Free Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer by Maureen Ogle Page B

unburdened by stone-etched ideas about how a brewery ought to run and who its customers should be. Nor were they brewmasters, and so came to the brewhouse without any firm ideas about how the beer ought to look or taste. Their breweries sat before them as lumps of clay, raw potential on which each man’s ambition could work its will.
    In that respect these four matched the times. In the thirty-five years after Appomattox, Americans masterminded one of the greatest economic and social transformations in history, and theirs became the leading industrial nation in the world. The heady 1840s and 1850s proved a mere appetizer for the main course, a late-century feast of automated production and gargantuan factories. Ravenous manufacturing operations devoured the labor of nearly twelve million new immigrants, and the hundreds of thousands of Americans who migrated to town and factory, refugees from farms where McCormick’s reapers and Deere’s plows rendered their labor obsolete. The owners of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Massachusetts, the world’s largest textile mill, required the services of seventeen thousand people to manage and operate their clanking bobbins and looms. Cyrus McCormick’s fifteen hundred hands built fifty thousand reapers a year.
    Other manufacturers cranked out typewriters and copper tubing, railroad tracks and ready-made clothes. Mechanical rocking chairs and porcelain toilets. Thousands of miles of electrical wire to carry millions of telegraphic messages. Gears and bolts and nails and drills tumbled out of factories large and small. Saddles and whips and machine-made doilies. Canned soups and bottled condiments—fifty-seven varieties from the Heinz Company alone. Boxes of crunchy Uneeda Biscuits to replace barrels of anonymous general-store crackers. Enough velvet upholstery and drapery fabric to reach the moon. Machine-rolled cigarettes and two-story Corliss steam engines. The American landscape would never be the same, and Americans would wait a hundred years before they negotiated another such moment of transformation.
    When the nation celebrated the hundredth anniversary of independence in 1876, the centerpiece of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition was Machinery Hall, a massive structure filled with fourteen acres of every kind of labor-saving and automated device then known to man. The building’s “tremendous iron heart” was a 1,400-horsepower Corliss steam engine that stood forty feet tall, weighed six hundred tons, boasted a three-hundred-foot driveshaft, and drove the full mile of shafting that powered exhibits such as mechanical icemakers and refrigerators, presses, lathes, and looms. So important was the Corliss engine that President Ulysses Grant formally opened the Exhibition by cranking the handle that set into motion this “athlete of steel and iron.”
    But the products of the factories and the sweatshops were useless without buyers. They were there, too, thanks to investors like Jay Gould and Jay Cooke—manipulators, some called them—who transformed what had been single, scattered rail lines into vast railroad empires that linked coast with coast and carried goods over vast distances. Between 1865 and 1893, crews of Irish and Chinese laborers laid 150,000 miles of railroad tracks. Unlike the rails of an earlier age, these were steel, the core of the new economy. In 1870, Americans produced just 850,000 tons of steel, at that time a revelatory new material—an inexpensive process for making large batches was developed only in the late 1850s. By 1900, with steel-manufacture technology perfected, more than ten million tons of the magic material rolled out of enormous fiery altars tended by thousands of men sweating through the brutality of ten- and twelve-hour shifts.
    The era’s potential sprawled ripe and full at Americans’ feet, ready for the picking by men of vision and energy. That some were corrupt or rapacious—Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller come to