Z **Archived from Fall 2008** American Economic History

Notes: Growth Accounting and the Pre-Industrial American Economy

Notes: Growth Accounting and the Pre-Industrial American Economy

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Notes: Who Benefited Most From North American Slavery?

Notes: Who Benefited Most From North American Slavery?:

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20080903 Malthusian Economy Problem Set

Due at lecture, Wednesday September 10:

1. Why do we think that for most of the period from 12000 BC to 1492, most of the Amerindian population was, by our standards, quite poor?

2. Suppose that an unpressured human population grows at an average rate of 3% per year, that colonization starts with 1000 humans in 12000 BC, and that the carrying capacity of the Americas with hunter-gatherer technologies is 10 million. What is the latest date at which the Amerindian population could possibly have been thought of as unconstrained by Malthusian scarcity?

3. Suppose that the Europeans had landed as they did around 1500, but also suppose that the Amerindians: had been lucky and better organized, had destroyed Cortes's expedition and those of a few more conquistadores, and had confined Spanish settlement to the islands and a few coastal enclaves like Vera Cruz. In this counterfactual history the plagues would still have decimated the Amerindian population--say, reduced it from 50 million to 5 million. But then it would have been in a Malthusian unstressed state, growing at 3% per year, and people would have built up immunity. About how many years after 1500 would it have taken before the Amerindian population would have grown back up to 25 million or so?

4. Provide three potential partial explanations for why it is that pre-industrial hunter-gatherer populations appear healthier than pre-industrial settled-agriculture populations.

5. Is the general level of rents likely to be low or high when land is abundant? Is the general standard of living likely to be low or high?

Why Are We Here? (In a Big Lecture, That Is)

Why do we still have big lecture courses in universities? It is somewhat of a mystery...

The Pre-Gutenberg University:

• Universities have their origins in the medieval need of the powerful to train theologians (for the church) and to train judges (for the emperor and the kings of France, England, Castile, and other kingdoms.
• A manuscript hand-copied book back in 1000 cost roughly the same share of average annual income as $50,000 is today.
• Hence if you have a "normal" college--eight semesters, four courses a semester--and demand that people buy and read one book a course, you are talking the equivalent of $1.6M in book outlay. Can't be done.
• Hence you assemble the hundred or so people who want to read Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy in a room, and have the professor read to them--hence lecture, lecturer, from the Latin lector, reader--while they frantically take notes because they are likely to never see a copy of that book again once they are out in the world administering justice in Wuerzburg or wherever...

Then Comes Gutenberg:

• From Greg Clark: The Secret History of the Industrial Revolution: "[C]onsider the introduction of the printed book by Gutenberg in 1445, again in the period where we can find no evidence of aggregate productivity growth, at least in England.... Output per worker increased by roughly 30 fold from manuscript production in the fourteenth century till the early nineteenth century... greater than the productivity advances achieved in the cotton textile industry over the Industrial Revolution period, though it took place over a much longer period..."
• Institution of the lecture does not make its original sense.
• Why not get everybody to buy the book, read the book, and then assemble in seminars to discuss the book?
  • Almost all of us can read faster than a lecturer can talk.
  • It is much easier to index and rewind a codex than a live audio stream before the age of mechanical reproduction.

Yet the Lecture Remains: Why? Four Possible Reasons:

• Budget stringency: lectures are cheap for the university relative to seminars, and even if they are markedly less effective they do soak up students' time
• Alternative information channel: The ears are wired to the brain differently than the eyes, and there is value in not only reading something but also hearing something in producing the synaptic changes that we want to see happen in college.
• A self-discipline device: if people have to show up at a certain place at a certain time to accomplish a task or be disciplined, they are more likely to do so. Lecture as a way of solving our self-command and self-control problems.
  • But why not then just have a study hall? Everyone reads the book, and the monitor circulates and answers quetions?
• A sociological event: East African Plains Apes like to do things in groups that involve language--that is just who we are--and the lecture is just another example of this

All four of these surely play some role. But I have no idea of the relative balance between them--and neither, it seems, does anybody else I can find...

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Early universitates magistrorum et scholarium:

848: Magnaura (Constantinople)
859: Al-Karaouine (Fez, Morocco)
975: Al-Azhar (Cairo)
1088: Bologna
1096: Oxford
1150: Sorbonne (Paris)
1175: Modena
1209: Cambridge
1218: Salamanca
1222: Padua
1224: Naples
1233: Mustansiriya (Baghdad)

20080827 Econ 113 Handout

Economics 113: August 27: Introductory Lecture: Handout

Lecture Notes: http://tinyurl.com/dl20080827
Course Syllabus: http://tinyurl.com/43sufu

J. Bradford DeLong; delong@econ.berkeley.edu Evans 601: Lecture: MW 4-5:30 4LeConte
Andrej Milivojevic; andrej@berkeley.edu: Sections: T4-5 87 Dwinelle, W8-9 61 Evans
Marc Gersen; mgersen@econ.berkeley.edu: Sections: F2-3 55 Evans, F3-4 55 Evans
Matthew Sargent; sargent@berkeley.edu: Sections: M9-10 85 Evans, Th1-2 45 Evans

Economics 113 is an upper-division economics course in the study of the history of the U.S. economy that satisfies the political economy major historical context requirement. We will survey over three hundred years of history, but inevitably focus more intensely on those incidents that the instructor finds particularly interesting. This is an economics course: we will spend most of our time looking at events, factors, and explanations, using economics to understand history and history to understand economics.

We have a textbook--Walton and Rockoff. Auxilliary books: Blinder and Yellen, and Friedman. Articles and web readings as well...

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• Administrivia
• Overview of Course
• Why Are We Here?
  • The Role of the University
  • Relevance of Economic History
  • Studying Economic History
  • Framework: Economic Growth & Development
• Assignments and Cleanup

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Administrivia:

• Final exam: Th Dec 18 8-11
• Enrollment
  • If you want to take the course, do all the assignments starting now
  • Enrollment through Telebears only
  • Attend sections!
• Grading
  • Exams:
    • Final: 20%
    • Midterms: 20% each
    • We will grade hard, but drop your lowest
  • Problem sets, 1500 and 500 word paper, et cetera: 20%
    • Assignments due Wednesday at lecture...
  • Lecture reactions: 10%
  • Section participation: 10%
    • Section week starts Thursday morning...

Overview of Course:

• Overview (Aug 27)
• Before the Civil War (Sep 3-22)
• Instructor-Reality-Check Midterm 1: September 24
• America Becomes an Industrial Society, 1870-1950 (Sep 29-Oct 15)
• The Triumph of Social Democracy, 1950-Present (Oct 20-Nov 10)
• Midterm 2: November 12
• The Crisis of Social Democracy (Nov 24-Dec 10)
• Final Exam (Dec 18)

Why Are We Here?

• The Role of the University
• Relevance of Economic History
  • Economic theory in general: theory is crystalized history, boiled down, and it is important to check that the right ingredients have been thrown into the mix
  • The economic history of the United States is particularly interesting for two reasons:
    • We are here...
    • It has been for two centuries a very special country: people, economic institutions, politics, and wealth
• Studying Economic History
  • Representative cases
  • Interconnections and patterns
  • Abstraction
  • Modelling
• Framework of Questions: Growth, Distribution, Markets, Institutions, and Politics

---

For you to do before your first section:

• Write a one-page paper in which you introduce yourself to your GSI
  • Include your name (and anything else you want him to know)
  • include a photo if you can
  • Submit at section (and via email)

For you to read before class on September 3:

• Walton and Rockoff, "The American Economy in Historical Perspective"
• Six Families Budget Their Money, 1884
• Walton and Rockoff, "Founding the Colonies;" *Bartholomew Gosnold Sails Along Northeastern North America, 1602:;
• Jared Diamond (1987), "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," Discover;
• Jared Diamond (2008), "Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents For The Last 13,000 Years?"

For you to think about over the next week:

Roughly 14000 years ago rough 100 humans made it to the Americas across the Bering Land Bridge.

A Malthusianly-unstressed preindustrial human population with reasonable access to food (whether hunter-gatherer, herder, or settled agriculture) roughly doubles in a generation of 25 years or so.

