(GENTLE ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)
If we retrace the steps by which America went
from a wilderness to a giant of technology,
there are less than 50 years from the homesteader growing food
on the 160 acres the government had given him
to mammoth factories processing food for this nation and other nations.
Less than half a century from a village on the prairie
to the first city of the plains, the phenomenon of Chicago.
(DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)
Chicago suffers from the curse of a violent legend.
If you ask anyone to give you a history of the city off the top of his head,
he's likely to remember the fire of the 1870s and tell you
that it started with a cow kicking over a lamp.
After that, I think he'd be vague and imply the city was rebuilt
as a stage set to accommodate the gang wars of Al Capone.
Anybody alive in the 1920s, an Englishman certainly,
would remember Big Bill Thompson,
who was the mayor who announced to a stunned globe
that if King George V ever dared to appear in Chicago,
"I will punch him in the nose."
Well, King George never obliged because it was well understood,
even in court circles, that Mayor Thompson presided
over an immense melting pot of immigrants.
He was simply asserting the Midwesterners' conviction
that he's as good as any Englishman, if not better.
More recently, the world has had this clownish yet brutal view of Chicago
confirmed by the ugly riots that defamed the city
in the Democratic convention of 1968.
But Chicago was prone to violence from the beginning.
This is a rigid preconception to say the least,
like remembering London only for the Black Death,
the abdication of Edward VIII and the nocturnal habits of Jack the Ripper.
Chicago was a thousand miles inland
and for countless centuries was known only to the Indians.
And then it was a fur-trading post for French trappers.
It lies on the shore of a great lake, the first of four,
linked with canals to give clear access all the way from the Atlantic
1500 miles to the shore of Lake Michigan.
Navigation stopped there because of a sandbar
between the bend in the Chicago River and the lake.
In 1833, they cut through it, and Chicago had a harbour.
Eight years later, in 1841,
the first bumper crop on the prairie was carried by steamboats, brigs and schooners
off to New York and even London.
In only nine years, Chicago had gone from a squatter settlement of 200 souls
to the largest grain market in the world.
(TRADERS SHOUT)
Chicago is not only the reception centre for the prairie's livestock and crops
but the stock exchange of the American farmer.
(TRADERS SHOUT)
This daily hullabaloo of bidding at high noon
will be reported a few hours later over thousands of radio stations
in a few laconic phrases.
Wheat, up one point.
Corn, down three-eighths.
Soybeans, steady.
After the Civil War, more ships cruised into Chicago
than into the six busiest coastal ports of America combined.
Lake and river traffic alone would not have made Chicago
the mammoth among inland cities.
It was the freight train that made Chicago
the ideal junction between the harvest of the encircling prairie
and people, thousands of miles in all directions,
who would eat and use it.
Because Chicago was where it was, when it was, the middle of the prairie,
that's why it became the biggest railroad centre in the world,
the hub whose spokes reached out in all directions
and magnetised not only business but businessmen.
It has been host to more than half the presidential nominating conventions
of both parties.
Once the cowboy had a pipeline for his cattle to the East and Europe,
he no longer sold his herds along the way for hides.
He poured them into the Chicago stockyards
as raw material to sell to the highest bidder in an international market.
(FIRST MAN) Yah, yah, yah, yah!
(SECOND MAN) Yah! Yah!
- Let 'em in. - Let me look at these heifers.
- Where are them cattle from? - Southern Illinois.
- Southern Illinois? Where? - South of Galesburg.
They're too light. How much?
- They're going a way over 90. - You ain't bid yet?
- On 31. - God, they're better heifers than that.
- They look a little full. - I'll give you that.
Look at the quality. They're fat heifers.
- Wanna go 31 and a quarter? - No.
- How much? - $32.
What the hell are you talking about, $32? You wanna go one and a half?
- No, 175 for a load of heifers. - Weigh the cattle!
All right. What number?
Raw crops and animals on the hoof were hurtled in here
and slaughtered, packaged and transformed.
A cow can come into Chicago as a cow and go out as a steak or a tennis racquet.
Down the years, Americans have tended to believe
that any big change in technology is a good thing
and is going to benefit everybody.
