by H. W. Brands
Patterns of use needed to be as carefully regulated as patterns of ownership. Only the largest streams were worth damming, but to preserve their worth their tributaries had to be kept free of diversion—which often meant free of settlement. Fences should be banned from much of the pasture lands, as they prevented stock from finding shelter from storms and making the most of the available grasses. But common grazing required communal policies regarding the number of stock each farmer could place on the range.
Communalism informed Powell’s vision from start to finish. Individualism had sufficed to develop the East, but individualism would fail in the West. Powell knew Congress—to which his report was addressed—well enough not to lecture the lawmakers explicitly on how this communalism ought to be accomplished. He pointed out that in Utah Territory the Mormon Church took the lead in developing and enforcing communal policies, especially with respect to irrigation. Yet, given the hostility most (Gentile) Americans held for the Mormons, Powell’s example was really a caution and an implicit argument for action by secular government.20
POWELL SPOKE FOR a distant future, as things turned out. His views would inform the development of the Southwest during the twentieth century, when government did take the lead in making the desert habitable and profitable. For the rest of the nineteenth century, however, another vision—one better tuned to the times—shaped western development.
William Allen White was a Kansan, a child of Emporia who left his home to learn journalism but returned to purchase and edit the local paper, the Emporia Gazette. His vigorous style caught the attention of his colleagues in the fourth estate, who reprinted his editorials and appointed him pulse taker to the American people. The editors of Scribner’s Magazine, as part of a series called “The Conduct of Great Businesses,” commissioned White to assess the state of the agricultural industry. The assignment seconded certain notions White had reached while watching agriculture evolve on the Middle Border. “When one is cataloguing the callings of men, one says, ‘the business man and the farmer,’ never the ‘the business man and farmer’ or the ‘business man engaged in farming,’ ” he wrote. “In daily speech modern men and women pay unconscious tribute to the ghost of the old order which seemed to decree that the farmer’s existence depended upon brawn and not upon brain.” The old order had vanished, White asserted, and with it the distinction between businessman and farmer. “The successful farmer of this generation must be a business man first, and a tiller of the soil afterward.… He must be a capitalist, cautious and crafty; he must be an operator of industrial affairs, daring and resourceful.”
Nowhere was this truer than on the large farms of the West, where agriculture in the 1890s took a particular bent. In the Central Valley of California and on the volcanic plateaus of eastern Oregon and Washington, wheat growers plowed, planted, and harvested on vast tracts that dwarfed anything found in the East. But the most striking examples of the “bonanza farms,” as the giant wheat operations were called, lay along the Red River in North Dakota. Accordingly, to the Red River Valley White traveled to observe the capitalist farmers at work.
The first thing that struck him upon entering the valley by train was the thoroughness of the cultivation. “There is not a barren acre. Wheat stretches away from the car window to the horizon, over a land flat as a floor. The monotonous exactness of the level makes one long for the undulating prairies of the middle west. Yet the very evenness of the plain has a commercial value, and makes the location here of the great wheat-farms possible. For in a rolling country there is waste land—here an ‘eighty’ on a hill top, there a ‘forty’ in a swamp. But in bonanza farming every foot of land must be productive with the expenditure of the least possible amount of human labor upon it.”21
Providence and geology had combined to endow the Red River Valley with its flatness, which in turn produced the deep soil, nearly devoid of stones, that made the task of the plowman almost a pleasure. But it was capitalism that fostered the creation of the large tracts—of thousands and tens of thousands of acres—of the biggest bonanza farms. The Northern Pacific Railroad had reached the Red River in 1872, underwritten by the same sorts of land grants as the Union and Central Pacific railroads. The financial panic of the following year left the Northern (and many other railroads) starved for cash, which the Northern’s directors partially obtained by unloading their land grants. Eastern and European investors shortly constructed some of the largest privately owned farms in North America.
