American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

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We often associate the Gilded Age, and the period leading up to it, with tycoons like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and a few other high rollers. What I really like about this book is the skill in which Professor Brands--who appears at length in the recent Ken Burns' ROOSEVELT SERIES--weaves five or six key elements of late 19th and early 20th century together, as our birth as an fledgling industrialized giant and international power rapidly transformed America in four or five decades. Railroads, corrupt speculation (monetary and stock manipulation), the railroads, the disappearance of Native American tribes, the end of RECONTRUCTION and the onset of JIM CROW down south, immigration, and the labor movement all make appearances in what is truly a fabulous, easily read, well researched, and at the same time complex and heartbreaking story of America as the 20th century loomed ahead of us. Books about the tycoons, like the biographies of Rockefeller and Vanderbilt and so forth all have their place. But we tend to view history as a linear progression (one thing happening, THEN another, THEN another) when in fact a multitude of actions, themes, and emerging cultural phenomena are all going on simultaneously. America was a vibrant, brawling, brash country in the 1890s. The monied class had very little supervision down at the stock market, so they managed to cause two or three depressions and crashes as a result. I like this book a lot. The guy knows what he is talking about. Buy it.

Picks up where Battle Cry of Freedom left off in this continuation of the Oxford History of the United States series. (I have and have read cover to cover every one in the series.) This one gives a good overview of the barons of big money that took over the U.S. financial world in the late 1800's and this book give you a good timeline and continuity that brings you up to the onset of the early 1900's with America's ventures into Imperialism, Teddy Roosevelt, becoming a major power (particularly at sea), etc. Well written as are most of this Oxford series.

I’ve been reading scholarly non-fiction books for over a quarter century now. Over the years I’ve learned to vet my prospective reading list carefully. However, when it came to “American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900” by H.W. Brands (2010), I got a bit sloppy with my due diligence and I paid the price for my laziness. I have no one to blame but myself.I wanted “American Colossus” to be a thoughtful analysis of the Second Industrial Revolution in America that sought to explain how and why the United States rapidly emerged as the world’s preeminent industrial power in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The book’s compelling title (not to mention the snazzy cover art) and the author’s reputation for producing serious works of history (two time Pulitzer Prize finalist) gave me confidence that “American Colossus” was, in fact, the book I was looking for.It wasn’t. It’s just a collection of short and familiar vignettes from the period of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age without any overarching thesis tying it all together or seeking to explain how and why things developed as they did.The pace of American industrialization between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century was staggering. In 1865 the United States possessed virtually no steel industry. By 1900 the country was out producing Great Britain and Germany combined. Brands notes that the federal government made much of this possible by underwriting railroad construction (and transferring first-lien rights to private investors), implementing protective tariffs, pursuing imperialism abroad, and creating a national currency. No longer was the federal government a foe of business, as it had been since the days of Jefferson and Jackson; the Republican Party of the late nineteenth century transformed the federal government, turning it into the active sponsor of business via favorable legislation and the protection of the courts. “By the century’s end,” Brands writes, “the imperatives of capitalism mattered more to the daily existence of most Americans than the principles of democracy … in the land of Jefferson, the sons of [Adam] Smith held sway.”The Gilded Age was a rough and tumble time and largely opaque. The author says that trying to navigate the American economy during this period is “often like venturing west from Europe during the Age of Discovery.” Most of the charts and maps were at best only directionally accurate. Verifiable information became the crown jewels of the age.Brands retells the familiar stories of the most infamous Robber Barons, such as John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and Jay Gould, most of whom, he says, displayed a conspicuous genius for organization and cost cutting, rather than product innovation and customer service, and he doesn’t forget the bloddy labor unrest that accompanied mass industrialization, such as the Homestead (1892) and Pullman (1894) strikes. Brands also places heavy emphasis on the currency question and the so-called Crime of ‘73 (when Congress passed the Coinage Act dropping silver dollars from official U.S. coinage). Farmers struggled with inexorable commodity price declines for over two decades (1870 to 1895); the price of corn dropped by a third, wheat by more than half, and cotton by two-thirds. Populists like Irish refugee Mary Elizabeth Lease called on farmers to “raise less corn and more hell.” In 1894, lawyer William Harvey published “Coin’s Financial School,” which depicted a fictionalized public seminar on the irrefutable benefits of bimetallism. Brands says that it was the “best selling, most influential book in America” at the time, selling over one million copies in the two years before the pivotal election of 1896.All of the above makes sense for a book about the triumph of American capitalism. But “American Collosus” is about much more, most of it only tenuously connected to the subtitle. For instance, Brands spends over half the book on seemingly random sidebars that have little to do with American industrial development, such as post Civil War Texas cattle drives, John Wesley Powell’s exploration of the Grand Canyon (1869), the Great Chicago Fire (1871), Grant administration and Tammany Hall corruption, Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, the remarkable string of razor tight presidential elections from 1876 (Hayes v. Tilden), 1880 (Garfield v. Hancock), 1884 (Cleveland v. Blaine), and 1888 (Harrison v. Cleveland), the closing of the American frontier, the introduction of Jim Crow across the South, and Custer’s Last Stand (1876). Brands even chronicles the emigrant experience of a young Jewish girl coming to the United States from Russia in the 1870s when transatlantic steamer fares dropped to only $10 (about $300 today) and over 13 million immigrants came to America between 1865 and 1900. What these stories have to do with the triumph of capitalism in America is left rather ambiguous.I was hoping for original insights and interpretations that could put the phenomenal growth of the American economy after the Civil War into perspective. For example, early in “American Colossus” Brands notes that the Supreme Court interstate commerce decision in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) played a pivotal role in ensuring that, from an economic perspective, the United States was a single, unified continental entity, an advantage that industrially advanced but politically fragmented Europe could never hope to match. It was these types of critical inflection points that I wanted to learn more about, not the political corruption of Boss Tweed, which if anything retarded the growth of entrepreneurial capitalism.Brands ultimately concludes that, “The capitalist revolution was in many ways the best thing to ever befall the ordinary people of America.” To begin with, even with major economic crises in 1873 and 1893, it is estimated that American real GDP grew at a blistering four percent per year on average in the half-century after the Civil War, while the population nearly doubled from 40 million to 76 million. The nation’s total output tripled in real terms while average per capita income doubled. Americans weren’t just getting richer and more productive, they were also getting healthier and better educated. Infant mortality declined by a third and life expectancy increased by 15% (albeit only to 50-years-old). The proportion of high school graduates in America increased by 300 percent as illiteracy was cut in half (from 20 percent to 10 percent). Indeed, despite ugly labor unrest and the widespread abuses perpetrated by sprawling monopolistic trusts, Americans never had it so good.“Yet for all the advances in American material and cultural life,” Brands writes, “there remained a feeling that things had gone wrong.” And perhaps it was all just a “feeling,” because the author isn’t able to marshal a single meaningful statistic to support the claim that things had all gone wrong. Rather, Brands recites some hollow platitudes in an effort to make his point, such as: “Prosperity was precarious” or "Inequality was more obvious than ever” and “The capitalists controlled the government.”The subtitle of the book may be “The Triumph of Capitalism,” but by the time you get to the end of the book it almost feels like it should be “The Triumph of Progressivism.” The progressives, which Brands describes as “democratic skeptics of capitalism,” struck several heavy blows against business at the end of the period under review. Beginning with the presidential ascent of Teddy Roosevelt in 1901, the federal government quickly began to wrest control away from the sprawling corporate interests of the day, beginning with the Northern Securities case of 1904, which signaled the start of firmer and more effective anti-monopoly prosecutions, eventually leading to the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911.The author writes, “No single reform shifted the balance between American capitalism and democracy more decisively” than the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, the same year that saw the passing of America’s longtime unofficial central banker, J.P. Morgan. According to Brands, during the 1890s Morgan was “the most powerful person in the country, not excluding the president,” an assessment that is difficult for anyone familiar with the era to refute.From the perspective of the twenty-first century reader, one of the most surprising aspects of the story is how relatively tiny, in terms of market capitalization, the dominant firms of the period were. Consider the case of US Steel, created in 1901 in a groundbreaking deal brokered by J.P. Morgan. The firm was initially valued at $450 million, making it the biggest company in the world. Even when adjusted for inflation, that’s only $17.5 billion. To put that number in perspective, I currently work at a ten-year-old enterprise software company that you’ve probably never heard of that is worth about that much. Meanwhile, the largest company in the world today (2023) by market capitalization is Apple, which currently trades at about $3 trillion, making it worth 171 times more than US Steel at its epoch-making creation.By the late nineteenth century, many Americans worried that capitalism was incompatible with democracy. The journalist Edward Bellamy captured the country’s imagination in 1888 with the book “Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887.” It is a Rip Van Winkle tale describing a young Bostonian who goes to sleep in 1887 and awakes over a century later to discover that Boston has become an urban paradise thanks to the complete nationalization of industry and commerce. The book sold 200,000 copies in its first year and became a national political sensation. Americans have been talking about some form of socialism as the cure for our nation’s socio-economic ills ever since.In closing, “American Colossus” was not the book I was looking for, but it is well written and easy to read. If you are generally unfamiliar with the period or place under consideration, it may be worth your while. Otherwise, I would skip it.

Great book... This is brands at his best.