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By Root 2599 0

quantities of raw materials and finished products that dwarfed the output of other countries – sometimes dwarfed the output of all other countries put together. Between 1850 and 1900, American coal production rose from 14 million tons to over 100 million, steel output went from barely 1 million tons to over 25 million, paper production increased ninefold, pig-iron production sevenfold, cotton-seed oil by a factor of fourteen, copper wire by a factor of almost twenty. In 1850 America’s 23 million people had a cumulative wealth of $7.1 billion. Fifty years later, the population had tripled to 76 million, but the wealth had increased thirteen-fold to $94.3 billion.4 In 1894 America displaced Britain as the world’s leading manufacturer. By 1914 it was the world’s leading producer of coal, natural gas, oil, copper, iron ore and silver, and its factories were producing more goods than those of Britain, Germany and France together. Within thirty years of Garfield’s death, one-fourth of all the world’s wealth was in American hands.

For the average American, progress was not, in the words of Henry Steele Commager, ‘a philosophical idea but a commonplace of experience ... Nothing in all history had ever succeeded like America, and every American knew it.‘5 In no other country could the common person enjoy such an intoxicating possibility of accumulating wealth. An obsession with money – and more specifically with the making of money – had long been evident in the national speech. As early as the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin was reminding his readers that ‘time is money’ and foreign visitors were remarking on the distinctly American expression ‘to net a cool thousand’,6 and on the custom of defining a person as being ‘worth so-and-so many dollars’. Long before Henry Clay thought up the term in 1832, America was the land of the ‘self-made man’.7 At about the same time people began referring to the shapers of the American economy as ‘businessmen’. The word had existed in English since at least 1670, but previously it had suggested only someone engaged in public affairs.8 In the sense of a person concerned with the serious matter of creating wealth it is an Americanism dating from 1830. As the century progressed people could be well-fixed (1822), well-to-do (1825), in the dimes (1843), in clover (1847), heeled (1867; well-heeled didn’t come until the twentieth century), a high roller (1881), or a money-bag (1896, and made into the plural money-bags early in this century). As early as the 1850s they could hope to strike it rich and by the 1880s they could dream of living the life of Riley (from a popular song of the period, ‘Is That Mr Reilly?’, in which the hero speculates on what he would do with a fortune).9

Not everyone liked this new thrusting America. In 1844 Philip Hone, a mayor of New York and a noted social critic, wrote ‘Oh, for the good old days’, the first use of the phrase.10 But most people, then as now, wanted nothing more than to get their hands on ‘the almighty dollar’, an expression coined by Washington Irving in 1836 in an article in the Knickerbocker Magazine.11

A great many of them did. As early as the mid-1820s, Americans were talking admiringly of millionaires, a term borrowed from the British who had in turn taken it from the French, and by 1850 were supplementing the word with a more aggressive version of their own devising: multimillionaires.12 An American lucky enough to get in on the ground floor (1872) with an arresting invention or a timely investment might reasonably hope to become a millionaire himself. In 1840 the country had no more than twenty millionaires. By 1915 there were 40,000.13

The new class of tycoons (from the Japanese taikun, ’military commander’, and first applied to business leaders in the 1870s) enjoyed a concentration of money and power that is almost unimaginable now. In 1891 John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil controlled 70 per cent of the world market for oil. J. P. Morgan’s House of Morgan and its associate companies in 1912 were worth more ‘than the assessed value of