Volume Iv Part 20 (2/2)
reduction in wages a.s.signed as its cause applying to comparatively few.
The next decade witnessed continual troubles of this sort, though rarely if in any case so serious, between wage-workers and their employers in nearly all industries. The worst ones befell the manufacturing portions of the country. Strikes and lock-outs were part of the news almost every day. The causes were various. One lay in the vast numbers of immigrants. .h.i.ther and the low, ignorant character of many of them--clay for the hand of the first unscrupulous demagogue.
Another cause was the wide and sedulous inculcation in this country of the communist and anarchist doctrines long prevalent in Europe.
Influences concurrent with both these were the actual injustice and the proud, overbearing manner of many employers. Capital had been mismanaged and wasted. The war had brought unearned fortunes to many, sudden wealth to a much larger number, while the unexampled prosperity of the country raised up in a perfectly normal manner a wealthy cla.s.s, the like of which, in number and power, our country had never known before. As therefore immigration along with much else multiplied the poor, the eternal, angry strife of wealth with poverty, of high with low, of cla.s.ses with ma.s.ses, crossed over from Europe and began on our sh.o.r.es.
The rise of trusts and gigantic corporations was connected with this struggle. Corporations worth nigh half a billion dollars apiece were able to buy or defy legislatures and make or break laws as they pleased; and as such corporations, instead of individuals, more and more became the employers of labor, not only did the old-time kindliness between help and hirers die out, but men the most cool and intelligent feared the new power as a menace to democracy. Strikes therefore commanded large public sympathy. Stock-watering and other vicious practices, involving the ruin of corporations themselves by the few holders of a majority of the shares, in order to re-purchase the property for next to nothing, contributed to this hostility; as did the presence in many great corporations of foreign capital and capitalists, and also the mutual favoritism of corporations, showing itself, for instance, in special freight rates to privileged concerns. Minor interests and individual employees, powerless against these t.i.tan agencies by any of the old legal processes, resorted to counter organization.
The Patrons of Husbandry grew up in the West, with influence longer than the Order's nominal life, of which the often unwise ”Granger” railroad legislation was one sign. In the East trades-unions secured rank development, and the Knights of Labor, intended as a sort of Union of them all, attained in 1887 a members.h.i.+p of a million. The manufacturers'
”black list,” to prevent any ”agitator” laborer from securing work, was answered by the ”boycott,” to keep the products of obnoxious establishments from finding sale. Labor organizations, so strong, often tyrannized over their own members, and boycotting became a nuisance that had to be abated by law.
[1880]
Labor agitation had of late years become greatly easier owing to the extraordinarily increased percentage of our urban population. In 1790 only 3.3 per cent. of the people in the country lived in places of 8,000 inhabitants and upward, and so late as 1840 only 8.5 per cent. In 1850 the percentage was 12.5; in 1860, 16.1; in 1870, 20.9; in 1880, 22.5; and in 1890, 29.2. The year 1880 saw within our borders twenty cities each with a population of over 100,000; 286 each with over 8,000. In 1890 there were twenty-eight cities each having 100,000 inhabitants or more, and 448 having 8,000 or more. It was mostly manufacturing and mechanical industry which thus brought these hordes of human beings together.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE MARCH OF INDUSTRY
[1869]
We can give but little idea of the advance in industrial artifice and appliances of all kinds made in the United States in the two decades after the Civil War. Take it first in textile manufacturing. A century earlier one person in every family had to work incessantly at spinning and weaving to keep the whole of them in clothing. Now one day's work a year per person sufficed for this. The speed of spindles had risen since 1860 from 5,000 to 7,500 revolutions a minute. Looms had gone from 120 picks to 160, and one hand tended from 25 to 50 per cent. more work. The ”slasher” dresser accomplished ten times more than the old machine, supplying 400 looms in place of forty, and requiring to manage it only one man and a boy instead of two men and ten girls. A generation earlier one operative made three yards an hour, now he made ten. In the twenty years under survey the annual production of cotton mills rose from two and one-half to three and one-half tons per hand. One man formerly tended forty spindles, now he tended sixty. In 1890 a single operative in America could make cotton cloth enough to supply 1,500 persons.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Large s.h.i.+p.]
The American Line Steams.h.i.+p St. Louis, launched from the Cramps Docks, November 12. 1894. (554 feet long 11,000 tons, and 20,000 horse-power.)
The improvements in woollen, iron, and miscellaneous manufacturing had perhaps not been quite as great, but were remarkable notwithstanding.
Power and automatic machinery were the order of the day. The Corliss engine got 23 per cent. more heat and energy from a given amount of coal than had ever been obtained before it was invented. Instead of the twenty-five days which the first transatlantic steamer required for the pa.s.sage from America to England, many vessels now went from New York to Liverpool in considerably less than six days, or at an average rate of more than twenty miles an hour. The speed of pa.s.senger trains on the main railways had doubled. So had the weight of the freight-car load and the amount of freight which an engine could pull. The newest locomotives weighed nearly or quite one hundred tons each.
In 1869 a submarine cable was laid which joined the United States to the continent of Europe. It extended about 3,050 miles, from Duxbury, Ma.s.s., to Brest, France, via the Island of St. Pierre, south of Newfoundland.
The company owning the cable was chartered by the waning empire of Louis Napoleon. In 1875 a new cable was stretched between the United States and Great Britain. It was called the United States Direct Cable, and at first operated in opposition to the original one. The rates for cable messages were greatly reduced in consequence. The price, once ten dollars a word, fell in antic.i.p.ation of the compet.i.tion to fifty cents, and to twenty-five after the compet.i.tion actually began. The two Anglo-American lines were subsequently united.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait.]
Cornelius Vanderbilt.
[1863-1869]
The year 1869 witnessed the junction of the Union Pacific with the Central Pacific Railway, forming a continuous railway line between the Atlantic and Pacific sh.o.r.es. The last rail was put down on May 12th, and on the 15th trains began to run. This work had been in process of construction ever since 1863. It traversed the Rocky Mountain range at an elevation of 8,243 feet above sea-level. The Northern Pacific Railway Company was chartered by Congress in 1864. The road was not completed till August, 1883, nor opened to traffic before September. Its length from Duluth to its then terminus on the Columbia River, Was.h.i.+ngton, was 1,674 miles. The Southern Pacific and the Atlantic and Pacific, both traversing the Rockies, soon followed. Still another line, the Great Northern, connecting St. Paul with the extreme Northwest, was opened in 1893. The country's total railway mileage in 1885 was 128,967 miles; in 1893 it was 170,607 miles.
In the same years with the opening of these continental lines began the consolidation of the older ones into great systems. The New York Central had already been formed out of sixteen different fragments, but the process of consolidation in a large way may be said to have been inst.i.tuted by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1869, when he joined the Lake Sh.o.r.e and Michigan Southern with the New York Central, thus placing under a single administration the entire route from New York to Chicago.
The first train pierced the Hoosac Tunnel, in Western Ma.s.sachusetts, February 9, 1875, completing another artery between East and West. The tunnel pa.s.sed through the Hoosac Mountain, a distance of four miles and three-quarters, and had been in process of boring, though not continuously, about fifteen years.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Rail line looping through a steep, narrow valley.]
The Big Loop on the Georgetown Branch of the Union Pacific, Colorado.
<script>