I. Introduction

A. We come now to one of the most critical developments in American history: the rise of an industrialized, urbanized society.

1. The rise of this industrialized, urbanized society destroyed forever many aspects of the original American republic, and placed a breaking strain on many other aspects.

2. It required sweeping changes in the way that Americans viewed everything: community, labor, government, even the basic nature of society.

3. It led directly to one change in particular: the transition from a community-based society that emphasized the individual to a nation-based society that emphasized the corporation.

B. The period between 1877 and 1920 was a time of profound dislocation. Life seemed to be changing too fast. Strange, poorly-understood but VAST forces seemed at work, society seemed to be unraveling. It was a time of exciting innovation but it was also a time of dislocation, frustration, anger and often outright fear.

1. This sense of dislocation and fear eventually led to a "search for order," which we'll discuss in future lectures.

2. Modern America emerged from this combination of unsettling change and the search for order it generated.

II. America in 1877

A. Let's begin by examining American life in 1877. There's nothing magic about the year; it just happens to coincide with the end of Reconstruction. In fact, however, one could just as easily use any other year in the 1870s.

1. In this year the forces that will create this industrialized, urbanized society are already in operation but have not yet mounted a serious challenge to the existing American society.

2. There are already American cities of considerable size, of course, and there is also substantial industry. But the hallmark of American society continues to be the farm and the small town. American life, in short, still revolves primarily around the local community.

B. America during the mid-nineteenth century was a society of many such island communities. Weak communication severely restricted the interaction among these islands and dispersed the power to form opinion and enact public policy. Aside from such issues as Reconstruction policy, national government concerned itself with little more than tariff schedules. Most serious public issues played themselves out within the community.

1. Small towns remained surrounded by farms and retained a certain agrarian air. Life moved according to the rhythms of agriculture: the rising and setting of the sun, the change of seasons.

2. Most people shared the same outlook: the same religion (usually Protestant), the same politics, the same values.

3. People understood business, economics and finance in very human terms. They believed that people who worked hard and exercised thrift would prosper, that failure struck only those who were lazy and shiftless. They believed

C. The changes that struck America at this time were national changes: industrialization, urbanization, mechanization. But Americans attempted to understand them in local terms, with the result that they experienced an enormous sense of dislocation and bewilderment.

1. Forces that had their origin far beyond the local community now exerted enormous influence on that community. It was baffling and scary. People felt a loss of control and they wondered: who was responsible?

2. The question is important: "Who was responsible?" Not "What was responsible?" Because at the community level all business and social transactions could be traced to single individuals with faces and names, Americans assumed the same must be true of these new national changes.

D. America in the nineteenth century was a society without a core. It lacked those national centers of authority and information that might have given order to such swift changes.

1. American institutions were still oriented toward a community life where family and church, education and press, professions and government, all largely found their meaning by the way they fit one with another inside a town or a detached portion of a city.

2. As men ranged farther and farther from their communities, they tried desperately to understand the larger world in terms of their small, familiar environment.

a. They tried, in other words, to impose the known on the unknown, to master an impersonal world through the customs of a personal society.

b. They failed, usually without knowing why; and that failure to comprehend a society they were helping to make contained the essence of the national story.

Eventually, these failures helped foster a new way of looking at society, one that viewed it more or less explicitly in corporate terms--which is to say, as a complex organism that, like a large corporation, required large-scale organization, regulation, and managerial expertise.

Military developments have to be understood within this context. Two concepts are particularly key: imperialism and progressivism.

III. Imperialism

A. In Europe as well as the United States, this was a period of expansion--a renewed drive for power, colonies, markets.

B. "Social Darwinism"--Darwin's theories of natural selection applied, in bastardized form, to interactions among humans, sometimes at the level of business, sometimes at the international level.

1. Sense that competition between nations was necessary and right--a part of the natural order.

2. Assisted by the relative absence of really major wars since the Napoleonic period.

C. "White Man's Burden"--belief that Anglo-Saxon peoples must subdue and civilize the rest of the world.

1. American evangelists: John Fiske, Josiah Strong

a. Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (1885)

b. Anglo-Saxons already controlled a third of the world. They must take more. "Then will the world enter upon a new stage of history--the final competition of races in which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled. If I do not read amiss, this powerful race will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond. And can anyone doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the `survival of the fittest'?."

D. The Expansionist Rationale

1. Expansionism a historic American policy--one might really say a mindset--stretching back to colonial period.

a. Two changes after 1860s

(1) shift from continental expansion to extracontinental expansion

(2) shift from territorial acquisition to exploitation of markets.

2. For several decades the settlement of the West Coast had been turning American attention toward expansion overseas

a. territorial expansion: Alaska; Central America (site of a potential canal); Caribbean Sea (flirtation with annexations, esp. of Dominican Republic); and Hawaiian Islands. These were areas considered desirable because they would facilitate trade.

b. economic expansion--quadrupling of gross national product: from $9.1 billion in 1869-1873 to $37.1 billion for 1897-1901.

(1) exports increased more sharply than imports.

(a) $393 million in 1870

(b) $858 million in 1890

(c) $1.4 billion in 1900 (By 1898 US exported more than it imported)

3. cultivation of foreign markets regarded as a priority. If unsuccessful, as one observer warned, "our surplus will soon roll back from the Atlantic coast upon the interior, and the wheels of prosperity will be clogged by the very richness of the burden which they carry, but cannot deliver."

4. Originally the concern of the private sector, this emphasis on exports presently became the concern of the Federal gov't as well--pressures to avert or recover from economic depressions, e.g., that of 1884.

5. This provided rationale for overseas economic expansion, creation of informal empire to support that expansion, a new battle fleet oriented navy to protect this now-vital commerce, and ultimately a peacetime army that would support U.S. interests overseas.

Spanish-American War and Philippine War can be traced directly to imperialist impulse; as can various interventions in central America and Caribbean.

Progressivism

Industrialization and urbanization produced many social and economic dislocations which were originally addressed within context of old, individualistic understanding of American life. If there were problems, it was because of wickedness on the part of a few wealthy fat cats or the misconduct of individual workers. Emphasis therefore on quick, easy fixes; e.g., Henry George's "single tax."

Later reformers--Progressives--had a different understanding of society and therefore a different approach to solving its problems.

E. Progressivism--response to impact of modernization (industrialization, urbanization, technology, etc.). This development had created a wholly new order; had, indeed, practically obliterated the "old order" characterized by small farmers, merchants, artisans, businessmen.

a. Based around small towns; local, regional markets.

b. New system characterized by consolidation, integration, cities, national markets.

(1) large-scale organizations; e.g., US Steel, first billion-dollar corporation.

c. Creation of a modern "power elite."

(1) Two new classes emerged: proletariat and "new" middle class.

(2) New middle class--white collar class.

(a) At one end, clerks, secretaries.

(b) At the other end, substantial wealth and power.

(c) educated (even college-educated)

(d) not propertied, but real skills.

(e) Administrators and bureaucrats: managers.

d. Central phenomenon: divorce between ownership and management.

F. New middle class led the principal reform movement (the same one of which Wilson was a part).

1. Didn't want to alter system, just adjust it in the interests of efficiency.

2. Greater efficiency would insulate society against threat of revolution if proletarian concerns not addressed.

3. Organizations: trade associations, involement in government and political parties.

4. Sought greater share in administration of Anerican political economy.

a. E,g., regulation of child labor, underclasses, anti-trusts.

(1) Trust threatened to control political market as well as economic market.

G. Key achievements: creation of Federal Reserve, Food and Drug Administration, and other regulatory agencies.

1. Agencies existed beside the political arena but were not part of it. Officials were not elected, but appointed.

a. Not subject to legislature.

b. Dominated by new middle class.

2. Creation of an "administrative state."

a. Element of anti-democracy.

b. Concerns about turmoil and what would happen if proletariat got power.

(1) Strategy: to remove crucial issues from political arena.

c. Highest value placed on efficiency, stability, order (as opposed to egalitarianism)

Progressives understood need of armed forces to professionalize. Armed forces began ca. 1880 to create a more professional officer corps--new schools (Leavenworth schools, Naval War College), and a general staff. Some improvements, but ran into trouble getting political authorization for major changes. Ultimate success owed much to changing understanding of society--progressives grasped need for organizational reform, rationalization, heightened managerial expertise, in a way earlier generation did not.

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Go On to Informal Empire

Go On to Military Reforms