Part III
In this part . . .
America was 100 years old in 1876 and still in its adolescence. It had gone through a childhood that was marked by some rough times, particularly when it was torn apart by the Civil War.
But it had also had some remarkable luck. It was a country blessed with tremendous resources, and it had great leaders when it needed them most.
In this part, the country begins to put its resources, both natural and human, to work. It takes its place as a world leader, endures both very good and very bad economic times, and emerges from a world war as a very grown-up nation.
Chapter 12
In This Chapter
● Cashing in on animals, minerals, and vegetables
● Allowing prejudice against non-whites to gain the upper hand
● Seeing big business boom while unrest settles in
● Remembering some forgettable presidents
● Battling with Spain for some islands
Americans have always been restless, and in 1876 they were hungry, too — for success. There seemed to be many ways and places to be successful, and it seemed very important to a whole lot of people.
In this chapter, the country starts its final push toward filling in the gaps between the coasts — and its final pushing aside of the original Americans. Railroads help do both, as well as usher in the birth of truly huge businesses. A string of mediocre presidents don’t do much of anything, and a war with Spain launches America on the road to becoming an empire.
Heading West in a Quest for Wealth
When settlers in America first started moving west (about ten minutes after they got here), they generally did so because of the lure of free land and the chance to put down roots. After the Civil War, however, Americans moved west as much to make a buck as to settle into a new life. The West was seen as a bottomless treasure chest of resources to exploit.
Making money from minerals
Some of those resources were mineral. Starting with the California Gold Rush of 1849, the West saw a steady stream of gold, silver, and copper discoveries touch off “rushes,” as hordes of miners careened like pinballs from strike to strike. In 1859, thousands descended on Pike’s Peak in Colorado, looking for gold. Later that year, it was the Comstock silver lode in Nevada. In 1861, it was Idaho; in 1863, Montana; in 1874, the Black Hills of Dakota; and in 1876, it was back to Colorado.
Towns with 5,000 inhabitants sprang up virtually overnight, composed of would-be millionaires and the gamblers, thieves, swindlers, prostitutes, and liquor sellers that accompanied them. They formed violent societies. Justice, if it existed at all, was often in the form of vigilance committees or vigilantes, who set themselves up as the law and sometimes didn’t bother with a trial before stretching a defendant’s neck.
Those who made most of the money from mining were symbolic of what was happening in the rest of the country. Big corporations, financed by stockholders from the East and Europe, had the capital to buy the equipment needed to mine on a large scale, and they reaped most of the profits. Average miners made little, and many of them ended up going to work as laborers for the large companies.
But mining had some positive impact on the West besides the wealth it created. The miners were the first to open much of the West, and they helped encourage the railroads to come. Some of those who came for the booms stayed on after the inevitable busts that followed. Because miners had to set up governments in a hurry to deal with the instant towns, political organization took root. Coupled with the mineral wealth, these organizations gave the mining areas clout in Congress. This helped speed the admission of new states, such as Nevada.
By the dawn of the new century, the big, fever-producing mineral strikes were over in the West. But they were replaced by the rush to extract oil — “Black Gold” — beneath western lands, particularly in Texas and Oklahoma.
Making money from animats
After the Civil War, Texas soldiers returned to find as many as five million cattle roaming around the state. They were descendants of animals brought to the area hundreds of years before by Spanish explorers and conquerors. There was plenty of grazing land and enough water, and the cattle were a hardy breed.
Bat Masterson
Unlike many of his contemporaries — Billy the Kid, Jesse James, John Wesley Hardin, just to name a few — William Barclay Masterson made a successful, and peaceful, transition from the Wild West to the twentieth century.
Born in Canada in 1853, Masterson left home at the age of 19 to become a buffalo hunter and a fighter of Native Americans. At the age of 23, he killed a man for the first time in a saloon gunfight over a woman. Masterson was shot in the leg and walked with a limp for the rest of his life. In 1877, he became sheriff of Ford County, Kansas, and with his brothers Jim and Ed held a variety of law enforcement jobs in Dodge City, Kansas, and Tombstone, Arizona, where he worked with his pal Wyatt Earp.
The dapper, derby-wearing Masterson carried two pearl-handled revolvers and knew how to use them. He was a true quick-draw artist, and his reputation stopped many fights before they started. After careers as a gambler and saloonkeeper, he was appointed a U.S. marshal by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt. In 1905, he hung up his guns and became a sportswriter and editor for the New York Morning Telegraph. He died in 1921 at his desk, at the age of 68.
