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“THE SESAME THAT OPENS THE DOOR OF TRADE:” JOHN HAYS HAMMOND AND FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT IN MINING, 1880–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2017

Mark Hendrickson
Mark Hendrickson*
Affiliation:
University of California-San Diego
*
email: ghendrickson@ucsd.edu
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Abstract

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, American mining engineers fanned out around the globe to potential or existing mines in China, Mexico, Siberia, South Africa, and beyond. This article examines the rise and work of mining engineer John Hays Hammond and the mining engineers, geologists, and capitalists with whom he worked. The paper reveals ways that a segment of the investor class depended upon members of the emerging professional middle class of university-trained mining experts for collaboration—and even inspiration—regarding possible sources of remunerative investment. The search for raw materials abroad opens up a chapter in the history of U.S. capitalism in which mining engineers like Hammond encouraged and facilitated a new phase of export of redundant U.S. capital and manufactured goods in a direction where investment would be secure, labor recruitable, and profits attractive and subject to repatriation. Filling in this vital narrative makes an essential contribution to the ongoing recovery of the history of the U.S. and world capitalism in the era of rapid industrialization.

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Articles
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The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , July 2017, pp. 325 - 346
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2017 

It is said that trade follows a nation's flag. It is equally true that trade likewise follows the investment of a nation's capital; indeed, this is the sesame that opens the door of trade.Footnote 1

John Hays Hammond, 1913

Reflecting on the impact of the Great War, United States Geological Survey director George Otis Smith wrote in 1920, “The U-boat threat taught us that certain minerals, even the names of which were unfamiliar to most citizens, were in fact ‘key’ commodities without which basic industries could not operate.”Footnote 2 Mining engineers, policy makers, and economists concurred. A year later, world-renowned American mining engineer John Hays Hammond and Cornell economist and international monetary expert Jeremiah Whipple Jenks authored a broad-ranging study of the great issues facing American society following World War I. While recognizing the abundance of some domestic natural resources available to American industry, Hammond and Jenks warned that in case of scarce minerals for which there were few or no domestic sources, “There is little likelihood that we shall be self-sufficient.” They counseled adoption of natural resource policies that ensured a steady flow of minerals to American manufacturers in peacetime and provided a measure of national security “as a matter of self-defense or national preparedness in case of the recurrence of conditions like those existing in the Great War.”Footnote 3

Jenks, Smith, and Hammond's widely held concern with raw materials access after WW I contrasts markedly with the belief held by earlier generations of Americans that the nation's abundant natural resources made it uniquely self-sufficient. Writing at the turn of the century, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Frank Vanderlip described “American soil and minerals” as “eternal”: “The resources of no other great power are for one moment to be compared with them … We have hardly comprehended the inevitable advantages which those resources give us,” Vanderlip argued.Footnote 4 Vanderlip's widely shared confidence in the defining nature of American abundance persisted well into the twentieth century. For much of American history, the domestic availability of natural resources and the development of manufacturing went hand in hand. A rich mineral stock, fertile soils, abundant waterways, vast timber resources, and a diverse climate were key factors that had contributed mightily to American economic growth. U.S. economic development depended, of course, on the availability of capital and labor but, as economic historian Gavin Wright argued, before WW I the United States “was uniquely situated” as the “world's leading producer” of a number of natural resources—including copper, coal, zinc, iron ore, lead, and other minerals—all of which lay “at the core of industrial technology” (see Figure 1).Footnote 5

Figure 1.

From Gavin Wright, “The Origins of American Industrial Success, 1879–1940,” American Economic Review 80 (Sept. 1990): 661.

The picture of U.S. resource abundance was not entirely sanguine. Indeed, concerns about the need to conserve the nation's resources could be heard in Theodore Roosevelt's administration. But it was the Mexican Revolution and WW I that ruptured American leaders' belief in the perpetual availability of U.S. natural resources. During this period, the United States confronted shortages of minerals critical to the war effort and experienced threats and seizures of direct investment capital in Mexico. One important result of these conflicts was a renewed effort—particularly by those with experience in the mining industry abroad—to create new institutions and develop new strategies to resolve international economic disputes and to ensure a steady flow of raw materials to fuel American industry. An examination of the career of mining engineer John Hays Hammond and his associates reveals the increasing importance of extractive industries abroad to the larger story of efforts to safeguard U.S. access to world markets, which, for an earlier generation of Americans, had mainly concerned the export of primary goods and later that of manufactured goods.

Previous work on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. political economy by historians beginning with William Appleman Williams and continuing in the work of Martin Sklar, Thomas McCormick, and others has emphasized the efforts of policy makers such as Charles Conant and Jenks in the late nineteenth century to solve the overproduction and oversavings problems in American manufacturing by opening up markets abroad and exporting investment capital.Footnote 6 Conant recognized that U.S. economic expansion abroad required “radical changes” in U.S. capitalists' strategic planning. He offered a stark policy choice between policy stasis (which would effectively promote accelerating class conflict), redistribution to reduce the glut of capital held by the investor class (which would effectively surrender to socialism), and exporting surplus capital through foreign direct investment. Only the latter would successfully address the economically ruinous and socially disruptive boom-and-bust cycle. If the United States did not work to ensure that U.S. capital could be employed abroad, Conant argued, it would “continue the needless duplication of existing means of production and communication, with the glut of unconsumed products, the convulsions followed by trade stagnation, and the steadily declining return upon investments.”Footnote 7

Conant's argument captured the attention of his contemporaries and later historians. Yet insufficient attention has been paid to how the involvement of Americans working for U.S. and non-U.S. companies in extractive industries outside of the United States actually reshaped the nation's political economy.Footnote 8 Indeed, there is an important story to be told concerning raw material importation—which increased as an overall proportion of imports from 8 percent in 1850 to 33 percent in 1900.Footnote 9 And there is a particular story to be told concerning U.S. direct investment in mining enterprises abroad, which best estimates suggest increased dramatically from $134 million in 1897 to $720 million in 1914; this increase dwarfed U.S. direct foreign investment in other sectors (i.e., railroads, utilities, petroleum, agriculture, and manufacturing) and constituted more than a quarter of overall U.S. direct foreign investment.Footnote 10 Filling in this vital narrative can make an essential contribution to the ongoing recovery of the history of the U.S. and world capitalism in the era of rapid industrialization and, as well, to our understanding of how gaining access to these resources structured the development of economic and foreign policy making during the ensuing decades and transformed the structure and capacities of the U.S. state. (The latter—i.e., the state capacity question—will be reserved for detailed treatment in a separate article).

This article examines the rise and work of mining engineer John Hays Hammond and the mining engineers, geologists, and capitalists with whom he worked.Footnote 11 Historians have addressed in some detail Herbert Hoover's career as a mining engineer.Footnote 12 But in April 1908, when the Washington Post described “not quite the foremost man in the world,” but “surely the foremost mining engineer,” and went on to suggest, “many capable observers believe that the engineers as a class will exercise a large influence in governmental affairs in the future,” they were referring to Hammond, not Hoover who had yet to make his fortune and had only once had his career (briefly) mentioned in the pages of the Post.Footnote 13

Hammond's remarkable and controversial career as a mining engineer helps to account for the dramatic increase in foreign direct investment in mining enterprises, and it demonstrates how recognition of new needs, formation of new scientific knowledge, and the actual scouting out of sources for needed material emerged as central activities of mining engineers and the mining industry. This article reveals ways that a segment of the investor class (both U.S. and, in some cases, British) depended upon members of the emerging professional middle class of university-trained experts for collaboration—and even inspiration—regarding possible sources of remunerative investment.Footnote 14 The early search for raw materials abroad opens up a chapter in the history of U.S. capitalism in which mining engineers like Hammond encouraged and facilitated a new phase of export of redundant U.S. capital and manufactured goods in a direction where investment would be secure, labor recruitable, and profits attractive and subject to repatriation.Footnote 15

Important work by historians—Sven Beckert and William Cronon prominently among them—has shown that major challenges to established patterns of economic activity, including wars, inventions, and population movements, have shifted the flows of investment established in earlier moments of capitalist expansion. Beckert's Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 describes how after the Civil War, New York City's merchant capitalists and bankers redirected a key component of their capital investment from purchasing and moving raw cotton through the New York port for export to England to moving both imported and domestically-produced finished goods into the rapidly expanding U.S. interior.Footnote 16 William Cronon's majestic Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West details how crucial collaborations by local investors and developers were to the emergence of Chicago, and not to other contenders, as the beneficiary of outside investment by New York capitalists in making Chicago the key transit point for shipment of grain, meat, and lumber into national and international markets.Footnote 17 Other studies, exemplary among them William Leach's Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture shows how the rise of department stores depended upon vital collaborations with investors such as John Wanamaker and Marshall Field by inventors (the elevator), architects (new building designs), managers, and advertisers, aiding capitalist expansion at the other, mass production end of the domestic and transnational U.S. capitalist transformation in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 18

By the turn of the century, Hammond worked to direct the flow of surplus capital and manufactured goods toward the pursuit of scarce resources buried in distant lands. To do so, he—working with a network of other mining engineers and geologists—located resources and established connections that supported the specific needs of extractive industries abroad. International mining efforts such as these involved the flow of capital, equipment, and labor from multiple nations, and this phenomenon in turn created a dizzying array of potential problems and conflicts. Historian David Pletcher has described mining engineers like Hammond as “professional optimists who must find favorable concessions abroad and money at home and somehow reconcile the demands of the individuals who could furnish these prerequisites.”Footnote 19 If worthwhile veins of coal or supplies of minerals could be located and access could be negotiated with local authorities, mining engineers often played a significant role in gaining financing for these risky endeavors and, at times, in leading efforts to build the infrastructure to move the rock or minerals to ports, where facilities also had to be constructed or overhauled. Thus they were an essential link between ready but cautious capital and profitable but undeveloped opportunity across the natural world.Footnote 20 As these engineers and the companies they represented expanded the scope of their efforts, they took into account lessons from the failures and successes of previous endeavors, thus storing up and building upon technical and situational knowledge.

Hammond remained committed to a two-pronged effort to promote American economic interests, more often than not at the expense of less-developed nations. Given the risks involved in investing outside U.S. borders, he had to understand—and to avoid or mitigate—any obstacles to the security of investment and repatriation of profits. As American mining engineers like Hammond, along with investors of capital, went to work on the natural resources of other countries, they argued that new markets would stimulate demand for a wide range of American manufactured goods related to mining and infrastructure development. Further distinguishing Hammond (and Hoover as well) from later experts and advocates of international trade was their belief that manufacturing jobs should remain in the United States, thereby supporting the purchasing power of American workers and fulfilling the desires of the emerging consumer society. They also argued that American minerals and raw materials should remain at home and be employed efficiently in American industry. In a patently outrageous double standard that echoed mercantilist thought and managed to violate notions of comparative advantage, they argued that the United States should extract as many natural resources from abroad as possible, but that it should keep all of its own natural resources at home and employed in domestic industry.Footnote 21

THE TRAINING OF A MINING ENGINEER

On May 3, 1926, a group of John Hays Hammond's friends celebrated his seventy-first birthday in the Grand Ballroom in New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel. So prestigious were the gathered and the guest of honor that all major newspapers covered the event, with Time magazine placing Hammond's image on the cover of its May 10 edition. So widely dispersed were Hammond's admirers that the Waldorf Astoria gathering coincided with dinners held the same night in Hammond's honor in three other American cities and in London, Paris, Lisbon, Manila, and South Africa. Back at the Waldorf Astoria, Hammond received a bound volume that included more than ten thousand messages honoring his life's work that had been sent, Time reported, by “men in all walks of life—ambassadors, financers, politicians, scientists, admirals, artists.” Those who came to the event and those who wrote in admiration celebrated a man who “had lived a life as few men can or even could have lived.” He was, according to Time, the “most radically democratic millionaire.”Footnote 22

Born in San Francisco in 1855 to a well-connected and comfortable (though not wealthy) family, John Hays Hammond enjoyed an upbringing that mixed vigorous outdoor activities with a top-notch education. Though always a Californian, Hammond took pride in his family's Southern roots, which included veterans of the Mexican-American War and the Confederacy as well as the legendary Texas Ranger John Coffee Hays. Hammond's education began at Lincoln Public School in San Francisco, but, following his mother's passing when John was twelve years old, his father sent him first to boarding school in Oakland and then to a preparatory school at the recently founded University of California, Berkeley. In mid-1871, Hammond boarded the transcontinental railroad bound for New Haven, Connecticut, where he enrolled in Hopkins Grammar School to prepare for his eventual admission into Yale University in the fall 1873.Footnote 23 At Yale, Hammond made lifelong contacts with future political and economic leaders, including William Howard Taft and Frederick William Vanderbilt.Footnote 24

Even as an undergraduate, Hammond gravitated toward individuals who concerned themselves with the determinants of U.S. economic development. Recounting his experiences at Yale, Hammond described being drawn to political economy and to political economist Francis A. Walker, whom he remembered as “the teacher who influenced me most at Yale.” According to Hammond, Walker's “poise, breadth of view, and even his temperament made him an ideal for me. He developed my interest in broad questions of public policy. I worked hard in his courses and I have never lost this interest.”Footnote 25 It is revealing that Hammond chose Walker as his ideal. In 1873, Walker, who would later serve as president of M.I.T., joined the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale as a professor of economics and history. Having grown up in a family defined in some respects by the Civil War but having spent little time in the South, Hammond immediately admired Walker's experience as a “wounded, captured, imprisoned, and paroled” officer in the Union Army who eventually “achieved the rank of brevet brigadier general.”Footnote 26 Walker also brought a tradition of public service that Hammond respected and would later work to emulate. Following the war, Walker served in the Grant administration on the important Revenue Commission, which helped to fashion postwar fiscal and monetary policy and then as superintendent of census in 1870 and 1880, for which he gained international acclaim as a statistician.Footnote 27 Walker's innovative work as Superintendent of the Census would have a direct impact on Hammond's career.

To pursue a career as a professionally trained mining engineer in the 1870s was in many cases to embed oneself in an international network from the very beginning. Completing his undergraduate degree in 1876, Hammond came of age at a moment when, although mining engineering education in the United States was still in its infancy, mining companies and financers increasingly placed a premium on professionally and technically trained engineers. As a result, Hammond opted to continue his training at the Royal Mining Academy in Freiberg, Germany.Footnote 28 In attending Freiberg, Hammond followed in the footsteps of some of the most famous American mining engineers of the late nineteenth century, including a number who would help to shape the emerging profession, among them Eckley B. Coxe, Rossiter W. Raymond, and James D. Hague as well as Louis, Henry, and Alexis Janin.Footnote 29 He shared this formative experience of crossing the Atlantic to pursue graduate training with soon-to-be founding members of the modern university discipline of economics and of the American Economic Association, whose career then in many ways resembled that of the American Institute of Mining, Engineers (AIME) established in 1871.Footnote 30

After three years in Germany, Hammond returned to the United States credentialed by the most important institution of mining engineering and connected to a network of prominent mining men, but with little in the way of experience. In 1879, when he returned to California from Freiberg, George Hearst—a family friend, future senator, wildly successful mining investor, and, of course, father of William Randolph Hearst—somewhat reluctantly offered the young man a job. Shortly thereafter, Hammond faced an early crossroads in his career, one that forced him to choose between valuable experience in government service and a lucrative promotion. After months of hard work and modest compensation, Hammond mustered the courage to ask Hearst for a raise. Not only did Hearst dramatically increase Hammond's pay, he also offered him a significant promotion to superintendent of the Homestake mine in South Dakota. Almost simultaneously, the director of the newly created U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Clarence King, offered Hammond a position with the USGS upon the recommendation of Hammond's fellow Freiberg graduate Gardner F. Williams.Footnote 31

That Hammond spurned Hearst's more lucrative offer and opted with no hesitation to take the government position speaks to the recognized importance of the USGS—almost from the moment of its inception—to the mining industry, mining engineers, and the nation. And it further underscores the larger trend in academia, government, and nonprofit organizations that increasingly plowed resources and energy into applied and basic research in the earth sciences.Footnote 32

From its creation in 1879, the USGS addressed a remarkably diverse set of issues of interest to the general public and the mining industry, operating in a way that both built on and transcended earlier state and local surveys and the four “great surveys” of the West by Ferdinand Hayden, Clarence King, George Wheeler, and John Wesley Powell.Footnote 33 Survey supporters saw in the new agency an opportunity to use geological investigation as a means of addressing not only diverse industries' demand for natural resources, but also the currency crisis that dominated the nation's politics during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The financial panic of 1873, the ensuing five-year recession, and the emergence of the Greenback movement ensured that gold and silver production would remain public concerns.Footnote 34 When King took on the job of first director of the USGS he determined early on that the Survey would focus its energies on practical matters that addressed the concerns of the mining industry.Footnote 35 Though later administrations would shift the focus to varying degrees toward basic research, the USGS continued in part to serve the mining industry and thus to bring into a common frame the interests of investors and mining engineers.Footnote 36 As would happen frequently for those dealing with natural resource deposits as a public concern, USGS advocates wrestled with the often-fraught issue of federalism and with the constitutional limitations imposed by the commerce clause, which was held to restrict the national government from entering into direct engagement with a broad range of issues.

From the start, USGS leaders worked to expand the scope of their work. The original task of the USGS was limited to the survey of public lands west of the 100th meridian, but King worked closely with Walker to expand its purview to include the entire country and privately owned mines. Walker, who had been keen to increase the quality of census statistics, ordered the Census Office to collect a broad range of information on the mining industry, but he turned to the Geological Survey for a force of “expert special agents” to conduct these investigations while still on the USGS's payroll.Footnote 37 Hammond served as one of fewer than eighty “expert special agents” who were compensated by the Geological Survey but served as agents of the Walker-led Census.Footnote 38 The new agency provided an almost ideal opportunity to learn about the mining industry. As Clark Spence has argued, work on the survey provided young engineers with a potent combination of educational experience and a stamp of legitimacy that fellow engineers and mining companies clearly recognized.Footnote 39

The work provided Hammond with an opportunity to learn about the mining industry but, more importantly, it also established a close link between the mining engineers like Hammond and the USGS, one that persisted well into the twentieth century. In fact, Hammond's last act in this phase of his involvement with the USGS was to turn in his completed report to lead geologist George F. Becker, who not only provided decades of credible service to the Survey, but who also—as we will see—some fifteen years later came to Hammond's aid at a critical moment in South Africa. More generally, as the mining industry continued to develop, it asked more and more of the USGS, thus cultivating the growth of survey methods that located valuable resources.

ENABLING MINING ABROAD

When mining engineers pursued opportunities in extractive industries abroad, they took with them their expectations regarding the profitable exploitation of resources and the best methods for recruiting and managing available labor. Hammond's next opportunity came by way of the Janin family. In the nineteenth century, the Janin brothers—Louis, Henry, and Alexis Janin—along with Louis Janin's sons, emerged as the first family of American mining engineering.Footnote 40 Like Hammond, the three older brothers were all educated at Freiberg and gained international reputations as successful and capable mining engineers. In 1882, Hammond accepted a position as manager of Minas Nuevas, a silver-mining property near Alamos, Mexico, in Sonora. While both Louis and Henry Janin had invested in the property, it was Louis who offered Hammond the job.

Hammond spent the fifteen months from April 1882 to June 1883 in Sonora, where he encountered political, social, and economic turmoil while managing the Minas Nuevas. The Engineering and Mining Journal described Sonora as a region rife with “political troubles” compounded by violence perpetrated by Apaches, other native groups, and the many newcomers to Sonora seeking precious metals. In this turbulent space, Hammond encountered obstacles to investment of alien capital that sprang from cultural and political differences and (unsurprising and justified) animosity toward agents of foreign capital and governments long bent on ensuring that Latin America remained a region of “open veins.”Footnote 41 Dripping with condescension, the Journal regretted that Americans with their “pushing ways, have not shown that spirit of conciliation which true policy would dictate.” Blame also lay, the Journal lamented, with the Mexican character: “The Mexicans, through long inactivity and a lack of ambition, are slow and difficult to deal with, and it cannot be expected that their habits can be transformed by simple contact with their more energetic neighbors.”Footnote 42 Sonora in the 1880s was in the early stages of dramatic political and economic change that would transform the region from what historian Miguel Tinker Salas characterized as a “relative backwater of the Mexican republic” into “one of [its] most prosperous states.” This emerging prosperity—at least for the mining companies—rested in no small measure on American investment in Sonora mining, which by 1902 reached more than $27 million, considerably more than was funneled into other Northern Mexico states. Foreign governments, too, took notice. Germany, France, Spain, the United States, and Great Britain all established consular offices in Sonora to explore their own business opportunities.Footnote 43

While he failed to make his fortune in this early adventure in Sonora, Hammond quickly established himself as not only an engineer, but also an expert who could mediate disputes between groups of capitalists, thus helping to ensure the continued flow of capital between nations. For instance, six years after Hammond finished his work at Minas Nuevas, a group of British and American investors, contemplating purchasing the Mulatos gold mine in Sonora from Manuel and Lucadio Aguayo, sent Alexis Janin and another mining engineer to conduct an eight-week examination of the property. In September of 1889, following the investigation, Alvinza Hayward purchased the property on behalf of a group of British investors, including the Rothschild family, for a reported $1,575,000.Footnote 44 Janin would later claim that the report he submitted had been only cautiously optimistic about the mine and not an actual assessment of its value, but the Janin family imprint was indelibly linked to the sale of the property.Footnote 45 Shortly after the mine's sale, Alexis Janin's nephew Louis Janin Jr., who had served as an assayer during Alexis's investigation, published a detailed report in the pages of the Engineering and Mining Journal in which he predicted that the Mulatos mine “will become one of the most noted and best paying gold mines in North America.”Footnote 46 Janin got it wrong—the mine turned out to have been salted—and the ensuing legal and political struggle further underscored hazards of foreign direct investment in mining and extractive industry more generally, especially with multiple sovereignties involved.Footnote 47 The original terms of the sale required that the buyers come to the table with $700,000 in cash and then deposit the remaining funds in the San Francisco bank Wenceslao Loaiza, to be paid out in a series of installments. As suspicion increased among the British mine owners regarding a likely fraudulent assay, the buyers asked for an injunction “restraining Loaiza from disposing of the notes” and requesting that a receiver be appointed to take charge of the remaining funds. As the case moved closer to trial in the San Francisco Superior Court, the San Francisco Call captured nicely the complicated nature of the situation:

The case involves a peculiar question of jurisdiction. Both the real plaintiffs, the English companies, and the real defendants, the Aguayo Brothers, are subjects of and residents in foreign countries. The property in question is in a foreign country and the ground upon which the claim to jurisdiction is based is that the notes which are sought to be recovered are in this city.Footnote 48

With the mine failing to produce, Hammond took center stage in an effort to resolve what threatened to become an extremely costly international incident that pitted American financial institutions and British investors against Mexican landowners. The resolution of this situation required a new use of expert scientific testimony. The Diaz government asked Hammond to assess the merits of the new mine owners' case.Footnote 49 After a ten-day investigation, Hammond concluded that the ore bodies contained only a fraction of the gold per ton that had been reported in the initial examination. On the strength of Hammond's analysis, the Diaz government eventually intervened and forced the Aguayos to refund “nearly all of the money paid.”Footnote 50

But even more striking was the dependence of the movement of capital on advance agents such as Hammond. He spent the 1880s and early 1890s in the United States and abroad, deepening his ties to business, working as a consultant, engineer, and manager. In the fall of 1893, he and his family left for Johannesburg, South Africa. There, he worked briefly with the De Beers Consolidated Company until, only six months after his arrival, Cecil Rhodes, head of Consolidated Gold Fields, recognized Hammond's expertise in deep-level mining and hired him for the unprecedented sum of $75,000 per year and a share of the profits. This involved Hammond with a very costly, technologically advanced method of mining that extended mines thousands of feet deeper than had commonly been the practice in South Africa. Hammond had great success in evaluating and developing deep-level mines and the money was good, but he also warmed immediately to Rhodes, whom he came to admire. He wrote privately back to his father-in-law, Nathaniel Harris, in the United States that Rhodes was “the biggest man I ever met” and that the two of them had developed an uncommon level of trust. Hammond described how he would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mines and men without so much as a review by Rhodes of the investment strategy Hammond had carefully put together.Footnote 51

Getting financers to invest millions of dollars into actual mines in distant lands required more than just a warm and trusting friendship with Rhodes, and Hammond could thank a talented geologist—well known to him from his California days—for helping make the case. Footnote 52 In 1896, Hammond's firm hired USGS chief geologist Dr. George F. Becker to conduct an investigation of the gold fields in Transvaal. American and British newspapers and periodicals followed Becker's investigation and championed his credentials: “Professor Becker of the United States Geological Survey [is] known to the scientific world as one of the most distinguished geologists of the two continents,” praised The Cosmopolitan in a preface to a summary of his investigation, while failing to mention that the mining company was picking up the tab for his work. In his investigation, Becker confirmed Hammond's assessment that mining could be done at deeper levels and that the veins of gold were richer than had previously been estimated.Footnote 53 Successful efforts to extract precious resources from South Africa could benefit more than just Hammond and his British employers. Even at this early stage in his career, Hammond leveraged his work abroad to provide a potential market for American manufacturers. Just months after he arrived in South Africa, he described in a private letter to William J. Chalmers, president Fraser and Chalmers Company (a leading producer of mining equipment whose metallurgical equipment production facilities were based in Chicago), how he had successfully managed to adjust matters with his own company in a way that eliminated an exclusive contract with a British manufacturer of mining equipment and further opened the South African market to Chalmers's firm.Footnote 54

Hammond's close collaboration with Rhodes was not entirely unproblematic. Frustrated by the Boer government's unwillingness to let foreign capital exert unfettered power, Hammond, Rhodes, and others joined in an effort to overthrow the local government. The effort failed spectacularly and Hammond—after being arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced to death following a trial widely covered in the United States, Europe, and South Africa—eventually agreed to leave the South African Republic and pay a $100,000 fine.Footnote 55

Such trouble did little to dampen investors' interest in Hammond's expertise; in fact, it did the opposite.Footnote 56 He would spend the next three years headquartered in London, but traveling extensively for pleasure and as a consultant for various mining interests. In 1903, he entered an even more lucrative period in his career, when he took work in Mexico with the Guggenheim Exploration Company, which until that point had focused much of its investments in the mining industry on smelting rather than the more risky task of mining. Hammond was brought in for the hefty salary of $250,000 per year—making him, according to many reports, the highest paid salary man in the world—for five years to assess the Guggenheim properties and to expand its holdings of new mines. By now a savvy operator with the press, Hammond's reports made national and international news: the Washington Post referred to him as “the most famous mining engineer in the world.”Footnote 57 Oftentimes even the rumor that Hammond might have examined a property required public explanation by potential investors and mine owners.Footnote 58 When press coverage veered toward the unfavorable, “intimate friends” of Hammond could be counted on to anonymously but comprehensively rebut the unfavorable press coverage.Footnote 59 Now much more than just a mere mining engineer, Hammond's stock rose in academic circles. When the Academy of Political and Social Science convened in 1905 to discuss “The Settlement of Political Affairs in the Far East,” they asked Hammond to come and share his thoughts on U.S. relationships with China, Russia, Japan, and Korea, among other topics. In addition to discussing American commercial interests, Hammond warned that despite efforts to increase the mobility and bolster the Pacific fleet, the United States was “now vulnerable in the Pacific at Manila and Honolulu.”Footnote 60

Like Conant, Jenks, and others, Hammond spent years arguing for the necessity of increased trade to solve the overproduction problem at home. In the 1905 Annals piece, he looked longingly to Russian resources as an investment opportunity for American capital and a destination for American manufactured goods.Footnote 61 Five years later, he took matters into his own hands. In late 1910, he went to Siberia on behalf of American investors to develop mines and to cultivate a market for American manufacturers of mining machinery. He reported to the Engineering and Mining Journal, “I shall go to Siberia solely in the interest of American capital.” But investment in mining also meant, Hammond argued, an expansion of markets for manufactured goods: “This will mean the development of manufacturers, for where there are mines there must be mining machinery.”Footnote 62 A few years later, in a lengthy and wide-ranging testimony before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations in late January of 1915, Hammond argued that the United States was “rapidly approaching the limit—that is to say the point of saturation—in our domestic markets.” What to do about this crisis point in the history of American capitalism? For Hammond the answer was clear: “It is obvious, therefore, that we must either curtail the capacity of our factories, which would result in throwing out of employment millions of wage earners … or we must depend upon the exploitation of foreign markets for the relief of our congested home industries.”Footnote 63

NEW CONCERNS: SCARCITY IN THE LAND OF ABUNDANCE

In the early decades of the twentieth century, concern over resource scarcity and dependence on foreign sources eroded a long-standing confidence that an abundance of American resources at home and access to raw materials abroad ensured American economic security and independence. This trend had its roots in the last years of the Theodore Roosevelt administration, but it became close to a prevailing wisdom in light of the unrest surrounding the Mexican Revolution and WW I.Footnote 64 Instability abroad after 1910 put talent and capital at risk, but it also made clear American industry's deep dependence on foreign sources of certain key raw materials, for which there were limited or nonexistent supplies at home. Whether thinking about domestic resource scarcity at home or dependence on foreign supplies abroad, Hammond and others continued to function as advance agents of corporate expansion and as advocates for extending supply chains for raw materials that were neither abundant nor cheap in the homeland.

The WW I-era recognition of American dependence on foreign nations constituted an important shift in thinking away from two quite different turn-of-the century assessments of the relationship between raw materials and economic development. While some economists and policy makers, in this earlier period, continued to believe that American raw material independence was crucial, an alternative argument concerning international trade suggested that increased trade markedly diminished the importance of a native supply of raw materials. Both of these understandings were on display at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association in 1902. At this meeting Brooks Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of two presidents and son of railroad magnate Charles Francis Adams, gave a roundtable address concerning the recent expansion of foreign trade. Embracing a version of American exceptionalism, Adams argued that as a result of American ports, infrastructure, natural resources, and public policies, the nation “enjoys not the advantages of Nineveh or Syracuse, of Rome, of Lombardy, or of England separately, but of all combined.”Footnote 65 Adams's argument regarding the importance of natural resources to economic development reflected long-standing perceptions of American raw material independence. Economists and policy makers who participated in the roundtable following Adams address criticized this point of view. Economists John F. Crowell and E. R. A. Seligman joined Conant in arguing that improvements in transportation of goods combined with international trade rendered the advantages provided by abundant resources within a single country meaningless. According to Crowell, the fact that a nation did not have access to raw materials for making iron and steel did not prevent it from competing with those that did. “In securing raw materials,” Crowell argued, “international boundaries are imaginary lines.”Footnote 66

By the end of WW I, no one would make that argument. Understanding its revision requires analyzing the significance of the Mexican Revolution and WW I to perceptions of the roles of transnational trade and cross-border investment in the trajectory of U.S. corporate capitalism's later development. As stewards of American capital increasingly looked abroad for markets and investment opportunity, new questions arose concerning how to ensure capital safety. Hammond joined them in articulating a version of American sovereignty that demanded protection for investors. In December of 1913, dismayed at events unfolding in revolutionary Mexico, Hammond chastised the Wilson administration, and in particular Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, for failing to intervene on behalf of American investors, who by the late Porfiriato dominated the Mexican mining industry.Footnote 67 In a speech at the Clark University Conference on Latin America, Hammond announced that he would not invest another cent abroad as long as the pacifist Bryan remained in the cabinet. Arguing for a more robust government role in protecting foreign investment, Hammond announced, “A nation that does not protect its citizens and investors is unworthy of the name nation.”Footnote 68 The Engineering and Mining Journal later provided a similar assessment, lamenting that with the fall of the Diaz government, the United States “should at once have stepped in and helped the country to an early adjustment and the needed reforms.”Footnote 69 Hammond's and the Journal’s understanding of U.S. sovereignty stood in marked contrast to the one President Wilson embraced as the crisis unfolded. Article 27 of the 1917 Mexican constitution gave direct ownership of the nation's natural resources to the Mexican government. When U.S. investors demanded that the Wilson administration do something to protect their investments abroad, Wilson's rebuff reflected a notion of sovereignty that envisioned sharply limited powers of the U.S. government abroad as it concerned the protection of direct investment.Footnote 70 He told WW I-era Secretary of the Navy and future ambassador to Mexico Josephus Daniels, “When an American elected to go into a country like Mexico and buy land and oil cheap because of conditions, he had no right to call upon the country he left to send in the Army to make his property more valuable.”Footnote 71

In 1914, as Europe descended into war and the effects of the Mexican Revolution continued to reverberate, Hammond looked to Latin America as a potentially safer venue for U.S. investment penetration and market for U.S. manufactures plagued by overproduction—provided the flag in new ways followed the dollar.Footnote 72 Toward that end, he joined efforts to promote the creation of a Pan American Supreme Court.Footnote 73 He explicitly tied the need to protect and expand U.S. investment abroad to the overproduction problem at home. For instance, in advocating the Pan American Court, he argued, “We have been fully occupied in satisfying the demands of our immense home market,” but we are “approaching rapidly what may be called the point of saturation in our home markets.”Footnote 74 Additionally, such an institution, Hammond argued, was a necessary precursor to further U.S. investment; otherwise potential investors would continue to be burdened with having to weigh not only the merits of specific investments, but also the potential costs of unanticipated economic, political, and social instability. American investors, he insisted, “must be assured of the encouragement and cooperation of our national administration and of the guarantee of the protection of their investments against discriminatory laws and confiscation.” The Pan American Court, as he envisioned it, would “investigate and decide disputes as to foreign investments in Latin America.” Led by eminent jurists from the United States and participating countries, it would “tend to insure the safety of North American investment in Central and South American enterprises” and “secure this capital for such enterprises at normally low interest charges.”Footnote 75

As in many other aspects of American life, U.S. involvement in WW I dramatically reshaped the discourse concerning the supply of natural resources. The war focused the nation's business and political leaders' attention on securing a ready supply of minerals and other natural resources needed in the war effort. Some of these had to be procured from foreign sources because domestic supplies were limited or nonexistent, among them platinum, nitrate, nickel, manganese, chrome, and potash.Footnote 76 By the end of the war, expanding America's access to minerals became both an industry priority and a national security concern. Long-time USGS director George Otis Smith spoke for many observers in the 1920s when he stressed, “The extraordinary demands of a war program awakened us from some of our dreams of self-sufficiency” in the supply of raw materials.Footnote 77

A good case in point concerned the scarcity of platinum, which emerged as a major bottleneck to expanding the nation's military capacity. Of all nations, the United States consumed far and away the largest amount of platinum, but it was not until 1938 that significant domestic deposits were discovered in Southwestern Alaska.Footnote 78 Hammond, who even in the late nineteenth century had looked to gain control of Russian platinum supplies, lamented that when it came to platinum (as well as nickel, tin and other minerals), “there is not much likelihood of our country being self-supporting.”Footnote 79 By 1918 the United States was using approximately 165,000 ounces of platinum in an average year, but producing only about 800 ounces.Footnote 80 In the WW I era, Russia's Ural Mountains furnished about 95 percent of the world's platinum, which was used in a range of consumer products including cars and jewelry. The world's dependence on Russia for platinum supplies was underscored by Lenin after the war: “In Russia we have wheat, flax, platinum, potash and many minerals of which the whole world stands in desperate need,” he told the New York World's Lincoln Eyre.Footnote 81 Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry editor Charles H. Herty warned in June 1918, “Without platinum we can wage no war,” and the New York Times chimed in later that summer that the “American Army cannot fight without platinum.”Footnote 82

During the war, the demand for platinum rose significantly at the same time that Russian imports fell and German aggression threatened to monopolize the platinum supply. Chief Engineer J. E. Spurr of the Interior Department's War Minerals Relief Commission wrote in October 1918 that the United States produced a mere few hundred ounces of platinum annually—an amount, he concluded, that was “totally inadequate.”Footnote 83 The solution to the wartime problem rested on efforts to restore access to Russian platinum, increase imports from other sources, and recover domestic supplies of platinum by recycling jewelry and other consumer products. Herty argued for the necessity of a massive effort to shift platinum use away from civilian uses and toward military production, declaring at one point, “A Hoover is needed to conserve platinum lest our military program halt simply because our acid works cannot meet their demands.” Early in the summer of 1918, underlining the dependence of resource procurement on mining expertise, Congress enacted a measure empowering the Bureau of Mines to regulate the “sale, possession and use of platinum,” and in September, the War Industries Board (WIB) issued an order banning the purchase or sale of platinum, irridium, and palladium.Footnote 84 Though the price of platinum continued to climb, the military supply crisis abated. By November and with the coming of the armistice, government purchases had reached a level sufficient for the WIB and Ordinance Department of the Army to announce, “No more deposits of platinum will be received.”Footnote 85

A mix of recovery, coercion, and conservation allowed the United States to avert a crisis in wartime production caused by scarcity of platinum and other materials, but the war laid bare American manufacturers' and farmers' dependence on foreign sources of some crucial minerals and other raw materials. Reflecting on the war experience, USGS Director George Otis Smith wrote, “The U-boat threat taught us that certain minerals, even the names of which were unfamiliar to most citizens, were in fact ‘key’ commodities without which basic industries could not operate.”Footnote 86 WW I underscored the potential dangers of relying on other nations for natural resources and also encouraged efforts toward import substitution. As Smith would argue by mid-decade, platinum, phosphate, and other raw materials were unlike wheat or wool, whose production could be increased or decreased by any number of means or furnished by a range of regions or nations. Minerals, according to Smith, “can neither be made nor replaced by man's agency—they cannot be found or won unless they already exist, and once they are mined there is no renewal of supply.” “Thus it is,” Smith concluded, “that minerals can in a special sense place limitations upon a nation's independence.”Footnote 87

No group understood this problem better than individuals like Hammond who had decades of experience in foreign direct investment. In the years after the war, Hammond became one of the strongest advocates for a new set of natural resource policies aimed at conserving American resources and constructing multinational bodies to mediate conflicts (or, alternatively, to bully producing countries) that arose in the process of securing minerals abroad for domestic manufacturing and consumption.

CONCLUSION

As an exploration into the career of mining engineer John Hays Hammond amply illustrates, the adage that trade followed the flag might be augmented to incorporate the role that facilitators of foreign direct investment like Hammond played in shaping the export of U.S. capital in ventures that supported many branches of production. Facing declining profits and recurrent violent uprisings of labor, American capital could follow the engineers' lead and move overseas. When American talent and capital went abroad, they had the effect of stimulating demand for American-made manufactured goods, and the minerals mined abroad would in turn supplement the still significant domestic supply of natural resources to power American industry at home. With an eye on labor unrest at home, Hammond argued that direct investment abroad should focus on extractive industries, not manufacturing. In taking this position, he followed a pattern that historian Mira Wilkins has identified in the outlook of engineer-turned-politician Herbert Hoover who counseled that U.S. factories in foreign lands would “give employment to alien labor, export technology, and assist other nations' economies” and that “such plants would be competitive with U.S. exports and should not be encouraged.”Footnote 88

As noted at the start of this account, Hammond's achievements and those of others like him also contributed to the continual transformation of the leading uses of investment capital, in light of signal events that altered sources of demand and opportunities for profit. As with New York merchants in the Civil War Era, entrepreneurs active in the rise of Chicago as “nature's metropolis,” and founders of the first great department stores redirected investment toward the main chance, so owners of capital from the 1880s forward took advantage of new sources of raw materials opened to them for investment by the mediating activities of advance agents like Hammond.

Moreover, just as supply chains from afar in the late twentieth century supported vast amounts of domestic consumption of consumers' goods, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hammond collaborated with holders of redundant capital in exporting dollars to develop sources for supplies of producers' goods. And just as capital could become “redundant” in the United States then only as a consequence of a radically unequal distribution of income and wealth, its investment abroad often yielded a surplus to those investors at the expense of the primary producers of imported raw materials. Hammond was thus not only an indispensable facilitator of overseas resource procurement; he was also an essential collaborator in the early development of what would ultimately become settled patterns of uneven development across “advanced” and “less-developed” economies that continue in the present to contribute to profound inequalities in incomes, wealth, and life chances across the globe.

Footnotes

I would like to thank a number of colleagues who commented on versions of this article, including Nathan Citino, Mary O. Furner, Paul Kramer, Larry Lankton, Mark Roberts, Emily Rosenberg, Richard Schneirov, Eric Van Young, and the two anonymous readers for the Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Ibid

References

NOTES

1 “The Development of our Foreign Trade: An Address at Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dec. 30, 1913,” John Hays Hammond Sr. Papers, Manuscript Division, Sterling Moss Library, Yale University (hereafter JHH Papers), Box 6, Folder 9.

2 Smith, George Otis, “Minerals as Essential Raw Materials,” American Academy of Political and Social Science 89 (May 1920): 99 Google Scholar.

3 Jenks, Jeremiah Whipple and Hammond, John Hays, Great American Issues, Political, Social, Economic (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921), 197 Google Scholar.

4 Vanderlip, Frank, The American ‘Commercial Invasion’ of Europe (New York: Scribner's, 1902), 97, 95Google Scholar.

5 Emphasis in original. The United States ranked first in mineral production in all of the categories outlined in the chart below except for two, in which it ranked second: bauxite (France ranked first) and gold (Transvaal ranked first). Gavin Wright, “The Origins of American Industrial Success, 1879–1940,” 661.

6 Williams, William Appleman, The Contours of American History (Cleveland, OH: World, 1961)Google Scholar; Sklar, Martin, “The Political Economy of Modern United States Liberalism,” Studies on the Left 1 (1960): 17–47 Google Scholar; and McCormick, Thomas, China Market: America's Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967)Google Scholar. Sklar's later work reframed corporate liberalism in a number of important respects. Sklar, Martin J., Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. For a recent insightful consideration of the capitalism in the Progressive Era, see Rodgers, Daniel T., “Capitalism and Politics in the Progressive Era and Ours,” Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era 13 (July 2014): 379–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an overview of more recent literature on the United States in the World, see Manela, Erez, “The United States in the World” in American History Now, eds. Foner, Eric and McGirr, Lisa (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 201–20Google Scholar.

7 Charles Conant, “The Economic Basis of ‘Imperialism,’” North American Review 167 (Sept. 1898): 339.

8 On the need to pay attention to “access to and development of raw materials,” see Priest, Tyler, Global Gambits: Big Steel and the U. S. Quest for Manganese (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), xxivGoogle Scholar; Rosenberg, Emily, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 125–36Google Scholar; Eckes, Alfred E. Jr., The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979)Google Scholar, particularly ch. 1. Ingulstad, Mats, “Banging the Tin Drum: The United States and the Quest for Strategic Self-Sufficiency in Tin, 1840–1945” in Tin and Global Capitalism: A History of the Devil's Metal, 1850–2000, eds. Ingulstad, Mats, Perchard, Andrew, and Storli, Espen, (New York: Routledge, 2015), 99–100 Google Scholar; Limbaugh, Ronald, Tungsten in Peace and War, 1918–1946 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2010), 18–42 Google Scholar; Shulman, Peter A., Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; LeCain, Timothy J., Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines that Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Walton, Gary M. and Rockoff, Hugh, History of the American Economy 11th ed. (Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning, 2010), 369 Google Scholar. Between the end of the Civil War and WW I, the United States imported increasing amounts of a number of metals, among them, manganese, chromite, tungsten, and nickel as well as some nonmetals such as pyrites. See Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington DC, GPO, 1975), 4:329–32, series Db132–49 and 4:333–34, series Db150–54.

