American History Revised (24 page)

William Shakespeare was the most popular literary figure in America in the nineteenth century. During his travels through the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville was astounded to find Shakespeare everywhere in “the recesses of the forests of the New World.” He observed: “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few old volumes of Shakespeare. I remember that I read the feudal drama of
Henry V
for the first time in a log cabin.”

Lots of log cabins had Shakespeare. Unlike today where volumes of Shakespeare gather dust on the bookshelf, Shakespeare was a popular poet admired for his oratory
and his moral stories about individual responsibility. His stories about heroes and villains appealed to people’s need for melodrama. His format—plays—lent itself to mass culture even for those who could not read. On makeshift stages in halls and saloons in small towns throughout the land, short scenes from Shakespeare were performed. They weren’t professional recreations of the entire play, they were short adaptations with lots of vitality, performed by bumptious barnstormers, acrobats, singers, orators, and jugglers. Popular audiences included people of all economic strata, especially the lower. Observed Washington Irving in 1802: the noise in the gallery “is somewhat to what prevailed in Noah’s ark; for we have an imitation of the whistles and yells of every kind of animal.” Because most everyone knew a little something of Shakespeare, they could participate fully—and did. If they didn’t like the performance, they got physical in expressing their disapproval. Observed one foreign visitor to America, “The egg as a vehicle of dramatic criticism came into early use in this continent.”

Shakespearean episodes helped bring people together. Recalling his days as an apprentice pilot on a Mississippi steamboat, Mark Twain marveled at his master’s passion for Shakespeare: “He would read Shakespeare to me, not casually but by the hour … he knew his Shakespeare as well as Euclid ever knew his multiplication tables.” In a vast, developing nation starved for entertainment, Shakespeare filled a vital role. During the 1849 California gold rush, a theater seating two thousand opened up in San Francisco and was packed to the roof: “Miners … swarmed from the gambling saloons and cheap fandango houses to see
Hamlet
and
Lear.”
Most everyone could relate to at least something from Shakespeare, and they enjoyed the camaraderie of the boisterous entertainment. He was the Twitter of the day, appreciated in short bytes. Everyone related to him.

Even as late as the 1880s, a European visitor observed:

It was the beginning of the end for Shakespeare. When people started taking him seriously toward the end of the century, he lost popularity. Shakespeare became highbrow, a literary classic requiring reading from beginning to end—out of reach for the mass market (let’s face it,
Shakespeare is not easy reading). Travesties and parodies fell out of fashion, serious theatre took over, and many English Shakespearean actors came to America to perform because the money was better. The result was good theatre—and smaller audiences. Then along came radio, movies, and television at the expense of theatre, transforming people into passive spectators. For many, Shakespeare had now lost his relevance and become a ponderous experience like going to church: “gratified that they have come, and gratified that they now may go.”

1877
From the days of the bazaar down to the era of the local general store, shopping was a personal experience. A customer walked into the store and engaged in a conversation with the proprietor. It was well understood that the customer was under an obligation to buy. A lengthy discussion would ensue, the price would be agreed upon, and the transaction consummated. The advantage was all with the retailer.
*

Enter the department store, made possible by the availability of a much wider range of goods delivered inexpensively by railroad, along with the growing urbanization of America. In the Gilded Age, America’s second-richest man after William H. Vanderbilt was department store magnate Alexander T. Stewart. This Irish immigrant introduced a retailing innovation that had great impact on the way customers shopped and made purchases, and eventually spread all over the world. Singlehandedly he changed the relationship between retailer and customer and made the industry more legitimate.

It had to do with a lot more than the grand department store he opened in 1877 in New York. Certainly this was the first “one-stop shopping” emporium in America, with no fewer than thirty different departments. Stewart’s real innovation was far more significant: he threw out the old method of bargaining, and introduced a fixed price for every article offered for sale. He also put a price tag on everything.

For the first time the customer was on an equal footing with the retailer. No longer was shopping a battle of wits, with haggling of the kind seen in an Istanbul bazaar. Thanks to Stewart, a powerful American tradition was launched: the pro-consumer movement culminating in fair-trade regulations concerning conspicuous signs, unit pricing, and content labeling. “Next to the president,” it was said at
the time, Stewart was “the best known man in America.” It can be argued that Stewart probably had more influence and impact than the president did.

