America Aflame by David Goldfield

America Aflame by David Goldfield

Author:David Goldfield
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2011-03-24T16:00:00+00:00


Triumph Hill, near Tidioute, Pennsylvania (ca. 1870), was at the center of the oil boom that John D. Rockefeller parlayed into the Standard Oil Company. The photo shows buildings, derricks, and storage tanks. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

The war also expanded the white-collar middle class: managers, salesmen and clerks to run the railroads, distribute goods, solicit orders, maintain account books, and analyze price trends. The professions, especially medicine and engineering, profited significantly from the war, adding considerably to the knowledge of bridge and railroad construction, surgical practice, and nursing. Union engineers constructed a bridge over the Chattahoochee River near Atlanta more than 740 feet long and 90 feet high in just four days, facilitating General Sherman’s capture of that city in September 1864.

The federal government was an active partner with private enterprise in expanding the economy and generating wealth. Government contracts, generous land grants, financial legislation and policy, and tax and tariff legislation contributed greatly to the economic expansion and to the Union war effort. John D. Rockefeller’s Cleveland office became an important gathering point for colleagues during the war, and not only to receive the latest news from the front off the telegraph. Rockefeller had installed a telegraph connection in order to react quickly to price changes in oil, commodities, and transportation. The federal government helped Western Union string telegraph wires across America, facilitating contact with armies in the field, and also enabling entrepreneurs like Rockefeller to receive timely information to make their businesses more efficient and profitable.

The working class did not benefit from the wartime economic boom. Labor shortages resulted in rising wages, but not enough to keep up with inflation. Prices rose nearly 80 percent in the North during the war years, wages less than two thirds of that figure. The change in scale and the resort to machinery mitigated labor shortages and reduced dependence on skilled operatives. Women whose husbands were in the service and immigrants suffered hardships during the war. The New York City draft riot originated in part from widespread labor discontent among the Irish immigrant working class. The Lincoln administration brooked no opposition from striking workers, dispatching federal troops to quell labor disturbances in a number of locations. When troops broke up a strike in the Parrott cannon factory at Cold Spring, New York, the administration tossed labor leaders into a military prison. Several states enacted anti-union legislation to prevent workers from organizing.

Despite the general prosperity, it is probable that the condition of working-class Americans was worse at the end of the war than at the beginning. Republicans, including Lincoln, believed in the dream of easy upward mobility and of the harmony of interests between capital and labor. Many Republican leaders had experienced that mobility, but they attained adulthood in a different era. Karl Marx hailed the Union war effort as a “matchless struggle for … the reconstruction of a social world.” He may have been correct, but not in the way he intended. Northerners pondered the addition of workers, especially immigrant



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