Americas Rise to Industrial Power

Americas Rise to Industrial Power

From reconstruction to the onset of the Progressive Era, the United States vastly transformed itself. Slaves were freed, although many of them continued to live austere lives under the sharecropping system. The Railroad and new farm technologies revolutionized trade and commerce, creating more efficient markets, but dangerously top-heavy and centralized ones as well. And the rise of increasingly clever advertising techniques helped companies to attract customers, while also risking their alienation and stoking their mistrust. Mark Twain called this time period the Gilded Age, for its veneer of prosperity, but jugular of suffering and exploitation. It represents one of the most dynamic, and perhaps even most definitively American, decades in the county's history.

The thirty five-years, from the Civil War's end until the end of the First World War, saw the United States race from a war torn nation to a foremost global power broker.

Not only was the U.S. recovering from a very bloody war, but, also, from the loss of a divisive, but respected President in Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was an innovative President, just as the many inventors who would rise to prominence after his death. Lincoln also foresaw what the future held: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

The hyper-industrialization that took place after the war emphasized the development of railroads, steel mills, and oil fields.

In fact, at the turn of the twentieth century, Los Angeles was a huge oil producing region, a la Saudi Arabia, and would give rise to "car culture" at the turn of the twentieth century.

Some of the most recognizable names in U.S. history hail from the second half of the nineteenth century: Edison, Bell, Westinghouse, Wright, and Pullman.

1865-1900 was a period of very rapid change, including the widespread introduction of the sharecropping system in the south, a legal, economic arrangement very similar to the pre-emancipation slave system. In it, the sharecroppers tilled a section of the plantation, typically growing cotton, tobacco, rice, and other cash crops and received a small portion of the plot's yield.

The efforts to circumvent the rights gained for blacks during the preceding decades were quite successful, and the country was to be segregated for another one-hundred years. The fourteenth amendment, originally drafted to give blacks more rights, was eventually used by the Supreme Court to imbue corporations with more rights.

As Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner referred to it in a book of the same name, it was The Gilded Age: a booming exterior only covered the devastated undertow.

Still, industrial and political elites in both the north and south organized the largest streak of economic growth in human history, albeit amidst an astonishing culture of corruption.

Extraordinary wealth lay in the hands of very few individuals, who drove the policy of major industries and finance, but, also, politics itself. The laborers these men used came from a number of different backgrounds: black, white, Chinese, European immigrants, and female. The Chinese were a source of opium on the west, in cities such as San Francisco. This was, after all, the time of the Opium Wars.

During the period between the Civil War and 1900, no longer was human muscle the keystone of production. Rather, steam and electricity dominated, as iron replaced wood, and steel replaced iron, although this did not necessarily make things easier for workers. In this period, oil began to light homes, streets and factories.

By 1900, there were 193,000 miles of railroad, and so railroad transported people and goods. The telephone, typewriter, and the adding machine made business more efficient. The impact of steam on industry could be felt from textile mills to sewing machines.

The machines of the latter half of the nineteenth century reshaped farming and agriculture. Whereas pre-Civil War an acre of wheat required 61 hours to be produced, by 1900 it took just 3 hours and 19 minutes. Manufactured ice allowed for the transport of food over long distances, giving rise to the industry of meatpacking.

Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, would reveal meatpacking factories as dangerous and disease-ridden workplaces at the onset of the following century. Upgrades in coal drilling meant that, while in 1860, 14 million tons of coal was mined, in 1884 it was 100 million tons.

The Gilded Age saw a boom in technology. People like Cyrus McCormick, the creator of the reaper which meant quicker and cheaper grain harvesting, and John Deer, whose steel plow slightly pre-dated the Gilded Age, in 1837, sped up the Midwest's production. The inventions of the time changed the fabric of society forever. In 1876, Alexander Bell invented the telephone.

Thomas Edison began the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City, financed in part by J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt family. In 1879, Edison tested a carbon filament light bulb that lasted 40 hours. He filed for patent later that year. With the patent for electricity distribution, Edison was able to capitalize on his invention.

Mark Twain, "the father of American literature," also lived during this time.

As the west was populated, more than 400 million acres of new land were made available to cultivation. Between 1870 and 1910, due to new farming techniques and agricultural mechanization, the number of Americans who farmed fell by a third. One way in which this is demonstrated is by the growth of the cities during this time. The growth of the city is a significant part of the Industrial Revolution. This rise of technology and fall in the number of farmers made more efficient all related processes. To be sure, this did not always benefit the worker. For instance, while in 1866 wheat farmers yielded 9.9 bushels per acre, by 1898 the yields had increased to 15.3 bushels per acre.

Those farmers who could not afford the new machinery or pay the rates for the railroad were forced to move to the cities. In the years between 1860 and 1914, New York's population boomed from 850,000 to 4 million; Chicago's from 110,000 to 2 million; Philadelphia's from 650,000 to 1.5 million. One novel of the time read: "I see a time when the farmer will not need to live in a cabin on a lonely farm. I see the farmers coming together in groups. I see them with time to read, and time to visit with their fellows."

With a depression at the end of the century, this man's dream came true -- although not as he would have liked.

The increase in people living the cities led to issues such as overcrowding and disease.

The prosperity during this time would have been impossible without innovative inventors, astute organizers and administrators for new types of corporations, a rich land-base, and lots of labor.

During this period, immigrants from Europe and China helped to complete the workforce. Chinamen faced difficult times on the west, where they were confronted with racism and desperate work prospects and working conditions.

Clearly, despite the unparalleled wealth creation, it was a costly time for workers. For each mile of railroad built, each ton of coal or iron ore mined, thousands of them died.

