages at all and instead receive a share of company profits in "employee-owned" companies. The nations of the world have spent the last century or so experimenting with different combinations of direct wages and indirect wages (taxes).
During the 1870s and 1880s, there were many protests to switch from twelve- to eight-hour workdays. In one such protest, on May 1, 1886, about 200,000 persons walked off the job in both large and small towns across the country. The workers said that the shorter workday would give a well-earned rest but also time to be human, to pursue education, and to fulfill civic duty. For example, some said they could not vote because they had neither time nor energy after finishing work. (You might like to examine Oregon's current mail-in voting option. Often, 80% of Oregonians vote while the voter turnout of the other states averages just 50%. But others argue that it is too easy for someone to bribe or coerce a voter who is not at a public voting booth.)
The railroad worker strike of 1877 began a few weeks after the executives of each of the major railroads simultaneously announced a 10% pay cut. Many persons thought this was an example of the worst of our executive's backroom deals. In Martinsburg, West Virginia on Monday, July 16, 1877 the railroad workers of the B&O Railroad refused to handle the trains or even to let them pass through town. The president of the B&O Railroad persuaded the governor of West Virginia to send in the state militia. The ease with which the corporate executive gained access to the "levers of power," including the governor's agreement to use the threat of deadly force, made many workers wonder if the U.S. was a nation that stood for the corporate executive's profits or for the general well-being of all of its people. How would you handle this situation? The troops who first arrived in Martinsburg were on the side of the workers but a fight did erupt and a striking worker was killed. This ignited a nationwide strike that spread to workers of other railroad companies and other businesses, too. The entire B&O Railroad was shut down. Protesters then gathered at the B&O office in Baltimore. In the resulting riot, ten of us protesters were killed, sixteen were injured, and 250 were arrested in fights with police. (Some of us think it's hard to imagine that some of us put the pursuit of our own profits above other human lives but there are others who believe the opposite.) The Governor of Maryland asked the President of the United States to send federal forces to help restore order in what was the first use of federal forces to suppress labor unrest.
Strikers in Pittsburgh were blocking all trains so the local militia was called in. When they refused to take up their post, the militia from more distant cities were summoned. in what te strikers viewed to be an invasion. As a train load of those troops arrived, they opened fire on the blocking strikers, killing twenty and wounding seventy. Word of this massacre brought the entire town into the streets to attack the militia, loot stores, and set fire to nearly all railroad property. After three days of fighting, the lives of forty persons were ended and 104 locomotives and 2,153 railroad cars were destroyed. Few railroad buildings were left standing.
Three days of rioting in Chicago left eighteen persons dead. The railroad strike spread into a general strike as many workers from many trades struck in sympathy (this means that owners and executives of these other trades would have been mad at railroad owners and executives for causing inconveniences to spread to their own lives). Some federal troops were actually brought in from fighting Native Americans to suppress the Chicago labor dispute.
This strike involved other towns, including San Francisco and St. Louis. The strike lasted for two weeks and halted much of the nation's commerce. This strike cost the railroads some $30 million and resulted in lost wages for workers. Many workers lost their job as they returned to work. In the end, thousands were jailed, hundreds were wounded, and fifty persons lost their life because the owners and executives of the nation's major railroads simultaneously announcing a 10% pay cut for railroad workers in an effort to make their corporations more profitable. (In Chapter 18 we will see that whenever such a cost-saving is found, it often occurs that the suggesting executive receives a portion of that saving as a bonus.)
It is the demonstrated nature of the owners and executives of our profit-depending businesses to pay the lowest wages for which workers will settle without violence. When this means a harsh and precarious life for a typical worker's family, who barely makes enough money to pay rent and buy bread, then our civilization is in need of adjustment. When many laborers endure a harsh life so that a few administrators can be very comfortable then the precious lives of those workers are being stolen from them; it is then evident that we have not yet finished building the fully-just civilization.
When the steelworkers of Homestead, Pennsylvania went on strike in 1892, the company's owners and executives instructed the factory guards to build fortifications. They also hired three hundred extra guards; as these new guards first arrived, they were attacked by striking workers. Nine workers and seven guards were killed. The state militia arrived to restore order and to enable the managers to hire non-union replacement workers. The union strike was broken after three months. Full production was again resumed but with fewer union workers. The people of Homestead were bitter for decades.
George Pullman had a manufacturing plant, located in Chicago, in which sleeping and dinning cars were built for sale to railroad companies. He built lodgings for his employees south of town but charged high rent. Licht describes how in June 1894 Pullman announced a reduction in wages in response to the 1893 recession. When the announcement caused his employees to strike, he in turn closed down the plant and threatened to evict his lodgers. This strike quickly spread to once again shut down the nation's railroad system. The strike ended when federal troops killed twenty-five persons and wounded sixty others. Pullman then reopened his plant with new employees.
On May 1, 1886, a nationwide strike began as 200,000 workers demanded the workday be cut from twelve to eight hours, as mentioned above. At Cyrus McCormick's reaper plant in Chicago, a rally was broken up by police who killed four persons. That night 2,500 persons met in Chicago's Haymarket Square to protest these killings. A bomb exploded in the midst of us police killing eight, so we in turn shot eight persons dead and wounded fifty others. This battle reverberated throughout the country. (The Library of Congress has a website containing Haymarket riot evidence at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ichihtml/hayhome.html. See also www.chicagohistory.org/dramas.)
The years 1880 through 1942 saw much conflict between those of us who owned factories and those of us who worked in them and bought their products. Those of us who own factories employ people to work in them, and in turn depend on the purchases of employees to obtain our own income. Since the government was siding with the corporations whenever a strike was seen to reduce interstate commerce, the unions learned to keep their strikes on a smaller and more local scale and to keep their objectives more focused. The last major strike occurred in 1894. From then until World War II, there continued to be many conflicts between labor and capital but few violent strikes happened after 1900. This clash between workers and corporation owners came within the first sixty years of our shift from being family farmers to wage-earning consumers. Those of us who make and operate corporations had shown much talent in concentrating the nation's assets. Strikes occurred as owners exceeded the wage-earner’s endurance for precarious lives and uncertain futures.
The role of government and courts in industrialization
What was the role of the U.S. government in the industrialization of the nation? Licht explains that its largest roles were in acquiring land through international transactions, such as the Louisiana Purchase, by taking land through war with Mexico, and in forcing native peoples onto reservations. The government surveyed and then sold these public lands to individuals and corporations. Before the Civil War of 1861 to 1865, the U.S. government played a minor role in economic development. The first and second U.S. banks developed fewer industries than did private funding. Telegraphs, canals, and railroads were mostly built with private funds. Education received less funding from government than from private sources until after 1860. Governmental tariffs helped to grow just a handful of industries–steel for example.
The political founders of the U.S. did not imagine that the nation would become a huge, economic machine. That began to occur a few decades after the Revolution of 1776 was over. To limit the power of the federal government, the founders restricted it from taxing luxuries, making bills on U.S. credit, or establishing national schools or research institutions, and the founders gave states the right to grant licenses of incorporation. (In the coming chapters, we will see that more recently some of the world's governments have tried instead to dictate industrialization from the top down.)
The founders knew there would be interstate commerce and said that no state could place obstacles to the flow of goods, people, or money across state borders. The federal government, not individual states, was to issue copyrights and patents to encourage trade, and only the federal government could expand the territory of the U.S. A state could not seek to expand its own size. Licht says that "the U.S. Constitution did not promote economic development, industrialization, or capitalism, it simply allowed them to occur." This was a larger role for the government than promoting canals or railroads or in setting protective tariffs. Through the end of the Civil War in 1865, the government played a minor role in industrializing the nation because of the distrust of power and the limits on power designed into the Constitution. It was felt that if the government were allowed to act, it would just grant favors to favored elites.
Until the battle between big business and government began to occur, there was little mention of laissez-faire economics in the U.S. That term was first used by corporate leaders to warn against government interference in their own objectives. In France in 1750, the term was used to mean that the government should not pick "pet industries" to protect and develop. For example, in response to the French government's involvement in the candle-making industry, someone said "the government should leave it alone before the king decides to outlaw the sun." Industries should be allowed to develop on their own instead of the king and queen of France trying to dictate which industries and which products should be created. Corporate leaders said the government had no role in the economy, which should be left to private business. But, while business was saying that government should leave them to act on their own to compete, they were forming agreements among themselves to act together to reduce competition, lower costs, and raise prices–all to raise profits–as we saw above in Rockefeller's holding company. Around the year 1800, the one-person craft-shops were competing to provide the most products and services for the least price. This sort of competition has occurred less often among large-scale corporations who sometimes work to limit competition and fix prices.
