39.Burlington Free Press, Dec. 5, 1845; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 200, 263; “Regulations to Be Observed by All Persons Employed in the Factories of the Middlesex Company” (1846); “General Regulations, to Be Observed by All Persons Employed by the Lawrence Manufacturing Company, In Lowell” (1833); “Regulations to Be Observed by All Persons Employed by the Lawrence Manufacturing Company” (1838); and “Regulations for the Boarding Houses of the Middlesex Company” (n.d.), all in Osborne Library, American Textile History Museum, Lowell, Massachusetts; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 150, 152, 157–60; Dublin, Women at Work, 78–79.
40.Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 66–67, 90; Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 59; Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 30–87.
41.Augusta Harvey Worthen, The History of Sutton, New Hampshire: Consisting of the Historical Collections of Erastus Wadleigh, Esq., and A. H. Worthen, 2 parts (Concord, NH: Republican Press Association, 1890), 192, quoted in Dublin, Women at Work, 55; population of Sutton from New Hampshire Office of Energy and Planning, State Data Center (accessed Feb. 6, 2015), https://www.nh.gov/oep/data-center/documents/1830-1920-historic.pdf; Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle, or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1898), 69–70; Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work, 111–18.
42.Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 8. Dublin’s Farm to Factory presents an excellent selection of letters from female mill workers.
43.The Lowell Offering and Magazine, May 1843, 191; Dublin, Farm to Factory, 69, 73; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 22–27, 30, 38–40.
44.The Lowell Offering and Magazine, January 1843, 96; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 42–43, 78–79, 82–83, 113–14.
45.According to Harriet Robinson, in 1843 there were “fourteen regularly organized religious societies” in Lowell. Robinson, Loom and Spindle, 78; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 97; Dublin, Farm to Factory, 80–81; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 256–59.
46.Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 38, 85–86, 110, 112; Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 98–101, 103–07; Dublin, Women at Work, 136–37. As Dublin points out, the expiration of patents taken out by the Waltham-Lowell group and advances in equipment design elsewhere made it easier for new companies to compete. On the relative cost of raw cotton and labor, see, for example, “Boston Manufacturing Company Memo of Cloth Made and Cost of Same … 25th August 1827 to 30th August 1828” and “Appleton Co. Mem. of Cloth Made to May 30, 1829,” both in box 1, folder 16, vol. 42, Patrick Tracy Jackson Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
47.Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Records, 142; Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 98–99; Dublin, Women at Work, 89–90, 98, 109–11, 137.
48.Dublin, Women at Work, 90–102.
49.Dublin, Women at Work, 93–96; Robinson, Loom and Spindle, 84. One version of the original song began: “What a pity that such a pretty girl as I, Should be sent to a nunnery to pine away and die!” with the chorus: “So I won’t be a nun, I cannot be a nun! I’m so fond of pleasure that I cannot be a nun.” https://thesession.org/tunes/3822 (accessed Feb. 7, 2015). For the growth of the labor movement before the Civil War, the most comprehensive account remains John R. Commons et al., History of Labor in the United States, vol. I ([1918] New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966).
50.There were a few later strikes in other mill towns and a small strike by immigrant workers in Lowell in 1859. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 235, 241; New-York Daily Tribune, May 14, 1846; Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness, 146–47; Dublin, Women at Work, 203–05.
51.Massachusetts restricted children under twelve and Connecticut children under fourteen to ten hours work a day. New Hampshire established ten hours as a day’s work for everyone, but allowed contracts calling for longer working hours, rendering the law all but meaningless. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 242–49; Dublin, Women at Work, 108–22.
52.Much later on, left-leaning historians perhaps made too much of the walkouts and agitation. For extended discussions of the protests which emphasize their importance, see, for example, Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, and Dublin, Women at Work. By contrast, Ware, earlier, was somewhat dismissive of the turnouts, which she wrote “were really less strikes than demonstrations, unorganized outbursts led by a few inflammatory spirits who had little idea what they were to achieve but who raised the girls to a state of great excitement” and noted that “Public sentiment did not generally support ‘striking females.’” Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 275, 277.
53.David Crockett, An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1835), 91–99; John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (New York: Penguin, 1977), 81; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 208.
54.For extended discussions of this evolution, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), and Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, esp. chap. 1 and 2. See also, Lawrence A. Peskin, “How the Republicans Learned to Love Manufacturing: The First Parties and the ‘New Economy,’” Journal of the Early Republic 22 (2) (Summer, 2002), 235–62, and Jonathan A. Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), esp. 233–35.
55.John G. Whittier, “The Factory Girls of Lowell,” in Voices of the True-Hearted (Philadelphia: J. Miller M’Kim, 1846), 40–41.
56.Seth Luther, An Address to the Working Men of New England on the State of Education and on the Condition of the Producing Classes in Europe and America, 2nd ed. (New York: George H. Evans, 1833), 19.
