Entre comienzos de la década de 1780, al finalizar la Guerra de la Independencia, y 1914, al

estallar la Primera Guerra Mundial, los Estados Unidos pasaron de ser un país con una
población reducida, distribuida en un extenso territorio, a ser la nación con el mayor ingreso per
cápita del mundo y el país industrial líder, superando a Gran Bretaña desde fines del siglo XIX.
Entre 1896 y 1900, los Estados Unidos generaron el 30% de la producción industrial mundial,
mientras que en ese periodo a gran Bretaña le correspondía el 20%, y a Alemania, el 17%.

LAS ETAPAS DE LA INDUSTRIALIZACION

NORTEAMERICANA
La economía y la industria crecieron en forma sostenida en el transcurso del siglo XIX, aunque
con más celeridad después del fin de la guerra civil (que se libró entre 1861 y 1865). El promedio
anual de la tasa de crecimiento del producto per cápita fue del 1.3 % hasta la guerra, y del 1.8
en la etapa posterior.

El proceso de industrialización se vio favorecido por la disponibilidad de recursos naturales y

por la existencia de un inmenso mercado interno, con un extraordinario aumento de la población,
que paso de menos de 4 000 000 de habitantes en 1790 a 90 000 000 en 1910, gracias a la
inmigración masiva y a las altas tasas de crecimiento vegetativo.Además, estos factores se
combinaron con un proceso constante de innovación tecnológica y organizativa, que les otorgó
a los Estados Unidos fuentes ventajas frente a sus competidores europeos.

En esta etapa colonial, la economía norteamericana era fundamentalmente agraria: en el norte,

predominaban las explotaciones agrícolas familiares, y en el sur, las grandes plantaciones
esclavistas. La producción industrial era limitada, y se llevaba a cabo en unidades domésticas
o en talleres artesanales.

La situación comenzó a cambiar con la revolución de la independencia, que libero al territorio

del mercantilismo británico y le dio la estabilidad política necesaria para la expansión comercial.
Entre finales de la década de 1780 y 1920 transcurrió una etapa en la que el historiador North
denomina «primeras tentativas industriales», el cual fue un periodo en el cual la producción
industrial se expandió.

El «boom» del algodón contribuyó al desarrollo de la actividad comercial, del transporte y del
sistema financiero, y a la acumulación de capitales, además de proporcionar la materia prima
para el sector más dinámico de la industria.

El desarrollo industrial y la difusión del sistema de fábrica se vieron estimulados por la

construcción de los ferrocarriles, que comenzó en 1830 y se aceleró a partir de 1840. En el
periodo 1840 – 1860, la industrialización se basó, sobre todo, en la producción de bienes de
consumo, en primer lugar la de textiles de algodón, seguida por la del calzado y el cuero, la del
hierro y la de las maquinas.

La industria textil género fuertes eslabonamientos hacia atrás y hacia adelante. En el primer
caso, impulsó la fabricación de maquinaria textil, que comenzó temporalmente, en la década de
1810. Las fábricas de maquinaria textil fueron el punto de partida para el desarrollo de la
industria mecánica, ya que dieron origen a establecimientos dedicados a la fabricación de otro
tipo de bienes, desde máquinas – herramientas hasta locomotoras. Hacia adelante la industria
textil derivó en la industria del vestido, que ocupó un lugar relevante en la expansión
manufacturera.
El período que va de 1860 a 1914 fue la etapa de afirmación de los Estados Unidos con o nación
industrial; en este lapso, se profundizaron las transformaciones estructurales que se habían
iniciado en las décadas anteriores. La industria incrementó su participación en el producto
nacional, a expensas de la agricultura, y el proceso de urbanización de aceleró. Mientras que
entre 1860 y 1910 la población rural se multiplicó por 7.

El mercado interno se amplió considerablemente gracias al crecimiento de la población, y se

convirtió en un mercado de masas cómo consecuencia de la extensión de la Red ferroviaria y
de la difusión del uso de telégrafo.

En esta etapa hubo cambios notables en la estructura de la industria, y el liderazgo pasó de los
sectores productores de bienes de consumo a los productores de bienes de capital. Al igual que
Alemania, en las últimas décadas del siglo XIX los Estados Unidos fueron uno de los centros de
la segunda Revolución Industrial.

Junto con la expansión y la transformación de la industria, hubo variaciones en su distribución

regional, declinando el peso relativo del nordeste a favor de la zona de los Grandes Lagos, que
fue el principal área productora de hierro y acero, y, más tarde de la industria automotriz.

Por el volumen de su producción, en 1914, los Estados Unidos eran el país más industrializado
del mundo, y su ingreso per cápita era mayor que el de cualquier otra nación.

LA POBLACIÓN, EL MERCADO INTERNO Y LOS

RECURSOS NATURALES
A Diferencia de los países europeos, la industrialización de los Estados Unidos en el siglo XIX
se basó casi exclusivamente en el mercado interno.

El gran aumento de la población en el siglo XIX se debió a una elevada tasa de crecimiento
vegetativo, pero, sobre todo, a la inmigración europea, que comenzó en los años veinte y se fue
incrementando en las décadas sucesivas, alcanzando su pico en los 10 años anteriores a la
Primera Guerra Mundial. Entre 1820 y 1920 se radicaron 25 000 000 de inmigrantes,
provenientes de Europa del Norte, del Este y del Sur.

Además de la población en constante crecimiento, los Estados Unidos tenían una dotación
privilegiada de recursos naturales. Poseían vastas tierras fértiles y excepcionales recursos
minerales en oro, hierro, carbón y petróleo. Contaban, también, con abundante madera y
recursos de agua en las primeras zonas industriales, lo que permitió obtener energía barata
antes de que comenzara la explotación del carbón.

LA INNOVACIÓN TECNOLÓGICA
El constante proceso de innovación tecnológica y organizativa es otro de los factores que
explican los altos índices de crecimiento. De la economía norteamericana y la expansión de su
industria a lo largo del siglo XIX.

