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Chapter One
"Bejabers, I'm Worth Me Thousands"
You can see it in people's faces, you can feel it in the air,"the old farmer chortled. "Everybody and everything's goin'places."
Except in the battered South, everybody and everything certainlyseemed on the move. The drain of the Civil War was over,the backward-looking planters were crushed. The IndustrialRevolution, whirled ahead decades by the five years of war, wascreating new careers by the thousands, stitching the nation togetherwith railroads, turning thistle patches into whistle stops,towns into cities, cities into metropolises. In the East, a rampantprosperity touched every venture with the magic of anything-is-possible.In the West, the tide of migration swept out in proportionsunequaled in all man's restless history. West and east,virtually every index of activity—the number of steel ingotsproduced and the number of trees felled, the immigrants arrivingfor a farm and the gentlemen leaving for a spin around Europe,the poems written, the backhouses torn down, the churches built,the "Devil's Dreams" danced to—almost any statistic showed awild surge upward. Somewhere in the middle of it all, therocking-chair was becoming standard equipment for the home. Inthe North of the late Sixties you moved while sitting still.
The sheer vitality of the period, its unbridled ambition andaudacity, were plain in the men who captured public attention.There was the burr-faced Cornelius Vanderbilt, hurling togetherthe largest fortune of the day by buccaneering, and answeringhiscritics with a brazen: "What do I care about the law? Hain't Igot the power?" There was the wild-haired Mark Twain,tumbling jumping frogs, river boating, and innocents abroad intoa new kind of literature, barging into the hushed sanctuary of theEastern literary world with the humor of the belly-laugh. Therewas the huge revivalist preacher Dwight L. Moody, two hundredand eighty pounds of Adam's flesh, every ounce of which, as hewould roar, "belonged to God." There was the rambunctiousCaptain Carver, he of the bellicose mustache and the long blackhair flying in the wind, wagering he could kill more buffalo thanany other man on earth and riding forth to leave miles of deadanimals until his rival's horse dropped from sheer exhaustion.There was, perhaps most symbolic of all, the nondescript UlyssesGrant, who had won the war and now intended to enjoy thepeace, hungrily scooping in fine Havana cigars, a fifty-thousand-dollarhome complete with the latest tazzas and lambrequins,vacations at fashionable Long Branch, and all the kudos of thePresidency of the United States.
More kudos, more money, the esteem and comforts that moremoney could bring, the whole congeries of things that to theAmerican meant getting ahead—here was the point of the furiousactivity. Americans had always believed their country the landof opportunity; the people of the North had never been surer,never raised their sights higher, than in the whirligig years of thelate Sixties. The basic conditions that brought confidence beforethe Civil War continued. Fabulous natural resources were in theearly stages of exploitation. Though urbanization and the concentrationof wealth were racing ahead, the society was still predominantlyone of small farms, small businesses, and small towns,in which both the hopelessly poor and the overwhelmingly richwere limited in number. A casual camaraderie in economic relationsencouraged assuming the next step up in the world. A steelplant of one hundred and fifty workers was exceptionally large,and the more usual factory or store consisted of a boss and ahandful of employees, working in close relationship and first-namingeach other. In the rural regions, the owner and the farmhand often labored side by side and ate at the same table; sinceeveryone assumed that the hand would soon have his own acres,who thought it strange if he took the boss's daughter to church onSunday?
Many of the symbols of caste that made Europe's upper-classlife seem so unattainably different to groups at the bottom wereless conspicuous or nonexistent in the new land across the ocean.A considerable number of wealthy Americans wielded their forkswith easily imitated abandon, cooked their own meals and shinedtheir own shoes, and spoke in a manner scarcely distinguishablefrom the language of the ditch-digger. Even getting shaved, anAmerican journal pointed out in 1866, was a process that underlinedthe relative lack of caste. In Europe the man with a valetwas dewhiskered in style. Only in the United States was everyonewho could "raise ten or fifteen cents ... surrounded during theoperation with so much buhl, ormolu, upholstery, and mirrors,and stretched on so easy a chair, and relieved of his beard with somuch skill and consideration, and scoured with so many unguents,and 'vivifiers,' and 'invigorators,' and 'purifiers.'"
If the old America of blurred distinctions still appeared verymuch present, the new America added exciting possibilities. Themushrooming cities, with their receptivity to the novel, their easyforgetfulness of people's pasts, their tendency to look the otherway when ambition cut a corner sharply, seemed ideal bases forany man in a hurry. Education, always a boulevard to success inthe eyes of Americans, was just entering a period of swift expansion.Whirlwind industrial and commercial growth was facilitatingmovement from the class of those who worked with theirhands to the white-collar group—for many, a sign of advancing inthe world as important as an increase in income, if not more important.When the census of 1870 was completed, dazed statisticiansestimated that the trading classes had grown twenty-one percent more quickly than the total population.
