history question

 

Please choose 1 of 5 prompts to write an paper about

Read instructions carefully

Disregard those characters it is only for length requirement  

Please choose 1 of 5 prompts to write an paper about
Read instructions carefully

Disregard those characters it is only for length requirement  escribe how the city of Boston and the people living there changed between 1850 and 1900?  

HIST 102 Essay 1/Essay 1 Prompt x
Module 1 Essay 1 Questions:

Describe the role of Edmund Ross in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Were the reactions of the other members of his party equal to Ross’s actions in the impeachment? Exactly how did Ross influence the history of the United States by his actions?

(
Profiles in Courage- Edmund G. Ross – I Looked into my Open Grave )

Module 2 Essay 1 Questions:

What are the differences in the two accounts of the Battle of Little Big Horn? What conclusions can you make from the different ways of presenting the same event? (
The Battle of Little Bighorn:  An Eyewitness Account by the Lakota Chief Red Horse)

(
The Battle of Little Big Horn, 1876)

Module 3 Essay 1 Questions:

Describe how the city of Boston and the people living there changed between 1850 and 1900? (
Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870 – 1900 )

Module 4 Essay 1 Questions:

After reading both articles describe the parody that L. Frank Baum supposedly meant the “Wonderful Wizard of OZ” to portray. Do you find the assertion of the allegory persuasive or is the connection between the “Wonderful Wizard of OZ” and the economic situation at the turn of the century itself a fable as the Hansen article asserts? Compare and Contrast the lives of the wealthy “10” and the lives of those who made up the working and farming classes of America. How do the ideas of “individualism” and “mutualism” help to define the differences between the various classes? Were farm families more like the wealthy “10” of the urban working families?

(
The Wizard of Oz: A Parable on Populism)

(
The Fable of the Allegory The Wizard of OZ in Economics)

(
Signs of Friction a Portrait of America at Century’s End from A Fierce Discontent)

Be very detailed and specific in writing the essay and be sure to follow all writing guidelines and conventions. After reading the designated article(s) for the specific essay question, write an essay considering these bulletins

·
Length: 2-3 pages; please keep the essay to no more than 3 pages. 
Format: Doubled-spaced, typed, font in 
Times New Roman or Arial, size 12. 1-inch margins all around. Written work for this course is to be submitted only in either Microsoft Word ( ) or Rich Text Format (.rtf).

·
After selecting an essay topic, you are also encouraged to use an additional source or two to enhance the experience. Please do not cite the textbook and online reference sources 
Wikipedia and 
Britannica, 
Infoplease, Sparknotes, Answers.com, Ask.com, 
et cetera.

HIST 102 Essay 1/Profiles in Courage- Edmund G. Ross – I Looked into my Open Grave

HIST 102 Essay 1/Signs of Friction a Portrait of America at Centurys End from A Fierce Discontent

A Fierce Discontent:
The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America; 1870 – 1920.

By Michael McGerr, Ph.D. Indiana University
Chapter One: Signs of Friction; Portrait of America at Century’s End

In one of Chicago’s elite clubs on election night in November 1896, a group of rich men were

euphoric. After a tense, uncertain campaign, their presidential candidate, the Republican William
McKinley, had clearly defeated the Democratic and Populist nominee, William Jennings Bryan. As
the celebration continued past midnight, a wealthy merchant, recalling his younger days, began a
game of Follow the Leader. The other tycoons joined in and the growing procession tromped across
sofas and chairs and up onto tables. Snaking upstairs and down, the line finally broke up as the men
danced joyfully in one another’s arms.

Their euphoria was understandable. McKinley’s victory climaxed not only a difficult election but
an intense, generation-long struggle for control of industrializing America. For Chicago’s elite, the
triumph of McKinley, the sober former governor of Ohio, meant that the federal government was in
reliable, Republican hands. The disturbing changes that Bryan had promised-the reform of the
monetary system, the dismantling of the protective tariff-would not pass. The frightening prospect of
a radical alliance of farmers and workers had collapsed. The emerging industrial order, the source of
their wealth and power, seemed safe.2

McKinley’s victory certainly was a critical moment, but the election did not settle the question of
control as fully as those rich men in Chicago would have liked. The wealthy could play Follow the
Leader, but it was not at all clear that the rest of the nation was ready to follow along. Driven by the
industrial revolution, America had grown enormously in territory, population, and wealth in the
nineteenth century. The United States was not one nation but several; it was a land divided by
region, race, and ethnicity. And it was a land still deeply split by class conflict. The upper class
remained a controversial group engineering a wrenching economic transformation, accumulating
staggering fortunes, and pursuing notorious private lives. Just three months later another party, this
one in New York City, highlighted the precariousness of upper-class authority at the close of the
nineteenth century.

While McKinley and Bryan battled for the presidency, Cornelia Bradley Martin had been plotting
her own coup in the social wars of New York’s rich. She and her husband, Bradley, were no
newcomers to the ranks of wealthy Manhattan. Cornelia’s father had been a millionaire merchant in
New York; Bradley’s, a banker from a fine Albany family. Though wealthy, their parents had lived
by the old Victorian virtues. Cornelia’s father, it was said, had been “domestic in his tastes”;
Bradley’s father, who early practiced “absolute self-denial” “never lost an opportunity of instilling”
in his sons “ideas of the importance of work and one’s duty towards others in every-day life.”
Cornelia and Bradley, married in 1869, had moved away from the old values. One sign of the change
was their surname, which somewhere along the line borrowed Bradley’s first name, occasionally
added a hyphen, and doubled from “Martin” to “Bradley-Martin.” Another was Cornelia’s collection
of jewelry, which included pieces from the French crown jewels, most notably a ruby necklace that
had belonged to Marie Antoinette. Never “domestic” in their tastes, the Bradley-Martins had become
well known in New York social circles, especially for their renowned parties in 1885 and 1890.3

In the depression winter of 1897, Cornelia arranged a costume ball at the Waldorf Hotel that
would, she hoped, eclipse not only her previous efforts but also Alva Vanderbilt’s famous ball of
1883, widely recognized as the greatest party in the history of the city. Cornelia was not bashful
about her intentions. For weeks before the ball, her secretary made sure that the papers got all the

details. Yet the publicity was not quite what Cornelia had expected. Across the country, preachers
and editorial writers argued over the propriety of a party that would cost hundreds of thousands of
dollars amid the worst depression in the nation’s history. At the fashionable St. George’s Episcopal
Church in New York, rector Dr. William Rainsford urged his congregation, which included financier
J. P. Morgan, to forgo the ball. “Never were the lines between the two classes-those who have
wealth and those who envy them-more distinctly drawn.” Rainsford warned. “Such elaborate and
costly manifestations of wealth would only tend to stir up… widespread discontent” and “furnish
additional texts for sermons by the socialistic agitators.” “Every thoughtful man” agreed a
parishioner, “must have seen signs of friction between the upper ten and the lower. Whatever tends
to increase it, as very elaborate social affairs may, can well be spared now” The pastor of Fifth
Avenue Baptist Church, where John D. Rockefeller worshipped, preached that wealth should be used
for philanthropy. Undeterred, Cornelia went ahead. Her supporters claimed that the expenditures for
the ball would stimulate the economy.

Some invited guests decided not to attend. But about six or seven hundred turned up, in costume,
when the great night came on February 10. Bradley dressed as a member of the court of Louis XV.
Cornelia, despite her Marie Antoinette necklace, dressed as another luckless queen, Mary Stuart.
Like a queen, the hostess greeted her guests from a raised dais “beneath a canopy of rare tapestries.”
There were mirrors, tables laden with food, “a wild riot of roses” and “mimic woodland bowers.”
The scene “reproduced the splendor of Versailles in New York, and I doubt if even the Roi Soleil
himself ever witnessed a more dazzling sight.” Bradley’s brother, Frederick Townsend Martin,
remembered. ‘The power of wealth with its refinement and vulgarity was everywhere. It gleamed
from countless jewels, and it was proclaimed by the thousands of orchids and roses, whose fragrance
that night was like incense burnt on the altar of the Golden Calf’ Royalty was everywhere, too-”per-
haps a dozen” Marie Antoinettes came to the ball. Amid all the bewigged and bejeweled royalty, a
reporter noted, there were hardly any American costumes. Only one or two George Washingtons
reminded the guests of their republican origins. Outside, about 250 police closed the sidewalks to
pedestrians and braced for trouble. While his wife danced inside, Police Commissioner Theodore
Roosevelt directed his men as they watched for anyone “likely to prove dangerous from an
anarchistic viewpoint.”

The revolutionary moment never came, but Cornelia’s triumph turned into disaster anyway.
Across the country, elite opinion condemned the Bradley Martins. The Chicago Tribune gave its
verdict by quoting Shakespeare’s
Puck: “What fools these mortals be.” Worse, New York City itself suddenly became inhospitable.
Municipal officials, noting Bradley’s opulence, raised his property taxes. The members of the city’s
elite clubs pronounced the Bradley Martins’ ball “magnificent” but “stupid.” Unlike Marie
Antoinette and Mary Stuart, Cornelia kept her head, but she and Bradley soon left the United States
to begin a self-imposed exile. Selling their mansion in Manhattan, the Bradley Martins bought a new
place in London, where their daughter had married Lord Craven a few years before. In 1899, they
returned briefly to New York to give a defiant farewell dinner party at the Waldorf at the cost of $u6
a plate. From then on, the Bradley Martins divided their time between London and Balmacaan,
Bradley’s estate in Scotland. They left behind a bemused Frederick Townsend Martin. Years later he
still could not understand why all this had happened. After all, the ball had helped the economy
because “many New York shops sold out brocades and silks which had been lying in their stock-
rooms for years” “I cannot conceive” Frederick wrote sadly, “why this entertainment should have
been condemned.”

If McKinley’s victory emphasized the strength of the “upper ten” the Bradley Martins’ ball

epitomized their weakness. Absurd as it was, the affair highlighted the cultural isolation and internal
division that plagued the wealthy. The industrial upper class upheld a set of values at odds with those
of other classes. Approaching life so differently from the rest of America, the rich could not
command respect from farmers and workers. Even among themselves, the “upper ten” disagreed
how best to live their lives and secure their future. The party did not last very long at all.

Cornelia Bradley Martin staged her costume ball when class differences were more pronounced

than at any time in the history of industrial America. The end of the nineteenth century saw more
than just “signs of friction between the upper ten and the lower;” wage workers, farmers, and the
rich were alien to one another. That sense of strangeness was not only a matter of obvious
differences in material circumstances. By choice and by necessity, America’s social classes lived
starkly divergent daily lives and invoked different and often conflicting values to guide, explain, and
justify their ways of life. The classes held distinctive views on fundamental issues of human
existence: on the nature of the individual; on the relationship between the individual and society; on
the roles of men, women, children, and the family; and on the relative importance of work and
pleasure. What would become the Progressive Era, an extraordinary explosion of middle-class
activism, began as an unprecedented crisis of alienation amid the extremes of wealth and poverty in
America.

In a land of some 76 million people, the “upper ten” were no more than a tiny minority, a mere
sliver of the nation. Wealthy capitalists, manufacturers, merchants, landowners, executives,
professionals, and their families made up not “ten” but only I or 2 percent of the population. These
were the people who owned the majority of the nation’s resources and expected to make the majority
of its key decisions. They could be found in cities, towns, and rural estates across the country. Their
ranks included the nation’s roughly four thousand millionaires, fabulously rich by almost any
standard. Their most visible and most powerful members were the two hundred or so families worth
at least $20 million, fortunes with few parallels in history. Concentrated in the Northeast and
especially New York State, theirs were the famous names of American capitalism-Vanderbilt,
Whitney, Carnegie, Harriman, and Morgan. Probably the greatest fortune of them all – a billion
dollars by 1913 – belonged to John D. Rockefeller, the leader of Standard Oil.

Membership in the upper ten was never only a matter of precise calculation in dollars; it was also
a matter of origins, experience, and outlook. Wealthy Americans shared several attributes that made
them a homogenous and distinctive group, similar to one another and different from the rest of
the population. In an increasingly diverse nation of new and old immigrants, the upper class came
mostly from English stock, from families long in America. In a largely Protestant land, they
belonged, by birth or conversion, to the smaller, most fashionable Protestant denominations-
Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Congregational. With only occasional exceptions, they came from
middle- and upper-class origins. Hardly any matched Andrew Carnegie’s storied rise from rags to
riches, from working-class bobbin boy in a textile factory to multimillionaire steel baron. While
fewer than 10 percent of the population had even graduated from high school, many of the upper ten
had gone to college or professional school.

Above all, the upper ten shared a fundamental understanding about the nature of the individual.
Glorifying the power of individual will, the wealthy held to an uncompromising belief in the
necessity of individual freedom. To Andrew Carnegie, “Individualism” was the very “foundation” of
the human race. “Only through exceptional individuals, the leaders, man has been able to ascend”
Carnegie explained. “[It] is the leaders who do the new things that count, all these have been
Individualistic to a degree beyond ordinary men and worked in perfect freedom; each and everyone a

character unlike anybody else; an original, gifted beyond most others of his kind, hence his
leadership.” It was just this strong-willed sense of her” exceptional” individuality that inspired
Cornelia Bradley Martin’s idea for a ball; and it was just this sense of her right to “perfect freedom”
that enabled her to stick to her plans in the face of so much condemnation.

The upper ten attributed the hardships of the poor not to an unfair economic system but to
individual shortcomings. The remedy was individual regeneration rather than government action.
“[The] failures which a man makes in his life are due almost always to some defect in his
personality, some weakness of body, or mind, or character, will, or temperament” wrote John D.
Rockefeller. “The only way to overcome these failings is to build up his personality from within, so
that he, by virtue of what is within him, may overcome the weakness which was the cause of the
failure.” Individualism, moreover, helped the wealthy resolutely deny the existence of social classes,
despite all the signs of friction around them. “The American Commonwealth is built upon the
individual;” explained the renowned corporate lawyer and US. Senator Chauncey Depew of New
York. “It recognizes neither classes nor masses.”

Upper-class individualism was more than just a crude version of “might makes right.” These men
and women had grown up in a land dedicated to individualism. In the Revolutionary era, the nation’s
sacred documents-the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights
proclaimed the dignity and worth of the individual. By the nineteenth century, that notion was so
powerful and so distinctively American that the visiting French observer Alexis de Tocqueville
coined the term individualism to describe it. The relentless spread of capitalism reaffirmed the
individualist creed, but with a new emphasis on each person’s ownership of his or her labor. By mid-
century, this reworked individualism drove the abolitionist assault on slavery and spurred the
Northern war against the South. Individualism justified the emerging factory system, built on
individual workers’ free exchange of their labor for wages. Individualism provided the core of the
Victorian culture that taught middle-class men self-discipline and self-reliance in the struggle for
success. “Take away the spirit of Individualism from the people” warned Wall Street veteran Henry
Clews, “and you at once eliminate the American spirit – the love of freedom, – of free industry, – free
and unfettered opportunity, – you take away freedom itself.”

Ironically, the wealthy themselves challenged freedom and individualism by creating the nation’s
pioneering big businesses, the giant trusts and corporations that employed the first white-collar
“organization men” There were even a few “organization men” among the upper ten. William Ellis
Corey, the second president of United States Steel, “is part of the mechanism itself;” wrote an
observer early in the twentieth century. “He feels himself to be a fraction, rather than a unit. His
corporation is an organism like a human body, and he is the coordinating function of its brain:”

Yet, men like Corey were unusual. For one thing, many of the wealthy did not share his
familiarity with corporate life. In the industrial city of Baltimore, sixth largest in the nation in 1900,
only about one-fifth of leading businessmen had made their careers as bureaucrats. Of the 185
leaders of the largest American firms between 1901 and 1910, just under half were career
bureaucrats, men who had never had their own businesses. But even business leaders accustomed to
bureaucracy tended to see themselves as individual units rather than fractions of some larger whole.
Railroad executives, members of the nation’s pioneering corporate hierarchies, still rejoiced in
“competitive individualism” after decades of collective enterprise. Such people may have felt a
special tie to their organizations, but that did not prevent them from feeling superior to everybody
else. William Ellis Corey was, after all, United States Steel’s “brain” rather than one of its lesser
organs. James Stillman, the leader of New York’s National City Bank, thought of his firm as a god
and sometimes as “our mother.” Yet, the obedience Stillman owed his god and his mother did not

keep him from being “lordly in his manner.”
The aristocratic and even regal bearing, with its assumption of individual prerogative, came easily

for the men and women of the upper ten. There were all those kings and queens at the Bradley
Martin ball. There was the financier E. H. Harriman, who “had the philosophy, the methods of an
Oriental monarch” His niece, Daisy Harriman, recalled visiting him in his library one evening.
“Daisy, I have a new plaything” he told her. “I have just bought the Erie [railroad] for five million
dollars. I think I will call them up now.”

J. P. Morgan, Harriman’s sometime competitor in buying railroads and organizing the corporate
world, shared that regal sense of individual entitlement. Although “a great gentleman” Morgan “was
in his own soul, in his ego, a king “royalty” He exercised the royal prerogative not only in the male
world of work on Wall Street but in the female domain of the home. Morgan, a family member
related, “loved to display a frank disregard of the usual rules about babies and assert his entire
independence of the mother’s and the nurse’s authority – he always took pleasure in doing that, not
only with his own children but with his grandchildren.” When his first child was born, Morgan had
her crib taken out of the nursery and set next to his bed, “so that he could look after her himself and
be perfectly sure that she was well covered up at night.” An intensely religious man, Morgan
nevertheless revealed his sense of individual authority even when he worshiped God in church. If
Morgan did not like a hymn, he slammed his hymnal shut, an observer noted. “If he liked the hymn
but not the tune, he would jingle the coins in his pocket quite audibly as a sign of his disapproval.”

Upper-class individualism was obviously self-serving and often self-deluding, but it was no
sham. More than any other group, the upper ten carried individualism proudly into the organized and
bureaucratized twentieth century. It was just this sort of individualism that their sons learned at
home, at private school, and then at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. And it was just this extreme
individualism that set the upper ten apart from other classes and that guaranteed social tension and
conflict in the new century.

Despite their individualism, the upper ten had broken away from much of their Victorian
heritage. Placing great emphasis on domesticity, Victorianism urged men and women to marry and
create homes. A wife was expected to devote herself to making that home both a soothing refuge for
her husband and a nurturing preparation for her sons’ eventual immersion in the economic struggle.
Unlike Cornelia Bradley Martin’s “domestic” father, however, the upper ten were not so dedicated to
the home. By the close of the nineteenth century, the wealthy had modified and contravened
domesticity in striking ways.

Of course, the rich typically married and created homes. Cornelia Bradley Martin and other
wealthy women, shunning careers in business or politics, seemingly devoted themselves to the
domestic ideal as wives and mothers. But these women artfully turned their domestic duty as
hostesses into quite public roles that earned them fame and notoriety. Cornelia Bradley Martin was
more of a public figure than her husband. Meanwhile, in a notable departure from Victorian
tradition, upper-class parents thrust their sons out of the protective cocoon of the home at an early
age. Rather than bring in tutors to school their boys at home as in the past, many of the wealthy
began sending their male heirs off to Groton, Choate, St. Paul’s, and other exclusive boarding
schools in New England.

The rich were also unusually willing to break up the home altogether. Before the Civil War,
divorce had been as unthinkable for the wealthy as for middle-class Victorians. But with the rise of
the industrial upper class after the war, May King Van Rensselaer of New York noted, society
circles “began to sanction divorces… All at once it became fashionable to divorce your helpmeet.”
In a nation where, as late as 1920, less than one percent of adults had been divorced, the marriages of

the rich collapsed with notable frequency. Ten percent of the Americans worth $20 million or more
who were born between 1830 and 1865 were divorced; of those born between the end of the Civil
War and the turn of the century, 20 percent were divorced.

The upper ten broke as well with the attitudes toward work and pleasure that underlay Victorian
individualism. The Victorians of the mid-nineteenth century believed the individual could be free
only because he was self-disciplined. Determined to accumulate capital and avoid dissipation, the
nineteenth-century middle class had glorified hard work, limited leisure, and warily eyed
consumption. As a boy in a Victorian household, Bradley Martin had duly learned about “the
importance of work” and “absolute self-denial.” But he and the rest of the upper ten, with so many
millions of dollars, had no need to work, save, and deny themselves pleasure at the end of the
nineteenth century. By and large, the upper ten agreed that life should be about pleasure as well as
the accumulation of wealth. Daisy Harriman even contended that “…the Bradley Martin Balls that
added to the gaiety of nations and set money in circulation were far more pious enterprises than
unostentatious hoarding.”

Admittedly, some of the rich had to work hard to forget their Victorian maxims. “I have never in
all my life done anything I wanted and cannot now” lamented James Stillman. Plagued by
headaches, the banker nevertheless drove himself and others to work still harder. His handpicked
successor at National City Bank, Frank Vanderlip, was much the same. “I had the work
habit incurably…” Vanderlip confessed. “I did not play. I did not know how to play. I never have
learned to play.” Nevertheless, Stillman and Vanderlip gradually found the time and money for a
string of pleasures. Stillman had his fine mansion -”large, heavy, ornate, pillared” -on East Seventy-
second Street; he had trips to Europe and Palm Beach, an art collection, and one of the earliest
automobiles. “Like most men, Mr. Stillman wanted the best of everything” an early biographer
explained almost apologetically, “but without extravagance.” His protégé Vanderlip drew the line at
buying a yacht but finally took up cigars and bought an estate up the Hudson River.

Other members of the upper ten took much more quickly to a life of relaxation and pleasure.
Morgan worked hard but enjoyed “frequent” vacations; Carnegie did not work full-time for most of
his adult life. This liberation from work was one of the most distinctive features of the culture of the
upper ten. To many Americans, the rich were, as Thorstein Veblen described them in 1899, The
Leisure Class.

The upper ten used their free hours, days, and months to enjoy a host of pleasures: mansions,
yachts, private railway cars, horses, jewels, and art collections. The homes of the rich suggest how
the old standards of restraint and frugality had decayed. The typical great mansion required a staff of
about twenty-four servants and $200,000 or $300,000 a year to maintain. The houses of the four
grandsons of Cornelius Vanderbilt illustrated the possibilities. The second oldest brother, Willie
Vanderbilt, and his wife, Alva, had a $2 million “Gothic palace” on the corner of Fifth Avenue and
Fifty-third Street; the oldest brother, Cornelius II, and his wife, Alice, had a $5 million house on
Fifth Avenue between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth Streets. At Newport, the Vanderbilt brothers
had” cottages” -Willie’s “Marble House” patterned after the Temple of the Sun at Baalbek, and
Cornelius’s 70-room residence, ‘The Breakers” Not to be outdone, the third brother, Frederick, had
houses in Manhattan and Newport, and a stunning 54-room Italian Renaissance castle up in Hyde
Park along the Hudson. The most extraordinary Vanderbilt home belonged to the youngest brother,
George. “Biltmore” completed in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in 1895, was a 250
room chateau on a feudal “barony” of 146,000 acres. Employing more workers than the United
States Department of Agriculture, “Biltmore” included gardens designed by Frederick Law Olmsted,
tree nurseries, dairies, reservoirs, schools, a hospital, and a model village.

While many wealthy New Yorkers pursued pleasure, they kept the pursuit relatively private,
hidden behind the walls of those mansions on Fifth Avenue. But part of Manhattan’s upper ten
sought the widest possible publicity. This was the “High Society” of the Bradley Martins. After the
Civil War, Mrs. William Astor had tried to unify High Society by blending old and new wealth: in
1888, her aide Ward McAllister had drawn up his famous list of the “400” guests – actually 273 –
who would fit into the Astor’s ballroom. With Mrs. Astor’s gradual retirement in the 189Os, High
Society fractured into factions led by Mrs. Ogden Mills, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, and other rival
hostesses who staged extravagant and widely reported dinners, receptions, house parties, and
cotillions.

Why should the lavish life-style of the upper ten matter to us? As the Bradley Martins learned, the
apparent trivialities of balls and parties counted for a great deal in turn-of-the-century America. The
culture of the upper ten, half perversion and half repudiation of Victorianism, made their wealth and
power all the more controversial. Elite values would repel the middle class enough to turn
respectable Victorians into radicals and set off the progressive explosion.

The gulf between the upper ten and the working class was enormous. Of necessity, working men,

women, and children lived by a different set of cultural rules that also challenged Victorianism and
aroused both fear and sympathy in the middle class. The constraints and uncertainties of working-
class life, low wages, lay-offs, accidents, limited opportunity, early death; made individualism at
best a wasteful indulgence and at worst a mortal threat. Realizing that they had to depend on one
another to survive, workers developed a culture of mutualism and reciprocity. At home and at work,
they taught sometimes harsh lessons about the necessity of self-denial and collective action.

