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Skilled Immigrants and American Industrialization: Lessons from Newport News Shipyard

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

W. Walker Hanlon
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Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, American shipyards started building modern metal ships, a sector dominated by the British. But, they faced a challenge: a shortage of domestic workers with the skills to fabricate large metal ships. Using census of population data, this article describes how one important U.S. shipyard, Newport News Shipbuilding, overcame the shortage of skilled domestic workers to assemble an effective labor force. The results show that skilled immigrants, mainly from Britain, played an important role in the shipyard's early life while, over time, native workers were trained to fill skilled occupations.

Keywords

shipbuildingimmigrationskilled workers
Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 92 , Issue 4 , Winter 2018 , pp. 605 - 632
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2019 

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Footnotes

For helpful comments, I thank Paula Bustos, Matthew Jaremski, Reka Juhasz, Joan Monras, and seminar participants at CEMFI, Colgate, and Michigan State University. Giorgio Ravalli provided excellent research assistance. This paper was funded by a Cole Grant from the Economic History Association and the Hellman Fellowship at UCLA.

References

1 On the impact of immigrants on natives through labor market competition, see Hatton, Timothy J. and Williamson, Jeffrey G., The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; and Hirschman, Charles and Mogford, Elizabeth, “Immigration and the American Industrial Revolution from 1880 to 1920,” Social Science Research 38, no. 4 (2009): 897–920CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. For reviews of the modern economic literature on immigration see Kerr, Sari Pekkala and Kerr, William “Economic Impacts of Immigration: A Survey,” Finnish Economic Papers 24 (2011)Google Scholar; and Borjas, George J., Immigration Economics (Cambridge, MA, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See, e.g., Jones, Bill and Lewis, Ronald L., “Gender and Transnationality among Welsh Tinplate Workers in Pittsburgh: The Hattie Williams Affair, 1895,” Labor History 48, no. 2 (2007): 175–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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4 John G. B. Hutchins, “History and Development of the Shipbuilding Industry in the United States,” in The Shipbuilding Business in the United States of America, Frederick G. Fasset, Jr., ed., (n.p., 1948), 14–60; Pollard, Sidney and Robertson, Paul, The British Shipbuilding Industry, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, MA, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and W. Walker Hanlon, The Persistent Effect of Temporary Input Cost Advantages in Shipbuilding, 1850–1911 (unpublished manuscript, 2018), mimeo.

5 Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding Industry.

6 The drop in iron prices was due in part to the discovery of new iron reserves, particularly in the Mesabi Range in Minnesota, which led to the expansion of iron and steel production in the United States, as shown by Irwin, Douglas A., “Explaining America's Surge in Manufactured Exports, 1880–1913,” Review of Economics and Statistics 85, no. 2 (2003): 364–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. At the same time, productivity in U.S. iron and steel production was improving rapidly. See Temin, Peter, Iron and Steel in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA, 2004)Google Scholar; Allen, Robert, “The Peculiar Productivity History of American Blast Furnaces, 1840–1913,” Journal of Economic History 37, no. 3 (1977): 605–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Allen, Robert, “International Competition in Iron and Steel, 1850–1913,” Journal of Economic History 39, no. 4 (1979): 911–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Allen, Robert, “Accounting for Price Changes: American Steel Rails, 1879–1910,” Journal of Political Economy 89, no. 3 (1981): 512–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Hatton and Williamson, Age of Mass Migration.

8 For recent reviews of this literature, see Margo, Robert, “The Economic History of Migration: The pre–World War One USA as Lens,” in International Handbook on Migration and Economic Development, ed. Lucas, Robert E. B. (Cheltenham, U.K., 2014), 42–64Google Scholar; and Abramitzky, Ran and Boustan, Leah P., “Immigration in American Economic History,” Journal of Economic Literature 55, no. 4 (2017): 1311–45CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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12 Shipyards in the Great Lakes were also protected by natural barriers that made it difficult for large vessels to transit between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic.

13 Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding Industry; James W. Culliton, “Economics and Shipbuilding,” in Fasset, The Shipbuilding Business, 1–13.

14 It is worth noting that boilermaker is a bit of a misnomer in the period I study, as workers with that title may not have been mainly engaged just in the production of boilers. Rather, boilermakers were involved in fabricating metal sheets and tubes, jobs that made them the most prominent skilled workers in metal shipbuilding.

15 Thiesen, William H., Industrializing American Shipbuilding, (Gainesville, FL, 2006), 101–12Google Scholar, provides an excellent description of the various stages involved in metal ship construction and how they were accomplished during the nineteenth century.

16 Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding Industry.

17 These conditions were very different from those experienced during both World War I and World War II, studied by Peter Thompson, where the production of repeated standardized designs allowed shipyards to expand by using lower skilled workers trained to do just one type of task. Thompson, , “How Much Did the Liberty Shipbuilders Learn? New Evidence for an Old Case Study,” Journal of Political Economy 109, no. 1 (2001): 103–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Hutchins, “History and Development of the Shipbuilding Industry in the United States.”

19 Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding Industry, 28.

20 Pollard and Robertson, 153.

21 Pollard and Robertson, 28–29, 42.

22 Berthoff, Rowland T., British Immigrants in Industrial America, 1790–1950, (Cambridge, MA, 1953)Google Scholar.

23 Newport News was also close to the Navy Shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia, which may have been useful for winning Navy contracts or learning about new metal shipbuilding technologies. Hanlon, The Persistent Effect of Temporary Input Cost Advantages in Shipbuilding, provides evidence that there were spillovers from Navy shipyards to other nearby private shipyards.

24 For a thorough review of the information available from both company records and other sources, see Smith, Edward O., History of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, (Newport News, VA, 1965)Google Scholar.

25 These manuscripts were accessed using the genealogy website Ancestry.com. While census data is available in transcribed form, hand collecting the data from the original manuscripts allows me to take advantage of additional details that are often unavailable in the transcribed databases while limiting the effect of transcription errors.

26 Smith, History of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company.

27 The main distinction between skilled craftsmen and specialists is that the former typically acquired their skills on the job or through apprenticeships while the latter may have had some more formal education.

28 For example, I exclude from this list occupations such as blacksmiths and electricians where some workers were likely to have been employed at the shipyard. I also focus only on male heads of household. The focus on males makes these data more comparable to the data on shipyard workers. The reason I focus on heads of household is to exclude some sons with fathers that worked at the shipyard.

29 Contemporary sources suggest that the Lorain yard employed seven hundred to one thousand workers in early 1898 so my data likely capture most of the yard's workforce. “Ship Yard Matters,” Marine Review, 27 Jan. 1898, 10. I have not found similar figures for the other two locations.

30 I do know that in Bath the only major metal ship producer was Bath Iron Works.

31 Smith, History of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, 12.

32 Smith, 16.

33 In fact, this number likely understates the true unskilled share since it may not include casual laborers.

34 The share of unskilled workers obtained from the census data roughly matches the share reported for different periods by Smith, based on information from correspondence and surviving shipyard records. For example, in October of 1889 there were 38 laborers out of a total of 97 workers, a share of 39 percent. Smith, History of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, 23.

35 Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding Industry, 153, table 8.1.

36 Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding Industry.

37 Smith, History of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, 81.

38 Evans, Cerinda W., Collis Potter Huntington, (Newport News, VA, 1954), 673Google Scholar.

39 Chippers/caulkers also appear to be important in both types of shipbuilding, but this is probably somewhat misleading because while the term caulker appears in both metal and wood shipbuilding, it means something very different in each setting.

40 We also see a smaller share of draftsmen in Lorain compared to Newport News. It may be that the designs for ships built in Lorain were still being drawn up at the company's older yard in Cleveland during this period.

41 Smith, History of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company.

42 Smith, 109–10.

43 United States Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC, 1975).

44 United States Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States.

45 Hanlon, The Persistent Effect of Temporary Input Cost Advantages in Shipbuilding.

46 An alternative explanation is that native-born workers were more likely to drop out of these occupations as they grew older, but this seems unlikely.

47 Smith, History of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, 22.

48 Data from Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding Industry, table 9.5.