The investors were betting on the future of the wheat industry, which during the late 1870s and 1880s indeed became an industry. Decades earlier millers had discovered the falls of the Mississippi and made Minneapolis a center of grain grinding. But after the Civil War they devised new methods for separating the coarse bran and oily germ of wheat from its starchy endosperm. Millstones gave way to steel rollers, which cracked the kernels and culled all but the fluffy white flour. This prized product yielded airy loaves and stayed fresh far longer than its whole-grain predecessors and so could be shipped across the country and across the sea. Not coincidentally—cause and effect being intimately entwined in economic and industrial development—the hard red wheat that grew best in the Red River hinterland of Minneapolis was ideally suited to the machining techniques of the milling industry. The investors envisioned their Red River farms feeding the world.22
But doing so required efficiency, for investors in other countries—Russia, Hungary, Argentina—had the same idea and access to the same markets and techniques. The farms of the Red River became outdoor factories, as mechanized in their own way as the refineries of John Rockefeller and the steelworks of Andrew Carnegie. “From the plough to the elevator,” William White observed, “from the first operation in wheat farming to the last, one is forced to realize how the spirit of the age has made itself felt here.” This was farming unlike anything previous generations had known. “The man who ploughs uses his muscle only incidentally in guiding the machine. The man who operates the harrow has half a dozen levers to lighten his labor.… The reaper needs a quick brain and a quick hand—but not necessarily a strong arm, nor a powerful back.… The threshers are merely assistants to a machine, and the men who heave wheat into the bins only press buttons.” The farm laborer of the West became decreasingly distinguishable from the factory worker of the East. “Each is the tender of a machine.”
The bonanza farms were to the yeoman’s plot what Carnegie’s works were to the corner blacksmith. “It is difficult to present the idea of the bigness of these farms to the person whose preconceived notion of a farm is a little checkerboard lying upon a hillside or in a valley,” White said. Seven thousand acres constituted the average Red River farm. “Distances across fields are so great that horseback communication is impracticable. Crews of workmen living at one end of the farm and operating it may not see the crews in other corners from season’s end to season’s end.” Most of the workers were full-time agriculturalists but part-time Red River men; they followed the spring from the southern Plains north, arriving in time to plow the warming ground. They worked in gangs, driving their horse-drawn harrows in echelon across the endless fields. Behind the harrows came the wheat drills, boring a bushel and a peck of the prime of last year’s crop into each acre. After the seeding all but a skeleton crew of eight or ten workers were dismissed. Most of those let go circled back to the southern Plains, where crops were already beginning to ripen, and they harvested their way north. Few paid rail fare; the railroad corporations, as a service to their largest customers—the bonanza farms—ensured the arrival of the labor forces by letting them ride free.
The harvest was the frantic season in the valley. Beginning in late July, weather permitting, it continued till all the wheat was in the elevators or rain ruined the rest of the crop. The men worked hard and long. “They eat breakfast at five o’clock and supper at half-past seven,” White wrote. They spent the intervening hours in the field. “It is found profitable to feed the hands in the fields rather
than to allow them to trudge through the hot sun to the dining-halls for dinner.” The shrewdest managers—the only ones who lasted in this competitive industry—took good care of their men. “In the old days, before the system of farming had been reduced to a business problem, no sleeping quarters were provided, and the men slept in the open and upon the straw.… But this plan brought sickness to the farms in the harvest season, and the farmers found that it was more expensive than housing and caring for the men in the best possible manner.” Similar thinking inspired the menus. “The bonanza farmers—at least the better class of them—are as careful of the food set before the men as they are of the fodder that is put before their horses.” A typical dinner consisted of “corned beef, boiled potatoes, salt pork, baked beans, stewed turnips, tea and coffee, milk, white sugar—and that is a point that has caused many a strike in the Mississippi Valley—syrup, hot and cold bread, cookies, doughnuts, pickles, two kinds of pie, and cheese.” The foremen imposed a certain social discipline upon the crews. “On the best farms there is no drinking, and card-playing is strictly prohibited. The foremen say that cards keep men out of bed at night, and they have not their best strength to work during the day.”
The hard work didn’t end with the harvest. The wheat had to be threshed and the grain sorted. The field stubble had to be burned to kill pests and fertilize the soil with the ash. After the ground cooled the fields were plowed, again by gangs of machines staggered across the field, each turning a twin furrow. The plows averaged twenty linear miles a day and up to three hundred acres per season. When the plowing ended the men went home to Chicago or St. Louis or Milwaukee, to the embraces of their wives and the economic benefit of their communities. “They bring home probably a million dollars in wages.” To White they seemed the salt of the earth. “They are steady, industrious men with no bad habits, and small ambitions.”
The ambitions of their bosses were larger. White found fascinating the obsession of the farm managers with costs; John Rockefeller couldn’t have been more ruthless in routing inefficiency. White laid out the operation as it appeared from the manager’s office.
This is his plant: First there is the land—about seven thousand acres of it. The raw land—if there were any raw land in this part of the world—would be worth about $175,000. The improvements are worth about $35,000. There are three divisions of the farm, each division having its division superintendent.… At each division house there are stables and implement barns. In each division stable are about one hundred head of horses.… In the machine-shed upon each division are ten four-horse ploughs, eight four-horse drills, half a dozen harrows, and seven binders.… There are three steam-motor threshing machines on the place, but except while they are in use they are kept at the division nearest the manager’s house.… Two elevators, one with a capacity of 40,000 bushels and the other with a capacity of 60,000, are located upon opposite corners of the farm by the railroad track which runs through the great field. A central office, wherein the bookkeeper and the manager conduct the business of the farm, is connected with the three division houses and with other important points on the farm by telephone.… A set of books, kept as carefully as the books of a bank are kept, and a telephone connecting the farm with a telegraph wire to the world’s markets complete the list of articles which may properly be called the tools of the business.
The manager and the bookkeeper monitored every step of the productive process—that is, of the life cycle of the wheat. Planting the wheat, for example, cost seventy to ninety-five cents an acre, depending on weather (once the crews arrived at the farm they drew their weekly wage of nine to twelve dollars even if rain kept them in the dormitories for days at a time). Feeding the men cost thirty cents a day (a bit more at first, as the men bulked up after eating for months on their own accounts, a little less afterward). White noted that casual observers of modern farm life often blamed farmers for carelessness in leaving their equipment in the fields to rust over the winter. On the bonanza farms this wasn’t carelessness but calculation. “The Dakota farmers, who buy machinery by the car-load, say that many times it does not pay to take a machine to the shed after a hard season’s wear and tear.… More money is lost in time repairing and tinkering with an old implement than would pay for two new ones.” On the bonanza farms, a piece of heavy equipment was not a capital investment but an item of consumption. If a harvester or a binder lasted a single season, the manager was satisfied, for he knew how much the equipment magnified the labor power of his men.
It was in the use of equipment that the big farms gained their greatest economies of scale. A farmer who planted a mere forty acres of wheat required a binder to tie it in sheaves. But the binder could easily tie the wheat from several times that acreage, leaving the small farmer to spread its cost over a much smaller harvest than the large farmer could. Likewise with harvesters and threshers. The small farmer might be tempted to share equipment with neighbors, and some did. But the wheat came ripe all at once, and the farmer who didn’t have the equipment at his instant disposal could be ruined by an untimely rain.
The output of the bonanza farms was prodigious.
Averaging twenty bushels to the acre, as many farms will this year, the total number of bushels in a crop on a bonanza farm would be 140,000. Putting five hundred bushels of that crop in a freight car, and allowing forty feet to the car, the train which would haul the crop from the farm would be two miles long, and if it were to come charging down Fifth Avenue and Broadway in New York, the rear end brakeman would be craning his neck from the caboose to catch sight of the Vanderbilt mansion while the engineer and fireman were enjoying themselves bumping the cable car down by Union Square.… If this crop had to go to mill the old-fashioned way, in two bushel sacks on a mule, the procession would stretch more than halfway from Brooklyn to Buffalo.
