Читать книгу From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry Since the Second World War - Geoffrey Owen - Страница 9

In the US, as in Britain, the first factory-based industry was cotton textiles, based on water power and located mainly in New England. The use of steam power increased after the Pennsylvania coal fields were opened up in the 1830s, but it was not until the construction of the railway and telegraph networks in the 1840s and 1850s that America’s two great advantages as a manufacturing country, the wealth of its raw materials and its huge home market, could be exploited on a larger scale. The railway boom gave a boost to the growth of the iron industry, and encouraged the exploitation of more distant natural resources, notably the Mesabi iron ore mines of Minnesota. The US was richly endowed with other minerals, including oil; the first oil strike was made at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859.

To make full use of these assets the US needed a combination of rising demand, entrepreneurial skill, and supportive policies and institutions.¹² The population, swollen by immigration, rose much more rapidly than Britain’s between 1870 and 1913 (TABLE 2.1). But the difference with Britain was not just a matter of size. Incomes in the US were more equal and consumer tastes more similar. These conditions favoured the manufacture of standardised goods for a mass market, and entrepreneurs had an incentive to design machinery which would permit low-cost, high-volume production. A well-known example was the Bonsack cigarette-making machine, introduced in 1884, which could turn out 125,000 cigarettes a day; the best that a skilled worker could do was 3,000 cigarettes a day.¹³ Manufacturers of branded consumer goods like tobacco and soap were among the first to build sales networks throughout the US. Some of the metal-working industries adopted what became known as the American system of manufactures, a way of making standard machinery from interchangeable components. Pioneered in government armouries for the production of small arms, it was taken up by manufacturers of sewing machines, typewriters and other products for which there was a large, homogeneous demand. The greatest triumph of the American system, achieved by Henry Ford shortly before the First World War, was the mass-produced automobile.¹⁴

TABLE 2.1 Population growth 1870–1913

(in millions)

	1870	1913
US	39.9	97.2
Britain	31.4	45.6
Germany	39.2	67.0
France	38.4	39.8

Source: Angus Maddison, Dynamic forces in Capitalist Development, Oxford, 1991, pp. 228–31.

Another distinctive feature of industrialisation in the US was the scarcity of skilled labour. The British apprenticeship system was transplanted to North America in colonial times, but it never established deep roots.¹⁵ The US was a dynamic, settler society in which labour was more mobile than in Britain. Opportunities for self-employment were greater, and the restrictions on personal freedom which apprenticeship entailed were less acceptable. Hence employers had difficulty in retaining the apprentices they had trained. Attempts to impose sanctions on runaway apprentices were unsuccessful and, except in a few trades such as printing, the system had virtually died out by the end of the nineteenth century. Since American manufacturers did not have access to the pool of skilled workers which was available in Britain, they looked for manufacturing methods which economised on the use of craft skills.

In the early stages of industrialisation American employers used the British internal contracting system, but as the volume of production rose and expensive investments were made in high-output machinery, these informal arrangements were no longer adequate. Tighter discipline and closer supervision were needed. In the 1890s Frederick W. Taylor, a production engineer at a leading steel company, worked out new ways of organising and motivating shop floor employees in order to ensure that machinery was used productively. Taylor’s approach, which was set out in his Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, was to establish scientifically how much time and effort a particular task required, and to reward workers who consistently achieved those standards. The ‘Taylorist’ style of management, giving workers less control over the pace and organisation of work, was resisted by the American trade unions, which, like their British counterparts, were organised on craft lines. But American employers were not prepared to compromise on the principle of managerial control. ‘British employers generally chose to accommodate the craft workers; US employers, to confront them.’¹⁶

The increasing scale of manufacturing operations brought with it the need for well-trained, technically competent managers. The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, providing federal support for the creation of new universities, led to an expansion of engineering education. One of the new institutions was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which formed close links with the electrical engineering industry. The first business school – the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania – was opened in 1881. The expansion of commercial education put pressure on the older, classical universities to make their teaching more relevant to the needs of industry.¹⁷ Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration, modelled on the Harvard Law School, was founded in 1908.

The professionalisation of management was accelerated by the wave of mergers which took place around the turn of the century. Entrepreneurs in industries making high-volume, standardised goods invested heavily in machinery and equipment, and profitability depended on keeping this expensive plant fully employed, and on avoiding destructive price wars. When cartels were prohibited by the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, mergers were seen as a more secure means of keeping competition under control. Several industries acquired an oligopolistic structure, which was to persist with little fundamental change until after the Second World War. An extreme case was United States Steel Corporation, which at the time of its creation in 1901 accounted for 65 per cent of America’s steel-making capacity. Most of the big mergers which took place around the turn of the century involved the transfer of ownership from the original founders or their descendants to outside investors, and the appointment of salaried executives to senior posts.

Industrialisation in the US was characterised by scale, organisation and raw-material intensity. The US did not have any great reputation at this stage for scientific originality. As in Britain, American technology was oriented to the shop floor and built on practical experience.¹⁸ American entrepreneurs were good at taking inventions made elsewhere, like the internal combustion engine, and adapting them to local conditions. Even in electrical engineering, which was an outstanding American success, Thomas Edison was a brilliant experimenter, not a trained scientist, although he recognised the need for scientifically trained colleagues to translate his ideas into practice. The growth of the US electrical industry rested on organisational skills – the construction of an integrated system for generating, transmitting and distributing electricity – and on the recognition that, once the system was in place, a mass market was waiting to be tapped.