57.Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness, 165; Emerson quoted in Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, 124–25. Earlier, Emerson had hailed manufacturing for freeing New England from the need to farm under uncongenial conditions: “Where they have sun, let them plant; we who have it not, will drive our pens and water-wheels.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson, and Waldo Emerson Forbes, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson with Annotations, vol. IV (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 209.
58.Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 115–18.
59.As late as 1853, there were over 1,800 children under fifteen working in Rhode Island manufacturing establishments, including 621 between ages nine and twelve and 59 under the age of nine. Luther, An Address to the Working Men of New England, 10, 21–22, 30; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 210; Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 86, 213.
60.Trollope, North America, 253; John Robert Godley, Letters from America, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1844), 7–11; Edward Bellamy, “How I Wrote ‘Looking Backwards,’” in Edward Bellamy Speaks Again (Chicago: Peerage Press, 1937), 218, quoted in Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, 192. Relative industry size from Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 180.
61.Herman Melville, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” Harper’s magazine, Apr. 1855, 670–78; Scott Heron, “Harper’s Magazine as Matchmaker: Charles Dickens and Herman Melville,” Browsings: The Harper’s Blog, Jan. 13, 2008, http://harpers.org/blog/2008/01/harpers-magazine-dickens-and-melvilles-paradise-of-bachelors/.
62.Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, 90–93.
63.Luther, An Address to the Working Men of New England, 29.
64.Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness, 115–16, 119, 130–35, 139–41, 146.
65.Dublin, Women at Work, 139–40.
66.U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 106; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 227–232; Dubl
in, Women at Work, 138–39.
67.Dublin, Women at Work, 134, 140–44, 155, 198; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 83.
68.Dublin, Farm to Factory, 187; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 37, 42–43, 79; Nelson, Managers and Workers, 6; Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860–1912 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), xiv–xv, 28, 75; Hareven and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 10.
69.Dublin, Farm to Factory, 187; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 80, 142; Hareven and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 18–19, 202–03; Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort, 29–30, 75, 82–83, 97 (quote).
70.Accounts of the death toll from the Pemberton collapse vary considerably, from 83 to 145. Clarisse A. Poirier, “Pemberton Mills 1852–1938: A Case Study of the Industrial and Labor History of Lawrence, Massachusetts,” Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1978, 81–84, 191–93; Polynesian [Honolulu], Mar. 3, 1860; New York Times, Jan. 12, 1860, and Feb. 4, 1860; The Daily Dispatch [Richmond, Virginia], Jan. 16, 1860; The Daily Exchange [Baltimore], Jan. 12, 1860; New-York Daily Tribune, Jan. 16, 1860; Alvin F. Oickle, Disaster in Lawrence: The Fall of the Pemberton Mill (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2008); Bahr, “New England Mill Engineering, 68–71; Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort, 18–19.
71.By the time Hine visited Amoskeag, children under age sixteen actually made up only a small part of the New England textile workforce: 2.0 percent in New Hampshire, 5.7 percent in Massachusetts, and 6.0 percent in Rhode Island, compared to 10.4 percent nationally and 20.3 percent in Mississippi. Hareven and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 33; Arden J. Lea, “Cotton Textiles and the Federal Child Labor Act of 1916,” Labor History 16 (4) (Fall 1975), 492.
72.Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 88–90; Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort, 7, 47–62, 77.
73.In the racialist language of the day, which many socialists shared, Berger went on to say, “White men and women of any nationality will endure a certain degree of slavery, but no more. The limit of endurance seems to have been reached in Lawrence.” House Committee on Rules, The Strike at Lawrence, Hearings before the Committee on Rules of the House of Representatives on House Resolutions 409 and 433, March 2–7, 1912 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1912), 10–11. There is a large literature on the 1912 strike. An excellent account can be found in Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969).
74.Hareven and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 11, 336; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 165, 190–95, 225–29; Mary H. Blewett, The Last Generation: Work and Life in the Textile Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1910–1960 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990).
75.British population does not include Ireland. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope, 4; B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750–1993 (London: Macmillan Reference, 1998), 4, 8; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, 8.
Chapter 3
“THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION”
1.Joshua Freeman et al., Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 2 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), xii–xx; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 20, 1876; J. S. Ingram, The Centennial Exposition, Described and Illustrated (Philadelphia: Hubbard Bros., 1876); Linda P. Gross and Theresa R. Snyder, Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2005); John E. Findling, ed., Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851–1988 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 57–59; Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 9–37; Centennial Photographic Co., “[Saco] Water Power Co.—Cotton Machinery,” Centennial Exhibition Digital Collection Philadelphia 1876, Free Library of Philadelphia, CEDC No. c032106 (accessed Mar. 20, 2015), http://libwww.library.phila.gov/CenCol/Details.cfm?ItemNo=c032106. See also Bruni Giberti, Designing the Centennial: A History of the 1876 International Exhibition in Philadelphia (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002).
2.On the national divides at the time of the exhibition, see Freeman et al., Who Built America? vol. 2, xx–xxiv.
