easy reading homework

9/7/2015 IEB Wireframe

http://textflow.mheducation.com/parser.php?secload=19.2&fake&print 1/3

RAILROADS: AMERICA'S FIRST BIG BUSINESS In 1882, the year T. S. Hudson scampered across America, clocks in New York and Boston were 11 minutes 45 seconds apart. Stations often had several clocks showing the time on different rail lines, along with one displaying “local mean time.” In 1883, without consulting anyone, the railroad companies divided the country into four time zones an hour apart to clean up this inefficient mess. Congress did not get around to making the division official until 1916.

Page 380

At the center of the new industrial systems lay the railroads, moving people and freight, spreading communications, reinventing time, tying the nation together. Railroads also stimulated economic growth, simply because they required so many resources to build—coal, wood, glass, rubber, brass, and, by the 1880s, 75 percent of all U.S. steel. By lowering transportation costs railroads allowed manufacturers to reduce prices, attract more buyers, and increase business. Perhaps most important, as America's first big business they created techniques of modern management, soon adopted by other companies.

A Managerial Revolution

A Managerial Revolution To the men who ran them, railroads provided a challenge in organization and finance. In the 1850s one of the largest industrial enterprises in America, the Pepperell textile mills of Maine, employed about 800 workers. By the early 1880s the Pennsylvania Railroad had nearly 50,000 people on its payroll. From paying workers to setting schedules and rates to determining costs and profits, everything required a level of coordination unknown in earlier businesses.

The so–called trunk lines devised new systems of management. Scores of early companies had serviced local networks of cities and communities, often with fewer than 50 miles of track. During the 1850s longer trunk lines emerged east of the Mississippi to connect the shorter branches, or “feeder” lines. By the outbreak of the Civil War, with four great trunk lines under a single management, railroads linked the eastern seaboard with the Great Lakes and western rivers.

The operations of large lines spawned a new managerial elite, beneath owners but with wide authority over daily operations. Daniel McCallum, superintendent of the New York and Erie in the 1850s, laid the foundation for this system by drawing up the first table of organization for an American company. A tree trunk with roots represented the president and board of directors; five branches constituted the main operating divisions; leaves stood for the local agents, train crews, and others. Information moved up and down the trunk so that managers could get reports to and from the separate parts.

9/7/2015 IEB Wireframe

http://textflow.mheducation.com/parser.php?secload=19.2&fake&print 2/3

MAP 19.1: RAILROADS, 1870–1890RAILROADS, 1870–1890

By 1890 the railroad network stretched from one end of the country to the other, with more miles of track than in all of Europe combined. New York City and Chicago, linked by the New York Central trunk line, became the new commercial axis.

What was the western terminus of the New York Central Railroad?

Click here to view the interactive version of this map

Page 381

These managerial techniques soon spread to other industries. Local superintendents were responsible for daily activities. Central offices served as corporate nerve centers, housing divisions for purchases, production, transportation, sales, and accounting. A new class of middle managers ran them and imposed new order on business operations. Executives, managers, and workers were being taught to operate in increasingly precise and coordinated ways.

Competition and Consolidation

Competition and Consolidation While managers made operations more systematic, the fierce struggle among railroad companies to dominate the industry was anything but precise and rational. In the 1870s and 1880s the pain of railroad competition began to tell.

The most savage and costly competition came over the prices charged for shipping goods. Managers lowered prices, or “rates,” for freight that was shipped in bulk, on long hauls, or on return routes, since the cars were empty any way. They used “rebates”—secret discounts to preferred customers—to drop prices below the posted rates of competitors and then recouped the losses by overcharging small shippers like farmers. When the economy plunged or a weak line sought to improve its position, rate or price wars

9/7/2015 IEB Wireframe

http://textflow.mheducation.com/parser.php?secload=19.2&fake&print 3/3

broke out. By 1880, 65 lines had declared bankruptcy.

