It had grown, this infant, until in every valley of the East there stood factories and mills uncounted. Turning from the little iron mines of New Jersey, the pioneers of our greatest industry had begun to open up the hills of Pennsylvania and even Michigan. In that age, which has been called the golden age of industry, fortune followed swiftly upon the heels of honest labour.
Always, it was free, democratic, independent, this march of the manufacturers. A hundred men manufactured cotton cloths in one small area of New England. No one of them would have listened to the call of combination. They worked out their own destinies, took their own profits, built up their own plants from very small to very large. In the twenty years from 1840 to 1860 the independent American manufacturer became the true American type. In 1850, for the first time, the products of industry surpassed in value the products of agriculture. America came into its destiny.
Often have I heard this tale of the making of America; and I can trace, by hearsay, the evolution of the mighty industrial enterprises of to-day from the puny beginnings of the days of Franklin. Then, in our nation’s youth, manufacturing was carried on in the home, by household industry. In the homes of New England men spun and wove the cotton; or beat the stubborn iron implements of agriculture. Long the battle of industry was fought along these lines.
Then came the change, when, after the War of 1812, the English manufacturers, armed with new industrial machinery, flooded the United States with manufactured goods. In self-defence America took to its arms the hated factory system, realizing that here and here alone lay its industrial salvation. Instead of the scattered household manufacturing, the country developed the gathering and working of all sorts and conditions of manufacturing under one roof. Instead of piece work, paid for as delivered, men began to work for wages.
How strange, in this day, sounds the warning of Franklin in our ears! At the risk of being tiresome, let me quote a paragraph from his writings:
A people spread through the whole tract of country on this side of the Mississippi, and secured by Canada in our hands, would probably for some centuries find employment in agriculture, and thereby free us at home effectually from our fears of American manufactures. Unprejudiced men well know that all the penal and prohibitory laws that ever were thought of will not be sufficient to prevent manufactures in a country whose inhabitants surpass the number that can subsist by the husbandry of it. That this will be the case in America soon, if our people remain confined within the mountains, and almost as soon should it be unsafe for them to live beyond, though the country be ceded to us, no man acquainted with political and commercial history can doubt. It is the multitude of poor without land in a country, and who must work for others at low wages or starve, that enables undertakers to carry on a manufacture, and afford it cheap enough to prevent the importation of its own exportation.
But no man who can have a piece of land of his own, sufficient by his labour to subsist his family in plenty, is poor enough to be a manufacturer, and work for a master. Hence while there is land enough in America for our people, there can never be manufactures in any amount or value.—Writings of Benjamin Franklin: Smith Ed. Vol. IV, pp. 48–49.
This was written in 1761—just a century before the Civil War! What a transition to our day—and we have but begun! In the days of Franklin, according to our best authorities, less than one out of eight of the population depended for a living on manufacturing, trade, transportation, and fisheries. As early as 1851, it was one out of five. The character of the nation had undergone a complete and sweeping change.
Yet, let me repeat, the American industrialist of that day was not the serf he is to-day. In every sense, he was a free and independent man. True, he had been forced to leave the household plan for the factory plan; but yet he managed without any trouble to keep the spirit of individualism and independence thoroughly alive. Industry, in the middle of the last century, was carried on in this country in scattered individual plants, each one a little independent republic of its own. The owners generally worked in the factory and the mill. Half a dozen partners, perhaps, laboured side by side with the men in their employ. Men stepped swiftly from the position of wage workers to the independence of ownership. The doors of individual opportunity stood wide open.
I would, if I dared risk tiring the reader with extended comment upon subject matter that has been handled often much better than I can handle it, dwell upon this happy phase of the making of America. For it is germane to my subject. And then, again, it is gone from us forever—gone with the happy simplicity and innocence of the youth of our nation. In its stead there has come upon us an age of industrial terror, of fierce, abnormal struggle for expansion and wealth beyond the dreams of the fathers.