What was the role of the U.S. courts in promoting or restricting industrialization? The courts were usually more sympathetic with entrepreneurs and with creditors than with private individuals. For example, the court would more often side with the mill-builder seeking access to a river rather than with the farmer who needed to irrigate a crop field. Consumers had little recourse when they found that they had purchased defective goods (we still see fights between manufacturers and consumers, republicans and democrats, over this today). The U.S. Constitution of 1789 called for a nationally uniform bankruptcy law but none was passed until the 1860s because the courts struck down every attempt–a final law was passed in 1893. Similarly, debtor's prison was not abolished until the 1830s. Employees assumed all risk for injuries on the job–placing the value of the product above the life of a human. The courts showed that the fine print of a contract mattered more to them than did any ideas of fair practice. Since these court rulings sided with business over fairness, local communities had to pass laws for quality product-standards and worker safety. The debate was characterized as a fight over un-liable businesses versus governmental intrusions.
Since the U.S. Constitution had nothing to say about the working conditions of laborers, a new decision had to be made about the role of government in regulating business in this way. Do you think this is a role of government or should employees and employers make their own agreements? Which party would yield the most power in such an agreement, an employer or a group of employees? Do you think business should be free to sell defective or harmful products and let the consumer choose not to buy them or to instead use the products of a competitor or should the government be involved? Sometimes, corporate power seeks to impose its will on its workers and the consumers. Government has been force to become involved in defense of the sometimes lesser power of individuals. One of today's decision about the role of government has been over the health care of the members of the nation.
Local courts were most often sympathetic to business owners and fought labor unions by considering them to be illegal attempts to restrict interstate trade. Legal protection for unions did not exist until the 1930s. In 1886, the courts ruled that since a corporation is a collection of citizens, it has all the same rights as a citizen. But the courts didn't decide that a union is a similar collection of citizens. Does a corporation restrict interstate trade? What does it restrict? Mills says that the supremacy of corporate economic power began with this Supreme Court decision.
The southern, agricultural states stood in the way of most of the attempts of the northern, industrial states to get the federal government to fund any expansion of northern industry. For example, southern legislators blocked the building of roads that were needed only in the north since the south had plenty of navigable rivers. But during the Civil War, the South was temporarily absent from the U.S. Congress, and this allowed the northern states to get their way in passing the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution and in established the preeminence of federal over state government. (In Chapter 19 we will see how a democracy is a balance of views and priorities while an authoritarian government consists of a single party with its single view of priorities.) Do you want to have strong national government or strong state and local government? This change in governmental power relations of states versus federal preeminence played less role in reshaping the nation than did the rise of the corporation, or the fight between labor and capital, or the changes in government that came in response to the Great Depression (in the economic cycle). When the Civil War was over, the South returned to Congress and continued to block the growth of federal government.
In his 1956 book The Power Elite, sociologist C. Wright Mills gives a description of the growth of U.S. business and government during the years 1800 to 1950. He explains that the growth of Big Government is a delayed and reluctant response to the social consequences of our shift from farming to factory work. This is an important lesson. He also describes the layers of our society. The following pages contain a summary of his book.
In the United States in the year 1776, the Founding Fathers said that a strong and independent middle class made a society of balanced classes. At that time there were several small organizations, each having equal power. (The United States never had a nobility. That is, there were never persons who held power simply because they were born into a noble family.) The political and economic aspects of society were independent of each other; today they are intricately joined.
At that time, the military establishment, economic institutions, political order, and social life shared the same group of leading persons, and the cultural, social, economic, political, and military leaders easily shifted from a top role in one of these areas to another. The more-important persons were leaders in more than one of these groups at the same time. The elite could be legislators, merchants, people of the frontier, scholars, or surveyors. Henry Cabot Lodge said that he first remembered Boston society to be based on the families that had been there the longest. Their previous generations had been educators, merchants, lawyers, legislators, and judges, and they had fought in the Revolution and helped to write the State and National Constitutions. Until 1850, the elite were at most a loose coalition. In the early 1800s, the emergence of the factory owner broadened the economic order. There also emerged a political elite in charge of the new party system that grew with the new nation. But no small clique dominated either political or economic affairs.
After some decades, it came to be that every small town had a set of upper families who owned most of the town's property (remember that New England towns were small commercial centers rather than living centers), and these families were able to make important local decisions concerning the building of new expansion projects and such. This situation still exists today. These are the people whose faces you often see in the local newspaper. They own the paper. They own the radio station, the three important local industrial plants, and most of the commercial property along main street. They direct the banks, and their children intermarry. Big cities contain a collection of such wealthy families. An extreme example today is that just a handful of families, including the Agnelli's who own Fiat, control two-thirds of Italy's commerce.
It takes a good starting sum of money and the right circumstances to build larger amounts of money. But to obtain great wealth requires that you are born wealthy. The newly-rich are referred to as "new money." The families who make up the upper class are constantly changing but the type of person remains. They are the persons included in "social registers" listing those who are not just wealthy or of notoriety but who are truly comfortable in a ballroom and will not make other guests uncomfortable. For similar reasons, a wealthy person will pay $1,000 for a meal or a motel room to be guaranteed that the clientele includes no riffraff, who are persons unable to pay such a fee. Mills says that today's pro-athletes and movie-stars merely form the celebrity element of our society. He also points out that the members of the Senate and the Congress usually come from the upper class and that few have been wage-earners.
As the new industries of steel, railroad, automobiles, and oil developed there occurred humongous corporations with a few persons at the top who would become very rich. Many of the very-rich became so by receiving huge gifts of the people's resources from our government. The railroad and mining industries have received more land than was given to all of the homesteaders who spread the nation westward. Our taxes have built the roads that enabled a few families to become very rich by manufacturing cars.
The United States spent a tremendous amount of money during World War II, most of which involved a small number of corporations. Two-thirds of the prime supply contracts went to a set of one hundred corporations–one-third of those contracts went to just ten of them. That is, ten corporations accounted for one-third of the war-material business. This meant that the plans for the war effort involved military and corporate leaders more than it included political leaders.
These largest corporations are administratively and politically interrelated in that they share top executives and associations. These associations organize a unity of view and translate narrow economic powers into industry-wide and class-wide powers used against labor organizations and in getting politicians to promote their interests. They also transfer their views to small business operators.
Mills finds that the corporate leaders mainly came from the most-rich not from the middle or lower class, nor from recent immigrants–as the "land of opportunity" promises. The chief executives and the very-rich are mainly the same group of persons and have a single guiding interest. The corporate leader is not the person with the knowledge or the ideas for new products. Instead leaders simply make decisions from the briefings they receive from those who do have knowledge. When handed a 3,000 page report, a leader might say “In three sentences, just tell me what I need to know to make this decision.” (George W. Bush likes to explain that this is how he handles it.) They hire people with knowledge and ideas but do not move these people into higher corporate positions. It is a fallacy that the smart and knowledgeable always become wealthy or that the wealthy are smart and knowledgeable.
Wealth occurs in the form of money, land, buildings, and stocks. The corporate world is the organizational center of the private property system. A fraction of a percent of our businesses own most of the wealth and assets and employ most of the workers. By 1939, the top 250 corporations already owned 56% of the production facilities of the United States. Mills points out that most of the stock of the largest corporations is owned by a small number of the most wealthy of us and that this means that the profit of those corporations is simply the income of the most wealthy of us. Today, 0.5% of us own one-third of all stocks, just 10% of us own 80%. Typically, just a fraction of 1% of us own most of the voting stock and receive the majority of corporate dividends.
The corporate executives control the property that belongs to many individuals. They are the trustees for the financial interests of these individuals but no checks exist for their fairness and judgment. They never had to win the moral consent and approval of those over which they hold power. These executives are hidden behind closed doors and are not always concerned with the numerous, interrelated aspects of society–including pollution and health or unemployment, divorce, and decreased consumption–just the profit of their own business. It amounts to what they can get for themselves at the expense of others. In contrast, the state is the trustee for all aspects of society and is subject to a free electorate. When elected politicians perform poorly or do not respond to our requests then we vote them out of office. In contrast, the business executive holds no public debate of actions and does not have to campaign for election by the entire public. Some stock holders are able to vote but lots of stock are sold as nonvoting shares. When voting in political elections, it is one vote per person–giving each person an equal say. In contrast, it is not one vote per stockholder but one vote per share, giving more say to persons having more shares. In deciding whether you want a particular task to be handled by business or government, you might decide whether you want the handler to have a free hand or to have to answer to a free electorate. For example, there is now a debate to turn social security over to private business. (The U.S. social security system was our response in the 1930s to seeing our elderly poor die in the streets.)
Mergers began around the year 1895 and within just fifty years the largest two or three hundred corporations dominated the nation's economy. (We'll see in Chapter 18 that today about 300 global corporations dominate the global economy.) The industry of the United States was growing through the production of washing machines, see www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=7801 and www.memorialhall.mass.edu/collection/itempage.jsp?itemid=7989, steel, cars, radios, telephones, stoves, and televisions and such. In each type of business, the all-out attempt at monopoly creates two or three large companies which are the end result of a series of successively larger mergers. For example, Merrill explains that 2,200 car models were made during the years 1895 to 1905, including 125 each of steam powered and electric powered cars. Within a few decades, just a handful of companies remained and these would no longer compete. (When was the last time you saw a price war among automakers or an ad that brought attention to the shortcomings and flaws of another brand of car?)
