by Aaron Swartz
It was far from a perfect life. It could be difficult to make ends meet and there was no protection from falling prices or market downturns. But you were free. You worked as your own boss, followed your own rules. And that was not something Americans were inclined to give up lightly.
At first the mills promised freedom too. For the daughters of these families, they provided a chance to break away from the rule of their fathers and strike out to work on their own—for their own wages, in their own lives. Instead of working under the thumb of their parents, New England girls went out to mill towns—whole new cities created along the river to staff the mills, the first real factories in the country. Instead of women spinning cotton into cloth at home, girls operated vast machines powered by water turbines to do the work in the city.
And these were girls. Harriet Robinson went to work in the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, at the age of ten. “I worked first in the spinning-room as a ‘doffer,’” she recalled. “The doffers were the very youngest girls, whose work was to doff, or take off, the full bobbins, and replace them with the empty ones. I can see myself now, racing down the alley, between the spinning-frames, carrying in front of me a bobbin-box bigger than I was.”*
Fibre & Fabric: A Record of American Textile Industries in the Cotton and Woolen Trade, 1898, Volume 28, 170.
The law took no cognizance of woman as a money-spender. She was a ward, an appendage, a relict. . . . I can see them now, even after sixty years, just as they looked,—depressed, modest, mincing, hardly daring to look one in the face, so shy and sylvan had been their lives. But after the first pay-day came, and they felt the jingle of silver in their pockets, and had begun to feel its mercurial influence, their bowed heads were lifted, their necks seemed braced with steel, they looked you in the face, sang blithely among their looms or frames, and walked with elastic step to and from their work.†
Harriet Robinson, Loom and Spindle, Applewood Books, 68–70.
From a condition approaching pauperism they were at once placed above want; they could earn money, and spend it as they pleased; and could gratify their tastes and desires without restraint, and without rendering an account to anybody. At last they had found a place in the universe; they were no longer obligated to finish out their faded lives mere burden to male relatives. Even the time of these women was their own, on Sundays and in the evening after the day’s work was done. For the first time in this country woman’s labor had a money value.*
Ibid., 69.
But while the ability to earn one’s own keep was liberating, the conditions under which it was possible were not. Long before the advent of the eight-hour day, these girls worked fourteen hours, from five in the morning until seven at night—with only a half hour off for breakfast and dinner. They lived in cramped quarters with the other girls, two to a bed, four to a room, hardly any space or privacy.
Their bosses, by contrast, “lived in large houses, not too near the boarding-houses, surrounded by beautiful gardens which seemed like Paradise to some of the home-sick girls, who, as they came from their work in the noisy mill, could look with longing eyes into the sometimes open gate in the high fence, and be reminded afresh of their pleasant country homes.”
The work was dull, but it allowed plenty of time to think, and despite their lack of formal education, these girls did plenty of it. And after work they read assiduously, passing books from hand to hand. And they eagerly attended the talks of visiting lecturers. “I used every winter to lecture for the Lowell Lyceum,” recalled a Harvard professor. “Not amusement, but instruction, was then the lecturer’s aim. . . . The Lowell Hall was always crowded, and four-fifths of the audience were factory-girls. When the lecturer entered, almost every girl had a book in her hand, and was intent upon it. When he rose, the book was laid aside, and paper and pencil taken instead; and there were very few who did not carry home full notes of what they had heard. I have never seen anywhere so assiduous note-taking. No, not even in a college class.”*
A.P. Peabody, “The Lowell Offering,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1891.
And through all that thinking and learning and discussing, they began to question the less pleasant aspects of their situation. When, in 1836, the Lowell mill owners decided to cut their employees’ pay, the girls walked out. “My own recollection of this first strike (or ‘turn out’ as it was called) is very vivid,” recalls Harriet Robinson.
I worked in a lower room, where I had heard the proposed strike fully, if not vehemently, discussed; I had been an ardent listener to what was said against this attempt at “oppression” on the part of the corporation, and naturally I took sides with the strikers. When the day came on which the girls were to turn out, those in the upper rooms started first, and so many of them left that our mill was at once shut down. Then, when the girls in my room stood irresolute, uncertain what to do, asking each other, “Would you?” or “Shall we turn out?” and not one of them having the courage to lead off, I, who began to think they would not go out, after all their talk, became impatient and started on ahead, saying, with childish bravado, “I don’t care what you do, I am going to turn out, whether anyone else does or not”; and I marched out, and was followed by the others.
As I looked back at the long line that followed me, I was more proud than I have ever been since at any success I may have achieved.†
Robinson, Loom and Spindle, 84.
She was eleven years old.
What these young girls accomplished is truly amazing. They organized their own newspaper, the Voice of Industry, which they wrote, edited, printed, and sold themselves. Through it they organized more protests and strikes, as well as organized their own slate of candidates in the state elections to fight for better working conditions and a ten-hour day. Amazingly, their slate won. The owners, outraged, got their legislators to declare the election results invalid and hold a revote. Before the revote, large signs were posted threatening that anyone who voted for the ten-hour slate would be fired. And yet the slate won again.
