Like most people of my generation, I learned that Eli Whitney, who invented the cotton gin (and who is featured on today’s #stampoftheday, was one of America’s “Great Men.” What I didn’t understand or know then is that Whitney’s legacy is, to say the least, mixed.
Whitney, who was born on December 8, 1765, was honored on a 1-cent stamp issued in 1940, which was one of five stamps honoring inventors in that year’s 35-stamp series honoring “Famous Americans.” (The other inventors were Samuel F.B. Morse (telegraph), Cyrus McCormick (reaping machine), Elias Howe (sewing machine), and Alexander Graham Bell (telephone).)
The Post Office Department’s assessment of Whitney mirrors the one found in “They All Laughed,” the great 1937 Gershwin song that’s been recorded by a host of artists including Fred Astaire, Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby, Eric Dolphy, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, and (in 2014) Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga.
The song, of course, starts, “They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, when he said the world was round. They all laughed when Edison recorded sound. They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly. Why, they told Marconi, wireless was a phony. It’s the same old cry.”
After noting “they all laughed at me wanting you” and “they all laughed at Rockefeller Center. Now they’re fighting to get in,” the song continues: “They all laughed at Whitney and his cotton gin.” It continues: “They all laughed at Fulton and his steamboat, Hershey and his chocolate bar, Ford and his Lizzie, kept the laughers busy. That’s how people are.”
And then it ends: “Why, they laughed at me wanting you. Said it would be, ‘Hello, Goodbye,’ But, oh, you came through. And now they’re eating humble pie…So who’s got the last laugh now?”
As the song accurately reports, in the late 18th Whitney invented the cotton gin, which made it much easier to separate the short-staple cotton grown by many Americans from its seeds. Before Whitney’s invention, which he patented in 1794, the work was done by hand. One person could produce about a pound of cleaned cotton a day. (A gin developed centuries earlier in India only worked with long-staple cotton grown on that subcontinent.). Whitney built a wooden drum stuck with hooks that pulled the cotton fibers through a mesh (an approach Whitney claimed was inspired by watching as a cat attempting to pull a chicken through a fence was only able get some features) could produce up to 55 pounds of cleaned cotton daily.
By making it possible to produce more cotton with less labor, the machine made growing and picking cotton at a large scale much more lucrative, which, in turn, spurred the growth of large plantations worked by slaves. Cotton exports from the South went from about 180,000 pounds in 1793 to 93 million tons by 1810 and slavery, which many people thought would die out continued to be economically lucrative and the source of growing political tensions, particularly over whether it would be allowed in new territories and states, such as Kansas and Nebraska. So one could well argue that Whitney bears some responsibility for the growth of slavery, the Civil War, and the long history of racial tension and inequality in the United States.
But wait, as they say on TV, there’s more! Whitney supposedly played a major role in creating the manufacturing economy in the North that provided the overwhelming resources and materials that the North used to win the Civil War against the slave-holding states trying to defend the slave-based economic system that his cotton gin fostered.
Specifically, in 1798, Whitney who was having major financial problems won a government contract to provide 10,000 muskets in one year even though he had no experience manufacturing arms. While his original proposal did not call for it, he became a champion of creating interchangeable parts for the weapons. This approach proved to be a key innovation in manufacturing that helped build up the economy in the North. But it initially wasn’t successful. In fact, Merritt Roe Smith, an authority on the history of arms manufacturing, contended that a successful demonstration of weapons that Whitney put on in 1801 for President Adams, President-elect Jefferson and others was done “with specimens specially prepared for the occasion….it appears that Whitney purposely duped government authorities…[and] encouraged the notion that he had successfully developed a system for producing uniform parts.”
Whitney’s contract also contained an unusual paragraph, not included in the government’s agreement with any other supplier, specifying that he would receive an immediate advance of $5,000 and another $5,000 when he had spent the initial payment. This proved to be critical because Whitney did not, as promised, provide the arms within a year. In fact, he did deliver all the arms until 1809.
Historians recently have found that the delays were largely due to the fact that Whitney spent about five years in South Carolina trying to secure the financial benefits from court victories involving his patent for the cotton gin. As he wrote to a friend, “bankruptcy and ruin were constantly staring me in the face and disappointment trip’d me up every step I attempted to take. I was miserable….I knew not which way to turn….By this contract I obtained some thousands of Dollars in advance which saved me from ruin.” Robert Woodbury, an historian at MIT, wrote in 1060 that such correspondence showed that “from 1801 to 1806 Whitney not only failed to fulfill the contract, he regularly substituted long letters of excuse for honest effort to carry out his obligation, while he chased the richer prize of rewards he expected from the cotton gin.”
For all these reasons, wrote Peter Baida in American Heritage Magazine in 1987, “the star of Eli Whitney has dimmed.”
As Gershwin wrote, “Ha Ha Ha. Who’s got the last laugh now?”
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.