AMERICA 1900-1910 -- 'THE COCKSURE ERA' (Part 4)

SEIFERT

Posted By: David (email)
Date: 3/7/2004 at 21:15:03

'AMERICA 1900-1910'

'The Cocksure Era'

---------

No one, not even the most imaginative prophet, could have predicted in 1900 what was about to happen to a sunbaked Oklahoma hamlet known locally as Tulsey town. Tulsey town itself might well have looked to the past rather than the future. Long an Indian meeting place, it was a small cowtown in l900; its population was only 1,340, and the town consisted of a single dirt street lined with ramshackle buildings. According to the local press, freight-car business for the first week of 1900 was far from encouraging: "Receipts: one car bran; shipments: two cars hogs, one car sand, one car mules." The big story of the day was half business, half social event: Chief Frank Corndropper was soon to give his daughter Mary in marriage and to receive in return the groom's gift of several hundred ponies.

But 18 months later, Tulsey town - Tulsa - struck oil. By 1910, the population had soared to 18,182; 14 years later Tulsa would be a prosperous city of 110,000 inhabitants. Not everybody got rich, of course. But the career of one man was a fair index to Tulsa's success. James J. McGraw arrived as a poor boy in the land rush of '93, and he rose with the town to become president of a bank, ensconced in offices in a 12-story skyscraper, doing an annual business of $40 million.

Even more spectacular was the growth of a planned city on the banks of the Calumet River in northern Indiana. In l905, the site was 12.5 square miles of waste-land - rolling sand dunes covered with scrub oak. But late that year the city's namesake, Judge Elbert H. Gary, chairman of the board of United States Steel, poked a manicured finger at a map and told his directors, "This will be our metropolis. We'll build near the railroad junction of Chicago, where acres of land can be had almost for the asking, midway between the ore regions of the North and the coal regions of the South and East." The analysis was faultless and the city of Gary was christened before it was born.

The company's efforts soon proved once again that nothing could prevent American money and technology from working miracles. A bothersome river was moved a hundred yards. Great mechanical diggers chewed a mile-long harbor back from Lake Michigan; the major site was raised l5 feet with fill pumped in from the lake bottom. As railroad connections were forged, the jagged outlines of steel mills and foundries and tinplate plants rose against the sky. The final product was ready in July l908. With proper ceremony, the first ore boat unloaded its cargo in Gary harbor and set the mills thundering. By 1910, Gary was an efficient corporative barony with a population of 16,802. That was Progress.

Or was it? A world of subtle difference separated true progress from mere change, and more and more Americans pondered the dimensions of that world as the decade wore on. Were urban phenomena like Gary and Tulsa and New York better places of habitation than the small town of Columbus, Indiana, or were they - as several grimly realistic novelists insisted - misbegotten work centers whose ugliness appalled the eye and whose labors crushed the human spirit with the mindless repetition of a single act on the production line? Did all their labor-saving, product-multiplying devices really improve the quality of American life? And was the work and wealth of modern industry divided equitably?

On this last count, the opponents of the status quo had a great deal to say. Muckraking journalists published angry exposes and backed their demands for reform with disturbing statistics. The average annual earnings of industrial workers in 1900 was a subsistence wage of less than $490; included in that figure were some 1.7 million children who labored for as little as 25 cents a day. One citizen out of eight lived in dire poverty in festering slums and perished of disease at about twice the rate of modest-income groups. In short, the reformers charged that labor was being exploited by an oligarchy of capitalists who lived in idle ostentation on annual incomes of many millions. The Very Rich said little in rebuttal, but one plutocrat did their cause no good by declaring arrogantly, "We own America; we got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it."

Along these lines a battle was joined that would develop into a national crisis of social conscience. America's sense of justice and humanity, its treasured precept of equal opportunity for all, its jealously guarded tradition of free enterprise - all were called sharply into question. A free-swinging article in the Atlanta Constitution went so far as to say: "Government is no longer a vehicle for the enforcement of human rights but an agency for the furtherance of commercial interests."

Slowly, painfully, citizens faced up to the great civic work of 20th Century America: to make government more responsive to the needs and aspirations of the people; to reduce the discrepancies between lofty ideals and expedient practices, between good intentions and driving ambitions. That work had barely begun when the decade drew to a close. But it did begin. And that was Progress.

Yet if the sense of urgency was slow to grow, it was only natural to the time. For the great majority of people, the decade was a golden interlude, a long, comfortable moment before the good young days vanished completely and modern times arrived at full tide. Americans believed the judgments that confirmed their personal experience: That the human condition "is immensely improved and continually improving"; that "To stay in place in this country, you must keep moving"' that the average U.S. citizen possessed, and should enjoy, "the large cheerful average of health and success." It was generally true. Life for Americans from 1900 to 1910 was mellow and quite secure, full of vigor, savor and fascination. All they had to do was go out and live it.

To Be Continued -- A Man's World..

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copied by Nancee(McMurtrey)Seifert
February 24, 2004