How Did Mills Discuss Making America Great Again

A Century of Expansion

Miller: In 1800, America was undergoing not one, but two revolutions: ane political, the other economic. The forces unleashed by these twin revolutions; republic, industrialization, and commercialism, developed in tandem and transformed the look and graphic symbol of the state. There's a earth of difference between the America of Thomas Jefferson and that of Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1801, when Jefferson was inaugurated, the U.s. was a new, underdeveloped country of just over five 1000000 people. Although it was a state shaped past immigration, immigrants from one country, England, made up one-half the population. Some audacious pioneers had moved west of the Appalachian Mountains, but America was still a seacoast settlement, hugging the Atlantic shoreline.

It was a prosperous nation, but information technology lagged far behind England, which was industrializing furiously. And with just 10% of its population living in cities and towns, it was still overwhelmingly agrarian. In 1801, all this was nearly to change. And the change would exist sudden, explosive, and deeply disorientating.

In the next century, the nation's boundaries would expand enormously, the result of a relentless westward push. And as America expanded, clearing, capitalism, and technology would reshape the state, old places every bit well as the new ones. In 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt became President, more than 77 million Americans lived in a continental empire that stretched from sea to sea. And Roosevelt'south America was a veritable nation of nations, a melting pot for over 30 nationalities.

Forty percentage of Americans still worked on farms in 1900, but an equal number lived in cities. And by this fourth dimension, America had surpassed England as the leading industrial nation on globe. The forces responsible for these sweeping transformations were gathering as the 19th century began. The American Revolution broke the back of land-regulated mercantile capitalism and opened the way for a market revolution that produced the world's most dynamic economical system.

Adam Smith and a New Commercialism

This was the kind of capitalism that Adam Smith, the Scottish economist, had called for in his main piece of work,The Wealth of Nations, which was published, interestingly, in 1776. Smith argued that the product of wealth would increment dramatically if individuals were allowed to pursue their self-interest, with little interference from government. And in serving their ain interests, individuals would serve the public involvement, unconsciously, as if guided, as he said, by an "unseen hand." Better the unseen manus than the hand of the State.

Hither were radically new ideas; simply not to Americans. Smith's theory coincided with a long-developing American tradition of individualism and opposition to government interference. America, not Great britain, would be the great testing ground of Adam Smith'south ideas.

Almost anybody recognizes Smith as the founder of laissez-faire economics. Less well known are his ideas of about the segmentation of labor. The sectionalization of labor, he insisted, would greatly improve the efficiency of workers.

To make his point, Smith described the workings of a pin manufacturing plant. One person making a pivot could make perhaps 1 in a solar day, maybe a few more. But if the job were divided into ten parts and given to ten workers, each performing a specialized function, a minor factory could turn out 48,000 pins a day. This was the associates line a century and a half earlier Henry Ford was credited with inventing information technology.

At the turn of the 19th century, America began to modify almost in accordance with Smith'due south ideas. What we commonly call the American Industrial Revolution was really two converging revolutions: a technological revolution based on the division of labor, and a commercial revolution powered past a deep faith in economic individualism and unrestrained competition.

Samuel Slater and the Manufactory Arrangement

The American Industrial Revolution began with an act of economic espionage. In 1789, an English mechanic named Samuel Slater left his country for America, bearded as a farmer. In his head were the closely guarded secrets of British textile manufacturing. The following yr, Slater built a factory from memory at Pawtucket, Rhode Island with the backing of two local capitalists.

It was America's first factory. Slater's factory was a place for making textiles, the woven fabrics used for article of clothing and hundreds of other products. The cotton fiber cloth was manufactured past spinning machines powered by h2o. Since America had not yet discovered great deposits of coal, its embryonic industrial revolution would be a revolution primarily in water-powered, fabric production.

Slater's biggest problem was finding laborers. Unable to induce farmers to work in his manufactory, he hired orphans and poor children who were wards of the town government, paying them 25 cents a calendar week. This was America's first industrial work force. A new age had begun, and it was the cause of concern and debate.

When Alexander Hamilton heard well-nigh Slater's factory, he celebrated its birth a year later in his famousWritten report of Manufacturers, which laid out the advantages of industrial development for the United States. Thomas Jefferson was less sanguine about Slater's manufactory. Jefferson loved science and technology. He experimented with mechanical gadgets and labor-saving devices, and turned Monticello into a wonder place of technological contrivances.

Simply Jefferson worried about the new mill arrangement that had sprung up in England and was now threatening to make its advent in America. Jefferson associated industrialization with Manchester, the recklessly expanding urban center that had become the center of the British cotton industry. It was a metropolis of fabled wealth and unimaginable wretchedness, a place where rivers had been turned into blackness sewers and workers into industrial slaves.

On a visit at that place, the French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, captured Manchester'due south paradoxical combination of economic ingenuity and social backwardness. "From this foul drain," he wrote, "the greatest stream of human being industry flows out to fertilize the whole globe…. Hither humanity attains its most consummate development and its nigh brutish; hither civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a barbarous."

Jefferson knew that America couldn't escape industrialization, but he hoped that American factories could be placed in the countryside and worked by farm families with potent democratic values. That way nosotros could industrialize without endangering our republican institutions and creating an entrenched urban proletariat. Samuel Slater tried this family system of production in New England, after his expanding arrangement of factories ran out of children to use.

Along with hundreds of other early on industrialists, Slater built agricultural villages effectually his mills to attract displaced farm families. The fathers worked in supervisory and coincident jobs, and the women and kids in the factory itself. So American industry began in the state, non in the city, and remained there for a long fourth dimension, for that'south where there was falling water to power the new machines.

The Lowell Experiment

The most promising experiment in rural industry was a model town that had been built from scratch in the 1820s, on a beautiful spot at the falls of the Merrimack River, north of Boston. Information technology was named afterward another industrial spy, Francis Cabot Lowell. Lowell, a Boston merchant, had gone on a bout of British textile mills, memorized their technological secrets, and on his render to America, began building a textile empire. Lowell became its queen city.

What made Lowell unique was its work force: it was made up almost entirely of young, unmarried women, recruited from local farms. To attract them, a wholesome, handsomely landscaped community was constructed, the American answer to Manchester. For a promising moment, America looked like it would be the Peachy Exception, the merely country to industrialize without savaging the environment or debasing the workers.

The women of Lowell lived in clean, orderly boarding houses supervised by matrons. They worked long hours, but they were farm girls who were used to a 70-hr piece of work calendar week. What was new, and difficult to adjust to, was the tight subject and the new work routine. The women worked to the footstep of their power driven machinery and to the rhythms of the clock.

The bells in the cupolas over the mills awoke them and called them to their jobs, to meals, and to bed in the evening. And the work was divided into boring, highly specialized tasks. Only in that location were compensations. In their off hours, the women attended uplifting lectures, formed improvement groups, and editing their ain mag, theLowell Offering.

For the mill owners, the secret to the system was the rotating work force. When workers built upward a dowry or helped send a blood brother through college, they left. This made it easier to handle increasing complaints virtually pay or the speed-up of the piece of work. There were several strikes in the 1830s, but the agitators weren't there for long.

The Lowell Experiment was killed, not by labor discontent, but by technological change. In the 1830s, steam ability began to replace water power in the mills, steam generated past newly-exploited Pennsylvania hard coal, or anthracite. Slater was the starting time to build large steam driven factories, just soon other cotton mills made the conversion to coal and steam.

Steam power meant bigger mills, faster production runs, closer supervision of the workers, and a greater division of labor in the involvement of efficiency. And when this happened, the young Yankee women began to get out. They were replaced by Irish workers fleeing the Tater Famine of the 1840s.

The divergence was; the Irish women stayed. They were besides poor to leave. By 1850, Lowell was a squalid mill town, a miniature Manchester, with the industrial slavery Jefferson had warned well-nigh.

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Source: https://www.learner.org/series/a-biography-of-america/the-rise-of-capitalism/

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