Mark Aldrich

Flexible Exchange Rates, Northern Expansion, and the Market for Southern Cotton: 1866–1879

Anumber of economic historians, including Charles Beard, C. Vann Woodward, and others have argued that southern economic development during the nineteenth century may have been significantly hindered by the Souths political and economic relations with the North. Certainly the best known of such arguments is that of Charles Beard. Beard thought that the “normal†workings of the pre-Civil War political economy would have resulted in the relative eclipse of the southern economy even in the absence of the Civil War. Wartime devastation plus such northern policies as the tariff, the Homestead Law, the National Banking Act, and emancipation of the slaves, merely hastened and worsened the Souths economic decline.

Regulating Transportation of Hazardous Substances: Railroads and Reform, 1883–1930

The increase in volume of explosives and other hazardous materials transported by rail during the nineteenth century resulted in a growing number of accidents. In response, the Pennsylvania Railroad developed some of the first regulations governing the transport of such materials. In the twentieth century, a combination of enforcement difficulties and competitive pressures led the company, working through the American Railway Association, to press for industry-wide rules and enforcement, which resulted in the Associations, Bureau of Explosives. Similar motives impelled the carriers to seek federal regulation, which began in 1908. The Interstate Commerce Commission provided the legal authority in this public–private partnership, whilethe bureau took the lead in inspecting shipments, encouraging improvements in shipping techniques, and developing rules that formed the basis of all modern regulations of hazardous shipments.

Determinants of Mortality Among New England Cotton Mill Workers During the Progressive Era

Multiple regression analysis reveals that work in New England cotton textile mills during 1905-1912 raised age-adjusted mortality rates over those of non-millworkers and that worker mortality increased with years of mill experience. Mortality varied among groups because of differential self selection. Central age group native males with broad occupational choices had lower mortality rates than control groups. Young males women and the foreign born had restricted occupational choices. Hence they were less self selected and experienced higher mortality. Death rates were highest among married women workers who bore children. The combination of homework and millwork worsened their health and raised their mortality rates. (EXCERPT)

Earnings of American Civil Engineers 1820–1859

S KILED engineers who had sufficient technical know-how to construct the antebellum canals and railroads were viewed by their contemporaries as a key input in the transportation revolution, and a number of modem scholars have concurred in this judgment.1 Yet very little is known about the economics of the antebellum engineering profession. This article is a modest attempt to help remedy that deficiency. We shall present and describe three original salary series that chart the course of earnings for three distinct grades of antebellum civil engineers from 1820 through 1859. In addition, we shall argue that our data clearly indicate that a highly competitive market of broad geographical scope for high-ranking engineers was coming into being during the decade of the 1820s. This trend toward competition which these data reveal persisted until about 1835, but was then swamped by the rapid economic changes which occurred in the fifteen years from 1835 to 1850, only to reappear again in the last antebellum decade. As we shall argue below, the economic changes that temporarily overrode the earlier pattern of competition reflect a significant structural change in the antebellum engineer market. Table 1 presents mean yearly earnings for three distinct grades of civil engineers from 1820 through 1859, in current dollars. Table 1 also includes, in addition to average yearly earnings, the number of salary observations for each grade-year. The more than 4,000 observations from which Table 1 was com-

On the Track of Efficiency: Scientific Management Comes to Railroad Shops, 1900–1930

In 1910, Louis Brandeis claimed that scientific management could save the railroads a million dollars a day and avoid a rate increase. While Brandeiss claims are well known, historians have neglected the influence of scientific management on the railroads. In 1904, Harrington Emerson introduced repair scheduling techniques in the locomotive shops of the Santa Fe. Scheduling revolutionized repair, and–esponding in part to the regulatory pressures Brandeis helped create–by 1925 most major railroads employed it. In the 1920s, the carriers imported a second new management technique–the “progressive” system that focused on material flows, and introduced batch production techniques to car and locomotive repair. Collectively these methods prevented transportation bottlenecks, raised labor productivity, and reduced capital requirements.

A mighty rough road: The deterioration of work safety on American railroads, 1955–75

While nineteenth-century American railroads were fabled for their dangerous working conditions, after 1900 a new safety regime grew up. Threatened by union and public pressures that resulted in numerous safety regulations and rising accident costs, the carriers innovated safety programs intended to stave off further regulation. The carriers’ formula for successful safety work involved worker participation, management commitment, and technological modifications. Finally, the new regime included expert oversight from both government and the trade press but comparatively little direct regulation. While these resulted in dramatic improvements in work safety down through World War II, there were weaknesses in the system and after 1955 work safety worsened for two decades. While this resulted in part from the continued shift from passenger to more dangerous freight work, some new technologies also worsened risks. In addition worker involvement had eroded, many safety departments had become moribund, and declining profits undermined safety. By the 1960s, as derailments skyrocketed, railroad safety again became a public issue and a new regime resulted. Congress transferred responsibility from the Interstate Commerce Commission to the Federal Railroad Administration and in 1970 extended federal control over nearly all aspects of rail safety.

Running Out of Steam: Federal Inspection and Locomotive Safety, 1912–1940

Locomotive inspection was among the most important Progressive Era federal workplace regulations. Inspection rules were enforced by a new Bureau of Locomotive Inspection, which claimed credit for subsequent safety improvements. Relying on published and unpublished data this article assesses these claims. Literary sources suggest that the bureau achieved compliance by emphasizing regulatory benefits and that its activities sharply reduced locomotive defects through the 1920s, in part by reducing agency problems. A model for 19231932 reinforces this conclusion, but suggests that the safety gains came at high cost. After 1932 safety improvements stagnated, for inspection ran out of steam.

The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865 1914. By Nancy Cohen. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xi, 318.

In this brief volume Nancy Cohen “offers a new narrative of the origins of modern American liberalism†(p. 4). As this agenda suggests, the book is primarily a history of political thought. Briefly, her argument is that the values and programs of Progressive Era corporate liberalism originated in the debates among two generations of Gilded Age political intellectuals. Men such as Edwin L. Godkin, David A. Wells, and Francis A. Walker represented the first generation in the immediate post–Civil War decades. These were not simply classical liberals but “the pioneering theorists of economic consolidation and the active liberal state†(p. 13). A second generation of liberals emerged around the American Economic Association in the 1880s and was led by economists such as Henry C. Adams, John B. Clark, Richard T. Ely, and Edwin R. A. Seligman. Initially more radical, this group was purged in the 1880s, often with the aid of their older colleagues. Together these two generations “confronted the problem of the relationship between democracy and capitalism†(p. 15), and they provided “ideological legitimization of the novel economic, political and social relationships attendant on the rise of corporate capitalism.â€

22.50, paper

In what he terms a pursuit of “unwritten history†(p. 197), Thomas Jepsen has penned a social history of women in telegraphy during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jepsen is well versed in the technology of the industry and has written several articles on women telegraphers. Here in seven chapters he describes the extent of female employment, both in the United States and other countries, and then ranges widely over a host of issues. These include wages, working conditions, personal characteristics of women telegraphers, social class, ethnicity, mechanization, love in the office, and even women telegraphers in literature and the cinema. There is also a considerable discussion of the role women played in the many, mostly unsuccessful attempts of telegraphers to unionize. The book is based on a wide reading of primary sources including the Western Union Archives, as well as much secondary literature.