Voice of Industry

The Voice of Industry was a worker-run newspaper published between 1845-1848, at the height of the American Industrial Revolution. The Voice was centrally concerned with the dramatic social changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, as workers came to depend on corporations for a wage.

The Voice, a small four-page newspaper, started publication on May 29, 1845 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts under the auspices of the New England Workingmen’s Association, with the young mechanic William F. Young at the helm. While primarily concerned with land and labor reform, the paper addressed a number of other social issues, including war, education, women’s rights, religion, slavery, and prison reform. All of the writing was done by the “workingmen and women," who, Young wrote in his inaugural editorial, “can wield the pen with as much perfection as the instruments of their respective vocations,” and to whom he extended “a hearty welcome...whether they agree with us on all points or not.”

Shortly after it was established, the paper moved from Fitchburg to Lowell, where it was adopted by the first union of working women in the United States, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association led by the young labour leader Sarah Bagley.

Workers writing in the Voice were sharply critical of the character and effects of the Industrial Revolution. Their concerns mirrored those of the broader American labor movement in the 1840s, a period in which worker unrest was directed towards the loss of status and economic independence experienced under the new economic system. It was, as the historian Norman Ware noted, “this social revolution that primarily affected the industrial worker in this period, and against which his protests were made. At the center of this revolution was a dramatic loss of control over economic life, as workers were made to sell their labor for a wage. This new dependence was, they argued, the natural result of an economic system driven by an imperative to accumulate wealth. It was this acquisitive, selfish drive that was the target of many workers in the 1840s who opposed the new economic order.

Accordingly, criticism in the Voice spanned a broad range. Workers denounced the new ethic of accumulation itself, seeing it as both immoral and destructive of the benevolent parts of human nature. They expressed alarm at how the profit motive directed technological change, as new ‘labor-saving’ machinery that might have been used to reduce toil was instead deployed to increase output. They protested the new ways of organizing work, which, in the name of maximizing profit, was divided into confined, repetitive tasks that diminished their capacity for self-development. They were dismayed by how economic power infected the political system, resulting in dubious and expensive wars, and making labor reform efforts difficult. And all of this, of course, in addition the harsh disciplinary power wielded by the corporations directly, which worsened their position amidst unprecedented corporate prosperity.

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