Industry Comes of Age1865-1900

Chapter 24

Spanning the Continent with RailsRail laying at the California end was undertaken by the

Central Pacific Railroad.The Central Pacific, which was granted the same

princely subsidies as the Union Pacific, had the same incentive to haste.

Some 10 thousand Chinese laborers, sweating from dawn to dusk under their basket hats, proved to be cheap, efficient, and expandable (hundreds lost their lives in premature explosions and other mishaps).

A “wedding of the rails” was finally consummated near Ogden, Utah, in 1869, as 2 locomotives– “facing on a single track, half a world behind each back”– gently kissed cowcatchers.

Binding the Country with Railroad TiesThe Northern Pacific Railroad, stretching from Lake

Superior to Puget Sound, reached its terminus in 1883.The last spike of the last of the 5 transcontinental

railroads of the 19th century was hammered home in 1893.

Yet the romance of the rails was not without its sordid side.

Pioneer builders were often guilty of gross over optimism. Avidly seeking bounties and pushing into areas that lacked enough potential population to support a railroad, they sometimes laid down rails that led “from nowhere to nothing.”

Railroad Consolidation and MechanizationThe genius in this enterprise was “Commodore” Cornelius

Vanderbilt– burly, boisterous, white-whiskered.Having made his millions in steam boating, he daringly

turned, in his late 60s, to a new career in railroading. Though ill-educated, ungrammatical.

The Westinghouse air brake, contribution to efficiency and safety.

The Pullman Palace Cars, advertised as “gorgeous traveling hotels,” were introduced on a considerable scale in the 1860s.

Swaying kerosene lampsAppalling accidents continued to be almost daily tragedies,

despite safety devices like the telegraph (“talking wires”), double-tracking, and (later) the block signal.

Revolution by RailwaysMore than any other signal factor, the railroads

network spurred the amazing economic growth of the post-Civil War years. By stitching North America together from ocean to ocean.

The forgoing of the rails themselves generated the largest single source of orders for the adolescent steel industry.

Railways were a boon for cities and played a leading role in the great city ward movement of the last decades of the century.

Railroad companies also stimulated the mighty stream of immigration.

The land also felt the impact of the railroad.

On the short grass prairies of the high plains in the Dakotas and Montana, range-fed cattle rapidly displaced the buffalo, which were hunted to near-extinction .

The major rail lines decreed that the continent would henceforth be divided into 4 “time zones.”

The railroad, more than any other single factor, was the maker of millionaires.

Wrongdoing in RailroadingCorruption lurks nearby when fabulous

fortunes can materialize overnight.“Stock Watering.” The term originally referred

to the practice of making cattle thirsty by feeding them salt and then having them bloat themselves with water before they were weighed in for sale. Using a variation of this technique, railroad stock promoters grossly inflated their claims about a given line’s assets and profitability and sold stocks and bonds far in excess of the railroad’s actual value.

While abusing the public, the railroaders blandly bought and sold people in public life. They bribed judges and legislatures, employed arm-twisting lobbyists, and elected their own “creatures” to high office.

Railroads king were, for a time, virtual industrial monarchs.

The earliest form of combination was the “pool”– an agreement to divide the business in a given area and share the profits.

Other rail barons granted secret rebates and or kickbacks to powerful shippers in return for steady and assured traffic.

Government Bridles the Iron HorseThe scattered state efforts screeched to a halt in 1886.The Supreme Court, in the famed Wabash, St. Louis &

Pacific Railroad Company v. Illinois case, decreed that individual states had no power to regulate interstate commerce.

But Congress ignored his grumbling indifference and passed the epochal Interstate Commerce Act in 1887. It prohibited rebates and pools and required the railroads to publish their rates openly.

Most important, it set up the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to administer and enforce the new legislation.

What the new legislation did do was to provide an orderly forum where competing business interests could resolve their conflicts in peaceable ways.

The Interstate Commerce Act tended to stabilize, not revolutionize, the existing business system.

Yet the act still ranks as a red-letter law. It was the 1st large-scale attempt by

Washington to regulate business in the interest of society at large.

Miracles of MechanizationInnovations in transportation fueled growth,

too, by bringing the nation’s amazingly abundant natural resources– particularly coal, oil, and iron– to the factory door.

A shipping system through the Great Lakes carried the rich iron deposits in the Mesabi Range of Minnesota to Chicago to Cleveland for refining.

The sheer size of the American market encouraged innovators to invent mass-production methods.

The captions of industry had a major incentive to invent machines: they made it possible to replace expensive skilled labor with unskilled workers, now cheap and plentiful as a result of massive immigration.

Gospel wealth

Sherman Anti Trust Act

Unions there is strength

Knights of Labor

Haymarket Square

AFL

The Middle-Class ImpulseIn 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr

established Hull House on Chicago’s West Side.

At the Henry Street Settlement in New York, Lillian Wald made the provision of visiting nurses a major service.

Mary McDowell, head of the University of Chicago Settlement, installed a bathhouse, a children’s playground, and a citizenship school for immigrants.

In a famous essay, she spoke of the “subjective necessity” of the settlement house.

The Protestant clergy itself struggled with there issues, translating a long-felt concern for the poor into a theological doctrine: the Social Gospel.

Addams was a daughter of the middle-class.

Progressive IdeasIf the facts were known, everything else was possible.

That was the starting point for progressive thinking.Rejecting the pursuit of absolute truths, William James

advocated instead a philosophy he called pragmatism, which judged ideas by their consequences.

Progressives were drawn to scientific management, which had originally been intended to waste in municipal government, schools, and hospitals and even at home.

Scientific management was an American invention.Since the 1870s, Americans had flocked to German

universities, absorbing the economics and political science that became key tools of progressive reform.

One such principle was liberty of contract, which the Supreme Court invoked in Lochner v. New York(1905) to strike down a state law limiting the hours of the bakers.

The Court contended that it was protecting the liberty of the bakers.

Muckraker

Women ProgressivesJane Addams did not regard Hull House as a specifically

female enterprise. Men were welcome but the it was overwhelmingly led and staffed by women.

Josephine Shaw Lowell of New York City founded the New York Consumers’ League in 1890. Her goal was to improve the wages and working conditions of female clerks in the city’s stores by issuing a “White List”– a very short list at first– of cooperating shops.

From these modest beginnings, Lowell’s organization spread to other cities and blossomed into the National Consumers’ League in 1899.

Muller v. Oregon decision in 1908, which upheld an Oregon law limiting the workday for women to 10 hours.`

Believing that working women should be encouraged to help themselves, New York reformers in 1903 founded the National Women’s Trade Union League.

In 1916, Paul organized the militant National Woman’s Party.

Carrie Chapman Catt, a skilled organizer from the New York movement, took over as national leader in 1915 of National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

Urban LiberalismWhen the Republican Hiram Johnson ran for

California governor in 1910, he was the candidate of the state’s middle class.

The New York State Factory Commission developed a remarkable program of labor reform: 56 laws dealing with fire hazards, unsafe machines, industrial homework, wages, and hours for women and children.

American Federation of Labor (AFL)The Anti-Saloon League— “the Protestant church in

action”– became a formidable advocate for prohibition in many states, skillfully attacking Demon Rum to other reform targets.

2,000 coal miners were killed every year, dying from cave-ins and explosions at a rate 50% higher than in German mines.

Not until the Great Depression would the country be ready for a more comprehensive program of social insurance.

Reforming PoliticsProgressive reformers attacked corrupt party

rule.