♪ ♪ (kids shouting) NARRATOR:
A vicious cold snap hit New York in the first week
of February 1897, but nothing could slow
the preparations for the impending revelry. The city's wealthiest citizens
were readying themselves for one of the most anticipated
balls in the nation's history-- an extravagant exclamation point on what would come to be known as the Gilded Age. REBECCA EDWARDS:
During the Gilded Age, Americans feel quite certainly
that they are the vanguard of civilization and progress. This is an enormous period of opportunity,
and possibility, and hope. NARRATOR:
No group felt more confident about the future than the guests
who would gather for the party at the luxurious
Waldorf Hotel. The evening's total price tag,
according to newspaper reports, was enough to feed nearly a
thousand working-class families for a full year. ♪ ♪ Defenders noted
that the ball stood to benefit the entire city. Critics begged to differ. "With all the people,"
warned one minister, "who have to lie awake nights
contriving "to spend their time and their
money, and all the others "who lie awake wondering
how they may get food, there is danger in the air." It was a fractious time in which
a sense of desperation amidst growing wealth
was emerging. EDWARD O'DONNELL:
Increasingly workers
begin to say, "If I as, as a member
of this society "lack the ability to pay my
bills, and to feed my family "then I am not a free citizen
of a healthy republic. "I'm something, something else, something that the Founding
Fathers would not recognize." (whistle blows) RICHARD JOHN:
The magnitude of the late
19th-century transformation of American society
is hard to exaggerate. It was as if you woke up
in one country and you went to bed in another. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Thirty years after
the Civil War, America had transformed into an economic powerhouse, but the transformation had
created stark new divides in wealth, standing,
and opportunity. STEVE FRASER:
It's shocking for people to see
a country developing before them that is increasingly
clearly divided into the haves and have-nots. NELL IRVIN PAINTER:
Gilded is not golden. Gilded has the sense of a patina
covering something else. It's the shiny exterior
and the rot underneath. NARRATOR:
By the time New York's elite
gathered at Waldorf ballroom, the richest 4,000 families
in the country-- less than one percent
of all Americans-- had scooped up nearly
as much treasure as the other 11.6 million
families combined. "We are the rich,"
one partygoer remarked. "We own America;
we got it, God knows how, "but we intend to keep it
if we can." There is this fight over what is America's
collective self-identity. Who are we? Are we two nations,
the poor and the wealthy, or are we one nation where everybody has a chance
to succeed? ♪ ♪ DAVID NASAW:
When this nation comes out
of the Civil War, we are still a nation divided
by regions. There's very little
national market. If you need a pair of shoes, you don't get it from a factory
a hundred miles away. You get it from
the local shoemaker. (birds squawking) PAINTER:
Life was much, much more local, much more what was going on
right around you, what your neighbors were doing,
what your friends were doing, what your enemies were doing,
and how you were doing on a day-to-day basis. H.W. BRANDS:
America had been founded, its political system
had been founded, for a country of farmers, but it was becoming a nation
of industrialists. It was becoming a nation
of urban workers. It was becoming a nation
of cities. (train chugging) Railroads knit the entire
country together in a way that hadn't existed
before. So now merchants, manufacturers,
industrialists can think nationally. You don't have to think simply
in terms of your local market. If you have a good idea, if you have a good procedure
for producing something, you can think of selling your
goods all over the country. (train clacking on tracks) NARRATOR:
By the early 1880s the nation's
largest corporation, the Pennsylvania Railroad, carried more than
two million tons of industrial and consumer goods
every year. Steel left mills in Pittsburgh for destinations
around the country; so too did refined oil
from Cleveland, factory-made furniture
from Cincinnati, and harvesters from Chicago. (train steam hissing) Railroads moved coal from
Wyoming, timber from Oregon, silver from Nevada and Colorado,
and copper from Montana. ♪ ♪ Tens of thousands of young men
and women from farm families could hop on the train to go
where the jobs were: the newly industrializing
cities. Former slaves and their children
joined the urban migration, bound for new opportunities
in Memphis, Atlanta, Richmond, or as far north as Philadelphia
and New York. The hope is for equality, and
for first-class citizenship, and to be a part of
what is happening in terms of progress and change. They're trying to make
the democracy and the country work for them. FRASER:
Progress is part
of the American credo and has been almost from
the beginning of the nation. Americans prided themselves on their inventiveness,
their ingenuity, their entrepreneurial
get-up-and-go. GIDDINGS:
Progress is thought of
as inevitable. It's divinely inspired. There's a pastor who talked about these
technological innovations as God's tools to make
a more perfect society. ♪ ♪ And so it becomes almost
a spiritual idea, this industrial spirit. (birds chirping) ♪ ♪ (horse hooves clomping) NARRATOR:
One of the most innovative
entrepreneurs of the day was Andrew Carnegie. He owned a stable
full of fine-blooded horses and enjoyed taking long rides
through Central Park. (horse whinnies) ♪ ♪ In the spring of 1881 he was a
man in the saddle in all ways, having just consolidated his growing manufacturing
enterprises under a single banner:
Carnegie Brothers & Company. Some days Carnegie would ride
out of the park and head north on upper
Broadway. Other days he would ride
all the way to the High Bridge, where traffic loosened and
he could open up to a gallop along the banks
of the Harlem River. In the few hours he was out
riding through New York his blast furnaces 300 miles
to the west produced more than
60 tons of steel, and earned him about as much as the average American
made in a year. This remarkable and novel fact
made 45-year-old Andrew Carnegie the emblem of a new kind
of American dream. ♪ ♪ Like John D. Rockefeller
in the oil refining business and Cornelius Vanderbilt
in railroads, Carnegie was riding a wave
of industrialization-- using new technology
and mass production to secure enormous
personal wealth. NASAW:
What's important to realize
is that these men, they have visions. Carnegie, Rockefeller,
the railroad barons-- they don't invent anything. They're managers. JACKSON LEARS:
Carnegie is one of the few
American millionaires of this era or any other who can genuinely call himself
a self-made man. He really does come
from humble origins. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Andrew Carnegie was born
in 1835 in a small town in Scotland. His father, William,
supported the family as a respected weaver
of fine clothes and linens, until the spread of more
efficient mechanized looms began to cut into his business. O'DONNELL:
William Carnegie literally
cannot provide for his family. They were hungry, and poor, and there's no future
at this point for them. And so they are forced to make
really an incredible decision, which is to uproot themselves
from this town in Scotland where they've lived
for generations and go to some strange place
called Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Andrew Carnegie and the city of
Pittsburgh came of age together. Steam-powered machine shops and
iron factories drew workingmen to the city in the 1840s. The first railroads arrived
in the 1850s, not long after the first
telegraph wires. There was opportunity
on every coal-dusted block, especially for a go-getter
like Carnegie, who became his family's
main provider when he was still a teenager. (telegraph typing) LEARS:
Carnegie has a number of talents
that get him noticed early. (tapping continues) He is a smooth operator, which is a term
that was used for guys who worked for Western Union who could tap out Morse code
very smoothly. NARRATOR:
Young Andrew rose quickly, from telegraph operator
to trusted assistant of a powerful railroad manager
to a manager himself. But he was not content
with a salary job-- no matter how good the salary. (train chugging) ♪ ♪ Carnegie saw opportunity in the
booming railroad industry. (whistling, wheels churning) Relying on connections to
powerful railroad executives, he invested in sleeper cars,
iron works, bridge building concerns, coal mines, and oil producers. He was not yet 30
when he resigned his position at the Pennsylvania Railroad to become a full-time
independent capitalist. Carnegie's skill at turning
insider information into hard cash had allowed him
to amass a fortune of nearly half a million
dollars. Not long after, a product caught
his eye, one the railroads badly needed:
steel. (sizzling) O'DONNELL:
It's not a new substance; steel's been around
for a long, long time, but mass-produced, high-quality,
super-strong steel, that is a new thing
in the Gilded Age. (hissing) NARRATOR:
In 1873, at the start of one of
the worst economic depressions in the nation's history, Carnegie pushed forward
on construction of a massive steel plant
outside of Pittsburgh. NASAW:
Nobody can understand why he is building huge
factories during the depression. The bankers question him, you
know, "Why are you doing this?" (sizzling) But Carnegie understands that steel is the basic building
block of the new America. It's gonna begin with
railroads... (train whistle blows) and then the cities are gonna be
rebuilt with steel, and the bridges are gonna be
rebuilt with steel. (train whistle blowing) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
In the fall of 1875, while the economy was still
sliding downhill, the first steel rails rolled out
of Carnegie's new mill. The keys to underselling the
