any person of life, liberty, or property, without
due process of law’. However, as a protection of
the civil rights of African Americans, the four-
teenth amendment proved worthless because it
was not enforced. It was used instead by the rising
industrialists and financiers to amass greater for-
tunes and influence through combinations and
mergers.
The age distribution of the immigrants and
their tendency to have larger families than the
American-born kept the increase of population at
a much higher level than could otherwise be sus-
tained. America was in reality, and in self-image,
a young country constantly renewing itself. At the
turn of the century, the US had just recovered
from the depression of the mid-1890s, and
Americans faced the twentieth century with much
optimism believing, rightly as it turned out, that
their country was on the threshold of indus-
trial expansion and the accumulation of wealth.
Between 1900 and 1914 manufacturing produc-
tion nearly doubled and overtook agriculture as
the main source of national wealth. The tradi-
tional America was a nation of farmers, artisans
and small businessmen. The America of the twen-
tieth century was predominantly industrial, with
the growth of cities, and railways linking the
industrial Midwest and the east. Industry was
increasingly dominated by the giant corpora-
tions such as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil
Company or the Trusts of J. Pierpont Morgan,
though small businesses also persisted. The
absolute growth of population, the opening up of
virgin lands in the west, made possible simulta-
neously a great expansion of agricultural output
despite the population movement to the towns.
This increasing output was more than enough to
feed the growing American population and leave
sufficient to export. Meat packing and food
canning became important industries. The vast
continent of the US was singularly blessed in all
its resources – fertile land, forests, coal, iron and
oil. Their simultaneous successful development
provided the dynamic of American economic
growth which no European nation could match,
and meant that Americans were less dependent on
imports or exports than any other advanced
Western nation.
In the early twentieth century, American busi-
ness nevertheless expanded American exports to
industrialised Europe, seeing this as a necessary
insurance against a glut in the market at home –
yet these exports were only a small proportion of
America’s total production, which was protected
at home by a high tariff. In the early twentieth
century the application of electricity as a new
energy source provided a further boost, and elec-
trical machinery together with automobiles –
Henry Ford alone producing 125,000 cars a year
by 1913, half the nation’s total output – were the
‘new industries’ maintaining America’s lead as the
world’s first industrial power.
America’s explosive growth was not achieved
without severe political and social tensions. This
was the other side of the optimism expressed at the
turn of the century about the future. People began
to ask who would control the destinies of the US.
Would it be the new breed of immensely success-
ful and wealthy financiers and businessmen? Was
not their influence already the main reason for the
corruption of government, no longer a govern-
ment for and by the people but for the good of
business? The cleavage between the rich and poor
appeared to widen as the Vanderbilts, Morgans,
Rockefellers and Harrimans displayed their wealth.
The western farmers were exposed to the
vagaries of the seasons and also to the increases
and falls of world grain prices. A good harvest
could drive the prices farther down and the
farmers seeking a cause for their misfortunes
focused on the high interest they had to pay on
the loans they needed – the result, as they saw it,
of government dominated by the industrial east.
The southern US remained relatively stagnant,
unable to diversify when, after the worldwide
drop in cotton prices, cotton could no longer
yield the same profit as before the civil war.
The American workers in the mines and fac-
tories also tried to organise to meet the increased
power of business. Socialism as a political force
had developed in the US as well as in Europe
during the nineteenth century, and for a short
while after 1872 the headquarters of Marx’s First
International was in New York. But the Socialist
Labor Party of North America could not estab-
lish itself as a serious force in politics. In the early
1
THE EMERGENCE OF THE US AS A WORLD POWER 67