Today, each brand-new industry will have early competition that is soon followed by a series of mergers. Examples from recent decades include the initial spread and subsequent merger of cable television and internet access providers. The first managers and executives of a new industry know not to be mentally attached or loyal to a single company but to instead look out for the interests of the industry and its coming mergers. In most every industry today, just a few corporations dominate. These few companies are not a monopoly or subject to antitrust laws but do not compete. They monitor each other's decisions. They are happy to share the industry's market because to risk further competition is to risk being the one out of three that would disappear. They set prices to be "the highest the market will bear" because that results in the largest profit percentages (maybe not the largest incomes) and the safest financial existence.
In 1996, 82% of the twenty million firms in the United States were sole proprietorships and partnerships while just 18% were corporations, but 90% of sales were done by the corporations. The nation's small business employs about half of us workers but the largest 1,000 companies in the U.S. account for over 60% of the nation's Gross National Product. The new technologies of the typewriter, telephone, rapid printing, and then the computer has enabled the bureaucracy necessary for the corporation to grow to billion dollar size.
Korten lists some of the monopolized U.S. industries of the 1990s. (Economists use the rule of thumb that if four companies control 40% of a market then it is monopolistic.) Ninety-two percent of the appliance market was controlled by the top four major appliance corporations, which include Whirlpool, General Electric, Electrolux/WCI and Maytag. The four airlines United, American, Delta, and Northwest account for 66% of passenger miles. Four computer software companies controlled 55% of software sales in 1990, and then two of these merged in 1994. In the entire world, the top five companies control about 50% of their market in the consumer durables, automotive, airline, aerospace, electronic components, electrical, electronics, steel, oil, personal computer, and media industries.
Corporations are now more than simply a business; the largest are states within states. A small company can come and go without many effects but when a giant corporation gets into trouble there can be government and military intervention on their behalf. If it occurs that the President of the United States more often relies on corporations then those corporations rely on the President, then the corporations will be in a position to make demands of the President. (This is similar to the way that King John relied more on the landed barons than they did on him, enabling them to force him to sign the Magna Carta.)
The Congress dominated the President throughout the 1800s. Then, from 1900 to 1945 Congress partially relinquished power to the President. The two-party system had become a semi-feudal structure of favors and protection. Legislators would search for a favor they could do without harming their other interests. The committee rules of the House and Senate were chosen such that their senior members held all of the power. The legislators ignored national issues and could raise local issues in only a contrived manner. They were happy to let the President insert national issues into the picture and to abdicate to the President all debate concerning emergency issues of war and society–lest a semi-organized deadlock would occur.
Recently, Congress has been making steps to restore the balance because a series of presidents have exceeded their legal power. For example, our presidents waged the Vietnam war for years without having ever received the consent of Congress, which has the sole Constitutional authority to wage war. Other abuses include the Watergate Scandal, Nixon's refusal to spend the money that Congress had budgeted, and several more Presidential wars that had no congressional approval. If power has no authority then secret manipulation becomes necessary, as occurred in Reagan's Iran-Contra affair.
Mills warns that the number of us who are making the decisions of our businesses has decreased to the point that just a few thousand business leaders are making decisions that can affect millions of us. These decisions are being based on the motives of only the business and profit side of our civilization. These decision makers have not been democratically elected and probably will never be. Our political institutions must be increasingly thorough in governing these economic enterprises as the magnitude of the social consequences of their actions increases. When a business grows to be so large that it begins to interfere with the actions of a government (we'll see examples in Chapter 18) then there is no longer government by the people.
Mills explains that we expect that all official decisions are in the public interest and that no single group is to dictate policy. The public of anonymous, equally-weighted individuals are to think things out for themselves and then contribute their voices to public opinion. The people are to see a problem, have discussions, make decisions, formulate views, discuss competing views, form a consensus, and then take action on the problem. Important policies should be reasoned, argued, justified, and intellectually debated. Public relations cannot replace reasoned argument. Political debate must not become repeated accusations just hoping to become accepted as truth–like advertisements. Mills emphasizes that issues and priorities should be raised and decided by the public. Too often it is only the media bosses who are raising new issues–and the number of media bosses is decreasing. Public debate is crucial to democracy. Education of the public is also crucial.
The purpose of our education system is not merely to provide job-training at public expense but to build politically knowledgeable citizens and to promote self-development and societal development. Knowledge first clarifies what civilization is and what a person is, and it then sets them free. Even if you owned and ruled the world, without knowledge you would be a pretend human. Knowledgeable persons recognize that their own personal troubles are also experienced by others and see that solutions require modifications of the structures of society so that improvement can then occur. A genuine public of thinking individuals need no master. And public education must not be politically timid. A successful school approach can be measured in terms of an increasing number of books sold per person each year and an increasing number of hours spent discussing societal issues and possible solutions to newly revealed troubles.
Mills harshly criticizes both our business and political leaders today by saying their talents are less broad then they were two hundred years ago. He says that today's upper class of business leaders has no ideology that is suitable for public use; it is culture-less. Feudal society at least had some honor–not so for the successful capitalist. If the successful are viewed as immoral then success itself will decline as a trait. Mills echoes Confucianism in stating that laws without supporting moral conventions invite crime and spur the growth of an amoral attitude. If our society treats moneymaking as a sacred endeavor then it will produce only sharp operators and shady dealers. Personal relations will be turned into public relations and a personality market that tries to convince others that you are the opposite of yourself.
Until the 1850s, the elite of culture were also the most knowledgeable and held the positions of power. One person might simultaneously serve as mayor, head the local militia, and run a large farm. Several of our first presidents had enough knowledge and talent to write the U.S. Constitution. They had knowledge of past governmental forms and of past forms of injustice. Should you vote for the presidential candidate today who is best prepared to write a constitution, as were our first presidents? Mills compares two Congressional discussions from the years 1830 and 1947, both of which concerned Greece's fight for independence from Turkey. In 1830 the debate was knowledgeable, dignified, and eloquent while in 1947 it was a dreary garble of irrelevancies and bad history, see http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html. George Washington read Voltaire and Locke but Eisenhower simply read cowboy tales and mysteries. Even worse is that today's politicians often don't know that they should be ashamed. Some are not the cultural elite they once were.
Consider the one hundred most powerful persons and the one hundred most knowledgeable persons. In 1776, many persons were among both groups while today few would be found in both groups. Back then, the persons in power pursued learning and the persons of learning were in positions of power. The knowledgeable today are mere consultants to the persons of power who are neither kinglike nor philosophical. Intellectuals often serve powerful supervisors only reluctantly. Democracy needs a knowledgeable public and also knowledgeable and responsible politicians. Today's leaders hold power that is unequaled in human history but are not always the most able and knowledgeable persons. Since education builds knowledge and improves results, it must be among the highest priorities of our society.
Mills points out that history does not unfold around a select group of leaders. There is no group of omnipotent persons who conspire to rule all. History is not due to chance or fate; it is a sequence of innumerable small decisions mixed in with a few larger ones. The decisions are made by just a few persons but the group of decision-makers continually includes different persons. The first set of decision makers did not leave instructions for all later sets to follow; instead, each group promotes its own directions. This means that the decision-makers do not conspire to a previously agreed upon course but simply test many directions. Mills warns that as the circle of decision makers is narrowed, the means of decision-making is centralized and the consequences of their decisions become enormous. We do not want a small group of persons to make the decisions of history; we prefer instead that all of us should make these decisions together after sufficient public debate.
Mills defines the power elite as those few persons who either make decisions for millions of us or fail to make decisions. There are just a small number of organizations within our society, and at the top of each we find just a few persons. He points out the undemocratic reality that some of these persons–who have power over the lives of millions–are not elected. It is likely that the decision-makers of our corporations will never be democratically elected, but these corporate decision-makers need to be governed. Are you comfortable with the level of today’s corporate governance?
In the previous chapter we saw that democratic government and our ideas of personal freedom were a response to what we had learned the hard way about the lack of freedom and inclusion in the political process in Europe during the previous centuries, while democracy in Athens was a response of all city members to economic oppression by a handful of members. Licht explains that democracy was setup in the U.S. before industrialization, commercialization, and urbanization were later added. The books by Larkin, Licht, and by Bernhard's team, help us glimpse the world of 1776. It was a pre-industrial world of family farms, country stores, and craft shops.
During the years 1850 to 1900 individual corporations grew to have marketing areas that were national in size. As the owners and executives of the corporations talked of individualism and free competition unfettered by governmental interference, they were themselves acting in increasingly associated ways. Throughout the 1800s, the unbridled market activity increased economic inequality and created social unrest among the workforce. We saw that the striking workers of the 1880s and 1890s said that their loss of control over their own lives occurred because our continued income depends on economic cycles, our supervisor's whims, and the cold decisions of distant managers. Reforms began to occur around 1900.
