A Little History of the United States by James West Davidson

Author:James West Davidson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

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THE NEXT BIG THING

ONE OF THE CONQUISTADORS WHO explored for treasure in Spanish America liked to display a motto below his portrait. It read, “By compasses and the sword: more and more and more and more.” Sometimes it seems as if all American history has been a scramble for more and more, from one boom country to the next. The search for gold and silver. Sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Virginia tobacco, Carolina rice. Fur traders roaming the Rockies. Cotton kingdoms and textile mills. Each boom seemingly bigger than the last. How big was big? By 1860, a large southern plantation put over 250 slaves to work. In Maine, the Pepperell Cotton Mills hired about eight hundred people, from mill girls and Irish immigrants to the boys paid to spear the eels that clogged the mill’s waterwheels. In 1860, eight hundred workers seemed a huge number for one company.

But only twenty-five years later, the Pennsylvania Railroad listed fifty thousand people on its payroll. Near Pittsburgh, not far from where George Washington tried to stop the French from building a tiny two-acre fort, the sixty-acre Homestead Steel Works belched smoke into the sky as its furnaces turned out two hundred tons of steel rails every day. The railroads gobbled them up as fast as they could get them. Steel transformed American cities, too. For centuries churches had been the tallest buildings, their steeples stretching toward heaven. Now, new steel girders made it possible for buildings to climb ten, twenty, even thirty stories high—“sky-scraping apartment houses,” one newspaper called them.

But there was more to bigness than getting bigger. You couldn’t just triple the size of a railroad and have done with it. To grow truly big, Americans had to create new systems. These systems were crucial for mastering the thousand and one details that went into becoming big.

Consider the difference between a steamboat and a locomotive. Someone who wanted to get into the steamboat business could pretty much just buy a boat and cast off downriver, stopping at one town or twenty-two. A railroad, on the other hand, needed not merely a locomotive and railcars; it had to buy the land its tracks would run on, clear a path through trees, fill in swamps, construct bridges over rivers, lay gravel and track, and build railroad stations. All that and more was necessary before the company could earn money carrying freight or passengers. In the 1850s many small railroads already crisscrossed the eastern United States, so companies like the New York Central Railroad began to buy them up to make “trunk lines” that ran smoothly between big cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Still, no one had settled the question of how wide railroad tracks should be. Many companies laid rails four feet eight and a half inches apart. Others preferred a five- or six-foot width. At least half a dozen sizes were in use. In order for one railroad to send freight to many different destinations, miles of tracks had to be adjusted so that the systems worked together.

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