Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865

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AMERICAN STORIES

Notes

1. Curtis F. Smith, The Brothels of Bellingham: A Short History of Prostitution in

Bellingham, WA (Bellingham, WA: Whatcom Historical Society, 2004), 2.

2. William Kittredge, Owning It All (Saint Paul, MN: Gray Wolf, 2002).

3. Larry McMurtry, The Colonel and Little Missie: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, and

the Beginnings of Superstardom in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 50.

4. Thom Hatch, The Custer Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to the Life of

George Armstrong Custer and the Plains Indians Wars (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stack-

pole, 2002), 104.

David Fritdjof Halaas and Andrew E. Masich, Halfbreed: The Remarkable

True Story of George Bent Caught Between the Worlds of the Indian and the White

Man (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2004), 160.

6. Halaas and Masich, Halfbreed, 147.

Thom Hatch, Black Kettle: The Cheyenne Chief Who Sought Peace but Found

War (Hoboken: John Wiley, 2004), 165.

8. Jerry L. Russell, 1876 Facts About Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn

(New

York: Da Capo, 1999), 50.

9. Garrick Mallery, Picture-Writing of the American Indians (Whiteﬁsh, MT:

Kessinger, 2006), 2: 565.

10. New York Times, “An Indian Victory,” July 7, 1876, 4.

1. New York Times, “What Is Thought in Washington; How Shall the Indians Be

Subjugated—A

Call For Volunteers Probable,” July 8, 1876, 1.

12. William F. Cody, The Life of Honorable William F. Cody (Whiteﬁsh, MT:

Kessinger, 2004), 213–214.

13. Fred Lockley, Mike Helm, ed., Conversations with Pioneer Women (Eugene,

OR: Rainy Day

, 1981).

14. Richard S. Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E. Cummings

(New

York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 130.

15. N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (Albuquerque: University of

New Mexico Press, 1969), 8, 6, 88.

16. Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain, 10.

17. Robert Utley, The Lance and the Shield (New York: Ballantine, 1993), 285.

18. Utley, 294.

19. Utley, 295.

20. Dee Brown, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the

American West (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), 439.

21. Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 446.

22. McMurtry, The Colonel and Little Missie, 229.

23. A couple of other noted works by Mr. Alexie are The Lone Ranger and Tonto

Fistﬁght in Heaven (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2005); and One Stick Song (New

York: Hanging Loose, 2000).

24. A special thanks to Sherman Alexie and Hanging Loose Press for permission

to reprint “Evolution,” from Sherman Alexie, The Business of Fancydancing: Stories

and Poems (Hanging Loose, 1992).

A MOSAIC OF AMERICAN LIFE

New Americans, circa 1905 (Lewis W. Hine/Getty Images)

A Mosaic of American Life

1875–1914

AMERICAN STORIES

Millions of Watts: Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla

Gas lamps puffed out. Kerosene ﬂames dimmed and ﬂickered. Out with the

old, and in with the new: electricity had been tamed. In 1879 the incandescent

light bulb shimmered into existence. After September 1882—when the ﬁrst

power plant started generating a trickle of joules in New York City—rivers got

dammed and coal-ﬁred generators installed. Substations appeared, collecting

and then spilling volts into the crisscross maze of wires strung haphazardly

from building to building. Geniuses like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla

offered the telephone, the phonograph player, the motion picture, radio wave

transmission, remote-controlled boats, and electricity to homes, businesses,

streetcars, and light bulbs—only a sampling of the inventions and possibilities

that sprawled across the nation, lining store shelves from Florida to California.

Thomas Edison doubled as inventor and businessman. Where others might see

only light beaming from an electric lamp, Edison saw wealth and opportunity.

In 1879, right after the ﬁrst public demonstration of his incandescent bulb,

Edison remarked to a reporter, “We will make electricity so cheap that only

the rich will burn candles.”

Money ﬂowed into those crisscrossed power wires

and back out again, along with the megawatts of electricity.

