Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn

by Alan Dawley

In this twenty-fifth anniversary edition of his prize-winning book, Dawley reflects once more on labor and class issues, poverty and progress, and the contours of urban history in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts, during the rise of industrialism in the early nineteenth century. He not only revisits this urban conglomeration, but also seeks out previously unheard groups such as women and blacks. The result is a more rounded portrait of a small eastern city on the verge of becoming modern.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Labor

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Zachary Bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dawley does a community study of the shoe industry in Lynn, MA to try and discover the origins of an American working class consciousness. The book recounts the old story of the stages of the industrial revolution, from outwork, to the factory. A working class was developing in the 1820-30s, but since America extended the franchise to all white men, unlike Europe, workers bought into dominant capitalist political economy. The lack of traditional hierarchies and general economic prosperity made it easier for workers to move up the social ladder, and eschew whatever labor ideology they held for bourgeois free market sympathies. Dawley argues that this working class consciousness did emerge around 1870. The unifying ideological impulse was a demand for "Equal Rights" that were slowly being eroded by demands of factory workers who controlled ever larger amounts capital (Beckert-Monied Metropolis). Dawley characterizes groups such as the Knights of St. Crispin and the Knights of Labor as broad based, full of Yankees and Irish, men and women. A persistent impulse toward radical democracy gradually led to class consciousness by the end of the century, opening the door for more socialist alternatives.

[Evan Ash]

Dawley picked up where Marx left off hell yeah

[Pilar Ibarra · Rating 3 out of 5]

massachusetts shoemakers as a microcosm for class consciousness in the industrial revolution was kind of iconic