Look at the objects around you: your computer, your phone, your water bottle, the books on your desk. Chances are, all of these things came from a factory.
Even if you don’t think about them often, factories make our modern world possible. Indeed, one might argue that factories created the modern world, sometimes in ways that are rarely discussed.
The factory has been an integral part of America for a long time. Consider the 1876 centennial exhibition in Philadelphia. It was a celebration of the American nation; its legacy, triumphs and greatness. And what was its centerpiece?
“It’s not the [founding] documents,” said Joshua Freeman, author of "Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World." “It’s not George Washington’s wooden teeth. It’s a steam engine. And President Grant comes and flips the switch, and the steam engine starts and powers all the factory equipment that’s there.”
Though the first factory was an English silk mill, built in 1721, the idea of the factory system spread quickly. First throughout England, then Europe, then to America. The reason?
“There are just enormous efficiencies associated with the factory, with the coordination of production, the scale of production and the application of external power to production,” Freeman said.
And these enormous efficiencies have sometimes impacted people’s lives in horrifying ways. Freeman notes that young children were often put to work in the crowded chaos of early factory floors. Sometimes orphans would be employed.
Much like labor conditions, environmental impacts often weren’t a priority for 18th and 19th century factory owners. (Freeman points out that smoke was seen as a sign of prosperity.)
These factories drove foreign policy, too. Europe's climate wasn't suitable for growing cotton, and England needed that raw material for its textile mills. Freeman believes that Europe’s hunger for cotton absolutely shaped the entire world order at the time, the transatlantic slave trade in particular.
“[It] was one of the great reasons for the spread of American slavery ... 90 percent of their cotton comes from America by the 1820s, 1830s. So there’s a huge amount of global transformation, and frankly, global misery, in the process of supplying factories with raw materials,” he said.
Beyond the motivations of other nations, American factories also changed the daily lives of workers. Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, as you probably learned in grade school, but that wasn’t the end of it. When he first launched the assembly line, workers absolutely hated it, according to Freeman.
Turnover was so high that Ford had to hire four times the number of laborers the assembly line actually needed. His solution was to increase wages, and make that wage increase contingent on workers adopting “good habits.” These included not drinking, not being wasteful, and not “living in sin.” He also created a “Sociological Department” that would send delegates to people’s homes and make sure they were practicing those habits. In a sense, Freeman says, Ford didn’t just create “a new assembly line, but a new social system to accompany it.”
But this social system didn’t stay in place. It evolved, and was shaped by workers themselves, especially workers in unions. Freeman points out that consolidation in factories actually gave workers power, since they were able to stop work and go on strike. (Think of Norma Rae, as a cinematic example.)
“You could argue [that] this golden age of America that people are often very nostalgic for — from the end of the second World War up to the late 1970s — in part, rested on the combination of the large factory and unionization,” Freeman said.
This golden age may have ended, and many manufacturing jobs may have left the U.S., but factories still shape our world.
“The largest factories in human history exist right now,” Freeman said. “They’re making things like your sneakers and your cellphone. And some of these factories have 200 or 300,000 workers in a single factory complex. They’re absolutely mind-boggling.”