Consolidation worked better than competition. During the 1870s railroads created regional federations to pool traffic, set prices, and divide profits among members. Without the force of law, however, these regional federations failed. Members broke ranks by cutting prices in hopes of quick gain. In the end, rate wars died down only when weaker lines failed or stronger ones bought up competitors.

The Challenge of Finance

The Challenge of Finance Earlier in the nineteenth century many railroads relied on state governments for financial backing. They also looked to counties, cities, and towns for bonds and other forms of aid. People took stock in exchange for land or labor, particularly those living near the ends of rail lines who stood to gain most from construction. In the 1850s and 1860s western promoters went to Washington for federal assistance. Congress loaned $65 million to six western railroads and granted some 131 million acres of land.

Federal aid helped to build only part of the nation's railroads. Most of the money came from private investors. The New York Stock Exchange expanded rapidly as railroad corporations began to trade their stocks there. Large investment banks developed financial networks to track down money at home and abroad. By 1898 a third of the assets of American life insurance companies had gone into railroads, while Europeans owned nearly a third of all American railroad securities.

Because investment bankers played such large roles in funding railroads, they found themselves advising companies about their business affairs. If a company fell into bankruptcy, bankers sometimes served as the “receivers” who oversaw the property until financial health returned. By absorbing smaller lines into larger ones, eliminating rebates, and stabilizing rates, the bankers helped to reduce competition and impose order and centralization on railroads and other corporations. In the process, they often gained control of the companies they advised.

By 1900 the new industrial systems had transformed American railroads. Some 200,000 miles of track were in operation, 80 percent of it owned by only six groups of railroads. Time zones allowed for coordinated schedules; standardized track permitted easy cross–country freighting. Soon passengers were traveling 16 billion miles a year. To that traffic could be added farm goods, raw materials, and factory– finished products. Everything moved with new regularity that allowed businesses to plan and prosper.

REVIEW

How did the railroads contribute to the rise of big business?

9/7/2015 IEB Wireframe

http://textflow.mheducation.com/parser.php?secload=19.3&fake&print 1/8

THE GROWTH OF BIG BUSINESS In 1865, near the end of the Civil War, 26–year–old John D. Rockefeller sat blank–faced in the office of his Cleveland oil refinery, about to conclude the biggest deal of his life. Rockefeller's business was thriving, but he had fallen out with his partner over how quickly to expand. Rockefeller was eager to grow fast; his partner was not. They dissolved their partnership and agreed to bid for the company. Bidding opened at $500, rocketed to $72,500, and abruptly stopped. “The business is yours,” said the partner. The men shook hands, and a thin smile crept across Rockefeller's angular face.

Twenty years later, Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company controlled 90 percent of the nation's refining capacity and an empire that stretched well beyond Cleveland. Trains swept Standard executives to New York, Philadelphia, and other eastern cities. It was a fitting form of transportation for Rockefeller's company, because railroads were the key to his oil empire. They pioneered the big business systems on which he was building. And they carried his oil products for discounted rates, giving him the edge to squeeze out rivals.

Page 382

Strategies of Growth

Strategies of Growth First a bedeviling business riddle had to be solved: how to grow and still control the ravages of competition? In Michigan in the 1860s, salt producers found themselves fighting for their existence. The presence of too many salt makers had begun an endless round of price–cutting that was driving everyone out of business. Seeing salvation in combination, they drew together in the nation's first pool. In 1869 they formed the Michigan Salt Association. They voluntarily agreed to allocate production, divide markets, and set prices—at double the previous rate.

