Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (American Century) - Softcover

9780809001460: Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (American Century)
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In examining the economic and cultural trs that expressed America's expansionist impulse during the first half of the twentieth century, Emily S. Rosenberg shows how U.S. foreign relations evolved from a largely private system to an increasingly public one and how, soon, the American dream became global.

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About the Author:

Emily Rosenberg is professor of history at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and, with her husband, Norman L. Rosenberg, co-author of In Our Times: American Since World War II.

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Spreading the American Dream
OneINTRODUCTION: THE AMERICAN DREAMTHE COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION OF 1893A SPECTACULAR World's Fair, the Columbian Exposition, opened in Chicago in 1893. Acres of classical buildings, constructed especially for the fair, created an urban wonderland; it glittered with artistic splendor and burgeoned with America's latest technological achievements. After a visit to this White City, the French novelist and critic Paul Bourget wrote: "Chicago, the enormous town we see expanding, the gigantic plant which grows before our eyes seems now in this wonderfully new country to be in advance of the age. But is not this more or less true of all America?"Bourget's comment was the kind Americans liked to quote; the exposition's exhibitors displayed their hopes for their country and for the world. Contrived and temporary, this Dream City flaunted America's faiths and glossed over its contradictions. Glamour triumphed over decay; time seemed suspended near the peak of perfection. From John Winthrop to Ralph Waldo Emerson to Josiah Strong, many Americans had thought, or hoped, that their country had escaped from history, that America was not just another power that would rise and then decline but that it was the quintessential civilization that would permanently culminate some long progression toward human betterment. Here, in rhetoric, iron, and stone, were the ideas and products that Americans prized and believedothers would gratefully accept. In the Dream City, America's most significant gifts to the twentieth-century world were already apparent: advanced technology and mass culture.The amazing scientific and technological innovations of America's farmers--displayed in Agriculture Hall--overwhelmed viewers and demonstrated the United States' importance as an exporter of primary products. Impressive displays of wheat, corn, and other crops from the prairie states bespoke opulence and plenty. In this pavilion, at least, there was no mention of the overproduction, the falling prices, and the crushing debts plaguing the Midwest and attracting converts to the populist revolt.Perched on a platform in one section of Agriculture Hall was a huge globe with an array of farm machines, all American-made, revolving around its circumference. America's preeminence in agricultural machinery was unmistakable, and manufacturers looked toward potential markets in the new and still-expanding farming frontiers of Manchuria, Siberia, Australia, Mexico, and Argentina. America's leading food processors, some already well known abroad, also displayed their latest techniques and products: Cudahy and Swift proudly showed beef extract; Gail Borden lined up cans of condensed milk; sugar refiners and soapmakers touted their innovations.Transportation Hall showed off the "engines of progress" that had opened the prairies to commercial cultivation. Railroad companies built massive Grecian-style pavilions and used full-size models to illustrate the historical development of locomotives. The Pullman Company escorted visitors through an entire train, to show its luxurious sleeping and dining quarters. The railroad's prominent place at Chicago seemed appropriate: promoters presented the railroad as a major civilizing force, one bringing prosperity, communication, and understanding to the world.The Pullman Company treated fairgoers to a large model of its other proud creation--the industrial town of Pullman. The neat workers' quarters, company stores, and cultural centers depicted an idyllic scene of industrial contentment. Within a few months, the great Pullman labor strike would mar the picture, permanently associating the town with class violence instead of harmony. But labor discontent, like farmers' revolts, had no place at Chicago. At the fair, Pullman was the promise of the future.Other transportation exhibits heralded America's new world-wide role. Pneumatic conveyors promised to revolutionize retailing by eliminating bottlenecks in the distribution of goods. Elevators effortlessly transported people and goods. A model of a canal across Nicaragua showed how modern technology might bisect Central America and stimulate American trade with Asia. The International Navigation Company erected a full-size section of an ocean steamer, showing the numerous decks and the different classes of staterooms and dining rooms. Twenty thousand people a day visited this lavishly outfitted "ship," absorbing the idea that comfort and luxury were now the rule in ocean travel. The day of the American tourist traversing the globe was still in its infancy, but the crowds at Chicago indicated tourism's potential.The vehicle exhibit lacked steam-, electric-, or petroleum-driven carriages, but future trends were evident all the same. American carriages were lighter and cheaper than European models. Unlike their competitors, they were, in the words of one commentator, made by "modern machinery and the systematic methods of large manufactories." They contrasted with the fine British coaches, which, the same American commentator noted, were "interesting on account of their style, long since out of fashion." Even before the automobile age, advanced technology and mass appeal distinguished America's transportation industry.Machinery Hall also emphasized technological wizardry. There, the White City's massive power plant, run by Westinghouse's huge engine-dynamo units, generated electrical power in quantities never before produced. Oil, rather than coal, was used for fuel, and Standard Oil built a forty-mile experimental pipeline that carried the fuel into the fair. Fifteen electric motors distributed the electricity throughout the fairgrounds, clearly demonstrating advanced techniques of power transmission. Half this power flowed to the most amazing exhibit of all--Westinghouse's incandescent lighting system. Illuminating the entire fairgrounds and its buildings, this system constituted the largest central power station in the United States. Not to be outdone, General Electric erected a ten-foot, 6,000-pound searchlight--the largest in the world--and powered the Edison Tower of Light, a seventy-eight-foot shaft glowing with thousands of colored flashing lights. Chicago's fair awesomely demonstrated the new electrical age.At Electricity Hall, power set in motion a mechanical world that seemed as marvelous in 1893 as it would seem commonplace in 1945. Most visitors got their first look at electric trolleys, long-distance phones, and electrical heaters. Edison's new kinetograph, in conjunction with a phonograph, visually reproduced an orator's movements and then synchronized these movements with the sound of his voice. G.E.'s elevated electric railroad safely speeded the huge crowds around the grounds. Other machinery exhibits highlighted Americans' talent for substituting technology for labor. All the fair's restaurants used dishwashing machines, and there were laundry and pressing machines, soapmaking machines, steamrollers, automatic sprinklers, street cleaners, and a machine that quickly weighed and bagged several tons of ground coffee a day. American sewing-machine companies such as Singer displayed improved versions of the home sewing machine. The Daily Columbian, a special World's Fair newspaper, spun off the latest steam-powered presses at the rate of eight hundred copies a minute. For one souvenir issue, workers placed pulp in a machine to make paper, composed the text on a linotype, printed, and distributed a finished newspaper--all in sixty-three minutes.Most startling in their diversity were the special machines for making boots and shoes. An expert operator using an improved sewing machine could sew nine hundred pairs of shoes a day; a "rivet and stud" machine inserted ninety rivets and studs per minute; a heeling machine drove three hundred nails per minute; a "burnishing and bottom-polishing and uppercleaning" machine finished the shoe for market. In all, more than a score of different processes contributed to making a single shoe.In contrast to the fair's technological originality, its artistic styles were imitative and familiar. Ironically, exposition planners, who defined art as the statuary and painting of an elite European tradition, refused to give a place to one of America's most successful and unique "artistic" creations: Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. But encamped outside the gates and across the street from the White City, the show attracted huge, enthusiastic crowds. An early yet fully developed expression of America's mass culture, Buffalo Bill's extravaganza became one of the Dream City's most popular exhibits. In Chicago, Americans flaunted the cheap mass products,the dazzling technology, and the alluring mass culture that, in the coming century, they would spread throughout the world.THE IDEOLOGY OF LIBERAL-DEVELOPMENTALISMThis American dream of high technology and mass consumption was both promoted and accompanied by an ideology1 that I shall call liberal-developmentalism. Reflected in partial form by some of the 3,817 lecturers who spoke in 1893 at the World Congress Auxiliary to the Columbian Exposition, this ideology matured during the twentieth century. Liberal-developmentalism merged nineteenth-century liberal tenets with the historical experience of America's own development, elevating the beliefs and experiences of America's unique historical time and circumstance into developmental laws thought to be applicable everywhere.The ideology of liberal-developmentalism can be broken into five major features: (1) belief that other nations could and should replicate America's own developmental experience; (2) faith in private free enterprise; (3) support for free or open access for trade and investment; (4) promotion of free flow of information and culture; and (5) growing acceptance of governmental activity to protect private enterprise and to stimulate and regulate American participation in international economi...

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  • PublisherHill and Wang
  • Publication date1982
  • ISBN 10 0809001462
  • ISBN 13 9780809001460
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages264
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