Manufacturing

a.

1. Employed, or chiefly employed, in manufacture; as, a manufacturing community; a manufacturing town.

2. Pertaining to manufacture; as, manufacturing projects.

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Rather than undergoing a single, rapid "industrial revolution," manufacturing in America has evolved over four centuries of European settlement. While the first colonists introduced some manufacturing processes to their "new world," manufacturing did not become a vital part of the economy until the achievement of national independence. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, all forms of manufacturing—household, artisanal, and factory based—grew and expanded, and textile manufacturing in particular spawned important new technologies. From the Civil War through the early twentieth century heavy industry grew rapidly, transforming the national economy and the very nature of society. After a period of manufacturing prosperity due, in part, to World War II, heavy industry began to decline and Americans suffered from deindustrialization and recession. The growth of high technology and the service sector in the final decades of the century offered both challenges and opportunities for American manufacturing.

The Colonial Era to 1808

Both of the major early English settlements hoped to establish manufacturing in America. The Virginia Company attempted to set up iron foundries and glass manufactories on the James River while the Puritans built several iron foundries in Massachusetts. As colonization proceeded, however, manufacturing became increasingly peripheral to the economy. With quicker and easier profits to be made from cash crops and trans-Atlantic trade, colonists exerted little effort toward manufacturing. Beginning in the late-seventeenth century, colonial manufacturing was further hindered by mercantilistic restrictions imposed by the English, most notably the Woolen Act (1699), Hat Act (1732), and Iron Act (1750). All three of these acts were designed to limit nascent colonial competition with English manufacturers in keeping with the developing mercantilistic perception that colonies should serve the empire as producers of raw materials and consumers of finished products from the mother country. While large-scale iron and steel manufacturing continued to have a presence in the colonies, most colonial manufacturing would still be performed in the farm household and, to a lesser extent, within craft shops.

It was only after the French and Indian War (1689– 1763) that Americans, propelled by their new quest for independence from England, began to turn toward manufacturing in a systematic way. Colonial resistance to the Sugar Act (1764), Stamp Act (1765), Townshend Duties (1767), and Coercive Acts (1774/1775) all involved economic boycotts of British goods, creating a patriotic imperative to produce clothing, glass, paint, paper, and other substitutes for British imports. Empowered by this movement and increasingly politicized by the resistance, urban artisans began to push for a permanently enlarged domestic manufacturing sector as a sign of economic independence from Britain.

The Revolution itself offered some encouragement to domestic manufacturing, particularly war materiel such as salt petre, armaments, ships, and iron and steel. But it also inhibited manufacturing for a number of reasons. Skilled laborers, already scarce before the war, were now extremely difficult to find. Wartime disruptions, including the British blockade and evacuation of manufacturing centers such as Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia further hindered manufacturing.

In the years immediately following the war, manufacturing began to expand on a wider scale. Lobbying efforts by urban mechanics as well as some merchants swayed state governments and later the new federal government to establish mildly protective tariffs and to encourage factory projects, the most famous of which was Alexander Hamilton's Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures in Patterson, New Jersey. New immigrants brought European industrial technologies. The best known case was that of Samuel Slater, who established some of the new nation's first mechanized textile mills in Rhode Island in the 1790s. But the great majority of manufacturing establishments still relied on traditional technologies to perform tasks such as brewing beer, refining sugar, building ships, and making rope. Moreover, craft production and farm-based domestic manufacturing, both of which grew rapidly during this period, continued to be the most characteristic forms of American manufacturing.

