American Decades
The World of Work
American Industry.
The continuing Industrial Revolution made the workplace of the 1900s a starkly different place from that of the mid nineteenth century, and within the decade itself the nature of industrial work changed even more. First, the scale of industrial enterprises continued to increase: in the early twentieth century the old industrial giants of the Gilded Age—plants that manufactured steel, iron rails, and other railroad equipment—would be dwarfed by enormous factory complexes some-times employing fifteen thousand to twenty thousand workers and producing automobiles, farm machinery, electrical equipment, and textiles. Second, within the new factories the skills of the nineteenth-century artisan were being replaced by machines that could be tended by workers with much less training and experience. Where artisanal skills had once given workers a degree of control over the pace and method of work, machines—along with...
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1900's Lifestyles and Social Trends
