Journal of the History of Biology 35: 43–78, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 43 Harnessing Heredity in Gilded Age America: Middle Class Mores and Industrial Breeding in a Cultural Context PHILLIP THURTLE School of Communications University of Washington Seattle WA 98195-3740 USA Abstract. By investigating the practices and beliefs of Gilded Age trotting horse breeders, this article demonstrates the relationship between industrial economic development and the growth of genetic reasoning in the United States. As most historians of biology already know, E.H. Harriman, Leland Stanford, and John D. Rockefeller not only transformed American business practice, they donated heavily to institutions that promoted eugenic research programs. What is not widely known, however, is that these same industrialists were accomplished trotting horse breeders with well-developed theories of inheritance. The article that follows uses these theories to place the rise of eugenic and genetic research into the context of the rapid development of industry in post Civil War America. Specifically, the study identifies how functional utility as defined through the narrow concerns of industrial practices were privileged over form and pedigree in American horse breeding. Even more importantly, this article suggests that the continuity established between the practices of the industrial philanthropists and the scientific research institutions that they established occurred at two levels: through the values privileged by the development of the dynamics of a mass society and through the tools used to process the large amounts of information necessary to understand breeding patterns in slow breeding organisms. Keywords: breeding, distinction, eugenics, Gilded Age, heredity, horses, industry, information, selection Newland Archer dined one evening in the 1870s with his mother, his sister, Miss Sophy Jackson, and the authority on New York’s families, the old bachelor Sillerton Jackson. The news about the imminent financial collapse of a prominent banker had been the topic of conversations for weeks now. The participants in the “pyramid” of the New York elite always felt the banker, Julius Beaufort, to be “common.” Arriving from England with letters of recommendation in his hand (but little money in his purse), the uneducated Beaufort had “speedily made himself an important position in the world of affairs; but his habits were dissipated, his tongue was bitter, his antecedents mysterious.”1 1 Wharton, 1968, 19. 44 PHILLIP THURTLE For the guests at Mrs. Archer’s table, Beaufort represented just one more crack in the edifice of the New York social elite. “Observing it from the lofty stand-point of a non-participant, [Newland’s mother] was able, with the help of Mr. Sillerton Jackson and Miss Sophy, to trace each new crack in its surface, and all the strange weeds pushing up between the ordered rows of social vegetables.”2 Because of the scandal, Mrs. Archer supposed that the Beauforts’ would retire from polite society and live in their country house in North Carolina. “ ‘Beaufort has always kept a racing stable, and he better breed trotting horses. I should say he had all the qualities of a successful horse dealer.’ Everyone agreed with her . . .”3 In this dinner table conversation from The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton sketched the reaction of an old-moneyed New York elite to the brash and assuming manners of the newly wealthy. The understated confidence behind Mrs. Archer’s declaration about Julius Beaufort’s proper (as opposed to assumed) place in society relied on judgments shared in the patriciate regarding taste, family, and proper social form. In the Archers’ social circle, one maintained social prestige by how one carried one’s self in the world, and Beaufort’s risky financial dealings and his predilection for fast horses distinguished him as from an inferior class. In this popular novel of late nineteenth century manners, the character of Beaufort demonstrates how deeply intertwined personal taste was with class distinction and the conservation of familial property. To modern readers, Wharton’s reference to Beaufort’s trotters may seem little more than an allusion to an obsolete form of transportation. During the Gilded Age, however, trotters were powerful symbols of industrial progress. To begin with, raising and breeding trotters was the most popular leisure activity of rich industrialists; Cornelius Vanderbilt, Leland Stanford, John D. Rockefeller, and E. H. Harriman all drove or bred trotters. Moreover, trotting horse racing was America’s first “modern sport.” Trotting horse owners relied on and promoted professional sports organizations, formal rules and regulations, professional specialization, the keeping of formal statistical records, and a specialized sporting press. Although the sport’s origins at county agricultural fairs resonated with the industrialists own reverence for a rural past, the sport itself would not have been possible without the groomed roads of large urban centers.4 Since so many of the “empire builders” of the nineteenth 2 Wharton, 1968, 256. 3 Wharton, 1968, 279. 4 Adelman, 1981, 5, 8. HARNESSING HEREDITY 45 century developed an interest in racing and breeding trotters,5 an investigation into the sport offers an unique opportunity to study the industrialists’ theories on the potential of living beings. In an age where theories on the transmutation of the species were widely debated and where all living beings were confidently assessed by a calculus of productive labor, theories for increasing the labor power of horses often shed light on ways to increase the labor power of humans. The late nineteenth century practice of breeding trotting horses holds at least five specific areas of interest for historians of biology: (1) Many trotting horse breeders contributed substantial sums of money for research into heredity and eugenics. Leland Stanford, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Mr. And Mrs. E. H. Harriman are only the most obvious. According to one horse breeder, “[t]o the Trotting Horsemen, more than any one else, is due the advancement this country is making in eugenics.”6 Until now, however, most historians interested in the relationship of agricultural breeding and eugenics have concentrated on the well documented case of plant breeding.7 (2) Theories on breeding held by high profile owners were perhaps the most widely disseminated theories on heredity in the late nineteenth century America. Written up in books, daily newspapers, and a specialized sporting press, the public eagerly awaited the application of industrial sized success to the breeding of biological beings. (3) Trotting horse farms in general were one of the first “Modern” agricultural enterprises; they were maintained with vast resources and run by extended managerial hierarchies under absentee owners, they also sold specialized produce and utilized rationalized breeding methods. As such they provide an interesting set of discussions on the relationship of the values promoted by the flows of industrial capital to the values we use to gauge and categorize living beings. (4) The bodies of horses supplied much more than an analogue for thinking about human potential; rather it provided a forum to think about how to select for this potential and then apply to the training and breeding of humans. theories demonstrate the ubiquity of the motif of selection in hereditary discourse. Thus horses’ trotting times were 5 The term was first used by Josephson, but Licht has recently adopted it to distinguish those who integrated many different enterprises as opposed to those who were only involved in finance or promoted other enterprises. See Josephson, 1934; Licht, 1995, 138–145. 6 Stokes, 1917, 22. 7 Barbara Kimmelman’s dissertation remains one of the best sources for this information, Kimmelman, 1987. See also Kimmelman, 1988; Kimmelman, 1983. The important exception here is Garland Allen. See Allen, 1986. 46 PHILLIP THURTLE constantly assessed as demonstrating new capabilities brought about by new breeding techniques. (5) Finally horse breeding demonstrates how deeply intertwined theories of inheritance were with the values supported by and the information processing procedures utilized in large scale industrial enterprises. Garland Allen has recently demonstrated how foundations that supported eugenic research “played an extremely important role during the Progressive Era in translating the concerns of wealthy elites into concrete, scientifically grounded research projects, or into social planning.”8 Much of the “translation” that Allen refers to above takes place through the transmission of a common set of values supported by the tools that industrialists, philanthropists, and scientists used to process and organize data. Without these tools of coordination and processing, these breeders could not have worked as easily on the large scales needed for effective selection of slow breeding organisms. The first part of this article outlines how these values were formulated in opposition to an oldmoneyed American elite. The second part of this article looks at how industrial information processing tools (such as middle managers)9 made these values seem natural as well as modern when applied to large scale breeding projects. Edith Wharton may not have realized it, but horse breeding was the best developed model for understanding the relation of biological inheritance to social circumstances. For many Gilded Age thinkers the history of the horse mirrored Western civil development. The development of society was so dependent on horses that they were presumed to share the same history as Western Europeans. In the introductory chapter to the book The Horse in Motion (produced by Leland Stanford with photographs by Eadward Muybridge) J.D.B. Stillman writes, “[t]he horse of all animals, holds the most important relations to the human family. Though the earliest traces of his existence on the globe are found as fossils in North America, as an historical character he is traced to Central Asia with the Caucasian race.”10 More importantly, horse breeders provided some progressive reformers with the tools to reorganize society. Horse breeding encouraged the recording of elite horses’ ancestors – much in the same fashion that elite families traced their own family origins. Depending on the value and type of horse this might range from simple references to a horse’s ancestor to elaborately drawn and researched pedigrees. After the turn of the century, eugenicists referred to the record keeping of horse breeders as the ideal means for consciously 8 Allen, 1986, 2, 260. 9 On middle management as an information processing system see Yates, 1994. 