Textile Industry

Textile Industry. American colonists hand‐produced textiles for various purposes. The English first devised textile‐manufacturing machinery, and Samuel Slater, an English mill overseer who immigrated to America, successfully produced cotton yarn at a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, mill in 1790. As was to be the case repeatedly, Slater's success rested on the contributions of a community of inventors, machinists, laborers and financial backers. Relying on the employment of families, the “putting‐out system” to weave yarn in area homes, and the development of corporate villages, the Slater system spread throughout New England. Entrepreneurs in Philadelphia, New York City, and other cities employed skilled labor to produce short runs of expensive specialty materials such as fashion goods and upholstery, gradually moving from hand to factory production.

A group of merchants known as the Boston Associates created a third style of production, first at Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814, and then at Lowell, Massachusetts, and other single‐purpose industrial cities across New England. Building large, integrated factories and installing water‐powered looms that processed raw cotton into vast quantities of coarse cloth, they hired rural young women to tend machines requiring minimal skills. With large‐scale capital investment, and aided by state governments, these corporations harnessed major waterpower sites.

Each type of textile production endured decades of strife between management seeking profit and labor attempting to negotiate acceptable terms and conditions for the new ways of work. In mill villages, some accommodation was necessary to maintain production with limited human resources on both sides of the dispute, although the owners' preponderance of power gave them an advantage. Skilled producers of specialty goods and their bosses, sharing the culture and rewards of production, generally adapted pay, hours, and profits to mutually acceptable levels. In the large single‐industry cities, employers refused to make concessions, and successive groups of workers—Yankees, Irish, French‐Canadians, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—all rejected conditions and left the mills at the first opportunity, with no reconciliation of conflicting interests.

Though northern textile mills and specialty production survived well into the twentieth century, the New South desired to industrialize to make both cloth and profits more easily by shifting their investments away from the circumstances and taxes (e.g., workers' compensation and unemployment insurance) their manner of operation had created. By 1900, the capital generated by northern textile workers was financing southern branches of established mills and new mills founded by southerners. Textile‐machinery builders and cloth‐marketing agents, taking stock instead of cash from southern mills, came to control many of them. American industry thus began its perpetual search for easier, cheaper venues in which to operate.

By the end of the twentieth century, however, the industry faced intense competition from cheaper producers abroad, especially Asia. Total employment in U.S. textile mills fell from 1.2. million in 1950 to under 700,000 in 1990.
See also Clothing and Fashion; Cotton Industry; Factory System; Global Economy, America and the; Immigrant Labor; Industrialization; Labor Movements; Lowell Mills; Strikes and Industrial Conflict; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

Philip Scranton , Figured Tapestry, 1989.
Laurence F. Gross , The Course of Industrial Decline, 1993.

Laurence F. Gross