$Unique_ID{COW03882} $Pretitle{444} $Title{United States of America Chapter 6A. The Era of Expansion and Reform} $Subtitle{} $Author{United States Information Service} $Affiliation{United States Government} $Subject{new million years states business country united act cities cleveland} $Date{1991} $Log{} Country: United States of America Book: An Outline of American History Author: United States Information Service Affiliation: United States Government Date: 1991 Chapter 6A. The Era of Expansion and Reform "We must abolish everything that bears even the semblance of privilege." Woodrow Wilson Message to Congress, April 8, 1913 Between two great wars-the Civil War and the first World War-the United States of America came of age. In a period of less than 50 years it was transformed from a rural republic to an urban state. The frontier vanished. Great factories and steel mills, transcontinental railroad lines, flourishing cities, vast agricultural holdings marked the land. With these came corresponding evils. Monopolies tended to develop. Working conditions were often poor. Cities grew so quickly they could not properly house or govern their teeming populations. Factory production sometimes outran practical consumption. Reaction against these and other abuses came from the American people and their political leaders-Grover Cleveland, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson. Articulate reformers, idealistic in philosophy but realistic in execution, underscored the need for reform, and the accomplishments of the period did serve effectively to check the wrongs engendered by over-rapid expansion. "The Civil War," says one writer, "cut a wide gash through the history of the country; it dramatized in a stroke the changes that had begun to take place during the preceding 20 or 30 years . . . ." War needs had enormously stimulated manufacturing and had speeded an economic process based on the exploitation of iron, steam, and electric power, and the forward march of science and invention. In the years before 1860, 36,000 patents were granted; in the next 30 years, 440,000 patents were issued, and in the first quarter of the 20th century, the number reached nearly a million. As early as 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse had perfected electrical telegraphy, and soon afterward distant parts of the continent were linked by a network of poles and wires. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell exhibited a telephone instrument and, within half a century, 16 million telephones would quicken the social and economic life of the nation. The growth of business was speeded by the invention of the typewriter in 1867, the adding machine in 1888, and the cash register in 1897. The linotype composing machine, invented in 1886, the rotary press and paper-folding machinery made it possible to print 240,000 eight-page newspapers in an hour. Edison's incandescent lamp lit millions of homes. The talking machine, too, was perfected by Edison, who, in conjunction with George Eastman, also helped develop the motion picture. These and many other applications of science and ingenuity resulted in a new level of productivity in almost every field. Concurrently, the nation's basic industry-iron and steel-was forging ahead, protected by a high tariff. Previously concentrated near deposits in the eastern states, the iron industry moved westward as geologists discovered new ore deposits. Especially notable was the great Mesabi iron range at the head of Lake Superior, which became one of the largest ore producers in the world. The ore lay on the surface of the ground and was easy and cheap to mine. Remarkably free of chemical impurities, it could be processed into steel of superior quality at about one-tenth the previously prevailing cost. Industry Grows Bigger Andrew Carnegie was largely responsible for the great advances in steel production. Coming to America from Scotland as a child of 12, Carnegie progressed from bobbin boy in a cotton factory to a job in a telegraph office, then to one on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Before he was 30 he had made shrewd and farsighted investments, which by 1865 were concentrated in iron. Within a few years, he had organized, or had stock in, companies making iron bridges, rails, and locomotives. Ten years later the steel mill he built on the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania was the largest in the country. Carnegie acquired commanding control not only of new mills, but also of coke and coal properties, iron ore from Lake Superior, a fleet of steamers on the Great Lakes, a port town on Lake Erie, and a connecting railroad. His business, allied with a dozen others, could command favorable terms from railroads and shipping lines. His resources sufficed amply for a vast expansion of plants and labor. Nothing comparable in industrial growth had ever been seen in America before. Yet though Carnegie long dominated the industry, he never achieved a complete monopoly over the natural resources, transportation, and industrial plants involved in the making of steel. In the 1890s, new companies challenged his pre-eminence, and at first, stung by competition, Carnegie threatened to build an even more powerful business complex. But now, a tired old man, he was persuaded to merge his holdings with an organization that eventually would embrace most of the important iron and steel properties in the nation. The United States Steel Corporation, which resulted from this merger in 1901, illustrated a process under way for 30 years: the combination of independent industrial enterprises into federated or centralized companies. Begun during the Civil War, the trend gathered momentum after the 1870s, as businessmen realized that if they could bring competing firms into a single organization, they could control both production and markets. The "corporation" and the "trust" were developed to achieve these ends. Corporations, making available a deep reservoir of capital and giving business enterprises permanent life and continuity of control, attracted investors both by the profits anticipated and by the limited liability in case of business failure. In their turn, the trusts, which were in effect combinations of corporations whereby the stockholders of each placed their stocks in the hands of trustees who managed the business of all, made possible large-scale combinations, centralized control and administration, and the pooling of patents. Their larger capital resources provided greater power to expand, to compete with foreign business organizations, and to drive hard bargains with labor, which was beginning to organize effectively. They could also exact favorable terms from railroads and exercise influence in politics. The Standard Oil Company, one of the earliest and strongest corporations, was followed rapidly by other combinations-in cottonseed oil, lead, sugar, tobacco, and rubber. Soon aggressive individual businessmen began to mark out industrial domains for themselves. Four great meat packers, chief among them Philip Armour and Gustavus Swift, established a beef trust. The McCormicks achieved pre-eminence in the reaper business. A 1904 survey showed that more than 5,000 previously independent concerns had been consolidated into some 300 industrial trusts. The trend toward amalgamation was manifest in other fields, particularly in transportation and communications. Western Union, earliest of the large communications combinations, was followed by the Bell Telephone System and eventually by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had seen that efficient railroading required unification, in the 1860s consolidated some 13 separate railroads into a single line connecting New York City and Buffalo, nearly 380 kilometers away. During the next decade he acquired lines to Chicago and Detroit, and the New York Central System came into being. Other consolidations were already under way, and soon the major railroads of the nation were organized into trunk lines and "systems" directed by a handful of men. Cities and Problems Multiply In this new industrial order, the city was the nerve center, bringing to a focus all the dynamic economic forces: vast accumulations of capital, business and financial institutions, spreading railroad yards, smoky factories, and armies of manual and clerical workers. Villages, attracting people from the countryside and from lands across the sea, grew into towns and towns into cities almost overnight. In 1830, only one of every 15 persons lived in communities of 8,000 or over; in 1860, the ratio was nearly one in every six; and in 1890, three in every 10. No single city had as many as a million inhabitants in 1860, but 30 years later New York had a million and a half, and Chicago and Philadelphia each had over a million. In these three decades, Philadelphia and Baltimore doubled in population, Kansas City and Detroit grew fourfold, Cleveland sixfold, Chicago tenfold. Minneapolis, Omaha, and many communities like them-hamlets when the Civil War began-increased 50 times or more in population. Grover Cleveland, a Democrat elected to the Presidency in 1884, understood the forces that were transforming the country and made some effort to control them. Several railroad abuses demanded redress. The practice of extending cheaper rates to large shippers by rebating a portion of the charge, operated to the disadvantage of small shippers. Also, some railroads charged arbitrarily higher rates to some shippers than to others between certain points, irrespective of distance. Moreover, while competition held down freight charges between cities with several rail connections, rates were excessive between points served by only one line. Thus it cost less to ship goods 1,280 kilometers from Chicago to New York than to places a few hundred kilometers from Chicago. And by joint action to avoid competition-pooling-rival companies divided the freight business according to a prearranged scheme that placed the total earnings in a common fund for distribution. Popular resentment at these practices stimulated state efforts at regulation. These had some salutary effect, but the problem was national in character and demanded congressional action. In 1887, President Cleveland signed the Interstate Commerce Act, which forbade excessive charges, pools, rebates, and rate discrimination, and created an Interstate Commerce Commission to guard against violations of the act and to regulate railroad charges and practices. Cleveland was also active in combatting the high tariff, which, adopted originally as an emergency war measure, had come to be accepted as permanent national policy. Cleveland regarded this as responsible, in large measure, for a burdensome increase in the cost of living and for the rapid development of trusts. After many years, during which the tariff had not been a political issue, the Democrats, in 1880, demanded a "tariff for revenue only," and soon the clamor for reform became insistent. In this annual message in 1887, Cleveland, despite warnings to avoid the explosive subject, startled the nation by denouncing the extremes to which the principle of protecting American industry from foreign competition had been pushed. The tariff became the issue of the next presidential election campaign, and the Republican candidate, Benjamin Harrison, defending protectionism, won. The Harrison Administration, fulfilling its campaign promises, passed in 1890 the McKinley tariff bill, a measure designed not only to protect established industries but also to foster infant industries and, by prohibitory duties, to create new ones. The new tariff's generally high rates were shortly reflected in high retail prices, and before long there was widespread dissatisfaction. During this period, public antipathy toward the trusts increased, and the gigantic corporations, subjected to bitter attack through the 1880s by such reformers as Henry George and Edward Bellamy, became a hotly debated political issue. To break the monopolies, the Sherman Antitrust Act, passed in 1890, forbade all combinations in restraint of interstate trade and provided several methods of enforcement with severe penalties. Couched in vague generalities, the law itself accomplished little immediately after its passage. But a decade later, in the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, its effective application earned the President the nickname of "trust-buster." Despite these significant trends, the political picture of the period was largely negative. One distinguished historian has written: "Between 1865 and 1897 there were put upon the federal law books not more than two or three acts which need long detain the citizen concerned only with those manifestations of political power that produce essential readjustments in human relations." The vitality of the people was directed elsewhere, as most clearly reflected in the history of the west. In 1865 the frontier line followed generally the western limits of the states bordering the Mississippi River, bulging outward to include the eastern sections of Kansas and Nebraska. Behind this thin edge of pioneer farms there was still much unoccupied land, and beyond that stretched the unfenced prairies, merging finally in the sagebrush plains that extended to the foothills of the Rockies. Then, for nearly 1,600 kilometers, loomed the huge bulk of mountain ranges, many richly stored with silver, gold, and other metals. On the far side, untouched plains and deserts stretched to the wooded coastal ranges and the Pacific Ocean. Apart from the settled districts in California and scattered outposts, the vast inland region was peopled only by Indians. Opportunities Open in the West A mere quarter-century later, virtually all the country had been carved into states and territories. Settlement was spurred by the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted free farms of 64 hectares to citizens who would occupy and improve the land. By 1880 the Act had placed nearly 22,400,000 hectares into private hands. Conflicts with the Indians had come to an end. Miners had ranged over the whole of the mountain country, tunneling into the earth, establishing little communities in Nevada, Montana, and Colorado. Cattlemen, taking advantage of the enormous grasslands, had laid claim to the huge expanse stretching from Texas to the upper Missouri River. Sheepmen, too, had found their way to the valleys and mountain slopes. Farmers swarmed into the plains and valleys and closed the gap between the east and west. By 1890, the frontier had disappeared. Five or six million men and women now farmed where buffalo had roamed only two decades before. Speeding this settlement were the railroads. In 1862, Congress voted a charter to the Union Pacific Railroad, which pushed westward from Council Bluffs, Iowa. At the same time, the Central Pacific began to build eastward from Sacramento, California. The whole country was stirred as the two lines steadily approached each other, finally meeting on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point in Utah. The months of laborious travel hitherto separating the two oceans was now cut to a fraction of that time. The continental rail network grew steadily, and by 1884 four great lines linked the central Mississippi Valley area with the Pacific. The first great rush of population to the far west was drawn to the mountainous regions, where gold was found in California in 1848, in Colorado and Nevada 10 years later, in Montana and Wyoming in the 1860s, and in the Black Hills of the Dakota country in the 1870s. Miners opened up the country, established communities, and laid the foundations for more permanent settlements. Yet even while digging in the hills, some settlers perceived the region's farming and stock-raising possibilities. Eventually, though a few communities continued to be devoted almost exclusively to mining, the real wealth of Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and California proved to be in the grass and soil. Cattle-raising, long an important industry in Texas, became even more flourishing after the war, when enterprising men began to drive their Texas longhorns north across the open public domain. Feeding as they went, the cattle arrived at railway shipping points in Kansas, larger and fatter than when they started. Soon this "long drive" became a regular event, and, for hundreds of kilometers, trails were dotted with herds of cattle moving northward. Cattle-raising spread into the trans-Missouri region, and immense ranches appeared in Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakota territory. Western cities flourished as centers for the slaughter and dressing of meat. Ranching introduced a colorful mode of existence with the picturesque cowboy as its central figure. "We led a free and hardy life with horse and with rifle," wrote Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-fifth President of the United States, in reminiscence of his own experiences in Dakota. "We worked under the scorching midsummer sun when the wide plains shimmered and wavered in the heat; and we knew the freezing misery of riding night guard round the cattle in the late fall roundup .... But we felt the beat of hardy life in our veins and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living." Altogether, between 1866 and 1888, some six million head of cattle were driven up from Texas to winter on the high plains of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. The cattle boom reached its height by 1885, then the range became too heavily pastured to support the long drive, and was beginning to be criss-crossed by railroads. Not far behind the rancher creaked the prairie schooners of the farmers bringing their families, their draft horses, cows, and pigs. Under the Homestead Act they staked their claims and fenced them with barbed wire. Ranchmen were ousted from lands they had roamed without legal title. Soon the romantic "wild west" had ceased to be. Machines and Science Help Farmers Despite the great gains in industry, agriculture remained the nation's basic occupation. The revolution in agriculture-paralleling that in manufacturing after the war-involved a shift from hand labor to machine farming, and from subsistence to commercial agriculture. Between 1860 and 1910, the number of farms in the United States trebled, increasing from 2 million to 6 million while the area framed more than doubled from 160 million to 352 million hectares. Between 1860 and 1890, the production of such basic commodities as wheat, corn, and cotton outstripped all previous figures in the United States. In the same period, the nation's population more than doubled, with largest growth in the cities. But the American farmer grew enough grain and cotton, raised enough beef and pork, and clipped enough wool not only to supply American workers and their families but also to create ever-increasing surpluses. Several factors accounted for this extraordinary achievement. One was the expansion into the west. Another was the application of machinery to farming. The farmer of 1800, using a hand sickle, could hope to cut a fifth of a hectare of wheat a day. With the cradle, 30 years later, he might cut eight-tenths of a hectare a day. In 1840, Cyrus McCormick performed a miracle by cutting from two to two-and-a-half hectares a day with the curious machine he had been developing for nearly 10 years. Foreseeing the demand, he headed west to the young prairie town of Chicago, where he set up a reaper factory and by 1860 sold a quarter of a million reapers. Other farm machines were developed in rapid succession: the automatic wire binder, the threshing machine, the reaper thresher or combine. Mechanical planters, cutters, huskers, and shellers appeared, as did cream separators, manure spreaders, potato planters, may driers, poultry incubators, and a hundred other inventions. Scarcely less important than machinery in the agricultural revolution was science. In 1862, the Morrill Land-Grant College Act allotted public land to each state for the establishment of agricultural and industrial colleges. These were to serve both as educational institutions and as centers for research in scientific farming. Congress subsequently appropriated funds for the creation of agricultural experiment stations throughout the country and also granted funds directly to the Department of Agriculture for research purposes. By the beginning of the new century, scientists throughout the land were at work on a wide variety of agricultural projects. One of these scientists, Mark Carleton, traveled for the Department of Agriculture to Russia. There he found and exported to his homeland the rust-and-drought -resistant winter wheat that now accounts for more than half the United States wheat crop. Another scientist, Marion Dorset, conquered the dread hog cholera, while still another, George Mohler, helped conquer hoof-and-mouth disease. From North Africa, one researcher brought back Kaffir corn; from Turkestan, another imported the yellow-flowering alfalfa. Luther Burbank, in California, produced scores of new fruits and vegetables; in Wisconsin, Stephen Babcock devised a test for determining the butter-fat content of milk; at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the great black scientist George Washington Carver found hundreds of new uses for the peanut, sweet potato, and soybean.