Transcript Industry Comes of Age 1865-1900

Chapter 24
Spanning the Continent with Rails
 Rail 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
Ties
 The 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
Mechanization
 The genius in this enterprise was “Commodore” Cornelius
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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 illeducated, 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 lamps
Appalling accidents continued to be almost daily tragedies,
despite safety devices like the telegraph (“talking wires”),
double-tracking, and (later) the block signal.
Revolution by Railways
 More than any other signal factor, the railroads network
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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 nearextinction .
 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 Railroading
 Corruption 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 Horse
 The 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 Mechanization
 Innovations 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 Impulse
 In 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 Ideas
 If the facts were known, everything else was possible. That
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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 Progressives
 Jane 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 Liberalism
 When 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 Politics
 Progressive reformers attacked corrupt party rule.