Révolution industrielle

JOSSO 1S2

Maxence

History

Dissertation

The Industrial Revolution is the most significant change of its time and radically changed many aspects of society and economy. Tools and machines evolved as needs in the environment changed.

The economy was also modernized by the introduction of industries in the US. This industrialization had many causes. First, the US had a a pioneer spirit of exploration and experimentation (Taylor and Ford). Also, the US had been gaining a huge amount of land due to the purchase of Louisiana and the “Mexican cession” which concerns half of the Mexican territory at that time. The fact that the government sent people west increased the population and the production. A huge amount of natural resources was available in those new territories such as coal, timber, hydroelectricity and much more. Immigration also played a role by bringing an increasing supply of laborers. Between 1860 and 1890, the population grew from31 million to 76 million. The consumer marketplace expanded, The federal government had a lot of capital, the system of liberalism and finally the newly made peace and stability made it preferable to the industrialization of the US.

Two other factors modified the American economy : Taylorism and Fordism.

Taylorism is based on three factors. The first is that the task of each worker is broke up into simple operations which makes the work go faster and the wokers don't need training and are so, easy to replace. The second is that the work should be under surveillance of a supervisor who times with a stopwatch and the third is that there should be a geographical and human separation between the conception (engineers) and the execution of the work (manual workers). Fordism was one only point : Men don't go to the work, the work goes to the men. Also Henry Ford was paying his workers 5$/day which increased the motivation and made his workers costumers and better workers. Thanks to that, Ford was able to mass-product : he produced 9000 cars everyday. He was then able to make it more affordable for the middle class.

In the 1850's only the Northwest was industrialized, the manufacturing belt. This is called the pre-industrial society. Small rural industries were emerging around the country such as Cotton factories in New Hampshire or shoe making factories in Connecticut or the Lowell's girls in Massachusetts or the rubber factory in Cleveland. The nature of that economy was mostly weapons, textile and steel.

In 1940, the US was a fully industrialized country. Industries had been spreading around the country such as in Pittsburgh, Chicago and Houston. In the manufacturing belt were the more traditional industries however in the South were the oil industries and in the West the electronics. The US cars represented 40% of the car world production. The rest of that production was in Europe : Italy, Germany, France … The agro-industries were located in the Great Plains. In order to finance such a revolution, businessmen had three options. The first was self-financing but they needed a very wealthy fortune, the second was the banks (deposit bank and merchant bank) and finally there was the stock exchange. The result of this last option was that companies needed to be very profitable in order to pay the dividend (use f vertical and horizontal integration). There were less familial companies and more and more open companies owned by foreigners. This is callled capitalism. It is risky and can lead to a crisis like the one of 1929.

However industry wasn't the only domain touched by the huge technological improvements.

Agriculture was also transformed by the industrialization but started to modernize itself a lot earlier. The first industrial revolution occurred in Great Britain and Europe during the late eighteenth century with the invention of the steam machine in1769 by James Watt in Scotland. It then centered on the United States. The first and the second industrial revolution happened at the same time in the US, around 1870. The American agriculture had begun to modernize itself after the invention of the cotton gin in 1794 by Eli Whitney but industrialized itself for good during the late 19^th century. This industrialization was boosted by all the agricultural inventions such as the of the steam engine by James Watt, the mechanical reaper by Cyrus McCormick and the steam weaving loom by Edmund Cartwright. Francis Cabot Lowell founded a mill that went through the entire process of manufacturing cotton based on the British cotton mills. These technological inventions let the agriculture increase its production, made it easier to grow crops and the invention of the barbed wire by Joseph Gildden in 1876 made it easier to keep the cattle. T. As the railroad industry developed, the sector of agriculture was able to export goods as well as import them (the US was the first nation to export). This marks the beginning of agribusiness, the food processing industry and the creation of a national market. Due to the exportation and importation of goods, farmers were able to specialize themselves and so, increase their income. The railroads were a symbol of the power and the industrialization of the country and the railroad industries proved it with the creation of the first transcontinental railroad. This process of industrialization made the need of peasants decrease. All the blue-collar workers who couldn't keep up with the increasing competition had to move to the city in order to find a job in a factory often led by a “Robber Baron”.