John Habakkuk elaboró una interpretación en la que sostiene que el alto costo del trabajo y la
escocés de elasticidad en su oferta en los Estados Unidos fueron el factor determinante para la
adopción de tecnología que permitiera ahorrar mano de obra.
La fabricación de bienes finales mediante el sistema de piezas intercambiables (que formó parte
del «American system») otorgó ventajas la producción norteamericana de máquinas –
herramientas, que fue, a su vez, uno de los factores que impulsaron el avance industrial en el
siglo XIX.

Hasta fines del siglo XIX, los principales aportes de los Estados Unidos se dieron en el campo
de la tecnología, mientras que el avance científico continuó generándose en los países
europeos, sobre todo, en Alemania. A partir de comienzos de este siglo, esta situación empezó
a modificarse.

La competitividad de la industria norteamericana no fue producto sólo de la innovación

tecnológica, sino también de la innovación organizativa. En las primeras décadas del siglo XIX,
el «American system» se difundió más allá de sus fronteras, y sirvió de modelo para la
organización de las grandes empresas industriales europeas.

LA REVOLUCIÓN DE LOS TRANSPORTES

A comienzos del siglo XIX, el elevado costo del transporte interior limitaba la posibilidad de
explotar los recursos naturales del territorio. Además, a diferencia de.los países europeos, las
distancias entre las regiones eran muy grandes, lo cual dificultaba el establecimiento de
comunicaciones por vía terrestre.

En las primeras décadas del siglo XIX, la vía de comunicación por excelencia fueron los ríos y
los canales. En 1830 se inició la construcción de los ferrocarriles. En una primera etapa, ellos
no alteraron de forma sustancial las rutas o los medios de transporte existentes, pero la situación
comenzó a cambiar a partir del primer «boom» ferroviario, a finales de la década de 1840 y
principios de la década de 1850.

EL IMPACTO DE LOS FERROCARRILES

El tema del impacto del ferrocarril en la industrialización norteamericana ha dado lugar a fuertes
controversias. Robert Fogel, argumento, a partir de un análisis cuantitativo, que no existió una
relación de causalidad entre la construcción de los ferrocarriles y el desarrollo económico, y que
su función pudo haber sido desempeñada por los sistemas de transporte fluvial preexistentes.

Alfred Chandler discrepa de Fogel, y enfatiza el papel de ferrocarril – junto con el telégrafo – en
la integración de un mercado de masas, gracias a la disminución de los costos del transporte y
al incremento de la velocidad de la distribución.

LAS EMPRESAS Y LOS EMPRESARIOS

Otro de los grandes temas en la historia de la industrialización norteamericana ha sido el del
papel que debe atribuirse al factor empresarial, y en particular, en que medida la existencia de
empresarios innovadores fue una de las condiciones que posibilitaron el desarrollo económico.

El enfoque de Chandler se centra particularmente en la gestión de lo que denomina «la gran

empresa moderna»; analiza cómo las grandes empresas pasaron a dominar la economía
norteamericana a partir de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX.
Las grandes empresas modernas nacieron en diversas ramas de la producción: industrias de
producción en Gran escala mediante procesos continuos (refinación y destilación, bienes de
consumo masivo), industrias de fusión y primera elaboración de metales, industria metal
mecánica (maquinarias producidas en gran escala a través del sistema de piezas
intercambiables).

La forma de propiedad característica fueron las sociedades anónimas, y la principal fuente de

financiación fue el mercado de capitales, en el que los bancos de inversión tuvieron un papel
destacado.

El modelo más acabado de organización científica de la producción a comienzos de este siglo

fue el de la empresa Ford, en la que en 1913 se implantó por primera vez la cadena de montaje.

LAS REGIONES Y LA INDUSTRIALIZACIÓN

El desarrollo industrial se concreto en la región del nordeste, que mantuvo su primacía a lo largo
de todo el siglo XIX. La primer zona industrial fue la de Nueva Inglaterra, el principal centro de
desarrollo de las industrias textil y mecánica hasta la década de 1860. En esta etapa Nueva
Inglaterra fue la zona más poblada urbanizada, y la que disponía de mejores servicios
comerciales y financieros.

Las otras dos grandes regiones del territorio, el sur y el oeste, fueron, en esencia, productoras
agrícolas. Ambas abasteciendo a las industrias y a las poblaciones del nordeste, y fueron
mercados de consumo para la producción industrial del norte.

Fuente:

María Inés Barbero. (2001). Historia económica y social general. México: Macchi.

ndustrialization of the U.S. economy

The growth of industry

By 1878 the United States had reentered a period of prosperity after the long
depression of the mid-1870s. In the ensuing 20 years the volume
of industrial production, the number of workers employed in industry, and the
number of manufacturing plants all more than doubled. A more accurate index to
the scope of this industrial advance may be found in the aggregate annual value
of all manufactured goods, which increased from about $5,400,000,000 in 1879
to perhaps $13,000,000,000 in 1899. The expansion of
the iron and steel industry, always a key factor in any industrial economy, was
even more impressive: from 1880 to 1900 the annual production of steel in the
United States went from about 1,400,000 to more than 11,000,000 tons. Before
the end of the century, the United States surpassed Great Britain in the
production of iron and steel and was providing more than one-quarter of the
world’s supply of pig iron.
Many factors combined to produce this burst of industrial activity. The
exploitation of Western resources, including mines and lumber, stimulated a
demand for improved transportation, while the gold and silver mines provided
new sources of capital for investment in the East. The construction of railroads,
especially in the West and South, with the resulting demand for steel rails, was a
major force in the expansion of the steel industry and increased the railroad
mileage in the United States from less than 93,262 miles (150,151 kilometres) in
1880 to about 190,000 miles (310,000 kilometres) in 1900. Technological
advances, including the utilization of the Bessemer and open-hearth processes in
the manufacture of steel, resulted in improved products and lower production
costs. A series of major inventions, including the telephone, typewriter,
linotype, phonograph, electric light, cash register, air brake, refrigerator car, and
the automobile, became the bases for new industries, while many of them
revolutionized the conduct of business. The use of petroleum products in industry
as well as for domestic heating and lighting became the cornerstone of the most
powerful of the new industries of the period, while the trolley car, the increased
use of gas and electric power, and the telephone led to the establishment of
important public utilities that were natural monopolies and could operate only on
the basis of franchises granted by state or municipal governments. The
widespread employment of the corporate form of business organization offered
new opportunities for large-scale financing of business enterprise and attracted
new capital, much of it furnished by European investors. Over all this industrial
activity, there presided a colourful and energetic group of entrepreneurs, who
gained the attention, if not always the commendation, of the public and who
appeared to symbolize for the public the new class of leadership in the United
States. Of this numerous group the best known were John D. Rockefeller in
oil, Andrew Carnegie in steel, and such railroad builders and promoters
as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Henry Villard,
and James J. Hill.




