In The Cradle of Industry and Liberty

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@ This page: Female workers at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1918. Wartime conditions created employment opportunities for women in jobs that had been traditionally held by men. PHILADELPHIA RECORD PHOTO COLLECTION, HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA. Certain Philadelphia companies were known for employing specific nationalities. Henry Disston preferred workers of English descent, for example, while it was mostly Polish workers who labored in the noxious tanning pits of Foerderer Leather. Breweries often employed Germans, while Irish Catholics constituted a major part of the workforce in the Kensington textile mills. Certain types of jobs were also traditionally reserved for women, particularly in the textile, garment, and hat making industries. “No female that can handle a needle need be idle [in Philadelphia],” a young immigrant Irish woman wrote from Philadelphia to friends back home in 1851, and this was still the case a half century later. Light industrial work such as assembling parts and tending textile machinery were also common jobs for women. Philadelphia’s manufacturing workforce was also overwhelmingly white in the early twentieth century. With some notable exceptions, African Americans were shut out of manufacturing jobs in Philadelphia in this period. Companies such as Baldwin, Cramp, Sellers, and Bromley’s Quaker Lace, with tens of thousands of workers between them, had virtually no black employees prior to the 1930s. Others such as J. G. Brill, General Electric, and Smith, Kline, & French, had only a handful of black workers among their thousands of employees. Companies that did hire African Americans included Atlantic Refining, Franklin Sugar, Disston, and, most notably, Midvale Steel. Midvale began hiring blacks in the late 1890s through an initiative of Frederick Winslow Taylor and had several thousand African Americans on the payroll by 1917. Wartime conditions changed things significantly, as employers broadened their hiring practices to fill labor shortages caused by their mostly white male workers leaving by the thousands for military service. Philadelphia manufacturers hired increasing numbers of African Americans and women during World Wars I and II. In some cases, the new workers were let go when the original workers returned, but in other instances wartime opportunities did lead to longer term work for these often underemployed segments of the workforce. Children continued to make up a large part of the workforce into the early twentieth century, although efforts to abolish abusive child labor practices were gaining steam. One of the chief advocates on behalf of the young workers was the Irish immigrant labor activist Mary Harris Jones, better known as “Mother Jones.” In her autobiography IN THE CRADLE OF INDUSTRY AND LIBERTY 74
she writes of the sad circumstances of child laborers in Philadelphia: In the spring of 1903 I went to Kensington …where seventy-five thousand textile workers were on strike. Of this number at least ten thousand were little children. The workers were striking for more pay and shorter hours. Every day little children came into Union Headquarters, some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckle. They were stooped things, round shouldered and skinny. Many of them were not over ten years of age, the state law prohibited their working before they were twelve years of age. The law was poorly enforced and the mothers of these children often swore falsely as to their children’s age. In a single block in Kensington, fourteen women, mothers of twenty-two children all under twelve, explained it was a question of starvation or perjury. That the fathers had been killed or maimed at the mines. I asked the newspaper men why they didn’t publish the facts about child labor in Pennsylvania. They said they couldn’t because the mill owners had stock in the papers. THE LABOR MOVEMENT Mother Jones was also active in the Knights of Labor, the first national industrial union in the United States. The Knights began as a secret society of tailors in Philadelphia in 1869 and by the 1880s had grown to a nationwide labor organization with over 750,000 members. The Knights had a strong presence in Philadelphia; among other local activities they organized a successful shoemakers strike and struck in sympathy with female carpet makers in 1884. However, while Philadelphia was the site of important developments in the labor movement earlier in the nineteenth century, and unions would later have a major impact on city industries beginning in the late 1930s, organized labor had a relatively low profile in Philadelphia in the early years of the twentieth century, particularly when compared to other large industrial cities such as Chicago and Pittsburgh. It is estimated that only about ten percent of the city’s industrial workers were represented by unions prior to the 1930s. Here again, it was largely a function of the nature of manufacturing work in the city at this time: Philadelphia’s highly-skilled, specialized workforce was, for the most part, well-paid and less inclined to join unions. Also, several of the city’s major industrialists, such as Henry Disston and John Stetson, offered generous benefits to their employees, no doubt out of concern for their workers’ welfare, but also with an eye to keeping unions out of their shops. Labor did try to organize in Philadelphia in the early twentieth century and some unions were successful in representing workers in certain industries. Some 2,000 Philadelphia custom upholstering and drapery weavers formed a union that was effective in advocating for their interests. On the other hand, the Metal Manufacturers Association of Philadelphia, a trade group established in 1904 by the city’s metal and machine industrialists, was successful in dismantling the local Iron Moulders’ Union, which at one point had represented over ninety percent of the workers in Philadelphia’s casting foundries. In the ebb and flow of power between labor and management in Philadelphia, management definitely held the upper hand in the early twentieth-century. It was not until the 1930s and 1940s that unions would begin to assume a more powerful role. @ Striking workers at J. G. Brill Company in Southwest Philadelphia, March 1941. PHILADELPHIA RECORD PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA. CHAPTER FOUR 75
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IN THE CRADLE OF INDUSTRY AND LIBER
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IN THE CRADLE OF INDUSTRY AND LIBER
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CONTENTS 4 FOREWORD 6 ACKNOWLEDGEME
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@ Michael A. Nutter, Former Mayor,
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For the historical images that enli
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This is a history of manufacturing
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While other manufacturing centers w
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@ Above: Workers at Midvale Steel p
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aircraft that dates to the earliest
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would hold into the early nineteent
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technology, transportation, and com
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age had joined the Religious Societ
Page 25 and 26: Philadelphians lived in the city’
Page 27 and 28: “and many boats, which are useful
Page 29 and 30: Quaker merchant Thomas Masters purc
Page 31 and 32: INDUSTRY INVENTORS Manufacturers in
Page 33 and 34: Quaker upbringing. Known as the “
Page 35 and 36: MAKING A CASE FOR AMERICAN MANUFACT
Page 37 and 38: up cotton manufacturing operations
Page 39 and 40: After receiving a patent for the en
Page 41 and 42: The Globe Mill on the Cohocksink Cr
Page 43 and 44: @ Opposite: Detail from 1849 map sh
Page 45 and 46: of the town’s total population. S
Page 47 and 48: On a positive note, a group of Fran
Page 49 and 50: factories with a powerful energy so
Page 51 and 52: and flagship for Commodore Matthew
Page 53 and 54: @ Left: Penn Steam Engine & Boiler
Page 55 and 56: Garrett & Eastwick Locomotive Works
Page 57 and 58: seen. The episode brought Hagner co
Page 59 and 60: United States, the nation’s de-fa
Page 61 and 62: The turn of the twentieth century p
Page 63 and 64: in various categories at the Centen
Page 65 and 66: makers, 20 stove manufacturers, 12
Page 67 and 68: and lace, in which Kensington manuf
Page 69 and 70: through exploitation of their worke
Page 71 and 72: @ Left: Yard locomotives at Midvale
Page 73 and 74: among the largest in the world at t
Page 75: factory nearby. This became the lar
Page 79 and 80: @ Clockwise, starting from the top:
Page 81 and 82: BEER AND TOBACCO Beer making contin
Page 83 and 84: MILK AND ICE CREAM Like any major c
Page 85 and 86: the Philadelphia Phillies. Located
Page 87 and 88: and a half later from a city of man
Page 89 and 90: After major cutbacks in the auto in
Page 91 and 92: into countless lunchboxes throughou
Page 93 and 94: hangar space in 1980 at Northeast P
Page 95 and 96: is the nation’s largest manufactu
Page 97 and 98: fuel for local industries, current
Page 99 and 100: centralize operations in the buildi
Page 101 and 102: BOOKS AND ARTICLES Bridenbaugh, Car
Page 103 and 104: Sutcliffe, Andrea J. Steam: The Unt
Page 105 and 106: Penrose, Bartholomew & Thomas shipy
Page 107 and 108: PARTNERS IN BUILDING PHILADELPHIA H
Page 109 and 110: @ Left: An early Kingsbury advertis
Page 111 and 112: PARTNERS IN BUILDING PHILADELPHIA 1
Page 113 and 114: Aerodynamics. The name DeVal was a
Page 115 and 116: packaging and shipping; and nondest
Page 117 and 118: Another step in product advancement
Page 119 and 120: PHILLY CASE From the basement of a
Page 121 and 122: Under Yost’s direction, The Rowla
Page 123 and 124: The story of Tioga Pipe is a classi
Page 125 and 126: neighborhood. The increased product
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Humphrys is one of the oldest manuf
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The Doherty brothers realized, to s
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Centrally located off the Pennsylva
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Jersey and Delaware. Outgrowing the
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Philadelphia is famous for its appr
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injection molded plastic to enter t
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had expanded from smaller pieces fo
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for many years and they know the fi
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furnace as well as a custom flame h
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and Salmon Streets. The company wou
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The company capitalized on the stra
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discharges. The supercapacitors are
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products that are custom designed t
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Today manufacturing matters, now mo
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LEADERSHIP SPONSORS Historical Publ
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