A bit of honest history of America --- Episode 1

ROBBER BARONS AND HORATIO ALGER BULLSHIT 

  In the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century: the black would be put back ; the strikes of the white workers would not be tolerated ; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression --- a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth. 
   Between the Civil War and 1900, steam and electricity replaced human muscle, iron replaced wood, and steel replaced iron [ before the Bessemer process, iron was hardened into steel at the rate of 3 to 5 tons a day ; now the same amount can be processed in 15 minutes] . Machines could now drive steel tools. Oil could lubricate machines and light homes, streets, factories. People and goods could move by railroad, propelled by steam along steel rails ; by 1900 there were 193,000 miles of railroad. The telephone, the typewriter, and the adding machine speeded up the work of business. 
  Machines changed farming. Before the Civil War it took 61 hours of labor to produce an acre of wheat. By 1900, it took 3 hours, 19 minutes. Manufactured ice enabled the transport of food over long distances, and the industry of meatpacking was born. 
   Steam drove textile mill spindles ; it drove sewing machines. It came from coal.  Pneumatic drills now drilled deeper into the earth for coal. In 1860, 14 million tons of coal were mined ; by 1884 it was 100 million tons. More coal meant more steel, because coal furnaces converted iron into steel ; by 1880 a million tons of steel were being produced ; by 1910, 25 million tons. By now electricity was beginning to replace steam. Electrical wire needed copper, of which 30,000 tons were produced in 1880 ; 500,000 tons by 1910. 
   To accomplish all this required ingenious inventors of new processes and new machines, clever organizers and administrators of the new corporations, a country rich with land and minerals, and a huge supply of human beings to do the back-breaking, unhealthful, and dangerous work.  Immigrants would come from Europe and China, to make the new labor force. Farmers unable to buy the new machinery or pay the new railroad rates would move to the cities. Between 1860 and 1914, New York grew from 850,000 to 4 million, Chicago from 110,000 to 2 million, Philadelphia from 650,000 to 1.5 million. 
   In some cases the inventor himself became the organizer of businesses --- like Thomas Edison, inventor of electrical devices. In other cases, the businessman compiled other people's inventions, like Gustave Swift, a Chicago butcher who put together the ice-cooled railway car with the ice-cooled warehouse to make the first national meatpacking company in 1885. James Duke used a new cigarette-rolling machine that could roll, paste, and cut tubes of tobacco into 100,000 cigarettes a day ; in 1890 he combined the four biggest cigarette producers to form the American Tobacco Company.  
   WHILE SOME MILLIONAIRES STARTED IN POVERTY, MOST DID NOT.  A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad, and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle-or upper-class families. THE HORATIO ALGER STORIES OF "RAGS TO RICHES" WERE TRUE FOR A VERY FEW MEN, BUT MOSTLY A MYTH, AND A USEFUL MYTH FOR CONTROL. 
  Most of the fortune building was done legally, with the collaboration of the government and the courts. Sometimes the collaboration had to be paid for. Thomas Edison promised New Jersey politicians $1,000 each in return for favorable legislation. Daniel Drew and Jay Gould spent $1 million to bribe the New York legislature to legalize their issue of $8 million in "watered stock" [ stock not representing real value] on the Erie Railroad.
   The first transcontinental railroad was built with blood, sweat, politics and thievery, out of the meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads. The Central Pacific started on the West Coast going east ; it spent $200,000 in Washington on bribes to get 9 million acres of free land and $24 million in bonds, and paid $79 million, an overpayment of $36 million, to a construction company which really was its own. The construction was done by three thousand Irish and ten thousand Chinese, over a period of four years, working for one or two dollars a day. 
   The Union Pacific started in Nebraska going west. It had been given 12 million acres of free land and $27 million in government bonds. It created the Credit Mobilier company and gave them $94 million for construction when the actual cost was $44 million. Shares were sold cheaply to Congressmen to prevent investigation. This was at teh suggestion of Massachusetts Congressman Oakes Ames, a shovel manufacturer and director of Credit Mobilier, who said : "There is no difficulty in getting men to look after their own property." The Union Pacific used twenty thousand workers ---war veterans, and Irish immigrants, who laid five miles of track a day and died by the hundreds in the heat, the cold, and the battles with the Indians opposing the invasion of their territory. 
   Both railroads used longer, twisting routes to get subsidies from towns they went through. In 1869, amid music and speeches, the two crooked lines met in Utah. 

              MUCH MORE TO COME. STAY TUNED.