In a grand-scale narrative history, the bestselling author of
two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize now captures the decades when
capitalism was at its most unbridled and a few breathtakingly
wealthy businessmen utterly transformed America from an agrarian
economy to a world power.
The years between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth
century saw the wholesale transformation of America from a land of
small farmers and small businessmen into an industrial giant.
Driven by unfathomably wealthy and powerful businessmen like J. P.
Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, armies of workers,
both male and female, were harnessed to a new vision of massive
industry. A society rooted in the soil became one based in cities,
and legions of immigrants were drawn to American shores. What’s
more, in accomplishing its revolution, capitalism threatened to
eclipse American democracy. “What do I care about the law?”
bellowed Cornelius Vanderbilt. “Hain’t I got the power?” He did,
and with it he and the other capitalists reshaped every aspect of
American life. In American Colossus, H.W. Brands portrays the
emergence, in a remarkably short time, of a recognizably modern
America.
The capitalist revolution left not a single area or aspect of
American life untouched. It roared across the South, wrenching that
region from its feudal past and integrating the southern economy
into the national one. It burst over the West, dictating the
destruction of Native American economies and peoples, driving the
exploitation of natural resources, and making the frontier of
settlement a business frontier as well. It crashed across the urban
landscape of the East and North, turning cities into engines of
wealth and poverty, opulence and squalor. It swamped the politics
of an earlier era, capturing one major party and half of the other,
inspiring the creation of a third party and determining the issues
over which all three waged some of the bitterest battles in
American history.
Brands’s spellbinding narrative beautifully depicts the oil
gushers of western Pennsylvania, the rise, in Chicago, of the first
skyscraper, the exploration of the Colorado River, the cattle
drives of the West, and the early passionate sparks of union life.
By 1900 the America he portrays is wealthier than ever, yet
prosperity is precarious, inequality rampant, and democracy
stretched thin. American Colossus is an unforgettable portrait of
the years when the contest between capitalism and democracy was at
its sharpest, and capitalism triumphed.
關於作者：
H. W. Brands is the Dickson Allen Anderson Professor of
History at the University of Texas at Austin. He was a finalist for
the Pulitzer Prize in biography for The First American: The Life
and Times of Benjamin Franklin, and for Traitor to His Class: The
Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt. His Web site is www.hwbrands.com.
內容試閱：
Prologue: The Capitalist Revolution
John Pierpont Morgan enjoyed an excellent Civil War. He didn’t
fight, although he was prime military material, being in his
midtwenties and blessed with solid health. Instead he hired a
substitute in the manner of many rich, tepid Unionists. Morgan’s
father was a transatlantic banker with one foot in New York and the
other in London; to train his son for the business he had sent him
to school in Switzerland and college in Germany. The young man’s
aptitude for numbers prompted one of his professors at Gottingen to
suggest a post on the mathematics faculty, but he replied that he
heard the family business calling, and he returned to America to
become a commodities trader. In an early transaction he bought a
boatload of coffee without authorization; before his astonished
superiors could fire him, he unloaded the cargo for a fat profit.
They appreciated the income but distrusted the audacity and so
declined to make him a partner, whereupon, in 1861, he planted his
own flag on Wall Street.
His timing couldn’t have been better, nor his scruples more
suited to the opportunities the war afforded. Hearing of a man who
had purchased five thousand old carbines from an armory in New York
for $3.50 each, Morgan proceeded to finance a second purchaser, who
paid $11.50 per gun, rifled the barrels to improve the weapons’
range and accuracy, and sold them back to the government for $22.00
apiece. The government got something for the six-fold premium it
paid to repurchase its guns, but not nearly as much as Morgan
did.
Morgan speculated in all manner of commodities during the war.
Though he didn’t shun honest risk, neither did he unnecessarily
court it. He cultivated confidential informants who could tell him,
a critical moment before such news became common knowledge, of the
latest developments on the battlefield. His rewards were
remarkable, especially for one so young. The tax return he filed in
the spring of Appomattox revealed an annual income of more than
$50,000, at a time when an unskilled worker counted himself lucky
to get $200.
Morgan wasn’t alone in profiting from the nation’s distress.
Andrew Carnegie had clerked on the Pennsylvania Railroad during the
decade before the war; by the time the war ended he was crowing,
"I’m rich! I’m rich," from his speculations in railroads, iron, and
oil. John D. Rockefeller focused on oil and did even better than
Carnegie, creating the company that would show America and the
world what an industrial monopoly looked like and how it behaved.
Jay Cooke sold more than a billion dollars of bonds for the Union
and took several hundred thousand in commission for himself.
Cornelius Vanderbilt lengthened his lead as the richest man in
America by diversifying from steamboats into railroads. Jay Gould
learned the ways of Wall Street and the weaknesses of the federal
government as he prepared for a breathtaking assault on the
nation’s gold supply. Daniel Drew, Gould’s occasional partner,
summarized the mood of the entrepreneurial classes: "Along with
ordinary happenings, we fellows in Wall Street had the fortunes of
war to speculate about, and that always makes great doings on a
stock exchange. It’s good fishing in troubled waters."
