The Least You Need to Know
The kind of raw energy that animated the “Wild West” seemed to drive the rest of the country as well during the latter half of the 19th century.
After the Civil War, big business grew largely unchecked, even at the expense of the public welfare, creating a roller-coaster boom-and-bust economy.
Big business generated investment in innovation, and the post-Civil War period was an era of great inventions.
Word for the Day
The cowboy’s ancestors are the vaqueros (from the Spanish vaca, “cow”), originally Indians attached to the old Spanish missions and employed by them to handle their beef herds. The cowboys roped steers with a loop of braided rawhide rope known as la reata–a lariat. They wore chaparreras, leather trousers designed to protect their legs from brush and chaparral; later, American cowboys wore chaps. The word vaquero found its American counterpart in a synonym for cowboy.
Stats
For all their notoriety, neither Jesse James nor Billy the Kid holds any Wild West record for gunfighting. In terms of number of men slain, Billy the Kid comes in at 10th place (4 murders), behind Jim Miller (12), Wes Hardin (11), Bill Longley (11), Harvey Logan (9), Wild Bill Hickok (7), John Selman (6), Dallas Stoudenmire (5), Cullen Baker (5), and King Fisher (5). Jesse James doesn’t even come close to the top 10. In nine gunfights, only one killing is confirmed, though James may have assisted in the slaying of three more.
Main Event
Strangely enough, the usually canny Edison saw little future motion pictures. He even decided against projecting the films for audiences, because he didn’t think there would be much demand. Instead, Edison developed an electrically driven peephole viewing machine-the Kinetoscope—which displayed moving images to one viewer at a time for the price of a nickel. Not until 1903 did the Edison Company began to exploit projected motion pictures. In this year, Edwin S. Porter, an Edison employee, directed “The Great Train Robbery,” generally considered the first movie—the filming of a genuine story, complete with beginning, middle, and end. If the origins of the American film industry can be traced to any single event, it is the creation of “The Great Train Robbery.”
Stats
In 1908, Ford manufactured 10,607 cars retailing for $850 each. In 1916, he turned out 730,041 Model T cars at $360 each.
Octopus and Jungle
(1877-1906)
In This Chapter
Immigration and opposition to immigration
Oklahoma land rush
Labor organization to fight oppression
Corruption and reform
“History,” said the English writer Thomas Carlyle, “is the biographies of great men.” For a long time, most historians thought of their craft in this way. Thus the tale of the last quarter of the 19th century might be told exclusively through the lives of Carnegie, Gould, Rockefeller, Ford, and the rest. However, more recent historians have come to realize that these biographies relate only part of the story. History is also an account of ordinary people, the working men and women whose lives were influenced, even shaped, by the actions of politicians, robber barons, and (to use another phrase of Carlyle) the “captains of industry.” While the moneyed elite fought one another for control of more and more capital, the nation’s working people were tossed on the brutal seas of an economic tempest. Fortunes were being made and great inventions created, but for plain folk, the waning century presented plenty of hard times.
The Golden Door
America is a nation of immigrants. During the 17th century, colonial entrepreneurs actively recruited new settlers. Most of the early immigrants spoke English, but by the 18th century, waves of German immigrants arrived as well, causing alarm and resentment among the English-speakers, especially those who had been born on these shores. Yet, gradually, the German immigrants and those of the Anglo-American mainstream came to terms.
The next great wave of immigration began in 1841, when Ireland suffered a great potato famine, which caused untold hardship and even starvation. Millions left the country, most of them bound for the United States. The influx of Irish-Catholics into what was principally an Anglo-Protestant nation prompted many to worry that “their” American culture would crumble. The Irish immigrants were subjected to abuse and prejudice, some of it even backed by local legislation.
Beginning around 1880, the clamoring demands of American industry began to drown out the anti-immigrant chorus. Immigrant labor was cheap labor, and employers looked for unskilled and semiskilled workers to feed newly emerging assembly lines and do the heavy lifting required to build bridges and raise skyscrapers. American employers called not only on the German states and Ireland, but also on southern and eastern Europe, encouraging the immigration of Italians, Greeks, Turks, Russians, and Slavs. For the first time, substantial numbers of Jews came to the United States, adding a new element to the nation’s blend of ethnic identities and religious faiths.
While the cities of the East and the Midwest tended to assimilate the new immigrants readily, resistance to immigration remained strong in the West and Southwest. Not that employers in these regions scrupled against hiring foreigners; they just didn’t want the workers to enjoy citizenship. Asians, prized as hard workers, were barred from attaining U.S. citizenship by naturalization laws. In the Southwest, migrant labor from Mexico provided a scandalously cheap source of temporary farm workers. By 1882, prejudice against Asians resulted in passage of the first of a series of Chinese Exclusion Acts, which blocked the importation of Chinese laborers. However, authorities winked at the continued influx of Mexican migrants, some of whom came lawfully and others not.
By the second decade of the 20th century, most Americans were eager to close the golden door. In 1917, would-be immigrants were required to pass a literacy test, and in 1924, Congress set a strict limit on immigration—154,000 persons annually. Congress also established quotas aimed at reducing immigration from southern and eastern European countries.
How the Other Half Lived
At the end of the 19th century, most large American cities were deeply divided places. Established citizens lived in varying degrees of prosperity, decently clothed, fed, and housed, while many of the newer arrivals languished in overcrowded, dilapidated, and ultimately crime-plagued slums. The middle-class reaction to this “other half” of America was to ignore it—at least until Jacob August Riis (1849-1914), a New York journalist, published an eye-opening study in text and photographs of his city’s slum life. How the Other Half Lives (1890), Theodore Roosevelt declared, came as “an enlightenment and an inspiration.” The book heralded reform movements not only in New York, but across the nation.