The second distinguishing characteristic of this pioneer era of American big business, big money and big power was that most of its successful practitioners, unlike so many of the great entrepreneurs of the Old World, who often seemed obsessed with technological construction as such, seemed uncommitted to any special way of making money. All they wanted was to maximize profits, though it happens that most of them met in and through the great money-maker of the age, railroads. Cornelius Vanderbilt had a mere 10–20 million dollars before he got into railroads, which brought him an extra 80–90-odd millions in sixteen years. Small wonder, when men like the California crowd – Collis P. Huntington (1821–1900), Leland Stanford (1824–93), Charles Crocker (1822–88) and Mark Hopkins (1813–78) – could unblushingly charge three times the actual cost of building the Central Pacific Railroad, and racketeers like Fisk and Gould could scoop up millions by rigged dealing and looting without actually organizing the laying of a single sleeper or the departure of a single locomotive.

Few of the first-generation millionaires made their career in a single branch of activity. Huntington began by selling hardware to gold-rush miners in Sacramento. Perhaps his customers included the meat magnate Philip Armour (1832–1901 ) who tried his luck in the goldfields before turning to the grocery business in Milwaukee, which in turn enabled him to make a killing in pork during the Civil War. Jim Fisk was in turn circus hand, hotel waiter, pedlar and dry-goods salesman, before discovering the possibilities of war contracts and thereafter the stock exchange. Jay Gould was in turn cartographer and leather merchant, before discovering what could be done with railway stock. Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) did not concentrate his energies on steel until he was almost forty. He began as a telegraphist, continued as a railway executive – his income already made from investments whose value was rapidly increasing – dabbled in oil (which was the chosen field of John D. Rockefeller, who began life as a clerk and book-keeper in Ohio), while gradually moving into the industry he was to dominate. All these men were speculators and ready to move towards the big money wherever it was. None had noticeable scruples or could afford to have in an economy and an age where fraud, bribery, slander and if necessary guns were normal aspects of competition. All were hard men, and most would have regarded the question whether they were honest as considerably less relevant to their affairs than the question whether they were smart. Not for nothing did ‘Social Darwinism’, the dogma that those who climbed to the top of the heap were the best, because the fittest to survive in the human jungle, become something like a national theology in the late-nineteenth-century United States.

Perhaps this led to a greater emphasis on the other economic incentive. If any single factor dominated the lives of nineteenth-century workers it was insecurity. They did not know at the beginning of the week how much they would bring home at the end. They did not know how long their present work would last or, if they lost it, when they would get another job or under what conditions. They did not know when accident or sickness would hit them, and though they knew that some time in middle age – perhaps in the forties for unskilled labourers, perhaps in the fifties for the more skilled – they would become incapable of doing a full measure of adult physical labour, they did not know what would happen to them between then and death. Theirs was not the insecurity of peasants, at the mercy of periodic – and to be honest, often more murderous – catastrophes such as drought and famine, but capable of predicting with some accuracy how a poor man or woman would spend most days of their lives from birth to the graveyard. It was a more profound unpredictability, in spite of the fact that probably a good proportion of workers were employed for long periods of their lives by a single employer. There was no certainty of work even for the most skilled: during the slump of 1857–8 the number of workers in the Berlin engineering industry fell by almost a third. There was nothing that corresponds to modern social security, except charity and relief from actual destitution, and sometimes little of either.

For the world of liberalism insecurity was the price paid for both progress and freedom, not to mention wealth, and was made tolerable by continuous economic expansion. Security was to be bought – at least sometimes – but not for free men and women but, as the English terminology put it clearly, for ‘servants’ – whose liberty was strictly constrained: domestic servants, ‘railway servants’, even ‘civil servants’ (or public officials). In fact, the greatest body even of these, the urban domestic servants, did not enjoy the security of the favoured family retainers of the traditional nobility and gentry, but constantly faced insecurity in its most terrible form: instant dismissal ‘without a character’, i.e. a recommendation to future employers from the former master, or more likely mistress. For the world of the established bourgeois was also considered to be basically insecure, a state of war in which they might at any moment become the casualties of competition, fraud or economic slump, though in practice the businessmen who were thus vulnerable probably formed only a minority of the middle classes, and the penalty of failure was rarely manual labour, let alone the workhouse. The most serious risk which faced them was that to their involuntarily parasitic women-folk – the unexpected death of the male breadwinner.

Neither economic incentives nor insecurity therefore provided a really effective general mechanism for keeping labour hard at work; the former, because their scope was limited, the latter because much of it was or seemed as unavoidable as the weather. The middle class found this hard to understand. Why should the best, soberest and ablest workers be the ones most likely to form trade unions, since they were the very ones who were worth the highest wages and the most regular employment? But unions were in fact composed of and certainly led by such men, though the bourgeois mythology saw them as mobs of the stupid and misled, instigated by agitators who could not otherwise have earned a comfortable living. There was of course no mystery. The workers for whom employers competed were not merely the ones with the bargaining strength to make unions practicable, but also those most aware that ‘the market’ alone guaranteed them neither security nor what they thought they had a right to.

Dominance implies inferiority. But the mid-nineteenth-century bourgeoisie was divided on the nature of that inferiority of the lower classes about which there was no substantial disagreement, though attempts had to be made to distinguish, within the subaltern mass, between those who might be expected to rise into, at least, the respectable lower middle class and those who were beyond redemption, since success was due to personal merit, failure was clearly due to personal lack of merit. The traditional bourgeois ethic, puritan or secular, had ascribed this to moral or spiritual feebleness rather than to lack of intellect, for it was evident that not much in the way of brains was needed for success in business, and conversely that mere brains did not guarantee wealth and still less ‘sound’ views. This did not necessarily imply anti-intellectualism, though in Britain and the United States it was pervasive, because the triumphs of business were pre-eminently those of poorly educated men using empiricism and common sense. Even Ruskin reflected the common view when he argued that ‘busy metaphysicians are always entangling good and active people, and weaving cobwebs among the finest wheels of the world’s business’. Samuel Smiles put the matter more simply:

‘The experience to be gathered from books, though often valuable, is but of the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is of the nature of wisdom; and a small store of the latter is worth vastly more than a stock of the former.’

From master to master-race was thus only a short step. Yet the right to dominate, the unquestioned superiority of the bourgeois as a species, implied not only inferiority but ideally an accepted, willing inferiority, as in the relation between man and woman (which once again symbolizes much about the bourgeois world view). The workers, like women, ought to be loyal and contented. If they were not, it must be due to that crucial figure in the social universe of the bourgeoisie, the ‘outside agitator’. Though nothing was more obvious to the naked eye than that the members of craft unions were likely to be the best, the most intelligent, the most skilled workers, the myth of the work-shy outsider exploiting simple-minded but basically sturdy operatives was indestructible. ‘The conduct of the workers is deplorable,’ wrote a French mining manager in 1869, in the process of ferociously repressing the sort of strike of which Zola’s Germinal has given us a vivid picture, ‘but one must recognize that they have been merely the savage instruments of agitators’. To be more precise: the active working-class militant or potential leader must be by definition an ‘agitator’, since he could not be fitted into the stereotype of obedience, dullness and stupidity. When in 1859 nine of the most upright miners from Seaton Delaval – ‘every man a teetotaller, six of them Primitive Methodists, and two of the six local preachers’ – were sent to jail for two months after a strike which they had opposed, the mine manager was quite clear on this point. ‘I know they are respectable men, and that is why I put them in prison. It is no use sending to jail those who cannot feel.’

Racism played a distinctly central role in another rapidly developing social science, anthropology, a merger of two originally quite distinct disciplines, ‘physical anthropology’ (chiefly deriving from anatomical and similar interests) and ‘ethnography’ or the description of various – communities. Both inevitably generally backward or primitive – confronted, and were indeed dominated by, the problem of the differences between different human groups and (as they were drawn into the evolutionist model), the problem of the descent of man and of different types of society, of which the bourgeois world appeared unquestionably the highest. Physical anthropology automatically led to the concept of ‘race’, since the physical differences between white, yellow or black peoples, Negroes, Mongols, Caucasians (or whatever other classifications might be used) were undeniable. This did not in itself imply any belief in racial inequality, superiority or inferiority, though when married to the study of the evolution of man on the basis of the pre-historic fossil record, it did. For man’s earliest identifiable ancestors – notably Neanderthal man – were clearly both more ape-like and culturally inferior to their discoverers. But if some existing races could be shown to be closer to the apes than others, would this not prove their inferiority?

