Several works of fiction in addition to the Horatio Alger stories are well worth students' attention. Thomas Bell, Out of This Furnace (1941), is a powerful novel of Slovak workers in the steel mills of Braddock, Pennsylvania, near Homestead. It is valuable for its evocation of life in an immigrant community as well as for conditions of industrial labor. Frank Harris, The Bomb (1908), deals with the Haymarket episode. William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), is a realistic novel about the growth of a Boston businessman. Gore Vidal, 1876 (1976), treats the world of finance and politics in Vidal's inimitably witty style.

Instructors may wish to consider a number of half-hour films in the Rise of Industrial America Series. They are The Industrial Revolution: Beginnings in the United States, The Rise of Big Business, and The Rise of Labor. For more information check the Educational Film & Video Locator. The University of Pittsburgh Press is offering The River Ran Red, a sixty-minute video of the Homestead strike of 1892. Zenger Media, P.O. Box 802, Culver City, Calif. 90232, has The Pullman Strike (twenty minutes).

The American History Slide Collection of the Instructional Resources Corporation offers a group of 216 slides under the heading Transportation. More than a dozen slides deal with late-nineteenth-century railroad. Another section, American Labor and Industry, has 117 slides, of which over three dozen deal with the last third of the century.

Films for the Humanities and Sciences offers a series of fifteen-minute videotape biographies, including Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, and Henry Ford. PBS Video offers The Richest Man in the World: Andrew Carnegie (two hours) and also Edison's Miracle of Light (sixty minutes), both from the American Experience series.
Document Set 18-1

The Impact of Industrial Change: The Work Process and The Work Force

1. A Machinist Describes Specialization, 1883
2. A Shoe Worker Comments on the Decline of Craft Consciousness, 1899
3. A Union Leader Sees Worker Regimentation, 1883
4. Payment in Scrip, 1885
5. A French Economist Notes the Machine's Impact on American Workers, 1897
6. Dr. John B. Whitaker Explains the Impact of the Factory on Worker Health, 1871
7. Carroll D. Wright Assesses the Factory System's Influence, 1882This unit focuses on the changes associated with the Industrial Revolution in the United States. It is designed to enrich the students' understanding of the social and economic transformation described in the text sections on the character of industrial change and the work force. It also introduces students to the new labor history by examining the life experiences of ordinary workers, providing evidence of the opinions and beliefs of laborers caught in the transition between the older craft/domestic system and the modern factory work environment.Using the documents as a resource, instructors might begin by examining the entire concept of the factory as the locus of the fabrication process. Students might be asked to compile lists of distinctions between the old and new work environments. Moreover, it is important to see the new manufacturing system as a complex of interrelated developments; students should be encouraged to explore links between the sweeping technological and organizational innovations detailed early in Chapter 18 and the altered workplace described in the balance of the chapter and the documents.Instructors might also encourage discussion of what modern labor historians label "worker culture," a concept that embodies customs, beliefs, and value systems. The documents relating to worker preference for an earlier, craft-oriented workplace provide an opportunity to explore the question of self-image and values. This discussion, if linked with the contradictory demands of the new industrial conditions, may deepen student understanding of what some social critics saw as an incipient class crisis by the 1890s.Equally instructive will be discussion of the vision of nineteenth-century work experience evident in the documents included in this set. Students should consider the types of workers whose testimony is recorded. It is important that students be aware of background as a factor in the witnesses' testimony. Students might review the text account of the work force to determine how representative the selected accounts are.The topic of work process, regimentation, and industrial discipline provides an opportunity to establish linkage with modern work experience. With work in the documents, students may become acquainted with the deskilling process that was under way by the late nineteenth century. Depending on the student profile, it may be possible to generate discussion by introducing the question of the modern factory environment and work process. For many who have had factory or other work experience, the fears of nineteenth-century workers may be all too real.By working with the evidence, students should gain insight into the dramatic innovations that changed the lives of American workers as the pace of industrialism quickened. They may come to see that adjustment to the machine and worker regimentation were as great a concern to pre-industrial workers as bread-and-butter issues.

Recommended Readings for Document Set 18-1


David Brody. In Labor's Cause: Main Themes in the History of the American Worker (1993).

Melvyn Dubofsky. Industrialism and the American Worker (2d ed., 1985).

Leon Fink. In Search of the American Working Class (1994).

Michael S. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds. Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society (1983).

David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, eds. Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (1986).

Herbert G. Gutman. Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (1976).

David Montgomery. The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (1987).

------. Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (1979).

Daniel Nelson. Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1850-1920 (1975).

Alan Trachtenburg. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (1982).
Audiovisual Resources for Document Set 18-1


1877: The Grand Army of Starvation (videotape--30 min.). American Social History Productions, 99 Hudson Street, New York, N.Y. 10013.

Molders of Troy (videotape--90 min.). Public Broadcasting System, 475 L'Enfant Plaza SW, Washington, D.C. 20024.

Palace Cars and Paradise (film--29 min.). Illinois Labor History Society, 28 E. Jackson Boulevard, Chicago, Ill. 60604.
Document Set 18-2

The Worker Response to Industrialism: Unionism and Labor Violence

1. A. C. Buell Accounts for the Violence of the Railroad Strike, 1877
2. Terence V. Powderly Defines the Knights of Labor, 1878, 1889
3. "Eight-Hour Day," ca. 1880s
4. August Spies Comments on the Haymarket Incident, 1886
5. Samuel Gompers Urges Clemency for the Haymarket Anarchists, 1887
6. Leonora M. Barry Describes Obstacles to the Organization of Women, 1887
7. An AFL Perspective on Women in the Work Force, 1897The central issue addressed in the second document set for Chapter 18 is worker action in response to industrial change. Building on students' knowledge of the evolving work process (see Document Set 18-1), this chapter examines both labor violence and union organization in the late nineteenth century. By so doing, it encourages students to understand historical development as change over time, including the dynamics of cause/effect relationships. Furthermore, analysis of American worker activism should provide students with an awareness of conflict as a theme in the social history of the United States.In many ways, this chapter enables instructors to present ordinary experience in a dramatic way. For example, the social disorganization of 1877 can be introduced with a screening of 1877: The Grand Army of Starvation, a thirty-minute film produced by the American Social History Project. This film, together with several of the documents, should produce lively discussion of the broader significance of the railroad strike. Debate might focus on the social implications of the strike, which may be approached through both the text account and the newspaper story included in the documents.Similarly, the development of the eight-hour movement and the related Haymarket incident may be analyzed through the documents. This issue allows the instructor to reintroduce the problem of work process, pace, and the new workplace environment of the Gilded Age. Students might be asked to relate these innovations to the activism of the 1870s and 1880s. Equally provocative will be discussion of the public reaction to rising worker militancy. By analyzing the words of August Spies, A. C. Buell, and Samuel Gompers, students should gain an appreciation of the hysteria that swept the middle and upper classes as a result of increased labor violence.The Gompers petition and the comments of Terence V. Powderly will also be useful as an introduction to the internal differences in the American labor movement. Students can first use their text as a background resource for interpreting the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. Another way of defining the similarities and differences would be to compare the two documents bearing on the organization of women. A useful supplement to this discussion would be The Inheritance, a fifty-four-minute film produced by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Discussion of this film together with the documents can sharpen students' grasp of the differences present in the labor movement.Discussion of these documents will also enable students and instructors to explore the political culture of the American worker. The paradox of worker radicalism and organizational conservatism should promote discussion, as will student efforts to analyze the public response to labor activism. Knowledge of the outcome will also contribute to the students' understanding of the American labor movement in the twentieth century.

Recommended Readings for Document Set 18-2


Paul Avrich. The Haymarket Tragedy (1984).

Robert V. Bruce. 1877: Year of Violence (1959).

Leon Fink. Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (1983).

Gerald Grob. Workers and Utopia: A Study of Ideological Conflict in the American Labor Movement, 1865-1900 (1970).

Stuart B. Kaufman. Samuel Gompers and the Origins of the AFL (1973).

Alice Kessler-Harris. Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States (1982).

------. "Where Are the Organized Women Workers?" In A Heritage of Her Own, edited by Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (1979).

Shelton Stromquist. A Generation of Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Labor Conflict in Nineteenth Century America (1993).

Kim Voss. The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century (1995).
Audiovisual Resources for Document Set 18-2


1877: The Grand Army of Starvation (videotape--25 min.). American Social History Project Film Library, 22d Hollywood Avenue, Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J. 07423.

The Inheritance (film--54 min.). Instructional Media Services, West Allis, Wis. 53214; phone (414) 541-8008.

Masses and the Millionaires (Homestead Strike) (film--27 min.). Learning Corporation of America, 711 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022.

The Molly Maguires (videotape--123 min.). Facets Multimedia, Inc., 1517 W. Fullerton, Chicago, Ill. 60614.

