After the Civil War the United States Supreme Court interpreted the due process clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment, passed initially to protect the rights of African Americans, to shield private property from state government regulation. The Fourteenth Amendment provides that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Court narrowed the protection of the due process clause for individuals in the 1883 Civil Rights Cases (denial of equal access to public accommodations was a private, not a state, matter) and in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision (state-mandated segregation did not violate due process). While the Court reduced the protection of human rights by the due process clause, some justices—initially a minority—found in that clause, beginning in the 1870s, the means of protecting property rights from state regulation.
In the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873, the Court limited the application of the Fourteenth Amendment. The state of Louisiana law gave the Crescent City Live Stock Landing and Slaughterhouse Company a monopoly over the butchering trade in New Orleans. A rival group of independent butchers sued, claiming that the law deprived them of their “privileges and immunities” as citizens without due process of law. By the slim margin of 5 to 4, the Court rejected the claims of the independent butchers. The majority held that the protections guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, in particular that of due process, were intended to apply to former slaves and not to questions of economic regulation. But among the dissenters was Justice Stephen J. Field, who argued for a broader definition of due process that would narrow state “police power” and would protect property rights from state regulation. In the most famous of the Granger cases, Munn v. Illinois (1877), the Court upheld an Illinois Warehouse Act on the grounds that states had the authority to regulate private property when it was used in the public interest. Again, in a stinging dissent, Field argued that the due process clause protected private business from state regulation. His dissent in this case anticipated the future direction of the Court in its definition of the Fourteenth Amendment.
By the 1880s, the Court adopted Field’s broad interpretation of the due process clause. In the case of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886), the Court accepted the argument that the word “persons” in the Fourteenth Amendment applied equally to corporations and individuals; therefore, corporations could enjoy the same benefits of due process and equal protection as did individuals. The due process clause thus insulated corporations from unreasonable state regulation and also protected freedom of contract to the extent that the Court, in time, overturned maximum hour and minimum wage legislation. From the end of the 19th century to well into the 20th century, the Court was a bastion of judicial conservatism and a champion of laissez-faire capitalism.
Further reading: William E. Nelson, The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Principle to Judicial Doctrine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
—Phillip Papas
Dunbar, Paul Laurence (1872-1906) poet, novelist Born on June 27, 1872, in Dayton, Ohio, the son of former slaves, Paul Dunbar edited the high school newspaper, wrote his class’s song, and graduated with honors. Unable to find a job in journalism, he became an elevator operator in his hometown and spent his spare time writing poetry. He came to the attention of and was encouraged by several white men, including the Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley. Before his 21st birthday he had published his first book of poetry, Oak and Ivy. His second book, Majors and Minors, received a favorable review from William Dean Howells, editor of the prestigious Harper’s Monthly, who then gladly wrote an introduction to Dunbar’s third volume of poetry, Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896). He praised Dunbar’s dialect poems as artistically “literary interpretation[s]” but dismissed Dunbar’s poetic English offerings as “very good” or better, but not really a “contribution” to American poetry.
Dunbar’s short life was scarred by financial pressures, tuberculosis, alcoholism, and a failed marriage. Two
Paul Laurence Dunbar (Library of Congress)
Intense compulsions added complications to these wounds: The first was reflected in the Howells introduction; Dunbar wanted to be honored for his straight, not his dialect, poetry, but such recognition never came. His despair echoes in two stanzas of “The Poet,” which begin “He sang of life, serenely sweet / With, now and then, a deeper note” and closed with the lament “But, ah, the world, it turned to praise / A jingle in a broken tongue.” Dunbar wrote dialect poetry to earn a living, to satisfy a publishing market. Recent scholars now acknowledge his supreme artistry in reproducing southern black speech. No other author or poet has matched his accuracy.
Dunbar’s dialect poetry resonates when read aloud. The rhythm of “When Malindy Sings” suggests the beauty of Malindy’s voice, “But fu’ real melojous music / Dat jes’ strikes yo’ hea’t and clings / Jes yo’ stan’ an’ listen wif me / When Malindy sings.” The poem flows like music. Critics have complained that Dunbar’s dialect paints African Americans as ignorant and servile. The dialect in Dunbar’s poetry mirrored the speech of some southern blacks in his time. It was not demeaning. Every once in a while Dunbar slipped in a race-pride allusion. In “When Malindy Sings,” for example, the narrator tells Miss Lucy to “Put dat music book away,” because no matter how hard she tries, she’ll never be able to sing like Malindy.