Now, Texans were as fond of beef as the next state’s inhabitants, but they really wanted to find a way to share their wealth on the hoof with the rest of the nation. Cattle that were worth $3 to $4 a head in Texas could be sold for 10 times that much in Eastern states, if you could get them there. Cattle drives to the East and even California had been tried before. But many of the cattle died before the drives were over, and the survivors were worn thin by the effort.
After the war, however, someone got the idea to shorten the distances by driving cattle to the railroads that were moving west, and then shipping them east by rail. Rail met cow at “trailheads” in Abilene and Dodge City in Kansas, Ogalalla in Nebraska, and Cheyenne in Wyoming. By 1871, 750,000 head of cattle were moving through Abilene alone. By 1875, the advent of the refrigerated car allowed cattle to be slaughtered and butchered in Midwest cities like Kansas City and Chicago before being shipped east.
The rise of the cattle industry also gave rise to an American icon: the cowboy. Hollywood has turned the cowboy into a romantic figure who was quick on the draw with a six-shooter and spent most of his time drinking whiskey and playing poker in town, with a beautiful blonde dance-hall girl perched at his shoulder.
In truth, the cowboy was most likely an ex-Confederate soldier or former slave who spent most of his life on the back of a short-legged cow pony, hundreds of miles from the nearest bar or woman. He was brave and tough, but he was far less likely to use his pistol on his fellow man than he was on rattlesnakes or as a noisemaker. He was likely in his late teens or early 20s, and about one in five was African American. He worked for $25 a month and ate beans, bacon, and black coffee day after day.
By the early 1890s, the day of the cowboy and the cattle drive was coming to an end. Like other aspects of American life, inventions (such as barbed wire) and investments (by Easterners and Europeans) turned ranching into big business, and cowboys became caretakers on large fenced ranches rather than riders of the range. A far less glamorous, but much more numerous, type of Westerner was now dominant: the sodbuster.
Making money from vegetables
In the wake of the miner and the cowboy came the farmer. The railroads were eager to colonize the areas they controlled with potential customers and offered land near their tracks through giant advertising efforts in the East and Europe. The federal government tried various ways to sell public lands, most of them badly managed.
Regardless, the settlers rushed in. The populations of Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska doubled or tripled. The Dakotas went from 14,000 residents after the Civil War to 500,000 in 20 years. In 1889, the “Cherokee Strip” in Northern Oklahoma was purchased from Native Americans and thrown open to settlement, and by 1900, the Oklahoma Territory had a population of about 800,000.
Most of the farmers faced a blizzard of hardships: drought, grasshopper invasions, prairie fires, and, well, blizzards. There was even foreign competition. In the 1870s, crop failures in Europe helped drive up prices and open markets for American farmers. But in the 1880s, crop prices fell as new producers in Australia and India came on the scene.
More and more farmers in the West found themselves in the same plight as those in the war-torn South. The number of farms that were either mortgaged or farmed by tenant farmers steadily increased as the last 20 years of the century passed.
Still, between 1870 and 1900, the number of American acres under cultivation more than doubled, from 407 million to 841 million acres. The frontier had been mined, ranched, and farmed into submission.
Happy 100th, America
In 1871, Congress decided to put on a big to-do to celebrate America's 100th birthday. It took awhile to raise the dough, but on May 10, 1876, 13 giant bells chimed, 100 cannons fired a salute, and an 800-voice choir sang the "Hallelujah Chorus" to open the U.S. Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.
The fair, spread over a 248-acre park, featured exhibits from all over the world, but the highlights were the proud displays of Yankee know-how. Crowds, which included Pres. Ulysses Grant and Emperor Don Pedro II of Brazil, gasped and gaped at the largest steam engine ever built up to that time; an ice box that used ammonia as its refrigerant; and a printing process that printed, cut, and sorted pages for up to an hour at a time.
The first prize for new inventions went to Alexander Graham Bell for a device he called the telephone. The Brazilian emperor put the thing to his ear and quickly dropped it, exclaiming, "My God, it talks!" But Bell's invention drew smaller crowds than an exotic exhibit from Central America. It featured a strange fruit, called the banana.
Ousting "Undesirables"
Gen. Philip Sheridan never said: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
What he did say, however, was just as bad: “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”
There were plenty of dead Native Americans by 1876. When Columbus arrived, there were probably 1 million to 1.5 million Native Americans living in what is now the United States. By the time of the Civil War, that number had dropped to about 300,000, with two-thirds of them living on the Great Plains.
The Plains Indians generally tolerated the white man crossing their territory on the way to California and Oregon. But when the newcomers began to settle in, tensions grew and both sides resorted to violence.
In 1862, a tribe of Sioux went on the offensive in Minnesota against encroaching settlers, killing more than 700 before the militia defeated them and hanged 38 of the tribe’s leaders. In 1864, John Chivington, a Colorado militia colonel, attacked a band of Cheyenne at Sand Creek, Colorado, and killed 133 people, most of them women and children. Many white Americans were appalled at Chivington’s brutality.
After the Civil War was over, a debate began in earnest on what to do about “the Indian Problem.” Ideas ranged from extermination to reservations to ending tribal customs and forcing Native Americans to adopt white culture. All of them were tried to varying degrees. Between 1859 and 1876, soldiers and Native Americans fought at least 200 pitched battles and signed 370 treaties.
“They made us promises more than I can remember,” noted one Sioux leader, “but they never kept but one. They promised to take our land, and they did.”
They also all but wiped out the American bison, or buffalo, which to the Plains Indians was a walking supermarket. The tribes not only ate the buffalo, but also wore clothes and blankets from it, and used its bones for tools and its dried dung for fire fuel. In 1840, an estimated 40 million buffalo roamed the Plains.
But buffalo were dumber than rocks when it came to being hunted, placidly grazing while hunters with long-range rifles picked them off one by one for their hides, their meat, or just for the heck of it. By 1875, only a million buffalo were left; by 1893, less than 1,000. The Plains Indians were starved into submission far more than they were outfought.
In 1868, after a series of Native American victories on the Plains, both sides agreed to a grand scheme in which two large reservations would be created, one in Oklahoma and one that took in all of western South Dakota. That included the Black Hills, which were sacred to the Sioux (more properly known as Lakota).
Putting up a fight
Six years later, an expedition led by Colonel George Armstrong Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills. White prospectors poured into the area. The government, powerless to stop them, offered to buy the land from the Native Americans but was refused. The last great war against the Native Americans began, and for the first time, the Plains tribes united into a formidable fighting force.
I quit
"I am tired of fighting. The old men are all dead . . . it is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death . . . Hear me my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad.
From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."
— Nez Perce Chief Joseph, before surrendering to U.S. Army troops, 1877.
On June 25, 1876, a force of 212 soldiers led by Custer foolishly attacked a Native American encampment at the Little Big Horn River in Montana. It proved to be populated by 2,500 warriors. Custer and his men were wiped out to the last man.
“Custer’s Last Stand” horrified people in the East as well as the West, and the army greatly increased its efforts to end the Native Americans’ ability to fight back. The battle proved to be the beginning of the end for the Plains Indians. Over the next decade, tribe after tribe was gradually worn down by hunger and continual pursuit by the army. What happened to the Plains tribes was repeated throughout the West — the Apache in Arizona, the Crow and Blackfoot in Montana, the Ute in Colorado, the Nez Perce in Idaho — all were decimated by hunger, disease, and harassment by the whites.
In 1887, Congress passed a law that divided land into individual allotments for Native Americans, as part of an effort to turn them into small farmers.
It also provided for an education system and eventual U.S. citizenship. However well intentioned the law was, it didn’t work. Most Native Americans didn’t want to be farmers or U.S. citizens, and the education system never amounted to much. Many Native Americans eventually signed away their land for a few cents an acre to speculators, who promptly resold it to settlers for a few dollars an acre.
Crazy Horse
Crazy Horse was named after his father after proving himself in battle, which was probably a good thing, because in his early years he was called "Curly." Born around 1842 near the Belle Fourche River in South Dakota, the Lakota (Sioux) warrior began his fight against the white invaders in 1865. He became known as a daring fighter who used tricks and guerilla tactics well. In 1866, he helped lure 80 soldiers into an ambush in which all of them were killed.
Eleven months after leading the combined tribes against Custer at the Little Big Horn, Crazy Horse surrendered to troops that had
been relentlessly harassing his band. He was taken to Fort Robinson, Wyoming, where he was held for several months.
"They say we massacred him [Custer]," he said during his captivity, "but he would have done the same thing to us had we not defended ourselves and fought to the last. Our first impulse was to escape . . . but we were so hemmed in that we had to fight."
In September 1877, while still in custody, he was stabbed to death by a soldier under questionable circumstances. Crazy Horse became a mythic figure among Native Americans of all tribes.
In 1890, a misunderstanding led to a cavalry attack on a group of Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota who were under military escort, near a creek called Wounded Knee in South Dakota. The soldiers killed more than 200 men, women, and children, and then left their bodies in the snow for three days before burying them in a mass grave. It was the last major violence between the Native Americans and whites, and a tragic and horrifyingly typical response to America’s “Indian Problem.”
Legalizing discrimination
While white America was pushing the Native Americans to adopt white ways and become part of white culture, it was pushing to keep African Americans out. Reconstruction had failed to give blacks equal rights, and a conservative U.S. Supreme Court ensured the failure would last another 50 or 60 years.
In 1883, the Court ruled the federal government had no right to interfere with discrimination by private enterprises or individuals. In 1896, in a case called Plessy v. Ferguson, it decided states had the right to legally segregate public facilities, from schools to trains. And in 1899, the Court ruled that states could erect schools for white kids only, even if there were no schools for blacks.
Encouraged by the decisions, Southern states passed what were called Jim Crow laws (named after a popular song that depicted African Americans as shiftless children), which not only tried to completely separate the races, but also take away most of the rights they had been accorded by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Blacks couldn’t serve on juries, represent themselves in court, or drink from the same public drinking fountains as whites. If they quit a job, they could be arrested for vagrancy. They also established elaborate tests that black would-be voters had to take to get a ballot. The result was that the level of black voting dropped like a boulder off a bridge.
But as if the Jim Crow laws weren’t enough, during the 1890s, the South averaged 130 lynchings a year. They were so commonplace that they were sometimes advertised in advance in newspapers. The North generally shrugged at the Jim Crow laws and ignored the lynchings. “The Negro’s day is over,” shrugged Yale Professor William Graham Sumner. “He is out of fashion.”
Even the best-known African American leader of the day was not ready to challenge the injustices. Born into slavery, Booker T. Washington had become a schoolteacher, the founder of a major vocational school in Alabama called the Tuskegee Institute, and an eloquent advocate of African Americans improving themselves economically.
To improve their economic situations, Washington urged blacks to “accommodate” whites when it came to demands for segregation, in return for white help in obtaining black schools and economic opportunity. “The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest of folly,” he argued. While it’s easy to criticize Washington’s approach today, it may have been a matter of accepting reality in 1896, especially when the reality included a rope.
White America didn’t care much for Chinese immigrants, either. “The Yellow Peril,” many of whom were brought to America to work on the railroads at half the wages paid to white workers, were viewed as a competitive labor threat to American-born workers. Anti-Chinese riots broke out in San Francisco in 1877. In 1882, Congress passed a law prohibiting all Chinese immigration for ten years. The ban, called the Chinese Exclusion Act, was later extended to last indefinitely, and wasn’t repealed until 1943.
Cramming into Cities
The law that excluded immigration by Chinese also banned criminals, the mentally ill or retarded, and those likely to end up as public charity cases. Otherwise, America’s front door was wide open, and people poured in. Between 1866 and 1915, 25 million immigrants came to the United States. Most of them came from Italy and Southeastern Europe, but they also came from Scandinavia, Russia, Poland, Germany, Ireland, England, and France. By 1910, 15 percent of the country’s total population was foreign-born. Most of them came to escape hard economic times at home, despotic governments, or both. Many times their expectations were unrealistically high. “America is all puddings and pies!” enthused one young man as he stepped off the ship in New York.
Despite the warning of a popular immigrant guidebook to “forget your past, your customs, and your ideals,” many of the new Americans clung to their own languages, customs, and cuisines, and gravitated to communities populated by others from their country. The presence of so many immigrants in so short a time caused alarm in some “natives,” who feared the newcomers would weaken their chances in the job market and pollute American culture. But it wasn’t until 1921, after World War I had created millions of refugees in Europe, that Congress tightened immigration policies.
In the meantime, as much as 80 percent of the immigrant wave settled in Northern cities. By the turn of the century, more than a third of Chicago’s populace was foreign-born, and there were more Irish in New York City than there were in Ireland. The immigrants weren’t the only newcomers in town, because there were plenty of American-born country folks moving to urban areas, as well. By 1900, 30 million Americans lived in cities, about a third of all U.S. residents. The number of cities larger than 100,000 increased from 9 to 50 between 1860 and 1910.
Slum Life
"All the fresh air that enters these stairs comes from the hall-door that is forever slamming. . . . The sinks are in the hallway, that all tenants may have access — and all be poisoned alike by the summer stenches. . . . Here is a door. Listen! That slow, hacking cough, that tiny helpless wail — what do they mean? The child is dying of measles. With half a chance, it might have lived; but it had none."
