American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  To a degree, Edison became a kind of “captive scientist”—captive to the entrepreneurs who could supply capital and to the marketplace. In creating Menlo Park as a scientific factory, he obtained funds before his next inventions were anything more than an idea or perhaps a quick sketch in his or one of his partners’ lab books. As in a factory, work was subdivided among Edison’s gifted inventors and technicians, a division of labor prevailed, and a bureaucratic organization evolved. And as in any other private enterprise, “practicality” ruled. Edison would not work on a project unless it would meet a present or future need and make money.

  “A scientific man busies himself with theory,” Edison said to a reporter. “He is absolutely impractical. An inventor is essentially practical. Anything that won’t sell I don’t want to invent….”

  Working around the clock in his rumpled clothes, taking catnaps on laboratory tables, smoking twenty cheap cigars a day, gouging chaws out of huge hunks of chewing tobacco he shared with his associates, leaving the floor around him covered with spittle, Edison hardly appeared a heroic figure. He was something more important. While winning a reputation as an independent and single-minded inventor—“my business is thinking,” he liked to say—he was in fact, as Norbert Wiener pointed out, a transitional figure who pointed the way toward the big, bureaucratically organized research of the technological age to come.

  Philadelphia 1876: The Proud Exhibitors

  The crowd gaped at the massive engine towering over it—at the gleaming cylinders pointed skyward, at the huge, delicately balanced walking beams above, responding at one end to the ten-foot stroke of the cylinders and from the other plunging down to the thirty-foot flywheel. Two diminutive figures down on a platform, Ulysses S. Grant and Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, on command gently turned some wheels and the walking beams began to rock majestically, the flywheel to turn, and now the engine’s 1,500 horsepower was moving along leather belts to other mechanical showpieces—sewing machines, circular saws, presses, carpet looms, and thousands of other machines crowding the exhibition halls.

  It was May 10, 1876, the opening day at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. The rain seemed not to dampen the spirits of thousands pouring into Fairmount Park and jamming the pie stalls, lemonade stands, beer gardens, ice cream parlors, P. T. Barnum’s “Wild Man of Borneo,” and other attractions lining the approaches to the huge exhibition halls. But the keenest interest by far was in the exhibits. In the industrial exhibits: lathes, power looms, pumps, milling machines, a section of wire cable from John A. Roebling’s Niagara suspension bridge, a model showing how the steel arches of Eads’s St. Louis bridge had been formed, a 7,000-pound pendulum clock by Seth Thomas, Westinghouse’s air brake, Philadelphia-and Hartford-made machine tools, “sober black iron monsters whose varied steel edges could cut, chip, stamp, mold, grind, and otherwise shape metal,” in Joseph and Frances Gies’s words. In the agricultural exhibits: reapers and mowers and horse rakes and fruit dryers and steam road rollers and gang plows.

  Most exciting and baffling were the electrical exhibits, including “multiplex” telegraph devices. The Exhibition actually produced a historic event when Emperor Pedro II, who had met Alexander Graham Bell while visiting the Boston School for the Deaf, ran into the inventor at a Western Union exhibit and insisted on inspecting his “harmonic telegraph.” The emperor electrified the crowd when he pressed his ear to Bell’s receiver while the inventor declaimed Hamlet’s soliloquy from some distance away.

  “I hear, I hear!” the emperor cried. “To be or not to be!” The incident gave Bell the recognition he sorely needed. Other activities and exhibits at the exposition also portended a strange new future—most notably an internal combustion engine displayed by Langen & Otto of Germany. Perhaps many of the Exhibition’s visitors felt as John Greenleaf Whittier did when he wrote in his “Centennial Hymn”:

  Our fathers’ God! from out whose hand

  The centuries fall like grains of sand,

  We meet to-day, united, free,

  And loyal to our land and Thee,

  To thank Thee for the era done,

  And trust Thee for the opening one.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Structure of Classes

  SNORTING AND BAWLING, THEIR beady eyes glittering with fear, the cattle were driven out of the railroad cars by men with spiked poles and prodded down wooden ramps into the Chicago stockyards. Other men on horses herded the steers to pens that lay along alleys and streets, in blocks as regular as in the best-laid-out town. All was meticulously organized. Cowboys in the western ranges had rounded up their stock and driven them to towns like Abilene and Kansas City, Atchison and Hannibal, where they had been loaded into stockcars. Despite the length and frequent heat of the journey, stockmen usually delivered the cattle in good shape, since five dollars a head could be deducted for sick or damaged steers. Daily, the stockcars also disgorged thousands of hogs and sheep. They took their own places in pens that covered hundreds of acres on Chicago’s west side.

  After traders on horseback, trotting from pen to pen, bought and sold the stock, sealing their oral deals with quick handshakes, the beasts were driven into the nearby slaughterhouses. Here they were surveyed—“laid off like a map”—and delivered to the “chain.” Workers hoisted them by nose or feet to an overhead belt, which moved them steadily and inexorably to other men with knives who slit their throats and sliced off their skin, men who bashed their brains in with hammers, men who cleaved backbones with axes, men who sometimes plunged a still palpitating carcass into a vat of boiling water. “Everything of the pig was used except the squeal,” a meat packer boasted. A Chicago humorist noted, “A cow goes lowin’ softly in to Armour’s an’ comes out glue, gelatine, fertylizer, celoo-loid, joolry, sofy cushions, hair restorer, washin’ sody, littrachoor an’ bed springs so quick that while aft she’s still cow, for’ard she may be anything fr’m buttons to pannyma hats.”

  The workers—Poles, Germans, Slovaks, Irishmen—with their special tasks and chainlike organization were as regimented as the beasts. Signs in several languages enforced the rules. But this did not keep them from having fingers or hands sliced off as they grappled with carcasses and cutting machines on blood-soaked sawdust floors. Workers were often left with tubercular lungs, rheumatic bodies, hands scarred from the acid used to loosen wool from the skins of sheep.

  This scene in the Chicago stockyards would not have surprised Karl Marx. In the late 1880s, the first English translations of the first volume of Capital, edited by Friedrich Engels, were reaching radical circles in the United States. Under capitalism, Marx had written, “all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy any remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange him from the intellectual potentials of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his lifetime into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital.…”

  “Capital is dead labour,” Marx had written, “that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Marx’s passions seemed to rise as he wrote. “You rob me,” he had the worker telling his boss, “every day of 2/3 of the value of my commodity…. You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and in the odour of sanctity to boot; but the thing that you represent face to face with me has no heart in its breast.” Labor was hardly above the level of cattle, Marx implied; indeed, cattle had perhaps a higher status for, in its fattening, cattle was a raw material and at the same time a means of producing manure.

  Industrial labor under capital
ism, Marx contended, was degraded into the status of a commodity, transformed into the cog of a machine, converted into an urban proletariat. This was its tragedy, but in this also lay its great potential for liberation. Labor’s common status at the bottom of the heap, its sharing of work experiences, its proletarianization, established a solid foundation for a common consciousness of its status, for united protest, for joint political action. Did American workers have such a potential? Marx lived in a city where in 1880, for example, “63 of every 100 Londoners were native to that city, 94 coming from England and Wales, and 98 from Great Britain and Ireland,” according to Herbert Gutman, while in the same year the vast majority of the persons living in America’s biggest cities were immigrants or the children of immigrants.

  For that matter did the United States, with its capitalists concentrated not in one center like London but spread out in old and new industrial and financial centers across the country, possess even the potential for a “ruling class”?

  Upper Classes: The New Rich and the Old

  About three miles from the noisome stockyards, Philip D. Armour rose every morning at five in his home on fashionable Prairie Avenue, breakfasted at six, and soon, seated in his Goddard buggy drawn by two fast trotters and driven by a liveried coachman, he was on his way to his LaSalle Street office. He liked to get down to work, he would say, “before the boys with the polished nails show up.” Soon the place was a beehive of activity, as Armour leaned back in his swivel chair summoning messenger boys, sending out telegraphic instructions to distant posts in his business empire, talking and moralizing at length to his associates. At six, no matter what business lay before him, he left for home and by nine was in bed.

  One of six sons of New Englanders who had settled in the Mohawk Valley, Armour had traveled overland to California, panned gold and built sluices in the Sacramento River, returned home with several thousand dollars, and then had gone west again, plunging into the soap business in Cincinnati, selling hides in St. Paul, and moving on to grain dealing and meat packing in Milwaukee. During the Civil War, he made at least $2 million by agreeing to deliver, for $30 to $40 a barrel, pork that he was able to buy for $18 through a shrewd estimate of the likely fall of pork prices in the wake of Union victories. Soon he moved to Chicago, which had replaced Cincinnati as the pork-packing center of the nation. There, he pioneered in bringing live hogs to the city, slaughtering them, using the waste products, and refrigerating his shipments.

  A big, thickset man with thinning sandy hair and reddish whiskers, Armour was a proudly “self-made” entrepreneur who did not pretend any interests except meat packing and moneymaking. Asked by a reporter, “You have made your pile; why not clear out?,” he said, “I do not love the money. What I do love is the getting of it.” He had no interest in art or music, and he was reputed to have read only one book in his life—David Harum, about the horse trader who liked to say, “Do unto others as they would like to do unto you, only do it fust.” Armour enjoined his associates to “stick to facts” and avoid theory. But he liked to moralize about the value of hard work and rugged competition.

  Despite his rough speech and appearance, and his occasional early-morning visits to the stockyards, Armour moved among a select circle. All of his five brothers worked for him. He sent his sons to private schools and made a place for them in his business. He had a paternalistic way with his subordinates, rewarding them with $100 handouts on the spot when they pleased him, bullying them when they did not. He had no stomach for labor unions and collective bargaining.

  Even more select were the other notables on Prairie Avenue and environs: the millionaire merchant Marshall Field; his friend George M. Pullman, the sleeping car tycoon who lived in a palatial mansion down the street; the piano maker W. W. Kimball; and other meat packers, including Armour’s arch-rival, Gustavus Swift, another self-made man and a specialist in beef. Such men as these often lunched together at the “Millionaires’ Table” of the Chicago Club, or at the Palmer House, with its staircases of Carrara marble, its gigantic Egyptian chandelier over the reception desk, its “voluptuous Venetian mirrors” on the landings. Scattered around the North Side were other extraordinary edifices, with dining rooms sporting carved panels that portrayed rabbits, ducks, and prairie chickens; libraries of walnut and ebony set off with silver and curtained with raw silk lambrequins; music rooms with Gobelin tapestries and satinwood. In the sandstone mansion of Cyrus Hall McCormick, a fresco on the dining room ceiling pictured the emblem of the Legion of Honor, some sheaves of grain, and the McCormick reaper.

  A thousand miles to the east, proper Bostonians liked to talk about the Chicago pork barons and their vulgar mansions, about the pork barons’ wives in their silk hair nets with bangles of gold and silver braid and their frantic social rounds that seemed little short of stampedes. Chicago liked to talk about the Brahmins, too. A favorite story told of the Chicago banking house that asked Lee, Higginson in Boston about a certain Mr. Smith, a young Bostonian who had applied for a job in the banking house. The man at Lee, Higginson could hardly contain his enthusiasm for the young man. Mr. Smith, he wrote the banker, was a descendant of Peabodys, Cabots and Lowells, Saltonstalls, Appletons, and even Winthrops. Back came a brief letter from the Chicago banker. There seemed to have been a mistake, he wrote: “We were not contemplating using Mr. Smith for breeding purposes.”

  Bostonians called this story apocryphal, but they could not dispute the truth that lay behind it. As the old Brahmin elites faced intensifying economic competition from Chicago, New York, and myriad other centers, and as a flood of immigrants and outsiders overran Boston tenements and even Boston business offices, the Bostonians drew in among themselves economically, socially, culturally. What the new elites saw as an arrogant snobbishness, the old elites viewed as a discriminating exclusiveness. They retired into a bastion as many-walled as a feudal fortress. They tied their money up in trusts guarded by formidable attorneys. They sealed themselves off in organizations—the Massachusetts Society of Colonial Dames, the Society of Mayflower Descendants, genealogic societies—that no parvenu could crash. They sent their sons to select private schools and then to Harvard. Surrounded and besieged in the city, they retired to social citadels in the country. One family—the Forbeses—owned a good-sized island off Martha’s Vineyard, all for themselves.

  Above all, they protected their bloodlines through intermarriage. “In one Cabot family,” according to Cleveland Amory, “out of seven children who married, four married Higginsons. In a Jackson family of five, three married Cabots. In a Peabody family of four boys and two girls, two of the boys and a girl married Lawrences. In one family of Boston Shaws, there were eleven children. Nine married members of other Boston First Families, one died at the age of seven months, and the eleventh became a Catholic priest.” First Families had a penchant for marrying cousins, especially first cousins.

  And then there was the fabled “Boston woman.” Attired in sensible shoes and remarkable hats, often inherited, she spent her days in culture and good works, rushing from bookstore to church to symphony, from lecture to charity tea to indignation meeting. But she was not all this easily stereotyped, and she prided herself on her individuality. Most individualistic of all was Mrs. Jack Gardner, who publicly drank beer rather than tea, embraced Buddhism rather than Unitarianism, paraded down Tremont Street with a lion on a leash, told risqué stories in mixed company, had John Singer Sargent paint her in a costume that had all Boston talking, attired her coachman and two footmen in full livery—and left Boston an imported Florentine palace of pink marble with a fine art collection.

  No wonder a Beacon Hill lady, questioned as to her disdain for travel, asked, “Why should I travel when I’m already here?” No wonder many a Boston man who did travel kept Boston time on his big Waltham watch. But the Boston elites that retreated into apartness did not descend into impotence. While they could no longer dominate Boston’s electoral politics—before the Civil War seven mayors of Boston had held Br
ahmin status—men like Charles Francis Adams, Jr., chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Railway Commissioners and moderator of Quincy town meetings, held important posts in state and local government. In business, according to F. C. Jaher, “Brahmins maintained a vigorous entrepreneurial role and continued to control an appreciable segment of the great individual and corporate wealth in Boston.” And the old Brahmin families—the Cabots, Higginsons, Lees, and the rest—maintained a firm grip on the city’s cultural and charitable organizations, such as the Boston Symphony, the Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Somerset Club, the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Board of Overseers of Harvard, the North American Review. For many with old wealth, these and family demands took most of their waking hours.

  Other elites along the Atlantic seaboard displayed the same solidarity and exclusiveness as the proper Bostonians, but with local variations. Philadelphia society had long since moved from the old Independence Hall-Second Bank area a few blocks west of the Delaware to the Rittenhouse Square region a few blocks east of the Schuylkill. In this square and the blocks around it the banking, merchant, railroad, iron, coal, and—later—oil families built their mansions, held their balls, retreated to their clubs (Rittenhouse and Philadelphia), attended their Episcopalian churches (St. Mark’s and the Church of the Holy Trinity), sponsored the arts (Academy of Music, Academy of the Fine Arts), discussed their Republican politics (Union League Club). Not only Biddies but Baldwins (locomotives), Disstons (steel and saws), Bromleys (textiles), Wideners (traction and utilities), Cramps (ships), and Elkinses (traction and oil) who lived in the square and its environs “definitely felt themselves to be different, aloof and apart, from the rapidly developing heterogeneity of the rest of American society,” according to E. Digby Baltzell. “Their wives and children lived in a money-insulated world of the great houses, private schools and fashionable churches surrounding the Square.” Possibly, reflected Baltzell, this “privatization” went back to Andrew Jackson’s triumph over Nicholas Biddle.