The Pottery Industry of Trenton: A Skilled Trade in Transition, 1850–1929 by Marc Jeffrey Stern

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 637 ThePottery Industry ofTrenton: A Skilled Trade in Transition, 1850-1929. By Marc Jeffrey Stern. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Pp. xiii+306; tables, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $48.00. At first glance, Marc Stern’s study ofthe Trenton potteries appears to posit yet another version of the familiar handicraft-to-industry tale wherein labor bucks but ultimately yields—powerless and de­ skilled—under the manufacturers’ mighty sway. While Stern’s book in part depends on this familiar deskilling paradigm, The Pottery In­ dustry of Trenton subtly and carefully revises such well-worn models in business, technological, and labor history. Originally trained as a labor and social historian, and recently inspired by Philip Scranton’s call for interdisciplinary and “inclusive industrial history” (p. 3), Stern draws on several literatures to defy conventional wisdom about American industrialization in his case study of Trenton’s pottery trade. Stern considers two phases of Trenton’s pottery business to cri­ tique the Chandler thesis and other corporatist models of historical change. First, he examines the genesis, flowering, and decline of generalware, or whiteware, manufacturing in Trenton from 1850 to 1915. Second, he explores the rise and maturation of sanitary ware production from the 1890s through the 1920s. Stern rightly asserts that the history of Trenton’s pottery industry “differed in many ways” from standard models of “industrialization and labor rela­ tions” drawn from the study of “other industries” and “competing pottery centers” (p. xi). According to Stern, Trenton’s pottery trade was distinguished not only by its skill-intensiveness but also by man­ agers’ and workers’ mutual commitment to associationist strategies for controlling markets. Ultimately, those strategies failed, paving the way for the triumph of bulk production by plumbing supply houses. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of Stern’s book is his discussion of Trenton’s whiteware industry, which includes a careful analysis of activism amongjourneymen potters in the Knights of Labor dur­ ing the 1880s. In his campaign against the big business paradigm, Stern shows us that small and mid-sized family-owned potteries, staffed by skilled craft workers, persisted in Trenton into the early 20th century. The demand for highly differentiated products, ac­ cording to Stern, precluded technical innovation and checked the evolution of scale economies. To compete, generalware managers tried to control manufacturing costs by circumscribing piecework rates. By the late 1890s, bosses and employees, organized into a trade association (United States Potters’ Association) and a new union (National Brotherhood of Operative Potters), stumbled toward the realization that peaceable relations on the shop floor were essential to sustained productivity—and to their industry’s survival. Union men anxious for high earnings and managers eager to stabilize mar­ 638 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE kets established annual wage agreements and, for the most part, avoided strikes. As testimony to labor’s power, managers hxed prices only after wage agreements were signed. The success of this strategy depended on the silent partnership of the federal government, which established protectionist tariffs and overlooked cartel behav­ ior. Stern’s pottery parable thus provides a model of industrial change wherein labor and capital trod an uneasy middle terrain be­ tween conflict and cooperation, ultimately achieving a balance of power in the 1890s by embracing associationism to control wages, prices, and markets. In the late 1890s, however, generalware potters in Trenton were challenged by manufacturers in the midwestern pottery center of East Liverpool who were building markets for inexpensive massmarket tablewares. Trenton’s proximity to urban markets in the Northeast in part convinced managers that shifting to the manufac­ ture of sanitary plumbing fixtures would be the salvation of the east­ ern potting trade. The bosses’ new organization, the Sanitary Pot­ ters’ Association, adopted the associationist tactics devised by generalware manufacturers, but their ties to the construction busi­ ness made eastern sanitary potters—and their cartel—visible and open to criticism. Thus in the early 1920s consumer outcry against exorbitant building costs led the Justice Department to dismantle the SPA and to prosecute its members for violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. According to Stern, the longstanding liaison among pottery manufacturers, labor, and the federal government collapsed under public...