Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0388/03882.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 22KB | 363 lines

$Unique_ID{COW03882}
$Pretitle{444}
$Title{United States of America
Chapter 6A.   The Era of Expansion and Reform}
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$Author{United States Information Service}
$Affiliation{United States Government}
$Subject{new
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$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 soo