But this sudden, new transcontinental transport system,
which the first railroad men built as much for money as for use,
transformed the colonial idea of the small farmer
as the almost sacred norm of American life.
Jefferson called the farmer God's finest creation.
He was thinking of a man who farmed a few acres with his own hands.
But not all the small farmers in the world could satisfy the giant maw of Chicago.
The farmers' livelihood, it now appeared,
was rooted in a false 18th-century assumption
about the basic American farm.
The Founding Fathers, remember, had never left the East.
Their idea of an expanding agriculture
was Virginia or Massachusetts going on for ever.
Parcels of land happily alternating pasture with woods and little rivers,
all assigned according to a rational, neat 18th-century plan
in firm little rectangles, exactly one-quarter square-mile each.
But the prairie was not like that.
One man's 160 acres might have the luck of a creek and a few shade trees.
But another man's 160,000 acres might be barren of all shade and water.
A lot of families who went to the Midwest
with high hopes of self-sufficiency got badly bruised,
not least thousands of homesteaders
whose quarter square-mile was too arid or too tough to work
or was bought out by a railroad financed by government subsidies.
The government had given with one hand and taken away with both.
As a bitter rhyme of the day had it,
"In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted."
If farming was to prosper in the heart of the continent,
it would have to turn into an industry.
As usual, the machines appeared to do it.
William Ogden, first Mayor of Chicago,
invited a young Virginian named Cyrus McCormick to come west
and mass-produce a mechanical reaper he'd been demonstrating.
This is it, the McCormick reaper.
Before McCormick, they cut wheat by hand with a scythe and cradle.
This machine did the work of five men with obviously less fatigue.
And so, with dramatic suddenness,
Pennsylvania and Ohio were no longer the big wheat states.
The bread basket moved a thousand miles west into the prairie here,
which was a lucky thing, because the population of the United States
went in 40 years from 13 millions to 60 millions.
And this machine guaranteed that they would be fed.
And after the reaper, there came in tumbling succession
the automatic wire binder, and the twin binder,
the threshing machine, the combine, mechanical corn planters,
corn cutters, huskers, shellers, the cream separator,
the potato planter, the hay dryer.
America discovered several decades before Europe
that the land was a gorgeous deposit of raw material,
ready for mass cultivation, shipping, processing and packaging.
This is a far cry from the original American ideal
of the sturdy, independent small farmer
who made all his own farming and building implements,
who made tallow for candles,
raised a few crops for the sustenance of his own family,
and tapped the trees for the family sugar.
Yet, by a familiar human contradiction,
the faster this ideal faded, the more it was mooned over.
Millions of Americans bought reproductions of pictures like this,
and the coloured prints of Currier and Ives,
in the hope of asserting as the sacred fact of American life
what was already becoming a memory,
the idea of America as a continent without cities,
a far-flung republic of yeoman farmers.
But the resources of America were as far-flung as its geography.
In other landscapes that had never seen a pig or an ear of corn,
other fortunes lay not above the ground but under it.
Traces of gold were found in the Colorado Rockies.
And a year later, there was a city with a hotel and a jeweller's store.
Lumber sold in Denver for $100 per thousand feet
and sugar and coffee for their weight in the only going currency.
Gold dust.
In Nevada, scratching gold miners
cursed the black stuff they found mixed in with the gold
until they had it assayed and discovered that the black stuff
was silver of unbelievable richness.
A campsite of a few hundred miners could turn in three years
into a city of 35,000 with five newspapers and gas lighting on the streets.
In fact, America was spawning cities like rabbits.
They grew wherever the railroad loaded produce or unloaded food and necessities.
The old settlers were content, they used to say,
with bare floors, Windsor chairs and cowhide boots.
The young wanted what didn't grow on the prairie.
They wanted heat and light and news, and conveniences, and even entertainment.
There were inventors ready to pipe all these into them.
When Samuel Morse flicked the switch that passed the first telegraph,
somebody said, "Now Maine can talk to Florida."
Up in snug Boston, Ralph Waldo Emerson said,
"Yes, but has Maine anything to say to Florida?"
Well, New York and Chicago had lots to say,
and to Denver and San Francisco and the whistle-stops in between.
