During the War of Independence domestic craft industry was stimulated by necessity. But the means were crude and the products imperfect; and when, after peace, British merchants with an accumulation of goods on their hands began to offer them for sale in the United States at low prices, hoping to recover their new-world trade in competitive terms, the infant industries cried out for protection. They got it. One of the first acts of the American Congress was to erect a tariff against foreign-made goods in order that the country might become self-sufficing in manufactures. This was the beginning of our protectionist policy.
Fewer than four million unbusiness-like people coming into free possession of that part of the North American continent which is named America was a fabulous business event. We cannot even now comprehend it. They had not the dimmest notion of what it was they were possessed of, nor what it meant economically. Geography ran out at the Mississippi. The tide of Westward immigration was just beginning to break over the crest of the Alleghany mountains.
Over-seas trade grew rapidly, as there was always a surplus of food and raw materials to be exchanged abroad for things which American industry was unable to provide. Foreign commerce was an important source of group-wealth and public interest was much concerned with it. Besides, it was easier to trade across seas than inland. Philadelphia until about 1835 was nearer London than Pittsburgh, not as the crow flies but as freight moves. Domestic business, arising from the internal exchange of goods, developed slowly, owing partly to the wretched state of transportation and partly to the self-contained nature of families and communities. The population was more than nine-tenths rural; rural habits survived even in the towns, where people kept cows and pigs, cured their own meats, preserved their own fruits and vegetables, and thought ready-made garments a shocking extravagance. Business under these conditions performed a subservient function. People’s relations with it were in large measure voluntary. Its uses were more luxurious than vital. There was not then, nor could any one at this time have imagined, that interdependence of individuals, groups, communities, and geographical sections which it is the blind aim of business increasingly to promote, so that at length the case is reversed and people are subservient to business.
In Southern New Jersey you may see a farm, now prosperously devoted to berry and fruit crops, on which, still in good repair, are the cedar rail fences built by a farmer whose contacts with business were six or eight trips a year over a sand road to Trenton with surplus food to exchange for some new tools, tea, coffee, and store luxuries. That old sand road has become a cement pavement—a motor highway. Each morning a New York baking corporation’s motor stops at the farm-house and the driver hands in some fresh loaves. Presently a butcher’s motor stops with fresh meat, then another one with dry groceries, and yet another from a New York department store with parcels containing ready-made garments, stockings and shoes.
Consider what these four motors symbolize.
First is an automobile industry and a system for producing, refining and distributing oil which together are worth as much as the whole estimated wealth of America three generations ago.
Back of the bakery wagon what a vista! An incorporated baking industry, mixing, kneading, roasting, and wrapping the loaf in paraffine paper without touch of human hands, all by automatic machinery. Beyond the Mississippi, in a country undiscovered until 1804, the wheat fields that are ploughed, sown, reaped by power-driven machinery. In Minnesota a milling industry in which the miller has become an impersonal flour trust. A railroad system that transports first the grain and then the flour over vast distances at rates so low that the cost of two or three thousand miles of transportation in the loaf of bread delivered to the New Jersey farm-house is inexpressible.... Back of the butcher’s motor is a meat-packing industry concentrated at Chicago. It sends fresh meat a thousand miles in iced cars and sells it to a New Jersey farmer for a price at which he can better afford to buy it than to bother about producing it for himself.... Back of the grocer’s motor are the food products and canning industries. By means of machinery they shred, peel, hull, macerate, roll, cook, cool, and pack fruits, cereals, and vegetables in cartons and containers which are made, labelled, and sealed by other automatic machinery.... And back of the department store motor are the garment-making, shoe-making, textile, and knitting industries.
If one link in all this ramified scheme of business breaks there is chaos. If the State of New Jersey were suddenly cut off from the offices of business for six months, a third of her population might perish; not that the State is unable potentially to sustain her own, but that the people have formed habits of dependence upon others, as others depend upon them, for the vital products of specialized labour.
All this has happened in the life of one cedar rail fence. You say that is only fifty or sixty years. Nevertheless it is literally so. The system under which we live has been evolved since 1860. The transformation was sudden. Never in the world were the physical conditions of a nation’s life altered so fast by economic means. Yet it did not happen for many years. The work of unconscious preparation occupied three-quarters of a century.
Man acts upon his environment with hands, tools, and imagination; and business requires above everything else the means of cheap and rapid transportation. In all the major particulars save one the founders were ill-equipped for their independent attack upon the American environment. At the beginning of the 19th century there were no roads, merely a few trails fit only for horseback travel. There were no canals yet. And the labour wherewith to perform heavy, monotonous tasks was dear and scarce and largely self-employed. Though the hands of the pioneer are restless they are not patiently industrious. There was need of machinery such as had already begun to revolutionize British industry, but the English jealously protected their mechanical knowledge.