The Linguistic Culture-8 (Years of Growth) (1157934)
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LECTURE N 8 YEARS OF GROWTHKey words: backwater, slaughter houses, to bribe, to pass laws, combat, iron ore,shells, over-crowded slums, labor unions, interchangeable parts, assembly-line,installment plan, underconsumption, shares, stocks, to plague, to ration, tosurrender, a thug, devastating depression, conscription act, to work at full swing,output, to surrender, unscrupulous, merit, relocation policy,détente.After the end of the Civil War the United States continued theacquisition of the new territories. The United States acted like an imperialnation, gathering and settling new territories, pushing aside those who stood inits path. In 1867 the United States bought Alaska from Russia, later Spain gavemost of its oversea empire to the USA – Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico anda small Pacific island Guam.
At the same time the USA also annexed Hawaii - agroup of islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Having started as acolonial country, the USA quickly became a colonial power herself.In the early 1900s the American government wanted to build a canalacross the Isthmus of Panama to join North and South America.
As theColumbian government was slow to give the Americans permission to build thecanal, in 1903 president Theodore Roosevelt sent warships to Panama. Thewarships helped a small group of Panamanian businessmen to rebel against theColumbian government and to give the Americans Control over a ten-and-ahalf-mile wide strip of land called the Canal Zone.Parallel to the acquisition of the oversea lands the USA continued thesettlements of North American territories.
After the “Gold Rush» in Californiagold and silver were also discovered in Colorado, Nevada and Arizona,Wyoming and Dakota. Some former mining settlements grew into permanentcommunities. New towns sprang up throughout the gold and silver regions.Within twenty-five years after the end of the Civil War the Great Plainswere divided into States and territories of the USA. Ranchers were feeding largeherds of cattle on the “sea of grass”; farmers were using the latest harvestingtechnology on the large irrigated fields of “Great American Desert” to growwheat.
By 1890 the separate areas of settlement on the Pacific Coast and alongthe Mississippi River had moved together and the wilderness had been largelyconquered.In the 1880s great deposits of iron were found near Lake Superior. Soonthe Mesabi became one of the largest producers of iron ore in the world. Besidesiron at that time a great amount of coal was being extracted in the USA.
Iron andcoal were used to make steel for the railroads, locomotive, freight wagons andpassenger cars. The first railroad finished in 1869 and was quickly joined byothers. By 1884 four more major transcontinental lines had crossed the continentto link the Atlantic with the Pacific Coasts. New towns appeared along therailroads. By 1890 the industries of USA were earning the country more than itsfarmlands.
Within a few decades after the civil war the USA transformed froman undeveloped backwater into a primary world power.By 1913 more than one third of the whole world’s industrial productionhad been originated from the mines and factories of the USA. The growth ofAmerican industry was organized and controlled by the number of powerfulbusinessmen like Andrew Carnegie, the owner of the giant Carnegie steelcorporation and D. Rockefeller, the “king” of the growing oil industry. Asthe corporations grew bigger and more powerful, they often became “trusts”. Bythe early 20-century the trusts had controlled large parts of American industry.The biggest trusts were richer than most other nations.
By their wealth andpower they controlled the lives of millions of people.The United States was created as a land of equal opportunities toeveryone. Yet half the American people had hardly enough finance to buysufficient food and clothing. In the industrial cities of the North, such asChicago and Pittsburgh, immigrant workers still labored long hours for lowwages in steel mills, factories and slaughter houses. The workers’ homes wereover-crowded slums. In the South thousands of poor farmers, both black andwhite, worked from sunrise to sunset to earn barely enough to live on.The handful of rich and powerful men bribed politicians to pass laws,which favored them.
Others hired private armies to crush any attempts by theirworkers to obtain better conditions. Their attitude to the rights of other peoplewas summed up in a famous remark of the railroad and ship “king” William H.Vanderbilt. When he was asked whether he thought that railroads should be runin the public interest, “The public be damned” he replied.Progressive Americans were alarmed by the power of the trusts and thecontemptuous way in which leaders of industry like Vanderbilt rejected thecriticism. In the early years of the twentieth century a stream of books andmagazine articles drew people’s attention to a largenumber of national problems.
Novelists like Mark Twain and Henry Jamesanalyzed the impact of wealth and ambition on social life. Herbert G. Wells inhis novel “The War in the Air” (1908) sharply criticized the life in the USA ofthat period. He wrote: “I see it, the vast rich various continent, the giganticprocess of development, the acquisitive successes, the striving failures, themultitudes of those rising and falling who come between, all set in a texture ofspacious countryside, of clangorous towns that bristle to the skies, of greatexploitation, of district and crowded factories, of wide deserts and mine-tornmountains, and huge half-tamed rivers”.The Progressive movement found a leader in the Republican TheodoreRoosevelt T.
Roosevelt who became president in 1901 got particularlyconcerned about the power of the trusts. He wanted to allow the businessmenenough freedom of action to make their firms efficient and prosperous, but at thesame time to prevent them from taking unfair advantage of other people (thepolicy of so-called “square deal»). However the “square deal” of Roosevelt’sadministration (1901-1909) failed to bring the trusts under control.President Woodrow Wilson who won the presidential elections in 1912started his policy “The New Freedom».
One of Wilson’s first steps was also toreduce the powers of the trusts, give more rights to labor unions and make iteasier for farmers to borrow money from the federal government to work theirland.The Progressive movement changed and improved American life inmany ways, but did not help unemployed or unprivileged very much.
The idealsof equal opportunity, proclaimed in the USA, were often denied to Americanswho were non-white. Millions of the Blacks still lived in great poverty. Most ofthem still lived in Southern farms. In cities they lived in so-called “blackghettos”, because many whites resented their moving into white neighborhoods.The First World War and the Roaring Twenties.The World War 1 helped the USA to become even more powerful. Whilethe war started on the continent of Europe, brought death and sufferings tomillions of European people, the USA, physically untouched by combat andgreatly enriched by wartime profits, quickly became the main supplier ofweapon and capital to the countries of the Anti-German allies.
The entirerailroad system came under government supervision; the demand for industrialproduction grew fast. Guns, ships, shells, and other essential goods were madefor the war.When in May 1919 the Versailles Peace Treaty was signed in Europe, theUSA met it as the country with a primary world economy, with enormousproductive capacity and extensive markets for manufactured goods. Having lessthan 10% of the world’s population, the USA produced about 25% of theworld’s goods and more than 40% of the world manufacture. Business boomed.Automobiles and trucks transformed the life of the nation.
Airplanes, usedduring the war, were now geared to peacetime purposes. Chemical and electricalprocesses, together with light machinery made of alloyed metals, were changingthe character of factories. Mass production proved itself in building ships andairplane motors. Electricity also speeded the revolution in production: in 1914some 30% of manufacturing was electrified, in 1929 70% of all factoriesbenefited from the power sources. In the field of finance, New York began toreplace London as the hub of the world’s finance market.Businessmen became popular heroes in the 1920s.There were widespreadbeliefs in the USA that individuals were responsible for their own life success,and that unemployment or poverty were the result of personal failings.
Thenewspaper and magazine writers maintained that although not all Americanscould become rich, at least middle-class Americans ought to be rich.Journalist L. Allen wrote that at that time “business had become almost thenational religion of America”. Men like automobile-maker Henry Ford, steelindustry owner Andrew Carnegie, oil and finance tycoon Rockefeller,George Pullman, W.
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