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HOW GOVERNMENT MODERNIZED AMERICAN AGRICULTURE

The modernization of the American economy between the 1890s and the 1930s was not solely the work of the private sector. In agriculture, radio, and aviation, the federal government acted as inventor, entrepreneur, and investor, in a return to the mixed-enterprise tradition of the early American republic.

In the 1790s, George Washington had lobbied unsuccessfully for a national agricultural university devoted to improving American agriculture. His vision of federal support for agricultural research was realized during the Civil War. The Morrill Act of 1862 used federal lands to subsidize land-grant agricultural and mechanical (A&M) colleges in the states. American agricultural reformers were inspired by the success of Germany in applying government-sponsored research to agriculture. The 1887 Hatch Act provided each state with federal funds on the condition that it establish at least one central experiment station “to conduct original researches or verify experiments . . . bearing directly on the agricultural industry of the United States.”
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Subsequent acts—the Adams Act (1906), the Smith-Lever Act (1914), the Purnell Act (1925), and the Bankhead-Jones Act (1935)—also provided money for research.

By the early twentieth century, a sophisticated industrial policy had developed in American agriculture. State land-grant colleges and regional experiment stations worked on the problems of American farmers. New techniques were disseminated by extension agents, who by 1914 numbered more than two thousand and were found in three-fourths of the agricultural counties of the United States.
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County agents initiated the formation in 1919 of the American Farm Bureau, a private trade association that became the most important farm lobby in the nation.

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND AMERICAN AVIATION

The US government played a key role in the development of manned flight, although initially it backed the wrong inventor. Samuel Pierpont Langley was a brilliant astrophysicist, the director of the Smithsonian Institution, and a friend of Alexander Graham Bell, who witnessed the successful flight of Langley’s unmanned, steam-powered glider above the Potomac River near Washington on May 6, 1896. In 1898, the War Department commissioned Langley to produce a manned military aircraft, giving him a grant of fifty thousand dollars—roughly $1.3 million in 2010 dollars. But in test flights over the Potomac on October 7 and December 8, 1903, the manned version of Langley’s glider, now powered by a gas engine, crashed and the pilot barely escaped each time. A little more than a week after the second attempt failed, on December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful flights of a manned heavier-than-air craft on the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Humiliated and ridiculed, Langley died in 1906.

But the United States quickly lost the lead in aviation, as the great powers of Europe developed the new technology for military purposes. Between 1908 and 1913, the US government spent only $435,000 on aviation, compared to the $28 million spent by Germany, the $22 million spent by France, and the $12 million spent by Russia.
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As World War I approached, however, the government played a greater part. Between World War I and World War II, the federal government promoted the development of the American aviation industry by three methods: military procurement, public R&D in aeronautics, and airmail subsidies.

Although it had bet on the wrong inventors, the US government was quick to get into the airplane business. The military was the first client for the company that the Wright brothers set up.

Patent wars among early aircraft companies ended with the advent of World War I, when the aircraft manufacturers established the Manufacturers’ Aircraft Association to coordinate wartime aircraft manufacturing in the United States and formed a patent pool with the approval of the US government. All patent litigation ceased automatically. Royalties were reduced to 1 percent and free exchange of inventions and ideas took place among all the airframe builders. The government-encouraged pooling of patents set a precedent for similar enlightened technology-sharing arrangements that the military and civilian agencies later imposed on contractors and federal grantees.

The federal government also promoted American aviation by means of a system of publicly funded R&D that resembled the American system of agricultural experiment stations. In 1915, as the possibility of US intervention in World War I increased, Congress used a naval appropriations bill to establish the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), the ancestor of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In the 1920s, NACA performed R&D at its Langley Field facility in Virginia. This was joined in the 1930s by other research centers, including one at Moffett Field near Sunnyvale, California, close to aircraft manufacturing, and a NACA center established in 1940 in the center of aircraft engine manufacturing, Cleveland, Ohio, in order to research improvements in aircraft engines. Thanks in part to public R&D, the 8 percent annual productivity growth in US aviation outstripped that in other industries between the 1920s and the 1960s.
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In 1958, NACA was merged with the newly founded NASA, which was charged with the most spectacular state capitalist project in American history: the US space program, which culminated with the 1969 landing of the first astronauts on the moon.

Beginning in 1918, the federal government used the airmail program to subsidize the infant American aviation industry. The use of contract carriers for airmail encouraged the growth of aviation companies. The McNary-Watres Act of 1930 indirectly subsidized passenger flights, by replacing payment by weight of airmail with a fixed price for airmail per mile, no matter how much space was used for passengers.

President Herbert Hoover’s postmaster general, Walter Folger Brown, used his power to award airmail contracts to compel mergers that created a few large carriers. As a result, from the early 1930s until after World War II, the US airline industry was dominated by four airlines: American, TWA, Eastern, and United.
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The federal government’s investment in aviation paid off. By the time World War II broke out, the United States had the largest commercial airline system and the most advanced commercial airliner, the Douglas DC-3, which continued in service until the 1960s.
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THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND THE CREATION OF AMERICAN RADIO AND TELEVISION

The federal government also shaped the radio industry, which later pioneered television. The US Navy was wary of Britain’s domination of global communications by means of its global underwater cable system. While taking part in postwar negotiations at Versailles in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson identified three areas of economic rivalry with military implications between the United States and Britain: oil production, merchant shipping, and global telecommunications. The United States had a lead in oil production, but the British Empire led in merchant shipping, and the British lead in global telecommunications threatened to increase because the Marconi company was based in London.

