Philadelphia's Industrial History: Context and Overview
© Philip B. Scranton, Ph.D.,
Workshop of the World, 1990.
"Workshop of the World" was
the proud claim of Philadelphia boosters for the best
part of the century after the Civil War. Though at
present the city is best known for its vehicles of
consumption (the Eagles, the Orchestra, fine restaurants,
the Mummers) once not so long ago Philadelphia
represented prowess in production, the American apex of
skill, versatility and diversity in manufacturing. Thanks
to the dedication of area SIA [Society for Industrial
Archeology] members, we are now afforded a special
opportunity to revisit this nearly forgotten city, its
world of workshops. With this guide in hand, you may map
for yourself tours of a Philadelphia different from the
one imagined by the hundreds of thousands who stroll
through Independence Hall and Old City. Where they
call up visions of bewigged gentlemen debating the birth
of a nation, scribbling away with quill pens, you must
conjure a later cacophony of steam engines, whirling
lathes, pounding forges, clattering looms, smoke, sweat
and strain. You can circle among the landmarks of
Philadelphia's industrial age, drawing from these silent
stones a sense of the energy and intensity that lay
behind the boast, "Workshop of the World!" And as you
encounter mounting numbers of mute brick and concrete
masses, you will inevitably come to the question: What
happened? What went wrong? As with most historical
processes, there is no simple (or single) answer, but
surely it is as important to cherish and reflect upon
Philadelphia's industrial greatness as it is to draw
inspiration from its eighteenth century political
heritage.
This introduction aims to offer a bit of historical
context for reading and using what follows, a narrative
sketch of the urban evolution in which the city's
neighborhoods were shaped and peopled. It also seeks to
set Philadelphia's course alongside that of other cities,
so as to highlight briefly what made it special. Let us
begin with our title phrase and at the point when it was
close to being an accurate description of Philadelphia.
From roughly 1880 through the 1920s, Philadelphia's
industrial districts supported an array of mills and
plants whose diversity has scarcely been matched anywhere
in the history of manufacturing. When the U. S. Census
charted some three hundred categories of industrial
activity, surveys of Philadelphia showed firms active in
nearly ninety percent of them. No city had a wider range
of textile products, for example, as Kensington,
Germantown, Frankford and Manayunk churned forth laces,
socks, carpets, blankets, rope and cordage, men's
suitings and women's dress goods, silk stockings,
upholstery, tapestries, braids, bindings, ribbons,
coverlets, knit fabric and sweaters, surgical fabrics,
military cloths and trimmings, draperies, and yarns of
every description. At the turn of the century, roughly
seven hundred separate companies operated in textiles
alone, employing some sixty thousand people. Yet this
immense workforce amounted to only one quarter of the
city's industrial workers. Unlike New England centers
that often focused on a single sector (for Massachusetts,
textiles in Lowell, Lawrence, Fall River and New Bedford,
paper in Holyoke, shoes in Lynn), Philadelphia could and
did do nearly everything across the spectrum of
transforming materials into products.
Moreover, though it hosted some huge facilities,
Philadelphia was known far better as an incubator for
small enterprises, as a city packed with workshops and
mid-size firms begun in many cases by workers or
supervisors who "graduated" from employment to
entrepreneurship. In Lawrence, Pittsburgh, or Detroit in
its Ford era, a tiny number of great firms were the major
employers (American Woolen, U. S. Steel) and dominated
the landscape as well as local economic and political
life. Yet in Philadelphia, even the eight to ten thousand
workers engaged at the Baldwin Locomotive Works were a
minuscule fragment of the city's quarter million
industrial employees. Hence the city was dependent
neither on one manufacturing trade nor on any cluster of
giant corporations for its economic health. Nor however
could the rapid rise of a leading firm or sector produce
a city-wide growth boom, as autos did for Detroit.
Diversity was unspectacular, but it avoided the high-wire
act of being dedicated to a single industry. It was such
reliance that turned the textile and shoe cities of New
England into "ghost towns" during the 1920s, and more
recently has ground down Detroit and Pittsburgh. By
contrast, Philadelphia's decay like its advance was
spread across half a century, a pattern that robbed it of
sudden drama and made it difficult to perceive or
reverse.
In its heyday, Philadelphia's thousands of modest scale
firms were linked together through contracts and trade in
elaborate ways that make it possible to view the city as
a vast workshop as well. Carpet makers purchased yarn
from one firm, had it dyed at a second, bought pattern
designs from a third, punched cards to control the
weaving process (Jacquard) from a fourth. The card makers
got coated paper stock from specialist paper
manufacturers in Manayunk; the dyers bought special
machinery from Procter and Schwartz which in turn
purchased metal castings from various city foundries.
Even at the level of the biggest establishments, such
connections were frequent. Midvale Steel, makers of
everything from armor plate to ship's cannon and drive
shafts, bought its yard locomotives from Baldwin and
commissioned special machines for metal cutting from
William Sellers, the city's most venerable machinery
building plant. Some of Midvale's plate doubtless found
its way to the Navy Yard or to Cramp's, shipbuilders for
a century along the Delaware. Baldwin Locomotive long
operated as a network of workshops complete with internal
contracts upon which shop masters might turn efficiency
into a profit. The presence of hundreds of firms with
every sort of capacity so close to hand encouraged
Philadelphia mill men to value and use nearby talent,
thereby deepening the web of interconnections.
Of course, none of this could have been developed without
the "world" out to which Philadelphia shipped its final
products and from which materials, fuel, and for a long
period, fresh workers and entrepreneurs arrived by ship
and rail. During the decades surrounding 1900, the city
drew heavily on Pennsylvania's rich coal reserves,
depended on the reliability of the vast Pennsylvania
Railroad system, the Reading and the B&O, and
profited from its deepwater port, through which a sturdy
fraction of the world's wool supply flowed steadily. Of
course, Philadelphia firms supplied the nation with tools
and saws, fabrics and machinery, but they were also alert
to the possibilities of export trade.
Philadelphia may by 1890 have virtually covered the world
of manufacturing, but its products were in large measure
confined to domestic markets. Much of the reason for this
lay in the American system of protective tariffs. In
order to "free" the new United States from economic
dependence on technically more advanced Britain, the
federal government early determined to erect a set of
import taxes (tariffs) which would bring foreign goods'
prices up to or above those of products "Made in the
U.S.A." These barriers certainly had something to do with
the rise of industry (precisely what is still being
debated), but by the late nineteenth century they
generated a secondary consequence. The entire cost
structure of American production and consumption was, on
average, pitched at a level higher in global terms than
that of our principal rivals, Britain and Germany. As a
result, though our standard of living may have been
higher (again a disputed point), most of our goods were
priced higher for export than those of European
competitors. The erratic but considerable expansion of
demand at home sustained overall growth, but as the
industrial system matured, concern mounted about how to
establish additional outlets for the products of our
manufacturing capacity.
This question was debated intensely in Philadelphia,
especially during the long depression of the 1890s, when
home markets flagged and export trade to pick up the
slack could not be found. At the century's turn, local
activists created the Commercial Museum, whose building
still squats alongside Convention Hall and its modern
extensions in West Philadelphia. In essence the Museum
was to be a collective marketing agency for Philadelphia
wares, not a site for displaying relics. Visitors,
especially foreign visitors, were shown what Philadelphia
made and encourage to contact its firms to meet their
needs, however unusual or precise. It's hard to know for
certain, but if this brokerage may have worked better in
the imagination than in fact, it nonetheless remained
active for a generation, publishing a monthly journal
(Commercial America) trumpeting Philadelphia's ability to
get any job done, on time, and right. Such an institution
was born here, and not in Pittsburgh, exactly because of
the city's diversity and skill in making to order. Tons
of pig iron were staple goods that could be had more
cheaply on the world market than from American plants,
but finely crafted machinery, scientific instruments or a
host of other local specialties competed in terms of
quality, not price, with rival items from Europe. No firm
better exemplified this capacity than Baldwin, which
moved beyond supplying the Santa Fe to providing
locomotives to rail systems in Brazil, Russia, and Japan,
among many nations. The Brill Company, specialists in
street railway cars, plowed similar furrows with success
over the long term, as did scores of textile firms during
the briefer fever that World War I brought. After 1914,
Philadelphia's prominence as a fabric center brought
millions of dollars in contracts for military goods to
the city's mills, while its metalworking plants supplied
other needs nastier than those for leggings and caps, and
its shipyards fattened on repair work diverted from
belligerent nations. The early part of the "Great War"
was good for exports, if not for humanity.
If Philadelphia was in some measure able to go to the
world, so too did firms from afar come to Philadelphia.
Its immense reserve of skilled labor drew immigrant
entrepreneurs as well as firms seeking to get inside the
tariff wall by starting American plants. Belgian textile
mill owners, Swedish metal tradesmen, and German chemists
all sought a place in the Quaker City. The chemists, of
course, were Rohm and Haas, a team that had devised a
specialty product for leather tanning, an item that
eliminated the use of animal dung's particularly
unpleasant contribution to a generally unsavory process.
As Philadelphia held the nation's largest concentration
of fine leather works, locating a plant here for
synthesis of "Oropon" was a natural choice, and added yet
another layer to the city's interindustry connections. So
too did national corporations that needed access to
skilled labor for construction of complex products find
their way to Philadelphia (GE and Westinghouse, the
latter just outside the city boundary at Lester).
In its greatest era, Philadelphia could hardly be
faulted for proclaiming itself the world's workshop. Two
questions quickly appear: what brought this about, and
how did it erode?
As John Bowie has pointed out, the city's association
with manufacturing commenced shortly after its
settlement, expanded in the age of artisans, and
blossomed dramatically in the nineteenth century.
Philadelphia was the largest colonial city, if not its
richest. Why? In the age of eighteenth
century agricultural development, Philadelphia, Like
Charleston and New York, profited vastly from its
location as the linking point between highly productive
farm districts and the wider world. Though theirs was a
risky trade, Philadelphia merchants built fortunes
through handling incoming fruits of the land, supplying
farmers and rural stores with their needs, and marketing
Pennsylvania wheat, etc., across the colonies and across
the seas. Not only did such activity lead towards Oliver
Evans' continuous process flour mill, it also fed tastes
for refined consumption, in housing, furnishings, reading
matter, and so forth. These in turn provided tasks for
cabinetmakers, printers, and by extension, papermill
operators and sawyers, who intersected with the region's
charcoal iron producers (offering intermediate goods for
making tools, nails, et al.) to created a bustling, but
politically vulnerable manufacturing base. Both producer
and consumer demand could by the Revolutionary era be met
largely from local sources, surely adding to the regional
fervor for independence from English colonial
constraints. Such productive interactions made the city
nearest the Revolution's breadbasket a prime candidate
for economic growth in the new century.
These were the beginnings, the raw materials for
industrial extension. With fundamental competence in
wood- and metalworking, imbedded in a prosperous region,
Philadelphia drew new talent for long generations after
Franklin came down the coast from Boston. A few of the
merchant elite (the Harrisons in chemicals, most notably)
contributed to the dynamic of mechanical inventiveness
and product differentiation, but by mid-century,
Philadelphia looked and was different from New York,
Boston or Charleston, each more known for commerce (New
York perhaps wrongly) than for production. Boston
merchants may have owned cotton mills but rarely
frequented them. Charleston planters and traders
moved in an orbit cosmically separate from the workshop
worlds of Kensington, and New York bankers and railway
financiers stood far above the harsh scrambling of their
own city's degraded craft districts. The "best"
Philadelphians also floated serenely to their Assemblies,
but quietly and surely hosts of Scots and Yorkshiremen,
Celts and Teutons were creating both goods and
institutions that forged a city of industry, a process
which the elite diarist Sidney George Fisher viewed with
proper disdain.
Machinery men like Alfred Jenks, William Morris and
William Sellers led the new vanguard, and help generate
steam engines, textile equipment, and machine tools,
along with the Franklin Institute, in its time one of the
world's great forums for promoting and assessing
mechanical inventiveness. These men knew or sensed that
in interaction and exchange, in public intercourse rather
than secrecy, lay the mechanism for advancing their
individual and collective interests. In its journal,
exhibitions, prize awards, and public debates, the
Franklin Institute captured, refined and distributed the
essence of Philadelphia's prowess and drew to the city in
return some of the finest scientific and technical
innovators of the nineteenth century. (Fittingly, the
Atwater Kent Museum, devoted to the history of
Philadelphia, occupies the Franklin Institute's early
quarters on Seventh Street south of Market.) Networks
among proprietors and workers stemmed not only from such
institutions, but were also created in the social spaces
of industrial neighborhoods and inside workshop walls.
Before the Civil War, most masters lived close by their
shops and mills, whether in densely settled Kensington or
Northern Liberties or in the hollows of Germantown.
Shared problem solving was as routine matter, as was
contracting out jobs to "competitors" when a rush of
business arrived, "calling into service others'
machinery" as it was termed. In such relations lay
one key to Philadelphia's special genius, its flexibility
and specializations, its endless versatility, for the
firm was not a closed box but a unit in a constantly
shifting web of interconnected activities. New products,
ideas, solutions percolated through the city (some
patented, most not) generating productive "external
economies" that made the districts as a whole far more
than the sum of their parts.
