Made in America: U.S. Manufacturing in Gilded Age Census Maps

I recently heard a factoid in passing that fascinated me and sparked further investigation: after having been decidedly middle of the pack immediately post-Civil War, the United States’ share of total world manufacturing output became the highest in the world between 1880 and 1900, with a near exponential pace of growth during these decades. Oddly, this was during a time of great financial upheaval, as the Gilded Age Panic of 1873 led to the so-called “Long Depression” of the 1870s-1890s. Because I’m a map librarian and not an economic historian, rather than try to make sense of the monetary and fiscal policy debates over how this could happen, I thought I’d see what I could learn from items in our collection about this interesting point in American prosperity. (If you were actually hoping for hard-hitting economics in this post, pair the image below with this article about the Gold Standard and the 1896 presidential election.)

Right off the bat, I was further intrigued to find that people at the time, not just later in academia and hindsight, understood that this development in manufacturing output was sudden, unprecedented, and worthy of study. Fortunately, they were able to crunch the data necessary to do this kind of research, and we can read their findings today, all thanks to the U.S. Census.

After the Censuses of 1870, 1880, and 1890, U.S. Census Office staff produced a statistical atlas recapping the major demographic news of each of those years, using maps and data visualizations to illustrate the numbers in an exciting way. Lining up the three atlases side by side, which we can do digitally today, it is striking to see the differences between each one. The post-1870 Census statistical atlas focuses on westward expansion of American settlers, and mentions mining and coal but otherwise focuses on population statistics, such as race, ethnicity, population density, and public health. The post-1880 Census atlas, which has previously been well described in a blog post by my colleague Meagan Snow, turns its attention more sharply to industry, finance, and manufacturing, and the post-1890 atlas builds on the latter benchmarks with even greater emphasis on their historic significance.

Something you might be wondering by this point is how we should define and categorize “manufacturing.” Fortunately, the 1880 atlas defines the scope of manufacturing, first with a list of categories on image 211 ranging from flour mills to meatpacking to steelworks, and then with a striking map of the United States on image 219 (Plate 118), which shows dozens of manufacture types sorted by their prevalence across the country as well as alphabetically.

There’s a lot to focus on visually here, but the part that stood out to me was the text underlying what the Census demographers noticed, and what they made of it. Image 211 says at the bottom of the page that the importance of manufacturing relative to agriculture, which had been the number one industry of the U.S. to that point, was rapidly increasing. On an earlier page about occupations, image 127, the authors make some employment-related assertions as to why manufacturing is on the rise: “… the fact is unquestionable, that, owing mainly to the extension of the factory system, the increased division of labor, and the opening of wider fields of employment for women, the proportion of those engaged in gainful occupations materially increased during the decade.” They bring up this idea again on image 212, saying that between 1870 and 1880, “the tendency during the decade was toward an economy of labor by the employment of labor-saving machinery… The amount of work done in 1880 by 2,732,595 hands, would have required, in 1870, 2,913,720 hands.” So in their view, technological innovations and expansion of the labor force made manufacturing output increase at a high rate, while requiring fewer people to do the work than would have been expected in previous times. Furthermore, as they state in the finance section on image 139, “… regarding the wealth of other countries, the United States is, in absolute amount, the wealthiest nation upon the globe, its resources slightly exceeding those even of the mother country.” Following this sentence, a table shows that the U.S. had already beaten Great Britain in terms of overall wealth by 1880, according to the Census Office’s calculations.

The 1890 statistical atlas takes these impressive numbers even further. For one thing, as written in the text and shown in graphs on image 108, the manufacturing output that had already seemed so impressive in 1880 had doubled between 1880 and 1890! They also say on this page something echoing a point from the 1880 atlas, that manufacturing output outstripped invested capital because of innovations in machinery, making employees wealthier and more individually productive. While these statistics are not the same as the one I mentioned at the beginning, about the U.S. being first in the world in terms of manufacturing output, they seem to lean in that direction, and it’s possible that that would have been clear by the time of the next Census.

These various claims have been argued and re-argued by economists and historians over the past century, and I have nothing fruitful to add to that discussion, but it is interesting to see what the most respected analytical minds of the time – trusted by the federal government to study their population – believed about this nation’s prosperity based on the data they collected, visualized, and mapped.

To conclude, I leave you with two maps I liked from these atlases that are unrelated to the above discussion. First, from the 1890 atlas, a map of the U.S. showing the center of manufacturing moving westward with each passing decade, reaching northwest Ohio by 1890. Last but certainly not least, a map from 1880 showing factory production of butter and cheese.

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For a classic article about the rise of American manufacturing that I consulted in writing this post, see: Wright, Gavin. “The Origins of American Industrial Success, 1879-1940.” The American Economic Review 80, no. 4 (1990): 651–68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2006701.