Industrialization After U.S. Civil War American Industrialization

Industrialization after U.S. Civil War

AMERICAN INDUSTRIALIZATION AFTER THE U.S. CIVIL WAR (1865-1920)

It is a truism that large-scale warfare tends to increase industrial production and innovation, and that societies benefit from this industrialization after the war is over. In America, the Civil War was followed by the economic prosperity of the Gilded Age -- I would like to argue that the chief effect of this prosperity was to cause new conflicts in American society, which had to be settled by reform rather than Civil War. This is in some ways a counterintuitive argument, when in 2014 many have been conditioned to believe that a prosperous economy benefits everyone, when (in the words of the old cliche) a rising tide lifts all boats. But did the booming economy of America between the end of the Civil War and the onset of the First World War actually benefit child laborers or former slaves? Was it even a booming economy or was it the sort of false facade of prosperity that we are familiar from the moments before the 2008 economic crisis? A closer examination of the period following the civil war -- with a focus on exploitative labor practices, economic inequality, and economic instability -- will demonstrate that the Gilded Age actually increased societal conflict, and led to further problems that would have to be solved later.

An increase in industrial production necessarily requires an increase in the labor force. But America in the nineteenth century had very different ideas in what constituted fair or acceptable treatment for the labor force. The most obvious way in which to observe this would be in the permissibility of child labor. American culture was fascinated by child labor in the period immediately following the Civil War, as can be seen in the unbelievable popularity of Horatio Alger's novels in this period, beginning with the publication of Ragged Dick in 1867 and surviving Alger's death in 1899. Alger's novels all basically had the same plot, which is described as "rags to riches" -- a young person, usually a poor orphan, begins work at the most menial occupation but manages to rise to bourgeois respectability through hard work and virtuous behavior. Ragged Dick himself shines the shoes of wealthy businessmen, who offer him platitudes like this, in the novel's eleventh chapter:

"I believe he is a good boy," said Mr. Whitney. "I hope, my lad, you will prosper and rise in the world. You know in this free country poverty in early life is no bar to a man's advancement. I haven't risen very high myself," he added, with a smile, "but have met with moderate success in life; yet there was a time when I was as poor as you." (Alger, XI)

I adduce Horatio Alger's novels to suggest what the official public mythology was concerning child labor: that it was the only way to "rise in the world." But like all mythology, these stories had no real basis in reality: the purpose that these stories served was to dull the public's sensitivity to what was an appalling condition for children forced into work. However, the reality was difficult to ignore. The general attitude of the public by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was summarized succinctly by the Christian Socialist poet Sarah Cleghorn, who summed up attitudes against child labor in a four-line poem, usually entitled "The Golf Links":

The golf links lie so near the mill

That almost every day

The laboring children can look out

And see the men at play. (Cleghorn, 1916)

What is crucial to understand about this poem is that it describes a golf course, which is the emblem not of prosperous men hard at work in factories, but of men whose prosperity has permitted them to become a leisure class and engage in the ostentatious waste of time and arable land which we call "golf." Cleghorn's poem highlights the issue of economic inequality, to which I will return later. For now it is enough to note that by the early twentieth century child labor had become a focal point for reformers, and was emphasized by Theodore Roosevelt himself in his 1910 "New Nationalism" speech:

Roosevelt…pressed for new laws regulating child labor and women's work, enforcing better working conditions, and providing vocational training. 'No matter how honest and decent we are in our private lives,' he concluded, 'if we do not have the right kind of law and the right kind of administration of the law, we cannot go forward as a nation.' (Goodwin 644)