A Short History of American Shoemaking

1912 book by Fred A. Gannon

published by Newcomb & Gauss, Salem, Massachusetts

Beginnings

• each man in John Endicott’s company came with four pairs of boots
• first shoemakers in America Thomas Beard and Isaac Rickman
• Philip Kertland settled in Lynn in 1635
• Henry Elwell settled in Scituate, Massachusetts in 1636
• “selectman”

Shoemaking in Colonial Times

• The Puritans tried to make the laws of Moses the laws of the land.

• 1651 Massachusetts General Court authorized Boston shoemakers’ organization
• but forbade schemes to increase prices
• quotes the act

• no unlawful combination may be made at any time by the said company of shoemakers for enhancing the price of shoes, boots or wages whereby either owner or people may suffer

• no shoemaker shall refuse to make shoes for any inhabitant, at reasonable rates, of their own leather for use of themselves and families if they be required thereunto

• prohibited butchers from tanning, tanners from making shoes, shoemakers from making leather
• “packer tanners”
• fines for making poor leather
• law against “insufficiently tanned leather” in boots and shoes
• for “persons of mean estate” from wearing great boots or other expensive footwear

Ways of Early Yankee Shoemakers

• farmers made shoes during long storms, winter
• “10-footer” workshops
• shoe shops popular “loafing place”
• “shin boards” for sitting close to fire without burning knees

• determined whether or not it was too cold to work by wetting a lapstone, and seating an unlucky apprentice on it. If the boy’s trousers froze on the stone, the weather was considered too cold to work.

• Shoemakers’ candles, like tailors’ candles, were made by pressing two candles into one candle with two wicks.

• notion that everything came into use again once in seven years, so he saved everything he could

• Henry Wilson
  • “The Natick Cobbler”
  • became vice president of the US
  • would talk over issues in the shoe shop
• “The Musical Shoemakers of Salem” once contracted out with a circus for a summer
• author laments chewing and smoking tobacoo
• high death rate from consumption
• author laments alcohol
• got drunk on St. Crispin’s, once a holy day

(continued)

• Moses Putnam riding to Boston to sell shoes
• pride in work
  • worst men laid off first
  • prizes at mechanics’ fairs
• “draw on the clam bank” (dig up clams to eat)
• “greens” (dandelions)

• In Lynn, shoemakers established a general store called a Union store, and paid their employees in orders on this store.

  • Scrip

  • orders were commonly exchanged for provisions

  • refused employment to those who demanded cash

Ebenezer Breed, First Tariff Maker

• John Adam Dagyr
  • settled in Lynn
  • imported shoes and dissected them
  • improved on them
  • served in Continental Army
• Ebenezer Breed
  • proposed a national tariff on shoes of sufficient size

  • to keep out European shoes, until American shoemakers got a firm start in Business

  • shoemakers had protected the country during the perils of the Revolution, and now they deserved protection against their own foreign enemies

  • big dinner in Philadelphia
  • brought up a Quarker
  • became shoe merchant
  • received by King George
  • visited Paris
  • learned to drink in Europe
  • beloved’s parents refused marriage
  • ended up in the almshouse

  • One little girl, the daughter of the Quaker miss he had loved, often brought him baskets of dainties from her mother’s kitchen.

Story of The Sewing Machine

• lighten the work of women

• more than a century of experiments
• Barthlemy Thinonnier in Lyons

  • A mob destroyed it, and threatened to destroy its inventor also.

• Napoleon, who wanted clothing for his soldiers, offered rich reward for a sewing machine.

• Elias Howe
  • by tradition, came to him in a dream

  • seized by savages whose king commanded him to be beheaded if he did not make his sewing machine sew within thirty minutes

  • eye in the point of each guardsman’s spear

  • should be in its point, not in its butt

  • volunteered in Civil War

  • his regiment being without pay, he disappeared from camp and returned with a treasure chest, from which he paid the entire regiment

• Allen B. Wilson patented moving feed bar in 1850
• Isaac H. Singer patented presser foot in 1852
• John Brook Nichols, Lynn shoemaker, set up shop sewing trousers for tailors
• William B. Bliss, a Massachusetts shoe manufacturer, had advanced Howe money for his patents, had the sole right to use for leather
• Nichols and Bliss formed Nichols, Bliss & Co.
• young woman shoe closer:

  “I would like to see you hanged to a sour apple tree. Your machine will rob me of my daily bread.”

• They could not foresee the great boot it would be to them.

• Some men of shoe cities recall that when they were boys it was their task to turn the wheel of the sewing machine after school, while mother stitched shoes on it.

• women came from their homes, where they had been sewing shoes for years, to run the machines in the factories

The Revolutionary McKay Machine

• Civil War: so many shoemakers volunteered that not enough to make shoes

• dropped unfinished shoes on their benches

• Prices of shoes doubled.

• Congress considered removing the tariff
• Gordon McKay
• invented by Lyman R. Blake “a Yankee genius”
  • whittled model with a knife
  • patent 1858
  • $70k for patent rights, $8k cash, $62k from profits
  • opened a retail shoe store in Staunton, left to the Confederates
• McKay

  • once declared the invention of so great importance that it was impossible to spend too much money on it

• used in New England factories by 1862

• Shoemakers at the front, who had deserted their benches before the McKay machine appeared, used to study the shoes, and wonder how in the world any sort of a machine could be made to sew shoes.

• The McKay machine revolutionized the shoe manufacturing industry.

• When shoemakers worked by hand, they bent over their lasts much of the time, cramping their lungs. Consumptions, as tuberculosis, was then called, was a common disease among shoemakers. [???]

• McKay machine diminished tuberculosis [???]
• Blake invented roller skates
• McKay established royalty system
• left $5m to Harvard

A Machine with Fingers Like a Laster

• Matzeliger a McKay operator
• worked in secret

• He spent all his earnings on his experiments.

• third model so successful that company tried to buy out his patents
• died of consumption before fourth model

• after stubborn, prolonged and costly strikes against it by the hand lasters

• the machine revented Matzeliger on the hand lasters who taunted him, by singing as it worked, “I’ve got your job, I’ve got your job.”

• left stock to Methodist church in Lynn, paid off their mortgage

• commonly called the Consolidated machine, or hand method machine

• hand laster: 60 pairs per day, machine 200-700

Growth of the U. S. M. Co.

• United Shoe Machinery Corporation

• a natural economic development [???]

• Railroads and large industrial corporations had been caused to cease cut throat competition, and to merge their interests and efforts, for the protection of investors and the improvement of their service to the public. The shoe machine trade was compelled to do likewise. [???]

• 1899-02-09
  • McKay Sewing Machine Company, Consolidated
  • McKay Lasting Machine Company
  • Goodyear Shoe Machinery Company
  • International Goodyear Shoe Machinery Company
  • Goodyear Shoe Machinery Company of Canada
  • Eppler Welt Machinery Company
  • Davey Pegging Machine Company
• list of officers

• absorbed small shoe machinery companies until it controlled 90 per cent. of the shoe machinery business of the country, not including the stitching room machinery business, which is in the hands of the Singer and other sewing machinery companies

• royalty charges average 2 3-8 cents per pair

• not show an increase during the decade

• sold around the world
• model plant in Beverly with many amenities

• Women employees leave the factory ten minutes before the men, and report for work ten minutes after the men, thereby gaining privacy from men employees, and also, seats in electric cars.

• It is very much to be doubted…could have been accomplished by any other means than the formation of this big shoe machinery company…

• brought about mostly by Sidney W. Winslow and George W. Brown

• Careless men ignore it; thrifty men secure additional life insurance.

• Winslow developed the Naumkeag Buffing Machine Company
• Brown as Winslow’s business associate

The Royalty System

• McKay introduced

• ==possibly getting it from the patent medicine industry==

• prevails in 98 per cent. of the shoe factories of the country today

• investigated by government
• fought by Shoe Manufacturers' Alliance

• this profit, though large, would stop when all factories were equipped with machines, and that the presence of old machines in factories would be a serious obstacle to the sale of improved machines

• charge 1-5 cents per pair
• counters put on machines to track
• Shoemaker’s Gift Enterprise
  • $100 worth of stamps gets you 1 share of stock, par $5
  • story about sticking certificates to wall, painter painting over them, destroying “a small fortune”
  • tempted by stock to lease machines
• royalty income stopped after patents expired
• USM

• “anything from a tack to a complete factory equipment”

• It declined to sell outright any of its chief machines.

• first class repair

• road men

• has been likened to a railroad system

• Some of them require the lessee to use in conjunction with certain leased machines of the United Shoe Machinery Company auxiliary machines and supplies and parts provided by the United Shoe Machine Company. The clauses fixing these requirements, are called “tying clauses.” The leases are for a period of 19 years.

• 1909 Massachusetts law allowing use with auxiliary machinery

• In 1911, western shoe manufacturers, who failed to purchase the Wonder Working system of Thomas G. Plant, formed the Shoe Manufacturers’ Alliance.

  • lower royalties
  • permit use of other auxiliary machinery
  • established Non Royalty Shoe Company in St. Louis with non-royalty machinery
• USM arguments

  • would be impossible for ambitious men with limited capital to start shoe manufacturing

  • unable to buy new machines as they appeared and thereby would be forced out of business by progressive and more wealthy rivals

• While the United Shoe Machinery Company declared itself fighting against the formation of a shoe manufacturing trust, the United States government prosecuted it for maintaining a shoe machinery trust.

• Tying

• Sentiment in the shoe trade is divided…

The Factory System

• the change had been going on slowly for a half century before McKay’s machines appeared

• division of labor
• women closing at home
• toolkit in “Sketches of Lynn” by Johnson
  • whet board
  • pettibois
  • fender
  • paste horn
  • dog fish skin

• The shoemaker of today would be as much at loss to handle these old fashioned tools…

• many imported tools
• shark skin as sand paper

• It began, according to tradition, with the rolling machine.

• chronology
  • 1833 Samuel Preston’s pegging machine
  • McKay
  • 1862 Goodyear machine invented by August Destroy
  • Matzeliger
• first machine driven by hand or foot
• William F. Trowbridge added steam engine in 1855

• The Goodyear machines did even more than the McKay machine to multiply product, increase wages and provide the people with better footwear.

• the custom shoe makers, who made shoes by hand, had to retire from business [???]

• look better and fit better than dd the hand made welt shoes provided a generation ago

• ==When machines were harnessed to steam power, shoemakers had to come to factories to run them.==

• Tapley shop preserved in garden of Essex Institute in Salem

• If the big firms keep growing, a few of them will soon be able to make shoes for the entire nation. But the day of the small manufacturer is not yet at an end.

• In colonial days, each shoemaker was his own master.

• specialization
• today: 60 men operating 60 different machines
• specialized manufacturers
  • Brockton: men’s
  • Lynn: women’s
  • Haverhill: slipppers

• ==It is by this specialization that American manufacturers have beaten the world in shoemaking.==

• trade associations

• most valuable for dealing with huge problems, like the tariff, and national trade regulations

• The smaller organizations deal with credits, factory conditions and labor matters.

• Boot and Shoe Club dinners

• Shoeworkers have organized strong labor unions…

  • Boot and Shoe Workers
  • United Shoe Workers of America
  • not yet merged

  • demand consideration of the human element

  • proven their power to secure legislation

  • The labor movement goes for its foundation to Christianity and civilization…

• scientific management

• It seeks, not to make shoes cheaply by employing men cheaply, as was the methods of former times, but to constantly improve the employment of men, machinery and methods and product…

• Like most innovations in industry, it is opposed or ignored by many, but the few that are taking advantage of it are profiting.

• has become one of the chief industries of the nation

• the American people are the best shod in the world

Indenture of Joseph Verry, Apprentice

[terms reproduced in full]