The Search for Order, 1877-1920

Preface

AMERICA during the nineteenth century was a society of island communities. Weak communication severely restricted the interaction among these islands and dispersed the power to form opinion and enact public policy. Education, both formal and informal, inhibited specialization and discouraged the accumulation of knowledge. The heart of American democracy was local autonomy. A century after France had developed a reasonably efficient, centralized public administration, Americans could not even conceive of a managerial government. Almost all of a community’s affairs were still arranged informally.

My purpose is to describe the breakdown of this society and the emergence of a new system. The health of the nineteenth-century community depended upon two closely related conditions: its ability to manage the lives of its members, and the belief among its members that the community had such powers. Already by the 1870’s the autonomy of the community was badly eroded. The illusion of authority, however, endured. Innumerable townsmen continued to assume that they could harness the forces of the world to the destiny of their community. That confidence, the system’s final foundation, largely disappeared during the eighties and nineties in the course of a dramatic struggle to defend the independence of the community.

Although no replacement stood at hand, the outlines of an alternative system rather quickly took shape early in the twentieth century. By contrast to the personal, informal ways of the community, the new scheme was derived from the regulative, hierarchical needs of urban-industrial life. Through rules with impersonal sanctions, it sought continuity and predictability in a world of endless change. It assigned far greater power to government—in particular to a variety of flexible administrative devices—and it encouraged the centralization of authority. Men were now separated more by skill and occupation than by community; they identified themselves more by their tasks in an urban-industrial society than by their reputations in a town or a city neighborhood. The new system, moreover, had applications as important in foreign as in domestic affairs. This, in sum, was America’s initial experiment in bureaucratic order, an experiment that was still in process as the nation passed through the First World War.

My outstanding debts, other than those suggested by the bibliography, begin with the one I owe my wife Lonnie, who not only encouraged and criticized in sensitive proportions but maintained a family’s good temper throughout. Richard W. Leopold and Carl Resek stole time to offer very valuable advice on the entire manuscript. I am especially grateful to David Donald, Whose extensive and incisive commentary improved the final product immeasurably. James E. Sheridan helped me in more ways than I am able to calculate. I also benefited from conversations with Herbert Bass, Claude Barfield, George Daniels, John Keiser, Grady McWhiney, Robert Marcus, Zane Miller, Robert Reid, and Joel Tarr. Northwestern University granted me a timely leave of absence, and once again the Social Science Research Council generously supported my efforts.

R.H.W.

1

Prelude

THE OUTLINES OF DEPRESSION in the 1870’s were simple and severe. An economy buoyed by extravagant railroad construction sank abruptly when further expansion could no longer attract long-term investments. Bankers such as the celebrated Jay Cooke had precipitated the panic of 1873 by their use of any available short-term credits to keep afloat railroad promotions that foreign investors were scorning, and when no European money materialized to rescue them, those who had lived dangerously died as desperately. The manner in which the House of Cooke collapsed foreshadowed conditions lasting until the end of the decade. Falling prices and uncertain profits continued to discourage long-term investments even after the American economy might otherwise have enticed Europeans back again. The nation’s youthful heavy industry experienced six very lean years.

Yet in other respects it was a strange depression. The longest in the nation’s history, in human terms it proved one of the mildest. The same falling prices that deterred investors facilitated commerce, as migrants filled the land along the new railroad lines and enterprising businessmen, adequately supplied with those short-term credits which had lured Cooke into disaster, rushed to exploit the new possibilities in trade. While overbuilding the railroads had brought depression, it had created a commercial reservoir which for years afterward sustained much of the economy, including the railroads themselves. The volume of freight, growing as fast as rates declined, maintained the income of the roads. Because industrialists cut prices much more often than they did production, employment in most sectors of the economy remained reasonably high, and because prices dropped so markedly, real income rose over 60 percent between 1869 and 1879.

A depression of this nature, distressing but not devastating, shed a uniquely revealing light on the workings of American society. In a nation geared to promotion and expansion, stagnant years had traditionally carried a special frustration. They were quite literally soul-searching times, for throughout the nineteenth century a great many looked upon economic downturns as a moral judgment, precise punishment for the country’s sins. They were, moreover, times of release when those strained human relations which prosperity often cloaked would burst into the open. Now lines cleared, and the contours sharpened.

Small-town life was America’s norm in the mid-seventies. Depending upon the lines of transportation, groups of these towns fell into satellite patterns about a larger center, to which they looked for markets and supplies, credit and news. But however much they actually relied upon an outside world, they still managed to retain the sense of living largely to themselves. With farms generally fanning around them, these communities moved by the rhythms of agriculture: the pace of the sun’s day, the working and watching of the crop months, the cycle of the seasons. Relatively few families lived so far from town that they did not gravitate to some degree into its circle, and there people at least thought they knew all about each other after crossing and recrossing paths over the years. Usually homogeneous, usually Protestant, they enjoyed an inner stability that the coming and going of members seldom shook. Even when new towns were established in fresh farm country, the gathering families brought the same familiar habits and ways so that a continuity was scarcely disturbed.

From a distance the towns exemplified a levelled democracy, sustaining neither an aristocracy of name nor an aristocracy of occupation. Almost anyone with incentive, it seemed, could acquire the skills of a profession. Lawyers and doctors, ministers and teachers, either trained themselves or, like the town’s craftsmen, apprenticed themselves briefly with masters. But beneath that flat surface, each community was divided by innumerable, fine gradations. Distinctions that would have eluded an outsider—the precise location of a house, the amount of hired help, the quality of a buggy or a dress—held great import in an otherwise undifferentiated society. In fact, what Thorstein Veblen made famous as conspicuous consumption carried a far more exact meaning in the town where everyone looked on and cared than in the cities where only squandered millions would attract attention. At the top stood the few who not only had greater wealth than their neighbors but controlled access to it as well. These men—merchants, bankers, successful farmers—were Mister or Major, not Bill or Sam. In the same fashion, variations in religion, accent, and skin coloring distinguished individuals, groups, and even entire communities from one another. Except in rare circumstances, custodians of a genteel but explicit Protestantism with Anglo-Saxon names enjoyed a powerful advantage over all competitors.

Many lives diverged from the norm. Nevertheless, coal and mill towns with a different work discipline, or somewhat larger commercial centers with a quicker tempo and a greater heterogeneity, usually shared enough of these qualities, including many of the ties with agriculture, to keep them in the same social camp. Even in the cities, life often retained much of the town’s flavor. Within the city limits yet detached from its core, neighborhoods provided fairly cloistered way stations between urban and rural living. In these years garden plots and a smattering of livestock came as standard accouterment to the city scene. Apart from the rest, urban elites of wealth and family—the nation’s closest approximation of an aristocracy—also qualified as small self-contained communities. Enjoying little interchange with the rich and well-born in other cities, they fashioned private lives that would protect their exclusiveness and intermarry their young. In all, it was a nation of loosely connected islands, similar in kind, whose restless natives often moved only to settle down again as part of another island.

Men searched for the explanation of America’s economic punishment from that provincial, community-centered base. If there was an American philosophy in the seventies, it was a corrupted version of Scottish common-sense doctrines, taking as given every man’s ability to know that God had ordained modesty in women, rectitude in men, and thrift, sobriety, and hard work in both. People of very different backgrounds accommodated themselves to this Protestant code which had become so thoroughly identified with respectability, and the keepers of the national conscience applied its rules with slight margin for the deviant. An age in which the Supreme Court justified oppression of the Mormons because no right-thinking man could consider theirs a religion would not be remembered for its cosmopolitan tolerance. Americans were judging the world as they would their neighborhood. Their truths derived from what they knew: the economics of a family budget, the returns that came to the industrious and the lazy, the obnoxious behavior of the drunken braggart, the advantages of a wife who stayed home and kept a good house. In an island community people had little reason to believe that these daily precepts were not universally valid, and few doubted that the nation’s ills were caused by men who had dared to deny them.

Consequently, cries for reform sounded much like the counsel of reaction. Deep inside, everyone knew the path of virtue; and those who had strayed would simply have to return. In depression, small-town America took its stand against the credit system, the fashion system, and every other system tending to prodigality and bankruptcy. The government in particular would have to relearn the fundamentals of thrift. From the Midwestern farmers and shopkeepers to the editors of Eastern literary magazines came demands for retrenchment and reform: drastically reduced appropriations, austerity on all public occasions, and lower salaries. Reform must continue, declared the Illinois Grange, until every department of our government gives token that the reign of licentious extravagance is over, and something of the purity, honesty, and frugality with which our fathers inaugurated it, has taken its place. Newspapers across the land denounced a reasonable, if mishandled effort to raise Congressmen’s stipends as a salary grab.

Never had so many citizens held their government in such low regard. A part of that reputation had been acquired as a result of the extraordinary experiments in reconstructing the former Confederate States, experiments that had been predicated on the existence of a new national sovereignty. Without the tradition, the means of communication, the legal framework, or the administrative apparatus—in effect, without anything beyond an army and the tenuous cooperation of some local citizens to implement a detailed public policy—reconstruction had guaranteed confusion, disappointment, and recrimination. Yet even after a large majority had agreed upon its failure, extrication was extremely complex. Men with reputations and vital interests at stake had continued to clutch their disintegrating program, and some remnants of reconstruction remained until 1877. Out of this process had come a haunting sense of the war’s failure, a vague feeling of political betrayal.

In fact, war and reconstruction had helped to disrupt an entire system of government. The sudden departure of eleven states and their erratic return, the years of preoccupation with strange problems, had invited endless distortions in the making of policy. Those internalized restraints which the traditional ways of governing had bred no longer operated. Corrupt bargains, crude force, and extralegal expedients had become the new standard, as the methods of Congressional reconstruction and the techniques of white redemption in the South so amply illustrated. The irregular distribution of public favors to satisfy a passion for railroad construction and the inability of city governments to provide even minimum services each added its measure to the chaos. Little wonder that Americans everywhere were crying out in scorn and despair. Unable to comprehend that they had heaped impossible tasks upon officials with woefully deficient means, they explained all crimes in the time-honored manner—unique failures in leadership and public morality.

Somehow, some way, it seemed, ruthless men had usurped the government and were now wielding it for their private benefit. Those who administer the laws, the rising politician John Peter Altgeld told his audience in Savannah, Missouri, have been taken from classes of citizens who live off the farmer [and other honest laborers] and who profit by [their] distress.… One increasingly popular proposal was a Federal civil service to drive the marauders away and force them, as the independently wealthy Richard Henry Dana, Jr., put it, to begin the unaccustomed business of earning a living by legitimate work. Politics as a vocation was never truly legitimate work; most successful politicians continued to designate themselves lawyers or businessmen or generals, as if they were temporarily on leave from their real occupations. And as the very title of the Senate Committee on Civil Service and Retrenchment indicated, pure government always meant parsimonious government.

Currency posed a knottier problem of morals, with greenbacks, the paper currency issued in quantity as a war measure, creating the major complication. Silver, too scarce, had been quietly demonetized in 1873. In the boom times before the panic, greenbacks had offered some relief from an insufficient gold currency, some encouragement to expansionists little and big who feared deflation and tight credit. More important, gold was already acquiring a vague association with fat, parasitic bondholders. Nevertheless, the impulse to recapture fundamentals proved too strong, and throughout the countryside waverers selected currency with a feel and a ring that crinkly paper could never match. In 1875 Congress passed the Specie Resumption Act. Although it was a compromise in that it did not actually retire the greenbacks, the law still represented a moral commitment to currency that citizens could recognize as safe, sound, and honorable.

More than the chance of politics pitted Rutherford B. Hayes against Samuel J. Tilden in the Presidential campaign in 1876. Both hard-money men who promised an austere, limited government, they were models of probity, untouched by scandal and impervious to all wild schemes. Dull perhaps, and certainly unimaginative; but this was no year to choose between a captive general and an aging faddist. Time now for the bedrock values.

In communities across the land, railroad promotions collapsed as the first casualties of the panic. But if new construction practically ceased, payments on the old bonded debt did not. In the cold morning after, hundreds of counties and dozens of states swore they would never gamble again. A reasonable vow in the mid-seventies, it would prove too severe in many localities that still lay outside the nation’s railroad network. The panic had frozen a mere infant system. Just four years earlier, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific had linked tracks to complete the first transcontinental line. Even in the Northeast, which already boasted an impressive railway mileage, what at first glance looked like continuous road was often fragmented by a score of competing companies, several widths of track, and gaps where citizens had excluded the sooty monsters from the center of town. Again only four years before the panic, Cornelius Vanderbilt had consolidated the first trunk line from the Atlantic to Chicago; and not until 1901 did one management operate the Union Pacific–Central Pacific route.

A pall of thwarted opportunity, of frustrated dreams, hung over large parts of the nation. Innumerable townsmen had been looking to the railroads as their avenues to greatness. Now nothing could entice a company to build past their community. Or if the track had already been laid, it had too often brought trouble instead of glory. Towns that had tied their future to a local line almost never owned it. Nor did they have any part in deciding the rates charged, the services offered, the distant connections made or not made. That power lay elsewhere, in alien hands. Moreover, crops were increasingly processed well beyond the farmer’s ken, and the goods he needed came more often from strange, remote places. What would later be known as trusts were rings in the seventies—the Harvester Ring, the Plow Ring, and many more—whose very existence may have depended upon agitated imaginations but whose control seemed ominously complete from an agrarian perspective.

When Commodore Vanderbilt died in 1877, he left a fortune of $90 million. While the people struggled day by day, the argument ran, a few men far away were hoarding the nation’s wealth and power. The time was when none were poor and none rich, the Texan John Reagan told his constituents that year as he left for Washington to battle the monopolists. There were no beggars till Vanderbilts and Stewarts and Goulds and Scotts and Huntingtons and Fisks shaped the action of Congress and moulded the purposes of government. Then the few became fabulously rich, the many wretchedly poor … and the poorer we are the poorer they would make us.

Reagan’s destination was not the usual one. Most of the angry townsmen turned instead to the local and state governments, which had traditionally supported their enterprise. Here, in a familiar setting, the townsmen would defend themselves. Through countless, now-forgotten local ordinances and a cluster of state measures known as the Granger laws, they tried to hold those elusive, threatening forces. A legislature or a commission would fix railroad rates, establish just practices at the mill and warehouse, set the rules of business behavior. From an agrarian viewpoint these laws were simply the preconditions for fair play. By determining such matters once and for all, they would free the American people’s natural initiative. It was another return to fundamental morality.

Even at the height of their popularity, the Granger laws held only a qualified appeal. Some of those who cursed one road were simultaneously wooing another. Just beyond the temporary obstacles grand opportunities always seemed to beckon. Most states, moreover, never passed such measures, despite undercurrents of a similar spirit. The prime strength of the Granger movement lay in that portion of the Midwest which bordered the Mississippi River. Farther west, where everything remained to be done; in the South, just now reviving and eager to build; in the East, which had already experienced the first shocks of a railroad economy, the emotions of depression generally found other outlets.

Nor did the Granger legislatures wish to outlaw all large enterprise. Too many ambitious men pictured themselves as tomorrow’s kings to proscribe royalty. The townsmen had had relatively little time to ponder the evils of big business. That pathfinder in monopoly, John D. Rockefeller, had just acquired the basis for control in petroleum, and few Americans would know much about his practices until the end of the decade. Even great fortunes were still rare enough to be regarded as oddities. A token of the future, the Commodore’s son William more than doubled his inheritance before dying only eight years after his father. In all, the Granger movement hinted at problems that one day would assume giant proportions, but it neither formulated them clearly nor held its followers tightly to the cause.

The nation of small towns and big enterprise was the America of popular fancy. Songs and stories romanticized it, orators honored it, and faith in the sovereign public was predicated on it. Yet millions inhabited another world. My people do not live in America, declared a Slavic immigrant, they live underneath America. The same held true for many more who had recently arrived from Europe, for the gangs of Chinese who had laid the Central Pacific tracks, for Negroes a step from slavery, for the growing bands of migratory workers, and for other marginals in industry and agriculture. When William Dean Howells, who came out of Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, to serve as the arbiter of literary fashions, excluded violence and casual brutality from his definition of realism because they were unnatural and sensationalist, he denied everyday life in the slums and shanty towns. When the famous minister Washington Gladden rebuked gamblers by invoking the orderly, prudent values of his Ohio town, he ignored that precarious existence where only chance made sense. Addressing the American Social Science Association in 1875, the economist David A. Wells, who worked a few blocks from the densest tenement district in the world, remarked in passing, But few are so poor nowadays as not to be able to afford some sort of a carpet for their parlor. So many dwelled in the city and never saw it.

In the summer of 1877, a portion of that hidden America rose momentarily into view. By announcing yet another wage cut that July, the management of the Baltimore and Ohio touched off a wildcat strike that soon spread north and west along the railroad lines to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, San Francisco, and scores of stops between. In the towns, people expressed a rather orderly hostility to the roads. But in the cities crowds gathered and milled, clashed with trigger-happy vigilantes and militia, then drifted downtown to riot and loot. Frightened state officials convinced a reluctant President to send Federal troops. The mobs dwindled, then disappeared. Called America’s first national strike, it was actually the first national holiday of the slums. The rioters, rather than self-conscious wage earners, were simply the inhabitants of center city who had taken advantage of a singular opportunity to come out and roam.

As shaken as substantial Americans were by the explosion, they put it out of mind with surprising ease. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was quickly classified an exception and, once categorized, it became no more than a bad memory, an incident rather than an index to fear or failure. By the end of the decade, the nation was preoccupied once again with building, growing, expanding.

2

The Distended Society

AFTER A PAUSE during the depression, three more trans-continentals—the Southern Pacific, the Northern Pacific, and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe—were completed at two-year intervals early in the eighties. A fourth, the Great Northern, reached the West Coast just before the panic of the nineties. Though none could re-create the drama of the first, together the four lines gave the sudden impression of an integrated country. The rush into the Black Hills in 1877 marked the last bonanza frontier in western mining. The tragic dispersal of the Indians moved fitfully toward an end, with Congress debating their future as it might have discussed taxes. Territory so recently a part of the Great American Desert was now brought into the Union: Colorado in 1876; after interminable delays, the Dakotas, Washington, and Montana in 1889, and Idaho and Wyoming in 1890; then that sober land of tantalizingly immoral images, Utah, in 1896. In fact from afar the West appeared much more settled than it actually was, and Easterners were already fashioning a mythical land of tall men, brave women, and valorous deeds.

So great numbers of Americans came to believe that a new United States, stretched from ocean to ocean, filled out, and bound together, had miraculously appeared. That, it seemed, was the true legacy of the war, and by the early eighties publicists were savoring the word nation in this sense of a continent conquered and tamed. It was a term that above all connoted growth and development and enterprise. The talk had such a breathless quality: so much so fast, with so much still coming. An age never lent itself more readily to sweeping, uniform description: nationalization, industrialization, mechanization, urbanization.

Yet to almost all of the people who created them, these themes meant only dislocation and bewilderment. America in the late nineteenth century was a society without a core. It lacked those national centers of authority and information which might have given order to such swift changes. American institutions were still oriented toward a community life where family and church, education and press, professions and government, all largely found their meaning by the way they fit one with another inside a town or a detached portion of a city. As men ranged farther and farther from their communities, they tried desperately to understand the larger world in terms of their small, familiar environment. They tried, in other words, to impose the known upon the unknown, to master an impersonal world through the customs of a personal society. They failed, usually without recognizing why; and that failure to comprehend a society they were helping to make contained the essence of the nation’s story.

The rush to the cities, swelling established centers like New York and Chicago and creating new ones like Denver and Kansas City out of overgrown towns, brought a constant influx of inexperienced newcomers who required jobs, homes, and a sense of belonging. Older residents were inundated. Not only did masses congest the center of the city, but in response to pressures for living space, transportation lines thrust outward, cutting into communities that had existed apart and pulling them into a greater urban area. Patterns of development followed little logic beyond the availability of dry land and the enterprise of speculators, builders, and trolley companies. Even then leaders often turned into followers as the fate of Harlem soon after 1900 demonstrated. The collapse of real estate values suddenly transformed an area for the well-to-do into a fashionable slum for New York’s Negroes.

Each city desperately needed such fundamental services as fresh water, sewers, paving, and transportation, yet the same conditions that made the need so imperative diminished the capacity to meet it. Pell-mell expansion destroyed the groups and neighborhoods that sustained social action. The thousands recently arrived, the thousands more moving about, concentrated narrowly on their own security. Men struggling to learn new skills or to preserve old ones in a rapidly changing economy could not afford to think about city-wide issues. Without stability at home or on the job, the civic spirit had no place to take root. When a city depended upon industries with absentee owners, the problem was that much more acute. Local leaders who might otherwise have championed civic improvements protected that distant railroad king or machinery manufacturer from the higher taxes and closer regulation which they feared would drive him away. Beyond all of these obstacles lay an archaic system of government. Originally designed so that a handful of city fathers could express the community’s purpose, the intimate club had now grown into an unwieldy council, mirroring a fragmented and confused city. Essential services became the playthings of private profit, and a busy people paid the price of danger, dirt, and disease.

A later generation thought it saw a neat three-class system emerging in the cities of the late nineteenth century, with men of great wealth and power at the top, lesser businessmen, professionals, and white-collar workers in the middle, and the mass of wage earners below. At close range, the scheme vanished. Established wealth and power fought one battle after another against the great new fortunes and political kingdoms carved out of urban-industrial America, and the more they struggled, the more they scrambled the criteria of prestige. The concept of a middle class crumbled at the touch. Small business appeared and disappeared at a frightening rate. The so-called professions meant little as long as anyone with a bag of pills and a bottle of syrup could pass for a doctor, a few books and a corrupt judge made a man a lawyer, and an unemployed literate qualified as a teacher. Nor did the growing number of clerks and salesmen and secretaries of the city share much more than a common sense of drift as they fell into jobs that attached them to nothing in particular beyond a salary, a set of clean clothes, and a hope that somehow they would rise in the world. The proletariat included a few with important skills, a number of demoted artisans, many families fresh from the farms, an increasingly complex array of immigrants, and an admixture of Negroes, some of Northern and some of Southern background. No pot melted these bits and pieces into a class. Fearful of each other’s competition and ignorant of each other’s ways, they lived in mutual suspicion, as separated into groups of their own kind as they could manage.

From the outside, however, the cities seemed monolithic in their strangeness, centers of alien ways and murky power. Sermons, popular verse, and tales of country lasses corrupted on a Saturday night all taught small-town Americans to think of the city as fundamentally different and thoroughly dangerous. The message contained its kernel of truth. Immigration poured largely into centers of 25,000 or more, and as the flow quickened the major source of immigrants shifted in the mid-eighties from Northern and Western to Southern and Eastern Europe. Each year the cultural gap between city and countryside widened. Moreover, the very process of urban living generated its own special values. The individualism and casual cooperation of the towns still had their place in a city. But new virtues—regularity, system, continuity—clashed increasingly with the old. The city dweller could never protect his home from fire or rid his street of garbage by the spontaneous voluntarism that had raised cabins along the