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(More customer reviews)In his introduction to this highly readable, deeply-researched history of the New York bourgeoisie, Beckert says that the current trend in American history of examining the unknown voices of average Americans is laudable. But, he points out, since it is the rich and powerful who make the conditions under which average Americans live, they are also deserving of study. (At least I think that's what Beckert was driving at; I took the book back to the library and am writing this review from memory).
When I first moved to New York I went with a friend to the Steinway showroom. He was studying piano at Julliard and wanted to try out a couple of pianos to see how different they were from his old 1923 grand. I don't know where my friend is these days, but Steinway is still there, just as it has been from the 1840s (if not before -- I don't have the book, so I can't check). But what I do know is that Steinway and the manufacture of pianos through the period covered in this great book, is just one of the many stories that Beckert tells to illustrate his main idea: from small manufactories, great industrial fortunes grew up, from a small mercantile elite great financiers were born, from the Civil War the New York merchants and especially the new manufacturing class profited mightily.
The eariler merchants, who had kept the manufacturers out of their exclusive society, had to let them inside the charmed circle. (After all the manufacturers wealth often outstripped that of the earlier merchant class. The money made from the exportation of cotton and the importation had been good, but it didn't compare to the vast wealth born out industry).In the process, the old merchant class taught the new manufacturing class (many of whom were fair and equitable in their dealings with workers, who saw them often as co-workers, as honest hard-working Americans who were deserving of their wages, as free man in the spirit of the American Revolution), that their employees were of a lower racial and societal order. Peter Cooper (Cooper Union) never bought into this lie, but many others did.
And so the great consolidation of wealthy New Yorkers was accomplshed as the newly wealthy were taught about perquisites of power. In the process, the new manufacturing elite grew increasingly distant from their employees. And later, as newly efficient industrial processes robbed craftsmen of their importance in the creation of goods, and immigrants were brought in to work for pennies a day and set against each other so that labor costs could be cut, tensions and misunderstandings flourished. The monied class looked for and found ideologies to support their views of themselves of an elite -- Spencer's social darwinism, for example. In addition to ideologies, they used their vast fortunes to build armories the length of Manhattan to protect themselves from the rabble (who only a generation before had been freeborn Americans worthy of respect.) Steinway, for instance, had done his best in earlier days to pay decent wages. But when they unionized and sought better wages, he and his fellow piano manufacturers conspired to lock out any piano union employees who supported a strike against any other piano manufacturer. From a belief in the goodness of men, and the perfectability of the American system through the agency of freeborn men, the discourse changed to the adoption of a bogus science that justified their weath and power. The same the story was eventually told everywhere in America.
A short review can't hope to do this book justice. It tells a vast, complex story with admirable clarity and continuity. I may just get it out of the library again and read it for a third time!
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