INVENTORS AND INDUSTRIES

In 1876 President Ulysses S. Grant traveled to Philadelphia to open a special exhibition. The exhibition was called the Centennial Exposition. It had been organized to celebrate the United States'  hundredth birthday as an independent nation by showing some of its achievements.

The main attraction of the Centennial Exposition was the Machinery Hall. This was a big wooden building that covered more than twelve acres. Inside it visitors could see such recent American inventions as the typewriter and the telephone as well as machines for countless other uses - for sewing, grinding, screwing, printing, drilling, pumping, hammering.

In the six months that the Exposition was open almost ten million people wandered through the hall. They gazed in wonder at its hundreds of machines. Even the normally patronizing British newspaper The Times was impressed. "The American invents as the Greek sculpted and as the Italian painted," it reported. "It is genius."

At the time of the Centennial Exposition, the United States was still mainly a farming country. But in the years that followed, American industries grew quickly. The production of coal and iron grew especially fast. These were the most important industrial raw materials in the nineteenth century.

Americans discovered vast new deposits of both in the 1880s and 1890s. In a range of low hills at the western end of Lake Superior, for example, some brothers named Merritt found the great Mesabi iron deposits. The Merritts made their discovery in 1887 and the Mesabi soon became one of the largest producers of iron ore in the world. The ore lay close to the surface of the ground in horizontal bands up to 500 feet thick. It was cheap, easy to mine, and remarkably free of chemical impurities. Before long Mesabi ore was being processed into high quality steel at only one tenth of the previous cost.

By 1900 ten times more coal was being produced in the United States than in 1860. The output of iron was twenty times higher. These increases were both a cause and a result of a rapid growth of American manufacturing industries in these years.

Railroads were very important in this growth of manufacturing. Vast amounts of coal and iron were used to make steel for their rails, locomotives, freight wagons and passenger cars. But this was not all. The railroads linked together buyers and sellers all over the country. Without them big new centers of industry like Pittsburgh and Chicago could not have developed. It was the railroads that carried cattle to Chicago from the Great Plains to keep its huge slaughter houses and meat processing plants busy. It was the railroads, too, that took reapers, windmills and barbed wire from Chicago's farm equipment factories to homesteaders on the prairies.

By 1890 the industries of the United States were earning the country more than its farmlands. In the twenty years that followed, industrial output went on growing, faster and faster. By 1913 more than one third of the whole world's industrial production was pouring from the mines and factories of the United States.

The growth of American industry was organized and controlled by businessmen who found the money to pay for it. Many of these men began their lives in poverty. By a mixture of hard work and ability, and by ignoring the rights of others, they made themselves wealthy and powerful. Their admirers called such men "captains of industry." Their critics called them "robber barons" - or worse!

Andrew Carnegie was one of the best known of these men. Carnegie was born in Scotland in 1835, but immigrated to America at the age of thirteen. He began his life there working for one dollar twenty cents a week in a Pittsburgh cotton mill. From there he moved to a job in a telegraph office, then to one on the Pennsylvania Railroad. By the time he was thirty he already had an income of over forty thousand dollars a year from far-sighted investments.

Carnegie concentrated his investments in the iron and steel business. By the 1860s he controlled companies making bridges, rails, and locomotives for the railroads. In the 1870s he built the biggest steel mill in America on the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania. He also bought coal and iron ore mines, a fleet of steamships to carry ore across the Great Lakes from Mesabi to a port he owned on Lake Erie, and a railroad to connect the port to his steel works in Pennsylvania.

Nothing like Carnegie's wealth and industrial power had ever before been seen in America. By 1900, as owner of half the shares in the giant Carnegie Steel Corporation, his annual income was estimated to be over twenty-three million dollars - this was about twenty thousand times more than the income of the average American of the day.

The great wealth of men like Carnegie came partly from their success in swallowing up rival firms or driving them out of business. Businessmen like Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, the "king" of the growing oil industry, realized that they could greatly increase their profits by doing this. They could reduce the costs of running their companies, and with no competitors to challenge their position they could raise the prices of their products to whatever level they wished.

The giant industrial organizations that such men created were known as "corporations." As the grew bigger and more powerful still, they often became "trusts." By the early twentieth century trusts controlled large parts of American industry. One trust controlled the steel industry, another the oil industry, another the meat-packing industry, and there were many more. The biggest trusts were richer than most nations. By their wealth and power - and especially their power to decide wages and prices - they controlled the lives of millions of people.

Many Americans were alarmed by the power of the trusts. The United States was a land that was supposed to offer equal opportunities to everyone. Yet now it seemed that the country was coming under the control of a handful of rich and powerful men who were able to do more or less anything they wished. Some bribed politicians to pass laws which favored them. Others hired private armies to crush any attempt by their workers to obtain better conditions. Their attitude to the rights of other people was summed up in a famous remark of the railroad "king" William H. Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt was asked whether he thought that railroads should be run in the public interest. "The public be damned!" he replied.

The contemptuous way in which leaders of industry like Vanderbilt rejected criticism made people angry. It strengthened the feeling that something ought to be done to limit such men's growing power over the nation's life. Many people came to see this matter as the most important problem facing the United States in the early years of the twentieth century. Unless something was done about it, they feared, the United States would become a nation whose life was controlled by a handful of rich businessmen.

Bryn O'Callaghan: An illustrated history of the USA; Longman, Harlow, 1990/1996, page 72 ff.