Race pride, or what one scholar has called “racial fire,” was a second compulsion in Dunbar’s life. He felt the oppressive prejudice of the day, as evidenced by his many letters to newspapers. A few of his poems reflect his heated resentment at the way blacks were treated. “Rights Security” demonstrates this feeling with subtle intensity: Whatever blows might fall, we praise “that man who will not compromise with wrong / . . . Minorities, since time began / have shown the better side of man.”
In a more revealing mood Dunbar wrote his well-known “We Wear the Mask,” which “grins and lies” while “With torn and bleeding hearts, we smile.” Dunbar was neither cheerleader nor apologist for his race. His poetry probed a variety of human thoughts and emotions, including pride of race and repugnance of prejudice.
A friend wrote that though Dunbar was courtly in manner, polished in speech, and modest in behavior, he carried “a sac of bitterness” born of his reception as an artist, his ill-fated marriage to the talented Alice Moore (later Alice Dunbar-Nelson), his painful illness, and the pinch of finances. Animated in personality, he was an appealing performer who read his poems with expressive passion. He was also a prolific writer, producing more than 400 poems, four novels, four volumes of short stories, and collaborating on several musical revues. His last and best novel, The Sport of the Gods (1902), one of the first to tackle the theme of northern migration, followed a southern black family to Harlem, where the gilt and glamour almost destroy them.
Largely forgotten for most of the 20th century, Dunbar’s poetry is now slowly gaining acknowledgment for its lyrical quality, its careful but courageous racial fire, and the beauty of what the contemporary poet Nikki Giovanni, calls “plantation speech.” Dunbar was, Giovanni concludes in a telling phrase, “a natural resource for our people.” Dunbar died on February 9, 1906.
Further reading: Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay, eds., The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York, Norton, 1997), 884-86; Jay Martin, ed., A Singer in the Dawn (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975); Lida Keck Wiggins, The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1907).
—Leslie H. Fishel, Jr.
Eads, James Buchanan (1820-1887) engineer Perhaps the most distinguished American engineer in the Gilded Age, James Eads was born beside the Ohio River in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, on May 23, 1820. He became a steamboat clerk on the Mississippi in 1839; when his boat sank, he perceived business opportunities in cargo salvage. He designed a diving bell in 1842 and started a salvage business. He later expanded into clearing river snags, made a fortune, and retired in 1857. During the Civil War, Eads designed and built ironclad gunboats for the Union, and these played a key role in gaining control of the Mississippi and its tributaries.
In 1866 Eads’s proposal for a bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis was adopted, and he became its engineer-in-chief in 1867. A major problem was constructing piers from bedrock up through the sandy bottom of the river. Eads used a pressurized caisson, floated into position and sunk to the bottom, within which excavators could work with compressed air to keep out the water. The first caisson reached bedrock 100 feet below the river surface in 1870. Records show that 119 men suffered from “the bends,” and 14 died before it was learned that slow decompression was necessary after working under compressed air. In 1873 laborers began erecting the steel arches of the bridge. With three spans, each more than 500 feet long, the bridge marked the first extensive use of steel in bridge construction.
The great bridge officially opened on July 4, 1874, after Eads demonstrated its strength by driving 14 locomotives back and forth across it. An estimated 300,000 people attended the celebration, a municipal triumph for St. Louis. The bridge would carry increasingly heavy trains for 100 years. Closed to rail traffic in 1974, it reopened in 1993 to carry light-rail Metrolink trains across the Mississippi. The bridge is not only a vital transportation link; its functional beauty also inspired the architectural work of Louis SULLIVAN.
In 1873 Eads began investigating another problem: how to maintain navigation for ocean ships at the shallow mouth of the Mississippi. He argued against proposals for a canal to bypass the shallow sandbars and suggested building jetties to direct the river flow and scour a channel. Despite opposition, Eads’s proposal was accepted in 1875. Construction of the jetties began the same year, and by 1879 the channel was 30 feet deep and routinely used by oceangoing steamers.
Eads’s final great project, never accomplished, was to have been a multitrack ship railway to carry ocean liners from the Gulf of Mexico across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to the Pacific. Eads began investigating the possibility in 1879 as an alternative to an ill-conceived proposal by the French promoter Ferdinand de Lesseps to construct a sea-level isthmian canal across Panama. Eads would lobby for his project until his death in 1887. Not until 1914 would the Panama Canal (with locks) be opened to traffic.
In 1920 Eads was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, and in the 1932 the deans of the American colleges of engineering named Eads one of the five greatest engineers of all time, ranking him alongside Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Alva Edison.
See also BRIDGES.
Further reading: Quinta Scott and Howard Miller, The Eads Bridge (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, (1979).
—Francis H. Parker
Eakins, Thomas (1844-1916) painter, photographer, sculptor
Best known as a painter, Thomas Eakins also used the mediums of photography, sculpture, and watercolor to conduct uncompromising explorations of the human form. Eakins’s life and art are linked with Philadelphia, where he was born on July 25, 1844. The son of a master calligrapher, Eakins excelled at mathematics and mechanical drawing in high school. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of
Thomas Eakins's Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, 1871 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
The Fine Arts and anatomy at Jefferson Medical College. In 1866 he began four years of studying painting and sculpture in Paris, his only significant time away from Philadelphia. Along with Eadweard Muybridge, Eakins did pioneering work in motion photography in the late 1870s. As a teacher at the academy, Eakins championed the study of anatomy for both men and women, and by the early 1880s the school was one of the most progressive institutions worldwide. In 1886, however, Eakins removed a male model’s loincloth in a women’s or mixed life-drawing class, and he was fired. The incident, often cited as an archetype of Victorian prudery, was only one among Eakins’s unconventional tactics, which also included a domineering manner, vulgar speech, and nude photography sessions involving himself and his students. Upon Eakins’s dismissal, loyal pupils founded the Art Students’ League of Philadelphia, and Eakins taught there until 1893. He also taught anatomy at other institutions in Philadelphia, New York, and Washington. Most of Eakins’s art was uncommissioned and he sold few works; crucial financial support came from his father. Eakins’s rep-
Utation as the consummate American realist was only established after his death on June 25, 1916, in Philadelphia.
Hallmarks of Eakins’s style, which varied little over the course of his career, include a limited tonal palette, dark shadows cut by shafts of light, and a great wealth of specific detail. In oils, watercolors, and sculpture Eakins executed portraits and genre topics, such as American colonial themes, an Arcadian series, and the sports of sculling, hunting, sailing, and boxing. His realism was built upon a laborious armature of preparation that included perspective drawings and wax mannequins for the study of light. Figure studies, some with frankly erotic themes, were conducted with photography; these were private, study works. All these methods were investigations into the underpinnings of appearances.
Eakins’s first masterwork was The Gross Clinic (1875, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia). In a crowded surgical amphitheater, Dr. Samuel Gross removes diseased bone tissue from the thigh of a prone patient, the incision and his bloody hands making shocking red points amid
Rembrandtesque shadows. Most critics could not commend the painting; one noted, “power it has, but very little art.” In The Swi-mming Hole (ca. 1883-84, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas) Eakins constructed a pyramidal composition of five nude youths diving, swimming, and lounging, moving the prosaic scene back to an idyllic age. In the searing The Artist's Wife and His Setter Dog (1884-ca. 89), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), a thin Susan Macdowell Eakins sits slumped in a chair, red-rimmed eyes and an empty, upturned palm almost beseeching the viewer. It takes its place among Eakins’s brutally frank, meditative, melancholy portraits, which remain his most memorable works.
Further reading: William Innes Homer, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art (New York: Abbeville Press, 1992); John Wilmerding, Thomas Eakins (1844—1916) and the Heart of American Life (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1993).
—Karen Zukowski
Eastman, George (1854-1932) inventor, businessman, philanthropist
George Eastman, inventor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, was born on July 12, 1854, in Waterville, New York, the son of a nurseryman and educator who moved with his family to Rochester, New York, when George was five, and died two years later, leaving the family poor. Eastman quit school at age 13 to help support his mother and sisters. Methodical, efficient, and bent on self-improvement, he worked up from office boy to bank clerk. When, in 1877, he happened to take up photography, he added to his qualities a passionate single-mindedness verging on obsession. Photography still required the preparation and development of a wet-plate negative on the spot and at the time of an exposure, a process involving a bulky camera, tripod, plates, paper, storage box, a tent used as darkroom, and a wide array of chemicals and chemical apparatus. To carry and cope with all this demanded unusual patience, skill, and muscle. Eastman had all those, but he was also determined to find a better way. In 1878 he found it in the dry-plate process just developed in England, whereby plates could be prepared in advance and taken at leisure to a fixed laboratory for development.
