In the late Eighteenth Century there existed a great debate between the most prominent philosophic and political thinkers of the age. The topic of the debate would ultimately change the face of the United States of America into the country that we live in today. The landscape of the nation was very different from what it is now. Farmland and dusty roads took up most of the land. People were content with living unsophisticated lives under a newly formed democracy. Causing change in the lifestyles of people was not the priority of the leaders of the country, however, the need to become a more modern and self-sufficient nation was.
             The participants of this great debate were split among two sides, those that held to the traditional times with the belief that the country was fine as it was and it would not be necessary to industrialize, and those that believed that society would benefit greatly from this industrialization. The fear that human life would become devalued in light of what happened in previous republics was the main reason of this holding back. In the end however, the benefits that industrialization and manufacture brought to the country far outweighed the downsides, and brought the United States into a whole new era.
             Some of the greatest minds and prominent politicians, some of who were the founding fathers of the nation, agreed that industrialization was unnecessary and would only bring harm to nation. Benjamin Franklin, a successful inventor and scientist, was one of the first to take a stand against the movement for manufacture. "'Manufactures are founded in poverty,' he wrote, for 'it is the multitude of poor without land in a country, and who must work for others at low wages or starve, that enables undertakers to carry on manufacture'" (Licht, 15). Essentially Franklin was saying that manufacture needed laborers who would work for low wages, making the investors richer, th...