The Books: “A History of the American People” (Paul Johnson)

Next book on the US history shelf:

Next book in my American history section is the massive A History of the American People , by Paul Johnson. Massive in scope and really well-written – I totally recommend this book. There are swaths of American history I’m not clear on … and Paul Johnson attempts to cover it all: industries rising, the birth of American literature, the religious renaissance that swept the nation in the 1800s … but then, of course, we go through each President … and each administration, the events that shaped our nation, domestic and foreign. Johnson’s English, an outsider, but I think that makes him even more qualified to write about some of this stuff, because he’s not trying to stick it to a political party he despises, he’s not trying to right a historical wrong, he doesn’t write with a massive CHIP on his shoulder, which is unbelievably refreshing. He certainly has opinions – he’s LOADED with opinions … but it’s still an outsider’s analysis of how our nation morphed into what it is today. Johnson loves America. He is certainly not uncritical of a lot of it – but whatever, we’re a huge nation – anyone who is completely uncritical of America in a kneejerk way is a moron.

Johnson writes at the end of his introduction: “I have not bowed to current academic nostrums about nomenclature or accepted the fly-blown philacteries of Political Correctness. So I do not acknowledge the existence of hyphenated Americans, or Native Americans, or any other qualified kind. They are all Americans to me: black, white, red, brown, yellow, thrown together by fate in that swirling maelstrom of history which has produced the most remarkable people the world has ever seen. I love them and salute them, and this is their story.”

He’s a marvelous writer. This book is enormous and rather daunting – but I can’t recommend it highly enough.

It was hard to figure out what to choose as an excerpt – there’s so much awesome information here – but I decided to go with an excerpt from his section called “Monster Cities: Chicago and New York”. I loved this section especially because Chicago and New York are both so dear to me … I loved reading about their development.

From A History of the American People , by Paul Johnson.

New York, by contrast, was circumferenced by water and chose to have its park, on a giant scale, in the middle. New York was still second in size to Philadelphia at the time of the 1810 census, with 91,874 to 96,373 people, and the plan for its development laid down the following year provided only minimum public spaces (its original Parade Ground between 23rd and 34th Streets had been long since greedily built over). But when the fashions for laying out big public parks within cities was brought from London and Paris soon after, New York still had plenty of undeveloped land in central Manhattan, and the city fathers were able to set aside an enormous area. The landscape architect F.L. Olmsted (1822-1903), from Hartford, Connecticut, that nursery of genius, together with the Londoner Calvert Vaux (1824-95), designed Central Park as an extraordinary multi-class complex of carriage drives, walks, lakes for fishing, boating, and skating, and boulder-strewn wilderness woods.

By the time the Park was in working order the City was fast growing up around it. Population was then 813,000. Forty years later, thanks largely to immigration, it was nearly 3,500,000 and still growing at breakneck speed. The rise of high buildings meant that the immense flat space of Central Park was increasingly surrounded by a periphery of stone and masonry achieving spectacular effects of precisely the rus in urbe appeal which had been the aim of the earliest town planners, like John Nash of London. No other city in the world can produce these skylines. First came four or five-story structures, developed out of British precedent for shops, factories, and warehouses, the leading spirits being two brilliant iron-founders of the 1850s, Daniel Badger and James Bogardus. From this emerged cage-constructions, whose interiors were self-supporting metal frameworks reinforced by independent masonry walls. Next was skeleton-type construction, in which even the external walls hung off the metal frame. The Equitable Building of 1868-70 is often regarded as the first New York skyscraper: it had a frontage only five bays wide but it rose to 142 feet in eight stories and was serviced by two elevators. (Its replacement, the Equitable Building of 1913-15, was an entire block, reached forty stories and 542 feet, and had forty-eight elevators making 50,000 trips a day, giving some idea of the leap from large to gigantic in New York City in these four decades.

Evidently the New York skyline was beginning to assume its characteristic form, and to promote deep thoughts in visitors, as early as 1876, when T.H. Huxley, the leading promoter of scientific ideas in Europe, made his first visit. His verdict was: “Ah, that is interesting. In the Old World, the first things you see as you approach a great city are steeples; here you see, first, centers of intelligence.” Huxley was in a sense right: the skyscraper represented the application of science at its frontiers and imaginative intelligence in the art of building in precisely the way a great Renaissance architect like Michelangelo would have instantly appreciated. But the men who devoted huge creative intelligence and engineering and mathematical skills to making New York a “scientific city” did not share Huxley’s atheism. Rather the contrary. A characteristic American religiosity tended to enter even the field of the high-rise and the structurally gigantic. John Roebling (1806-99), the German-trained immigrant who designed the Brooklyn Bridge (it was completed by his son Washington in 1883), then the longest suspension bridge in the world, said it was “proof positive that our mind is one with the Great Universal Mind.”

