Paternalismo

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Varieties of Paternalism: Industrial Structures and the Social Relations of Production in American Textiles Author(s): Philip Scranton Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer, 1984), pp. 235-257Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2712726Accessed: 08-07-2015 14:25 UTC

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VARIETIES OF PATERNALISM: INDUSTRIAL STRUCTURES AND THE

SOCIAL RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION IN AMERICAN TEXTILES

PHILIP SCRANTON Rutgers University, Camden

STUDENTS OF INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE AND America have frequently made note of paternalist relationships between masters and workers as one dimension of the social relations of production in emergent capitalist manufacturing.' For adherents of modernization approaches, those relationships may represent a way-station along the road to cost-conscious, rational, business practice. For some Marxist historians, they can be seen as an obstacle to workers' realization of their class position and their appreciation of the surpluses being wrung from their labor. For others, paternalism might seem to be an extension of patriarchal family authority from the farm or home/workshop into the factory and mill, a reconstitution of the father's dominion over a set of industrial children.

In my work on the textile trades in nineteenth-century America, principally centered on Philadelphia's industry, and in the literature of the textile manufacture in New England and the South, evidence of factory paternalism abounds. Yet when examined closely, the relationships in place at Lowell or Manchester, those in Philadelphia, and those in the rural North or in the post-Reconstruction Carolinas are strikingly dissimilar. If paternalism is not to become a spongy term, calling forth only imagery of a fuzzy, vaguely friendly form of domination, it may be worth pursuing the elements that constituted various forms of paternalism, to link them to particular constellations of material and cultural contexts, and to speculate as to the logic and character of obligation that surfaced in different settings.

'Carolyn Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture (193 1; rpt. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1966); Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840-1860 (1924; rpt. New York: Quadrangle, 1964); Melton McLaurin, Paternalism and Protest (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971); Stanley Buder, Pullman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967). For the paternalism of slave society, see Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1972).


236 American Quarterly

Capitalist development has hardly been homogeneous. As one of the formats for human interaction within that process, paternalism too has taken several forms. Specifying them will link variations in behavior to the context of structural variations in productive relations, both material and cultural. Establishing the complex of factors that conditioned the three paternalist formats present in the developing textile industry will create a framework for systematic comparison and analysis of the social relations of production in other sectors, other regions, and other eras.

First a fairly basic observation: industrial paternalism, whatever its particular conformations, contributes to the viability of an enterprise. Manufacturing firms must generate products and profits in order to expand and survive in a capitalist economic system. Just as technology and marketing must be so arrayed as to facilitate the realization of a surplus, so too must the social relations of work be fitted to the same end. This assertion by no means reduces paternalism to a cost-calculation in an idealized rational entrepreneur's account books. Instead, it locates the productive relations within that total situation I have elsewhere termed the accumulation matrix,2 the composite of material and cultural factors that condition a manufacturer's efforts to realize profits and retain a surplus through production and sales. Other sorts of relationships between masters and workers are clearly evident historically (authoritarian, bureaucratic); hence, paternalism is itself but one among a number of formats for the social relations of production.

Of what does paternalism consist in factory capitalism? Under what circum- stances does it develop and persist? What accounts for the varied patterns of paternalist relations and for their demise? There are no tidy answers to these basic questions, but a preliminary sketch of factory paternalism may be a first step. To deal with the second and third questions, I shall review three styles of paternalist relationships in the American textile industry, relating each to the material and cultural bases for production upon which they were mounted, hoping thereby to address the problem of variation.

There are three dimensions to the relationships expressed in factory paternalism- context, content, and affect. Contextually, paternalism stands as a transitional form of interaction in the developmental trajectories of industrial capitalism.3 For the

2An accumulation matrix is

a catalogue of the broad range of social and economic factors that together constitute the total situation for production and profit faced by entrepreneurs. In stressing the interlocks between various factors and the sequential effects of decisions regarding them upon future firm options, the full complexity of the manufacturing environment will be revealed.

For a full exposition concerning these factors, see Philip Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800-1885 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 4-6. An analogous notion has recently been put forward by Gordon, Edwards, and Reich, termed "the social structure of accumulation:" See David Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), 22-26.

3This notion indicates the collective outcomes of business projects mounted within an accumulation matrix over time, "trajectory" reflecting the specific sense of the path charted by "a body moving under certain forces" (Eugene Ehrlich et.al., Oxford American Dictionary [New York: Oxford Univ.


Varieties of Paternalism 237

American textile case at least, it is found, though not universally, in the first stages of factory establishment, in New England, circa 1800-1860s, at Philadelphia, circa 1840-1870s, and in the Carolinas, first in some antebellum mills and again during the years of expansion (the 1 880s into the present century). The personalized relationships so common among paternalist firms represent a means of facilitating the cultural transition from the customary formats of artisanal or agricultural smallholding production to the world of the millfloor, by means of a restoration of the relations of authority and familiarity once held by the master/farmer/father in the persons of the agent/overseer/proprietor. Since paternalism is not universal, firms engaged in such social relations of production are vulnerable to competition from others whose practices are more ruthless, or whose rejection of paternalism permits rapid adoption of technical or organizational alterations.4 Thus was Lowell paternalism imperiled by the rise of Fall River and New Bedford; Philadelphia patterns threatened by hardline big-mills on carpets (Yonkers) and woolens (Lawrence), and the Carolina firms by other southern and ultimately Third World firms run on tightly corporate-rational terms.5

The content of paternalism as a manufacturing practice involved overlapping spheres of provision, protection, and control, sometimes a vast array of services and restrictions, and on occasion an informal and genuine commitment to fair dealing and reciprocal concern. In all cases, paternalism evoked more than the exchange of labor for a pay-packet. Provision often included the surety of labor, availability of housing, board or stores for food, jobs for kin, support or creation of churches and educational opportunities, and occasionally libraries and recreational facilities. Protection involved manufacturers being responsible for deflecting nox- ious moral influences (drink, irreligion), as well as workers' being insulated from the vagaries of the labor market, whenever long-term work at living wages (even if on family-wage terms) was possible. Protection also extended to shop-floor conduct, where, ideally, sexual demands on women workers (by overseers or male co- workers) would be constrained by the authority of the paternalist proprietor/agent. Control flowed from these initiatives and institutionalized practices. It included policing, formal or informal (the mill-town proprietor overlapping local state functions), the establishment of standards of behavior (timeliness and diligence,

Press, 1980], 729). The use of the plural derives from my contention that varying sets of matrix elements will imply quite different "correct solutions" to the problems of profit and accumulation, alternative coexisting strategies within the larger framework of capitalist industrialization.

4Firms adopting authoritarian, openly exploitive practices with regard to their workers will not necessarily be at a competitive advantage, of course, for the profit potential that may lie in driving the workforce can be quickly eroded if turnover or absenteeism increase, shoddy work is turned out, or resistance surfaces in the form of sabotage, turnouts, and/or community and union organizing.

'This contextual base for paternalism should be distinguished from that of the corporate welfare schemes of the early twentieth century, created as they were to address labor relations problems at a much later stage of industrial development in theNortheast and the industrial Midwest. Gordon, Reich, and Edwards, Segmented Work, 136-46; James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); Tamara K. Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), 40-46; Ronald Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923-60 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983), chs. 1-3.



acquiescence to the owners' leadership in political, and at times religious, activity), and the power to punish individuals for violations (fines, dismissal, eviction, blacklisting).

