When the railroad threatened to come to Lancaster, Ohio, back in the mid-1840s, the local school board greeted the prospect as a looming moral disaster. The board refused to make its building available to discuss the coming of the iron horse. Citizens, these officials decided, might use the schoolhouse to debate “all proper questions,” but railroads and telegraphs were beyond the pale, examples of “rank infidelity.” Concluded the board, “If God had designed that his intelligent creatures should travel at the frightful speed of 15 miles per hour, by steam,” he would have said so, or had one of his prophets approve it. Clearly, the railroad was “a device of Satan to lead immortal souls down to Hell.”1
Soon after that, people coming of age around the time of the Civil War felt and saw things differently, still awestruck but not afraid. The 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia celebrating the country’s birth elicited a national love affair with Progress, not just with the iron horse but with all the manifestations of American industrial genius and its promise of unimaginable abundance. (Indeed, the Exposition’s theme was “A Century of Progress.”) Covering 236 acres in the city’s Fairmount Park, the exposition was full of delights. Ten million people came to marvel at the young republic’s accomplishments.
Breathtaking above all was the display of sheer power. The giant Double Walking-Beam Corliss Steam Engine, which supplied the energy for all the other thirteen acres of machines housed at Machinery Hall, captured the most attention. It was 45 feet high, equipped with two 10-foot pistons and a flywheel weighing 56 tons rotating at the astonishing rate of six times a minute. Massive, silent yet emanating an unearthly force, the engine struck the writer William Dean Howells as “an athlete of steel and iron with not a superfluous ounce of metal on it.” A journalist from Wisconsin was there when it sprang to life, manned by only a single attendant:
In obedience to the simple touch of a wheel and a lever, the cross-beam rocked high and low; the crank revolved; the pistons shot in and out of their cylinders, and nearly eight miles of steel shafting gave motive power to 13 acres of machinery simultaneously! A thousand different noises assailed the ear, some in short, staccato notes; others in a dull, draining hum; others still in the brisk rattle of musketry; and many in a spiteful hiss and splutter. Long bands of leather writhed and crackled over fly-wheels.… Man’s power over matter never received so complete an exemplification before. The terrific force adapted by his hand to his will, the fertility of his inventions, the delicacy of his touch, and his inexhaustible muscularity, appeared at once in cohesion and in contrast.
Beside the engine itself, a multitude of other mechanical marvels dazzled the hundreds of thousands who visited the exhibit (numbers that grew especially after a hellish July heat wave cooled). On view were a prototype of the first automatic screw-making machine, power looms, lathes, sewing machines, toolmaking machines, pumps of assorted kinds and purposes, an Otis elevator, Westinghouse air brakes for railroads, Pullman cars, farm machinery of great variety, a typewriter, a precursor of the electric light, a slice of steel cable that not many years later would be used by the Roebling brothers to support the monumental Brooklyn Bridge, and of course locomotives. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was on display as well and so shocked the Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil that, startled, he dropped it exclaiming, “My god! It talks.” New consumer devices and delicacies were also exhibited including refrigerators and the first bottles of Heinz ketchup and Hires root beer.
Howells, who would later go on to become a coruscating critic of American industrial capitalism, was reverential. He noted the Corliss engine’s “vast and almost silent grandeur,” its “unerring intelligence.” Something immaterial, something exalted, lodged deep within the animated mass of energized iron and steel. For many the notion of Progress had become a kind of rapture. Or to put things the other way around, the metaphysical had become physical, spirit had transmogrified into tangible nuts and bolts, pulleys and screws, steam and smoke and fiery furnaces. Taking in the exposition’s whole spectacle, swelling with patriotic pride at this “glorious triumph of skill and invention,” Howells declaimed: “Yes, it is still in these things of iron and steel that the national genius most freely speaks.”2
Once upon a time the meaning of Progress had been less focused, both homelier yet more mind-expanding. The term might have suggested something as simple as moving from one place to another; or might have inflated to embrace the nation’s manifest destiny as the birthplace and haven of liberty and democracy. Indeed, before there was a nation, the New World had beckoned as the last frontier of spiritual progress, a teleological mission or Pilgrim’s Progress at the end of which waited a safe harbor for the saved. It was, even in secular form (and for all social classes, although not in the same way), the defining utopian conceit of an age given over to utopian anticipations. Only during the Gilded Age did Progress first take on its overriding, singular attachment to industry, science, technological innovation, economic development, material abundance, and private capital accumulation.
Progress became earthbound, enmeshed in a network of axles and gears, coal mines and iron rails, steel plows, coke ovens and telegraph wires. But even as it took on this material density, it reached for the infinite. If the country was destined to be a city on a hill, promising a fresh chance for humanity as its Puritan forebears had believed, it was because the hand of Providence was manifest in the “silent grandeur” of creations such as the Corliss engine. The wonders of scientific discovery, the amazing acrobatics of the machine, the calling forth of the stupendous energies locked away in a fossilized underground or somewhere in the invisible ether, the cornucopia pouring out of the factories and fields—all this was evidence of some more profound truth about man’s fate.
Faith in economic growth soon enveloped and embodied all other airborne hopes for freedom and equality. It was not only providential, but inevitable. Gilded Age Americans, a lot of them anyway, fervently believed in economic progress and abundance as the pathway to freedom; indeed its champions conflated the metaphysics of freedom with the mechanics of material abundance, believing that was how the New World would escape the sorry fate of the Old, weighed down as it was by those scarcities and inequities that left it plagued with bitter social jealousies, resentments, and incipient violence.
Ever since the days of the Corliss engine, America has worshipped at the altar of Progress and Abundance. At the height of the Cold War, Vice President Richard Nixon visited Russia, where he faced off against Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in what thereafter became known as the “kitchen debate.” Standing in the middle of a model kitchen on display at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, Nixon extolled American freedom and the American way of life by pointing to the exhibit’s array of electric ranges, washing machines, and television sets. If a bellicose Khrushchev had once prophesied that communism would inevitably “bury” capitalism, the vice president retorted by promising that an avalanche of American consumables would do the same to the Soviet Union. Even now this amalgam of freedom, free enterprise, and material plenty constitutes the axiomatic hard core of the American credo.
Yet discontent so profound it would shake the foundations of American life rose up alongside this miracle of Progress, like a countermiracle. To grasp how astonishing that was we must first reckon with just how stupendous were the accomplishments of the American triumph.
All this first took shape during the Gilded Age. No nation in history (now with the possible exception of China) industrialized as rapidly as the United States. In a historical eye-blink America went from being an underdeveloped country to an industrial goliath mightier than the chief economies of Europe combined. Measured in carloads of wheat, tons of coal, ingots of steel, kilowatts of electricity, locomotive and machine engine horsepower, miles of railroad and trolley track and telegraph wire, acreage under cultivation, patents per capita, numbers of new cities, bridges, tunnels, dockyards, and sewage and water treatment plants, evidence of Progress in post–Civil War America mounted up year by year at a dizzying pace. People born in 1860 when Abraham Lincoln was elected would have felt more at home in late-twentieth-century America—at least with respect to their material surroundings—than the world their parents grew up in, Lincoln’s world.
Every era has had its signature industry: big box retailing, information technology, and finance today, cars in the mid-twentieth century, steel before the Great Depression. Railroads first assumed that position in post–Civil War America. They were the engine house of the economy, knitting together from ocean to ocean the first national marketplace, thereby spurring the growth of factory-based mass production, speeding up communications and the transfer of information between far-flung regions, midwifing new towns, populating the wilderness, and opening up its natural resources to economic exploitation. No terrain—no matter how mountainous, arid, or remote—and no weather—no matter how hot, freezing, windswept, or snowy—could stop the iron horse.
Already in the decades before the Civil War, the transportation revolution had cut a trip from the East Coast to the Ohio valley from fifty days by wagon to twenty-five days by steamboat. Thirty years later it took a week by train. By the turn of the century a trip from New York to San Francisco, which before the Civil War took months, could be done in three and a half days. Moreover, the railroad fueled a nearly insatiable demand for the output of basic industries like coal, iron, and steel, as well as machine making of various sorts. Shipping costs plummeted first, thanks to canals and then the iron horse, from thirty to seventy cents a ton/mile to seven cents or much less. And this is not to mention the way this transformation inspired ancillary technological innovations and the growth and complexity of trade and finance. One observer from the 1860s described the iron horse as “the most tremendous and far-reaching engine of social revolution which has ever either blessed or cursed the earth.”3
By 1891, the Pennsylvania Railroad (the U.S. Steel or General Motors or WalMart of its day) employed 110,000 people, more than the combined armed services of the United States. Although America accounted for a mere 6 percent of the earth’s land mass (and an even tinier percentage of its population), by the end of the century its rail network accounted for 42 percent of the world’s total trackage, or nearly 200,000 miles. The railroads employed nearly a million people and spent more than all governments—local, state, and federal—put together. Between 1880 and 1900, freight and passenger traffic nearly quadrupled.
Thanks in part to the impetus provided by the railways, steel production expanded exponentially. By 1880 three-fourths of all steel manufactured in the United States was consumed by the railroads. A good portion of the remainder found its way into the I beam skyscraper, steel ships, steel cable and piping, and all varieties of machinery and armaments.4
Everywhere one might look the iron horse had left its imprint. Along with the telegraph whose wires paralleled the tracks, it became the information superhighway of the nineteenth century. It accelerated transactions and communications—first commercial and then private ones—so rapidly as to constitute a triumph over time and space at least as dramatic as the one we now associate with computers, the internet, and the telecommunications industry. Moreover, the relationship between new ways of traveling and communicating was symbiotic: the telegraph facilitated the railroad revolution by making instantaneously available information about train times, expediting the safe shipment of products and people. As a consequence the costs of production and transportation for all kinds of goods and services fell dramatically.
Rural America would never be the same. The railroad commercialized Jefferson’s “empire for liberty” to an extent that would have unnerved the Virginia visionary. It swept the farthest reaches of frontier settlement into the orbit of global commodity production and trade, and once and for all put an end to the world of yeoman self-sufficiency.
Industrialization often implies rural depopulation; certainly the proportions of the labor force living on the land did shrink in comparison with town and city dwellers. But the expansion of American agriculture during the Gilded Age was so outsized that the number of farmers and farms, sheep, and cattle ranches also grew considerably. More land was settled or occupied by farmers, cattle herders, and speculators after the Civil War than in the three centuries preceding it. In the 1880s alone grain plantings of all kinds (wheat, corn, oats, rye, etc.) covered the Great Plains as the federal government sold off public lands twice the size of California, three times the area of Missouri. And this vast domestication of the landscape became itself the country’s core primary production and at the same time a market for the richly diversified output of national industry.5
During the 1870s an area the size of France was put to the plow. Over the next two decades planted acreage exceeded the size of France, Germany, and Wales combined. Southern cotton production also doubled during the same period. “Bonanza farms” encompassing thousands of acres of the flat, fertile land of Minnesota and the Red River valley of the Dakotas, usually owned by capitalist investors from back east, were run like highly mechanized food factories. The Cass-Cheney farm founded near Fargo, North Dakota, in 1874 was the prototype; by 1880 it cultivated 30,000 acres, employed 2000 people, and every day loaded 30,000 bushels of wheat onto waiting freight cars. Longhorn cattle ranchers (in Texas the XIT Ranch, organized in the mid-1870s and spread over 3 million acres surrounded by 600 miles of barbed wire, was the largest) and sheepherders joined grain farmers in turning the “Middle Border”—all that newly opened land west of the Mississippi and north of Missouri—into a food machine.
Miraculous is a fair way to characterize this makeover of the American landmass. Total acreage under cultivation more than doubled from 408 million acres to 841 million between 1870 and 1900. And indeed, without all the new machinery that transformed farming—threshers, binders, reapers, harvesters, the steel plow, corn huskers, sugar mills, cotton presses, and more—and without the railroad which connected the agricultural backcountry to domestic and worldwide urban markets, that agrarian miracle was inconceivable. So, for example, one man using a machine to harvest wheat in 1900 could do the work that not long before required twenty. An acre of wheat that in antebellum America took sixty hours to cultivate required only four by the end of the century. The Scott and Chisolm pea sheller could remove as many peas from a pod as it once took 600 workers to do by hand. In 1881 a new machine turned out 70,000 cigarettes every day, compared with the 3000 a skilled worker could manage. The telegraph (or “lightening wire”) trimmed the time to transmit information from weeks or months to days or hours. “What has become of space?” an astonished New York Herald asked.6
Summoning powers once undreamed of made all this happen. From time immemorial human and animal muscle, wind, the tides, waterfalls, and wood provided the energy making settled society possible. New godlike sources of energy suddenly changed all that. Steam, coal, oil, gas, and electricity revolutionized everyday life and vastly expanded productive capacity. Coal, for example, was the principal energy source for the steam engine. No steam engine would mean no mechanized factories, no steamboats plying the rivers and oceans, no locomotives, smelters, or agricultural machinery like those harvesters, threshers, binders, and tractors, and so on.
An official in the U.S. Patent Office put the case for the steam engine as the summa of industrial life: “It speeds the locomotive across the continent… [and] the mighty steamship on the seas; it grinds our grain; it weaves our cloth; it prints our books; it forges our steel, and in every department of life it is the ubiquitous, tireless, potent agency of our civilization.” In 1882 most city streetcars were pulled by horses; by 1900, thanks to the advent of electrical power generation, 99 percent were racing down boulevards as if driven by hundreds and hundreds of horses, whipped along by the conversion of coal to steam and steam into the galvanic magic of an electric current. While wood accounted for 73 percent of energy consumption in 1870, by 1920 it had fallen below 8 percent; meanwhile the coal that had supplied 17 percent of the nation’s energy sources accounted for 73 percent by the end of World War I.7
And then there were those great urban conurbations that seemed to spring out of nowhere and which made the rapid transit of masses of people essential. No fossil fuels, no high-rising elevators, no skyscrapers would mean no Chicago or New York, those exemplars of the new city. Powers so extraordinary, whether embodied in the first incandescent lightbulbs, telephones, refrigerators, sewing machines, or streetcars, conveyed an awe-inspiring sense of power in general, of limitless human capacities. Progress indeed.8
Gadgets like the telephone or even items like the modern bicycle or ready-made clothes or packaged cereals, meats and ready-to-eat canned foods, central heating, indoor plumbing, and the electrified home full of new appliances and utensils (not to mention the first prototypes of the horseless carriage and, soon to emerge, the phonograph and first motion pictures) testified to the inventive genius that seemed to inspire this unparalleled Progress. More than that, they became the desired paraphernalia of a new consumer economy and culture: brand names, national advertising, chain stores, the whole spectacle that began redefining people by what they consumed, not by what they did. Soon enough consumer delectables would supplant the machine as the quintessence of Progress and the Abundant Society. At first this shift was largely confined to an upwardly mobile middle class, but its growth was spectacular. The director of the 1890 Census estimated private consumer debt at $11 trillion, three hundred times more than any economist or social observer had predicted.9
Whether or not you were among the fortunate able to afford a phone or some other modern gizmo, there could be little doubt that the more basic measures of national economic growth and the standard of living were tracking upward. Between 1860 and 1890 national wealth increased almost sixfold, from $16 billion to $90 billion. Per capita income rose from $514 to $1165—a greater and faster increase than in any other nation in the world. Output per capita in 1899 was 250 percent greater than a half century earlier. Extraordinary productivity and intense competition lowered prices for all goods, agricultural and industrial, so that real wages improved and average hours of work declined from eleven a day to nine and a half.
Together with the agricultural revolution, this made city life possible for millions; the country’s urban population tripled between 1870 and 1900. Public education became widely accessible. Thanks to improved nutrition, modern medicine’s assault on bacterial disease, and innovations in public sanitation—especially as piped water began to replace cisterns, and incinerators, sewers, and paved roads became more common features of urban living—life expectancy rose by six years as the Gilded Age drew to a close.10
Soon enough this cornucopia became the envy of the world and a favorite American boast. Why not? Triumphalism like this was abetted by the remarkable and growing differential between the pace of industrial progress in the United States as compared with Europe’s. Already by 1886 America turned out more steel than Britain; by the end of the century its steel output exceeded that of the United Kingdom and Germany combined. Broader comparisons were even more striking. The value of what American manufacturers produced was twice that of the United Kingdom and half as great as that of the whole European continent. Between 1850 and 1880 factory output in Britain rose by 100 percent; in America by 600 percent. There were more miles of railroads and telegraph lines than in all of Europe. The United States led the world in the production of virtually every strategic industrial commodity, including steel, coal, gold, timber, silver, oil, telephone, telegraph, electric lighting, machine tools, hardware, and locomotives. One historian sums up this extraordinary ascent: “American industrialization created the infrastructure for what became the richest and most influential material civilization in history.”11
How did this happen? Conventional explanations have long emphasized the New World’s perfect combination of the factors of production—land, labor, and capital—that together created the skeletal structure of the modern world. A nation stretching from ocean to ocean offered up inexhaustible natural resources (at least they seemed inexhaustible back then). Portions of the labor force were remarkably literate and skilled. To the degree that workers were in short supply, their numbers were periodically refreshed from abroad by immigrants who either were equally adept or, if less so, bore the burden of brute manual labor that factory production, digging up coal, laying the tracks, chopping down the forests, and harvesting the crops demanded in ever-increasing quantities. If relative shortages of labor could sometimes be a problem, they were also a blessing in disguise that encouraged technological innovation so machines could substitute for humans.
