Group items tagged

75-90 labor-hours required to produce 100 bushels of corn (2-1/2 acres)

35-40 labor-hours required to produce 100 bushels (2-1/2 acres) of corn with 2-bottom gang plow, disk and peg-tooth harrow, and 2-row planter

with walking plow, harrow, and hand planting

About

15-20 labor-hours required to produce 100 bushels (2-1/2 acres) of corn with 2-bottom gang plow, 7-foot tandem disk, 4-section harrow, and 2-row planters, cultivators, and pickers

1860 the North had approximately 1.3 million industrial workers, whereas the South had 110,000, and northern factories manufactured nine-tenths of the industrial goods produced in the United States.

1850, 20 percent of all southern white adults could not read or write, while the illiteracy rate in New England was less than half of 1 percent.

1850, 17 percent of the farming population held two-thirds of all acres in the rich cotton-growing regions of the South.

Louisiana, for example, nearly half of all rural white families owned no land. During the 1850s, the percentage of the total white population owning slaves declined significantly. By 1860, the proportion of whites holding slaves had fallen from about one-third to one-fourth.

The Plantation Legend

the South was, in reality, a diverse and complex region

large parts of the South were unsuitable for plantation life

Unlike the slave societies of the Caribbean, which produced crops exclusively for export, the South devoted much of its energy to raising food and livestoc

Piedmont, Tidewater, coastal plain, piney woods, Delta, Appalachian Mountains, upcountry, and a fertile black belt--regions that clashed repeatedly over such political questions as debt relief, taxes, apportionment of representation, and internal improvements.

Large slaveholders were extremely rare. In 1860 only 11,000 Southerners, three-quarters of one percent of the white population owned more than 50 slaves; a mere 2,358 owned as many as 100 slaves. However, although large slaveholders were few in number, they owned most of the South’s slaves. Over half of all slaves lived on plantations with 20 or more slaves and a quarter lived on plantations with more than 50 slaves.

These slaveowners were a diverse lot. A few were African American, mulatto, or Native American; one-tenth were women; and more than one in ten worked as artisans, businesspeople, or merchants rather than as farmers or planters. Few led lives of leisure or refinement.

The average slaveowner lived in a log cabin rather than a mansion and was a farmer rather than a planter. The average holding varied between four and six slaves, and most slaveholders possessed no more than five.

The southern economy generated enormous wealth and was critical to the economic growth of the entire United States. Well over half of the richest 1 percent of Americans in 1860 lived in the South. Even more important, southern agriculture helped finance early 19th century American economic growth. Before the Civil War, the South grew 60 percent of the world’s cotton, provided over half of all U.S. export earnings, and furnished 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Cotton exports paid for a substantial share of the capital and technology that laid the basis for America’s industrial revolution.

revolutions in American industry

Technological innovations

national investments

slashed the costs of production and distribution

National credit agencies

Taylorism

Frederick Taylor

Taylorism increased the scale and scope of manufacturing and allowed for the flowering of mass production.

use of interchangeable parts in Civil War–era weapons manufacturing

sewing machines

packers’ “disassembly” lines

grain reapers

Duke cigarette rollers

Henry Ford made the assembly line famous

Cyrus McCormick

Industrialization and mass production pushed the United States into the forefront of the world

massive economies of scale

New industrial companies therefore hungered for markets to keep their high-volume production facilities operating

A new class of managers—comprising what one prominent economic historian called the “visible hand”—operated between the worlds of workers and owners

between 1898 and 1902, a wave of mergers rocked the American economy

Industrial capitalism realized the greatest advances in efficiency and productivity

But it also created millions of low-paid, unskilled, unreliable jobs with long hours and dangerous working conditions

new ideas arose to bestow moral legitimacy upon them

One of Darwin’s greatest popularizers, the British sociologist and biologist Herbert Spencer, applied Darwin’s theories to society and popularized the phrase survival of the fittest.

H. L. Mencken wrote in 1907. “All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to uplift the weak.”11

By the time Mencken wrote those words, the ideas of social Darwinism had spread among wealthy Americans and their defenders

American workers toiled in difficult jobs for long hours and little pay. Mechanization and mass production threw skilled laborers into unskilled positions

skyrocketing rents trapped families in crowded slums.

Strikes ruptured American industry throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Knights of Labor enjoyed considerable success in the early 1880s

It welcomed all laborers,

In the summer of 1886, the campaign for an eight-hour day,

culminated in a national strike on May 1, 1886.

The deaths of the Chicago policemen sparked outrage across the nation, and the sensationalization of the Haymarket Riot helped many Americans to associate unionism with radicalism

Labor leaders and radicals called for a protest at Haymarket Square

The American Federation of Labor (AFL) emerged as a conservative alternative to the vision of the Knights of Labor. An alliance of craft unions (unions composed of skilled workers), the AFL rejected the Knights’ expansive vision of a “producerist” economy and advocated “pure and simple trade unionism,” a program that aimed for practical gains (higher wages, fewer hours, and safer conditions) through a conservative approach that tried to avoid strikes.

Homestead, Pennsylvania.

Henry Clay Frick

Pinkerton detectives,

1894, workers in George Pullman’s Pullman car factories struck when he cut wages by a quarter but kept rents and utilities in his company town constant. The American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene Debs, launched a sympathy strike: the ARU would refuse to handle any Pullman cars on any rail line anywhere in the country.

workers were not the only ones struggling to stay afloat in industrial America. American farmers also lashed out against the inequalities of the Gilded Age and denounced political corruption for enabling economic theft.