Grand Pursuit: A Story of Economic Genius. Sylvia Nasar
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Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Trollope had been occupied by old questions, now settled, of democracy, slavery, and the survival of the union. Marshall wanted to know where the rise of industry, the growth of global commerce, and the decline of traditional morality were leading. These were advancing more rapidly in America than anywhere else. “I wanted to see the history of the future in America,” he told an audience when he returned to Cambridge.81
Marshall sailed to America during the biggest transatlantic tourism boom in history. Sales of the most popular North American guide were climbing toward the half-million mark. The North Atlantic was now a virtual highway of the sea. No fewer than ten steamship companies offered weekly departures from Liverpool to New York, and English travelers were advised to book berths as much as a year in advance.82 Marshall’s trip aboard the SS Spain, one of the fastest and most luxurious of the big liners, took a mere ten days, in contrast to the miserable three-week crossing Dickens had endured in 1842. Travel in America was expensive, owing to the immense distances. Marshall had to budget £60 a month versus £15 a month when he spent summers climbing in the Alps. But afterward, according to Mary, he felt that “he had never spent money so well. It was not so much what he learnt there as that he got to know what things he wanted to learn.”83
His experiences convinced him that “economic influences play a larger part in determining the higher life of men and women than was once considered.” In particular, he believed, “there are no thoughts or actions, or feelings, which occupy a man and which thus have the opportunity of forming the man . . . as those thoughts and actions and feelings which make up his daily occupation.”84 He spent some of his time in churches and drawing rooms, especially in Boston, where he met leading American intellectuals, including the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson and the art historian Charles Eliot Norton. He lingered for several days at communes run by Shakers and disciples of Robert Owen in New England. But mostly he toured factories, filling notebooks with interviews with businessmen and workers and drawings of machinery. At Chickering and Sons piano factory near Boston, he observed that “care & judgment were required from many of the workers in a very high degree” and that the workers there had “able, almost powerful & artistic faces.” On a visit to an organ factory, he wondered whether “the work of each individual being confined to a very small portion of the whole operation” did not “prevent the growth of intelligence?”85 He found that it did not.
The business traveler of that time was always something of a tourist. Marshall was no exception. He could not resist the lure of the recently completed transcontinental railroad. In his hotel in Niagara, he plotted his westward route on an advertising map provided by the Union Pacific, marking it with pinpricks so that his mother back home in London could follow his progress toward San Francisco by holding the map up to a light.
Chicago was the best place to catch a train for the Pacific coast. The new railway system was like a giant hand whose palm lay atop the Great Lakes and whose fingers stretched all the way to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and, in the case of the two southernmost routes, Los Angeles. Most travelers took the North Western from Chicago due west across Illinois and Iowa to Council Bluffs. Marshall took the Great Northern line to St. Paul and then sailed back down on a Mississippi riverboat, the kind “more famous for their propensity to blow up than for the magnificence of their fittings.”86 He met up with the North Western at the Iowa border and was in Council Bluffs a day later. From there he crossed the river to Omaha and transferred to the Union Pacific train. From Omaha it was a straight shot west to Cheyenne and Granger, in Wyoming, where the line dipped down toward Ogden, Utah; Reno; and Sacramento before making the final 125-mile jog south to San Francisco. In Cheyenne, Marshall boarded a stagecoach for a twenty-four-hour side trip to Denver. In Ogden, he stopped to explore the Mormon capital, Salt Lake City. On the return trip, he got off in Reno for a look at “the wild population of Virginia City.” He was conscious throughout of witnessing something extraordinary and unprecedented. From his railway car he was seeing what another young Briton had earlier described as “the unrolling of a new map, a revelation of a new empire, the creation of a new civilization.”87
Marshall was bowled over by the constant motion he witnessed. “Many things have changed since [Tocqueville’s] time . . . many things which were nearly stationary then are not stationary now,” he wrote in a letter home.88 The first thing to catch his eye after he checked in at the Fifth Avenue Hotel was “a steam lift which without ever stopping from 7 a.m. until midnight goes up & down [emphasis his].” He was captivated by the lobby’s unmanned telegraph machine spewing paper ribbons of stock quotations. Business travelers staying uptown “are as well posted as if they were on the Exchange itself,” he wrote.89
Mobility was the preeminent fact of American life, Marshall decided. It wasn’t just the railway and telegraph, the successive waves of new immigrants, or the movement of the population from the manufacturing centers of the Northeast to the “mushroom towns” of the West, sprouting so fast that one “can only suppose that, the soil being so fruitful, buildings grow spontaneously.”90 The most interesting freedom of motion was economic, social, and psychological. Marshall was astonished by ordinary Americans’ readiness to leave family and friends for new towns, to switch occupations and businesses, to adopt new beliefs and ways of doing things. He reported, “If a man starts in the boot trade and does not make money so fast as he thinks he ought to do, he tries, perhaps, grocery for a few years and then he tries books or watches or dry goods.” He was delighted by the independence of young people: “American lads . . . abhor apprenticeships . . . The mere fact of his being bound down to a particular occupation is sufficient in general to create in the mind of an American youth that he will do something else as soon as he has the power.”91
Americans’ welcoming attitude toward growing urbanization also struck him powerfully: “The Englishman Mill bursts into unwonted enthusiasm when speaking . . . of the pleasures of wandering alone in beautiful scenery,” he noted dryly, adding that “many American writers give fervid descriptions of the growing richness of human life as the backwoodsman finds neighbors settling around him, as the backwoods settlement develops into a village, the village into a town, and the town into a vast city.”92
Like his favorite novelists, Marshall was less interested in the material and technological advances, impressive as these were, than in their consequences for how people thought and behaved. What guarantee was there that individual choices added up to social good? Would all the up and down movement of individuals and the attendant loosening of traditional ties lead, as pessimists such as Marx and Carlyle predicted, to social chaos? Or did mobility imply a “movement towards that state of things to which modern Utopians generally look forward.” That was the question.93
Marshall’s visceral reactions put him squarely on the other, optimistic side. In Norwich, Connecticut, he went on an evening drive with a Miss Nunn, who told him she was prepared to take the reins and wound up steering. Marshall found the experience “very delicious.” He observed that young American women are “mistresses of themselves . . . [with] thorough freedom in the management of their own concerns.” Such freedom, he admitted, “would be regarded as dangerous license by the average Englishman,” but he found it “right and wholesome.”94
The absence of rigid class distinctions delighted him. When a clerk in a hat shop removed the bowler Marshall was wearing and tried it on his own head in order to gauge the correct size, Marshall noted approvingly, “My friend was such a perfect democrat that it did not occur to him that there was any reason why he should not wear my hat: his manner was absolutely free from insolence. May the habit become general!”95 When he reached California, he was pleased to report that the farther west he traveled, the more American society resembled its egalitarian ideal. “I returned on the whole more sanguine with regard to the future of the world than when I set out,” he noted.
Striking a prophetic note, he envisioned a new type of society:
In America, mobility was creating an equality of condition . . . Where nearly all receive the same school education, where the incomparably more important education which is derived from the business of life, however various in form it be, yet is for every one nearly equally thorough,