Salt processing and other industries that specialized in consumer goods had low start–up costs, so they were often plagued by competition. Horizontal combination—joining to–gether loosely with rivals that offered the same goods or services—had saved Michigan salt producers. By the 1880s there was a whiskey pool, a cordage pool, and countless rail and other pools. Such informal pools ultimately proved to be unenforceable and therefore unsatisfactory. (After 1890 they were also considered illegal restraints on trade.) But other forms of horizontal growth, such as formal mergers, spread in the wake of an economic panic in the 1890s.

consumer goods products such as food and clothing that fill the needs and wants of individuals. horizontal combination strategy of business growth (sometimes referred to as “horizontal integration”) that attempts to stifle competition by combining more than one firm involved in the same level of production, transportation, or distribution into a single firm.

Some makers of consumer products worried less about direct competition and concentrated on boosting efficiency and sales. They adopted a vertical–growth strategy in which one company gained control of two or more stages of a business. Take Gustavus Swift, a New England butcher, for example. Swift moved to Chicago in the mid-1870s, aware of the demand for fresh beef in the East. He acquired new refrigerated railcars to ship meat from western slaughterhouses and a network of ice–cooled warehouses in eastern cities to store it. By 1885 he had created the first national meatpacking enterprise, Swift and Company.

Swift moved upward, closer to consumers, by putting together a fleet of wagons to distribute his beef to

9/7/2015 IEB Wireframe

http://textflow.mheducation.com/parser.php?secload=19.3&fake&print 2/8

retailers. He moved down toward raw materials, extending and coordinating the purchase of cattle at the Chicago stockyards. By the 1890s Swift and Company was a fully integrated, vertically organized corporation operating on a nationwide scale.

Vertical growth generally moved producers of consumer goods closer to the marketplace in search of high–volume sales. The Singer Sewing Machine Company and the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company created their own retail sales arms. Manufacturers began furnishing ordinary consumers with technical information, credit, and repair services. Advertising expenditures grew, to some $90 million by 1900, in an effort to identify markets, shape buying habits, and increase sales.

Carnegie Integrates Steel

Carnegie Integrates Steel Industrialization encouraged vertical integration in heavy industry but more often in the opposite direction, toward reliable sources of raw materials. These firms made products for big users such as railroads and factory builders. Their markets were easily identified and changed little. For them, success lay in securing limited raw materials and in holding down costs.

Andrew Carnegie led the way in steel. A Scottish immigrant, he worked his way up from bobbin boy to expert telegrapher to superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad's western division at the age of 24. A string of wise investments paid off handsomely. Among other things, he owned a locomotive factory and an iron factory that became the nucleus of his steel empire.

   Andrew Carnegie around 1868. A decade later, a world tour he took tempered his attitude toward the social Darwinist view that evolution had produced the superiority of Western technology and ideas. “Go and see for yourself how greatly we are bound by prejudices, how checkered and uncertain are many of

9/7/2015 IEB Wireframe

http://textflow.mheducation.com/parser.php?secload=19.3&fake&print 3/8

our own advances,” he told friends. “No nation has all that is best.” Page 383

   Carnegie steel furnaces, Braddock, Pennsylvania, on the banks of the Monongahela River were opened in 1875 as part of the J. Edgar Thomson Steel Works. Named for the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the mill was capable of producing as much as 255 tons of steel rails a day, many of which went into the construction of the Pennsylvania Railroad line.

In 1872, on a trip to England, Carnegie chanced to see the Bessemer process in action. Awestruck and dreaming of the profits to be made from cheap steel, he rushed home to build the biggest steel mill in the world. It opened in 1875, in the midst of a severe depression. Over the next 25 years, Carnegie added mills at Homestead and elsewhere in Pennsylvania and moved from railroad–building to city–building.

Carnegie succeeded, in part, by taking advantage of the boom–and–bust business cycle. He jumped in during hard times, building and buying when equipment and businesses were cheap. But he also found skilled managers who employed the administrative techniques of the railroads. And Carnegie knew how to compete: he scrapped machinery, workers, even a new mill to keep costs down and undersell competitors. The final key to Carnegie's success was expansion. His empire spread horizontally by purchasing rival steel mills and constructing new ones. It spread vertically, buying up sources of supply, transportation, and eventually sales. Controlling such an integrated system, Carnegie could ensure a steady flow of materials from mine to mill and market, as well as profits at every stage. In 1900 his company turned out more steel than Great Britain and netted $40 million.

