Abstract

"Economies of Scale: Business and the State in Gilded Age America"

Rosanne Currarino, Queen's University (rc16@queensu.ca)

Much recent work on the strength and vigor of the Gilded Age state has either focused on the state’s own efforts to intervene in economic development or has detailed on public calls for state regulation of emerging large corporations. But in the 1870s and 1880s the impetus for state or federal government intervention in the economy also came from business people who demanded and expected a robust state. This paper will examine the efforts of California’s orange growers, self-described businessmen, to force the state of California and the federal government to support their fledgling enterprise. Growers believed that profitable fruit-growing required “practical experimentation by individuals and the state” and a “State and nation” willing to “expend its millions” on such work “in the name of our common humanity.” Growers’ need for state help grew acute in the 1800s when Icerya purchasi (the cottony cushion scale) arrived, determined to eat every single orange tree in Southern California. Faced with this “army of minute but redoubtable and relentless enemies,” growers begged California for stronger quarantine laws, horticultural inspectors, and pesticides. With equal fervor they pleaded for the Department of Agriculture to find something, anything that would kill the ferocious insect. In response Department entomologists found Vedalia cardinalis in Australia and imported the “wondrous” ladybug. Its limitless appetite for Icerya saved California’s orange industry. Growers’ demands on the state, especially during the Icerya crisis, imply that state engagement in business enterprises, including regulation (here via quarantine), were as much as response business needs as to public efforts to control enterprises’ growth. At the same time, growers placed limits on how much “interference” they wanted. At least some Gilded Age businessmen saw the state as an invaluable partner, but businessmen expected to be the senior partners in that relationship.