New York differed from Chicago in key respects. Though less innovative, it was richer in the sense that it was the source of the capital for Chicago as well as itself, and most major firms with immortal longings, who wished to commemorate themselves with the tallest, largest, most expensive skyscraper, had their headquarters in New York. So ultimately New York skyscrapers were not only taller but more decorative. The ten-story Western Union headquarters was put up in 1873-5, followed quickly by the eleven-story Tribune building, then the sixteen-story World Building in 1889-90 and the twenty-story Manhattan Life Insurance giant of 1893. New York soon surpassed Chicago in height, with ten stories or more added every decade, and it indulged in fantastic and often beautiful accretions of domes, columns, and spires. Most New York skyscrapers were permanent advertisements for their companies. Thus the Singer Building of 1902 paid for its construction by one year’s extra sales in Asia alone. Equally, New York’s vast insurance industry dictated the construction, regardless of cost, of headquarters buildings which vaunted strength, size, and durability (rather like banks). In the first decade of the 20th century, the Metropolitan Life had insurance in force totaling over $2.2 billion, so it built and occupied, 1909-10, an immense temple in the sky which was 700 feet high, the world’s tallest for a time. Another example was the spectacular Woolworth Building of 1911, which for long represented the skyscraper. Frank Winfield Woolworth (1852-1919), who established his first five-and-ten-cent store in 1879 and by 1911 had over 1,000 worldwide, told the contractor who put up his building that though it could never make a proper return on capital it had an enormous hidden profit as a gigantic signboard.

By 1903 office rents were four times higher in Manhattan than in central Chicago and that was one reason buildings were taller. High rents also determined the cluster of skyscrapers within easy reach of the Stock Exchange: by 1910 they could be as high as $24,750 a square foot in Wall Street but only $800 in South Street a few blocks away. Then in 1916 came the New York Set-Back ordinance: so long as your architect worked out the set-backs correctly, you could go to any height you liked. Grandeur and display raised the height well above the economic optimum and by 1930 it was averaging sixty-three stories in the best area around Grand Central, with the Chrysler Building (1929-30) pushing up to seventy-seven stories, the extra being the advertising element. The sensation of the 1920s, indeed, was the development of the Grand Central area as an alternative to Wall Street, and New York skyscrapers are still to this day grouped around these two foci.

But we are getting ahead of our story, and above it too, for beneath the towering New York high-rises were the clustering tenements, themselves also multistory, of the burgeoning metropolis of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. New York had begun as a Dutch city, then had expanded as a mainly English city, then in the 19th century had broadened into a multiethnic city, much favored by Germans and, above all, by the Irish. Then came the turn of the Italians, the Greeks, and the Jews from Eastern Europe. The outbreak of savage state pogroms in Russia from 1881 had dramatic consequences for New York. In the following ten years Jews were arriving in the city at the rate of 9,000 a year. In the 1890s it jumped to an average of 37,000 a year and in the twelve years 1903-14 it averaged 76,000 a year. In 1886 the Grench people commemorated the centenary of American Independence by having their sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi fashion a gigantic copper statue of Liberty, which was placed on a 154-foot pedestal on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor, the whole rising to 305 feet, making it the highest statue in the world. A local Jewish relief worker, Emma Lazarus (1849-87), whose talent had been spotted by Emerson, grasped, perhaps better than anyone else in America at that time, the true significance of the open-door policy to the persecuted poor of Europe. So she wrote a noble sonnet, “The New Colossus,” celebrating the erection of the statue, in which the Goddess of Liberty herself speaks to the Old World:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, the tempest-toss’d to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

The refugees and the huddled masses crowded not just into Manhattan as a whole but in particular into the Lower East Side, one and a half square miles bounded by the Bowery, Third Avenue, Catherine Street, 14th Street, and the East River. In 1894 the density of Manhattan reached 142.2 people an acre, as opposed to 126.9 in Paris and 100.8 in Berlin. They were much higher than the Chicago tenements, perhaps safer — fire escapes had been made obligatory in 1867 — and far more crowded. The most infested were the Dumbell Tenements, which get their name from a shape determined by the 1879 regulartion which imposed airshafts. They were five to eight stories high, 25 feet wide, 100 feet deep, and with fourteen rooms, only one of which got natural light, on each floor. Over half a million Jews were crowded into the Lower Easy Side, and the heart of New York Jewry was the Tenth Ward, where, in 1893, 74,401 people lived in 1,196 tenements spread over six blocks. Five years later the population density in Tenth Ward was 747 persons per acre or 478,080 per square mile. By comparison, the modern density of Calcutta is only 101,010 per square mile (1961-3). The New York buildings had more stories of course; even so, the Tenth Ward was probably the most crowded habitation, in the 1890s, in the whole of human history. By 1900 there were 42,700 tenements in Manhattan, housing 1,585,000 people.

So here were luxury skyscrapers surrounded by slums, an image of rich-and-poor America. And the poor were, in a sense, sweated labor, most of them in the ‘needle trades’. By 1888 no less than 234 out of 241 New York clothing firms were Jewish. By 1913 clothing was New York’s biggest industry, with 16,552 factories, nearly all Jewish, employing 312,245 people. But the apparent rich-poor dichotomy concealed a huge engine of upward mobility. The whole engine of America was upwardly mobile, but New York, for the penniless immigrant, was the very cathedral of ascent.