BEHEMOTH

A HISTORY OF THE FACTORY

AND THE MAKING OF THE
MODERN WORLD

Joshua B. Freeman
 As always,
for Debbie, Julia, and Lena
Rereading your book has made me regretfully aware of our increasing age. How
freshly and passionately, with what bold anticipations, and without learned and
systematic, scholarly doubts, is the thing still dealt with here! And the very illusion
that the result will leap into the daylight of history tomorrow or the day after gives
the whole thing a warmth and vivacious humour—compared with which the later
“gray in gray” makes a damned unpleasant contrast.

—Karl Marx, in an 1863 letter to Friedrich Engels

about The Condition of the Working Class in England

At sea, the sailors … manufacture a clumsy sort of twine, called spun-yarn… . For
material, they use odds and ends of old rigging called “junk,” the yarn of which are
picked to pieces, and then twisted into new combinations, something as most
books are manufactured.

—Herman Melville,
Redburn: His First Voyage (1849)
 Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

“LIKE MINERVA FROM THE BRAIN OF JUPITER”

The Invention of the Factory

CHAPTER 2

“THE LIVING LIGHT”

New England Textiles and Visions of Utopia

CHAPTER 3

“THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION”

Industrial Exhibitions, Steelmaking, and the Price of
Prometheanism

CHAPTER 4

“I WORSHIP FACTORIES”
Fordism, Labor, and the Romance of the Giant Factory

CHAPTER 5

“COMMUNISM IS SOVIET POWER PLUS THE

ELECTRIFICATION OF THE WHOLE COUNTRY”
Crash Industrialization in the Soviet Union
CHAPTER 6

“COMMON REQUIREMENTS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION”

Cold War Mass Production

CHAPTER 7

“FOXCONN CITY”
Giant Factories in China and Vietnam

CONCLUSION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

INDEX
 INTRODUCTION

W E LIVE IN A FACTORY-MADE WORLD, OR AT LEAST most of us do. Almost

everything in the room I am writing in came from a factory: the
furniture, the lamp, the computer, the books, the pencils and pens,
the water glass. So did my clothes, shoes, wristwatch, and cell
phone. Much of the room itself was factory made: the sheetrock
walls, the windows and window frames, the air conditioner, the
parquet floor. Factories produce the food we eat, the medicines we
take, the cars we drive, the caskets we are buried in. Most of us
would find it extremely difficult to survive, even for a brief time,
without factory-made goods.
Yet in most countries, except for factory workers themselves,
people pay little attention to the industrial facilities on which they
depend. Most consumers of factory products have never been in a
factory, nor do they know much about what goes on inside one. In
the United States, it is the absence of factories rather than their
presence that gets publicized. The loss of roughly five million
manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 20161 led to sharp critiques,
from the right and the left, of the international trade agreements
blamed for their disappearance. Factory jobs are deemed “good
jobs,” with little examination of what they actually entail. Only
occasionally do factories themselves become a big story, as when in
2010 the mistreatment of Chinese workers who assembled iPhones
and other electronic gear briefly became subject to international
scrutiny.
 Things weren’t always this way. Factories, especially the largest
and most technically advanced, were once objects of great wonder.
Writers, from Daniel Defoe and Frances Trollope to Herman Melville
and Maxim Gorky, marveled at them, or were horrified. Tourists,
ordinary and celebrated—Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens,
Charlie Chaplin, Kwame Nkrumah—visited them. In the twentieth
century, they became a favorite subject of painters, photographers,
and filmmakers, leading artists like Charles Sheeler, Diego Rivera,
and Dziga Vertov. Political thinkers, from Alexander Hamilton to Mao
Zedong, debated their significance.
From eighteenth-century England on, observers recognized the
revolutionary nature of the factory. Factories visibly ushered in a new
world. Their novel machinery, workforces of unprecedented size, and
outflow of uniform products all commanded attention. So did the
physical, social, and cultural arrangements invented to
accommodate them. Producing vast quantities of consumer and
producer goods, giant industrial enterprises brought a radical break
from the past, in material life and intellectual horizons. The large
factory became an incandescent symbol of human ambition and
achievement, but also of suffering. Time and again, it served as a
measuring rod for attitudes toward work, consumption, and power, a
physical embodiment of dreams and nightmares about the future.
In our time, the ubiquity of factory-made products and the lack of
novelty in the existence of the factory has dulled appreciation of the
extraordinary human experience associated with it. At least in the
developed world, we have come to take factory-made modernity for
granted as a natural condition of life. Yet it is anything but. Only a
brief flash in the history of humankind, the age of the factory does
not go as far back as Voltaire’s first play or the whaling ships of
Nantucket. The creation of the factory required exceptional ingenuity,
obsession, and misery. We have inherited its miraculous productive
power and long history of exploitation without giving it much thought.
But we should. The factory still defines our world. For nearly half
a century, scholars and journalists in the United States have been
announcing the end of the industrial age, seeing the country as
transforming into a “postindustrial society.” Today, only 8 percent of
American workers are in manufacturing, down from 24 percent in
1960. The factory and its workers have lost the cultural purchase
they once had. But worldwide, we are in a heyday of manufacturing.
According to data compiled by the International Labor Organization,
in 2010 nearly 29 percent of the global workforce labored in
“industry,” down only a bit from a 2006 prerecession high of 30
percent and considerably above the 1994 figure of 22 percent. In
China, the world’s largest manufacturer, in 2015, 43 percent of the
workforce was employed in industry.2
The biggest factories in history are operating right now, making
products like smartphones, laptops, and brand-name sneakers that
for billions of people around the world define what it means to be
modern. These factories are staggeringly large, with 100,000,
200,000, or more workers. But they are not without precedent.
Outsized factories have been a feature of industrial life for more than
two centuries. In each era since the factory arrived on the stage of
history, there have been industrial complexes that have stood out on
the social and cultural landscape by dint of their size, their machinery
and methods, the struggles of their workers, and the products they
produced. Their very names—Lowell or Magnitogorsk or now
Foxconn City—have broadly evoked sets of images and
associations.
This book tells the story of these landmark factories as industrial
giantism migrated from England in the eighteenth century to the
American textile and steel industries in the nineteenth century, the
automobile industry in the early twentieth century, the Soviet Union
in the 1930s, and the new socialist states after World War II,
culminating in the Asian behemoths of our time. In part, it is an
exploration of the logic of production that led at some times and
places to the intense concentration of manufacturing in massive,
high-profile facilities and at other times and places to its dispersion
and social invisibility. Equally, it is a study of how and why giant
factories became carriers of dreams and nightmares associated with
industrialization and social change.
The factory led a revolution that transformed human life and the
global environment. For most of human history, up to the initial
stirrings of the Industrial Revolution and the creation of the first
factories in the early eighteenth century, the vast majority of the
world population was rural and poor, living precarious existences
plagued by hunger and disease. In England, in the mid-eighteenth
century, life expectancy did not reach forty, while in parts of France
only half of all children lived to see their twentieth birthday. Average
annual per capita growth of global economic output during the period
between the birth of Jesus and the first factory was essentially zero.
But in the eighteenth century it began nudging up and between 1820
and 1913 approached 1 percent. In the years since it has been
higher, with a peak, between 1950 and 1970, of nearly 3 percent.
The cumulative effect of the increased production of goods and
services has been utterly transformative, measured most basically in
life expectancy, now over eighty in the United Kingdom, a bit higher
in France, and nearly sixty-nine globally. Steady supplies of food,
clean water, and decent sanitation have become the norm in much of
the world, no longer restricted to tiny pockets of the wealthy in the
most advanced areas. Meanwhile, the surface of the earth, the
composition of the oceans, and the temperature of the air have been
profoundly altered, to the extent of threatening the species itself. Not
all of this was strictly the result of the Industrial Revolution, let alone
the giant factory, but much of it was.3
In both capitalist and socialist countries, the giant factory was
promoted as a way to achieve a new and better way of life through
increased efficiency and output from advanced technology and
economies of scale. More than simply a means to boost profits or
reserves, large-scale industrial projects were seen as instruments for
achieving broad social betterment. As factories came to embody the
idea of modernity, their physical structures and processes were
hailed by writers and artists for their symbolic and aesthetic
characteristics. But even as giant factories inspired utopian dreams
and reveries of machine worship, they also brought on fears about
the future. For many workers, social critics, and artists, the big
factory meant proletarian misery, social conflict, and ecological
degradation.
Understanding the history of giant factories can help us think
about what kind of future we want. The outsized factory has been a
marvel at reducing unit costs and pouring out massive quantities of
goods. Yet these testaments to human ingenuity and labor often
proved short-lived. Most of the facilities discussed in this book no
longer exist or function at much reduced scales of operation. In
Europe, the Americas, and most recently Asia, the abandoned
factory has become a distressing, all-too-common sight. The
concentration of production in a few massive complexes again and
again created vulnerabilities, as pools of available workers dried up
and employees began asserting claims to proper compensation,
humane treatment, and democratic voice (demands manufacturers
in many countries are confronting today). Heavy capital investment
reduced flexibility when new products and production techniques
emerged. Industrial wastes and heavy energy consumption led to
ecological despoilment. What has kept the model of industrial
giantism alive has not been its sustainability in any one locale but its
reemergence, over and over, in new places, with new workforces,
natural resources, and conditions of backwardness to be exploited.
Today, as we may well be witnessing the historic apogee of the giant
factory, economic and ecological conditions suggest that we need to
rethink the meaning of modernity and whether or not it should
continue to be equated with ever more material production in vast,
hierarchically organized industrial facilities of the kind that were the
bane and the glory of the past.
As once landmark factories in Europe and the United States
closed, leaving behind physical ruins and social misery, a nostalgia
for the factory and its world has grown up, particularly in blue-collar
communities. Websites lovingly document factories long shuttered,
what some scholars have dubbed “smokestack nostalgia” or, more
cuttingly, “ruin porn.” There are literary versions, too. In an essay
about Philip Roth, Marshall Berman noted his novel American
Pastoral’s theme of “the tragic ruin of America’s industrial cities.”
Roth “writes vividly about the decay, but his writing really takes off
when he tries to imagine the city as a Utopia of industry. The voice
he develops to tell this story could be called Industrial Pastoral. The
common feeling here is that life was far more ‘real’ and more
‘authentic’ yesterday, when men in boots made things, than it is
today, when it is a lot harder to say what it is we do all day.” Berman
reminds us, “One important quality of pastoral vision is that it leaves
out dirty work.”4
 Some of the power of factory nostalgia comes from the
association of the factory with the idea of progress. Out of the
Enlightenment emerged the notion that through human effort and
rationality the world could be transformed toward greater abundance,
well-being, and moral order, a central belief of both the
entrepreneurs who led the Industrial Revolution and the socialists
who were their harshest critics. The factory was repeatedly portrayed
as an instrument of progress, an almost magical means to achieve
modernity, part of a larger Promethean project that also brought us
the great dams, power plants, railways, and canals that have
transformed the surface of our planet.
Today, for many people, the very idea of progress seems quaint,
even murderous, an artifact of the Victorian era that could not
survive world war, genocide, and abundance. The modern appears
old-fashioned in a declared-to-be postmodern world. For others, the
notion of progress retains a powerful grip on their imaginations and a
deep moral significance, informing a yearning for a return to—or
arrival at—a world of large-scale industry.
Understanding the giant factory requires coming to grips with the
ideas of progress and modernity. Rather than a narrow exercise in
the study of architecture, technology, or industrial relations, a full
history of the giant factory takes us beyond factory walls to changing
moral, political, and aesthetic sensibilities and the role of the factory
in producing them.
Modernity, with which the factory has been linked, is a slippery
term. It can simply denote the quality of being modern, something
contemporary, existing at the current moment. But it often has
served as more than a neutral categorization. Until the nineteenth
century, the modern usually was unfavorably compared to the past.
Then, in the age of the factory, modern increasingly came to connote
improved, desirable, the best that can be. Modern entailed a
disavowal of the past, a rejection of the old-fashioned for the most
up-to-date, an embrace of progress. One dictionary defines
modernity as “characterized by departure from or repudiation of
traditional ideas, doctrines, and cultural values in favour of
contemporary or radical values and beliefs.”
 Modernism in the arts and literature, arising in the nineteenth
century, took modernity as its battle cry, in what Jürgen Habermas
called “the cult of the New,” even as it sometimes critiqued or
mocked it. Novelty became its own virtue, a weapon in an assault on
conventional values and ruling authorities. The factory system and
the dizzying rate of change it made possible were its precondition.
Not surprisingly, the factory itself became a favored subject for
modernist artists.5
This study focuses on very large factories, the largest of their
time measured by the number of workers they employed, not all
factories.6 Giant factories served as templates for the future, setting
the terms of technological, political, and cultural discussion. They
were not typical. Most factories were much smaller and less
sophisticated. Very frequently, they had worse conditions for their
workers. But giant factories monopolized public attention. Debates
about the meaning of the factory tended to focus on the industrial
behemoths of the day.
There have been few studies of the factory, let alone the giant
factory, that cut across time and space. Rarely has it been
considered as an institution in its own right, with a distinctive history,
aesthetic, social characteristics, political salience, and ecological
impact.7 But much has been written about particular factories. That
is especially true of the factories discussed in the pages that follow,
for they were selected in part because they were so celebrated or
condemned in their time. Without the work of other scholars, as well
as the wealth of journalistic accounts, government reports, visual
representations, fictional portrayals, and first-person descriptions,
this study would not be possible. The work of my predecessors is
particularly impressive because while some factories have been
proudly shown off by their creators, many others, from the earliest
English textile mills to the giant factories of today, have been
carefully shrouded in an effort to protect trade secrets and hide
abusive practices.
To many inhabitants of the modern world, the factory may seem
distant from their everyday routines and concerns. It is not. Without
it, their lives could not exist as they are. Except in some very isolated
places, we are all part of the factory system. Given the great costs
as well as great benefits of the giant factory, we owe it to ourselves
to understand how it came to be.
BEHEMOTH
 CHAPTER 1

“LIKE MINERVA FROM THE BRAIN OF

JUPITER”
The Invention of the Factory

IN 1721, A STONE’S THROW FROM ALL SAINTS’ CHURCH (now Cathedral)

in Derby, England, the first successful example of a factory, as we
use the term today, was built on an island in the River Derwent.
Unlike many older types of buildings—the church, mosque, palace,
or fortress, the theater, bathhouse, dormitory or lecture hall, the
courtroom, prison, or city hall—the factory is strictly a creature of the
modern world, a world it helped create. As far back as the ancient
world, there were episodic large assemblages of workers to make
war or build structures such as pyramids, roads, fortifications, and
aqueducts. But until the nineteenth century, manufacturing generally
took place on a far more modest scale, engaged in by craftsmen and
their helpers working alone or in small groups or by family members
making goods for home consumption. In the United States, as late
as 1850, manufacturing establishments on average employed fewer
than eight workers.1
With John and Thomas Lombe’s Derby Silk Mill, the factory
seemingly popped into existence fully developed, without infancy.2 A
picture of the mill is immediately recognizable to our eyes as a
factory. A five-story, rectangular brick building, its façade punctured
by a grid of large windows, in outward appearance it closely
resembles thousands of the factories which were to come, including
many still operating. Inside it had all the main characteristics of a
modern factory: a large workforce engaged in coordinated
production using powered machinery, in its case driven by a twenty-
three-foot-high waterwheel. The combination of externally powered
equipment and numerous people working together in one space
might not seem like much today, but at the time it represented the
beginning of a new world.3

Figure 1.1 Sir Thomas Lombe’s Derby Silk Mill in 1835.

The first factories were built not out of grand social visions but to
take advantage of mundane commercial opportunities. The Lombes
put up their factory to profit from a shortage of organzine, a kind of
silk yarn used for warp. To make cloth, yarn, called the weft, is
woven over and under a crossing set of yarns, called the warp.
Because alternate strands of warp are repeatedly pulled up to allow
the weft to be pushed through, they need to be stronger. To make
organzine, long threads produced by silkworms were wound into
skeins. These had to be put onto bobbins, twisted, “doubled” with
other threads, and then twisted again to make yarn, a process
known as silk throwing. While on the continent machines were being
used to throw silk, in England it was done using spinning wheels, a
process too slow to meet the demand from weavers.
In 1704, a Derby barrister built a three-storied, water-powered
mill to house imported Dutch silk-throwing machines, but he proved
unable to produce quality yarn. Thomas Lombe, a local textile dealer,
tried next, sending his half brother John to northern Italy to study the
methods used there. Defying laws banning the disclosure of
information about the construction of silk-throwing machinery, he
returned with several Italian workers and enough information for the
Lombes, working with a local engineer, to build and equip their
factory. Children apparently did much of the work inside.
Thomas Lombe claimed that his mill was never a great success,
in part because of his difficulty in getting raw silk from Italy. This may
have been a strategy to discourage competitors and convince
Parliament to extend the patent he took out on his machines.
Instead, in 1732 the British government, to promote industrial
development, gave Lombe a large cash payment in return for making
public a model of his machinery.4
The factory system spread slowly. In 1765 there were just seven
mills producing organzine, though one, near Manchester, by the end
of the century had two thousand workers, a gigantic enterprise by
contemporary standards. More common were smaller mills using
power-driven machinery to produce tram, a weaker type of silk
thread used for weft.5
While entrepreneurs, driven by practical calculations, moved
cautiously in following the Lombes’ footsteps, observers almost
immediately recognized the novelty and importance of the Derby
mill. Daniel Defoe visited the factory—“a vast Bulk”—in the 1720s,
declaring it “a Curiosity of a very extraordinary Nature.” Like Charles
Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind, fictional archetype of the early
industrial age, Defoe, in the face of this modern marvel, fell back
upon “Fact, fact, fact!” “nothing but Facts!” Anticipating the gee-whiz
wonder of so many future descriptions of large factories, he
recounted how the Lombe machinery “contains 26,586 Wheels and
97,746 Movements, which work 73,726 Yards of Silk-thread, every
time the Water-wheel goes round, which is three times in one
Minute, and 318,504,960 Yards in One Day and Night.”6 James
Boswell, who visited the same mill a half century later, in the stream
of tourists who came to see this new thing under the sun, more
tersely described the machinery as “an agreeable surprize.”7
Alone, the Derby mill might have remained “a Curiosity of a very
extraordinary Nature.” But it turned out to be the opening of the
factory age. In its wake came ever more factories, which would
radically transform the British economy and ultimately world society.
The large factory would prove to be the leading edge and the leading
symbol of a broader Industrial Revolution that created the world we
live in.

Cotton
The lasting importance of the Lombes’ factory was not as a template
for silk mills but as a template for cotton mills. Limited demand,
foreign competition, and difficulty obtaining suitable raw material
restricted British silk production. But cotton was a different story,
becoming the driving force for the Industrial Revolution and the
creation of the factory system we still use today.
Cotton cloth, used for clothing and decoration, long predated the
first British cotton mills. By the sixteenth century, textiles produced in
India by spinners and weavers working at home with simple, hand-
powered equipment were being exported to Europe, West Africa,
and the Americas. A century later, they had become a truly global
commodity.8
Until the late seventeenth century, it would have been rare to
have seen someone in Europe wearing cotton clothes; imported
cotton textiles were used largely for household decoration. Most
clothing was made out of other fibers: wool, flax, hemp, or silk.9 But
the quality and variety of cotton cloth soon made it a favorite for
European garments. With increasing population and rising income
pushing up demand, local merchants tried to take over at least some
of the processes for making cotton textiles from foreign producers,
an early example of what would later be called import substitution.10
Instead of importing calicos—cotton cloth with printed patterns—
European traders began buying plain white Indian cloth, which they
had decorated by local artisans. By the mid-eighteenth century,
large-scale calico printing shops, some with hundreds of workers,
were operating in various parts of Europe.11 English merchants also
began weaving imported cotton yarn with flax to produce fustians.12
In 1774, Britain ended restrictions on producing and decorating
all-cotton textiles, earlier put into place to protect the silk and wool
industries. Deregulation, along with fustian production, contributed to
ballooning demand for cotton yarn.13 Merchants, artisans, and
entrepreneurs set out to capture the market with locally produced
product. But the obstacles they faced were considerable.
Simply getting enough raw cotton was the first problem. Indian
producers used Indian-grown cotton, but the European climate was
unsuitable for its cultivation. In the late eighteenth century, Britain
imported cotton from all over the world, including Asia and various
parts of the Ottoman Empire. Supply lagged behind demand, leading
to the increasing cultivation of cotton in the Americas using slave
labor, first in the West Indies and South America and then, after the
introduction of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (patented in 1794), in the
southern United States. By the early nineteenth century, over 90
percent of the cotton used in Britain was grown by slaves in the
Americas. As British textile production exploded, cotton growers in
the United States moved westward into the Mississippi River valley,
where a brutal empire arose on the labor of enslaved Africans (“food
for the cotton-field,” Frederick Douglass called them). Thus, the rise
of the factory system, with its association with modernity, was utterly
dependent on the spread of slave labor. “Without slavery you have
no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry,” wrote Karl
Marx—an overstatement, but one with much truth.14
 The technical demands of turning raw cotton into weft and warp
presented a second challenge. As Edward Baines wrote in his 1835
History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, whereas “silk
needs only that the threads spun by the worm should be twisted
together, to give them the requisite strength,” “[c]otton, flax, and
wool, having short and slender filaments, require to be spun into a
thread before they can be woven into cloth.” The raw cotton used in
Britain had individual fibers generally less than an inch long. To
convert it into yarn it had to be “carded,” combed to pull apart the
fibers and line them up in parallel to create a “sliver.” Slivers were
then drawn out to a prescribed thickness (“roving”) and twisted to
gain strength. Both the last step and all the processes together were
called “spinning.”15
Until the 1760s, spinning was a domestic industry, with men
doing the heavy work of carding, while women used spinning wheels
to create finished yarn and children helped out in various ways. As
Blaines noted, “the machines used . . . were nearly as simple as
those of India.” However, it cost more to produce cotton yarn in
Britain than in India and the quality was lower, too fragile to use as
warp. And there was not enough of it; it took at least three spinners
along with a few ancillary workers to keep one weaver (generally
male) in yarn, meaning weavers often had to go beyond their own
household for supplies, a problem exacerbated by the introduction of
the flying shuttle in the 1730s, which greatly increased weaving
productivity.16
Conditions were ripe for a radical change. Expanding fustian,
hosiery, and cotton textile production ensured inventors and
investors a payoff if they could increase the output, improve the
quality, and lower the cost of cotton yarn. Merchant entrepreneurs
already had experience with large-scale production through their
organization of extensive networks of domestic spinners and
weavers, who were given raw materials by a central agent to make
specific types of yarn or cloth and paid by the piece. Though the
banking system in the textile districts had limited financial and
technical capacity, manufacturers, merchants, and landed gentry had
capital resources to back new enterprises. A large, underemployed
agricultural workforce constituted a potential labor pool for large-
scale industry.17
In the last decades of the eighteenth century, English inventors,
artisans, and merchant manufacturers developed a series of
machines to boost the quality and quantity of locally produced cotton
yarn. James Hargreaves developed the first mechanical spinning
device in 1764, the jenny. It proved of limited use, since it could only
produce weft and required a skilled worker to operate. Richard
Arkwright was more successful. A tinkerer, who had had his ups and
downs as a barber, wig maker, and public house owner, Arkwright
applied for a patent on a spinning machine in 1768 and seven years
later for carding equipment. With partners, he first built a mill in
Nottingham that used horses to power spinning machines. He soon
switched to water power, long used for sawmills, grain mills, mineral-
crushing mills, and paper mills, building a factory in Cromford, an
isolated spot sixteen miles up the River Derwent from where the
Lombes had built their mill. Once he perfected his carding and
spinning machinery, Arkwright and various partners built additional
factories along the Derwent and then elsewhere. Arkwright’s profits
from his mills and royalties from his patents made him a very rich
man.18
In part to circumvent Arkwright’s patents, other carding and
spinning machines were developed, including Samuel Crompton’s
spinning mule, giving those seeking to go into cotton yarn
manufacturing a choice of equipment, some better suited for warp
and some for weft. The boosts in productivity were startling: the
earliest jennies increased output per worker sixfold or more, while
Arkwright’s equipment, once perfected, proved several hundredfold
more efficient. In the late eighteenth century, the first power looms
for weaving were introduced, mechanizing the next step in textile
production. The early looms had many problems and could produce
only low-quality fabric. As a result, hand-weaving remained dominant
in cotton production until the 1820s and even later in worsted and
wool. But with incremental improvements, power looms gradually
became the norm in virtually all forms of weaving.19
Arkwright’s Nottingham mill employed three hundred workers,
about the same number as the Lombes’. His first mill in Cromford
was smaller, with about two hundred employees, mostly children. A
second mill he put up in Cromford had eight hundred workers.
Jedidiah Strutt, a hosiery manufacturer and early partner of
Arkwright’s, erected a mill complex in Belper, seven miles south of
Cromford, that employed 1,200 to 1,300 workers by 1792, 1,500 in
1815, and 2,000 by 1833. The complex of mills in New Lanark,
Scotland, which Arkwright helped build but Robert Owen and his
partners took over, had 1,600 to 1,700 workers in 1816. By then,
steam-powered cotton mills were being erected in urban areas, with
several factories in Manchester employing over a thousand workers.
The giant factory had arrived.20
Figure 1.2 English inventor and entrepreneur Sir Richard Arkwright in 1835.

Why the Giant Factory?

Why did cotton manufacturers adopt factory production? And why
did their factories grow so large? This was a subject of considerable
discussion both at the time that the first big mills were built and
among scholars in more recent times. Popular accounts of the birth
of the factory often present it as a technologically driven imperative,
the outgrowth of a series of paradigm-shifting inventions, like
Arkwright’s spinning machines. But as many scholars have shown,
there was no simple relationship between mechanical innovation,
social organization, and production scale.
Early mechanized spinning equipment did not require a factory
environment. The first models of Arkwright’s machines were small
and could be powered by hand in a cottage setting. That also was
true of the early jennies and mules. Arkwright apparently promoted
centralized factory production not because of technical
considerations but to protect his ability to collect patent royalties.
Reasoning that if his machines were widely used in domestic
production they inevitably would be copied without his receiving
payments, he only licensed his equipment to be used in units of a
thousand spindles or more, practical only in large, water-powered
mills of the sort he himself constructed (hence his spinning machines
were dubbed “water frames”). Even then, Arkwright tried hard to
keep information about his equipment secret; in 1772, he wrote to
Strutt, “I am Determind for the feuter [future] to Let no persons in to
Look at the wor[k]s.”21
Even as large factories became a familiar sight in the early
nineteenth century, they were not the most common mode of
production in the British textile industry. Nonfactory production, far
from disappearing, continued and even grew in various sectors of
the industry. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, many textile
manufacturers had both factories for spinning and weaving and
networks of domestic handweavers.22 Furthermore, well into the
nineteenth century, the typical British textile mill was small. In 1838,
the average cotton mill had 132 workers, the average woolen mill
just 39. In Lancashire, the most important textile region, in 1841, only
85 of 1,105 mills employed more than 500 workers.23
Factories did not necessarily follow the Lombe/Arkwright model
of a single manufacturer operating an entire, powered plant. Some
factories housed large numbers of workers using hand-powered
equipment. Also, until the 1820s, it was common for mills to rent
space and power to multiple small employers. In 1815, two-thirds of
Manchester cotton firms occupied only part of a factory. One
Stockport mill housed twenty-seven master artisans, who collectively
employed 250 workers, a system not unlike that common in
metalworking factories, where artisans rented individual work spaces
and access to steam power. In the woolen industry, into the mid-
nineteenth century, one historian wrote, “multiple tenancy of mills
and the subletting of room and power were common features.” There
were even some “cooperative” mills used by subscribing small
producers. In the silk industry, when steam-powered looms began
being used in the 1840s and 1850s, the technology was adapted to
domestic production. Steam engines were erected at the end of rows
of cottages occupied by weavers, each with a few looms, with power
transmitted through shafts into the small buildings.24
Myriad arrangements, then, of technology, scale of production,
and business organization could be found for nearly a century after
the first large, water-powered cotton mills were constructed. Only in
the mid-nineteenth century did steam- or water-powered equipment
located in factories owned and operated by single entities become
the dominant model in all the major subdivisions of the British textile
industry. And even then, what by the standards of the day could be
considered very large factories—mills employing over a thousand
employees—were the exception, not the rule, in both urban and rural
settings.25 But the very large mills received a disproportionate
amount of attention, both at the time and since, because they were
seen as the cutting edge of not only industry and technology but also
of social arrangements.26
Why did the owners of these facilities choose to go big, to adopt
the large, centralized factory model? Charles Babbage, the great
English mathematician and inventor, devoted a whole chapter “On
the Causes and Consequences of Large Factories” in his influential
1832 book, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers.
Babbage began with the obvious, that the introduction of machinery
tended to lead to greater production volume, resulting in “the
establishment of large factories.” A leading student of the division of
labor, he contended that efficient production units had to be multiples
of the number of workers needed for the most efficient division of
labor in a particular production process. He also noted various
economies of scale. These included the cost of maintenance and
repair workers and accounting staff, who would be underutilized in
too small a factory. Additionally, centralizing various stages of
production in one building reduced transportation costs and made
one entity responsible for quality control, making lapses less likely.27
But what exactly was large? Babbage elucidated the factors that
set a floor on efficient size, but not how to determine optimal size. In
the cotton industry, only a few workers were needed to operate each
spinning or weaving machine. In practice, during the first decades of
the nineteenth century, it seemed as if there were few production
economies achieved by the giant cotton factories that midsize or
even smaller enterprises did not share. In the late nineteenth
century, the pathbreaking economic theoretician Alfred Marshall
noted that “There are . . . some trades in which the advantages
which a large factory derives from the economy of machinery almost
vanish as soon as a moderate size has been reached. . . . [I]n cotton
spinning, and calico weaving, a comparatively small factory will hold
its own and give constant employment to the best known machines
for every process: so that a large factory is only several parallel
smaller factories under one roof.”28
Writing just after Babbage, Leeds journalist Edward Baines
echoed some of his explanations for the adoption of the factory
model, while adding a few that pointed in a different direction.
Centralization, he argued, allowed greater supervision of every stage
of production by a skilled overseer. It also lessened the risk of waste
and theft of materials. Finally, it facilitated the coordination of various
stages of the production process, preventing “the extreme
inconvenience which would have resulted from the failure of one
class of workmen to perform their part, when several other classes of
workmen were dependent upon them.”29 In sum, centralizing gave
manufacturers the ability to better supervise and coordinate labor,
the work of many individuals who under the putting-out system would
be supervising their own labor (and that of family members) in far-
flung domestic settings.
 Scholars trying to explain the rise of the factory system have
elaborated Baines’s arguments. Until the 1970s, historians of
industrialization stressed technology as the driving force for change.
David Landes began his long chapter on “The Industrial Revolution
in Britain” in his 1969 classic, The Unbound Prometheus, by stating,
“In the eighteenth century, a series of inventions transformed the
manufacture of cotton in England and gave rise to a new mode of
production—the factory system.” New machines opened the
possibilities for increased productivity and profits, sparking a series
of organizational and social shifts, often quite sudden, including the
rise of the large factory and the industrial “revolution” that
accompanied it.
The academic neo-Marxist revival that began just as Landes was
finishing his tome led to a reconsideration of the story, pointing
toward advantages in labor supervision rather than technical
superiority in the rise of the factory system. Concentrated workers
could be made to work longer and harder than dispersed workers,
while creating more consistent products and limiting endemic theft
and embezzlement. Thus the example of early factories that brought
workers under one roof without introducing power machinery or
changes in production methods. But other scholars then challenged
the idea that the reorganization of labor accounted for the savings
gained by factory production, pointing instead to some of the
advantages that Babbage, Baines, and Marshall noted in moving
multiple processes, which in the past had been conducted by
external agents, into a single location and within a single firm:
inventories could be reduced, transportation costs lowered, and
production more closely aligned with shifts in demand.30
Concurrent with these debates over the reasons for the adoption
of the factory model was a growing literature that rejected the idea
that the industrialization entailed a radical break with past practices.
Rather, economic historians argued, a less visible process of
“protoindustrialization” laid the basis for later, more dramatic and
widely noted changes that came to be labeled the Industrial
Revolution. By the early eighteenth century, in England and
elsewhere in Europe, merchants and entrepreneurs were organizing
increasingly large networks of home-based producers, selling to
broadening markets, and accumulating capital. In the process,
urban-based manufacturing migrated to the countryside, where
excess and off-season agricultural workers provided a ready labor
source. Thus large-scale, rural-based manufacturing already had
emerged before the invention of power-driven machinery and large
mills, making the seemingly revolutionary leap not quite so great.31
Even with the old and new explanations for the rise of the factory
system, it remains unclear why cotton mills so quickly reached a very
large size, in the 1,000- to 1,500-worker range, but thereafter
stopped growing, with new mills tending to be smaller. In the early
days of the factory, the economics of water power may have made
large-sized plants attractive, given the relative scarcity of sites and
the capital investment needed to construct dams and channels to
deliver a steady flow to waterwheels. At New Lanark, the largest mill
complex in Great Britain, workers had to carve out a hundred-yard
rock tunnel to get water to the mill wheels. Steam power provided
greater flexibility. While some steam-powered mills also were large,
perhaps as a way to quickly grab market share, historian V. A. C.
Gatrell suggested that, after the first wave of cotton mill construction,
new entrants saw few economies and greater risks in matching the
size of the pioneer plants, recognizing that managerial constraints
could make larger plants less efficient.32
Perhaps plant size did not simply reflect economic calculus. At a
moment when most wealth in Britain took the form of land ownership
or government bonds, large factories provided a way to establish
social status. Arkwright built a castle, Willersley, near his Cromford
mills, having bought most of the surrounding land. The ex-barber
was soon acting as a paternal grandee, building a chapel and school
(with compulsory attendance) for the children who made up much of
his workforce and sponsoring festivals for his workers. In an
extravagant gesture that symbolized the social elevation made
possible by his inventions and mills, Arkwright lent the Duchess of
Devonshire five thousand pounds to cover her gambling debts. His
son, while continuing to operate the family mills, invested heavily in
land and government bonds and provided mortgages to the gentry
and even the nobility, becoming the richest commoner in Britain. The
Strutt family, though better established than Arkwright, followed a
similar trajectory. Frances Trollope portrayed the use of a large
factory to transform social status in her 1840 novel, The Life and
Adventures of Michael Armstrong the Factory Boy, with Sir Matthew
Dowley building a mansion on an estate from which the “grim-looking
chimney cones” of his factory could be seen.33 As it would do over
and over again, the giant factory brought into existence not only a
new mode of production but also a new class of wealthy industrialists
who sought to join the ruling elite.

Creating the Factory World

Cotton mills were on an entirely different scale than the small
commercial and residential buildings in the river valleys and towns
where they first appeared. England had big buildings, buildings
bigger than the biggest new cotton mills. The great cathedrals were
much larger. And in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, new
types of large urban buildings sprung up: hospitals, barracks,
citadels, prisons, colleges, warehouses, and dockyards. But
cathedrals and other big buildings had interior spaces organized for
very different activities than manufacturing.34 To accommodate
large-scale production, power-driven machinery, and masses of
workers, new architectural designs and improved building techniques
and materials were needed. Innovations to meet the specific needs
of the cotton industry soon spread beyond it, shaping the built
environment in England and elsewhere for the next two centuries.
Arkwright apparently modelled his first Cromford mill on the
Lombes’, also five stories high. Its “long, narrow proportions, height,
range of windows . . . and large areas of relatively unbroken interior
space,” wrote historian R. S. Fitton, “became the basic design in
industrial architecture for the remainder of the eighteenth and
through the nineteenth centuries.” Arkwright’s second mill at
Cromford was seven stories high and 120 feet long, and a third mill
he erected nearby was 150 feet long and topped by a cupola.35
Arkwright used timber post and beam construction for his mill
interiors, leaving them vulnerable to the ever-present danger of fire,
with so much flammable thread and cloth lying around and cotton
dust in the air. In the early 1790s, William Strutt (Jedidiah’s son)
erected a mill with cast-iron columns, ironclad wood beams, and
brick-arch floor supports to reduce the fire danger. Soon after,
Charles Bage, a friend of Strutt, designed a five-story flax mill that
was the world’s first completely iron-framed building, forerunner of all
the iron- and steel-structured buildings that were to come, including
the skyscrapers that steel framing made possible. Improvements to
iron beams quickly followed; replacing wood timbers with iron not
only reduced the danger of fire but increased the distances which
could be spanned, allowing wider floors to accommodate the large,
self-acting spinning mules that were introduced in the 1820s. To heat
their multistory mills (which reduced thread breakage), Arkwright and
the Strutts followed the example of the Lombe mill, designing
complex systems to circulate warm air.36
Power looms, which became increasingly common in the second
and third decades of the nineteenth century, did not easily fit into
existing mills, because their operation created such strong vibrations
that they could not safely be situated above the ground floor.
Instead, it became the common practice to build single-story
weaving sheds, often abutting spinning mills or in their yards. To light
these extensive structures, their roofs had rows of pitched ridges,
with windows on one side of each ridge to bring in indirect sunlight.
The “sawtooth roof” soon topped all sorts of industrial buildings and
can still be seen on both sides of the Atlantic.37
In early textile factories, complex arrangements of shafts and
gears distributed power from waterwheels to individual machines.
Water power was cheap and efficient, as long as there was a steady
flow of water. That meant that mills had to be sited on rivers with
substantial, steady flows, like the Derwent. Even then, sometimes
there was not enough water, leading some mill owners, including
Arkwright, to experiment with using steam engines—recently
perfected to drain mines—to lift water into reservoirs, which could
steadily supply water to a waterwheel.
The thin supply of labor in the often isolated areas with good mill
sites presented a bigger problem. (Arkwright chose Cromford for his
mills in part because it was near a lead mine, hoping to hire miners’
wives and children.)38 Using steam power to directly drive spinning
and weaving equipment, though more expensive, allowed mills to be
built in urban areas, giving access to larger labor pools and obviating
the need of mill owners to supply housing.
Technically, only minor modifications were needed to adapt mill
design from water to steam power, but the change had huge effects.
Steam engines required coal-fired boilers, leading to a vast
expansion of the coal industry, which became another driving force
of the Industrial Revolution. Steam-powered mills contributed
mightily to environmental degradation, both from coal mining and the
volumes of soot and black smoke emitted from their boilers. In Hard
Times, Dickens described the “rattling” and “trembling” of factory
steam engines, pistons going up and down “like the head of an
elephant in a state of melancholy madness,” and boilers spewing out
“monstrous serpents of smoke.” Black smoke and polluted air came
to emblemize Manchester and other urban centers of textile
production and the Industrial Revolution itself.39
Another innovation, first seen in cotton mills, was the elevator, a
clever solution to the challenge of rapidly moving people and
material in and out of multistory buildings. Primitive water-powered
hoists were installed in several Strutt mills around the turn of the
nineteenth century. A large 1834 Stockport mill, designed by William
Fairbairn, included a steam-powered elevator in each wing, a device
so new that a contemporary description had no language for it,
calling the shafts “upright tunnels.”
Fairbairn was a key figure in the diffusion of design innovations.
His company could provide a complete, fully equipped factory to
specification; “The capitalist has merely to state the extent of his
resources, the nature of his manufacture, its intended site, and
facilities of position in reference to water or coal, when he will be
furnished with designs, estimates, and offers.” Fairbairn’s firm built
plants around the world, including a wool factory near Istanbul for the
Sultan of Turkey and a giant spinning and weaving complex in
Bombay.40
Nothing better captured the sense of invention in the textile
districts of Britain than the “Round Mill” built at the Strutts’ factory
complex in Belper. The three-story, circular stone building, divided
into eight segments, apparently derived from Samuel and Jeremy
Bentham’s panopticon. In its center stood an inspection station from
which a supervisor could observe activity in the entire building,
realizing the ideal of constant surveillance the Benthams
championed. The Strutts may have adopted the Benthams’ design to
minimize the risk from fire, as the central overlooker could shut off
any of the building segments by closing doors, isolating the flames
and protecting the rest of the structure.41 Though the Round Mill
found few direct imitators, the idea of continual surveillance would
become ever more part of the factory regime, never more so than in
our own times.
Change rippled outward from the large factory, beyond its own
walls. Mill owners had to develop physical, social, and psychological
infrastructure to make factory production possible. Simply getting
people and material to and from rural mills required extraordinary
effort. When Arkwright arrived at Cromford, the nearest road suitable
for wheeled vehicles lay miles away; small bales of raw cotton had to
be carried over the moors by packhorses until 1820, when mill
owners built a new road alongside the Derwent. Even with workers
walking as much as four or five miles to work each day, not enough
people lived near rural mills to staff them fully. So many early mill
owners built housing for their workers, sometimes even what
amounted to whole new villages, with churches, schools, inns, and
markets.42
Feeding so many people clustered near isolated mills also
presented a challenge. Some manufacturers set up their own farms
to supply their workers with foodstuffs. Very commonly workers
received only a small part of their wages in cash with the rest in the
form of rent payment for company-owned houses and “truck,” goods
or credit at company stores (“tommy shops”) that sold food, coal, and
other supplies, often above market prices and of low quality, a
source of smoldering resentment among workers.43
Truck helped solve another problem mill owners faced, a
shortage of currency with which to pay their employees. Small-
denomination coins did not circulate in sufficient quantities to meet
big payrolls, which were extremely unusual before the mills.
Hoarding exacerbated the problem.Mill owners had to improvise,
paying workers with tokens or foreign currency overstamped with
new denominations or issuing their own notes, which they hoped
local merchants would accept.44
Difficult as these challenges were, they paled before the problem
of discipline. For Andrew Ure, a leading booster of the emerging
factory system, the greatest hurdle mill operators faced was “training
human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to
identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex
automation.” Of course, hand-powered, domestic manufacturing—
like all work—required discipline, too, but it was a different kind of
discipline, with the pace of work keyed to the completion of particular
tasks. Much as in farming, intense activity alternated with slack
times. Domestic producers interspersed carding, spinning, and
weaving with household chores, farming, other kinds of labor, and
leisure. Famously, in many trades workers used “Saint Monday” (and
sometimes “Saint Tuesday,” too) to take care of personal business,
recover from hangovers or bring on new ones, socialize, or simply
laze about, putting in few hours of productive labor. Recalling the
days of hand spinning, one witness testified before an 1819
parliamentary commission that “it was generally the practice to drink
the first day or two of the week and attempt to make it up by working
very long hours towards the close of the week.”
The sometimes romanticized autonomy of domestic labor
extended only to heads of households, generally men. Wives,
children, apprentices, and employed journeymen did not have the
same control over their time; they were subject to external discipline
regulating not only their periods and pace of work but all aspects of
the production process. Discipline was familial, embedded in their
general subservience to the head of their household. It could be
harsh but it still was task-oriented, with production for the market
intermixed with production for the home, domestic chores, and, if
they were lucky, recreation.
By contrast, factory production required coordinated activity by
dozens or hundreds of workers, who were expected to start and stop
work at the same time, day after day. Companies developed
elaborate sets of rules and systems of fines and punishments for
their violation. Overseers monitored when workers came and went
and what they did inside the mill. Some workers had their activities
regulated by the demands of the machines they worked on, having
to do a particular task at a particular point in the cyclical operation of
the apparatus. Ure pooh-poohed the strain of such machine-paced
work; the “piecers” in fine spinning, children charged with retying
broken threads, had “at least three-fourths” of each minute off,
making it, in his view, an easy job. Friedrich Engels, writing a decade
later, saw it differently: “To tend machinery—for example, to be
continually tying broken threads—is an activity demanding the full
attention of the workers. It is, however, at the same time a type of
work which does not allow his mind to be occupied with anything
else. . . . [It] gives the operative no opportunity of physical exercise
or muscular activity. . . . It is nothing less than torture of the severest
kind . . . in the service of a machine which never stops.” “In
handicrafts and manufacture,” Marx wrote in Capital, “the workman
makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him.”45
If, as David Landes put it, “The factory was a new kind of prison;
the clock a new kind of jailer,” that in turn created another problem,
how to be punctual in a world in which workers did not own clocks. In
the past, workers never needed to be punctual or to key their work to
particular moments of time. To enforce the new time discipline, some
factories rang morning bells to awaken their workers. In urban
districts, workers hired a “knocker-up” who used a long pole to knock
on their upstairs window each morning to make sure they arose in
time for work. Eventually, the knocker-up became a stock figure on
Lancashire music-hall stages, adding to the original meaning of the
term a second one that it retains to this day.46

Factory Tourism
Although recent scholarship has debunked the idea that the factory
system arose from the genius of a few inventors and entrepreneurs
who changed everything, drawing a subtler picture of economic and
social changes that began long before the Industrial Revolution took
off, the Industrial Revolution nonetheless was a revolution, and seen
as such at the time. Contemporary observers had no doubt that the
cotton mill and the changes it wrought represented a technical,
economic, and social break from the past. From the late eighteenth
century on, factories, factory villages, and manufacturing cities drew
tourists, journalists, and philanthropists from continental Europe and
North America as well as Great Britain itself.47 Part of the attraction
was their novelty. W. Cooke Taylor, the son of an Irish manufacturer
who toured the industrial districts of Lancaster in the early 1840s,
wrote that “The steam-engine had no precedent, the spinning-jenny
is without ancestry, the mule and the power-loom entered on no
prepared heritage: they sprung into sudden existence like Minerva
from the brain of Jupiter.”48
The scale and setting of mill buildings, whether in rural river
valleys or crowded industrial cities, startled visitors. British poet
laureate Robert Southey wrote that the approach to the New Lanark
mills reminded him “of the descent upon the baths of Monchique,”
built by the Romans in southern Portugal. Like many other
observers, Southey searched for precedents to understand the
novelty he confronted. The view, he wrote, surprised him because
there was “too a regular appearance” of the buildings, which “at a
distance might be mistaken for convents, if in a Catholic country.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited Manchester in 1835, likened mills
to “huge palaces,” a common comparison in a world with few secular
structures of such scale. One German visitor to northern England
wrote that he “might have arrived in Egypt since so many factory
chimneys . . . stretch upwards towards the sky like great obelisks.”
“Just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and
things, in creating something that has never yet existed,” Marx wrote
three decades after Southey visited New Lanark, “precisely in such
period of revolutionary crisis,” people “anxiously conjure up the
spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names,
battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world
history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.”49
Even more than mill buildings themselves, the machinery they
contained mesmerized visitors. In Michael Armstrong, Trollope wrote
of visitors being given a mill tour: “It is the vast, the beautiful, the
elaborate machinery by which they were surrounded that called forth
all their attention, and all their wonder. The uniform ceaseless
movement, sublime in its sturdy strength and unrelented activity,
drew every eye, and rapt the observer’s mind in boundless
admiration of the marvelous power of science!” Trollope bemoaned
the visitors’ inattention to the child laborers nearby: “Strangers do not
visit factories to look at them; it is the triumphant perfection of British
mechanism which they come to see.” French socialist and feminist
Flora Tristan wrote of a steam engine she saw in England: “In the
presence of the monster, you have eyes and ears for nothing else.”50
The modernity of the mills dazzled observers. To lengthen hours
of operation, in the early nineteenth century mill owners began
installing gaslights, a spectacle that drew visitors from near and far.
In Hard Times, Dickens described morning in “Coketown” as “The
Fairy palaces burst into illumination.” The size of the mills and
accompanying warehouses even made possible new types of
entertainment. Sam Scott drew an immense Manchester crowd in
1837 when he leapt off the roof of a five-story warehouse into the
River Irwell, surviving to repeat the stunt in Bolton. Another
daredevil, James Duncan Wright, attracted even larger crowds in the
1850s with his act of using a pulley to slide down ropes attached to
mill chimneys, which he claimed made him the fastest man alive.51

Debating the Factory System

For all the wonder of the buildings and the machines, though, it was
the broader social innovation—what came to be called the “factory
system”—on which discussion, debate, and conflict centered during
the first half of the nineteenth century. An imprecise term, the
“factory system” generally referred to the whole new mode of
production that came with the factory, including the workforce that
had to be assembled, the conditions of labor and of life for those
workers, and the impact of the factory on economic and social
arrangements. Cooke Taylor, allied with the new manufacturers,
recognized that because England was “already crowded with
institutions,” the rapid development of mechanized factory production
“dislocated all the existing machinery of society.” “A giant forcing his
way into a densely-wedged crowd,” he wrote, “extends pain and
disturbance to the remotest extremity: the individuals he pushes
aside push others in their turn . . . and thus also the Factory system
causes its presence to be felt in districts where no manufactures are
established: all classes are pressed to make room for the
stranger.”52
For many of its critics, and even some of its supporters, the
exploitation of labor, particularly of child labor, became their focus in
judging the new system. Though underutilized agricultural workers
were a draw for manufacturers, the scale of the factories made
recruiting and retaining a workforce a challenge, especially in the
countryside. Many local men proved reluctant to take mill jobs,
unwilling to submit to the unaccustomed close supervision and
discipline that came with them. In any case, mill owners did not want
adult men for most positions, preferring women and children whom
they could pay less and who did not have the sense of pride and
craft that came from apprenticeship training. Mechanical power
eliminated the need for most heavy labor, especially in spinning.
Instead, the new yarn-making equipment largely required constant
monitoring to look for broken threads, full bobbins, and other
problems that needed to be quickly addressed, work that
necessitated nimble fingers and alert minds but not strength. So mill
owners recruited a workforce that was young and primarily female. In
1835 Ure estimated that a third of cotton mill workers in England
were under twenty-one; a half in Scotland.53 Many were very young;
at Cromford, some employees were only seven years old (though
the firm preferred to hire workers starting between ages ten and
twelve). In some spinning mills, virtually the only adults present were
overseers. Today, in the United States, factories are associated with
masculinity, but in their early days they were spaces largely occupied
by women and children.54
Conditions for mill workers were harsh. Entering a factory for the
first time could be a terrifying experience: the noise and motion of
the machinery; the stifling air, full of cotton dust, in many mills kept
oppressively warm to reduce breakage; the pervasive stench from
the whale oil and animal grease used to lubricate the machinery
(before petroleum products were available) and from the sweat of
hundreds of laboring people; the pale countenances and sickly
bodies of the workers; the fierce demeanor of the overseers, some of
whom carried belts or whips to enforce their discipline. In weaving
rooms, the deafening clatter of scores of looms, each with a shuttle
being batted back and forth some sixty times a minute, made it
impossible for workers to hear one another.

Figure 1.3 Carding, Drawing, and Roving, a somewhat idealized 1835 illustration
of English factory life.

In the early decades, mill owners generally ran their factories day
and night, with two twelve- or thirteen-hour shifts (including an hour
break for dinner), following the schedule pioneered by the Derby Silk
Mill. Children worked both shifts. With Sunday the only day off,
workweeks of over seventy hours were normal. To keep exhausted
children awake and working, supervisors and adult workers hit them
with straps, hands, and even wooden poles (though there was much
debate about how common such abuse was).55
 Perhaps not surprisingly, early mill owners often found
themselves unable to fully staff their mills with willing workers. So
some turned to unwilling workers. Workhouses—the prisonlike
residences of last resort for orphans and the destitute—were tapped
for child workers, whom parish officials apprenticed to mill owners,
giving them full legal authority over their charges and making it a
criminal act for the children to run away. In Yorkshire, it was not
uncommon for 70 percent or more of a mill’s workforce to be parish
apprentices. At New Lanark, before Robert Owen took over
management, some of the apprentices were as young as five years
old. Ordinary apprentices, signed up by their parents, also could be
jailed for running away. So could workers who signed fixed-term
contracts if they quit before their termination date. Further, an 1823
law made any worker who left his or her job without notice liable to
three months imprisonment. Thus the power of the state helped
assemble and keep in place a workforce for the new factory system.
What’s more, it was not uncommon for the state and an employer to
effectively be one and the same, since mill owners sometimes
served as magistrates who judged cases of desertion involving their
own workers.56 Legally unfree labor, not only in the growing of cotton
but in the mills themselves, played an essential role in the early
decades of the factory system.
Today, in popular discourse and mainstream ideology, the
Industrial Revolution is often associated with individual liberty and
what is called the free market.57 But in the early years of the factory
system, it was as likely to be dubbed a new form of slavery as a new
form of freedom. Joseph Livesey, a well-known journal publisher and
temperance campaigner, himself the son of a mill owner, wrote of the
apprenticed children he saw in mills during his childhood, “They were
apprenticed to a system to which nothing but West Indian slavery
can bear any analogy.”58 In The Life and Adventures of Michael
Armstrong, Trollope wrote that apprenticed paupers suffered
“miserable lives, in labour and destitution, incomparably more
severe, than any ever produced by negro slavery.” In its structure,
Michael Armstrong is a version of the slave rescue narrative,
recounting the frustrated efforts of the heroine, the rich daughter of a
factory owner, to liberate Armstrong from his villainous
apprenticeship at an isolated factory and his ultimate escape.59
The metaphor of slavery for factory labor no doubt reflected the
intense debate over slavery itself during the early decades of the
nineteenth century, leading up to emancipation in the British Empire
in 1834. Still, it was a measure of how horrifying factory labor was
seen to be that so many observers equated it with chattel slavery.
One self-described “Journeyman Cotton Spinner” wrote of the
terrible heat in spinning rooms, where workers had no breaks: “The
negro slave in the West Indies, if he works under a scorching sun,
has probably a little breeze of air sometimes to fan him; he has a
space of ground, and time allowed to cultivate it. The English spinner
slave has not enjoyment of the open atmosphere and breezes of
heaven.” Engels, writing of English textile workers just a few years
after Trollope, believed “Their slavery is more abject than that of the
negroes in America because they are more strictly supervised.” He
also bemoaned that, as in slavery, the wives and daughters of
workers were forced to gratify the “base desires” of manufacturers.
Elsewhere, Engels compared workers under the factory system to
“the Saxon serf under the whip of the Norman baron.” Similarly, in
Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Sybil, or the Two Nations, one character
pronounces that “There are great bodies of the working classes of
this country nearer the condition of brutes than they have been at
any time since the Conquest.” Richard Oastler entitled his 1830 letter
in the Leeds Mercury, which launched the Ten Hours Movement to
reduce factory working hours, “Yorkshire Slavery.”60
For Robert Southey, the association of slavery with the factory
system did not stem from particular abuses but from the nature of
the system itself. Calling the New Lanark mills under Owen, who
even before his radical turn was known for his humane treatment of
workers, “perfect of their kind,” he nonetheless felt that “Owen in
reality deceives himself. He is part-owner and sole Director of a large
establishment, differing more in accidents than in essence from a
plantation: the persons under him happen to be white, and are at
liberty by law to quit his service, but while they remain in it they are
as much under his absolute management as so many negro-slaves.”
The factory system, Southey believed, even at its best, tended “to
destroy individuality of character and domesticity.” At its worst it was
outright devilish; after visiting a Manchester cotton factory, he wrote
“that if Dante had peopled one of his hells with children, here was a
scene worthy to have supplied him with new images of torment.”61
Some critics of the factory system—and some defenders of
slavery—questioned the very distinction between free labor and
slavery, given the circumstances in which mill workers lived. British
laborers were “slaves of necessity,” wrote Samuel Martin in 1773,
unable to “mitigate their labours” or “increase their wages.” Owen
asked of factory operatives, “Are they, in anything but appearance,
really free labourers? . . . What alternative have they or what
freedom is there in this case, but the liberty of starving?”62 Here lay a
critique that went to the very heart of the spread of market relations,
part and parcel of the Industrial Revolution.
Besides the ill-treatment of labor, environmental despoilment
figured heavily in critiques of the factory system. Over and over
again, accounts of Manchester and other industrial centers noted the
darkness and foul air. Scottish geologist Hugh Miller wrote of
Manchester in 1845: “One receives one’s first intimation of its
existence from the lurid gloom of the atmosphere that overhangs it.”
Similarly, Cooke Taylor wrote, “I well remember the effect produced
on me . . . when I looked upon the town . . . and saw the forest of
chimneys pouring forth volumes of steam and smoke, forming an
inky canopy which seemed to embrace and involve the entire place.”
The air was so polluted, Taylor observed, that everyone who could
live outside Manchester proper did so.63 Major General Sir Charles
James Napier, appointed in 1839 to command the northern district of
England, which included Manchester, described the city as “the
entrance to hell realized,” with its rich and poor, immorality, and
pervasive pollution; the whole city, was “a chimney.”64
Water pollution was as severe as air pollution. Hugh Miller
recounted the befouling of the River Irwell from cloth dyes, sewage,
and other waste, so it resembled “considerably less a river than a
flood of liquid manure, in which all life dies.”65 Maybe the most
impressive aspect of Sam Scott’s leap was not the five-story drop
but his surviving the toxic brew into which he plunged.
 The environmental damage of cotton manufacturing extended far
beyond mill sites themselves. Cotton growing required deforestation
and it rapidly depleted soil, one reason why in the United States it
migrated (along with its slave labor force) from the eastern seaboard
to the Mississippi Valley. Coal mining polluted rivers and scarred the
landscape.66

Figure 1.4 Cotton Factories, Union Street, Manchester, an 1835 engraving

showing the proliferation of factories in England and resulting pollution.

Perhaps the most famous critique of the factory system—at least

the most remembered in our era—captured its despoilment of nature
in just a few words, William Blake’s decrying of the “dark Satanic
Mills” that blotted England’s “mountains green” and “pleasant
pastures,” in an 1804 verse that formed part of the preface to his
long visionary poem Milton. Set to music in 1916 under the title
“Jerusalem,” Blake’s words today are sung throughout the English-
speaking world, in churches and soccer stadiums alike. At least in
part, Blake seemed to be reacting directly to the smoke-blackened
sky that was becoming a feature of urban English life. Near his home
in London, a large, steam-powered grinding mill operated until
consumed by fire in 1791 (by some reports as a result of arson by
angry workers). Yet for Blake, it was not just smoke that made mills
“Satanic.” For the great mystical poet, the mill symbolized a spiritual
descent from a preindustrial England on which God had smiled, a
metaphor for a whole way of life Blake was determined to overcome
in order to build a new Jerusalem “In England’s green & pleasant
Land.”67
Urban poverty was often portrayed as another form of
despoilment, another fall from grace. The mechanization of the
cotton industry brought an enormous increase in the population of
the districts in which factories were located. The population of
Lancashire almost doubled, from 163,310 in 1801 to 313,957 in
1851. “What was once an obscure, poorly-cultivated bog,” Engels
wrote in 1845, “is now a thickly-populated industrial district.” Factory
towns, like Manchester, Glasgow, Bolton, and Rochdale,
“experienced a mushroom growth.” Manchester and adjacent Salford
more than tripled in population, from 95,000 in 1800 to more than
310,000 in 1841. In Lancashire alone, in 1830 there were more than
100,000 cotton mill workers.68 Rural migrants from elsewhere in
England made up much of the new industrial workforce, as did
newcomers from Scotland and Ireland, where rural poverty pushed
thousands upon thousands to emigrate.69
The densely packed working-class neighborhoods that sprung up
near mills were in their own way as novel and disturbing as the mills
themselves. The congregation of so many workers in one place was
unprecedented. Taylor wrote “The most striking phenomenon of the
Factory system is, the amount of population which it has suddenly
accumulated on certain points.” “[H]ad our ancestors witnessed the
assemblage of such a multitude as is poured forth every evening
from the mills of Union Street [in Manchester], magistrates would
have assembled, special constables would have been sworn, the riot
act read, the military called out, and most probably some fatal
collision would have taken place.” What was so frightening to Taylor
were not just the sheer numbers but the fact that the factory workers
were new creatures, an unknown and uncontrolled breed, “new in its
habits of thought and action, which have been formed by the
circumstances of its condition, with little instruction and less
guidance, from external sources.”70
Writing at almost the same time, Engels, in The Condition of the
Working Class in England, provided some of the most graphic
descriptions we have of the miserable living conditions of English
factory workers: their destitution, the meagerness and filth of their
dwellings, their tattered clothing, the awful smell of their homes and
the streets they lived on. (Manchester’s assistant poor-law
commissioner described streets “so covered with refuse and
excrementitious matter as to be almost impassable from depth of
mud, and intolerable from stench.”) Like Blake, Engels compared life
under the factory system to an idealized vision of preindustrial life,
the “idyllic” world of cottage textile workers, who “vegetated happily,”
self-sufficient if outside the realm of intellectual or political
consciousness. For Engels, it was not just the poverty of the new
working class that appalled him, but also the work itself, the
machine-paced production, the “iron discipline” demanded by
overseers, the “endless boredom.” “No worse fate can befall a man
than to have to work every day from morning to night against his will
at a job he abhors.”71
In the end, though, for Engels, like Taylor, the most significant
aspect of the concentration of large numbers of workers in mills and
factory neighborhoods was the creation of a new social formation, a
“proletariat . . . called into existence by the introduction of
machinery.” Urbanization, wrote Engels, “helps weld the proletariat
into a compact group with its own way of life and thought and its own
outlook on society.” Historian E. P. Thompson summed up prevailing
sentiment in nineteenth-century England: “However different their
judgments of value, conservative, radical, and socialist observers
suggested the same equation: steam power and the cotton-mill=new
working class.” And that class, for Engels and many others, meant
the coming of a new stage of history.72
Of course, the factory system had its defenders, in the national
debate it provoked and more specifically around efforts, beginning at
the start of the nineteenth century, to protect child and female
workers, primarily by limiting their hours of work.73 A few factory
defenders claimed there were no problems, or at least not any that
were the responsibility of mill owners. Andrew Ure—who Marx
dubbed “the Pindar of the automatic factory”—argued that the
beating of children in woolen factories working on “slubbing
machines” (which prepared yarn for spinning) was strictly the fault of
the adult “slubbers.” Slubbing machines were hand powered,
allowing their operators, Ure claimed, to slack off, leading them to
beat their assistants in their efforts to catch up. Powered equipment,
by setting the pace of labor, would eliminate the abuse of children.
After acknowledging such problems also existed in cotton spinning
mills using steam or water power, Ure retreated to simple denial,
writing that in his visits to factories in Manchester and surrounding
districts he “never saw a single instance of corporal chastisement
inflicted on a child, nor indeed did I ever see children in ill-
humour. . . . The work of these lively elves seemed to resemble a
sport, in which habit gave them a pleasing dexterity.”74
W. Cooke Taylor acknowledged poverty among mill workers and
granted “juvenile labour to be a grievance.” He blamed neither the
factory system nor the mill owners but depressed economic
conditions stemming from Britain’s extended conflict with France and
restrictions on trade, a view echoed by Charlotte Brontë in her novel
Shirley (set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars). For Taylor, there
was one thing worse than juvenile labor, “juvenile starvation.” “I
would rather see boys and girls earning the means of support in the
mill than starving by the roadside, shivering on the pavement, or
even conveyed in an omnibus to Bridewell.” As a propagandist
against the Corn Laws, which put a tariff on imported grain, for Taylor
the solution to the ills of the factory lay in free trade, which would
expand markets abroad and cheapen food at home.75 Thomas
Carlyle shared Taylor’s view that the ills of the factory system were
not intrinsic to it: “Cotton-spinning is the clothing of the naked in its
results; the triumph of man over matter in its means. Soot and
despair are not the essence of it; they are divisible from it.” This faith,
that the Promethean triumph of the factory fundamentally represents
human progress and can be cleansed of its abuses, has remained a
core liberal belief ever since.76
While reformers defended the factory system in spite of its faults,
others opposed all efforts to regulate mills. In the debate over an
1833 bill to limit the working hours of mill children, the Chancellor of
the Exchequer, Lord Althrop, feared that new rules would diminish
Britain’s competitiveness and reduce international demand for British
textiles, hurting those meant to be protected. Some factory
defenders opposed regulation on the grounds that property rights
were absolute.77
A potentially powerful argument in the defense of the factory
system—that if conditions were bad, they were no worse than
elsewhere—gained little purchase, even though in many respects it
was true. Cooke Taylor took a jab at the rural gentry—supporters of
the Corn Laws—in claiming that conditions for agricultural workers
were worse than for factory workers. Ure argued that the lot of
handcraft workers was worse than “those much-lamented labourers
who tend the power-driven machines of a factory,” while children
working in coal mines were worse off than in textile factories. Engels
did not fundamentally disagree. His study of the condition of the
English working class documented the miserable circumstances of
miners, domestic workers, pottery workers, and agricultural workers,
as well as mill workers. In his view, the “most oppressed workers”
were not factory employees but “those who have to compete against
a new machine which is in the process of replacing hand labor.”78
Historian John Gray, in a study of the debate over factory
regulation, showed how the mills came to symbolize the broad
changes caused by industrialization and became the focus of efforts
to ameliorate the often dreadful condition of workers, especially
women and children. Nonfactory workers—some laboring for less
money under harsher conditions—were all but ignored. The novelty
of the factory system drew attention to the exploitation of its
workforce, while the long-standing exploitation of agricultural
workers, domestic producers, servants (encompassing nearly twice
as many women as in the textile industry), and others went largely
unnoted by politicians, journalists, and writers, who generally had
little interest in the lower classes.79
The Factory Acts passed by Parliament in 1802, 1819, 1825,
1829, and 1831 regulated labor only in cotton mills and only the
labor of children, doing nothing for the vast majority of British
workers.80 They had only very modest effect on actual conditions,
lacking effective enforcement mechanisms. During the debate over
the 1833 act—which did bring substantial changes, ending the
employment of children under nine and limiting the hours and
banning night work for older children—a Royal Commission
endorsed the regulation of factories not because they were
necessarily the site of the most onerous child labor but because
regulation was more feasible in “buildings of peculiar construction,
which cannot be mistaken for private dwellings” and where
timekeeping was subject to “the regularity of military discipline” than
at other worksites. Precisely because textile manufacturing had
become so concentrated in large, well-known mills, it was more
susceptible to regulation and improvement than dispersed
employment. In the voluminous official inquiries and extended
parliamentary debates about textile mill labor, Gray notes, “The
identification of problems requiring intervention was dissociated from
any systematic critique of industrial capitalism, and indeed became
linked to a vision of the well-regulated factory as the site of social
and moral improvement, as well as the symbol of economic
progress.” Thus the large factory became the vehicle for not only
visions of ever-greater productivity and material bounty but also for
the notion that a more humane version of the economic system soon
to be dubbed capitalism was possible.81
Not everyone agreed. Engels said of the 1833 law, “By this Act
the brutal greed of the middle classes has been hypocritically
camouflaged by a mask of decency.” Admitting that the law checked
the “worst excesses of the manufacturers,” he pointed to the
ineffectiveness of some of its provision, like the requirement for two
hours daily schooling for child mill workers, which Engels charged
owners met by hiring unqualified retired workers as teachers. More
profoundly, Engels, like Marx, believed that the exploitation of labor
was an inherent characteristic of capitalism, of which the textile mills
were the leading edge. For Marx and Engels, misery was not
divisible from the factory system; for workers, it was its very
essence.82
Marx’s opus, Capital, is an often abstract analysis of the entire
system of the creation, circulation, and reproduction of capital and
attendant social processes. Today, to the extent it is studied, it
usually is as a universal description and critique of capitalism as an
economic system. Yet Capital is a book deeply rooted in a specific
time and place, in an England when the textile industry reigned
supreme. Cotton is everywhere in Capital: in Marx’s explanation of
key ideas, such as surplus value; in his account of broad historical
developments, such as the transition from manufacture in the old
sense of hand production to power-driven machine production; in his
examination of a new set of class relations; and in his outrage at the
exploitation of workers. The centrality Marx gave to the struggle over
the working day in Capital, “a struggle between collective capital, i.e.,
the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class,”
which he saw as the main battleground over the degree of
exploitation of workers, mirrors the centrality of the hours issue in the
national debate over regulating English cotton mills, which both Marx
and Engels wrote about in great detail.83
Time after time, when in Capital Marx uses an example to
illustrate his theories, he turns to the cotton mill. In a typical passage,
in which he is explicating his method to calculate the “rate of surplus-
value,” Marx tries to explain to his readers “the novel principles
underlying it” with examples: “First we will take the case of a
spinning mill containing 10,000 mule spindles, spinning No. 32 yarn
from American cotton, and producing 1 lb. of yarn weekly per
spindle. We assume the waste to be 6%; under these circumstances
10,600 lbs. of cotton are consumed weekly, of which 600 lbs. go to
waste. The price of the cotton in April, 1871, was 7 3/4 d. per. lb.; the
raw material therefore costs in round numbers £342. The 10,000
spindles, including preparation-machinery, and motive power, cost,
we will assume, £1 per spindle . . .” and on and on he goes for
another half page of detailed calculations. There is nothing abstract
here; Marx is talking about the ins and outs of the daily business of
making cotton yarn, drawing much of his information from Engels,
who spent nearly twenty years helping manage a Manchester cotton
mill his family partly owned.84 Thus, the cotton mill figured very large
in the emergence of industrial capitalism and in the thinking of its
most important critics, who gave a privileged place in their
understanding of the capitalist system to a particular form of
production and a particular group of workers who were seen as
representing the future shape of society, even though at the time
they still constituted a modest fraction of economic activity and of the
working class.

Worker Protest
Journalists, critics, government investigating committees, novelists,
even poets, almost all from the middle or upper classes, poured out
a flood of words about the factory system during the first half of the
nineteenth century. By contrast, we have only a tiny corpus of
appraisals from workers themselves, most of whom, if not illiterate,
had little occasion or capacity to record their thoughts in forms that
would receive much attention or survive through the years.85 To the
extent we can reconstruct the attitude of workers toward the factory
system, we have to do so largely by looking at their actions, not their
words.
One relevant word, though, was brought into the English
language by workers, “Luddite.” Today “Luddite” is widely used as a
catchword for technophobes, opponents of machine-based
advancement, stripped from its original context.86 The word came
from the bands of workers and their supporters who in 1811 and
1812 and again from 1814 to 1817 attacked textile machinery, mills,
and mill owners in the Midlands and in northern England, claiming
they were acting under the command of General (or sometimes
Captain or King) Ned Ludd.
Britain had a long history of machine-breaking as a form of
protest and pressure, which predated the Luddites and continued
after them. In the textile industry alone, incidents of machine
wrecking occurred as early as 1675, with an attack on silk-weaving
machines, and continued through the 1820s with periodic assaults
on cotton equipment. Both Hargreaves and Arkwright had early
installations of their machines destroyed by mobs, leading Arkwright
to design his Cromford complex to be easily defended, with building
placements, walls, and gates restricting access.87 But the Luddites
represented a more extensive, threatening, and enthralling episode
of machine breaking than anything before or after.
Luddite attacks generally were preceded by letters threatening
the destruction of machines and buildings and even murder unless
employers met specified demands. An 1811 letter, apparently sent to
a hosier named Edward Hollingsworth, read (as transcribed from the
damaged original) “Sir if you do not pull don the Frames or stop pay
[in] Goods onely for work or m[ake] Full fason my Company will [vi]sit
yr machines for execution agai[nst] [y]ou. . . ,” signed “Ned Lu[d].”88
The framework knitters, who made stockings, lace, and other
woven goods on looms they sometimes owned but often rented from
merchant-hosiers, were the first group of Luddites to go into action.
To cut labor costs, merchants increased the rent and introduced wide
looms, on which, instead of making a single item, large pieces of
knitted material could be produced and then cut and sewed to make
cheap goods, including stockings. Also, many merchants began
paying in truck rather than cash. Faced with declining income and
what they saw as the debasement of their trade, the frameworkers
rallied under the banner of the mythical General Ludd, targeting wide
frames and merchants who were cutting wages. Over the course of a
year, an estimated one thousand knitting frames in Nottinghamshire,
Leicestershire, and Derbyshire were destroyed. It took the passage
of a law making framebreaking a capital crime to halt the attacks.
The “croppers” in West Riding, Yorkshire, formed a second
battalion in King Ludd’s army. Croppers did the final, highly skilled
finishing work on woven wool, raising the nap and using large,
heavy, hand shears to cut and even the surface. The introduction of
gig mills, to raise the nap, and shearing frames, to trim it, threatened
to eliminate cropping as a skilled, well-paid craft. After trying
unsuccessfully to use lawsuits and parliamentary lobbying to check
the advance of the new machines, the croppers took to armed
attacks on mills housing the machinery, including a successful
assault by some three hundred Luddites on a mill near Leeds and an
armed battle at a mill in Rawfolds that left two Luddites dead (and
provided the plot for Shirley). Soon after, a particularly hated mill
owner was assassinated. To restore order, four thousand troops
were sent to occupy West Riding.89
 In Lancashire, a third eruption of worker violence broke out,
including food riots and assaults on mills using steam-powered
weaving equipment. The mill attacks—including one by a crowd of
over a hundred, marching behind a straw effigy of General Ludd,
which burned down a mill owner’s house before being fired on by a
military unit, killing at least seven protesters—reflected the impact of
mechanization on the hand-loom weavers. Initially, the factory
system led to boom times for handweavers, as spinning machinery
produced a bountiful supply of cheap yarn and a growing demand for
weavers. The hand-loom workforce probably exceeded a half million
between 1820 and 1840, outnumbering all factory textile workers.
But the weavers’ “golden age,” as E. P. Thompson called it, was
short-lived. The entrepreneurs who supplied the weavers with yarn
and bought their products pressed down wages, even before power
mills began providing substantial competition. Once they did, the
downward pressure on wages and living standards became horrific,
as mass impoverishment—sometimes literal starvation—descended
on the weavers and their families. Looking back from not long after
power weaving finally all but eliminated hand work, Marx wrote that
“History discloses no tragedy more horrible than the gradual
extinction of the English hand-loom weavers.” And it was not just in
England that the incorporation of weaving into the factory system
took its toll; governor-general of India William Bentinck reported in
1834–35 “The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains
of India.”90
Luddism, though the focus for much of the debate about
industrialization, for the most part was only indirectly connected,
when connected at all, to the giant factories that had popped up
since the late eighteenth century. Hosiery knitting generally occurred
in modest-sized workshops. Wool finishing likewise generally did not
take place in massive mills. Only the attacks on power looms
occurred on the terrain of the factory behemoth.
Luddites generally were more concerned with particular
grievances against particular employers than with abstract
opposition to technology. Some machine wrecking was part of a
tradition of what Eric Hobsbawm called “collective bargaining by riot,”
using the destruction of property to pressure employers to raise
wages and make other concessions. Many of the Luddites
themselves operated machinery, albeit hand-powered, and most
depended on factory-produced yarn for their livelihoods.91
Rather than as an expression of opposition to machinery or the
mill system, Luddism is better understood as one of many forms of
protest against the miseries workers—in factories, competing with
them, and not engaged with them at all—experienced during the
helter-skelter industrialization of the first half of the nineteenth
century. Worker action took the forms that it did in part because other
forms of collective activity were blocked. The concentration of
workers in factories and urban neighborhoods created a critical mass
for political discussion and labor organization, the context in which
“The working-class made itself,” as Thompson famously wrote.92 But
the outlets for action were limited.
Workers were shut out of direct participation in governance
through most of the nineteenth century, with women and working-
class men excluded from voting during the decades when the factory
emerged as a key social institution. Workers did seek redress from
Parliament, proposing laws, gathering signatures on petitions,
testifying at commission hearings, and sending delegations to lobby
members, but generally with scant results. The demand of the
Chartists, who led massive popular mobilizations in the 1830s and
1840s, for universal male suffrage and the democratization of
Parliament, fell on deaf ears.93
The government also severely limited the ability of workers to join
together to pressure employers to improve wages and conditions. In
reaction to the late eighteenth-century growth of proto-trade unions
(among nonfactory workers) and the fear among British rulers,
brought on by the French Revolution, of any type of radicalism or
popular action, Parliament passed a series of laws—most
importantly the 1800 Combination Act—against worker organization.
Between 1792 and 1815, the government built 155 military barracks
in industrial areas.94
In spite of legal prohibitions, workers formed open and secret
organizations, held strikes, and joined in marches and mass
demonstrations. The 1810s saw the first substantial walkouts by
factory workers, some involving thousands of cotton spinners. The
government reaction was heavy-handed, arresting, imprisoning, and
transporting to the colonies leading activists and, in the case of some
Luddites, hanging them. When in 1819 some sixty thousand
protestors gathered in Manchester to demand democratic reforms, a
military unit made up of local manufacturers, merchants, and
storeowners charged the peaceful crowd, killing eleven people and
leaving hundreds wounded in the so-called Peterloo Massacre. The
government response was to pass still more repressive legislation,
among other things banning meetings with more than fifty people
present.
The 1820s brought yet more strikes, machine breaking, and
reform campaigns, followed in the 1830s by a massive push to win
legislation limiting factory working hours. In 1842 came a widespread
strike among mill workers and miners, called the Plug Riots because
strikers removed the plugs from steam engines, rendering them
inoperable. By the 1850s, larger and more stable (though still mostly
local) unions began to form among textile workers. Some launched
large, prolonged, though generally unsuccessful strikes. Over a half
century after the first factory giants had been erected, in spite of
repeated, episodically large-scale efforts, the workers within them
still lacked any effective political or organizational method for
improving their lot or shaping the society in which they lived.95
Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Great Britain often
has been portrayed as a freer society than continental Europe. Some
scholars, like Landes, suggest that this was one reason why the
Industrial Revolution took off there first.96 But for workers, especially
factory workers, Britain was far from a free society. Factories grew
up under an autocratic political regime, at least as far as it concerned
working people. Workers did not have the right to vote, they did not
have the right to assemble, they did not have the right to join
together to bargain collectively with their employers, they did not
have the right to quit their jobs whenever they wanted to, they did not
have the right to say whatever they thought. Nothing better
symbolized the support the state gave the emerging industrial
system than the hanging of workers for the crime of not attacking
persons but inanimate objects, breaking machines. Later to be
extolled as the triumph of a new kind of freedom, the factory system
was nurtured by severe restrictions on the rights of those whose
labor made it possible. It took—and continued to take—the
repressive power of the state to enable the giant factory to take root
in unbroken soil.97

Becoming Ordinary
In the second half of the nineteenth century, cotton mills became
less central to discussions and struggles about the structure of
British society and the shape of its future. For one thing, they were
no longer novel. By then, generations had grown up with large mills
as a part of the world they lived in. Other, newer marvels had taken
the lead as symbols of modernity, most importantly the railroad,
which drew extraordinary attention from writers, artists, and the
general public. In 1829 some ten to fifteen thousand people
assembled in Lancashire to watch a competitive test of newly
designed locomotives. The next year, when the first modern railway
line opened, linking Liverpool to Manchester, dignitaries filled the first
train and huge crowds lined the tracks. Trains became, as Tony Judt
put it, “modern life incarnate.”98
Textile mills no longer held first place, either, in sheer size, as
other types of worksites came to rival or exceed them. The railroad
system had a huge workforce, with some shops that built and
maintained equipment employing as many workers as large textile
mills. Other industries, especially metalworking, also built very large
plants. By the late 1840s, the Dowlais iron works in Wales employed
some seven thousand men in a complex that included eighteen blast
furnaces, puddling ovens, rolling mills, and mines, dwarfing even the
largest textile mill.”99
Changed economic and political circumstances also muted
attention to the textile factory. In the mid-nineteenth century, the
British economy began to significantly improve, with growing
international markets for English textiles contributing to increased
revenue and improved conditions for workers. Legislation also began
easing the lot of mill employees, especially the 1831 Truck Act,
which required workers to be paid in cash, the 1833 act regulating
child labor, and an 1847 law that limited the working day for children
and women in mills to ten hours, realizing a long-time goal of
working-class reformers. When Engels returned to Manchester in
1849, just seven years after he began research for what became
The Condition of the Working Class in England, he found a very
different city, more prosperous and peaceful. “The English
proletariat,” he complained, “is actually becoming more and more
bourgeois.”100
The transformation was as much political as economic. The
failure of the Chartists to win their demands, in spite of their huge
success in mobilizing support, took much of the wind out of the sails
of the radical movements. At the same time, Chartism, with its
emphasis on male suffrage, shifted attention away from female and
child mill workers to adult men: artisans, construction workers, and
other nonfactory laborers. The campaign against the Corn Laws,
which began in 1838 and triumphed eight years later, rearranged the
political terrain, too, in effect bringing workers and mill owners into
alliance against the landed gentry, at least on this one, much
debated issue. Further easing tensions, more mill owners began
adopting paternalist practices, which had been prevalent among
some of the earliest textile manufacturers, like Arkwright and Strutt,
but rejected by many others.101
Textile workers continued to protest conditions they faced in the
mills, but their struggles were no more prominent than those of
miners and other groups acting through unions. After the mid-
nineteenth century, the attention of middle-class reformers and
observers shifted away from the mill, even as conditions for mill
workers, though improved, remained often oppressive and child
labor, albeit slightly older, continued to be widely used into the
twentieth century. The questions surrounding the large textile mill
and the factory system it brought into being devolved into part of a
more general and less apocalyptic debate about the rights and
standards of labor. By the time Charlotte Brontë published Shirley in
1849, she viewed the great dramatic struggles over the factory
system as something from the past, with the large cotton mill having
been, all in all, a source of social betterment.102
 By then, the giant cotton factory had led to new ways of
organizing production, new sets of social relations, and new ways of
thinking about the world. All but its most adamant defenders
recognized that in the short run the big factory had brought with it
massive human suffering, both among the workers in the mills and
those displaced by them. Yet for many, the mill held forth the promise
of a better world. In an unpublished article which would become the
basis of The Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels wrote:
“Precisely that quality of large-scale industry which in present society
produces all misery and all trade crises is the very quality which
under a different social organization will destroy that same misery
and these disastrous fluctuations.”103 For better and for worse, the
extraordinary social invention that first appeared with the Lombes’
mill and the early cotton spinning mills, the factory behemoth,
represented a giant leap toward a new world, our modernity.
 CHAPTER 2

“THE LIVING LIGHT”

New England Textiles and Visions of Utopia

D URING AN 1842 TOUR OF THE UNITED STATES, Charles Dickens spent

a day visiting Lowell, Massachusetts, the largest cotton
manufacturing center in the country. Founded just twenty years
earlier, the midsize city, set in the countryside, had become a
bustling conglomeration of mills, boardinghouses, and churches, its
streets lined with trees and flowers and filled with lively young
women. If he were to make a comparison between Lowell and the
factories of England, Dickens wrote, “The contrast would be a strong
one, for it would be between the Good and Evil, the living light and
deepest shadow.” Dickens was far from alone among European
travelers in seeing Lowell as a different order of society than the
manufacturing centers of Britain. Englishman John Dix wrote in 1845
that “a more striking contrast than that afforded by
Manchester . . . and Lowell, can scarcely be imagined.” Michael
Chevalier, a French political economist, described manufacturing as
“the canker of England,” which at least “temporarily involves the
most disastrous consequences.” By contrast, he found Lowell “neat,
decent, peaceable and sage.” Novelist Anthony Trollope, son of
Frances Trollope (who wrote Michael Armstrong), dubbed Lowell “a
commercial Utopia.”1
European writers visiting Lowell—a regular stop on the circuit of
New World wonders—were particularly taken by its pastoral setting
and young, female workforce. “COTTON MILLS! In England the very
words are synonymous with misery, disease, destitution, squalor,
profligacy, and crime!,” wrote Dix. “How different from the
neighborhood in which we now are, where the only sound which is
heard above the whirling of spindles, and the clatter of machinery, is
the chirp of the locust or the song of the robin.” Chevalier found the
sight of Lowell “new and fresh like an opera scene.” Witnessing
“neatly dressed” young women working “amidst the flowers and
shrubs, which they cultivate, I said to myself, this, then, is not like
Manchester.” Dix, too, was impressed by the “healthy, good-
humored, pretty faces, and honestly-earned habiliments” of the
Lowell workers, who, he wrote, “belonged to another race of beings”
compared to their Manchester counterparts.2
If, in the Old World, cotton mills came to be seen as dystopian, in
the New World, they were repeatedly hailed as beacons of a bright
future. As it turned out, many of the characteristics of New England
textile manufacturing that won such praise—the bucolic surroundings
of the factories, the neat mill towns, and the attractive young female
workers—lasted but a few decades. But other aspects of the Lowell
system of manufacturing, which commanded less notice from casual
visitors, endured, anticipating what nearly a century later would
come to be called “mass production.” By promoting a vision of the
mill town as a morally uplifting and culturally enlightening community,
and developing a system of cheap, standardized manufacturing,
Lowell spread the idea that both economic and social betterment
could be achieved through technically advanced industry. Lowell
reduced fears of industrialization while equating progress with the
efficient production of consumer goods. Doing so made the New
England textile industry an important episode in not only the history
of the giant factory, but also in the development of our modern
world.3
 Beginnings
Lowell was not the first attempt to establish cotton manufacturing in
the United States. Earlier, the industry had begun to develop along
the same lines as in England. In the late eighteenth century, a few
efforts were made to build spinning and carding machines, including
one that, like Arkwright’s early mill, used horses as a source of
power.4 But success only came when, in an echo of the Lombes’
theft of Italian technology, textile machinist Samuel Slater evaded a
British ban on the emigration of skilled manufacturing workers, in
place until 1825. Like the Italians, the British hoped to maintain
through the force of law a monopoly on advanced technology—
textile machinery could not be exported until 1843—but the effort
proved futile.
Slater, born in Belper, amid the world’s first successful cotton
mills, had apprenticed with Jedidiah Strutt, living with the Strutt
family and working in one of its mills, where he became familiar with
Arkwright’s equipment. In 1789, he slipped out of England, telling no
one of his plans. Arriving in America, he quickly hooked up with
Moses Brown, a partner in the Rhode Island merchant company
Almy and Brown, who hired him to build and equip a water-powered
mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Compared to the brick or stone
English mills, the Almy and Brown factory was very modest, a two-
and-a-half story wood structure, housing machinery made almost
entirely out of wood. Starting up slowly, it initially did carding and
spinning with a workforce of nine local children. By 1801 it had over
a hundred children at work.5
The Almy and Brown factory soon spawned new operations, as
Slater and other mechanics who worked there launched their own
enterprises, often in partnership with merchants. The Slater-style
mills remained small, as the rivers they were built on generally could
power only modest operations. Also, there were not enough nearby
children to sustain large plants, with no poorhouses, as there were in
England, to turn to for forced recruits. Mills advertised for large
families to hire, with men to work as skilled mechanics and children
minding machines. But with labor scarce in the thinly populated
United States, recruiting workers proved difficult. So production grew
not through increased mill size but by replication, with factories
moving further into the back country, where untapped pools of labor
could be found. By 1809, at least twenty-seven mills were operating
in Rhode Island, eastern Connecticut, and southern Massachusetts.6
The American mills mimicked English practices, most obviously
in the extensive use of child labor, including children as young as
four. In another carry-over, they generally paid their employees,
except for skilled mechanics, with credit at a company store rather
than cash, reflecting, as in Britain, a shortage of small currency, as
well as limited working capital. To conserve cash and retain workers,
mills usually paid wages only once a quarter, or even less frequently,
and delayed for weeks giving final payouts when workers quit.
At first, total factory output remained modest. For one thing, the
demand for cotton yarn was limited. Most Americans wore flax or
wool clothing. Those who preferred cotton could buy British exports.
For another thing, raw cotton was hard to obtain. Little cotton was
being grown in the United States when Slater got started, so at first
he used cotton imported from Cayenne and Surinam, only later
adding Southern-grown cotton to the mix.7
But output soared in the second decade of the nineteenth
century. The Napoleonic Wars, the Embargo Act (in effect from 1807
to 1809), and the War of 1812 disrupted English imports just when a
growing taste for cotton clothing and an increasing market for cotton
cloth from settlements west of the Alleghenies boosted demand.
Looking to cash in, merchants and mechanics launched a wave of
spinning mill construction across the Northern states. Weaving
remained strictly hand done. In Pennsylvania, full-time skilled
artisans produced fine-quality cloth. In New England, some mills set
up networks of outworkers to weave, but rarely as a full-time
occupation. Frustrated by the difficulty in getting outwork returned in
a timely fashion, Almy and Brown hired weavers to work in the
company’s factory.8
It was in this context that Frances Cabot Lowell conceived of a
different way to produce cotton cloth. A wealthy Boston merchant,
Lowell, during an extended sojourn in Britain, decided that big profits
could be made through the large-scale integrated production of
textiles, using powered equipment for all phases of the operation
within a single factory. At the time, few British firms spun and wove in
the same plant and no power loom had ever been used in the United
States, because of Britain’s technology embargo. On returning
home, Lowell hired a skilled mechanic, Paul Moody, to help him build
machinery modeled after what he had seen in England. By 1814,
they had a power loom successfully operating and a dressing
machine to prepare the warp.9
Meanwhile, Lowell formed a joint-stock company, the Boston
Manufacturing Company, with other Boston merchants to build and
operate a mill. The investors realized that with the full-scale
resumption of British trade after the War of 1812, their opportunities
for profits in international commerce would be reduced.
Manufacturing promised to be a rewarding alternative, even as they
continued to be active in trade and real estate speculation.
Creating the company was a radical innovation. In the early
nineteenth century, stockholder corporations were rare, with each
needing a separate enabling state law. Generally, they were used
only for enterprises considered public utilities, like building a canal.
The corporate form had great advantages; it allowed aggregation of
capital on a scale few individuals could afford and shared risk among
multiple parties, a practice well known to merchants, who often
formed partnerships to finance ship journeys. Joint stock
corporations also facilitated enterprise continuity when investors
chose to withdraw their funds and eased the process of inheritance,
important for the rich, largely passive stockholders who would be
drawn to the textile industry. (Corporations gained an additional
advantage when they were granted limited liability in most New
England states during the 1830s and 1840s.) Within five years,
Boston Manufacturing raised $400,000 in capital (soon raised to
$600,000). By contrast, as late as 1831 the average capitalization for
119 mills in Rhode Island fell below $45,000.10
To begin operations, Boston Manufacturing bought a mill site in
Waltham, up the Charles River from Boston, where a paper mill
already was using water power. There the company built a four-story
brick mill, forty feet wide and ninety feet long, topped by a cupola
housing a bell to call employees to work. Though not much larger
than the largest existing U.S. cotton mills, the Waltham factory
fundamentally differed in that it housed weaving as well as spinning
equipment, so that within a single structure bales of raw cotton were
turned into finished cloth. Also, Boston Manufacturing recruited a
different kind of workforce than earlier mills, hiring, in addition to a
few skilled male workers, local young women to operate both the
spinning and weaving equipment.11
The Boston Manufacturing looms were crude, requiring course
yarn—much coarser than what was being used in England—to avoid
excessive breakage. As a result, the mill could only produce basic,
heavy cloth. Initially the company turned out yard-wide white
sheeting, of the sort then being imported from India, a product
popular in the growing Western settlements, where home spinning
and weaving were less common than in New England and durability
was valued. Some of the cloth was sold in the South to make
clothing for slaves. The company distributed all of its output through
a single agent, paid on commission, rather than by the consignment
system other mills used. Lowell cleverly protected his market by
lobbying to have the 1816 Tariff Act place a higher duty on cheap
imported textiles than on higher-priced goods of the sort that the
Rhode Island mills were producing, effectively locking out foreign
competition.12
The Waltham mill, completed in late 1814, proved almost
immediately profitable. In 1817 Boston Manufacturing paid out its
first dividend, 12½ percent. By 1822, the company had fully repaid
its initial investors, with a cumulative dividend of 104½ percent. In
1816, the company built a second mill, close to the first, somewhat
larger at 40 feet by 150 feet. A small separate building was erected
for picking, the breaking up of the raw cotton bales that produced
highly flammable cotton dust. Like the first mill, the second had
towers on the outside of the main structure to hold stairs and toilets
(which dumped their waste into the Charles River).13
With the completion of the second Waltham mill, a template for
the northern New England textile industry was in place. Somewhat
as had occurred a century earlier at the Lombe mill, a new model of
production came together rapidly, followed by a long period of
replication and incremental improvements, but no radical shifts.
Nathan Appleton, an original Waltham investor, noted in 1858 “how
few changes have since been made from the arrangements
established . . . in the first mill built at Waltham.”14
What made the Waltham system different and important? First,
the integration of production within a single space and a single firm.
Raw materials went into a mill and finished products came out. All
the problems and costs associated with coordinating and
transporting materials in various stages of production to and from
different factories or outworkers and ensuring their quality were
eliminated. Having all processes under one roof allowed productivity
gains, such as spinning weft directly onto bobbins used in
subsequent weaving.
Second, the Waltham model mills concentrated on making
standardized products at high speed. Most Waltham-style mills
produced only a single type of cloth or at most a few and ran their
machinery at higher speeds than equivalent equipment in England.
Innovations introduced by Lowell and Moody traded off flexibility for
speed. Their “double speeder” roving frames, for example, were
costly to reconfigure for different types of yarn, encouraging long
production runs of the same product. Moody later introduced other
changes to speed up equipment, including using leather belts rather
than shafts to transmit power to individual machines and making
main shafts out of wrought iron rather than wood. But the high-speed
equipment could only produce relatively simple fabrics, not complex
weaves, like ginghams, that had colored patterns, or other “fancy
goods.”
Third, the Waltham system automated as many processes as
possible to reduce the need for skilled labor. Many Waltham-style
machines had “stop-motion” features, which halted the equipment if
a thread broke or another problem developed, reducing the needed
skill of operatives and increasing the number of machines they could
monitor.15
Fourth, the Boston group, in pioneering the use of the corporate
form for manufacturing, linked big capital to goods production. The
corporation would not become the norm for manufacturing outside of
textiles for decades to come, but the advantages it brought
eventually made it standard for large-scale industrial enterprises.
With heavy capital investment in plant and equipment and large
reserves, Boston Manufacturing and the companies modeled on it
could build larger, more efficient factories and were better able to
withstand the vicissitudes of the economy than smaller companies
modeled on the Slater mills.
Fifth, the use of a single selling agent rather than multiple jobbers
created a close identification between particular products and
particular companies, a step toward what would later be called
branding. Sometimes it was the selling agent rather than the mill that
decided what products should be made, much like how, nearly two
centuries later, brand-name companies and giant chain stores would
tell clothing, shoe, and electronics manufacturers precisely what to
produce. The sales agent, rather than the manufacturer, felt the
pulse of the market.16
Finally, the Waltham model mills developed primarily as
domestic, not international, enterprises. Much of the recent literature
on the cotton industry stresses its global character. This certainly
was the case in Britain, which imported raw cotton and exported
cotton goods, a hub of world commerce. But the Waltham-Lowell
mills used cotton grown in the United States and sold their products
primarily within the nation’s borders. In 1840, exports accounted for
less than 8 percent of U.S. cotton cloth production, in 1860 still less
than 10 percent, a nice source of profit and a safety valve for excess
output, but not central to the industry.17 The rich array of natural
resources in the United States and its large, growing domestic
market meant that American industry would develop primarily as a
domestic enterprise, engaged with international markets but not
dependent on them.

Lowell
Waltham established the model, but it was Lowell that became
famous. The Boston Manufacturing Company founded the city to
expand its capacity. After erecting a third mill in Waltham, the
company directors decided to build a new complex to produce
calicoes. Without enough water power in Waltham for additional
mills, company leaders found a site twenty-three miles north of
Boston, in what was then East Chelmsford, Massachusetts, where at
Pawtucket Falls the Merrimack River dropped thirty feet, unleashing
enormous energy.
Years earlier, a company called the Proprietors of Locks and
Canals on the Merrimack had built a canal around the falls to permit
navigation. Quietly, Boston Manufacturing bought up the stock of the
older company and land along the river. To launch the new
enterprise, in 1822 it created the Merrimack Manufacturing
Company, offering shares to its investors. Using Irish laborers, the
new company widened and deepened the existing canal and rebuilt
the locks to create mill sites with adequate power. At a time
preceding power equipment and dynamite, the infrastructure work,
along with building and equipping new mills, proved extremely
expensive. Only an assemblage of some of the richest men in New
England could have financed industrial development on this scale.18
The mills built at the new site—and others later modeled on them
—were much larger and more substantial than the early Rhode
Island factories. Handsome, durable brick structures, without much
ornament, they bore at least a superficial resemblance to the
Lombes’ mill, by then already a century old.19 Technical
considerations dictated their size and shape. The wooden shafts
used to convey power from waterwheels could be extended only so
long before breaking, no more than one hundred feet. Even after
builders began centering mills over their waterwheels, allowing
horizontal shafting on both sides, building length was limited. The
need to bring in light from perimeter windows restricted mill width. So
floor plates could not be very big, in the case of the Merrimack mills,
156 feet by 44½ feet. To create more space and fully utilize the
power of the waterwheels, mills were built up, in the Merrimack
model five stories high, including an attic and a basement. For
greater capacity, Merrimack and other textile companies built
multiple mills in clusters, sometimes arrayed around a central yard.
New England textile firms did not make much use of iron
structural elements until the 1840s. Cast iron was expensive in the
United States, while large wooden beams were readily available,
familiar to local construction workers, and capable of supporting
heavy weights and absorbing vibrations. Like the British, the
Americans worried about the danger of fire, but they adopted a
different approach to minimizing it, not attempting fireproof
construction by replacing wood with iron and brick but instead
seeking to retard the spread of flames by using very heavy timbers,
not only for beams but also for flooring, which would be slow to catch
fire and capable of continuing to support weight even if charred.
By 1825, Merrimack had completed five virtually identical mill
structures and additional buildings for bleaching and calico printing.
Each mill was self-contained, with both spinning and weaving
equipment, capable of turning raw cotton into woven cloth.20 As in
Waltham, the new mills proved quickly profitable; within two years of
commencing production, Merrimack paid its first dividend. To further
expand, its directors came up with a strategy of creating additional
firms, each of which would have its own stockholders and directors,
with heavy overlap in ownership from company to company. The
structure facilitated raising capital from new investors, while allowing
existing stockholders to withdraw money from older companies to
invest in new ones.
To advance the corporate metastasis, Merrimack transferred the
land and water power it did not need to a reconstituted Locks and
Canals company, which also took over the machine-shop operation
of Boston Manufacturing. Like the William Fairbairn’s company in
England, Locks and Canals could provide what today would be
called a turnkey facility. When new companies were formed—starting
with Hamilton Manufacturing in 1824, followed by Lowell
Manufacturing, Appleton Company, Lawrence Manufacturing, Boott
Mills, Suffolk Manufacturing, and Tremont Mills—Locks and Canals
sold them mill sites and machinery and provided water power
(usually for a per spindle fee).
 Figure 2.1 An engraving of Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1850s, featuring a
bucolic setting in the foreground.

The owners carefully orchestrated the proliferation of companies.

Rather than have firms compete with one another, each new
company specialized in a different product: Merrimack, calicoes;
Hamilton, twilled and fancy goods; Lowell, carpets as well as cotton
cloth; and so on. Many of the companies shared the same selling
agent and routinely exchanged cost information. Eventually there
were ten major firms in Lowell operating a total of thirty-two mills.21
Merrimack and its progeny built more than mills; they built a
whole city in what had been nothing but a thinly populated farming
area. At the initiative of Merrimack, the mill sites and surrounding
land were spun off from Chelmsford as a separate town, named for
Frances Cabot Lowell, who died in 1817. With nowhere near a large
enough local population to staff the factories that were rapidly going
up, the first priority was to build housing for workers to be recruited
from afar.
The feature outside observers usually focused on when they
wrote about Lowell, the company boardinghouses full of lively young
women, did not come from Waltham. Boston Manufacturing owned
some housing in Waltham, but apparently rented it largely to male
workers. Unmarried female workers either lived with their own
families, if they were local, or with families not connected to the
company. The boardinghouse model developed elsewhere. Shortly
after Boston Manufacturing had its first mills up and running, it began
selling machinery and patent rights to others setting up textile
factories, who generally used the second Waltham mill as a template
for their buildings. In New Hampshire, the Dover Manufacturing
Company built two mills housing Boston Manufacturing machines
and a new town, complete with street grid, company store, bank,
commercial buildings, and boardinghouses for its female employees.
The company rented the boardinghouses to housekeepers to
manage, detailing rules for the residents. A similar complex in Great
Falls, New Hampshire, likewise included boardinghouses for female
workers. Apparently it was from these complexes that the builders of
Lowell adopted the boardinghouse model.22
The Lowell boardinghouses were not uniform in design. The early
structures, made out of wood, generally rose two stories high; later
units, made of brick, three stories. By 1830, Merrimack owned, in
addition to its production facilities, twenty-five wood tenements, four
brick tenements, twenty-five cottages, a house for its agent, a church
and parsonage, storage buildings, and a “Fire Department,” along
with a store and two warehouses in Boston. As Lowell grew, the
textile companies helped finance a library, reading room, and lecture
hall. By 1840, Lowell housed eight thousand textile workers, with a
total population exceeding twenty thousand, making it the
eighteenth-largest city in the United States.23
Figure 2.2 Merrimack Mills and Boarding Houses, an 1848 engraving by O. Pelton
depicting boardinghouses at Lowell lined up and leading to a mill at the end of the
street.

Scaling Up
Even as the core group of textile investors—what economic historian
Vera Shlakman dubbed the “Boston Associates”—expanded their
production in Lowell by forming multiple corporations, they expanded
beyond Lowell by founding new mill towns across northern New
England. In Chicopee Falls, on the edge of Springfield,
Massachusetts, they helped launch four textile companies,
mimicking the Lowell pattern of having an additional company to
control land and water power and manufacture machinery. Other
complexes arose in Taunton and Holyoke, Massachusetts; Nashua
and Manchester, New Hampshire; and Saco and Biddeford, Maine.
In the mid-1840s, when Lowell itself ran out of mill sites, a group of
Boston investors developed a new town, Lawrence, nearby on the
Merrimack River, which became a major wool and cotton center. In a
few instances, the Boston group took over mills others had founded,
like the complex in Dover.24
The Boston Associates companies were genuinely Boston
companies. Their owners consisted largely of Boston residents who
had made their fortunes before their textile investments. Most rarely
visited their mills. Even companies with distant factories were run by
a treasurer who lived in Boston, operating through an on-site agent.
Selling and banking were done in Boston as well. The combination of
absentee ownership and workers largely recruited from afar meant
that the mills and mill towns often had few local roots. Industrial
capitalism—which in the United States, as in England, had the textile
industry at its lead—did not develop organically out of existing
communities but was implanted, fully formed, by outside merchant
capital.25
The textile complexes built by the Boston group dwarfed
contemporary factories. An 1832 federal survey found that of the
thirty-six manufacturing enterprises reporting more than 250
employees, thirty-one were textile companies. On the eve of the Civil
War, manufacturing establishments in the United States employed
on average only 9.34 workers. By contrast, Merrimack, the largest
Lowell company, in 1857 had 2,400 workers, while six other
companies in the city had over 1,000.26
Continuing growth, however, did not mean continuing innovation.
After an initial burst of inventiveness, the Boston-based mill owners
and managers proved a conservative lot, not introducing major
technological changes for decades. Until the mid-1840s, individual
mill buildings rarely exceeded by much the dimensions of the second
Waltham mill, each housing 250 to 300 workers. The companies
increased production by speeding up existing equipment and
building new mills using their well-established template. Able to
make a good return on their money by doing more of the same, the
Boston investors felt little need for novelty.27
The question of power provides a good illustration. With plentiful
water power, and coal farther away and more expensive than it was
for British mills, New England mill owners did not widely adopt steam
power until after the Civil War, long after it had become common in
England. As a result, New England mill towns had none of the black
smoke and soot so characteristic of British industry. When the
growth of Lowell and the planning of Lawrence presented the
possibility that companies on the Merrimack would run out of water
power, instead of installing steam engines the mill owners bought
real estate and water privileges at the outlet of Lake Winnipesaukee
in New Hampshire, over sixty miles away, to direct more water into
the river (outraging Ralph Waldo Emerson for what he saw as
arrogance).28
The corporate arrangements adopted by the Boston textile
investors allowed expansion on a scale unprecedented for
manufacturing. In 1850, the mills they controlled accounted for about
a fifth of all the cotton spinning in the United States. In Lowell alone,
in 1857 the ten mill companies, the Lowell Bleachery, and the Lowell
Machine Shop (spun off from Canals and Locks) together employed
over thirteen thousand workers.29
But the Lowell model did not take full advantage of potential
efficiencies that came with size. Within firms, running each mill
building as a self-contained production unit meant that while there
were some shared functions that no doubt lowered costs—most
importantly buying raw cotton and selling finished goods—in other
respects each building operated as a separate, modest-sized
enterprise. The idea of a fully integrated, rationalized, multisite
company still lay in the future. The Lowell mills did not begin to even
calculate unit costs until the 1850s, so they had no way to know the
advantages and disadvantages of different arrangements, sticking by
habit to the system Lowell had introduced in the first Waltham mill.
Even after the companies began connecting once-freestanding mill
buildings to one another and completely ringing mill yards with
buildings—to the dismay of workers who could no longer look out at
town and country scenes—they continued to treat each mill as a
separate entity. And because each cluster of four or five mills was
organized as a separate corporation, other savings that might have
accrued in purchasing, sales, and management were not realized.30
Amoskeag Manufacturing Company was the exception that
suggested there might be greater efficiencies in a different
organizational structure. Set up in the late 1830s to develop a new
textile center on the Merrimack River in New Hampshire, along with
a town grandiosely named Manchester, the company at first
replicated the Lowell pattern, expanding through the creation of new
corporate entities. But unlike in Lowell, eventually the separate
companies began to consolidate under one management, until all
the mills in Manchester were controlled by Amoskeag. The
consolidated corporate structure facilitated expansion. At its peak in
the early twentieth century, Amoskeag had 17,000 workers in thirty
mills and many associated buildings, bordering the river for over a
mile on one side and a half mile on the other. Its size allowed the
company to be almost completely self-sufficient, using its own
workers for even major construction projects and building most of its
own machinery.31
The model of expansion through replication—many separate mill
buildings, controlled by many separate companies—proved
something of a dead end. When other companies began to approach
and then exceed the size of the Boston Associates network, like the
Pennsylvania Railroad, Standard Oil, and U.S. Steel, some
experimented with interlocking directorates, but most quickly moved
to consolidate corporate control and financial supervision, even with
far-flung facilities.32 Organizationally idiosyncratic, nonetheless it
was the Waltham-Lowell system that first brought large-scale
factories to the United States, and it was that system that until the
Civil War represented industrialism in political and cultural discourse,
a pole for criticism and, more often, praise of a new type of society.

Factory Girls
“The American factory girl,” declared an 1844 article about Lowell in
the New-York Daily Tribune, “is generally the daughter of a farmer,
has had a common education at the district school, and has gone
into the factory for a few seasons to acquire a little something for a
start in life. She spends some weeks or months of every year under
her father’s roof, and generally marries and settles in its vicinity.
Many attend Lectures and evening schools after the day’s work is
over, and of the six thousand more than half regularly occupy and
pay for seats in the numerous Churches of Lowell. . . . [H]ardly any
where is Temperance more general or are violations of the law less
frequent.” The newspaper perhaps painted an overly rosy picture,
but its description was basically accurate. It was the character of the
Lowell “girls” and their life in the mill town that so impressed visitors
from home and abroad and led them to sharply contrast American
mills to British ones.33
Frances Lowell and his partners turned to farm girls as a
workforce largely out of a lack of alternatives. The Lowell group
sought to avoid the social disapproval that accompanied the
wholesale employment of children and, in any case, their power
looms required considerable strength to operate, necessitating adult
operators. Unlike Britain, the United States had neither a surplus of
urban male workers nor an overpopulated countryside to draw on.
Perhaps in an earlier era slaves might have been used; in the much
smaller Southern textile industry, they were used; by one estimate,
more than five thousand slaves labored in Southern cotton and
woolen mills by 1860. But by the time Lowell built the Waltham mills,
slavery was all but over in the North.
Instead, the Waltham-Lowell–style factories found a brilliant
solution in the recruitment of young women from rural New England.
Unmarried, in their teens and twenties, they provided a well-
educated workforce, accustomed to seeing and doing hard work and
being subservient to male authority, but not so vital to their families
that their withdrawal would create an economic or social crisis. And,
to the mill owners’ liking, they were a revolving labor force. When
they became unhappy or the mills lacked work, they could return to
their families rather than staying nearby and making trouble,
avoiding the discontent and disorder that came in England with the
creation of a permanent proletariat.34
For these workers, the mills represented an opportunity before
marrying to expose themselves to a wider world, while economically
helping themselves and their families. Few came from destitute
homes, desperate for additional income, as was so commonly the
case in Great Britain. Rather, they typically came from middling
families, daughters of farmers or rural artisans. But money did play a
big part in why they came. Typically, they kept their earnings, using
them to buy clothes, accumulate a dowry, save money for normal
school, or to set themselves up independently from their families.
Many also sent money home, to help pay off a farm mortgage or
family debts, to support a widowed mother, or to pay for a brother’s
education. A big attraction of the Waltham-Lowell–style mills was
that they paid cash, not credit at a company store, like many of the
Rhode Island–style mills. At the time, women had few other ways to
make money, except domestic service (which many New Englanders
rejected as subservient), schoolteaching (more seasonal than factory
labor), or seamstressing.
But money was not the whole story. The mills also provided an
escape from families, rural life, boredom, and isolation, a chance to
experience a new, more cosmopolitan world of independent living,
consumer goods, and intense sociability. Earning their own living
gave women a sense of independence and relieved their parents of
a burden. Ironically, the mills themselves made redundant one of the
main contributions young women had made to the family economy,
spinning yarn and weaving cloth at home for family use or for the
market.35
There were other components of the mill workforce besides
young women. Especially in the early days, there was a strict sexual
division of labor. Women held almost all the jobs operating
machinery, except for picking and carding. Men did all the
construction, maintenance, and repair work and held all the
supervisory positions. In addition, the mills recruited skilled male
workers from England and Scotland for specialized jobs for which
there was no pool of qualified native workers, including calico
printing and producing woolens. A small number of children worked
in the mills, too (though the Lowell mills generally did not hire anyone
under age fifteen), as did a few older, married women. The Hamilton
Manufacturing Company was probably typical in 1836, with women
making up 85 percent of its workforce. Over time, the percentage of
female workers dropped, at least modestly. In 1857, excluding the
all-male Lowell Machine Shop, the Lowell textile workforce as a
whole was a bit over 70 percent female.36
The Lowell-style mills rarely had to advertise for workers. Young
women—a sample of Hamilton workers found their average age on
hiring just under twenty—came on their own after hearing about the
mills, often joining or sending for sisters, cousins, or friends. The
Lowell Offering, a magazine of poetry and fiction by mill workers, not
only received extensive praise from visitors, it also served as a form
of job advertising for the companies (which quietly subsidized it).
When nearby hinterlands became tapped out of workers, the mills
sent recruiters to scour the more distant countryside, bringing back
their finds on wagons before railroads eased transportation.37
Female mill workers typically had a relatively short tenure. Most
estimates agree that women stayed on average something like four
or five years, commonly returning home for stretches while
employed.38
From the start, mill owners calculated that parents would allow
their daughters to live on their own and work in the mills only if they
were assured of their safety and well-being. For the mills “To obtain
their constant importation of female hands from the country,” wrote
the Burlington [Vermont] Free Press in 1845, “it is necessary to
secure the moral protection of their characters while they are
resident in Lowell.” To that end, the companies established what the
paper termed a system of “moral police.” Elaborate company rules
regulated workers off the job as well as on. The Middlesex Company
declared that it would “not employ any one who is habitually absent
from public worship on the Sabbath, or whose habits are not regular
and correct.” Workers were forbidden from smoking or using any
kind of “ardent spirit” in the mills and were generally required to live
in company-owned boardinghouses unless they had family living
nearby. The boardinghouses, in turn, had their own sets of rules,
including a ten o’clock curfew and, in at least one case, the
requirement that all residents be vaccinated for smallpox (which the
company agreed to pay for). The matrons who ran the
boardinghouses had to report rules violators, who could be fired.
Companies required workers to sign one-year contracts and give two
weeks’ notice before quitting. They circulated among themselves
lists of workers who had been discharged or who had quit before the
end of their contracts, whom they agreed not to hire, and imposed
fines for lateness and poor-quality work.39
 Company paternalism was not simply regulatory or punitive;
especially in the early years the companies tried to make the mills
attractive places to work and the mill towns attractive places to live.
Lowell was carefully laid out, with trees lining its broad streets and
an orderly placement of the mills, boardinghouses, and commercial
structures. Companies planted trees and put in flower beds around
their buildings and in their mill yards and allowed workers to grow
plants and flowers on windowsills inside the factories. One newly
arrived worker in Manchester, impressed by the brick houses and
“very handsome streets,” wrote her sister that she thought it “a
beautiful place.” The sociability of the mill towns, especially Lowell,
with its lectures and literary societies, was widely praised, though
also somewhat exaggerated, since, given the very long hours of
work, workers had limited time for other activities. Still, cities like
Lowell and Manchester looked and felt very different than the
crowded, filthy, impoverished English textile centers like Wigan,
Bolton, and the namesake Manchester.40
The experience of working in a factory and living in a factory town
transformed the women who flocked to Lowell, Manchester,
Chicopee, and the like. Augusta Worthen, two of whose sisters had
worked in Lowell, later recalled that the young women from her town,
Sutton, New Hampshire (population 1,424 in 1830), who traveled to
take jobs in Lowell or Nashua had “a chance to behold other towns
and places, and see more of the world than most of the generation
had ever been able to see. They went in their plain, country-made
clothes, and after working several months, would come for a visit, or
perhaps to be married, in their tasteful city dresses, and with more
money in their pockets than they had ever owned before.” For one
group in particular, mill work could be utterly altering, widows and
older unmarried women, dependent on their relatives for support. Mill
worker Harriet Robinson later remembered them “depressed,
modest, mincing, hardly daring to look one in the face. . . . But after
the first pay-day came, and they felt the jingle of silver in their pocket
and had begun to feel its mercurial influence, their bowed heads
were lifted, their necks seemed braced with steel, they looked you in
the face, sang blithely among their looms or frames, and walked with
elastic step to and from their work.”
 Many mill workers returned to their hometowns to marry,
sometimes settling down to farm lives much like those of their
parents. But a detailed study, by historian Thomas Dublin, of women
who had worked for Hamilton Manufacturing found that they typically
married at a somewhat later age than women from their hometowns
who had not gone to a mill, were far less likely to marry a farmer, and
were more likely to settle down in a city, with quite a few staying in
Lowell after marrying. Although the New England countryside itself
was changing, with improvements in transportation and the spread of
commercial relations, for young workers the mill experience
accelerated the transition out of a world of semi-subsistence
agriculture into an emerging commercial society. Even those women
who settled back home were never quite the same as those who
never left.41
Unlike British textile workers, the young women who flocked to
the New England mills left behind a veritable flood of words. Almost
all literate, they kept diaries, wrote letters back home and to one
another, contributed to The Lowell Offering, its successor, The New
England Offering, and labor papers like The Voice of Industry, and,
in a few cases, wrote memoirs or autobiographies. In their letters,
money is discussed frequently: wage rates, how much could be
earned in alternative types of employment, expenses, and so on.
Work itself does not figure as strongly as activities outside of work,
family news, or religion. There are very occasional comments on the
pace of work, but surprisingly little description of the mills. Social life
and saving money—the reasons why so many workers left their
homes—remain at the forefront, while work tasks and the factories in
which they occurred seemed to have been taken for granted.42
Perhaps one reason was that, at least in the first decades, mill
workers generally did not consider their labor especially arduous.
“Many of the girls who come to Lowell, from the country,” an 1843
editorial in The Lowell Offering noted, “have been taught by their
good mothers that industry is the first of virtues.” Responding to
claims about the unhealthful effects of factory labor, the editorial
declared mill work “light—were it not so there would not be so many
hurrying from their country homes to get rid of milking cows, washing
floors, and other such healthy employments.”
 Just as in England, often new hires walking into a mill for the first
time found the noise and motion of the machinery overwhelming, the
experience of sharing a huge work space with scores of others
disorienting, and the tasks tiring. But acclimation usually followed.
Though the intensity of jobs varied considerably, at least in the early
years, when the companies were still perfecting machinery and
operations and profits were high, many jobs were not especially
taxing. In the spinning and weaving rooms, workers often had
stretches of free time while they monitored equipment, waiting for a
thread to break or a bobbin to need replacing, in some case defying
rules to read or socialize.43
But the work was work. In a review of Dickens’s American Notes,
The Lowell Offering quoted approvingly his comment about the
“Lowell operatives” that “It is their station to work. And they do
work. . . . upon an average, twelve hours a day; which is
unquestionably work, and pretty tight work too.” Repetitive actions
over the long days brought boredom and fatigue. The air in the mills
was often foul, especially during the winter when candles and lamps
were needed for light, and the noise could become oppressive. Often
it was too hot or too cold. And many workers resented the tight
regulation of their lives, what some came to call “factory tyranny.”44
Mill town life also had its downside. Some newcomers found
being surrounded by so many other people, after having spent their
lives on isolated farms or in small villages, disconcerting. The
boardinghouses were crowded, with four to six women sharing each
bedroom (two to a bed), affording little privacy (though that was
nothing new for those who had grown up in large New England farm
families, crammed into close quarters). But the opportunities for
richer social, intellectual, and religious life than possible in their
hometowns—and to make money—seemed to outweigh the
challenges of urbanity for most of the newcomers.45
Conditions, however, were not static; they deteriorated over time.
An extended burst of mill building—both of the Slater and Lowell
types—began narrowing the gap between supply and demand for
cloth. By 1832, some five hundred cotton mills operated in New
England alone. To keep up dividends in the face of growing
competition and falling prices, the Boston-based corporations sought
to cut costs. Payroll was not necessarily their biggest expense. In
some years, companies paid more for raw cotton than for the labor
to convert it into cloth. But it was an expense over which they had
control.46
Companies reduced labor costs in multiple ways. Sometimes
they simply lowered wage rates, which for many workers were piece
rates. In March 1840, for example, the directors of Merrimack
Manufacturing voted “That in consequence of the depression of the
times a reduction of the wages of the operatives is indispensable,”
authorizing the company treasurer to cut wages “to the point that
they may be deemed expedient & practicable.” The companies also
began running machinery at higher speeds, taking advantage of
technical improvements in shafting and equipment. And they began
assigning spinners and weavers more machines to monitor.
Whereas once a weaver might have been assigned one or two
looms, by the 1850s it was common to assign three or four. As
output—and the strain of work—went up, piece rates were reduced,
so that wages rose at most modestly. A study of four Lowell-style
mills in northern New England found that between 1836 and 1850
productivity increased by almost a half, while wages went up only 4
percent.47
In the 1830s, in response to wage cuts, a few dramatic if brief
flashes of protest occurred. They came at a moment of increasing
labor organization nationally, as a language and politics of worker
mobilization emerged. An announcement by the Lowell mills in early
1834 of a forthcoming 12½ percent wage cut set off a wave of
meetings, petitions, and agitation, seeking to reverse the decision.
When a mill agent fired a leader of the protest, other workers walked
out with her, parading the streets and visiting other mills, calling for
their employees to walk out, too. Some eight hundred women joined
the “turnout.” But it was short-lived and unsuccessful. Within less
than a week the strikers had either returned to their jobs or quit
them, and the wage reduction went through as planned.
Two years later, 1,500 to 2,000 workers took part in a much
better organized turnout, protesting a hike in the price of room and
board in the company boardinghouses, effectively another wage cut.
At some mills, the walkout lasted for weeks, with at least one
company having to shut down a mill, consolidating its nonstriking
workers in its others to keep production going. A newly formed
Factory Girls’ Association, with a reported 2,500 members,
coordinated the strike. Though the exact outcome remains unclear,
at least some mills partially or fully rescinded the increase.48
These were not the first mill worker strikes; there had been
earlier, brief walkouts in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and Waltham and
Dover, Massachusetts. But the Lowell walkouts were bigger and
carried more symbolic weight because they took place in the most
celebrated factory town in the nation. Also, though the organized
labor movement in the United States had been developing in fits and
starts since soon after the Revolution, walkouts by women and
factory workers were still a novelty.
In other ways, though, the Lowell strikes fit a national pattern, in
which the language of republicanism and the spirit of the Revolution
were invoked to mobilize workers against what was seen as an
emerging tyranny of economic power. “We circulate this paper,” read
one petition circulated during the 1834 strike, “wishing to obtain the
names of all who imbibe the spirit of our Patriotic Ancestors, who
preferred privation to bondage. . . . The oppressing hand of avarice
would enslave. . . . [A]s we are free, we would remain in possession
of what kind Providence has bestowed upon us, and remain
daughters of freemen still.” Strikers saw wage reductions and the
power to impose them as not just a menace to their economic well-
being but also to their independence and respectability, threatening
to reduce them to the opposite of freemen—or daughters of freemen
—slaves. Just as in England, workers feared that the mill might not
be a source of freedom but of its opposite. During the 1836 walkout,
strikers walking in procession down the Lowell streets sang:

Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I—

Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
Oh! I cannot be a slave,
I will not be a slave,
For I’m so fond of liberty
That I cannot be a slave.
There was something light-hearted in this—the verse parodied the
song “I won’t be a nun,” which went “I’m so fond of pleasure that I
cannot be a nun”—but something serious, too.49
In Lowell, the walkout movement proved short-lived. But worker
criticism of the factory system, if anything, became more common
during the 1840s. As in England, reformers focused on the long
hours of labor. “The great master evil in operation in Lowell, and too
generally in American factories,” the New-York Daily Tribune wrote,
“is that of Excessive Hours of Labor.” New England factories rarely
operated around the clock, but the workday was very long. In Lowell,
in the mid-1840s it generally lasted between 11½ and 13½ hours on
weekdays, with somewhat shorter hours on Saturdays, with Sundays
off. 50
Following the same path as in England, New England textile
workers sought legislative restriction of working hours—to ten hours
—first for children and then for workers generally. Mill workers
petitioned legislatures, formed organizations, including Female Labor
Reform Associations in Lowell and Manchester, held picnics and
parades, and published appeals in an effort to reduce the hours of
work. Massachusetts and Connecticut did pass laws limiting working
time for children, but unlike in Britain, American mill workers did not
win meaningful legislation covering adult workers. Some Lowell mills
reduced working time slightly, but despite an impressive
organizational effort, the ten-hour movement effectively failed.51

Paradise or Paradise Lost?

The dissatisfaction of mill workers with their jobs, employers, and
what they perceived as an unrepublican disparity in wealth and
power made little impression on the stream of visitors who came to
see the mills.52 Davy Crockett, then a Whig congressman from
Tennessee, visited Lowell just months after the 1834 strike (less than
two years before his death at the Alamo). Crockett wrote that he
“wanted to see the power of machinery . . . . [and] how it was that
these northerners could buy our cotton, and carry it home,
manufacture it, bring it back, and sell it for half nothing; and, in the
mean time, be well to live; and make money besides.” Like so many
others, he was fascinated by the manufacturing processes and
charmed by the “girls” who “looked as if they were coming from a
quilting frolic.” “Not one,” he reported, “expressed herself as tired of
her employment or oppressed with work,” not surprising given that
Crockett was accompanied by Abbott Lawrence, one of the most
prominent mill owners. “I could not help reflecting,” Crockett
continued, “on the difference of condition between these females,
thus employed, and those of other populous countries, where female
character is degraded to abject slavery.”
Though a bitter opponent of Andrew Jackson, Crockett’s view of
Lowell resembled that of the president, who had visited a year
earlier. (Jackson was not the first president to visit a textile mill;
James Monroe toured Waltham in 1817.) Leading Lowell investors
hoped to charm Jackson at a moment of intense debate over tariffs,
a matter in which they had great interest. They largely succeeded,
organizing a procession of thousands of female workers in white
dresses carrying parasols and wearing sashes reading “Protection to
American Industry” and taking the president on a tour of the
Merrimack mills.53
By the mid-1830s, it was not surprising for political opponents to
be in agreement about Lowell-style manufacturing. In the era of the
American Revolution, many leaders, like Thomas Jefferson, worried
that manufacturing would threaten the agrarian nature of the country,
on which, they believed, liberty, virtue, and republicanism rested.
Industry, they feared, would bring the social ills and divisions it bred
in Britain. But by the War of 1812 a broad consensus jelled that the
United States needed its own manufacturing industries to ensure its
strength and independence. Furthermore, even many critics of
industrial development came to believe that the physical and political
setting of the United States would shape a system of manufacturing
shorn of the evils that accompanied it in Europe. Using water power
rather than steam meant that American mills were dispersed in
towns and small cities, avoiding the congestion and urban ills of
Manchester and other British mill cities. Using young, country
women as short-term workers avoided the creation of a debased
proletariat. What was wrong with Old World manufacturing,
American political and intellectual leaders came to believe, was not
manufacturing but the Old World. Lowell, many contended,
demonstrated that manufacturing in the New World could coexist
with democratic values, moral purity, and pastoral harmony.54
Not everyone was so sanguine. Poet and abolitionist John G.
Whittier was often quoted for his smile-inducing 1846 description of
“The Factory Girls of Lowell”: “Acres of girlhood—beauty reckoned
by the square rod, or miles by long measure!—The young, the
graceful, the gay—flowers gathered from a thousand hill-sides and
green vallies of New England.” Whittier praised the Lowell workers
for their “hope-stimulated industry,” teaching “the lessons of Free
Labor,” a sharp contrast to the “whip-driven labor” of the slave
plantation. But later in the same article he chastised the “good many
foolish essays written upon the beauty and divinity of labor by those
who have never known what it really is to earn one’s livelihood by
the sweat of the brow—who have never, from year to year, bent over
the bench or loom, shut out from the blue skies, the green grass, and
the sweet waters, and felt the head reel, and the heart faint, and the
limbs tremble with the exhaustion of unremitted toil.” Whittier
acknowledged “much that is wearisome and irksome in the life of the
factory operative.”55
Labor reformer Seth Luther sharply took to task politicians who
praised the cotton mills based on whirlwind tours: “For an hour or
more (not fourteen hours) he seems to be in the regions described in
Oriental song, his feelings are overpowered. . . . His mind being filled
with sensations, which from their novelty, are without a name, he
explains, ’tis a paradise.” But for Luther, “if a cotton mill is a
‘paradise,’ it is ‘Paradise Lost,’” a site of unhealthy long hours, poorly
paid workers, and tyrannical overseers.56
Critics of New England mill conditions, unlike in England, rarely
claimed that factory conditions were as bad as or worse than slavery.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was something of an exception when, in a
bitter commentary on Lowell, he equated black slaves in the South
with female mill worker “slaves” and criticized mill owners for wanting
to live in luxury without working, “enjoyment without the sweat.”57 But
critics still turned to slavery for metaphors of oppression. An 1844
letter in the Manchester Operative, for instance, likened the mill bell
calling workers to their tasks to “a slave driver’s whip,” while for a
New Hampshire worker the unrestrained power of overseers was
equivalent to that of slave drivers. A few critics—though not many—
acknowledged that while the mills were not a form of slavery
themselves, they were deeply embedded in the slave system,
dependent on slave labor to grow the cotton they used and
producing textiles sold to slave owners to clothe their chattel.58
Though supporters and critics generally agreed that New
England mills were not as bad as those in Britain, some argued that
the difference might be temporary. Seth Luther declared that the
“misery in horrid forms . . . in the manufacturing districts of England”
was “directly produced by manufacturing operations” and that the
United States was “following with a fearful rapidity the ‘Splendid
Example of England.’” Luther highlighted the employment of
children, very common in the Rhode Island–style mills, a harsh
reality usually elided by the focus of contemporary observers and
later historians on the Lowell-style mills. Luther decried the lack of
education that inevitably resulted from toiling long hours in the
“palaces of the poor.” To the cry of manufacturers that “it is not so
bad as it is in England yet,” he responded that one might as well “say
the Cholera is not so severe in Boston yet as it has been in New
York.”59
Anthony Trollope came to similar conclusions. The superior
conditions and paternalist institutions of Lowell, he suggested, were
made possible by its comparatively small size by English standards.
(On the eve of the Civil War, there were nearly four times as many
cotton workers in Britain as in the United States.) Scaling up,
Trollope envisioned, would require moving from water to steam
power. If Lowell made the switch and “spread itself widely,” he wrote,
“it will lose its Utopian characteristics.” John Robert Godley made a
similar point in his 1844 Letters from America, questioning whether
Lowell could be used to demonstrate that “the evils which have in
Europe universally attended the manufacturing system are not
inevitable in it.” Lowell, he noted, was set up and developed “under
eminently favorable circumstances.” Over time, as the population of
the United States grew, wages fell, and manufacturing increased in
importance, he doubted that “the favourable contrast which the New
England factories now present to those of England, France, and
Germany, can possibly continue.” A quarter century later, Edward
Bellamy, a lifelong resident of Chicopee Falls and author of the
blockbuster utopian novel Looking Backward, also saw European
conditions of poverty and social division coming to the United States.
He had “no difficulty,” he wrote, “in recognizing in America, and even
in my comparatively prosperous village, the same conditions in
course of progressive development.”60
Herman Melville at least implicitly suggested that the United
States already had the same kind of class division that
manufacturing had brought to England in his 1855 story, “The
Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” The first part of
the story portrays a group of well-fed, self-indulgent London lawyers,
while the latter part recounts a winter visit to a paper factory in an
isolated New England valley, apparently based on Melville’s visit to a
paper mill in Dalton, Massachusetts (which is still operating). The
narrator expresses his awe at the ingenuity and operation of the
papermaking machine, “this inflexible iron animal,” “a miracle of
inscrutable intricacy.” But he is horrified by the pale, unhealthy
looking, silent “girls,” the unmarried women who come from “far-off
villages” who operate the machinery, “mere cogs to the wheels,” a
far cry from the way Lowell workers usually were portrayed. Rather
than in a “commercial Utopia,” Melville’s young women were trapped
in “Tartarus,” a province of the underworld, while far away the
wealthy barristers fed and liquored themselves.61
New England reformer Orestes Brownson was more explicit in
seeing the nation divided into “two classes,” laborers and capitalists.
In a widely debated essay on “The Laboring Classes,” Brownson
used Lowell as an example in decrying the effect of factory labor on
workers and the growing gap between industrialists and their
employees, suggesting that only a radical recasting of society could
re-create true community.62 Seth Luther concurred: “The whole
system of labor in New England, more especially in cotton mills, is a
cruel system of exaction on the bodies and minds of the producing
classes, destroying the energies of both, and for no other object than
to enable the ‘rich’ to ‘take care of themselves,’ while ‘the poor must
work or starve.’ ”63
Alexis de Tocqueville, too, saw a growing class division in the
United States, brought about by factory production. The efficiencies
of large factory production, he predicted, would enrich manufacturers
to the extent that they would become a new aristocracy, threatening
democracy, while workers were physically and mentally
disadvantaged by the narrow, repetitive nature of factory tasks.
“Whereas the workman concentrates his faculties more and more
upon the study of a single detail, the master surveys a more
extensive whole, and the mind of the latter is enlarged in proportion
as that of the former is narrowed.” The industrial class divide, the
concentration of workers, and the cyclical nature of the economy
might well endanger “public tranquility,” a problem, in Tocqueville’s
view, that would require more government regulation to avoid.64

Faded Visions
The debate over Lowell raised what already had become a recurring
question: Was the factory system inherently oppressive to workers
and threatening to social cohesion or did its nature change with its
environment? Over time, the critical views of Brownson, Tocqueville,
and Luther became more widely shared. In England, the cotton mill
quickly brought a broad acceptance of the idea that it was creating a
new type of class society. In the United States, there was an
interregnum during which the large factory was associated with the
idea that industry and republican community could coexist. But by
the time of the Civil War, changes in the factory system itself, evident
in Lowell and other cotton centers, faded visions of “commercial
Utopia.”
Above all, it was the transformation of the workforce that changed
the public perception of the New England mills. By the late 1840s,
fewer young New Englanders were coming to the mill towns as a
result of growing displeasure with the pay, hours, and increased
workload, evident in the strikes of the 1830s and the ten-hour
movement. Also, for young women other alternatives to staying in
rural homes opened up. Railroads made it easier to move to urban
centers or out West. With the spread of public education, the number
of jobs for teachers swelled and salaries improved.65
Fortunately for the mills, in the mid-1840s, just as the influx from
the countryside diminished, a new labor pool materialized with mass
migration from famine-gripped Ireland. Between 1846 and 1847
alone, immigration from Ireland more than doubled, and by 1851 it
more than doubled again. There were always Irish workers in Lowell
and other mill towns; Irish men dug the canals and helped build the
factories. But before 1840, the textile companies generally spurned
Irish women; in 1845, only 7 percent of the Lowell mill workforce was
Irish. Necessity ended the discrimination; by the early 1850s, about
half the textile workers in Lowell and other mill towns were Irish. At
the Hamilton mill, by 1860 over 60 percent of the employees had
been born abroad.66
The increasing number of immigrant workers brought other
changes. More children began being hired in Lowell-style mills,
especially boys, as whole families needed to work to support
themselves, a reversion to the pattern in the early Slater-type mills.
The gendered division of labor broke down as male immigrants
accepted jobs once reserved for women, paid wages that in the past
only women would take. At Hamilton, in 1860, 30 percent of the
workforce consisted of adult men.
Immigrant family labor contributed to the decline of the
boardinghouse system and company paternalism. Lowell firms put
up mills at a faster pace than they built housing, and after 1848 they
stopped building housing entirely. Institutional arrangements once
needed to attract rural young women and reassure their parents
became increasingly superfluous, as the companies acknowledged
in the 1850s when they dropped requirements for church attendance
and boardinghouse residence for single women. A growing
proportion of the workforce—including more and more single women
—lived in non-company-owned boardinghouses or in rented
tenement apartments. The company boardinghouses lingered on—
between 1888 and 1891 a quarter of the workers at the Boott mills
were still living in company-owned housing—but they declined in
importance as the immigrant workforce grew.67

Figure 2.3 Winslow Homer’s 1868 engraving of New England factory life, Bell-
Time.

As the novelty of the mills wore off, the “acres of girlhood”—or at

least of native-born girlhood—shriveled, and company paternalism
diminished, travelers, politicians, and writers lost interest in Lowell.
But even as public attention moved away, the mills continued to
expand. The Civil War stimulated growth. With cotton all but
unobtainable and raw cotton prices soaring, many Lowell mills sold
off their cotton inventories for windfall profits, reducing or stopping
their own operations. Some took advantage of the hiatus to expand
and modernize. The Boott mill added two buildings and replaced
much of its machinery. In the postwar years, it built yet another mill
and began supplementing water power with steam. By 1890 it
employed over 2,000 workers, large but nowhere nearly as large as
the Merrimack mills, with over 3,000 workers, and the Lawrence
mills, with over 4,500.
In nearby Lawrence, the economic downturn in 1857 drove three
mills into bankruptcy, but the war brought a boom. Unlike in Lowell,
the Lawrence mills generally held on to their cotton to continue
production. Old mills expanded and new ones shot up and continued
to grow after the war, on a scale surpassing anything in Lowell. To
hedge against cotton goods’ booms and busts, most Lawrence mills
also produced woolens or worsteds. One Lawrence factory, the
Wood Mill, controlled by the American Woolen Company, in the early
twentieth century had more than seven thousand workers.
Altogether, Massachusetts employment in the cotton textile industry
soared from 135,000 in 1870 to 310,000 in 1905. In New Hampshire,
Amoskeag Manufacturing Company expanded until it was the largest
textile factory complex in the world.68
As the New England mills kept growing, Irish workers were joined
and partially replaced by an influx of French Canadians. In the early
twentieth century, other immigrant groups began working in the mills,
too, largely Southern and Eastern Europeans but smaller groups,
like Syrians, as well. For some of the newcomers, the experience of
mill work felt not much different than it had for the early New
Englanders. Cora Pellerin, a French Canadian who began working at
Amoskeag in 1912 at age eleven, thought “It was paradise here
because you got your money, and you did whatever you wanted to
with it.” But for many others, the experience of mill work and mill-
town life was far less positive, as working conditions deteriorated
and widespread poverty came to characterize the factory towns. “By
1910,” according to historian Ardis Cameron, “readers of Charles
Dickens would have found Lawrence’s dull streets and cluttered
alleys, its black canals and purple ill-smelling river, its vast piles of
soot-covered brick buildings, its flimsy, damp privies whose waste
oozed down open sewers and meandered through the city’s shaded
backyards a familiar landscape.”69
After the 1850s, when New England mills appeared in the news,
it usually was because of untoward developments. In January 1860,
the seven-year-old Pemberton mill in Lawrence fell down, its poorly
made cast iron columns unable to withstand the weight and
vibrations of its machinery. In the collapse and subsequent fire that
engulfed the rubble and those trapped in it, some one hundred
people died and many more suffered serious injuries. It remains to
this day one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history.
Newspapers and magazines as far away as Hawaii reported on the
catastrophe, recounting “heart-rending and appalling scenes” and
featuring drawings of rescues and the charred remains of victims.
Some papers—going beyond the conclusions of a coroner’s inquest,
which held the mill architect responsible—blamed the calamity on
“the wealthy Boston philanthropists” who owned the mill and the
“flagrant disregard” of company leaders for the “safety of their
employees,” tarnishing the reputation of the mill owners.70
Child labor also brought the mills unflattering public attention.
Textile was among the industries targeted in an early twentieth-
century campaign to keep children out of mines and mills. The
photographs that Lewis Hine took in 1909 for the National Child
Labor Committee of children working at Amoskeag became iconic.71
Labor strife further buried the notion that the New England mills
would avoid the ills of European industry. After the Civil War, textile
strikes became increasingly common. Some involved relatively small
groups of skilled male workers, like mule spinners. In other cases,
women workers or alliances cutting across skill and gender lines
conducted the strikes. Lawrence workers staged small strikes in
1867, 1875, and 1881, and a long strike in 1882, which received
national attention. Failed strikes took place in Lawrence in 1902 and
in Lowell in 1903.72
The last time the country was captivated by a vision of the future
emanating from the mills of New England came in 1912, when some
fourteen thousand workers in Lawrence went on strike for two
months to protest a pay cut, instituted in response to a state law
reducing working hours. “The strike in Lawrence,” declared socialist
Congressman Victor Berger, “is a rebellion of the wage-working
class against unbearable conditions.” Led by fiery organizers from
the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), women and men from
forty different ethnic groups banded together, creating multilingual
committees to direct the struggle. The militancy and solidarity
displayed by the Lawrence strikers—the type of semiskilled
immigrant workers mainstream labor leaders had written off as
impossible to organize—inspired radicals and unionists across the
country to imagine that a new labor movement and a transformed
nation were coming.
Figure 2.4 Lewis Hine is famous for his startling portraits of child workers,
including this one of a girl working in the Amoskeag textile factory in 1909.
 Mill owners and government officials set out to crush the strike
with a declaration of martial law, a ban on public meetings, the arrest
of strike leaders on trumped-up charges, the mobilization of the
National Guard, and physical attacks on the strikers and their
supporters. When the strikers, running out of food and money,
started sending their children out of town to live with supporters, the
police and militia tried to stop them, clubbing adults and children
alike at the railway station. The owners overplayed their hand, as a
wave of national outrage contributed to their decision to grant a
substantial pay increase, ending the strike in a workers’ victory.73
After the strike, the IWW failed to consolidate its power. It took
another two decades before New England mill workers finally
created stable unions. By then, the end was near. Slow to
modernize, and facing ever-growing competition from lower-cost
Southern mills (some financed by New England mill owners), the
mills put up by the Boston Associates began shutting down in the
early twentieth century. Amoskeag closed in 1936, the rebuilt
Pemberton mill in 1938, and the last of the original Lowell mills in the
1950s. Bits and pieces of textile production continued in Lawrence
and elsewhere in New England, but the great experiment launched
by Francis Cabot Lowell was over.74
Well before the Lowell factories began closing, the United States
had surpassed Great Britain as the world’s greatest industrial power.
By the mid-1880s, more goods flowed out of American factories than
British ones. By World War I, the manufacturing output of the United
States topped that of Britain, France, and Germany combined. The
meteoric growth of American manufacturing reflected, in part, the
growing size of the country itself, which in 1890 approached a
population of 63 million, far larger than Britain, with 33 million;
France, with 38 million; and Germany, with 49 million, allowing the
high output of cheap standardized goods for the home market.75
Lowell had helped usher in America’s industrial age and its global
industrial dominance. It had been born amid a blaze of positive
publicity because it promised the fusion of mechanized
manufacturing with republican values, creating a “commercial
Utopia” that would confirm the United States as a land of new
beginnings and infinite possibilities, free of the class divisions and
inequalities of the Old World. The success of Lowell in creating a
different social and cultural model for manufacturing helped ease
long-standing national concerns about the impact of industrialization
on what was still an agrarian republic, allowing a new consensus
equating progress with increased productivity through mechanization
and large-scale enterprise. By the time the Lowell mills receded from
view, Americans had squarely embraced a vision of the future built
on the bedrock of industry. Ironically, when the mills dominated
national news for a final time, in 1912, before fading into oblivion and
decay, it was because of the very kind of class warfare the
promoters of Lowell had claimed its system would avoid.
 CHAPTER 3

“THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION”

Industrial Exhibitions, Steelmaking, and the Price of
Prometheanism

O N MAY 10, 1876, THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION of Arts,

Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine opened in
Philadelphia, a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the
Declaration of Independence. One hundred thousand people heard
speeches by assorted dignitaries, sixteen national anthems, the
premiere of Richard Wagner’s “Centennial Inauguration March,” the
“Hallelujah Chorus” sung by a thousand-voice choir, and a 100-gun
salute. But for many visitors the highlight of the day came when
President Ulysses S. Grant and Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil led
the crowd into the immense Machinery Hall. There they climbed onto
the platform of the forty-foot-high Corliss double walking beam steam
engine. When each man turned a valve before him, the 56-ton,
1,400-horsepower engine came to life, turning twenty-three miles of
shafting that powered hundreds of machines filling the wood and
glass building.
The Centennial Exhibition, as it was commonly known, was an
extravaganza occupying 285 acres, attended, during its six-month
run, by nearly ten million visitors, equivalent to about a fifth the
population of the United States. With exhibits from thirty-seven
nations, its displays were encyclopedic, featuring everything from
exotic plants and prize cattle to fine art and historical artifacts. But
machines and machine-made products overwhelmed all else.
Figure 3.1 President Ulysses S. Grant and Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil start
the Corliss engine at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876.
 The fourteen-acre Machinery Hall contained a dizzying array of
industrial equipment, including a complete printing operation that
produced a newspaper twice a day, a railroad engine, metalworking
and woodworking machinery, brickmaking machines, and spinning
and weaving equipment from Saco, Maine. In the section called, in
the taxonomic terminology typical of the exhibition, “Machines,
Apparatus, and Implements Used in Sewing and Making Clothing
and Ornamental Objects,” a visitor could watch a pair of suspenders
mechanically made with his or her name woven into the fabric.
Among the new inventions unveiled were the typewriter, the
telephone, and a mechanical calculator. A huge variety of machine-
made products could be found in the Main Exhibition Building.
Smaller buildings, like the Singer Sewing Machine Company building
and the Shoe and Leather Building, housed still more machines and
machine-made products. Even the Agricultural Hall was full of
machines, from reapers to windmill-driven pumps to chocolate-
making equipment.1
It was a peculiar way to mark the one hundredth anniversary of
the United States. There was plenty of patriotic imagery and patriotic
kitsch. But the weight of the exhibition lay elsewhere, in the
celebration of the technological marvels of the day, of the great
productivity and inventiveness of the United States, of its progress
as measured by its mastery of the mechanical realm. It took an
ideological leap to see the connection between the American
Revolution and the Corliss engine.
The concentration on mechanical marvels and industrial bounty
measured how much views of national greatness and progress had
changed during the half century since the Lowell mills opened. With
little dissent, Americans had come to see machines and mechanical
production as central to the meaning of the national experience, as
integral to modernity. Americans had deep, sometimes violent
disagreements about the structure and values of their society, as
Reconstruction in the South came to a bitter end, workers suffering
through a devastating economic depression launched the largest
strikes the country had ever seen, and wars against Native
Americans raged in the West. But about machinery and what it made
possible, there was not much discord.2
 Americans believed that machines were opening the door to a
new age of unprecedented bounty, freedom, and national power. The
steam engine took center stage. It seemed to defy the gods, as
Prometheus had, capturing fire from them and putting it to work.
Tench Coxe, a Philadelphia merchant who worked closely with
Alexander Hamilton in the late eighteenth century promoting
manufactures, even used the term “Fire” for the steam engine.
The miraculous power of steam fully revealed itself with the
introduction of the first practical steamboats not long after the
Revolution. John Fitch began operating a steam-driven ferry
between Trenton and Philadelphia in 1790. In 1807, Robert Fulton’s
North River, equipped with a British-built steam engine, travelled up
the Hudson River from New York to Albany. Four years later, his New
Orleans introduced the steamboat to the Ohio-Mississippi river
system, opening up the western frontier of the United States to
commercial development. Two-way shipping on the Mississippi
facilitated the spread of cotton culture and, with it, slavery.
But it was not just the effect of the steamboat that drew
admiration; it was the boat itself, its speed, power, and unnatural
beauty. Mounting a steam engine on a boat radically changed the
experience of time, space, and distance, making once-epic journeys,
like the trip from St. Louis to New Orleans, achievable in just a few
days. Writer Edmund Flagg declared “There are few objects more
truly grand—I almost said sublime—than a powerful steamer
struggling with the rapids of the western waters.” For Flagg and
others, the contrast between the steamboat, the creation of mankind,
and the wild, natural setting of the Mississippi contributed to making
the scene so memorable, bordering on the sublime, which for the
nineteenth-century observer meant not just awesome or beautiful but
frightening, unsettling, and overwhelming, too.
Americans and Europeans traveling into newly settled lands often
saw the steamboat to be a carrier of civilization itself, or at least their
idea of civilization. But it did not take a wild Western setting to make
the steamboat seem exalted. In 1848, Walt Whitman, echoing Flagg,
wrote of the engine room of a Brooklyn ferry, “It is an almost sublime
sight that one beholds there; for indeed there are few more
magnificent pieces of handiwork than a powerful steam-engine
swiftly at work.” Three years later he said the United States had
become a nation “of whom the steam engine is no bad symbol.”3
The railroad soon eclipsed the steamboat as a symbol of
modernity. Steam-driven trains were even more widely seen, more
widely used, and more widely praised than steamboats. In the year
of the Centennial, Whitman wrote in “To a Locomotive in Winter”:
“Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the
continent!” By radically reducing the time, cost, and difficulty of
moving people and things, the railroad tied the nation together,
spreading commercial relations and disseminating ideas and
sensibilities. With the railroad came new landscapes, a new sense of
time, and a new cosmopolitanism.4

Exhibiting Modernity
Even standing still, the steam engine became a symbol of progress
and national prowess, part of the broader celebration of machinery
and manufactured goods, so evident at the Centennial Exhibition.
Before the Philadelphia fair and continuing long after it, public
exhibitions were built around the processes, symbols, and products
of mechanical manufacturing, equating them with modernity. In 1839,
for example, the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association
held its second exhibition at Boston’s Quincy Market. Over the
course of twelve days, seventy-thousand people attended. Among
the exhibits were an operating miniature railroad, a small steam
engine that powered other machinery, planning machines, a
“cassimere shearing machine,” printing presses, and knitting
machines. Displayed goods included textiles from Lowell, looking
glasses, cabinets, coaches, saddles, hosiery, hats, caps, furs,
confectionery, soaps, perfumes, boots, cannons, rifles, swords,
hardware, cutlery, locks, pumps, fire engines, and musical
instruments. Defending against the belief that manufacturing was
undermining republican virtue, James Trecothick Austin, in an
address at the exhibition, tried to dismiss “the supposed conflicting
interests of the various classes in American society.” “Our splendid
manufacturies of silver,” he said, “are worse than useless, if it is a sin
against democracy to use a silver fork.”5
The 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, officially the
“Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations,” marked the
beginning of the great international expositions and world’s fairs,
temples dedicated to progress and modernity as reflected in
machines and machine-made objects. The building that contained
the fair was at least as impressive as the exhibits within it. A huge
iron and glass conservatory, the Crystal Palace was constructed
entirely out of machine-made parts, so that after the exhibition
closed it was easily disassembled and reconstructed on a different
site. The British exhibit, by far the largest, had sections devoted to
fine arts, “raw materials,” “machinery,” and “manufactures.” The
industrial tourism that the well-connected had indulged in with factory
visits now was brought to the masses. Fifteen steam-driven
machines for carding, spinning, and weaving took raw cotton and
converted it to cloth while viewers stood nearby. The enormous
display of manufactured goods educated attendees about the
emerging consumer society, showing the myriad things that could be
made and how they would make life better. “World exhibitions,”
Walter Benjamin would later write, were “sites of pilgrimage to the
commodity fetish.”6
The United States mounted a “Crystal Palace” exhibition of its
own, the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, in 1853. The iron
and glass exhibit hall, built in New York City on the site of what is
now Bryant Park, was essentially a smaller version of the London
building, with a dome added. It created a sensation; nothing like it
had ever been seen in the New World. Like the London exhibition, it
contained a hodgepodge of art, machinery, and manufactured
products.7
Other countries, too, mounted international exhibitions. The
French held a series of fairs in Paris, starting with the 1855
Exposition Universelle and its Palais de l’Industrie, intended by
Napoleon III to top the London display. Succeeding exhibitions came
in 1867, 1878, 1889, and 1900. Vienna put on an International
Exhibition in 1873. Chicago created the large, well-attended, and
widely celebrated 1893 Columbian Exposition. Other United States
fairs followed in short order, including in Omaha (1899), Buffalo
(1901), and St. Louis (1904).8
Even the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition, held in
Atlanta to highlight the economic recovery of the South under white
rule and the continued reign of King Cotton, prominently featured a
Machinery Hall. One account called it “the heart” of the fair; “wheels,
big and little, whirl in every quarter; dynamos generate untold volts of
electricity; pumps and lathes, planes and drills are hard at work, all
obediently responding to an unseen but irresistible force.”
“Southerners joined with millions of Yankee guests,” wrote historian
C. Vann Woodward about the Southern expositions held in the
1880s and 1890s, “to invoke the spirit of Progress and worship the
machine.”9
The Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 Exposition Universelle,
became the foremost icon of the international fairs. Gustave Eiffel, a
successful French engineer, won a government competition for a
centerpiece for the exposition celebrating the hundredth anniversary
of the French Revolution. Made up of more than eighteen thousand
wrought-iron members, fabricated at an off-site factory, the 312-
meter tower soared to nearly twice the height of what had been the
world’s highest structure, the Washington Monument, completed just
five years earlier. From the top, the tower offered vistas previously
known only to a few balloonists, a preview of the bird’s-eye view of
the great metropolis that would become common only decades later,
after the invention of the airplane.10
Before it was built, a group of prominent French artists,
musicians, and writers protested what they called the “useless and
monstrous Eiffel Tower,” “the hateful column of bolted iron,” which
they declared would desecrate the beauty and honor of Paris.11 But
the tower almost immediately became celebrated as a symbol of
modernity, portrayed as a new kind of beauty. Even before it was
completed, George Seurat made it the subject of one of his best-
known canvases. A flood of drawings, paintings, and lithographs
followed, including works by Henri Rousseau, Diego Rivera, Marc
Chagall, and, perhaps most delightfully, Robert Delauney, who
returned to the subject over and over again. The tower proved an
ideal subject for modernist approaches to representation, including
pointillism and cubism. Pioneer filmmakers also engaged the tower,
the subject of short films by Louis Lumière in 1897 and George
Méliès in 1900.12 So did writers. In Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem
“Zone,” the tower herded the way to modernity:

At last you’re tired of this elderly world

Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating

You’re fed up living with antiquity13

Blaise Cendrars concluded “Tower,” his 1913 poem dedicated to

Delauney,

You are all

Tower
Ancient god
Modern beast
Solar spectrum
Subject of my poem
Tower
World tower
Tower in movement14

The huge numbers of visitors to the expositions and the flood of

positive publicity attested to the widespread admiration for the new
industrialism—the steam engines, vast iron structures, and
machinery on display. 15 Of course, not everyone was entranced.
Guy de Maupassant declared, “I left Paris, and France, too, on
account of the Eiffel Tower. It could not only be seen from
everywhere, but it could be found everywhere, made of every kind of
known material, exhibited in all windows, an ever-present and
racking nightmare.” The author tired of the crowds the 1889 fair
attracted, among them “the people who toil and emit the odor of
physical fatigue.”16
 Just how many working people actually attended the various fairs
is difficult to say. The middle and upper classes apparently made up
the bulk of the audience, better able to afford travel and entrance
fees. The planners of the London Crystal Palace Exhibition paid
considerable attention to attracting and controlling working-class
visitors. Admission was cheaper on Mondays through Thursdays,
facilitating visits by workers and their families, while allowing
wealthier patrons to have Fridays and Saturdays largely to
themselves. Many companies subsidized employee expeditions to
the exhibition. The Philadelphia Centennial closed on Sundays,
generally the only day workers had off, as a result of pressure from
local clergymen, making it difficult for them to attend. But as in
England, employers sponsored trips to the exposition for their
workers.17
Working-class visitors generally seemed to have enjoyed the fairs
—by some reports, they were more interested in machinery and less
interested in fine art than their economic betters—but some leaders
of workers’ movements could not ignore what they saw as the
exploitation that underlay the industrial bounty on display. Radical
Chartist G. Julian Harney called the exhibits at the 1851 exposition
“plunder, wrung from the people of all lands, by their conquerors, the
men of blood, privilege, and capital.” During the 1889 Paris fair,
socialists from Europe and the United States gathered at congresses
in the city. Friedrich Engels, who by then had retired from his
Manchester cotton mill, stayed away. He wrote Laura LaFarge,
Marx’s daughter, “There are two things which I avoid visiting on
principle, and only go to on compulsion: congresses and exhibitions.”
Paul LaFarge, Laura’s husband, complained to Engels that “the
capitalists have invited the rich and powerful to the Exposition
universelle to observe and admire the product of the toil of workers
forced to live in poverty in the midst of the greatest wealth human
society has ever produced.”18

Iron
The crystal palaces in London and New York, the great machinery
halls, and the Eiffel Tower were possible because of advances in the
iron industry. If the first half of the nineteenth century constituted the
age of cotton, the decades after 1850 were the age of iron. By the
time of the Centennial Exhibition, the largest manufacturing plants in
Europe and the United States made iron and steel goods, not
textiles. Iron mills and, later, steel mills supplanted textiles mills as
symbols of modernity, as poles for debate about the nature of the
society and what kind of future people sought.
Until the nineteenth century, iron was made only in small
quantities for specialized products. Typically, in Europe and North
America, the mining of ore, its conversion into iron, and the
production of finished goods all took place at one site, by small
groups of skilled workers. But by the middle of the nineteenth
century, the rising demand for iron outstripped traditional production
techniques, in which small furnaces, fueled by charcoal or coke,
were used to remove oxygen and impurities from iron ore, producing
metal which could be cast into finished goods or later reheated and
converted into stronger, more malleable wrought iron.19
A huge boost in the demand for iron came from the spread of the
railroad and the need for rails. In 1840, there were 4,500 miles of
railway worldwide; by 1860, 66,300 miles; and by 1880, 228,400. At
first, producing rails proved painfully difficult. Because not enough
iron could be rolled at once to make a single rail, small bars had to
be rolled into strips, which were layered, reheated, and rolled again.
Quality was low; sometimes rails delaminated and, on heavily used
lines, they wore out in as little as three months. American
metallurgist Frederick Overman wrote in the early 1850s, “The
application of science and machinery in the manufacture of iron does
not exhibit so high a state of cultivation as we find in . . . the
manufacture of calico prints and silks.”20
That changed with a series of technical innovations that
increased the quantity and quality of production. First came the blast
furnace. Instead of forcing cold air through heated iron ore to remove
the carbon in it, starting in 1828 in England and six years later in the
United States, hot air, heated by the exhaust of the furnace itself,
was used, greatly increasing the speed and efficiency of the process.
Raising the temperature and pressure of the air yielded further gains.
From a typical output in the 1850s of one to six tons of iron a day, by
1880 furnaces neared an output of one hundred tons a day.21
Iron produced by blast furnaces could be used to make some
products by casting, like stoves and plows. But it was too brittle for
many uses. Further reducing the carbon content to make wrought
iron gave it greater strength and flexibility but required intensive
labor, either repeated pounding at a forge or chemical transformation
through a process known as puddling. Puddlers reheated cast-iron
bars, so-called pig iron, along with scrap iron in special furnaces,
stirring the mixture to oxidize the carbon and burn off impurities.
Experience, skill, and physical strength were needed to control the
process.
With a strong craft culture and a high level of unionization,
puddlers forced iron manufacturers into what effectively was a
partnership. The workers regulated all aspects of the puddling
process, including how much iron to produce in each turn and their
hours of work. They often paid helpers out of their own wages. In
Pittsburgh, the most important iron center, a sliding scale linked
puddlers’ pay to their output and the selling price of iron, so that they
shared any gains that resulted from higher productivity or improved
market conditions. The men who operated rollers for shaping rails
and other products also exerted near total control over the
production process. In some mills, they negotiated a price per ton for
an entire team of workers, which they decided among themselves
how to divide.22
Early iron plants tended to be small, as puddling could make
wrought iron in batches of only about six hundred pounds at a time.
Soon, though, technical and financial considerations pushed up plant
size. Rolling rails required expensive equipment; to be profitable, rail
mills had to be operated around the clock, which necessitated a
great deal of wrought iron. Some rail makers purchased iron from
other firms, but the leading companies integrated backward, setting
up their own blast and puddling operations. Switching fuel from
charcoal to coke liberated them from the need to be near large tracts
of forested land from which charcoal could be produced. Coal
deposits and major rail lines made Pennsylvania particularly
attractive for large-scale operations.

Figure 3.2 Cambria Iron and Steel Works in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, circa 1880.

The Cambria Iron Works, near Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was for

a time the most advanced mill in the United States, introducing a
system of three-high rollers, which allowed iron to be moved
backward and forward between shaping rollers, minimizing the need
for reheating. Its rail mill extended over a thousand feet long and a
hundred feet wide, far larger than the largest cotton mill. In 1860 it
employed 1,948 workers, about as many as the largest Lowell mills.
The Montour Iron Works in central Pennsylvania, another rail
producer, had three thousand employees. Though like the first textile
mills, iron mills often lay in rural areas or small towns near rivers,
they proved far more disruptive, sprawling over large sites and
spewing out dark smoke. One European traveler described iron-mill
smoke in Pittsburgh as giving “a gloomy cast to the beautiful hills
which surround it.”23
The introduction of the Bessemer process led to a further leap in
the scale of mill complexes. Puddling created a bottleneck in the
production of iron goods, both because of its small-batch process
and the strong control exerted by the puddlers. The Bessemer
process, developed by Englishman Henry Bessemer in the mid-
1850s, provided an alternative way of turning blast-furnace iron into
a stronger, more malleable metal. As modified by subsequent
inventors, it worked by forcing air into molten pig iron, allowing
oxygen to combine with the carbon in the metal, thus removing it,
with a manganese-based ore introduced to remove excess oxygen
and sulphur. The end product fell somewhere between pig iron and
wrought iron in its carbon content and proved more durable for rails
than puddled metal. Its promoters dubbed it steel, appropriating the
name of an older form of purified iron that had been very difficult to
produce.
The Bessemer process worked best with iron made from ore with
a low phosphorous content, more readily available in the United
States than in Europe. So it was in the United States, starting right
after the Civil War, that the Bessemer process was first widely
adopted. Some products, like pipes, bars, and plates, continued to
be made out of puddled iron even as the Bessemer and the later
open-hearth processes for steelmaking spread. As late as the 1890s,
one company, Jones and Loughlins, had 110 puddling furnaces. But
thereafter iron production plummeted and the age of steel was firmly
established.24
Even early on, Bessemer furnaces could convert five tons or
more of iron into steel in one turn. To feed them, companies built
bigger and bigger blast furnaces. Rather than making pig iron that
later had to be reheated, they loaded Bessemer converters directly
with molten metal. In Pittsburgh and Youngstown, they built bridges
to allow trains with special ladle cars to carry liquid iron from blast
furnaces on one side of a river to converters on the other. In the
1880s, some firms began taking ingots produced by converters
directly to rolling mills, where, after adjusting their temperature in
“soaking pits,” workers rolled them without reheating. Thus heat and
energy were conserved as the molten metal never was allowed to
fully cool between its initial creation and the completion of finished
products.25
Increased output, integration, and an ever-growing array of end
products, requiring finishing mills for structural steel, wire, plate, and
other goods, boosted iron and steel mills to unprecedented size. In
Germany, the Krupp works in Essen, out of which came steel
cannons that were crowd favorites at the Crystal Palace and other
exhibitions, grew from seventy-two workers in 1848 to 12,000
workers in 1873. In France, the Schneider works in Le Creusot, an
iron and steel producer which, like Krupp, came to specialize in
armaments, had 12,500 workers in 1870.26 In the United States,
firms were quicker to mechanize and had fewer employees but also
were growing. In 1880, the Cambria mill had the largest workforce in
the industry, 4,200. Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead plant, which
displaced Cambria as the most technologically advanced mill in the
United States, and which like Krupp and Schneider heavily engaged
in producing armor, grew from 1,600 workers in 1889 to nearly 4,000
in 1892.
In 1900, of the 443 manufacturing establishments in the United
States with over a thousand employees, 120 produced textiles,
mostly cotton, and 103 iron or steel, so that half of all the large
factories in the country were in these two industries. Among the very
biggest plants, iron and steel dominated. Three of the four factories
in the United States with over eight thousand workers made steel
(Cambria, Homestead, and the Jones and Laughlins Pittsburgh
plant), while the fourth made locomotives. Three more steel mills had
between six thousand and eight thousand workers.27
The steel mill, as a production system, was far more complex
than the cotton mill. Its products were less uniform. Rails made to
standard specifications were produced in large quantities, but
finishing mills also filled orders for myriad other goods, some in small
numbers: structural steel in all shapes and sizes, steel sheets of
varying dimensions, armor plate of different thicknesses and
strengths, pipes, wire, bars, tinplate, and so on. Experienced
workers and constant adjustment of machinery were needed to meet
ever-changing specifications. Carnegie came to dominate the steel
industry by running his business like the Lowell mills. “The surest
way to continued leadership,” he believed, was “to adopt policy of
selling a few finished articles which require large tonnage.” Bridges,
he said, were “not so good because every order different.” But
beyond rails, which became relatively less important as the railroad
system was built out and stronger rails required less frequent
replacement, Carnegie’s policy proved hard to imitate.28
A single worker operating a single machine could turn roving into
thread or thread into fabric, but no one worker could produce a bar of
pig iron or a steel rail. Instead, coordinated activity by teams of
workers was needed. Even puddlers, the most autonomous
metalworkers, worked in pairs, the heat and effort being so draining
that they needed to spell each other. Each was assisted by a helper
and sometimes a “boy.” Larger groups of workers, some skilled and
some laborers, operated blast furnaces, Bessemer and open-hearth
converters, and rollers.
Unlike spinning and weaving, most iron and steel operations
were not continuous. Blast furnaces were run nonstop, with raw
materials poured in the top and iron tapped out at the bottom, until
the linings burnt out or other problems developed, when they would
be cooled and rebuilt. But most other processes were batch
operations. Once a Bessemer converter was charged with molten
iron, it took only eight to ten minutes before steel was poured out
and the cycle restarted. Open-hearth converters took eight hours to
complete their work—one reason why, though they produced higher-
quality steel, companies were slow to adopt them. Unlike textile
workers, many of whom did exactly the same thing all day long,
ironworkers and steelworkers often took on varied tasks and
alternated periods of intense labor with rest and recovery.29
In textile mills, many identical machines operated side by side,
drawing power from a common source. Integrated iron and steel
mills had many fewer machines (often with individual engines driving
them), but they were linked in tighter sequential operation.
Some of those machines were gigantic. At Homestead, workers
made armor from steel ingots that weighed as much as one hundred
tons. After being rolled to the appropriate size, their ends were
trimmed by a hydraulic press with a 2,500-ton capacity. They were
then reheated to be tempered and cooled in a bath of 100,000
gallons of oil. Final machining was done with enormous equipment,
like a planning machine weighing two hundred tons. The flywheel
alone on one engine in the beam mill weighed one hundred tons.
The Bethlehem Iron Company built an armor plant that had a 125-
ton steam hammer, a massive, towering apparatus that dwarfed
anyone standing nearby. Even equipment for handling raw materials
grew to enormous size, like machines that could lift entire railcars full
of ore or limestone and turn them upside down to load a blast
furnace. Dignitaries at the 1890 opening of a steel mill in Sparrows
Point, Maryland, rode in decorated gondola cars along the route iron
ore would take, being pulled up to a charging platform over eight
stories high.30

The Romance of Steel

“There is a glamor about the making of steel,” John Fitch wrote at
the beginning of his 1910 study of Pittsburgh steelworkers. “The very
size of things—the immensity of the tools, the scale of production—
grips the mind with an overwhelming sense of power. . . . majestic
and illimitable.” Fitch was only the latest in a long line of writers,
artists, and journalists to be fascinated by the making of iron and
steel. More than a half century earlier, Nathaniel Hawthorne was
entranced by “exhibitions of mighty strength, both of men and
machines” during a visit to an iron foundry in Liverpool, where he
watched a twenty-three-ton cannon being made. “We saw lumps of
iron, intensely white-hot, and all but in a melting state, passed
beneath various rollers and . . . converted into long bars, which came
curling and waving out of the rollers like great red ribbons.”
Hawthorne “found much delight in looking at the molten iron, boiling
and bubbling in the furnace,” with “numberless fires on all sides,
blinding us with their intense glow.”31
Fire was a big part of the allure of iron- and steelmaking, the
intense heat, the white molten metal, the glowing red ingots. Heroic
images of workers using fire to turn ore into metal were commonly
featured in nineteenth-century journals, often depicted at night to
heighten the effect of radiant metal in blast furnaces or Bessemer
converters. Several of the drawings Joseph Stella made for the early
twentieth-century Pittsburgh Survey showed men’s faces lit by the
glow of molten metal.
 One of the most common allusions in writing about the Industrial
Revolution was to Prometheus, for giving man powers of the gods.
Fire was the greatest of his gifts, iron and steel the most Promethean
industry. In seeking classical reference for an act of alchemy that
seemed beyond the realm of ordinary mortals, the nineteenth
century also looked to Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and
metalworking. When the Pittsburgh-area puddlers organized a union
in 1858, they called themselves the Sons of Vulcan. An 1890
account of a large steelworks in Newcastle, England, reported that in
the foundry “modern Vulcans, in shirt-sleeves and with unbroken
legs, are still casting thunderbolts.” Artists commonly portrayed iron
and steelworkers as intensely masculine, often bare-chested, with
muscles rippling, a bit like ancient portrayals of Vulcan himself. The
contrast was great to the typical representation of the English textile
worker as a sickly child or the New England textile worker as a well-
dressed young woman.32
But if for some iron- and steelmaking seemed the realm of the
gods, for others it appeared the province of Satan, like the early
English mills had been for Blake. Hawthorne described molten
ribbons of iron as looking “like fiery serpents wriggling out of Tophet,”
the place in the Old Testament where worshippers burnt their
children alive in sacrifices to Moloch and Baal, a hell on earth. Early
in the twentieth century, the manager of an iron and steel mill in
Pueblo, Colorado, wrote, “The steam, the fire, the fluid metal, the
slag and the whir of the machine all ma[d]e it look like it was the
Devil’s Workshop.” For Joseph Stella, Pittsburgh, “Often shrouded by
fog and smoke, . . . ever pulsating, throbbing with the innumerable
explosions of its steel mills—was like the stunning realization of
some of the most stirring infernal regions sung by Dante.” Similarly,
Lincoln Steffens wrote, “I have never lost my first picture of
Pittsburgh when I went there to write about it. It looked like hell,
literally . . . with its fiery furnaces and the two rivers which pinched it
in.” 33
 Figure 3.3 Charles Graham’s 1886 illustration, Making Bessemer Steel at
Pittsburgh.

Hellish though they might have been, iron and steel mills were
often hailed as markers of national greatness and the advance of
civilization. Their growth allowed the introduction of iron and steel
implements on farms and in homes, the mechanization of other
industries, a transformed landscape of railroads, bridges, and
skyscrapers, and imperial power based on giant guns and steel
warships. In 1876, George Thurston described the then-new Edgar
Thomson steel mill in Braddock, Pennsylvania, as “a striking
illustration of . . . the progress of civilization.” “No grander monument
to the growth of the nation . . . or the triumph of American
manufactures and of American mechanics, could well be built.” Mary
Heaton Vorse, a left-wing journalist with a very different sensibility,
nonetheless agreed in her 1920 book Men and Steel: “Our
civilization is forged in the steel towns.” And not just any civilization,
but modernity: “Iron and Steel began the life of the moderns.”
Sociologist Sharon Zukin noted that “Steel has power because it has
been the lifeline of industrial society. . . . Steel is linked upward to the
national government by warfare and international trade, and
downward to the local manufacturing community as an emblem of
economic power.” In the late 1940s, best-selling journalist John
Gunther declared, “The basic power determinant of any country is its
steel production.”34

Class War
Fire, power, but one more thing, too, made iron and steel factories
centers of public attention—labor strife. The English textile industry
sparked a great debate about child labor and working conditions, if
not much effective worker organization. The American textile
industry was hailed, with considerable exaggeration, for harmonious
relations between owners and workers. By contrast, labor conflict
came to be strongly associated with the iron and steel industry, the
site of some of the most dramatic episodes of what can only be
called class war in the history of the United States.
In the decades after the Civil War, the growing power of industrial
capital set off fierce economic and political struggles, at their
broadest about what type of society the United States would be, and
who would decide. Former slaves, farmers, women, and the
unemployed mobilized, as a wide range of voices, far wider than we
hear today—populists, monetary reformers, socialists, anarchists,
social Darwinists, Christian reformers, feminists, and cooperativists
—jumped into debates over social values and structures. Workers
and the organizations they built composed the single most important
force challenging the growing economic and political dominance of
industrialists and financiers during what Mark Twain so aptly labeled
the Gilded Age. Nowhere was labor conflict more intense than in the
iron and steel industry.35
More than any other industry, iron and steel seemed to confirm
the notion that the factory system was creating two, new, hostile
classes. With much higher costs for starting up an iron or steel mill
than a textile mill, capital tended to concentrate in a handful of
powerful firms. For the men who controlled them, usually hands on,
they were not one of many investments—as the textile mills were for
the Boston Associates—but the source of all their wealth and power,
the means to achieve some of the largest fortunes in the country.
Their workers recognized what they were up against. The preamble
to the constitution of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel
Workers declared “Year after year the capital of the country becomes
more and more concentrated in the hands of the few . . . and the
laboring classes are more or less impoverished. It therefore
becomes us as men who have to battle with the stern realities of life,
to look this matter fair in the face.” Only admitting skilled workers, the
Amalgamated’s membership fluctuated with good times and bad,
peaking in 1891 at more than 24,000 members. Its power rested on
a sense of solidarity among its members and their skills, without
which the mills could not operate.36
Or couldn’t until they began mechanizing. New technology and
the shift from iron to steel diminished the number of skilled workers
and the level of skill needed in various phases of production. The
move to steel also increased firm size and created an intensely
competitive atmosphere, both of which worked against labor.
The market for rails, which drove the steel industry until late in
the nineteenth century, fluctuated wildly, encouraging a ruthless
management culture. During economic upswings, there were plenty
of orders for everyone, but in downturns companies had to scramble
and slash prices to keep their mills operating. Steel executives
repeatedly made and broke deals with other companies to fix prices
and divvy up markets, while pressing their subordinates to lower
costs. Mechanization provided one route; reducing wages and
extending hours another. But squeezing labor costs meant having to
take on unions, leading to escalating battles in the 1880s and
1890s.37
The big companies took the lead in fighting the Amalgamated,
equipped with the financial resources and multiple plants to win
extended battles. Homestead saw some of the sharpest clashes. In
1882, the management of the plant (not yet owned by Carnegie)
insisted that to keep their jobs employees had to sign an ironclad
agreement not to join a union. Refusing, several hundred skilled
workers struck for over two months, surviving repeated battles with
private guards and the state militia until the general manager
capitulated. Six years later, Carnegie used a four-month lockout and
Pinkerton National Detective Agency guards to crush the union at his
Edgar Thomson mill and go from a system of three shifts of eight
hours to two shifts of twelve, a rout not only of unionism but of the
standards it had defended.38
The next year, 1889, Carnegie tried to replicate his Thomson
triumph at the Homestead mill, which he had purchased in 1883,
plotting his moves while on a visit to Europe to see the great Paris
exhibition. Once again, his company delivered a take-it-or-leave-it
ultimatum to his workers, locked them out when they rejected it, and
hired Pinkerton guards. But after two efforts to bring in scabs were
repulsed by massive crowds of steelworkers and Homestead
residents, the local manager gave in and negotiated a new
agreement with the Amalgamated Association.39
When the contract expired at the end of June 1892, Carnegie
sought to rid himself of the union once and for all. By then, nearly a
decade of industrial strife had placed the issue of labor relations at
the center of American life. Observers saw Homestead as a
bellwether for the future of class relations. The high productivity of
the Homestead plant and the Amalgamated’s sliding scale made
labor costs at the mill, according to Carnegie’s calculations, above
the norm, while allowing its skilled workers relative comfort, buying
small houses in town (and electing one of their own to lead its
government), purchasing some furnishings, living in decency.
The economic conflict had an ideological dimension. Carnegie
and his partners, determined to drive down labor costs, wanted
complete freedom to set wages and working conditions without union
interference, to control what they saw as solely their property. By
contrast, workers felt they had a moral claim on the company, having
contributed to its success through their skill and toil. Many shared
what at the time was a common democratic vision in which working
people (or at least the white, English-speaking men among them)
should—and in Homestead for a while did—have a say in both civic
and industrial life.40
As the battle loomed, Carnegie again absented himself to
Europe, leaving in charge his partner Henry Clay Frick. Again, the
company prepared an offer it knew the union would reject. As it shut
down operations and locked out its workers, Frick surrounded the
mill with an eleven-foot-high fence, with gun ports and topped by
barbed wire, and contracted with Pinkerton for three hundred guards.
All remained peaceful until the company tried to sneak the
Pinkertons into Homestead on barges. In the middle of the night,
union lookouts spotted them, alerting the town. As the New York
Herald described it, “Like the trumpet of judgement blew the steam
whistle of the electric light works at twenty minutes to three-o’clock
this morning. It was the signal to battle, murder and sudden death,
though not one of the thousands who heard and leaped from their
beds to answer its signal dreamed of how much blood was to flow in
response to its call.” Workers and townspeople positioned on the
steep banks of the Monongahela River kept the well-armed private
army from disembarking, firing a cannon at them (which ended up
killing a union backer by mistake), rolling flaming railcars toward the
moored barges, raining down fireworks and sticks of dynamite, and
pouring oil on the river and setting it on fire. Finally surrendering, the
Pinkertons found themselves beaten, robbed, and humiliated by a
gauntlet of strikers and local residents. Seven workers and three
Pinkertons died in the fighting.
The union victory proved short-lived. Within a week, the governor
of Pennsylvania sent 8,500 men—the state’s entire National Guard
—to occupy Homestead, where they remained until October. This
massive application of state power—accompanied by the indictment
of well over a hundred workers on charges of murder, riot, and
conspiracy—proved the key to the company’s victory. With the troops
in place, it began recruiting scab workers from around the country.
On July 23, anarchist Alexander Berkman attempted to kill Frick—a
rare American example of European-style propaganda by the deed
—but the Carnegie executive proved a tough bird, surviving bullet
and knife wounds, even helping to tackle his assailant. When a
National Guardsman shouted, “Three cheers for the man who shot
Frick,” he was court-martialed and hung from his thumbs. In
November, the union formally gave up.41
Figure 3.4 An Awful Battle at Homestead, Pa., depicting the bloody clash between
Carnegie’s locked-out workers and the Pinkertons in the summer of 1892.

The fight at the Carnegie plant was closely followed across the
country and abroad. A hundred reporters and sketch artists from
major magazines, the press syndicates, and newspapers in
Pittsburgh, New York, St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore,
and London assembled in Homestead to cover the conflict. With
special telegraph lines installed, news from the front lines
immediately spread. Photographers documented the clash as well.
Several companies sold stereoscopic images for home viewing,
providing three-dimensional portrayals of the industrial war.42
The workers’ defeat reverberated far and wide. Having been
pushed out of the most advanced steel mill in the country, the
Amalgamated saw its hold in the industry rapidly deteriorate. Within
a year, more than thirty of the sixty-four mills in southwestern
Pennsylvania rid themselves of the Amalgamated. In the iron
industry, the union maintained strength among puddlers and sheet
and tin plate workers, but even there company resistance and inept
leadership gradually diminished its power. By 1914 it was down to
just 6,500 members.43
Like the early British textile industry, the American iron and steel
industry grew in an atmosphere of denied political rights—free
speech, free assembly, rule of law. With unions weakened or
eliminated, the steel companies came to exert near-autocratic
control over not only the mills but the communities in which they
were located. The town of Homestead sank into a dark era of
suspicion and demoralization. In mid-1894, Hamlin Garland wrote in
McClure’s Magazine, “The town was as squalid and unlovely as
could well be imagined, and the people were mainly of the
discouraged and sullen type to be found everywhere labor passes
into the brutalizing stage of severity.” Theodore Dreiser, who lived in
Homestead for six months that same year, found “a sense of defeat
and sullen despair which was over all.” More than a dozen years
later, when John Fitch came to town, residents shied away from
talking to him, fearful of company spies and retribution. Steel
company influence over Homestead was so great that no halls could
be found for any sort of union meeting. As late as 1933, four
decades after the lockout, the only place in Homestead Secretary of
Labor Frances Perkins could find to address a crowd of workers was
inside a post office, an island of federal authority.44
In 1919, radical critic Floyd Dell called Pittsburgh, across the river
and likewise dominated by the iron and steel industry, “capitalism
armed to the teeth and carrying a chip on its shoulder. . . . lynch-law
carefully codified by a trained legislature and carried out by
uniformed desperadoes.” The city, he suggested, was “an
experiment in what might be called super-capitalism. It is a
sociological experiment, akin (despite the oddity of the comparison)
to the Utopias founded here and there from time to time by
enterprising if unrealistic socialists. But instead of a poor, precarious,
struggling, starved, doomed Utopia, it is a flourishing and, so far,
absolutely triumphant Utopia. It is a Billion Dollar Capitalist Utopia.”45
Often repression and paternalism mixed together. During the
1870s and 1880s, leading European iron and steel companies built
industrial villages, including Krupp in Essen and Schneider in Le
Creusot. Many American companies followed suit. Like the Lowell
textile firms, steel mills in isolated locations needed to provide
housing if they were to attract a workforce. When in the early 1890s
the Pennsylvania Steel Company built its complex at Sparrows
Point, an empty spit of land on the north side of Baltimore’s harbor, it
constructed a new town a half mile from the blast furnaces. Under an
arrangement with the governor of Maryland, the company directly
ran the community, without any local democratic structures. Rufus
Wood, the company executive who designed the town, was the son
of a foreman at the Boott cotton mill in Lowell. He modeled Sparrows
Point on the Massachusetts city, though with mostly family
accommodations rather than boardinghouses. Dwellings ranged in
size and quality from an eighteen-room, three-story colonial for
Wood himself down to small wooden houses without running water
or indoor plumbing for black workers. As in Lowell, elaborate rules
governed behavior not only on the job but in the housing, too.46
The most ambitious mill town scheme came in 1895, when the
Apollo Iron and Steel Company decided to build a new mill a mile
and a half from its existing plant in western Pennsylvania. It
contracted with the firm headed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the
foremost landscape architect and town planner in the country, to
design a new town, Vandergrift, named after the Standard Oil partner
who was the largest investor in the company. Cost concerns kept the
Olmsted plan from being fully realized, but parts of the town featured
curvilinear streets, wide boulevards, scattered small parks, and a
village green, characteristic of the high-end suburbs that were
beginning to surround older cities. But only the best-paid workers
could afford those areas; most lived in a less attractive grid laid out
on one side of town or in an unplanned hovel on another.47
Company officials saw housing as a way to retain workers. Some
companies offered their employees rental housing at below market
rates. Others sold them houses. Carnegie built housing for his
workers just outside Homestead, offering low-interest loans that
could be repaid through small deductions from their pay. Because
many steel mills sat in essentially one-employer towns, home-
owning employees, as their bosses knew, would be reluctant to
jeopardize their jobs in any way, because without them they would
be forced to move. Companies hoped that orderly, well-regulated
communities—both Sparrows Point and Vandergrift banned the sale
of alcohol—would produce orderly, disciplined workers.48
In the early twentieth century, when the world’s largest company
built the world’s largest steel mill, it, too, built a company town. As
the United States recovered from the depression of the 1890s, a
wave of corporate mergers swept through the already highly
concentrated steel industry. In 1901 Carnegie threatened to expand
his finishing operations, in response to the backward integration of
firms that had been purchasing his steel ingots. To avoid
overcapacity and ruinous competition, J. P. Morgan, the country’s
leading financier, arranged a huge merger of steel concerns. For his
interests, Carnegie received $226 million (the equivalent of several
billion dollars today). The new entity, the United States Steel
Corporation, controlled almost 60 percent of the output of the
industry and was widely seen as the very embodiment of industrial
capitalism.49
Four years after its formation, U.S. Steel bought nine thousand
acres on the shore of Lake Michigan, just east of Chicago, where it
erected a massive, sprawling integrated steel mill. To allow boat
delivery of ore from its Minnesota mines, the company built a deep
harbor next to the plant. It also laid out a new city, Gary, named after
its chairman, Elbert H. Gary—American industrialists loved naming
towns after themselves and each other—where it sold vacant lots
and constructed rental housing. Vandergrift, by then part of the U.S.
Steel empire, served as something of a model. But in building the
new city, the company spurned the utopian pretensions of Lowell
and Vandergrift, stating that it was not trying to create a model
community, only building a necessary adjunct to its new facility.50

Scientific Management
Even with unions defeated and worker resistance tamed, steel
companies still struggled to control labor in their mills and reduce
labor costs, an imperative in periods of intense competition. With
sprawling physical facilities and a large array of jobs, managers had
difficulty even knowing what all their workers did, let alone how
efficiently they were working. Skilled workers retained considerable
autonomy, using knowledge accumulated through formal or informal
apprenticeships to determine their methods of work, often effectively
setting their own pace. Foreman pushed unskilled workers using
threats and verbal abuse, with little planning or measurement of
productivity.
Throughout American industry, factories had swollen in size and
complexity without a proportionate increase in managerial personnel
or sophistication. Well into the 1880s, many major firms still
managed labor through the direct presence of top executives. Cyrus
McCormick’s brother and his four assistants long managed the giant
McCormick Works in Chicago. Thomas Edison and three assistants
personally supervised production at his factories in Harrison, New
Jersey, and New York City.51 But with the development of giant
multiplant firms, such personal, informal control was no longer
tenable.
“Systematic management,” later more widely known as “scientific
management,” grew out of a quest for internal corporate controls and
increased productivity, a sweeping effort at reorganizing production.
Its development involved many different companies, engineers, and
managers over an extended period, who instituted a series of
incremental changes that together represented a substantial
transformation in how manufacturing—and later office work—was
carried out. But in the public mind, scientific management became
largely associated with one man, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who
emerged as its leading theoretician, ideologue, and publicist.
Taylor, the son of a prominent, liberal Philadelphia family,
followed an unusual path in spurning college to become an
apprentice machinist and patternmaker, before taking on a series of
factory-management positions and then a career as an industrial
consultant. (In 1876, he took six months off from his apprenticeship
to work at the Centennial Exhibition.) Many of Taylor’s key
innovations took place during the 1880s at Midvale Steel Works, a
Philadelphia producer of high-quality steel products, and then, during
the last years of the nineteenth century, at the much larger
Bethlehem Steel Company. Taylor had an intense interest in the
mechanics of steel production and metalworking, particularly high-
speed machine tools, making numerous technical advances. But his
greater importance lay in applying a systematic, engineering mind-
set to what commonly had been a seat-of-the pants, chaotic
approach to managing manufacturing.
Taylor’s contributions included improvements in cost accounting,
inventory control, tool standardization, and shop floor layout. But his
best-known innovations involved labor. Working among machinists,
Taylor realized how commonly workers set a stint, a maximum
output, designed to conserve their energy and spread out the work.
Managers had no idea what the maximum output could be or what
should constitute a full day’s work. The first step to boosting
productivity, Taylor came to believe, lay in the careful observation
and measurement of workers as they did their jobs, using
stopwatches and, later in the hands of his disciples, stop-action
photography and motion pictures. Once managers understood the
elements of any given task, they could determine the best way to
carry it out and the time it should take to complete.
Critical to the Taylor method was the separation of the planning of
work from its execution, breaking the hallmark of the skilled
craftsperson, his or her ability to conceive of how to make various
items and then to do the work themselves. All planning, Taylor
believed, should be in the hands of management, in a specialized
planning department (something previously all but unknown). Using
knowledge of machinery and worker practices gathered through
systematic observation, workers would be given detailed instructions
about how to carry out each task (usually in the form of an instruction
card). Pay would be calculated by a piecework system that rewarded
with higher rates workers who met specified production norms and
penalized those unable or unwilling to meet management-dictated
standards.
For skilled workers in particular, like the machinists that steel
companies employed to make finished products and maintain their
equipment, Taylorism meant a loss of autonomy and an attack on
craft pride, as well as an intensification of work, leading to fierce
battles. But Taylor always claimed his system would benefit workers
as well as company owners, because the increases in productivity
that would result from scientific management were so great that
workers could be given higher pay even as company profits rose. In
an example Taylor repeatedly used in publicizing his system, a
Bethlehem laborer he called Schmidt, who was loading pig iron into
railroad cars, increased his daily tonnage to forty-seven tons, from a
previous gang average of twelve and a half, by following precise
instructions. For his increased output, Schmidt received a wage
boost from $1.15 to $1.85 a day. His wages thus went up by roughly
60 percent, while output nearly quadrupled, a good deal for the
company though also a gain, if much more modest, for the worker. At
least in theory, scientific management, or Taylorism as it was
sometimes called, made the struggle between workers and owners
over wages no longer a zero-sum game. For this reason, in the eyes
of many Progressive Era reformers, scientific management held the
promise of eliminating or at least ameliorating the class conflict that
had come with industrialization and the giant factory, without
fundamentally restructuring society.52

The Road to 1919

In practice, at least in the short run, scientific management failed to
have much effect on the growing class tensions in the steel industry
and the nation. Steelmaking remained a difficult and dangerous
undertaking even with greater managerial presence and after
mechanization eliminated some of the most arduous labor (along
with many skilled, higher-paid positions).
After Carnegie’s Homestead victory, the twelve-hour day became
the norm in iron and steelmaking jobs. (Some positions, especially
finishing work, had shorter hours.) Bessemer furnace workers and
many others typically toiled for thirteen consecutive twelve-hour day
or night shifts and then, after a day off, worked a “long turn” of
twenty-four hours, which put them on the opposite shift for the next
two weeks. The schedule wreaked havoc on their lives, making
normal family life impossible and wearing men out at an early age.
 During their shifts, workers had stretches of extremely
demanding labor in almost unbearable heat. When open-hearth
furnaces were tapped, the molten metal could be as hot as three
thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Workers had to stand over giant
ladles containing the liquid steel to throw in heavy bags of scrap
metal and alloys to adjust the final chemical composition. In a sheet
mill, John Fitch observed “men standing on floors so hot that a drop
of water spilled would hiss like a drop on a stove.” They wore special
shoes with thick wooden soles to provide at least some protection.53
Long hours, giant mechanical devices, crisscrossing rail lines,
and molten metal made steelwork extraordinarily dangerous. In just
one year, from July 1, 1906, to June 30, 1907, Allegheny County,
Pennsylvania, which included Pittsburgh, Homestead, Braddock, and
other metalmaking towns, recorded 195 accident-related deaths in
the iron and steel industry. If death or maiming did not get a
steelworker, occupational disease very well might, like the fine dust
that pervaded the air in steel mills, ravaging workers’ lungs, or the
relentless noise that led to widespread hearing loss.54
For years the companies showed little concern about the effect of
long hours and dangerous conditions on their employees, whom they
regarded—at least the unskilled workers—as easily replaceable. And
they were. Starting in the 1880s, a flood of Southern and Eastern
European immigrants entered the steel mills (except in the
Birmingham, Alabama, area, the major southern iron and steel
district, where African Americans filled many of the unskilled jobs). In
March 1907, in the former Carnegie mills in Allegheny County,
11,694 of the 14,359 common laboring jobs were filled by Eastern
Europeans. The immigrants largely had been peasants or migrant
laborers, coming to America without their families for what they
expected to be a limited period, hoping to make enough money to
buy land, pay off a mortgage, or set up a shop back home. Some
eventually decided to stay, sending for wives and children, but many
returned. As in Lowell, the rotating workforce provided something of
a safety valve for the owners, less likely to organize than more
permanent workers. Linguistic and cultural barriers between the
unskilled immigrants and the skilled workers, who generally were
native-born or from the British Isles, and among the immigrant
groups, also made organizing difficult, giving the steel companies
free rein.55
Or at least for a while. In the early years of the twentieth century,
immigrant steelworkers began demonstrating their discontent in
protests and strikes. Most were short and without union involvement.
But in 1909, five thousand immigrant and native-born workers
conducted a prolonged walkout at the Pressed Steel Car Company,
a U.S. Steel subsidiary, in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. More than
a dozen men died as the company and local authorities repeatedly
tried to bust the strike through physical force. Ultimately, U.S. Steel
was forced to give in to the strikers’ demands, a sharp reversal after
a string of company victories against organized labor and its
declaration, just before the walkout, that going forward it would
operate on a strictly nonunion basis in all of its plants.56
The episodic immigrant strikes led the steel companies to pay
more attention to labor policies and to seek favor with their workers,
especially because they occurred at the same time that the industry
was coming under scrutiny from middle-class reformers. Their
interest flowed from a broad concern with what came to be called
“the labor question.” Narrowly construed, the labor question meant
how to maintain orderly relations between employers and employees
and prevent the outbursts of labor warfare that had become common
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1875
and 1910, state troops were called out nearly five hundred times to
deal with labor unrest and at least several hundred persons died in
strike-related violence. But for many labor activists, reformers,
politicians, and even some business leaders, the question implied
more. What place should workers have in American society? What
say should they have in the workplace and in politics? And, most
broadly, was democracy possible in an industrialized society with
great economic inequality, and if so, what did it mean?57
By the start of the twentieth century, the factory-based, corporate-
controlled Industrial Revolution had radically changed society. For
millions of workers who entered the factory, leaving behind villages
or farms in New England, Ireland, Italy, or Eastern Europe, wage
work, industrial time discipline, and mechanized production were
new and often troubling experiences. Just as industrial work was
strange to them, the industrial worker was strange—and threatening
—to many more prosperous Americans, especially employers. In
1889, three years before he crushed his workers at Homestead,
Carnegie wrote, “We assemble thousands of operatives in the
factory, and in the mine, and in the counting-house, of whom the
employer can know little or nothing, and to whom the employer is
little better than a myth. . . . Rigid castes are formed, and, as usual,
mutual ignorance breeds mutual distrust.”58
Early in the new century, a number of middle-class writers
dressed up as workers and plunged into working-class life to report
about a world utterly unfamiliar to better-off elements of society.
Whiting Williams, a former personnel director at a Cleveland steel
mill, spent nine months working undercover in steel mills, an iron
mine, a coal mine, and an oil refinery to write What’s On the Workers
Mind, By One Who Put on Overalls to Find Out. Pioneer social
workers and social scientists set out on a similar mission, in line with
the Progressive Era belief in the reforming potential of exposure.
Concerned about the brutalization of moral life brought about by
industrialization and sympathetic to the plight of immigrant workers,
these middle-class reformers nonetheless worried about the threat
they posed unless assimilated to civil society and national culture.
The steel industry was a natural focus for their concern. The
centrality of steel to the economy gave it special importance. The
formation of U.S. Steel as the largest corporation ever created added
to the sense that steel had to be a matter of public concern, not
strictly a private endeavor. The juxtaposition of the toll steelmaking
took on workers with the extraordinary rewards reaped by mill
owners—the formation of U.S. Steel made Carnegie “the richest man
in the world,” Morgan told him—commanded the attention of not just
unionists and political radicals, but a broad swath of the nation.59
In 1907 and 1908, several dozen investigators descended on the
Pittsburgh area to conduct a massive study of work, workers, and
civil life centered on the steel industry. Funded by the newly formed
Russell Sage Foundation, the Pittsburgh Survey staff included some
of the leading reform intellectuals of the day, like economist John L.
Commons and Florence Kelly, a settlement house resident,
suffragist, and consumer advocate, who had been the first to
translate Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England
into English. The survey produced dozens of articles, six large
books, and a photographic exhibition that documented life and labor
in the Pittsburgh area, a model for the kind of foundation-funded
social science that soon became prevalent. The picture painted by
the survey was grim: families unable to live on an unskilled
steelworkers’ wages, poor housing, dangerous jobs, and a climate of
repression.60
In the wake of the Pittsburgh Survey, the McKees Rocks strike,
and a subsequent walkout at a Bethlehem Steel mill in South
Bethlehem, the Senate launched an investigation of the steel
industry and the Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against
U.S. Steel. The giant corporation, mindful of its precarious legal
situation, sensitive to public opinion, and not facing the competitive
pressures that characterized the industry before its creation, made
some modest improvements in working conditions. It started giving
more workers Sundays off, reducing the seven-day workweek to six
days, but it clung tightly to the twelve-hour work shift, which it
claimed a necessity (even though in other countries steel companies
succeeded without it). Steel companies launched employee stock-
purchase and pension plans and a safety campaign (responding not
just to bad publicity but also to the growing crop of state laws
requiring employers to provide accident insurance to their workers).
Fundamentally, though, industry leaders stood pat, successfully
repulsing all efforts, from workers and middle-class reformers alike,
for basic change.61
Their most severe test came in 1919, when workers across the
country mounted the most radical challenge to industrial capitalism in
American history, part of a great, worldwide surge of reform and
revolutionary sentiment. World War I transformed labor relations.
The combination of a war-induced economic boom and an
immigration cutoff created a labor shortage that left workers in a
strong bargaining position, no longer fearful of losing their jobs since
others could be easily found. With inflation pushing up prices,
workers bounced from job to job, went on strike, and joined unions to
better their lot. To keep labor strife from interrupting war production,
the Woodrow Wilson administration, with strong input from the
American Federation of Labor (AFL), set up a series of
administrative bodies and promulgated regulations designed to give
workers new rights on the job. Companies were forced to end
discrimination against union members and enter discussions with
worker councils (though not unions per se). Under these
circumstances, union membership increased by nearly 70 percent
between 1917 and 1920, reaching just over five million. More than
one out of every six nonagricultural workers carried a union card.
Combined with the radical fervor set off by the Russian Revolution, a
wave of near-millennial enthusiasm swept through working-class
quarters. In 1918, the young leader of the clothing workers’ union,
Sidney Hillman, wrote to his infant daughter that “Messiah is arriving.
He may be with us any minute. . . . Labor will rule and the World will
be free.”62
The steel industry was hit especially hard by changed labor
market conditions and wartime federal progressivism. With
immigration from Europe blocked by the fighting, the steel
companies found themselves unable to tap their usual source for
unskilled labor. In the spring of 1916, they began recruiting black
workers from the rural South. But with the military draft soon pulling
men out of their plants, a labor shortage remained, emboldening
workers to launch a series of strikes. Meanwhile, under intense
pressure from the federal government, the industry adopted the
eight-hour day as its standard, though in practice that largely meant
paying workers time-and-a-half for the last four hours of their twelve-
hour shifts.63
With conditions favorable, unions decided to take another shot at
organizing steel. This time the impetus came from two militant,
Chicago-based unionists, John Fitzpatrick, the head of the Chicago
Federation of Labor, and William Z. Foster, the future head of the
American Communist Party, who had developed a new organizing
model in their successful drive to unionize the meatpacking industry.
Recognizing the impossibility of organizing large-scale industrial
companies on a craft union basis, they convinced the AFL to set up
the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers, with
which twenty-four unions affiliated. Organizing was centrally
directed, with workers steered to the union appropriate for their job
only after they had signed up with the National Committee.64
Launched in September 1918 in the Chicago region, the
organizing drive, with the slogan “Eight Hours and the Union,” got off
to a fast start. Many immigrant steelworkers by then had decided to
remain in the United States, giving them a greater stake in future job
conditions. Unionists turned the democratic rhetoric of the war
against industrial autocracy, giving the drive something of a patriotic
air. Though short on money and organizers, it soon spread to
Pittsburgh and other regions.
The end of the war made things much harder for unions.
Companies began laying off workers and reverted to their hard-
nosed antiunionism, defying government decrees that in theory
remained in effect. In the Pittsburgh area, the National Committee
had to wage a relentless battle simply to secure the right to
assemble, as mill town officials, acting on behalf of the steel
companies, forbid union meetings and even street rallies. It took
mass arrests and national publicity to win modest cracks in the solid
wall of antidemocratic practices. Still, in a measure of how much
steelworkers resented company control over their lives and the new
spirit ushered in by the war, more than a hundred thousand workers
—the National Committee claimed a quarter of a million—signed up
in the union drive.
The steelworker mobilization took place against the background
of an extraordinary national wave of strikes, the largest in U.S.
history proportional to the size of the workforce. Unions sought to
maintain their wartime organizational gains and increase wages to
keep up with inflation, while companies fought to roll back union
advances and reestablish their dominance. Four million workers—
one fifth of the workforce—took part in the strike wave, which
included a general strike in Seattle, a police strike in Boston, a
telephone operators strike in New England, an actors strike in New
York, and, at the end of 1919, a strike by four hundred thousand coal
miners. Everyone, it seemed, was walking off the job.65
The leaders of the steel-organizing drive hoped to avoid a strike,
fully cognizant of the power of the companies. But Elbert Gary, the
leader of U.S. Steel and effectively of the whole industry, rejected all
requests for negotiations, even a private one from President Wilson.
With workers increasingly restless and the companies firing activists,
on September 22, 1919, the National Committee, feeling it had no
alternative, launched the first national steel strike in American
history. Within a week, some 250,000 workers—half the industry
workforce—stopped work.
In a reversal of the usual past pattern, the strike was strongest
among immigrant and unskilled workers, though many skilled
workers supported it as well. In some regions, like Chicago, Buffalo,
Youngstown, and Cleveland, the strike was nearly 100 percent
effective, forcing the mills to shut down. But at the Bethlehem Steel
plants, strike leader William Z. Foster estimated only about half the
workers went out, while in the Pittsburgh area, the most important,
the strike was 75–85 percent effective. In the South, it barely made a
dent.
The companies fought back hard. Wherever they could, they kept
plants in token operation, even if unprofitable, bringing in white
scabs from Northern cities and black scabs from the South. State
police, deputy sheriffs, private guards, and vigilantes operating on
their behalf launched what Foster termed a “reign of terror.” Pickets
and organizers were arrested and driven out of town, mounted police
attacked picketers and demonstrators and even a funeral
procession, rallies were banned, strikers were shot. In Gary, the
governor declared martial law and 1,500 regular Army troops
occupied the city. A score of people were killed during the conflict,
almost all strikers or their sympathizers, and hundreds were
seriously injured.66
To a greater extent than in previous industrial battles, both sides
recognized the importance of public opinion to the outcome.
Company propaganda portrayed the worker action as not an
industrial dispute but an attempted revolution, playing on the
antiradicalism that came in reaction to the Russian Revolution.
Foster’s past record of radicalism was uncovered and widely
publicized. The anti-Red, anti-strike campaign had a decidedly
nativist tone, as it portrayed immigrant strikers as “un-American.”
The press generally supported the companies, while the Wilson
administration, by then in sharp retreat from its wartime
progressivism, failed to back the strikers, leaving them on their own
in taking on the most powerful companies in the world.67
Slowly the employers began increasing production, as some
workers, at first mostly skilled, began returning to their jobs and new
workers were recruited and trained. Tens of thousands of strikers
stuck it out into the winter. But on January 8, 1920, the National
Committee acknowledged the futility of going on, ordering its
members to return to work in what Foster himself called an
“unconditional surrender.”
The 1919 strike had been a test of the ability of organized labor
to penetrate the great national manufacturing companies, backed
and controlled by the most powerful financial interests. Its failure
meant that for another generation the largest and most advanced
factories in the United States would remain nonunion and their
workers outcasts.
Yet even as it remained a fortress of industrial autocracy, the
steel industry maintained its allure, even among those with little
sympathy for the owners. The scale, power, and elemental
processes of steelmaking commanded attention separate from the
social arrangements that surrounded them. Neither the fierce
discontent of labor, nor the well-documented dangers and difficulties
of work in giant factories, nor the massive accumulation of power in
the hands of the plutocracy that owned them dented the enthusiasm,
cutting across the political spectrum, for the processes and products
of the steel and other manufacturing industries, so proudly displayed
at the world’s fairs. Mary Heaton Vorse, who volunteered as a
publicist for the strikers in 1919 and was a model for one of John
Dos Passos’s characters in his account of the clash in The Big
Money, was far from alone when she wrote a year later, “I would
rather see steel poured than hear a great orchestra.” The steel mill
had become the modern sublime.68
 CHAPTER 4

“I WORSHIP FACTORIES”
Fordism, Labor, and the Romance of the Giant
Factory

INA 1926 ENTRY IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA, Henry Ford (or the
publicist who ghostwrote the article) defined “mass production” as
“the modern method by which great quantities of a single
standardized commodity are manufactured.” If anyone knew about
the manufacture of “great quantities of a single standardized
commodity,” it was Ford. His Model T, introduced in 1908, turned the
automobile from a luxury plaything into a mass-consumer good. Prior
to then, automobile companies typically manufactured at most a few
thousand cars a year. By 1914, the Ford Motor Company was rolling
out nearly a quarter of a million Model Ts annually. By the time the
company stopped selling the iconic model in 1927, fifteen million had
been produced.1
Henry Ford’s worldwide fame stemmed as much from the
methods his company used to make the Model T as from the car
itself. To manufacture it, the Ford Motor Company built some of the
largest factories that ever had been seen and introduced countless
technical and organizational innovations, including the assembly line,
which enormously increased the speed and efficiency of production.
To control the tens of thousands of workers who populated its plants,
the company devised new methods of labor management that
extended beyond the factory walls into workers’ homes and minds.
Ford pioneered what amounted to a new political economy of
inexpensive consumer products that transformed people’s lives,
high-volume factories to produce them, and high wages and strict
controls to discipline the workforce. Before Ford himself popularized
the term “mass production,” commentators often spoke of “Fordism,”
“Ford methods,” or the “Ford system,” appropriate terms for the new
production, distribution, and consumption regime, for it was Henry
Ford and the Ford Motor Company that ushered in a new phase of
industrialization and a factory scale that would be unsurpassed for
nearly a century.2
Just as the “factory system” of early nineteenth-century England
captured the interest and imagination of journalists, political activists,
writers, and artists, so, too, did the “Ford system” of the twentieth
century. Once again, it seemed like a new world was aborning. Part
of what made Fordism so transfixing was the promise of a wholesale
rise in the standard of living and amelioration of the class conflict that
had been shaking the United States. In 1924 merchant and reformer
Edward Filene wrote that in Fordism lay “a finer and fairer future than
most of us have even dared to dream.” Beyond the social
implications of Fordism, many writers, painters, filmmakers, and
photographers were entranced by the physical structures in which it
unfolded. More than with earlier industrial production, artists and
intellectuals explicitly linked Fordism to modernist trends in art and
society. The great photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who
through her work in Fortune and Life magazines did more than any
other individual to popularize industrial imagery, captured the age
when she bluntly declared “I worship factories.”3

The Road to Mass Production

The Ford system was a culmination of past manufacturing practices
and a radical break from them. Almost from the start, American
factories had been engaged in the production of “great quantities of
a single standardized commodity,” be it the white sheeting made in
Waltham or the rails that drove the expansion of the iron and steel
industry. But automobiles were of an entirely different order of
complexity. It was a long road to enable such complicated machinery
to be produced on a mass scale.
Fordism built on two manufacturing innovations, interchangeable
parts and continuous flow. Until the early nineteenth century,
products with interacting metal parts, like guns or clocks, were
individually made by skilled artisans, who spent a great deal of time
fitting together parts, filing and adjusting them to make sure they
worked together. No one finished product was exactly like the next.
The standardization of parts occurred first in the United States.
Generally, introducing interchangeable parts initially increased the
cost of production, since it required a huge investment in specialized
machines, tools, jigs, and fixtures and a great deal of
experimentation to achieve the tolerances that made it possible to
assemble a product from a pile of parts without custom fitting. The
key innovations took place before the Civil War in New England
armories. The military greatly valued the ease of repair allowed by
interchangeable parts and cared less about costs than private
manufacturers. “Armory practice” slowly spread to the making of
clocks, sewing machines, typewriters, agricultural equipment,
bicycles, and other civilian products.4
American conditions promoted standardization and
interchangeability. A mass market existed that justified heavy capital
investment and that was hard to take full advantage of without
uniformity. In 1855, 400,000 brass clocks were produced in the
United States. During the Civil War, three million rifles were used.5 A
shortage of skilled workers and relatively high wages made it
expensive and sometimes impossible to produce complex products
in large quantities using traditional artisanal methods. With
interchangeable parts, skilled workers were still needed to build
specialized machinery and tooling, but less skilled workers could
churn out parts and assemble them.6
None of this was easy to achieve. The Singer Manufacturing
Company, one of the most celebrated manufacturers of its day,
illustrated the challenge. Well before the Civil War, the company
emerged as a leader in the sewing machine industry, selling a high-
priced model made with traditional metalworking techniques. During
the war, Singer began mechanizing, but it would take almost two
decades before the company fully achieved interchangeable parts. In
the interim, it expanded by hiring more and more workers to make
parts using some specialized machinery and employing fleets of
fitters, who filed and adjusted them. The factory Singer erected in
Elizabethport, New Jersey, in 1873 was reportedly the largest in the
United States making one product in a single building. Journalists
wrote about it, tourists visited it, it appeared on postcards. Along with
a second Singer plant in Scotland, it produced an extraordinary 75
percent of the world’s sewing machines. Yet even when in 1880 the
company was turning out a half million machines a year, they were
still assembled, like almost all complex metal products at the time, by
carrying all the needed parts to workstations where workers
assembled one machine at a time, filing and finishing when less than
true interchangeability had been achieved.7
Continuous flow operation ultimately led to a radically different
approach to assembly. The idea of keeping material moving as
workers conducted various operations first developed in industries
handling liquid or semiliquid products, most notably oil refining. Grain
milling, brewing, and canning came next. But the industry that
apparently had the greatest influence on Ford was meatpacking,
where the disassembly of animals was done by hanging newly killed
carcasses on an overhead conveyor, moving them from worker to
worker, each of whom made a particular cut or removed particular
pieces, until the animal had been reduced to smaller chunks of meat
that might then undergo further processing. Implicit in continuous
flow processing was an intense division of labor; each worker
performed just one or a few operations on something going by or
momentarily standing still, rather than many operations on a
stationary object.8
Ford began experimenting with continuous assembly in 1913, five
years after introducing the Model T. Henry Ford had been born
during the Civil War, to a farm family in Dearborn, Michigan, near
Detroit. Beginning as a machine shop apprentice, he worked his way
up through a variety of jobs before becoming the chief engineer in
Detroit for the Edison Illuminating Company. He built his first car in
1896, proving his models’ worth by racing them. He founded the
Ford Motor Company in 1903 with investors who supplied the capital
needed to take on the expensive business of making automobiles. In
1907 he wrested control of the firm from his partners. Aiming at rural
America, Ford conceived of the Model T as a lightweight vehicle,
sturdy enough to withstand the terrible roads that farmers depended
on but simple enough for them to repair themselves and for him to
produce at a price they could afford.9
Sold through a network of independent distributors, the Model T
proved an instant hit. Sales zoomed from 5,986 units in 1908 to
260,720 in 1913, as the price of the touring model dropped from
$850 to $550 ($13,629 in 2017 dollars).10 Part of the reason Ford
could make so many cars and sell them so cheaply was product
standardization. “The way to make automobiles,” Henry Ford said,
“is to make one automobile just like another . . . . just like one pin is
like another pin when it comes from the pin factory, or one match is
like another match when it comes from the match factory.” Ford,
perhaps unconsciously, echoed Adam Smith’s famous use of pin
manufacturing in The Wealth of Nations to illustrate the savings that
could come from the division of labor in producing a standardized
product. From 1909 on, the Ford Motor Company only produced the
Model T. The vehicle’s different body styles all used the same
chassis. For most of its history, it was available only in black.11
With just one model produced in high volume, Ford could invest
heavily in equipment and experimentation to manufacture it as
efficiently as possible. The tremendous profits the Model T
generated freed him from depending on outside investors or Wall
Street—which he despised—to expand his plants and add new
machinery. Ford toolmakers developed specialized fixtures and jigs
to simplify and speed up operations. One machine simultaneously
drilled forty-five holes into engine blocks from four sides, replacing
the numerous setups and operations needed for the same result
using traditional methods. The adoption of single-purpose machinery
also helped ensure that tolerances would be met for
interchangeability and easy assembly. The company boasted that
“You might travel round the world in a Model T and exchange
crankshafts with any other Model T you met enroute, and both
engines would work as perfectly after the exchange as before. . . . All
Ford parts of the same kind are perfectly interchangeable.”
Specialized machines also were a strategy to deal with the
severe shortage, high wages, and union orientation of skilled
workers in the Detroit area as the automobile industry took off. Ford
engineers called their jigs and fixtures “farmers’ tools,” since they
allowed new workers to produce high-quality parts, lessening the
need for skilled machinists and their craft culture. (Preferring workers
with no craft background had a long history among American
manufacturers; arms maker Samuel Colt once said “the more
ignorant a man was, the more brains he had for my purpose.”) The
Ford company also made extensive use of stamped parts, a practice
adopted from the bicycle industry, cheaper and easier than casting
and machining.12
For most of the nineteenth century, standard machine shop
practice had been to group machines together by type—all lathes in
one area, drill presses in another, and so on—which required a
significant expenditure of manpower to move pieces from one area
to another as the production process proceeded. By the early
twentieth century, the most advanced manufacturers, including the
Olds Motor Works, which made the Oldsmobile, and Ford began
what Ford called “the planned orderly progression of the commodity
through the shop.” Placing machine tools, carbonizing furnaces, and
other equipment in the sequence in which they were used reduced
the time spent on transporting unfinished parts and made
immediately obvious where holdups were occurring. Here was a
spatial embodiment of the logical flow Marx saw in the mid-
nineteenth century when he wrote that in a “real machinery system”
“[e]ach detail machine supplies raw material to the machine next in
order.”
At Ford, progressive placement of machinery went hand in hand
with an ever-greater division of labor. Each workstation was manned
by a worker who did only one or a few tasks, usually simplified by the
creation of equipment designed to do just those operations, over and
over again. The gains in productivity were enormous. In 1905, with
three hundred workers, Ford produced twenty-five cars a day; three
years later, with some five hundred workers, it rolled out one
hundred.13
Next came installing mechanical devices to move parts from one
workstation to another, rather than doing so by hand, applying
continuous flow processing to complex manufacturing. In 1913, Ford
began experimenting with a conveyor system in its foundry and with
slide rails and tables for assembling magnetos and transmissions,
having workers stand still while parts for processing or assembling
moved past them. Before the new system was installed, it took a
single worker about twenty minutes to assemble a magneto at a
stationary workbench. After Ford introduced what would become
called an assembly line, splitting up the process into twenty-nine
separate steps, it took fourteen workers a cumulative time of five
minutes to make a magneto, a fourfold increase in productivity.14
Inspired by the enormous savings, Ford engineers turned to the
assembly of chassis and finished cars. Originally, Ford assembled its
cars following the standard practice for manufacturing complex
machinery: “we simply started to put a car together at a spot on the
floor,” Ford recalled, “and workmen brought to it the parts as they
were needed in exactly the same way that one builds a house.”
Other early automakers also used the “craft method” of assembling
vehicles on stationary sawhorses or wooden stands.
With the Model T, Ford moved from having a team of workers
assemble an entire automobile to breaking down the assembly
process into many discrete steps. At stationary stands, arrayed in a
large circle, cars were put together piece by piece, with parts carried
to the stands as they were needed. But rather than working on one
car until it was completed, workers walked around the circle, at each
stand doing just one particular operation—attaching the frame to the
axles or fitting in the engine or installing the steering wheel. After the
last operation (fitting in the floorboards), the completed car was
removed for testing and shipment and the first parts for a new
vehicle were laid out at the station. In mid-1913, the Model T
assembly area had a hundred stations, with five hundred assemblers
cycling around them and another hundred workers bringing them
parts.15
Figure 4.1 The magneto assembly line at Ford’s Highland Park factory in Detroit in
1913.

From there it was just one small step, but a world-historic

revolution, to keeping the workers stationary and moving the
vehicles as they were being assembled. In August 1913, Ford
engineers tried pulling chassis frames through a corridor of
preplaced parts, with assemblers walking along with the vehicles
installing them. Then they switched to positioning stationary workers
along the path of the vehicles, having them attach parts to the
chassis being slowly pulled past by a chain drive below. By April
1914, the assembly line had reduced the labor time needed for final
assembly of a car from twelve and a half hours to ninety-three
minutes.
The success of the final assembly line led to a burst of
innovation, as Ford engineers introduced gravity slides, rollways,
conveyor belts, chain-driven assembly lines, and other material-
handling systems to various subassembly operations, everything
from putting together motors to upholstering seats. Many of the
subassembly lines fed directly into the final line, delivering engines,
wheels, radiators, other components, and, ultimately, finished bodies
to the appropriate spots for their installation on the moving chassis.
Just as at the Derby silk mill and the Waltham cotton mill, a new
system of production came together in a remarkably short period of
time. In less than two years after the first experiments with the
assembly line, Ford had installed the system for all phases of Model
T production. The factory had become one huge, integrated
machine.16

Ford Labor Problems and the Five Dollar Day

Some of the productivity gain of the assembly line came from the
greater efficiency of material handling. Some came from the
increased division of labor. But much of it came from the sheer
intensification of work, the elimination of the ability of workers to
wander around looking for a part or tool, to slow down while a
foreman wasn’t watching, or to store up finished parts to allow
resting later on. For assembly-line workers, work was relentless and
repetitious, a single task or just a few done over and over again,
every time a new part or subassembly or chassis appeared before
them.17
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, management
experts considered “soldiering” (workers deliberately working at less
than a maximum possible pace) the paramount obstacle to efficiency
and profits. To counter it, they devised all sorts of schemes, from
elaborate systems of piecework pay to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s
“scientific management.” The assembly line provided an alternate
solution to the same problem, having machinery set the pace of work
rather than foremen or incentives. Well before Ford adopted the
assembly line, packing house managers saw the possibilities in
mechanically pacing production; in 1903, a Swift supervisor said, “if
you need to turn out a little more, speed up the conveyers a little and
the men speed up to keep pace.”18
Assembly-line work proved physiologically and psychologically
draining in ways other types of labor were not. More than ever
before, workers were extensions of machinery, at the mercy of its
demands and its pace. One worker complained, “The weight of a
tack in the hands of an upholsterer is insignificant, but if you have to
drive eight tacks in every Ford cushion that goes by your station
within a certain time, and know that if you fail to do it you are going
to tie up the entire platform, and you continue to do this for four
years, you are going to break under the strain.” Another said, “If I
keep putting on Nut No. 86 for about 86 more days, I will be Nut No.
86 in the Pontiac bughouse.” Ford workers complained that
assembly-line work left them in a nervous condition they dubbed
“Forditis.” Speed, dexterity, and endurance, not knowledge and skill,
were the attributes needed for assembly-line work. Men aged quickly
on the line, no longer considered desirable workers well before
middle age.19
The swelling sales of Model Ts left the Ford Motor Company with
a voracious appetite for labor, especially “operators,” unskilled
workers who by 1913 constituted a majority of the workforce. From
about 450 employees in 1908, the company leaped to roughly
14,000 in 1913. The Highland Park factory, where Model Ts were
made, averaged 12,888 workers in 1914, a size that surpassed even
the largest nineteenth-century plants.
Highland Park was not unique. Big and very big factories were
becoming more common in the United States. In 1914 there were
648 manufacturing establishments with over one thousand workers.
By 1919, there were 1,021 (54 of which made automobiles or
automobile parts or bodies), which together employed 26.4 percent
of the manufacturing workforce. Rising demand led firms to expand
existing facilities, as many companies preferred to keep
manufacturing centralized near their administrative headquarters,
expediting supervision and coordination. General Electric had 15,000
workers at its Schenectady, New York, complex and 11,000 at a
plant in Lynn, Massachusetts. Pullman and International Harvester
each employed 15,000 workers at their Chicago plants. Goodyear
Tire and Rubber had 15,500 employees in Akron, Ohio.
With its best-selling car and assembly-line operations, Ford soon
leaped to a whole new scale. In 1916, Highland Park averaged
32,702 workers; in 1924, 42,000.20 Photographs of the inside of the
plant show workers standing literally elbow to elbow, a density of
human labor unlike anything seen in textile or steel mills or other
types of manufacturing. They were crammed together not just
because of their sheer numbers but by design. Ford engineers
wanted workers and machines placed as close to one another as
possible, to minimize the time and effort needed to transport parts
and subassemblies.21
When Ford introduced the assembly line, extraordinarily high
turnover added to the company’s difficulty in meeting its ever-
growing need for workers. Turnover was a general problem for
American industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Skilled workers were loyal to their craft, not their employer,
often changing jobs to learn new skills or try a different environment.
Unskilled workers left their jobs to seek higher pay, to take a
vacation (in an era before employers provided any), when they had a
dispute with a foreman, or for myriad other reasons. Staying put had
no particular benefit.22
Ford methods pushed the turnover rate through the roof. Many
workers hated Ford’s extremely routinized, repetitive work and the
stressful pace of production, quitting often after only short tenures.
Most simply walked away, never formally resigning. In 1913, the year
the assembly line was introduced, Ford had an astounding turnover
rate of 370 percent. To maintain a workforce of a bit less than
14,000, that year the company had to hire more than 52,000
workers. Absenteeism added to the difficulties; on any given day, 10
percent of Ford workers did not show up.
Ford had other labor problems, too. Increasingly, the labor pool in
Detroit was made up of immigrant workers, especially in the
unskilled ranks. In 1914, foreign-born workers made up 71 percent of
the Ford workforce, from twenty-two different national groups. A
babel of languages meant that workers often could not communicate
with foremen or one another. One supervisor recalled that “every
foreman had to learn in English, German, Polish and Italian” to say
“hurry up.” Ethnic tensions sometimes exploded into fistfights. In
January 1914, the company fired over eight hundred Greek and
Russian workers for staying home to celebrate what by their
Orthodox Christian calendar was Christmas but for the company was
just another production day.
Detroit automakers, including Ford, also worried about unions.
The introduction of the assembly line coincided with a national surge
of labor militancy. In Detroit, both the radical Industrial Workers of the
World and the new Carriage, Wagon, and Automobile Workers’
Union, affiliated with the more moderate American Federation of
Labor, launched organizing drives in the auto industry, leading a few
short strikes. Their gains were modest, but their specter haunted
employers.23
Ford responded to its labor problems with a program of higher
pay and shorter hours, “The Five Dollar Day.” Already, the company
had begun instituting policies to retain employees and increase their
productivity. In 1913, it introduced a multitiered wage plan that
boosted pay as workers’ skills grew and, with longevity, a spur to
self-improvement and steady employment. In early January 1914,
the company went farther, shortening the workday from nine hours to
eight (six days a week), which reduced the strain on workers while
allowing Highland Park to go from two shifts to three. And more
dramatically, it announced that it would effectively double the wages
of unskilled workers, from somewhat below $2.50 to $5.00 a day.
The wage boost set a precedent for mass production, especially
automobile manufacturing, to be a high-wage system. Supporters
hailed high wages for allowing workers to buy the kinds of goods
they made, creating the mass purchasing power necessary to keep
mass production going.
But the Five Dollar Day was more ambitious and more
complicated than just a wage boost. Technically, it was not a pay
increase at all but a possibility for workers to get what was dubbed a
profit-sharing payment that would bring their daily income up to five
dollars. Qualification was not automatic; women were not eligible (at
least initially), male workers generally had to be over twenty-one,
and, most importantly, they had to abide by a set of standards and
regulations the company set, aimed not only at behavior in the
factory but away from it, too. Workers had to be legally married to
their partners, “properly” support their families, maintain good “home
conditions,” demonstrate thrift and sobriety, and be efficient at their
jobs. Ford established a “Sociological Department” to investigate if
workers were eligible for the profit sharing and to guide them in
behavioral change if they were not.
Fifty investigators, often accompanied by translators, made home
visits to Ford workers to assess their qualifications for the plan. After
an initial round of investigations, 40 percent of the workers eligible by
age and sex were deemed deficient in some respect to receive the
payments. Failure to rectify their behavior within a given period led to
dismissal, but improvements could win retroactive profit-sharing.
Ford was particularly concerned with “Americanizing” immigrant
workers. Sociological Department agents encouraged them to adopt
American habits and teach their children American ways. Workers
who did not speak English were heavily pressured to attend an
English school the company established, which taught “industry and
efficiency” and American customs and culture along with language.
Some 16,000 workers graduated in 1915 and 1916 alone, reducing
the non-English-speaking component of the workforce from 35
percent in 1914 to 12 percent in 1917.24
There were precedents for many aspects of the Ford labor
policies. The Lowell-style mills had their own elaborate regulations
for behavior on and off the job. Like Ford, the mill owners had the
challenge of establishing behavioral norms and worker self-discipline
necessary for the collective, integrated nature of factory work. And
like Ford, they had moral concerns that extended beyond the factory
walls. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a new wave
of behavior-shaping programs began as many companies, especially
manufacturers with large plants, initiated “welfare work” to increase
worker productivity and reduce turnover. Companies built cafeterias,
libraries, and “rest rooms”; offered recreational activities, health
services, and pensions; established savings and insurance plans;
and occasionally introduced the type of social work Ford imposed.
But the comprehensiveness of the Ford program, its
intrusiveness, and its link to a doubling of wages put it at the
forefront of employer efforts to shape the behavior and mindset of
employees to make them fit into a factory regimen. S. S. Marquis,
who became head of the Sociological Department in late 1915
(renaming it the Educational Department in response to widespread
worker criticism of the home investigations), wrote: “as we adapt the
machinery in the shop to turning out the kind of automobile we have
in mind, so we have constructed our educational system with a view
to producing the human product in mind.”25
Ford executives would have agreed with Italian communist leader
Antonio Gramsci when he wrote, “In America rationalization has
determined the need to elaborate a new type of man suited to a new
type of work and production process.” Henry Ford’s rural Protestant
moralism, with its stress on thrift, sexual rectitude, and spurning of
alcohol and tobacco, prescribed a way of life that Ford executives—
and Gramsci—saw as necessary for the physical and psychological
demands of mass production. As the Italian communist, sounding
like an auto executive, noted, “The employee who goes to work after
a night of ‘excess’ is no good for his work.” “The enquiries conducted
by the industrialists into the workers’ private lives,” Gramsci
cautioned, “and the inspection services created by some firms to
control the ‘morality’ of their workers are necessities of the new
methods of work. People who laugh at these initiatives . . . and see
in them only a hypocritical manifestation of ‘puritanism’ thereby deny
themselves any possibility of understanding the importance,
significance and objective import of the American phenomenon,
which is also the biggest collective effort to date to create . . . a new
type of worker and a new type of man.”26
Ironically, by the time Gramsci wrote his essay “Americanism and
Fordism” (in prison after his 1926 arrest by the fascist Italian
government), Henry Ford already had abandoned his effort to create
“a new type of man.” As part of a cost-cutting drive during the 1920–
21 recession, Ford shrank the responsibilities of the original
Sociological Department until it effectively disappeared. He also
abandoned his profit-sharing scheme, switching to a basic wage rate
of six dollars a day (an income boost less than inflation), with
bonuses based on skill and longevity. Deeming paternalism and
welfare work too expensive and a threat to the control of the factory
by production officials, Ford instead turned to an elaborate spy
system and autocratic management to control labor. The “Service
Department,” into which he folded the remnants of the Sociological
Department, was headed by a Harry Bennett, a former boxer with
extensive ties to the police and organized crime, who used spies and
brute force to maintain discipline, hiring many ex-convicts to do the
job.27 But if Ford himself abandoned the link between mass
production and the creation of a “new man,” the idea itself would live
on for decades, including in some very different places.

Alfred Kahn and the Modern Factory

To make the Model T, Ford created not only a new production
system but also new types of factory structures, which became
templates for generations of giant factories around the world. Their
technical and visual legacy remains strong today.
Ford’s first factory, on Mack Avenue in Detroit, had been a small,
one-story, wood-framed building. His second, completed in 1904 on
Piquette Avenue, was considerably larger, a handsome, three-story
brick building. But in design it differed little from an early nineteenth-
century textile factory: long and narrow, with large windows and
wooden columns, beams, and floors.28
Even before Model T production began, Ford anticipated that his
company would soon outgrow Piquette Avenue, purchasing land in
nearby Highland Park for a new plant. To design the factory he hired
Detroit architect Alfred Kahn, who would become the foremost
factory designer of the twentieth century. Kahn stumbled into
industrial architecture early in his career, somewhat by chance.
Eclectic in his commissions and styles, Kahn, a German Jewish
immigrant, met Henry B. Joy, the head of the pioneer automaker
Packard Motor Company, who helped him get a number of
nonindustrial commissions before asking him to design a new factory
complex for his firm.29
The first nine buildings Kahn designed for Packard were
conventional. But the tenth was a radical departure, made not of
wood and brick but of reinforced concrete. In designing it, Kahn
worked closely with his brother Julius, who had developed a system
for reinforcing concrete with a particular type of metal bar.
Reinforced concrete, first used in Europe during the 1870s and in
the United States not long after, was strong, resistant to vibration,
inexpensive, and fireproof. It allowed for large, uninterrupted spaces
and a greater window area than older construction methods. A
concrete shoe factory, built in Massachusetts in 1903–04, brought
the material to the attention of industrial architects. Kahn’s 1905
reinforced concrete Packard Plant Number 10, with its large window
area and orderly layout, attracted much attention, as did a plant he
built the following year in Buffalo for the George N. Pierce Company,
which incorporated overhead cranes and rail platforms for loading,
unloading, and moving materials.30 So when Ford hired him, Kahn
already had begun building a reputation as an innovative factory
designer.
The Highland Park complex extended Kahn’s earlier work. The
exterior walls of the main four-story factory building were mostly
glass, allowing in so much light that observers dubbed it the “Crystal
Palace,” a reference to the London exhibition hall built over a half
century earlier. Kahn convinced Ford to allow him to use metal
window sashes, at the time so unusual that they had to be ordered
from England, which gave the building a particularly clean, modern
look. Inside, the large open spaces facilitated the experiments that
led to the assembly line.
But in some ways, the initial Highland Park buildings still
harkened back to traditional factory design. The long, narrow main
building, with stairs, elevators, and toilets in four external towers, had
the proportions and layout of a Lowell mill, even if much larger. The
adjacent one-story machine shop, with its sawtooth roof, resembled
an English weaving shed. Even after the assembly line had been
installed in the factory, some material, including car bodies, was
moved by horse-drawn cart.31
Kahn’s 1914 addition to Highland Park, the “New Shop,”
represented a more radical break from the past. Almost immediately
after Highland Park opened, Ford began adding more Kahn-
designed buildings to the tightly clustered complex, including an
administration building and a large power plant. It soon needed new
assembly space as well. The company decision to begin making
parts that it previously had bought from outside suppliers, along with
the growing volume of production and a growing workforce, left the
main factory crowded almost as soon as it was completed.
Furthermore, the assembly line and the rapid pace of production
made material handling an ever-greater priority, as large quantities of
raw materials, parts, and subassemblies needed to be delivered to
particular points along various assembly lines at a pace that avoided
pileups of inventory or shortages that stopped production.
Kahn’s solution in the New Shop was to build two parallel six-
story factory buildings, connected by an 842-foot-long, glass-roofed
shed. Along the bottom ran railroad tracks, so that trainloads of
supplies could be brought directly into the plant. Along the top ran
two overhead cranes that could lift loads of up to five tons to some
two hundred platforms jutting out from all levels of the adjacent
buildings. From the platforms it was only a short distance to any
place within the new buildings, allowing workers to use hand trucks
to quickly deliver supplies to the many workstations within. Strikingly
modern, the craneway, with concrete and glass buildings making up
its walls, the staggered pattern of the jutting platforms, and its glass
roof, was a new kind of space, resembling more the great
nineteenth-century shopping arcades, like the Galleria Vittorio
Emanuele II in Milan, stripped of ornamentation, than a traditional
factory.
Inside the New Shop, the foundry and machine shop were
positioned on the top floor rather than on the bottom level, the usual
practice, possible because of the strength of the reinforced concrete
construction. Production could then flow downward, as parts and
subassemblies were lowered from floor to floor by gravity slides and
conveyor belts, until reaching the final assembly line on the ground
level. Air circulation was accomplished through ducts inside hollow
concrete columns, an approach reminiscent of that used in English
factories by Lombe, Arkwright, and Strutt over a century earlier.32
The Highland Park factory almost immediately became the object
of enormous worldwide attention for its design, its assembly line, its
experiment in high-pay paternalism, and the Model Ts that came out
of it. Ford sought the attention, using the building complex as an
advertisement for his firm. (Manufacturers had been doing variations
of this for decades, designing handsome factories adorned with large
signs, putting engravings of their plants on their stationery, allowing
postcards of them to be issued, and sometimes welcoming
journalists.33) The freestanding administration building was
handsomely designed and carefully landscaped. The nearby power
plant had plate glass windows, allowing passersby to look in at the
giant generators. Henry Ford insisted that the plant have five
chimneys, so giant letters spelling out Ford could be positioned
between them, though fewer chimneys would have sufficed. In 1912,
the company began conducting public tours of the plant. By the
summer of 1915, three to four hundred people a day were visiting. To
further publicize the factory, Ford issued a booklet detailing its
operations, with pictures from its own, in-house Photographic
Department (which also produced weekly short films to distribute to
Ford dealers and local theaters).34

Figure 4.2 An aerial view of Ford’s Highland Park factory in 1923.

 Among the most important visitors to Highland Park was
Giovanni Agnelli, the chairman of the Italian automaker FIAT, who
came away determined to adapt Ford methods to the European auto
industry, which still largely made cars through handcrafting. To
accommodate the Ford system, he commissioned a new factory in
the Lingotto district of Turin, which opened in 1923. The plant—one
of the great landmarks of modernist architecture—was Highland
Park turned on its head. Like the New Shop, it had two long, linked,
parallel buildings for assembly operations, each five stories high and
over a quarter mile long. In the huge courtyard between the
buildings, two spiral ramps connected all of the floors to the roof. In
an opposite procedure from Highland Park, raw materials were
delivered on the ground floor and production proceeded upward until
finished cars were driven onto a test track on the roof, with banked
curves that allowed high speeds. Then the cars were driven down a
ramp for delivery. (In a ricochet, when Kahn designed an eight-story
service center for Packard on the West Side of Manhattan, he
included two interior ramps that allowed access to a rooftop test
track.)35
Highland Park positioned Kahn as the leading architect for the
automobile industry. He was soon designing factories for the Hudson
Motor Company, the Dodge brothers, Fisher Body, Buick, and
Studebaker, as the industry rapidly adopted both the assembly line
and reinforced concrete construction. Ultimately his firm designed a
wide range of industrial buildings, not only in North America but in
South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa as well. Kahn also
designed office buildings for the auto industry and other industrial
firms, including the massive General Motors Building in midtown
Detroit (the largest office building in the world when it opened in
1922), and the adjacent, opulent headquarters for Fisher Body. And
he designed homes for auto executives, including lakefront
mansions in Gross Pointe for Henry Joy and Henry Ford’s son,
Edsel. He even designed the Henry Ford Hospital. The extraordinary
productivity of his firm, which by the late 1920s had four hundred
employees, and the rapidity with which it could complete designs,
rested on a high degree of division of labor, with various departments
performing specialized functions, an application to professional,
white-collar work of some of the principles Ford perfected for
manufacturing. To track work, Kahn’s firm used forms similar to
those used by Ford at Highland Park.36

River Rouge
Even as Kahn’s practice grew, Henry Ford remained his most
important client. Together they designed what became the next
flagship of industrial giantism, Ford’s River Rouge plant. Almost as
soon as the New Shop was completed, Ford began planning a much
larger complex in nearby Dearborn, buying massive tracts of land.
Some was used for Ford endeavors besides the car company,
including a separate firm that produced Fordson tractors. But most of
it was devoted to making the Model T. Ford decided to advance to
the extreme his effort at vertical integration, seeking to make not only
parts but also basic materials like steel, glass, and rubber for his
cars, eliminating the possibility of suppliers raising prices or not
fulfilling orders when inventories were tight. The Dearborn property,
along the Rouge River, allowed the direct delivery of bulk goods,
including iron ore, coal, and sand, from Great Lakes ships and had
plenty of water for industrial processes. Also, the sparsely populated
Dearborn suburb gave Ford greater control over his environment
than Detroit, with its heterogeneous population and episodic labor
activism.37
Ford began constructing a blast furnace at River Rouge in 1917.
It was followed by a series of other processing plants, including coke
ovens, open-hearth furnaces, a rolling mill, a glass factory, a rubber
and tire plant, a leather plant, a paper mill, a box factory, and a
textile mill. Ford put great effort into integrating the various plants
and reusing byproducts. Impurities from the blast furnaces, for
example, were sent to an on-site factory to be made into cement.
Ford also began buying coal and iron mines and vast tracts of forest
land in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where he built sawmills,
kilns, and factories to make wooden parts for the Model T. Sawdust
and scrap lumber were used to make the charcoal briquettes, sold
under the Kingsford brand, which to this day fuel barbecues and
family happiness across America. His grandest effort at backward
integration was a vast rubber plantation in the Amazon Basin that
proved a costly failure.38
Complete Model Ts were never produced at River Rouge, which
initially served as a feeder plant for Highland Park. Engines, tires,
windows, and other components were taken from the Rouge to
Highland Park for final assembly. But with the high volume of Model
T production, even the feeder operations were vast. The River
Rouge foundry, where engine blocks were cast from molten iron
conveyed from adjacent blast furnaces, was the largest in the world,
employing ten thousand men.39
When final assembly operations did begin at the Rouge, it was,
ironically, to make boats, not cars. During World War I, Henry Ford
contracted with the Navy to build 112 submarine chasers using
assembly-line methods. The Navy paid for a new plant to produce
them, the “B Building,” designed by Kahn. Freestanding, it was the
largest factory ever built, 300 feet wide and 1,700 feet—a third-of-a-
mile—long, a huge shed with walls composed almost entirely of
windows. As tall as a three-story building but open inside to
accommodate boat production, it was designed to allow the later
addition of intermediate floors. When the last of the Eagle Boats left
the building in September 1919 (none were completed in time to be
used in combat), floors were added and the building was used to
assemble Model T bodies, which previously had been purchased
from outside contractors.
The B Building represented the beginning of a shift in factory
design principles for Ford and Kahn, moving away from the
ingenuous architectural machine that they had just developed at the
New Shop. Kahn helped lead not one but two revolutions in industrial
architecture. Rather than multistory buildings, at the Rouge Kahn
and Ford erected very large single-story factories to avoid the cost of
hoisting materials and to allow bigger uninterrupted spaces, since
columns to support upper floors were no longer needed. The
expansive, open areas gave engineers flexibility in machine
placement, aided by the company decision to stop using overhead
shafts and belts to power machinery, instead deploying individual
electric motors. Single-story plants also avoided the need to punch
holes between floors when assembly lines were repositioned. In
1923, Ford switched its standard design for branch plants from
multistory to single-story as well.
With the move to single-story factories, Kahn abandoned
reinforced concrete, no longer needing its vibration dampening
qualities. Instead he used steel frames, which allowed structures to
be put up more quickly and expanded more easily. Kahn’s new
buildings had, if anything, even more glass on the walls than his
earlier structures, and he generally used roof monitors—raised
structures with glass facing in varied directions—rather than
sawtooth roofs, which provided more diffuse natural light.
The loft-style, concrete buildings Kahn helped popularize
continued to be built for manufacturing and storage. Resistant to
water damage and strongly constructed, they can be found in large
numbers in older American industrial districts, sometimes still used
for manufacturing, sometimes abandoned, sometimes converted to
warehouses or offices, and occasionally turned into trendy
apartments. But Kahn himself almost never returned to the style.
Instead, Kahn embraced sleek surfaces of glass and metal in
buildings both functional and beautiful. Over the course of two
decades, he created a bounty of industrial buildings of great
modernist design—clean, light, spare, seemingly endless. Many of
Kahn’s Rouge buildings were expressions of almost pure form—tall
cylindrical chimneys, long glass walls, shapely monitor roofs—
unsullied by ornamentation. The Engineering Laboratory, completed
in 1925, where Henry Ford had his office, had a particularly striking
interior, with a long central space flanked by smaller galleries, with
two levels of monitor windows on both sides flooding it with light.
Some of Kahn’s later designs, like his Chrysler Half-Ton Truck Plant,
are widely recognized as among the greatest industrial buildings
ever erected, modernist masterpieces.
Yet neither Kahn nor Ford thought of themselves as modernists.
In a 1931 speech, Kahn gave a nuanced but largely negative
appraisal of modernist architecture. Kahn criticized the extreme
functionalism and lack of ornamentation of architects like Walter
Gropius and Le Corbusier (arguably traits that characterized his own
factory designs). “What we call modernism today is largely
affectation, a seeking for the radical, the extreme.” In his
nonindustrial projects, Kahn drew on a variety of historical styles,
designing often handsome but rarely pathbreaking buildings. Henry
Ford was even more explicitly antimodernist at the very moment he
was creating a new industrial modernity. Concurrent with the creation
of the Rouge, he continued to add to his collection of old machines,
furniture, and buildings, which he eventually installed in Greenfield
Village, near the Rouge plant, a recreation of an earlier, small-town
America. Even as his cars and factories promoted urbanization and
cosmopolitanism, Ford remained deeply nostalgic about the
parochial, rural world he grew up in and chose to leave.
Buildings continued to be added at the Rouge all through the
1920s and 1930s. The Press Shop, completed in the late 1930s,
became the largest single factory building in the world, with a floor
area of 1,450,000 square feet. Ford spaced the Rouge buildings far
apart to allow for later expansion, having plenty of room on the
1,096-acre site. An elaborate system of rail lines, roads, 142 miles of
conveyors, monorails, and an elevated “High Line” with an automatic
transport system moved raw materials, parts, and subassemblies
within and between buildings. Employee parking lots ringed the vast,
isolated complex, but many workers arrived at special streetcar and
bus terminals. Fences, railroad tracks, and guarded gates restricted
access to the plant, which came to resemble a fortress, in contrast to
Highland Park, which was situated in a busy urban neighborhood,
with public sidewalks alongside the factory buildings.40
Ironically, while the Rouge was being built out to produce
everything needed to make a Model T, the car itself was becoming
obsolete. By the mid-1920s, other car companies, including General
Motors and Chrysler, had introduced more technically advanced and
varied models than Ford, which still only sold the Model T (though it
offered luxury cars under the Lincoln nameplate). By 1927, as sales
diminished, it became evident that something had to be done.
Abruptly, Ford stopped making the Model T, even before finalizing
the design of its replacement, the Model A. For six months, Ford
factories sat idle, while the company replaced 15,000 machine tools
and rebuilt 25,000 more. New molds, jigs, dies, fixtures, gauges, and
assembly sequences had to be created. Meanwhile, the layoff of
60,000 Detroit-area Ford workers created a social crisis, as relief
agencies, free clinics, and child-placement agencies struggled to
meet the huge demand for their services.
The underbelly of the Ford system had been exposed. Extreme
standardization had allowed other companies to win over consumers
on the basis of style and change, what General Motors president
Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., called “the ‘laws’ of Paris dressmakers . . . in the
automobile industry.” Single-purpose, specialized machinery, which
made it inexpensive to produce particular parts, made it expensive to
switch over to new products (a problem that went all the way back to
the high-speed but inflexible machinery used in the early Lowell
mills). The changeover from the Model T to the Model A cost the
Ford Motor Company $250 million ($3.5 billion in 2017 currency) and
first place in sales to General Motors. Vertical integration had its
downside, too, evident when the economy and auto sales tanked just
a few years after the introduction of the Model A; Ford had a harder
time cutting costs than the other major automakers, which bought
most of their parts from outside suppliers. Over the course of the
decade starting in 1927, Ford had a cumulative net loss, while
General Motors made nearly $2 billion in after-tax profits.
The introduction of the Model A completed the transfer of the
center of the Ford empire from Highland Park to River Rouge. The
final assembly line for the new car was set up in the B Building,
which was so large that it also could house at various times an
assembly line for Fordson tractors, a trade school, fire department,
and hospital. The geographical move was accompanied by a purge
of pioneer Ford engineers and executives, most of those remaining
from the team that had created the Model T, the assembly line, and
the Ford system. With Harry Bennett and Charles Sorenson, a long-
time, very tough Ford production manager, effectively running the
Rouge, an autocratic, chaotic, and brutal culture came to
characterize the plant. Workers decried harsh discipline for petty
offenses, arbitrary, ever-changing rules, and tyrannical foremen. One
Rouge worker complained that “The bosses are thick as treacle and
they’re always on your neck, because the man above is on their
neck and Sorenson’s on the neck of the whole lot—he’s the man that
pours the boiling oil down that old Henry makes. . . . A man checks
’is brains and ’is freedom at the door when he goes to work at
Ford’s.”
The Rouge—“that self-sufficing industrial cosmos, a masterpiece
of ingenuity and efficiency,” Edmund Wilson called it—embodied an
extreme strategy of industrial concentration. Ford set up dozens of
branch plants in the United States to assemble kits of parts shipped
from Highland Park and later Dearborn, but manufacturing remained
highly centralized at the major complexes. During the 1920s and
1930s, the company built a series of “village industry” factories in
rural southeastern Michigan. Powered by small hydroelectric dams,
the plants produced small parts for use at Highland Park and the
Rouge—starter switches, drill bits, ignition coils, and the like. Henry
Ford conceived of the plants as providing work for farmers during the
slack winter season. Again, as at Greenfield Village, he seemed to
be embracing an idealized vision of a decentralized Jeffersonian
society, even as his life’s work undermined it. But with a combined
workforce at their height of only some four thousand workers, the
village factories were not much more than an ideological gesture in
the shadow of the giant Ford plants.
Other automakers also built very large plants. The complexity of
manufacturing an automobile, with its hundreds of different parts; the
cost of transporting bulky components like frames, axles, motors,
and bodies; and the heavy investment needed to build and equip an
automobile plant made concentration of production a widely shared
strategy. The Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck (an independent
enclave within Detroit) began as a parts supplier for Ford, but the
Dodge Brothers later expanded it to produce their own car. Albert
Kahn designed the first buildings; Smith, Hinchman, & Grylls,
another Detroit architectural firm, many additional buildings, most of
them multistory structures made of reinforced concrete. Under the
Dodges and later Chrysler, which bought the company after its
founders’ deaths, the factory became a fully integrated
manufacturing and assembly plant, larger in floor space than
Highland Park, its nearest equivalent. It had some 30,000 workers in
the late 1930s and even more during World War II, remaining in
operation until 1980. General Motors became famous for its
divisional structure and decentralization, but in Flint, Michigan, it, too,
had a huge production complex, several really. In the late 1920s, the
gigantic Buick plant (yet another Kahn design) had 22,000 workers;
a cluster of Chevrolet factories employed 18,000 workers; Fisher
Body, by then a GM subsidiary, had 7,500 workers; and still more
workers could be found in the factories of AC Spark Plug, another
GM subsidiary.
But nothing touched the Rouge in sheer scale. Historian Lindy
Biggs characterized it as “more like an industrial city than a factory.”
In 1925 it had 52,800 workers, still trailing Highland Park, where the
workforce had swelled to 55,300. With the Model A, though, the
Rouge moved ahead. It peaked at 102,811 workers in 1929, a level
of employment entirely unprecedented at a single factory complex.
To this day, at least in terms of the size of its workforce, it remains
unmatched in the United States. It was, simply, the largest and most
complicated factory ever built, an extraordinary testament to
ingenuity, engineering, and human labor.41

Celebrating Ford
Ford methods attracted widespread interest among industrial
professionals as soon as they were introduced. Henry Ford
welcomed reporters, especially from the technical press, into his
factories, openly sharing details about his latest innovations, a
departure from the usual wariness among manufacturers about
releasing information about their techniques. Trade journals like
American Machinist, Iron Age, and Engineering Magazine ran
extensive articles about the methods developed to produce the
Model T. Other American automobile companies and consumer
goods manufacturers quickly adopted the assembly line.42
The general public was likewise fascinated by the Ford system,
especially the assembly line. Henry Ford realized that public interest
in the methods of making Ford cars could help sell them. In addition
to providing tours of the Highland Park plant, he took the assembly
line on the road. At the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition
in San Francisco, just two years after the assembly line had been
introduced, a Ford exhibit included a working production line that
turned out twenty Model Ts a day. When in 1928 Ford unveiled the
Model A at Madison Square Garden, the company put up displays of
every facet of the production process, from dioramas of Ford iron
and coal mines to workstations for making glass and upholstery. At
the 1933–34 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, part of the
Ford Exposition Building, designed by Albert Kahn and later moved
near the entrance to the Rouge plant, showed “the complete
production of the car in all its parts.” In 1938, nearly a million people
visited the display. And they flocked to the Rouge itself, too. In the
late 1930s, Ford offered a two-hour tour of the complex starting
every half hour. Other manufacturing firms, including Chrysler and
General Motors, also opened their plants and set up exhibits for a
public endlessly fascinated with how things were made, especially
with the complex, wondrous choreography of the assembly line. The
Kahn-designed General Motors Exhibit at the Chicago Exposition
featured a model production line, which allowed visitors on an
overlooking balcony to watch workers assembling vehicles.
The public romance with the giant factory and the assembly line
proved long-lasting. In 1971, 243,000 people visited the Rouge, a
record number. A few years later, the U.S. Department of Commerce
published a list of plants in the United States that offered tours. It ran
to 149 pages, with everything from distilleries to steel mills, including
a dozen auto plants.43
Intellectuals and political activists were caught up in the allure of
Fordism, too. Perhaps surprisingly, given Ford’s later reputation as a
union-hating, conservative autocrat, some prominent leftists at first
praised the Ford system. In early 1916, after visiting the Highland
Park plant, Kate Richards O’Hare, a well-known socialist leader,
published two articles in The National Rip-Saw, a mass circulation
socialist monthly, praising Henry Ford. O’Hare saw the Five Dollar
Day, the Sociological Department, and the Ford English School as
advancing the lot of workers (along with Ford’s decision to take the
power to fire away from foremen). Using a jarringly racist simile, she
wrote that as a result of Ford’s policies “men freeze to a job in the
Ford plant like a negro to a fat possum.” “If every Capitalist in the
United States were to suddenly become converted to Ford’s
ideas . . . it would not solve the social problems, eliminate the class
struggle or inaugurate the co-operative commonwealth, BUT it would
advance the cause of social justice, demonstrate the soundness of
the socialist theories and bring the mighty pressure of education to
hasten the final and complete emancipation of the working class.”44
Later that same year, John Reed, soon to be the most important
chronicler of the Russian Revolution and a founder of the American
Communist Party, wrote a similarly glowing if more sophisticated
portrait of Ford in the left-wing journal The Masses. Ford’s strategy
of low prices and high wages, especially the profit-sharing built into
the Five Dollar Day, for Reed represented a huge step forward from
normal industrial practices. Reed detailed the difference high wages
made in the lives of Ford workers. Beyond that, after interviewing
Ford, he came to believe that the auto giant was moving toward
some sort of new form of corporate control that would give workers a
say; the Five Dollar Day was “turning into something dangerously
like a real experiment in democracy, and from it may spring a real
menace to capitalism.” This was why, Reed believed, “capitalists
hate Henry Ford,” an echo of Ford’s own perception of himself, in the
Populist idiom he grew up around, as a producer of value having to
fight off the parasitic financiers of Wall Street.45
Left-wing praise for Henry Ford diminished over time, in part in
response to changes in his company’s practices and his rabid anti-
Semitism during the 1920s; Edmund Wilson, writing fifteen years
after Reed, dubbed him the “despot of Dearborn.” But Fordism struck
a strong chord with a group that during the New Deal would ally with
elements of the left, businessmen and their supporters who saw
mass consumption as critical to maintaining prosperity and profits.
Edward Filene, who made his money in department stores, was
perhaps the most outspoken member of those who have been
dubbed “proto-Keynesians” for seeing the need for mass purchasing
power to maintain economic growth. Unlike in the past, Filene wrote
in 1924, businesses needed to produce “prosperous customers as
well as saleable goods.” Fordism, with its promise of high wages and
cheaper products, was a way to create a virtuous circle of mass
purchasing power, mass consumption, mass production, and
economic growth. Unlike O’Hare and Reed, Filene acknowledged
the monotony of Fordist labor, but saw shorter hours as partially
ameliorating the problem. And, in any case, “every man is not an
artist, every man is not a creative craftsman.” “Poverty brings a
monotony a thousand times more deadly to body and mind than the
monotony of factory routine,” he added in a comment reminiscent of
W. Cooke Taylor’s remark about child labor eighty years earlier.46
Novelists, too, saw in Fordism a startling development, a step
into a new type of world. John Dos Passos profiled Ford in The Big
Money (1936), which concluded his great three-volume portrait of the
country, U.S.A., writing not only about the Model T and the
exhausting labor used to produce it but also the automaker’s many
contradictions, his pacifism, war profiteering, and anti-Semitism, his
revolutionary inventions and antiquarianism. (Alfred Kazin shrewdly
observed that U.S.A., with its complex structure composed of
different types of narrative building blocks, was itself a “tool,”
“another American invention—an American thing peculiar to the
opportunity and stress of American life.”)47 Louis-Ferdinand Céline,
who visited a Detroit Ford factory in 1926, included a scene of
working on the company assembly line in Journey to the End of the
Night (1932). Upton Sinclair wrote a not very good novel about Ford,
The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America (1937). And most
famously, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) depicts a
dystopia of Fordism, a portrait of life A.F.—the years “Anno Ford,”
measured from 1908, when the Model T was introduced—with Henry
Ford the deity.48
Dos Passos, Sinclair, Céline, and Huxley all wrote about Ford
and Fordism during the 1930s, well after the initial burst of
journalistic and industrial excitement over mass production. Their
work was colored by the Great Depression and the Ford Motor
Company’s violent antiunion actions, which radically changed the
public image of Ford and the Fordist project. By contrast, the key
visual depictions of Fordism began earlier, during the 1920s. More
than in the written word, it was in the visual arts that Fordism and the
giant factory were celebrated.
 Giant Factories and the Visual Arts
Factories had been portrayed from their earliest days in drawings,
lithographs, and paintings. But only in the twentieth century did the
factory become an important subject for artists. It is difficult to think
of a truly great eighteenth- or nineteenth-century artistic
representation of a factory, but there are plenty of great twentieth-
century factory paintings, photographs, and films. For many artists
during the 1920s and 1930s, the factory represented modern life—
secular, urban, mechanical, overwhelming—a break from the rural
landscape or intimate domestic interior. And it provided a vehicle for
modernist modes of artistic representation, moving toward
abstraction. While in the nineteenth century, novelists and other
writers played a major role in shaping public perceptions of the
factory and the factory system, in the twentieth century, visual artists
came to the fore.
Photography, in particular, took the lead in influencing public
perceptions of the giant factory. Itself a product of the Industrial
Revolution that created the factory system, photography allowed the
easy reproduction and dissemination of imagery, while painting
remained an inherently elite form, largely created for private viewing
by collectors or museum goers. It was fitting that photography and
film, so well suited to the creation of unlimited identical products,
proved the most important media for the representation of mass
production.
Early in the twentieth century, a number of American
photographers, including Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, and Alvin
Langdon Coburn, began taking pictures of machinery, machine
parts, and industrial landscapes. By the 1920s, photographers and
artists elsewhere—purists in France, futurists in Italy, Bauhaus
affiliates and Neue Sachlichkeit photographers in Germany,
constructivists in the Soviet Union—also had turned to industry for
visual ideas, symbols, and a machine aesthetic.49 But photographing
actual factories, especially their interiors, presented formidable
technical problems in an era of large, heavy cameras, a limited
choice of lenses, slow film, and primitive lighting devices. The
photographer who first overcame many of the challenges and did
more than any other to disseminate images of giant industry was
Margaret Bourke-White.
Bourke-White’s father, an engineer and inventor, worked for a
printing press manufacturer. He often took Margaret, while a child
living in New Jersey, to the plants where presses were being made
or installed. She later wrote of the first time he took her to a foundry,
“I can hardly describe my joy. To me at that age, a foundry
represented the beginning and end of all beauty.” Her lifelong
fascination with industry was linked to her intense feelings for her
father, who died when she was only eighteen. “I worshipped my
father,” she wrote. “Whenever I go on a job, I always see machinery
through my father’s eyes. And so I worship factories.”
Bourke-White moved to Cleveland in the mid-1920s to try to
make a go of it as an architectural photographer, documenting
upscale homes and gardens. But she found herself drawn to the
Flats, the smoky, dirty, noisy district in the heart of the city that
housed heavy industry. “Fresh from college with my camera over my
shoulder, the Flats were photographic paradise.”
Soon Bourke-White was selling exterior shots of industry to a
local bank for its house publication. But getting inside factories was
another story; Cleveland industrialists, like most factory owners, had
no interest in allowing outsiders inside. Her break came when the
head of Otis Steel gave her access to his mill. With a confidence
beyond her years, she pronounced to him “that there is a power and
vitality in industry that makes it a magnificent subject for
photography, that it reflects the age in which we live.” She had come
to believe that “Industry . . . had evolved an unconscious beauty—
often a hidden beauty that was waiting to be discovered.”
After five months of experimenting with camera positions,
lighting, film, and darkroom technique, Bourke-White managed to
capture the drama of molten steel being poured. Otis Steel bought
her prints, and other industrial commissions began coming her way.
For the stage set of Eugene O’Neill’s play Dynamo, she
photographed the generators at the Niagara Falls Power Company.
Years later, when she reprinted the image, she wrote in the caption,
“Dynamos were more beautiful to me than pearls,” quite a statement
for a woman devoted to stylish looks and expensive clothes.50
 In 1929, Henry Luce, the publisher of Time, hired Bourke-White
for his new business publication, Fortune. A lavish, heavily illustrated
magazine, with some of the top writers and designers in the country,
Fortune provided sophisticated documentation, celebration, and
analysis of American business. Its photographers, including Bourke-
White, had access to the largest and most advanced industrial
complexes in the country. In 1930, she photographed the Rouge.
Four years later, she took pictures at Amoskeag Mills, where years
earlier Lewis Hine had photographed child workers.
Bourke-White’s audience expanded exponentially when Luce
shifted her to his new “photo-magazine,” Life. The cover of the first
issue, dated November 23, 1936, was a Bourke-White photograph of
the spillway of the world’s largest earth-filled dam, the Fort Peck
Dam in eastern Montana, a masterpiece of formal, nearly abstract
composition and human-dwarfing scale. Within months, Life was
selling a million copies a week, with Bourke-White one of its stars.
In her early industrial photographs, Bourke-White displayed little
interest in workers. Often they are totally absent. When present, they
seem negligible compared to the huge structures and machines that
dominate her pictures. This effacing of workers from industrial
imagery was a common characteristic of photographs and paintings
during the 1920s and early 1930s (in Europe as well as the United
States), a sharp contrast to the earlier work of Hine. Though Hine
sometimes showed machines dwarfing humans, emphasizing their
large scale and abstract shapes, the bulk of his work centered on the
human experience of labor, on the faces, bodies, and expressions of
the workers who inhabited the industrial realm. For Bourke-White, at
this stage of her career, it was not the worker who held her interest,
nor the products being made, but the abstract forms of industry.
“Beauty of Industry,” she wrote in 1930, “lies in its truth and
simplicity.”51
Charles Sheeler, who beat Bourke-White to the Rouge, shared
her credo. “I speak in the tongue of my times,” he said in 1938, “the
mechanical, the industrial. Anything that works efficiently is
beautiful.” “Our Factories,” he declared, “are our substitutes for
religious expression.” A precisionist painter from Philadelphia, whose
early work included the magnificent, abstracted urban landscapes
Church Street El (1920) and Skyscrapers (1922), Sheeler took up
photography as a way to support himself while painting. His
commercial work included photographs for a Philadelphia advertising
agency, N. W. Ayer & Son, which the Ford Motor Company engaged
to promote the introduction of the Model A. Vaughn Flannery, the
Ayer art director, working with Ford, decided to sell the new car by
portraying the giant machines and factories used to manufacture it.
Flannery sent Sheeler off to the Rouge, where he spent six weeks
producing an extraordinary portfolio of images. Most of the
photographs depict steelmaking and stamping processes, with their
giant equipment and elemental drama. There are no photographs of
assembly operations. Many of the images appear nearly abstract,
with chimneys, conveyors, pipes, and cranes cutting across the
picture plane, often at dramatic angles. Workers are entirely absent
in many photographs and barely visible, at the edges of the frame, in
others. As in some of Bourke-White’s photographs, when humans
are present they serve to make evident the massive scale of the
equipment and buildings near them (not dissimilar to the relationship
between man and machine in illustrations of the Corliss engine at the
Centenary Exhibition).
Figure 4.3 Charles Sheeler’s striking photograph of the Ford River Rouge factory,
Criss-Crossed Conveyors—Ford Plant, 1927.

“The Flannery Ford campaign,” wrote architectural historian

Richard Guy Wilson, “was the first to portray a beauty and heroism in
the manufacturing process in order to spur sales. The Rouge ads
started a fad, as many advertisers found that industrial views could
be used in popular, mass-circulation magazines as well as in trade
journals.” Flannery shrewdly realized that the giant factory, with its
Promethean grandeur, represented a modernity with which
consumers would want to associate themselves.52
While Ford made use of Sheeler’s Rouge photographs for
advertising, some were presented as art objects. Sheeler himself
used them in a photomontage exhibited at the Museum of Modern
Art in 1932. He also produced a series of paintings, drawings,
watercolors, and prints of the Rouge. The best-known paintings,
American Landscape and Classic Landscape, were not studies of
individual factory buildings but vistas of the complex. Both realistic
and abstract in their concentration on form, line, and light, the near
absence of people in Sheeler’s depictions of an industrial plant
which had tens of thousands of workers gives an eerie air to the
paintings. The critic Leo Marx wrote of American Landscape that
Sheeler “eliminated all evidence of the frenzied movement and
clamor we associate with the industrial scene. . . . This ‘American
Landscape’ is the industrial landscape pastoralized.”
In depicting few people on the Rouge site, Sheeler was being
literal. Other observers noted that, counterintuitively, very few people
could be seen outside the factory buildings in many parts of the
highly mechanized complex. But Sheeler also was making choices
about what to depict. After World War II, he did a series of paintings
of the by then-shuttered Amoskeag Mills. Hine’s Amoskeag
photographs portrayed young workers. Bourke-White’s captured the
symmetry and repetitive patterns of the machinery. Sheeler’s
Amoskeag paintings were again landscapes, with no person in
sight.53
Art historian Terry Smith criticized Bourke-White and Sheeler for
“banishing productive labor, excluding the human, implying an
autonomy to the mechanical, then seeking a beauty of repetition,
simplicity, regularity of rhythm, clarity of surface. This is the gaze of
management at leisure, marveling at the new beauties which its
organizational inventiveness can create.” Smith has a point. After all,
Bourke-White’s first clients were business leaders who wanted
beautiful images of the buildings and facilities they controlled, before
she moved on to a broader audience of business readers at Fortune.
Edsel Ford bought Classic Landscape. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller,
wife of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., bought American Landscape.54
But to leave it there is to miss the greatness of this art. Bourke-
White’s subject was not the control of industry by capital; it was the
grandeur of the structures of industry and the processes of
production. Her photographs celebrate the power and creativity of
humanity as manifested in industrial forms and the transformation of
intractable materials. In her early work, the creations of workers
effaced the workers themselves or at least diminished them. But
over time, her interest in workers and the impact of industry on them
grew. For Fortune, she photographed not only factories but skilled
artisans, laborers, and industrial workers. At the Rouge, she had
groups of workers informally pose for her. Her cover story for the first
issue of Life documented not only the Fort Peck Dam but also the
boomtown that grew up for the workers building it. One of her most
striking images is of workers relaxing at a local bar. Her 1938 Life
photographs of a Plymouth factory documented men at work.55
In his Rouge photographs, Sheeler was even more concerned
with form and geometry than Bourke-White, creating stunning formal
compositions (some of which did include workers). He, too, had a
central concern with power, as Fortune recognized when it
commissioned him to create six paintings on the theme for its
December 1940 issue. But if Sheeler’s industrial photographs have a
cool, triumphal feel, his industrial paintings, with their near absence
of humanity, have a melancholy air, reminiscent of Edward Hopper in
their light, treatment of shadow, and emotional tenor. These are far
deeper and more ambiguous images than simple celebrations of
possession.56
During the 1920s and 1930s, other painters besides Sheeler
found a rich subject in large-scale industry, many lumped together
under the label of precisionism, including Elsie Driggs (who did a
painting of the Rouge in 1928), Charles Demuth, and Louis
Lozowick. Lozowick, a self-conscious leftist who had extensive
contact with the European and Soviet avant-garde, defended the
portrayal of industrial machinery “more as a prognostication than as
a fact” of the time when “rationalization and economy” would be
“allies of the working class in the building of socialism.” Other
painters, like Stuart Davies and Gerald Murphy, adopted what has
been dubbed a “machine aesthetic,” though they never made
industrial structures themselves their subject. But the artist who best
captured the world of heavy industry, and the Rouge in particular,
was not a precisionist but rather a Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera.57

Diego Rivera and Detroit Industry

Automaking turned Detroit into a boomtown. As workers poured in to
take factory jobs, the population more than tripled, from 466,000 in
1910 to 1,720,000 in 1930, and the city sprawled. The newly
enriched industrial captains built their mansions in lakeside suburbs
and took it upon themselves to endow the city with the civic and
cultural institutions that mark centers of power. Among them was the
Detroit Institute of Arts, owned by the city but overseen by a small
board, which was headed by Edsel Ford and included Albert Kahn
and Charles T. Fisher of Fisher Body.58 In 1930, the ambitious
museum director, William Valentiner, commissioned Diego Rivera to
paint two murals in the courtyard of its new building. The artist,
already well known in international art circles, at the time was
working on his first murals in the United States. Valentiner convinced
Edsel Ford, whom he tutored in art history, to finance the project.
By the time Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo, arrived in Detroit in
April 1932, it was a very different place than when Sheeler had taken
his photographs five years earlier. The Depression had hit the city
hard, with mass unemployment in the auto industry and severe
deprivation in the working-class neighborhoods. Radical movements
had swelled, demanding jobs, relief, and unionization. On March 7,
1932, Ford guards and Dearborn police opened fire on a march of
unemployed workers and their supporters, killing four and wounding
many others. A funeral procession for the slain attracted sixty
thousand marchers.
 Though a self-identified Marxist and sometimes communist,
Rivera (and Kahlo, too) seemed oblivious to the ferocious class
conflict. Instead, he was entranced by Henry Ford and the industrial
empire he had built. “My childhood passion for mechanical toys,” he
later wrote, “had been transformed to a delight in machinery for its
own meaning for man—his self-fulfillment and liberation from
drudgery and poverty.” Rivera admired the photographs of industrial
equipment that Kahlo’s father, a prominent Mexican photographer,
had taken. The artist toured a variety of Detroit-area factories, but
like for so many others it was the Rouge that captured his
imagination and became the centerpiece of his work. Rivera grew so
enthusiastic that Valentiner and Edsel Ford agreed to enlarge the
commission to cover all four walls of the museum courtyard (at
double the original fee), with twenty-seven panels providing space
for a huge pictorial program, which, in accordance with Edsel’s wish,
included not only the Rouge but also scenes from other locally
important industries.59

Figure 4.4 Left to right: Albert Kahn, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera at the Detroit
Institute of Arts on December 10, 1932.

Rivera completed the murals in mid-March 1933, the very low

point of the Great Depression. While he and his assistants had
worked on them from heavy scaffolding, groups of visitors had
watched, much like the tourists at River Rouge, whom Rivera
incorporated into one of his panels. Even before they were unveiled,
the murals were subject to attacks of all kinds. But they proved
immensely popular—thousands came the first week to see them—
and they have remained one of Detroit’s premier attractions ever
since.60
Detroit Industry is one of the triumphs of twentieth-century art, the
most fully realized visual representation we have of the factory
system. The two largest panels depict with remarkable visual
compression the complex process of automobile manufacturing at
the Rouge. The north wall panel shows the production of
transmission housings and V8 engines (just recently introduced by
Ford), from the blast furnace through casting, drilling, and assembly.
The south wall portrays the stamping and finishing of steel car
bodies and the final assembly line. Visually dense, with conveyors,
pipes, cranes, and balconies serpenting through the panels, Rivera’s
Rouge, unlike Bourke-White’s or Sheeler’s, teems with people:
workers toiling, supervisors and tourists watching, and Henry and
Edsel Ford, Valentiner, Rivera himself, and—thrown in for good
measure—Dick Tracy all standing by.61
 Figure 4.5 A detail from the north wall of Detroit Industry, a series of frescoes
completed by Diego Rivera in 1933.

As remarkable as the Rouge panels are, they are only part of a

larger array, epic in its conceptual and visual sweep. Other panels
depict the miracle of modern medicine, the constructive and
destructive sides of the aviation and chemical industries, huge
figures representing each of the races, fruits and vegetables
illustrating the bounty of the earth, and even the earth itself, with its
stratifications and fossils and a fetus within it. While most of the
Rouge workers have the faces and bodies of European Americans
or African Americans, other figures, including two remarkable giant
portraits of nude women representing the bounty of agriculture (in
the upper corners of the east wall) are indigenous Mexicans in face
and body, a fusion of two countries and two cultures in Rivera’s
vision of modernity.
 Human labor and machines co-dominate the Rivera mural. The
toll that Fordism took on workers is evident in a predella panel of
their tired bodies trudging across an overpass on their way home.
But in its totality, the mural celebrates the strength of man and
machine, the power seized from nature by mankind and harnessed
in the giant factory.
Only in one tiny detail does an explicit critique of Ford appear, a
hat worn by one worker that reads “We Want,” no doubt a reference
to the union movement then gaining power in Detroit and ferociously
resisted by the company. Rivera, though, could not contain his
disdain for capital (though not for the Fords, father and son, whose
company he seemed to genuinely enjoy). As soon as he finished
Detroit Industry, he headed to New York to create a mural in the
newly completed Rockefeller Center. His refusal to remove portraits
of Lenin and of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., with a drink in hand and
women nearby led the Rockefellers to destroy the work.
Rivera also had been commissioned to create a mural entitled
Forge and Foundry for the Kahn-designed General Motors exhibit at
the upcoming Century of Progress International Exposition in
Chicago. The architect, who initially had not been enthusiastic about
commissioning the Rivera murals at the Institute of Art, had come to
strongly defend them. But after the Rockefeller Center controversy,
General Motors ordered him to fire Rivera. Kahn promised the artist
to “do my best to get permission for you to proceed,” but the auto
company did not relent. Rivera told the press, “This is a blow to me. I
wanted to paint men and machinery.” Returning to Mexico, he hardly
ever did again. Fordism and the giant factory lost their greatest
chronicler.62
Ironically, and tellingly, today the most widely seen image of the
Rouge in high culture is probably neither the Rivera murals nor
Sheeler’s work but a painting by Frida Kahlo. When she came with
Rivera to Detroit, Kahlo was almost completely unknown as an artist,
but while in the city she produced a number of works that eventually
came to overshadow Rivera’s mural in the global art world, just as
her overall reputation came to overshadow his. In her best-known
work of the period, the extraordinary painting Henry Ford Hospital,
the Rouge appears as visual and topical background to the central
image of a bleeding Kahlo lying in bed after the miscarriage she had
in Detroit (probably induced as an abortion). Among other things, her
painting is a premonition of the shift of cultural interest in North
America and Europe away from industry toward intensely personal,
inward concerns.63

The Tramp in the Factory

In terms of sheer popularity, the premier visual representation of
Fordism and the giant factory was not a painting or photograph at all,
but Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times, released in 1936. Mass
production had long fascinated the filmmaker, by then one of the
country’s best-known celebrities. In 1923 he had visited Detroit,
touring the Highland Park powerhouse and assembly line with Henry
and Edsel Ford as his guides. Years later, trying to come up with a
way to cinematically deal with the misery caused by the Great
Depression and more broadly with the machine age, the Ford factory
provided inspiration. In the last major silent film to be made in
Hollywood, Chaplin utilized what already was an archaic technology
to critique mass production, mass consumption, and the capitalist
crisis. (The film has a sound track, but the only voices heard come
from mechanical devices until, near the very end, we finally hear
Chaplin’s voice, singing a nonsense song with no intelligible words.)
From the very first frame—a picture of a clock face—Chaplin
presents the demands of industrial discipline. In a long early
sequence, his character, the Tramp (his long-standing film persona,
though in this film identified as “A Factory Worker”), works on an
assembly line tightening bolts for a never-seen product. Funny and
horrifying, the workers struggle to keep up with the line while the
Tramp mischievously tries to subvert the system. The company
president, from his office (where he is doing a jigsaw puzzle), can
see everything in the factory, including the bathroom, through a
television system (in real life then still in an experimental stage),
which he uses to issue commands to speed up the line. The
dehumanization of the worker in the service of productivity reaches
its climax when the Tramp is used as a guinea pig for a machine
designed to feed workers while they continue to work. It
malfunctions, forcing bolts into the Tramp’s mouth and assaulting
him with food and a mechanical mouth wiper. Soon, the endless
repetitive motion of the assembly line has the Tramp uncontrollably
twitching and eventually going mad, a comedic representation of the
“Forditis” workers suffered when Ford introduced the assembly line.
As the film proceeds, it broadens out to encompass the ills of the
whole society—mass unemployment, inequality, hunger, labor
unrest, and heartless government authorities. The Tramp returns for
a second stint in the factory, this time as a mechanic’s helper, to find
himself literally dragged into the bowels of the machinery. Chaplin is
not oblivious to the rewards of Fordism; at one point the Tramp, out
of a job again because of a strike, and his companion, the beautiful
Gamin played by Paulette Goddard, fantasizes life in a well-
furnished worker’s bungalow, with modern appliances and a cow that
furnishes milk on demand. But in the end, there is no satisfactory
place for the Tramp and the Gamin in Modern Times, in the world of
the giant factory. The film concludes with the couple walking down a
rural road toward sunset and an unknown future, with a touch of
hope provided by the final title, “Buck up—never say die. We’ll get
along.”
Chaplin’s film is a critique of Depression-era capitalism, but it is
also a critique of the fundamental characteristics of the mass-
production factory. For Chaplin, the only solution to the soul-
deadening drudgery and monotony of the giant factory is literally to
walk away. In this regard, Modern Times is different and far more
radical than the work of other left-wing chroniclers of the giant
factory, including Rivera, who saw it as advancing humanity, even if,
as Louis Lozowick had written, it might only be in the future that
“rationalization and economy” would be “allies of the working class in
the building of socialism.” Left-wing labor leader Louis Goldblatt told
Chaplin his film was “Luddite.” Machines, Goldblatt asserted, were
necessary for improving living standards of the working class.
At least publicly, though, the left largely applauded Modern
Times. Chaplin had become friendly with Boris Shumyatsky, the
head of the film industry in the Soviet Union, during his visit to the
United States, and Shumyatsky’s public praise for the film made it
hard for those in the communist orbit to do otherwise. (A Daily
Worker review did say that in Modern Times “machinery turns out to
be a gadget for comic use, like a trick cigar.”) Much of the
mainstream press hailed the film as a triumphant comeback for
Chaplin, who had not made a movie for five years.
As Edward Newhouse noted in Partisan Review, few critics, even
as they praised him, acknowledged Chaplin’s radical message.
Modern Times became a favorite of the cineastes and leftists for
decades. It was shown in cinemas in the Soviet Union and, after the
Cuban Revolution, when mobile projection crews brought motion
pictures to remote villages where they had never been seen, the first
film they showed was Modern Times. But communist leaders, like
capitalists, had no desire to walk away from factory modernity, the
way the Tramp did in Chaplin’s masterpiece. To the contrary, at the
very moment the film premiered, the Soviet Union was well into a
crash industrialization program, building giant factories that used
Ford methods, even as in the United States workers were finally
finding a way to tame them. 64

Unionizing Mass Production

“Jesus Christ, it’s like the end of the world.” So mouthed a tirebuilder
at the huge Firestone tire factory in Akron, at 2 a.m. on January 29,
1936, when the workers began one of the first major sit-down strikes
in American history. It was a chilling moment, as Ruth McKenney
reconstructed it in her book Industrial Valley, when a tirebuilder
pulled a handle to shut down the production line:

With this signal, in perfect synchronization, with the rhythm they had
learned in a great mass-production industry, the tirebuilders stepped back
from their machines.
Instantly, the noise stopped. The whole room lay in perfect
silence. . . . A moment ago there had been the weaving hands, the
revolving wheels, the clanking belt, the moving hooks, the flashing tire
tools. Now there was absolute stillness.
 When the silence broke, the men began cheering. “We done it!
We stopped the belt!” Then they sang “John Brown’s Body.” Out the
windows they chorused “He is trampling out the vintage where the
grapes of wrath are stored.”65
It was like the end of the world, or at least the beginning of the
end of the world of industrial autocracy that had been part and parcel
of factory giantism. The great labor upheaval in the United States
during the late 1930s and 1940s transformed the giant factory, the
lives of industrial workers, their families and communities, and the
nation itself. With unionization, an industrial system that had once
brought so much misery now brought unprecedented working-class
upward mobility, security, and well-being. The unionized giant factory
helped create what many Americans look back at as a golden era of
shared prosperity, when children did better than their parents and
expected their children to do better than themselves.66
Workers had tried to unionize large-scale industry before the
1930s, but repeatedly they had been repulsed, unable to overcome
the physical fortresses and financial resources of the giant
manufacturing concerns. But by the mid-1930s conditions had
changed. The Great Depression robbed big business and its allies of
political legitimacy and popular support. Financially pressed,
companies eliminated many of the welfare programs they had
introduced in the early twentieth century. Wage cuts, speedup, and
layoffs further angered workers. Various left-wing groups, though
small, provided ideas and leaders to disaffected workers, by this time
less divided by ethnicity and language as a result of the restrictions
on immigration that came during and after World War I. And crucially,
the New Deal and its state-level equivalents provided symbolic and
practical support for workers trying to unionize. In 1935, a group of
veteran unionists, seeking to capitalize on the new circumstances,
founded the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), dedicated
to organizing the mass-production industries across the board,
bringing skilled and unskilled workers into the same organizations.67
The largest industrial facilities, like the U.S. Steel plant in Gary
and the main plants of the Big Three automakers—General Motors,
Ford, and Chrysler—initially remained impervious to significant union
gains. Instead, industrial workers generally first made organizational
advances in smaller or peripheral plants. In the automobile industry,
unions progressed among skilled tool- and die-makers; in parts
plants, like Electric Auto-Lite in Toledo, Ohio, struck in 1934; and at
smaller firms outside of the industry’s Michigan heartland, like White
Motors in Cleveland and Studebaker in South Bend, Indiana. In the
electrical-equipment industry, early labor success largely came at
smaller companies, like Philco Radio in Philadelphia and Magnavox-
Capehart in Fort Wayne, Indiana. At the number-two company,
Westinghouse, unionists established a toehold at the East
Springfield, Massachusetts, plant, but at the company’s giant East
Pittsburgh facility, scene of bitter battles in earlier years,
management maintained firm control. General Electric, the industry
giant, had a more liberal labor policy, allowing small unions to start
up at its giant complexes in Schenectady, New York, and Lynn,
Massachusetts, but they had little real power.
By 1936, with an economic recovery under way and the CIO
providing support, industrial unions began making progress even in
some factory goliaths. In Akron, where the nation’s tire-making
capacity was highly concentrated in a few large factories, a
prolonged strike at Goodyear followed the Firestone sit-down. In the
auto industry, the CIO-affiliated United Automobile Workers (UAW)
began building a base in the General Motors empire.68
The UAW picked General Motors—which operated 110 factories
and had more employees than any other manufacturing enterprise in
the world—as its primary target in its effort to break into the Big
Three. The contest between the infant union and what by some
measures was the largest corporation anywhere seemed absurdly
lopsided. But UAW organizers understood that a high degree of
centralization and the tight integration of the company production
processes left it vulnerable to a militant minority. In particular, only
two sets of dies for making the bodies for the newest GM model
existed, one in Cleveland and the other in Flint. Stopping those
factories would shut down most of the company’s domestic car-
making.
Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection in November 1936, in a campaign
marked by sharp class rhetoric and massive labor support for the
president, gave a boost to organizing efforts. UAW leaders hoped to
launch a national strike against GM in early 1937, but outbreaks of
worker militancy forced their hand sooner. In mid-November, workers
at the GM plant in Atlanta began a sit-down strike. A month later, so
did GM workers in Kansas City. Then, on December 28, workers in
the GM plant in Cleveland sat down, too.
In Flint, the heart of the GM production system, after several
years of effort the union still had signed up only a small minority of
the forty thousand workers. But when on December 30 a union
activist saw body dies being loaded to ship out, apparently to
factories in areas with less union strength, the workers sat down in
the small Fisher Body Plant No. 2 and the seven-thousand-worker
Fisher Body No. 1, blocking the removal of the equipment. In the
days that followed, workers at more GM plants in Indiana, Ohio,
Michigan, and Wisconsin followed suit. With the production of car
bodies and other key components halted, within a week the whole
GM national operation began grinding to a halt, with roughly half the
workforce idled. The efficiencies and strategic advantages of the
giant factory had come back to haunt the company, as a minority of
workers, by seizing key choke points, leveraged power far beyond
what one might expect from their modest numbers (which the sit-
down tactic help disguise).
During the forty-four days strikers stayed inside the Flint plants,
the giant factory turned from a site of managerial control to an arena
of worker self-expression. The strikers organized themselves into
committees in charge of overall leadership, security (including
making sure no machinery was damaged), sanitation, and food.
Makeshift sleeping quarters were built in car bodies and on factory
floors, using car cushion stuffing to provide a touch of comfort.
Cards, games, radio, Ping-Pong, and classes on labor history and
parliamentary procedure helped ease the boredom and fear. So did
dancers, theater troupes, and other sympathetic outsiders who
entered the plants to provide entertainment.
The GM strike captured national attention, closely reported by
newspapers, radio, and newsreels. The tense confrontation included
an effort by company guards and Flint police to evict the occupiers of
Fisher No. 2, repulsed by workers heaving heavy door hinges out
second-story windows and training high-pressure water hoses on the
police (who during their retreat opened fire on union backers); the
mobilization of strikers’ wives and other family members to physically
defend the occupied plants and provide the sit-downers with food
and supplies; the seizure of an additional Flint plant, the gigantic
Chevy No. 4 factory, which made every engine used in a Chevrolet;
the mobilization of the Michigan National Guard, which surrounded
the occupied factories; and, ultimately, negotiations involving GM
officials, CIO President John L. Lewis, Michigan governor Frank
Murphy, and federal officials, all the way up to President Roosevelt.
The agreement that ended the strike, in itself, constituted but a
modest union gain, a written company pledge that for six months it
would recognize the UAW as the representative of its members in
the struck plants. But as huge crowds cheered the haggard,
bearded, smiling men who marched out of the occupied Flint plants,
everyone knew that the world had changed; workers had shown that
they could bring one of the most powerful corporations in the world
to its knees by shutting down the giant factories in which they
labored.69
The UAW victory set off a wave of strikes and union organization
everywhere from giant factories to local retail stores. Nearly five
million workers took part in walkouts during 1937, including four
hundred thousand sit-downers. For its part, General Motors gave its
workers a 5 percent pay hike and agreed with the UAW to a shop-
steward system and the use of seniority in layoffs. Meanwhile, the
auto union won agreements with smaller car companies, with parts
makers, and, after a month-long sit-down in Dodge Main and six
other factories, with Chrysler. In the electrical-equipment industry,
the United Electrical Workers signed a contract with RCA covering
the nearly ten thousand workers (three-quarters female) at its
Camden, New Jersey, plant while General Electric agreed to a
national contract that covered most of its largest plants, including its
sprawling complex in Schenectady.70
The most remarkable breakthrough came in the steel industry,
what Lewis called “the Hindenburg line of [American] industry.” Less
than a week after the end of the General Motors strike, Lewis signed
an agreement with Myron Taylor, the chairman of U.S. Steel, which
granted workers a wage increase, the forty-hour week, time-and-a-
half for overtime, and a grievance procedure. The CIO had created
the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) to try to unionize
the industry, but the going had been slow. Nonetheless, Taylor
apparently decided that, given the union victory over GM and the
pro-labor sentiment in Washington and in the statehouses of key
steelmaking states, unionization was inevitable. Rather than allowing
a prolonged battle that would mobilize the rank and file and perhaps
interrupt production, Taylor cut a deal with Lewis, with no
involvement of local activists or even SWOC leaders.71
As impressive as it was, the CIO offensive failed to sweep the
field, as a number of key operators of very large industrial facilities
successfully resisted unionization. The worst setback came in steel,
as the so-called “Little Steel” companies, giants except in
comparison with U.S. Steel, refused to recognize SWOC. In
response, their workers walked out in late May 1937, but the strike
ended in defeat; as in the past, the companies mobilized local
governments, police, and the press against the strikers. Eighteen
workers died during the battle, including ten shot by police during a
peaceful protest in front of Republic Steel’s South Chicago mill. Just
days earlier, when the UAW sent organizers to pass out leaflets
outside the Rouge, they were set upon by Ford thugs and beaten
mercilessly. Westinghouse, Goodyear, International Harvester, and,
most importantly, Ford all dug in their heels and refused to sign
contracts with the CIO, weakened as it was by the Little Steel defeat
and a downward plunge of the economy that began in mid-1937. The
victory of industrial unionism was not yet assured.72
But World War II allowed the American labor movement to
complete the unionization of large-scale industry. Even before the
United States entered the conflict, a defense buildup revived the
economy, tightening labor markets and bolstering worker confidence.
Also, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers the
right to join unions without reprisal and established a mechanism for
their legal recognition, finally began forcing employers to change
their ways. By late 1941, through a combination of legal challenges,
worker mobilization, strikes, and federally supervised recognition
elections, SWOC succeeded in organizing Little Steel.
Westinghouse, International Harvester, Goodyear, and other
holdouts fell to the CIO as well.73
The largest and symbolically most important victory came at
Ford. In the fall of 1940, the UAW relaunched its stalled effort to
organize the company. By the end of the year, the union had won
substantial backing at the Rouge and a Lincoln plant in Detroit, filing
for recognition elections. On April 1, 1941, a strike broke out at the
Rouge after the company fired members of a union grievance
committee in the rolling mill. As the number of strikers swelled, union
leaders called a full-scale walkout at all Ford plants. To keep scabs
out of the Rouge, with its immense perimeter, the strikers
supplemented traditional picketing with a motorized encirclement of
the plant and even aerial surveillance. In a reversal of the past
pattern, Ford “servicemen” working for Harry Bennett found
themselves being beat up by unionists. After ten days, the company
agreed to end the strike by reinstating the fired workers and holding
union recognition elections. At the Rouge, seventy-four thousand
workers cast ballots in one of the largest such elections ever held,
with 70 percent supporting the UAW. The union won decisive
victories at Highland Park, the Lincoln plant, and other Ford factories
as well. Then, in a startling and somewhat inexplicable move, the
company agreed to one of the most generous contracts that any CIO
union had achieved, including a provision that required all new
employees to join the union, a checkoff of union dues (which the
company took out of workers’ pay and gave to the union), disbanding
Bennett’s Service Department, strengthened seniority and grievance
systems, the rehiring, with back pay, of workers fired for union
activity, and even allowing smoking in designated areas at the
Highland Park and Lincoln plants, repudiating Henry Ford’s
imposition of abstinence on his employees.74
The swelling of the union movement continued during the war
itself. To check inflation, the federal government kept wage rates at
prewar levels, but gave unions a boost by granting them
“maintenance of membership,” requiring all workers at unionized
plants to join unless they took advantage of a brief opt-out window.
Virtually every new hire at unionized firms automatically became a
union member, a flood of dues-payers as defense payrolls soared.
Other new members came through organizing campaigns, which
unions, aligning themselves with the war effort, often portrayed as
patriotic endeavors. Union membership, which jumped from 3.6
million at the start of the Great Depression to 10.5 million in 1941,
reached 14.8 million in 1945, with roughly one out of three
nonagricultural workers carrying a union card. With only a few
notable exceptions, the giant factory had been placed under the roof
of the house of labor. Fordism had revolutionized the American
economy and society; the uprising of industrial workers gave mass
production a new, more democratic meaning.75
 CHAPTER 5

“COMMUNISM IS SOVIET POWER

PLUS THE ELECTRIFICATION OF THE
WHOLE COUNTRY”
Crash Industrialization in the Soviet Union

IN DECEMBER 1929, PHILIP ADLER, A REPORTER FOR THE Detroit News,

visited Stalingrad, on the Volga River in southwestern Russia (until
1925 called Tsaritsyn), where the government of the Soviet Union
was erecting a huge new tractor factory on a muddy, treeless field
that had been used for growing melons. The factory held special
interest for Motor City readers because American companies and
workers—many from Detroit—were heavily involved in its planning
and operation. Albert Kahn served as the overall architect, the Frank
D. Chase Company laid out the foundry, and R. Smith, Incorporated,
designed the forge shop. McClintic-Marshall Products Company
fabricated the beams and trusses. Most of the production equipment
was made in the United States, and the Soviets hired several
hundred Americans to work at the plant, in many cases as foremen
or supervisors.
Before going to the factory site, a half hour out of town, Adler
visited the city center, where in the market he found “the familiar
figures of the tinker, the cobbler and the dealers in second hand
clothing and furniture who employ the most primitive methods of
manufacture and salesmanship. The ox team, the camel and the
biblical ass rival the horse as mediums of transportation.” From a
minaret among the church cupolas came the cry “ ‘Allah Ho
Akbar!’—Allah is powerful!” But when Adler got to the construction
site, the watchword everywhere was “ ‘Amerikansky Temp’ or
‘American tempo’ ” and the slogan plastered about was “To catch up
with and surpass America.” The following summer, with the plant
beginning to turn out its first tractors, Margaret Bourke-White arrived
after an arduous journey, taking what would become one of her most
iconic photographs, of three workers on a newly finished tractor
coming off an assembly line.1
 Figure 5.1 Margaret Bourke-White’s iconic 1931 photograph, Stalingrad Tractor
Factory.

The Tractorstroi (“tractor factory”) in Stalingrad was part of a

feverish drive by the Soviet Union to rapidly industrialize, boosting its
standard of living and increasing its defensive capacity on the road
to creating a socialist society. Most Bolshevik leaders believed that a
socialist or communist society could be achieved in Russia—a poor
and economically backward country—only after significant industrial
development. Seizing political power was not enough. “There can be
no question of . . . communism,” Vladimir Lenin declared in 1920,
“unless Russia is put on a different and a higher technical basis than
that has existed up to now. Communism is Soviet power plus the
electrification of the whole country, since industry cannot be
developed without electrification.” And it was a particular type of
industrialization Lenin and his comrades had in mind, “large-scale
machine production.”2
It took time before the Soviet Republic could launch a major
industrialization effort, but by the late 1920s a detailed plan had been
adopted. In 1929, on the twelfth anniversary of the October
Revolution, Joseph Stalin wrote, “We are advancing full steam
ahead along the path of industrialization—to socialism, leaving
behind the age-old ‘Russian’ backwardness. We are becoming a
country of metal, a country of automobiles, a country of tractors.”
Industrial behemoths were key to the Soviet effort to leap from
“The ox team, the camel and the biblical ass” to “a country of metal,
a country of automobiles, a country of tractors.” The First Five-Year
Plan, begun in 1928, centered on a series of very large scale factory
and infrastructure projects, including three huge tractor factories, a
big automobile plant in Nizhny Novgorod, immense steel complexes
at Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk, the Dnieporstroi hydroelectric dam,
the Turksib railway connecting Kazakhstan with western Siberia, and
the Volga-Don canal. Lacking the technical expertise and industrial
resources for creating and equipping projects of such size and
sophistication, the Soviets turned heavily to the West, especially the
United States, for engineers, construction and production experts,
and machinery, adopting the techniques of scientific management
and mass production and in some cases creating virtual replicas of
facilities in the United States. As Stephan Kotkin wrote in his
landmark history of Magnitogorsk, for the communists, “The dizzying
upheaval that was Soviet industrialization was reduced to the
proposition: build as many factories as possible, as quickly as
possible, all exclusively under state control.” In the Soviet Union, just
as in the United States, the giant factory came to be equated with
progress, civilization, and modernity.3
But the Soviet Union was a very different place than the United
States. Would the factory itself be different there? Would it have a
different social significance? In 1927, Egmont Arens, an editor of the
left-wing journal New Masses, reviewing a play, The Belt, which
demonized assembly line production, remarked, “The Belt is
something that has got to be faced even by advocates of a workers’
state. Right now Russia is installing modern industrial plants of her
own. Are the horrible things that The Belt does to minds and bodies
of workers inevitable? Or is there a difference between high pressure
production in Socialist Russia and Henry Ford’s Detroit?”4
The factory had developed largely as a means for industrialists
and investors to make money for themselves. Though it was
sometimes freighted with moral imperatives and claims of social
good, its physical design, internal organization, technology, and labor
relations were determined primarily by the desire to maximize
profits.5 What did it mean to have a factory in a society where profits,
in the usual sense, did not exist, where all large-scale productive
entities belonged to a government that, at least in theory, served as
the agent of the people, especially the working class? Could and
should the capitalist factory, as a technical, social, and cultural
system, simply be moved into a socialist society? Were methods like
scientific management and the assembly line, designed to increase
efficiency and labor productivity in order to boost profits, appropriate
for a society in which the needs of workers and the well-being of the
entire population were declared paramount?
The Soviet Union differed from the United States not only in its
ideology but also in its level of economic development. Before the
1917 revolution, Russia had been an overwhelmingly agricultural
society. What industry it did have was severely disrupted by the
revolution and the civil war that followed. Could large, technically
advanced industrial facilities successfully operate in such an
environment, short-cutting the long process of economic
development that had occurred in Western Europe and the United
States? Could a heroic effort to leap directly to large-scale
industrialization stimulate broad economic growth, or would chaos
ensue from the lack of needed material inputs, logistics, and worker
and managerial skills?
Questions about the role of the giant factory in economic
development and social structure remain alive today, both in the few
remaining countries that call themselves communist—most
importantly China and Vietnam—and in the capitalist world. With
much of the world’s population still living in poverty, the issue of how
to raise living standards remains a central economic, political, and
moral concern. What role should the giant factory play in the effort to
achieve broad material and social well-being? What price should
industrial workers pay for social abundance?
Some of the answers to these knotty questions began to emerge
during the 1930s, from the muddy fields on the outskirts of Stalingrad
and from other sites like it across the Soviet Union. The experience
with the American-style giant factory proved crucial not only in
shaping the history of the Soviet Union but also in defining a path for
development for much of the world in the decades after World War II.
Stalinist industrial giantism, for better and for worse, became one of
the main paths for trying to achieve prosperity and modernity, a
Promethean utopianism that mixed huge social ambitions with
enormous human suffering.

“Marxism Plus Americanism”

In the twentieth century, American production techniques and
managerial methods—what came to be called “Americanism”—
commanded considerable interest in Europe. Some of it was
technical, in high-speed machining and the high-strength metals it
required, the standardization of products, the use of various kinds of
conveyance devices, and the mass-production system that these
developments made possible. But interest was at least as great in
the ideology associated with advanced manufacturing, the promise
that with productivity gains the income of workers could go up even
as profits rose, thereby dissipating class conflict and social unrest.6
As avatars of scientific management and mass production,
Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford became well-known and
well-regarded figures in Europe. By the early twentieth century,
Taylor’s writings had been translated into French, German, and
Russian. In the early 1920s, Ford displaced Taylor as the icon of
Americanism, as worker criticism of Taylorist management grew and
the wonders of the assembly line and the Model T became better
known abroad. In Germany, Ford’s autobiography, My Life and Work,
translated in 1923, sold more than two hundred thousand copies.
Though Americanism as a technical and ideological system had
considerable influence all across Europe, perhaps surprisingly its
greatest impact occurred in the Soviet Union. The groundwork was
laid before the revolution. What industry Russia had tended to be
highly concentrated, with quite a few large factories, some foreign-
owned and operated with the help of foreign experts who were
aware of the latest trends in management thinking, including those
associated with Americanism. In addition, at least a few Russian
socialists, most importantly Lenin, knew about scientific
management and thought about its implications.
In his first comments about scientific management, while in exile
in 1913, Lenin echoed critiques common among American and
European unionists and leftists, seeing its “purpose . . . to squeeze
out of the worker” more labor in the same amount of time. “Advances
in the sphere of technology and science in capitalist society are but
advances in the extortion of sweat.” Three years later, he plunged
deeper into scientific management in preparation for writing
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, reading a German
translation of Taylor’s book Shop Management, a book on the
application of the Taylor system, and an article by Frank Gilbreth on
how motion studies could increase national wealth. In the end, he
never discussed management techniques in Imperialism, but his
notes from the time indicate a view of scientific management in
keeping with the general tenor of the book, in which capitalist
advances, whatever their motives, were portrayed as laying the
basis for a socialist transformation, in line with Marx’s portrayal of
capitalism as an antechamber to a socialist economy.7
The 1917 revolution radically changed the context for Russian
thinking about scientific management. Instead of critiquing existing
social arrangements and defending workers, Russian communists
and their allies now found themselves facing the almost
overwhelming challenge of restoring the economy of a country
depleted and disrupted by war and revolution to the point of famine,
even as they fought a civil war and tried to consolidate their power.
For Lenin, scientific management became a necessary tool to
increase productivity and overcome economic backwardness, a
prelude to establishing a socialist society:

The Russian is a bad worker compared with workers of the advanced

countries. Nor could it be otherwise under the tsarist regime and in view
of the tenacity of the remnants of serfdom. The task that the Soviet
government must set the people in all its scope is—learn to work. The
Taylor system, the last word of capitalism in this respect, like all capitalist
progress, is a combination of the subtle brutality of bourgeois exploitation
and a number of its greatest scientific achievements in the field of
analyzing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous
and awkward motions, the working out of correct methods of work, the
introduction of the best system of accounting and control, etc. The Soviet
Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of
science and technology in this field. . . . We must organize in Russia the
study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and
adapt it to our purposes.

Lenin even suggested bringing in American engineers to implement

the Taylor system.8
Lenin’s backing helped legitimize scientific management as a
practice and ideology in the new Soviet Republic. Exigency
accelerated its adoption. One of its earliest adoptions came in
railroad shops and armaments factories during the civil war, when
keeping train engines operating and producing arms were literally
matters of life and death for the revolution. As Commissar of War,
Leon Trotsky embraced Taylorism as a “merciless” form of labor
exploitation but also “a wise expenditure of human strength
participating in production,” the “side of Taylorism the socialist
manager ought to make his own.” Desperate to increase production,
the Soviet government adopted piecework as a general practice and
set up a Central Labor Institute to promote means of increasing labor
productivity, including time and motion studies and other forms of
scientific management.9
The embrace of Taylorism did not go unchallenged. As in the
West, many workers and trade unionists opposed the imposition of
more stringent work norms through piecework and so-called
scientific methods, especially if workers themselves did not play a
role in establishing and administrating them. And there were more
sweeping ideological objections, too, centered on the relationship
between building a new kind of society and using capitalist methods.
On the one side were trade unionists, “Left Communists,” and,
later, members of the “Workers Opposition” within the Communist
Party, who believed that a socialist society required different social
structures of production than had developed under capitalism, with
greater worker participation and authority on the shop floor, in
managing enterprises, and in determining methods of production.
These critics of scientific management wanted to devise ways to
increase productivity without further exploiting workers, opposing the
extreme division of labor that transformed “the living person into an
unreasoning and stupid instrument.” To simply adopt methods
workers had long criticized under capitalism would negate the
meaning of the revolution.
On the other side were those who viewed capitalist production
methods as simply techniques that could be used to any end,
including the creation of wealth that would be the property of the
whole society under a socialist regime. Alexei Gastev, a one-time
worker-poet who became the secretary of the All-Russia Metal
Workers’ Union, the head of the Central Labor Institute, and the
leading Soviet proponent of scientific management, wrote in 1919,
“Whether we live in the age of super-imperialism or of world
socialism, the structure of the new industry will, in essence, be one
and the same.” Like other Soviet supporters of scientific
management, Gastev saw in Russian culture, especially among
peasants and former peasants who had entered industry, an inability
to work hard at a steady pace, instead alternating spurts of intense
labor with periods of little if any work (the same complaint early
English and American factory owners had about their workers).
American methods and an American sense of speed would provide a
cure. Trotsky gave intellectual and political weight to the case for
adopting capitalist methods, advocating the use of the most
advanced production techniques, regardless of their origin. Labor
compulsion, necessary during the transition to socialism, he
contended, had different significance when used in the service of a
workers’ state than for a capitalist enterprise (an argument that made
little headway with many Soviet trade unionists).10
The dispute over scientific management was largely resolved at
the Second All-Union Conference on Scientific Management, held in
March 1924. The participation by top communist leaders in the
extensive public debate that preceded it was a measure of the
importance of the question of the use of capitalist management
methods in the Soviet Union. By and large, the conference came out
in support of Gastev and the wide application of scientific
management, reflecting the demographic and economic
circumstances of the period. The prerevolutionary and revolutionary-
era skilled working class, the natural center for opposition to
Taylorism, had been all but decimated by war, revolution, and civil
war, with many of its survivors co-opted into leadership positions in
the government and the party. The main challenge in trying to raise
Soviet productivity was not squeezing more labor out of experienced,
skilled workers but getting useful labor out of new workers with little
or no industrial experience, for which scientific management, with its
stress on the simplification of tasks and detailed instructions to
workers, seemed well suited.11
It is not clear how much actual impact the endorsement of
scientific management had on Soviet industry, at least in the short
run. The Soviet Union lacked the experts, equipment, and
experience to implement the methods advocated by Taylor and his
disciples. Gastev’s institute, the center of scientific management, did
not have even basic equipment, conducting simplistic experiments of
little practical significance. Much of its work consisted of exhorting
workers: “Sharp eye, keen ear, alertness, exact reports!” Gastev
urged. “Mighty stroke! Calculated pressure, measured rest!” Many
Soviet managers adopted piecework pay, but unless accompanied
by detailed studies and reorganization that did nothing to increase
efficiency, instead simply inducing workers to work harder using
existing methods. Some scientific management techniques did
become common, like the use of Gantt charts for production
planning, as over time Soviet management journals and training
institutes spread the Taylorist gospel. But the immediate importance
of the endorsement of scientific management lay not in the field but
in opening the door to a broader embrace of Western methods and
technologies, which would soon lead to a crash program to re-create
the American-style giant factory.12
An early experiment came in the textile industry, in cooperation
with an American labor union. In 1921, Sidney Hillman, the president
of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW), after meeting with top
Bolshevik leaders and Soviet trade unionists, signed an agreement
to set up the Russian-American Industrial Corporation (RAIC), a joint
enterprise with the Russian Clothing Workers syndicate, which
ended up controlling twenty-five garment and textile factories that
employed fifteen thousand workers. The deal came just as the
Soviet Union was abandoning “War Communism,” the direct state
control and partial militarization of the economy during the civil war,
turning to a partial restoration of private ownership and market
relations under the “New Economic Policy (NEP).”
The ACW proved a perfect partner for what in effect was a state-
sponsored cooperative enterprise, meant to deploy the most
advanced American equipment and management techniques in the
restoration of the Russian garment industry. Many members and
leaders of the heavily Jewish ACW, including Hillman, had emigrated
from the Russian Empire, infected with the same radicalism that
culminated in the revolution. Under Hillman’s leadership, though, the
ACW had become increasingly practical in its policies, seeing in
scientific management a way to improve productivity in a
fragmented, often technologically primitive industry, creating the
basis for upgrading worker living standards. The trade-off the ACW
insisted on was union involvement in setting production norms and
piecework rates and a system of neutral arbitration to resolve
grievances. But the union affinity with scientific management was not
strictly pragmatic; as Hillman’s biographer Steve Fraser wrote, “the
ACW elite was firmly implanted in those socialist traditions that
affixed the tempo and timing of socialism to the inexorable rhythms
of industrial and social developments under capitalism.”
Through RAIC, the ACW brought to the Soviet garment industry
not only Western capital but more importantly advanced equipment
and expertise, including leading proponents of scientific
management, factory managers the union had dealings with in the
United States, and skilled workers familiar with joint union-
management efforts at Taylorization. In short order, RAIC could
boast of factories that matched the most advanced plants in the
United States in their equipment, productivity, and progressive labor
relations.13

Flirting with Ford

The NEP, which RAIC was part of, reanimated the Soviet economy.
But it failed to fully restore Soviet industry to prerevolutionary levels
of production, let alone fulfill the promise of the revolution to improve
life for tens of millions of workers and peasants. In October 1925,
Soviet industry still produced only 71 percent of pre–World War I
Russian output. Fairly small investments under NEP were able to
boost industrial output because there was considerable unused
capacity. But by the mid-1920s, with utilization much higher, fewer
possibilities remained for quick gains and possible reversals loomed;
little capital investment for a decade meant that much of the
industrial machinery in the country had reached or exceeded its
expected service life. Further advances would require heavy
investment in plant renovation, construction, and equipment.14
For most Soviet planners and political leaders, that meant staking
the future of the revolution on large-scale industrial and infrastructure
projects, though they disagreed sharply about the means and pace
of investment. The Marxist tradition had long associated progress
and modernity with the concentration of capital and mechanization.
The prerevolutionary Russian industrial experience also influenced
the Soviet sense of scale. In 1914, over half of Russian factory
workers were employed in plants with more than five hundred
workers, compared to less than a third in the United States. On the
eve of the revolution, Petrograd had a cluster of very big
government-controlled armament factories, some with well over ten
thousand workers, as well as a few giant private plants, including the
Putilov metalworking complex, with around thirty thousand workers
(where a strike helped kick off the revolt against the Tsar).15
Many Soviets credited the success of the United States, which
they saw as an exemplar, to its adoption of standardized products
and large industrial complexes. As in Western Europe, Henry Ford
was well known in the Soviet Union, seen as a living embodiment of
the most advanced social, technical, and economic developments.
By 1925, the Russian translation of My Life and Work had gone
through four printings. But even more important in spreading Ford’s
fame was his tractor, the Fordson.
Before World War I, there were only about six hundred tractors
spread across the vast domains of Russia. Believing the upgrading
of agricultural productivity central to the revolution, starting in 1923
the Soviet Union began importing tractors in growing numbers,
largely Fordsons. By 1926, 24,600 orders for Ford tractors had been
placed. The Soviet Union also imported some Model Ts. A pipeline
from River Rouge to the Russian steppes and cities had been
opened.
In 1926, the Soviet government asked Ford to send a team to
see how it could improve the maintenance of tractors, a large
percentage of which, at any given time, were inoperable because of
poor servicing, a lack of quality replacement parts, and inefficient
labor. Also, the Soviets wanted to explore the possibility of Ford
setting up a tractor factory in Russia. Already, they were trying, not
very successfully, to produce knock-offs of the Fordson on their own.
After spending four months touring the Soviet Union, a Ford
delegation recommended against building a factory, fearful of
political interference in operations and possible future expropriation.
Undeterred, Soviet officials still hoped for Ford-style factories to
make much-needed agricultural equipment and motor vehicles.16
By then, Ford methods did not evoke great controversy in the
Soviet Union. The debate over Taylorism already had led to the
endorsement of the use of capitalist methods. Also, Fordism less
directly challenged the small but influential cadre of skilled
metalworkers than scientific management, since, even with
assembly lines, craftsmen would be needed to make tools and dies
and maintain machinery. After touring the Soviet Union in 1926,
William Z. Foster reported “revolutionary workers are . . . . taking as
their model the American industries. In Russian factories and
mills . . . . It is all America, and especially Ford, whose plants are
generally considered as the very symbol of advanced industrial
technique.” “Fordizatsia”—Fordisation—became a favorite Soviet
neolism.17
Still, there was some opposition to Fordism by left-wing critics
who thought the adoption of methods designed to extract more labor
from workers went against the fundamental socialist project of
diminishing the exploitation and alienation of the working class. One
of the sharpest ripostes to them came from Trotsky, a leading
advocate of the adoption of Ford methods, just as he had been a
leading advocate of the adoption of scientific management. In a 1926
article, he bluntly declared, “The Soviet system shod with American
technology will be socialism. . . . American technology . . . will
transform our order, liberating it from the heritage of backwardness,
primitiveness, and barbarism.”
Trotsky thought the assembly line, or conveyor method as he
called it, would supplant piecework as a capitalist means of
regulating labor, replacing an individualized mode with a collective
one. Socialists needed to adopt the conveyor, too, he argued, but
under their control it would be different, since the pace and hours of
work would be set by a workers’ regime. Nonetheless, he
acknowledged that by its very nature the assembly line degraded
human labor. In perhaps the most powerful argument ever made in
defense of the Fordist factory, at least from a point of view other than
that of those who profited from it, Trotsky answered a question he
had been asked, “What about the monotony of labor, depersonalized
and despiritualized by the conveyor?” “The fundamental, main, and
most important task,” he replied, “is to abolish poverty. It is
necessary that human labor shall produce the maximum possible
quantity of goods. . . . A high productivity of labor cannot be achieved
without mechanization and automation, the finished expression of
which is the conveyor.” Just like Edward Filene, Trotsky claimed “The
monotony of labor is compensated for by its reduced duration and its
increased easiness. There will always be branches of industry in
society that demand personal creativity, and those who find their
calling in production will make their way to them.” Then came a final
flourish: “A voyage in a boat propelled by oars demands great
personal creativity. A voyage in a steamboat is more ‘monotonous’
but more comfortable and more certain. Moreover, you can’t cross
the ocean in a rowboat. And we have to cross an ocean of human
need.”18

Embracing the Giant Factory

Just how to cross that ocean of need became the subject of an
intense debate among Soviet leaders in the mid-1920s. The
Bolshevik assumption always had been that the survival of their
revolution would depend on the spread of socialism to advanced
countries in Western Europe, which would then help Russia develop.
But by a half-dozen years after World War I, it was clear that in the
near future there would be no triumphant revolutions elsewhere. For
economic development, the Soviet Union would have to depend on
its own very limited resources.
Some Soviet leaders, including Nikolai Bukharin, argued that
under the circumstances the best road forward lay in modest,
balanced growth, driven by upgrading the agricultural sector.
Increased peasant income would expand the market for consumer
goods, which could be met through investments in light industry.
Heavy industry would have to grow slowly.
Others wanted heavy industry to take the lead, with a faster pace
of industrialization and economic growth. In part, they were driven by
fears that the Western powers would again use their military forces
to try to overthrow the Soviet regime, as they had during the civil
war, necessitating the rapid development of an industrial base that
could support a powerful army. They also feared placing the fate of
the economy in the hands of a peasantry that wavered in its
allegiance to the Soviet regime, withholding grain and other goods
when prices were low or when there were too few consumer goods
available to spend their money on. Instead, advocates of rapid
industrialization, including Trotsky, sought to extract more wealth
from the peasantry, if need be through levies, selling grain and raw
materials abroad to finance industrialization.
A Communist Party congress in late 1927 balanced the two
positions. But during the next two years, as a detailed Five-Year Plan
for the economy was worked out, policy shifted toward the “super-
industrializers” and then went far past even their most ambitious
goals. The final plan called for a pace of industrialization
unprecedented in human history, in half a decade doubling the fixed
capital of the country and increasing iron production fourfold.
The swing coincided with Joseph Stalin’s victory over his rivals in
the battle for the leadership of the Communist Party that followed
Lenin’s death in January 1924. Having outmaneuvered his most
formidable opponent, Trotsky, Stalin appropriated his program of
rapid industrialization and vastly accelerated it. Stalin feared that
boosting the wealth of the peasantry would increase its political
power. To free the party and state once and forever from being held
hostage, he sought to diminish the economic resources of the
peasantry and ultimately transform it by collectivizing farm
production. Wealth squeezed out of agriculture would finance the
growth of heavy industry and, with it, an enlarged working class.
The call for very rapid industrialization was central to what
historians have dubbed Stalin’s “revolution from above.” Its success
was predicated on a revival of the heroic spirit and mass mobilization
of the revolution and the civil war. Stalin’s “vision of modernity”
embodied in the First Five-Year Plan, wrote historian Orlando Figes,
“gave a fresh energy to the utopian hopes of the Bolsheviks. It
mobilized a whole new generation of enthusiasts,” including young
workers and party activists, for whom the industrialization drive was
to be their October. By sheer willpower, the Soviet Union would seize
modernity and catch up to and pass its capitalist rivals.19
The giant factory played a pivotal role in the effort. One Soviet
planner said that preparing a list of needed new factories was “the
soul of five-year plans.” While some funds were invested in
renovating and expanding existing plants, building new ones
provided the opportunity for installing the most advanced technology
available. Some experts proposed adopting European methods and
machine designs, their smaller scale and lesser demand for
precision standardized parts as more appropriate to the existing
state of Soviet industry than American mass production. But Soviet
leaders decided to adopt the American model, seeing investment in
a few, very large factories, where great economies of scale could be
achieved through rationalization, specialization, and mechanization,
as a better use of precious investment funds than spreading them
thinly to build more, smaller, less technically advanced plants. When
one critic of that approach questioned the availability of trained labor
to operate American machinery, asking “Maybe you want to breed a
new race of people,” Vassily Ivanov, the first manager of the
Stalingrad tractor plant, replied “Yes! That is our program!”
The First Five-Year Plan incorporated a few big projects already
begun or planned, like the Dnieporstroi dam and hydroelectric
project, and proposed massive new ones, like the Magnitogorsk iron
and steel complex and the several tractor and automobile factories.
These landmark projects would create the transportation and power
infrastructure, iron and steel industry, and tractor and vehicle output
to transform the whole country and lay the basis for new defense
production.
The epic scale of the First Five-Year-Plan projects reflected the
utopianism associated with it and the need to stir popular
imagination for the massive mobilization and sacrifice it required.
Giantism was as much an ideological matter as a technical one. The
very scale of the planned industrial complexes made achieving
modernity, measured against the most advanced nations, and doing
so quickly, seem a palpable possibility, something worth suffering to
achieve. Tempo was deemed an existential issue. “We are 50–100
years behind the advanced countries,” Stalin declared in 1931. “We
must make up this distance in ten years. Either we do this, or they
will crush us.”20

Turning to the West

The Soviet Union lacked the engineering cadre, experience, and
capital goods manufacturing capacity to build the Five-Year Plan
projects on its own. Necessity forced it to turn to personnel and
machinery from the capitalist world. Some foreign experts already
were working in the Soviet Union, but their role greatly expanded
once the First Five-Year Plan got under way. Not only did the Soviet
Union have too few engineers, industrial architects, and other
specialists experienced with large-scale projects; equally important,
the Bolsheviks distrusted the experts they had, most of whom had
begun their careers working for private firms, had not supported the
revolution, and were seen as lacking knowledge of the newest
industrial developments and the boldness and initiative found
abroad, especially in the United States. The largest group of foreign
experts the Soviets recruited came from Germany, with Britain and
Switzerland also providing significant numbers of engineers and
technicians. But in terms of their role, American companies and
consultants were most important, taking on outsized roles in the
leading Five-Year Plan projects. Though unsympathetic to the
Russian Revolution, American businesses did not hesitate to take
advantage of the commercial possibilities it presented.21
The influx began with work on Dnieporstroi, the huge dam and
hydroelectric project in the Ukraine, the largest in Europe when it
opened in 1932. In 1926, a Soviet delegation visiting the United
States signed a contract with Hugh L. Cooper, who had supervised
the construction of the dam and power station in Muscle Shoals,
Tennessee, to play a similar role for Dnieporstroi. For one or two
months a year, Cooper worked on site, while a small group of
engineers from his firm stayed year-round. The Soviets purchased
much of the heavy equipment for the project in the United States.
The Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company built nine
turbines for the dam, the largest ever manufactured, and sent
engineers to supervise their installation. General Electric built some
of the generators, part of its very extensive involvement in Soviet
electrification and industrialization during the late 1920s and
1930s.22
American involvement in the Stalingrad tractor plant was even
more extensive. The tractor held almost mythical importance in the
Soviet Union; Russian-American writer Maurice Hindus, who
traveled frequently in his native land, declared the tractor the “arbiter
of the peasant’s destiny,” “not a mechanical monster, but a heroic
conqueror.” Tractors almost never were sold to individual peasants
but rather used as inducements and support for collective cultivation.
The tractor station, which housed equipment for use on nearby
collective farms, became a key Soviet institution, not only supplying
mechanical power but also collecting grain for the state and serving
as a symbol of modernity and Bolshevik power. Rebellious villages
did not get access to tractors.23
Already spending heavily to import tractors, the Soviet
government made their domestic production an investment priority.
Having been spurned in its request to Henry Ford to set up a
Russian tractor plant, the government turned to the next best thing,
Ford’s favorite architect, Albert Kahn. Soviet leaders knew of Kahn
because of his work at River Rouge. But in planning what would
become the Stalingrad plant, they did due diligence, in November
1928 sending a delegation of engineers to the United States to study
tractor production and visit equipment manufacturers and
engineering and architectural firms, including Kahn’s. In early May
1929, Amtorg, a trading company controlled by the Soviet
government, signed a contract with the Detroit architect to design a
factory capable of producing forty thousand tractors a year (a target
later raised to fifty thousand). Kahn also agreed to lay out the site,
supervise the construction, help procure building materials and
equipment from U.S. companies, and supply key personnel for the
start-up of the plant.24
Upon signing the Amtorg contract, Kahn presented the problems
the Soviet Union faced as technical, with it having many of the same
challenges and opportunities as the United States. As would be true
in most of his statements about the U.S.S.R., he never mentioned
communism and avoided politics. Perhaps to forestall criticism from
anticommunist businesses, he portrayed the Soviet Union as a large
potential market for U.S. equipment manufacturers.25
In choosing the Kahn firm, Soviet leaders threw in their lot with a
company capable of operating at the rapid pace at which they hoped
to carry out industrialization. Within two months of signing the
contract, two Kahn engineers arrived in the Soviet Union with
preliminary drawings for the main buildings. John K. Calder had
worked on building Gary, Indiana, and been the chief construction
engineer at River Rouge, a role he essentially reprised at the
Stalingrad Tractorstroi, working alongside Vassily Ivanov. Leon A.
Swajian, another Rouge veteran, assisted him. Other Kahn
representatives and engineering recruits soon joined them.
But if leading Bolsheviks and the Kahn firm were largely in tune
about pace—if anything the Russians wanted to go faster—as
Calder quickly discovered conditions on the ground were anything
but conducive to rapid progress. Modern equipment for
transportation and construction was all but absent—camels were
used to move materials—while many Soviet construction officials
objected to the fast-track methods Calder introduced. Ivanov later
wrote that he had to confront “the sluggish inertia of Russian building
methods” in what became a political as well as technical battle over
the all-important issue of “tempo.” A popular play by Nikolai Pogodi,
entitled Tempo, would portray the struggle, with a character based
on Calder overcoming many obstacles, including bureaucracy and
lack of discipline, to push the project forward.
Remarkably, the basic construction at Tractorstroi, which became
the largest factory in the Soviet Union, with an assembly building a
quarter mile long and large adjacent foundry and forge buildings,
was completed in just six months, though it took another half year for
all the equipment to arrive and be installed. Meanwhile, factory
officials set up a recruiting office in Detroit and hired some three
hundred and fifty American engineers, mechanics, and skilled
workers to help start up the plant, including fifty from the Rouge, a
process made easier by the beginning of the Great Depression. At
the same time, young Soviet engineers were sent to collaborate with
the Kahn firm on design work and to various American factories to
gain experience with the kind of machinery that would be used in the
plant. Ivanov himself traveled to meet with equipment suppliers in
the United States, where “The straight roads, the abundance of
machines, the whole technical equipment . . . convinced me of the
correctness of the course we had chosen.”26
Figure 5.2 The Stalingrad Tractor Factory Is Open, the celebratory cover of a 1930
issue of a Soviet magazine.

On June 17, 1930, just fourteen months after Amtorg signed its
contract with Kahn, tens of thousands of spectators gathered in
Stalingrad to watch the first tractor, decorated with red ribbons and
placards, come off the assembly line. By then, a start-up workforce
of 7,200 had been assembled, 35 percent female. Stalin sent his
congratulations to the workers, declaring, “The fifty thousand tractors
which you are to give the country every year are fifty thousand shells
blowing up the old bourgeois world and paving the way to the new
socialist order in the countryside.” He ended, less bombastically, by
giving “Thanks to our teachers in technique, the American specialists
and technicians who have rendered help in the building of the
Plant.”27
While work on the Tractorstroi was proceeding, Amtorg went on a
buying spree in the United States, signing technical assistance and
equipment purchase agreements with some four dozen companies.
The most important agreement was with Ford. When Kahn signed
his contract, Henry Ford seemed to regret not being involved in the
great experiment of Soviet industrialization. Publicly, he offered Kahn
help and asked him to tell the Soviets “anything we have is theirs—
our designs, our work methods, our steel specifications. The more
industry we create no matter where it may be in the world, the more
all the people of the world will benefit.” Privately, he asked Kahn to
signal to the Soviets that he was now willing to make a deal.
Nine months earlier, the Soviet government had set up a
commission to build up its vehicle industry, which at the time
consisted of only two small factories producing fewer than a
thousand trucks a year. In the spring of 1929, the decision had been
made to build a giant vehicle plant near Nizhny Novgorod, 250 miles
east of Moscow. By then, the Soviets had approached both Ford and
General Motors about assistance, but without much progress.
Impatient, Stalin personally intervened behind the scenes,
demanding that Amtorg speed up negotiations. Ford’s new interest
was thus a godsend, and by the end of May Amtorg signed an
agreement with his firm.
 The pact did not revive the idea of Ford setting up a plant in the
Soviet Union. Instead, it called for massive assistance to the Soviets
in building up an automobile industry under their own aegis. In a
nine-year contract, Ford agreed to help design, equip, and run a
plant at Nizhny Novgorod capable of manufacturing seventy
thousand trucks and thirty thousand cars a year, as well as a smaller
assembly plant in Moscow. Ford granted the Soviets the right to use
all of its patents and inventions and produce and sell Ford vehicles in
the country. It pledged to provide detailed information about the
equipment and methods used at River Rouge and to train Soviet
workers and engineers at its Detroit-area plants. The agreement also
called for the Soviet Union, during the period its own plants were
being started up, to buy seventy-two thousand Ford cars, trucks, and
equivalent parts. (The vehicles were sent as knocked-down kits to be
assembled at Soviet plants.) Although Ford later claimed that it lost
money on the agreement, it served both sides well, giving the
U.S.S.R. a huge boost in setting up a modern car and truck industry
while providing Ford with work during the depth of the Depression
and allowing it to sell off the tools and dies for the Model A as it
switched to its new V8 model.28
To design the Moscow assembly plant and a temporary assembly
plant in Nizhny Novgorod, the Soviets again turned to Kahn. But for
the main Nizhny Novgorod factory, which was to be the largest
automobile plant in Europe—conceived of as a scaled-down version
of the Rouge, a fully integrated, mass production facility—and for a
nearby city to accommodate thirty-five thousand workers and their
families, the Soviets signed a contract with the Cleveland-based
Austin Company, one of the leading industrial builders in the United
States, which had recently erected a huge Pontiac factory for
General Motors. If Kahn’s firm was noted for its design innovations,
Austin was best known for its one-stop approach, planning, building,
and equipping complete industrial facilities using standardized
designs and highly rationalized techniques. Though experienced with
big projects, the Soviet commission was larger than anything it had
ever undertaken.29
Like the Kahn engineers in Stalingrad, the first fifteen Austin
engineers to arrive at Nizhny Novgorod—there would be forty at the
peak—faced challenges quite unlike anything they had known. Living
conditions were difficult and good food scarce. Chronic shortages of
materials and labor delayed construction (though at the height of the
effort forty thousand workers—40 percent female—were on the job).
Water, heat, and power facilities and systems for transporting and
storing equipment and supplies had to be built from scratch. The
Soviets lacked the managerial experience or tools for a project of
this scope. Expensive imported equipment was lost, misplaced, left
outside to deteriorate, and stolen, while primitive machinery and
brute force were used in its stead. Layer upon layer of bureaucracy,
competition among organizations involved in the project, and
constant personnel changes made decisions torturous and their
implementation difficult. Cost-cutting forced last-minute design
changes and the redoing of carefully worked out plans. And then
there were the natural conditions, months and months of extreme
cold, springtime floods, and massive fields of mud.30
Austin largely retained control over the design and engineering of
the factory complex, but the Soviets ultimately took over planning the
adjacent city. The urban center would be one of the first new cities
built in the Soviet Union and as such became an opportunity to
envision what a socialist city should look like. A design competition
led to a plan that included extensive communal facilities and, in
some sections, no traditional living units.
The first phase of the city had thirty four-story residential
buildings. Most were divided into individual apartments housing
several families each (already the urban norm in the face of a
massive national housing shortage), but some buildings were
designed for an experiment in social reorganization. Clusters of five
of these buildings, connected by enclosed elevated walkways, were
to be living and social units for a thousand persons each. Each unit
had its own clubhouse with social, educational, and recreational
facilities and a large communal dining room, where it was anticipated
that most meals would be consumed. Showers were clustered
communally and there were library, reading, chess, and telephone
rooms and special spaces for the study of political matters, military
science, and science experimentation (to encourage innovation and
technical expertise, allowing the country to free itself of dependence
on foreigners). Kindergartens and nurseries allowed parents to leave
their children as long as they chose, including, essentially, full time.
Living spaces were small, meant largely for sleeping, with no
individual cooking facilities. The top floors of the “community units”
had larger rooms designed for “communes” of three or four young
people who would live, work, and study together.
The utopianism of the auto city quickly floundered in an ocean of
need and the desire of construction workers and later automobile
workers for individual apartments. Even before the first residential
buildings were completed, they were flooded with squatters, workers
who had been living in tents, dugouts, and other improvised
structures through a long winter. Cots and little individual stoves
appeared everywhere. Planners expected that communal living
would become more popular, allowing them to convert buildings
divided into traditional apartments to the community unit model, but
in the end the conversions went the other way, as workers sought
more private, individualized spaces. Also, cost-cutting meant that
after the first buildings were completed, designs for communal
facilities were reduced, and eventually the whole master plan for the
city was abandoned. Still, even in its truncated form, the new
workers’ city represented a particularly elaborate realization of a
broader effort to provide extensive social, cultural, and recreational
programs and benefits through the workplace, with factories all over
the Soviet Union taking responsibility for housing and feeding their
workers and their families, educating them, and uplifting their cultural
level. The Soviet welfare state centered on the large factory.31
In spite of all the obstacles, the huge auto complex at Nizhny
Novgorod, soon to be renamed Gorky, was essentially completed in
November 1931, just eighteen months after the first American
engineers arrived (though construction of the accompanying city
lagged behind). Specialists from the United States and the
application of American methods accounted for some of the success.
But much of the credit had to go to Soviet government and party
officials, who, in spite of their inexperience, bureaucratic ways, and
frequent ineptitude, proved able to mobilize heroic efforts by Soviet
workers. They could do so because they could capitalize on a
reservoir of deep commitment by at least some workers, particularly
young ones, to crash development—industrialization as a form of
revolution. Engaged in what they understood as a world-historic
project and defense of the revolution, Soviet workers made
extraordinary sacrifices, living in miserable circumstances,
volunteering to work unpaid Saturdays, joining “shock brigades,”
accepting dangerous worksite conditions, and putting up with the
bumbling and arrogance of officials in charge of the big Five-Year
Plan projects. For at least a brief moment, many Soviet workers saw
the factories they were building as theirs, as the means to a brighter
future, to a different kind of society, and were willing to do whatever
was necessary to complete them.32

The Kahn Brothers in Moscow

The Stalingrad tractor plant and the Gorky automobile factory were
among the best-known Soviet projects in the West, receiving
extensive coverage in the American press. The New York Times,
Detroit Times, Detroit Free Press, Time, trade journals, and other
publications regularly ran stories about them.33 But there were many
other large Soviet projects with Americans involved, too. Du Pont
helped set up fertilizer factories, Seiberling Rubber Company
assisted in constructing a large tire factory, C. F. Seabrook built
roads in Moscow, other companies advised on coal mines, and the
list went on and on.34
Albert Kahn took on an expanded role after work on the
Tractorstroi started. In early 1930, his firm signed a two-year contract
with Amtorg that made it the consulting architect for all industrial
construction in the Soviet Union. Under the agreement, twenty-five
Soviet engineers worked with the firm in its Detroit offices. But more
importantly, it established a Kahn firm outpost in Moscow within a
newly created, centralized Soviet design and construction agency.
Albert’s younger brother Moritz led a team of twenty-five American
architects and engineers in the new Russian office, not only
designing buildings but also teaching Soviet architects, engineers,
and specialists the methods of the Kahn firm.
 The contract with the Soviet Union provided a boon for Kahn,
enabling his firm to survive through the trough of the Great
Depression, when virtually no new construction took place in the
United States. But more than just expediency, the Soviet-Kahn
partnership grew organically from a shared vision of progress
through physical construction and rationalized methods. Moritz
relished the opportunity to apply the “standardized mass production”
system of the automobile industry to construction—a notoriously
chaotic industry making custom products—which would be possible
in the U.S.S.R. because there would be one centralized design
agency and one customer, the Soviet government, allowing the
development of designs for particular types of factories that could be
used over and over. Moritz pointed out that government ownership
would eliminate the costs associated with advertising, sales
promotion, and middlemen and allow the rationalization of
transportation and warehousing, all of which appealed to his
technocratic sensibility. Albert was more patronizing; he told the
Detroit Times, “My attitude toward Russia is that of a doctor toward
his patient.”35
The joint Moscow design center proved challenging but ultimately
successful. There were few qualified Soviet architects, engineers, or
draftsmen available when it began and a lack of basic supplies, from
pencils to drafting boards, with only one blueprint machine in all of
Moscow. Nonetheless, in two years the Kahn team supervised the
design and construction of over five hundred factories across the
Soviet Union, using the Fordist methods the firm had perfected in
Detroit. Equally important, some four thousand Soviet architects,
engineers, and draftsmen were trained by the Kahn experts,
including in formal classes taught in the evenings. They, in turn, took
the approach to design and construction developed by Kahn, in
collaboration with Ford and other U.S. manufacturing firms, and
spread it throughout the country. Kahn’s methods, according to
Sonia Melnikova-Raich, who chronicled his Soviet collaboration,
“became standard in the Soviet building industry for many
decades.”36
Kahn also did more Soviet design work in his Detroit office,
including two new tractor plants to meet the insatiable demand for
mechanized agricultural equipment. A plant in the Ukraine, on the
outskirts of Kharkov, was virtually a copy of the Stalingrad plant,
designed to produce the same model tractor and varying only in the
greater use of reinforced concrete, as the Soviets diminished their
expensive steel imports from the United States. Leon Swajian, after
finishing up as number two at the Stalingrad plant, served as general
superintendent for the construction (receiving the Order of Lenin for
his role). The other plant was the biggest yet. Located in
Chelyabinsk, some 1,100 miles due east of Moscow, just east of the
Urals near the border between Europe and Asia, it was designed to
produce tractors with metal crawlers rather than wheels. The
buildings in the complex, looking like a chunk of Detroit industry
planted in the Russian wilds, had a combined floor area of 1,780,000
square feet, laid out on a tract of 2,471 acres (twice as large as the
Rouge). Though the Soviets began building the plant without
American advisors on site, when things got bogged down, American
engineers, including Calder and Swajian, were called in to help.37

Starting Up
If building the gigant Soviet factories had been an enormous
challenge, getting them to actually produce goods proved even more
difficult. Their start-up became a moment of truth for the idea that the
Soviet Union could leapfrog into modernity by adopting the most
advanced capitalist methods on a giant scale, building a socialist
society without going through an extended process of
industrialization like the United States and the Western European
powers had experienced.
The Stalingrad Tractorstroi was the first test. Stalin’s June 1930
message congratulating the tractor-factory workers on beginning
production of fifty thousand tractors a year proved wildly premature.
During the first month and a half, the factory produced only five
tractors. During its first six months, only just over a thousand. During
all of 1931, 18,410.
 Not all the equipment had arrived and been installed when the
plant opened. But the bigger problem was the utter unfamiliarity of
the vast bulk of the workers and Russian supervisors with basic
industrial processes, let alone advanced mass production. When
Margaret Bourke-White visited the factory during its first summer of
operation, she reported, “the Russians have no more idea how to
use the conveyor than a group of school children.” In the plant, “the
production line usually stands perfectly still. Half-way down the
factory is a partly completed tractor. One Russian is screwing in a
tiny bolt and twenty other Russians are standing around him
watching, talking it over, smoking cigarettes, arguing.”38
The American workers, engineers, and supervisors hired to help
start up production and teach the workforce necessary skills had
their hands full. Henry Ford’s dictum, that mass production could
occur only if parts were so standardized that no custom fitting was
required, immediately proved a trial. The skilled Russian workers the
plant did have largely had been trained in craft ways. Plant manager
Vassily Ivanov raced around the factory in a rage when he saw
foremen using files to fit together parts (probably because some
parts were not truly interchangeable, a problem at Highland Park as
late as 1918). As usual in the Stalinist universe, the metaphor of war
was used to describe the situation: “We were fighting our first battle,”
Ivanov later said, “against handicraft ‘Asiatic’ methods,” making the
traditional Marxist equation of Asia with backwardness and Europe
with modernity.
Unskilled workers posed, if anything, a greater problem. Many
had just arrived from small peasant villages, never having seen a
telephone, let alone a precision machine tool. Frank Honey, an
American toolmaker, described the first worker sent to him to train as
a spring maker as “a typical peasant . . . dressed as he was in some
strange, countrified sort of clothes.” Such workers did not have any
notion of basic factory procedures. Bearings in expensive new
machines were quickly damaged because they did not know to keep
oil free of dirt. Discipline was often lax, with a great deal of standing
around doing nothing. It required a slow, painstaking process to
teach the new workforce, which swelled to fifteen thousand, how to
operate the sophisticated machinery, especially as the American
instructors had to work through translators.
Furthermore, the Soviet Union lacked the well-developed supply
chains on which Fordism rested. High-speed machine tools required
steel of precise specifications, but when the tractor factory could get
the raw materials and supplies it needed at all (which was often not
the case), the composition and quality varied from batch to batch,
making for spoiled parts, damaged tools, and long delays.
Fordism also required complex coordination, which the plant
management had no experience in achieving. Workers and
managers spent endless time in consultations and meetings, but
nonetheless things did not arrive where and when they were
expected. When Sergo Orjonikidje, the Commissar for Heavy
Industry, in charge of implementing the Five-Year industrialization
plan, visited the factory as political pressure mounted to get
production going, he reported, “What I see here is not tempo but
fuss.”
With Stalin personally monitoring daily production figures—a
measure of how important the plant was seen to the future of the
country—personnel changes came quickly. Ivanov was replaced by
a more technically knowledgeable communist official to work
alongside a new top engineering specialist. The Soviet Automobile
Trust sent yet another American engineer to the plant, an expert on
assembly-line production, to try to straighten out the mess. To help
establish order, the plant cut back from three daily shifts to just one.
Slowly, production began to improve, though product quality
remained a problem. Much of the advance came from the growing
experience of the workforce and skills gained though a massive
training and education effort. The peasant newcomer whom Honey
schooled eventually became a skilled worker and later foreman of
the spring department. (Rapid promotions for such workers, though,
created more problems, as their replacements needed to be trained.)
During the first six months of 1933, the plant turned out 15,837
tractors, a significant improvement, but, after three years of
operation, still well below the projected annual production of “fifty
thousand shells blowing up the old bourgeois world.”39
 At the Nizhny Novgorod auto plant, managers tried to avoid the
start-up problems encountered at Stalingrad. They sent hundreds of
workers to Detroit to learn production techniques at Ford, while
recruiting hundreds of Americans to come help get the plant going.
(The presence of a female Soviet metallurgist studying heat
treatment at Ford merited a headline in the New York Times, part of
an unending fascination among American reporters and engineers
with Soviet women holding blue-collar jobs that in the United States
were strictly male.) Production was begun gradually, first just
assembling car and truck part kits sent from Detroit before beginning
to make all the needed parts on site. Still, the plant took longer than
expected to get up to speed.40
Again, shortages of supplies and managerial ineptitude were part
of the problem, but a shortage of labor, especially skilled labor, would
have made a rapid start-up impossible under the best conditions.
Larger than the Stalingrad Tractorstroi, what was soon named GAZ
(Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod [“Gorky Automobile Factory”]) had
thirty-two thousand workers. Few had any industrial experience or
much work experience of any kind. When the plant opened, 60
percent of the workers were under age twenty-three and only 20
percent over age thirty. Nearly a quarter of the manual workers were
female. It was almost like being in an early British or American textile
mill, in a world of the young.
New workers and their foreign teachers confronted difficult
conditions. Living quarters were primitive, if somewhat better for the
Americans, and meat, fish, fresh fruit, and vegetables nearly
impossible to find. When Victor and Walter Reuther, auto union
activists from Detroit, arrived at the plant in late 1933 to work as tool-
and die-makers, most of the complex had no heat. They were forced
to perform and teach precision metalworking in temperatures far
below freezing, periodically going into the heat-treatment room to
warm their hands.
As at Stalingrad, political pressure quickly mounted to get
production going. Even before the plant opened, ineptitude became
criminalized; nine officials were tried for “willful neglect and
suppression” of suggestions made by American workers and
technical specialists. After a show trial in Moscow before several
thousand spectators, light sentences—at most the loss of two
months’ pay—were handed out, in a warning to other managers.
Three months after production began, Orjonikidje came to inspect,
accompanied by Lazar Kaganovich, like him a member of the
Politburo, the top communist ruling body. The pair blamed local
communists and unionists for mismanagement and slandering
engineering and technical personnel, resulting in the firing of some
plant and regional party officials.
But slowly production improved, a measure of the eagerness of
the young workforce to learn new skills and what amounted to a
whole new way of life and their resilience in the face of hardship. By
the time the Reuther brothers headed back to the United States after
eighteen months at GAZ, most of the other foreign workers already
had departed, the skill level of the native workforce had enormously
improved, more food and consumer goods were available, and cars
and trucks were steadily coming off the line. New York Times
Moscow reporter Walter Duranty, a big booster of Stalinist
industrialization, in declaring his confidence that GAZ would quickly
get up to speed, chided that “Foreign critics sometimes fail to realize
two things about Russia today—the astonishing capacity for bursts
of energy to get the seeming impossible accomplished and the fact
that Russians learn fast.” When two Austin engineers returned to the
plant site in 1939, they were “dumbfounded” to see that a city of
120,000 people had grown up around the core residential area they
had constructed, with six- to eight-story apartment buildings, paved
streets, “quite a few flowers,” and people who “looked better.”41
As a cadre of skilled workers developed, other start-ups became
easier. When the Kharkov tractor plant began operations in the fall of
1931, it benefited from a large group of experienced workers who
were transferred from its twin in Stalingrad. Also, rather than
immediately having to manufacture the 715 custom parts that went
into its tractors, the plant could begin assembling vehicles using
some parts shipped over from the Stalingrad factory.42
By contrast, the construction and initial operation of the
Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex made the Stalingrad tractor
factory and the Gorky automobile plant look like easy sailing.43
Before the revolution, Russia had only a small iron and steel
industry. The First Five-Year Plan called for a huge leap in metal
production. Key to the effort was to be a massive integrated steel
plant forty miles east of the Urals, next to two hills which contained
so much iron ore that they affected the behavior of compasses,
giving them the name Magnetic Mountain (Magnitnaia gora) and the
city that was to arise with the plant the name Magnitogorsk. By some
accounts, Stalin personally called for the creation of the complex
after learning about the U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana. Like Gary,
the plant was to include every phase of the production of steel
products, including blast furnaces, open-hearth converters, rolling
mills and other finishing plants, coke-making furnaces, and
equipment to make chemicals out of coke by-products. Unlike Gary,
the complex included its own iron mine.
Magnitogorsk—“The Mighty Giant of the Five Year Plan,” as one
Soviet periodical dubbed it—was but one component of an even
larger scheme, a Kombinat, an assemblage of functionally and
geographically related facilities, which stretched all the way to
Kuznetsk in Central Siberia, the source of most of the coal initially
used in the steel complex, and which included the Chelyabinsk
tractor factory, 120 miles northwest of Magnitogorsk. Even some of
the less-heralded Kombinat factories were huge, like the railroad car
plant in Nizhny Tagil, north of Chelyabinsk. A prominent part of the
Second Five-Year Plan, which began in 1933, the sprawling factory
complex employed forty thousand workers and had its own blast
furnaces and open-hearth department.44
Foreign experts helped design Magnitogorsk, but unlike in
Stalingrad and Nizhny Novgorod no one firm coordinated the whole
effort, creating myriad problems. In 1927 the Soviets retained the
Freyn Engineering Company of Chicago as a general advisor in
developing its metallurgy industry, and it did some initial planning for
Magnitogorsk. Then the Soviets hired the Cleveland firm of Arthur G.
McKee & Company to do the overall design, but amid much rancor
the company proved unable to churn out plans at the rate the
Soviets desired. So its role was cut back and other U.S. and German
firms were brought in to design particular components of the
complex, with various Soviet agencies playing a part, too. As a
result, in the words of American John Scott, who spent five years
working at Magnitogorsk, its elements were “often very badly
coordinated.” The whole project was late in getting going and took
far longer to complete than originally projected.
Even if the planning had been better managed, the scope of work
and the challenges of the site would have made the “super-American
tempo” the Soviets claimed was being maintained impossible to
achieve. When work at Magnitogorsk began, there was nothing in
place, no buildings, no paved roads, no railroad, no electricity,
insufficient water, no coal or trees to provide heat or energy, no
nearby sources of food, no cities within striking distance. Out of the
dust of the steppe, Soviet officials and foreign experts had to conjure
up a vast industrial enterprise, and do so in the cruel weather east of
the Urals, where summers were short and winters exceedingly long
and cold. In January and February, the low temperature averaged
below zero degrees Fahrenheit. Some winter mornings it was thirty-
five degrees below zero. John Scott, while working as a welder on
blast furnace construction, once came upon a riveter who had frozen
to death on the scaffolding.45
Much like the first English textile factory owners, Magnitogorsk
managers had to recruit a workforce to build and operate the
complex, which by 1938 had twenty-seven thousand employees, and
come up with ways to house it, feed it, and take care of all its needs
in an isolated spot where there never had been a large assemblage
of people. Some workers came voluntarily, swept up in enthusiasm
for the effort to leap forward to modernity and socialism or simply
looking for an escape from their village or an unpleasant situation.
Others were assigned by their employers to go to Magnitogorsk, like
it or not. But such workers were not enough, especially since they
flowed out of Magnitogorsk almost as quickly as they flowed in, put
off by the extremely primitive living conditions and difficult work. So,
again, like the early English mill owners, the Soviets turned to unfree
labor, on a huge scale.
The Soviets used forced labor at many big projects, including the
Chelyabinsk tractor factory, the Dnieprostroi Dam, and, most
famously, the White Sea–Baltic Canal, constructed almost entirely by
prisoners. At Magnitogorsk, by Scott’s account, in the mid-1930s
some fifty thousand workers were under the control of the security
police, the GPU (after 1934, the NKVD), most doing unskilled
construction work but some employed in the steel plant itself. Even
more than the early English textile mills, Magnitogorsk refuted simple
correlations between industrialization, modernity, and freedom.
Forced laborers in Magnitogorsk fell into several categories.
Common criminals made up the largest group, over twenty thousand
workers, most serving relatively short sentences, living in
settlements (including one for minors) surrounded by barbed wire,
going to work under guard. A second group consisted of peasants
dispossessed during the collectivization drive, so-called kulaks,
deported to the steel city. In October 1931, there were over fourteen
thousand former kulak workers and twice that number of their family
members living in “special labor settlements,” initially enclosed by
barbed wire, too. Even by Magnitogorsk standards, conditions for the
forced migrants were appalling, with 775 children dying in one three-
month period. (By 1936, most restrictions on these workers were
eased.) Finally, there were veteran engineers and technical experts,
trained under the old regime, who had been convicted of crimes but
nonetheless worked as specialists and supervisors, in some cases,
especially in the early days, holding very responsible positions,
generally indistinguishable from other managerial personnel except
for their legal status.46
The use of prison labor constituted just one part of the
intertwining of the national security apparatus with the crash
industrialization. In Magnitogorsk, as construction and production
delays and difficulties stretched on and on, the NKVD became ever
more involved with the steel complex, a shadow force with more
power than the factory administration and the local government and,
at some points, even than the local Communist Party. Problems
stemming from poor planning, incompetent management, untrained
workers, supply and transportation shortages, and the wear on
machines and workers from politically driven crash efforts were
increasingly attributed to failure to follow the Communist Party line,
to deliberate wrecking and sabotage, and eventually to conspiracies
involving foreign powers and internal oppositionists, like the
“Trotskyite-Zinovievite Center” and the “Polish Military Organization,”
which were alleged to be operating in Magnitogorsk. Starting in
1936, all industrial accidents became subjects of criminal
investigations. “Often they tried the wrong people,” Scott
commented, “but in Russia this is relatively unimportant. The main
thing was that the technicians and workers alike began to appreciate
and correctly evaluate human life.”
But if technicians and workers developed a greater appreciation
of human life, the police and judiciary became ever more cavalier in
their treatment of workers and managers, as arrests, interrogations
involving “physical measures,” fabricated evidence, detentions, and
executions became common. Top factory managers, state officials,
and party functionaries toppled into the abyss as real and perceived
failures were attributed to treachery and counterrevolution, until
finally even the leaders of the Magnitogorsk NKVD, who led the
terror, themselves fell to it. Though no exact count is available,
according to Scott, in 1937 the purge led to “thousands” of arrests in
Magnitogorsk. And it was similar elsewhere; at the Gorky auto plant,
during the first six months of 1938, 407 specialists were arrested,
including almost all the Soviet engineers who had spent time in
Detroit and some of the few Americans who still remained at the
factory.47
Watching on the ground, Scott saw the fury of charges,
countercharges, and arrests impede production, but in his view only
temporarily and to a limited extent. Overall, as managers and
workers slowly mastered their jobs, supply and transportation
problems were ironed out, and new components of the complex
came on line, Magnitogorsk’s output of iron ore, pig iron, steel ingots,
and rolled steel all moved upward, as did productivity.48 Some of the
gigants built during the 1930s never reached their projected output,
but, overall, the First Five-Year Plan (which was accelerated to be
finished in four years) and the Second Five-Year Plan that followed
led to an enormous leap in Soviet industrial output. Estimates vary,
but between 1928 and 1940 total industrial output increased at least
three-and-a-half-fold and by some accounts as much as sixfold. The
greatest gains were in heavy industry. Iron and steel production
more than quadrupled. Machine production increased elevenfold
between 1928 and 1937, and military production twenty-five-fold. By
the latter year, motor vehicle production approached two hundred
thousand vehicles. Electrical power increased sevenfold.
Transportation and construction also swelled. By contrast, output of
consumer goods—a low priority in the First Five-Year Plan—rose
only slightly. Stalin was premature in 1929 when he said, “We are
becoming a country of metal, a country of automobiles, a country of
tractors,” but a decade later there was much truth to his claim.49

Making Socialist Citizens

The giant Soviet factories were conceived of not only as a way to
industrialize and protect the country but also as instruments of
culturalization, which would create men and women capable of
operating these behemoths and building socialism. Communist
leaders often described this cultural project as fighting backwardness
—the illiteracy, ignorance of modern medicine and hygiene, and
unfamiliarity with science and technology that characterized the bulk
of the population of the prerevolutionary Russian Empire. Many
Bolsheviks, especially Lenin, defined culture in traditional European
terms, as literacy, knowledge of science, appreciation of the arts.
Civilization meant novels, chess, Beethoven, indoor plumbing,
electricity. But some communists, and to some extent the party and
state as a whole, at least through the early 1930s, believed that a
distinctly communist culture and civilization should be created out of
the revolution. The factory was an instrument to realize socialist
modernity.50
The simple act of coming to a factory could launch the process of
cultural change. This was especially the case for men and women
from peasant villages, and even more so for migrants from nomadic
regions of the country. Many newcomers had never seen a
locomotive, indoor plumbing, electric lights, even a staircase.
Walking into a factory for the first time could be terrifying, just as it
had been in earlier years in England and the United States. A. M.
Sirotina, a young woman who came to the Stalingrad tractor factory
from a village near the Caspian, remembered, “There was an awful
roaring and hammering of machines and there were motor-cars
whizzing to and fro over the shop. I dodged to one side in fright and
took refuge behind a stand.”51
That a young woman was on the shop floor of the Tractorstroi
reflected the profound change in gender roles and family relations
that accompanied the gearing up of heavy industry. After the
revolution, the Communist Party and the Soviet government
promoted women’s equality and new familial arrangements, but the
changes were especially dramatic in the budding industrial centers,
where there was no old order that had to be overthrown. At the start
of the First Five-Year Plan, 29 percent of industrial workers were
female; by 1937, 42 percent. Women held many types of positions
for which they would never even be considered in the United States
or Western Europe, such as crane and mill operator. Still, old ways
died hard, as some men refused to allow their wives to work, abused
them, and abandoned their families without alimony or child
support.52
Learning utterly unfamiliar jobs took time. To hasten the process,
the Soviets launched a massive educational effort. In addition to
informal shop-floor training by skilled workers, supervisors, and
foreign experts, formal classes were held after work to teach skills
for specific jobs. Victor Reuther recalled that the Gorky auto plant
“was like one huge trade school.” Rollo Ward, the American foreman
of the gear-cutting department at the Stalingrad tractor plant, noted
that while in the United States factory owners tried to keep workers
from fully understanding the machinery they operated, in the Soviet
Union workers were encouraged to learn everything about the
equipment, beyond just what was needed to perform their own
particular tasks.53
The educational push was not narrowly vocational. In the new
industrial cities, crash efforts were made to build enough
kindergartens and elementary schools for the flood of incoming and
newborn children. Adult literacy courses were heavily attended, in
Magnitogorsk enrolling ten thousand students. To raise the political
level of activists, there were schools teaching Marxist theory and
Soviet economic and social structure. For workers who had
mastered basic skills, there were advanced schools in engineering,
metallurgy, and the like. Women made up 40 percent of the students
at the Magnitogorsk Mining and Metallurgical Institute.
Many of these programs had some day students receiving
stipends and many more students coming after work. John Scott,
who attended night school most of the time he lived in Magnitogorsk,
reported that virtually everyone in the city between ages sixteen and
twenty-six was studying in some sort of formal program, which took
up almost all of their spare time. “Every night from six until twelve the
street cars and buses of Magnitogorsk were crowded with adult
students hurrying to and from schools with books and notebooks
under their arms, discussing Leibnitz, Hegel, or Lenin, doing
problems on their knees, and acting like high-school children during
examination week in a New York subway.” For worker-students, the
tremendous dedication needed to get to class, stay awake, and then
do homework after a hard day’s work opened a path of upward
mobility. For Soviet leaders, the education push, especially in
technical fields, liberated the country from dependence on foreign
and old-regime expertise.54
Factories tried in other ways, too, to transform worker culture.
“Red corners” were common. Somewhat like the reading rooms in
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English and American union
halls, these designated spaces had books, pictures of Lenin and
other communist leaders, political posters, and room for meetings.
Many enterprises sponsored literary groups, with worker-writers
producing wall newspapers and broadsheets that were posted at
worksites. At the Gorky auto plant, management sponsored a
competition among departments for ideas to elevate the cultural
level. One department brought in artificial palm trees from Moscow,
which were placed alongside the assembly line. The department in
which the Reuther brothers worked made dies to punch out metal
spoons, considered a cultural advance over the wooden, peasant-
style spoons workers used in the plant cafeteria and at home. In
Stalingrad, the factory manager, inspired by what he saw in the
United States, had trees and grass planted around the tractor plant
to keep down dust that might damage machinery and to create a
more attractive view for workers as they arrived and left.55
 Figure 5.3 The workers’ cafeteria at the Gorky auto plant.

The cities that arose alongside the giant factories were at least as
important in promoting new habits and values as the plants
themselves. Generally, in the U.S.S.R., local Soviets—the
government—owned housing and other urban facilities. But in the
industrial boomtowns, factories often filled that role, taking charge of
almost all aspects of their employees’ lives. Much as in the early
English textile industry, many factories owned stores and farms to
supply them, with workers spending a substantial proportion of their
wages at factory canteens and shops (with special shops with better
goods and lower prices for foreign workers and later on for party
officials, top managers, “shock workers,” and other favorites).
In Magnitogorsk, the steel company had four thousand
employees in its department of “Everyday-Life Administration,” in
charge of housing and an array of social and cultural programs. The
factory controlled 82 percent of the living space in the city and
sponsored many of its cultural institutions, which included a large
theater, two theater troupes, eighteen movie houses, four libraries, a
circus, and twelve workers’ clubs, among them one for ironworkers
and steelworkers, the Palace of the Metallurgists, which featured a
large auditorium, marble hallways, chandeliers, and an elegant
reading room. The largest movie house in town, the Magnit, showed
foreign as well as domestic films, including Chaplin’s Modern Times,
which the local press hailed as “a rarity in bourgeois cinema—a
great film,” perhaps missing the irony of its radical critique of Fordist
production. Physical culture was not neglected, with two stadiums,
many gymnasiums and skating rinks, and an aeronautical club that
offered flying and parachuting lessons, popular activities in the
Soviet Union. What the city did not have was a single church.56
By necessity and design, life in the gigant factory towns was
more communal than in Western industrial centers. Especially at
isolated sites like Magnitogorsk, but even in Stalingrad, workers
initially lived in barracks, without private kitchens or toilets (or often
indoor toilets of any kind), sleeping together in large, poorly heated
rooms. Town construction lagged behind factory construction; in
Magnitogorsk, in 1938, when the population had grown to nearly a
quarter of a million, half of the people still lived in barracks or other
temporary housing. Planning the steel city turned into something of a
fiasco, as a team of modernist German architects, headed by Ernst
May, and various Soviet officials went back and forth over designs,
while on the ground building began haphazardly, with no plan at all.
The first permanent housing in Magnitogorsk, as in the town
adjacent to the Gorky auto plant, had utopian-communal features:
small living spaces in large buildings with shared toilets and baths
and meals to be either eaten at public cafeterias or prepared in a
single kitchen serving a whole structure. But a tilt toward more
traditional family structures, coming from below and above, led to the
adoption of communal apartments as the new norm, with several
families, rather than a whole building, sharing kitchens and toilets.57
Within a few years, the most radical cultural ideas associated
with the First Five-Year Plan were abandoned. Nonetheless, the
giant factory transformed the workforce. The story of G. Ramizov, a
die forger at the Stalingrad tractor plant, captured the national arc.
From a poor peasant family, he arrived with just the clothes he wore,
one change of underwear, and a basket holding all his worldly
possessions. His earnings soon allowed him to buy his very first
toothbrush, a towel, his first suit and tie, and a winter coat. As time
went on, and he switched from construction to production work, he
was able to obtain furniture, books, a clock (a symbol in the
U.S.S.R., just as it had been in England and the United States, of
modernity and industrial discipline), a stove, dishes, and pictures to
decorate his living quarters (including portraits of Lenin and Stalin).
Conventional, ordinary, unimpressive, unless one came from the
poverty, illiteracy, and cultural isolation that was the lot of the vast
bulk of people in the Russian Empire before the revolution and the
crash industrialization it sponsored.58

Celebrating the Gigant

Soviet writers, artists, and government officials relentlessly
celebrated big factories during the decade prior to World War II.
Joining outsized infrastructure and huge collective farms in a cult of
giantism, they were at the core of national self-understanding and
state propaganda. Artists and propagandists commonly equated the
struggle to build socialism with the drive to industrialize, making the
factory a central site for the fight against backwardness and the
plunge into a new type of future.
In literature, the machine often appeared as a metaphor for
society. It also appeared more literally. The title character in Lydia
Chukovskaya’s novella Sofia Petrovna, written at the end of the
1930s, comments that in Soviet stories and novels “there was such a
lot about battles and tractors and factory shops and hardly anything
about love.”59
But where the factory truly came to the forefront was in the many
documentary projects of the era. The Soviets were in the vanguard
of what was a heyday of documentary art and literature in Europe
and the United States, helping to inspire and shape the broader
movement. While elsewhere documentary art and writing often
focused on social ills, including those stemming from the Great
Depression, in the Soviet Union documentary work had a celebratory
tenor, highlighting the great progress being achieved across the vast
nation.60
The most innovative work combined photography and journalism
in elaborate, visually striking accounts of the advance of Soviet
society through large-scale industry, infrastructure, and
collectivization. The magazine USSR in Construction featured many
of the most outstanding visual artists in the Soviet Union. Produced
by the State Publishing House of the Russian Soviet Republic, with
an editorial board that included Maxim Gorky, the large-format
journal came out each month from 1930 through 1941 in four
editions: Russian, English, German, and French, with a Spanish
edition added in its last years. It specialized in the photo-essay, an
innovative format often attributed to Life magazine but actually
developed earlier in the Soviet Union. The title page of the fifth issue
captured the editorial agenda in its subhead: “More Iron! More Steel!
More Machinery!” In issue after issue, photo-essays appeared on
dams, canals, hydroelectric plants, railroads, auto factories, tractor
factories, tractors arriving at collective farms, paper mills,
woodworking plants, garment factories, a match factory, shipyards,
workers’ housing, technical institutes, and workers’ clubs. Whole
issues were devoted to the Chelyabinsk tractor factory,
Magnitogorsk, the Nizhny Tagil railroad car factory, and GAZ (“The
Soviet Detroit”).
USSR in Construction bore no resemblance to the engineering
and trade journals in the United States that documented industry, like
Scientific American (in its early years) or Iron Age, with their
technical language, tightly packed text, and diagrammatic
illustrations. The Russian magazine was gorgeous, with innovative
design, selective use of color, and arresting layouts of photographs
taken by leading Soviet photographers, including Max Alpert, Arkady
Shaikhet, Georgy Zelma, Boris Ignatovich, Semyon Fridlyand,
Yevgeny Khaldei, and, perhaps most notably, Alexander Rodchenko.
Gorky himself wrote some of the text for the early issues. But the
true auteurs of the magazine were the designers, who included
Nikolai Troshin, Rodchenko and his wife Varvara Stepanova, and the
married team of El Lissitzky and Sophie Küppers. Layouts were
complex, varied, and innovative, juxtaposing picture and text in ever-
changing ways, making use of unusual typography and montage.
Sometimes the layouts were conceived before the photos were
taken, with the photographers instructed on the kinds of images that
would be needed for the assemblage. Over time, the designs
became ever more elaborate, as the magazine began using
horizontal and even vertical foldout leaves, inserts, maps, pop-ups,
irregularly cropped photographs, and transparent overlays. One
issue, devoted to a new airplane model, had an aluminum cover.61
Some of the same photographers and designers were involved in
books that used a similar format to exhaustively document the
industrialization effort. USSR stroit Sotzsialism (“USSR Builds
Socialism”), a 1933 volume, was organized by industry—electric,
coal, metallurgy, and so forth—with exquisite photography,
montages, and other graphic devices. Like USSR in Construction, it
was in part designed as propaganda promoting Soviet achievements
abroad, with the main text in Russian but captions in German,
French, and English as well. But the most important audience for the
celebration of industrialization and the giant factory was at home. In
its early years, the press run for the German and English editions of
USSR in Construction peaked just over ten thousand (with fewer
copies in French), but the Russian edition had issues with print runs
exceeding one hundred thousand. The key readership group for this
semi-avant-garde testament to industry and infrastructure was the
new Soviet elite of party officials, government functionaries, and
industrial managers, who no doubt took a proprietary pride in the
accomplishments of the new society, at the top of which they sat,
much like American industrialists enjoyed the celebration of industry
in Fortune and the photographs of Margaret Bourke-White. For the
1935 Seventh Congress of the Soviets, Lissitzky and Küppers
produced a lavish seven-volume documentation of “Heavy Industry,”
complete with accordion foldouts, overlays, special papers, collages,
and incorporated fabric.62
The documentary magazines and books and the many posters
celebrating industry drew much of their splendor from the very high
quality of Soviet photography. With most of the country illiterate
during the first years after the revolution, the Bolsheviks saw
photography, film, posters, and heavily illustrated magazines as
more effective vehicles of propaganda and enlightenment than the
written word. The first issue of USSR in Construction carried a notice
that “The State Publishing House has chosen the photo as the
method of illustrating socialist construction for the photograph
speaks much more convincingly in many cases than even the most
brilliantly written article.” The camera itself became a mark of
modernity; “Every progressive comrade,” Anatoly Lunacharsky, the
Commissar of Enlightenment, wrote, “must not only have a watch but
also a camera.”63
Soviet photographers engaged in fierce debates over the style
and to a lesser extent the content of their images, forming rival
organizations, but most shared a commitment to the socialist project
and willingly followed government injunctions to document the giant
projects of the Five-Year Plans. Even sites distant from Moscow and
Leningrad attracted top photographers. Dmitri Debabov, Max Albert,
and Georgy Petrusov all took extraordinary photographs at
Magnitogorsk, with the latter spending two years there as the head
of information for the factory. While there were some commonalities
between the documentary approach of the Soviets and leading
American industrial photographers, like Bourke-White and Charles
Sheeler, there were important differences, too. Soviet photographers
more quickly adopted the small, light 35-mm camera, introduced by
Leica in 1924 (with a Soviet version beginning production in 1932),
than the Americans, who largely stuck with their big, heavy, large-
format equipment. The 35-mm camera made it easier to shoot from
odd angles and unusual vantage points. Uncommon framing,
diagonal positioning, unfamiliar angles, and shots taken from very
low down or very high up characterized early Soviet photography,
including the industrial work. Although by the early 1930s
government authorities began to criticize unconventional artistic
modes, moving toward an embrace of socialist realism, photography,
as art historian Susan Tumarkin Goodman wrote, remained “the last
bastion of a radical visual culture,” imparting excitement to the
documentation of the giant factory and associating it with modernist
trends in the arts.64
Soviet filmmakers, who shared many stylistic approaches with
Soviet photographers, also embraced the factory as a subject. In the
1931 film Entuziazm (Simfoniya Donbassa) (“Enthusiasm:
Symphony of the Donbas”), the avant-garde newsreel and
documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov portrayed the transformation of
Ukrainian towns, wracked by religion and alcoholism, through the
development of coal mines and a giant steel mill. Dramatic images of
steelmaking contribute to the visual inventiveness and frantic
montage typical of Vertov’s films, in this case complimented by the
innovative use of sound, then just being introduced. Charlie Chaplin
declared Enthusiasm the best picture of the year.65
While the Soviets favored visual imagery in their celebration of
the factory, they did not ignore the written word. In 1931, Maxim
Gorky proposed a massive project to document the “History of
Factories and Plants,” both older facilities and the new giants of the
First Five-Year Plan. Reflecting how important Soviet leaders viewed
the representation of factories, the highest levels of the Communist
Party became involved with the series, which was discussed by both
the Central Committee and the Politburo. Bukharin (by then already
beginning to fall out of favor) and Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s closest
colleagues, composed separate lists of possible editors and Stalin
himself crossed off names and added others. Thirty volumes were
published before the series was discontinued in early 1938 amid the
height of the purges. Some documentary volumes were published in
English as well as Russian. An abridged version of Those Who Built
Stalingrad, As Told by Themselves, an oral history of the Soviet and
foreign workers who built the tractor factory and started up
production, with a foreword by Gorky, was published in New York in
1934, an innovative work that had some of the quality of the books
Studs Terkel would assemble decades later in the United States,
stressing the cultural and political transformation of the workers as
much as the operations of the plant itself. A booklet about
Magnitogorsk, with an image of a blast furnace embossed in copper
on its cover, was sold at the Soviet pavilion at the New York World’s
Fair.66
Many American journalists, economists, and academic experts
on the Soviet Union also were swept up by what one of the best
known of their number, George Frost Kennan, called “the romance of
economic development.” Foreign correspondents like Walter Duranty
and William Henry Chamberlin from the Christian Science Monitor
regularly filed stories about industrial projects and wrote about them
in books. Economists and social critics influenced by Thorstein
Veblen’s technocratic outlook, like Stuart Chase and George Soule,
were particularly enthusiastic. Sharing the equation of progress with
economic growth and industrialization, they admired the Soviet
embrace of large-scale planning and thought the United States could
learn much from it. Though the journalists and academics were well
aware of the great sacrifices that were being made by the Soviet
people to finance the crash industrial drive, most thought it was a
price worth paying. Louis Fischer, the Moscow correspondent for
The Nation, later wrote that before World War II he had been
“glorifying steel and kilowatts and forgetting the human being.”67
Europeans flocked to the Soviet Union in even greater numbers
than Americans. Many brought back positive reports from sites of
industry. Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, who later became
internationally famous for directing The Spanish Earth, a pro-
Republican documentary made during the Spanish Civil War, spent
three months in 1932 camped out in a barracks in Magnitogorsk,
filming workers erecting huge blast furnaces. Left-wing Austrian
composer Hanns Eisler, who agreed to create the soundtrack for his
film, joined him, recording industrial sounds to use, much as Vertov
had done in his recently released Enthusiasm. Ivens centered what
became Song of Heroes on the transformation of a Kirghiz peasant
into a Soviet worker. Complex political and artistic debates swirled
around the film at a moment when cultural experimentation was
being reined in across the Soviet Union. Premiered in early 1933, it
soon disappeared from view. Meanwhile, Eisler and Soviet writer
Sergei Tretyakov planned an opera about Magnitogorsk, which was
scheduled to premiere at the Bolshoi Theater, but never did, perhaps
for political reasons.68
At least in the United States, more than mainstream journalists or
avant-garde leftists, perhaps the person most responsible for getting
out the story of Soviet industrial behemoths was Margaret Bourke-
White, in effect reprising the role she had played for American
factories. She was drawn to the Soviet Union, where few foreign
photographers had ventured, not out of any particular sympathy for
the socialist experiment but by a desire to document rapid
industrialization and the transformation of the peasantry into a
working class. “I was eager to see what a factory would be like that
had been plunged suddenly into being,” she later wrote.
Getting into the Soviet Union proved quite a challenge. In spite of
letters of introduction from Sergei Eisenstein, whom she met in New
York, it took her unyielding persistence and a considerable wait to
finally get a visa. Then came an arduous train trip from Germany
carrying her bulky equipment. But when she finally got to Moscow,
her portfolio of photographs of blast furnaces, oil derricks,
locomotives, and coal freighters worked like a magic wand, opening
all doors. “I had come to a country where an industrial photographer
is accorded the rank of artist and prophet,” she discovered. In short
order Soviet officials organized a five-thousand-mile tour of key sites
of the First Five-Year Plan, a kind of Stations of the Cross on the
road to socialism, including a textile mill, the Dnieprostroi Dam, a
collective farm, a Black Sea cement plant like the one fictionalized in
Fyodo Vasilievich Gladkov’s popular novel Cement, and the
Stalingrad tractor factory.
Bourke-White published a book, Eyes on Russia, documenting
her journey, the first time she complemented her photographs with
substantial text. One picture she took at the Stalingrad plant
appeared in both Fortune and, in a slightly different version, in USSR
in Construction (which published several other of her photographs as
well). In the summer of 1931, she returned to the Soviet Union at the
invitation of the government, extensively photographing
Magnitogorsk. The New York Times Sunday Magazine published six
articles by her, accompanied by photographs, based on her trip. The
next summer she returned to the Soviet Union yet again, in her first
and last effort at filmmaking, a largely failed endeavor that
nonetheless yielded two short films distributed in theaters when the
United States recognized the U.S.S.R. in late 1933.69
Bourke-White’s photographs of Soviet industry resembled her
work in the United States: pictures of machinery that highlighted
symmetry and repetition; large-scale equipment and installations set
against dramatic skies; molten steel flowing within dark sheds. Her
photographs of a textile mill on the outskirts of Moscow were not so
different from those she had taken in Amoskeag. The main
dissimilarity between her Soviet photographs and her early industrial
work is her greater attention to workers, both in industrial settings
and in portraits.
Compared to Soviet photographers, with their more unusual
compositions, Bourke-White’s Soviet photographs seem a touch old-
fashioned: staid, dignified, a bit static. As was the case in the United
States, she often staged photographs to capture what she saw as
the essence of the processes before her. For her photograph of a
tractor at the end of the Stalingrad assembly line, she scoured the
plant to find the right figure for the “exultant picture” of industry
triumphant.
Bourke-White would become increasingly committed to the
political left during the 1930s and 1940s, in part as a result of her
experiences in the Soviet Union. But politics, in the usual sense, did
not shape her images of Soviet industry. Rather, it was the physical
machinery of industry and the people building and operating it that
captivated her. In the Soviet Union, as in the United States, Bourke-
White saw in large-scale industry beauty, progress, and modernity. It
was the giant factory, not its social context, that she documented,
and in doing so implicitly suggested a fundamental similarity of the
factory as an institution in the communist world and the capitalist
one.70

Paying the Bill

The heavy involvement of foreign workers and professionals in
Soviet industrialization proved short-lived. By 1933, the net flow had
reversed, with more foreigners headed out of the Soviet Union than
into it. Within a few years, very few remained.
To a great extent, it was a matter of money. Foreign contracts,
with workers and companies, generally called for payments in
dollars, European currencies, or gold. To finance purchases of
foreign equipment and expertise, the Soviets exported grain, gold,
artwork, and raw materials, including timber, oil, flax, and fur. But the
value of these goods was falling. A global drop in commodity prices
began in the late 1920s, even before the American stock market
crash, forcing the Soviets to increase foreign sales to stop the
depletion of their gold and hard currency reserves. In August 1930,
Stalin called for more than doubling grain exports, “Otherwise we risk
being left without our new iron and steel and machine-building
factories. . . . We must push grain exports furiously.” That meant ever
greater and more brutal requisitioning of grain in the countryside and
hunger throughout the country.
By the time first new factories were ready to begin operating, the
Great Depression had hit the United States and Western Europe, so
that there were plenty of skilled workers out of jobs willing to head to
the Soviet Union simply to get work, if not out of political sympathies.
But the Depression also led to a further drop in prices for grain and
raw materials, accelerating the decline of Soviet foreign reserves. In
mid-1931, Soviet leaders began curtailing the importation of foreign
equipment and the use of foreign experts. The Americans were hit
particularly hard, as firms in other countries offered better terms and
credit arrangements not available from the United States.
When Alpert Kahn’s consulting contract ended in 1932, the
Soviets offered to renew it only if the company agreed to be paid in
rubles, which were not convertible into dollars. Kahn traveled to
Moscow in an effort to save the partnership, but in the end his
company brought home its personnel. In 1934, after purchasing the
number of vehicles and parts specified in their contract with Ford, the
Soviets terminated that agreement, too.71
But it was not just a matter of money. Inflated expectations of
what foreign equipment, methods, and experts could accomplish led
to something of a disillusionment with Americanism as the new
factories, erected at enormous cost, had difficulty meeting their
targeted output. The effects of the Depression in the West also
dampened enthusiasm for the United States and its representatives,
as a traditional Marxist critique of the internal contradictions that
crippled capitalist progress reemerged. Vassily Ivanov reported after
his trip to the United States early in the Depression, “I saw with my
own eyes how the productive forces were outgrowing their narrow
capitalist framework. The factories were working at one third of
capacity, repressing their powers, crushing and constricting their
exuberance of technical potentialities.” The United States might not
continue to be a leader in industrial innovation.
At the same time, a new generation of Soviet managers and
specialists was beginning to come into its own, with up-and-coming
leaders increasingly confident they did not need foreign tutors, whom
in some cases they came to resent. A general turn toward suspicion
of outsiders and even xenophobia emerged in the mid and late
1930s, accompanied by ever more grandiose claims of Soviet
superiority in all realms. In accounts of the industrialization drive, the
role of foreigners became downplayed or erased. After the mid-
1930s, nonnatives who decided to stay in Russia were viewed with
suspicion and had difficulty finding work or even staying out of
prison.72
While the Soviets began moving away from directly copying
methods, plants, products, and processes developed under
capitalism, the basic thrust of their industrial drive remained
unchanged. The Second Five-Year Plan and a Third Five-Year Plan,
begun in 1938 but cut short by World War II, continued to prioritize
heavy industry, though they gave greater attention to consumer
goods as well. After World War II, the Soviet Union resumed the
prewar model of multiyear economic plans and concentrated
investment in giant production and research complexes, often with
accompanying new cities. The crash industrialization of the First
Five-Year Plan created a template that would be used in the Soviet
Union until its demise and in many of its satellites and allies as
well.73
But many of the key figures in the industrialization drive did not
live to see the spread of the model they helped create. The Great
Terror of the late 1930s wiped out the pioneers who brought the
“Amerikansky Temp” to the Soviet Union and built the first giant
factories. Many of the participants in the industrialization debate of
the 1920s, including Bukharin and other top Bolsheviks, were
arrested on patently absurd charges, convicted in show trials, and
executed, or, in Trotsky’s case, murdered in exile. Sergo Orjonikidje
committed suicide in 1937. Alexei Gastev, the Soviet Taylorist,
survived repeated internal party battles, only to be arrested in
September 1938 on charges of “counterrevolutionary terrorist
activity” and executed the following spring. Saul Bron, who as head
of Amtorg had signed agreements with American companies worth
tens of millions of dollars, including the pacts with Kahn and Ford,
was arrested in October 1937, tried in secret, and shot in April 1938.
Others executed at roughly the same time included Vassily Ivanov,
the first directors of the tractor plants in Kharkov and Chelyabinsk,
the first director of the Gorky auto factory, and the head of the auto
trust who signed the contract with the Austin Company. Such leaders
of the big industrialization projects, who generally had political but
not technical credentials (making them dependent on foreign or old-
regime expertise), having done their jobs and built potentially
threatening local power bases in the process, were simply wiped out,
replaced by a generation of newly trained managers, usually from
peasant or working-class backgrounds, who had no ties to the early
days of the Bolsheviks and the ideological and organizational
resources they provided.74

Did It Work?
Did the giant factory succeed in the Soviet Union? The question
carries a different meaning and weight than if asked about earlier
incarnations of industrial giantism. Elsewhere, big factories had been
built by individuals or corporations for a narrow purpose, their own
economic reward. Sometimes they also had philanthropic or social
goals, but those were almost always secondary and often
instrumental to the economic success of the factory and its payoff to
its creators and investors. By contrast, in the Soviet Union, giant
factories were seen as a means to very large social and political
ends: industrialization, modernization, national defense, and the
creation of socialism. While earlier big factories were conceived of as
a way to expand production, in the Soviet Union they were seen as a
way to transform society, culture, and, ultimately, world history.
By the measure of aggregate output and economic growth, the
Soviet industrialization drive of the 1930s succeeded. The
infrastructure and industrialization efforts under the Five-Year Plans
accelerated the growth of industry and the overall national economy
to rates that surpassed those in the West, where the Depression left
the leading industrial countries in stagnation. In sector after sector,
Soviet industrial output zoomed up, in many cases with industrial
giants playing a critical role.
Economists have debated if the same kind of growth could have
been achieved through a more balanced program of development,
less focused on concentrated investment in landmark gigants. As the
Soviets discovered, there were diseconomies of scale in creating
islands of industrial giantism in a vast, undeveloped nation.
Expensive, advanced equipment went unused, unmaintained, or
prematurely worn down through overuse. Skilled labor shortages
proved endemic and supply chains immensely difficult to create and
sustain, given the thinness of the national industrial base and the
difficulties of coordination through centralized planning structures
rather than markets. Unable to depend on reliable flows of quality
material through official channels, industrial managers built their own
off-the-books networks of suppliers, using barter, favors, and other
methods, creating shortages and difficulties elsewhere, while they
themselves often passed defective goods up the chain.75
But the success of the giant factory cannot be fully judged using
only economic measures. The scale of the great Soviet industrial
projects, more than the scale of projects in the capitalist world,
served an important ideological function. Giantism contributed to the
massive social mobilization required for the industrialization drive,
which became the moral equivalent of revolution and civil war. The
world-historic scale of Soviet factories and infrastructure contributed
to a cultural revolution in which modernity and progress were linked
to Soviet power and mechanization. And it worked, as millions of
Soviet citizens made heroic efforts to construct new facilities, a new
economy, a new society.
At a price. The industrialization drive was linked, by design, to
squeezing as much as possible out of the peasantry, even to the
point, at times, of famine. The brutal collectivization of agriculture
pushed millions of peasants away from their homes to industrial
employment. Conditions during the First Five-Year Plan were worst
in the countryside, but real wages and living standards for workers
fell, too. Circumstances at the new plants were harsh and shortages
widespread.
But comparatively the situation did not look quite so bad. Housing
was very crowded, but lack of private space was nothing new to
most peasants or even to most urban workers. What was new, for
many, was electricity, clean running water, and central heating.
Furthermore, by the standards of the early phases of industrialization
in England and the United States, working hours in the Soviet Union
were short, in the early 1930s generally seven hours a day (not
counting dinner breaks) and six hours in dangerous occupations. By
the late 1930s, material conditions for workers notably improved.76
Isolating the giant factory from everything else going on in the
Soviet Union during the 1930s—including the collectivization of
agriculture and the Great Terror—is impossible, so judgments on the
efficacy of industrial giantism as a developmental strategy are
difficult to make. But in one realm, the record seems clear. The
creation of the metallurgy, automotive, and tractor industries,
especially the plants located deep in the Soviet interior, proved
critical to Soviet survival and ultimate victory during World War II.
One reason the Soviets sited so many industrial behemoths in the
Urals was to distance them from any invasion, positioning them
beyond not only land attack but also aerial bombardment. Many key
industrial facilities were designed to be quickly convertible to
armaments production. While the Reuther brothers were working in
the Gorky tool room, army specialists would show up regularly to
supervise the construction of dies and fixtures for making military
equipment, which would be tested and stored for possible later use.
During World War II, the factory produced cars, trucks, jeeps,
ambulances, armored cars, light tanks, self-propelled guns, and
ammunition for the military. The Stalingrad tractor factory also
poured out light tanks, until the Germans destroyed the factory
during the epic battle for the city. The Chelyabinsk tractor plant
proved even more important, before the war producing self-propelled
artillery pieces, howitzers, and light and heavy tanks. After the
Germans invaded, machinery and personnel from other factories,
including the Kharkov tractor plant and diesel engine factory, were
moved to Chelyabinsk. Over the course of the war, the expanded
complex produced 18,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, 48,500
tank engines, and over seventeen million pieces of ammunition. As
John Scott wrote in early 1942, the Magnitogorsk plant and the
broader Ural industrial district it was part of were “Russia’s number
one guarantee against defeat at the hands of Hitler,” which, of
course, also helped ensure the victory of Britain and the United
States.77
But if the giant Soviet factory contributed to industrialization,
modernization, and national defense, its role in the creation of
socialism depends on what is meant by the term. As state-owned
endeavors, the Soviet giants were part of an economic and social
system built around government and—to a lesser extent—
cooperative ownership of the means of production. But whether this
made the Soviet Union a socialist society, a state capitalist one, or
something else entirely was a subject of fierce debate in the 1940s
and 1950s and is still a matter of controversy in the much-shrunken
universe of people who care about such things.78
Did socialism, or state ownership, change internal relationships
within the factory? A bit, but not much. Even in the years of purges
and terror, Soviet workers felt free to criticize managers and
government officials about how plants operated, probably more so
than workers at, say, Ford or U.S. Steel before they unionized. But
ironically, at the same time that American unions began to grow,
Soviet unions, which once gave workers something of an
autonomous base, were defanged of independence and real power
(though their role in providing social benefits expanded). During the
late 1930s, workers sometimes used the atmosphere of suspicion
and secret police power to bring down disliked officials. After the
terror abated, harsh new labor laws criminalized absenteeism,
lateness, and quitting without permission (a throwback to English law
at the time of the first factories). More fundamentally, social relations
inside the factory remained hierarchical, in much the same way they
were in the West. As one journalist wrote, describing the Stalingrad
tractor factory, the assembly line was “no longer an issue of
disagreement between capitalists and socialists.”79
 When in 1931 H. J. Freyn, who had spent four years in the Soviet
Union as a leading consultant to its metallurgy industry, gave a
speech to a meeting of the Taylor Society—disciples of the father of
scientific management—about the First Five-Year Plan, he described
the Soviet Union as a dictatorship, but he felt that at its current stage
dictatorship was “essential for the welfare of the people.” And in any
case, “a modern business enterprise can scarcely be operated or
managed by applying the principles of democracy.” Like Kahn, Freyn
barely mentioned communism when he discussed Soviet industrial
development.80
The giant factory shaped the path along which the Soviet Union
developed, and became a mainstay of ideas of economic growth and
modernity in the country for decades to come. But as an institution
unto itself, it proved remarkably impervious to its surroundings.
 CHAPTER 6

“COMMON REQUIREMENTS OF
INDUSTRIALIZATION”
Cold War Mass Production

F ROM THE EARLY 1940s THROUGH THE 1960s, IT BECAME common

among political intellectuals and academics, especially in the United
States, to argue that the United States and the Soviet Union were
becoming more similar, that ultimately they would come to closely
resemble one another. James Burnham first made this case to a
broad public in his 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution. Burnham,
an American backer of Leon Trotsky, initially accepted the exiled
Russian leader’s characterization of the Soviet Union as a “workers’
state,” even if degenerated by Stalinism and the rise of a
“Bonapartist bureaucracy.” But in late 1939, he broke with Trotsky,
coming to see the U.S.S.R. as neither socialist nor capitalist but as a
new type of social organism, in which a managerial elite ruled
through control of state-owned property. Burnham contended that
bureaucratic collectivism, or what he called “managerial society,”
represented a universal phase of historical development, the actual
successor to capitalism, rather than socialism, which had been
posited as such by leftists for a century. The Soviet Union, he
argued, represented the advance guard of a form of social
organization that the United States and European capitalist nations
inevitably would come to adopt.1 A few years later, Friedrich von
Hayek, coming from the political right, made a similar claim, seeing a
growth of collectivism in capitalist societies pushing them toward the
“serfdom” to which he believed socialism was headed.
The idea that the Soviet Union and the United States were
converging soon gained traction among American social scientists.
The leading sociologist of the post–World War II era, Talcott
Parsons, was an early adopter of “convergence theory,” which came
to be embraced, in one form or another, by such luminaries as C.
Wright Mills, Alex Inkeles, Herbert Marcuse, and Walt Rostow.
Leftists like Mills and Marcuse fretted that the stifling bureaucracy of
Soviet life was being re-created in the West, while Parsons and other
liberal proponents of modernization theories thought that the Soviet
Union would inevitably become more like the United States.
What these theories shared was the belief that economic
development was behind convergence. As Marcuse put it in 1958,
both the Soviet Union and the United States were shaped by the
“common requirements of industrialization,” which pushed them
toward bureaucracy, centralization, and regimentation. In effect,
these authors believed, modern industry existed as a social and
cultural system independent of the economic arrangements in which
it was embedded. Ultimately it would mold the larger society. They
adopted “industrial society” and “industrial civilization” as descriptive
terms and analytic categories that bridged the Iron Curtain, capturing
the central features of life in “developed” or “advanced” nations. By
contrast, “capitalism” and “communism” were seen in sophisticated
academic circles as atavistic slogans, of little explanatory value in
understanding modern life.2
Ironically, at the very moment when some of the leading minds of
the left, right, and center were declaring that industrial development
was resulting in a convergence of the capitalist and communist
blocs, their actual industrial practices were diverging. Through World
War II, in both realms, industrial giantism was adopted as a road to
economic development, social progress, and modernity, a heroic
effort celebrated in art, literature, and politics. But after the war,
American corporations moved away from ever-upping the scale of
industry, deciding that the industrial behemoth had reached its limits
of profitability and control. Rather than continuing to concentrate
production in industrial colossuses, they began to decentralize
manufacturing in smaller, scattered plants. By contrast, leaders in
the Soviet Bloc—and in other parts of the world—retained a belief in
the efficacy of gigantic industrial projects as means for rapid
economic growth and as symbols of national prowess and social
progress. Though there were multiple reasons for the diverging fate
of the giant factory in the United States, the Soviet Bloc, Western
Europe, and what came to be called the Third World, the course of
labor organization was critical. The intensity of class conflict in the
United States brought unprecedented benefits to workers in large-
scale industry, making what retrospectively has come to be called
the “American Dream” come true, at least for a while. But it also
contributed to the demise of the giant factory. Elsewhere, with labor
less volatile, industrial giantism continued to be seen as a viable
path to the future.

Military Giantism
The downsizing of American factories came after a final wave of
industrial giantism during World War II, devoted to making military
goods. Some armaments production took place at government
facilities, which swelled during the war. The Brooklyn Navy Yard
doubled its size, taking over adjacent land to build the world’s largest
dry docks and the world’s largest crane, with its employment roll
hitting seventy thousand. But most defense production took place in
corporate-run factories, mills, and shipyards, facilities converted to
war production or newly built for the purpose.3
Albert Kahn designed some of the largest war plants in a last
burst of activity before his death in December 1942. They included
the Chrysler Tank Arsenal in Warren, Michigan; the East Chicago
cast armor plant for American Steel Foundries Company; Amertorp
Corporation’s torpedo plant in Chicago; the Curtis-Wright
Corporation plant in St. Louis; the Wright Aeronautical plant in
Cincinnati; and the Dodge Chicago plant, which made aircraft
engines (the last three of these were huge structures). But Kahn’s
largest war plant, the best known of all the wartime defense facilities,
was the Ford Willow Run aircraft factory, an effort to bring Fordism to
an industry even more complex than the auto industry.4
As World War II loomed, in a dash to build up American air
warfare capacity, defense officials—and Walter Reuther, by this time
a top UAW leader—pressed for the partial conversion of the
automobile industry to airplane production. Officials at Ford, which
previously had manufactured small aircraft, with limited success,
proposed to use assembly-line methods to produce the newly
designed B-24 heavy bomber. When defense officials agreed, a
crash effort began to build a massive factory and adjacent airport on
Ford-owned land in Ypsilanti, Michigan, twenty-five miles west of
Detroit. The main building—which covered sixty-seven acres,
making it at the time the largest factory structure in the world—went
up quickly, but getting production going was a whole other matter.
The federal government and Ford proved not much better than the
Soviets in starting up such a massive endeavor and faced similar
problems in assembling a workforce in an area distant from existing
pools of skilled labor (which, in any case, were too small to meet
wartime demand).
Part of the blame for Willow Run repeatedly falling behind
production schedules—which became a political hot potato—came
from applying mass-production techniques to the manufacture of
bombers. Creating specialized tools and fixtures delayed the start of
parts making, usually done in the aircraft industry using standard
machine tools. Repeated design changes from the Army impaired a
manufacturing approach predicated on long runs of standardized
parts. As in the Soviet Union, slow delivery of materials contributed
to delays. So did repeated reorganizations and personnel changes in
the federal defense agencies and managerial chaos at Ford.
(Contrary to its rationalist public image, Ford suffered from personal
fiefdoms, fierce competition among executives, and a lack of clear
lines of responsibility.) But an inability to find and retain enough
workers presented the biggest problem.
 Figure 6.1 The B-24 Liberator assembly line at the Willow Run bomber plant in
Michigan, circa 1944.