Rockefeller and the Great Standard Oil Trust

Rockefeller and the Great Standard Oil Trust John D. Rockefeller accomplished in oil what Carnegie achieved in steel. And he went further, developing an innovative business structure—the trust—that promised greater control than even Carnegie's integrated system. At first Rockefeller, who specialized in refining petroleum, grew horizontally by buying out or joining other refiners. To cut costs he also expanded vertically, with oil pipelines, warehouses, and barrel factories. By 1870, when he and five partners formed the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, his high–quality, low–cost products set a competitive standard.

Because the oil–refining business was a jungle of competitive firms, Rockefeller proceeded to twist arms. He bribed rivals, spied on them, created phony companies, and slashed prices. His decisive edge came from the railroads. Desperate for business, they granted Standard Oil not only rebates on shipping rates but also “drawbacks,” a fee from the railroad for any product shipped by a rival oil company. Within a decade Standard dominated American refining with a vertically integrated empire that stretched from drilling to selling.

Throughout the 1870s Rockefeller kept his empire stitched together through informal pools and other business combinations. But they were weak and afforded him too little control. He could try to expand

9/7/2015 IEB Wireframe

http://textflow.mheducation.com/parser.php?secload=19.3&fake&print 4/8

further, except that corporations were restricted by state law. In Rockefeller's home state of Ohio, for example, corporations could not own plants in other states or own stock in out–of–state companies.

In 1879 Samuel C. T. Dodd, chief counsel of Standard Oil, came up with a new device, the “trust.” The stockholders of a corporation surrendered their shares “in trust” to a central board of directors with the power to control all property. In exchange, stockholders received certificates of trust that paid hefty dividends. Since it did not literally own other companies, the trust violated no state law, many of which sought to limit the power of big businesses by preventing one corporation from owning stock in another.

Page 384

In 1882 the Standard Oil Company of Ohio formed the country's first great trust. It brought Rockefeller what he sought so fiercely: centralized management of the oil industry. Other businesses soon created trusts of their own—in meatpacking, wire–making, and farm machinery, for example. Just as quickly, trusts became notorious for crushing rivals and controlling prices.

trust business arrangement in which owners of shares in a business turn over their shares “in trust” to a board with power to control those businesses for the benefit of the trust.

The Mergers of J. Pierpont Morgan

The Mergers of J. Pierpont Morgan The trust was only a stepping–stone to an even more effective means of avoiding competition, managing people, and controlling business: the corporate merger. The merging of two corporations—one buying out another—remained impossible until 1889, when New Jersey began to permit corporations to own other companies through what became known as the “holding company” (a company that held stock in other companies). Many industries converted their trusts into holding companies, including Standard Oil, which moved to New Jersey in 1899.

Two years later came the biggest corporate merger of the era. It was the creation of a financial wizard named J. Pierpont Morgan. His orderly mind detested the chaotic competition that threatened his profits. “I like a little competition,” Morgan used to say, “but I like combination more.” After the Civil War he had taken over his father's powerful investment bank. For the next 50 years the House of Morgan played a part in consolidating almost every major industry in the country.

Morgan's greatest triumph came in steel. In 1901 a colossal steel war loomed between Andrew Carnegie and other steelmakers. Morgan convinced Carnegie to put a price tag on his company. When a messenger brought the scrawled reply back—over $400 million—Morgan merely nodded and said, “I accept this price.” He then bought Carnegie's eight largest competitors and announced the formation of the United States Steel Corporation. The mammoth holding company produced nearly two–thirds of all American steel. Its value of $1.4 billion exceeded the national debt and made it the country's first billion–dollar corporation.