Capital investments afforded laboratory space and time to invent. The

incentive for proﬁts spurred researchers and investors to put money and

minds together. Both poor farm children and desperate immigrants let loose

in America’s bulging cities provided the labor to turn inventions into inven-

tory

. Edison, a once poor boy from Ohio, amassed a fortune working from his

ofﬁce complexes at Menlo Park and West Orange, New Jersey—a sleepless

creator engineering the future. Edison was frequently quoted, “Genius is 1

percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” although later in life he did

not remember ever having said that.

The sentiment, however, was accurate

enough: he tried at least 6,000 separate substances (including beard hair)

for the ﬁlament in the incandescent light bulb. Nikola Tesla, however, did

design-work in his head, able to picture complex mechanics and circuitry

in three dimensions. Tesla literally imagined a remote-controlled submarine

and then built a working miniature that he tested for the U.S. Navy. Tesla,

an ethnic Serb, emigrated from Paris in 1884, with a letter of introduction to

Thomas Edison from a mutual associate. The letter simply said, “I know two

great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man!” Within a

few months, Tesla had improved on some of Edison’s machines and designs

for direct current transmission of electricity. Immediately after, the two men

had a falling-out. According to Tesla, Edison reneged on a promised bonus of

$50,000, saying, “Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor.”

Whatever the real cause of their split, Tesla quit, opened his own laboratory,

A MOSAIC OF AMERICAN LIFE

and within a few years teamed up with George Westinghouse to sell alternat-

ing current to the nation—a business arrangement that made Westinghouse

phenomenally wealthy only after Tesla had generously waived a proﬁt-sharing

offer in order to give Westinghouse the money on hand to advertise and de-

velop

their type of electrical current. The “Battle of the Currents” was on.

Westinghouse and Tesla were battling Edison, who mistakenly hung onto

direct current as the better method for providing electricity commercially.

Over distances longer than two miles, however, direct current travels poorly

and becomes more dangerous. Edison had already poured his public image

and money into direct current, and the stubbornness that ignited his creativity

also made him inﬂexible. He was unable, or unwilling, to see that Tesla was

right. The 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago—the Columbian Exposition where

Bill Cody performed daily outside the main fairgrounds, giving free tickets

to orphans—was lit by alternating current, provided at half the price Edison

had bid. Buildings painted white sparkled under incandescent light, Edison’s

ﬁlaments powered by Tesla’s ingenuity and Westinghouse’s marketing. The

modern age was taking shape.

Chicago,

an immigrants’ city sprung from the prairies, hosted a corporate

carnival. Brand-name products like Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Juicy Fruit

gum tickled the coins out of the pockets of 27 million fairgoers, the wealthiest

of whom luxuriated their way to the “White City” in the fanciest transport of

the day: Pullman railroad cars, made on the outskirts of Chicago by workers

who lived in tightly regulated housing tracts built and maintained by George

Pullman. His craftsmen built library cars, dining cars, and sleeper cars with

burnished hardwood and brass ﬁttings. Pullman’s factory-town employees

were expected to maintain the highest standards of moral decency (according

to his deﬁnitions), with an expected result of harmony between workers and

managers. Relations had been good for years, seeming to justify Pullman’s

near-obsession with appearances, like his prohibition of employees sitting

on their front stoops at night to smoke a pipe and watch the children play

in the yards. There were parks for that type of behavior, Pullman said. But

a ﬁnancial panic hit the United States during 1893, the year of the Chicago

fair, and Pullman kept rents high at his houses while reducing his employees’

pay. In 1894, violent strikes engulfed Pullman’s factories. Neither the white

paint and burning bulbs of the Columbian Exposition nor George Pullman’s

model town could hide the lavish habits separating America’s superrich from

its underpaid majority. Now that the gleaming buildings of Chicago’s fair-

grounds

sat as empty as Pullman’s factories, there was neither diversion nor

employment to keep people’s spirits high.

In 1894, in the languor of the new economic depression precipitated by too

little money in circulation, thousands of men from around the entire nation

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hopped on freight cars and descended on Washington, DC, following the lead

of Jacob Coxey, a former stonecutter turned politician from Ohio. This ﬂood

of the unemployed became known as Coxey’s Army, and its pleas for relief

had no effect on the police who arrested its leaders on the grass lawn of the

Capitol. Jacob Coxey wanted capitalism to work, but he wanted it to work

better. He and his followers demanded that the federal government print more

paper dollars, which would devalue the currency, making it easier, for example,

for indebted farmers to pay off ﬁxed-sum loans. Supporters of Coxey—the

unemployed, underpaid, and indebted—also looked to the newly formed

Populist Party for help. In 1896, the Populist Party endorsed the Democratic

candidate, William Jennings Bryan, for president, and he almost got elected,

a testament to the nation’s willingness to experiment. Bryan advocated unlim-

ited

coinage of silver (another way of getting more money into circulation)

and government ownership of railroads and power companies. At the 1896

Democratic convention, Bryan received a thirty-minute standing ovation

and the nomination for president after closing a speech with, “You shall not

press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not cru-

cify

mankind upon a cross of gold.”

The gold standard, in Bryan’s opinion,

symbolized privilege—the privilege of the few who had enough money to get

by. Although he lost to William McKinley, Bryan received 47 percent of the

vote. This son of a Baptist preacher who had moved to the promised land of

Platte, Nebraska, witnessed the worries of common Americans too poor and

too rural to be reached by electrical power lines.

Other

Americans became entirely disgusted with the economic system,

believing that capitalism corrupted democracy. In 1912, six out of every

100 voting Americans voted for Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate

for president. Debs was a former railroad ﬁreﬁghter who had come to the

realization that corporations—like the Pullman Car Company and John D.

Rockefeller’s Standard Oil—were more interested in proﬁts than in the well

being of their workers. In the twenty-seven years from 1890 to 1917, more

than 2 million railroad employees got injured on the job, and about 72,000

died. In wood mills on the West Coast, it was said that an employee’s time on

the job could be counted by the number of missing ﬁngers and half-ﬁngers

on his splintered hands. 1n 1902, Eugene Debs explained how he had gone

from being a railroad ﬁreﬁghter to a union leader to a socialist. At ﬁrst, Debs

wrote, “I was with the boys in their weary watches, at the broken engine’s

side and often helped to bear their bruised and bleeding bodies back to wife

and child again. How could I but feel the burden of their wrongs? How could

the seed of agitation fail to take deep root in my heart?”

So he had become a

union organizer, trying to get all railroad workers into the American Railway

Union, begun in 1894, the year of the Pullman strikes. George Pullman hired

A MOSAIC OF AMERICAN LIFE

Pinkerton detectives, who battered the striking workers newly organized by

Debs, and Debs found himself in jail, accused of fomenting anarchy and

communism. In the following months, he began to read about socialism, and

eight years later he wrote, “The American Railway Union was defeated but

not conquered—overwhelmed but not destroyed. It lives and pulsates in the

Socialist movement, and its defeat but blazed the way to economic freedom

and hastened the dawn of human brotherhood.”

Bald, well dressed, and still

ﬁt after decades of union work, Debs was a reformer, not a revolutionary.

Like Jacob Coxey and William Jennings Bryan, Debs believed in America,

but unlike the other two, he no longer believed that corporate America was

trustworthy in the least. For Debs, socialism was an adaptation, an advance-

ment that would curb the cruel edges of the corporate wage system.

Newness

was America’s tonic. Old problems and new, people believed,

could be overcome through experimentation of every kind, whether in the

laboratory, the voting booth, the picket line, or the suburbs. People wanted

progress; it was synonymous with America. The feast of capitalism, with its

smorgasbord of technologies and opportunities, promised to provide enough

money, housing, and security for all. People clung to the chance of betterment

through wages and hard work. But when the social and economic experiments

of America’s capitalists, like George Pullman, went awry, other ways of achiev-

ing

decency and plenty were explored. America’s corporations provided jobs

along with oil, railroads, bubble gum, and light bulbs. But for many workers,

from the 1870s on, the toll in human suffering was beginning to outweigh

the beneﬁts of convenience and the joys inherent in novelty. American-style

progress would fail without bread on the table. For that matter, municipal

governments short on funds were having difﬁculty feeding streetlights. The

riverside town of Vancouver, Washington, turned off all its street lamps in

1896, no longer able to afford the cost. The mayor of Boise, Idaho, had already

pulled the plug in his town in 1894, leaving just eight street lamps burning at

night. The “Depression of 1893” lasted until 1897. Those years of hardship

kept Americans wondering whether the costs of industrializing were worth

the beneﬁts, particularly when the beneﬁts seemed to have evaporated. Could

progress be maintained?

Thomas

Edison was considered the number one hero of progress. He was

known as the “Wizard of Menlo Park” for his more than 1,000 patents, and

although his direct current trailed Tesla’s alternating current, it was Edison

who propped up the story that riches came to those with “luck and pluck.”

Tesla was without the ﬁnancial luck, but he was every bit the real wizard. He

discovered that high-frequency, high-voltage electricity will not easily pen-

etrate

the skin, and he used to put on demonstrations for friends at his New

York laboratory with his “Tesla coil.” Visitors such as Mark Twain would

AMERICAN STORIES

accompany Tesla back to his ofﬁces after a night of high talk and good food.

Blue tongues of electricity would shroud Tesla’s body when he touched the

strange generator, bathing him in the spare electrons of industry.

In capitalist America, Tesla’s eerie genius accounted for less than Edison’s

cutthroat business style. Tesla offered the ﬁrst wireless energy display inside a

vacuum tube (which later provided the ﬁrst television images). His inventions

tended to be ethereal and applicable only after others had harnessed them into

some sort of practical, commercial doodad. Edison made machines that people

could use right away. Wax cylinder “records” could be snatched off a store shelf

and taken home, and Edison’s name went with them—what is known today

as “branding.” Tesla’s generators and induction coils worked literally behind

the scenes, and his one easily marketable technology—transmittable and re-

ceivable

radio waves—was stolen by way of patent by Guglielmo Marconi.

Although Tesla patented a number of the technologies that Marconi used to

transmit the ﬁrst long-distance radio message—sending the letter “s” across

the Atlantic—the U.S. patent ofﬁce nonetheless gave Marconi credit for the

radio in 1904 (probably because he had the ﬁnancial backing of Edison, while

Tesla was too broke to effectively sue). Then in 1943, the Supreme Court gave

the patent to Tesla—just after his death (Edison had died in 1931).

Consumers tended to be less interested in who had patented their new

purchase than they were in getting it at a good price and getting it home. No

matter how tough times got, no matter how many people lost their jobs, had

their wages cut, got attacked by Pinkerton detectives while walking a picket

line on strike, or watched their children succumb to black lung disease working

in an anthracite coal mine, capitalism won out over its competition. Slowly,

measurable “standards of living” improved for all Americans, measured in

access to indoor plumbing, indoor lighting, movie theaters, safer meats, safer

pharmaceuticals, public schools, longer life expectancies, and shorter work-

days.

Getting to the better days was the struggle, and for every Edison who

succeeded there was a Tesla who barely hung on.

Millions of Immigrants

big cities entrepreneurs built big stores, like Neiman Marcus and Marshall

Field’s. Elevators whisked women to the top ﬂoors while merchants often

reserved the ﬁrst ﬂoor for men’s items, assuming that men were not interested

enough in shopping to go farther than absolutely necessary. For women with

means, shopping was fast becoming a hobby all by itself. Even poor women

were encouraged to “window-shop.” And for newly arrived immigrants in

remote locations, like Swedish newcomers on the ice sheets of upper Min-

nesota,

where there were no department stores or even mom-and-pop shops,

A MOSAIC OF AMERICAN LIFE

salvation was at hand. Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck offered the

mail-order catalogue with color photos (starting in 1897) of cookware, toy

soldiers, bicycles, wedding gowns, jewelry, vials of cocaine, gasoline engines,

and everything else being manufactured in or imported into the States. Orders

could be placed by letter, and, within little more than a week, a trip to the

nearest train depot rewarded the store-starved consumers with whatever their

hearts desired (and could afford).

Here to build and assemble the bicycles and light bulbs, to sew the gowns

and shape the top hats, were immigrants from the world over. From 1900 to

1910, more than 8 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Some cit-

ies

had more foreign-born residents than native-born. They crowded into the

tenement districts of New York City, Chicago, and other high-rise cities of the

North, where they built the consumer goods and bought them—when wages

permitted. Chinatowns formed in San Francisco and New York City—partly

in response to discrimination that Chinese-Americans faced, partly because a

sense of culinary, linguistic, and cultural familiarity could be had in such dis-

ricts. The Irish got their neighborhoods in Boston, and the Italians in Cleveland

grouped together in Little Italy. The district’s name could not have been more

appropriate: by 1911, about 95 percent of Cleveland’s Little Italy residents

had been born in Italy. Eastern European Jews came to escape persecution

and settled in New York City’s Lower East Side. During some decades, more

than half of some ethnic immigrant populations returned home, having stayed

in the United States just long enough to earn money to take back to the old

country, where they could pay off family debts or open a business.

These decades surrounding the turn of the century announced in marquee

lights the arrival of the modern age. Women were gaining the vote. Mass transit

linked suburbs to cities. Mass media helped create the stirrings of a national-

ized,

popular culture through pulp ﬁction, national news stories—and what

passed for news stories. Skyscrapers towered over ﬁnancial districts echoing

with the latest stock reports incoming on the ticker-tape machines invented

by Thomas Edison. Subway cars barreled through fresh tunnels underneath

the chaotic streets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Sewage systems

washed human excrement out of sight and out of smell (often dumping it

untreated into area rivers, lakes, and bays). Congress and presidents were

creating national parks as permanent preserves for humans and animals alike.

The rich were generally getting richer, and by comparison the poor were

certainly seeming poorer. The changes were staggering, dizzying, confusing,

and often upsetting.

ecause Americans typically welcomed technological innovation, not

enough people initially worried about the possible long- or short-term con-

sequences

of burning coal to generate electricity or stacking people on top of

AMERICAN STORIES

each other like kindling in windowless apartments. Such worries set in after

coal soot coated window ledges like industrial snow and smudged spring skies

with a gray haze. Pollution was a sibling of progress. In poor neighborhoods

where draft-animal conveyances had not yet been replaced by electric trolleys,

dead horses lay bloated in roadways. People debated how to balance civic and

environmental health with the new reliance on power generation and tenement

dwelling for wageworkers. The “City Beautiful movement” became one way

to soften urban blight. Frederick Law Olmstead led a new generation of re-

ormers—landscape architects—who argued that parks could enliven the spirit

with sprigs of green while also bringing together the poor, the middle-class,

and the rich. Central Park in New York City was Olmstead’s creation, from

its playing ﬁelds to its lakes and cool patches of oak shade. He hoped a little

theater in the park, a few strands of a Mozart quartet, and the self-restraint

modeled by sober families sipping lemonade would initiate the unlettered,

unassimilated masses into America’s middle-class values. Coal generators

continued to roar and belch, but at least a thirteen-year-old Lithuanian shirt

maker had somewhere relaxing to go on Sunday. Reformers and inventors also

hoped that new inventions would arrest whatever miseries could not be cured

by parks, literary societies, and temperance. The light bulb, it seemed, could

banish both darkness and ignorance: electric light meant more time to read at

night after the day’s labors were ended. And nighttime criminals would have

fewer places to lurk with city lights glaring down at them from hooked poles

strung together with power lines singing a high-voltage tune. Poverty, factory

injuries, child labor, rodent infestations, bedbugs, and disease epidemics (like

the bubonic plague, which showed up in San Francisco in 1900) competed

with the hope and optimism that brought millions of immigrants to America

and kept most of them here.

