American economic growth in the nineteenth century was the wonder of the Western world. Over the course of the century the growth rate of national product averaged 3.5 to 4.0 percent per year, far higher than in England or other European countries. Compared with the twentieth century, nineteenth-century American growth owed much more to increases in factor supplies than technological change. Of the three major productive inputs – labor, natural resources, and capital – increases in the supply of labor account for the largest fraction of aggregate growth in the nineteenth century: twice as important as capital accumulation, five times as important as additions to the stock of natural resources. If it is true that labor makes a nation’s wealth, few better examples could be found than the American economy of the nineteenth century.

This chapter surveys the major developments in the American labor force in the nineteenth century: its size and composition; rewards to labor; and labor relations, within firms and with the government. The scope of the chapter is deliberately wide, with an underlying emphasis on aspects of change important in the subsequent development of the labor force in the twentieth century. For example, I give considerable attention to trends in nonfarm wages because a majority of American workers in the late twentieth century are employed in nonfarm industries. In keeping with this theme, the chapter concludes with a snapshot view of labor markets at the turn of the twentieth century compared with labor markets today.

During the past century America’s business system has experienced three dramatic transformations. The first, which climaxed in the last years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries and is usually labeled “The Great Merger Movement,” featured a shift to the corporate form of organization and the development of a high degree of concentration in most sectors of the industrial economy. A second, less drastic, wave of change took place in the 1940s and 1950s, when the multidivisional, decentralized firm operating in worldwide markets became the norm for America’s leading enterprises. We are currently experiencing the third and most formidable of these three transformations, as leading U.S. companies – many of them now in the service sector – reorganize and develop appropriate strategies for an international economy characterized by intense competition and seemingly unending pressures to innovate.

All three of these transitions have been successful, and the U.S. corporate economy has, on balance, succeeded in providing society with the goods, services, jobs, and economic opportunities that the American people wanted. The key to that success has been the ability of corporate enterprise to adapt to new conditions in its external environment and to reshape its personnel, organizations, and operations so as to remain innovative over the long term.

The single most important factor accounting for the ability to adapt and innovate has been the manner in which successful U.S. companies have blended corporate resources with professional expertise. This combination has taken place in cultural and institutional settings that have fostered risk-taking and creative change.

In the late eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin commented on the remarkably high fertility and large family size in what was British North America, which he attributed to the ease of acquiring good farm land. His comments were reiterated by Thomas Robert Malthus in his famous Essay on the Principle of Population:

A long line of scholarship minimizes the importance of international financial transactions for the development of the American economy. Foreign investment financed only a small share – perhaps 6 percent – of nineteenth-century U.S. capital formation. At no point in the twentieth century did international financial flows amount to more than a fraction of domestic savings. For an extended period after World War II, U.S. monetary and fiscal policies were formulated with little regard to balance-of-payments considerations. American economic history texts, adopting this perspective, consign international financial transactions to footnotes and appendixes.

The theme of this chapter is that international financial transactions and the institutions governing their conduct have in fact significantly influenced the growth and fluctuation of the American economy. Foreign investment was critical on the margin, helping to mold the pattern of economic development from the railway age of the mid-nineteenth century to the Internet age of the twentieth. Repeatedly over the course of American economic history, the business cycle was shaped and policy responses were constrained by international financial flows.

A subsidiary theme is that U.S. international financial transactions have exerted an important influence on other economies. At the beginning of the twentieth century, flows of gold and capital to and from the United States jeopardized the stability of major European currencies and occasionally threatened the entire international gold standard edifice. U.S. capital exports facilitated European reconstruction after World War I and transmitted the American depression of the 1930s to the rest of the world. After World War II even more than before, the international financial system turned on the stability of U.S. lending and the position of the dollar.

INTRODUCTION

An examination of technological innovation in the twentieth-century U.S. economy must naturally begin in the nineteenth century. An appropriate starting point is Alfred North Whitehead’s observation, in Science and the Modern World, that “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention” (98). The sentence just quoted is well known, but equally important is the less famous observation that immediately followed it:

Whitehead’s statement serves as a valuable prolegomenon in at least two respects to much of this chapter’s discussion of technology in the twentieth century. First, a distinctive feature of the twentieth century was that the inventive process became powerfully institutionalized and far more systematic than it had been in the nineteenth century. This institutionalization of inventive activity meant that innovation proceeded in increasingly close proximity to organized research in the twentieth century. Of course, this research was not confined, as Whitehead appreciated, to the realm of science, much less to scientific research of a fundamental nature. But Whitehead’s observation is apposite in another respect as well. For all its reorganization and institutionalization, the realization of the economic impact of twentieth-century scientific and technological advances has required significant improvement and refinement of the products in which they are embodied.

INTRODUCTION

The United States was the first country of continental proportions to develop in the nineteenth century. This result was largely the consequence of the development of internal transportation. Through a combination of a massive investment in the transport sector and the initiation of newer and more efficient transport modes, the original coastal settlement on the Atlantic reached out to an ever-wider hinterland. The rich interior, with its better soils, was integrated into a regionally specialized whole. Without the allocation of resources to transportation on a large scale and the succession of nineteenth-century transport innovations in canals and railroads, the contours of the American economy would have been far different.

In this chapter I examine how the interplay of American market conditions and social intervention functioned to evoke transport investment in great abundance; how these facilities both lowered the costs of movement and widened the market; and how the benefits were distributed to the rest of the economy.

I begin by discussing some of the theoretical effects of transport investment. The second section then treats the motives, magnitudes, and financing of the succession of transport innovations undertaken in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also deals with their success in lowering transport rates and attracting traffic. The third and fourth sections examine the variety of economic effects attributable to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century transportation revolutions. The final section briefly reviews that entire experience to see what conclusions may be drawn from it.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter is concerned with quantitative features of the development of the American economy in the period between the late eighteenth century and World War I – the long nineteenth century. A reasonable place to begin is with measurements of the size of the economy. Since a central feature of any economy is production, size is appropriately measured by aggregate output. Other indicators, such as population and geographic extent, are considered below.

The conventional measures of aggregate output are the national product – that is, output produced by factors of production owned by Americans – and the domestic product – output produced by factors of production domiciled in the United States. The proper index to select depends upon whether one thinks of the United States as the sum of all Americans or as a geographic entity. We are interested in the history of the people of the United States, and therefore the national product is the more appropriate concept. It underlies most of the measurements treated in this chapter; in practice the choice matters little, however, since in the years under examination the national product and the domestic product were virtually identical. A more important question is the extent to which these conventional measures properly describe levels of output and changes in output over time, a question set aside for the moment but treated later in this essay.

Among strategies for the study of the elusive Ravel is that of the ubiquitous ‘compare and contrast’ approach: Debussy and Ravel give insights by refraction even though their theatrical works could hardly be more different. If Ravel attended all the performances in the first run of Debussy's Pelléas, no wonder his two completed ‘operas’ are nothing like Debussy's: he knew he had to be different.

L'Heure espagnole in context

L'Heure espagnole was written between April and October of 1907, orchestrated in 1910, and described as a ‘comédie musicale’. It was around this time that Ravel's professional relationship with Debussy crossed the thin line from respect to rivalry. In 1906, there was the welldocumented conflict with Pierre Lalo when Debussy was credited with an innovatory style of piano writing which Ravel felt he had initiated in Jeux d'eau. In 1907, a further accusation was the last straw, this time of Debussy's plagiarism, in ‘La Soirée dans Grenade’, of a harmonic ‘trouvaille’ from Ravel's early ‘Habanera’ from Sites auriculaires. All the more reason for Ravel to distance himself from Debussy. This latter furore may have suggested that Ravel was particularly proud of his Spanish innovations. Manuel Rosenthal noted the strength of the composer's relationship with his mother, of ‘basquo-ibérique’ descent: there was a strong sense of his belonging to Spain, and of Spain belonging to him, as it could not have done to Debussy.

Given that Ravel's compositional output is relatively small for a major composer, his corpus of thirty-nine songs would appear to be significant by sheer size alone. However, once we discount the eight songs composed prior to the orchestral cycle Shéhérazade (1903) – all essentially student efforts, and the twelve folk melodies for which Ravel provided accompaniments as something other than fully composed, serious ‘art song’, we are left with quite a scant amount of work. How then does the genre of song figure within Ravel's oeuvre? Is its stature analogous, say, to that of solo song in Mozart, or perhaps Stravinsky – some tasty morsels obscured by works of far greater scope and quality? Or is the situation closer to Debussy, whose songs clearly are more significant and represent a critical component of his stylistic evolution?

Despite its relative obscurity, even for devotees of Ravel, the genre of song is crucial to his compositional development and achievement. Ravel himself cited among his favourite works the Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé and the Chansons madécasses. More concretely, the songs (and the operas) provide a perfect conduit for characteristic elements of Ravel's musical voice, including exoticism, irony, ‘literalism’ (text painting on multiple planes) and archaism.

Consider these statements written within ten years of one another. Each emanates from a figure who is at once a major theorist of art and a practitioner whose work retains its classical status today. Yet no two statements could be less alike in the circumstances under which they were voiced or in the roles we assign them within intellectual history.

Innovation in orchestration and genius in the handling of shape and colour are generally undervalued in broadly analytical studies of music, even in work on early twentieth-century music where, arguably, these factors were increasingly used to grant the coherence that pitch relationships were no longer able to provide. Pitch-centred analysis of modernist music has tended to regard music as independent of its medium, and has helped to build an aesthetic that treats works that depend on colour and shape, Ravel's Rapsodie espagnole for example, as less significant than those that directly confront the problems of tonality's supposed demise. Furthermore, the popularity of such pieces has meant that analysts have been denied their crusading role: they have not had to invoke complex methods to help secure the place of these compositions in the canon. Given the scope of this chapter, analyses must be brief, and will often give explications of form, thematic interconnections and post-tonal harmonic structures in the time-honoured way, but there will be a little more attention to register, shape and colour than normal, indicating the essential rather than secondary role of these parameters in Ravel's music.

Shéhérazade (overture)

Ravel's first orchestral work, Shéhérazade, ouverture de féerie, was conducted by its composer in its first and only performance until recent times on 27 May 1899. It was the first of only four orchestral pieces that did not begin their lives as piano works or as ballets. I will consider these in the first part of this chapter and then proceed to Ravel's transcriptions.

“Au Grand et cher auteur de Roméo et Juliette, l'auteur reconnaissant de Tristan et Isolde” – so reads the dedication on the copy of the full score of Tristan that Wagner sent to Berlioz, on 21 January 1860, accompanied by a brief and touching letter:

“I am delighted to be able to offer you the first copy of my Tristan,” writes Wagner, who urges Berlioz to accept the score “as a token of friendship.” Such attentiveness is a small indication, I think, that even as a mature composer nearing his forty-seventh birthday, Wagner continued to regard Berlioz, then fifty-six, as his senior and by no means conventionally benevolent colleague. In fact the gift was one of extraordinary generosity, both because this was indeed a first, and rare, pre-publication copy, sent by the publishers to Wagner only one week earlier, and because it was a costly item, whose list price of thirty-five thalers, or one hundred and forty-four francs, was equivalent at the time to the monthly income of many a professor, government functionary, or itinerant musician. What led Wagner to bestow such bounty upon Berlioz? And why, for Wagner, was the Frenchman still the “grand and dear author of Roméo et Juliette” – the now more than twenty-year-old dramatic symphony of 1839?

Berlioz left posterity an admirable performance legacy. The scores and parts published under his supervision and, for the most part, to his satisfaction, are sources that typically offer unambiguous direction as to his intent. They often reflect years of perfecting the manuscript materials in conjunction with live concerts under his own baton. His personal involvement with multiple performances of the symphonic works, unusual for its time (and far greater, for instance, than Beethoven's), led to meticulous and ongoing recomposition, and with his orchestration and conducting treatises he left useful guides to the performing forces at his disposal and his notions as to their most effective deployment. His sensitivity to the practical issues of live music-making, if not always to the cost of music and musicians, makes his work feel somehow welcoming to those who undertake it. With the exception of perhaps a half-dozen passages of legendary difficulty, the music lies well beneath the fingers and is rewarding to discover and re-create – that is, to perform.

