Excerpted as "The Bastardization of Craft" in Gary Kornblith, ed., The Industrial Revolution in America (1998)

Written from the critic's (artisan's) perspective, Wilentz's account argues that changes in craft production in New York City "undermined artisanal pride, lowered earning power, and reduced workers' independence" even if the trade was not mechanized in any major way." (p. 80) Wilentz avoids the pitfalls of oversimplifying the world of work in antebellum NYC, while at the same time identifying changing patterns of craft production.

New York city witnessed tremendous growth in the first half of the 19th C, becoming a major trade and finance city. With the growth of industry in NYC, there were also growth of inequity between rich and poor. "Laissez nous faire" housing policy ensured that the poorest residents lived in squalid conditions. But there were limits to the rate of growth of large manufacturing concerns, the lack of major water works being one example. While there were new heavy industries like gas production and fine tool making in the City prior to 1850, these only made up about 5% of the city's manufacturing workers. "As in the Jeffersonian period, the typical manufacturing worker in antebellum New York was not an iron molder or a brewery worker, but a tailor (or tailoress), a carpenter, a shoemaker, a baker -- to name only the largest occupations." (p. 83)

The major change that happened in the antebellum period was the subdivision of labor into sub-components. The "bastardization of craft" refers to the tendency of a business to only retain artisans to do small parts of the work that were needed to finish a product, hence allowing the business owner to hire less expensive workers for more repetitive and lower skilled work. The "headquarters" of the bastard system was the "manufactories" or "outwork manufactories" in which perhaps 20 workers performed strictly sub-divided tasks, which as a whole had represented what a single journeyman would have done. The natural outcome of the sub-division of labor was the advent of piece work. With piece work being done in garret workshops or even at home, this deskilling of labor reached even into people's homes where entire families labored in the putting out system.

The major irony here is that the bastardization of craft was accomplished by the master craftsmen who took advantage of the new economic order to enrich themselves, and in so doing they destroyed their own trades and debased their own journeymen. As credit became harder and harder to get, the elusive dream of starting one's own shop became more difficult to realize. Class lines were drawn more firmly and more permanently.