American Experiment (170 page)

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.

S
NORTING AND BAWLING, THEIR
beady eyes glittering with fear, the cattle were driven out of the railroad cars by men with spiked poles and prodded down wooden ramps into the Chicago stockyards. Other men on horses herded the steers to pens that lay along alleys and streets, in blocks as regular as in the best-laid-out town. All was meticulously organized. Cowboys in the western ranges had rounded up their stock and driven them to towns like Abilene and Kansas City, Atchison and Hannibal, where they had been loaded into stockcars. Despite the length and frequent heat of the journey, stockmen usually delivered the cattle in good shape, since five dollars a head could be deducted for sick or damaged steers. Daily, the stockcars also disgorged thousands of hogs and sheep. They took their own places in pens that covered hundreds of acres on Chicago’s west side.

After traders on horseback, trotting from pen to pen, bought and sold the stock, sealing their oral deals with quick handshakes, the beasts were driven into the nearby slaughterhouses. Here they were surveyed—“laid off like a map”—and delivered to the “chain.” Workers hoisted them by nose or feet to an overhead belt, which moved them steadily and inexorably to other men with knives who slit their throats and sliced off their skin, men who bashed their brains in with hammers, men who cleaved backbones with axes, men who sometimes plunged a still palpitating carcass into a vat of boiling water. “Everything of the pig was used except the squeal,” a meat packer boasted. A Chicago humorist noted, “A cow goes lowin’ softly in to Armour’s an’ comes out glue, gelatine, fertylizer, celoo-loid, joolry, sofy cushions, hair restorer, washin’ sody, littrachoor an’ bed springs so quick that while aft she’s still cow, for’ard she may be anything fr’m buttons to pannyma hats.”

The workers—Poles, Germans, Slovaks, Irishmen—with their special tasks and chainlike organization were as regimented as the beasts. Signs in several languages enforced the rules. But this did not keep them from having fingers or hands sliced off as they grappled with carcasses and cutting machines on blood-soaked sawdust floors. Workers were often left with tubercular lungs, rheumatic bodies, hands scarred from the acid used to loosen wool from the skins of sheep.

This scene in the Chicago stockyards would not have surprised Karl Marx. In the late 1880s, the first English translations of the first volume of
Capital,
edited by Friedrich Engels, were reaching radical circles in the United States. Under capitalism, Marx had written, “all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy any remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange him from the intellectual potentials of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his lifetime into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital.…”

“Capital is dead labour,” Marx had written, “that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Marx’s passions seemed to rise as he wrote. “You rob me,” he had the worker telling his boss, “every day of 2/3 of the value of my commodity…. You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and in the odour of sanctity to boot; but the thing that you represent face to face with me has no heart in its breast.” Labor was hardly above the level of cattle, Marx implied; indeed, cattle had perhaps a higher status for, in its fattening, cattle was a raw material and at the same time a means of producing manure.

Industrial labor under capitalism, Marx contended, was degraded into the status of a commodity, transformed into the cog of a machine, converted into an urban proletariat. This was its tragedy, but in this also lay its great potential for liberation. Labor’s common status at the bottom of the heap, its sharing of work experiences, its proletarianization, established a solid foundation for a common consciousness of its status, for united protest, for joint political action. Did American workers have such a potential? Marx lived in a city where in 1880, for example, “63 of every 100 Londoners were native to that city, 94 coming from England and Wales, and 98 from Great Britain and Ireland,” according to Herbert Gutman, while in the same year the vast majority of the persons living in America’s biggest cities were immigrants or the children of immigrants.

For that matter did the United States, with its capitalists concentrated not in one center like London but spread out in old and new industrial and financial centers across the country, possess even the potential for a “ruling class”?

About three miles from the noisome stockyards, Philip D. Armour rose every morning at five in his home on fashionable Prairie Avenue, breakfasted at six, and soon, seated in his Goddard buggy drawn by two fast trotters and driven by a liveried coachman, he was on his way to his LaSalle Street office. He liked to get down to work, he would say, “before the boys with the polished nails show up.” Soon the place was a beehive of activity, as Armour leaned back in his swivel chair summoning messenger boys, sending out telegraphic instructions to distant posts in his business empire, talking and moralizing at length to his associates. At six, no matter what business lay before him, he left for home and by nine was in bed.

One of six sons of New Englanders who had settled in the Mohawk Valley, Armour had traveled overland to California, panned gold and built sluices in the Sacramento River, returned home with several thousand dollars, and then had gone west again, plunging into the soap business in Cincinnati, selling hides in St. Paul, and moving on to grain dealing and meat packing in Milwaukee. During the Civil War, he made at least $2 million by agreeing to deliver, for $30 to $40 a barrel, pork that he was able to buy for $18 through a shrewd estimate of the likely fall of pork prices in the wake of Union victories. Soon he moved to Chicago, which had replaced Cincinnati as the pork-packing center of the nation. There, he pioneered in bringing live hogs to the city, slaughtering them, using the waste products, and refrigerating his shipments.