Across America, defense industries scrambled to find workers,

especially with industrial skills. The location of Willow Run added a
burden. As construction and production workers began flooding into
the sparsely populated rural area, they found virtually no homes they
could buy or rent, forcing them to room with local residents or live in
trailers, tents, or jerry-built structures, shades of Gorky and
Magnitogorsk.
The UAW proposed the construction of a ten-thousand-unit
“Defense City,” a permanent new settlement to house plant workers.
It commissioned Oscar Stonorov, a German-born modernist architect
who had designed a union-sponsored housing complex in
Philadelphia, to lay it out. (In 1931, Stonorov, with a partner, had
taken second place in an international competition to design the
Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, besting such celebrities as Le
Corbusier and Walter Gropius.) Defense City, and a similar plan by
federal officials for a “Bomber City,” proposed multifamily structures
and extensive communal facilities, social housing of the sort that had
been pioneered in interwar Europe and tried at Gorky and elsewhere
in the Soviet Union. Stonorov and his partner at the time, Louis I.
Kahn (later famed for his modernist structures, and no relationship to
Albert), produced striking designs for a variety of types of dwelling
units. But nothing came to pass in the face of fierce opposition from
local real estate interests, Ford, and even some union members who
—like their Russian counterparts—preferred individual living (in this
case single-family homes) to the communalism promoted by left-
wing planners. Reversing gears, federal authorities quickly threw up
prefabricated temporary dwellings, including—again shades of the
U.S.S.R.—worker dormitories.
With living conditions difficult and jobs elsewhere easy to find,
workers flowed out of Willow Run almost as fast as they flowed in.
Most had little industrial experience, requiring considerable training
before they could begin efficient work. Though at one point Ford
projected a plant workforce of 100,000, in practice it peaked at
42,506, massive but not massive enough to meet production
schedules. Reluctantly giving up the idea of Rouge-style total
integration, Ford began moving some B-24 parts production to other
plants and even did some subcontracting.
Eventually tools were finished, production methods perfected,
and a large enough workforce trained to achieve high-volume output.
By 1944, the plant turned out one plane every sixty-three minutes.
When production ended in June 1945, the plant had manufactured
8,685 B-24s. Some were shipped out as kits for final assembly
elsewhere, but 6,792 were put together on site and flown off, many
almost immediately into action.5
No other aircraft plant tried as thoroughly to apply mass
production methods, but industrial giantism characterized the
wartime aviation industry as a whole. North of Baltimore, at Middle
River, Glenn L. Martin employed even more workers than Willow
Run, 45,000, making B-26 bombers and PBM Mariner flying boats at
a complex that included a huge Kahn-designed assembly building
with the longest flat-span trusses ever used and massive lift-up
doors that allowed airplanes to move in and out. On Long Island,
Republic Aircraft Corporation swelled from a few hundred workers to
more than 24,000 and Grumman Aircraft from 1,000 to more than
25,000. In the Seattle area, Boeing employed 50,000 workers, nearly
half of them women.6
Wartime shipbuilding also depended on huge facilities and
assembly-line methods. Until the war, ships had been custom-built
by highly skilled workers, a practice that continued for naval vessels
at facilities like the Bethlehem Steel shipyard at Sparrows Point,
Maryland, which employed eight thousand workers. But for cargo
ships, needed in massive numbers for the war effort, assembly line
techniques were developed, including the standardization of design,
extensive prefabrication of parts, the use of welding instead of
riveting, and a highly developed division of labor. At Bethlehem’s
newly constructed Fairfield yard in Baltimore harbor, 45,000 workers,
90 percent of whom had never worked in a shipyard, produced over
four hundred vessels during the war. On the West Coast, Henry J.
Kaiser, a construction company owner new to shipbuilding, threw up
a series of huge yards to produce Liberty ships and other vessels
using mass-production methods. His Richmond, California, shipyard
employed some 90,000 workers, making it one of the most populous
industrial worksites in American history. To support his operations,
Kaiser built the first integrated steel mill on the West Coast, in
Fontana, east of Los Angeles; constructed new cities for his workers,
like Vanport in Portland, Oregon, with homes for nearly ten thousand
families; and expanded his prepaid comprehensive medical program,
which he renamed Kaiser Permanente—altogether an American
Kombinat. After the war, Kaiser leased the Willow Run plant from the
federal government to produce automobiles for the newly
established Kaiser-Frazer Corporation, which remained in the car
business until 1955.7
Defense production—especially in huge factory complexes—
elevated the social prestige of the blue-collar worker, already raised
by the substance and imagery of the New Deal and the great union
organizing drives. Political, military, and labor leaders repeatedly
stressed the importance of the industrial home front to victory,
overlaying patriotism on the Promethean heroism already associated
with the giant factory and the workers within it. Flags, bond sale
rallies, blood drives, and collection points for British, Soviet, Greek,
and Chinese relief made factories, mills, and shipyards into arenas
of patriotic expression. Newsreels, billboards, and magazines
celebrated war workers—female and male—for their skill and
dedication, their ease in operating giant machines and building huge
objects, their role in the defense of the nation. Workers responded to
such publicity, higher income brought by steady work, unionization,
and the tight labor market with a confidence evident in the many
short wartime strikes, held in defiance of the union movement’s no-
strike pledge, and in a jauntiness that characterized the industrial
workforce across the country. It could be seen in wartime
photographs of industrial workers, like those Dorothea Lange took at
the Kaiser Richmond shipyard. Though few realized it at the time,
the war brought the giant factory and the blue-collar worker to their
apogee in American life.8

The Bounty of Unionized Industry

The end of World War II led to a rapid shrinkage of employment at
defense plants, fears of mass unemployment, and a tectonic crash
between workers and their employers. The immediate issue was the
desire by workers for wage boosts to catch up with inflation and
compensate for diminished hours once war production ended. But
the larger question was the place of organized labor in the postwar
world, the desire by unions to solidify their New Deal and wartime
gains and by employers to check or roll them back. In the year
following the end of the war, five million workers went on strike in the
largest strike wave in American history. At its height, in January
1946, two million workers were off the job, including 750,000
steelworkers, 175,000 GM autoworkers, 200,000 electrical
manufacturing workers, and more than 200,000 meatpacking
workers. Left-wing reporter Art Preis wrote from Pittsburgh of steel
plants “sprawled lifeless,” while fires to warm pickets formed “a
mighty chain up and down the valley and the river banks.”
A similar clash had taken place at the end of World War I. Unions
had won some battles and lost others (including the steel strike), but,
in the face of repression, an economic downturn, and a conservative
political turn, the net result was a sharp decline in the size and power
of the labor movement. The post–World War II strike wave proved a
different story. Generally peaceful, with widespread public support,
the big strikes ended with an eighteen-and-a-half-cent per hour wage
increase (the equivalent of $2.46 in 2017) or something close to it, a
huge boost. For the only time, the United States effectively had a
national wage settlement. Price hikes soon cut deeply into the wage
gains, but the strikes marked just the beginning of a quarter century
of dramatic improvements in pay and benefits for industrial workers.9
Before World War II, the newly formed industrial unions had not
stressed wage rates, in part because in a deflationary period steady
wages meant rising real income. Instead, they fought to check the
power of management on the shop floor through union recognition,
increasingly detailed contracts, shop stewards, grievance
procedures, and the use of seniority in layoffs and jobs assignments.
After the war, unions successfully pressed for wage increases and a
growing array of employer-provided benefits, including health
insurance, pensions to supplement social security, and
supplementary unemployment insurance.
The cumulative result was a revolution in the daily lives of
workers in large-scale industry, and for their families and
communities. Steelworkers’ union president Philip Murray once said
that for working people a union meant “pictures on the wall, carpets
on the floor and music in the home.” A quarter century after World
War II, workers in heavily capitalized, unionized industry had
achieved that and much more. Things once unusual or unknown
among workers—home ownership, modern appliances, vacations,
cars and second cars, children sent to college, retirement while still
healthy—became common. Unionism grew so established that in
1949 a critic in a left-wing newspaper could write that “In revealing
the beauty of factory architecture, [Charles] Sheeler has become the
Raphael of the Fords. Who is it that will be the Giotto of the U.A.W.?”
 Higher income and welfare programs provided by the
government and employers, including pensions, unemployment
insurance, disability insurance, and health insurance, gave workers
an unfamiliar sense of security and well-being. Many resented the
high price they paid for their improved way of life, especially the
continued, if diminished, authoritarianism of Fordist production, the
monotony of assembly-line work, and the physical toll of
manufacturing labor. Still, as Jack Metzgar, the son of a Johnstown,
Pennsylvania, steelworker wrote of his family’s experience, “If what
we lived through in the 1950s was not liberation, then liberation
never happens in real human lives.”10

Dispersion and Downsizing

While for workers the 1945–46 strike wave launched a trajectory of
material improvement and union power, for industrialists it brought
home a lesson some had begun to glean during the strikes of the
1930s, the danger of extreme industrial concentration in large-scale
facilities. Even before the burst of labor militancy in the mid-1930s, a
few large corporations had begun to hedge their bets, building
smaller plants to supplement their main production facilities. By the
late 1920s, the big three tire makers, Goodyear, Goodrich, and
Firestone, in addition to their giant plants in Akron, all had factories
in Los Angeles to meet the demands of the West Coast market. In
1928, Goodyear built another tire factory, this time in Gadsden,
Alabama, a low-wage, antiunion center far from any major tire
market. The purpose seemed primarily to lower labor costs and gain
a threat to use against Akron workers. After the 1936 strike at the
main Goodyear plant, the company expanded the Alabama factory.
Other Akron firms also started decentralizing production. By 1938
the Firestone workforce in Akron had fallen from 10,500 to about
6,000, as the company shifted work to a factory it built in Memphis
and to other outlying plants. The Goodyear Akron plant shed a fifth
of its workforce.
 Labor was not the only reason tire companies began dispersing
production. Technological innovations and the increasing
standardization of tire sizes made it possible to build mass-
production plants that operated efficiently at smaller scales than the
Akron monsters. As car ownership spread and population
redistributed, siting plants near growing markets meant lower
shipping costs.
But the biggest factor seemed to be a desire to stop being held
hostage by small groups of workers. The sequential nature of tire
production meant that if one department went on strike, a whole
plant might be shut down. And that happened repeatedly in Akron,
where sit-downs and other strikes, often begun without official union
involvement, became endemic, as a volatile worker culture of direct
action developed. In an October 1944 strike at the Goodyear factory,
just four striking workers idled five thousand others.
When siting new factories, companies looked for locations where
labor costs were lower and unionism was less likely to succeed, or at
least be of a less militant sort. Repeated prewar efforts by the United
Rubber Workers to unionize Goodyear’s Gadsden plant and
Firestone’s Memphis plant failed, with a reign of terror in Alabama
that included severe beatings of union organizers by company thugs
and antiunion workers in cahoots with local law enforcement.11
The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) also reacted quickly to
labor militancy. In 1936, a month-long strike, overcoming imported
strikebreakers and police violence, led to the unionization of the
company’s two-million-square-foot complex in Camden, New Jersey,
just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, where 9,700
workers (75 percent female) produced nearly all of its products.
Almost immediately, RCA began moving operations elsewhere,
between 1936 and 1947 setting up a component plant in
Indianapolis, a radio plant in Bloomington, Indiana, tube plants in
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Marion, Indiana, a record plant in
Hollywood, and a cabinet shop in Pulaski, Virginia. By 1953, only
three hundred consumer-electronics jobs remained in Camden. The
original complex continued to be an important center for the
company, primarily for research and development and manufacturing
military equipment, but all mass production of consumer goods had
been scattered to smaller plants.12
General Motors likewise realized early the threat labor militancy
presented to its integrated production system. A 1935 strike at its
Toledo transmission factory forced the shutdown of every Chevrolet
plant in North America. Soon after, the company launched a $50
million program to expand and modernize its manufacturing, which
included building new plants so that the interruption of production at
one factory would not halt operations elsewhere. Most of the new
factories, which included a plant in Muncie, Indiana, to duplicate the
output of the Toledo factory, were in small towns or cities with weak
union movements.13
The GM program came too late to block the UAW’s triumph in
1937. The Flint sit-down and the strikes that followed reinforced the
message about industrial concentration. While there might be
economies of scale in producing every Chevy engine in a single
plant or bodies for all GM cars of a particular body type in a single
factory, when workers grew militant it brought danger, too.
No company, even giants like General Motors with huge financial
resources, could quickly build factories to duplicate all the production
of their most centralized facilities—plants like the Rouge or Dodge
Main or the Chevy and Buick complexes in Flint. But World War II
provided an opportunity to begin or further the process. As in the
Soviet Union, national security dictated the siting of defense plants in
the interior of the country, safe from bombardment. Warm weather
and vast empty expanses made the Southwest especially attractive
to military planners. With government financing, the rubber
companies built new tire plants to meet war needs in Iowa, Texas,
Pennsylvania, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Kansas. After the war,
Washington sold off the plants at bargain prices to the corporations
that operated them. Other big wartime defense factories were sold,
too, and converted to civilian production, like the North American
Aviation bomber plant in Kansas City, Kansas (which had twenty-six
thousand workers), taken over by General Motors to assemble cars
and, briefly, jet fighters, and the Louisville, Kentucky, war plant that
became the nucleus for General Electric’s “Appliance Park.”14
 The postwar strike wave provided further impetus for industrial
relocation and more but smaller plants. The country had never seen
anything like it before. Not only were the strikes huge, they were
highly disciplined, with very few workers breaking ranks, even as
some of the walkouts dragged on and on, GM for 113 days, textile
workers for 133 days, glass workers for 102 days. Corporate leaders
found deeply disturbing the support the strikers won in industrial
centers. In steel towns, where for a century local officials,
newspapers, and businesses had backed the companies in their
clashes with labor, now they stayed neutral or supported the strikers.
Striking electrical workers won support from college students, the
mayors of Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and fifty-five members of
Congress. Veterans played a conspicuous role in many of the
postwar walkouts, lending them moral capital earned on the
battlefields. In Bloomfield, New Jersey, which housed both GE and
Westinghouse factories, the local branch of the American Legion, a
notoriously conservative group with a history of antiunionism, backed
the strikers, even though leftists led their union. In Chicago,
pharmacies and grocery stores extended credit to striking
packinghouse workers, while priests joined their picket lines. The
Truman administration vacillated in its handling of the walkouts, but it
took the legitimacy of unionism for granted and ultimately used
federal power to force the major corporations to grant large wage
hikes.15
 Figure 6.2 Pittsburgh Mayor David L. Lawrence addressing a crowd of
Westinghouse strikers in April 1946.

The strikes made painfully clear to manufacturing companies that

they no longer controlled the physical, social, and political
environments in which their largest factories operated. GE president
Charles Wilson bitterly complained in congressional testimony that
strikers had kept even nonunionists—managers, scientists, and
office workers—from entering struck facilities. “I don’t think a
corporation should have to go with its hat in hand to a union and ask
permission to bring its engineers and so on into a plant.” Politics and
daily life in industrial communities changed as prounion politicians
got elected to local and state office, small businesses allied
themselves with their working-class customers, and unions injected
themselves into all aspects of civil life, from the Community Chest to
recreational sports to cultural activities. In Yonkers, New York,
manufacturing companies like Otis Elevator and Alexander Smith,
which, with a peak workforce of seven thousand workers at its
massive mill, was the premier carpet manufacturer in the United
States, had effectively controlled the town. But after the war,
decisions about taxes and public policies became subjects for
debate, with a well-organized, ambitious local labor movement
throwing around its weight. Giant industrial complexes, once
fortresses of corporate power, had become hostages to communities
of workers in dense urban centers, where working-class solidarity
developed in ethnic organizations, veterans groups, churches, bars,
bowling alleys, and social venues, as well as within factory gates.16
GE had the most multifaceted response to the upsurge of union
power in and around its leading factories. After the 1946 strike, the
company named a public relations expert, Lemuel R. Boulware, as
vice president of employee and community relations. Boulware took
a hard line toward unions, in negotiations presenting the company’s
offer as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, while arguing its
reasonableness through newspaper advertisements and other media
to employees and residents in the towns where GE plants were
located. In addition to promoting the virtues of the company,
Boulware worked to educate GE workers and the general public
about the merits of free-market capitalism, hiring Ronald Reagan to
be a spokesperson for the firm in its ideological offensive. GE’s
efforts, though unusually extensive, were part of a broad corporate
campaign to reshape public thinking about the economy, an
extended drive to counter the ideological and political impact of the
New Deal.17
GE and other electrical equipment manufacturers also started
transferring operations out of their large factories to smaller plants
located in the South, the border states, the West Coast, rural New
England, the Midwest, the mid-Atlantic region, and Puerto Rico. The
resulting drop in employment in older factories could be very
substantial. When GE transferred some of the production of small
home appliances from its Bridgeport, Connecticut, plant to new
factories in Brockport and Syracuse, New York; Allentown,
Pennsylvania; and Asheboro, North Carolina; the workforce shrank
from 6,500 to less than 3,000. At the historic GE Schenectady
factory, which produced heavy-current products and at its height
during World War II employed 40,000 men and women, the
workforce plummeted from 20,000 in 1954 to 8,500 in 1965, as the
company shifted work to plants in Virginia, Indiana, Maryland, New
York, Vermont, and California.18
Multiple reasons figured in the dispersals. In the case of GE,
building geographically distributed plants was linked to a corporate
reorganization, which created decentralized product divisions. As
had begun before the war, many companies built plants to be near
growing markets, especially in the South and West, facilitated by
improvements in transportation, communication, and air conditioning.
Modernization sometimes necessitated relocation. In cities like
Detroit, few large empty tracts of land with good railroad connections
(necessary for producers of large products, like automobiles)
remained. As manufacturers sought to replace old, multistory plants
with single-story facilities, with room for truck-loading docks and
employee parking, they often turned to suburban sites, small or
medium-size cities, or even rural areas, where large tracts were
readily available. Government incentives also came into play,
including tax breaks, tax-free industrial development bonds, and
labor training programs, all widely used by Southern states to attract
Northern industry.19
In the large, theoretical literature on industrial location, labor
rarely gets much attention. Differential wage rates are sometimes
considered, but the presence or absence of militant workers and
unions almost always is ignored.20 However, in practice, labor often
was a key factor in corporate decision-making. One guidebook “for
executives charged with evaluating the placement of a company’s
productive capacity” frankly and matter-of-factly noted an “informal
decision rule that some corporations follow is no plant which is
unionized will be expanded on-site,” a dictum “grounded in
management’s concern for maintaining productivity and flexibility at
its facilities.” When companies embarked on major expansions,
rather than enlarging unionized plants they generally built new ones,
“often new locations in right-to-work states.” GE publicly justified its
downsizing of older plants and job relocations as an effort to remain
competitive with companies using low-wage Southern labor, but
privately Boulware discussed it, along with speedup, as a way to
discipline the workforce.21
Some large corporations with national union contracts faced
opposition when they began moving production to areas hostile to
organized labor. In 1960, striking workers sought a contractual
measure limiting the ability of GE to shift work from Northern plants
to the South, but the company rejected the idea and the walkout
proved a dismal failure. A decade later, the UAW took on the same
issue when it accused GM of a “southern strategy” in building parts
plants in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi and an
assembly plant in Oklahoma City. Ultimately, all the GM plants were
unionized, but many companies, like RCA, found that in moving out
of established factories to new communities they might end up with
unions, but weaker and less militant unions than they were leaving
behind.22
Not all new plants were smaller than the ones they replaced or
partially supplanted, but most were. Sometimes this reflected a
desire to multisource intermediate or final products, building plants
for just some of the production previously done at a larger factory.
Automation also led to downsizing. Many manufacturers embraced
new technologies after World War II that allowed machines to be
self-regulating and perform tasks that previously required human
labor. Motives included greater precision and speed and the
elimination of physically onerous tasks. But a desire to lower labor
costs and reduce the power of workers contributed significantly to
the automation drive.
In the automobile industry, Ford took the lead. Setting up an
“Automation Department,” the company began shifting work out of
the Rouge, which had one of the most militant UAW locals in the
country and where wildcat strikes and slowdowns remained
common. The labor savings proved considerable. In the mid-1950s,
the company transferred production of Ford and Mercury engines
from the Rouge to a newly automated plant in Cleveland. It also built
a plant in Dearborn to make Lincoln engines. At the Rouge, it had
taken 950 workers to make piston connecting rods, but at the
Cleveland and Lincoln plants it required only a combined workforce
of 292. During the 1950s, Ford transferred many other operations
out of the Rouge to more automated plants, including stamping,
machine casting, forging, steel production, and glassmaking. As a
result, employment at the Rouge shrank from 85,000 in 1945 to
54,000 in 1954 to 30,000 in 1960, making it still one of the largest
factories in the United States though only a shadow of what it had
been in its heyday.23
Dodge Main underwent a similar metamorphosis, as the Chrysler
Corporation deintegrated, decentralized, and automated production.
From a peak of 40,000 workers during World War II, the plant
production workforce shrank to 8,300 in 1963. With parts production
moved elsewhere, the sprawling plant housed little more than
assembly operations. When, in 1980, the company shuttered it
completely, only 5,000 men and women remained.24
Automation and mechanization contributed to an impressive rise
in productivity. During the quarter century after World War II,
employment in the automobile industry plateaued at three-quarters
of a million, while output roughly doubled. Between 1947 and 1967,
total employment by manufacturing enterprises rose 27 percent,
while value added (adjusted for inflation) jumped 157 percent. More
efficient management and speedup accounted for some of the boost,
but new plants and equipment figured heavily.
Large factories continued to be built; in 1967 there were 574
factories in the United States with 2,500 or more workers, compared
to 504 twenty years earlier.25 But companies rarely erected the kind
of giant, showcase plants that had sprung up across the
manufacturing belt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. GE’s Appliance Park in Louisville—where the company
manufactured refrigerators, washers, driers, electric stoves,
dishwashers, disposals, and later air conditioners—was something
of an exception. Begun in 1951 on a 700-acre site (eventually
expanded to 920 acres), the heavily landscaped complex included
six factory buildings, a research and development center, a
warehouse, and its own powerhouse. It even had its own zip code.
With 16,000 workers in 1955 and 23,000 at its peak in 1972 (15,000
union represented), the complex was large by any standard. But it
never reached the size of the workforce at the company’s
Schenectady complex during its heyday and was only a fraction of
the one-time size of such giants as the Rouge and Dodge Main.26

The Disappearing Worker

With the shrinkage of the giant factory and broad social changes, the
industrial worker faded in popular culture and political saliency. For a
brief period after World War II, the media still paid attention. In 1946,
Fortune sent Walker Evans to photograph the Rouge for a story on
“The Rebirth of Ford.”27 One early television show, The Life of Riley,
featured a Los Angeles airplane worker, occasionally showing the
lead character, played first by Jackie Gleason and then by William
Bendix, in a factory, riveting wings and complaining about work and
the pretensions of the rich (though most episodes revolved around
domestic doings). The show lasted until 1958. Blue-collar workers
would not again appear regularly on television screens until the
1970s.28
With white-collar workers beginning to outnumber blue-collar
workers in the mid-1950s, and unions increasingly integrated into
established economic and political relationships, intellectuals, too,
largely lost interest in the men and women working inside the biggest
industrial plants, or at least no longer saw them as key to the future.
Left-wing scholars like Mills and Marcuse and many of their followers
in the New Left abandoned the idea that the industrial proletariat
would act as an agent for progressive social change. While in 1972
there were 13.5 million manufacturing production workers in the
United States (more than two million of them working in facilities with
2,500 or more workers), one-time socialist Daniel Bell, a leading
sociologist, announced in a book the next year, The Coming of Post-
Industrial Society. For Bell and many others, “knowledge workers” or
“symbolic analysts” had elbowed aside blue-collar workers to
constitute the key economic group.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a brief flurry of
political and cultural interest in the discontent of industrial workers—
the so-called “blue-collar blues”—but an economic downturn quickly
put an end to that. The next time factory workers captured public
attention, they did so as a result of deindustrialization and the
massive social crisis it brought to the “rust belt.” Between 1978 and
1982, employment in the automobile industry fell by a third, with
more than three dozen factories shuttered in the Detroit area alone.
During those same years, the steel industry shed more than 150,000
jobs. Bethlehem cut ten thousand jobs at Sparrows Point and
phased out operations in Lackawanna, New York, and Johnstown,
Pennsylvania. U.S. Steel eliminated twenty thousand jobs in Gary,
devastating the city, and in 1986 shut down the historic Homestead
mill. The worker in the giant factory, once a heroic figure, mastering
volcanic forces and massive machines, at least in the United States
came to be seen as an atavism, a problem, a sad relic of a passing
age.29

Soviet Giantism Marches On

As American companies downsized and dispersed their factories, in
much of the rest of the world giant industrial complexes continued to
be built and celebrated. After World War II, the Soviet Union revived
the model of the outsized production facility with an accompanying
worker city. Under Soviet influence, the gigant model spread to
Eastern Europe and China. On the other side of the Cold War divide,
the giant factory remained alive and well, too, in parts of Western
Europe and some developing countries. As before the war, very
large scale industrial complexes were seen as a quick means of
economic advance and an efficient investment strategy, especially in
countries with centralized planning mechanisms. They also
continued to serve important ideological and cultural functions, as
carriers of ideas about modernity and the good life and a means of
asserting national pride. While in the United States the industrial
behemoth was becoming associated with the past—a receding era
pictured in black and white—in much of the rest of the world the
giant factory remained associated with the future.
 The Soviet Union, after being devastated by World War II, initially
concentrated on reconstruction. Giant factories like the Stalingrad
tractor plant were rebuilt, in many cases continuing to produce
military equipment while also resuming the manufacture of civilian
goods. Unlike their counterparts in the United States, Soviet
managers did not worry about worker militancy or the risk of workers
using industrial chokepoints to assert their power.
Magnitogorsk, after playing a vital role in the war effort, doubled
in size during the 1950s and 1960s. By the late 1980s, it was the
largest steelmaking complex in the world, with 63,000 employees,
54,000 directly connected to steel production, annually putting out
almost as much steel as Great Britain. New large-scale infrastructure
projects were launched as well, of the sort associated with the First
Five-Year Plan—canals, dams, power stations, and irrigation
systems—“the giant construction projects of communism.”30
In the late 1940s and 1950s, the U.S.S.R. also built a series of
new cities, variants of the industrial gigant model, as centers for
scientific research and nuclear weapons production, like Ozersk in
the Urals, which housed the huge Maiak plutonium plant. The
scientific and atomic cities, in many cases constructed in part by
prison labor, like Magnitogorsk were self-contained settlements, with
schools, cultural institutions, and housing estates linked to large
employers. Many were closed cities, with no access for nonresidents
and sometimes no exit for residents, secret places that literally did
not exist on maps or in directories.31
When the Soviet Union sought to up the production of civilian
goods, belatedly embracing the idea of consumer society, its
leaders, many of whom had begun their careers with technical
training and as factory managers, turned to the giant factory for that
as well. For their generation, the First Five-Year Plan had been a
formative experience. During his 1959 tour of the United States,
Premier Nikita Khrushchev recalled—probably to blank looks from
the Americans around him—“when you helped us build our first
tractor plant, it took us two years to get it going properly,” an episode
still vivid in his mind a quarter century later.32
In the mid-1960s, the automobile industry once again took the
forefront in Soviet industrialization. Vehicle production had
languished in the Soviet Union as the military and other industries
ranked higher for investment. Also, some communist leaders, most
notably Khrushchev, favored mass transit over private car
ownership. In 1965, the country manufactured only 617,000 vehicles,
mostly trucks and buses, paling before the 9.3 million cars that
poured out of U.S. factories. Following Khrushchev’s ouster, Soviet
leaders set out to jump-start the vehicle industry by returning to the
methods of their youth, in 1966 signing an agreement with FIAT for
technical assistance and training for a huge new factory to mass
produce a version of a current FIAT model. It was the most important
foreign commercial contract the country had signed since the deal
with Ford decades earlier (which in monetary terms it surpassed).
The Soviets located the plant in Togliatti, a small city on the Volga
River that had recently been renamed for the deceased Italian
communist leader. Though the site was not selected primarily
because of the link to Italy, both sides made the most of the
connection, portraying the new plant as an exemplar of Italian-Soviet
friendship. The vertically integrated plant, which included its own
smelter, eventually covered more than a thousand acres. When it
began operation in 1970, it had over 42,000 employees, including
nearly 35,000 production workers, with a majority under the age of
thirty. The workforce kept growing, reaching an astounding 112,231
(46 percent female) in 1981.
To house the workers and their families, the Soviets created what
amounted to a new city, Avtograd. In something of a reprise of the
1930s, young workers from all over the Soviet Union came to build
the plant and city (in this case without prison labor). Like other Soviet
factory cities, extensive club and sports facilities, schools, libraries,
and day-care centers were provided, with the factory taking charge
of everything from the local hockey team to a military museum. What
made the city unusual, though, were the extensive accommodations
made for cars, a novelty in a country where individual automobile
ownership always had been rare.33
The Soviet government launched a second giant vehicle factory,
KamAZ, to build heavy duty trucks in Naberezhnye Chelny, along the
Kama River in Tatarstan. One hundred thousand workers were
mobilized to build the plant. The Soviets purchased much of the
equipment to make a projected 150,000 trucks and 250,000 engines
annually from foreign firms. Later, the factory added minicar
production. The adjacent city grew to a population of a half million.34
The latter-day Soviet vehicle-making giants lasted until the end of
the U.S.S.R. itself and beyond. At the start of the twenty-first century,
the Togliatti auto company, renamed AvtoVaz, still employed some
100,000 workers (some outside the city). After the company was
privatized and looted by managers, oligarchs, and criminal gangs to
the point of near collapse, Renault and Nissan eventually obtained
majority control. When they began cutting the workforce and
reorganizing the plant in 2014, it still had 66,000 employees, far
more workers than at any U.S. factory and, with the exception of the
Rouge, more workers than had ever been employed at an American
auto plant. In a deeply troubled economy, excess staffing served a
social-welfare function difficult to disrupt. KamAZ (with Daimler AG
buying a minority stake in 2008) kept going, too, producing its two-
millionth truck in 2012.35 Stalinist giantism lived on in Russia long
after the statues of Stalin, and the country he helped build,
disappeared.

First Cities of Socialism

In the late 1940s, as the Soviet Union helped the communist parties
of Eastern Europe consolidate their control, it fostered on the region
its template of model socialist cities built around large-scale
industrial projects. As had been the case in the U.S.S.R., the motive
was partly economic, to promote accelerated growth through
concentrated investment in heavy industry. Most of Eastern Europe
never had much industry, except parts of East Germany and
Czechoslovakia, and much of what there had been had been
destroyed during the war or, in the case of Germany, taken by the
Soviet Union as reparations. But showplace industrial-urban
complexes served important political and ideological functions as
well. The Eastern European communist parties were very small
when World War II ended, able to achieve power only because of the
presence of the Red Army. Communist leaders faced a huge
challenge in establishing their legitimacy, mobilizing the population
for reconstruction (Germany and Poland, in particular, had suffered
massive destruction), and winning popular favor for their Soviet
protectors. Model industrial cities, forerunners of new socialist
societies, were meant to serve all these functions.36
Several of the cities supported new steel plants: Stalinstadt in
East Germany, Sztálinváros in Hungary, Nowa Huta in Poland, and
Nová Ostrava in Czechoslovakia, part of what one historian dubbed
a “cult of steel” linked to the cult of Stalin (whose adopted name
meant “man of steel”). Communist leaders saw steel as key to
industrial development and arms production, a priority as the Cold
War settled in. Breaking the pattern, Bulgaria built its model city,
Dimitrovgrad, around a large chemical plant (named after Stalin) and
a big power plant. Dimitrovgrad and Stalinstadt also had cement
plants, supplying a favored construction material in the Soviet Bloc.37
Launched with great fanfare, the new factories and cities were
presented as the first living embodiments of what socialism would
be, part and parcel of a valorization of industry and workers seen in
the iconography and rituals of the new people’s democracies. The
100-zloty note issued in Poland in 1948 featured a picture of a miner
on one side and an industrial landscape, with rather old-fashioned
factory buildings and belching smokestacks, on the other (quite a
contrast to the American one-hundred-dollar bill, with Benjamin
Franklin on one side and a pastoral view of Independence Hall on
the other). Governments called for heroic efforts to rapidly build the
industrial settlements. Youth brigades were organized for short-term
labor and full-time workers recruited mostly from rural areas. Most
workers were young, their presence offered as evidence of the
promise of the new societies.
Though each model city had distinct features and a distinct
history, reflecting national circumstances, they shared many
characteristics. Their planners and architects all consulted with
Soviet specialists about overall layouts and even individual buildings.
The most striking thing about the new cities was not their socialism
but their urbanism. Initially, some of the plans envisioned dispersed
housing, eliminating a hard boundary between countryside and city
and providing green space and areas for growing food. But the
planners quickly switched gears, moving toward higher density, with
a concentrated population and no garden plots within city
boundaries.
Several factors explain the shift. First, cost. Building apartment
blocks, often of standardized design and in many cases using
prefabricated materials, was cheaper than constructing many small
dwelling units, an important consideration for countries with vast
housing needs. Second, compact, dense cities made it easier to
provide extensive social and cultural services, important features of
cities meant to prefigure what socialist life would be like. Third, the
urbanism of the industrial cities constituted an explicit rejection of the
postwar vogue in the capitalist West for dispersion: British new
towns, Scandinavian satellite towns, American suburban sprawl.
(Divided Berlin became a showplace for competing planning visions:
density and continuous streetwall in the East; greenswards, lower
density, and dispersed buildings in the West.) Grand boulevards and
large squares were featured as sites for parades and rallies, but
there were smaller-scale urbanist gestures, too, like arcades. The
industrial cities were meant to represent modernity, newness,
gateways to the future. Anything that smacked of the old rural
village, with its individual ramshackle houses and garden plots,
seemed a reactionary repudiation of the very spirit of the enterprise.
Though they owed their existence to the Soviet Union, the
Eastern European showcase cities served as centers of nationalism.
Ritualist expressions of friendship with the Soviet Union abounded,
in monuments, buildings donated by the Soviets, statues of Stalin,
and the naming of some of the cities and factories for Soviet leaders.
But the settlements were projected as vehicles of nation-building,
albeit socialist nation-building, not of an abstract, generic socialist
revolution. Socialist realism, a forced import from the Soviet Union,
ironically furthered this by promoting the somewhat vague idea that
buildings should be socialist in content but national in form.
Accordingly, many of the buildings at the new factory sites and
accompanying cities incorporated motifs and styles associated with
national pasts. Building socialism, figuratively and literally, was
portrayed as a national drama.
 Most of the industrial showcases were never finished, at least as
originally planned. Stalin’s death in 1953 loosened the Soviet reins in
its satellite bloc and ended the need for ritualistic deference to the
Soviet dictator. Building large industrial facilities and new cities at
breakneck speed proved very expensive. What once seemed like
economies of scale in concentrating investment on large-scale
projects, which were meant to stimulate broader economic
development, no longer looked so favorable, as the distorting effects
of putting so much financial and political capital into just a few sites
became evident. A few years after they were begun, plans for the
industrial centers were cut back or abandoned, and what growth did
occur generally was improvised and haphazard. Most of the “first
cities of socialism” quickly faded into obscurity, renamed and largely
forgotten, except as kitschy remnants of the Stalin years.38
But not Nowa Huta (“New Mill”), site of the largest and most
important of the new factories, arguably the last Stalinist utopia. The
idea for a steelworks in central Poland predated World War II and the
communist regime. In 1947, the Polish government ordered plans for
a large mill from Freyn Engineering, the same U.S. firm that had
done work in the Soviet Union, including at Magnitogorsk. But the
intensification of the Cold War led to the cancellation of the contract.
A 1948 economic agreement with the U.S.S.R. and the creation, the
following year, of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance,
linking the Soviet Union and the Eastern European states, provided
the framework for a new start. This time the Poles worked with the
Soviets, who pressed for a very large facility that would serve the
whole communist bloc, much larger than the steel plants around
which other model cities in the region arose. The U.S.S.R. lent
Poland $450 million to build the plant (a substitute for funds that
might have been lent by the United States if the Soviet Union had
allowed the Eastern European nations to participate in the Marshall
Plan), picked a site six miles east of Kraków, designed the
equipment and built much of it, trained 1,300 Polish engineers in
Soviet steel plants, and sent skilled workers and specialists to help
get the factory going, taking on many of the roles foreign companies
had played in the Soviet Union two decades earlier.
 In the Stalinist spirit, the government made a crash effort to
rapidly build the Nowa Huta plant (later named the Vladimir Lenin
Steelworks), the lead project in the Polish Six-Year Plan (1950–55).
The sprawling enterprise, on a 2,500-acre site, ultimately
encompassing five hundred buildings (including its own power and
heating plants), grew in stages over several decades. It began
operations with its first blast furnace in 1954. More blast furnaces,
coke ovens, a sintering plant, and open-hearth and electrical steel
converters followed. By the time the cold-rolling mill went on line in
1958, the plant had 17,929 employees, producing 1.6 million tons of
steel a year (half of what twenty-three Polish steel mills had
produced before the war), much of it exported to the Soviet Union.
And the complex kept growing, with more coke ovens and open-
hearth furnaces, a pipe-welding operation, a galvanizing mill, and a
basic oxygen steel mill (by this time with some of the equipment
imported from the West). In 1967, a fifth blast furnace opened, one
of the largest in the world and bigger than anything in the Soviet
Union, and the plant’s workforce reached 29,110. One Polish
account argues that the continued expansion of the plant was “clear
evidence of the authorities’ love of grandeur—motivated more by
politics than by economy,” with the giant blast furnace, which
required anthracite coal, a poor investment. New slabbing and rolling
mills followed. Annual output peaked in 1978 at 6.5 million tons of
steel and employment a year later at 38,674 (a larger workforce than
ever seen at an American steel plant, though smaller than at
Magnitogorsk).39
 Figure 6.3 Uneven and combined development in Poland, as shown in Henryk
Makarewicz’s 1965 photograph of the Lenin Steelworks.

Though like the mill, the city of Nowa Huta stood as a national
priority, its construction proved a long, difficult haul. While heavy
equipment was used in building the steelworks, limited funds meant
that the residential and commercial area was largely built by hand,
with shovels, wheelbarrows, and occasional cranes. Material
shortages and mismanagement slowed construction, while the poor
quality of building supplies led to later problems. Authorities used
agitation campaigns, labor competitions (which pitted workers
against one another), and extra voluntary labor to push the pace of
construction at what was dubbed the “great building site of
socialism.” Women were hired in large numbers, at both the mill and
in the construction effort, to promote sexual equality and help meet
the demand for labor. Many held blue-collar jobs traditionally
reserved for men, like the all-female casting crews in the mill and the
bricklayers and plasterers in the city. With housing construction
lagging behind the growth of the steel mill and the flood of arriving
workers, for years most people in Nowa Huta had to live in crude,
cold, single-sex barracks, sometimes with over a dozen men or
women sharing a single room, lacking basic sanitary provisions.
Magnitogorsk redux.40
But by the mid-1950s, the housing shortage and generally
miserable living conditions began to ease. Between 1949 and 1958,
workers built 14,885 apartments in Nowa Huta, with the original plan
essentially completed two years later, as the population reached
100,000. Many residents came to view the city quite favorably.41
The pre-1960 part of Nowa Huta forms half an octagon, with
major boulevards radiating out from a central square on one edge (in
2004 renamed after Ronald Reagan). The steel mill gates are a half
mile away, far enough so that the plant is barely visible from the
center of the city, though, no doubt, in its heyday smoke from the
mill, a notorious polluter, could have been seen. A tramline connects
the mill and the original housing and commercial district.
A distinct urbanism characterizes the city center, reinforced by
the appropriation of elements of Renaissance design, like galleries
and squares, a marked contrast to contemporary residential
developments in the United States of roughly the same size, like
Levittown, New York, and Lakeland, California, with their small,
single-family, detached houses and automobile-based design.
Apartment buildings line the main avenues and fill the areas between
them, organized into clusters designed for five to six thousand
residents. From along the avenues, the long facades of the housing
blocks, ranging from two to seven stories high, feel ponderous, but
behind them are enclosures, quiet and humanly scaled, with little
traffic. Lawns, playgrounds, schools, day-care centers, garages, and
clotheslines fill the space. Each neighborhood unit was meant to be
largely self-sufficient, with stores on the ground floors, health
centers, libraries, and other services. Cinemas, a theater, a
department store, restaurants, and public institutions generally were
within walking distance from the residences, while a tramline
provided a connection to Kraków proper (which in 1951
administratively absorbed Nowa Huta). The social organization in
effect constituted a more fully realized, if less radical, embrace of
communal life along the lines of the early worker housing in Gorky.
 Figure 6.4 An aerial view of Nowa Huta.

Plans for Nowa Huta kept being changed, in some ways to the
benefit of the city. The first housing units were quite basic, but,
keeping with the idea of Nowa Huta prefiguring a new socialist
society, many of the estates that followed were built to standards far
above the norm for ordinary Poles, with more space, private
bathrooms, built-in radios, shared telephones in every entryway,
cooling cupboards, and balconies. The blocks completed in the first
half of the 1950s had a generic, socialist realist stodginess, but their
lower height and smaller scale compared to similar housing
elsewhere, like along the Stalinallee (now Karl-Marx-Allee) in East
Berlin, avoided the monumentality sometimes wrongly attributed to
the city. Contributing to the human scale was the abandonment of
plans for an unattractive, towering city hall and a monumental
theater, meant to bookend the central axis. Efforts to incorporate
traditional Polish elements ranged from the charming, like the
octagonal cupolas on the small Ludowy Theater (which housed one
of the most innovative theater companies in the country) to the
absurd, like one of the two factory administration buildings, built to
resemble a Renaissance palace with a “Polish parapet.”
With Stalin’s death, greater variety crept into Nowa Huta housing,
including the modernist “Swedish house” apartment block, derivative
of Le Corbusier. Cost-cutting, however, led to the elimination of such
features as elevators and parquet floors. As the city population grew
to exceed original expectations, new housing estates were built on
the outskirts of town. Many of these were modernist in appearance
but of poor-quality construction, with low- and high-rise buildings
separated by green space, with few nearby stores or amenities, the
sort of “tower in the park” developments that became the vogue for
urban housing in both the communist and capitalist blocs.42
Meant to be a showcase for socialist Poland, Nowa Huta
garnered national and even international attention. Over the years,
visitors included Khrushchev, Charles de Gaulle, Haile Selassie,
Kwame Nkrumah, and Fidel Castro. The steelworks and town figured
in numerous novels, journalistic accounts, films, and even musical
compositions. The mill appeared on postage stamps in 1951 and
1964. Generally, propaganda and artistic renderings presented
Nowa Huta extremely positively, as the start of a socialist future, “the
pride of the nation,” “the forge of our prosperity.” But having been
elevated by communist authorities to a prominent place in the
national narrative, it also became a pole for critiques of the socialist
project. Adam Ważyk’s sensational 1955 “Poem for Adults,” openly
critically of Polish socialism (by a writer until then known as a
communist hardliner), painted an ugly portrait of Nowa Huta (“a new
Eldorado”) and its residents (“A great migration, carrying confused
ambitions, . . . A stack of curses, feather pillows, a gallon of vodka, a
lust for girls”). Andrzej Wajda’s acclaimed film Man of Marble,
released in 1977, used Nowa Huta for a wrenching, clear-eyed look
back at the history and mythology of Polish communism, prefiguring
the revolution that would soon come to the steelmaking city, the
nation, and the whole communist bloc.43

Socialist Citizens
Like their Soviet predecessors, the showcase industrial cities of
Eastern Europe were meant to not only produce steel, concrete, and
other vital supplies, they also were to produce new men and women,
templates for the socialist citizens of the future. One youth brigade in
Bulgaria chose as its motto “We build Dimitrovgrad, and the town
builds us.” But the lived reality proved far more complex.
Some workers did move to Nowa Huta and the other showcase
cities out of genuine enthusiasm for the socialist project and the new
people’s democracies. And some found the experience of helping
build and launch new factories and cities intoxicating, something
they would look back on fondly. But many workers joined the
construction efforts and took jobs at the new plants not out of any
particular ideological identification but from necessity.
As in the Soviet Union, the recruitment of construction and
industrial workforces was intimately connected to miserable
conditions in the countryside, the result of increased taxes, dictated
crop sales, collectivization, long-standing poverty, and the impact of
years of war. Many rural Hungarians who moved to Sztálinváros
were hostile to the communist government because of policies they
saw as attacks on their home villages and way of life. The lack of
any church in Sztálinváros added to their alienation. For at least
some, Sztálinváros came to be seen not as a beacon to a brighter
future but as a symbol of everything that was wrong with the socialist
state. Experienced industrial workers who came to the pioneer
Hungarian city had a more positive view, appreciating the better
housing and higher wages available than elsewhere, but
nonetheless they often resented the autocratic management in the
plant, the intensity of the labor, and the ongoing shortages of food
and other goods.44
Poland, with the tacit approval of the Soviet Union, did not
attempt to collectivize agriculture, so there was no direct link
between forced displacement and worker recruitment for Nowa Huta.
Nonetheless, the bulk of the construction force and city population
came from the countryside, mostly people under the age of thirty.
Even in the steel mill, where many jobs required industrial skills, in
1954, 47 percent of the workers came from peasant backgrounds.
Many were landless peasants from the immediate area. “Looking
into the future,” historian Katherine Lebow wrote, “they saw a life of
relentless drudgery and cultural marginalization and found the
prospect intolerable.” More pushed out of their old life than drawn to
a vision of a new one, they hoped that Nowa Huta would provide an
opportunity to gain skills and money, escape the boredom of rural
life, and achieve a brighter individual future. As later remembered by
trade unionists, the attraction was not any pride in the idea of
working in the country’s leading industrial establishment but the
desire to enjoy the superior wages, housing, and privileges offered in
Nowa Huta once it got past its start-up difficulties.45
For many newcomers, Nowa Huta, especially in the early years,
proved a disappointment, with its challenging living and working
conditions, including high rates of industrial accidents. Many simply
left, creating a serious problem of labor turnover (also the case in
other showcase cities). Rather than Nowa Huta forging socialist men
and women out of peasant stock, the opposite seemed to be
happening, as what the communists saw as ills of rural
backwardness infected the city. Same-sex barracks, a very large
cohort of young men but far fewer women, and the paucity of
entertainment, recreation, or religious opportunities led to boredom
and rowdiness. Alcoholism became epidemic, despite drastic efforts
by authorities to control it. With it came a great deal of brawling and
sexual assault, lumped by communist officials into the category of
“hooliganism.” With civil and familial authority thin and religious
authority absent, sexual freedom (and venereal disease) flourished,
to the dismay of government officials. And when former villagers did
adopt a kind of modernity, it was not necessarily the kind authorities
wanted. Some young men became bikiniarstwo (“Bikini boys,”
named after the bomb site, not the bathing suit), who adopted dress
and hairstyles modeled after American youth culture.
Similar problems arose elsewhere. In Dimitrovgrad, former
peasants took over public parks and courtyards to plant vegetables
and raised goats, chickens, and rabbits in the cellars of apartment
blocks, until communist authorities finally managed, during the
1960s, to stop the urban farming. In Sztálinváros, young factory
workers from urban backgrounds brawled with construction workers
from the countryside.46
 Communist authorities wrung their hands over the behavior and
attitudes of the working class they were creating and intensified
efforts to inculcate socialist urbanity. In private and sometimes even
in public, they acknowledged that the leap to socialist personhood
was not taking place as planned. But as long as misbehavior
remained outside the political realm, they took no drastic action.
Serious political trouble first occurred in Sztálinváros, not as a
reaction to conditions specific to the steel mill but as part of the 1956
Hungarian Revolution. Sztálinváros became a center of revolutionary
action, with a workers’ council challenging government authority.
After troops fired on a demonstration, killing eight, workers fought
back, forcing the soldiers to retreat and seizing the local radio
station. Later, when the Soviet army arrived to pacify the city,
workers joined defecting Hungarian soldiers and officers to defend
what its citizens had renamed Dunapetele, the name of the village
that had preceded the steelworks. The factory and city that in their
very appellation were to be testaments to Soviet-Hungarian
friendship turned into the opposite. Ironically, workers finally seemed
to embrace an identity linked to the showcase project when they
declared that they would defend from Soviet troops what they
themselves had built, a form of nationalist expression the planners of
Sztálinváros had not anticipated. After 1956, an effort by the new
communist leadership, installed by the Soviets, to woo worker
support through improved wages and social benefits ultimately
shifted opinion in what was once again called Sztálinváros, as a local
socialist patriotism developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a
sense of shared class experience and pride.47
Trouble came later in Nowa Huta, following a different course.
Steelworkers helped lead a challenge to the ruling powers, at first
not over work issues but in assertion of their Catholicism. Like
Magnitogorsk and Sztálinváros, Nowa Huta was designed without
any church, forcing residents to worship in nearby villages. Requests
from the Kraków diocese to build a church in the city were repeatedly
turned down until the fall of 1956, when, in response to widespread
protests, the Polish Communist Party brought back as its first
secretary the once-imprisoned Władysław Gomułka. Attempting to
improve relations with the Church, Gomułka gave the OK. A year
later a site was chosen and a cross erected there. Then authorities
began stalling, and in 1960 reassigned the site to a school, ordering
the cross removed. But the crew sent to take it down was blocked,
first by a group of neighborhood women and then by a crowd swelled
by workers finishing their shift at the mill. The defenders of the cross
sang both “The Internationale” and hymns, a sign of their multiple
allegiances. The day ended with a full-scale battle between four
thousand residents and militia troops, who used water cannons, tear
gas, and bullets, while the crowd threw stones, vandalized stores,
and torched a building. Nearly five hundred people were arrested,
some given substantial prison terms. The authorities, belatedly
realizing the explosive symbolism, let the cross remain.
Within a few years, Catholic leaders resumed their campaign for
a church, with the backing of the new archbishop, Karol Wojtyła, the
future Pope John Paul II. In 1965 the government gave approval for
a church near a new housing development. It took an extended
campaign to raise money for the building and erect it (with no
cooperation from the government), culminating in the consecration of
what was called the Lord’s Ark by the then-cardinal Wojtyła in May
1977, with seventy thousand people in attendance.48
The defense of the cross and building the church helped forge a
culture of resistance and networks of mobilization that soon would be
used for a more profound challenge to the establishment. But the
politics of Nowa Huta were by no means simple. In 1968, when
student protests broke out across Poland, authorities had to move
vigorously to keep secondary and technical school students in Nowa
Huta from joining demonstrations in Kraków. At the same time,
workers from the steel mill were bussed into the nearby city, where
they beat up students from Jagiellonian University, perhaps reflecting
class and cultural antagonisms as much as political differences (as
in the hard-hat demonstrations in the United States two years later,
when construction workers beat up student antiwar protesters). As
late as 1980, about a quarter of the workers in the mill belonged to
the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party.
By then, intellectual and worker opponents of the Polish regime
had become increasingly vocal and well organized. In Nowa Huta, in
April 1979, a group drawing on Catholic social teaching, the
Christian Community of Working People, formed just months before
Pope John Paul II spoke at a monastery on the outskirts of the city,
after being denied government permission to visit the Lord’s Ark.
“The cross cannot be separated from man’s work,” he declared.
“Christ cannot be separated from man’s work. This has been
confirmed at Nowa Huta.”49
Both national and local developments undermined steelworker
support for the regime. Price hikes in 1970 and 1976 led to
widespread worker protests across the country, while in Nowa Huta
the construction of a large steel mill in Katowice and a growing
environmental movement criticizing pollution by the Lenin Steelworks
raised fears about the future.50 When in July 1980 yet another price
hike led to new wave of strikes, workers in Nowa Huta joined in,
winning concessions from management. The following month, they
began forming units of the independent Solidarity trade union,
founded at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. The Nowa Huta
steelworkers had long had a union, but it had little authority; workers
wanting something often went straight to the party, the real power in
the shop. When an alternative appeared, workers flocked to it.
By the fall of 1980, with 90 percent of the workforce signed up,
the steel mill unit became the largest workplace Solidarity branch in
the country, second in importance only to Gdańsk. In a measure of
their new confidence to assert their own values, workers began
bringing crosses, consecrated at the Lord’s Ark church, into the mill
(along with Solidarity banners), reversing the flow of culture creation
from civic society to the workplace rather than the other way around
as communist planners had envisioned. Nowa Huta Solidarity
activists also joined in creating the “Network,” linking together the
largest industrial workplaces in Poland, acknowledging their
vanguard role.51
The declaration of martial law on December 13, 1981, began a
prolonged “state of war” in Nowa Huta (and elsewhere) between
Solidarity, now driven underground, and the government. Workers
occupied the Lenin Steelworks for three days before militia units with
tanks regained control. By the next year, workers had begun building
a clandestine Solidarity structure in the mill. The size and resources
of the showcase enterprise facilitated organizing. Solidarity activists
used mill supplies and printing presses to produce underground
newspapers and propaganda in large quantities, for circulation both
within and without the complex. Mill technicians helped set up and
maintain a clandestine radio network that served the southern part of
the country. Supplies lifted from the factory were distributed to
Solidarity activists elsewhere. Overseas backers sent aid to the
Nowa Huta unionists, who eventually obtained a computer before the
mill itself had one.
With so many workers toiling and living together, norms and
networks of resistance spread inside and outside the plant, as Nowa
Huta became one of the most militant centers of opposition to the
government. In 1982, regular protest marches began, first led by
workers but over time increasingly consisting of youths. Often the
protesters assembled in churches before setting out for the center of
the city, inevitably to be confronted by police and militia. In the
regular running battles, at least three protesters were killed.
Solidarity was less successful in its efforts to hold protest strikes in
the mill itself.
In 1988, Nowa Huta helped push the country to a radical
resolution of what had become a permanent economic and political
crisis. Once again, price hikes led to protest. On April 26, workers at
the Lenin Steelworks, still the largest industrial enterprise in the
country, launched a sit-down strike demanding an increase in wages
and the legalization of Solidarity. Taking control of the complex,
workers’ spouses and children, sympathetic priests, and outside
Solidarity leaders came into the plant to support the protest. On May
4, soldiers took back control of the mill and arrested the strike
leaders. But by then, the strike had sparked strikes elsewhere, most
importantly at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. In an effort to end the
protests, the government reached out to Lech Walesa, who had
helped launch Solidarity, ultimately leading to the “Round Table”
negotiations with the group, the legalization of independent unions,
and, in 1989, open elections for the national senate. The massive
victory by Solidarity candidates brought an end to communist rule in
Poland and hastened the end of communist control in all of Eastern
Europe.52
 The rise and ultimate victory of Solidarity demonstrated—too late
—to Polish authorities the dangers of factory giantism and industrial
urbanism. Nowa Huta, intended, among other things, to create a
politicized working class largely out of children of the peasantry,
succeeded, but in a way its planners had not anticipated. By the
account of Solidarity unionists, Nowa Huta workers came to have a
shared pride in working in the plant not because of its role in creating
a socialist Poland but because of its role in fighting it.53 As
Goodyear, GM, Ford, GE, and other American corporations had
learned decades earlier, large assemblages of workers who work
together, live together, pray together, drink together, and die together
can turn the largest, most important factories from models of
efficiency into weapons of labor power.
The aftermath of victory proved ironic for Polish workers. Giant
fortresses of industry, built to lead the transition to socialism, stood
little chance of surviving intact the transition back to capitalism. Most
of the outsized Polish industrial complexes suffered from
underinvestment, low productivity, and overstaffing, lacking
advanced machinery found in the West. As government subsidies
were lessened, captive markets lost, and privatization begun, they
could not compete. What had been the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk
underwent repeated reorganizations, layoffs, and privatization, until
its workforce, 17,000 in 1980 when it gave birth to Solidarity, shrank
to fewer than 2,000 in 2014.54
In Nowa Huta, one Solidarity unionist, soon after the first
noncommunist government took power, estimated that a mill in the
West with the same output as the Lenin Steelworks would have
7,000 workers, not 30,000, a measure of more modern equipment,
more intense work, and no obligation to keep aging, ill, or alcoholic
workers. With production in Nowa Huta plummeting, in 1991 the
government, after negotiating with various unions (Solidarity, at that
point, represented only about a third of the workforce), began a
program of deintegration, spinning off various support functions, like
the internal railroad network and slag recycling, and some finishing
operations to twenty new enterprises, which together employed
about 60 percent of the old workforce. The original company focused
only on basic steel operations. To reduce pollution, large parts of the
plant were simply shut down, including two blast furnaces, the open-
hearth furnace, the sintering plant, and some coke ovens. The broad
social mandate for the mill was reduced, too; over the years it had
taken on many functions for the workforce and the city, including
running a farm, canteen, medical center, vacation facilities, and a
football club. These, too, were spun off or downsized.
In 2001 the Nowa Huta steelworks (by then renamed for Polish
engineer Tadeusz Sendzimir) were merged with the other major steel
mills in the country. Following privatization and a later merger, it
became part of the largest steel company in the world, ArcelorMittal.
The new owner invested some money in modernization, with an
advanced hot rolling mill opening in 2007. But in 2015 only 3,300
employees remained on the payroll, with another 12,000 workers at
separate companies linked to the mill. Wages, once considerably
above the norm, now were comparable to those at other area
businesses. The great heroic days of socialist construction and the
fight for faith and freedom were over. The mill had become ordinary,
like many others across Europe and the United States, employing a
modest-sized workforce, providing only a small percentage of the
output of its parent company, and facing the challenge of a
worldwide glut of steelmaking capacity—the result of many
countries, especially China, still seeing steelmaking as a prerequisite
to national greatness and modernity.55

Global Giantism
During the era when American companies moved to smaller,
dispersed factories and the Soviet Union stuck to the giant factory
model, spreading it to Eastern Europe, very large factories continued
to be built and acclaimed in other parts of the world, too. Some giant
factories operated in Western Europe, most notably in Germany.
There also were some very large factories in the developing world.
Today, the largest automobile factory in the world is in Wolfsburg,
Germany, where 72,000 workers at a 1,600-acre industrial complex
turn out 830,000 Volkswagens a year. With nearly 600,000
employees worldwide, including 270,000 in Germany, the Wolfsburg
workforce represents only 12 percent of the company total.56 Still, no
other company in Europe or North America concentrates so many
workers at one site.
Germany had an industrial history somewhat different than the
United States or Britain. In the nineteenth century, the Krupp
steelworks in Essen was one of the largest factories in the world. But
in the first half of the twentieth century, small and midsize firms
dominated German industry, often working in collaboration with one
another, as the country’s industrial strength lay in the production of
diversified, high-quality goods rather than standardized, low-cost
products. There were some very large plants making producer goods
—most notably steel and chemicals—but consumer-products plants
remained smaller. Though Fordism attracted a great deal of
attention, in practice German companies were slow to adopt its
production techniques and the very large scale factories that came
with them due to capital shortages, trade barriers that limited the
scale of the market, and a highly skilled labor force that would be
underutilized using American methods.57
German auto companies began experimenting with the assembly
line in the early 1920s, but only slowly moved toward integrated,
mass production. When the National Socialists took power, Adolf
Hitler, a great admirer of Ford, pressed the companies to join
together to mass produce a German equivalent of the Model T, a
“people’s car” or Volkswagen. When they declined, the government
itself took charge. In 1938, Hitler laid the cornerstone for a
Volkswagen factory at what was originally called Stadt des KdF-
Wagens bei Fallersleben or the City of the Strength Through Joy Car
at Fallersleban (the nearest village, later to be renamed Wolfsburg).
Like the Soviets, the Nazis turned to the United Sates for
specialized, single-purpose machinery. But the war intervened
before the people’s car could go into mass production; instead, the
factory engaged in war production using forced labor, mostly
conscripted in Eastern Europe.
German manufacturers gained experience with mass production
making armaments during the war. By the early 1950s, conditions in
West Germany facilitated its application to civilian production, as
domestic spending power and trade increased. The Wolfsburg
factory, which survived the war with little damage, converted back to
its original purpose. In a throwback to the early days of Ford, for
years it produced only one model, the Volkswagen Beetle, later
adding a closely related van. The company resisted building plants
overseas to keep up volume and make extensive automation
profitable. The German model of codetermination, which gave an
extensive role to unions in corporate management, and high wages
and generous social benefits (including large profit-sharing
payments) helped ensure peaceful labor relations. Unlike
contemporary American manufacturers, Volkswagen did not fear that
workers might take advantage of concentration to disrupt production
and force their will on the company.58
Though the Mittelstand of small and medium-sized enterprises
continued to dominate the West German and later unified German
economy, there were, besides Volkswagen, some manufacturers
with very large plants. The chemical giant BASF, once part of IG
Farben but reformed as a separate entity after World War II,
concentrated production at its long-established complex along the
Rhine in Ludwigsafen. In 1963, its managing board acknowledged
“that a company whose production volume is concentrated in one
geographical spot is especially vulnerable in many respects (e.g. to
strikes, earthquakes, and other forces beyond one’s control).”
Nonetheless, it decided to continue investing and expanding its
historic main plant, while later adding others to increase capacity. In
2016, some 39,000 employees worked at the four-square-mile site,
which had some 2,000 buildings.59
But Volkswagen remained the showcase of German industry and
Wolfsburg a temple to factory giantism. Like Henry Ford, aware that
a factory could be a merchandising tool, Volkswagen’s management
built an automobile theme park, Autostadt, next to the main plant,
which in 2014 had 2.2 million visitors. Many purchasers arranged to
pick up their newly manufactured vehicles there. After German
unification, the company built an extraordinary new plant in Dresden
to make its highest-priced models. Glass walls make the production
process completely visible, with finished cars displayed in a twelve-
story glass tower, a Crystal Palace for the twenty-first century.60
 If Volkswagen exemplified postwar Western European industrial
giantism, dependent on stable labor relations through firm-level and
national social democratic policies, the Misr Spinning and Weaving
Company in Mahalla el-Kubra, Egypt, in the heart of the Nile delta,
demonstrated again the explosive potential when giant factories
brought together masses of workers and treated them poorly. Year
after year, regime after regime, the Mahalla workers have been at
the forefront of the Egyptian labor movement, defending their
immediate economic interests and increasingly intervening in
national political events as well.
The Misr company was founded in 1927 by Bank Misr, an
explicitly nationalist enterprise created to fund Egyptian-owned
businesses during an era when Britain still occupied the country and
controlled much of its economy. Despite the long history of the
Egyptian cotton industry, Misr was the first modern mechanized
textile plant to be owned by Muslim Egyptians. At the end of World
War II, the integrated mill, which did spinning, weaving, and dyeing,
employed twenty-five thousand workers, making it the largest
industrial establishment in the Middle East.
Egyptian authorities and company officials projected mechanized
textile mills as “citadels of modernity, national progress, and
economic development.” But the workforce, largely recruited from
the peasantry, did not accept the elite notion of the mill as a shared
nationalist project, repeatedly protesting harsh work conditions and
low pay. In 1938, the first large strike at the mill demanded higher
piece rates and a switch from twelve-hour to eight-hour shifts. A brief
strike in 1946 was followed the next year by a massive walkout
protesting layoffs and autocratic management. Tanks entered the
plant to crush the strike, and three workers were killed in the
confrontation. When in 1952 army officers led by Gamal Abdel
Nasser seized power, overthrowing the Egyptian monarchy, workers
at the mill expected improved conditions, but when they struck, the
army once again smashed their walkout.
In a measure of the symbolic and practical importance of Misr,
when in 1960 Nasser took a left turn to embrace “Arab Socialism,”
the mill was the first industrial enterprise to be nationalized. Under
government ownership, the tradition of worker militancy continued,
including participation in a three-day strike in 1975 that led to
substantial wage increases for industrial workers employed by the
state. In 1986, workers struck again, winning a wage hike, and two
years later struck yet again, this time explicitly criticizing President
Hosni Mubarak. A strike at the mill in late 2006, when the
government reneged on promised bonus payments, set off a wave of
worker protests at other textile mills and was the prelude to an even
bigger strike the following year that won a big boost in the bonuses.
An April 2008 protest by Mahalla workers, broken up by
thousands of police, leaving at least three dead, helped spark open
opposition to Mubarak, culminating in his tumbling in 2011 during the
Arab Spring. In February 2014 workers at the mill struck, demanding
the removal of Mubarak-era officials still in company management.
Even after yet another quasimilitary regime took power, led by Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi, the textile workers kept up their militancy, striking in
another conflict over bonuses, to protest a government decision to
end cotton subsidies, and to call for the ouster of corrupt company
officials. As had happened elsewhere, the launching of a giant
factory in the name of nationalism and modernity created a
workforce with its own views of what that meant, in a strategic
position to make their ideas about the past, present, and future
matter.61
 CHAPTER 7

“FOXCONN CITY”
Giant Factories in China and Vietnam

IN MID-2010, A RASH OF WORKER SUICIDES BROUGHT global attention to a

company that three years earlier the Wall Street Journal had dubbed
“the biggest exporter you’ve never heard of,” Hon Hai Precision
Industry Co., operating under the name Foxconn. That year,
eighteen workers between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five
attempted suicide at Foxconn factories in China, fourteen
successfully, all but one by jumping off a company building. Though
startling by themselves, what made the suicides a big story around
the world was that they occurred at factories that assembled iPads
and iPhones, among the hottest consumer goods on the market,
symbols of modernity and good living. The juxtaposition of workers
feeling so oppressed and alienated by their jobs that they took their
lives with the elegantly designed Apple products—seamless,
luxurious, futuristic—for a moment raised uncomfortable questions
about the sausage factory in which the meat of modernity was being
produced, and the human cost of stylish and convenient gadgets.1
The corporate reaction to the suicides proved almost as
disturbing as the deaths. The companies that used Foxconn to
produce their products, including Apple, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard,
took a low-key approach, expressing concern and saying that they
were investigating. Apple CEO Steve Jobs called the suicides “very
troubling,” adding, “We’re all over this.” In 2012, after more bad
publicity about Foxconn, Apple contracted with the nonprofit Fair
Labor Association to inspect Foxconn plants and their compliance
with the monitoring group’s workplace code of conduct. But none of
Foxconn’s major clients, including Apple, stopped using its services.
Foxconn founder and chairman Terry Gou at first dismissed the
suicides as insignificant, given the size of his workforce. But as the
deaths and bad publicity mounted and Foxconn’s share price fell, the
company began to act. In June 2010, Foxconn raised basic wages at
its Shenzhen plants, where most of the suicides occurred, from the
legally mandated minimum of 900 renminbi a month ($132) to 1,200
renminbi ($176) and in October raised wages again. It also set up a
twenty-four-hour counseling center for its workers and put on an
elaborate celebration at its largest plant, complete with a parade,
floats, cheerleaders, Spider-Men, acrobats, fireworks, and chants of
“treasure your life” and “care for each other to build a wonderful
future.”2
But there was a darker side to the Foxconn reaction, too. The
company tried to limit its liability for future deaths by requiring
employees to sign disclaimers saying “Should any injury or death
arise for which Foxconn cannot be held accountable (including
suicides and self-mutilation), I hereby agree to hand over the case to
the company’s legal and regulatory procedures. I myself and my
family members will not seek extra compensation above that
required by the law so that the company’s reputation would not be
ruined and its operation remains stable.” Worker outrage soon led it
to abandon the effort. The company also began moving production
from Shenzhen to new factories in the interior of China, largely to
lower wages but also believing that if its migrant workers—the vast
majority of its employees—were closer to home they would be less
likely to kill themselves. Finally, the company began putting wire
mesh around the balconies and outdoor staircases at its dormitories
and latches on upper-story windows to keep workers from jumping,
while surrounding all its factory and dormitory buildings with netting
twenty feet above the ground, so that if a worker did manage to leap
they would not die. It used more than three million square meters of
yellow netting in the process, almost enough to cover all of New
York’s Central Park if a latter-day Christo got really ambitious.
Foxconn’s Swiftian response—not to change a production regime
that was leading young men and women to jump off buildings, but
instead to try to catch them before they hit the ground—seemed a
return to the warped utilitarianism of Charles Dickens’s Thomas
Gradgrind, applied to factories so large that they made Manchester’s
textile mills look like mom-and-pop shops.3
Although some of the stories about the Foxconn suicides noted
the very large size of the factories involved, none mentioned that the
company’s Longhua Science and Technology Park in Shenzhen,
better known as “Foxconn City,” was, as far as can be determined,
the largest factory, in number of employees, in history. Foxconn’s
extreme secretiveness makes it impossible to be sure about even
such basic information as the numbers of workers at its plants, but
journalistic and scholarly accounts have reported that at the time
Longhua had more than 300,000 employees, and by some accounts
more than 400,000, dwarfing even such monuments to giantism as
River Rouge and Magnitogorsk, which combined had far fewer
workers than the Foxconn plant. A visiting Apple executive, finding
his car stuck in a mass of Longhua employees during a shift change,
declared, “The scale is unimaginable.”4
Though no other factory equaled Longhua in its number of
workers, there are plenty of other supersized factories in East Asia.
Foxconn itself owns many of them. In 2016, the company employed
1.4 million employees in thirty countries, over a million of whom
worked in factories in China that ranged in size from eighty thousand
to several hundred thousand workers. A second Foxconn factory in
Shenzhen, run in close coordination with Longhua, employed
130,000 workers in 2010. One hundred and sixty-five thousand
workers produced iPads at a Chengdu factory, a ten-square-
kilometer complex several times larger than the Longhua campus.
And at peak moments during 2016 an astounding 350,000 workers
made iPhones at a Foxconn complex in Zhengzhou, one of the most
populous factories in history.5
 Other electronics firms also have very large factories in China. In
2011, after the trouble at Foxconn, Apple began shifting some iPad
and iPhone production to Pegatron, like Foxconn a Taiwanese-
owned firm. In late 2013, Pegatron had more than 100,000 workers
at its Shanghai plant, including 80,000 living in overcrowded
dormitories.6 Electronics plants with 10,000, 20,000, or even 40,000
workers are not unusual in China. Though small by Foxconn
standards, they have more employees than almost any factory in the
United States. The 2006 film Manufactured Landscapes, about
Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, begins with a tracking
shot moving slowly down the aisle of a factory in Xiamen City, Fujian
Province, which housed some 20,000 workers making electric
coffeepots, irons, and other small appliances. The shot goes on for
nearly eight full minutes, giving a sense of the immensity of a factory
with even just 20,000 workers.7
A few other industries in Asia besides electronics have very large
factories. The Huafang Group, a leading Chinese textile producer,
had one factory complex with more than a hundred buildings and
30,000 employees. A few toy factories also are very large.8 And
there are some truly gigantic factories making sneakers and casual
shoes.
The Foxconn of footwear is Yue Yuen Industrial (Holdings)
Limited, a subsidiary of the Taiwanese firm Pou Chen Corporation,
founded in 1969. A little more than an hour’s drive north of Foxconn
City sits a Yue Yuen factory in Dongguan that in the mid-2000s had
110,000 workers, making it the largest shoe factory in history.
Workers produced nearly a million pairs of shoes a month for
international brands like Nike (which had offices inside the plant) as
well as for Yue Yuen’s own YYSports brand, sold through a chain of
company-owned retail stores in China. Like Foxconn City and many
other Chinese factories, the plant included dormitories and dining
rooms for its workers, as well as a reading room and disco built by
Nike. Yue Yuen had five other factories in China, including three
more in Guangdong Province. Pou Chen, which in 2015 had
revenues of $8.4 billion, controlled shoe factories in Taiwan,
Indonesia, Vietnam, the United States, Mexico, Bangladesh,
Cambodia, and Myanmar as well. In June 2011, more than 90,000
workers went on strike at a Yue Yuen plant in Vietnam, probably the
largest single-site strike anywhere in the world in decades.9
Two developments led to the latest chapter of factory giantism.
First was the opening up, starting in the 1980s, of China and
Vietnam to private and foreign capital, part of national efforts to
boost living standards and embrace a modernity increasingly
measured by global, largely capitalist, standards. Second was a
revolution in retailing in the United States and Western Europe, as in
many product lines merchants, rather than manufacturers, became
the key players in design, marketing, and logistics. The convergence
of these changes resulted in the construction of the biggest factories
in history.
Twenty-first-century factory giantism in many ways resembles
earlier moments of outsized industrialism, almost eerily so. But in
some respects it is quite dissimilar, representing a new form of the
factory behemoth. While contemporary Asian factory giants have
built on past experience in their organization, management, labor
relations, and technology, they play different economic, political, and
cultural roles than earlier giant factories. Like the largest and most
advanced factories in the past, today’s industrial giants embody the
possibilities and horrors of large-scale industry. But they do so
largely out of the spotlight, hidden rather than celebrated as factories
once were.

Maoist Giantism
The giant factories built in China and Vietnam over the past two
decades came after one of the last substantial efforts to reconceive
the factory as a social institution. In the years following the victory of
the communist forces in China in 1949, a complicated story of scale
and struggle unfolded in the effort to modernize the country through
industrialization. Fitfully, the Chinese communists experimented with
new ways of organizing production, not content to simply transplant
the factory as it developed under capitalism and Stalinism to
revolutionary China. The attempts proved deeply controversial,
contributing to divisions that nearly split the country apart and
ultimately led to a radical political and economic reorientation.
At first, the factory story in communist China seemed like a rerun
of the Soviet experience, much like what was occurring in Eastern
Europe. After a period of economic recovery following the end of the
civil war, in 1953 the communist government, with Soviet advice,
launched a Five-Year Plan. Following the Soviet precedent, China’s
plan placed heavy emphasis on industry, which accounted for more
than half the planned investment in the overwhelmingly agricultural
country. Producer goods, especially the iron and steel, machine-
building, electric-power, coal, petroleum, and chemical industries,
had priority. Six hundred and ninety-four large-scale, capital-
intensive projects were to be the driving force for economic growth, a
quarter of which were to be built with Soviet assistance. China
imported much of the machinery and equipment from the Soviet
Union using short-term loans. Like Eastern Europe, China became
an heir to an industrial tradition that had traveled from the United
States through the Soviet Union, with a stress on specialized tasks
and equipment, high-volume output, hierarchical management, and
incentive pay.10
But even before their Five-Year Plan ended, Chinese leaders
began edging away from the Soviet model. First they rejected “one-
man management” of factories, seeking broader party and worker
involvement, and began abandoning individual incentive pay. Then,
in the preliminary planning for a Second Five-Year Plan, priority
shifted from huge, capital-intensive projects to smaller-scale, more
widely distributed plants, seen as more appropriate for China’s
limited financial capacity.
The Second Five-Year Plan never was completed because of a
more radical departure, the Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958 in
an effort to accelerate economic growth through mass mobilization
and decentralized innovation. The Great Leap Forward had a deeply
disruptive, antibureaucratic thrust. In industry, the new policy
embraced “walking on two legs,” continuing capital-intensive, large-
scale, modern factory development while also promoting small-scale,
labor-intensive, technologically simple industry that used local
resources. Microindustry was meant to take advantage of
underutilized rural labor and materials, serve agriculture, and provide
inputs to large-scale industrial concerns. Most famous were the
several hundred thousand very small “backyard” blast furnaces built
across the country, which, along with small mines to feed them, at
one point employed sixty million workers. Local initiatives took on a
more prominent role in industrial development, while the importance
of central directives diminished.
In addition to experimenting with factory scale, supporters of the
Great Leap Forward also tried to break down the division between
management and labor within the factory and the unequal
distribution of power and privilege between them. In May 1957, the
Central Committee of the Communist Party directed that all
managerial, administrative, and technical personnel in factories
spend part of their time directly engaged in productive activities,
exposing them to the conditions, concerns, and views of workers. At
the same time, workers were given greater opportunities to
participate in the management of factories, or at least to have some
say over the behavior of managers. Periodic congresses of workers
evaluated managerial action while wall newspapers provided a more
immediate outlet for criticism. Some administrative tasks, including
accounting, scheduling, quality control, job assignments, and
discipline, were shifted from managers to teams of workers. To
enable workers to engage technical and administrative issues in an
informed way, the country launched a massive program of technical
education, reminiscent of the Soviet Union during the 1930s.
The efforts to create small-scale rural industry and give workers
greater say over factory management reflected a Maoist belief in the
centrality of popular mobilization to economic development and
building socialism. But the Great Leap Forward, including its radical
experiment with industrial scale, proved a disaster. Output of some
goods soared, but they were of such low quality and often in
unneeded varieties that they proved virtually useless. Meanwhile,
pulling labor out of agriculture to local industry, along with the chaos
that came with a weakening of central planning and wild
misestimates of upcoming harvests, led to a severe famine. Even the
strongest backers of the Great Leap Forward, including Mao, had to
acknowledge that economic growth could not be achieved simply
through mass mobilization.
Yet even as the Chinese leadership shut down most of the
backyard iron furnaces, reasserted central control, and put experts
back in charge of industry, experimentation continued, promoted
particularly by Mao, in an effort to avoid what were seen as the flaws
in the Soviet model and the hardening of hierarchy and bureaucracy
at the expense of communist ideals. While again embracing
industrial giantism as a path of national development, Mao hoped to
grant large enterprises considerable autonomy in order to diminish
the complexities and rigidities of central planning and create an
environment for greater worker involvement in management.
The Anshan Iron and Steel Company, along with the Daqing Oil
Field, became a model for the leftist approach to industrial
management promoted by Mao. Anshan, located in the northeast,
had been one of the two largest steelmakers in precommunist China,
expanded with Soviet help during the First Five-Year Plan. In 1960,
Mao approved a “constitution” for the management of the mill,
supposedly written by its workers. Though its details were not
published, its general principles stressed putting politics in
command, relying on mass mobilization, bringing workers into
management, avoiding irrational rules and regulations, and creating
work teams that joined together technicians, workers, and managers.
The “Anshan Constitution” was presented explicitly as a counter to
the management approach at Magnitogorsk, which subordinated
workers through restrictive rules and regulations.11
Giant industrial enterprises, Mao believed, could become anchors
for new social arrangements. Rather than simply pouring out a
narrow range of goods, a steel plant could also operate machinery,
chemical, construction, and other enterprises, in effect becoming an
all-purpose commercial, social, educational, and even agricultural
and military organization. The factory would be the core of an all-
encompassing community, going beyond even the expansive role of
large factories in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The Daqing
Oil Field, like Magnitogorsk, developed in what had been a sparsely
settled area, presented an opportunity to conceive a new type of
settlement to break down the urban-rural divide. Unlike at
Magnitogorsk, where the Soviets built a new city along conventional
lines, at Daqing the Chinese developed dispersed residential areas,
while providing support for agricultural production and a range of
social and educational services.12
Mao believed that the key to the advance to a socialist society,
with both greater equality and more rapid growth, lay in the relations
of production, not simply in the level of material development. Who
ruled the factory made all the difference. But there were plenty of
critics among Chinese leaders as a debate unfolded in the late
1950s and early 1960s—somewhat reminiscent of the debate in the
Soviet Union during the 1920s—over economic policies and
industrial practices. Many Chinese leaders, in the wake of the Great
Leap Forward, rather than promoting enterprise self-sufficiency and
worker self-rule, called for greater specialization of enterprises and
workers and greater use of material incentives.
Minister of Labor Ma Wen-jui represented one side of the debate
when in 1964 he argued—much like Trotsky four decades earlier—
that modern industry, with its complex machinery and coordinated
activity of large numbers of workers, required a particular form of
organization, regardless of whether it operated in a capitalist society
or a socialist one. Maximizing output “to satisfy the needs of society”
remained the “basic task” of state-owned enterprises. Socialism
eliminated the inherent class conflict within the factory under
capitalism because all output was for the benefit of society as a
whole—workers and managers no longer had different interests. But
the actual internal organization of the factory need not differ
significantly from capitalist models. Ma endorsed worker involvement
in overseeing managers but did not anticipate eliminating the
distinction between them.
For others, though, a change in ownership constituted only the
first step in the transformation of the factory and the larger society.
Politics, they argued, needed to take command inside the factory as
well as outside of it, promoting not only greater equality but also “the
revolutionization of man.” Socialism should lessen the distinctions
between mental work and manual work and between manager and
worker. Practically, that meant requiring everyone associated with
the factory to do some physical labor, bringing workers into
administrative and leadership bodies, and having the Communist
Party oversee factory management. Workers might continue to
engage in highly specialized activities within a detailed division of
labor, but that would not be all they would do. With their colleagues,
technical personnel, and political cadre they would join with
managers in determining all aspects of plant operation.13
The Cultural Revolution that began in 1966 intensified the
struggle over who should run the factory and what it should be doing.
The factory, though slow to be drawn into the escalating political
strife, eventually became a center of battle as the turbulent political
climate encouraged attacks on entrenched factory leaders and the
powers and privileges they enjoyed. Worker critics and their allies
challenged what they saw as bloated bureaucracies, full of officials
doing little of real use, while workers were locked out of participation
in such key areas as technical innovation. More radically, supporters
of the upsurge questioned the notion that the factory should be
understood simply as an economic unit responsible for maximum
production. Harking back to Mao’s view during the Great Leap
Forward, they argued that the factory should be a social institution,
serving the multiple needs of its workers and the surrounding
community, even at the cost of diminished production and profit.
Some pushed for the despecialization of factories, especially in rural
areas, so that their equipment and expertise could be used to serve
local needs and make varied products for local consumption, rather
just a narrow range of products for the national market.
The period of radical experimentation proved short-lived. As
political conflict in schools, government agencies, and factories
intensified and threatened to spin completely out of control, top
communist leaders moved to reassert their authority using the army
as their agent, as local Communist Party units were hopelessly
sundered. As order was restored, so was hierarchy, though with
great variation from factory to factory, as some degree of worker
participation in management and experimentation with organizational
forms continued. Still, the shift in the tide was clear.14
 “Feeling the Stones”
The Cultural Revolution led to a break between the first Chinese
industrial revolution, based on capital-intensive, state-owned
enterprises making producer goods like steel and petrochemicals,
and a second, based on labor-intensive consumer-goods
manufacturing by privately owned enterprises. The chaos of the
Cultural Revolution, followed by Mao’s death in 1976, left an opening
for reformers, led by Deng Xiaoping, who sought to revive the
stagnant Chinese economy and improve Chinese life. In many cases
themselves victims of the Cultural Revolution, the reform leaders
rejected basic Maoist tenets, including the centrality of mass
mobilization and the need to reject all capitalist forms of
organization. By the late 1970s, many communists came to believe
that China’s continuing poverty, and its lag behind not only
developed Western countries but also rapidly developing Asian
nations like Singapore, stemmed from the country’s lack of markets.
To stimulate growth, the reformers sought at least the limited
introduction of markets. They also pressed for a shift away from
state investment in heavy industry. Somewhat like Bukharin and
others in the Soviet Union a half century earlier, they argued that
labor-intensive production of consumer goods would provide a more
effective path to economic growth and rising living standards in a
country lacking in capital but with plenty of underutilized labor. Over
time, funds generated by light manufacturing could be channeled
into more advanced, capital-intensive endeavors.15
Deng and his allies sought foreign capital and expertise to help
expand industry without having a long-term blueprint. Instead, Deng
called for “crossing the river by feeling the stones.” As an
experiment, in 1979 the government established “special economic
zones” in Guangdong and Fujian provinces, designed to attract
foreign businesses. Within these zones, firms would be taxed at
lower rates than elsewhere in the country. Additionally, companies
could obtain tax holidays of up to five years; repatriate corporate
profits and, after a contracted period, capital investments; import
duty-free raw materials and intermediate products going into export
products; and pay no export taxes. Local authorities within the zones
were granted considerable autonomy and generally aligned
themselves with the privately owned businesses being courted. Seen
as a success, additional special zones were established over the
course of the 1980s in other coastal areas and, in 1990, in the
Pudong New Area of Shanghai. Two years later came a new set of
zones in other parts of the country.16
During the 1980s, Chinese leaders came to share the cultlike
faith in the power and efficacy of markets associated in the West with
Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and their followers. The dream
of modernity in China, wrote Hong Kong–based social scientist Pun
Ngai, became associated with “the great belief in capital and the
market,” a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree shift from the prior belief
that socialism represented a more advanced phase of history.
“Search for modernity” and “quest for globability” became
catchphrases as the marketization of a once almost completely
socialist economy began.17
A similar swing took place in Vietnam. The long war with the
United States, the subsequent wars with Cambodia and China, and
the international boycott after the Cambodian conflict had severely
drained the Vietnamese economy. Communist leaders had great
difficulty integrating the capitalist economy in what had been South
Vietnam with the socialized economy in the North. Measured by per
capita income, Vietnam was one of the poorest countries in the
world.
In an attempt to revive the southern economy, in 1981 and 1982
local authorities allowed Chinese merchants in Saigon to resume
their activities, leading to a burst of prosperity. By 1986, the
communists who had led the Saigon effort had won national-
leadership positions, promoting pro-market reforms. The Doi Moi
(“renovation”) policy, meant to move Vietnam toward a “socialist-
oriented market economy,” included reforms in the state sector and
opening up the country to foreign investment, market activity, and
export industry. As in China, ideological change accompanied the
shift in practical policies, with the Communist Party speaking of the
objective laws of the market with a certainty once reserved for the
virtues of central planning. Membership in the World Trade
Organization (WTO) in 2007 deepened Vietnam’s integration into
global markets and further facilitated export manufacturing.18
In China, the new market-oriented policies rapidly transformed
the Pearl River Delta region in Guangdong. The region was selected
as one of the first special economic zones because of its relative
isolation from the major population and power centers of the country
and its proximity to Hong Kong and Macao, and that proved critical
to its success. At the time, the economy of Hong Kong (still under
British control) depended heavily on manufacturing, trade, and
transportation. With land and labor costs rising, the opening up of the
adjacent part of the People’s Republic provided an opportunity to
shift manufacturing to a much lower-cost area with which many Hong
Kong businesspeople had family ties. At first, Hong Kong–run
businesses largely aimed their operations within China at its
domestic market, but by the middle and late 1980s, as the Chinese
government eased restrictions on direct foreign investments, export-
oriented manufacturing became increasingly prevalent, first in the
garment industry, then in footwear and plastics, and finally in
electronics.
The Hong Kong–Guangdong combination proved a remarkable
profit machine, reflecting the advantages for capitalists of uneven
global development. Hong Kong businesses, in many cases with
extensive experience in international trade, initially moved their
simplest, most labor-intensive operations to the People’s Republic,
taking advantage of far lower labor and land costs and the free reign
they were given in managing labor relations. They kept their
administrative, design, and marketing operations in Hong Kong and
used the territory’s advanced infrastructure, including the world’s
busiest container port and extensive airfreight capacity, for exporting
Chinese-made goods. As the authors of a study of the Pearl River
Delta put it, “Third World level costs are combined with First World
caliber management, infrastructure, and market knowledge.”19
As the initial Hong Kong–based forays into manufacturing in
China proved successful and the Chinese government further
loosened regulations and spent heavily on infrastructure serving the
special economic zones, more investment flowed in. Hong Kong
firms began shifting more complex manufacturing processes,
logistics, quality control, sourcing, and packing to China. At the same
time, companies based in Taiwan began manufacturing in mainland
China, too, soon followed by companies from Japan and Korea, at
first almost always operating through Hong Kong or Macao
middlemen. Many of the Taiwanese firms were headed by executives
with family ties to the mainland. Terry Gou, head of Foxconn, which
built its first Chinese plant in Shenzhen in 1988, was a charismatic
army veteran whose family came from north-central China and
whose father fought with the Kuomintang before fleeing with Chiang
Kai-shek to Taiwan in 1949. Once the United States granted China
permanent normal trade relations in 2000 and China joined the WTO
the following year, American companies began shifting
manufacturing operations to China as well.20

Dagongmei and Dagongzai

A measure of the explosive growth of export-oriented Chinese
manufacturing can be seen in the dizzying rise of Shenzhen’s
population, which shot up from 321,000 in 1980 to more than seven
million in 2000, one of the most rapid urban growths in history. Most
of the new residents were migrants from elsewhere in China who
came to work in the factories that were popping up all over.21 With
the local labor pool quickly exhausted, a system of migrant labor
developed that has been central to China’s second industrial
revolution and which has made possible the hyper-giantism of
twenty-first-century Chinese manufacturing.
Soviet and Eastern European factories recruited peasants
displaced by the collectivization of agriculture. In China, it was the
decollectivization of agriculture that freed up a workforce no longer
ensconced in the benefits and obligations of the collective farm. After
Mao’s death, communal farms were broken up, with small parcels of
land leased to individual farmers under the “household responsibility
system,” which allowed them to sell produce exceeding quotas on
the open market. Initially, the new system brought a rapid boost to
the rural standard of living. But further changes, including opening
the country to food imports and rising costs for health care,
education, and other social benefits, left the countryside far poorer
than the cities. Many children from farm families, seeing limited
economic and social opportunities at home, moved to the new
export-oriented manufacturing centers to take factory jobs.
But usually only temporarily. Unlike those in England or the
Soviet Union, Chinese peasants were not dispossessed of their
property; though the state continued to own all agricultural land,
thirty-year leases gave families effective control. Workers could and
did move back and forth between farms and factories, knowing that
they had something to return to in their home villages.22
In most cases they had to return home, like it or not, because of
the Chinese hukou system of residency permits, instituted in the
1950s. Chinese citizens need a permit to live in particular areas and
most social benefits, including health care and public schooling, are
linked to the specific hukou they possess. Migrant workers received
temporary residency permits arranged by their employers, which
expired when they left their jobs. Obtaining a permanent shift of
residency permit to a city was all but impossible. For the first
generation of migrant workers, factory jobs (and urban construction
work and service jobs) were necessarily interludes, usually lasting a
few years, often between the time of finishing or dropping out of
school and beginning a family, much as had been the case for New
England mill workers.23
Migrant factory workers had a different and inferior social status
than workers in state-owned enterprises. Until reforms that began in
the late 1980s, state-owned and collective employers in China
provided a broad range of benefits, including permanent job tenure,
training, housing, lifetime medical care, pensions, and other welfare
provisions, even subsidized haircuts. Generally, the intensity of work
was light and managerial discipline minimal.24 This was not the case
in the privately owned factories that blossomed as the state-owned
enterprises began to shrink. Job turnover in the special economic
zones was astoundingly high. Many companies provided dormitory
housing to migrant workers for free or a fee but otherwise took no
responsibility for their welfare. Whatever benefits workers were
eligible to receive—including educational opportunities for their
children and pensions—came from their home area, where they
were registered under the hukou system. Private employers were
legally required to contribute to social benefit funds for their workers,
but like minimum wage and overtime regulations the requirement
was frequently ignored. The intensity of work in private-sector
factories was high and discipline harsh.25
In effect, China developed two quite different systems of factory
production, one state or collectively owned, the other privately
owned, with different informing ideologies, laws, customs, standards
of living, and workforces. Even the terminology for workers differed.
Employees at state enterprises were gongren (“workers”), holding, at
least in theory, the highest social status in China during its
communist heyday. Rural migrant workers, by contrast, were often
called by newly coined terms dagongmei or dagongzai (“laboring
girl”) or (“laboring boy”) with the connotation of hired hand, a low-
status appellation.26
The migrant labor system provided employers with a vast
workforce, expandable and shrinkable at will. The pool of rural young
men and women was so large that it took nearly two generations
before labor shortages began. And it was a pool of cheap labor. Most
factories paid migrant workers the legal minimum wage (which in
China is set by local governments) or less, as enforcement generally
was minimal. Recruiting out of a rural labor market, where living
standards and wages were far below urban norms, the coastal
export factories did not have to match wage levels for local workers
or what state-owned enterprises paid, able to attract workers
because the low wages they offered were substantial by village
standards. Furthermore, because the factories did not pay for most
social welfare benefits for their workers, they were effectively being
subsidized by the rural governments that did, allowing their labor
costs to be below the cost of social reproduction in the areas they
were located. Like Stalinist industrialization, Chinese industrialization
has depended on squeezing wealth out of the countryside.27
Lodging workers in company dormitories was both a necessity
and an advantage for big export factories. Migrant workers, because
of housing shortages in the factory boomtowns and their lack of
permanent resident status, often had difficulty finding lodging. To
attract workers, factories provided it themselves, just as the Lowell
mills and the Soviet industrial giants had done. Doing so allowed
them to pay workers less than they would have to if those workers
had to obtain housing on the open market.
In the early years of private factory growth, most of the migrant
workers were young women, so lodging them in company dorms
also had an element of providing a chaste environment. One large
electronic firm required as a condition of employment that all young,
unmarried, single women live in dormitories within the factory
complex. Even after men began to be hired for production jobs,
dormitories generally remained sexually segregated.
The dormitory system gave companies extraordinary control over
their workers. As in the Lowell-style mills, many Chinese factories
had (and have) detailed rules for behavior, imposing fines not only
for being late to work, poor-quality work, or talking on the job but also
for littering or leaving dormitory rooms untidy. Foxconn forbids
workers of the opposite sex from visiting one another in their rooms,
bans drinking and gambling, and imposes a curfew.
Having workers in company housing allows factories to mobilize
large numbers of workers rapidly when rush jobs come in and makes
it easier to have large numbers of young women working night shifts.
Extremely long working hours—sometimes twelve hours at a time or
more, a common practice, especially during busy seasons—are
easier to demand if workers live right at the factory.28
In the mid-1990s, there were an estimated 50 million to 70 million
migrant Chinese workers. In 2008, 120 million. By 2014, more than
270 million, nearly double the number of employed civilian workers
of any kind in the United States, an oceanic movement of population
from farms to factories and back.
Hometown networks play an important role in the movement, as
migrant workers tell sisters and brothers and neighbors about the
opportunities and city life and help them find jobs. Provincial and
local governments have facilitated the flow. Interior provinces helped
recruit workers for factory labor elsewhere, prizing the remittances
they sent back home. Some local governments set up offices in
Shenzhen to connect workers from their region to foreign-owned
factories. Without active state support, the whole system would not
have been possible.
The urban employment of rural workers has turned the Spring
Festival week around Chinese New Year into an epic of logistics,
emotion, and labor recruitment. Each year, millions upon millions of
migrant workers return home for the holiday, to be reunited with
parents, children, and village friends, in what has become the world’s
largest, regular human migration. In 2009, the Chinese railway
system expected to carry about 188 million passengers during the
holiday period. Huge crowds fill stations and spill over into
neighboring streets. Ticket systems crash under the weight of
demand. Trains and buses are crammed and overcrammed with
people and baggage (though the recent expansion of the Chinese
railroad system has somewhat eased the chaos). When the holiday
ends, not everyone goes back. Each year, millions of migrant
workers decide to stay home, forcing factories and other employers
to scramble to find replacements.29

Why So Big?
Migrant labor made possible the rapid expansion of export-oriented
manufacturing in China—and also Vietnam—but it does not explain
the creation of factories larger than any ever seen before.30 For the
most part, their size is not a result of technical requirements of
production. Look at a photograph of a large sneaker factory in, say,
Vietnam and what you will most likely see will be rows of workers
sitting at individual workstations assembling precut pieces.
(Sneakers and casual footwear are made by gluing and stitching
together pieces of rubber, synthetic fabrics, synthetic leather, and
sometimes actual leather.) Masses of workers may be under the
same roof, but for the most part their labor is individual or in small
groups, doing work identical to other individuals or groups nearby,
without interacting with them.31 In this respect, these plants are less
like River Rouge or Magnitogorsk and more like the early English
textile mills, where weavers or spinners stood side by side doing
individual tasks.
Even when products require more complex assembly, there is
often no clear relationship between the number of workers needed to
make a particular product and the size of a factory. In the EUPA
factory, the Taiwanese-owned small appliance plant featured in
Manufacturing Landscapes and one of Edward Burtynsky’s best-
known photographs, assembly workers are housed in a vast,
modern, single-story shed. But each assembly line within it is short
and relatively simple. Thirty lines made electric grills, but each had
an average of only twenty-eight workers, not the hundreds found on
integrated assembly lines in automobile or tractor plants. Rows of
assembly workers face each other across a slowly moving belt. For
the most part they use simple hand tools, without mechanical pacing
of production, taking pieces on and off the belt rather than working
on moving components, as in an auto plant.

Figure 7.1 Workers making Reebok shoes in a factory in Ho Chi Minh City,
Vietnam, 1997.
 Electronics firms are notoriously secretive, so it is difficult to get a
full sense of their manufacturing processes. But one account of an
Apple production area within the Foxconn Longhua complex
described assembly lines ranging from dozens to more than a
hundred workers each, larger than the lines in shoe or small
appliance factories but still very modest in size compared to the
overall size of the factory, with its several hundred thousand workers.
Vertical integration adds to plant size. Some footwear plants
make the synthetic materials that go into sneakers and shoes, mold
and cut pieces, and embroider logos. EUPA manufactures most of
the parts used in the goods it produces. Foxconn makes some of the
components that go into the devices it assembles, though most of
the high-end elements come from elsewhere.
Still, even adding in parts manufacturing, technological
requirements do not explain giant plant size. Rather it is like Alfred
Marshall’s comment about cotton spinning and weaving, that “a large
factory is only several parallel smaller factories under one roof.” At
Foxconn City, that was almost literally the case, with separate
buildings used to assemble similar products for different companies.
Beyond some point, economies of scale in production diminish or
disappear. In his classic study Scale and Scope Alfred D. Chandler,
Jr., after noting that at one point close to a quarter of the world’s
production of kerosene came from just three Standard Oil refineries,
wrote: “Imagine the diseconomies of scale that would result from
placing close to one-fourth of the world’s production of shoes,
textiles or lumber into three factories or mills! In those instances the
administrative coordination of the operation of miles and miles of
machines and the huge concentration of labor needed to operate
those machines would make neither economic nor social sense.” Yet
something close to that has happened in the production of electronic
devices and some types of footwear. In the case of Apple, production
concentration has gone beyond what Chandler imagined as absurd;
every iPad is assembled in a single factory and most iPhone models
in just one or two.32
Why are the factories so large? The answer seems to lie in
economies of scale and competitive advantages, not for
manufacturers, but for the retailers that sell the products they make.
This reflects a fundamental shift in relations between the two parties.
Until fairly recently, the design, manufacture, and marketing of
consumer products generally occurred within the confines of one
company. But since the 1970s they have been delinked. And, as
sociologist Richard P. Appelbaum has argued, in contemporary
global supply chains it is retailers and branders (designers and
marketers that depend on others for manufacturing) who have the
most power to establish the arrangements and terms of production,
not factory owners. Factory giantism serves their interests.33
Early in the history of factory production, some of the most
successful manufacturers established their dominance by selling
their products under brand names and controlling distribution
networks. In the United States, the Lowell mills pioneered this
approach, which was adopted by such iconic companies as the
McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. The Singer
Manufacturing Company extended the model to a global scale, as its
salesmen and distribution agents sold sewing machines across
Europe and the Americas, largely produced in just two factories. The
big automobile manufacturers used the model as well, selling cars
that they branded—Fords and Chevys, Chryslers and Cadillacs—
through independently owned dealerships that they effectively
controlled. General Electric, IBM, and RCA likewise sold or leased
their products under their own names and exerted considerable
influence, if not total control, over distribution networks.
The manufacturer-dominated system of branded products stayed
in place in Europe and the United States through the 1970s. Goods
producers like Volkswagen, GM, Siemens, Sony, Ford, Whirlpool,
Levi Strauss, and Clarks shoes (which first garnered wide attention
when its products won awards at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition)
persisted as household names. The companies, their products, and
the factories that produced them remained tightly bound to one
another in reality and image.34
The severe global recession of the 1970s and a series of
subsequent developments unraveled the ties. With profit rates
declining as a result of increased international competition, rising
energy and labor costs, tight credit, and inflation, many American
corporations, under pressure from corporate raiders, sought to
reduce costs and shed less profitable operations. To become leaner
and more flexible and show a rapid drop in spending, they began
outsourcing to other firms functions they had traditionally performed
themselves. They tended to start with support services, such as data
processing and communications. But over time, companies began
outsourcing core functions, too, including manufacturing.35
Take sneakers. From their introduction in the nineteenth century
through the 1960s, sneakers generally were designed and made by
the same companies, mostly large, stodgy rubber firms like United
States Rubber Company (Keds) and BF Goodrich (PF Flyers). But
then dominance shifted to companies like Adidas, Puma, Reebok,
and Nike that were built around athletic footwear and clothing rather
than rubber and focused on technological innovation, fashionable
design, and marketing. While into the 1980s most of the industry
leaders, including Nike, did at least some of their own manufacturing,
increasingly they contracted out production, until they became
essentially just branders.36
In the electronics and computer industries as well, leading
corporations began contracting out some of their manufacturing. Sun
and Cisco, two Silicon Valley success stories, worked with
specialized contract manufacturers, like Solectron and Flextronics
(before the rise of Foxconn, the largest such firm), to manufacture
advanced products, sold under their brand names. Some
companies, including IBM, Texas Instruments, and Ericsson (a large
Swedish telecommunications manufacturer), sold off individual
factories or even whole manufacturing divisions to smaller firms, with
which they then contracted to do their manufacturing. Over time,
contract manufacturers became increasingly sophisticated in their
design and logistics capacities, partnering with their clients in
integrated, multifirm production systems, stitched together by
electronic data communication.37
During the same years, a revolution in selling took place as well.
It had two facets, the rise of new, giant, low-price retailers and the
burgeoning of global brand companies that did little or no
manufacturing themselves.
In the United States, the new mass retailers had their origins in
the 1960s, when a series of discount store chains, including Wal-
Mart and Target, were founded. But it was not until the 1980s that
they really took off. Wal-Mart, using a combination of low-wage labor,
low prices, advanced technology, and highly efficient logistics, grew
into the largest retailer in the world. In 2007 it had 4,000 stores in the
United States and 2,800 elsewhere. Though no company came even
close to Wal-Mart in size, other retailers based in Europe and the
United States, like Carrefour, Tesco, and Home Depot, ballooned
through expansion and acquisitions.
With their massive purchasing power, giant retailers won an edge
over their suppliers, whether well-known companies like Levi Strauss
or obscure firms that made products sold under the retailers’ house
labels. New communications and logistics technology, including bar
codes, computer tracking systems, and the internet, allowed retailers
to monitor, communicate with, and direct suppliers on an almost
instantaneous basis. Faced with the possibility of the loss of massive
orders, companies that made goods for megaretailers were at their
mercy and often restructured their operations to meet their needs
and desires.38
A parallel process developed in the growth of branded product
companies like Apple, Disney, and Nike. Such firms achieved
massive global sales by concentrating on product design and, above
all else, marketing, making their products symbols of hipness,
worldliness, modernity, and fun. Some of the big brands at one point
or another did some of their own manufacturing, but typically they
eventually outsourced most or all of the production of the goods they
sold. Koichi Nishimura, the CEO of Solectron, in 1998 said of his
customers that “The more sophisticated companies work on wealth
creation and demand creation. And they let somebody else do
everything in between.” Apple initially manufactured its own
products, some in factories near its Silicon Valley headquarters. But
in the mid-1990s it began selling and shutting down plants,
contracting out almost all of its physical production. In 2016 Apple
made only one major product, a high-end desktop computer, in the
United States. Similarly, in the 1990s Adidas, which had made most
of its footwear in factories in Germany, began getting out of the
manufacturing business, closing down all of its plants except for one
small operation it used as a technology center.39
 One advantage of contracting out manufacturing was that it
distanced brand companies from the work conditions under which
their products were made. Seeking lower labor costs usually meant
relocating manufacturing to low-wage regions, often with autocratic
or corrupt governments; avoiding unions; and paying less attention
to worker health, safety, and well-being. If child labor, excessive
hours, use of toxic chemicals, repression of unionists, and the like
took place within the facilities of a brand company, its image—its
most important asset—might well be damaged. But if the problems
could be blamed on a contractor down the supply chain, the damage
would be less costly and more easily contained. Nike and Apple
were both able to survive with remarkably little long-term harm
revelations about work conditions and worker treatment in the plants
that made their products by blaming contractors, promising better
oversight and more transparency, and issuing new codes of
conduct.40
The location and size of the contract factories serving large
retailers and brand companies varied greatly and changed over time.
Early on, many American electronic companies contracted with local
firms, some in or near Silicon Valley, to build their products. But
logistical and political changes made it ever easier to locate
manufacturing plants at great distances from contracting firms.
Container shipping and expanded airfreight capacity increased the
speed and lowered the cost of shipping. Cheap international
telephone rates, satellite connections, and the internet improved
communications. Lower tariffs reduced the surcharge on
manufacturing across borders.
As retailers and brand-name firms like Wal-Mart and Apple
relentlessly pressured their suppliers and subcontractors to lower
their prices, firms scouted the world for low-wage regions to locate
their factories. Mexico was one favored site. So, following the
collapse of Soviet communism, were Eastern European countries.
Textile and garment manufacturers built plants in Central America,
the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa. Malaysia, Singapore, and
Thailand attracted contract electronics manufacturers. And, more
and more, manufacturers looked to China to locate their plants, with
its vast, cheap labor pool and cooperative government authorities.41
 The staggering size of orders from transnational corporations like
Hewlett-Packard, Adidas, and Wal-Mart made it convenient for them
to depend on concentrated production centers, minimizing the
administrative and logistical tasks that would result from using many
widely scattered suppliers. The changed economics of shipping
made it possible for them to concentrate manufacturing in a single
small region or just a single factory. In the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, even companies known for centralized, vertically
integrated production, like Ford, set up branch plants to assemble
products for markets distant from their main factories. But the radical
reduction in shipping costs and increase in shipping speed, largely
as a result of container shipping and highly efficient port logistics,
meant that companies like Apple could supply a particular product to
retail stores and internet customers around the world from just one
or two locations.42
Concentrated production did not necessarily mean big factories.
Sometimes it meant industrial districts or centers where many small
plants and ancillary services clustered together. In the mid-2000s,
over a third of the world’s socks—nine billion pairs a year—were
produced in Datang, China, not by one company but many,
supplying retail giants, including Wal-Mart. Production of neckties
began in Shengzhou, China, in 1985 when a Hong Kong company
moved its production there. Soon various managers left to start their
own companies and tie production grew until the city became the
global leader, able to meet orders of hundreds of thousands of units
at a time. At one point Yiwu, China, had six hundred factories where
workers, who in many cases did not know what Christmas was,
produced over 60 percent of the world’s Christmas decorations and
accessories.43
But sometimes scaling up meant just one giant factory. For some
products, including footwear and electronics, big buyers, especially
brand marketers, have preferred very large factories, which can
consistently provide the vast quantity of goods they sell and quickly
gear up to make new products or meet rush orders. Apple
represents this tendency taken to the extreme. It produces only a
very limited number of products but in mind-boggling quantities. Its
marketing strategy depends on carefully choreographed, highly
publicized annual or semiannual product introductions, stimulating
global stampedes by consumers eager to get the newest product
and demonstrate their position on the leading edge of technology,
style, and modernity. In June 2010, Apple sold 1.7 million iPhone 4s
in the three days following its introduction. In September 2012, it sold
five million iPhone 5s on the first weekend of sales. Three years
later, the company sold more than thirteen million iPhone 6 and 6
Plus units during the first three days after launch. With final product
design often locked up only shortly before sales begin, Apple needs
to mobilize a vast amount of labor in a very short time to produce
inventory for the sales rush to come. Factory giantism has been the
solution Apple has adopted, though the giant factories are not its
own.
Using giant contract manufacturers, like Foxconn and Yue Yuen,
has allowed Apple, Nike, and their ilk to operate without large
standing inventories of products that tie up capital and run up
warehouse expenses. Even more important, just-in-time production
avoids the possibility of being stuck with piles of outdated cell
phones, laptops, or sneakers in what are essentially fashion
industries. Tim Cook—the Apple executive who masterminded the
company’s shift from in-house production to contracting out before
succeeding Steve Jobs as CEO—once called inventory
“fundamentally evil.” “You kind of want to manage it like you’re in the
dairy business. If it gets past its freshness date, you have a
problem.”44
Foxconn and Pegatron keep Apple’s milk fresh by rapidly
mobilizing hundreds of thousands of young, poorly paid Chinese
workers, often under harsh conditions (perhaps closer to evil than
inventory). In 2007, just weeks before the scheduled unveiling of the
first iPhone, Jobs decided to switch from a plastic to a glass screen.
When the first shipment of glass screens arrived at the Foxconn
Longhua plant at midnight, eight thousand workers were awoken in
the dormitories, given a biscuit and a cup of tea, and sent off to
begin a twelve-hour shift fitting the screens into their frames.
Working around the clock, the plant was soon pouring out ten
thousand iPhones a day. On occasion, to fulfill an order, Foxconn
moved large groups of workers from one factory to another in an
entirely different part of the country. Meeting surges of demand
requires not only a vast army of labor but also a large corps of junior
officers, thousands of industrial engineers to set up assembly lines
and oversee them, something that China, with its massive program
of technical education, can provide. It is this ability to quickly scale
up (and, when the rush is over, quickly scale down) production that
Apple and other customers prize in the giant contract manufacturing
plants that have sprung up in East Asia.45
A combination of Fordism and Taylorism facilitates the rapid
mobilization of unskilled workers. Apple is ideal for this approach,
because it makes a very limited number of highly standardized
products, just as Henry Ford did. Some of the final assembly
procedures for Apple’s computers and mobile devices are highly
automated, but most are not. Rather, they involve an extreme
division of labor, very simple tasks repeated over, and over, and over
again. Workers can be taught them in virtually no time—critical given
the very high turnover of workers at factories employing Chinese
migrant workers (who have no reason to be loyal to their employers
and frequently switch jobs) and the need to bring on fleets of new
employees rapidly when big orders come in. The orientation for new
hires at Foxconn involves lectures about company culture and rules,
but no training in actual production tasks.46
Many large contract manufacturing firms cope with big rush
orders by subcontracting some of the work to small companies with
which they have relationships. Rather than either/or, large and small
factories often work in symbiotic relationships, with the bigger
companies helping small ones, sometimes just family workshops, to
set up as parts suppliers or as subcontract assemblers or
processors. Such networks enhance the ability of big firms to quickly
scale up production without adding to their fixed costs.47
Some contract manufacturers have preferred large-scale
factories for their own convenience or out of a kind of corporate
vanity, separate from the preference of their customers. The head of
a firm that made cases for PCs and game consoles related that he
preferred to buy land in low-wage areas close to major markets,
build a large factory, and set up suppliers right there. Rather than
many small factories, his company runs six big industrial parks
spread around the globe. Yue Yuan built gigantic factories in part
simply as a strategy to quickly raise its capacity to produce a vast
volume of shoes in its successful quest to become the world’s
largest footwear company. Foxconn’s Longhua plant grew very large
out of a rush to scale up production, as well as to serve as a
showcase for the company and its CEO, Gou. The manager of the
complex felt it far too big for efficient operation. Most subsequent
Foxconn factories have been considerably smaller, though still very
large.48
Asian industrial giantism requires state support. In recent
decades, the Chinese government has maintained the Soviet and
early Mao-era view that very large concentrations of productive
capacity are the quickest route to industrial advance and economic
growth (a policy Vietnam has followed as well), with distributed,
small manufacturing no longer a major thrust. Concentration has not
necessarily meant giant factories. The Chinese government actively
encouraged the creation of the sprawling clusters of small and
midsize firms making specialized products, providing big parcels of
land for development, creating industrial parks, building
infrastructure and transportation, and providing tax benefits. But
often it has meant outsized plants. One manager in the Chinese
automobile industry, which is partially owned and heavily guided by
government entities, told sociologist Lu Zhang “the government
wants big firms. To achieve large scales and high volumes in a short
time, we rely not only on highly advanced machinery, but also on our
hard-working workers—our comparative advantage.” Provincial
Chinese governments have embraced industrial giantism as a
development strategy. Companies seeking to build large new plants
have been offered land (sometimes for free), tax breaks, reduced-
cost electricity, and help in recruiting a workforce (including student
interns, an increasingly important source of cheap labor for
manufacturers).49

Inside the Behemoth

What is it like to work in the industrial behemoths of modern Asia? In
some ways, the experience is remarkably like that of factory workers
generations and even centuries ago in England, the United States,
and the Soviet Union. As was the case with nineteenth-century
Lowell-style mills, many young women and men have been attracted
to twentieth- and twenty-first-century Asian factories by the
opportunity to earn money and help their families, build houses or
pay for a sibling’s education, or amass savings to start a business or
bring to a marriage (providing women some protection in case it
goes bad). Some women sought to escape arranged marriages,
patriarchal control, or family disputes. Just as in the Lowell-style
mills, most workers returned to their home village after a few years of
factory work to settle down to marriage and family in the countryside,
farming or sometimes setting up small businesses.
But factory work in China has not only been a means to make
money but also a way to escape rural provincialism and experience
city life and what is seen as modernity. The first generation of
migrant workers, in the 1980s and 1990s, had little idea of what to
expect. Returning migrants were living billboards for a different
world. One teenaged woman from an ethnic minority in Guangxi
Province recalled that when young people from her village came
back for the New Year celebrations in their new clothes, she was
envious, echoing the experience of New England teenagers nearly
two centuries earlier. She soon left to take a job in an electronics
factory. Later migrants were more sophisticated, having seen images
of city life and modern factories on television and become at least
superficially familiar with fashion and fashionable products through
smartphones. One young female worker from Hunan Province, who
took a job in an electronics factory near Guangzhou, recalled “When
I saw factories on TV, they always seemed so nice: well-built
buildings, tiling, and a clean environment, so I thought it would be
fun.”50
Going from the countryside to a factory hundreds of miles away,
teeming with tens or even hundreds of thousands of workers, could
be deeply disorienting. Recently industrialized Chinese cities do not
look like modern equivalents of Manchester. Because so many low-
paid workers live in company dormitories, there are not sprawling
districts of slums. Some industrial centers, like Shenzhen, contain
within them neighborhoods or villages filled with migrant workers and
businesses serving them, which reproduce something of the feel of
village life. But most new industrial regions are modern and large
scale. Upriver from Shanghai, sociologist Andrew Ross reported
“Spotless, newly laid highways reached out in all directions.
Crowding out all the other buildings were the industrial newcomers—
fat, squat warehouses with high-tech roofs, rows of factories as long
as freight trains, and a multitude of postmodern boxes that carried
the brand of their corporate owners but said nothing about what was
done inside their walls.” Driving across Dongguan, Nelson
Lichtenstein and Richard Appelbaum saw “broad but heavily
trafficked streets, continuously bordered by bustling stores, welding
shops, warehouses, small manufacturers, and the occasional large
factory complex. This is how the cities of the old American rust belt
must have once looked, smelled, even vibrated.”51
Simply finding the way around vast factory complexes like
Foxconn City could be bewildering to teenagers who had rarely left
their small villages, if ever. The Longhua plant covers over two
square kilometers; it takes an hour to walk from one side to the
other. Many signs at Foxconn plants were English acronyms,
meaningless to newcomers. Frustration and anomie from sudden
immersion in an alien world contributed to the rash of Foxconn
suicides.
But there was excitement, too. Many migrant workers marveled
at new sights and experiences. One worker from Hunan, assigned to
a factory dormitory, recollected, “I had never lived in a multi-story
building, so it felt exciting to climb stairs and be upstairs.” Just as
had been the case in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, something as
simple—and taken for granted—as a staircase could be the divide
between two universes.52
The factory giants in China and Vietnam are not sweatshops.
Generally, they are recently built and modern looking, though
undistinguished. Inside they are mostly clean, orderly, and well lit.
Some are air conditioned. As a rule, conditions, pay, and benefits are
better in foreign-owned large factories than in locally owned small
plants and workshops. And large factories are less likely than small
ones to cheat workers out of what they are owed, a big problem in
China.53
Still, work inside large factories often is difficult and the
atmosphere oppressive. Many Taiwanese-owned industrial giants
use quasimilitary discipline to control their workforces, full of
newcomers. Workers at EUPA, Foxconn, and other large plants wear
company uniforms. Plant security is intense. The entire perimeter of
Foxconn City is walled, with barbed wire topping some sections. Like
River Rouge, entry is only though manned security gates.
Identification cards are necessary to enter most large factory
complexes and sometimes again to enter particular buildings. At
Foxconn plants, surveillance cameras are ubiquitous.
Foxconn puts particular stress on following detailed rules and
work instructions—a kind of hyper-Taylorism—enforced by a
multilayered management hierarchy. Line leaders, themselves poorly
paid workers, supervise individual production lines, in turn overseen
by layers and layers of higher-level supervisors. Workers are
forbidden from talking on the job (though in practice enforcement
varies greatly) or moving about the plant. Slogans adorn banners
and posters on factory walls, some reminiscent of Alexei Gastev:
“Value efficiency every minute, every second,” others more
hyperbolic, “Achieve goals or the sun will no longer rise,” and still
others crudely threatening, “Work hard on the job today or work hard
to find a job tomorrow.”
At Foxconn and other foreign-owned factories in China, there is
no echo of the experiments with worker involvement in management
that took place in state-owned enterprises. The genealogy of the
internal organization of modern Chinese factory giants lies in
Western and Japanese systems of management, not in the earlier
years of communist China. Hierarchy is unquestioned, rules and
regulations extensive. Quality-control systems, imported from
developed capitalist countries, further top-down organization.54
Assembly-plant jobs that require the rapid repetition of a series of
motions for long periods of time are exhausting and even debilitating,
reminiscent of early English textile mills where child workers suffered
physical damage from doing the same tasks over and over again. At
the Foxconn Chengdu plant, some workers’ legs swelled so badly
from standing all day that they had difficulty walking. Extremely long
working hours compound the problem. Though Chinese laws
stipulate a normal workweek of forty hours and limit overtime to nine
hours a week, factories routinely ignore them, scheduling much
longer workweeks. Schedules of well over sixty hours are not
uncommon. At Foxconn, workdays of twelve hours (including
overtime) are common, but there and elsewhere, when order
deadlines approach, workdays can stretch even longer. Foxconn
workers switch between day and night shifts once a month, much
like American steelworkers used to rotate shifts every two weeks,
leading to sleep loss and disorientation. Though workers like
extensive overtime for the boost it gives to their earnings, they have
fought to control their hours and raise wages so that huge amounts
of overtime are not necessary to make a decent living. At one giant
Yue Yuen factory, workers found the mandatory overtime so
exhausting that they struck in protest. Just as in Marx’s time, much
of the struggle between labor and capital in today’s megafactories
revolves around the length of the working day.55
Discipline is another point of contention. In many giant Chinese
factories, discipline is harsh and degrading. Firms commonly impose
fines for negligent work and even minor rule violations, like talking or
laughing on the job, recalling English textile factories, where, Marx
noted, “punishments naturally resolve themselves into fines and
deductions from wages, and the law-giving talent of the factory
Lycurgus so arranges matters, that a violation of his laws is, if
possible, more profitable to him than the keeping of them.” (By
contrast, fines as a form of labor discipline are illegal in Vietnam.)
Some foreign managers believe that especially strict disciplinary
measures are required in China because of a lax pace of work
inherited from socialism, along with a culture of everyone “eating
from the same rice bowl,” collective rather than individual effort and
reward.
At Foxconn, supervisors verbally abuse workers for breaking
minor rules. In one instance, a supervisor forced a worker to copy
quotations from CEO Gou three hundred times—a cross between
schoolhouse punishment and the Cultural Revolution. Security
guards sometimes beat up workers suspected of theft or simply
violating a rule (shades of the Service Department at River Rouge).
Some Chinese factories hire off-duty policemen as guards, giving
them a sense of impunity.56
Xu Lizhi, a Foxconn worker who committed suicide in 2014,
addressed factory discipline in a poem, “Workshop, My Youth Was
Stranded Here,” published in the company newspaper, Foxconn
People:

Beside the assembly line, tens of thousands of workers line up

like words on a page,
“Faster, hurry up!”
Standing among them, I hear the supervisor bark.

In “I Fall Asleep, Just Standing Like That,” he wrote:

They’ve trained me to become docile

Don’t know how to shout or rebel
How to complain or denounce
Only how to silently suffer exhaustion.57

Some giant Asian factories have had severe health and safety
problems. In 1997, an internal report commissioned by Nike found
serious problems with toxic chemicals in a large Korean-owned
contracting plant in Vietnam. Levels of toluene in the air far
exceeded both U.S. and Vietnamese standards. Pervasive dust and
oppressive heat and noise added to the poor conditions. In China,
too, exposure to toluene, along with benzene and xylene, created
hazardous conditions in footwear factories. Chemical solvents used
to clean screens are a hazard in electronics factories. Aluminum
dust, from making and polishing cases for iPads, presents another
danger; workers breathe it in and it can be highly explosive. A 2011
blast at the Foxconn Chengdu plant caused by the dust killed four
workers and severely injured eighteen others.58
In Lowell, boardinghouses, centers of sociability and relaxation
albeit strictly regulated by the companies, provided something of a
respite from the monotony, fatigue, and regimentation of the factory.
At many Chinese factories that is less the case. About a quarter of
Foxconn’s Shenzhen workers live in company housing, one of the
thirty-three dormitories inside its factory complexes or the one
hundred and twenty dorms it rents nearby. Foxconn dorm rooms
typically house six to twelve workers, more than housed in Lowell
boardinghouse rooms, though unlike in Lowell, each worker has her
or his own bunk bed. (Many Taiwanese-owned factories also have
higher-grade housing for managers.) Workers are assigned to rooms
randomly, so that friends, relatives, workers from the same
production area, or workers from the same region rarely bunk
together. With some roommates working day shifts and others at
night, disruptions come regularly and rooms cannot be used for
socializing. As in Lowell, strict rules regulate dormitory behavior:
curfews are enforced, visitors restricted, and cooking forbidden.59
But many industrial giants, including some though not all
Foxconn plants, have extensive on-site social and recreational
facilities that provide opportunities for relaxation, socializing, and
entertainment. Foxconn City, in addition to dormitories, production
buildings, and warehouses, includes a library, bookstores, a variety
of cafeterias and restaurants, supermarkets, extensive sports
facilities including swimming pools, basketball courts, soccer fields,
and a stadium, a movie theater, electronic game rooms, cybercafés,
a wedding-dress shop, banks, ATMs, two hospitals, a fire station, a
post office, and huge LED screens that show announcements and
cartoons. In 2012, a central kitchen used three tons of pork and
thirteen tons of rice every day to feed workers. Another company’s
factory complex, where workers made small motors for electronic
devices and automobile accessories, contained a skating rink,
basketball courts, badminton fields, table-tennis courts, billiards, and
a cybercafé (though workers complained about the lack of Wi-Fi in
the dormitories).
At Foxconn City, the giant outdoor television screens and
extensive shopping and recreational venues brought consumer
modernity into the plant itself, offering workers a taste of the world
they left their villages seeking. Migrant workers often quickly
assimilate to it. Journalist James Fallows wrote after visiting
Longhua in 2012, “At factories I’d previously seen across China,
workers looked and acted like country people weathered by their
rough upbringing. Most of the Foxconn employees looked like they
could have come from a junior college.” Many second-generation
migrant workers own—or are saving to own—the products they
themselves make that symbolize modernity, like smartphones and
stylish footwear and apparel.60

Militant Workers
Fallows sees China as a feel-good story, a country rapidly moving
from working-class living conditions like those in William Blake’s
England to those like in the United States in the 1920s, and
continuing upward. Since China began allowing foreign entities to
build and run factories, there has been an enormous decline in
poverty, also the case in Vietnam. According to World Bank data,
between 1981 and 2012 more than a half billion Chinese rose above
a poverty line defined as living on the equivalent (in 2011 dollars) of
$1.90 a day or less. Life expectancy at birth rose from sixty-seven in
1981 to seventy-six in 2014. Nonetheless, even at the most modern
industrial giants in China and Vietnam, factories with pay and
conditions above local norms, workers have repeatedly expressed
their dissatisfaction through high turnover rates, strikes, and
protests.
In recent decades, China has experienced a massive, if not well
publicized, strike wave. The China Labour Bulletin details 180 strikes
in 2014 and 2015 that involved a thousand or more workers,
estimating that it has information on only 10 to 15 percent of all
strikes that occurred. By contrast, during those same two years,
there were only thirty-three strikes with a thousand or more workers
in the United States.61
All kinds of factories in China have been hit by walkouts—large
and small, state-owned and privately owned. Strikes have occurred
at leading industrial giants in the electronic and footwear industries
over pay, benefits, and working hours. Tactics, beyond stopping
work, have included threatening suicides, blocking roads, and
marching on government offices. With many strikers living in
company dormitories, stoppages often become de facto occupations
or sit-downs.
Even the largest contract manufacturers have been affected. In
2012, 150 workers at a Foxconn plant in Wuhan spent two days on a
building roof threatening to jump off to protest a pay cut that
accompanied their transfer from Shenzhen and conditions in the new
plant. In the Spring of 2014, most of the forty thousand workers at a
Yue Yuen factory in Guangdong Province struck to demand that the
firm comply with a law obligating it to make pension contributions,
one of the largest single-site strikes China has seen. Some protests
have been violent. Workers at the Foxconn Chengdu plant rioted
several times in fury over uninhabitable dormitory conditions and pay
cuts. In one case, it took two hundred police officers to end the
protest.
Chinese strikes occur in a legal gray zone. For years, workers
had a right to strike, encoded in the constitutions of 1975 and 1978.
But in 1982, as the government moved to attract foreign investment
and reject the mass mobilizations of the Cultural Revolution, the right
was removed from the fundamental law. Now workers cannot openly
organize or publicize job actions. But they strike nonetheless. Most
walkouts arise with little if any prior organization, no union
involvement, and no clear leaders, and last a day or two at most.
Often they end when the government intervenes to mediate.
As long as the stoppages are local, short, and nonpolitical, the
government generally tolerates them. But if they get out of hand or
last too long, physical force and arrests are used to break them up.
Authorities want to make sure that labor turbulence does not drive
away foreign investors or threaten the political status quo. For their
part, foreign factory owners seem confident that the government will
keep labor militancy under control, not hesitating to concentrate
production in very large plants that if shut down would halt most or
all production of particular goods.62
Strikes are even more common in Vietnam than China. Workers
there have a legal right to strike, though in practice most walkouts
have taken place without the elaborate steps necessary for
authorization. Worker strikes hit large South Korean and Taiwanese-
owned factories making shoes for Nike, Adidas, and other global
brands in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2015. The gigantic 2011
strike at the Yue Yuen factory, protesting low wages, captured
international attention for its sheer size.
Even more startling were the riots three years later, which
damaged or destroyed scores of foreign-owned factories outside of
Ho Chi Minh City. The disturbances began with a rally of workers
protesting China’s deployment of an oil rig into waters claimed by
Vietnam. But the protesters soon turned against nearby sneaker and
clothing factories, many of which were Taiwanese, South Korean,
Japanese, or Malaysian owned, angry about stagnating wages and
foreign exploitation. A staff person at the Taiwanese Chutex Garment
Factory reported that some eight thousand to ten thousand workers
were involved in an attack on the plant, burning “everything, all of the
materials, computers, machines.”63
In China, worker militancy has pushed up wages and improved
conditions, aided by pressure from international labor rights groups
and brand companies afraid of their reputations being sullied by
stories of worker abuse. Even so, by the 2010s large factories were
having difficulty recruiting and retaining migrant workers. The rapid
expansion of manufacturing, a shrinking rural population, a gender
imbalance favoring men, and the growth of service-sector female
employment meant that the pool of young women from the
countryside that the factories preferred was effectively tapped out.
Foxconn and other firms were forced to broaden their hiring
practices, turning to men—who now constitute the majority of
Foxconn employees—and older workers.64
Companies responded to rising wages and labor shortages by
building new plants in lower-wage regions of central China. Many
also turned to semicoercive measures to recruit and retain workers,
echoes—though much attenuated—of practices from the earliest
days of the factory. Some companies insisted that migrant workers
make “deposits” to obtain their jobs, which would only be refunded if
they left with permission of the firm. Similarly, companies withheld
parts of workers’ wages, promising to pay them at the end of the
year.65 Larger factories, under greater scrutiny and more attuned to
international standards, were less likely to engage in such tactics.
Instead, they turned to student interns as a new, cheap labor supply.
Chinese vocational schools require completion of a six-month or
one-year internship before graduation. Foxconn and other firms have
exploited this requirement by working with government and
educational authorities to have large numbers of student interns sent
to their factories, along with their teachers, who serve as de facto
foremen and forewomen. In the summer of 2010, Foxconn had
150,000 interns, including more than 28,000 making Apple products
at its Guanlan factory in Shenzhen. Generally, interns engage in
basic production jobs that have no relationship to their field of study.
Instead, the internships are simply enforced labor—students can
leave, but doing so jeopardizes their ability to graduate. Interns
receive basic entry-level wages but no benefits, making them
cheaper than regular employees. Though not bound labor like parish
apprentices in English textile mills, the students, who have become
an increasingly important component of the Chinese factory labor
force, are not exactly free workers hired through an open labor
market, either. Rather, they are mobilized by state-company
institutional arrangements that give them no real freedom of
choice.66

Hiding in Plain Sight

The giant factory in China and Vietnam has not received the kind of
notice it did in its earlier incarnations in England, the United States,
the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. Considerable attention has
been paid to the plight of migrant Chinese workers, particularly in
film, but much less to the factories they work in.67 Part of the reason
is the secretiveness of factory owners, who for the most part see
only a downside in allowing their facilities to be visited or
documented. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, companies
saw their factories as good advertising, symbols of their position at
the cutting edge of industry and a way to get their products better
known among consumers. Soviet and Eastern European authorities
viewed their giant factories as showcases for socialism, also
appealing, in a different way, to a broad public. By contrast, owners
of giant Chinese and Vietnamese manufacturing enterprises do not
want anything to do with the public. For the most part, their
customers are not end users but other companies. And as far as
those companies go, by and large the less known about the
manufacturing processes the better.
For one thing, companies like Apple and Adidas want to keep
secret proprietary methods and details about products about to be
introduced. For another, they fear criticism of the working conditions
under which their products are made, including by international
social-justice groups adept at circulating images and information
about worker abuse. While ordinary tourists could visit River Rouge,
and still can, the idea is unthinkable with Foxconn plants or most
other giant factories in China. Scholars, journalists, and
documentarians have great difficulty getting past factory gates, and
when they do, they are closely guided by minders, not given full
access. The leading media of their day were awash with images of
English textile mills, Lowell, Homestead, the Stalingrad Tractorstroi,
and Nowa Huta. By contrast, photographs of factories owned by
Foxconn, Pegatron, and Yue Yuen are surprisingly uncommon, and
pictures of what goes on inside them rarer still.68
Because the largest Asian factories do not serve as
advertisements or symbols for the products made within them, there
is no incentive to invest in distinctive or innovative architecture, as
leading manufacturers did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
There is no Belper Round Mill or FIAT Lingotto in China. Instead,
there are generic factory buildings, modern looking but utterly lacking
ornamentation or distinguishing features, even the distinctive
fenestration that once marked major manufacturing sites. Many
Chinese plants look like they could be suburban office buildings.
Bloomberg Businessweek described Foxconn City, with its multistory
buildings faced in gray or white concrete, as “drab and utilitarian.” In
recent decades, China has been the leading world center for hiring
celebrity architects to build unusual, large-scale, modernist
structures, but they are office buildings, concert halls, stadiums,
museums, libraries, shopping malls, and hotels, not factories.69
 Recently built factories in China and Vietnam are not held up as
sources of national pride, as steel mills in Braddock, Pennsylvania,
and Nowa Huta once had been. Unlike the showcase factory giants
of the past, the new massive factories in China and Vietnam are
largely foreign owned, run by foreign managers, making goods
largely for consumption out of the country. Rather than symbolizing
how advanced their host countries are, they serve as reminders of
how much catching up they have to do to match countries like South
Korea, Taiwan, and Japan in technology, design, and management.
Many leaders in the developing world, including China, do not
see having locally owned, large-scale manufacturing as their real
target nor as a badge of entry to the club of First World nations. They
are acutely aware that rich countries like the United States have
been shedding mass-production manufacturing, concentrating
instead on higher-end production of specialized goods, design,
technological innovation, marketing, services, and finance. Basic
manufacturing, for better or worse, seems like yesterday in much of
the advanced world, especially the United States, an attitude picked
up in less developed countries. Modernity does not mean the
assembly line for Chinese policy makers and elites. Rather, they see
mass manufacturing as a stage to go through and leave behind in
achieving modernity. Chinese officials still see a role for mass
production in raising living standards; they hope to hold on to lower-
end, lower-paid manufacturing by moving it into poorer interior
regions. But in wealthier parts of the country, including pioneer
special economic zones, the push is to move beyond basic
assembly-line production. In Shenzhen, the epicenter of the
explosion of Chinese industrial giantism, older factories are being
knocked down to build upscale residential and commercial
buildings.70
Seen more as a necessity than a triumph, giant Chinese and
Vietnamese factories are devoid of the heroic overtones associated
with earlier large-scale industrial projects or with modern Chinese
infrastructure projects like the Three Gorges Dam or the
skyscrapers, bridges, and high-speed rail lines that have remade the
landscape. In part, this is an issue of gender; modern apparel,
footwear, and electronic plants are heavily staffed by women, unlike
steel and automobile factories and big construction sites, where men
have dominated the workforce, and largely still do. Heavily female
industries sometimes have been associated with utopian dreams,
like the early New England textile mills, but Promethean daring
generally has been associated with brawny male workers, workers
resembling the common portrayal of Prometheus himself.71
The nature of the products that pour out of Asian factory giants
contributes to their banality. The twenty-first-century factories with
the most employees typically churn out small things, like coffeepots,
sneakers, or smartphones, which could fit into a small box or the
palm of a hand, not the large, awe-inspiring cannons, beams,
machines, vehicles, and aircraft produced by the largest nineteenth-
and twentieth-century factories. Billions of people worldwide may
want iPhones or Nike sneakers and see them as symbols of
modernity, but these accessories lack the world-historic aura of the
products that came out of the giant steel mills and auto plants of
yore.
Rather than representing an enlargement of the human spirit,
modern factory giants often seem to symbolize its diminishment.
Images of Chinese factories typically do not celebrate machinery or
man’s mastery of nature but instead document bland, boring
structures or portray repetitiveness—size as endless replication.72
What makes Burtynsky’s photographs of Chinese factories so
extraordinary is not the extension of human power through the
mastery of materials and machines or the beauty of the machinery
itself, themes of so many earlier factory portrayals, but the shrunken
scale of people, regimented in lines and grids within the vast
confines of factory sheds. Burtynsky, like Andreas Gursky, also
known for his spectacular photographs of factories and public
spaces in Vietnam and China, generally takes large-format pictures
from a distance, showing humans in almost abstract patterns, rarely
focusing on any individual, the way earlier factory photographers like
Margaret Bourke-White and Walker Evans did, at least
occasionally.73
Foxconn, Yue Yuen, and the other modern giants of Asian
manufacturing represent a culmination of the history of industrial
giantism. They build on the past, incorporating all the lessons about
assembling and coordinating masses of workers, the detailed
division of labor, externally powered equipment, mechanical transfer
of components and pacing of production, economies of scale, and
shaping every aspect of workers’ lives. All of the past lives in the
present. But the future does not, except in the most limited, technical
way. The giant factory no longer represents a vision of a new and
different world a-coming, of a utopian future or a new kind of
nightmare existence. Modernity, Foxconn-style, may be associated
with higher living standards and innovative technology but not with a
new phase of human history, as giant factories once were, whether it
be the coming of a new type of class society in England and the
United States or a new type of classless society in the Soviet Union
and Poland. The future has already arrived, and we seem to be
stuck with it.
 CONCLUSION

O UTSIZED FACTORIES HAVE BEEN WITH US FOR THREE centuries. But no

individual factory has lasted anywhere nearly that long. The Lombes’
Derby Silk Mill, the first modern, large factory, also proved one of the
longest lasting; with ups and downs, workers continued to produce
silk thread in the mill until 1890, a run of 169 years. By contrast,
Awkright’s first cotton mill in Cromford all but shut down within
seventy years. The first mill complex in Lowell, Massachusetts, built
by the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, outlasted its successors,
producing textiles for 134 years. Amoskeag, once the largest textile
complex in the world, closed after barely a century. The pioneering
Cambria Iron Works in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, operated until
1992, a total of 140 years, thirty-five years longer than the
Homestead Steel Works, the scene of epic labor battles.1
Some landmark factory giants have kept going. Though Dodge
Main, the Chevy complex in Flint, and FIAT’s Lingotto plant all shut
down decades ago, River Rouge remains part of Ford’s now
decentralized production system, with some six thousand workers
pouring out F-150 trucks, the best-selling vehicle in the United
States.2 The Stalingrad Tractorstroi, Magnitogorsk, and Nowa Huta
likewise continue to operate.
One hundred or one hundred-and-fifty years might seem like a
long time, but many other institutions routinely function in their
original buildings for far longer: parliaments, prisons, hospitals,
churches, mosques, colleges, prep schools, even opera companies,
to name a few. Seen from a distance of time, giant factories lose the
solidity, the air of permanence, that so impressed contemporaries.
Few last more than a lifetime or two.
The very dynamism of modernity that creates the giant factory
leads to its demise. Giant factories have a natural life cycle. They
arrive with explosive force, transforming not only production methods
but whole societies. Their success generally rests at least in part on
the exploitation of workers previously outside the labor market—
children and adolescents, small farmers and peasants, nomads,
prisoners, and wards of the state. During a period of primitive
accumulation, workers could be exploited, sometimes brutally,
through long hours, low pay, and harsh conditions, because they
lacked the freedom of movement, legal rights, or ready alternatives.
Radical factory innovations have been followed by periods of
incremental improvement or stagnation. The vast amounts of capital
tied up in existing buildings and machinery promotes institutional
conservatism, allowing new competitors using more advanced
methods and technology to become more efficient producers.
Meanwhile, worker protest and pressure from reformers pushes up
labor costs. Some companies succeed in extending the high profits
of primitive accumulation by repeatedly recruiting new workforces,
new waves of young workers or immigrants from afar. But at some
point, a combination of archaic technology, aging buildings, and
rising labor costs forces a decision about whether to modernize, start
over elsewhere, or milk a property and then shut it down.
The owners of the Boott mills in Lowell were typical. In 1902, a
consultant they hired reported, “Your old buildings have perhaps
served well their purpose in the past, but they were long ago out of
date, and are of no value now. . . . I therefore recommend the entire
demolition of the present structures, or at least so much of them as
are dangerous to work in, or would in any way interfere with the best
arrangement and construction of a first-class new mill.” But at a time
when many New England mill owners were investing in factories in
the lower-wage South, Boott’s owners decided, instead of building a
“first-class new mill,” to limp along using their dangerous old facility,
where workers kept making textiles and profits for investors for
another half century.3
 In the socialist world, cost calculations played out differently,
because workers had greater ideological and political standing and
big factories were more central to social welfare systems. Closing
factories, or even downsizing them, presented huge social and
political risks that states shied away from, instead keeping bloated
workforces at increasingly uncompetitive plants. Even today, the
Chinese government moves gingerly in its prolonged effort to shut
down unneeded or inefficient state-owned factory giants. But the
collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the move of most of what remains of
the communist world toward market economies has brought a
convergence in industrial practices between the once-socialist and
always-capitalist spheres.
Taken together, the overlapping cycles of giant factory
development, spread across time and space, represents continuity
and progress, with ever bigger and more efficient manufacturing
operations appearing, which nonetheless retain a clear genetic
heritage going back to the Derwent Valley three hundred years ago.
Imitation, licensing, and theft have allowed each wave of factory
developers to incorporate past innovations, as industrial giantism
leapt across oceans and political divides. But if resilient and durable
as a totality, industrial giantism in any given place has proven
unsustainable. Specific communities have experienced the giant
factory not as a continuity of progress but as an arc of disruptive
innovation, growth, decline, and abandonment. As historians
Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott wrote in a book about
American deindustrialization, “the industrial culture forged in the
furnace of fixed capital investment was itself a temporary condition.
What millions of working men and women might have experienced
as solid, dependable, decently waged work really only lasted for a
brief moment.”4 Especially in areas dominated by a single industry,
when the cycle of factory giantism moved on, prolonged devastation
resulted, even as somewhere else on the globe giant factories were
creating new possibilities and wealth.
The current cycle of industrial giantism shares much with earlier
iterations, but it also differs in important ways. For one thing, the arc
from development to decline has become shorter. Just thirty years
after Foxconn built its first factory in Shenzhen, the region has
passed its peak as a center of large-scale manufacturing, as
companies, including Foxconn, move on to other areas of China and
elsewhere for cheaper land and labor. For another thing, many
workers in the new giant factories do not share the illusion of
permanence that workers in earlier plants might have had, expecting
to spend most of their lives elsewhere, back where they came from
or in some other, better situation.
Though still seen as vehicles for profit and national economic
development, giant factories are far less likely these days to be
celebrated or held up as models for the larger society than they once
were. Often, they are all but unknown to the purchasers of the goods
they make, who are likely to be many miles and national borders
away. Once, a buyer of a Singer sewing machine or a Ford Model T
knew precisely where it was made. Today, the purchaser of a
sneaker or a refrigerator or even an automobile probably has no idea
what country it was manufactured in, let alone what factory.
Production—work—once proudly associated with the physical goods
we need and cherish is now largely hidden away.
As a global phenomenon, the giant factory may have reached its
apogee. While very big factories continue to be built, many
manufacturers have moved in other directions, seeking to lower
labor costs and avoid the possibility that—as has happened in the
past—their workers will take advantage of the concentration of
production to assert their power. Continuing mechanization and
automation is one path, the cause in the United States of much
greater loss of factory employment than the movement of plants
abroad. Even Foxconn, the world’s largest employer of factory
workers, is experimenting with greater automation. At its smartphone
factory in Kunshan, China, not far from Shanghai, the company has
invested heavily in robots, allowing it to reduce its number of
employees from 110,000 to 50,000, still a very large workforce but
no longer near the top of the list of the world’s largest factories.5
Other companies have turned to many small and midsize factories in
very low wage regions, like Bangladesh, seemingly turning back the
clock, as young women, freshly arrived from rural villages, make
goods for global giants like Wal-Mart and H&M in low-tech, crowded,
and often extraordinarily dangerous factories that more resemble
late-nineteenth-century American sweatshops than modern Chinese
factory giants.6
But if the giant factory has lost some of its allure, there still are
entrepreneurs eager to begin the cycle again in fresh territory,
unsullied by a history of labor activism or environmental spoilage.
Huajian Shoes, a Chinese firm that manufactures footwear for
international brands like Guess, in 2012 opened a factory in Ethiopia,
where in 2014 the basic after-tax minimum wage was $30 a month,
compared to an average manufacturing wage in China of $560.
Within two years it had 3,500 workers. But the company had far
grander plans, centered on a proposed new complex near Addis
Ababa that would employ 30,000 workers and include worker
dormitories, a resort, a technical university, a hotel, and a hospital,
all on a site ringed by a replica of the Great Wall of China and
shaped like a woman’s shoe. In October 2016, Huajian announced
plans to move its production of shoes for Ivanka Trump’s line from its
factory in Dongguan to Ethiopia.7
Whatever the future of the giant factory might prove to be, it
already has left behind a transformed world. In some ways, industrial
giants have fulfilled the dreams of their promoters, having been part
and parcel of an extraordinarily rapid and large improvement in
social well-being, comfort, longevity, material possession, and
security, one without precedent in human history. The Industrial
Revolution, which the giant factory pushed forward, contributed to
not only higher living standards but also the creation of the modern
state, urbanized society, and a transformed face of the planet.
It also helped create a “new man.” Perhaps not exactly a new
man at one with the automatic machinery and industrial processes of
the giant factory as envisioned, in their own ways, by Henry Ford,
Alexei Gastev, and Antonio Gramsci. But a new man and a new
woman nonetheless, with a time sense dictated by the needs of
mass, coordinated activity and the rhythms of machinery; with a
commitment to the idea of progress through technical innovation and
increasing efficiency; worshiping factory products and an industrial
aesthetic; and taking for granted the idea of sacrifice for future gain.
In short, the giant factory helped produce modernity, the now we
inhabit still, even if it no longer has the awe-inspiring novelty it once
had. And it is a modernity that transcends particular political and
economic systems. Usually, the large-scale factory is portrayed as a
product of capitalism, a stage in its historic development. Yet, as this
study shows, to portray the giant factory as strictly a capitalist
institution requires eliding much of its history, including some of the
largest factories ever built. The giant factory was central to both
capitalist and socialist development, not only economically but
socially, culturally, and politically as well. The factory is never just the
same within different cultures and social systems, but its essential
features have proved remarkably stable and enduring, as it has
roamed the world, setting down in places seemingly utterly different
from one another. The giant factory, rather than a feature of
capitalism, turns out to be a feature of modernity, in all its variations.8
The giant factory has made dreams reality, but it has rendered
nightmares real, too. In every society, the great productivity of the
giant factory has rested on great sacrifices, almost always unevenly
shared. In the capitalist world, it was the workers in the factory itself
who most obviously suffered, exploited to produce rivers of products
and profits. But the workers who produced the raw materials for the
factory, including, at various times, the slave growers of cotton, coal
miners, iron miners, rubber harvesters, and today miners of rare-
earth elements needed for electronic components, suffered, too. So
did workers using older methods, forced to compete with factory
production.
In the socialist world, factory workers toiled hard, but often held a
relatively privileged place in society, with better housing, food, and
benefits than other citizens. The greatest sacrifices in the Soviet
Union and Maoist China came distant from the factory itself, in the
countryside, where peasants were squeezed hard, sometimes to the
point of death, to generate the resources needed to build industrial
giants.
For a few decades after World War II, in Europe and the United
States, the giant factory became a vehicle for an extraordinary
improvement in the pay, benefits, and security of workers (though
the actual work remained physically draining, monotonous, and
alienating). Largely because of unionization, workers shared the
great productivity gains of large-scale industry, a moment of relative
equality and democracy in the long history of capitalist society. In the
light of the past four decades of stagnating working-class income
and growing insecurity, the post–World War II era in retrospect looks
golden, and the critiques of the factory during it all but forgotten. But
the ugly residue of the giant factory is difficult to ignore.
Just as the costs of creating and operating the giant factory were
unevenly shared, so has been the environmental and social
wreckage it has left behind. No place better symbolizes the
nightmarish afterlife of industrial giantism than Flint, Michigan, once
the center of the great General Motors empire, now a shrunken,
deeply impoverished community, given so little respect that state and
local officials poisoned the population with lead-contaminated water
to save money during a state-imposed administratorship. The toxic
fate of Flint can be found with variations around the globe, in the
depressed former industrial centers of the American Midwest,
northern England, northern France, Eastern Europe, Russia,
Ukraine, and northern China, with their plagues of unemployment,
poverty, contaminated earth and water, drug and alcohol use, and
despair.
What comes next? It is too soon to declare the giant factory over
as a global institution. But in many cities, areas, and nations, its
import has vastly shrunk or all but disappeared. Cities deserted by
industry have tried to reinvent themselves, frequently hoping to use
depressed land prices and abandoned industrial structures as the
basis for reemergence as cultural and entrepreneurial centers, a
strategy that has yielded, at best, modest returns.9 On a national
level, capital in Great Britain, the United States, and other pioneer
industrial countries has increasingly shifted from production to
finance, enabling continued economic gains from the factory system,
but now through financing the system and its many ancillary
activities rather than through actual operation, a strategy that has
yielded great wealth for a few, growing economic inequality, and
deep social fissures.
If the coming of the giant factory was associated with visions of
utopia (along with dystopian fears), its passing has been associated
with social malaise and shriveled imagination. The Industrial
Revolution and the giant factory have left in their wake a continuing
belief in a teleology of progress and techno-determinism. But for
many, the future has already come and gone, perhaps leaving them
with sneakers and a smartphone, but with little hope or belief in their
ability to create a new world, a post-factory world that builds on the
extraordinary advances of the giant factory to forge a new and
different kind of modernity, one more democratic and more
sustainable, socially, economically, and, perhaps most important,
ecologically.
We are all in this, all implicated. In 2016, the second-largest
holder of stock in Hon Hai Precision Industry, the major owner of
Foxconn Technology Company, was The Vanguard Group, Inc., a
mutual fund company with a benign image that holds the savings
and retirement accounts of more than twenty million people
(including this author). Very few of them were aware that they owned
a piece of a factory from the roof of which workers jumped to their
deaths in despair. (Vanguard also was the third-largest holder of
stock in Pegatron Corporation, Foxconn’s biggest rival, and the
ninth-largest holder of stock in footwear maker Yue Yuen.) Even
funds that claim to be socially responsible have dirty hands; the
largest holding of Calvert Investments, “founded on the belief that
investment capital, properly stewarded, could improve the world for
its less powerful inhabitants,” is Apple, Foxconn’s partner and
biggest customer.10 And of course, even if you do not own a tiny
piece of a giant factory through a retirement fund or a savings
account, it is almost certain that you own a product made in one.
The giant factory has left us with a complex legacy and many
lessons. It demonstrated in practical, concrete ways the ability of
humankind to exert mastery over nature (at least for a while), in the
process vastly improving the standard of living for billions of people
but also despoiling the earth. It illuminated the deep ties between
coercion and freedom, exploitation and material advance. It revealed
the beauty to be found not only in the natural world, but in the
manmade world, in labor and its products. It demonstrated the deep
yearning of working people for control over their lives and a degree
of justice, as decade after decade, century after century, they
launched struggles against exploiting employers and oppressive
states, often against enormous odds. But perhaps, at this moment,
the most important lesson of the giant factory is the one that is
easiest to forget; that it is possible to reinvent the world. It has been
done before, and it can be done again.
 Acknowledgments

T HIS BOOK WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE WITHOUT THE work of generations of

scholars, journalists, and writers who shared a fascination with big
factories and their social and cultural importance. Their publications,
cited in my notes, collectively represent a stupendous intellectual
achievement, indispensable for understanding the past and present.
I owe them all a great debt.
As I finished this study, at the same time that my father, Harold
Freeman, reached his one-hundredth birthday, I realized how much
his sensibility pervades it. Throughout his life he combined a deep
interest in technical matters with a critical political stance and broad
familiarity with European and American culture, a kind of
Enlightenment outlook once common in the working-class milieu in
which he grew up. I vividly remember him taking me along as a child
on a work-related visit to a glass factory, watching a worker pull a still
glowing-red Coke bottle off the line, stretching and twisting it with
tongs for our amusement. In that bit of magic, I suspect, lies the
origin of this project.
I have been fortunate to learn about the factory and its
implications not only from scholars but from workers and unionists,
too. My summer sojourn as an eighteen-year-old in a cosmetics
factory opened my eyes to the dense human drama that takes place
within the walls of a production site, the combination of boredom,
pride, fatigue, and solidarity; the gossip, storytelling, and arguing; the
differing experiences and beliefs rubbing against one another; the
skills of work, survival, and maneuver that working women and men
have to master. In the years since, in other jobs and in my work with
the labor movement, I have been privileged to learn more about what
the poet Philip Levine called “What Work Is.” I am grateful to the
many labor activists and workers who, often without realizing it,
enriched my understanding of toil, unionism, politics, and working-
class life.
An embryonic version of this study appeared in the journal New
Labor Forum as one of a series of columns I wrote with Steve Fraser
under the heading “In the Rearview Mirror.” Steve came up with the
idea of a column that looked at historic precedents for current
events. His notion of how to link the past and the present sparked
the idea for what became Behemoth, which I sometimes think of as
one of our columns writ very large. The encouragement of my
colleagues at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education
and Labor Studies at the City University of New York, who heard a
lunchtime talk I gave on the history of giant factories, convinced me
the subject was worth pursuing further. Brian Palmer pushed me
along when he suggested I submit a version of that talk for
publication in Labour/Le Travail, the lively, sophisticated journal, of
which he was the long-time editor.
A year-long fellowship at the Advanced Research Collaborative
at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York made
possible research for this book. I am greatly thankful to its director,
Donald Robotham, and my fellow fellows for a remarkably
stimulating and fruitful year. Additional support for this project was
provided by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional
Staff Congress and The City University of New York.
Mark Levinson from the Service Employees International Union
and Cathy Feingold from the AFL-CIO, along with Robert Szewczyk
and Dorota Miklos from NSZZ Solidarność, helped arrange my
meeting with Solidarity union leaders in Nowa Huta. Stanisław
Lebiest, Roman Natkonski, Krysztof Pfister, and their colleagues
(with able translation by Piotr Smreczynski) were extraordinarily
generous in devoting their time to discussing the history of the plant
and their union and giving me a tour of the mill. May Ying Chen and
Ruting Chen from the Murphy Institute and Lu Zhang from Temple
University made extensive efforts to arrange a visit to Chinese
factories. Though in the end the trip proved impossible, I deeply
appreciate their attempts and the great deal I learned from them
about China.
Many others helped along the way. Early on, Carol Quirke gave
me valuable suggestions for reading about industrial photography.
Dave Gillespie, John Thayer, and Maayan Brodsky provided
research assistance. Josh Brown was extraordinarily generous in
helping me with illustrations, sharing his incomparable knowledge of
nineteenth-century graphics and personally scanning images to
make sure they came out right. My students at Queens College put
up with good humor my use of them as guinea pigs for many of the
ideas in this book, in a global history course that focused on factories
and industrialization. Daniel Esterman accompanied me on a
research trip to Lowell and engaged in numerous discussions of this
project as it unfolded, providing a sounding board and many good
ideas. I also talked about factories on repeated occasions with Edgar
Masters, whose long career in the textile industry and efforts to
preserve industrial sites have made him a repository of information
and insight.
I am especially grateful to colleagues who read drafts of chapters
about places I was writing about for the first time: Timothy Alborn
(chapter 1), Kate Brown (chapter 5), and Xiaodan Zhang (chapter 7).
Their expertise and advice proved invaluable, even when my
interpretations differed from theirs. These chapters are much
improved as a result of their generosity. Jack Metzgar once again
became an unflagging supporter as I worked on this book, reading
every chapter in draft, providing detailed comments, and, most
importantly, reassuring me that I was on to something when my
doubts swelled. No one could ask for a more generous colleague
and friend.
Steve Fraser was there at the end, just as he was at the
beginning, reading the full manuscript and responding as I have
come to take for granted, with comments both detailed and
sweeping, raising historical questions and seeing connections I
missed and making suggestions for structural changes that greatly
strengthened the narrative. His friendship and our collaboration over
the years have been enormously important to me. Kim Phillips-Fein
put aside other things to read the first chapters of the manuscript as I
approached the finish line, helping clarify and deepen them.
Nearly two decades ago, Matt Weiland edited a book I wrote and
it was a terrific experience. The opportunity for a reprise has been
one of the pleasures of this project. Once again, Matt got right away
what I was trying to do, encouraging me to be bolder and more
expansive, combining a sense of adventure with some necessary
realism. Remy Cawley shepherded me through the publication
process with good cheer, good advice, and a remarkable ability to
keep track of never-ending details. I want to thank as well William
Hudson, for his copyediting; Brian Mulligan, for the beautiful design
of the book; and everyone at W. W. Norton for their extraordinary
professionalism.
Finally, I want to thank my family for their love and support,
especially my partner through the many years, Deborah Ellen Bell,
who among many other things read the manuscript for this book and
provided her usual good advice, and our wonderful daughters, Julia
Freeman Bell and Lena Freeman Bell.
 Notes

Introduction
1. Most manufacturing jobs are in factories, but not all. Some are in retail
establishments, like bakeries, or even in homes. U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics, “Employment, Hours and Earnings from the Current Employment
Statistics survey (National),” http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet
(accessed Sept. 24, 2016).
2. Heather Long, “U.S. Has Lost 5 Million Manufacturing Jobs Since 2000,” CNN
Money, Mar. 29, 2016, http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/29/news/economy/us-
manufacturing-jobs/; The World Bank, World Data Bank, “Employment in
Industry and World Development Indicators” (based on International Labour
Organization data), http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.IND.EMPL.ZS, and
http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?
source=2&series=SL.IND.EMPL.ZS&country= (accessed Sept. 24, 2016);
Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, 2017 (New York: Skyhorse
Publishing, 2016), 179.
3. For life on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, see Fernand Braudel, The
Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol.
1 (New York: Harper and Row, 1981) (French life expectancy, 90), and E. J.
Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: New American
Library, 1962), 22–43. See also Roderick Floud, Kenneth Wachter, and
Annabel Gregory, Height, Health and History: Nutritional Status in the United
Kingdom, 1750–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 292;
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2014), 71–72; and Central Intelligence Agency, World
Factbook, 2017, 303, 895, 943.
4. Tim Strangleman, “‘Smokestack Nostalgia,’ ‘Ruin Porn’ or Working-Class
Obituary: The Role and Meaning of Deindustrial Representation,” International
Labor and Working-Class History 84 (Fall 2013), 23–37; Marshall Berman,
“Dancing with America: Philip Roth, Writer on the Left,” New Labor Forum 9
(Fall–Winter 2001), 53–54.
5. “modern, adj. and n.” and “modernity, n.” OED Online. September 2016.
Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/120618 (accessed
September 17, 2016); Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture
and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 208–09;
Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” in M. Passerin
d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, eds., Habermas and the Unfinished Project of
Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of
Heresy, From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (New York: W. W. Norton,
2008).
6. Size can be measured in different ways. I have defined it by number of
employees. As a labor historian, that seems natural, coming from an interest in
the lived experience of workers and class relations. There are other useful
ways to define scale that would lead to the selection of a different set of
factories to study. If we were to look at the size of factory buildings, in the
current era the massive aircraft factories of Boeing and Airbus would rise to the
fore, huge structures that go on and on but have within them fewer workers
than many more compact plants. To understand the ecological impact of large
factories, we might define size by the acreage of the sites on which production
facilities are located. By that standard, chemical plants and, especially, atomic-
fuel and weapons complexes exceed in size most of the factories discussed in
this book. My definition of size is somewhat arbitrary, but it serves well the
focus of this study on the linkage between the factory and modernity.
7. Gillian Darley, Factory (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), and Nina Rappaport,
Vertical Urban Factory (New York: Actar, 2016) are exceptions, but are heavily
architectural in their tilt.

Chapter 1
“LIKE MINERVA FROM THE BRAIN OF JUPITER”

1. Prior to 1721, only a few British industries had centralized production facilities
and these, by later standards, were quite small, like the Nottingham framework
knitting workshops that employed several dozen workers apiece. In Central
and Western Europe, there were a few large-scale, unmechanized
manufacturing operations. Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures: Industry,
Innovation and Work in Britain, 1700–1820 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985),
212; Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism,
15th–18th Century, vol. II (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 329–38. U.S. figure
calculated from 1850 census data in U.S. Census Office, Manufacturers of the
United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1865), 730.
2. The Derby silk mill is generally considered the first factory in England, the
pioneer in the Industrial Revolution. There were at least a few earlier
production facilities that had some if not all the characteristics of modern
factories, including the sixteenth-century silk mills in Bologna, which developed
some of the machinery and organization that the Lombes later copied. Anthony
Calladine, “Lombe’s Mill: An Exercise in Reconstruction,” Industrial Archeology
Review XVI, 1 (Autumn 1993), 82, 86.
3. Calladine, “Lombe’s Mill,” 82, 89; William Henry Chaloner, People and
Industries (London, Frank Cass and Co., Ltd., 1963), 14–15. An 1891 fire
destroyed most of the building, which was reconstructed on a smaller scale. It
now houses the Derby Silk Mill museum.
4. S. R. H. Jones, “Technology, Transaction Costs, and the Transition to Factory
Production in the British Silk Industry, 1700–1870,” Journal of Economic
History XLVII (1987), 75; Chaloner, People and Industries, 9–18; Calladine,
“Lombe’s Mill,” 82, 87–88; R. B. Prosser and Susan Christian, “Lombe, Sir
Thomas (1685–1739),” rev. Maxwell Craven, Susan Christian, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004);
online ed., Jan. 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16956.
5. John Guardivaglio, one of the Italian workers who had come back with John
Lombe, helped set up the mill near Manchester. Tram could be made from raw
silk imported from Persia, easier to get than the higher-quality Italian or
Chinese silk needed for organzine. Calladine, “Lombe’s Mill,” 87, 96–97; Berg,
Age of Manufactures, 202–03; Jones, “Technology, Transaction Costs, and the
Transition to Factory Production,” 77.
6. Daniel Defoe, A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, 3rd. ed., vol. III
(London: J. Osborn, 1742), 67; Charles Dickens, Hard Times for These Times
([1854] London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 7, 1.
7. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, vol. III (London: J.M. Dent &
Sons, 1906), 121.
8. Though India was the most prominent center of cotton textile production, there
were others, including Southeast Asia, the Arabian Gulf, and the Ottoman
Empire, where artisans turned out imitations of Indian cottons. Prasannan
Parthasarathi, “Cotton Textiles in the Indian Subcontinent, 1200–1800,” 17–41,
and Giorgio Riello, “The Globalization of Cotton Textiles: Indian Cottons,
Europe, and the Atlantic World, 1600–1850,” 274, in The Spinning World: A
Global history of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850, ed. Riello and Parthasarathi
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 17–41.
9. Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), 126; Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of
Manufactures or An Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and Commercial
Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain (1835; New York: Augustus M.
Kelley, 1967), 12.
10. D. T. Jenkins, “Introduction,” in D. T. Jenkins, The Textile Industries (Volume 8
of the Industrial Revolutions, ed. R. A. Church and E. A. Wrigley) (Cambridge,
MA: Blackwell, 1994), xvii; Riello, Cotton, 127.
11. Riello, Cotton, 172–73, 176; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 205.
12. Fustians were easier to produce than all-cotton fabric because flax warps were
less likely than cotton to break during weaving.
13. Riello, “The Globalization of Cotton Textiles, 337–39; Riello, Cotton, 217, 219.
14. In the 1850s, the United States supplied 77 percent of the raw cotton imported
by Britain, 90 percent by France, 92 percent by Russia, and 60 percent by the
German states. Between 1820 and 1860 the number of slaves in Mississippi
and Louisiana, mostly growing cotton, rose from 101,878 to 768,357. R. S.
Fitton and A. P. Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights 1758–1830: A
Study of the Early Factory System (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1958), 347–48; Riello, Cotton, 188, 191, 195 (Marx quote), 200–207, 259;
Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” in Frederick
Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (Chicago:
Lawrence Hill, 1999), 197; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History
(New York: Knopf, 2014), 243; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery
and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2013), 256.
15. Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H.
Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, [1835]), 11; R. L. Hills, “Hargreaves,
Arkwright and Crompton, ‘Why Three Inventors?’ ” Textile History 10 (1979),
114–15.
16. Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 115; Deborah Valenze, The First
Industrial Woman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 78; David S.
Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial
Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1969), 57. European commentators and
historians long claimed that Indian wages were far below British ones, leading
to lower prices for cotton products, but recently some historians have
challenged this view. For a restatement of the orthodox position, see Beckert,
Empire of Cotton, 64; for a reassessment suggesting near parity of wages, see
Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global
Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), 35–46.
17. Jenkins, “Introduction,” x; Franklin F. Mendels, “Proto-Industrialization: The
First Phase of the Industrialization Process,” Journal of Economic History
XXXII (1972), 241–61; S. D. Chapman, “Financial Restraints on the Growth of
Firms in the Cotton Industry, 1790–1850,” Textile History 5 (1974), 50–69;
Berg, Age of Manufactures, 182.
18. Hills, “Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton,” 118–23; Berg, Age of
Manufactures, 236; Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 61–
68, 76–78, 94–97; Adam Menuge, “The Cotton Mills of the Derbyshire Derwent
and Its Tributaries,” Industrial Archeology Review XVI (1) (Autumn 1993), 38.
19. Berg, Age of Manufactures, 236, 239, 244, 248, 258; George Unwin, Samuel
Oldknow and the Arkwrights (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1924),
30–32, 71, 124–25; Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 85; E. P. Thompson, The
Making of the English Working Class ([1963] London: Pelican Books, 1968),
327, 335; Jones, “Technology, Transaction Costs, and the Transition to Factory
Production,” 89–90.
20. Chaloner, People and Industries, 14–15; Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts
and the Arkwrights, 98–99, 192–95, 224–25.
21. Small four-spindle, hand-powered spinning frames, built from Arkwright’s plans
for a demonstration model, can be seen at the museums in Cromford and
Belper. Hills, “Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton,” 121; Berg, Age of
Manufactures, 236, 239, 242, 246; Menuge, “The Cotton Mills of the
Derbyshire Derwent,” 56 (Arkwright quote).
22. John S. Cohen, “Managers and Machinery: An Analysis of the Rise of Factory
Production,” Australian Economic Papers 20 (1981), 27–28; Berg, Age of
Manufactures, 19, 24, 40–42.
23. Jenkins, “Introduction,” xv.
24. Berg, Age of Manufactures, 40–41, 231–32, 282–83; Pat Hudson, The
Genesis of Industrial Capital: A Study of the West Riding Wool Textile Industry
c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 137; Jones,
“Technology, Transaction Costs, and the Transition to Factory Production,” 89–
90; Roger Lloyd-Jones and A. A. Le Roux, “The Size of Firms in the Cotton
Industry: Manchester 1815–1840,” The Economic History Review, new series,
vol. 33, no. 1 (Feb. 1980), 77.
25. V. A. C. Gatrell, “Labour, Power, and the Size of Firms in Lancashire Cotton in
the Second Quarter of the Nineteenth Century,” Economic History Review, new
series, vol. 30, no. 1 (Feb. 1977), 96, 98, 112; Jenkins, “Introduction,” xv.
26. Berg, Age of Manufactures, 23–24; Thompson, Making of the English Working
Class, 208–11; Robert Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England,
1830–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3–4.
27. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers, 4th ed.
(London: Charles Knight, 1835), 211–23.
28. Gatrell, “Labour, Power, and the Size of Firms,” 96–97, 108; Alfred Marshall,
Principles of Economics (1890; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1920), 8th
ed., IV.XI.7, http://www.econlib.org/library/Marshall/marP25.html#Bk.IV,Ch.XI.
29. Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 184–85.
30. Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 41; Jones, “Technology, Transaction Costs,
and the Transition to Factory Production,” 71–74; Jenkins, “Introduction,” xiii;
Berg, Age of Manufactures, 23–24, 190, 246; Hudson, Genesis of Industrial
Capital, 70–71. Marx discussed the issue of economies of scale and the rise of
the factory system at great length in Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political
Economy, vol. 1 ([1867] New York: International Publishers, 1967), chap. 13
and 14 (“Cooperation” and “Division of Labour and Manufacture”).
31. Jenkins, “Introduction,” x–xii; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 24; Hudson, Genesis
of Industrial Capital, 81, 260; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class,
299, 302.
32. Gatrell, “Labour, Power, and the Size of Firms,” 96–97, 107.
33. On British forms of wealth, see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First
Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 113–20, 129–31.
Willersley Castle now is a Christian Guild hotel. Fitton and Wadsworth, The
Strutts and the Arkwrights, 91, 94–98, 102, 169, 246; R. S. Fitton, The
Arkwrights: Spinners of Fortune ([1989] Matlock, Eng.: Derwent Valley Mills
Educational Trust, 2012), 224–96; Frances Trollope, The Life and Adventures
of Michael Armstrong the Factory Boy ([1840] London: Frank Cass and
Company Limited, 1968), quote on 76.
34. Local church towers, however, did rival the mills in height. Mark Girouard,
Cities & People: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1985), 211–18; Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and Power:
Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types (London:
Routledge, 1993), 263.
35. Fitton, The Arkwrights, 30, 50, 81.
36. Fitton, The Arkwrights, 30, 81; Thomas A. Markus, “Factories, to 1850,” The
Oxford Companion to Architecture, vol. 1, ed. Patrick Goode (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 304–05; Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the
Arkwrights, 200–207, 211–12; Malcolm Dick, “Charles Bage, the Flax Industry
and Shrewsbury’s Iron-Framed Mills,” accessed Mar. 29, 2017,
http://www.revolutionaryplayers.org.uk/charles-bage-the-flax-industry-and-
shrewsburys-iron-framed-mills/; Markus, Buildings and Power, 266–67, 270–
71, 281–82; Menuge, “The Cotton Mills of the Derbyshire Derwent,” 52–56.
37. A. J. Taylor, “Concentration and Specialization in the Lancashire Cotton
Industry, 1825–1850,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, I (1949), 119–20;
Markus, Buildings and Power, 275. Not all power looms were situated in sheds;
some manufacturers built multistory weaving mills. See Colum Giles, “Housing
the Loom, 1790–1850: A Study of Industrial Building and Mechanization in a
Transitional Period,” Industrial Archeology Review XVI (1) (Autumn 1993), 30–
33. On the spread of the sawtooth roof, first called the “weave shed roof,” to
the United States, see Betsy Hunter Bradley, The Works: The Industrial
 Architecture of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999),
192–93.
38. The first Cromford mills, though near the Derwent, were powered by a sough
draining a lead mine and a brook, not the river itself. Fitton, The Arkwrights,
28–29.
39. Steam power was first used in a cotton mill in 1789, but water remained the
most common power source for several decades. An 1870 industrial census
found that cotton mills used more power from steam engines than any other
industry. Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 103; Unwin,
Samuel Oldknow, 119; Markus, Buildings and Power, 265–66; Parthasarathi,
Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not, 155; Dickens, Hard Times, 22, 69;
W. Cooke Taylor, Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire,
2nd ed. (London: Duncan and Malcolm, 1842), 1–2.
40. In the first report of the Factory Commission, Edwin Chadwick described an
elevator as “an ascending and descending room, moved by steam.” Ure, The
Philosophy of Manufactures, 32–33, 44–54 (“upright tunnels” on 45); Markus,
Buildings and Power, 275, 280–81; Gray, The Factory Question, 92–93.
41. The Round Mill, built between 1803 and 1813, remained standing until 1959,
when in the course of its demolition four workers were killed. Fitton and
Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 221; Markus, Buildings and Power,
125; Humphrey Jennings, Pandemonium, 1660–1886: The Coming of the
Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, ed. Mary-Lou Jennings and
Charles Madge (New York: Free Press, 1985), 98; Belper Derbyshire, Historical
& Genealogical Records, “Belper & the Strutts: The Mills,” July 20, 2011,
http://www.belper-research.com/strutts_mills/mills.html.
42. The housing Arkwright built in Cromford is still occupied. The row houses had
lofts for weavers, who bought yarn from Arkwright and whose wives and
children worked in his mill. Fitton, The Arkwrights, 29, 187; Arkwright Society
presentation at Cromford Mills, May 15, 2015; Fitton and Wadsworth, The
Strutts and the Arkwrights, 97, 102–04, 246; Chris Aspin, The First Industrial
Society; Lancashire, 1750–1850 (Preston, UK: Carnegie Publishing, 1995),
184; Unwin, Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights, 95.
43. Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 246, 252; Unwin,
Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights, 191; Fredrich Engels, The Condition of
the Working Class in England, trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 205.
44. Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 240–44; Unwin, Samuel
Oldknow and the Arkwrights, 178.
45. Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 150, 283–84, 312; Fitton, The
Arkwrights, 146, 151; John Brown, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, An Orphan
Boy (1832), reprinted in James R. Simmons, Jr., ed., Factory Lives: Four
 Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiographies (Peterborough, ON:
Broadview Editions, 2007), 169; Cohen, “Managers and Machinery,” 25;
Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 174, 199; Marx,
Capital, vol. 1, 422. The classic study of the change from task-oriented to time-
oriented work is E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial
Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (Dec. 1967), pp. 56–97.
46. Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 43; Ellen Johnston, Autobiography (1869),
reprinted in Simmons, Jr., ed., Factory Lives, 308; Aspin, First Industrial
Society, 92; “knocker, n.” OED Online. September 2014. Oxford University
Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/104097; “knock, v.” OED Online.
September 2014. Oxford University Press.
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/104090.
47. Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 97; Gray, The Factory
Question, 136; Giorgio Riello and Patrick K. O’Brien, “The Future Is Another
Country: Offshore Views of the British Industrial Revolution,” Journal of
Historical Sociology 22 (1) (March 2009), 4–5.
48. Taylor, Notes of a Tour, 4.
49. Robert Southey, Journal of a Tour in Scotland in 1819, quoted in Jennings,
Pandemonium, 156; Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working
Class (New York: Random House, 1974), 34–40, 60–61; Riello and O’Brien,
“The Future Is Another Country,” 6; Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or the Two
Nations (London: Henry Colburn, 1845), 195; Karl Marx, The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852; New York: International Publishers, 1963),
15.
50. Trollope, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, 236–37; Flora
Tristan, Promenades dans Londres (Paris, 1840), quoted in Riello and O’Brien,
“The Future Is Another Country,” 5.
51. Dickens, Hard Times, 69; Aspin, First Industrial Society, 4, 239–41.
52. It was a measure of how quickly the system was spreading that Taylor used
the metaphor of machinery to describe society, a usage unusual before the
eighteenth century. Gray, The Factory Question, 23–24; Thompson, Making of
the English Working Class, 209; Taylor, Notes of a Tour, 4–5; “machinery, n.”
OED Online. September 2016. Oxford University Press,
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/111856.
53. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 341; Ure, The Philosophy of
Manufactures, 20–22, 474.
54. Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 226; Katrina
Honeyman, “The Poor Law, the Parish Apprentice, and the Textile Industries in
the North of England, 1780–1830,” Northern History 44 (2) (Sept. 2007), 127.
55. Brown, Memoir of Robert Blincoe, 115–18, 132, 173; William Dodd, A
Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd, A Factory Cripple,
 Written by Himself (1841), reprinted in Simmons, Jr., ed., Factory Lives, 191,
193–95; Fitton and Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 98–99, 103,
226; Fitton, The Arkwrights, 152, 160–61; Honeyman, “The Poor Law,” 123–25;
Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 171, 179–80, 299, 301; Jennings,
Pandemonium, 214–15.
56. Some mills withheld part of the wages of workers on contract until the end of
each quarter as further insurance against their departure. Fitton and
Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 104–06, 226, 233; Aspin, First
Industrial Society, 53, 104.
57. Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not, 3–4, 53–54. See, for
example, Thomas E. Woods, Jr., “A Myth Shattered: Mises, Hayek, and the
Industrial Revolution,” Nov. 1, 2001, Foundation for Economic Education,
https://fee.org/articles/a-myth-shattered-mises-hayek-and-the-industrial-
revolution/; “Wake Up America,” Freedom: A History of US (PBS), accessed
Dec. 8, 2016, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/historyofus/web04/.
58. Livesey quoted in Aspin, First Industrial Society, 86. See also, Brown, Memoir
of Robert Blincoe, 91, 109, 138–39.
59. Trollope, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, quote on 186.
60. The equation of British factory workers with West Indian slaves was used not
only by critics of the factory system but also by defenders of slavery, who
argued that slaves were actually better off than mill workers. Thompson,
Making of the English Working Class, 220; Engels, Condition of the Working
Class in England, 202, 204, 207–08; Disraeli, Sybil, 198; Catherine Gallagher,
The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative
Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 1–2.
61. Southey, Journal of a Tour in Scotland in 1819, quoted in Jennings,
Pandemonium, 157–58; Robert Southey, Espiella’s Letters, quoted in Aspin,
First Industrial Society, 53.
62. Gallagher, Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 6–21 (quotes on 7 and
10).
63. Jennings, Pandemonium, 230; Taylor, Notes of a Tour, 1–2, 30.
64. Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class, 45–46.
65. Jennings, Pandemonium, 231.
66. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 154–57, 180–83; Paul L. Younger,
“Environmental Impacts of Coal Mining and Associated Wastes: A
Geochemical Perspective,” Geological Society, London, Special Publications
236 (2004), 169–209.
67. William Blake, Collected Poems, ed. W. B. Yeats ([1905] London: Routledge,
2002), 211–12. Blake’s original manuscript, with the punctuation used here,
can be seen at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_did_those_feet_in_ancient_time#mediaviewer/
 File:Milton_preface.jpg (accessed Dec. 6, 2016). Steven E. Jones, Against
Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism (New York: Routledge, 2006),
81–96.
68. By 1881, the Lancashire population had doubled again, to 630,323. GB
Historical GIS / University of Portsmouth, Lancashire through time | Population
Statistics | Total Population, A Vision of Britain through Time (accessed Oct. 5,
2016), http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/unit/10097848/cube/TOT_POP. Engels,
The Condition of the Working Class in England, 16; Tristram Hunt, Marx’s
General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (New York: Metropolitan
Books, 2009), 78–79.
69. Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 116–17.
70. Taylor, Notes of a Tour, 6–7. For a different view, stressing the infection of both
mill owners and workers by greed, see Robert Owen, Observations on the
Effect of the Manufacturing System, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Hart, Rees,
and Orml, 1817), 5–9.
71. Engels wrote this not long after leaving his first stint at his family’s cotton mill in
Manchester, a job he himself abhorred and was to return to for another two
decades. Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England, 9–12, 153, 174,
199–202.
72. The Condition of the Working Class in England was an enormously influential
book, both in the development of Marxism and in perceptions of Manchester
and the Industrial Revolution. However, it had no immediate impact in the
English-speaking world, since it did not appear in English until 1886, more than
forty years after its publication in German, when an American edition came out.
It was not published in England until 1892. Engels, Condition of the Working
Class in England, 134–38; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class,
209; Hunt, Marx’s General, 81, 100, 111–12, 312.
73. For the history of debate over factory legislation, see Gray, The Factory
Question.
74. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 418; Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures, 17–18, 171,
179–80, 290, 299–301.
75. Taylor, Notes of a Tour, 3–4, 46, 237–38, 330.
76. Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, quoted in Jennings, Pandemonium, 35. Marx and
Engels shared the belief that the rise of the factory system represented
progress for mankind, in their eyes laying the basis for a new, more
democratic, egalitarian, and productive social system. See, for example, Hunt,
Marx’s General, 323–24.
77. Gray, The Factory Question, 100–101, 103–04; Ure, The Philosophy of
Manufactures, 295.
78. Taylor, Notes of a Tour, 80–82, 223–24; Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures,
334–38; Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 27, 156, 278.
79. Gray, The Factory Question; Valenze, The First Industrial Woman, 5.
80. B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison, A History of Factory Legislation (London: P.S.
King & Son, 1911).
81. Gray, The Factory Question, 23–24, 59–60, 72, 88 (quote from Factory
Commission First Report), 130; Michael Merrill, “How Capitalism Got Its
Name,” Dissent (Fall 2014), 87–92.
82. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 195.
83. Marx devoted Chapter X of the first volume of Capital to “The Working-Day,”
capital’s “vampire thirst for the living blood of labour,” including a detailed
discussion of the Factory Acts. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 231–302 (“struggle” on
235; “vampire” on 256). Engels analyzed the Factory Acts in The Condition of
the Working Class in England, 191–99.
84. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 219; Hunt, Marx’s General, 1, 7, 179, 198, 234. As Hunt
repeatedly points out, Engels’ years as a cotton mill manager supplied Marx
not only with detailed information about how the business worked but with the
financial support he needed to write Capital.
85. Janice Carlisle, “Introduction,” in Simmons, Jr., ed., Factory Lives, 27–28. See
also David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-
Century Working-Class Autobiography (London: Europa Publications, 1981),
and Kevin Binfield, ed., Writings of the Luddites (Baltimore, MD, and London:
Johns Hopkins Press, 2004) for how limited the sources are for working-class
views of the factory system.
86. In Against Technology, Steven E. Jones traces the changing understanding of
Luddism in British and American culture up through the twentieth century.
87. Berg, Age of Manufactures, 262; E. J. Hobsbawm, “The Machine Breakers,” in
Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour ([1964] Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books, 1967), 7–26; Fitton, The Arkwrights, 51, 53–55.
88. There is an extensive literature of Luddism. Particularly useful were
Hobsbawm, “The Machine Breakers”; Thompson, Making of the English
Working Class, chap. 14 (“An Army of Redressers”); and Kevin Binfield, ed.,
Writings of the Luddites (quoted letter on 74).
89. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 570–91, 608–18.
90. Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 42, 259; Aspin, First Industrial
Society, 67; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 211, 297–346,
616–21; Marx, Capital, vol. I, 431–32.
91. Jones, Against Technology, 9, 47; Hobsbawm, “The Machine Breakers,” 9–16.
92. Thompson, however, questioned Engels’s depiction of cotton workers making
up the nucleus of the emerging labor movement. Aspin, First Industrial Society,
55; Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England, 24, 137, 237;
Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 211, 213.
93. Not only were workers unable to vote but also the districts in which mills were
located were vastly underrepresented in Parliament as a result of the way
seats were apportioned. Aspin, First Industrial Society, 56–57, 153–54; Henry
Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (Hammondsworth, UK: Penguin
Books, 1963), 18–19.
94. Pelling, History of British Trade Unionism, 24–29; Beckert, Empire of Cotton,
196.
95. Hobsbawm summarizes the major outbreaks of unrest in Britain between 1800
and 1850 in Labouring Men, 155. See also Ure, The Philosophy of
Manufactures, 287, 366–67; Pelling, History of British Trade Unionism, 29–33,
36–37, 43–44, 46–49; and Thompson, Making of the English Working Class,
308, 706–08, 734–68.
96. Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 48–50, 62, 71. Walt Rostow made a similar
claim in W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist
Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 33–34, 54.
97. See, for example, Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
(Auburn, AL: Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 1998), 613–19. Von Mises writes of
early factories, “The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody
to take a factory job,” ignoring the fact that the state performed that function for
them. On hanging Luddites, see Thompson, Making of the English Working
Class, 627–28, and Lord Byron’s eloquent speech in the House of Lords
against making machine breaking a capital crime,
http://www.luddites200.org.uk/LordByronspeech.html (accessed Oct. 7, 2016).
98. Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later
Victorian England (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 55;
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 194; Aspin, First Industrial
Society, 15–17, 23–30; Mechanics’ magazine, Sept. 25, 1830, reprinted in
Jennings, Pandemonium, 176–79; J. C. Jeaffreson and William Pole, The Life
of Robert Stephenson, F.R.S., vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and
Dyer, 1866), 141; Tony Judt, “The Glory of the Rails” and “Bring Back the
Rails!,” The New York Review of Books, vol. 57, no. 20 (Dec. 23, 2010), and
vol. 58, no. 1 (Jan. 13, 2011).
99. Timothy L. Alborn, Conceiving Companies; Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian
England (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 182–83; Jennings,
Pandemonium, 311–12; Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 121.
00. G. W. Hilton, “The Truck Act of 1831,” The Economic History Review, new
series, vol. 10, no. 3 (1958): 470–79; Hutchins and Harrison, History of Factory
Legislation, 43–70; Hunt, Marx’s General, 184–86.
01. Gray, Factory Question, 140, 163; Aspin, First Industrial Society, 185. On
paternalism, see Joyce, Work, Society and Politics, esp. 135–53, 168–71, 185.
02. Brontë, Shirley, 487–88; Pelling, History of British Trade Unionism, 43–49;
Carlisle, “Introduction,” in Simmons, Jr., ed., Factory Lives, 63–65.
03. Engels, “Principles of Communism,” quoted in Hunt, Marx’s General, 144.

Chapter 2
“THE LIVING LIGHT”

1. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (London: Chapman

and Hall, 1842), 152–64 (quote on 164); [John Dix], Local Loiterings and Visits
in the Vicinity of Boston (Boston: Redding & Co., 1845), 44; Michael Chevalier,
Society, Manner and Politics in the United States: Being a Series of Letters on
North America (Boston: Weeks, Jordan and Company, 1839), 128–44 (quotes
on 136, 142, 143); Anthony Trollope, North America ([1862] New York: Knopf,
1951), 247–55 (quote on 250).
2. Marvin Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness; The European Response to
American Industrialization, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1967), 32–43, 92–95, 105–08; Dix, Local Loiterings, 48–49, 75, 79; Chevalier,
Society, Manner and Politics in the United States, 133, 137.
3. Caroline F. Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture: A Study in
Industrial Beginnings ([1931] New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), 17–18, 30.
Three of the most important histories of the New England textile industry were
written by women: Ware’s Early New England Cotton Manufacture; Vera
Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town; A Study of Chicopee,
Massachusetts (Northampton, MA: Department of History of Smith College,
1936); and Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads; New England’s Mill Girls
and Magnates (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949). At the time,
economic history (and academic scholarship more generally) was almost
exclusively a male enterprise. Perhaps they were drawn to the subject by the
large number of female textile workers. In an appreciation of their contributions,
Herbert Gutman and Donald Bell wrote that the three “extended the boundaries
of American working-class history beyond those fixed by John R. Commons
and others described as this subject’s founding fathers. Their books . . . offered
new ways to think about working-class history. . . . Their perspectives differed,
but all asked new questions about the early history of New England capitalism
and wage labor.” Long before the current vogue in the history of capitalism,
these extraordinary scholars were writing just that. Herbert G. Gutman and
Donald H. Bell, eds., The New England Working Class and the New Labor
History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), xii.
4. George Rogers Taylor, “Introduction,” in Nathan Appleton and Samuel
Batchelder, The Early Development of the American Cotton Textile Industry
([1858 and 1863] New York: Harper & Row, 1969), xiv.
 5. George S. White, Memoir of Samuel Slater: The Father of American
Manufactures: Connected with a History of the Rise and Progress of the Cotton
Manufacture in England and America (Philadelphia: Printed at No. 46,
Carpenter Street, 1836), 33–42; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global
History (New York: Knopf, 2014), 152–54; Ware, Early New England Cotton
Manufacture, 19–23; Betsy W. Bahr, “New England Mill Engineering:
Rationalization and Reform in Textile Mill Design, 1790–1920,” Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Delaware, 1987, 13–16.
6. Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 26–27, 29–30, 60, 82, 227.
7. Following the English example, Slater and other southern New England mill
owners set up Sunday schools for their child workers. Ware, Early New
England Cotton Manufacture, 22–23, 28, 30–32, 245–47, 284–85; Samuel
Batchelder, Introduction and Early Progress of the Cotton Manufacture in the
United States (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1863), in Appleton and
Batchelder, Early Development of the American Cotton Textile Industry, 46, 74.
8. Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 17, 28, 50–55.
9. Nathan Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, and Origin of Lowell
(Lowell, MA: Proprietors of the Locks and Canals on Merrimack River, 1858), in
Appleton and Batchelder, Early Development of the American Cotton Textile
Industry, 7; Robert Brook Zevin, “The Growth of Cotton Textile Production After
1815,” in Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The
Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York: Harper & Row,
1971), 139; Taylor, “Introduction,” in Appleton and Batchelder, Early
Development of the American Cotton Textile Industry, 9. Lowell also was in
contact with machinists in Rhode Island who could build spinning equipment.
See, for example, Wm. Blackburns to Francis Cabot Lowell, June 2, 1814,
Loose Manuscripts, box 6, Old B7 F7.19, Francis Cabot Lowell (1775–1817)
Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts.
10. Director’s Records, Volume 1, MSS:442, 1–2, Boston Manufacturing Company
Records, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School,
Allston, Massachusetts; Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite: The Boston
Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1987), 8–10, 26; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 63,
138, 147–48.
11. Carding was done on the first floor, spinning on the second, and weaving on
the third and fourth. In 1820, after it built a second mill, Boston Manufacturing
employed about 230 to 265 workers, of whom roughly 85 percent were women
and only 5 percent “boys.” Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 1;
Richard M. Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early
Waltham System,” in Robert Weible, Essays from the Lowell Conference on
Industrial History 1982 and 1983: The Arts and Industrialism, The Industrial
City (North Andover, MA: Museum of American Textile History, 1985), 19, 24,
 26; U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service, “National Register of
Historical Places Inventory—Nomination Form,” Boston Manufacturing
Company (accessed Jan. 16. 2015),
http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NHLS/Text/77001412.pdf; Ware, Early New
England Cotton Manufacture, 64.
12. Peter Temin, “Product Quality and Vertical Integration in the Early Cotton
Textile Industry,” Journal of Economic History XVIII (1988), 893, 897; Appleton,
Introduction of the Power Loom, 9–12; Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 147; Ware,
Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 65, 70–72; Zevin, “The Growth of
Cotton Textile Production,” 126–27.
13. The original two Waltham mills are still standing, but in altered form, having
had their pitched roofs replaced by flat ones and the space between them filled
in by subsequent construction. Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture,
66; Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham
System,” 24–25; “National Register of Historical Places Inventory—Nomination
Form,” Boston Manufacturing Company.
14. While the first mill established the basic framework for production, the second
mill established the physical template for future mills. Candee, “Architecture
and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System,” 29, 34; Appleton,
Introduction of the Power Loom, 14.
15. Batchelder, Introduction and Early Progress of the Cotton Manufacture, 81;
Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite, 30–31, 50; Appleton, Introduction of the Power
Loom, 9; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 83; Laurence Gross,
The Course of Industrial Decline: The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Mass.,
1835–1955 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 12; Thomas
Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in
Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1979), 59; Betsy Hunter Bradley, The Works: The Industrial Architecture of the
United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93.
16. Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 63, 139, 145, 184; Gross,
Course of Industrial Decline, 6–7, 229.
17. Recent accounts that stress the global nature of the cotton industry include
Prasannan Parthasarathi and Giorgio Riello, eds., The Spinning World: A
Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009); Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Beckert, Empire of Cotton. On U.S.
cotton exports, see Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 189–91.
18. Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 4–5; Appleton, Introduction of the Power
Loom, 23–24; Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, shelf number 1, Merrimack
Manufacturing Company Records, Baker Library, HBS, 5, 15; Shlakman,
Economic History of a Factory Town, 36.
19. Mills of this design still can be seen across large parts of New England, many
now converted to condominiums, office space, warehouses, artists’ studios,
museums, or cultural centers or sitting abandoned.
20. Merrimack purchased from Boston Manufacturing the right to use machinery it
had designed and patented. All the space in the five mill buildings was not
initially filled with equipment, but the company soon purchased additional
machinery. Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, shelf number 1, Merrimack
Manufacturing Company Records, 5, 51–54; Bradley, The Works, 93, 113–14,
125–28, 133–35, 139; Bahr, “New England Mill Engineering,” 13, 21, 27, 40–
41, 44–45; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 7. For an example of the
concern about fire, see the 1829 report by a committee of the Merrimack Board
of Directors about measures “to render the mills at Lowell more secure from
fire,” in Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, shelf number 1, Merrimack
Manufacturing Company Records, 61, 63–65.
21. Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite, 47–50, 47–50; Thomas Dublin, Farm to Factory:
Women’s Letters, 1830–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 5–
8; Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 28–29; Samuel Batchelder to
Nathan Appleton, Sept. 25, 1824, and William Appleton to Samuel Batchelder,
Oct. 8, 1824, in Minute Books, v.a – Directors, 1824–1857; Proprietors, 1824–
64, Hamilton Manufacturing Company Records, Baker Library; F-1 Records
1828–1858, 26–27, Bigelow Stanford Carpet Co. collection, Lowell
Manufacturing Company records, Baker Library; Shlakman, Economic History
of a Factory Town, 38, 42. A list of the various Lowell textile firms, their officers,
and principal stockholders appears in Shlakman, 39–42.
22. Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System,”
25–30.
23. Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Records,
23, 25–26, 81; Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early
Waltham System,” 38–39; Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 24;
Lowell Manufacturing Company Records, 1828–1858, 66–68; Dublin, Farm to
Factory, 5–8; U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Population of the 100 Largest Urban
Places: 1840,” June 15, 1998,
https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab07.txt.
24. Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 25–26, 36–37, 39–42.
25. Local workers were hired for construction work associated with the mills. But
even for that, some outside workers—like Irish canal diggers—were brought in.
Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite, x, xi, 56, Shlakman, Economic History of a
Factory Town, 24–25, 49, 64–65; Tamara K. Hareven and Randolph
Lanenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory City (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1978), 16.
26. The Lowell Machine Shop, separated from Canals and Locks in 1845,
employed 550 workers, making it a giant among machine shops, turning out
 not only textile equipment but also planning machines, steam boilers, mill
shafting, and even locomotives. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The
Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1977), 60; United States Census Office, Manufacturers of the
United States in 1860 (Washington, DC: 1865), 729; “Statistics of Lowell
Manufactures. January, 1857. Compiled from authentic sources.” [Lowell,
1857], Library of Congress (accessed Jan. 28, 2015),
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?
ammem/rbpebib:@field(NUMBER+@band[rbpe+0620280a]); David R. Meyer,
Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 205.
27. Some companies did introduce new types of spinning machines, which could
operate at higher speeds. Dublin, Farm to Factory, 5–8; Dalzell, Jr.,
Enterprising Elite, 55, 69–71; Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: The
Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 6; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline,
37, 42; Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham
System,” 34, 38.
28. The companies eventually replaced their original waterwheels with more
efficient water turbines. Even after the Civil War, they only gradually installed
steam engines. As late as the 1890s, the Boott mills were getting half their
power from water. Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 19–20, 42–43; Ware,
Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 144–45. For a comparison of the cost
of steam and water power, see “Difference between the cost of power to be
used at Dover the next 15 years and a full supply of water,” Box 6, Vol. III–IX,
Nov. 1847, Amos Lawrence Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
29. Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 37; Ware, Early New England
Cotton Manufacture, 86–87; “Statistics of Lowell Manufactures. January, 1857.”
30. Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 30–31, 37, 42, 50–53; David A.
Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers & The
Mechanized Factory System, 1815–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992), 69–70; Chandler, The Visible Hand, 68–71.
31. Hareven and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 9–10, 13–16.
32. Even after it ballooned in size, Amoskeag continued to be run by a single
treasurer, working out of Boston. Hareven and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 16. The
best overview of the development of American management remains Chandler,
The Visible Hand.
33. New-York Daily Tribune, Jan. 17, 1844. For the experience of young women in
British cotton mills, see Deborah Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 103–11.
34. Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite, 31–34; Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in
the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 13; Ware, Early New
England Cotton Manufacture, 12–13, 198–99, 203. Slave labor also was used
in the cotton industry in Egypt, where the first mechanized equipment was
introduced at the same time as the Waltham mills were being built. Beckert,
Empire of Cotton, 166–68.
35. Dublin, Women at Work, 5, 31–34, 141; Zonderman, Aspirations and
Anxieties, 131, 270–71, 276; Dublin, Farm to Factory, 13–14; Ware, Early New
England Cotton Manufacture, 217–18.
36. Dublin, Women at Work, 26, 31, 64–65; Zonderman, Aspirations and
Anxieties, 130, 138–40. When in 1826 Merrimack Manufacturing was planning
to print calicoes, it sent its treasurer, Kirk Boott, to England “for the purpose of
procuring a first rate Engraver, or such as he can get,” as well as to gather
information “which he may think will be useful in manufacturing, printing or
machine building.” Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, shelf number 1, Merrimack
Manufacturing Company Records, 32–33. 1857 percentage calculated from
“Statistics of Lowell Manufactures. January, 1857.”
37. Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 212–15, 220–21; Thomas
Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial
Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 82–83, 89; Shlakman,
Economic History of a Factory Town, 49; Zonderman, Aspirations and
Anxieties, 163–64, 166–68.
38. Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 224–25; Zonderman,
Aspirations and Anxieties, 256–57. Thomas Dublin found among a sample of
workers at the Hamilton mill in Lowell that those who never married worked on
average 3.9 years; those who did, 2.4. Dublin, Farm to Factory, 110.
39. Burlington Free Press, Dec. 5, 1845; Ware, Early New England Cotton
Manufacture, 200, 263; “Regulations to Be Observed by All Persons Employed
in the Factories of the Middlesex Company” (1846); “General Regulations, to
Be Observed by All Persons Employed by the Lawrence Manufacturing
Company, In Lowell” (1833); “Regulations to Be Observed by All Persons
Employed by the Lawrence Manufacturing Company” (1838); and “Regulations
for the Boarding Houses of the Middlesex Company” (n.d.), all in Osborne
Library, American Textile History Museum, Lowell, Massachusetts; Zonderman,
Aspirations and Anxieties, 150, 152, 157–60; Dublin, Women at Work, 78–79.
40. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 66–67, 90; Shlakman, Economic
History of a Factory Town, 59; Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working
Class in England, trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1958), 30–87.
41. Augusta Harvey Worthen, The History of Sutton, New Hampshire: Consisting
of the Historical Collections of Erastus Wadleigh, Esq., and A. H. Worthen, 2
parts (Concord, NH: Republican Press Association, 1890), 192, quoted in
 Dublin, Women at Work, 55; population of Sutton from New Hampshire Office
of Energy and Planning, State Data Center (accessed Feb. 6, 2015),
https://www.nh.gov/oep/data-center/documents/1830-1920-historic.pdf; Harriet
H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle, or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell, 1898), 69–70; Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work, 111–
18.
42. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 8. Dublin’s Farm to Factory presents
an excellent selection of letters from female mill workers.
43. The Lowell Offering and Magazine, May 1843, 191; Dublin, Farm to Factory,
69, 73; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 22–27, 30, 38–40.
44. The Lowell Offering and Magazine, January 1843, 96; Zonderman, Aspirations
and Anxieties, 42–43, 78–79, 82–83, 113–14.
45. According to Harriet Robinson, in 1843 there were “fourteen regularly
organized religious societies” in Lowell. Robinson, Loom and Spindle, 78;
Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 97; Dublin, Farm to Factory, 80–81;
Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 256–59.
46. Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 38, 85–86, 110, 112;
Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 98–101, 103–07; Dublin,
Women at Work, 136–37. As Dublin points out, the expiration of patents taken
out by the Waltham-Lowell group and advances in equipment design
elsewhere made it easier for new companies to compete. On the relative cost
of raw cotton and labor, see, for example, “Boston Manufacturing Company
Memo of Cloth Made and Cost of Same … 25th August 1827 to 30th August
1828” and “Appleton Co. Mem. of Cloth Made to May 30, 1829,” both in box 1,
folder 16, vol. 42, Patrick Tracy Jackson Papers, Massachusetts Historical
Society.
47. Minutes: Directors, 1822–1843, Merrimack Manufacturing Company Records,
142; Shlakman, Economic History of a Factory Town, 98–99; Dublin, Women at
Work, 89–90, 98, 109–11, 137.
48. Dublin, Women at Work, 90–102.
49. Dublin, Women at Work, 93–96; Robinson, Loom and Spindle, 84. One version
of the original song began: “What a pity that such a pretty girl as I, Should be
sent to a nunnery to pine away and die!” with the chorus: “So I won’t be a nun, I
cannot be a nun! I’m so fond of pleasure that I cannot be a nun.”
https://thesession.org/tunes/3822 (accessed Feb. 7, 2015). For the growth of
the labor movement before the Civil War, the most comprehensive account
remains John R. Commons et al., History of Labor in the United States, vol. I
([1918] New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966).
50. There were a few later strikes in other mill towns and a small strike by
immigrant workers in Lowell in 1859. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties,
 235, 241; New-York Daily Tribune, May 14, 1846; Fisher, Workshops in the
Wilderness, 146–47; Dublin, Women at Work, 203–05.
51. Massachusetts restricted children under twelve and Connecticut children under
fourteen to ten hours work a day. New Hampshire established ten hours as a
day’s work for everyone, but allowed contracts calling for longer working hours,
rendering the law all but meaningless. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties,
242–49; Dublin, Women at Work, 108–22.
52. Much later on, left-leaning historians perhaps made too much of the walkouts
and agitation. For extended discussions of the protests which emphasize their
importance, see, for example, Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, and
Dublin, Women at Work. By contrast, Ware, earlier, was somewhat dismissive
of the turnouts, which she wrote “were really less strikes than demonstrations,
unorganized outbursts led by a few inflammatory spirits who had little idea what
they were to achieve but who raised the girls to a state of great excitement”
and noted that “Public sentiment did not generally support ‘striking females.’”
Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 275, 277.
53. David Crockett, An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East
(Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1835), 91–99; John F. Kasson, Civilizing
the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (New
York: Penguin, 1977), 81; Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 208.
54. For extended discussions of this evolution, see Leo Marx, The Machine in the
Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1964), and Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, esp. chap. 1 and
2. See also, Lawrence A. Peskin, “How the Republicans Learned to Love
Manufacturing: The First Parties and the ‘New Economy,’” Journal of the Early
Republic 22 (2) (Summer, 2002), 235–62, and Jonathan A. Glickstein,
Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1991), esp. 233–35.
55. John G. Whittier, “The Factory Girls of Lowell,” in Voices of the True-Hearted
(Philadelphia: J. Miller M’Kim, 1846), 40–41.
56. Seth Luther, An Address to the Working Men of New England on the State of
Education and on the Condition of the Producing Classes in Europe and
America, 2nd ed. (New York: George H. Evans, 1833), 19.
57. Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness, 165; Emerson quoted in Kasson,
Civilizing the Machine, 124–25. Earlier, Emerson had hailed manufacturing for
freeing New England from the need to farm under uncongenial conditions:
“Where they have sun, let them plant; we who have it not, will drive our pens
and water-wheels.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Waldo Emerson, and
Waldo Emerson Forbes, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson with Annotations,
vol. IV (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 209.
58. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 115–18.
59. As late as 1853, there were over 1,800 children under fifteen working in Rhode
Island manufacturing establishments, including 621 between ages nine and
twelve and 59 under the age of nine. Luther, An Address to the Working Men of
New England, 10, 21–22, 30; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture,
210; Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in
Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983), 86, 213.
60. Trollope, North America, 253; John Robert Godley, Letters from America, vol. 1
(London: John Murray, 1844), 7–11; Edward Bellamy, “How I Wrote ‘Looking
Backwards,’” in Edward Bellamy Speaks Again (Chicago: Peerage Press,
1937), 218, quoted in Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, 192. Relative industry
size from Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 180.
61. Herman Melville, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,”
Harper’s magazine, Apr. 1855, 670–78; Scott Heron, “Harper’s Magazine as
Matchmaker: Charles Dickens and Herman Melville,” Browsings: The Harper’s
Blog, Jan. 13, 2008, http://harpers.org/blog/2008/01/harpers-magazine-
dickens-and-melvilles-paradise-of-bachelors/.
62. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, 90–93.
63. Luther, An Address to the Working Men of New England, 29.
64. Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness, 115–16, 119, 130–35, 139–41, 146.
65. Dublin, Women at Work, 139–40.
66. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial
Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1975), 106; Ware, Early New England Cotton
Manufacture, 227–232; Dublin, Women at Work, 138–39.
67. Dublin, Women at Work, 134, 140–44, 155, 198; Gross, Course of Industrial
Decline, 83.
68. Dublin, Farm to Factory, 187; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 37, 42–43,
79; Nelson, Managers and Workers, 6; Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst
Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860–1912 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1993), xiv–xv, 28, 75; Hareven and Lanenbach,
Amoskeag, 10.
69. Dublin, Farm to Factory, 187; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 80, 142;
Hareven and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 18–19, 202–03; Cameron, Radicals of
the Worst Sort, 29–30, 75, 82–83, 97 (quote).
70. Accounts of the death toll from the Pemberton collapse vary considerably, from
83 to 145. Clarisse A. Poirier, “Pemberton Mills 1852–1938: A Case Study of
the Industrial and Labor History of Lawrence, Massachusetts,” Ph.D.
dissertation, Boston University, 1978, 81–84, 191–93; Polynesian [Honolulu],
Mar. 3, 1860; New York Times, Jan. 12, 1860, and Feb. 4, 1860; The Daily
Dispatch [Richmond, Virginia], Jan. 16, 1860; The Daily Exchange [Baltimore],
 Jan. 12, 1860; New-York Daily Tribune, Jan. 16, 1860; Alvin F. Oickle, Disaster
in Lawrence: The Fall of the Pemberton Mill (Charleston, SC: History Press,
2008); Bahr, “New England Mill Engineering, 68–71; Cameron, Radicals of the
Worst Sort, 18–19.
71. By the time Hine visited Amoskeag, children under age sixteen actually made
up only a small part of the New England textile workforce: 2.0 percent in New
Hampshire, 5.7 percent in Massachusetts, and 6.0 percent in Rhode Island,
compared to 10.4 percent nationally and 20.3 percent in Mississippi. Hareven
and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 33; Arden J. Lea, “Cotton Textiles and the Federal
Child Labor Act of 1916,” Labor History 16 (4) (Fall 1975), 492.
72. Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 88–90; Cameron, Radicals of the Worst
Sort, 7, 47–62, 77.
73. In the racialist language of the day, which many socialists shared, Berger went
on to say, “White men and women of any nationality will endure a certain
degree of slavery, but no more. The limit of endurance seems to have been
reached in Lawrence.” House Committee on Rules, The Strike at Lawrence,
Hearings before the Committee on Rules of the House of Representatives on
House Resolutions 409 and 433, March 2–7, 1912 (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1912), 10–11. There is a large literature on the
1912 strike. An excellent account can be found in Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall
Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle
Books, 1969).
74. Hareven and Lanenbach, Amoskeag, 11, 336; Gross, Course of Industrial
Decline, 165, 190–95, 225–29; Mary H. Blewett, The Last Generation: Work
and Life in the Textile Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1910–1960 (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1990).
75. British population does not include Ireland. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope, 4;
B. R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750–1993 (London:
Macmillan Reference, 1998), 4, 8; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical
Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, 8.

Chapter 3
“THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION”
1. Joshua Freeman et al., Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s
Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 2 (New York: Pantheon Books,
1992), xii–xx; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 20, 1876; J. S.
Ingram, The Centennial Exposition, Described and Illustrated (Philadelphia:
Hubbard Bros., 1876); Linda P. Gross and Theresa R. Snyder, Philadelphia’s
1876 Centennial Exhibition (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2005); John
E. Findling, ed., Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851–
 1988 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 57–59; Robert W. Rydell, All the
World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–
1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 9–37; Centennial
Photographic Co., “[Saco] Water Power Co.—Cotton Machinery,” Centennial
Exhibition Digital Collection Philadelphia 1876, Free Library of Philadelphia,
CEDC No. c032106 (accessed Mar. 20, 2015),
http://libwww.library.phila.gov/CenCol/Details.cfm?ItemNo=c032106. See also
Bruni Giberti, Designing the Centennial: A History of the 1876 International
Exhibition in Philadelphia (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002).
2. On the national divides at the time of the exhibition, see Freeman et al., Who
Built America? vol. 2, xx–xxiv.
3. When Whitman visited the Centennial Exhibition, he reportedly sat for a half
hour in silence before the Corliss engine. Leo Marx, The Machine in the
Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1964), 150–58, 163–64; Andrea Sutcliffe, Steam: The Untold
Story of America’s First Great Invention (New York: Palgrave, 2004); Walter
Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 73–96; Edmund Flagg, The
Far West: or, A Tour Beyond the Mountains, vol. 1 (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1838), 17–18; John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology
and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (New York: Penguin, 1977),
141; Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 15–16.
4. Walt Whitman, Two Rivulets: Including Democratic Vistas, Centennial Songs,
and Passage to India (Camden, NJ: [Walt Whitman], 1876), 25–26; Marx,
Machine in the Garden, 27. There is a very large literature on the railroad and
modernity. See, for example, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey:
The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986).
5. Giberti, Designing the Centennial, 2–3; “Manufactures of Massachusetts,” The
North American Review 50 (106) (Jan. 1840), 223–31.
6. The Crystal Palace burned down in 1936. Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great
Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1999); Benjamin quoted in Robert W. Rydell, Worlds of Fairs: The
Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993),
15.
7. Many exhibits for the New York fair were not ready when it opened, damping
down attendance. Unlike the profitable original, it ended in bankruptcy. Charles
Hirschfeld, “America on Exhibition: The New York Crystal Palace,” American
Quarterly 9 (2, pt. 1) (Summer 1957), 101–16.
8. Pauline de Tholozany, “The Expositions Universelles in Nineteenth Century
Paris,” Brown University Center for Digital Scholarship,
http://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/worldfairs.html (accessed Mar. 27, 2015). For
 a list of nineteenth- and twentieth-century international expositions and fairs,
see Findling, ed., Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 376–
81.
9. Report of the Board of Commissioners Representing the State of New York at
the Cotton States and International Exposition held at Atlanta, Georgia, 1895
(Albany, NY: Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Co, 1896), quote on page 205; C.
Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913: A History of the South
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1951), 123–24.
10. Jill Jonnes, Eiffel’s Tower: The Thrilling Story Behind Paris’s Beloved
Monument and the World’s Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists
Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count (New York: Viking, 2009);
“Origins and Construction of the Eiffel Tower,”
http://www.toureiffel.paris/en/everything-about-the-tower/themed-files/69.html,
and “All You need to Know About the Eiffel Tower,”
http://www.toureiffel.paris/images/PDF/about_the_Eiffel_Tower.pdf (both
accessed Oct. 21, 2016); Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other
Mythologies ([1979] Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 8–14.
11. Letter published in Le Temps, Feb. 14, 1887, reprinted in “All You Need to
Know About the Eiffel Tower.”
12. “Représentation de la tour Eiffel dans l’art,”
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repr%C3%A9sentation_de_la_tour_Eiffel_dans_l%2
7art; and Michaela Haffner, “Diego Rivera, The Eiffel Tower, 1914,” the Davis
Museum at Wellesley College,
https://www.wellesley.edu/davismuseum/artwork/node/37002 (both accessed
Apr. 1, 2015). For a different reading of the iconography of the Eiffel Tower, with
less emphasis on its importance as a symbol of industrialism and the
mechanical age, see Gabriel Insausti, “The Making of the Eiffel Tower as a
Modern Icon,” in Writing and Seeing: Essays on Word and Image, ed. Rui
Carvalho Homem and Maria de Fátima Lambert (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi,
2006).
13. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone,” translated by Donald Revell,
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/zone. For an alternative, more literal
translation by Charlotte Mandell, see
http://www.charlottemandell.com/Apollinaire.php (accessed Apr. 2, 2015).
14. Blaise Cendrars, “Elastic Poem 2: Tower,” trans. by Tony Baker, GutCult 2 (1)
(Winter 2004), http://gutcult.com/Site/litjourn3/html/cendrars1.html.
15. The great nineteenth-century expositions were not only about industry and
consumer goods. They also celebrated national identity and greatness as
manifested in the arts and empire. And empire was tightly linked to ideas of
racial hierarchy, a theme that bluntly recurred in fair after fair. Technological
and racial advance were inextricably linked. See Auerbach, Great Exhibition of
1851, 159–89; Joseph Harris, The Tallest Tower: Eiffel and the Belle Epoque
 (Bloomington, IN: Unlimited Publishing, 2004), 88–89, 107–08; Rydell, All the
World’s a Fair, 21–22; Rydell, Worlds of Fairs, 19–22; Findling, ed., Historical
Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 79, 181, 183.
16. Guy de Maupassant, La Vie Errane, Allouma, Toine, and Other Stories
(London: Classic Publishing Company, 1911), 1–4.
17. Auerbach, Great Exhibition of 1851, 128–58; Freeman et al., Who Built
America? vol. 2, xxiii.
18. Auerbach, Great Exhibition of 1851, 132, 156; Friedrich Engels to Laura
Lafarge, June 11, 1889,
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1889/letters/89_06_11.htm (accessed
Apr. 4, 2017); Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of
Friedrich Engels (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 335–36.
19. The Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel, published by U.S. Steel in ten
editions between 1919 and 1985, provides encyclopedic information on iron-
and steelmaking, including their history. For a history and analysis of this
remarkable volume, see Carol Siri Johnson, “The Steel Bible: A Case Study of
20th Century Technical Communication,” Journal of Technical Writing and
Communication 37 (3) (2007), 281–303. See also Peter Temin, Iron and Steel
in Nineteenth-Century America: An Economic Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1964), 13–17, 83–85.
20. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848–1875 (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1975), 39, 54–55; Temin, Iron and Steel, 3–5, 14–15, 21. For the
difficulties in producing rails, see John Fritz, The Autobiography of John Fritz
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1912), 92–101, 111–15, 121–23, 149. Overman
quoted in Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Politics,
Culture, and Steel (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 47.
21. In addition to iron ore and fuel (charcoal, coke, or sometimes anthracite coal),
limestone was put into blast furnaces to help form slag out of impurities. Temin,
Iron and Steel, 58–62, 96–98, 157–63; U.S. Steel, The Making, Shaping and
Treating of Steel (Pittsburgh, PA: U.S. Steel, 1957), 221–25.
22. Krause, Battle for Homestead, 48–49; David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in
America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 11–12. For a
firsthand account of puddling, see James J. Davis, The Iron Puddler; My Life in
the Rolling Mills and What Came of It (New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1922).
23. Temin, Iron and Steel, 66–67, 85, 105–06, 109–13; Fritz, Autobiography of
John Fritz, 91–135; Marvin Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness: The
European Response to American Industrialization, 1830–1860 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1967), 162–63.
24. Krause, Battle for Homestead, 52–65; Temin, Iron and Steel, 125–27, 130,
153; David Brody, Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era (1960; New
York: Harper & Row, 1969), 8.
25. Some companies also integrated backward, buying or leasing ore mines and
making their own coke. Temin, Iron and Steel, 153–69, 190–91; Brody,
Steelworkers in America, 10–12; William Serrin, Homestead: The Glory and
Tragedy of an American Steel Town (New York: Random House, 1992), 56–59.
26. Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, 213; Harold James, Krupp: A History of the
Legendary German Firm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 47,
53; Gross and Snyder, Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition, 83;
Schneider Electric, 170 Years of History (Rueil-Malmaison, France: Schneider
Electric, 2005), 3–5, 20–22 (http://www.schneider-
electric.com/documents/presentation/en/local/2006/12/se_history_brands_mar
ch2005.pdf).
27. Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in
the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975),
6–7; David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 405;
U.S. Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United States—1900; Census
Reports, vol. VII—Manufactures, part I (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Office,
1902), 583, 585, 597.
28. U.S. Steel, Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel; Carnegie quoted in Brody,
Steelworkers inAmerica, 21.
29. Michael W. Santos, “Brother against Brother: The Amalgamated and Sons of
Vulcan at the A. M. Byers Company, 1907–1913,” The Pennsylvania Magazine
of History and Biography 111 (2) (Apr. 1987), 199–201; Davis, Iron Puddler, 85;
John Fitch, The Steel Workers (New York: Charities Publication Committee,
1910), 36, 40–44, 48, 52. William Attaway’s novel, Blood on the Forge ([1941]
New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), set in Pittsburgh at the end of
World War I, gives a good sense of the rhythms of steelwork, with its alternate
periods of exhausting labor and waiting for the next burst of activity.
30. Harry B. Latton, “Steel Wonders,” The Pittsburgh Times, June 1, 1892,
reprinted in David P. Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red”: Homestead 1892
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 13–15; Fritz,
Autobiography of John Fritz, 203; Brody, Steelworkers in America, 9; Mark
Reutter, Sparrows Point; Making Steel—The Rise and Ruin of American
Industrial Might (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 18.
31. Fitch, The Steel Workers, 3; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the English
Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 1 (Boston: James R. Osgood and
Company, 1872), 370–72. I was pointed to Hawthorne’s statement by John F.
Kasson, who quotes part of it in Civilizing the Machine, 142.
32. Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 192, 200, 270–71; Joseph Stella, “In the
Glare of the Converter,” “In the Light of a Five-Ton Ingot,” “At the Base of the
Blast Furnace,” and “Italian Steelworker” (accessed Apr. 28, 2015),
http://www.clpgh.org/exhibit/stell1.html; W. J. Gordon, Foundry, Forge and
Factory with a Chapter on the Centenary of the Rotary Press (London:
 Religious Tract Society, 1890), 15; John Commons et al., History of Labour in
the United States, vol. II ([1918] New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966), 80.
33. Hawthorne, Passages from the English Note-Books, 371; Thomas G.
Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2008), 62; Joseph Stella, “Discovery of America:
Autobiographical Notes,” quoted in Maurine W. Greenwald, “Visualizing
Pittsburgh in the 1900s: Art and Photography in the Service of Social Reform,”
in Greenwald and Margo Anderson, eds., Pittsburgh Surveyed: Social Science
and Social Reform in the Early Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 136; Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln
Steffens (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), 401.
34. Nasaw, Carnegie, 164; Mary Heaton Vorse, Men and Steel (New York: Boni
and Liveright, 1920), 12; Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to
Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 60; Gunther
quoted in Reutter, Sparrows Point, 9.
35. For a vivid account of the tumultuous struggles of the Gilded Age, see Steve
Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence; The Life and Death of American Resistance
to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015),
chap. 4–6, especially chap. 5 on industrial strife.
36. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers was created by an
1876 merger of the Sons of Vulcan with two unions of rolling mill workers.
Brody, Steelworkers in America, 50–53; Preamble to the Constitution of the
Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, reprinted in Demarest,
Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red,” 17; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of
Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 9–22.
37. Some companies continued to just make iron goods, without the intensely
competitive ethos of the dominant steel producers. Montgomery, Fall of the
House of Labor, 22–36; Brody, Steelworkers in America, 1–10, 23–28, 31–32.
38. Krause, Battle for Homestead, 177–92; Nasaw, Carnegie, 314–26.
39. Nasaw, Carnegie, 363–72. See also Krause, Battle for Homestead, 240–51.
40. Joshua B. Freeman, “Andrew and Me,” The Nation, Nov. 16, 1992; Nasaw,
Carnegie, 406.
41. Frick had made a fortune producing coke before joining forces with Carnegie.
Most of the charges against workers were dropped after acquittals in the first
trials. The Local News, July 2, 1892, New York Herald, July 7, 1892, Pittsburgh
Commercial Gazette, July 25, 1892, and Robert S. Barker, “The Law Takes
Sides,” all in Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red,” a wonderful compilation
of essays, contemporary accounts, photographs, and drawings about the 1892
battle; Freeman, “Andrew and Me”; Krause, Battle for Homestead; Nasaw,
Carnegie, 405–27.
42. Russell W. Gibbons, “Dateline Homestead,” and Randolph Harris,
“Photographers at Homestead in 1892,” in Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran
Red,” 158–61.
43. Nasaw, Carnegie, 469; Anne E. Mosher, Capital’s Utopia: Vandergrift,
Pennsylvania, 1855–1916 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2004), 66–67; Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 41; Brody, Steelworkers
in America, 56–58, 60–75.
44. Hamlin Garland, “Homestead and Its Perilous Trades; Impressions of a Visit,”
McClure’s Magazine 3 (1) (June 1894), in Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran
Red,” 204–05; Dreiser in Nasaw, Carnegie, 470; Fitch, The Steel Workers,
214–29; Serrin, Homestead, 175–76.
45. Floyd Dell, “Pittsburgh or Petrograd?” The Liberator 2 (11) (Dec. 1919), 7–8.
46. Bethlehem Steel later purchased the Sparrows Point mill, which during the
1950s was the largest steel complex in the world. Mosher, Capital’s Utopia, 73–
74; Reutter, Sparrows Point, 10, 55–71.
47. Mosher, Capital’s Utopia, 73–127.
48. Brody, Steelworkers in America, 87–89; Mosher, Capital’s Utopia, 74, 102;
Reutter, Sparrows Point, 50.
49. For many years after its formation, U.S. Steel functioned essentially as a
holding company, with its many subsidiaries operating independently. Alfred D.
Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American
Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 359–62; Nasaw,
Carnegie, 582–88.
50. To prevent workers from sieging or seizing the mill, U.S. Steel redirected a
river on the site into a concrete channelway, a moat separating the plant from
the town. James B. Lane, “City of the Century”: A History of Gary, Indiana
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 27–37; Brody, Steelworkers in
America, 158; Mosher, Capital’s Utopia, 177; S. Paul O’Hara, Gary, the Most
American of All American Cities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011),
19–20, 38–53.
51. Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in
the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 25.
52. In Taylor’s account, all the iron loaders eventually achieved the high rate, but
independent evidence indicates that only one worker was able to carry
anything like forty-seven tons of pig iron a day over an extended period. Daniel
Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1980); Montgomery, The Fall of the House of
Labor, esp. chap. 6; Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The
Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1974), 85–123. See also Charles D. Wrege and Ronald G. Greenwood,
 Frederick W. Taylor, the Father of Scientific Management: Myth and Reality
(Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin, 1991).
53. Brody, Steelworkers in America, 31–40, 170–73; U. S. Steel, Making, Shaping
and Treating of Steel, 314; Fitch, Steel Workers, 43, 60, 166–81.
54. Fitch, The Steel Workers, 57–64.
55. Steel mills in Maryland also hired a substantial number of black workers.
Homestead was something of an exception in the strong solidarity between the
Eastern European laborers and the English-speaking skilled workers, before
and during the 1892 clash. Brody, Steelworkers in America, 96–111, 135–37;
Henry M. McKiven, Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in
Birmingham, Alabama, 1875–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1995), 41; Paul Kraus, “East-Europeans in Homestead,” in Demarest,
Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red,” 63–65. For an evocative portrait of Slovak
steelworkers in Braddock, Pennsylvania, see Thomas Bell’s novel Out of This
Furnace ([1941] Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976).
56. Strictly speaking, these were not steelworkers; they worked in a factory that
built steel railway cars. Brody, Steelworkers in America, 125, 145–70; Philip S.
Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. IV: The
Industrial Workers of the World, 1905–1917 (New York: International
Publishers, 1965), 281–305.
57. “Labor,” in Eric Foner and John A. Garrity, eds., The Reader’s Companion to
American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 632; Steven Fraser, Labor
Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free
Press, 1991), 146–47.
58. Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” The North American Review 148 (391) (1889):
654.
59. Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 88; Whiting Williams, What’s on the
Worker’s Mind, By One Who Put on Overalls to Find Out (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1920); “WILLIAMS, WHITING,” in The Encyclopedia of
Cleveland History (accessed May 5, 2015), http://ech.case.edu/cgi/article.pl?
id=WW1; Nasaw, Carnegie, 386. There is a vast literature on Progressive Era
reform. A good place to start is Michael McGeer, Fierce Discontent: The Rise
and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
60. The Pittsburgh Survey examined the whole region and its economy, but steel
dominated the study and was the main subject of several volumes. Greenwald
and Anderson, eds., Pittsburgh Surveyed.
61. In 1920, the Supreme Court dismissed the antitrust case against U.S. Steel.
Brody, Steelworkers in America, 147, 154, 161–71; Fitch, The Steel Workers,
178–79.
62. Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 61–76; union data calculated from
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial
Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, part 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1975), 126, 177; Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 121–40,
144 (quote).
63. David Brody, Labor in Crisis: The Steel Strike of 1919 (Philadelphia: J.B.
Lippincott, 1965), 45–51, 59–60.
64. The most thorough accounts of the steel organizing drive and the 1919 strike
are William Z. Foster, The Great Steel Strike (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1920),
and Brody, Labor in Crisis. Except where otherwise noted, I have drawn from
them.
65. Freeman et al., Who Built America? 258–61.
66. For the strike in Gary, see Lane, “City of the Century,” 90–93. For a gripping
portrayal of the strike from the point of view of black workers, see Attaway,
Blood on the Forge.
67. The actual demands of the striking workers were far from radical, dealing, very
concretely, with hours, wages, and union recognition. See Brody, Labor in
Crisis, 100–101, 129. The New York Times, like many newspapers, gave heavy
coverage to the strike. From September 23 through September 26, the Times
ran three-line banner headlines about the strike on its front page that
emphasized the strike’s size and violence.
68. Foster, The Great Steel Strike, 1; Vorse, Men and Steel, 21; John Dos Passos,
The Big Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936).

Chapter 4
“I WORSHIP FACTORIES”
1. Henry Ford, “Mass Production,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, 13th ed. (New
York: The Encyclopædia Britannica, 1926), vol. 30, 821–23; David A.
Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1984), 1, 218–19, 224; Helen Jones
Earley and James R. Walkinshaw, Setting the Pace: Oldsmobile’s First 100
Years (Lansing, MI: Public Relations Department, Oldsmobile Division, 1996),
461; The Locomobile Society of America, “List of Cars Manufactured by the
Locomobile Company of America,” http://www.locomobilesociety.com/cars.cfm,
and “U.S. Automobile Production Figures,”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Automobile_Production_Figures (both
accessed Feb. 6, 2017); Joshua Freeman et al., Who Built America? Working
People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 2 (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 277.
 2. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1, 228. My
discussion of the development of the Ford system draws heavily from
Hounshell’s superb study.
3. Edward A. Filene, The Way Out: A Forecast of Coming Changes in American
Business and Industry (Garden City, NY: Page & Company, 1924), 180; Vicki
Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row,
1986), 74.
4. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 4–8, 15–50.
5. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848–1875 (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1975), 44.
6. John A. James and Jonathan S. Skinner, “The Resolution of the Labor Scarcity
Paradox,” Working Paper No. 1504, National Bureau of Economic Research,
Nov. 1984.
7. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 115–23; Alfred D.
Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 196.
8. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in
American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 240,
249–53; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 240–43.
9. Until 1915, Ford partner James Couzens played a central role in the Ford
Motor Company, developing many of its innovative practices and contributing
greatly to its overall success. Keith Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford (New
York: Rinehart & Company, 1948), 9–27, 43–46.
10. Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford, 44–45; Hounshell, From the American
System to Mass Production, 224.
11. Stephen Meyer, The Five Dollar Day; Labor Management and Social Control in
the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921 (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1981), 16, 18; Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations ([1776] London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 6–7;
Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 227.
12. Though various accounts at the time and after, including by the Ford company,
have claimed that by the time of the introduction of the assembly line complete
interchangeability of parts had been achieved, apparently for several years
some filing and grinding of parts on the assembly line occurred. Sward, The
Legend of Henry Ford, 42, 46, 68–77; Ford Factory Facts (Detroit, MI: Ford
Motor Company, 1912), 46–47, 49; Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford:
Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons:
1957), 522; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 219–
20, 224–25, 230–33; Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 10, 22–29; Jack Russell,
“The Coming of the Line; The Ford Highland Park Plant, 1910–1914,” Radical
America 12 (May–June 1978), 30–33.
13. Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: The Origins of the New Factory
System in the United States 1880–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1975), 21–23; David Gartman, “Origins of the Assembly Line and
Capitalist Control of Work at Ford,” in Andrew Zimbalist, ed., Case Studies on
the Labor Process (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 197–98; Ford,
“Mass Production,” 822; Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 29–31; Karl Marx,
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (1867: New York: International
Publishers, 1967), 380.
14. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 237–49; Gartman,
“Origins of the Assembly Line,” 201.
15. Russell, “The Coming of the Line,” 33–34, 37 (includes Ford quote).
Photographs of cars and trucks being assembled using the craft method at
various early vehicle companies can be seen in Bryan Olsen and Joseph
Cabadas, The American Auto Factory (St. Paul, MN: Motorbooks, 2002).
16. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 250–60.
17. Gartman, “Origins of the Assembly Line,” 199, 201–02.
18. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 249–53; Russell,
“The Coming of the Line,” 38; Lindy Biggs, The Rational Factory: Architecture,
Technology, and Work in America’s Age of Mass Production (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 27.
19. Joyce Shaw Peterson, American Automobile Workers, 1900–1933 (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1987), 43; Meyer, The Five Dollar Day,
40–41; Biggs, The Rational Factory, 133–34; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion
and Challenge, 534.
20. Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 10, 50; Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry,
Art and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 53;
Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Census of
Manufactures, 1919 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1923),
355, 374–75; Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope, 27; Nelson, Managers and
Workers, 9.
21. Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 288. A selection from the
very large Ford collection of photographs documenting the Highland Park plant
can be viewed online at https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-
research/.
22. David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor; the Workplace, the State,
and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), 133–35, 238–40.
23. Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 77–78, 80–85, 89–93, 156; Russell, “The Coming
of the Line,” 39–40.
24. In 1926, Ford reduced the workweek from six days to five, becoming one of
the first major industrial companies to institute the forty-hour week. Meyer, The
 Five Dollar Day, 95–168; Peterson, American Automobile Workers, 156; John
Reed, “Why They Hate Ford,” The Masses, 8 (Oct. 1916), 11–12.
25. Nelson, Managers and Workers, 101–21; Montgomery, The Fall of the House
of Labor, 236–38; Reed, “Why They Hate Ford”; Meyer, The Five Dollar Day,
114, 156–57.
26. Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 107–09; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the
Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and
Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), lxxxvi–
lxxxvii, 286, 302, 305.
27. Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 197–200; Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 291–
342. See also Harry Bennett, We Never Called Him Henry (Greenwich, CT:
Gold Medal Books, 1951).
28. Biggs, The Rational Factory, 89–94. The Piquette Avenue plant is still
standing. It now houses a museum and can be rented for corporate parties,
weddings, and bar mitzvahs. See http://www.fordpiquetteavenueplant.org/
(accessed Sept. 8, 2015).
29. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 225–26;
“Industry’s Architect,” Time, June 29, 1942; Grant Hildebrand, Designing for
Industry: The Architecture of Albert Kahn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974),
26–27. Some of Kahn’s early work can be seen in W. Hawkins Ferry, The
Legacy of Albert Kahn (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1970).
30. George N. Pierce became the manufacturer of Pierce-Arrow automobiles.
Nelson, Managers and Workers, 15–16; Betsy Hunter Bradley, The Works: The
Industrial Architecture of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999), 155–58; Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 28–43; Albert Kahn,
“Industrial Architecture” (speech), May 25, 1939, Box 1, Albert Kahn Papers,
Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Smith,
Making the Modern, 59.
31. Biggs, The Rational Factory, 93–102, 110; Kahn, “Industrial Architecture.”
32. Smith, Making the Modern, 41–42, 71; Biggs, The Rational Factory, 78, 109,
120–25; Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 52.
33. I thank Jeffrey Trask for making this point to me. See Gillian Darley, Factory
(London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 157–89.
34. Biggs, The Rational Factory, 103–4, 150; Ford Factory Facts (Detroit, MI: Ford
Motor Company, 1915) is an expanded and updated version of the 1912
booklet.
35. Both the Lingotto plant and the New York Packard service building are still
standing. The former was converted into a cultural, hotel, office, retail, and
educational complex by Renzo Piano; the latter now houses a car dealership.
Jean Castex, Architecture of Italy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 47–
 49; Darley, Factory, 10–12; Christopher Gray, “The Car Is Still King on 11th
Avenue,” New York Times, July 9, 2006.
36. Photographs of all of the mentioned buildings appear in Ferry, The Legacy of
Albert Kahn, except for the Joy house, which is in Hildebrand, Designing for
Industry, 74. On Kahn’s automobile projects and his firm organization, see
Olsen and Cabadas, The American Auto Factory, 39, 65; George Nelson,
Industrial Architecture of Albert Kahn, Inc. (New York: Architectural Book
Publishing Company, 1939), 19–23; Smith, Making the Modern, 76–78, 85–87;
and Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 60, 124.
37. Olsen and Cabadas, The American Auto Factory, 39; Biggs, The Rational
Factory, 138–40, 151. For Ford tractors, see Reynold Wik, Henry Ford and
Grassroots America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 82–97.
38. Biggs, The Rational Factory, 146, 151; Writers’ Program of the Works
Progress Administration, Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1941), 221–24; Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise
and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2009). Kingsford is now owned by The Clorox Company. The Clorox Company,
“A Global Portfolio of Diverse Brands” (accessed Sept., 13, 2015),
https://www.thecloroxcompany.com/products/our-brands/.
39. The Rouge foundry also made parts for Fordson tractors. Biggs, The Rational
Factory, 148–49, 152; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass
Production, 268, 289.
40. Nelson, Industrial Architecture of Albert Kahn, Inc., 132; Biggs, The Rational
Factory, 129, 141–57; Kahn, “Industrial Architecture”; Ferry, The Legacy of
Albert Kahn, 113–16, 120–22, 129–301; The Reminiscences of Mr. B. R. Brown
Jr., Benson Ford Research Center, Dearborn, Michigan; Works Progress
Administration, Michigan, 220–21; Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 91–92,
99, 102–08, 172–82. On Kahn’s and Ford’s antimodernism, see Albert Kahn,
“Architectural Trend” (speech), April 15, 1931, Box 1, Albert Kahn Papers;
Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 259–75; and Smith, Making the Modern, 144–55
(though Smith’s interpretation is very different than mine).
41. In addition to Highland Park and River Rouge, Ford built major manufacturing
plants in Canada and England that built finished cars and trucks and supplied
parts to foreign branch plants. As employment at the Rouge grew, it shrank at
Highland Park. In 1929, when the average number of hourly employees at the
Rouge was 98,337, at Highland Park it was only 13,444. After the stock market
crash, employment at the Rouge fell but remained substantial. Edmund Wilson,
The American Earthquake (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), 219–20, 234,
687; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 210, 365–66, 542–43;
Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope, 207–08; Bruce Pietrykowski, “Fordism at Ford:
Spatial Decentralization and Labor Segmentation at the Ford Motor Company,
1920–1950,” Economic Geography 71 (4) (Oct. 1995), 386, 389–91; Historic
 American Engineering Record, Mid-Atlantic Region National Park Service,
“Dodge Bros. Motor Car Company Plant (Dodge Main): Photographs, Written
Historical and Descriptive Data” (Philadelphia: Department of the Interior,
1980); Ronald Edsforth, Class Conflict and Cultural Consensus: The Making of
a Mass Consumer Society in Flint, Michigan (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1987), 77; New York Times, May 31, 1925, Apr. 9, 1972;
Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 263–301; Biggs,
The Rational Factory, 148; Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 185–205; The
Reminiscences of Mr. B. R. Brown Jr.
42. Not everyone, though, was enthralled. European carmaker André Citroen, after
reporting that his visit to Dearborn left him “greatly impressed by the power of
Ford’s production and his marvelous industrial creations at the River Rouge
plant,” added “regrettably, the artistic element is absent. Nothing about Ford or
his plant suggests a trace of the finer esthetic qualities.” Hounshell, From the
American System to Mass Production, 260–61; Olsen and Cabadas, The
American Auto Factory, 61, 63, 67, 70–71; New York Times, Apr. 22, 1923.
43. Kahn also helped design both the General Motors and Ford exhibitions at the
1939 New York World’s Fair. John E. Findling, ed., Historical Dictionary of
World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851–1988 (New York: Greenwood Press,
1990), 22; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1–2; Grandin,
Fordlandia, 2; Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim, and Dickran Tashjian,
The Machine Age in America 1918–1941 (New York: The Brooklyn Museum
and Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 27; Nelson, Industrial Architecture of Albert Kahn,
Inc., 97; Hildebrand, Designing for Industry, 206, 213; Works Progress
Administration, Michigan, 286, 292–93; New York Times, Apr. 9, 1972; U.S.
Travel Service, U.S. Department of Commerce, USA Plant Visits 1977–1978
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, n.d.).
44. David Roediger, “Americanism and Fordism—American Style: Kate Richards
O’Hare’s ‘Has Henry Ford Made Good?’,” Labor History 29 (2) (Spring 1988),
241–52.
45. John Reed, “Why They Hate Ford,” 11–12; Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford:
Expansion and Challenge, 88.
46. Edmund Wilson, “The Despot of Dearborn,” Scribner’s Magazine, July 1931,
24–36; Roediger, “Americanism and Fordism—American Style,” 243; Steven
Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New
York: Free Press, 1991), 259–70; Filene, The Way Out, 199, 201, 215–17, 221.
On Ford’s anti-Semitism, see Sward, Legend of Henry Ford, 146–60.
47. John Dos Passos, The Big Money ([1936] New York: New American Library,
1969), 70–77, and Alfred Kazin’s introduction to this edition, xi–xii. Cecelia
Tichi expanded on Kazin’s observation in Shifting Gears: Technology,
Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1987), 194–216.
48. Smith, Making the Modern, 16–18; Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End
of the Night ([1932] New York: New Directions, 1938); Upton Sinclair, The
Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America (Emaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1937);
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: A Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932).
49. Darley, Factory, 15–27, 34; Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, The Machine Age in
America, 23, 29; Kim Sichel, From Icon to Irony: German and American
Industrial Photography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995); Leah
Bendavid-Val, Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the
U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. (Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1999).
50. Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself (New York: Simon and Schuster,
Inc., 1963), quotes on 18, 33, 40, 49; Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White, quote
on 74. Bourke-White may have been inspired by O’Neill’s play, in which one
character says “I love dynamos. O love to hear them sing.” Eugene O’Neill,
Dynamo (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), 92.
51. Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, 69; Goldberg,
Margaret Bourke-White, 87–89; Life, Nov. 23, 1936; William H. Young and
Nancy K. Young, The 1930s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 156.
“Margaret Bourke-White Photographic Material, Itemized Listing” is a
comprehensive list of her photographs at the Margaret Bourke-White Papers,
Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, including
her factory photographs, https://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/b/bourke-
white_m.htm#series7 (accessed Sept. 23, 2015). For Hine, see, for example,
Jonathan L. Doherty, ed., Women at Work: 153 Photographs by Lewis W. Hine
(New York: Dover Publications and George Eastman House, 1983).
52. Sheeler’s portfolio of Rouge photographs can be seen at the Detroit Institute of
Art website for the 2004 exhibition “The Photography of Charles Sheeler,
American Modernist” (accessed Sept. 23, 2015),
http://www.dia.org/exhibitions/sheeler/content/rouge_gallery/hydra_shear.html.
Sharon Lynn Corwin, “Selling ‘America’: Precisionism and the Rhetoric of
Industry, 1916–1939,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley,
2001, 17–79, 158; Carol Troyen, “Sheeler, Charles,” American National
Biography Online Feb. 2000 (accessed Sept. 24 2015),
http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00795.html; Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian,
The Machine Age in America, 24, 78, 218–19; Smith, Making the Modern, 111–
13. The Ford company returned to the strategy of selling cars through imagery
of the magic and majesty of their production in a 1940 film it commissioned,
Symphony in F, shown at the New York World’s Fair. It can be seen at
“Symphony in F: An Industrial Fantasia for the World of Tomorrow,” The
National Archives, Unwritten Record Blog, Mar. 3, 2016, https://unwritten-
record.blogs.archives.gov/2016/03/03/symphony-in-f-an-industrial-fantasia-for-
the-world-of-tomorrow/.
53. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 355–56; Nevins and Hill,
Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 282–83. For Sheeler’s photomontage
“Industry,” see Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, 24,
218. American Landscape is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern
Art; Classic Landscape in the collection of the National Gallery of Art. See also
River Rouge Plant, Whitney Museum of American Art, and City Interior,
Worcester Art Museum. Amoskeag Mill Yard # 1 and Amoskeag Canal are in
the collection of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Amoskeag Mills #2 is in the collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum in
Bentonville, Arkansas. Hine’s Amoskeag photographs are owned by the Library
of Congress and can be viewed at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?
q=Amoskeag%20hine (accessed Nov. 4, 2016). Bourke-White’s Amoskeag
photographs are in Oversize 5, folders 31–35, Margaret Bourke-White Papers.
54. Smith, Making the Modern, 194; Troyen, “Sheeler, Charles.”
55. Carol Quirke, Eyes on Labor: News Photography and America’s Working
Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 273–74; Corwin, “Selling
‘America,’” 127; Life, Nov. 23, 1936; Nov. 14, 1938.
56. Sharon Lynn Corwin stresses, contrary to the standard account and to Terry
Smith, that workers do appear in Sheeler’s Rouge photographs and are critical
to their meaning. Corwin, “Selling ‘America,’” 23; Fortune, Dec. 1940.
57. Like Bourke-White, Driggs grew up familiar with the world of industry; her
father was an engineer for a steel company. Rivera and many of the
Precisionists shared a past engagement with Cubism. Corwin, “Selling
‘America,’” 145–48, 159–62, 165; Barbara Zabel, “Louis Lozowick and
Technological Optimism of the 1920s,” Archives of American Art Journal 14 (2)
(1974), 17–21; Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, The Machine Age in America,
237–42, 343; Linda Bank Downs, Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals
(New York: Norton, 1999), 21.
58. Downs, Diego Rivera, 22, 28.
59. Henry Ford offered a chauffeured Lincoln to Rivera and Kahlo to use in their
exploration of the city, but Rivera thought it would be embarrassing for artists to
be seen in such luxury, so he accepted a more modest car from Edsel instead.
Mark Rosenthal, “Diego and Frida”; Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera, “April 21,
1932”; Linda Downs, “The Director and the Artist: Two Revolutionaries”; and
John Dean, “’He’s the Artist in the Family’: The Life, Times, and Character of
Edsel Ford,” all in Rosenthal, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit (Detroit,
MI: Detroit Institute of Arts, 2015). On the impact of the Depression on Detroit,
see Steve Babson with Ron Alpern, Dave Elsila, and John Revitte, Working
Detroit: The Making of a Union Town (New York: Adama Books, 1984), 52–60.
60. Rosenthal, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, 102–03, 219.
61. Rivera’s depiction of the machinery and processes at the Rouge, working from
sketches, photographs, and information provided by Ford engineers, is
remarkably accurate. The one major exception is the giant stamping machine
in the south wall panel. Rivera painted an older model machine—the one
Sheeler had photographed—rather than the one then in use. (Rivera may have
worked from the Sheeler photo.) Apparently Rivera preferred the
anthropomorphic qualities of the older machine. For a detailed description and
analysis of the murals and their relationship to actual Rouge activity, see
Downs, Diego Rivera.
62. Rosenthal, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, 103–07, 182; Detroit News, Mar. 22,
1933, and May 12, 1933. Before returning to Mexico, Rivera completed a
series of murals for the leftist New Workers School in New York City that
included a portrayal of the Homestead strike. See David P. Demarest, Jr., ed.,
“The River Ran Red”: Homestead 1892 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 218. The Rouge appears in another Detroit mural,
painted in 1937 by WPA artist Walter Speck for the headquarters of United
Automobile Workers Local 174. It now is in the Walter Reuther Library, Wayne
State University, Detroit. See “Collection Spotlight: UAW Local 174 Mural,” Oct.
20, 2016, https://reuther.wayne.edu/node/13600.
63. In another painting Kahlo began in Detroit, Self-Portrait on the Borderline
between Mexico and the United States, the Highland Park powerhouse
appears in the background. Downs, Diego Rivera, 58–60; Rosenthal, “Diego
and Frida: High Drama in Detroit,” and Solomon Grimberg, “The Lost Desire:
Frida Kahlo in Detroit,” in Rosenthal, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
64. Charles Chaplin, Modern Times (United Artists, 1936); Hounshell, From the
American System to Mass Production, 319–20; Charles Musser, “Modern
Times (Chaplin 1936),” (accessed Sept. 30, 2015),
http://actionspeaksradio.org/chaplin-by-charles-musser-2012/); Joyce Milton,
Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 336, 348,
350; Mark Lynn Anderson, “Modern Times” (accessed Sept. 30, 2015),
http://laborfilms.org/modern-times/; Edward Newhouse, “Charlie’s Critics,”
Partisan Review and Anvil, Apr. 1936, 25–26 (includes quote from Daily
Worker review); Stephen Kotchin, Magic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 184; Octavio Cortazar, Por
Primera Vez/For the First Times (El Instituto Cubano, Lombarda Industria
Cinematografia, 1967). In an odd coda, after the completion of Modern Times,
Paulette Goddard and Chaplin ended their romantic relationship and Goddard
went on to have one with Rivera. In a mural Rivera painted in San Francisco in
1940, Unión de la Expresión Artistica del Norte y Sur de este Continente (The
Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on This
Continent), he included images of Chaplin, Kahlo, and Goddard eyeing each
other suspiciously and a mashup of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue and a Detroit
 Motor Company stamping machine, a rare return to a theme of Detroit Industry.
David Robinson, Chaplin, His Life and Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 509;
City College of San Francisco, “Pan American Unity Mural,” (accessed Oct. 1,
2015), https://www.ccsf.edu/en/about-city-college/diego-rivera-
mural/overview.html.
65. Ruth McKenney, Industrial Valley (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 261–62.
66. For an overview of this era, see Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire, 1945–
2000: The Rise of a Global Empire, the Democratic Revolution at Home (New
York: Viking, 2012).
67. There is a large literature about labor upsurge of the 1930s, but the best single
account remains Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American
Worker 1933–1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970).
68. In addition to Bernstein, Turbulent Years, see, Ronald W. Schatz, The
Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse,
1923–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Daniel Nelson,
American Rubber Workers and Organized Labor, 1900–1941 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1988); and Sidney Fine, The Automobile Under the
Blue Eagle: Labor, Management, and the Automobile Manufacturing Code
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964).
69. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 509–51; Henry Kraus, The Many and the Few: A
Chronicle of the Dynamic Auto Workers ([1947] Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1985). See, also, Sidney A. Fine, Sit-down: The General Motors Strike
of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).
70. Joshua Freeman et al., Who Built America? 395; Bernstein, Turbulent Years,
551–54, 608–09, 613; Steve Jefferys, Management and Managed: Fifty Years
of Crisis at Chrysler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 71–77;
Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 17–33.
71. Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995), 54–60; Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 432–73.
72. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 478–98; Zieger, CIO, 79, 82.
73. Zieger, CIO, 121–31.
74. No similar size election again would be held until 1999, when seventy-four
thousand home-care workers in Los Angeles were sent ballots to determine if
they wanted union representation. John Barnard, American Vanguard: The
United Auto Workers during the Reuther Years, 1935–1970 (Detroit, MI: Wayne
State University Press, 2004), 153–64; Zieger, CIO, 122–24; Los Angeles
Times, Feb. 26, 1999.
75. Joshua Freeman, “Delivering the Goods: Industrial Unionism During World
War II,” Labor History 19 (4) (Fall 1978); U.S. Department of Commerce,
Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789–1945 (Washington, D.C., U.S.
 Government Printing Office, 1949), 72. See also Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s
War at Home: The CIO in World War II ([1982] Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2003).

Chapter 5
“COMMUNISM IS SOVIET POWER PLUS THE ELECTRIFICATION
OF THE WHOLE COUNTRY”
1. Detroit Sunday News, Dec. 15, 1929. Photographs of the plant site and
construction are in box 10, Albert Kahn Papers, Bentley Historical Library,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. See also “Agenda for Meeting
with Russian Visitors—Saturday, June 13, 1964,” Russian Scrapbooks, vol. II,
box 13, Kahn Papers; Those Who Built Stalingrad, As Told by Themselves
(New York: International Publishers, 1934), 29; Alan M. Ball, Imagining
America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 124; New York Times, Mar. 29, 1930, May 18,
1930; Margaret Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1931), 118–27.
2. V. I. Lenin, “Our Foreign and Domestic Position and Party Tasks,” Speech
Delivered to the Moscow Gubernia Conference of the R.C.P.(B.), Nov. 21,
1920, Lenin’s Collected Works, Volume 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
Moscow, 1966), 419–20.
3. Edward Hallett Carr and R. W. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy,
1926–1929, Vol. I–II (London: Macmillan, 1969), 844, 898–902; Alexander
Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–1928 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1967), 164–65; J. V. Stalin, “A Year of Great
Change, On the Occasion of the Twelfth Anniversary of the October
Revolution,” Pravda 259 (Nov. 7, 1929),
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1929/11/03.htm;
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), 32 (quoted passage), 69–70, 363, 366.
4. Arens went on to become a leading industrial designer, working for some of
the best-known American corporations. Barnaby Haran cites Arens’s
comments in his article “Tractor Factory Facts: Margaret Bourke-White’s Eyes
on Russia and the Romance of Industry in the Five-Year Plan,” Oxford Art
Journal 38 (1) (2015), 82. The full text is in New Masses 3 (7) (Nov. 1927), 3.
On Arens, see “Biographical History,” Egmont Arens Papers Special
Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, accessed Feb. 23,
2016, http://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/a/arens_e.htm#d2e97.
5. Of course, there always were some government-owned factories, particularly
to produce armaments. As discussed in Chapter 4, at times these played an
 important role in the development of production techniques.
6. On the impact of scientific management and mass production in Europe, see
Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and
Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970 (New York: Viking, 1989), 285–323;
Judith A. Merkle, Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International
Scientific Management Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1980), esp. 105, 136–223; Charles S. Maier, “Between Taylorism and
Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in
the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History 5 (2) (1970), pp. 27–61; and
Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections from the Prison
Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
7. Lenin was particularly attracted to Gilbreth’s work (as other Russian
communists would be) because, by simplifying motions for completing tasks, it
claimed to increase productivity without increasing the exploitation of workers
as speedup did. S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories 1917–
1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 7–12; Merkle,
Management and Ideology, 105–06, 179; Daniel A. Wren and Arthur G.
Bedeian, “The Taylorization of Lenin: Rhetoric or Reality?” International Journal
of Social Economics 31 (3) (2004), 287–99 (quote from Lenin on 288); V. I.
Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism; A Popular Outline ([1917]
New York: International Publishers, 1939).
8. Lenin’s remarks about Taylor were soon translated into English, circulated in
the United States, and frequently quoted in business circles. Wren and
Bedeian, “Taylorization of Lenin,” 288–89; Merkle, Management and Ideology,
111–15 (quote on 113).
9. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed; Trotsky: 1879–1921 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1954), 499–502; Merkle, Management and Ideology, 118–19;
Kendall E. Bailes, “Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism,
1918–24,” Soviet Studies 29 (3) (July 1977), 374, 380–83.
10. Merkle, Management and Ideology, 114–20; Bailes, “Alexei Gastev”; Vladimir
Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia: Industrialization and Social Change in a
Planned Economy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 101–02; Wren and
Bedeian, “Taylorization of Lenin,” 290–91; Deutscher, The Prophet Armed,
498–501.
11. An earlier All-Russian Conference on Scientific Management had been
organized by Trotsky in 1921, but failed to resolve the differences between the
two sides of the debate. Bailes, “Alexei Gastev,” 387–93; Kendall E. Bailes,
“The American Connection: Ideology and the Transfer of American Technology
to the Soviet Union, 1917–1941,” Comparative Studies in Society and History
23 (3) (July 1981), 437; Wren and Bedeian, “Taylorization of Lenin,” 291.
12. When a delegation from the Ford Motor Company visited Gastev’s institute in
1926, they deemed it “a circus, a comedy, a crazy house,” “a pitiful waste of
young people’s time.” Merkle, Management and Ideology, 123; Andrle, Workers
in Stalin’s Russia, 93–94; Bailes, “Alexei Gastev,” 391, 393; Timothy W. Luke,
Ideology and Soviet Industrialization (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985),
165–66; Wren and Bedeian, “Taylorization of Lenin” 291–96; Ball, Imagining
America, 28–29.
13. My discussion of RAIC is based on Steve Fraser, “The ‘New Unionism’ and the
‘New Economic Policy’,” in James E. Cronin and Carmen Sirianni, eds., Work,
Community and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America,
1900–1925 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983).
14. William Z. Foster, Russian Workers and Workshops in 1926 (Chicago: Trade
Union Educational League, 1926), 52; Erlich, Soviet Industrialization Debate,
24–25, 105–06, 114.
15. Erlich, Soviet Industrialization Debate, xvii–xviii, 140, 147, 161; Smith, Red
Petrograd, 7–8, 10–12; Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 1891–1991: A
History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 112.
16. Bailes, “The American Connection,” 430–31; Hans Rogger, “Amerikanizm and
the Economic Development of Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and
History 23 (3) (July 1981); Hughes, American Genesis, 269; Dana G.
Dalrymple, “The American Tractor Comes to Soviet Agriculture: The Transfer of
a Technology,” Technology and Culture 5 (2) (Spring 1964), 192–94, 198; Allan
Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons: 1957), 255, 673–77.
17. Foster also claimed that Soviet workers accepted piecework and Taylorism
because “The benefits of increased production flow to the workers, not to
greedy capitalists.” William Z. Foster, Russian Workers, 13, 54; New York
Times, Feb. 17, 1928 (“Fordizatsia”).
18. In seeing socialism as the outcome of a combination of Soviet rule with
American methods, Trotsky was not only echoing Lenin but also voicing a
common Bolshevik belief. In 1923, for example, Nikolai Bukharin declared “We
need Marxism plus Americanism.” Rogger, “Amerikanizm,” 384. The Trotsky
quotes come from his essay “Culture and Socialism,” Krasnaya Nov, 6 (Feb. 3,
1926), translated by Brian Pearce, in Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life
and Other Writings on Culture and Science (New York: Monad Press, 1973).
19. The Five-Year Plan was a highly detailed document, running more than 1,700
pages long. Erlich, Soviet Industrialization Debate; Carr and Davies,
Foundations of a Planned Economy, 894, 896; Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 4,
139, 146–48.
20. There perhaps was a cultural element in the Soviet embrace of industrial
giantism as well; Russia, before and after the revolution, had a general
 predilection to monumentality, evident, for example, in buildings from the
Hermitage to the never completed Moscow Palace of Soviets. My thanks to
Kate Brown for this point. Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned
Economy, 844, 898–902; Erlich, Soviet Industrialization Debate, 67–68, 107–
08, 140; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 27; Those Who Built Stalingrad,
33–38.
21. Bailes, “The American Connection,” 431; Merkle, Management and Ideology,
125; Rogger, “Amerikanizm,” 416–17.
22. Another American, Bill Shatov, supervised a second, large early Soviet project,
the Turksib railway, but that was a very different story; Shatov was a Russian-
born anarchist, active in the United States in the Industrial Workers of the
World, who returned to Russia in 1917. Hughes, American Genesis, 264–69;
Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 900–901; Bourke-White,
Eyes on Russia, 76–88; Sonia Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two
‘Unknowns’: How an American Architect and a Soviet Negotiator Jump-Started
the Industrialization of Russia: Part II: Saul Bron,” Industrial Archeology 37
(1/2) (2011), 8–9. Melnikova-Raich’s article is the second part of her revelatory
examination of the role of American companies and experts in Soviet
industrialization based on extensive research in both U.S. and Soviet archives.
On Shatov, see the Emma Goldman Papers, Editors’ Notes (accessed Jan. 11,
2016), http://editorsnotes.org/projects/emma/topics/286/.
23. Adler, “Russia ‘Arming’ with Tractor”; Maurice Hindus, “Preface,” in Bourke-
White, Eyes on Russia, 14–15; Dalrymple, “The American Tractor Comes to
Soviet Agriculture,” 210; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 3.
24. The Soviets planned to produce a tractor based on an International Harvester
model, receiving cooperation from the company without paying it royalties. New
York Times, Nov. 5, 1928, May 5, 1929, and May 7, 1929; Sonia Melnikova-
Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns’: How an American Architect
and a Soviet Negotiator Jump-Started the Industrialization of Russia: Part I:
Albert Kahn,” Industrial Archeology 36 (2) (2010), 60–61, 66; Economic Review
of the Soviet Union, Apr. 1, 1930.
25. Detroit Free Press, May 14, 1929, and June 1, 1929.
26. Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 61, 66–
68; New York Times, July 1, 1929, Mar. 29, 1930, May 18, 1930, and Mar. 27,
1932; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 38–45, 50–56 (Ivanov quote on 52), 206;
Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 84–85; Rogger, “Amerikanizm,” 383–84.
27. New York Times, June 19, 1930; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 13, 62.
28. Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part II,” 9–11,
23–24; New York Times, May 5, 1929, May 7, 1929, June 1, 1929; Nevins and
Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 677–78, 683; Richard Cartwright Austin,
 Building Utopia: Erecting Russia’s First Modern City, 1930 (Kent, OH: Kent
State University Press, 2004), 12.
29. Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part II,” 11–12;
Michigan Manufacturer and Financial Record, Apr. 19, 1930; Lewis H.
Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2008), 40; Betsy Hunter Bradley, The Works: The
Industrial Architecture of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999), 22; Austin, Building Utopia, 5–6, 13–19.
30. Austin, Building Utopia, 31–43, 59–101, 121–39; New York Times, Dec. 2,
1931.
31. In April 1930, the Soviet Automobile Construction Trust decided it had been a
mistake to ask Austin to design the autoworkers’ city: “If Americans are
specialists in automobile construction, they are certainly far from specialists in
designing Socialist town [sic] for the Soviet Republics.” Nonetheless, even in
the radical socialist vision for the city there was some American influence. One
of the key figures involved, architect and educator Alexander Zelenko, had
spent time in the United States, including visits to Hull House in Chicago and
the University Settlement in New York, where he was influenced by the ideas of
John Dewey. New York Times, Dec. 16, 1929, Apr. 11, 1931, Mar. 27, 1932;
Yordanka Valkanova, “The Passion for Educating the ‘New Man’: Debates
about Preschooling in Soviet Russia, 1917–1925,” History of Education
Quarterly 49 (2) (May 2009), 218; Austin, Building Utopia, 45–53, 84–85, 161–
68; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 366.
32. The very popular Soviet novel Cement, by Fyodo Vasilievich Gladkov ([1925]
New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1973), vividly portrays the huge
obstacles and heroic efforts involved in Soviet industrialization. For first-person
accounts in English of work on First-Year Plan projects, see Those Who Built
Stalingrad and John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s
City of Steel (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1942).
33. On-site reports include The Detroit Sunday News, Dec. 15, 1929, and New
York Times, Nov. 21, 1930. Time coverage includes “Great Kahn,” May 20,
1929, “Austin’s Austingrad,” Sept. 16, 1929, and “Architects to Russia,” Jan.
20, 1930.
34. Saul G. Bron, Soviet Economic Development and American Business (New
York: Horace Liveright, 1930), 76, 144–46.
35. Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 60–63;
New York Times, Jan. 11, 1930; “Architects to Russia,” Time, Jan. 20, 1930;
Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85; Detroit Free Press, Jan. 18, 1930;
Detroit Times, Mar. 17, 1930.
36. “Industry’s Architect,” Time, June 29, 1942; Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet
Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 62–66, 75.
37. The design of the tractor to be produced in Chelyabinsk and much of the
engineering for its manufacture was done at a Detroit office that had twelve
U.S. and forty Soviet engineers. Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with
Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 69–71.
38. Those Who Built Stalingrad, 56-58, 261; Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia, 188.
Of course, not speaking Russian and unfamiliar with the circumstances, it is
quite possible that Bourke-White and other American observers failed to fully
understand what they were seeing and its causes.
39. New York Times, Nov. 7, 1930, Nov. 24, 1930, Dec. 27, 1930, Sept. 28, 1931,
Oct. 4, 1931, Apr. 14, 1934; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge,
522; Meredith Roman, “Racism in a ‘Raceless’ Society: The Soviet Press and
Representations of American Racial Violence at Stalingrad in 1930,”
International Labor and Working-Class History 71 (Spring 2007), 187; Those
Who Built Stalingrad, 64–66, 161, 164, 228–29, 261, 263.
40. New York Times, July 20, 1930; Austin, Building Utopia, 190–91; Victor
Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1976), 93, 101.
41. New York Times, July 20, 1930; May 11, 1931; May 14, 1931; May 18, 1931;
Dec. 2, 1931 (Duranty), May 18, 1932; Austin, Building Utopia, 190–91, 197;
Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 35; Reuther, Brothers Reuther, 88, 93, 101,
110.
42. Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 69; Those
Who Built Stalingrad, 158; New York Times, Dec. 2, 1931.
43. The following account of Magnitogorsk is based primarily on Stephen Kotkin’s
brilliant history, Magnetic Mountain, and the first-person account by American
John Scott, who worked in the plant, Behind the Urals.
44. “Mighty Giant” from USSR in Construction, 1930, no. 9, p. 14. The Nizhny Tagil
plant looked very much like a Kahn factory, but apparently only Soviet
specialists were involved in designing, building, and starting it up, including
many veterans of First Five-Year Plan projects. See USSR in Construction,
1936, no. 7 (July).
45. “Super-American tempo” from USSR in Construction, 1930, no. 9, p.14. On the
weather, see http://www.weatherbase.com/weather/weather.php3?
s=83882&cityname=Magnitogorsk-Chelyabinsk-Russia (accessed Jan. 26,
2016) and Scott, Behind the Urals, 9–10, 15. For many Americans besides
Scott, cold was a defining feature of their experience in the Soviet Union. When
Victor Herman, who accompanied his father to the Gorky auto plant, attended a
Kremlin celebration of the first vehicles to come off the line, the first thing he
noticed was the warmth in the banquet hall, realizing that he had not been
 “really all-over warm” since arriving in the country. Victor Herman, Coming Out
of the Ice (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 53.
46. Kotkin and Scott both extensively discuss the use of unfree labor. See, also,
William Henry Chamberlin, Russia’s Iron Age (Boston: Little, Brown, 1934), 51–
53; Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special
Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 101.
47. In addition to Kotkin and Scott (quoted passage on 159), see Melnikova-Raich,
“The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’” Part II, 19; Herman, Coming Out of
the Ice; and Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades, 58–59.
48. Scott, Behind the Urals, 204–05, 277–79.
49. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades, 45; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 16;
Robert C. Allen, Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial
Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 92–93, 102–06.
On the difficulty of obtaining accurate Soviet economic data, see Oscar
Sanchez-Sibony, Red Globalization: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold
War from Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2014), 12–19.
50. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 70, 363; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism:
Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 79–83.
51. Scott, Behind the Urals, 16; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 168–73.
52. Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 35; Scott, Behind the Urals, 144; Kotkin,
Magnetic Mountain, 189. Tensions about shifting gender roles are a major
theme in Cement, Gladkov’s widely read novel about the struggle to reopen a
huge, prerevolution cement factory.
53. Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and
the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 39; Those Who
Built Stalingrad, 98.
54. Scott, Behind the Urals, 138, 152, 212–19; Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 87;
Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 214–15.
55. Scott, Behind the Urals, 40; Katerina Clark, “Little Heroes and Big Deeds:
Literature Responds to the First Five-Year Plan,” in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed.,
Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1978), 197; Reuther, Brothers Reuther, 98–99; Those Who Built
Stalingrad, 52–53. Oddly, artificial palm trees seemed to have been something
of a rage in the Soviet Union; when Ernst May and a team of German
architects entered the country in 1929 to design new industrial cities, they
found artificial palms common in railway waiting rooms. Ernst May, “Cities of
the Future,” in Walter Laqueur and Leopold Labedz, eds., Future of Communist
Society (New York: Praeger, 1962), 177.
56. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 49, 55–56, 95–103; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s
Russia, 37; A. Baikov, Magnitogorsk (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing
House, 1939), 19, 30–31; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 67, 182–92, 290–91;
Scott, Behind the Urals, 235–36.
57. Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 38; Scott, Behind the Urals, 234; Kotkin,
Magnetic Mountain, 108–23.
58. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 80–82; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 212–19.
59. Clark, “Little Heroes and Big Deeds,” 190–92; Susan Tumarkin Goodman,
“Avant-garde and After: Photography in the Early Soviet Union,” in Goodman
and Jens Hoffman, eds., The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography,
Early Soviet Film (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 23, 31–32;
Lydia Chukovskaya, Sofia Petrovna (1962; Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1988), 4. Chukovskaya’s novella was not published in
Russian until 1962 and in English until 1967.
60. For a comparison of documentary photography in the United States and the
Soviet Union, see Bendavid-Val, Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the
1930s in the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. (Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1999).
61. Over time, the magazine began covering more varied topics, including political
events, the army, ethnic groups, distant regions of the country, and sports.
USSR in Construction, 1930–1941; USSR in Construction: An Illustrated
Exhibition Magazine (Sundsvall, Sweden: Fotomuseet Sundsvall, 2006);
University of Saskatchewan Library, Digital Collections, USSR in Construction,
“About” (accessed Feb. 5, 2016), http://library2.usask.ca/USSRConst/about;
Goodman, “Avant-garde and After,” 27–28; Bendavid-Val, Propaganda and
Dreams, 62–65.
62. SSSR stroit sotsializm (Moskova: Izogiz, 1933); USSR in Construction: An
Illustrated Exhibition Magazine (press run data); B. M. Tal, Industriia
sotsializma. Tiazhelaia promyshlennost’k VII vsesoiuznomu s’ezdy sovetov
[Industry of Socialism. Heavy Industry for the Seventh Congress of Soviets]
(Moscow: Stroim, 1935).
63. Goodman, “Avant-garde and After,” 15, 17; USSR in Construction, 1930, no. 1.
64. Goodman, “Avant-garde and After,” 22–27, 38. Leah Bendavid-Val stresses
similarities between Soviet and U.S. photographers in Propaganda and
Dreams, which includes photographs of Magnitogorsk by Debabov, Albert, and
Petrusov. For more extensive collections of Petrusov’s work, see Georgij
Petrussow, Pioneer Sowjetischer Photographie (Köln, Germany: Galerie Alex
Lachmann, n.d.) and Georgy Petrusov: Retrospective/Point of View (Moscow:
GBUK “Multimedia Complex of Actual Arts,” Museum “Moscow House of
Photography,” 2010).
65. Entuziazm (Simfonija Donbassa), Ukrainfilm, 1931. Filmmakers like Vertov and
Sergei Eisenstein, who used avant-garde techniques to pursue revolutionary
 themes, drew considerable attention outside of the Soviet Union, but domestic
audiences preferred more conventional entertainment. Jens Hoffman, “Film in
Conflict,” in Goodman and Hoffman, The Power of Pictures.
66. The Soviets also published in English a collection of letters from foreigners
who worked in the Soviet Union. Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with
Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part II,” 17–18; Cynthia A. Ruder, Making History for Stalin;
The Story of the Belomor Canal (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
1998); Those Who Built Stalingrad; Baikov, Magnitogorsk; Garrison House
Ephemera (accessed Nov. 13, 2016),
http://www.garrisonhouseephemera.com/?page=shop/flypage&product_id=546;
Sixty Letters: Foreign Workers Write of Their Life and Work in the U.S.S.R.
(Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R.,
1936).
67. Duranty’s articles on Soviet industry are too numerous to individually cite. For
Chamberlin, see Russia’s Iron Age. On American academic experts and
intellectuals, see David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore:
American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), esp. 5–6, 9, 156–57, 166, 237 (Fischer
quote).
68. Hans Schoots, Living Dangerously: A Biography of Joris Ivens (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 74–81.
69. Bourke-White returned to the U.S.S.R. in 1941, when she photographed
Moscow during German bombing raids, Stalin in the Kremlin, and the front line.
Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia (quotes on 23 and 42); Margaret Bourke-White,
Portrait of Myself (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1963), 90–104, 174–
88; Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography (New York: Harper &
Row, 1986), 128– 32; Haran, “Tractor Factory Facts.”
70. To compare Bourke-White’s Soviet and U.S. textile mill photographs, see
Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia and Bourke-White, “Amoskeag” (1932),
reproduced in Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim, and Dickran Tashjian,
The Machine Age in America 1918–1941 (New York: Brooklyn Museum and
Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 234. Bourke-White also took similar photographs at
the American Woolen Company in Lawrence, Massachusetts. For an
interesting discussion of her Soviet work, see Haran, “Tractor Factory Facts.”
71. A drop in grain production during the first years of collectivization, combined
with the export of grain, exacerbated the food crisis. Sanchez-Sibony, Red
Globalization, 36–53 (Stalin quote on 51); Bailes, “The American Connection,”
433, 442–43; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 150, 198; Scott, Behind the Urals,
86–87, 174; Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part
I,” 74–75; New York Times, Mar. 26, 1932; Detroit Free Press, Mar. 29, 1932;
Daily Express, Apr. 19, 1932; Detroit News, Apr. 24, 1932; Nevins and Hill,
Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 682.
72. Merkle, Management and Ideology, 132; Bailes, “The American Connection,”
442–44; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 54, 198; Michael David-Fox, Showcasing
the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet
Union, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 285–86, 297–
99; Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 75–
76; Scott, Behind the Urals, 230–31.
73. Bailes, “The American Connection,” 445; Chamberlin, Russia’s Iron Age, 61–
65; R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison, and S. G. Wheatcroft, eds., The Economic
Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 95, 155; Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 5, 178.
74. Wikipedia, “Alexei Gastev” (accessed Nov. 12, 2016),
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksei_Gastev; Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet
Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part II,” 17–20; Patrick Flaherty, “Stalinism in
Transition, 1932–1937,” Radical History Review, 37 (Winter 1987). Bill Shatov,
who had returned home from the United States and supervised the Turksib
railway project, was exiled to Siberia in 1937 and executed the following year.
Emma Goldman Papers, Editors’ Notes (accessed Jan. 11, 2016),
http://editorsnotes.org/projects/emma/topics/286/. For an account of the long
imprisonment, Siberian exile, and eventual return to the United States of a
young American worker at the Gorky auto plant, see Herman, Coming Out of
the Ice.
75. Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of
Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928–1941 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe,
1986), 126–27, 261–66; Erlich, Soviet Industrialization Debate, 182–83; Allen,
Farm to Factory, 152, 170–71; Flaherty, “Stalinism in Transition,” 48–49.
76. After their revolution, the Soviets (like the French) introduced a new
organization of time, replacing the weekend with a system of one day off work
during every five days (four days in the metallurgy industry), later switching to
one day off every six days, before ultimately returning to more conventional
timekeeping. Filtzer, Soviet Workers, 91–96, 156; Kate Brown, A Biography of
No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003), 92–117; Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 4,
42–45.
77. Most of the twenty thousand Stalingrad Tractor Factory workers were
evacuated as the battle broke out. The factory was rebuilt after the war. The
Nizhny Tagil Railroad Car Factory also was converted to military production,
and, like the Chelyabinsk plant, continues to produce both military and civilian
equipment, employing thirty thousand workers in 2016. Melnikova-Raich, “The
Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 68–69, 71–73; Reuther, Brothers
Reuther, 102–03; Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades, 61–62; Jochen Hellbeck,
Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich (New York: Public Affairs
Press, 2015), 89; “History—Chelyabinsk tractor plant (ChTZ)” (accessed Jan.
 18, 2016), http://chtz-uraltrac.ru/articles/categories/24.php; New York Times,
Feb. 25, 2016; Scott, Behind the Urals, vii–viii, 63–65, 103.
78. John P. Diggins, Up from Communism ([1975] New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), 189–98; Christopher Phelps, “C.L.R. James and the Theory of
State Capitalism,” in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Social
Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Filtzer, Soviet Workers, 270–71.
79. Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 126–76, 198–201; Kotkin, Magnetic
Mountain, 206–07, 318–19; Filtzer, Soviet Workers, 233–36; Federico Bucci,
Albert Kahn: Architect of Ford (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993),
92.
80. If anything, Freyn thought the Soviets were a bit too democratic; it would be
better if “more decisions might be made by responsible individuals rather than
by committees and commissions.” Edmund Wilson, “A Senator and an
Engineer,” New Republic, May 27, 1931; “An American Engineer Looks at the
Five Year Plan,” New Republic, May 6, 1931; Detroit News Apr. 24, 1932.

Chapter 6
“COMMON REQUIREMENTS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION”
1. Many of Burnham’s arguments had been put forth earlier by Bruno Rizzi, but
received little notice outside of small, left-wing circles. At roughly the same
time, C. L. R. James broke with Trotsky to describe the Soviet Union as “state
capitalist,” with productive enterprises collectively owned by a reemerging
capitalist class through the government. Ultimately, the United States, too,
James argued, would become state capitalist. James Burnham, The
Managerial Revolution ([1941] Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960);
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast; Trotsky: 1929–1940 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1963), 459–77; Christopher Phelps, “C.L.R. James and the
Theory of State Capitalism,” in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism:
Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
2. These paragraphs draw substantially from David C. Engerman, “To Moscow
and Back: American Social Scientists and the Concept of Convergence,” in
Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism.
3. http://brooklynnavyyard.org/the-navy-yard/history/ (accessed Mar. 29, 2016).
For a popular overview of the role of private business in wartime defense
production, see Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business
Produced Victory in World War II (New York: Random House, 2012).
4. To undertake the war work, Kahn’s firm grew from four hundred to six hundred
employees. Hawkins Ferry, The Legacy of Albert Kahn (Detroit, MI: Wayne
 State University Press, 1970), 25–26.
5. To expand the labor pool for Willow Run, Ford opened up jobs to women, who
eventually made up 35 percent of the workforce. However, in a departure from
its policy at Highland Park and the Rouge, the company all but spurned African
Americans. Willow Run workers eventually achieved productivity far above the
airplane industry norm. The latest use of the Willow Run factory grounds has
been as a test site for driverless cars. Sarah Jo Peterson, Planning the Home
Front: Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2013); Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion
and Challenge, 1915–1933 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons: 1957), 242–
47; Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther
and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 160–74; Gail
Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 121–32; New York Times, June
6, 2016.
6. Not all the workers at other airplane manufacturers were housed in single
plants; Republic and Grumman built auxiliary factories near their main plants to
bring work nearer to where workers lived, reducing problems with commuting
and housing. T. P. Wright Memorandum for Charles E. Wilson, Mar. 21, 1943,
box 7, National Aircraft War Production Council, Harry S. Truman Library,
Independence, MO; Ferry, Legacy of Albert Kahn, 25, 127–28; Tim Keogh,
“Suburbs in Black and White: Race, Jobs and Poverty in Twentieth-Century
Long Island,” Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 2016, 53–56, 77;
T. M. Sell, Wings of Power: Boeing and the Politics of Growth in the Northwest
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 19; John Gunther, Inside
U.S.A. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), 142–43.
7. “Bethlehem Ship,” Fortune, Aug. 1945, 220; Bernard Matthew Mergen, “A
History of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America,
1933–1951,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1968, 2–3, 103–
04, 134–37, 142; [Baltimore] Evening Sun, Dec. 8, 1943; Apr. 5, 1944; Apr. 20,
1944; May 15, 1944; July 1, 1944; Karen Beck Skold, “The Job He Left Behind:
American Women in Shipyards During World War II,” in Carol R. Berkin and
Clara M. Lovett, eds., Women, War, and Revolution (New York: Holmes &
Meier, 1980), esp. 56–58; Eric Arnesen and Alex Lichtenstein, “Introduction:
‘All Kinds of People,’ ” in Katherine Archibald, Wartime Shipyard: A Study in
Social Disunity ([1947] Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), xvi, xxxi–
xxxv; Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire, 1945–2000: The Rise of a Global
Empire, the Democratic Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 2012), 21;
Peterson, Planning the Home Front, 279.
8. For the impact of World War II on the American working class, see Joshua
Freeman, “Delivering the Goods: Industrial Unionism during World War II,”
Labor History 19 (4) (Fall 1978); Nelson Lichtenstein, “The Making of the
 Postwar Working Class: Cultural Pluralism and Social Structure in World War
II,” The Historian 51 (1) (Nov. 1988), 42–63; Gary Gerstle, “The Working Class
Goes to War,” Mid-America 75 (3) (1993), 303–22. Dorothea Lange and
Charles Wollenberg, Photographing the Second Gold Rush: Dorothea Lange
and the East Bay at War, 1941–1945 (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1995).
9. Jack Metzgar, “The 1945–1946 Strike Wave,” in Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day,
and Immanuel Ness, eds., The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History
(Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2009); Art Preis, Labor’s Giant Step: Twenty years
of the CIO (New York: Pioneer Press, 1965), 257–83.
10. Ronald W. Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General
Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1983), 105–64; Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, 282–
98; Freeman, American Empire,119–24; Labor’s Heritage: Quarterly of the
George Meany Memorial Archives, 4 (1992), 28; Joshua Freeman, “Labor
During the American Century: Work, Workers, and Unions Since 1945,” in
Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., A Companion to Post-
1945 America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); Ruth Milkman, Farewell to the
Factory: Auto Workers in the Late Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997); Charles Corwin in New York Daily Worker, Feb. 4,
1949, quoted in Karen Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 114; Jack Metzgar, Striking
Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000),
30–45 (quote on 39).
11. Daniel Nelson, American Rubber Workers and Organized Labor, 1900–1941
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 82–83, 234–45, 257–64,
271, 307–09, 315–17; Charles A. Jeszeck, “Plant Dispersion and Collective
Bargaining in the Rubber Tire Industry,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of
California, Berkeley, 1982, 31, 47–54, 106–08.
12. The Bloomington plant swelled to more than eight thousand employees after
RCA began producing televisions there, but the company eventually shifted
much of the production first to Memphis and then Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 10, 15, 17, 22–35, 42–43.
13. In a further effort to avoid interruptions in production, General Motors, unlike
Ford, made it a policy to use outside suppliers for a majority of the parts and
accessories that went into its vehicles. Douglas Reynolds, “Engines of
Struggle: Technology, Skill and Unionization at General Motors, 1930–1940,”
Michigan Historical Review 15 (Spring 1989), 79–80; New York Times, Aug. 12,
1935; Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial
Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 208.
14. Jeszeck, “Plant Dispersion,” 33–35; “Flying High,” Kansas City Public Library,
http://www.kclibrary.org/blog/week-kansas-city-history/flying-high, and “Fairfax
 Assembly Plant,” GM Corporate Newsroom,
http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/company_info/facilities/assembly/fairfax.
html (both accessed Apr. 5, 2016); Schatz, Electrical Workers, 233. On war-
related industrial development in the Southwest, see Elizabeth Tandy Shermer,
Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
15. Metzgar, “The 1945–1946 Strike Wave”; Freeman, American Empire, 39–41;
Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement
from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 93–97;
Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on
Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994),
138–39.
16. Kim Phillips-Fein, “Top-Down Revolution: Businessmen, Intellectuals and
Politicians Against the New Deal, 1945–1964,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia
University, 2004, 220; Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and
Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000), 60–71; Tami J.
Friedman, “Communities in Competition: Capital migration and plant relocation
in the United States carpet industry, 1929–1975,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia
University, 2001, 22, 70–76, 201–04.
17. Schatz, Electrical Workers, 170–75; Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 97–114.
18. Schatz, Electrical Workers, 233–34.
19. Schatz, Electrical Workers, 234–36; Freeman, American Empire, 303–06;
Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in
Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 128–29;
James C. Cobb, The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial
Development, 1936–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1982); Friedman, “Communities in Competition,” 111–66.
20. See, for example, Martin Beckman, Location Theory (New York: Random
House, 1968); Gerald J. Karaska and David F. Bramhall, Locational Analysis
for Manufacturing: A Selection of Readings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969);
and Paul Krugman, Geography and Trade (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University
Press and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), esp. 62–63 for discussion of
Akron.
21. Counter to the common management view, the productivity of unionized
workers often exceeded that of nonunion workers. Roger W. Schmenner,
Making Business Location Decisions (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1982), vii, 10–11, 124–26, 154–57, 239; Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 104;
Lawrence Mishel and Paula B. Voos, eds., Unions and Economic
Competitiveness (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1992).
22. Kimberly Phillips-Fein, “American Counterrevolutionary: Lemuel Ricketts
Boulware and General Electric, 1950–1960,” in Lichtenstein, ed., American
 Capitalism, 266–67; John Barnard, American Vanguard: The United Auto
Workers during the Reuther Years, 1935–1970 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State
University Press, 2004), 483; Cowie, Capital Moves, 53–58. See also
Friedman, “Communities in Competition,” 380–81, 403–21.
23. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 130–35.
24. Steve Jefferys, Management and Managed: Fifty Years of Crisis at Chrysler
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 155; Historic American
Engineering Record, Mid-Atlantic Region National Park Service, “Dodge Bros.
Motor Car Company Plant (Dodge Main): Photographs, Written Historical and
Descriptive Data” (Philadelphia: Department of the Interior, 1980), 20.
25. Freeman, American Empire, 115; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1967 Census of
Manufactures, vol. 1: Summary and Subject Statistics (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1971), table 1 (pages 2–4).
26. Charles Fishman, “The Insourcing Boom,” The Atlantic, Dec. 2012; Mark
Reilly, “General Electric Appliance Park,” in John E. Kleber, ed., The
Encyclopedia of Louisville (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2000),
333–34.
27. “The Rebirth of Ford,” Fortune, May 1947, 81–89. The Evans photographs are
now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and can be seen at
http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/281891 and
http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/279282 (accessed Apr. 11,
2016).
28. Warren Bareiss, “The Life of Riley,” Museum of Broadcast Communications—
Encyclopedia of Television (accessed Apr. 11, 2016),
http://www.museum.tv/eotv/lifeofriley.htm. See also George Lipsitz, “The
Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television
Programs,” Cultural Anthropology 1 (4) (Nov. 1986), 355–87.
29. Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor ([2002]
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 148–62, 215–18; U.S.
Bureau of the Census, Census of Manufactures, 1972, vol. 1, Subject and
Special Statistics (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976),
68; Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society; A Venture in Social
Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Freeman, American Empire, 303–
06, 344–49; Metzgar, Striking Steel, 210–23.
30. Anders Åman, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin
Era; An Aspect of Cold War History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 76;
Sonia Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns’: How an
American Architect and a Soviet Negotiator Jump-Started the Industrialization
of Russia: Part II: Saul Bron,” Industrial Archeology 37 (1/2) (2011), 21–22;
“History—Chelyabinsk tractor plant (ChTZ)” (accessed Jan. 18, 2016),
http://chtz-uraltrac.ru/articles/categories/24.php; New York Times, Feb. 25,
 2016; Stephen Kotkin, Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), xii–xiii, 2, 5.
31. Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet
and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013);
Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 80–81.
32. Alan M. Ball, Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century
Russia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 162.
33. Most of the housing in Avtograd consisted of apartments for individual families
in five to sixteen story buildings. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades, 81–109; Wall
Street Journal, Apr. 11, 2016.
34. KAMAZ, “History,” https://kamaz.ru/en/about/history/ (accessed May 2, 2017).
35. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades, 112–24; Wall Street Journal, Apr. 11, 2016;
KAMAZ, “History”; KAMAZ, “General Information” (accessed May 2, 2017),
https://kamaz.ru/en/about/general-information/.
36. Czechoslovakia was exceptional in having a large communist party with
substantial popular support. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since
1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 129–39, 165–96; Åman, Architecture and
Ideology, 12, 28–30, 147; Mark Pittaway, “Creating and Domesticating
Hungary’s Socialist Industrial Landscape: From Dunapentele to Sztálinváros,
1950–1958,” Historical Archaeology 39 (3) (2005), 76, 79–80.
37. Romania never had a “first socialist city” of the sort found elsewhere in Eastern
Europe. Åman, Architecture and Ideology, 77 (“cult of steel”), 81, 147, 157–61;
Ulf Brunnbauer, “‘The Town of the Youth’: Dimitrovgrad and Bulgarian
Socialism,” Ethnologica Balkanica 9 (2005), 92–95. See also Paul R.
Josephson, Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth? Technological Utopianism under
Socialism, 1917–1989 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012),
65–119.
38. Åman, Architecture and Ideology, esp. 33–39, 102–03, 158, 162; Pittaway,
“Hungary’s Socialist Industrial Landscape,” 78–81, 85–87; Brunnbauer, “‘The
Town of the Youth,’” 94, 98–111; Katherine Lebow, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa
Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–56 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2013), 46, 52–56.
39. Paweł Jagło, “Steelworks,” in Nowa Huta 1949+ [English version] (Kraków:
Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa, 2013), quote on 18; Lebow, Unfinished
Utopia, 19–26, 36–40, 69; Alison Stenning, “Placing (Post-)Socialism: The
Making and Remaking of Nowa Huta, Poland,” European Urban and Regional
Studies 7 (Apr. 2000), 100–01; Boleslaw Janus, “Labor’s Paradise: Family,
Work, and Home in Nowa Huta, Poland, 1950–1960,” East European Quarterly
XXXIII (4) (Jan. 2000), 469; H. G. J. Pounds, “Nowa Huta: A New Polish Iron
and Steel Plant,” Geography 43 (1) (Jan. 1958), 54–56; interview with
 Stanisław Lebiest, Roman Natkonski, and Krysztof Pfister, Nowa Huta, Poland,
May 19, 2015. The largest U.S. Steel mill, in terms of employment, the
Bethlehem Steel Sparrows Point complex, had 28,600 workers in 1957 and a
capacity of 8.2 million tons a year. The U.S. Steel mill in Gary, Indiana, peaked
at an estimated 25,000 workers in 1976. In 1996, with only 7,800 workers
remaining, it produced 12.8 million tons of steel. Mark Reutter, Sparrows Point;
Making Steel—The Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (New York:
Summit Books, 1988), 10, 413; Chicago Tribune, Feb. 26, 1996.
40. Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 37–40; 61–62, 74–77, 82–88, 92–93, 97–98, 103;
Janus, “Labor’s Paradise,” 455–56; Poland Today 6 (7–8) (July–Aug. 1951),
14. Photographs of the construction of Nowa Huta, including of female
plasterers, can be seen in Henryk Makarewicz and Wiktor Pental, 802 Procent
Normy; pierwsze lata Nowej Huty [802% Above the Norm: The Early Years of
Nowa Huta] (Kraków: Fundacja Imago Mundi: Vis-à-vis/etiuda, [2007]).
41. Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 65, 71, 157–58; Paweł Jagło, “Architecture of Nowa
Huta,” in Nowa Huta 1949+, 26.
42. Leszek J. Sibila, Nowa Huta Ecomuseum: A Guidebook (Kraków: The
Historical Museum of the City of Kraków, 2007); Jagło, “Architecture of Nowa
Huta”; Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 29–35, 41–42, 71–73; Åman, Architecture
and Ideology, 102–103, 151–53; Nowa przestrzeń; Modernizm w Nowej Hucie
(Kraków: Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa, 2012). For U.S. comparison,
see Freeman, American Empire, 12–27, 136–39.
43. Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 3, 146–49; Åman, Architecture and Ideology, 151;
stamps:
https://www.stampworld.com/en_US/stamps/Poland/Postage%20stamps/?
year=1951 and http://colnect.com/en/stamps/list/country/4365-
Poland/theme/3059-Cranes_Machines (accessed Nov. 25, 2016); Anne
Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–56 (New
York: Doubleday, 2012), 360, 372, 377–78, 384–85 (quotes from Ważyk in her
translation on 384); Andrzej Wajda, Man of Marble (Warsaw: Zespól Filmowy
X, 1977). See also Marci Shore, “Some Words for Grown-Up Marxists: ‘A
Poem for Adults’ and the Revolution from Within,” Polish Review 42 (2) (1997),
131–54.
44. Brunnbauer, “’The Town of the Youth,’” 96–97, 105; Janus, “Labor’s Paradise,”
454–55; Pittaway, “Hungary’s Socialist Industrial Landscape,” 75–76, 82–85.
45. Judt, Postwar, 172; Janus, “Labor’s Paradise,” 464–65; Lebow, Unfinished
Utopia, 45, 47, 50–51, 56; interview with Lebiest et al.
46. Janus, “Labor’s Paradise,” 459–64; Brunnbauer, “‘The Town of the Youth,’”
105; Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 124–25, 138–45; Pittaway, “Hungary’s Socialist
Industrial Landscape,” 87.
47. Sztálinváros was renamed Dunaújváros in 1961. Josephson, Would Trotsky
Wear a Bluetooth?, 85–86; Applebaum, Iron Curtain, 459; Pittaway, “Hungary’s
Socialist Industrial Landscape,” 88–89.
48. Paweł Jagło, “Defense of the Cross,” in Nowa Huta 1949+, 39–40; Lebow,
Unfinished Utopia, 161–69.
49. Paweł Jagło, “Anti-Communist Opposition,” in Nowa Huta 1949+; Stenning,
“Placing (Post-) Socialism,” 105–06; Chicago Tribune, June 10, 1979.
50. Kraków environmentalists often blamed the steel mill for the severe air
pollution in the city, but prevailing winds took emissions from Nowa Huta
eastward, away from the city, not toward it. Local plants, industry west of
Kraków, coal-burning furnaces, and growing traffic were more responsible.
Maria Lempart, “Myths and facts about Nowa Huta,” in Nowa Huta 1949+, 50.
51. Judt, Postwar, 587–89; Stenning, “Placing (Post-)Socialism,” 106; Jagło, “Anti-
Communist Opposition.”
52. The official government-recognized union tacitly supported the 1988 strike,
though with its own, more modest demands. The discussion of Solidarity in
Nowa Huta is drawn primarily from Lebow, Unfinished Utopia, 169–76, and my
interview with Lebiest et al. See also Jagło, “Anti-Communist Opposition”; New
York Times, Nov. 11, 1982, Apr. 29, 1988, May 3, 1988, and May 6, 1988; and
Judt, Postwar, 605–08.
53. Interview with Lebiest et al.
54. “Poland Fights for Gdansk Shipyard,” BBC News, Aug. 21, 2007,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6956549.stm; “Gdansk Shipyard Sinking
from Freedom to Failure,” Toronto Star (accessed May 6, 2016),
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/01/27/gdansk_shipyard_sinking_fro
m_freedom_to_failure.html).
55. New York Times, Nov. 27, 1989; interview with Lebiest et al.; Jagło,
“Steelworks,”19–20; Stenning, “Placing (Post-)Socialism,” 108–10, 116.
56. New York Times, Oct. 6, 2015, and Oct. 7, 2015.
57. Harold James, Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2012), 39; Werner Abelshauser, The Dynamics of
German Industry: Germany’s Path toward the New Economy and the American
Challenge (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 3, 85–86, 89.
58. Though in some respects the Wolfsburg plant was modeled on River Rouge,
Volkswagen did not integrate backward to make all its parts, instead
purchasing many from a network of closely connected suppliers. Abelshauser,
Dynamics of German Industry, 91–104, 108–09; Volker R. Berghahn, The
Americanization of West German Industry 1945–1973 (Lemington Spa, NY:
Berg, 1986), 304–09.
59. Werner Abelshauser, Wolfgang Von Hippel, Jeffrey Allan Johnson, and
Raymond G. Stokes, German Industry and Global Enterprise; BASF: The
 History of a Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 487–99
(quote on 488); New York Times, Oct. 27, 2014; “BASF Headquarters”
(accessed May 16, 2016), https://www.basf.com/us/en/company/career/why-
join-basf/basf-at-a-glance/basf-headquarters.html.
60. New York Times, Oct. 6, 2015; Gillian Darley, Factory (London: Reaktion
Books, 2003), 187–89.
61. Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 99–113 (“citadels” on 109), 127, 158;
Beinin, “Egyptian Textile Workers Confront the New Economic Order,” Middle
East Research and Information Project, Mar. 25, 2007,
http://www.merip.org/mero/mero032507; Beinin, “The Militancy of Mahalla al-
Kubra,” Middle East Research and Information Project, Sept. 29, 2007,
http://www.merip.org/mero/mero092907; “The Factory,” Al Jazeera, Feb. 22,
2012,
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/revolutionthrougharabeyes/2012/01/201
213013135991429.html; “Mahalla textile workers’ strike enters eighth day,”
Daily News Egypt, Feb. 17, 2014,
http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2014/02/17/mahalla-textile-workers-strike-
enters-eighth-day/; Alex MacDonald and Tom Rollins, “Egypt’s Mahalla textile
factory workers end four-day strike after deal reached,” Middle East Eye, Jan.
17, 2015, http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/egypts-mahalla-textile-factory-
workers-end-four-day-strike-after-management-agreement-260129749.

