The Dawn of Innovation (44 page)

Rockefeller's primary achievement was to create the world's first global consumer product, with market shares in Europe, China, and Russia, akin to those in the United States. Hamlin Garland, writing of his hardscrabble childhood on a Great Plains farm, told of coming home from the fields in 1869 to the amazing transformation effected by a kerosene lamp on the table. Magazines like
America's Women's Home
extolled the advantages of a “student lamp” for late-night studying. The bright white light of the kerosene lamp, in every apartment and farm house, was a hallmark of modernity, just as the Standard Oil blue five-gallon kerosene can marked one of the earliest presence of modern markets in some of the remotest sections on earth.

Michael Spence is a New York University economist who has been studying the processes by which emerging markets, like Brazil and India, make the leap into the ranks of advanced countries. He suggests that there is a critical point he calls the “middle-income transition,” when a sufficient mass of the population become future-oriented, are able to plan and to save, and consciously set out to improve their positions. The United States,
indeed, may be one of the few nations that was middle-class from the start.
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The act of emigration itself suggests the presence of Spence's middle-class mind-set. Tocqueville may have been the first to use the term “middle-class” in this sense, and Trollope was continually struck by the striving, go-ahead impulse among her midwesterners. Nobody they encountered, other than Southern slaves, reminded them of the peasants of England and France.

A key feature of a middle-income transition is the shift from infrastructure spending to consumer-oriented production. That transition was in full blast in the United States by the 1880s. Underlying the shift was the country's pervasive social mobility. The very bottom and very top layers were probably more stable than Tocqueville believed, but the top ranks were far from impenetrable. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and John Rockefeller all came from modest backgrounds. Mobility was especially high within the middle three quintiles, probably higher than anywhere else. A number of studies show quite high rates of farm laborers becoming farm owners, blue-collar workers becoming managers, and countinghouse clerks rising to very senior positions.
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Real incomes grew steadily after the 1873–1874 recession and continued to grow through the 1880s, and it was reflected in people's housing. The typical house got bigger and, in urban areas, was separated from the workplace, becoming a locus of family bonding after the day's activities. In other words, it became a “home.” On farms as well, farmhouses evolved from a family factory into a civilized retreat from the animals and the odors. With the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, Brooklyn became a bedroom suburb of Manhattan, and the “lunchroom” dotted the business district.

The midwestern “balloon” house, a wooden self-supporting frame hung with weather-proofing walls, became the American standard and
may have inspired the steel-cage structure of the new office skyscrapers. Midwestern factories churned out machine-made doors and windows, and by the 1870s, machine-made mail-order kit houses were available in a wide range of prices and styles. Inexpensive, machine-made carpets and drapes and new methods of grinding paint pigments allowed people of quite modest incomes to add a touch of color or personal style to their home. Home spaces were divided into a semiformal parlor or sitting room, a dining room and a scullery, and bedrooms. Children increasingly had their own beds. Middle-class families regularly supplemented incomes by taking in boarders, who also supported the cost of household help.

The focus on the home space drastically changed the role of women, who became society's officially designated civilizing force, arbiters of domesticity—“homemakers” who, as
Harper's
noted, “legislate for our dress, etiquette, and manners without fear of veto.” Home economics, advice columns, home management, etiquette, and cookbooks proliferated. Being middle-class was a life strategy, a continuing campaign, mostly managed by women. Tactics included smaller families, more intense child rearing and education, budgetary management and savings plans, and training children in prudence and deportment.

The new respect for the purchasing power of women was reflected in the blossoming of the department store. The first establishment by that name was John Wanamaker's, which opened in Philadelphia in 1876 as the “largest space in the world devoted to retail selling on a single floor.” Occupying a full city block in midtown, it was all about women. Lighted by a stained-glass ceiling by day and hundreds of gas lights by night, it was arranged in concentric circles, as much as two-thirds of a mile long, with 1,100 counter stools, so a lady could sit and discuss her purchase. Displays featured “Ladies' Furnishings Goods,” “Gloves,” “Laces,” and “Linen Sheeting.” The 70,000 people who showed up on opening day were naturally almost all women, as were the counter assistants—although the lordly, formally dressed floor walkers were all male. The department store became a fixture in every sizeable city. New York had its Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Lord & Taylor, and B. Altman; Brooklyn its Abraham & Straus;
Boston its Filene's; Chicago its Marshall Fields; San Francisco its Emporium. Even much newer, rawer cities, like Detroit, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee had their Hudson's and Gimbels.

Beneath the surface gloss, urbanization brought serious problems, especially in sanitation, which lagged population growth by several decades. Water-borne diseases like cholera and typhoid remained dangerous killers well into the twentieth century, accounting for a quarter of all infectious disease deaths in 1900. Wives, or servants, were still lugging water from pumps in the 1870s, but by the end of the decade most larger cities were piping (unfiltered and unchlorinated) water into homes in most of their residential areas. Privies were not connected to sewage systems. The backyard latrine—or in many working-class areas, the neighborhood latrine—gradually gave way to indoor toilets. Water closets, which flushed into a pit, were suitable for less settled areas, while urban designers experimented with a host of “earth closet” contraptions.

Many cities had gas lighting, at least in better neighborhoods, and almost everyone had a kerosene lamp. Over time, the expanding national wealth readily financed a great burst of municipal investment in clean water, sewers, garbage collection, transit, street lighting, police and fire services, and parks, stretching from the 1880s well into the twentieth century. Local water systems became a major market for Corliss's big-ticket steam engines.

The clinching proof of the consumerization of America was the sudden explosion of brands. History had never seen a burst of new products like that in the America of the 1880s and 1890s. Store shelves offered Cream of Wheat, Aunt Jemima's Pancakes, Postum, Kellogg's Shredded Wheat, Juicy Fruit gum, Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, Durkee's salad dressings, Uneeda Biscuits, Coca-Cola, and Quaker Oats. Pillsbury and Gold Medal wiped out local flour millers. (Wives started buying cake mixes in the 1890s, but baking one's own bread was still a badge of honor.) Advertising flourished right alongside. (N. W. Ayer, one of the first of the big advertising companies, got its start with John Wanamaker's.) So Jell-O was the “quick and easy” dessert; Schlitz Beer was made with “filtered water”; Huckin's soups
were “hermetically sealed”; no human hands had touched Stacey's Workdipt Chocolates. H. J. Heinz created a fifty-foot-tall electric pickle with 1,200 light bulbs in Times Square in 1896. The sign blinked Heinz's “57 Good Things for the Table,” listing each one in lights. You'd “Walk a Mile” for a Camel and hum the jingle for Sunny Jim cereal. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, A&P, was the first national grocery chain, and Frank Woolworth's “nickel stores” swept through the country.

The speed of the branded-food triumph could have been due to the naïveté of consumers or perhaps to the execrable quality of local stores' barrel food. One suspects it was both; nostalgia buffs too readily assume that consumers were fooled. Packaged brands brought people in much of the country their first access to more varied diets. Local grocers were often sinks of poor hygiene, bad storage conditions, adulteration, and outright misrepresentation (hog fat for butter). The packaged food industry had its own scandals, especially in meat, but safety and consistency were probably a great improvement over the general store.

A vast range of products made life simpler—Bissell carpet sweepers, Gillette “safety” razors with disposable blades, rubber boots and shoes, zippers, ice boxes (often with an opening on a house's outer wall, so the iceman could fill it), Levi's for workers. Or made life more fun: roller skates were a craze in the 1870s, bicycles in the 1890s. James Bonsack's automatic cigarette-making machine went into production in James Duke's factory in 1886. By 1900, Americans were buying more than 4 billion cigarettes a year, almost all of them from Duke, including still-current brands, like Lucky Strike. A pre-Duke cigarette maker invented the baseball card. Young women were discouraged from smoking but had a “mania” for cosmetics. Handbag stores prestuffed their bags with branded lipsticks and rouge. Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, between them, dominated the business by the early 1900s. Household walls were festooned with chromolithographs: color facsimiles of American painters like Audubon, Bierstadt, and Winslow Homer. Currier and Ives were among the first to produce paintings specifically for chromolithography. Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee knows he is in a strange place because the medieval castle has no “chromos” on the walls.

Residential mail service triggered a postcard craze and then a greeting card craze. Postcards with photographic scenes were popular collectibles—one company produced 16,000 different views. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1879, but Emile Berliner came up with the popular gramophone and the flat record in 1889; his system could make thousands of records from a single master. Versions of the modern juke box proliferated in the 1890s, and it was a natural accompaniment to the drugstore soda fountain—a pharmacist could pull in $500 worth of nickels a week. Both were an index of the increased leisure time of young people. Middle-class parents kept their kids in school, instead of sending them off to the factory, and were discovering that the demographic between child and adult was a previously undreamed-of species.

Home entertainment sales boomed—lawn tennis and croquet, board games, and stereoscopes. Two stereoscopic slides viewed in front of a light source produced a three-dimensional scene. Millions of slides were produced—natural wonders, stories, religious matter. Oliver Wendell Holmes once boasted that he had seen more than 100,000 stereo views. George Eastman introduced the celluloid film roll for his Kodak in 1888. A Kodak-sponsored photography contest in New York in 1897 drew 26,000 people. By 1900, the country had more than 1.5 million telephones. Improvements in printing technology produced an outpouring of magazines, inexpensive novels, and city newspapers. Plant lighting made morning papers possible, and publishers pulled in readers with sports pages, comics, puzzles, women's pages, and advice columns. Dorothy Dix's column started in 1896. Professional entertainment—baseball, boxing, vaudeville, burlesque, Barnum's circus—and the amusement park were fixtures even in smaller cities. The Ferris wheel at the 1892 Chicago Exposition was 264 feet high, each of its cars was larger than a Pullman coach, and the fully loaded wheel handled more than 2,000 people at a time.

The great investment banks that had financed the railroad and steel industries—J.P. Morgan and Jacob Schiff's Kuhn, Loeb—were supplemented by newcomers like Goldman, Sachs, and Lehman Bros. They were mostly Jewish, ascended from the earlier urban “rag trade,” and provided
industrial-scale financing for consumer industries, which the Morgans and the Schiffs did not understand. Julius Rosenwald, a true retailing genius, took operational command of a struggling Sears and Roebuck in 1895 and, through Goldman's, launched the first-ever public stock offering in a retail company. The purpose of the offering was to finance a mechanized rail-and roller-based goods assembly and distribution system, not unlike those pioneered by Alexander Holley for the steel industry. By the turn of the century, virtually every consumer was within reach of a Sears or Montgomery, Ward catalog. Delivery times almost anywhere in the country were thirty days or less, which prevailed until air-freight deliveries became widespread three-quarters of a century later. In order of magnitude, the gains in distributional efficiency were probably greater than those from the Internet in our own day. And with consumers as the driving force behind growth, the American economy was roaring ahead at a rate faster than any country had ever sustained over so long a period.

American industrial output steadily closed the gap with Great Britain throughout the nineteenth century and then exploded to the top rank. In 1800, the output of American factories and mines was only a sixth that of Great Britain; by 1860, it was a third, and by 1880, two-thirds. American industrial production pulled ahead of Great Britain's sometime in the late 1880s and by the eve of World War I was 2.3 times larger. In 1860, Great Britain accounted for about 20 percent of world industrial output and the United States only about 7 percent; by 1913, the American share was 32 percent, while Great Britain's had slid to 14 percent.
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Strikingly, despite the country's high rate of population growth, per capita industrial production grew faster in the United States than anywhere else in the world. Industrial output per head grew sixfold in the United States from 1860 to 1913, compared to only 1.8 times in Great Britain. Only Germany among the major powers showed a per capita growth rate (5.6 times) comparable to that in America, and the Germans started from
a much lower baseline. (On the eve of the Great War, decades of hyper-rapid growth had pulled German output to Great Britain's level.) By the end of the 1870s, America dominated international trade in grain, enjoyed a near monopoly of the world meat trade with a 70–80 percent share, and enjoyed at least as great a share of the burgeoning global petroleum market. As for the other Great Powers, France steadily lost ground to both Great Britain and Germany, while Russia remained a sink of despondency.