Lynn, Massachusetts

Alan Dawley, in Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn, explores the effects of that 19th century revolution on the shoemaking community of Lynn, Massachusetts. Essentially, before the Industrial Revolution, Lynn was a community without strong class differences, while afterwards a great class gulf opened up between the few capitalists and the many workers. Before the revolution, those workers were part of a system of masters and apprentices with the household as the center of the community and of work. After the revolution, the apprenticeship system was broken, and workers became dependent on the factory, weakening the household as the center of life and work which held the community and its people together in relative equality.

These differences were all generally negative for the people of Lynn. However, because the people had previously had such a strong sense of unity for so long, and because their system of labor had been so strong and entrenched, they fought back against the new conditions wrought by the revolution. Dawley's book, then, is about both the negative effects of that revolution and the efforts of the people of Lynn to fight back.

As Dawley writes, "The concept of class is the analytical foundation of the present work" (4). In other words, the story of Lynn is the story of the progression from a relatively classless community, o the class division created by the revolution, and finally to the class struggle between the workers and the cap

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time lost in transporting the goods to and from the workers, the factory generated an intense concentration of human energy on the productive process. The factory worker . . . worked steadily at a pace set by the external forces of the production line and enforced by the line foreman. If he slackened his pace, he threatened his own standard of living, either by risking firing or by cutting down his piece-wage for the day (95). With the factory and the inequality between the capitalist factory owners and the factory workers also came urbanization and modernization throughout the community of Lynn. The entire economic and social structure underwent profound changes, all of which flowed from the changes in the process of production based on the factory, the heart and soul of the Industrial Revolution. However, as stated earlier, the workers of Lynn retained a sense of the cooperation, relative equality, and the dignity of individual work which had preceded the revolution. The Workingmen's party was one result of their efforts to recover what the revolution was taking away from them. The short-lived successes of the Workingmen's party, however, came to an end with the Civil War. The people's success in fighting the capitalists, and

Category: History - L