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Mechanization and Work in the American Shoe Industry: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1852–1883

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

William H. Mulligan Jr
William H. Mulligan Jr
Affiliation:
Assistant to the Director of the Regional Economic History Research Center, Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation, Wilmington, DE 19807
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Abstract

Between 1852 and 1883 the nature and organization of work in the American shoe industry changed due to the introduction of machinery and the factory system. For generations before 1852 shoes had been made by hand in small workshops organized through a putting out system. Each artisan possessed the skill and tools to make an entire shoe by hand, and work was intertwined with family life. With the introduction of machinery, making a shoe was divided into many distinct tasks, each performed by a different worker, and work was moved into a factory where it came under closer supervision.

Type
Papers Presented at the Fortieth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , March 1981 , pp. 59 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1981

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References

1 Lewis, Alonzo, The History of Lynn (Boston, 1829 and subsequent editions);Google ScholarHazard, Blanche Evans, The Organization of the Boot and Shoe Industry in Massachusetts before 1875 (Cambridge, MA, 1921).Google ScholarThe other studies of Lynn include Dawley, Alan, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, MA, 1976);Google ScholarFaler, Paul, “Cultural Aspects of the Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts Shoemakers and Industrial Morality, 1826–1860,” Labor History, 15 (1974), 367–96;Google ScholarFaler, Paul, “Workingmen, Mechanics and Social Change: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1800–1860,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1971.Google Scholar My own research on family life among Lynn artisans is developed in “The Transmission of Skill in the Shoe Industry: From Family to Factory Training in Lynn, Massachusetts, 1800–1920,” in Quimby, Ian M. G., ed., The Craftsman in Early America (New York, forthcoming);Google Scholar and my dissertation, “The Family and Technological Change: The Shoe. makers of Lynn, Massachusetts during the Transition from Hand to Machine Labor,” Clark University, in progress.Google Scholar

2 A good description of the operation of this system is in Johnson, David Newhall, Sketches of Lynn, or the Changes of Fifty Years (Lynn, 1880).Google Scholar See also Hall, John Philip, “The Gentle Craft: A Narrative of Yankee Shoemakers,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1953.Google Scholar

3 Hazard, Organization; Johnson, Sketches of Lynn; and Bryant, Seth, Shoe and Leather Trade of the Last Hundred Years (Boston, 1891).Google Scholar

4 This process is discussed in my “Mechanizing the Gentle Craft: The Introduction of Machinery into the Lynn, Massachusetts Shoe Industry, 1852–1883, ” in Proceedings of the Lowell Conference on Industrial History (Lowell, MA, forthcoming); Hazard, Organization;Google ScholarThompson, Ross D., “The Origin of Modem Industry in the United States: The Mechanization of Shoe and Sewing Machine Production,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1976.Google Scholar

5 Hazard, Organization; Bryant, Shoe and Leather Trade; Burt, E. W., The Shoe-Craft: Its Organization (Boston, 1917);Google ScholarAllen, Frederick J., The Shoe Industry (New York, 1922);Google ScholarGannon, Fred A., A Short History of American Shoemaking (n.p., 1912); and many of the sources cited above.Google Scholar

6 The increasing dominance of New England in the shoe industry is clear from Hirsch, Susan E., “Industrialization and Skilled Workers: Newark 1826 to 1860,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1974,Google Scholar and Galster, Augusta E., The Labor Movement in the Shoe Industry with Special Reference to Philadelphia (New York, 1924). The work of Billy G. Smith on living standards among Philadelphia artisans and that of Robert Sean Wilentz on New York artisans indicates that New England dominance was having a depressing effect on the shoe trade of those cities before 1800.Google Scholar

7 I have examined all Lynn Directories from 1832 through 1865.

8 The richest single source of career histories is the obituaries published in the Register of the Lynn Historical Society, 1 (1897).Google Scholar

9 Roe, Joseph W., The Mechanical Equipment, Factory Management Course, Industrial Extension Institute, vol. 9 (New York, 1922).Google Scholar

10 Newhall, Howard Mudge, “A Pair of Shoes,” Harpers' New Monthly Magazine (January 1885), 273–89.Google Scholar