President Donald Trump dreams of using tariffs on foreign goods to produce a golden age of U.S. industry. Yet, this vision is based upon a misunderstanding of the causes and consequences of American industrial decline.
As the story so often goes, in the late-19th century, America became a prosperous, industrial superpower founded on stable, factory jobs. But, in the latter half of the 20th century, a shadowy cabal of high-flying financiers and elite manufacturers moved those jobs abroad, in search of lower wages and bigger profits. They left behind broken cities and devastated local economies. Free trade helped the rich get richer, but left everyday Americans behind.
The problem is this story lionizes an industrial past with little basis in reality. Nowhere is that clearer than in New Bedford, Mass., which was once the nation’s largest fine cotton cloth producer, and now is one of the many suffering Rust Belt towns chasing revitalization. Only understanding the true story of American industrialization will allow for formulating good policy today.
The idea of stable industrial prosperity would’ve shocked America’s Founders, who tended to see manufacturing as less a harbinger of wealth than an adjunct of poverty. Industry depended on impoverished workers with no other option but the tedium of mass manufacturing. The result, Thomas Jefferson reflected in 1805, was “a depravity of morals, a dependence and corruption” that made factory labor “an undesirable accession to a country whose morals are sound.”
Indeed, early American industrial work was demanding, dull, and dangerous. Massachusetts’s early-19th century factories kept workers at their machines every workday from dawn to 7:00 or 7:30 PM. Reports of grisly accidents were a constant feature of local newspapers. In 1867, for example, eight-year-old millworker Katie Lyon, despite having “just been beaten for carelessness,” got her dress caught in the spinning room gears, drawing her arm…