Whether

to accept or repel the Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, Polish, Syrian,

Turkish, Mexican, German, Italian, or Irish immigrants perplexed philoso-

hers, policy makers, and everyday street talkers across the United States. Jews

wanted not to work on Saturdays rather than Sundays. The Chinese seemed

to have no discernible religion. Catholics were still believed to be in the back

pocket of the pope. The Germans and Irish appeared to consume their fair

share of alcohol, along with everyone else’s share. Almost no immigrants came

from a country with a democracy, and no one knew whether these immigrants

would help the economy or hurt it. Were they creating jobs or stealing them?

In 1885, 300 white people from Tacoma, Washington, answered the question

violently by banding together and forcing its 700 Chinese residents to ﬂee the

city. Seattle’s white residents followed suit the next year, and although authori-

ties

intervened on behalf of the Chinese, most chose to leave Seattle anyway.

In both cases, people from the mob, white urban laborers, complained that the

A MOSAIC OF AMERICAN LIFE

Chinese were taking their jobs by accepting low wages no white worker was

willing to accept. At any given time, a person opposed to a certain immigrant

population might also advocate for a different group’s rights. Mary Kenworthy,

for example, helped establish voting rights for women in Washington Territory

in 1883 (soon disallowed by the territorial supreme court in 1888), but Mary

Kenworthy also led the movement to drive the Chinese out of Seattle, even

offering to pay their boat fare from her own pocket.

Making matters worse, racial theorists borrowed from the new sciences of

genetics and Darwinian evolution to argue that dark-skinned people, whether

African, Eastern European, or Indian, were actually a lesser form of human-

ity

. Scientiﬁc racism gave new justiﬁcations for bigotry and helped get laws

like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 through Congress, which banned

further Chinese immigration into the States for at least ten years. In 1892,

Chinese immigrants were banned for another ten years, and then in 1902 the

law was extended indeﬁnitely. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt signed

the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with the emperor of Japan, which essentially

halted further Japanese migration to the United States. Such international

racism was fostered by world’s fairs and expositions, for instance at Chicago

in 1893, where grand concourses were set up with displays of native peoples

from around the globe in “natural” habitats. An entire group of Dahomey

villagers from West Africa came over to live in grass huts according to their

more allegedly primitive home customs. Along the concourse, the dioramas

followed a line from savage to civilized, and the closer one got to savage, the

darker the skin tones.

The

four decades from 1875 to 1914 have been called by a variety of

names: the Gilded Age, the Wageworkers’ Frontier,

the Populist Era, and

the Progressive Era. Taken together, the names suggest certain images. The

yachts and crystal chandeliers of America’s megamillionaires—the Rock-

efellers,

Vanderbilts, and Carnegies—epitomized the Gilded Age (there were

about 300 millionaires in 1860 and nearly 4,000 by 1890). The deep-forest

loggers known as “bindle stiffs” carried their worldly belongings in bundles

tied to the ends of sticks, dependent on their own sinew and the paltry wages

dangled in front of them on the wageworkers’ frontier; the census of 1870

marked the ﬁrst time in U.S. history that more people worked for wages than

for themselves. The indebted southern and western farmers scrambled to pay

unseemly railroad rates during decades when produce prices were already

unstable—the same farmers who formed the backbone and underbelly of the

1892 Populist Party, which demanded a national currency and publicly owned

transportation and communication networks. And, ﬁnally, middle-class, pro-

gressive

reformers like Jane Addams started the settlement house movement

in the United States, dedicated to assimilating immigrants. Addams believed