If the incipient Amerindian population had remained unstressed, how many American Indians would there be today?

What implications does this have for how we think about the human history of the Americas between ca. 12000 BC and 1492?

For you to do before midnight:

• Surf to http://tinyurl.com/dl20080827
• Scroll down to the bottom of the page
• Send me a comment as feedback on this lecture, telling me what was the most interesting, boring, or confusing thing you heard--or what you did not hear that you expected to--this afternoon.

Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents For The Last 13,000 Years?

Jared Diamond: Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents For The Last 13,000 Years?: I've set myself the modest task of trying to explain the broad pattern of human history, on all the continents, for the last 13,000 years. Why did history take such different evolutionary courses for peoples of different continents? This problem has fascinated me for a long time, but it's now ripe for a new synthesis because of recent advances in many fields seemingly remote from history, including molecular biology, plant and animal genetics and biogeography, archaeology, and linguistics.

As we all know, Eurasians, especially peoples of Europe and eastern Asia, have spread around the globe, to dominate the modern world in wealth and power. Other peoples, including most Africans, survived, and have thrown off European domination but remain behind in wealth and power. Still other peoples, including the original inhabitants of Australia, the Americas, and southern Africa, are no longer even masters of their own lands but have been decimated, subjugated, or exterminated by European colonialists. Why did history turn out that way, instead of the opposite way? Why weren't Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who conquered or exterminated Europeans and Asians?

This big question can easily be pushed back one step further. By the year A.D. 1500, the approximate year when Europe's overseas expansion was just beginning, peoples of the different continents already differed greatly in technology and political organization. Much of Eurasia and North Africa was occupied then by Iron Age states and empires, some of them on the verge of industrialization. Two Native American peoples, the Incas and Aztecs, ruled over empires with stone tools and were just starting to experiment with bronze. Parts of sub-Saharan Africa were divided among small indigenous Iron Age states or chiefdoms. But all peoples of Australia, New Guinea, and the Pacific islands, and many peoples of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, were still living as farmers or even still as hunter/ gatherers with stone tools.

Obviously, those differences as of A.D. 1500 were the immediate cause of the modern world's inequalities. Empires with iron tools conquered or exterminated tribes with stone tools. But how did the world evolve to be the way that it was in the year A.D. 1500?

This question, too can be easily pushed back a further step, with the help of written histories and archaeological discoveries. Until the end of the last Ice Age around 11,000 B.C., all humans on all continents were still living as Stone Age hunter/gatherers. Different rates of development on different continents, from 11,000 B.C. to A.D. 1500, were what produced the inequalities of A.D. 1500. While Aboriginal Australians and many Native American peoples remained Stone Age hunter/gatherers, most Eurasian peoples, and many peoples of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, gradually developed agriculture, herding, metallurgy, and complex political organization. Parts of Eurasia, and one small area of the Americas, developed indigenous writing as well. But each of these new developments appeared earlier in Eurasia than elsewhere.

So, we can finally rephrase our question about the evolution of the modern world's inequalities as follows. Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years? Those differing rates constitute the broadest pattern of history, the biggest unsolved problem of history, and my subject today....

Most of us are familiar with the stories of how a few hundred Spaniards under Cortes and Pizarro overthrew the Aztec and Inca Empires. The populations of each of those empires numbered tens of millions. We're also familiar with the gruesome details of how other Europeans conquered other parts of the New World. The result is that Europeans came to settle and dominate most of the New World, while the Native American population declined drastically from its level as of A.D. 1492. Why did it happen that way? Why didn't it instead happen that the Emperors Montezuma or Atahuallpa led the Aztecs or Incas to conquer Europe?

The proximate reasons are obvious. Invading Europeans had steel swords, guns, and horses, while Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few dozen mounted Spaniards to defeat Indian armies numbering in the thousands.

Nevertheless, steel swords, guns, and horses weren't the sole proximate factors behind the European conquest of the New World. Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World's Indian population. Those diseases were endemic in Europe, and Europeans had had time to develop both genetic and immune resistance to them, but Indians initially had no such resistance. That role played by infectious diseases in the European conquest of the New World was duplicated in many other parts of the world, including Aboriginal Australia, southern Africa, and many Pacific islands.

Finally, there is still another set of proximate factors to consider. How is it that Pizarro and Cortes reached the New World at all, before Aztec and Inca conquistadors could reach Europe? That outcome depended partly on technology in the form of oceangoing ships. Europeans had such ships, while the Aztecs and Incas did not. Also, those European ships were backed by the centralized political organization that enabled Spain and other European countries to build and staff the ships. Equally crucial was the role of European writing in permitting the quick spread of accurate detailed information, including maps, sailing directions, and accounts by earlier explorers, back to Europe, to motivate later explorers.

So far, we've identified a series of proximate factors behind European colonization of the New World: namely, ships, political organization, and writing that brought Europeans to the New World; European germs that killed most Indians before they could reach the battlefield; and guns, steel swords, and horses that gave Europeans a big advantage on the battlefield. Now, let's try to push the chain of causation back further. Why did these proximate advantages go to the Old World rather than to the New World? Theoretically, Native Americans might have been the ones to develop steel swords and guns first, to develop oceangoing ships and empires and writing first, to be mounted on domestic animals more terrifying than horses, and to bear germs worse than smallpox.

The part of that question that's easiest to answer concerns the reasons why Eurasia evolved the nastiest germs. It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans, in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World. There are two straightforward reasons for this gross imbalance. First, most of our familiar epidemic diseases can sustain themselves only in large dense human populations concentrated into villages and cities, which arose much earlier in the Old World than in the New World. Second, recent studies of microbes, by molecular biologists, have shown that most human epidemic diseases evolved from similar epidemic diseases of the dense populations of Old World domestic animals with which we came into close contact. For example, measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.

Let's now push the chain of reasoning back one step further. Why were there far more species of domesticated animals in Eurasia than in the Americas? The Americas harbor over a thousand native wild mammal species, so you might initially suppose that the Americas offered plenty of starting material for domestication.

In fact, only a tiny fraction of wild mammal species has been successfully domesticated, because domestication requires that a wild animal fulfill many prerequisites: the animal has to have a diet that humans can supply; a rapid growth rate; a willingness to breed in captivity; a tractable disposition; a social structure involving submissive behavior towards dominant animals and humans; and lack of a tendency to panic when fenced in. Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.

Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it's the world's largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with. That preexisting difference was magnified 13,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age, when most of the large mammal species of North and South America became extinct, perhaps exterminated by the first arriving Indians. As a result, Native Americans inherited far fewer species of big wild mammals than did Eurasians, leaving them only with the llama and alpaca as a domesticate. Differences between the Old and New Worlds in domesticated plants, especially in large-seeded cereals, are qualitatively similar to t hese differences in domesticated mammals, though the difference is not so extreme....

[T]he north/south axis of the Americas meant that species domesticated in one area couldn't spread far without encountering day-lengths and climates to which they were not adapted. As a result, the turkey never spread from its site of domestication in Mexico to the Andes; llamas and alpacas never spread from the Andes to Mexico, so that the Indian civilizations of Central and North America remained entirely without pack animals; and it took thousands of years for the corn that evolved in Mexico's climate to become modified into a corn adapted to the short growing season and seasonally changing day-length of North America.

Eurasia's domesticated plants and animals were important for several other reasons besides letting Europeans develop nasty germs. Domesticated plants and animals yield far more calories per acre than do wild habitats, in which most species are inedible to humans. As a result, population densities of farmers and herders are typically ten to a hundred times greater than those of hunter/gatherers. That fact alone explains why farmers and herders everywhere in the world have been able to push hunter/gatherers out of land suitable for farming and herding. Domestic animals revolutionized land transport. They also revolutionized agriculture, by letting one farmer plough and manure much more land than the farmer could till or manure by the farmer's own efforts. Also, hunter/gatherer societies tend to be egalitarian and to have no political organization beyond the level of the band or tribe, whereas the food surpluses and storage made possible by agriculture permitted the development of stratified, politically centralized societies with governing elites. Those food surpluses also accelerated the development of technology, by supporting craftspeople who didn't raise their own food and who could instead devote themselves to developing metallurgy, writing, swords, and guns.