Palace Cars and Paradise (film--29 min.). Illinois Labor History Society, 28 E. Jackson Boulevard, Chicago, Ill. 60604.
Document Set 18-3

The Rise of The New South: New Opportunities in A Changing Economy

1. T. Thomas Fortune Predicts a Class Struggle in the South, 1884
2. Henry W. Grady's Vision of a New South, 1886-1887
3. D. Augustus Straker's Prescription for Southern Racial Harmony, 1888
4. The Atlanta Compromise as a Blueprint for African-American Economic Progress, 1895
5. Ray Stannard Baker Analyzes the Southern Labor Problem, 1908
6. Workers in the New SouthDocument Set 18-3 permits instructors and students to discuss the long-term economic consequences of the Civil War. These materials are intended to increase student grasp of economic history and its important social implications. A useful introduction to the topic would be a lecture dealing with the New South promotional effort and its results. Students might be encouraged to examine the New South movement and to form an opinion as to its success or failure by the time of World War I.The evidence presented will lead students into an exercise in comparative economic history. As they review the documents and relate them to the substantial textbook coverage of the New South and the rise of the milltowns, students should be encouraged to explore the relationship between the North and the South, especially the role of outside capital in southern economic development. Instructors might focus on the results of lingering northern financial control of southern industrial enterprise, including the perpetuation of the South's economic dependency. Students should be encouraged to account for the limited success of promoters in building an independent economy.This discussion will lead to further examination of the social consequences of economic decisions. Student research teams could make an independent investigation of various aspects of southern life in the early twentieth century, such as industrial production, agricultural output, income levels, occupational patterns, public health, race relations, and population movement. These separate study groups might then report their findings to the class in a discussion session designed to assess the drive to diversify the southern economy. It is likely that this investigation will lead to greater student awareness of the grinding poverty that plagued the South, which still remained the nation's most underdeveloped area even after a full generation of New South boosterism.The human consequences of the economic realities will draw the greatest student interest. Instructors might capitalize on this curiosity by employing a role-playing exercise in which student groups (or individuals) assume the identity of sharecroppers, millworkers, Tuskegee educators, New South publicists, steel mill laborers, white Democratic politicians, and agrarian radicals. These parties could then discuss the drawbacks and benefits of New South economic changes, from their respective points of view.As discussion develops, it will be impossible to miss the key problem of race adjustment as the central theme in southern social history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Students should be encouraged to analyze the failure to create a humane biracial society in the American South and to search for an explanation for the racial solutions adopted during the Progressive era.Finally, this unit should enable instructors to help students expand their understanding of primary source material by employing nontraditional documents. Class discussion of the photographic evidence should produce lively debate over the implications of New South industrial growth for social relations, occupational patterns, population movement, and racial adjustment. Moreover, these materials will enrich the students' understanding of sectional economic differences and their social implications. Not only does the visual evidence provide the critical observer with extensive detail concerning everyday life in the milltowns of the South, but it also highlights the social problems attendant upon rapid industrialization. With careful guidance from the instructor, students can sharpen their critical faculties by asking questions of the evidence that take into account not only objective reality but also the photographer's intent. For example, after an introductory lecture on Lewis Hine, the Hine photographs might be compared with the others available in an attempt to assess the importance of the photographer's background as a factor in creating the documents. In this way, students will be reminded that visual evidence must be questioned and analyzed with the same rigor as print documents. In the process, the instructor will advance the students' critical thinking skills.

Recommended Readings for Document Set 18-3


Edward L. Ayers. The Promise of the New South (1992).

Don Doyle. New Men, New Cities, New South (1990).

Paul M. Gaston. The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (1970).

Jacqueline Dowd Hall et al. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987).

Cathy McHugh. Mill Family: The Labor System in the Southern Textile Industry, 1880-1915 (1988).

Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch. One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (1977).

Alan Trachtenberg. Reading American Photographs: Images as History from Matthew Brady to Walker Evans (1990).

Joel Williamson. Rage for Order: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (1986).

C. Vann Woodward. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951).

Gavin Wright. Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (1986).
Audiovisual Resources for Document Set 18-3


America and Lewis Hine (film--56 min.). Cinema Guild, 1697 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10019.

Booker T. Washington: The Life and the Legacy (film--30 min.). National Audio-Visual Center, Information Services YC, Washington, D.C. 20409.

Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee America (film--25 min.). Kent State University Audio Visual Services, Kent, Ohio 44242.

Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice (videotape--60 min.). From The American Experience Series, PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, Va. 22314-1698.