 Rockefeller, John D.John D. Rockefeller.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Carnegie, AndrewAndrew Carnegie.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (cph 3b35116)

Vanderbilt, CorneliusCornelius Vanderbilt.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (cph 3a11569)

Stanford, LelandLeland Stanford.From The Days of a Man, Being Memories of a Naturalist, Teacher, and Minor Prophet of
Democracy, by David Starr Jordan, Vol. 1, 1922

The dispersion of industry

The period was notable also for the wide geographic distribution of industry.
The Eastern Seaboard from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania continued to be the
most heavily industrialized section of the United States, but there was a
substantial development of manufacturing in the states adjacent to the Great
Lakes and in certain sections of the South.
The experience of the steel industry reflected this new pattern of diffusion. Two-
thirds of the iron and steel industry was concentrated in the area of western
Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. After 1880, however, the development of iron
mines in northern Minnesota (the Vermilion Range in 1884 and the Mesabi
Range in 1892) and in Tennessee and northern Alabama was followed by the
expansion of the iron and steel industry in the Chicago area and by the
establishment of steel mills in northern Alabama and in Tennessee.

Pillsbury Mine in the Mesabi Range, near Hibbing, Minnesota.Milt and Joan Mann/CameraMann International

Most manufacturing in the Midwest was in enterprises closely associated with

agriculture and represented expansion of industries that had first been established
before 1860. Meat-packing, which in the years after 1875 became one of the
major industries of the nation in terms of the value of its products, was almost a
Midwestern monopoly, with a large part of the industry concentrated in Chicago.
Flour milling, brewing, and the manufacture of farm machinery and lumber
products were other important Midwestern industries.
 flouring millC.C. Washburn's flouring mills, by the Falls of St. Anthony in the historical milling district,
Minneapolis, Minnesota.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital. id. pga 01523)

The industrial invasion of the South was spearheaded by textiles. Cotton mills
became the symbol of the New South, and mills and mill towns sprang up in
the Piedmont region from Virginia to Georgia and into Alabama. By 1900 almost
one-quarter of all the cotton spindles in the United States were in the South, and
Southern mills were expanding their operations more rapidly than were their
well-established competitors in New England. The development of lumbering in
the South was even more impressive, though less publicized; by the end of the
century the South led the nation in lumber production, contributing almost one-
third of the annual supply.
 cotton mill: weaving roomWeaving room in a cotton mill, Augusta, Georgia, late 19th century.Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.

Industrial combinations

The geographic dispersal of industry was part of a movement that was converting
the United States into an industrial nation. It attracted less attention, however,
than the trend toward the consolidation of competing firms into large units
capable of dominating an entire industry. The movement toward consolidation
received special attention in 1882 when Rockefeller and his associates organized
the Standard Oil Trust under the laws of Ohio. A trust was a new type of
industrial organization, in which the voting rights of a controlling number of
shares of competing firms were entrusted to a small group of men, or trustees,
who thus were able to prevent competition among the companies they controlled.
The stockholders presumably benefited through the larger dividends they
received. For a few years the trust was a popular vehicle for the creation of
monopolies, and by 1890 there were trusts in whiskey, lead, cottonseed oil,
and salt.
In 1892 the courts of Ohio ruled that the trust violated that state’s antimonopoly
laws. Standard Oil then reincorporated as a holding company under the more
hospitable laws of New Jersey. Thereafter, holding companies or outright
mergers became the favourite forms for the creation of monopolies, though the
term trust remained in the popular vocabulary as a common description of any
monopoly. The best-known mergers of the period were those leading to the
formation of the American Tobacco Company (1890) and the American Sugar
Refining Company (1891). The latter was especially successful in stifling
competition, for it quickly gained control of most of the sugar refined in the
United States.
Foreign commerce

The foreign trade of the United States, if judged by the value of exports, kept
pace with the growth of domestic industry. Exclusive of gold, silver, and
reexports, the annual value of exports from the United States in 1877 was about
$590,000,000; by 1900 it had increased to approximately $1,371,000,000. The
value of imports also rose, though at a slower rate. When gold and silver are
included, there was only one year in the entire period in which the United States
had an unfavourable balance of trade; and, as the century drew to a close, the
excess of exports over imports increased perceptibly.
Agriculture continued to furnish the bulk of U.S. exports. Cotton, wheat, flour,
and meat products were consistently the items with the greatest annual value
among exports. Of the nonagricultural products sent abroad, petroleum was the
most important, though by the end of the century its position on the list of exports
was being challenged by machinery.
Despite the expansion of foreign trade, the U.S. merchant marine was a major
casualty of the period. While the aggregate tonnage of all shipping flying the
U.S. flag remained remarkably constant, the tonnage engaged in foreign trade
declined sharply, dropping from more than 2,400,000 tons on the eve of the Civil
War to a low point of only 726,000 tons in 1898. The decline began during the
Civil War when hundreds of ships were transferred to foreign registries to avoid
destruction. Later, cost disadvantages in shipbuilding and repair and the
American policy of registering only American-built ships hindered growth
until World War I.
Labour

The expansion of industry was accompanied by increased tensions between

employers and workers and by the appearance, for the first time in the United
States, of national labour unions.
Formation of unions
The first effective labour organization that was more than regional in
membership and influence was the Knights of Labor, organized in 1869. The
Knights believed in the unity of the interests of all producing groups and sought
to enlist in their ranks not only all labourers but everyone who could be truly
classified as a producer. They championed a variety of causes, many of them
more political than industrial, and they hoped to gain their ends through politics
and education rather than through economic coercion.

Knights of Labor"Puck" cartoon attacking James Cardinal Gibbons's support of the Knights of Labor.Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.

The hardships suffered by many workers during the depression of 1873–78 and
the failure of a nationwide railroad strike, which was broken when President
Hayes sent federal troops to suppress disorders in Pittsburgh and St. Louis
(see Great Railroad Strike of 1877), caused much discontent in the ranks of the
Knights. In 1879 Terence V. Powderly, a railroad worker and mayor of Scranton,
Pennsylvania, was elected grand master workman of the national organization.
He favoured cooperation over a program of aggressive action, but the effective
control of the Knights shifted to regional leaders who were willing to initiate
strikes or other forms of economic pressure to gain their objectives. The Knights
reached the peak of their influence in 1884–85, when much-publicized strikes
against the Union Pacific, Southwest System, and Wabash railroads attracted
substantial public sympathy and succeeded in preventing a reduction in wages.
At that time they claimed a national membership of nearly 700,000. In 1885
Congress, taking note of the apparently increasing power of labour, acceded to
union demands to prohibit the entry into the United States of immigrants who
had signed contracts to work for specific employers.
The year 1886 was a troubled one in labour relations. There were nearly 1,600
strikes, involving about 600,000 workers, with the eight-hour day the most
prominent item in the demands of labour. About half of these strikes were called
for May Day; some of them were successful, but the failure of others and internal
conflicts between skilled and unskilled members led to a decline in the Knights’
popularity and influence.

Summary and Keywords

Between 1880 and 1929, industrialization and urbanization expanded in the United States
faster than ever before. Industrialization, meaning manufacturing in factory settings using
machines plus a labor force with unique, divided tasks to increase production, stimulated
urbanization, meaning the growth of cities in both population and physical size. During this
period, urbanization spread out into the countryside and up into the sky, thanks to new
methods of building taller buildings. Having people concentrated into small areas
accelerated economic activity, thereby producing more industrial growth. Industrialization
and urbanization thus reinforced one another, augmenting the speed with which such
growth would have otherwise occurred.

Industrialization and urbanization affected Americans everywhere, but especially in the

Northeast and Midwest. Technological developments in construction, transportation, and
illumination, all connected to industrialization, changed cities forever, most immediately
those north of Washington, DC and east of Kansas City. Cities themselves fostered new
kinds of industrial activity on large and small scales. Cities were also the places where
businessmen raised the capital needed to industrialize the rest of the United States. Later
changes in production and transportation made urbanization less acute by making it
possible for people to buy cars and live further away from downtown areas in new
suburban areas after World War II ended.

Keywords: industrialization, urbanization, transportation, electricity, skyscrapers, assembly line, Henry

Ford, Andrew Carnegie

Industrialization and urbanization began long before the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
but it accelerated greatly during this period because of technological innovations, social
changes, and a political system increasingly apt to favor economic growth beyond any
other concern. Before 1880, industrialization depended upon a prescribed division of
labor—breaking most jobs up into smaller tasks, and assigning the same people to repeat
one task indefinitely. After 1880, industrialization depended much more on
mechanization—the replacement of people with machines—to increase production and
maximize profits. The development of the modern electrical grid, starting in the early
1880s, facilitated such technological advances. Henry Ford’s assembly line and the rise of
mass production after the turn of the 20th century only strengthened this effect. As a
result, the total manufacturing output of the United States was twenty-eight times greater
in 1929 than it was 1859. Adjust that number for the growth in population over the same
period, and it still multiplied seven times over.1

Cities in America date back to the beginning of the colonial period, but the tendency for
new industrial factories to be located in or near urban areas meant that cities grew much
faster during the late 19th century than ever before. This trend was most apparent in large
cities like New York, which expanded from approximately half a million to around 3.5
million people between 1850 and 1900, and Philadelphia, which increased in size from
slightly more than 100,000 inhabitants to more than 1.2 million people over the same
period. During the last half of the late 19th century, Chicago proved to be the fastest
growing city in the world. Overall, 15.3 percent of Americans lived in cities in 1850. By
1900, that percentage had increased to 39.7, and kept growing. The 1920 Census
revealed that more Americans lived in cities than the countryside for the first time.2

Not every city in the country developed as fast as the largest cities did. Important regional
differences existed in urbanization because of differences in the nature of industrial
growth. The largest cities in the Northeast were manufacturing powerhouses that
contained everything, from large factories building railroad locomotives to small shops
producing textiles in people’s apartments. The Northeast also gave rise to smaller cities
that concentrated on particular industries, like Rochester, New York, which specialized in
men’s clothing, boots, and shoes. Following on a tradition of manufacturing from earlier in
the century, New Bedford and Fall River, Massachusetts increased in size because of their
cotton textile factories. Other cities, like Elizabeth, New Jersey, grew as byproducts of the
expansion of their larger neighbors.

Chicago, the largest city in the Midwest, made its name processing natural resources from
the Western frontier before those resources traveled eastward as finished products. Grain
and lumber—two industries that had been crucial for Chicago’s early growth—relied on
Chicago for marketing and storage. With perfection of the refrigerated railroad car, meat
processing became such an enormous industry that the vast majority of the meat that
Americans ate was processed in the stockyards on that city’s south side. (That activity
would disperse again, after the turn of the 20th century, to other cities like Fort Worth and
Kansas City.) Smaller cities in America’s industrial heartland would grow around other
manufacturing pursuits like steel in Youngstown, and machine tools and cash registers in
Dayton, Ohio.3

The South had lagged behind the rest of the country since before the Civil War. As a
result, many advocates for outside investment in this region expanded their activities after
the war. They were somewhat successful. While the rate of industrialization (and therefore
urbanization) picked up in the South during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it still
has not fully caught up with the rest of the country. Birmingham, Alabama, for example,
founded in 1871, flourished as a center for iron and steel manufacturing during the 1880s,
when two railroads first linked that city to the region’s mineral resources.4 The growth of
cotton mills in the “upcountry” section of the Carolinas began during the 1870s. After the
turn of the 20th century, this region became an important center of activity for the textile
industry, in large part because of the cheap, nonunion labor available there.
What separates this period from earlier periods in urban and industrial history is that this
was the first time in American history that cities had moved to the center of American life.
Cities were where most of the new factories got built. Waves of immigrants settled in cities
because that’s where the job openings in industrial factories were. Cities were also places
where the effects of industrialization, especially the increased inequality of wealth, were
most visible. That means that the problems of cities became the problems of America.

The Electrical Grid and Improvements in

Transportation
One of the reasons that later industrialization progressed at such a greater pace than
before was the improvement in power sources. The early industrial revolution depended
upon steam engines and waterpower. The earliest engines were large and prohibitively
expensive for all but the largest firms. Water wheels were a possibility for smaller
concerns, but they could not perform nearly as much work as later power sources could.
Between 1869 and 1929, total available horsepower in the United States increased from
2.3 million to 43 million units. In factories, the greatest part of that growth came from a
huge increase in the use of electricity.5

Although factories had grown larger and more efficient over the entire 19th century, they
grew particularly large after 1880, as the power to run them became cheaper, cleaner, and
more convenient to acquire. Starting in the late 1870s, Thomas Edison turned the attention
of his extensive laboratory towards harnessing electricity to create affordable electric light.
This achievement depended not only upon the creation of an efficient, inexpensive,
incandescent light bulb, but also on the creation of an electrical system to power it—
everything from generators, to electrical wires, to switches. Without a precedent for any of
these things, the Edison Electric Company and many related subsidiaries (later gathered
together under the umbrella of General Electric) had to manufacture just about everything
to make the grid operate. “Since capital is timid, I will raise and supply it,” explained Edison
to one of his investors. “The issue is factories or death!”6 Other companies soon followed,
because creating the central stations and the grid that eventually powered just about
everything was so obviously lucrative.

Symbolizing the importance of capital to Edison’s efforts, the first person to have his home
successfully wired for electricity was the banker J. P. Morgan, in 1882. Despite setbacks,
his experience with electric light encouraged him to invest further in Edison’s efforts.
Edison built the first central generating station in New York City later that same year. The
first area of Manhattan that Edison wired was a neighborhood filled with the homes and
workplaces of those who operated the financial institutions he hoped to convince to invest
in his enterprises, as well as two major newspapers that would publicize his achievements.
By 1902, there were 2,250 electrical generating stations in the United States. By 1920, that
number grew to just short of 4,000.7 Electricity spread from large cities to small cities and
eventually out into rural areas by the 1920s.

This kind of growth required substantial improvement beyond Edison’s initial vision of an
electrical system. The effects of a reliable electric grid on the cities where it first appeared
were numerous, ranging from less coal smoke in the air to new sounds produced by
various electrical creations—everything from streetcars to arc lights. Early arc lights were
so bright people thought they could stop crime and vice by exposing the people who
perpetrated these crimes. In smaller cities, obtaining electric light was a sign of
modernization, which implied future growth. Modern light in urban workplaces made office
work easier by lessening strain on the eyes. As electric light companies moved in, the
much-hated urban gas companies lost a considerable amount of economic power. Since
people preferred electric light to gas, it became increasingly popular, as the grid expanded
and the costs dropped. Electric light even changed the way people lived inside their
houses. For example, children could now be trusted to put themselves to bed since there
was no longer a fire risk from the open flames that were once needed to get to bed in the
dark.

Nevertheless, the growing electrical grid created new urban dangers. High voltage
electrical wires strung above ground joined other wires from telephones, telegraphs—even
stock tickers—posed a new urban “wire menace.” Many came down in bad weather. They
were a hazard for electric company employees and pedestrians alike. “The overhead
system is a standing menace to health and life,” reported one medical journal in 1888.8 In
1889, a fire caused by overheated electrical wires ignited a building full of dry goods and
burned down much of downtown Boston.

The most noteworthy effect of high-quality, affordable lighting was the widespread practice
of running factories twenty-four hours a day—which made them much more productive
without any improvements in the technology of production. Replacing putrid gas lamps
also made the smell of factories better for the workmen who worked there. As the electrical
grid became more reliable, electric motors gradually began to replace steam engines as
the source of power in manufacturing. Using small electric motors as a source of power
freed factories from having to be located near water sources to feed boilers and made it
possible for them to be smaller too.

Between 1880 and 1900, factories tended to adopt electric lighting but kept using earlier
sources of power for their operation. Electric power for factory operations came quickly
between 1900 and 1930. Both these developments (along with the large supply of
immigrant workers) contributed to the industrialization of cities. The electrification of
industrial facilities of all kinds proceeded quickly during the first two decades of the 20th
century. Businesses got wired for electricity much faster than cities because they could
make the most use of what started out as a relatively expensive service.

Because factories were concentrated in or near cities, it was a lot cheaper to wire them
than it was to wire farms or even smaller cities away from electrical generating stations.
Many of the new factories built during this later period appeared outside city limits, another
new development. Electrification allowed managers to automate jobs once done by hand
labor, thereby eliminating inefficiency, gaining greater control over the production process,
and boosting overall productivity. New devices like time clocks and even new modes of
production like the assembly line also depended upon electric power.

The advent of cheap and readily available electricity had a particularly important effect
upon the physical layout of American cities during this period. Frank Sprague, an electrical
engineer who had once worked for Thomas Edison, designed the first electric streetcar
system for Richmond, Virginia, in 1888. Such systems supplanted horse-drawn carriages,
making it possible for people to travel further and faster than they would have otherwise.
This gave rise to a burst of suburbanization, a spate of new towns on the outskirts of
American cities where wealthy and middle-class people could move to escape from the
difficulties of modern urban life but still be close enough to enjoy many of its advantages.
The new suburbanites often traveled to and from work via new electric streetcars. The
electrical equipment manufacturer Westinghouse was one of the major manufacturers of
vehicles powered by an overhead wire. Electric streetcars had the advantage over horses
of not leaving manure or of dying in the streets. Streetcars were more popular during
weekends than during the week as working class people took advantage of low fares to
explore new neighborhoods or to visit amusement parks, like Coney Island, generally built
at the end of these lines.

