The Industrial Revolution is truly one of the most significant chapters in the history of America and perhaps in the whole history of mankind as well. If we use the year 1607 as our starting date, then the typical U.S. History college class deals with about 400 years of American History. Here at NHU the first part of U.S. History focuses on the years between 1607 and 1865.
The first 150 years comprise the Colonial Period, when England established thirteen colonies on the Atlantic seaboard. A greater emphasis, however, is usually placed on the 1776-1865 period, from the Declaration of Independence to the end of the Civil War. Three major events or themes dominate American History during this period:
1) The first major event is the American Revolution with emphasis on the ideas of individual rights, a written constitution, and democratic government.
2) The second major theme is the Industrial Revolution. In the century from 1800 to 1900, America became an industrial nation. Factories were built everywhere and a new way of life was created in the fast-growing cities.
3) The third major event is the Civil War and the struggle over slavery.
SOCIAL CHANGES
Before the Industrial Revolution, families grew their own food. They took care of animals like chickens, pigs, and cattle. They grew vegetables to eat and sometimes to sell. This is true for many cultures around the world. We as human beings have a strong agricultural background and many people still do.
At one time it seemed as if it would go on forever. But that traditional way of life began to change around 1800 when the Industrial Revolution got under way with the invention of machines: steam power, spinning wheels and levers, pulleys and pistons, and many more amazing devices. After the development of electricity after the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution began to accelerate even more.
All of these mechanical inventions, both in terms of production and consumption, combined to change the way people lived. Ever large cities came into being as workers became concentrated near the industrial plants. Populations of cities began climbing upwards to tens of thousands of people, then hundreds of thousands.
Many of these newly arrived residents (including immigrants from overseas) were working-class laborers who did the hard physical labor in the mines, mills, and factories, who would supply the muscle power for building roads and bridges—for creating a New World.
By 1865 and the end of the Civil War, a new industrial America was rapidly emerging. A new age was dawning. Throughout the nineteenth century, Americans became used to steamboats and railroads for transportation and telephones and telegraph lines for faster communication, along with new inventions such as the electric light-bulb, the phonograph, the sewing machine, and the typewriter.
As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the inventions kept coming: radios, moving pictures, automobiles, airplanes and a whole lot more. Indeed, today we live in the age of computers and electronic technology which appears so advanced that it may seem entirely distinct from previous eras, but all of today’s high-speed modern inventions grew out of the Industrial Revolution.
These nineteenth century mechanical changes, therefore, were truly significant, since they would re-define the very nature of society itself. The cell phone evolved from the earliest telephone, for example, though they may look worlds apart.
The faster cars on the road today derived from the earliest combustion engines or “horseless carriages.” By magnitude of speed and power the difference between the earliest and the latest is truly quite huge, yet an organic link will always remain between them.
The overwhelming majority of American people lived on farms and in small towns in 1700 and not that much had changed by 1800. But from 1800 to 1900, the changes become much more visible and undeniable. For the first time in American history, a majority of the people (54%) were listed in the census of 1900 as urban dwellers living in small, medium, and large cities (minimum of 2,500).
In short, for the first time more people lived in cities than in the countryside. In this context alone– in the movement of people from farms and villages to towns and cities–the Industrial Revolution created a new historical divide as family farming traditions were being broken and lost. The way families cooked, ate, slept, and provided shelter for themselves began to change dramatically in all the industrializing nations of the world.
Instead of people growing and making what they needed, they began to buy the necessities of life in stores. These items were increasingly mass-produced in factories and mills, as opposed to individual hand-crafted goods. For people to buy these goods they would need money, which meant “selling their labor” to a factory owner and increasingly they could only earn money by finding employment away from the farm or ranch.
The farming days start to vanish for them; instead of milking cows they buy milk in cartons in stores. Instead of gathering eggs from chickens in a hen-house, they buy a dozen at a time in a carton. Instead of making their own clothes, they buy their clothes off the racks and shelves in department stores.
