The American textile industry was in every sense a child of the British factory system. In 1790 Samuel Slater, a British mechanic, introduced the first successful American cotton-spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. This event transformed New England from an agricultural to an industrial region and led to such modern forms as the corporation, the separation of ownership and management, and the development of big business. The system's emphasis on the individual rather than family or community was a major shift in American society and came to characterize the new nation's industrial and social development. It also meant that the federal government would only encourage industry; the actual operation of mills would be left to individuals.
Slater, while living in England, had worked for Jedediah Strutt, partner of Richard Arkwright, who was the progressive factory master and inventor of a revolutionary water-powered spinning machine. Strutt exposed Slater to every phase of textile production from the construction of machines to the management of a labor force. Because of limited opportunities in England, Slater immigrated to America in 1789. In New York, he answered an advertisement from Moses Brown who wanted a mechanic knowledgeable about the English system of production. After considerable negotiation, the men formed the firm of Almy, Brown, and Slater. With financial backing from the Brown family, Slater constructed machines based on the Arkwright model and employed young children to operate them. The business grew, and Slater constructed additional mills in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
Slater soon realized that British practices would have to be modified to meet the requirements of New Englanders. The family was an important institution in New England, and any system of production that disregarded its interests would be short-lived. Slater altered the British system to fit the local situation. The new system featured the partnership or single proprietorship form of ownership, personal management, small-scale production, the use of water power, and the employment of family labor. A division of labor based on gender and age emerged. Men were employed in supervisory capacities as farm hands and laborers or as skilled artisans. Adult women remained at home, and children and adolescents worked in the mills. The children, some as young as seven or eight, earned as little as twenty-five cents a week, and all wages went directly to the head of the household. Hundreds of manufacturers throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic states emulated Slater, and his mode of operation became known variously as the Slater, Rhode Island, or British system.
During these years of industrial experimentation, the federal government was developing its strategy toward manufacturing. In his Report on Manufactures issued in 1791, Alexander Hamilton enumerated the advantages of industrial development for the United States and advocated government assistance for industrialization. What form that assistance should take was debated. Should the government subsidize industry, or decide the location of mills or towns or the type of product to be manufactured? In the case of the textile industry, agents for the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures selected the site of Paterson, New Jersey, as a potential textile manufacturing center and encouraged its development. But the undertaking proved unsuccessful, and it folded in 1796. This ended direct government interest in the location and construction of textile mills. Thereafter, the federal government confined its support to passing tariffs and issuing patent protection. With the exception of the arms industry, private capital and individual entrepreneurs were to chart America's industrial future.
The Slater system was not the only factory form to develop during the early nineteenth century. Francis Cabot Lowell, a wealthy Boston merchant, introduced another form to New England. Known as the Lowell system, it differed markedly from Slater's. His Boston Manufacturing Company, capitalized at $400,000, built a factory in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1813. Unlike Slater's, Lowell's early mills used power looms, and his operations combined the spinning of yarn and the weaving of cloth. To operate the equipment, Lowell employed women and girls. Historians have labeled the Lowell style the first form of big business in America. His enterprises were large-scale, integrated, incorporated ventures utilizing professional management. His eventual domination of the domestic market for coarse cloth was assisted by the passage of the tariff of 1816, which imposed a 25 percent tariff on imported cotton and woolen goods. The Lowell companies were an immediate financial success with profits reaching 20-24 percent annually.
In 1826 the town of Lowell was founded in Massachusetts and six firms established there. The company built boardinghouses to accommodate its labor force of twelve-to-twenty-five-year-old females. The twenty-five or so women residing in each house developed a sense of sisterhood, working, eating, and spending leisure time together. Although they enjoyed the cultural and economic advantages available in Lowell, they did not succumb to the popular notion that Lowell was a "finishing school for young ladies." They had come, mostly from New England farms, to work, and they expected to be paid for their labor and treated with respect.
When a downturn occurred in the textile industry beginning in 1829 and management sought to cut wages, these women reacted. They went out on strike in 1834 and 1836 and ran petition campaigns in the 1840s. They formed the Factory Girls' Association and joined the widespread ten-hour movement. Theirs were among the first forms of collective action taken by industrial workers. In response, mill owners there and elsewhere turned to immigrant labor, hiring French-Canadian and Irish workers to replace the native-born labor force.