And just as the railroad and the McCormick reaper combined
to spark a mass-production system for the farmer,
so there was one man more than any other
who was inspired to mass-produce conveniences for remote towns
that either had to improvise them or had never heard of them.
This man was Thomas Alva Edison, born in 1847 in a small town in Ohio.
The extent of his education was three months in a public elementary school.
At 12, he was a railroad newsboy,
and at 15, a telegraph operator in various cities.
He'd evidently been born with an itch to take things apart and see how they ticked.
At 19, he took out his first patent, which was for an electrical vote recorder.
Within a year or two, he was working on a telephone.
He knew what New York would want to say to San Francisco,
so he invented the stock ticker.
So this is his what? His workshop?
Not really.
This is something that in the 1870s not even the universities had,
not even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This is the first scientific research laboratory.
You see, Edison was not a tinkerer.
And he was not a pure scientist, so-called, who disdained practical utility.
His genius was of a quite different order.
How to make a scientific principle workable as a universal convenience.
If Edison had invented gravity,
he'd wonder how gravity helped the farmer and the grocer.
Not the fine workmanship of a Swiss watch.
How do you make a dollar watch?
This illustrates his ordeal with the incandescent lamp.
When on to something, he was a monster of persistence
and drove his skilled workers,
expecting from them the same sleeplessness that he imposed on himself.
In the 1870s, the universal form of lighting was gas.
The arc light had been developed in various expensive and clumsy forms.
But what Edison wanted was a cheap filament in a small bulb
to provide light for the ordinary householder.
Now, that was like ordering up a cheap family spaceship.
They tried all sorts of conductors: Metal, iridium, chromium.
Platinum, at $7 an ounce.
And they overheated, they needed enormous current, they oxidised.
Edison started his trial of endless forms of materials, fibres, papers.
Hemp and bark and cork. And... lemon peel.
And in desperation, saw the whiskers on the beard of a friend. Took that.
What he still needed was a tiny, tough, high-resistance filament
that would burn in a vacuum.
One day, he saw a shred of sewing cotton, carbonised it,
mounted it on electrodes, pumped out the air to a millionth of an atmosphere
and then started to feed the power with this series of Bunsen batteries,
increasing the current as he went.
Didn't overheat. Stayed cool and alive for over 45 hours.
The problem was solved. Next day, cardboard worked.
Then, after a trial of 6,000 vegetable fibres,
he eventually found a Japanese bamboo that lasted a thousand hours.
And for the first time, the world was lit with electricity.
Edison's creation of the permanent electric light swept the headlines.
Everybody cheered. But the manufacturers were leery.
Mrs Vanderbilt, the Fifth Avenue hostess,
went into hysteria when two crossed lines started a fire.
The cities dragged their feet.
Factories, even ranches, installed his lighting plant. And theatres.
It's an attractive thing about Edison.
He assumed total responsibility for his product.
He was present at the first performance of "Iolanthe" to be lit by electricity.
After the interval, the lights began to dim, go red.
Edison dashed to the cellar, stripped off his clothes,
started shovelling coal in to maintain the steam pressure
right through a banquet that had been given in his honour.
He had great pride in this electrical thing, but on the way to it
he had 30 or 40 ideas in his head and he blitzkrieged the government
with more than a thousand patents.
He would come into the lab in the morning, take out scraps of paper,
drawings as primitive as this, which looks like a comic-strip joke.
To an assistant, Kruesi, "Make this, Edison."
Kruesi said, "What will it do?"
Edison said, "It will talk back," and it did.
And here it is, the most simple, revolutionary discovery,
that a steady needle embossing in depth on tin foil
the reverberations of a human voice, Edison's speaking phonograph.
This was the first sentence that he ever recorded.
(COOKE SHOUTS) Hello, hello. Mary had a little lamb,
its fleece was white as snow,
and everywhere that Mary went,
the lamb was sure to go.
Put it back. Unlock the needle.
And lock it again.
And play it back.
(SLURRED) Hello, hello. Mary had a little lamb,
(FADING) its fleece was white as snow,
and everywhere that Mary went,
the lamb was sure to go.
