History That Doesn't Suck - 99: The Gilded Age’s Singer Sewing Machines & Dangerous Bananas w/ Dr. Ben Sawyer of The Road To Now

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

Did Singer Sewing Machines take over the world? And are bananas as dangerous as they appear in cartoons? The answer to both of these questions are a resounding “yes!” in the Gilded Age. Listen in as the Prof. discusses these and other Gilded Age topics with his esteemed colleague and fellow podcaster: Dr. Ben Sawyer of Middle Tennessee State University and The Road to Now Podcast (check them out here: https://www.theroadtonow.com/)! ____ Connect with us on HTDSpodcast.com and go deep into episode bibliographies and book recommendations join discussions in our Facebook community get news and discounts from The HTDS Gazette  come see a live show get HTDS merch or become an HTDS premium member for bonus episodes and other perks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts. Welcome to History That Doesn't Suck. I'm your professor, Greg Jackson, and as in the classroom, Age of Napoleon, wherever you find your podcasts. bonus content, and other exclusive perks, I invite you to join the HTDS membership program. Sign up for a 7-day free trial today at htdspodcast.com slash membership, or click the link in the episode notes. Welcome to History That Doesn't Suck.

I am your professor, as always, Greg Jackson. And today, it is my pleasure, my honor, to welcome a very special guest for a discussion about the Gilded Age, the one and only Ben Sawyer. Well, there's probably more than one Ben Sawyer out there, is my guess. Yeah. But there's only one of me. Absolutely. But Ben, let me give a little more about you.

Ben Sawyer is a senior lecturer of history at Middle Tennessee State University. And we've actually known each other for quite a while. You were kind enough to have me on to your podcast, The Road to Now. Man, that was longer ago than I think I care to admit. The time flies when you're having fun, huh? It does. I just look back today. I think that's episode 128.

And we just finished up episode 208. So yeah, it's, you know. A little while, just a little while, but it's a, it's a brilliant podcast. I really enjoy the conversations that you have. And of course, if anyone's interested in that, they can go check out the road to now.com and we'll circle back to that at some point as well. But today, Ben, we're talking about the gilded age. As you know, my listeners here have gone through a number of stories about tycoons. We've talked about Carnegie.

We've talked about Rockefeller. We've talked about some incredible feats of engineering. And of course, we've also discussed presidential politics, the changing economy. And these are all some of the things that we're going to dive into. Yeah? Yeah. And I was just thinking that we should start like this. Greg, do you know anybody who lives on a farm? I'm in Utah. Of course, I know people who live on a farm. Okay. What time do farmers get up? Farmers get up with the sun.

Exactly. But you don't, do you? I do not. No. Well, here's the thing. right farmers get up with the sun and after the civil war most people in america live on farms they live an agricultural life and what's going to happen throughout the gilded age is that we're going to go from 1860 the united states has an urban population of just over six million people by the time you get to 1900 you've got over 30 million people living in cities it's going to take a while it's really going to be 1920 before more people live there. But throughout the Gilded Age, you really find a situation in which you end up with tens of millions of people who've never lived in a world of the city. And this is going to change not just the way they work, but the way they perceive the world around them and their relationship to

nature. So if you think about this, farmers, as you said, they get up at what? When the sun comes up. That's not a time. And how long do they work? Until the sun goes down. Or until the work's done, one or the other, right? That's a way of living. One's life is in sync with the natural world around you. So, you know, there are seasons, there are lengths of days, but your pace is set by nature. And the industrial revolution, one of the things that it does, and the best way I've ever described, you know, what capitalism does as a system is that capitalism finally figures out how to conquer nature, which has been man's biggest enemy. And so so what happens is you have not a gradual shift

for these tens of millions of people who are moving to the city of this area. You have a very sudden shift. And what happens is you go from a place where you work the land. A lot of times you own the tools. And these people who are losing their land and are moving into the cities for various reasons,

whether it be immigration, some people were farmers back in Europe. Some people were farmers in the United States. And what ends up happening is that you go from a life that is defined by nature to a life that is defined by the clock. Right. And the clock is powerful. And we don't think about it a lot.

We just assume it. The clock is a mechanism for coordinating tens of millions of people. But it's also something that is hard to get used to because 7 a.m. is 7 a.m. And sometimes at 7 a.m. the sun is up and sometimes at 7 a.m. it is dark outside. And you live no longer by life defined by nature. Your life is defined by a clock and the clock doesn't actually care what season it is. It's a constant process. And you go from a life where you control the tools or the ideal situations, you control the tools at least, but maybe the land. You go from

doing that to a world in which the tools move you. You not only own your land, you generally don't own the place that you live. Your entire relationship with the world around you changes, and that is what's happening in the Gilded Age. It is a sudden shock and an entire change in perception of the world around you. And that's the reason I think we see, as you pointed out in previous episodes, so many uprisings, so many labor movements that people are more sympathetic to it. It is a fundamental shock to one's place in the world. I like the way you've set that up

because we are so used to our clocks today, right? I mean, as the United States has continued to change, I'm sure many listeners can think about probably a few generations back, they're aware of a farmer in the family. I mean, I certainly have never farmed. My parents didn't. I had grandparents that were farmers though.

And as I keep going back, you know, family line gets really agricultural really, really fast. And there has to be someone who has to go through that major disruption in their lives to shift. Using the clock to, as you put it, conquer nature. And yet at the same time,

you're also beheld into that clock. I mean, we all feel that every day. I feel that when my alarm goes off in the morning. Yeah. As I point out to my students, I tell them that they're all controlled by robots and they say they're not. And I always say, well, how'd you wake up this morning? Did your mom wake you up? Did a rooster wake you up? Or did a machine wake you up? And that's the way your entire day started. And you've been staring at that machine to figure out where to go ever since.

And it's this amazing thing. And what people don't get, I think, is that you don't need a clock unless you were trying to coordinate large numbers of people. Right. And this way of getting people there is powerful, but then that regiments your entire life because you're supposed to do this much in this amount of time. It's a revolution. And this is what the Gilded Age is about, is people coming head on into this strange, strange transition. Well, I mean, it really is kind of, in some ways, it's the start of our modern world,

right? I mean, as the railroads essentially invent our time zones so that they can coordinate, so they can do this mass movement that you're talking about, so that goods can move, people can get to places. I mean, it really is a marvel when you pause and think about it. You are coordinating with people thousands of miles away. Right. Which is why this is the era when we see time zones. Right. You know, the railroads is another thing in industry when you look at this time,

certainly the railroads are an earlier creation, but they show, because railroads are really where you see the first large scale enterprise that's going to change people's lives. Right. But again, it breaks from general nature. Where's the first wave of American cities? It's along the coast because it's a colonial society. Where's the second wave? It's along rivers.

Nashville, where I live, on the Cumberland River. Absolutely, yeah. You've got Memphis. You've got St. Louis. All these things are places that are created because of nature. And I'm not to say that nature doesn't still matter, but why is Charlotte where it is? Charlotte, North Carolina. It's not because of a river.

It's because of a largely incidental fact that two railroads connected there. Why is Atlanta where it is? Because it's the northern point on a railroad line where you can cut west and not run into the Appalachian Mountains. Why is Birmingham where it is? For no other reason that they discovered that there was coal in the ground there and that it could be a city used for producing steel, which is essential in this era. Right.

And so you start to see that cities can be places that nature doesn't take the city. And that's why you have these, you know, when I was a kid, I only ever went to Charlotte and Atlanta. And I remember going to other cities, I think Philadelphia, and being like, man, this is great. This is on the water. And then going to a city like St. Louis and be like, you got a river running through this city. How crazy is that?

I know, I just grew up in the New South. Which by the way, you mentioned the term New South. That's something that my listeners are gonna hear about in spades very shortly. So just a quick definition, New South, we're talking about post-Civil War, a new economy. Do you wanna go ahead and take the lead there, Ben? Well, yeah, it's just like you said,

the New South, the Old South was centered around plantation agriculture. And so, you know, that type of a development creates an entirely different world, right? I mean, you don't have urban centers. You don't have really the types of incentives that you need to create specialists because you have a very small number of buyers because the bulk of the people who are working are enslaved. And you don't get a consumer market when you have slavery. So, the New South is an attempt to reorganize Southern societies in ways that go from the previous forms of production into the new production. And one of the things they have to deal with is the fact that, you know,

we talk about a railroad revolution, but look at railroad maps of the South prior to really this era. They're sparse. They only need to run a couple of places because you have large scale production of a few single export crops. And in fact, they're not even uniform. They're different gauge sizes. Yes, they are. That in and of itself is a huge project, getting all of those railroads slowly over time to shift over to standard gauge. Right. So the New South, these New South cities, Atlanta kind of being the quintessential one, but Charlotte, North Carolina, Houston. It's basically remaking the South in a way that works with the economic model that's being established in the North. Right. And this late 19th century version of capitalism.

So, okay, we've established that we've got clocks, we're coordinating on this massive level, the yeoman farmer world that Thomas Jefferson adored. It's just, it's gone for all intents and purposes, right? Well, I would argue that it is in terms of lived life, but don't forget that a lot of people show up in these factories believing that they're just gonna save up enough money to go back and buy some more land.

And there's always that lag between the reality. So does that world exist in reality? Maybe not. But in the minds of Americans, just as strong as it was whenever the guy who wasn't a Yemen farmer said that everyone should be Yemen farmers. Okay, that's well put.

I like that. All right. So where do we go from here? We've got clocks running the world now, right? Or at least running the United States. We'll keep ourselves on point. They're certainly taking over. They're growing.

Yes. So this is, you know, we're not there all the way yet, but this is something that people are seeing en masse for the first time. Right. And so it's harnessing. I mean, the productivity is up, right? It brings a lot of great accomplishments and things, but it is dramatically altering the day-to-day life. And this is the thing that you see workers reconciling themselves with these

things. I mean, you could take it back to Shays' Rebellion and, you know, just going back to that point. One of the things that I try to explain to people is that the reason that the Shays' Rebels were angry was because they understood something that's so regularly assumed by us that we forget to even really analyze it. They understood that they were being taxed to pay off debt that someone else held. And the debt isn't an amorphous thing. They understood they were being taxed and having their land taken away from them to pay back not just overseas borrowers, but the wealthy people in Boston who had lent their money to the revolution. And they were angry about that because that was the government clearly picking sides in Boston, which is one of the reasons they wanted to get rid of the courts

and everything. So you go into this moment right here and you look at what your average worker is experiencing and they are seeing the productivity of the places they're working going through the roof. And another part of this shift, which I think has to do with this discontent and this sense of being lost. And it takes a lot of desperation to do things like the Great Railroad Strike or to do what you see with Pullman in the 1890s.

These two great strikes. Right, both of which we've covered, right? So that should be resonating with listeners. So you see in this, not just this sense of being lost in their world, but imagine that you work every day and you're a farmer. What happens? You own the thing you produce. Right. Imagine if you work every day and you're a small craftsman.

You have a large degree of control and at least ownership temporarily, whatever you do with it. You have some autonomy over what you do with the product. But in this world, what they're also experiencing is the fact that they're working every day for a place that seems to consider them to be expendable. They have absolutely no control over what it is that they do. And this is another one of these assumptions that we hold now that is really, it's pronounced in the Gilded Age.

Because your average person is looking around and saying, okay, so I work every day. I don't have any wealth here. I'm seeing one person gain a lot of wealth. But underneath the surface here is this another sense of alienation, which is I now have absolutely no control over anything that I make. And Greg, if there's one thing I think that, you know, this is my take on things, but if there's one thing that I could say to most people is say, have you ever built something with your hands? And they say, yes.

How does it feel? It feels good. Yep. In our modern world, we've largely reconciled ourselves to the fact that that's something we're going to do on a house project on the weekends. You know, that's something we're going to do.

It's a, well, you know, we did a little renovation work or we painted a wall or we put a barbecue in the backyard. I did help a friend fix a sprinkler line just earlier this afternoon. How did it feel, Greg? It was gratifying, man. It was good. It feels good.

He's also an academic and we both, you know, we talked about like that reward that comes with seeing, you know what I mean? Love our day job, but there's that reward of like, I did this thing and it took X amount of time. In this case, it was a very simple fix, you know, under an hour and I can see the product, right? Like it's there.

This is what I have done. Behold. But what you just said, Greg, is revealing. You just said, love my day job, but this thing that I did one time, I'm well aware made me feel a sense of pride and a sense of accomplishment. I produced something tangible. I produced a tangible result. And not only that, but maybe it's not your house, but you get to see the emotional happiness of the person you worked for. Sure, sure. Hey, you ever make it out to Utah,

I am going to show you the downstairs bathroom that I tiled. Like that's a thing. I'll have to highlight that. And if you come to my house, you better plan a weekend because I renovated this whole house. You know, this is a- All right.

I did not take a traditional route to academia. I was a carpenter for a long time. But what I'm getting at here is that we're talking about this and you're like, I love my day job, but you implicitly just said what I'm saying about reconciling yourself with the fact that we don't do work that we see the immediate results of in the same way. Now you and I do work where I see immediate results in my students accomplishing amazing things. And that's one of the reasons I feel very fortunate to have the job that I have, because that is a really rewarding thing. But you know what? Your average

factory worker isn't getting that type of satisfaction at seeing the corporation they work for. Oh, we work for a corporation that's, oh, it's now the third most profitable in the world. And we live in a shanty. And more than that, it's that people who work that are small craftsmen, that are farmers, their life, they just do what you said that you enjoyed so much. They every day go out and work on land that's theirs and they see it produced. And that sense of accomplishment is just a part of their work. And you go from that and control everyone's product into a situation where you don't own anything you make. You don't own the

tools. They seem to work you. And in return, you get money. Right. And that's got to be especially poignant for someone who's going through that shift. You know, I mean, you're pointing out how we still get that gratification in the present when we do a hands-on project. But we're used to this. I think that's part of the disconnect perhaps we miss sometimes when we try and think about these bygone eras in the present. We are so accustomed to the idea that I'm going to do a thing for this larger entity. I will be compensated for it. I receive cash. And this is a generation where, I mean, we're talking about gold and silver and questions about minting even in this era. Getting to a common currency alone in some ways, that is still not quite on the table.

So getting into this world where it's clocks and paychecks, this isn't even to say good or bad, right? Like this is a huge shift that anyone living through it, I mean, this is a revolution, right? Yes, the time you have is no longer the daylight, it's now numbers. The thing you make is no longer the shoes. You make numbers on a piece of paper and everything is becoming extracted and divorced from the actual

natural world. And again, human beings adapt. As I tell my students, sometimes my students are going through breakups and I tell them, look, you'll get through this. Human beings live in the Arctic and human beings live in the equator. We're quite adaptable. We can adjust. And we have, but it took time. Right. Now, Ben, you know a thing or two about senior sewing machines

and can give us some fun examples here, right? Why don't we take a quick break and we'll come back. We can dive into that. That sound good? Sounds good. All right, man. Want to learn how you can make smarter decisions with your money?

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So turn to the nerds to answer your real-world money questions and get insights that can help you make the smartest financial decisions for your life. Listen to NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Was the Sphinx 10,000 years old? Were there serial killers in ancient Greece and Rome? What were the lives of transgender, intersex, and non-binary people like in the ancient world? We're Jen and Jenny from Ancient History Fangirl. We tell you true stories and tall tales of the ancient world. Sometimes we do it tipsy. Sometimes we have amazing guests on our show. Historians like Barry Strauss, podcasters like Liv Albert, Mike Duncan,

and authors like Joanne Harris and Ben Aronovich. We take you to the top of Hadrian's Wall to watch the Roman Empire fall at the end of the world. We walk the catacombs beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent under Teotihuacan. We walk the sacred spirals of the Nazca Lines in search of ancient secrets. And we explore mythology from ancient cultures around the world. Come find us at ancienthistoryfangirl.com or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, welcome back. I am again with Ben Sawyer from the excellent podcast, The Road to Now, and a university professor, senior lecturer to be specific. Ben, we're going to talk

about these Singer sewing machines. Yes, Singer sewing machines, the thing that your grandmother probably had growing up. 100%. Yes, that was absolutely, yes. Everywhere. There's a reason it's everywhere though, Greg, and it goes back to just before the Gilded Age, actually. So, Isaac Singer creates a sewing machine in the early 1850s, right? So, it basically goes out, the company's formed in 1850, then Corporation 51. And so, you end up with the sewing machine. And the sewing machine is a revolutionary instrument, and there's actually a patent war over who actually owns it. But it's not something that Singer can really, they're not the only ones who are making sewing machines. Okay.

Like anything else, there's going to be some competition. Absolutely. So why is it that Singer is the one that ends up in everybody's house? Why is it they dominate? Why is this American company that formed in Boston and moves to New York ends up becoming really America's first international corporation? Why are they selling sewing machines in Russia in 1865? Why do they have a separate owned company in England where they selling sewing machines in Russia in 1865? What if they have a separate owned company in England where they manufacture sewing machines in Glasgow?

Why do they have a German organization? Why do they have better maps than most governments have? Really? Yes. Okay. They have better maps than most governments have. And I'll tell you why. It all goes back to corporate organization. Singer Sewing Machine figured out that people wanted a sewing machine and their great innovation. It's not necessarily the machine itself because other people could make those. Their innovation was something you're probably familiar with if you've shopped anywhere in America today. They're the ones who created the installment plan. Really? Yeah.

