(^300) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
frame), which used semiskilled women workers to make a tougher,
coarser yarn; and then substantially increased its productivity by the in
vention, first of cap spinning, and then of ring spinning. Similarly,
American innovations in weaving quickly (by the 1820s) made the
Waltham-type cotton factory "at least 10 percent more efficient in
throughput" than its British competitor.^15
The figures tell the story. In 1788, Philadelphia's Fourth of July pa
rade featured a hand-powered cotton carding machine and an eighty-
spindle jenny—symbols of a preindustrial (pre-power) economic
independence. Twenty years later, the young United States was pow
ering almost 100,000 cotton spindles; between 1810 and 1820 the
number tripled, and in the next decade more than tripled again. So, by
1831, the industry counted 1.2 million spindles and 33,500 looms,
most of them power-driven by piedmont streams from New Hamp
shire in the North to Maryland in the south.^16
A recent comparison of productivity in manufacturing shows Amer
ica well ahead of Britain by the 1820s.^17 This was an extraordinary
achievement, bringing together enlightened and often explicitiy patri
otic enterprise, knowledge and know-how, and an intelligent work
force. Some workers were Luddites who had fought machinery back in
the old country but were ready to accept it in the New World; some,
handloom weavers who had once refused to enter mills. Why the
change? Like old England, New England resented the factory's strict
hours and personal supervision. But whereas old England could count
initially on involuntary labor—poorhouse apprentices, daughters and
wives, people who could not say no—New England had to find ways
to make these new jobs acceptable if not attractive. The American mills
paid higher wages and gave their women and girls the kind of housing
and chaste environment that reassured parents.* The paternalism of the
cotton manufacturers of Lowell became legendary—the cleanly board-
inghouses with their reading material and pianos, the women's own pe
riodical (the Lowell Offering), the virtuous (sanctimonious) parietal
rules.^18
Some historians have called attention to less happy circumstances be
neath the surface. These had to be there, they argue, for how could
capitalism really spend for the benefit of employees? No doubt. The
system had its own logic; business had its ups and downs, and hard
- Hours were long, but shorter for example than in Japanese mills at the same stage.
They varied somewhat with the season, but ran to some eleven to thirteen hours per
day—Montgomery, Practical Detail of the Cotton Manufacture, pp. 173-77.