INDUSTRIAL EXPANSION

Today, we discuss industrialism in the U.S.

Try to name an area of your life not now impacted by industrialism.




“This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times…It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed.”
Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879

Why does such wretched poverty often seem to accompany vast economic growth?


The Age of Unparalleled Industrial Expansion:


How much growth was there?

Handout: 1860 vs. 1900

1. Write your name on the back of the handout.
Look at the numbers, but do not say anything to your neighbor. Do, however, write extensively on the paper. Write down any idea that comes to mind, connecting them to the fact that spurred the thought. Circle. Draw lines. Write. Fill the page with your ideas.
Do this first part without conferring with your neighbor.

2. Pass the paper to someone in a row far far away.

3. With the paper now in front of you, choose a couple of the ideas that you think are most compelling or brilliant. Comment on them, asking questions, expanding the conclusions of the original author, or remarking in any way that you think will push the conversation on paper forward.

4. Pass the paper again…continue the conversation.


5. Get the thing back to the original author.



The Age of Unparalleled Industrial Expansion:


Why was there such vast growth so rapidly in the U.S.?

1. War: Why would war encourage industrial growth?

Example #1: Morrill Act (1862)

Example #2: Railroads:
1860: 30,000 miles of r.r.
1864: Congress grants 131 million acres
1910: 240,000 miles of railway

2. Resources: land, raw materials, people,
ideas=booooooom!
…in 1800 it took 56 man-hours per acre to raise wheat.
…in 1900, it required only 15 man-hours per acre.



1864: 872,000 tons of iron and steel
1919: more than 24 million tons

1860: 20 million tons of coal
1910: 500 million tons of coal

1860: 500,000 barrels of petroleum
1910: 209 million barrels of petroleum


3. Integration:

a. Horizontal Integration:
--monopolize one part of the productive process
Example: meatpacking plants

b. Vertical Integration:
--monopolize all elements of productive process

Example: Andrew Carnegie: mining iron ore, own blast furnaces (factories), own shops, own ships, own railroad and rail lines


4. Mindset:

a. Small Government is Best:
Laissez faire: “let it do”

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)
“the invisible hand”

b. Aggressive Business Mentality:
The Robber Barons

Notable examples:
• John D. Rockefeller
• Andrew Carnegie


Andrew Carnegie: “It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.”

“The man who dies rich, dies disgraced”.

• J.P. Morgan


• Jay Gould: “Mephistopheles of Wall
Street”
(bribed Grant’s brother in law for gold
secrets)
• Cornelius Van Derbilt:
(steamships and railroads: $100 million)


Gentlemen:
You have undertaken to cheat me. I will not sue you, for law takes too long. I will ruin you.
Sincerely,
CVD

c. Justifying the New World:
How do you justify the world when fabulous wealth and wretched poverty exist so closely together?
William Graham Sumner:
Social Darwinism


The product of all that wealth so quickly is the NEW CITY,
The New Impoverished City

Rapid Urbanization:
1860: 25 million Americans lived in rural areas

6.2 million in what the Bureau of the Census
called "urban territory" (2500 or more)

1910: 42 million of the 92 million in urban areas



Tenement Buildings:
1879 NYC law declared that every room must have a window and every floor must have a bathroom

Contamination:
1877-Philadelphia: 82,000 privies

Boston Harbor was “one vast cesspool, a threat to all
the towns it washed.”

Crime-Filled:
Murder Rate: 1266 in 1881
7340 in 1898
(an increase of 25 per million people, to 107 per million people)

Women in Workforce:
1/7th of the Paid workforce
(2.6 million of the 17.4 million)
500,000 married, yet they were paid less than
men, especially after 1900 when the “family wage” idea spread.

Immigration:
Newspaper in 1900: "It is well known that nearly every foreigner…goes armed. Some carry revolvers, while many others hide huge ugly knives upon their person."

Senator William Bruce (Maryland):
Immigrants are “indigestible lumps in
the national stomach.”

1890-1900: 3.5 million
1900-1910: 7 million
Ellis Island:

“Such an impulse toward better things there certainly is. The German rag-picker of thirty years ago, quite as low in the scale as his Italian successor, is the thrifty tradesman or prosperous farmer of to-day. The Italian scavenger of our time is fast graduating into exclusive control of the corner fruit-stands, while his black-eyed boy monopolizes the boot-blacking industry in which a few years ago he was an intruder.”
Jacob Riis on social fluidity

Child Labor:
1900: 700,000 10 and 15 year olds in workforce.

--Monangah, West Virginia, 1907:
Martin Honick


Children Working in the cotton mills (Tennessee Valley)
"They were children only in age…little, solemn pygmy people, whom poverty had canned up and compressed…the juices of childhood had been pressed our…no talking in the mill…no singing…they were more dead than alive when at seven o clock, the Steam Beast uttered the last volcanic howl which said they might go home…in a speechless, haggard, over-worked procession.

What if you do not want to justify the disparity between rich and poor? What could you do?
(next is Progressivism)