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CHAPTER5THE RISE OF REALISM:1860-1914The U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) between theindustrial North and the agricultural,slave-owning South was a watershed inAmerican history. The innocent optimism of theyoung democratic nation gave way, after the war,to a period of exhaustion. American idealismremained but was rechanneled. Before the war,idealists championed human rights, especiallythe abolition of slavery; after the war, Americansincreasingly idealized progress and the selfmademan. This was the era of the millionairemanufacturer and the speculator, whenDarwinian evolution and the “survival of thefittest” seemed to sanction the sometimesunethical methods of the successful businesstycoon.Business boomed after the war. War productionhad boosted industry in the North and givenit prestige and political clout. It also gave industrialleaders valuable experience in the managementof men and machines. The enormous naturalresources — iron, coal, oil, gold, and silver— of the American land benefitted business.The new intercontinental rail system, inauguratedin 1869, and the transcontinental telegraph,which began operating in 1861, gave industryaccess to materials, markets, and communications.The constant influx of immigrants provideda seemingly endless supply of inexpensive laboras well. Over 23 million foreigners — German,Scandinavian, and Irish in the early years, andincreasingly Central and Southern Europeansthereafter — flowed into the United Statesbetween 1860 and 1910. Chinese, Japanese, andFilipino contract laborers were imported byHawaiian plantation owners, railroad companies,and other American business interests on theWest Coast.In 1860, most Americans lived on farms or insmall villages, but by 1919 half of the populationwas concentrated in about 12 cities. Problemsof urbanization and industrialization appeared:poor and overcrowded housing, unsanitary conditions,low pay (called “wage slavery”), difficultworking conditions, and inadequate restraints onbusiness. Labor unions grew, and strikes broughtthe plight of working people to national awareness.Farmers, too, saw themselves strugglingagainst the “money interests” of the East, theso-called robber barons like J.P. Morgan and JohnD. Rockefeller. Their eastern banks tightly controlledmortgages and credit so vital to westerndevelopment and agriculture, while railroadcompanies charged high prices to transport farmproducts to the cities. The farmer graduallybecame an object of ridicule, lampooned as anunsophisticated “hick” or “rube.” The idealAmerican of the post-Civil War period becamethe millionaire. In 1860, there were fewer than100 millionaires; by 1875, there were more than1,000.From 1860 to 1914, the United States was transformedfrom a small, young, agricultural excolonyto a huge, modern, industrial nation. Adebtor nation in 1860, by 1914 it had become theworld’s wealthiest state, with a population thathad more than doubled, rising from 31 million in1860 to 76 million in 1900. By World War I, theUnited States had become a major world power.As industrialization grew, so did alienation.Characteristic American novels of the period —Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,Jack London’s Martin Eden, and later TheodoreDreiser’s An American Tragedy — depict thedamage of economic forces and alienation on47