The Interstate Commerce Act of 1877 was intended to regulate the railroads on behalf of patrons. "From a railroad point-of-view," one lawyer explained: "The Commission…is or can be made of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that that supervision is almost entirely nominal…"

It is this sort of cunning which earned Wall Street the reputation of showcasing a dark brilliance.

The Central Pacific railroad started on the West Coast headed east. $200,000 dollars in bribes in Washington were needed to acquire the nine million acres of free land and $24 million in government bonds. The construction was carried out, over four years, by three thousand Irish and ten thousand Chinese. The wages were one to two dollars a day. The Union Pacific had received 12 million acres and $27 million in bonds. Both railroads were built along longer, non-sensible routes, in order to gain subsidies from the towns they passed through. Railroad construction was a costly endeavor.

The fraud of the railroads meant more control of the railroad finances by bankers. By the 1890's, the lion's share of the railroad was concentrated into six large organizations Four of these were under the partial or full control of the House of Morgan, and two other by the bankers Kuhn, Loeb, and Company. J.P Morgan linked railroads to railroads, the railroads to banks, and the banks to insurance companies. By 1900, he held 100,000 miles of railroad; that is, half of the country's mileage.

Having started as a bookkeeper in Cleveland, John D. Rockefeller accumulated money while being a merchant, and then bought his first oil refinery in 1862. By 1870 he had started Standard Oil Company of Ohio. His secret agreements with railroads allowed him to ship his oil with rebates and discounts, thusly driving competitors out of business. By 1899, The Standard Oil Company, acting as a holding company, controlled the stock of many companies, with $110 million in capital, and $45 million in profit a year. John D. Rockefeller's fortune was estimated at $200 million.

It is not an unusual tale, the one in which clever businessmen built empires by mercilessly defeating competition, keeping prices high and wages low, and using government subsidies. At the turn of the century, American Telephone and Telegraph had a monopoly over the nation's telephone system, and International harvester made 85% of all farm machinery. The banks had interests tied up in many of these monopolies. This created an interwoven network with overlapping, and powerful, corporate directors, each of whom sat on the boards of many corporations other than their own.

A Senate report in the early twentieth century revealed that Morgan, at his peak of power, sat on the board of forty-eight different corporations, and Rockefeller thirty-seven corporations.

During this rise of big business in the post-war years, commerce and newspapers got back on track, and by the 20th century, many advertising agencies were conducting business in cities across the United States.

Corporations benefited greatly from the advent of advertisements, which, in the first 20 years of the next century, would evolve into "public relations," one of the most important industries in business. This process marked an end to direct sales and the onset of mass-communicating advertising.

In the 1890's, advertisements featuring a central catchy phrase or slogan came into widespread use. For example, Kodak advertised its camera with the phrase: "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest." Some slogans were so catchy, they became familiar by most within the culture; for example, "leggo my eggo." In the nineteenth century, customers bought generic sugar, rice, coffee, molasses, salt, and other products in stores. Packaged goods, however, transformed marketing, for rice, coffee and other products now had brand names, which had a significant role in giving commodities personalities and meanings. Exaggerated, romantic images of beautiful people in a serene world were used to sell products. By the turn of the century, to be sure, many people in the United States had grown weary of such advertising techniques.

While the government attempted to appear neutral, its policies greatly benefited the rich, whether it was passing legislation to enable corporations to exist in multiple states at once or in the form of massive land subsidies to few corporations for the railroad. The irrelevance of the two-party system was made obvious when, in 1877, the Democrats and Republicans arranged to elect Rutherford Hayes. No matter which party was elected, national policy would not change in any significant way.

In 1844, when Grover Cleveland was elected president, he assured industrialists: "No harm shall come to any business interest as the result of administrative policy so long as I am President…a transfer of executive control from one party to another does not mean any serious disturbance in existing conditions." Despite past subsidies to corporations, Cleveland refused to provide relief to Texas farmers to help them purchase grain during a drought. In the same year, Cleveland used his surplus of gold to pay wealthy bondholders at $28 dollars above the $100 value of each bond, representing a gift of $45 million.

The spread of education during this period meant the proliferation of literate workers, both skilled and semiskilled. In the middle and late nineteenth century, high schools aided the industrial system. History, for example, was used to encourage patriotism. The educational and political demeanor of the teachers was controlled by loyalty oaths, teacher certification, and the requirement of citizenship. School officials, furthermore, controlled what textbooks were used -- and not the teachers.

It is during this period when the factory like nature of the classroom revealed itself fully. Many commentators of the time noticed how unenthusiastic were the schoolchildren, and stern were the teachers.

Despite the rise of education system designed to stabilize the industrial system as it evolved, large workers movements, which typically interrupted the industrial system, swept the country in the 1880's and 1890's, at a time when European immigrants were coming to the country at rates higher than ever. A severe depression, in 1893, caused elites to look overseas to battle the problem of under-consumption at home. A populist movement at the time tried to forge a new and independent culture for the nation's farmers.

The Farmer is a man the farmer is the man lives on credit till the fall with the interest rates so high it is a wonder he don't die and the mortgage man's the one who gets it all.

At the height of the 1877 depression, a "farmers alliance" began on a farm in Texas. It took only a few years for it to spread across the state, and by 1886, 100,000 farmers had joined in two thousand suiballiances. They had alternatives to the old way of doing things: join the alliance and form cooperatives; buy things together and get lower prices. In order to keep up with the pace of change, farmers had to borrow money, with the hope the prices of their harvest would stay high.