Henry Disston's Model Industrial Community: Nineteenth-Century Paternalism in Tacony, Philadelphia
I N NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA PATERNALISM informed manufacturing practices—in part due to the influence of English reformers on American thinking and, moreso, due to local circumstances, especially in the early textile industry, which favored a paternalistic model of factory organization. The towns of Lowell, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire, were widely reported examples of American industrial paternalism. But such factory organization yielded to market forces soon enough. By the late nineteenth century paternalism recalled a simpler age of mill villages tucked in New England woods along the fall line. Amid the clanging steel and blast furnaces of huge factories with polyglot work forces, paternalism was as outdated as the village smithy under the spreading chestnut tree. Profit-oriented manufacturers ruthlessly exploited workers, and workers responded with violence and strikes. Indeed, during the 1870s and 1880s labor unrest wracked the nation. The 1886 Haymarket bombing in Chicago generated a crisis atmosphere in the country. The