Constant Turmoil: The Politics of Industrial Life in Nineteenth-Century New England

Abstract

Constant Turmoil: The Politics of Industrial Life in Nineteenth-Century New England. By Mary H. Blewett. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Pp. xii, 521. Illustrations. $40.00.) Mary H. Blewett has written a multi-layered account of the interconnections between class, culture, gender, and power in the growth of the cotton print cloth industry in southeastern New England (especially in Fall River, Massachusetts) during the nineteenth century. Blewett rejects simple dichotomies. Whether she is assessing the role of women, the impact of ethnicity, or the formal and informal power of mill owners, Blewett successfully conveys the multiple meanings and tensions within as well as between groups. Constant Turmoil is a sophisticated history of nineteenthcentury industrialization in which conflict and contingency accompanied capitalists' attempts to create and exercise power. A signature feature of Blewett's approach is to situate her understanding of unfolding events in response to a classic interpretive study of nineteenth-century industrial life. For example, Blewett criticizes as overly determined the view of the market revolution that Charles Sellers offers in his influential study, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1991). She shows that Fall River's leading textile capitalists, the Borden family, acted from complex and very personal motives. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the Bordens and their related cousinhood in Fall River created a patrimony of political, economic, social, and cultural influence founded upon monopoly control in the local production and marketing of cotton print cloth. By 1880 Fall River produced more than half of southeastern New England's cotton print cloth product, or slightly less than a third of total U. S. production. Fall River mill owners achieved their economic authority in the textile industry through their mass marketing of cheap cloth, regular upgrading of technology, and persistent efforts to shape and dominate the workforce. Unlike their Lowell competitors, the textile captains of the Borden family rejected paternalism. A remark attributed to one Borden in the 1850s conveys the standard they sought to achieve: As for my-self, I regard my work-people just 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 that I can (39). The grand vision for the industry of Fall River's textile captains did not go unchallenged either by other mill owners in the region and beyond or by the workers who they hoped to dominate. Fall River was still a small village in 1827; its workforce grew slowly through the antebellum years. Whereas in 1827 only forty-two of the 700 employed were recorded as being foreigners, by 1875, Fall River had the highest percentage of foreign-born (predominately British) workers in Massachusetts. In Blewett's retelling, the Lancashire background of the English immigrants figured prominently in the history of labor-employer relations in Fall River. Unlike the historians Charlotte Erickson and Rowland Berthoff, who described English migrants as culturally invisible and politically conservative (see, respectively, Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America [1972] and British Immigrants in Industrial America, 1790-1950 [1953]), Blewett identifies a specific Lancashire-based popular radicalism as the primary source of worker resistance in the Massachusetts textile industry throughout most of the nineteenth century. Blewett posits a remarkable transference to New England of Old World political traditions that had been expressed most forcefully in the Chartist movement following the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Fall River operatives upheld a Lancashire tradition that emphasized local community values, the notion of a moral economy, resistance to new market imperatives, and the ideals of mutual obligation and social justice. …