Not So Hard Times

...Starting with the material culture of the area—and no reader should by-pass the essay in the Appendix, "Paradigmatic Processes and Culture Change" —we are reminded that southeastern Pennsylvania, formerly a prosperous wheat-producing area, was now in decline...

...The industrialists' belief that they should control the machines for their own economic interest, to which the operator was incidental, is not foreign to us...

...Rockdale sent its men into the First Pennsylvania Volunteers...

...A better representation would be a Trojan horse (or, more accurately, the spinning mule) led innocently to water (power): The community is ready—the personnel, the ethic, the market, the capital—but the consequences prove to be unpredictable...

...Inside the mill-usually 40 by 50 feet and two to four stories high—the power from the exterior wheel was translated to the gears that put all machinery into action (most shafts were wooden and lubricants were made of either animal fats or vegetable oils...

...There seemed to be a general acceptance of social order based on a class hierarchy, attenuated by the belief that individuals could always rise from lower to higher station...

...Despite class differences, however, everyone knew everyone else (Crozerville, the largest of the seven towns, had only 411 people in 1850), and even the interiors of each others' houses...

...even their idea of the social contract was "a mirror image, reversed in direction" of their religious faith...

...To our surprise, we find that Rockdale in 1850 was "a pastoral community not far from wilderness...

...This niche was Christian evangelism...

...Coincident with the takeoff into industrialism there emerged a belief that the whole world could become Christian, and it was fostered by the novelty of technology and great wealth...

...They also had machine shops, though most of the spinning equipment had to be purchased from outside the immediate area, and there was always the necessity to keep abreast of technological improvements...

...there is the whistle of the locomotive—the long shriek, harsh, above all other harshness, for the space of a mile cannot mollify its harmony...

...Led by the family of Richard S. Smith in the Rockdale district and symbolized by the building of Calvary Episcopal Church, attended by industrialists and workers alike, this second Great Awakening owed much of its energy and spirit to upper-class women...

...The combined wages enabled a family to earn money sufficient to move west and farm or to settle, establish credit, and perhaps become managers...

...And indifference, if not opposition, to organized religion proved the greatest stumbling block of all...

...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of History, San Francisco State University In the summer of 1844, Nathaniel Hawthorne made his way through the woods toward a place known as Sleepy Hollow, observing that the trail was "strewn over with little bits of dry twigs and decayed branches, and the sear and brown oak-leaves of last year that have been moistened by snow and rain, and whirled about by harsh and gentle winds, since their departed verdure...

...Most of the 2,000 people in the Rockdale district were workers, living (on the average) six to a tenement (two rooms plus attic plus half cellar) and working (husband, wife, children) in the mill from dawn to dusk...

...Wallace tells us there were...

...Since there was little printed literature on cotton manufacturing, the technical advice and skills of emigres from English mills were critical...

...These individuals, the heirs of the Enlightenment, should not have felt strange around Chester Creek, for the Philadelphia-Wilmington area was not only the center of radical social thought in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but that thought was initially quite respectable...

...The culture of the machine-makers, known as "mechanicians," was "fundamentally different from that of the manufacturer: the machinist thought with his hands and eyes, and when he wished to learn or communicate he made a drawing or a model...

...It was, of course, identified with Thomas Jefferson and his immediate successors in the White House...

...The mills were powered by softly flowing water, the looms clattered behind closed windows, the workers were called by a tower bell...

...It was perfect for water-powered mills, however, a place "prepared by time for the harmonious combination of men, machines, and nature in the pastoral phase of American manufacturing...

...the Civil War could thus be seen as Armageddon...

...Could there have been any conditions that ameliorated the differences in ways of life...

...This mixture of motives aids in our understanding of mid-century politics: "Eventually evangelical enthusiasm joined forces with economic and political self-interest to form a new Republican Party...

...The machine was in the garden, to be sure, but it was a machine that had grown almost organically in its niche, like a mutant flower that was finding a congenial place among the rocks...

...tried—and failed —to wrest control of the machines away from the private owner and place it in the hands of the community...

...But they did press enthusiastically into the one niche in the occupational structure that was opening its doors wide to women...

...Technology played a part in the breakdown of these rural industrial communes—and of the privately-owned rural mills too—when an inexpensive, efficient steam engine replaced water power in the 1850s...

...This cotton was processed through the picker house into the card room, whence it emerged as a rope ready for the throstle (which produced warp threads for power looms) or the mule (which produced finer yarns...

...It was with those passages that Leo Marx set the stage for The Machine in the Garden...

...Millennialism and the sectional confrontation were connected in the minds of evangelical Protestants...

...The Industrial Revolution, we conclude from Wallace's study, cannot be seen simply in the image of the railroad shattering the peace...

...Reaching his destination, he settled into a reverie: "But, hark...

...In 1824, the Franklin Institute was organized in Philadelphia to deal with their special concerns—carrying out, for example, experiments on the performance of water wheels...

...two strikes...

...It is clear enough that the industrialists heard clergymen preach sermons against labor unions, and that the denizens of Chester Creek sent an anti-Enlightenment radical candidate to Congress...

