"The Busy Hive" by William Cronon

In William Cronon’s chapter entitled “The Busy Hive”, Cronon describes the different ways the market worked in the United States during the electromechanical control revolution era. To achieve this, Cronon split the chapter into two general sections: before the railroad and after the railroad came into use. Cronon also examines urban manufacturing, wholesaling, improved postal service, and advertising throughout the chapter. Cronon examines some case studies, such as the McCormick reaper works and Montgomery Ward and Company as well.

Cronon begins the chapter describing how the market was run before railroads came into play. During this time, it was hard to transport goods and products between city and country. People wanted to buy from urban market because of its “newness”. Buying from these markets had a way of making buyers feel modern. As Cronon puts it, “Buying from the city meant participating in the progress of the age (318).”

Chicago became one of the biggest market areas during this time, and one reason was because of the McCormick reaper works. Cyrus McCormick invented his first reaper to mechanize grain harvesting, and farmers saw it as a solution to the high labor costs. A problem that McCormick faced was that people did not want to spend a lot of money for his reaper. Because of this, he came up with a solution: advertising. This was a way to educate the public about the wondrous new technology from his factory, in order to try to get them to buy his product.

One topic that Cronon describes is the banknotes and how they became popular during this time. Banknotes were “checks drawn on a bank that promised payment in gold or silver to anyone who submitted them (322).” This became very important and popular because America did not have a national currency during the nineteenth-century. A simpler way, however, was credit. Credit was a solution to the problem of frontier money shortages and without it, the economies would have quickly collapsed.

The railroad was very promising. The railroad meant speed. It meant the future. The railroad lowered the cost of travel, and because of this, it brought country and city closer together. The railroad meant that one needed “neither as much wealth nor as much credit to be successful (326)”. It allowed for endless opportunities for individuals to be successful. Post offices took advantage of the railroads and used them to accelerate mail service speed and efficiency.

In 1872, Aaron Montgomery Ward founded a marketing institution that would later become one of the most successful businesses in Chicago. By 1900, Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck were the two greatest merchandising organizations in the world. His success could be traced to the pages of his catalogs. His catalogs allowed people to buy goods from wherever they lived, whether it be in the city or country. The building from which they operated in, which was located in Chicago, got the name “A Busy Bee-Hive” because of how it was a perfect emblem of the city at that time.

Cronon wanted to prove that the same market that brought city and country closer together also concealed the very linkages it was creating. He also wanted to show that the geography of capital produced a landscape of obscured connections, and he did this through the paradox of nineteenth-century Chicago.