Mills has explained that Big Government developed in response to the social consequences of our shift from a farming to a wage-earning way of subsistence. Our initial government-of-farmers had to take on new functions as we became wage-earning laborer-customers. The economic collapse of the Great Depression resulted in the origin of much of Big Government–for example, social security and unemployment insurance. By the way, a person having no income does not buy factory products. In turn, this leads to decreased production and additional layoffs. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, we initiated unemployment insurance to help the out-of-work individual not only buy food but also to continue buying factory products. It is simultaneously aid for the unemployed and aid for the factory that would otherwise decrease production. Back in the year 1800, we all grew old and died on the family farm. As we switched to being factory workers, we wage-earners often found that our lifetimes ended in conditions of poverty as we became too old to continue earning a wage, causing some of us to die poor in the streets. Our governments reacted with the development of social security programs that drastically reduced poverty among the oldest of us. (Some of us now want our government out of the "retirement business." In every approach to such problems, we must carefully measure the success of our attempted solutions.)
During the 1890s, many contemporary investigative journalists were exposing the underhanded practices of some of the most wealthy of us–for example, Rockefeller's holding company–and published many photos showing exploitative working conditions and the poor living conditions endured by many workers, see www.cis.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/title.html. This forced us to consider the social rather than the personal causes of poverty and the necessity of public involvement. We were beginning to see new roles for government in regulating working and housing conditions, and in developing a system of financial assistance for those of us who become unemployed, incapacitated, or elderly. We were also beginning to see that we form an interacting whole to which each of us contributes our lifetime's work. We saw that many labor strikes involved worker grievances about the arbitrary rule of the supervisors and that strikers sought justice and security in the workplace. Starting in the late 1860s, trade unionists and social reformers called on state governments to begin gathering statistics on working-conditions, standards of living, and worker unrest. They hoped this information would increase public awareness of the deteriorating working-class life and lead to legislative action.
Kurian reports that the number of federal civilian employees was 6,914 in 1821 and 36,672 in 1860, which was 0.1% of the population as compared to today's government that involves as much as one-third of our Gross Domestic Product. The U.S. government grew during the Civil War by creating, for example, the first income tax. It created the Department of Agriculture that was to sponsor research and development. This means that seventy years elapsed before the people of the U.S. decided that government should be involved in research despite George Washington's call for governmental sponsorship of agricultural research in 1797. Many of us today think of government first whenever an action needs to be taken. For the first time, the U.S. government also created some economic agencies that would lead to a greater, centralized role in the nation's economy. Today the Federal Reserve Board is in the daily news. These first debates about enlarging government occurred as the economy was enlarging.
Already by 1870, farming was becoming more capital intensive and was concentrating into fewer hands. Since railroad companies were charging smaller fees for their largest customers, farmers organized and lobbied state legislators to regulate railroad prices, and they also pressed to regulate grain elevator prices. These Grange Laws were the first steps toward greater governmental regulation of U.S. business. In 1887, farmers got the federal government to create the Interstate Commerce Commission to prevent collusive activity among railroads. The federal government was beginning to play a larger role in economic affairs.
Mills explains that before 1920, events of importance tended to be political in nature. The events of the 1930s shows the extent of the role of business in the world. For the first time there occurred massive social legislation and the inclusion of lower class issues in government. During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt's administration conducted a desperate search for the ways and means to reduce the magnitude of the numbers of unemployed. There was a shifting balance of power between the newly instituted farm measures, newly organized labor unions, and big business–all contained within the framework of an enlarging governmental structure. Decisions were still being made in an entirely political manner as large corporations were not yet overly influential. The political leaders balanced interest groups, adjusted conflicts, gave in to some demands and sidetracked others and were the servants of no single group. Roosevelt's welfare state differed from the laissez-faire state. While Teddy Roosevelt was neutral because he sanctioned favors to no one, Franklin Roosevelt was neutral because he offered favors equally to all groups.
Many aspects of modern life have created new reasons for expansions in government. In the U.S. before the year 1900, roads were little more than chuck-hole-filled cow paths. Is it the responsibility of our government to build roads for automobiles or should our automobile manufacturers build these? Which organization should issue licenses or traffic tickets?
We see that the growths of Big Government and Big Bbusiness are closely related, and that it has always been the case that Big Business stays ahead of Big Government's attempt to govern them. We saw that it quickly occurred that individual states could not govern our corporations that were by then doing business in several states at once. We will see in Chapter 18 that since many of today’s corporations operate in several independent, soverign nations at once, business has taken on a global scale while government has not at all. Today's global corporation is capital intensive, owned by a group of persons, bureaucratically managed, mass-produces items in the region of the world that results in the lowest cost, and sells the resulting product in the region of the world in which the highest price can be paid. For example, shoes are made in Asia for $5 and then sold in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. for $100. This also means that the wages of Asian shoemakers are so low that they cannot buy those shoes they are making.
When a nation chooses to industrialize today
Every nation that has already industrialized has done so through its own unique route. We have seen that large differences existed even between the northern and southern regions within the U.S. alone. The differing economic and political systems sought by North and South illustrate that a people's culture plays a large role in their choice of their own economic and political system. This is referred to as "political culture" and will be discussed in Chapter 19 as we illustrate how the differing peoples of the world have differing political systems.
There were differences in the development of industrialization of two nations as closely related as were England and the U.S. Some differences were due to the lack of guilds in the U.S. For example, England's guilds more-often resulted in career artisans continuing to make all the components of an entire product while an unskilled U.S. laborer made just a single component of an entire product. Remember that the apprentice was learning not just a skill but an entire business and was becoming not just a laborer but an artist; the apprentice was also a family member while a laborer is not. Some other differences were due to the differing amounts of forests and open land within each of these two countries. England's relative lack of forests resulted in expensive but long-lasting iron machinery while the heavily forested U.S. could instead use cheap but short-lived wooden machinery. This gave English machinery designers more reason to make improvements in iron-making technology, visit http://home.btconnect.com/Dunaskin/photos.htm for photos. The smaller number of laborers caused the U.S. machinery designers to make machines that required fewer operators.
In 1830, the farm machinery of England was replacing farmers and causing them to take urban, factory jobs. That is, a farmer who had the resources to purchase machinery could out-compete the smaller farmers who could not buy these machines. The machine-using farmer could then expand further by purchasing the lands of those less-competitive farmers. (Today, this same thing is occurring in many newly industrializing nations around the world.) Machinery replaced fewer workers in the U.S. since there was nearly endless land in the ever-expanding West that needed the machinery to handle the available area. Machines were also taking jobs away from the large number of English industrial laborers. In the U.S., there were not enough workers to begin with so that machines were less-often cursed for stealing jobs, but machines were cursed for decreasing the ties among the members of the neighborhood. After steam engines began to be used, machinery was then believed to be replacing U.S. workers–not the first wave of workers, like the Lowell Girls, but the workers who were recent immigrants and had replaced the farm girls at the factory machines.
We see that the industrialization of the world has been an ongoing process for 250 years. In Chapter 18 we will see that industrialization has spread to just a portion of the peoples of the earth. In another century or so, around the year 2100 the entire world will be more equally industrialized. One benefit of industrializing today rather than one century ago is the ability to skip over older technologies, techniques, and systems and instead install today’s versions. For example, the overhead telephone wires of the early 1900s and the underground cables of the 1970s can be skipped for the wireless phones of the year 2000.
When the people of a nation choose to begin a planned course toward industrialization today, they do so in a world that is very different from that which England encountered in the year 1760 or the U.S. encountered in the year 1820, and the lessons learned back then are of little use in guiding a nation today. For example, none of the world had yet industrialized so there was no competition to consider. Today, a nation might decide to concentrate on a product they believe to be in short supply. This works well unless several other nations also get the same idea all at the same time. Sometimes the price of this single product suddenly drops, leaving that nation with insufficient income to purchase enough food for its people. (For example, the United Nations report The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets 2004 concerning the global food market can be seen at www.un.org/apps/news/storyAr.asp?NewsID=13348&Cr=food&Cr=agriculture or at the Global Policy Forum website at www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/trade/2005/0215fao.htm.) We will see that sometimes these bad situations are the result of the more-industrialized, money-lending nation's attempts to plan an industrialization course for the people of another nation using inappropriate scenarios. Since the acceptance of those plans is sometimes a requirement for receiving the loan in the first place, the people of many nations have been angered by these economic intrusions.
From the time of our first cities in Mesopotamia until about 150 years ago, less than 10% of us worked in shops while 90% of us worked as farmers. Business was a much smaller portion of the community than it is today. Since there was a smaller portion of us who depended on wages from others there was much less chance for unemployment and poverty to occur. The occasional drought will cause occasional famine for farmers but low-wages will cause continual malnutrition for wage-earners. In the U.S. today, just 1% of us are farmers. All of our livelihoods are now more intricately woven into our mutual business and so are now susceptible to the fluctuations of the business cycles rather than the fluctuations of the weather. Our levels of production, purchases, wages, and profit all alternate together between too much and too little.