Berlioz the conductor left across Europe a generation of professional musicians schooled in how his music was supposed to go – though too few conductors committed to his cause. By the end of his life, most of the completed works had been well performed. A good proportion of these had been heard often and were familiar to serious listeners both in Paris and elsewhere; a few – the Fantastique, the Pilgrims' March from Harold in Italy, the Roman Carnival Overture, the Hungarian March from Faust, and portions of L'Enfance du Christ – were even popular: hummed in the streets, known to hundreds.

Poetic metaphors and scientific models

The century and a half preceding the Romantic period was marked not only by an unprecedented succession of major scientific discoveries, but also by the rise of entirely new domains of scientific knowledge. From Newtonian mechanics to chemistry, from biology to psychology, each new field disclosed natural phenomena that were increasingly inaccessible to ordinary human observation. Such phenomena had to be apprehended through technological innovations (telescopes, microscopes), and were often only comprehended through the use of mathematical formulas and conceptual models.

Amidst this growing scientific abstraction, Romantic writers have been seen as conducting a valiant but ultimately futile crusade to save the appearances. Goethe insisted that natural objects should not merely be studied objectively – ‘in themselves and in their relation to each other’ – but viewed in relation to the observers themselves. Blake bitterly denounced Newton's mechanistic world-view, and even Coleridge, while professing admiration for Newton's scientific discoveries, deplored the passivity of corporeal bodies in Newton's scheme of nature and, what for him was worse, the passivity of Newton's concept of the mind itself. ‘[T]he Souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton’, he wrote, adding that ‘Newton was a mere materialist – Mind in his system is always passive – a lazy looker-on on an external World.’ The Romantics' suspicion of a scientific approach to nature is best expressed in Wordsworth's line, ‘we murder to dissect’.

Yet such criticism of Newtonian abstraction and materialism does not mean that the Romantics were hostile to science itself.

“J'adore Mozart” wrote Berlioz in 1856. Ten years later, at a time when he took pleasure in not going to operas any more, he attended eight performances of Don Giovanni at the Théâtre Lyrique, where he was seen to “cover his face and cry like a child.” Yet neither Berlioz himself nor his biographers are ever inclined to include Mozart among the select pantheon of historical figures who inspired him most deeply, the names being more usually Shakespeare, Goethe, Virgil, and among musicians Gluck, Beethoven, sometimes Weber, sometimes Spontini. Mozart never displaced Gluck in Berlioz's mind as the greatest of eighteenth-century composers, a preference which very few would admit to in the present century when an admiration for Mozart has been a solid donné among professionals and amateurs alike. Where did Mozart stand in his critical perspectives, and what part did Mozart play in his work as conductor and composer?

The matter was admirably summed up by Berlioz himself in chapter 17 of the Mémoires, which is devoted entirely to his regard for Mozart. Written probably in 1848, or soon after, it describes the fiery passions of his student years: “I have said that […] I was taken up exclusively with the study of great dramatic music. I should rather have said, of lyric tragedy; and it was for this reason that I regarded Mozart with a certain coolness.” Gluck was performed in French at the Opéra while Mozart was sung in Italian at the Théâtre Italien, and that was sufficient to assign him to the enemy camp.

If this topic should seem either too piecemeal or too self-evident to include in a general volume on romantic criticism, it may help to recall that for René Wellek the status of neoclassical criticism among the Romantics is the crucial issue that makes the second volume of his History of modern criticism possible: ‘I think we must recognize that we can speak of a general European Romantic movement only if we take a wide over-all view and consider simply the general rejection of the neoclassical creed as a common denominator.’ But possibly this claim only deepens suspicion. Arthur Lovejoy had famously argued that no criterion of any kind was common to all Romanticisms, and Wellek, who wrote his equally famous rebuttal of Lovejoy while at work on volume two, would have been especially eager at that time to uphold the legitimacy of broad period definitions. Can the exceptions, we may ask – Byron and Chateaubriand, for example – ever be acceptably rationalized from any standpoint, not just Lovejoy's?

Nevertheless, whatever one might feel moved to say on other occasions, this is clearly not the place for the postmodern insistence that only an atomism vastly exceeding even Lovejoy's can do justice to the complexity of literary history (and in any case, Musset had already said that about ‘Romanticism’ in 1824!). One must do what one can, aided in this case by the easily overlooked precision of Wellek's claim: we can try at first to agree, tentatively, that what the spirit of the Romantic age rejects is the neoclassical, not necessarily the Classical or the texts of antiquity, and proceed from there. It may finally be possible to show, however, that there is something even more telling, more truly characteristic and self-defining, albeit more varied, about the Romantic reception of Classical antiquity itself.

An important part of Ravel's compositional aesthetic is bound up with objectification, crystallisation and detachment, ideas that connect with Symbolist notions of imagery, Cubist notions of spatial and temporal planes and, beyond World War I, with the basic tenets of neoclassicism. Musical machines or mechanisms represent a particular embodiment of this aesthetic, and so this chapter probes Stravinsky's commonly invoked image of ‘the most perfect of Swiss clockmakers’. Although ideas of musical objects and machines are closely related (even interlocked), for the sake of clarity, and in keeping with the artificial subject-matter, they are here explored successively rather than simultaneously.

Ravel's objectivity and ‘l'objet juste’

Beyond the elusive essentials of inspiration and imagination, composition for Ravel involved a life-long striving for the highest technical achievement: ‘conscience compels us to turn ourselves into good craftsmen. My objective, therefore, is technical perfection.’ Ravel then goes a step further: ‘The truth is one can never have enough control. Moreover, since we cannot express ourselves without exploiting and thus transforming our emotions, isn't it better at least to be fully aware and acknowledge that art is the supreme imposture?’ As a subsidiary non-musical pursuit, Ravel also had a passion for collecting meticulously honed objects at his small house in Montfort-l'Amaury: glass ornaments, figurines, clocks and mechanical toys.

To argue for a Romantic genre theory may seem surprising. This is the period when William Wordsworth writes that every author must ‘creat[e] the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’, when Madame de Staël praises Germany as opposed to France because its authors ‘form [their] public’, and when Victor Hugo insists that writers be judged by the ‘laws of their personal organisation’ instead of ‘rules and genres’. But as Hugo indicates Romanticism may not so much reject genre as expand its provenance so that it is no longer a system of exclusion. Noting that a work's ‘defects’ are often the ‘condition of [its] qualities’ (p. 107), Hugo questions the equation of genre with achieved form. He also points to what is more systematically theorized in Germany as hermeneutics: the understanding of culturally or historically different texts through a reading that is ‘psychological’ as well as ‘grammatical’ and ‘technical’. Wilhelm Dilthey later links a specifically Romantic hermeneutics to a tradition leading from Leibniz through Goethe and Herder to the post-Kantians, one that sees ‘the shaping structure of the soul behind the appearance’ of natural and cultural phenomena. Instituting a hermeneutics of genre, romanticism replaces earlier pragmatic or formalist approaches with a phenomenological approach to genres as expressing sometimes conflicted states of (cultural) consciousness. Genres are seen not in terms of effects or structural features, but as sites of negotiation between subject and object, inwardness and its externalization, or as (in)adequate embodiments of the ‘Idea’. This essay traces the emergence of ‘philosophical genre theory’ up to its temporary consolidation by Hegel.

In this essay I would like to discuss the inaugural and modern dimensions of literary and artistic Romantic criticism in Europe. It is useful to begin, however, with a few general observations on the Enlightenment, and, first of all, with the fact that in this period reason was engaged in a critique of the world and of itself, thereby transforming traditional rationalism and its atemporal, geometric qualities. Modernity has its origins in this new orientation of reason and criticism, that is to say, in the emergence and diffusion of critical reason in every sphere.

Criticism becomes, therefore, the distinctive trait of modernity. Modernity begins as a critique, expressed through the principles of reason, philosophy, religion, morality, law, history, economics and politics. From this same critique arise the fundamental concepts and cardinal ideas of modernity, above all, progress, evolution, revolution, liberty, democracy, science and technology.

Criticism manifested itself in numerous ways and domains, first and foremost in the critique of Reason itself, in reason's renunciation of the grandiose constructs which identified it with the good, with being and with truth. Reason likewise ceased to be the home of the idea and became instead a journey, an investigative methodology based on scientific and empirical principles. Criticism also expressed itself as the critique of metaphysics and of its truths impervious to change. But it likewise became the critique of the certainties of traditional values, institutions and beliefs. With Rousseau, Laclos and Sade, to mention a few emblematic names, criticism expressed itself as the critique of habits and customs.