Learning Manufacture: Education and Shop-Floor Schooling in the Family Firm

On September 8, 1902, a young man 21 yr. 5 mos. old commenced work in the machine shop at James Doak, Jr.'s, yarn factory, a worsted spinning mill in the Kensington section of Philadelphia.' The Doak Company was fairly typical of the local textile manufacture, a proprietary firm located in a substantial brick building, employing about 200 workers in the production of specialty textiles, in this case a variety of yarns for men's suitings and fine carpets. Hundreds of such firms operated similarly in the various industrial trades in the nation's greatest manufacturing center, engaging the talents of over 60,000 workers on textiles alone.2 Yet this young man was special, if not unusual. He was Charles Doak, son of the proprietor, and he, like hundreds of others, was being groomed to succeed to a family business through embarking on his manufacturing apprenticeship, a shop-floor education in the social and technical relations of production. Aided by the diary young Doak kept from 1902 to 1906, we may reconstruct his experiences and come to understand their role in the factory culture of the private firm. Situating this tale within the larger context of industrial (and educational) development will help expose the rarely glimpsed imperatives of proprietary businesses, long overshadowed by historical attention to mass-production corporate enterprises.