A History of American Literature

222 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900

also ignored the fact that Native Americans had insufficient knowledge of white

law and legal maneuvering to stop them losing or being tricked out of what was

theirs. By 1887, Native Americans had lost all except 150 million of their original

three billion acres; and by 1934, when the policy of allotment was finally reversed,

all that was left was 48 million acres, a miserable 1.5 percent of what had once been

in their hands.

Real power lay elsewhere, for all sections of the population. By 1890, 1 percent of

the entire American population owned over 25 percent of the nation’s wealth. Three

years later, a survey revealed that there were over four thousand millionaires in the

United States: this at a time when seven hundred dollars was a reasonable annual

income. At one end of the newly emerging economic and social scale was an indus-

trial working class far outnumbering the middle class: by 1915, the poor would in

fact constitute 65 percent of the population. At the other, were those like John

D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. Pierpoint Morgan: industrialists and financi-

ers who accumulated vast fortunes and power. Rockefeller gradually acquired control

of 90 percent of the oil industry in the United States. Diversifying, his company

Standard Oil had by 1890 become not just the largest oil company in the world but

the largest railway company and one of the largest banking concerns. During the

same period, Carnegie, who had started working life as a telegraph operator, built up

the largest steel manufacturing industry in the world, which he then sold off to a

business rival for 500 million dollars. The business rival, Morgan, merged the

Carnegie Steel Corporation with other smaller steel companies: the result was the

first billion-dollar trust, US Steel, which has dominated its field from its foundation

to the present day. Morgan was the spider in a vast web of interlocking directorships,

741 of them in 112 corporations. The web was so intricate, and so tight, that, by

the early twentieth century, almost all the leading American capitalists, or “robber

barons” as they were and are sometimes called, were associated with either Morgan

or Rockefeller. The emergence of this new breed of capitalism could be seen as the

price the United States had to pay for its commitment to economic freedom and its

emergence as a global power. It was certainly a high one. By the end of this period,

in any event, the development and the rationalization of industrialism by private

capital was more or less complete.

Morgan, Rockefeller, and their associates sometimes adopted a posture of brazen

defiance in response to criticism of their unlimited wealth and power. “What do

I care about the law?” Morgan said once to a reporter. “Ain’t I got the money? The

public be damned.” “I cheat my boys every chance I get,” Rockefeller similarly

declared, “I want to make ’em sharp.” But, more often, they subscribed to an

emerging ideology which saw their wealth as justified, the reward of pluck and

luck. The ideology drew on the Protestant ethic, the belief that wealth was a sign of

heavenly favor, and on a popularized version of Darwinian theories of evolution:

what was termed “the survival of the fittest.” That ideology, with its emphasis on

success as the inevitable outcome of hard work and sturdy self-reliance, was carried

to the public in the popular literature of the day, the exemplary tales for young

adults and the new “dime novels” that first appeared in the 1860s and quickly reached

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