What Morgan helped to create in steel was rapidly coming to pass in other industries. A wave of mergers swept through American business after the depression of 1893. As the economy plunged, cutthroat competition bled businesses until they were eager to sell out. Giants sprouted almost overnight. By 1904 in each of 50 industries one firm came to account for 60 percent or more of the total output.

Corporate Defenders

Corporate Defenders As Andrew Carnegie's empire grew, so did his social conscience. Preaching a “gospel of wealth,” he urged the rich to act as agents for the poor, “doing for them better than they would

9/7/2015 IEB Wireframe

http://textflow.mheducation.com/parser.php?secload=19.3&fake&print 5/8

or could do for themselves.” “The man who dies rich … dies disgraced,” he warned. He devoted more and more of his time to philanthropy by creating foundations and endowing libraries and universities with some $350 million in contributions.

Defenders of the new corporate order were less troubled than Carnegie about the rough–and–tumble world of big business. They justified the system by stressing the opportunity created for individuals by economic growth. Through frugality, acquisitiveness, and discipline—the sources of cherished American individualism—they believed anyone could rise like Andrew Carnegie.

When most ordinary workers failed to follow in Carnegie's footsteps, defenders blamed the individual. Failures were lazy, ignorant, or morally depraved, they said. British philosopher Herbert Spencer added the weight of science by applying Charles Darwin's theories of evolution to society. He maintained that in society, as in biology, only the “fittest” survived. The competitive social jungle doomed the unfit to poverty and rewarded the fit with property and privilege.

Spencer's American apostle, William Graham Sumner, argued that competition was natural and had to proceed without any interference, including government regulation. Millionaires were simply the “product of natural selection.” Such “social Darwinism” found strong support among turn–of–the–century business leaders. The philosophy certified their success even as they worked to destroy the very competitiveness it celebrated.

Corporate Critics

Corporate Critics Meanwhile, a group of radical critics mounted a powerful attack on corporate capitalism. Henry George, a journalist and self–taught economist, proposed a way to redistribute wealth in Progress and Poverty (1879). George attacked large landowners as the source of inequality. They bought property while it was cheap and then held it until the forces of society—labor, technology, and speculation on nearby sites—had increased its value. George proposed to do away with all taxes except a single tax on these “unearned” profits to end monopoly landholding. “Single-tax” clubs sprang up throughout the country, and George nearly won the race for mayor of New York City in 1886.

Page 385

The journalist Edward Bellamy tapped the same popular resentment against the inequalities of corporate capitalism. In his utopian novel, Looking Backward (1888), a fictional Bostonian falls asleep in 1887 and awakens Rip Van Winkle–like in the year 2000. The competitive, caste–ridden society of the nineteenth century is gone. In its place is an orderly utopia, managed by a benevolent government trust. “Fraternal cooperation” and shared abundance reign. Like George's ideas, Bellamy's philosophy inspired a host of clubs around the nation. His followers demanded redistribution of wealth, civil service reform, and nationalization of railroads and utilities.

Less popular but equally hostile to capitalism was the Socialist Labor Party, formed in 1877. Under Daniel De Leon, a West Indian immigrant, it stressed class conflict and called for a revolution to give workers control over production. De Leon refused to compromise his radical beliefs, and the socialists ended up attracting more intellectuals than workers. Some immigrants found its class consciousness appealing, but most rejected its radicalism and rigidity. A few party members bent on gaining greater support revolted and in 1901 founded the more successful Socialist Party of America. Workers were beginning to organize their own responses to industrialism.

socialism philosophy of social and economic organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods are owned collectively or by government.

9/7/2015 IEB Wireframe

http://textflow.mheducation.com/parser.php?secload=19.3&fake&print 6/8

   This drawing is from a 1905 edition of Collier's magazine, famous for exposing corporate abuses. Here it mocks John D. Rockefeller, head of the Standard Oil Company, as the new god of the industrial age by parodying the Protestant doxology of thanks: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow, Praise him all creatures here below!”

By the mid-1880s, in response to the growing criticism of big business, several states in the South and West had enacted laws limiting the size of corporations. But state laws proved all too easy to evade when New Jersey and Delaware eased their rules to cover the whole nation.

In 1890 the public clamor against trusts finally forced Congress to act. The Sherman Antitrust Act relied on the only constitutional authority Congress had over business: its right to regulate interstate commerce. The act outlawed “every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce.” The United States stood practically alone among industrialized nations in regulating the size of business combinations.

Its language was purposefully vague, but the Sherman Antitrust Act did give the government the power to break up trusts and other big businesses. So high was the regard for the rights of private property, however, that few in Congress expected the government to exercise that power or the courts to uphold it. They were right. In 1895 the Supreme Court dealt the law a major blow by severely limiting its scope. United States v. E. C. Knight Co. held that businesses involved in manufacturing (as opposed to “trade or commerce”) lay outside the authority of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Not until after the turn of the century would the law be used to bust a trust.

The Costs of Doing Business

The Costs of Doing Business The heated debates between the critics and the defenders of industrial capitalism made clear that the changes in American society were two-edged. Big businesses helped to rationalize the economy, to increase national wealth, and to tie the country together. Yet they also concentrated power, corrupted politics, and made the gap between rich and poor more apparent than ever.

9/7/2015 IEB Wireframe

http://textflow.mheducation.com/parser.php?secload=19.3&fake&print 7/8

More to the point, the practices of big business subjected the economy to enormous disruptions. The banking system could not always keep pace with the demand for capital, and businesses failed to distribute enough of their profits to sustain the purchasing power of workers. The supply of goods periodically outstripped demand, and then the wrenching cycle of boom and bust set in. Three severe depressions—1873–1879, 1882–1885, and 1893–1897—rocked the economy in the last third of the nineteenth century. With hard times came fierce competition and ruthless cost cutting.

Some of the costs were unclear at the time. Although anyone could see the environmental impact of industrialization, the long–term effects were less apparent. In the nineteenth century most people, scientists included, assumed that nature would maintain its own balance, largely unaffected by human action. And for the handful of observers interested in climate change only the most basic calculations were possible.

BOOM-AND-BUST BUSINESS CYCLE, 1865–1900

Between 1865 and 1900, industrialization produced great economic growth but also wild swings of prosperity and depression. During booms, productivity soared and near-full employment existed. But the rising number of industrial workers meant high unemployment during deep busts.

Page 386

It took a Brit and a Swede consumed with discovering the cause of the prehistoric Ice Age to work out the climatic ramifications of new smokestack industries. In 1859 British scientist John Tyndall took up the question of precisely what in the atmosphere prevented the Earth from freezing. By testing the “coal gas” (gas emitted by burning coal) from a jet in his laboratory, he found that methane and carbon dioxide captured heat. Historically such gases had come from volcanic eruptions and other natural occurrences, but growing amounts were now being thrown aloft by industry.

Opinion

9/7/2015 IEB Wireframe

http://textflow.mheducation.com/parser.php?secload=19.3&fake&print 8/8

Who deserves more credit for making the United States an industrial powerhouse, industrialists or workers?

In Sweden, Svante Arrhenius carried the idea a step further in 1896. If heat–trapping gases raised global temperatures even slightly, warmer air would absorb more of the most potent heat trapper of all—water vapor—raising temperatures still higher. A new and dramatic cycle of climate change might spread across the planet. With the age of industry in its infancy, few paid attention to the implications for what would later be called “global warming.”

REVIEW

What strategies and structures did businesses use to grow and at what costs?

