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  BEHEMOTH

  A HISTORY OF THE FACTORY

  AND THE MAKING OF THE

  MODERN WORLD

  Joshua B. Freeman

  As always,

  for Debbie, Julia, and Lena

  Rereading your book has made me regretfully aware of our increasing age. How freshly and passionately, with what bold anticipations, and without learned and systematic, scholarly doubts, is the thing still dealt with here! And the very illusion that the result will leap into the daylight of history tomorrow or the day after gives the whole thing a warmth and vivacious humour—compared with which the later “gray in gray” makes a damned unpleasant contrast.

  —Karl Marx, in an 1863 letter to Friedrich Engels

  about The Condition of the Working Class in England

  At sea, the sailors … manufacture a clumsy sort of twine, called spun-yarn… . For material, they use odds and ends of old rigging called “junk,” the yarn of which are picked to pieces, and then twisted into new combinations, something as most books are manufactured.

  —Herman Melville,

  Redburn: His First Voyage (1849)

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1

  “LIKE MINERVA FROM THE BRAIN OF JUPITER”

  The Invention of the Factory

  CHAPTER 2

  “THE LIVING LIGHT”

  New England Textiles and Visions of Utopia

  CHAPTER 3

  “THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION”

  Industrial Exhibitions, Steelmaking, and the Price of Prometheanism

  CHAPTER 4

  “I WORSHIP FACTORIES”

  Fordism, Labor, and the Romance of the Giant Factory

  CHAPTER 5

  “COMMUNISM IS SOVIET POWER PLUS THE ELECTRIFICATION OF THE WHOLE COUNTRY”

  Crash Industrialization in the Soviet Union

  CHAPTER 6

  “COMMON REQUIREMENTS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION”

  Cold War Mass Production

  CHAPTER 7

  “FOXCONN CITY”

  Giant Factories in China and Vietnam

  CONCLUSION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  WE LIVE IN A FACTORY-MADE WORLD, OR AT LEAST most of us do. Almost everything in the room I am writing in came from a factory: the furniture, the lamp, the computer, the books, the pencils and pens, the water glass. So did my clothes, shoes, wristwatch, and cell phone. Much of the room itself was factory made: the sheetrock walls, the windows and window frames, the air conditioner, the parquet floor. Factories produce the food we eat, the medicines we take, the cars we drive, the caskets we are buried in. Most of us would find it extremely difficult to survive, even for a brief time, without factory-made goods.

  Yet in most countries, except for factory workers themselves, people pay little attention to the industrial facilities on which they depend. Most consumers of factory products have never been in a factory, nor do they know much about what goes on inside one. In the United States, it is the absence of factories rather than their presence that gets publicized. The loss of roughly five million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 20161 led to sharp critiques, from the right and the left, of the international trade agreements blamed for their disappearance. Factory jobs are deemed “good jobs,” with little examination of what they actually entail. Only occasionally do factories themselves become a big story, as when in 2010 the mistreatment of Chinese workers who assembled iPhones and other electronic gear briefly became subject to international scrutiny.

  Things weren’t always this way. Factories, especially the largest and most technically advanced, were once objects of great wonder. Writers, from Daniel Defoe and Frances Trollope to Herman Melville and Maxim Gorky, marveled at them, or were horrified. Tourists, ordinary and celebrated—Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, Charlie Chaplin, Kwame Nkrumah—visited them. In the twentieth century, they became a favorite subject of painters, photographers, and filmmakers, leading artists like Charles Sheeler, Diego Rivera, and Dziga Vertov. Political thinkers, from Alexander Hamilton to Mao Zedong, debated their significance.

  From eighteenth-century England on, observers recognized the revolutionary nature of the factory. Factories visibly ushered in a new world. Their novel machinery, workforces of unprecedented size, and outflow of uniform products all commanded attention. So did the physical, social, and cultural arrangements invented to accommodate them. Producing vast quantities of consumer and producer goods, giant industrial enterprises brought a radical break from the past, in material life and intellectual horizons. The large factory became an incandescent symbol of human ambition and achievement, but also of suffering. Time and again, it served as a measuring rod for attitudes toward work, consumption, and power, a physical embodiment of dreams and nightmares about the future.

  In our time, the ubiquity of factory-made products and the lack of novelty in the existence of the factory has dulled appreciation of the extraordinary human experience associated with it. At least in the developed world, we have come to take factory-made modernity for granted as a natural condition of life. Yet it is anything but. Only a brief flash in the history of humankind, the age of the factory does not go as far back as Voltaire’s first play or the whaling ships of Nantucket. The creation of the factory required exceptional ingenuity, obsession, and misery. We have inherited its miraculous productive power and long history of exploitation without giving it much thought.

  But we should. The factory still defines our world. For nearly half a century, scholars and journalists in the United States have been announcing the end of the industrial age, seeing the country as transforming into a “postindustrial society.” Today, only 8 percent of American workers are in manufacturing, down from 24 percent in 1960. The factory and its workers have lost the cultural purchase they once had. But worldwide, we are in a heyday of manufacturing. According to data compiled by the International Labor Organization, in 2010 nearly 29 percent of the global workforce labored in “industry,” down only a bit from a 2006 prerecession high of 30 percent and considerably above the 1994 figure of 22 percent. In China, the world’s largest manufacturer, in 2015, 43 percent of the workforce was employed in industry.2

  The biggest factories in history are operating right now, making products like smartphones, laptops, and brand-name sneakers that for billions of people around the world define what it means to be modern. These factories are staggeringly large, with 100,000, 200,000, or more workers. But they are not without precedent. Outsized factories have been a feature of industrial life for more than two centuries. In each era since the factory arrived on the stage of history, there have been industrial complexes that have stood out on the social and cultural landscape by dint of their size, their machinery and methods, the struggles of their workers, and the products they produced. Their very names—Lowell or Magnitogorsk or now Foxconn City—have broadly evoked sets of images and associations.

  This book tells the story of these landmark factories as industrial giantism migrated from England in the eighteenth century to the American textile and steel industries in the nineteenth century, the automobile industry in the early twentieth century, the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and the new socialist states after World War II, culminating in the Asian behemoths of our time. In part, it is an exploration of the logic of production that led at some times and places to the intense concentration of manufacturing in massive, high-profile facilities and at other times and places to its dispersion and social invisibility. Equally, it is a study of how and why giant factories became carriers of dreams and nightmares associated with industrialization and social change.

  The factory led a revolution t
hat transformed human life and the global environment. For most of human history, up to the initial stirrings of the Industrial Revolution and the creation of the first factories in the early eighteenth century, the vast majority of the world population was rural and poor, living precarious existences plagued by hunger and disease. In England, in the mid-eighteenth century, life expectancy did not reach forty, while in parts of France only half of all children lived to see their twentieth birthday. Average annual per capita growth of global economic output during the period between the birth of Jesus and the first factory was essentially zero. But in the eighteenth century it began nudging up and between 1820 and 1913 approached 1 percent. In the years since it has been higher, with a peak, between 1950 and 1970, of nearly 3 percent. The cumulative effect of the increased production of goods and services has been utterly transformative, measured most basically in life expectancy, now over eighty in the United Kingdom, a bit higher in France, and nearly sixty-nine globally. Steady supplies of food, clean water, and decent sanitation have become the norm in much of the world, no longer restricted to tiny pockets of the wealthy in the most advanced areas. Meanwhile, the surface of the earth, the composition of the oceans, and the temperature of the air have been profoundly altered, to the extent of threatening the species itself. Not all of this was strictly the result of the Industrial Revolution, let alone the giant factory, but much of it was.3

  In both capitalist and socialist countries, the giant factory was promoted as a way to achieve a new and better way of life through increased efficiency and output from advanced technology and economies of scale. More than simply a means to boost profits or reserves, large-scale industrial projects were seen as instruments for achieving broad social betterment. As factories came to embody the idea of modernity, their physical structures and processes were hailed by writers and artists for their symbolic and aesthetic characteristics. But even as giant factories inspired utopian dreams and reveries of machine worship, they also brought on fears about the future. For many workers, social critics, and artists, the big factory meant proletarian misery, social conflict, and ecological degradation.

  Understanding the history of giant factories can help us think about what kind of future we want. The outsized factory has been a marvel at reducing unit costs and pouring out massive quantities of goods. Yet these testaments to human ingenuity and labor often proved short-lived. Most of the facilities discussed in this book no longer exist or function at much reduced scales of operation. In Europe, the Americas, and most recently Asia, the abandoned factory has become a distressing, all-too-common sight. The concentration of production in a few massive complexes again and again created vulnerabilities, as pools of available workers dried up and employees began asserting claims to proper compensation, humane treatment, and democratic voice (demands manufacturers in many countries are confronting today). Heavy capital investment reduced flexibility when new products and production techniques emerged. Industrial wastes and heavy energy consumption led to ecological despoilment. What has kept the model of industrial giantism alive has not been its sustainability in any one locale but its reemergence, over and over, in new places, with new workforces, natural resources, and conditions of backwardness to be exploited. Today, as we may well be witnessing the historic apogee of the giant factory, economic and ecological conditions suggest that we need to rethink the meaning of modernity and whether or not it should continue to be equated with ever more material production in vast, hierarchically organized industrial facilities of the kind that were the bane and the glory of the past.

  As once landmark factories in Europe and the United States closed, leaving behind physical ruins and social misery, a nostalgia for the factory and its world has grown up, particularly in blue-collar communities. Websites lovingly document factories long shuttered, what some scholars have dubbed “smokestack nostalgia” or, more cuttingly, “ruin porn.” There are literary versions, too. In an essay about Philip Roth, Marshall Berman noted his novel American Pastoral’s theme of “the tragic ruin of America’s industrial cities.” Roth “writes vividly about the decay, but his writing really takes off when he tries to imagine the city as a Utopia of industry. The voice he develops to tell this story could be called Industrial Pastoral. The common feeling here is that life was far more ‘real’ and more ‘authentic’ yesterday, when men in boots made things, than it is today, when it is a lot harder to say what it is we do all day.” Berman reminds us, “One important quality of pastoral vision is that it leaves out dirty work.”4

  Some of the power of factory nostalgia comes from the association of the factory with the idea of progress. Out of the Enlightenment emerged the notion that through human effort and rationality the world could be transformed toward greater abundance, well-being, and moral order, a central belief of both the entrepreneurs who led the Industrial Revolution and the socialists who were their harshest critics. The factory was repeatedly portrayed as an instrument of progress, an almost magical means to achieve modernity, part of a larger Promethean project that also brought us the great dams, power plants, railways, and canals that have transformed the surface of our planet.

  Today, for many people, the very idea of progress seems quaint, even murderous, an artifact of the Victorian era that could not survive world war, genocide, and abundance. The modern appears old-fashioned in a declared-to-be postmodern world. For others, the notion of progress retains a powerful grip on their imaginations and a deep moral significance, informing a yearning for a return to—or arrival at—a world of large-scale industry.

  Understanding the giant factory requires coming to grips with the ideas of progress and modernity. Rather than a narrow exercise in the study of architecture, technology, or industrial relations, a full history of the giant factory takes us beyond factory walls to changing moral, political, and aesthetic sensibilities and the role of the factory in producing them.

  Modernity, with which the factory has been linked, is a slippery term. It can simply denote the quality of being modern, something contemporary, existing at the current moment. But it often has served as more than a neutral categorization. Until the nineteenth century, the modern usually was unfavorably compared to the past. Then, in the age of the factory, modern increasingly came to connote improved, desirable, the best that can be. Modern entailed a disavowal of the past, a rejection of the old-fashioned for the most up-to-date, an embrace of progress. One dictionary defines modernity as “characterized by departure from or repudiation of traditional ideas, doctrines, and cultural values in favour of contemporary or radical values and beliefs.”

  Modernism in the arts and literature, arising in the nineteenth century, took modernity as its battle cry, in what Jürgen Habermas called “the cult of the New,” even as it sometimes critiqued or mocked it. Novelty became its own virtue, a weapon in an assault on conventional values and ruling authorities. The factory system and the dizzying rate of change it made possible were its precondition. Not surprisingly, the factory itself became a favored subject for modernist artists.5

  This study focuses on very large factories, the largest of their time measured by the number of workers they employed, not all factories.6 Giant factories served as templates for the future, setting the terms of technological, political, and cultural discussion. They were not typical. Most factories were much smaller and less sophisticated. Very frequently, they had worse conditions for their workers. But giant factories monopolized public attention. Debates about the meaning of the factory tended to focus on the industrial behemoths of the day.

  There have been few studies of the factory, let alone the giant factory, that cut across time and space. Rarely has it been considered as an institution in its own right, with a distinctive history, aesthetic, social characteristics, political salience, and ecological impact.7 But much has been written about particular factories. That is especially true of the factories discussed in the pages that follow, for they were selected in part because they were so celebrated or con
demned in their time. Without the work of other scholars, as well as the wealth of journalistic accounts, government reports, visual representations, fictional portrayals, and first-person descriptions, this study would not be possible. The work of my predecessors is particularly impressive because while some factories have been proudly shown off by their creators, many others, from the earliest English textile mills to the giant factories of today, have been carefully shrouded in an effort to protect trade secrets and hide abusive practices.

  To many inhabitants of the modern world, the factory may seem distant from their everyday routines and concerns. It is not. Without it, their lives could not exist as they are. Except in some very isolated places, we are all part of the factory system. Given the great costs as well as great benefits of the giant factory, we owe it to ourselves to understand how it came to be.

  BEHEMOTH

  CHAPTER 1

  “LIKE MINERVA FROM THE BRAIN OF JUPITER”

  The Invention of the Factory

  IN 1721, A STONE’S THROW FROM ALL SAINTS’ CHURCH (now Cathedral) in Derby, England, the first successful example of a factory, as we use the term today, was built on an island in the River Derwent. Unlike many older types of buildings—the church, mosque, palace, or fortress, the theater, bathhouse, dormitory or lecture hall, the courtroom, prison, or city hall—the factory is strictly a creature of the modern world, a world it helped create. As far back as the ancient world, there were episodic large assemblages of workers to make war or build structures such as pyramids, roads, fortifications, and aqueducts. But until the nineteenth century, manufacturing generally took place on a far more modest scale, engaged in by craftsmen and their helpers working alone or in small groups or by family members making goods for home consumption. In the United States, as late as 1850, manufacturing establishments on average employed fewer than eight workers.1