In 1884, Iwasaki leased the Nagasaki Ironworks—renaming it the Nagasaki Shipyard—so his shipping operation could repair its own ships. In 1887, Mitsubishi bought the shipyard and soon expanded into shipbuilding, making the first iron steamship built in Japan in 1895. In World War II, Mitsubishi built Japan’s largest battleships and the fearsome Zero fighter planes.
Today Japan is the second-largest ship and car producer and the third-richest nation on earth. All of it was born from the singular vision of a forward-thinking samurai.
THE INVENTORS AND CAPITALISTS who transformed raw materials into usable products and financed the assembly lines of the second industrial revolution created wealth and material progress on an unprecedented scale—ushering in the modern, industrialized world. However, for the men, women, and children who extracted the natural resources that fed these new industries, life was much like that of their predecessors toiling in sixteenth-century silver mines and on first-century Roman roads and aqueducts. That’s because the demand for valuable natural resources—and the goods made from them—was relentlessly high.
And it would only grow more intense after an unlikely discovery by a nonscientist working in a New York City tenement in 1839.
Goodyear’s recipe made rubber as valuable as silver. And this wonder material made possible huge technological leaps, including one of the greatest inventions of the modern world—the motor car. In Henry Ford’s Model T, not only the tires, but six hundred other components were made from rubber, preventing the vehicle from shaking to bits.
Today, fifty thousand different products are made from vulcanized rubber—each a treasure mined from Goodyear’s discovery during the second industrial revolution. And a glorious revolution it was.
But not for everyone.
FROM THE BEGINNING, THE Industrial Revolution had had its dark side: starvation wages, sweat shops, child labor, the slums of the new industrial cities, diseases caused by exposure to industrial chemicals, and accidents caused by machines with no safety devices. One of the second industrial revolution’s ugliest chapters unfolded in Central Africa. Industry’s swelling demand for rubber hoses, tubing, gaskets, and insulation created a worldwide rubber boom—and unleashed a reign of terror in the Congo.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the European powers engaged in a desperate race for imperial possessions, known as the Scramble for Africa. Since the fifteenth century, Europeans had been involved to some degree in Africa. They had established trading posts on the coastal fringe of the continent and founded strategic colonies in Algeria and South Africa. But they had left the African interior alone.
Suddenly, in the 1870s, European powers began to carve up the African continent. The nominal causes for the scramble were summed up in missionary and explorer David Livingstone’s motto “Christianity, Commerce and Civilization.” The true driving force was rivalry between European nations. England was the biggest player, expanding its South African colonies, occupying Egypt, and claiming Nigeria as part of its sphere of influence. Soon powers new to the imperial game entered the race, looking for what Kaiser Wilhelm II called their “place in the sun.”
RUBBER
Rubber comes from the milky sap of several hundred varieties of rubber trees that grow in tropical forests. Amazingly versatile, it can be molded to any shape, does not conduct electricity, and is impervious to water.
Unfortunately, rubber is virtually useless in its natural state. It becomes a gooey mess in hot weather and brittle when the weather turns cold. If it is exposed to grease, oil, or acid—all common elements in the manufacturing world—rubber decomposes, giving off a horrible stench in the process.
But mixed with sulfur and heated, a process called vulcanization, rubber turns into a wonder material. It stretches when pulled but will snap back to its former shape. It will not melt in the sun or break in the cold.
Our world is shaped by rubber. Without it, the enormous changes brought on by mechanization would not have been possible. Mechanization requires essential natural or man-made rubber components for machines—belts, gaskets, joints, valves, O-rings, washers, tires, seals, and countless others. Mechanized transportation—cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes—has changed the way we move people and goods. Mechanization of industry has changed the jobs we do and the way we do them. Mechanization of agriculture has allowed the growth of cities and changed our society from rural to urban. Rubber has played an essential part in all these events.
Our exploration of future worlds may be shaped by rubber, as this material—an essential part of space stations, space suits, rockets, and shuttles—is now enabling us to explore horizons beyond our own.
King Leopold II of Belgium was eager to get his hands on “a slice of this magnificent African cake.” Posing as a philanthropist interested only in stopping the slave trade and bringing medical aid to Africans, he carved out a vast private domain in the Congo River basin. Working on behalf of Leopold, explorer Henry Morgan Stanley built a two-hundred-mile road through the jungle, set up hundreds of stations along fifteen hundred miles of the Congo, and signed treaties with two thousand African chiefs. When the European powers met in Berlin in 1884 to decide on the fate of disputed African states, they reluctantly ratified Leopold’s hold on a region as large as the United States east of the Mississippi. He called his new kingdom the Congo Free State.
But instead of helping Africans, Leopold’s government in the Congo effectively turned them into slaves. At first the entire state was organized around collecting ivory. In the 1890s, Leopold turned his attention to cashing in on rubber from the rain forests. Thousands of Africans were forced into harvesting the valuable crop. Every adult male Congolese was required to produce between six and nine pounds of rubber each week. Men who failed to tap the daily quota were lashed with long whips of twisted hippopotamus hide. (The whips were often wielded by other Africans, who would be flogged themselves if they refused to obey.) Leopold’s “army” of mercenary thugs took women and children as hostages from villages that fell behind on their rubber quota.
Congolese rubber slaves
victims of King Leopold II’s terror regime
ALICE HARRIS’S MISSION
MAY 1904. BARINGA, THE BELGIAN CONGO. The home of Baptist missionaries Reverend John Harris and his wife, Alice, who is also an amateur photographer. The British couple has lived in the Congo Free State since 1898.
The Harrises had moved to Baringa to spread the “Good Word” to their Congolese neighbors. But the urgent message they are about to receive will radically change the nature of their work and put them on the world stage, advocating for a more immediate cause.
Alice Harris hears a knock at the door. Who on earth can it be? she wonders. She quickly finishes pinning up her hair, then hurries to open the door.
Over the last six years, Alice and her husband have earned the trust of their neighbors, and she knows many of them by name. But she doesn’t recognize the Congolese man who stands before her now, clutching a bundle of leaves to his chest. Still, the obvious exhaustion, despair, and desperation on his face concern her enough to invite him in.
With tears running down his face, he tells her his name is Nsala. He tries to tell her why he has come, but his throat closes on the words. His hands shake as he unwraps the parcel to show Alice the contents: the severed hand and foot of a small child. Alice gasps.
“My daughter,” he says, choking back sobs.
Not immediately comprehending, Alice asks, “What happened to her?”
“We did not meet our quota,” Nsala replies angrily, then sinks to the floor, still clutching his daughter’s bloody appendages. He can no longer hold in his pain. His howls fill the house, bringing Reverend Harris from his study.
“What on earth . . . ?” he begins.
“Why—why would they do this?” Alice interrupts, her eyes wide.
Gently, the missionary helps Nsala to his feet and into a chair, then urges the heartbroken father to tell him the whole
story. It is simple and horrifying: Nsala had not delivered his weekly six pounds of rubber sap, and Leopold’s mercenaries had punished him by maiming his child.
The Harrises decide, then and there, that they must do something.
“I know it is difficult,” the missionary says, “but we must let the world see what you and your people are enduring and what you’ve had the courage to show us tonight.”
Immediately, Alice gets her camera. She then convinces Nsala to allow her to take a picture of him with his child’s body parts. With shaking hands, she prepares her glass slides, tripod, and camera, then poses Nsala on the porch for a photograph—it is the first of many she will take detailing Belgium’s brutality in the Congo.
WEEKS HAVE PASSED, AND THE HARRISES have been busy. They have traveled five thousand miles along the Congo and its tributaries, by river steamer, by canoe, and on foot, visiting village after village. With her camera and his pen, they have captured stories of brutality by colonial officials and soldiers against the people of the Congo. Alice has taken more than three hundred photographs documenting conditions in King Leopold’s Congo: a catalog of the terror that reigns in the heart of Africa, unseen by the wider world. Photographs of Congolese being whipped and chained. Villages burned to the ground. Men, women, and children with missing hands and feet—cut off as punishment by Leopold’s soldiers.
But photos alone, as vivid as they are, will not be enough. The Harrises know they must be the voice of Nsala and the rest of the Congolese people. They have traveled back to England to make their case.
At a church in London, nearly a hundred well-dressed British citizens fill the pews as Reverend Harris goes to the lectern. He thanks the crowd for coming, then pauses, his emotions palpable, before saying, “My good, God-fearing friends, as civilized people, we must speak up and demand an end to horrors being committed on the African continent that put the entire human race to shame.”
As he begins to recount the terrible night when Nsala brought his daughter’s severed hand and foot to their door, Alice Harris silently displays her photographs, in the form of lantern slides, as illustrative proof.
Gasps and shouts of “No!” fill the church.
And the spark is ignited.
In Europe, the Harrises’ story and Alice’s photographs created outrage—and a movement dedicated to ending Belgian atrocities in the Congo. Every week another celebrity joined the Congo Reform Association, bringing renewed publicity to the cause. The Congo became one of the most infamous international scandals of the early twentieth century, and Leopold was ultimately forced to relinquish control of it to the government of Belgium.
His harsh regime had been—directly or indirectly—responsible for the deaths of 10 million people.
King Leopold was shamed and deposed from the throne, but the scars from European colonial rule in Africa lasted well beyond his brutal reign. It would be another sixty years of struggle before much of Africa would regain its independence.
AS AFRICA WAS RESHAPED BY imperialism and struggles for independence, America was enriched by the greatest voluntary migration in human history. Between 1880 and 1923, twenty-one million people streamed to America. By 1912, twenty ships a day landed in New York City. Germans and Irish had dominated earlier waves of immigration. Many of the immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century were from eastern and southern Europe. Like earlier immigrants, some came in search of freedom or to escape persecution. More came hoping to make their fortunes.
European immigrants disembarking at Ellis Island, ca. 1907
Passage from Europe to America was expensive. Often a family could afford only one fare, so the father or oldest son came first. Some traveled on ships specially designed to transport immigrants. Most traveled in steerage class, the lowest part of a passenger liner. In fact, immigrant travel was such big business that many large passenger liners made more profit carrying steerage passengers than they did on the high-paying passengers on the luxury decks.
The Atlantic crossing took about six days. At New York Harbor, the ship docked first at Manhattan, where the first- and second-class passengers disembarked. Then a ferryboat collected the immigrants from steerage and took them to Ellis Island, which was opened in 1892 to process the flood of immigrants.
Many immigrants referred to Ellis Island as the Isle of Tears. Immigrants stood in long lines to find out whether they would be allowed into the United States or sent back to Europe. They were checked for mental illness, contagious diseases, lice, obvious disabilities, and trachoma. Families were sometimes split up if one family member could not pass the medical exam; on occasion, children as young as ten were sent back to Europe alone. An immigrant could also be barred if he had been convicted of a crime involving “moral turpitude,” such as anarchism or polygamy. And a few failed the trick question of whether they had a job waiting for them: the correct answer was no. (Coming with a job already arranged was a violation of immigration laws.) Examiners marked the backs of their clothes with chalked symbols indicating whether they had been accepted, rejected, or needed further examination.
Once they successfully navigated their way through Ellis Island’s screening process, many immigrants stayed in New York, which soon had the most diverse population on earth. Others scattered across the country, looking for jobs in the growing industrial cities of Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Detroit, where they made the steel that forged modern America and built the new skyscrapers that changed the urban landscape.
Most immigrants spoke little or no English when they arrived. They clustered together in neighborhoods with people from their own countries, turning them into little Italys, little Polands, and little Germanys. They read newspapers in their own languages and shopped at stores that sold familiar foods. The work was hard and wages were low. Most immigrants lived in crowded city tenements with none of the comforts produced by the second industrial revolution.
Even under these conditions, they managed to save. They sent astonishing amounts of money home to pay the cost of a steamship ticket for a relative or friend. With luck and hard work, a person could fulfill the immigrant dream of buying a home and sending his children to school, where they would learn English and become Americans.
BEYOND THE UNITED STATES
In the hundred years between 1830 and 1930, more than sixty million people emigrated from Europe in search of new opportunities and resources. Most went to the United States, but many European immigrants also settled in what they saw as the “empty spaces” of Australia, Canada, Latin America, New Zealand, and South Africa, pushing native populations off the land in the process. French farmers settled in North Africa. British and Dutch planters made homes in India and Indonesia.
Newly arrived European immigrants at Ellis Island in 1921
A TITANIC SURVIVOR
APRIL 14, 1912. THE THIRD-CIASS DECK OF THE RMS Titanic. Theodor de Mulder has invited four of his fellow passengers to join him for a card game in his cramped but tidy cabin. The thirty-six-year-old Belgian paid nine pounds ten shillings for his passage to America, a thousand dollars in today’s money. He has left his wife and two children at home while he travels in search of new opportunities. He plans to come home a rich man.
De Mulder misses his family, but he has never before had an entire week free of work. A week in which to walk on the decks, listen to his fellow passengers play the accordion or the fiddle, flirt with a pretty girl—and play cards.
He takes a slug of his drink and examines his cards, then allows himself a slow grin. He slams a winning hand down on the table, jumps up from his chair, and crows with delight. His guests shake their heads. De Mulder’s been lucky all night. He toasts himself with another glass of whiskey, flushed with excitement and slightly tipsy.
RMS Titanic, which sank after hitting an iceberg on its maiden voyage, 1912.
The dining room of the RMS Titanic
Better to quit while he’s still ahead. He bids his guests good night, and they stumble off to their own cabin
s. He falls into bed and is asleep immediately.
But his sleep is short-lived. The electric lights begin to flicker on and off. And what is all that racket? De Mulder sits up in bed and tilts his head, as if to listen. What he has heard, ever since he and his fellow passengers first sailed, was the thrum of the ship’s engines, so constant that de Mulder has stopped noticing them. Now, he notices, they are silent, replaced by the cacophony of frantic voices in the passageway. What is happening?
Three of the Titanic’s lifeboats hanging from the side of the Carpathia
De Mulder puts his feet on the floor. Water is seeping under the cabin door. He scrambles out of bed and rushes into the corridor.
There is confusion everywhere he looks. Panicked passengers crowd the passageway, all talking at once. “What is going on?” de Mulder asks. The crew has no instructions and no information.
In fifteen minutes, the third-class section is already flooding. De Mulder clambers, along with his shipmates, to get out of the congested passageway. But the flickering lights and the maze of corridors disorient him. He reaches a stairwell, but it is blocked by a locked gate. Turning back, he shoves through a herd of oncoming passengers, takes a hard right down another passageway, and comes to another flight of stairs at the end of the narrow passage.
Also blocked.
De Mulder knows why. US immigration laws. These locked gates are meant to keep third-class passengers separate from the rest of the ship.
The corridor is rapidly filling with water. People are screaming and pushing, separated from their families, desperate.
But de Mulder has found another staircase, and it is not blocked. He makes his way up and fights his way to the deck.
Mankind Page 33