Understanding the dramatic changes in our grandparent's way of life as we first industrialized in the U.S. enables those of us in the U.S. today to better understand what the people of another nation will go through as they now begin to industrialize. We have seen that there are both benefits and drawbacks to industrialization. In each newly industrializing region of the world today we can expect similarly pronounced increases in the inequality of wealth to develop–and similar reactions to then develop in response. (In Chapter 19 we will see that nations sometimes become politically unstable when there is a sudden increase in inequality.) The industrialization of a nation means a lessening of social bonds within the community as a people change from working their own family farm within a neighborhood to being wage-earning consumers with less control over their own continued well-being. Until the increased health benefits of the last few decades, the main benefit of industrialization had been nothing other than an increase in the number of utensils and decorations within our homes. Increasing the standard of living with more utensils does not automatically guarantee that we will increase our happiness.
There is a tendency for some industrialists to rate the “progress" of other countries in terms of the average number of industrial products found within their homes. Those of us who have not industrialized simply measure success in life in terms of healthy and happy children and communities. How do you gauge success in life? (You might like to list the things most important to you.)
We have seen how the people of each region choose their own economic course. For example, we saw that the plantation owners of the Southern U.S. chose to continue the economic system that had worked so well for them for centuries and so did not industrialize until the time of the World Wars. The people of every nation have their own complicated circumstances and history.
We have seen that a group of people will not drastically change their way of life unless outside forces give them no other option. It is wrong for an industrialist to think that every other person on the planet wants to be an industrialist, too. The industrialists way of life is not the object of desire of all the peoples of the world–as if every person on the planet wants to suddenly alter their long-working traditions and turn themselves into another people for no good reason.
Remember that it is not the level of technology of the products that matter to a people but their own customs and traditions and the well-being of their family members and society. Industrialization and technology, like any other tool we have invented–including the tool we call our civilization–are useful only if they improve our well-being and the quality of our lives and allow us to be human. It is important that nearly all of us experience an improvement, not just a small portion of us (we are just now beginning to measure these portions). Sadly, the peoples of the various regions of the world who still live as either gatherer-hunters or as self-sufficient farmers will not be able to choose to do so for very many more decades. This homogenization will change our planet into a less-interesting place.
We have seen that we humans are naturally predisposed to form social groups. The details of our social systems and social interactions have changed through time as we moved from bands to clans, tribes, chiefdoms, kingdoms, and republics–and as we moved from gatherer-hunters to village farmers and then to factory workers. Still today–whether we are members of a band, tribe, neighborhood, nation, or planet–we humans are naturally predisposed to join together socially and to interact with the other members of our group in every manner that is necessary and mutually beneficial in the culture of our own time and place. We are naturally adept at figuring out which helping actions on our own part will likely be returned in kind to us by another person in the future–because this exchange of help is the social glue that creates society, including those of our social primate ancestors. These requirements change in time and place but always involve tasks which are larger than can be done by a single person. In 1800, this meant such things as exchanging help to mow hay, peel apples or corn, and to clear fields of rocks and felled trees. Those of us who live in the big city today are more independent and have fewer reasons to exchange help because few of our daily chores require more than the effort of a single person. This enables us to understand that at any time and place, we interact socially with the other members of our group in every manner that is necessary and mutually beneficial in the culture of the moment. We do continue to assist each other in every way in which each other's mutual assistance is needed and exchanged. We are not going it alone.
Throughout our past and throughout the earth, we humans have taken just three different lifestyles: gatherer-hunters, village farmers, and wage-earner-customers (who both produce and purchase the utensils and decorations of their lifestyle or culture). Each of these three comprise very different, external ways of life but none alters the nature of a human. They are only manifestations of human nature, sort of external attachments. Happiness for us humans results from caring for our children, family, friends, neighbors, and community–not from the number of manufactured utensils and decorations contained in our home. We find that people everywhere, and at all times of the past, are the same in that we simply want to laugh and joke with our spouse, family, friends and neighbors, pursue life and the limits of our talents, and raise children. We expect our society to be mutually beneficial for all of us and we will react against any unfairness or injustice in any interaction within our community.
We have seen that during the 1800s our transition from farming to factory work was as large a shift in our way of life as had earlier occurred when we switched from being gatherer-hunters to farmers. Our invention of farming and our Industrial Revolution each allowed the population of us humans to increase dramatically. The emergence of industrialization, the expansion of the commercial market to include the buying and selling of everything, and the accompanying occupational shift from farming to wage-earning factory work was the largest transition in our civilization begun 10,000 years ago as gatherer-hunters became farmers.
What did the Industrial Revolution mean to the people of the U.S. during the first half of the 1800s? There was an increase in the number of utensils and decorations in our homes. We went from twenty such items in the home to two hundred–or even 2,000–as we went from stick forks, clamshell spoons, spinning-wheels, and cooking over fires to factory-made stoves, mirrors, carpets, curtains, wall pictures, clothing, and painted homes that had white picket fences. By the way, Cowell lists the utensils and furnishings–the "prized possessions"–of a Roman home (on page 23 of Life in Ancient Rome) to be a frame bed and couch, spade, mattock, scythe, sickle, hammer, hatchet, knife, rake, hoe, plow, sword, shield, lance, spindle, weaving frame, chair or stool, grinding stones or mill, some earthenware and metal cooking utensils, some essential clothing, comb of wood or bone, a ring, a broach or two, some bone or metal hair pins, a bracelet or two, some earrings, and a mirror. The homes of poor persons contained less. The homes of the wealthiest persons didn't have more items, just more expensive versions of the same things.
Our Industrial Revolution also meant an increase in inequality between rich and poor as the differences between these groups of persons became more pronounced. We saw that in eighteenth-century New England farming communities, the gap between rich and poor used to be measured merely by counting candles and chamber pots. We saw that much of the U.S. came into being by "plucking" the middle 2% out from many European nations.
Our Industrial Revolution also brought a decrease in control over our own continued well-being as we switched from living directly from our own farming efforts–where the quality of our own lives depended on no one except ourselves–to wage-earning in which that quality can be suddenly altered due to the ups and downs of the economic cycle, the whims of bosses, or the cost-saving or merger decisions made by distant persons. We came to have less control over the continued quality of our own lives because our wages might stop at any moment. As our wage varies so does the quality of our lives because we can no longer pay rent or buy food.
Our shift from farming to factory work resulted in decreased community ties. Our way of life changed from being communities of mutually assisting farmers who traded harvesting and processing assistance to being more-independent, big-city factory-workers who had fewer reasons to exchange help because no chore required more than a few minutes or a single person.
We switched from hand-making the utensils and decorations of life to using the mechanized, mass production techniques of our Industrial Revolution's factories. Factory-made objects are much cheaper to produce than are those more laboriously made by hand. The decrease in price meant that every home could now contain what only the wealthiest of us could previously afford. This also meant that unique, handcrafted items were replaced by more-plain and identically styled, mass-produced items. We went from the barter of a few home extras to the cash buying and selling of everything. And we went from live-in help and apprentices who were treated as family members to live-away help who were paid in cash.
Larkin explains that already by 1840, when an elderly person looked back on the nation they saw that we had more possessions in our homes but life had become more anxious and plodding and our social bonds had weakened. There was much contemporary discussion about the apparent lessening in the community ties and in the social web of the neighborhood since factory workers were finding less numerous reasons to exchange help with their neighbors than had their farming parents. But the children who were growing up in this new system felt that it was the only "natural" way of life. We take today's arrangement for granted because it is the culture of our youth. We had also been tamed a bit through the 1800s as exhibited by our decreased drinking and lessened appetite for public executions and for betting on bloody, fight-to-the-death animal “games.”
The factory's capacity to produce large quantities of low cost items both created and then responded to an increased demand. The first factories produced low priced cloth. As increasing numbers of persons bought factory-made cloth, increasing numbers of persons were needed to work in increasing numbers of cloth factories. As we bought increasing numbers of manufactured products, the number of factories increased to provide them: manufacturing output and consumer demand go hand in hand. The number of consumers, factory workers, and factories increase together because each requires and promotes the other two. The next set of factory-made items included clothing, carpets, drapery, brooms, and furniture and such. Soon, most everyone was working in a factory, most everything was made in a factory, and factory workers were buying most everything they used from those factories.
In the U.S. in 1900, about 40% of its seventy-seven million citizens were living in cities. About 40% of us were still occupied as farmers (today its 1%) and farming still accounted for 25% of the nation's Gross National Product. The volume of farm products continually increased as farmland spread westward with the expanding nation, but farming's share of the total gross national product decreased. About half of us were working in industry, and of that half, 25% were industrial laborers while another 25% held white-collar or service-sector jobs within industry. At this time, U.S. manufacturing accounted for one-third of the world's industrial output.
Licht explains that the market society is as old as the first farming village. What changed with the emergence of our Industrial Revolution's factory was the "pervasiveness of the market that grew to include the buying and selling of everything." We saw that the U.S. market began the 1800s by shedding its mercantile past, was next unregulated for some decades, and then became a corporate and state-administered system.