1883
Nobody thinks of railroads much anymore, but the impact of railroads on the development and unification of a vast country like America was enormous. “The railroad,” wrote one historian, “is to American imagery what the church was to Europe … in the middle ages.”

This takes considerable imagination to appreciate. Go to Europe and spend solemn moments in majestic places like Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame, St. Mark’s Square in Venice. Was the “iron horse” truly equal to this?

Since the beginning of civilization, people had traveled at an average of 4.8 miles per hour. The railroads changed everything. Sixty miles per hour meant people arrived at a place long before they were supposed to, necessitating a major change in the concept of time normally measured on a sundial. While there were complaints that America should operate on “God’s time, not Vanderbilt’s,” within a few years the concept of standard time became accepted—with profound consequences for America, hitherto a vast continent of cities and villages far apart.

Originally, God’s time was local solar time, based on the number of hours and minutes since noon, when the sun was highest in the sky. A person traveling from Boston to New York by six-hour train ride had to move his clock back by several minutes when he arrived at his destination, because the sun arrived at noon in New York later than it did in Boston. (“Sun time” changes approximately one minute for every twelve and a half miles traveled east or west.)

Throughout cities and villages, the correct time was the time according to the clock on the church steeple; people walked by daily and calibrated their watches to it. For people in rural areas without ready access to correct time, there existed entrepreneurial traveling timekeepers who offered their services, carrying a watch with the correct time to adjust the clocks in a customer’s home on a weekly basis. In cities, there emerged the solution of the time ball. On top of a tall building was a large ball, three to four feet in diameter. At official noon, the ball fell and people watching from a mile away could adjust their timepieces with confidence. In large cities like Chicago or Kansas City, the number of people watching every day was in the thousands.

The amount of time required for the sun to traverse a country as large as the United States necessitated some three hundred local times. For the railroads, trying to coordinate connections between an arriving train’s time and a departing train’s time was chaos. Compounding the problem was
the fact that each railroad’s timetable keyed off the local time of the city where it had its headquarters or major terminus. The Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, used Philadelphia time, which was five minutes “slower” than New York time and five minutes “faster” than Baltimore time. When it was noon in Chicago, it was 12:31 in Pittsburgh, 12:24 in Cleveland, 12:13 in Cincinnati, 12:07 in Indianapolis, 11:50 in St. Louis, and 11:27 in Omaha. In Pittsburgh the train station used six different clocks, one for each of six major railroads.

Just in the state of Michigan, for example, to go from east to west meant changing your watch twenty times. To ascertain the correct time, each train station would have to call a major urban center to get the correct standard time, then adjust their local time accordingly.

The railroads, not the government, took matters into their own hands to resolve this mess. The leader of this movement was an obscure businessman named William F. Allen, owner and publisher of a widely read, indispensable publication,
The Railroad Traveler’s Official Guide.
It was essentially
nothing more than a six-hundred-page compendium of timetables, along with a time chart—hardly the makings of a bestseller. The traveler from New York to Pittsburgh, for example, was informed he needed to move his watch back by thirty minutes; from Washington to Albany, forward by two minutes.

“Hey, fella, move out of the way!” Until railroads could figure out how to coordinate their times, traffic foul-ups and near-collisions were frequent.

Yet Albany, New York City, Washington, and Pittsburgh are very close to each other on the latitudinal scale. Such specificity of time in an era of high-speed transport was a cumbersome and clearly obsolete concept. A much more sweeping simplification needed to be done.

In an 1883 meeting called the General Time Convention, the railroads carried time standardization to its fullest by recognizing the genius of a Canadian, Sir Sanford Fleming, who seven years earlier had proposed that the world be divided into twenty-four time zones separated by one hour, each spaced fifteen degrees of longitude apart. Applied to the United States, the magic number of time zones would be four. Under the plan put forth by William Allen, the approximate longitudinal centers of these zones would be Philadelphia, St. Louis, Denver, and Reno.

At exactly twelve o’clock noon on November 18, “The Day of Two Noons,” the U.S. was divided into Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones—on railroad timetables only. But the idea caught on, and within a year 85 percent of American cities with a population greater than 10,000 were using standard time, and in 1918 the U.S. Congress finally got around to passing the Standard Time Act, making railroad time mandatory everywhere. Like the great cathedrals of Europe, the railroads had unified a nation.