Yet huge output was no guarantee of profit. The farm managers didn’t open their books to White, and so he had to guess at some of the costs of production. Labor and equipment were relatively straightforward, as were the purchase cost and upkeep of livestock. Taxes were a matter of public record; interest and insurance premiums were not. Tallying it all up, White arrived at a cost of about eight dollars per acre to operate one of the big farms. In a good year this translated into a cost of about forty cents per bushel of wheat. The price of wheat the last several years had averaged more than fifty cents, leaving the bonanza farmers a tidy profit.
But not every year was a good year. When the rains came too soon or too late or not at all, the acre yield fell off dramatically, while the farmers’ expenses did not. Over time the yields diminished even in good weather, as the wheat monoculture depleted the soil. And in even the best years, the Red River farmers were at the mercy of occurrences half a world away. Price tickers in managers’ offices recorded fluctuations in the grain markets in Minneapolis and Duluth and Buffalo, which in turn responded to developments on the world market. “A rainfall in India or a hot wind in South America is felt upon the Dakota farm in a few hours. The nerves of trade thrill around the globe, and the wages of the harvester in the Red River Valley are fixed by conditions in the fields of Russia, or in Argentina, or in India. The distance between the fields has been lost. The world’s wheat crop might as well lie in one great field, for the scattered acres are wired together in the markets, and those markets are brought to the farmer’s door.”23
Part Three
GOTHAM AND GOMORRAH
Chapter 9
THE TEEMING SHORE
The capitalist revolution affected other countries besides America. Britain felt its influence first, as befitted the homeland of Adam Smith. The revolution then swept across the German states, causing Karl Marx to predict capitalism’s ultimate self-destruction. It touched France and a dozen other countries of Europe. Most of Asia and Africa remained beyond its immediate reach, yet, like a tropical storm system roiling across one of the world’s oceans, it sent ripples and eddies into regions far removed from its center. It created zones
of high pressure and low pressure, so to speak, causing resources to flow from the former to the latter, often accompanied by the disruption turbulent weather entails. During the middle and late nineteenth century, for example, the American economy was a low-pressure zone for capital, sucking investment from Britain, a comparatively high-pressure zone.
The weather analogy applied equally, and more conspicuously, to human resources. The capitalist revolution in America created persistent low pressure that pulled immigrants out of Europe and Asia into North America. Not all parts of those people-exporting continents responded equally to the pull. Microclimates within countries and regions caused Ireland to lose more sons and daughters to America than Scotland did, and Germany more than France. The microclimates shifted as the nineteenth century matured, with the center of European high pressure moving east and south. And the strength of the storm in America itself varied, over both space, as cities developed and the frontier shifted, and time, as the American economy surged and stalled.
The United States wasn’t the only low-pressure zone. Empty land pulled immigrant farmers to the plains of Canada and Argentina, and expanding factories drew workers to the cities of England and Germany. But during the second half of the nineteenth century no country experienced such sustained and powerful low pressure as America. And the whirlwind that resulted transformed the face of American society.
THE IRISH RODE the leading edge of the storm. The capitalist revolution in England—in particular the introduction of steam-driven textile machinery—heightened demand for wool and prompted landlords in Ireland to convert their crop farms to sheep pastures. The enclosing of the fields crowded Irish peasants onto ever-smaller plots, where they became dependent on potatoes for their sustenance. A few Irish, those with the foresight to see where things were going and the means to act on their prescience, emigrated to America during the 1820s and 1830s, but most stayed home, praying the potatoes would hold out. The density of population increased and the potato monoculture deepened until in the 1840s the system became unsustainable. A fungus attacked the potato crop, and with entire districts devoted to the single species it ate through field after field, leaving nothing but blighted leaves and shriveled tubers.
