Industrialization

There is no special group, except for the social surveyors of the early twentieth century, who concern themselves with the particular effects of industrialization upon the social patterns of cities, but there is a rich literature from which one can select titles with a high density of urban information. A mine of information and a series of studies that has never been excelled is John R. Commons et al., History of Labour in the United States , 4 v., 1918-35, New York, 1966. The first volume on the early unions and working conditions of the first phase of industrialization is especially useful. The technological pace of the years before 1870 has been brilliantly sketched in Dorothy Brady's "Relative Prices in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of Economic History , 26 (June 1964), 145-203. An exciting if eccentric overview of technological change down to our own times is offered by Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command , New York, 1948; and his suggestions can be tested against the realities of economic development by consulting the essays in Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, The Reinterpretation of American Economic History , New York, 1971.

The authority on the rise of big business is Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., whose two outstanding contributions are "The Beginnings of 'Big Business' in American Industry," Business History Review , 33 (Spring 1959), 1-31; and Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of Industrial Enterprise , Cambridge, 1962. The interactions between large-scale industry and the city can be followed by reading that fascinating old sociological study, "The Pittsburgh Survey," Charities and Commons , 21 (January 1909); or the complete edition, Paul U. Kellogg et al., The Pittsburgh Survey , 6 v., New York, 1909-14. Much of this work is summarized in a modern labor history that may be more accessible: David Brody, Steelworkers in America: The Non-Union Era , Cambridge, 1960.

To sample the materials of our own era, a good approach is to blend national with urban studies. I have found the following works the most useful. C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes , New York, 1951; Jules Henry, Culture Against Man , New York, 1963; Robert Blauner, Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry , Chicago, 1964; and Warren G. Bennis and Philip E. Slater, The Temporary Society , New York, 1968. These national assessments can then be related to such urban studies as St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis , 1945, 2 v., New York, 1962; Stanley Lebergott, "Tomorrow's Workers: The Prospects for the Urban Labor Force," in my Planning for a Nation of Cities , Cambridge, 1966, pp. 124-40; and John F. Kain, "The Distribution and Movement of Jobs and Industry," in James Q. Wilson, ed., The Metropolitan Enigma , Cambridge, 1968, pp. 1-32.