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Finally,
it has been widely insisted that the disruption of normal labor
conditions during the war, in conjunction with the increased demand
for food and clothing, was directly responsible for the rise of the
McCormick Harvester and the Singer Sewing Machines fortunes. Again
the logics are quite clear. The more soldiers the Union armies
needed left less farmers to grow more grain needed to supply the
campaigns. The McCormick reaper was the technological solution to
this problem. A similar reasoning holds for Singer's sewing machine.
But again, it can easily be argued that the war was just the
catalyst, an acceleration factor of a movement, which was already
under way, when it occurred. And again, this cannot be considered
war profiteering.
Thus
the direct impact of Civil War and war profiteering were not the
major factor in the building of the large Gilded Age fortunes. It
was more, the combined impacts of the opening of the Western
frontier, the discovery of rich mineral resources (much needed by
emerging industries), the increasing population (both through
immigration and natural growth) and the ability to attract talents
and capital, which created the unprecedented opportunities. It was
only natural, that such a nation would also produce or attract
enterprising men (and women) to seize these opportunities and
thereby build large fortunes.
The
first expression of the Gilded Age actually occurred more than ten
years before Civil War. It started with the discovery of gold on
John August Sutter's farm in Central California. The event ended
California's peaceful existence as a distant agricultural colony, a
seemingly worthless prize won as a side effect of a more proximate
war. It precipitated America into a frenzy, which was never seen
before and would be so characteristic of the Age of Moguls. In the
Sacramento of the early 1850's, fortunes were made and lost by the
day. Thousands of hopeful fortune-seekers enriched the visionary
shipping magnates who organized faster service to the Pacific Coast.
Fortune
eluded most of them and rather rewarded the astute merchant or
banker for his trading sense, than the miner for his courage and
hard work. Speculation was paramount and fed an ever increasing
inflow of adventurers, laborers and entrepreneurs. The
mining
bonanza started with the gold rush of the Forty-Niners in California
and extended to Nevada and the other Western territories, creating a
new economy, in what was once the forgotten Pacific Coast of North
America. The large mining fortunes were not made from the gold of
California in the 1850's, but rather from the silver and lead of
Nevada in the 1870's and from copper in other states still later.
Fabulous
mining bonanza kings included the Big Four of the Comstock Lode :
John William Mackey;
James Graham Fair,
James Clair Flood and
William
Shoney O'Brien. Mining fortunes laid the foundation for California
and the West Coast's economy and later radiated on the whole
nation's economy, as the mining bonanza kings and their descendents
invested their silver or copper profits in enterprises of national
interest.
After
organizing with James G. Fair the Bank of Nevada in San Francisco,
John William Mackay joined New York press lord James Gordon Bennett
in the Commercial Cable Company, which laid a transatlantic cable
and challenged the Western Union Telegraph Co.
George Hearst, whose
mining fortune stemmed from the Homestake and a share in Marcus
Daly's Anaconda, bought the San Francisco Examiner and gave it to
his son to manage. Using the millions he inherited from his father,
William Randolph Hearst later built one of the major tabloid
newspaper chains in the Twentieth Century.
The Gilded Age
>
Introduction and Index
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