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Readings > HTML > Modernization |
The World of Preindustrial Workers
Historian Bruce Laurie highlights a range of preindustrial behaviors by urban artisans that impeded the efforts of a new manufacturing class to increase production. Abridged from "'Nothing on Impulse': Life Styles of Philadelphia Artisans, 1820-1850," Labor History 15 (1974): 34448, 350-51. Reprinted from "'Nothing on Impulse': Life Styles of Philadelphia Artisans, 1820-1850," by Bruce Laurie, from Labor History, Milton Cantor, editor, Summer 1974, Vol. 15, No. 3. Copyright @ 1974 by The Tamiment Institute.
Fluctuations in trade were not the only determinants of employment. . . . [M]any artisans who lived in the transitional period between the pre-industrial and industrial age adhered to values, customs, and traditions that went against the grain of early industrial discipline. Prizing leisure as well as work, they engaged in a wide spectrum of leisure-time activities, ranging from competitive sport to lounging on street comers. Many of them also belonged to volunteer organizations, which successfully competed with their places of employment for their attention and devotion.
Traditions die hard, and perhaps none died harder than preindustrial drinking habits. Advances in science and medicine, early industrial changes and . . . the advent of revivalism, eroded customary drinking habits among some sectors of the medical profession, the clergy, and the emerging industrial elite. But the old commercial classes and most artisans still clung tenaciously to older ways. They valued alcohol for its own sake and used it as a stimulant or as medicine to combat fatigue, to cool the body in summer or warm it in winter, and to treat common illness.
Numerous contemporaries report that artisans were not particular about where they imbibed.... Looking back on his days as a journeyman, [tanner Benjamin] Sewell recalled that young apprentices learned to drink while they learned a trade. Journeymen arrived at work with flasks and appointed an apprentice to make periodic trips to the local pub in order to have them filled, "for which service" he "robs the mail . . . takes a drink before he gets back. . . . . This training ground turned many young wage earners into hardened drinkers, inclined to go on an occasional binge.
Employers winced at such behavior, but one ought not assume that all of them were martinets who enforced regulations against drink. Owners of textile mills could afford to do so because they relied upon a semi-skilled labor force which could be replaced with relative ease. The concentration required by operators of power-driven machinery, moreover, caused some to relinquish drink without much prompting from employers.... Smaller employers, on the other hand, were more tolerant of workers who drank.... Many, if not most, small employers were former journeymen themselves steeped in preindustrial culture, and those who did custom work anticipated fluctuations in trade and therefore tolerated irregular work habits. These employers "expected" journeymen to shun the shop on holidays—official as well as self proclaimed—and they endured drinking, as long as their journeymen worked "tolerably regularly" and managed to avoid getting "absolutely drunk."
Most artisans did their drinking in pubs, and pubs probably assumed greater importance in their life after some employers began to prohibit drinking in the shop. Working-class pubs had a style all their own. Signs with piquant inscriptions hung above entranceways and stood in bold contrast to the sedate placards which graced the vestibules of middle-class establishments.... Immigrant taverns sometimes advertised popular political causes. . . . These taverns offered a wide variety of entertainment, illicit and otherwise....
Despite these attractions most workers, we may believe, visited pubs for the sake of camaraderie. At the end of the workday homebound artisans, made detours to their favorite taverns, where they exchanged stories or discussed politics over drams or mugs of a variety of malt liquor. Outworkers broke the boredom of toiling alone by visiting the local pub during the day, and shopworkers probably went there to celebrate the completion of a task or an order. Most observers agree that tavern traffic increased dramatically on Sunday night and in winter when trade slowed. . . .
[A]rtisans especially enjoyed pastimes in which they could participate. They simply loved shooting matches and hunting small game, according to an observer who bemoaned that "every fair day" yielded a "temptation to forsake the shop for the field." The most avid hunters, he contended, were artisans who toiled indoors, for they found a jaunt in the fields especially relaxing. Artisans who resided in the same neighborhood sometimes set aside time for exercise by declaring holidays and staging competitive games. . . .
Sport, merrymaking, and drinking were also staples at ethnic gatherings. English, German, and Irish immigrants honored Old World customs and traditions, celebrated weddings and holidays, or gathered simply in order to socialize regardless of the time of day or day of the week. Germans, for instance, set aside Monday as their "principal day for pleasure," and festivities could spill into the middle of the week. . . . The Irish were also known to set aside Monday for outings in the suburbs. Their national games, the Donneybrook Fair, traditionally attracted hundreds of enthusiasts and no self-respecting Irish Protestant missed the annual July 12 parade commemorating the glorious victory on the banks of the Boyne in 1690. . . .
These pursuits and activities—drinking and gaming, participating in popular sports and in fire companies—characterized a vibrant, preindustrial style of life. A number of factors underpinned this style, the most significant of which were demographic and material. First, as Herbert Gutman notes, it was repeatedly replenished by waves of immigrants and rural-urban migrants, who came from widely divergent sub-cultures but whose values and behavior collided with the imperatives of early industrial discipline. Second, and perhaps more important, at mid-century many wage earners worked in traditional (as against modern) settings which, together with the boom-bust quality of the economy, supported sporadic work habits. Those who know this environment best were outworkers—especially hand-loom weavers, shoemakers, and tailors—who toiled at home without direct supervision of employers and custom workers, who fashioned consumer goods to the taste of individuals and who thereby evaded the more vigorous regimen of workers producing for the mass market.
Outworkers and custom workers displayed traditional forms of behavior in that they made no sharp distinction between work and leisure. Blending leisure with work, they punctuated work-days with the activities sketched above. Nor did they respect the specialization of role and function which normally accompanies modernization. Instead they persisted in assuming the dual role of artisans and firemen in the face of strong opposition from urban reformers who wished to relegate firefighting to paid professionals. It is probable, moreover, that the values, activities, and organizations of this style of life filled the basic needs of its adherents by sanctioning and supplying vehicles for recreation, neighborhood or drastic alteration of those customs, traditions, and practices cohesion, ethnic identity, and camaraderie.
At the same time, however, there emerged a competing culture with its own organizations and institutions. Unlike preindustrial culture, it made a sharp distinction between work and leisure and regarded preindustrial culture as wasteful, frivolous and, above all, sinful. Sanctioning a more modern style of life, it originated not among the working class but with the emerging industrial elite and the Presbyterian clergy. This elite was in the process of displacing the old Quaker oligarchy and included manufacturers who represented the most advanced industries, . . . as well as merchants and professionals with investments in industry and transportation.
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