[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Salmon P.Chase felt the new attitude as early as 1863. We beganwithout capital, he wrote that year,  and if we should lose the greater partof it before this [war] is over, labor will bring it back again and with apower hitherto unfelt among us.The fact that the war had been financed internally, and with such vastsums, brought home just how rich and powerful the nation had become.America is  to-day the most powerful nation on the face of the globe,Congressman Godlove S.Orth told an audience in Lafayette, Indiana, in1864. This war has been the means of developing resources and capa-bilities such as you never before dreamed that you possessed.The people knew they possessed them now, and with the end of theCivil War, as the country s military forces shrank quickly to insignifi-cance, they would, in the next three decades, use those new resourcesand capabilities to astonish the world.C h a t e r E l e v e nC A P I TALI S M R E DI N T O O TH AN D C L A WN TH E HALF CE NTU RY between the end of the Civil War and theIbeginning of World War I in Europe, the American economychanged more profoundly, grew more quickly, and became more diver-sified than at any earlier fifty-year period in the nation s history.In 1865 the country, although already a major industrial power, wasstill basically an agricultural one.Not a single industrial concern waslisted on the New York Stock Exchange.By the turn of the twentieth cen-tury, a mere generation later, the United States had the largest and mostmodern industrial economy on earth, one characterized by giant corpo-rations undreamed of in 1865.The country, an importer of capital sinceits earliest days, had become a world financial power as well, the equal ofGreat Britain.While displaced from the center of the American economy, agricul-tural production also greatly increased, as farmers and ranchers pouredinto the Great Plains via the railroads that were laid across them in theseyears.By 1890 the Census Bureau declared that the frontier a primaryfeature of American political geography since 1607 and a profoundinfluence on the American character had ceased to exist.There was206 AN E M P I R E O F WEAL THstill much land that was unoccupied, but it was fragmented, and therewas no longer an identifiable line across the continent that marked theend of civilization and the beginning of the once boundless wilderness.The United States was now a continental nation in geopolitical reality aswell as nominal geographic fact.The need to devise the new rules and institutions that would allowthis new economy to flourish, and to assure that its fruits were equitablyenjoyed by all segments of society, would dominate domestic Americanpolitics for the next century, just as preserving the Union and slaveryhad dominated the politics of the antebellum period.Many of thedevices adopted to govern the new economy in this time would comethrough governmental and legislative action, especially in the latterdecades.But, in fact, just as many would emerge out of the private sec-tor, as the lawyers, bankers, brokers, railroaders, labor leaders, andindustrialists sought to advance their own long-term self-interests, whichwere by no means always identical.Increasingly involved in the debate over economic policy and therules of the game as the nineteenth century drew to a close were intellec-tuals who had previously had no role beyond abstract economic theory.Often they sought to speak for society as a whole, rather than the self-interests of a particular group.Inevitably, of course, they spoke for theirown self-interests, although it usually seems they were unaware that theyhad any.Some such as Karl Marx and Henry George remained theorists,but ones who attracted large popular followings.(Henry George, how-ever, running as a reformer, was very nearly elected mayor of New Yorkin 1886, and finished well ahead of the Republican candidate, TheodoreRoosevelt.) Others, such as Charles Francis Adams and his brotherHenry, were principally writers and journalists.Many of these intellectu-als, however, had a very limited acquaintance with the real economicworld they sought to influence.It was, in short, a typically messy democratic process, but, as demo-cratic processes usually do, it worked in the long term.No society in his-Capitalism Red in Tooth and Claw207tory had ever needed to govern a highly dynamic industrially basedeconomy in a nation that was constitutionally a federal republic of lim-ited powers.The United States learned how to do so, using, largelyunconsciously, the great insights of the Founding Fathers: that men arenot angels, that they are driven by self-interest, and that that self-interestcan be exploited for the general good by an interlocking system ofdivided powers.Although sometimes racked by severe depressions, the Americaneconomy would flourish so abundantly, in the long term, in the next 140years precisely because the American nation devised a highly effectivesystem of checks and balances for governing that economy in thedecades after the Civil War.IMMEDIATE LY AFTE R THE WAR, however, nothing characterizedAmerican politics and thus the American economy so much as corrup-tion.There were, in effect, no cops on the beat, and the result, for a fewyears, was capitalism red in tooth and claw.It was often entertaining, atleast for those who were not directly involved, but it was no way to runan economy.Capitalism without regulation and regulators is inherentlyunstable, as people will usually put their short-term self-interests aheadof the interests of the system as a whole, and either chaos or plutocracywill result.As Herbert Hoover explained,  The trouble with capitalismis capitalists.They re too damn greedy.Nowhere was this corruption more pervasive than in New York, andespecially on Wall Street.Before the Civil War, the financial market hadbeen small enough that formal regulation was largely unnecessary; thevarious players could keep an eye on one another.While chicanery andoutright fraud were hardly unknown, the players in the game weremostly professionals who knew what they were getting into.With thevast inflow of securities due to the war and an equally large increase inthe number of people trading there, however, the situation changed.208 AN E M P I R E O F WEAL THBut there was no mechanism to provide oversight.The federal gov-ernment was not thought to have any role in regulating markets at thistime, and the state and city governments were cesspools of corruption.As early as 1857 George Templeton Strong wrote despairingly in hisdiary,  Heaven be praised for all its mercies, the Legislature of the stateof New York has adjourned [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]