These were lessons that Rahel Golub learned painfully in the 1890’s. Born in Russia, she came to
America in 1892 at the age of eleven to help her father in a tailor shop in New York City. Rahel and
her father lived in a one-room apartment in the crowded Jewish neighborhood of Cherry Street, not
too many blocks from the Bradley Martins. But Rahel’s world was far away from the lives of the
Bradley Martins and their friends on Fifth Avenue. As she learned to baste pocket flaps and coat
edges, she also discovered the rules of life in her new country.

The center of Rahel Golub’s world was her family. Everything revolved around the family’s
needs, above all the imperative of reuniting parents and children in America. Rahel and her father
had to work and save to pay for the rest of the family’s passage to the United States. Against that
necessity, her needs and wishes, her chance for an education, did not matter at all. Rahel sometimes
felt the tension between her family and her individuality. “One Saturday” she related, “while
standing out on the stoop I saw one little girl show a cent to another and boasting that she was going
to buy candy… It occurred to me that I too would like to have a cent with which to do just as I
pleased.” So Rahel asked her father for the money. “He looked at me silently for a long moment” she
recalled. “Then he rose slowly, took out his pocket book, took a cent from it, held it out to me, and
said with a frown… “Here, and see that this never happens again.” Rahel was stunned: “I felt as if
the coin were burning my fingers. I handed it back quickly, left the room and walked about in the
streets. I felt mortally hurt. I felt that I was working from morning till night like a grown up person
and yet when I wanted one single cent.” When she would not eat that night, her father beat her with a
twisted towel. “I felt the towel across my back again and again” she would write. “Finally he threw it
down and said, panting for breath, “Girl, I’ll break you if you don’t change.” I said in my heart, “My
father, we shall see!”

Nevertheless, Rahel came to accept the self-denial at the heart of her life and her father’s. “In the
shop one morning I realized that he had been leaving out of his breakfast the tiny glass of brandy for

two cents and was eating just the roll” she said. “So I too made my sacrifice. When as usual he gave
me the apple and the roll, I took the roll but refused the apple. And he did not urge me.” There were
other sacrifices: Rahel avoided changing jobs because the loss of even one day’s pay would slow her
family’s arrival.

As a new “feller hand” in a tailor shop, Rahel worked as hard and as fast as she could to make the
money needed to bring her mother and siblings to America. The work seemed to be worth her while
because the shop owner paid by the piece-her output-rather than by the hour. But the older women in
the shop turned on her for showing that it was possible to produce more goods in less time. They
thought that her production would encourage the boss to lower the piecework rates he paid them. “I
knew that I had done almost as much work as the ‘grown-up girls’ and that they did not like me”
Rahel realized. “I heard Betsy, the head feller hand, talking about’ a snip of a girl coming and taking
the very bread out of your mouth.” And so Rahel learned to obey the rules of a workplace “family”
too.

Rahel and her father discovered other collective bonds. “Each of you alone can do nothing” a
member of the garment workers’ union told them. “Organize!” They joined the union. Rahel’s father
also belonged to a mutual aid society; she remembered meetings in their apartment to discuss burial
plots for the members.

Rahel’s self-denial paid off. Eventually, she and her father earned the money to bring her mother,
brother, and sisters to America. But the reunion of the family did not end the demands on her.
Plagued by poor health that kept her from working, Rahel knew she still had to help: she had to
marry well. Her parents arranged a match for her with Israel, a young grocer. “It is true that you are
young” her mother explained, “but you see, father is poor and you are not strong!” By then, Rahel
understood the logic: “It is clear then; I thought that I must marry… My people could live near and
get things at cost price, bread, butter, sugar, potatoes. It will be a great help.” But she was reluctant
to live with “the strange young man and his mother” So Rahel put off the decision. “At last” she
remembered the scene, “I heard father lay down his spoon and push his chair away from the table a
little. “Well” he asked in a ‘by the way’ tone, “What have you decided?” It grew so still, even the
breathing seemed to have stopped. And in this stillness I heard myself say, “Yes.” I did not look up.
I knew that every face had grown brighter. It was pleasant to know that I was the cause. I had been
nothing but a sorrow so long.’

In one way or another, the story of Rahel Golub was repeated over and over in the United States
at the turn of the century. This was, at least numerically, a working-class nation. In 1900, more than
half the country, perhaps 36 to 40 million men, women, and children, made up the laboring class that
performed manual work for wages. They toiled with their hands on docks, roads, and farms, in
factories, mines, and other people’s houses. They practiced ancient crafts such as tailoring and
carpentry, and newer arts such as iron molding and metal cutting. They were machine tenders in
mills and factories, unskilled laborers in towns, farm hands in the countryside, cowboys on the
range, and domestic servants in Victorian houses. All of them, even the best-paid skilled workers,
lived circumscribed, vulnerable lives, constrained by low pay and limited opportunity, and menaced
by unemployment, ill health, and premature death.

The central fact of working-class life was limited resources. In 1900, wageworkers in
manufacturing earned an average of $435 for the year; in contrast, middle-class clerical workers in
railroad and manufacturing firms averaged $1,011, more than twice as much. The lowest working-
class wages were low indeed: in 1900, anthracite coal miners averaged $340 for the year; domestics,
$240; and agricultural laborers, only $178 with room and board.

These numbers alone virtually guaranteed that Victorian individualism was impossible for the

working class. Many workers simply could not make enough to support themselves, let alone a
family. In cities, working-class women, crowded into less-skilled jobs and paid less than men,
struggled to get by on their own. Even working-class men, generally better paid, had trouble making
ends meet. In Buffalo, New York, where it took from $650 to $772 to support an Italian family of
five for a year, a laborer could expect to earn only between $364 and $624. The calculus held true
elsewhere. In Chicago, a typical packinghouse worker could make just 38 percent of the income
needed to support a family of four in 1910. Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh, working-class fathers
contributed only about three-quarters of average family income.

Workers’ wages were uncertain as well as low. Skilled and unskilled alike lived with the almost
constant threat of unemployment. The cycles of capitalism produced regular upheavals, such as the
depression of the 189OS that cost Rahel’s father and hundreds of thousands of other workers their
jobs. Even in prosperous times the working class could not count on year-round employment.
Common laborers and dockworkers found their jobs measured in days or weeks; they had to hope
that a boss or superintendent would choose them at the next “shape up” along the docks or at the
factory gates. Every worker knew that a job might end at any time because of seasonal lulls,
irregular supplies, and equipment problems.

If workers survived the threat of unemployment, they still faced the twin specters of injury and
early death. Every working-class occupation had its difficulties and dangers, from the explosions,
fires, cave-ins, debilitating “miner’s lung” and other notorious perils of hard-rock mining in the West
to the “Monday morning sickness” asthma, byssinasis, tuberculosis, and maimings in the textile
mills of the East. While the upper ten seemed to last into their sixties, hard labor and poor diets aged
workers quickly. An iron puddler was ‘old at forty” ready for a helper on the job. In Detroit, life
expectancy for children barn to white-collar workers in 1900 was fifty-three years. Working-class
children born that year could expect to live to forty eight; the children of Polish immigrants, who
were mostly unskilled workers, could expect to live only to forty-one.

By the turn of the twentieth century, few workers had much hope of escaping this cycle of low
wages, looming unemployment, frequent accidents, and early death. Only marriage delivered
working-class women from dead-end jobs that seldom led to advancement. Most male workers could
hope at best only to rise to more skilled manual jobs. With little chance of joining the middle class,
workers could only interpret Andrew Carnegie’s storied rise into the upper ten as an isolated miracle,
a freak of nature. “The average wage-earner has made up his mind that he must remain a wage
earner…” observed the trade union leader John Mitchell. “He understands that working men do not
evolve into capitalists as boys evolve into men are as caterpillars evolve into butterflies…”

The constraints and dangers of labor decisively shaped gender roles, childhood, and family
arrangements for the working class. When so few working-class men could support a family,
working-class women had to make money. Most labored for pay at same point in their lives. Unlike
nearly all middle- and upper-class women, working-class women typically took jobs before
marriage. Many held semiskilled positions in textile mills, garment shops, and box factories. Others
worked as domestic servants and field hands. However briefly, they entered the mostly male world
of wage work that few middle- and upper-class women ever experienced. After marriage and
childbirth, the wives and mothers of same particularly hard-pressed laboring families had no choice
but to return to the workplace. Even stay-at home working-class women contributed to family
income by helping husbands with craft work, making jewelry and artificial flowers, taking in
washing and sewing, keeping animals, or cooking and cleaning for paying boarders.

Children worked as well. Although same ethnic groups, notably immigrant Jews, placed a high
value an education, economic realities forced sons and daughters, like Rahel Golub, to leave school

early. In the South, boys and girls as young as seven and eight labored in the textile mills, first as
unpaid helpers for their parents and siblings, then as wage earners in their own right. In cities around
the country, boys got their start on the streets as newsboys, peddlers, junkers, scavengers, even
thieves. Girls occasionally worked as newsies and peddlers, but, not surprisingly, parents wanted
their daughters off the streets and in the home, where they helped with cooking, cleaning, childcare,
handicraft work, and boarders. In one way or another, most working-class children were contributing
to family income by their mid-teens. Few went to high school.

In one sense, then, working-class children grew up fast. “I was twelve years old but I wasn’t,”
recalled Yetta Adelman, a Polish garment worker. “Compared to a child [born] here in the United
States I was twenty.” In another sense, working-class children grew up quite slowly. Like Rahel’s
father, working-class parents made sure their sons and daughters did not think too much about
independence. The crowded conditions of their homes made it that much harder for children to
develop a sense of their individuality and autonomy. Wage work did little to change this reality. For
the most part, working-class sons and daughters dutifully turned over their wages to their parents.
They tended to live with those parents longer-even into their twenties-than did middle- and upper-
class children. As Italian children in Pittsburgh put it, “you never left your mother and father.”

That sentiment was no doubt reassuring for working-class husbands and fathers, who were “old
at forty.” Yet, they lived with the discouraging knowledge that they could not match middle- and
upper-class men. “A tailor is nothing,” sighed a German immigrant, “without a wife and very often a
child.” “I left Europe and I was a man” a Russian Jew lamented, “and here I am a what?” America,
Ukrainian men concluded, is “a woman’s country.” That frustrating thought led some working-class
men to give up. In the South there were the “mill daddies” idle fathers who abandoned work in the
textile factories and depended instead on the earnings of their wives and children. For many
working-class men who continued to labor, life seemed to exact a toll in frustration, drink, and
domestic violence. Perhaps that was why Rahel Golub’s father, already dependent on his daughter’s
wages, beat her when she defied his order to eat dinner.

Immigrant and migrant workers had an especially strong sense of the economic interdependence
at the heart of working-class family life. Many immigrants came to America with some notion of a
“family economy” in which each member of the family, under the direction of the male head, con-
tributed his or her earnings and resources for the benefit of the whole. Like Rahel Golub’s family,
people came to America in chains of families, as relatives in the United States sent back news and
steamship tickets to the next immigrants. Once in the New World, immigrants depended on relatives
to show them the ropes, keep storekeepers from cheating them, and find and teach them work.
Native-born migrants from the countryside also depended on kin to make the transition to mill towns
and cities. At every step of the way – from Europe to America, from the country to the city, from
childhood to adulthood – workers knew that strong mutual ties made life possible in America.

They worked hard, but their attitudes toward work were far from Victorian. Most workers labored
out of compulsion, need, ambition, and pride. But given the dangers and indignities of wage labor,
there was little chance that laboring men would mimic the Victorians and glorify hard work. There
was also virtually no chance for American workers to mimic the outlook of the upper ten and
celebrate a life of leisure: laboring men and women spent far too much time on the job for that.
“Father” asked Rahel Golub soon after her arrival in New York, “does everybody in America live
like this? Go to work early, come home late, eat and go to sleep? And the next day again work, eat,
and sleep?” Most workers did. At the turn of the century, employees in the blast furnaces of
Pittsburgh’s steel mills often toiled twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Around the country, live-
in domestic servants labored eleven or twelve hours a day, with two half days off a week-and then

remained “on call” at almost all hours. Only a privileged minority, such as unionized cigar workers,
lived the dream of an eight-hour day, forty-hour week.

Despite the limits on their free time and income, many laboring men and women did share with
the wealthy a powerful attraction to pleasures and objects. Countless immigrant workers were drawn
to the United States because the country held out the promise of consumer pleasures. “My godfather
was in Detroit and wrote me that he had paper on the walls, shoes, meat every day, fresh bread, milk,
water in the house, beer on the corner, soup, and plenty of money” a Polish immigrant recalled.
“From that time I was crazy to come.” But industrializing America proved to be an expensive place.
Rents in Pittsburgh were twice as high as in the English manufacturing city of Birmingham. In order
to save money or even get by in this expensive country, many working-class Americans typically
had to deny their appetites, just as Rahel gave up her apple at breakfast and her father skipped his
brandy. Yet, other workers felt that lack of money and opportunity made self-restraint irrelevant.
Many wage workers, notably single men and Southern plain folk, saw little point in trying to save
their dollars and deny themselves.

As a result, a rich culture of release and expressiveness flourished. Some workers shared the
upper-class obsession with fashion and display. Young laboring women spent precious dollars on
flashy clothing intended to match or even outdo the upper ten. “If my lady wears a velvet gown, put
together for her in an East Side sweatshop” a reporter in New York observed in 1898, “may not the
girl whose fingers fashioned it rejoice her soul by astonishing Grand Street with a copy of it next
Sunday? My lady’s in velvet, and the East Side girl’s is the cheapest, but it’s the style that counts. In
this land of equality, shall not one wear what the other wears?” The clothing of young working-class
women was bold, unconventional, and overstated: “Does Broadway wear a feather? Grand Street
wears two. Are trailing skirts seen on Fifth Avenue? Grand Street trails its yards with a dignity all its
own.”

Workers were known for their boisterous observance of the Fourth of July and their noisy,
demonstrative behavior in theaters. Public drinking was a further element of this expressive life.
Amid Victorian abstemiousness, the saloon had emerged as a vital working-class institution by the
late nineteenth century. The barroom served many functions-meeting place, reading room, music
hall, ethnic preserve, and male bastion. The saloon was also the place where workers dropped the
discipline of the workplace and loosened self-control.

For many workers, sex offered a similar opportunity for expression and release. In towns and
cities, working-class neighborhoods were associated with the public display of sexuality. Men and
women made physical contact in the popular dance halls that featured such risqué steps as the hug
me close, the shiver, the hump-back rag, and the lovers’ walk. “Couples stand very close together” a
middle-class observer noted, “the girl with her arms around the man’s neck, the man with both his
arms around the girl or on her hips; their cheeks are pressed close together, their bodies touch each
other.” Working-class neighborhoods were also the site of brothels and red-light districts. Most
prostitutes were apparently working-class women desperate for a living wage.

As it celebrated pleasure and release, the public culture of the working class still embodied the
mutualism taught at home. The quintessential saloon custom was the practice of treating, in which a
man bought a round of drinks for his mates and they bought drinks for him. On the giant wheat
farms of California, rootless, single male migrant harvesters and threshers developed “a strong sense
of confederation” out of shared coarse humor, hunting, banjo music, cards, and drinking binges.
Single working women forged their own mutualistic communities in cities such as Chicago. Mutual
aid associations, like the one Rahel’s father had joined pooled contributions so that individual

workers and families could cope with unemployment, illness, and death. Trade unions, like the one
Rahel and her father had joined, celebrated collective action and condemned upper-class
individualism. “The organization of laborers into Trades Unions” wrote the labor reformer George
McNeill, “recognizes the fact that mutualism is preferable to individualism.” The middle-class
journalist Herbert Croly saw workers’ unions the same way. “[The] American laborer… is… far
more aggressively preoccupied with his class, as contrasted with his individual interests, than are his
employers,” Croly observed. “He has no respect for the traditional American individualism… His
own personality is merged in that of the union.” It was a formula for labor strife; and it would help
fuel the middle-class rebellion to come.

The nation’s farmers also seemed to share little with the rich at the turn of the century. Like
the working class, farmers lived precariously; they, too, valued cooperation and practiced a form of
family economy. Like many workers, farmers had a practical, unromantic view of work, a restrained
attitude toward leisure, and a wary skepticism about pleasure. But farmers were set apart from
workers as well as from the rich. Unlike most of the working class, agrarians had not lost the chance
for economic self-rule. Squeezed by competition and threatened by nature, American agrarians could
aspire if not to wealth then at least to independence. Unlike workers, farmers ruled over their own
domain, however small. On a far smaller scale, they could be as lordly as the Stillmans, Harrimans,
and Morgans. America’s farmers were a cultural hybrid, caught between independence and dire
need.

The pressures of agrarian life and culture were starkly apparent in the story of Richard Garland
and his family. This longtime farmer loved to hear his wife, Belle, sing his favorite song, “O’er the
Hills in Legions, Boys” with its exuberant, imperial chorus: “When we’ve wood and prairie land, /
Won by our toil, / We’ll reign like kings in fairy land, / Lords of the soil!” That song, Richard’s son
Hamlin wrote, “was a directing force in the lives of at least three generations of my pioneering race”
In the 1850s, the dream of dominion and independence had directed Richard Garland’s father to
leave the Northeast and strike out west for Wisconsin. There, Richard had mortgaged a 160-acre
farm of his own in Green’s Coulee, a little valley along the LaCrosse River. His belief in that
economic and political vision-the dream of a free man, lord of his agricultural domain, the equal of
his fellow lords was so strong that Richard, like millions of other Northern men, was ready to fight
for it. The day he paid off his mortgage in 1863, Richard joined the Union Army and went to battle
the slave-holding, freedom-denying South. After the Civil War, Richard’s vision directed him farther
and farther west on the nation’s “Middle Border” to ever larger farms and better lands that would
surely, he believed, make him a true “lord of the soil” Richard moved first to Winneshiek County,
Minnesota, then to Mitchell County, Iowa, and then on to Brown County in the Dakota Territory in
the 1880s.

Richard’s quest for independence depended on the labor of his family. He could not take care of
his land alone: his Dakota wheat farm sprawled across nearly a thousand acres. Neither could he
afford to hire all the laborers his land demanded. So Richard turned to his family for help. Hamlin
remembered how hard his mother worked. “Being a farmer’s wife…” he noted, “meant laboring
outside any regulation of the hours of toil.” Belle not only managed the Garland household and fed
her children and her husband; she also cooked and cleaned for his hired hands. As Richard’s farms
grew larger, Belle had only more “drudgery… cooking, sewing, washing, churning, and nursing the
sick from time to time” As soon as they were old enough, Richard’s children -Hamlin, Frank,
Harriet, and Jessie- began to work on the farm. “My father believed in service.” Hamlin explained.
“He saw nothing unnatural in the regular employment of his children.” At seven Hamlin had

“regular duties.” “I brought firewood to the kitchen and broke nubbins for the calves and shelled
corn for the chickens,” he remembered. “In summer Harriet and I drove the cows to pasture, and
carried’ switchel’ to the men in the hay-fields…” Hamlin soon graduated to more demanding tasks,
including dragging and plowing.

Working hard for his father, Hamlin absorbed contradictory messages. On one hand, his father
taught stern lessons about mutualism and self-denial that Rahel Golub would have found familiar.
Richard schooled his children to obey his will, not their own. “We were in effect small soldiers…”
Hamlin recalled. Richard, the Civil War veteran, was their “Commander-in-Chief.” Like Rahel,
Hamlin had his first real confrontation with his father over the impulse to gratify an individual
desire. In his teens, Hamlin wanted a fashionable lightweight yellow duster like the one owned by
his friend John Gammons, who was known as “somewhat of a dandy in matters of toilet.” Richard
declined. “If you are too warm” he told Hamlin, “take your coat off.’ At first, Hamlin obeyed. But,
“furious” the boy “rebelled” against “the Commander-in-Chief.” “As I am not only doing a man’s
work on a boy’s pay but actually superintending the stock and tools, I am entitled to certain
individual rights in the choice of a hat” he told Richard. “You will wear the hat I provide,” Richard
insisted. “For the first time in my life I defied him,” Hamlin reported. “He seized me by the arm and
for a moment we faced each other in silent clash of wills.” “Don’t you strike me” Hamlin warned.
“You can’t do that any more.” Richard, “after a silent struggle with himself,” handed Hamlin two
dollars. “Get your own hat,” the farmer told his son, and walked off. Like Rahel, Hamlin had gotten
his way. And like her, he was shocked at what he had done.

In a sense, Richard’s” silent struggle” and capitulation were not surprising. Unlike Rahel’s father,
Hamlin’s wanted independence for his child. Richard wanted Hamlin to follow his own path, to
grow up and become an independent “lord of the soil.” So, teaching obedience on one hand, Richard
taught Hamlin independence on the other. “Fight your own battles, my son,” Richard instructed. “If I
hear of your being licked by a boy of anything like your own size, I’ll give you another when you
get home.” Hamlin got the message. His father’s farms were, he concluded, “a stern school, the
school of self-reliance and resolution.

Across the continent, the nation’s nearly 6 million farmers would easily have recognized that
“school.” Their farmsteads likely differed from Dick Garland’s. Notably diverse, American
agriculture ranged from the developing dairy farms of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states to
the increasingly mechanized grain and hog farms of the Midwest, to the impoverished sharecropping
cotton and tobacco plots of the South, and on out to the giant wheat farms and cattle ranches of the
West. About two-thirds of American farmers, like Dick Garland, owned or mortgaged their land.
The rest were renters, tenants, and sharecroppers who cultivated other people’s land under a
bewildering variety of agreements. In the North, renters were often young men who would purchase
land eventually. In the South, tenants and sharecroppers, laboring on unfavorable terms, were less
likely to become independent. The poorest of the sharecroppers, without animals and tools of their
own, were virtually as dependent as wage workers. But for all the variations in land, crops, profits,
and ownership, American agrarians generally shared the central practices and values Hamlin
Garland learned on his father’s farm.

Hardly any man or woman could manage to do all the work of a farm alone; a farmer had to have
help. But as late as 1910, American farmers’ average annual income was only $652. This average
concealed notable differences. Landowning agrarians – the “progressive” farmers of the North and
the “yeomen” of the South- typically made more money than sharecroppers and tenants.
Nevertheless, the great majority of farmers could not afford to hire all the help they needed. And all
farmers, however wealthy, faced the same threats from nature -the droughts, wind storms, insects,

illness, and other perils that could doom one harvest and then another. These economic and natural
realities almost inevitably compelled farmers to develop various forms of mutualism.

One was the stereotypical “family farm.” “There is a co-operative unity in the farm family that is
rather striking,” an observer noted. “The whole family is engaged in work that is of common
interest.” Other rural wives and mothers worked as hard as Belle Garland did. Like her, they saw to
the farmhands and sometimes took in paying boarders. By tradition, farm wives also raised chickens
and tended garden plots. The cash these women earned from selling eggs, vegetables, and other
products was often the only money a farm family saw before the harvest. Farm women frequently
labored in the family’s fields. Sometimes, they worked for payoff the farm.

Children also played a critical role in the survival of American farms. “[E]very boy born into a
farm family was,” one farmer observed, “worth a thousand dollars.” Girls were worth more than a
little, too. That understanding helped to explain high rural fertility rates -the highest in the nation.
Most farm women still had several children at the turn of the century. On the frontier farms of South
Dakota and the poor white farms of the South, families with eight, nine, or ten children were not
uncommon. Like working-class sons and daughters, the children of farmers had to grow up quickly.
Like Hamlin and his siblings, other farm children helped out with the chores. Many did wage work.
On Southern cotton farms, a nine- or ten-year-old was already reckoned a “half-hand” able to pick
half as much as an adult. As in working-class households, education often had to give way to work.
The school year was typically shorter in the countryside than in the city. Farm parents were more
likely to take their children out of school. When Hamlin Garland wanted to stay in school rather than
work full-time at the age of sixteen, it took his mother’s determined intervention before Richard
would agree. Even then, Hamlin had to wait until November before his father let him go back to his
studies. In many farm families, a sixteen year-old would never have gone back at all.

At times, farmers needed more help than wives, children, and paid farmhands could provide.
American agrarians had long cooperated with one another through a variety of formal and informal
arrangements. To secure needed goods and services, rural neighbors established systems of
borrowing and bartering. This tradition of mutual aid culminated toward the end of the nineteenth
century in Midwestern threshing” rings” groups of farmers who rented expensive mechanical grain
threshers together and then worked the large, complicated machines on one another’s farms at
threshing time. Immigrant farmers had their own forms of cooperation -the churches and mutual-
benefit associations similar to those of the cities. In the 1870’s, the Patrons of Husbandry, the
farmers’ organization known as the Grange, tried a number of cooperative efforts. For a couple of
years in Mitchell County, Iowa, Richard Garland managed one of the thousands of local Grange
grain elevators, cooperative ventures intended to net farmers better prices than those offered by
commercial elevator operators. In the 1880s and 189Os, the Farmer’s Alliance developed its own
cooperatives for purchasing supplies and processing and marketing crops.

There were limits to cooperation, however. Most of the farmers’ cooperatives collapsed, partly
because of mismanagement and competition. The cooperatives were also undermined by farmers’
strong sense of individual self-interest and autonomy. One early supporter of the cooperatives traced
their failure to “the in-adaptation of rural life and character to the cooperative method of managing
business.” Farmers tended, he explained, “to gratify their whims” rather than support their own
cooperatives. As Richard Garland angrily discovered when he managed the Grange elevator in the
1870S, many farmers would abandon the cooperative whenever they could get” a little more than the
market price” for their grain somewhere else. “It only shows… how hard it will be to work out any
reform among the farmers,” he concluded bitterly. “They will never stand together.” His lesson duly
learned, Richard went back to farming – and his independent ways.

Richard Garland was typical. “Completeness, individuality, self-dependence, is the ideal life
which the country should stimulate – a state so desirable for the really developed man,” an agrarian
advocate maintained in 1890. Isolated by poor roads and poor mail service, farm families felt
independent. Like Garland, agrarian parents prepared their children for the difficult life ahead by
encouraging personal toughness and independence. Farmers’ children obviously expected to help
their parents, but it would have been unusual to hear a son or daughter echo the Italian children of
Pittsburgh and say “you never left your mother and father.” When Hamlin Garland decided to leave
home, Richard did not beg or order him to stay. Instead, the “Commander-in-Chief” handed Hamlin
some travel money. More prosperous Northern farmers in particular tried to prepare their children
for independence. Recognizing that their sons and daughters might well leave the land, mothers and
fathers first provided adolescent children with a “room of one’s own,” a separate bedroom; next
came livestock and plots of land, along with encouragement to make money and manage it for
themselves.

Unlike the upper ten, rural couples were highly unlikely to divorce. But this rather Victorian
commitment to the permanence of marriage did not mean that agrarian husbands and wives were
committed to the Victorian domestic ideal. Set amid barns, chicken coops, and fields, the American
farmhouse was no refuge. Rural women contributed much to the family economy. Agrarian fathers
spent a good deal of time supervising their sons and daughters. As Hamlin Garland and thousands of
other hardworking farm children could testify, their fathers were hardly remote figures. Men and
women mixed together more readily in sitting rooms, camp meetings, and picnics than did city
dwellers. Joining the Grange and the Farmer’s Alliance, women participated in discussion in both
groups.

Rural attitudes toward work and leisure were neither Victorian nor working-class. Farm labor was
as difficult as any working-class occupation and often just as dull – hardly something to glorify.
Even in the more prosperous North, agriculture was barely mechanized at the turn of the century.
Farmers, unlike wage workers, could set their own pace much of the time, but that pace was
demanding. Life on the farm, a commentator noted in 1896, was “drudge, drudge, drudge, from
daylight to dark, day after day, month after month, year after year.” Most farmers worked a six- or
seven-day week and took no vacations. Yet, farmers took pleasure in work when they could and just
accepted it for the rest. ‘They had always worked” the son of a ranch family recalled. “[T]hey
assumed that work was a condition of life.”

Although American farmers worked hard, most of them seemed not to be particularly acquisitive.
Well into the nineteenth century, many farmers, distant from the market, had lived fairly self-
sufficient lives; they raised what they needed on their land, and bartered for much of the rest. By
1900, that self-sufficiency had largely ended. Whether they wanted to or not, most farmers now
produced cash crops for the market. Caught up in a thoroughly commercial enterprise, they needed
money to get by in turn-of-the-century America. That did not necessarily make them lust for capital,
however. Farmers might work hard to buy their land and to see that it went to their children, but they
had no great yearning for riches. The typical farm was no place to make a fortune, in any event.
Agrarians were not entranced by leisure and pleasure, either. Obviously, hardworking farmers had
little time for leisure. They tended to spend that time attending meetings and revivals, hunting and
fishing, and just singing and talking at home. Some agrarians, Southern poor whites in particular,
liked their liquor; but others practiced temperance or at least preached self-discipline. “My father did
not believe in serving strong liquor to his men, and seldom treated them to even beer,” Hamlin
Garland remembered. “While not a teetotaler he was strongly opposed to all that intemperance
represented.” Agrarians were similarly restrained about sexual pleasure and personal affection.

“Love was… a forbidden word,” Garland recalled. “You might say, ‘I love pie; but to say ‘I love
Bettie,’ was mawkish if not actually improper.”

This sense of restraint helped produce a growing divide between farmers and their hands, who
zestfully embraced the working-class culture of expressiveness and pleasure. By the turn of the
century, farmers talked about their wage-earning “labor” with suspicion and contempt. They derided
these men “as hobos, tramps, and bums” – “men whose lives and aims are not on so high a plain.”
Farmhands, said Hamlin Garland, “are often creatures with enormous appetites and small remorse,
men on whom the beauty of nature had very little effect.” For them, time off meant “a visit to town
and a drunken spree.” Their talk of women and vice districts “shocked and horrified” the young
Garland: “We had not known that such cruelty, such baseness was in the world and it stood away in
such violent opposition to the teaching of our fathers and uncles…”

Farmers were similarly restrained about consumerism. Farmhouses ranged from Southern
sharecroppers’ pathetic one- or two-room shacks to Northern “progressive” farmers’ framed,
sometimes bricked houses, with two-gabled roofs. But they were all generally plain. Inside even the
most prosperous farmhouses, there was not much in the way of objects-some factory-made furniture,
perhaps a sewing machine, possibly a piano. Even prosperous farmers, proud of their houses, still
disdained urban showiness. Instead of an ornate, overstuffed parlor, there was a simple sitting room
with a plain rag carpet. Rural life was unadorned in other ways, too: children had few toys; parents
had few good clothes. Farmers were simply reluctant to take money away from their barns and
fields. Even when crop prices were good, Hamlin Garland recalled, “the homes in the neighborhood
were slow in taking on grace or comfort.”

So alien in condition and outlook, farmers, workers, and wealthy almost inevitably came into

conflict. The relentless development of the industrial economy, the increasing spread of news in
papers and magazines, and the unceasing political contests of a democracy all made the different
classes constantly aware of one another and generated the many signs of friction in late nineteenth-
century America. It was an unstable situation – the more so because each group suffered from
organizational weakness and internal divisions.

By 1900, farmers’ largest cooperative endeavors, optimistically begun in the Gilded Age, had
already waxed and waned. The once-mighty Grange numbered only about 98,000 families
nationwide. Perhaps 30,000 or 40,000 agrarians belonged to other farmers’ organizations. The vote
totals of the People’s Party, the greatest political expression of agrarianism, had lurched downward
from a million in the presidential election of 1892 to a mere 50,000 in the national contest of 1900.
In the South, Populism had provoked costly retaliation: powerful whites were making sure that
virtually all African-Americans and even some poor white farmers lost the right to cast ballots in
elections. At the start of the new century, any new agrarian political organization would have to
draw from a greatly diminished bloc of voters.

Agrarians were themselves partly to blame for their organizational weakness. Agrarians with
different kinds of crops did not always care enough about one another’s challenges. Well-to-do
farmers often had little sympathy for the poorest agrarians. Ethnic and racial prejudice kept farmers
divided from one another. In the 1890s, nativism ran through the countryside as the American
Protective Association railed against the malign influence of foreigners and Roman Catholics on the
nation. But at least farmers were fairly homogeneous ethnically. As late as 1910, immigrants-
Canadians, Norwegians, Swedes, and, above all, Germans- made up only about 10 percent of farm
operators. And the immigrants did not differ fundamentally in practices and outlook from native-

born farmers.
Race made a starker, more difficult divide across rural America. Only a couple of thousand

Japanese and several hundred Chinese operated farms, mostly in the West, at the turn of the century.
They faced substantial hostility and discrimination from whites. Meanwhile, about three-quarters of
a million African-Americans operated farms, mainly in the South. White prejudice against black
farmers had seriously weakened the Farmer’s Alliance and the People’s Party. In most cases across
the South, white and black agrarians had formed separate alliances. When white elites moved to
disfranchise Southern blacks, too many white farmers were unwilling to defend the African-
Americans’ right to vote. By 1900, agrarian leaders such as the old Populist Tom Watson of Georgia
were whipping up racial hatred instead.

Dogged by organizational weakness and internal division, agrarians also suffered from a more
general sense of defeat and decline. Richard Garland was fairly typical in this respect. The hard work
and hybrid rural culture of his family never quite made Richard the independent “lord of the soil” he
wanted to be. Each year, harvests were too small, or prices too low. Chinch bugs-”pestiferous mites”
with “ill-smelling crawling bodies”-ate up his crops two years running and drove him out Iowa.
Drought and low prices plagued him in Dakota. Death struck along the way, too: Harriet died in
Iowa; Jessie died in Dakota. “Where are the ‘woods and prairie lands’ of our song?” Hamlin asked
his brother Frank. “Is this the ‘fairy land’ in which we were all to ‘reign like kings’? Doesn’t the
whole migration of the Garlands… seem a madness?”

Hamlin was not the only agrarian asking such questions as the 1890s arrived. By the middle of
that difficult decade, most farmers across the nation, however prosperous, had begun to feel
diminished. Like Richard Garland, whose farms increased from 160 acres to 300 to 1,000 as he
moved westward, American agriculture had grown in the late nineteenth century yet somehow
deteriorated in the process. Despite increases in farms, population, and aggregate wealth, agricultural
America was falling behind the nation’s urban areas. “While rural conditions are actually no worse
than they were thirty years ago, relatively they are worse,” noted one observer in 1906. “The cities of
the United States have moved forward by leaps and bounds.” Though the number of agricultural
workers increased, the number of non-farm workers increased still faster. Agriculturalists, a majority
of the gainful workforce as late as 1870, made up only 38 percent of the nations labor by 1900.
Farms, which accounted for about 40 percent of the nation’s wealth before the Civil War, now
represented only 16 percent. Even a rise in crop prices in the late 1890s did little to change the
farmers’ relative economic position: in 1900 non-farm workers averaged $622 in income but farm
workers averaged only $260.

The sense of decline powerfully affected younger agrarians. As early as the 1880s and 1890s,
rural sons and daughters were questioning farm life. Hamlin and Frank Garland did not care for all
the hard, dull work on their father’s land. For Hamlin, the human toll of farming was unbearable. He
could not stand to see his mother worn down by all her labors and cares. The death of his sister
Harriet left Hamlin feeling “like a wounded animal, appalled by weight of despair and sorrow…”

Meanwhile, Hamlin and Frank had glimpsed another, much more alluring way of life. When their
father agreed to run the Grange elevator in Mitchell County, Iowa, he moved the family temporarily
to the town of Osage. For the Garland children, Osage was” a new and shining world, a town world
where circuses, baseball games and county fairs were events of almost daily occurrence.” Without
realizing it, Richard had critically weakened his hold on his children. The spectacle of Osage “had…
far-reaching effects” Hamlin remembered. “It tended to warp us horn our father’s designs. It placed
the rigorous, filthy drudgery of the farm-yard in sharp contrast with the carefree companionable
existence led by my friends in the village, and we longed to be of their condition. We had gained our

first set of comparative ideas, and with them an unrest which was to carry us very far away.”
Chief among those” comparative ideas” was the attractiveness of a life more devoted to pleasure.

The Garland children raptly drank in the leisure and consumption of the well-to-do. “We had
observed… how well Avery Brush’s hock coat fitted and we comprehended something of the elegant
leisure which the sons and daughters of Wm. Petty’s general store enjoyed” Hamlin wrote. “Over
against these comforts, these luxurious conditions, we now set our ugly little farmhouse, with its rag
carpets, its battered furniture, its barren attick, and its hard, rude beds. -All that we possessed seemed
very cheap and deplorably commonplace.”

By the time he reached the age of twenty-one, in 1881, Hamlin Garland was animated by a vision
quite different from the one that had driven his father. Richard had been inspired to go west to live
out the agrarian dream of independence; Hamlin was inspired to go east to live out an urban dream
of consumer pleasures. Leaving the farm that year, Hamlin became a writer-a successful one, too,
with the publication in 1891 of Main- Travelled Roads, a book of six stories about rural life on
America’s “middle border.” The pattern of Hamlin’s life was set: his career as a middle-class writer
in Boston, Chicago, and New York City depended on the farm, but he would never be a farmer.
Neither would Frank, who also left home for an urban life as an actor.

The Garlands’ exposure to a life-style of leisure and consumerism was not unique. By 1900, farm
families did not have to move into town to glimpse another way of life. Since the Civil War,
pioneering mail-order businesses had produced increasingly thick and beguiling catalogs filled with
clocks, sewing machines, clothes, sporting goods, and other consumer pleasures. Beginning in 1872,
John Montgomery Ward of Chicago built the first great mail-order business; by the end of the
century, Sears, Roebuck and Company was successfully challenging Ward’s hold on the rural
market.

Paging through the Sears and Ward catalogs, rural sons and daughters found more reasons to
escape the relative decline of the American farm. Like Hamlin and Frank Garland, young people
with” a desire for improvement, an ambition for wider success, an impulse to greatness,” kept
leaving for towns and cities. “Sons were deserting their well-worn fathers, daughters were forgetting
their tired mothers,” Hamlin concluded. “Families were everywhere breaking up.”

At the turn of the century, wage workers did not have to worry about the survival of their class.
As long as industrial capitalism endured, there would be plenty of low-wage manual jobs. But
workers, like farmers, suffered from organizational weakness and internal division. The union
movement was still more a promise than a power. Hard times, hostile, employers, and unfriendly
courts handicapped organized labor in the 1890s. With the gradual return of prosperity, the total
number of unionized workers shot up from 447,000 in 1897 to 1,125,000 in 1901. Nevertheless,
unions claimed only a small fraction – less than 10 percent – of the American workforce. Unions had
barely penetrated broad sectors of the economy and had left numerous working-class occupations
almost alone – semiskilled factory workers, domestic servants, agricultural laborers. The most
ambitious attempt to organize across occupational lines, the Knights of Labor, had grown aston-
ishingly in the 1880s and then collapsed. The largest national labor organization at the turn of the
century, the American Federation of Labor, consisted almost exclusively of craft unions of male,
skilled workers.

Working-class political organization was still less developed. Gilded Age ventures such as the
Union Labor Party had come and gone. The most promising political vehicle, powered by a form of
mutualist ideology, was socialism. But in 1900, Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the American
Railway Union, won only 87,000 votes as the Social Democratic candidate for president. Third-party

political action was controversial. Many trade unionists held back from partisan endorsements, let
alone separate political action. And most politically active workers cast ballots for the Republicans
and Democrats.

One of the chief obstacles to political action and unionization was the striking diversity of
American wage earners. In 1900, the majority of the 36 to 40 million members of the working class
were Protestants. But most of the nation’s 10 million Roman Catholics and several hundred thousand
Jews were workers. In 1900, 26 million people, more than a third of the population, were immigrants
or native-born Americans with at least one foreign-born parent; most of this minority belonged to the
working class. And the immigrant population was surging as the economy revived: the 229,000
arrivals of 1898 were followed by 449,000 in 1900 and more than a million in 1905. The immigrants
were becoming more diverse, too, as Southern and Eastern Europeans like Rahel Golub and her
family increasingly supplanted the German, English, and Irish mainstays of nineteenth-century
migration. Moreover, the predominantly white working class also included many of the nation’s 10
million African-Americans, 103,000 Mexicans, 82,000 Chinese, and 25,000 Japanese.

All these differences of race, ethnicity, and religion produced suspicion, antagonism, and conflict
among workers. Irishmen harassed Rahel Golub’s father and other Jews on the Lower East Side.
Around the country, Irish, Polish, and Italian Catholics fought for control of churches, and trade
unionists kept out blacks. Working-class children quickly learned to respect and perpetuate such
divisions. In New York City, Jewish boys who strayed into Catholic or Protestant neighborhoods
discovered what it meant to be “cockalized.” “The enemy kids,” a victim recalled, “threw the Jew to
the ground, opened his pants, and spat and urinated on his circumcised penis while they shouted
“Christ killer.’” Racial, ethnic, and religious differences spilled over into occupational differences
among workers. Skilled “labor aristocrats” prizing their high wages and specialized knowledge,
often looked down on less-skilled workers. The leaders of the American Federation of Labor, mostly
skilled craftsmen from German, Irish, or English stock, wanted nothing to do with the unskilled
workers who came from Eastern and Southern Europe. And occupational differences in turn spilled
over into gender differences. Despite Rahel Golub’s experience, very few male unionists welcomed
wage-earning women into their organizations around the country.

Like farmers, workers also faced the loss of children enticed by other ways of living. Frank
Capra, born in Sicily a few years after Rahel Golub, passed through New York City with his family
on the way to Los Angeles early in the new century. Although the California city was three thousand
miles from the Lower East Side, Capra found the same kind of working-class life that Rahel had
come to know so well. But Capra could not stand it. “I hated being poor” he said. “Hated being a
scrounging news kid trapped in the sleazy Sicilian ghetto of Los Angeles… I wanted out. A quick
out. Capra was sure that education would give him that out. His family, like most working-class
families, believed jobs were more important than school. “To my family I was a maverick,” he
recalled. “I was jeered at, scorned, and even beaten.” Finally, Capra’s determination forced a
compromise. As long as he made money for the family by selling papers and doing odd jobs, he
could go to school. Daring to “think of myself as another Horatio Alger, the success kid, my own
rags-to-riches hero,” Frank Capra was on his way-to high school, to Cal Tech, and ultimately to
wealth and fame as a film director.

Rahel Golub’s story illustrated another way that workers could lose hold of their children.
Although Rahel submitted to her parents, she still felt the tension between the demands of family
and her individuality. How captivating it was to think of one’s self. She remembered the shock of
reading a Hebrew translation of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield: “I turned to the first page of
the story and read the heading of the chapter: ‘I am born.’ Something in these three little words

appealed to me more than anything I had yet read. I could not have told why, but perhaps it was the
simplicity and the intimate tone of the first person. I had not yet read anything written in the first
person.”

For a long time, that sense of self, of life lived in the first person, was only a faint, private stirring
within her. To meet her obligation to the family, Rahel continued to work hard when she could and
then agreed to marry Israel when he asked. Nevertheless, she could not bear the prospect of life with
this shopkeeper and his mother. Eventually Rahel had the courage to give him back his ring and risk
her family’s reaction. “Mother cried bitterly,” Rahel remembered, “and father, who had been so
quiet, so silent all afternoon, went out into the street without saying a word.” Powerful as they were,
the old ties could not survive the revolt of too many Rahel Golubs and Frank Capras.

Despite the weaknesses and internal divisions that plagued workers and farmers, the upper ten
still could not manage to take the lead in a divided America. By 1900, the rich had their own
problems. The rising number of divorces and other danger signals warned of a basic instability in
wealthy families. So many rich men and women seemed chronically unhappy. The sons of the upper
class were particularly unfortunate. Inevitably measured against their famously successful fathers
and grandfathers, wealthy boys found men like Rockefeller and Morgan a hard act to follow. Not
only that, but the sons of the upper ten had to perform a tricky balancing act their fathers had been
spared: these boys and young men had to be conscious of the responsibilities of wealth yet immune
to its temptations; they had to be loyal to the family yet independent enough to lead it effectively in
the future. To help meet these challenges, anxious upper-class parents confined Cornelius Vanderbilt
IV and other boys in the fortress like mansions and secluded boarding schools, safe from the lure to
spend too much money or to meet unsavory strangers.

Despite such efforts, or partly because of them, upper-class boys too often became miserable
young men. “My life was never destined to be quite happy,” said William K. “Willie” Vanderbilt,
grandson of the Commodore. “It was laid out along lines which I could foresee almost from earliest
childhood. It has left me with nothing to hope for, with nothing definite to see or strive for.” That
realization often led to indolence, incapacity, and even self-destruction. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had
a nervous breakdown at sixteen. The Bradley Martins’ son Sherman was evidently an alcoholic with
“an inordinate desire for liquor” “[He] had too much money to spend and too much time to spare.”
The New York Times reported. “His parents, with an indulgence that he had been accustomed to
from childhood, permitted him to do pretty much as he pleased… “Falling in with a “dissolute set”
in fashionable London, Sherman, underage, married a music hall “ballet girl” without his parents’
knowledge. In December 1894, he left a sanitarium in Hartford, Connecticut and went drinking with
friends in Manhattan. Collapsing into unconsciousness in a cafe, Sherman died of “apoplexy of the
brain” the next morning at the age of twenty-five.

The plight of upper-class children helped turn key members of the upper ten against the frivolous
life of High Society. Some businessmen, such as Morgan, avoided it as much as possible. One
upper-class group, descendants of the Knickerbocker founders of New York, self-consciously
offered an alternative public style. This so-called Faubourg-St. Germain set, including the Van
Rensselaers and the Roosevelts, rejected ostentation and frivolity and emphasized intellectual culture
and quiet home life instead. Decidedly “old money” the Faubourg-St. Germain set also objected to
High Society’s willingness to admit rich new members to its ranks. The Knickerbocker descendants
believed the upper class would best survive by keeping out unsuitable nouveau riches. The values of
the Faubourg-St. Germain set were the product of necessity: these people had the pedigrees but not
the huge fortunes necessary to triumph in High Society. Yet, the Knickerbocker elite also acted out

of a different sense of what life was all about.
So did perhaps the two richest New Yorkers at the turn of the century. John D. Rockefeller and

Andrew Carnegie, migrants to the city, certainly had the money to compete in Society, but both
abhorred the world of the Bradley Martins. Neither was known for ostentation; indeed, Rockefeller
was considered “poor in his pleasures.” But both men were also critical of “unostentatious
hoarding.” Looking for another way of life, the two found it in philanthropy.

Mostly for religious reasons, Rockefeller had long been a giving man. Driven by Protestant
beliefs in the stewardship of God’s gifts, he made charitable contributions as soon as he began
earning money as a teenager in the 1850s. By the 1890s, Rockefeller’s commitment to philanthropy
also reflected his realization that the pursuit of money and pleasure was ultimately unsatisfying. “I
know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the waking hours of the
day to making money for money’s sake,” Rockefeller declared. The conversion of money into
possessions was not very satisfying either. “The novelty of being able to purchase anything one
wants soon passes, because what people most seek cannot be bought with money,” he said. “As I
study wealthy men, I can see but one way in which they can secure a real equivalent for money
spent, and that is to cultivate a taste for giving where the money may produce an effect which will be
a lasting gratification.”

Simply because Rockefeller had so much money, it was difficult for him to live up to his
philanthropic ideals. With the aid of his son, John, Jr., and his adviser, Baptist minister Frederick
Gates, Rockefeller increasingly made his giving more businesslike, “scientific” and grandiose. In
fact, he began to dream of a giant philanthropic “trust” to manage his benevolences. With the
establishment of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1901, the General Education
Board in 1903, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission in 1909, and ultimately the Rockefeller
Foundation in 1913, he realized that dream. Giving away hundreds of millions of his wealth to better
society, Rockefeller believed that other rich men ought to do the same. “[We] have come to the
period,” he said, “when we can well afford to ask the ablest men to devote more of their time,
thought, and money to the public well being.”

Carnegie, meanwhile, had reached the same conclusion by a different route. More than
Rockefeller, he presented philanthropy as an answer to the fundamental, perhaps intractable
problems of the industrial upper class. Beginning with two famous articles published in 1889,
Carnegie laid out what his British publisher titled “The Gospel of Wealth.” While Carnegie defended
the inequities of industrial capitalism, he recognized both the social isolation of the wealthy and the
plight of their children. The Scot also freely criticized the lifestyle of Society. “Whatever makes one
conspicuous offends the canon,” he insisted. “If any family be chiefly known for display, for
extravagance in home, table, or equipage, for enormous sums ostentatiously spent in any form upon
itself-if these be its chief distinctions, we have no difficulty in estimating its nature or culture.”
Noting the hostility between classes in America, he called on the wealthy to use their money for the
common good. “The problem of our age,” the steel baron wrote, “is the proper administration of
wealth, that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious
relationship.”

Carnegie also favored philanthropy for the sake of the rich themselves. If they spent their money
on ostentatious pleasures, they were guilty of offensive selfishness. If they tried to pass it on to their
offspring, they were making a terrible blunder. “Why should men leave great fortunes to their
children?” Carnegie asked. “[The] parent who leaves his son enormous wealth generally deadens the
talents and energies of the son, and tempts him to lead a less useful and less worthy life than he
otherwise would…” For the sake of their families, the rich should give their money away. “This,

then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth,” Carnegie concluded: “To set an example of
modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the
legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and, after doing so, to consider all surplus revenues
which come to him simply as trust funds… for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his
superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or
could do for themselves.”

In promulgating his Gospel of Wealth, Carnegie was not worried whether particular families
managed to retain their money and upper-class status over the years. At bottom, the steel magnate
doubted that wealth offered much of a basis for a self-perpetuating class. Unsurprisingly, perhaps,
this rare example of rags-to-riches mobility insisted “that the greatest and best of our race have
necessarily been nurtured in the bracing school of poverty – the only school capable of producing the
supremely great, the genius.” With no son to follow him, Carnegie wanted to promote turnover in
the membership of the upper ten. Most sons of the rich, he thought, should not hold places of
authority in their fathers’ companies. Believing the industrial elite needed a steady influx of talented
men from the lower classes, he made a special effort to elevate poor young workers to partnerships
in Carnegie Steel. Philanthropy was one more way to ensure that the wealthy, relieved of their
fortunes, would make way for new blood. To make sure the rich pursued philanthropy in life,
Carnegie even favored the heresy of inheritance taxes at death: rather than lose their money to the
government, wealthy men would likely prefer to give it away themselves for the public good.

Carnegie himself gave his money away with huge donations for higher education, public
libraries, hospitals, parks, meeting and concert halls, swimming pools, and churches. In 1911, he
founded the charitable Carnegie Foundation to continue his work. Distributing 90 percent of his
fortune before his death in 1919, Carnegie lived up to the prescriptions of the Gospel of Wealth. And
like Rockefeller, he expected the rest of the upper ten to do the same.

In their way, Carnegie and Rockefeller were the revolutionaries of the upper ten. More than most
other members of their class, these two men grasped its fundamental problems at the end of the
nineteenth century. Carnegie in particular understood just how ill-equipped were the wealthy to win
the battle for authority in America. Rejecting the acquisitive obsession of big businessmen, the
ostentation of the Bradley Martins, and the genteel withdrawal of the Faubourg-St. Germain set, the
Gospel of Wealth demanded a radically different approach to life. Carnegie tried to conceal his
radicalism: philanthropy, he insisted, was only “the further evolution of existing conditions…
founded upon the present most intense individualism.” But, not unexpectedly, few wealthy New
Yorkers were ready to follow Carnegie and Rockefeller. High Society held hardly any charitable
functions at the turn of the century; rich men set up few foundations. Having earned or inherited
their money, these New Yorkers were going to keep it. Whatever they thought of their sons and
daughters, the wealthy intended to leave their fortunes to the next generation.

Two generations had come and gone since the Civil War, but the fundamental problems of the
upper class remained unresolved. Many of the rich, isolated as they were, did not understand that
time had run out on their opportunity to take full control of industrializing America. The wealthy
faced challenges, not only from workers and farmers; the Victorian middle class could no longer
abide the alien cultures, class conflict, and violence of a divided industrial nation. By the turn of the
century, middle-class men and women, radicalized and resolute, were ready to sweep aside the upper
ten and build a new, progressive America.

As if to reassure the rich, the election of 1900 repeated 1896. Once again, McKinley and Bryan
battled for the presidency; once again, McKinley won the White House. Yet, in September 1901,
when the president traveled to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, an anarchist, Leon

Czolgosz, fired a concealed revolver twice and mortally wounded him. News of the president’s
assassination shocked the gay partygoers at a costume ball in Newport. As the crowd fell silent and
the host pulled off his mask, the orchestra began to play the national anthem. “They felt, those
bearers of America’s ‘greatest’ names,” wrote Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, “that from then on they
would have to run as fast as they could in order to remain in the same place, in order that the
nightmare of the future might not become the terror of the present.” The Vanderbilts woke their
children in the middle of the night, bundled them on board the family yacht, and steamed hurriedly
to New York to consult bankers and lawyers. Cornelius realized what it all meant for his class. “The
party” he knew, “was over.”

Chapter One: Signs of Friction; Portrait of America at Century’s End

HIST 102 Essay 1/Streetcar Suburbs – The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870 to 1900

Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870 –1900
By Sam B Warner, Jr.
Harvard University Press and The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1962
Chapter 1 and Chapter 2
THE CITY of Boston is old and full of monuments to the past. To visitors it often appears a dowdy
repository for some of the nation’s early memories. But to those who know it better the city’s life has
always been one of ceaseless change. The visitor who stops at Paul Revere’s house seldom realizes
that within thirty years the society that had produced so many revolutionaries was dead. And the
local resident who stands before William Lloyd Garrison’s well-known statue seldom recognizes that
the generation of Bostonians who erected this statue could not bring forth such an uncompromising
radical. Boston, like the various societies that made it, has been ever changing, ever in transition.
The differences that mark the successive eras have come from the shifting of emphasis from one set
of problems to another from politics to business, from foreign trade to manufacture, from prosperity
to depression.

No period in Boston’s history was more dynamic than the prosperous years of the second half of
the nineteenth century. One of the most enduring of the many transformations of this era was the
rearrangement of the physical form of the city itself. In fifty years it changed from a merchant city of
two hundred thousand inhabitants to an industrial metropolis of over a million. In 1850 Boston was a
tightly packed seaport; by 1900 it sprawled over a ten-mile radius and contained thirty-one cities and
towns. The growth of the city brought other major changes. The old settlement of 1850 became by
1900 the principal zone of work-the industrial, commercial, and communications center of the
metropolitan region. At the same time the tenements and old dwellings of the area came to house the
lower-income half of the population. Beyond the inner concentrated section there grew an equally
novel environment, the enormous outer ring of new commuters’ houses.

Boston in 1900 was very much a city divided. With the exception of the expensive houses of the
Back Bay, it was an inner city of work and low income housing, and an outer city of middle- and
upper-income residences. The wide extent of settlement in the outer residential zone was made
possible by the elaboration of the new street railway transportation system, and a parallel extension
of city services. Here the course of building reflected the movement of successive waves of people
out from the center of the city. Here the new houses and neighborhoods demonstrated the economic
progress of half of Boston’s families and their aspirations for a satisfactory home environment.

With these changes in scale and plan many of the familiar modem problems of city life began to
emerge: the bedroom town; the inundation of country villages by commuters; the sudden withdrawal
of whole segments of an old neighborhood’s population; the rapid building and rapid decay of entire

MAP 1. The pedestrian city of 1850 and the suburban metropolis of 1900. The metropolis of 1900 is that described by Sylvester Baxter, Greater
Boston; A Study for a Federated Metropolis (Boston, 1891). See Table 1 for population distribution.
THE PEDESTRIAN CITY OF 1850 (2 mile radius)
Boston Proper
East Boston
South Boston
Cambridge
Charlestown
Roxbury

THE PERIPHERAL TOWNS IN 1850 (3 mile radius) Brookline
Chelsea
Dorchester
Somerville
D THE NEW SUBURBS IN 1900 (10 mile radius)

sections of a city; the spread of the metropolis beyond any encompassing political boundaries; the
growth of non-elective agencies of government to meet metropolitan transportation, sanitary, and
recreation demands; and, above all, the discipline of the lives of city dwellers into specialized
transportation paths, specialized occupations, specialized home environments, and specialized
community relationships. With the new metropolis and all its changes the ancient problems of large
cities once more came to life: the individual members of urban society became isolated within a
physical and social network which had passed their comprehension and control.

In 1850 Boston was something familiar to Western history and manageable by its traditions. The
attitudes and institutions that governed its daily life had been developed slowly over at least 500

years. By 1900 it had become, along with many European and American cities, something entirely
new, an industrial and suburban metropolis. Most of this metropolis of 1900 still survives. Even
today it is the home of the bulk of Greater Boston’s industry and commerce, and probably half its
population. Decisions made by city officials, corporation managers, and homebuilders, decisions
now sixty to one hundred years old, still rule much of today’s social, economic, and political life.
Perhaps most important, many of the traditions of thought and behavior first elaborated during the
last half of the nineteenth century still dominate present action.

WHO BUILT THE METROPOLIS?

The Boston metropolis is the product of hundreds of thousands of separate decisions. Looking
back on the period for which detailed information is available, the years 1870-1900, one can make
out a kind of partnership which constructed the new industrial and suburban metropolis. It was a
partnership between large institutions and individual investors and homeowners.

No organization, however, tied together the two groups. Boston’s water commissioners and the
president of the West End Street Railway Company, for example, were guided by their own day-to-
day needs. And the homeowner who sought a lot and decided to build a house was unable to change
city policy or affect the transportation service currently offered. Although throughout the last half of
the nineteenth century one third to one half of the City of Boston’s budget was annually committed
to projects and services directly affecting real estate, most of the political campaigns turned on other
conflicts: Republicans versus Democrats; native Americans versus immigrants; more city jobs
versus economy; corruption versus honesty. In addition, no zoning laws and few of the direct
regulations now current in American cities then controlled the behavior of builders.

Common ideas and attitudes created the partnership of the large institutions and the individual
homeowners and investors. Both groups shared an enthusiasm for a two-part city-a city of work sep-
arated from a city of homes. This enthusiasm colored every decision, whether it was a decision made
by the director of a large corporation or by a mortgage-pressed carpenter. Both groups were also
subject to common disciplines: the disciplines of the contemporary money market, the disciplines of
the current engineering and architecture, the disciplines of Boston’s geography, and the disciplines of
the matrix of prior decisions which set the environment in which men worked.

The building of the new divided metropolis was a popular movement, a movement executed by
hundreds of thousands of middle class citizens. This book is a search for the historical background of
the ” multitudes of decisions which together created the new urban environment of 1900. Three
questions will guide the search. Who made the decisions to build what? What patterns were created
by the repetition of individual decisions? What were the consequences of these patterns?
The old records of the building of Boston do not yield information to which a modern sociological
class analysis can be applied. Little but the census and legal records survive as the literature of this
mass movement. Therefore, the story must be told largely by the patterns made by the end products
of the decisions themselves: the parks, the streets, the pipes, the tracks, the houses. The method of
this book will be to look first at the largest patterns and then with ever narrowing focus to descend to
the smallest patterns. The book will proceed from common nineteenth century ideas and
experiences, to the metropolitan transportation and utility network, to the towns, to the neighbor-
hoods, to single streets, and finally to individual houses and their builders. In the range of narrow
focus Boston’s old suburbs, the formerly independent towns of Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dor-
chester, will provide the detail of the story.

COMMON IDEAS AND EXPERIENCES

In the late nineteenth century most Bostonians, indeed most Americans, held in common a certain
way of looking at the world. Their outlook was a product of the conditions of the times. Three sets of
experiences and three associated ideas informed men’s life in the city: ‘the increasing
industrialization of work was accompanied by the idea of romantic capitalism; The experience of
immigration gave rise to nostalgic nationalism; The impact of ever more intensive urbanization
called forth the emotional reaction of the rural ideal. Old residents and newcomers alike interpreted
the changing possibilities and disciplines of their lives in terms of a mixture of these experiences and
ideas. .

Industrialization and immigration together fired the economy of nineteenth century Boston. The
port of Boston, one of the most active ports in the United States, served as the place of entry for
thousands of European immigrants. Prior to the 1840’s farmers, artisans, and mill workers from the
British Isles, men squeezed by the shifting rewards and penalties of English industrialization, made
up the bulk of the new arrivals. Joining them were sizeable numbers of Germans seeking an escape
from the poverty of Central Europe. Also, as the trading center for New England and the Maritime
Provinces of Canada, Boston attracted a steady flow of men from this back country.

These three main groups of newcomers, though they included small numbers of German Jews and
Irish, German, and French-Canadian Catholics, were much the same in background, habits, and
religion as the resident population of the city. Indeed, with some variations in proportions, these
areas had supplied New England with its immigrants for the past two hundred years. The strong tide
of democratic tolerance that had been growing since the eighteenth century easily buried such
religious and ethnic tensions as existed among these groups, the old residents, and the other small
immigrant colonies. Men from the British Isles, from the Maritimes, and from rural New England
continued to come to Boston in large numbers throughout the nineteenth century, and with the
repeated experience of easy assimilation this immigration came to be fused in people’s minds with
the old stock.

The great decline of Irish agriculture, beginning with the terrible potato famines of the 1840’s,
brought a radical change in Boston’s population. Catholic Irish peasants, for the most part unskilled
and penniless, arrived by the shipload. By 1875, sixty thousand foreign born Irish were living in
Boston. During the balance of the century immigration from that poverty stricken island continued
so rapidly that despite the growth of the city the Irish newcomers and their children made up from 30
to 40 percent of Boston’s total population. Then, in the last decade of the century, as Irish
immigration began to slacken, their place was taken by new waves of people from Central, Eastern,
and Southern Europe. Beginning around 1890, Jews and Italians became an important element in the
population of the city.

This enormous and continuous influx of people made Boston a great labor pool. Early
industrialists had set up their factories in the small towns of New England not only for water power
but also to tap the surplus labor resources of the farm-young women and children. .

Now next to a fully developed seaport there existed a whole army of men and women desperately
in need of work. The industrial prosperity of the Boston region dates from the 1840’s when
improvements in steam engines provided the power, and the flood of cheap labor provided the hands
to tend factories and machines. Ironworks, textile and shoe factories, and almost every kind of
manufacture came to be carried on in the area. In some cases businessmen adapted old trades to the
unskilled peasants. For example, by the Civil War Boston led the nation in the production of
inexpensive ready-made garments. Ready-made clothes was a new industry developed by the novel
breakdown of tailoring into its simplest operations. With this reorganization unskilled women and
children could work this formerly complicated trade in sweatshop factories or tenement homes.

With its old merchant capital and new abundance of workers, the city grew, and grew wealthy, as

never before. The money of this period paid for the expensive homes of the South End and Back
Bay, the estates of Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, Brookline, Milton, and Dedham. Municipal enterprise
went forward on an unprecedented scale. The streets were widened, marshes filled and hills leveled,
parks laid out, and miles of waterworks constructed. Year after year the City of
Boston’s expenditures exceeded those of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And the ample stone
churches which still stand in every section of the city bear testimony to the wealth of private
subscription.

This whole fifty-year era brought with it a special kind of life. Its dynamism and prosperity not
only made its economic system of capitalism popular but also generated a kind of enthusiasm for
wealth and productivity which gave contemporary enterprise a romantic quality. For the majority of
men prosperity and happiness in this capitalist era required the acceptance of its three disciplines:
hard work, thrift, and education. Each one of these disciplines was at once a description of rational
behavior necessary for the success of the economic system and a prescription of an ideal in its own
right.

Hard work and devotion to the task brought advancement in the job and security against being laid
off. By long hours, too, ambitious men working on borrowed capital pitted their time against the
risks of speculation. Beyond such rational guides to behavior emphasis also fell on hard work
because the job lay at the core of romantic capitalism. In this society work was a source of joy as
well as a virtue. The society had a great appreciation for productivity in any form. The man whose
dozen garish barn signs brought orders for a carload of
patent medicines, the inventor of an automatic oven that sent forth an unceasing parade of soda
crackers, or the traditional artisan whose high skill and patience could make a violin-all were heroes.
However, since the production of personal wealth brought the greatest power in the society, this kind
of productivity brought with it the greatest popular standing.

Thrift was likewise a rational economic necessity and a generalized virtue. By putting aside
earnings a man could protect himself against hard times, and by thrift he could put himself into a
position to buy a
business or make some investment. By practicing thrift, just as by working hard, a man also
demonstrated virtue and gained respect. In this way he at once realized the benefits of social
approval and acquired the standing necessary to borrow money from banks and private investors.

Finally, education was both a tool and a source of status and pleasure. At the lowest level the new
industrial society created jobs that needed workers who could read, write, and do arithmetic. The
well paid and rewarding jobs in law, engineering, finance, and business increasingly required
educated men who could handle words, numbers, and ideas. With the elaboration of the society and
its tools, high school, technical school, and even college and professional education became every
year more necessary job criteria. In addition education brought social standing, for people tended to
associate class with different levels of training and rising scales of financial reward. Finally,
education offered the pleasures inherent in being in touch with the world, both past and present.
These pleasures were open alike to the dirt farmer who first learned to read the newspapers, and the
college graduate who could follow world literature and technology.

For the average Boston family the formula of hard work, thrift, and education meant a 48- to 55-
hour work week for the father, little vacation for the family, and emphasis on the education of the
children and financial gain. The ultimate test of the family’s success and the key to its social standing
rested within the capitalist framework-how much money did the family have, how much property
did it control? To have such goals, and to live such a life, was, in the nineteenth century, to be a
middle class American.

Such goals were generally shared in the society, as can be seen by the rapid multiplication of
stores and businesses; the increase in homeownership; the frequent use of the words “middle class”
as a term of wide inclusiveness; the constant repetition of capitalist goals in popular literature; and,

in family histories and reminiscences, the almost universal description of success by thrift, hard
work, and education. Perhaps 60 percent of Boston’s population was middle class by living habits
and aspirations. The exceptions to the dominant code of behavior were some of the rich for whom
money making no longer appeared a satisfying way of life, and a large proportion of the lower –
income groups for whom wealth was an impossibility.2

Another test of the extent to which a society is middle class is to examine the distribution of
income. As one might expect, more people held middle class aspirations than enjoyed the income
necessary to live out these ideals. A reasonable guess would be that 40 to 50 percent of the families
of Boston were middle class by income. Such people were sufficiently well off to live by the income
of one member of the family. This income was secure enough not to be drastically curtailed in times
of panic; it provided the family with a safe, sanitary environment; and it allowed the family to
dispense with children’s work at least long enough for them to finish grammar school. Although but
one quarter of Boston’s families owned houses in 1900, and for a number of reasons many preferred
homes in multiple dwellings, it seems also a fair presumption to say that this 40 to 50 percent of the
society accumulated enough capital in its lifetime to be able to choose homeownership instead of
tenancy. Since most men’s income and capital rose slowly, at any given moment probably not more
than half of Boston’s middle class earned enough or had saved enough to be able to purchase a home.
Thus, any year’s potential housing market could not have exceeded one fifth of the total families in
the city.3

Many aspiring to middle class life lacked the income. These families resorted to multiple
employment to achieve their goal. If, when the children were young, husband and wife were lucky
and neither fell sick or were unemployed for long, in time the earnings of the children would push
the family income into the middle range. For the immigrant family who arrived in Boston without
skill or capital this advancement to middle class standing usually took two or three generations. The
immigrant’s children, educated in the public schools and armed with the skills and goals of the
American middle class, were frequently the first to benefit from the chance for advancement offered
by the industrial prosperity of the age. The constant rise of great numbers of immigrant families to
middle-income jobs and their movement into middle class neighborhoods was taken by
contemporaries as testimony to the success of the capitalism of the day and a reassurance of its
harmony with the general goals of American democracy.

Although the aspirations and disciplines of romantic capitalism dominated the majority of men’s
minds there were many Bostonians who lacked this conviction. Perhaps 40 percent of the city’s
population did not have middle class aspirations. Laborers, factory workers, and new immigrants
made up most of this group, but to it must be added artisans, clerks, and skilled mechanics who,
though they possessed a fair income, resented the discipline of the industrial world and neither
understood nor enjoyed the pleasures of a life devoted to the current definition of “getting ahead.”
Most of those without middle class aspirations, however, took their opposition not so much as a
matter of independent belief, but as a consequence of the unequal distribution of income.

For thousands, perhaps one third of Boston, natives and immigrants alike, life brought only the
tensions of too few jobs at too little pay, inhuman work conditions, wage cuts and seasonal layoffs,
accidents and disease, and, at times, terrible depressions whose effects public authorities relieved
only by the inadequate and inhospitable charity of the city’s soup kitchens. These economic tensions
and hardships led many lower class Bostonians to attack not the methods of industrialism that caused
their suffering, but each other.

Quite different from the case of European cities in the second half of the nineteenth century, the
suffering of Boston’s poor produced no strong movement for corrective alternatives to the dominant
capitalism. Instead, men whose fate rested upon the successful reshaping of society in one country
and in one era turned their thoughts back to visions of other places and former times. Large numbers
of peasants had been driven by famine and hard times from a society of enduring tradition to the

hazards of a new land, new work, and a new society that was itself ever changing. Such men sought
an anchor against uncertainty and confusion, they sought a device to lessen the scope of the world
and thereby render it more manageable.

Old nationalisms and the maintenance of old ethnic ways offered such a device. Nationalism
created in large American cities a temporary refuge in which die world could be thought of as
containing only one’s own group and “the others” -others of whom one need have no knowledge, for
whom one need take no responsibility. Nor was the escape into nationalism limited to immigrants.
The native poor of Boston, in competition with immigrants for jobs and sharing with them the
penalties of the mal distribution of income, often matched the newcomers in clannishness and
frequently confronted them with raw hostility. Their nationalism produced the special political
movement known as nativism. From 1854 to 1857, nativists were in control of the state government,
and anti-foreign, anti-Catholic sentiment remained an active ingredient in state and city politics for
the rest of the century.

In 1834 a Charlestown convent was burned; in the 1850’s there was a church bombing and anti-
Catholic riots; Protestant street gangs, militia, and fire companies fought their Irish Catholic
counterparts; and later in the century Jewish families became the objects of Irish attacks. More
important than these sporadic outbursts of local violence, the nationalist response to the social stress
of immigration and industrial change infected all levels of the society with job discrimination, ethnic
politics, and racist stereotypes. The whole spectrum of behavior from the aristocrat’s snobbery to the
barroom brawl distracted men’s attention from the problems of poverty, housing, education, and
welfare which severely limited the promise of American democracy.

For most Bostonians nationalism was a passive secondary attitude; the business of making a living
and mastering wealth and production occupied their major efforts. For lower class families the
retreat into sentimental nationalism provided some temporary relief from the pains of life. For the
middle class, both families who had achieved the promise of a competence and those still aspiring to
it, sentimental nationalism was a second thought, a set of ideas that filled the vacuum left by their
dominant code of capitalist striving. It provided a vehicle for thoughts of love and security which
capitalist competition ignored, and it occasionally guided action in areas in which there were no
capitalist imperatives.

Much of the nationalism of the nineteenth century was a reaction to the stresses of the present, a
longing of both native and immigrant for some “old country” or “old days.” The immigrant tended to
blur the memory of the clay on his boots with a vision of the rolling green hills of Ireland, or obscure
the memory of a broken-down farm with the vision of the forests and shores of Maine or Nova
Scotia. Russian Jews, Italians, Germans, Scots, Canadians, Englishmen, and Americans all shared a
knowledge of a past era prior to industrialization. As every year went by the reality of the past grew
dimmer, and the “old country” or “old days” took on the very qualities that were missing in the
modern world. In this blend of fact and fancy, life was less disciplined and more leisurely, and men
lived in simple communities where all spoke the same language, went to the same church, and
shared a common life. Friends were true and wealth unimportant, the girls prettier and the cooking
better, honest craftsmen labored for love to make things of beauty, not cheap machine shoddy, and
when a man came home at night it was to a neat cottage and a family of healthy happy children.

The sentimental, backward-looking, quality of the urban nationalisms of the late nineteenth
century formed part of a general contemporary reaction to the growing industrial metropolis. In
abetting this popular movement nationalism joined a strong and old American tradition-the rural
ideal. The rural ideal was an attitude which had always contained the notion of escape from city
restraints, organizations, and objects. The city’s ways and forms were conceived of as too artificial
and of the wrong quality to support a moral life. In opposition to the oppressive modes of social
behavior in the city, in the country the church, the village, and the home were to provide the setting
for simple gatherings of families and friends on a basis of fellowship and common interest.

The very fact of light settlement assisted in the creation of a moral dichotomy between the city as
artificial, incomplete, and temporal. and the country as simple, full, and timeless. The wild
surroundings of forest, rivers, and hills, like the landscape of farms where men’s lives depended
directly upon plants and animals, provided some of the key weapons of the rural ideology. Here, the
physical setting encouraged the family to live by some concept of harmony with the unending cycles
and seasons of nature.

The city, on the other hand, was thought to be the home of feasts and orgies, of clothes cut to
fashion alone, of men and women devoting their lives to the pursuit of money, power, and happiness
in a setting not made in the image of nature but by the goals of the city itself Whereas in the country
simple village institutions would suffice to police the actions of the villagers, the city often appeared
out of control. The city accumulated great wealth, but it seemed lacking in devices to harness that
wealth to moral ends.

FIG. 1. A romantic cottage, West Roxbury, 1856-1857

FIG. 2. The suburban achievement, 1903

The prevalence of this contrast between city and country goes far hack in the Western world, at

least to Roman times. It was, however, the model of the country gentleman of seventeenth and
eighteenth century England that transmitted the rural philosophy to the United States. By his service
to the state and frequent trips to London the model country gentleman kept his contact with the
largest world of Ills day while at the same time living a well-rounded life on his estate. The lives of
the Virginia presidents of the United States were but domestic copies of this image. Men like
Harrison Gray Otis and John Hancock, with their town houses and country estates, served as models

for middle class Bostonians.
Numerous wealthy families during the first half of the nineteenth century copied this form of

life. In Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester rich men, following the Roman and English
traditions of an interest in farming, carried on important experiments in scientific agriculture. Today
the remainder of their tradition still survives in the Institutions they founded: the Massachusetts
Horticultural Society, and the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.
Prior to the steam railroad and street railway two houses, not one, were generally required.
Just outside Boston, country villages like Watertown, Jamaica Plain, and Brookline provided the
sites for the rural ideal, but most early estate owners needed, also, a town house for their business
life and social contacts. The streetcar suburb brought with it a whole set of new problems. Much of
its success or failure centered around the attempt by a mass of people, each with but one small house
and lot, to achieve what previously had been the pattern of life of a few rich families with two large
houses and ample land.

