Factory System

Factory System. The shift of manufacturing from hand to machine processes was a central element of the Industrial Revolution that transformed the early modern economy and contributed to the emergence of modern industrial capitalism. The coming of the modern factory led to a tremendous increase in labor productivity, which contributed, in turn, to a rising standard of living, an increasingly complex division of labor, growing agricultural production, and a massive rural‐to‐urban population shift. It is no exaggeration to characterize the factory system as the major contributor to this interrelated complex of changes that distinguish modern society.

The factory system in the United States emerged with the growth of the cotton textile industry in New England after the Revolutionary War. Customarily historians identify the cotton spinning mill of Almy, Brown, and Slater established in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1790 as the first permanent factory in the new nation. Samuel Slater, a former apprentice in the Derbyshire, England, mill of Jedidiah Strutt, emigrated to the United States in 1789 with an extensive knowledge of English carding and spinning machinery. In Pawtucket, with the financial backing of two Providence merchants, William Almy and Smith Brown, he constructed the requisite machinery and set a small spinning mill in operation in December 1790. Rhode Island, eastern Connecticut, and southern Massachusetts dominated early cotton textile manufacturing in the United States. The reconstruction of a power loom at the Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1813 by a group of investors subsequently called by historians the Boston Associates, set the stage for further expansion of the industry, with the emergence of a vertically integrated system that combined all stages of the production process at a single site.

Before 1850, textiles were the single major consumer commodity successfully produced within a factory setting. The Waltham‐Lowell–type mills of northern New England realized the full potential of factory production. In Lowell, for instance, by 1850 ten large mill complexes, with assets valued at twelve million dollars, employed more than ten thousand operatives producing a million yards of cloth weekly. With a population of some 33,000, Lowell was Massachusetts's second largest city and the leading factory town in the country. By 1850 textiles manufactured in New England and the Philadelphia region clothed virtually the entire nation. Only on isolated frontiers might homespun fabrics still be found; only among urban elites did imported textiles have a substantial market.

Factory production soon spread to other sectors of the economy. By the mid–nineteenth century, shoemaking and garment manufacture were increasingly concentrated in urban factories. After the Civil War, the iron and steel industry emerged as the leader of a second industrial revolution, which shifted production from light consumer goods to heavy industry. Whereas textile, shoe, and garment manufacturing were localized operations, steel production created new national corporate enterprises by the turn of the twentieth century. Buying up coal and iron ore deposits, purchasing railroads and steamship lines, and merging with potential competitors, steel magnates like Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) and Andrew Carnegie built and administered fortunes that dwarfed those of the antebellum New England cotton mill owners.

Given the economies of factory production, corporate managers sought to systematize factory operations to maximize their returns. The scientific‐management principles espoused by Freierick W. Taylor in the Progressive Era captured the new imperatives. In the meatpacking, automotive, rubber, and electrical industries, new ways of organizing production emerged to take advantage of mechanization and increase the productivity of labor. As workers lost control of the work process in the modern factory, their unions bargained for increased wages, offering American workers by the mid–twentieth century the highest standard of living in the world. Referring to feelings of powerlessness and purposelessness among factory workers in the post–World War II decades, some sociologists discerned a growing sense of alienation. Radical social critics questioned whether labor's new contract was a pact with the devil.

At the end of the twentieth century the continuing growth of factory productivity transformed the American economy in still other ways, resulting in a sharp decline in manufacturing jobs and the growth of a newly dominant service sector. Financial and information services increasingly constituted the growth sectors of the nation's economy. Unions, traditionally strongest in the manufacturing sector, experienced dramatic declines in membership and economic and political power, as yet another consequence of the ongoing global transformation of factory production. What role the factory will continue to play in a postindustrial world economy remains an open question.
See also Agriculture; “American System” of Manufactures; Antebellum Era; Automation and Computerization; Business; Cotton Industry; Economic Development; Gilded Age; Labor Markets; Labor Movements; Mass Production; Meatpacking and Meat Processing Industry; Multinational Enterprises; Post–Cold War Era; Technology; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Harry Braverman , Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, 1974.
Alan Dawley , Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn, 1976.
Thomas Dublin , Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860, 1979.
Barry Bluestone and and Bennett Harrison , The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment and the Dismantling of American Industry, 1982.
Gary B. Kulik , Industrialization, in Encyclopedia of American Social History, eds. Mary Kupiec Cayton, Elliot J. Gorn, and Peter W. Williams, 1993, pp. 593–604.
Walter Licht , Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century, 1995.

Thomas Dublin