The Dawn of Innovation by Charles R. Morris

Author:Charles R. Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2012-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

America Is Number Two

BY 1860, THE UNITED STATES WAS HOME TO 31 MILLION PEOPLE, OR NEARLY as populous as Great Britain and France. Until the 1830s, population growth had been dominated by the rate of natural increase. Immigration accelerated in the 1830s, and from the 1840s until the 1920s consistently accounted for a quarter to a third of the total growth in population. As the country grew, its center of gravity also steadily moved west.

The country was urbanizing. At the turn of the century, three-quarters of employed Americans worked in agriculture, but by 1860, only 56 percent of workers toiled on a farm. Agricultural employment accounted for fewer than a third of jobs in the Northeast by 1860 but still more than 60 percent in the Midwest, and a nearly unchanging three-quarters in the South, which remained dependent on King Cotton.1 The Northeast still commanded about half of the country’s total income, but average incomes in the Northeast and the Midwest had begun to converge and would be approaching parity by the end of the century.2

The Northeast’s large income advantage reflected both its lower reliance on agriculture and greater concentration of good-paying, white-collar, service employment—banking, insurance, accounting, wholesale and retail trade. The white-collar pay advantage was particularly strong in the nineteenth century. Edward Tailer was twenty in 1850, when he started work as an assistant clerk for a New York dry goods importer while complaining of his $50 annual salary. But within two years, and after two job changes, he was making $1,000—a solid middle-class income. He then went on the road as a traveling salesman at $1,200 and had his own business when he was twenty-five.3

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