Well, it's hard to believe now but after that,
everything from Beethoven to "Iolanthe" could be heard at home,
from California to Maine and from Maine to the Baltic.
In 35 years after the Civil War,
the United States Patent Office granted over half a million patents.
Alexander Graham Bell produced the miracle of the telephone,
George Eastman, the handy family camera,
a unique marvel that was known in all languages as simply a Kodak.
The home sewing machine. The typewriter.
Inventions that changed for ordinary people the ways of work and pleasure.
But just before this golden age of the liberating gadget,
something happened on good farmland in an eastern state
that transformed this country from a farming republic to an industrial giant.
It began here, by a river in the Alleghenies.
For years, perhaps centuries, farmers, especially in this part of the country -
this is Pennsylvania -
found their streams muddied by a kind of black glue.
It turned up with good soil. First they cursed it.
Then on a tip from the Indians, they bottled it and sold it as medicine.
Here it is. It says, "Genuine petroleum,
"non-genuine without the signature of Samuel Keer."
Now, this was touted far and wide as a guaranteed cure
for asthma, rheumatism, gout, tuberculosis, cancer and fallen arches.
There is indisputable evidence that it was a sovereign remedy for constipation.
A man then discovered it made pretty good though smelly lighting fluid.
After that came a distillation process
which produced a purer, odourless liquid, kerosene.
Then in 1859 came the bonanza.
A man near by here, in Titusville, Pennsylvania,
did what convinced neighbours he was crazy.
He was a man named Drake.
And he was the first man deliberately to drill for oil.
He got a man who used to dig salt wells
to sink a shaft 70 feet by a steam-drill process,
and it spouted the first petroleum well in history.
Everybody and his cousin was out with a shovel
or a drill and a moving platform,
and oil towns sprouted like weeds.
Within 30 years, in a sprawling mess of towns almost in sight of this spot,
they were producing 31 million barrels in a single year.
But in the beginning, it was desperate, small-scale stuff,
every man for himself, make a quick pile in the traditional American way.
If you discovered a new resource,
a turpentine forest, a seam of coal, a gusher of oil,
you worked it to exhaustion, ravaged the land, and moved on.
And most of these bustling, breakneck towns produced their fill,
gave out, and then, like this one, went back to the grass and the wind.
What the oil business needed was organisation.
Entire now the organiser in the person of a prim, methodical young man
from Cleveland, Ohio,
a smart young bookkeeper who had saved his pennies
and become a junior partner in a produce-commission firm.
One day, a bunch of money men in Cleveland who had confidence in him
sent him off here to Pennsylvania to examine the long-range possibilities of these gushers.
He went back to Cleveland and delivered his report,
with its firm conclusion there was no future in it.
His name was John Davison Rockefeller.
He changed his mind when it was pointed out
that this black glue was not necessarily an end in itself.
It was still oil for lighting.
Rockefeller guessed it might soon become oil for heating, steamships,
for lubrication.
When a man proposed that they build a refinery -
and the word itself was quite new then -
Rockefeller took a look at his savings
and he put in what for him was a substantial sum, $5,000.
Then he got richer men to build more refineries,
and since his habits were more austere than theirs,
in time he absorbed them.
And then he sat back and he dreamed a dream.
Why not make his business in Cleveland the biggest in Ohio?
The biggest in the Midwest? In America!
Why not the world?
When he was 30, he formed the Standard Oil Company of Ohio
and bought 25 refineries.
He built a monopoly by means both genteel and ruthless.
And it was rudely hinted that he had in the palm of his hand
the best state legislatures and United States senators
that money could buy.
He got the railroads to give him special low rates
because of the colossal business he could throw their way.
As a further inducement, they secretly guaranteed him a bonus
from the regular rates that scores of small producers had to pay.
It is very lucrative work if you can get it.
When this arrangement leaked, it provoked a national outcry.
Rockefeller rode out this scandal by simply sitting back and taking ease.
He was only 33. He owned 90% of all the refineries,
all the main pipelines, and all the oil cars, the wagons,
of the Pennsylvania railroad.
Within a few years, he was the first billionaire in history.
Now, this is his bedroom in New York and it's not very imperial.
