THE INTEGRATION OF INDUSTRY IN THE 

 UNITED STATES. 



BY WILLIAM FRANKLIN WILLOUGHBY. 



[William Franklin Willoughby, economist; born Alexandria, Va., July 20, 1867; 

 graduated Johns Hopkins, 1888; appointed special agent of the United States com- 

 mission to the Paris exposition, 1900; appointed, 1890, expert in the United 

 States department of labor and has represented that bureau at several international 

 congresses and has conducted several investigations abroad in its behalf; author of 

 Workingman's Insurance and contributed the following article to the Quarterly 

 Journal of Economics.] 



The tendency toward what may be designated as the 

 integration of industry is a tendency which, though it has 

 been at work for some time, has only in very recent years 

 become one of marked prominence. At the present time, how- 

 ever, it constitutes the fundamental force now at work for the 

 reorganization of our industrial system. Through it alone can 

 be established the significance of recent important happenings. 



By integration of industry is meant the knitting together, 

 so as to form one compact, harmonious whole, of all the related 

 branches, or all the necessary processes, of any great depart- 

 ment of industrial work. As such, it is evidently a movement 

 quite distinct from that of concentration of industry. Concen- 

 tration indicates the bringing together of likes under central 

 management, as where all the coal mines or all the blast fur- 

 naces or rolling mills are brought under the control of one or 

 a few parties. Integration indicates the bringing together of 

 dissimilar, but interdependent, branches of an industry, so that 

 complete harmony may be obtained among them, and the 

 undertaking contain within itself a complete control of all the 

 factors necessary for the successful and uninterrupted prose- 

 cution of its work. This is what takes place when the same 

 management acquires control of such widely dissimilar, but 

 essentially dependent, branches of industrial work as the min- 

 ing of coal and ore, the operation of railways and steamships 

 for its transportation, the extraction of lime, the working of 

 coke ovens, the manufacture of pig, its conversion into billets, 

 bars, sheets, and what not, and from them the manufacture of 



63 



