The Industrial Revolution and Labor

1. The Industrial Revolution and Labor

2. Industrialization and Historians • Triumphant view • -- celebrated industrialization with little or no criticism • Progressive historians • --robber baron view and threatened American ideas expressed by founding fathers • Business history school • --shifted focus from the personality of the industrialist to the nature of competitive capitalism • --emphasized abilities of these leaders and companies for bringing efficiency to industry • New Left • large-scale business enterprise not inevitable • forged to stem tide of competition by turning to gov’t for help • feared democratic upsurge against corporate capitalism at turn of century

3. The Industrial Age • Eads Bridge and Industrial America • Secession and rise of Republican Party • Morrill Tariff (1861) • high protective tariff for industry • Homestead Act (1862) • Pacific Railroad Act (1862) • subsidizes RR construction and expands market • National Banking Acts (1863,64) • nat’l banking system and currency • What is big business? • Scale of business and diffused ownership • greater fixed capital and more production • large, bureaucratic management system • greater geographic scope • numerous economic functions • Contemporary example of corner market v. Vons

4. Robber Barons?

5. Carnegie and Rockefeller • Andrew Carnegie and Steel • vertical integration: control entire production and distribution from resources to delivery • John D. Rockefeller and Oil • horizontal integration: combining similar producers into larger group to control market • Competition, cartels • Standard Oil trust • Significance: These two men represented the primary methods used to expand size and market share of industry as well as became symbols of new wealth and power.

6. Gospel of Wealth • Social Darwinism • survival of fittest and laissez faire • Gospel of Wealth • natural economic aristocracy • politicians not naturally selected • gov’t to protect property and maintain order • poverty inevitable and so gov’t can’t interfere • rich should give back on their terms

7. Workers, Unions, and Strikes in the Industrial Age

8. Workers and Historians • Commons School/Institutional School • focus on institutions like unions rather than workers • explored why pure and simple unionism won out over socialism • focused mostly on workplace and little on life, politics, and culture outside workplace • New Labor History (1960s-70s) • looked beyond the workplace and labor-management relations to who were the workers, their ideas and values, working-class culture, and other non-workplace experiences • influenced by Neo-Marxist like Thompson who looked at class consciousness • new issues like class, republicanism, and community added • Recent labor history • introduced gender and race to compete with class analysis

9. Workers in the Industrial Age • Class and American society • Freedom means economic independence • workers’ defend the American Revolution • Changing composition • wage workers increase by 3X • Diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender • immigration

10. Working Conditions • Some gains in wages and less hours • Accommodation to factory life • high industrial accident rate • Chronic underemployment • no safety nets • Wage labor as permanent condition • increased deskilling of workforce

11. Open to all producers, skills, races, sex ideology shaped by political/social consequences of industrialization Goals coops, education, 8 hr day save the republic Methods and Success Strikes, political activity and election victories Failure and Collapse lost strikes, failed coops major parties coopted leaders and ideas Skilled workers/ few women and races Ideology of “pure and simple unionism” Goals: wages, hours, conditions, unions Methods: organize workers/no political parties but support friends of labor Success: largest union, good gov’t relations by WWI Failure: limited membership Knights of Labor v. AFL

12. Strikes and Conflicts Haymarket Riot (1886) • Demise of Knights of Labor • Homestead steel mills (1892) • lockout and Pinkertons • Pullman Boycott (1894) • Pullman Palace Car company • Debs and ARU boycott • AFL refuses to aid ARU • Significance: These strikes indicate the profound depths of class conflict in the industrial age and helped encourage Americans to confront this problem. • Unions and Strike Today? • Grocery stores and Wal Mart

13. Reforming Visions in the Early Industrial Age • Politics of Paralysis • Balance of power • Party loyalty • Traditional Ideas • Weak central gov’t; class conflict; party loyalty • Henry George • Progress and Poverty • Land as source of ills • Single Tax • Edward Bellamy • Looking Backward • Utopian society

14. Web Links • http://members.aol.com/TeacherNet/Industrial.html • http://homicide.northwestern.edu/context/movements/haymarket • http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/haymarket/haymarket.html • http://www.boondocksnet.com/gallery/political_cartoons.html • http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/mmh/steel/default.cfm • http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/mmh/gildedage/ • http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/mmh/laborconflict/ • http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awlhtml/