— Reporter Jacob Riis, in "How the Other Half Lives," 1890.
But many parts of the big cities were festering sores. In those areas, fire protection, street cleaning, sewage systems, garbage collection, and water treatment barely existed. The Chicago River was an open sewer. Baltimore’s sewers emptied into the tidal basin and in the summer heat, journalist H.L. Mencken wrote, it “smelled like a billion polecats.”
Housing was often designed to cram the most people into the least space. It wasn’t uncommon for 24 four-room apartments to be built on a 2,500- square-foot lot. Tenement slums took on fitting names, such as “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Bone Alley,” or “Poverty Gap.”
Gradually, things improved in the major urban areas. No one, rich or poor, wanted to live in filth, and after the link between disease and poor sanitation was firmly established, city leaders began to develop adequate sewage and water systems. Public transit systems, based on streetcars or trolleys, were put in place. But none of it happened overnight, and more than a few farmers-turned-city-dwellers must have yearned more than once to be home on the range.
Inventing Big Business
As America reached young adulthood in the last part of the nineteenth century, it began to shake off its rural roots and become an industrial city slicker. From 1859 to 1899, the value of the country’s manufactured products rose 622 percent, from $1.8 billion to $13 billion, and America became the world’s leading manufacturer. It rode its way to the top on the train.
Building the railroads
The railroad system was America’s first truly big business and its growth and impact were enormous. In the 41 years from 1830 to 1870, about 40,000 miles of track were laid in the country. But in the 20 years from 1871 to 1890, more than 110,000 miles were laid. In 1869, the first transcontinental line linking the East and West coasts was opened, and by 1900, there were four more.
By 1890, annual railroad freight revenues totaled $1 billion — which was more than twice what the federal government gathered yearly in revenue. The railroads not only transported goods and people, they dictated where towns would grow and businesses would locate. They employed more than one million people by 1900. They helped push Congress to create four standard time zones across the country so train schedules could be worked out.
The railroads created or greatly expanded other industries with their demands for materials like steel for rails and passenger and freight cars. And they helped speed development of America’s telegraph system, because where the rails went, the wires went. With telegraph stations at most train stations, the Western Union Company was sending 40 million messages a year by 1883, over 400,000 miles of wire.
Despite all those grand and glorious numbers, the railroad boom wasn’t exactly a shining example of American free enterprise at its best. The rails were laid mostly on public land given to the railroads by the federal government (and the state of Texas) — more than 240,000 square miles, or an area the size of Germany — along with more than $60 million in taxpayer-financed grants or loans.
Because the federal government didn’t want to get directly in the railroadbuilding business, the land was thought of as an incentive to attract private investment. The idea was that the railroad companies would sell most of the land near their tracks, and that’s where they would make their money, because rail operations alone weren’t expected to turn a profit for years.
The system was ripe for corruption, and scandals were plenty. The Union Pacific line, for example, was built by the Credit Mobilier Construction Company, which was owned by the same people who owned the railroad. They took fat federal grants and awarded themselves exorbitant contracts — and bought off inquisitive congressmen with bribes of heavily discounted railroad stock.
And dribble before you shoot . . .
James Naismith had an unruly class on his hands. The Canadian-born YMCA teacher was training would-be YMCA instructors in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1891. His boss had ordered him to come up with a new indoor game that would get the class reenthused about exercise in the winter.
Naismith tried variations of soccer and lacrosse. They proved too rough. After two weeks, he was still stumped. Then a solution began to fall into place. The first notion was to use a big, round ball that didn't require a stick to hit it. Second,
running with the ball was eliminated, so no tackling was required. Third, goals were set up through which to chuck the ball.
"I met Mr. Stebbins, the superintendent of buildings," Naismith later recalled, "and I asked him if he had two boxes about 18 inches square. Stebbins thought a minute, and then said: 'No, but I have two old peach baskets down in the store room.'" By noon, Naismith had nailed up the peach baskets, and two nine-man teams were playing "basket ball" — as opposed to what presumably would have been "box ball."
The business attracted titans of industry (or robber barons, depending on how you viewed them). There was Cornelius Vanderbilt in the East, Thomas A. Scott in the Midwest, James J. Hill in the Northwest, and Jay Gould in the Southwest. Each had their railroad fiefdoms and battled with the others for government favors. But not all of the country’s big wheels concentrated on trains — there were fortunes to be made in other fields, too.