The industrialization of the U.S. took decades to develop as there continued to be a mixture of wage labor, slave labor, family farms, commercial farms, craft shops, and mechanized factories. There were industrial towns with large factories that mass produced lowcost items; these often produced a single item. There were diverse and specialized shops in the large cities that produced smaller quantities of custom, handmade items while being careful not to make expensive versions of the lowcost items that the factories were making. There were also mill villages using the outwork system in which family labor was performed in the home–as had occurred since the time of the first cities. There were also single-industry towns.
We saw that by the year 1850, groups of us had formed corporations that merged by 1900 into some nationally operating corporations. Those of us who owned and operated these large-scale businesses had to invent procedures that allowed such organizations to exist. Already by 1900, about 300 corporations dominated the nation's economy. By 1950 a few of these came to dominate each industry within each nation. We'll see that by 2000 a few hundred will come to dominate the global business of the portion of the world that is currently participating in business and industry. In most every industry, mergers result in the creation of about three large, remaining companies. These companies no longer compete in that they do not try to sell the most products and services for the least possible price but instead charge "what the market will bear." To risk further competition is to risk being one of the three companies who would disappear.
Today some of us complain about either Big Business or Big Government, as if the two were unrelated. In the early 1800s, some of us were complaining that our society was changing from one composed of help-exchanges among neighbors and live-in helpers who were treated as family members into one of cash exchanges, cold business cycles driven by supply and demand and calculation, business persons concerned for nothing but profits, and of wage-earning laborers losing control over their own lives.
Workers rely on factory jobs for continued income to pay rent, buy food, and maintain a certain quality of life. Wages are paid by those of us who own the factories, while the factory's profits are the wages for those of us who own the factory. Factory owners rely on profits for their personal income and would not make money unless they paid cash wages to laborers who would operate the factory machinery and purchase the resulting products. As has been the case since the first cities, the more-wealthy persons have the upper hand and cause some persons to live under the unjust situation of a precarious existence. This situation started small but continued to grow for fifty years until the national labor strikes of the 1880s and 1890s. Inequality within the U.S. reached a peak during the 1920s and then began a slow but slight decline; still today the most-wealthy 1% of us own 40% of all assets.
If the wage-earner-customers were to decide to return to the self-sufficient life of the family farmer then the factory owners would soon have to also. This is still true today–though impossible. To illustrate our sequence of steps in reverse one might notice that if we chose to stop farming then we would again be gatherer-hunters, and if we then chose to stop living in social groups or caring for our families we would again be living as lone animals rather than as social primates. Humans care first for their children. If we stopped caring for our children we would no longer be mammals.
We each contribute our life’s efforts to our industrial ways because we believe that it holds great promise for a better life for all of us in a mutually beneficial manner. Most of us just want to earn enough money to sustain a certain quality of life for our family. Few of us have an interest in accumulating an industrial empire, or having as much money as thousands of other persons. As the promise of our civilization increases it does not have to mean an increase in injustice. We will know that we have finished building our civilization when such injustice no longer occurs.
The industrialization of our civilization has been building for 250 years as it has taken that long to include about half of us. The clothing and utensils of our 250-year-old Industrial Revolution have slowly spread out to cover increasing areas of the planet. It has taken that long to switch a portion of us from making our own clothing and utensils to instead being both the makers and purchasers of factory-made versions of these items. We saw that industrialization spread from England out into the world including New England. From New England it spread to the western and southern U.S. We will have a look at global business in Chapter 18 and see that "global business" today simply means taking the raw materials and labor from the regions of the planet with the lowest costs and then taking the resulting products to sell in the areas of the planet that will pay the highest price.
Seeing the magnitude of the social changes that the people of the industrializing U.S. went through during the 1800s helps us to understand what some other people are going through in other parts of the world today. At the time, there was a lot of discussion about these social changes because everyone was very much aware that they were occurring–just as we continually talk about the changes that are occurring today. During more recent decades societal changes in the U.S. have been less dramatic. For example, thirty years ago a person was more likely to work their entire life for a single employer while today we change employers every few years. The largest changes in the industry of the U.S. today involve global mergers and the shift of labor to other areas of the world, as will be described in the following chapters.
Often, those of us who are wage-earning customers have trouble seeing those of us who are either gather-hunters or single-family farmers as anything but "toy people" who are living a backward way of life. We have seen that throughout history, all peoples and all governments have been reluctant to change. For example, we saw how the people of the Southern U.S. chose not to industrialize until a century after the North had done so. We make sudden changes in our culture only when the surrounding world forces us to do so. A large portion of the world's population today feels that our life as self-sufficient farming families has been fine for many centuries. Why should we change now? The Industrial Revolution has taken 250 years to become adopted into the lives of about half the world's population. In another century or so the entire world is certain to be more equally industrialized. There are both benefits and drawbacks for the people of a nation to shift from being more-or-less self-sufficient farmers to wage-earning customers. Industrialization has recently brought longer and healthier lives to its converts but throughout its history it has also increased poverty and hunger for many of us and decreased social ties within the community.
During the last few decades we have begun to understand enough about our own health to enable most of us to survive infancy and to live lives less often shortened by a simple illness or injury. This is a more meaningful benefit from our efforts to civilize than are the increased numbers of utensils for our homes because only life really matters. A long and healthy life for ourselves and our children is a meaningful goal for our civilization. This means that our civilization–which consists of the combined efforts of individuals at home, in government, and in business–should arrange that medical care is available for each of us so that nobody is robbed of his or her full life. Life is a precious gift for each and every one of us.
Questions
1. For people living in the U.S. in the year 1800, which elements of life were similar and which were different from the ways of their grandparents living in Africa, Europe, or in the farming villages of Native Americans.
2. Compare the cultural ways of the people living in the Northeastern U.S. in the year 1800 with those of their European ancestors living in a Medieval farming village in the thirteenth century.
3. Compare the food sources of the regions of Ancient Mesopotamia, the Kalapalo, Yoruba, Cahokia, and the Northeast U.S. of the year 1800. What are the food sources of your own region, today? Where does the food come from that you eat?
4. Today, are we more or are we less dependent on the other members of our society? Describe how we are mutually dependent on each other and how our society is mutually beneficial to all of us today. In which ways is it not mutually beneficial?
5. Larkin says that the county records from the early 1800s contain lists of the house contents of every newly deceased household head. Check at your county offices for such records. Describe the contents of a typical home and compare them with those of other times and places.
6. Describe the differences between poor, average, and wealthy families in the years 1800, 1850, 1900, 1950, 2000, and today.
7. Compare the items an average home bought in 1820 and 1920 with those bought today.
8. Compare the items that our factories were making in 1830 with the items our factories make today. What portion of family's could afford these things then and now? What determined the prices of these items? Gatherer-hunter groups make clothing, rope, and homes and such. Which items do we make in the factory which are also made by gatherer-hunters? Which are not?
9. Did the number of items in a home determine the family's happiness in the year 1700, 1800, 1850, 1900, 1950, or 2000?
10. Compare the changes brought about by the new iron cooking stove with those of the new microwave oven.
11. What would you think today if taking a new job meant moving in with your new employer?
12. Do you feel a natural tendency to exchange favors, utensils, or goods with your neighbors? Has your family ever exchanged these items or the assistance of youngsters with a neighboring family?
13. What do you think a person from the year 1800 thought life was about? Would the urban and rural people have different answers?
14. In past ages, what sort of material attributes distinguished a rich person from typical or poor persons.
15. Compare the range in wealth between rich and poor around the year 1800 and today. Also, compare levels of education and life expectancy.
16. Compare the culture of the U.S. in 1800 with the culture of some of the others we have met in this book, including the Ancient Mesopotamian farmers, the Kalapalo, Yoruba, and the Medieval Chinese, Africans, and Europeans.
17. At all times and places, the members of a society help their other members and rely on the help of those others in every way needed. Compare the changes in these needs as we switched from being gatherer-hunters to being farmers in the villages of Ancient Mesopotamia. Compare the changes in these needs as we switched from being the family farmers of 1800 to the urban factory workers of 1850. Compare the number of ways neighbors exchange mutually-beneficial help among the chimpanzees, Kalapalo, Yoruba, Cahokians, Mesopotamians, U.S. farmers of the year 1820, and in your neighborhood today.
18. What are the variables that affect population levels? In every region of the world, population grows rapidly whenever industrialization develops. Why do we choose to begin having more children during certain times and fewer children at other times? Can we relate changing population levels to a changing quality of life?
19. Describe some changes that are occurring today in our industry, occupations, and in our interactions with our neighbors.
20. For a nation that is deciding whether to industrialize today, what are the drawbacks and promises of this process?
21. Were the people of the South gaining or losing money when they sold cotton to the North that was then repurchased as more-expensive clothing? How does this relate to nations today that are trying to industrialize, for example, by producing and exporting raw sugar that it then imports and repurchases as more-expensive candy?