Chapter 7
“FOXCONN CITY”
1. Pun Ngai, Shen Yuan, Guo Yuhua, Lu Huilin, Jenny Chan, and Mark Selden,
“Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese Workers’ Struggles from a Global Labor
Perspective,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17 (2) (2016), 166; Jason Dean, “The
Forbidden City of Terry Gou,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 11, 2007. Ngai, Chan,
and Selden have written the most important study of Foxconn and of Apple in
China, Dying for an iPhone, from which I have greatly benefited. It is
forthcoming in English but available in Spanish and Italian editions, Morir por
un iPhone (Bueno Aires: Ediciones Continente S.R.L., 2014) and Moirire per
un iPhone (Milan: Jaca Books, 2015).
2. To offset the wage hikes, Foxconn also raised its prices. New York Times, May
25, 2010, June 2, 2010; Elizabeth Woyke, The Smartphone: Anatomy of an
Industry (New York: New Press, 2014), 135–36; Bloomberg Businessweek,
June 7, 2010, Sept. 13, 2010; “Foxconn’s Business Partners Respond to
Suicides,” CCTV Com English, May 20, 2010,
http://english.cntv.cn/program/china24/20100520/101588.shtml; “Foxconn
 Shares Dive on Suicides,” CCTV Com English, June 29, 2010,
http://english.cntv.cn/program/bizasia/20100528/102843.shtml; “Foxconn to
Hike Prices to Offset Pay Increase,” CCTV Com English, July 22, 2010,
http://english.cntv.cn/20100722/104196.shtml; “Foxconn Hikes Salaries Again
in South China Factory After Suicides,” CCTV Com English, Oct. 1, 2010,
http://english.cntv.cn/program/20101001/101698.shtml.
3. Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept.
13, 2010; James Fallows, “Mr. China Comes to America,” The Atlantic, Dec.
2012.
4. For various statements of the number of employees at the Foxconn Shenzhen
factories in 2010, see “Foxconn Hikes Salaries Again in South China Factory
After Suicides,” CCTV Com English, Oct. 1, 2010; Bloomberg Businessweek,
June 7, 2010, Sept. 13, 2010; New York Times, May 25, 2010; Pun Ngai,
Migrant Labor in China: Post-Socialist Transformations (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2016), 101, 119. See also Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, “How the
U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work,” New York Times, Jan. 21, 2012
(“unimaginable”).
5. Foxconn factories outside of China are generally much smaller, in some cases
modest-sized assembly plants serving local markets, built to circumvent tariffs.
Some Foxconn factories make parts or finished products for multiple clients,
including Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Cisco, GE, Amazon, HP, Dell, Motorola,
Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Nintendo, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Acer, and Lenovo.
Others serve just one client or even make only one product. Ngai, Migrant
Labor, 105; Rutvica Andrijasevic and Devi Sacchetto, “Made in the EU:
Foxconn in the Czech Republic,” WorkingUSA, Sept. 2014; Devi Sacchetto
and Martin Cecchi, “On the Border: Foxconn in Mexico,” openDemocracy, Jan.
16, 2015, https://www.opendemocracy.net/devi-sacchetto-mart%C3%ACn-
cecchi/on-border-foxconn-in-mexico; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an
iPhone; New York Times, Mar. 29, 2012; David Barboza, “China’s ‘iPhone City,’
Built on Billions in Perks,” New York Times, Dec. 29, 2016.
6. Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; New York Times, Dec. 11, 2013;
“BBC Documentary Highlights Conditions at a Chinese iPhone Factory, But Is It
All Apple’s Fault?” MacWorld, Dec. 19, 2014,
http://www.macworld.com/article/2861381/bbc-documentary-highlights-
conditions-at-a-chinese-iphone-factory-but-is-it-all-apples-fault.html.
7. Ngai, Migrant Labor, 102; Boy Lüthje, Siqi Luo, and Hao Zhang, Beyond the
Iron Rice Bowl: Regimes of Production and Industrial Relations in China
(Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2013), 195, 198; Hao Ren, ed., China on Strike:
Narratives of Workers’ Resistance, English edition edited by Zhongjin Li and Eli
Friedman (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 11, 201–03; Jennifer Baichwal,
Manufactured Landscapes (Foundry Films and National Film Board of Canada,
2006).
 8. David Barboza, “In Roaring China, Sweaters Are West of Socks City,” New
York Times, Dec. 24, 2004; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 102.
9. New York Times, Nov. 8, 1997, Mar. 28, 2000; Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail
Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2009), 173; Richard P. Appelbaum, “Giant Transnational
Contractors in East Asia: Emergent Trends in Global Supply Chains,”
Competition & Change 12 (Mar. 2008), 74; “About PCG,”
http://www.pouchen.com/index.php/en/about/locations, and “Yue Yuen
Announces Audited Results for the Year 2015,”
http://www.yueyuen.com/index.php/en/news-pr/1147-2016-03-23-yue-yuen-
announces-audited-results-for-the-year-2015 (both accessed June 3, 2016);
International Trade Union Confederation, 2012 Annual Survey of Violations of
Trade Union Rights—Vietnam, June 6, 2012,
http://www.refworld.org/docid/4fd889193.html.
10. Some ten thousand Soviet technicians were posted to China to help with the
industrialization drive, while nearly three times that many Chinese went to the
Soviet Union for training. Carl Riskin, China’s Political Economy: The Quest for
Development Since 1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 53–63, 74;
Nicholas R. Lardy, “Economic Recovery and the 1st Five-Year Plan,” in
Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge History of
China, vol. 14: The People’s Republic, part 1: The Emergence of Revolutionary
China, 1949–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 157–60,
177–78.
11. Riskin, China’s Political Economy, 64, 117–18, 125–27, 133, 139, 161–65;
Kenneth Lieberthal, “The Great Leap Forward and the Split in the Yenan
Leadership,” in MacFarquhar and Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge History of
China, vol. 14; Stephen Andors, China’s Industrial Revolution: Politics,
Planning, and Management, 1949 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1977),
68–134. By the 1990s, Anshan had become China’s largest industrial
enterprise, employing some 220,000 workers. “Anshan Iron and Steel
Corporation,” in Lawrence R. Sullivan, Historical Dictionary of the People’s
Republic of China, second edition (Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 24–
26. See, also, Cheng Tsu-yuan, Ashan Steel Factory in Communist China
(Hong Kong: The Urban Research Institute, 1955).
12. Andors, China’s Industrial Revolution, 144–47, 158–59.
13. Andors, China’s Industrial Revolution, 135–42.
14. While there was a push during the Cultural Revolution for the despecialization
of factories, there apparently was not an effort to despecialize the work of
individual workers in the production process, even as they were given
expanded roles in management and other aspects of factory function. Andors,
China’s Industrial Revolution, 160–240.
15. Ngai, Migrant Labor, 11, 15.
16. Henry Yuhuai He, Dictionary of the Political Thought of the People’s Republic
of China (London: Routledge, 2015), 287; Michael J. Enright, Edith E. Scott,
and Ka-mun Chang, Regional Powerhouse: The Greater Pearl River Delta and
the Rise of China (Singapore: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 6, 36–38.
17. Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 1, 7.
18. Gabriel Kolko, Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace (London: Routledge, 1997); The
World Bank, “Vietnam, Overview,” Apr. 11, 2016,
http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/vietnam/overview; Nguyen Thi Tue Anh,
Luu Minh Duc, and Trinh Doc Chieu, “The Evolution of Vietnamese Industry,”
Learning to Compete Working Paper No. 19, Brookings Institution (accessed
Aug. 13, 2016), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/07/L2C_WP19_Nguyen-Luu-and-Trinh-1.pdf.
19. Enright, Scott, and Chang, Regional Powerhouse, 6, 12, 16, 36, 38–39, 67–68,
74, 98, 101–02, 117.
20. Enright, Scott, and Chang, Regional Powerhouse, 75, 98, 108; Andrew Ross,
Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade—
Lessons from Shanghai (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 24–26; Bloomberg
Businessweek, Sept. 13, 2010.
21. Enright, Scott, and Chang, Regional Powerhouse, 47.
22. Ngai, Migrant Labor, 2, 20–21, 25, 32, 76–78.
23. The Guardian, July 31, 2014,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/31/china-reform-hukou-migrant-
workers; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 4-5; Ngai, Made in China, 36, 43–46.
24. For an interesting portrait of life in a state-owned factory during the 1980s, see
Lijoa Zhang, “Socialism Is Great!” A Worker’s Memoir of the New China (New
York: Atlas & Co., 2008). See, also, Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor
Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007), 35–36; Ross, Fast Boat to China, 57.
25. Ngai, Migrant Labor, 35, 93, 128–29; “Workers Strike at China Footwear Plant
Over Welfare Payments,” Wall Street Journal, Apr. 16, 2014,
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304626304579505451938007
332; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 186.
26. Ngai, Migrant Labor, 31. For an in-depth comparison of systems of
manufacturing in China, see Lüthje, Luo, and Zhang, Beyond the Iron Rice
Bowl.
27. The wages and benefit contributions of export factories in high-cost regions
would not have been enough to support locally-living families and the services
provided to them, the cost of “social reproduction.” Enright, Scott, and Chang,
Regional Powerhouse, 192, 250; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 32–35.
28. Ngai, Migrant Labor, 83–104, 123; Hong Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor
Control: A Case Study of Three Electronics Factories in China,” International
Labor and Working-Class History 73 (Spring 2008), 92; Anita Chen, China’s
Workers Under Assault: The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy
(Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 12; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an
iPhone; Duhigg and Bradsher, “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work”; Ren,
ed., China on Strike, 7, 184.
29. For a fine, painful portrait of a migrant worker family and their trips back home,
see the documentary film Last Train Home, directed by Lixin Fan (EyeSteel
Films, 2009). Ngai, Migrant Labor, 30–32; Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor
Control,” 85, 98–99; U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The
Employment Situation—May 2014,”
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_06062014.pdf (accessed July
16, 2016); Michael Bristow, “China’s holiday rush begins early,” BBC News,
Jan. 7, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7813267.stm; Ross, Fast
Boat to China, 16; New York Times, Jan. 26, 2017.
30. As in China, in Vietnam migrant workers form a large part of the workforce in
foreign-owned factories, especially near Ho Chi Minh City. See Anita Chan,
“Introduction,” in Chan, ed., Labour in Vietnam (Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 4.
31. In addition to the Peter Charlesworth photography of workers making Reebok
shoes, see, for example, Dong Hung Group, “Shoe Manufacturers in Vietnam”
(2012), http://www.donghungfootwear.com/en/phong-su-ve-dong-hung-
group.html, which includes factory photographs and a video showing the
processes used for making sneakers. See, also, Tom Vanderbilt, The Sneaker
Book: Anatomy of an Industry and an Icon (New York: New Press, 1998), 78–
80.
32. For EUPA, see the documentary film Factory City (Discovery Channel, 2009).
Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Dean, “The Forbidden City of
Terry Gou”; Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics ([1890] London:
Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1920), 8th ed., IV.XI.7,
http://www.econlib.org/library/Marshall/marP25.html#Bk.IV,Ch.XI (accessed
Sept. 22, 2014); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of
Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 25.
33. For Appelbaum’s analysis, on which I lean heavily, see Appelbaum, “Giant
Transnational Contractors.”
34. The classic discussion of the importance of the link between manufacturing
and distribution is Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial
Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1977). See also, Nelson Lichtenstein, “The Return of Merchant Capitalism,”
International Labor and Working-Class History 81 (2012), 8–27;
http://www.clarksusa.com/us/about-clarks/heritage (accessed July 19, 2016).
35. Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire, 1945–2000: The Rise of a Global
Empire, the Democratic Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 2012), 343–54.
36. Vanderbilt, Sneaker Book, 8–25, 76–88.
37. Boy Lüthje, “Electronics Contract Manufacturing: Global Production and the
International Division of Labor in the Age of the Internet,” Industry and
Innovation 9 (3) (Dec. 2002), 227–47.
38. There is a large literature on changes in retailing. In addition to Appelbaum,
“Giant Transnational Contractors,” particularly useful works include Charles
Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company
Really Works—and How It’s Transforming the American Economy (New York:
Penguin, 2006); Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution; and Xue Hong,
“Outsourcing in China: Walmart and Chinese Manufacturers,” in Anita Chan,
ed., Walmart in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
39. For a pioneering critical look at modern branding, see Naomi Klein, No Logo:
Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Picador, 1999). Lüthje, “Electronics
Contract Manufacturing,” 230 (Nishimura quote); Marcelo Prince and Willa
Plank, “A Short History of Apple’s Manufacturing in the U.S.,” The Wall Street
Journal, Dec. 6, 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/12/06/a-short-history-of-
apples-manufacturing-in-the-u-s/; Peter Burrows, “Apple’s Cook Kicks Off
‘Made in USA’ Push with Mac Pro,” Dec. 19, 2013,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-18/apple-s-cook-kicks-off-
made-in-usa-push-with-mac-pro; G. Clay Whittaker, “Why Trump’s Idea to
Move Apple Product Manufacturing to the U.S. Makes No Sense,” Popular
Science, Jan. 26, 2016, http://www.popsci.com/why-trumps-idea-to-move-
apple-product-manufacturing-to-us-makes-no-sense; Klein, No Logo, 198–99.
40. Vanderbilt, Sneaker Book, 90–99; New York Times, Nov. 8, 1997; Klein, No
Logo, 197–98, 365–79; Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, “As Apple
Grew, American Workers Left Behind,” Nov. 16, 2011,
http://americawhatwentwrong.org/story/as-apple-grew-american-workers-left-
behind/; David Pogue, “What Cameras Inside Foxconn Found,” Feb. 23, 2012,
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/what-cameras-inside-foxconn-
found/.
41. Lüthje, “Electronics Contract Manufacturing,” 231, 234, 236–37; Boy Lüthje,
Stefanie Hürtgen, Peter Pawlicki, and Martina Sproll, From Silicon Valley to
Shenzhen: Global Production and Work in the IT Industry (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 69–149; Appelbaum, “Giant Transnational
Contractors,” 71–72.
42. For the container revolution, see Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping
Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
43. David Barboza, “In Roaring China, Sweaters Are West of Socks City”; Oliver
Wainwright, “Santa’s Real Workshop: The Town in China That Makes the
World’s Christmas Decorations,” The Guardian, Dec. 19, 2014,
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-
blog/2014/dec/19/santas-real-workshop-the-town-in-china-that-makes-the-
worlds-christmas-decorations.
44. Ngai et al., “Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese Workers’ Struggles,” 169; Wall
Street Journal, July 22, 2014; Adam Starariano and Peter Burrows, “Apple’s
Supply-Chain Secret? Hoard Lasers,” Bloomberg Businessweek, Nov. 3, 2011,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-03/apples-supply-chain-
secret-hoard-lasers; and Adam Lashinsky, “Apple: The Genius Behind Steve,”
Fortune, Nov. 24, 2008, http://fortune.com/2008/11/24/apple-the-genius-behind-
steve/ (Cook quote).
45. In 2004, Foxconn employed five thousand engineers in Shenzhen alone.
Duhigg and Bradsher, “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work”; Ngai, Chan,
and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Lüthje et al., From Silicon Valley to
Shenzhen, 191.
46. Lüthje, Luo, and Zhang, Beyond the Iron Rice Bowl, 188–89; Ngai, Chan, and
Selden, Dying for an iPhone.
47. Ngai, Migrant Labor, 102–03; Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor Control,” 88–89.
48. Lüthje, Luo, and Zhang, Beyond the Iron Rice Bowl, 197;
http://www.yueyuen.com/index.php/en/about-us-6/equipments (accessed Dec.
20, 2016); Dean, “The Forbidden City of Terry Gou”; lecture by Pun Ngai,
Joseph S. Murphy Institute, City University of New York, Feb. 23, 2016.
49. Barboza, “In Roaring China, Sweaters Are West of Socks City”; Lu Zhang,
Inside China’s Automobile Factories: The Politics of Labor and Worker
Resistance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 8, 23, 60; interview
with Qian Xiaoyan (First Secretary, Embassy of the People’s Republic of China
in the U.S.A.), New York, Apr. 16, 2015; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 115–19. For
Vietnamese government policy, see Nguyen Thi Tue Anh, Luu Minh Duc, and
Trinh Doc Chieu, “The Evolution of Vietnamese Industry,” 14–24.
50. Ngai, Migrant Labor, 66, 72, 78; Ngai, Made in China, 2–3, 55–56, 65–73;
Ren, ed., China on Strike, 96.
51. Ngai, Migrant Labor, 86, 101; Emily Feng, “Skyscrapers’ Rise in China Marks
Fall of Immigrant Enclaves,” New York Times, July 19, 2016; Ross, Fast Boat
to China, 164–65; Richard Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein, “A New World
of Retail Supremacy: Supply Chains and Workers’ Chains in the Age of Wal-
Mart,” International Labor and Working-Class History 70 (2006), 109.
52. Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 97.
53. Ngai, Made in China, 32; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 5–9, 27.
54. Ngai, Migrant Labor, 120–23, 128–29; Ngai et al., “Apple, Foxconn, and
Chinese Workers’ Struggles,” 174; Duhigg and Bradsher, “How the U.S. Lost
Out on iPhone Work”; Wall Street Journal, Dec. 18, 2012. See also Lüthje et
al., From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, 184–87.
55. Charles Duhigg and David Barboza, “The iEconomy; In China, the Human
Costs That Are Built Into an iPad,” New York Times, Jan. 26, 2012; Ngai, Chan,
and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 7, 184; Xue, “Local
Strategies of Labor Control,” 89, 92. For comparison, see William Dodd, A
Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd, A Factory Cripple,
Written by Himself, reprinted in James R. Simmons, Jr., ed., Factory Lives:
Four Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiographies (Peterborough, ON:
Broadview Editions, 2007).
56. Chen, China’s Workers Under Assault, 10, 12, 23, 46–81; Xue, “Local
Strategies of Labor Control,” 91–92; Ngai et al., “Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese
Workers’ Struggles,” 172–74; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political
Economy, vol. 1 ([1867] New York: International Publishers, 1967), 424; Jee
Young Kim, “How Does Enterprise Ownership Matter? Labour Conditions in
Fashion and Footwear Factories in Southern Vietnam,” in Chan, ed., Labour in
Vietnam, 288; Ngai, Made in China, 80, 97.
57. “The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (1990–2014)”
(accessed Aug. 4, 2016), libcom.org, https://libcom.org/blog/xulizhi-foxconn-
suicide-poetry.
58. Serious as these problems are, large plants generally have better health and
safety equipment and records than smaller parts suppliers with fewer
resources and less subject to international scrutiny. Under pressure from Nike,
conditions in the factory in Vietnam were improved and more use was made of
less toxic water-based solvents. New York Times, Nov. 8, 1997, Apr. 28, 2000;
Chen, China’s Workers Under Assault, 82–97; Duhigg and Barboza, “The
iEconomy”; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Lüthje et al., From
Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, 187.
59. Some Chinese factories consciously mix workers from different regions on
production lines, to undercut worker solidarity. Others, usually smaller, recruit
workers from particular regions or even villages, so that hometown bonds
extend into the workplace and dormitories. Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for
an iPhone; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 129–30; Lüthje et al., From Silicon Valley to
Shenzhen, 190; Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor Control,” 93, 97–98.
60. Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 13, 2010; Duhigg and Bradsher, “How the
U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work”; Lüthje, Luo, and Zhang, Beyond the Iron Rice
Bowl, 187; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 201–03; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 119, 130;
Fallows, “Mr. China Comes to America,” 62. See also Factory City.
61. Unlike in China, the reduction of poverty in Vietnam has not been
accompanied by a large increase in inequality. World Bank, [China] “Overview,”
 http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/china/overview#3; World Bank, “China”
[Data], http://data.worldbank.org/country/china; and World Bank, [Vietnam]
“Overview,” http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/vietnam/overview, all
accessed Dec. 2, 2016. Chinese strike data derived from Chinese Labour
Bulletin “Strike Map,” http://maps.clb.org.hk/strikes/en; U.S. data from United
States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Work stoppages
involving 1,000 or more workers, 1947–2015,”
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkstp.t01.htm (both accessed Aug. 16, 2016).
62. For overviews of strikes in China, see Ren, ed., China on Strike; Lee, Against
the Law; James Griffiths, “China on Strike,” CNN.com, Mar. 29, 2016,
http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/28/asia/china-strike-worker-protest-trade-union/;
and China Labour Bulletin’s extraordinary interactive “Strike Map.” See also
New York Daily News, Jan. 11, 2012; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an
iPhone; Duhigg and Barboza, “The iEconomy.”
63. The Vietnamese government is generally more supportive of worker strikes
against foreign companies than the Chinese government and has less often
used repressive power against them. Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, “Workers’
Protests in Contemporary Vietnam” and Anita Chan, “Strikes in Vietnam and
China in Taiwanese-owned Factories: Diverging Industrial Relations Patterns,”
in Chan, ed., Labour in Vietnam; “10,000 Strike at Vietnamese Shoe Factory,
USA Today, Nov. 29, 2007, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-
11-29-vietnam-shoe-strike_N.htm; “Workers Strike at Nike Contract Factory,”
USA Today, Apr. 1, 2008,
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/economy/2008-04-01-
1640969273_x.htm; “Shoe Workers Strike in the Thousands,” Thanh Nien
Daily, http://www.thanhniennews.com/society/shoe-workers-strike-in-the-
thousands-16949.html; “Vietnamese workers extract concessions in
unprecedented strike,” DW, Feb. 4, 2015, http://www.dw.com/en/vietnamese-
workers-extract-concessions-in-unprecedented-strike/a-18358432 (all
accessed Aug. 8, 2016); International Trade Union Confederation, 2012 Annual
Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights—Vietnam; Kaxton Siu and Anita
Chan, “Strike Wave in Vietnam, 2006–2011,” Journal of Contemporary Asia,
45:1 (2015), 71–91; New York Times, May 14, 2014; Wall Street Journal, May
16, 2014, June 19, 2014.
64. Both the shrinking rural population and the gender imbalance stem in part from
China’s one-child policy. Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; “Urban
and rural population of China from 2004 to 2014,” Statista (accessed Aug. 16,
2016), http://www.statista.com/statistics/278566/urban-and-rural-population-of-
china/; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 21–23; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 35, 114.
65. Bruce Einhorn and Tim Culpan, “Foxconn: How to Beat the High Cost of
Happy Workers,” Bloomberg Businessweek, May 5, 2011,
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-05-05/foxconn-how-to-beat-the-
 high-cost-of-happy-workers; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 114–15; Xue, “Local
Strategies of Labor Control,” 96; Chen, China’s Workers Under Assault, 9.
66. Zhang, Inside China’s Automobile Factories, 57–59; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 117–
18; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone.
67. For films dealing with Chinese factories and migrant workers, see Elena
Pollacchi, “Wang Bing’s Cinema: Shared Spaces of Labor,” WorkingUSA 17
(Mar. 2014); Xiaodan Zhang, “A Path to Modernization: A Review of
Documentaries on Migration and Migrant Labor in China,” International Labor
and Working-Class History 77 (Spring 2010).
68. For the factory as a sales tool, see Gillian Darley, Factory (London: Reaktion
Books, 2003), 157–89. In China, EUPA seems something of an exception,
allowing filmmakers and photographers to document its factory. For examples
of tightly controlled tours, see James Fallows, “Mr. China Comes to America,”
and Dawn Chmielewski, “Where AppleProducts Are Born: A Rare Glimpse
Inside Foxconn’s Factory Gates,” Apr. 6, 2015,
http://www.recode.net/2015/4/6/11561130/where-apple-products-are-born-a-
rare-glimpse-inside-foxconns-factory.
69. Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 13, 2010; Xing Rung, New China Architecture
(Singapore: Periplus Editions, 2006); Layla Dawson, China’s New Dawn: An
Architectural Transformation (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2005).
70. Neil Gough, “China’s Fading Factories,” New York Times, Jan. 20, 2016; Feng,
“Skyscrapers’ Rise in China Marks Fall of Immigrant Enclaves”; Mark Magnier,
“China’s Manufacturing Strategy,” Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2016.
71. For example, compare two collections of images by the pioneer American
photographer Lewis W. Hine: Hine, Men at Work: Photographic Studies of
Modern Men and Machines ([1932] New York: Dover, 1977), and Jonathan L.
Doherty, ed., Women at Work: 153 Photographs by Lewis W. Hine (New York:
Dover, 1981). Of course, gender patterns have varied over time and place, with
more women working in heavy industry in communist countries than capitalist
ones and gender imbalances diminishing over time.
72. Countless examples can be seen by doing a Google search for images of
Chinese factories.
73. For Burtynsky, see
http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/site_contents/Photographs/China.html
(accessed Dec. 2, 2016); for Gursky, see, for example, Marie Luise Syring,
Andreas Gursky: Photographs from 1984 to the Present (New York: TeNeues,
2000).

Conclusion
1. Kenneth E. Hendrickson III, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Industrial Revolution
in World History, vol. III, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014),
568; R. S. Fitton, The Arkwrights: Spinners of Fortune ([1989] Matlock, UK:
Derwent Valley Mills Educational Trust, 2012), 228–29; Timothy J. Minchin,
Empty Mills: The Fight Against Imports and the Decline of the U.S. Textile
Industry (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013), 31; Tamara K.
Hareven and Randolph Lanenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American
Factory City (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 10–11; Gray Fitzsimons,
“Cambria Iron Company,” Historic American Engineering Record, National Park
Service, Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., 1989; William Serrin,
Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town (New York:
Random House, 1992).
2. Lindsay-Jean Hard, “The Rouge: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow,” Urban and
Regional Planning Economic Development Handbook, University of Michigan,
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Dec. 4, 2005,
http://www.umich.edu/~econdev/riverrouge/; Perry Stern, “Best Selling Vehicles
in America—September Edition,” Sept. 2, 2016, http://www.msn.com/en-
us/autos/autos-passenger/best-selling-vehicles-in-america-%E2%80%94-
september-edition/ss-AAiquE5#image=21.
3. Laurence Gross, The Course of Industrial Decline: The Boott Cotton Mills of
Lowell, Mass., 1835–1955 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1993), 44–45, 102–03, 229, 238–40.
4. Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, “The Meanings of Deindustrialization,”
in Cowie and Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of
Deindustrialization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 4. There is a
large literature on deindustrialization. In addition to this volume, see the cluster
of articles on “Crumbling Cultures: Deindustrialization, Class, and Memory,” ed.
Tim Strangleman, James Rhodes, and Sherry Linkon, in International Labor
and Working-Class History 84 (Oct. 2013).
5. Paul Wiseman, “Why Robots, Not Trade, Are Behind So Many Factory Job
Losses,” AP: The Big Story, Nov. 2, 2016,
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/265cd8fb02fb44a69cf0eaa2063e11d9/mexico-
taking-us-factory-jobs-blame-robots-instead; Mandy Zuo, “Rise of the Robots:
60,000 Workers Culled from Just One Factory as China’s Struggling
Electronics Hub Turns to Artificial Intelligence,” South China Morning Post, May
22, 2016, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/1949918/rise-
robots-60000-workers-culled-just-one-factory-chinas. See also Wall Street
Journal, Aug. 17, 2016.
6. Rich Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein, “An Accident in History,” New Labor
Forum 23 (3) (2014), 58–65; Ellen Barry, “Rural Reality Meets Bangalore
Dreams,” New York Times, Sept. 25, 2016.
 7. Kevin Hamlin, Ilya Gridneff, and William Davison, “Ethiopia Becomes China’s
China in Global Search for Cheap Labor,” Bloomberg, July 22, 2014,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-22/ethiopia-becomes-china-
s-china-in-search-for-cheap-labor; Lily Kuo, “Ivanka Trump’s Shoe Collection
May Be Moving from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Made in Ethiopia,’” Quartz Africa, Oct.
8, 2016, http://qz.com/803626/ivanka-trumps-shoe-collection-may-be-moving-
from-made-in-china-to-made-in-ethiopia/; Chris Summers, “Inside a Trump
Chinese Shoe Factory,” Daily Mail.com, Oct. 6, 2016,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3824617/Trump-factory-jobs-sent-
China-never-come-back.html.
8. For variations of the factory under different social systems, see Michael
Burawoy, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and
Socialism (London: Verso, 1985), and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working
Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1989).
9. The documentary film After the Factory (Topografie Association, 2012),
comparing efforts in Lodz, Poland, and Detroit at postindustrial reinvention,
suggests the possibilities and limitations of such strategies.
10. 4-traders: “Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd.,” http://www.4-
traders.com/HON-HAI-PRECISION-INDUSTR-6492357/company/, and
“Pegatron Corporation,” http://www.4-traders.com/PEGATRON-
CORPORATION-6500975/company/, both accessed July 5, 2016, and “Yue
Yuen Industrial (Holdings) Ltd.,” accessed Jan. 1, 2017; “Fast Facts About
Vanguard” (accessed Jan. 3, 2017), https://about.vanguard.com/who-we-
are/fast-facts/; Calvert Social Investment Fund, “Annual Report,” Sept. 30,
2016, 4, 7.
 Illustration Credits

2 Derby Silk Mill: Look and Learn.

78 Girl at Amoskeag: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division,
National Child Labor Committee Collection LC-DIG-nclc-01782.
125 Magneto assembly line: From the Collections of The Henry Ford.
136 Aerial view of Highland Park: From the Collections of The Henry Ford.
152 River Rouge: Photograph © 1927 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
156 Kahn, Kahlo, and Rivera: Detroit Institute of Arts Research Library & Archives.
170 Margaret Bourke-White’s Stalingrad Tractor Factory: © Estate of Margaret
Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
189 1930 Soviet magazine cover: New York Public Library.
208 Workers’ cafeteria at Gorky: The Austin Company.
230 B-24 Liberator assembly line: From the Collections of The Henry Ford.
239 Lawrence addressing Westinghouse strikers: UE News Photograph Collection,
1933–1998, University of Pittsburgh.
253 Lenin Steelworks: Henryk Makarewicz / Imago Mundi Foundation collection.
255 Nova Huta: Henryk Makarewicz / Imago Mundi Foundation collection.
289 Reebok factory in Vietnam: Peter Charlesworth/Getty Images.
 Index

Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your
device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.

Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations.

absentee ownership, 56
absenteeism, 129, 225
AC Spark Plug, 144
ACW (Amalgamated Clothing Workers), 178–79
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 318
Adidas, 292–95, 307, 309
Adler, Philip, 169–70
AFL (American Federation of Labor), 113–14, 129
African Americans, 5, 59, 104, 110, 114, 116, 157, 357n, 380n
Agnelli, Giovanni, 136
aircraft industry, 229–32, 230, 238, 328n, 381n
Akron, Ohio, 128, 161, 163–64, 235–36
Alabama, 110, 235–36
Alexander Smith carpets, 239
All Saints’ Church (Derby, England), 1
Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, 110
Allentown, Pennsylvania, 240
All-Russia Metal Workers’ Union, 177
Almy and Brown, 45–46
Alpert, Max, 212, 214
Althrop, Lord, 32
Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, 99–103, 355n
Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW), 178–79
American Communist Party, 114, 145
American Federation of Labor (AFL), 113–14, 129
American Landscape (Sheeler), 152–53
American Legion, 238
American Machinist (trade journal), 144
American Notes (Dickens), 64
American Pastoral (Roth), xvi
American Steel Foundries Company, 228
American Woolen Company, 76
“Americanism and Fordism” (Gramsci), 132
Amertorp Corporation, 228–29
Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, 57–58, 76–77, 78, 79, 150, 153, 314, 345n,
349n
Amtorg, 187–90, 194, 221
Anshan Iron and Steel Company, 277–78
antitrust suits, 113, 357n
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 86–87
Apollo Iron and Steel Company, 104
Appelbaum, Richard P., 290, 300
Apple, xii, 270–71, 273, 289–90, 293–97, 308–9, 322
Appleton, Nathan, 49
Appleton Company, 53
Appliance Park (General Electric), 238, 243–44
Arab Spring, 269
ArcelorMittal, 265
architecture and design
boardinghouse model, 54, 55
building length and width, 51–52
in China, 310–11
collapse of factories, 76–77, 349n
early British textile mills, 14–17
in Eastern Europe, 251, 253–56
elevators, 16–17
fires and fire danger, 15, 17, 52, 76–77, 349n
iron, 15, 52
Kahn and modern industrial design, 133–37, 139–40
lighting, 15, 20–21, 52, 139–40
New England textile mills, 48–49
reinforced concrete, 133, 135, 139
roof monitors, 139–40
sawtooth roofs, 15, 134, 140
single-story factories, 139
steam power, 16
steel frames, 139
Arens, Egmont, 172, 369n
Arkwright, Richard, 7–9, 8, 13–15, 17, 35–36, 45, 314, 334n
armor and armaments industry, 93–95, 120, 123, 176, 223–24, 228–33, 369n
art and artists, xii
depictions of Chinese industry, 273, 288, 303, 310, 312
depictions of Cold War mass production, 233, 244, 256–57
depictions of Eiffel Tower, 86–87
depictions of Fordism and industry, 77, 102–3, 119, 136, 145, 148–61, 157, 366n
depictions of iron and steel industry, 96, 97
depictions of Soviet industry, 170, 170, 210–18
Arthur G. McKee & Company, 202
Asheboro, North Carolina, 240
assembly line, 118, 124–27, 125, 144–45, 182, 196–98
Atlanta, Georgia, 85–86, 164
Austin, James Trecothick, 84
Austin Company, 191–92, 221, 373n
automation and mechanization
cotton industry, 7, 9
downsizing and, 242–43, 317–18
Fordism, 118, 124–27, 125, 144–45, 182, 242–43, 297
textile industry, 50
automotive industry. See also names of specific automotive manufacturers
artistic depictions of, 155–58
in China, 298
conversion for military production, 229–31
in Germany, 265–67, 388n
increase in number of giant factories, 127–28, 143–44
innovative factory architecture, 133, 136–37, 140
number of workers, 143–44, 245
product standardization, 141–42
protests and strikes, 161–66
in Soviet Union, 171, 190–93, 199–200, 205
trade unions and labor organization, 129, 162–68
Autostadt (Volkswagen), 267
Avtograd, Soviet Union, 248, 385n
AvtoVaz, 248
Awful Battle at Homestead, Pa, An (illustration), 102

B Building (Ford), 139, 142

B-24 bombers, 229, 230, 231
B-26 bombers, 232
Babbage, Charles, 10–12
backward integration, 90, 105, 138, 353n, 388n
Bage, Charles, 15
Baines, Edward, 5–6, 11–12
Bangladesh, 274, 318
Bank Misr, 268
BASF, 267
Bell, Daniel, 244–45
Bellamy, Edward, 72
Belper, England, 8, 17, 45
Belt, The (play), 172
Bendix, William, 244
Benjamin, Walter, 85
Bennett, Harry, 132, 142, 168
Bentham, Jeremy, 17
Bentham, Samuel, 17
Bentinck, William, 37
Berger, Victor, 77
Berkman, Alexander, 102
Berlin, Germany, 250, 256
Berman, Marshall, xvi
Bessemer, Henry, 92
Bethlehem Iron Company, 95
Bethlehem Steel Company, 107, 113, 116, 232, 245, 356n, 385n
BF Goodrich, 292
Biddeford, Maine, 55
Big Money, The (Dos Passos), 117, 147
Biggs, Lindy, 144
Birmingham, Alabama, 110
Blake, William, 28, 96
Bloomberg Businessweek, 310
Bloomfield, New Jersey, 238
Bloomington, Indiana, 237, 382n
Boeing, 232
Bologna, Italy, 329n
Bolton, England, 21, 29, 62
Bombay, India, 17
Bomber City proposal, 231
Boott, Kirk, 345n
Boott Mills, 53, 74–75, 104, 315–16
boredom, 30, 60, 64, 165, 258–59
Boston, Massachusetts, 47–48, 54, 84, 115
Boston Associates companies, 55–56, 65, 77, 79, 99
Boston Manufacturing Company, 47–51, 53–54, 341n, 343n
Boswell, James, 3–4
Boulware, Lemuel R., 240, 242
Bourke-White, Margaret, 119, 149–54, 170, 170, 197, 213–14, 216–18, 377n
Braddock, Pennsylvania, 97, 110
branding, 50, 290–93
Brave New World (Huxley), 147
Bridgeport, Connecticut, 240
Brockport, New York, 240
Bron, Saul, 221
Brontë, Charlotte, 31, 42
Brooklyn Navy Yard, 228
Brown, Moses, 45
Brownson, Orestes, 72–73
Buffalo, New York, 85, 116, 133
Buick, 137, 144
Bukharin, Nikolai, 183, 215, 220, 371n
Burlington Free Press (newspaper), 61
Burnham, James, 226, 380n
Burtynsky, Edward, 273, 288, 312

Cadillac, 290
Calder, John K., 188, 196
calico industry, 5, 11, 51–52, 60, 345n
California, 232–33, 235, 237, 368n
Calvert Investments, 322
Cambodia, 274, 281
Cambria Iron and Steel Works, 91, 91, 93, 314
Camden, New Jersey, 166, 236
Cameron, Ardis, 76
Canada, 76, 363n
Capital (Marx), 19, 33–34, 94
capitalism
as atavistic slogan, 227
convergence theory and, 227, 316
early British textile mills and criticism of, 33–35
emergence of industrial capitalism, 33–35
factories as essential to development of, 319
implantation of by outside merchant capital, 56
iron and steel industry “super-capitalism,” 103–5
socialism vs., 172–73, 175–76, 224–25, 278
carding, 6–7, 18, 24, 45, 341n
Carding, Drawing, and Roving (illustration), 24
Carlyle, Thomas, 31
Carnegie, Andrew, 93–94, 100–101, 105, 111–12
Carrefour, 293
Carriage, Wagon, and Automobile Workers’ Union, 129
Castro, Fidel, 256
Cayenne, French Guiana, 46
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 147
Cement (Gladkov), 217, 373n
cement industry, 138, 217, 249
Cendrars, Blaise, 87
Centennial Exhibition (1876), 80–82, 81, 84, 88, 107, 350n
“Centennial Inauguration March” (Wagner), 80
Central Labor Institute, 177, 371n
Chadwick, Edwin, 333n
Chagall, Marc, 86
Chamberlin, William Henry, 215
Chandler, Alfred D., Jr., 290
Chaplin, Charlie, xii, 159–61, 209, 214
Charles River, 48–49
Chartists and Chartism, 38, 41, 88
Chase, Stuart, 215
Chelmsford, Massachusetts, 54
Chelyabinsk, Soviet Union, 196, 201, 203, 212, 221, 224, 374n, 379n
Chengdu, China, 272, 302, 304, 306
Chevalier, Michael, 43–44
Chevrolet, 144, 165, 237, 290, 314
Chiang Kai-shek, 283
Chicago, Illinois, 106, 128, 167, 228–29
post-WWII strikes, 238
world’s fairs, 85, 145, 158
WWI-era labor movement, 114–17
Chicago Century of Progress Exposition (1933–34), 145, 158
Chicago Federation of Labor, 114
Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, 55, 62, 72
child labor, 19, 42, 348n
early British textile mills, 3, 21–25
efforts to regulate, 30–33, 41, 68
New England textile mills, 45–46, 59–60, 68, 71, 74, 77, 78, 347n, 349n
outsourcing, 294
China Labour Bulletin, 306
Chinese industry. See also names of specific locations
architecture and design, 310–11
changes leading to giantism, 274
company housing and villages, 278, 285–87, 300, 304–5
compensation and wages, 271, 286, 301
Cultural Revolution, 279–80, 391n
dagongmei or dagongzai, 286
 debate over economic policies and industrial practices, 278–80, 391n
decline of giant factories, 317
decollectivization of agriculture, 284
discipline, 285, 301–3
excitement of, 301
export-oriented manufacturing, 281–86, 288, 392n
Five-Year Plans, 275, 277
foreign investment and manufacturing, 282–83
gender and rural/urban imbalances, 308, 397n
government support for giantism, 298–99
Great Leap Forward, 275–79
hukou system of residency permits, 284–85
interns, 308–9
involvement of Soviet Union, 275, 390n
iron and steel industry, 277–78
leftist approach to industrial management, 277–78
legacy of giantism, 320
Maoist era, 274–80
market-oriented policies, 280–83
mass production as passing stage, 311
migrant labor, 294–301, 305, 308
number of workers, 272–73, 287
percentage of workers in manufacturing, xiii
poverty and life expectancy, 305–6
protests and strikes, 302, 306–8
recruitment, 286–87, 308, 396n
safety issues, 304
secretiveness, 272, 289, 309–10
shutting down giant factories, 316
size and scale of, 272–74, 288–90, 296–98, 300
small-scale rural industry, 276
social status, 285–86, 392n
special economic zones, 281
Spring Festival holiday week, 287–88
symbolism of factories, 310–13
turnover, 285
women, 286–87, 308, 311
worker input over management, 276
worker suicides and company reaction, xii, 270–72, 389n
working conditions, 301–4
working day and hours, 302
Christian Community of Working People, 261
Christian Science Monitor (newspaper), 215
Christmas decorations and accessories, 295
Chrysler Corporation, 140, 143, 145, 163, 166, 243, 290
Chrysler Tank Arsenal, 228
Chukovskaya, Lydia, 211
Church Street El (Sheeler), 151
Chutex Garment Factory, 307
Cincinnati, Ohio, 229
Cisco, 292
Citroen, André, 363n
Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, 382n
Civil War, 75, 120
Clarks shoes, 290
class. See social status and class
Classic Landscape (Sheeler), 152–53
Cleveland, Ohio, 116, 149, 163–64, 238, 242
Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 149
Cold War mass production
in Eastern Europe
decentralization and downsizing, 264–65
factory construction, 253–54, 257
model industrial cities, 249–57
Nowa Huta steelworks, 249, 251–65, 253, 255, 387n
politicized working class, 257–64
shrinkage of workforce, 264–65
urbanism, 250–51, 254
valorization of industry and workers, 249–50
in Egypt, 268–69
in Germany, 265–67
legacy of giant factories, 320
in Soviet Union
automotive industry, 246–48
convergence theory, 226–27
post-WWII reconstruction, 245–46
scientific and atomic cities, 246
tractor industry, 246
Western assistance, 247
in United States
convergence theory, 226–27
decentralization and downsizing, 227–28, 235–44, 382n
loss of interest in industrial workers, 244–45
military giantism, 228–33
post-WWII sale of plants, 238
productivity increases, 243
 shrinkage of workforce, 240–41, 243–45
trade unions and labor organization, 233–42
Colt, Samuel, 123
Columbian Exposition (1893), 85
Coming of Post-Industrial Society, The (Bell), 244–45
Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), 163–68
Commons, John L., 112
Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels), 42
company housing and villages
boardinghouse model, 54, 55, 61–62, 65–66, 74–75
in China, 278, 285–87, 300, 304–5
Eastern European model industrial cities, 249–51, 253–56
iron and steel industry, 103–6
in Soviet Union, 192–93, 208–10, 246, 248, 373n, 385n
company housing and villages (continued)
textile industry, 18, 20, 53–54, 61–62, 65–66, 74–75, 334n
WWII era, 230–32
company stores, 18, 46
compensation and wages, xv
in China, 271, 286, 301
company store credit, 46
currency shortages, 18, 46
downward pressure on wages and living standards, 37
Ford Motor Company, 129–30, 132, 145–46
piecework, 6, 65, 108, 176, 178–79, 371n
post-WWII, 234
productivity vs., 65–66
raising after bad publicity, 271, 389n
reductions in, 65–66, 99–100, 163
sliding scale, 90, 100
truck, 18, 36
Waltham-Lowell system, 60
withholding, 308, 335n
women and children, 23
Condition of the Working Class in England, The (Engels), 29–30, 41, 112, 337n
Connecticut, 46, 68, 240, 347n
Cook, Tim, 296
Cooper, Hugh L., 186
cooperatives, 10, 179, 224
Corliss engines, 80, 81, 350n
Corn Laws, 31–32, 41
Cotton Factories, Union Street, Manchester (engraving), 28
cotton gin, 5
cotton industry, 4–8
age of workers, 23
architecture and construction of mills, 14–17
early American, 45–46
in Egypt, 268
England compared to New England, 43–44
environmental damage from, 27–28
fire danger, 15, 17
first giant factories, 7–10
import substitution, 5
limit of plant size, 13
living conditions, 29–30
machine wrecking, 35
Marx’s Capital and, 34
mechanization of, 7, 9
radical change in, 6–7
renting space and power to multiple employers, 10
rising demand for goods, 4–5, 46
slavery and, 5
technical demands of, 5–6
theories behind adoption of factory model, 10–13
working conditions, 23–27, 30–32
Cotton States and International Exposition (1895), 85–86
Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, 252
Couzens, James, 359n
Cowie, Jefferson, 316–17
Coxe, Tench, 82
Criss-Crossed Conveyors—Ford Plant, 1927 (Sheeler), 152
Crockett, Davy, 68–69
Cromford, England, 7–8, 13–15, 17, 23, 36, 314, 333n–34n
Crompton, Samuel, 7
croppers, 36–37
Crystal Palace Exhibition (1851), 84–85, 88, 93, 134, 291
Cuba, 161
Curtis-Wright Corporation, 229
Czechoslovakia, 249, 385n

Daily Worker (newspaper), 161

Daimler AG, 248
Dalton, Massachusetts, 72
Daqing Oil Field, 277–78
Datang, China, 295
Davies, Stuart, 154
de Gaulle, Charles, 256
Dearborn, Michigan, 122, 137–38, 155, 242. See also River Rouge plant
Debabov, Dmitri, 213
Defense City proposal, 230–31
Defoe, Daniel, xii, 3
Delauney, Robert, 86–87
Dell, 270
Dell, Floyd, 103
democratic voice, xv
iron and steel industry, 101, 103
“labor question,” 111
late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Great Britain, 39–40
male suffrage, 41
workers shut out of direct participation, 38, 338n
Demuth, Charles, 154
Deng Xiaoping, 280–81
Derby Silk Mill (England), 1–4, 2, 7–8, 24, 314, 329n
Derbyshire, England, 36
Derwent Valley, 316
design. See architecture and design
Detroit, Michigan, 122. See also Ford Motor Company and Fordism
artwork by Kahlo, 159
artwork by Rivera, 155–58, 157
closure of factories, 245
involvement in Soviet
industrialization, 169, 188, 190, 194–95, 199
relocation from, 241
trade unions and labor organization, 129, 138, 167
workforce, 123, 129
Detroit Free Press (newspaper), 194
Detroit Industry (Rivera), 156–58, 157
Detroit Institute of Arts, 155, 158
Detroit News (newspaper), 169
Detroit Times (newspaper), 194–95
Devonshire, Duchess of, 14
Dickens, Charles, xii, 3, 16, 43, 64, 76, 272
Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria, 249, 257, 259
discipline
in China, 285, 301–3
early British textile mills, 18–20, 23, 30
in Eastern Europe, 258–59
Ford Motor Company, 130–32
iron and steel industry, 105
 New England textile mills, 61–62, 74
in Soviet Union, 197
Disney, 293
Disraeli, Benjamin, 26
division of labor, 11, 60, 74, 121–22, 124, 232
Dix, John, 43–44
Dnieporstroi hydroelectric dam, 171, 185–86, 203, 217
Dodge and Dodge Main plant, 137, 143, 166, 229, 237, 243, 314
Dom Pedro II, 80, 81
Dongguan, China, 273, 300, 318
Dos Passos, John, 117, 147
“double speeder” roving frames, 49
Douglass, Frederick, 5
Dover, Massachusetts, 66
Dover, New Hampshire, 54–55
Dover Manufacturing Company, 54
Dowlais iron works (Wales), 41
Dreiser, Theodore, 103
Dresden, Germany, 267
Driggs, Elsie, 154, 366n
Du Pont, 194
Dublin, Thomas, 63, 345n–46n
Dunapetele, Hungary. See Sztálinváros, Hungary
Dunaújváros, Hungary. See Sztálinváros, Hungary
Duranty, Walter, 215
Dynamo (play), 150

East Chelmsford, Massachusetts, 51

East Springfield, Massachusetts, 163
Edison, Thomas, 106
Edison Illuminating Company, 122
Egypt, 268–69
Eiffel, Gustave, 86
Eiffel Tower, 86–88
Eisenstein, Sergei, 216, 377n
Eisler, Hanns, 216
Electric Auto-Lite, 163
electronics industry, 270–73, 289–97, 306, 308
elevators, 16–17, 333n
Elizabethport, New Jersey, 121
Embargo Act, 46
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 57, 70, 348n
Encyclopedia Britannica, 118
Engels, Friedrich, 19, 26, 29–30, 32–34, 41–42, 88, 112, 337n–38n
Engineering Magazine, 144
England. See cotton industry; Great Britain; names of specific locations; textile
industry
Enlightenment, xvi
Entuziazm (Simfoniya Donbassa) (Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas) (film),
214, 216
environment and ecology, xiv–xv
British mills and factories, 16, 27–28, 28
Eastern European industry, 261, 387n
iron and steel industry, 91
legacy of giant factories, 320–21
New England textile mills, 56–57, 76
Ericsson, 292
Essen, Germany, 93, 104, 266
Ethiopia, 318
EUPA, 288–90, 301
Evans, Walker, 244
Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations (1853), 85, 88, 351n
Exposition Universelle (1855), 85
Exposition Universelle (1889), 86–88, 100
Eyes on Russia (Bourke-White), 217

F-150 trucks, 314

factories and factory giantism
abandoned factories, xv–xvi
concepts of modernity and progress and, xiii–xvii, 5, 20–21, 31, 40–41, 171, 319
consolidation, 57–58
cycles of factory giantism, 315–17
defense of, 30–32
defining nature of, xii–xiii
efforts to regulate, 31–33
environmental damage, 27–28
expansion through replication, 53, 55–58
exploitation of labor, 22–27, 65–66, 301–4
first factories, 1–4
future of, 321
general definition of factory system, 22
legacy of, 318–22
longevity of, 314–15
loss of manufacturing jobs, xi
nostalgia for, xv–xvi
as objects of wonder, xii, xiv–xv, 20–22, 119
 percentage of workers in manufacturing, xiii
“postindustrial society,” xiii
poverty, 29–31
revolutionary nature of, xii–xiv
size and scale of, xvii, 1, 9, 289–96, 328n
as source of fear, xv
support of the state, 39–40
sustainability vs. reemergence, xv, 316
theories behind adoption of factory system, 10–13
transformation from novel to ordinary, 40–42
transformation of social status and, 13–14
ubiquity of, xi–xii, xviii, 127–28
unknown to purchasers of goods, 317
Waltham-Lowell system, 47–61
Factory Acts, 32–33
factory cities. See company housing and villages
Factory Girls’ Association, 65–66
“Factory Girls of Lowell, The” (Whittier), 69–70
factory housing. See company housing and villages
factory tourism, xii, 4, 20–22, 43, 69–70, 85, 135–36, 144–45, 151–52, 156, 159,
217, 310
Fair Labor Association, 271
Fairbairn, William, 17, 53
Fairfield shipyard (Baltimore, Maryland), 232
Fallows, James, 305
Female Labor Reform Associations, 67–68
FIAT, 136–37, 247, 314, 362n
Figes, Orlando, 184
Filene, Edward, 119, 146–47, 182
filmmaking, 86, 136, 148, 159–61, 214, 216–17
fires and fire danger, 15, 17, 52, 76–77, 349n
Firestone, 161, 164, 235–36
Fischer, Louis, 216
Fisher, Charles T., 155
Fisher Body, 137, 144, 155, 164–65
Fitch, John, 82, 95, 103, 109
Fitton, R. S., 15
Fitzpatrick, John, 114
Flagg, Edmund, 83
Flannery, Vaughn, 151–52
flax industry, 4–6, 15
Flextronics, 292
Flint, Michigan, 143–44, 164–66, 237, 314, 320
Flivver King, The (Sinclair), 147
flying shuttles, 6
Fontana, California, 232
footwear industry, 133, 273–74, 288–90, 289, 291–95, 298, 307, 309, 318
forced labor, 24–25, 203. See also slavery
Ford, Edsel, 137, 153, 155–57, 159, 366n
Ford, Henry, 118–19, 122, 124, 131, 138–41, 143, 147, 157, 159, 168, 174, 180,
186–87, 190–91, 319, 366n. See also Ford Motor Company and Fordism
Ford Motor Company and Fordism, 142, 317
architecture and design, 132–37, 136
assembly line, 118, 124–27, 125, 144–45
backward integration, 138
company paternalism, 130–32, 145
compensation and wages, 129–30, 132, 145–46
concentration of production, 143
continuous flow processing, 121–22, 124
conversion for military production, 229–31
conversion for Model A, 141–42
decentralization and downsizing, 242–43
depictions of, 77, 102–3, 119, 136, 145–61, 152, 157, 366n
discipline, 130–32
fascination with, 144–45
Five Dollar Day plan, 129–30, 132, 145–46
immigration and immigrants, 129–30
interchangeability of parts, 120–21, 123, 359n
labor problems, 127–29, 142, 155
manufacturer-dominated system, 290–91
mass production, 118–27
material-handling systems, 126
number of workers, 127–29, 144, 363n
outsourcing, 295
product standardization, 122, 141–42
progressive placement of machinery, 123–24
protests and strikes, 155, 167–68
publicity and factory tourism, 135–36, 144–45, 151–52, 363n
single-purpose machinery, 122–23
social status and class, 119
Sociological (Service) Department, 130–32, 145, 168
Soviet industrialization and, 186–87, 190–91, 196–98, 371n
stamped parts, 123
trade unions and labor organization, 129–30, 163, 167–68
turnover, 128–29
vertical integration, 138, 142
 village factories, 143
women, 130
working day and hours, 129
“Forditis,” 127, 160
Fordson tractors, 138, 142, 180–81, 362n
Forge and Foundry (Rivera), 158
Fort Peck Dam, 150, 154
Fort Wayne, Indiana, 163
Fortune (magazine), 119, 150, 153–54, 213, 217, 244
Foster, William Z., 114, 116, 181, 371n
Foxconn, xiii
advantages for retailers, 296
architecture, 310
automation, 317–18
company housing, 304–5, 396n
decline of, 317
discipline and control, 301–4
interns, 308–9
investment in, 321–22
number of workers, 272–73
protests and strikes, 306
recruitment of men, 308
safety issues, 304
scaling up production, 296–98, 394n
secretiveness, 272, 289, 309–10
size and scale of, 289–90, 300–303, 389n
symbolism of, 312–13
worker suicides and reaction, 270–72, 300, 303, 389n
working conditions, 296–97, 301–3
Foxconn People (company newspaper), 303
France, 31, 79, 149, 330n
armor and armaments industry, 93
French Revolution, 39
life expectancy, xiv
world’s fairs, 85–88
Frank D. Chase Company, 169
Fraser, Steve, 179
free trade, 31
Freyn, H. J., 225, 379n
Freyn Engineering Company, 201, 252
Frick, Henry Clay, 101–2, 355n
Fridlyand, Semyon, 212
Fujian, China, 281
Fulton, Robert, 82–83
fustian industry, 5–6, 330n

Gadsden, Alabama, 235–36

Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, 135
Gantt charts, 178
Garland, Hamlin, 103
Gary, Elbert H., 106, 116
Gary, Indiana, 106, 116, 163, 188, 201, 245, 385n
Gastev, Alexei, 177–78, 220–21, 301, 319, 371n
Gatrell, V. A. C., 13
GAZ (Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod [Gorky Automobile Factory]), 190–94, 199–
200, 204, 207–8, 208, 210, 212, 221
Gdañsk, Poland, 262–64
General Electric (GE), 128, 163, 166, 186, 238–44, 290
General Motors (GM), 137, 142–44, 190–91, 237–38, 291
decentralization, 237, 382n
protests and strikes, 164–65, 234
trade unions and labor organization, 163–66
world’s fair exhibits, 145, 158
George N. Pierce Company, 133
Georgia, 85–86, 164
Germany, 79, 149, 174, 186, 293. See also names of specific locations
armor and armaments industry, 93
automotive industry, 265–67, 388n
Eastern German industry, 249
trade unions and labor organization, 267
giantism. See factories and factory gigantism
gig mills, 36
Gilbreth, Frank, 174, 370n
gingham industry, 49
Gladkov, Fyodo Vasilievich, 217
Glasgow, Scotland, 29
Gleason, Jackie, 244
GM. See General Motors
Goddard, Paulette, 160
Godley, John Robert, 71
Goldblatt, Louis, 161
Gomułka, Władysław, 260
Goodman, Susan Tumarkin, 214
Goodrich, 235
Goodyear Tire and Rubber, 128, 164, 167, 235–36
Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod. See GAZ
Gorky, Maxim, xii, 211–12, 214
Gou, Terry, 271, 283, 303
GPU (later known as NKVD), 203–4
Graham, Charles, 97
Gramsci, Antonio, 131–32, 319
Grant, Ulysses S., 80, 81
Gray, John, 32–33
Great Britain, xiv, 39–40, 186, 321. See also cotton industry; names of specific
locations
architecture and construction of factories, 14–15
average mill size in nineteenth century, 9
compared to New England, 43–44
life expectancy, xiv
textile industry, 1–7, 9–10, 15, 17, 30, 35–36, 38
worker protests, 35
Great Depression, 155–56, 159, 162, 168, 188, 194, 211, 219
Great Falls, New Hampshire, 54
Greenfield Village (Ford), 141, 143
Gropius, Walter, 140, 230
Gross Pointe, Michigan, 137
Grumman Aircraft, 232, 381n
Guangdong, China, 281–82, 306
Guangxi, China, 299
Guangzhou, China, 300
Guanlan, China, 308
Guardivaglio, John, 329n
Guess, 318
Gunther, John, 98
Gursky, Andreas, 312

H&M, 318
Habermas, Jürgen, xvii
Hamilton, Alexander, xii, 82
Hamilton Manufacturing Company, 53, 61, 63, 74
Hamtramck, Michigan, 143
Hard Times (Dickens), 16, 21
Hargreaves, James, 7, 35–36
Harney, G. Julian, 88
Harrison, New Jersey, 106
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 95–96
Hayek, Friedrich von, 226–27
Heathcott, Joseph, 316–17
hemp industry, 4
Henry Ford Hospital (Kahlo), 159
Herman, Victor, 375n
Hewlett-Packard, 270, 295
Highland Park factory (Ford), 125, 127–28, 133–38, 136, 141, 143, 145, 159, 167–
68, 363n
Hillman, Sidney, 114, 178–79
Hindus, Maurice, 186–87
Hine, Lewis, 77, 78, 150–51, 153
History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (Baines), 5–6
Hitler, Adolf, 266
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 289, 307
Hobsbawm, Eric, 38
Hollingsworth, Edward, 36
Hollywood, California, 237
Holyoke, Massachusetts, 55
Home Depot, 293
Homestead, Pennsylvania, 93–94, 100–103, 102, 105, 110, 245, 314, 357n
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., 270, 321. See also Foxconn
Honey, Frank, 197–98
Hong Kong, 282–83, 295
Hopper, Edward, 154
hours. See working day and hours
housing. See company housing and villages
Huafang Group, 273
Huajian Shoes, 318
Hudson Motor Company, 137
Hudson River, 83
Hunan, China, 300–301
Hungary, 249, 257–60, 387n
Huxley, Aldous, 147

“I Fall Asleep, Just Standing Like That” (Xu), 303

IBM, 290, 292
IG Farben, 267
Ignatovich, Boris, 212
Illinois. See Chicago, Illinois
immigration and immigrants
Ford Motor Company, 129–30
involvement in protests, 110–11, 117
iron and steel industry, 110, 115, 357n
New England textile mills, 74, 76–78, 343n
Imperialism (Lenin), 174–75
India, 4–6, 17, 37, 48, 329n, 331n
Indiana. See names of specific locations
Indianapolis, Indiana, 237
Indonesia, 274
Industrial Revolution, xiv, xvi, 4, 13, 16, 20, 24, 27, 40, 96, 111, 148, 318–19, 321
Industrial Valley (McKenney), 162
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 77–78, 129
Inkeles, Alex, 227
insurance, 113, 131, 234–35
interchangeability. See standardization and interchangeability
International Exhibition (1873), 85
international exhibitions. See world’s fairs and international exhibitions
International Harvester, 128, 167, 372n
International Labor Organization, xiii
interns, 308–9
Ireland, 29, 74, 111
Iron Age (trade journal), 144, 212
iron and steel industry, 41, 88–95
Bessemer process, 91–92, 94, 96
blast furnaces, 89–90, 92, 94, 96, 353n
cast iron, 90
in China, 277–78
company paternalism, 104–5
compared to textile industry, 93–94, 96, 98
criticism of, 96–97, 103–4
democratic voice, 101, 103
depictions of, 96, 97
early nonfactory production, 89
in Eastern Europe, 249, 251–65
factory housing and villages, 103–6
fascination with, 95–96, 97, 117
growth of, 92–93
immigration and immigrants, 110, 115, 357n
iron shafts, 49
number of workers, 91, 93, 245
pollution, 91
production system, 93–95
protests and strikes, 98–103, 102, 167, 358n
puddling, 90–92, 94, 96, 103
railroads and, 89–94, 99
reformers’ focus on, 111–13
repression by, 103–4
safety issues, 109–10
scientific management, 107–9
 shift work, 109
social status and class, 99–100
in Soviet Union, 171, 185, 201–5, 207, 209–10, 214, 246
“super-capitalism,” 103–5
as symbol of modernity, 97–98
technological innovations in, 89–92
trade unions and labor organization, 99–103, 166–67
undercover reporting on, 112
unionization efforts, 166–67
use of iron in early mill construction, 15, 52
working day and hours, 109
wrought iron, 90
WWI-era labor movement, 114–17
WWII and post-WWII, 234, 246
Istanbul, Turkey, 17
Italy, 3, 111, 149, 247. See also names of specific locations
Ivanov, Vassily, 185, 188, 197–98, 219, 221
Ivens, Joris, 216
IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), 77–78, 129

Jackson, Andrew, 69
Jagiellonian University, 261
James, C. L. R., 380n
Japan, 283, 302, 307, 310
Jefferson, Thomas, 69
jennies, 7, 9, 20
Jobs, Steve, 271, 296
Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 91, 91, 235, 245, 314
joint stockholder corporations, 47–48, 50–52
Jones and Laughlin, 92–93
Journey to the End of the Night (Céline), 147
Joy, Henry B., 133, 137
Judt, Tony, 40

Kaganovich, Lazar, 200, 215

Kahlo, Frida, 155, 156, 158–59, 366n–67n
Kahn, Albert, 133–34, 137–40, 143–45, 156, 158, 169, 187–91, 194–95, 219, 228–
29, 232, 363n, 380n
Kahn, Julius, 133
Kahn, Louis I., 230–31
Kahn, Moritz, 194–95
Kaiser, Henry J., 232
Kaiser Permanente, 232
Kaiser-Frazer Corporation, 232
KamAZ, 248
Kansas City, Kansas, 164, 238
Kazakhstan, 171
Kazin, Alfred, 147
Kelly, Florence, 112
Kennan, George Frost, 215
Khaldei, Yevgeny, 212
Kharkov, Soviet Union, 195–96, 200, 221, 224
Khrushchev, Nikita, 247, 256
Kingsford charcoal, 138
“knockers-up,” 20
Kotkin, Stephan, 171
Krupp, 93, 104, 265–66
Kunshan, China, 318
Küppers, Sophie, 212–13
Kuznetsk, Soviet Union, 171, 201

labor organization. See trade unions and labor organization

“The Laboring Classes” (Brownson), 72
Lackawanna, New York, 245
LaFarge, Laura, 88
LaFarge, Paul, 88
Lake Michigan, 105
Lake Winnipesaukee, 57
Lancashire, England, 9, 20, 29, 37, 40, 336n
Lancaster, England, 20
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 237
Landes, David, 12, 20, 40
Lange, Dorothea, 232
Lawrence, Abbott, 68
Lawrence, David L., 239
Lawrence, Massachusetts, 55, 57, 75–77, 79, 349n
Lawrence Manufacturing, 53
layoffs, 141, 163, 166, 234, 264, 268
Le Corbusier, 140, 230
Le Creusot, France, 93, 104
Lebow, Katherine, 258
Leeds Mercury (newspaper), 26
Leica, 214
Leicestershire, England, 36
Lenin, Vladimir, 158, 170–71, 174–76, 184, 205, 370n
Lenin Shipyard (Gdañsk, Poland), 262–64
Letters from America (Godley), 71
Levi Strauss, 290, 293
Lewis, John L., 165–66
Liberty ships, 232
Lichtenstein, Nelson, 300
Life (magazine), 119, 150, 154, 211
Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong the Factory Boy, The (Trollope), 13–14,
21, 25
Life of Riley, The (television program), 244
Lincoln, 167–68, 242
Lingotto, Italy, 136, 314, 362n
Lissitzky, El, 212–13
Liverpool, England, 40, 95
Locks and Canals company, 52–53
Lombe, John, 1–4, 7–9, 15, 45
Lombe, Thomas, 1–4, 7–9, 15, 45
London, England, 84–85, 87–88, 93
Long Island, New York, 232
Longhua Science and Technology Park. See Foxconn
Looking Backward (Bellamy), 72
looms, 7, 15, 36–37, 47–48, 59, 65, 333n
Lord’s Ark church (Nowa Huta, Poland), 261–62
Los Angeles, California, 235, 368n
Louisville, Kentucky, 238, 243
Lowell, Frances Cabot, 47–49, 54, 57, 59, 79
Lowell, Massachusetts, xiii
architecture of mills, 51–52
boardinghouse model, 54, 55, 61–62, 65–66, 74–75, 304
company paternalism, 61–62, 71, 74–75, 131
corporate structure, 52–53
criticism of, 70–73
economic downturn, 75
effects on American manufacturing, 79
engraving of, 53
expansion beyond, 55–58
founding and composition of town, 53–54, 62
infrastructure for mills, 51
longevity of, 314
manufacturer-dominated system, 290
“milking” of old property, 315–16
number of workers, 54, 56–57, 75
population of, 54
protests and strikes, 66–68, 77, 347n
 sale of patent rights, 54
shutting of mills, 79
visitors’ impressions of, 43–44, 54, 58–59, 68–69
women laborers, 48, 54, 58–70
working day and hours, 67–68
Lowell Bleachery, 57
Lowell Machine Shop, 57, 61, 344n
Lowell Manufacturing, 53
Lowell Offering, The (magazine), 61, 63–64
Lozowick, Louis, 154, 161
Lu Zhang, 298
Luce, Henry, 150
Ludd, Ned, 35–37
Luddites, 161
Ludowy Theater (Nowa Huta, Poland), 256
Ludwigsafen, Germany, 267
Lumière, Louis, 86
Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 213
Luther, Seth, 70–73
Lynn, Massachusetts, 128, 163

Ma Wen-jui, 278–79
Macao, 282–83
Mack Avenue plant (Ford), 133
Magnavox-Capehart, 163
magnetos, 124, 125
Magnitogorsk, Soviet Union, xiii, 171, 185, 201–5, 207, 209–10, 212, 214–17, 224,
246, 314
Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex. See Magnitogorsk, Soviet Union
Magnitogorsk Mining and Metallurgical Institute, 207
Mahalla el-Kubra, Egypt, 268–69
Maiak plutonium plant (Ozersk, Soviet Union), 246
Maine, 55, 81
Makarewicz, Henryk, 253, 255
Making Bessemer Steel at Pittsburgh (illustration), 97
Malaysia, 295, 307
Man of Marble (film), 257
Managerial Revolution, The (Burnham), 226
Manchester, England, 3, 8, 10
compared to Lowell, 43–44, 62
Engels and, 34, 88, 337n–38n
entertainment, 22
pollution, 16, 27, 28
 population increases and poverty, 29–30
protests, 39
railroad, 40
renting space and power to multiple employers, 10
scale of mills, 21
working conditions, 26, 31
Manchester, New Hampshire, 55, 58, 62, 68, 76
Manchester Operative (newspaper), 70
Manufactured Landscapes (film), 273, 288
Mao Zedong, xii, 277–79, 284
Marcuse, Herbert, 227, 244
Marion, Indiana, 237
market proximity, 236, 241
Marquis, S. S., 131
Marshall, Alfred, 11–12, 290
Martin, Glenn L., 231–32
Martin, Samuel, 27
Marx, Karl, 5, 21, 30, 33–34, 37, 88, 123, 303, 337n–38n
Marx, Leo, 153
Maryland, 231–32. See also Sparrows Point, Maryland
Massachusetts, 46, 133, 347n. See also names of specific locations
Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, 84
Masses, The (journal), 145
Maupassant, Guy de, 87
May, Ernst, 210
McClintic-Marshall Products Company, 169
McClure’s Magazine, 103
McCormick, Cyrus, 106
McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, 106, 290
McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, 110–11, 113
McKenney, Ruth, 162
meatpacking industry, 114, 121, 127, 234
mechanization. See automation and mechanization
Méliès, George, 86
Melnikova-Raich, Sonia, 194–95
Melville, Herman, xii, 72
Memphis, Tennessee, 236, 382n
Men and Steel (Vorse), 98
Mercury, 242
Merrimack Manufacturing Company, 51, 56, 65, 314, 343n, 345n
Merrimack mills. See Lowell, Massachusetts
Merrimack Mills and Boarding Houses (engraving), 55
Merrimack River, 51, 55, 57–58
Metzgar, Jack, 235
Mexico, 274, 294, 382n
Michigan. See Ford Motor Company and Fordism; names of specific locations
Middle River, Maryland, 231–32
Middlesex Company, 61
Midvale Steel Works, 107
Milan, Italy, 135
Miller, Hugh, 27
Mills, C. Wright, 227, 244
Milton (Blake), 28
mining, 16, 28, 32, 39, 41–42, 115, 194, 201, 333n
Misr Spinning and Weaving Company, 268–69
Mississippi River, 83
Missouri, 85, 229
Model A, 141–42, 144–45, 151, 191
Model T, 118, 122–27, 138, 141–42, 144–45, 147, 174, 181, 317
Modern Times (film), 159–61, 209
modernity and progress
American view of mechanical progress as integral to, 82–85
Chinese vision of, 281, 311, 313
Eastern European model industrial cities, 251
Eiffel Tower as symbol of, 86–87
factories as producers of, 319, 321
factories as symbols of, xiii–xvii, 5, 20–21, 31, 40–41
iron and steel industry as symbol of, 97–98
life cycle of factories, 315
railroads as symbols of, 40, 83–84
slavery and, 5
Soviet vision of, 171, 184, 205–6, 210, 213
steam power as symbol of, 82–84
Monchique, Portugal, 21
Monongahela River, 101
Monroe, James, 69
Montour Iron Works, 91
Moody, Paul, 47, 49
Morgan, J. P., 105, 112
Moscow, Soviet Union, 190–91, 194–95
Mubarak, Hosni, 269
Muncie, Indiana, 237
Murphy, Frank, 165
Murphy, Gerald, 154
Murray, Philip, 234
Muscle Shoals, Tennessee, 186
Museum of Modern Art, 152
My Life and Work (Ford), 174, 180
Myanmar, 274

N. W. Ayer & Son, 151

Naberezhnye Chelny, Soviet Union, 248
Napier, Charles James, 27
Napoleon III, 85
Napoleonic Wars, 46
Nashua, New Hampshire, 55, 62
Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 268
Nation, The (magazine), 216
National Child Labor Committee, 77
National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers, 114–17
National Guard, 78, 101–2, 165
National Labor Relations Act, 167
National Rip-Saw, The (journal), 145
Nebraska, 85
New Deal, 146, 163, 233, 240
New Economic Policy (NEP), 178–80
New England Offering, The (magazine), 63
New England textile mills. See also Lowell, Massachusetts; names of specific
locations; Waltham, Massachusetts
architecture of mills, 51–52, 343n
criticism of, 70–73
expansion beyond Lowell, 55–58
faded vision of as “commercial Utopia,” 73–79
number of workers, 54, 56–57, 75–76
pollution, 76
protests and strikes, 66–68
shutting of, 79
women, 48, 54, 58–70, 75
working day and hours, 67–68, 347n
New Hampshire, 54–55, 58, 62, 68, 76, 347n
New Jersey. See names of specific locations
New Lanark, Scotland, 8, 13, 21, 24, 26
New Masses (journal), 172
New Orleans (steamboat), 82–83
New York City
Edison factory, 106
strikes, 115
world’s fairs, 85, 88, 215, 351n, 363n
New York Herald (newspaper), 101
New York (state). See names of specific locations
New York Times (newspaper), 194, 200
New York Times Sunday Magazine, 217
New York World’s Fair (1939), 215, 363n
Newcastle, England, 96
Newhouse, Edward, 161
Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, 186
New-York Daily Tribune (newspaper), 58–59, 66
Niagara Falls Power Company, 150
Nike, 273, 292–94, 296, 304, 307, 396n
Nishimura, Koichi, 293
Nissan, 248
Nizhny Novgorod, Soviet Union, 171, 190–93, 199
Nizhny Tagil, Soviet Union, 201, 212, 374n, 379n
Nkrumah, Kwame, xii, 256
NKVD (formerly GPU), 203–4
nonfactory production, 4–6, 9, 32
North American Aviation, 238
North River (steamboat), 82–83
Nottingham, England, 7–8, 328n
Nottinghamshire, England, 36
Nová Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, 249
Nowa Huta, Poland, 249, 251–65, 253, 255, 314, 387n

Oastler, Richard, 26
O’Hare, Kate Richards, 145–46
Ohio. See names of specific locations
oil industry, 277–78, 290
Olds Motor Works, 123
Olmsted, Frederick Law, 104–5
Omaha, Nebraska, 85
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers (Babbage), 10–11
O’Neill, Eugene, 150
organzine industry, 2–3
Orjonikidje, Sergo, 198, 200, 220
Otis Elevator, 239
Otis Steel, 149–50
Ottoman Empire, 5, 329n
outsourcing, 291–96
Overman, Frederick, 89
Owen, Robert, 24, 26
Ozersk, Soviet Union, 246
Packard Motor Company, 133, 137, 362n
painting, 86, 148, 151–59, 157, 366n
Palace of the Soviets (Moscow, Soviet Union), 230
Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915), 144–45
panopticon, 17
paper industry, 72
“Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, The” (Melville), 72
Paris, France, 85–88, 100
Parsons, Talcott, 227
Partisan Review (magazine), 161
patents and patent royalties, 3, 7, 9, 54, 190, 343n, 346n
Pawtucket, Rhode Island, 45, 66
Pawtucket Falls, 51
PBM Mariner flying boats, 232
Pearl River Delta, China, 282–83
Pegatron Corporation, 273, 296, 310, 322
Pellerin, Cora, 76
Pelton, O., 55
Pemberton Mill, 76–77, 79, 349n
Pennsylvania, 46. See also names of specific locations
Pennsylvania Railroad, 58
Pennsylvania Steel Company, 104
pensions and retirement, 113, 131, 234–35, 285, 306, 321–22
Perkins, Frances, 103
Petrograd, Russia, 180
Petrusov, Georgy, 214
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 80–82, 81, 84, 88, 107, 163
Philco Radio, 163
photography
depictions of Cold War mass production, 233, 244
depictions of Fordism and industry, 77, 102–3, 119, 136, 145, 148–54
depictions of Soviet industry, 211–14, 216–18
Piano, Renzo, 362n
piecework, 6, 65, 108, 176, 178–79, 371n
Pierce, George N., 361n
Pierce-Arrow, 361n
Pinkerton National Detective Agency, 100–101
Piquette Avenue plant (Ford), 133, 361n
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 90–93, 95–97, 97, 103, 110, 115, 163, 234, 238, 239
Pittsburgh Survey, 96, 112–13, 357n
Plug Riots, 39
Plymouth, 154
“Poem for Adults” (Ważyk), 256–57
poetry, 86–87, 256–57, 303
Pogodi, Nikolai, 188
Poland, 250, 252, 261–64. See also Nowa Huta, Poland
Polish Military Organization, 204
politics and government
democratic voice, xv, 39–41, 101, 103, 111, 338n
in Eastern Europe, 259–62
incentives to relocate, 241
post-WWII support for union labor, 238
reaction to protests and strikes, 38–39, 78, 100–102, 110–11, 116, 165, 167,
236, 307
regulation, 5, 30–33, 41, 68, 114
Senate investigation of steel industry, 113
state support of factory system, 39–40
Waltham-Lowell system, 69
pollution. See environment and ecology
Pontiac, 191
Pou Chen Corporation, 273–74
power sources, 2, 16
charcoal, 89–91
coal, 91, 253
coke, 89–90, 353n
electric, 139
hand power, 4, 9–10
horse, 7, 45
iron shafts, 49
leather belts, 49
pace of labor and, 31
steam, 8, 10, 13, 16–17, 20, 56, 75, 80, 81, 82–84, 333n, 344n
water, 2–3, 7, 9–10, 13, 16, 51–52, 56–57, 143, 333n, 344n
Preis, Art, 234
Press Shop (Ford), 141
Pressed Steel Car Company, 110–11
production and productivity. See also automation and mechanization
adoption of factory model and scale of production, 10–11
compensation and wages vs., 65–66
concentration and centralization of production, xv, 11–12
effects on environment, xiv
effects on life expectancy, xiv
just-in-time production, 296–97
mass production, 118–19, 124
New England textile mills, 56–57
post-WWII automation and mechanization, 243
 scaling up production, 296–98, 394n
scientific management, 107–9
union vs. nonunion workers, 383n
progress. See modernity and progress
Progressive Era, 112
proletariat, 30, 41
Prometheus, 96
Proprietors of Locks and Canals on the Merrimack, 51
protests and strikes
automotive industry, 155, 161–66
in China, 302, 306–8
early labor organization, 38–39
in Eastern Europe, 259–63
in Egypt, 268–69
electronics industry, 306
first substantial walkouts, 39
government and military reaction to, 38–39, 78, 100–102, 110–11, 116, 165,
167, 236, 307
immigrant participation in, 110–11, 117
iron and steel industry, 98–103, 102, 167, 358n
“labor question,” 111
Luddites, 35–39
machine wrecking, 35–39
New England textile mills, 66–67, 77–78
transformation from novel to ordinary, 42
in Vietnam, 274, 307, 397n
women’s participation in, 66–67, 77, 347n
WWI era, 115–17, 234, 358n
WWII and post-WWII, 233–35, 238, 239
“protoindustrialization,” 13
publicity. See art and artists; factory tourism
Pudong New Area of Shanghai, China, 281
Pueblo, Colorado, 96
Pulaski, Virginia, 237
Pullman, 128
Puma, 292
Pun Ngai, 281
punctuality, 20
punishment, 19, 24–25, 31, 303
Putilov metalworking complex (Petrograd, Soviet Union), 180

Quincy Market (Boston, Massachusetts), 84

R. Smith, Incorporated, 169
Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 166, 236–37, 242, 290, 382n
RAIC (Russian-American Industrial Corporation), 178–79
railroads
iron industry and, 89–94, 99
opportunities for women, 74
in Soviet Union, 176
as symbols of modernity, 40–41, 83–84
Ramizov, G., 210
Rawfolds, England, 37
RCA. See Radio Corporation of America
Reagan, Ronald, 240, 254, 281
recruitment (labor)
in China, 286–87, 308, 396n
difficulties during WWII, 229–30
early British textile mills, 23–24
early US, 45–46
in Eastern Europe, 257–58
New England textile mills, 59–61
in Soviet Union, 186, 188, 199
Reebok, 289, 292
Reed, John, 146
regulation
child labor, 68
textile industry in England, 5, 31–33
working day and hours, 68
WWI era, 114
Renault, 248
Republic Aircraft Corporation, 232, 381n
Republic Steel, 167
retirement. See pensions and retirement
Reuther, Victor, 199–200, 207–8, 223
Reuther, Walter, 199–200, 208, 223, 229
Rhode Island, 45–46, 66, 71, 348n
Richmond, California, 232–33
River Derwent, 1, 7, 16–17
River Irwell, 21, 27
River Rouge plant (Ford), 137–45, 150–54, 152, 156–57, 157, 159, 167–68, 188,
242–44, 310, 314, 362n–63n
Rivera, Diego, xii, 86, 154–59, 156–57, 161, 366n
Rizzi, Bruno, 380n
Robert, Owen, 8
Robinson, Harriet, 63
Rochdale, England, 29
Rockefeller, Abby Aldrich, 153
Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 153, 158
Rockefeller Center (New York City), 158
Rodchenko, Alexander, 212
Romania, 385n
Roosevelt, Franklin, 164–65
Ross, Andrew, 300
Rostow, Walt, 227
Roth, Philip, xvi
Round Mill (Belper, England), 17, 333n
Rousseau, Henri, 86
“ruin porn,” xvi
rural-based manufacturing, 6, 13, 17–18, 69
Russell Sage Foundation, 112
Russian Clothing Workers syndicate, 178
Russian Revolution, 114, 116
Russian-American Industrial Corporation (RAIC), 178–79

Saco, Maine, 55, 81

safety issues
in China, 304
in Eastern Europe, 258
fires and fire danger, 15, 17, 52, 76–77, 349n
iron and steel industry, 109–10
in Vietnam, 304, 396n
Saigon, Vietnam, 282
“Saint Monday,” 18–19
Salford, England, 29
sawtooth roofs, 15, 134, 140
Scale and Scope (Chandler), 290
Schenectady, New York, 128, 163, 166, 240, 244
Schneider, 93, 104
Scientific American (magazine), 212
scientific management (Taylorism), 107–9, 127, 174–79, 181, 297, 356n, 371n
Scotland, 8, 13, 21, 23–24, 26, 29, 60, 121
Scott, John, 202–4, 207, 224
Scott, Sam, 21, 27
Seabrook, C. F., 194
Seattle, Washington, 115, 232
Second All-Union Conference on Scientific Management, 177
Seiberling Rubber Company, 194
Selassie, Haile, 256
Sendzimir, Tadeusz, 264
Seurat, George, 86
sewing machine industry, 82, 121, 290, 317
Shaikhet, Arkady, 212
Shanghai, China, 273
Shatov, Bill, 372n, 378n
Sheeler, Charles, xii, 150–54, 152, 158, 214, 235
Shengzhou, China, 295
Shenzhen, China, 271–72, 283–84, 287, 300, 304, 308, 311
shift work, 24, 100, 109, 129, 198, 268, 287, 302, 304
shipbuilding industry, 232
Shirley (Brontë), 31, 37, 42
Shlakman, Vera, 55
Shop Management (Taylor), 174
Shumyatsky, Boris, 161
Siberia, 171
Siemens, 290
silk industry, 1–6, 10, 35
Sinclair, Upton, 147
Singer Manufacturing Company, 82, 121, 290, 317
Sirotina, A. M., 206
Sisi, Abdel Fattah el-, 269
skilled labor and workers, 45, 60, 90
differences in treatment of, 46, 100, 106
mechanization and reduction in number of, 36–37, 50, 99
protests and strikes, 77, 100, 116–17
scientific management and, 108
in Soviet Union, 181
specialized machinery and, 123, 229
standardization of parts and, 120, 229
trade unions and labor organization, 99–100, 110
Skyscrapers (Sheeler), 151
Slater, Samuel, 45, 50, 65, 74, 341n
slavery
cotton industry, 5, 330n, 345n
metaphor of slavery for factory labor, 25–27, 70–71, 336n, 349n
modernity and, 5
Southern textile mills, 59
Sloan, Alfred P., Jr., 142
slubbing machines, 30–31
Smith, Adam, 122
Smith, Hinchman, & Grylls, 143
Smith, Terry, 153
“smokestack nostalgia,” xvi
social status and class
attendance at world’s fairs, 87–88
concentration of large numbers of workers, 30
critical mass for political discussion and labor organization, 38
of factory owners, 13–14
growing class division in US, 72–73
iron and steel industry, 99–100
Marx’s Capital and, 34–35
migrant labor in China, 285–86
politicized working class, 257–64
promise of Fordism, 119
socialism and, 278–79
sock industry, 36, 38, 295
Sofia Petrovna (Chukovskaya), 211
soldiering, 126
Solectron, 292–93
Solidarity trade union, 262–64
Song of Heroes (film), 216
Sons of Vulcan, 96, 355n
Sony, 290
Sorenson, Charles, 142
Soule, George, 215
South Bend, Indiana, 163
South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 113
South Korea, 283, 304, 307, 310
Southey, Robert, 20–21, 26
Soviet Automobile Trust, 198, 373n
Soviet industrialization
American involvement in, 169, 171, 178–79, 185–94, 197–200
automotive industry, 190–93, 199–200, 205
call for unprecedented rapid industrialization, 183–84
capitalist industrialization vs., 172–73, 224–25
conveyor method (assembly line), 182
culturalization efforts, 205–10
documentary and artistic depictions of, 210–18
factory design and construction, 187–88, 191–92, 194–95, 201–2
factory start-up difficulties, 196–205
Five-Year Plans, 183–86, 198, 201, 205–6, 210, 213, 215, 217, 220, 222–23,
225, 372n
forced labor, 203–4
Fordism, 180–82, 187, 196–99
Great Terror, 220–21
 interest and adoption of Americanism, 173–78, 184–85
iron and steel industry, 171, 185, 201–5, 207, 209–10, 214, 246
judging success of, 221–25
Kahn partnership, 194–95, 219
legacy of giant factories for workforce, 320
paying for, 218–19, 378n
productivity increases, 205
rejection of foreign involvement, 219–21
resistance to Americanism, 176
scientific management, 174–79, 181, 371n
security police, 203–4
tractor industry, 180–82, 186–89, 189, 194–98, 200, 224, 372n, 374n, 379n
Soviet Union, 149, 161. See also Cold War mass production; names of specific
locations; Soviet industrialization
convergence theory, 226–27
involvement in Chinese industrialization, 275
involvement in Eastern European industrialization, 251–52, 258
Spanish Earth, The (film), 216
Sparrows Point, Maryland, 95, 104–5, 232, 356n, 385n
spinning. See cotton industry
spinning mules, 7, 9, 14–15, 20, 77
Springfield, Massachusetts, 55
St. Louis, Missouri, 85, 229
Stalin, Joseph, 170–71, 184–85, 190, 198, 201, 205, 215, 219, 251
Stalingrad, Soviet Union, 169–70, 170, 185–89, 189, 194, 196–97, 206, 208, 210,
217, 224, 246, 314, 379n
Stalingrad Tractor Factory (Bourke-White), 170
Stalinstadt, East Germany, 249
Standard Oil, 58, 104, 290
standardization and interchangeability
armor and armaments industry, 120
automotive industry, 120–23, 141–42, 359n
shipbuilding industry, 232
skilled labor and, 120, 229
in Soviet Union, 197
tire industry, 236
steamboats, 82–83
steel industry. See iron and steel industry
Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), 166–67
Steffens, Lincoln, 97
Stella, Joseph, 96–97
Stepanova, Varvara, 212
Stieglitz, Alfred, 149
Stockport, England, 10, 17
Stonorov, Oscar, 230–31
Strand, Paul, 149
strikes. See protests and strikes
Strutt, Jedidiah, 8–9, 14–17, 45
Strutt, William, 15
Studebaker, 137, 163
Suffolk Manufacturing, 53
Sultan of Turkey, 17
Sun, 292
supervision of labor, 11–12, 17, 23–24, 60, 169, 203, 301, 303
Surinam, 46
Sutton, New Hampshire, 62
Swajian, Leon A., 188, 196
Swift, 127
Switzerland, 186
SWOC (Steel Workers Organizing Committee), 166–67
Sybil, or the Two Nations (Disraeli), 26
Syracuse, New York, 240
Syria, 76
Sztálinváros, Hungary, 249, 257–60, 387n

Taiwan, 273–74, 283, 288, 301, 304, 307, 310

Target, 293
Tariff Act, 48
Taunton, Massachusetts, 55
Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 107–8, 126, 174–78, 356n. See also scientific
management
Taylor, Myron, 166
Taylor, W. Cooke, 20, 22, 27, 29, 31–32, 147, 335n
Taylor Society, 225
technology. See also names of specific inventions and devices; power sources
adoption of factory model, 12
architecture and construction of factories, 15–17
assembly line, 118, 124–27, 125, 144–45, 182, 196–98
automation and mechanization, 7, 9, 50, 118, 124–27, 125, 144–45, 182, 242–
43, 297, 317–18
British embargo, 45, 47
iron and steel industry, 89–92
textile industry, 7, 9–10, 56
theft of, 3, 45
wonder and novelty of, 21
television, 244
Tempo (play), 188
Ten Hours Movement, 26, 68, 73–79
Tennessee, 186, 236, 382n
Terkel, Studs, 215
Tesco, 293
Texas Instruments, 292
textile industry. See also names of specific textile industries
in China, 273
compared to iron and steel industry, 93–94, 96, 98
efforts to regulate, 32–33
in Egypt, 268
elimination of hand work, 37
England compared to New England, 43–44
growing international markets, 41
Indian exports, 4
Marx’s Capital and, 34
pollution, 16
post-WWII strikes, 238
preindustrial and nonfactory production, 4–6, 9, 30
relocation and outsourcing, 294–95
size of early mills, 9
in Soviet Union, 178–79
Thatcher, Margaret, 281
Thompson, E. P., 30, 37–38, 338n
Thomson, Edgar, 97, 100
Those Who Built Stalingrad, As Told by Themselves (book), 215
Three Gorges Dam (China), 311
Thurston, George, 97
Time (magazine), 150, 194
tire industry, 128, 161, 163–64, 235–36
“To a Locomotive in Winter” (Whitman), 83
Tocqueville, Alexis de, xii, 21, 73
Togliatti, Soviet Union, 247–48
Toledo, Ohio, 163, 237
“tommy shops,” 18
tourism. See factory tourism
“Tower” (Cendrars), 87
tractor industry, 169–70, 170, 180–82, 185–89, 189, 194–98, 200, 206, 208, 210,
217, 224, 246, 314, 372n, 374n, 379n
Tractorstroi. See Stalingrad, Soviet Union
trade unions and labor organization
automotive industry, 129, 162–68
Cold War mass production in US, 233–42
 early British textile mills, 38–39
in Eastern Europe, 262–64
in Egypt, 268–69
Ford Motor Company, 129–30, 163, 167–68
in Germany, 267
immigrants and, 110
iron and steel industry, 90, 96, 99–103, 166–67
membership in, 99, 103, 115
New England textile mills, 66, 77–78
outsourcing, 294
post–Civil War economic and political climate, 98–99
productivity, 383n
in Soviet Union, 176, 178–79, 224–25
WWI era, 114–15
WWII era, 168, 233–35
tram (silk) industry, 3, 329n
Tremont Mills, 53
Tretyakov, Sergei, 216
Tristan, Flora, 21
Trollope, Anthony, 43, 71
Trollope, Frances, xii, 14, 21, 43
Troshin, Nikolai, 212
Trotsky, Leon, 176–77, 182–84, 220, 226, 370n–71n, 380n
Trotskyite-Zinovievite Center, 204
truck, 18, 36
Truck Act, 41
Truman, Harry S., 238
Trump, Ivanka, 318
Turkey, 17
Turksib railway, 171, 372n, 378n
turnkey facilities, 53
turnover, 128–29, 258, 285, 297, 306
Twain, Mark, 99

Unbound Prometheus, The (Landes), 12

United Automobile Workers (UAW), 164–68, 230, 237, 242
United Electrical Workers, 166
United Rubber Workers, 236
United States. See also Cold War mass production; Ford Motor Company and
Fordism; names of specific locations; New England textile mills
cotton industry, 5, 27–28, 45, 50, 85–86, 330n
growth of manufacturing before WWI, 79
involvement in Soviet industrialization, 169, 171, 178–79, 185–94, 197–200
 percentage of workers in manufacturing, xiii
size of manufacturing in 1850, 1
steam power, 82–83
view of mechanical progress as integral to modernity, 82–85
world’s fairs, 80–81, 84–88, 144–45
United States Rubber Company, 292
urban-based manufacturing, 13, 16, 28–31, 38
Ure, Andrew, 18–19, 23, 30–32
U.S. Department of Commerce, 145
U.S. Steel (United States Steel Corporation), 58, 105–6, 110–13, 116, 163, 201,
245, 356n–57n, 385n
U.S.A. (Dos Passos), 147
USSR in Construction (magazine), 211–13, 217, 376n
USSR stroit Sotzsialism (USSR Builds Socialism) (book), 212

Valentiner, William, 155–57

Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, 104–6
Vanguard Group, Inc., 321–22
Vanport, Oregon, 232
Veblen, Thorstein, 215
vertical integration, 138, 142, 247, 289
Vertov, Dziga, xii, 214, 216, 377n
Vienna, Austria, 85
Vietnamese industry
changes leading to giantism in, 274
discipline, 303
market-oriented policies, 281–82
migrant labor, 392n
poverty, 396n
protests and strikes, 274, 307, 397n
safety issues, 304, 396n
size and scale of, 288, 289
Vietnamese industry (continued)
symbolism of factories, 310–13
Vladimir Lenin Steelworks. See Nowa Huta, Poland
Voice of Industry, The (newspaper), 63
Volga-Don canal, 171
Volkswagen, 265–67, 290, 388n
Von Mises, Ludwig, 339n
Vorse, Mary Heaton, 98, 117
Vulcan, 96

wages. See compensation and wages

Wagner, Richard, 80
Wajda, Andrzej, 257
Wales, 41
Walesa, Lech, 263
walk-outs. See protests and strikes
Wall Street Journal, 270
Wal-Mart, 292–95, 318
Waltham, Massachusetts, 48–51, 54, 56–57, 66, 69, 341n–42n
War of 1812, 46–47, 69
Ward, Rollo, 207
Warren, Michigan, 228
“water frames,” 9
Ważyk, Adam, 256–57
Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 122
weaving. See cotton industry
West Indies, 5, 25–26, 336n
West Riding, Yorkshire, England, 36–37
Westinghouse, 163, 167
What’s On the Workers Mind, By One Who Put on Overalls to Find Out (Williams),
112
Whirlpool, 290
White Motors, 163
White Sea–Baltic Canal, 203
Whitman, Walt, 83, 350n
Whitney, Eli, 5
Whittier, John G., 69–70
Wigan, England, 62
Willersley castle (England), 13
Williams, Whiting, 112
Willow Run factory (Ford), 229–31, 230, 232, 380n
Wilson, Charles, 239
Wilson, Edmund, 142, 146
Wilson, Guy, 152
Wilson, Woodrow, 113–14, 116–17
Wojtyła, Karol (Pope John Paul II), 260–61
Wolfsburg, Germany, 265–67, 388n
women
in China, 286–87, 308, 311
company paternalism, 61–62
early British textile mills, 23, 32, 41
in Eastern Europe, 254
Ford Motor Company, 130
motivations of, 59–60
 New England textile mills, 43–44, 48, 54, 58–68, 73–75, 345n
in Soviet Union, 189, 191, 199, 206–7
working conditions, 64–65
WWII era, 232, 380n
Wood, Rufus, 104
Wood Mill (Lawrence, Massachusetts), 76
Woodward, C. Vann, 86
wool industry, 4–7, 9–10, 17, 30, 36, 38, 60, 76
workhouses, 24
working conditions
assembly-line production, 127
automotive industry, 127, 142
in China, 296–97, 301–4
cotton industry, 23–27, 30–32
early British textile mills, 23–27, 30–32
in Eastern Europe, 258
New England textile mills, 64–65, 76
outsourcing, 294
WWII era, 109–10, 113
working day and hours
in China, 302
Ford Motor Company, 129, 361n
iron and steel industry, 109
New England textile mills, 67–68, 73, 347n
outsourcing, 294
regulation of, 41
in Soviet Union, 379n
Ten Hours Movement, 26, 68, 73–79
“Workshop, My Youth Was Stranded Here” (Xu), 303
World Bank, 305–6
World Trade Organization (WTO), 282–83
World War I era
Ford and Navy Eagle Boats, 139
labor relations, 113–14
protests and strikes, 115–17, 234, 358n
trade unions and labor organization, 113–15
World War II era
factory housing and villages during, 230–32
protests and strikes, 233–35, 238, 239
recruitment of labor, 229–30
Soviet industrialization and, 223–24
trade unions and labor organization during, 168, 233–35
unionization efforts, 167–68
 women, 232, 380n
working conditions, 109–10, 113
world’s fairs and international exhibitions, 80–81, 84–88, 117, 144–45, 352n
Worthen, Augusta, 62
Wright, James Duncan, 21
Wright Aeronautical, 229
WTO (World Trade Organization), 282–83
Wuhan, China, 306

Xiamen City, China, 273

Xu Lizhi, 303

Yiwu, China, 295

Yonkers, New York, 239
Yorkshire, England, 24
Youngstown, Ohio, 92, 116
Ypsilanti, Michigan, 229
Yue Yuen Industrial (Holdings) Limited, 273, 296, 298, 302, 306, 310, 312, 322
YYSports, 273

Zelenko, Alexander, 373n

Zelma, Georgy, 212
Zhengzhou, China, 273
“Zone” (Apollinaire), 86–87
Zukin, Sharon, 98
 ALSO BY JOSHUA B. FREEMAN

In Transit:
The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933–1966

Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy,

Politics, Culture, and Society (coauthor)

Audacious Democracy: Labor, Intellectuals, and

the Social Reconstruction of America (coeditor)

Working-Class New York:

Life and Labor Since World War II

American Empire:
The Rise of Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home
 Copyright © 2018 by Joshua B. Freeman
Excerpt of translation of Blaise Cendrars, “Tower” © Tony Baker

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