The affective dimension of factory paternalism is more elusive, yet as the family analogy is ever present in workers' accounts of life in paternalistic mills,6 psycho- logical bonds clearly played a role in their social dynamics. The affective experience of paternalism, built from familistic motifs, differed significantly given variations in the make-up of masters and workers, both among firms and within them, as the relations between proprietors and skilled male workers took a different shape than those between proprietors and young women loomtenders or bobbin boys. In small firms well into the present century, owners or managers were often "able to call every employee by his first name" and "frequently [had] an intimate acquaintance with the home conditions of the help.I7 In big mills, overseers and exceptional agents kept analogous track of the hands' lives, offering advice, placing kinsmen in vacancies, and building the family myth that enables paternalism to "continue . . . to suggest itself as an answer to the continuing problems of industrialization 'I For masters, the affective rewards of paternalist social relations were substantial, as they became doubly fathers both within their own families and at the factory, vending work and discipline, tempered with warmth, on a scale that reinforced their self-esteem and on occasion their sense of religious or historical vocation. Petty tyrants made bad paternalists,9 while those who overdid their expressions of "fellow feeling" risked the loss of that delicate distance that lay at the base of their authority."' Moreover, effective paternalism required that the master have broader claims than merely his role as an employer of labor to buttress his position. His connections to a noted local family, long experience and expertise in the practice of manufacture, or membership in leading ethnic or religious communities appropriate to different contexts would all contribute to the creation of durable paternalist social relations.

From the workers' side of the relationship, it was crucial that dependence not devolve into servility. For displaced agriculturalists, immigrant mill or craft veterans and their sons and daughters, the paternalist factory master should offer

6Hareven, Family Time, 72. 7J.J. Rhyne, Some Southern Cotton Mill Workers and Their Villages (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North

Carolina Press, 1930), 205. 8Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England

(Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1980), 146. 9An excellent example may be found in Anthony F.C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an

American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York: Random House, 1978), in the person of John P. Crozer.

'OA pointed New England example of this comes from Connecticut's Thompsonville Carpet Manufacturing Company in the 1 830s, where skilled Scots immigrant "weavers, dyers and machinists" worked. Orrin Thompson might have been "greatly interested in the welfare and comfort of those in his employ," but the "latter were quick to sense any condescension. . . . When Thompson gave fine broadcloth to the men and silk to the women for Christmas, the spirited workers returned it with the comment, 'If ya gae us our proper wages, we'll buy our own suits and dresses.' See John Ewing and Nancy Norton, Broadlooms and Businessmen: A History of the Bigelow-Stanford Carpet Company (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1955), 46-47.



conditions of labor that lessened the sense of vulnerability that had penetrated their experiences in rural New England, the Carolinas or Ireland, or in the towns of Britain and Germany. The master who could engender gratitude for having "rescued" his hands from worse fates, without ever throwing that fact in their faces, had solved the paternalist equation. For workers in paternalist mill towns, factory employment could open the path toward economic and social stability, the proprietors taking the place of the prosperous farmers toward whom they had been deferential (or if tenants, downright dependent) in other times. Although the boundaries of obligation were complex and varied, and paternalism could foster psychologically a "dependence which mocked independence,"" it must be remembered that life on "hardscrabble" farms was yet more bleak and isolated, that rawer forms of industrial exploitation lay in wait, that relationships in community, family, and churches leavened the industrial experience, and that paternalism did not function uniformly to render workers perpetual children of the father/firm. For nearly a century, in its variations, which were not so much regional as they were reflective of different configurations of the accumulation matrix, paternalism served workers as a line of resistance against the atomization of labor, and served capitalists as a strategy that married profit with the preservation of the customary duties and status of community leaders.

While matters of context, content, and affect constitute the underpinnings of factory paternalism in general, to identify distinct patterns of variation involves an empirical exploration of historical practices. For the case of American textiles, it appears that paternalism had three basic profiles during the nineteenth century: the formal, familiar, and fraternal styles. The formal, exemplified by the highly structured environment characteristic of Lowell and its offspring, has had considerable attention paid it by scholarly and popular writers. 12 Provision, protection, and control were handled through the creation of substantial brick boardinghouses for single women and handsome family homes for skilled male workers. Rules for acceptable behavior were drawn up and enforced in common among the corporations through blacklisting. At its height in the decades before the Irish influx, Lowell paternalism included an operatives' publication, land grants for churches (at which attendance was at first obligatory), savings societies, and kin recruiting, along with the informal controls represented by the "moral police," resident reporters of impropriety. Though in the good years before the forties overseers were frequently considered benevolent room bosses, formal paternalism was a corporate creature, distanced, decreed by boards of directors never personally in contact with the workforce. The only spot where the family motif operated in the big-mill environment was in the boardinghouse, a maternal and sisterly context in which widows or couples fed and sheltered working women according to corporate

"Joyce, Work, Society and Politics, 137. 'Thomas Dublin, Women at Work (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1979); C. Ware, Early Cotton

Manufacture; Thomas Dublin, Farm to Factory (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1981); Philip Foner, The Factory Girls (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1977); Arthur Eno, ed., Cotton Was King (Lowell, Mass.: Lowell Historical Society, 1976); Judith Rossner, Emmeline (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980).



guidelines." Having created a city, the Lowell directors felt no need to operate stores, though their influence over the local commercial bourgeoisie, the press, and the schools was substantial. Local politics, which women workers could but observe, was decidedly Whiggish and overseers regularly served as city aldermen. 14 Overall, Lowell's formal paternalism was a rational and bureaucratic corporate policy well fitted to the industrial goal of mass-scale production of staple fabrics in the second quarter of New England's nineteenth century.

The familiar style most often inhabited the mill village, that small town or bend in the river at which a powered mill was erected, or a stone grist or fulling mill converted for yarn or fabric manufacture. First appearing in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and neighboring southern Massachusetts near the beginning of the nineteenth century, paternalist mill villages sprouted in Pennsylvania and Delaware by the twenties and in the Carolinas by the forties.'5 In their introduction to The New England Mill Village, 1790-1860, Roger Parks and Michael Folsom aptly characterize these scattered sites. A firm in the typical village "employed some 100 workers" and for their shelter, "made use of any housing that had been standing on the land it had bought and also built new tenement houses?" Though a tavern might "double . . . as a boardinghouse for single employees," Lowell-type boardinghouses were not erected. Paternalist firms offered "garden plots" and "pasturage to support a family's cow" for rent. "In the larger villages, company- owned farms might supply firewood, meat and other commodities?" The company store and its credit-against-wages ledgers were a standard feature, one regarded by Parks and Folsom as more a service than a scheme for padding profits. "The population of the new village was often too far from established stores for conve- nience and too small to attract an independent shopkeeper." Schools and churches were opened, often on company land donated for the purpose, though the schools, like others in farm districts, ran but a few months a year. Like the proprietors, the workers were a homogeneous native-born population supplemented by a few British mechanics. Though Providence merchants founded many southern New England mill villages, local capital was commonly engaged in Pennsylvania and the Carolinas, and was not insignificant in New England partnerships. The pres- ence of local worthies at the head of family partnerships reinforced the social obligations of the district elite. Such proprietors could take satisfaction in their ability to provide work for poor families, "children of widows, and unskilled agricultural laborers, . from nearby communities. 16 Though they might privately regard their workers with a measure of pity and/or contempt,'7 their capacity

'3See N. Ware, Industrial Worker, chs. 5, 6; for the Middlesex Company's boardinghouse regulations, see Dublin, Farm to Factory, 9.

