THE SECOND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

 

  I. Characteristics

National power is now measured by industrial progress [coal and iron production, mileage and tonnage of railways and navies, mechanization of industry, skill of populace] rather than population, area and size of army.  State-building, a strengthening and centralizing process, becomes the major activity of governments in the 2nd half of the 19th c.: repression of dissent (U.S.=Civil War; England=suppression of Irish struggle for home rule; Italy=South by North; Germany=Catholics and Socialists; Russia=minorities by Tsars). 

The First Industrial Revolution began in textiles; wood fuel was replaced by coal; wood as a material was replaced by iron; the railway and telegraph increased communications; the factory system was a new way of organizing labor.  Up to 1850 “...farmers still plowed their fields much as they had since roman times two thousand years before.  The horse provided the chief means of transportation on land, the sailing vessel on water.  The swiftest method of communication was to signal a message from one hilltop to the next. ...

  “Today the citizen of modest circumstances can afford luxuries which a Roman noble could not obtain with a thousand slaves.”

 “There is no easy comparison to be found in history for this revolutionary change” (Ferguson 740).  This "Second Industrial Revolution" (after 1850) included new alloys and metals (steel and aluminum), new fuels (gas and petroleum), new forms of business (monopolies and cartels).  In summary, the Second Industrial Revolution was characterized by:

1. New forms of business and labor organization appeared:  monopolies and cartels and specialized banks capitalizing heavy industry.  A monopoly is a giant company that dominates entire industries.  “In a cartel, independent enterprises worked together to control prices and fix production quotas, thereby restraining the kind of competition that led to reduced prices.  Cartels were especially strong in Germany, where banks moved to protect their investments by eliminating the ‘anarchy of competition’” (Spiel.4th Ed. 681).  “Workers also formed trade unions to improve their working conditions.  Attempts to organize the workers did not come until the last two decades of the nineteenth century after unions had won the right to strike in the 1870s.  Strikes proved necessary to achieve the workers’ goals.  A walkout by female workers in the match industry in 1888 and by dock workers in London the following year led to the establishment of trade union organizations for both groups.  By 1900, two million workers were enrolled in British trade unions, and by the outbreak of World War I, this number had risen to between three and four million, although this was still less than one fifth of the total workforce” (Spiel.4th Ed. 687).  By the 1890s, unskilled workers in England, United States, France and Germany, began organizing unions based on an industry, not on a single skill or craft--they did bring improvements but they were attracted to the socialist movement.  In fact in the 1890s there was a series of strikes marked by violence. (Spiel.4th Ed. 698).

2. The middle class rose in political and social power corresponding to its economic power.

            “The middle classes consisted of a variety of groups.  Below the upper middle class was a middle level that included such traditional groups as professionals in law, medicine, and the civil service as well as moderately well-to-do industrialists and merchants.  The industrial expansion of the nineteenth century also added  new groups to this segment of the middle class.  These included business managers and new professionals, such as the engineers, architects, accountants, and chemists who formed professional associations as the symbols of their newfound importance.  A lower middle class of small shopkeepers, traders, manufacturers, and prosperous peasants provided goods and services for the classes above them.        “Standing between the lower middle class and the lower classes were new groups of white-collar workers who were the product of the Second Industrial Revolution.  They were the traveling salesmen, bookkeepers, bank tellers, telephone operators, department store salespeople, and secretaries.  Although largely propertyless and often little better paid than skilled laborers, these white-collar workers were often committed to middle-class ideals and optimistic about improving their status.  Some even achieved professional standing and middle-class status” (Spiel.4thEd. 693).

 

3. Traditional groups or classes declined:  artisans and peasantry were replaced by skilled factory workers and machines.

 

4. The roles of women and children changed:  higher wages for skilled male workers allowed females to stay home and children to become students.
          “Between 1890 and 1914, however, family patterns among the working class began to change.  High-paying jobs in heavy industry and improvements in the standard of living made it possible for working-class families to depend on the income of husbands and the wages of grown children.  By the early twentieth century, some working-class mothers could afford to stay at home, following the pattern of middle-class women” (Spiel.4th Ed. 698).

            “Men provided the family income while women focused on household and child care.  The use of domestic servants in many middle-class homes, made possible by an abundant supply of cheap labor, reduced the amount of time middle-class women had to spend on household work.  At the same time, by reducing the number of children in the family, mothers could devote more time to child care and domestic leisure . . .(Spiel.4th Ed. 695).