10 Stillman, 1882, 2. HARNESSING HEREDITY 47 establishing the “proper” relation between human hereditary privilege and social circumstances. Charles B. Davenport, the head of the Eugenic Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, once remarked to a prospective patron that the most “progressive revolution in human history” would be attained “if human matings could be placed upon the same high plane as that of horse breeding.”11 According to many eugenicists, Americans could solve most serious social problems if they chose mates with as much care as they chose prize breeding stock. Horse breeders also provided the terms to think about the capacities of living beings in a hierarchically organized industrial society. The horse breeders’ dual roles as gentlemen farmers and promoters of industry provided them with a unique perspective to think about the capabilities of living beings in an industrial social order. Attracted at first to riding horses as an escape from the demands of the modern world, horse breeders applied management techniques developed within their businesses to their own breeding enterprises. Industrialists utilized vast resources in setting up some of the first heavily capitalized experimental breeding farms. Since most trotting horse fanciers were newly moneyed, breeding horses reflected many middle-class values. Consequently, I begin this paper by highlighting different conceptions for the reproduction of social privilege among an old-moneyed elite, whose families had acquired their fortunes through mercantile capitalism and land speculation, and a new industrial class, who acquired their money through the development of manufacturing, transportation, and communication systems. The new rich promoted a view of inheritance that relied on competition in institutional environments for the reproduction of social privilege. This second-order form of corporate inheritance, often conducted by the impersonal “visible hand” of management, contrasted sharply with the kinship inheritance of the old mercantile elite, with its face-to-face enforcement of proper social form. Part 1: Middle Class Mores Distinction through blood: Trotters and thoroughbreds Importantly, Edith Wharton linked Beaufort with trotting horses and not their aristocratic ancestors the thoroughbreds. These two forms of horsemanship had different geographic distributions, appealed to different populations, and evoked different cultural associations. Spurred on by the importation of thoroughbreds from England, horse racing gained in popularity as an American spectator sport in the early 19th century. The South especially embraced 11 Charles Davenport quoted in Kevles, 1985, 48. 48 PHILLIP THURTLE thoroughbred horses. Less inhibited by Northern Puritanical restraint towards all types of leisure activities, Southern horse fanciers cultivated a taste for British turf sports. By mid-century, however, the seat of racing supremacy passed to the Northern states, where horse fanciers preferred riding in a smart carriage to riding in a saddle.12 Harness horses – horses that could pull carriages while at a trot – were preferred to thoroughbreds for these carriage rides.13 Historian Melvin Adelman has argued that thoroughbred racing lost much of its popularity in the early nineteenth century because thoroughbred horses “had little practical benefit.” As one newspaperman from the New York Herald declared, trotting “may not be attended with all the high zest and excitement” of thoroughbred races, but it is “a more useful sport, as the qualities in the horse which it is calculated to develop are more intimately connected with the daily business of life.”14 For those who still fancied thoroughbreds, however, their lack of utility was part of the attraction. Good horses have always been symbols of prestige where “the ownership and use of anything at all resembling a good horse was the Hallmark of the upper class,”15 but thoroughbred racing strengthened this appeal through its strong association with the practices of the English aristocracy and landed gentry. The sport had been transplanted to American culture from its English context, where it developed as an aristocratic pastime. Emulating the practices of the British nobility indicated status in late nineteenth century American elite social circles.16 Reflecting their aristocratic origins, the thoroughbred’s distinction as an elite horse depended on the purity of its ancestral lineage.17 Thoroughbred breeding relied on the conservation of elite qualities through pure line breeding, where owners paid great attention to the ancestry of the horse through keeping of pedigrees. Breeding a thoroughbred to a non-pedigreed horse deprived the offspring of thoroughbred status. One of the consequences of the strict attention to pedigrees was that economic value was derived as much as a function of the blood line as of the performance and beauty of the horse. This was the argument put forward by the horse breeder J. H. Sanders when he revealingly used the analogy of human families to press his case: 12 Gorn and Goldstein, 1993, 70; Struna, 1981, 28–57. 13 When the diagonal hooves of a horse (left front and right rear, for example) touch the ground simultaneously, the horse is trotting. 14 Adelman, 1981, 11. 15 JHervey, 1947, 14. 16 Thornton, 1989, 201–212. 17 Harriet Ritvo has made a similar argument for thoroughbreds as well as the Durham Ox for British nobility in the 19th century. See Ritvo, 1987, 19, 45–81. HARNESSING HEREDITY 49 There is a solid foundation, in physiological fact, for the admiration with which the “first families of Virginia” have been regarded in some parts of the country, and the same may be said of the old families of New England and other parts of the country. . . . To know that a man or woman is descended from an old family whose record has been honorable, beyond reproach and without taint, is the very best possible evidence, next to his own individual record, that he is also worthy of confidence and respect; and a taint in the blood of the opposite character should certainly be regarded with as much distrust as a similar taint in the blood of any of our domesticated animals, and for the same reasons.18 Much like the members of New England’s elite families, the value of the thoroughbreds was measured by the reputation of the ancestors. Contrary to the thoroughbred’s appeal to those who reenacted aristocratic turf sports, trotters were an out-right celebration of utilitarianism. The whole sport – from racing to breeding – embodied the middle-class Victorian virtues of speed, democracy, and rugged masculinity. As the English tourist, John Henry Vessey, remarked on the sporting scene in 1859, “riding is not the fashionable amusement with the American people, they seem to delight in driving these fast trotting horses in light buggies.”19 By the 1850s organized trotting horse races dominated agricultural fairs, while popular songs (such as “Old Grey Mare”) and mass produced lithographs championed the animal heroes of these races. Horse racing became the first sport “international in scope,”20 while trotting horse racing in particular became the first “mass supported and mass endorsed spectator sport” in America.21 Although fast trotting horses were high quality horses, during the middle of the nineteenth century they were distinguished more by what they accomplished than on whom they were bred from. As railroads tied together urban centers, horses were increasingly relied upon to bring people and goods from the surrounding countryside to the railroads. Since trotters moved quickly while in a smooth gait, they were perfectly suited for transportation with a minimum of disturbance. In the eyes of their enthusiasts, the emphasis on performance without recourse to noble ancestry allowed the fastest trotters membership in the American “aristocracy of merit.” Since trotters performed a specific function, owners did not initially emphasize the preservation of ancestral lines through pure line breeding. Instead, they selected individuals that demonstrated the ability to perform 18 Sanders, 1888, 10. Emphasis in the original. 19 Welsh, 1967, 17. 20 Gorn and Goldstein, 1993, 53. 21 Welsh, 1967, 49. 50 PHILLIP THURTLE that function. In fact the trotter’s mongrel ancestry reflected the emphasis on utility at the expense of pedigree. Trotters were thought to have descended from mixes of the following four types of horses: the English thoroughbred, the Norfolk trotter, the Arab or Barb, and certain pacers of mixed breeding.22 For the mass of Anglo middle-class Americans who defined themselves in opposition to aristocratic British culture, the mixed ancestry of the trotter qualified it as the most American of animals.23 As Oliver Wendell Holmes stressed: “Horse-racing is not a republican institution; horse-trotting is.”24 Reflecting the utility of trotters, trotting horse racing developed in the large urban centers of the Northeast. Although New York was the dominant producer of trotting horses, the sport quickly became popular in Boston and Philadelphia, while large stock farms were established in the West and the South during the last few decades of the nineteenth century. In fact, as the first national sport, the development of trotting horse racing roughly followed the lines of transportation and communication as they extended outward from the Northeast urban centers. Consequently, the narrative that follows will begin with a comparison of attitudes of the old moneyed elite in New York and Boston to the industrialists who moved to these centers for their financial transactions. Since “[n]obody has describe this process more vividly or with more insight than Edith Wharton,”25 I turn to her writings for insights into the relationship between class and hereditary privilege among elite New York society. Bloodline inheritance: The conservation of elite social privilege through the enactment of proper social form The appeal of an European aristocratic heritage shaped many social traditions of the New York rich during the 1870s and 1880s. As America’s gateway to Europe, New York’s dominance as a shipping port promoted economic and social exchange with Europe. More so than their “provincial” Boston counterparts, elite New Yorkers often purchased goods from European merchants and took extended vacations at European destinations. More importantly, counting European aristocracy among one’s ancestors qualified one for the very apex of the New York social triangle. As Edith Wharton reminisced, “My mother, who had a hearty contempt for the tardy discovery of aristocratic genealogies, always said that old New York was composed of Dutch and British middle class families, and that only four or five could show a 22 Merwin, 1892, 23. 23 Welsh, 1967, 51. 24 Holmes, 1886, 25. 