'4N. Ware, Industrial Worker, 101; Dublin, Farm to Factory, 107-08. '5See C. Ware, Early Cotton Manufacture; Wallace, Rockdale; and Martha Briggs, "Mills and Mill

Owners in an Antebellum North Carolina County," MA thesis, Univ. of North Carolina, 1975. 16Gary Kulik, Roger Parks, and Theodore Z. Penn, eds., The New England Mill Village, 1790-1860,

Introd. Roger Parks and Michael Folsom (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), xxvii-xxix. '7Smith Wilkinson of Connecticut observed workers to be "often very ignorant and too often



personally to dispense favors or punishments lent a sharp immediacy to the double father role of proprietors. Whether respected, feared or resented, they were familiar figures, masters who knew their hands by name, pressed their souls toward church or chapel, commanded their political allegiance, and rewarded the virtue of the diligent, devout, deserving few.

Although the imagery of patriarchal familial relations appears repeatedly in accounts of firms practicing the first two styles of paternalism, the dependencies engendered in the workers rarely led to industrial maturity, the graduation to economic adulthood that might be demonstrated by acquisition of an agent's position or by founding one's own firm. While single women laboring for the corporations were thoroughly blocked from such aspirations, it is nonetheless striking that "[n]o worker in Lowell is known ever to have risen to corporate management." 18 The chances for skilled men in mill villages to begin firms of their own were only slightly better, for though an adequate facility "could be built or bought for as little as $10,000,,'9 even a partnership half (or tenth) of such an enterprise was a far reach for a twenty-dollars-a-month loom boss. Village elites' familiarity with their workers did not often extend to accepting working-class sons-in-law, obstructing strategic marriage as a capital-raising device.20 These obstructions served both corporate and mill masters' interests in discouraging upward mobility by members of their labor pool, but this spurred lateral mobility by making it clear to workers that relocation was one remaining plausible path to advancement.

However, at Philadelphia, where the fraternal style of factory paternalism took shape, the situation was very different. To be sure, Philadelphia millmen built a few tenements,2' particularly in outlying districts (Germantown, Manayunk), gave land for churches, served on district councils and school boards, and expected their workers to follow their political lead. Yet the textile mills of Philadelphia were in addition schools for entrepreneurs, who commenced manufacturing "on their own account" after perfecting their skills on the shop floors. Moreover, Philadelphia mills, until the crisis of the eighties, were renowned for their high wages and comparatively steady work, leading an 1876 Boston observer to call its textile

vicious" (quoted in ibid., xxx). For attitudes at Rockdale, see Wallace, Rockdale, 51-56. '8Kulik et. al., Mill Village, xxix. "Ibid., xxviii. The one skilled worker who is mentioned as having commenced on his own failed in

business. 20At Rockdale, one prospective entrepreneur, Abraham Blakeley, enhanced his chances by marrying

a churchgoing village girl, "Maria Miles, the protegee of Sophie duPont." Blakeley had been weaving foreman for John P. Crozer and married Miles in 1838. He entered a manufacturing partnership eight years later, and by 1853 became sole proprietor-of a new factory in the industrial town of Chester, Pennsylvania. At his death in 1886, the firm was a substantial producer of cotton "ticks, stripes and cheviots" with over two hundred power looms in operation. See Wallace, Rockdale, 408-09; Lorin Blodget, The Textile Industries of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Collins, 1880), 63.

2However, they built no boardinghouses. Boarding in an established urban environment took place in workers' houses and in taverns and inns.



trades "the paradise of the skilled workman.?22 Proprietors of some firms during the Civil War led companies of their own workers off to battle, while the Lowell corporations laid off ten thousand hands and encouraged the males to enlist. Worker reciprocity in these relations of mutual obligation appeared in the form of presentations and public testimonials. Face-to-face contacts similar to those of the mill village were standard, for Philadelphia was a city of mid-size firms, only a handful of which had even in 1880 reached the scale of the smaller Lowell corporations (approximately five hundred workers).23

Certainly one key to the fraternal style is that Philadelphia's proprietors and their skilled, predominantly male workforce shared a common class background, for the vast majority of both groups were craft and factory-experienced immigrants, distant from the elite networks of capital and influence that were so much a part of the city's commercial and financial history.24 Yet in attempting to account for the differences between the fraternal and the other styles of factory paternalism, the shared cultures of immigrants are only one among a number of factors to be considered. Along a half-dozen dimensions, the components of the accumulation efforts undertaken by the three sorts of firms vary significantly (see Figure 1). Through comparing these components-production strategy, labor force requirements, productive format, spatial context, capital needs and sources, and trajectories of development-a fuller appreciation of the historical conditions that gave rise to different sets of paternalist relationships may be possible.

Figure 1. PATERNALIST FORMS AND MATERIAL ELEMENTS OF ACCUMULATION

Formal Familiar Fraternal

Production bulk staple batch staple batch specialty strategy goods goods goods Labor force largely low-skill largely low-skill largely skilled requirements high % female high % women and high % male

children Productive incorporated, incorp. & partnerships, proprietary and format integrated integrated moderate partnerships, partial

large-scale scale ops. process* moderate operations scale ops.

Spatial context regional satellite small towns and urban complex cities rural sites (neighborhoods)

Startup capital $200,000 or more $10,000-$40,000 $500-$5,000 (c. 1850) Trajectories of corporate expansion on-site expan. or spinoff new firms in development and interlock similar site acquisition urban districts

(branch-planting) (replication) *special function firms: spinning, weaving, dyeing, finishing.

22John Hayes, ed., Awards and Claims . . . at the International Exhibition, 1876 (Boston: National Association of Wool Manufacturers, 1877), 371.

23See Lorin Blodget, Census of Manufactures of Philadelphia: 1882 (Philadelphia: Dickson and Gilling, 1883), 159-90.

24Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism, 178-80, 196-97, 227-28, 236-38.



Though the formal style of factory paternalism has received much attention, it is worthwhile to explore the material and cultural base upon which it was mounted. The format for production at Lowell and sister sites was the integrated mill, organized as an incorporated company, taking in raw fiber and performing the full array of preparatory, spinning, weaving, and finishing processes within the firm. Profits from goods (distributed by Boston commission houses engaged by the directors) were paid out to shareholders in the form of dividends. The production strategy through which these surpluses were to be achieved centered on bulk manufacture of a narrow range of relatively coarse goods, principally cottons, whose sale in the domestic market was eased by the establishment of protective tariffs on competing British goods. Initial capital was raised through the sale of shares entitled to dividends, and working capital came from an extensive network of short-term borrowing upon which interest was paid.25 These funds, from several hundred thousand to a million for start-up, flowed into mill and residence construction and into the design and purchase of machinery suited to mass production. Working capital fueled huge annual purchases of raw stock, machinery and plant replacement, and the wage fund, wages being paid in cash. Though these huge facilities were planted at sources of substantial water-power potential, distant from urban markets, their shipment in and out of massive quantities of material and finished goods drew ancillary investment in canal and later rail links that facilitated transport. Having created riverside manufacturing towns, the corporate leaders were in a position to control the use of space within them, at Lowell most crucially to inhibit establishment of firms not modeled on the example of the founding corporations, and secondarily to dole out portions of their lands for commercial, religious, or other uses.26

The workforce whose labor would activate these projects was enormous, from five hundred to one thousand operatives per firm in the 1830s. Yet apart from the room bosses and skilled dyers, and the craftsmen at the Lowell Machine Shops, it was a workforce of relatively low-skilled, largely young, female machine operatives, drawn initially from the surrounding countryside but in time from all of upper New England. Aware of the urban squalor that accompanied English industrialization, and of their need to draw together a sizable labor force from a largely agricultural region, Lowell's capitalists were obliged to create an industrial garden in order to recruit (and retain for a few years) the thousands of young women without whom the mills could not function. They were not expected to be long-term industrial workers, but instead would depart from the mills enriched both culturally and

2'While initially these shares were held in large blocks by a small cluster of elite families, by mid-century ownership became more dispersed and share prices were later regularly quoted in the commercial press, a sign of continued turnover among investors. See Eno, Cotton Was King, 144; N. Ware, Industrial Worker, 103-05. On borrowing, see Lance Davis, "The New England Textile Mills and the Capital Markets: a Study of Industrial Borrowing, 1840-1860," Journal of Economic History, 20 (1960), 1-30.