Manufacturing steel more efficiently
Before the Civil War, steel was a rare and expensive building material, mainly because the process to make it from iron ore was a lengthy one. But a method that became widely used in the early 1870s greatly shortened the process while greatly increasing the amount that could be made at one time.
In America, steel-making became synonymous with one man: Andrew Carnegie. Born in Scotland, Carnegie came to America at the age of 13 and got a job working in a Pennsylvania factory for $1.50 a week. He moved on to jobs with Western Union and the Pennsylvania Railroad, made smart investments, and, by the time he was 28, was making $50,000 a year.
Carnegie eventually focused on steel. He hired chemists to perfect the production process, developed markets for steel, reinvested his profits, and expanded. He bought up or leased vast holdings of iron ore and coal in order to corner the supply of raw materials. By 1890, America was producing 4 million tons of steel per year, mostly for the railroads, and 70 percent of it was made by Carnegie’s steel plants near Pittsburgh.
By-product to buy product
Robert A. Chesebrough was looking for a way to keep from going broke. He had a kerosene company in Brooklyn, but the big oil finds in Pennsylvania undercut his prices and threatened to drive him out of business.
So Chesebrough went to Pennsylvania with the idea of getting into the oil business. When he came back to Brooklyn, he brought with him some pasty gunk that stuck to the oil drills and was considered a nuisance. The young chemist fooled around with the stuff, purified it, and called it "petroleum jelly." He also found that it seemed to help cuts and burns heal faster. So Chesebrough hit the road, offering free samples of his "Vaseline" (it's unclear where the name came from) to anyone who would try it.
The salve was a smash success, and by the 1870s, Chesebrough had made a fortune. Vaseline was used for everything from preventing rust on tractors to getting stains out of furniture. And its inventor had one more use for it. Every day Chesebrough ate a spoonful of the stuff as a health aid. He lived to be 96.
In 1901, Carnegie sold out to financier J.P. Morgan for the staggering sum of $447 million. In his later years, he gave away more than $300 million of his fortune through philanthropies that included building 2,811 public libraries and donating 8,000 organs to churches.
Refining (and controlling) oil: Rockefeller
In the 1850s, whale oil — the primary fuel for providing light — had become very expensive, and people began to look for an alternative. Gradually, drilling for oil became practical enough that kerosene made from refined petroleum began replacing whale oil.
The most famous — or infamous — of the oil men was John D. Rockefeller, a Cleveland businessman who had made some money during the Civil War selling meat and grain. In 1870, Rockefeller combined five companies he owned into the Standard Oil Company. A ruthless and brilliant businessman, Rockefeller either bought up the competition or drove it out of business by undercutting prices. Political bribery was also a standard tool of Standard Oil: One critic noted that Rockefeller “had done everything to the Pennsylvania legislature except refine it.” By 1879, Standard Oil controlled 90 percent of the nation’s refining capacity, a huge network of pipelines, and large oil reserves, and by 1892, Rockefeller had amassed a fortune of $800 million.
Getting wired for sound and light
New industries were also springing up around new inventions. In 1876, a teacher of the deaf, Alexander Graham Bell, invented the telephone. By 1880, 85 cities and towns had phone networks, and by 1900, more than 800,000 telephones were in place throughout the country.
In 1879, inventor Thomas A. Edison came up with a practical electric light bulb. Over the next 20 years, America began to wire up. At first, direct current (DC) was used, but DC didn’t work over distances of more than a few miles. Then a man named George Westinghouse began using alternating current, which allowed high voltage to be sent long distances through transformers and then reduced to safer levels as it entered buildings. Switching from steam engines to electricity made factories safer and more efficient, too.
Forming trusts and striking against them
In 1882, Standard Oil organized the first of the nation’s trusts. A trust oversaw virtually all of an industry’s operations, from production to price-setting to distribution and sales. It was supposedly run not by a single company, but by trustees. A trust issued certificates to stockholders in the industry’s companies and paid dividends. Virtual monopolies like Standard Oil could then argue that they didn’t control an industry; the trust did.
Monopolies weren’t all bad. Because of the economies of doing business on a large scale, costs could be kept down and prices lowered. The price of kerosene, for example, dropped a fair amount after Standard Oil dominated the market. Of course with no competition, prices were at the mercy of the monopolies, and could — and often did — swing up again. In addition, the sheer size and power of the monopolies was worrisome to some Americans.
