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By Root 2600 0

all the property in the 22 states and territories west of the Mississippi’.14 With great wealth came the luxury of eccentricity. James Hill of the Great Northern Railroad reportedly fired an employee because the man’s name was Spittles. The servants at J. P. Morgan’s London residence nightly prepared dinner, turned down the bed and laid out nightclothes for their master even when he was known beyond doubt to be three thousand miles away in New York. The industrialist John M. Longyear, disturbed by the opening of a railroad line past his Michigan residence, had the entire estate packed up – sixty-room house, hedges, trees, shrubs, fountains, the works – and re-erected in Brookline, Massachusetts.15 James Gordon Bennett, a newspaper baron, liked to announce his arrival in a restaurant by yanking the tablecloths from all the tables he passed. He would then hand the manager a wad of cash with which to compensate his victims for their lost meals and spattered attire. Though long forgotten in his native land, Bennett and his exploits – invariably involving prodigious drinking before and lavish restitution after – were once world famous, and indeed his name lives on in England in the cry ‘Gordon Bennett!’, usually uttered by someone who has just been drenched by a clumsy waiter or otherwise exposed to some exasperating indignity.

The indulgences of the rich become all the more insufferable when contrasted with the miserable condition of those whose labours sustained their wealth. Through the 1860s, workers in factories – or manufactories as they were still often called – routinely worked sixteen-hour days six days a week for less than twenty cents a day. Often they were paid in scrip, which they could spend only at the factory store. Workplaces were often ill-lit, ill-heated and filled with dangerous machinery and perilous substances. A physician in the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, noted just after the turn of the century that 36 per cent of factory workers there didn’t live to see their twenty-fifth birthdays.16

As America prospered, less attractive words entered the language, like slum (a word of uncertain origin, but probably based on a British dialectal variant of slime) and sweatshop (commonly shortened to sweater and first recorded in 1867), and tenderloin for the less salubrious areas of cities. This last named has been traced to a New York policeman who announced upon being assigned to the district around Forty-second Street that the opportunities for graft would enable him to stop eating ground beef and switch to tenderloin. The obvious pun on a prostitute’s salient anatomical feature no doubt helped to reinforce the term.17 Older words, too, sometimes took on new, more sinister meanings. Tenement originally described any tenanted dwelling. In America, where only the poor lived in shared housing, it had by the 1840s taken on the sense of a crowded, fetid building inhabited by the lowest orders.

Out in the sunshine of prosperity, however, it was a dazzling age. A brief list of just some American inventions of the period may give an idea of the dynamism that seized the country: the passenger elevator, escalator, telephone, phonograph, air-brake, cash register, electric light, fountain-pen, linotype, box camera, pneumatic tire, adding machine, revolving door, safety pin, and typewriter. All were invented in America, mostly in the frantic last quarter of the nineteenth century, and all were designed to relieve people of some everyday inconvenience. Where other countries tied their fortunes to revolutionary industrial processes – Bessemer steel, Jacquard looms, steam presses – Americans churned out appliances that made life easier. They took to heart Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous apophthegm: ‘Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.’ Or they would have, had Emerson ever said any such thing. In fact, what Emerson said didn’t mention mousetraps and was a good deal more prolix: ‘If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles