In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

factory nearby. This became the largest leather
plant in the world, employing up to 5,000
workers and processing over nine million skins
a year. The company made shoes, gloves, and
leather accessories from Foerderer’s famously
soft and supple kid leather. Robert Foerderer
died in 1903 at the age of forty-three, while in
his first term as a U.S. Congressman. His son
Percival took over management of the company
and operated it for thirty-some years until
closing it in 1937 during the Great Depression.
THE
WORKFORCE
The lives of the foregoing Philadelphia
captains of industry are enshrined in history,
but what of the workers who labored in
their factories and made their products, who
were they? It is difficult to generalize about
a workforce that at the turn of the twentieth
century numbered over a quarter of a million
workers employed in thousands of establishments
across the city. However, some general
characteristics of the Philadelphia manufacturing
workforce in this period are
discernible. The first is that it was mostly
native-born as opposed to immigrant. While
other cities attracted huge numbers of
unskilled immigrant workers who took all
manner of menial manufacturing jobs, such
workers were a minority in Philadelphia.
The city never received the massive numbers
of immigrants that New York City did, but
the main determining factor was the nature of
Philadelphia’s manufacturing environment:
the specialty companies that dominated the
city’s industrial sector employed primarily
highly-skilled workers, offering the kind of
jobs that were more likely to be learned
over generations and passed down through
families than made available to unskilled
new arrivals. Many of the latter could not
find employment in Philadelphia and
moved on to work in the coal mines, railroads,
and steel mills of northeastern and
western Pennsylvania. The Jewish and Italian
immigrants who made up a large percentage
of Philadelphia’s early twentieth-century new
arrivals are an exception; many of them
settled in the city and did textile outwork or
labored in the sweatshops of Old City and
the riverwards of South Philadelphia.
@
Above: Disston workers, undated late
nineteenth-century photo. Disston employed
mostly English workers in this period, a
reflection of both founder Henry Disston’s
heritage and the strong tradition of English
metal working. The company workforce
became more diverse in the twentieth century.
DISSTON COLLECTION, HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF TACONY.
Below: Female workers at Artcraft
Silk Hosiery Company in the Juniata
neighborhood near Frankford, 1930.
Running textile machinery was a common
job for women in this period.
PHILADELPHIA COMMERCIAL MUSEUM COLLECTION,
PENNSYLVANIA STATE ARCHIVES.
CHAPTER FOUR
73