1867 | Commerce
Commerce
A new Internal Revenue Act approved by Congress March 2 reduces taxes.
The Secret Order of the Knights of St. Crispin founded by shoemakers at Milwaukee March 7 quickly grows to have 50,000 members nationwide, making it the largest labor union in America (Crispin is the patron saint of shoemakers). Orders for footwear have fallen off sharply since the end of the Civil War and manufacturers have been reducing wages, the larger ones to increase their competitive advantage, the smaller to avoid bankruptcy; machinery developed since the 1850s has made it possible to employ unskilled labor, which is in oversupply, and factories have been reducing their need for skilled workers by producing soles separately from uppers and letting nearby contracting shops that specialize in lasting sew the parts together and finish them (see Daughters of St. Crispin, 1869; strikebreakers, 1870).
The Bank of California opens June 27 at San Francisco.
The Gold and Stock Telegraph Co. incorporated in August with offices at 18 New Street, New York, promotes the first stock ticker, adapted from a printing telegraph invented by Edward Callahan. The clacking ticker will be installed next year on the New York Stock Exchange, will initially serve only brokers on that exchange, but will soon be used on other exchanges throughout the country, printing stock quotes on strips of paper and eliminating the need to have runners carry quotes from one office to another (see Western Union, 1871).
Standard and Poor's has its beginnings in Poor's Publishing Co., a corporation founded by Maine-born New York historian-economist Henry Varnum Poor, 55, to publish his annual "Manual of the Railroads and Canals of the United States." Poor's History of Railroads and Canals of the United States, which appeared in 1860, pioneered U.S. publication of financial and investment information (see 1941).
Directors of the Union Pacific Railroad let congressmen have shares in their 3-year-old Crédit Mobilier company in an effort to stave off investigation into the high personal profits they are making on the line under construction in the West (see 1863). The company will pay dividends of 200 percent to its shareholders in one year while its workers go unpaid (see 1869; communications [Sun exposé], 1872). Collis P. Huntington of the Central Pacific comes down from his New York office and bribes congressmen with cash to influence their votes.
Das Kapital by Karl Marx appears in its first volume, urging an end to private ownership of public utilities, transportation facilities, and, above all, the means of production, which Marx says should be owned by the workers, not by capitalists. The English system of private enterprise and competition arose in the 16th century from the development of sea routes, foreign trade, and colonialism, he argues; it grew out of an "enormous accumulation of commodities" and was facilitated by the division of labor, the concentration of workshops, the adoption of mechanization, technical progress, and other changes in the forces of production. Marx has adapted the concepts of Adam Smith and David Ricardo to introduce new concepts such as that of surplus value, insisting that all economic value derives from human labor: "Surplus value is produced by the employment of labor power. Capital buys the labor power and pays the wages for it. By means of his work the laborer creates new value which does not belong to him, but to the capitalist. He must work a certain time merely in order to reproduce the equivalent value of his wages. But when this equivalent value has been returned, he does not cease work, but continues to do so for some further hours. The new value which he produces during this extra time, and which exceeds in consequence the amount of his wage, constitutes surplus value." The class struggle will end only when the workers own the means of production, Marx says.
The Zollverein customs union established in 1833 expands to include Baden, Bavaria, Hohenzollern, and Württemberg (see 1853; politics [German unification], 1871).
Thyssen AG (Aktiengesellschaft) has its beginnings in a rolling mill opened at Duisburg, Westphalia, by chicken-wire producer August Thyssen, 25, whose company will grow to become Europe's largest steel producer and a major manufacturer of armaments (see 1871).
United Iron Mills is founded by Philadelphia scale manufacturer Henry Phipps, 28, in partnership with Andrew Carnegie (see 1865; Frick, 1873).
South African schoolboy Erasmus Jacobs discovers a diamond as large as a child's marble on the Orange River near Hope Town (see 1729); the discovery will not be made public for some years, but South Africa will soon supplant Brazil as the world's leading source of diamonds (see 1871).
South Carolina industrial pioneer William Gregg dies September 13 at age 67 following a flood that has seriously damaged his textile mill, whose production was not disrupted by the Civil War.