It's not the bedroom of the young, frugal Rockefeller
but of the old, frugal Rockefeller, because...
he lived all his life much more simply than most stockbrokers.
And then at 60, penitence set in.
You know, the Victorians had a huge capacity to rationalise their energy
as the engine of God.
And as happened with nearly all these money barons,
the coming on of arthritis convinced them
that they'd made this money for the public good, then they disbursed it.
Rockefeller, through a foundation created in his own name,
gave 530 millions for worldwide medical research.
And, I must say, he's the only philanthropist I can think of
who gave away his fortune with absolutely no strings binding its use.
He was photographed everywhere to prove that even Rockefeller
was as mortal as the rest of us, and that though he was a kind of monarch,
he had the common touch.
(CROWD LAUGHS)
We all unite in wishing them the very best all their lives long.
And we thank you all for giving us the five dollars, each one five dollars,
but we haven't seen the five yet!
When Rockefeller died at the age of 98, it was as if an emperor had gone.
There were not many men like Rockefeller,
but enough of them to constitute a cabal, a national, continental power
that overshadowed the elected power of the presidents of the United States.
There was Henry Clay Frick, who turned coke into gold.
EH Harriman collected railroads the way other men collect stamps.
There was JP Morgan, whose specialty was money itself.
We are in the library of another man,
Andrew Carnegie,
who had three specialties: Steel, making money and giving it away.
And maybe this is as good a place as any to bring up the intriguing topic
of the making and uses of money.
Now, I can appreciate
that the ways in which these tycoons controlled a continent's resources
were both subtle and masterly,
from taking the stuff out of the ground - the iron or the oil -
to forming holding companies that controlled its worth.
But I won't pretend to understand this expertise,
because if I did, I'd probably have a packet myself.
But it has come to seem to me that the gift of money-making
is something that resides in a single lobe of the human brain.
Now, this is probably bad neurology and sheer envy on my part.
But I think it is an aptitude like cabinetmaking, playing chess,
speaking foreign languages, that has nothing to do with intelligence.
Harold Nicolson once said he knew a man who spoke 16 languages with total fluency
and could say nothing sensible in any of them, including his own.
But what moneyed people do with their money is something that fascinates us all.
It's through them that we live out our fantasies of admiration and envy.
How about Andrew Carnegie?
He was the son of a poor weaver, born in this cottage in Scotland
at a time of such depression that in the revolutionary year of 1848
the family took off for America
and for a squalid house in a grimy town called Pittsburgh.
The father went back to weaving.
The mother went back to stitching shoe leather.
Not much of a new world for them.
Their 12-year-old boy was as shiny as an apple and as lively as a squirrel.
He went hopping up the golden ladder rung by rung,
from bobbin boy to telegraph messenger to railroad clerk,
superintendent, director, until iron entered into his career,
if not his soul, and finally steel.
At the turn of the century, he wrote an article which ended with the phrase,
"Farewell, then, Age of Iron.
"All hail, King Steel."
He was really proclaiming his own coronation.
He foresaw before anybody the infinite possibilities of steel -
from bridge-building to steamships to knives and forks.
Make steel and make it cheap
and you could own the industrial empire of the new century.
Once you've got the fortune, what then?
Well, Carnegie, to me, exemplifies a truth about American money men
that many people fail to grasp.
The chase and the kill are more fun than the prize,
which you then give away. Carnegie had a philosophy about it.
He retired at the age of 65 to Scotland,
bought an ancient castle in the Highlands, where we now are,
and he wrote a best-selling sermon called "The Gospel of Wealth".
"A kept dollar is a stinking fish.
"The man who dies rich dies thus disgraced."
We're at this organ because this is how he started
to disembarrass himself of his huge fortune.
This was before the government saved you the embarrassment
by taking it anyway.
Once a Scottish Presbyterian church had asked him for a pipe organ.
He provided it and the word got around.
Within 40 years, he gave all around the world over 7,000 pipe organs.
Because as a boy he'd had the first apprentice's card
to a free public library in Pennsylvania,
he gratefully presented over 3,000 public libraries
in America, Britain, Europe, Africa, Fiji.
Of the $400 million he made, 350 went to public benefactions,
20 to an endowment for peace
and the remaining 30 million to pension off former presidents' widows
and tenants and crofters and servants and innumerable old friends,
including a lifetime annual pension to "my dear friend,
"David Lloyd George".
"The man who dies rich dies disgraced."
Well, I guess by his lights he was not disgraced.
He left to his widow and daughter
a trust fund to keep them in considerable comfort,
but only through their lifetime.
He believed that the most evil possible use of money
was to leave it to your own family.
"I would as soon," he wrote, "I would as soon leave my son a curse as the almighty dollar."
(BAGPIPE PLAYS)
As he looked out over this splendid and remote landscape,
he liked to think of himself as a simple Scottish laird
who had given to America more than he took.
It wasn't a bad place to be
when his steelworkers were shooting it out with hired strike breakers.
While this went on in Pennsylvania, he was stung by the suggestion
of a United States senator that he was skulking in his castle.
For he was one of those Victorian types, personally kind and pious,
professionally merciless.
But his feeling against inherited wealth was genuine enough.
The people he most despised were the pack of self-aggrandisers,
the sons and daughters of new fortunes
in coke, tin, copper, iron, streetcars, railroads,
on the other side of the Atlantic,
who wanted only to flaunt their wealth in some private Versailles.
They found it here on the rocky coast of New England
at Newport, Rhode Island.
It had once been a haven for religious dissenters out of Massachusetts,
and later a capital port of the slave trade.
100 years after the declaration that all men are created equal,
there began to gather here a colony of the rich
determined to show that some Americans were conspicuously more equal than others.
They became, in a manner of speaking, dukes and princes
by buying or reproducing
the trappings of the old dukes and princes of France and Italy.
And to display their trophies, they built summer houses
of the appropriate style and scale.
If you needed a bloodline,
Tiffany's of New York would improvise a suitable coat of arms.
By a typical affectation of the day, these families built
what they always called summer cottages.
This is the cottage of the Vanderbilts.
The Vanderbilts could well afford such a cottage.
Their original fortune derived from a ferry-boat captain
who went into steamships and railroads, died and left his son $94 million,
which the son doubled in ten years.
This house was built by his son and daughter-in-law,
who spent a mere two million on the house and nine on the furnishings.
They opened it on a hot August night in 1892
with a ball held in such a room
as few people have ever danced in before or since.
This baroque splendour produced its own baroque style of boredom.
On a famous night, this room glittered with the uniforms of a British regiment
and the decorations of the diplomatic corps.
There were no soldiers or diplomats present.
They were an army of actors, hired by a devoted wife,
whose husband had gone quietly mad
and believed himself to be the Prince of Wales.
There was a beautiful and candid girl who was once asked by a Frenchman
what really went on in Newport.
"Nothing," she said, "but gaiety and grief."
These houses were open for usually only about seven weeks in the summer.
But during that period, these people packed a royal lifetime
in formal picnics and luncheons and dinners and polo and yachting
and fancy-dress balls
and the preliminaries to marrying another Newporter or a foreign title.
Somebody figured that 500 of the plutocrats' daughters
were, so to speak, passed over to European dukes and counts
whose noble houses required the ballast of the sound American dollar.
In this house, Consuelo, Mrs Vanderbilt's daughter,
became engaged to the Duke of Marlborough.
The subsequent wedding blazed like a comet over the New York season.
Now, it could cost up to $200,000 to throw a fancy-dress ball.
And there was a lady who set aside, each summer,
$10,000 for what she itemised as "mistakes in my clothes".
When the brother-in-law of Tsar Nicholas II came here,
he said he had never even imagined such luxury.
He'd never seen horses bedded down
on linen sheets stamped with the family monogram.
And he had probably never seen a man fling a Persian carpet
on his lawn and order his army of gardeners
to reproduce the intricacies of the pattern and the colour
in a mosaic of flowerbeds.
There was a dinner at which the centrepiece
was a long, thin sandbox implanted with tiny pails and shovels
of sterling silver, and the guests were invited on a given signal
to dig for favours of rubies, sapphires and diamonds.
Well, it was a bad time for such goings-on to be advertised
as they were in the national press.