26Eno, Cotton Was King, 208-09; Charles Cowley, Illustrated History of Lowell (Boston and Lowell: Lee and Shepard, 1868), 62-63; Louis Hunter, A History of Industrial Power in the United States, Volume I: Waterpoiver (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1979).



financially from their terms of employment. Further, due to their close moral supervision, they would emerge with their reputations intact, plausibly better fitted for marriage than their penniless sisters isolated in the rural barrens. The initiators of such opportunities for the mobilization and enlightenment of farm daughters, while plainly acknowledging their profit-making intentions, could in addition claim the highest motives for the Waltham/Lowell corporate experiment. Hear Edward Everett, Lowell's congressman and later president of Harvard, speaking to the local Fourth of July crowd in 1830:

You have shown that the home-bred virtues of the parental roof are not required to be left behind by those who resort for a few years to these crowded marts of social industry; and, in the fruits of your honest and successful labor, you are daily carrying gladness to the firesides where you were reared.. . . I think it may be truly said that in no other way has so much been done, as in these establishments . . . to confer upon labor the advantages of previous accumulations. . . . This I regard as one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, morals and, I will add, religion. To elevate [labor] in the social scale, to increase its rewards, to give it cultivation and self-respect, should be the constant aim of an enlightened patriotism."

Thus culturally justified, wrapped both in the flag and in the tenets of Christian virtue, Lowell's formal paternalism was a brilliant solution to mobilizing a labor supply and matching it with technology for the mass production of goods and the realization of a surplus. While the economic base was sturdy (none of the Lowell firms failed throughout the rest of the century), paternalist productive relations faded away by mid-century. Why?

The ebbing of formal paternalism can be traced both to the economic pressure that replication of the big-mill model brought and to a shift in the composition of the in-migrating population available for factory labor. Competition and narrowing profit margins led to speed-up and stretch-out in the forties, ending the comradery between operatives and overseers. The realization that housing and boarding workers were less remunerative than production itself led to a fall-off in rooming- house construction and increases in the board charges.28 By the Civil War, the corporations had ceased building such facilities and commenced selling off those in their possession. Private housing speculators filled the gap, erecting flimsy structures that were soon overcrowded with millworkers.29

As Thomas Dublin has demonstrated, just as the supply of native-born rural women was declining, Irish immigrants began to satisfy the mills' labor needs. Women first, and then, with additional stretch-outs, boys and adult males entered the weave rooms. The faster speeds and additional machines assigned each worker brought endurance into the labor calculation. The paternalist spinning or weaving room with scores of young farm girls supervised by a fatherly "boss" gave way to the sharp-edged drive system, in which moral sheltering was dropped for the

27Michael Folsom and Steven Lubar, eds., The Philosophy of Manufactures (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), 292-93.

28Eno, Cotton Was King, 118; Paul F McGouldrick, New England Textiles in the Nineteenth Century: Profits and Investments (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), 41, 65-66.

29Eno, Cotton Was King, 208-09.



benefits of increased output. With males and foreigners inside the citadel, Lowell gradually became a typical industrial city, sporting slums, high death rates, and successions of immigrants (Quebecois, Greeks, Portuguese, and Poles) over the next half-century. Other corporate manufacturing towns that had adopted the formal style also discarded most of its features in the face of hard times and the cotton famine.30 (A partial exception was the Amoskeag at Manchester, New Hampshire, whose higher quality goods brought sales sufficient to maintain the tenements and at which three generations of the same family served as agents, permitting an unusual continuity of policy.3) Designed for the labor and product markets of the 1830s, servicing a high-volume, standard output production system with relatively low skill requirements, formal paternalism faded as intensified competition in staple goods and alternate sources of labor developed, dismembered within a generation of its heralded establishment.32

The manufacturing environment for firms adopting the familiar style of paternalism was light-years away from that of the corporate city, but unfortunately many of these modest mills plied the same trades, working the same yarns and fabrics as did their urban rivals. Whether in New England, outlying mid-Atlantic districts, or in the Carolinas, rural firms manufactured predominantly coarse yarns and simple cottons and wools. Though initially local and regional districts afforded them a market, when railways penetrated their "local monopolies," competition from big-mill producers of bulk staples threatened their survival. Given this constraint, together with the limited local labor supply and the "grow or die" motif central to capitalist production, it is no surprise that the attrition rate among rural mills was high.33 Frequently such firms started out as yarn-spinners, as did Slater, putting out their intermediate product to cottage weavers, or in the southern case, selling it to northern manufacturers who wove it up. For successful firms, the addition of looms in order to capture the value added by weaving was a strategic extension of firm capacity. The capital required for start-up of a rural mill was minuscule compared with the high six-figure sums gathered for the Lowell enterprises, permitting the district's landed and commercial figures entry into manufacture as proprietors or partners. Once begun, thinly capitalized mills were hard-pressed for working

30Dublin, Women at Work, chs. 8-10; Eno, Cotton Was King, ch. 12. "This managerial clan was the Straw family, featured in Tamara Hareven and Ralph Langenbach,

Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City (New York: Random House, 1978), and in Hareven, Family Time.

32New England was not the only locale in which formal paternalism was created. In the mid-Atlantic states, a Lowell-style firm was founded in 1844 by David S. Brown, a New Hampshire native who had migrated from Boston to Philadelphia in 1821. Capitalized at 250 thousand dollars, his mills were built on open ground across the Delaware from the Philadelphia docks and were both incorporated and cotton-based. The town created in this "wilderness" sported steam-mills, company-built parks, and boardinghouses, all linked to Camden by a railway also incorporated by the firm founders. See George Prowell, History of Camden County, New Jersey (Philadelphia, 1888), 590-92. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania holds an enormous collection of D.S. Brown papers, unfortunately lacking an inventory due to budget constraints.

33I know of no attempt to establish a figure for failures of rural factory firms, but from Rockdale, ch. 3, and The New England Mill Village documents, it appears that most firms did not last long. Indeed those that endured for a period sufficient to leave records for historical probing are likely marked exceptions.



funds, helping to account for the role of the company store in both provisioning the workforce and conserving cash outlays by the owners.34 Moreover, if Rockdale and Carolina examples are at all typical,35 few proprietors were blessed with extensive mill experience, leading to considerable dependence on imported skilled workers and/or superintendents whose capacities were too frequently overstated. The vulnerability of these enterprises was clearly substantial. Still, outside the few skilled hands, their labor needs could be satisfied through recruitment of from twenty to fifty women and children, along with a handful of males for unskilled work in picking and carding. Displaced farm families, or widows with children to support, fitted neatly this labor demand. They could be paid a family subsistence wage, mostly in store orders, thereby shoring up the firm's tenuous finances. Indeed, surrounded by these contingencies, often "proprietors had no clear sense of how much of their profits came from manufacturing and how much, if any, came from their store.:36 Given that the context for production confronted by rural proprietary firms was vastly different than that of corporate enterprises, in what ways does this difference condition the familiar style of paternalism common among such firms?