9/7/2015 IEB Wireframe

http://textflow.mheducation.com/parser.php?secload=19.4&fake&print 1/4

THE WORKERS' WORLD At seven in the morning Sadie Frowne sat at her sewing machine in a Brooklyn garment factory. Her boss, a man she barely knew, dropped a pile of unfinished skirts next to her. She pushed one under her needle and began to rock her foot on the pedal that powered her machine. Sometimes Sadie pushed the skirts too quickly, and the needle pierced her finger. “The machines go like mad all day because the faster you work the more money you get,” she explained of the world of industrial work in 1902.

The cramped sweatshops, the vast steel mills, the dank tunnels of the coal fields—all demanded workers and required them to work in new ways. Farmers or peasants who had once timed themselves by the movement of the sun now lived by the clock and labored by the twilight of gaslit factories. Instead of being self–employed, they were under the thumb of a supervisor and were paid by the piece or hour. Not the seasons but the relentless cycle of machines set their pace. Increasingly, workers bore the brunt of depressions, faced periodic unemployment, and toiled under dangerous conditions as they struggled like their managers to bring the new industrial processes under control.

Page 387

Industrial Work

Industrial Work In 1881 the Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Company opened its new mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Nearly 400 men and boys went to work in its 60 acres of sheds. They kept the mill going around the clock by working in two 12-hour shifts. In the furnace room, some men fainted from the heat, while the vibration and screeching of machinery deafened others. There were no breaks, even for lunch.

Few industrial laborers worked under such conditions, but the Homestead mill reflected common characteristics of industrial work: the use of machines for mass production; the division of labor into intricately organized, often repetitive tasks; and the dictatorship of the clock. At the turn of the century, two–thirds of all industrial work came from large–scale mills.

Under such conditions labor paid dearly for industrial progress. By 1900 most of those earning wages in industry worked 6 days a week, 10 hours a day. They held jobs that required more machines and fewer skills. Repetition of small chores replaced fine craftwork. In the 1880s, for example, almost all the 40 different steps that had gone into making a pair of shoes by hand could be performed by a novice or “green hand” with a few days of instruction at a simple machine.

9/7/2015 IEB Wireframe

http://textflow.mheducation.com/parser.php?secload=19.4&fake&print 2/4

   This photograph from 1902 of the lock-and-drill assembly line at the National Cash Register Company suggests something of the growing scale of factory enterprise—and also of the dangers that workers in these manufacturing shops faced.

With machines also came danger. Tending furnaces in a steel mill or plucking tobacco from cigarette– rolling machines was tedious. If a worker became bored or tired, disaster could strike. Each year from 1880 to 1900, industrial mishaps killed an average of 35,000 wage earners and injured more than 500,000. Workers and their families could expect no payment from employers or government for death or injury. The law operated under the presumption that such accidents were the worker's fault.

Higher productivity and profits were the aims, and for Frederick W. Taylor, efficiency was the way to achieve them. During the 1870s and 1880s Taylor undertook careful time–and–motion studies of workers' movements in the steel industry. He set up standard procedures and offered pay incentives for beating his production quotas. On one occasion he designed 15 ore shovels, each for a separate task. One hundred forty men were soon doing the work of 600. By the early twentieth century “Taylorism” was a full–blown philosophy, complete with its own professional society. “Management engineers” prescribed routines from which workers could not vary.

For all the high ideals of Taylorism, ordinary laborers refused to perform as cogs in a vast industrial machine. In a variety of ways they worked to maintain control. Many European immigrants continued to observe the numerous saints' days and other religious holidays of their homelands, regardless of factory rules. When the pressure of six–day weeks became too stifling, workers took an unauthorized “blue Monday” off. Or they slowed down to reduce the grueling pace. Or they simply walked off the job. Come spring and warm weather, factories reported turnover rates of 100 percent or more.

For some, seizing control of work was more than a matter of survival or self-respect. Many workers regarded themselves as citizens of a democratic republic. They expected to earn a “competence”—enough money to support and educate their families and enough time to stay abreast of current affairs. Few but highly skilled workers could realize such democratic dreams. More and more, labor was being managed as another part of an integrated system of industry.

