A Manual of Shoemaking and Leather and Rubber Products

by William H. Dooley

If one reviews the history of the trade during the past ten years, there will be little question but that one will find it has been a period of the greatest advancement that the trade has ever known.

Within the time of those who read these words, the way to make a shoe has been completely changed. Methods which held their own for centuries have disappeared, to be replaced by processes which only recently would have been thought impossible, and which have brought within the reach of men of modest means a luxury once enjoyed exclusively by the well-to-do. The feet of the million are clad to-day as finely as the feet of yesterday’s millionaire. Shoes marked by comfort, durability, and style have driven to historical museums the stiff and clumsy boots and brogans which not so many years ago were worn by those who could not pay to have shoes sewed by hand.

The American people spend more than three hundred million dollars every year in buying shoes, and average three pairs apiece, and yet few ever think about their shoes so long as they do not look clumsy, or wear out too quickly, or hurt the foot. Every one likes to buy good shoes as cheaply as he can, and every one likes to feel that shoe manufacturers are independent and successful, and that workmen get good wages, because these things help along prosperity; but that is all. Yet here is an industry in which the United States within a decade has come to lead the world, and there are many things about it which it would be worth while for every one to understand. It is worth while, for instance, to know that there is no important operation on a shoe which need be done by hand; that in the making of every good shoe no less than fifty-eight different machines, and sometimes twice that number, are brought into play; that nearly all these machines are of American invention; and that they have been so perfectly adjusted one to another that they work together almost with the precision of a watch; it is worth while to know something about the marvelous system under the encouragement of which this typical American industry has blossomed and borne fruit until it employs two hundred million dollars of capital and nearly two hundred thousand people, and turns out two hundred and fifty million pairs of shoes a year; and why it is that the average man you meet to-day has a better fitting, better wearing, and better looking shoe than the moneyed man of yesterday—at a fraction of the expense.

This remarkable growth is distinctly American. In the United States the tendency among the artisan class has been to abandon the slow hand process. This tendency has been as strong as the tendency in Europe to adhere to it. Moreover, there has developed among the laboring classes in the United States a mobility such as is unknown elsewhere in the world.

Another advantage which has contributed to the rapid development of the manufacture of shoes in the United States is the comparative freedom from inherited and overconservative ideas. This country has entered upon its industrial development unfettered by the old order of things, and with a tendency on the part of the people to seek the best and quickest way to accomplish every object.

Stitching Room of a German Shoe Factory.

In all of the European countries in which the manufacturing of shoes is an important industry, the transition from the household to the factory system was hampered by guilds, elaborate national and local restrictions, and by the national reluctance with which a people accustomed for generations to fixed methods of work, in which they have acquired a large degree of skill, abandon those methods for new ones. It was natural, also, that in spite of the superior advantages of machine methods, hand process of manufacture should still continue side by side with them, in the European countries, though machine work had long since usurped the whole field of the shoe industry in the United States.

As an American goes about among the European shoe factories he is greatly surprised at the state of affairs. He is struck by three things which are very conspicuous. They are: (1) Lack of use of machinery, lack of all sorts of devices in order to save hand labor, which is carried out so extensively in the United States. (2) Lack of the division of labor, one factory attempting to make four or five kinds of shoes. (3) Lack of methods employed for handling large quantities of materials.