The American republic was scarcely born when in 1790 Samuel Slater installed the first working spinning machines in Providence, Rhode Island. He was followed by others, and New England, with its strong streams, became a major center of cotton and woolen manufacture. Here, as on the European continent, British expatriates were the primary agents of technological diffusion.12 Yet the character of the receiving society mattered even more. The few carriers who brought the knowledge found quick students to copy, imitate, and, most important, improve. When Francis Lowell of Boston introduced the power loom in 1814, he found a ready workforce, descendants of “many generations of farmer-mechanics in the workshops of New England.”13
So a few machines came from England, but only a few, and Americans were soon adapting them to the needs and tastes of the home market. (They were also inventing new devices and exporting them to Britain—the best sign of technological independence.)14 Thus British cotton spinners used the mule, which called for highly skilled, invariably masculine, labor, and concentrated on finer counts of yarn; while the Americans developed the throstle (derived from Arkwright’s water frame), which used semiskilled women workers to make a tougher, coarser yarn; and then substantially increased its productivity by the invention, first of cap spinning, and then of ring spinning. Similarly, American innovations in weaving quickly (by the 1820s) made the Waltham-type cotton factory “at least 10 percent more efficient in throughput” than its British competitor.15
The figures tell the story. In 1788, Philadelphia’s Fourth of July parade featured a hand-powered cotton carding machine and an eighty-spindle jenny—symbols of a preindustrial (pre-power) economic independence. Twenty years later, the young United States was powering almost 100,000 cotton spindles; between 1810 and 1820 the number tripled, and in the next decade more than tripled again. So, by 1831, the industry counted 1.2 million spindles and 33,500 looms, most of them power-driven by piedmont streams from New Hampshire in the North to Maryland in the south.16
A recent comparison of productivity in manufacturing shows America well ahead of Britain by the 1820s.17 This was an extraordinary achievement, bringing together enlightened and often explicitly patriotic enterprise, knowledge and know-how, and an intelligent workforce. Some workers were Luddites who had fought machinery back in the old country but were ready to accept it in the New World; some, handloom weavers who had once refused to enter mills. Why the change? Like old England, New England resented the factory’s strict hours and personal supervision. But whereas old England could count initially on involuntary labor—poorhouse apprentices, daughters and wives, people who could not say no—-New England had to find ways to make these new jobs acceptable if not attractive. The American mills paid higher wages and gave their women and girls the kind of housing and chaste environment that reassured parents.* The paternalism of the cotton manufacturers of Lowell became legendary—the cleanly boardinghouses with their reading material and pianos, the women’s own periodical (the Lowell Offering), the virtuous (sanctimonious) parietal rules.18
Some historians have called attention to less happy circumstances beneath the surface. These had to be there, they argue, for how could capitalism really spend for the benefit of employees? No doubt. The system had its own logic; business had its ups and downs, and hard times make hard masters. Inevitably, in spite of what economists tell us about the homogenizing effects of competition, some employers left much to be desired.19 Even so, conditions were apparently better than in old England. To cite Charles Dickens, the contrast was “between the Good and Evil, the living light and deepest shadow.”20
Another example of technological autonomy. The newly independent Americans also imported steam engines, at first of the atmospheric type. But then they opted for high pressure, and once again local invention played a critical role. The key figure was Oliver Evans (1755-1819), a brilliant jack-of-all-trades who made important contributions to wool carding and flour milling as well as to steampower. Evans’s device went back to the 1780s, but the major applications date from the turn of the century* These high-pressure reciprocating engines, typically smaller and cheaper, gave more power for size than the older atmospheric-vacuum type; hence were well suited not only to industry but to transport, where space counted. These smaller machines made possible the steamboat and the railway locomotive. On the other hand, high-pressure engines could explode—one reason why James Watt and many British engine builders and users stuck to the atmospheric variety. The Americans seemed ready here to trade dead and injured for cheaper power and transport.
The decisive and most distinctive American innovation, though, was not any particular device, however important, but a mode of production—what came to be called the American system of manufactures. This was a creative response to (1) a market free of the local and regional preferences and the class and status distinctions that prevailed in Europe, hence ready to accept standardized articles; and (2) the scarcity of labor relative to materials. The two were related. In a labor-scarce economy, standardization was a way of dividing, hence of simplifying, tasks and making them repetitive, thus substantially enhancing productivity. But fast work tended to waste material—no time for Old World habits of trimming and thrift. In Europe, even rich merchant bankers might write their letters down the page, then turn the sheet and continue at right angles in order to save paper.
