C&C Dawley

Alan Dawley, in Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn, explores the effects of that 19th century revolution on the shoemaking community of Lynn, Massachusetts. Essentially, before the Industrial Revolution, Lynn was a community without strong class differences, while afterwards a great class gulf opened up between the few capitalists and the many workers. Before the revolution, those workers were part of a system of masters and apprentices with the household as the center of the community and of work. After the revolution, the apprenticeship system was broken, and workers became dependent on the factory, weakening the household as the center of life and work which held the community and its people together in relative equality.
These differences were all generally negative for the people
The triumph of the revolution, the factory system, the RepublicanParty, and business interests divided the people like never before: The great cleft between home and work divided people from themselves and their families. The entire economic and social structureunderwent profound changes, all of which flowed from the changes in theprocess of production based on the factory, the heart and soul of theIndustrial Revolution. through the cooperative work of many laboring families (57). Oneorganization which emerged from this conflict and gave the workers thepower to fight was the Knights of St. had the economy not beenexpanding as it was in the 187 s, the workers' efforts might have failed asthey did in earlier times when the factory owners were able to hire outsideworkers. . . The Industrial Revolution, with its factory as the center ofproduction, rather than the household, put an end to this system ofrelative equality and community cooperation. As Dawley writes, "The concept of class is the analytical foundationof the present work" (4). However, Lynn was not such a community. the new patterns of geographical and social mobility made people perpetual strangers to...