America Aflame (65 page)

The steel mills created thousands of jobs that did not exist before the war, and not merely on the shop floor. The new industries, due to their size and the extent of their markets, required a white-collar army to manage and grow their business. The expansion of such jobs in cities was crucial to the creation of a national economy. Although such positions accounted for only 7 percent of total employment by 1880, they ranked among the fastest-growing sectors of the labor force. During the 1870s, the number of clerks in offices quadrupled, and the number of bookkeepers and accountants doubled. Similar spurts of growth occurred in insurance firms, banks, and railroad offices. Traveling salesmen fanned out across the country on the new rail network. Department stores, relatively rare prior to the war, provided employment for clerks, managers, and buyers. A new professional and managerial class emerged—salaried administrators, accountants, bankers, brokers, advertisers, and magazine editors and writers. It also included new professions requiring technical expertise, such as engineers, landscape architects, and interior designers.

Salaries from these jobs fueled dramatic economic growth. Industry churned out a dazzling array of goods for eager and able customers. Between 1865 and 1873, the nation's industrial production increased by 75 percent. To speed these products and the information to market and sell them efficiently, the nation's railroad and telegraph networks expanded significantly. By 1880, 128,000 miles of railway and 760,000 miles of telegraph traversed America—more mileage of each than in all of Europe. Old Europe, as Mark Twain had satirized, was yesterday; America was the future. The jobs created by economic expansion drew many from Old Europe to the New World. More than eight million immigrants entered the nation during that same time, many absorbed into the burgeoning industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. One of those immigrants, Andrew Carnegie, declared, “The old nations of the earth creep on at a snail's pace; the Republic thunders past with the rush of the express.”
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Women's work outside the home changed as well. Working-class and immigrant women had concentrated in domestic service and the needle trades. Those jobs persisted in the industrial city, but new technologies and changing aspirations attracted middle-class women into the urban labor market. The advent of the typewriter in the late 1860s opened up office work for middle-class women. “Type girls” could earn as much as nine hundred dollars per year in the early 1870s, or about half the salary of the male clerks whom they replaced. Teachers earned from four hundred to eight hundred dollars a year, making clerical jobs more attractive to middle-class women. By 1875, the typical office had become totally “feminized.”
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Hard work and city living left little time for recreation. Critics worried that the move from farm to city created a generation of overweight and overwrought Americans. Amateur athletic clubs, some operating out of YMCA organization, sprang up across urban America, and publications such as
Sporting Times
and
Sports and Games
appeared in the late 1860s to instruct and encourage the urban middle class on exercise routines and organized sports activities. The articles urged all family members, regardless of age or gender, to participate and cease their sedentary habits.

Affluence allowed for more leisure time for some, especially favoring those activities that involved the entire family. Spectator sports flourished accordingly, especially baseball. In 1869, the first professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, whose players received seasonal salaries ranging from eight hundred to fourteen hundred dollars, barnstormed across the country beating almost every amateur squad in sight. Players and entrepreneurs in other cities took note, and by the mid-1870s they had organized the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs out of the old National Association.

While tens of thousands of Americans moved to the city to work, a smaller but growing number left the city to live. The booming urban economy crowded out residential uses from city centers. Industry disgorged its essence into residential areas. The influx of immigrants crowding into dwellings near their places of work made inner cities even less desirable for those with the means to move. As land uses segregated, so did people. Steam railroads and horse-drawn railways enabled residents to live five to twenty miles away from their work. In the early 1870s, magazines advertised spacious homes for sale in the towns around New York City. By 1873, Chicago boasted nearly one hundred suburbs with a combined population of more than fifty thousand. These suburbanites, part of the new middle class, sought environments conducive to family life, with people much like themselves. As one suburban resident gushed to his city friends, “If you want to bring up a family, to prolong your days, to cultivate the neighborly feeling … leave your city block and become like me. It may be a little more difficult for us to attend the opera, but the robin in my elm tree struck a higher note and a sweeter one yesterday than any prima donna ever reached.”
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The Russells of Short Hills, New Jersey, endorsed this sentiment. Short Hills was a railroad suburb eighteen miles from New York City, founded in 1877. William Russell and his wife, Ella Gibson Russell, were typical of the early residents. They moved from Brooklyn to Short Hills with their six children, seeking a “pleasant cultured people whose society we could enjoy” and a cure for Mr. Russell's rheumatism. Russell, who owned and managed a small metal brokerage in New York, described himself as a “clean liver” who enjoyed gardening, reading, and socializing with his new neighbors. Ella Russell cared for the six children with the help of a servant but also found time to belong to several clubs and charities.
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“Hurrying for the Train,” September 2, 1871. The American move to the suburbs of northern cities began in earnest after the Civil War. The image of the dashing commuter, familiar to Americans of the mid-twentieth century, has its late-nineteenth-century counterpart here. (
Harper's Weekly
)

The Russells followed the design principles of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine Beecher. Mrs. Russell, as a “domestic scientist” (in the words of Stowe and Beecher), ensured the cleanliness of her home as well as selecting the appropriate furnishings. Following Stowe and Beecher's recommendations, they located the utility hardware in a central core, freeing wall areas for other functions. Central heating removed the necessity of designing small, compact rooms, each with a fireplace or stove. The new arrangement reduced the number of rooms and encouraged the family to pursue their individual activities in a common space. Gone were parlors and reception rooms. The rigid spatial segregation of the sexes disappeared as well. Such standards as the children's wing, the male “smoking room,” and the female parlor were not included in the new allocation of space.