            “...Recent research indicates that in France, Germany, and even mid-Victorian Britain, relatively few families could actually afford to hire a host of servants.  More often, middle-class families had one servant, usually a young working-class or country girl not used to middle-class lifestyles.  Women, then, were often forced to work quite hard to maintain the expected appearance of the well-ordered household” (Spiel.4th Ed. 697).

            In the educational systems, “Girls did less math and no science but concentrated on such domestic skills as sewing, washing, ironing, and cooking, all prerequisites for providing a good home for husband and children” (Spiel.4th Ed. 699).

5. Technology advanced in industry:  engineers and scientists are hired to apply inventions and scientific discoveries to industrial production.   “After 1870, the relationship of science and technology grew closer.  Newer fields of industrial activity, such as organic chemistry and electrical engineering, required more scientific knowledge than the commonsense tinkering once employed by amateur inventors.  Companies began to invest capital in laboratory equipment for their own research or hired scientific consultants for advice” (Spiel. 4th Ed. 682).

 

            The steam engine and cheap steel accelerated the shift from hand to machine production.  After 1870 “New methods of rolling and shaping steel made it useful in the construction of lighter, smaller, and faster machines and engines, as well as railways, ships, and armaments” (Spiel.4th Ed. 679).  But soon the age of steam is over as Daimler and Benz perfect the internal combustion engine and Henry ford uses mass-production assembly-line techniques to usher in automobile age.

            Electricity was a major new form of energy that proved to be of great value since it could be easily converted into other forms of energy, such as heat, light, and motion, and moved relatively effortlessly through space by means of transmitting wires.  In the 1870s, the first commercially practical generators of electrical current were developed.  By 1881, Britain had its first public power station.  By 1910, hydroelectric power stations and coal-fired steam-generating plants enabled entire districts to be tied into a single power distribution system that provided a common source of power for homes, shops, and industrial enterprises.

            “Electricity spawned a whole new series of inventions.  The invention of the light bulb by the American Thomas Edison and the Briton Joseph Swan opened homes and cities to illumination by electric lights.  [By end of 19th c. electricity was providing power for lights, trains, for urban and suburban use, & some factory machines.] A revolution in communications was fostered when Alexander Graham bell invented the telephone in 1876 and Guglielmo Marconi sent the first radio waves across the Atlantic in 1901.  Although most electricity was initially used for lighting, it was eventually put to use in transportation.  The first electric railway was installed in Berlin in 1879.  By the 1880s, streetcars and subways had appeared in major European cities and had begun to replace horse-drawn buses.  Electricity also transformed the factory.  Conveyor belts, cranes, machines, and machine tools could all be powered by electricity and located anywhere.  In the first Industrial Revolution, coal had been the major source of energy.  Countries without adequate coal supplies lagged behind in industrialization.  Thanks to electricity, they could now enter the industrial age.

            “The development of the internal combustion engine had a similar effect.  The first internal combustion engine, fired by gas and air, was produced in 1878.  It proved unsuitable for widespread use as a source of power in transportation until the development of liquid fuels, namely, petroleum and its distilled derivatives.  An oil-fired engine was made in 1897, and by 1902, the Hamburg-Amerika Line had switched from coal to oil on its new ocean liners.  By the end of the nineteenth century, some naval fleets had been converted to oil burners as well.

            “The development of the internal combustion engine gave rise to the automobile and airplanes.  Gottlieb Daimler’s invention of a light engine in 1886 was the key to the development of the automobile.  In 1900 world production stood at 9,000 cars; by 1906, Americans had overtaken the initial lead of the French.  It was an American, Henry Ford, who revolutionized the car industry with the mass production of the Model T.  By 1916, Ford’s factories were producing 735,000 cars a year.  In the meantime an age of air transportation began with the Zeppelin airship in 1900.  In 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Wright brothers made the first flight in a fixed-wing plane powered by a gasoline engine.  It took World War I to stimulate the aircraft industry, however, and the first regular passenger air service was not established until 1919” (Spiel.4th Ed. 679-80).

            New materials were invented from advances in chemistry:  dyes, aspirin, drugs, saccharin, and disinfectants.  In medicine, anesthetics and antiseptics increased life expectancy.

            “By 1900, Europe was divided into two economic zones.  Great Britain, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, the western part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and northern Italy constituted an advanced industrialized core that had a high standard of living, decent systems of transportation, and relatively healthy and educated peoples.  Another part of Europe, the backward and little industrialized area to the south and east, consisting of southern Italy, most of Austria-Hungary, Spain, Portugal, the Balkan kingdoms, and Russia, was still largely agricultural and relegated by the industrial countries to the function of providing food and raw materials” (Spiel.4th Ed. 682).

