Transcript
Asleep in Boston
1887 → 2000
Boston, May 30, 1887. Julian West is twenty-nine, rich, and can't sleep.
On bad nights he slept in a stone room under his house. A mesmerist put him under.
That night the house burned. Everyone assumed Julian West burned with it.
In 2000 a doctor digging a cellar found the vault.
Dr. Leete …and you have slept exactly one hundred and thirteen years, three months, and eleven days.
Julian West At my feet lay a great city. Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings…
No poverty, no strikes, no money.
Everyone got an equal share of what the nation made, drawn on with a card. Bellamy called it a credit card. In 1888.
Julian West was made up. His readers were real. They bought hundreds of thousands of copies, and they formed clubs to build his future.
Julian West …a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road.
Julian West The driver was hunger…
In 1887 the new passengers were clerks, typists, teachers and managers. What would they do with their salaries? Shop, climb, give, or change the system?
White Collars
1868–1900
The coach’s new passengers came out of the corporations.
A company with customers in every state needed managers, bookkeepers, salesmen, and floors of clerks.
They drew a salary, not a wage, and kept their collars white.
In 1874 a rifle maker in Ilion, New York, began selling the typewriter. It typed only capital letters.
In 1870 the census counted 154 stenographers. By 1900, more than 112,000. Three in four were women.
The census counted “stenographers and typewriters.” She was the typewriter. She earned more than a mill hand or maid, and less than the man at the next desk.
In Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick, a shoeshine boy pulls a merchant’s son from the river. His reward: a clerk’s desk at ten dollars a week.
Rags to riches? No. Rags to respectability, and a new name. Real tycoons rarely started in rags. Most grew up comfortable.
The ladder to that desk was school. States required children to attend, and cities built public high schools.
College enrollment nearly quadrupled between 1870 and 1900. By 1900, more than a third of the students were women.
Land-grant colleges taught farming and engineering. An 1890 law told states: admit Black students, or fund separate colleges for them.
Fisk, Howard, and Meharry trained Black teachers, ministers, and doctors, who mostly served their own communities.
Julian West …the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out of them and falling to the ground…
A salary wasn’t a fortune. One bad panic could put a clerk back on the rope.
The End of the Line
1888–1896
The clerk went home on a streetcar.
In February 1888, Frank Sprague’s electric streetcars began climbing the hills of Richmond. Within a few years, most big cities had them.
Cities grew out along the lines like fingers. Land at the end of the line was cheap, and the ride downtown was quick.
Mass-produced lumber and nails made a house affordable on a salary.
Frederick Law Olmsted designed Riverside, near Chicago, with curving roads and lawns: a village in a park.
Some buyers wanted grass and quiet. Many also wanted neighbors who looked like them. Some developers wrote that into the deeds.
Meet the Wellers of Flatbush, Brooklyn, December 1896. They’re a composite family. Every object in their house is real.
The family’s out shopping. Let yourself in.
In 1890, one American working woman in three was a servant. In Northern cities, many were Irish immigrants. Much of the middle class’s free time ran on their work.
Streetcar companies built amusement parks at the ends of their lines, to fill the cars on Sundays. By 1896, a nickel could carry you from downtown Brooklyn to Coney Island.
Ladies’ Mile
1872–1896
The Wellers had a list and a river to cross.
Ada and Nell Weller rode the El to Sixth Avenue. New Yorkers called that stretch of stores Ladies’ Mile.
Electric light made the windows glow. Christmas had become a season for shopping.
Inside, nearly everything sat under one roof, each item with a marked price. Nobody haggled.
Macy’s in New York, Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia and Marshall Field’s in Chicago made shopping a pastime.
Farm families shopped by mail. Montgomery Ward’s first catalog, in 1872, was a single sheet. By 1897 the Sears catalog ran to 786 pages.
Magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal cost a dime, because advertisers paid for them. Kodak’s whole pitch fit on one line.
Behind the counters, young women stood from eight in the morning, often without a stool.
Many earned four or five dollars a week. Cash girls, some of them children, earned under two.
In 1891 shoppers and saleswomen formed the Consumers’ League of New York. Josephine Shaw Lowell was its president.
They wrote a standard for a fair store: six dollars a week, seats, equal pay regardless of sex. Eight stores made the first White List.
The League did the math on Christmas 1895: sixteen big stores, six hundred thousand unpaid evening hours. Shopping could be a kind of politics too.
The Gospel of Wealth
1868–1898
Above the middle seats rode the richest Americans who had ever lived.
By the 1890s the richest tenth of Americans held most of the country’s wealth. What was a fortune like that for?
Rev. Russell H. Conwell I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich.
Russell Conwell, a Baptist minister, gave that lecture over six thousand times.
Most of the fees went to poor students. His night classes for working men became Temple University.
In 1889 Andrew Carnegie, the steel king, gave the fullest answer.
Andrew Carnegie The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.
Competition, he wrote, was hard on individuals but best for “the race.” A London editor retitled it “The Gospel of Wealth.”
His rule: give it away in your lifetime, and wisely. Die rich, he warned, and the public verdict would be:
Andrew Carnegie The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.
His favorite ladder was the free public library. The first opened in 1889 in Braddock, Pennsylvania, beside his own steel mill.
About seventeen hundred in the United States. Each town supplied the land and paid for upkeep every year.
He gave away about $350 million. About $30 million was left when he died in 1919.
Three years after “Wealth,” his company broke the union at Homestead, and men died on the riverbank. Many of his workers said they would rather have had the money as wages.
In 1898 he gave Homestead a library, with a music hall and a heated swimming pool.
Rockefeller paid to found the University of Chicago. The Stanfords built a university in memory of their son.
The Dukes moved a college to Durham. An oil man gave Brooklyn the Pratt Institute.
Biddy Mason was born enslaved. She walked behind her enslaver’s wagons from Mississippi to Utah, then California. In 1856 a Los Angeles judge declared her free.
As a nurse and midwife she saved, and in 1866 bought land on Spring Street. She grew wealthy, and she gave to the poor and the jailed.
Julian West While others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and injured.
Bellamy drew that before Carnegie wrote a word. Charity was liniment. The critics wanted to fix the road.
Chautauqua
1874–1894
In August 1874, a Methodist minister, John Heyl Vincent, and an Ohio inventor, Lewis Miller, opened a summer camp. It was for Sunday-school teachers, on Chautauqua Lake, New York.
It had a scale model of the Holy Land by the water. You could walk the Jordan River before supper.
Lewis Miller's daughter Mina married Thomas Edison. So Edison's father-in-law ran a lake full of lectures.
Chautauqua grew into a summer town of lectures and concerts. Its reading course, begun in 1878, mailed a college curriculum to people who'd never see a college.
In 1882, the first class of 1,718 readers walked through a golden arch to graduate. About three in four graduates were women.
In the summer of 1894, with the Pullman strike in the papers, one question hung over the lawns. What do the rich owe everyone else?
Sumner, Carnegie, Gladden, George and Bellamy wrote for the same readers: the people in these seats. The middle class was the jury.
Progress and Poverty
1873–1897
Why did millions of Americans buy books that attacked the system?
A depression in 1873. A railroad strike in 1877. Haymarket in 1886. Each hard time sent readers looking for an explanation.
In 1879 a San Francisco journalist, Henry George, named the puzzle.
Henry George This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times.
His answer was a single tax on land. In 1886 he ran for mayor of New York and came second. Third place went to a 28-year-old named Theodore Roosevelt.
In 1904 a stenographer, Lizzie Magie, patented a board game to show how landlords get rich. People kept copying it. One copy became Monopoly.
Bellamy's readers formed more than 150 Nationalist clubs. Their call for government-run railroads reached a farmers' party platform in 1892.
Pastors like Washington Gladden preached a Social Gospel: Christianity had to fix wages and housing as well as save souls. Cardinal James Gibbons defended the Knights of Labor.
In 1895 Eugene Debs sat in the Woodstock jail for his part in the Pullman strike.
Eugene V. Debs The writings of Bellamy and Blatchford early appealed to me.
In 1896 the Black minister Reverdy Ransom backed socialism. He also named labor's color line.
Rev. Reverdy C. Ransom The great 'labor unions' and 'brotherhoods' of this country have, by introducing the word 'white' into their constitutions, excluded the Negro from membership.
Writers went after the era too. Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's 1873 satire was called The Gilded Age. Gilded means a thin coat of gold over cheap metal.
Novelists like Howells and Stephen Crane wrote about city poverty. Jacob Riis showed readers how the other half lived in 1890. You'll meet him in Unit 7.
Farmers were about to build a party of their own. That story comes later.
Henry George ran for mayor again in 1897. He died four days before the election. A newspaper counted over a hundred thousand mourners.
Lifting as We Climb
1868–1896
Frances Willard led America’s largest women’s organization. In her fifties she learned to ride a bicycle, and named it Gladys.
Frances E. Willard I finally concluded that all failure was from a wobbling will rather than a wobbling wheel.
The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union formed in 1874. Its members had watched drink eat wages and wreck homes.
But for many immigrant men, the saloon was also their club, their hiring hall and their mail drop.
Willard’s motto was “Do Everything.” Temperance led her to kindergartens, prisons, labor laws and the vote.
Frances E. Willard I dare prophesy that twenty years from now woman will be fully panoplied in the politics and government of all English-speaking nations…
Nationally, the vote took twenty-seven years.
The New York Press Club gave Charles Dickens a dinner in 1868. It treated Jane Croly’s ticket request as a joke. She founded a women’s club instead.
By 1890 the clubs had a General Federation. Members raised money for libraries, kindergartens and playgrounds.
Dr. Edward H. Clarke If she puts as much force into her brain education as a boy, the brain or the special apparatus will suffer.
Women went anyway. By 1900 they were more than a third of American college students.
Mary Church Terrell graduated from Oberlin in 1884, one of the first Black women to earn a college degree.
Mary Church Terrell …when the murder of colored men is of almost daily occurrence in the South, when you have with you to night in the person of Miss Wells an exile,
Mary Church Terrell driven from home, because she dared to raise her voice in defense of her own oppressed and persecuted people.
A mob had wrecked Wells’s Memphis newspaper that spring. Black women’s clubs carried her campaign across the country.
In 1894 Wells told British audiences that Frances Willard had excused lynch mobs. The quarrel exposed a color line inside reform.
In 1896 Black women’s clubs united as the National Association of Colored Women, with Terrell as president. Their motto: “Lifting as we climb.”
In 1872 Susan B. Anthony voted in Rochester. She was arrested, tried and fined a hundred dollars.
Susan B. Anthony May it please your honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.
Suffragists had split in 1869. In 1890 the two wings merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
The West went first. By 1896 women voted in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Idaho. In Colorado, men voted it in.
Susan B. Anthony I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.
She was talking about the bicycle.
The Year 2000
1898 → 2000
Julian West slept for 113 years. Edward Bellamy got 48.
He died of tuberculosis in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, in May 1898.
The calendar kept going. Here is how his year 2000 turned out.
Music piped into the house. Shopping from home. College for millions. He got the credit card. He didn't get the end of poverty.
The new middle class shopped, climbed and gave. A growing number also climbed down to the rope, and argued about the road.
Their argument fed a farmers' revolt in the 1890s. After 1900 it fed a reform movement. In 1920, women won the vote.
What do the people on top owe the people pulling? Americans are still arguing about it.