Critical too, the country’s political and legal environment was emphatically supportive of private property and private capital accumulation, which further encouraged this audacious entrepreneurial ingenuity. True since the days of Benjamin Franklin, it became truer still during the Gilded Age. First of all, the pervasive atmosphere of liberty, democracy, and individualism acted as a tonic exciting the imagination of those enterprising adventurers and inventors. Local, state, and federal governments provided all sorts of incentives to private businesses, including tax exemptions, subsidies, land grants, mineral rights, franchises, scientific research, and, when necessary, force of arms to assure the sanctity of private property. Meanwhile, the federal judiciary warded off efforts by local authorities to encumber business with rules and regulations regarding their pricing, labor, and competitive practices. Nothing was allowed to dull the appetite for private capital accumulation; the rate of personal savings and reinvestment of company profits was higher in the United States than anywhere else, behavior encouraged by the government’s rigid adherence to the gold standard that helped stabilize the currency and attract foreign capital.
America emerged like some exquisitely designed (some thought divinely inspired) hothouse of Progress in sync with universal laws of nature, including especially the law of evolution. But it might have remained barren, or so standard interpretations suggest, had this American scene not nurtured, above all, the country’s fearless embrace of change. Alexis de Tocqueville had already captured this unique zeitgeist decades before the Civil War: “America is a land of wonders in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement.… [They] all consider… humanity as a changing scene in which nothing is, or ought to be permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow.” From this hot-blooded zest for the new a lot followed. Above all, it invited the emergence of the restless, driven, far-seeing hero of the story of Progress: the American Entrepreneur.12
Railroad, coal, steel, iron, meatpacking, and oil barons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, E. H. Harriman, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, and John D. Rockefeller (and numerous others less famous than they) made their mark not as inventors or managers but as inspired organizers and risk takers. First of all, they extended and deepened the division of labor and specialization of tasks without which the miracle of mass production was inconceivable. Then they erected complex administrative structures to supervise and coordinate this vast, highly integrated labor process. More than that, these managerial dynamos mastered those intricate connections between production on the one hand and transportation, distribution, marketing, and finance on the other, an ensemble of functions that together created the national marketplace. And they did this in the teeth of a mercilessly competitive economy that drove many of their commercial rivals under.
The modern corporation, which emerged as the economy’s dominant institution by the end of the Gilded Age, was born out of this fierce struggle to survive killing panics and depressions. Such economic disruptions occurred every fifteen years or so, beginning in 1837 and continuing through to the end of the century. For example, Frick (he of the often noted riveting “grey-eyed gaze”) fished in troubled waters, like others of his ruthless disposition. In a pitiless pattern characteristic of this age of hypercapitalism, the Lilliputian titan (he was five feet tall) fashioned an empire by buying up coke lands and ovens and railroads bankrupted by the brutal depression of 1873.
One historian has described the dynamic at work:
The competitive market, left to itself, yielded not the harmonies… not the equilibrium… not the steady investment and accumulation of capital, not the balancing of supply and demand at high levels of employment of labor and resources, but market disorganization, “wastes of competition,” business failures, recurrent depressions, strikes and lockouts, social distemper and political upheaval.… By the mid-1890s, in the midst of the third long depression in three successive decades, a revulsion against the unregulated market spread among the bourgeoisie of all sectors of the economy.13
By the time this economy of marvels imploded in the Great Depression, what had begun as the handiwork of entrepreneurial patriarchs had morphed into the impersonal domain of the “men in suits.” Corporate America as we have come to know it had arrived.
Out of these rites of passage, demanding nerve, gamesmanship, moral amnesia, and the will to power, dynastic capitalists transformed entrepreneurial into corporate capitalism of a peculiarly dynastic kind. Bourgeois society is by its very nature matter-of-fact, sober and businesslike, peaceable and modest, methodical, calculating, and prudential—in a word, unromantic to the bone. Its true and only hero is the acquisitive individual writ large: the businessman as warrior. The larger-than-life financial titans, coal and steel barons, and railroad Napoleons who lit up the stage of Gilded Age industrialism were the heroes of middle-class society. As the architects of Progress, they absorbed into their otherwise unprepossessing lives all the honorariums that once attached to the soldier, the aristocrat, the knight errant, the conquistador, the adventurer, the explorer—the doers who turned a society’s most cherished dream, its most valued value, into reality, a reality so grand and transformative it takes the breath away.
Yet a question remains. If Progress was, as this account would have it, a benign outcome of indigenous talents and natural endowments, a perfect union of temperament, institutional genius, and felicitous political invention, then why all the deep misgivings and uproar it incited? Where was the devil hiding in the weeds that would dim for millions the infatuation with Progress everlasting?