Expound. Okay. So if you were someone, I mean, most households, particularly agricultural households, you have increasing workloads, right? You have increasing pressures, you have finite time. And one of the things is mending clothes. And so Singer realizes there's a huge demand for this. And this really is something that saves households time. Well, and Ben, if I may, I think it's worth just reminding people that this is not a time when you go down to a large department store and pick up a pair of jeans for the same cost as taking the family out for dinner. Right. This is a time when

you're sewing your own clothes. Largely, you might have a couple sets of clothes you've got to keep them taken care of. And it's also a time where people are finding work doing this on the side. It's a whole complicated situation, but we can leave it at the fact that this is a piece of technology that if you can get it in your house, will make your life better. and Singer realizes, hey, people will take these. They're heavy duty. They're going to last a long time. We can get them to pay us in installations and give them periods over time to pay for this. And so that's what they do. And it's not that hard for them

because they can actually take back the sewing machine if the people don't continue to pay for it. But what this means, Greg, is that they have to create an organizational structure that facilitates this. And in order to facilitate this, they have to have a team of employees who regularly go to either small towns, right? So maybe to one shop, but often to people's houses and go around and collect the payments. Well, that's an added cost unless you have those people take thread and needles that you need for the sewing machine, the oil. And so what you have is in doing this,

you have a structure that creates a sales force that is not only collecting, but also there to sell the products. So you now have cornered a market and they will come to you often, once a month or whatever it is. But the thing is though, Greg, in order to do this, they need to really know where you are. They need to know what your income is broadly. They need to know how much land you own. They need to know all of these things. And so Singer in doing this

begins collecting some pretty detailed geographic, demographic and economic data because they have an incentive to do it and they take this around the world with them. And what years are we? I mean, we're talking pre-Gilded Age even? So Singer starts off in 1850s. And then they're already expanding.

I mean, and this is a time, the Gilded Age, one of the things that marks it is this lack of U.S. support for trade abroad. I mean, that's, which is interesting because, you know, that's the old imperial system. That's still strong and mighty with the British and the French at this time. I mean, very much foreign policy and the expansion of national corporations, you know, it goes back to mercantilism, right? So, there's that tie. The United States is still inwardly focused. I mean, you know, where's the focus? Civil war takes over the focus. And then you look at what's happening in the Gilded Age, the primary focus of expansion is the West.

Sure. I mean, even by the time we get to World War I, we're still going to be trying in some ways to be inward. Oh, you don't feel that way. No, no. Trying. I think the key word is trying. Yeah, there's a reason I said trying. Right.

Labs and flows. I mean, this is the thing is that the progressive era, I mean, you see, and you'll talk about this in upcoming episodes. You get to the point where you clearly see that in 1898, it's just, well, this is it. We've done this. And so, you know, there's going to be the Philippine War, which is going to last years and millions of lives. Philippines is going to be a United States territory until just after World War II. You've got expansion. You know, we de facto control Haiti from 1915, I believe it is, and go in. Wilson orders the Marines to go in after a coup and then takes all their money, puts it in a bank in New York, and says, you guys can have this back when you act the way we want you to. You've got Cuba.

So what I'm saying is we back off from some of that later on, but it's that back and forth. Gilded Age is a time where the United States is primarily focused on trying to figure out how to heal these wounds between the North and the South. And the West, as Heather Cox Richardson argued very well in West for Mathematics, the West becomes the place where suddenly we're all Americans again. And that's the focus there. So Singer's doing all of this in the context of not really having any official government support. It's the model. The model works, right? And so,

you see them doing this. And just the numbers here, I got some numbers. In 1863, they were selling 20,000 machines a year. Okay, not bad. By 1895, really at the end of this era, they manufacture and sell 14 million sewing machines. 14 million sewing machines. That's insane. And that's just in that year. Yep. Of course, by this year, they're on the verge of creating a Russian subsidiary, which is going to go very badly for them during World War I. But they're building these maps. And this is why, and interestingly enough, this is something that happens towards later into this period. This is why Singer

actually becomes very suspicious to a lot of governments because they've got better maps than the governments have of their own country. They've got better economic data. And it's a really interesting thing, but it's the structure, and this gets into what's happening at this time. If you go back to look at what the great developments are, the second industrial revolution, a lot of it is combining previous inventions, like putting refrigeration on a ship, on a steamship. Things that now your trade can go further, right? You can move things from, like beef from Argentina, right, up to North America. And so this changes things. But the real contribution is the change in organizational structure. Because the corporation, the 14th Amendment actually empowers the corporation a lot.

Because that 14th Amendment clause about not being able to deprive of property is applied. And already what had begun at the state level in the 1840s and 50s, really, a little bit before that, of a corporation having more powers, by the time you get to the Gilded Age, corporations are immortal. Previously, corporations were chartered for one purpose and one set amount of time. And once you have this immortal entity, you have the ability to project over much longer time periods and to combine capital. And so Singer is not just an example of how this organizational strategy works with the corporation. It's also how within the corporation, having this scale, having this reach, having this ability to muster this many

resources, well, we can say, you know what? We're not a guy who makes a sewing machine in his garage and has to sell it immediately. We can give it to you. You'll pay us back. We've got a longer-term view. And on top of that, they're doing marketing. They're some of the first marketing people. They've got songs. They've got the famous girl sitting at the singer sewing machine. They've got artists. Right. And you're seeing, again, all of these things that we know of in the modern world, you're seeing them be developed. Everything you're listing off, I'm sure that there have to be a lot of people listening who are envisioning several other corporations, whether it's, you know, Coca-Cola and the iconic Christmas ads, right? With Santa

Claus and such brilliant artwork that goes into that and the different jingles. I mean, I can still think of candy bars from my childhood that just come back to me in two seconds. If you play two notes, right? You know, in the right order and boom, I'm ready for a KitKat, right? We're just giving all sorts of free shout outs to corporations here now. That's interesting, Greg. I think it's time for us to bring in our new sponsor. Ironically, Twix. We don't even know why we're talking about KitKat. We're terrible. Got word we've got canceled. No, the sponsorship's canceled because we're promoting KitKat. Anyway, let's move on. So, I mean, this is really the start of this,

frankly, in many ways, the world that we know today. Yep. And structurally, electricity is coming into cities and it's not everywhere yet. But you're seeing it. I mean, this is another thing. It's like in 1889, Singer creates the first electronic sewing machine.

And so you can see companies responding to this. And I think it's fascinating. And I'll tell you, Greg, actually one of my favorite stories about this and how all this comes together has to do with bananas. Oh. Has to do with bananas. Can I just read you something? By all means, sir.

I would love to read you something here. I would love to read you something. This is from the New York Times, July 8th, 1884. Okay? Okay. The headline here is, The Dangerous Banana Peel. Mm. The Dangerous Banana Peel. Yes. This is from the banana peel. The dangerous banana peel.

Yes. This is from the July 8th, New York Times, 1884. All right. John Bassett, a wealthy merchant, age 75, while coming home from church last night, slipped on a banana peel in front of his home and broke his right leg near the hip. He is not expected to recover. Okay. Yeah. This dude slipped on a banana peel, right? That's crazy, right? Isn't that, that's the thing. It's supposed to, this is a joke, right?

Yeah, no, it's a gag, right?'s crazy right isn't that that's the thing it's supposed to this is a joke right yeah no it's a gag right i mean to reference childhood again i remember watching the cartoons where you know they place the banana peel and it's ridiculous and yet someone slips on it yeah but this is real i mean this is real you just made the cartoons of my childhood a real thing just back in the 19th century yeah well you know there's also an article i've got a ton of articles here but but let me just, I'll just flash forward here to you. From the New York Times here. So this is from 1893. Okay.

Here's the headline. War on the Banana Skin. Mr. Roosevelt orders a prohibitory ordinance enforced. Must keep the sidewalks clean. It was an apple that got Adam into trouble. A basket of peaches caused the dismissal of Captain Stevenson from the New York police force and his indictment and conviction for bribery. And now comes the banana skin, threatening to bring about a shakeup in the police department.

Dun, dun, dun. Mr. Roosevelt orders a prohibitory ordinance. Mr. Roosevelt, what was he doing in the early to mid 18... Oh, he was the head police commissioner of the New York City Police Department. That he was. Long before he stormed the hills. Well, maybe stormed the hills. That's a separate story. Sure, yeah.

In the Spanish-American War in Cuba. Here we have him. The first war he declared was on the banana skin. And according to the evidence here, Greg, he did not win because, I mean, here we go. The Tennessean already in the 1912 treacherous banana peel, luscious banana, a slippery outlaw. Forbidden by statute to hurl unsuspecting pedestrian to the street is not enforced. This is, I can show you the articles. I've got articles from Atlanta.

I've got articles from Nashville. I've got articles from D.C. I've got, I mean, all over the country. The world is living in fear of bananas. Yes. Yes. It is a problem. Now, Greg, it is normally a joke now.

I don't know anybody who's ever slipped on a banana peel. Do you? You don't either, do we? I'm afraid I do not have the pleasure of knowing anyone who's ever suffered such a terrible calamity as stepping on a banana peel. No. All right. So why was it such a big deal? Why did this happen?

And really in the later part of the Gilded Age? Well, it has everything to do with what a city looks like, Greg. Okay. Think about this. Cities. Go look up some pictures of like New York City in the 1870s, 1880s. The streets are dirt. Yeah.

They're not paved with concrete. They're dirt. And when it rains, you get mud. And on top of that, horses are pulling everything through there. Horses, let me tell you, the exhaust from a horse is solid. That it is. And on rainy days, these carriages come through there delivering goods. The dirt turns into mud, add horse manure, and there are these plank sidewalks.

So they're raised up. But on a real rough day, you're going to walk up there a couple of hours, they're going to be covered in manure. You also don't have a real efficient sanitation system for the city. So this means that when someone has a banana and they don't have anywhere to throw it,

they're going to throw it on the ground. It hits one of those plank sidewalks and on top of those plank sidewalks already is a cover of mud and manure. It gets kicked around a couple of times. It's then covered in those things. You can't see it. And then suddenly you're on your way home from church and the New York Times reports you're not expected to recover. And this is what's happening in the cities. And this is why it's a problem then and it's not now. So chalk one up to good sanitation and also chalk one up to paving roads. But the story of this is not just a story about the cities.

You can imagine how filthy these cities are. Imagine what I just described to you is what you smell every time it rains. Rotting food, horse manure, and people are moving into cities packed in a small, cramped environment. Oh, yeah. It's not very, there's not very good sanitation. But the character in this story is actually a banana, right? Because the banana peel is just what's left over from the banana. And this is a fascinating story because this is one of these products of American companies

starting to look outward. The first banana sold in the United States in 1870 by a guy named Captain Lorenzo Baker. And by 1885, he's teamed with other people to form the Boston Fruit Company. And this is going to be what eventually forms in 1899 into the United Fruit Company, which is one of the most powerful corporations. People don't quite get this. They're like, the fruit company is like, well, we're going to borrow their ships in World War I. That's how big they are and their fleets are powerful. But they control these places. We're going to borrow their ships in World War I. That's how big they are and their fleets are powerful. Right.

But they control these places. And what's happened is, why is the banana so essential at this time? Why does it show up and why is it everywhere? It all comes down to the fact that once the technology is there to transport these things, you've got the business organizations that allow you to do it. You start bringing these bananas in. And you know what? Banana is, it is like you invented it for life in a city,

especially if you work in a factory. Because a banana doesn't go bad and make you sick if it's hot, and it doesn't go bad if it's cold, and it can stay at room temperature, and it comes in its own wrapper. So if you're working in a factory where there's oil or cotton or whatever there is in the air, you can set this thing somewhere, And when it's time to eat it, all that stuff peels right off. And inside is a calorie and potassium bomb that is dense as can be. I mean, basically, it's the Central American potato, you could say. Right. And it fuels you inexpensively.

