Honors English
14 December 2013
The Causes of the Industrial Boom
Before 1860, the United States was known as an agricultural based nation. The United States had so much land that could be cheaply bought, labor work was too costly, and products could not be shipped quick enough. For the United States, being a farming community simply made more sense. While over in Europe, especially England, industrial factories were booming immensely. Except there was a great light of industry heading towards the United States, and it was coming fast. Soon enough the United States would be entering a new era, the Industrial Boom. New transportation options, rapid immigration, and new mechanical developments played major …show more content…
This sparked immigration to the United States, all of these people came over looking for jobs, and they would take any job they could find. The immigrants cultures ranged from Asian to Polish, there were ones from all over to the states. They all came looking to fulfill the American dream. They would work for very low wages. Except for a lot of these immigrants a lot of these very low wages in the U.S. were actually better than what they were making back in their homeland according to the worksheet, “Push And Pull Factors”. As seen in the graph in document six, by the nineteen hundreds there were as much as 8.8 million immigrants coming into the United States. This spark caused some citizens of the United States wanting a law limiting how many immigrants could come to the United States. The Republican Party openly refused and stated on how they opposed the idea of “immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged [reduced] or impaired [harmed]”. This left the Americans fighting for their jobs with these new immigrants. Businesses saw this as a way to lower wages, which turned out to be a smart plan for most companies. Something to consider is that companies only spent money on what was going to make them more money, so money was never spent on things like safe working conditions. These companies were just streaming in all of this money, because of the immigrants coming over. Immigrants …show more content…
As said in document one, even just simply moving one piece of a product to another part of the factory had to be done. All of this hands on work made it so that the company would have to hire more people to fulfil these jobs, because if they didn’t it would take way too long for their products to be made (Overview of the Industrial Revolution). Except once the Industrial Boom hit the United States, ideas starting rolling, and new inventions were being drawn up. Some machinery cut out as much as two weeks of time that it would have taken to fulfil a job. That meant that these industries were able to make more of its product at an increased rate. It also allowed companies to fire a lot of employees and cut wages, which would save the company even more money. In addition, with all these new machines, there was a less chance for human error. Machinery changed the way companies were ran in a remarkable way for these different