Platt Brothers and Company: Small Business in American Manufacturing by Matthew W. Roth

Abstract

412 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE workers were equally divided over seemingly clear-cut forms of col­ lective action. Workers’ writings, in other words, demonstrated both “Solidarity and Fragmentation” (chapter 4). All in all, Zonderman’s point seems to be that New England factory workers were vocal participants in the debate over a mechanized fac­ tory system and that they remained divided in their appraisals of it. In short, some had aspirations while others had anxieties. Ardis Cameron Dr. Cameron is associate professor in the American and New England Studies De­ partment at the University of Southern Maine. Platt Brothers and Company: Small Business in American Manufacturing. By Matthew W. Roth. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994. Pp. x + 256; illustrations, notes, appendixes, index. $40.00. Alfred Platt began making brass buttons with a power press to supplement the income from his farm near Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1822. Four generations of his family carried on the metalworking enterprise at Platts Mills and sold it as a going concern 140 years later. Matthew Roth gives us a business history of this Naugatuck valley enterprise based on his detailed study of the Platt family papers and his deep knowledge of Connecticut industrial history. In 1820 farmers had already cultivated all the arable land in the Naugatuck valley, and most of their numerous sons either moved on or found new occupations. Abundant river water was the only natural resource those who chose to stay could exploit. Alfred Platt was able to undertake manufacturing because his family had part of an under­ developed water privilege and farmland that he could mortgage to raise capital. At the same time, sons of his neighbors began making brass goods with power from Waterbury’s Mad River. The new entre­ preneurs exchanged techniques and services among one another. The Waterbury community of brass fabricators and machine build­ ers, much like the steelmakers of Sheffield, England, developed ex­ pertise others could not easily duplicate. It kept American brass mak­ ing concentrated in the Naugatuck valley through the early 20th century. We lack an adequate history of the mechanical, metallurgi­ cal, and business innovations that the partnerships and, later, firms in Waterbury and its sister cities in the valley used to dominate Ameri­ can brass manufacture. Roth has started to fill this gap because, as he examined the enterprise at Platts Mills, he also traced the complex interactions within the community of mechanics, merchants, millers, and salesmen that the Platt family worked with. The Platts succeeded by devising techniques for making specialized products needed by steady customers whose demand was too small to interest more aggressive and better-capitalized suppliers. Alfred TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 413 began with brass buttons. His sons found a small but steady market for rolled zinc. They learned the idiosyncracies of working zinc few others would bother with. As demand for one product declined, they shifted to another: the Platts made, successively, zinc tent buttons for the army in the Civil War, riveted zinc fly buttons, the zinc strip for shoelace ferrules, and precision strip for the fusible links of electrical fuses. They made all the iron-cored zinc rod that provided cathodic protection for the steel in the Alaska pipeline. Roth used the records kept by the Platt family to show how Alfred and the following generations survived wartime dislocations, the mo­ nopolistic practices of the large brass mills, and the worst flood in Connecticut history. These records detail business and real estate transactions, and relations between family members. (Readers would have found it easier to follow Roth’s sources if the publishers had allowed him to include a bibliography and had keyed the endnotes to page numbers.) The Platts, like most Waterbury entrepreneurs and mechanics, left few records of the techniques they used. Only in the 1920s, as they began to manufacture fuse wire for the electrical industry, did they ask professional metallurgists for advice and, con­ sequently, generate a record of some of their techniques. Even then, the Platts preferred to leave the finer points of rolling in the hands of experienced artisans rather than professional engineers. The pau­ city of the documentary record of the techniques that...