First, to the extent that manufacturers were planting their mills in the wilderness, they were obliged to construct housing and operate stores for workers "in order to retain them for service."37 However, the family character of the potential labor supply necessitated the substitution of tenement rows, or in the south three-room wooden singles, for the boardinghouses of corporate cities. Since firms were often able to combine low-skill mill jobs with opportunities for agricultural work (garden plots or labor for males at nearby farms), the family-at-work theme could readily be extended. Frequently, adult males could ply some commercial or craft skill in the village; but in the worst case, they idled as "mill daddies," the southern term.38 Hiring personally, the proprietor could pose as benefactor along several lines, the -provider of labor in distressed areas, the Christian gentleman bringing both work and salvation to the brutish poor, or in the post-Reconstruction South, the standard bearer of regional cultural and economic revitalization. His personal authority in the mill village was not mediated by a set of bureaucratic institutions, but penetrated the nooks and crannies of daily life.

To the extent that proprietors came from the local elite, pre-factory patterns of authority and dependence were retained in the mill towns. Writing of the Carolinas, Billings notes that "under the leadership of the landed class, textile manufacturing was incorporated into the traditional social structure when the paternalistic ethos of

34See Kulik et.al., Mill Village, 413-25, for one exemplary set of accounts. 35See Wallace, Rockdale, 73-119; Dwight Billings, Planters and the Making of the "New South"

(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1979), 60-69; Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 78-83.

36Kulik et.al., Mill Village, xxviii. 37Ibid. The phrase is from Zachariah Allen's memoir of the early Rhode Island mills, a portion of

which appears in this volume, 142-51. 38Prude, Coming of Industrial Order, 118.



the plantation was extended into the mill village."39 The most thorough master no-t only provided housing, supplies, work, and churches, but "always endeavored to protect the character of his people by excluding the vicious," sometimes tramping "through the surrounding countryside personally soliciting the services of such laborers" as met his moral standards.40 For Billings, the all-white character of southern mill employment reinforced the "semi-paternalistic relationships between the planter class and the more numerous yeomen farmers," whose postwar displacement led the latter toward factory jobs.4' The successful familiar paternalist not only knew his workers by name, "he knew their pedigrees and their histo- ries . . . (and) kept himself posted as to their lives as they were living under his wing.:42 Though workers might circulate among regional mills, seeking the best terms from a good master, their modest skills and irregular work rhythms43 would make difficult migrations toward skill-intensive or impersonally managed city firms.

As a double father, the familiar paternalist may be justly charged with regarding his ordinary hands as children. Yet frequently one of the social functions of the familiar style was to reestablish a base for the preservation of customary social forms: the family productive unit, the personal obligations of the "best people" toward the less fortunate, the common interests of all citizens/Christians. This was attempted through tailoring one of the most threatening dimensions of historical change, industrial development, to the social and cultural pattern present in rural districts. The personalized paternalist relationship and the family motif that attends it formed a defensive and conservative system of unequal obligations, which was nonetheless rendered vulnerable both by the economic contingency of the core firm and by the fundamental flaws of the relationship itself. Patriarchy serves its dominant and dependent parties to markedly different degrees (and profits outsid- ers as well, on occasion, as "free riders"). The main beneficiaries of a familiar style were surely proprietors and their colleagues in commerce and agriculture. The prosperity of the firm brought direct revenues to partners or shareholders located generally in the "better" classes, along with trade at the village shops that some of them operated." Yet for workers, the positive aspects of mill masters'

39Billings, Planters, 100. 40Ibid., 108. 41Ibid., 102. 42W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), quoted in ibid., 109. 43Kulik et.al., Mill Village, 284-307; Billings, Planters, 111. 4Provisioning for residents bunched about the factories profited such local farmers as would seek to

embrace commercial production rather than the customary goal of "meeting [their] family requirements." In Prude's antebellum Massachusetts districts, this surfaced in the form of increased output of firewood and dairy products (Coming of Industrial Order, 193-97, quote from 197). The absence of a developed artisanal sector in the rural/agricultural locale was important for the effective working of familiar paternalism, as Gary Kulik illustrates in his study of Pawtucket ("Pawtucket Village and the Strike of 1824: The Origins of Class Conflict in Rhode Island," Radical History Review, 17 [1978], 5-38.) While the behavior of Pawtucket mill proprietors can reasonably be described as an effort to establish familiar paternalism, the town was before 1800 "an industrial village prior to the introduction of textile mills" (8). With their craft traditions and notions of independence, local artisans rejected the churches and temperance organizations sponsored by the mill operators, opposed their local political initiatives and vigorously supported the 1824 walkout of largely women textile operatives against a lengthened workday and simultaneous rate cut.



"welfare" efforts (housing, churches, etc.) were offset somewhat by their arroga- tion of the partriarchal authority of household heads.45 The relative security workers purchased by entry into such a relationship was bought at the price of accepting boundaries of obligation analogous to those demanded of children. The system could remain stable so long as neither party betrayed the other by departing from the script.

Of course, the contradiction that fractured the relationship was rooted in the continuing development of the capitalist economy, defense against which was the impetus for originating the familiar style. Aggregate industrial development was not frozen, but instead exercised continual pressure on the proprietors to rationalize, economize, and reorganize to meet the competition of more impersonal producers in the market economy. Whether at a stroke or through a thousand little betrayals, masters shed their responsibilities, responding to a changing context by altering both the content and the affective dimensions of their relationships with workers.

Ultimately, such proprietary maneuvers undercut the whole relationship; the hands' perception of this fact yielded defensive responses-increasing turnover or strikes that were at least as much about the destruction of the customary relations of production as they were about wages and hours. For example, Billings, describing the upheavals that occurred during the rationalization of southern textile production in the twenties, regards the Gastonia and other strikes as "an effort to restore the balance of rights and duties and to defend the style of personal relations in the mills that workers had been taught to expect in the early postbellum period."46 Though it is far more grounded in cultural and emotional bonds than the formal style, familiar paternalism too is a transitional set of productive relationships, sustainable only in a context where the absence of effective profit-threatening competition in the firm's product line insulates proprietors and hands from the rigors of technological and organizational development.

The relationships I have called the fraternal style of factory paternalism are most vividly displayed in the Philadelphia textile industry, though, as with the other forms, evidence of similar patterns likely exists for other locations. The accumulation matrix for Philadelphia textile firms is quite different from that lying behind the previous cases.

While the mills were built in an urban space, the city was not of their owners' making, as at Lowell, nor was it focused on production in a single industrial sector. Nineteenth-century Philadelphia was one of the most industrially diversified cities on the globe, with a textile workforce that grew from twelve thousand in 1850 to over fifty thousand three decades later. Yet in a city that numbered over 800 thousand at the latter date, and one with about 240 thousand manufacturing jobs, textile labor was just under a quarter of all manufacturing employment. The firms were

45Prude, Coming of Industrial Order, 116-19. 46Billings, Planters, 112. Other situationally analogous examples are the Rockdale strikes of the

1840s (Wallace, Rockdale, 359-74), and those in Dudley and Oxford, Massachusetts in 1827 (Prude, Coming of Industrial Order, 141-42).



organized along proprietary lines, in the words of one owner, in 1880 "numbering 847-no corporations. 47 The operators were predominantly immigrants, chiefly from Britain, Ireland, and Germany; successful firms were passed down family lines. Spatially, production was concentrated in four neighborhoods (Kensington, Frankford, Germantown, and Manayunk), but every other quarter of the city had one or more mills as well. Unlike corporate or rural sites, Philadelphia mills were frequently let "by floors" or as "rooms with power," and a lively market in used machinery operated alongside scores of machinery-building firms. Though manufacturers erected "weavers' rows" in the early decades of the century, particularly in outlying Germantown and Manayunk, both housing and provisioning were soon external to firm operations. In production format, Philadelphia textile firms were at variance from their rivals along two axes of specialization. First, they operated principally as dis-integrated elements in a network of linked firms, each performing separate steps in the total manufacturing sequence. Thus some firms handled preparation and spinning, others dyeing, yet others weaving, printing, or finishing. Second, Philadelphia became a center for specialized final products, hosiery, worsteds, carpets, fine yams, braids, silk trim, and eventually, upholstery and lace goods.

The capital and workforce needs in such an environment were dramatically different from either of the previous situations. To start a single function firm in rented quarters, one needed only a few frames or looms, together with contacts for raw materials and marketing (for fabrics, a commission house; for yams, a weaving firm). With one thousand dollars a risky beginning could be made; with a partner or two and five thousand dollars quite a respectable establishment could commence. Specialty production necessitated far more skilled workers than the endless reproduction of bulk staples. It is hardly surprising to find Philadelphia to be a major destination for skilled spinners, dyers, and knitters emigrating from the British Isles. Their centrality to quality production brought them wages (or in the old craft terminology "prices for work") appreciably higher than in other locations. If steady work made savings possible, such workers could take their shop-floor skills into entrepreneurial ventures that required neither huge capitals nor talents beyond their expertise. A skilled knitter could secure a few machines, rent a mill-floor or workshop, buy yarn, set up his own designs for fancy goods, and enter the marketplace alongside the immigrant masters for whom he had worked in earlier years. Should his fledgling business fail, a return to the shops would follow, with perhaps another attempt years later. Such sequences recurred at Philadelphia at least from the 1 820s through the 1 880s.

How then is paternalism manifest in this context? One base for the fraternal style was textile proprietors' and workers' shared position as "new men" in an urban complex, for the vast majority of both groups were English, Scots, Irish, and German immigrants.48 The city's "native aristocracy" welcomed few of the

47Thomas Dolan in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, 28 Jan. 1880, 1. 48Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism, 196-99, 227-28, 236-38, 251-65.



textile capitalists to their exclusive clubs; indeed the fortunes of Philadelphia's mid-century elite were generated through commerce, real estate, mining, and railroad investments rather than by dint of manufacturing enterprise." Moreover, mill and shop masters also shared a factory and craft background with their hands, and resided in the industrial wards rather than in the old city center (or the later "Main Line" suburbs). 50 In these shared cultural and neighborhood experiences lay the foundation for the bonds of mutuality that underlay the fraternal style. Second, the personalized workplace contacts of the rural mills were duplicated in Kensington, Germantown, and Manayunk, but amid a productive format in which mechanical and design inventiveness were crucial to the flexible production capacity characteristic of specialty firms that profited from their responsiveness to market shifts. Philadelphia manufacturers who sought to copy European styles or create novelty knitting yarns were critically dependent on the talents of their skilled workers, who in turn regularly faced new problems to address, solutions to which broadened their own mastery of the trade.

In such an environment, social relations of production emerged, at least for a portion of the workforce, which did not have the suffocating qualities of the familiar style but instead mirrored the unequal relations of master and journeymen from the craft tradition (shared by hosiers and carpet workers, for whom powered production was a new wrinkle in the postbellum era). After years of preparation, a worker seeking to become his own master did not pose a destabilizing threat to the paternalist system, but instead stood as living evidence of the successful functioning of the fraternal relationship. Many workers doubtless shied away from the personal and financial contingencies of beginning manufacture on an individual footing, instead plowing their earnings into home purchases, a hallmark of Philadelphia's manufacturing districts. However, those who did seek to "commence on their own account" were not shattering their relations with their former employers, but instead were fulfilling the potential of that relationship. In this sense, the appear- ance of shop floor "graduates" on the margins of the entrepreneurial class had its own family character, that of the individuating family whose offspring are prepared, not for the choice between lasting dependency and rejection, but for a capitalist version of adulthood.5'

In addition, it follows that present masters would, consciously or not, assist their most promising workmen in achieving the goal of separation and independence, successful accomplishment of which broadcast their firms as preparatory schools for proprietors. This relationship may both have recapitulated their own experi-

49Russell Weigley, ed., Philadelphia: A 300-Year History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), 327-30; E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958), ch. 5. 50Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism, 337-49. 5"In addition, one might speculate that a related reinforcing aspect inducing acceptance of the

fraternal style by skilled male workers was its indirect reproduction of patriarchy, insofar as it provided a workplace locus for male individuation as against corporate or rural alternatives where family patriarchy was challenged by managers' and agents' power over kin and offspring in a family labor context.



ences a generation earlier and have confirmed a quite different double father role-building their own firms for their sons' succession along with raising surrogate sons to the brink of entrepreneurial individuation. This process was surely facilitated by the material context sketched above and was reinforced by shared cultural backgrounds. To be sure, the business cycle imperiled fragile new firms and the entire process was dependent on a secularly expanding market, but this was indeed the case for Philadelphia textile products between 1840 and 1880.52

Examples of such fraternal styles frequent the records remaining for the Philadel- phia trades. However, as the figures involved are less familiar than the Boston Associates or Slater and his successors, several illustrations may be of value here. Consider the story of Benjamin Bullock, who in 1815 came to Philadelphia from Bradford, England, to work as a wool puller in the braid and trim works of Henry Korn. After seven years, "having accumulated some capital," he took up a partnership "and commenced the business of wool pulling," a preparatory process. In 1837, having again generated a surplus, he took advantage of his cash position in hard times to occupy a mill, the "Spruce Street Factory," to undertake fabric manufacture. This proved a successful venture, and during the fifties, Bullock removed to larger facilities at nearby Conshohocken, arranging for sale of his first factory to "Mr. William Devine, who was foreman at this mill." The relocated firm continued to prosper, and in 1859, the elder Bullock "ceased from his labors," leaving the plant to his five sons, who expanded it dramatically during the Civil War under the name of Benjamin Bullocks' Sons.53

Young James Ledward (born in 1823 at Ashton, Lancashire), at the age of eight was "bound out and obliged to enter the mills," working up a mastery of weaving before his emigration in 1845. He soon commenced work at Manayunk's Ripka Mills, and "at the end of five months became . . . foreman." Two years later Ledward removed to John P. Crozer's mill near Rockdale, again as foreman. Four years with Crozer were followed by two at Chester, by the end of which time he had saved "his first $1000" and returned to Manayunk where he "rented a room in what is now (1875) known as Sciota Mills." Ledward leased an entire mill six years later, and by 1866 had funds sufficient to purchase a two-story factory in Chester, a facility that was "enlarge(d) each successive year." In 1871, his son, who had "entered the mills in his youth and grew up in the business, mastering all the practical details," was received in partnership.

James Doak also had a link with the Ripka Mills, for he spent ten years there, from 1850 to 1860, becoming power loom boss by the end of his tenure. Doak, a Londonderry native, served in both army and navy units in the Civil War, ulti-

52See Blodget, The Textile Industries of Philadelphia, Introd.; and Lorin Blodget, Census of Manufactures of Philadelphia: 1882, passim.

