A History of American Literature Since 1870. Fred Lewis Pattee
CHAPTER XVI THE TRIUMPH OF THE SHORT STORY
CHAPTER XVII SHIFTING CURRENTS OF FICTION
A HISTORY OF
AMERICAN LITERATURE
SINCE 1870
CHAPTER I
THE SECOND DISCOVERY OF AMERICA
I
We are beginning to realize that the Civil War marks a dividing line in American history as sharp and definitive as that burned across French history by the Revolution. That the South had been vastly affected by the war was manifest from the first. The widespread destruction of property, the collapse of the labor system, and the fall of the social régime founded on negro slavery, had been so dramatic and so revolutionary in their results that they had created everywhere a feeling that the ultimate effects of the war were confined to the conquered territory. Grady's phrase, "the new South," and later the phrase, "the end of an era," passing everywhere current, served to strengthen the impression. That the North had been equally affected, that there also an old régime had perished and a new era been inaugurated, was not so quickly realized. The change there had been undramatic; it had been devoid of all those picturesque accompaniments that had been so romantic and even sensational in the South; but with the perspective of half a century we can see now that it had been no less thoroughgoing and revolutionary.
The first effect of the war had come from the sudden shifting of vast numbers of the population from a position of productiveness to one of dependence. A people who knew only peace and who were totally untrained even in the idea of war were called upon suddenly to furnish one of the largest armies of modern times and to fight to an end the most bitterly contested conflict of a century. First and last, upwards of two millions of men, the most of them citizen volunteers, drawn all of them from the most efficient productive class, were mustered into the federal service alone. It changed in a moment the entire equilibrium of American industrial life. This great unproductive army had to be fed and clothed and armed and kept in an enormously wasteful occupation. But the farms and the mills and the great transportation systems had been drained of laborers to supply men for the regiments. The wheatfields had no harvesters; the Mississippi the great commercial outlet of the West, had been closed by the war, and the railroads were insufficient to handle the burden.
The grappling with this mighty problem wrought a change in the North that was a revolution in itself. The lack of laborers in the harvest fields of the Middle West called for machinery, and the reaper and the mowing machine for the first time sprang into widespread use; the strain upon the railroads brought increased energy and efficiency and capital to bear upon the problem of transportation, and it was swiftly solved. Great meat-packing houses arose to meet the new conditions; shoes had to be sent to the front in enormous numbers and to produce them a new and marvelous machine was brought into use; clothing in hitherto unheard-of quantities must be manufactured and sent speedily, and to make it Howe's sewing