Once seated, the legislators were able to pass a ten-hour bill through the state House, but as usually happens with progressive legislation, it was killed in the state Senate.
But their writing in the Voice shows that they wanted much more than simply better working conditions. They saw themselves as slaves—wage slaves—and concluded that the solution was not simply to demand that the bosses be nicer to them or pay them more, but to abolish the bosses entirely.
The laborer does not yet know what terrible odds he contends with. Concentrated skill in the form of machinery and accumulated labor in the shape of capital, both directed by superior intelligence, are arrayed against him. These powerful forces, which should be on his side, should be his servants, his tools, are crushing them. . . . In the true order of things, wherever is the most wealth would be the least poverty; but now it is otherwise; the more glittering the splendor of capital; the more squalor, wretchedness, degradation obtrude near it.*
The Voice of Industry, April 14, 1848.
The solution was clear:
Instead of quibbling, temporizing, and compromising with capitalists, we want to see the working classes getting daily into a position of independence through a system of cooperation and mutual guarantees. When they can obtain the means of living independent of capitalists, then and not till then, will “strikes” and “turn outs” mean something. They must consolidate and combine so as to become their own employers and do their trading without the interference of the go-betweens and jobbers. Let them unite in themselves both the functions of laborer and capitalist. So long as we are dependent on cotton mills for employment, so long we shall be oppressed. They who work in the mills ought to own them.*
The Voice of Industry, March 10, 1848.
One is almost tempted to call this Marxist, but it was many years before Marx. “They who work in the mills ought to own them.” It was just plain common sense.
The mill owners were not happy about such agitation. They fired these t
roublemaking (sabotaging?) workers and added their names to the blacklist shared with all the other mills. They sought out more compliant replacements. And they used their control over housing and stores to try to force their workers back to work.
But their most striking plan was also their most far-reaching: they sent the girls to school. Lowell, the home of America’s industrial revolution, the home of the girls who fought back against it and concluded that “they who work in the mills ought to own them,” was also the home of America’s first schools.
The schools they built—the common schools—would be easily recognizable by any modern student. “The door [of each school] shall be closed precisely at the time fixed for the opening of the school, and in the morning religious exercises will be performed, for which purpose 10 minutes are allowed.” (Today we just say the pledge of allegiance.) “Each teacher shall call the roll call of his or her classes . . . in the morning and afternoon, and shall keep an accurate record of all absences.” The day was then divided into separate lessons, allowing “30 minutes for the study of each lesson and 10 minutes for each recitation.”†
Reference unknown.
Instead of corporal punishment, teachers were encouraged to secure order “by the mildest possible means” to instill “a regard for right, and thus a standard of self-government in the minds of the children themselves.”* Students were tested on how much they learned and, just like today, working coordinating other students was considered “cheating” and punished. (Perhaps they were worried that if students learned to coordinate they might be more likely to foment strikes once in the mills.)
Reference unknown.
In 1855, the Lowell School Committee noted that they had some trouble with one misguided parent who believed the schools “to be a republic, where the subject may call into question the power of the ruler; whereas a school government is and must be an absolute monarchy . . . where no subject can or ought to question an order or law of the supreme head.”† So much for training kids for democracy!
David Isaac Bruck, “The Schools of Lowell, 1824–1861: A Case Study In the Origins of Modern Public Education in America,” honors thesis, Harvard University, 1971. http://id.lib.harvard.edu/aleph/003824609/catalog.
The curriculum was also much like that of modern schools,
adding grammar, geography, history and physiology to the basic program of reading, writing and arithmetic. But what is striking about this extension of the curriculum is the intrinsic uselessness of the material treated . . . [these classes] were totally given over to the memorization of minute and generally trivial facts. Candidates for high school entrance in 1850, for example, were expected to know the names of the capital of Abussinia, of two lakes in the Sudan, of the river that “runs through the country of the Hottentots,” and of the desert lying between the Nile and the Red Sea, as well as to locate Bombetok Bay, the Gulf of Sidra, and the Lupata Mountains. [Other subjects had] a similar approach, with all the questions given over to very specific and in most cases minute pieces of information completely unrelated to the present or future lives of the pupils being taught.
And indeed, such studies did not improve a student’s performance in the mills. Careful records kept by the mill owners allow us to compare mill workers who did and did not go to school. Just as with modern students, there is no evidence of any impact of increased education on worker productivity.*
Luft.
So why did the mill owners spend so much money building and running these schools? They were quite clear about their intent. The classes were justified not for their usefulness but because memorizing them was a form of “moral education” leading to “industrious habits . . . and the consequent high moral influence which it exerts upon society at large.”
As one Lowell manager explained it, “I have never considered mere knowledge, valuable as it is in itself to the laborer, as the only advantage derived from a good common-school education. I have uniformly found the better educated, as a class, possessing a higher and better state of morals, more orderly and respectful in their deportment, and more ready to comply with the wholesome and necessary regulations of an establishment.”
