The Industrial Revolution in Retrospect

The Industrial Revolution was the shift from hand machine products to machine or factory made ones. It began England in the early 1700s. It spread first from England to America and Continental Europe and eventually to the entire world. The peak in England was in the 1800s. The Industrial Revolution involved all classes and even created new ones such as an upper class of factory and landowners, an upper – middle class of entrepreneurs, factory managers and merchants and a working class of factory and domestic workers. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the majority of the people held agricultural jobs. After the Industrial Revolution, the majority of people worked in the textile industry, or in a factory. The Industrial Revolution ultimately benefited society and individuals more then it harmed them because, over time, unions were formed,better working conditions were instilled and child labor was stopped.

Eventually the Industrial Revolution led to many improvements in working and living conditions. Upset factory workers banded together and formed unions. Sally Mitchell wrote a document on Victorian England. In it she acknowledged that “In the 1870s, unionized factory workers were able to reduce their work to fifty-four or fifty-six hours …; by 1900 miners and some other well-organized workers were getting close to a eight-hour day or a forty-four hour week.” Unions began to bring an end to the workers’ awful life. Union members began receiving lower working hours. They attained this by using collective bargaining and strikes. Domestic workers, such as house servants and other white-collar employees remained scattered and unable to join together. They still endured long irregular hours for low pay. Roger Beck also acknowledged this fact while writing an educational history textbook. He wrote, “They unions bargained for better working conditions and higher pay. If factory owners refused these demands, union members could strike…” Unions helped shift the balance of power more in favor of the workers over the owners. They gave the workers something to barter with. The unions could, and did improve the conditions of working in factories and mines. Other workers had no need for unions, as their holdings were already satisfactory. One kind Samaritan lived in the late-1800s and early-1900s. Her name was Jane Adams, and when she graduated from college she was unsure what to do with her life. One document quotes her as saying that she “gradually became convinced that it would be a good thing to rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive and actual needs are found…” She went on to found a boarding house that eventually grew to include a gym, nursery and kitchen. One lucky girl, Mary Paul, was able to work and live in a similar establishment during the 1800s. In 1846 Mary Paul wrote a letter expressing her pleasure at working in a factory. “... I have a very good boarding place, have enough to eat…I think that the factory is the very best place for me.” Mary worked in a Massachusetts textile factory. She was truly happy with her situation. Many reformers would have been concernedabout her education, or lack thereof. One important U.S. reformer, named Horace Mann, believed in “free public education for all children.” (Roger Beck, 1999) He worked with many other reformers to attain this goal. By 1850 numerous states began to form a system of public schools and in Western Europe it was made available in the late 1800s. This allowed the poor and working class people to become educated and have a chance to move up. To them, it was priceless. Evenduring the Industrial Revolution, the standards of life were not as awful as portrayed and eventually all people came to have a high standard of high-quality living and working conditions.

At it’s beginning, the Industrial Revolution did cause the deaths of many people, although sometimes indirectly. The new technology lost four thousand men their jobs. “…How are these men … to provide for their families?” (J.F.C. Harrison, 1786) Men forced out of jobs frequently starved to death, repeatedly taking their family with them. Men lost jobs because they were not needed for as much of the labor as before. A machine given twelve hours “could do as much as ten men with the same amount of time.” (J.F.C. Harrison, 1786) Men lost their jobs and had few options as to how to survive. Friedrich Engels, a Londoner during the Industrial Revolution, knew that if a man cannot find work, “he can steal, unless he is afraid of the police; or he can go hungry and then the police will see to it that he will die in such a way as to not disturb…the middle classes.” Friedrich Engels meant that the government was unconcerned about the deaths of the lower classes, so long as the higher classes were unaffected. Stealing was a popular alternative to starving. (And rightly so.) Children were not exempt from the conditions of lower class life. Child labor was completely legal and unregulated during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In 1842, Parliament created a commission to investigate child labor. Eleven-year-old Ellison Jack mentioned this in her testimony. “ I have been working below three years…father takes me down at two in the morning and I come up at one and two the next afternoon.” Ellison had worked in the mines since age eight. Ellison worked eight hours a day underground inhaling all that coal dust. Ellison most likely would have contracted lung cancer or black lung before she turned twenty and would have died shortly after that. Thankfully, by 1904, reformers began to fight against child labor. The U.S took a little longer to agree. Children worked in factories until the early 1900s and were often maimed or killed by moving parts. Nevertheless, “The Supreme Court in 1919 had objected to a federal child labor law.” (Roger Beck, 1999) Laissez faire, or the idea the government should not interfere with businesses, was very prominent during the Industrial Revolution. It made many governments reluctant to regulate working ages or interfere with the workings of a factory. Additionally many cities were poorly constricted due to “lack of good brick, the absence of building codes, and the lack of machinery for public sanitation.” (Professor Gerhard Rempel) The working class section of a town would have had less access to proper building materials then the richer part of town. Factory owners viewed their workers as living machines and treated them like such. Factory owners did not want to spend extra money insuring the safety and well being of their human resources. The immediate affects of the Industrial Revolution resulted in the deaths of many people in ways such as taking their jobs away and causing them to starve, by the mistreatment and abuse of the poor by higher social classes, and lack of good housing for the poor.

The Industrial Revolution both helped and hindered society, but eventually, the positive effects began to be recognized. Working conditions were bad, but these conditions caused workers to join together in unions to change them. Employees were originally helpless against their employers. They created unions to help even the balance of power. The unsupervised working conditions caused the unions to rebel. The unions fought back against their employers to obtain the better working conditions available in most of the world today. In addition several shocking practices were engaged more frequently than before, one of which was child labor. If child labor had not been thrust so far into prominence, governments would not have viewed it as a problem and child labor could still be legal today. Instead, governments began investigating child labor and then introduced a series of reforms that led to its demise. Many people did die as a result of the Industrial Revolution, but their deaths urged the survivors to create unions, improved working conditions and an end to child labor. The Industrial Revolution eventually helped society.

Bibliography:

Adams, Jane in Beck, Roger et al. Modern World History. Evanston: McDougal Little, 1999.

Beck, Roger et al. Modern World History. Evanston: McDougal Little, 1999.

Engels, Friedrich. Conditions of the Working Class in England. Leipzig, 1845.

Harrison, J.F.C. Society and Politics in England, 1780 – 1960. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.

Jack, Ellison in Beck, Roger et al. Modern World History. Evanston: McDougal Little, 1999.

Mitchell, Sally. Daily Life in Victorian England. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Paul, Mary. Letter to her father. Massachusetts, 1846.

Rempel, Gerhard Prof. “The Industrial Revolution” Western New England College