The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  I believe that under modern industrial conditions … there should be organization of labor in order better to secure the rights of the individual wage-worker. All encouragement should be given to any such organization … Wage-workers have an entire right to organize and by all peaceful and honorable means to endeavor to persuade their fellows to join with them in organizations. They have a legal right … to refuse to work in company with men who decline to join their organizations.121

  Large corporations and trusts remained unpopular in the United States, though some had some influential defenders, such as George Gunton. Once close to Theodore Roosevelt, Gunton regarded himself as a friend of the labour movement but thought that the real enemy of the workers were small firms. In his article ‘The Economic and Social Aspect of Trusts’ (1888) he tried to defend even a universally hated corporation such as Standard Oil on the grounds that its superior efficiency would lead to lower prices.122

  The large manufacturing corporations, a rarity before 1890 and mainly associated with the railways, had become, by 1910, the dominant form of business, accounting for over half of the value of all manufacturing capital.123 The high wages these firms were able to pay brought about the first large mass consumer market. And they paid high wages because the demand for labour grew at a faster rate than the flow of immigrants. The combination of a large domestic market, constant innovation, and rising productivity was unbeatable.

  It may well be to the advantage of a single capitalist to exploit his workers, pay them absurdly low wages, make them redundant at the slightest whim of the business cycle, but, collectively, capitalists need prosperous workers able and willing to buy the goods produced; they need satisfied workers able and willing to turn up to the factory gates with, if not quite a smile on their faces, at least able and willing to work another day with some prospects that their conditions of existence will not deteriorate and will perhaps improve.

  Henry Ford understood this perfectly well. Although an uncomplicated union-basher, an anti-Semite, and an admirer of Adolf Hitler (who decorated him in 1938), he was not a reactionary (there were few true reactionaries in North America). He was an authentic pioneer of twentieth-century capitalism. High wages were a way of bribing workers away from militancy. In January 1914, Ford announced he would pay his workers five dollars a day (far more than what similar firms paid) – the equivalent, adjusted for inflation, of $109.09 a day in 2010. (In 2010 an automotive worker earned on average $28.57 per hour or $228.56 for an eight-hour day – just over twice as much as in 1914.)124 Ford’s decision deeply perturbed financial circles and puzzled trade unionists, but it signalled that modernity could and would benefit the industrial working class. The five-dollar day, however, included a bonus (half of the daily wage) to be paid to workers who were disciplined, who performed well, and who abandoned their old ‘values’ carried over from Europe (whatever these might have been) in favour of ‘Americanism’.125 Henry Ford, who blended modernity with a paternalistic attitude towards his workers, explained that ‘These men of many nations must be taught American ways, the English language, and the right way to live.’ Married men should not take on lodgers. Workers should live in clean ‘well-conducted homes, in rooms that are well lighted and ventilated’ and not in slums. A Ford pamphlet intoned: ‘Employees should use plenty of soap and water in the home, and upon their children, bathing frequently. Nothing makes for right living and health as much as cleanliness. Notice that the most advanced people are the cleanest.’126 Religiosity was encouraged but not when it interfered with profits; thus, almost 900 Greek and Russian workers (6 per cent of the workforce) were dismissed because they celebrated ‘their’ Christmas, following the Julian calendar, thirteen days later than other Christians: ‘If these men are to make their home in America they should observe American holidays,’ declared Ford (though even he would have agreed that Jesus was not American).127 As wages crept up in other companies and wartime inflation took its toll, the size of the bonus decreased as a proportion of the total pay and there was less of an inducement for workers to follow Ford’s precepts.128 American wages remained higher than European ones, though welfare was much lower in the United States than in advanced European countries.

  As mentioned above, American capitalism, like British capitalism (and unlike Japanese and Russian), did not start big but small: a myriad of small enterprises dominated every sector of human activity.129 This was not the result of market forces or native Yankee ingenuity, but rather of the management by the state of the way the land was settled. The federal government contributed decisively to the creation of a class of small landholders through the Homestead Act of 1862, when Abraham Lincoln’s administration granted land hitherto uncultivated to those who wished to cultivate it (provided they had not fought with the South). Between 1880 and 1910 the farm population grew from 22 million to over 32 million.130 At the same time the number of people living in cities increased. Normally, urbanization and depopulation of the countryside is the trend within each economy, but the United States attracted immigrants who settled both in the countryside and in the cities. This was the basis for a considerable industrial expansion. American farmers too were now involved in worldwide economic networks. They had to learn to behave like businessmen, or else sink. American farmers (including some of the more prosperous among the small ones) demanded and were eager to adopt new mechanized equipment such as the McCormick reaper, the McCormick harvester, and the steam tractor.131 In 1883 alone McCormick sold 48,000 machines.132 By using such industrial goods, American farmers raised their productivity dramatically, increasing the production of wheat between 1870 and 1900 four times, lowering export prices and destroying the livelihood of increasingly uncompetitive farmers in the USA, but causing even more destruction in Europe, particularly in eastern Europe. The main beneficiaries were, of course, the larger farms.

  The myth of the frontier, celebrated by historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner in his famous 1893 Chicago lecture ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, and glorified in endless books and films, depicted brave settlers going west to build a new Jerusalem against the odds (the drought, the cold, the outlaws, the Indians). This myth is contradicted by modern historians, who point out that home-steaders got the poorer land while the better land had already been acquired by speculators in order to resell it to others, or by richer farmers who could afford the new implements and machines. In 1886 a congressional committee discovered that twenty-nine companies, all foreign owned, controlled more than 20 million acres of farmland and one English company held 3 million acres in Texas alone.133

  Unlike the rest of rural North America, California was not a place of small farms but of plantations and large estates. The workers were not individualist small farmers but exploited indentured Chinese and migrant Mexicans.134 In industry, transport, and mining a similar process of concentration was underway. By 1918 the United States had 318,000 corporations. The largest 5 per cent earned almost 80 per cent of the total net income.135 Hence the enduring appeal of an American form of right-wing populism (especially among disgruntled small farmers) angry at large corporations, cities, modernity, immigrants, and, above all, the federal government.

  Capitalism may be constantly renewing itself but many of the companies that still dominated the corporate landscape at the end of the twentieth century had been founded in the nineteenth century – companies such as Eastman Kodak, Boston Food, which became, eventually, United Fruit (famous for Chiquita bananas), Johnson and Johnson (pharmaceutical and baby products), Coca-Cola, Westinghouse Electric, Sears Roebuck (department store chain), Avon (beauty products), and Hershey Food (the famous chocolate bars started to be sold in 1900). Then in the years preceding the First World War, car manufacturers appeared (Ford and General Motors), publishing (McGraw-Hill), Gillette (the first razor went on sale in 1903), Black and Decker (1910, in 1917 they invented the portable power drill), and the supermarket chain Safeway (the original store was founded in 1915 in Idaho
). Of the largest 500 American firms at the end of the twentieth century, 144 originated in the period 1880 to 1910 (fifty-three in the 1880s, thirty-nine in the 1890s, and fifty-two in 1900s).136

  American big business inspired fear in Europe, and rightly so. After all, the more mechanized, innovative, and efficient American agriculture was, the more European agriculture was in danger (as noted when discussing Hungary and Romania, see Chapter 4). Manufacturing countries too began to be afraid of the Americans. America gloried in its unlimited possibilities. American businesses advanced on the international scene steadily, even before the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1836 nine out of the fifty-five foreign firms operating in Guangzhou (Canton) were American. By 1851, at the Crystal Palace World Fair, American firms exhibited chemicals, reapers (McCormick), firearms (Samuel Colt), and starch (Colgate). The first great US international firm was Singer (sewing machines) followed by Standard Oil, General Electric, National Cash Register, and International Harvester. To save transport costs Singer in 1867 built a factory in Glasgow, where by 1881 it had three.137

  Germans were afraid of an invasion of American-made goods and all the more so since the United States itself protected its manufactures behind a wall of tariffs.138 The French too were scared. In 1898 the liberal economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu argued that the entry of the USA into the global system was irrevocably changing the political framework within which the European powers operated. The population of America increased constantly, he noted, estimating that by 1950 there would be 120 to 130 million people – a slight underestimate since the figure for 1950 was 151,325,000. And if you added Great Britain and her colonies, he continued, there would be in the world some 200 to 220 million ‘Anglo-Saxons’. Faced with this danger the continental European powers should end the arms race and proceed towards the constitution of a European Federation, one of whose objectives would be to ensure that only European powers continued to colonize Africa; another would be inter-European cooperation in Asia and the Pacific. And, in what appears to be a precursor of the European Economic Community, the main purpose of the federation would be to proceed towards a western European customs union that excluded the United States and the United Kingdom.139 The idea of a united Europe had not been uncommon among European intellectuals in the nineteenth century (such as Giuseppe Mazzini, Victor Hugo, and Julius Fröbel), but it was usually linked with the idea of peace and not so obviously tied to a vision of a continent battling against American and British economic supremacy.

  Americans too were anxious: would they really be able to sustain their growth and defeat European competition – the competition of a Europe that was edging towards protectionism, even including that great bastion of free trade, Great Britain? After all, they indicated, the Europeans, and the British in particular, still had some significant advantages: greater international experience in trade matters in markets they had themselves established and control of international banking and shipping.140 Anxiety overcomes both laggards and pathbreakers.

  PART THREE

  Involving the Demos

  10

  Building the Nation

  The great revolutions of the eighteenth century, the French and the American, and the British Industrial Revolution, were not driven by a desire to catch up with more advanced countries: France, the United States, and Great Britain were the more advanced countries. They thought they were the centre of the world. They were inventing a new modern politics. They had no lessons to learn and plenty to teach: the universality of the rights of men and citizens (France), the right of settlers to organize themselves and their taxes independently of a distant ‘mother country’ (USA), the establishment of an industrial society semi-autonomous from the state (Great Britain).

  It seemed, then and now, that there was a kind of symmetry between democratization and capitalist growth. In Britain, the model for so many, citizenship was being developed throughout the nineteenth century, expanding gradually to include a greater proportion of the (male) working class, and women too acquired rights they had not possessed before.

  In France the process of democratization was more erratic, but went deeper than Britain, particularly after the foundation and the stabilization of the Third Republic in the decade after 1870 and the introduction of universal male suffrage (as happened in Germany when the country was unified). In America the conception of a state of the whole people had been a founding principle of the United States themselves, albeit only in theory, since women were excluded from voting (like almost everywhere else), as were slaves and, after the Civil War, former slaves.

  The revolutions that ensued elsewhere in the nineteenth century borrowed heavily from these pathbreakers. The settlers in Latin America followed in the footsteps of their counterparts in North America and broke with Spain and Portugal; nationalists in Germany and Italy constructed new states, hoping to emulate France and Great Britain; reformers in Japan reorganized an existing state to resist the West.

  The idea of democracy, of having to achieve some form of popular consent, of having to carry the masses along, was never far from these developments. The liberal grandiloquence of the West (the French Liberté, égalité, fraternité, the American ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’, the English ‘rule of law’ and ‘parliamentary representation’) resonated for the rest of the world not least because this wonderful rhetoric could be redeployed against actual and potential Western oppressors. Subsequently, throughout the twentieth century, whatever was done politically, whether by democracies or dictatorships, was done ‘in the name of the people’. The initial shot may have been that of the newly formed United States of America – the preamble to its constitution started with the proud words: ‘We the People’ – but the sentiment was also to be found in an older nation, about to be dismembered, namely Poland, where Stanisław Poniatowski was proclaimed king in 1791 by the ‘grace of God and the will of the nation’.1 And earlier, in June 1789, Count Mirabeau, representative of the Third Estate (the first two Estates being the nobility and the clergy), warned (as legend has it) Louis XVI with the proud words: Nous sommes ici par la volonté du peuple et nous n’en sortirons que par la force des baïonnettes (‘We are here by the will of the people and we will leave only if forced by bayonets’). Jean-Sylvain Bailly, astronomer and future mayor of Paris, joined in declaring proudly that la nation assemblée ne peut recevoir d’ordre (‘the nation, assembled, cannot receive commands’).

  History, language, and religion all have an important role to play in building the nation. The new emerging nations usually pretended to be old since it was thought that the people could be held together more firmly if they possessed the memory of a shared past. Often such a past was invented. Some thinkers understood this perfectly well. Ernest Renan, in his famous 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne (‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’), explained that a nation was a ‘great solidarity constituted by the common understanding of the sacrifices made in the past and those to be made in the future’. But this past, he added ominously, was often a constructed past, for it assumed ‘oblivion’ (l’oubli): ‘historical error [my emphasis] is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a threat to the nation’.2

  Renan added that ‘the existence of a nation is like a daily plebiscite’, meaning that national unity must be constantly constructed and reconstructed. As Anne-Marie Thiesse explains, ‘the real birth of a nation occurs when a few individuals declare that the nation exists and decide to prove it.’3 It is the work of an elite. Of course, nationalists did not just want to celebrate a nation, a community that holds itself to be a nation, but the transformation of the nation into a sovereign state, the idea being that the state embodied the people, something quite different from the states of old, embodied in a sovereign. Friedrich Nietzsche saw this clearly in 1881 when in Thus Spoke Zarathustra he exclaimed:

  The state? What is that? Well then! Now open your ears, for now I
shall speak to you of the death of peoples. The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’4

  When the Italian nationalist republican activist and historian Carlo Cattaneo, writing in the 1840s (before Italy was a state), appealed to the Italians, he really meant the Italy of cultural elites, not the ‘multitude divided in manifold warring nations, divided by casts, dialects, and greedy and bloodthirsty factions, who thrive in superstition, in selfishness, and in ignorance …’5

  Massimo D’Azeglio, a Piedmontese politician and supporter of Italian unification, is supposed to have coined the famous aphorism, on the morrow of national unity: ‘We have made Italy, now we have to make the Italians’ – a recognition that, somehow, the people are constructed by politics rather than the other way round. D’Azeglio’s actual words, however, were a little different: ‘Italy’s first objective,’ he wrote, ‘is the formation of Italians endowed with a strong and noble character. Unfortunately every day we move to the opposite pole; unfortunately we have made Italy, but not the Italians.’6 What had gone wrong? Italy, he explained, had (re)-acquired its territory, but had not achieved real national unity: ‘Italy’s most dangerous enemies are not the Germans [i.e. the Austrians] but the Italians.’ A new Italy was born, but the Italians were not yet really Italians or, at least, not the ‘right’ kind of Italian. The Italians needed to be taught how to acquire a sense of citizenship.7

  In 1866 Pasquale Villari, historian and politician, in an article entitled ‘Di chi è la colpa?’ (‘Who is to Blame?’), contrasted the remarkable performance of Bismarck’s new Germany to that of Italy, whose real enemy was: