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  The government also severely limited the ability of workers to join together to pressure employers to improve wages and conditions. In reaction to the late eighteenth-century growth of proto-trade unions (among nonfactory workers) and the fear among British rulers, brought on by the French Revolution, of any type of radicalism or popular action, Parliament passed a series of laws—most importantly the 1800 Combination Act—against worker organization. Between 1792 and 1815, the government built 155 military barracks in industrial areas.94

  In spite of legal prohibitions, workers formed open and secret organizations, held strikes, and joined in marches and mass demonstrations. The 1810s saw the first substantial walkouts by factory workers, some involving thousands of cotton spinners. The government reaction was heavy-handed, arresting, imprisoning, and transporting to the colonies leading activists and, in the case of some Luddites, hanging them. When in 1819 some sixty thousand protestors gathered in Manchester to demand democratic reforms, a military unit made up of local manufacturers, merchants, and storeowners charged the peaceful crowd, killing eleven people and leaving hundreds wounded in the so-called Peterloo Massacre. The government response was to pass still more repressive legislation, among other things banning meetings with more than fifty people present.

  The 1820s brought yet more strikes, machine breaking, and reform campaigns, followed in the 1830s by a massive push to win legislation limiting factory working hours. In 1842 came a widespread strike among mill workers and miners, called the Plug Riots because strikers removed the plugs from steam engines, rendering them inoperable. By the 1850s, larger and more stable (though still mostly local) unions began to form among textile workers. Some launched large, prolonged, though generally unsuccessful strikes. Over a half century after the first factory giants had been erected, in spite of repeated, episodically large-scale efforts, the workers within them still lacked any effective political or organizational method for improving their lot or shaping the society in which they lived.95

  Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Great Britain often has been portrayed as a freer society than continental Europe. Some scholars, like Landes, suggest that this was one reason why the Industrial Revolution took off there first.96 But for workers, especially factory workers, Britain was far from a free society. Factories grew up under an autocratic political regime, at least as far as it concerned working people. Workers did not have the right to vote, they did not have the right to assemble, they did not have the right to join together to bargain collectively with their employers, they did not have the right to quit their jobs whenever they wanted to, they did not have the right to say whatever they thought. Nothing better symbolized the support the state gave the emerging industrial system than the hanging of workers for the crime of not attacking persons but inanimate objects, breaking machines. Later to be extolled as the triumph of a new kind of freedom, the factory system was nurtured by severe restrictions on the rights of those whose labor made it possible. It took—and continued to take—the repressive power of the state to enable the giant factory to take root in unbroken soil.97

  Becoming Ordinary

  In the second half of the nineteenth century, cotton mills became less central to discussions and struggles about the structure of British society and the shape of its future. For one thing, they were no longer novel. By then, generations had grown up with large mills as a part of the world they lived in. Other, newer marvels had taken the lead as symbols of modernity, most importantly the railroad, which drew extraordinary attention from writers, artists, and the general public. In 1829 some ten to fifteen thousand people assembled in Lancashire to watch a competitive test of newly designed locomotives. The next year, when the first modern railway line opened, linking Liverpool to Manchester, dignitaries filled the first train and huge crowds lined the tracks. Trains became, as Tony Judt put it, “modern life incarnate.”98

  Textile mills no longer held first place, either, in sheer size, as other types of worksites came to rival or exceed them. The railroad system had a huge workforce, with some shops that built and maintained equipment employing as many workers as large textile mills. Other industries, especially metalworking, also built very large plants. By the late 1840s, the Dowlais iron works in Wales employed some seven thousand men in a complex that included eighteen blast furnaces, puddling ovens, rolling mills, and mines, dwarfing even the largest textile mill.”99

  Changed economic and political circumstances also muted attention to the textile factory. In the mid-nineteenth century, the British economy began to significantly improve, with growing international markets for English textiles contributing to increased revenue and improved conditions for workers. Legislation also began easing the lot of mill employees, especially the 1831 Truck Act, which required workers to be paid in cash, the 1833 act regulating child labor, and an 1847 law that limited the working day for children and women in mills to ten hours, realizing a long-time goal of working-class reformers. When Engels returned to Manchester in 1849, just seven years after he began research for what became The Condition of the Working Class in England, he found a very different city, more prosperous and peaceful. “The English proletariat,” he complained, “is actually becoming more and more bourgeois.”100

  The transformation was as much political as economic. The failure of the Chartists to win their demands, in spite of their huge success in mobilizing support, took much of the wind out of the sails of the radical movements. At the same time, Chartism, with its emphasis on male suffrage, shifted attention away from female and child mill workers to adult men: artisans, construction workers, and other nonfactory laborers. The campaign against the Corn Laws, which began in 1838 and triumphed eight years later, rearranged the political terrain, too, in effect bringing workers and mill owners into alliance against the landed gentry, at least on this one, much debated issue. Further easing tensions, more mill owners began adopting paternalist practices, which had been prevalent among some of the earliest textile manufacturers, like Arkwright and Strutt, but rejected by many others.101

  Textile workers continued to protest conditions they faced in the mills, but their struggles were no more prominent than those of miners and other groups acting through unions. After the mid-nineteenth century, the attention of middle-class reformers and observers shifted away from the mill, even as conditions for mill workers, though improved, remained often oppressive and child labor, albeit slightly older, continued to be widely used into the twentieth century. The questions surrounding the large textile mill and the factory system it brought into being devolved into part of a more general and less apocalyptic debate about the rights and standards of labor. By the time Charlotte Brontë published Shirley in 1849, she viewed the great dramatic struggles over the factory system as something from the past, with the large cotton mill having been, all in all, a source of social betterment.102

  By then, the giant cotton factory had led to new ways of organizing production, new sets of social relations, and new ways of thinking about the world. All but its most adamant defenders recognized that in the short run the big factory had brought with it massive human suffering, both among the workers in the mills and those displaced by them. Yet for many, the mill held forth the promise of a better world. In an unpublished article which would become the basis of The Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels wrote: “Precisely that quality of large-scale industry which in present society produces all misery and all trade crises is the very quality which under a different social organization will destroy that same misery and these disastrous fluctuations.”103 For better and for worse, the extraordinary social invention that first appeared with the Lombes’ mill and the early cotton spinning mills, the factory behemoth, represented a giant leap toward a new world, our modernity.

  CHAPTER 2

  “THE LIVING LIGHT”

  New England Textiles and Visions of Utopia

  DURING AN 1842 TOUR OF THE UNITED STATES, Charles Dickens spent a day visiting Lowell, Massa
chusetts, the largest cotton manufacturing center in the country. Founded just twenty years earlier, the midsize city, set in the countryside, had become a bustling conglomeration of mills, boardinghouses, and churches, its streets lined with trees and flowers and filled with lively young women. If he were to make a comparison between Lowell and the factories of England, Dickens wrote, “The contrast would be a strong one, for it would be between the Good and Evil, the living light and deepest shadow.” Dickens was far from alone among European travelers in seeing Lowell as a different order of society than the manufacturing centers of Britain. Englishman John Dix wrote in 1845 that “a more striking contrast than that afforded by Manchester . . . and Lowell, can scarcely be imagined.” Michael Chevalier, a French political economist, described manufacturing as “the canker of England,” which at least “temporarily involves the most disastrous consequences.” By contrast, he found Lowell “neat, decent, peaceable and sage.” Novelist Anthony Trollope, son of Frances Trollope (who wrote Michael Armstrong), dubbed Lowell “a commercial Utopia.”1

  European writers visiting Lowell—a regular stop on the circuit of New World wonders—were particularly taken by its pastoral setting and young, female workforce. “COTTON MILLS! In England the very words are synonymous with misery, disease, destitution, squalor, profligacy, and crime!,” wrote Dix. “How different from the neighborhood in which we now are, where the only sound which is heard above the whirling of spindles, and the clatter of machinery, is the chirp of the locust or the song of the robin.” Chevalier found the sight of Lowell “new and fresh like an opera scene.” Witnessing “neatly dressed” young women working “amidst the flowers and shrubs, which they cultivate, I said to myself, this, then, is not like Manchester.” Dix, too, was impressed by the “healthy, good-humored, pretty faces, and honestly-earned habiliments” of the Lowell workers, who, he wrote, “belonged to another race of beings” compared to their Manchester counterparts.2

  If, in the Old World, cotton mills came to be seen as dystopian, in the New World, they were repeatedly hailed as beacons of a bright future. As it turned out, many of the characteristics of New England textile manufacturing that won such praise—the bucolic surroundings of the factories, the neat mill towns, and the attractive young female workers—lasted but a few decades. But other aspects of the Lowell system of manufacturing, which commanded less notice from casual visitors, endured, anticipating what nearly a century later would come to be called “mass production.” By promoting a vision of the mill town as a morally uplifting and culturally enlightening community, and developing a system of cheap, standardized manufacturing, Lowell spread the idea that both economic and social betterment could be achieved through technically advanced industry. Lowell reduced fears of industrialization while equating progress with the efficient production of consumer goods. Doing so made the New England textile industry an important episode in not only the history of the giant factory, but also in the development of our modern world.3

  Beginnings

  Lowell was not the first attempt to establish cotton manufacturing in the United States. Earlier, the industry had begun to develop along the same lines as in England. In the late eighteenth century, a few efforts were made to build spinning and carding machines, including one that, like Arkwright’s early mill, used horses as a source of power.4 But success only came when, in an echo of the Lombes’ theft of Italian technology, textile machinist Samuel Slater evaded a British ban on the emigration of skilled manufacturing workers, in place until 1825. Like the Italians, the British hoped to maintain through the force of law a monopoly on advanced technology—textile machinery could not be exported until 1843—but the effort proved futile.

