The Dawn of Innovation (31 page)

Americans were the best-fed people in the world—already by the mid-eighteenth century their nutritional intake was about the same as that of 1960s Americans. They were taller by several inches than the average European and commensurately heavier. The average work output of Americans was plausibly larger than that of Europeans, an effect that was partly offset by the Europeans' adaptive smaller stature.
^ba
4

Oddly, although American incomes and dietary provision continued to rise, height and mortality data suggest a major decline in Americans'
health over about a thirty-year period starting in the 1840s. The causes have not been definitively pinned down. Rapid urbanization and the westward migrations are obvious culprits. The exploding population in the West was a feast for malarial mosquitoes, while runaway growth in coastal cities overwhelmed public water and sanitation infrastructure, triggering wave after wave of typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, and other crowd diseases. The poor health of many arriving immigrants, especially the famine Irish who flooded the eastern cities in the 1840s, was undoubtedly also a factor.

Recent research points to cataclysmic health consequences from the Civil War, which “produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century, claiming more soldiers' lives and resulting in more casualties than battle or warfare, and wreaked havoc on the population of the newly freed.” Freedpeople were particularly vulnerable as they were crowded into refugee camps and poorly fed and sheltered. Smallpox, cholera, and other diseases were rampant. To make matters worse, the Freedmen's Bureau spread epidemics by frequently moving its charges from camp to camp over large areas of the country. Similar consequences appear to have followed the forced Native American migrations of the 1870s. Whatever the reason, Americans were still slightly shorter than the English and Swedes in the 1880s, although they recovered their advantage in the twentieth century.
⁵

Finally, ordinary Americans, at least outside the South, were better educated than Europeans. The New England public school movement was well underway by 1820 and rapidly spread through the Middle Atlantic states and then to the Midwest. A study of national census return figures shows a quintupling of the population's average lifetime days of school instruction. By the 1830s, about 70 percent of the white population ages five to nineteen in New England and the Middle Atlantic states were enrolled in school, including more than half of the children of paupers. The Midwest made spectacular gains starting a decade or so later and reached equivalency of provision with the Northeast well before the Civil War. Southern states increased their spending sharply in the 1850s, but enrollments were
far lower than in the rest of the country, so only favored groups benefited from the spending increases. The spending increases were concentrated on the common schools in the early days of the movement, but as states approached near-universal literacy and numeracy among school-age children, reformers shifted their attention to high schools. By 1860, Massachusetts had nearly 120 public high schools.
⁶
The great British industrialist Sir Joseph Whitworth suggested that the receptivity of American workers to productivity-enhancing machinery was a consequence of their comparatively high levels of education.
⁷

Even with the slippage in health-related indicia, the overall favorable demographic and economic trends were such that the country was growing very rich. In 1800, the United States was a struggling ex-colony, wrestling crops and wood products from a resistant nature either for subsistence or to export to its erstwhile mother country. A half century later, it was the second biggest economy in the world, with output per worker virtually even with that in Great Britain. Isolating just manufacturing productivity, the United States was probably already ahead of Great Britain by the 1820s, and by 1850, according to a recent analysis, the average output of American manufacturing workers was plausibly 75 percent higher than that of the British.
^bb
8

Economy-wide, Great Britain still had a small edge in output per worker, as a result of substantial advantages in services and agriculture. All of Great Britain's commercial services industries—shipping, railroads, delivery services, banking, and finance—were far in advance of America's, even as the very large share of agricultural workers in the American labor force—three times that of Britain—pulled down average worker output even further.

By 1860, there was already visible a rough map of American industry that would prevail into the 1930s and beyond, leaving aside developments in the far West. Both the Northeast and the Midwest were becoming industrial powerhouses, but each with its own development pattern. Industry in the Midwest was closely tied to its natural resources, while the eastern patterns of development were more the result of history and specific skill bases. We will look at each in turn.

By the time of the Civil War, about a third of the free population lived in the nonslave states west of the Appalachians. For a couple of decades in mid-century, the region's economy revolved around the city of Cincinnati. Its population was on an exponential curve that reflected the growth of commerce—2,500 in 1810 to 161,000 in 1860. By then it was the seventh largest city in the country, just a hair behind New Orleans, with fast-growing St. Louis and Chicago nipping at its heels.

For a vivid journalistic tour through Cincinnati in the 1850s, we are indebted to another Englishwoman, Isabella Lucy Bird, just twenty-four at the time but as intrepid as Trollope and as gifted a writer. She was the sickly daughter of a minister, visiting American relatives but traveling solo for much of the time. Although she was pious, the “sickliness” seemed to occur only when she was living in the parsonage or later with her spinster sister. She desperately longed to travel and finally convinced her father to allow her to go to America. He gave her £100 for her trip, with his permission to stay as long as the money lasted. She stretched it for nearly a year in 1854–1855, a journey she described in her first book,
The Englishwoman in America
. For the rest of her life, the inevitable sickliness induced by sojourns in England was magically cured by travel—to the Rocky Mountains, Japan, Tibet, much of South Asia. Back in England, and turning fifty, she finally acquiesced to a pathetically long courtship by a respectable doctor some years her junior. Marriage greatly worsened her health, but her husband's providential early death effected a complete cure. After training
as a doctor to justify continued travel, she spent the rest of her life in the remotest parts of the world, mostly in Asia and the Near East. There were eighteen more books after her first American account, the last of which, on Morocco, she produced in 1901, when she was seventy.
⁹

Lucy Bird on the road was nothing like the neurasthenic creature haunting the parsonage halls. For one thing, she liked men. Her first encounter with “prairie men” on a train from Cincinnati to the Mississippi, made her giddy:

We get a fuller picture of Lucy Bird from her second American trip eighteen years later, ostensibly to seek the curative air of the Colorado Rockies. By now, the twaddle about infirmities was a comic tic, for the trip was the last leg of a jaunt through Australia and Hawaii, where she had climbed Mauna Loa. Her “cure” over a long winter high in the Rockies, included serious climbing and eight hundred miles of horseback travel, some of it alone in mountain blizzards. She rode astride the saddle like a man and was strong enough on a “
broncho
” that she was drafted to work as a cowboy during a difficult, weeks-long, end-of-winter roundup of cattle scattered through snowed-in ravines. Her most reliable companion was her “dear desperado,” “Mountain Jim” Nugent, who was missing an eye from an encounter with a bear. He was a legendary trapper and formidable gunfighter, with a dark past as a Kansas-Nebraska War bushwhacker. She was out riding one morning and saw him standing by his cabin.

Even better, her mountain man was well spoken and courtly; he wrote poetry and knew the classics, although nothing is known of his roots. While her account gives no direct hints, some suspect a serious romance. One hopes it's true. But Nugent was also an episodic alcoholic, and whiskey could make him a monster—and she does record her pleading with him to swear off drink. “Too late,” he always replied.
¹²

When she finally left for home, Nugent rode down the mountain with her to the stage. It arrived with an Englishman, a land speculator, whom she had met previously on her trip: “He was now dressed in the extreme of English dandyism, and when I introduced them, he put out a small hand cased in perfectly-fitting lemon-coloured kid gloves. As the trapper stood there in his grotesque rags and odds and ends of apparel, his gentlemanliness of deportment brought into relief the innate vulgarity of a rich
parvenu
.”
^bc
13

Bird's youthful trip to Cincinnati occurred in the early fall of 1854, so she was able to travel from Boston entirely by rail. The trip covered about 1,000 miles in forty-two hours, with just a couple of train changes and a few brief stopovers to allow passengers to hurriedly purchase meals from station vendors. She recorded her arrival thus: “It was a glorious morning. The rosy light streamed over hills covered with gigantic trees, and park-like glades watered by the fair Ohio.... And before us, placed within a perfect amphitheatre of swelling hills, reposed a huge city, whose countless spires reflected the beams of the morning sun—the creation of yesterday—Cincinnati, the ‘Queen City of the West.'”
¹⁴

The city reminded her of Glasgow, “the houses built substantially of red brick, six stories high—huge sign-boards outside each floor denoting the occupation of its owner or lessee—heavily laden drays rumbling along the streets . . . massive warehouses and rich stores—the side walks a perfect throng of foot passengers—the roadways crowded with light carriages.” And all of this “life, wealth, bustle, and progress” are on a “ground where sixty years ago an unarmed white man would have been tomahawked as he stood.”
¹⁵

Cincinnati's population had multiplied fourfold since Trollope's visit, with about half the increase from newly immigrated Germans and Irish. But it was a crossroads city, and Bird saw “dark-browed Mexicans, in
som-breras
and high slashed boots, dash about on small active horses with Mamelouk bits—rovers and adventurers from California and the Far West, with massive rings in their ears, swagger about . . . and females richly dressed . . . driving and walking about, from the fair-complexioned European to the negress or mulatto.”
¹⁶

Trollope had been a generation too early with her dream of a department store featuring European luxuries, for Bird found that although store windows featured “articles of gaudy apparel and heavy jewelry, suitable to the barbaric tastes of many of their customers,” inside she found “the richest and most elegant manufactures of Paris and London,” while a bookstore, “an aggregate of two or three of our largest, indicated that the culture of the mind was not neglected.”
¹⁷

Despite her hitherto sheltered life, Bird had a quick grasp of economics:

Bird closes her descriptions of the beauty of Cincinnati's streets and the “astonishing progress, and splendour of her shops” by divulging: