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WHAT THE CHANGE DID TO WORK · 1850 TO 1920
The population curve: The factory city can be read off the census of population: 2,080 in 1840; 4,282 in 1850; 10,388 in 1860; 17,718 in 1870; 26,880 in 1880; 35,393 in 1890; 45,115 in 1900; 63,933 in 1910; 86,549 in 1920. A town that had multiplied five-fold in the canal-and-railroad generation multiplied again, almost exactly, in the factory generation. One modern compilation's table gives 7,000 for 1860; the figure carried here, 10,388, is the one given by the Ninth Edition Britannica, the Griswold-Phelps handbook and the 1921 Polk directory alike. The growth was fed from abroad and from the countryside together: at the turn of the century a large influx of German and Irish immigrants swelled the city, and the historian Peggy Brase Seigel puts the 1900–1920 workforce at about 60 percent German heritage within an unusually native-born population — Fort Wayne industrialized with fewer newcomers, proportionally, than the great lake cities, drawing much of its labor from the farms and small towns of its own region.
The new shape of a working life: By 1920 more than 16,300 men and women worked in the city's industries, served by seven railroads and five interurban lines, and the characteristic Fort Wayne worker was no longer a craftsman selling a finished thing but a wage earner selling hours inside someone else's system — tending a machine whose product he never saw whole, on a shift set by the plant, in a labor market where the big employers' hiring gates, not the master's bench, decided who worked. The census's distinction makes the point in its own vocabulary: where the 1905 local count had found 240 manufacturing institutions, most of them still small, the value and the payrolls were already concentrating — 200 counted concerns held $12.98 million of capital, and the single largest plants each employed a thousand or more. Skill did not vanish; it moved — into the machinists, molders, knitters and electricians whose crafts the unions organized — but it was now exercised inside the factory, at the factory's pace.
New workers, drawn and then stopped: The First World War's labor shortage brought the first significant Black workforce to the factories: manufacturers recruited Black workers from the South in 1917 and 1918, and the city's Black population rose from 572 in 1910 to 1,454 in 1920 and an estimated 2,200 within two years more. Then the door closed: after the local unions' defeat in the final wave of postwar strikes in 1922, the historian Iwan W. Morgan records, the expansion ceased abruptly and only a handful of firms hired new Black workers thereafter. The communities these workers built are in the Communities section; the gate that opened and shut belongs to the history of the workforce itself.
Sources: U.S. decennial census figures as compiled in the Ninth Edition Encyclopædia Britannica, the Griswold-Phelps Handbook and Guide (1913–14) and Polk's 1921 directory (the population series and the 10,388 figure for 1860); Seigel, "Industrial 'Girls' in an Early Twentieth-Century Boomtown," Indiana Magazine of History (2003) (the 16,300 industrial workers, the seven railroads and five interurbans, the German-heritage share); Morgan, "African Americans, Jobs, and Housing in Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1940–1960," Indiana Magazine of History (1999), for the 1917–22 recruitment and its end, citing Tom Lewandowski's paper on the 1919 Bowser lockout and Bass strike and the National Urban League's 1928 survey.