It was a time of deep depression.
While the Newport millionaires dug for rubies with their sterling-silver shovels,
miners dug for coal and children bent over sewing machines 16 hours a day.
Industry had produced something
that was originally supposed never to happen in America:
A permanent factory population.
It began to see itself as the slave of the trusts and the money barons.
There was wide unemployment and ugly protest in the cities,
riots and strikes, a sweatshop march,
a coalminers' strike, a national railroad strike,
aggravated by armies of strike breakers,
and broken usually by federal troops.
But it was out on the prairie that the people felt most cheated.
They had gone out to realise the dream of free men and free soil.
They had been conned, first by the railroads and their land grants,
then by the farm machines and their makers.
For the price of those beautiful machines was a mortgage on the land.
Thanks to their productivity, the value of the dollar trebled in 20 years.
The homesteaders were now in hock to the money-makers
who had beguiled them into feeding two continents.
In an angry time, America usually finds, not always for her own good,
an angry man.
It found him in the 1890s in Lincoln, Nebraska,
in the heart of the prairie - Williams Jennings Bryan,
a handsome, farm-bred boy from Illinois,
a fairly unsuccessful lawyer,
who got into Congress with the help of the railroads and liquor interests.
That was an odd irony, because he came to champion
the defeated farmers against just such men.
But Bryan had one consummate talent.
He was the best, the most persuasive breast-beater in the nation.
He had a voice of bronze
and with it, he expressed all the most brazen beliefs of the pious, cheated farmers.
To roaring audiences of them he would say,
"The farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day
"is as much of a businessman as the man who goes upon the board
"and bets upon the price of grain."
He was Baptist-bred, Anglo-Saxon to the bone,
the new Moses of the Middle West.
The East, he called the enemy country,
the home of the gold standard and the money changers.
To Bryan, truth lay only in holy scripture.
Scripture consisted of two books -
the Bible and the Constitution of the United States.
The Bible talked about driving the money changers from the Temple.
And the Bible spoke truer than John D Rockefeller.
The Founding Fathers laid it down that the basis of a sound national currency
was gold AND silver.
And the Founding Fathers knew better than Carnegie or Morgan.
So... he had a solution that was godsent for the prairie.
What could be simpler when you're short of money than to make it?
So abolish this accursed single gold standard and allow the free coinage of silver.
And silver, to Bryan, became holy water.
And the Democrats rushed to their convention in 1896 and bathed in it.
Bryan swept the convention and the Democratic presidential nomination
with a single speech,
the last two sentences of which rolled around the nation.
It ended, "You shall not press down upon the brow of labour
"this crown of thorns.
"You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."
Well, it took the nation but it didn't quite take all the votes.
The prairie went for him, but the railroad tycoons and the steelmen
and the oil companies were assessed hundreds of thousands of dollars
to subscribe to his defeat.
And yet that night in Chicago was his first great triumph.
He appalled, of course, the Eastern money interests.
But in most other places it was almost compulsory to call him the Great Commoner.
And yet that first great triumph in Chicago was really also his last.
The silver crusade collapsed within a few years,
when they extracted gold from low-grade ore.
But there was more to the killing off of Williams Jennings Bryan than that.
Quite simply, he went on speaking for the lonely farmer
when three Americans in four lived in cities.
He lived on for 30 years and he ran for the Presidency twice again,
and lost both times.
He wound up in a much-publicised trial in a small Tennessee town,
prosecuting a young schoolteacher named Scopes
for teaching the theory of evolution.
So, you see, to the end, he was the advocate of rural America,
its habits, its bigotries, its nostalgias,
and the bitterest of its lost causes, a republic of yeoman farmers.
Just as his silver crusade was bypassed by a scientific process,
so his rude Old Testament idea of the dignity of man
was defeated by the awesome figure of Charles Darwin.
By the way, the State Legislature of Tennessee
only in 1968 abolished its anti-evolution law,
and decided that man, even a small farmer, was a mammal.
But by the turn of the century, the small farmer was beginning to be a primitive relic
of a nation that was given over to the combine, to the grain exchange,
to the assembly line, to the factories.
And for better or worse, to the cities.