Not only were those who went through school better at following rules, but they were less likely to stir up trouble: “In times of agitation I have always looked to the most intelligent, best educated, and the most moral for support and have seldom been disappointed . . . . But the ignorant and uneducated I have generally found the most troublesome, acting under the impulses of excited passion and jealousy.”
In other words, “that class of help which has enjoyed a good common-school education are the most tractable, yielding most readily to reasonable requirements, exerting a salutary and conservative influence in times of excitement, while the most ignorant are the most refractory.”† In short, “the owners of manufacturing property have a deep pecuniary interest in the education and morals of their help.”
Letter from H. Bartlett, Esq. to Horace Mann, Lowell, Dec. 1, 1841, in Horace Mann, ed., Common School Journal, 1842, 366.
Another Lowell manager: “I have observed that when the demagogues have found it for their interest to persuade the dear people that are employed in the mills that their employers are exacting, over-reaching and oppressive, the minds and morals of the ignorant are usually more readily poisoned.”
As the Lowell School Committee summarized their findings: “The proprietors find the training of the schools admirably adapted to prepare the children for the labors of the mills.” Why? “When [their laborers] are well educated . . . controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factitious considerations.”*
Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Report of the Board of Education, Vol. 23, 1860, p. 56.
Students, they noted, “have to receive their first lessons of subordination and obedience in the school room. At home, they are either left wholly to their own control, or, what is almost equally bad, the discipline to which they are subjected alternates between foolish indulgence, and exasperated tyranny.”†
Lowell Mass. School Committee, Annual Report, 1847, Vol. 21, p. 56.
Indeed, school was so important that the mill owners quickly decided to make it mandatory. “No language of ours can convey too strongly our sense of the dangers which wait us from [those who] are not and have never been members of our public schools,” warned the Lowell School Committee. Universal schooling is “our surest safety against internal commotions.”‡
Samuel Bowles, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, Haymarket, 1976, p. 160.
The children who didn’t attend school “constitute an army more to be feared than war, pestilence and famine,” warned the committee. “Unsuccessful attempts, during the past year, to burn two of our school-houses . . . are an index to the evils which threaten from such sources.”§
Ibid.
More accurately, such burnings were an index of public resistance to such coercion. In 1837, 300 teachers were forced to flee their classrooms by riotous and violent students.|| In 1844, the Irish population went on strike from the schools, reducing attendance by 80%. The School Committee stepped up their anti-truancy efforts to force them and others back to school.
David K. Cohen and Barbara Neufeld, “The Failure of High Schools and the Progress of Education,” Daedalus I 10 (Summer 1981): 87, n. 2.
And just as the factory model spread out from Lowell, so did the model of mandatory schooling. An analysis of census data by Alexander Field found that what led to a town getting a school was not its growth into a city nor a rise in incomes nor the introduction of expensive machinery, but instead the introduction of the factory system itself. As factories marched across the country, public schools followed.
And their justification didn’t change either. As historian Merle Curti notes, “Hardly an annual meeting of the National Education Association was concl
uded without an appeal on the part of leading educators for the help of the teacher in quelling strikes and checking the spread of socialism and anarchism. Commissioners of education and editors of educational periodicals summoned their forces to the same end.” Commissioner of education John Eaton argued that businessmen must “weigh the cost of the mob and tramp against the expense of universal and sufficient education,” while NEA president James H. Smart declared that schools did more “to suppress the latent flame of communism than all other agencies combined.”
“Again and again,” Curti writes, “educators denounced radical doctrines and offered education as the best preventive and cure.” The titans of industry agreed—business leaders like Henry Frick, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Pierre S. du Pont eagerly supported the spread of education programs. As social reformer Jane Addams put it, “The business man has, of course, not said to himself: ‘I will have the public school train office boys and clerks for me, so that I may have them cheap,’ but he has thought, and sometimes said, ‘Teach the children to write legibly, and to figure accurately and quickly; to acquire habits of punctuality and order; to be prompt to obey, and not question why; and you will fit them to make their way in the world as I have made mine!’”*
Merle Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators, Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1959. An excerpt (pp. 218–220, 228, 230, 203).
***
And this has been their attitude ever since. Despite all the talk about educators and education priorities, the most important people in any school have always been businessmen. They constantly complain that our schools our failing, that they need to cut out modern fads and go “back to basics,” that unless schools get tougher on students American business will be unable to compete.
As Richard Rothstein has shown, such claims are hardly new. Because schools have never been about actual education, businessmen have been easily collecting studies about their failure at this task since the very beginning. In 1845, only 45% of Boston’s brightest students knew that water expands when it freezes. In one school, 75% knew the U.S. had imposed an embargo on British and French goods during the War of 1812, but only 5% knew what embargo meant. Students, the secretary of education wrote, were simply memorizing the “words of the textbook . . . without having . . . to think about the meaning of what they have learned.”