From 1808 to the Civil War

Factory production, particularly in the textile industries, became an important part of the American economy during the Embargo of 1808 and the War of 1812. During these years imports were in short supply due to the United States' efforts to boycott European trade and disruptions caused by the British navy during the war. Economic opportunity and patriotic rhetoric pushed Americans to build their largest textile factories to date, from Baltimore's Union Manufactory to the famous establishments financed by the Boston Associates in 1814 in Waltham and in 1826 in Lowell, Massachusetts. America's first million-dollar factories, they used the latest technologies and employed thousands of workers, many of them women and children. After the war promanufacturing protectionists pushed for high tariffs to ensure that manufacturing would continue to flourish. These efforts culminated with the so-called Tariff of Abominations of 1828, which included rates of 25 percent and more on some imported textiles. Protectionism was a vital part of the Whig Party's American System, consisting of tariffs, improved transportation, and better banking. But after 1832, as Southerners successfully fought to lower tariffs, government protection of manufacturing waned.

During these years the proportion of the workforce involved in manufacturing grew more rapidly than in any other period in America's history, rising from only 3.2 percent in 1810 to 18.3 percent by 1860. Growth in textile manufacturing led the way. Cotton production capacity alone increased from 8,000 spindles in 1808 to 80,000 by 1811 and up to 5.2 million by the dawn of the Civil War. By 1860 the United States was, according to some calculations, the world's second greatest manufacturing economy, behind only England. Spectacular as this growth was, it did not come only from the revolution in textile manufacturing. In fact, American manufacturing was extremely varied. While even Europeans admired American inventors' clever use of interchangeable parts and mechanized production, traditional technologies also continued to flourish. Household production, although declining relative to newer forms, remained a significant element of American manufacturing. Many industries other than textiles, and even some branches of textiles, relied on more traditional processes. Established urban centers such as New York City experienced metropolitan industrialization that relied more on the expansion and modification of traditional craft processes than on construction of large vertically integrated factories on the Lowell model.

From the Civil War to World War II

During the latter part of the nineteenth century the United States became the world's leading industrial nation, exceeding the combined outputs of Great Britain, France, and Germany by 1900. Between 1860 and 1900 the share of manufacturing in the nation's total production rose from 32 percent to 53 percent and the number of workers employed in manufacturing tripled from 1.31 million to 4.83 million. Heavy industry, particularly steel, played the most dramatic role in this story. Between 1873 and 1892 the national output of bessemer steel rose from 157,000 to 4.66 million tons. Geographically, the trans-Appalachian midwest was responsible for a disproportionate amount of this growth. Major steel-making centers such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago led the way. The combined population of these industrial metropolises grew by more than 2,500 percent between 1850 and 1900. Yet, even smaller midwestern towns rapidly industrialized; by 1880 60 percent of Ohio's population was employed in manufacturing, and ten years later Peoria County, Illinois, was the most heavily industrialized in the United States. To a far lesser extent manufacturing also extended into the New South after the Civil War. Here industries based on longtime southern agricultural staples such as cotton manufacturing and cigarette making led the way, following some mining and heavy industry.

Besides the growth of heavy industry and large cities, this era marked the onset of big business. The railroad industry, which benefited from the ease of coordination offered by large units, set the pace, but it was in the steel industry that bigness really triumphed, culminating in the creation of United States Steel, America's first billion-dollar firm (it was capitalized at $1.4 billion in 1901). By 1904, 318 large firms controlled 40 percent of all American manufacturing assets. Firms grew due to vertical integration (incorporating units performing all related manufacturing functions from extraction to marketing) as well as horizontal integration (incorporating new units providing similar functions throughout the country). Such growth was hardly limited to heavy industry; among the most famous examples of vertical integration was the Swift Meat Packing Corporation, which, during the 1870s and 1880s, acquired warehouses, retail outlets, distributorships, fertilizer plants, and other units that built on its core businesses.