Eastman experimented tirelessly with the process and began selling plates to others. In 1880 he patented an improved apparatus and in 1881 opened a factory in Rochester. He faced stiff competition, but he also saw the potential in exploiting a vast market of unhandy amateurs by continually making the process simpler and cheaper. He invented roll film, a roll holder attached to the camera, and bromide printing paper suitable for darkroom development. He also demonstrated a brilliant grasp of marketing, coining the catchy brand name “Kodak” (based on a feeling that “K” was a “strong” letter), reaching out to a world market (beginning with a London branch in 1885), and spending lavishly on advertisements for which he wrote most of the copy. In 1888 he introduced a portable box camera, which held a roll for 100 photos, and urged buyers to send their rolls and cameras to Rochester for development. He wrote a slogan that became a worldwide catch phrase: “You press the button, we do the rest.” Constant improvement led to the “Brownie” camera of 1900, which sold for a dollar and came in a bright yellow package, a triumph of product identification.
In a series of acquisitions and reincorporations, Eastman’s personal fortune reached the million-dollar mark by the end of the century. He gave a third of it to Eastman employees worldwide, and he subsequently pioneered in employee benefits: medical insurance, pensions, and profit sharing. In 1901 he organized his enterprises as a holding company. This drive toward monopoly ran up against federal antitrust laws, but he preserved his dominance in photography by strategic concessions. After 1901 he diverted more of his energies to philanthropy, which he had engaged in since his teens. Eventually, being a lifelong bachelor, he distributed the bulk of his $100 million fortune for the benefit of the public, avoiding personal publicity. He gave the Massachusetts Institute of Technology $20 million as a gift from “Mr. Smith.” He also helped support African-American education through Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes, classical music (in which he delighted), medical research, dental clinics, parks, local political reform, and improvements in the city of Rochester. As a debilitating spinal affliction came upon him in his 70s, he put his affairs in order, bequeathing his estate to worthy causes. On March 14, 1932, leaving a terse note—”My work is done. Why wait?”—he shot himself through the heart.
Further reading: Elizabeth Brayer, George Eastman: A Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
—Robert V. Bruce
Eddy, Mary Baker (1821-1910) Christian Science founder
Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of CHRISTIAN Science, was born on July 16, 1821, near Concord, New Hampshire. Although she was an emotional, sickly child who attended school irregularly, she had a aura of excitement about her and after age 12 occasionally published poetry. In 1843 she married George Washington Glover, who died six months later, leaving her pregnant and penniless. After returning to her parents’ home in poor health, she gave birth to a son, who grew up abandoned by her and illiterate. Despite her ill health, in 1853 she married Daniel Patterson, an itinerant dentist. They were divorced in 1873.
Eddy’s search for health brought her in 1862 to Phineas Parkhurst Quimby of Portland, Maine, whose direct mental healing hinted at modern psychological theories. Without denying illness, he maintained that its cause was often in the mind of the sufferer. Blooming under his guidance, Eddy became physically strong and a convert to his beliefs, copying out his manuscripts (one of which he called “Christ or Science”). When Quimby died four years later, Eddy reluctantly prepared to proclaim his healing message.
Working alone, without financial backing and estranged from her family and husband, Eddy wrote and in 1875 published Science and Health, the handbook of the Christian Science movement. Insisting that the mind could triumph over illness, her book made a religion of Quimby’s theories, which she called her own and in many instances plagiarized. In her book’s 381 revisions, Eddy gradually altered Quimby’s teachings, linking them to the Bible. Unlike him, she denied the reality of illness and death, claiming they
Mary Baker Eddy (Library of Congress)
Were not of the “Father Mother God” who created everything. When her followers appeared ill, they were to seek help from Christian Science practitioners, not medical doctors. Possessing bad teeth and needing glasses, Eddy allowed Christian Scientists to see dentists and optometrists. A believer in demonology, she blamed problems and deaths (including that of Asa Gilbert Eddy, whom she married in 1877 and who died in 1882) on the “malicious animal magnetism” of disgruntled former followers.
