Industrial Revolution · CHAPTER 9 ·
Industrial Revolution in America
Chapter 9 of The Industrial Revolution, 1750–1914: “America Industrialises”
Between the Civil War and the First World War the United States became the world’s largest industrial economy, drawing on a protected market, vast resources and immigrant labour. The first transcontinental railway was completed at Promontory Summit, Utah, on 10 May 1869, its western section built largely by Chinese workers.
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The map above is the world of The industrial world, 1890 — America overtakes Britain.
Part of IB History: The Industrial Revolution →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The United States became the world’s largest industrial economy between the Civil War of 1861–65 and the First World War, and its rise shows how industrialisation worked on a continental scale. It had advantages on a scale Britain could not match: a vast internal market protected by high tariffs, taxes on imports that made foreign goods dearer, enormous reserves of coal, iron ore, oil, timber and farmland, and millions of immigrant workers. It also carried the legacy of slavery, since before 1861 its greatest export had been cotton grown by enslaved people for the mills of Lancashire and New England, where Lowell, from 1823, became the model American factory town. After the war, railways joined the continent: the first transcontinental line was completed at Promontory Summit in Utah in 1869, its western section built largely by Chinese workers, most from Guangdong, working east from the line’s base at Sacramento. A single market now stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Industry grew around those railways on a scale no other country matched. The Scottish-born businessman Andrew Carnegie’s steelworks near Pittsburgh used ore shipped across the Great Lakes, and Chicago’s slaughterhouses moved carcasses past rows of workers on overhead lines. In 1913 the carmaker Henry Ford’s moving assembly line at Highland Park cut the time to assemble a car’s chassis, its frame, engine and wheels, from about twelve and a half hours to about one and a half. This was mass production, the making of identical goods cheaply on standardised lines, which still shapes manufacturing because it lets one factory supply millions. On the map the United States turns charcoal and arrows bring immigrants through Ellis Island, New York’s immigration station; about 22 million arrived between 1880 and 1914. The same years brought violent strikes, a law shutting out Chinese workers and a South kept poor after slavery, because the gains of growth went first to those who owned the railways, mills and land.
The full story
America’s industrial rise began before the Civil War, and its first stage was tied to slavery and to Britain. Samuel Slater, who had memorised the inventor Richard Arkwright’s spinning machines in England, began spinning cotton in Rhode Island in 1790, and in 1823 a group of Boston merchants began production at Lowell in Massachusetts, a planned factory town whose mills hired young women from New England farms, who struck against wage cuts in 1834 and 1836. The cotton these mills spun came from the slave South, where the enslaved population grew from about 700,000 in 1790 to almost four million in 1860. The Civil War of 1861–65 destroyed slavery and confirmed the power of the industrial North, because its factories and railways outproduced the South’s. Emancipation freed four million people, yet most of them remained poor farm workers and sharecroppers, tenants who paid their rent with a share of the crop, in a South kept poor and segregated.
Railways turned the United States into a single continental market, and they were built with immigrant labour and public land. Congress gave the Union Pacific and Central Pacific companies land grants and loans, and on 10 May 1869 their tracks met at Promontory Summit. The Central Pacific, building east from Sacramento over the Sierra Nevada mountains, employed 10,000 to 15,000 Chinese workers at a time, about 90 per cent of its workforce in 1867, at lower pay than white workers; how many died is unknown, with estimates from about fifty to over a thousand. By 1893 five lines crossed the continent, and because a factory in Chicago or Pittsburgh could now sell to the whole country, firms grew to a size no local market could have supported; the railroads themselves became the first big businesses, run by professional managers. The railway that united the country’s market was built by men the country then refused to admit, through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Steel, mass production and mass immigration made America the world’s leading industrial power by the 1890s, and conflict accompanied every stage. The steelmaker Andrew Carnegie’s Edgar Thomson works near Pittsburgh, opened in 1875, made steel rails by the Bessemer process, which blasted air through molten iron to burn out impurities in minutes, from ore shipped across the Great Lakes, and American steel output passed Britain’s around 1886. Chicago’s meat-packing plants moved carcasses along overhead lines past rows of workers, a disassembly line that the carmaker Henry Ford said inspired his moving assembly line at Highland Park, where each worker repeated one task as the work moved past. About 22 million immigrants entered between 1880 and 1914, many through Ellis Island, New York’s immigration station, after 1892. Strikes were met with force: at Carnegie’s Homestead steelworks in 1892 a battle between strikers and private guards left seven workers and three guards dead, and the union was broken. By 1913 the United States made about a third of the world’s manufactured goods, more than Britain and Germany together. The economy Britain had pioneered was now outbuilt by one with a continent behind it.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Why America grew so large so fast
Historians explain America’s rise by combining resources, scale and people. The economic historian Gavin Wright showed in 1990 that American manufacturing exports before the First World War were unusually intensive in natural resources such as coal, copper, oil and timber, so the country’s industrial strength rested heavily on its geology. The domestic market grew from about 31 million people in 1860 to 92 million in 1910, joined by railways and sheltered by tariffs, taxes on imports, that from the Civil War onwards were among the highest in the industrial world. The economic historian H. J. Habakkuk argued in 1962 that scarce and costly labour pushed American firms toward labour-saving machinery, building on the American system of manufactures, the use of interchangeable parts, identical components that fit any copy of a gun or machine, first developed in government arms factories. Immigration supplied workers in vast numbers, and British capital financed many railroads. The business historian Alfred Chandler’s The Visible Hand (1977) argued that the railroads created the first modern business enterprises, run by layers of salaried managers, a model that steel, oil and meat-packing firms then copied. Each factor reinforced the others, which is why the American rise was so fast once the continent was joined.
Chinese workers and the politics of exclusion
The Chinese workers who built the Central Pacific, the western half of the first transcontinental railroad, left almost no written records, so historians reconstruct their lives from company payrolls, newspapers and archaeology. Stanford University’s Chinese Railroad Workers project estimates that 10,000 to 15,000 worked at any one time, mostly from Guangdong province in southern China, paid less than white workers and expected to buy their own food. In June 1867 several thousand of them struck in the Sierra Nevada mountains for equal pay and shorter hours; the company cut off their food supplies and the strike ended after about a week. Their deaths, from blasting, avalanches and accidents, were never counted. After the railroad was finished, Chinese workers met growing hostility from white workers and politicians who blamed them for low wages, and in 1885 a white mob killed at least 28 Chinese miners at Rock Springs, Wyoming. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first federal law to bar immigrants by nationality, and it was renewed until 1943. Industrial America welcomed labour from abroad and decided by race whom it would admit.
Capital, labour and the Gilded Age
The decades after the Civil War, which the novelist Mark Twain mocked as the Gilded Age, meaning gold-plated over cheap metal, saw the largest fortunes and some of the fiercest labour conflicts in American history. A railroad strike spread nationwide in 1877 and was crushed by troops. The Knights of Labor, a national union open to almost all workers, grew to about 700,000 members by 1886, the year a bomb thrown at a rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, and the police gunfire that followed, killed seven officers and at least four civilians; four anarchists, opponents of all government, were later hanged on weak evidence. The lockout, a shutdown to break the union, at the steelmaker Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead works in 1892 and the strike of 1894 against the Pullman sleeping-car company, broken by federal troops, showed the power of employers backed by courts and the state. Between 1895 and 1904 rival firms combined into giant corporations, among them US Steel in 1901, the first company valued at over a billion dollars. Historians have long argued about the men who built them. The journalist Matthew Josephson called them robber barons in 1934, the historian Allan Nevins defended them as industrial statesmen, and the historian Richard White’s Railroaded (2011) argues that the transcontinental railroads were overbuilt, badly run and propped up by government favours. The debate turns on whether the costs of such rapid growth were the price of growth or the result of political favour.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
A continent of resources. The United States held some of the world’s largest deposits of coal, iron ore, copper and oil, as well as vast forests and farmland taken from Native American nations by treaty and war. The hatched patches on the map show the Pennsylvania coalfields and the Lake Superior iron ranges whose ore fed Pittsburgh. Cheap resources rewarded technologies that used them lavishly, which is why American industry became so hungry for energy and materials.
A huge protected market. American industry grew inside the largest protected market in the world: the population of the United States rose from about 31 million in 1860 to 92 million in 1910, and railways joined it into one market with no taxes on trade between states. High tariffs, taxes on imports, raised during the Civil War and kept afterwards, sheltered American factories from British and German competition, much as Friedrich List, the German economist who argued that young industries need protection, had recommended for Germany. Firms that could sell to a whole continent could build plants of enormous scale and spread their costs over millions of customers.