While consumers welcomed the increasing availability of mass-produced goods ranging from dressed meat to pianos, the growth of big industry also worried many Americans. Concerns that the new colossuses would serve as monopolies spurred government concern, beginning with state actions in the 1880s and the federal Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and followed by a number of largely ineffectual efforts by federal courts to bust trusts such as those alleged in the whiskey and lumber industries to keep the market competitive for smaller players. Perhaps more importantly, workers were also frightened by the increasing amount of economic power in the hands of a few industrial giants who were able to slash wages at will. Major labor actions against railroad and steel corporations helped to build new unions such as the Knights of Labor (established 1869), the United Mine Workers (1890), and the American Federation of Labor (1886). In the 1890s there were an average of 1,300 work stoppages involving 250,000 workers per year. Such actions sometimes ended in near-warfare, as in the famous case of the 1892 strike at Carnegie Steel's Homestead, Pennsylvania, plant.

The most important new manufacture of the twentieth century was the automobile. In 1900 the United States produced fewer than $5 million worth of automobiles. Only sixteen years later American factories turned out more than 1.6 million cars valued at over half a billion dollars. Henry Ford's assembly line production techniques showcased in his enormous River Rouge factory transformed industry worldwide. Automobile production also stimulated and transformed many ancillary industries such as petroleum, rubber, steel, and, with the development of the enclosed automobile, glass. Automobiles also contributed significantly to the growth of a consumer culture in the era before World War II, leading to new forms of commuting, shopping, traveling, and even new adolescent dating rituals. While the development of new forms of consumption kept the economy afloat during good times, reluctance to purchase goods such as automobiles and radios during the Great Depression would intensify the economic stagnation of the 1930s.

World War II to 2000

After the fallow years of the depression, heavy industry again thrived during and after World War II, buoyed by defense spending as well as consumer purchases. Due partly to the politics of federal defense contracts and partly to lower labor costs, the South and West experienced more rapid industrial growth than the established manufacturing centers in the Northeast and Midwest. While workers in the Pacific coast states accounted for only 5.5 percent of the nation's manufacturing workforce in 1939, by 1969 they accounted for 10.5 percent of the total. Manufacturing employment in San Jose, Phoenix, Houston, and Dallas all grew by more than 50 percent between 1960 and 1970.

Industrial employment reached its peak in 1970, when 26 percent of Americans worked in the manufacturing sector. By 1998 the percentage had plunged to 16 percent, the lowest since the Civil War. Deindustrialization struck particularly hard during the 1970s when, according to one estimate, more than 32 million jobs may have been destroyed or adversely affected, as manufacturing firms shut down, cut back, and moved their plants. Due to increasing globalization, manufacturing jobs, which previously moved from the northern rust belt to the southern and western sun belt, could now be performed for even lower wages in Asia and Latin America. These developments led some observers to label the late twentieth century a post-industrial era and suggest that service industry jobs would replace manufacturing as the backbone of the economy, just as manufacturing had superseded agriculture in the nineteenth century. They may have spoken too soon. In the boom years of the 1990s the number of manufacturing jobs continued to drop, but increased productivity led to gains in output for many industries, most notably in the high technology sector. Additionally, other economic observers have argued that manufacturing will continue to matter because the linkages that it provides are vital to the service sector. Without manufacturing, they suggest, the service sector would quickly follow our factories to foreign countries. Thus, at the dawn of the twenty-first century the future of manufacturing and the economy as a whole remained murky.

Bibliography

Bluestone, Barry, and Bennett Harrison. The Deindustrialization of America. New York: Basic Books, 1982.

Clark, Victor. History of Manufactures in the United States, 1893–1928. 3 vols. New York: McGraw Hill, 1929.

Cochran, Thomas. American Business in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Cochran, Thomas, and William Miller. The Age of Enterprise: ASocial History of Industrial America. New York: Macmillan, 1942.

Licht, Walter. Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Porter, Glenn. The Rise of Big Business, 1860–1910. New York: Caswell, 1973; Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1973.

Tryon, Rolla M. Household Manufactures in the United States,1640–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917. Reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint Company, 1966.

For a list of words related to manufacturing, see:

• Economics and Economic Theory - manufacturing: production of commodities for sale
• Commerce and Trade - manufacturing: production of commodities

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