Eddy was both an energetic teacher and a pragmatic organizer. She formed the Christian Science Association in 1876 and chartered the Church of Christ (Scientist) in 1879 and, in 1881, the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, which granted degrees for nearly a decade. For $300 tuition (making Eddy the highest paid teacher of her day), adherents could attend her lectures and become teachers and healing practitioners. The trainees (mostly women, including numerous widows) acquired a lucrative profession and brought new believers to the movement, particularly after 1883 when the monthly Journal of Christian Science publicized their triumphs. Valuing good publicity, Eddy established in 1898 the weekly Christian Science Sentinel and in 1908 the daily Christian Science Monitor
Eddy shrewdly shaped her denomination to increase her power, and during the last 20 years of her life she was the most famous woman in America. Annoyed by deteriorating health and her church’s everyday problems, she began secluding herself in 1887, but nevertheless tightened control of her denomination by creating in 1892 “The Mother Church” with a self-perpetuating board of directors. In semiretirement, her emotional outbursts, her consulting with doctors and taking morphine to relieve her painful kidney stones, and her increasing paranoia were less noticed. She died on December 3, 1910, and left most of her $2.5 million estate to her church, which, despite numerous lawsuits and unfavorable publicity, had grown to nearly 100,000 members.
Further reading: Stephen Mottschalk, The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy, 3 vols. (Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 1966-77).
—Olive Hoogenboom
Edison, Thomas Alva (1847-1931) inventor Thomas Edison, the most renowned inventor of the Gilded Age, was born on February 11, 1847, in the small town of Milan, Ohio. He did not have an easy start in life: Edison lost part of his hearing as a boy, his family fell on hard times, and his formal schooling was meager. He peddled candy and newspapers on railroad trains and set up a small
Thomas Alva Edison, with phonograph (Library of Congress)
Electrical lab in a baggage car. Able to overhear the clicking of a railroad telegraph, he became a skilled operator and, in the tradition of the craft, moved from job to job. In 1868 he arrived in Boston, the center of American science and technology, where he resolved to be a full-time inventor. His first invention, an electric legislative vote recorder, was not wanted by politicians, who needed time to dicker during a vote. Edison thus learned to study the market before inventing for it. He also devised an improved stock ticker. When his Boston credit ran out in 1869 he moved to New York City. There he sold his stock ticker rights for enough to finance his own business in Newark.
From 1870 to 1876 Edison concentrated on improving telegraphy, in 1874 producing his most complex and notable invention in that field, the quadruplex telegraph, which could send two messages each way over a single wire. In 1876 he set out to establish an “invention factory” that would turn out “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.” The plain two-story wooden building in the hamlet of Menlo Park, New Jersey, foreshadowed the modern industrial research laboratory. Edison put together and brilliantly led a dedicated team of skilled workers and scientific specialists. There and elsewhere in New Jersey over the next 15 years he changed the world and called whole new industries into being with a succession of inventions unequaled by any one person before or since, including his carbon-button telephone transmitter, phonograph, electric light, and integrated system of electrical generation and transmission. The public mythologized him as “the wizard of Menlo Park.” Ultimately more than 1,000 patents bore his name, though not all were primarily his creation.
After the 1880s Edison changed his style. He came up with no more strikingly original and fundamental inventions, although his team did much to develop motion pictures. Instead, perhaps sensing that the day of the great independent inventors was passing or perhaps because his own incandescent genius was fading as he aged, he turned to massive projects such as ore separation and cement manufacture, both processes that required giant machinery and heavy infusions of capital. He struggled to join the American pantheon of great industrialists, but the new role was not natural to him and he failed, losing much of his fortune. Nevertheless, his triumphs in basic invention have made him a figure of undying fame and legend in American history. The technology he created is, and is likely to remain, an indispensable and inextricable part of human life. When Edison died on October 18, 1931, it was suggested that in observance of his death all dynamos be stopped momentarily, but the cost and disruption of even so fleeting an event was recognized as unthinkable.
Further reading: Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: Wiley, 1998).
—Robert V. Bruce
World History
