American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  [San Francisco’s cultural life]: Rolle. p. 450; Lucy Jones Diary, Bancroft Library, Franklin Walker, San Francisco’s Literary Frontier (Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), pp. 8, 116, 127, 316, 352; Lawrence Ferlinghetti and NancyJ. Peters, Literary San Francisco (City Lights Books and Harper & Row, 1980), pp. ix–xi, 29–32, 42–44, 64–66, 75–84.

  Industrialists: Carnegie, Rockefeller, and the Two Capitalisms

  102 [Carnegie]: Joseph Frazier Wall, Andrew Carnegie (Oxford University Press, 1970), passim, Irishman quoted at p. 151.

  [“I can get nae mair work”]: quoted in Harold C. Livesay, Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business (Little, Brown, 1975), p. 11.

  [Carnegie making the trains run]: Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (Houghton Mifflin, 1920), pp. 70–72.

  [Carnegie burning wrecked freight cars]: Wall, p. 151.

  104 [Carnegie on lime and coke]: quoted in ibid., p. 342.

  [Wall on Carnegie and cost-cutting]: Joseph F. Wall, “Andrew Carnegie,” in Garraty, op. cit., p. 176.

  [“We were boys together”]: J. Edgar Thomson, quoted in Livesay, p. 162.

  [Growth and economies]: ibid., pp. 155–56.

  [“Beyond this never earn”]: quoted in Wall, Carnegie, pp. 224–25.

  [“Gospel of Wealth”]: ibid., pp. 805–15.

  [The “other” Carnegie in England]: ibid., ch. 14; see also Carnegie, chs. 22–25.

  105 [John D. Rockefeller and his family]: David Freeman Hawke, John D. (Harper & Row, 1980), ch. 1.

  105–6 [Rockefeller’s youthful enterprises]: ibid., p. 12.

  [Rockefeller on competition and combination]: a composite of paragraphs of conversations of John D. Rockefeller with William O. Inglis, quoted in ibid., pp. 153–55.

  107 [Philanthropy of Carnegie and Rockefeller]: Burton J. Hendrick, “Andrew Carnegie,” in Johnson, Dictionary of American Biography, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 505; Wall, Carnegie, ch. 22; AllanNevins, John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise (Scribner’s, 1941), vol. 2, chs. 48, 49, and p. 712.

  [Marxist definition of need]: Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx (St. Martin’s Press, 1974), passim.

  [Production in the late nineteenth century]: Edwin Frickey, Production in the United States: 1860–1914 (Harvard University Press, 1947), especially pp. 7–15 (Table 1); John A. Garraty, The New Commonwealth, 1877–1890 (Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 82–85.

  107 [Manufactured goods index]: Garraty, New Commonwealth, p. 80; see also David A. Wells, Recent Economic Changes (D. Appleton, 1899).

  108 [Innovation in 1886–95]: Urdang, op. at., pp. 244–58.

  109 [Scientific man versus inventor]: Edison in Brooklyn Citizen, November 4. 1888, quoted in Roberc Conot, A Streak of Luck (Seaview Books, 1979), p. 460.

  [“My business is thinking”]: ibid., p. 456.

  [Edison as a transitional figure]: Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Houghton Mifflin, 1950), p. 127.

  Philadelphia 1876: The Proud Exhibitors

  [Philadelphia Centennial Exposition]: Gies and Gies, op. cit., pp. 3–9; Oliver, op. cit., pp. 300–302; Marshall Davidson, Life in America (Houghton Mifflin, 1974). vol. 1, pp. 538–41; J. S. Ingram, The Centennial Exposition (Hubbard Bros., 1876).

  110 [“Sober black iron monsters”]: Gies and Gies, p. 7.

  [Bell at the Centennial]: ibid., pp. 327–28; Bruce, op. cit., p. 197.

  [“Centennial Hymn”]: The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (Houghton Mifflin, 1895), p. 234, stanza 1.

  4. THE STRUCTURE OF CLASSES

  111 [Chicago stockyards]: W.Joseph Grand, The Illustrated History of the Union Stock Yards, Chicago, Ill. (Thomas Knapp, 1896); “The Meat Industry of America,” Scientific American, vol. 100, no. 4 (January 23, 1909), pp. 84–86 and no. 5 (January 30, 1909), pp. 99–102; Rudolf A. Clemen, The American Livestock and Meat Industry (Ronald Press, 1923); Lewis Corey, Meat and Man (Viking Press, 1950).

  [Everything used but the squeal]: quoted in Bessie L. Pierce, A History of Chicago (Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), vol. 3, p. 123.

  [Uses of the cow]: Finley Peter Dunne, quoted in ibid., vol. 3, p. 124.

