After Appomattox, every one seemed bent on finding a short cut to opulence.To foreign observers, the United States was then simply a scrambling mass of selfish units, for there seemed to be among the American people no disinterested group to balance accounts between the competing elements--no leisure class, living on secured incomes, mellowed by generations of travel, education, and reflection; no bureaucracy arbitrarily guiding the details of governmental routine; no aristocracy, born umpires of the doings of their underlings.All the manifold currents of life seemed swallowed up in the commercial maelstrom.By the standards of what happened in this season of exuberance and intense materialism, the American people were hastily judged by critics who failed to see that the period was but the prelude to a maturer national life.
It was a period of a remarkable industrial expansion.Then "plant" became a new word in the phraseology of the market place, denoting the enlarged factory or mill and suggesting the hardy perennial, each succeeding year putting forth new shoots from its side.The products of this seedtime are seen in the colossal industrial growths of today.Then it was that short railway lines began to be welded into "systems," that the railway builders began to strike out into the prairies and mountains of the West, and that partnerships began to be merged into corporations and corporations into trusts, ever reaching out for the greater markets.Meanwhile the inventive genius of America was responding to the call of the time.In 1877 Bell telephoned from Boston to Salem; two years later, Brush lighted by electricity the streets of San Francisco.In 1882 Edison was making incandescent electric lights for New York and operating his first electric car in Menlo Park, New Jersey.
All these developments created a new demand for capital.Where formerly a manufacturer had made products to order or for a small number of known customers, now he made on speculation, for a great number of unknown customers, taking his risks in distant markets.Where formerly the banker had lent money on local security, now he gave credit to vast enterprises far away.New inventions or industrial processes brought on new speculations.
This new demand for capital made necessary a new system of credits, which was erected at first, as the recurring panics disclosed, on sand, but gradually, through costly experience, on a more stable foundation.
The economic and industrial development of the time demanded not only new money and credit but new men.A new type of executive was wanted, and he soon appeared to satisfy the need.Neither a capitalist nor a merchant, he combined in some degree the functions of both, added to them the greater function of industrial manager, and received from great business concerns a high premium for his talent and foresight.This Captain of Industry, as he has been called, is the foremost figure of the period, the hero of the industrial drama.
But much of what is admirable in that generation of nation builders is obscured by the industrial anarchy which prevailed.
Everybody was for himself--and the devil was busy harvesting the hindmost.There were "rate-wars," "cut-rate sales," secret intrigues, and rebates; and there were subterranean passages--some, indeed, scarcely under the surface--to council chambers, executive mansions, and Congress.There were extreme fluctuations of industry; prosperity was either at a very high level or depression at a very low one.Prosperity would bring on an expansion of credits, a rise in prices, higher cost of living, strikes and boycotts for higher wages; then depression would follow with the shutdown and that most distressing of social diseases, unemployment.During the panic of 1873-74 many thousands of men marched the streets crying earnestly for work.
Between the panics, strikes became a part of the economic routine of the country.They were expected, just as pay days and legal holidays are expected.Now for the first time came strikes that can only be characterized as stupendous.They were not mere slight economic disturbances; they were veritable industrial earthquakes.In 1873 the coal miners of Pennsylvania, resenting the truck system and the miserable housing which the mine owners forced upon them, struck by the tens of thousands.In Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Maryland, Ohio, and New York strikes occurred in all sorts of industries.There were the usual parades and banners, some appealing, some insulting, and all the while the militia guarded property.In July, 1877, the men of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad refused to submit to a fourth reduction in wages in seven years and struck.From Baltimore the resentment spread to Pennsylvania and culminated with riots in Pittsburgh.
All the anthracite coal miners struck, followed by most of the bituminous miners of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.The militia were impotent to subdue the mobs; Federal troops had to be sent by President Hayes into many of the States; and a proclamation by the President commanded all citizens to keep the peace.Thus was Federal authority introduced to bolster up the administrative weakness of the States, and the first step was taken on the road to industrial nationalization.
