CHAPTER VI
A great commercial revival, affecting the whole United States, began during the Administration of Hayes. Ingersoll had predicted it, in defining his candidate in 1876, when he declared: "The Republicans of the United States demand a man who knows that prosperity and resumption, when they come, must come together; that when they come, they will come hand in hand through the golden harvest-fields; hand in hand by the whirling spindles and the turning wheels; hand in hand past the open furnace doors; hand in hand by the flaming forges; hand in hand by the chimneys filled with eager fire, greeted and grasped by the countless sons of toil." In every section and in every occupation commerce revived during 1878 and 1879. Manufactures began to invade the South; mining-booms gave new life to the camps of the Far West; the wheat-lands of the Northwest, reached by the "Granger" railroads and cultivated by great power machines, produced a new type of bonanza farming; in the Southwest and on the plains great droves of cattle produced a new type of cattle king; and the factory towns of the East began again to grow. Connecting the various sections, the railroads played a new part, and built more miles of track in the next ten years than in any decade before or since. The whole country awoke as from an anæsthetic, tested its muscles to find that they were stronger than ever, and set to work again.
The silent evidence of the United States Treasury testifies to the prosperity of the next ten years. The average expenditures of the United States from 1850 to 1860 were under $60,000,000; they ranged between 1880 to 1890 from $244,000,000 to $297,000,000 without exhausting the supply. Yearly, despite the heavy drains upon it, a surplus accumulated to the embarrassment of the Government and the demoralization of Congress. The aggregate accumulation for ten years was over $1,000,000,000.
The disbursements of the United States were growing at a higher rate than its population, though this was keeping up the traditions of a new country. From 31,443,321 inhabitants, with which the nation faced the Civil War in 1860, it had grown to 38,558,371 in 1870, and it was now, in 1880, 50,155,783. In mobility and activity it had increased even more rapidly than this, for it was served by nearly three times as many miles of railway (87,000) in 1880 as when the war broke out. Along the old frontier the percentage figures for population and railway mileage were highest, but everywhere a larger population was moving more actively, and studying itself more intently than ever before. It was also generating more internal friction than ever. In the silver mines at Leadville in 1878 had occurred one of the great forerunners of economic clash. This had been preceded in 1877 by the railway strikes of Pennsylvania and the East. In California, Dennis Kearney and the Irish were driving the Chinese from society in the interest of "America for Americans." The murders by the "Molly Maguires" had brought condign punishment upon the lawless in the anthracite region; and throughout the East men were vaguely conscious of a secret society that called itself the Knights of Labor.
Complexity, class interest, and the problems at once of labor and of capital, thrust themselves upon a society that had occupied its continent and used most of its free land. The Centennial had revived the study of American history from patriotic reasons. An intense interest in self-analysis now kept this alive, as Henry Adams, James Schouler, and John Bach McMaster devoted themselves to a scrutiny of historic facts, as colleges began to create chairs of American history, as James Ford Rhodes retired from his office to his study to write the history of his own times. In the next few years associations for the study of political economy, political science, sociology, and history multiplied the testimonies to the existence of a new nation.
It was many years before the study of history and institutions reached the eighties and began to place events in their true proportion. Then it appeared that there was in fact a fundamental economic problem and that the political issues of the decade faced it from various angles.
The United States had nearly reached its greatest capacity in production by 1880, and was no longer able to consume its output. Through its first century there had been a rough plenty everywhere,—enough food, enough work, and free land,—so that the industrious citizen need never go hungry, although he was rarely able to acquire great wealth. Men had worked with their own hands and with the labor of their beasts of burden, as men had ever worked. Their land had appeared, indeed, to be the land of opportunity. Population had doubled itself in a short generation, and America had called upon the oppressed of Europe to aid in reclaiming the plains and forests. With all the labor and opportunity, there had rarely been either an overproduction or a lack of work.
The industrial revolution changed the nature of American society in many directions. Through an improved system of communication, whose results were first visible between 1857 and 1873, it had broadened the realm to be exploited, brought the rich plains of the West into agricultural competition with the Middle West and the East, and enabled an increased production of staples by lessening freights and widening the area of choice. As the result of rapid communication grain, cotton, and food animals increased more rapidly than population. The use of manures and a more careful agriculture on the smaller farms—and all the farms were growing smaller—further swelled the productivity of the individual farmer.
Machinery increased the capacity of the laborer as transportation widened his choice of home. The factories, as they were reorganized in the new period of prosperity, found that invention had lessened the need for labor and increased the product. Machine tools in agriculture, in iron and steel, in textiles, in shoemaking, rendered the course of manufacture nearly automatic, and when steam neared its limit in dexterity active minds could see electricity holding out a new promise.