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  After the 1850s, when New England mills appeared in the news, it usually was because of untoward developments. In January 1860, the seven-year-old Pemberton mill in Lawrence fell down, its poorly made cast iron columns unable to withstand the weight and vibrations of its machinery. In the collapse and subsequent fire that engulfed the rubble and those trapped in it, some one hundred people died and many more suffered serious injuries. It remains to this day one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history. Newspapers and magazines as far away as Hawaii reported on the catastrophe, recounting “heart-rending and appalling scenes” and featuring drawings of rescues and the charred remains of victims. Some papers—going beyond the conclusions of a coroner’s inquest, which held the mill architect responsible—blamed the calamity on “the wealthy Boston philanthropists” who owned the mill and the “flagrant disregard” of company leaders for the “safety of their employees,” tarnishing the reputation of the mill owners.70

  Child labor also brought the mills unflattering public attention. Textile was among the industries targeted in an early twentieth-century campaign to keep children out of mines and mills. The photographs that Lewis Hine took in 1909 for the National Child Labor Committee of children working at Amoskeag became iconic.71

  Labor strife further buried the notion that the New England mills would avoid the ills of European industry. After the Civil War, textile strikes became increasingly common. Some involved relatively small groups of skilled male workers, like mule spinners. In other cases, women workers or alliances cutting across skill and gender lines conducted the strikes. Lawrence workers staged small strikes in 1867, 1875, and 1881, and a long strike in 1882, which received national attention. Failed strikes took place in Lawrence in 1902 and in Lowell in 1903.72

  The last time the country was captivated by a vision of the future emanating from the mills of New England came in 1912, when some fourteen thousand workers in Lawrence went on strike for two months to protest a pay cut, instituted in response to a state law reducing working hours. “The strike in Lawrence,” declared socialist Congressman Victor Berger, “is a rebellion of the wage-working class against unbearable conditions.” Led by fiery organizers from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), women and men from forty different ethnic groups banded together, creating multilingual committees to direct the struggle. The militancy and solidarity displayed by the Lawrence strikers—the type of semiskilled immigrant workers mainstream labor leaders had written off as impossible to organize—inspired radicals and unionists across the country to imagine that a new labor movement and a transformed nation were coming.

  Figure 2.4 Lewis Hine is famous for his startling portraits of child workers, including this one of a girl working in the Amoskeag textile factory in 1909.

  Mill owners and government officials set out to crush the strike with a declaration of martial law, a ban on public meetings, the arrest of strike leaders on trumped-up charges, the mobilization of the National Guard, and physical attacks on the strikers and their supporters. When the strikers, running out of food and money, started sending their children out of town to live with supporters, the police and militia tried to stop them, clubbing adults and children alike at the railway station. The owners overplayed their hand, as a wave of national outrage contributed to their decision to grant a substantial pay increase, ending the strike in a workers’ victory.73

  After the strike, the IWW failed to consolidate its power. It took another two decades before New England mill workers finally created stable unions. By then, the end was near. Slow to modernize, and facing ever-growing competition from lower-cost Southern mills (some financed by New England mill owners), the mills put up by the Boston Associates began shutting down in the early twentieth century. Amoskeag closed in 1936, the rebuilt Pemberton mill in 1938, and the last of the original Lowell mills in the 1950s. Bits and pieces of textile production continued in Lawrence and elsewhere in New England, but the great experiment launched by Francis Cabot Lowell was over.74

  Well before the Lowell factories began closing, the United States had surpassed Great Britain as the world’s greatest industrial power. By the mid-1880s, more goods flowed out of American factories than British ones. By World War I, the manufacturing output of the United States topped that of Britain, France, and Germany combined. The meteoric growth of American manufacturing reflected, in part, the growing size of the country itself, which in 1890 approached a population of 63 million, far larger than Britain, with 33 million; France, with 38 million; and Germany, with 49 million, allowing the high output of cheap standardized goods for the home market.75

  Lowell had helped usher in America’s industrial age and its global industrial dominance. It had been born amid a blaze of positive publicity because it promised the fusion of mechanized manufacturing with republican values, creating a “commercial Utopia” that would confirm the United States as a land of new beginnings and infinite possibilities, free of the class divisions and inequalities of the Old World. The success of Lowell in creating a different social and cultural model for manufacturing helped ease long-standing national concerns about the impact of industrialization on what was still an agrarian republic, allowing a new consensus equating progress with increased productivity through mechanization and large-scale enterprise. By the time the Lowell mills receded from view, Americans had squarely embraced a vision of the future built on the bedrock of industry. Ironically, when the mills dominated national news for a final time, in 1912, before fading into oblivion and decay, it was because of the very kind of class warfare the promoters of Lowell had claimed its system would avoid.

  CHAPTER 3

  “THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION”

  Industrial Exhibitions, Steelmaking, and the Price of Prometheanism

  ON MAY 10, 1876, THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine opened in Philadelphia, a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. One hundred thousand people heard speeches by assorted dignitaries, sixteen national anthems, the premiere of Richard Wagner’s “Centennial Inauguration March,” the “Hallelujah Chorus” sung by a thousand-voice choir, and a 100-gun salute. But for many visitors the highlight of the day came when President Ulysses S. Grant and Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil led the crowd into the immense Machinery Hall. There they climbed onto the platform of the forty-foot-high Corliss double walking beam steam engine. When each man turned a valve before him, the 56-ton, 1,400-horsepower engine came to life, turning twenty-three miles of shafting that powered hundreds of machines filling the wood and glass building.

  The Centennial Exhibition, as it was commonly known, was an extravaganza occupying 285 acres, attended, during its six-month run, by nearly ten million visitors, equivalent to about a fifth the population of the United States. With exhibits from thirty-seven nations, its displays were encyclopedic, featuring everything from exotic plants and prize cattle to fine art and historical artifacts. But machines and machine-made products overwhelmed all else.

  Figure 3.1 President Ulysses S. Grant and Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil start the Corliss engine at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876.

  The fourteen-acre Machinery Hall contained a dizzying array of industrial equipment, including a complete printing operation that produced a newspaper twice a day, a railroad engine, metalworking and woodworking machinery, brickmaking machines, and spinning and weaving equipment from Saco, Maine. In the section called, in the taxonomic terminology typical of the exhibition, “Machines, Apparatus, and Implements Used in Sewing and Making Clothing and Ornamental Objects,” a visitor could watch a pair of suspenders mechanically made with his or her name woven into the fabric. Among the new inventions unveiled were the typewriter, the telephone, and a mechanical calculator. A huge variety of machine-made products could be found in the Main Exhibition Building. Smaller buildings, like the Singer Sewing Machine Company building and the Shoe and Leather Building, housed still more machines
and machine-made products. Even the Agricultural Hall was full of machines, from reapers to windmill-driven pumps to chocolate-making equipment.1

  It was a peculiar way to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the United States. There was plenty of patriotic imagery and patriotic kitsch. But the weight of the exhibition lay elsewhere, in the celebration of the technological marvels of the day, of the great productivity and inventiveness of the United States, of its progress as measured by its mastery of the mechanical realm. It took an ideological leap to see the connection between the American Revolution and the Corliss engine.

  The concentration on mechanical marvels and industrial bounty measured how much views of national greatness and progress had changed during the half century since the Lowell mills opened. With little dissent, Americans had come to see machines and mechanical production as central to the meaning of the national experience, as integral to modernity. Americans had deep, sometimes violent disagreements about the structure and values of their society, as Reconstruction in the South came to a bitter end, workers suffering through a devastating economic depression launched the largest strikes the country had ever seen, and wars against Native Americans raged in the West. But about machinery and what it made possible, there was not much discord.2

  Americans believed that machines were opening the door to a new age of unprecedented bounty, freedom, and national power. The steam engine took center stage. It seemed to defy the gods, as Prometheus had, capturing fire from them and putting it to work. Tench Coxe, a Philadelphia merchant who worked closely with Alexander Hamilton in the late eighteenth century promoting manufactures, even used the term “Fire” for the steam engine.

  The miraculous power of steam fully revealed itself with the introduction of the first practical steamboats not long after the Revolution. John Fitch began operating a steam-driven ferry between Trenton and Philadelphia in 1790. In 1807, Robert Fulton’s North River, equipped with a British-built steam engine, travelled up the Hudson River from New York to Albany. Four years later, his New Orleans introduced the steamboat to the Ohio-Mississippi river system, opening up the western frontier of the United States to commercial development. Two-way shipping on the Mississippi facilitated the spread of cotton culture and, with it, slavery.

  But it was not just the effect of the steamboat that drew admiration; it was the boat itself, its speed, power, and unnatural beauty. Mounting a steam engine on a boat radically changed the experience of time, space, and distance, making once-epic journeys, like the trip from St. Louis to New Orleans, achievable in just a few days. Writer Edmund Flagg declared “There are few objects more truly grand—I almost said sublime—than a powerful steamer struggling with the rapids of the western waters.” For Flagg and others, the contrast between the steamboat, the creation of mankind, and the wild, natural setting of the Mississippi contributed to making the scene so memorable, bordering on the sublime, which for the nineteenth-century observer meant not just awesome or beautiful but frightening, unsettling, and overwhelming, too.

  Americans and Europeans traveling into newly settled lands often saw the steamboat to be a carrier of civilization itself, or at least their idea of civilization. But it did not take a wild Western setting to make the steamboat seem exalted. In 1848, Walt Whitman, echoing Flagg, wrote of the engine room of a Brooklyn ferry, “It is an almost sublime sight that one beholds there; for indeed there are few more magnificent pieces of handiwork than a powerful steam-engine swiftly at work.” Three years later he said the United States had become a nation “of whom the steam engine is no bad symbol.”3

  The railroad soon eclipsed the steamboat as a symbol of modernity. Steam-driven trains were even more widely seen, more widely used, and more widely praised than steamboats. In the year of the Centennial, Whitman wrote in “To a Locomotive in Winter”: “Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent!” By radically reducing the time, cost, and difficulty of moving people and things, the railroad tied the nation together, spreading commercial relations and disseminating ideas and sensibilities. With the railroad came new landscapes, a new sense of time, and a new cosmopolitanism.4

  Exhibiting Modernity

  Even standing still, the steam engine became a symbol of progress and national prowess, part of the broader celebration of machinery and manufactured goods, so evident at the Centennial Exhibition. Before the Philadelphia fair and continuing long after it, public exhibitions were built around the processes, symbols, and products of mechanical manufacturing, equating them with modernity. In 1839, for example, the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association held its second exhibition at Boston’s Quincy Market. Over the course of twelve days, seventy-thousand people attended. Among the exhibits were an operating miniature railroad, a small steam engine that powered other machinery, planning machines, a “cassimere shearing machine,” printing presses, and knitting machines. Displayed goods included textiles from Lowell, looking glasses, cabinets, coaches, saddles, hosiery, hats, caps, furs, confectionery, soaps, perfumes, boots, cannons, rifles, swords, hardware, cutlery, locks, pumps, fire engines, and musical instruments. Defending against the belief that manufacturing was undermining republican virtue, James Trecothick Austin, in an address at the exhibition, tried to dismiss “the supposed conflicting interests of the various classes in American society.” “Our splendid manufacturies of silver,” he said, “are worse than useless, if it is a sin against democracy to use a silver fork.”5

  The 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, officially the “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations,” marked the beginning of the great international expositions and world’s fairs, temples dedicated to progress and modernity as reflected in machines and machine-made objects. The building that contained the fair was at least as impressive as the exhibits within it. A huge iron and glass conservatory, the Crystal Palace was constructed entirely out of machine-made parts, so that after the exhibition closed it was easily disassembled and reconstructed on a different site. The British exhibit, by far the largest, had sections devoted to fine arts, “raw materials,” “machinery,” and “manufactures.” The industrial tourism that the well-connected had indulged in with factory visits now was brought to the masses. Fifteen steam-driven machines for carding, spinning, and weaving took raw cotton and converted it to cloth while viewers stood nearby. The enormous display of manufactured goods educated attendees about the emerging consumer society, showing the myriad things that could be made and how they would make life better. “World exhibitions,” Walter Benjamin would later write, were “sites of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish.”6

  The United States mounted a “Crystal Palace” exhibition of its own, the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, in 1853. The iron and glass exhibit hall, built in New York City on the site of what is now Bryant Park, was essentially a smaller version of the London building, with a dome added. It created a sensation; nothing like it had ever been seen in the New World. Like the London exhibition, it contained a hodgepodge of art, machinery, and manufactured products.7

  Other countries, too, mounted international exhibitions. The French held a series of fairs in Paris, starting with the 1855 Exposition Universelle and its Palais de l’Industrie, intended by Napoleon III to top the London display. Succeeding exhibitions came in 1867, 1878, 1889, and 1900. Vienna put on an International Exhibition in 1873. Chicago created the large, well-attended, and widely celebrated 1893 Columbian Exposition. Other United States fairs followed in short order, including in Omaha (1899), Buffalo (1901), and St. Louis (1904).8

  Even the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition, held in Atlanta to highlight the economic recovery of the South under white rule and the continued reign of King Cotton, prominently featured a Machinery Hall. One account called it “the heart” of the fair; “wheels, big and little, whirl in every quarter; dynamos generate untold volts of electricity; pumps and lathes, planes and drills are hard at work, all obediently responding to an unse
en but irresistible force.” “Southerners joined with millions of Yankee guests,” wrote historian C. Vann Woodward about the Southern expositions held in the 1880s and 1890s, “to invoke the spirit of Progress and worship the machine.”9

  The Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, became the foremost icon of the international fairs. Gustave Eiffel, a successful French engineer, won a government competition for a centerpiece for the exposition celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. Made up of more than eighteen thousand wrought-iron members, fabricated at an off-site factory, the 312-meter tower soared to nearly twice the height of what had been the world’s highest structure, the Washington Monument, completed just five years earlier. From the top, the tower offered vistas previously known only to a few balloonists, a preview of the bird’s-eye view of the great metropolis that would become common only decades later, after the invention of the airplane.10

  Before it was built, a group of prominent French artists, musicians, and writers protested what they called the “useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower,” “the hateful column of bolted iron,” which they declared would desecrate the beauty and honor of Paris.11 But the tower almost immediately became celebrated as a symbol of modernity, portrayed as a new kind of beauty. Even before it was completed, George Seurat made it the subject of one of his best-known canvases. A flood of drawings, paintings, and lithographs followed, including works by Henri Rousseau, Diego Rivera, Marc Chagall, and, perhaps most delightfully, Robert Delauney, who returned to the subject over and over again. The tower proved an ideal subject for modernist approaches to representation, including pointillism and cubism. Pioneer filmmakers also engaged the tower, the subject of short films by Louis Lumière in 1897 and George Méliès in 1900.12 So did writers. In Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Zone,” the tower herded the way to modernity: