§ 729] CONSOLIDATION OF LINES 607 been transformed. Just after the war, attempts were made to cultivate huge plantations of the old type with gangs of hired Negroes. This proved a losing venture; and soon the great plantations began to break up into smaller holdings, rented on shares to Negroes or to Poor Whites. These renters have been growing rapidly into owners. The Negro's wholesome ambition to own a farm promises to be a chief source of industrial and social salvation to his race and to the whole South. 728. Railway extension (§§ 562, 703) had been checked during the four years of war, but the last five years of the sixties almost doubled the mileage of the country. The new lines were located mainly in the Northwestern States and Territories; and they were busied at first only in carrying settlers to the moving frontier, and then soon in bringing back farm produce. From 1873 to 1878, construction was checked again by one of the periodic business panics. Then by 1880, another almost fabulous burst raised the mileage to 92,000, and the next ten years nearly doubled this, to 164,000 miles. Since 1890, expansion has been less rapid; but the next twenty years (to 1910) raised the total to 237,000 miles. Since 1880, America has had a larger ratio of railway mileage to population than any other country. Railroads represent one seventh the total wealth of the Nation, and employ more than a million men. The eighties witnessed also a transformation in the old railroads. Heavier steel rails, thanks to the Bessemer invention,1 replaced iron. This made possible the use of heavier locomotives and of steel cars of greater size; and these called in turn for straightening curves, cutting down grades, and bettering roadbeds. Such changes "fixed" a large amount of capital, but they greatly reduced the cost of transportation. 729. More significant than these physical changes was the consolidation of railway management and ownership. In 1860 no one 1 It was this same invention that made possible also a transformation of cities in exterior, and in character of life, -a change symbolized by the replacement of the old four or five-storied buildings by the new steel ten-to-thirtystoried structures. company reached from the Atlantic to Chicago: indeed, no company controlled five hundred miles of road. One short line led to another, and so to another, perhaps with awkward gaps, and certainly with annoying and costly transfers, and with confusing changes in rates and in schedules and sometimes in width of track. By 1880, the gaps had been filled, gauges unified, and small lines grouped into larger systems-still counting, however, some 1500. By 1895, this number had been cut in half by further consolidation, and forty leading lines controlled half the mileage of the whole country. Since 1905, all important lines have been controlled by seven or eight groups of capitalists. 730. A like consolidation of capital and management has been marked in nearly every sort of industry and commerce.1 The age of small individual enterprise has given way to an age of large combinations. Small stores merged into department stores; small firms into larger corporations; large corporations into still larger "trusts." In the East, the making of " ready-made" clothing became a mighty factory industry, and new leather sewing machinery built up huge shoe-factories. In the West, the farmer's grain was no longer ground in a neighboring mill on some small stream, but in great flour centers like Minneapolis; and his beeves and hogs went, not to a village slaughter-house, but to the vast meat-packing industries of Chicago. Even in agriculture this era of combination saw a new type of "bonanza farmers," each owning his thousands of rich acres in the Dakotas; and "cattle kings" seized on the immense feeding ranges of the Southwest. In connection with new scientific knowledge, this combination brought vast saving of wealth. The old village slaughter house threw away horns and hoofs and hair and intestines: the great packing-house works up all these everything except the squeal " - into articles of use. Pine stumps were found valuable for turpentine, and the Southern cottonseed, formerly consigned to troublesome refuse heaps, was found highly 66 1 Between 1880 and 1890 the number of woolen mills decreased from 1990 to 1311, and the manufactories of farm implements from 1943 to 910; but in each line the output was more than doubled. So, too, of iron and steel mills. 8 731] BUSINESS IMMORALITY 609 valuable, first for fertilizing land, then for stock food, and finally for vegetable oils for human food. So, too, in countless other lines. 731. Unhappily, this material growth was accompanied by an amazing growth of business immorality. This tendency, noticeable before the war, had been strengthened by the flaunting success of corrupt army contractors, and was fostered for years afterward by the gambling spirit begotten of an unstable currency and of the spectacle of multitudes of fortunes made overnight in the oil wells of Pennsylvania1 or in the new mining regions of Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana. In later years, too, the tremendous power over credits possessed by railroad kings and by the heads of other great consolidations of capital has tempted them constantly from their true functions as "captains of industry" to play the part of buccaneers in the stock market. Unreasonable profits, too, in the regular line of business draw the controlling stockholders in multitudes of corporations to increase their own shares by juggling the smaller holders out of theirs. Sometimes the controlling stockholders of a corporation turn its affairs over to an operating company-composed of themselves alone-which then absorbs all the profits of the whole business in salaries or in other ways provided in the contract which the raiders have made with themselves. Or leading members of a railway company organize an inside company-like an express company- to which then the legitimate profits of the first company are largely diverted in the shape of excessive rates on certain parts of the railroad business. Only one degree worse is the deliberate wrecking of a prosperous corporation, by intentional mismanagement, so that the insiders may buy up the stock for a song, and then rejuvenate it to their huge profit. Step by step, the law has striven to cope with all such forms of robbery; but numerous shrewd corporation lawyers find employment in steering "malefactors of great wealth "2 through the devious channels of "high finance" so as to avoid grazing the letter of the law. 1 Petroleum was discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859, but no marked development came in production till after the War. Then "to strike oil" soon became a byword for success equivalent to a "ship come home" in the days of more primitive commerce. In 1872 petroleum ranked among our exports next to cotton, wheat, and meats. - 2 A phrase of President Roosevelt's (§ 832). 732. One ruinous consequence of this lack of moral sense in business was a general indifference to the looting of the public domain by business interests and favored individuals. Thus, the timber on the public lands, with decent care, would have supplied all immediate wants and still have remained unimpaired for future generations. But with criminal recklessness, the people permitted a few individuals not only to despoil the future of its due heritage, but even to engross to themselves the vast immediate profits which properly belonged to present society as a whole. And, in their haste to grasp these huge profits, the big lumbermen wasted more than they pocketed,taking only the best log perhaps out of three, and leaving the others to rot, or, along with the carelessly scattered slashings, to feed chance fires into irresistible conflagrations, which, it is estimated, have swept away at least a fourth of our forest wealth. Quaintly enough, this piteous spoliation and waste was excused and commended as "development of natural resources," and laws were made or twisted for its encouragement. Timber land, especially the pine forests of the Northwest, did not attract the genuine homesteader: too much labor was required to convert such lands into homes and farms, and the soil and distance from market were discouraging for agriculture. Such lands ought to have been withdrawn by the government from homestead entry. But, as the law was then administered, a man could "enter" a quarter section, clear a patch upon it, appear upon it for a night every few months, and so fulfill all legal requirements to complete title, after which he had perfect right to sell the valuable timber, which had been his only motive in the transaction. Multitudes, less scrupulous about legal formalities, sold the timber immediately after making entry, without ever "proving up" at all. These individual operations were trivial in amount; but the big lumber kings extended their effect by hiring hundreds and thousands of "dummy " homesteaders to secure title in this way to vast tracts of forest and to turn it over, for a song, to the enterprising employer. Nor, in early years, did any one see § 733] SIGNS OF PROMISE 611 wrong in this process. Condemnation, none too severe, was reserved for the lumbermen who took shorter cuts by forging the entries or by using the same "dummies" many times over, in open defiance of the law. In ways similar, but varied as to details, the State lands, too, became the legalized booty of private citizens. 733. This epidemic of waste and plunder had its golden age from 1870 to about 1890. James Russell Lowell spoke sorrowfully of the degradation of the moral tone in America, and many less robust thinkers despaired openly of democracy. But signs of promise were not wanting. A passion for education possessed the people. The public high school was just taking full possession of its field. A new group of great teachers and organizers at new universities, Andrew D. White at Cornell, James B. Angell at Michigan, Gilman at Johns Hopkins, Eliot at his reorganized Harvard, with their many fellows, were setting up higher ideals for American scholarship, and connecting scholarship as never before with the daily life of the people. About 1890, such institutions began to send forth trained, devoted, vigorous young men to the service of the nation in its battle with corruption and with intrenched privilege. Meantime, during the darkest years of material prosperity, some of the fine idealism of the Civil War period lived on sometimes no doubt in blundering paths in the movements of the Greenbackers and Prohibitionists and Grangers (§ 782) to regenerate society. FOR FURTHER READING. - Every high school student should read Winston Churchill's In a Far Country, William Allen White's A Certain Rich Man, each a sort of "Pilgrim's Progress" allegory of American life in the decades following the Civil War, and Booth Tarkington's The Turmoil. The phases, good and bad, of the waste of the public domain are pictured graphically in Stewart Edward White's two related stories, The Riverman and The Rules of the Game. The difficult and important period since the Civil War is treated well in two small recent volumes, one of which every student should read: Haworth's Reconstruction and Union, and Paxson's New Nation. |