competition, as Carnegie saw it, were volume and efficiency. "Cut the prices, scoop the
market, run the mills full, watch the costs,"
Carnegie preached, "and the profits will take care
of themselves." LEARS:
Rather than conserve his
machinery, he uses it up. If the machinery wears out,
he'll just buy more. He wants 24-hour operation, two shifts, 12 hours each
for the workers. The point is to get the
productivity going at peak performance. (sizzling) NARRATOR:
Carnegie's grand bet had paid
off beautifully by 1881. His newly consolidated company
was on its way to a profit of 40% in its first year, which meant a personal take of
more than a million dollars. (horse galloping) At 45, the steel baron
found himself with plenty of spare time
to reflect back on his improbable rise. (birds chirping) He read the great
English philosophers, made studies of Confucius and
the prophets of Buddhism, Hinduism, and the Persians, searching for answers
to a gnawing question. NASAW:
Andrew Carnegie
is an intellectual-- self-educated
but an intellectual. And he tries to figure out how
the hell did this happen. "Why me? "Why have I made
all this money?" ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
It was, by design, like no house
New York had ever seen-- a gleaming palace with gargoyles and gables and
flying buttresses. ♪ ♪ Plans for the grand interiors included the fine
and expensive detail favored by European aristocracy. All of it was carefully devised by 25-year-old
Alva Smith Vanderbilt, who had married into one of the
country's wealthiest families. Alva meant to create a spectacle
at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street. And she did. ♪ ♪ By the time it was completed
in 1882, the mansion was the talk
of New York society. ♪ ♪ Critics, including many
of Alva's friends, thought her new home too ornate. They were appalled
by the nude statues, which stood proudly
on exterior walls for all the world to see. SYLVIA HOFFERT:
Alva craves attention,
and so she intentionally makes
the outside of the house something that New Yorkers
are not used to. ♪ ♪ She's testing whether
she can shock people or not. She writes, "People don't
appreciate that this is "the latest in
architectural design. "They're unsophisticated. They're Puritans." It's clear that she doesn't
really care what other people think as long
as she gets what she wants. The Vanderbilts were in society but they weren't
at the very top. She has a goal, and her goal is
to make the Vanderbilts leaders of New York society. (bell ringing) NARRATOR:
Scaling the heights
of New York society was perilous work
for any newcomer, even one with the right address
on Fifth Avenue. The city's fashionable families, most descended from the earliest
Dutch settlers, were wary of social climbers. Their own homes reflected
this sensibility. They prized manners and modesty
over striving and show. O'DONNELL:
Part of the ideal back at the
beginning of the republic was a notion of restraint
and simplicity. So you might be really wealthy
but you wouldn't parade around in a gilded carriage
and have servants in livery and all of that. That was considered bad form, not just gauche but really bad
republican form-- small R republican form. HOFFERT:
Old money was wealthy, but these new entrepreneurs were
immensely wealthy, the kind of money that could buy
anything. They aren't quiet about it. They want to flaunt it. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Few members of New York's
old money crowd were more suspicious
of the newly wealthy than Caroline Schermerhorn
Astor, whose ancestors had arrived
from the Netherlands in 1630. And no one held more sway. It was Mrs. Astor
who would decide if the Vanderbilts
were worthy of ascension into the highest tier
of society. It was a very exclusive club,
roughly the number of guests Caroline Astor could comfortably
host in her ballroom. 400 was the magic number. JOHN KUO WEI TCHEN:
It's a very personal
and interpersonal world in which having the right kind
of tea sets and the right kind of
surroundings are fundamental. Since the U.S. doesn't have
a preexisting aristocracy, it's really these women who kind of have to make it up
on the fly, and they become the people who
are creative and improvisational in claiming who the new elites
would be and how deserving they are. NARRATOR:
Mrs. Astor was especially wary
of the Vanderbilts. Their patriarch, Cornelius, who had made his fortune
building railroads, was considered ruthless,
unscrupulous, and crude. He had reportedly horrified
one society dame and all of her friends by spitting his tobacco plugs
onto her carpet. Mrs. Astor did have
a grudging respect for the Vanderbilt family money. Cornelius's children
and grandchildren were already among
the richest individuals in the entire country. And with no inheritance tax,
income tax, or tax on corporate earnings,
they were certain to remain so. HOFFERT:
When you think about
Caroline Astor's 400, it makes it sound like
it's really rigid, but it's fluid enough
for some people to make it and then make it
a little bit further, and then make it a little bit
further. Alva's determined to take
advantage of that fluidity. NARRATOR:
Alva understood
the power of money. ♪ ♪ (cicadas chirping) Born in Alabama before the
Civil War, her family fortune, made in the slave-fueled
cotton trade, afforded her
a privileged existence. She spent her girlhood
at fashionable homes in New York and in France, attended a pricey
boarding school outside Paris, and summered at the resort town
of Newport, Rhode Island. "There was a force in me,"
Alva recalled, "that seemed to compel me
to do what I wanted to do "regardless of what might happen
afterwards." HOFFERT:
She was disobedient. She was willful. She says that there was one year that she was beaten every day
for misbehaving. What she learns from childhood
is that if she is disobedient enough and
willing to take the punishment then she's gonna get
what she wants. NARRATOR:
The furniture was still being
delivered from Europe when Alva and her husband,
Willie K. Vanderbilt, decided to throw
a housewarming party in their own very accommodating
ballroom. They sent invitations
to 1,200 guests, none more important
than Mrs. Astor. Alva could not be sure
Mrs. Astor would accept, so she made certain her upcoming
ball was the talk of the town. (trolley bell ringing,
wheels clacking on tracks) ♪ ♪ NEWSBOY:
Extra, extra! TCHEN:
It's a moment in which
the newspapers are competing for news. Hundreds of thousands of people, not only in New York City
but also nationally, are reading these newspapers. It's really comparable to the
emergence of social media. So instead of tweets,
we have people like Alva who are understanding
this change and starting to take advantage of the new possibilities
of the media coverage. ♪ ♪ HOFFERT:
She invites newspaper columnists
to come into her house. She gives them very detailed
instructions as to what kind of décor
the house has, what it's made of,
who the artists are-- all of the details that she
thinks will impress people. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
On the day of the ball, March
26, 1883, New York was abuzz. Society dames spent hours
fitting themselves into gowns styled after bygone
European aristocracy. Their husbands visited
hairdressers, then rushed home to pull up
their tights and strap on swords. Crowds of curious onlookers began gathering outside
the Vanderbilt mansion at 8:00 that evening, though the party would not begin
until 11:00. Mrs. Astor was among
the arrivals. As she made her way down
the grand staircase, she took in the century-old
French and Italian tapestries, towering palms,
Japanese lanterns, and gilded baskets
filled with roses. Young Alva, Mrs. Astor had
to admit, exhibited style. "We have no right
to exclude those whom the growth of this great
country has brought forward," Caroline Astor explained. "The time has come
for the Vanderbilts." ♪ ♪ (crowd chattering) FRASER:
This is a nouveau riche world. They were what used to be called
the chip-chop aristocracy, had no breeding,
no genealogy... (distant chatter) And they need to lay claim to establish their
cultural legitimacy. One way to do that
is to live splendidly, to be a spectacle
and awe people. TCHEN:
The ostentation
is not frivolous. It's really about how do you
express the kind of virtue that you have through taste
and through what you consume. Alva is actually being
very creative, and being very tenacious in trying to establish
that profile. Branding the Vanderbilt family, making the public, other elites
included especially, appreciative of why they belong. ♪ ♪ It's not just wealth building
in terms of actual dollars, it's wealth building
in terms of status. (steam turbine puffing) (chains squeaking) (faint clanging) BRANDS:
The American economy was growing
very rapidly. There were opportunities
for all sorts of people-- people who had skills,
people who had no skills-- and they were attracted
to America. If you wanted
to improve your lot, especially if you wanted to
ensure that your children would have a greater opportunity
than you did, America was the place to go. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Between 1880 and 1885, more than three million men,
women, and children entered the United States, more than triple the number
who had arrived in the previous five years. They came from Ireland, Italy,
Russia, Scandinavia, Asia, and Latin America, fleeing religious persecution
and poverty. EDWARDS:
The U.S. is kind of a gambler's
paradise in this era. It's a lottery where you can go
and you may do well. You're very unlikely to be
Andrew Carnegie and get super rich,
but a few people do it and many more will get by. ♪ ♪ GIDDINGS:
Freedom from want now is going
to create a new sense of the imagination-- freedom from all the problems
of the old world, from its resentments, from its
conflicts, from its scarcities. (trolley bell rings) NARRATOR:
The nation's biggest draw was
New York - the country's first
million-person city, where the population had nearly
doubled in a single generation. TCHEN:
You can just imagine what it's
like to be in a place that's growing so quickly
around you that it's almost dangerous
to be outside. The numbers of people,
the numbers of vehicles, the acceleration of technology, the concentration of money means
that the buildings are happening all the time, there's street works happening
all the time, there are people moving through
the streets all the time. NARRATOR:
The city needed muscle to build new streets, sewers,
and water mains. There were jobs running elevated
trains, driving omnibuses, raising new wonders like
the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. ♪ ♪ (sounds of construction) Immigrants often worked
in trades according to their
place of origin-- Irish as carpenters;
Italians, stonemasons; Syrians, street merchants. Owners of garment factories, molasses refineries,
meat-packing plants relied on people who were
willing to work long hours for meager pay. NASAW:
One of the things we have to
understand about the Gilded Age is that the number
of individuals who become employees, who become
dependent on paychecks, increases dramatically. PAINTER:
Workers served as sellers
of their labor, and it was important for the person who was running
the whole enterprise to buy that labor
as cheaply as possible. It didn't matter
from the point of view of the person at the top
of the company whether or not the cheapest
possible price for labor could support a family. NARRATOR:
Employers expected everybody,
even children, to work 12 hours a day, six days
a week, with few if any breaks. Factories were often overheated
and lacked ventilation. Workers had no escape
from harsh chemicals that caused lung infections
and respiratory disease. NASAW:
There was no workman's
compensation. There was no insurance. If you were lucky,
you were taken care of for a little while
by the employer, but industrial accidents
were a major concern. Workplace safety
was a major concern. NARRATOR:
A sense of shared peril
bred solidarity. Men and women joined
labor unions to demand better wages
and safer working conditions. They embraced their role
in the democracy and proudly identified
themselves as working class. ♪ ♪ JOHN:
The late 19th-century
United States was an anomaly in world history
in a major way. We confronted all
of the challenges that are associated
with rapid industrialization-- the labor conflicts, the tensions between one
economic group and another-- within a government in which
just about every white male and many African Americans--
a decreasing number, but many African Americans--
had the vote. NASAW:
People voted from the moment
they got off the boat at Castle Garden
or Ellis Island. Everybody voted, and political
participation was high. (clamoring) NARRATOR:
The always-increasing
working-class vote worried New York's political
barons in both parties. Strikes and boycotts
in the summer of 1886 forced politicians to act, and they jailed union leaders. O'DONNELL:
Labor leaders
in July of 1886 say, "Enough with the major parties. "The Democratic Party
and the Republican Party "are in the grasp
of big business. "They have no interest in the
problems of working people. "We're going to form an
independent labor party, "and we're going to run somebody
for mayor." And they begin to court
Henry George. NARRATOR:
Henry George did not look
the part of political savior. An unassuming 47-year-old author who dressed like
a small-town merchant, George was not seeking a life
in politics just then. But he was intrigued
by the offer. O'DONNELL:
He's the perfect candidate. He's a worker, so he's got these
working-class credentials, but he's also an intellectual. He's also a public figure. NARRATOR:
Henry George's renown was almost
entirely self-generated, born out of his own difficulties with the rapidly changing
American economy. A native of Philadelphia, George
had gone west to California, when he was just 19,
to make his fortune. He tried his luck
in the gold fields, set type in printing firms, and even sold hand-cranked
clothes dryers door to door to support his young family. Nothing worked. His low point came the day
his second child was born, and his new printing business
was failing. O'DONNELL:
He is absolutely broke and
he doesn't know what to do. He's completely desperate. Now he has a family
to provide for. So he steps out onto the street
and he walks up to a man and says, "Could I have
five dollars?" And the man gives him the
five-dollar bill and George writes, "I was desperate enough to have
killed him for that money." Henry George is sort of
imprinted in that moment in a way he's never
going to forget. Here he is, this hard-working,
smart, ambitious man, and he's out there on the
streets begging for his little family. RICHARD WHITE:
He begins to wonder
what's going on. This is a country
with plenty of land. It's a country with plenty
of resources. It's a country with
millions of people who want to work and who can't. What has gone wrong? NARRATOR:
George spent nearly a decade
parsing the riddle and emerged with an answer: a 500-page tome describing the
new American political economy. LEARS:
He produces this book that draws
everyone's attention to what ought to have been plain
as the nose on their faces, the sheer fact of inequality, poverty amid plenty. What George recognizes is that
along with American progress, with the development
of the economy, with the development of great
fortunes there's also the development
of poverty, that the success of America
is not uniformly spread. He said that it's not
fairly spread. NARRATOR:
"It is as though an immense
wedge were being forced through society," George wrote. "Those who are above the point
of separation are elevated, but those who are below are
crushed down." Henry George self-published his
new book, "Progress and Poverty," and moved to New York in 1881
to promote it. "It will ultimately be
considered a great book," he told his father. "This I know." He was right: "Progress and Poverty"
was a surprise best-seller. ♪ ♪ O'DONNELL:
One of the things that captures
people's imagination is the way he talks
about poverty. He breaks with
the American tradition, which always said poverty is
the result of your own failures. George says,
"It's not your own fault. "It is the fault of the way
we have organized our economy, "the way we've allowed
certain things "to develop unchecked
and uncontrolled. There's no reason for anybody
to be poor in America." NARRATOR:
Labor parties had run candidates
for mayor in New York before; they rarely polled more than
several hundred votes. But in the fall of 1886, with little more than a month
to Election Day, Henry George agreed to toss
his hat in the ring on behalf of working people. WHITE:
He sees it as a way
to popularize his ideas. The one percent, as George
calls it, owns New York. So for him it seems
the perfect example of the problems that he talked
about in his book. O'DONNELL:
He accepts the nomination, and over the next five weeks
or so they launch the most
incredible campaign in New York City history. (crowd chattering) He will give five, six, seven
speeches a night all around the city. This is called
the tailboard campaign, because he would get in
these wagons, they'd pull the wagon up in
front of a railroad station, in front of a factory,
flip down the tailboard, and Henry George would stand up
and deliver a speech urging people to not vote
for the major parties but to vote for
the United Labor Party. NARRATOR:
"Look over our vast city,
and what do we see?" George would say. "On one side a very few men "richer by far than it is good
for men to be, "and on the other side a great
mass of men and women "struggling and worrying
and wearying "to get a most pitiful living. "Is this by the will
of our Divine Creator? "No. "It is by the fault of men. We are going to the polls." (crowd cheering) George championed
opportunity for all, and a city government that would "prevent the strong from
oppressing the weak and the unscrupulous
from robbing the honest." He offered big new ideas like increased taxes
on property owners, public ownership
of mass transit, and better working conditions. O'DONNELL:
Once the grassroots campaign
gets going, he sort of played off
his own momentum and the enthusiasm of the crowd. And began to realize, "Something
seems to be happening here." He starts to have a sense that, "We could actually win
this thing." ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Most political pros
believed his message was too radical
to have wide appeal. They figured he would poll 5,000
votes, maybe 10,000, not enough to beat
the favored Democrat or the Republican challenger. ♪ ♪ O'DONNELL:
On Election Day, right out of the gate, people
are reporting huge turnouts. (din of a large crowd) At the end of the day,
George finishes second. He gets 68,000 votes, which is a lot more
than just a few hundred, which is what a typical Labor
Party candidate could get. BRANDS:
The appeal of Henry George
indicates that a growing number
of Americans believe that there is something
seriously wrong with the emerging
American economy. America retains this idea that
it is this land of opportunity, and when people like
Henry George say, "We have to pit workers
against employers, the poor against the rich," what he is saying is, "It's
not the land of opportunity. The opportunity is closed off." (birds chirping) NARRATOR:
J. Pierpont Morgan valued order
and stability above all else. He demanded routine. The 51-year-old banker
breakfasted each morning at his home at Madison Avenue
and 36th Street, enjoying his first cigar
of the day while reading the financial news
from Europe, which came in over his personal
telegraph machine. By mid-morning he hopped in
a hired carriage for the ride to his office
building at the southern tip of
Manhattan. (horse hooves clopping) Half an hour later, he was on
the narrow cobblestone lane where modern American finance
was being invented-- Wall Street. When he closed the door
to his glass office, J.P. Morgan rarely looked up
from his paperwork. Everyone at Drexel, Morgan &
Company, even his partners, knew not to interrupt him. SUSIE PAK:
Morgan was definitely the boss. He was a very confident person, and when he determined what was
the right path of what to do, he did it. He was undisputedly
the final word. BRANDS:
Morgan came from
a moneyed family, moneyed in two senses-- they were wealthy,
but in addition, they were in the business
of money. And Morgan understood
at a very early age that money was what made
everything else happen. NARRATOR:
Pierpont's father,
Junius Morgan, was a powerful,
London-based American banker who had introduced his son to his network
of European investors and taken pains to ready him
for a life in finance. "I wish to impress upon you
the necessity of preparation for responsibilities," Junius
had told his only surviving son. "Be ready to assume
and fulfill them whenever they shall be
laid upon you." Junius was a very exacting
but also very attentive father, so he's very, very interested in Pierpont's moral, intellectual
health and development. His father had groomed him
for business, and he not only accepted it, but I think also expected it
of himself. O'DONNELL:
J.P. Morgan sees himself
as a nation builder, as a person who's not only
carrying out private business transactions, but as a person really at the
center of this new, emerging, booming American economy,
booming American society. NARRATOR:
America had emerged as an urban
and industrial powerhouse in the 30 years since Morgan followed his father
into banking. There were only eight
U.S. cities over 100,000 people in 1860. Now there were almost 30. The country was overtaking
Britain and Germany in the production of iron,
steel, oil, and coal. European investors wanted a
piece of the American action and turned to Morgan to get it. JOHN:
Think of him as a conduit
or a pivot between European capital
and American industry, and especially American industry that's dependent on large sums
of foreign capital, and that will be the railroads. ♪ ♪ (train chugging, bell ringing,
whistle blowing) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
The railroads pushing
into the American West became the hot-ticket investment
in the 1870s and 1880s. (train whistle blowing) By 1888, billions of dollars had
flowed into the industry, much of it from Morgan's
European clients. But Pierpont was finding it
increasingly difficult to vouch for the
financial stability of America's signature industry. The American industrial economy
in the Gilded Age was a bare-knuckles
competitive arena. Someone who had a rail line
from New York City to Albany, okay, had that rail line. But there was usually nothing
that prevented a competing railroad from
building another line, let's say on the other side
of the Hudson River. There could be cutthroat
competition between the two. NASAW:
J.P. Morgan understands
that the railroad business, unless it stops these
wasteful parallel roads that lead to the same place, is not going to be able to pay
off its debts and make money. He understands that competition
has to be eliminated, that the railroads, instead
of competing with one another, have to begin to cooperate. (whistling) (train bell ringing,
steam hissing) (engine chugging) NARRATOR:
In the Christmas season
of 1888, between tending to the plans
for Madison Square Garden and paying for a holiday dinner
for 200 orphans at the East Side newsboys
lodging house-- Morgan convened a gathering of
14 key railroad presidents. This is a guy who can beckon these corporate titans
to his home, and they show up. FRASER:
Morgan had already established
a reputation for his commanding presence,
his own internal discipline. He was a man of a kind
of iron will, and his purpose at that meeting is to begin to establish
among them some kind of self-conscious reining in
of their competitive instincts. NARRATOR:
Morgan hosted a series
of meetings over the next three weeks, with harsh words cutting through
the halo of soft electric light in his Madison Avenue mansion. Amid his growing trove
of treasures-- paintings, tapestries,
medieval armor, ivories, and ancient bronzes--
Morgan bullied and cajoled. "Your railroads belong
to my clients," he gruffly reminded the bosses. O'DONNELL:
He's a very large man. And people always talk about
his piercing eyes, intimidating, hawk-like eyes. So when he sweeps into a room, people describe it as sort of
the wind rushing through a room. He has a condition with his nose
that has disfigured his nose. It's enlarged, it's red. He knows that
it's a bit unnerving, and that actually played
to his advantage in these close negotiations. NARRATOR:
By the second week of January, Morgan had herded the railroad
men into an agreement to set uniform rates,
to assign to each road "its due share of the
competitive traffic," and to stick to the arrangement
or risk financial penalty. The commercial treaty lasted
only a matter of weeks. O'DONNELL:
Morgan comes to a conclusion that he's never going be able
to pull this off, that that these railroads
are inherently antagonistic toward each other. ♪ ♪ So the only solution
is consolidation, to merge these railroads so that there's less and less
competition. NARRATOR:
Morgan would never say
the word aloud, but his plan was to engineer
something nearing a monopoly in the railroad industry,
and to maintain control. BRANDS:
Morgan had almost
an aesthetic sense of what an economy
should look like, and it should be well organized. He thought that people like him,
with his background, with his understanding,
with his intelligence, were the ones who really ought
to direct the American economy. (train chugging) NARRATOR:
Problematic as they were, the railroads were proving to be
the engines of industrialization on the American plains. By 1890 there were more than
70,000 miles of track in operation
west of the Mississippi, where the population had nearly
quadrupled in just 30 years. American farmers were shipping
wheat, corn, oats, and rye across the world,
feeding the growing cities on the eastern seaboard
and the capitals of Europe. ♪ ♪ But the men and women producing
this bounty weren't seeing many
of the benefits. Farmers in Kansas, for instance, were working 15- or 16-hour days and losing ground. Prices for their crops had been
declining for a decade. Most farmers had taken loans
to make up shortfalls, and their mortgages were likely
to be held by bankers back east. And there were few laws to stop
the most predatory lenders from charging 20, or 30, or even
50 percent interest per year. The cost of transporting crops
to market, meanwhile, remained an onerous burden. NASAW:
The only way to get their goods
to market is on the railroads, and they've kept rates high. These are not the small family
yeoman farmers that Thomas Jefferson envisioned
as the heart of America. These are farmers who are in
debt to the banks and who now have to pay
a huge chunk of their income to the railroads. There are memories
that people still have of what it was like before
industrial capitalism. That, of course, is rooted
in the agrarian past, the small proprietor past. It is also redolent of a more
egalitarian vision of society than the one that's emerging. BRANDS:
There was a feeling that control
had shifted from Kansas to the East Coast. They looked at their own lives
and they say, "50 years ago, when my
grandfather was young, he controlled his own life." This idea that people ought to
be in control of their destiny is something that's very
powerful. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Frustration in Kansas had
sharpened into resentment and scorn. Among the loudest voices of
protest on the hot, dry prairie was a 39-year-old former school
teacher and licensed attorney named Mary Elizabeth Lease. She was an energetic agitator who made a living
giving speeches in support of underdogs:
labor unionists, suffragettes, and, in the summer of 1890,
the Kansas farmer. "She flashed across Kansas
in that day of turmoil," one well-known editor remarked, "a harridan in the eyes
of her enemies, "a goddess to her friends. I think she was
a little of both." EDWARDS:
She's apparently
just a riveting orator. She has a tremendous voice. She can speak to crowds
of thousands, and she also has
a tremendous memory. She can speak
for a couple of hours without reviewing any notes. And clearly she strikes a chord. NARRATOR:
Mary Lease could empathize
with the thousands of Kansans whose daily lives balanced
on a razor's edge between plenty and want. She was one of them. Lease was the sixth child
of immigrants who had fled the Great Famine
in Ireland. Her father and one brother died
fighting for the Union in the Civil War. Another brother was killed when
a train crushed him while working as a laborer
for a railroad corporation. In the early 1870s, when Lease
was still in her twenties, a nationwide economic depression swept away her husband's
pharmacy business and all of their savings. EDWARDS:
They lose everything. She's very embittered by
poverty, and frustrated, and comes to feel that,
you know, that the social order
just isn't fair. NARRATOR:
Women could not run for state
office in Kansas in 1890, but Lease helped to spur
the founding of a new local political
organization -- the People's Party,
widely known as the Populists. NASAW:
The Populists believe that
they're being ripped off, that industrial capitalism
discriminates against them, and they're right. The Populists
organize politically to do something about that. ♪ ♪ FRASER:
They leave both parties
to form their own because they feel both parties
are corrupted beyond hope, that they're too much
under the thumb of big business. They buy senators. They buy congressmen. Their lobbyists infest
the Capitol. NARRATOR:
The People's Party put up a full
slate of candidates for the election that year
and announced its intent to wrest state government
from the grasp of Big Business. FRASER:
Mary Lease says,
"This kind of system is fatal "and destroying the lives of
millions of people, "and that if we don't do
something drastic about this, "we not only will lose our way
of life, "but American democracy
will go down the... "down with that way of life." ♪ ♪ EDWARDS:
She said when someone
has five homes, and someone else is starving, then the first man has something
that belongs to the second man. People shouldn't be starving while other people
have so much more than they can possibly
ever use or spend. NARRATOR:
Lease had scoundrels to blame,
and she called them out. She was particularly focused
on bankers in New York, like the one at 23 Wall Street, who seemed to have his fingers
in everything-- J.P. Morgan. "It is no longer a government
of the people, by the people, "and for the people,"
Lease told her crowds, "but a government
of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street." FRASER:
Wall Street is the archvillain. It doesn't produce anything. It just trades in paper,
controls everybody else's life without offering
anything tangible to the national welfare. That's how they see it. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Republican officials, whose party had dominated state
politics for nearly 30 years, weren't much concerned
with Lease and her followers in the early weeks
of the campaign. But they were startled
by the procession of a thousand
horse-drawn carriages bound for one
of the People's Party events, by the crowds of 10,000
at a rally in Lawrence, and 20,000 in Emporia, and by reports that
the upstart party had enrolled 130,000 members
in the state. Election day news out
of Kansas shocked the country. The Democrats won only eight
seats in the state legislature; the Republicans,
long in the majority, won 26. The People's Party won 91 seats and control
of the Kansas state legislature. "This triumph," declared
one Populist newspaper, "is but the beginning." ♪ ♪ Success in Kansas
sparked a brushfire that swept through much of the
nation in the next two years. Newly encouraged farmers
joined acolytes of Henry George, labor unionists,
and miners from the West. Black professionals and farmers
in the South were also drawn
to the People's Party. Republicans had abandoned them in the years
after the Civil War; and Democrats were working to
strip them of the right to vote. The Populists were
the last best hope. EDWARDS:
There is a surprising number
of black farmers who have managed to buy land despite the fact that most
white landowners in the South are pretty reluctant
to sell land to blacks. But the vast majority of black
farmers are tenant farmers, or they're sharecroppers. The economy's
in very bad shape, and the Populists
have a program to really transform the economy in ways that'll be
good for working people. NARRATOR:
The People's Party
built a platform of radical and untested ideas: public ownership
of railroads and utilities; a federal income tax; a treasury department
empowered to write loans and to control
the money supply. NOAM MAGGOR:
The Populists were
incredibly modern, incredibly forward-looking. They are thinking in very
constructive, practical ways about how American
political institutions and the role of government
could reorganize. NASAW:
What's important to remember
about this period is this sense of hope. Change was possible. Change was imminent. Democracy would triumph. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
While the Populists were
organizing for future elections, there was another kind
of fight bubbling at Andrew Carnegie's steel mill
in Homestead, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh. Homestead had become the jewel
in the crown of Carnegie Steel by 1892. The plant was the envy
of the industry. The town that grew up around the
mill accommodated the families of 4,000 steel workers, many of
whom enjoyed the protection of the two labor unions
that represented them. EDWARDS:
People are doing pretty well
under Carnegie. The skilled workers at Homestead
will have pretty nice homes. Their kids are getting
an education, and there are ways in which
they really have bought into and benefit from what
Carnegie has built. O'DONNELL:
They have incredible identity
with this work. They feel that this is not just
simply a job that they go to, there's a real sense
of job ownership. Clearly they know
Carnegie owns the factory, but they feel that
they have a stake in it. (birds chirping) NARRATOR:
Andrew Carnegie was enjoying
an extended vacation in the British Isles with his
wife in the summer of 1892, but he was keeping an eye
on business. (birds chirping) Union demands for wage increases
at Homestead had riled him. His calculation was simple: rising wages meant
falling profits. Like business owners
all over the country, Carnegie did not care to be
dictated to by his hired hands. O'DONNELL:
Carnegie may be a friend
of labor, but he's most importantly
an independent capitalist. When he's got these
competing sets of values it comes down to running
his business in the most profitable way
possible. And by 1892 he says, "That's going to be
without a union labor force." NARRATOR:
Carnegie and his team had
already diminished the power of labor at his smaller plants; now he planned to break
the unions at Homestead. If the steel baron
had any qualms, it was a fear
that his reputation as the workingman's friend
would be broken, too. But he never doubted
his right to do it. His long-ago search
to understand his own spectacular success had made him
a true believer in the philosophy
of Herbert Spencer. Spencer had migrated
Charles Darwin's elegant new theory of evolution
from the realm of biology to society at large,
and coined the term "survival of the fittest." O'DONNELL:
Social Darwinism becomes
a very powerful idea that justifies success and justifies doing nothing about the people
that are less fortunate. Herbert Spencer would say,
"Look around you. "The people who you see rising, the people who you see
succeeding are the fit ones." They are the ones who have "it,"
whatever "it" is-- good genes, hard work,
morality, thrift, sobriety. They have got "it," and they are succeeding because
of that, and that's good. EDWARDS:
Carnegie says, "Oh. "This is how the world
is supposed to be. "For me to struggle for survival
out there in a ruthless way "is going to contribute
to progress. "So not only am I not being,
you know, "sinful when
I am being ruthless, I'm doing exactly
the right thing." ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Carnegie had given his right-
hand man, Henry Clay Frick, clear instructions: demand a
sizeable wage cut at Homestead and refuse to negotiate. "We all approve
of anything you do," Carnegie wrote
from 3,000 miles away. "We are with you to the end." (birds squawking) LEARS:
He's over in a manorial estate
in Scotland drinking wine
and going stag hunting. And his lieutenant, Henry Clay
Frick, who is mean as hell, is in charge,
and he's the one who brings about the
confrontation with the strikers. But Carnegie's on board
with it, of course, he's just not on the premises. NARRATOR:
Frick circled the 600-acre
factory grounds with a fence, water cannons,
and sniper towers that gave Homestead the look
and feel of an armed garrison. The steel workers
would not be intimidated and refused to accept
the proposed wage cuts. Frick shuttered the plant and put a stop
to the company payroll. Union men went on strike and threatened
to block any replacements from entering the mill. On July 6, 1892,
under the cover of darkness, Frick shipped a 300-man
private security force to protect the non-union
replacement workers. When the barge carrying
the armed guards arrived, Homestead's union employees
were there waiting for them, guns in hand. (gunfire) After a prolonged firefight,
the strikers used explosives in an attempt
to blow up the barge. (explosion) At least 16 people were killed
and more than 150 injured in the battle that followed. (gunfire continues) Carnegie refused to back down. "Stand firm," he telegraphed
Frick from Scotland. "Must not fail now." It took five months, but Carnegie did crush
the union at Homestead, with plenty of help
from state officials. When the company asked
the governor of Pennsylvania to send in National Guard troops to shore up its
tattered private army, he dispatched a force
of 8,500 soldiers to put down the strike. Carnegie also knew
he could count on the federal government
if needed. The president sent in troops to put down a similar strike
at silver mines in Idaho that same week. EDWARDS:
One of the big questions is,
"Whose business is it?" Is it Carnegie's business, and does he get to make
all the decisions, or do workers have a place
in that business, too? And that's kind of
an open question, and government ends up really
coming out on the side of the guy
who owns the property rather than the people
who do the work. NARRATOR:
Carnegie was not happy that his
public image had been tarnished by five months of bad press, but he made no apologies
for exercising the full power and authority of ownership. "Through the war at last," Carnegie wrote to Frick from his
new vacation spot in Italy. "What a relief. Now for long years of peace
and prosperity." (bells ringing, birds chirping) The morning of May 4, 1893, dawned like any other spring day
in Lower Manhattan; contentment and complacency
didn't last long though, as strange news began
to ripple through Wall Street. ♪ ♪ One of the most powerful trusts
in the country-- a company that had
a virtual monopoly on the manufacture
of rope and twine-- was on the verge of failure. If this powerful near-monopoly
could collapse, many wondered what was safe. Cautious investors began
to shed stock across industries. The Dow Jones Company recorded
a precipitous drop. A run on banks picked up speed. (commotion) By the end of that day, the nation's wealth
was already draining away. The United States had weathered
panics and downturns before, in fairly regular cycles& but the last big hit was
a generation earlier, and the American economy
had been transformed in those 20 years. When the Panic of 1893 hit, it was sharper, faster,
and more severe than before, and this reflecting the fact
that the United States had industrialized further. There were more people
in America who were dependent
on their employment. There were more people
who were connected to the growing financial system. There were more people who relied on the continued
smooth working of things. EDWARDS:
The U.S. has industrialized
that much more, has urbanized that much more, is that much more dependent
on manufacturing jobs, and so the impact is
really very severe. People starve to death. NARRATOR:
As many as a million people
were thrown out of work. One in five Americans
no longer had an income. "Last cent gone,"
wrote one young widow. "Children went to work
without their breakfast. This awful struggle
is wearing me out." JULIA OTT:
What doesn't exist in 1893
is really any capacity of government at any level, you know, national, state,
local, or anything like that to step in to help American
citizens through hard times. EDWARDS:
All through the Gilded Age,
police all over the country had traditionally allowed people
to sleep in the police station. They would have a little
potbellied stove, and you can sleep on the floor, as long as
you're not disruptive. That's kind of the last-ditch
place of refuge. And the police station stopped
serving that function because they just can't handle
the numbers. They're totally overwhelmed. They just start
turning people away. (drums beating) NARRATOR:
The nation was still
weighed down by economic depression a year
after the crash when, in the spring of 1894, a hundred men gathered
at Massillon, Ohio. They showed up
to support Jacob Coxey, a trim, bookish, 39-year-old
with an electrifying idea: a march on the nation's capital. "What I am after,"
Coxey declared, "is to try to put this country
in a condition "so that no man who wants work shall be obliged
to remain idle." EDWARDS:
His basic idea is, "Look, "we have two problems. "We have bad roads, and
we have massive unemployment. There are thousands and
thousands of men who want work." And he says, "Why can't
the government hire people to fix the roads?" BRANDS:
Coxey proposes that
the government should take responsibility for employing people
who are out of work. That government do something
to help them deal with the deficiencies
of American capitalism. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Coxey and his men had
a 700-mile walk to Washington, D.C.,
in front of them. They hoped to make
about 15 miles a day, camping along the way, and stopping in towns and cities
in Ohio and Pennsylvania to drum up support
for their cause. (wind whipping) ♪ ♪ When his group started
out on Easter Sunday, they walked straight
into an ominous gale, and then a snowstorm. The first week was all misery; wagon wheels got mired
in ice and mud; feet froze. But the campaign, the
first-ever march on Washington, was front-page news
across the country. ♪ ♪ BRANDS:
This march is the big story
of that season because nothing like this
has ever happened before, and in some ways it looked like
a pilgrimage of the Middle Ages, where people would gather
together and go to a shrine, but this is the shrine of
democracy they're going to. They're going to the Capitol
in Washington, and they are petitioning
the government. NARRATOR:
Within days of Coxey's start, groups of men
formed new regiments of what had become known as the
"United States Industrial Army." They began their own marches
to join Coxey in Washington. NASAW:
The news of
Coxey's Army spreads. These are a lot
of unemployed people. It's at the height
of the depression. Nobody knows how long this
depression is going to go on, and the sense is, "What do we
have a government for? "You know, the government
is responsible to us, "to the people,
and we're suffering." EDWARDS:
People in Tacoma, Washington, and California would say, "I have so few options here
that I'm just going to go "to Washington and ask
for help and see if people will feed us
along the way." WHITE:
At first people in power treat
Coxey as a joke. Coxey's little army doesn't
bother them, but further west you can't march
to Washington from Portland, or from Butte, Montana,
or from San Francisco, or from Los Angeles. People start stealing trains. (din of crowd) NARRATOR:
When Coxey's own small
procession crossed into
the industrialized sections of western Pennsylvania, 6,000 citizens of Beaver Falls
came out to welcome it. Locals donated wagonloads
of food and a little cash. More than 40,000 hailed them
at Allegheny City, where onlookers proudly pinned
red, white, and blue "Coxey" badges
on their lapels. (horse hooves clopping) As they approached Homestead,
home to Carnegie Steel, they were given their
warmest greeting yet, and Coxey's numbers swelled
to around 600. The notion that the situation
had changed, that people were no longer able
to be self-reliant, that the economy was so subject
to chaotic fluctuations, that they had no recourse
in these down times except for the government,
that was a very alien idea. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
"The lessons of paternalism
ought to be unlearned," President Grover Cleveland
had declared in his inaugural address
the year before, "and the better lesson taught "that while the people should "patriotically and cheerfully
support their government, its functions do not include
the support of the people." Business owners and
editorial boards agreed and imputed the worst of motives
to the marchers-- they were shirkers,
or grasping, or criminals. LEARS:
There's a kind of universal hostility
among the respectable classes. These are the rabble. They have no permanent abode. Their mobility
across the landscape is somehow threatening. It shows the divisions
in the society with a kind
of stunning clarity. NARRATOR:
Coxey planned to read a speech
and present a petition asking Congress to fund
a program that would pay unemployed
workers $1.50 a day to build roads and schools
and courthouses. He never got the chance. Coxey gets up
to address the crowd, and the police come
and drag him off, beat him up, drag him off for walking
on the grass. NARRATOR:
Coxey's followers
in Washington dispersed, and the other marches stalled. Only a handful of United States
Industrial Army regiments made it anywhere near
the Capitol. Coxey was convicted
of the crime of displaying a partisan banner
on the Capitol grounds, as well as walking
on the government's grass. He was fined $5 and sentenced
to 20 days in jail. EDWARDS:
The results are pretty bitterly
disappointing to people who were hoping that they could
bring attention and action on the issue of unemployment. People can't feed
their families, and they're hoping maybe
there'll be a solution. And there isn't. Some of Coxey's supporters
get arrested and put on the chain gang
in Maryland, and the whole movement
just kind of collapses. O'DONNELL:
It's a confirmation that
the political establishment is not in the hands
of the people. It's in the hands
of corporate interests, and also political parties
that don't want to hear from the people. ♪ ♪ (train chugging) NARRATOR:
The wrenching depression had
barely touched J.P. Morgan. Net profits at his private bank
were five times that of the country's
largest commercial bank and growing every year. (train chugging, whistle blows) The downward economic spiral
had even offered Morgan the opportunity
to finally bring to heel large sections
of the railroad industry. Morgan bought
controlling interest in a slew of bankrupt railroads, stacked their corporate boards
with men he deemed trustworthy, and handpicked management teams
that answered to the person who represented the bulk
of the stockholders-- Pierpont Morgan himself. FRASER:
Morgan is a principal architect of the publicly traded
corporation, which will transform
American economic life. He also recognizes
that if you have a kind of impersonal management, one that doesn't have
a direct proprietary stake in the corporation, you can get a more global view of what is good
for the corporation. (thunder rumbling) NARRATOR:
Just at the moment Morgan
gained control, a storm was gathering, and Pierpont could see
it develop up close. ♪ ♪ Across the street
from the House of Morgan, at the New York Sub-Treasury, wagons were being loaded up
with gold bars for the short trip
to the New York docks, and then for the longer passage
to Europe. EDWARDS:
Gold was money, and in a depression,
people want their money back, and so literally ships
full of gold were leaving New York
and other U.S. ports and going to Europe as people
asked to have their money back. WHITE:
In 1895 everything that can go
wrong with the gold standard had gone wrong. Europeans, because
of the depression, are pulling investments
out of the United States. And also the cotton crop
has failed, which brings in a lot
of European gold coming in in exchange for American cotton. So it's a perfect storm. There was this cycle
that fed on itself. As people got more nervous
about the paper dollars, they more and more
demanded gold, and as they demanded gold, then the gold drained
from the Treasury's vault, and people got
more nervous still. NARRATOR:
By the last week
of January 1895, with the nation's gold reserve
down by more than 50%, President Grover Cleveland
asked Congress to appropriate funds
to borrow more gold. Federal legislators took a pass; many saw the crisis
as an opportunity to get the United States
off the gold standard. Scores of congressmen
had already advocated the introduction of silver
into the U.S. currency system. BRANDS:
The fight over money-- does money consist of gold,
or silver, or something else-- is a fight that pits
the capitalists, who want to stick with gold--
they're property owners, and gold means that
the dollar will be strong and their property
will be worth a lot. It pits them
against farmers and workers. NARRATOR:
The mere talk of silver,
Morgan believed, was spooking European investors and causing them to flee
the U.S. market. At the beginning of February, with the nation's gold supply
still dwindling, and Congress sitting
on its hands, Morgan calculated that the
United States government would default on its debt in
a matter of weeks, if not days. J.P. Morgan believed
in stability, and he bet on America. And in 1895 he'd come
to the realization that he's going to need
to take direct action in order to preserve
financial stability. BRANDS:
He doesn't want the U.S. federal
government to go bankrupt because it would have
horrible ramifications for the standing of
the United States in the world, for the American economy. He knew this would be
a disaster. But also Morgan was
a wealthy man, and nearly all of his holdings
were in U.S. dollars. And if the dollar becomes
worth less, he loses. So he hitches his special
private railroad car to a southbound train,
and he goes to Washington. NARRATOR:
"We shall make
strongest possible fight for sound currency," Morgan
wired to a partner in his bank. "If fail, it is impossible
to overestimate "what shall be result. Must admit am not hopeful." (train whistle blowing) When Morgan arrived
in Washington, the president refused
to see him. Grover Cleveland did not want
to be seen as a tool of the big banks. Morgan checked
into the Arlington Hotel, across Lafayette Square
from the Executive Mansion, and waited, sure the president
would come to his senses. JOHN:
It's not as if Grover Cleveland has an enormous toolkit
at his disposal. You see, the whole idea
that President Cleveland could solve the problem
by himself is based on this
bizarre assumption that presidents can solve
economic problems. That's a
20th-century assumption. It's not a
19th-century assumption. So when President Cleveland
turns to Morgan, he quite rightly is turning
to the one individual who has the power,
at least potentially, to solve the problem. Cleveland doesn't. BRANDS:
Morgan was having
breakfast when an invitation came
from the White House, "Mr. Morgan,
the president will see you." J.P. Morgan has connections throughout the
financial industry, and so he knows who's going
to be demanding gold, now and in the near future,
in a way that Cleveland doesn't. And what Morgan tells
Cleveland is that, "You don't realize this,
Mr. President, "but the government
of the United States "is going to collapse
financially today unless you do
something dramatic." NARRATOR:
Morgan explained to the
president that he had a plan. An obscure Civil War-era
law allowed for an emergency loan of gold
to the U.S. Treasury from private parties
without the need of Congressional approval. BRANDS:
So Cleveland says, "Where is
the money going to come from?" "Well, there's a syndicate
that I've put together. "Investors, American investors, "and a number
of European investors. "And they're willing to lend
to the U.S. government gold." NARRATOR:
Cleveland reluctantly signed on
to Morgan's plan, and Morgan made it work. His syndicate provided the cash
and credit Congress would not. The nation's gold reserves
soon began to climb back toward safe levels. We don't have a
Federal Reserve Bank in 1895. There is no institution
that can smooth out the perturbations
in the business cycle. Morgan basically smooths
them out himself. Now we can certainly say
that this is a problem, that a private individual
has acquired such power. But the question then comes, "Well if J.P. Morgan hadn't
acted what would have happened?" At that moment,
Morgan was clearly the most powerful man
in America and clearly at that moment
more powerful than the president
of the United States. Grover Cleveland could not
have stemmed the panic. J.P. Morgan did. (waves crashing,
seagulls squawking) NARRATOR:
Pierpont Morgan appeared
to have the wind at his back as he entertained fellow
industrialists on his yacht in June of 1895. "The feeling abroad is
very strongly in favor of American securities,"
Morgan told reporters in a rare public statement. "They recognize the fact
that the government is pledged to maintain the gold standard." When Morgan moored in the resort
town of Newport, Rhode Island, later that summer,
he found himself in decidedly
like-minded company. ♪ ♪ "I suppose there is no place
like it in the world," a young British diplomat
reported, "where people
have put themselves "to so much trouble and expense
to get the means of happiness." HOFFERT:
No one worked. It was more pleasant
than spending your summers in New York. You would've taken your staff
to your house. They spent an enormous amount
of time trying to figure out how to entertain themselves
and each other. What you did was
to plan parties, and suppers, and picnics. You'd have tennis tournaments,
and you'd have parades. They would've changed clothes
five and six times a day, so they would spend a lot
of time in their dressing room. ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
There was, at least, a whiff of social intrigue
in the summer of 1895. Alva Vanderbilt,
who had been firmly established as a leader of elite society, had broken a cardinal rule
of her crowd. And she had done it,
as was her custom, in a very public way. O'DONNELL:
When Alva Vanderbilt sues her
husband for divorce, it is a capital-S scandal. It wasn't unheard of,
but it was extremely rare in the United States
for people to get divorced. It was also considered
not the thing to do if you were a member
of the elite. HOFFERT:
The underlying assumption was
that men of this social class were having affairs with women, and there was absolutely nothing
their wives could do about it. It simply wasn't discussed,
and the wives put up with it. Willie K.'s problem is that
he went to Paris, took up with a woman,
and flaunted it. And Alva's problem was
she didn't put up with anything. NARRATOR:
The well-publicized divorce
had been completed long before the summer season. The regular folk
keeping track in the newspapers had to think Alva won the day. She got to keep her palace
on Fifth Avenue, her summer cottage in Newport, and custody of
the couple's three children. She did not retain custody of
her cherished social standing. HOFFERT:
She'd go to a dinner party and the women would
completely ignore her, people she considered
to be her friends. She was warned that
she would be cut out of society, and I think she thought, given her ego, that she was just
too important for anyone to-to treat like that,
and she was wrong. NARRATOR:
Alva had an ace up her sleeve-- a way to not simply regain
her standing, but to improve it. The scheme depended largely
on her daughter, Consuelo, who had just reached
marrying age. While traveling in Europe,
Alva had arranged for Consuelo to meet the Duke of Marlborough, one of the most
eligible bachelors among the British aristocracy. O'DONNELL:
The Vanderbilt family
has massive amounts of money, and the Duke of Marlborough
has a title, has an estate, has all that heritage,
but lacks money. So it's a perfect marriage. "We've got the money,
you've got the heritage. "Let's make a deal." NARRATOR:
Alva kept the duke
as her private prize when he arrived in Newport
at the end of August. HOFFERT:
Keep in mind that
she's been banished by society, so what's really interesting is that when she announces
that she's going the have the Duke of Marlborough visit, all of a sudden she's
perfectly acceptable company. Everyone wants to meet
the Duke of Marlborough. NARRATOR:
Consuelo's wedding that fall
in New York was front-page news
across the nation, and everyone in Alva's circle
clamored for an invitation. ♪ ♪ Queen Victoria sent
a telegram of congratulations. MAGGOR:
Marrying into
an aristocratic family as a way of legitimizing
a family status is increasingly attractive for
some of these elite families. They're trying
to establish themselves as a class apart from society. NARRATOR:
Alva's triumph was not
universally cheered, especially when news got out
that the Duke of Marlborough had only married Consuelo
for her money, which by some accounts amounted
to a dowry of $5 million. The Populist firebrand
Mary Elizabeth Lease called the marriage
"a disgrace." "Once we made it our boast
that this nation "was not founded upon any class
distinction," she lamented. "Now we are selling our children
to titled débauchées." (trolley clanging on tracks) ♪ ♪ Democrats convened in Chicago
in the summer of 1896 to pick their nominee for the upcoming
presidential election. There were six
serious contenders, and no clear frontrunner. Neither was there
a definite consensus on an issue that had become
increasingly contentious-- the future of
the nation's currency. Some Democrats supported
the gold standard, which aligned them
with big business. Others were determined
to introduce silver, which they believed
would help out struggling farmers
and working people. BRANDS:
The silver wing of the party has this continuing complaint
against Cleveland and the gold Democrats, complaining that Cleveland
sold the United States to J.P. Morgan. And those people
who criticized Morgan said, "This is one more example of
what this nation has come to, "where one individual can hold
the entire nation hostage "to his willingness
to cut this deal or not. "This is untenable. Something has to change." NARRATOR:
Making the case for silver
fell to a little-known former congressman
from Nebraska: 36-year-old
William Jennings Bryan. MICHAEL KAZIN:
He has practiced relentlessly
to make sure his voice can be heard as far as possible. He can project his voice so well
and modulate it so well that it's quite possible
that he was the only speaker in that debate that
everyone in the hall could hear. NARRATOR:
"Having behind us
the laboring interests and all the toiling masses," Bryan thundered to
the 15,000 conventioneers, "we will answer demands for
a gold standard by saying "you shall not press down
upon the brow of labor "this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind
upon a cross of gold." He thrusts out his arms, "Are we going to crucify America
on a cross of gold?" And he stands there
in the pause, in the silence, as he himself becomes
this epitome of the-the United States,
of workers, of everybody as being
the crucified Christ in this great, evangelical
Protestant appeal, and the audience just erupts. (cheering) FRASER:
It's so powerful because
it does sum up what people have been feeling for, now,
probably two generations, certainly all through
the Gilded Age, that the country seemed to many
to have lost its soul, that all that mattered
was enrichment, the gathering in of as much
money and wealth as possible, and that this was the election. This-this was going
to be a turning point. NARRATOR:
Bryan's speech won the hall and secured him
the Democratic nomination. He advocated something
entirely new for a major national party. Bryan Democrats
supported silver, a federal income tax
on the highest earners, and the break-up of
powerful industrial monopolies. EDWARDS:
For the 19th century, the Democrats had been really
the party of smaller government and more local authority. And all of a sudden they're
saying, "You know what? "In this era
of corporate capitalism, "we need government to do more, "to play a role
in protecting and advancing "the interests
of ordinary people "who are facing forces that are
much bigger and more powerful than they have in the past." NARRATOR:
The People's Party fell in line at their own convention
in St. Louis; their delegates chose
not to nominate their own candidate
for president, but pledged support
to William Jennings Bryan. Mary Elizabeth Lease, like many
Populists, was wary; she suspected Bryan was more
political opportunist than true believer. But she saw the Democrat
as the best hope to put power back in the hands
of the people; and the best hope
to harness political blocs that had not yet
found common ground. O'DONNELL:
If the campaign had a wish list, it's that Bryan's message
of economic fairness, of greater opportunity for all, that that will play really well
in the heartland and gather the rural vote, and it will also play well
in urban America. BRANDS:
This was a critical moment. It was the moment
in American history where there was the greatest
possibility of real class-based politics. Bryan's success depended on
something happening that hadn't happened before, and that is, that farmers
and industrial workers would see that they had
a common cause. If they do, Bryan will win. NARRATOR:
The Republican Party nominated former congressman and Ohio
governor William McKinley, a long-time champion of
American business and, more recently,
the gold standard. He ran a decidedly
traditional campaign, remaining on his front porch
in his hometown of Canton, hosting daily trainloads
of visiting groups. McKinley vehemently opposed
Bryan and his platform. The economy was finally ready
to climb out of the long depression,
McKinley insisted. America's signature industries had already overtaken all
the leading European producers, Jobs were coming back. McKinley promised to protect
the gains and extend them. O'DONNELL:
The Republican message was
pretty straightforward. "We are the party of business,
the party of prosperity," They say, "You are going
to kill the goose "that lays the golden egg. "Right now we've got the goose,
this industrial economy, "and it's doing fine, and
it's laying golden eggs at a... "at a rate we've never
seen before. "And if you start meddling
with this "and start imposing regulations, "and start imposing artificial
constraints on it, you will kill the goose
that lays the golden egg." (train chugging) NARRATOR:
Bryan, meanwhile, embarked on something
rarely seen in politics-- the whistle-stop tour. (train whistle blowing) He traveled more than 18,000
miles, with reporters in tow, and brought his message
directly to the voters. NASAW:
William Jennings Bryan is a
phenomenon in American politics. He could speak
from the stump for hours, and everywhere he went,
he drew huge crowds. NARRATOR:
Bryan had sympathetic audience
and a motivated one. The country might be
on the upswing again, but it was hard to feel. Americans were enduring
a third straight year of economic depression. The unemployment rate
had tripled. Exports were still
on the decline. Farmers watched as wheat sales
dropped 75%. And neither
the sitting president nor the United States Congress appeared willing to mitigate
the suffering. "There are those who believe
that if you will only legislate "to make the
well-to-do prosperous, "their prosperity will leak
through on those below," Bryan proclaimed. "The Democratic idea, however, "has been that if you legislate
to make the masses prosperous, "their prosperity
will find its way up through every class
which rests upon them." O'DONNELL:
Bryan says, "There are two
theories of government. "One theory of government is
that government should do things "to benefit the wealthy. "And there's another
theory of government, "which is that the government
should do things "to maximize the prosperity of
the greatest number of people, and that will make us
a healthy, vibrant democracy." NARRATOR:
Growing alarmed at
the size of the Bryan crowds all through that summer, the Republican Party dispatched
surrogates across the country to make the case
for McKinley and continuity. NASAW:
The business interests begin to coalesce
in a bigger way than ever before behind
the Republican Party because they fear the
Henry Georges in the East, and the Populists
in the Midwest, and the stirrings of populism
in the South. BRANDS:
McKinley's manager
goes around Wall Street saying, "Okay, your profits this year
are so much. "We think you ought
to contribute this much "to the campaign because if you don't
we're all going to lose." KAZIN:
There was no barrier at all
in the law at the time for individuals who ran
corporations writing checks to a political candidate. John D. Rockefeller was reputed to have written a check
for $250,000. "Here you go, you know,
hope he wins." ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
McKinley's campaign used its
cash to blanket the country with his picture
and his message. ♪ ♪ Andrew Carnegie contributed
to the effort by writing a pamphlet
of his own. "If your literary bureau
publishes it," Carnegie explained to the
McKinley campaign, "I will pay the cost." NASAW:
Andrew Carnegie wanted nothing
to do with politics for a long time. But, like other businessmen,
he had no choice. He had to-to protect
his interests. Carnegie and the Carnegie Steel
people argue over and over again to their working people, "Look, you're being paid
good wages, and those wages, "because they're backed by gold,
can buy much more." They also say, "You prosper
because we prosper." ♪ ♪ NARRATOR:
Polling stations overflowed on
election day, November 3, 1896. 80% of the eligible electorate
turned out to vote, two million more than in any
previous election. BRANDS:
The real question was, and sort of the wild card
at this point was, what are urban workers
going to do? Are they going to vote
along class lines and join forces
with the farmers? So this is the moment of truth
for this emerging working class. NARRATOR:
Bryan carried the South,
the Great Plains, and much of the West. It wasn't enough. Factory workers went big
for McKinley. He carried the heavily populated and heavily industrialized
region from the Great Lakes through the Northeast, winning more than 60%
of the electoral votes. Republicans made a
clean sweep that day, solidifying their majorities
in the Senate and the House. LEARS:
The election of 1896
constitutes a conclusion for this period of class war. It doesn't end it
by any means, but it does bring
a sigh of relief to the propertied classes
of America. It also validates a kind
of upper-case Republican view, as a later president would say, "The business of America
is business." FRASER:
A society which
had prided itself on being a nation
of small producers, skilled workers, farmers, all roughly equal
in their social position, was no longer that. It was overwhelmingly a nation of very powerful, concentrated
wealth on the one hand, and wage labor on the other suffering a very serious dilemma
about how they would survive. (train chugging) NASAW:
By 1900, we're producing
more steel than Germany and
the United Kingdom combined. The economy has more than
doubled its size in 30 years. NARRATOR:
In the first weeks
of the 20th century, J. Pierpont Morgan put
his own exclamation point on the Gilded Age with an attempt to merge
the biggest competitors in the steel industry into a single
publicly traded corporation. "Pierpont," wrote one acquaintance
as the news got out, "is apparently trying
to swallow the sun." Convincing Andrew Carnegie
to agree to the merger was no mean feat; it took a payment of
$250 million to entice Carnegie to sell the company
he built from scratch. "Mr. Carnegie," Morgan said, as the two men shook hands
over the deal, "I want to congratulate you on being the richest man
in the world." (train bell ringing) NASAW:
There had never, ever been
as rapid an economic leap as took place
in the United States. In little more
than a generation, this nation went
from being a backwater to the leading industrial power
in the world. ♪ ♪ FRASER:
As the country industrializes
during the Gilded Age, it provides the infrastructure that makes the country
the global power it is. It is an enormous economic
bequest to the 20th century. (stamping) But the country has to wrestle
with how to solve the dilemmas that we're making it a nation
of have and have-nots. BRANDS:
During the Gilded Age, capitalism gained
greater and greater control of American life. (machines whirring) The essence of democracy
is equality. Everybody gets one vote. The essence of capitalism
is inequality. Rich people are much more
powerful than poor people. PAINTER:
The question of wealth versus people ballooned in the Gilded Age. Do our governments
represent wealth, or do they represent people? That is a fundamental issue,
which is with us today. (whistle blowing)
