HE MUST STUDY POLITICS and war, John Adams had said, so that his sons might have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. But it did not quite work out that way. A son, John Quincy, took up not philosophy but diplomacy, politics, and the presidency. A grandson, Charles Francis Adams, embraced not painting and porcelain but law, diplomacy, and Republicanism. And a great-grandson, Charles Francis Jr., took up not poetry and music but war, law, business—and railroads.
“I endeavored to strike out a new path,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., said later, “and fastened myself, not, as Mr. Emerson recommends, to a star but to the locomotive-engine.”
A locomotive engine! How could this young Adams, inheriting the Adams disdain for money-grubbing, choose business over public service and the professions? Because he was restless in that tradition; because as a young Harvard graduate he felt hopelessly adrift and socially and politically inept, felt that he made the worst kind of “Adams impression”—of hauteur and gracelessness—even when he wanted to be liked; because railroads to him meant not only investments but the kind of railroad regulation that would occupy him during the best years of his life. Above all because, by the 1850s and 1860s, business and industry, with their constant innovations, hair-raising speculation, huge losses and dizzying profits, were coming into their own as respectable occupations for the privileged—and even more, as a form of intellectual adventure and personal liberation.
The world into which Adams graduated from Harvard in the 1850s, and the world to which he returned after war service in the 1860s, seemed to beckon the free-enterprising spirit. The smell of individual opportunity, the sense of boundless economic possibilities, the idea of unlimited progress seemed to pervade the very air men breathed. The well-established mid-century businessmen had grown up in an earlier era of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian individualism. Many had imbibed doctrines of personal and political liberty, individual enterprise, laissez-faire, limited government. The roaring prosperity of the flush 1840s and 1850s, the exploding technology, the cornucopia of farm and factory goods had whetted their appetites for more prosperity and profits.
Never mind that most Jeffersonians had been as suspicious of big business as of big government, that the federal government in fact built roads, made grants for canals and railroads, improved rivers and harbors, passed tariffs to help American exporters and shippers. No matter that some state governments launched almost an orgy of public enterprise, subsidizing banks and even establishing them, building and chartering turnpikes, canals, and railroads, providing bounties to farmers who grew certain crops, experimenting with numerous social reforms. The ethic of individual responsibility, of personal progress, of economic self-fulfillment, prevailed. Had not Emerson himself preached a need for the self-reliant man of affairs?
Adams plunged into an economic arena in which technology paced the growth of productive forces and production was the measure of all things economic. As early as the 1820s American patents had averaged three times those in Britain, the production center of the world; of course, as Englishmen pointed out, Washington had far easier patent requirements than London. “Machinery has taken almost entire possession of the manufacture of cloth,” an observer noted in 1844; “it is making steady—we might say rapid—advance upon all branches of iron manufacture; the newly invented machine saws, working in curves as well as straight lines.” The planing and grooving machines, and the tenon and mortise machine, were also impressive. In no field did technology move faster than in Charles Adams’s own, railroads. And not least of the forces for expanded production was the collective talent of the young men in Adams’s war generation who had mobilized, organized, and transported armies of machines and men.
By the late 1860s the nation was poised for another huge economic takeoff that would make it, within a quarter century, world leader in the production of timber and steel, meat packing, the mining of coal, iron, gold, silver. The only circumstances that seemed able to slow American production were depression or panic. The fifty years before the Civil War had seen periodic boom-and-bust: a small boom during the War of 1812–15 followed by speculation, a collapse in foreign market prices and land values, amid numerous bank failures; a boom in railroad and canal building in the mid-thirties followed by a drop in stock and commodity prices and an acute bank crisis; a big expansion in business in the early 1850s followed once again by overspeculation in railroads and land and then by a brief but sharp panic.
The remorseless sequence of boom-and-bust seemed to pick up again after the Civil War. In the wake of an overextension of railroad securities and the failure of the banking house of Jay Cooke and Co. in September 1873, banks failed, brokers went bankrupt, and prices dropped drastically. There followed two decades of steady rise in industrial investment, marred by downturns in the mid-eighties and at the end of that decade. The panics had their human cost, not least among the capitalists themselves. “Am going through a period of such stress—Bluest kind of a blue day—Stocks tumbling—I am caught and must bow my back to the burden—Took a cogitating sleigh ride—I’m trying to get sail in,” young Adams jotted down in his diary day by day during the troubles of ’83.
But Adams’s woes could not compare with those of the masses of men thrown out of work in every depression or major panic—a fact well appreciated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And no capitalist was more concerned about the forces of production, and the failures of production, than the author of Capital. Not only was production an initial material test of the capacity of an economy to perform; even more, the forces of production—by which Marx meant workers, raw materials, technology, and organization—essentially determined the productive relations of classes, which in turn conditioned intellectual and political forces. His conception of history, he wrote in The German Ideology, started from “the material production of life itself” and the need to “comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this (i.e., civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history; further, to show it in its action as State, to explain the whole mass of different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc., etc., and trace their origins and growth by which means, of course, the whole thing can be shown in its totality (and therefore, too, reciprocal action of these various sides on one another).” The mass of productive forces, not “idealistic humbug,” was crucial.
“The bourgeoisie,” he and Engels asserted in the Communist Manifesto, “cannot exist, without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”
Karl Marx. Twenty years after the Communist Manifesto of 1848, few Americans had heard of him or the blazing summons to the world proletariat, even fewer of his partner Friedrich Engels or of the recently published Capital. Some Americans had read his January 1865 letter to Lincoln, asserting that the “anti-slavery war” would bring the ascendancy of the working class just as the Revolutionary War had brought that of the middle class, and foreseeing the inexorable fate of the Emancipator—the “single-minded son of the working class”—to lead that struggle. Marx’s views were doubtless better known to good bourgeois readers of the New York Daily Tribune than to American toilers, for Marx, with Engels’s help, had written nearly five hundred articles on American, European, and Asian politics for the Tribune between 1852 and 1862, until Horace Greeley became disturbed by his views and dropped him.
Nor would most Americans have been impressed by the man himself, living and working in a grimy London flat among dense tobacco fumes, piles of newspapers and manuscripts, the heady talk of visiting revolutionaries. His family was blighted by illness and poverty; one child died, then another, and the father was afflicted with liver troubles, hepatitis, a facial ulcer, coughing spells, carbuncles. He spoke of the “wretchedness of existence.” But, by sheer force of will and intellect, he and Engels were impressing their views on the quarreling, floundering revolutionaries of Europe.
Marx had long been fascinated by far-off America, by its economic dynamism, its vast frontier that could drain off steaming social pressures, its socioeconomic classes that seemed to him to “continually alter and mutually exchange their component parts,” and above all by its “feverish and youthful movement of a material production” that “has to appropriate a new world [but] has left neither time nor opportunity for the abolition of the old spiritual world.” The intensity of that production meant to Marx that—in contrast to his mentor Hegel’s view of the United States as “outside history”—Americans had moved within history by the mid-nineteenth century. And production was crucial; he credited the bourgeoisie with freeing productive forces, accomplishing “wonders far surpassing the Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.” American railroads especially impressed Marx, for they would bring class unity.
For both communist and capitalist, in short, Production was king. And for both, technology was his sword.
The Hoosac Mountains, northwest Massachusetts, the late 1860s:
Technology is a wholly practical matter to several hundred men slowly boring a tunnel through the Hoosac mountain range of northwest Massachusetts during the late 1860s. Knee-deep in muck, soaked to the skin, they have to attend to their drilling and blasting while staying on guard against falling rock, floods, suffocating dust and smoke, premature explosions. A hundred or more men have died in small accidents since the digging started; still more will die before the toilers glimpse their goal, the “pinprick of light.” These are hardy men. Some have recently arrived from Canada, Ireland, and Italy; others are old Yankees whose forefathers might have included some of “Shays’s rebels” who had stumbled over the Hoosac range through the bitter winter of 1787 as they fled from the state militia.
Over four miles in length, the most direct link between Boston and the busy Troy factories on the Hudson, the Hoosac would be the longest bore in the United States when completed. But when would this be? Originally proposed in 1819, actually started in 1851, the tunnel project had repeatedly run out of funds. The men had not faltered, only the machines. At the start, amidst much pomp and ceremony, “Wilson’s Patented Stone-Cutting Machine,” weighing seventy-five tons, had been hauled from South Boston and wheeled into the east portal of the bore. Its huge revolving iron cutters were expected to grind out a circle of rock; then black powder would blast out the center. While visiting legislators watched with delight, the monster crunched into the rock for about ten feet. Then it ground to a halt, never to run again, defeated by the Hoosac gneiss and schist.
Not for twenty-five years would the Hoosac barrier be pierced—and then only because of clever innovations. In the early years, the tunnelers used simple gunpowder to split the rock. One man held the star-pointed hand drill while his workmate whacked it three or four feet into the rock with a twenty-pound double-jack hammer. Next the powder—a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal—was tamped into the drill hole and ignited by a goose-quill fuse; then the igniter sprinted for safety while his mates cowered behind heavy wooden parapets. In later years a “safety fuse” made of powder thread spun in jute yarn and coated with coal tar was attached. Still later compressed-air rock drills, with holes in the center through which water was pumped to cool the bits and clear the dust, considerably quickened progress.
Even more important was the replacement of gunpowder with nitroglycerin. In a two-story factory in North Adams, at the west portal, glycerine was mixed, drop by drop, with nitric and sulfuric acids, in a solution bathed in ice and stirred continuously. Several times more powerful than black powder, nitro was also far more volatile. It had such a reputation for killing workers that its shipment was regulated abroad, and interstate in America, but it continued to take its toll among Hoosac men. One day, C. P. Granger was hauling a load of nitro to the bore when his sleigh skidded over a snowbank. Granger jumped into the snow and awaited the blast; hearing none, after a time he collected the now frozen cartridges, only to discover that they could not be detonated until thawed. Thereafter nitro was carried frozen.
Most of the technological progress, however, was due more to determined experimentation than to luck. New ideas and machines at first were imported from abroad, after Yankee engineers had scoured England and the Continent—especially Italy and France—for the latest tunneling techniques. In turn the Hoosac innovators, and others like them, fertilized inventions in other fields. In particular, the new drilling and detonating methods stimulated innovation in the coal and iron mines to the west. Coal production was soaring as more and more mines opened west of the Alleghenies and, as coal went, so went the flourishing iron industry, with its rolling mills and puddling furnaces. By the early 1870s, Henry Clay Frick was buying up extensive coal lands in southwest Pennsylvania, building thousands of beehive ovens, introducing machines for drawing coke from the ovens—a fuel that when fired produced far greater heat than raw coal—and shipping coke by the trainload to the Pittsburgh iron mills.
The American Iron Age had long before dawned as Missouri ore mountains were opened up and then the rich Marquette range in the 1840s. Transportation had been the bottleneck in the Lake Superior region—even sleds and sailboats had been used—until the federal government built a canal at the Sault Sainte Marie rapids in 1856 and steamboats and railroads took over the big hauling jobs. Civil War ironclads had dramatized the power of the dense metal. The reign of Iron really began as rock drills replaced the picks of earlier days, steam shovels scooped up the ore from the stockpiles and dumped it into the shipping cars, and the elongated ore ships, built of iron too, carried the huge loads on the long trip to the hungry furnaces. Just as Hoosac workers had been lowered through shafts to the bore below, the iron miners were let down in steel cages to the mining areas as these were tunneled ever deeper.
Technology paved the way for all this, and no technology was more pivotal than machine tools. Just as Hoosac tunnelers and Marquette drillers had to wait for their compressed-air drills and other equipment, manufacturers of a hundred products had to wait on the innovations of “ingenious Yankees” in the famous old firms of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Gone were the earlier days when Americans had to borrow from the English engineer-entrepreneurs who had developed boring machines and planers mainly for the making of British steamships and locomotives; gone too were the days when American ingenuity seemed devoted primarily to the arms industry. Now, after the Civil War, “Yankee inventors” were brilliantly carrying forward their earlier progress in precisely formed, smoothly machined interchangeable parts.
Milling machines, developed intensively in national armories, served as the cutting edge of this cutting-edge industry. By 1880, thousands of these versatile machines had been built to fashion tools to make arms, clocks, sewing machines, and more machine tools. Turret lathes, which held a cluster of tools that performed a precise sequence of operations without needing resetting or removing of the workpiece, had virtually revolutionized the production of large quantities of small components such as screws; now the revolution was renewed through the automatic turret lathe, which “was eventually to make possible all modern automatic lathe operations.” Other machinery had to be perfected—hard, durable, precise ball bearings, for one thing—as bigger and speedier machinery was put on the market.
By the late nineteenth century, celebrated American firms and their famous inventors were becoming the talk of the business world, even of industrial exhibitions abroad. At the old Brown and Sharp firm in Providence, J. R. Brown, son of the founder, produced the first micrometers to be manufactured commercially. Pratt and Whitney in Hartford perfected interchangeability of parts by developing a standard system of gauges, a comparator accurate to one fifty-thousandth of an inch, and finally a standard measuring machine. In Philadelphia, William Sellers developed a standardized system of screw threads, nuts, and boltheads that was to be adopted even in Europe. The most imaginative of the innovators was Frederick W. Taylor, who worked at a steel company headed by Sellers. A Harvard Law School graduate who climbed his way up from common laborer to chief engineer, Taylor became the genius-inventor of automatic grinders, forging and tool-feeding mechanisms and the biggest practical steam hammer ever built in the United States; later he introduced a steel alloy that vastly improved the efficiency of cutting tools at high temperatures.
Machines, like men, need one another. As drilling and cutting machines helped stimulate coal and metal production, innovations in iron and steel production made possible the development of tougher high-speed machinery. With the development of the Bessemer process, iron and steel technology moved a long way from the days of the blacksmith’s forge or the puddler’s mold. Into the Bessemer converter, which looked like a great pear-shaped egg, air was blasted from the bottom and molten pig iron poured from the top, with the effect of volatilizing the carbon, silicon, and other impurities in the iron ore. Slow to adopt the Bessemer process, American steel makers forged ahead rapidly after the Civil War as they built vaster—and vastly more efficient—blast furnaces.
Bursting into a volcano of sparks in the stygian gloom of the huge steel plants, the Bessemer converters became a symbol of the fiery age of iron and steel. Few could forget their first sight of the process: the seething pig iron in the converter—the flames flashing out of the pot as the air roared into the bottom—the dazzling explosion of sparks that rained down among the workers—the brawny steelmen, expressionless behind their heavy glass goggles, tilting the converter to pour out the molten steel, amid another shower of sparks. Almost as dramatic were the next steps, as the ingot castings were moved to the forge where enormous hammers molded them almost like butter, or to the rolling mills that flattened them into blooms and billets and then rolled them into rails, rods, bars, slabs, and strips.
Some of these rods and strips went into iron and steel’s most conspicuous achievements—the bridges that spanned the nation’s widest rivers. For some years American engineers, borrowing heavily from European experience, had been putting up suspension bridges which, aside from such brilliant achievements as John Roebling’s Niagara span, had a tendency to collapse. Waiting to be bridged in the early 1870s was the mighty Mississippi—mighty in its width, in its depth, in its 200,000 cubic feet moving ten feet a second in high-water time, in the massive ice fields that drifted down from the north, in the deep mud that made abutments insecure. Waiting to bridge the Mississippi at St. Louis was a remarkable engineer, Captain James Eads. Little schooled except in the price of technological progress—he had arrived in St. Louis in 1833 at the age of thirteen in a steamboat that burst into flames as it docked, and he made his first fortune on the Mississippi salvaging wrecked steamboats with a diving bell—Eads had built ironclads during the Civil War, and now was responding to the pleas of St. Louis businessmen weary of having to ferry goods across the river.
Advised by experts to build either a suspension bridge or a standard multiple-span iron truss, Eads decided instead on the old arch form—but built of steel rather than stone or iron. He designed a center arch of 515 feet, attached to two piers resting in bedrock, with side arch spans of 497 feet running from the piers to shore abutments. These abutments had to be built down to a depth never before achieved. Borrowing from French experience, Eads devised a caisson down whose center spiral stairs diggers descended to the river floor. Emerging from work at the 76-foot depth, the crews began to complain of stomach pains caused by the change in pressure. From a depth of 93 feet, a man climbed to the top feeling fine, only to drop dead ten minutes later; five more men died of the bends in the next few days. Working with his personal physician, Eads hit on the solution—gradual decompression. With his deepest abutment solidly planted 103 feet below the surface, Eads then could turn to the task of cantilevering his arches out from the piers and joining the arch halves high over the river. The bridge opened for vehicles and locomotives in June 1874—and still stands today.
Better steel and steel-making were already putting within reach the improved farm equipment that would in turn swell the farm produce that the long freight trains would now haul across the Mississippi. Steel would make possible a new harrow with long, curved spring teeth that could cope better than iron tines with hard roots and rocks. Another new harrow with discs of varying shapes and sizes, automatically scraped clean as they revolved, came into wide use. New American grain drills, with devices that fed seed into furrows opened up mechanically by fluted hoes, won praise abroad—even a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1878.
One innovation, the twine binder, hardly looked imposing enough to revolutionize harvesting, but so it did. Men had for centuries walked behind reapers and rake, binding the straw into bundles—a slow and costly task. Then a new mechanical wire binder delighted farmers, until they discovered that bits of wire were showing up in cattle straw and even in flour. The twine binder, made of imported Manila jute and sisal rather than wire and employing an automatic knot-tying device, solved this problem so well that Cyrus McCormick sold over 15,000 of the new product in the single year of 1882.
Tunnels and mines—iron and steel—jute and sisal: still other fields would attract the innovators. During the first decade after the Civil War, Samuel Van Syckel installed an oil pipeline near Titusville, Pennsylvania; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened with fifteen students; Congress legalized the metric system (but did not require its use); Maria Mitchell became, at Vassar College, the nation’s first woman professor of astronomy; America’s first refrigerated railroad car was built in Detroit; the American Naturalist magazine was founded; George Westinghouse invented air brakes; the Federal Meteorological Service was established as part of the United States Army Signal Corps; Luther Burbank undertook experiments with plant breeding; Popular Science Monthly began publication; Louis Agassiz founded the first American school to concentrate on oceanography. During the following decade, James Sargent and Halbert Greenleaf patented a time lock for bank vaults; Josiah Willard Gibbs applied the laws of thermodynamics to physical chemistry in his On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances; the American Chemical Society was founded; Asaph Hall, astronomer, discovered two moons of Mars; America’s first copper refinery was established in Connecticut; George Eastman patented a process for making dry photographic plates; the Archeological Institute of America was founded in Boston and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in New York; Hiram Maxim invented a machine gun and a self-regulating electric generator; surgeons began to use silk sutures instead of catgut; Lewis E. Waterman patented a practical fountain pen; smokeless gunpowder was developed; and all through this decade Thomas Edison and others were patenting invention after invention in the field of electricity, culminating in the decking out of the Statue of Liberty with electric arc lamps as she waited to be dedicated in New York Harbor.
Americans seemed to be bursting with ideas, experiments, inventions, enterprises, projects. And why not? The nation offered an almost ideal setting for ambitious young men, inventive tinkerers, innovating leaders, risk-taking entrepreneurs. Its “relatively open and uncluttered scene,” in economist John E. Sawyer’s words, “the abundance of natural resources, the availability of labor and capital from abroad, the timing of 19th Century American expansion in relation to the long evolution of technology and of the institutions of market capitalism in the Western world—these constituted a set of conditions and objective possibilities without historical parallel….” A fluid social structure, largely unorganized labor, and a generally noninterfering national government doubtless helped. And the fact that white Americans were perhaps the best-educated population in the world helped even more; the investment in popular schooling in the 1840s and 1850s was now paying off.
Marx, Engels & co. were not surprised by all this. They knew that the very heart of bourgeois rule was its technological dynamism, its incentives for higher productivity, its capacity to exploit scientific knowledge in manipulating the natural environment so as to satisfy human wants, whatever its colossal human cost in the end. There was a law, Marx said in Wage-Labor and Capital, a law of competition that gave capital no rest and continually whispered in its ears: “Go on! Go on!”