3.When Whitman visited the Centennial Exhibition, he reportedly sat for a half hour in silence before the Corliss engine. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 150–58, 163–64; Andrea Sutcliffe, Steam: The Untold Story of America’s First Great Invention (New York: Palgrave, 2004); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 73–96; Edmund Flagg, The Far West: or, A Tour Beyond the Mountains, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), 17–18; John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (New York: Penguin, 1977), 141; Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 15–16.
4.Walt Whitman, Two Rivulets: Including Democratic Vistas, Centennial Songs, and Passage to India (Camden, NJ: [Walt Whitman], 1876), 25–26; Marx, Machine in the Garden, 27. There is a very large literature on the railroad and modernity. See, for example, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
5.Giberti, Designing the Centennial, 2–3; “Manufactures of Massachusetts,” The North American Review 50 (106) (Jan. 1840), 223–31.
6.The Crystal Palace burned down in 1936. Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Benjamin quoted in Robert W. Rydell, Worlds of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 15.
7.Many exhibits for the New York fair were not ready when it opened, damping down attendance. Unlike the profitable original, it ended in bankruptcy. Charles Hirschfeld, “America on Exhibition: The New York Crystal Palace,” American Quarterly 9 (2, pt. 1) (Summer 1957), 101–16.
8.Pauline de Tholozany, “The Expositions Universelles in Nineteenth Century Paris,” Brown University Center for Digital Scholarship, http://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/worldfairs.html (accessed Mar. 27, 2015). For a list of nineteenth- and twentieth-century international expositions and fairs, see Findling, ed., Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 376–81.
9.Report of the Board of Commissioners Representing the State of New York at the Cotton States and International Exposition held at Atlanta, Georgia, 1895 (Albany, NY: Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Co, 1896), quote on page 205; C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913: A History of the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1951), 123–24.
10.Jill Jonnes, Eiffel’s Tower: The Thrilling Story Behind Paris’s Beloved Monument and the World’s Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count (New York: Viking, 2009); “Origins and Construction of the Eiffel Tower,” http://www.toureiffel.paris/en/everything-about-the-tower/themed-files/69.html, and “All You need to Know About the Eiffel Tower,” http://www.toureiffel.paris/images/PDF/about_the_Eiffel_Tower.pdf (both accessed Oct. 21, 2016); Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies ([1979] Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 8–14.
11.Letter published in Le Temps, Feb. 14, 1887, reprinted in “All You Need to Know About the Eiffel Tower.”
12.“Représentation de la tour Eiffel dans l’art,” http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repr%C3%A9sentation_de_la_tour_Eiffel_dans_l%27art; and Michaela Haffner, “Diego Rivera, The Eiffel Tower, 1914,” the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, https://www.wellesley.edu/davismuseum/artwork/node/37002 (both accessed Apr. 1, 2015). For a different reading of the iconography of the Eiffel Tower, with less emphasis on its importance as a symbol of industrialism and the mechanical age, see Gabriel Insausti, “The Making of the Eiffel Tower as a Modern Icon,” in Writing and Seeing: Ess
ays on Word and Image, ed. Rui Carvalho Homem and Maria de Fátima Lambert (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2006).
13.Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone,” translated by Donald Revell, http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/zone. For an alternative, more literal translation by Charlotte Mandell, see http://www.charlottemandell.com/Apollinaire.php (accessed Apr. 2, 2015).
14.Blaise Cendrars, “Elastic Poem 2: Tower,” trans. by Tony Baker, GutCult 2 (1) (Winter 2004), http://gutcult.com/Site/litjourn3/html/cendrars1.html.
15.The great nineteenth-century expositions were not only about industry and consumer goods. They also celebrated national identity and greatness as manifested in the arts and empire. And empire was tightly linked to ideas of racial hierarchy, a theme that bluntly recurred in fair after fair. Technological and racial advance were inextricably linked. See Auerbach, Great Exhibition of 1851, 159–89; Joseph Harris, The Tallest Tower: Eiffel and the Belle Epoque (Bloomington, IN: Unlimited Publishing, 2004), 88–89, 107–08; Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 21–22; Rydell, Worlds of Fairs, 19–22; Findling, ed., Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 79, 181, 183.
16.Guy de Maupassant, La Vie Errane, Allouma, Toine, and Other Stories (London: Classic Publishing Company, 1911), 1–4.
17.Auerbach, Great Exhibition of 1851, 128–58; Freeman et al., Who Built America? vol. 2, xxiii.
18.Auerbach, Great Exhibition of 1851, 132, 156; Friedrich Engels to Laura Lafarge, June 11, 1889, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1889/letters/89_06_11.htm (accessed Apr. 4, 2017); Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 335–36.
19.The Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel, published by U.S. Steel in ten editions between 1919 and 1985, provides encyclopedic information on iron- and steelmaking, including their history. For a history and analysis of this remarkable volume, see Carol Siri Johnson, “The Steel Bible: A Case Study of 20th Century Technical Communication,” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 37 (3) (2007), 281–303. See also Peter Temin, Iron and Steel in Nineteenth-Century America: An Economic Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 13–17, 83–85.
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