The family enjoyed the Athletic Club, where all members, not just the male head of household, could play tennis, swim, or skate. Because Short Hills bordered on undeveloped woodland traversed by trails, “wheel clubs” sprang up to organize families for bicycle outings. Leisure and sports activities amid bucolic settings, once the preserve of the wealthy, became accessible to middle-class Americans. The new economy, and the employment opportunities it created, enabled many families like the Russells to achieve this latest version of the American dream.

It was now possible to talk about a middle-class “lifestyle,” and what that implied in terms of family, living arrangements, work, leisure, education, and consumer preferences. While the pursuit of money may have characterized the postwar age, the pursuit of happiness was equally important, and the two were frequently linked in the American mind. Absorbed in great issues and then a great war for two decades, it was refreshing to focus on home, family, work, and leisure.

The Russells were among many northern families finding a better life after the war. Home ownership was more readily available to Americans in the early 1870s than at any previous time in the nation's history. Middle-class salaries averaged $2,000 per year and a modest suburban home cost $750. Although thirty-year fixed-rate mortgages with little or no down payment would not appear until the mid-twentieth century, building and loan societies emerged during the 1860s to provide financial assistance to prospective homeowners. An income of $2,000 qualified a buyer for a $2,500 loan at 7 percent interest, sufficient to purchase a lot and a two-story home in Brooklyn in 1866, with monthly payments and taxes totaling $400 annually. “House pattern books” flooded the market in the late 1860s, providing consumers with relatively simple and inexpensive plans for home building. “There never was a time,” an art critic wrote in 1872, “when so many books written for the purpose of bringing the subject of architecture—its history, its theory, its practice—down to the level of popular understanding were produced as in this time of ours.”
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New technologies eased middle-class life and made it more affordable. Balloon frame construction (think of a birdcage) reduced the cost of raw materials and facilitated larger and more flexible designs. Power looms lowered the cost of wool carpets to less than one dollar per yard. Advances in paint technology allowed new homeowners to use a variety of colors both inside and outside their dwellings.

Residents could accessorize their homes more cheaply than ever. Currier and Ives produced inexpensive black-and-white lithographs from the 1860s onward ranging in cost from fifteen cents to three dollars. Such bargains allowed homeowners to fill their walls with landscapes and historic scenes just like the rich folks. By the 1860s, gas stoves were replacing cast-iron stoves heated by wood or coal, providing cleaner and more efficient output with considerably less work.

Women especially appreciated the benefits of the gas stove and the access to new foods and ingredients that lent variety and nutrition to mealtimes. The advent of refrigerated rail cars, canned goods, fresh fruits, and factory-made dairy products brought the farm closer to middle-class homes. The old general store gave way to supermarkets. The first chain grocery store—the New York–based Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, known popularly as the A&P, opened its doors in 1864.

Fashion, once the purview of the wealthy, attracted middle-class devotees already adjusting to new occupations, residences, and leisure activities. Clothes became a mark of class, a means to delineate one's arrival into success. In November 1867,
Harper's
announced the first number of
Harper's Bazaar
magazine, a publication targeting middle-class readers. The objective of the new magazine was to clothe the middle-class with the accouterments of the well-to-do at a fraction of the cost.
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America's future lay in these homes in these cities and suburbs. In 1870, for the first time in American history, a majority of citizens no longer lived on farms. Farm life was changing, too, however. In some parts of the North, farming became an industry, taking advantage of new railroad connections and agricultural technology. Well into the 1880s, the majority of patents approved related to farming. “Bonanza” farms appeared on the fertile prairies of the Dakotas and Minnesota, vast tracts of a thousand acres or more, highly mechanized and owned by absentee landlords. These farms hired accountants and purchasing agents, as well as seasonal farmworkers. Managers broke down operations into discrete tasks such as cultivating, harvesting, loading, and shipping, much like an industrial factory. The farms also helped cities grow. Minneapolis became nationally renowned as a flour-milling center primarily through the entrepreneurial skill of Charles A. Pillsbury, who established a state-of-the-art mill there in 1869. By the mid-1870s, a national system of grain exchanges existed as well as standards for grading, storage, and weighing the crop. America was feeding the world, and western farmers fed their profits back into more and better technology, just like the industrialists.
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Most farmers in the West, though, were family farmers who felt isolated from the urban industrial boom. Aaron Montgomery Ward, a young man who started working at the age of fourteen in a barrel factory, moved with his family from New York to Niles, Michigan. Though farm families had access to ready-made clothing, country stores charged considerably more for such items than did merchants in the cities. Ward began a mail-order business, sending out printed sheets to farmers across the Midwest with pictures of each item for sale. He purchased and shipped the merchandise from Chicago at a cost considerably below that offered by country merchants by eliminating the middleman. In 1874, Ward published and mailed his first catalog. Within a decade, the catalog included 240 pages listing more than ten thousand items. Ward's Chicago operation employed hundreds of clerks and shippers and an inventory worth over $500,000. Farmers were no longer his only customers. Residents of towns eagerly grasped the opportunity to live at least a little like the folks in the big cities. Ward remained the leading mail-order entrepreneur until Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck entered the field in the 1890s.