Thus, we began by identifying a series of proximate explanations ÷ guns, germs, and so on ÷ for the conquest of the Americas by Europeans. Those proximate factors seem to me ultimately traceable in large part to the Old World's greater number of domesticated plants, much greater number of domesticated animals, and east/west axis. The chain of causation is most direct in explaining the Old World's advantages of horses and nasty germs. But domesticated plants and animals also led more indirectly to Eurasia's advantage in guns, swords, oceangoing ships, political organization, and writing, all of which were products of the large, dense, sedentary, stratified societies made possible by agriculture....

[T]echnology has to be invented or adopted. Human societies vary in lots of independent factors affecting their openness to innovation. Hence the higher the human population and the more societies there are on an island or continent, the greater the chance of any given invention being conceived and adopted somewhere there. Second, for all human societies except those of totally-isolated Tasmania, most technological innovations diffuse in from the outside, instead of being invented locally, so one expects the evolution of technology to proceed most rapidly in societies most closely connected with outside societies.

Finally, technology not only has to be adopted; it also has to be maintained. All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use. Whenever such economically senseless taboos arise in an area with many competing human societies, only some societies will adopt the taboo at a given time. Other societies will retain the useful practice, and will either outcompete the societies that lost it, or else will be there as a model for the societies with the taboos to repent their error and reacquire the practice.... All other things being equal, the rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere. If this interpretation is correct, then it's... likely to contribute to the differences that I already discussed between the farmers of sub-Saharan Africa, the farmers of the much larger Americas, and the farmers of the still larger Eurasia....

The broadest pattern of history -- namely, the differences between human societies on different continents -- seems to me to be attributable to differences among continental environments, and not to biological differences among peoples themselves. In particular, the availability of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication, and the ease with which those species could spread without encountering unsuitable climates, contributed decisively to the varying rates of rise of agriculture and herding, which in turn contributed decisively to the rise of human population numbers, population densities, and food surpluses, which in turn contributed decisively to the development of epidemic infectious diseases, writing, technology, and political organization.

Reading for M Sep 8: Colonists: Inventory of the Possessions of Thomas Springer, 1804

Inventory of Thomas Springer's possessions:

• Inventory page 1
• Inventory page 2
• Inventory page 3

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/sia/2clark.htm#

Barbara Clark Smith is Curator of Social History at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, where she has worked since 1983. Her research ranges from the material culture of household life to forms of popular participation in the era of the American Revolution. Dr. Smith has curated exhibitions on such topics as household and community life in the early republic, costume and the construction of gender, and the history of housework. Her publications include After the Revolution: The Smithsonian History of Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century; "Food Rioters and the American Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly, (1994); and "Revolution in Boston," for the National Park Service handbook for the Freedom Trail:

WHAT QUESTIONS DO YOU BRING TO READING A DOCUMENT LIKE THIS?

This is an inventory. An inventory and appraisement of the goods and chattel of a man named Thomas Springer in 1804. And an inventory is a list of the possessions of someone that's taken after that person dies. It's usually the head of the household because that's who owns the possessions. Therefore most of the inventories we have are inventories of men. And it's a document that's created by the fact that wealth in the late 18th, early 19th-century, is not so much in the form of things in the bank or things in the stock market, but real estate and actual moveable goods. So when someone dies, the county court appoints appraisers, local men, to go out and look at an estate, see what's there, list it, and estimate its value. And these documents are of immense interest to people who want to know about the possessions and the living standards of people in the past. Particularly about people who aren't famous, or whose things were not saved. You can get a sense of what did this man own at least at the time of his death. What was in his household?

Thomas Springer is someone I got interested in--his possessions are something I got interested in, as a museum curator. It was my job to figure out what this man owned because we, at the Smithsonian, owned the house that he lived in. This was a house built in the 1790's and it's built of logs. And it was collected some time ago. My job was to go back and find out everything I could about the people who lived in this house. Not just Thomas Springer, but his wife, Elizabeth. It's hard to find out about Elizabeth--she doesn't have the inventory. Although there may be hints in here about her life, too.

WHAT THINGS WOULD YOU WANT TO KNOW THAT YOU CAN’T LEARN FROM JUST READING THE INVENTORY?

The first thing I'd want to do is know a good deal more about Thomas Springer. It's really hard to know much about him with only this. So, I'd go track down… luckily I can find him in tax lists, find out what he's listed as owning at different moments, how much he paid, find his will. I can find a record of his marriage, and his children's birth in the local church. And I can find the deeds of his sales. So I'd want to find out as much as I can about him. And then I want to find out about other people who live in Mill Creek Hundred, or New Castle County, those other people on the tax lists. What their lives are like, how much land they own, what possessions they have. So that I can tell, is this man typical or is he exceptional in some way? And for that I'd want to then locate the document in the context of other documents, particularly in this region. And compare this inventory with the inventory of other people in Northern Delaware in this time period. Maybe take a 10-year period of time and see, of people who die, and paying attention to how old they are when they die. What do they own? How much is it valued at? So I think, that, first Thomas Springer, find out more about him. And then find out more about the other people around him in his community and what's going on in the region in general.

I think what's interesting; the other final context is the context of change in material culture. And probably what's most interesting there is the house itself. Because it's very easy to have an image of 18th-century houses and early 19th-century houses as being several different rooms, high style, with separate parlors, bedrooms. A central hall in the Georgian style. That's what you see when you go to most historic houses because the ones that have been saved are these very nice houses of well-to-do people. And here's a really ordinary house. It's small. We'd have a hard time being comfortable living in this space. And there's no evidence particularly, that Tom Springer or Elizabeth Springer or their children had a hard time living in this space. And this as it turns out is extremely typical. Most people in the early 19th century are still living in one or two room houses made of wood. Not made of brick, not fancy, nothing permanent, nothing meant to last all that long.

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE THINGS YOU LEARN BY READING THIS INVENTORY?

Like many of these inventories it begins with the wearing apparel of the deceased. The basic thing is coats, jackets, shirts, trousers, hats, boots, drawers. Those are valuable items. You can see that clothing are valuable. They're valued here in 1804 at 30 dollars. You can look at the list of how things are valued and get a sense of what were expensive things and what were cheap things. Many inventories are like this. They're simply a straight list. A few go room by room. They list different rooms. They say, "In the parlor, there was this." Those are usually the inventories of the most well to do people because they have a lot of rooms. This man lives in a one-room house, perhaps with a loft upstairs. So you have to picture the inventory men coming through and as you read their list you can get a sense, to some degree, not just of what Thomas Springer may have owned, but of how it may have been arranged or organized.

As you go thorough you begin to see a place where they tell us certain things about particular belongings. I'd ask the question, "What's really surprising?" Well, one thing is this man owned one thing worth 40 dollars. It's a piece of furniture which is a really expensive item and that's an eight-day clock. One looking glass worth one dollar and an eight-day clock: 40 dollars. So that's kind of interesting. That's a luxury item. And it's certainly a luxury for a farmer to own a clock. You don't need the clock to know when to milk the cows. And, that's a sign that this man doesn't live too far from Wilmington, where he's very likely to have purchased this clock. And he's interested in what is a scientific piece of equipment and an expensive one. There's a point as you go down through the list you can learn about… unfortunately you get to read something like this in many inventories: "a lot of books, fifty cents." And I'd love to know what the books were. My guess is a bible, okay, what else? I'd love to know what he was reading. But it does suggest people in this house were literate. It doesn't simply say, "a family bible" which might be there whether people read or not. This suggests some people are reading.

You certainly get a picture of a few of their behaviors. They have teacups and a tea table, so they're probably partakers in the afternoon or evening ceremony of tea. There's a part where it seems they've gone from the house, outside. This is right at the bottom of the first page of the typed copy. After a lot of "Queensware," which is ceramic ware, you start finding "saddles, saddlebag, blanket and bridle, axes, maul and wedges, sledges and a crowbar." Here, maybe we've moved to the barn. Maybe we've moved to an outside building of some sort. "Two spinning wheels." Alright there we're getting a sense possibly, of what women in the Springer household may have done. Maybe that tells us a little something about Elizabeth.

