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November 3 - November 3, 2020
At the end of the period, Mark Twain wrote, “that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
He located dishonesty in political machines and patronage rather than in the fee-based nature of the offices themselves.
The Pendleton Act created a salaried Civil Service Commission to replace the old U.S. Civil Service Commission, which had been defunded in the Grant administration. It was to craft exams for the selection of officials in certain classified government positions. The Pendleton Act also prohibited contributions from office holders, thus choking off a key conduit of patronage.60 The results were not what reformers intended. Rarely has a law so failed to achieve its stated objectives while creating a set of unanticipated consequences.
The act had a loophole that allowed bureau and division chiefs to hire whomever they wanted for positions above the test-passing line. The act thus transferred political power as well as social power to those chiefs. Nor did patronage vanish; it took up residence in new places.
Instead, it created a nonpartisan gloss on a persistent partisan system. Presidents continued to replace members of the opposing party with members of their own; they just did it differently. After the passage of the Pendleton Act, removal from office did not appreciably decline in periods of party turnover; indeed it sometimes increased.
The Pendleton Act did change the financing of political campaigns. With federal officials prohibited from contributing to political campaigns, a major source of financing for the national parties dried up. There is no denying the corruption of the old system, but turning to corporate and wealthy donors hardly seemed a turn for the better.
Between 1862 and 1888, Congress created as many new bureaus and departments as had existed in the country’s previous history. The list of major additions were impressive: the Department of Agriculture, created in 1862 and raised to cabinet rank in 1889; the Department of Justice (1870); and a Department of Labor, without cabinet rank, in 1888. In addition there was a Department of Education (1867), subsequently abolished and its functions moved to the Interior Department.
To the surprise of virtually everyone (including Chester A. Arthur), Arthur had turned out, at least by Gilded Age standards, to be a reasonably competent president. He signed the Pendleton Act knowing that it gave him cover as a reformer. He had modified the tariff in a compromise that created the “Mongrel Tariff,” and assented to laws restricting Chinese immigration.
Arthur reasonably thought that his success in protecting the Republicans would make him the Republican nominee for president, but instead the party chose Blaine, still leader of the Half-Breeds and master of the minutiae of American politics.
Cleveland, a man celebrated for his honesty, easily shoved Field aside, but an election MacVeagh believed would be based on character soon became comic. Cleveland had, or accepted that he very likely might have, fathered a son out of wedlock. He initially supported the child and the mother, but then arranged to have the boy adopted. This led to the Republican campaign chant: “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?” The Democrats resurrected Blaine’s corrupt dealing with the railroads. Joseph Pulitzer used his cartoonists to caricature Blaine week after week on the New York World’s front page.
Henry Adams, who hated Blaine, came to enjoy the campaign: “When I am not angry, I can do nothing but laugh.”71 Most liberals were not laughing.
Blaine, for all his cultivation of the Irish, suffered a fit of inattention when, at a meeting with Protestant clergy, he let pass a denunciation of the Democrats as the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” The Democrats seized on it.
Cleveland carried New York by less than a thousand votes, and with it the election. The margin was so slight that analysts could plausibly credit his defeat to any—or all—of several causes. It could have been Conkling, who refused to campaign for Blaine, saying that although he was a lawyer, he did not “engage in criminal practice.” Oneida County, the core of Conkling’s constituency, had a two-thousand-vote Republican majority in 1880. In 1884, it went for Cleveland. But it could have been Pulitzer’s cartoons or the Republican alienation of New York Catholics. The Democrats controlled the
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Cleveland was poorly prepared for the White House. Horace White, who had moved from Chicago and was editor of the New York Evening Post, interviewed him and found his grasp of national issues “extremely defective.” The New York Tribune’s Charles Nordhoff thought he was “curiously ignorant of federal questions and politics.” Vague promises of good government had won him office, but he would have to transform promises into policy and, Nordhoff wrote, he was “bound to have a troublesome time.”
Cleveland was for economy, honesty, efficiency, the gold standard, and tariff reduction. He saw the West as the hope of free labor and promised to make sure it was reserved for actual settlers, while Indians would be set on the road to “education and civilization … with a view to their ultimate citizenship.”
There would not be a single Democratic vote for a civil rights bill for the rest of the century. Cleveland regarded black people, particularly Southern black people, as lazy and thriftless.
By the most basic standards—life span, infant death rate, and bodily stature, which reflected childhood health and nutrition—American life grew worse over the course of the nineteenth century. Although economists have insisted that real wages were rising during most of the Gilded Age, a people who celebrated their progress were, in fact, going backwards—growing shorter and dying earlier—until the 1890s. Real improvement would come largely in the twentieth century.
In the Gilded Age people living in most rural areas outside the South were comparatively healthier and lived longer lives, but in the cities the crisis intensified, producing a facsimile of war with a series of epidemic invasions and eruptions as well as a steady annual carnage that took a particular toll on the nation’s infants and children. The diseases came through the air, in the water, and via insects. The losses were not simply an ancient and predictable toll. This was a decline from previous American standards,
Three major indexes take the measure of a calamity that afflicted human beings as well as their surroundings: average life expectancy at birth, average number of years left for a person who reached ten and twenty, and measures of adult height. All trended in the direction of trouble.
The average life expectancy of a white man dropped from the 1790s until the last decade of the nineteenth century. A slight uptick at midcentury proved fleeting; nor was it certain that the smaller rise in 1890 would be permanent. A clear trend toward longer lifespans for white men was not visible until the turn of the century.
Infant mortality worsened after 1880 in many cities. In Pittsburgh it rose from 17.1 percent in 1875 to 20.3 percent in 1900. Between 1850 and 1890 the chances of an American white child dying before the age of five were often between 25 percent and 30 percent, with a sharp bump upward in 1880, the figure falling to around 20 percent by 1890.
Disease played the greatest role in the crisis, but over the course of time the leading killers changed. For most of the century tuberculosis was the great destroyer.
As tuberculosis declined, water-borne and insect-transmitted diseases became the most lethal killers. Malaria was endemic across the Midwest, while yellow fever epidemics plagued the Southern coasts, advancing up the Atlantic seaboard and the Mississippi Valley. Cholera epidemics struck repeatedly, spread through contaminated water. Bacterial diseases such as dysentery and other diarrheal diseases were less spectacular but more consistent killers.
Only 512 civil and mechanical engineers lived in the United States during the Civil War, but in 1867 there were enough civil engineers for them to organize their own professional organization, the American Society of Civil Engineers. By 1880 civil engineers alone numbered 8,261, and that rose to well over 100,000 in the early twentieth century.
By 1880 a basic modern water infrastructure was in place in most cities.17
Meat packing ranked as Chicago’s largest industry following the Civil War, producing a quarter of the city’s manufacturing output by 1868. Five large firms produced half of Chicago’s pork, then the city’s leading product. The packers dumped blood, offal, and manure into the Chicago River, despite an ordinance prohibiting them from doing so. They protested that to do otherwise would increase their costs, put them at a disadvantage against competitors elsewhere, and force them out of Chicago.
To clean up the river, the city took money from the pockets of all Chicago taxpayers instead of only from the pockets of the packers, who had caused the problem and made money in the process. The packers gained wealth; most other Chicago residents lost it.
The big meat packers having opposed attempts to make them take responsibility for slaughterhouse wastes switched positions and supported stricter environmental and health regulations within Chicago’s limits. They hoped these laws would both drive independent butchers out of business and force other packers to move into the yards, where they would share the expenses.28
In destroying cities, nineteenth-century fires simultaneously presented opportunities. They swept away decades of haphazard growth and offered possibilities to begin again. Despite annihilating real property—buildings and roads—the property in land that Henry George decried remained intact. Fire could not touch property lines, and property restrained possibilities.
Water, too, distributed income upward. Businesses used far more water than households but paid proportionately lower fees, and the fee system was so opaque that it left room for negotiation and bribes. Chicago’s level of water consumption was one of the highest in the nation, despite the system’s partial exclusion of the poorest Chicagoans, who still resorted to public pumps.
Pittsburgh seemed an American Manchester. That British city, with its dark satanic mills, had emerged as the Victorian era’s conflicted symbol of industrialization. No city in the world had the same ability to simultaneously appall and amaze.
It was what Americans feared they were replicating. Pittsburgh was, visitors thought, “hell with the lid off.”46 If Pittsburgh was hellish, then Parton and the city’s citizens seemed Pollyannas in hell.
The smoke had “its inconveniences,” but it combated miasma. Inhabitants credited it with killing the malaria they believed arose from wetlands. It saved eyesight by cutting down the glare. Far from being an evil, the smoke was a blessing and the residents of Pittsburgh claimed to live longer than anyone in the world. Above all, it was a mark of prosperity. Parton noted, however, that as the smoke grew worse, residents who could afford to do so moved farther and farther away from the city proper to avoid the damage it did.
Philadelphia, New York, and Boston used anthracite, which, though more expensive, had a greater energy density and burned more cleanly than bituminous coal.
Many urban households kept a cow or two for milk; others were grouped in urban dairies. Antebellum cities had existed within a closed ecological loop, one Chadwick had hoped to retain by turning human and animal excrement into fertilizer. In antebellum New York City manure, as well as human excrement—night soil—had found a ready market on Long Island, where farmers used it to fertilize the hay and oats that they resold to urban buyers to feed their horses and other animals. Waste as fertilizer flowed out, and food flowed in.
Milk from urban dairies contributed to the soaring infant death rate in New York and other cities. A staple of the urban poor, milk carried “tuberculosis, typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and streptococcal germs.” The diseases came from sick cows, and dairy operators exacerbated the problem by diluting their milk with impure water.
Improvement in the milk supply began about 1890, but dramatic changes came only in the early twentieth century with pasteurization, regular testing of cows, and refrigeration. The improvements correlated with a decline in the infant death
Edison succeeded where others had failed by recognizing how to correct the weak point—the filament—in existing designs. But to create indoor electrical lighting, he had to design not just a bulb but also an entire lighting system, from generation to transmission.
Edison’s fame rested on expensive consumer goods; Westinghouse capitalized on the Gilded Age economy’s emphasis on producer goods. He cultivated the market for marginal improvements in established technologies rather than creating transformative novelties. Westinghouse prospered by improving railroad brakes. He understood the corporate needs for uniformity, predictability, and control.
Virtually all the inventions of the period arose from the tinkering culture of American shops and factories. There were numerous versions of most devices. Attaching a single inventor to any of them and awarding a patent often involved seemingly endless litigation.
Westinghouse won, but by then Edison had triumphed as a cultural figure. Edison’s greatest invention remained Thomas Edison, “The Wizard of Menlo Park.”
New technologies allowed the buildings to rise. The safety elevator, invented by Elisha Otis in 1852, moved people and things from floor to floor without undue labor. Pipes brought steam from central plants to heat the new buildings. In New York, buildings sprouted water towers on their roofs to create the necessary pressure for running water and sprinklers to suppress fires. The buildings had become too large for fire ladders and fire hoses to reach their upper stories, and the new water systems offered them protection. But the most critical innovation was the use of iron and steel in
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Not New York but rather Chicago gave birth to the American skyscraper. The city’s immense growth—nearly doubling every decade—produced more than a million residents by 1890 and powered it past Philadelphia, making it the nation’s second-largest city. With downtown real estate values at a premium, Chicago architects borrowed from the French, who were the leaders in iron construction.
Tenements concentrated all the maladies of the poor: infant mortality, disease, and their declining stature and health. The working life of their residents and the conditions in which they lived contributed to the problems that made poor children die young and stunted those who survived.
Average caloric intake for Americans seems to have fallen, and the cost of food seems to have risen between 1840 and 1870, but they had held steady before 1840. The availability of food improved after 1870, so scarcity and hunger alone cannot explain the decline in measures of well-being across most of the period.
Ice may have been the crucial element in reversing declines in American stature and nutrition. The rapid spread of refrigeration increased consumption of ice by a factor of five between 1880 and 1914.
Ice can claim credit for perhaps 50 percent of the improvement in nutrition in the 1890s, and with it the beginning of the rise in average height.
Municipal tax policy passed the burden of the crisis to taxpayers as a whole while reserving the benefits, and profits, of the proposed solutions for the wealthiest. The poor derived the least benefit from the infrastructure of sanitation and clean water in the cities.
In 1886 more than six hundred thousand American workers walked out of shops, factories, and work sites. There were fourteen hundred separate strikes affecting 11,562 businesses.
The strikes peaked on May Day, May 1, with a national strike for the eight-hour day; collectively they became what the economist and labor historian Selig Perlman later called the Great Upheaval. The size, extent, organization, and expanse of the strikes far exceeded those of 1877. This was not the spontaneous walkout of largely unorganized workers. Labor organizations of a size the country had never seen before coordinated, or tried to coordinate, most of them.