  Slater, born in Belper, amid the world’s first successful cotton mills, had apprenticed with Jedidiah Strutt, living with the Strutt family and working in one of its mills, where he became familiar with Arkwright’s equipment. In 1789, he slipped out of England, telling no one of his plans. Arriving in America, he quickly hooked up with Moses Brown, a partner in the Rhode Island merchant company Almy and Brown, who hired him to build and equip a water-powered mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Compared to the brick or stone English mills, the Almy and Brown factory was very modest, a two-and-a-half story wood structure, housing machinery made almost entirely out of wood. Starting up slowly, it initially did carding and spinning with a workforce of nine local children. By 1801 it had over a hundred children at work.5

  The Almy and Brown factory soon spawned new operations, as Slater and other mechanics who worked there launched their own enterprises, often in partnership with merchants. The Slater-style mills remained small, as the rivers they were built on generally could power only modest operations. Also, there were not enough nearby children to sustain large plants, with no poorhouses, as there were in England, to turn to for forced recruits. Mills advertised for large families to hire, with men to work as skilled mechanics and children minding machines. But with labor scarce in the thinly populated United States, recruiting workers proved difficult. So production grew not through increased mill size but by replication, with factories moving further into the back country, where untapped pools of labor could be found. By 1809, at least twenty-seven mills were operating in Rhode Island, eastern Connecticut, and southern Massachusetts.6

  The American mills mimicked English practices, most obviously in the extensive use of child labor, including children as young as four. In another carry-over, they generally paid their employees, except for skilled mechanics, with credit at a company store rather than cash, reflecting, as in Britain, a shortage of small currency, as well as limited working capital. To conserve cash and retain workers, mills usually paid wages only once a quarter, or even less frequently, and delayed for weeks giving final payouts when workers quit.

  At first, total factory output remained modest. For one thing, the demand for cotton yarn was limited. Most Americans wore flax or wool clothing. Those who preferred cotton could buy British exports. For another thing, raw cotton was hard to obtain. Little cotton was being grown in the United States when Slater got started, so at first he used cotton imported from Cayenne and Surinam, only later adding Southern-grown cotton to the mix.7

  But output soared in the second decade of the nineteenth century. The Napoleonic Wars, the Embargo Act (in effect from 1807 to 1809), and the War of 1812 disrupted English imports just when a growing taste for cotton clothing and an increasing market for cotton cloth from settlements west of the Alleghenies boosted demand. Looking to cash in, merchants and mechanics launched a wave of spinning mill construction across the Northern states. Weaving remained strictly hand done. In Pennsylvania, full-time skilled artisans produced fine-quality cloth. In New England, some mills set up networks of outworkers to weave, but rarely as a full-time occupation. Frustrated by the difficulty in getting outwork returned in a timely fashion, Almy and Brown hired weavers to work in the company’s factory.8

  It was in this context that Frances Cabot Lowell conceived of a different way to produce cotton cloth. A wealthy Boston merchant, Lowell, during an extended sojourn in Britain, decided that big profits could be made through the large-scale integrated production of textiles, using powered equipment for all phases of the operation within a single factory. At the time, few British firms spun and wove in the same plant and no power loom had ever been used in the United States, because of Britain’s technology embargo. On returning home, Lowell hired a skilled mechanic, Paul Moody, to help him build machinery modeled after what he had seen in England. By 1814, they had a power loom successfully operating and a dressing machine to prepare the warp.9

  Meanwhile, Lowell formed a joint-stock company, the Boston Manufacturing Company, with other Boston merchants to build and operate a mill. The investors realized that with the full-scale resumption of British trade after the War of 1812, their opportunities for profits in international commerce would be reduced. Manufacturing promised to be a rewarding alternative, even as they continued to be active in tra
de and real estate speculation.

  Creating the company was a radical innovation. In the early nineteenth century, stockholder corporations were rare, with each needing a separate enabling state law. Generally, they were used only for enterprises considered public utilities, like building a canal. The corporate form had great advantages; it allowed aggregation of capital on a scale few individuals could afford and shared risk among multiple parties, a practice well known to merchants, who often formed partnerships to finance ship journeys. Joint stock corporations also facilitated enterprise continuity when investors chose to withdraw their funds and eased the process of inheritance, important for the rich, largely passive stockholders who would be drawn to the textile industry. (Corporations gained an additional advantage when they were granted limited liability in most New England states during the 1830s and 1840s.) Within five years, Boston Manufacturing raised $400,000 in capital (soon raised to $600,000). By contrast, as late as 1831 the average capitalization for 119 mills in Rhode Island fell below $45,000.10

  To begin operations, Boston Manufacturing bought a mill site in Waltham, up the Charles River from Boston, where a paper mill already was using water power. There the company built a four-story brick mill, forty feet wide and ninety feet long, topped by a cupola housing a bell to call employees to work. Though not much larger than the largest existing U.S. cotton mills, the Waltham factory fundamentally differed in that it housed weaving as well as spinning equipment, so that within a single structure bales of raw cotton were turned into finished cloth. Also, Boston Manufacturing recruited a different kind of workforce than earlier mills, hiring, in addition to a few skilled male workers, local young women to operate both the spinning and weaving equipment.11