 

 II. State-building: a response to industrialization

1. Great Britain:  Although it was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution and most of its people were enjoying a higher standard of living and it had a great degree of political liberty and economic and social reform, it was still an oligarchy in reality (“country gentlemen” dominated politics).

1)      Gladstone & Disraeli will change this.  William E. Gladstone (1809-1898) was 4 times prime minister; pious, sober, a great orator; great political champion of reform; came from an industrial family and married into the aristocracy.  A liberal who saw politics as a struggle between the forces of good and evil (believed God had chosen him to carry out his divine will.  Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), was a novelist and dreamer who had a vision of empire (his father was a Jew who converted to Christianity); a conservative who though politics was a fascinating game (loved being a courtier to Queen Victoria.  Through their efforts suffrage was extended to a majority of city workers (Disraeli) and by 1884 rural workers (Gladstone’s reform bill of 1884).  “The Tory leader in Parliament, Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), was apparently motivated by the desire to win over the newly enfranchised groups to the Conservative Party.  He believed that the uneducated class would defer to their social superiors when they voted.  He knew that the Liberals viewed, as the party of reform would not dare to oppose the reform bill.  The Reform Act of 1867 was an important step toward the democratization of Britain.  By lowering the monetary requirements for voting (taxes paid or income earned), it by and large enfranchised many male urban workers” (Spiel.4th Ed. 660) . . .“the right to vote was further extended during the second ministry of William Gladstone (1880-1885) with the passage of the Reform Act of 1884.  It gave the vote to al men who paid regular rents or taxes, thus largely enfranchising the agricultural workers, a group previously excluded” (Spiel.4th Ed. 702).

 

2) Unrest: labor, Irish, feminists

    A depression in 1873 shook up all class and they began to fear each other.  Labor had legal unions and reforms did occur that saved England from a revolution in the 1840s, but the monopolies, cartels, and foreign competition and widespread poverty after 1873 led to a rise in militancy in a push for minimum wages.

    Irish- “They detested the absentee British landlords and their burdensome rents” (Spiel. 838).  Then the great famine of 1845-7 led to 1 mil. deaths and 1 mil. emigrants.  Parliament offered no help and a revolutionary republican army--the Fenians--was born that engaged in terrorism demanding independence (home rule).  It wouldn’t happen until after WWI when Ireland would be divided with the south gaining independence while 6 counties of Ulster remained part of the United Kingdom.

    Feminists- more radical women demanding suffrage began militant action in the form of breaking windows, starting fires in mail boxes, chaining themselves to the gates at Parliament, hunger strikes when arrested.  It would take the role women would play in WWI to get the vote (over 30 by 1918; 21 by 1928).

 

3) David Lloyd George & Winston Churchill

Before WWI David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, liberals, introduced important social measures:  old age pensions, unemployment and health insurance, minimum wages in certain industries.  David Lloyd George introduced the “people’s budget” of 1909 to pay for all this with taxes aimed at the wealthy.  They balked at the taxes and a constitutional crisis ensued.  The King George V threatened to create enough new peers to add to the House of Lords to get the Parliament Act of 1911 passed;  it gave the House of Commons the power to pass a bill without the House of Lords (they could only delay, not stop passage).  In other words, on the eve of WWI, Britain becomes a real democracy!

 

2. France:

 

1)  Napoleon III

After being elected president of the Second French Republic in 1848, by 1851 Napoleon III has made himself dictator and the Second French Republic becomes the Second Empire.  He outraged liberals and republicans, but most of the French accepted him:  they ratified his take-over in a plebiscite (though it was rigged).

      He did support economic expansion that benefited the bourgeoisie and workers (jobs!):  state-sponsorship of building canals and railroads on cheap credit from government banks; he expressed concern for workers.  So under Napoleon III there was the appearance of democracy (elections, plebiscites--though he manipulated them-- and intellectual debate--though he harassed critics--and a press--though he censored it.

      Later, in the 1860s, he loosened control of the press and legislaturep; in 1869 many members of the opposition were elected.  He accepted a new constitution, which made him a constitutional parliamentary monarch.  He did manage some domestic achievements, particularly economic expansion through state sponsorship of building of canals and railroads.

       End of the Empire:  Unfortunately for him, his foreign policy would be his undoing [Crimean War, 1854-6, the Italian affair (deal with Cavour), and the Franco-Prussian War].  He allowed himself to be drawn into the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and was captured by the Prussians.  He was released in 1871 and escaped to England with his wife and son only to die in 1873.

       Meanwhile a provisional government would attempt to form a republic.  Radical elements of the Parisian populace established a radical city government called the “Paris commune” to oppose the Prussians and the new French government (National Assembly).  It was monarchical and bourgeois.  After a 10-week experiment of abolishing the police and army with civilian militia taking over the factories and churches, the French communards were put down mercilessly and 20,000 were executed without a trial by Adolph Thiers (Tire), head of the provisional government.  But law and order was restored in France.  Disunity among the monarchists in France would result in France becoming a republic by default when Republicans gained control of the legislature (both houses) in the elections of 1879.

2) Third French Republic:  This Third French Republic would last from 1870 to 1940 (when Hitler would invade France).  Though not popular, it would survive only because of dissension among its enemies.  It would be slow in economic development (fewer and smaller industries than Britain or Germany and more rural).  It would be slow to enact social measures (pensions, regulations governing working conditions, wages, and hours), yet when it does, the ruling class regarded it as socialist, the socialists as tokens to buy off workers.  The radical syndicalists advocated bringing industries and the government under the control of workers; anarchists had supporters among the workers and intellectuals.  But no group could gain a majority to overthrow the republic.  So approaching WWI, France was a deeply divided country.

 

 3) Dreyfus affair

      France suffered from a number of scandals in the second half of the 19th c.  Boulanger (a general and Republican) committed suicide on the grave of his former mistress after fleeing France when he was expected to lead a coup d’etat of the third Republic.  A giant stock swindle occurred concerning the financing the building of the Panama Canal.  And the country became divided over the Dreyfus affair.  Captain Alfred Dreyfus, and Alsatian-Jewish artillery officer, was wrongly accused in 1894 of having sold secrets to the Germans.  Radical republicans rallied around Dreyfus and when he was cleared in 1906 pushed for separation of church and state.  The army and the Gallican church knew Dreyfus was innocent but did not want to admit it.  France would become a secular state with taxes no longer supporting the parishes and schools:  complete separation of church and state.

3. Germany:  The new German empire under Bismarck was the most powerful state in Europe.  It was a federation of 24 German states each of which retained its own government; the rulers of these states were represented in a council, the Bundesrat; William I was the king of Prussian and the German emperor;  the Bundesrat must approve all laws; the Reichstag (elected by universal suffrage) was the lower house of the legislature; there was also a president or chancellor.  Bismarck was appointed by the emperor as chancellor and was only responsible to him.  The only control over Bismarck as chancellor of the German Empire was the Reichstag’s refusal to pass the budget (which rarely ever was done).  Realpolitik was the policy of Bismarck and he did not tolerate political parties.  [On the road to German unification as Bismarck set his talents to the task of making Prussia supreme in German and Germany supreme in Europe, he realized it could not be achieved by compromise or persuasion as he said upon taking up his position as chancellor:  “Not by speeches and majority votes are the great questions of the day decided--that was the mistake of 1848 and 1849--but by blood and iron” (Ferguson 708).

1) Bismarck 

In his efforts to maintain the state he had created, Bismarck began to attack three groups he saw as challenges to unity:  Catholics, liberals, and socialists.  Catholics were see as a group who did not put the interests in Germany first.  When the pope was proclaimed infallible in matters of faith and morals by the Vatican council, Bismarck was his chance to persecute and control them.  Although 40 per cent of Germany was roman Catholic, some of them did not support the decree of papal infallibility.  Bismarck supported them against the orthodox bishops and this opened a conflict known as the Kulturkampf (:struggle for civilization”) that resulted in a number of anti-Catholic laws in 1873 that tried to subject the church to the state:  (1) expelled the Jesuits from Germany and severed diplomatic relations with the Vatican and Germany. (2) no clerical office could be held unless the person had attended a German high school and university and approved by the state.

        RESULT:  The Catholic resistance became stronger and were able to increase their representation in the Reichstag.  That is his actions backfired and the Catholic Center Party grew.  So Bismarck dropped his war on the Catholics to concentrate on the Socialists.

        “The policies of Bismarck, who served as chancellor of the new German state until 1890, often served to prevent the growth of more democratic institutions.   At first, Bismarck worked with the liberals to achieve greater centralization of Germany through common codes of criminal and commercial law.  The liberals also joined Bismarck in his attack on the Catholic Church, the so-called Kulturkampf or ‘struggle for civilization.’  Like Bismarck, middle-class liberals distrusted Catholic loyalty to the new Germany.  Bismarck’s strong-arm tactics against Catholic clergy and Catholic institutions proved counter productive, however, and Bismarck welcomed an opportunity in 1878 to abandon the attack on Catholicism by making an abrupt shift in policy. . . . In 1878, Bismarck abandoned the liberals and began to persecute the socialists” (Spiel. 841).

