The Decline in Manufacturing in New York State

It is a commonplace of American history curricula that the Industrial Revolution in the United States may have begun with the invention of the cotton gin in America and the steam engine in England, it achieved momentum only by way of internal "infrastructure" improvements in communication and transportation, including construction of roadways and waterways, to facilitate movement of goods and workers for trade purposes. The ability to move goods from their source to markets fostered the rise and dominance of a merchant and industrial class possessed of values and protocols distinct from the agrarian class comprising gentlemen and yeoman farmers as well as slaveholding cultures, plus the growth of a working/laboring class. The origin of industrial momentum in the United States and its diverse cultural and social legacy was situated quite specifically along the Erie Canal, a 363-mile east-west stretch of water linking Albany, N.Y., at the east end, at the headwaters of the Hudson River Va

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York, both state and city. The concentration of capital in industrial organizations and the so-called robber barons who founded them supplied employment advantages and cost efficiencies, but it also created problems. A few men, many of them located in New York City and state, controlled the bulk of the country's wealth and industry. By and large this was tolerated as one of several "small maladjustments" in America's "magnificent growth, but these were necessary evils attendant on such expansion. Things would even out." The unionization dynamics of New York's apparel and textile industries illustrate the irony cited above. As far back as the 1900s, New York City's Lower East Side was considered the "epicenter of apparel manufacturing." New York's apparel factories were fed their raw materials by New England and upstate New York textile mills; a major apparel factory was established in Rochester, New York, in the 1880s. Levi Strauss, meanwhile, set up a factory in the city in 1908, having relocated from a San Francisco devastated by the 1906 earthquake. The development of mass produced clothing, largely a New York innovation, was transforming the apparel experience of the American middle class: The move from custom-made to read
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Approximate Word count = 5590
Approximate Pages = 22 (250 words per page)

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