The most shocking thing in the list, that takes you up short, is we find listed, right among the artifacts, people. "One Negro man, named A something-something-Ace" is the closest I came. "Nine years to serve. Valued at 180 dollars." Below that, "one old Negro man, a slave, 66 years old named Will, valued at zero." One's first response I think is, as I say, just of shock, that we've been listing horses and bridles and now we've got people, and it reminds us about this time period, that that's a routine, this is a possession. But there's also something else in this list that's interesting. There is one, one of these people is a slave. This is in Delaware in 1804 where slavery is really dying out. It's not as profitable as it is to the South. But here's the "Negro man named Ace," nine years to serve. And that suggests to us that what Ace did was what a lot of African-Americans did which was that they negotiated for their freedom in the years after the American Revolution. And that he had some form of indenture or agreement with the Springers. That he would work for a certain amount of time, for his freedom, or he would work for a certain amount of time for a set amount of money at the end of it.

HOW DOES ONE TRY TO CONTEXTUALIZE THE MATERIAL OBJECTS THAT ARE REPRESENTED IN THE INVENTORY?

To begin with you have to figure out what they are, which in some cases is really hard. A corner cupboard, I sort of have an image of, or thought I did. "Decanters, jars." But something like "Queensware" is worth going and looking up-either in a dictionary or in a local museum or in a ceramics history. "Queensware" is imported ceramics, kind of middling. You can find images of it. Again, you'd always want to compare. That is, in many cases there are very fine examples of something and not so fine examples of something. So you'd want to get a sense of what did most people own. Is this person typical or atypical? Looking at the artifact themselves is a great help.

The other thing I should mention about moving to artifacts is that there is a wealth of knowledge that people who've studied material culture have about what was typical in certain regions at certain times. And that doesn't mean that your one inventory may not be atypical because he may, his six leather-bottomed chairs, maybe they're a family heirloom and they came down from somebody in some other part of the country. That's possible. But given what we know about how expensive it is to transport things over land or to put chairs on a ship and ship them out, that's unlikely. They are likely to be fairly locally made or at least locally sold. They may have been brought in by boat from say, Philadelphia to Wilmington. And there's a lot of studies that material culture scholars have done to figure out what specifically did people own.

I think probably the main thing about these inventories is that they're most valuable when you have a whole lot of them. You need a great number of them and many of the studies of them have been quantitative. So we know what people in say a given county--if you could go to this entire Hundred, Mill Creek Hundred, of New Castle County in Delaware, in a 10-year time period and go through and see what different people owned, that would give you a good idea about what some of these things were. And which of these things were typical, which of these things were extraordinary to this family, if anything. If that's the same or different than it is in other parts of the country, you'd want to know that.

20080827 Econ 113 Lecture: Administration and Overview

Economics 113: August 27: Introductory Lecture:

Lecture Audio: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2008_mov/20080827.mp3

This file: http://tinyurl.com/dl20080827; http://delong.typepad.com/american_economic_history/2008/08/20080827-econ-1.html

J. Bradford DeLong delong@econ.berkeley.edu Evans 601: Lecture: 4 LeConte; MW 4-5:30

Andrej Milivojevic andrej@berkeley.edu: Sections: T4-5 87 Dwinelle, W8-9 61 Evans
Marc Gersen mgersen@econ.berkeley.edu: Sections: F2-3 55 Evans, F3-4 55 Evans
Matthew Sargent sargent@berkeley.edu: Sections: M9-10 85 Evans, Th1-2 45 Evans

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Economics 113 is an upper-division economics course in the study of the history of the U.S. economy that satisfies the political economy historical context requirement. We will survey over three hundred years of history, but inevitably focus more intensely on those incidents that the instructor finds particularly interesting. This is an economics course: we will spend most of our time looking at events, factors, and explanations, using economics to understand history and history to understand economics. Economics 113 must be taken for a grade if it is to be used toward the requirements for the political economy or the economics major.

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We have a textbook--Walton and Rockoff's big book. We have two auxilliary books: Blinder and Yellen, and Friedman. We have a bunch of articles and web readings.

For those unfamiliar with U.S. history, Marty Olney recommends John Faragher et al (2005), Out of Many (New York: Prentice-Hall)

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• Administrivia
• Overview of Course
• Why Are We Here?
  • The Role of the University
  • Relevance of Economic History
  • Studying Economic History
  • Framework: Economic Growth & Development
• Assignments and Cleanup

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Administrivia:

• Course webpage http://tinyurl.com/43sufu http://delong.typepad.com/american_economic_history/

• Staff

  • J. Bradford DeLong delong@econ.berkeley.edu Evans 601:
  • Andrej Milivojevic andrej@berkeley.edu: Sections: T4-5 87 Dwinelle, W8-9 61 Evans
  • Marc Gersen mgersen@econ.berkeley.edu: Sections: F2-3 55 Evans, F3-4 55 Evans
  • Matthew Sargent sargent@berkeley.edu: Sections: M9-10 85 Evans, Th1-2 45 Evans

• Final exam: Th Dec 18 8-11

• Enrollment

  • If you want to take the course, do all the assignments starting now
  • Enrollment through Telebears only
  • If you don't attend the first two sections, the Econ Department will drop you
  • For your first section meeting: a one-page paper in which you introduce yourself to your GSI
    • Include your name and anything else
    • include a photo if you can

• Grading

  • Two grading options:
    • I assign a lot of work--especially reading. You do the work. Course median a low B+
    • I assign a lot of work--especially reading. You don't do the work. Course median a low B
    • This is the finest public university on the planet, and the finest university on the planet for some definitions of "finest"
    • Your choice
    • Exams:
    • Final: 20%
    • Midterms: 20% each
    • We will grade hard, but drop your lowest
      • Yes, this includes scores of 0...
    • Problem sets and papers, et cetera: 20%
    • Lecture reactions: 10%
    • Section participation: 10%
    • A word about section coordination:
    • Section week starts Thursday morning...
    • General assignments due Wednesday at lecture...

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Overview of Course:

• Overview (Aug 27)
• Before the Civil War (Settlement, Slavery, Growth, Political Economy) (Sep 3-22)
• Instructor-Reality-Check Midterm 1: September 24
• America Becomes an Industrial Society, 1870-1950 (Technologies, Factories, Workers, Depressions, New Deal, World War II, Cold War) (Sep 29-Oct 15)
• The Triumph of Social Democracy: Inclusion, Redistribution, and Stabilization, 1950-Present (Oct 20-Nov 10)
• Midterm 2: November 12
• The Crisis of Social Democracy (Reagan, Pensions, Doctors, the New Economy, Oil Shocks, Global Warming, Limits to growth) (Nov 17-Dec 10)
• Final Exam (Dec 18)

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The Role of the University:

• Why are we here?

---

The Relevance of Economic History:

Economic history sheds light on:

• The role of education in the economy
• The nature and causes of economic growth
• Boom and bust cycles--in high tech and elsewhere
• The pros and cons of immigration
• Work and opportunity
• The appropriate size and role of the government
• Economic theory in general: theory is crystalized history, boiled down, and it is important to check that the right ingredients have been thrown into the mix
• The economic history of the United States is particularly interesting for two reasons:
  • We are here...
  • It has been for two centuries a very special country...
    • Politics
    • People

---

The Method of Economic History:

• Economics: concerned with averages
• Cases are useful in that they shed light on what average numbers mean, but unrepresentative cases are--to me, and us, at least here--uninteresting
• Not facts but interconnections and patterns are interesting
• History is key for understanding economic theory: theory is crystalized history, boiled down, and it is important to check that the right ingredients have been thrown into the mix
• Economists ruthlessly abstract from details
• Economists model
  • Words
  • Equations
  • Graphs
• Clometrics: economic theory and statistical reasoning to understand history
• Counterfactual: how would things have been different if X had happened differently?
• Models we will use:
  • Demography
  • Growth accounting
  • Competitive market equilibrium
  • Tariffs and trade
  • Returns to factors of production
  • Investment and economic growth
  • Interest group politics
  • The quantity theory of money
  • Manias, panics, and crashes
  • Keynesian models of output determination
  • Increasing returns and technological change
  • Unions and union threat
  • Discrimination
  • International migration
  • Institutions and incentives
  • Resource scarcity and energy shocks
  • Climate change
• The Framework of questions
  • Growth
  • Distribution
  • Markets
  • Institutions
  • Politics

---

Section assignment for first section meeting:

A one-page paper in which you introduce yourself to your GSI

• Include your name and anything else
• include a photo if you can
• Submit at section (or via email)

---

For you to think about over the next week:

Roughly 14000 years ago rough 100 humans made it to the Americas across the Bering Land Bridge.