Of supreme importance to most ambitious men, opportunitiesto make money were taking on bonanza proportions. For decades,Northern businessmen had maneuvered to get federal legislationfavorable to themselves, but most of these efforts had been stoppedby the frosty vetoes of an agrarian-minded Washington. Therepresentatives of the Southern planters had hardly stomped outof the Capitol when Washington was taken over by leaders whoconsidered crushing the Confederacy, battling for Negro rights,and passing pro-business laws all part of the same crusade forProgress. During and after the war these "Radical" Republicanserected high tariff walls around American industry, guaranteed acheap supply of factory labor by authorizing the importation ofcontract workers, managed finances in a way that invited speculation,and handed out the nation's natural resources in profligateslices.
Industrial workers and white-collar employees had their ownencouragements. If obscure statistics proved that real wages werenot rising, pay envelopes were certainly growing fatter and theenvelopes could seem delightfully thick to the thousands who hadbeen farm hands or penniless immigrants a few years before. Successwas in the air; every clerk or factory hand knew of a caselike that of the two New York girls who had made roses formilliners before the war and in 1866 sold a business and a trademarkfor one hundred thousand dollars. The most disgruntledurbanite had before him a pair of ever expanding, ever alluringfrontiers: the one, just around the corner, where a new establishmentwas always offering new jobs, the other, across thecountry, to the plains that people were calling the Golden West.
For the would-be farmer as well as the farmer, two concernshad always been paramount, cheap land and ample transportation,and these seemed available as never before. The Homestead Lawof 1862 and subsequent land legislation offered a farm on termsthat resembled a give-away. At the same time, rapid railroad constructionwas making the long trip west much more comfortableand offering the means to reach distant markets. On May 10, 1869,every telegraph ticker in the nation clicked "One, two, three—done!"in unison with the blows driving down the last goldenspike for the transcontinental railroad. To the poet and philosopher,the day might be an occasion for rhetoric on the finalconsummation of Union. To millions of Americans with theirhopes fixed on the land, the golden spike glittered in suggestion oftheir own economic futures.
For both rural and urban communities, swift technologicaldevelopments were heightening the sense of burgeoning opportunityby providing cheaply produced markers of each family'sadvances. The factory worker or clerk could, with carefulhandling of his money, achieve a succession of signs of his family'srising status—a Sunday dish of salmon shipped all the way fromOregon, one of the wondrous new sewing machines, then, perhaps,an elaborately carved organ for the parlor. Many farmfamilies, after a good year's crop, knew the exhilaration of store-boughtclothes for the whirl to a "Devil's Dream," the pride ofadding Disraeli's Lothair or Greeley's American Conflict to thebookshelf, even, if the crop were especially fine, a Pullman tripto Mr. Barnum's "Incredible, Educational Circus," which wassure to be good for admiring mention in the county paper.
And, withal, the whole conception of how far a man could goand how swiftly he could move was taking on a bold new scope.War and pell-mell industrialization seemed to have shaken upthe society, weakening if not shattering any crust of caste. Astriking number of the figures who won national attention wereinstances of the miraculously swift rise from obscure origins,poverty, and ignorance. The awesomely rich Cornelius Vanderbilt,a power in New York Society, started life in the one-roomcabin of a ferryboat worker and never read a book until he passedhis seventieth year. The Reverend Dwight Moody, second onlyto Jesus in the eyes of millions, came to the pulpit a barely literateshoe salesman, struggling to pronounce the words in his KingJames Bible. Mark Twain, hailed as a great writer by Bostonitself, was the son of a ne'er-do-well and at the age of twelve wasout of school, working as an apprentice printer. In the WhiteHouse, not only President of the United States but the nation'snumber-one hero, sat the man who had begun his rise a thirty-nine-year-oldnobody, his reputation mottled by failure andwhisky, his clothing seedy, maneuvering for a clerking post in theramshackle United States Army.
Even Americans with heavy drags on their feet, the scornedrecent immigrants from Catholic Ireland, could dream headydreams. Irishmen might be accustomed to signs reading "No IrishNeed Apply" and to the stock wisecrack that the wheelbarrowwas the greatest of inventions because it taught Irishmen to walkon their hind legs. Yet bonanza economics often forgot to askwhere you were born or what your church was, and crumblingwalls jarred the stoutest foundations of aristocracy. It was an oilspeculator a few years from County Cork who could boast:"Yisterday I wasn't worth a cint and bejabers to-day I'm worthme thousands upon thousands." Any Irishman could see thefuture of his family in terms of the life of Charles O'Conor, sonof a ragamuffin immigrant from Dublin, apprenticed to a lampblackmanufacturer at twelve, a lawyer at twenty, a high-pricedcounsel in his thirties, and now the recognized leader of the NewYork bar, the holder of five honorary degrees from universities,and the master of a stately mansion at Nantucket.
"In worn out, king-ridden Europe," Charles O'Conor phrasedthe day's credo, "men must stay where they are born. But inAmerica a man is accounted a failure, and certainly ought to be,who has not risen above his father's station in life."
Excerpted from RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY by Eric F. Goldman. Copyright © 1952 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