2) Social Democratic Party

        The SDP party was founded in 1875 and Bismarck wanted to separate workers from their leaders and to crush the socialists.  “When two attempts on the emperor’s life occurred in 1878, he demanded that the socialists be suppressed...[“got parliament to pass a stringent antisocialist law that outlawed the Social Democratic Party and limited socialist meetings and publications, although socialist candidates were still permitted to run for the Reichstag] (but) The Social Democratic Party, like the Catholic Center party before, survived the persecution; it grew stronger and better disciplined as the liberals grew weaker, discredited by their unwillingness to act” (Perry 589).  [The liberals had kept silent during the persecution of the Catholics as well as during the current persecution of the socialists.]

        Bismarck attempted to woo the workers away from socialism by social legislation and Germany became the first state to enact a program of social legislation for the proletariat [paid for by contributions of workers and employers, so as to avoid the taint of socialism], which included insurance against sickness, disability, accidents, and old age.  Despite Bismarck’s attempts, the German working class continued to support the Social Democratic Party in elections since it was a way of life (members belonged to the many socialist political organizations, youth and women’s divisions, athletic leagues, and cultural societies).  By WWI the Social Democratic party was the largest single party in Germany.  Bismarck’s opportunistic maneuvers against Catholics, liberals, and socialists undermined the development of a viable parliamentary government.  The bureaucracy, the military, and the chancellor remained out of the reach of the voting populace (Perry 591).

3) William II:  In March of 1890 Bismarck was forced to resign by William II who wanted to pursue his own policies.

 

4) Germany's Industrial Growth:  “When Kaiser William II (1889-1918) ascended the throne, Germany possessed the most extensive sector of large-scale and concentrated industrial and corporate capitalism of any Great Power with the largest and most powerful unions” (Perry 648). 

 

SUMMARY:  So Bismarck, in an attempt to entrench his own power, conceded more to liberals and socialists than they could have won for themselves.

 

4. Austria-Hungary

After the defeat by Prussia in the Seven Weeks’ War had forced the Habsburg monarchy to make concessions to the Magyars with the Settlement of 1867, the Magyars and Germans became the dominant nationalities in the Empire of Austria-Hungary with the advent of the Dual Monarchy which split the territories into Austria and Hungary with a common ruler--the emperor of Austria = king of Hungary--but Hungary in control of its internal affairs.

   The Rumanians, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Serb, Croats and Jews suffered from Magyarization.  So the rising tide of nationalism in the late 19th c. would not only be a force leading to the breakup of this empire, but also to the outbreak of WWI with the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria by Serbians.

 

5. Italy

Though finally united into a country, Italy’s unification is tragically plagued by internal problems:  1) continued separation of the industrialized north and the poverty-stricken south; 2) religious controversy:  Catholics (despite the papal decree Non expedit of 1871 which forbade Catholics to vote or take part in national affairs, many want the pope less involved in politics) v. liberal nationalists (want a secular state, civil marriage and public education); 3) local loyalists (some principalities are resisting unification) and 4) corruption (there is extensive corruption among government officials).

  Unfortunately Italian leaders ignored all these social ills and pursued a policy of foreign affairs and military glory in an attempt to become a Great power (but it will become the first European power to lose to an African state--Ethiopia).  Therefore Italy is plagued by strikes and rural discontent and they decide to be neutral in WWI.

 

6. Russia

     There were only two classes in Russia:  the tsar and the servitors (army officers, officials and landed nobility) and serfs (the great mass of people).  “In Russia, the government made no concession whatever to liberal and democratic reforms.  The assassination of Alexander II in 1881 convinced his son and successor, Alexander III (1881-1894), that reform had been a mistake, and he quickly instituted what he said were ‘exceptional measures.’  The powers of the secret police were expanded. Advocates of constitutional monarchy and social reform, along with revolutionary groups, were persecuted.  Entire districts of Russia were placed under martial law if the government suspected the inhabitants of treason.  The powers of the zemstvos, created by the reforms of Alexander II, were sharply curtailed.  When Alexander III died, his weak son and successor, Nicholas II (1894-1917), began his rule with his father’s conviction that the absolute power of the tsars should be preserved:  ‘I shall maintain the principle of autocracy just as firmly and unflinchingly as did my unforgettable father’” (Spiel. 843).

 

SUMMARY:  These nation states were increasingly centralized, bureaucratized, and imperialistic.  Nationalistic feelings in such conditions would lead to intense international rivalries that would make war almost inevitable.