The American Nation A History of the United States, Combined Volume (14th Edition)

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Irish and German Immigrants 229

For a generation after the opening of the Merrimack
Manufacturing Company in 1823, the thriving factory
towns of Lowell, Chicopee, and Manchester provided
the background for a remarkable industrial idyll.
Young women came from farms all over New England
to work for a year or two in the mills. They were
lodged in company boardinghouses, which, like col-
lege dormitories, became centers of social life. Unlike
modern college dormitories, the boardinghouses were
strictly supervised; straitlaced New Englanders did not
hesitate to permit their daughters to live in them. The
regulations laid down by one company, for example,
required that all employees “show that they are pene-
trated by a laudable love of temperance and virtue.”
“Ardent spirits” were banished from company prop-
erty, and “games of hazard and cards” prohibited. A
10 PMcurfew was strictly enforced.
The women earned between $2.50 and $3.25 a
week, about half of which went for room and board.
Some of the remainder they sent home, the rest (what
there was of it) they could spend as they wished.
Most of these young women did not have to sup-
port themselves. They worked to save for a trousseau,
to help educate a younger brother, or simply for the
experience and excitement of meeting new people and
escaping the confining environment of the farm. “The
feeling that at this new work, the few hours they had of
every-day leisure was entirely their own was a satisfac-
tion to them,” one Lowell worker recalled. Anything
but an industrial proletariat, they filled the windows of
the factories with flowering plants, organized sewing
circles, edited their own literary periodicals, and
attended lectures on edifying subjects. That such


activity was possible on top of a
seventy-hour work week is a com-
mentary on both the resiliency of
youth and the leisurely pace of these
early factories. The English novelist
Charles Dickens, though scarcely
enchanted by other American ways,
was impressed by his visit to Lowell,
which he compared most favorably to
“those great haunts of misery,” the
English manufacturing towns. “They
were all well dressed,” he wrote of
the workers. “They were healthy in
appearance, many of them remark-
ably so, and had the manners and
deportment of young women....
The rooms in which they worked
were as well ordered as themselves.”
Life in the mills was neverthe-
less demanding. Although they
made up 85 percent of the work-
force, women were kept out of
supervisory positions. In 1834 workers in several
mills “turned out” to protest cuts in their wages and
a hike in what they paid for board. This work stop-
page did not force a reversal of management policy.
Another strike two years later in response to a work
speedup was somewhat more successful. But when a
drop in prices in the 1840s led the owners to intro-
duce new rules designed to increase production,
workers lacked the organizational strength to block
them. By then young women of the kind that had
flocked to the mills in the 1820s and 1830s were
beginning to find work as schoolteachers and clerks.
Mill owners turned increasingly to Irish immigrants
to operate their machines.

Irish and German Immigrants


Between 1790 and 1820 the population of the
United States had more than doubled to 9.6 mil-
lion. The most remarkable feature of this growth
was that it resulted almost entirely from natural
increase. The birthrate in the early nineteenth cen-
tury exceeded fifty per 1,000 population, a rate as
high as that of any country in the world today.
Fewer than 250,000 immigrants entered the United
States between 1790 and 1820. European wars, the
ending of the slave trade, and doubts about the via-
bility of the new republic slowed the flow of
humanity across the Atlantic to a trickle.
But soon after the final defeat of Napoleon in
1815, immigration picked up. In the 1820s, some
150,000 European immigrants arrived; in the 1830s,
600,000; and in the 1840s, 1.7 million. The 1850

The first mill operations performed only the task of spinning wool, cotton, and other fibers
into thread; soon weaving was also mechanized so that fabric ready to be cut and sewn was
manufactured. Note that the workers are all women, supervised by a male foreman.

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