Frustrated by the need to rely on the British government because of Guglielmo Marconi’s British patents, in 1919 the navy, led by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt, persuaded General Electric, Westinghouse, AT&T, and other companies to pool their radio-related patents and form the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), to ensure that interlocking American corporations controlled radio development in the US. GE bought out the patents of the American subsidiary of Marconi and gave its patents to RCA.
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The initial purpose of RCA was military and commercial, and large-scale radio broadcasting was delayed by the lack of a business model, since anyone could listen without paying. One proposal, a government station paid for by licenses for radio owners, was suggested by David Sarnoff and taken up as the funding model for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In 1922, AT&T solved the problem differently by selling advertising and linking several New York stations together in a network. Threatened by AT&T, Westinghouse, GE, and the others in 1926 forced AT&T to sell its stations and agree to lease its long-distance lines to a new network, the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC). In 1931, antitrust judgments separated Westinghouse and GE from NBC, and RCA was forced by subsequent orders to sell its Blue network, which became the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), in 1943.
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The modern age of television in the United States began on April 30, 1939, when antennas atop the Empire State Building in Manhattan broadcast live images of President Roosevelt at the opening ceremonies of the New York World’s Fair. On the same day, RCA’s affiliate NBC began regular US television broadcasts, which were limited at first to New York and other big cities in the Northeast.

RCA had delayed the evolution of American television by engaging in patent litigation with Philo T. Farnsworth, a brilliant Mormon from Utah who began dreaming of broadcasting images while studying at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Helped by research engineers at the California Institute of Technology and investors after he moved to San Francisco, Farnsworth established the Farnsworth Television and Radio Company and obtained a patent in 1927. RCA, backing television research by Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian émigré engineer, fought Farnsworth over the patent in the courts. The nascent British television industry licensed Farnsworth’s technology and began regularly scheduled programming for a limited audience in 1936. The 1936 Berlin Olympics were the first to be televised. Only after World War II, however, did television transform society by reaching mass audiences.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE LANDSCAPE BY THE SECOND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The second industrial revolution created a distinctive pattern of production, work, and entertainment, based on the automobile and the electric grid. In the pedestrian city, the walkable area was about three square miles, with the edge of town limited to a mile from the center. Although mass transit is frequently advocated as an alternative to automobile-created suburbanization, the earliest suburban sprawl was created in the nineteenth century by mass transit. Taking advantage of the fact that horses could pull greater weights along rails, New York in the 1830s, followed by other American cities, adopted horsecar omnibus lines. The horsecar lines permitted the distance of the edge from the center of town to increase to 2.5 miles, producing an increase in area of twenty square miles. The horsecar began the process of migration of middle-class and working-class Americans to less crowded and less expensive housing on the urban periphery.
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Because of the noise and pollution they produced, steam locomotives were opposed as a method of urban transportation. Electricity provided an alternative. Following many experiments, the first genuine electrical streetcar system was created in the 1880s by Charles Van Depoele in Montgomery, Alabama. Frank Sprague, a former member of Edison’s Menlo Park team, created the Richmond, Virginia, electric streetcar system. Sprague’s streetcars used an overhead electric wire that “trolled” along other wires, thus the name, “trolley.” Sprague’s version became the standard when Henry Whitney adopted it to replace the world’s largest horsecar rail system, the West End Railway of Boston.
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The Boston trolley system pioneered the use of a flat fare for any length of ride, which further encouraged the working class to disperse to suburban lodgings. Electric trolley systems were soon joined by electric interurbans. The difficulty of creating new overland routes through existing neighborhoods led Boston, New York, and other cities to invest in subway systems.

By World War I, middle-class and working-class suburbs were growing up on the edges of cities. Industrial plants followed them, to take advantage of lower rents and more space. Polluting industries were nudged out by means of zoning, a form of urban regulation that spread rapidly in the early twentieth century.

As the central city was emptied of residents and manufacturing, it evolved into the downtown, a district that specialized in retail businesses, including department stores that served entire metropolitan areas, like Macy’s and Gimbel’s in New York and Filene’s in Boston. The new downtowns were characterized by a distinctive skyline created by tall office buildings. In the preindustrial era, large buildings had generally been limited to five or six stories accessed by stairs. The elevator allowed buildings to grow. The earliest elevators were cargo-hoisting machines employed in warehouses of a kind that would have been familiar to medieval and ancient engineers. Elisha Graves Otis, the founder of Otis Elevator, devised a cable-drawn elevator. In 1857, the first safe passenger elevator was installed in the H. V. Haughwort Store in New York.
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While the elevator had solved the problem of vertical transportation, the height of buildings was still limited by the nature of masonry construction, which required greater and greater thickness at the base as the height increased. This problem was solved first by cage construction and later by curtain-wall construction. A wrought iron cage was used as the skeleton of the seven-story Harper’s Building in 1854 by the architect James Broadus. The first true skyscraper, however, was the Equitable Insurance Building in New York, built between 1868 and 1870. It was an office building that combined an iron cage with an elevator.
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But it was Chicago, not New York, that would develop the skyscraper. Architect William Le Baron Jenney’s ten-story Home Insurance Building used a steel cage that permitted more light and larger windows, producing a distinctive Chicago skyscraper style. New Yorkers were so wary of heights that the architect of the eleven-story Tower Building at 50 Broadway in 1889 put his own office in the top floor to persuade Manhattanites of its safety.
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The offices in the new downtown buildings were filled with the clatter of adding machines and typewriters. The product of a long evolution, the familiar mechanical typewriter was first produced in 1874 by Philo Remington, a New York manufacturer of sewing machines and other devices, on the basis of a design patented in 1867 by a retired newspaper editor named Christopher Latham Sholes. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who was better known under his nom de plume Mark Twain, wrote a testimonial: