America Aflame (64 page)

Alger's stories resonated because Americans were flush with confidence and enthusiasm after the Civil War. And because there were abundant examples, in the press and in the real world of young men who had risen from modest circumstances to comfortable, if not wealthy, lives. The leading architects of the Republican-inspired economic revolution were themselves products of low beginnings and hard work, not least of whom was Abraham Lincoln. In his December 1861 message to Congress, he outlined the upward mobility available to young American men, “the prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” Americans believed these examples abounded in the postwar nation. Banker Thomas Mellon looked back on this extraordinary time when ordinary people could realistically hope for riches:

It was such a period as seldom occurs, and hardly ever more than once in anyone's lifetime. The period between 1863 and 1873 was one in which it was easy to grow rich. There was a steady increase in the value of property and commodities, and an active market all the time. One had only to buy anything and wait, to sell at a profit; sometimes, as in real estate for instance, at a very large profit in a short time.
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The spirit captured Mark Twain, a fellow not likely to be taken in by pie-in-the-sky promises. On January 12, 1867, a boat carrying Twain maneuvered through the ice of New York Harbor and docked at Castle Garden in the Battery. Twain aimed to take the metropolis by storm. “Make your mark in New York and you are a made man,” he reported back to California. “With a New York endorsement you may travel the country over, without fear—but without it you are speculating up a dangerous issue.”
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Depositing himself at a rooming house on East Sixteenth Street, he immediately took to Broadway on foot, accurately discerning it to be the most efficient mode of travel on this crowded thoroughfare. It was nearly impossible to cross the street. The city erected a cast-iron bridge at Fulton Street so pedestrians could get to the other side of Broadway. The ceaseless energy of the city impressed Twain. “It is hard even for an American to understand this. But it is a toiling, thinking, determined nation, this of ours, and little given to dreaming. Our Alexanders do not sit down and cry because there are no more worlds to conquer, but snatch off their coats and fall to shinning around and raising corn and cotton, and improving sewing machines.”
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Twain set about to attain a cosmopolitan demeanor, though his skepticism and sense of humor often compromised the effort. He took a bride from an abolitionist family, which raised his northern bona fides considerably. He moved to Hartford, a prominent center of publishing and insurance that had grown immensely prosperous from the war as the site of the Colt revolver works and the Sharps rifle factory. Twain, like many other Americans, became a great baseball fan, attending the games of the Hartford Dark Blues of the National Association, the forerunner of the National League. And he counted Harriet Beecher Stowe as his friend and next-door neighbor when she traveled up from Florida. Twain would pad over to Stowe's house several mornings a week to converse and swap off-color jokes. The encounters would drive Twain's wife to tears, not because she was concerned about any improper doings but because Twain went there in his pajamas, something no high-bred New England gentleman would consider when visiting a lady. Stowe did not seem to mind, and Twain made a poor study of Brahmin etiquette anyway. He particularly enjoyed tweaking the local religious establishment, often referring to the Congregational church down the street as “the Church of the Holy Speculators,” again much to his wife's dismay.
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Yet he was not immune to the siren of speculation. Twain was not only a successful author but a wealthy one as well. The reason was the subscription system of publication, headquartered in Hartford. Under the subscription system, a book would not go to press until the publisher's door-to-door salesmen had secured enough advance orders—subscriptions—for the book. The typical reader resided on a farm or in a small town and had relatively little formal education. The book, therefore, had to read easily and provide enough excitement and melodrama to sustain the interest of such an audience. The formula proved successful for Twain, who boasted to his friend and fellow novelist William Dean Howells, “Anything but subscription publishing is printing for private circulation.” Howells retorted, more accurately, “No book of literary quality was made to go by subscription except Mr. Clemens' books, and I think these went because the subscription public never knew what good literature they were.” Nevertheless, subscription publishing flourished as, like other postwar businesses, it rationalized the production and marketing of a commodity, in this case, literature.
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Twain was also America's first national celebrity. Taking advantage of his homespun humor and the rapidly expanding rail network, Twain traveled across the country on the lecture circuit. The lectures resembled stand-up comedy more than erudite ruminations, and audiences loved it. His popularity soared to the point that he even had his own cigar brand. “DON'T FAIL TO SMOKE MARK TWAIN CIGARS,” blared the advertising copy. Like subscription publishing, the lecture circuit became rationalized in the years after the Civil War with the formation of bureaus that booked presentations for an array of worthies, taking 10 percent of the fee. James Redpath, who had fought alongside John Brown in Kansas, headed the most notable of these organizations, the Boston Lyceum Bureau. Popular lecturers could earn five hundred dollars an evening, a significant sum considering that an annual salary of two thousand dollars placed one solidly in the middle class in the late 1860s. Before the Civil War, preachers and intellectuals dominated the lecture circuit, as did the idea that talks should improve listeners' minds and souls. After the war, entertainment and practical information eclipsed spiritual stimulation. Henry Ward Beecher's standard lyceum lecture, “The Ministry of Wealth,” and former abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson's presentation on “The Natural Aristocracy of the Dollar” give an idea of what listeners wanted to hear after the war.
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Twain embraced modern technology as much as he had modern publishing. He was the first resident of Hartford to install a phone in his house, in 1877. In 1874, he spied a “type-machine” in a Boston store window, bought it, and took it back to Hartford. He pecked out “The boy stood on the burning deck” over and over again until he could type twelve words per minute, at which point he figured it was fast enough to write a novel on the machine. Twain turned out
Life on the Mississippi
(1876), the first book ever typed before being sent to the printer.
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Many young men like him were migrating to the great American cities, a fact not lost on Twain. These were the places where imaginations could run free and the possibilities for success seemed boundless. In
The Gilded Age
(1873), a book he wrote with his Hartford neighbor Charles Dudley Warner and which gave its name to the period, Twain described the optimism of these recent urban recruits, himself included: “To the young American … the paths to fortune are innumerable and all open; there is invitation in the air and success in all his wide horizon.” America's Romantic Age was over, or at least it had subsumed itself in the pursuit of wealth. As a character in William Dean Howells's novel
The Rise of Silas Lapham
(1885) put it: “There is no doubt but money is to the fore now. It is the romance, the poetry of our age.” That romance, more than likely, would be requited in the city.
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In 1880, the United States Census Bureau, for the first time in its history, published two supplementary volumes on American cities. The volumes surveyed 222 cities, providing historical, economic, infrastructural, and political details for each. The
Report on the Social Statistics of Cities
also delineated an array of urban problems, but expressed confidence that experts, armed with the bureau's statistics, would find the best scientific solutions. The application of social science methodology to cities would help urban America to become more efficient and rational, just as the natural sciences helped to harness the natural world. If reforms were necessary, social science would enable policy-makers to render informed decisions. Though critics have claimed these early social scientists were oblivious to economic and social misery, they were not opposed to government or private interventions. They argued, rather, for informed and rational decisions based upon verifiable facts, not on emotions or sentiment. This was America's Age of Reason, when faith in science replaced faith in God as the basis for public policy. These attitudes would coalesce by the end of the century into the Progressive movement.
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Chicago and New York were the epicenters of the new urban America. The cities epitomized the energy and confidence of the nation. New York was already America's major city by the time of the Civil War, and it was clear Chicago would become the colossus of the West. The change after the war was primarily in scale, a tremendous horizontal and vertical expansion fueled by unprecedented population and economic growth. More than a hundred thousand people called Chicago home in 1860. The city would grow its population almost fivefold over the next the next two decades. This despite the most destructive fire in American history in 1871, which wiped out more than three square miles of the city and left nearly a hundred thousand people homeless.
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New York's urban landscape grew vertically after the Civil War. The nation's first apartment building erected exclusively for residential use appeared on East Eighteenth Street in New York in 1869. A six-room apartment rented for one hundred dollars a month. Apartment living offered the affluent private living quarters and proximity to work without the burdens of home ownership. The success of the five-story Stuyvesant House touched off a wave of apartment construction in the city. The
New York Times
proclaimed the apartment “a domiciliary revolution.” Structures and flats became ever more luxurious, capped by the Dakota on West Seventy-second Street, which remains an exclusive address today. Boston quickly followed New York's example, and by the late 1870s “miles of new middle-class apartment houses … marched out of Boston in every direction.” These apartments possessed amenities previously available only to the wealthiest: electricity, central heating, and plumbing innovations.
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New York's structural transformation included the incorporation of new and more expensive materials, such as marble, iron, and granite. Commercial buildings boasted these facades of new materials, replacing and supplementing the traditional five- and six-story brownstones that lined Broadway. The nine-story Tribune Building topped off the city's new skyline in 1875, its iron and granite tower a commercial version of a church steeple. Height became more than a practicality in New York and other booming American cities. It conferred status, a confirmation of lofty ambition realized.
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Affluent districts of Chicago and New York were the opulent parlors of America's modern mansion of progress. Pittsburgh was the boiler room, where the initial dirty work of generating wealth and prosperity occurred. This was Andrew Carnegie's domain. The telegraph had fascinated Carnegie during the Civil War. He studied it, left his job at the textile mill, and landed a position as a telegrapher for Tom Scott and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Scott, one of the nation's leading railroad entrepreneurs, mentored the young immigrant, advising him to invest in companies poised to benefit from the nation's growing railroad network. Carnegie followed this advice, using money he borrowed from Scott. He soon received his first dividend check. As he noted in his autobiography, “I shall remember that check as long as I live. It gave me the first penny of revenue from capital—something that I had not worked for with the sweat of my brow. ‘Eureka!' I cried. ‘Here's the goose that lays the golden eggs.'” That goose continued to deliver for Carnegie as he invested in the infant oil industry during the war. Then he returned to Europe. During his tour, he happened upon Henry Bessemer's steel plant in Sheffield, England. When the Grant administration raised the duty on imported steel in 1870, Carnegie seized the opportunity and poured his life savings into the construction of a steel mill outside Pittsburgh.
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Steel and iron works soon lined both banks of the Monongahela, vomiting lurid flames and smoke so dense that black snowflakes filled the air, the eyes, and the mouth. At dusk, the fires from the chimneys illuminated the particles in kaleidoscopic tints of red, purple, pink, and gray. The ships at sea, the locomotives steaming across the Plains, and the skyscrapers and bridges of the great cities began here. Though located at the city's edge, the mills drenched Pittsburgh with their effluvia. Of the city's buildings, an observer wrote, “Whatever their original material and color, [they] are smoked to a uniform, dirty drab.” Of the atmosphere during the day, he noted that “a drab twilight hangs over the town, and the gas-lights which are left burning at mid-day, shine out of the murkiness with a dull-reddish glare.” The sun, when it could be seen, looked “coppery through the sooty haze.” While Thomas Edison worked in his laboratory to turn night into day, the great iron and steel industry of Pittsburgh managed to turn day into night. In either case, man had conquered nature. The first sight of this perpetual twilight on the river usually inspired awe rather than revulsion. A correspondent for
Scientific American
described it as “a scene of variable and indescribable beauty.”
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