Study of Civilization Texts 

; Academic Year 2022/23

American Industrial Revolution : from British Imitation to Fordism and World

Domination of the American System

American Industrialization has long been considered a successful experience, to such an extent that
Fordism, a term coined after industrialist Henry Ford, describes the industrial mode of mass
production , organization and distribution that dominated the world economy down to the last
decades of the twentieth century. Yet, the beginnings of American industrialization in a spatially
expanding America dominated by Agrarianism were difficult. While the Civil War stymied the
agrarian forces, these remained powerful, displaying their power each time American faced
economic depression and (temporarily?) acknowledging defeat only after WWII. As was the case in
Britain, American industrialization went through two different phases, with America imposing its
system on the rest of the world, after bringing rivals such as Germany, Japan and Russia down on
their knees with the help of Britain.

A.The First Phase of American Industrialization(1789-1860): Using and Improving the British Mode
of Production

Industrialization took off in the mercantile North East with financial and commercial expertise and
with close cultural and economic ties to Britain. The end of the slave trade and the decline of the
West Indies sugar plantations put an end to profitable commercial exchanges between the North
East and the West Indies, pushing the US region to look for other sources of profit. Culturally, the
Protestant North East, like most British industrialists, had a hard working, penurious and highly
individualistic Protest ethic which, according to the German sociologist Max Weber, promotes hard
work together with capital investment and accumulation. From its very outset, however, New
England industrialization, went further as it had a tradition of innovation, skilled immigration and a
taste for change unchecked by past and history.

a.Improving Production, Organization and Distribution in industrial NorthEast: Standardization and

Interchangeable Parts, Integration and Specialization, Marketing and Advertising in the NorthEast

While the Cabot brothers are said to have started the first American textile Industrial venture in
Massachusetts(1787), Samuel Slater, a British immigrant who brought the British textile technology
to the North East(1789) is said to have given American Industrialization its solid foundations. Under
his impulse, wool carding mills were established in the first decade of the nineteenth century along
the Blackstone River running from Massachusetts to Rhode Island. With capital built on the first
public stock offering in America, the Boston Manufactory Company at Waltham (founded by Francis
Cabot Lowell in 1810) was a fundamental innovator in American industrial capitalism. Emerging in
the wake of the War of 1812, which made imports impossible and during which goods had to be
produced locally, the American manufacturing belt ,which on its outset included New England and
the Mid Atlantic states, extended to the MidWest in the 1840S.

This early phase of American industrialization did not content itself with borrowing from Britain. It
quickly developed production, organizational and distribution methods which proved its superiority
to its British counterpart. First mechanization was continuous due to the inventiveness of its
engineers. Standardization, and the use of interchangeable spare parts, both worked out by Eli

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Whitney, were soon adopted in factories. Early marketing and advertising methods pointed at the
commercial past of the East coast very soon confronted with the challenges of distribution. With a
high rate of literacy and brought up in an atmosphere of change, the American workers and buyers
were open to such innovations.

b.The Importance of Transportation.: Long Rivers and and State-Built Canals

Much like the British mills, the American workshops were built near rivers to facilitate the supply of
raw materials and the sending of finished products. Furthermore, canals were built to ship the
merchandise, the best known being the Erie canal(1825) on the East West route. Joining the Atlantic
to the Great Lakes, Hudson river with Erie lake, New York with Buffalo, it opened the Midwest to
East Coast finished products and brought Western agricultural products to the East Coast. Metal
work, finished agricultural goods such as cheese, milk, flour or butter were extensively produced and
shipped through canals which increasingly used the steam boat. The latter became the most popular
means of transportation down American rivers and canals. Contrary to Britain, the railroad was used
only in the late 1840S, when it transported passengers to the expanding frontier, facilitated contact
with distant places and prevented transshipping or the use of several means of transportation, which
could damage increasingly fragile consumer goods.

c.The Canal System, Tariffs and the B.U.S. as Causes of Dissension between Industrial North and
Agrarian South

Up to Jackson’s election in 1828, the Federal Government, led by the Democratic Republicans,
played an important role in the development of industrialization. The canal system was financed by
the State of New York with Federal money, that is funds collected from the different US states to
whom it was explained that it provided mutual profit for both Industrial North and Agrarian South.
Protective tariffs, making foreign products more expensive than local ones together with the
founding of the BUS (Bank of the United State) a private body ,which provided capital for
industrialists and made the dollar stable, further boosted industrialization.

On the other hand, the Southern States objected to the Democratic Republican defense of
industrialization, declaring that, while protective tariffs impeded Southern cotton exports to Britain ,
the canal system was of no use to them. Jackson’s access to power in 1828 reversed the trend from
East Coast to the Agrarian cotton breeding South which depended on slavery and cotton exports to
Britain. During the Jacksonian era, which lasted until 1860, industrialization faced deep political
hostility which led to the Civil War,to the defeat of the agrarian slave South and to the second phase
of the US Industrial Revolution.

B. The Second Phase of the Industrial Revolution: Moving from the Biggest Agrarian Nation to the
Biggest Industrial Nation(1860-1914)

The Civil War boosted industrialization as the US army needed weapons, clothes, food and
ammunitions. This economic boom took place on the East Coast , the Mid Atlantic states and the
MidWest when the South was destroyed and the West still largely unsettled. The Civil War was also
the background against which the second phase of industrialization was set up by the adoption of
such pivotal laws as the Homestead Act(1862), which settled the West with miners, cattleraisers and
farmers, by providing each family man with 160 Acres of land, the Pacific Railway Act(1862-1864)

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which joined the East Coast with the West Coast through the Transcontinental Railroad and the
Morrill Agricultural Land-Grant Colleges Act (1862) which encouraged education, agricultural
research and ‘Mechanical Arts” , modernizing them with scientific methods and approaches. The
latter act gave birth to colleges, research laboratories and experimental stations, founded by both
private companies( such as Dupont, Ford, Graham Bell and Edison) and Federal government.

a. Fiercely Competing with Germany: the Steel and Chemical Industries

The railroad started a huge steel industry whose production and quality outpassed that of other
industrial centers in the world. Using the Bessemer process, owing to the purity of the American iron
ore, the US steel industry allowed US engineers and inventors in all fields to use stronger metal for
their specific needs. Suspension bridges, such as the Brooklyn bridge, skyscrapers, which became
emblematic of the US, together with more familiar items such as telegraph lines and telephone
cables, railways, wheels, brakes and increasingly heavier machines were produced in ever bigger
factories using continuously improved machine tools which produced more precise spare parts. Big
production made for cheaper prices and exports of American industrial products to all countries of
the world.

Under the impulse of DuPont Company and the Dow Chemical Company , American chemical
industry managed to challenge Germany, the world leader in that field. Worked out by Herbert
Henry Dow in 1891, the Dow process ,which extracted Bromine from brine electrolytically ,was
widely used in medicine and the emerging photograph industry. Dow had previously found a cheap
way of extracting caustic soda out of sodium and therefore to fabricate domestic products such as
soap, detergents and paper at a lower cost. During WWI, the Dow Company developed chemicals for
incendiary weapons, The synthetic explosive market, however, was dominated by Du Pont Company
who provided engineers, tunnel makers, miners builders and the army with a wide variety of
synthetic explosives such as dynamite and nytroglycerin. In 1910 DuPont research laboratories
turned to the synthetic fabrication of non explosives such as cellulose, dyes and lacquers. In the
early decades of the twentieth century, from nylon to Teflon, its plastic polymers dominated the
world of chemistry. Dow and DuPont merged in 2017, giving birth to the biggest world chemical
company, the DowDuPont Company.

b. The Car and Electricity Industries: America’s Contribution to the Industrial Revolution

While all industrialized countries counted electricity inventors, the electric industry was first
developed in the US which built on European inventions or benefited from the works of skilled
immigrants(such as British Graham Bell and Serbian Michael Pupin). Therefore George
Westinghouse and William Stanley’s alternating current(1877), which prevented electric cables
from taking fire , completed Belgian Zénobe Gramme’s dynamo. While the incandescent lamp was
invented by Belgian Marcellin Jobard and improved by British Warren de la Rue, Thomas Edison’s
cheaper incandescent lamp became an instant success in cities, factories and homes. The electric
industry was concentrated in the North East and was quickly dominated by General Electric who held
close ties with the Bell Telephone Company. Electricity was produced industrially through coal,
hydroelectricity, which used the Niagara Falls(1895) and, later, by electric generators

Although the first cars were produced industrially by German engineer Carl Benz(1887) ,the
American car industry, like its American electric counterpart, soon symbolized US industrial

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superiority in the world. The first American car was designed by Charles and Frank Duryea
( 1892).Using the internal-combustion engine invented by German Nikolaus Otto, it was not
financially profitable and therefore ignored by investors. Ford’s genius allowed him to design a
simplified model which , while using the internal-combustion engine, was produced cheaply. In
1908, his factory produced the legendary Model T which almost every American could afford,
making the automobile part of American life and later” putting the world on its wheels.” By 1913
Ford made half the American cars thanks to the first moving assembly line which improved on the
assembly line by rolling standardized parts of the car to work stations, that is lines of workers
specialized in a specific operation of the whole assembling process required to make a car. Ford’s
methods of saving time, effort and material followed the tenets of Taylorism which believed in the
scientific management of work, herein studying ways of producing more at lowest human and
financial costsThe moving assembly line, which allowed the mass production of cars, put America at
the head of the world car industry.

c.Henry Ford: the Father of the American System

Henry Ford, revolutionized the American economy by considering that workers had to be paid,
trained and treated well in order to sustain economic prosperity by turning then hard workers and
good consumers. A firm believer in education, he founded schools, the trade schools, which taught
various technological skills through experience and issued diplomas which the workers could use for
higher wages and for buying more goods. Ford further provided health care, housing and even
entertaining facilities which he thought would make his workers happier and therefore more
productive. Ford’s concern with workers’ well-being was gradually adopted by other corporations,
giving birth to a new welfare civilization which put material comfort and consumerism above
everything else.

Ford further improved on the corporate organization that characterized American industrialization in
the eyes of the world. The corporate system, worked out as early as the 1850s to organize the
railroad industry, integrated individual companies into bigger units which could more easily control
prices, raw materiasl supplies and distribution chains in an increasingly competitive environment.
The corporations contained specialized departments , each concerned with a specific business line ,
such as production, shipping, marketing, advertising, sales or staff. Being anonymous companies,
with capital gathered from numerous shareholders, they were run not by one person but by an
administration board of directors representing the biggest shareholders and whose decisions were
collective. The corporations ushered in a managerial era based on competence and knowledge as
departments were run by managers hired for their skills and not for their investment in the
company. Aware that raw materials, shipping and other supply and distribution chains could be
disrupted and therefore check production, he developed the principle of vertical integration along
which his corporation bought mines, railroad, chainstores to control the whole process of car
production. Moreover, convinced that sales were boosted by workers, he added socially oriented
departments such as a sociology department, a social department and English school, a health
department and an education department to his company.

American prosperity and dynamism depended on cheap food which grew out of the steel and
chemical industries. Canned food, put in rust-proof metal boxes, and refrigeration allowed meat and
other perishable goods to be shipped from one end of the country to the other and to be preserved

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for a long time. In fact, farms became huge, technologically advanced and scientifically managed
factories, yielding an ever bigger amount of milk , dairy products, vegetables and fruits.

This lecture has not said everything about American Industrialization. Students are strongly
advised to read and view the following resources in order to complete their knowledge of this
event.

1. Look up the terms, expressions and proper names in bold in Wikipedia

2. Written resources:

“Analysis of Henry Ford’s Contribution to Production and Management”

file:///C:/Users/hp/AppData/Local/Temp/04_462_Tomac_et_al.pdf

“What Accounts for the US Ascendency to Economic Superpower by the Early Twentieth Century:
The Morrill Act-Human Capital Hypothesis”

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/697512

3. Audio-Visual Resources

“The American Industrial Revolution”

“Andrew Carnegie, the Law of Competition”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZlgPco_3YY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYmrBmf3wI0