  112 [Alienation in capitalist production]: Karl Marx, Capital, Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, trans. (Charles H. Kerr, 1915), p. 708.

  [Capital as dead labor]: ibid., p. 257.

  [Labor robbed of its value]: ibid., pp. 202–3.

  [Gutman on London]: Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), p. 40.

  Upper Classes: The New Rich and the Old

  113 [The Chicago rich]: Wayne Andrews, Battle for Chicago (Harcourt, Brace, 1946); Harper Leech and John Charles Carroll, Armour and His Times (Appleton-Century, 1938); Pierce, op. cit., vols. 2 and 3; Dixon Wecter,The Saga of American Society (Scribner’s, 1937), pp.143–48.

  [Armour’s routine]: Andrews, pp. 86–87, quoted at p. 87.

  [Armour on making money]: quoted in ibid., p. 87.

  [Ethics according to David Harum]: Edward N. Wescott, David Harum (D. Appleton, 1899), p. viii.

  114 [Elites generally]: see Frederic Cople Jaher, ed., The Rich, The Well Born, and the Powerful (University of Illinois Press, 1973); Frederic Cople Jaher, “Nineteenth Century Elites in Boston and New York,”Journal of Social History, vol. 6, no. 1 (Fall 1972), pp. 32–77;Maury Klein and Harvey Kantor, Prisoners of Progress (Macmillan, 1976), esp. ch. 7;Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes (C. H. Kerr, 1909).

  [Palmer House]: Andrews, pp. 75–78, quoted at p. 76.

  [McCormick’s fresco]: ibid., p. 112.

  [Boston elites]: Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians (E. P. Dutton, 1947); Lucius Beebe, Boston and the Boston Legend (Appleton-Century, 1935).

  [Chicagoans and Mr. Smith]: Amory, p. 11.

  115 [Intermarriage in Boston high society]: ibid., p. 20.

  [Mrs. Jack Gardner]: ibid., ch. 6; Beebe, ch. 17.

  [Beacon Hill lady on being “already here”]: quoted in Amory, p. 23.

  115 [Jaher on Brahmin power]: Jaher, “Nineteenth Century,” p. 60.

  116 [Philadelphia elites]: E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (Collier-Macmillan, 1966); Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy (Little, Brown, 1963).

  [“Different, aloof and apart”]: Baltzell, p. 188.

  [Pepper on Walnut Street]: quoted in ibid., p. 185.

  117 [New York elites]: John A. Kouwenhoven, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York (Doubleday, 1953); Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York (Random House, 1951); Mrs. John King van Rensselaer. The Social Ladder (Henry Holt, 1924).

  [McAllister on standards]: quoted in Klein and Kantor, p. 221.

  [The “Four Hundred”]: ibid., pp. 225–26; Morris, ch. 12;Ward McAllister, Society As I Have Found It (Cassell, 1890).

  118 [American society managed by women]: quoted in Klein and Kantor, p. 231; see also Wecter, ch. 8.

  [Ambitious hostesses]: Klein and Kantor, p. 226.

  [The Vanderbilts]: Wayne Andrews, The Vanderbilt Legend (Harcourt, Brace, 1941).

  [Vanderbilt, Astor hostilities]: ibid., pp. 254–55; Harvey O’Connor, The Astors (Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), pp. 195–98.

  [Vanderbilt Hyde Park mansion]: Charles W. Snell, Vanderbilt Mansion (National Park Service Historical Series No. 32, 1960).

  119 [New Haven class structure]: Robert E. Dahl, Who Governs?: Democracy and Power in anAmerican City (Yale University Press, 1961), Books 1, 2.

  [Springfield]: Michael Frisch, Town into City: Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Meaning of Community, 1840–1880 (Harvard University Press, 1972). [Patriarchal chauvinism]: see O’Connor, pp. 193, 194.

  The Middle Classes: A Woman’s Work

  [Details of home life]: Helen Smith Jordan, Love Lies Bleeding: The Life in Letters of Mary Abigail Abell (1979). at Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe; Mary E. Howard, “The Changing Household, 186
5–1900,” paper presented to Radcliffe Women’s Archives Workshop, 1952–53, Schlesinger Library; Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown (Harcourt, Brace, 1929), ch. 12, p. 167 footnote 17; Philip C. Dolce, ed..Suburbia: The American Dream and Dilemma (Anchor Books, 1976), pp. 5–7; Earl Lifshey, The Housewares Story (National Housewares Manufacturers Association, 1973), pp. 124, 126; Richard Sennett, “Middle-Class Families and Urban Violence: The Experience of a Chicago Community in the Nineteenth Century,” in Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennett, eds., Nineteenth Century Cities (Yale University Press, 1969); Doreen Yarwood, Costume of the Western World (St. Martin’s Press, 1980).

  119–20 [Laundry tasks]: Diary of Annie Thompson (unpublished manuscript in private collection, Chicago), quoted at p. 117; Howard, passim.

  120 [Housecleaning]: Claudia L. Bushman, A Good Man’s Poor Wife (University Press of New England, 1981), pp. 112–13.

  [“Hattie’s ‘opera cape’ ”]: Harriet Hanson Robinson, quoted in ibid., p. 113.

  [Journals read by women]: Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (Harvard University Press, 1930–68), vol. 3, ch. 4; vol. 4, ch. 21 and supplement; collection. New York Historical Society.

  121 [Domestic help]: U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office, Statistics of the Population of the United States of the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880) (Government Printing Office, 1883), p. 729; Theresa M. McBride, The Domestic Revolution (Holmes & Meier, 1976), pp. 18–19; David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (Oxford University Press, 1978);Jordan; Bushman, pp. 109–12; Lillian Pettingill, Toilers of the Home (Doubleday, 1903); Harriet Prescott Spofford, The Servant Girl Question (1881; reprinted by Arno Press, 1977); Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women (Wesleyan University Press, 1983).

  [Housewives’complaints]: Harriet Hanson Robinson, quoted in Bushman, pp. 109, 110, 109 respectively; see also Katzman, pp. 16–17.

  [Domestic science, domestic feminism]: Catharine E. Beechcr and Harriet Beechcr Stowe, The American Woman’s Home: or Principles of Domestic Science (J. B. Ford, 1869; reprinted, 1874, as The Housekeeper’s Manual); Edith Hoshino Altbach, Women in America (D. C. Heath, 1974), pp. 8. 33; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (Yale University Press, 1973),pp.96–97, 158–67, and passim; Mary P. Ryan, “The Power of Women’s Networks: A Case Study of Moral Reform in Antebellum America,” Feminist Studies, vol. 5, no. 1 (Spring 1979), pp. 66–85; Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good (Anchor Press, 1978), ch. 5.

  121 [Training of daughters]: Edna Ormsby. Journal (Schlesinger Library), February 12, 1895, p. 73; ibid., February 20, 1896, p. 84; Bushman, p. 112; Jordan, passim; Thompson, passim.

  121–22 [Sexuality]: Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 23–25; Ronald G. Waters, Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America (Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 65–78; see also Stephen Kern, Anatomy & Destiny: A Cultural History of the Human Body (Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), ch. 9; G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth Century America (Harper & Row, 1976).

  122 [“The full force of sexual desire”]: William Sanger, The History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes and Effects Throughout the World (Harper & Bros., 1858), pp. 488–89, in Waters, p. 67.

  [Fashion]: Yarwood, pp. 52, 54.

  [Corsets]: AndrewSinclair, The Better Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman (Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 103–5, Stanton quoted at p. 105.

  [English visitor on corseted American women]: Ada S. Ballin, The Science of Dress in Theory and Practise (Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1885), p. 160, in Kern, p. 13.

  [Beecher on cares of marriage]: Catharine Beecher, “On Female Health in America,” from Letters to the People on Health and Happiness (Harper & Bros., 1855), in Nancy F. Cott, ed., Roots of Bitterness (E. P. Dutton, 1972), p. 263.

  [“Like a man a-mowing”]: Anonymous wife, quoted in Gordon, p. 105. [“Unaccommodating and capricious”]: ibid., p. 125.

  [Women’s network]: Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth Century America,” in Linda K. Kerber and Jane De Hart Mathews, eds., Women’s America: Refocusing the Past (Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 156–79.

  123 [Contraception and control of family size]: Gordon, chs. 5–6; Daniel Scott Smith, “Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America,” in Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck, A Heritage of Her Own (Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 222–45.

  [Comstock law]: reprinted in Kerber and Mathews, p. 438; and see Gordon, pp. 24, 167.

  [Abortion ]: James C. Mohr, “Abortion in America,” in Kerber and Mathews, pp. 179–89.

  [Stanton on Whitman and women]: Harriet Stanton Blatch and Theodore Stanton, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Arno Press, 1969), vol. 2, p. 210 (diary entry, September 6, 1883).

  [Burton on love]: Harriet Burton Laidlaw, Diary, Harriet B. Laidlaw Papers, Schlesinger Library.

  [Survey of women’s attitudes toward sex]: Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher, “Hygiene and Physiology of Women” (Mosher Papers, Stanford University), vol. 10, in Carl N. Degler, “What Ought to Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review, vol. 79, no. 5 (December 1974), pp. 1467–90, quoted at p. 1487.

  [Gilman ‘s illness ]: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Harper Colophon Books, 1975), p. 92.

  [Women’s depression]: Ehrenreich and English, pp. 1–4; and ch. 4, esp. p. 95.

  124 [Alice James on the “receptive attitude”]: Alice James to William James, January3–7, 1886(?), in Ruth Bernard Yeazell, The Death and Letters of Alice James (University of California Press, 1981), p. 107.

  [Beecher on “decay of female health”]: Beecher, “On Female Health in America,” in Cott, pp. 263–70, quoted at p. 263.

  [Woman as “chief ornament”]: Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (Modern Library, 1934), p. 180.

  [Gilman on wife’s role]: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Are Women Human Beings?,” Harper’s Weekly, May 25, 1912, p. 11, in Aileen S. Kraditor, ed., Up from the Pedestal (Quadrangle, 1975), pp. 325–31; see also Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (Small, Maynard, 1898).

  124 [Doctors and women]: Ehrenreich and English, pp. 35–88, also ch. 4.

  [Henry Ward Beecher]: Clifford E. Clark, Jr., Henry Ward Beecher: Spokesman for a Middle-Class America (University of Illinois Press, 1978);William G. McLoughlin, The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay on the Shifting Values of Mid-Victorian America, 1840–1870 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1970).

  125 [Victoria Woodhull]: Emanie Sachs, “The Terrible Siren” (Harper & Bros., 1928); Johanna Johnscon, Mrs. Satan (Putnam’s, 1967).

  [Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly]: Mott, vol. 3, pp. 443–53; extensive (though incomplete) collection of the Weekly in New-York Historical Society.

  125–6 [Woodhull on freeing women from sexual slavery]: Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, October 1, 1870, p. 11.

  126 [Woodhull’s appearance in Steinway Hall]: Sachs, pp. 135–36; see also the Weekly, January 2, 1875, p. 2.

  [Woodhull’s exposé of the Beecher-Tilton relationship]: Weekly, November 2, 1872, pp. 9–13; see also Robert Shaplen, Free Love and Heavenly Sinners (Alfred A. Knopf, 1954).

  127 [Beecher as spokesman for the middle class]: Clark, prologue.

  The Farmer’s Lot

  [Department of Agriculture study of farm wife’s work]: cited in John Mack Faragher, “The Midwestern Farming Family, 1850,”in Kerber and Mathews, op. cit., pp. 114–29, quoted at p. 123.

  [Farm women’s routine]: John Ise, Sod and Stubble: The Story of a Kansas Homestead (University of Nebraska Press, 1967), ch. 3.

  128 [E.B.’s complaint and rejoinders]: from The Household, 1878–79, 1883, in Norton Juster, So Sweet to Labor: Rural Women in America, 1
865–1895; (Viking Press, 1979), pp. 145–51, quoted at pp. 145, 146, 149.

  [Migration into the Plains states]: Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer’s Last Frontier (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), p. 38; see also Page Smith, Daughters of the Promised Land (Little, Brown, 1970), esp. ch. 15.

  [Creating new counties and communities]: John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (University of Minnesota Press, 1931), p. 18.

  [Homestead Act]: ibid., pp. 9–10.

  129 [Sod houses and living conditions]: Ise, passim; Hicks, p. 30.

  [Farmers’ financial plight]: Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 114; Hicks, pp. 89–90; Norman Pollack, ed., The Populist Mind (Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), p. 34; Ise, p. 17.

  130 [Farmers, middlemen, and trusts]: Shannon, pp. 174, 179, 192–93; Hicks, p. 61.

  [Downgrading “number one” wheat]: Lewis Walker, Jr., “Abuses in the Grain Trade of theNorthwest,” in Annals of the American Academy of Politicul and Social Science, vol. 18 (November 1901), pp. 488–90, quoted at p. 490.

  [The small farmer’s high costs of transportation]: Hicks, pp. 61–65.

  [Migration back to the East]: ibid., p. 84; Shannon, p. 146.

  130–1 [Susan Orcutt’s appeal]: quoted in Pollack, p. 36 (June 29, 1894).

  131 [Condition of Southern farmers, post-Civil War]: Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge University Press, 1977). p. 151.

  [The cotton mania]: Charles H. Otken, The Ills of the South (Putnam’s, 1894), ch. 7, quoted in Hicks, p. 49.

  [Conditions in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi]: C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Louisiana State University Press, 1951), p. 177.

  [Political leaders on farmers’ conditions]: quoted in ibid., pp. 187–88.

  132 [“Working on halves”]: Ransom and Sutch, pp. 89–90.

  [“Slavery under a new name”]: Robert Preston Brooks, “The Agrarian Revolution in Georgia, 1865–1912,” in Georgia Studies: Selected Writings of Robert Preston Brooks (University of Georgia Press, 1952), p. 101.