At first motor carriages were so slow that wags would shout, ‘Get a horse!’ Edison had encouraged Henry Ford, a Michigan farmboy who had long tinkered with gasoline-fuelled farm engines to create the self-propelled Ford Quadricycle. Like Edison himself, Ford was far from the only visionary: an engineer in Mannheim, Germany, Carl Benz, had developed a petrol engine in 1885 and designed the Benz motor car. These inventors were male, but in August 1886 Mrs Bertha Benz stole her husband’s contraption with her two sons on board, and drove sixty-five miles, buying gasoline from pharmacies, to visit her mother. It was the first road trip, but Bertha also made driving safer by using a garter to insulate a wire, wielding a hairpin to unblock a pipe and inventing brake pads. Ford took note. At his Ford Motor Company, he developed mass production of affordable automobiles – as did his rival Benz in Mannheim. Edison and Ford – a virulent antisemite and conspiracy theorist – became friends, holding annual motoring expeditions.*
As new oilfields were discovered in Texas and California, and in Persia, automobiles – followed by buses and trucks – opened the world up and swiftly became so popular that gasoline became essential. And Rockefeller became the richest man in the world – just as Teddy Roosevelt, the politician who would challenge his monopoly, was first elected to the New York State Assembly.
The bumptious, wealthy, toothy Republican attracted the hostility of the Democrats, who planned to humiliate him with a blanket-tossing. ‘By God, if you try anything like that,’ Teddy warned, ‘I’ll kick you, I’ll bite you, I’ll kick you in the balls.’ One day he was called out of a session by a desperate telegram.
Rushing back to his house in Manhattan, he faced a double tragedy: his mother Mittie had died of typhoid; his adored young wife, Alice ‘Sunshine’ Lee, had given birth to a daughter, Alice, and then died of Bright’s Disease. ‘The light,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘has gone out of my life.’ He was close to a breakdown. Dumping his daughter Alice with relatives, he consoled himself in the lawless, thrilling Badlands of the Dakota Territory where the Native Americans had been broken, the buffalo herds hunted to extinction and fortunes could be made in cattle raising and gold mining. There he befriended Quanah Parker, the last of the Comanche chiefs.
A wealthy poseur, Teddy bought the Elkhorn ranch in North Dakota, dressing the part of cowboy – ‘I wear a sombrero, silk neckerchief, fringed buckskin shirt, sealskin chaparajos, alligator-hide boots, and [carry] my pearl-hilted revolver and a beautifully finished Winchester rifle,’ plus a Bowie knife engraved ‘T.R.’. Elkhorn was not far from where Sitting Elk, Lakota leader, now faced the vengeance for Custer’s massacre.
On 29 December 1890, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the Seventh Cavalry were disarming a Lakota village when a deaf warrior who couldn’t hear the orders discharged his rifle, seemingly by accident. Mayhem ensued. Soldiers shot the ailing chief Sitting Elk. Afterwards soldier Hugh McGinnis recalled that ‘helpless children and women with babies in their arms had been chased as far as two miles from the original scene of encounter and cut down without mercy by the troopers … The soldiers simply went berserk.’ Three hundred Lakota were killed; twenty-five soldiers died too. ‘I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch,’ remembered Black Elk, a Lakota survivor. ‘A people’s dream died there.’
The US, both liberal democracy and conquest state, had grown by a factor of ten since independence: this was the end of the continental conquest made irresistible by the sheer numbers of settlers. Wrangling his cattle in thirteen-hour days on horseback and hunting down cattle thieves at gunpoint, Roosevelt learned that ‘By acting as if I wasn’t afraid, I gradually ceased to be afraid.’ He played out an aristocratic version of the frontier, but lower down the social ladder, millions were arriving by steamship, a wave sparked by the assassination of Alexander II.
Rumours spread that the assassins were Jews (though in fact none of them were). In Kyiv, Warsaw and Odessa, and around 200 other places, Jews were attacked by Russian crowds, probably hundreds raped and killed in pogroms (from the Russian