25 Auchincloss, 1989, 4. HARNESSING HEREDITY 51 pedigree leading back to the aristocracy of their ancestral country.”26 The rest of those who had gained social privilege, had, for the most part, made their fortunes through the land speculation and mercantile trading that marked an earlier period of US economic expansion. As David Hammack has argued, during the 1880s merchants and lawyers were still the most prominent of the New York economic elites.27 Without direct recourse to aristocratic bloodlines to support their social privileges, New York’s old-moneyed elite distinguished themselves on the privileges of wealth and the observance of proper social form. Those who recently acquired their fortune, having no opportunity to acquire elite social practices or the ability to carry out these practices un-self consciously, betrayed their “common” background to members of elite society. By distinguishing who could and who could not belong to their subculture, New York elites maintained their social privilege through the conservation of social form. Displaying proper social form signified that one was well bred. In use, however, the phrase “well bred” only indicated a loose aggregate of qualities. For instance notice how easily Edith Wharton associates the nationality of ancestral heritage with the ability to use the language skills of the well bred: Bringing up in those days was based on what was called “good breeding.” One was polite, considerate of others, carefully accepted formulas, because such were the principles of the well-bred. And probably the regard of my parents for the niceties of speech was a part of their breeding. . . . I have noticed that wherever, in old New York families, there was a strong admixture of Dutch blood, the voices were flat, the diction careless. My mother’s stock was English, without Dutch blood, and this may account for the greater sensitiveness of all her people to the finer shades of English speech.28 Signifying a constellation of behaviors, to be “well bred” meant to observe proper social form with the assumption that that ability came from one’s family origins. Of course, this is not to say that the concepts “learning” and “inheritance” were entirely conflated. On the contrary, rough facsimiles of these two categories were continually enacted. The Age of Innocence opens at the New York Academy of Music, where Gounod’s Faust provided the counterpoint for the drama in the box seats. With opera glasses inclined toward the audience, the two guardians of New York society, Lawrence Lefferts and Stillerton 26 Wharton, 1933, 783. 27 Hammack, 1987, 36. 28 Wharton, 1933, 783. 52 PHILLIP THURTLE Jackson, exchanged their opinions about the goings on in society. Lefferts was “the foremost authority on form in New York society,” while “old Mr. Jackson was as great an authority on ‘family’ as Lawrence Lefferts was on form.” One turned to Lefferts in order to understand “just when to wear a black tie with evening clothes,” while Jackson had not only mastered “the forest of family trees” he had registered “most of the scandals and mysteries that had smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society within the last fifty years.”29 The coherence of this tight social circle relied on the distinct judgments of Lefferts and Jackson. They simultaneously defined the boundaries of society through judgments of taste and a knowledge of the intermingled kinship that wove together the social circle of the New York elite. In short, family and proper form were the two axes that structured the conservation of elite society. Although I have read Wharton’s portrayal of the guardians of elite society as representations of cultural tendencies, it is important to remember that real people assumed the responsibility for preserving proper social form in late 19th Century New York. Isaac Brown was one of these self-appointed guardians, and it was to Brown that many turned for advice on who to invite to social functions. Historian Frederic Jaher describes him thus: “A consummate snob, he separated society into ‘old family, good stock’ or ‘new man’ who ‘had better mind his p’s and q’s or I will trip him up.”30 The most important point is that the authority for the preservation of New York society was at this time still specifically embodied; it was through the face-to-face interactions of the drawing room circle or the elaborate spectacle of the box seats at the opera that proper social form was enforced. Alfred Chandler has argued that a similar type of face-to-face enforcement took place in the merchant businesses that the New York elite were engaged in. Most commercial enterprises were still partnerships, contractual agreements between individuals: “American merchants did not yet feel the need for a legal form that could give an enterprise limited liability, the possibility of eternal life, or the ability to issue securities. Even when an enterprise was incorporated it remained a small single-unit firm run in a highly personal manner.” Even the large enterprises were often partnerships built into a “chain of mutually supporting partnerships reflecting a kinship network.”31 Within these partnerships there was little delegation of tasks and the “organization and coordination of work . . . could easily be arranged in a personal and daily conversation.”32 29 Wharton, 1929, 9–10. 30 Jaher, 1982, 249. 31 John Killick quoted in Beniger, 1986, 127. 32 Chandler, 1977, 37. HARNESSING HEREDITY 53 Edith Wharton detailed the social ostracism that followed if one did not abide by the “traditional code of family and commercial honor”33 through which these partnerships were run: “New York has always been a commercial community, and in my infancy the merits and defects of its citizens were those of a mercantile middle class. The first duty of such a class was to maintain a strict standard of uprightness in affairs; and the gentlemen of my father’s day did maintain it, whether in the law, in banking, shipping or wholesale commercial enterprises. I well remember the horror excited by any irregularity in affairs, and the relentless social ostracism inflicted on the families of those who lapsed from professional or business integrity.”34 In the parochial world of New York elite society, not only did business and social interactions easily interpenetrate, they were based on a strict code of conduct enforced by personal interaction. The dinner-time discussion of Julius Beaufort’s financial scandal with which I began this paper is one dramatization of the social ostracism that could follow upon a large breach of proper business conduct. Because of newcomers like Beaufort, maintaining proper social form not only reproduced social privilege among those with the proper childhood backgrounds, but also provided a means to conserve that privilege from those who had just acquired money. Since elite society had no basis in aristocratic hereditary privilege it was ultimately permeable to anyone with the large reserves of cash and patience. It took the Vanderbilt family three generations before they were thought to arrive. As late as 1897 Edith Wharton wrote: “I wish the Vanderbilts didn’t retard culture so very thoroughly. They are entrenched in a sort of Thermopylae of bad taste, from which apparently no force on earth can dislodge them.”35 It was this tension between the emulation of aristocratic social forms and the need to distinguish oneself from the newly rich pretenders that marked the patterns of inheritance of social privilege among the old moneyed elite during the 1870s and 1880s. Although their distinction as an elite class relied on the conservation of social form more than on the conservation of family ties (in fact members of the knickerbocker elite intermarried with new comers more frequently than their Boston counterparts) many members of a growing middle class interpreted this need to conserve in biological terms.36 After the turn of the century it was common to hear the interpretation that the old New York families lost their social influence because their tendencies 33 Beniger, 1986, 129. 34 Wharton, 1933, 799. 35 Auchincloss, 1989, 153. 36 Jaher, 1982, 208, 279. 54 PHILLIP THURTLE to conserve social privilege led to physiological problems associated with inbreeding – most especially the loss of male vigor and fertility. Writing in 1916, the horse breeder and eugenicist W.E.D. Stokes reminisced about childhood visits to old New York families: “. . . the ladies were all very old and distinguished looking. They dressed in black with white lace collars, and often wore lace half gloves and always talked about the dead. . . . There were few marriageable men, and of these many remained bachelors and some old medical records and correspondence I procured indicate that the majority were blanks. Their seed lacked fertility.”37 Competition and hierarchical control Those amassing large fortunes through the expansion of industries were more interested in participating in a social hierarchy that recognized the “fit” as those who acquired wealth and social privilege rather than those who conserved it. For the most part this was an explicitly progressive set of discourses that relied on images of virile manliness and mechanical efficiency. According to Alfred Chandler the means for coordinating business operations also changed. With increased speeds and volumes of production and distribution, administrative coordination (as opposed to informal faceto-face interactions) proved more safe, reliable, and efficient. More recently, James Beniger re-applied Chandler’s structural arguments to explain the rise of the “information society.” Beniger claims that throughputs of industrial production spurred a Crisis of Control consisting in crises in safety, distribution, production, and marketing and advertising. The Control Revolution managed the Crisis of Control; throughputs and material flows were rationalized and made more efficient through the use of new communication technologies.38 In order to ensure the economies of scale promised by new systems of production and distribution “new organizational and social innovations were used to improve control” of the material outputs of printing industries. These included the inexpensive newspaper to expand markets, press and publisher associations, and railroad distribution. The development of the penny presses helped diversify the content of news publications. As the historian Ralph Admari argues, the rise in public schooling, along with other factors, helped broaden the readership for magazines that incorporated illustrations, serial stories, and the use of a more 37 Stokes, 1917. 