INDUSTRIALISM AND THE NEW CITY

Which of the following two quotes better represents what you believe?

“The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.” (A.C.)

                                                         --or--                                                  

         “The one who dies with the most toys wins.” (B.S.)

Today, we discuss industrialism in the U.S.

Try to name an area of your life not now impacted by industrialism.

“This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times…It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed.”

Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879

Why does such wretched poverty often seem to accompany vast economic growth?

The Age of Unparalleled Industrial Expansion:

I. Why was there such vast growth so rapidly in the U.S.?

1.  War: Why would war encourage industrial growth?

Example #1: Morrill Act (1862)

Example #2: Railroads:

                     1860: 30,000 miles of r.r.

                     1864: Congress grants 131 million acres

                     1910: 240,000 miles of railway

2.         Resources:     land, raw materials, people,

ideas=booooooom!

…in 1800 it took 56 man-hours per acre to raise wheat.

…in 1900, it required only 15 man-hours per acre.

                     1864: 872,000 tons of iron and steel

1919: more than 24 million tons

        

                     1860: 20 million tons of coal

1910: 500 million tons of coal

                     1860: 500,000 barrels of petroleum

1910: 209 million barrels of petroleum

3. Integration:

         a. Horizontal Integration:

--monopolize one part of the productive process

Example: meatpacking plants

b. Vertical Integration:

--monopolize all elements of productive process

Example: Andrew Carnegie: mining iron ore, own blast furnaces (factories), own shops, own ships, own railroad and rail line.

4. Mindset:

a. Small Government is Best:

                     Laissez faire: “let it do”

                     Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)

                                 “the invisible hand”

b. Aggressive Business Mentality:

The Robber Barons

         Notable examples:

ü  John D. Rockefeller

ü  Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie: “It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.”

“The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.”

ü  J.P. Morgan

ü  Jay Gould: “Mephistopheles of Wall

Street”

                                             (bribed Grant’s brother in law for gold

secrets)

ü  Cornelius Van Derbilt:

(steamships and railroads: $100 million)

Gentlemen:

You have undertaken to cheat me. I will not sue you, for law takes too long. I will ruin you.

                                             Sincerely,

                                                         CVD

II. The New Impoverished City

1. Rapid Urbanization:

1860:   25 million Americans lived in rural areas

6.2 million in what the Bureau of the Census

called "urban territory" (2500 or more)

1910: 42 million of the 92 million in urban areas

2. Tenement Buildings:

1879 NYC law declared that every room must have a window and every floor must have a bathroom

3. Contamination:

         1877-Philadelphia: 82,000 privies

        

         Boston Harbor was “one vast cesspool, a threat to all

the towns it washed.”

4. Crime-Filled:

         Murder Rate: 1266 in 1881

 7340 in 1898

(an increase of 25 per million people, to 107 per million people)

5. Women in Workforce:

         1/7^th of the Paid workforce

         (2.6 million of the 17.4 million)         

                     500,000 married, yet they were paid less than

men, especially after 1900 when the “family wage” idea spread.

6. Immigration:

         1890-1900: 3.5 million

         1900-1910: 7 million

Newspaper in 1900: "It is well known that nearly every foreigner…goes armed. Some carry revolvers, while many others hide huge ugly knives upon their person."

Senator William Bruce (Maryland):

Immigrants are “indigestible lumps in

the national stomach.”

“Such an impulse toward better things there certainly is. The German rag-picker of thirty years ago, quite as low in the scale as his Italian successor, is the thrifty tradesman or prosperous farmer of to-day. The Italian scavenger of our time is fast graduating into exclusive control of the corner fruit-stands, while his black-eyed boy monopolizes the boot-blacking industry in which a few years ago he was an intruder.” 

Jacob Riis on social fluidity

                     Ellis Island:

7. Child Labor:

         1900: 700,000 10 and 15 year olds in workforce.

         --Monongah, West Virginia, 1907:

                                             Martin Honick

Prior to the disaster, Fairmont citizens regularly criticized miners. One Fairmont man wrote that miners in Monongah were "possibly the lowest grade of European workmen that can be imported" (Roberts 1904, 13). Relations were especially difficult, according to McAteer, between “immigrants and ‘native’ peoples” (70). One newspaper in Worthington, a town near Monongah, warned that “a lot of Italians from Monongah have been committing depredations on the farms in the vicinity…those who suffer from their petty thieving propose to resort to the shot gun in the future” (Ibid.). Others in the region shared this disdain for the miners of West Virginia. One report pondered, “We have often wondered what kind of animals they have digging coal in West Virginia…Their ignorance must be more dense, their prejudice more bitter and their blindness more intense than that of any other body of miners we have ever heard tell of” (Corbin 1981, 25).

Genevieve McDonnell, a Fairmont resident, agreed and expressed this sentiment in her poem, "To Stricken Monongah," published in the Fairmont Times on December 14^th: "We are coming, O Monongah, to thy vigil--feast of woe. We have leveled all the barriers of caste.” If anything, life in Fairmont before the Monongah explosion accentuated class differences. Before the explosion, most residents of Fairmont derided the miners and their families. But this poet mused, “Our souls will blend with your souls to the last, in a fellowship of anguish we are marshaling to thy aid." Residents of Fairmont had never before discussed such an egalitarian, heartfelt outreach to the miners in Monongah. Another Fairmont man, in the Fairmont Times on December 9^th, captured perfectly this newfound solidarity: "We are all akin today, miner, business man, boss, official, stockholder, citizen, all brothers in a kindred sorrow." Noting all masculine roles, this man recognized an affiliation between men that symbolically broke down class divisions. As he wrote, they were now “all akin.” The loss of male life caused residents of Fairmont to, in the words of another contributor, "forget their personal differences, growing out of business and personal strife, and set about to do some act of kindness." Following this major disaster, stark class and ethnic boundaries that normally separated Fairmont from Monongah blurred. The dynamic public response overrode previous public distinctions of wealth and ethnicity. As one Fairmont man insisted in his letter to the Fairmont Times, "Monongah's sorrow was a common sorrow."

Children Working in the cotton mills (Tennessee Valley)

"They were children only in age…little, solemn pygmy people, whom poverty had canned up and compressed…the juices of childhood had been pressed our…no talking in the mill…no singing…they were more dead than alive when at seven o clock, the Steam Beast uttered the last volcanic howl which said they might go home…in a speechless, haggard, over-worked procession."

III. Justifying the New World:

Living in this time, you would have to respond to the poverty.

Two of those responses are here:

1. SOCIAL DARWINISM:

         William Graham Sumner:

What if you do not want to justify the disparity between rich and poor? What could you do?

2. Progressivism: