The Search For Order, 1877-1920

Book Notes #37

The Search For Order is a history book published in 1967 as part of Harvard’s The Making of America series. I will organize this review into reviews of each chapter, with more summary than quotation than usual, if I can help it. The chapters generally progress along the timeline 1877-1920, although they jump slightly forward and backward based on the themes of the chapter.

Chapter 1: Prelude

Chapter 1 details the re-creation of America after the Civil War and failure of Reconstruction. This America was made up of islands of small communities that would soon combine and transform into a great power, and the social standing of the people in those old community structures changed from the old relations into dependence on one’s occupation in a bureaucratic structure. Railroads connected these community islands together, but the people in the communities through which the railroads ran had no control over what came through, when, where from, and where hence it would go. Men of great fortune were still exceptional oddities in America. The concept of the super-rich was only just developing. Politicians still referred to their actual professions as their occupation rather than their political office.

Chapter 2: The Distended Society

America was still provincial. The regions were economically distinct. The West supplanted the South as the agricultural region when railroads opened up vast new lands for development, and new machinery created entrepreneurial farms and selected for the farmers who could win the industrialization race. These farms used hired hands, and the mass-use of hired labor created sharper class divides that weren’t present before the railroad era. The horizon grew beyond the community town and those able to see past it raced ahead of the others. Tactical, rather than strategic struggles for the next competitive advantage dominated the well-to-do moneymaking class. Large companies were not tightly controlled, but ever-growing, unwieldy behemoths that relied on ad-hoc solutions. The owners simply couldn’t exercise national control over their organizations due to limitations in the transmission of information. Owners of work shops that became factories didn’t know how to run factories, and small banks didn’t understand what was happening with their money they deposited in larger ones. Holding companies and trusts did not have the central monopoly control over the country, as many modern people believe. New systems of cooperation between businesses were being developed. While great systems developed to solve specific problems, such as railroad, they also destroyed in their wake.

America generated enough concentrated capital to finance its own industrial projects rather than relying on foreign investment. This accumulation of domestic capital for the first time would be key to the rise of America to great power status, but as capital accumulated, very few knew how to use it. The elite looked to the elite of the elite, such as J.P. Morgan for guidance; but even captains of industry such as Morgan only has a narrow field of view. The capital surplus America developed was not used nearly as promptly or efficiently as it could have been as the creative energy for national policy.

The United States Treasury had a surplus. It struggled at passing legislation on what to do with the money. Even if it could, there was little in the way of “national policy.” Congress passed laws and executive responsibility passed down to its local recipients. The magnates with tangible national interests in rail, steel, and finance could expect little from the weak executive, but could at least expect Congress to address national policy. Some business bought Congressmen with lucrative reflection packages, but this subversion of bottom up power to the top down was less common than one might think and did not successfully impose order on a disordered country.

Politics was the national pastime. Rich men sponsored politicians not for repayment in kind, but as a sort of sport. National campaigns and party platforms didn’t really exist. Party affiliation was parochial and as much about who the opposing neighborhood supported as anything else. Urban city bosses gained power through various wards, especially through immigrants, and had power independent of national parties. The elected President was a factional leader among peers, who appointed cabinet members based on the delicate sensibility to slights various factions had, and not the singular national party leader that we recognize today. The Congress was slow to act; the Senate took a decade to pass railroad regulations, but this was not considered strange.

In the mines, absentee owners like John D. Rockefeller allowed subordinates to deal with troublemakers as they saw fit, leading to inhumane treatment that owners such as Rockefeller didn’t approve of, but were too distant to control. Rockefeller and men like him simply didn’t and couldn’t know what their company was doing at a detailed level because of the information problem.

The cities cordoned themselves off from their slums, but these slum dwellers soon because necessary industrial workers and the police brutally cracked down on slum demonstrators.

The author characterizes this period as the “age of bulk” in every sense, but without the systems to management to handle the exploding quantity of labor, products, and infrastructure.

Chapter 3: Crisis in the Communities

The old age of haggling and human contact in cross-community trading was replaced by a business owner consulting a price list and placing orders through mail. People began expecting that their national government provide them with some sort of recompense for the disruption of their lives. In general, people were anti-monopoly, and anti-alien. Against alien people, alien companies, and alien power. Americans had an inconsistent relationship with the new economic developments, as the following describes.

P. 46:

“An ingenious, persevering man who had won a personal fortune still belonged among the nation’s heroes; sinister corporations that profited at the people’s expense were the despoilers. A small businessman might praise Andrew Carnegie as the embodiment of the American success story and in his next breath condemn the “steel trust” as its corruption. Judgments like these represented a state of mind that people entered and left in unpredictable ways. Community boosters who had courted a factory for years would suddenly find it a tyrant and turn violently against it. “The people are in favor of building a new road and do what they can to promote it. [But] after it is once built and fixed,” an official of the Illinois Central ruefully observed, “then the policy of the people is usually in opposition.””

There was widespread belief that corrupt usurpers had taken over the U.S. government. People searched for a silver bullet solution to the problems of the national government in answers to what was called “The Social Question.”

P. 62:

“Because most reformers conceived the world as an orderly affair where societies, like planets, normally functioned according to rational laws, they had customarily looked for that one gear askew, that one fundamental rule violated, as an explanation for America’s troubles. Reset the gear, abide by the great law, and all difficulties would vanish. A crisis psychology accentuated this tendency: the more anxious the search, the more imperative that men penetrate to the root of the matter; the more serious society’s predicament, the more grandiose the visions of perfection following that single correction. Solutions that already leaned toward revelation, such as Henry George’s discussion of land monopoly, were pushed the final distance. As the single tax, George’s program won a host of new and particularly zealous converts during the mid-eighties. At the same time, analysts reformulated problems to suit their solutions. “The Social Question,” a term that covered subjects ranging from obscene literature and liquor to strikes and monopolies, suddenly emerged in 1885 as the most popular topic of the day, and in a debate of panaceas, Americans offered each other inclusive answers to the inclusive question. “All the great problems...,” the nativist Robert DeCourcy Ward declared, “the liquor question, the public school question ....., are tied up with the one great problem of foreign immigration.” Socialists, prohibitionists, inflationists, and many more merely substituted their chosen word for “immigration.” Eighteen eighty-seven was an appropriate year for President Cleveland to rally his party behind a single issue, tariff reform. Brand Whitlock, the novelist who later served as mayor of Toledo, recalled that among his educated friends “the tariff question had seemed entirely fundamental” in the later eighties.”

The Knights of Labor were a social movement typical of the period, with a mix of “philosophical radicalism and decent daily behavior.” They were ultimately the victim of their own success.

P. 68

“Avowedly a moral movement, the Knights sought an ethical substitute for the capitalism they believed was destroying opportunity, equality, and brotherhood. As the eventual replacement for an evil system, the leaders of the Knights placed their hopes in producer and consumer cooperatives, the economic expression of the community spirit. In the meantime, they advocated the abolition of national banks, clearing the way for a currency issued “direct to the people”; the nationalization of the railroads, transforming them into society’s avenues; and an end to alien land ownership, reopening farms for honest laborers everywhere. Powderly in particular deplored the strike as a fruitless, barbaric practice. Instead the national officials counselled discussion and negotiation, even the advice of an impartial outsider, and in time they accepted the boycott as an appropriate means of community persuasion.

This combination of philosophical radicalism and decent daily behavior constituted a petition for membership as respected citizens in a moral American society. Certainly those ethnic groups, especially of Irish background, who had captured portions of the Knights behaved as if their organizations were a personal plea for recognition; the antagonism of many Catholic clergymen to the Knights represented the special hostility of a rival for these people’s loyalty. When the anarchist Albert Parsons claimed with some justification that “the foundation principle of socialism, or anarchy is the same as the Knights of Labor, viz., ‘The abolition of the wages system’ and the substitution in its stead of an industrial system of universal cooperation,” the leaders of the union recoiled. “He is a true Knight of Labor,” Powderly declaimed, “who with one hand clutches anarchy by the throat and with the other strangles monopoly!” Powderly courted the company of such people as Henry George, whose dislike of exclusive trade unions led him to befriend the Knights; Frances Willard, another supporter who some said secretly loved the handsome labor leader; and the respectable agrarians in the farmers’ alliances.

In that setting success proved the Knights’ undoing. Early in 1885, a time of high tension among wage earners, Jay Gould made a tactical retreat before the Knights on his Western railroads, giving them the semblance of an astonishing triumph. Impatient workers by the hundreds of thousands poured into the organization. These angry immediatists, demanding a quick return on their membership, came faster than the staid officials could even count, let alone control, and then proceeded to set their own policies. Distressed and confused, Powderly changed overnight from the eloquent spokesman into an indecisive, quarrelsome leader who followed orders with counterorders, accepted then cancelled charters, and generally made a fool of himself and his organization in a desperate effort to contain the rabble and save the Knights’ good name. Victory had made a travesty of Powderly’s dream. As he denounced radicals and subverted the strikes of his own districts, substantial Americans and members alike called this fumbling man a megalomaniac. A quick succession of defeats, including one in 1886 at the hands of the crafty Gould, sent membership tumbling, with urban workers the first to leave. Powderly never understood that they needed a workaday sustenance for their visions. By the early nineties, the Knights of Labor had declined into a sedentary organization composed mostly of small-town Americans. By the standards of late-nineteenth-century reform, Powderly and his colleagues had been rational men mangled by an irrational world.”

Something interesting about the development of this period can be found in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Edward Bellamy envisioned a utopia in the year 2,000 and looked back at its development in the novel. The “Great Trust” was a mechanical state run by experts was described as:

“The machine which they direct is indeed a vast one, but so logical in its principles and direct and simple in its workings, that it all but runs itself.”

Bellamy became associated with Nationalism, and by this we mean not the racial nationalism of the 20th century, but a Nationalism that was more socialist, and would solve the rampant individualism (of the capitalists) and bring the country together from fragmented communities into a unified whole. The fact that this whole could be projected as a future utopia is interesting because it seems impossible to make any possible future projection today that is not a dystopia.

