In his book A Shopkeepers Millenium, Paul E. Johnson tells of a settlement in early 1800s Western New York called Rochester, an inland, water-powered town which thrived by dint of mercantilism, trade, and supplying manufacturing goods for nearby towns and travelers passing through. Rochester’s mills made it famous, and commerce thrived in Rochester because it had goods that were in high demand. Rochester’s settlers were wealthy men, and maintained this by carefully courting wealthy women or having their family members marry into wealth. In the late 1820’s, Rochester succumbed to public drunkenness, debauchery, and an uncontrolled lower class. Johnson argues that the evangelical revival during the winter of 1931 was a reaction to dissolution …show more content…
Workers, who had traditionally lived with their masters in what was a very common social contract, began to work in prototypical assembly lines, where the manufacturing of a good lay in the hands of men in varying professions. Johnson uses the business of a shoemaking as an example of this stark change in business practices. In 1831, one shoemaker reported that ”most of the work” was done in boardinghouses. (39) By 1834, there existed distinct locations for the different steps used to manufacture shoes. Contractors in Rochester came to realize that making unique houses was inefficient and costly. Contractors began producing house frames with similar architecture very prolificly, and another group of men would build upon the house. The uprising of mercantilism in Rochester, according to Johnson, was a key player in dissociating worker from master. When masters realized that there was money in selling the goods made by multiple, separate workers at a profit, the definition of a “skilled craft” changed. No longer was a master limited to working with what he was skilled at. He could amass a workforce to make a product for him, and working men came out of contact with the final product. (41) As mentioned earlier, workers typically lived with their masters. In doing so they adopted the rules, tenets, and ideals of their masters. Masters in 1820’s Rochester were typically religious men who kept their workers in moral check. When masters physically distanced themselves from workers, usually by separating the management and work sections of a business, workers were put under less
Though the Industrial Revolution was supposed to bring an easier lifestyle to the world, however in reality only gave factory owners a chance to increase the amount of product they could produce within a shorter amount of time, and this prompted them to hire people desperate enough for jobs who would be paid in small sums of money to produce large amounts of product. Camelot on the Merrimack, this title is ironic, for Lowell was no fairy tale “Camelot.” For the girls, life in the textile factories was unmitigated
The southern revivals settled the arrangements of authority some of them declared interest of some evangelicals to race and the bitterness of the slavery.During the 1830, the s...
Johnson, through the revival, shows a growing Protestant influence within Rochester, New York. Charles Finney came, Bible in hand, proclaiming that the Millennium was in reach, but only through the efforts of the willing: this was a revival for social ch...
Sam Patch’s father, who was a drunkard, exhausted all his family fortune, and in 1807 the Patches moved to the mill village of Pawtucket. This was a climactic moment in their history because it marked their passage out of the family economy and into the labor market. This caused the Patches to be dependent on factory owners for a job. Factory spinners, including Sam Patch, were people with a lot of pride and dignity. Before 1820, most spinners in New England mills were emigrants from the factory towns of Lancashire England. They were veterans who knew that their skills were essential, and they commanded respect (Johnson 23). Industrialization brought with it urbanization or city growth but it had an unintended consequence of creating massive wealth gaps between the rich people and the working class people.
The Industrial Revolution in America began to develop in the mid-eighteen hundreds after the Civil War. Prior to this industrial growth the work force was mainly based in agriculture, especially in the South (“Industrial Revolution”). The advancement in machinery and manufacturing on a large scale changed the structure of the work force. Families began to leave the farm and relocate to larger settings to work in the ever-growing industries. One area that saw a major change in the work force was textile manufacturing. Towns in the early nineteen hundreds were established around mills, and workers were subjected to strenuous working conditions. It would take decades before these issues were addressed. Until then, people worked and struggled for a life for themselves and their families. While conditions were harsh in the textile industry, it was the sense of community that sustained life in the mill villages.
In the 1830s, clerks were adolescent boys who traveled to New York to learn the business trade. Most clerks came from middle-class families who could not spare the expense to send all of their sons to college but could afford to release them into the world of work. The young boys clerked in assorted commercial businesses and shops “earning at most $4 per week” (Cohen, 111) and accumulated several hundred dollars a year. Clerks were aspiring to become journeymen who earned “$10 to $12 a week” (Cohen, 111) and possibly have their own shop or mercantile business one day. “By day they penned letters, measured cloth, swept stores, sold to customers, or perhaps kept the books” and by night the experienced their newfound independence on the city streets and in its saloons and brothels.
consciousness of artisans in New York City during the Jacksonian period. (pp. 14 & 25) The pre-industrial revolutions of the 1800s provided many avenues of employment for masters, journeymen, and laborers; however, the transformation of a merchant capitalist economy provided for many masters to subdivide labor. (pp. 113) Contracted work caused a rift in the structure of the old artisanal class. Masters no longer needed to employ apprentices since they hired out separate tradesmen for the...
A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, Authored by, Paul E Johnson in 1978, conveys the idea of the changing routes in trade, due to the efficiency of Eerie Canal, and the splitting political efforts from "The Elites", farmers turned business entrepreneurs, attempting to control the reformation movements until the religious revivals of Charles Finney, introduced a patriarchy style leadership to control the social and moral lives of the people in the city of Rochester. The author presents his narrative as more of a case study of the social, political, economic and religious development of the Middle Class Society in New York, evident by the brilliant use of information gathered from church records, economic registers, and political documents. There is a very interesting aspect that can be extracted from the narrative, specifically the separation of church and state. Were the “Elites” of Rochester of 1830, in violation of the first amendment of the US Constitution that became effective in 1789?
Dorsett, Lyle W. Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America. Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans Pub, 1991.
Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
During the nineteenth century, Europe had made its way into an age of industrialization, Great Britain being the leader, making progress to resemble the modern era. With the new innovations and technologies, profits soared and industries thrived, but the laboring class had suffered at the cost of modern industry. Before factories started rising all over Europe, and even before the establishment of factories solely near a water source, the “factories” of that time were in the homes of rural laborers, engaged in the putting-out system in which they manufactured textiles in the comforts of their own homes. However, when these new factories had opened, the putting-out system was no match for the factories that were producing goods ten times faster than the production in the homes of rural people. Being forced to move into the urban cities, workers came to the realization that they did not enjoy the environment and conditions of the factories because of the disadvantages they imposed in comparison to working at home. In addition to these problems, much of Europe had just recovered from
Since factories started to incorporate machines through industrialization, the required long hours were not needed anymore. The working class wanted to have more freedom away from their jobs. “They also desired more free time to rest, eat their dinners, enjoy conversations and drink beer” (Green 162). Since the rest of America was enjoying freedom, the working class wanted to have a part in it as well. The idea of not being dependent on their wages, was extremely important to the working class at this time. Also with factories mainly supplying unskilled work, skilled workers started to feel degraded in their proud craft. “By the same token, proud American and European craftsmen viewed other forms of unskilled or menial labor as degrading” (Green 107). Although factories allowed their skilled workers to keep their jobs, they expected them to take a pay cut. Also with the pay cut, the skilled workers were forced to give up the skilled work that they took pride in. With workers becoming frustrated with not having freedom and, skilled workers not being treated fairly unions were
O’Donnell who was with his company for eleven years, would lose their jobs to a machine who could do the job quicker or to a worker who would work for a lower wage, like young boys or immigrants. O’Donnell described how men would gather to be picked for work in the mill and the men with young boys to serve as “back-boys” always got picked first because they could do the work faster and the young boys worked for $.30 or $.40 a day as opposed to the $1.50 O’Donnell usual took home for a day’s work. He also described how it didn’t take a skilled worker like himself to operate the new ring-spinners that expedited the cotton spinning process. But skilled workers and laborers weren’t the only ones who were “under the plating” of the Gilded Age. In Document 19-2, women described the struggles of working as domestic servants. Many women went to work during the late 19th century to help out their families in this time of financial anguish. Many took up jobs as domestic
Economy in the sense of jobs, labor systems, industrialization, and social classes. Why was there a call for such mass production of goods? The need of hundreds of workers, and the inhumane conditions put upon these workers commonly led to their death? Americas movement into a consumer culture pushed for a new way of life. Instead of making things for themselves, they wanted to buy things for themselves. Therefore businesses needed a way to make enough products at a low enough cost so that people could buy them. This therefore led to employers hiring hundreds of workers that got paid very little. By doing so, it provided a way for businesses to produce and provide cheaply. As discussed in the textbook, workers commonly quit due to the awful labor systems that were like a “scene that resembled hell” (Roark, Johnson, Cohen, Stage, Hartmann). The textbook expands on these work conditions, and how the employers may choose to pay their workers less at any given time. It is no wonder that so much of the population was in poverty. The survival of many families depended on contributions from each family member, this is known as the family
Dunnes Stores is an indigenous, family owned Irish Company. The Company is a retailer in both the food and textile market who work around the principle of providing competitive prices, high quality products and a vast variety of choices. The company’s motto of “Better Value” looks to draw in all these principles together.