When Abraham Lincoln honored the heroes of Gettysburg after the
battle that largely decided the war, he carried his listeners back
to the dawn of American freedom, to the moment when Thomas
Jefferson drafted and the Continental Congress approved the
Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s assertion that all men
were created equal provided the basis for democracy--the government
of, by, and for the people Lincoln proclaimed the Gettysburg dead
had died defending.
Yet another manifesto of 1776 was beginning, by the time of the
Civil War, to exert as much influence over American life. Adam
Smith’s Wealth of Nations was to capitalism what Jefferson’s
Declaration was to democracy; where Jefferson cited natural law to
justify a politics of self-government, Smith appealed to human
nature in support of an economics of self-interest. Democracy
didn’t spring fully formed from Jefferson’s brow, nor capitalism
from the brain of Smith; each required decades to evolve and
mature. But nowhere did they mature more fully than in the United
States, which became the world’s archetype of a capitalist
democracy.
Yet the dual manifestos of 1776 were also dueling manifestos. The
visions limned by Jefferson and Smith were in some ways
complementary, with each claiming to maximize personal freedom, the
first in politics, the second in economics. But in other respects
they were antagonistic. Democracy depends on equality, capitalism
on inequality. Citizens in a democracy come to the public square
with one vote each; participants in a capitalist economy arrive at
the marketplace with unequal talents and resources and leave the
marketplace with unequal rewards. Nor is inequality simply a side
effect of capitalism. A capitalist economy can’t operate without
it. The differing talents and resources of individuals are
recruited and sorted by the differential rewards, which reinforce
the original differences. Inequality drives the engine of
capitalism as surely as unequal temperatures drive heat
engines--including the steam engines that were the signature
devices of industrial capitalism.
Tension between capitalism and democracy has characterized
American life for two centuries, with one and then the other
claiming temporary ascendance. During the first half of the
nineteenth century, democracy took the lead, as the states
abandoned property qualifications for voting and the parties
responded by courting the masses of ordinary men. Andrew Jackson
embodied the democratic ethos, by both his humble origins and his
reverence for the people as the wellspring of political legitimacy.
Jackson waged political war on the pet projects of the big
capitalists of his day, smashing the Bank of the United States,
vetoing federal spending on roads and canals, and beating down
tariff rates.
But capitalism fought back during the Civil War. Even as the
Republican party freed the slaves, it emancipated the capitalist
classes from the constraints imposed by Jackson and his Democratic
heirs. Government became the sponsor of business rather than its
foe, underwriting railroad construction, raising tariff rates,
creating a national currency, and allowing the likes of Morgan to
troll for fortunes in the troubled waters of the war.
And the war was just the beginning of the capitalist ascendance.
Morgan’s peace proved even better than his war. He never became as
wealthy as Carnegie, Rockefeller, or some of the other great
capitalists of the era; upon the reading in 1913 of Morgan’s will,
which showed an estate of $68 million exclusive of an art
collection valued at $50 million, Carnegie lamented, "And to
think, he was not a rich man." Yet Morgan’s power was more
pervasive than the others’. Carnegie dominated steel, the industry
on which modern America was, almost literally, built, and
Rockefeller controlled oil, which lit, lubricated, and was
beginning to power American life. But Morgan commanded money, the
philosopher’s stone of modern capitalism. Morgan money’s
reorganized the railroads, the nation’s vascular system. It bought
out Carnegie and fought off Rockefeller to create the largest
corporation in American history to that time, the United States
Steel trust. And in one telling instance, it rescued President
Grover Cleveland and the federal government from financial
catastrophe.
In his lighter moments Morgan played at being a pirate. He
cruised about in a black-painted yacht he called the Corsair; he
read of the exploits of that other famous Morgan, the English
buccaneer Henry, and wondered if they were related. But Morgan was
more than a pirate. He was a revolutionary. Pirates prey on the
status quo; Morgan dismantled and rebuilt it. During the decades
after the Civil War, Morgan and his fellow capitalists effected a
stunning transformation in American life. They turned a society
rooted in the soil into one based in cities. They lifted the
standard of living of ordinary people to a plane associated, not
long before in America and for decades after elsewhere, with
aristocracy. They drew legions of souls from foreign countries to
American shores. They established the basis for the projection of
American economic and military power to the farthest corners of the
planet.
They didn’t do this alone, of course. A secret of their success
was their ability to harness the strength and skill of armies of
men and women to their capitalist purposes. More than a few of
these foot soldiers participated unwillingly in the revolution;
many hated Morgan and his ilk and passionately opposed them. But
the nature of revolutions is to sweep the reluctant along, and
despite the protests of farmers, laborers, and others attuned to a
different time and sensibility, the capitalist revolution surged
forward.
It left not a single area or aspect of American life untouched.
It roared across the South, wrenching that region from its feudal
past into the capitalist present, reshaping relations of race,
property, and class and integrating the Southern economy into the
national economy. It burst over the West, dictating the destruction
of aboriginal economies and peoples, driving the exploitation of
natural resources and making the frontier of settlement a frontier
of national--and global--capitalist development. It crashed across
the urban landscape of the East and North, turning cities into
engines of wealth and poverty, opulence and squalor, that confirmed
cardinal tenets of the American creed even as it contradicted
others. It swamped the politics of an earlier era, capturing one
major party and half the other, inspiring the creation of a third
party, and determining the issues over which all three waged some
of the bitterest battles in American...
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