England vs. America: Industrial Superpowers

          The Industrial Revolution brought the world into a new age.  Specifically, it brought the two most progressive nations at the time (England and the USA) to the forefront of a global movement to completely satisfy peoples needs through mass production.  This increase in demand led to overpopulation, low wages, and terrible working  and health violations.  But were the conditions in one nation worse than the other?  Or were the conditions equally appalling?

          The English had the easiest time with the new boom in technology.  The isles were packed with people, and there was no space for farming or sustenance living, so the British had to rely on city jobs to bring home food.  The industrial revolution saw factories and mills appear throughout the cities and the receding countryside, and the massive workforce could be given strict rules and low wages without complaint, because they were made to fear that they would lose their jobs.

          The American business owners were not so lucky.  With western expansion extending the territory and most of the population living in small farm communities or frontier towns, the workers for the factory would have to be persuaded to work in the city, and the wages and conditions would have had to been reliable.  In this sense, the American factory workers were better off at first, but when word of the high wages spread around, many people couldn't resist the temptation to go to Lowell  and get a factory job.  In time, American cities were just as crowded as British ones.

         Workers in the factories were constantly beaten by overseers, and one account from Cressbrook Mill shows exactly how awful the conditions were.  John Birley told the Ashton Chronical in 1849 that "Mr. Needham, the master, had five sons: Frank, Charles, Samuel, Robert and John. The sons and a man named Swann, the overlooker, used to go up and down the mill with hazzle sticks. Frank once beat me till he frightened himself. He thought he had killed me. He had struck me on the temples and knocked me dateless. He once knocked me down and threatened me with a stick. To save my head I raised my arm, which he then hit with all his might. My elbow was broken. I bear the marks, and suffer pain from it to this day, and always shall as long as I live."  This retelling shows us just how bad the overseers were, and that many workers rarely recovered from these atrocities.

         In America, the workers were not beaten, because the workers had to adhere to a strict more moral code that prohibited the overseers from becoming to violent.  However, the girls that violated the rules were often "blacklisted" which essentially caused every factory around to shun them and refuse to hire them.  The English workers were often beaten, but they still kept their jobs afterwards.

         Accidents in both countries were common, and as Michael Ward, a doctor in Manchester gave his story to show the world just how often they happened.  "When I was a surgeon in the infirmary, accidents were very often admitted to the infirmary, through the children's hands and arms having being caught in the machinery; in many instances the muscles, and the skin is stripped down to the bone, and in some instances a finger or two might be lost. Last summer I visited Lever Street School. The number of children at that time in the school, who were employed in factories, was 106. The number of children who had received injuries from the machinery amounted to very nearly one half. There were forty-seven injured in this way."  The amount of workers injured-almost half-is frightening to thing about.  The fact that there was almost a 50% chance for an accident is enough to cause anyone to quit and take their chances on the street, but sadly very few workers knew this.

       Although English mills were physically brutal and were essentially child abuse warehouses, American factories always had the looming threat of endless poverty and a poor reputation.  Each country had roughly the same accident rate, and in the end, what really matters is that we remember how bad they both were, and remember that we must insure that they are never this way again.