...Those of us whose social consciences owe something to the depiction of the Industrial Revolution in Dickens' Hard Times may be resistant to the pleasantness of Wallace's portrait...

...Such men advised on building a wooden wheel powered by the head of water provided by a millrace, since the dimensions of the works and the efficiencies of various types of wheels were not common knowledge...

...a disastrous flood...

...The richness of Wallace's approach is nowhere more apparent than in his transition from thinking about machinery and the consequent problem of conveying technological information, to thinking about ways of life and the consequent problem of controlling machinery and the persons who operate it...

...The radicals reckoned without the evangelical counterattack against "infidelity...

...The Rockdale men were materialists, thinking about money and machinery...

...As Roy Nichols, Wallace'slate colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, used to say: "The Republican Party was half greed, half idealism...

...The wisdom of Wallace's work is that he is able to draw this complex picture in terms we can all understand...

...Families worked together in the mills, and parents disciplined (or controlled the discipline of) their own children—though, of course, they could do nothing about the fatigue that frequently overcame youngsters...

...But the weakness of the Enlightenment philosophy contributed as well: a naive faith in reason, community, democracy, equality, and localism was not compatible with the times...

...Still, these women probably did not really affect their husbands, who continued to put economic interest before moral considerations (cleanliness was not next to godliness in the mills...

...and several changes in working conditions (the decline in skilled labor due to technological innovation, reform bills pushed by industrialists that co-opted radical labor movements, the encouragement of upward mobility for able workers...

...as the hope of speedy victory was crushed with the continuing news of defeat and dying, a further polarization was achieved: the forces of God were surely at war against the devil—a point of view that has since had global implications...

...Generally, these entrepreneurs had failed in other undertakings or had unexpectedly come into ownership of a mill...

...then the yarn was packaged and shipped out...

...Yet "Christian Industrialism," a view that emphasized stewardship, harmony, protection, individual salvation, and progress, was an amalgam of the Enlightenment past and the evangelical present...

...Wallace does not deny class struggle, nor has he painted an idyllic still life of rural industrialism...

...Bales of cotton weighing 300-350 pounds came to the spinning mills from the South by way of a Delaware River port...

...The fraternity of mechanicians, best understood by studying families, probably numbered no more than 300-400 (plus journeymen and apprentices) in the English-speaking world...

...While they did not lack for solidarity, always being willing to rescue a fellow capitalist in distress, the men were never so close to one another as were the women—whose province was spirituality...

...At the same time, these possibilities boosted morale, i.e., made for good workers...

...Initially, only one spinning mill also did weaving, but by 1834 all mills had power looms...

...So, too, were the conservative gentlemen who first bought the decaying mills along Chester Creek...

...the contrast between the bucolic past and the technologic future conforms to the prevalent understanding of the Industrial Revolution...

...It was the product not only of an ideology, or of ideologies in conflict, but also of experience: an eight-year recession...

...The Rockdale industrial district—in which the village of Rockdale was one of seven mill towns along a three-mile stretch of Chester Creek, where it dropped from 120 to 30 feet above sea level—was too rugged a terrain for farming...

...Family life is affected, ideologies change, a new politics and economics emerges...

...At Valley Forge a commune was set up along the lines of Owen's New Harmony...

...What we may be unaware of is that in the early 19th century there was a struggle over this issue, that a "generation of romantic, free-thinking radicals...

...The sisterhood were not feminists...

...So when Anthony F. C. Wallace informs us in the opening sentence of his book, "There is a village in America called Rockdale where the people used to manufacture cotton cloth," we steel ourselves for the onslaught of industrialism...

...They began with limited capital borrowed from family members (making them especially vulnerable in the early years), and they functioned with a minimum of cash...

...The cover description of his book, a device as old-fashioned as the bell in the cupola that summoned the workers, gives us an immediate glimpse of the dynamic quality of his study: "An account of the coming of the machines, the making of a new way of life in the mill hamlets, the triumph of evangelical capitalists over socialists and infidels, and the transformation of workers into Christian soldiers in a cotton-manufacturing district in Pennsylvania in the years before and during the Civil War...

...the manufacturer and manager thought with his larynx, as it were, and when he wished to learn or communicate, did so with words, in conversation or in writing...

...The hierarchy was not simply employer and worker, it included a level of persons in between, from the clergy to the blacksmiths, who performed services for all village residents, as well as a bottom stratum of indigent poor...

...Perhaps this very concern allowed women to be more physically intimate, though Wallace attributes it to a basic need for friendship...

...But their wives, relieved of the burdens of child rearing by nurses, were afforded the leisure to travel, read and correspond continuously within a tight network of friendship...

...they sought to preserve a fading way of life, not to create an Industrial Revolution...

...The managers, residing in 10-12-room stone houses on the hills above the hamlets, certainly drove themselves as hard as the workers, basing their activity on a strict code of fidelity to contract while engaging in every shrewd, aggressive practice within the bounds of contractual legality...

...Although just one of the Chester Creek industrialists embraced this philosophy, it found an audience among workers and had contemporary advocates, such as Robert Owen...

...Only miles south of Philadelphia and west of Chester, it still had no railroad...