A Malthusianly-unstressed preindustrial human population with reasonable access to food (whether hunter-gatherer, herder, or settled agriculture) roughly doubles in a generation of 25 years or so.

If the incipient Amerindian population had remained unstressed, how many American Indians would there be today?

What implications does this have for how we think about the human history of the Americas between ca. 12000 BC and 1492?

---

Readings for September 3:

Required:

• Walton and Rockoff, "The American Economy in Historical Perspective"
• Six Families Budget Their Money, 1884
• Walton and Rockoff, "Founding the Colonies;" *Bartholomew Gosnold Sails Along Northeastern North America, 1602:;
• Jared Diamond (1987), "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," Discover;
• Jared Diamond (2008), "Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents For The Last 13,000 Years?"

20080903 Econ 113 Lecture: Amerindians, Conquistadores, Explorers, Settlers, and Empires, 10000 BC to 1800

Lecture Audio: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2008_mov/20080903.mp3

The Role of the Lecture: Four Reasons

• Budget stringency: lectures are cheap for the university relative to seminars, and even if they are markedly less effective they do soak up students' time
• Alternative information channel: The ears are wired to the brain differently than the eyes, and there is value in not only reading something but also hearing something in producing the synaptic changes that we want to see happen in college.
• A self-discipline device: if people have to show up at a certain place at a certain time to accomplish a task or be disciplined, they are more likely to do so. Lecture as a way of solving our self-command and self-control problems.
  • But why not then just have a study hall? Everyone reads the book, and the monitor circulates and answers questions?
• A sociological event: East African Plains Apes like to do things in groups that involve language--that is just who we are--and the lecture is just another example of this...

The Relevance of Economic History:

Economic history sheds light on:

• The role of education in the economy
• The nature and causes of economic growth
• Boom and bust cycles--in high tech and elsewhere
• The pros and cons of immigration
• Work and opportunity
• The appropriate size and role of the government
• Economic theory in general: theory is crystalized history, boiled down, and it is important to check that the right ingredients have been thrown into the mix
• The economic history of the United States is particularly interesting for two reasons:
  • We are here...
  • It has been for two centuries a very special country...
    • Politics
    • People

The Method of Economic History:

• Economics: concerned with averages (cases shed light on what average numbers mean, but unrepresentative cases are uninteresting); not facts but interconnections and patterns
• History: economic theory is crystalized history, boiled down, and it is important to check that the right ingredients have been thrown into the mix
• Economists abstract and model (using words, equations, and graphs)--we are going to be economists studying history
• The Framework:
  • Growth
  • Distribution
  • Markets
  • Institutions
  • Politics

---

A Question: Hunter-gatherers who are exploring a previously-unsettled frontier can walk a mile a week.

How long after their arrival in the new world ca. 14000 years ago do you think it took the Amerindians to spread out and essentially cover the entire two continents of the Americas?

What implications does this have for how we think about the human history of the Americas between ca. 12000 BC and 1492?

---

A Question: Roughly 14000 years ago rough 100 humans made it to the Americas across the Bering Land Bridge.

A Malthusianly-unstressed preindustrial human population with reasonable access to food (whether hunter-gatherer, herder, or settled agriculture) roughly doubles in a generation of 25 years or so.

If the incipient Amerindian population had remained unstressed, how many American Indians would there be today?

What implications does this have for how we think about the human history of the Americas between ca. 12000 BC and 1492?

---

Chronology:

12000 BC Clovis People: Migration to America? (100 people?)
300 Teotihuacan (10 square miles; 150,000 people?)
800 Tikal (15 square miles; 150,000 people?)
1001 Norse: Leif Eiriksson to Newfoundland
1200 Inca: Manco Capac founds Kingdom of Cuzco
1248 Mexica Tenochca: Settle Chapultepec
1325 Mexica Tenochca: Found Tenochtitlan (peak population 200,000?)
1425-1487 Mexica Tenochca: Hutzilopochtli Reformation under Tlacaelel
1428 Mexica Tenochca: Triple alliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan
1442 Inca: Tawantinsuyu Empire under Pachacutec
1449 Mexica Tenochca: Motecozoma I becomes the sixth Hueyi Tlatoani
1492 Spain: Columbus to America
1497 England: John Cabot to Newfoundland
1500 Portugal: Pedro Álvares Cabral to Brazil
1508 Spain: Cuba settled
1518 Spain: Slavery introduced into Caribbean
1521 Spain: Cortes conquers Mexico
1524 France: Verrazano to the U.S. Atlantic Coast
1527 Inca: Smallpox epidemic kills Inca Emperor Huayna Capac and crown prince Ninan Cuyochi
1529-1532 Inca: Huascar-Athualpa civil war
1533 Spain: Pizarro conquers Peru
1565 Spain: Settles St Augustine, FL
1585 England: Settles Roanoke Island, NC
1588-1603 England-Spain: War of the Armada
1607 England: Settles Jamestown, VA
1608 France: Settles Quebec
1609 Spain: Settles Santa Fe, NM
1620 England: Settles Plimouth Plantation, MA
1624 Holland: Settles New Amsterdam
1629 England: Settles Boston, MA
1634 England: Settles Maryland
1643 Sweden: Settles Pennsylvania
1664 England-Holland: England captures New York and New Jersey
1670 England: Settles Georgia
1718 France: Settles New Orleans, LA
1763 Spain-France: Spain captures New Orleans
1761 England-France: England captures Canada
1763 England: Royal proclamation places a moratorium on settlement beyond the Appalachian mountains
1769 Spain: Fray Junípero Serra settles San Diego
1771 Spain: Gaspar de Portola arrives at San Francisco Bay
1784 Russia: Grigory Shelikhov settles Alaska
1812 Russia: Settles Fort Ross, CA
1836 Spain: Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo settles Sonoma, CA
1843 England: Settles Vancouver, BC

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Lecture Topics:

• Beringia
• Chronology
• Clovis Points
• The Weight of 2ⁿ
• Teosinte --> Corn
• Skeletons...

---

During the pre-industrial early-modern period, 1400-1700, high Eurasian civilizations projected power across oceans in six ways...

• Ming China--Zheng He's prestige voyages: 25 K people in an armada of 100 ships; compare to British navy in mid-eighteenth century of 50 K; bring back oddities--giraffe--Qilin--King of Ceylon, but... (i) expensive, (ii) does nothing to challenge the view that China is the Central Country, (iii) politics leads to shutting-down of Ming Dynasty transoceanic exploration, and (iv) under the subsequent Qing the sea was regarded as a place from which danger came:

  • Pirates
  • Ming pretenders
  • Managing the gentry elite in the Yangzi valley and the rest of the Chinese southland was hard enough
  • The peach-blossom fan

• Seaborne Empires: Portugal--Holland--Britain (with France trying to get into the game): (i) invade the Indian ocean; (ii) sink everything that moves; (iii) acquire monopoly of ocean traffic; (iv) build bases (example: Sultan of Malacca); (v) trade--from a highly advantageous position as a monopolist; (vi) PROFIT!

  • Holland in late seventeenth century: maybe 50 K people directly and indirectly engaged in East India trade (out of a total population of 4 million); 5% of Dutch GDP; healthy, but not overwhelming effect on the Portuguese, Dutch, and British economies; but did have first-order effects on domestic politics; then in the late 1800s the British East India Company makes its bid for power in India...