Carnegie and other giants of capitalism immodestly preached the “Gospel of Wealth,” arguing that it was natural for a few people to have most of the wealth, a sort of economic “survival of the fittest.” As long as they used their fortunes to benefit society, they contended there was nothing wrong with it.
Caveat emptor, chump
"Let the buyer beware; that covers the whole business. You cannot wet-nurse men from the time they are born until the time they die. They have to wade, and get stuck, and that is the way men are educated."
— Sugar baron Henry O. Havemeyer, to a congressional committee investigating the sugar industry, 1895.
But opening libraries and donating church organs didn’t put bread on the table of the average working guy. Labor unions began to try to do that after the Civil War by organizing on a large scale. Most notable were groups called the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In 1877, America faced its first national labor strike when railroad workers walked off the job after wages were cut. State and federal troops were called in, hundreds of strikers were killed or wounded, and service was restored at the point of a gun.
In May 1886, an AFL strike for an eight-hour day for workers led to a clash at Chicago’s Haymarket Square between police and strikers. A bomb killed seven cops and injured 67 others. The police, who had killed four strikers the day before, fired into the crowd and killed four more. Seven strike leaders were eventually convicted and four were hanged. The incident was condemned by anti-union forces as an example of how the labor movement was controlled by “anarchists” and “radicals.”
In 1894, a strike against the Pullman railroad car company spread over 27 states and paralyzed the country’s railroads. Federal troops were called out, and a court order ended the strike. The Haymarket Square riot and Pullman strike dealt severe blows to the chances of things getting better for the average working stiff through labor unions. America was progressing, but not all of its citizens were.
Elizabeth Jane Cochrane: Journalist extraordinaire
A lot of people give a bit extra to their jobs, but Elizabeth Cochrane became a thief, went insane, and traveled around the world for hers. She was a pioneer investigative journalist who later became a successful businesswoman. The world knew her better by her pen name: Nellie Bly.
Cochrane was born in Pennsylvania in 1864. She became a journalist at the age of 18 after writing a letter to a Pittsburgh newspaper in support of women's rights. The editor liked her writing and offered her a job.
She eventually went to work for Joseph Pulitzer at the New York World and became famous for going undercover to get the story. She posed as a thief and was arrested to see how police treated female prisoners. She pretended to be insane and spent ten days in an asylum for a story on the sad plight of the mentally ill. In 1889, she traveled around the world in a little more than 72 days as a stunt to see whether she could break the fictional record set in the Jules Verne novel Around the World in 80 Days.
Cochrane left newspapers in 1895 after marrying. When her husband died, she assumed control of his businesses. She returned to journalism in World War I and reported from the battlefields. Cochrane died in 1922 at the age of 58, a newswoman to the end.
Nickel-and-diming it
The growth of the cities helped spark the development of retail stores designed to do a high volume of business by selling low-cost goods. In February 1879, a self-described "boob from the country" of upstate New York, named Frank W. Woolworth, opened the "Great Five-Cent Store" in Utica, New York. During its first months, it took in a grand total of $2.50 a day.
Undismayed, Woolworth figured his store was just in a bad location and opened another in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It featured a "5-cent counter" in the front of the store that was supposed to lure customers in the door, where they might buy some higher-priced items.
The idea worked. By 1900, Woolworth had 59 stores, and by 1913, he was wealthy enough to pay $13.5 million in cash to construct what was then the tallest building in the world, the Woolworth Building in Manhattan. By the way, that's 270 million nickels.
Electing a String of Forgettable Presidents
America has had good presidents and bad presidents, but it’s doubtful it has ever had as many mediocre presidents in a row as it did between 1876 and 1900. It wasn’t a case of boring elections. Party splits and factions, and the fact that winners got to milk the government for jobs, made for intense and nasty campaigns. There were plenty of big issues, too, from tariffs to bank panics to civil service reform. The men elected to deal with them, however, were a forgettable bunch. Here they are, before I forget them:
● Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican, 1877-1881): Hayes was a Civil War hero who was very politically cautious. He hated making tough decisions, so he avoided them. The Democrats controlled Congress most of the time he was president, so he accomplished little. He chose not to run for a second term and might not have been nominated anyway.
● James A. Garfield (Republican, 1881): Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled office seeker four months after taking office. He was also the last president to be born in a log cabin.
● Chester A. Arthur (Republican, 1881-1885): Arthur was a lifelong politician who never won an election, except as Garfield’s running mate. He was a fairly dignified and businesslike president, but he accomplished little.