38 Although Beniger’s scholarship is sound, I can not agree with the basic premise of his argument: information processing is a fundamental quality of life. A more nuanced interpretation of his materials is that the rise of information technologies supplied a set of metaphors and values through which life was understood as an information processing system. HARNESSING HEREDITY 55 common brand of language.39 These presses often hired professional writers to submit stories intended for middle-class audiences. One of these writers, Sylvanius Cobb Jr., had such a vast output that he earned the title the “Father of Mass Production in American Fiction.”40 Some of the more sensational authors were paid very high sums for single articles,41 but even the less sensational could make a decent living. Howell’s, for instance, claimed in an article titled “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business” that “many authors live now, and live prettily enough, by the sale of the serial publication of their writings to magazines.”42 Another development that extended the control of informational throughputs was the growth of advertising and techniques for market feedback. Although these innovations were initially intended to create a demand for a new product (easing the crisis of production) they soon became a form of the “bureaucratic control of mass consumption,” extending influence on “competitors, wholesalers, retailers, and consumers.”43 Some of the first innovations in advertising were developed in the printed media. Robert Bonner, publisher of one of the most successful and controversial news magazines in the 1870s and 1880s, The New York Ledger, is credited as being one of the earliest innovators in the development of advertising techniques. An investigation into the interests and activities of Bonner offers insights into the relationship between the development of the new industries and the appeal of trotting horse races as a competitive public forum. Born in Ireland in 1824 Bonner emigrated to the United States and worked as a printer’s apprentice in Hartford Connecticut. In 1844 he moved to New York and began working for The American Republic and then the New York Evening Mirror, as a printer, writer and sub-editor. In 1851 he purchased New York Merchants Ledger and slowly replaced the paper’s reports on merchant business with feature stories, domestic columns, stories, and illustrations. In 1855 he shortened the title of the paper to the New York Ledger.44 With the implementation of these changes Bonner had transformed a publication devoted to mercantile interests with a circulation of 3,000 to a weekly feature magazine with a subscription of over 400,000 by 1872.45 Although Bonner excluded advertising from his own weekly, his advertisements in other papers pioneered new techniques for advertising 39 Admari, 1935, 176. 40 Boorstin, 1973, 140. 41 Admari, 1935, 176–193. 42 Trachtenburg, 1982, 194; Howells, 1902, 7. For a discussion on the effect of profession- alization and “gear and girder” culture on the content of literature see Tichi, 1987. 43 Beniger, 1986, 349. 44 Admari, 1935, 176–193. 45 Hudson, 1873, 646–655. 56 PHILLIP THURTLE display and content.46 His innovations included iteration copy (printing of the same phrase over and over again – once even filling seven pages), inserting laudatory testimonials about The Ledger that appeared as if they were regular columns in a competitor’s paper, printing the first section of a serial in a rival’s paper that would only be completed in The Ledger, and even buying out the entire edition of a publication with his own advertisements. Since these controversial advertisements made Bonner as famous as his paper, some contemporaries claimed that his greatest genius was in self-promotion.47 Although Bonner’s publishing exploits made him famous, his ability to pay extravagant prices to own the world’s fastest trotters made him popular. Although he dabbled in breeding some of his expensive horses, Bonner was more of a horse collector than a horse breeder. After a horse had made a record on the trotting track, Bonner often purchased them for his high profile drives through town. For those who could not glimpse Bonner in person, newspapers often reported on the health of his horses and Bonner’s ability to handle them: “To-day Sunol [Bonner’s new horse] will be hitched up with Alfred S., and Mr. Bonner and Mr. Marvin will take a drive through the Park. Let us all be there to see! It has been said that Mr. Bonner can not drive her. It was said that he could not drive Dexter, but he did.”48 Bonner and other industrialists turned to trotting as a recreation to relieve the strains of modern life. Since driving involved physical exercise and brought the patient out into the open air, horses were thought to be the best corrective for nervous exhaustion related to over working. Both Robert Bonner and Leland Stanford were recommended by doctors to relieve the strain of work by riding behind a horse. Bonner’s doctor reportedly suggested that he take up horse back riding to counter balance his demanding work schedule “You are confining yourself too closely to business. My advice to you is, get a horse and come out every morning with me, and take an hour’s exercise on horseback. It will do you more good than all the medicine I can give you.” Bonner eventually found the rides on horseback too rough and turned to the less demanding exercise of driving a trotter.49 As the nature of work changed, and the industries became more specialized, the tasks demanded were often repetitive and limited behaviors. Even the owners of these industries were often confined to desks, preoccupied with the matters of business. For many of these men, exercising while riding a trotter was the link to a pre-modern past that emphasized physical accomplishment and corrected a bodily economy that had overemphasized the 46 Admari, 1935, 176–193; Boorstin, 1973, 140–141. 47 Boorstin, 1973, 140; Hudson, 1873, 654. 48 Stanford Papers, “Scrap Book #22,” Sc 33f, 59. 49 Bonner Papers, “Scrap Book of Newspaper Clippings Vol. 1: The Trotting Horse,” 75. HARNESSING HEREDITY 57 mental at the expense of the physical: “The swift trotting horse is distinctively an American outgrowth or development. His performances are so extraordinary as to excite the wonder and the admiration of the people of other countries, and here in our own land has become a necessity to many men of sedentary habits – men who must have outdoor exercise and breathe fresh air if they would preserve their health . . .”50 Exercising also distinguished the rugged middle-class man of accomplishment from the coddled upper-class gentlemen.51 Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed that “[a]s for any great athletic feat performed by a gentleman in these latitudes, society would drop a man who should run the Common in five minutes.” Holmes prescribed manly exercise to “give men a renewed sense of power” and correct the threat of “America’s white blooded degeneracy.”52 In order to gain supremacy of the New York trotting lanes, Bonner purchased the world record holding trotter “Dexter” for his own personal use. Although many speculated that Bonner’s purchase of the horse was another act of self promotion, Bonner flatly denied this claiming that he just wanted to “beat Commodore Vanderbilt and have the fastest horse in the world”53 (see Figure 1). “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt was perhaps the epitome of the rough man of business who made his fortune through risky competitive business techniques. In his younger years, while the skipper of his own boat, Vanderbilt was known for his ability to literally out-race his competition. Described as “one of the first modern captains of industry,” Vanderbilt was by most accounts a key transitional figure in the development of large scale businesses. Almost seventy years old by the start of the civil war, yet living until 1877, Vanderbilt’s life spanned the early days of American industrial expansion. Although Vanderbilt’s methods for accounting were still primitive (his books were kept informally), he was the first to build a large transportation system.54 “Step by step, from the manipulation of small railroad stocks, he had advanced to succeeding phases of combination, wresting profits many times the millions he originally possessed in short order, until his system of iron rails was fixed as the industrial heart of the country . . .”55 For many observers of Bonner and Vanderbilt’s year long trotting duel of 1856, the industrialists’ mastery over their horses was an expression of the 50 Bonner Papers, “Scrap Book of Newspaper Clippings Vol. 1: The Trotting Horse,” 75. 51 The literature on sport and Victorian masculinity is voluminous. For an introduction see Mangan and Walvin, 1981, or go straight to some of the classic texts: Mangan, 1981; Newsome, 1980; Haley, 1990. 52 Gorn and Goldstein, 1993. 53 Hudson, 1873, 654. 54 Josephson, 1934, 73. 55 Josephson, 1934, 73. 58 PHILLIP THURTLE Figure 1. Robert Bonner leads the pack (front and center driving the tandem team) in this 1871 lithographic reproduction of New York’s fastest horses. Cornelius Vanderbilt is to his left. Photograph courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute, Photo #56175. same characteristics that made them successful businessmen. Their ability to accumulate their wealth through aggressive business tactics and their ability to best their rival in a competitive duel reinforced their reputations as “aristocrats of character.” As one trotting historian hagiographically phrased it, “Bonner and Vanderbilt were self made men. It was chiefly men of their sort, men who had started business from scratch or with a handicap and had come out in front of the field, who plunged most eagerly into the game. . . . Each a rugged exponent of the American ambition to go ahead, get up, and to reach to the top! Each enjoyed the shocks and the strain of the competition, shared the American passion for fast and supreme accomplishment.”56 Winning a trotting duel signified that one possessed the aggressive virility required to pull one’s self up by the bootstraps. Andrew Carnegie elevated competition to a beneficial law for human progress: “We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves; great inequality of environment; the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of the few; and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, 56 Akers, 1938, 95. HARNESSING HEREDITY 59 but essential to the future of the race.”57 Even David Starr Jordan, trustee of the Carnegie Foundation and the first President of Stanford University, jotted in his notebook that war was not a means for beneficial evolution because “[c]ompetition is not a fight: it may be a race. The race cannot be to the slow.”58 In Jordan’s view, competition at the race track was a better analogy for natural selection because it celebrated rather than destroyed its participants. As a President of the First International Congress on Eugenics, Professor Jordan’s beliefs held great influence with others interested in applying competitive selection to breeding better human stock. The trotters that the industrialists drove were more than mechanisms used in competitions, they were living beings closely related in biology and temperament to humans. In fact while other primates were clearly more related to humans in structure, horses were the highest animal besides humans that actively participated in society. Writing in 1888 J. H. Sanders began his book, Horse Breeding, with the claim that “It is stated in Holy Writ that ‘God made man a little lower than the angels,’ and by common consent the horse is voted next highest in the scale of beings.”59 Since horses shared humankind’s double allegiance to nature and society, the breeding of horses often directly reflected the social circumstances of humans. Perhaps it is not surprising then to see that encouraging progressive evolution through competition was the driving concern for the breeding reforms instituted by National Association of Trotting Horse Breeders. In 1879, just three years after its institution, the association created a set of rules and standards designed to establish trotters as a distinct breed. Since trotters were from a mixed ancestry (derived from the English thoroughbred, the Norfolk trotter, the Arab or Barb, and certain pacers of mixed breeding)60 the variability of “the produce” made it difficult to consistently breed a horse with the inclination to trot. In order to fix this inclination among the heritable constitution of trotters, breeders established a basis for a pure line. The National Association of Trotting Horse Breeders created a breeding registry “[i]n order to define what constitutes a trotting-bred horse, and establish a BREED of trotters on a more intelligent basis. . . .”61 For a horse to qualify as a trotting horse it had to have trotted a mile in 2:30 or better, had a mare or sire who had met this performance standard, or has a grandam or grandsire that has met this 57 Carnegie, 1992, 132. 58 Jordan Papers, Large Diary, Nov. 1, 1892, pt 1 (Box II-A), 2. 59 Sanders, 1888, 2. 60 Merwin, 118. 61 Busbey, 1898, 278. 60 PHILLIP THURTLE performance standard. The standard was set high enough so as to assure that only the “exceptional horse should be entitled to a place in the record.”62 Although thoroughbred owners in England had established a breeding register approximately 100 years before, the differences between the two cases were telling.63 Whereas the original thoroughbred register traced ancestral lineages to a series of progenitor horses, trotters had to meet a single performance standard. The object was to take the handful of trotters who had had superlative racing performances and create a breed from them. Trotting horse owners were attempting to rationally establish a new breed of horse based on a utilitarian function. As a writer for Wallace’s Monthly claimed: “These measurements have not been made to test the purity of his blood, for he is a thorough composite, but to determine its strength and power to achieve what has been claimed for it.”64 Part 2: Breeding True: Processing a New Elite “Fixing” a function: Industrial scales and managerial hierarchies Trotting historian Dwight Akers claimed that the Vanderbilt-Bonner duel “marked the beginning of a change that provided the sport not only with the strong financial backing but an efficient leadership.”65 As many of the industrialists turned to racing trotters they made use of the developments that their industries promoted: “large scale investments of money, sound promotion, the application of science and invention to the technical problems of the sport. These things the business leaders who joined up with the sport were prepared to bring it.” Many at the time were excited about the progress that these individuals would bring to the sport. As one writer for the Chicago Herald reasoned, “And then in the last few years men of wealth and brains have gone into the business with the ideals of producing the fastest horses in the world. . . . When such men as Governor Stanford, who built a railroad across the Rockies, and Robert Bonner, who was a successful journalist, put thousands of dollars into the training and breeding of horses, why, they are bound to have a measure of the same success they have had in other lines.”66 Although these reports exaggerate the role of the industrialists in the changes that trotting horse breeding went through during the 1870s and 62 Akers, 1938, 176. 63 Merwin, 1892, 118. 64 Akers, 1938, 176. 65 Akers, 1938, 176. 66 Stanford Papers, “Scrap Book #22,” Sc 33f, 61. HARNESSING HEREDITY 61 1880s, the farms that these individuals financed introduced large scale animal husbandry practices to trotting horse breeding. These heavily capitalized “laboratories of speed” utilized vast resources, paid more attention to “organized” breeding methods, and developed intricate managerial hierarchies.67 In contrast to previous farms that bred trotters as just one domesticated animal among many, these new farms concentrated solely on breeding trotting stock. For instance, Leland Stanford’s stock farm at Palo Alto, one of the most famous of the large “laboratories of speed,” had as many as 775 horses in 1889.68 In order to coordinate these vast enterprises, the breeders relied on one of the important social “innovations” that Beniger and Chandler have argued mark the beginnings of managerial capitalism – the creation of an extended managerial hierarchy. John Bradburn, the superintendent of a farm owned by C. J. Hamlin (who had made his money from the dry goods business and glucose manufacturing) wrote an advice book on how to set up a large scale trotting farm. Aimed at wealthy individuals with little knowledge of horses, Bradburn detailed the necessary chain of managerial command. Beneath the proprietor of the stock farm was the superintendent who would answer directly to the owner. It was the superintendent’s job to coordinate the different tasks involved in running the farm and to make sure that it operated economically. Beneath the superintendent of the farm were the trainers who were directly responsible for developing the speed of the colts. Below the trainer were the grooms who were responsible for most of the handling that the horses received. Then below the grooms were laborers who took care of many of the mundane tasks at the farm.69 Add to this the fact that many farms also had facilities for growing and milling their own feed, a blacksmith shop, and a wheelwright shop, and it is easy to appreciate the amount of coordination it took to keep a large farm running profitably. Leland Stanford’s farm alone employed up to six trainers and on the average of 150 laborers.70 Working on such a large scale gave these breeders a distinct advantage. Since trotters were from “mongrel” backgrounds, large scale breeding projects gave the breeders an opportunity to locate that rare “golden cross” that would outshine other horses. The “culls,” or horses that were only fit for labor, were easily distributed to nearby farms, thus not ruining the important national reputation of a stock farm. The large specialized farms had in effect become large arenas for screening horses with the right potential. 67 Akers, 1938, 168–169; Adelman, 1981, 21. 68 Tutorow, 1971, 162. 69 Bradburn, 1906, 120–126. 70 Tutorow, 1971, 177; Bradburn, 1906, 120–126. 62 PHILLIP THURTLE In their dual roles as promoters of industry and promoters of animal breeding many of these industrialists explicitly discussed how increasing the speed of trotters would increase the productivity of the nation. Robert Bonner, for instance, argued with Mr. Garrett, President of the Baltimore and the Ohio Railroad, “that a breed of horses could be raised capable of hauling a streetcar from the Astor House to the Central Park in ten minutes less time than it now takes ordinary horses to haul it, and with even more ease to the horses.”71 Leland Stanford evaluated similar arguments for increasing productivity of horses as an economic consideration: “I have been told that there are about thirteen millions of horses in the United States. . . . It seems to me that the majority might be bred up to the standards of the best, thus increasing the average value $100 per horse. The increased value would represent a gain of thirteen hundred millions of dollars to the United States on the present number of horses. . . . There is, therefore, a great economic question involved in the breeding of good horses for labor.”72 In order to increase the speed of the trotter, Leland Stanford undertook a series of different types of experiments. Perhaps the most famous of these was the hiring of Eadward Muybridge to record his trotter “Occident” while in motion.73 While this experiment has shouldered a heavy interpretive burden for a constellation of fin-de-siècle discourses, one of the most interesting has been Anson Rabinbach’s recent investigation into Muybridge’s influence on Etienne-Jules Marey and his concerns for the conservation of labor power.74 Marey realized, and petitioned potential sponsors, that his instantaneous photography, which broke a continuous action into a series of discrete movements, could be used to determine the “conditions the maximum speed, force, or labor which the living being can furnish may be obtained.”75 Drawing the continuities the other way, however, back through Stanford to his other experiments for improving the productivity of trotters, emphasizes how heredity (not just motion) could be rationalized to increase productivity. Just as the dis-articulation of a movement of a worker allowed for the reorganization of an action on a more efficient basis, the dis-articulation of the stream of a hereditary constitution of a breed (or bloodline) could lead to the reorganization of the breed on a more efficient basis. From the perspective of the new animal breeders, the breed of the animal more than the animal itself was the object of manipulation – even superb performances of individual 71 Bonner Papers, “Scrap Book of Newspaper Clippings Vol. 1: The Trotting Horse.” 72 Stanford Papers, “Scrapbook #22,” Sc 33f, 33. 73 On Muybridge at Stanford see Stanford, 1972. 74 Rabinbach, 1990, 102–103. 75 Rabinbach, 1990, 104. HARNESSING HEREDITY 63 trotters were indicators of the “evolution” of the breed in general.76 In the new stock farms, engineering the increase in a single trotter’s speed indicated that trotters as a whole were becoming more productive. Incorporating heredity: Selecting a new elite By the end of the century, the captains of industry who had so selfconsciously defined themselves against the social practices of an oldmoneyed elite now found themselves rubbing elbows with them.77 Marrying into an elite family was only one means of acquiring gentle blood, using their incredible wealth to redefine cultural standards was another. For instance, when Cornelius Vanderbilt’s son, William, was denied box seats at the New York Academy of Music he donated money to create the Metropolitan Opera House.78 Or when William’s daughter in-law Alma was shunned by Mrs. Astor, she used her money to throw her own costume ball, a lavish spectacle to which she did not at first invite the Astors.79 In a social order primarily built on the display of wealth as an indicator of social privilege, newcomers with wealth could not be excluded for long. As Wharton’s Newland Archer reflected: “There was always a traitor in the citadel; and after he (or generally she) had surrendered the keys, what was the use of pretending that it was impregnable? Once people had tasted of Mrs. Struthers’s easy Sunday hospitality they were not likely to sit at home remembering that her champagne was transmuted Shoe-Polish.”80 Although the new industrialists had become the social and economic elite, it was through a much more complex process than the simple amalgamation of new comers into an older elite culture.81 By the end of the nineteenth century, political power and cultural tastes had diversified enough that it was increasingly difficult to point to a single unified economic and cultural elite. As Donald Hammack has argued in his fine grained analysis of political and social power in New York city, this had serious consequences for the development of social policy at the end of the century. Since the new elite relied more on the advice of experts from institutions, and not on the advice of lawyers as 76 Busbey, 1898. 77 According to Jaher, this happened via two different mechanisms in Boston and New York. New York was more prone to amalgamation, while the Boston old-moneyed elite more often took up the new industries. Jaher, 1982, compare 117–125 with 275–281. 78 Jaher, 1982, 271. 79 Josephson, 1934, 331. 80 Wharton, 1929, 259–260. 81 Auchincloss, 1989, 3–8. 64 PHILLIP THURTLE their old-moneyed counterparts had, “heterodox ideas” for social policy were promoted with increasing frequency.82 What Hammach doesn’t note, however, is that many experts from the new institutions justified the Anglo-males’ social privileges on the grounds that they were the most fully developed or evolved, while the social constraints placed on people of color and women were justified on the basis that they were thought to be less developed.83 Since the primary principle behind these hierarchies was “development,” assumptions about the developmental sequence often cut across the categories sex, race, and class. For instance, individuals from within a race were also arranged on a developmental hierarchy. Because there has been little engaged analysis into the fields of beliefs and practices that supported assumptions about human development there is still no clear understanding why a conception of human potential based on developmental sequences became prevalent. Consequently, even when scholars argue against a developmental hierarchy that excluded individuals on the basis of class, sex, and race, they end up lending credence to a definition of human excellence that supports these hierarchies. It is only through an analysis into the circumstances that gave credence to this view of human excellence that we can understand how fully these ideas supported dominant interests. In the discussion that follows I will look at theories developed on Stanford’s stock farm supported suppositions about the importance of early development as a definition of excellence. I will argue that the early specialization of Stanford’s trotters was a consequence of the application of the values and organization promoted by industrial systems to the training of living beings. As one of the first sites to rationally produce animals for greater productivity, Stanford’s stock farm is a wonderful model for investigating how presuppositions for increasing industrial productivity were identified as natural capacities. Trotters on Stanford’s farm trained at a younger stage of life than other farms. Stanford, in fact, is credited with changing the way that trotters were trained. Most trainers had followed the techniques set down in Hiram Woodruff’s The Trotting Horse of America.84 This text claimed that because trotters weren’t expected to perform at full capacity until maturity, training shouldn’t begin until the trotter’s third or fourth year. Stanford, on the other hand, began training his horses during their eighth month of life in a manner similar to the races it would run in adult life. Most likely influenced by a 82 Hammack, 1987, 312. 83 On the importance of developmental hierarchies in American culture see Gould, 1977. On their application to women and people of color see Gould, 1981; Russet, 1990. 84 Marvin, 1892, 200. HARNESSING HEREDITY 65 Figure 2. A colt trotting on the “kindergarten track” at Leland Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm. Photograph courtesy of Stanford University Department of Special Collections, Photo #9341. growing interest kindergarten education (Mrs. Stanford donated generously to kindergartens around the Bay Area) Stanford ordered a small track built for the young horses in 1879 that he named the “kindergarten track” (see Figure 2). Once broken to the halter, the colt trained on the kindergarten track. Charles Marvin, the head trainer at the Stanford Stock Farm, recognized that trotters could be trained like humans because they both needed the direction of human guidance to fit into social circumstances: Every one must admit that there are a great many points of resemblance between a colt and a young child. They are both mammals, and are therefore to be conceived, begat and nourished to point of absolutely independent existence on similar lines, but the resemblance extends beyond this period for they are either as colts or children subject to the direct interference and guidance of man in the matter of education or training, each after their allotted sphere. Now, how would any sensible parent or guardian train a child? And by that word train I wish to convey the ideal of physical as well as mental education; they go hand in hand, for a healthful body makes a healthful mind. To draw the parallel closely we must bear in mind the fact that a child of seven to eight is no older in proportion than a yearling, and that 66 PHILLIP THURTLE a two-year-old is on a level in that respect with a healthy school-boy of from fifteen to sixteen. The answer to my question is conveyed by an old proverb, the truth of which has been evident from the very beginning of society: “Train up a child in the way he should go.” Alter but one word, and it will be equally applicable to the little fellows we are just now most concerned about: “Train up a colt in the way he should go.”85 Training on the kindergarten track did not mean teaching the colt new skills. The main value of the kindergarten track is that it allowed the trainer to evaluate the ability of a horse at a young age: They gave the promise of their future greatness there. Sunol and Palo Alto, Margeruite and Bonita, Hinda Rose and the Beautiful Bells family have been the stars of the kindergarten, just as they were afterwards stars of the sterner battle-field of the turf. And this fact proves more than any other the truth of what I have contended – that this is above all the best natural method of training young trotters now extant. If it were not a natural system it would not prove so true an index of the capacity which the horse is afterward destined to exhibit.86 Selecting the correct horse to train made good business sense. Training a world class trotter was an expensive procedure, often requiring many hours of training time before a horse was ready to race. The kindergarten allowed the trainer to evaluate whether the horse had inherited the potential that merited the attention of the trainers. As Marvin claimed, “. . . the miniature track enables you to select those of your colts that will best repay the labor and expense of training. Let me work allot of colts on this track for three months and I will pick out the stars . . . .”87 The horses that weren’t early bloomers were sold off as stock, saving the owner the cost of training a horse without the right potential. Or, as John Bradburn advised these “culls can usually be disposed of to advantage among the farmers of your neighborhood, who will use them as general-purpose horses,” so that the reputation of one’s farm is not damaged. Training at the “large laboratories of speed” did not mean teaching the horse a skill, it meant selecting the horses with the right potential and then providing the best arena for the development of this potential. Early training of trotting horses also made good business sense in a different way. Racing a horse brought little money directly into a stock farm; 85 Stanford papers, “Scrap Book #22,” Sc 33f, 95. 86 Marvin, 1892, 210. Italics in the original. 87 Marvin, 1892, 210. HARNESSING HEREDITY 67 however, it did provide a forum for highlighting the major asset of a horse – its progeny. If a horse produced fast horses then it would raise the price of the rest of its progeny. Under the old system of breeding and training it took too long to judge the progeny of a horse: “The business of breeding has now reached a point where few breeders have the inclination, even if they were financially able or believed it beneficial to wait six or seven years for the get of their stallions and the produce of their mares to show what their blood is worth.”88 Under Stanford’s new training system, a trainer only had to wait two or three years to display the heritable potential of a horse. In a culture where potential was marketed as a commodity, the early training of horses was reinforced by powerful financial incentives. Early training not only selected the fastest young trotters, it also contributed to the evolution of the trotter as a distinct breed. Marvin claimed that the horses could be trained so young because the trotter had been through many rounds of selective breeding. “The older the breed grows, and hence the higher capacity in the special purpose for which it is bred, the earlier this capacity manifests itself in a high degree.”89 Early selection not only promised immediate financial incentives, but also promised to progressively evolve the trotter as a distinct breed capable of performing its function – to trot at a fast speed. By adopting the standards of a modern industrial enterprise the new large scale trotting farms redefined the values for training and breeding horses. Since trotters were a breed based on a set of actions that fit a function, increasing the productivity of the trotter meant increasing the ability of the trotter to perform this single function. This promoted a conception of the potential of the trotter based on a developmental hierarchy, where the horses that demonstrated this ability at an early age were thought to be those that had the natural capacity for this function. The early specialization of trotters was a function of a conception of life promoted by the needs of the new industries and as such, Stanford later promoted a similar system for the education of humans. David Starr Jordan recognized how Stanford’s experiments on the stock farm helped substantiate Stanford’s theories of education for the “human colt:” One of the interesting features of the Farm was “the kindergarten,” a trotting track for the younger colts on which they were taught to maintain the proper gait from the beginning, and which thus served as a basis for an orderly progressive training. With a somewhat similar notion in regard to human education Mr. Stanford often dallied, imagining a school which 88 Marvin, 1892, 185. 89 Marvin, 1892, 189. 68 PHILLIP THURTLE should receive only a limited number of children and train them continuously from kindergarten to university. The suggestion stirred up a certain amount of ridicule, but it held more than a modicum of sound sense, although it overlooked the necessity of a broader range of environment for the human colt.90 When the owners of industries set up breeding farms, they applied the criteria and methods of their business to rationalize the production on these farms. This contributed to a redefinition of the quality of the product along single specialized criteria. Conscious of how their businesses demanded a new criteria of human excellence many of the owners of these industries turned to philanthropic giving to increase the production of their industries. From the beginning, Leland Stanford intended that his university “educate boys and girls in such practical industries as will enable them to go out in the world equipped for useful labor.”91 Stanford never considered education as an end onto itself. As the head of a major industry, Stanford wearied of hiring university graduates who had no practical skill. Universities weren’t producing a product that fit the needs of the growing industrial sector. Stanford sought to change this with his creation of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. After Stanford died, an anonymous author couldn’t resist the temptation to describe Stanford’s family tree as if it was the pedigree of one of his famous horses. The three paragraphs that introduce this document succinctly weave together themes argued in this paper. More importantly, by weaving these themes together, this document demonstrates how these themes fit together to form an interlocking and mutually supportive set of beliefs: Stanford University, as the climax to Leland Stanford’s career as a railroad builder and statesman, was a logical sequence of the heredity derived by its founder . . . If Stanford had been as familiar with his own pedigree as he was with the pedigrees of the racers which preceded the human colts on the Stanford farm, he would have known that in carrying out his desires to establish a great university he was stepping true to form. As well might some early farmer have marveled, “That Morgan mare’s colt was broke to plow; where would he get the notion of trotting?” . . . . . . Before the day of specialization, that stout strain of early New England speedsters broke the ground for the oats they trained on when the leisure harvest set them free to test their inborn speed. Leland Stanford had to plow a wide field with his steel rails, and harrow it 90 Jordan, 1922, 370. 91 Stanford in conversation with friend Frank Pixley, quoted in Clark, 1931, 417. HARNESSING HEREDITY 69 to some degree of smoothness with his administrative powers, before it grew the population which enabled his . . . blood to fulfill itself.92 In these paragraphs the author recognized the trotter’s status as an elite horse distinguished from an utilitarian background, and how institutions could train individuals for the demands of the division of labor in an industrial society. More intriguingly, he also wonderfully mixes industrial and agricultural metaphors to suggest how the institution that Stanford created fulfilled the promise of his bloodline. The institution that Stanford funded, and not the Stanford family, became an organ for the reproduction of a social order. For W. E. D. Stokes, this association was so strong he made no distinction between Stanford University, Stanford’s stock farm, and the eugenic interests of Stanford University’s first president: “To the Trotting Horsemen, more than anyone else, is due the advancement this country is now making in eugenics. It was Governor Leland Stanford, owner of ‘Electioneer,’ and the great Palo Alto Farm, who placed David Starr Jordan at the head of Stanford University, with unlimited funds, to carry out his ideas on breeding and heredity.”93 Stanford was only one of a group of benefactors supporting new institutions of higher education during the last half of the nineteenth century; Jonas Clark, Johns Hopkins, Andrew Carnegie, and Ezra Cornell were only the most famous industrialists who intended to recreate higher education closer to their own image. Since these institutions were intended to address similar social problems, and since many of the philanthropists actually discussed their projects among fellow philanthropists and educators, it is not surprising that these institutions held certain ideals in common.94 First of all, these institutions were developed in distinction to older institutions. “[A]s men of affairs” they “believed that existing institutions failed to give young people the equipment needed for successful achievement in business, agriculture, and the sciences.”95 There was a growing conviction that the older institutions were still bent upon instilling “a series of underlying responses, applicable to all future situations.”96 With an emphasis on the traditional curriculum (“Greek, Latin, mathematics, and to a lesser extent moral philosophy”97 ) older intuitions had little time for the science oriented curriculum prized by the industrialists. Even the faculty of many older institutions, with their limited range of specialties, often appeared as the product of “[i]nbreeding.”98 92 Stanford Papers, “Stanford Family Tree,” box 3, folder 17. 93 Stokes, 1917, 20–21. 94 See Veysey, 1965, 57–120. 95 Curti and Nash, 1965, 114. 96 Veysey, 1965, 39. 97 Veysey, 1965, 36. 98 Veysey, 1965, 47. 70 PHILLIP THURTLE “Relations with and attitudes toward family” provided another set of distinctive dispositions. In a frequently cited study, Merle Curti points out that industrialists giving large amounts of money to “perpetuate the family name” lacked “close family connections.”99 Curti’s analysis takes the first crucial step in understanding the growth of industrial philanthropy, yet he fails to adequately consider that many founders never intended to leave large inheritances to their sons, even if they had them (Ezra Cornell and Andrew Carnegie are the most well known cases). The more general question behind the gifts is why were institutions seen as a “logical fulfillment” of a bloodline? The value of blood: Trotting as a natural capacity During the last decade of the nineteenth century, owning and riding a champion trotter became a symbol of wealth and conspicuous consumption – trotting had in effect become an elite activity. Although owning a fast horse had always been expensive, the prices of champion trotters during the last part of the nineteenth century reached astonishing heights: Leland Stanford sold the three year record holder, Sunol, to Robert Bonner for $41,000, while in 1892 he sold the promising young stud, Arion, to Malcom J. Forbes for the unheard of price of $125,000. Often even the stalls that the horses were kept in were lavish affairs, expensively decorated in order to receive the guests who came to look at the fast horses.100 Not all horse owners were happy with the changes that the sport had gone through; in fact the growing commercialization of the trotter and the fantastic prices paid for the best “horse-flesh” irritated many horsemen who idolized the rural origins of the sport. As argued earlier, one of the reasons that trotting had become popular in the first place was that the sport was open to those with hardy but not immense incomes. As the fastest trotters became more and more expensive critics charged that rich industrialist owners were making the sport too elite. Just as the heritable constitution of Stanford’s trotters came closer to approximating the hot blooded thoroughbreds, the practices of trotting had come closer to resembling the practices of thoroughbred racing. Many sharply criticized the conspicuous consumption and the pretensions to European culture that owners now exhibited. One newspaper article described the farm of a “syndicate composed of an editor, manufacturer, and others who, following the fashion of the day came down with ‘the horse and Jersey cow fever’:” “Overhead was built a large dance hall, which of course was a necessary adjunct to the breeding of a valuable horse or cow, for how could a Jersey 99 Curti and Nash, 1965, 112. 100 “Trotters of New York,” 1886, 3. HARNESSING HEREDITY 71 cow give milk fit for Boston’s ‘400’ unless she could dance? They were to be reared with such environments as to become graceful, polite, and light stepping . . . these accomplishments were to be taught the animals bred at the farm by an imported French dancing master, who had constantly at his command a German orchestra, selected from the most famous musicians of Berlin and Munich.” The most revealing criticisms were the increasing complaints that owners were not “natural” horsemen, that they had purchased their expertise with their large fortunes instead of carrying this set of skills from their family upbringing. In a set of satirical columns titled “Stable Talk,” originally published in The Horse Review, the owners of the horses are portrayed as know-nothing city dudes, while the stable hand is the source of authority and knowledge of the horse. Uneducated and without wealth, the seat of the stable man’s authority is his rural upbringing and his rough mannered business sense. Take for example the stable hand’s advice to his owner on the importance of pedigrees: “Why, I’ve knowed owners an’ breeders by the hundreds that blowed in trunks full of dough breedin’ and racin’ pedigrees. Whenever they lost they got hosses with better pedigrees, an’ tried it again. They never did win nothin’, of course, but they got their money’s worth out of the pedigree, an’ that’s what you ought to learn to do.”101 Not only does this quotation demonstrate that modern trotting owners no longer came from the background of the farm (and therefore no longer carried the authority of a rural past) but it points to its effects on the horses themselves. In the eyes of those who identified with stories of the rural origins of trotters, pedigrees might be a reliable indicator of a horse’s economic value, but they couldn’t adequately gauge performance. As the comments of the stable hand indicate, a trotter’s blood line now served a social and economic function outside of the race track. The growing elitism of trotting is best illustrated by the sensational sale of Stanford’s trotter “Arion” to J. Malcom Forbes for the fabulous price of $125,000. Holding the record for a two year old trotter (2:10 3/4), Arion promised to develop into the fastest trotter ever. Forbes was not the self-made man that the earlier generation of trotting horsemen had been. A member of the Boston moneyed elite, Forbes was the son of John Murray Forbes, who had gained his money through his large railroad empire.102 As part of the elite Boston sporting set, Forbes had been best known for his yacht racing, where he became the first American to win the World’s Cup. Forbes purchased Arion 101 Howe, 1900, 35. 102 John Murray Forbes initially made his money in the East India trade as the Canton agent for his uncle Thomas Handasyd Perkins. Wealthy Bostonians more frequently took up the new industrial businesses than their New York counter parts. Jaher, 1982, 23, 123–124. 72 PHILLIP THURTLE to be the progenitor sire for a breeding establishment. Although Forbes set up one of the largest breeding establishments his judgments about horses were often questioned and motives suspected: “Did you say that you wished to see Mr. Forbes? Well you won’t find him at the farm. . . . His horses are but a pastime, the same as a few years ago was his famous yacht, the Thistle. Is he a horseman? Only in having plenty of money to buy whatever he wishes, and not in the highest sense. His horses are to him but a pleasant way of getting rid of money and enjoying a new ‘fad’.”103 Forbes eventually made his name as a trotting horse breeder by applying the strategy “speed produces speed.”104 Forbes built his stock farm around a group of stallions and mares that had shown early speed and gained low records. Previously, a horse’s performance was not thought indicative of their ability to pass these traits on to their offspring. Consequently most breeders bred from sires and dams that were better known for their ability to produce fast horses and not for their own racing performance. Forbes’ breeding strategy demonstrates how much confidence some breeders now placed in the inheritance of the trotting gait as a distinct trait. In just a few generations of trotters, the emphasis on breeding the horse had gone from the value placed on its mongrel ancestry and the variability of its produce, to the trotter as an elite breed whose bloodline conserved qualities that once had to be rigorously selected for. But two generations of horses was not enough time to breed purebred trotters. What changes occurred in the breeding and training of trotters that convinced owners like Forbes that they could now follow pure line breeding methods? The new trotting farms had instituted large scale breeding programs that selected for trotters at a young age. Breeders began rigorously selecting the fastest trotters from the rest of the stock. Thus the variability of a trotter’s produce had been reduced through the “visible hand” of the trainer. A radically new type of inheritance had in effect been set up, an corporate inheritance that relied on early competition as an expression of natural capabilities. The horses’ “natural” capabilities could only be proven, however, on the value laden system of the track, where selection occurred based on a functional standard that conformed with the needs and values of the new industries. The horse and the management of the farm had become a single reproductive entity for reproducing elite equine bloodlines. A similar type of development had taken place under hierarchically managed business. In an almost too pat example, trotting horse fancier Andrew Carnegie chose the analogy of race horses to best describe how 103 Stanford Papers, “Scrap Book #22,” Sc 33f, 65. 104 Hervey, 1947, 314. HARNESSING HEREDITY 73 internal promotion was a form of selection by performance. According to business historian Harold Livesay: Another cornerstone of Carnegie’s success was the use of systematic analysis to evaluate his men’s performance. He was the first manufacturer to do so . . . individual records were kept of “who produced the best results,” “thus to compare one [man] with the other,” in order to inspire what Daniel McCallum had called “an honorable spirit of emulation to excel” . . . Thus Carnegie said of a suggested promotion: “He may be just the man we need. give him a trial. That’s all we get ourselves and all we can give anyone. If he can win the race, he is our race-horse. If not, he goes to the cart.” Those who turned out to be “race-horses” could aspire to promotion, even partnership. As Carnegie said, “Mr. Morgan buys his partners, I raise my own.” . . . The system also fostered jealousy and, bitterness, and sometimes despair. But it produced results.105 Lacking the bureaucratic vocabulary of the modern personnel office, Carnegie resorted to the analogy of artificial selection. As industries vertically integrated, opportunities were created for a new class of professional workers possessing new skills. The institutions funded by the captains of industry were intended to train students in these skills. In the industries that these individuals promoted and the institutions that their money helped to build, a new definition of human excellence emerged that relied on competition as an indicator of one’s “natural” ability for leadership. This type of corporate inheritance led to a system where social privilege could be conserved through competition at the institutional level only. The selection of functional capacities through competition in hierarchically organized institutions and not the bloodline would become the major unit for the reproduction of social privilege. A “backward glance”: Corporate inheritance as bastard birth Sitting alone in his study on a day near the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Newland Archer contemplated the changes that occurred over the last twenty six years. The material changes in his world were immense: automobiles transformed personal transportation (making trotting horses even less useful than their thoroughbred counterparts) and telephones enabled communication at a distance. Professionally, young men of means now chose occupations other than law or business. Archer’s eldest son, for 105 Livesay, 1975, 99–100. 74 PHILLIP THURTLE instance, studied architecture. Other young men indulged their interests in “municipal reform,” “archeology,” or even “landscape engineering.”106 The changes that most pre-occupied Newland, however, were the changes to his family. His oldest son had recently announced his engagement to Fanny Beaufort, the daughter of Julius Beaufort and his mistress Fanny Ring. After the death of his wife, Beaufort quietly married his mistress, moved to South America, and recovered his fortune through international business ventures. His daughter appeared in New York after Beaufort and his wife died in Buenos Aires. Archer remembered a comment that Lawrence Lefferts, the guardian of proper social form, dropped decades ago: “What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him? He remembered a sneering prophecy of poor Lawrence Leffert’s, uttered years ago in that very room: ‘If things go on at this rate, our children will be marrying Beaufort’s bastards.’ It was just what Archer’s eldest son, the pride of his life, was doing; and nobody wondered or reproved.”107 Put into the context of the ideas explored in this paper, Wharton’s use of the analogy of bastard birth suggests more than a relaxation of social mores. New York society embraced Beaufort’s bastard with little fear because the enforcement of proper social form no longer depended on face-to-face interactions. As the loci of political, social, and cultural power became more fragmented, greater emphasis was placed on the specialization of knowledge and opinions of experts. The institutions that housed these experts, however, were often supported by those who had gained their fortunes through the expansion of industries. Their values were built into the tools used to coordinate and process the data that enabled production of industrial scales. New forms for conceiving of inheritance became possible when these tools were applied to looking at the transmission of hereditary character. For those of Wharton’s generation and class, reproducing social privilege on the institutional scale changed the perceptions of human relationships. The world had in effect grown larger and more impersonal: “Nothing could more clearly give the measure of the distance that the world had traveled. People nowadays were too busy – busy with reforms and” movements, “with fads, and fetishes and frivolities – to bother much about their neighbours. And of what account was anybody’s past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around the same plane?”108 From the expanded perspective of the institution, people were only statistical entities – kinetic particles sorted by managerial hierarchies. With the realization that “systematic management 106 Wharton, 1929, 345. 107 Wharton, 1929, 352. 108 Wharton, 1929, 353. HARNESSING HEREDITY 75 was built on the assumption that individuals were less important than the systems that they functioned within,”109 the new forms of reproducing social privilege began systematizing individuals according to the specialized needs of the new industries. Although explicitly referred to as the basis for a meritocracy, the promise of mobility within these hierarchies depended on the performance of specialized tasks. Even as they affirmed the agency of the individual through competitive displays, individuals remained only components within the system. Even though kinship inheritance never really disappeared, the reproduction of social privilege relied more and more heavily on the institutions that the Beauforts of the world built. This did not mean that society was homogenized to the degree that Wharton claimed – in fact the new institutions often lent new authority to previous prejudices – but rather that bloodlines of the families needed to flow through the institutions to retain social privilege. Just as Beaufort produced Fanny outside of the family, corporate inheritance now reproduced social privilege outside of the family. From the perspective of the Larry Lefferts and Sillerton Jacksons, this form of indirect inheritance, with its disregard for family and social form, made each American just one more of Beaufort’s bastards. 109 Yates, 1989, pxvii. References Manuscripts David Starr Jordan Papers. Deposited at Special Collections Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Leland Stanford Papers. Deposited at Special Collections Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Robert Bonner Papers. Deposited at the New York Public Library, New York, New York. Published material Adelman, M. 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