A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (88 page)

While the nation struggled with Reconstruction, patronage, and Indian policy, the pace of industrial production and business enterprise had rapidly accelerated. Growing industries, increasing immigration, and the gradual replacement of the family farm with the new factory system as the chief form of economic organization brought new stresses. Perhaps because the factories were located generally in the North where the intellectuals were; perhaps because the “Negro problem” had proven more difficult to solve; and perhaps because Reconstruction itself in many ways reflected the political corruption that had characterized the Tweed Ring, eastern intellectuals, upper class philanthropists, and middle-class women all gradually abandoned the quest for equality of black Americans in order to focus on goals they could more easily achieve. Emphasizing legislation that regulated large businesses (the hated trusts), these activists pursued widespread social and economic changes under the umbrella of “reform.” They also embarked on a crusade to end private vices—mostly exhibited by the lower classes, particularly immigrants—including prostitution, pornography, drugs, and hard liquor.

Another group who saw itself as victims of industry and powerful interests also clamored for change, largely through the direct intervention of the federal government. Agrarians, especially in the West and South, detected what they thought was a deliberate campaign to keep them living on the margin. Convinced that railroads, banks, and grain elevator owners were all conspiring to steal their earnings, reinforced by a government policy of subsidies and deflation, they, too, clamored for reform.

The two groups—the intellectual reformers and the agrarians—had little in common, save that they both saw Uncle Sam as a combination moral evangelist and playground monitor. Whereas upper-class reformers sneered at the rural hicks who wanted to force the railroads to lower prices, they nevertheless saw the necessity to temporarily ally with them. It would be a long road to the ultimate fusion of the two groups in the Prohibition movement, and for the better part of the late nineteenth century they ran on roughly parallel rails without touching.

Part of the affinity for government action had come from experience in the cities, where individuals could not repair their own streets or clear their own harbors. Cities had become exactly what Jefferson feared, pits of political patronage built largely on immigrants and maintained by graft and spoils. Political reform, however, had proved difficult to come by. In the first place, both parties played the spoils game. Second, individuals did benefit from the political largesse, and constituents could, to some degree, be bought off. To the reformers of the late 1800s, this circumstance was eminently correctable, mainly through the expansion of the franchise and through more open and frequent use of the machinery of democracy. Efforts to allow people to bring up their own legislation (with sufficient signatures on a petition), known as an initiative—which originated in rural, Populist circles but which quickly spread to the cities—or to vote on an act of the state legislature, known as a referendum, or even to remove a problem judge or a long-term elected official (a recall) were all discussed frequently.

An equally important issue—and one the reformers thought easier to attain because they controlled the terms of the debate—involved public health. Public health, of course, is ultimately personal and not public at all, and, as the reformers found, addressing public health issues meant imposing one group’s standards of hygiene and behavior upon others with, or without, their consent. But the offensive began inoffensively enough, with threats taken seriously by all: safe water and prevention of fire.

Two of the most serious enemies of safe cities in the 1800s, fire and disease, could be fought by the same weapon—water. At the end of the American Revolution, observers were struck by the cities’ “almost incredible absence of the most elementary sanitary provisions.”
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At that time in New York, columns of slaves belonging to the wealthiest families each evening carried tubs filled with feces and urine to the banks of the Hudson. Most people simply “disposed of excrement by flipping it through the handiest window.”
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Piles of feces remained where they landed until either Tuesday or Friday, when a city ordinance required they be pushed or swept into the streets. In winter, however, “it lay where it landed,” where it received the local appellation “corporate pudding.”
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Locals sank wells in the middle of streets, whereupon seepage drained into the drinking supply. Other sources of water included New York City’s Tea Water pump, fed by the seepage from Collect Pond, which by 1783 was filled with dead dogs, cats, rodents, and further seasoned with the laundry drippings of all the shantytown residents who lived on its banks.

The United States trailed France and England in this respect. Paris had fourteen miles of sewers in 1808, and London began a massive sewer system that was substantially completed by 1865, yet Philadelphia still depended heavily on its eighty-two thousand cesspools in 1877. Nevertheless, citywide water systems spread steadily, if slowly, during the century. The resulting improved sanitation was instantly reflected in plunging death rates. By midcentury, typhoid deaths had fallen in Boston and New York, and plummeted in New Orleans and Brooklyn.
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Digestive illness also dropped steadily. Where cholera once struck fear in the hearts of Jacksonian city dwellers, by the time of the Great Depression it had essentially been eliminated as a major public health threat. Such progress depended heavily on safe water systems.

As late as the 1830s, most citywide water systems were privately constructed: in 1800 only 5.9 percent of waterworks were publicly financed, and in 1830 a full 80 percent of the existing water systems remained in private hands, although this percentage had fallen to only 50 percent by the 1880s.
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Chicago adopted a modified public system in which an owner of property had to show proof that he owned a lot before he could vote on any levy related to water assessments.
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Brooklyn (1857), Chicago (1859), Providence (1869), New Haven (1872), Boston (1876), Cincinnati (1870), and Indianapolis (1870) all had citywide planned water systems, and Worchester, Massachusetts (1890), had the country’s first modern sewage disposal plant that employed chemicals to eliminate waste. By that time, nearly six hundred waterworks served more than 14.1 million urban residents. These systems, which used steam pumps, had become fairly sophisticated. Along with cast-iron pipes, these pumps provided effective protection against fire, especially when used in connection with hydrants, which were installed in New York in the early 1800s. By the middle of the century, major cities like Boston and Philadelphia had thousands of hydrants.
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Still, large-scale fires swept through Chicago (1871), New York (1876), Colorado Springs (1878), and in San Francisco on multiple dates, some resulting from earthquakes. Chicago suffered more than $200 million in damage—a staggering loss in the nineteenth century—in its 1871 blaze, which, according to legend, was started when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern. Flames leaped thirty to forty feet into the air, spreading throughout the West Side’s downtrodden shacks, then leaping the Chicago River to set most of the city afire. Even the wealthy North Side combusted when the winds carried aloft a burning board that set the district’s main fire station afire. Ultimately, thousands of people sought shelter in the frigid October water of Lake Michigan.

These fires occurred in no small part because many cities still used natural gas lighting, which proved susceptible to explosions; fire could then spread easily because wood was the most common construction material in all but the largest buildings. The growing number of citywide water systems and fire departments offered a hope of reducing the number, and spread, of fires. Generally speaking, by 1900 most of the apocalyptic fires that eradicated entire towns occurred on the grasslands, where in a two-year period the Dakota towns of Leola, Jamestown, Sykeston, and Mt. Vernon were “virtually incinerated by fires rising out of the prairies.”
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Even with fire prevention measures, plenty of water, and urban fire departments (often volunteer), fire-related disasters still plagued America well into the twentieth century. Baltimore suffered a two-day fire in 1904, and the San Francisco quakes set off fires that paved the way for a binge of looting by inhabitants of the notorious Barbary Coast section of town. Soldiers had to be called in, and authorities issued orders to shoot looters on sight.
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The introduction of electricity, more than the appearance of water systems, diminished the threat of fires in American cities. Before electricity, urban areas had relied on gas lighting, and a leak could turn city blocks into smoking ruins. When electric dynamos began to provide energy for lighting in the major cities, gas-originated fires naturally became less frequent. The introduction of electricity to business, however, could only ensue after several corporate giants strode onto the national stage.

Titans of Industry

In 1870 steelmaker Andrew Carnegie ordered construction of his Lucy blast furnace, completing the transition of his company into a vertical combination that controlled every aspect of product development, from raw materials to manufacturing to sales. With the Lucy furnace, Carnegie would become a supplier of pig iron to his Union Mills, and when it was completed two years later, the Lucy furnace set world records, turning out 642 tons of steel per week (the average was 350). Completion of the furnace ensured Carnegie a steady supply of raw materials for his Keystone Bridge Company, allowing him to concentrate exclusively on reducing costs. Lucy provided the springboard that Carnegie would need to become the nation’s leading steelmaker and one of the wealthiest men in America—a remarkable accomplishment considering he had arrived in America penniless.

Carnegie (born 1835) had come to America from Scotland at the age of thirteen, arriving in Pittsburgh, where his mother had relatives.
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First employed to change bobbins for $1.20 a week, Carnegie improved his skills with each new job he took. He learned to operate a telegraph and to write messages down directly without the intermediate step of translating from Morse code. His skills impressed the district superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Thomas Scott, enough that when the Pennsy opened service from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, Scott hired Carnegie as his personal telegraph operator. The Scotsman soaked up the railroad business from Scott, learning all aspects of business management and placing him in contact with other entrepreneurs. At age twenty-four, when Scott was promoted, Carnegie took over his district supervisor job.

Seeing the railroads firsthand convinced Carnegie that the next boom would occur in the industry that supplied their bridges, leading him to found the Keystone Bridge Company (1865); he then took the next logical step of supplying iron to the bridge company through a small ironworks. In the 1860s, British iron works had turned out 6 million tons. That was
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—before Carnegie. After he had applied his managerial skill and innovation to his integrated steel process, the United States surged ahead of British producers as Lucy and other similar furnaces produced 2 million tons of pig iron. Hiring the best managers by offering them a share of the partnership, Carnegie brought in steel men who were innovators in their own right, including Julian Kennedy, who claimed patents on 160 inventions, half of which were in operation at the Carnegie mills during Kennedy’s employ.

Carnegie viewed depressions as mere buying opportunities—a time to acquire at a bargain what others, because of circumstance, had to sell. But he ran against the grain in many other ways. Dismissing the old advice against putting all your eggs in one basket, Carnegie said, “Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket!” He eagerly embraced new, and foreign, technologies. When his own mills became obsolete, even if built only a few years earlier, he engaged in “creative destruction,” whereby he leveled them to build new state-of-the-art facilities.
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He obtained his own source of raw materials whenever possible: the company’s demand for coal and coke had originally led Carnegie into his association with Henry Clay Frick, a titan Carnegie called “a positive genius” who operated 1,200 coke ovens before the age of thirty-five.
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Inexpensive steel, obtained by driving costs down through greater efficiencies in production, provided the foundation for America’s rapid economic surge, but the obsession with low costs was hardly Carnegie’s alone. (John D. Rockefeller had the same attitude toward kerosene when he said, “We are refining oil for the poor man and he must have it cheap and good.”)
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Carnegie put it slightly differently: two pounds of iron shipped to Pittsburgh, two pounds of coal (turned into a quarter pound of coke), a half a pound of limestone from the Alleghenies, and a small amount of Virginia manganese ore yielded one pound of steel that sold for a cent. “That’s all that need be said about the steel business,” Carnegie adroitly noted.
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Carnegie ran the company as a close partnership, rather than a modern corporation. He never fit the modern working definition of “big business,” which requires that ownership be separated from management, usually because ownership consists of thousands of stockholders who elect a board of directors who in turn hire a president to run the company. As large as Carnegie Steel was, though, the Scotsman essentially managed the company himself, sometimes consulting his brother or a few close confidants. Thus, the Carnegie management style meant that Carnegie Steel had more in common with the corner drugstore than it did with Rockefeller’s equally imposing Standard Oil. Yet it was this structure that gave Carnegie his flexibility and provided the dynamism that kept the company efficient and constantly pushing down prices.