THE MANUFACTURING ENTERPRISE
186. =Preponderance of Economic Interests.=--Such a social centre as
the city has several functions to perform for its inhabitants. Though
primarily concerned with business, the people have other interests to
be conserved; the city, therefore, has governmental, educational, and
recreational functions as a social organization, and within its limits
all kinds of human concerns find their sponsors and supporters.
Unquestionably, the economic interests are preponderant. On the
principle that social structure corresponds to function, the structure
of the city lends itself to the performance of the economic function.
Business streets are the principal thoroughfares. Districts near the
great factories are crowded with the tenements that shelter the
workers. Little room is left for breathing-places in town, and little
leisure in which to breathe. Government is usually in the hands of
professional politicians who are too willing to take their orders from
the cohort captains of business. Morals, æsthetics, and recreation are
all subordinate to business. Even religion is mainly an affair of
Sunday, and appears to be of relatively small consequence compared
with business or recreation. The great problems of the city are
consequently economic at bottom. Poverty and misery, drunkenness,
unemployment, and crime are all traceable in part, at least, to
economic deficiency. Economic readjustments constitute the crying need
of the twentieth-century city.
187. =The Manufacturing Industry.=--It is the function of the
agriculturist and the herdsman, the miner and the lumberman, to
produce the raw material. The sailor and the train-hand, the
longshoreman and the teamster, transport them to the industrial
centres. It is the business of the manufacturer and his employees to
turn them into the finished product for the use of society.
Manufacturing is the leading occupation in thousands of busy towns and
small cities of all the industrial nations of western Europe and
America, and shares with commerce and trade as a leading enterprise in
the cosmopolitan centres. The merchant or financier who thinks his
type of emporium or exchange is the only municipal centre of
consequence, needs only to mount to the top of a tall building or
climb a suburban hill where he can look off over the city and see the
many smoking chimneys, to realize the importance of the factory. With
thousands of tenement-house dwellers it is as natural to fall into the
occupation of a factory hand as in the rural regions for the youth to
become a farmer. The growing child who leaves school to help support
the family has never learned a craftsman's trade, but he may find a
subordinate place among the mill or factory hands until he gains
enough skill to handle a machine. From that time until age compels him
to join the ranks of the unemployed he is bound to his machine, as
firmly as the mediæval serf was bound to the soil. Theoretically he is
free to sell his labor in the highest market and to cross the
continent if he will, but actually he is the slave of his employer,
for he and his family are dependent upon his daily wage, and he cannot
afford to lose that wage in order to make inquiries about the labor
market elsewhere. Theoretically he is a citizen possessed of the
franchise and equal in privilege and importance to his employer as a
member of society, but actually he must vote for the party or the man
who is most likely to benefit him economically, and he knows that he
occupies a position of far less importance politically and socially
than his employer. Employment is an essential in making a living, but
it is an instrument that cuts two ways--it establishes an aristocracy
of wealth and privilege for the employer and a servile class of
employees who often are little better than peasants of the belt and
wheel.
188. =History of Manufacturing.=--The history of the manufacturing
industry is a curious succession of enslavement and emancipation.
Until within a century and a half it was closely connected with the
home. Primitive women fashioned the utensils and clothing of the
primitive family, and when slaves were introduced into the household
it became their task to perform those functions. The slave was a
bondman. Neither his person nor his time was his own, and he could not
hold property; but he was taken care of, fed and clothed and housed,
and by a humane master was kindly treated and even made a friend. When
the slave became a serf on the manorial estate of mediæval Europe,
manufacturing was still a household employment and old methods were
still in use. These sufficed, as there was little outside demand from
potential buyers, due to general poverty and lack of the means of
exchange and transportation. Certain industries became localized, like
the forging of iron instruments at the smithy and the grinding of
grain at the mill, and the monastery buildings included apartments for
various kinds of handicraft, but the factory was not yet. Then
artisans found their way to the town, associated themselves with
others of their craft, and accepted the relation of journeyman in the
employ of a master workman; there, too, the young apprentice learned
his trade without remuneration. The group was a small one. For greater
strength in local rivalries they organized craft guilds or
associations, and established over all members convenient rules and
restrictions. Increasing opportunities for exchange of goods
stimulated production, but the output of hand labor was limited in
amount. The position of the craftsman locally was increasingly
important, and his fortunes were improving. The craft guilds
successfully disputed with their rivals for a share in the government
of the city; there was democracy in the guild, for master and
journeyman were both included, and they had interests much in common.
A journeyman confidently expected to become a master in a workshop of
his own.
189. =Alteration of Status.=--Under the factory system the employee
becomes one of many industrial units, having no social or guild
relation to his employer, receiving a money wage as a quit claim from
his employer, and dependent upon himself for labor and a living. For
a time after the factory system came into vogue there were small shops
where the employer busied himself among his men and personally
superintended them, but the large factory tends to displace the small
workshop, the corporation takes the place of the individual employer,
and the employee becomes as impersonal a cog in the labor system as is
any part of the machine at which he works. It used to be the case that
a thrifty workman might hope to become in the future an employer, but
now he has become a permanent member of a distinct class, for the
large capital required for manufacturing is beyond his reach. The
manufacturing industry is continually passing under the management of
fewer individuals, while the number of operatives in each factory
tends to increase. With concentration of management goes concentration
of wealth, and the gap widens between rich and poor. Out of the modern
factory system has come the industrial problem with all its varieties
of skilled and unskilled work, woman and child labor, sweating, wages,
hours and conditions of labor, unemployment, and other difficulties.
190. =The Working Grind.=--There are many manufacturing towns and
small cities that are built on one industry. Thousands of workers,
young and old, answer the morning summons of the whistle and pour into
the factory for a day's labor at the machine. A brief recess at noon
and the work is renewed for the second half of the day. Weary at
night, the workers tramp home to the tenements, or hang to the trolley
strap that is the symbol of the five-cent commuter, and recuperate for
the next day's toil. They are cogs in the great wheel of industry,
units in the great sum of human energy, indispensable elements in the
progress of economic success. Sometimes they seem less prized than the
costly machines at which they work, sometimes they fall exhausted in
the ranks, as the soldier in the trenches drops under the attack, but
they are absolutely essential to wealth and they are learning that
they are indispensable to one another. In the development of social
organization the working people are gaining a larger part. The
factory is educating them to a consciousness of the solidarity of
their class interests. All class organizations have their faults, but
they teach their members group values and the dependence of the
individual on his fellows.
191. =The Benefits of the New Industry to the Workers.=--It must not
be supposed that the industrial revolution and the age of machinery
have been a social misfortune. The benefits that have come to the
laboring people, as well as to their employers, must be put into the
balance against the evils. There is first of all the great increase of
manufactured products that have been shared in by the workers and the
greatly reduced price of many necessaries of life, such as matches,
pins, and cooking utensils. Invention has eased many kinds of labor
and taken them away from the overburdened housewife, and new machinery
is constantly lightening the burden of the farm and the home.
Invention has broadened the scope of labor, opening continually new
avenues to the workers. It is difficult to see how the rapidly
increasing number of people in the United States could have found
employment without the typewriter, the automobile, and the numerous
varieties of electrical application. The great number of modern
conveniences that have come to be regarded as necessaries even in the
homes of the working people, and the local improvements in streets and
sidewalks, schools and playgrounds that are possible because of
increasing wealth, are all due to the new type of industry.
Conditions of labor are better. Where building laws are in force,
factories are lighter, cleaner, and better ventilated than were the
houses and shops of the pre-factory age, and the hours of labor that
are necessary to earn a living have been greatly reduced in most
industries. There have been mental and moral gains, also. It requires
mental application to handle machinery. An uneducated immigrant may
soon learn to handle a simple machine, but the complicated machinery
that the better-paid workmen tend requires intelligence, care, and
sobriety. The age of machinery has brought with it emancipation from
slavery, indenture, and imprisonment for debt, and has made possible
a new status for the worker and his children. The laborer in America
is a citizen with a vote and a right to his own opinion equal to that
of his employer; he has time and money enough to buy and read the
newspaper; and he is encouraged and helped to educate his children and
to prepare them for a place in the sun that is ampler than his own.
READING REFERENCES
CHEYNEY: _Industrial and Social History of England_, pages
199-239.
NEARING AND WATSON: _Economics_, pages 206-212, 256-266.
HENDERSON: _Social Elements_, pages 143-156.
ADAMS AND SUMNER: _Labor Problems_, pages 3-15.
BOGART: _Economic History of the United States_, pages 130-169,
356-399.