Industries - The Power of the Machines and Human Workforce

In 1876 President Ulysses S. Grant traveled to Philadelphia  to open a special exhibition. The Exhibition  was called the Centennial Exposition. It had been organized  to celebrate the United States’ hundredth birthday as an independent nation by showing some of its achievements. The main attraction of the Centennial Exposition was the Machinery Hall. This was a big wooden building that covered more than twelve acres. Inside it visitors could see such recent American inventions as the typewriter and the telephone as well as machines for countless  other uses-for sewing, grinding,  screwing, printing, drilling, pumping, hammering.

In the six months that the  Exposition was open almost ten million people wandered through the hall. They gazed in wonder at its hundreds of machines. Even  the normally patronizing British newspaper The Times was impressed. "The American invents as the Greek sculpted and as the Italian painted. "It reported. "It is genius." At the time of the Centennial Exposition, the United States was still mainly a farming country. But in the years that followed, American industries grew quickly. The production of coal and iron grew especially fast. These were the most important industrial raw materials in the nineteenth century.

Americans discovered vast new deposits of both 1880 and 1890s. In a range of low hills at the western end of Lake Superior; for example. Some brothers named Merritt found the great Mesabi iron deposits. The Merritt made their discovery in 1887 and the  Mesabi soon became one of the largest producers of iron ore in the world. The ore lay close to the surface of the ground III horizontal bands up to 500 feet thick. It was cheap, easy to mine and remarkably free  of chemical impurities. Before long Mesabi ore was being processed into high quality steel at only one tenth of the previous cost. By 1900  ten times more coal was being produced in the United States than in 1860. The output of iron was twenty times higher. These increases were both a cause and a result of a rapid growth of American manufacturing industries in these years. Railroads were very important in this growth of manufacturing. Vast amounts of coal and iron were used to make steel for their rails, locomotives. Freight wagons and passenger cars. Bur this was not all. The railroads linked together buyers and sellers all over the country. Without them big new centers of industry like Pittsburgh and Chicago could not have developed. It was the railroads that carried cattle to Chicago from the Great Plains to keep its huge slaughter houses and meat processing plants busy. It was the railroads, too,  that took reapers, windmills and barbed wire from Chicago's farm equipment  factories to homesteaders on the prairies. By 1890 the industries of the United States were earning the country more  than its farmlands. In the twenty years that followed, industrial output went on growing, faster and faster. By 1913 more than one third of the whole world's industrial production was pouring from the mines and factories of the United States. The growth of American industry was organized and controlled by businessmen who found the money to pay for it. Many of these men began their lives in poverty. By a mixture of  hard work and ability, and by ignoring the rights of others, they made themselves wealthy and powerful.

The giant industrial organizations that such men created were known as "corporations," As they grew bigger and more powerful still, they often became "trusts". By the early twentieth century trusts controlled large parts of American industry. One trust controlled the steel industry, another the oil industry, another the meat-packing industry, and there were many more. The biggest trusts were richer than most nations. By their wealth and power-and especially their power to decide wages and prices - they controlled the lives of millions of people. Many Americans were alarmed by the power of the trusts. The United States was a land that was supposed to offer equal opportunities to everyone. Yet now it seemed that the country was coming under the-control of a handful of rich and powerful men who were- able to do more or less anything they wished. Unless  something was done about it, they feared the United States would become a nation whose life was controlled by handful of rich businessmen.

Bibliography:

1.    The Norton Anthology of American Literature.

2.    A History of American Literature, A. Grey

3.    An Outline of American History.

4.    An Illustrated History of the USA.