Innovations
QUESTION
Industrialization improved the political, social, and economic quality of life of the American farmer and
industrial worker between 1875 and 1910.
Assess the validity of this statement using the documents and your knowledge of the period.
Document A
Quote from a business owner
Source: Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Thirteenth Annual Report, 1883.
I regard my people as I regard my machinery. So long as they do my work for what I
choose to pay them, I keep them, getting out of them all I can. What they do or how
they fare outside my walls I don’t know, nor do I consider it my business to know. They
must look out for themselves as I do for myself.
Document B
Machinery and the price of goods
Source: Carrol D. Wright, Influences of Machinery on Labor, 1886.
A pound of cotton, costing at the time this calculation was made but 13 cents, has been
developed into muslin which sold in the market for 80 cents, and into chintz which
sold for $4. Seventy-five cents’ worth of common iron ore has been developed into $5
worth of bar-iron, or into $10 worth of horse-shoes, or into $180 worth of table knives,
or into $6,800 worth of fine needles, or into $29,480 worth of shirt buttons, or $200,000
worth of watch-springs, or $400,000 worth of hair-springs, and the same quantity of
common iron ore can be made into $2,500,000 worth of pallet arbors.
Document C
Quote from a Pullman laborer, 1883
We are born in a Pullman house. We are fed from a Pullman shop, taught in a Pullman
school, catechized in the Pullman church and when we die we shall be buried in a
Pullman cemetery and go to a Pullman hell.
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Innovations
Document D
1896 Election Map
Document E
Growth of a mill between 1881 and 1901
Source: Yearbook of Advanced Threshing Machinery, no.22, Battle Creek, Michigan, 1908–09
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Innovations
Document F
Catalog advertisement for new cotton planter
Source: Cole Manufacturing Company Catalog, 1910–23.
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Innovations
Document G
Immigration and the standard of living
Source: Leonard Dinnerstein, Roger L. Nichols, and David M. Reimers, Natives and Strangers: A Multicultural History of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 220-21.
Old stock Americans often thought that others were strange, inferior and potentially
disloyal. . . . Labor violence, such as that occurring during the railroad disturbances of
1877, . . . crowded slums in the nation’s fast growing cities, and industrial strikes also
created uneasiness about the stability of American society. . . . Many others, reformers
and non-reformers, feared economic impact of immigration…they played the
immigrants for lowering the standard of living.
Document H
Costs of manual and machine labor
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