53J.L. Bishop, History of American Manufactures (Philadelphia: Edward Young, 1864), II, 561. 54Daniel Robson, ed., Manufactories and Manufacturers of Pennsylvania in the Nineteenth Century

(Philadelphia: Galaxy, 1875), 193-94.



mately joining in partnership with William Arrott, a fellow Orangeman, "renting a portion of the factory of Israel Foster, at Frankford" for carpet manufacture.55 Their landlord had himself spent twenty years in the Manayunk mills. Foster had served as manager of carding and spinning at Erben and Shaw, before his first partnership venture at Falls of Schuylkill in the forties, when he was thirty-four years of age.56 There seem thus to have been two patterns in these entrepreneurial preparations: long service with a single firm and a peripatetic accumulation of experiences. The former built personal relations at the risk of narrowed skill, the latter broadened mastery of a trade at the hazard of severed contacts. For geographical mobility, few could match the travels of Isaac Stead, son of Yorkshire immigrants. Stead's father had been in a partnerhsip wool firm during the thirties, but failed, "lost all he possessed and thus placed his family in actual want." Isaac,

after various wanderings and vicissitudes, . . . settled down in Manayunk, employed by George Sutton and Son as a wool carder [circa 1850]. He was employed in various factories till 1858, when he was sent to Georgia to superintend a woolen factory there, and ultimately was taken into partnership. . . . Preferring however to reside in Philadelphia, he returned there, and after being employed in city factories until 1863, began business . . . by renting two floors in a [Kensington] building, where he undertook the spinning of woolen yarns.57

Some firms produced a number of "graduates," notably the Horstmann silk mills and the Ripka cotton works. However, the dean of the factory school was doubtless John Button, hosiery maker of Germantown. A native of Leicestershire, center of the British knitting districts, Button emigrated to Philadelphia in 1831, bringing with him two hand-powered knitting frames. On arrival, he geared his frames for manufacture of "children's socks," which sold well. Removing to the hills of Germantown, Button added eight frames and advertised for workers in the Nottingham and Leicester papers, helping to make Philadelphia a focal point for those who could manage to extricate themselves from the depressed knitting regions. He was quick to experiment with harnessing steam to his frames. "Not only was he the founder of [what became] a large establishment . . ., but under his instruction many of those now at the head of similar industries learned the art of making knit goods by steam power" Button's brother-in-law Conyers Smith joined him in partnership to expand the firm, withdrawing in 1851 when he "returned to England, possessed of an ample fortune." The founder drew in his two sons and retired himself in 1861. After the bounties of war-contract prosperity had been reaped, the elder son, Joseph, also withdrew in comfort, leaving the younger, Conyers Button, in possession of the whole. In 1869, Conyers "admitted his nephew, Theodore A. Fleu, into partnership," preparing the succession for a third

55Ibid., 82. 56Ibid., 132. 57Ibid., 56-57.



generation.58 Thus the Buttons, like others, played the double father role at Philadelphia, opening the way for reconstituting the artisanal pattern of journeymen becoming masters while propelling the family firm forward through generational succession.

There were other dimensions to the fraternal style which extended to the rest of the workforce, even if only persistently profitable firms were in any position to play these roles. Consider the following array of incidents. During the Civil War, the proprietors of S&C Schofield, Manayunk woolen manfacturers, twice convened a company of men from their workforce to march off in the emergencies of 1862 and 1863, "continuing their wages in their absence," the junior partner commanding the force.59 Other firms, notably the Schofields' close associates, John and James Dobson, did likewise. William Baird, the Glasgow-born owner of Frankford's Lanark Mills,60 formerly seven years foreman at a city cotton factory, erected alongside his "mills" two enormous structures, complete with meeting rooms, twelve hundred-seat theatre, offices for neighborhood benevolent associations, and dining halls as a "free gift," before withdrawing from business in 1872 when he leased his mills to a successor firm.6'

Alexander Crow, during the seventies, transported the entire workforce of his Spring Garden carpet mill to oceanside Cape May for a day at the shore, a "Treat" recorded for history only because his employees paid for a notice of appreciation in the Philadelphia Public Ledger shortly thereafter.62 A combination of patriotic enthusiasm and reciprocity for unrecorded gestures by the owners led to the formal presentation of huge flags, hand sewn by women operatives, to the proprietors of two Manayunk mills in the first year of the Civil War.63 More costly, but hardly less dramatic, is the later presentation (1863) to George Bullock by his workforce of

a service of purest silver, lined with gold, consisting of a pitcher 22 inches in height, a salver, goblets and other articles, duplicates of those which received the prize at the late International Exhibition held in Paris, weighing 400 ounces, and purchased at the cost of one thousand dollars.64

Not only had Bullock's workers had full-time employment while thousands of New England textile operatives stood idle, but the firm had also used part of its profits to pipe gas into workers' dwellings, macadamize the main street, and construct "a park with walks and flower-beds, and central fountain as its ornament. "65

58Ibid., 255. 59Ibid., 186. "'Named indeed for Robert Owen's experimental factory community, whose public facilities Baird

wished to replicate in Philadelphia. 6'Biographical Encyclopedia of Prominent Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1888), 185-86; Robson,

Manufactories, 1 7. 62Philadelphia Public Ledger, 27 July 1880. 63Manavunk Star and Roxborough Gazette, 27 April 1861, 22 Feb. 1862. 'Bishop, History, II, 562. 65Ibid.



Whereas the context, content, and affect of these interactions may echo the relationships Patrick Joyce documented for mid-Victorian British textile trades,66 there is a wide gap between such practices and the formal or familiar styles outlined above. Though penetration of their specialties by corporate competition yielded a complex running battle with the Knights of Labor in the eighties, Philadelphia factory owners struggled to retain the respect of their workers, and their roles as "THE MEN of the place"67 Though their variety of factory paternalism was surely doomed by the larger movements of an industrializing economy, the fraternal style involved not simply the provision of churches and jobs, but in addition, kin hiring, fair wages, and the opening to entrepreneurship for those so driven. It had little to do with protection, except in the tariff sense, and insofar as control was achieved, as it is visible in the elections of factory owners to city office, it drew less on forced obligation than the other styles68 and more on the functioning mutualities of reciprocal respect.

Discussion of the path to proprietorship leads toward the broader issue of worker mobility as a dimension of paternalism. For its predominately female workforce, the formal system offered quite limited opportunities for career advancement. Even the relatively well-paid positions as drawers-in, warpers, and dressers lost their lustre by the forties as rate-cuts and mechanization occurred. Skilled male workers might rise to posts as second hands or overseers, but the path to corporate management was closed. Cowley stressed this obstruction in his 1868 History of Lowell, listing forty-two men "heretofore employed in the mills, who found no adequate sphere on the corporations, and who have risen to higher theatres of action outside the Lowell mills:.69 Blocked vertical mobility thus encouraged lateral movement, either geographical (migration) or occupational (into other industrial sectors or toward commercial trades). In his study of rural Massachusetts mills, some of which engaged in a familiar paternalism, Jonathan Prude finds managers and agents more frequently drawn from the shop floor, but "elevations from salaried agent to mill master" were rare, occurring "just often enough . . . to emerge as a credible goal for superintendents.": The quest for such promising placements was one element in the set of factors that engendered high antebellum turnover rates in the district (100-250 percent per year, of which about half Prude analyzes as "voluntary" departures).7'

The mobility profile for the fraternal style evident at Philadelphia is sharply different. Both skilled craftsmen and later, salaried bosses within proprietary

66Joyce, Work, Society and Politics, chs. 3, 4. 67Manayunk Star and Roxborough Gazette, 12 Feb. 1859. 68For such forced political obligation in the familiar style, see Wallace, Rockdale, 421; for the same

arm-twisting in the formal style, see Eno, Cotton Was King, 169n. 69Charles Cowley, History of Lowell, 61. "Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order, 81. "Ibid., 145, 227.



mills,72 emerged regularly as independent shop masters or firm partners. Philadelphia's noted high wages and spreading tracts of worker-owned housing likely yielded a reasonably "settled" factory textile workforce. Moreover, for the handloom crafts there was simply nowhere a more favorable environment in which to practice their trades than in the Quaker City's immigrant neighborhoods. It is arguable that given the large number of local employers (over 450 firms in 1860, more than 900 by the eighties73), turnover rates might be quite as high as elsewhere without the physical relocation of worker households. Few employment registers survive from nineteenth-century Philadelphia textile firms, but records from a small Manayunk spinning mill (1888-189 1) do show a remarkably stable workforce.

