The Intellectual Origins and New-Worldliness of American Industry

Abstract

The revolutionary technological changes that have come to typify our modern industrial society were first felt in the New England textile industry. The American zeal for useful improvements that greeted the industrial revolution was counterbalanced by a patriotic fear that the ill consequences of European manufacturing would be repeated here. The textile manufacturers who introduced the factory system into the United States early in the nineteenth century found it necessary, in order to win a full measure of public support and secure workers in a land where labor was dear, to demonstrate that “the moral standards of the community would not be impaired.”