After the revolution, two new social classes appeared creating an even more unbalanced social scale. The first new class is the tycoons, the “Robber Barons” and the second is the factory workers who are at the bottom of the social scale. In the middle was the middle class. The tycoons were or part of a dynasty, or were former workers in a company and obtained the job of a manager, or were scientist, inventors who made something revolutionary like Ford. These people also had a specific way of living. The industrial elite had huge houses ( mansions), servants, spare time activities such as hunting or golfing, and were very concerned for the boy's education and the girl's dowry. They were the economical and political elite of the countries. They also had values like needing to give social benefits for society and were often a sponsor for universities or trustees. Very few elite were self made men. Few people like Carnegie, Ford or Rockefeller went from rags to riches.

Then there was the middle class, the white collar workers. This social class includes a huge diversity of workers. It includes the civil servants, the engineers, bankers,post-men, lawyers or even doctors. The dream of the middle class was to live like the high class and wanted to show their social status. They had their own apartment, very few servants (usually one or two), expensive items such as a piano, spare time activities, nice clothes and had one only goal : upward mobility. Their main values and concerns were education, hard work and saving money. Finally there was the lower class, the manual workers, the industrial worker who lived in overcrowded places without furniture with barely any salary at all. They were the farmers who were left without a job and had to move to the city.

During the industrial revolution occurred a huge urbanization and rural exodus due to the mechanization of the agriculture. The switch from a rural population to an urban one happened in 1900 while the American population grew at an alarming rate : 25 million Americans in 1850, 70 million in 1900 and 140 million in 1930. Because of this population growth, people with a small amount of money had to live in quickly and poorly built houses. The living conditions of the Lower Class were extremely poor. The houses or more the rooms were dusty, small, dark, with damp walls and without furniture besides a bed. The health conditions also, were very poor : The toilets touched the water system contributing to the spreading of the diseases like tuberculosis, influenza (flu), cholera and many others. However, inventions like the telephone by Bell and Edison, cinema by the Lumiere Brothers, or even aspirin by Bayer improved the way of life of the middle and high class. The industrial workers also had poor working conditions. They had no security, no union, no mutual assistance, no compensation, they were easy to fire and their tiredness made their work more dangerous. Accidents were very common in the factories. Since the machines were very dangerous, kids often lost an arm or a leg. In the US in the 19^th century in the railroad industry, 1/26 workers was injured and 1/400 workers was killed. An other tragic accident is the Triangle Fire factory on March the 25^th, 1911. Eventually, the workers got fed up with all that, were supported by unions and started to strike.

On the first of January 1900, senator Beveridge gave a toast to the coming century and said : “The 20^th century will be American”. In opposition to the capitalist system that had been created in order to finance such a change, the workers struck hard. In 1894, there were 1400 industrial strikes. The smallest concern of the factory owners was the security of the workers. The main fight led by the workers was to reduce the number of working hours. In the 1830's, they fought for the 10hours/day, in the 1860's, they fought for the 8hours/day under the slogan : “eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest”. The most known strikes for this cause are the May Day Parade in Chicago on May 1^st, 1886 which involved 80 000 people and the Hay Market Square riots that same year. The US reached the 8 hours a day only in 1937.

While the the American industrial power grew in the 1870's , 1880's, unions representing the workers emerged in parallel. However, in the USA, labor unions never included more than 2% of the total labor force or 10% of the industrial workers because it was seen as foreign, or opposed to the American tradition of individualism, and workers moved a lot, which made creation of unions very difficult. National unions were gradually created during that time and approached matters differently. First there was the reformists like the American Federation of Labor (AFL) who were looking to obtain an increase of salary by negotiating rather than striking. The there were the revolutionary unions like the Knights of Labor who do not trust politics and want to shape the society by general strikes. In this last section are also the the Industrial Workers of the World or IWW. It was an \"industrial\" union, one that included and organized both skilled and unskilled workers within particular industries. The unions and strikes were lead by two different ideologies : socialism and anarchism.

The industrial revolution refers to a change from hand and home production to machine and factory, a change from a rural society to an urban one, a change from a more or less balanced society to a completely unbalanced one, a change from a peaceful era to one of tensions, of strikes. However even if some of the changes benefited society, others caused harm to most of the society especially the working class. The industrial revolution made the US the wealthiest country in the world by completely changing the primary, secondary and tertiary sector of economy as well as creating gaps between the different classes of society. Finally there is the modern day and the future. Technology and industry have and still dominated our world, improving it to a point that would have been unimaginable one hundred years ago, and with the help of the people, the sacrificing and the hardships, progress continues.