• Conquest and Occupation: Spain in the New World: encomienda/hacienda/mining--creation of an elite ruling class; largely uninterested in what we would see as economic development; "to serve God, to win glory, and to grow rich"; nevertheless, over time things changed: no longer Spanish would-be aristocrats ruling over Amerindian serfs...

  • Digression on Silver and Spain
    • Allows Carlos V and Felipe II-IV to fight the Wars of the Counterreformation
    • Deindustrializes Spain
    • In the long run, Spain's American empire a source of wealth--and a cultural and industrial curse
    • Miguel de Cervantes and Don Quixote

• Slave Raiding: the slave trade in historical perspective; Gaius Julius Caesar; Middle Easterners in East Africa; firearms change things; Europeans in West Africa: (i) trade guns for slaves on the African coast; (ii) kings to whom you have sold guns than capture more slaves; (iii) ship slaves to sugar islands and turn them into a labor force; (iv) work them nearly to death; (v) ship commodities to Europe; (vi) PROFIT!

  • Need (a) firearms, (b) and (c) plantation agriculture, plus (d) a middle class market; similar but much less terrible things going on in eastern Europe at the same time--the "second serfdom"; terrible consequences for African civilizations...
  • Extraordinary potential profitability of slavery: some rough numbers:* consider a small slave ship: 150 slaves--100 survive--surplus value: 100 x 1/4 x 10 yrs = 250 man-years of value; amortized cost of ship: 25 man-years; cost of crew (2 voyages a year): 10 man-years; cost of trade goods (guns): 15 man-years; a 5-1 ratio of revenue to cost--but exceptional hazards, cost to your conscience, et cetera...

• Plantation Agriculture on the Sugar Islands: use slaves to grow plantation crops: coffee, sugar, tobacco [chocolate, cocaine?]: digression on pests and parasites, extremely nasty social formations on the sugar islands; extremely profitable...

• Small-Farmer Settlement:

  • Religious motive
  • Company profit motive (except for the Hudson's Bay Company, didn't work)
  • Get-a-farm motive

The sixth--small farm settlement--was, to contemporaries, the least attractive--it was what you did when you couldn't do anything else. The sixth was also, in the long run, the most productive as far as economic growth is concerned...

---

Pre-Industrial Growth Accounting: http://tinyurl.com/dl20080902

• Lecture Notes: 10000 BC to 1800
• Required Readings: Walton and Rockoff, "Founding the Colonies; Bartholomew Gosnold Sails Along Northeastern North America, 1602:; Jared Diamond (1987), "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," Discover; Jared Diamond (2008), "Why Did Human History Unfold Differently On Different Continents For The Last 13,000 Years?"

---

Problem Set for Next Week:

Malthusian Economy (due September 10): http://delong.typepad.com/american_economic_history/2008/09/20080903-malthu.html

Readings for Next Week:

M Sep 8: Colonists, 1600-1776

• Lecture Notes: "Growth Accounting, Natural Resources, and Pre-Civil War America";
• Required Readings: Walton and Rockoff, "Colonial Economic Activities," "Economic Progress and Wealth"; Inventory of the Possessions of Thomas Springer, 1804; Peter Temin (1966), “Labor Scarcity and the Problem of American Industrial Efficiency in the 1850's”; "I Wove To-day": Elizabeth Fuller Grows Up in Rural Massachusetts;

W Sep 10: Slavery and Its Legacy, 1600-1929

• Lecture Notes:
• Required Readings: Walton and Rockoff, "The Entrenchment of Slavery and Regional Conflict," "War, Recovery, and Regional Divergence"; Claudia D. Goldin and Frank D. Lewis (1975), "The Economic Cost of the American Civil War: Estimates and Implications," Journal of Economic History, Vol. 35, No. 2. (Jun., 1975), pp. 299-326; "Is It Not Enough that We Are Torn From Our Country and Friends?": Olaudah Equiano Describes the Horrors of the Middle Passage, 1780s; Additional Reading (necessary background for problem set 2)

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M Sep 8: Colonists, 1600-1776

• Lecture Notes: "Growth Accounting, Natural Resources, and Pre-Civil War America";
• Required Readings: Walton and Rockoff, "Colonial Economic Activities," "Economic Progress and Wealth"; Inventory of the Possessions of Thomas Springer, 1804; Peter Temin (1966), “Labor Scarcity and the Problem of American Industrial Efficiency in the 1850's”; "I Wove To-day": Elizabeth Fuller Grows Up in Rural Massachusetts;

Reading for W Nov 12: Why Was There So Little Social Democracy in the United States?

From History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web:

W Nov 12: Why Was There So Little Social Democracy in the United States?:

"I Will Kill Frick": Emma Goldman Recounts the Attempt to Assassinate the Chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company During the: Homestead Strike in 1892:

Henry Clay Frick, chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, was demonized by labor for his role in the violent Homestead strike in 1892 in which a pitched battle was fought between strikers and company-hired Pinkerton detectives. Known for his uncompromising and cruel tactics, Frick became an obvious target for labor activists looking to make a statement during the protracted strike. In this excerpt from her autobiography, Living my Life, radical Emma Goldman described how fellow radical Alexander Berkman decided to murder Frick during the Homestead strike.

It was May 1892. News from Pittsburgh announced that trouble had broken out between the Carnegie Steel Company and its employees organized in the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. It was one of the biggest and most efficient labour bodies of the country, consisting mostly of Americans, men of decision and grit, who would assert their rights. The Carnegie Company, on the other hand, was a powerful corporation, known as a hard master. It was particularly significant that Andrew Carnegie, its president, had temporarily turned over the entire management to the company’s chairman, Henry Clay Frick, a man known for his enmity to labour. Frick was also the owner of extensive coke-fields, where unions were prohibited and the workers were ruled with an iron hand.

The high tariff on imported steel had greatly boomed the American steel industry. The Carnegie Company had practically a monopoly of it and enjoyed unprecedented prosperity. Its largest mills were in Homestead, near Pittsburgh, where thousands of workers were employed, their tasks requiring long training and high skill. Wages were arranged between the company and the union, according to a sliding scale based on the prevailing market price of steel products. The current agreement was about to expire, and the workers presented a new wage schedule, calling for an increase because of the higher market prices and enlarged output of the mills.

The philanthropic Andrew Carnegie conveniently retired to his castle in Scotland, and Frick took full charge of the situation. He declared that henceforth the sliding scale would be abolished. The company would make no more agreements with the Amalgamated Association; it would itself determine the wages to be paid. In fact, he would not recognize the union at all. He would not treat with the employees collectively, as before. He would close the mills, and the men might consider themselves discharged. Thereafter they would have to apply for work individually, and the pay would be arranged with every worker separately. Frick curtly refused the peace advances of the workers' organization, declaring that there was “nothing to arbitrate.” Presently the mills were closed. “Not a strike, but a lockout,” Frick announced. It was an open declaration of war.

Feeling ran high in Homestead and vicinity. The sympathy of the entire country was with the men. Even the most conservative part of the press condemned Frick for his arbitrary and drastic methods. They charged him with deliberately provoking a crisis that might assume national proportions, in view of the great numbers of men locked out by Frick’s action, and the probable effect upon affiliated unions and on related industries.

Labour throughout the country was aroused. The steel-workers declared that they were ready to take up the challenge of Frick: they would insist on their right to organize and to deal collectively with their employers. Their tone was manly, ringing with the spirit of their rebellious forebears of the Revolutionary War.

Far away from the scene of the impending struggle, in our little ice-cream parlour in the city of Worcester, we eagerly followed developments. To us it sounded the awakening of the American worker, the long-awaited day of his resurrection. The native toiler had risen, he was beginning to feel his mighty strength, he was determined to break the chains that had held him in bondage so long, we thought. Our hearts were fired with admiration for the men of Homestead.

We continued our daily work, waiting on customers, frying pancakes, serving tea and ice-cream; but our thoughts were in Homestead, with the brave steel-workers. We became so absorbed in the news that we would not permit ourselves enough time even for sleep. At daybreak one of the boys would be off to get the first editions of the papers. We saturated ourselves with the events in Homestead to the exclusion of everything else. Entire nights we would sit up discussing the various phases of the situation, almost engulfed by the possibilities of the gigantic struggle.

One afternoon a customer came in for an ice-cream, while I was alone in the store. As I set the dish down before him, I caught the large headlines of his paper: “LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN HOMESTEAD — FAMILIES OF STRIKERS EVICTED FROM THE COMPANY HOUSES—WOMAN IN CONFINEMENT CARRIED OUT INTO STREET BY SHERIFFS.” I read over the man’s shoulder Frick’s dictum to the workers: he would rather see them dead than concede to their demands, and he threatened to import Pinkerton detectives. The brutal bluntness of the account, the inhumanity of Frick towards the evicted mother, inflamed my mind. Indignation swept my whole being. I heard the man at the table ask: “Are you sick, young lady? Can I do anything for you?” "Yes, you can let me have your paper,“ I blurted out. ”You won’t have to pay me for the ice-cream. But I must ask you to leave. I must close the store." The man looked at me as if I had gone crazy.

I locked up the store and ran full speed the three blocks to our little flat. It was Homestead, not Russia; I knew it now. We belonged in Homestead. The boys, resting for the evening shift, sat up as I rushed into the room, newspaper clutched in my hand. “What has happened, Emma? You look terrible!” I could not speak. I handed them the paper.

Sasha was the first on his feet. “Homestead!”he exclaimed. “I must go to Homestead!” I flung my arms around him, crying out his name. I, too, would go. “We must go tonight,” he said; “ the great moment has come at last!” Being internationalists, he added, it mattered not to us where the blow was struck by the workers; we must be with them. We must bring them our great message and help them see that it was not only for the moment that they must strike, but for all time, for a free life, for anarchism. Russia had many heroic men and women, but who was there in America? Yes, we must go to Homestead, tonight!

I had never heard Sasha so eloquent. He seemed to have grown in stature. He looked strong and defiant, an inner light on his face making him beautiful, as he had never appeared to me before.

We immediately went to our landlord and informed him of our decision to leave. He replied that we were mad; we were doing so well, we were on the way to fortune. If we would hold out to the end of the summer, we would be able to clear at least a thousand dollars. But he argued in vain—we were not to be moved. We invented the story that a very dear relative was in a dying condition, and that therefore we must depart. We would turn the store over to him; all we wanted was the evening’s receipts. We would remain until closing-hours, leave everything in order, and give him the keys.

That evening we were especially busy. We had never before had so many customers. By one o’clock we had sold out everything. Our receipts were seventy-five dollars. We left on an early morning train.

On the way we discussed our immediate plans. First of all, we would print a manifesto to the steel-workers. We would have to find somebody to translate it into English, as we were still unable to express our thoughts correctly in that tongue. We would have the German and English texts printed in New York and take them with us to Pittsburgh. With the help of the German comrades there, meetings could be organized for me to address. Fedya was to remain in New York till further developments.

From the station we went straight to the flat of Mollock, an Austrian comrade we had met in the Autonomie group. He was a baker who worked at night; but Peppie, his wife, with her two children was at home. We were sure she could put us up.

She was surprised to see the three of us march in, bag and baggage, but she made us welcome, fed us, and suggested that we go to bed. But we had other things to do.

Sasha and I went in search of Claus Timmermann, an ardent German anarchist we knew. He had considerable poetic talent and wrote forceful propaganda. In fact, he had been the editor of an anarchist paper in St. Louis before coming to New York. He was a likable fellow and entirely trustworthy, though a considerable drinker. We felt that Claus was the only person we could safely draw into our plan. He caught our spirit at once. The manifesto was written that afternoon. It was a flaming call to the men of Homestead to throw off the yoke of capitalism, to use their present struggle as a stepping-stone to the destruction of the wage system, and to continue towards social revolution and anarchism.

A few days after our return to New York the news was flashed across the country of the slaughter of steel-workers by Pinkertons. Frick had fortified the Homestead mills, built a high fence around them. Then, in the dead of night, a barge packed with strike-breakers, under protection of heavily armed Pinkerton thugs, quietly stole up the Monongahela River. The steel-men had learned of Frick’s move. They stationed themselves along the shore, determined to drive back Frick’s hirelings. When the barge got within range, the Pinkertons had opened fire, without warning, killing a number of Homestead men on the shore, among them a little boy, and wounding scores of others.

The wanton murders aroused even the daily papers. Several came out in strong editorials, severely criticizing Frick. He had gone too , far; he had added fuel to the fire in the labour ranks and would have himself to blame for any desperate acts that might come.

We were stunned. We saw at once that the time for our manifesto had passed. Words had lost their meaning in the face of the innocent blood spilled on the banks of the Monongahela. Intuitively each felt what was surging in the heart of the others. Sasha broke the silence. “Frick is the responsible factor in this crime,” he said; “he must be made to stand the consequences.” It was the psychological moment for an Attentat; the whole country was aroused, everybody was considering Frick the perpetrator of a cold-blooded murder. A blow aimed at Frick would re-echo in the poorest hovel, would call the attention of the whole world to the real cause behind the Homestead struggle. It would also strike terror in the enemy’s ranks and make them realize that the proletariat of America had its avengers.

Sasha had never made bombs before, but Most’s Science of Revolutionary Warfare was a good text-book. He would procure dynamite from a comrade he knew on Staten Island. He had waited for this sublime moment to serve the Cause, to give his life for the people. He would go to Pittsburgh.

“We will go with you!” Fedya and I cried together. But Sasha would not listen to it. He insisted that it was unnecessary and criminal to waste three lives on one man.

We sat down, Sasha between us, holding our hands. In a quiet and even tone he began to unfold to us his plan. He would perfect a time regulator for the bomb that would enable him to kill Frick, yet save himself. Not because he wanted to escape. No; he wanted to live long enough to justify his act in court, so that the American people might know that he was not a criminal, but an idealist.

“I will kill Frick,” Sasha said, "and of course I shall be condemned to death. I will die proudly in the assurance that I gave my life for the people. But I will die by my own hand, like Lingg. Never will I permit our enemies to kill me."

Source: Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Alfred Knopf, Inc., 1931) 83–88.

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Debs Attacks "the Monstrous System" of Capitalism:

In 1912, four candidates battled to become President of the United States. Republican incumbent William Howard Taft and Democrat Woodrow Wilson, a moderate governor, represented the two major parties. Former President Theodore Roosevelt, angered over what he felt was a betrayal of his policies by Taft, his hand-picked successor, abandoned the Republican party and founded the Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party. While all four candidates appealed directly to working-class voters, whose votes would prove decisive, by far the most radical platform in the campaign was that of the Socialist Party nominee, Eugene V. Debs. Running for the fourth time, Debs called for the abolition of capitalism rather than for its reform. In this speech accepting the party’s nomination he proclaimed the Socialist Party “the party of progress, the party of the future.” Debs finished last in the contest, receiving 900,000 votes.

It is with a full sense of the responsibility it imposes and the service it exacts that I accept the nomination for president tendered to me by the Socialist party of the United States. Personally, I did not wish the nomination. It came to me unsought. It came as summons to service and not as a personal honor.

Every true member of the Socialist party is at the party’s service. The confidence of his comrades is to him a sacred trust and their collective will the party’s law.

My chief concern as a presidential candidate is that I shall serve well the party, and the class and the cause the party represents.

Socialist Party Different

The Socialist party is fundamentally different from all other parties. It came in the process of evolution and grows with the growth of the forces which created it. Its spirit is militant and its aim revolutionary. It expresses in political terms the aspiration of the working class to freedom and to a larger and fuller life than they have yet known.

The world’s workers have always been and still are the world’s slaves. They have borne all the burdens of the race and built all the monuments along the track of civilization; they have produced all the world’s wealth and supported all the world’s governments. They have conquered all things but their own freedom. They are still the subject class in every nation on earth and the chief function of every government is to keep them at the mercy of their masters.

The workers in the mills and factories, in the mines and on the farms and railways never had a party of their own until the Socialist party was organized. They divided their votes between the parties of their masters. They did not realize that they were using their ballots to forge their own fetters.