● Grover Cleveland (Democrat, 1885-1889, 1893-1897): Cleveland was the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms and the only one to have personally hanged a man. He accomplished the latter feat as sheriff in Buffalo, New York. He managed the former by losing his re-election bid in 1888 to Benjamin Harrison, and then defeating Harrison in 1892. Cleveland was elected the first time despite the revelation that he fathered a son by a woman he never married. His second term was marked by an economic depression. He didn’t win nomination for a chance at a third term.
● Benjamin Harrison (Republican, 1889-1893): Benjamin Harrison was the grandson of Pres. William Henry Harrison. Six new states — Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, and South Dakota — were admitted during his administration. That was pretty much it.
● William McKinley (Republican, 1897-1901): By most accounts, Bill McKinley was a nice guy. He was an Ohio congressman and governor and very devoted to his invalid wife. He also had friends in high places, especially political boss Mark Hanna. Hanna and others helped elect McKinley president. He defeated Democrat-Populist William Jennings Bryan in 1896, and again in 1900. He was assassinated by a crazy anarchist named Leon Czolgosz in 1901. As he lay wounded, McKinley urged that his killer not be harmed. But they executed him in the electric chair anyway.
The Rise of Populism
Times were tough on the farm in the 1890s. Crop prices fell as production rose. Credit was hard to get and interest rates were high. Many of the rural areas’ best and brightest had taken off to seek their fortunes in the cities.
These hard times triggered a political movement called Populism. Populists sought higher crop prices and lower interest rates. They wanted a system where farmers could deposit crops in storage facilities and use them as collateral for low-interest government loans.
They also wanted more money put into circulation and more silver coins made. The idea was that more money in circulation would raise prices, while their mortgage payments would stay the same. But it was also risky. Money based on the amount of gold reserves the country had was more stable than money based on silver, because the amount of silver reserves was increasing and therefore could “cheapen” the value of money as the price of silver dropped.
Republicans generally opposed the Populist ideas, while Democrats generally lined up with the Populists. The Democrats nominated 36-year-old Nebraska Congressman William Jennings Bryan as their 1896 presidential candidate. Bryan, an outstanding orator, gave a rousing speech at the Democratic convention in favor of “free silver,” by exclaiming “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” But Bryan lost to Republican William McKinley anyway, mostly because McKinley’s supporters raised and spent $3 million on his campaign.
"A Splendid Little War"
When Cuba revolted against Spain in 1868, most Americans weren’t very interested. But in 1898, when the Caribbean island rebelled again, America took notice. The difference was that by 1898, the United States was Cuba’s best customer for its sugar and tobacco crops, and its biggest investor.
So when the fighting destroyed American property in Cuba, the country’s interest was aroused.
Some Americans wanted to free Cuba from Spanish oppression. Some wanted to protect U.S. economic interests, and others saw it as a chance to pick off some of Spain’s colonies for America.
The anti-Spain flames were fanned by New York newspapers that tried to outdo each other in reporting about Spain’s “atrocities.” “You furnish the pictures,” New York publisher William Randolph Hearst told an illustrator for his New York Journal, “and I’ll furnish the war.”
In January 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine was sent to Havana when it was reported that American lives were in danger. On February 15, the Maine mysteriously exploded, killing 260 U.S. sailors and officers. By April, America and Spain were at war.
It was, in the words of one American official, “a splendid little war.” In the Philippines, a U.S. fleet commanded by Commodore George Dewey blasted a Spanish fleet and U.S. soldiers easily took the islands. Cuba took a little longer to conquer, but the Spanish forces there also fell. The four-month war cost 5,642 American lives, all but 379 to disease. And a grown-up America now had the makings of an empire on its hands.
How are ya, Hawaii?
The islands of Hawaii have always been a great place to visit for Americans. Yankee traders visited there in the 1790s. In the 1840s, the islands were home to American whaling ships. And by 1860, many U.S. citizens owned land there.
In 1875, America dropped a ban on Hawaiian sugar that had been urged by U.S. sugar growers and became the islands' best customer; and in 1887, Hawaii granted America exclusive rights to use Pearl Harbor as a coaling station and repair base for U.S. ships.
But making Hawaii a U.S. territory took some doing. In 1893, white businessmen led a successful rebellion against Queen Liliuokalani. The rebels promptly petitioned to be annexed to the United States. But Pres. Grover Cleveland rejected the offer. The new Hawaiian government asked again in 1897, but this time the Senate rejected it. Finally, in 1898, Hawaii became a U.S. territory. In 1959, it became the 50th state.