10 Wilkins, Mira, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise, American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 110 Google Scholar. For a sweeping overview of global commodity chains, see Topik, Steven C. and Wells, Allen, “Commodity Chains in a Global Economy” in A World Connecting: 1870–1945, ed. Rosenberg, Emily (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 593–812 Google Scholar.

11 In his classic 1958 study of British finance and American mining, Clark C. Spence noted that with the exception of the Hammond's two-volume autobiography, “biographical data on Hammond is disappointingly scarce.” Spence, Clark C., British Investments and the American Mining Frontier (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), 104 Google Scholar. With the exception of brief moments in Hammond's career—particularly his time in South Africa—not much has changed in this regard. To the extent that historians have integrated Hammond's story into a broader narrative, they have largely relied on Hammond's two-volume autobiography, which I use sparingly.

12 On Hoover's career as a mining engineer, see, for instance, Nash, George H., The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Engineer, 1874–1914 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1983)Google Scholar; Phimister, Ian and Mouat, Jeremy, “Mining, Engineers and Risk Management: British Overseas Investment, 1894–1924,” South African Historical Journal 49 (Nov. 2003): 2–3 Google Scholar; and Phimester, and Mouat, , “The Engineering of Herbert Hoover,” Pacific Historical Review 77 (Nov. 2008): 553–84Google Scholar.

13 “A High-Salaried Expert,” Washington Post, Apr. 29, 1908, 6; and “Friends Honor John Hays Hammond,” Engineering and Mining Journal, (hereafter EMJ), May 8, 1926, 780–81. In the summer of 1908, Hoover, then thirty-four, had a solid reputation as a mining engineer and was about to begin, according to George H. Nash's biography, a six-year stretch devoted to making his fortune. Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, 384. The only mention of Hoover in the pages of the Post, prior to 1908, that I can find is “In the World of Labor,” Washington Post, Jan. 5, 1902, 16.

14 On the technological change in mining and professionalization in mining engineering and geology, see Hovis, Logan and Mouat, Jeremy, “Mining, Engineers, and the Transformation of Work in the Western Mining Industry, 1880–1930,” Technology and Culture 37 (July 1996): 429–56Google Scholar; Nystrom, Eric, Seeing Underground: Maps, Models, and Mining Engineering in America (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Lucier, Paul, Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil in America, 1820–1890 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. On speculation and fraud in mining in the American West that includes considerable discussion of Hammond's career, see Lingenfelter, Richard E., Bonanzas and Borrascas: Copper Kings and Stock Frenzies: 1885–1918 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012)Google Scholar. And on professionalization, engineering, and science more generally, Noble, David F., America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; and Layton, Edwin T. Jr., The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971), particularly 93–101 Google Scholar.

15 The efforts of these mining engineers are similar to that of the financial experts described by Emily Rosenberg. Rosenberg's financial experts and advisors worked with varying levels of success to create “a trading network greased by predictable financial infrastructures, encouraged by progressive government, and guided by experts who exemplified the business virtues of regularity and reliability.” Rosenberg, , Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 1, 93–96 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rosenberg, , “Foundations of United States International Financial Power: Gold Standard Diplomacy, 1900–1905,” Business History Review 59 (Summer 1985): 169–202 Google Scholar.

16 Beckert, Sven, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

17 Cronon, William, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1991)Google Scholar.

18 Leach, William, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993)Google Scholar.

19 Pletcher, David M., The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economic Expansion, 1865–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 22 Google Scholar. On the relationship between expertise and risk management in other fields, see, for instance, Levy, Jonathan, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; and, in a related vein, Cowie, Jefferson, Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

20 A focus on this group can also shed further light on a question Richard John posed in the pages of this journal. John, Richard R., “Who Were the Gilders? And other Seldom-Asked Questions about Business, Technology, and Political Economy, 1877–1900,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8 (Oct. 2009): 474–80Google Scholar.

21 Hammond and Cornell economist Jeremiah Jenks were among those who advocated limiting U.S. exports of raw materials. Jenks and Hammond, Great American Issues, 196. See also Hammond, John Hays, “Wanted—A Foreign Trade Policy,” The North American Review (June 1919): 755 Google Scholar.

22 “Unique,” Time, May 10, 1926, 11. For other coverage, see, for example, “Many High Tributes Paid J. H. Hammond,” New York Times (hereafter NYT), May 4, 1926, 21; “John Hays Hammond,” Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1926, A4.

23 Hammond, Autobiography, 1:17–62.

24 “Note on John Hays Hammond,” May 3, 1911, JHH Papers, Box 12, Folder 8.

25 Hammond, Autobiography, 2:41.

26 Furner, Mary O., Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1975), 44–45 Google Scholar.

27 Ibid., 46.

28 A generation earlier, Beckert's well-to-do New Yorkers sent their youth to Europe as a display of social capital and “to be ‘cultured,’” but Hammond and his cohort came, it appears, primarily for the for the training and credentials. See Beckert, Monied Metropolis, 43. The Columbia School of Mines and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did not produce their first graduates until 1867 and 1868 respectively (Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West, 40). On mining engineering education, see Nystrom, Seeing Underground, 46–49 and 192–220; Ochs, Kathleen H., “The Rise of American Mining Engineers: A Case Study of the Colorado School of Mines,” Technology and Culture 33 (Apr. 1992): 278–301 Google Scholar; Read, Thomas Thornton, The Development of Mineral Industry Education with Foreword by Hoover, Herbert (New York: The American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, 1941)Google Scholar; and Wadsworth, M. E., “Some Statistics of Engineering Education,” and “The Michigan College of Mines” Transaction of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, 27 (1898): 696–731 Google Scholar.

29 Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West, 25; and Nystrom, Seeing Underground, 54.

30 On the pursuit of graduate education in Europe, particularly Germany, and the professionalization of the social sciences, see, for instance, Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity. On the AIME, see Nystom, Seeing Underground, 59, 65–66; Parsons, A. B., ed., Seventy Years of Progress in the Mineral Industry, 1871–1946 (New York: The American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, 1947)Google Scholar; and Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers, 93–101. For a useful and accessible summary of professionalization in other sectors of the economy and society in the Progressive Era, see Diner, Steven, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 176–99, 290–93Google Scholar; Wiebe, Robert, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)Google Scholar, particularly ch. 5; Bledstein, Burton, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976)Google Scholar; and Kimball, Bruce, The “True Professional Ideal” in America: A History (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell, 1992)Google Scholar.

31 Hammond, Autobiography, 2:83–86. Williams spent nearly twenty years in South Africa where he eventually served as manager for the De Beers Mining Company working for Cecil Rhodes; see T. A. Rickard, “Gardner F. Williams,” EMJ 114 (Sept. 23, 1922): 532–33. Hammond and Williams worked together in South Africa, Hammond to Williams, Feb. 28, 1894; and Hammond to C. J. Clark, Apr. 22, 1895, JHH Papers, Box 3, Folder 8.

32 This is a period during which the research of a number of American geophysists and geologists achieved international recognition, including the USGS's Clarence King, Clarence Dutton, and G. K. Gilbert. Evidence of increasing professionalization in these fields in this period abounds as well. For instance, the Geological Society of America was founded in 1888 and it received the Cuvier medal of the French Académie des Sciences. Oreskes, Naomi, The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 128–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The study of geology (and efforts to professionalize it) in the United States was not new to this period. Lucier describes geology as the “acknowledged queen of sciences in the early nineteenth century.” See Lucier, Scientists and Swindlers, 38, for quote and ch. 4 on mining science.

33 This is not to diminish the significance of state government bureaus; indeed, throughout Hammond's career, he would rely on California State Minerologist William Irelan for aid, and he at times returned the favor by conducting studies for California. See for instance, Hammond, John Hays, “The Milling of Gold Ores in California” in Annual Report of the State Mineralogist (Sacramento, CA: State Office, 1888), 696–715 Google Scholar. For a recent analysis of the emergence of the USGS, see Kelly, Andrew S., “The Political Development of Scientific Capacity in the United States,” Studies in American Political Development 28 (Apr. 2014): 1–25 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and for classic treatment of the Great Surveys, see Goetzman, William H., Exploration and Empire (New York: Knopf, 1966)Google Scholar; and Stegner, Wallace, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (New York: Penguin Books, 1953)Google Scholar.

34 On the currency issue and its relationship to changes in the U.S. economy, politics, and foreign policy, see Emily S. Rosenberg, “Foundations of United States International Financial Power,” 169–202; Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World; and Unger, Irwin, The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

35 Rabbit, Mary C., A Brief History of the U S Geological Survey (Arlington, TX: U.S. Geological Survey, 1979), 8–9 Google Scholar; Rabbit, Minerals, Lands, and Geology for the Common Defence and General Welfare: 1879–1904 (Washington DC, GPO, 1980), 2:17–56; and Wilkins, Thurman, Clarence King: A Biography Revised and Enlarged (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 271–92Google Scholar.

36 Historians of the USGS and its early leadership have described a dramatic change in the survey when John Wesley Powell replaced Clarence King as director. Under Powell's watch, they argue, the survey focused more on basic research and largely abandoned economic geology. While this general characterization of the survey's work is likely true, there were some USGS geologists whose work continued to be extremely relevant to the mining industry. In the pages that follow, George F. Becker is representative of this class of geologist. In Eric Nystrom's work, S. F. Emmons plays a somewhat similar role. See Nystrom, Seeing Underground, 88, and the whole book, particularly ch. three, on the changing relationship between mining engineering and geology in this period. On USGS, see Mary C. Rabbitt, Minerals, Lands, and Geology for the Common Defence and General Welfare: Volume 2, 1879–1904; Kelly, The Political Development of Scientific Capacity in the United States”; Wilkins, Thurman, Clarence King: Biography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian; Dupree, A. Hunter, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1957), ch. 10Google Scholar; and Worster, Donald, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

37 Clarence King, The First Annual Report, 53, 56; and T. Wilkins, 275. On changes to the census more generally in this period, see Anderson, Margo J., The American Census: A Social History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 99–100 Google Scholar.

38 Clarence King, The First Annual Report, 53 and 56.

39 Clark C. Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West, 60.

40 On the Janin family, see Spence, Clark C., “The Janin Brothers: Mining Engineers,” Mining History Journal 3 (1996): 76–82 Google Scholar. On the Janin family, see Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West; and on Charles Janin, see Chaput, Donald, “Gold for the Commissars: Charles Janin's Siberian Ventures,” Huntington Library Quarterly 49 (Fall 1986): 386 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 A nod here to Eduardo Galeano's classic work, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent with a foreword to the 25th anniversary edition by Isabel Allende (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997).

42 EMJ, Sept. 2, 1882, 119.

43 Salas, Miguel Tinker, In the Shadow of the Eagles: Sonora and the Transformation of the Border During the Porfirato (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 202 Google Scholar; and “Sonora: The Making of a Border Society, 1880–1910,” Journal of the Southwest 34 (Winter 1992): 434 Google Scholar. On cross-border economic development in this region, see Truett, Samuel, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of U.S. Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

44 “Mina De Mulatos,” Daily Alta, Sept. 26, 1889, 1. See also Grossman, Sarah E. M., “Mining Engineers and Fraud in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1860–1910,” Technology and Culture 55 (Oct. 2014), 840–44Google Scholar.

45 “Mr. Janin Explains,” Daily Alta, Mar. 20, 1890, 4; “The Mulatos Mine: A Letter from Alexis Janin” San Francisco Chronicle (hereafter SFC), Mar. 20, 1890, 5. As late as 1896, Alexis was still trying to separate himself from the original report on the Mulatos mine and, by then, his nephew's report; see “Louis Janin Jr. and the Mulatos Mine,” SFC, Sept. 25, 1896, 8.

46 Louis Janin, Jr., “The Mulatos Gold Mines, State of Sonora, Mexico,” EMJ, Feb. 1, 1890, 132; “Louis Janin Jr. and the Mulatos Mine,” SFC, Sept. 25, 1896, 8. The Janin stamp of approval caused the value of the mine to more than double and created a speculative flurry in Sonora, “Foreign Mining News,” EMJ, Feb. 15, 1890, 208.

47 A salted mine is one in which either the mine itself or the assay sample has been tampered with in a way that fraudulently enhances the apparent value of the property. In this case, there are differing accounts of how Janin evaluated the property and the assay, whether he was able to complete his inspection, and the degree to which his various parties oversold his findings. See Grossman, “Mining Engineers and Fraud in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” 840–44.

48 “Mulatos Mine Case,” San Francisco Call, Mar. 22, 1890, 6.

49 Joining Hammond in this investigation was California State minerologist William Irelan.

50 “The Mulatos Mine,” EMJ, Mar. 7, 1891, 279; “A Mexican Mining Suit Satisfactorily Adjusted,” Sacramento Daily Union, Jan. 17, 1891, 1. Lucier, Scientists and Swindlers (especially ch. 2) addresses the role of an earlier generation of geologists in resolving legal disputes in extractive industries.

51 Hammond to Harris, Oct. 8, 1895, JHH Papers, Box 1, Folder 10.

52 Referencing both Hammond's earlier service to the USGS under Becker and Becker's own service to Hammond in South Africa, Becker wrote on the back of a portrait of Hammond, “Mr. John Hays Hammond. Assistant to Geo. F. Becker in series of gold at $50 a month. Afterwards G. F. B. reported on Gold in Africa for J. H. H. at $500 a day.” George Ferdinand Becker Papers, 1814–1928, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (hereafter GFB Papers), Box 23, file: History: So Africa.

53 “The Gold Fields of South Africa,” The Cosmopolitan, Dec. 22, 1896, 22, 2; Los Angeles Herald, Nov. 20, 1896, 7; “Consolidated Goldfields of South Africa, Limited,” The Economist, Nov. 14, 1896, 1507; “The Present Value of the Witwatersand,” The Economist, Jan. 2, 1897, 4; “The Present Value of the Witwatersrand,” Jan. 9, 1897, 40; “Gold Incalculable in the Transvaal, NYT, Feb. 20, 1898; and “The Value of the Rand,” Wall Street Journal (hereafter WSJ), Jan. 12, 1897, 1. Meyer, Lysle E., The Farther Frontier: Six Case Studies of Americans and Africa, 1848–1936 (Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), 228, fn. 23Google Scholar. Becker to George H. Benson, June 20, 1896, GFB Papers, container 17, no. 2. When Becker returned to the United States in the fall of 1896, he made a point of defending Hammond's work in South Africa. See G. F. Becker to Lecture on Transvaal,” Washington Post, Oct. 15, 1896, 4.

54 Hammond to Chalmers, JHH Papers, Apr. 2, 1894, Box 3, Folder 8; “W. J. Chalmers Dies; Maker of Mine Machinery,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 11, 1938. The organization of the Fraser and Chalmers Company is a complicated matter that space prevents me from addressing here, but it is clear that Hammond saw his work in South Africa as, in part, a way to further open up a market for American manufacturers. On Fraser and Chalmers Company, see Peterson, William F., An Industrial Age: Allis-Chalmers Corporation (Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee County Historical Society, 1976)Google Scholar; and Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investment in the United States to 1914, 429–30; There are several short, unpublished histories of the Fraser and Chalmers Company in Files 18 and 19, Box 4, Milwaukee County Historical Society Research Collection.

55 See the first twelve folders of the JHH papers in Box 1, which address the period leading up to his arrest. For arrest and efforts to secure his release see Box 1, folders 13 and 14 and Box 2, Folders 1 through 6. See also C. Tsehloane Keto, “The Aftermath of the Jameson Raid and American Decision Making” in Transaction of the American Philosophical Society, New Series Vol. 70 (1980); Thomas J. Noer, 44–68; and Teisch, Jessica B., Engineering Nature: Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 97–132 Google Scholar.

56 Hammond certainly had his critics in this period. The San Francisco Call and Sacramento Daily Union were among the papers that cast Hammond as a tool of a British empire bent on imposing its will over South African domestic issues. See “Attempt to Steal the Transvaal,” Sacramento Daily Union, Feb. 3, 1896, 2; “The African Issue,” San Francisco Call, Dec. 5, 1896, 6. John. P. Jones to Hammond, Aug, 20, 1896, Box 2, Folder Six, JHH Papers. Teisch comes to a different conclusion concerning Hammond's status when he left South Africa; see Teisch, Engineering Nature, 183.

57 “People Met in Hotel Lobbies,” Washington Post, Jan. 28, 1904, 6.

58 On coverage of Hammond's examination of mines, see, for instance, “Purchase of Mexican Gold Mine,” WSJ, July 2, 1903, 5; “United States Mining Co.: As to Mr. Hammond's Examination,” WSJ, Nov. 19, 1903, 5; “Cripple Creek Sensation: John Hay Hammond Reports Unfavorably on Its Leading Mine,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 27, 1902, 2x.

59 “Nipissing Mining: John Hays Hammond vs. Guggenheims,” WSJ, Dec. 10, 1906, 5.

60 Hammond, John Hays, “American Commercial Interests in the Far East,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 26 (July 1905): 85–88 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the address, see also, “Urge Need of Navy” New York Tribune, Apr. 9, 1905, 4; “Discuss Affairs of Other Lands,” SFC, Apr. 9, 1905, 20. Hammond would become a frequent contributor to Annals.

61 John Hays Hammond, “American Commercial Interests in the Far East,” 88. Hammond remained optimistic about the opportunities for investment in and exports to Russia, see, for instance, “Our South American Commerce: An Address at Banquet in Honor of the Republic of Argentine,” Nov. 3, 1915. JHH Papers, Box 10, Folder 5.

62 “Personal,” EMJ, Nov. 19, 1919, 1025; “Personal,” EMJ, Dec. 3, 1910, 1121. For more on Hammond's mission, see Askew, William C., “Efforts to Improve Russo-American Relations before the First World War: The John Hays Hammond Mission,” Slavonic and East European Review 31 (Jan. 1, 1952): 179–85Google Scholar.

63 Industrial Relations: Final Report and Testimony Submitted to Congress by the Commission on Industrial Relations, Vol. VII (Washington, DC: GPO, 1916), 7989. Hammond's CIR testimony, which emphasized a more robust role for the state, was covered all major newspapers, including WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, and SFC. Hammond reiterated the saturation point on many occasions, for example, in the article cited in this article's epigraph; “The Expansion of our Latin American Trade,” The Independent, Dec. 14, 1914, 406; and John Hays Hammond, “The Needs of our Foreign Trade,” Modern Business Supplement (Jan.–Mar. 1916): 3. The increased demand for American goods during WW I would temporarily put these overproduction concerns to rest, but in many of the pieces cited above, Hammond warned that saturated market conditions would return upon the end of the war. During the 1920s, Hoover was among those who advocated increased consumption at home as a means of providing a market for abundant U.S. goods. See Hendrickson, Mark, American Labor and Economic Citizenship: New Capitalism from WWI to the Great Depression (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

64 On Hammond's involvement in earlier conservation efforts—particularly his service along with Andrew Carnegie, Gifford Pinchot, and Irving Fischer on the minerals section of the Roosevelt's National Conservation Commission (NCC)—see Rossiter W. Raymond to John Hays Hammond, Feb. 18, 1908; Evan E. Olcott to Hammond, Feb. 28, 1908; Hammond to Raymond Mar. 1, 1908; and Hays, Samuel P., Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 127–33Google Scholar.

65 Adams, Brooks, “Meaning of the Recent Expansion of Foreign Trade of the United States,” Publications of the American Economic Association 3 (Feb. 1902): 90–91 Google Scholar. On Adams, see Williams, William A., “Brooks Adams and American Expansion” in McCormick, Thomas J. and LaFeber, Walter, eds., Behind the Throne: Servant of Power to Imperial Presidents, 1898–1968 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 21–34 Google Scholar.

66 Roberts, George E., Conant, Charles A., Willis, Henry P., Seligman, Edwin R. A., Gardner, Henry B., and Crowell, John F., “Meaning of the Recent Expansion of Foreign Trade of the United States: Discussion,” Publications of the American Economic Association 3 (Feb. 1902): 97–117, particularly 103 and 107Google Scholar. The role of natural resource abundance in shaping the development of nations has remained a contested issue; see Wright, Gavin and Czelusta, Jesse, “Resource-Based Growth Past and Present” in Lederman, Daniel and Maloney, William F., Natural Resources: Neither Curse nor Destiny (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 183–211 Google Scholar.

67 Changes to the Mexican mining code in 1882 and 1892, intended to further stimulate investment from abroad, dramatically strengthened the hand of foreign investors and mining companies. In the 1892 reforms, the Mexican government granted “unquestioned title to whatever subsoil deposits there might be.” In this context, investment flowed from the north and by 1896, American investors controlled a majority of the now nearly 7,000 mines working in Mexico. See Jason Mason Hart, 152; Bernstein, Marvin D., The Mexican Mining Industry: 1890–1950 (Albany: State University of New York, 1965), 27 Google Scholar.

68 EMJ, Dec. 13, 1913, 1138. See also Hammond, “The Economic Effects of Our Foreign Policy” Bulletin [for Hughes presidential campaign], Oct. 5, 1916. In private correspondence as well, Hammond was also critical of the Wilson administration's failure to protect American investment in Mexico; see Hammond to Frederick Russell Burnham, Feb. 15, 1919, Frederick Russell Burnham Papers, Yale University, Box 6 Folder 73.

69 “The Mexican Problem,” EMJ, Dec. 27, 1919, 935.

70 I stress direct investment here so as to distinguish Wilson's unwillingness to intervene in this sphere from his willingness to use military intervention in others, including the invasion of Vera Cruz and the decision to send General John J. Pershing-led troops into Northern Mexico in a futile effort to capture Francisco “Pancho” Villa. On American direct investors’ disappointment with Wilson, see Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise, 37–39.

71 Quoted in Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise, 37.

72 Hammond's efforts in this area echoes William Appleman Williams's observation that Latin American served as a laboratory for American foreign policy. Williams, William Appleman, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell, 1962), 1–13 Google Scholar. On the need to cultivate markets in Central and South America, see, for instance, Hammond, “Our South American Commerce: An Address at Banquet in Honor of the Republic of Argentine,” Nov. 3, 1915, JHH Papers, Box 10, Folder 5.

73 Hammond joined a diverse and broad group of internationalists who developed transnational economic, social, and cultural networks that worked toward the formation of organizations such as the League of Nations and Permanent Court of International Justice that they believed might serve as the “kernel that might grow into a global legal system,” to borrow from Rosenberg. Emily S. Rosenberg, “Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World,” 841.

74 Edward Marshall, “John Hays Hammond Wants Pan-American Court,” NYT, Dec. 27, 1914, SM4.

75 Marshall, “John Hays Hammond Wants Pan-American Court,” NYT, Dec. 27, 1914, SM4. “Foreign Trade: Address Delivered before Governors and Mayors, New Interior Bldg., Washington,” JHH Papers, Box 11, Folder 2. For support of Hammond's position among mining engineers, see EMJ editorial “Mr. Hammond Proposes a Pan-American Court,” EMJ, Jan. 2, 1915, 32. On late nineteenth-century efforts to promote Pan Americanism, see David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Expansion in the Hemisphere; and on efforts to strengthen international law in this period, see Wertheim, Stephen, “The League That Wasn't: American Designs for a Legalist-Sanctionist League of Nations and the Intellectual Origins of International Organization, 1914–1920,” Diplomatic History 35 (Nov. 2011): 797–836 Google Scholar.

76 Smith, George Otis, “The Economic Limits to Domestic Independence in Minerals” in Mineral Resources of the United States: 1917 Part I: Metals (Washington DC: GPO, 1921)Google Scholar, 1A. The WIB took an active interest in ensuring industry had a ready supply of a number of raw materials, particularly copper, manganese, zinc, aluminum, and tungsten. See WIB Papers, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland (hereafter NA), correspondence and papers on copper, manganese, zinc, aluminum, and tungsten, boxes 169–186. See also Limbaugh, Tungsten in Peace and War, 18–42; Eckes, The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals, 3–26; Shulman, Coal and Empire, 176–80 and 208–10; Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream, 125–26; and Priest, Global Gambits, 57–89.

77 George Otis Smith, “Theory and Practice of National Self-Sufficiency in Raw Materials,” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in City of New York (July 1926): 122. For a similar assessment of the impact of the war on thinking about raw material access, see works cited in fn. 9.

78 Mary C. Rabbit, Minerals, Lands, and Geology for the Common Defence and General Welfare, 3:152 and 389.

79 John Hays Hammond, “Wanted—A foreign Trade Policy,” 755. During the spring of 1898, Hammond traveled extensively through Russia in an attempt to “secure the control of the platinum-mines in Russia.” See Hammond, “Russia of Yesterday and To-Morrow,” Scribner's Magazine LXXI (May 1922): 519–20.

80 “Orders Platinum Seized,” NYT, Mar. 1, 1918, 4.

81 “The Problem of Russia,” Current History, Apr. 1, 1920, 81.

82 “The Government Must Have Platinum,” NYT, July 23, 1918, 12.

83 “Status of Import and Export Restrictions as of October 15, 1918 of Minerals Named and Not Named in Mineral Act,” RG 194 War Mineral Relief Commission, Box 45, File “Imports and Export Restrictions,” NA.

84 “Shortage of Platinum Is Becoming Alarming,” NYT, June 30, 1918, 29; “The Government Must have Platinum,” NYT, July 23, 1918, 12; “Use of Platinum Restricted,” NYT, Oct. 1, 1918, 15. On metal price increases, see Limbaugh, Tungsten in Peace and War, 26–27; Eckes, The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals, 16–17; and Ingulstad, “Banging the Tin Drum,” 99.

85 “No More Platinum Needed,” NYT, Nov. 16, 1918, ; and “To Sell Surplus Platinum,” NYT, June 29, 1919, 10.

86 George Otis Smith, “Minerals as Essential Raw Materials,” 99.

87 George Otis Smith, “Theory and Practice of National Self-Sufficiency in Raw Materials,” 117. For an overview of government involvement in the mineral industry during the war, see “Technicians in Government Service,” EMJ, Feb. 1, 1919, 225–26.

88 Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprises, 52–53.

Figure 0

Figure 1.From Gavin Wright, “The Origins of American Industrial Success, 1879–1940,” American Economic Review 80 (Sept. 1990): 661.