Already in colonial times, for example, much American house construction had turned from carpentry to millwork. Doors and windows were cut and assembled to standard size; glass, precut accordingly. (A French ship arriving in the young republic around 1815 with a cargo of window glass of various sizes was surprised to find it had to give most of it away.) Sawdust generated in the process might be recovered for other uses.21 Then, in the 1830s, invention of the balloon-frame house normalized and deskilled the building itself. Gone were the heavy members of traditional barns and dwellings; gone the mortise-and-tenon joints; gone the masonry and plaster walls, interior and exterior, of Old World construction.* Instead, one used precut 2x4’s and nailed them together, then sheathed the frame and clapped on such facade as was practical and pleasing. The new structures were not beautiful or authentically local; but they were cheap, made use of abundant materials, and were prosaically utilitarian. The balloon technique spread widely, except where wood was scarce.22
This reliance on wood led to a whole family of machines: power saws, lathes, millers, and planers, “machinery for boring, slotting, dovetailing, edging, grooving, etc.” These worked fast—faster than similar machines for shaping metal—and they were, for that very reason, hugely wasteful of material. But that was all right: America could spare the wood, not the time or manpower.23
Houses and buildings were only the beginning. The idea was to make all assembled objects in such wise that the parts be similar, if not interchangeable.24 The degree of similarity was a function of materials and tolerances: fit could be approximate for some purposes but not for others; and wood was a lot more forgiving than metal. So a carpenter could adjust pre-made doors and windows and a glazier could make window panes tight with a judicious use of putty; but the firing assembly of a musket called for greater precision than the stock, and a watch required closer tolerances than a clock. Meanwhile assembly depended on the skillful use of a file for last-minute adjustments and fitting; unless, that is, one wanted the parts to fit and work well from the start, without fitting, and that called for even more exactitude.
Such work required precision tools capable of exact repetition and the organization and siting of tasks in such manner as to gather, move, process (machine), and put together the materials and components in an efficient way—what we now call hardware and software. Hardware is often the focus of attention, because the machine tools invented for this purpose were spectacular achievements of the mechanician’s art. But layout and synchrony were more important in operations such as meat slaughtering that called for disassembly rather than assembly; or where, as in flour milling and petroleum refining,
higher throughput yielded major economies of scale.
In all these areas of manufacture, the United States was, if not the pioneer, then the great practitioner.* From the start, the adoption of machines, in textile manufacture for example, was followed by the creation of machine shops to maintain and build the equipment; and these shops, little worlds of assembled and interchangeable skills, often took to making other kinds of machinery: steam engines, furnaces and boilers, locomotives, above all, machine tools. These last in turn, dedicated originally to one or another special purpose, found application in diverse industrial branches. It was not only the craftsmen who had children and grandchildren to carry the torch; their machines proliferated as well.25
Unlike Europe, America made little resistance to this advance of deskilling and routinizing technique. In a country of continuing revolution, old ways had little leverage. Listen to an official visitor to the Springfield Armory in 1841:
…the skill of the armorer is but little needed: his “occupation’s gone.” A boy does just as well as a man. Indeed, from possessing greater activity of body, he does better.
The difficulty of finding good armorers no longer exists; they abound in every machine shop and manufactory throughout the country. The skill of the eye and the hand, acquired by practice alone, is no longer indispensable; and if every operative were at once discharged from the Springfield armory, their places could be supplied with competent hands within a week.26
Small wonder that when the British, with all their industrial achievements, belatedly (mid-nineteenth century) wanted to make good and cheap muskets for military use, they sent their people to the United States to study American arsenal methods.27
That did not mean that the British simply junked old ways. Knowing is not doing, and Europeans in general found it harder than Americans to accept the ruthless logic of productivity. Take the doctrine of sunk costs, which says that spent money is spent, obsolete is obsolete; that just because machines will work is no reason to work them. This kind of reasoning goes against the grain, but the open frontier (robber baron) mentality accommodated it. The standard examples are Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick (the big mean): when they decided to go over from Bessemer to open-hearth steel, they just scrapped the old plant. But listen also to this account of a cotton mill superintendent at the turn of the century:
The mule spinners are a tough crowd to deal with. A few years ago they were giving trouble at this mill, so one Saturday afternoon, after they had gone home, we started right in and smashed up a room-full of mules with sledge hammers. When the men came back on Monday morning, they were astonished to find that there was no work for them. That room is now full of ring frames run by girls.28
The “American system” set standards of productivity for the rest of the industrial world. Each technology became a stepping stone to others. Clocks and guns prepared the way for watches and sewing machines. Mowers and harvesters led to sowers (planters and drills), reapers, binders, threshers, and eventually combines; bicycles, to automobiles; cash registers, to typewriters and calculators. And machines invented for one purpose slid easily to others: a sewing machine could be used on leather and canvas as well as fabric, could make boots and shoes and sails and tents as well as cloth garments.
This was a mechanic’s wonderland, in agriculture as in industry. A letterwriter to the Scientific American of July 1900 exulted: “Indeed there is scarcely a thing done on the farm today in which patented machinery does not perform the greater part of the labor.”29 So agriculture became an industry too, with economies of scale, division of labor, attention to labor productivity. And to land productivity as well, though to a smaller degree: the accident of geography, the character of the new land to the west—virgin prairie, deep topsoil, water for farming, open range for animals—all ensured abundant return and meant that every movement of the frontier added substantially to the national income. Holdings were family-size, and the system of land grants and concessionary sales was designed to promote family farming. But family size could be very large and grew with the machinery; also with the appearance of specialized, itinerant teams of machine operators.
All of this meant that the indigenous population was uprooted repeatedly to make way for land-hungry newcomers. The Indians fought back, the more so as settler expansion entailed repeated violations of ostensibly sacred and eternal agreements—as long as the sun would shine and the waters run. The white man broke faith at will, while the natives were slandered as “Indian givers.” Here, too, technology made the difference. Repeating weapons, batch-or mass-produced with roughly interchangeable parts, multiplied the firepower of even small numbers and made Indian resistance hopeless.
Of course, many Americans are sorry now, while Europeans invite Indian chiefs to Paris and Zurich to recount the litany of white wrongdoing. Hollywood films, once cowboy-and-Indian cliches, now remind us and others of the misdeeds of the invaders. Meanwhile the American government has fitfully tried to recompense the descendants of the dispossessed, hiring economic historians to calculate the value of native land at the time it was taken; and well-meaning people offer help with the preservation and reinvention of “Native American” culture. Some of these compensations have proved astonishingly lucrative: thus newfound Indian rights to engage in gambling operations, often in partnership with white businessmen. Casino revenge.
The Indian tragedy illustrates the larger dilemma of modernization: change or lose; change and lose. What is a man profited, if he shall gain the world and lose his soul? The new ways of today tear at indigenous peoples and ancient cultures everywhere. In the meantime, the people of the United States are not about to give the country back and return to the lands of their ancestors. History, like time, has an arrow; but unlike time, it moves at an uneven pace: it can only stutter forward.
And so, during those frontier days of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the technological possibilities were almost endless, and American industry went on from one success to another. Other countries could copy; some indeed made forays along similar lines. But these older societies did not have the tabula rasa and the optimistic, open culture that eased the task of the American farmer and manufacturer. They had to work with cramped systems of land tenure, peasants (no peasants in the United States) who scrimped on equipment to add to their holdings, great landlords who saw land more as the foundation of status and style than as capital;* and with craftsmen who saw mechanization as a personal diminution, an offense to status, a threat to jobs. The older countries had their machine-breakers; America did not.
European countries also had a consumption problem. Class structures and segmented tastes made it harder there to adopt standardized products. Even so, I would stress supply rather than demand, the attitudes of producers rather than consumers. When Europeans belatedly adopted techniques of mass production, they had no trouble selling cheaper goods.
To get a sense of what was involved, look at the great European industrial spurt after World War II. This mirrored earlier American advances and implicitly testified to previous class-based failure. Europe had a pent-up demand for consumer durables, whetted by film images and the American presence. Few Europeans before had thought that just about everyone might want, even need, a car or a telephone.† As late as the 1970s, many French people were still going to cafes or to the post office (but only during office hours) to make their phone calls, either because they could not afford a phone at home or were waiting two or three years to get a line. Getting a dial tone could take a half-hour and more. People still reserved ahead for international calls. Business suffered and the complaints mounted to heaven: no point directing them to human beings because the authorities were imperturbably indifferent. After all, telephones were part of the postal system, and the post office thought them an extravagance, a plaything for rich people. What was wrong with writing letters and buying stamps?**
In 1870, the United States had the largest economy in the world, and its best years still lay ahea
d. By 1913, American output was two and a half times that of the United Kingdom or Germany, four times that of France. Measured per person, American GDP surpassed that of the United Kingdom by 20 percent, France by 77, Germany by 86.30 This American system of manufacture had created, for better or worse, a new world of insatiable consumerism, much decried by critics who feared for the souls and manners of common people. The world had long learned to live with the lavishness and indulgences of the rich and genteel; but now, for the first time in history, even ordinary folk could aspire to ownership of those hard goods—watches, clocks, bicycles, telephones, radios, domestic machines, above all, the automobile—that were seen in traditional societies as the appropriate privilege of the few. All of this was facilitated in turn by innovations in marketing: installment buying, consumer credit, catalogue sales of big as well as small items; rights of return and exchange. These were not unknown in Europe, which pioneered in some of these areas. It was the synergy that made America so productive. Mass consumption made mass production feasible and profitable; and vice versa.
On the Shortcomings of Economic Logic
Adam Smith took note of the absolute prohibition that Britain had imposed on its North America colonies not to build steel furnaces or slit mills; nor to make finished iron and steel articles even for their own consumption. In addition, Britain had banned commerce between colonies in fur hats or woolen goods,
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor Page 36