To stress this is not to argue that Philadelphia was a
Garden of Eden for working people and entrepreneurs.
There were plenty of terrible jobs; exploitation of women
(particularly in outwork sewing) was acute, whereas both
skilled and unskilled operatives had to cope with
seasonal unemployment year after year. Firms, especially
new ones, went belly up with depressing frequency,
sending masters back to the workshops of others and
cashiered employees in search of new positions. Some
bosses were notoriously brutal, others were cheats,
"knocking off" copies of designs by their more creative
rivals or swindling their workers and clients. All the
standard human passions and frailties surged through the
city's factory districts, yet there was such a vitality
to the world of possibilities open in Philadelphia that
tens, then hundreds of thousands came, struggled and
stayed.
When secession and war split the nation, the city was
deeply divided. Its old elite had extensive
southern connections, and a substantial fraction of its
factory output flowed to southern merchants. Once the
course towards combat was set, rebel sympathies and
general misgivings were forced into private spaces, as
Philadelphia mobilized both its people and its industries
in the Union cause. As J. Matthew Gallman notes in his
recent study of Civil War Philadelphia, due to its
"extremely diverse array of shops and manufactories...the
City of Brotherly Love [was] particularly well prepared
to adjust to rapidly shifting wartime demands."
1
As in succeeding
wars, the city's metalworking plants became arsenals and
its textile mills fed the Quartermaster Corps' vast
needs. Profits for many firms were equally vast,
and were poured into constructing expanded facilities,
perhaps in part because rapid inflation whittled away the
value of liquid assets. Where Lowell, utterly dependent
on cotton and unable to shift its rigid technology to
wool or blended fibers, essentially closed shop for the
duration, Philadelphia used its flexibility to good
advantage, reaping the economic benefits of war so
adroitly that area textile investment grew half again as
fast in the 1860s as during the previous decade, even
with inflation factored out. It was a bloody prosperity,
to be sure, but by 1870 the nation recognized that
Philadelphia possessed a supple, creative industrial
system which could master any task set before it.
As it approached an era of prominence, industrial
Philadelphia appeared to be, as one carpet weaver put it,
"the paradise of the skilled workman." Wages were high,
and if work was cyclical, job opportunities were growing.
Hundreds took the step up to proprietorship, "commencing
on their own account" in small partnerships, renting
"rooms with power" in mills purposely built for hosting a
dozen or more newly-started enterprises. However,
conflict like cooperation was built into the Philadelphia
system. Workers had here created some of the
nation's earliest trade unions in the teeth of legal
obstructions and masters' opposition to any interference
with their direct relations with individual employees.
These institutions had often crumbled in depressions, but
were rebuilt again and again. It was in post-war
Philadelphia that the Knights of Labor commenced (1869)
and put forth its vision of a cooperative commonwealth, a
vision that proved unattainable without extensive
conflict. Both the rapid rise and collapse of the Knights
in schism and strikes (c. 1880-86) indicated the profound
tensions that lay then as now just beneath the surface of
capitalist industrialism. Ultimately, employers had a
critical if limited form of power over their workers,
capacities to fire or promote, distribute good and
miserable tasks. This power was constrained by workplace
and trade customs, by habits and practices of reciprocity
in and beyond the mills, but when it was used unjustly or
irresponsibly, conflicts burst out, fueled on each side
by a sense of the other's betrayal. Values were generally
as much as issue as was money; settlements were never,
indeed could not ever be, final.
Hence in the decades of high industrialism, Philadelphia
witnessed strikes and lockouts great and small, including
general strikes in 1903 and 1910. This rhythm of conflict
amid necessary cooperation brought labor and capital into
new forms of antagonistic institutional development. Thus
the Labor Lyceum and the Lighthouse in Kensington stood
across a divide from the Manufacturers' Club in Center
City, and sectoral unions faced trade associations (the
Metal Manufacturers' Assn., Master Dyers, Worsted
Spinners, and so forth). 2
The gap narrowed
and widened at different rates in different decades in
different sectors, was bridged more in some firms and
trades than others, was more visible in the age of
permanent institutions than earlier, but it would not go
away. What is important and essential is that creativity,
flexibility and cooperation persisted despite this
structure of conflict, that contests between proprietors
and workers were as much (or more) a feature of
manufacturing's peak era as they were in its decades of
decay. Simple notions that workers organized unions and
industries thus fell to pieces square neither with the
pattern of Philadelphia's success nor with the dynamics
of its industrial decline.
Philadelphia was not alone in
1900 as an American center of diversified and flexible
manufacture. In New England, Worcester (MA) and
Providence (RI) developed along similar lines, as did
Newark and Trenton in the Mid-Atlantic. All of them
entered eras of slow, seemingly inexorable decline after
World War I. 3
The reasons for
this slippage were multiple. The increasing importance of
science and research, carried on by multi-plant corporate
giants, devalued the experiential shop-based knowledge of
smaller firms in these urban centers. The latters'
associations were legally powerless to compel members to
support comparable inquiry collectively, or even to
install standard accounting and pricing practices (as was
done in Europe). Government policies failed to comprehend
the complementarities between specialist and mass
production and indirectly favored the latter through
pressure for standardization and narrowing of product
ranges to eliminate economic "waste." In consumer goods,
shifts in retailers' and distributors' business practices
following the sharp "inventory depression" of 1920-21
pushed inventory risks for seasonal and style goods back
on their manufacturers. As dealers cut the stocks they
held to increase turnover, producers were led toward
predatory price cutting to secure sufficient orders to
keep workers active and mill running, thus ruining
profitability. As consumers benefitted in the short run,
producers' protests to governments fell on deaf ears. In
capital goods, the war and post-war period were equally
critical. Massive emergency demand for ships, locomotives
and machinery, all with long working "lives," led to a
slump in the 1920s, worsened by the great depression.
Finally, shutting off the immigrant flows that had
ceaselessly revitalized industrial districts soon yielded
the greying of the core of skilled workers so vital to
the system. As Americans had failed to multiply the few
educational institutions which trained "practical"
machinists, etc., and paid steadily less attention to
vocational education, both the status and supply of
flexible, problem-solving "mechanics" eroded amid dreams
of automatic factories and white collar jobs for
everyone. Put it all together and you get first a
trickle, then a torrent of liquidations by
Philadelphia-style firms, commencing in the 1920s and
accelerating through the terrible thirties. World War II
demand for special work quickly done (millions of yards
of mosquito netting, for example) kept many survivors
afloat. Yet the contraction soon resumed as mass
production of standard goods by Fortune 500 corporations
seemed to have swept the day and swept away versatile
specialists.
In Philadelphia, Cramp's shipyard closed in the 1920s,
was reopened for emergency service in World War II, then
faded from memory. Baldwin's moved part (and later all)
of its production to Eddystone near Chester to secure
bigger quarters, only to founder in bankruptcy in the
1930s and be absorbed into a merger. After World War II,
Eddystone too gradually fell silent. The textile
districts emptied out bit by bit, a few firms moving to
the suburbs or the South, hundreds more sticking it out
to the end on the sites of their glory years. What
remains is still an impressive cluster of specialty
manufacturing firms, but in the half-century after 1925
the city lost two-thirds of its industrial jobs and
virtually all of its greatest firms. Of the 25 largest in
1925, only the Budd Company remains a major player in its
sector.
The chapters that follow offer an extraordinarily
striking portrait of what endures, in a physical and
architectural sense, of industrial Philadelphia. Its
range of neighborhoods makes an effective selection among
the places and spaces created through industrialization
(or with Chestnut Hill, spawned from its profits).
Moreover, multiple sites from every era and every
significant trade are covered, along with major features
of the transportation, power and public utility net,
crucial elements in the matrix not often given as careful
attention as is done here. Finally, enterprises of every
scale have been documented and, though flexible batch
operations predominate, several among the city's few bulk
producers (e.g., sugar refining) make an appearance.
Thus, in your hands is a fully representative guide to a
great manufacturing city. If much of what we have left is
buildings and memories, both are worth preserving for
uses that as yet lie only in our imagination. This guide
is a tool for preserving sites and for sparking thought,
one that will itself be used over and over in the years
ahead. I, for one, am grateful to the Oliver Evans SIA
team for creating it, and expect that a few hours from
now, you will be too.
1 J. Matthew Gallman, Mastering
Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia during
the Civil War, (New York, 1990), pg.
254.
2 Philip Scranton, Figured
Tapestry: Production, Markets and Power in Philadelphia
Textiles, 1885-1940, (New York, 1989).
3 For an insightful study of
Trenton's long, downhill slide, see John Cumbler, A
Social History of Economic Decline, (New Brunswick, NJ.,
1989).