By the time of the Civil War, the distinctions between the Lowell and Slater systems had begun to dissolve. Both utilized immigrant and family labor, constructed tenements to house workers, and sought to control their lives as well as their working hours. Both adopted the corporate form of ownership, professional management, and cost accounting.
But New England was not the only center of textile production. The Paterson, New Jersey, venture was successfully revived, and in Philadelphia, the textile industry flourished. Diversification was the key here with factories specializing in weaving, spinning, dyeing, or finishing.
The labor situation in Philadelphia, however, was volatile. Strikes and riots in the 1840s reflected disputes between labor and management as well as nativist anger over the hiring of immigrants. There was also a labor glut during the decade, and management played one group of workers against another: immigrants versus the native-born, men versus women, adults versus children. Given these conditions, along with the depression of 1836-1844 and scant experience with organization, labor won few victories during these years.
For much of the nineteenth century, the Northeast remained the center for textile production with cotton, woolen, linen, and thread output soaring. New mills were constructed in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York; some of them were considered model operations, such as that at Hopedale, Massachusetts, but others, including mills at Lawrence and Fall River, were substandard.
In the 1880s a shift in location began to occur. Small textile mills moved south, many of them mirroring the earlier Slater system: town design based on rural villages, small-scale production, and paternalistic practices by owners. These southern mill towns were controlled by mill agents and superintendents, with the company providing jobs, houses, food, clothing, and goods. The work force was drawn from the countryside, and conditions were harsh. In the 1880s and 1890s the Knights of Labor and the National Union of Textile Workers organized southern mill workers, but strikes were ineffective with the national economy in trouble.
In the early twentieth century, conditions in the textile industry continued to deteriorate in the North. Major strikes organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (iww) occurred in 1912 and 1913, with the iww developing new tactics. One of the most successful was the "Children's Crusade." Workers in Lawrence sent their children dressed in rags to New York and other cities to parade through the streets and gain sympathy for the strikers. Although a settlement was reached in this case, overall, labor could do little to influence management's long-range operations. If labor got too powerful in one location, the firms simply moved.
Several new factors were entering the picture now, including the introduction of synthetic fibers like nylon, which began to replace cotton; changing fashions in the 1920s, which subjected textile producers to the whims of designers and consumers; and increasing international competition, especially from Japan. Tariffs on woolens and cottons had been drastically lowered in 1913. Although sporadic adjustments were made in the 1920s and 1930s, they were not enough to help, and many manufacturers shut down, left the industry, or moved south. By the 1920s New England textile towns were in a depression.
In the South the situation was equally precarious. Mill owners instituted the speed-up and the stretch-out (forcing workers to manage additional machines), initiated night work, and cut wages. Strikes occurred across the South, and the National Textile Workers Union moved in to organize the workers. Violence erupted and the strike it called was eventually lost. But it had foreshadowed the issues that were to preoccupy the nation in the 1930s: unemployment or low wages, long hours, night work, miserable factory conditions, and union ineptitude.
In 1934 the United Textile Workers called for a general strike of the textile industry, and again it failed. Broad economic circumstances did not favor collective action. Only the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 and the advent of World War II permitted unions to establish a foothold in the South.
In the decades following the war, the American textile industry lost ground to firms in Asia and Central and South America. In 1946 imports of cotton and woolen manufactures were worth $45 million and $41 million, respectively; within ten years they had risen to $161 million and $196 million. Textile communities throughout the nation were forced to develop new economic strategies. Lowell, Massachusetts, for example, became a center of high technology. But many textile towns continued to decay, reflecting the new realities of American industry in a global context.
Bibliography:
Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (1979); Jacquelyn Hall et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987); Barbara M. Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790-1860 (1984).
Author:
Barbara M. Tucker
See also Child Labor; Cotton; Industrial Revolution; Labor; Lawrence Strike; Lowell System; Nativism; Paterson Silk Strike; Report on Manufactures.