Many saw the transformation as positive and inevitable, and with society moving forward so fast it is little wonder that people lacked time to assess what they might be losing as well. Gone the fresh air of countryside and the natural beauty of a green environment—now replaced by sweatshops and factories, tenements and ghettoes, with land, air, and water becoming ever more polluted.
We will return to the question of gain and loss later, but for now it is enough to acknowledge that the Industrial Revolution–the Machine Age–fundamentally changed how people lived and worked: slow changes at first, and then faster and faster. In the space of a few decades, the Industrial Revolution gathered tremendous momentum and spread with incredible swiftness.
England became “the workshop of the world” as England, Germany, France, and other nations began rapidly to industrialize. The production of coal, iron, and steel skyrocketed upward and soon was measured in thousands of tons each year. Patents–the written record of inventors and their inventions–began to multiply from a few hundred to a few thousand per year.
America, a seemingly backward colonial outpost of England at one time, started far behind these other European giants in the race to industrialize and yet by the end of the 19th century was ready to surpass England, Germany, and France in nearly every key category measuring total industrial output. Today we tend to take all these changes for granted, as though this is the way life has always been.
We tend to forget how different life used to be and what a radical change the Industrial Revolution truly was–and is–as it continues to spread to nearly all peoples on all continents of the world. At one time people around the world depended on agriculture, or hunting and gathering. Then, in the space of a few decades, the Industrial Revolution transformed one society after another, with every invention leading to countless more.
Each advance in production technique led to another; there always seemed a faster way of producing more and more goods for people to buy. In 1908, the Ford Motor Company sold 10,000 cars. Five years later, in 1913, it sold 248,000 cars. Today there are nearly 250,000,000 cars and trucks on the road in America.
Before the coming of the automobile, the invention of the railroad dramatically changed the way people traveled and how goods could be moved around the country. Railroad trains and steamboats made it possible for people to travel long distances quickly. It took the colonists two months to cross the Atlantic Ocean in the early 1600’s.
To go from New York to San Francisco by boat, around all of South America, took six months.
After the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, the train trip from New York to San Francisco took only six days. That may sound long to us today but at that time it seemed incredibly short!
The telegraph and telephone made possible long-distance communication. The phonograph recorded the human voice for the first time and later was used to record and play music. The long-playing album would be next, followed by tape recorders and a large variety of electronic equipment for recording and playing music and speech.
The light-bulb “extended the length of the day”, as one writer put it. People no longer needed candles. At the flick of a switch they could illuminate a room or a whole house or an entire office building or a city block or a city! As people moved through the 20th century, along came other labor-saving devices: washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, toaster, microwave oven, electric can opener, sewing machine, vacuum cleaner, and much more: the list is nearly endless.
Along came newspapers and magazines; radio, television, and motion pictures; automobiles, buses, and trucks; ships and boats and ocean liners; airplanes, jets, and rocket ships. Along came electronic devices, the silicon chip, and computers; satellites in orbit, astronauts standing on the moon, and spaceships heading toward the planets and stars and to unknown places beyond the solar system . . .
And we have not yet begun to exhaust the ability of human beings to invent and create! The hand that painted a picture in a cave 10,000 years ago can now place a CD in a car while driving, talking on a cell phone, and pressing a button to use an electronic map that is receiving the latest and most accurate information from a satellite circling the earth 20,000 miles overhead! And yet, it is the same hand in a sense, is it not? It is a human hand.
We have not changed as much away from the shape and purpose of our most distant ancestors as we sometimes think. We are still related, when all is said and done, to people who lived 10,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago, even though they never dreamed of the modern world we now enjoy as normal and natural. How different are we from human beings who lived 5,000 years ago? These questions remain to be answered.
In the meantime, society itself, in the last two centuries, has undergone a most amazing and revolutionary transformation. The world we see around us today is very different from that of our grandparents, or how society looked to their grandparents. Families once lived in the same village and farmed the same piece of land for many generations. Sons and daughters carried on the ways of their fathers and mothers.
Generations came and went and there was only one life-style that they knew and usually it was good enough. Some persons lived their entire lives within a few miles of where they were born!
We remain in a period of extremely rapid social change and this rate of change is not only likely to continue but it will possibly accelerate even more. The Industrial Revolution–a hallmark event in the history of humanity–is now giving birth to a Revolution of Technology that may have consequences as great as that of the Industrial Revolution itself. Of course, the two are not really separate events–the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the Age of Technology; the latter could not have occurred without the former.
In part that is what the study of history is all about: change. The answer to “who we are” can be found in the lives of the people who went before us. Every human being who lived and died is one of our ancestors–no, not always in sense of a direct genealogical family line, but at the very least as an ancestor of all humanity. If we wish to be counted as part of the Family of Humanity, then all past human beings can be considered ancestors of us as well, even though they may have died many long centuries ago.
We don’t know all their names; we don’t know what they looked like; we don’t even know how their voices sounded when they talked. Yet we know them as human beings who lived on this earth and tried to deal with the world–with Nature and with each other–the best they could. The work that they did–the labor of their hands, is part of our world. The art that they created, the high and noble thoughts that they expressed are part of an inheritance that belongs to all of us.
It is an inheritance handed down from generation to generation, even as you will hand it down to your children and they in turn to their children. As President John F. Kennedy said in 1960, “The torch of freedom has been handed to a new generation.”
This is what the Constitution of the United States means when it uses the phrase “to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and to our Posterity.” The same precious thought of living in freedom, written a thousand different ways, has warmed the hearts and minds of countless human beings down through the ages.
Some lived under terrible conditions of poverty and oppression, of despair and hopelessness; some lived as slaves and would never know the sweet taste of freedom during their own lifetimes. And yet, the song of freedom remained alive on their lips and deep in their hearts in a place where it could never be extinguished.
They did what they had to do just to survive, while they waited and hoped for a new day of freedom and justice–if not for themselves, then for their children.
Whether free or slave, prosperous or poor, most of our human ancestors worked hard and led decent lives of quiet dignity. They would leave this world a better place and they would help make the future a little better and brighter for us as well!
Perhaps I can be accused of putting words into the mouths of others, but the evidence is clear–just look around you. This world was built with love and care by decent, loving, and honest human beings. It is our right and our duty to accept this legacy: to say “thank you” to them and to promise to do what is right as the best way to honor and respect them.
It is one of the obligations of every new generation to accept that rich legacy which past generations helped create for us, whether in terms of literature and art and philosophy or in terms of material goods and all the other comforts that go into making up America’s high standard of living today.
We inherit trust, hope, and a sense of conscience as well. It is an on-going moral responsibility for this generation to treasure and protect Mother Earth and in due time to pass on this legacy to the generations that will come after us.
“Every life is precious”: when we can say that and mean it, we are keeping faith with the best ideas of human beings everywhere, both past and present, who live simple decent lives and have hopes that they and their children can live in a world of peace and justice, freedom and equality–a world in which the terrible scourges of war, poverty, and racism will one day be vanquished forever. This is the real lesson of U.S. History.
In 1776 a new generation of men and women lit the torch of freedom, secured the victory with their blood, and asked only of future generations to hold the torch aloft. Do not let this flame of freedom go out. If you understand that you are part of the “posterity” of which the Founding Fathers spoke, if you understand that people sacrificed their lives to give liberty a new birth of freedom, then you are in touch with the heartbeat of America.
If you understand this much, you understand everything you need to know about the essential story of the United States and what it means to be an American. We were born in Revolution.
We are the first nation in the modern period to proclaim proudly: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
No matter where you were born, no matter where you choose to live, no matter whether you live in a village or a town or in a big city, we are all sons and daughters of the earth that comes to life each spring with bright flowers and fruits of many colors and fragrances . . . this very earth that provides us with the food we eat and which we harvest each fall with such gladness and joy in our hearts:
We are all sons and daughters of Mother Earth . . .
and every human life is precious!