But the awakening came. It was bound to come. Class rule became more and more oppressive and wage slavery more and more galling. The eyes of the workers began to open. They began to see the cause of the misery they had dumbly suffered so many years. It dawned upon them that society was divided into two classes - capitalists and workers, exploiters and producers; that the capitalists, while comparatively few, owned the nation and controlled the government; that the courts and the soldiers were at their command, and that the workers, while in a great majority, were in slavish subjection.

When they ventured to protest they were discharged and found themselves blacklisted; when they went out on strike they were suppressed by the soldiers and sent to jail.

They looked about them and saw a land of wonderful resources; they saw the productive machinery made by their own hands and the vast wealth produced by their own labor, in the shadow of which their wives and children were perishing in the skeleton clutch of famine.

Began to Think

The very suffering they were forced to endure quickened their senses. They began to think. A new light dawned upon their dark skies. They rubbed the age-long sleep from their eyes. They had long felt the brutalizing effect of class rule; now they saw the cause of it. Slowly but steadily they became class conscious. They said, “We are brothers, we are comrades,” and they saw themselves multiplied by millions. They caught the prophetic battle cry of Karl Marx, the world’s greatest labor leader, the inspired evangel of working-class emancipation, “Workers of all countries, unite!”

And now, behold! The international Socialist movement spreads out over all the nations of the earth. The world’s workers are aroused at last. They are no longer on their knees; their bowed bodies are now erect. Despair has given way to hope, weakness to strength, fear to courage. They no longer cringe and supplicate; they hold up their heads and command. They have ceased to fear their masters and have learned to trust themselves.

And this is how the Socialist party came to be born. It was quickened into life in the bitter struggle of the world’s enslaved workers. It expresses their collective determination to break their fetters and emancipate themselves and the race.

Is it strange that the workers are loyal to such a party, that they proudly stand beneath its blazing banners and fearlessly proclaim its conquering principles? It is the one party of their class, born of their agony and baptized in the blood of their countless brethren who perished in the struggle to give it birth.

Hail to this great party of the toiling millions whose battle cry is heard around the world!

Doesn’t Plead for Votes

We do not plead for votes; the workers give them freely the hour they understand.

But we need to destroy the prejudice that still exists and dispel the darkness that still prevails in the working-class world. We need the clear light of sound education and the conquering power of economic and political organization.

Before the unified hosts of labor all the despotic governments on earth are powerless and all resistance vain. Before their onward march all ruling classes disappear and all slavery vanishes forever.

The appeal of the Socialist party is to all the useful people of the nation, all who work with brain and muscle to produce the nation’s wealth and who promote its progress and conserve its civilization.

Only they who bear its burdens may rightfully enjoy the blessings of civilized society.

There are no boundary lines to separate race from race, sex from sex, or creed from creed in the Socialist party. The common rights of all are equally recognized.

Every human being is entitled to sunlight and air, to what his labor produces, and to an equal chance with every other human being to unfold and ripen and give to the world the riches of his mind and soul.

Economic slavery is the world’s greatest curse today. Poverty and misery, prostitution, insanity, and crime are its inevitable results.

The Socialist party is the one party which stands squarely and uncompromisingly for the abolition of industrial slavery; the one party pledged in every fiber of its being to the economic freedom of all the people.

So long as the nation’s resources and productive and distributive machinery are the private property of a privileged class the masses will be at their mercy, poverty will be their lot and life will be shorn of all that raises it above the brute level.

New Progressive Party

The infallible test of a political party is the private ownership of the sources of wealth and the means of life. Apply that test to the Republican, Democratic, and Progressive parties and upon that basic, fundamental issue you will find them essentially one and the same. They differ according to the conflicting interests of the privileged classes, but at bottom they are alike and stand for capitalist class rule and working-class slavery.

The new Progressive party is a party of progressive capitalism. It is lavishly financed and shrewdly advertised. But it stands for the rule of capitalism all the same.

When the owners of the trusts finance a party to put themselves out of business; when they turn over their wealth to the people from whom they stole it and go to work for a living, it will be time enough to consider the merits of the Roosevelt Progressive party.

One question is sufficient to determine the true status of all these parties. Do they want the workers to own the tools they work with, control their own jobs, and secure to themselves the wealth they produce? Certainly not. That is utterly ridiculous and impossible from their point of view.

The Republican, Democratic, and Progressive parties all stand for the private ownership by the capitalists of the productive machinery used by the workers, so that the capitalists can continue to filch the wealth produced by the workers.

The Socialist party is the only party which declares that the tools of labor belong to labor and that the wealth produced by the working class belongs to the working class.

Intelligent workingmen are no longer deceived. They know that the struggle in which the world is engaged today is a class struggle and that in this struggle the workers can never win by giving their votes to capitalist parties. They have tried this for many years and it has always produced the same result to them.

The class of privilege and pelf has had the world by the throat and the working class beneath its iron-shod hoofs long enough. The magic word of freedom is ringing through the nation and the spirit of intelligent revolt is finding expression in every land beneath the sun.

The solidarity of the working class is the salient force in the social transformation of which we behold the signs upon every hand. Nearer and nearer they are being drawn together in the bonds of unionism; clearer and clearer becomes their collective vision; greater and greater the power that throbs within them.

Hosts of Freedom

They are the twentieth-century hosts of freedom who are to destroy all despotisms, topple over all thrones, seize all sceptres of authority and hold them in their own strong hands, tear up all privilege by the roots, and consecrate the earth and all its fullness to the joy and service of all humanity.

It is vain to hope for material relief upon the prevailing system of capitalism. All the reforms that are proposed by the three capitalist parties, even if carried out in good faith, would still leave the working class in industrial slavery.

The working class will never be emancipated by the grace of the capitalists class, but only by overthrowing that class.

The power to emancipate itself is inherent in the working class, and this power must be developed through sound education and applied through sound organization.

It is as foolish and self-destructive for workingmen to turn to Republican, Democratic, and Progressive parties on election day as it would be for them to turn to the Manufacturers‘ Association and the Citizens’ Alliance when they are striking against starvation wages.

The capitalist class is organized economically and politically to keep the working class in subjection and perpetuate its power as a ruling class. They do not support a working class union nor a working-class party. They are not so foolish. They wisely look out for themselves.

The capitalist class despise a working-class party. Why should the working class give their support to a capitalist-class party?

Capitalist misrule under which workingmen suffer slavery and the most galling injustice exists only because it has workingmen’s support. Withdraw that support and capitalism is dead.

The capitalists can enslave and rob the workers only by the consent of the workers when they cast their ballots on election day.

Every vote cast for a capitalist party, whatever its name, is a vote for wage-slavery, for poverty and degradation.

Every vote cast for the Socialist party, the workers' own party, is a vote for emancipation.

We appeal to the workers and to all who sympathize with them to make their power felt in this campaign. Never before has there been so great an opportunity to strike an effective blow for freedom.

Capitalism Doomed

Capitalism is rushing blindly to its impending doom. All the signs portend the inevitable breakdown of the existing order. Deep-seated discontent has seized upon the masses. They must indeed be deaf who do not hear the mutterings of the approaching storm.

Poverty, high prices, unemployment, child slavery, widespread misery and haggard want in a land bursting with abundance; prostitution and insanity, suicide and crime, these in solemn numbers tell the tragic story of capitalism’s saturnalia of blood and tears and shame as its end draws near.

It is to abolish this monstrous system and the misery and crime which flow from it in a direful and threatening stream that the Socialist party was organized and now makes its appeal to the intelligence and conscience of the people. Social reorganization is the imperative demand of this world-wide revolutionary movement.

The Socialist party’s mission is not only to destroy capitalist despotism but to establish industrial and social democracy. To this end the workers are steadily organizing and fitting themselves for the day when they shall take control of the people’s industries and when the right to work shall be as inviolate as the right to breathe the breath of life.

Standing as it does for the emancipation of the working class from wage-slavery, for the equal rights and opportunities of all men and all women, for the abolition of child labor and the conservation of all childhood, for social self-rule and the equal freedom of all, the Socialist party is the party of progress, the party of the future, and its triumph will signalize the birth of a new civilization and the dawn of a happier day for all humanity.

Source: Eugene Debs, “Speech of Acceptance,” International Socialist Review (October, 1912).