President Donald Trump dreams of using tariffs on foreign goods to produce a golden age of U.S. industry. Yet, this vision is based upon a misunderstanding of the causes and consequences of American industrial decline.
As the story so often goes, in the late-19th century, America became a prosperous, industrial superpower founded on stable, factory jobs. But, in the latter half of the 20th century, a shadowy cabal of high-flying financiers and elite manufacturers moved those jobs abroad, in search of lower wages and bigger profits. They left behind broken cities and devastated local economies. Free trade helped the rich get richer, but left everyday Americans behind.
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The problem is this story lionizes an industrial past with little basis in reality. Nowhere is that clearer than in New Bedford, Mass., which was once the nation’s largest fine cotton cloth producer, and now is one of the many suffering Rust Belt towns chasing revitalization. Only understanding the true story of American industrialization will allow for formulating good policy today.
The idea of stable industrial prosperity would’ve shocked America’s Founders, who tended to see manufacturing as less a harbinger of wealth than an adjunct of poverty. Industry depended on impoverished workers with no other option but the tedium of mass manufacturing. The result, Thomas Jefferson reflected in 1805, was “a depravity of morals, a dependence and corruption” that made factory labor “an undesirable accession to a country whose morals are sound.”
Indeed, early American industrial work was demanding, dull, and dangerous. Massachusetts’s early-19th century factories kept workers at their machines every workday from dawn to 7:00 or 7:30 PM. Reports of grisly accidents were a constant feature of local newspapers. In 1867, for example, eight-year-old millworker Katie Lyon, despite having “just been beaten for carelessness,” got her dress caught in the spinning room gears, drawing her arm in. The machine stripped the flesh “from her arm in some places to the bone, and many of the arteries and sinews were severed.”
The bleak conditions in factories explained why, when massive industrial growth occurred in the second half of the 19th century, it came at a time of swirling economic uncertainty and staggering working-class misery. New Bedford, for instance, transformed into an industrial powerhouse following the downfall of the city’s famed whaling industry in the 1860s. The decline of the whaling industry left the city in panic: shops were empty, wharves were idle, and the number of residents on poor relief nearly doubled.
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But New Bedford’s economic catastrophe soon gave it an unexpected industrial advantage: numerous unemployed workers with nowhere to turn but the factory floor. Wealthy whalers quickly transformed themselves into textile magnates; the low wages they paid allowed them to outmaneuver their competitors and dominate the fine spinning market.
The vast majority of the city’s industrial jobs remained low paying, dangerous, and only attractive to the most desperate Americans until the 1940s.
In the 1920s, New Bedford’s textile industry collapsed under the pressure of newer, even lower wage competitors in the American South. Once again, the ensuing increase in unemployed workers in New Bedford attracted a new wave of manufacturing. This time, it was garment factories, moving from Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York in search of pliable workers willing to accept rock-bottom wages. Initially, many of these factories functioned as little more than exploitative sweatshops in which desperate young women sewed clothes for as little as five cents an hour (roughly $1 in 2025 dollars).
But over time, the efforts of local union organizers and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal transformed the labor market in New Bedford. The 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act curtailed the ability of employers to stymie labor activism through court injunctions; the 1935 Wagner Act protected workers’ right to organize and collectively bargain; the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 finally set a national minimum wage, helping to undercut competition from “low-wage” states in the South.
Simultaneously, union organizers at the area’s Har-Lee dress company—the nation’s largest cotton dress manufacturer at the time—launched a massive organizing drive, using everything from pro-union radio melodramas to an elaborate live play (“Sit Down Sister!”) to convince workers that collective bargaining promised them a better future. After a union was certified in 1941, workers gained an enormous pay bump: a minimum weekly wage of $15 (roughly $340 in 2025).
By the end of the 1940s, union contracts ensured that workers got paid vacations and holidays, health insurance, and seniority rights. Federal programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance, and—by the 1950s—disability insurance provided workers with a semblance of security and a path to eventual retirement.
In fact, contrary to popular belief, it was union workers—not fat-cat manufacturers—who soon became some of the most vocal advocates of free trade. As labor leader Walter Reuther explained in 1961, the goal was to move beyond the “narrow, protectionist point of view,” and use free trade and labor internationalism to undermine the “economic rat-race, in which international capital makes one group of workers compete with the other…on the basis of who can live on the lowest standard of living.” By spreading the values of unionism and free trade across the world, American workers sought to raise global living standards and forever banish the threat of low-wage competition from abroad.
Reuther’s advocacy illuminates how free trade wasn’t the villain in the story of deindustrialization that it has long been made out to be. Instead, the relatively short period of industrial prosperity came crashing down in the 1970s and 1980s because of far more complex factors.
In New Bedford, the slide began when a confluence of developments diminished the appeal of factory jobs. First, Massachusetts made historic investments in education—in particular, the 1969 establishment of a full, public university in nearby Dartmouth—which provided workers with other avenues to good-paying jobs, especially in suburban Boston’s blossoming tech economy. Simultaneously, a series of conglomerate takeovers of local manufacturing plants led to waves of re-structuring and cost-cutting: factory jobs no longer seemed quite so stable. In addition, the inflation of the 1970s and the ascent of the anti-union Reagan administration in the 1980s combined to erode organized labor’s power and assertiveness.
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In the context of weakening unions, more unstable job prospects, and easier access to higher education, workers in New Bedford began to turn away from factory labor. Local apparel makers, frustrated by workers’ lack of interest, were soon bemoaning the “paradox” that “even when work is available, this area suffers from high unemployment.” As one local journalist reflected in 1989, workers “prefer to put on a tie, even if it means a lower-paying job in a bank, insurance company or real estate firm.”
This episode reinforced the long historical reality: when Americans had alternatives, they often eschewed factory labor—even if it meant a pay cut.
But despite this history, the myth of free trade crushing American industry has shaped American politics for decades. Presidents from both sides of the aisle have long aspired to bring manufacturing “back” to the U.S. Barack Obama’s 2012 economic plan was “built on American manufacturing.” Joe Biden put “U.S. manufacturing” at the center of his planned “Arsenal of American Prosperity.” But no politician has paid more fealty to this myth than Donald Trump. His wide-ranging and volatile tariff crusade aims to restore American industrial supremacy by taxing the consumption of foreign products, thereby spurring more domestic manufacturing and “high-paying manufacturing jobs,” as he recently promised.
But even if he’s right—and, despite evidence to the contrary, tariffs can bring factory jobs back to the U.S.—it’s not clear that Americans would want them. Factory owners may find themselves in the same situation New Bedford faced in the 1980s: overloaded with unfilled factory jobs nobody wants.
This doesn’t mean that today’s working-class laborers—underpaid service, hospitality, and healthcare workers, among others—don’t yearn for the lost prosperity of mid-century factory labor. But wanting stable good-paying jobs doesn’t mean yearning for factory jobs. Like factory workers in the first part of the 20th century, today’s working class is desperate to transform the jobs that already exist into something more sustainable. The transformation of those hated factory jobs nearly a century ago offers clues as to how to do that today: unionization, a livable minimum wage, progressive taxation, and a strong welfare state.
Industry did not cause the mid-20th century prosperity that primes today’s nostalgia. Instead, it just happened to be the reigning economic regime at the time. Understanding this historical truth exposes the flaws in President Trump’s economic vision and provides a clear path forward for ensuring that prosperity reaches a far broader swath of Americans.
Shaun S. Nichols is associate professor of history at Boise State University and author of Manufacturing Catastrophe: Massachusetts and the Making of Global Capitalism, 1813 to the Present.