There was no sun. People in the town walked in darkness in the middle of the afternoon on some days. Dirt, dust, filth and horse manure were everywhere, and the stench was horrific. Long working hours (10-14 hours per day), child labor, crime, destitution, riots, alcoholism and an abundance of miserable lives dotted the landscape..
If that description sounds similar to a novel by the prolific nineteenth century English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), the celebrated author of A Christmas Carol (1843) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859), you would be right. For the residents of Manchester, England, however, the nightmare of unchecked industrialization was a daily reality in the decades after the establishment of the modern cotton mill by Richard Arkwright (1732-1792) in 1782.
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The Social and Ecological Rape of Manchester
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Due to the construction of canals, it became possible to turn relatively small-scale cotton spinning mills into giant factories. By the 1840s, Manchester was home to 4.2 million mule spindles and more than 300,000 workers in the production of textiles for domestic consumption and export. Expanding populations in Britain, Continental Europe and North America translated into a growing demand for clothes. The market seemed limitless.
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While the production of cotton goods was lucrative for factory owners, it came at a ruinous social cost for an overwhelming majority of Mancunians (the term for citizens of Manchester). As coal powered the factories, thick, black clouds poured upward into the sky and came down as soot that overspread the entire town. At times, seeing daylight was a luxury.
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By the middle of the century, Manchester was burning one million tons of coal annually. To combat the billowing haze, a few middle-class citizens (there were not many) formed the Society for the Prevention of Smoke. The organization proved largely ineffectual, however, as Manchester grew exponentially year by year in terms of cotton production and population. People flocked to the city's factories out of sheer necessity. Earning a paltry wage was better than starving on the street.
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More pollution and more people resulted in more than 3,500 deaths from lung disease in a single year (1876) out of a population of approximately 550,000, and another 14,630 became ill (not fatally) from bronchitis, pneumonia and other respiratory ailments over the same twelve-month period.
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A history of the town, written some years later, recalled, "The rain water was so much blackened by soot that it was like ink, and useless even for cleaning purposes until it had been allowed to settle or had been filtered; the river water was even worse." Clearly, something had to be done. Fortunately, Manchester had a person ready, willing and able to take on the capitalist-industrial machine - a machine that ground up nature and human life with impunity.
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Rowley's Political Campaign
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Born in 1840, Charles Rowley (1840-1933) probably received little attention in a house with twelve siblings. His father, who was not only a successful picture frame-maker but also a crusader for adult education (which primarily benefited members of the working-class), may have been a role-model for young Charles. While in his twenties, Charles taught Sunday school and participated in literary clubs. At age thirty, however, he experienced some kind of psychological or nervous breakdown. In a city where people were tied to the production of goods and where days were erased by coal-powered smoke, Charles certainly could not have been the only Mancunian to have succumbed to the stresses of Cottonopolis - an apt nickname given to Manchester.
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His five years outside the city in a wealthier area, where the owners of production lived lives of affluence while their workers barely survived, made him conscious of the intolerable conditions and the injustice of the order. When he returned to the city proper in 1875, Rowley campaigned for city council with the slogan "Sanitation, Social Reform and Education" and won. He had every intention of keeping his campaign promises.
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In making a request for funding to construct a meeting hall in Ancoats - the slum that helped vote him into office, he was branded a radical by the establishment. Why did the political elites vociferously condemn the idea of having a large gathering place there? The answer was simple. If workers had a place to assemble, they might become collectively conscious of their plight and seek radical changes in the system or even worse - overthrow the system altogether. British lawmakers were often stalking horses of their wealthy capitalist patrons - the owners of the factories.
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In a subsequent election, Rowley was turned out of office shortly thereafter by the antagonized business interests. They had found an anti-reformist, political puppet to do their bidding. Yet, the citizens of Manchester had been stirred. Rowley's proposed public venue, New Islington Hall, received funding and was built. While certainly an accomplishment, Rowley's largest contribution to his town would come in the years after leaving office.
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Rowley's Social Campaign
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In 1878, Rowley had an idea born of compassion that would bring hope to thousands of people in Manchester and tens of thousands more across the Atlantic. To give the exploited workers an opportunity for both leisure and education, he organized free lectures, free concerts and free art exhibitions on Sundays. This was the genesis of the first settlement house - where working-class people could find entertainment, free vocational training, language instruction, lectures on home economics and management and most importantly - network with others in the community to devise social programs aimed at improving the quality of life.
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Over the next two decades, Rowley's settlement house model would be replicated by Jane Addams (1860-1935) in Chicago and Lillian Wald (1867-1940) and others in New York. The capitalist economy, which largely divorces ethics from its profit-system and turns people into atomized individuals instead of individuals within an integrated society, was challenged from the bottom-up by Rowley in a constructive fashion. Rather than the empty rhetoric of revolution, Rowley and his allies determined on a practical program of community building. They sought to help those most in need and to teach people how to remake their lives by getting involved. No grand theories required - or wanted.
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Rowley's ability to attract people to his cause was impressive. He even got George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), the famous Irish playwright and champion of the working-class, to lecture one Sunday. In speaking of Rowley, Shaw stated, "(He) is the only man alive who could induce any sane man to go to Manchester unless he had urgent and lucrative business there." Shaw's comment is instructive. The avaricious pursuit of "lucrative business" had placed Mancunian workers in a state of servitude no better than slaves. At the same time, the city's air and water had become commodified and contaminated.
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Making a reasonable profit is certainly not unethical. Making a profit at the expense of human life and the environment, however, is a crime against nature and a crime against humanity.
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In 1885, Rowley wrote Social Politics. By that time, his organization, the Brotherhood of Ancoats, was more than 2,000 members strong. In the pages of his book, Rowley offered his assessment on the importance of guarding nature from greedy misuse,
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"Everybody who pollutes a stream, in any way whatever, by a water closet, a dye works, or in any fashion, public or private, should be considered a molester of his kind, and treated as such."
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Rowley was far ahead of his time. As man has been produced and only exists due to nature, an attack on one is an attack on the other. Human beings are not - and ought not ever be - thought of as distinct from the environment. Whenever a socio-economic system attempts to wholly subordinate the environment to the pursuit of wealth, both man and nature are violated.
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Coming Soon: The End of Cottonopolis
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As a result of Rowley's sacrifices for his fellow man and woman, Manchester became a far more livable city by the time of his death in 1933. Of course, he did not save the city alone. Thousands of Mancunians were pulling in the same direction for reform. Nonetheless, Rowley was an exemplar of compassionate, ethical leadership, and he can serve as a guide in our efforts to extinguish the very real vestiges of Cottonopolis in our societies today - wildly excessive income inequality, the exploitation of 'cheap labor' among agricultural, factory and retail employees and the continued rape of the environment for the purpose of producing goods that few people actually need or can afford.
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Things can be different. We can work less and spend more time with our families and friends instead of working long hours to mindlessly push environmentally damaging, unnecessary commodities around the world. That will not happen, however, until we follow in the footsteps of Charles Rowley for a Manchester united - and a world united for economic, social and political justice.
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(Image: Charles Rowley of Manchester)
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Key Sources
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1. Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) A first-rate work of scholarship. Highly recommended.
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2. Audrey Kay, "Charles Rowley and The Ancoats Recreation Movement, 1876-1914" Manchester Centre for Regional History See PDF in link: http://www.mcrh.mmu.ac.uk/pubs/pdf/mrhr_07_kay.pdf
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(To view images and photos of Manchester, UK past and present, please click onto kleostimes.tumblr.com to the right and check postings for 26 February)
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J Roquen