For the middle class of the late nineteenth century the rural ideal was one positive element in a
complex of conditions which shifted people’s attitude from being favorable to being hostile to city
life. The physical deterioration of old neighborhoods, the crowding of factory, shop, and tenement in
the old central city, the unceasing flow of foreigners with ever new languages and habits-these
negative pressures tended to drive the middle class from the city. The new technology of the street
railway and the contemporary sanitary engineering enabled these families to move out from the old
city boundaries into an expanded area of vacant and lightly settled land. In this new land the rural
ideal, by its emphasis on the pleasures of private family life, on the security of a small community
setting, and on the enjoyment of natural surroundings, encouraged the middle class to build a wholly
new residential environment: the modern suburb.

CHAPTER TWO

THE LARGE INSTITUTIONS

AT ANY given time the arrangement of streets and buildings in a _ large city represents a
temporary compromise among such diverse and often conflicting elements as aspirations for
business and home life, the conditions of trade, the supply of labor, and the ability to remake what
came before.

The physical plan of metropolitan Boston in 1850 rested upon a primitive technology of
urban transport: Boston was a city of pedestrians. Its form reflected a compromise among
convenience and privacy, the aspirations of homeownership, and the high price of land. The arrival
of the street railway freed the elements of the compromise from their former discipline of pedestrian
movement and bound them together again by its own new discipline. By 1900 the transformation of
Boston had been completed. The patterns made by this new compromise are what today is
recognized as the suburban form of the metropolitan city.

THE WALKING CITY

In 1850 the area of dense settlement hardly exceeded a two-mile radius from City Hall. It included
only portions of the towns and cities of Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Charlestown, Chelsea, Dor-
chester, Roxbury, and Somerville. Before the invention of the telephone in 1876 and the introduction
of street railways in the 1850’s, face-to-face communication and movement on foot were essential in-
gredients of city life.

One can only guess just how large metropolitan Boston would have grown had there been no
invention of new communication devices. If the spread of the city had begun to exceed the distance a
man might walk in about an hour, say a three-mile radius, the shops and offices of the metropolis
would have fallen out of easy daily communication with each other. The result would have been the
destruction of a single unified communication network and the development of semi-autonomous
sub-cities which would have had to duplicate many of the services and facilities offered in other
parts of the city. One of the principal contributions of nineteenth century transportation and
communication technology was to preserve the J centralized communication of the walking city on a
vastly enlarged scale.

In 1850 carriages were a prominent sight on Boston’s downtown streets. They moved only a small
proportion of the city’s population, however, because few people could afford to maintain a private
horse and carriage. The omnibus and the steam railroad were likewise supplements to walking. The
omnibus, an urban version of the stagecoach, was first introduced in 1826. It moved slowly, held
relatively few passengers, and cost a lot. The steam railroad, in operation since 1835, was also
expensive and accomplished, during its first fifteen

FIG. 3. An antique omnibus

years, little to change the old pattern of the city. At best it was a limited method of mass
transportation. The railroad was fast but its infrequent stops and its single terminal, often located at
some distance from passengers’ ultimate destinations, prevented it from offering the great variety of
choices of entrance and exit that streetcar systems ultimately provided. Prior to the Civil War the
principal contribution of the’ railroad lay in its joining of the port of Boston, with its wharves and
warehouses, to the manufacturing and farming towns of New England. The result was to accelerate
the industrialization of both the trading center and its hinterland. For residents of the Boston region
the railroad simplified business transactions with outlying industrial cities like Lynn and Waltham.
The railroad also enabled some men of wealth and leisure to settle permanently at their summer
estates which lay in scattered clusters about the hills beyond Boston.

Before 1850 Boston’s geography had inhibited easy expansion. Marshes, rivers, and the ocean
restricted the paths of pedestrian communication. Boston itself was a rough, hilly peninsula set on
the end of a narrow strip of land that connected it to the mainland at Roxbury. In the general area
where the wharves now stand, against the eastern and northern part of the peninsula, lay the deep-
water harbor. The rest of the peninsula was surrounded by tidal basins and enormous marshes. So
confined by the harbor, Boston land had always been expensive, and almost from the beginning of
its settlement men cramped for space began damming and filling the marshes and flats, first for
commercial, and later for residential, purposes. As the city prospered and housing standards rose,
more extensive works became profitable. Hills were leveled and sea walls built. By the 1850’s
developers had reclaimed the area around Charles street, parts of the North End, and much of the
South End, (See Map 3 for sections of Boston) and had cut down a good deal of Beacon and other
hills.

In the succeeding twenty years Boston’s two most ambitious land filling schemes were
executed: the South End and the Back Bay. The South End was almost completely taken up with
houses by 1880; the Back Bay, by 1900. Only the rich and the prosperous segment of the middle
class could afford most of the new houses in these sections even though the common design of
narrow row houses, three and one half to four and one-half stories high, required but small parcels of
land.2

Under such circumstances speculators turned their attention to land just beyond the main
peninsula. What they wanted was property that could be more easily developed and therefore sold at

lower prices. The search for cheap land began long before central Boston was filled. In 1804 South
Boston was opened as a housing speculation. Its progress remained slow, however, until the 1830’s
when the growth of Boston created a shortage of land sufficient to persuade people to move beyond
the old peninsula and walk the added distance.3 Similarly, Charlestown, parts of Cambridge, East
Boston, and the nearby sections of Roxbury filled up rapidly in the period from 1830 to 1850 when
Boston’s industrial prosperity and expansion began to make headway.

These peripheral communities were not simple bedroom towns for commuters, not exact early
models of the modern middle class residential suburb; rather they were mixed settlements of Boston
commuters and local workers. All these communities lay at the edge of the harbor and possessed
considerable industrial and mercantile

FIG. 4. Middle class single-family houses of the peripheral towns, c. 1830-1870

FIG. 5. Mid-nineteenth century working class alley housing located to the rear of houses in Figure 4

potential. Charlestown and East and South Boston developed large shipbuilding and wharf facilities,
while Cambridge and Roxbury became manufacturing centers.4 Promoters of these areas, used to the
tight scale of the walking city, saw no incompatibility between residences and factories; they wished
to recreate the conditions of Boston.

Throughout the tiny metropolitan region of 1850, streets of the well to do lay hard by workers’
barracks and tenements of the poor; many artisans kept shop and home in the same building or suite;
and factories, wharves, and offices were but a few blocks from middle class homes. The wide
physical separation between those who could afford new houses and those who could not awaited
the expansion of the city that accompanied the introduction of the street railway. .

Despite the peripheral towns’ imitation of the central city some architectural differences marked
the two areas. On the filled land of
the main peninsula close copies of the brick London town row house predominated. In the peripheral
areas, detached houses, continuations of eighteenth century American wooden construction, were the
rule.

These latter structures were often smaller and generally cheaper than their in town opposites.
Today, after detached wooden styles have dominated residential fashions for over eighty years, the
little wooden houses of South and East Boston appear to be significant alternatives to the brick row
house. In the early nineteenth century, however, these houses were but a continuation of old habits.
They were the products of a class of people who had yet to earn the wealth, had yet to learn the
modes, of city life.

Compared to the enlarged lots, the picturesque houses, and the planted streets of the streetcar
suburbs of the last third of the nineteenth century, the architecture of Boston in 1850 was strongly
urban. The houses of the central city and the peripheral towns, set as they were on small narrow lots
and generally placed against the street, created a town environment of dense settlement. Building in
both

FIG. 6. Medium-priced two-family house, c. 1850

FIG. 7. Roxbury Village, Dudley and Warren streets, c. 1860

areas was eminently suited to a city short of land, a city which depended on people’s walking for its
means of transportation, a city which depended upon face-to-face relationships as its means of
communication.5

THE STREET RAILWAYS

The history of Boston’s street railways in the nineteenth century is the story of fifty years of
aggressive expansion. During both the early years of the horse car and the later years of the electric,
lines were rapidly lengthened and service frequently increased. This continuous expansion of surface
transportation had a cumulative effect upon the city. The pace of suburbanization, at first slow, went
forward with in

MAP 2. Railroad trackage, 1870-1900

MAP 3. Street railway tracks, 1872

creasing acceleration, until by the 1890’s it attained the proportions of a mass movement.

From 1852 until 1873 the horse railroads of Boston merely stretched out the existing city along
already established paths. The outer boundary of dense settlement moved perhaps half a mile, so that
at the time of the great Depression of 1873 it stood two and a half miles from Boston’s City Hall.
During the next fourteen years, from 1873 to 1887, horse car service reached out about a mile and a
half farther, bringing the outer edge of good transportation to four miles from City Hall. Lines of
suburban settlement began to appear in what were formerly distant places. In the late 1880’s and
1890’s the electrification of street railways brought convenient transportation to at least the range of
six miles from City Hall. The rate of building and settlement in this period became so rapid that the
whole scale and plan of Greater Boston was entirely made over.

Boston’s first street railway had but one car which in 1852 began service between Harvard Square,
Cambridge, and Union Square,

MAP 4. Street railway tracks, 1886
Somerville. The success of this experiment and the example of profitable lines in other American
cities brought on a wave of entrepreneurial enthusiasm. To the local investment public, used to the
relatively long periods necessary to realize profits on large-scale land speculations, the rapid
construction of horse railroads seemed to promise a generous and immediate harvest. To real estate

men the simple procedure of placing a coach on iron rails seemed a miraculous device for the.
promotion of out-of-town property.

The experience of the three towns of Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester was typical. The
first line in this section of the metropolis commenced running in 1856. It followed the seventeenth
century path which ran from downtown Boston along Washington street in the South End to
Roxbury Crossing. In effect, the new service merely replaced the existing omnibus and
supplemented the main traffic of pedestrians and carriages. In the short period from the first
incorporation of 1852 to the Depression of 1873, seven companies were formed to serve the outlying
towns of Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester. Only four ever operated. By 1873 only two
companies, the Metropolitan Street Railway, and the Highland Street Railway, survived.

Some of Boston’s street railways had been projected for routes with too light settlement and
traffic, others were badly financed, and some were bogus companies put together to lure investors or
to harass operating companies. The scramble for franchises, which were granted by the Boston
Board of Aldermen, and for charters of incorporation, which were granted by the state legislature,
further confused the ever shifting rivalries of the city’s street railway companies.

MAP 5. Street railway tracks, 1901

FIG. 8. Horsecar in front of the Metropolitan Street Railway car barn, South and Jamaica streets, Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury, c. 1880

These early difficulties of franchise and capitalization were soon superseded by the problems of
the downtown. Boston’s streets were just too narrow to carryall the needed cars. The downtown
squeeze made necessary complicated lease arrangements for competitors’ use

FIG. 9. Open horsecar on Centre street, Jamaica Plain Village, 1883
of each other’s tracks. The tempers of street railway employees were not always equal to this
requirement of cooperation in a field of intense competition. All too often rival drivers raced for
switches, stalled, and in general interfered with each other’s progress. Nevertheless, despite early
confusion, chicane, and false starts, by 1873 the main streets of the old city had become the new
horsecar thoroughfares. During the years from 1852 to 1873 the periphery of dense settlement
moved from 2 to 2.5 miles from City Hal1.6

For the next fourteen years service in Greater Boston expanded steadily outward. Then, in 1887,
Henry M. Whitney, a steamship operator and speculator in Brookline real estate, formed a syndicate
out of his small West End Street Railway and began to purchase stock in the other five operating
companies of Boston. After he had bought up large amounts of stock, especially in the biggest line,
the Metropolitan, he offered by an exchange of stock and bonds to combine all the companies into
one. Minority stockholders, probably helpless, and at any rate anticipating great profits from the
rationalization of Boston service under one giant company, agreed to the merger. At the same time,
the promise of rapid expansion of service and relief to downtown traffic jams persuaded the public
and the legislature to

FIG. 10. Downtown traffic, Post Office Square, May 23, 1904

allow the creation of the traction monopoly. Consolidation did in fact accelerate the rate of
improvements in transportation.

Whitney continued two historic policies of street railway management. First, he was more
interested in increasing the total number of fares on his system than in watching the relationship of
distance, cost, and fare per ride. He, like his fellow streetcar managers the state over,

was so convinced that the key to profit lay in the endless expansion of the numbers of passengers
that, with little regard to costs, he constantly expanded the service area of the West End. As a result,
by 1900 the outer limits of Boston’s electric railways lay at least six miles from the downtown.

Second, Whitney, like all horse car managers before him, was an ardent believer in the five-cent
fare. Thus expansion of service took place without additional charge to the commuter. As cross town
lines were built, free-transfer points were added, so that the nickel fare was almost universal in 1900.
During the 1870’s and 1880’s eight cents had been required for many transfer rides; two full fares
had been required where riders moved to the cars of different companies. 7

In his speeches before city clubs and regulatory agencies Whitney often pointed to these twin
policies of rapid service expansion and the uniform five-cent fare as the proper basis for a public
transportation system. He was an ardent champion of the suburban city. He frequently appealed to
the popular belief that the rapid suburbanization of modern industrial cities was perhaps the most
important single contribution of the street railway. Like his listeners, also, Whitney did not wish to
control the form and direction of this suburban expansion, but rather to leave the development of
suburbs to individual builders and homeowners. Though statistics of 1890 and 1900 showed that
only one quarter of Boston’s suburbanites owned their houses,8 he, like his contemporaries, felt that
the continued suburbanization of the city would bring a substantial increase in homeownership. He
liked to use as a typical example of the coming benefits the rather untypical case of the workingman
buying a lot of land in the suburbs upon which would be built his own home. Whitney’s speeches
were also full of comparisons to conditions in Europe and references to the old pre-streetcar sections
of Boston where multifamily tenements and crowded old wooden houses were the rule.

Whitney made these appeals to what was then termed the “moral influence” of street railways both
from personal conviction, and from

FIG. 11. Working class wooden houses and tenements in the West End, photograph c.1890

the need to answer the numerous critics of his monopoly. He was continually before state and city
agencies defending the profits and schedules of the West End Street Railway. Most important for the
growth of the suburban city, criticism always took for its point of departure the same view of public
transportation that Whitney’s management undertook to carry out. For critics, the trouble with the
West End Company was that its very vigorous performance was not vigorous enough: new service
was not added fast enough, profits were too high, and fares not cheap enough.9

The demise of Whitney’s West End Street Railway as an operating company was due not to the
shortcomings of its suburban service, but to continued strife over downtown traffic conditions. The
details of the decade of controversy over the control and pricing of tunnels and elevateds are not
relevant to this history. In the end, in 1897, a group of rival capitalists formed the Boston Elevated
Street Railway Company,

FIG. 12. The moral influence of the street railway, outer edge of new construction, 1904

and, under the supervision of the state-created Boston Transit Authority, leased the West End system
in its entirety. With this new operating company the great subway and elevated projects were under-
taken in a belated effort to solve downtown traffic problems. The Boston Elevated’s suburban policy
remained that of its predecessors: expand for more total passengers.

During the entire second half of the nineteenth century two things made possible this continuous
expansion of service under all kinds of managements. The first was the declining costs of materials;
the second was electrification. In 1888 the West End began experimenting with electric cars and in
1889 introduced its first trolley service. The electric car moved at least twice as fast as the horse
drawn one and soon was perfected to carry three times the number of passengers. Of course
offsetting these advantages, the new machines required a great deal more investment in heavy
equipment than the horse and his car barn.

In the center of the system, where traffic was heavy, the electric car was cheaper to operate per
passenger mile than the horse car. It seemed reasonable to run the electric car from the in-town
segment of a line out to the suburban terminal, especially since in the outer areas of less frequent
stops the electric could really show its speed. In this way the electric-powered streetcar beguiled
traction men who were careless about costs into spinning out the web of their service even beyond
profitable limits.10

OTHER SERVICES TO HOME BUILDERS

Good transportation was not the only requirement for the successful large-scale development of
suburban land, nor was the street railway the only important invention which contributed to the
changing pattern of Greater Boston. During the last third of the nineteenth century sanitation and
power services became established as prerequisites’ for the standard home.

Until the 1870’s the cities and towns of the metropolitan region had relied upon a mixture of public
and private agencies for water supply and waste disposal. Municipal and private scavengers carried
off rubbish, garbage, and privy waste. Some crowded districts had cooperative underground sewer
lines, others did not. Because the discharge points were unregulated by anything but the common
law of nuisance many of the low lands and neighborhood swamps of the

FIG. 13. Typical electric streetcar, 1900

FIG. 14. Open electric car for summer service, about 1903

region were terminal sewage pools. In crowded town centers, where surface wells proved
inadequate, public and private water companies had been formed to meet group needs. The City of
Boston’s Cochituate Water Works of the 1840’S’ was the most famous and largest of the systems. All
the municipal and private systems together, however, failed to give more than partial coverage to the
metropolis.

Partial coverage was almost useless to a public health program. The periodic plagues and
epidemics that had swept the city regularly since the seventeenth century gave frequent
demonstration that no part of the metropolis was safe until all parts were clean. By 1870 Boston’s
own efforts and other American and European sanitary projects showed that the incidence of disease
could be effectively reduced by thoroughgoing sanitary engineering. Fear of disease gave the late
nineteenth century public health movement its great popularity, while the concurrent benefits of
water for industrial use and fire protection assisted reformers in arguments with cost-conscious
taxpayers.

During the last third of the nineteenth century Boston’s sanitary projects, its waterworks, sewer
lines, land filling, and re-grading took about one third of the total city budget. Homeowners installed
their own plumbing, and water meters and special installation assessments paid for the operating
costs. But the enormous initial expenditure demanded for water mains, reservoirs, pumping stations,
and trunk sewers could only have been met by the pledge of municipal and state credit.

Historically public interest in the supply of water preceded interest in waste disposal.
Consequently the water and sewer systems of the metropolis continued under separate institutional
management throughout the century. The great popularity of the sanitary engineering program
assured strong public support, first for town and city boards, and later for the integrating
metropolitan boards. As a result of the public enthusiasm, expenditures were usually generous and
the planning of the works aggressive. As fast as new street railway transportation brought new
houses to outlying parts of the city the sanitary departments hastened to provide facilities.12 ,

The lesser utilities-gas, electricity, and telephones-were <1eveloped by private corporations. The convenience of gas and electric lights, and the efficiency of telephone communication gave private companies marketable products for which users would pay the whole cost. Also, because these minor utilities did not need to cover the whole city at once they could seek the highest paying users first, and then expand their systems on a profit making basis. The extension of gas service, which began in the 1840's, and the extension of electric and telephone services, which began in the 1890's, were clearly derivative. Once street railways and sanitary engineering opened an area to home building the other utilities sought customers there. Most of the utility conflicts of the day concerned consumer rates, not the slowness of new service offerings.13 COMMON PATTERNS OF DECISION Because of the aggressive quality of the public health movement and the imitative nature of the lesser utilities and municipal services the narrative of the development of the Boston metropolis during the last third of the nineteenth century can be simplified. Had these utilities and municipal services lagged significantly behind transportation, or had they pursued a radically different timing and pattern of location they would require an extensive separate treatment. As it was, the role of the large public and private institutions in the building of the metropolis can be analyzed in terms of the street railway alone. First, within their financial means all institutions undertook to render equal service throughout their geographic jurisdiction. Second, none of the institutions built houses themselves and, as much as possible, they avoided interfering with private profit making. Indeed, all encouraged individual capitalist enterprise as much as they could. Third, all institutions were somewhat sympathetic to the goals of the rural ideal, and to the extent that their actions were relevant, encouraged the dispersal of the urban population. Although Boston society suffered severe ethnic tensions during this period of large scale immigration, its public agencies pursued a policy of service without regard to ethnic background. Just as the streetcar companies undertook to serve all the villages and quarters of the metropolitan region, so the schools and libraries undertook to serve all, the children and adults within the municipality. Sewer, water, gas, and electric utilities were available at uniform prices to users every- where.14 Water was as plentiful in the immigrant North End as in the native Back Bay. If there were unsanitary conditions in the slums, such conditions were regarded as the responsibility of landlords and tenants. The evidence of disease-riddenl8lums in an era of great concern for public health illustrates the second policy of public agencies in the late nineteenth century. Effective devices were developed for bringing public services to the property owner. The supervision of property owners' individual performances, however, was lightly touched upon, and no effective machinery was devised for public assumption of responsibility when the owners failed in their performance.15 The official policy was to interfere as little as possible with individuals, and, where possible, to assist individuals in their role as private capitalists. The contrast between the achievements in the old slum neighborhoods and the new suburbs graphically demonstrates the results of this policy. In the slums agencies dealt with individuals whose means were inadequate to the task; in the suburbs the public effort met immediate and effective private response. In the suburbs water lines, sewers, and public utilities hurried along with new construction, while the public transportation was extended with uniform fares to ever greater distances from the city. Likewise, at enormous cost, schools, libraries, fire stations, indeed, all municipal services, hastened after the movement of people within the metropolis.16 The City of Boston, the Metropolitan Commissioners, the West End Street Railway, and the predecessors of the Boston Consolidated Gas and Boston Edison companies all extended their services at a very rapid rate. They were able to do so because their fees and taxes rested upon large and prosperous geographical bases. Where the geographical units were small and poor, as was the case in most of the towns beyond five miles from Boston, the rate of progress was slow. The water pipes rarely ran beyond Main Street, and community expansion consisted of the building of a graded primary school, or, perhaps, the addition of those two new municipal ornaments, the high school and the public library. Today's municipal planning policy rests on a conscious attempt to control the uses of land. One of the major goals of modern planning is to allocate the various uses of land with an end to minimizing public costs and maximizing public benefits. Though in today's terms there was no planning in late nineteenth century Boston, the largely successful effort to give new services to the whole jurisdiction with its consequent aid to private development was a conscious policy designed to achieve the ends of society By providing equal service to all citizens, by extending service as rapidly as possible to the whole geographic jurisdiction Boston's public agencies hoped to give the greatest scope to the workings of individual capitalists. Education, health, transportation, and plentiful land were tools to encourage individuals to work effectively as private profit makers. The works of the individual private profit makers were to be the return for the public costs and effort.17 The third policy of the public agencies was to encourage the dispersal of the urban population. Tenement slums were the scandal of the age. Street railway managers, real estate men, politicians, philanthropists, health officers, school teachers, and the middle class generally all shared the attitude that open country surroundings and the small community were beneficent settings for family life. This widespread sympathy for the rural ideal provided additional impetus for the expansion of public services over the entire metropolitan region.18 The most general result of the work of the large institutions of Greater Boston was to make possible the creation of a new environment in the suburban edge of the metropolis while, at the same time, leaving the in-town section largely undisturbed. Much of this one sided effect upon the physical plan of the metropolis must be attributed to the continued need of close proximity for daily work. Though railroads and steamships brought goods and passengers from great distances with unprecedented speed, though the street rail way daily moved thousands of commuters, though telephones, telegraphs, and railway mail connected all sections of the metropolis to the nation, much of the economic life of 1900 still depended upon physical proximity. As only some customers and suppliers had telephones, office boys bearing notes were still a major form of rapid communication; hand carts and wagons and teams were still the methods of moving small lots of goods from ship to warehouse, from freight car to factory and shop, from store to customer. Because of these limited means of communication the work and shopping center of Boston remained packed tight against the harbor. Larger wharves, warehouses, and railway yards were built at or near old locations; offices, stores, and factories replaced houses. And in the downtown core tall buildings with elevators replaced the former five-story walk-ups. The novel contribution of the street railway came in the zone beyond the old central city where the new transportation allowed the wide diffusion of the residential area. Most of the extension of the metropolis that took place with the establishment of street railways benefited middle-income families. Though they still had to seek their livelihood in the central cit_ their homes spread over an unprecedented area of suburban land. During the last fifty years of the nineteenth century Greater Boston tripled its population, but the houses of the new suburbs generally had two and often three times the land of their predecessors, and such was the revolution in transportation that even after such rapid growth vast amounts of vacant land still remained for future building.19 To see the full effects of the policy and work of the large institutions upon the construction of the new suburbs one must look at the patterns of building in some detail. Since the final decision of whether or not to put up a house rested with thousands of individual landowners, one must look closely at a small area, an area which reflects the scale of their decisions. Three Boston streetcar suburbs, the former towns of Roxbury, West Roxbury, and Dorchester, will serve as the area of detailed study. During the last third of the nineteenth century these towns experienced an enormous growth of population, and over much of their territory the pattern of streets and houses took on the new suburban form. Even today the achievements and shortcomings of this former era continue to dominate their life. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 HIST 102 Essay 1/The Battle of Little Bighorn from an account by the Lakota Chief Red Horse (1) The Battle of Little Bighorn An Eyewitness Account by the Lakota Chief Red Horse recorded in pictographs and text at the Cheyenne River Reservation, 1881 Five springs ago I, with many Sioux Indians, took down and packed up our tipis and moved from Cheyenne river to the Rosebud river, where we camped a few days; then took down and packed up our lodges and moved to the Little Bighorn river and pitched our lodges with the large camp of Sioux. The Sioux were camped on the Little Bighorn river as follows: The lodges of the Uncpapas were pitched highest up the river under a bluff. The Santee lodges were pitched next. The Oglala's lodges were pitched next. The Brule lodges were pitched next. The Minneconjou lodges were pitched next. The Sans Arcs' lodges were pitched next. The Blackfeet lodges were pitched next. The Cheyenne lodges were pitched next. A few Arikara Indians were among the Sioux (being without lodges of their own). Two-Kettles, among the other Sioux (without lodges). I was a Sioux chief in the council lodge. My lodge was pitched in the center of the camp. The day of the attack I and four women were a short distance from the camp digging wild turnips. Suddenly one of the women attracted my attention to a cloud of dust rising a short distance from camp. I soon saw that the soldiers were charging the camp. To the camp I and the women ran. When I arrived a person told me to hurry to the council lodge. The soldiers charged so quickly we could not talk (council). We came out of the council lodge and talked in all directions. The Sioux mount horses, take guns, and go fight the soldiers. Women and children mount horses and go, meaning to get out of the way. Among the soldiers was an officer who rode a horse with four white feet. [This officer was evidently Capt. French, Seventh Cavalry.] The Sioux have for a long time fought many brave men of different people, but the Sioux say this officer was the bravest man they had ever fought. I don't know whether this was Gen. Custer or not. Many of the Sioux men that I hear talking tell me it was. I saw this officer in the fight many times, but did not see his body. It has been told me that he was killed by a Santee Indian, who took his horse. This officer wore a large-brimmed hat and a deerskin coat. This officer saved the lives of many soldiers by turning his horse and covering the retreat. Sioux say this officer was the bravest man they ever fought. I saw two officers looking alike, both having long yellowish hair. Before the attack the Sioux were camped on the Rosebud river. Sioux moved down a river running into the Little Bighorn river, crossed the Little Bighorn river, and camped on its west bank. This day [day of attack] a Sioux man started to go to Red Cloud agency, but when he had gone a short distance from camp he saw a cloud of dust rising and turned back and said he thought a herd of buffalo was coming near the village. The day was hot. In a short time the soldiers charged the camp. [This was Maj. Reno's battalion of the Seventh Cavalry.] The soldiers came on the trail made by the Sioux camp in moving, and crossed the Little Bighorn river above where the Sioux crossed, and attacked the lodges of the Uncpapas, farthest up the river. The women and children ran down the Little Bighorn river a short distance into a ravine. The soldiers set fire to the lodges. All the Sioux now charged the soldiers and drove them in confusion across the Little Bighorn river, which was very rapid, and several soldiers were drowned in it. On a hill the soldiers stopped and the Sioux surrounded them. A Sioux man came and said that a different party of Soldiers had all the women and children prisoners. Like a whirlwind the word went around, and the Sioux all heard it and left the soldiers on the hill and went quickly to save the women and children. From the hill that the soldiers were on to the place where the different soldiers [by this term Red-Horse always means the battalion immediately commanded by General Custer, his mode of distinction being that they were a different body from that first encountered] were seen was level ground with the exception of a creek. Sioux thought the soldiers on the hill [i.e., Reno's battalion] would charge them in rear, but when they did not the Sioux thought the soldiers on the hill were out of cartridges. As soon as we had killed all the different soldiers the Sioux all went back to kill the soldiers on the hill. All the Sioux watched around the hill on which were the soldiers until a Sioux man came and said many walking soldiers were coming near. The coming of the walking soldiers was the saving of the soldiers on the hill. Sioux can not fight the walking soldiers [infantry], being afraid of them, so the Sioux hurriedly left. The soldiers charged the Sioux camp about noon. The soldiers were divided, one party charging right into the camp. After driving these soldiers across the river, the Sioux charged the different soldiers [i.e., Custer's] below, and drive them in confusion; these soldiers became foolish, many throwing away their guns and raising their hands, saying, "Sioux, pity us; take us prisoners." The Sioux did not take a single soldier prisoner, but killed all of them; none were left alive for even a few minutes. These different soldiers discharged their guns but little. I took a gun and two belts off two dead soldiers; out of one belt two cartridges were gone, out of the other five. The Sioux took the guns and cartridges off the dead soldiers and went to the hill on which the soldiers were, surrounded and fought them with the guns and cartridges of the dead soldiers. Had the soldiers not divided I think they would have killed many Sioux. The different soldiers [i.e., Custer's battalion] that the Sioux killed made five brave stands. Once the Sioux charged right in the midst of the different soldiers and scattered them all, fighting among the soldiers hand to hand. One band of soldiers was in rear of the Sioux. When this band of soldiers charged, the Sioux fell back, and the Sioux and the soldiers stood facing each other. Then all the Sioux became brave and charged the soldiers. The Sioux went but a short distance before they separated and surrounded the soldiers. I could see the officers riding in front of the soldiers and hear them shooting. Now the Sioux had many killed. The soldiers killed 136 and wounded 160 Sioux. The Sioux killed all these different soldiers in the ravine. The soldiers charged the Sioux camp farthest up the river. A short time after the different soldiers charged the village below. While the different soldiers and Sioux were fighting together the Sioux chief said, "Sioux men, go watch soldiers on the hill and prevent their joining the different soldiers." The Sioux men took the clothing off the dead and dressed themselves in it. Among the soldiers were white men who were not soldiers. The Sioux dressed in the soldiers' and white men's clothing fought the soldiers on the hill. The banks of the Little Bighorn river were high, and the Sioux killed many of the soldiers while crossing. The soldiers on the hill dug up the ground [i.e., made earth-works], and the soldiers and Sioux fought at long range, sometimes the Sioux charging close up. The fight continued at long range until a Sioux man saw the walking soldiers coming. When the walking soldiers came near the Sioux became afraid and ran away. [TEXT: Garrick Mallery, Picture Writing of the American Indians, 10th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (1893).] The Battle of Little Bighorn An Eyewitness Account by the Lakota Chief Red Horse recorded in pictographs and text at the Cheyenne River Reservation, 1881 HIST 102 Essay 1/The Battle of Little Bighorn from an account by the Lakota Chief Red Horse The Battle of Little Bighorn An Eyewitness Account by the Lakota Chief Red Horse recorded in pictographs and text at the Cheyenne River Reservation, 1881 Five springs ago I, with many Sioux Indians, took down and packed up our tipis and moved from Cheyenne river to the Rosebud river, where we camped a few days; then took down and packed up our lodges and moved to the Little Bighorn river and pitched our lodges with the large camp of Sioux. The Sioux were camped on the Little Bighorn river as follows: The lodges of the Uncpapas were pitched highest up the river under a bluff. The Santee lodges were pitched next. The Oglala's lodges were pitched next. The Brule lodges were pitched next. The Minneconjou lodges were pitched next. The Sans Arcs' lodges were pitched next. The Blackfeet lodges were pitched next. The Cheyenne lodges were pitched next. A few Arikara Indians were among the Sioux (being without lodges of their own). Two-Kettles, among the other Sioux (without lodges). I was a Sioux chief in the council lodge. My lodge was pitched in the center of the camp. The day of the attack I and four women were a short distance from the camp digging wild turnips. Suddenly one of the women attracted my attention to a cloud of dust rising a short distance from camp. I soon saw that the soldiers were charging the camp. To the camp I and the women ran. When I arrived a person told me to hurry to the council lodge. The soldiers charged so quickly we could not talk (council). We came out of the council lodge and talked in all directions. The Sioux mount horses, take guns, and go fight the soldiers. Women and children mount horses and go, meaning to get out of the way. Among the soldiers was an officer who rode a horse with four white feet. [This officer was evidently Capt. French, Seventh Cavalry.] The Sioux have for a long time fought many brave men of different people, but the Sioux say this officer was the bravest man they had ever fought. I don't know whether this was Gen. Custer or not. Many of the Sioux men that I hear talking tell me it was. I saw this officer in the fight many times, but did not see his body. It has been told me that he was killed by a Santee Indian, who took his horse. This officer wore a large-brimmed hat and a deerskin coat. This officer saved the lives of many soldiers by turning his horse and covering the retreat. Sioux say this officer was the bravest man they ever fought. I saw two officers looking alike, both having long yellowish hair. Before the attack the Sioux were camped on the Rosebud river. Sioux moved down a river running into the Little Bighorn river, crossed the Little Bighorn river, and camped on its west bank. This day [day of attack] a Sioux man started to go to Red Cloud agency, but when he had gone a short distance from camp he saw a cloud of dust rising and turned back and said he thought a herd of buffalo was coming near the village. The day was hot. In a short time the soldiers charged the camp. [This was Maj. Reno's battalion of the Seventh Cavalry.] The soldiers came on the trail made by the Sioux camp in moving, and crossed the Little Bighorn river above where the Sioux crossed, and attacked the lodges of the Uncpapas, farthest up the river. The women and children ran down the Little Bighorn river a short distance into a ravine. The soldiers set fire to the lodges. All the Sioux now charged the soldiers and drove them in confusion across the Little Bighorn river, which was very rapid, and several soldiers were drowned in it. On a hill the soldiers stopped and the Sioux surrounded them. A Sioux man came and said that a different party of Soldiers had all the women and children prisoners. Like a whirlwind the word went around, and the Sioux all heard it and left the soldiers on the hill and went quickly to save the women and children. From the hill that the soldiers were on to the place where the different soldiers [by this term Red-Horse always means the battalion immediately commanded by General Custer, his mode of distinction being that they were a different body from that first encountered] were seen was level ground with the exception of a creek. Sioux thought the soldiers on the hill [i.e., Reno's battalion] would charge them in rear, but when they did not the Sioux thought the soldiers on the hill were out of cartridges. As soon as we had killed all the different soldiers the Sioux all went back to kill the soldiers on the hill. All the Sioux watched around the hill on which were the soldiers until a Sioux man came and said many walking soldiers were coming near. The coming of the walking soldiers was the saving of the soldiers on the hill. Sioux can not fight the walking soldiers [infantry], being afraid of them, so the Sioux hurriedly left. The soldiers charged the Sioux camp about noon. The soldiers were divided, one party charging right into the camp. After driving these soldiers across the river, the Sioux charged the different soldiers [i.e., Custer's] below, and drive them in confusion; these soldiers became foolish, many throwing away their guns and raising their hands, saying, "Sioux, pity us; take us prisoners." The Sioux did not take a single soldier prisoner, but killed all of them; none were left alive for even a few minutes. These different soldiers discharged their guns but little. I took a gun and two belts off two dead soldiers; out of one belt two cartridges were gone, out of the other five. The Sioux took the guns and cartridges off the dead soldiers and went to the hill on which the soldiers were, surrounded and fought them with the guns and cartridges of the dead soldiers. Had the soldiers not divided I think they would have killed many Sioux. The different soldiers [i.e., Custer's battalion] that the Sioux killed made five brave stands. Once the Sioux charged right in the midst of the different soldiers and scattered them all, fighting among the soldiers hand to hand. One band of soldiers was in rear of the Sioux. When this band of soldiers charged, the Sioux fell back, and the Sioux and the soldiers stood facing each other. Then all the Sioux became brave and charged the soldiers. The Sioux went but a short distance before they separated and surrounded the soldiers. I could see the officers riding in front of the soldiers and hear them shooting. Now the Sioux had many killed. The soldiers killed 136 and wounded 160 Sioux. The Sioux killed all these different soldiers in the ravine. The soldiers charged the Sioux camp farthest up the river. A short time after the different soldiers charged the village below. While the different soldiers and Sioux were fighting together the Sioux chief said, "Sioux men, go watch soldiers on the hill and prevent their joining the different soldiers." The Sioux men took the clothing off the dead and dressed themselves in it. Among the soldiers were white men who were not soldiers. The Sioux dressed in the soldiers' and white men's clothing fought the soldiers on the hill. The banks of the Little Bighorn river were high, and the Sioux killed many of the soldiers while crossing. The soldiers on the hill dug up the ground [i.e., made earth-works], and the soldiers and Sioux fought at long range, sometimes the Sioux charging close up. The fight continued at long range until a Sioux man saw the walking soldiers coming. When the walking soldiers came near the Sioux became afraid and ran away. [TEXT: Garrick Mallery, Picture Writing of the American Indians, 10th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (1893).] The Battle of Little Bighorn An Eyewitness Account by the Lakota Chief Red Horse recorded in pictographs and text at the Cheyenne River Reservation, 1881 HIST 102 Essay 1/The Battle of the Little Bighorn The Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1876 In late 1875, Sioux and Cheyenne Indians defiantly left their reservations, outraged over the continued intrusions of whites into their sacred lands in the Black Hills. They gathered in Montana with the great warrior Sitting Bull to fight for their lands. The following spring, two victories over the US Cavalry emboldened them to fight on in the summer of 1876. To force the large Indian army back to the reservations, the Army dispatched three columns to attack in coordinated fashion, one of which contained Lt. Colonel George Custer and the Seventh Cavalry. Spotting the Sioux village about fifteen miles away along the Rosebud River on June 25, Custer also found a nearby group of about forty warriors. Ignoring orders to wait, he decided to attack before they could alert the main party. He did not realize that the number of warriors in the village numbered three times his strength. Dividing his forces in three, Custer sent troops under Captain Frederick Benteen to prevent their escape through the upper valley of the Little Bighorn River. Major Marcus Reno was to pursue the group, cross the river, and charge the Indian village in a coordinated effort with the remaining troops under his command. He hoped to strike the Indian encampment at the northern and southern ends simultaneously, but made this decision without knowing what kind of terrain he would have to cross before making his assault. He belatedly discovered that he would have to negotiate a maze of bluffs and ravines to attack. Reno's squadron of 175 soldiers attacked the northern end. Quickly finding themselves in a desperate battle with little hope of any relief, Reno halted his charging men before they could be trapped, fought for ten minutes in dismounted formation, and then withdrew into the timber and brush along the river. When that position proved indefensible, they retreated uphill to the bluffs east of the river, pursued hotly by a mix of Cheyenne and Sioux. Just as they finished driving the soldiers out, the Indians found roughly 210 of Custer's men coming towards the other end of the village, taking the pressure off of Reno's men. Cheyenne and Hunkpapa Sioux together crossed the river and slammed into the advancing soldiers, forcing them back to a long high ridge to the north. Meanwhile, another force, largely Oglala Sioux under Crazy Horse's command, swiftly moved downstream and then doubled back in a sweeping arc, enveloping Custer and his men in a pincer move. They began pouring in gunfire and arrows. As the Indians closed in, Custer ordered his men to shoot their horses and stack the carcasses to form a wall, but they provided little protection against bullets. In less than an hour, Custer and his men were killed in the worst American military disaster ever. After another day's fighting, Reno and Benteen's now united forces escaped when the Indians broke off the fight. They had learned that the other two columns of soldiers were coming towards them, so they fled. After the battle, the Indians came through and stripped the bodies and mutilated all the uniformed soldiers, believing that the soul of a mutilated body would be forced to walk the earth for all eternity and could not ascend to heaven. Inexplicably, they stripped Custer's body and cleaned it, but did not scalp or mutilate it. He had been wearing buckskins instead of a blue uniform, and some believe that the Indians thought he was not a soldier and so, thinking he was an innocent, left him alone. Because his hair was cut short for battle, others think that he did not have enough hair to allow for a very good scalping. Immediately after the battle, the myth emerged that they left him alone out of respect for his fighting ability, but few participating Indians knew who he was to have been so respectful. To this day, no one knows the real reason. Little Bighorn was the pinnacle of the Indians' power. They had achieved their greatest victory yet, but soon their tenuous union fell apart in the face of the white onslaught. Outraged over the death of a popular Civil War hero on the eve of the Centennial, the nation demanded and received harsh retribution. The Black Hills dispute was quickly settled by redrawing the boundary lines, placing the Black Hills outside the reservation and open to white settlement. Within a year, the Sioux nation was defeated and broken. "Custer's Last Stand" was their last stand as well. Carnage at the Little Bighorn George Herendon served as a scout for the Seventh Cavalry - a civilian under contract with the army and attached to Major Reno's command. Herendon charged across the Little Bighorn River with Reno as the soldiers met an overwhelming force of Sioux streaming from their encampment. After the battle, Herendon told his story to a reporter from the New York Herald: "Reno took a steady gallop down the creek bottom three miles where it emptied into the Little Horn, and found a natural ford across the Little Horn River. He started to cross, when the scouts came back and called out to him to hold on, that the Sioux were coming in large numbers to meet him. He crossed over, however, formed his companies on the prairie in line of battle, and moved forward at a trot but soon took a gallop. "The Valley was about three fourth of a mile wide, on the left a line of low, round hills, and on the right the river bottom covered with a growth of cottonwood trees and bushes. After scattering shots were fired from the hills and a few from the river bottom and Reno's skirmishers returned the shots. "He advanced about a mile from the ford to a line of timber on the right and dismounted his men to fight on foot. The horses were sent into the timber, and the men forward on the prairie and advanced toward the Indians. The Indians, mounted on ponies, came across the prairie and opened a heavy fire on the soldiers. After skirmishing for a few minutes Reno fell back to his horses in the timber. The Indians moved to his left and rear, evidently with the intention of cutting him off from the ford. "Reno ordered his men to mount and move through the timber, but as his men got into the saddle the Sioux, who had advanced in the timber, fired at close range and killed one soldier. Colonel Reno then commanded the men to dismount, and they did so, but he soon ordered them to mount again, and moved out on to the open prairie." "The command headed for the ford, pressed closely by Indians in large numbers, and at every moment the rate of speed was increased, until it became a dead run for the ford. The Sioux, mounted on their swift ponies, dashed up by the side of the soldiers and fired at them, killing both men and horses. Little resistance was offered, and it was complete rout to the ford. I did not see the men at the ford, and do not know what took place further than a good many were killed when the command left the timber. "Just as I got out, my horse stumbled and fell and I was dismounted, the horse running away after Reno's command. I saw several soldiers who were dismounted, their horses having been killed or run away. There were also some soldiers mounted who had remained behind, I should think in all as many as thirteen soldiers, and seeing no chance of getting away, I called on them to come into the timber and we would stand off the Indians. "Three of the soldiers were wounded, and two of them so badly they could not use their arms. The soldiers wanted to go out, but I said no, we can't get to the ford, and besides, we have wounded men and must stand by them. The soldiers still wanted to go, but I told them I was an old frontiers- man, understood the Indians, and if they would do as I said I would get them out of the scrape which was no worse than scrapes I had been in before. About half of the men were mounted, and they wanted to keep their horses with them, but I told them to let the horses go and fight on foot. "We stayed in the bush about three hours, and I could hear heavy firing below in the river, apparently about two miles distant. I did not know who it was, but knew the Indians were fighting some of our men, and learned afterward it was Custer's command. Nearly all the Indians in the upper part of the valley drew off down the river, and the fight with Custer lasted about one hour, when the heavy firing ceased. When the shooting below began to die away I said to the boys 'come, now is the time to get out.' Most of them did not go, but waited for night. I told them the Indians would come back and we had better be off at once. Eleven of the thirteen said they would go, but two stayed behind. "I deployed the men as skirmishers and we moved forward on foot toward the river. When we had got nearly to the river we met five Indians on ponies, and they fired on us. I returned the fire and the Indians broke and we then forded the river, the water being heart deep. We finally got over, wounded men and all, and headed for Reno's command which I could see drawn up on the bluffs along the river about a mile off. We reached Reno in safety. "We had not been with Reno more than fifteen minutes when I saw the Indians coming up the valley from Custer's fight. Reno was then moving his whole command down the ridge toward Custer. The Indians crossed the river below Reno and swarmed up the bluff on all sides. After skirmishing with them Reno went back to his old position which was on one of the highest fronts along the bluffs. It was now about five o'clock, and the fight lasted until it was too dark to see to shoot. "As soon as it was dark Reno took the packs and saddles off the mules and horses and made breast works of them. He also dragged the dead horses and mules on the line and sheltered the men behind them. Some of the men dug rifle pits with their butcher knives and all slept on their arms. "At the peep of day the Indians opened a heavy fire and a desperate fight ensued, lasting until 10 o'clock. The Indians charged our position three or four times, coming up close enough to hit our men with stones, which they threw by hand. Captain Benteen saw a large mass of Indians gathered on his front to charge, and ordered his men to charge on foot and scatter them. "Benteen led the charge and was upon the Indians before they knew what they were about and killed a great many. They were evidently much surprised at this offensive movement, and I think in desperate fighting Benteen is one of the bravest men I ever saw in a fight. All the time he was going about through the bullets, encouraging the soldiers to stand up to their work and not let the Indians whip them; he went among the horses and pack mules and drove out the men who were skulking there, compelling them to go into the line and do their duty. He never sheltered his own person once during the battle, and I do not see how he escaped being killed. The desperate charging and fighting was over at about one o'clock, but firing was kept up on both sides until late in the afternoon." References: Connell, Evan S. Son of the Morning Star (1984); New York Herald (July 1876); Utley, Robert M. Cavalier in Buckskin; George Armstrong Custer and the Western Frontier (1988). HIST 102 Essay 1/The Fable of the Allegory The Wizard of OZ in Economics 254 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC EDUCATION The Fable of the Allegory: The Wizard of Oz in Economics Bradley A. Hansen Abstract: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has become popular as a teaching tool in economics. It has been argued that it was written as an allegory of Populist demands for a bimetallic monetary system in the late 19th century. The author argues that Baum was not sympathetic to Populist views and did not write the story as a monetary allegory. Key words: economic history, monetary economics, teaching economics, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz JEL codes: A2, N1 One method of enhancing student learning in economics courses is to intro- duce economic concepts through literature (Watts and Smith 1989; Kish- Goodling 1998; Scahill 1998). A well-known example in economics has been the incorporation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into the teaching of monetary issues. The book is presented as an allegory about Populists’ demands for monetary expansion in the late 19th century. The allegory provides an efficient means of introducing students to debates about monetary issues because the elements of the story are so familiar. Students may also be intrigued by the unfamiliar interpretation. Although using The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a means to discuss monetary issues may have pedagogical merits, economists have gone too far by claiming Bradley A. Hansen is a professor of economics at Mary Washington College (e-mail: bhansen@mwc.edu). The author thanks Ben and Joanna Gregson for letting him read all the Oz books to them. He also thanks Mary Eschelbach Hansen for carefully reading several drafts of this article, and Hirschel Kasper and four anonymous referees for helpful comments. He also thanks Hugh Rockoff and Ranjit Dighe. Neither gentleman entirely agrees with him, but both provided numerous thoughtful comments and suggestions. In this section, the Journal of Economic Education publishes articles concerned with substantive issues, new ideas, and research findings in economics that may influence or can be incorporated into the teaching of economics. HIRSCHEL KASPER, Section Editor Content Articles in Economics Summer 2002 255 that the book was actually intended to be a monetary allegory. The primary evi- dence in support of the allegorical interpretation is what appears to be an extra- ordinary number of similarities between characters and events in the book and the people and events of the 1896 presidential campaign. The most popular ver- sion of the allegorical interpretation suggests not only that Baum described the Populist movement but that he was sympathetic to it. Historical research on Baum undermines both these propositions (Hearn 1992, 2000; Parker 1994; Tys- tad-Koupal 1996). Baum’s writings, as well as his life history, provide consider- able evidence that he did not have Populist sympathies and did not intend the book to be anything more than a delightful story. Indeed, the true lesson of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz may be that economists have been too willing to accept as a truth an elegant story with little empirical support, much the way the char- acters in Oz accepted the Wizard’s impressive tricks as real magic. THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ AS A MONETARY ALLEGORY In 1964, Henry Littlefield, a high school history teacher, described what ap- peared to be numerous coincidences between The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the Populist movement of the late 19th century. Once viewed through a Populist lens, the symbolism of the book appears incredibly obvious. The Scarecrow rep- resents farmers, the Tin Woodman represents industrial workers, and the Cow- ardly Lion represents William Jennings Bryan.1 Dorothy was told to follow a yel- low brick road—the gold standard. People in the Emerald City were forced to look at everything through green glasses—greenbacks. The silver shoes— coinage of silver—really had the power to take Dorothy home. Oz itself refers to the abbreviation for an ounce of gold. Many economists have followed Littlefield’s lead. In an article on the use of literature in teaching economics, Watts and Smith (1989, 298) suggested the use of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a tool for enlivening the study of bimetallism, which they observed, “is often considered one of the dullest episodes in money and banking or economic history courses.” In the Journal of Political Economy, Rockoff (1990, 739) also claimed that the book was “not only a child’s tale but also a sophisticated commentary on the political and economic debates of the Populist Era.” He extended the allegorical interpretation by examining the story in light of both monetary theory and history and found additional symbols in the book such as the seven passages and three flights of stairs that Dorothy passed through in the palace of Oz (a symbol of the Crime of ’73).2 Like Watts and Smith, Rockoff (1990, 740) suggested that one of the primary benefits of the alle- gorical interpretation was pedagogical. Although Rockoff was not the first author to write on the subject, he must be credited with extending the interpretation and bringing it to a wide audience of economists. Rockoff’s article quickly became popular among economic histori- ans. Friedman (1990, 1167) cited it approvingly in his 1990 article, “The Crime of 1873.” When Whaples and Betts (1995) put together a collection of the most popular articles in American economic history, their survey showed that many economic historians included Rockoff’s article in their course reading lists. 256 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC EDUCATION The interpretation suggested by Rockoff’s article is the most common form of the allegorical interpretation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He suggested that Baum was a Populist, or at least a Populist sympathizer, and that he wrote the book as an allegory. But advocates of the allegorical interpretation do not speak with a single voice. They disagree about whether or not Baum was a Populist and whether or not he intentionally wrote the story as an allegory. Clanton (1998, 183), for example, argued that Baum was a conservative Republican who “apparently amused himself by writing a subtle yet ingenious anti-Populist, gold standard tract in the form of a highly suggestive and enormously successful children’s story.” Rit- ter (1997b, 173) argued that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is “a cultural and politi- cal satire which was neither simply pro-Populist or pro-capitalist.” She suggested that Baum’s intentions are not necessarily relevant. In her book Goldbugs and Greenbacks, Ritter (1997a, 21) argued that “motive is not at issue. The argument here is that Baum lived in the midst of a highly charged political environment and that he borrowed from the cultural materials at hand as he wrote.” Ranjit Dighe (forthcoming) argued that Baum was probably a progressive Republican, and although he may not have written The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a monetary alle- gory, he was probably influenced by the political currents of the time. He also emphasized that the merits of the allegorical interpretation are primarily pedagog- ical. The common thread is a belief that L. Frank Baum, intentionally or uninten- tionally, portrayed political actors and events of the 1890s. The Rockoff interpretation has now spread from money and banking and eco- nomic history courses to economic principles courses. In his Principles of Eco- nomics, Mankiw (2001, 648) claimed that when Baum “sat down to write a story for children, he made the characters represent protagonists in the major political battle of his time. Although modern commentators differ somewhat in the inter- pretation they assign to each character there is no doubt that the story highlights the debate over monetary policy” (emphasis added). There is doubt. Evidence in support of the allegorical interpretation turns out to be rather meager. Rockoff (1990, 756) conceded that “Baum left no hard evi- dence that he intended his story to have an allegorical meaning: no diary entry, no letter, not even an offhand remark to a friend.” He claimed that the evidence in favor of the allegorical interpretation is that “It has been recognized indepen- dently by a number of thoughtful readers,” and that, “It is consistent with what we know of Baum’s politics” (Rockoff 1990, 756). Rockoff and others have claimed that Baum consistently voted Democrat and marched in torchlight parades for Bryan (Rockoff 1990; Baum and MacFall 1961; Gardner 1957). They also observed that Baum was the editor of a small-town newspaper in South Dakota before moving to Chicago in 1891 and suggested that this probably led to his Populist sympathies (Mankiw 2001; Ziaukas 1998). On closer examination, the evidence in favor of the allegorical interpretation melts away like the Wicked Witch of the West. In contrast, the evidence against the allegorical interpretation is abundant. It can be grouped into four categories. First, there have not been multiple independent discoveries of the allegorical interpretation. Second, Baum was not reluctant to express his political views, yet he did not express Populist sympathies and did express anti-Populist sympathies. Summer 2002 257 Third, much of what is written in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Baum’s other children’s books is inconsistent with the allegorical interpretation. Fourth, much of what has been interpreted as political or economic symbolism in the book can be traced to other sources. THE CASE AGAINST THE ALLEGORICAL INTERPRETATION Independent Discovery Rockoff suggested the independent discovery by many individuals of the alle- gorical interpretation was evidence in its favor. Although it is true that many peo- ple have come to the conclusion that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was an allego- ry of the Populist movement, no one appears to have come to the conclusion before Littlefield did, 64 years after the book was published. The New York Times review of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published September 8, 1900, when peo- ple should have been more aware of the supposed political symbolism in the text, treats it only as a fairy tale. Those who have made the argument in favor of an allegorical interpretation in recent years have almost all acknowledged Little- field’s lead (Rockoff 1990; Ritter 1997; Ziaukas 1998; Schweikart 2000; Watts and Smith 1989). Those who did not cite Littlefield cited others who did; Mankiw, for example, cited Rockoff. It is far from evident that many people have come to the conclusion independently. Political Sympathy The evidence on Baum’s politics is even more problematic than the evidence in favor of multiple independent discoveries of the allegory. Supporters of the allegor- ical interpretation point out that Baum marched in torchlight parades for Bryan and consistently voted for Democrats. This claim would appear to have great weight because of its appearance in a biography coauthored by Baum’s son, Frank Joslyn Baum. There are, however, reasons to be skeptical. To Please a Child: A Biography of L. Frank Baum was published in 1961, 40 years after the death of L. Frank Baum and 3 years after the death of Frank Joslyn Baum, at the age of 75. The claim that Baum consistently voted Democrat and marched for Bryan appears to have come from a biographical sketch of Baum by Gardner (1957, 29), published a few years before To Please a Child. Gardner provided no references for the claim. In addition, the story is at odds with the available evidence on Baum’s politics.3 Baum’s support of woman suffrage, opposition to monopolies, and apparent sympathy for Asians and Native Americans have also been offered as evidence of Baum’s Populist-Democratic sympathies. Some of this evidence presents an accurate view of Baum, but a misleading and somewhat anachronistic view of late 19th century history. Baum’s support of woman suffrage and antitrust does not imply that he was a Democrat. His editing of a newspaper in South Dakota does not imply that he was a Populist. Some of these suggestions are simply incorrect: Baum consistently wrote editorials in support of Republican causes and candidates and was not particularly sympathetic to Native Americans.4 It is true that Baum was an outspoken advocate of woman suffrage. His moth- 258 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC EDUCATION er-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was a participant at the Seneca Conference and co-author with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony of History of Woman Suffrage. Matilda Gage often stayed with the Baums, and she encouraged L. Frank Baum to write down his children’s stories and to seek a wider audience for them. Baum clearly sided with his mother-in-law on the issue of suffrage. He promoted woman suffrage in his newspaper and actively campaigned for it in South Dakota (Tystad-Koupal 1996, 10–12). Baum also seems to have been in- terested in the problems associated with big business and monopoly. He worked for a time in 1901 on a musical entitled The Octopus, or The Title Trust. The mu- sical was never completed because Baum turned his attention to a musical ver- sion of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Baum also has an octopus in The Sea Fairies take offense at being compared to the Standard Oil Co. (Gardner 1957, 29). Many people now may associate women’s rights and the regulation of business more closely with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. At the turn of the century neither support for antitrust nor support for woman suffrage was inconsistent with Republican party politics. For example, a Republican Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, and a Republican President signed it into law. Theodore Roosevelt, the great trust buster, was also a Republican. Although Roo- sevelt did not take office until 1901, his views on big business were well known from his days as governor of New York (Bittlingmayer 1994, 381). Woman suf- frage also was not associated with just one political party. Initially, the woman suffrage movement had strong connections to the Republican Party because of its ties to the abolitionist movement. When Republicans supported voting rights for African Americans but not women, some leaders of the woman suffrage move- ment began to seek support without regard to party affiliation (Foner 1988, 252 and 313). In the Midwest, one could find advocates of woman suffrage among both Populists and Republicans (Goldberg 1994). The Populist interpretation of Oz also associates Baum’s position as the editor of a midwestern paper with Populism. For example, Tim Ziaukas (1998, 8) explained that in 1887 Baum “moved to an area that would become the state of South Dakota, where he ran a variety store and worked in journalism and wit- nessed the desperation of the kinds of people who would be instrumental in the Populist movement.” However, the Plains States were far from being a solid block in support of Democratic-Populism. Although Independents (the original name used by the Populists in South Dakota) did well in the 1890 elections, their hold in South Dakota was not particularly strong. South Dakota was a clean sweep for the Republican Party in congressional elections in 1892 and 1894 (Hicks 1961, 262 and 333) and went for the Republican presidential candidate Benjamin Har- rison in 1892. Bryan won South Dakota in the 1896 presidential contest, but McKinley outpolled him in much of the eastern border of the state, where Baum had lived. In 1900, South Dakota, like most of the other Plains States, returned to the Republicans and voted for McKinley (Faulkner 1959, 134, 207, and 277). Baum was one of the South Dakotans who never strayed from the Republican Party. Baum’s Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer was generally regarded as a Republi- can paper, and he himself referred to it as a Republican paper (Tystad-Koupal 1996, 85). In his editorials, he consistently supported Republican candidates and Summer 2002 259 Republican issues, such as the tariff.5 It is not necessary to decipher his views on Populists from his children’s books; he stated them quite clearly in his editorials. Although he was not as hostile toward Independents as the other Republican paper in Aberdeen, he could be very critical of particular Independents. After a speech by the Independent candidate for governor, he suggested the man had made “a fool of himself before all intelligent men” (Tystad-Koupal 1996, 90). Baum continued to support Republican causes after his move to Chicago in 1891. In 1896 he published the following poem in the Chicago Herald Tribune: When McKinley gets the chair, boys, There’ll be a jollification Throughout our happy nation And contentment everywhere! Great will be our satisfaction When the “honest money” faction Seats McKinley in the chair! No more the ample crops of grain That in our granaries have lain Will seek a purchaser in vain Or be at mercy of the “bull” or “bear”; Our merchants won’t be trembling At the silverites’ dissembling When McKinley gets the chair! When McKinley gets the chair, boys, The magic word “protection” Will banish all dejection And free the workingman from every care; We will gain the world’s respect When it knows our coin’s “correct” And McKinley’s in the chair! (Hearn 1992)6 He could hardly have been clearer in his opposition to Populist monetary pro- posals. Baum clearly believed that the combination of sound money and tariff protection, advocated by the Republican Party, would solve all the problems of merchants, farmers, and workingmen. Skeptical examination of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as well as subsequent Oz books (Baum wrote over a dozen more Oz books before his death in 1919), pre- sents even more problems for the allegorical interpretation of The Wonderful Wiz- ard of Oz. A particular problem is the issue of democracy. The Populist Party was not a single-issue party devoted solely to bimetallism. Populists were almost as concerned with democratic reform as with monetary reform. The Omaha Platform adopted in 1892 stated that “Corruption dominates the ballot box, the legislatures, the congress and touches even the ermine of the bench.” The party’s objective was to “restore the government of the Republic to the plain people.” Two of the 10 sup- plementary resolutions put forward by the platform committee directly addressed democratic institutions. Consider resolutions 7 and 8. 7. RESOLVED, That we commend to the favorable consideration of the people and the reform press the legislative system known as the initiative and referendum. 8. RESOLVED, That we favor a constitutional provision limiting the office of Pres- ident and Vice-President to one term, and providing for the election of Senators of the United States by a direct vote of the people (Hofstadter 1958, 152–53).7 260 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC EDUCATION Democratic reform was clearly central to Populist Party politics. The monetary problem was regarded as just one symptom of a broader problem. It would seem odd that someone writing a Populist allegory should completely disregard these other issues, especially someone as concerned with suffrage as Baum. Allegory: Alternate Interpretations In contrast to the Populists, the inhabitants of Oz were not democrats. Quite the contrary, they were avowed monarchists. All four of the main characters in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz were elevated to royalty. The Scarecrow became ruler of the Emerald City, the Tin Woodman became emperor of the Winkies, and of course, the Cowardly Lion became king of the forest. Upon her return to Oz in later books, Dorothy became a princess. Beginning with The Marvelous Land of Oz, the second book in the series, Oz is ruled by Ozma. The powers of Ozma were extensive. In The Emerald City of Oz, the sixth book in the series, Baum explained that, “All the property belonged to the Ruler. The people were her children and she cared for them” (Baum 1991, 30). People in Oz lived where the ruler told them to and worked at the jobs the ruler assigned them (Baum 1995, 185). Baum’s descriptions of the economy of Oz are also problematic for a Populist interpretation. Consider, for example, the dialogue between the shaggy man and the Tin Woodman about the Tin Woodman’s castle, from The Road to Oz (1991, the fifth book in the series): “It must have cost a lot of money,” remarked the shaggy man. “Money! Money in Oz!” cried the Tin Woodman. “What a queer idea! Did you suppose we are so vul- gar as to use money here?” “Why not?” asked the shaggy man. “If we used money to buy things with, instead of love and kindness and the desire to please one another, then we should be no better than the rest of the world,” declared the Tin Woodman. “Fortunately money is not known in the Land of Oz at all. We have no rich, and no poor; for what one wishes the others all try to give him, in order to make him happy, and no one in all Oz cares to have more than he can use.” (Baum 1991, 164) Hardly the views of a sophisticated monetary theorist. It seems easier to apply a utopian interpretation to the Oz economy than a Populist one. It sounds more like a household economy, in which the relationship between ruler and ruled is the same as that between parent and child.8 If Baum was not a Populist how can all the seeming coincidences be ex- plained? One might simply argue that a better understanding of Baum’s politics leads to a better understanding of the symbolism in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Clanton (1998, 183), for example, has argued that Baum was a Republican and that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written as a parody of Populists. Others have suggested that even if Baum was not a Populist and the book was not intend- ed as a full-scale allegory or parody, Baum’s writing was shaped by the political events of the time (Ritter 1997a, 21; Dighe forthcoming). Although one can try to reconcile a non-Populist Baum with an allegorical interpretation of Oz, many of the elements of the book that appear most laden with meaning actually have alternative explanations. Many of the elements of Baum’s stories can be traced to his experiences. Summer 2002 261 Baum was born in Chittenango, New York, in 1856. His father rose from the ranks of the middle class to amass considerable wealth, then lost most of it. By 1898, Baum had written and performed in plays; managed a chain of theaters; been a traveling salesman for axle grease, hardware, and china; edited a small paper and reported for a large one; managed a general store; written a book on raising chickens; and edited a magazine on window decorating. When he was liv- ing in Aberdeen, the area was experiencing a drought. Baum wrote a humorous column about a farmer who put green goggles on his horses so that they would think wood chips were grass, just like the Wizard made the inhabitants of Oz wear green glasses to convince them the city was made of emeralds (Baum and MacFall 1961, 74).9 One of Baum’s sons described the Tin Woodman as a prod- uct of Baum’s interest in window displays. According to Harry Baum, his father “wanted to create something eye catching, so he made a torso out of a washboil- er; bolted stovepipe arms and legs to it, and used the underside of a saucepan for the face. He topped it with a funnel hat, and what would become the inspiration for the tin woodman was born” (Carpenter and Shirley 1992, 43). Baum once explained that he had been fascinated with scarecrows since he was a child (Hearn 2000, 64). The story about pieces of china that come alive in chapter 20 of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz hardly seems surprising from a man who had been a salesman for a china company. Much of the allegorical argument is built on the significance of colors: a City of Emeralds, a yellow brick road, silver shoes, and so forth. Although colors are important in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, their significance arises from the col- laboration of Baum with the illustrator W. W. Denslow. Many people now read reprints of the Oz books that contain only black and white illustrations, but the original books were unique at the time for their use of color and the integration of text and illustrations (O’Reilly 1997, 42–47).10 Baum was the story teller, but he worked throughout the creative process with Denslow. Each part of Oz had its own dominant color. Blue was the color of the Munchkins, yellow was the color of the Winkies, and red the color of the Quadlings. The colors in the book changed as the characters moved through Oz. Such extensive use of color illus- trations was unusual and expensive, but Baum and Denslow were so committed to their vision that they agreed to pay for the printing plates themselves. Fur- thermore, whereas many of the colors appear significant in the allegorical inter- pretation, others are left unexplained. Why, for example, was the color of witch- es white? Why was Dorothy’s bonnet pink? Economist Rockoff adds a quantitative element to the case for the allegorical interpretation: the seven passages and three flights of steps (the Crime of ’73) that Dorothy passes through in the Wizard’s palace. Like the colors, however, this example selects one out of many numeric combinations to present as significant. What of the many other numerical combinations? The Emerald City had “nine thousand, six hundred and fifty-four buildings, in which lived fifty-seven thou- sand three hundred and eighteen people” (Baum 1991, 29). To go home, Dorothy clicked her heels three times and took three steps. The possessor of the Golden Cap was allowed to call the Flying Monkeys three times. What is the significance of these numbers? 262 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC EDUCATION Other Sources of Symbolism There is an alternative interpretation of Baum’s use of colors and numbers. The vivid colors and exact numbers, all expressed in simple language, are part of what Hollister refers to as the “three dimensionality” that made The Wonderful Wizard of Oz a success among children, if not among literary critics. He describes this quality as “the three dimensional experience of going into another universe where everything is brighter and more fragrant, more dangerous, and more alive” (Hollister 1983, 195). The importance of color is not restricted to Baum’s Oz books either. In Sky Island (1912), one of Baum’s attempts to escape from the Oz series, the story takes place on an island in the sky where pink peo- ple live on one-half and blue people on the other. It is difficult, if not impossible, to go more than a couple of pages in one of Baum’s books without a reference to a color or a number. These are descriptions that children understand and can readily imagine. Other historians have suggested additional sources for Oz. Leach (1993, 246–60) argued that the book is largely a product of Baum’s interest in theoso- phy. Parker (1994) argued that Baum was strongly influenced by the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Baum was clearly a man with wide-ranging interests. Hearn’s The Annotated Wizard of Oz (2000) provides innumerable examples of contemporary events that are likely to have influenced Baum’s writing. He was aware of developments in politics, religion, and popular culture. It seems rea- sonable that many of these developments influenced his writing, but the available evidence strongly suggests that he did not write The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a monetary allegory. CONCLUSION Rockoff noted that the empirical evidence that Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as an allegory was slim, but he compared an allegorical interpreta- tion to a model and suggested that “economists should not have any difficulty accepting, at least provisionally, an elegant but controversial model” (Rockoff 1990, 757). He was right—we did not have any difficulty accepting it. Despite Rockoff’s warning, we appear to have accepted the story wholeheartedly rather than provisionally, simply because of its elegance.11 It is as difficult to prove that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was not a monetary allegory as it is to prove that it was. In the end, we will never know for certain what Baum was thinking when he wrote the book. I suggest that the vast majority of the evidence weighs heavily against the allegorical interpretation. It should be remem- bered that no record exists that Baum ever acknowledged any political meanings in the story and that no one even suggested such an interpretation until the 1960s. There certainly does not seem to be sufficient evidence to overwhelm Baum’s explicit statement in the introduction of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that his sole purpose was to entertain children and not to impress upon them some moral. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a great story. Telling students that the Populist movement was like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz does seem to catch their atten- Summer 2002 263 tion. It may be a useful pedagogical tool to illuminate the debate on bimetallism, but we should stop telling our students that it was written for that purpose. NOTES 1. Bryan was the presidential candidate representing the fusion of the Democratic and Populist par- ties in 1896. He lost to the Republican William McKinley. 2. The Crime of ’73 was used by proponents of bimetallism to refer to the Coinage Act of 1873, which omitted coinage of the silver dollar. 3. Gardner almost certainly misinterpreted one aspect of Baum’s politics when he suggested that his writings betrayed a distaste for feminism and woman suffrage (Gardner 1957, 21). 4. It has also been suggested that the Winged Monkeys represented Plains Indians and the Winkies represented Asians (either Filipinos or Chinese immigrants) and that Baum was “clearly sympa- thetic to the plight of the Philippines (and to the Plains Indians)” (Rockoff 1990, 751). Baum’s editorials in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer indicate that his sympathy was limited. He declared that whites had wronged the Native Americans but argued that the only solution to the Indian problem was total extermination of these “untamed and untamable creatures” (Tystad-Koupal 1996, 147). 5. It might be suggested that Baum was merely pandering to a Republican audience, but he also used his editorials to discuss issues that do not appear to have been popular in Aberdeen, such as advocating woman suffrage and challenging the teachings of local churches (Hearn 2000, xxiii). 6. Chicago Sunday Times Herald, July 12, 1896. Reprinted in Hearn (1992). 7. Prior to the 17th Amendment, adopted in 1913, senators were selected by state legislatures rather than by direct election. 8. Thanks to Mary Hansen for pointing this out to me. 9. Baum does not seem to have been very concerned with being consistent from one book to the next. By the time of The Emerald City of Oz, the city is actually emerald encrusted. 10. The Books of Wonder reprints of the Oz series contain the original color illustrations by W. W. Denslow and John Neill. Particularly spectacular are the illustrations in The Emerald City of Oz, each of which incorporates a special metallic green ink. The annotated centennial edition edited by Michael Patrick Hearn also reproduces the original appearance of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. 11. I use the term “we” literally because I told the story to my classes for several years. I did not start to doubt it until I read the Oz series to Ben and Joanna Gregson. REFERENCES Baum, F. J., and R. MacFall. 1961. To please a child: A biography of L. Frank Baum. Chicago: Reilly and Lee. Baum, L. F. 1900. The wonderful wizard of Oz. Chicago: Hill. 1904. The marvelous land of Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Britton. 1912. Sky island. Chicago: Reilly and Britton. 1991. [1909] The road to Oz. New York: William Morrow. 1993. [1910] The Emerald City of Oz. New York: William Morrow. 1995. [1913] The patchwork girl of Oz. New York: William Morrow. Bittlingmayer, G. 1996. Antitrust and business activity: The first quarter century. Business History Review 70 (3): 363–401. Carpenter, A. J., and J. Shirley. 1992. L. Frank Baum: Royal historian of Oz. Minneapolis: Lerner. Dighe, R. S. Forthcoming. The historian’s wizard of Oz: Reading L. Frank Baum’s classic as a polit- ical and monetary allegory. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. Faulkner, H. U. 1959. Politics, reform and expansion. New York: Harper & Row. Foner, E. 1988. Reconstruction: America’s unfinished revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row. Friedman, M. 1990. The crime of 1873. Journal of Political Economy 98 (6): 1159–94. Gardner, M. 1957. The royal historian of Oz. In M. Gardner and R. Nye, eds., The wizard of Oz and who he was. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Goldberg, M. 1994. Non-partisan and all-partisan: Rethinking woman suffrage and party politics in gilded age Kansas. Western Historical Quarterly, 25 (1): 2–44. Hearn, M. P. 1992. Oz author never championed Populism. New York Times Jan. 10. ———. 2000. The annotated wizard of Oz: A centennial edition. New York: W. W. Norton. Hicks, J. 1961. The Populist revolt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 264 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC EDUCATION Hofstadter, R. 1958. Great issues in American history, vol. 2: 1864–1957. New York: Vintage. Hollister, C. W. 1983. Oz and the fifth criterion. In M. P. Hearn, ed., The wizard of Oz. New York: Schoken. Reprinted from 1971. The Baum Bugle (Christmas issue):5–8. Kish-Goodling, D. M. 1998. Using The Merchant of Venice in teaching monetary economics. Jour- nal of Economic Education 29 (Fall): 330–39. Leach, W. 1993. Land of desire: Merchants, power and the rise of a new American culture. New York: Pantheon. Littlefield, H. M. 1964. The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism. American Quarterly 16 (1): 47–58. Mankiw, N. G. 2001. Principles of economics. 2nd ed. Orlando: Dryden. Nye, R. 1957. An appreciation. In M. Gardner and R. Nye, eds., The wizard of Oz and who he was. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. O’Reilly, M. 1997. Oz and beyond: The fantasy world of L. Frank Baum. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Parker, D. 1994. The rise and fall of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a “parable of populism.” Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians 15: 49–63. Ritter, G. 1997a. Goldbugs and greenbacks: The antimonopoly tradition and the politics of finance in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997b. Silver slippers and a golden cap: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and historical meaning in American politics. Journal of American Studies 31 (2): 171–202. Rockoff, H. 1990. The wizard of Oz as a monetary allegory. Journal of Political Economy 98 (4): 739–60. Reprinted in R. Whaples and D. C. Betts, eds., 1995. Historical perspectives on the Amer- ican economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scahill, E. M. 1998. A Connecticut yankee in Estonia. Journal of Economic Education 29 (Fall): 340–46. Schweikart, L. 2000. The entrepreneurial adventure: A history of business in the United States. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt Brace. Tystad-Koupal, N., ed. 1996. Our landlady. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Watts, M., and R. E. Smith. 1989. Economics in literature and drama. Journal of Economic Educa- tion 20 (Summer): 291–307. Whaples, R., and D. C. Betts, eds. 1995. Historical perspectives on the American economy. Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press. Ziaukas, T. 1998. Baum’s wizard of Oz as gilded age public relations. Public Relations Quarterly 43 (3): 7–11. HIST 102 Essay 1/The Wizard of Oz as a Parable on Populism The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism by Henry M. Littlefield On the deserts of North Africa in 1941 two tough Australian brigades went into battle singing: Have you heard of the wonderful wizard, The wonderful Wizard of Oz, And he is a wonderful wizard, If ever a wizard there was. It was a song they had brought with them from Australia and would soon spread to England. Forever afterward it reminded Winston Churchill of those "buoyant days."[1] Churchill's nostalgia is only one symptom of the world-wide delight found in an American fairy tale about a little girl and her odyssey in the strange land of Oz. The song he reflects upon came from a classic 1939 Hollywood production of the story, which introduced millions of people not only to the land of Oz, but to a talented young lady named Judy Garland as well. Ever since its publication in 1900 Lyman Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been immensely popular, providing the basis for a profitable musical comedy, three movies, and a number of plays. It is an indigenous creation, curiously warm and touching, although no one really knows why. For despite wholehearted acceptance by generations of readers, Baum's tale has been accorded neither critical acclaim, nor extended critical examination. Interested scholars, such as Russel B. Nye and Martin Gardiner, look upon The Wizard of Oz as the first in a long and delightful series of Oz stories, and understandably base their appreciation of Baum's talent on the totality of his works[2]. The Wizard of Oz is an entity unto itself, however, and was not originally written with a sequel in mind. Baum informed his readers in 1904 that he has produced The Marvelous Land of Oz reluctantly and only in answer to well over a thousand letters demanding that he creation another Oz tale. [3] His original effort remains unique and to some degree separate from the books which follow. But its uniqueness does not rest alone on its peculiar and transcendent popularity. Professor Nye finds a "strain of moralism" in the Oz books, as well as "a well-developed sense of satire," and Baum stories often include searching parodies on the contradiction in human nature. The second book in the series, The Marvelous Land of Oz, is a blatant satire on feminism and the suffragette movement. [4] In it Baum attempted to duplicate the format used so successfully in The Wizard, yet no one has noted a similar play on contemporary movements in the latter work. Nevertheless, one does exist, and it reflects to an astonishing degree the world of political reality which surrounded Baum in 1900. In order to understand the relationship of The Wizard to turn-of-the-century America, it is necessary first to know something of Baum's background. Born near Syracuse in 1856, Baum was brought up in a wealthy home and early became interested in the theater. He wrote some plays which enjoyed brief success and then, with his wife and two sons, journeyed to Aberdeen, South Dakota, in 1887. Aberdeen was a little prairie town and there Baum edited the local weekly until it failed in 1891. [5] For many years Western farmers had been in a state of loud, though unsuccessful, revolt. While Baum was living in South Dakota not only was the frontier a thing of the past, but the Romantic view of benign nature had disappeared we well. The stark reality of the dry, open plains and the acceptance of man's Darwinian subservience to his environment served to crush Romantic idealism. [6] Hamlin Garland's visit to Iowa and South Dakota coincided with Baum's arrival. Henry Nash Smith observes, "Garland's success as a portrayer of hardship and suffering on Northwestern farms was due in part to the fact that his personal experience happened to parallel the shock which the entire West received in the later 1880's from the combined effects of low prices, ... grasshoppers, drought, the terrible blizzards of the winter of 1886-1887, and the juggling of freight rates..."[7] As we shall see, Baum's prairie experience was no less deeply etched, although he did not employ naturalism to express it. Baum's stay in South Dakota also covered the period of the formation of the Populist party, which Professor Nye likens to a fanatic "crusade". Western farmers had for a long time sought governmental aid in the form of economic panaceas, but to no avail. The Populist movement symbolized a desperate attempt to use the power of the ballot. [8] In 1891 Baum moved to Chicago where he was surrounded by those dynamic elements of reform which made the city so notable during the 1890's. [9] In Chicago Baum certainly saw the results of the frightful depression which had closed down up on the nation in 1893. Moreover, he took part in the pivotal election of 1896, marching in "torch-light parades for William Jennings Bryan". Martin Gardiner notes besides, that he "consistently voted as a democrat...and his sympathies seem always to have been on the side of the laboring classes." No one who marched in even a few such parades could have been unaffected by Bryan's campaign. Putting all the farmers' hopes in a basket labeled "free coinage of silver," Bryan's platform rested mainly on the issue of adding silver to the nation's gold standard. Though he lost, he did at least bring the plight of the little man into national focus. [11] Between 1896 and 1900, while Baum worked and wrote in Chicago, the great depression faded away and the war with Spain thrust the United States into world prominence. Bryan maintained Midwestern control over the Democratic Party, and often spoke out against American policies toward Cuba and the Philippines. By 1900 it was evident that Bryan would run again, although now imperialism and not silver seemed the issue of primary concern. In order to promote greater enthusiasm, however, Bryan felt compelled once more to sound the silver leitmotif in his campaign. [12] Bryan's second futile attempt at the presidency culminated in November 1900. The previous winter Baum had attempted unsuccessfully to sell a rather original volume of children's fantasy, but that April, George M. Hill, a small Chicago publisher, finally agreed to print The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Baum's allegiance to the cause of Democratic Populism must be balanced against the fact that he was not a political activist. Martin Gardiner finds all through all of his writings "a theme of tolerance, with many episodes that poke fun at narrow nationalism and ethnocentrism." Nevertheless, Professor Nye quotes Baum as having a desire to write stories that would "bear the stamp of our times and depict the progressive fairies of today."[13] The Wizard of Oz has neither the mature religious appeal of a Pilgrim's Progress, nor the philosophic depth of a Candide. Baum's most thoughtful devotees see in it only a warm, cleverly written fairy tale. Yet the original Oz book conceals an unsuspected depth, and it is the purpose of this study to demonstrate that Baum's immortal American fantasy encompasses more than heretofore believed. For Baum created a children's story with a symbolic allegory implicit within its story line and characterizations. The allegory always remains in a minor key, subordinated to the major theme and readily abandoned whenever it threatens to distort the appeal of the fantasy. But through it, in the form of a subtle parable, Baum delineated a Midwesterner's vibrant and ironic portrait of this country as it entered the twentieth century. We are introduced to both Dorothy and Kansas at the same time: "Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small, for the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There was four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty-looking cooking stove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else. When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child's laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy's merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at. Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke. It was Toto that made Dorothy laugh, and saved her from growing as gray as her other surroundings. Toto was not gray; he was a little black dog, with long silky hair and small black eyes that twinkled merrily on either side of his funny, wee nose. Toto played all day long, and Dorothy played with him, and loved him dearly.[14] Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur would not have recognized Uncle Henry's farm; it us straight out of Hamlin Garland. [15] On it a deadly environment dominated everyone and everything except Dorothy and her pet. The setting is Old Testament and nature seems greyly impersonal and even angry. Yet it is a fearsome cyclone that lifts Dorothy and Toto in their house and deposits them "very gently -- for a cyclone -- in the midst of a country of marvelous beauty." We immediately sense the contrast between Oz and Kansas. Here there are "stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits... gorgeous flowers... and birds with ... brilliant plumage" sing in the trees. In Oz "a small brook rushing and sparkling along" murmurs "in a voice very grateful to a little girl who had lived so long on the dry, gray prairie."(p. 20) Trouble intrudes. Dorothy's house has come down on the Wicked Witch of the East, killing her. Nature, by sheer accident, can provide benefits, for indirectly the cyclone has disposed of one of the two truly bad influences in the land of Oz. Notice that evil ruled in both the East and the West; after Dorothy's coming it rules only in the West. The Wicked Witch of the East had kept the little Munchkin people "in bondage for many years, making them slave for her night and day." (pp. 22-23) Just what this slavery entailed is not immediately clear, but Baum later gives us a specific example. The Tin Woodman, whom Dorothy meets on her way to the Emerald City, had been put under a spell by the Witch of the East. Once an independent and hard working human being, the Woodman found that each time he swung his axe it chopped off a different part of his body. Knowing no other trade he "worked harder than ever," for luckily in Oz tinsmiths can repair such things. Soon the Woodman was all tin. (p. 59) In this way Eastern witchcraft dehumanized a simple laborer so that the faster and better he worked the more quickly he became a kind of machine. Here is a Populist view of evil Eastern influences on honest labor which could hardly be more pointed. [16] There is one thing seriously wrong with being made of tin; when it rains rust sets in. Tin Woodman had been standing in the same position for a year without moving before Dorothy came along and oiled his joints. The Tin Woodman's situation has an obvious parallel in the condition of many Eastern workers after the depression of 1893.[17] While Tin Woodman is standing still, rusted solid, he deludes himself into thinking he is no longer capable of that most human of sentiments, love. Hate does not fill the void, a constant lesson in the Oz books, and Tin Woodman feels that only a heart will make him sensitive again. So he accompanies Dorothy to see if the Wizard will give him one. Oz itself is a magic oasis surrounded by impassable deserts, and the country is divided in a very orderly fashion. In the North and South the people are ruled by good witches, who are not quite as powerful as the wicked ones of the East and West. In the center of the land is the magnificent Emerald City ruled by the Wizard of Oz, a successful humbug whom even the witches mistakenly feel "is more powerful than all the rest of us together." (p.24) Despite these forces, the mark of goodness, placed on Dorothy's forehead by the Witch of the North, serves as protection for Dorothy throughout her travels. Goodness and innocence prevail even over the powers of evil and delusion in Oz. Perhaps it is this basic and beautiful optimism that makes Baum's tale so characteristically American -- and Midwestern. Dorothy is Baum's Miss Everyman. She is one of us, levelheaded and human, and she has a real problem. Young readers can understand her quandary as readily as can adults. She is good, not precious, and she thinks quite naturally about others. For all the attractions of Oz, Dorothy desires only to return to the gray plains and Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. She is directed toward the Emerald City by the good Witch of the North, since the Wizard will surely be able to solve the problem of the impassable deserts. Dorothy sets out on the Yellow Brick Road wearing the Witch of the East's magic Silver Shoes. Silver shoes walking on a golden road; henceforth Dorothy becomes the innocent agent of Baum's ironic view of the Silver issue. Remember, neither Dorothy, nor the good Witch of the North, nor the Munchkins understand the power of these shoes. The allegory is abundantly clear. On the next to last page of the book Baum has Glinda, Witch of the South, tell Dorothy, "Your Silver Shoes will carry you over the desert.....If you had known their power you could have gone back to your Aunt Em the very first day you came to this country." Glinda explains, "All you have to do is knock the heels together three times and command the shoes to carry you wherever you wish to go." (p.257) William Jennings Bryan never outlined the advantages of the silver standard any more effectively. Not understanding the magic of the Silver Shoes, Dorothy walks the mundane -- and dangerous -- Yellow Brick Road. The first person she meets is a Scarecrow. After escaping from his wooden perch, the Scarecrow displays a terrible sense of inferiority and self-doubt, for he has determined that he needs real brains to replace the common straw in his head. William Allen White wrote an article in 1896 entitled "What's the Matter with Kansas?" In it he accused Kansas farmers of ignorance, irrationality and general muddle-headedness. What's wrong with Kansas are the people, said Mr. White. [18] Baum's character seems to have read White's angry characterization. But Baum never takes White seriously and so the Scarecrow soon emerges as innately a very shrewd and very capable individual. The Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman accompany Dorothy along the Yellow Brick Road, one seeking brains, the other a heart. They meet next the Cowardly Lion. As King of Beasts he explains, "I learned that if I roared very loudly every living thing was frightened and got out of my way." Born a coward, he sobs, "Whenever there is danger my heart begins to beat fast." "Perhaps you have heart disease," suggests Tin Woodman, who always worries about hearts. But the Lion desires only courage and so he joins the party to ask help from the Wizard (pp.65-72). The Lion represents Bryan himself. In the election of 1896 Bryan lost the vote of Eastern Labor, though he tried hard to gain their support. In Baum's story the Lion meeting the little group, "struck at the Tin Woodman with his sharp claws." But, to his surprise, "he could make no impression on the tin, although the Woodman fell over in the road and lay still." Baum here refers to the fact that in 1896 workers were often pressured into voting for McKinley and gold by their employers.[19] Amazed, the Lion says, "he nearly blunted my claws," and he adds even more appropriately, "When they scratched against the tin it made a cold shiver run down my back" (pp. 67-68). The King of Beasts is not after all very cowardly, and Bryan, although a pacifist and an anti-imperialist in a time of national expansion, is not either. [20] The magic Silver Shoes belong to Dorothy, however. Silver's potent charm, which had come to mean so much to so many in the Midwest, could not be entrusted to a political symbol. Baum delivers Dorothy from the world of adventure and fantasy to the real world of heartbreak and dissolution through the power of Silver. It represents a real force in a land of illusion, and neither the Cowardly Lion nor Bryan truly needs or understands its use. All together now the small party moves toward the Emerald City. Coxey's Army of tramps and indigents, marching to ask President Cleveland for work in 1894, appears no more naively innocent than this group of four characters going to see a humbug Wizard, to request favors that only the little girl among them deserves. Those who enter the Emerald City must wear green glasses. Dorothy later discovers that the greenness of dresses and ribbons disappears on leaving, and everything becomes a bland white. Perhaps the magic of any city is thus self-imposed. But the Wizard dwells here and so the Emerald City represents the national Capitol. The Wizard, a little bumbling old man, hiding behind a facade of papier-mâché and noise, might be any president from Grant to McKinley. He comes straight from the fairgrounds on Omaha, Nebraska, and he symbolizes the American criterion for leadership -- he is able to be everything to everybody. As each of our heroes enters the throne room to ask a favor the Wizard assumes different shapes, representing different views toward national leadership. To Dorothy he appears as an enormous head, "bigger than the head of the biggest giant." An apt image for naive and innocent little citizen. To the Scarecrow he appears to be a lovely, gossamer fairy, a most appropriate form for an idealistic Kansas farmer. The Woodman sees a horrible beast, as would any exploited Eastern laborer after the trouble of the 1890's. But the Cowardly Lion, like W. J. Bryan, sees a "Ball of Fire, so fierce and glowing he could scarcely bear to gaze upon it." Baum then provides an additional analogy, for when the Lion "tried to go nearer he singed his whiskers and he crept back tremblingly to a spot nearer the door." (p. 134) The Wizard has asked them all to kill the Witch of the West. The golden road does not go in that direction and so they must follow the sun, as have many pioneers in the past. The land they now pass through is "rougher and hillier, for there were no farms nor houses in the country of the West and the ground was untilled." (p.140) The Witch of the West uses natural forces to achieve her ends; she is Baum's version of sentient and malign nature. Finding Dorothy and her friends in the West, the Witch sends forty wolves against them, then forty vicious crows and finally a great swarm of black bees. But it is through the power of a magic golden cap that she summons the flying monkeys. They capture the little girl and dispose of her companions. Baum makes these Winged Monkeys into an Oz substitute for the plains Indians. Their leader says, "Once we were a free people, living happily in the great forest, flying from tree to tree, eating nuts and fruit, and doing just as we pleased without calling anybody master." "This," he explains, "was many years ago, long before Oz came out of the clouds to rule over this land" (p. 172). But like many Indian tribes Baum's monkeys are not inherently bad; their actions depend wholly upon the bidding of others. Under the control of an evil influence, they do evil. Under the control of goodness and innocence, as personified by Dorothy, the monkeys are helpful and kind, although unable to take her to Kansas. Says the Monkey King, "We belong to this country alone, and cannot leave it." (p. 213) The same could be said with equal truth of the first Americans. Dorothy presents a special problem to the Witch. Seeing the mark on Dorothy's forehead and the Silver Shoes on her feet, the Witch begins "to tremble with fear, for she knew what a powerful charm belonged to them." Then "she happened to look into the child's eyes and saw how simple the soul behind them was, and that the little girl did now know of the wonderful power the Silver shoes gave her." (p. 150) Here Baum again uses the Silver allegory to state the blunt homily that while goodness affords a people ultimate protection against evil, ignorance of their capabilities allows evil to impose itself upon them. The Witch assumes that proportions of a kind of western Mark Hanna or Banker Boss, who, through natural malevolence, manipulates the people and holds them prisoner by cynically taking advantage of their innate innocence. Enslaved in the West "Dorothy went to work meekly, with her mind made up to work as hard as she could; for she was glad the Wicked Witch had decided not to kill her." (p. 150) Many Western farmers have held these same grim thoughts in less mystical terms. If the Witch of the West is a diabolical force of Darwinian or Spencerian nature, then another contravening force may be counted upon the dispose of her. Dorothy destroys the evil Witch by angrily dousing her with a bucket of water. Water, that precious commodity which the drought-ridden farmers on the Great Plains needed so badly, and which if correctly used could create an agricultural paradise, or at least dissolve a wicked witch. Plain water brings an end to malign nature in the West. When Dorothy and her companions return to the Emerald City they soon discover that the Wizard is really nothing more than "a little man, with a bald head and a wrinkled face." Can this be the ruler of the land? Our friends looked at him in surprise and dismay. "I thought Oz was a great Head," said Dorothy...."And I thought Oz was a terrible Beast," said the Tin Woodman. "And I thought Oz was a Ball of Fire," exclaimed the Lion. "No; you are all wrong," said the little man meekly. "I have been making believe." Dorothy asks if he is truly a great Wizard. He confides, "Not a bit of it, my Dear; I'm just a common man." Scarecrow adds, "You're more than that...you're a humbug." (p. 184) The Wizard's deception is of long standing in Oz and even the Witches were taken in. How was it accomplished? "It was a great mistake my ever letting you into the Throne Room," the Wizard complains. "Usually I will not see even my subjects, and so they believe I am something terrible."(p. 185) What a wonderful lesson for youngsters of the decade when Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland and William McKinley were hiding in the White House. Formerly the Wizard was a mimic, a ventriloquist and a circus balloonist. The latter trade involved going "up in a balloon on circus day, so as to draw a crowd of people together and get them to pay to see the circus." (p. 186-187) Such skills are as admirable adapted to success in late-nineteenth-century politics as they are to the humbug wizardry of Baum's story. A pointed comment on Midwestern political ideals is the fact that our little Wizard comes from Omaha, Nebraska, a center of Populist agitation. "Why, that isn't very far from Kansas," cries Dorothy. Nor, indeed, are any of the characters in the wonderful Land of Oz The Wizard, of course, can provide the objects of self-delusion desired by Tin Woodman, Scarecrow and Lion. But Dorothy's hope of going home fades when the Wizard's balloon leaves too soon. Understand this: Dorothy wishes to leave a green and fabulous land, from which all evil has disappeared, to go back to the gray desolation of the Kansas prairies. Dorothy is an orphan; Aunt Em and Uncle Henry are her only family. Reality is never far from Dorothy's consciousness and in the most heartrending terms she explains her reasoning to the good Witch Glinda. Aunt Em will surely think something dreadful has happened to me, and that will make her put on mourning; and unless the crops are better this year than there were last I am sure Uncle Henry cannot afford it. (p. 254) The Silver Shoes furnish Dorothy with a magic means of travel. But when she arrives back in Kansas she finds, "The Silver Shoes had fallen off in her flight through the air, and were lost forever in the desert." (p.259) Were the "her" to refer to America in 1900, Baum's statement could hardly be contradicted. Current historiography tends to criticize the Populist movement for its "delusions, myths and foibles," Professor C. Vann Woodward observed recently.[22] Yet The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has provided unknowing generations with a gentle and friendly Midwestern critique of the Populist rationale on these very same grounds. Led by naive innocence and protected by good will, the farmer, the laborer and the politician approach the mystic holder of national power to ask for personal fulfillment. Their desires, as well as the Wizard's cleverness in answering them, are all self-delusion. Each of these characters carries within him the solution to his own problem, were he only to view himself objectively. The fearsome Wizard turns out to be nothing more than a common man, capable of shrewd but mundane answers to these self-induced needs. Like any good politician he gives the people what they want. Throughout the story Baum poses a central thought; the American desire for symbols of fulfillment is illusory. Real needs lie elsewhere. Thus the Wizard cannot help Dorothy, for of all the characters only she has a wish that is selfless, and only she has a direct connection to honest, hopeless human beings. Dorothy supplies real fulfillment when she returns to her aunt and uncle, using the Silver Shoes, and cures some of their misery and heartache. In this way Baum tells us that the Silver crusade at least brought back Dorothy's lovely spirit to the disconsolate plains farmer. Her laughter, love and good will are no small addition to that gray land, although the magic of Silver has been lost forever as a result. Noteworthy too is Baum's prophetic placement of leadership of Oz after Dorothy's departure. The Scarecrow reigns over the Emerald City, the Tin Woodman rules in the West and the Lion protects smaller beast in "a grand old forest." Thereby farm interests achieve national importance, industrialism moves West and Bryan commands only a forest full of lesser politicians. Baum's Fantasy succeeds in bridging the gap between what children want and what they should have. It is an admirable example of the way in which an imaginative writer can teach goodness and morality without producing the almost inevitable side effect of nausea. Today's children's books are either saccharine and empty, or boring and pedantic. Baum's first Oz tale -- and those which succeed it -- are immortal not so much because the "heart-aches and nightmares are left out" as that "the wonderment and joy" are retained (p. 1). Baum declares "The story of 'the Wonderful Wizard of Oz' was written solely to pleasure children of today" (p. 1). In 1963 there are very few children who have never heard of the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman or the Cowardly Lion, and whether they know W. W. Denslow's original illustrations of Dorothy, or Judy Garland's whimsical characterization, is immaterial. The Wizard has become a genuine piece of America folklore because, knowing his audience, Baum never allowed the consistency of the allegory to take precedence over the theme of youthful entertainment. Yet once discovered, the author's allegorical intent seems clear, and it gives depth and lasting interest even to children who only sense something else beneath the surface of the story. Consider the fun in picturing turn-of-the-century America, a difficult era at best, using these ready-made symbols provided by Baum. The relationship and analogies outlined above are admittedly theoretical, but they are far too consistent to be coincidental, and they furnish a teaching mechanism which is guaranteed to reach any level of student. The Wizard of Oz says so much about so many things that it is hard not to imagine a satisfied and mischievous gleam in Lyman Frank Baum's eye as he had Dorothy say, "And oh, Aunt Em! I'm so glad to be at home again!" Footnotes 1. Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour (Cambridge, 1949). pp. 615-16. 2. Martin Gardiner and Russel B. Nye, The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was (East Lansing, Mich., 1957), pp. 7 ff, 14-16, 19. Professor Nye's "Appreciation" and Martin Gardiner's "The Royal Historian of Oz" totaling some fourth-five pages, present as definitive an analysis of Baum and his works as is available today. 3. L Frank Bum, The Marvelous Land of Oz (Chicago, 1904), p 3 (Author's Note). 4. Gardiner and Nye, Wizard, pp. 5-7,23. 5. Ibid., pp. 20-22. 6. See Calton F. Culmsee, Malign Nature and the Frontier (Logan, Utah, 1959), VII, 5, 11, 14. The classic work in the field of symbolism in Western literature is Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Lane (New York, 1961), pp. 225-26, 261, 284-90. 7. Ibid., p. 287. 8. Russel B. Nye, Midwestern Progressive Politics (East Lansing, Mich., 1959). pp. 63, 56-58, 75, 105. See also John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (Minneapolish, 1931), pp. 82, 93-95, 264-68. 9. See Ray Ginger, Altgeld's America (New York, 1958). 10. GArdiner and Nye, Wizard, p. 29 11. See Williams Jennings Bryan, The First Battle (Lincoln, Neb., 1897), pp. 612-29. Two recent studies are notable: Harold U. Faulkner, Politics, REform and Expansion (New York, 1959), pp. 187-211 and Nye, Politics, pp. 105-20. 12. See Richard Hofstadter's shattering essay on Bryan in The American Political Tradition (New York, 1960), pp 186-205. Nye, Politics, pp. 121-22; Faulkner Reform, pp. 272-75. 13.Gardiner and Nye, Wizard, pp. 1, 30. 14. L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, pp. 11-13. All quotations cited in the text are from the inexpensive but accurate Dover paperback edition (New York, 1960). 15. Henry Nash Smith says of Garland's works in the 1890's, "It has at last become possible to deal with the Western farmer in literature as a human being instead of seeing him through a veil of literary convention, class prejudice or social theory." Virgin Land, p. 290. 16. Hicks declares that from the start "The Alliance and Populist platforms championed boldly the cause of labor...." Revolt p. 324. See also Bryan's Labor Day speech, Battle, pp. 375-83. 17. Faulkner, Reform, pp. 142-43. 18. Richard Hofstadter (ed.), Great Issues in American History (New York, 1960), II, 147-53. 19. Bryan, Battle, pp 617-618, "During the campaign I ran across various evidences of coercion, direct and indirect." See Hicks, Revolt, p. 325, who notes that "For some reason labor remained singularly unimpressed" by Bryan. Faulkner finds overt pressure as well, Reform, pp. 208-9. 20. Faulkner, Reform, pp. 257-58. 21. Professor Nye observes that during 1890 (while Baum was editing his Aberdeen weekly) the Nebraska Farmer's Alliance "launched the wildest campaign in Nebraska history." Politics, p. 64-65. Bryan was a Senator from Nebraska and it was in Omaha that the Populist party ratified its platform on July 4, 1892. Seen Henry Steele Comager (ed.), Documents of American History (New York, 1958). II, 143-46. 22. C. Vann Woodward, "Our Past Isn't What It Used To Be," The New York Times Book Review (July 28, 1963), p. 1; Hofstadter, Tradition The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism