Excerpted from How to Become an American: A History of Immigration, Assimilation, and Loneliness, by Daniel Wolff, published December 2022 by University of South Carolina Press.
Her mother had grown up during the Civil War. You could argue that her daughter, born in Minneapolis in 1886, came of age during the Labor Wars.
Part of what the Confederacy had rebelled against was the industrial future. In 1860, the nation had more slaves than factory workers. There’d been little to no industry in Charleston, St. Augustine, or Jacksonville. The role of the Southern merchant was like what it had been in the Old World: an accepted but tainted go-between. Real Southerners — real Americans? — worked the land. Or, better, owned land that others worked.
But that side, the anti-industrial side, had lost. In defeat, the family had moved to embrace the new future. Mill City created wealth through huge transportation centers and refining operations that employed thousands. During the 1880s alone, the Pillsbury Company added six mills equipped with state-of-the-art machinery. The city’s booming economy brought profit to its kings of industry and, via trickle-down, its merchants. An Alien paint store owner might be no more welcome among the city’s old established Yankees than he’d been with Charleston’s aristocracy, but at least business itself was respected. It was the lifeblood of the city and of Gilded Age America.
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