American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Adams plunged into an economic arena in which technology paced the growth of productive forces and production was the measure of all things economic. As early as the 1820s American patents had averaged three times those in Britain, the production center of the world; of course, as Englishmen pointed out, Washington had far easier patent requirements than London. “Machinery has taken almost entire possession of the manufacture of cloth,” an observer noted in 1844; “it is making steady—we might say rapid—advance upon all branches of iron manufacture; the newly invented machine saws, working in curves as well as straight lines.” The planing and grooving machines, and the tenon and mortise machine, were also impressive. In no field did technology move faster than in Charles Adams’s own, railroads. And not least of the forces for expanded production was the collective talent of the young men in Adams’s war generation who had mobilized, organized, and transported armies of machines and men.

  By the late 1860s the nation was poised for another huge economic takeoff that would make it, within a quarter century, world leader in the production of timber and steel, meat packing, the mining of coal, iron, gold, silver. The only circumstances that seemed able to slow American production were depression or panic. The fifty years before the Civil War had seen periodic boom-and-bust: a small boom during the War of 1812–15 followed by speculation, a collapse in foreign market prices and land values, amid numerous bank failures; a boom in railroad and canal building in the mid-thirties followed by a drop in stock and commodity prices and an acute bank crisis; a big expansion in business in the early 1850s followed once again by overspeculation in railroads and land and then by a brief but sharp panic.

  The remorseless sequence of boom-and-bust seemed to pick up again after the Civil War. In the wake of an overextension of railroad securities and the failure of the banking house of Jay Cooke and Co. in September 1873, banks failed, brokers went bankrupt, and prices dropped drastically. There followed two decades of steady rise in industrial investment, marred by downturns in the mid-eighties and at the end of that decade. The panics had their human cost, not least among the capitalists themselves. “Am going through a period of such stress—Bluest kind of a blue day—Stocks tumbling—I am caught and must bow my back to the burden—Took a cogitating sleigh ride—I’m trying to get sail in,” young Adams jotted down in his diary day by day during the troubles of ’83.

  But Adams’s woes could not compare with those of the masses of men thrown out of work in every depression or major panic—a fact well appreciated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And no capitalist was more concerned about the forces of production, and the failures of production, than the author of Capital. Not only was production an initial material test of the capacity of an economy to perform; even more, the forces of production—by which Marx meant workers, raw materials, technology, and organization—essentially determined the productive relations of classes, which in turn conditioned intellectual and political forces. His conception of history, he wrote in The German Ideology, started from “the material production of life itself” and the need to “comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this (i.e., civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history; further, to show it in its action as State, to explain the whole mass of different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc., etc., and trace their origins and growth by which means, of course, the whole thing can be shown in its totality (and therefore, too, reciprocal action of these various sides on one another).” The mass of productive forces, not “idealistic humbug,” was crucial.

  “The bourgeoisie,” he and Engels asserted in the Communist Manifesto, “cannot exist, without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”

  Karl Marx. Twenty years after the Communist Manifesto of 1848, few Americans had heard of him or the blazing summons to the world proletariat, even fewer of his partner Friedrich Engels or of the recently published Capital. Some Americans had read his January 1865 letter to Lincoln, asserting that the “anti-slavery war” would bring the ascendancy of the working class just as the Revolutionary War had brought that of the middle class, and foreseeing the inexorable fate of the Emancipator—the “single-minded son of the working class”—to lead that struggle. Marx’s views were doubtless better known to good bourgeois readers of the New York Daily Tribune than to American toilers, for Marx, with Engels’s help, had written nearly five hundred articles on American, European, and Asian politics for the Tribune between 1852 and 1862, until Horace Greeley became disturbed by his views and dropped him.

  Nor would most Americans have been impressed by the man himself, living and working in a grimy London flat among dense tobacco fumes, piles of newspapers and manuscripts, the heady talk of visiting revolutionaries. His family was blighted by illness and poverty; one child died, then another, and the father was afflicted with liver troubles, hepatitis, a facial ulcer, coughing spells, carbuncles. He spoke of the “wretchedness of existence.” But, by sheer force of will and intellect, he and Engels were impressing their views on the quarreling, floundering revolutionaries of Europe.

  Marx had long been fascinated by far-off America, by its economic dynamism, its vast frontier that could drain off steaming social pressures, its socioeconomic classes that seemed to him to “continually alter and mutually exchange their component parts,” and above all by its “feverish and youthful movement of a material production” that “has to appropriate a new world [but] has left neither time nor opportunity for the abolition of the old spiritual world.” The intensity of that production meant to Marx that—in contrast to his mentor Hegel’s view of the United States as “outside history”—Americans had moved within history by the mid-nineteenth century. And production was crucial; he credited the bourgeoisie with freeing productive forces, accomplishing “wonders far surpassing the Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.” American railroads especially impressed Marx, for they would bring class unity.

  For both communist and capitalist, in short, Production was king. And for both, technology was his sword.

  Innovators: The Ingenious Yankees

  The Hoosac Mountains, northwest Massachusetts, the late 1860s:

  Technology is a wholly practical matter to several hundred men slowly boring a tunnel through the Hoosac mountain range of northwest Massachusetts during the late 1860s. Knee-deep in muck, soaked to the skin, they have to attend to their drilling and blasting while staying on guard against falling rock, floods, suffocating dust and smoke, premature explosions. A hundred or more men have died in small accidents since the digging started; still more will die before the toilers glimpse their goal, the “pinprick of light.” These are hardy men. Some have recently arrived from Canada, Ireland, and Italy; others are old Yankees whose forefathers might have included some of “Shays’s rebels” who had stumbled over the Hoosac range through the bitter winter of 1787 as they fled from the state militia.

  Over four miles in length, the most direct link between Boston and the busy Troy factories on the Hudson, the Hoosac would be the longest bore in the United States when completed. But when would this be? Originally proposed in 1819, actually started in 1851, the tunnel project had repeatedly run out of funds. The men had not faltered, only the machines. At the start, amidst much pomp and ceremony, “Wilson’s Patented Stone-Cutting Machine,” weighing seventy-five tons, had been hauled from South Boston and wheeled into the east portal of the bore. Its huge revolving iron cutters were expected to grind out a circle of rock; then black powder would blast out the center. While visiting legislators watched with delight, the monster crunched into the rock for about ten feet. Then it ground to a halt, never to run again, defeated by the Hoosac gneiss and schist.

  Not for twenty-five years would the Hoosac barrier be pierced—and then only because of clever innovations. In the early years, the tunnelers used simp
le gunpowder to split the rock. One man held the star-pointed hand drill while his workmate whacked it three or four feet into the rock with a twenty-pound double-jack hammer. Next the powder—a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal—was tamped into the drill hole and ignited by a goose-quill fuse; then the igniter sprinted for safety while his mates cowered behind heavy wooden parapets. In later years a “safety fuse” made of powder thread spun in jute yarn and coated with coal tar was attached. Still later compressed-air rock drills, with holes in the center through which water was pumped to cool the bits and clear the dust, considerably quickened progress.

  Even more important was the replacement of gunpowder with nitroglycerin. In a two-story factory in North Adams, at the west portal, glycerine was mixed, drop by drop, with nitric and sulfuric acids, in a solution bathed in ice and stirred continuously. Several times more powerful than black powder, nitro was also far more volatile. It had such a reputation for killing workers that its shipment was regulated abroad, and interstate in America, but it continued to take its toll among Hoosac men. One day, C. P. Granger was hauling a load of nitro to the bore when his sleigh skidded over a snowbank. Granger jumped into the snow and awaited the blast; hearing none, after a time he collected the now frozen cartridges, only to discover that they could not be detonated until thawed. Thereafter nitro was carried frozen.

  Most of the technological progress, however, was due more to determined experimentation than to luck. New ideas and machines at first were imported from abroad, after Yankee engineers had scoured England and the Continent—especially Italy and France—for the latest tunneling techniques. In turn the Hoosac innovators, and others like them, fertilized inventions in other fields. In particular, the new drilling and detonating methods stimulated innovation in the coal and iron mines to the west. Coal production was soaring as more and more mines opened west of the Alleghenies and, as coal went, so went the flourishing iron industry, with its rolling mills and puddling furnaces. By the early 1870s, Henry Clay Frick was buying up extensive coal lands in southwest Pennsylvania, building thousands of beehive ovens, introducing machines for drawing coke from the ovens—a fuel that when fired produced far greater heat than raw coal—and shipping coke by the trainload to the Pittsburgh iron mills.

  The American Iron Age had long before dawned as Missouri ore mountains were opened up and then the rich Marquette range in the 1840s. Transportation had been the bottleneck in the Lake Superior region—even sleds and sailboats had been used—until the federal government built a canal at the Sault Sainte Marie rapids in 1856 and steamboats and railroads took over the big hauling jobs. Civil War ironclads had dramatized the power of the dense metal. The reign of Iron really began as rock drills replaced the picks of earlier days, steam shovels scooped up the ore from the stockpiles and dumped it into the shipping cars, and the elongated ore ships, built of iron too, carried the huge loads on the long trip to the hungry furnaces. Just as Hoosac workers had been lowered through shafts to the bore below, the iron miners were let down in steel cages to the mining areas as these were tunneled ever deeper.

  Technology paved the way for all this, and no technology was more pivotal than machine tools. Just as Hoosac tunnelers and Marquette drillers had to wait for their compressed-air drills and other equipment, manufacturers of a hundred products had to wait on the innovations of “ingenious Yankees” in the famous old firms of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Gone were the earlier days when Americans had to borrow from the English engineer-entrepreneurs who had developed boring machines and planers mainly for the making of British steamships and locomotives; gone too were the days when American ingenuity seemed devoted primarily to the arms industry. Now, after the Civil War, “Yankee inventors” were brilliantly carrying forward their earlier progress in precisely formed, smoothly machined interchangeable parts.

  Milling machines, developed intensively in national armories, served as the cutting edge of this cutting-edge industry. By 1880, thousands of these versatile machines had been built to fashion tools to make arms, clocks, sewing machines, and more machine tools. Turret lathes, which held a cluster of tools that performed a precise sequence of operations without needing resetting or removing of the workpiece, had virtually revolutionized the production of large quantities of small components such as screws; now the revolution was renewed through the automatic turret lathe, which “was eventually to make possible all modern automatic lathe operations.” Other machinery had to be perfected—hard, durable, precise ball bearings, for one thing—as bigger and speedier machinery was put on the market.

  By the late nineteenth century, celebrated American firms and their famous inventors were becoming the talk of the business world, even of industrial exhibitions abroad. At the old Brown and Sharp firm in Providence, J. R. Brown, son of the founder, produced the first micrometers to be manufactured commercially. Pratt and Whitney in Hartford perfected interchangeability of parts by developing a standard system of gauges, a comparator accurate to one fifty-thousandth of an inch, and finally a standard measuring machine. In Philadelphia, William Sellers developed a standardized system of screw threads, nuts, and boltheads that was to be adopted even in Europe. The most imaginative of the innovators was Frederick W. Taylor, who worked at a steel company headed by Sellers. A Harvard Law School graduate who climbed his way up from common laborer to chief engineer, Taylor became the genius-inventor of automatic grinders, forging and tool-feeding mechanisms and the biggest practical steam hammer ever built in the United States; later he introduced a steel alloy that vastly improved the efficiency of cutting tools at high temperatures.

  Machines, like men, need one another. As drilling and cutting machines helped stimulate coal and metal production, innovations in iron and steel production made possible the development of tougher high-speed machinery. With the development of the Bessemer process, iron and steel technology moved a long way from the days of the blacksmith’s forge or the puddler’s mold. Into the Bessemer converter, which looked like a great pear-shaped egg, air was blasted from the bottom and molten pig iron poured from the top, with the effect of volatilizing the carbon, silicon, and other impurities in the iron ore. Slow to adopt the Bessemer process, American steel makers forged ahead rapidly after the Civil War as they built vaster—and vastly more efficient—blast furnaces.

  Bursting into a volcano of sparks in the stygian gloom of the huge steel plants, the Bessemer converters became a symbol of the fiery age of iron and steel. Few could forget their first sight of the process: the seething pig iron in the converter—the flames flashing out of the pot as the air roared into the bottom—the dazzling explosion of sparks that rained down among the workers—the brawny steelmen, expressionless behind their heavy glass goggles, tilting the converter to pour out the molten steel, amid another shower of sparks. Almost as dramatic were the next steps, as the ingot castings were moved to the forge where enormous hammers molded them almost like butter, or to the rolling mills that flattened them into blooms and billets and then rolled them into rails, rods, bars, slabs, and strips.

  Some of these rods and strips went into iron and steel’s most conspicuous achievements—the bridges that spanned the nation’s widest rivers. For some years American engineers, borrowing heavily from European experience, had been putting up suspension bridges which, aside from such brilliant achievements as John Roebling’s Niagara span, had a tendency to collapse. Waiting to be bridged in the early 1870s was the mighty Mississippi—mighty in its width, in its depth, in its 200,000 cubic feet moving ten feet a second in high-water time, in the massive ice fields that drifted down from the north, in the deep mud that made abutments insecure. Waiting to bridge the Mississippi at St. Louis was a remarkable engineer, Captain James Eads. Little schooled except in the price of technological progress—he had arrived in St. Louis in 1833 at the age of thirteen in a steamboat that burst into flames as it docked, and he made his first fortune on the Mississippi salvaging wrecked steamboats with a diving bell
—Eads had built ironclads during the Civil War, and now was responding to the pleas of St. Louis businessmen weary of having to ferry goods across the river.

  Advised by experts to build either a suspension bridge or a standard multiple-span iron truss, Eads decided instead on the old arch form—but built of steel rather than stone or iron. He designed a center arch of 515 feet, attached to two piers resting in bedrock, with side arch spans of 497 feet running from the piers to shore abutments. These abutments had to be built down to a depth never before achieved. Borrowing from French experience, Eads devised a caisson down whose center spiral stairs diggers descended to the river floor. Emerging from work at the 76-foot depth, the crews began to complain of stomach pains caused by the change in pressure. From a depth of 93 feet, a man climbed to the top feeling fine, only to drop dead ten minutes later; five more men died of the bends in the next few days. Working with his personal physician, Eads hit on the solution—gradual decompression. With his deepest abutment solidly planted 103 feet below the surface, Eads then could turn to the task of cantilevering his arches out from the piers and joining the arch halves high over the river. The bridge opened for vehicles and locomotives in June 1874—and still stands today.

  Better steel and steel-making were already putting within reach the improved farm equipment that would in turn swell the farm produce that the long freight trains would now haul across the Mississippi. Steel would make possible a new harrow with long, curved spring teeth that could cope better than iron tines with hard roots and rocks. Another new harrow with discs of varying shapes and sizes, automatically scraped clean as they revolved, came into wide use. New American grain drills, with devices that fed seed into furrows opened up mechanically by fluted hoes, won praise abroad—even a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1878.