And it's the perfect food for the age. So these things get imported and they become crucial in these cities. Yeah. And so there you go. That's why people slipped on banana peels. All right. So these bananas are, I guess you could say immigrating to the U.S., right? They're starting to take off. They're this new arrival. We have a lot of other new arrivals in the Gilded Age. So why don't we take a quick break and then let's transition into that and have a little more discussion about who's coming to the United States and what's happening on that front. When Johann Rall received the letter on Christmas Day 1776, he put it away to read later. Maybe he

thought it was a season's greeting and wanted to save it for the fireside. But what it actually was was a warning delivered to the Hessian colonel, letting him know that General George Washington was crossing the Delaware and would soon attack his forces. The next day, when Rawl lost the Battle of Trenton and died from two colonial Boxing Day musket balls, the letter was found, unopened in his vest pocket. As someone with 15,000 unread emails in his inbox, I feel like there's a lesson there. Oh well, this is The Constant, a history of getting things wrong. I'm Mark Chrysler.

Every episode, we look at the bad ideas, mistakes, and accidents that misshaped our world. Find us at ConstantPodcast.com or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back again. I'm joined by Ben Sawyer, the one and only Ben Sawyer of the Road to Now podcast. So there's only one of us there. That's right. Ben, we've now established that bananas are the great killer of the 19th century.

You also hinted at the cities being basically packed to the gills with people living in less than great circumstances. Hygiene isn't all that phenomenal. So who's showing up in the Gilded Age? We've touched on this a little bit on history that doesn't suck, but let's go into a little bit deeper. Who's showing up? What do things look like? The floor is yours, sir. Where would you like to go with this? Well, thank you. Well, if you look at what happens with immigration, I mean, you have a huge surge during the potato famine and before there's usually the Civil War, but then you have kind of a lull for a while. But then it begins picking up after this era. But one of the interesting things here

is that the Civil War and Reconstruction in particular, as I'm sure you've talked about before, I mean, the federal government takes on all these powers that had never been within the federal jurisdiction before. And a lot of that has to do with really who is a citizen is outsourced to the states. Yeah. Originally that was really the concept, right? The states defined who is and isn't a citizen. I mean, this is all part of that increasingly stronger federal government that comes out of the civil war is the bill of rights. Those early amendments are all about prohibiting powers to the federal government. And then you get to reconstruction era and on, and it's actually more about expanding those powers. The federal government has the authority to enforce this. This is a huge shift that a lot of Americans

sometimes I think don't realize that really our conception of what the union means, it got overhauled following civil war. You know, some call it the second American revolution. I mean, the 13th, 14th, the 15th, but really the 14th. I mean, that's the one that completely changes conceptions of citizenship. But also my favorite part is it also repudiates Confederate war debt, which nobody ever remembers. But at that point, they're like, you're not getting paid back.

You know what you did. But it's this establishment. And so much goes back to this. It is taking a lot of power over the right to vote. Who's a citizen, right? It's the first time in all of American history that there's a definition of American citizenship that's at least laid out in the Constitution. Before that, as you guys know from Dred Scott, it was a matter of interpretation by the Supreme

Court. So, what ends up happening with this is that the state's authority over citizenship begins to shift. And you see by the end of the 1870s that this not only pertains to who's a citizen within the U.S., it also pertains to who can come into the U.S. And so, you see that the makeup of, you know, who's coming changes. And with the gold rush and just the proximity of California, once the United States takes all of this land on the West Coast and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, there becomes a new migrant population. And in this, you see this attempt. You go from states having their own immigration policies, by and large, to really what is the first fully articulated federal immigration policy, which you all know is the Chinese Exclusion Act from 1882. Yep. And in this, you see, I mean, there is historically this inside-outside game that is played. As your listeners know, this is the same time that there are being new innovations for excluding Black Americans from participating in the economy, participating in society and democracy.

Yeah, so this is what I'm just about to get to in the next upcoming episode, where the same episode we're going to talk about the New South, we're going to talk about these Jim Crow laws that are doing exactly what you just hinted at. So, and we've touched on a little bit. I'm sure plenty of my listeners are, if they're not already aware from previous history classes of Jim Crow laws, it's been touched on a little bit. But anyhow, I apologize. Keep going, Ben. No, it's good. And spoiler alert, you may notice that the 15th Amendment doesn't say anything about previous conviction for felonies, which is going to be a nice loophole through which you could hang

your desire to keep black people from voting as they do. Shout out to Pippa Holloway, if you haven't read her work on that, it's amazing. But going back to this, there's a lot of policing who can and can't be an American. And there is internally this fear of, you know, that's stoked, this attempt to stoke fear against black Americans and then the fear of Chinese influence in the country coming over. And so you end up with, you know, the first federal policy excludes Chinese people. Right. They're not allowed to come here. And this I think this reflects the tendency of the time. Now, the fascinating thing, Greg, I don't know if you know this, but there were no restrictions on people who came from other parts of the world, and particularly from Europe. This door is wide open. And what a lot of people, it's hard for people to kind of

wrap their minds around this. A lot of organized labor was very, very, very for closing the border. And these are people who are, you know, a lot of times people will think they're on the left of things. But the reality is that there was a real incentive to keep the doors open to immigration from Europe because a lot of the manufacturing was on the East Coast. And as long as you have a high supply of labor, you can keep wages down. So throughout this period, you have pretty intense support by major corporations to keep the borders open because, you know, in the laws of supply and demand, if the supply shuts off and the demand stays the same or as it may be growing, your wages would have to go up. And this, in fact, is why it's only in the 1920s with Johnson-Reed Immigration Act where you finally see that businesses are willing to support closing borders because productivity is going up so quickly that the productivity is maintaining a high supply

of labor. And, you know, as you say all that, I'll remind my listeners, my mind goes to the hay market riot slash massacre, right? Depending on who's telling the tale. But the speakers that we heard as I read off various participants german english i mean yeah there were some native-born workers as well but it exemplifies exactly what you're talking about in terms of all this immigration coming in from europe you've got a lot of these workers even who are involved in say the eight-hour movement and whatnot, when you look at who they are, you can see

they're freshly immigrated themselves. They are first-generation Americans. Yeah. And this is one of the lessons I always take away from history, is that groups come in and everyone's pretty certain that they're going to be the ones who bring down the whole country. And yet, and this is my opinion, but I found this country's quite strong and quite enduring. And that these fears have not been realized.

My Irish ancestors didn't mess it up after all. Is that what you're saying, Ben? I guess not. I guess not. You're still young, Greg. Other than bringing me here, sure. Yeah. Do you ever think about how in your family, 100, 200 years ago, somebody took a risk on getting on a ship.

And they were like, they knew nothing about where they were going. It was all desperation. And they did it all for this dream. And that, like, we're just the end result of that. Yeah. Do you ever think that if your, like, fourth grade grandfather could be like, he's going to be doing what? He's going to talk all the time. I'm supposed to get on the ship.

He's a professor. That was that. And I'm good. I'm just going to stay here. I'm doing this for future generations and look at what they've done. I wonder about that all the time. I wonder if the people. You know, you're right.

I mean, I think about myself here with a PhD and we're having this conversation. And I do kind of wonder, I mean, my grandparents, both my grandfathers fought in World War II and had grown up. One was a farmer. The other came from coal miners in Pennsylvania. I mean, getting a PhD, that's crazy talk. Yeah. I mean, just to your point.

Yeah. And I was being ridiculous before, but on a more sanguine note, it is kind of amazing. No, no. Yeah. As I tell people, people lose faith in this country, but when my father was born, segregation was legal. And when my son was born, we had a black president, so don't believe change can't happen. Yeah.

But other things, just to get into the Gilded Age and the origins of some things that we take for granted, one of the big things that happens here is cities bring people together. And again, my students, when we were talking about this in class, they're like, you know, talking about cities versus rural. And I say, well, cities are just places where people live who don't grow food. And the number of people you can have in a city is a function of how many people it takes to grow food. And you have the Reapers, you have John Deere, you have the McCormicks and then International Harvester forming under a corporation, which they themselves are sold all over the world.

And this brings people into cities. And while people don't have a lot of leisure time because there's no minimum workday and there's not a whole lot of pay, people do look for things to do in the rare spare time they have. And you have the rise of spectator sport, which, you know, you have 1869, the first professional major league baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings. 1881, the first professional Negro League team, right? The Cuban Giants, who were actually, I believe, in New York. You have pugilists, boxers. And, you know, it's interesting always to me how space shapes the way that you engage things. I mean, boxing, why is that a popular sport? Man, you could do that anywhere, right? Sure.

Two toughest guys in town, put them in a bar room, right? They fight each other. And you're good to go, right? You got a match. Exactly. Just move some chairs. And the reality is there's something to that. And so, this is something you can put on places. Whereas baseball, remember, it's a very pre-modern sport in the sense that it's not timed, right? It's not timed. And people want to time it because it is this strange, beloved, pre-modern, pre-time sport. And people go, let's time everybody in every way possible. And people are like, that's kind of why we like it is because who knows what time we're getting home,

how much we're paying the babysitter. Oh, it's ending 14. I'm going to have to get a second job. But there's something beautiful about that. There's something beautiful about that. Oh, 100%. It takes space. Well, I have to say, Ben, I never quite thought about that. And baseball, it does have, depending on what version you want to go with, it has roots back to the colonial era and beyond it. I'd never paused and thought about, you know, that compared to say basketball as a, as a newer invention and how the clock is so precise and ever present.

Yes. And so the other sports are created at the time of the clock. And so they're created around the notion of a clock, right? So another interesting thing in this, in these years is that you have the growth of college football. And the interesting thing that a lot of people, that blows people away is because like now I think most people think of football as like kind of a blue-collar sport. You know, you go out with your truck and you tailgate. But the first college football game is actually played just before this. It's Rutgers versus Princeton on November 6th, 1869. And throughout these years, you see these intercollegiate games being set up that began actually in the Northeast. And the crazy thing is you have the growth of something that's called

American football. It looks different than it is now, but it's a dandy sport. It's associated with the upper class because it's played at college and that's where it comes out of. And so you have this, you know, it leaves college and becomes more popularized. But yeah, again, these other sports are created at times where you go, well, the clock, right? I mean, we're living by the clock. How else will we think? I mean, if you thought about creating anything right now, a sport, okay, well, what did you do?

You'd probably time it. It's because we've internalized the notions of time, but baseball has not. But baseball also takes space. And if you think about living in a city where, yeah, you've got New York, but baseball has not. But baseball also takes space. And if you think about living in a city where, yeah, you've got New York, which has Central Park. You've got some cities that set aside green space, but not always. But what's a baseball ticket is, if you live in a city, it's a place to go and there's grass. Right.

Right? And it's a space where people come together. It's a different experience. It's nature. It's, you know, they're as close as you can get to it. Yeah. You know, on the few hours you've got off on that Saturday afternoon. It might be manicured lawn, but hey, it's something green. Yeah. In an otherwise dense, endless city.

Yeah. And so it's just interesting how, you know, cities are places of innovation. And when you see a surge in the city, you see that disorientation that causes a lot of suffering for people. And in that environment, you see people trying to adjust and trying to figure out ways to make their time count, figure out ways to turn this piece of paper they've got into something they can do that's fulfilling to get out of there. I mean, they're not going to stay in their homes because there's multiple families living in there.

You've got to go find something to do. The bar room becomes a place where people go. It's just, to me, these cities, they're so chaotic. They're so poorly organized. They're so overcrowded. And yet in these cities, so much of modern American culture really is brought forward in ways that we still see today. And fortunately, other things like,

hey, if this building burns down, well, sorry, I guess we'll have to find somebody else to work at our factory. And that being the only response, fortunately, those things have passed as well. Ben, dude, I can't thank you enough. I think you've built on a number of things that have come up in previous episodes. You've taken us into some different places. Let me ask you one

last question here before we sign off. The Gilded Age gets a bad rap. I mean, the name itself, right? Mark Twain is dissing the era. Yeah. If we were to end on a positive note, what would you say when you look at the Gilded Age as something that you go, you know what? The world is better because this thing came out of this era. Does anything come to mind for you? Okay. It is a heavy era. Yeah.

It is on the footsteps. And we have to acknowledge all of the, you know, with black Americans, what they go through. And women are still marginalized, right? But, I mean, there's a couple ways you could do this. One is the rebranding attempt to call this the Great Transformation. But it's a great transformation. I don't know if you've caught up on that. Actually, my lecture on the class is called The Gilded Age or The Great Transformation. And I'm like, which one is it? You tell me, because there's so much of this. But I think what you see in this era is you see,

before this, you've got the moral act, the creation of state universities, right? And you see, before this, you've got the Morrill Act, the creation of state universities, right? And you see on display the capability of people. Now, not everybody can be Carnegie. Not everybody can be a Scottish immigrant who comes to be one of those powerful people in a country. But you do see that in very tangible ways that the abilities that people have are on display. You do see a path, though it's narrow, you see a path for some upward mobility there. It's very limited. But I think sometimes these things make us recognize, like it'd be dangerous because sometimes we go,

yeah, like people with Carnegie. Well, if I can do it, anybody can do it. So you see that. But I think also the beauty in this is, you know, this era ends with the populist movement. And the populist movement is an alliance of farmers and factory workers. And I don't know if anybody listening right now has been alive in the 20th or 21st century. But that rift between cities and the countryside has grown. And yet you see in this times where, as in 1877, these folks coordinate across the country and shut down the railroads. And it's not that I'm happy that they shut down the railroads.

It's that they knew something needed to change and they coordinated and they figured out that people could actually do things when they work together around a common issue. And for all the dark in the past, Greg, I want to say this is something that shocks you when you begin to study the past is how much dark there is in the past. And the thing that I constantly say is, but you've got to look around you right now and say, in my class, I say when the American Revolution, the first constitution, I say, all right, let's figure out what democracy means at this time. Raise your hand if you're a white dude. I'm like, you know who you are, right? Me and all the other this time raise your hand if you're a white dude i'm like you know who you are right we all raise you know me and all the white guys raise our hand right and then i'm gonna keep them up if you are 21 and own land and then a couple people have hands up i go not your daddy owns land you own land and then the last ones put their hand down and i go so just me

huh just me i go all right me. I go, all right. Now, if you can vote right now, raise your hand. Everyone raises their hand. And I say, see? And you see these moments in it and you say, in spite of all that darkness, look what we've done. And if in spite of all that darkness, which we've, you know, things are not fixed, but we've come a long way. In spite of all that, you've got to find the bright spots. And when I see the ability of people to get along,

even in the hardest moments, I mean, that to me is inspiring because farmers and city workers, even though, you know, a lot of the city workers, urban workers used to be on the farms, they live very different lives. And the fact that they were able to come together and spoiler alert for everyone here, lay together a petition that says we should have an eight-hour workday, we should have a progressive income tax, we should directly elect our senators, all things that in the 1890s people said they were insane for ever wanting that now you guys just take for granted. You can see that even in the hardest times, people can come together and they can articulate a vision of a future that works for more people. It takes time, but then it happens. That's just my take on it.

It's a good take, Ben. Thank you. Thank you again so much. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Greg, it's a pleasure to talk to you too, man. I love your podcast. I love your podcast. The worst part about this for me, Greg,

is that when I go to give my Gilded Age lecture, I can't turn on your podcast on the Gilded Age and listen to it because it's just going to be me. I'm not kidding. I listen to episodes of your podcast, particularly in the early American Revolutionary period, especially when you get to the War of 1812 and after. Your episodes on that stuff is so good. And you find lines in history that I hadn't seen. And so this podcast, your podcast, your work, we all spread information, right? Those of us who produce and share knowledge,

we hope that it'll have an impact. And I can tell you that students in my classes are certainly beneficiaries of the work that you've done. So thank you. I appreciate that, really. Coming from a fellow academic, I appreciate it, sir. Yes, sir. All right.

Well, hey, people want to find your podcast. Again, theroadtonow.com. Where else can your podcast. Again, theroadtonow.com. Where else can they go? Well, theroadtonow.com is our website, but they can go to, we have social media. We have Twitter. It's at road underscore T-O to underscore now. So road underscore to underscore now. Same thing on Instagram.

And then you can follow us on Facebook. And yeah, so we've got 207, 208 episodes up. We've had Ken Burns on. We've had Heather Cox Richardson. We've had Annette Gordon Reid. Then we've taken some interesting paths and found what we could learn from Lance Armstrong. We've had Governor John Hickenlooper, who's now Senator John Hickenlooper, on a couple of times. We talk to people from all parties. So, you know, one of our good friends is Doug High, who was the RNC communications director, and we've also had on our friend Mo Lathie, who's the DNC communications director. And I always try to get different perspectives,

because I will tell you this. One thing I think we can agree on, if I can make a statement about politics now, no party has a monopoly on bad ideas, Greg, historically. No, nope. I'm going to agree with you on that, man. So check us out there. Absolutely. Okay. Thank you so much. And I look forward to talking to you again soon. Likewise. Thank you. John Boovey, John Keller, John Oliveros, John Radlavich, John Schaefer, John Sheff, Jordan Corbett, Joshua Steiner, Justin M. Spriggs, Justin May, Kristen Pratt, Karen Bartholomew, Cassie Koneko, Kim R., Kyle Decker, Lawrence Neubauer, Linda Cunningham, Mark Ellis, Matthew Mitchell, Matthew Simmons, Melanie Jan, Nick Seconder, Nick Caffrell, Noah Hoff, Owen Sedlak, Paul Goeringer, Randy Guffrey, Reese Humphreys-Wadsworth, Rick Brown, Sarah Trawick, Samuel Lagasa, Sharon Thiesen, Sean Baines, Steve Williams, Creepy Girl, Tisha Black, and Zach Jackson.