The argument is feeble, but made a natural appeal to those who wanted to prove racial inferiority, e.g. of blacks to whites – or for that matter of anyone to whites. (The shape of the monkey could be discerned by the eye of prejudice even in the Chinese and Japanese, as witness many a modern cartoon.) But if Darwinian biological evolution suggested a hierarchy of races, so did the comparative method as applied in ‘cultural anthropology’, Of which E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) was the leading landmark. For E. B. Tylor (1832–1917), as for so many believers in ‘progress’ who observed communities and cultures which, unlike fossil man, had not died out these were not so much inferior by nature as representatives of an earlier stage of evolution on the road to modern civilization. They were analogous to infancy or childhood in the life of individual man. This implied a theory of stages – Tylor was influenced by Comte’s – which he applied (with the usual caution of respectable men touching on this still explosive subject) to religion. From the primitive ‘animism’ (a word invented by him) the road led to the higher monotheistic religions, and eventually the triumph of science which, capable of explaining increasingly large areas of experience without reference to spirit, would ‘in one department after another substitute for independent voluntary action the working out of systematic law’. Meanwhile, however, historically modified ‘survivals’ of earlier stages of civilization could be discerned everywhere, even in the evidently ‘backward’ parts of civilized nations, e.g. in the superstitions and customs of the countryside. Thus the peasant became a link between savage man and civilized society. Tylor, who thought of anthropology as ‘essentially a reformer’s science’, did not, of course, believe that this indicated any incapacity of peasants to become fully paid-up members of civilized society. But what was easier than to assume that those who represented the stage of childhood or adolescence in the development of civilization were themselves ‘child-like’ and had to be treated like children by their mature ‘parents’?

As the type of the Negro [wrote the Anthropological Review] is foetal, so that of the Mongol is infantile. And in strict accordance with this, we find that their government, literature and art are infantile also. They are beardless children whose life is a task and whose chief virtue consists in unquestioning obedience.

Or, as a Captain Osborn put it in a bluff naval way in 1860: ‘Treat them as children. Make them do what we know is for their benefit as well as our own, and all difficulties in China are at an end.’

Other races were therefore ‘inferior’, either because they represented an earlier stage of biological evolution or of socio-cultural evolution, or both. And their inferiority was proved because in fact the ‘superior race’ was superior by the criteria of its own society: technologically more advanced, militarily more powerful, richer and more ‘successful’. The argument was both flattering and convenient – so convenient that the middle classes were inclined to take it over from the aristocrats (who had long fancied themselves a superior race) for internal as well as international purposes: the poor were poor because they were biologically inferior and conversely, if citizens belonged to ‘lower races’, it was no wonder that they stayed poor and backward. The argument was not yet clothed in the garments of modern genetics, which had virtually not yet been invented: the now celebrated experiments of the monk Gregor Mendel (1822–84) on the sweet peas in his Moravian monastery garden (1865) passed completely unnoticed until they were rediscovered about 1900. But in a primitive way the view that the upper classes were a higher type of humanity, developing its superiority by endogamy, and threatened by mixture with the lower orders and even more by the more rapid increase of the inferior, was widely held. Conversely, as the (mainly Italian) school of ‘criminal anthropology’ purported to prove, the criminal, the anti-social, the socially underprivileged, belonged to a different and inferior human strain from the ‘respectable’, and could be recognized as such by measuring the skull or in other simple ways.

Racism pervades the thought of our period to an extent hard to appreciate today, and not always easy to understand. (Why, for instance, the widespread horror of miscegenation and the almost universal belief among whiles that ‘half-breeds’ inherited precisely the worst features of their parents’ races?) Apart from its convenience as a legitimation of the rule of white over coloured, rich over poor, it is perhaps best explained as a mechanism by means of which a fundamentally inegalitarian society based upon a fundamentally egalitarian ideology rationalized its inequalities, and attempted to justify and defend those privileges which the democracy implicit in its institutions must inevitably challenge. Liberalism had no logical defence against equality and democracy, so the illogical barrier of race was created: science itself, liberalism’s trump card, could prove that men were not equal.