The Coming Caesars by De Riencourt Amaury

Author:De Riencourt, Amaury [De Riencourt, Amaury]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coward-McCann, Inc
Published: 2013-12-29T16:00:00+00:00

From One Century To Another

In 1880, there were 50-million Americans, 40-million of them living in rural areas. The next fifty years witnessed the dramatic metamorphosis of a predominantly rural America into an overwhelmingly urban society. The flight from the land was partly masked by the steady increase in immigration from the Old World, but the flight had nonetheless become alarming in the eastern United States. Like Roman Italy, America was becoming a land of city-dwellers, of rootless populations divorced from the soil, conglomerating into gregarious and increasingly impersonal crowds. By 1880, half of the eastern population had become urban and the waning of eastern agriculture was proceeding at a fast rate. The steady progress of urbanization can be gauged from the fact that in 1790 city dwellers totaled less than 4 percent of the population whereas in 1860 they totaled already 16 percent.

The growing cities were absorbing and concentrating an increasing portion of the national wealth while the farmers were losing their political importance. Farms were heavily mortgaged, and farmers were becoming the rebellious and unwilling tools of city merchants and bankers. The new American West, now developing in the Great Plains beyond the Mississippi, linked up politically with the agrarian South and attempted to fight the urban industrialist-capitalist octopus that was slowly devouring the traditional rural America. This defensive movement eventually became, in the 1890s, the Bryan-Populist revolt.

The frontier was coming to an end. The Great Plains were filling up, the last Indians were confined in their reservations, and the colorful epic of the Far West was drawing to a close. Cosmopolitan life with its increasing mechanization was slowly extending over the entire continent, as it was all over the world. Soon, there would be no wild refuge for those who wanted to escape from the class distinctions that seem to permeate every civilization, for those whose self-reliance and boldness found no outlet in the tameness of more settled areas. America was now changing much faster than Europe, becoming more unified and more mobile. Instead of the thousand years predicted by the post-Revolutionary generation, American settlements had reached the Mississippi in 25 years and another quarter of a century had seen them on the Pacific. By 1900, the continent was virtually settled from coast to coast.

The economic depression of 1873 had started the long tale of agricultural woes. Farmers were in the same desperate straits as their Roman counterparts when large-scale slave farming had made the lot of the old-fashioned Roman homesteader intolerable. A similar revolution, on a much higher technical level, was taking place in American agriculture. The huge treeless prairies—what used to be called the “great American desert”—were brought under cultivation thanks to products of the Industrial Revolution: the dense network of railroads, barbed wire fencing, the tractor, and the automatic binder. The older, smaller farms of the East and the wooded West were ruined by the large-scale farming of the plains. New England’s barren fields could no longer support its traditional sheep-raising and sent thousands of

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