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The U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) held between the industrial North and the agricultural slave-owning south was the most significant historical event. It was a watershed in the American history. The innocent optimism of the young democratic nation gave way, after the war, to a period of exhaustion. American idealism remained as usual and it was rechanneled. Before the war, the idealists championed human rights, especially the abolition of slavery. After the war, the Americans increasingly idolized material progress and the self-made man. This was the era of the millionaire manufacturer and the speculator when Darwinian evolution and the “survival of the fittest” seemed to sanction the sometimes unethical methods of the successful business tycoon.
The business boomed after the war. The war production had boosted industry in the North and given it press and political clout. It also gave to the industrial leaders a valuable experience in the management of men and machines. The enormous natural resources of iron, coal, oil, gold, and silver of the American land benefitted business. The new intercontinental rail system inaugurated in 1869, and the transcontinental telegraph, which began operating in 1861, gave industry access to materials, markets, and communications. The constant influx of immigrants provided a seemingly endless supply of inexpensive labor as well. Over 23 million foreigners - Gennan, Scandinavian, and Irish in the early years, and increasingly Central and neither Europeans thereafter - flowed into the United Slates between 1860 and 1910. Chinese, Japanese, and contract laborers were imported by Hawaiian plantation owners, railroad companies and other American business interests on the West coast.
By 1860, the most of the Americans lived on the farms Or in small villages, but by 1919 half of the population was concentrated in about 12 big cities. The problems of the urbanization and industrialization appeared: poor and overcrowded housing, unsanitary conditions, low pay (called “wage slavery”), difficult working conditions, and inadequate restraints on business. Labor unions grew, and strikes brought the plight of working people to national awareness. The “money interests” of the East, the so called robber barons like; J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Their eastern banks tightly controlled mortgages and credit so vital to western development and agriculture, while railroad companies charged high prices to transport farm products to the cities. The farmer gradually became an object of ridicule, lampooned as an unsophisticated “hick” or “rube.” The ideal American of the post- Civil War period became a millionaire. In 1860, there were fewer than 100 millionaires; by 1875, there were more than 1,000. From 1860 to 1914, the United States was transferee! from a small, young, agricultural economy to a huge, modern, industrial nation. A debtor nation in 1860, by 1914, it had become the world’s wealthiest state, with a population that had more than doubled, rising from 31 million in 1860 to 76 million in 1900. By World War I, the United States had become a major power.
As industrialization grew, so did alienation in society. The characteristic American novels of the period Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Jack London’s Martin Eden, and later Theodore Dresser’s An American Tragedy-depict the damage of economic forces and alienation on the weak or vulnerable individual survivors, like Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Humphrey Vanderveyen in London’s The Sea-Wolf, and Dreiser’s opportunistic Sister Carrie, endure through inner strength involving kindness, flexibility, and above all, individuality.