Class discourse in an early 19th-century New England factory

Conclusions

While the egalitarian, Republican ring of the 1833 exchange of speeches between Collins and his workers was not a true reflection of the relationship between them, it held sufficient mutual beliefs and desires to be spoken and heard as meaningful. By 1846 the edge of class had sharpened, and language was no longer able to dull it. The speech in 1846 was not successful. There is no record of the workers' language since Collins did not record either their request nor their response—although he copied his own excessively long speech into his memoirs—but we have Collins's word that the speech was not effective, and the men began to leave. According to Collins, in 1846 “the circumstances and the men were different.”⁶⁵ He might have added that he, also, was different, but it was a statement of the increasing distance between the classes that had not been bridged by the acceptance of hegemonic discourse.

According to Wilentz, the shift from Republicanism to a liberal rhetoric of supply and demand was equally unconvincing to New York artisans of this period. While the masters argued that “the price of all commodities including labor...were not governed by an ‘engrossing or monopolizing spirit’ on the part of the landowners or employers but by the limits of supply and demand”;⁶⁶ the journeymen argued that “the masters' plea that they only followed the laws of supply and demand was a fraudulent ruse, an impudent denial of the ‘best motives’ of the Revolution and the Constitution.”⁶⁷ In fact, this early use of the ideology of independence of the market coincided with an unprecedented involvement of government into the economy.⁶⁸

For the entrepreneurs who invested in and developed the new industries, Republicanism had been an adequate language for surrounding their actions with a patriotic gloss as they gained governmental and public support—financial, legal, and ideological—for private development and profit. It covered class divisions with a cloak of unity. However, the language of Republicanism was potentially inflammatory for workers as well as limiting to the business classes. At Lowell, in 1834, the striking women had circulated a petition grandly composed in Republicanism's rhetoric to protest the tyranny of the workplace: Our present object is to have union and exertion, and we remain in possession of our unquestionable rights. We circulate this paper wishing to obtain the names of all who imbible the spirit of our Patriotic Ancestors, who preferred privation to bondage, and parted with all that renders life desirable and even life itself to procure independence for their children.⁶⁹ Wilentz traces the development of Republicanism in the protests of the New York artisans, who argued that “only the journeymen, had the right to judge the value of their labor”,⁷⁰ and, even as late as 1850, battled not only specific wages but “the wages system” itself.⁷¹

At the Collins Company as elsewhere, as management developed more control over labor it spoke a different language. Collins was to some degree restrained by his own prior constructs and experiences. Later generations of employers would have no problem publicly facing their employees and rationalizing exploitation with the bland violence of liberal individualism, telling them that supply and demand was a natural law, self-interest worked to the benefit of all, and since anyone who worked hard could succeed, failure was the fault of the individual. Democracy's place was outside of the workplace after working hours. It was guaranteed by public suffrage and the two-party system.

For historians, the recent delineation of Republicanism has led to the understanding that liberal individualism is not just a natural American way to think but a cultural artifact whose beginnings can be traced. The impetus to understand and describe our own world view as a cultural fact has been the increasing inability of liberal individualism to explain or express the economic, social, and political world we live in. By 1846 the class division had become too strongly established for the language of Republicanism to meaningfully bridge it. By 1989 the same could be said for liberal individualism.