If capitalistic incentive was the mainspring of progress, experimentation was the method. The test of successful experimentation was simple: What worked? And the test of what worked was simple, on the face of it: that which satisfied economic demand reflecting human wants and needs. This practical, empirical, utilitarian test had long been familiar, going back to Benjamin Franklin and his contemporaries. While paying tribute to Franklin’s earlier emphasis on things that were “useful,” Jefferson had complimented Thomas Cooper on the practicality of Cooper’s chemistry, in contrast to the chemists who had not, Jefferson felt, been attentive “to domestic objects, to malting, for instance, brewing, making cider… bread, butter, cheese, soap….” He hoped Cooper would make his chemistry “intelligible to our good house-wives.”
It was the old American tradition of practical experimentation—but it held possible dangers to longer-run progress. Technological development in America had typically consisted of experimental, step-by-step advances, conducted “by guess and by God,” in specific, narrow fields calling for mechanical skill and ingenuity. The tinkerers and inventors had not conceptualized outside their fields because of the tradition of practicality, the immediate needs of hoped-for investors and customers, and the fact that their technical educations had been in the shop rather than in the science laboratory or lecture hall. “Our greatest thinkers,” a practical man boasted, “are not in the library, nor the capitol, but in the machine shop.” This view was understandable; before 1870 the nation had no journal wholly devoted to the subject of chemistry. But it meant that inventors might become imprisoned within specialities becoming obsolete, like mechanics improving the horse carriage while ignoring the advent of steam.
Alexis de Tocqueville had glimpsed the problem. Americans, he said, “always display a clear, free, original, and inventive power of mind.” But hardly any of them, he went on, “devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract portion of human knowledge,” to the “loftier spheres of the intellect.” Still, he granted, all the “energy and restless activity” could “bring forth wonders.”
That Americans were developing a capacity both to bring forth wonders and to exploit broader scientific concepts began to be apparent, however, toward the end of the nineteenth century. It occurred in a world far beyond that of the horse, the steamboat, the locomotive; it occurred in the mysterious field of electricity. Early in the century, André Marie Ampère of France and Michael Faraday of England had pioneered with theories of electromagnetism. The main early work in the United States was carried on by men who came to be entranced by electricity and spent their lives studying and applying it. Thus Joseph Henry of Albany advanced the technology of the electromagnet as he increased the magnetic power of its core by means of thickened insulation. Thomas Davenport, a Vermont blacksmith, without training in electricity or any science, for “some unaccountable reason” saw in a new magnet a possible source of power, built a crude little machine with four battery-powered electromagnets, fixed two of the magnets in a wheel, and found that he could revolve the wheel as he applied current. This discovery made possible the first commercially successful electric motor.
Alexander Graham Bell had been following still another tune, and one that at the start had little to do with electricity. Son of an Edinburgh phonetician who specialized in acoustics and teaching speech to deaf children, Bell had emigrated with his family to Ontario in 1870 and soon moved on to Boston, where he began to conceive a way to transmit the actual sound of the human voice through an electric current. For many months Bell and an assistant, Thomas A. Watson, experimented with pairs of telegraph instruments until one day, when Bell was in one room, routinely tuning the receiving reeds, and Watson was in another, plucking the transmitting reeds to send the right pitch, Watson tapped a stuck transmitter to start it vibrating. Suddenly Bell heard a “twang” on his receiver that he knew instantly to be sound from the vibration induced by a current over the wire from Watson. Amid mounting excitement, Bell had Watson pluck the reed again and again while Bell held the variously tuned receiver reeds against his ear.
By the end of that afternoon, Bell knew that speech could be transmitted electrically. But nine more months of experimentation passed before the two men could transmit intelligible words at their true pitch and loudness. After many tests of more sensitive transmitters and receivers, Bell, one Friday in March 1876, made his last adjustment—adding a speaking-tube mouthpiece—and shouted into the mouthpiece to Watson two rooms away: “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” When Watson burst into his room, Bell was delighted but still not sure. Repeat my words, he told his assistant. Watson: “You said, ‘Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.’” Then Bell knew for sure.
By the late seventies, it appeared that the man who might eclipse Bell and all other Americans in the field of electricity was the practical experimenter par excellence: Thomas Alva Edison. Everything in Edison’s early life had seemed to conspire to make him a mere tinkerer. He was born to a family so little concerned about his formal education that his parents let him leave school at about age twelve to do odd jobs around Port Huron, Michigan, and sell newspapers and candy on the local railroad. With his rumpled clothes, his cowlick, his rough speech (partly because of early deafness), and his tobacco chewing and spitting, he became a kind of Huck Finn of the railroads as he knocked about the Midwest. All the while, he showed a devouring interest in mechanics, saved his money to buy chemicals and batteries, developed an amazing facility both in mastering telegraphy and in turning an unused smoking compartment into his own personal laboratory, and patched up the crude machines of the day. Within a few years he devised improved telegraphy, a legislative vote recorder, a stock ticker, a carbon telephone transmitter, and—most originally—a phonograph.
Nowhere was Edison’s empirical style of innovation more vividly illustrated than in his search for a practical incandescent lamp. In the 1870s, Americans were already lighting their city streets, department stores, hotels, and factories with arc lamps. Consisting essentially of two electromagnets between which an arc flared when voltage was applied, these lamps produced such an intense light that people came from miles around to watch them turned on, and even fell to their knees in fear and awe. Their intensity and size, however, along with a tendency to flicker, made arc lamps unsuitable for less public places; what was needed was a moderate, steady, easily controlled light. For years, inventors had been experimenting with incandescent lights, but they could not find a filament that would glow with a white heat and not be quickly consumed.
Edison’s search for this filament became one of the great sagas of empirical investigation. “Somewhere in God Almighty’s workshop,” he is reported to have said, “there is a dense, woody growth with fibers almost geometrically parallel and with practically no pith, from which excellent strands can be cut.” He and his associates tested thousands of plants and grasses—even hairs clipped from the beards of staff members—and sent investigators to the jungles of South America and Asia until a species of Japanese bamboo seemed to work. More successful was a carbonized cotton filament that burned for forty hours.
All through this and succeeding experiments—on electrical distribution, on a fluoroscope, on the magnetic separation of iron, on the storage battery, on a dictating machine and a mimeograph and a moving picture machine—Edison continued to pride himself on being the practical experimenter, to poke fun at theoretical scientists, to disdain the upper-class pretensions of the academic elite. Yet he had read deeply in Faraday and other scientists, he openly exploited scientific ideas, and he employed a mathematical scientist in his laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey. In effect he was an innovative and imaginative “man of science,” if not a man of strikingly original theoretical ideas. Perhaps more than any other inventor of note, he personified the marriage of science and technology in late nineteenth-century America—a marriage that would spawn both benign and malignant progeny in the century ahead.
It was not easy to be an investor, even in the heyday of American capitalism and even when you inherited money. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., as he commuted between his idle and cheerless Boston law office and the ancestral home in Milton that could only remind him of his famous ancestors, alternated between periods of boring aimlessness and acute anxiety. His life was empty, “dull as ditchwater,” he confided to his diary. At times he felt like “tearing things.” Especially agonizing were the financial panics that periodically threatened his—and his wife’s—small fortunes.
Adams felt too that he lacked courage, combativeness, the capacity to take risks and enjoy doing so. With sneaking admiration as well as disdain, he had written after visiting the New York Stock Exchange that he had seen “men as nature made them, with every affectation cast aside.”
Investing called for more than available funds; it called also for a daring, an imagination, and an unquenchable confidence that were still remembered from the Boston of old and set the style for new entrepreneurs elsewhere. Men who had long sought their fortunes around the periphery of the Atlantic, in the Near East and the Far East, now turned to the uncharted resources of the American Midwest and West. And if the investors tended to define the West as anything the other side of the Connecticut River, or even of Dedham, they had overcome problems of terrain and technology, as in piercing the Hoosac barrier, that would anticipate greater challenges across the Appalachians and, later, the Rockies.
“A happy New Year to you, my beloved husband!” Susan Sedgwick of Stockbridge had written in the early days of 1828 to Theodore Sedgwick, who had just proposed the building of the Boston & Albany Railroad at state expense. “May it preserve to you all your blessings, multiply your strawberries, extend your grapes, & build your RAILROAD!” Amid failing health and jeering skepticism, Sedgwick had seen the line extended from Worcester to Springfield before he died.
Not even the trials and tribulations of railroading, however, could compare with the agonizing problems and dizzying profits of Boston’s greatest feat—opening up the copper lodes of Michigan. Mined by Indians for arrowheads and ornaments long before Columbus, the copper deposits lay in a small peninsula jutting out into Lake Superior. Everything seemed to conspire against profitable investment: the isolation of the copper country; the cost of shipping copper by lighters and shallow vessels on Superior’s waters, and then of unloading and reloading at Sault Sainte Marie; crude mining techniques that had miners digging by candlelight, hauling carts by their own labor, climbing up and down 100-foot ladders. But the Bostonians persevered, raising more capital and enlisting governmental aid. Their men on the peninsula installed steam hoists and pumps, modernized stamping and washing processes through “much trial-and-error fumbling” in William B. Gates’s words, and eventually solved the “special problems of the native, low-content rock.” Nevertheless, a host of old Bostonians lost their starched shirts as mines folded in the face of heavy costs and unstable world demand.
Then persistence paid off for some in the discovery of sensational lodes at the Calumet and Hecla properties, later combined. Louis Agassiz, already renowned as a Harvard naturalist, reported to his brother-in-law, Quincy Adams Shaw, that with some of the lodes yielding an incredible 15 percent of copper, the value of Calumet and Hecla was “beyond the wildest dreams of copper men.” Between 1867 and 1872 the percentage of Michigan copper shipped by Calumet and Hecla rose from 8 to 65.About eight hundred predominantly Boston stockholders waxed for years on Calumet and Hecla dividends; owning C & H became a mark of financial perspicacity and a badge of social status. Some of the shareholders were far more equal than others in the huge fortunes they extracted from the mines; for decades the Shaws alone mined yearly dividends of almost $300,000 from the distant lodes on Superior.
Still, it was railroading that seemed most to arouse the avarice and passions of Boston investors. John Murray Forbes, who had returned home from China at the age of twenty-four after making a fortune in Canton representing a Boston countinghouse, came to exemplify the bold “general entrepreneur” defined by Thomas C. Cochran as owning a big share in many ventures but tying himself down to none. Reluctant at first to break away from the world of seafaring and trading, he eventually plunged into railroad investment, led a group of capitalists in buying the unfinished Michigan Central Railroad from that state for $2 million, pushed the Central to Lake Michigan and then to Chicago, and thereafter carried his little empire farther West to the Mississippi River and across Iowa.
Some of these railroad leaders were self-made men; Chester W. Chapin, with only a few years of schooling, owned an ox team, tended bar, and operated steamboats on the Connecticut, before making enough money to promote western New England railroads and head the Boston and Albany. Most of the railroaders, however, were “college men” knit by family membership or close friendship into the economic and social elite of Boston. Many did their investing through Lee, Higginson, which in itself united a host of old New England families. It was to Henry Lee Higginson, a fellow Union officer who proudly bore a Confederate saber cut on his face, that Charles F. Adams, Jr., would turn for solace and advice.
Within a decade or two of Appomattox, however, the old entrepreneurial spirit seemed to be dying out in Boston. Thomas Gold Appleton honored his father Nathan for building a vast fortune out of shipping and textiles, but he could not emulate him. Thomas, a Harvard man, had no interest in moneymaking and liked to spend his time abroad writing poetry, painting, and composing essays. His despairing father might well have wondered: Would John Adams have approved of this kind of third generation? Capital tied up in family trusts, according to Frederic Jaher, was often unavailable for new and bold business ventures. Men now concerned more with promoting education, religion, and the arts were increasingly distanced from the rough and grimy world of railroads, copper, and iron. Perhaps the most poignant symbol of all this was the fate of Daniel Waldo Lincoln, Chapin’s successor at the Boston and Albany, who fell from the observation train while watching the Yale-Harvard boat race in 1880 and died.
Financial Boston seemed to be stagnating too, by the 1870s. The “hub” had long since lost out to New York and Philadelphia as a capital market. Manhattan’s booming savings banks, insurance companies, and large and efficient investment banking and brokerage agencies had made it the real financial hub of the nation. The availability of ready “call money” in New York attracted millions of speculative dollars. Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston, with their own ports and transportation facilities, shared in the expanding prosperity while Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and other “western” cities were racing ahead of the old New England centers.
It was A. Lawrence Lowell, himself a descendant of brilliant entrepreneurs, who had the last word, remarking to his fellow Brahmin George Cabot, “I’m getting rather worried about the Lowell Family, George. There’s nobody in it making money any more.”
Some persons seemed to have a special knack for making money—and also for losing it. These were the private bankers of New York and Philadelphia and other cities, an old-fashioned breed of men who were taking on new importance and becoming known as investment bankers. Private banking had long attracted entrepreneurs. Jacob Barker, a New York merchant and shipowner, at the age of thirty-six had founded the Exchange Bank on Wall Street with a capital investment of $250,000—a bank of which he was the sole owner—during the dying months of the War of 1812. During that war also, Stephen Girard of Philadelphia, another sea trader, became one of the nation’s first investment bankers when he helped underwrite a government loan. Following in his footsteps, Nicholas Biddle undertook a full-fledged investment banking business by contracting and negotiating securities. Some of these and other ventures flourished, some failed, but by mid-century the investment banker—essentially a middleman between corporations and governments issuing securities and those corporations, banks, and insurance companies needing long-term capital funds—had become a vital part of the financial system.
War vastly swells the demand for big money quickly raised, and the Civil War was no exception. The need called forth the man—Jay Cooke. Son of an Ohio congressman, Cooke had left school at fourteen, probably more from ambition than need, to clerk in a general store in Sandusky, then in a wholesale house in St. Louis, a transportation company in Philadelphia, and a banking house in the same city. There, on New Year’s Day in 1861, he opened his own banking house, Jay Cooke and Co. Through old Ohio and family connections with Secretary Chase, he gained an option to sell a $2 million bond issue in Pennsylvania. He did this so successfully that he was picked to peddle war bonds for the federal government.
Cooke soon proved to be a genius at the mass merchandising of these bonds. Immensely self-confident, still in his early forties, he used patriotic appeals, newspaper advertisements, and a large corps of field agents to sell “five-twenties”—a 6 percent loan payable between five and twenty years. He took the lead in raising half a billion dollars by 1864, and another $600 million in 1865. Perhaps a million Americans took shares in the public debt. A “creative entrepreneur,” in Fritz Redlich’s words, he vividly demonstrated the potential role in big government and business for multitudinous small pools of savings.
Private banking mushroomed after the war, enormously expanding the pool of investment money. By the early 1870s, over five hundred private banks were established in New York City, over a hundred more in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore together, and hundreds more throughout the country, with a remarkably high number in the western states. Many of these were tiny local banks, but increasingly dominant were the big investment bankers, centered in Wall Street, who alone or with other houses could float whole issues of securities. Some of these firms bore “old” names, such as Morton, Bliss & Co., with roots in ancient mercantile establishments. Others sported new names; the field seemed open to anyone with money and daring. Then there were the “Jewish” houses, as they were viewed, such as J. and W. Seligman and Co. and Kuhn, Loeb, with major foreign contacts. Attracting more and more attention in Wall Street by the 1870s was “young” J. P. Morgan, scion of the famous Junius Morgan of London, the American banker who had won world fame when he coolly placed a $50 million loan for the French during their war with Prussia, in the face of thunderous warnings by Bismarck.
Far more typical of American firms was Morton, Bliss, which left extensive records of its week-to-week activities in the letters of junior partner George Bliss to his senior, Levi P. Morton, who liked to linger in London and Newport. Life at Morton, Bliss was one of constant vigilance—following the securities market, closely watching competitors, picking up rumors, mingling with the bigger financiers, keeping an eye cocked on Washington. The firm had major foreign connections through its English partner, Sir John Rose. Like many other financiers, Morton doubled as a politician; he ran three times for Congress and won twice, and established close ties to the Grant Administration. (He would later serve as Minister to France, Governor of New York, and Vice-President.) But Presidents were temporary conveniences, not permanent allies. When Hayes succeeded Grant, Bliss wrote a friend that “our position with the new administration” would be “not less favorable (and it should be stronger) than with the last.”
Financiers lived day and night in the heady world of Wall and Broad Streets. After feverish bidding in the exchange, men would repair to Delmonico’s for more talk of finance, or they might thread their way through the long narrow alley that led to the plain but fashionable Dorlon’s and its oysters. When the exchange closed at four, some would move uptown for decorous carriage-riding in the new Central Park, or for spirited trotting up in Harlem Lane. But, from fear and excitement and avarice, the financiers could not escape the market; many would return around six to the “Gold Room,” a combination informal exchange and Republican party headquarters, where they kept on trading, sometimes around the clock.
These were enormously self-confident men. However watchful and even fearful they were from day to day in the market, they were also confident of the system that needed only their dynamic leadership. They could take pride, if they paid attention, in the tributes of old adversaries as well as new. “The bourgeoisie,” the Communist Manifesto had proclaimed, “during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”
From the perspective of a half-century later, Joseph Schumpeter would picture, as the true economic leaders, the entrepreneurs of this creative period of capitalism. They had to overcome environmental resistances ranging from simple refusal to finance a new thing to “physical attack” on the man who tried to produce it. “To act with confidence beyond the range of familiar beacons and to overcome that resistance requires aptitudes that are present in only a small fraction of the population and that define the entrepreneurial type as well as the entrepreneurial function,” Schumpeter said. “This function does not essentially consist in either inventing anything or otherwise creating the conditions which the enterprise exploits. It consists in getting things done.”
The investors got things done. In particular, they largely financed the expanded “forces of production” that Marx celebrated. But did they innovate better products, or better ways to make products? Critics charged that the investors were reluctant to subsidize innovation, that they preferred the safe old ways. The trend toward bigger businesses, Thorstein Veblen said later, and toward control by men with commercial rather than technical skills had led to a failure to innovate. Others disputed this view. But what does seem clear is that investment in innovative industry was on the whole safer than many of the entrepreneurs realized. The individual investor did run risks; but collectively the bankers and other investors could hardly fail in late nineteenth-century America.
One reason for this was the tariff, which was designed particularly to protect “infant industries.” Another was the patent system. Hardly an entrepreneur operated in this period save in a flurry of patent applications, patent claims, and patent suits. Patents, to be sure, were also a source of uncertainty, with some judges defining patents held without use as deserving little recognition in law and none in equity, and others defining them as an inviolable property right whether the discovery was used or not. But the patent system at least set up rules of the game that gave some protection to capitalists financing innovation. What primarily made risk-taking safe in post-Civil War America, however, was the enterprise system itself and the environment in which it operated. That system established multiple channels for investors: if one venture failed, another would succeed. And the environment minimized “interference risks” from a government that largely kept hands off, a labor force that was largely passive, and consumers who were largely unorganized.
Railroad issues continued to fuel the speculative market during this period, and “western” railroads in particular called forth all that was best and worst in the American entrepreneurial spirit—its daring, imagination, ability to get things actually done, along with its greed, lack of scruples, capacity to tarnish and corrupt everything it touched.
The extra-wide rails of the Erie, twisting and winding their way through the southern tier of New York, epitomized Americans’ bittersweet romance with the railroad. Built with an unusual six-foot gauge in order to hinder interchange of traffic with the rival Pennsylvania and Baltimore roads, the Erie swallowed millions of dollars from American and foreign investors—and from New York taxpayers—before reaching Dunkirk on Lake Erie, then Buffalo, and finally Chicago, on the eve of the Civil War. During the 1850s, following one of the Erie’s periodic money crises, Daniel Drew had taken control of the railroad’s finances. An old-time Hudson Valley cattle driver and horse trader, Drew combined sharp wits and a lack of scruples with a “sanctimonious devotion to Methodism.” “Shrewd, unscrupulous, and very illiterate,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., later described him—“a strange combination of superstition and faithlessness, of daring and timidity.” Promptly living up to his reputation, Drew began to manipulate the Erie stock.
His competitive instincts had long before pitted Drew against an even more formidable figure, Cornelius Vanderbilt. As pleasure-loving and calculating as Drew was somber and bold, the “Commodore” had spent most of his sixty-odd years operating sailing ships, ferries, and steamboats on waterways ranging from New York Harbor and the Hudson to the Atlantic and Pacific routes to gold-feverish California. He first came into competition with Drew when the onetime horse trader ran “antimonopoly” boats against him on the Hudson and forced down the fares. The two men squared off again after Vanderbilt bought control of the Harlem Railroad in the late 1850s. In a famous “corner” in 1864, Drew “was outwitted,” according to Allan Nevins, “went short on large commitments as the stock rose in five months from 90 to 285, and lost a half million dollars, an episode which left him eager for revenge.”
Revenge was only a few years in coming, in what would be known as not merely another contest among capitalists but as the “Erie War.” Both sides had prepared for combat. Using every political and financial resource he could muster, Vanderbilt had won control of the Hudson River Railroad and the New York Central; now, if he succeeded in adding the Erie to his rail network, he would monopolize the profitable grain freight from the west. His primary weapon was a long-tested one—the kind of vast financial resources he had used to buy out other lines.
Now, however, he faced not only the small but commanding figure of Daniel Drew but two lieutenant-generalissimos—and a most remarkable pair at that. Through skill, guile, and knavery Jay Gould had worked his way up from a blacksmith’s forge and a country-store clerkship to the ownership of railroads and then of a Wall Street brokerage house. The other, James Fisk, onetime hotel waiter, circus ticket seller, traveling salesman, and dry-goods jobber, was a comic-opera figure in behavior and appearance—a plump, brassy, jovial voluptuary who wore the garish uniform of a purchased national guard colonelcy, sported diamond bosom pins and lavender gloves, and liked to parade around Manhattan in a four-in-hand flanked by footmen in livery. He had the “instincts of fourteen,” Henry Adams wrote. Fisk was not a buffoon, though, but rather a canny and unscrupulous showman who believed it was a duty of the rich to provide entertainment to the poor.
The trio had one key weapon—possession of the Erie itself. Vanderbilt struck first, buying tens of thousands of shares of Erie stock. He knew his foes could not match his resources with money. But they could with chicanery. The trio issued to themselves $10 million of convertible bonds, changed them into stock, and dumped them on the market. After Vanderbilt replied with a New York contempt-of-court ruling against their issuing more watered stock, they made a retrograde movement across the Hudson to Newark, freed themselves from New York law, and then bribed the New Jersey legislature to legalize their stock issue. After this, Vanderbilt threw in his hand, and the Erie War ended tepidly in a division of the spoils.
Most of the railroad investing was conducted on a far higher plane than this, but often the issuance of rail securities reeked of collusion and fraud, with railroads despoiled and bankrupted in the process. The corruption of the railroads tainted the rest of the financial and political system. Soon it would be revealed that a group of railroad leaders had in effect bribed United States senators and representatives by giving them shares of stock, in a scandal that would come to be known as Crédit Mobilier.
Charles Francis Adams, Jr., observed all this; indeed, he wrote a searching and authoritative study, “A Chapter of Erie.” He did not hesitate to call Fisk a “damned rascal” and Gould a “moral monstrosity.” Yet Adams himself, as head of the Union Pacific, later was willing to pay $50,000 to a Kansas senator to gain his support of a Union Pacific funding bill. Feeling guilty, he blamed himself less for planning corruption than for ineptly failing to bring off the bribe. He justified his action as his duty to the stockholders; if he could not bribe the senator, he reflected, “it was questionable whether I had any right to retain my place as President.”
The great-grandson of John Adams had indeed fastened himself not to a star but to a locomotive engine.
It was a grand sight from the valley of Lake Donner, at eventide, a traveler reported, “to look up a thousand feet upon the overhanging cliffs where the workmen were discharging their glycerine blasts.” In the dusk, great fiery blasts shook the mountainsides amid dense clouds of smoke. “Huge masses of rock and debris were rent and heaved up in the commotion; then anon came the thunders of the explosion like a lightning stroke, reverberating along the hills and canyons, as if the whole artillery of heaven were at play.”
The time was 1868; the place, the east end of Summit Valley near Lake Donner; the occasion, the building of the Central Pacific Railroad east, through some of the most rugged mountainland in America, to meet the Union Pacific advancing west.
The men up on the cliffs earlier had brought the railroad across the Central Valley east from Sacramento, and were now blasting and digging their way through the high Sierras. Above, men were lowered down the sheer sides of cliffs, where they drilled holes, lighted the fuses, and tried to move out fast, with the American River raging more than a thousand feet below. It was even worse in the valleys, especially during the appalling winter of 1866–67, when snow lay fifteen feet deep by Christmas and one hundred feet or more later. Workers, living in deeply buried shacks, tunneled through the snow as much as two hundred feet to reach the railroad bore they were cutting. At day’s end they dragged themselves back through their labyrinth of snow corridors to wash in powder kegs filled with hot water, dine on rice, dried fish, pork, pickled vegetables, and tea, and then perhaps to have a turn at fan-tan and a pipe of opium before throwing themselves down for sleep. But day after day, month after month, they pressed on, at best cutting through twenty-seven inches of granite in a whole day.
The men who were building the Central Pacific made up perhaps the most extraordinary work force in American history. They had fled from poverty, misery, and civil war in their homeland. They had traveled 8,000 miles to an American shore, but from the west, not the east. Their Taoist and Confucian beliefs were about as far from the Catholic faith and Puritan ethic of their fellow Californians as could be imagined. With their oriental appearance, costumes, language, and pigtails, they were the most harshly treated immigrant group in America. They were segregated both at work and at home, and thus formed one more caste in “classless” America.
The Chinese had not been wanted by either the railroad builders or the labor trades. They were considered too small for the heavy work, averaging hardly one hundred pounds, and were said to be addicted to gambling and opium; good enough to be laundrymen and farmhands … but railroad laborers? Moreover, the other workers—usually summed up as “the Irish” —hotly opposed the Chinese and their lower wages. But the “Irish,” many of whom were miners of old, were prone to quit after payday, especially on news of a gold strike in the hills. At first taken on as potential strikebreakers—another red flag to union men—the Chinese proved such willing workers that several thousand were hired, many of them brought over directly from China.
And so here in the mountain passes and later on the burning sands of Nevada the dream of a transcontinental railroad was being carried out by a strange partnership of Sacramento capitalists and pigtailed “Celestials,” as they were called. The dream was an old and grandiose one. A transcontinental railroad, it had been argued in the 1840s, would be a strategic as well as economic boon; it would place on the West Coast naval power that could dominate the Pacific and even the Chinese seas. Only the coming of the Civil War had broken the long deadlock over a northern versus a southern railroad, and it was during the war that Congress had passed the legislation, Lincoln had signed it, and the Sacramento group had laid the first rails.
In charge of the enormous undertaking was a quartet of capitalists who would come to be known as the Big Four. The acknowledged, though not unchallenged, leader was the president of the Central Pacific, Leland Stanford of Sacramento. A majestic figure with his burly frame, ramrod posture, and thick beard and hair, he had amassed a small fortune as a Placer County merchant and then served as Unionist governor of California before he reached forty. The CP’s hard-driving construction boss was another big, burly young man with chin whiskers, Charles Crocker; two of its key capital raisers were the hardware merchant Mark Hopkins and a partner of Hopkins, Collis P. Huntington. Missing by now was the man who most of all had dreamed the great dream, Theodore Judah, a brilliant leader in conceiving the transcontinental route, lobbying the railroad bill through Congress, and raising money. He had died of yellow fever after crossing Panama.
As the Chinese threaded the railway through the mountain passes and over trestle bridges, Stanford’s office in Sacramento became a kind of GHQ. The generalissimo recruited thousands of workers and horses and flung them into the battle, brought locomotives and other heavy weapons around the Horn and up the Sacramento River to the railhead, shipped quantities of food and other supplies to the front-line troops (but expected them to live off the land too), communicated with Crocker in code, fought the wretched weather, made visits to what he called “the Front.” He had to deal with local nabobs commanding their territory, most notably with the imperious Mormon leader, Brigham Young. And he had to deal with labor shortages, to the point where the partners considered importing blacks from the East or even Confederate war prisoners.
Crocker was field commander. Spurred by messages from Stanford to “double his energy” or “move forward to north pass,” he shuttled back and forth in his private car, or rode on his sorrel mare. “There was no need for sympathy for those men,” he later told the historian H. H. Bancroft. “Why I used to go up and down that road in my car like a mad bull, stopping along the way wherever there was anything amiss and raising old Nick.” When the Chinese workers finally lost patience and struck for a pay increase to $40 a month and an eight-hour day in the tunnels—“Eight hours a day good for white men, all the same good for Chinamen,” their circular explained—Crocker put it down in a week, “I stopped the provisions on them,” he said later, “stopped the butchers from butchering, and used such coercive measures.” This was food the Chinese had already bought.
But the dread enemy was not strikers or slackers or Indians—it was the Union Pacific spearing its way west. Stanford and Crocker picked up rumors that the foe was stealing their supplies and even their men. Desperately they threw every reserve into the battle, hauling locomotives on sleighs and even on logs, working shifts of men through long days, goading their men to faster progress along the Nevada flats. When word arrived that the Union Pacific had laid 7.5 miles of track in a long, twenty-hour day, a Central Pacific crew put 10 miles down in thirteen hours. Seeking above all else the huge federal land grants, the two companies fought for exclusive rights-of-way and even graded 100 miles of parallel roadbed.
In the end, though, the two armies met peacefully at Promontory Point near Ogden, Utah. The CP’s “Jupiter,” wood-burning engine No. 6o, proudly stood, cowcatcher to cowcatcher, facing the UP’s coal-burner, No. 119. While the chief engineers of the rival roads shook hands, workers on the cowcatchers held out champagne bottles to each other. Stanford and his UP counterpart, Thomas C. Durant, used silver sledges to drive home the golden spikes. Both men missed the spike a few times, but no matter: America had its first transcontinental railroad.
The poet Bret Harte wondered what the engines said, head to head, each with half the world behind its back:
You brag of your East! You do? Why, I bring the East to you!
All the Orient, all Cathay,
Find through me the shortest way; And the sun you follow here
Rises in my hemisphere.…
After the ceremony of the golden spikes, the men who had built the Union Pacific, mostly Irish, could just keep “headed west,” now traveling on the road their Chinese counterparts had built. The CP’s Chinese workers (who are hardly evident in a photograph of the ceremony) drifted off to mining camps or headed back to California, some of them perhaps riding on the rails they had hauled into place. Newcomers and locals alike, they—and later a mellow philosopher from Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson—could share in the glories of the trip: immense numbers of ducks settling in the northern shallows of the Great Salt Lake, purple mountains beyond, and snow-covered ranges in the distance. Emerson was fascinated by the constantly shifting tints and lights of this landscape.
For Easterners, the terrain seemed incredibly varied. At one moment the train would be steaming through irrigated fields where corn, wheat, potatoes, and diverse fruits grew luxuriantly. Then the engine would be chugging through the canyons of the Humboldt River—“torn, jagged, barren rocks and cliffs, that looked as if wasted by a hundred centuries of lightning and storm,” a traveler with Emerson later remembered; “then through an alkaline region, where the surface of the ground was white like a city street that has been watered with salt water; but the alkali was thicker.” All of this reminded Emerson of biblical lands. Then they were pounding through country without trees, nothing but sagebrush and a “prickly shrub, and a sort of Scotch broom,” with small plumes of steam in the distance marking hot springs. Then finally the “grand stormy rush” down the Sierras and onto the Sacramento plain.
One sight above all electrified the passengers, causing some to get off and try their fortune—gold mining. They could see men spraying powerful jets of water against the gravel sides of mountains, washing away the earth so that the yellow ore might be exhumed. Long flumes carried the water, often for miles along the tracks. Almost the whole distance, indeed, mining towns were visible, perched on hills or straggling through canyons, and enveloped by once-barren hillsides covered with miners’ tents and gear. Everything in these towns appeared to revolve around minerals, including quartz; everyone in town seemed to own a gold or quartz claim, almost the way Easterners owned gardens. A visitor in one of these towns, during much excitement about a coming circus, observed “little urchins going out to the fields beyond the town with their mothers’ tin kitchen-pans” to “pan out enough to pay their entrance-fee to the circus.”
Passengers riding the Central Pacific to Sacramento found a bustling little town, proud of its position as the state capital and the hub of Central Valley agriculture, at the head of the tidewater on the Sacramento River. Many passengers left the train here to take the riverboat west to San Francisco; others traveled south on the new Southern Pacific railway. Often these included Chinese and Irish who would find jobs on the railroad itself. Spearing south along the San Joaquin River, through the immense burning prairie between the Sierras and the coast, the Southern Pacific connected with lovely towns like Stockton, which seemed to one traveler aflutter with windmills which irrigated domestic gardens. At Merced, tourists could turn east to view the mountains, gorges, and waterfalls of Yosemite. It was in this spectacular area that Emerson in 1881 encountered a young botanist and sawmill worker who told him excitedly of the local flora and of his long rambles through the mountains he loved. This was the “father of the wilderness,” John Muir.
Renewing their trip through the Central Valley as it widened out, travelers crossed a farmland of almost limitless expanse and diversity. At first, settlers from the east had found it hard to adjust their farming ways to the new seasonal rhythms of California. They had sown when the rains ended in May or June, only to see their crops turn brown in the long dry California summer. As time passed they found the grass on the plains to be abundant and nutritious, curing naturally in the summer sun and providing ample feed for sheep and market cattle. Only workhorses and oxen required grain. Plowing early in December and sowing and planting in March, farmers could grow six and even eight crops of alfalfa.
The rub was always water. Farmers often joined hands to build reservoirs and canals, windmills and artesian wells. Be more careful in buying water than land, old-timers advised.
It was a world of Spaniards and Indians. As travelers moved south, they could tell at a glance who lived in the houses along the way. “If the house is of reeds and straw, the owner is an Indian; if it is of adobe, it is a Spaniard who lives there; if it is of frame, be sure it is an ‘American,’” noted a visitor from the East. It was a peaceful land. A traveler through the lonely southern counties reported he had “stopped to cook my dinner in the Indian huts, asked for a night’s lodging at Spanish ranchos, slept sometimes on the green grass, with my horse staked out, my feet near a fire, and wrapped in overcoat and blanket; and journeying thus day after day, I had not even a revolver with me, and no arm larger than a pocket-knife.”
It was also a land of big ranches. A Spanish padrone might own 40,000 acres, 1,500 or so young colts, several thousand sheep, and so many cattle he could not count them until after the annual rodeo. This was the big event of the year. After the stock in a large district had been driven onto one great plain, vacqueros would pick out each owner’s cows, break them up into separate herds, brand the calves that innocently followed their mothers, and either turn the whole mass loose again or drive them home. The señor often lived in a house of adobe, perhaps with a store in front from which he sold dry goods and grape brandy to his Indian hands. Beyond the house might be a clay oven for baking bread, and beyond that the shanties for Indians and their roosting chickens. Many Spanish homes had earthen floors covered with expensive rugs, reflecting the new wealth of these landowners after the Gold Rush demand for beef made cattle owners rich.
The great Spanish landowners owned most of California, a traveler noted; the land, the cattle, the horses, the sheep were theirs. No-fence laws assured ranchers of almost unlimited range for their cattle. They had good relations with their hands, and in return “no vacquero addressed the master without either touching or taking off his hat.” But they “were not business men; they liked to live free of care; and they found it easy to borrow money….They knew nothing of interest” and they often squandered their money. This old, easy, bucolic life could not escape the currents surging through southern California in the 1870s.
In particular, the town of Los Angeles was just about to emerge from its drowsy, indolent past when one might, on driving into El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, encounter market wagons full of “oranges, pumpkins, a lamb, corn, green peas in their pods, sugar-cane, lemons and strawberries” and one-story, dilapidated houses whose inner courtyards were lovely gardens of flowers and fruit. The Southern Pacific came to the town in 1876, however, after the railroad exacted large subsidies from the city fathers. Los Angeles was not ready to be consigned to a backwater of progress, which was the fate of other cities that resisted the Southern Pacific’s strong-arm tactics.
Soon the railroad began shipping to the east wine, paper-wrapped oranges packed in ice, lemons, walnuts, and other products of the area’s new irrigated intensive farming. A growing emphasis on agriculture ended once and for all the cattle ranchers’ rule over the range, for cattle now had to be fenced in to prevent their trampling freshly planted fields or ripening harvests.
Young entrepreneurs were helping transform the city. One of these was Phineas Banning, who had begun to make carriages at the port of Wilmington, south of Los Angeles, built a wharf and warehouses, and developed a stage connection with the city. Banning was said to be the first to use a wireless telegraph in the area, the first to dig an artesian well, and the first to have an oil well. But now a spectacular real estate boom was about to begin, one that would transform the city and its environs. The old Los Angeles of flowers and vineyards would no longer exist. After years of struggles with the Southern Pacific, Banning would sell out to it.
The most direct route from Los Angeles to northern Californian ports in the 1870s was still by steamer or packet. Beating their way north, passengers could watch the great Pacific rollers breaking on the sands, the wooded and craggy coastal ranges, and sometimes the snow-covered Sierra peaks in the distance. It was always a breathtaking moment when the ship entered the Golden Gate and turned starboard to the fabled city on the hills.
San Francisco! With its fog-shrouded mornings, steep dunelike hills, busy, picturesque harbor, and lusty yet cultivated style, the city was still a magnet for the richest rich and the poorest poor, for immigrants from west and east, for Chinese, Irish, Yankees, Italians, and more Spanish from the south. It was now the economic capital of the West, and a cultural and social center as well. The Big Four had not remained long in Sacramento after their Central Pacific was built and making money. In the mid-seventies Stanford, his wife, and his son moved into a $2 million mansion that was greeted in the local press as “Stanford’s Palace, the Finest Private Residence in America.” The place was a great pile with marble steps, bay windows, billiard room, picture gallery, “Pompeian reception room,” ballroom, and forty or so other rooms, decorated in the Italian and other styles, and topped by a glass dome illuminating the entrance hall seventy feet below. Natives and visitors alike gawked at this and other ornate mansions built on Nob Hill.
While the Big Four ran their railroad empire out of their Southern Pacific offices, also long since removed from Sacramento, their wives and daughters dominated the social life of the city. For a wealthy young woman like Lucy S. Jones, niece of a high railroad executive, life in San Francisco in the 1870s was a weekly round of social calls, dress fittings, parties, cultural events, and church. Her brothers took singing lessons while she studied French. Her carefree life was shadowed only by the illnesses that coursed through San Francisco—influenza, consumption, scarlet fever. One young friend died, others were home in bed, the cook and Chinese servant were too ill to come to work, and Lucy and her aunt battled recurrent colds. “So many are going now,” she wrote in her diary after one friend’s death, and then crossed it out, as if it were bad luck.
Down in Chinatown, not many blocks north and east of Nob Hill, lived the people at the bottom of the social pyramid, in “dark and dingy garrets and cellars, steaming with air breathed over and over, and filled with the fumes of opium,” according to a newspaper report. By the mid-eighties the Chinese quarter had become known as an inner city of brothels, opium dens, and gambling halls, described by the historian H. H. Bancroft as “closely packed with some 25,000 souls, nearly all males, with a sprinkling of loose females.” This dense honeycomb was mostly owned by white absentee landlords. The Chinese experienced both discrimination and segregation, both legal and illegal harassment. “Negroes, Mongolians, and Indians” were excluded from the public schools. It was illegal to bring Chinese women into the country unless they were persons of “correct habits” and good character. In fact, estimated Bancroft, of 116,000 Chinese in California in 1876, 6,000—or 5 percent—may have been women, further arresting Chinese assimilation in California.
Feeling against the Chinese had mounted on the return of thousands of railroad workers from the Sierras. Whites reviled them for their willingness to accept low wages and harsh conditions, their alien ways, their pigtails, their Taoist stoicism, their habit of sending to the “old country” both their money and the bones of their dead. Labor leaders held mass meetings, formed “anti-coolie” clubs, organized mobs to climb Nob Hill and shout “the Chinese must go” outside the mansions of the magnates deemed responsible for bringing in Chinese labor. To win the labor vote, Democrats often passed planks against the Chinese.
The opposition of labor was especially telling, for San Francisco was already becoming a “labor town.” Most of the trades had been organized since the fifties. Building trades were especially strong, in line with San Francisco’s construction boom. In 1868 unions won the eight-hour day, but the following year labor faced its biggest challenge, the incoming flood of unorganized workers discharged from the Central Pacific Railroad.
Anti-Chinese sentiment became the binding force in the labor movement. Such organizations as the Knights of St. Crispin, shoemakers directly competing with a major Chinatown industry, and the Plumbers’ and Carpenters’ Eight-Hour League organized spectacular mass meetings throughout the 1870s, demonstrations that often exploded into riots and the burning and looting of Chinatown. Out of these meetings also erupted the meteoric Workingmen’s Party, led by the fiery Denis Kearney and fueled by economic frustration—a drought, a decrease in mining returns, a depression, and railroad strikes in the East. In June 1878, Workingmen won one-third of the seats in the state’s second constitutional convention, even against a coalition of Democrats and Republicans.
Fixed as it was on the issue of ending Chinese immigration, however, the Workingmen’s Party’s participation in the convention proved to be its undoing. Within a year of ratification of an anti-Chinese article of the new constitution, the United States Circuit Court declared that virtually all of its provisions violated the Fourteenth Amendment.
In the 1870s San Francisco was outliving its reputation as a frontier town full of saloons, opium dens, and gold seekers and other philistines. The city was becoming a place for thinkers like Henry George, poets like Bret Harte, historians like Bancroft, musicians, artists. The patronage of the rich was providing symphony orchestras, opera houses, museums, galleries. For years, Tivoli maintained a twelve-month opera season. Newspapers in seven languages offered a peculiarly western brand of humor, developed by Mark Twain and others. Edwin Booth broke all attendance records for American theater when he played for eight weeks in the city. Lillian Russell, appearing in Babes in the Woods wearing purple tights and high-buttoned shoes, delightfully shocked the city. Lucy Jones’s cultural life included Shakespeare and Wagner.
Yellow and black and white, rich and poor, Yankee and Indian, Mexican and Spanish, Californians made up the most diverse population in the Union. They boasted of their extremes—the highest mountains and the lowest deserts, the worst floods and the longest droughts, the biggest trees and the fiercest forest fires. Californians grew silk—not very successfully—and grain; the state ranked second in wheat production by 1890. By century’s end, San Francisco was a kind of experiment in good living, for whites, at least, one of the most agreeable and bucolic cities in the world. It seemed that this way of life, barring some act of God, might continue forever.
American capitalism had its saints as well as its rascals. Its finest leader and role model in the late nineteenth century was heroic in almost everything except appearance: five foot three, broad of face and nose, so youthful in features that even after he became a railroad superintendent and was clearing up a train wreck, a burly Irishman in a busy work crew picked him up and carried him to the side, saying, “Get out of my way, you brat of a boy.” In his career and achievements Andrew Carnegie was a Hero of Capitalist Production.
That career read as though it had been contrived by a master scenarist of Victorian dramas full of clichés and stereotypes. Rags to riches: he was born in the attic of a Scottish weaver’s cottage and died in his eighty-fourth year the owner of one of Manhattan’s finest mansions and one of Scotland’s most ostentatious castles. Poverty-stricken but determined mother: Margaret Carnegie tried for a time to shore up the family earnings by binding shoes and other cottage work, then bundled up her husband and sons and belongings, borrowed twenty pounds, and took passage to America. The rungs of the ladder of success: bobbin boy (at $1.20 a week) to engine tender, to telegraph messenger boy, to telegraph operator, to personal secretary to the superintendent of the western division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, to superintendent himself, to Civil War head of transportation and communications, all by his early forties.
There was, however, a far more extraordinary side to Carnegie’s life. He came from a family of fiery Scottish Chartists who for years had been agitating for political liberty, human rights, and religious toleration; his uncle had been arrested for “seditious activity.” When his father’s linen hand-loom weaving succumbed to the factory system, young Andrew would never forget his coming home in despair, saying, “Andra, I can get nae mair work.” But the father and an uncle had time to educate the boy in Scottish lore, the plebeian poetry of Robert Burns, and the evils of the Monarchy and Established Church. As a boy in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, where the immigrant family settled, he became an ardent reader and a letter writer to the New York Tribune, especially on slavery. His whole early life—his roots in poverty and radicalism, his long trip to America across the Atlantic and then up the Hudson and along the Erie Canal and by lake and canal to Allegheny, his daily work in Pittsburgh among factory boys and railroad laborers—he had converted into a self-schooling in democracy.
None of this, however, seemed to slow Carnegie’s determined rise through the capitalistic system. Observant, quick, steady, resourceful, everlastingly competent, he may not have rescued the boss’s daughter from a runaway horse, but he was able on one occasion, when all the trains in his division were held up because of a wreck and his boss was late, to unscramble the whole mess on his own initiative and get the trains running. He was then not yet twenty. His passion was to make things work. When wrecked freight cars blocked service, he coolly ordered them burned—an act that astonished his colleagues but later became standard procedure with the Pennsylvania Railroad.
In 1865, at the age of thirty, Carnegie left the Pennsylvania to branch out into other fields. He invested his railroad income shrewdly in oil, sleeping cars, bridges, and other railroads, as steel became a kind of common denominator in his investments. In Europe, he came to know Sir Henry Bessemer and the Bessemer process. Already Carnegie was showing the daring and imagination that attracted attention from his rivals in Pittsburgh and abroad. Bridges especially challenged him; with Captain Eads he shared the agony and glory of building the first great bridge over the Mississippi. By 1872, staking his hopes on Bessemer and other improved technology, he was ready to make an irreversible commitment to steel.
The story of Carnegie’s rise to czar of steel is the story of organization, cost-cutting, and competition. Take away his steel mills, his ores, his railroad lines, his coal, he liked to say, but leave him one thing and he would repeat his success. That one thing was organization, by which he meant picking skilled subordinates such as Captain “Bill” Jones, Henry Clay Frick, and Charles M. Schwab, and by which he also meant something that was still revolutionary in American industry—vertical integration. By such moves as acquiring massive iron deposits in the Mesabi range and buying railroads that linked Pittsburgh with the northwest water routes, Carnegie by the end of the century came to control raw materials, transportation, manufacturing, distribution, and finance. He stood astride the whole steel process, from mining ore to delivering railroad cars, boilers, nails, wires.
Cost-cutting was virtually an obsession at Carnegie Steel. The boss watched every nickel. “I cannot understand Lime,” he complained; “13 tons of lime used to each ton of metal. It can’t be lime, that is certain, half rock—I suspect.” Or: “I am surprised at two items in cost. Coke 1/2 ton per ton rails—8 bushels should smelt the pig and certainly 4 bushels the Spiegel. How do you account for the remainder?” He fretted over labor costs. “Profits, for Carnegie, were always tangential to and a mere consequence of reduced costs of production,” in Joseph Wall’s estimate. “To reduce costs, he would quickly scrap a new machine, a new process, or an entire mill in favor of more efficient operations. Labor was simply another item of cost, but if wages were low, so also were salaries of management.” Carnegie’s salary, however, was not low.
All this made Carnegie a ferocious competitor. His attitude toward his rivals was, “Come, let’s compete.” He said this in absolute confidence that he would outcompete them, and so he did. He fought not only with rival steel makers but also with railroads. His old association with the Pennsylvania Railroad did not deter him from forcing down its ore, coke, and limestone rates. “What are you fighting the Pennsylvania Railroad for?” a Pennsylvania chief asked him. “You were brought up in its service. We were boys together.” In answer, Carnegie handed him a list of his competitors’ rates.
The growth of American steel-making was simply phenomenal. In just a few years, Carnegie and the others far outstripped Britain, long the heart of world iron- and steel-making. American steel production quadrupled in the last thirty years of the century. Benefiting from economies of scale, in 1870 the industry produced 60 pounds of metal for each dollar invested; in 1900, 112 pounds. Carnegie did far better than the rest, more than doubling his per-dollar production between 1880 and 1900. In those same twenty years he cut his cost per ton of rail from $28 to less than $12.
All through these years, however, the “other” Carnegie seemed to hover over the steel magnate, reminding him of youthful dreams and ideals. At the age of thirty-three, in the first flush of success, he had promised himself: “By this time two years I can so arrange all my business as to secure at least 50,000 per annum. Beyond this never earn.” The reason? “No idol more debasing than the worship of money.” Yet Carnegie continued to worship that idol, as he built a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars even while preaching the “Gospel of Wealth”—the doctrine that making money was laudable, but only if the rich used their money to help the poor and benefit the whole community.
The most extraordinary manifestation of the “other Carnegie” appeared each spring when Carnegie returned to Scotland and England and reasserted his old Chartist faith. He had forgotten none of it during all the years of moneymaking. During the 1880s he bought out or into seven British dailies and ten weeklies and converted them into muckraking organs against the British monarchy, hereditary privileges, and limitations on the right to vote. He bored his radical friends and outraged his conservative foes with his fulsome tributes to American democracy. So stridently did Carnegie’s newspapers attack the aristocracy that even Carnegie’s liberal friends, including Prime Minister William Gladstone himself, felt embarrassed and heaved a sigh of relief when their American friend left for home every fall. Still, they could not help wondering at the man who supported radical political change, equality, and even striking coal workers on one side of the Atlantic, only to return to the Republican and capitalistic fold on the other.
Despite failures and frustrations, Carnegie never lost his Chartist faith—in the British Isles. Especially rewarding to him were the literary friendships he made among Britain’s intellectual elite. Matthew Arnold, Herbert Spencer, and John Morley, among other littérateurs, befriended Carnegie intellectually in Britain and were entertained by him royally on their trips to America. Carnegie wrote articles for the Fortnightly Review and letters to The Times. He rarely resisted an opportunity to mount the platform, from which he excoriated special privilege, lauded America’s form of democracy, and seemed far less the calculating capitalist than the arm-pumping radical—which in England he was.
By the end of the century, Andrew Carnegie was crowned in the press as the world’s richest man, succeeding Jay Gould. But waiting to assume the golden throne was a man who differed from Carnegie in almost every way except in the ability to make—and to give away—hundreds of millions of dollars. John D. Rockefeller was the son not of a poor Scot but of a roving upstate New York salesman, speculator, spurious physician, and apparent bigamist. Sometimes absent for months, the father was home often enough to teach his son the importance of money, the sanctity of contracts, and how to make a profit. In his early boyhood, it is said, John bought candy by the pound and sold it piece by piece to his siblings at a profit.
After a good high school education and a business college stint, young Rockefeller drew up a list of sound Cleveland firms, made the rounds of all of them seeking a job, and was stolidly starting around the circuit a second time when he got a job in a commission house as a bookkeeper. A frugal, industrious, deeply religious young man, Rockefeller loved bookkeeping—meticulously checking and rechecking figures, handling thousand-dollar bills, and learning every aspect of the firm’s business. Three months before his twentieth birthday, he and a young partner opened their own commission house. The firm prospered during the Civil War boom.
At the same time, Rockefeller and his associates became involved in the oil refineries that were springing up around Cleveland. Sensing that Cleveland could never outbid Chicago for the grain and meat trade, but that its railroad facilities would enable it to dominate oil-refining, he struck out boldly on his own. Slowly, methodically, he expanded his operation, taking advantage of the continuing oil boom. As his firm grew bigger, he found it easier to dictate terms to suppliers and railroads, and to profit from petroleum by-products. But Rockefeller came to fear and detest the chaos of the oil industry—the hundreds of tiny firms that sprang up in boom times and then folded, the ferocious competition of railroads and cities for business, the collapse of rates and prices to the point of bankruptcy for many firms. By 1870, when Rockefeller and his partners organized the Standard Oil Company (Ohio), the refining industry’s capacity was three times the demand.
Rockefeller’s answer to this problem was not Carnegie’s kind of competition but his own brand of order and stability, achieved through alliances, “voluntary” associations, combinations, and ultimately trusts. Rockefeller did not talk much at the time—a kind of aggressive silence was one of his main weapons—but later he bluntly argued the case for combination over competition.
“We wanted a new idea to prevail,” he said, “we wanted the old struggle to cease in the ugly forms it had assumed…. [We wanted] men to take their full share of the business, to be content with a fair share … and thus work together for the economies and enjoy together the success…. I think that it is fair to say that the strong men who were competitors in the oil refining business, the aggressive men …were the men who were most likely to take up the idea of cooperation…. The thing that caused the effort to be made to centralize the business was the exercise of this uncontrolled freedom for every man to have his own way in utter disregard of the rights of his neighbors.”
How Rockefeller effected these combinations aroused as much controversy as the combinations themselves. His basic strategy was not to out-compete his rivals but to eliminate them, in the name of a higher cooperation. He denied using pressure tactics, but his critics said he did not need to—he had the power, and everyone knew it. Quiet, soft-spoken, even polite, he could suddenly intimidate his rivals with his “gunpowder eyes” and, even more, his ample funds. Through cost-cutting, favorable rebates, a big marketing organization, purchase of competitors, occasional price-cutting, Rockefeller and allied firms developed common ownership of refineries, lubricating oil plants, pipelines, cooperage companies. The Standard Oil combination of firms came to control about nine-tenths of the oil industry by 1881.
For all their differences—and their contrasting capitalisms—Carnegie and Rockefeller ended up with one great interest in common: philanthropy. Of the several hundred million dollars that Carnegie made, he gave $350 million for libraries, education, and world peace. Of Rockefeller’s fortune of over $800 million, the oil tycoon gave over $550 million for medical research, education, religion, and, especially in the South, agricultural improvement. Neither man questioned the need for such giving; each considered it a duty. To radicals’ charges that they had exploited the masses, skimmed off enormous profits, and kept much for themselves, they would have answered—if they condescended to answer—that they had given the public something it needed more than material improvement: they had given it education, health, more assurance of world peace, greater opportunity for spiritual and moral development.
As for the argument of Marxists and others that, while of course the masses did have higher needs than the economic, it was up to the people as a whole, not their economic overlords, to define those needs, probably neither Carnegie nor Rockefeller would have understood the argument, and certainly neither would have deigned to answer it.
Steel and oil were not the most important forces in the late-nineteenth-century production boom, only the most dramatic. Flour production, lumber production, and tobacco products roughly doubled between 1870 and 1890; paper almost tripled. American textile mills consumed 797,000 bales of cotton in 1870, over thrice that in 1891. “Using the year 1899 as a standard,” according to John Garraty, “the output of manufactured goods increased from an index of 25 in 1870 to 30 in 1877, 42 in 1880, 71 in 1890, and 79 in 1892.” By 1890 the billion-dollar textile industry led in capitalization, followed by iron and steel and by lumber; textiles also led in number of workers (824,000) followed by lumber and by iron and steel, while the latter, with its skilled workers, had the highest wage bill. Food processing had the highest “value of product”—a stupendous $1.6 billion.
Expansion was uneven. Industry continued to be heavily centered in the northeast and north-central regions, with 85 percent of the manufactured goods produced there in 1890. But the regional balance was slowly righting itself. California doubled the value of its manufactures during the eighties alone. Minnesota was specializing in flour milling, Michigan and Wisconsin in lumbering, Illinois in meat packing and farm equipment. To a lesser but still marked degree, the South shared in the boom. Already, New England textile and textile-machinery firms were expanding south of the old Mason-Dixon Line.
If American production was the wonder of the world, success lay primarily in a combination both lucky and calculated, of seemingly inexhaustible raw materials, a fast-developing transportation system, a vigorous and talented labor force, massive foreign and domestic capital, an ethic of expansion, and brilliant innovators. Capitalism’s power of “creative destruction” was already evident. America’s rapidly expanding railroad system was pacing the booming economy and in the process supplanting many an expensive canal system—and supplanting countless canal workers too.
The third decade after the Civil War (1886–95) continued the diverse innovation of the first two. The new Westinghouse Electric Company built the nation’s first commercially successful power plant in Buffalo. The United States Forest Service was established in the Agriculture Department. The Pennsylvania Railroad operated an electrically lighted train between Chicago and New York. William S. Burroughs patented a commercially successful adding machine. The National Geographic Society was founded, and the nation’s first seismograph installed at the Lick Observatory in California. The Pullman Car Company built an electric locomotive for hauling freight; Singer marketed electric sewing machines; Otis Brothers installed an electric elevator in Manhattan. William Osler published Principles and Practice of Medicine. Westinghouse standardized alternating current at 60 cycles per second. A North Carolina chemist produced acetylene gas. The American Psychological Association was established, and the Journal of Geology first published. Chlorine was used to treat sewage in Brewster, New York, Boston schoolchildren began to receive medical examinations, and the world’s first antitoxin clinic was opened in New York City. Pneumatic rubber tires were manufactured in Hartford, and pasteurized milk was produced commercially.
Not only was industry innovative—innovation was being industrialized. The benign figure of Thomas A. Edison, industrialist, loomed as a prime example. By the late eighties Edison was still the creative inventor, experimenting now with a Kinetoscopic camera. But he was more than this—while creating manufacturing establishments to market his inventions, he had become one of America’s best-known small industrialists, employing between two and three thousand skilled and unskilled workers. He was an industrialist in an even more profound sense: in an era that recognized and rewarded systematically organized production, Edison was probably the first to found the “scientific” factory, one devoted to the production of scientific inventions rather than consumer or producer goods.
To a degree, Edison became a kind of “captive scientist”—captive to the entrepreneurs who could supply capital and to the marketplace. In creating Menlo Park as a scientific factory, he obtained funds before his next inventions were anything more than an idea or perhaps a quick sketch in his or one of his partners’ lab books. As in a factory, work was subdivided among Edison’s gifted inventors and technicians, a division of labor prevailed, and a bureaucratic organization evolved. And as in any other private enterprise, “practicality” ruled. Edison would not work on a project unless it would meet a present or future need and make money.
“A scientific man busies himself with theory,” Edison said to a reporter. “He is absolutely impractical. An inventor is essentially practical. Anything that won’t sell I don’t want to invent….”
Working around the clock in his rumpled clothes, taking catnaps on laboratory tables, smoking twenty cheap cigars a day, gouging chaws out of huge hunks of chewing tobacco he shared with his associates, leaving the floor around him covered with spittle, Edison hardly appeared a heroic figure. He was something more important. While winning a reputation as an independent and single-minded inventor—“my business is thinking,” he liked to say—he was in fact, as Norbert Wiener pointed out, a transitional figure who pointed the way toward the big, bureaucratically organized research of the technological age to come.
The crowd gaped at the massive engine towering over it—at the gleaming cylinders pointed skyward, at the huge, delicately balanced walking beams above, responding at one end to the ten-foot stroke of the cylinders and from the other plunging down to the thirty-foot flywheel. Two diminutive figures down on a platform, Ulysses S. Grant and Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, on command gently turned some wheels and the walking beams began to rock majestically, the flywheel to turn, and now the engine’s 1,500 horsepower was moving along leather belts to other mechanical showpieces—sewing machines, circular saws, presses, carpet looms, and thousands of other machines crowding the exhibition halls.
It was May 10, 1876, the opening day at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. The rain seemed not to dampen the spirits of thousands pouring into Fairmount Park and jamming the pie stalls, lemonade stands, beer gardens, ice cream parlors, P. T. Barnum’s “Wild Man of Borneo,” and other attractions lining the approaches to the huge exhibition halls. But the keenest interest by far was in the exhibits. In the industrial exhibits: lathes, power looms, pumps, milling machines, a section of wire cable from John A. Roebling’s Niagara suspension bridge, a model showing how the steel arches of Eads’s St. Louis bridge had been formed, a 7,000-pound pendulum clock by Seth Thomas, Westinghouse’s air brake, Philadelphia-and Hartford-made machine tools, “sober black iron monsters whose varied steel edges could cut, chip, stamp, mold, grind, and otherwise shape metal,” in Joseph and Frances Gies’s words. In the agricultural exhibits: reapers and mowers and horse rakes and fruit dryers and steam road rollers and gang plows.
Most exciting and baffling were the electrical exhibits, including “multiplex” telegraph devices. The Exhibition actually produced a historic event when Emperor Pedro II, who had met Alexander Graham Bell while visiting the Boston School for the Deaf, ran into the inventor at a Western Union exhibit and insisted on inspecting his “harmonic telegraph.” The emperor electrified the crowd when he pressed his ear to Bell’s receiver while the inventor declaimed Hamlet’s soliloquy from some distance away.
“I hear, I hear!” the emperor cried. “To be or not to be!” The incident gave Bell the recognition he sorely needed. Other activities and exhibits at the exposition also portended a strange new future—most notably an internal combustion engine displayed by Langen & Otto of Germany. Perhaps many of the Exhibition’s visitors felt as John Greenleaf Whittier did when he wrote in his “Centennial Hymn”:
Our fathers’ God! from out whose hand
The centuries fall like grains of sand,
We meet to-day, united, free,
And loyal to our land and Thee,
To thank Thee for the era done,
And trust Thee for the opening one.