Immigrant and coerced labour. Industry’s workforce came from Europe, China, Mexico and the American countryside. Immigrants supplied the hands for mines, mills and railways, often at low wages and in dangerous conditions, while Black southerners, freed from slavery but bound by debt and segregation, grew the cotton that remained a leading export. Labour from abroad kept wages lower than they would otherwise have been, although they stayed higher than in Europe, which kept the migrants coming.
Capital, organisation and the state. British and European investors financed American railroads, and federal land grants and loans lowered their risks. The railroads pioneered the large company run by salaried managers, which the business historian Alfred Chandler called the visible hand because managers’ planning now did the coordinating that markets had done, and steel, oil and meat firms copied them. Courts and governments generally sided with employers, sending troops and issuing injunctions, court orders that banned strikes, which kept labour costs down and profits high. The state built the conditions in which private enterprise flourished.
THE TURNING POINT
Promontory Summit, 10 May 1869. The meeting of the rails is the hinge because it joined the Atlantic and Pacific economies of the United States into one continental market. Goods, settlers and migrants could now cross the country in about a week, a journey that had taken months, and within twenty-five years four more lines followed. The railroad opened the West to farms, ranches and mines, drew the grasslands of the Great Plains into the world market and accelerated the destruction of Native American nations and the bison herds they lived on. Built largely by Chinese and Irish labour, the line also made the United States a nation whose industrial wealth rested on migrants it did not always welcome.
What it changed
America overtakes Britain. By about 1886 the United States made more steel than Britain, and by 1913 about a third of the world’s manufactured goods. American methods, from interchangeable parts, standard components that fit any copy of a product, to the assembly line, spread to Europe and Japan in the twentieth century, and American consumers, with the highest wages in the world, became the first mass market for cars and electrical goods. Britain’s old title of workshop of the world had crossed the Atlantic, and with it the lead in mass production that would shape the twentieth century.
Grain and migrants remake Europe. Cheap American grain carried by rail and steamship flooded European markets from the 1870s, lowering bread prices for workers but ruining many farmers and pushing millions of rural Europeans to emigrate. Germany and France answered with tariffs, taxes on imported grain, while Britain, committed to free trade without such taxes, let its farming shrink. The same railways and steamships that carried American grain east carried European migrants west, so one wave of globalisation fed the other.
The labour question goes national. Strikes at the Homestead steelworks in 1892, broken by Pennsylvania’s state militia after strikers fought off guards from the Pinkerton detective agency, and at the Pullman railway-car works in 1894, broken by federal troops, made the power of corporations a national political issue. Reformers of the Progressive Era, a movement of the 1900s and 1910s that set out to curb corporate power, passed laws against monopolies, firms that dominate a whole market, and unsafe food, states restricted child labour, and unions grew slowly. Industrial power had grown too large for American politics to leave it to the market alone.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was America’s industrial success built more on its resources or on its people?
Resources made the scale of growth possible. Coal, ore, oil, timber and land, much of it taken from Native American nations, gave American industry cheap inputs, and the economic historian Gavin Wright’s evidence shows how resource-intensive its exports were. Yet resources needed people to exploit them, and the people came from everywhere: inventors and managers who built the large corporation, about 22 million immigrants between 1880 and 1914, Chinese railway workers later barred from the country, and the formerly enslaved and their children whose cotton remained a leading export. Institutions shaped how both were used. High taxes on imports, federal land grants and courts friendly to employers channelled wealth toward industry and kept labour costs low, at the price of fierce conflict. The most convincing answer is that America’s abundance of resources set the direction of its technology, while its ability to draw labour and capital from the whole world set the speed. Abundance and openness together explain the rise, and exclusion and conflict show who paid for it.
An interesting fact
Railways gave the United States its time zones. Before 1883 American towns kept their own local times, and the railroads used dozens of different times on their timetables. On Sunday 18 November 1883, known as the day of two noons, the railroads of the United States and Canada switched to standard time zones, four of them across the United States, and in many eastern towns clocks struck noon twice as they were set back to the new standard. Most towns adopted railway time at once, and Congress made the zones law only in 1918, so a private industry had set the nation’s clocks for thirty-five years.
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