Lives of the Philadelphia Engineers: Capital, Class, and Revolution, 1830-1890 (review)

Andrew Dawson frames a strong and simple argument in this book. Philadelphia machine builders emerged in the 1850s as a new entrepreneurial class, to compete with an old merchant elite for control of the city's political life and thus the power to shape national policies, particularly with respect to slavery and the tariff. They opposed slavery because of their commitment to "free labor," code words for a system in which workers negotiated individually with their employers. And they depended on the tariff for protection against the superior skills and productivity of British workers, willingly exchanging their support of corrupt Republican machine politicians for it.

This neatly dovetailed set of trade-offs had its source in the peculiar character of Philadelphia's machine-building business. Unlike the light industry of New England that used interchangeable-parts manufacturing techniques to produce inexpensive guns and sewing machines, and without its water power resources, the Philadelphians depended on skilled workmen to custom make heavy equipment like steam engines, pumps, machine tools, and locomotives, a circumstance that made them especially sensitive to worker combinations. And, the author claims, because the Philadelphians could not successfully compete in international markets, they looked for their financial salvation in the tariff. Both policies put the machine builders on a collision course with the South, as well as with the city's mercantile aristocracy, who had long been engaged in commercial dealings with the South and from whom the industrialists were determined to wrest control of the city.

The title of this book means to call to mind Samuel Smiles's Lives of the Engineers (1861), a series of nineteenth-century biographies of British technical men, and in an analogous way, Dawson chronicles the rise of a group of industrialists like Matthias Baldwin of locomotive fame, machine builders Samuel Vaughn Merrick, machine tool makers William Sellers and William Bement, and shipbuilder William Cramp. Not only did these men invent alternative paths to wealth, but they also became the vanguard of a new industrial class that was remarkably unified, Dawson says, in its political and social ambitions. Their increasing wealth, certainly, was crucial. Joseph Harrison returned from building railroads in Russia with huge profits, which he used in an effort to establish himself as the city's cultural czar. Baldwin became equally rich supplying the domestic railway market, with sales so widespread that he could engage in antislavery campaigns without fear of offending southern customers. And Samuel Vaughn Merrick, with important family and political connections, came to establish himself as a central figure in the mid nineteenth-century's military industrial complex. As Dawson tells the story, this new group, allied with the Republican Party, used the Civil War to seize control of Philadelphia politics. "Republicans realized," he writes, "they had to supplant the old elite and transform the war from a contest of national integrity to a revolutionary battle for class power" (p. 145). That seems an odd rendering of the concept of class, and as Dawson's original categories begin to break down, he is forced to invent new ones, subdividing machine builders into two groups—one of "artisan mechanics" and another one of "mercantile mechanics." Merrick, hugely influential and a Democrat besides, is harder still to pigeonhole.

What is clear is that, like businessmen everywhere, the Philadelphians sought to ensure the most favorable circumstances for their enterprises, and they defined those things broadly, to include tariff barriers, lower local taxes, effective police and fire protection, and a system of public schools that served their interests. But it proved easier to buy politicians than it did to control labor, despite an array of educational experiments in industrial and vocational education, as apprenticeship programs declined in importance. According to Dawson, labor costs remained the central reason Philadelphia machine builders were still uncompetitive in the world market by the 1870s and the reason they encouraged Frederick Winslow Taylor's experiments in...