From The New York Review of Books:
Practically from the start of industrial manufacturing, gawkers appeared to marvel at the sight. The cotton mills of sooty Manchester were an obligatory stop for every clued-in visitor to that city. In the summer of 1915, Henry Ford’s Highland Park factory in Michigan, the first with a continuous assembly line, drew three to four hundred visitors a day. So prominent a feature of the industrial landscape were factory tourists that Diego Rivera painted them into his mural sequence Detroit Industry (1932–1933). In one panel, the throngs at Ford’s River Rouge plant (young, old, women, men, Dick Tracy among them) look on, their mouths downturned, as the line of chassis—pierced by steering wheels and ministered to by bent-over, jumpsuited workers—rolls by. In 1971, 243,000 people visited River Rouge. Later that decade, the Commerce Department’s USA Plant Visits, 1977–78, a compendium of factories that offered tours, ran to 153 pages.
Although American manufacturing output today is near a historic high, the percentage of manufacturing jobs drifted steadily downward in the decades after World War II, and then in 2000 plunged sharply. Factories currently employ less than 8 percent of the American workforce, a consequence of offshoring as well as automation. Perhaps because there is not much romance in watching robots go about their day, the factory tour pickings are now more meager. In the Chicago area in the 1960s, you could have seen how steel, furniture, newspapers, pottery, automobile parts, hosiery, and, yes, sausages were made. Today, the only factory tours left in the city are epicurean: craft distilleries, artisanal chocolateries, and a popcorn factory. If you want to have a look at manufacturing of the Make-America-Great-Again variety in Illinois, you will need to drive nearly two and a half hours to Moline, where the John Deere company, headquartered there since 1848, still provides free tours of the harvester works.
With nostalgia for manufacturing jobs now thoroughly weaponized in American politics, Joshua Freeman’s Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World is timely. Freeman, a historian of American labor and the author of American Empire, the Penguin history of the post–World War II United States, takes as his subject huge factories, the behemoths of his title: River Rouge; the Soviet steel complex Magnitogorsk, east of the Urals; and China’s Foxconn City, with its hundreds of thousands of workers, arguably the largest factory ever in operation. Focusing on these giants, Freeman suggests, reveals what happens when concentrated production and economies of scale are taken to the showiest extreme. It also helps to explain the hold that factories have had on the imagination over the past 250 years: the promise (largely delivered on) that industrialization would lift billions out of poverty, competing with the fears (also realized) that it would wreck the environment and sharpen social conflicts.
. . . .
The rise of the factory was the consequence of three interrelated developments: machinery that was so large or expensive that production could not be carried out at home, technological expertise that similarly exceeded the capacity of the individual household, and entrepreneurs who wished to directly supervise their workers. By the time factories appeared in Lancashire and the East Midlands, the transition to an industrial economy was already underway, and the task of making sense of this new system of manufactures fell first to the British. The perils were apparent: the exploitation of child labor and the thick forest of chimneys pumping out smoke and gasses, the filth of the overcrowded cities and the subjugation of workers to new forms of discipline that critics likened to slavery.
But just as obvious was the wonder. It was not simply about the goods produced—a quantity of textiles measured in miles rather than yards—but the factories themselves, of which Joseph Wright’s 1783 painting of Richard Arkwright’s cotton mills at night provides a glimpse. Outshining the moon in Wright’s picture is the factory, each one of its rectangular, symmetrical windows ablaze, a scene of harmonious, heavenly creation in the Derwent Valley. To describe what they were seeing, writers pressed far-fetched metaphors into service: Robert Southey thought the new factories looked like convents, Alexis de Tocqueville called them “huge palaces,” while Charles Dickens, describing the steam engine, likened its pistons to “the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness” and the smoke it produced to “monstrous serpents.”
Link to the rest at The New York Review of Books
When he was much younger, PG enjoyed factory tours. His favorite was probably the printing plant of a couple of large Chicago newspapers. Lots of moving machinery, huge rolls of paper and streams of uncut newspapers going all over the place. And some of the press workers wore little caps made from folded newspaper.
His tour through a large meat processing plant was less edifying, although that’s where the beef and pork many people enjoy is produced.
One summer, he worked in a small soft drink bottling factory and it was pretty boring.
Many years back I toured the LA Times office when they were still in the city. The building was familiar as the Great Metropolitan Newspaper that Superman (George Reeves, which dates me a bit) flew from. I was a freelance journo and my dh a cartoonist when we did the tour, and it felt like a gargantuan version of Aussie newspapers. The presses were astonishing and the Saturday edition humungous. We had the total American experience that day when a drunk with a gun boarded our bus on Wilshire Boulevard and sat down in front of us mumbling how a man had to protect himself. He got off next stop but not before I’d gone ice cold with fear, knowing what could have happened.
I’ve been an American all my life and been in many cities, and never had anyone with a gun board a bus or come into any venue where I was, except for shooting ranges. I wouldn’t exactly call that the total American experience. Drunks, yes. Armed drunks, no. I’m glad nothing bad happened, though.
How would you know?
There are somewhere around 18 million people with state-issued concealed carry permits in the US, plus all of the residents of the thirteen Constitutional Carry states that don’t need no steenkeeng permits, four more states that don’t need permits in various places, and the legions of police and “Law Enforcement Officers” who wear street clothes. And various criminals, of course.
Think of us as the Lizard People from “They Live”… we go peacefully about our daily affairs, seldom noticed by anyone. Though frankly, the way people are glued to their smartphones nowadays, they wouldn’t notice if I was dragging a wheeled carriage with a 6-pounder behind me.
Oh, the Diego Rivera exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts was a key focal point in a couple of field trips in my childhood. And a tour of the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, where I believe they had replicas of the Model T, and a factory assembly line.
If you’re in that area (Dearborn) and you need to give your kids an educational field trip, the Henry Ford is part of collection that includes Greenfield Village, where they show how Americans lived back in colonial times. I vaguely remember they had us making tallow candles there on a school field trip. They have a replica of Thomas Edison’s lab (sorry Nikola Tesla fanatics!) and a fun train you can ride in. And a farm, in case your kids think food spontaneously generates in the grocery store 🙂
As for factories, when I was young my mother worked for Bosch, which made airflow sensors for Ford. I had a blast visiting the factory for the kickoff of Take Your Daughters to Work Day. Bosch set up a nice program for us girls, where we got to “help” various people on the production line. Good times.
This title gave me a bit of whiplash. I was expecting a post on a horror novel or something 🙂
I had several summer jobs as a teenager in my father’s flour milling business (early IT technology, watching the rat mobs under the RR tracks eating the spilled grain, flour dust everywhere, and the old industrial part of town integrated into the railroads and the “port” for the Missouri River in KC).
The best part was the Thursday lab, where they tested the various blends of flours by baking a few standard recipes. Fresh Kaiser rolls every week throughout my childhood — hard to beat that.
It is. Working in the Kraft foods company store didn’t come very close, but Mallomars for $1.25 a box was fantastic. I think I gained five pounds during that temp job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPu7MiPkEk0
I worked at Black & Decker as a “temp” employee hired through their in-house temp agency–their way of getting full-time employees without having to offer benefits. Unfortunately, they had a policy that if you quit your “temp” job there, they wouldn’t rehire you. I did eventually quit that job. I don’t recall all the product brands they made there, but I do know they were also a major producer of DeWalt products. I worked on household appliances, gardening tools like hedge trimmers, and spent a good portion of my employment there working on this funky little handheld appliance that had different attachments for housecleaning and, believe it or not, foot care.
After Black & Decker, I went to a job manufacturing filter elements (the actual filter part) of fuel filters. I also did some time manufacturing oil filters. I can quite honestly tell you that it doesn’t really matter what brand of filter of either kind you get off the shelf at the auto parts store–Purolator made I think nearly all the brands that are still in the market today. We put the same things in them–same paper, same endcaps, same sealant, and all brands’ elements went through the same assembly, baking, inspection, and packing process. I’m no longer certain just where our filter elements were going, but I think they went to manufacturers of different brands of fuel and oil filters. The only thing different about the filters were their outer shells, for those we fully assembled in-house, which generally had their brands printed on them if they were Name Brand. There were display cases with the filters everywhere on the lines that manufactured those brands.
After that, and after the Navy, I did a brief stint in an affiliate factory that made components to assemblages made in Black & Decker and a variety of simple household things like plastic mailboxes.
Of the three manufacturing jobs I’ve had, I enjoyed Black & Decker the most because of the variety of tasks I performed. My third manufacturing job was a soul-killer, though I enjoyed the work overall. It was just that I was out of the Navy when I got that job and on my first slide into a bipolar depressive episode that made the job seem so horrible in other respects.
In a past life, I was a Chamber of Commere / Economic Development executive. I probably toured 500 factories (some big but mostly small) in 30 years. Retired now, I’d have to say I miss it. Touring factories was the most fun I ever had at work.
The amazing thing was I saw business whose factory floor and equipment were almost identicial and yet they were in entirely different businesses, some positioned for success and alive today, others on their way to the great junkyard of misplaced dreams.
It was all a matter of positioning, market intelligence, leadership, etc.
I love factories. It may be because my father worked for Pabst Blue Ribbon for 35 years (though I can’t stand breweries because of the smell and I don’t drink beer), I have always gotten a kick out of being on the factory floor somewhere.
My dream pay-the-rent job (as opposed to writing for a living) was a printer of financial books. I worked in the office doing programming and web, and you could walk out the door onto the factory floor and smell the printer’s ink and watch the pallets get shrinkwrapped and a host of other things that happened on the floor. I never got tired of it. Sadly, the shop went under after I was there only six months.
I have a few factory jobs (temporary and short-time) on my resume as well. I can’t explain why, but I did enjoy them all.
Maybe because you were producing something of value?
Knowing you’ve completed a job well done brings deep satisfaction to many people.
Yes, that’s certainly part of it, but I’ve been very proud of my work no matter whether it was typesetting, desktop publishing, or web. I’m very good at what I do, whether the end product is fluorescent light fixtures or a perfect page in a magazine or website.
It was something else, something indefinable.
I enjoyed manufacturing for a couple of reasons. One, I enjoy working with my hands. Two, once I got the hang of the assemblage processes I was taught, it mostly left my mind free to brain on story stuff.