22. Compare the role of Mesopotamian kings and queens in the average family's daily life with that of your government today.
23. Compare the increase in organization needed in the Ancient Mesopotamian temples with that of nation-wide corporations. What did the temples and the corporations have to invent to enable such increases in scale? Compare their retirement plans.
24. Compare Southern U.S. and Mesopotamian sharecropping contracts.
25. Why are certain corporations, like Standard Oil, still here while others have disappeared?
26. Why do some people protest the recent growth of global business? (For example, visit www.citizen.org for more information.) Compare their complaints with those of a Big Business protester of the year 1890. Visit www.freespeech.org/videodb/index.php?action=view&video_id=9832&media_id=5566&browse=0 to listen to a debate about the World Trade Organization.
27. Does your small hometown have a few families that own most of the downtown property?
28. Compare the process of industrialization of two different countries from two different continents.
29. Compare labor unions in the years 1830, 1900, and 2000.
30. Why did we develop Big Business? What benefit is it to us humans?
31. Why did we develop Big Government? What benefit is it to us humans?
32. Compare the leaders of culture, government, military, research, and religion.
33. Describe different pricing schemes of business.
34. Interview a franchise owner.
35. List some of today's occupational fields. What portions of us work in each of these fields? How do our wages compare?
36. List the ten largest businesses in your town, county, state, and nation.
37. Describe the current state of the masses.
38. Compare the details of your culture today with that of the people of the Northeastern U.S. around the year 1820.
39. Find out what has been said by several millionaires about what they have decided life is about.
40. What can you say about any differences in the feeling of satisfaction parents have while providing for their children by picking berries as gatherer-hunters, by growing crops and cows on the family farm, or by tending a particular machine at a factory?
41. Can you relate the size of economic upheavals to the portion of a population that is participating in commercial activity rather than working their own family farm? In what way do the farmers participate?
42. Was the 1820 U.S. society a form of band, tribe, chiefdom, or state? Does the 1820 U.S. society have anything in common with that of chimpanzees?
43. Compare the 1820 U.S. society with that of the Yoruba, Kalapalo, Mesopotamians, and to your own. Compare farming practices. Were separate fields farmed by individuals or did the entire village work together on the entire crop?
44. What can you say about the levels of social and economic equality in the 1820 U.S. society? Were some persons richer or poorer? Could some persons impose their views or preferences on others? Compare the health of infants in 1820 U.S. society to those of the Kalapalo, Yoruba, Mesopotamians, and your own group, today. Did each member of the 1820 U.S. society have equal access to education and the benefits of that society? Did the members of the 1820 U.S. society have a sense of belonging to a community? Did they have a feeling of control over their own lives and over their own continued well-being?
45. Do you see any manifestations of the primate social system in the 1820 U.S. society? Do you see the Golden Rule at work in that society? In what ways do the 1820 U.S. society members behave like mammals and primates?
46. Does the 1820 U.S. society have business, governmental, or religious aspects? Compare their commercial, governmental, and religious practices to those of your own culture.
47. Did the individuals of the 1820 U.S. society have innate talents for becoming engineers, artists, or doctors? Did the individuals of the 1820 U.S. society pursue the limits of their talents and interests?
48. What can you say about crime among the 1820 U.S. society? Compare reasons for crime, amounts of crime, and deterrents against crime in 1820 U.S. society with those of your own people?
49. What can you say about poverty in the 1820 U.S. society? Compare reasons for poverty and the amount of poverty in 1820 U.S. society with that of your own people?
50. Did the members of the 1820 U.S. society care for their family, friends, and society? For a member of the 1820 U.S. society, what were the most important things in life? What are the most important things in your own life?
51. Compare the age of marriage of Kalapalo, Yorubans, and Mesopotamians with that of the people of the U.S. in 1820. What is the typical age of marriage for your people today? Also compare the number of children per family and the age at which children are weaned.
52. Compare the legal status of Yoruba, Kalapalo, Athenian, Medieval, and Mesopotamian women with that of the people of the U.S. in 1820, and with your own people today?
53. Compare the functions and cooperations of the members of the extended family among the Yoruba, Kalapalo, and Mesopotamians with that of the people of the U.S. in 1820, and with your own people today?
54. List some elements of each of the religious views from Chapter 13 in the societies of Cahokia, Yoruba, and the United States during the nineteenth century, and some examples of the Golden Rule at work.
55. Did our invention of farming or factory-work have the greatest impact on our way of life?
56. Describe the effects on the culture of a people undergoing the transition to industrialization. Choose a particular nation.
57. In Life in a medieval village, the Gies describe how the village farmland was worked as a whole by the entire population. Compare the way this village exchanged help in farming with that of the Northeastern U.S. community described above.
58. Make a list of the topics in a conversation you held with your friends yesterday.
59. How do we arrange for children to have access to doctors and medicine at a cost of 1% of the family's wage rather than today’s 20%? What is the purpose of health care? Should the people of a nation strive for minimized costs, maximized lifetimes, or maximized profits? Design a gizmo having a thermometer, stethoscope, blood-pressure, ear and throat light that connects to a home computer and can be operated by a doctor through the internet.
60. Describe the form of town government in a city like Philadelphia as its population rose from 10 to 100,000 persons. What sorts of things were discussed in town meetings? How were decisions made?
61. State several differences between U.S. culture in the years 1800 and today. Were they "toy people" in the 1800s?
62. What is the maximum population level of a village before we can no longer ring the church bell to announce each death? When did towns first have bells and when were they first used for this purpose?
63. List some items from daily life and our world view during the year 1800 that have been carried forward to today and some that have not.
64. Without the Industrial Revolution could scientists have been able to eventually learn enough about medicine to enable most village farmers to survive infancy?
65. Find an elderly person's description from the year 1840 of decreasing community ties.
66. Describe the changes in culture during the last three generations of your family. Describe some cultural changes that have occurred since time of gatherer-hunters in clothing, shelter, food, entertainment, transportation and such. Describe some cultural changes since your grandparents switched from farming to wage-earning.
67. How have homes changed since the year 1800?
68. Grassroots movements are those in which the masses voice their opinion and take collective action toward a common goal. Was the temperance movement of 1830 the first grassroots movement in history? Were there grassroots movements during gatherer-hunter or Mesopotamian times? What are some of today's grassroots movements?
69. What were the changes in our social relations as we switched from being bands of gatherer-hunters to being village farmers? What were the changes in our social relations as our farming villages grew into cities of 100,000 persons? How did the magnitude of these social changes compare with that of our shift from farming to factory work? Which of these social changes occurred over the shortest span of time? How many generations were involved in each of these social changes?
70. We saw that the decreased community relations of the early 1800s was troubling to many persons. This might make one wonder if the origination of the Hindu, Zoastrian, Buddhist, Hebrew, and Confucian religions may have been a response to the decreasing social relations of the first-ever population centers and warring empires that previously had no religion of moral behaviors. Do you think any of the major religions of today were formed in response to this development?
71. Create a piece of art to describe some aspect of life during the nineteenth century. Can you communicate the sense of community, the loss of mothers and infants during birth, or the loss of family members from simple illnesses?
72. Try a nineteenth century game of graces, which is played with a hoop and a stick that has a fluttering ribbon attached.
73. What sorts of plants were grown in the herb garden and what were their purposes?
74. Describe nineteenth-century techniques for preserving winter-ice into the warmer months.
75. Why didn't the New England farmers take milk, eggs, or meat to exchange at the local store?
76. Now that you have had a glimpse of the change in community ties that occurs during industrialization, can you guess any changes that might have occurred as farming villages or cities first developed? As tribes, chiefdoms, or nations first developed? As imperialism developed? After your region was conquered? As one of today's major religions emerged 1,500 to 3,000 years ago? As cars, radio, television, computers, or gonkulators appeared?
77. A child sees both its parents throughout each day if it lives in a gatherer-hunter society. (We saw that gatherer-hunters spend about fourteen hours per week getting food and travel as a family while doing so.) A child similarly sees both parents if it lives in a farming village. In an industrialized society, one or both parents work away from home and their child for forty to sixty hours per week. How does this affect the child? What are the benefits and drawbacks for this child?
78. Describe the industrialization occurring in China today. How are home decorations and utensils changing? Are people migrating from the farm to the city? What educational opportunities exists. What is the infant-mortality rate in today’s China?
79. Why did colonial people have their shoes repaired? Do you do that today? Do you have your metal spoons and forks melted down and recast into another form or style?
80. If the U.S. had large palace and temple staff making large purchases in the year 1800, as we saw in Ancient Mesopotamia, what would have been their effect on the growth rate of industrialization?
81. Compare slavery in Ancient Mesopotamia with that of eighteenth-century America.
82. Compare some crafts, procedures, and technologies from Ancient Mesopotamia, the English colonies in North America, and your land today. You might like to compare glass, metal, or pottery making techniques and products, carpentry and wood working, weaving, or leather working form these times and places. What sort of metal, glass, pottery, wooden, woven, and leather products are made during each of these times and places? Follow grain preparation from harvesting, thrashing, and grinding to baking. What fees and profits occur in each time and place? What sort of dairy products are common to each of these times and places? Compare the apprenticeship system, taxation, the role of government, and store signs from each of these times and places. Compare the credit and loan making systems of these times and places.
83. Compare the uses of astrology through time and place. During the expansion of the Industrial Revolution, why didn't the people of the U.S. extend their astrological guidance system into the factory? Do you begin work at the astrologically correct time?
84. Describe some things that are common to each of the times and places–including your own–that we’ve seen so far in this book and describe some things that are unique to each time and place.
85. Compare sources of mechanical power through the ages. How has our energy needs changed through time? Where does your power come from today? Where will we get it from tomorrow?
86. Is there a group of people today in which each person makes his or her own shoes? Is there a group of people today who buy shoes from specialized shoemakers and have them repaired as many times as they "have wear in them?" Is there a group of people today in which each person buys shoes and does not have them repaired?
87. Compare cotton harvesting techniques of India and the Southern U.S. in the year 1850.
88. We see that gatherer-hunters and many persons today pay attention to birds are often aware of their nesting locations. There are many bird-watching organizations today. Is this a hobby or is it innate behavior, that is, have we been stealing and eating eggs for millions of years? Do monkeys eat bird eggs?
89. What percentage of the people taken from Western Africa to be enslaved in the Americas had been urban Muslims?
90. Compare the canals of Ancient Mesopotamia, Medieval China, and those of the nineteenth-century U.S.
91. Compare the social societies of medieval China and nineteenth-century New England.
92. Compare the continental expansions of U.S. and Russian. See www.eki.ee/books/redbook for information about the native peoples of Russia.
Primary sources for the chapter
The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840, Jack Larkin, 1989, HarperPerennial, New York.
Industrializing America, The Nineteenth Century, Walter Licht, 1995, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London.
Colonial Craftsmen and the Beginnings of American Industry, Edwin Tunis, 1965, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London. He has also written the two books Colonial Living, and Frontier Living.
Frances and Joseph Gies, Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel, Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages, 1995, HarperPerennial, New York.
The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills, 1956, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
John Buenker's article "The New Politics," is contained in the book 1915, The Cultural Moment, the New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theater in America, edited by Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick, 1991, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Suggestions for further reading
Firsthand America, A History of the United States Volume One, Virginia Bernhard, David Burner, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, John McClymer, 1994, Brandywine Press, St James, New York.
A People's History of the United States, 1492 - Present, Howard Zinn, 1999, HarperCollins Publishers, New York.
The Americans: the Colonial Experience, Daniel J Boorstin, 1958, Vintage Books, New York.
Home Life in Colonial Days, Alice Morse Earle, 1993, Berkshire House Publishers, Lee, Massachusetts.
Five points, the 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's most Notorious Slum, Tyler Anbinder, 2001, Plume, New York.
Victorian America, Transformations in Everyday Life, 1876-1915, Thomas J Schlereth, 1991, HarperPerennial, New York.
The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915-1945, Harvey Green, 1992, The University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Daily Life in Russia Under the Last Tsar, Henri Troyat, 1961, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.
The Enterprising Elite, the Boston Associates and the World they made, Robert F Dalzell, Jr., 1987, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, New York.
Oneida, Utopian Community to Modern Corporation, Maren Lockwood Carden, 1998, Syracuse University Press, New York.
Technology in the Ancient World, Henry Hodges, 1970, Marboro Books Corp, New York.
Engineering in the Ancient World, J.G. Landels, 1981, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.
Everyday Life in the Massachusetts Bay colony, George Francis Dow, 1988, Dover Publications, Inc., New York.
Everyday Life in Early America, David Freeman Hawke, 1988, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York.
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-century New Mexico, Andrew L. Knaut 1997, University of Oklahoma Press, Oklahoma
Changes in the Lives of Rural Gikuyu Women 1910-1995, Jean Davison, 1996, Lynne Rienner Publishers, London.
Death on the Prairie, the thirty years' struggle for the Western plains, Paul I Wellman, 1934, Macmillan, New York.
Bullwhip Days, the Slaves Remember, an oral history, edited by James Mellon, 1988, Avin Books, New York.
Denmark Vesey, The Buried History of America's Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It, David Robertson, 1999, Alfred A Knopf, New York.
Slave Counterpoint, Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry, Philip D. Morgan, 1998, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
The African American Presence At Stagville Plantation, Alice Eley Jones, 2003, Minnie-Troy Publishers, Murfreesboro, North Carolina.
For Cause and Comrades, Why Men Fought in the Civil War, James M. McPherson, 1997, Oxford University Press, New York.
Great Riots of New York, 1712-1873, Joel Tyler Headley, 1971, Dover Publications, New York.
Travel in the Ancient World, Lionel Casson, 1994, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London.
Our Own Snug Fireside, Images of the New England Home 1760 - 1860, Jance C. Nylander, 1994, Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
Gleanings From Long Ago, Ellen Mordecai, 1974, Capital Area Preservation, Inc., Raleigh, NC. Ellen describes life in Raleigh, North Carolina during the 1830s.
Becoming America, The Revolution Before 1776, Jon Butler, 2000, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Covered Wagon Days, From the Private Journals of Albert Jerome Dickson, Edited by Arthur Jerome Dickson, 1989, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska.
Pioneer Women, Voices from the Kansas Frontier, Joanna L. Stratton, 1981, Simon & Schuster, New York, New York.
The Changing Years, Arch Merrill, 1967, American Book-Stratford Press, Inc., New York, New York. This book discusses how some persons viewed the changes in their world (Western New York) during the years 1900 through 1960.
Valiant in the Faith, Gardner and Sarah Snow and their family, Archibald F. and Ella M. Bennett and Barbara Bennett Roach, 1990, Roylance Publishing, Utah.
The Search for Order 1877-1920, Robert H. Weibe, 1967, Hill and Wang, New York.
How the Other Half Lives, Studies Among the Tenements of New York, Jacob A. Riis, 1971, Dover Publications, New York.
Plainville, U.S.A., James West, 1945, Columbia University Press, New York.
Macroeconomics, Principles, Problems, and Policies, Thirteenth Edition, Campbell R. McConnell and Stanley L. Brue, 1990, McGraw-Hill, Inc New York.
A Historical guide to the U.S. Government, edited by George T. Kurian, 1998, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
The age of Jackson, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., 1945, Little, Brown and Company, Boston.
Watchers of the Stars, Patrick Moore, 1973, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York.
Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Man That Was a Thing, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1996, Barnes & Noble, New York.
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, 1983, Bantam Books, New York.
Alcott also described several 19th century occupations in Work: A Story of Experience, 1873, Penguin Classics, New York.
The Blessed Town, Ofxord, Georgia, at the Turn of the Century, Polly Stone Buck, 1986, Algonquin Books of Chapil Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
An Hour Before Daylight, Memories of a Rural Boyhood, Jimmy Carter, 2001, Simon & Schuster, New York.
Schoolyard Games, Bobbie Kalman & Heather Levigne, 2001, Crabtree Publishing Company, New York, New York.
Games from long ago, Bobbie Kalman, 1995, Crabtree Publishing Company, New York, New York.
Letters from an American Farmer, J. Hector St. John De Crevecceur, 1957, E. P. Dutton, New York.
Coming to America, A New Life in a New Land, Edited by Katharine Emsden, 1993, Discovery Enterprises Ltd., Lowell, Massachusetts.
Major Problems in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, Leon Frank, 1993, D.C. Heath and Company, Lexington, Massachusetts.
Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, Frances Anne Kemble, 1984, Brown Thrasher Books, The University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia.
Flowering of the Cumberland, Harriette Simpson Arnow, 1963, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska.
Class and community, The Industrial Revolution in Lynn, Alan Dawley, 1976, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Slave Songs of the United States, William Francis Allen et. al., first published in 1867, Applewood Books, Bedford, Massachusetts.
Log Cabin Pioneers, Stories, Songs & Sayings, Wayne Erbsen, 2001, Native Ground Music, Asheville, North Carolina. Compact disk and book.
Front Porch Songs, Jokes & Stories, Wayne Erbsen, 1993, Native Ground Music, Asheville, North Carolina. Compact disk and book.
Early Farm Life, Lise Gunby, 1992, Crabtree Publishing Company, New York.
The American Frugal Housewife, Dedicated to Those Who are not Ashamed of Economy, Mrs. Child, first published in 1833, Applewood Books, Bedford, Massachusetts.
In No Time At All, Carl Hamilton, 1974, The Iowa State University Press, Ames, Iowa. Carl describes life during the years 1910 to 1940.
The Sociable, or One-Thousand and One Home Amusements, first published in 1858, Applewood Books, Bedford, Massachusetts.
Tales of New England Past, Edited by Frank Oppel, 2002, Castle Books, Edison, New Jersey.
Copyright © 2009 Robert Dalling, www.UsHumans.net