In the same way that employers and city planners depended upon streetcars to move
people, manufacturers became more dependent upon railroads, after 1880, to move their
finished products. Railroad track mileage grew greatly after the Civil War, connecting cities
and leading to the growth of new factories in places that were convenient to the necessary
resources to make marketable goods. Eventually, mass distribution was a prerequisite to
benefit from all that increased productivity. For all these reasons, separating the causes
and effects of industrialization and urbanization is practically impossible.

Throughout the 19th century, factories usually had to be built near shipping ports or
railroad stops because these were the easiest way to get factory products out to markets
around the world. As more railroad tracks were built late in the 19th century, it became
easier to locate factories outside of downtowns. Streetcars helped fill up the empty space
downtown where factories would have gone. They made it easier to live further away from
work and still commute to the heart of downtown, thereby making it possible for other kinds
of businesses to locate there. One example would be the large urban department store, a
phenomenon that predates 1880, but grew into its own after that date. Such stores like
Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia or Marshall Field’s in Chicago bought the products of
industrialization in bulk and sold them at a discounted price to workers who might have
had trouble getting access to them any other way.

Structural Steel and Skyscrapers

While retail emporiums could be blocks long and only a few stories tall, other business
rented space in thinner buildings built much higher. By the late 1880s, structures that had
once been built with iron began to be built with a structural steel—a new, stronger kind of
steel. The practice had begun in Chicago, championed by the architect Louis Sullivan, who
designed the first skyscrapers there. A skyscraper, Sullivan wrote, “must be every inch a
tall and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a
single dissenting line.”9 That kind of design required a skeleton of structural steel upon
which other substances like brick or granite could hang. Even then, such skyscrapers had
to be tapered; otherwise, the weight from the top floors could make the whole structure
collapse.

Creating structural steel for skyscrapers required entirely different production methods
than had been required to make Bessemer steel (which had been used primarily for
railroad rails). Quantity and speed were the main requirements of producing Bessemer
steel. Structural steel required a more carefully made product. The demands of structural
steel encouraged steelmakers like Andrew Carnegie to redesign entire factories, most
notably replacing older Bessemer converters with the open-hearth process. This new kind
of steelmaking not only produced higher quality steel, it also required fewer skilled
workers. This encouraged Carnegie’s company to lock out its union workforce at
Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892, so that it could save money by employing cheap
replacement workers.

The other innovation that made skyscrapers possible was the electric elevator. Elisha
Graves Otis designed the first reliable elevator in 1857. With electric power, it became
possible to rise sixty stories in a matter of seconds. Before the elevator, rental spaces in
commercial buildings cost more on lower floors because people didn’t want to have to walk
up stairs to get to the top. With elevators, tenants willing paid a premium in order to get
better views out their windows. Without elevators, nobody would have bothered to erect a
building taller than five stories.10

The construction of skyscrapers was itself a terrific example of the industrial age
coordination of labor and materials distribution. Steel skeletons meant that the
unornamented higher sections of a building could be worked on even before the inevitable
elaborate ornamental fringes on the lower part of the building were finished. This saved
both time and money. When New York got so crowded that there was no space to store
raw materials, the appearance of those materials would be carefully choreographed, and
they would be taken directly off of flatbed trucks and placed in their exact positions near
the tops of new buildings. Around the turn of the 20th century, a major skyscraper could be
built in as little as one year. The faster a building could be built, the faster an owner could
collect rents and begin to earn back construction expenses.

The great benefit of skyscrapers was the ability to compress economic activity into smaller
areas. “The skyscraper,” explained one New Yorker in 1897, “gathers into a single edifice
an extraordinary number of activities, which otherwise would be widely separated. Each
building is an almost complete city, often comprising within its walls, banks and insurance
offices, post office and telegraph office, business exchanges restaurants, clubrooms and
shops.” These same miniature cities also included numerous retail outlets, where the
products of industrialized manufacturing could be purchased.11 Shorter distances between
these locations accelerated the pace of economic activity, which promoted further
economic growth. However, large projects (like the many skyscrapers associated with the
building of New York’s Grand Central Station) eliminated or at least obscured urban
industrial areas.

Unburdened by the need to pay federal income tax, industrial titans from across the United
States displayed their massive wealth by building lavish mansions along New York’s Fifth
Avenue during the 1890s. By the 1920s, the value of land in Manhattan grew so fast
because of its possible use for skyscrapers that second generation industrial families sold
their mansions, since they no longer wanted to pay huge property taxes on them. Blocks of
what was known as “Vanderbilt Alley,” named after the children of the steamship and
railroad pioneer who had built mansions in the same area, were replaced by skyscrapers
and high-end retail emporiums.

The same basic principles of skyscraper production—build it quick and large, and pack it
with people—motivated the way that builders produced other kinds of urban domiciles.
“Today, three-fourths of [New York City’s] people live in the tenements,” wrote the reformer
Jacob Riis in his 1890 classic, How the Other Half Lives, “and the 19th-century drift of the
population to the cities is sending ever-increasing multitudes to crowd them.”12 The best-
known tenement house design of this period was the dumbbell tenement of about five or
six stories tall. They came about as the result of a design contest, but were generally so
crowded that they did more harm than good to the people who lived in them. Four families
might live on a single floor with only two bathrooms between them. Designed to let light
and air into central courtyards (which explains why they were shaped like a dumbbell from
above), stacked up back-to-back, one against the other they did neither. Widely copied,
New York City actually outlawed this design for new buildings in 1901—but the old
structures remained.

Apartment houses made it easier to pack people into small urban areas and therefore live
closer to where they worked. Wealthy people could buy space and separation from one’s
neighbors, while those middle class people who could not afford to live in suburbs lost the
space they had before urbanization accelerated. To counter these unequal tendencies,
New Yorkers developed the idea of the cooperative, where many people bought a single
building and managed it themselves. Lavish apartments became alternatives for mansions
once Manhattan real estate became too expensive for all except those with huge fortunes.

The Assembly Line

The farther away that people lived from central business districts, the more they needed
efficient transportation. Streetcars helped, to an extent, but passenger lines that centered
on downtown neighborhoods left large areas that could be occupied with housing for a
growing working population, provided that these residents had their own way to get
around. “I will build a car for the great multitude,” declared Henry Ford in 1908. “[I]t will be
so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.”13 That car
was the Model T, and it revolutionized both auto-making and the American landscape. It
also revolutionized the entire concept of American production. Ford didn’t worry about
whether his cars would have a market. He would make a market for his cars by producing
them so cheaply that nearly every American could afford one.

Ford could achieve both quality and a low price at scale because of the assembly line.
This particular conceptual breakthrough owed much to the “disassembly lines” that had
been pioneered in the meatpacking industry during the previous century. In the same way
that a single carcass was picked apart by men with specialized jobs as it moved along a
line, mounted upon a hook, Ford arranged his new factory at Highland Park so that men
with highly specialized assignments could build an automobile much faster than before.
The assembly line moved work to the men rather than forcing men to move to the work,
thereby saving valuable time and energy. It also extended the concept of the division of
labor to its logical extreme so that workers would only perform one function in a much
larger assembly process all day, every day. The applicability of these principles to the
manufacturing of just about everything is what made Ford such an important figure in the
history of industrialization. Mass production became possible for all kinds of things that
had once seemed far removed from the automobile.

Ford built Model Ts at three different facilities over the entire history of that vehicle. He
improved his production methods over time (which included introducing and improving
upon the assembly line) so that he could produce them more cheaply and efficiently.
Efficiency depended on speed, and speed depended upon the exact place in the factory
where those machines were placed. Because Ford made only one car, he could employ
single-purpose machine tools of extraordinarily high quality. The company also used lots of
other automated manufacturing equipment, like gravity slides and conveyors, to get parts
of the car from one place to another in its increasingly large, increasingly mechanized
factories.
Because the assembly line moved the work to the men rather than the men to the work,
the company could control the speed of the entire operation. Like earlier manufacturers,
Ford depended upon standardized, identical parts to produce more cars for less, but the
assembly line also made it possible to conserve labor—not by mechanizing jobs that had
once been done by hand, but by mechanizing work processes and paying employees just
to feed and tend to those machines. This was not fun work to do. “The chain system you
have is a slave driver!” wrote an anonymous housewife based on her husband’s
experience working on the assembly line. “My God! Mr. Ford. My husband has come home
and thrown himself down and won’t eat his supper–so done out! Can’t it be
remedied?”14 Ford instituted an unprecedented wage of $5/day to keep workers on his
assembly line, but this reward did not make the work any easier.

Before Ford came along, cars were boutique goods that only rich people could afford to
operate. After Ford introduced the assembly line (actually a series of assembly lines for
every part of the car), labor productivity improved to such a degree that mass production
became possible. Perhaps more important than mass production was mass consumption,
since continual productivity improvements meant that Ford could lower the price of the
Model T every year, while simultaneously making small but significant changes that
steadily improved the quality of the car. Mass production eliminated choice, since Ford
produced no other car, but Ford built variations of the Model T, like the runabout with the
same chassis, and owners retro-fitted their Model Ts for everything from camping to
farming.

The increased number of automobiles on city streets further congested already congested
downtown areas. Streetcars got blocked. Pedestrians died in gruesome traffic accidents.
One of the basic requirements of having so many new cars on the roads was to improve
the quality and quantity of roads. Local city planners tended to attack such problems on a
case-by-case basis, laying pavement on well-traveled roads and widening them when
appropriate. New traffic rules, such as the first one-way streets, appeared in an effort to
alleviate these kinds of problems. Traffic control towers and traffic lights—the mechanical
solution to a problem inspired by industrialization—also appeared for the first time during
this era.

Cities grew when industries grew during this era. Since people had to live near where they
worked (and few people lived in skyscrapers), many builders built out into undeveloped
areas. If a city had annexed much of the land around it previous to these economic
expansions (like Detroit), those areas became parts of a larger city. If they hadn’t, much of
this growth occurred in new suburbs (like Philadelphia). Chicago was so confident of
further growth during this period that it built streetcar lines into vacant fields. To meet rising
demand for housing, homebuilders applied industrial principles to building—using
standardized parts that were themselves the result of mass production techniques. By the
1920s, buying pre-cut mail order houses became big business.

The Origins of Mass Production

After 1880, mechanization made factories even more productive thanks to technological
improvements. This can be traced back to Thomas Edison’s labs in New Jersey, where he
practiced systematic invention to exploit the great commercial opportunities that modern
life created. The electrical and chemical industries formed the vanguard for the blending of
science and the useful arts during this era. By the 1920s, engineers had been formally
integrated into the management hierarchies of countless American industries.

Reorganization of production merged with technological improvement had made mass

production possible long before Ford developed the assembly line. James Bonsack’s
cigarette rolling machine, for example, patented in 1881, could produce 70,000 cigarettes
in a single ten-hour day. By the end of that decade, it could produce 120,000 cigarettes in
a day.15 When James “Buck” Duke bought exclusive rights to this machine in 1885, it
became the basis of his American Tobacco Company, which quickly controlled most of the
industry.

By the 1920s, mass production had arrived in industries that produced goods that were
much more expensive than cigarettes. Ford’s principles of mass production spread quickly
throughout the manufacturing sector, to products of all kinds, because Henry Ford was so
open about the way he designed his factories. Among the other manufacturers that used
Fordist principles during the 1920s were the makers of home appliances, like refrigerators
and radios. General Electric, for example, built an eighteen million dollar assembly line for
its Monitor Top refrigerator and sold a million refrigerators just four years after its
introduction in 1927.16

Even craft-dominated industries like furniture making came to depend upon mass
production to make their products more available to the masses. People who moved from
farms to cities desperately needed furniture for their new urban residences, but in
industrial towns like Grand Rapids, Michigan, they could not afford pieces made by
craftsman. New mass-produced models made with minimal carving and overlays, based
on stylish patterns, found a market all over the country. It helped that companies like
Bassett, founded in Virginia in 1902, discouraged their workers from forming unions, just
like Ford did. An unorganized workforce made it easier for industrialists to impose changes
in the production process without resistance from employees.

The changeover from the Model T to the Model A, in 1927, demonstrated the limits of
industrialized mass production. The Model A was incredibly expensive, and Ford had to
shut his main plant for months to retool the production line for his new models. While the
new car sold well initially, sales dropped precipitously as the Depression deepened. “Mass
production is not simply large-scale production,” wrote the department store magnate
Edward Filene, in 1932. “It is large-scale production based upon a clear understanding that
increased production demands increased buying.”17 Mass buying became difficult when
people had little money with which to buy the products of industrialization. Urban building
slowed precipitously during the Depression too. Since cities were the focal points of
industrialization, urban citizens suffered disproportionately when production waned. Of
course, when the United States sank into the economic downturn of the Great Depression,
both urban and industrial growth decreased sharply.

Discussion of the Literature

It is difficult to cite previous scholarship on either industrialization or urbanization from
precisely the 1880–1930 period because both these trends pre- and post-date this period.
Equally importantly, both are so broad, in the sense that they encompass all kinds of
industries and locations that they include a huge range of books and other sources. While
none of the following suggestions are exact fits for these subjects during this time, they are
all worth reading because they cast at least some light on industrialization and
urbanization during this particular time period.

David Hounshell’s From the American System to Mass Production is simply the best
comprehensive history of industrialization available. It covers a few very important
industries in detail (like automobile manufacturing), but it is at its best when dealing with
the similarities in production technologies from industry to industry. My
own Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life is a simplified introduction to
these principles and a summary of their effects on many aspects of American history
during this period, including urbanization.18

A number of excellent studies of important industries during this period show how
industrialization progressed in some detail. Thomas Misa’s Nation of Steel is the definitive
work on the technology of that essential industry. Ron Chernow’s Titan, a biography of
John D. Rockefeller, Sr. will teach you everything you want to know about the oil industry
during this period. Richard R. John’s Network Nation describes the intricacies of the
telegraph and telephone industries. My own Refrigeration Nation is a close study of the
American ice and refrigeration industries.19

Sam Bass Warner Jr.’s The Urban Wilderness, an important history of urbanization
throughout the United States, includes discussion of many problems unique to this time
period. The best works of urban history published since then tend to deal with particular
cities or with the relationship between cities and surrounding suburban communities.
Warner’s Streetcar Suburbs, for example, covers the growth of Boston throughout the 19th
century. Donald L. Miller’s Supreme City masterfully handles New York during the 1920s
(and before, in order to set context). Miller’s City of the Century offers a similarly thorough
treatment of Chicago during the 1890s. Perhaps the most-beloved work of urban history
that covers cities around the country is Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier, which takes
in both the growth of suburbia and the cities they surround throughout American history,
but paying special attention to the years covered in this article. Building Suburbia by
Dolores is a detailed work that covers a similar subject over the same time period. William
Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West is the classic explanation of
the relationship between the fastest-growing city of the late 19th century and all the natural
resources that surrounded it.20

The turn towards social history among historians since the 1960s has made studies of
broad economic forces increasingly uncommon. Early labor history, for example, was often
written by economists. Therefore, it showed a tendency towards looking at the effects of
technological change upon workers. Early sociologists who practiced during this period
used to do field work in the cities where their universities were located. While a return to
this kind of study seems unlikely, more attempts to study the broader economic forces that
made social change happen would likely be appreciated by scholars working in multiple
disciplines.

Primary Sources and Links to Digital Materials

The best place to start any study of the 1880–1930 period is to look at the published
literature during that time. Luckily, because any book or magazine published before 1923
is in the public domain, people searching in the United States can find primary sources on
just about any topic by searching on Google Books, with their Advanced Book Search.
Be sure to check the box that says “Full View Only” and narrow the publication date range
to the exact years in which you are interested. A broad search will bury you in relevant
material, so you may have to do a lot of reading before you find hits that match your topic
exactly.

With respect to industrialization, trade journals, like Iron Age or Electrical World, are
particular helpful for understanding the exact technological changes that took place during
these years. Many such periodicals are available in full on Google Books, but to find
articles on a particular topic can require enough patience to search inside the bound
volumes of those journals one year at a time. Nevertheless, the fact that, only a few short
years ago, one had to travel to a major research library in order to read them at all,
demonstrates the wonders of digitization.

Chronicling America, the online repository of the Library of Congress for digitized
American newspapers is a particularly important resource for studying urban history during
this era. Begin with their Advanced Search tab, and you can limit the results to papers
from the state or city of your choice. While they currently have few papers from a city as
big as Chicago, they are strong on papers from New York City and Washington, D.C.

Anyone interested in urban history might consider perusing the digital collections of the
New York Public Library before a trip there to see what isn’t available online. Among the
online collections focusing on urban living are “Classic Six:” New York City Apartment
Building Living, 1880s‐1910s and Photographic Negatives of the New York City
Tenement House Department, 1902‐1914.

The Encyclopedia of Chicago presents considerable materials from the online archives
of the Chicago History Museum, and the Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy:
1921‐1929 is available online from the the Chicago Historical Society.

The excellent online resources of the Library of Congress include a collection

of Panoramic Maps of cities and towns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Two of the best business history archives in the United States are the Hagley Museum and
Library in Wilmington, Delaware and the Baker Library of the Harvard Business School.
Search these excellent online resources at Hagley Digital Exhibits and at the Harvard
Library Digital Collections.

American businesses, including those that go as far back as this period, tend to restrict
access to their archives by outsiders for legal reasons. Even if you can see materials that
no historian has seen before, there is a good chance that these materials will not be
processed, which will make using them much harder. Therefore, many studies of
industrialization on the ground during this era center on the few large companies whose
records are available. These include the McCormick-International Harvester
Collection curated by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, or the Colorado Fuel and
Iron Company archives of the Steelworks Center of the West, Pueblo, Colorado.

Further Reading
Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the
Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998.Find this resource:
Chandler, Alfred D., Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American
Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977.Find this resource:
Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W.
Norton, 1991.Find this resource:
Hayden, Dolores. Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000. New
York: Random House, 2003.Find this resource:
Hays, Samuel P. The Response to Industrialism 1885–1914. 2d ed. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995.Find this resource: