Progress of American life from 1900-1950, written in 1952. It’s interesting to read about the social and cultural changes caused by technology at a time when technological progress was much slower than it seems to be now. Original recommendation was from Morgan Housel’s review in 23 books that changed my life.
If a neatly adjusted time machine could take you back to the Main Street of an American town in 1900, to look about you with your present-day eyes, your first exclamation would probably be, “But look at all those horses!”
It is hard for us today to realize how very widely communities were separated from one another when they depended for transportation wholly on the railroad and the horse and wagon–and when telephones were still scarce, and radios non-existent.
(Always, in discussions of the economic status and opportunities of women, the effect of a woman’s occupation upon her sexual virtue was recurrent.)
But to most people such warnings just didn’t make sense. If lumbermen destroyed one forest, there were others to enjoy; if cottagers bought up one beach, there were others open to any bathers. The bounties of nature seemed inexhaustible.
At a luxurious hotel you might, if you paid extra, get a room with private bath, but not until 1907 did Ellsworth M. Statler build in Buffalo the first hotel which offered every guest a room and private bath at a moderate price.
Accordingly there were sharp limits to the fund of information and ideas which people of all regions and all walks of life held in common. To some extent a Maine fisherman, an Ohio farmer, and a Chicago businessman would be able to discuss politics with one another, but in the absence of syndicated newspaper columns appearing from coast to coast their information would be based mostly upon what they had read in very divergent local newspapers, and in the absence both of the radio and of newsreels it is doubtful if any of them–except perhaps the Chicago businessman–had ever heard with his own ears the silver voice of William Jennings Bryan.
It seems to be a continuing characteristic of American life that communities perpetually fail to catch up institutionally with their own growth;
Of all the contrasts between American life in 1900 and half a century or more later, perhaps the most significant is in the distance between rich and poor–in income, the way of living, and status in the community.
the American millionaire wanted to live like a prince; and since princes were foreign, and princely culture was likewise foreign, he must show his princeliness by living among foreign furnishings and foreign works of art,
there was the same eagerness for admission to the gatherings of the socially elect, whether these were assemblies, cotillions, sewing circles, the gatherings of some local association, or a leading family’s annual ball.
Wherever you may live today, you probably know some street which at the turn of the century was the abode of the prosperous and which has not been wholly rebuilt since then. As you walk along it, you may wonder how anybody with an income of less than princely size could have afforded to live in one of those big houses (most of which have probably been broken up into apartments within the past generation).
Indeed it is quite possible that part of the social security problem of our time–the widely expressed need for pensions, medical insurance, unemployment insurance, etc.–arises out of the fact that many families no longer can shelter those whom they used to consider their dependents–grandma, who used to have a third-floor room, or eccentric Cousin Tom, who was tucked away in the ell.
By 1900 what had formerly been a land mostly of farmers and villagers had become a land increasingly of cities and roaring industrial towns; and comforts, conveniences, and wealth had so piled up that it almost seemed as if a whole new world had been invented for people to work and play in. But the wealth still tended to flow into a few people’s pockets.
Hunter admitted that his figure of 10 million might be far short of the truth; there might be 15 million, or 20 million. He was dismayed that a nation devoted to the use of statistics had not shown real interest in getting an answer to what seemed to him a vital question. “But ought we not to know?” he asked.
those who made it their business to wrestle with the problem of American poverty often felt helpless to bring about any real improvement. “The real trouble,” wrote Woods, “is that people here are from birth to death at the mercy of great social forces which move almost like the march of destiny.”
(It was somewhat as if meteorologists should find it more logical to concentrate upon the behavior of fair weather than upon the behavior of storms.)
It was largely as a result of the discovery of tricks that could be played with corporations, and particularly with their capital stock, that the wealth produced in such a tremendous spate at the turn of the century flowed in large proportion into a few well-placed hands.
A man who had held the controlling interest in a small steel company–perhaps a struggling one–suddenly found himself the owner of a valuable block of shares of, let us say, American Tin Plate; and then, only a couple of years later, of a far more valuable block of shares of United States Steel. Millions of dollars appeared as if from nowhere and fell into his hands.
one might say, more specifically, that a typical Communist propagandist of the nineteen-fifties sounds exactly as if he were reacting angrily to the news in the morning papers of March 3, 1901.
Why, then, did very few people seem to realize that since the nature and behavior of American capitalism was a matter of transcendent importance to them, and involved great political problems, therefore the character and performance of their political representatives should come under the closest observation?
It seemed foreign to the nature of Americans, who were likely to be unsympathetic toward ideologies and disinclined to think of themselves as proletarians, however miserable their lot.
Nobody had told him that all Americans were interdependent; that each business, each social activity, each political activity, formed a part of a general American pattern which was affected by what everybody did; that, in the phrase of a later day, Americans were “all in the same boat.”
Is it any wonder that, in a day when such a magazine stood upon the pinnacle of journalism, there was a shortage of people burning to learn exactly how the ugly factories that disfigured the industrial towns of America were linked together by corporate charters into huge combinations, and how the masters of these combinations, and the bankers who stood behind them, subdued legislators to their will?
This was the kind of talk that millions of Americans of all walks of life–people allergic to ideologies, impatient of economic theory, but highly susceptible to moral evangelism and devoted to the idea of a fair chance for all–could understand and respond to.
And as the conflict that we now call World War I grew in fury and scope, the issues which it provoked began so to dominate the American scene that gradually the impulse toward reform was overwhelmed.
The idea that won out was that the existence of sharply defined economic and social classes was to be resisted as an offense to the American democratic ideal.
That the people who thought the machine would stop dead if you tinkered with it were wrong, and the people who thought you could invent out of hand a new machine that wouldn’t knock somewhere were also wrong.
one of the great principles of modern industrialism: the dynamic logic of mass production. This is the principle that the more goods you produce, the less it costs to produce them; and that the more people are well off, the more they can buy, thus making this lavish and economical production possible.
at first parked them at the edge of the station drive; then they needed a special parking lot, and pretty soon an extended parking lot, and in due course a still bigger one–and the larger the lot grew, the more people wanted to use it.
A friend of mine who was a very small boy in 1918 was told by his father that the Armistice had been signed, and asked, “Now that the war’s over, what will they find to put in the newspapers?” His father laughed, but in retrospect the question seems to have had considerable point. For the fact is that gradually military affairs and foreign affairs and politics began to yield first place in newspaper coverage to scandals, crimes, disasters, human dramas, and sports, not simply in such sensational sheets as the new tabloids, but also in the more severe and discreet ones.
The stuff could be produced all right. The question was whether it could be sold. The consensus was that a brisk enough salesman could sell it. And so the nineteen-twenties saw the canonization of the salesman as the brightest hope of America.
(One reason for this decline, possibly, was that union membership required effort and devotion and that union members, like other people, preferred to relax. Another was that wages were rising anyhow, though not, perhaps, as fast as productivity was rising. A third was that the prevailing union leadership was old-fashioned, large-waisted, and slow.)
What was destined to halt the forward progress of business was the fact that the businessmen of America had become bemused with paper values–with the piling up of speculative or artificially generated wealth which had little relation to the production of goods.
there developed a speculative mania which benefited immediately only those who could lay their hands on capital; and in addition, there were invented or improved a series of devices for distributing the fruits of prosperity–or what looked like them–into the pockets of the few.
attention. Not only were financiers and businessmen of high and low degree speculating, but housewives, ranchers, stenographers, clergymen, elevator men–whoever could lay hands on some cash to put into General Motors or Radio common or Monty Ward or Case Threshing or Electric Bond & Share.
One might reasonably interpret this statement to mean that any income below that level represented poverty. Practically 60 per cent of American families were below it–in the golden year 1929! The Brookings economists added another cautious observation: “There has been a tendency, at least during the last decade or so, for the inequality in the distribution of income to be accentuated.”
Distressing failures are readily forgotten, whether they are personal or national; instinctively one tries to lock away the memory of them. It was quite natural, in later years, for Republicans to try to gloss over what had happened during Hoover’s long ordeal; for believers in individualism to try to forget the tumble that private enterprise had taken; and, for that matter, for patriots generally to minimize what seemed a blot on the national record.
Most of them had been brought up to feel that if you worked hard and well, and otherwise behaved yourself, you would be rewarded by good fortune. Here were failure and defeat and want visiting the energetic along with the feckless, the able along with the unable, the virtuous along with the irresponsible. They found their fortunes interlocked with those of great numbers of other people in a pattern complex beyond their understanding, and apparently developing without reason or justice.
Through its general sympathy with labor, the New Deal had unleashed what J. Kenneth Galbraith has subsequently called a “countervailing force” in the American economy–a force which, acting in opposition to business managements, and generating for the time being a formidable amount of friction, served to bring about a redistribution of the national income downward to those in the lower income brackets.
Later, it is true, workers in essential industries were “frozen” in their jobs and the rulings of the War Labor Board tended to keep their pay within bounds; but the essential fact remained that these war workers became, as a group, the chief beneficiaries of the new prosperity.
By and large, what the war boom did, then–with numerous exceptions–was to give a lift to people with low incomes.
the government, through its Office of Scientific Research and Development and other agencies, was constantly saying during the war was, in effect: “Is this discovery or that one of any possible war value? If so, then develop it and put it to use, and damn the expense!”
But certainly there took place during the war a cross-fertilization of thinking which was stimulating to all concerned. Many a professor was enlivened by his new contacts, and many an industrial executive went home from Washington with a new insight into the future potential of scientific research.
Simultaneously the rising wage rates in American factories were prompting a restless search for labor-saving methods of production.
the symbolic significance is clear: you can not only dispense with even a reasonably skilled workman by building into a machine all the foreseeable motions with which he might react to variations in the task before him, but you can even provide the machine with eyes much sharper and reactions much prompter than his.
So it was that as the nineteen-fifties began, Americans in their wage-earning years were faced with the prospect of having to support, in one way or another, more human creatures senior and junior to themselves than ever before in recent history.
They are not a proletariat. They are a great number of people, very widely scattered, who are in very different sorts of trouble, economic and otherwise.
During the Depression Stuart Chase once wrote something to the effect that in a fluid society there would always be people climbing up the economic staircase and others tumbling down it, but that if it was a decent society there should be some way of preventing the latter from falling all the way to the cellar.
In fact when we compare the 1929 totals with the 1950 ones, we discover that total profits rose in the interval a little more sharply than total wages and salaries!
Much more impressive, however, than the narrowing of the gap in income between rich and poor has been the narrowing of the gap between them in their ways of living.
As Professor H. Gordon Hayes pointed out in Harper’s in 1947, the rich man smokes the same sort of cigarettes as the poor man, shaves with the same sort of razor, uses the same sort of telephone, vacuum cleaner, radio, and TV set, has the same sort of lighting and heating equipment in his house, and so on indefinitely.
Mass production rules us; and mass production permits diversity only within limits.
Today the cult of informality is pervasive. Its advance has been so long-continued that one would momentarily expect a reaction toward elegance; but for every step taken in the direction of formality, two steps are presently taken in the direction of an easier code of manners.
Few things are harder than to observe clearly the life and institutions of one’s own day.
As a matter of fact, many a tough-fibered tycoon of those days was dubious even about employing college graduates, whom he regarded as toplofty, impractical fellows who had to unlearn a lot before they were fit for the business arena.
At the mid-century the desire for synthesis and reconciliation–between various sciences, between science and industry, between sociology and business, between this element in our society and that–is widespread and contagious.
A lot of the companies in my industry were started in the early years of the century as one-man shows: there was a fellow with an idea and some capital, and the business was his personal business. Then the thing grew, and in the twenties the sales problem was uppermost, and this man was succeeded by a big salesman. Later we began to see the importance of research, and a research man, or at any rate a research-minded man, would get the nod. But now research has become so complicated that it’s a specialty, and what you need is a team of people each one of which knows one or more of these various specialties, and the chief thing required of the head fellow is that he be able to keep this team working as a well balanced unit.
The boss–whether president, or department head, or supervisor, or foreman–is an executive authority closer to them than any governor or mayor; and the code of practices of the firm–that body of common law of which we have spoken–seems to them to condition their lives and fortunes more urgently than the ordinances of the city or the laws of the state and nation.
Today, continues Mr. Bliven, we have lost this faith and are “frightened to death”–of war, atom bombs, and the looming prospect of a general brutalization and deterioration of the human species.
There has probably never been a generation some members of which did not wonder whether the next generation was not bound for hell in a handcar.
The concept of the national income, the idea of measuring the distribution of this income, the idea of the national economy as an entity affected by the economic behavior of every one of us, the very widespread interest in surveying sociologically the status of this and that group of Americans the country over, in the conviction that their fortunes are interdependent with ours: all these have developed during this half century.
there is an obscure feeling among a great many Americans that the acceptance of the principle of human dignity stops at the water’s edge: that a man who would be fiercely concerned over an apparent injustice to a fellow private in the American Army may be rude to Arabs, manhandle Koreans, and cheat Germans, and not lose status thereby–and
confront a world in which the biggest rewards for literary creation go to manufacturers of sexy costume romances; in which the Broadway theater, after a glorious period of fresh creation in the nineteen-twenties, is almost in the discard, having succumbed to the high cost of featherbedding labor and the competition of the movies; in which the movies in their turn, after a generation of richly recompensing those who could attract audiences by the millions and stifling those whose productions had doubtful box-office value, are losing ground to television; in which the highest television acclaim goes to Milton Berle rather than to Burr Tillstrom; and in which the poet finds his market well nigh gone.
The novelists of the Lost Generation concentrated their attention upon the meannesses and cruelties of contemporary life, and often their keynote was one of despair. Mencken led a chorus of scoffers at American vulgarity and sentimentality, not indignantly but cynically; when asked why he continued to live in a land in which he found so little to revere, he asked, “Why do men go to zoos?”
It is a source of continual astonishment to me that the nation which has the world-wide reputation of being the most optimistic, the most gregarious, and the freest on earth should see itself through the eyes of its most sensitive members as a society of helpless victims, shady characters, and displaced persons.
They are not an elite, but something else again. Let us say it in italics: This is something new; there has never been anything like it before.
In general one might ascribe this mental state to the difficulty of adjusting ourselves emotionally to life in what Graham Wallas called the “Great Society”–a complex society in which the fate of a Kansas farmer or a Syracuse druggist may be determined by a break in the New York stock market, or a government decision in Washington, or an invasion in Korea.
We are by nature a sanguine people, but never before have we been subjected to the sort of prolonged strain that we feel today, and our patience, humor, and courage are being sorely tested.
What had happened to bring about this astonishing result? The answer, in brief, is that through a combination of patchwork revisions of the system–tax laws, minimum wage laws, subsidies and guarantees and regulations of various sorts, plus labor union pressures and new management attitudes–we had repealed the Iron Law of Wages. We had brought about a virtually automatic redistribution of income from the well-to-do to the less well-to-do. And this did not stall the machine but actually stepped up its power.
We think we know a great deal more about economics than we did a generation ago, but we cannot be surer that we are living in a New Era than were the moguls of Wall Street who cherished that innocent faith in 1929.