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Essay 1 – Additional Readings
The Wizard of Oz: A Parable on Populism
The Fable of the Allegory The Wizard of OZ in Economics
Writing Assignment for Essay 1
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?
Signs of Friction a Portrait of America at Century’s End from A Fierce Discontent
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?
Be very detailed and specific in your essay. Be sure to use the conventions and writing guidelines established for the course.
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).
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
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.
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A Fierce Discontent:
The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America; 1870 – 1920.
By Michael McGerr, Ph.D. Indiana University
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
