Architects of the American System: The Mobilization of the Industrial Interest in the United States, 1815-1890
This project examines the mobilization of the U. S. manufacturing interest from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to 1890, when Congress began passing legislation to rein in corporate power. I examine the formation of this interest, its objectives, organizational structure, modes of operation, and the resources it mobilized. While political parties have attracted a great deal of attention among scholars of 19th-century United States, other modes of organizing interests and channeling political activism have been largely overlooked. Drawing perspectives and tools from collective action theory, this study of the emerging manufacturing interest will provide important new insights into U. S. nineteenth-century politics and the making of industrial capitalism. Collectivities do not mobilize spontaneously. Opportunities need to arise. Individuals have to formulate and coalesce around common interpretations and objectives. The capacity to organize and gain influence over the political process ultimately depends on the group's ability to secure and mobilize resources -- material, human, ideational, organizational. This project traces the evolution of the manufacturing interest chronologically, but place added emphasis on moments of heightened conflict over economic policy. My sources consist of leading organizers' manuscript collections (from archives in Philadelphia, Washington, and New York) along with pamphlets, petitions, protocols, notes from convention proceedings, and newspapers.
Final report
Purpose and project development:
The project examines the formation of an industrial lobby in 19th-century United States. More precisely, it focuses on associations of “friends of industry” in New York City and Philadelphia. The purpose is to show how groups established themselves, how they mobilized, how they acquired the necessary resources, and what role they played in federal and state politics. Existing studies do not cover this topic. There is comprehensive research about interest politics (or lobbying), but existing studies focus almost exclusively on the period around and after WWII. In this literature, the growth of interest groups is closely tied to the modern welfare state and its redistributive programs and regulatory framework. Organized interests during earlier periods remain largely unexplored. Historians of 19th-century United States have primarily devoted their attention to political parties and single-issue groups, such as abolitionists or temperance advocates.
The project has essentially followed the description in the original application. The study is chronologically structured and focuses in particular on the political mobilization of industrial organizations during economic and financial crises – the depression after the Napoleonic Wars, the recession and the “Nullification Crisis” during the late 1820s and the beginning of the 1830s, the recession from “Panic of 1837” to about 1842, the crisis in the iron industry in the wake of the 1846 tariff, the Panic of 1857, and the recession after the civil war.
However, the project differs from the original proposal in one important respect. My application suggested a study that would cover the period from the end of the Napoleonic War to the 1890s. According to the original plan, the final chapter would deal with how the industrial lobby handled the federal state’s attempts to regulate larger associations of companies and their political activities. While working on the project, however, I became convinced that the so-called trust debates in the late 1800s involved other issues and actors. The study is tied together by overlapping organizations. With that in mind, the years following the American Civil War, and more specifically the formation of the American Iron and Steel Association (1864) and the National Industrial League (1869), constitutes a more natural endpoint. In terms of organizational structure and resources, these new groups differed radically from associations of “friends of industry” in earlier decades. Another reason to end the study with the establishment of these organizations is that the conditions of politics changed radically during the civil war, as a result of democratization and bureaucracy.
I have made two month-long trips to the United States, where I have gathered material in the archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the New York Historical Society and the Hagley Museum and Library. The stay in Philadelphia also gave me access to the University of Pennsylvania's library and the Early American Newspapers newspaper database. The material has made it possible to identify key players, both individuals and organizations. Several of the early organizations, such as the American Society for the Encouragement of Domestic Manufactures, lack archives, but newspapers, private correspondence and diaries have made it possible to reconstruct their operations. With the help of advertisements and printed material from state legislative assemblies, I have been able to investigate the business relationships and personal financial interests of leading industry friends. Subsequent organizations, such as the American Institute of the City of New-York, have their own journals and extensive archives that have not been used extensively in historical research.
The three most important results and contributions to international research:
1. My study covers organizations and individual actors that have not previously been subject to historical research. Previous studies cite pamphlets and other materials produced by the American Society for the Encouragement of Domestic Manufactures, the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Manufactures and the Mechanical Arts, and other like-minded organizations, but these studies focus neither on the organizations themselves nor on the conditions of contemporary lobbying. Previous research in American political history has not studied how interest organizations organized during the 19th century, how they financed their activities, or what methods they employed as they sought to gain influence over the political process. Overall, we know very little about lobbying organizations and their members. My study includes a thorough survey of groups of friends of industry and shows how their way of organizing and working politically changed during the period. Older research, which focuses on elected politicians and congressional activities, has noted the tariff as a central issue of conflict. My project shows that industrial organizations played a central role in these conflicts. Furthermore, I show that industry friends engaged in a wide range of issues, which also included immigration, taxes, auctions, and business legislation. I also show that friends of industry belonged to the urban elite already at the end of the Napoleonic War. Previous studies of the urban upper strata claim that manufacturers did not gain access to the established mercantile elite's social network until during the civil war. My research shows that during the 1810s, "friends of industry" already had access to exclusive private clubs, offices and business opportunities. In fact, their political activities were premised on using these resources.
2. My study shows that “friends of industry” in important respects shaped the economic debate in the United States. During the period in question, neither the federal state nor the states had sufficient administrative capacity to collect and analyze economic data with respect to the rapidly expanding industrial sector. In principle, all relevant information on the domestic production of textiles, paper, glass, metal products et cetera was collected and published by groups of "friends of industry". On the few occasions the federal state initiated data collection – for example, the report compiled by Finance Minister Louis McLane in the early 1830s and the attempts to survey the iron industry at the end of the 1840s – it was industry friends who carried out the actual work. Efforts to identify, collect and interpret relevant data on U.S. industrial development formed a central part of early lobbying operations. The material was used in petition and newspaper campaigns, and it helped to strengthen the status of industrial organizations. “Friends of industry” purposefully used the information they collected to present themselves as impartial experts.
3. The study links the development of the industrial lobby to technological advances. Those who led the mobilization of "friends of industry" were consistently the same people who adopted new production methods and invested in new machines and power sources. During the recession after the end of the Napoleonic War, it was primarily industrialists who invested in hydropower and mechanized weaving that mobilized politically. At the end of the 1820s, it was mainly those who diversified their business operations and invested in large-scale production of wool textiles and machinery that fronted lobbying efforts. New technology brought together new combinations of interests. Improved infrastructure in the form of "turnpikes", bridges, canals and eventually railways meant not only that goods easier and cheaper could be transported to larger urban markets. It also meant that industrialists gained access to cheap coal from Pennsylvania and New Jersey. New manufacturing processes enabled the use of anthracite coal in large-scale production of iron. The transition to new production processes deepened links between iron producers, mining interests, and financiers. Companies that adopted new production methods required significantly higher capital investment. Risks increased significantly, but industrial leaders acquired greater resources for lobbying activities. At the time of the Civil War, the largest ironworks, coal mines, and railroads in the Midwest and eastern United States were controlled by a relatively small and homogeneous group of industrialists. The study concludes with an examination of the synergy of interests that arose around the steel producers who invested in new production methods.
New research questions:
The financial and military challenges posed by the Civil War underpinned the rapid expansion of the federal state, both in size and in capacity. During the conflict, ambitious federal officials carried through far-reaching reforms with regard to taxation, banking, trade, currency, and labor. Subsequent decades saw further growth of the bureaucratic apparatus, civil service professionalization, and the adoption of innovative procedures—including the increasing reliance on testimonies before congressional committees, the creation of independent regulatory commissions and joint government-industry advisory boards, and the systematic collection of policy-related data. Meanwhile, quasi-autonomous administrative and technical elites, bolstered by emerging ideas about rational and scientific governance, developed their own power bases. In short, political actors of all brands confronted radically different opportunities and constraints in 1920 compared to 1860.
In my next project, I will investigate the role of lobby groups in this development. More specifically, I will explore the political mobilization of the iron and steel industry from the end of the American Civil War to the time around the First World War. The study will focus on the American Iron and Steel Association (AISA), an umbrella organization formed in November 1864 by representatives of hundreds of the largest iron and steel plants, the machinery industries and trading companies in the metal sector. AISA grew rapidly and served during the period under review as the iron and steel industry's foremost political body. By looking at AISA, the proposed project will analyze the role of the industrial lobby in the political process between the Civil War and World War I, when the federal state and major industries formalized cooperation under the The War Industries Board, which was established in the summer of 1917 to coordinate the war effort. A study of this particular interest group is particularly important given the enormous rapid expansion of the iron and steel industry, its lasting political influence, and its central importance for the United States’ economic and geopolitical strength.
International dimension:
The topic of the study has an obvious international dimension. During the archival stays in Philadelphia, I participated in the seminar series organized by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, a research institute in Philadelphia where I have previously held a position. Through participation in international conferences (see below) I have received valuable comments and made new contacts. Several colleagues have read and commented on excerpts from my research.
Distribution of results:
Parts of my research have been presented at the following international conferences:
2019 Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, April 4-6 2019
“A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200,” Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, February 15-16 2019
43rd Annual Economic and Business History Society Conference, Jyväskylä, Finland, May 30-June 2 2018
Port Cities and Migration in the Modern Era, University of Gothenburg Center for European Research (CERGU), November 23-24, 2017
At the first three conferences, I was part of panels with colleagues from universities in the U.S., France, and Canada. Based on the studies presented at the Port Cities and Migration in the Modern Era, my colleague Christina Reimann and I have edited Migrants and the Making of the Urban-Maritime World. This collected volume (of about 130,000 words) includes contributions from historians at English, French, Belgian, Spanish, and German universities. It is under contract with Taylor & Francis and scheduled to be published in the series Routledge Advances in Urban History. A complete manuscript was submitted in late November, 2019. In addition to being one of the two editors, I contribute one chapter. My contribution is based on parts of one of the chapters in my planned monograph and deals with "friends of industry" organizations in New York City and how their policy with respect to foreign migrant changed during the decades following the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
The article "The American Institute and the Problem of Interest Group Mobilization in Antebellum United States" has been accepted for publication by Enterprise & Society. I have submitted the final proofs.The article examines The American Institute, a New York-based lobbying organization, and its innovative use of manufacturing fairs to generate revenue, attract new members, establish contacts with like-minded groups, and influence public opinion.The most important publication of the project is a monograph. My ambition is to publish with Chicago University Press or the Johns Hopkins University Press. Both publish studies in the field of "business history." The manuscript consists of ten chapters plus an introduction and an epilogue. Altogether, the manuscript is 90 percent completed. I plan to submit a full manuscript to publishers for peer review by June 30, 2020, at the latest.
The project examines the formation of an industrial lobby in 19th-century United States. More precisely, it focuses on associations of “friends of industry” in New York City and Philadelphia. The purpose is to show how groups established themselves, how they mobilized, how they acquired the necessary resources, and what role they played in federal and state politics. Existing studies do not cover this topic. There is comprehensive research about interest politics (or lobbying), but existing studies focus almost exclusively on the period around and after WWII. In this literature, the growth of interest groups is closely tied to the modern welfare state and its redistributive programs and regulatory framework. Organized interests during earlier periods remain largely unexplored. Historians of 19th-century United States have primarily devoted their attention to political parties and single-issue groups, such as abolitionists or temperance advocates.
The project has essentially followed the description in the original application. The study is chronologically structured and focuses in particular on the political mobilization of industrial organizations during economic and financial crises – the depression after the Napoleonic Wars, the recession and the “Nullification Crisis” during the late 1820s and the beginning of the 1830s, the recession from “Panic of 1837” to about 1842, the crisis in the iron industry in the wake of the 1846 tariff, the Panic of 1857, and the recession after the civil war.
However, the project differs from the original proposal in one important respect. My application suggested a study that would cover the period from the end of the Napoleonic War to the 1890s. According to the original plan, the final chapter would deal with how the industrial lobby handled the federal state’s attempts to regulate larger associations of companies and their political activities. While working on the project, however, I became convinced that the so-called trust debates in the late 1800s involved other issues and actors. The study is tied together by overlapping organizations. With that in mind, the years following the American Civil War, and more specifically the formation of the American Iron and Steel Association (1864) and the National Industrial League (1869), constitutes a more natural endpoint. In terms of organizational structure and resources, these new groups differed radically from associations of “friends of industry” in earlier decades. Another reason to end the study with the establishment of these organizations is that the conditions of politics changed radically during the civil war, as a result of democratization and bureaucracy.
I have made two month-long trips to the United States, where I have gathered material in the archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the New York Historical Society and the Hagley Museum and Library. The stay in Philadelphia also gave me access to the University of Pennsylvania's library and the Early American Newspapers newspaper database. The material has made it possible to identify key players, both individuals and organizations. Several of the early organizations, such as the American Society for the Encouragement of Domestic Manufactures, lack archives, but newspapers, private correspondence and diaries have made it possible to reconstruct their operations. With the help of advertisements and printed material from state legislative assemblies, I have been able to investigate the business relationships and personal financial interests of leading industry friends. Subsequent organizations, such as the American Institute of the City of New-York, have their own journals and extensive archives that have not been used extensively in historical research.
The three most important results and contributions to international research:
1. My study covers organizations and individual actors that have not previously been subject to historical research. Previous studies cite pamphlets and other materials produced by the American Society for the Encouragement of Domestic Manufactures, the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Manufactures and the Mechanical Arts, and other like-minded organizations, but these studies focus neither on the organizations themselves nor on the conditions of contemporary lobbying. Previous research in American political history has not studied how interest organizations organized during the 19th century, how they financed their activities, or what methods they employed as they sought to gain influence over the political process. Overall, we know very little about lobbying organizations and their members. My study includes a thorough survey of groups of friends of industry and shows how their way of organizing and working politically changed during the period. Older research, which focuses on elected politicians and congressional activities, has noted the tariff as a central issue of conflict. My project shows that industrial organizations played a central role in these conflicts. Furthermore, I show that industry friends engaged in a wide range of issues, which also included immigration, taxes, auctions, and business legislation. I also show that friends of industry belonged to the urban elite already at the end of the Napoleonic War. Previous studies of the urban upper strata claim that manufacturers did not gain access to the established mercantile elite's social network until during the civil war. My research shows that during the 1810s, "friends of industry" already had access to exclusive private clubs, offices and business opportunities. In fact, their political activities were premised on using these resources.
2. My study shows that “friends of industry” in important respects shaped the economic debate in the United States. During the period in question, neither the federal state nor the states had sufficient administrative capacity to collect and analyze economic data with respect to the rapidly expanding industrial sector. In principle, all relevant information on the domestic production of textiles, paper, glass, metal products et cetera was collected and published by groups of "friends of industry". On the few occasions the federal state initiated data collection – for example, the report compiled by Finance Minister Louis McLane in the early 1830s and the attempts to survey the iron industry at the end of the 1840s – it was industry friends who carried out the actual work. Efforts to identify, collect and interpret relevant data on U.S. industrial development formed a central part of early lobbying operations. The material was used in petition and newspaper campaigns, and it helped to strengthen the status of industrial organizations. “Friends of industry” purposefully used the information they collected to present themselves as impartial experts.
3. The study links the development of the industrial lobby to technological advances. Those who led the mobilization of "friends of industry" were consistently the same people who adopted new production methods and invested in new machines and power sources. During the recession after the end of the Napoleonic War, it was primarily industrialists who invested in hydropower and mechanized weaving that mobilized politically. At the end of the 1820s, it was mainly those who diversified their business operations and invested in large-scale production of wool textiles and machinery that fronted lobbying efforts. New technology brought together new combinations of interests. Improved infrastructure in the form of "turnpikes", bridges, canals and eventually railways meant not only that goods easier and cheaper could be transported to larger urban markets. It also meant that industrialists gained access to cheap coal from Pennsylvania and New Jersey. New manufacturing processes enabled the use of anthracite coal in large-scale production of iron. The transition to new production processes deepened links between iron producers, mining interests, and financiers. Companies that adopted new production methods required significantly higher capital investment. Risks increased significantly, but industrial leaders acquired greater resources for lobbying activities. At the time of the Civil War, the largest ironworks, coal mines, and railroads in the Midwest and eastern United States were controlled by a relatively small and homogeneous group of industrialists. The study concludes with an examination of the synergy of interests that arose around the steel producers who invested in new production methods.
New research questions:
The financial and military challenges posed by the Civil War underpinned the rapid expansion of the federal state, both in size and in capacity. During the conflict, ambitious federal officials carried through far-reaching reforms with regard to taxation, banking, trade, currency, and labor. Subsequent decades saw further growth of the bureaucratic apparatus, civil service professionalization, and the adoption of innovative procedures—including the increasing reliance on testimonies before congressional committees, the creation of independent regulatory commissions and joint government-industry advisory boards, and the systematic collection of policy-related data. Meanwhile, quasi-autonomous administrative and technical elites, bolstered by emerging ideas about rational and scientific governance, developed their own power bases. In short, political actors of all brands confronted radically different opportunities and constraints in 1920 compared to 1860.
In my next project, I will investigate the role of lobby groups in this development. More specifically, I will explore the political mobilization of the iron and steel industry from the end of the American Civil War to the time around the First World War. The study will focus on the American Iron and Steel Association (AISA), an umbrella organization formed in November 1864 by representatives of hundreds of the largest iron and steel plants, the machinery industries and trading companies in the metal sector. AISA grew rapidly and served during the period under review as the iron and steel industry's foremost political body. By looking at AISA, the proposed project will analyze the role of the industrial lobby in the political process between the Civil War and World War I, when the federal state and major industries formalized cooperation under the The War Industries Board, which was established in the summer of 1917 to coordinate the war effort. A study of this particular interest group is particularly important given the enormous rapid expansion of the iron and steel industry, its lasting political influence, and its central importance for the United States’ economic and geopolitical strength.
International dimension:
The topic of the study has an obvious international dimension. During the archival stays in Philadelphia, I participated in the seminar series organized by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, a research institute in Philadelphia where I have previously held a position. Through participation in international conferences (see below) I have received valuable comments and made new contacts. Several colleagues have read and commented on excerpts from my research.
Distribution of results:
Parts of my research have been presented at the following international conferences:
2019 Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, April 4-6 2019
“A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200,” Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, February 15-16 2019
43rd Annual Economic and Business History Society Conference, Jyväskylä, Finland, May 30-June 2 2018
Port Cities and Migration in the Modern Era, University of Gothenburg Center for European Research (CERGU), November 23-24, 2017
At the first three conferences, I was part of panels with colleagues from universities in the U.S., France, and Canada. Based on the studies presented at the Port Cities and Migration in the Modern Era, my colleague Christina Reimann and I have edited Migrants and the Making of the Urban-Maritime World. This collected volume (of about 130,000 words) includes contributions from historians at English, French, Belgian, Spanish, and German universities. It is under contract with Taylor & Francis and scheduled to be published in the series Routledge Advances in Urban History. A complete manuscript was submitted in late November, 2019. In addition to being one of the two editors, I contribute one chapter. My contribution is based on parts of one of the chapters in my planned monograph and deals with "friends of industry" organizations in New York City and how their policy with respect to foreign migrant changed during the decades following the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
The article "The American Institute and the Problem of Interest Group Mobilization in Antebellum United States" has been accepted for publication by Enterprise & Society. I have submitted the final proofs.The article examines The American Institute, a New York-based lobbying organization, and its innovative use of manufacturing fairs to generate revenue, attract new members, establish contacts with like-minded groups, and influence public opinion.The most important publication of the project is a monograph. My ambition is to publish with Chicago University Press or the Johns Hopkins University Press. Both publish studies in the field of "business history." The manuscript consists of ten chapters plus an introduction and an epilogue. Altogether, the manuscript is 90 percent completed. I plan to submit a full manuscript to publishers for peer review by June 30, 2020, at the latest.