Translating Academic Text for a Non-Academic, 21st-Century Audience

Using Track Changes or other software that makes your edits visible, rewrite the post-asterisk paragraphs so that they would be comprehensible to a modern reader who has not attended college. Title of the article: “American Shoemakers, 1648 –1895: A Sketch of Industrial Evolution” Author: John R. Commons, University of Wisconsin This is a slightly adapted version of text that was accessed through JSTOR and originally published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 1909, Volume 24, Issue 1, pp. 39-84.

* * * * * The boot and shoemakers, also known as “cordwainers,” were the earliest and most

strenuous of American industrialists in their economic struggles. The highly skilled and

intelligent class of tradesmen, who had been easily menaced by commercial and

industrial changes, were forced to confront each new menace with determination in order

to provide refuge to protective organizations. The shoemakers were among nine of the

seventeen trials for conspiracy prior to 1842. By using American documents from the gild

to the factory, it is possible to trace each industrial stage. Some organizations whose

records offer this picture of industrial evolution under American conditions are called the

“Company of Shoomakers [sic],” Boston 1648; the “Society of the Master Cordwainers,”

Philadelphia, 1789; the “Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers,” Philadelphia

1794; and “the Boot and Shoe Workers Union,”[ENTER LOCATION], 1895. Each of

these organizations stands for a definite stage within the industrial evolution, from the

primitive traveling cobbler to the modern factory; each represents an internal conflict

over the distribution of wealth provoked by external conditions of written documents,

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which preserve the types of social structure that struggled to adapt along with the

evolving economic series.

Probably the first American gild was that of the “Shoomakers [sic] of Boston,”

and its charter incorporation, granted by the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, on

October 18, 1648. The “Shoomakers [sic] of Boston” was the only complete American

charter of its kind. The coopers were granted a similar charter with the same result in

mind. The act recited that based on the “shoomakers” desire as well as complaints of the

“damage” to which the country sustained “by occasion of bad ware made by some of that

trade,” that they should meet and elect a leader of the organization.

The foregoing sketch of industrial evolution in America highlightes the part

played by the expanding area of competition and the effort of protective organizations to

ward off the abnormal competitive menace of each stage of development. From this

standpoint the sketch may be compared with investigations of Marx, Schmoller, and

Bücher. Karl Marx was the first to challenge the word with a keen analysis of economic

evolution, but his argument concerns the mode of production and not the extension of the

market. His two assumptions of a “use value” and a given “average social labor” serve to

destory the part played by price-bargain as well as the part played by the wage-bargain.

With these assumptions out of the way, he is able to focus on the production of “surplus

value” within his theory of the working day and the cost of living. But these are

secondary factors, results not causes. The primary factors are on the side of the market

where competition is carried on at different levels.

Without delay, the shoemakers of Philadelphia experienced the stimulus of this

extension of markets and entered the wholesale-order stage of the industry. At once what

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had been an external menace now became internal on this wider and lower level of

competition, resulting in the separation and struggle of classes. The wage-class began its

long journey to the political immunity of a private organization to eliminate the “scab” in

his many forms of non-unionist, sweat-shop worker, green hand, and immigrant. But,

prior to the merchant, capitalist stage, this separation of labor from merchant was

inconsistent. The employer because of the specialized wage-bargain, was only obligated

to occasionally appear. But after the merchant-capitalist period, the slogan of the

protective tariff became instead the protection for labor, where formerly it had been

protection for capital. Turning to the state governments, labor has summoned its political

strength for the suppression of the internal hazards of long hours, prison labor, and child

labor. Finally, neither politics nor organizations were able to limit the menace of

competition, both “manufacturers” and workmen in the shoe trade strive to raise

themselves above its level by cultivating the goodwill of the consumers, the former by his

trade mark, the latter by the union label. Thus, American shoemakers epitomize

American industrial industry.

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