James Lincoln Collier - The Rise of Industry: 1860 - 1900

T HE D RAMA OF A MERICAN H ISTORY

The RISE of INDUSTRY

18601900

Christopher Collier

James Lincoln Collier

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: The authors wish to thank Walter Licht, Professor of History and Director of the Graduate Division, University of Pennsylvania, for his careful reading of the text of this volume in The Drama of American History series and his thoughtful and useful comments. The work has been much improved by Professor Licht's notes. The authors are deeply in his debt, but, of course, assume full responsibility for the substance of the work, including any errors that may appear.

Photo research by James Lincoln Collier.

COVER PHOTO: Corbis-Bettmann

PICTURE CREDITS: The photographs in this book are used by permission and through the courtesy of:

Chapter I: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, Williamsburg : quilting party, quilt. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska : New Harmony, Indiana. Corbis-Bettmann : spinning mill, early steamboat, Thomas Alva Edison. Independence National Historical Park : Philadelphia in 1800, modern-day Philadelphia.

Chapter II: Corbis-Bettmann : James Watt, the DeWitt Clinton , passenger cars, little town along railroad tracks.

Chapter III: Corbis-Bettmann : John Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Museum of the City of New York : Richmond Hill.

Chapter IV: Corbis-Bettmann : sharecroppers, Herbert Spencer, Andrew Carnegie. Museum of the City of New York : hod carrier, tenement apartment, necktie workroom, public baths.

Chapter V: Corbis-Bettmann : Maryland National Guard, strikers in Corning, Eugene Debs, Pinkerton men, President Grover Cleveland.

Chapter VI: Corbis-Bettmann : Bessemer plant, Henry Ford, Ladies' Home Journal .

2000 Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the copyright holders.

First ebook edition 2012 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-517-8

Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9572-8

The RISE of INDUSTRY

18601900

C ONTENTS

P REFACE

OVER MANY YEARS of both teaching and writing for students at all levels, from grammar school to graduate school, it has been borne in on us that many, if not most, American history textbooks suffer from trying to include everything of any moment in the history of the nation. Students become lost in a swamp of factual information, and as a consequence lose track of how those facts fit together and why they are significant and relevant to the world today.

In this series, our effort has been to strip the vast amount of available detail down to a central core. Our aim is to draw in bold strokes, providing enough information, but no more than is necessary, to bring out the basic themes of the American story, and what they mean to us now. We believe that it is surely more important for students to grasp the underlying concepts and ideas that emerge from the movement of history, than to memorize an array of facts and figures.

The difference between this series and many standard texts lies in what has been left out. We are convinced that students will better remember the important themes if they are not buried under a heap of names, dates, and places.

In this sense, our primary goal is what might be called citizenship education. We think it is critically important for America as a nation and Americans as individuals to understand the origins and workings of the public institutions that are central to American society. We have asked ourselves again and again what is most important for citizens of our democracy to know so they can most effectively make the system work for them and the nation. For this reason, we have focused on political and institutional history, leaving social and cultural history less well developed.

This series is divided into volumes that move chronologically through the American story. Each is built around a single topic, such as the Pilgrims, the Constitutional Convention, or immigration. Each volume has been written so that it can stand alone, for students who wish to research a given topic. As a consequence, in many cases material from previous volumes is repeated, usually in abbreviated form, to set the topic in its historical context. That is to say, students of the Constitutional Convention must be given some idea of relations with England, and why the Revolution was fought, even though the material was covered in detail in a previous volume. Readers should find that each volume tells an entire story that can be read with or without reference to other volumes.

Despite our belief that it is of the first importance to outline sharply basic concepts and generalizations, we have not neglected the great dramas of American history. The stories that will hold the attention of students are here, and we believe they will help the concepts they illustrate to stick in their minds. We think, for example, that knowing of Abraham Baldwin's brave and dramatic decision to vote with the small states at the Constitutional Convention will bring alive the Connecticut Compromise, out of which grew the American Senate.

Each of these volumes has been read by esteemed specialists in its particular topic; we have benefited from their comments.

C HAPTER I: T HE P OWER OF T ECHNOLOGY

IN THE HISTORY of the United States the period from about 1870, when the country was settling down after the Civil War, to about 1900 was a time of immense changequite possibly the most dynamic era in the nation's life. When the period began, America was still largely a rural country. Nearly three-quarters of Americans lived on farms or in small agricultural communities. A lot of clothing was store-bought, but most other things of daily use were still made at home. Bread, pies, and cakes were baked in coal or wood stoves. Most people's milk came from pails, not bottles. Bathwater was drawn from wells in wooden buckets and heated on stovesbut not very often. Music came from parlor pianos and crude fiddles, rather than from machines. In 1870 work for most people meant physical labor outdoors, plowing fields with oxen and mules, cutting hay with scythes, felling trees with axes and handsaws, mining coal with picks and shovels, catching fish with nets and lines from open dories. About 15 percent of the nation's women worked in mills or as servants in the houses of the well-to-do, but the rest spent twelve or fourteen hours a day working in their homes, shelling peas, washing clothes in buckets and ironing them with flatirons heated on stoves, milking cows, feeding chickens in the backyard and weeding carrots and lettuce in the kitchen gardenand, of course, taking care of children.