The alliance movement of the Northwestern Southern, and Western states again the Northern and Eastern States was meant to be of the people against the corporate plutocrats. The contradiction of reform movements that sought to protect American communities is that they could not see a way to do so without a huge centralized government apparatus, highly democratized through referendum. Bellamy was a major philosopher of the alliance movement, whose philosophy along with Marxism and Christian socialism made up the alliance movement, which in the 1890s concentrated on agrarianism, especially in wheat, cotton, and tobacco. The alliance movement, commanding standing majorities through its members in many counties, dissolved itself into the Populist Party and into the necessities of politics that resulted in the loss of the feeling of national unity. The creation of this Party ultimately spelled doom for the alliance movement, as it could not take on the Democrat and Republican parties that controlled the levers of power.

The authors characterizes reformers mentioning in this chapter as having planned a failed revolution without realizing it.

Chapter 4: The Fate of the Nation

The law concerning labor and property had to be developed to handle the new state of affairs. The risk of anarchy from a strike or revolt in the slums was a fear among the urban elite in particular, where labor associations first began to form.

P. 79:

“Because the effective use of force depended upon timely government orders, prominent citizens now paid closer attention to politics. Like the spokesmen for reform, they thought of government, properly constituted, as a passive agent in society’s smooth operation, and they regularly complained about interfering politicians and disruptive legislation. Yet if their ideal government had no more free will than Bellamy’s mechanical state, it did contain noticeably more substance.”

The President had the veto and command of the troops, which gave him significant power in this time of worry over mass violence,

P. 80:

Yet above even the President, it was the Supreme Court that received the most solicitous attention. To the degree a general government policy existed in the years following reconstruction, Federal courts had usually supplied it. Disorganizing change during the late nineteenth century had encouraged exactly the kind of broad, outlined guidance the judiciary could provide, just as it had inhibited a more detailed, daily direction through either legislation or administration. Moreover, the other two branches had regularly invited the judiciary to assume greater responsibilities. The leading judges of the late nineteenth century saw themselves as major policymakers and framed their important decisions with that purpose in mind.

However, the Supreme Court left a great deal of discretion to lower courts in their rulings. Lack of rulings on labor law left lower courts with the ability to make generalized sweeping rulings on conflict between laborers and corporations.

The author describes the development of private vocabularies, which is interesting because we see similar “private vocabularies” today. This does not exactly refer to memes but how the same words mean difference things to different groups; for example, “conservative” to most people means “right-wing” whereas “conservative” to a minority means “liberalism driving the speed limit.”

P. 97

“To the Democratic President “Federal government” represented the natural, responsive agent of law and order, and “business” the corporate protectors of social stability. To the Democratic Governor “Federal government” referred to an alliance of monopolists and bosses bent upon wholesale oppression, and “business” the legitimate pursuits of average men thwarted by that alliance. “Republic” meant restraint of the masses to Cleveland and a local bulwark against national aggression to Altgeld.

At the center of each rhetorical cluster lay the symbols of finance. Over the last decades of the century banking and currency had come to hold a mysterious meaning apart from the rest of the economy. They comprised the inscrutable science. Unlike the bulky power of manufacturing and commerce, finance functioned invisibly. With fugitive slips of paper, men in hidden offices seemed capable of moving the universe. At the same time, finance appeared the most fundamental of all the nation’s business. It dealt with money—the core of the matter—and in the end everything else must revolve about it. This was simple logic in a society that relied so heavily upon wealth, raw wealth at that, as its differentiator. No doubt finance chilled more hearts than it warmed. Vast and mystical in scope, it worked itself into almost every discussion of corruption and iniquitous riches and alien power; that is, of all the eerie, evil forces besetting the community. The masters of Wall Street “engage in no commerce, no trade, no manufacturing,” wrote Justice Miller in the bitter perplexity of an old-fashioned man. “They produce nothing.” Yet they seemed to control everything. By the nineties a “Foreign Syndicate,” always standing far back in the shadows, explained each strike and each foreclosed mortgage to men like Henry Demarest Lloyd. Their feelings of impotence before such a phantom accounted for the extraordinary popularity of Coin’s Financial School (1894), a short tract in favor of free silver in which the common sense of an untutored youth confounded the greatest magicians of finance.”

“Free silver” referred to the unlimited coinage of silver. The free silver movement became a major part of politics in the nineties. Gold was a concentrated form of wealth that was not diffused into the West and other rural parts of the country. The free minting of silver coinage would have democratized the monetary supply, suddenly placing vast monetary wealth in the Western states and agrarian communities, who needed it because the lack of a sophisticated credit system to provide liquid capital. Gold really was a special form of power with the maturity of American financial power.

The Democrats and Populists suffered badly in this conflict. Populism was never an effective national party, because their opponents controlled the government and the and the lacked funding. The Populist Party was destroyed after the election of 1896, wherein the Populists nominated for President the same candidate as the Democrats, William Jennings Bryan (who lost to McKinley).