The carpet yarn factory of John Wilde and Brother over a term of ninety-five two-week "pays" (somewhat less than four years), employed a total of sixty-eight workers to keep a steady complement of twenty-two to twenty-four spinners and piecers on their rolls. Of this group, nine were temporary replacements for "regulars" who returned to their places after an absence of a few days or weeks. Moreover, of the twenty-two employees listed for the first pay (April 1888), seventeen were still present a year later, eleven still in the shop two years later. Of the twenty-two employees at work in the ninety-fifth period (November 1891), fourteen had been there a year, eleven two years or more.74 Annual turnover rates ranged from twenty-three to thirty-six percent, a fraction of what might have been expected.75

The Wilde yarn mill was a classic product of the fraternal system, founded in 1880 by two English-born sons of a Manayunk spinning mill worker, siblings who were at thirty-two and thirty years of age already mill veterans.76 They worked alongside their hands at the outset, hired the kinsmen of their long-term workers and paid themselves about a dollar a week more than their skilled head spinner

72Charles Doak, Journal, 1902-1906, Pastore Library, Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, 85-86. Doak chronicles the 1905 departure of the mill superintendent of this Kensington yam firm to start a partnership spinning venture elsewhere in the city.

73Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism, 270, 321. 74Time Book of John Wilde and Brother, 1888-1891, in possession of Russell Fawley, John Wilde and

Brother, Manayunk, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 7IThe late eighties were a crisis period for the carpet industry as overproduction drove prices

downward and led manufacturers to attempt wage reductions or to alternate full running with partial or total suspensions. The impact of these volatile conditions on a carpet-yarn specialist like Wilde and Brother might have been severe, for the surge and lag of yarn demand could have forced layoffs and recalls that would have increased the turnover rate. This did not happen, however, for the firm was a supplier to a dozen different carpet-weaving firms in Philadelphia. Evidently, the weaving mills' individual ups and downs cancelled one another out, allowing the Wilde firm to provide steady employment throughout the period. On the carpet crisis, see John S. Ewing and Nancy P. Norton, Broadlooms and Businessmen, 158-59. Details on Wilde and Brother's marketing are contained in the firm's Sales Record, 1880-1893, in possession of Russell Fawley, proprietor, John Wilde and Brother. Mr. Fawley is a fourth-generation descendent of the founders.

761880 Population Census Manuscript Schedules, Philadelphia County, Ward 21 (Manayunk), Enumeration District 430, 14.



(1888-1891).7 Their wide network of clients enabled them to offer "steady work," as neither layoffs nor shutdowns took place during these years.

Such relations were hardly universal at Philadelphia, for by the eighties the fraternal style had also begun to fray.78 The depression of the next decade, with its attendant bankruptcies, wage-cuts and protest strikes, the changing character of the immigrant flow, and the increasing pressure for nationally marketable standardized goods would ultimately reduce it to tatters. Yet for over half a century, it served as a means to translate the culture of skilled crafts into an array of shops and mills noted for specialized and flexible production.

On the whole, from its rural sites to the corporate cities and the industrial metropolis, textile paternalism represented an alternative to the atomizing individual- ism of factory capitalism. It emerged in distinct forms that were derived from variations in the material and cultural contexts for production. Documenting the diversity of these patterns within the larger industrialization process serves to enrich our understanding of the linkages between enterprise and locale, culture and technology, in the nation's social and economic history. Yet it also raises a number of issues for further reflection.

First, it is particularly striking that the three forms of paternalism can hardly be slotted within the customary categories of region or period. The corporate formal system was neither confined to New England nor universal there. The familiar style could be found in both antebellum and post-World War I eras. Perhaps the spatial reference points so long comfortably used (New England, the South) need sharpening through an emphasis on the different production contexts of central cities, satellite cities, and rural districts within and across regions. Likewise the periodization that marks off traditional time boundaries is an impediment to the assessment of chronologically discontinuous processes like the establishment of factory production. Generating a conceptual vocabulary that blends consideration of process and structure is one challenge for the comparative imagination in American Studies. The introduction here of the "accumulation matrix" is intended as a contribution to this effort.

On a different conceptual tack, the present work reaffirms an old lesson. Historians, like all scholars, must be cautious about the assumption of homogeneity. This has surely been learned by students of politics (fascism and communism admit of variety without a simple covering definition) and of social organization (as the family remains problematic). Frequently, phenomena given a common name, like paternalism, spring from quite different roots. When exposed, these differences in context help account for observed variations in practice.

More concretely, this work adds questions to the agenda for future inquiry. On the subject of paternalism, would parallel reconstructions of other industrial sectors (metal working, machinery building, or the leather trades) reinforce the portrait here drawn of the linkage between material and cultural conditions and the

"Interview with Russell Fawley, 13 Aug. 1980; Time Book of John Wilde and Brother, 1888-1891, passim.

78See Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism, ch. 10.



social relationships of production? Probing this question will involve determining the trajectories of development for such sectors, examining the alteration of labor processes, technology, product mixes, and population flows across a variety of sites and eras. Such an approach, focusing on relationships and their context, makes place and period variable and views paternalism as one "solution" to the dilemmas of accumulation during an industrial transition. Interdisciplinary and comparative, such research can illuminate the interdependence of the economic, technical, and cultural dimensions of industrialization.

Last but not least, the similarity between the paternalisms that attended the industrial transition and the corporate welfare schemes that developed during the process of capitalist consolidation (1890-1950) should be evaluated. As the single-plant firm gave way to the complex multi-plant enterprise, new rounds of routinization and technological innovation surfaced alongside a cluster of humaniz- ing efforts at the workplace (baseball leagues, cafeterias, and Americanization classes). Wide variation was certainly present in these programs, as a 1928 observer noted that "some are the outgrowth of sentimentalism while others are organic and sound."79 Exploring the notion that a set of distinct corporate welfarisms succeeded the old paternalisms as the industrial structure evolved should yield new insights into the sources of variation in twentieth-century management-labor relationships. Ultimately, the more fully the context, content, and affect of production are reconstituted, the more readily will we construct culturally nuanced and intellectually satisfying accounts of the irregular rhythms of mutuality and conflict in American industrial society.

79Max W. Stoehr, "Wool Industry, " in H.T. Warshow, Representative Industries in the United States (New York: Henry Holt, 1928), 638.


Article Contentsp. [235]p. 236p. 237p. 238p. 239p. 240p. 241p. 242p. 243p. 244p. 245p. 246p. 247p. 248p. 249p. 250p. 251p. 252p. 253p. 254p. 255p. 256p. 257

Issue Table of ContentsAmerican Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer, 1984) pp. 181-321Front Matter [pp. ]Ex-Slave Interviews and the Historiography of Slavery [pp. 181-210]Problems of Class and Race in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press [pp. 211-234]Varieties of Paternalism: Industrial Structures and the Social Relations of Production in American Textiles [pp. 235-257]"Oh That I Was a Soldier": John Adams and the Anguish of War [pp. 258-275]The Dynamics of History and Fiction in Melville's Typee [pp. 276-290]ReviewsThe Bourgeois Theorist [pp. 291-296]Seeing Through American Beauty [pp. 297-302]The Anti-Hypocrites: Sentimental Typology of Conduct in Victorian America [pp. 303-309]Re-Viewing American Romantic Painting [pp. 310-314]Inquisition and Appreciation: Two Approaches to the Study of Anthropologists [pp. 315-321]

Back Matter [pp. ]

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Paternalismo

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