Page 388

9/7/2015 IEB Wireframe

http://textflow.mheducation.com/parser.php?secload=19.4&fake&print 3/4

Children, Women, and African Americans

Children, Women, and African Americans The needs of industry for workers were so great that groups traditionally left out of the industrial ambit–children, women, African Americans—found themselves drawn into it. In the mines of Pennsylvania nimble—fingered eight–year–olds snatched bits of slate from amid the chunks of coal. In Illinois glass factories “dog boys” dashed with trays of red–hot bottles to the cooling ovens. By 1900 the industrial labor force included some 1.7 million children, more than double the number 30 years earlier. Parents often had no choice. As one union leader observed, “Absolute necessity compels the father … to take the child into the mine to assist him in winning bread for the family.” On average, children worked 60 hours a week and carried home paychecks a third the size of those of adult males.

Women had always labored on family farms, but by 1870 one out of every four nonagricultural workers was female. In general they earned one–half of what men did. Nearly all were single and young, anywhere from their mid–teens to their mid–20s. Most lived in boardinghouses or at home with their parents. Usually they contributed their wages to the family kitty. Once married, they often took on a life of full–time housework and child rearing.

Only 5 percent of married women held jobs outside the home in 1900. Married black women—in need of income because of the low wages paid to their husbands—were four times more likely than married white women to hold jobs outside the home. Industrialization inevitably pushed women into new jobs. Mainly they worked in industries considered extensions of housework: food processing, textiles and clothing, cigar making, and domestic service.

   Clerks' jobs, traditionally held by men, came to be filled by women as growing industrial networks created more managerial jobs for men. Here a factory floor full of neatly dressed female clerks bang away at their “Type-Writers,” patented first in 1868. Page 389

New methods of management and marketing opened positions for white–collar women as “typewriters,” “telephone girls,” bookkeepers, and secretaries. On rare occasions women entered the professions, though law and medical schools were reluctant to admit them. Such discrimination drove ambitious, educated

9/7/2015 IEB Wireframe

http://textflow.mheducation.com/parser.php?secload=19.4&fake&print 4/4

women into nursing, teaching, and library work, all considered forms of female nurturance. Their growing presence soon “feminized” these professions, pushing men upward into managerial slots or out entirely.

Even more than white women, all African Americans faced discrimination in the workplace. They were paid less than whites and given menial jobs. Their greatest opportunities in industry often came as strikebreakers to replace white workers. Once a strike ended, however, black workers were replaced themselves—and hated by the white regulars all the more. The service trades furnished the largest single source of jobs. Craftworkers and a sprinkling of black professionals could usually be found in cities. After the turn of the century, black–owned businesses thrived in the growing black neighborhoods of the North and the South.

The American Dream of Success

The American Dream of Success What–ever their separate experiences, working–class Americans did improve their overall lot. Though the gap between the very rich and the very poor widened, most wage earners made some gains. Between 1860 and 1890 real daily wages—pay in terms of buying power— climbed some 50 percent as prices gradually fell. And after 1890 the number of hours on the job began a slow decline.

Yet most unskilled and semiskilled workers in factories continued to receive low pay. In 1890 an unskilled laborer could expect about $1.50 for a 10-hour day; a skilled one, perhaps twice that amount. It took about $600 a year to make ends meet, but most manufacturing workers made under $500 a year. Native–born white Americans tended to earn more than immigrants, those who spoke English more than those who did not, men more than women, and all others more than African Americans and Asians.

Few workers repeated the rags–to–riches rise of Andrew Carnegie. But some did rise, despite periodic unemployment and ruthless wage cuts. About one–quarter of the manual laborers in one study entered the lower middle class in their own lifetimes. More often such unskilled workers climbed in financial status within their own class. And most workers, seeing some improvement, believed in the American dream of success, even if they did not fully share in it.

REVIEW

How did industrialization change the working day for people employed in factories?